The Depersonalization of God

One of the most apparent—and tragic—paradoxes of our strange, bewildering, and wonderful century is that many of its chief social victories are won at the cost of the identity and value of the individual. This is too commonplace an observation to need, or to deserve, emphasis or expatiation; but it is perhaps one of those truths (like the inevitably disastrous consequences of the population explosion) that, while accepted, are not really believed. Man, indeed, seems to have the capacity to lapse into a strange quiescence when confronted by massive problems, gazing, as it were, with dull eyes and without evasive action at the approach of menacing shadows. “The glories of our blood and state are shadows, not substantial things; there is no armour against fate,” wrote the seventeenth-century dramatist Shirley, merely putting into these particular words a thought common to all ages and civilizations.

Our own time is peculiarly conditioned to accept as irreversible and as unconquerable mass tendencies and alterations, believing, as the majority do, in some kind of mechanistic determinism that sees individual consciousness and will as negligible and often irrelevant factors in the eternal flux of matter. If environment creates consciousness, then the environment produced by clotted masses of humanity crowded on a dwindling planet will presumably eradicate as no longer valid any kind of independent individualism, and will produce in its stead a kind of mass consciousness in which numbers, rather than names, are alone adequate to distinguish one particle from another. Such masses, furthermore, must be governed, as are the molecules of gases, in terms of average tendencies, not individual peculiarities, as determined by the “laws” of behavior.

True, the twentieth century has given rise to disturbing theories about the indeterminacy of even physical laws, and the burden of irrationality hangs heavy on scientist and sociologist alike. But such theories, when embraced with finality, lead rather to a completely negativistic attitude toward the universe as a whole, finding irrationality and meaninglessness to permeate all being, than to a reaffirmation of the significance of individual consciousness. Momentarily, mere biological being seems to present some comfort, but not for long. Eventually will come the question Conrad Aiken puts into the mouth of a character in his novel Blue Voyage: “Who is this William Demarest? this forked radish? this carrier of germs and digester of food? momentary host of the dying seed of man?”

So modern man finds himself encircled by statistics and averages announcing various kinds of victory, and at the same moment feels himself of lessening stature and importance as a person. He finds himself in the predicament of W. H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen,” for whom everything had been done that was determined, by statistics, to be beneficial, but about whose personal happiness no one concerned himself. He knows that statistics show each year that a higher percentage of houses have electricity, televisions, refrigerators, and bathtubs; but he wonders if these things really assuage the personal anguish of a long wakeful night. He is told that medical statistics show that fewer and fewer people die of this or that disease, but he knows (as G. B. Shaw once pointed out) that the ultimate statistic is still the same: one out of one dies. He sees vast apartment houses built to replace miserable slums, and he is told that everything has been statistically determined to make optimum contribution to human welfare: square footage per person, temperature range, humidity variation, garbage disposal, recreation areas. But he has a dark suspicion that the building may still house a collection of human beings who are, as individuals, as miserable as before.

None of this, of course, is to denigrate the immeasurable physical benefits earned for us by the tireless probers into the nature of our material environment. It is simply to say, with René DeBos of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research: “There is no longer any thoughtful person who believes that the conversion of science into more power, more wealth, or more drugs necessarily adds to health and happiness, or improves the human condition.”

But it is not the dehumanization of man that is my present topic; it is the depersonalization of God. The two phenomena are significantly similar and interrelated, though not necessarily sequential. Ours is a time of great “religiosity,” of much talk about God (or god), of the making of many books, of the utterance of many theories. The goal in religion is similar to that in sociology: the creation of a planetary system in which all divergencies may be statistically smoothed away so that mass problems may permit mass solution. The massiveness of the movement makes the difficult, intransigent fact of personality unacceptable in any new planetary religion.

Hence modern religion tends to be undynamic, like the statistics of a life insurance company. It suggests much about people in the mass, but little about the condition of any individual. The magnificent personal emphasis of the first clause of the Twenty-third Psalm would, indeed, need the retranslation ironically suggested by the new president of Vassar College, Alan Simpson: “The Lord is my external-internal integrative mechanism.” He continues with a restatement of other parts of the psalm: “He motivates me to reorient myself towards a nonsocial object with effective significance. He positions me in a nondecisional situation. He maximizes my adjustment.”

Man And The Personal God

Personal religion, on the other hand, is dynamic because the only “dynamite” in the human condition resides precisely in personality. Just as our relation to another person is utterly unlike that to an idea or to a set of statistics, so is the relation of individual men, as persons, to an infinite, glorious, living, and personal God different from the relation between such things as “man” and “being.” As philosophical terms, these may be perfectly justified for abstract discussions; but they must continue to be the servants, not the eradicators, of personality, either of man or of God.

Happily, of course, man can scarcely hope to eradicate the personality of God even if he decides that he would like to do so. As Chesterton once wrote, speaking as rebellious man,

Thank God the stars are set beyond my power,

If I must travail in a night of wrath;

Thank God my tears will never vex a moth,

Nor any curse of mine cut down a flower.

But man may infinitely increase his own unhappiness if he behaves as if he had, by thinking, eliminated the personality of God from the universe.

In so doing, he will make religion impossible, for one may safely say, I think, that “impersonal religion” is a contradiction in terms—at least as the term “religion” is sensed intuitively by most people. At best, the term “impersonal religion” has only the force of a metaphor, as one says of someone that he is “wedded to his work.” Everyone knows that the difference between that “wedding” and a real one is the difference between reality and fancy, between life and non-life.

One must not, of course, make grand generalizations about “modern” thought and belief; but one cannot read very widely in the vast literature of contemporary theology without sensing a prevalent trend toward the substitution of a mere introspective awareness of “the God thought” for the worship of a living and eternal Person. Or at best there is apparent a revival of deism, with its belief in an original personal God who created all things but who has, with great tact, withdrawn himself from the affairs and even from the knowability of man. Thus is safely removed the need to have any feeling (personal emotion) about God, and there is offered instead the comforting opportunity to respond with intellectual calm to an impersonal First Cause who has left behind him only a set of laws and a supply (adequate, one hopes) of energy. There is nothing so disturbing to serenity as the presence of personality, and the titanic personality of the God of the Bible breathes from every page. The only safe treatment, therefore, for the emotional impact of this God is, in the mind of the world, to close the Book and pretend its God is not there.

To do this, however, requires some kind of rationalization. Among the most popular palliatives, at the moment, is that declaring that man “come of age” can no longer believe in a Person “out there.” If he is not “out there,” runs the implication, but only a part of my own psyche, I can deal with him. And besides, it has a fine ring to declare that man has outgrown a personal God.

There is, of course, nothing new in this concept. Among many other expressions of the same thought is one of some years ago by that excellent writer Miss Pearl Buck. I cannot quote her exact phraseology, but the gist of her assertion was that God is a composite of all the highest of man’s ideals and strivings. Again, here is a comfortable abstraction, a “law” of averages as the law of the behavior of gases under controlled conditions of heat and pressure is a law of averages.

On purely rational grounds (a basis commonly appealed to by the depersonalizers of God), it is difficult to find reason for depriving God of personal attributes. The brevity required by this writing prohibits anything like a fair presentation of this problem; but one may, it seems, fairly ask whether man “come of age” finds in any other aspect of existence that greatness is increased by the absence of personality. Do we not assume personality to be a characteristic of high status rather than a mark of deficiency? We say that electronic computers can almost think, and we thus ascribe to them a degree of importance. Would we not begin to stand in awe of one that began to exhibit traces of a genuine personality—concepts of value, of beauty, of order, of good and evil, of free will? We say of our pets that they sometimes look as if they could almost talk; and to the degree that we attribute to them characteristics of personality, we confer on them a status of importance not shared by inanimate objects. On what grounds does man “come of age” feel that a god deprived of that which men themselves most significantly possess is a greater god? (The question stands quite apart from the sharper one concerning the ultimate origin of personality.) Does the point of view include a logical extension, namely, that man himself will, as he “progresses,” keep diminishing in personality until he approaches the perfection of a non-personal god?

The Mark Of Highest Life

Personality, with its mysterious attributes of purpose, memory, love, beauty, and all the rest, is, on the contrary, the quality that marks the highest mode of existence we know on this planet. If there were intelligent life on other planets, we should call that life high as it exhibited something comparable to personality. How has man “come of age” transcended personality? Indeed, how has man come of age? The condition of our world, with perpetual conflict, with peace achievable only on the basis of common terror, with a recent history of slave camps and genocide and a contemporary condition of widespread hunger, poverty, and confusion—this condition does not seem to present a picture of man finally achieving maturity. If it does, one is inclined to agree with Ogden Nash that progress was a good thing, but it went on too long.

Or, turning from the picture of our planet in large dimensions, do we find that the great men of our time so consistently transcend the great ones of ancient history that we can safely say we have “come of age”?

There is, perhaps, another twist to the arguments presented by the depersonalizers of God: the personality, if any, of an infinite God would by definition be infinite, and hence forever beyond the comprehension of man. Quite true. But the Christian believes in Incarnation. Man cannot reach out and grasp God. But God can reach down and reveal to man that degree of himself which he chooses to reveal. A child cannot comprehend the wholeness of the father, but the father can choose to stoop to the child and reveal to the child true things about himself.

But whatever may be the situation with regard to the rational arguments in this area, one or two things are quite clear. First, without a personal God there is no God at all in any sense generally understood by man. A god with whom we cannot communicate because he lacks our attributes of personality is less than we are, and hence inferior to us. He has become merely an impersonal concept we have ourselves generated, a construct of the ideals of mankind. He is, in short, man-made—an idol.

In the second place, there can be no act of worship (which is surely central to religion) if there is no personal God. One cannot worship an idea, and he should not worship an idol. There is no prayer, for one cannot appeal to a “construct of ideals.” There is only man, alone in the universe, devising philosophies for himself, “ever learning, never coming to a knowledge of the truth.”

For dramatic contrast, we may think of the New Testament narratives. The initial, the continuing, and the lasting impact of Jesus was that of Personality. When he began to teach “hard sayings,” many left off following him, saying, in effect, as the Athenians did to Paul, “We will hear thee again of this matter.” Jesus, looking at the tiny band of disciples remaining, asked, “Will ye also go away?” Peter replied, “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.” And Jesus’ command was, “Follow me,” whom they knew only as a person. “Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us,” Philip demanded. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father,” was the reply.

When the disciples gathered in the Upper Room, weary with the effort to comprehend this strange Being whom they followed, hanging on his every word, fearful of the future, bewildered by the absence of earthly pomp to greet the one who said he was the Eternal Lord—when they gazed into his face, they did not take comfort from a “construct of ideals” there represented. They clung to a Person, a Person who said, “Let not your heart be troubled. Ye believe in God, believe also in me.”

Still valid are the words of the Psalmist: “The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth.”

Like As The Hart

There is an inner desert

stretching far beyond the fertile intellect,

barren of path

or sign

or presence,

without hope,

a place so desolate

the birds of prayer long since have died

or flown.

Saints who have wandered there

outside of time

make reticent report.

They have been silenced by immensity;

by nights of thunder, lightning, without rain,

parched, fevered, driven

to the Brooks of God.

PORTIA MARTIN

Calvin D. Linton is dean of Columbian College and professor of English literature at George Washington University in the District of Columbia. He holds the A.B. degree from George Washington University and the A.M. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.

- More from Calvin D. Linton

Enforced Christianity?

Ilion T. Jones

Someone recently said, “The future of our country depends upon whether we can take the policeman off the street corner and put him in our hearts,” thus unwittingly expressing one of the central doctrines of our Christian faith. For the genius of our Christian religion is this: Its followers are supposed to have an inner motive and power that compels them voluntarily to love, to be just, to live righteously. The Bible sets this forth clearly, in both the Gospels and the Epistles.

Our Lord was charged with being opposed to the Hebrew law. In dealing with this charge in one section of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5), he declared that he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. Having said that, he set forth a higher form of righteousness that he expected of his followers, a righteousness that would “exceed,” go beyond, the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, and that struck deeper than the law because it went beyond the head to the motives and the thoughts of the heart. Later he stated that both the law and the prophets depend upon two commandments: man is to love God with all his heart, soul, and mind, and to love his neighbor as himself (Matt. 22:36 f). Jesus did not lay down rules for his followers but sought rather to produce followers who would impose rules on themselves. He did not try to coerce the wills or compel the devotion of people. He invited them to follow him cheerfully of their own free will. In short, he summoned them to a voluntary righteousness that is generated by the expulsive and the compulsive power of a great affection.

