Book Briefs: March 27, 1964

Conflicts Within The Peace-Makers

Peace Shall Destroy Many, by Rudy Henry Wiebe (McClelland and Stewart [Toronto, Canada], 1962, 239 pp., $4.93), is reviewed by J. Wesley Ingles, professor of English, Eastern Baptist College, St. Davids, Pennsylvania.

It should cause concern and serious reflection among Protestant leaders that so little fiction of literary distinction and of genuine insight into our culture is being produced within the Protestant perspective. And in the evangelical Protestant tradition the paucity is even greater. By contrast, one can readily name an ever growing list of significant Roman Catholic and Anglican writers who make the novel a highly effective vehicle for communicating truth about life and the Christian faith as they see it.

Probably several factors contribute to this problem. One may be a lingering suspicion about the use of the theater and its cousin fiction as instruments for conveying truth. Further, the writer who would deal honestly with a particular segment of life often is under serious limitations. Taboos are imposed by a prudish public within the churches and by editors and publishers controlled by them. And there are also limitations within some writers themselves; they either have failed to master the craft of fiction or have a vision so limited or distorted that it makes an appeal only to an audience having no literary standards or having an equally limited understanding of life.

And therefore, when a young writer within a small branch of the evangelical tradition produces a novel worthy of a serious reading by intelligent people in all branches of the Christian Church, it is cause for rejoicing. This is what Mr. Wiebe has done in Peace Shall Destroy Many. It would be a great misfortune if such a promising first novel did not attain the wide reading it deserves.

Wiebe has set his novel on the edge of Saskatchewan wilderness. It is a study, sympathetic and yet critical, of a group of German-speaking Mennonites who migrated from Russia to Canada after the First World War, and the story is set in 1944, near the end of the Second World War. The life of one of the principal characters, Peter Block, has been shaped by and between these two great conflagrations.

Like the Quakers, these people are pacifists, and this conviction provides the basic dramatic tension within the central character, a young Mennonite farmer, through whom much of the action is perceived and felt. The awful paradox of the pacifist position in relation to the struggle of free peoples against the threat of Nazi enslavement is forcefully conveyed though ineffectively resolved. The apocalyptic events of this enormous struggle in the world beyond the wilderness wall of the community break in upon it constantly. There is no longer any hiding place.

The deeper paradox of the conflicts within a fellowship of “peace-makers”—tensions among themselves and with their neighbors—provides a significant central theme that in turn ramifies into related problems of a “separated” fellowship of believers withdrawing into a closed communion in serious danger of becoming an arrested society. They send missionaries to proclaim the Gospel of love to India but find it unthinkable to admit the Indian “breeds” of the wilderness settlement to membership in their communion. (The parallel to this horrifying anomaly in some branches of the Christian Church in the States is apparent.)

But while the novel embodies perplexing problems confronting the Christian conscience, it is fortunately more than a fictional projection of ideas. Fiction is to be taken most seriously when it reflects a segment of life with honest judgment and sensitive perception.

Stylistically, Wiebe has something of the poetic art of Alan Paton, though not yet, by any means, his mastery of fictional techniques. The novel is divided into four sections: “Spring,” “Summer,” “Autumn,” “Winter” (of 1944), each of which is introduced by a brief prose-poem prelude. These and other descriptive passages throughout the novel should be a delight to any perceptive and imaginative reader. Wiebe has the power to convey sensory experience directly to the mind in concrete terms, fresh images, musical rhythms, and unusual syntax constructions—all evidence of a genuine artist. Here, for instance, is a paragraph from the final prelude. The first great blizzard of the winter has struck at the end of November.

Now barns seeped cold, thick straw-sheds gave no protection. Bunched together, the stock crouched inside their heavy hides, stiffening, or stumped across squawking snow to watering, stirred only by the desperate beating of men. The trough-heaters, under prodding pokers, plumed smoke into the air; without them each pail of water had spread solid in the trough. Every breath drew a knife-wound down the throat. No one thought of the howling blizzard now. The men, dumping hay in mangers and heaping straw under the bellies of their stock, knew that the silent malignancy was far more deadly.

Not only can Wiebe draw the reader into a setting sharply perceived and powerfully presented; he is able also to create a convincing and varied cast of characters, from boys and girls to mature men and women. The dialogue is generally authentic, but in it lies one of the weaknesses of the novel; occasionally it stiffens out of its natural shape into formal English, or gets out of character, and it too seldom communicates the actual idiom of the spoken German in an English equivalent. We need to be told that people are speaking Low German or High German; we are not made to feel it. Wiebe has not yet mastered Hemingway’s technique of communicating the idiom of Spanish in literal translation and Baton’s similar technique of handling the Zulu idioms in English.

One of the strengths of the books is also a weakness. The author has adopted the multiple point of view to create a community portrait, shifting his stance frequently from the perspective of one character to that of another. This constant shifting does extend our understanding of complex relationships, but it tends also to weaken the story line. And the most dramatic events of the book are not associated directly with the central character, young Thom Wiens; they are related rather to the family of Peter Block, the deacon, a dogmatic, inflexible, passionate, and at times violent protector of the code of the fathers, who destroys the life of his daughter and who is finally broken when his own tendency to violence appeal’s in the son for whom he would sacrifice almost anything.