We commonly speak of one of Jesus’ sayings as “The Golden Rule,” which is not a legalistic rule at all but another way of stating what he had previously said about loving one’s neighbors. In effect it says: “Before anyone asks you to do so, before some authoritative body threatens to pass a law to make you do so, treat your fellow men rightly and generously. Do this voluntarily, of your own initiative and volition, because you want to do it, because to satisfy the promptings of your heart you must do it.”

Paul set forth this same general teaching. In the sixth chapter of Romans he explains that the Christian’s acceptance of Christ by faith is a vital union with him, in which, so to speak, the believer experiences the events through which Christ passed in his death, burial, and resurrection. These events are typified in Christian baptism, in which symbolically the believer descends into, is buried under, and ascends out of the water. Hence Christians, he says, are to think of themselves as “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (v.11, RSV). Once they have gone through this transforming experience they are to live as transformed people. He exhorts them, “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies.… Do not yield your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace” (vv. 13, 14).

The word “grace” is unquestionably the most significant single word in the Bible. It is our English word for Hebrew and Greek words that indicate the nature of God out of which proceed his gracious acts of the creation, the preservation, and the redemption of his children. Always these acts grow out of his unmerited love. As soon as a person experiences that grace, it has the singular effect of making him want to be gracious to his fellow men and manifest toward others the kind of love God manifests toward him. Out of sheer gratitude to God for his forgiving, redeeming love in Christ, the Christian is compelled, not by outside pressures but voluntarily, from within the citadel of his being, to be loving, just, and fair.

Later in the letter to the Romans (chap. 13) Paul faced the charge, which Jesus himself faced, that Christians are against the law. He repeated what Jesus tried to make clear, that Christians are under a new, more significant, more inclusive law, the law of love. He pleads with his readers: “Owe no man anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.… Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (vv. 8, 10). When he wrote to the Corinthians he said, “The love of Christ controls us” (2 Cor. 5:14), and “… you are not your own; you were bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6:19b, 20a). Because of the costly love of God in Christ for him, the Christian is bound to love his fellow men.

New Testament Christians did not undertake crusades to persuade the Roman government to outlaw great human wrongs such as slavery. The reason was not that they were indifferent to those wrongs but that they were engaged in a much more fundamental work. Because they recognized that the roots of all wrongs are in the hearts of men, their efforts were directed toward the regeneration of those hearts. Throughout the Epistles of the New Testament, it is implied that to the degree human hearts can be Christianized so social wrongs can be overcome.

Stones That Grow

In his first letter Peter calls Christians “living stones” (1 Pet. 2:5)—a graphic figure of speech. Real stones are dead, inert, and have to be lifted into place when a house is being erected. But a living stone would be magical. Put in place it would grow the foundation, the wall, or the cornice. If Christians are living stones, then as they are put down anywhere in the social order, they will on their own initiative become the growing edge of a new Christian society.

Moffatt translates Philippians 3:20, “You are a colony of heaven.” The people in Philippi were largely Romans who had moved to Macedonia and had constituted themselves a colony for the purpose of Romanizing Macedonia. Dr. Moffatt, therefore, believes that Paul was really saying to the Christians of Macedonia that they were expected to perform a similar function representing their heavenly King.

Whether or not that is the proper meaning of Paul’s words, it is true that everywhere a Christian is in the social order he is expected to be a living, transforming force for the Christian way of life. Each Christian ought to be able to say to every other Christian, “You do your Christian job where you are; I’ll do my Christian job where I am. I’ll do it without needing a policeman to check up on me, or threaten me with punishment if I don’t do it.”

Today large segments of people in the Christian churches are forgetting or repudiating this fundamental New Testament teaching. This in itself is not new. During Christian history some group has, on one ground or another, theological or otherwise, questioned the value and the validity of practically every type of experience reported in New Testament times: evangelism itself, sudden and radical conversions or second births, strange leadings of Providence, personal communions with a personal God, answers to prayer, and claims to having received the Holy Spirit.

Nor is it unprecedented for the churches to lay aside spiritual means temporarily and engage in a concerted campaign to bring the Kingdom of God to consummation hurriedly by political or other secular means. Witness the zealous effort decades ago to secure passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and thus revolutionize public morals.

Goodness By Constraint

What is unusual, certainly for the churches in recent times, is for them to discard their traditional spiritual efforts to persuade their members to “be good” voluntarily and embark on a crusade to use their ecclesiastical machinery, resources, and power to force their members to “be good,” and thus hasten the end of injustice in the world.

This is what seems to be happening in the present effort of the churches to bring about racial justice in our country. On the surface, at least, it appears that many of the leaders of our churches have all but lost faith in the power of spiritual means and have decided to put their trust in secular means. By “on the surface” is meant that in their public and official utterances little or nothing is said about spiritual means; these have been pushed into the background. Instead of embarking on an intensive crusade to instruct their members anew as to the meaning of their Christian faith and commitment, to appeal to them “by the mercies of God” to practice in all their social relations what they profess to believe, and to exhort them to engage in dynamic confrontation with the Spirit of God in their souls over racial injustice and all other forms of sin and wrong, the churches are bringing all available external pressures of the organized church upon their members to coerce them to treat all other races fairly.

Evidence to support these statements is abundant. Consider only the recent official statements of two leading denominations (the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches) and of the National Council of Churches on the subject of racial injustice. In Presbyterian Life, November 15, 1963, under the title, “The New Commission on Race: What Exactly was Launched?,” there appeared the manifesto of the Presbyterian Commission on Religion and Race (CORAR) by its executive secretary, Gayraud S. Wilmore. CORAR was set up by the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in 1963.

Dr. Wilmore states that the Presbyterian church has failed to contribute substantially to the solution of the problem of racial injustice in our country. The time has come to put the full weight of the organized church’s “prestige,” “authority,” “power,” and “money” into direct action to achieve concrete results. The distinctive feature of the Presbyterian form of government, its system of graded courts, lends itself to the kind of action he envisages, because the authority given to a commission duly appointed by the highest ecclesiastical court, the General Assembly, can be handed down to all the lower courts (the synods, presbyteries, and sessions of local churches), each of which has authority to require obedience to its directives by all individuals, institutions, and agencies under its jurisdiction.

With the authority of the General Assembly behind the commission he heads, Dr. Wilmore notifies the personnel of all the boards, agencies, institutions, and courts of the church of what methods the commission proposes to use to achieve its objectives. They intend to “investigate” all Presbyterian agencies and organizations as to their racial policies and practices, including their business contracts and investment policies. If necessary, “pressure” will be brought to bear to “correct” these practices and policies. He warns that sooner or later the presbyteries, which actually have all the powers given to bishops in some other denominations, will “examine” the policies of every local congregation and, where necessary, demand that a church “purge” itself of the sin of race discrimination. Aside from the question of this development of presbyteries into “bishops,” it is obvious that this correction of internal practice within the Presbyterian church is to be accomplished chiefly by external pressures rather than by moral suasion and spiritual appeal to the Christian hearts and consciences of its members.

A Catalogue Of Pressures

Among the many specific procedures indicated for correcting what is wrong within the church and without are these: pressures to end discrimination will be applied to banks from which Presbyterian boards and agencies borrow money, to individual Presbyterians who have rental property, and to housing projects undertaken by local churches, demanding that they be unbiased racially in their dealings; Presbyterian women will be encouraged to boycott merchants who practice discrimination; church members will be asked to collaborate with “secular action groups,” to “work with Negro mass movements,” to practice the “symbolic act of civil disobedience against an unjust law,” to bring the influence of the church to bear upon civil governments and legislative bodies, and to recognize openly “the moral use of coercive legislation.” Dr. Wilmore also announces that the commission will make use of the $500,000 now at its disposal and an additional amount of the same size yet to be requested to support, in a number of ways, individuals and organizations working for civil rights—because, as he says, “money talks.”

The Episcopal plan, proposed by the church’s Division of Social Relations and approved by the Bishop and Diocesan Council, as it was presented by Bishop James A. Pike to the Episcopalians of California for their consideration and adoption, was outlined in the San Francisco Chronicle of February 6, 1964. From this is appears that the Episcopal plan to achieve racial justice is of the same general nature and proposes to utilize many of the same methods as the Presbyterian CORAR. There is one notable difference between the two, however. The Episcopal document rightly stresses the need for teaching its members the meaning of the Gospel as it relates to the race problem, while the Presbyterian document contains no significant reference to education.

The plan contains several “directives” and several urgent “appeals” that are equivalent to directives. These deal with the use of the services and facilities of churches, including the sale and rental of property, on an equal basis for all races; the education of members on the many phases of Christian racial equality; and the refusal to deal with any job-discriminating business. This last directive was withdrawn after objections to it were voiced from the floor. Another proposal was that Episcopalians support the Rumford Act, a California law that bans housing discrimination and has been the cause of heated public controversies. This was carried, although objections to it came from the floor. Specifically one objector disliked being told by the church what to do. “This,” he declared, “should be voluntary.”

The statement of the National Council of Churches was adopted at the meeting of its General Assembly in Philadelphia on December 7, 1963, and was shortly thereafter publicized widely in both the secular and the religious press. (A report of this may be found in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, January 3, 1964, pp. 34 ff.) Since the specifications recommended to the member churches of the council have nearly all been incorporated in the Presbyterian plan, they need not be repeated here.

Obviously there has been close cooperation between the National Council and the leaders of Christian churches in planning details of the present nationwide crusade for civil rights. We therefore should not go far astray in assuming that all the leading member churches of the National Council, each in its own way and in accordance with its own form of government, has, or soon will have, a plan for civil rights campaigns similar to those of the Presbyterian and Episcopal churches.

The Pivotal Conviction

The entire racial rights program of the churches appears to be predicated on the conviction that the time has come to make full use of the power inherent in the corporate church as a social institution.

Several pertinent responses to the racial rights crusade of the churches are now in order.

1. The objectives of the churches—to achieve civil rights and justice for every person of whatever color or racial background in every nook and corner of our land—deserve the enthusiastic support of every Christian.

2. Christian citizens, like all other types of citizens in our land, should work for appropriate legislation against racial discrimination. Our nation must have a civil rights bill. Laws have their own distinctive functions—political functions—to perform in every organized society.

3. But the means that the churches as corporate bodies propose to use to reach these goals should be critically scrutinized and evaluated in accordance with the basic tenets of our Christian faith. It would be a fatal error for any Christian church to refuse to hear members who question the validity and prudence of the means it is using to achieve racial justice, or to equate the dissent of its members with disloyalty to the church or with opposition to racial equality itself.

4. In the crusade for racial justice, so little emphasis is laid by the churches on spiritual means and so much on secular means that we should ask whether many churchmen must now be thought of as belonging to that group Jesus referred to as “men of violence,” who are determined to take the Kingdom of God by force (cf. Matt. 11:12). In short, our Christian churches seem to be going secular with a vengeance.

Have we forgotten what the prophet said to Zerubbabel in the name of God, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord” (Zech. 4:6)? The Kingdom of God cannot be established on earth by human resources alone—not by social engineering, legislation, the use and manipulation of economic power, group pressures, or armies and wars, even though some of these may have important functions to perform in an organized society. The Kingdom of God can be established only by the power of the Spirit of God working upon, within, and through the hearts of men.

5. The distinctive role of the organized church in society is to be the instrument of God whereby human beings may find the inner, spiritual resources and motivations—the moral and ethical convictions, constraints and restraints, and undergirdings—necessary for their striving, each in his own sphere, to become instruments for building a Christian society. The Church, therefore, is engaged in the fundamental spiritual work of the world. If it fails to perform its unique, distinctive work, all other institutions ultimately fail. If it allows itself to become just one more institution among others in society, using primarily secular means, it betrays its divine trust and is disloyal to the people who look to it for aid in finding spiritual resources for living.