There are scenes of homely simplicity and beauty in which the life of the wilderness community is authentically conveyed. And there are scenes of violence, such as Block’s experiences in Russia, recalled in his memory. There is an almost Dostoevskian power in these Russian episodes, dealing as they do with the terrible paradoxes within man’s nature, the violence in the theoretical pacifist, and the explosion when his personality is whirled about in the cyclotron of suffering and anger.

Some of the scenes are melodramatic, the last one in particular. And there is a somewhat unsophisticated treatment of a supposedly sophisticated character. She is a “worldly” young schoolteacher who replaces Joseph Dueck, who has gone into the service after a struggle with his conscience and who has made a permanent impression on Thom Wiens. She is obviously introduced to serve as the fuse that ignites the final explosion, but she is not entirely convincing. (Perhaps she is no less convincingly portrayed than are Baptist deacons generally in the works of Faulkner!)

The book has, then, some of the weaknesses of a first novel. But it has so many strengths and so much good writing that it deserves the attention of all Christian readers concerned about encouraging better fiction within the evangelical perspective.

J. WESLEY INGLES

The Rest Are Now Obsolete

The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount, by W. D. Davies (Cambridge, 1964, 547 pp., $12.50), is reviewed by David H. Wallace, professor of biblical theology, California Baptist Theological Seminary, Covina, California.

The author of the important volume Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (S.P.C.K., 1955) has written another contribution to the enlarging concentration upon the Jewish foundations of the Christian faith. It is immediately clear that this massive and learned study has made obsolete all prior discussions of the subject, has brought new evidence and analysis to light, and will be the point of departure on this issue for many years to come, for English-language scholarship as well as Continental. Professor Davies’s control of the materials of late Judaism and his mastery of the critical problems of gospel history become apparent in the table of contents, and are thereafter confirmed in the body of the book. He is at home with the finds at Wadi Quintan and makes them highly relevant for this study.

In the development of the theme he has responded to the key scholars in this field of inquiry: Bultmann, Daube, Dodd, Jeremias, T. W. Manson, Schoeps, and, of course, Strack-Billerbeck.

The declared goal of the book is to determine by means of critical historical analysis the actual details surrounding the Sermon on the Mount. Source criticism, form criticism, and liturgical criticism have all added to the “tortuous” mass of problems that the historian must sift. In working his way through these questions Davies takes up the place of the Sermon in Matthew’s Gospel, in Jewish messianic expectation, in the Judaism of Jesus’ own day, in the primitive Christian community, and, finally, in the whole of Jesus’ ministry itself insofar as this may be ascertained.

As to the setting of the Sermon in Matthew, Davies concludes that the evangelist presents it as a “law” of Jesus (p. 108), but that Matthew does not simply promote Jesus to the status of a new Moses, nor is the “mount” a new Sinai. Late Jewish sources reveal that there was no uniform notion of the Messiah, and Matthew’s picture of Jesus of Nazareth fulfills only a part of those varied expectations. Next, in the light of contemporary gnosticism, the Qumran community, and the Jewish Council at Jamnia, the author holds that the Sermon is a primitive Christian answer to the issues raised by Jamnia; for just as Old Israel was required to re-identify herself, so was the nascent Church under obligation from within and without to state its identity and nature in the ancient world. The setting in the early Church is assessed in terms of the movement against Paul, his relation to tradition, the document Q, and several additional literary developments that are traced in part to the impact of the Sermon in primitive Christian thinking. Thus the Sermon is regarded as a transition between the early and post-apostolic churches, especially in respect to the forging of a new law established by Christ. Lastly, Davies considers what the Sermon meant in Jesus’ ministry; i.e„ how did Jesus himself regard these words? Impatient with the protracted search for the “real” Jesus, Davies maintains that the only Jesus available to us is the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels, and despite Matthew’s editorialization, the moral demand of Jesus persists in the Sermon. In his final statement the author makes two points: (1) the current dogmatic interest in theology has focused on the Pauline issue of law and grace, and this has led to the neglect of the Sermon, which in fact unites both themes, and (2) the hard demands of life in the early Church required not iconoclasm, nor antinomianism, but the royal “law of love” that supplanted the Torah of Judaism. A moral law for life was a necessity even for the eschatological people of God; and the Sermon provided, and still provides, a Christian response, a response that grows out of the “infinite demand of Christ.”

This book does not belong in every minister’s library. It is not easy reading. It offers no facile solutions to old ethical problems. It will not do to peruse this book lightly: to be grasped the book must be lived with. However, for the reader who wants to be taught by a master scholar, sometimes urged to conclusions that are uncongenial, this volume will prove to be a greatly rewarding investment despite its high cost.

DAVID H. WALLACE

Obstacle Course

The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus, by Gösta Lundström, translated by Joan Bulman (John Knox, 1963, 300 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by Herman C. Waetjen, assistant professor of New Testament, San Francisco Theological Seminary, San Anselmo, California.

At first it is hard to conclude whether this is a poor book because it was ineptly written or because it was badly translated. In the course of reading one becomes convinced both are true. And if one can survive to the end, he can only conclude that this book is not worth buying or reading. He may even wonder why John Knox Press published it.