6. If and when the Church embarks upon campaigns that necessitate its using primarily legal coercion and economic and group pressures in order to compel its members to treat their fellow men justly, it has already failed in its central purpose: to make Christians who love their fellow men voluntarily, from inner compulsion and desire. Every church member is the extended church in action in the particular spot in the social order where he lives. When he fails, it is not so much the Church’s failing as his failing the Church: his failing to live up to his teaching, his professions, his promises; his failing to maintain his spiritual disciplines.

7. A church-wide campaign that contemplates setting up a group of officials, arming them with ecclesiastical authority and power to punish, and authorizing them to pry into the private practices and personal policies of its members, smacks of ecclesiastical totalitarianism. It is disturbing, to say the least, to discover that major Christian churches are deliberately planning to engage in activities comparable to those of such organizations as bureaus of investigation, offices of district attorneys, and detective agencies. It is also discouraging to find them presuming to purge their members of their sinful ways. Purging is God’s prerogative. And God never coerces human wills or compels human conduct.

8. Many observers have commented on the churches’ launching and carrying on their crusade for racial justice with Pentecostal zeal. But it should be remembered that the zeal at Pentecost was inspired by the Holy Spirit, not for bringing secular pressures upon people, but for proclaiming the Gospel to them, for beseeching them to give the redemptive love of God a chance to change their hearts. The human heart is the perennial target of all the Church’s efforts. Unless the hearts of men can be radically changed, the campaign against racial injustice and all other forms of evil will ultimately fail.

One Evil Forgotten

Hawthorne has a strange tale, “Earth’s Holocaust,” about a time when the inhabitants of earth, “overburdened with an accumulation of wornout trumpery, determined to rid themselves of it by a general bonfire.” All night long a stranger, with cynical smile and haughty air, stood watching them bring things which they considered evil—trashy books, implements of war, liquor, tobacco, and what not—and toss them into the fire. Late in the night the stranger approached and said: “There is one thing that these wiseacres have forgotten to throw into the fire, and without which all the rest of the conflagration is just nothing at all—yes, though they have burnt the earth itself to cinders.” “And what may that be?” someone asked. He replied, “What but the human heart itself: and unless they hit upon some method of purifying that foul cavern, forth from it will reissue all the shapes, or worse ones, which they have taken such a vast deal of trouble to consume to ashes.… Oh, take my word for it, it will be the old world yet.”

The Christian Church has been entrusted with the spiritual means for purifying the heart—the Gospel of God’s redeeming grace in Christ. That Gospel is our “last, best hope” for a better world. To proclaim and explain the Gospel with never flagging zeal; to bring unceasingly all known powers of persuasion to bear upon the minds, the consciences, the wills, and the hearts of men to accept God’s proffered grace, to yield themselves to the power of the Gospel and live by it, and under its inspiration consecrate themselves and their abilities to the job of transforming this earth into God’s Great Society—this is the Church’s fundamental work in the world. All its energies, resources, and organizational machinery should be continuously devoted toward the effectual performance of this task.

Ilion T. Jones is professor emeritus of practical theology at San Francisco Theological Seminary, San Anselmo, California. While in the pastorate he was chairman (1940) of the Social Education and Action Committee of the Presbyterian (U.S.A.) General Assembly. His books include “A Historical Approach to Evangelical Worship” and “Practice and Principles of Preaching.”

- More from Ilion T. Jones

Theology

The Ten Commandments

Cyrus H. Gordon

We who are privileged to be alive today have at our disposal a wealth of newly unearthed data that illuminates the Bible. Cuneiform tablets shed light on two of the commandments—the second and tenth—as we shall soon note. Moreover, the text of the Ten Commandments as a whole takes on new meaning as we restudy it with the tools and materials of modern scholarship.

The Ten Commandments were originally addressed to the children of Israel. The opening words—“I am Yahweh, your God, Who brought you from the Land of Egypt, from the house of slaves”—are directed by God to his particular people. The text is a guide to a way of life worthy of his followers.

The purpose of this article is to review the contents of the commandments against a background of collateral evidence so that we may understand more fully how and why the commandments have become relevant not merely for ancient Israel but for mankind throughout the ages.

The commandments are not law in the legal sense. They are beyond law-court legality. We are to obey them, not because there is a penalty for breaking them, but because we love God. It is impossible to impose a legal penalty for coveting; violating the tenth commandment draws no punishment according to the Bible or to any other code. The Ten Commandments do not even allude to any legal punishment for theft, adultery, or murder. The text enjoins obedience on us for the love of God, not for fear of a penalty imposed by a court. It states that while God punishes sins down to the third and fourth generation, he metes out loving-kindness down to thousands of generations “for those that love Me and keep My commandments.” The commandments are thus beyond law in the ordinary sense, and will be practiced by those who love God, because to love God requires the fulfillment of his commandments. The Hebrews did not have to justify the validity of the commandments, as the Greek philosophers had to justify morality and ethics, for reasons to be given below.

The Ten Commandments appear twice, once in Exodus 20 and again in Deuteronomy 5. Some variant wording distinguishes the two versions, but the commandments are the same in both cases. The only significant difference is the reason given for the Sabbath. Exodus stresses that Sabbath observance is required by God’s example; like him, we must labor six days but rest on the seventh. Deuteronomy, on the other hand, reminds Israel that since they once experienced the evils of slavery, they should be careful to give a day of rest to those who work for them.

The first commandment forbids the worship of other gods. Israel had been rescued from slavery by its God, who therefore claims Israel’s sole allegiance: “I am Yahweh, your God, Who brought you from the Land of Egypt, from the house of slaves. You shall have no other gods in addition to Me.” No issue is made about the existence of other gods. The Hebrews in those early times did not seek converts, nor were they concerned about what other nations believed or practiced religiously. They were concerned with living by the rules of conduct required of them by their God.

For some time to come, Israel was to remain envisaged as a city-state: twelve tribes living in a fairly small land with a single national shrine to which everyone was to make pilgrimages, thrice yearly if possible: at the festivals of Tabernacles, Passover, and Pentecost. Israel was not a power to be reckoned with politically or militarily in the world at large until the Empire of David and especially of his son Solomon. It was primarily the internationalism of Solomon’s Age in the tenth century B.C. that paved the way for the spiritual universality of Israel’s immortal prophets starting with the eighth century B.C.

The second commandment forbids the making of images: “You shall not make for yourself any graven image, even any likeness of what is in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, and in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them nor serve them for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, visiting the sin of parents on children down to the third and fourth generations of those that hate Me, but working loving-kindness to the thousands, for those that love Me and keep My commandments.”

Individual Israelites were not above manufacturing their own private gods. Judges 17 relates how a Hebrew named Michah made an idol of silver and proceeded to set up a private family cult around it. To be sure, this was well meant and all in Yahweh’s name (see verses 2, 3, 13); but the fact remains that we have taken an overt step toward breaking with our fathers’ faith when we manufacture a new idol and build our own private cult about it.

The commandments seek to keep the people united by an undivided allegiance to God and his rules of living. Making new gods is a sure way of splitting up a community and of breaking up families as well. If all of us did what Michah did in the chaotic days of the judges, every household would have its own cult; the resultant spiritual chaos would contribute to general chaos in family, national, and world affairs. Most men of good will today rightly feel that the world needs spiritual unity rather than more gods.

The Nuzu Tablet

What we have just said about the second commandment may seem somewhat farfetched if we try to comprehend the biblical text without some external information. After all, the Ten Commandments were worded directly not for us but for a Near Eastern people over three thousand years ago. In our quest for a deeper understanding of the Bible, it is always helpful to gain access to pertinent data from biblical antiquity. The second commandment is now illuminated by a legal document from about 1400 B.C. The document is written in Babylonian on a clay tablet and comes from the town of Nuzu located near the modern Iraqian city of Kirkuk. (Professor E. R. Lacheman’s copy of the tablet is available as text 108 in Volume XIV of the Harvard Semitic Series [Cambridge, Mass., 1950].) It is the last will and testament of a father to his sons. The father commands his sons not to make other gods. Instead he deposits the household idols with his eldest son so that all his sons will be united through the worship of the family gods at the home of the chief heir: “After I die, my sons shall not make gods; my gods I leave with my eldest son.”

The religion of that Nuzu man is not like the religion of Moses. (But it is not unlike the religion of Laban, who had such gods, according to Genesis 31.) The Ten Commandments enjoin upon us the worship of one God; and even he must not be represented iconically. The Nuzu family was both polytheistic and idolatrous. But the Nuzu tablet shows us a danger that was recognized in the Bible world; namely, that making idols is divisive and should therefore be shunned. (We cannot enter into all the implications of idolatry in later times, but it is worth noting that defeated nations, on seeing their idols dragged off or smashed, tended to become demoralized and lose their identity. Assyria, Babylonia, the Seleucids, and Rome could not destroy the Jewish religion partly because God and his people’s allegiance to him were incorporeal and therefore indestructible. The second commandment thus paved the way for the historic survival of Yahwism.) Some of the prophets and the New Testament eschatology envisage the unity of all the nations in peace and in worship. But the Chosen People in the second millennium B.C. did not start out with any ecumenical program for immediate implementation. The structure of society in the Pentateuch is geared, as we have observed, to the requirements of a city-state. Pentateuchal regulations are not designed for a country the size of the United States of America, with its great distances and with a population much too large to assemble in the capital.

The city-state aspect of ancient Israel is not, of course, what made Israel distinctive or great. Other city-states (including Athens and Sparta) also shared the same general structure. What made Israel different and significant was the content of its law that took it out of the religious and moral pattern of all its neighbors. The other nations not only were idolatrous and polytheistic but also made a place (and all too often an honored place) for lax morality and warped ethics. Israel accepted the law that consciously forbade those internationally accepted usages. Nowadays, when biblical teachings are in theory approved (no matter how much they are violated in practice), the Ten Commandments seem self-evident, and it takes less courage to live by them than to flout them. But this was not so for the early Israelites, whose law put them out of step with the world and made them the objects of scorn and hate in pagan antiquity. The Roman historian Tacitus accused the Jews of turning the standards of the world topsy-turvy by inverting the accepted definitions of “sacred” and “impious.” From the standpoint of Mediterranean paganism, Tacitus was not entirely wrong. The Pentateuch (e.g., Leviticus 18:1–5, 30) tells us not to follow the customs of the other nations, because those customs are abominable; but instead to follow God’s laws, which, as we now know, are often in conscious opposition to the laws of Israel’s neighbors.

The third commandment forbids perjury: “You shall not swear by the name of Yahweh your God to a falsehood; for God will not clear anybody who swears by His name to a falsehood.” This commandment, by the way, is not an innovation. It was a widespread view that swearing to a falsehood would incite the god invoked to punish the perjurer. The idea is that when we offend God by misusing his name, he avenges his honor by bringing retribution on us.

The fourth commandment orders us to “remember to keep the Sabbath day holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work but the seventh day is a Sabbath unto Yahweh your God. (On it) neither you nor your son and daughter, your male or female slave, nor your cattle, nor the resident who is within your gates, shall do any work. For in six days Yahweh made the heavens, the earth and the sea and all that is therein, but He rested on the seventh day. Therefore Yahweh blessed the Sabbath day and sanctified it.”

A Rest Day For All

Other nations divided time into units of seven, but it remained for the Bible to establish the seventh day as a day of rest for the entire community. In the Exodus version which we have just translated, keeping the Sabbath is required by divine example. He labored for six days and rested on the seventh; hence it behooves us to do likewise. The Deuteronomy version, however, stresses the social side. The Israelite was to give his dependents a day of rest for humanitarian reasons: “Neither you nor your son and daughter, your male or female slave, nor your ox, ass or any of your cattle, nor the stranger who is within your gates, shall do any work, so that your male and female slave may rest like you. You shall remember that you were a slave in the Land of Egypt and Yahweh your God brought you out from there with a strong hand and outstretched arm. Therefore Yahweh your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.” Israel’s slavery had conditioned the nation to understand this commandment.

In antiquity slavery existed everywhere, even in Israel. The abolition of slavery lay far ahead in history; but humane treatment of the slave is a divine commandment, and his right to a weekly day of rest is guaranteed by the law. Tyranny can be exercised not only over one’s slaves but also over one’s children, so the commandment protects them, too. It remains to note that the ancient concept of the community embraces domestic animals as well as people. Accordingly, the work animals are to have their day of rest. It is interesting to note that after the Flood, God made his covenant not only with Noah and his sons but also with the animals on the ark (Gen. 9:8–17). To cite only one of many more examples: the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn applied to Egyptian cattle as well as people (Ex. 11:5).

The fifth commandment, to honor parents, is the key to social stability. Without it we run into juvenile delinquency and a general breakdown of law and order. Respect for society must be rooted in respect for parents in the home from early childhood. Israel took this responsibility seriously; Deuteronomy 21:18–21 prescribes the death penalty for incorrigible juvenile delinquents for the express purpose of “wiping out evil from the midst” of the community. We do not know how often, or indeed if ever, this drastic measure was implemented; but we do know that ancient Hebrew society did not spawn whole generations of children who wantonly violated the law and brought disgrace on their parents. No biblical Israelite youth was so delinquent as to come home and slay his parents because they were exercising their parental authority over him and not letting him run his life as he pleased. There is no dearth of crime narrated in the pages of Scripture, but the people who considered respect for parents a divine ordinance did not have any general problem of juvenile delinquency. The commandment reads: “Honor your father and mother in order that your days may be long on the Land that Yahweh your God is about to give you.” Note that the reward is long life in the Promised Land for the virtuous members of God’s particular people. The world as a whole was not yet ready for the Ten Commandments. Many ancient city-states had their own special law codes, but Israel alone had a law that has remained a living force throughout the centuries. Indeed, with the spread of Christianity, it is still widening its influence, whereas the laws of the other ancient nations are objects of study but not guides for living.

The sixth commandment (“You shall not murder”) is not directed against killing in general. Hebrew, like English, has entirely different words for “murder” and “kill.” This commandment does not apply, for example, to capital punishment meted out to criminals under law; nor does it apply to killing the enemy on the battlefield. Murder designates assassination or some other kind of treacherous or criminal manslaughter.

Sins Among The Gods

One might think that the prohibitions against murder, adultery (the seventh commandment), and stealing (the eighth) would be universal, but it is not so. In ancient Sparta, it was getting caught, not stealing, that was reprehensible. In Canaan the natives worshiped the goddess Anath, who, as we know from the Ugaritic poems, had a man murdered to rob him of his bow. (Ugarit was a city-state on the northern coast of Syria. The religious texts found there constituted “the Bible of the Canaanites,” so to speak, around 1400–1200 B.C.) The Homeric Hymn to Hermes glories in telling how that beloved god was a remarkable thief from infancy. And Zeus himself became enamored of married women—like Amphitryon’s wife Alcmene—and impregnated them.

In other words, the Hebrews lived in a world where people revered gods who committed theft, adultery, and murder. In Israel, however, the concept of God left no place for such behavior. Pagan gods—as we know from the religious texts of the pagans themselves—all too often set a sub-human standard for their devotees. In Israel the divine pattern uplifted men. This is why the biblical tradition, in which men are created in the image of God, leads men toward moral perfection by inspiring them to imitate their Maker. We are told, for instance, to follow God’s example by resting on the Sabbath. The perfect example of our righteous and unsinning God made it unnecessary for Hebrew moralists to set up a philosophical system for the good way of life. In Israel right living consisted in conforming to the divine pattern. Conduct was to be in accord with God’s commandments. At a later date the prophets found it unnecessary to justify virtuous living and social perfection, for these followed automatically from the nature of God as the people of Israel understood it.

Another talented people, the Greeks, also aspired to the good life; but they could not do so by emulating their deities. Instead the Greeks had to justify morality and ethics by systematic philosophy, a development the ancient Hebrews did not experience because they had no need for it. Yahweh provides a pattern for the moral man; Zeus does not.

The ninth commandment is, “You shall not bear false witness against the other fellow.” As we shall presently observe, distinguished neighbors of the Hebrews stooped to this crime even though universal agreement held it to be wrong. In Israel, however, it could not go unpunished.

Baal And Covetousness

The tenth commandment often seems enigmatic. How can anyone be found guilty of coveting unless it leads to theft or adultery?—and the latter offenses are punishable as such, regardless of the coveting that led to them. In our society today we expect a degree of coveting on the part of any normal person who wants to get ahead. In fact, a young man who does not aspire to the standard of living of those better off than he is considered ambitionless and as such reprehensible. In any case it seems at first strange that the Ten Commandments prohibit coveting, classifying it with theft, adultery, and murder. “You shall not covet the house of your neighbor, nor covet your neighbor’s wife, his male or female slave, nor his ox or ass, nor anything he has.” The biblical emphasis against coveting is clarified by Ugaritic literature, according to which the pagan god Baal is a god who covets the houses of his fellow gods and then succeeds in getting the best of all houses built for himself. The Bible is to a great extent a reaction against pagan values. Anything honored in pagan religion is likely to be regarded as an abomination in Israel. It is no accident that the very first article we are told not to covet is our neighbor’s house, for Baal coveted just that. Ugaritic literature also tells us that Baal coveted some mythological animals; this is countered by the biblical prohibition against coveting our neighbor’s livestock. The version in Deuteronomy 5 adds the field of our neighbor among the objects we must not covet; we may compare the Ugaritic tablet that tells of Baal’s coveting fields. (I have referred to the specific Ugaritic texts in “A Note on the Tenth Commandment,” The Journal of Bible and Religion 31, 1963, pp. 208, 209.) The emphasis against coveting is now clear from the Ugaritic texts that attribute covetousness to Baal.

The clash between Israelite and local pagan values is illustrated by the ill-starred marriage of Ahab and Jezebel. Ahab was weak vis-à-vis his foreign wife. Each was a product of his own culture. When Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard and Naboth refused to sell or trade it, Ahab, though distressed, would not put pressure on Naboth (1 Kings 21). Ahab as a Hebrew was not to covet another’s field, let alone bear false witness, steal, and murder to gain possession of it. Jezebel approached matters differently. She was of Phoenician-Canaanite background and a devotee of Baal. Far from outlawing covetousness, Baal had set the pattern for it. As a result Jezebel could not understand her husband’s scruples, and like her god she proceeded to get the coveted object. She filched the vineyard for Ahab by trumping up a false accusation against Naboth, hiring lying witnesses against him, and having him murdered so that Ahab could confiscate his property. Nowhere could we find a clearer contrast between Israel and the culture that surrounded it. By her native Phoenician standards she was a normal queen who never did anything worse than Baal or Anath. Ahab’s scruples were as incomprehensible to Jezebel as her behavior is to the average Bible reader today.

Once we grasp the values of Canaanite Baalism, we can begin to understand the magnitude and nature of the reaction embodied in Israel’s Yahwism.

Coveting is all too common. It characterizes vulgar people, and while not a punishable offense in itself, it frequently is the prelude to open transgression. The tenth commandment is designed to save us from the dangerous blight of such commonness.

The Ten Commandments are a landmark in human history, because they sum up in a few verses so much of what society and the individual need for a good, orderly, and productive life. All of us should aspire to accomplishing the best we have in us during the six working days of every week. If we were to follow these sacred precepts, we would become as free as possible from the turmoil that results from transgression, and from the dissatisfaction that stems from coveting. We would have a more stable society in which parents and children would be better united in respect and love. We would be more atune to the divine order of things through following the commandments of God.

But the modern man is not content with this. He asks: “How do we know there is a god who revealed these laws? What authority have they? As an intelligent person should I not work out my own code of morality?” And so forth. Once we relinquish our traditional moral absolutes, we succumb to moral relativism. Like the Greeks of old, we must then set about constructing our own system of right and wrong. The end of all such inquiries (if they are successful!) must quite closely approximate the Ten Commandments. But in the process of rediscovering time-honored, tested, and self-evident moral truth, we can fritter away much of our lifetime.

We should all have our appointed tasks. A few of us are philosophers whose professional business it may be to question ethical and moral systems; but most of us are in other walks of life. Our duty to society, to ourselves, and to our God is to live useful lives in our chosen fields and to be good citizens. Relativism in morality and ethics tends to deflect a man from his work and sometimes renders him in need of psychic therapy as well. The man who accepts the Ten Commandments as absolute has a better chance of being released for efficient work during six days, and refreshed on the Sabbath, every week.

Cyrus H. Gordon is professor of Near Eastern studies and chairman of the Department of Mediterranean Studies at Brandeis University. The author of several books, including “The World of the Old Testament” and “Before the Bible,” he belongs to a conservative synagogue. Dr. Gordon may be described as upholding the Jewish tradition that scriptural study is not only an academic pursuit but a sacrament and a way of life.

- More from Cyrus H. Gordon

The Isolationism of Islam

Three hundred Christian missionaries were expelled from the Sudan this month. Their departure emptied the entire southern part of the country of foreign religious workers.

The order from the Sudan government affected 272 Roman Catholic priests and nuns and 28 Protestant missionaries.

Major General Muhammed Ahmed Irwa, internal affairs minister, charged that “this grave step” was “justified” because of the missionaries’ “responsibility” for disorders which had broken out recently in the southern provinces.

In the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, Irwa produced copies of Frontier Call, a periodical of the Verona Fathers Mission published in Cincinnati, and other literature allegedly opposing Sudanese unity. In Cincinnati, Father Olive Branchesi, editor of the publication, denied that it had ever gone into Sudan’s political difficulties.

The internal affairs minister said at a press conference that the expulsions were intended, not to curb the freedom of southern or northern Christians, but to restore the stability and state security of the Sudan. He said that all churches and mission stations in the south will be taken over by Sudanese priests and clergymen, who will have “full freedom to carry out their religious rites.”

Catholic observers, however, labeled the promise that the foreign missionaries would be replaced by native priests as “sheer pretext.” They said that there are only ten or twelve such native priests, far too few to do an adequate work.

Among Protestants, the deportation orders were expected to apply to missionaries serving under the Sudan Interior Mission, the Church Missionary Society, and Missionary Aviation Fellowship. The SIM has had twenty-five missionaries in Sudan; they come from the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Eight CMS missionaries have been on furlough and are not expected to be able to return. The MAF has had two Britishers and two Canadians in the Sudan with one aircraft.

In taking action against the 300 missionaries, the government climaxed earlier measures which have resulted in similar expulsions over the past two years. Most of the difficulty has been in the south, where most of the country’s Christians live.

In February, 1963, 143 missionary teachers were ordered to leave the country. This followed Vatican charges that Arab political leaders were attempting to extend their influence over the Negro tribes in the southern provinces, where there are some 620,000 Christians, of whom 500,000 are said to be Catholics.

Christian leaders have repeatedly pointed out that since independence was gained in 1956, the predominantly Muslim Arab leaders of the north have sought to “Islamize” the chiefly Negro and pagan south, which has a total population of about 4,000,000.

Recently, the International Commission of Jurists announced in Geneva that Sudan’s government had declined to grant it permission to investigate human rights problems—particularly religious freedom—in that country. The commission, which has consultative status with the United Nations, previously charged that the Sudanese government had followed a policy of forcing Christian missionaries out of the country. Reviewing the ouster of many Protestant and Catholic missionaries, it said the Sudanese government was guilty of ignoring basic tenets of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

Officers of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs immediately issued a statement expressing regret over the deportations.

Sir Kenneth Grubb, chairman, and Dr. O. Frederick Nolde, director, charged that “evidence against two or three individuals is being used to cast suspicion on many devoted servants of the country and its people.”

Their statement declared that “the Christian church in Sudan will, of course, continue under its able Sudanese leadership, but a serious blow is being struck at the standard of theological education available for the future.”

Some observers note an increasing tendency among Islamic countries to bar Christian missionary effort. Tunisia, long a bright spot in the Muslim world in the minds of missionaries, has also shut the door. So has Somalia. Christian education in the United Arab Republic is becoming ever more difficult under nationalization of schools. Malaysia gained independence without relenting its policy of no Christian witness to the Moslem Malays.

In the United States, meanwhile, an offshoot of Islam was attracting public attention. Cassius Clay, newly crowned heavyweight boxing champion, declared himself a part of the movement of Black Muslims, an American Negro group that is unrecognized by mainstream Islam. Soon after, the deputy chief of the movement, Malcolm X, announced that he was withdrawing from the organization to form a rival party emphasizing “black nationalism as a political concept and form of social action against the oppressors.”