To try to read and understand the text is to encounter an obstacle course. One cannot help laying the book down again and again in sheer exasperation. What is going on? What is the point? The intention is stated as succinctly in the introduction as it is in the subtitle: “A History of Interpretation from the Last Decades of the Nineteenth Century to the Present Day.” But nothing more! Except for this subtitle, the title of the book is misleading. This is not an analysis of the Kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus. It is a survey of nineteenth-and twentieth-century interpretations of the Kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus. There is no real consideration of the New Testament, of the Old Testament, of apocalyptic literature, of linguistic evidence. There is rather a systematic treatment that attempts to illuminate the theological and philosophical presuppositions of the major thinkers on this subject, who often, according to Lundström, were not even aware of their assumptions, much less acknowledged them. This, of course, is a very ambitious undertaking: to throw light on the foundation structures of a man’s thought deep in the subterranean regions of his sub or un-consciousness.

In presenting the thinking of each theologian Lundström tries to be objective, but he cannot help adding a hint of criticism here and there. This creates a certain ambiguity: one is never quite certain whether the author is presenting the thought of his theologian or airing his own criticism. This uncertainty arises because there is no clear vantage point from which these men of the past are viewed and criticized. Many a thinker is declared to be wrong, but the why and what are never clearly stated. The more one reads, the more one becomes convinced that the author’s own presuppositions stand in the way of his grasping the true intent and nature of the theologians he has studied. The many fragmentary quotations woven into the text are often not lucid and are sometimes so numerous that the reader wonders whether he ought not to read the theologians themselves rather than Lundström.

Finally, at the very end of the book some sort of vantage point for the review is presented. And here it becomes clear that Lundström has not understood what the New Testament says about the Kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus. That is the tragedy of this book. The question, “What is the Kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus?” is answered, not by an examination of the New Testament, but by a cautious selection of various appealing ideas Lundström has from the theologians he has surveyed. Such a procedure is offensive, to say the least. And when the author is not even able to maintain accuracy, as when he fails to distinguish between the English scholars William Manson and T. W. Manson, and presents an inaccurate picture of J. Jeremias’s eschatology, one cannot but despair of the book’s integrity. For this the minister and student of theology should pay $7.50?

If there is any redeeming feature at all, it is the impressive bibliography of some 300 titles. Unfortunately, this does not offset the deficiencies of the book.

HERMAN C. WAETJEN

Foundations

God’s Stewards, by Helge Brattgard, translated by Gene J. Land (Augsburg, 1963, 248 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by W. Stanford Reid, professor of history, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

The author, pastor of the Annedals congregation in Gothenburg, Sweden, is one of the leading Lutheran authorities on the subject of stewardship. In this book he seeks to articulate its theological basis. He does so in a clear and concrete manner so that congregational study groups can understand and apply basic principles of stewardship.

He points out that Europeans, presumably Lutherans, have known little about the meaning of stewardship. He goes on to discuss its biblical basis and provides a large amount of extremely useful material, discussing not only the various terms for stewardship but also related subjects, such as the things over which the Christian is steward.

The author then turns to a discussion of stewardship in the light of the Lutheran confessions. Here one might wish he had broadened his scope and touched on other confessional positions. If he had, he might have found that the concept of stewardship is not so strange to those of the Calvinistic or the Anabaptist tradition as he thinks, for these churches have not always held, even in Europe, “established” positions. Yet, despite its tendency to myopia, the work has sufficient scope to prove extremely valuable to any minister who wishes to bring home to his congregation the theological foundations of stewardship.

W. STANFORD REID

British Criticism

Teaching and Preaching the New Testament, by Archibald M. Hunter (Westminster, 1963, 192 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by George Eldon Ladd, professor of New Testament theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

From the pen of Aberdeen’s prolific professor of New Testament comes a collection of essays and sermons illustrating his methodology for teaching and preaching the New Testament.

The first seven chapters consist of essays on various critical problems. Two of these (on the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables) have been expanded and published in book form. Other essays include a critique of the New English Bible, “Unfamiliar Sayings of Jesus,” “Recent Trends in Johannine Studies,” “The Style of St. Paul,” and a delightful paper (which the reviewer heard read before the Society of New Testament Studies in St. Andrew’s) on the authenticity of the much debated passage in Matthew 11:25–30. It is refreshing to hear a scholar of Hunter’s stature assert the authenticity of this important Christological periscope. These essays are followed by twelve brief sermons on such themes as “Tetelestai,” “Recall to Fundamentals,” and “What is Christianity?” Appended to these nineteen essays and sermons is a fifty-page essay on the theology of P. T. Forsyth.

This volume is an excellent illustration of the conservative tendency of some of the best British New Testament criticism. The thoughtful pastor and student of the Word will find in it many stimulating insights.

GEORGE ELDON LADD

Worthy Cause, Worthy Effort

The Layman in Christian History, edited by Stephen Charles Neill and Hans-Reudi Weber (Westminster, 1963, 408 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by John H. Kromminga, president, Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

In a day when the Christian Church is hard put to communicate meaningfully with an estranged world, this without question is a needed and valuable book. It does not quite measure up to the claim made in the preface, that it is “a genuinely original book” in which “unmistakably new ground has been broken.” Not many of the facts presented were unavailable before. But in assembling between one set of covers a reasonably smooth and progressive chronicle of the ups and downs of the Christian layman, the editors have performed a real service in an important cause.