Haitian Outlook

On January 31, two Canadian Jesuit priests landed at Bowen Field, Haiti’s international airport at Port-au-Prince. As a result of a baggage inspection by immigration officers, the Haitian government later in the week expelled all Jesuit personnel and terminated the order’s work, which had been authorized by special agreement in 1958. Identifying the two priests as Father Paul Larame, director of a radio station, and Brother Francois Xavier Ross, an electronics specialist, the Foreign Ministry explained the deportations in an official statement two weeks later in La Nouvelliste, a Port-au-Prince daily. It accused the Jesuits of having brought into the country propaganda material in the form of a “series of articles and writings, defamatory to the Haitian people, their government, and the national institutions,” the ultimate object of which was the overthrow of the constitutional government of President François Duvalier. While rejecting a protest by the Canadian government, the Haitians professed their support for the work of other Roman Catholic orders and priests “in the exercise of their ministry, so long as they do not interfere in the internal politics of Haiti.”

Nothing was said of the Protestant churches, which include Episcopal, Baptist, Mennonite, and Methodist. The latter is the most firmly established; its first missionaries came in 1817 on the invitation of Haiti’s first president, Alexandré Petion. In 1939 the Methodist Church launched a literacy campaign by preparing a phonetic system of spelling with the intention of teaching the people to read Creole (a French patois which is the only language spoken by 85 per cent of Haiti’s four million). In 1960 a school staffed by French-speaking Protestant teachers was opened in the capital, and it now has an enrollment of over 900 students. This number will be more than doubled on the completion of a new development project—a staggering venture of faith (not least from a financial angle) in an unsettled situation. Three months after the school opened, the President, a Roman Catholic, sent his own two children to be educated there; they attended for about two years until violence flared up again in a shooting incident outside the school when five of the children’s escorting party were killed or wounded. The children miraculously escaped unscathed, but all schools were dosed for a time thereafter.

Missionaries are especially encouraged by the extent and enthusiasm of the indigenous church, which has now produced two Haitian ministers (another graduates this year) and a Haitian deaconess, and believes in the efficacy of a 6 A.M. prayer meeting. Last fall, just before the hurricane Flora devastated the country and killed some 6,000 people, eighteen young people came to Haiti from the Swiss Reformed churches. Calling themselves the Gay Companions, they paid their own expenses, will receive no salary during their year in Haiti, and will work under a minister-leader wherever the need is most urgent.

J. D. DOUGLAS

An All-Christian Philippines?

By 1969 every one of the 27,500,000 citizens of the Philippines will become a Christian. This was the qualified prediction of the Rev. Onofre Fonceca, a bishop of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines. The qualification was that beginning this year, every member of the UCCP will win at least one Filipino to Christ. The UCCP is the largest Protestant denomination in the Philippines with 1,026 churches and 910,399 members.

While the bishop’s arithmetic was mainly intended to accentuate the role of the laity in evangelism, his conclusion was viewed as a direct challenge to the entire UCCP constituency for a more dynamic and intensive lay ministry.

If the each-one-win-one effort could be successfully extended to the whole Protestant population, the Philippine archipelago would be completely Christian by 1966. Protestants in the Philippines now number 3,564,667.

Electronic Rescue Operation

Several thousand people in Sydney, Australia, dialed 31–0971 during the last twelve months, and most of them were calling for help. The calls were to the Life Line Centre, founded a year ago this month to reach people in trouble: drug addicts, potential suicides, people with family or social problems, and others.

The man behind this venture is the Rev. Alan Walker, superintendent of the Central Methodist Mission in Sydney, which operates the Centre. Walker, known in Sydney for other unusual ventures, including the Teen-Age Cabaret and the Christian Floor Show, said a year ago that the Centre was designed to “come to grips with the changing emotional, physical, personal, family and spiritual problems of a modern society.”

“For twenty-four hours a day a lifeline will run out to the people along the telephone cables,” he said. “The Centre will say: ‘Help is as close as the telephone.’ ”

“For some reason many people hesitate to turn to neighborhood churches in spiritual need. They will use the more anonymous telephone call to seek spiritual help and counsel.”

His prediction has proved correct. Within the past year, some 12,000 persons were reached through telephone calls and other means.

Last month the mission suffered a crippling setback when its headquarters, which are separate from the Life Line Centre, were destroyed by fire. Rebuilding costs were estimated at a million dollars.

Walker says that the Life Line Centre is designed to be used as a referral point, and that the staff would call in professional help when necessary. The Centre is located in the downtown area, where the suicide rate is said to be the highest and the established church the least effective.

The Life Line movement has been described as “Discipleship in Depth.” “Behind every act of witness and service,” the aim is that “Jesus Christ shall be accepted as Saviour and Lord,” a representative said.

The rallying place for Life Line activities is the Sunday evening service at the Central Methodist Mission, reported to draw the largest Sunday evening congregation in Australia.

“It is here, where Christ is offered and open commitment to Him is sought, that members look expectantly for the conversion of all who have been served through the Life Line Movement,” said a worker.

The mission has an-extensive social service program in Sydney, the largest city in Australia, with a population of over two million. It operates homes and hospitals and has recently established a $50,000 emergency care center for abandoned children. The Life Line Centre cost nearly $88,000 for building and renovation. Besides the 96 counselors, over 200 other volunteers help run the Centre.

It offers a home nursing service, a youth advisory service, a marriage guidance counselor, a chiropody service for aged pensioners, a clothing store, and a two-way radio car for emergencies.

Missing In Action

A converted Jesuit scholar, Don Francisco Lacueva, disappeared from his home in England this month.

The former priest was reported missing following a trip to London on evangelistic work. His wife had expected him to return to their home in Kent the same day. Instead she received a telephone call from a man who said that Don Franciso would not be back. The mysterious caller refused to identify himself.

Inquiries revealed that Don Francisco evidently had gone to London Airport and taken a plane to Paris, where he was picked up in an automobile.

His Protestant friends in England are emphatic that he would never have gone of his own free will. Knowing of his recent evangelistic activities, they tend to place a sinister interpretation on his disappearance.

Don Francisco served for fourteen years as a professor of theology in a Roman Catholic seminary in Spain. He was converted through the witness of a Protestant pastor about two years ago, on the eve of the opening of the Second Vatican Council (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, October 12, 1962). Most recently he has been serving on the staff of the World Protestant Union.

In an article written several weeks ago, Don Francisco charged that drug and electric shock treatment had been administered to a Spanish Jesuit priest who was showing interest in evangelical doctrine. The article concludes: “The Roman inquisition is not yet only a fad reminiscent of the past. In spite of the ecumenical movement, the practical rule of the Jesuits that ‘the end justifies the means’ is still up to date.”

Theology

Current Religious Thought: March 27, 1964

Addison H. Leitch

Little old ladies make good foils for preachers’ stories. There was that little old lady (maybe in tennis shoes) on a guided tour in Westminster Abbey. And there, surrounded by noble and ignoble monuments and competing guides, she asked a ridiculous question. “Tell me,” she demanded a little nervously and therefore a little louder than she had planned, “has anyone been saved in this church lately?” The question shattered things; it hung out there in embarrassed silence. “Anybody saved here lately?” My dear lady, have you noticed the beautiful architecture? Have you no feeling for history? Being “saved” is for the Salvation Army, or maybe sweaty tent meetings; this is a cathedral. But there the question stood.

There are things hidden from the wise yet revealed to babes, and the foolishness of God is wiser than men. Apart from becoming like little children, we cannot even see the Kingdom. I am not sure what all that means. But one gets the notion in theology today that both the questions and the answers are being set up and controlled by the deviously subtle experts, and that the questions people really ask are not being answered.

In a theological seminary where I once was the chairman of the question-and-answer period for a visiting lecturer, the famous guest rephrased every question to suit his theological slant. Finally I became blunt and maybe rude and said, “Why don’t you answer the question the boy asked?” Well, he was dear enough, too: “Because he asked the wrong question, that’s why.” That simple questions can be very puzzling and lead to ambiguity or even mystery I should be the first to admit. But such answers as we know should fit the questions. And if the answers can be given and understood only by a man with an IQ of 185, then we are caught in a religion available only to people who are smart enough to get it.

The desperation in the Church regarding integration is both timely and overdue. A white Christian will accept a Negro as brother and indeed neighbor. But he is very naïve if he expects the other people on the street to act with him without his motive. The man who is saved has to find out how to act like a child of God. Those who deny God may be led to act the same way but from a different premise; they will be acting sociologically and not religiously.

Remember the time in the United Nations when the Arabs and the Jews were at each other’s throats and a good American New England Congregationalist interrupted their wrangling to ask, “Why don’t you people act like Christians?” Well, because they aren’t Christians! Youth conferences are full of instructions about living for young people who haven’t been born yet. “Are you saved?” Don’t confuse the awkwardness of the questioner with the profundity of the question. We shall have to have some Christians before we have a Christian civilization.

All of which leads to the question of authority on such matters. If you want to put a theological faculty in a tizzy, write various professors and ask them a simple question: “Is the Bible true?” They will in most cases do one of three things: (1) not answer your letter; (2) give you an equivocal answer; (3) say that they do not care to be examined by someone improperly informed to ask such a question. So you have a question on salvation and you think the Bible ought to have the answer. But is the Bible true? The great and good Hal Luccock once wrote, as Simeon Stylites in The Christian Century, about the Philippian jailor. “What must I do to be saved?” cried the jailor. “Well,” said Paul, “what do you think?” Maybe such questions are answered by committees or by majorities or, even better, by “What Are Youth Today Saying About Salvation?” Or maybe we need the woman’s viewpoint.

Another little old lady on her deathbed once asked me about the future life and the promise of eternal life. I could only turn to the Bible. I could only turn to the words of Jesus Christ; without the authority of those words I had nothing to say. It did me no good to give her my opinion or even to ask her opinion in the light of her own existential experience.

How, indeed, does one get assurance existentially about something that is yet to happen and is only a matter of promise? Unless there is some assurance from the beyond, it is impossible for us to be able to say anything with any certainty at all. This, it seems to me, has been one of the terrible results of modern criticism. The ordinary person has been taught to be suspicious of the authority of what is said in the Bible. Can he possibly know what is being said with any assurance unless he first consults the experts? Thus in a very subtle way we have taken away their authority.

So here are the simple questions. Are we saved? If so, where shall we find this out? Then, is the Bible true? Is it true enough for one to rest his assurance of eternal felicity on what is said there in the very words of Jesus himself? And unless He says it, who will say it for us?

Hear what Markus Barth, in the recent book Acquittal by Resurrection, has to say about the Resurrection: “Canonical gospels and apostolic writings alike do not attempt to produce any proof of the possibility, rationality or respectability of the resurrection. They do not ask whether or when it may be opportune to speak of it. They are satisfied to tell that Jesus Christ was raised, to add narrative elements or doctrinal statements that explain the power and relevance and to call for repentance and faith.” Again: “The gospels do not ask what can we do with a risen Jesus? Rather they state what he, the resurrected, does and will do for them and all men.… A critical analysis or experimental testing of [the resurrection] was not even attempted. It would have availed them little or nothing at all.” Markus Barth goes on to make the interesting observation that the Resurrection was not something believed by believers but was a real event that made believers out of unbelievers.

Many churches have classes in lay theology. Perhaps the laymen will begin to ask again the plain, simple questions, which theology must learn how to answer.

- More from Addison H. Leitch

Moral Diagnosis

J. D. Douglas

After a three-year investigation a special committee of the British Medical Association has published its findings in the booklet Venereal Disease and Young People. The report does much more than point out that between 1951 and 1962 the population increased by 6 per cent, but sexually transmitted diseases increased by 73 per cent. It suggests that the “bomb” and fear of world annihilation are partly responsible for a new hedonism in the young who, confronted with the prospect of death tomorrow, hurl themselves into a desperate search for pleasure today.

The committee does not hesitate to affirm that “society as a whole is to blame for the blurring of values and loss of respect for the human personality, not to mention the disregard for Christian principles, which increased promiscuity signifies.” Disapproval is expressed of the idea that pre-marital intercourse is a sensible preliminary to marriage, and this is followed by the remarkably forthright statement: “The maintenance of the Christian ideal of chastity is of the utmost importance not only in combating the sexually-contracted diseases but also in preserving the institution of marriage and the family life.… Anything which debases this is a threat to our society.”