This “enterprise of the Department on the Laity of the World Council of Churches” (p. 11) traces the layman’s lot in life through the various eras and areas of the history of the Church. It is occasionally marked by the inconsistency that plagues composite works; e.g., monks are dealt with as laity in some chapters and as clergy in others. Under the necessity of being selective, eyebrow-raising omissions sometimes appear, among them Alcuin of York and Marsilius of Padua. The most disappointing fault, although an understandable one, is the absence of a description of the function of the general membership of the Church in accepting or rejecting the decisions of the Church’s leaders and councils. This aspect of the laity’s function, which might have appeared as early as Chapter 2, does not come into view until Chapter 12, which deals with the Eastern Orthodox Church. Admittedly this is an elusive subject, requiring a penetration, little aided by the existing documents, into the centuries-old life of ordinary people. If the near-miracle of this penetration had been accomplished, the book would have been epoch-making. If this penetration had been more diligently pursued, the book would have been better than it is.

Nevertheless, there are some fine flashes of insight. One example is found on page 311: “A survey of church history since the Edict of Milan suggests that the vigour of lay activity in the Church varies inversely with the intimacy of the links connecting Church with State.” Another is given in a quotation from the Willingen Conference of the International Missionary Council (p. 381): “We believe that God is calling the Church to express its mission not only through foreign missionaries sent by the boards, but also through an increasing flow of Christian lay men and women who go out across the world in business, industry and government, and who do so with a deep conviction that God calls them to witness for him in all of life.”

Renewed attention to the layman is a ground swell that runs across theological and ecclesiastical lines. While this book traces that ground swell chiefly in terms of the ecumenical movement, it serves as an excellent sourcebook for those in other groups who recognize this as a uniquely proper and profitable development and thus seek to encourage it. Catholic thinking and writing has been giving the layman vastly increased attention. Fundamentalist Protestantism has always been strong on the witnessing function of the layman but is today struggling toward a broader conception of the manner in which that witness is to be carried out. Conservative Protestantism defined the layman’s place long ago; but here, as elsewhere, it is struggling to live up to its own definitions. The ecumenical movement has done some real pioneering in rethinking the role of the layman. Now it faces its own struggle, to recognize his maturity in its own larger assemblies and to make this new insight of the few the possession and profession of the many.

It is not easy for a professional ministerial class to recognize the Christian maturity of the layman. The designation of special functions easily passes over into the claim of special prerogatives or magical powers. But the day may be coming when the Christian layman will come into the full realization of his place, under Christ, as prophet, priest, and king. That will be a good day. The authors of this book deserve our thanks for helping prepare us for its arrival.

JOHN H. KROMMINGA

A Comparison

From Moses to Qumran: Studies in the Old Testament, by H. H. Rowley (Association, 1963, 293 pp., $7.50); and The Meaning of the Qumrân Scrolls for the Bible: With Special Attention to the Book of Isaiah, by William Hugh Brownlee (Oxford, 1964, 309 pp., $7.50), are reviewed by J. Barton Payne, associate professor of Old Testament, Wheaton College Graduate School of Theology, Wheaton, Illinois.

Established scholars inevitably accumulate journal articles and special lectures. How understandable, then, that they should succumb to pressures for books, even of heterogeneous content and unedited lecture-style, especially when each commands a price, it is hoped, of $7.50. Yet republication and potpourri may be justified when they make truth more generally available; and the above-noted anthologies have in common, not only a significant subject—Qumran—but also a multi-lingual thoroughness in well-documented research.

The eight essays of H. H. Rowley, Britain’s distinguished emeritus professor of Hebrew at Manchester University, extend literally From Moses to Qumran. They are re-issues of articles dated 1940–1961, and their augmented footnotes sparkle as Professor Rowley interacts with those who criticize his original releases. Of chief interest is his hitherto relatively inaccessible discussion on the authority (but not inerrancy) of the Bible. He rejects what he styles “bibliolatry” (p. 10) by syllogisms such as the following: since the Bible exhibits human elements it must be fallible; since men today do not need inerrant copies of the Bible there can be no additional need (such as Christ’s teaching?) to require infallible autographs; since “grandeur and loftiness” do not characterize all parts of Scripture there must exist levels of inspired truthfulness (pp. 12–15). It is regrettable that such an erudite scholar as Rowley (cf. his citation of recent American evangelical writings in the Evangelical Theological Society’s volume on Inspiration and Interpretation) should demonstrate such a misapprehension of historic orthodoxy.

Concerning Old Testament sacrifice, Rowley maintains a commendable balance between the primacy of the sacrificer’s heart attitude and the validity of the ritual as a means through which God really worked. On the relation of the prophets to ceremonial law, he repudiates the antithesis drawn by an older liberalism between priests and prophets, as well as the amalgamation proposed by certain modern critics of the canonical prophets into the class of cult functionaries (cf. E. J. Young’s My Servants the Prophets). Little wonder that he becomes skeptical of early Old Testament monotheism when he dismisses passages like Deuteronomy 4:35 and 39 as “quite certainly not issuing from Moses” (p. 42); and he questions the historicity and full unity of Job (contrast Brownlee below), though he has a positive conclusion on a sufferer’s need to trust in God. His final sections on Qumranic Messianism and on pre-Christian baptism exhibit an evident sympathy with the unique Saviourhood of Christ.

William H. Brownlee, author of The Meaning of the Qumrân Scrolls for the Bible and, since 1959, professor of religion at the Claremont Graduate School, California, is best known for his participation in the initial Dead Sea scroll discoveries in Palestine in 1948. He utilizes Rowley’s eighth essay in insisting that Qumran provides no antecedent to the central Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and of the atoning Death and Resurrection of Christ (Brownlee, pp. 125, 143–147; Rowley, pp. 248, 249). Both writers censure Qumran’s hatred of its enemies, its withdrawal from temple and community, and its legalism and unfulfilledness as contrasted with Christianity’s actual attainment of the New Age (Brownlee, pp. 147–150; Rowley, pp. 251–253, 275). Rowley, however, goes further in denying to Qumran any genuinely priestly-Messiah concept—its priest is anointed, but not really a deliverer (p. 268; contrast Brownlee, pp. 98, 113, cf. p. 149)—or a true initiatory baptism or sacramental communion service (pp. 264–266; contrast Brownlee, pp. 114, 115).

Much of Brownlee’s work concerns the contribution of Qumran’s great Isaiah scroll to Old Testament textual criticism. While claiming to present only “samples,” he has produced a useful introduction to the subject through his observations on some forty-eight key passages in Isaiah. His well-documented discussion of the resurrection of the Lord’s Servant (pp. 226–233), arising from IQ Isay’s reading of Isaiah 53:11, He shall see “light,” warrants serious consideration. Yet his enthusiasm for conjectural emendations, especially for the sake of poetic meter—cf. Isaiah 41:17, “We must trim it to size” (p. 143)—belies his more sober theory, “Be slow to emend” (p. 296). Stylistically, his attempt to produce a work for the nontechnical reader, well done on pages 131–134, sinks into cheapness, with phrases like “so revolutionary and so revelationary” (p. 45); and a number of his digressions seem frankly out of place: e.g., his caricaturing of scriptural difficulties (pp. 73, 74), his philosophizing on calendars (pp. 46, 47), or his anti-fundamentalist pleading for JEDP (pp. 76–78).

Among the somewhat repetitious articles and appendices, Brownlee strangely omits from his “summary of the better positions” concerning the name Yahweh the widely accepted meaning, “I am present.” Yet conservatives will appreciate his messianic understandings of Deuteronomy 18:15 and First Chronicles 29:22 (pp. 99, 100); his belief that Isaiah 49 ff. was written in “the Holy Land” (p. 226), with portions of 56–58 being “of possible pre-Exilic origin”; and his organization of the whole of Isaiah into two parallel halves of thirty-three chapters each.

J. BARTON PAYNE

Devotional Study

Paul’s Pentecost, by A. Skevington Wood (Paternoster Press [Exeter, Devon, England], 1963, 144 pp., 8s. 6d.), is reviewed by R. Peter Johnston, vicar of Islington, London, and president of the Islington Clerical Conference.

This book consists of a careful, detailed analysis and exposition of the eighth chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. It is primarily a devotional study, to which the author brings rich scholarship and an obvious concern for intellectual integrity, reminding one of Bishop Westcott’s words that it is possible to bury one’s head in a lexicon and rise in the presence of God. Deep spiritual truths are uncovered as the exact meaning and scriptural usages of various words are brought before us. “No form of Bible study is more profitable,” suggests Dr. Wood, “than the coverage in depth as we compare Scripture with Scripture and allow the Word of God to be its own interpreter.”

The title of the book may cause those in the stricter Reformed tradition to raise their eyebrows, but they will find little to which they cannot wholeheartedly subscribe. In dealing with the inner witness of the Spirit, the author emphasizes that it is “a witness which confirms what is already assured to the believer by the Word of God.” This is but one instance of the balanced approach that characterizes the whole.

The preacher will find here a fund of illustrative matter; no doubt the excellent outlines and headings will find their way into many a sermon—to the profit of many a congregation.

R. PETER JOHNSTON

Book Briefs

Philosophy and History, edited by Sidney Hook (New York University, 1963, 404 pp., $6). A symposium that probes into the nature of history, the possibilities of knowing historical phenomena, and the problems of historical writings. For scholars only.

All the Parables of the Bible, by Herbert Lockyer (Zondervan, 1963, 381 pp., $4.95). By making the term “parable” include “different phases of figurative language, such as similitudes, comparisons, sayings, proverbs, and the like,” the author presents a study and analysis of more than 250. In the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman, the author finds the “Parable of the Puppies,” and in Jesus’ remarks about the weather the “Parable of Weather Forecasting.”

The Psychology of Loving, by Ignace Lepp, translated by Bernard B. Gilligan (Helicon, 1963, 256 pp., $4.95). The discoveries of depth psychology applied to the reality, problems, and frustrations of human loving. A book of substance and insight for those who have time to read. With case histories.

Worship in Scripture and Tradition, edited by Massey H. Shepherd, Jr. (Oxford, 1963, 178 pp., $4.50). A substantial study of liturgies; the essays were written by members of the Theological Commission on Worship of the North American Section of Faith and Order. Theologically uneven, but provocative and profitable for the discerning.

Amish Society, by John A. Hostetler (Johns Hopkins, 1963, 347 pp., $6.50). The moving and pathetic story of the sectarian Amish people, who withdrew from society and who kept the insider in by threat of excommunication and the outsider out by doing no evangelizing or proselytizing. A valuable study, since the Amish differ from many Christians only in degrees.

The Apostles’ Creed: An Interpretation for Today, by Gardiner M. Day (Scribner’s, 1963, 174 pp., $3.50). The author’s announced purposes are to help those who would like to belong to the Church but cannot subscribe to historic creeds, and to examine a creed that has large significance for ecumenical unity. He does this, for example, by explaining the return of Christ as nothing more than the ultimate triumph of goodness.