It is argued that venereal diseases are primarily a social and moral problem, to which the key lies in the Pauline words, “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” On the subject of obscene literature, the report dryly suggests that many who read Lady Chatterley’s Lover undoubtedly did so “out of less pure motives than an interest in the development of the English novel or in Lawrence’s wish to divest the sexual act of pornographic connotations.”

Great interest and a measure of opposition have been stirred by the BMA booklet, which paradoxically comes at a time when the spoken and written words of some government ministers and Anglican clergy have reflected a new tolerance toward fornication. Most significant (and most resented in certain quarters) is the religious note in the report which suggests that young people do not understand that “religion is relevant to life,” and not just a Sunday affair. It further asserts that the moral standards of many consist of “a kind of watered down Christianity.” If, the report concludes, “piety appears to consist only of a somewhat mysterious and irrelevant weekly charade, the fault does not entirely lie at their own door. Some of the blame lies with the churches.”

Dr. R. R. Williams, Bishop of Leicester and chairman of the Church of England’s Board of Social Responsibility, said:

“These opinions are a welcome contrast to certain invitations to license which have been widely publicized and linked with the names of individual doctors and even occasionally with those of clergymen.”

Protestant Panorama

United Church of Christ officials proposed that six Protestant denominations now engaged in long-term unity talks take immediate action to unite their work in specific fields such as missions, relief, and mass communications.

Lutheran Church of America moved its Seamen’s Center in New York into a new eleven-story building erected at a cost of $1,100,000.

American Methodist leaders who recently visited Cuban congregations for the first time in two years reported that they have “grown in spiritual vitality.”

The number of baptisms in Southern Baptist churches dropped during 1963 for the second year in a row. The reported total for last year was 355,325, which represented a 6.9 per cent decrease from the 1962 figure.

Deaths

DR. S. T. LUDWIG, 60, general secretary of the Church of the Nazarene; in Kansas City, Missouri.

DR. LORENZ F. BLANKENBUEHLER, 78, editor emeritus of The Lutheran Witness; in St. Louis.

DR. JAMES F. GRECORY, 64, editor of The Free Methodist; in Warsaw, Indiana.

Miscellany

Increased pressure on Congress for federal aid to parochial as well as public schools was forecast by members of the House Committee on Labor and Education. The prediction was issued following scattered reports of curtailment of Roman Catholic elementary school programs and the appearance of a book bearing a bishop’s imprimatur and calling for gradual abolition of the parochial school system.

The Rev. William D. Goble, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Manchester, New Hampshire, publicly withdrew a charge he had made earlier that Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s divorce disqualified him, on moral grounds, for the presidency. Following a 45-minute talk with Rockefeller the minister declared that he thought neither party was divorced “simply to satisfy a love affair.” Goble made the retraction on the eve of the New Hampshire primary.

Play for Keeps, a color motion picture featuring the Christian testimonies of six leading athletes—Al Dark, Felipe Alou, Bobby Richardson, Bill Wade, Raymond Berry, and Bill Glass—was introduced this month by Gospel Films.

Personalia

Evangelist Billy Graham became a grandfather this month when his oldest daughter, Mrs. Stephan Tchividjian, gave birth to a son, Stephan Nelson.

Dr. Kyle Haselden named editor of The Christian Century.

Dr. Wilfred F. Butcher appointed general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches.

Dr. Robert J. Arnott elected president of Berkeley Baptist Divinity School.

Dr. Fred Hoskins resigned his professorship at Chicago Theological Seminary to become pastor of the Community Church of Garden City, New York.

They Say

“If I were a Catholic I should be outraged at the suggestion that Catholic votes could be bought.”—The Rev. C. Stanley Lowell, associate director of Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, in branding as a “political trick” a proposal by Democratic Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota that a U. S. ambassador be appointed to the Vatican.

- More from J. D. Douglas

Revolution in the Choir Loft

Donald Hustad

“Church Music for the Whole Church.” This was the motto over the stage of Convention Center in Louisville, Kentucky, during a three-day conference that celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the church-music program of the Southern Baptist Convention. Twenty choirs from Baptist colleges and seminaries delivered erudite sacred classics and sophisticated arrangements of folk hymns, then joined with the Louisville Symphony Orchestra for the premiere performance of Talmage W. Dean’s Behold the Glory of the Lamb, an apocalyptic oratorio commissioned for the occasion. Workshop sessions met thirteen at a time, with recognized experts discussing topics ranging from “How Is Your Diction?” to “Vocal Problems of the Pre-Adolescent.” More than 5,000 delegates had a chance to review the revolution that has taken place in American church music since World War II.

While some experts speak of a “church-music renaissance,” the change is better described as the first advent of serious church music in America. It is a product of democratic music education and of a spirit of self-examination unique to our time—with money enough to support it.

Statistically, the movement toward better music is impressive, especially among Southern Baptists. The larger seminaries boast music schools on an equal footing with schools of theology and Christian education. Yet they are not able to turn out enough ministers of music to supply the demand of their churches. Southern Baptists print two monthly church-music magazines. A field services department works through more than thirty state music secretaries, conducting numerous workshops and clinics and two annual conferences.

Twenty years ago, some observers imagined that a Baptist music program would make its greatest contribution in the realm of church promotion and organization. Intervening years have made it clear that Christian education and Christian art have profited as well. A typical urban church has five to ten choirs enrolling up to 500 people. Standards of choral literature and performance have improved remarkably. Two hymnbooks and a hymnal companion have been produced by Southern Baptists within the last ten years, and historic hymns of English, German, and Latin tradition are being added to the Baptists’ own particular heritage of gospel song.

Inevitably, other denominations suffer by comparison with Southern Baptist numbers, but church music is on the move everywhere. Music education is growing in importance in all seminaries. Bible colleges offer strong music majors, hoping to continue their leadership in supplying professional church musicians. Master’s and doctor’s degrees in church music are available in many secular universities and conservatories. As a result, American churches today offer the most new opportunities for a performing music career. Even small churches with part-time choir directors and organists can get help through fellowships and literature.

Methodists have had a national fellowship for musicians for more than eight years; they publish a monthly journal. Lutherans support two magazines in testimony to their leadership in the liturgical arts, one a monthly published by the Lutheran Church in America and the other a quarterly of the Lutheran Society for Worship, Music, and the Arts, whose membership and officers come from three Lutheran bodies. Younger organizations include the Association of Disciples Musicians, which began annual workshops in 1962, and the Fellowship of American Baptist Musicians, whose organizational meeting was held a few weeks ago.

Musicians of other small church groups banded together twelve years ago in the National Church Music Fellowship.

The spirit of introspection implicit in all this activity can probably be traced to two important volumes: Church Music in History (1937) by Canon Winfred Douglas and Protestant Church Music in America (1933) by Archibald T. Davison. They were written from the safety of cloisters; yet their attack on Romanticism in anthem music and hymn tunes, “erotic” and “self-centered” gospel hymnody, a “concert choir” and a “spectator audience,” has had a telling effect. It need not detract from their contributions to insist that Douglas and Davison espoused a simple, though possibly impractical standard for music in the house of God: The best church music is the best music. The last twenty years have seen a long line of moderate and even more helpful books—from Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, and independent evangelical authors—based on the premise that church music belongs to the people, not only to church musicians or the laity who have been musically educated.

One noted author, Austin C. Lovelace, minister of music at New York’s Christ Church (Methodist), was invited by Southern Baptists to help delineate church-music philosophy at the Louisville conference. His lectures reflected a profound understanding of the relation between music and theology as well as a self-effacing dedication to a Christian ministry that is rare among musicians of his stature. He contended that Christ is the center of a wedding scene, not the bride, and that the music should deal with worship and dedication, not romantic love. He urged that funerals move back from the funeral home to the church, with a congregation singing hymns of trust and faith, rather than a soloist intensifying the feeling of grief by singing “John’s favorite.”

It was in the area of Baptist distinctives—corporate evangelism and its accompanying pietist hymnody—that delegates at Louisville seemed to be a little embarrassed. Not one of the new hymns presented in the conference was a gospel hymn. A group of gospel songs effectively sung by soloist Claude Rhea seemed somewhat like museum pieces apologetically associated with Brahms, Vaughan Williams, and Mendelssohn. Most of the audience walked out on a discussion of music in evangelism. Dr. C. E. Autrey, director of the Southern Baptist department of evangelism, pointed out dynamically the historic relation between song and revival. But he offered no standard by which evangelism’s music should be measured today, no encouragement for evangelicals to guard their heritage of informal “experience” hymns against the growing apprehension (even of Baptist musicians) that they are poetically and musically unworthy.

Visitors at the exhibits were tempted to believe that the convention motto was to be translated, “Something for everybody—from Latin motets and a moderately dissonant oratorio to the frothiest of religious ballads.” Obviously, a continuing program of education will contribute to a norm of literature—at least a gamut not quite so wide. Many observers see the need to ignore the commercial religiosity of today’s so-called gospel music while at the same time perpetuating the best of yesterday’s artless expressions of Christian testimony. They regard it no more necessary to justify spontaneous folk hymns of Christian witness than to argue the validity of personal Christian experience.

Some evangelicals have expressed a fear that the heritage of congregational singing may be lost to the graded choir system or to an unrealistic standard of hymnody. One observer noted, with a little unholy glee, that the best congregational singing at the conference was done by the smallest crowd, singing “To God Be the Glory.” Dr. W. L. Howse. an official of the Baptist Sunday School Board, said the next program of education was to be aimed primarily at the congregation.

Education of pastors also came up. One seminary music professor said his greatest burden was the feeling that, to the rest of the faculty and to many fledgling pastors, music was of peripheral value as a ministry.

Many working musicians and some church-music professors have not yet developed their philosophy beyond Douglas and Davison. Church music for them is only a matter of aesthetics, not Christian communication and education. They seem intolerant of those to whom Bach may not communicate.

In the cycles of history, the church-art pendulum has swung from one extreme to another. More than once, reaction against highly developed forms resulted in an obscurantist orgy that outlawed choirs and “figural” music and destroyed manuscripts and musical instruments. The age of Bach, for instance, was followed in Germany by a pastoral insistence on simplicity and later by church music that was almost operatic. Today’s situation may be described by the title of a Baptist book, Church Music in Transition, by William Hooper.

The unanswered question is whether the great potential displayed in Louisville can be harnessed and controlled for the total spiritual good of the ecclesia. Musicians face the responsibility of insuring that their art remains a true servant of the Church. If it is allowed to become master, the future could spell another iconoclastic war that, figuratively, will put the ax to choir lofts and organs and make fancy robes and graded choir materials fuel for a bonfire.

Black Sheep Prodigy

Not many boys ever play Stradivarius violins. But this 17-year-old Wins critical acclaim with them in leading concert halls across North America. Next week, for instance, he will perform as featured soloist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. He is probably the only American prodigy who combines a concert career with high school studies and still fits in a daily hour of Bible study.

A clue to his biblical interest is found in his name: James Oliver Buswell IV. As a musician he is somewhat of a family “black sheep,” inasmuch as his two living namesakes excel in altogether different fields. His father (James III) teaches anthropology at Wheaton College. His grandfather (James Jr.) is dean of the graduate faculty at Covenant College and Seminary in St. Louis. Both are interested in music, however, and the youth’s mother—who lives with him in a New York apartment during the school year—is an accomplished organ and piano teacher.

As for the young violinist, reviewers have been charmed by his music, and their comments give an insight into the kind of person he is backstage. Washington’s Alan Doerr said of a December recital at the National Gallery of Art:

“Most young artists of his age are simply well-trained parrots, but Buswell plays from within. He seems genuinely involved with his music-making.… Though the fiendishly difficult Bach Chaconne was not an unqualified success, I have to admit that he generated more excitement with it than I have heard in a long time …”

“Jamie,” as his friends call him, attends the private, 160-student Birch Wathen School and studies under Ivan Galamian at the Julliard School of Music. He is an incurable opera fan and owns thirty full operas on record. He approaches music with a spontaneous enthusiasm, and he may well be on the way to one of the outstanding concert careers of the coming generation.

Jamie’s parents started him on the piano at the age of three and on a one-eighth size violin at five. But apparently there was not much forcing, because he says that music fascinated him even then.