The Sufficiency of God (Westminster, 1964, 240 pp., $5.50). Prominent ecumenical leaders present a series of essays on various facets of the ecumenical movement by way of paying tribute to its Hooft on the twenty-fifth year of his service as general secretary of the World Council of Churches.

The Validity of the Virgin Birth: The Theological Debate and Its Evidence, by Howard A. Hanke (Zondervan, 1963, 122 pp., $2.50). An attempt to vindicate the Virgin Birth by making it the foundation and keystone of all truths about Christ. An apologetic method that urges that unless the one is true nothing is true, will not greatly persuade either conservatives or liberals.

The Eternal Now, by Paul Tillich (Scribner’s, 1963, 185 pp., $2–95). Sixteen sermons providing insight into Tillich’s thought.

Philosophies of Judaism, by Julius Guttmann, translated by David Silverman (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964, 464 pp., $7.50). Christians and even secular philosophers are not well aware of the development of Jewish philosophy. Spanning the period from Hellenistic times to the beginning of this century, this book fills an unfortunate gap in our knowledge.

Paperbacks

A Christian’s Guide to Bible Study, by A. Morgan Derham (Revell, 1964, 63 pp., $.75). Written to promote an activity frequently praised but often neglected.

Pharisaism and Christianity, by Hugo Odeberg, translated by J. M. Moe (Concordia, 1964, 112 pp., $1.75). The author delineates the real difference between Pharisaism and Christianity in order to remove the leaven of Pharisaism from the Church. A valuable study.

God and Evil: Readings on the Theological Problem of Evil, edited by Nelson Pike (Prentice-Hall, 1964, 114 pp., $2.25).

A Factual Study of Latin America, by W. Stanley Rycroft and Myrtle M. Clemmer (Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations, United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., 1963, 246 pp., $1.50). A wealth of information about that great variety of peoples which is Latin America.

Modern Man and Spiritual Life, by Max Thurian (Association, 1964, 80 pp., $1.25). The sub-prior of the Community of Taizé discusses prayer, worship, and the inner, contemplative life. Stimulating reading.

A Christian’s Guide to Prayer, by Derek Prime (Revell, 1964, 63 pp., $.75). A very practical, down-to-earth discussion of prayer that reaches to the heavens.

The Israel of God, by John M. Oesterreicher (Prentice-Hall, 1963, 118 pp., $1.95). Christians of every persuasion can read this with profit.

New Songs and Carols for Children and More Songs and Carols for Children, by William Grime (Carl Fischer; 1955, 1959; 63, 64 pp.; $1 each). Two volumes of songs, some for Christmas. Simple, pleasant tunes and meaningful words will be well liked by primary-age children.

Strategy of Missions: An Evangelical View, by Harold R. Cook (Moody, 1963, 123 pp., $1.50). Author urges that greater unity among evangelicals is the only hope for achieving a missionary strategy of cooperation and coordination.

Love for the Neighbor in Luther’s Theology, by Donald C. Ziemke (Augsburg, 1963, 109 pp., $1.95).

The Riddle of Roman Catholicism: Its History, Its Beliefs, Its Future, by Jaroslav Pelikan (Abingdon, 1964, 272 pp., $1.50). A very reliable Protestant exposition of the Roman church. An Abingdon Award Winner. First printed in 1959.

Reprints

Great Sermons on the Resurrection, by Alexander Maclaren. Charles H. Spurgeon, D. L. Moody, T. DeWitt Talmage, and Canon Liddon (Baker, 1963, 127 pp., $1.95). First published in 1896.

The English Free Churches, by Horton Davies (Oxford, 1963, 208 pp., $1.70). This book deals with English Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and the Society of Friends of English church history. First published in 1952.

The Death of Christ, by James Denney (Inter-Varsity, 1961, 207 pp., $3.95). An evangelical classic by a fine theologian of the great tradition.

‘The Deputy’ and Its Critics

“THIS IS A HATE PLAY”—Poster carried by member of the American Nazi Party at the Broadway premiere of the play.

… NOT A “HATE SHOW” but a “shift the blame show.” [Hochhuth] does not spare the Germans, but he magnifies what he regards as the complacency, indifference, pettiness, diplomatic maneuvering and overcautious silence of Pius and the church hierarchy.…—Time.

WHO ARE WE, ANYWAY, that we dare to criticize the highest spiritual authority of the century? Nothing, in fact, but the simple defenders of the spirit, who yet have a right to expect the most from those whose mission it is to represent the spirit.—Albert Camus, quoted in the published version of The Deputy.

THIS DOES NOT MEAN that I absolve the German people of guilt. Quite the opposite. But there is a hierarchy of guilt. At the top are the people who gave the orders and actually performed the extermination. In the next level is the German people as a whole. It is a simple fact that Hitler came to power legally and that the nation supported him, actively or passively, practically to the end. But we are not alone. In a sense the whole civilized world shares guilt by association with that deed. It is a fact that a Jewish leader escaped from Poland in 1943 and tried to tell in England and America what was happening. The highest authorities could not or would not believe him.—Rolf Hochhuth.

LET US SUPPOSE THAT PIUS XII had done what Hochhuth blames him for not doing. His action would have led to such reprisals and devastation that Hochhuth … would have been able to write another play … about the vicar who, through political exhibitionism or psychological myopia, would have been guilty of unleashing on the already tormented world still greater calamities.…—Pope Paul VI.