He believes strongly in the performer as a creator, not just a “machine” turning out notes—one reason he says any serious musician must respect jazz. His favorites among the classics vary, and he suggested not quoting his likes and dislikes because “I change every week.”

One thing is constant. He can’t take rock ‘n’ roll, even though his girl classmates call him the “spare Beatle” (his brown hair sometimes strays over his forehead like that of the British singers).

At any rate, he is not greatly bothered by the girls. His only dates have been on a Dutch basis at concerts. He was the only stag at the school’s elegant open-house dance this year. He said he felt sorry for the girls wearing “pounds of make-up” and underpinnings such that “they could hardly sit down.”

“They were trying their best to make a big impression,” he declared, in somewhat the way of an elderly woman who came up to him after a concert and piped, “Young man, I think you’re good enough to play with Lawrence Welk!”

The contagious energy the reviewer noticed in Jamie is evident in a glance at his schedule. He has appeared in concerts from Rhode Island to Montana in the past year. He has prepared seven concertos for this season and at any one time has four or five sharpened to performance quality. He is thinking of going into concert work full-time next year.

About four years ago, Jamie began systematic, daily study of the Bible, and lately he has also started reading commentaries and books on theology. Right now he is “tangling with predestination.” The family belongs to the College Church of Christ (Congregational) in Wheaton, and in New York he is still trying to find a church that combines “a fine teaching pulpit and good music.” Most of his Bible study comes after midnight, and some of it is from a French Bible. He memorizes a proverb every day.

Jamie’s own faith in salvation never came at a specific time, but at the age of seven or eight, he said, he began to “think out what I’d heard before and crystallized my belief beyond just knowledge of Bible stories.”

DICK OSTLING

- More from Donald Hustad

NCC Draws Battle Lines

Measures designed to make cries of the Church more audible in the political arena won endorsement last month from the National Council of Churches’ 267-member General Board.

Bishop Reuben H. Mueller, new president of NCC, set the mood when he turned the tables on those who occasionally see the NCC leaning to Communism. Mueller stopped short of branding NCC critics as fellow travelers, but not by much. His verbal assault was aimed at those who say, “Let the Church be the Church and stick to religion. Let it be spiritual.” Mueller’s view’ is that “this is a corollary to Karl Marx’s teaching, that ‘religion is the opiate of the people.’ Either way, the intent is for religion to put the people to sleep so they will docilely submit to those who oppress them.” (See editorial, p. 26.)

The General Board, at a four-day meeting in Baltimore, acted upon Mueller’s admonition to “take our knowledge and our experience into the world for which Christ died.” The board called upon churches to “bring before their members the widest possible discussion of the issues and candidates at all levels of our political system.” The Christian citizen, the board said, “must exert his influence toward seeing that the elections result in the emergence of those leaders whose policies he believes best represent the ideals of the Judeo-Christian faith.”

The board also approved significant measures enabling the NCC’s free-wheeling Commission on Religion and Race to involve itself more deeply in civil rights litigation. One action authorizes the commission to file amicus curiae briefs in civil rights appeals cases, though an amendment enacted on the floor requires that the briefs must first be cleared by the general secretary of the NCC. The other measure authorizes the NCC to “enter into an agreement with any insurance company which agrees to write surety bonds in civil rights cases at the request of the Commission on Religion and Race, such agreement to indemnify the insurance company for any loss up to $150,000 suffered over and above the collateral placed with the company by the National Council of Churches.

Board members were advised, meanwhile, that “the Commission on Religion and Race has decided to sponsor a continuous service of worship in Washington, D. C., beginning the week after Easter, in the event the Civil Rights Bill has not yet been passed by the Senate.”Thus far only one U. S. company has agreed to write such bail bonds—upon the posting of 40 per cent collateral plus premium costs. Framers of the request for authorization tried to console the General Board by pointing out that “the experience of both the Commission and the major civil rights organizations indicates that better than 90 per cent of the defendants arrested in civil rights cases appeared for trial when required.”

“The benediction will not be pronounced,” said Commission Director Robert W. Spike, “until the bill is passed.”

Another commission official said that the “worship service” was “meant to call the attention of the country to any legislative maneuver intended to delay passage of the bill.”

Civil rights figured in still another key item on the board agenda: the representatives of the thirty-one Protestant and Orthodox denominations in the NCC approved a “Mississippi Delta Project” with a preliminary budget of $250,000. The project is aimed at combating proverty and racial tension in fifteen Mississippi Delta counties. It will involve such things as food distribution, establishment of literacy centers, and “development of community leadership.” Significantly, the board is asking the World Council of Churches to provide 40 per cent of the funds, the idea being that “though American Christians have enough material wealth to underwrite the Mississippi ministry, our psychological and spiritual unwillingness to face the full nature of the seriousness of the crisis means we cannot do it alone.”

In his speech, Mueller chided a group of “leading church members” who were witnesses in a Mississippi case described to NCC officials by a U. S. Justice Department staff member. It was, said Mueller, a “sordid story of bestiality and inhumanity that the responsible leaders of a community down there wreaked upon helpless women in jail, whose only offense was that they had pleaded for decent treatment for their fellow men. They had been manhandled and beaten and bruised by other inmates of the jail, men who were made drunken by the jailor and then ordered to do the dirty work. One can hardly believe that civilized man in our so-called Christian society could fall so low. Those women were seeking redress and justice under law. Physicians exhibited photos of their bruises and swollen backs and limbs; the men in jail who had been the dupes who perpetrated the horrors, admitted their part under duress, in the witness stand. In spite of these, leading church members of the community mounted that same witness stand, and, under oath, denied all charges and testified to the good character of those who were responsible for these abuses. The case was in the hands of the jury for but a brief time, and the verdict was ‘not guilty.’ ”

Compromise For Demonstrators

Ten Protestant ministers escaped jail terms in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, this month by appealing their conviction of disorderly conduct in a civil rights demonstration.

The ten had been charged with intent to disturb the peace when they ignored police orders not to march within a barricaded area in front of the Forrest County courthouse. The nine United Presbyterian clergymen in the group originally were given four-month jail terms and $200 fines. The tenth minister, who belongs to the Disciples of Christ, had been involved in an altercation with police and was also charged with assault and resisting arrest. He was sentenced to one month in jail and fined $125.

After day-long talks with appealing defense lawyers, during which the clergymen pleaded “no contest,” a county judge ordered the nine Presbyterians to pay $400 fines. The Disciples clergyman was fined $250 and costs. All jail terms were dropped.

Six of the ministers were from New York State, one from New Jersey, one from Illinois. one from Colorado, and one—the only Negro—from Missouri.

In Charleston, Illinois, meanwhile, the ministers of three Presbyterian churches in Hattiesburg who were invited to address the local presbytery issued strongly worded protests.

They declared that “we find no justification in the Word of God nor in the Presbyterian standards for the invasion of our community by relays of ministers from various parts of the country intent upon participating in daily picket-line marches at the Forrest County Court House.… Such activities by ministers serve to inflame frictions between the races, and to disgust many who have had a genuine concern for improved race relations.”

Pulpit Meditations On ‘Fanny Hill’

The Rev. William Belt Glenesk, a young Presbyterian minister who studied drama at the Actors’ Studio, believes in praising God with the timbrel and dance, and has made the Ichabod Spencer Memorial Church in Brooklyn, New York, a home for the performing arts.

One Sunday morning this month Glenesk arranged a kind of still-life tableau that was as arresting as the cymbals he regularly clashes while the congregation sings the doxology.

Behind the pulpit are inscribed, in letters visible from every pew, John 3:16 and three other verses. These verses formed the backdrop for the display on the pulpit that morning: the Bible and a copy of The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, a suppressed eighteenth-century novel, known to generations of collectors of undercover erotica as Fanny Hill. The book was published in the United States last year and was subsequently banned in New York State, although court appeals have made possible continued sales.

Glenesk’s sermon was a defense of the book, a plea for freedom of speech, and an indictment of censorship. The minister cited John Milton’s classic plea for unlicensed printing, Areopagitica. He also read discreetly selected portions from Fanny Hill (to buttress his position that the book is a “simple disarming story of a young country girl” who at heart wants to love one man), parts of Genesis (“And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed”), and some of the physical descriptions in the Song of Solomon.

“I am not sure that pornography is either pleasant or appealing—until the Pharisees get hold of it and put it behind bars,” Glenesk said.

“If the [sex] act is wrong and dirty, let the censors step into the bedrooms of this country and lay down the law, and let the censors of the church expurgate the Bible.”

The minister, who prayed before the beginning of the sermon, “The words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts may not be acceptable to thy world, but may they be acceptable to thee,” told his parishioners: “I’m not saying you ought to read [Fanny Hill] … but I am not afraid for you to read it.”

Afterward, in an adjoining room, Glenesk appeared on a panel that included Ralph Ginzburg, publisher of Eros magazine, which has been banned as obscene. Ginzburg, who is appealing a five-year prison sentence, was loudly applauded after saying that the Fanny Hill sermon “may go down as one of the significant events of the history of the Church.” Ginzburg implied that historical Protestantism had been “an anti-sexual instrument.” He also described the Bible as “an avowedly erotic work,” and called for “a new church position on sex.”

During the discussion that followed, one member of the audience took issue with the comparing of the Song of Solomon to Fanny Hill, stating that the love poetry in the Song was “in a marriage relationship,” unlike that in the narrative of Fanny Hill.

Glenesk had planned to distribute copies of the book at the service but was told by the District Attorney that he would be breaking the law if he did. The 37-year-old minister announced later that he did “not intend to break the law.”

Glenesk had earlier drawn public attention by collecting a total of over 100 parking tickets. He has paid fines on about half of them and has appealed a fine of $850 that a judge imposed for the others. The minister says that he received the tickets while making pastoral calls or when his car was parked near the church.

Fanny Hill has been defended by some critics, including Louis Untermeyer and Lionel Trilling, and by at least one other minister, the Rev. William S. Van Meter, an official of the Protestant Council of the City of New York, who called it “a serious book with a well-developed plot” during court hearings. Two other clergymen testified that it was “definitely pornographic.”

GEORGE WILLIAMS

Education: Soviet Style

Pravda announced this month the details of a broad new program to stamp out religion in the Soviet Union through “education.”

The presupposition for the approach is that atheism is the only scientifically accurate ideology available to mankind.

A multi-faceted attack on religion will center in Soviet universities, where courses in atheism will be taught. An Institute of Scientific Atheism will be established to coordinate research, train atheistic propagandists, maintain contact with foreign atheistic centers, and arrange convocations of propaganda workers.

Indoctrinations will concentrate on party members, trade union officials, youth leaders, and women’s groups.

The new campaign is the result of a decision by the Communist Party’s Central Committee. Pravda said that the war on religion has been lagging and cited “carelessness.”

While atheists mapped their strategy in Moscow, the Executive Committee of the World Council of Churches met in Odessa and released a statement voicing Christian confidence that truth will prevail in “any competitive dialogue.” It was the first time the committee had met in the Soviet Union.

Dr. O. Frederick Nolde, director of the WCC’s Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, presented a report which asserted that “freedom of religion or belief applies to all men in society whether atheists or adherents of religion.” The report focused upon recent CCIA objections to “shortcomings” in a proposed U. N. declaration on elimination of religious intolerance.

Nolde recalled that a Russian in the recent U. N. debate had urged that freedom of atheists be protected. Nolde said he agreed but added that the declaration should “insure all men have the right not only to maintain or change their religion or belief but also to maintain it in society.”

“There is consequently need for coexistence of varying religions and beliefs with every opportunity for peaceful competition,” he said. “In order that a confrontation of this can take place, freedom of religious propaganda as well as freedom of anti-religious propaganda must be insured by constitutional law, juridical action, and public practice.”

“Christians are confident that truth will prevail in any competitive dialogue,” he declared.

Earlier, in a statement released by WCC headquarters in Geneva, Nolde had said that the U. N. draft declaration did not measure up to expectations because it did not recognize the inter-relation between religious freedom and other human rights proclaimed in the U. N. Declaration of Human Rights and because, while dealing with the right of worship, teaching, and observance, it completely omits mention of the right of manifestation of religious liberty in practice.

Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, a leading spokesman for the WCC. told an American audience this month that the Church can counteract anti-religious propaganda as long as it remains free to preach the Gospel. Referring to Nolde’s report, he said:

“Americans don’t seem to understand that coupled with this apparently pro-Communist statement is the demand that churches should not only have freedom of worship but freedom of religious propaganda.”

A noted German theologian, Professor Helmut Thielicke, took sharp issue with Nolde. “The Church,” he said, “cannot permit its authority to be defined by people who have no idea of its mission.”

Protestant Footing in Israel

Dwight L. Baker

The United Christian Council in Israel, composed of eighteen Protestant denominations, is weighing the pros and cons of a landmark proposal, one that would ask the government for official community status.

Although Protestants have served in Palestine for more than 100 years under three different governments (those of Turkey, Britain, and Israel), none have ever been given recognition as a community. During Turkish and British rule Protestants functioned as registered societies and enjoyed almost the same rights and privileges as other recognized communities (e.g. Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Marionite, Jewish, and Muslim). In 1953, however, following the establishment of the state of Israel, the Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction Law was enacted giving exclusive jurisdiction over personal status affairs to the ecclesiastical courts of the recognized communities. While this law resulted in the strengthening of the authority of the ancient millet (religious community) system, it created serious civil disabilities for non-recognized denominations and left Protestants and others virtually without benefit of marital laws.

It is difficult, for example, for a Protestant to get married in Israel and impossible for him to get a divorce. The problem also extends into matters of inheritance and succession in the event of a contest and litigation. No civil court is able to decide matters pertaining to laws that concern family life.

Failure of the government to make adequate provisions for the rights of Protestant and other non-recognized bodies has become a matter of growing concern for the United Christian Council. But not all members agree on the community plan as a way out. Some object even to an organizational framework that could give the impression of a super-church. Others fear that to become a recognized community would result in Israel’s Protestants’ becoming a part of the Middle East’s ancient millet system with its highly restricted communal life. Still others feel it would violate the principle of separation of church and state.

The Rev. Magne Solheim, representing Lutheran groups, says that community status for Protestants is not the ideal solution. He maintains it would be far better if the government would allow civil courts to deal with personal status affairs. But, he adds, inasmuch as the government strongly opposes such court jurisdiction, Protestant churches are obliged to seek another solution.

Said Dr. Robert L. Lindsey, noted Baptist leader in Israel: “None of us is happy in promoting the project, but we are trying, in our concern for those adversely affected, to expand the area of personal status to persons deprived of such rights as are essential to a normal and free life, until the situation improves.”

There is no guarantee that the government would be willing to give community status to Protestants, even if they ask for it on a broad basis, but observers are convinced that they can get a sympathetic hearing.

A ‘Wonder Of The Nations’

An all-Christian settlement in Israel, after months of uncertainty, may at last look forward to accomplishing its aims. The Israel Cabinet gave its blessing to the project early this year.

Purpose of the Protestant settlement, known as Nes Amim, is to provide a new experience, proving to Israelis that there is a genuine attitude of good will among Christians based on profound respect for Jewry and Judaism. Also sought is a more direct opportunity for Christians to appreciate the values and problems of the creative effort of Israel.

The name Nes Amim is taken from Isaiah 11:10, “The root of Jesse shall stand as an ensign to the people,” or, literally, “a wonder of the nations.” A messianic concept is suggested in the name, thereby emphasizing Israel’s kinship with the nations.

The first settlers, a Swiss family, moved to the site last April. Two hundred sixty acres of fertile farm land were secured twenty miles north of Haifa between Acre and Naharia. Here the directors hope to develop both agricultural and industrial projects. Among the settlement’s American backers are Fred Worrell, a Southern Baptist from Atlanta, and Orie Miller, a Mennonite from Akron, Ohio. The founders of Nes Amim include a civil engineer and a surgeon from Switzerland and a physician from Holland.

Until the Nes Amim project, the approach of Christians to Jews usually fell into one of two categories: attempting to convert the Jew by every available means, or rejecting him as somehow being responsible for the death of Jesus. Both attitudes resulted in the erection of a formidable wall that prevented any effective encounter between the two faiths. The founders of the settlement say their aim is not to convert Jews but to “heal the breach which has existed between Jews and Christians for 2,000 years.”

Before the government of Israel would entertain any consideration of support and assistance for the project, Nes Amim directors had to give guarantees that the village would not prove to be a center of missionary activity. A joint supervisory committee with the government was established to assure that all commitments would be strictly observed.

DWIGHT L. BAKER

The Conversion Rate

Charges of proselytism leveled against Christian schools in Israel were deflated last month in a speech by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. He told the Cabinet that in thirteen years no more than eleven Jewish children had been baptized as Christians. The baptisms, he added, had not necessarily been influenced by Christian schools. He said that during the same period a total of 200 Jews were converted to Christianity or Islam and 407 Christians and Moslems were converted to Judaism.

There are currently about 52,000 Christians in Israel’s population of 2,400,000, and most of them are Arabs. The country has 210 Christian churches and places of worship, twenty more than there were when Israel became a state in 1948.

Analyzing ‘The Deputy’

Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy is the most controversial play to hit Broadway in decades. In the United States, as in Europe where it played earlier, it is arousing bitter criticism (for a sampling, see page 29). Outside the theater policemen keep order as pickets march in protest, denouncing the play in the name of Christian unity. Catholics are asked to join the boycott, and one picketer cries, “What has happened to brotherhood week?”

Inside, where outside noises are audible, ticket holders are given a booklet that contains two letters, one from the then Cardinal Montini, and another from Albert Schweitzer in which he declares that the Roman Catholic Church bears greater guilt for the slaughter of the Jews under Hitler’s Germany because the “Protestant Church was an unorganized, impotent, national power” whereas the Roman Catholic Church was an “organized, supra-national power in a position to do something.”

Reviewers have criticized the play as a malicious, unwarranted attack upon the Roman Catholic Church, and particularly upon Pope Pius XII for his failure to protest during the war-years the wanton, massive destruction of Jews in Hitler’s gas chambers. Yet The Deputy is not an anti-Roman Catholic play. Hochhuth conveys the fact that Roman Catholics secretly saved the lives of many Jews, helping them across borders and hiding them in clerical garbs and in monasteries. The pros and cons of Pius XII’s difficult and unenviable position are equally presented, and as many lines of script are devoted to explaining the ambiguities of the situation that counseled silence as are devoted to criticism for his failure to raise his voice in protest.

Reviewers have also criticized the play as an attempt to shift German guilt onto the shoulders of Pius XII. Yet this analysis also is too glib, for the play carries anguished lines decrying the silence of everyone as millions of Jews went their lonely way to extermination.

The play is largely a running conversation about what was happening offstage in the gas ovens of Auschwitz. In its written version the five-act drama includes an appendix called “Sidelights on History” containing documentation for nearly all the conversations. Most of the characters in the play are actual historical personages.

For all its historicity, the play has its moments of taut emotional power and its measures of subtlety. Although the outcome is known by viewers, there are areas of high suspense. And there is an occasional disturbing voice from the audience. Some walk out. At the end some Jews step into Times Square with tear-reddened eyes.

In the last act the background—men, women and children again plodding on to the ovens of Auschwitz—is more important than what is being said up front. It is consequently disappointingly weak. But one can hardly imagine a better last act as a concluding foil for Pope Pius’s final decision to remain silent.

The plot is simple. Kurt Gerstein (Philip Bruns), a deeply religious Protestant, has worked himself up in Hitler’s SS, where he functions as a double agent to discover whether the extermination camps really exist. He succeeds so well that he finds himself compelled not only to see what is going on but to do his part in the exterminations. He makes a tremendous impression on a young Jesuit, Father Riccardo Fontana, who makes impassioned pleas that the situation be presented to Pope Pius with an appeal that the Pope make public protest against the Nazi massacre of Jews, some of whom are Roman Catholics. The final confrontation with the Pope is highly dramatic, but no more can be elicited from Pope Pius than a bland and generalized statement. Pius argues that he must maintain the Vatican as a “haven of neutrality” to keep himself free for the role of mediator between the Allies and Hitler.

The whole play turns on the center of the Pope’s decision to remain silent, which for Hochhuth means hundreds of thousands of European families going to Hitler’s slaughterhouses “abandoned by everyone, abandoned even by the Deputy of Christ.”

Was the Pope right or wrong in not speaking against Hitler’s methodical extermination of Jews? Was he right in his choice to apply a political measure to the problem? Critics vary widely. Some label as naïve Hochhuth’s assumption that a protest from the Pope would have changed Hitler’s Jewish policy. Others contend that papal protestations would have brought bitter reprisals upon Roman Catholics in all the Nazi-dominated countries of Europe.

None of these is wholly convincing, for none really answers the moral indignation Hochhuth has just because he takes the papal office for what it claims to be.

According to Catholicism’s own conception and claim for the papal office, its occupant is the vicar of Christ, the highest and ultimate moral authority on earth. By virtue of his office, Pope Pius XII was God’s deputy, empowered to speak, and to speak infallibly, on matters of morals. Confronted with one of the most diabolical moral monstrosities the world has ever seen, his silence was a loud declaration that Christianity, and God himself, had nothing to say.

Pope Pius, confronted with monstrous immorality, did not remain silent because the moral problem itself was hopelessly ambiguous, or because he was a cold-hearted, avaricious, calculating politician, oblivious to suffering. Had he been able to speak his personal moral convictions—God’s Word to this situation—he would gladly have spoken and died for his convictions. But precisely because he was the Pope, God’s voice for others and thus the conscience of millions who would feel obligated to be obedient to his voice, he could not speak. Had he spoken and set the church of Rome against Hitler, millions of Roman Catholics might well have suffered the brunt of Hitler’s demonic, irrational wrath. (A Martin Niemoller could speak because his word did not automatically bind the consciences of others.) Pope Pius XII, the man, the Christian, could not do what his office demanded and his conscience forbade. The moral ambiguities, not of Hitler’s massacre of Jews but of his office, made it impossible for him to speak. Indeed, no Christian is able to meet the moral demands of the papal office. By his silence the Pope proved himself more Christian than his office, and his office less Christian than Roman Catholics claim.

God faced a greater evil and spoke, though it meant the sacrifice of his own Son; the Holy Father, Pope Pius XII, faced with a historical form of this same evil, could not speak and thereby sacrifice his children. This was to the credit of his conscience, and his Christianity—for he by his silence sacrificed his office and contradicted its claims for conscience’ sake.

This Hochhuth does not understand. He understands the claims of the papal office and is accordingly bitter about Pope Pius’s silence. Had he perceived the inner moral contradictions and ambiguities of the papal office, which an ugly history brought to light, his bitterness and moral indignation would have been tempered.

Hitler’s history unwittingly demonstrated the Protestant contention that no man can fulfill the office of Pope and be the consience of another. Hochhuth unknowingly shows it in the theater.

JAMES DAANE

- More from Dwight L. Baker

About This Issue: March 27, 1964

In recognition of Easter, this issue features a threshold page, an article by F. F. Bruce, and a lead editorial—all on aspects of the Resurrection.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY announces with pleasure the appointment, effective September 1, of Dr. Harold Lindsell as Associate Editor. A professor since 1947 at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he has served as dean of the faculty and vice-president, Dr. Lindsell is widely known for his books on missions and biblical studies. Most recently he has edited the Harper Study Bible (Revised Standard Version), to be published this summer.

Give Today

Share

Man And The Personal God

The Mark Of Highest Life

Like As The Hart

Share

Share

Stones That Grow

Goodness By Constraint

A Catalogue Of Pressures

The Pivotal Conviction

One Evil Forgotten

Share

Share

The Nuzu Tablet

A Rest Day For All

Sins Among The Gods

Baal And Covetousness

Share

Share

Haitian Outlook

An All-Christian Philippines?

Electronic Rescue Operation

Missing In Action

Share

Share

Share

Share

Protestant Panorama

Deaths

Miscellany

Personalia

They Say

Share

Share

Black Sheep Prodigy

Share

Share

Compromise For Demonstrators

Pulpit Meditations On ‘Fanny Hill’

Education: Soviet Style

Share

Share

A ‘Wonder Of The Nations’

The Conversion Rate

Analyzing ‘The Deputy’

Share

Share

Share