POPE JOHN would have spoken out.—Edward M. Keating, editor of the Catholic periodical Ramparts.

IN ANY CASE, it can certainly be argued that Pius erred. But this is not what Hochhuth charges. The playwright does not say Pius made a mistake in judgment; he says he followed the wrong course because he was a vain, greedy and unprincipled man. Hochhuth does what no man can do; he inserts himself into the mind of Pius and draws only the worst conclusions.—The Commonweal, Catholic lay weekly.

PIUS XII BROKE HIS POLICY of strict neutrality during World War II to express concern over the German violation of the neutrality of Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg in May 1940. When some German Catholics criticized him for this action, the Pope wrote the German bishops that neutrality was not synonymous “with indifference and apathy where moral and humane considerations demanded a candid word.” All things told, did not the murder of several million Jews demand a similarly “candid word”?—Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee.

THE GOVERNMENT IS SORELY GRIEVED that the desecration of the sacred memory of Pope Pius XII happened in Germany. This is something we cannot understand.—Statement on The Deputy issued by the West German government.

‘THE DEPUTY’ HAS BEEN CONDEMNED in some quarters as an anti-Catholic enterprise, but I didn’t find it so. If, on the one hand, it is something less than charitable in its presentation of Pius XII, it offers, on the other hand, a self-sacrificing young Jesuit.… I’m afraid that the role [of the Pope], as written, comes dangerously close to caricature.”—John McCarten in The New Yorker.

AS A PLAY The Deputy is flawed. As a polemic it is fierce and compelling.—Howard Taubman in the New York Times.

IT SEEMS TO ME that in this dispute, Hochhuth’s actual achievement has not been done justice to. It does not lie primarily in his portrait of the Pope.… If he had left the Vatican completely out, it would not have lost any of its value. The conflict between the hierarchy and the idealists, who ask more of it than it wants to give, actually provides only the dramatic occasion … for something else: the giving of form to this dreadful story [of the Jews], something that, before Hochhuth, no historian, no novelist, had been able to do. The power of the word, which heretofore has always failed when confronted with this subject—here it does not fail.—Prof. Golo Mann in the Basler Nachrichten.

ULTIMATELY, ‘THE DEPUTY’ may stimulate self-criticism. For the moment, however, this possibility seems lost in criticism of Hochhuth and Shumlin [producer-director of the Broadway version] on the one hand and criticism of their critics on the other.—The Christian Century.

IF IT TAKES dramaturgic ineptitude to move so many first nighters to visible tears, clodhopper playwrights are what the theater needs.… The theater is again stirring passions that matter.—Newsweek.

THE FAILURE was not that of the Catholic church alone, but that of the Protestant church as well.… Hochhuth’s drama is … a clarion call to our time, which stagnates in naïve inhumanity.—Albert Schweitzer.

Appalachia: Mountains of Poverty

Holmes Rolston III

This report by Holmes Rolston III (A.B., Davidson College; B.D., Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia; Ph.D., Edinburgh University), who is pastor of the Walnut Grove and High Point Presbyterian Churches near Bristol, Virginia, was prepared at the request of the editors ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Mountains and religion go well together. “Get you up this way southward, and go up into the mountain: and see the land, what it is, and the people that dwelleth therein, whether they be strong or weak, few or many” (Num. 13:17, 18). Do altitude and the beauty of the hills give highlanders a constant reminder of the Creator that those who dwell below have not? Perhaps it is easier with the Smokies on the horizon to sense the presence of him who once spoke at Mt. Sinai. Whatever the reason, faith has flourished in these mountains.

But of late, charges have arisen that religion in these mountains is as much a liability as an asset. “Hard-shell religion inspires faith, tends to oppose change,” commented a leading magazine recently featuring Appalachia. Harry M. Caudill says of the mountaineers: “They have retained a respectful reverence for the Holy Bible and for the Protestant cause but it is a reverence without scholarship, discipline, or leadership.” Others say denominational leaders are interested only in suburbia, in more people with more income, and are forgetting the hill folk in their hour of greatest need. At the same time, the national press has widely applauded United Presbyterian Church action preventing the closure of ten United Mine Workers hospitals. In his state-of-the-union message, President Johnson pledged a “special effort in the chronically depressed areas of Appalachia”; he has recently readied a $4 billion Appalachian “Marshall Plan.” Where is the Church? What is the religious mood of the highlander today?

Two significant surveys of highland problems have appeared recently. The Southern Appalachian Studies, financed largely by a Ford Foundation grant, has analyzed social, cultural, religious, and economic conditions in a 190-county, seven-state area. In 1962 twenty-two researchers published their findings in The Southern Appalachian Region. Dr. W. D. Weatherford, father of the studies, and Dr. Earl D. C. Brewer, religious sociologist at Emory University, have condensed the survey into an inexpensive paper studybook, Life and Religion in Southern Appalachia. More recently, in Night Comes to the Cumberlands, Harry M. Caudill has revealed the grim depression and social decay in the Kentucky mountains.

Economically, in too many places the natural beauty and wealth of the Southern mountains mask ugly scars of stubborn poverty. Those who prosper in Knoxville, the Tri-Cities, Asheville, Roanoke, Staunton, or in thriving communities of Western Carolina or the Tennessee Valley, may be reminded of rural and village half-living and hardship only by the influx from creeks and coves of those seeking jobs on “public works.” Yet multiple forces—such as automation of mines, cutting out of timber, small and primitive farming on worn-out land, substandard education, unimaginative leadership, inefficient politics—together form, in Mr. Caudill’s phrase, “the rape of the Appalachians,” and make this area lag far behind the nation in employment and income. In some areas, the unemployable subsist on welfare handouts “on a scale unequalled elsewhere in North America and scarcely surpassed anywhere in the world.” Socially and culturally, within the limitations of a failing economy, the area long isolated by geography, tradition, and myth is rapidly being thrust into the mainstream of American life.

In religion, too, Appalachia is changing; but here change is slowest of all. There is a constancy about faith that does not apply in culture or economics; particularly in faith, change is not always progress.

Religious attitudes are rather more conservative than across the nation. The Appalachian study found fundamentalism “impressively strong” among pastors and people. “There is no gainsaying that fundamentalism remains the main theme of religious thought in the region, and that it shows few signs of imminent weakening.” About 70 per cent maintain that the Bible is absolutely free from the most insignificant human discrepancy. Many simply assume, without further inquiry, that God’s Word must have somehow been dictated miraculously. Oblivious of the human and historical element in the making of the Scriptures, many understand divine truth in ways that tend to be forced and over-literal. Many are also given to a matter-of-fact meaning in each word that hinders imaginative application to the contemporary scene.

What the study calls “militant, antiscientific fundamentalism” is supported by perhaps one-third of the population. Moreover, most are content with an avoidance of uncomfortable conflict between science and religion. It is not that the religious mind of Appalachia has seriously, honestly, and openly confronted the challenge of new scientific and biblical studies and advanced to a new evangelical position. Rather it seems a fair observation that religious conservatism here often has not even faced many of the problems the twentieth century has posed for faith. Perhaps the greatest toll is on the youth who move out into higher education to find the faith of their home church intellectually sterile.

Religion in the mountains has traditionally been and remains a lay movement, with resulting strengths and weaknesses. This was once due to geography. Circuit riders seldom came round, and, except for the annual revival, the Gospel had to be passed on without benefit of clergy. Even now, Dr. Brewer’s surveys show that only one church in ten has a full-time resident minister, and over half the full-time ministers serve four or more churches. Half the ministers hold other jobs, in mills and mines, as school teachers and farmers.

Appalachia has, not without some justification, been characterized as a land of semi-literate lay preachers. There have been great improvements in educational standards, but still four out of ten ministers serving the region have only a high school education or less; about half have a college education, and less than one-third have seminary training. Pastors’ self-study and in-service training, according to surveys, is very low. Here, more than elsewhere, every man is potentially a preacher regardless of abilities or education, provided he has had a suitable conversion and can gather a following. Every town and community has its capable, trained ministers but also all kinds of clergy in between.

Inadequate religious knowledge reflects the low educational level of the land. You can still hear theological argument at the country store or factory workbench. But many fine Bible readers notwithstanding, the data of such argument are often hand-me-down, and opinion and tradition get garbled with biblical facts and “Thus saith the Lord.…” Surveys show that generally here in the “Bible belt” even elementary biblical knowledge is appallingly low. Not one in fifty denies the divine origin of Scripture; yet only a little over half could repeat the Lord’s Prayer, and 37 per cent did not know whether it was in the New Testament or the Old. Only four in one hundred knew even the main points of all ten commandments. Despite rural religious vitality, city people consistently scored higher. Obviously, a great many believe the Bible from “cover to cover” but have only a hearsay idea what is between the covers. Then, too, in some areas one-fifth of the adults are functional illiterates, and many more read poorly.

Substandard education is perhaps the heart of all Appalachia’s problems, religious and economic. In the past all the education available was often provided by the church and her schools. But now church colleges are inadequately financed, and surveys show that most plan to limit enrollment to a predetermined small size. Therefore, as across the nation, these schools will play an increasingly smaller role in general education. But some churches do not always lift educational levels where they can. A teen-age girl, who had sought me out to ask about college possibilities, said in unconscious indictment of her own church, one of Bristol’s largest, “Oh, they aren’t interested in helping you with that sort of thing there.”

For all his propensity to religion, the mountaineer—once solitary, always independent and self-reliant—has never been an especially good churchman. Many prefer attendance at irregular revivals. Some feel religion to be a private matter, with church affiliation optional. Church membership here has been consistently lower than in the country as a whole (in 1957, 46 per cent versus 53 per cent); but, according to Dr. Brewer’s studies, in the last generation Appalachians have been joining the church twice as rapidly as the national average.

According to National Council of Churches statistics, almost 40 per cent of church members here are Southern Baptist, and this church is growing more rapidly than any other large denomination. The second largest group is the Methodist Church, whose growth quite closely keeps pace with the population’s. These two account for about 60 per cent of all church members. The third and much smaller church is the Presbyterian Church, U. S. (about 5 per cent of the total).

The individualism of the mountaineer has plagued the land with too many small churches, developed with poor denominational strategy, splintering, competing with other church groups, and later maintained despite shifting populations. In this land of low church membership, nonetheless, a survey in the ‘fifties showed twice as many churches per 1,000 population in the Southern Appalachians as in the country as a whole, of an average size (167 members) one-third the national average.

The “gospel according to the mountaineers” remains chiefly personal and concerned with other-worldliness. Another legacy of isolation and individualism is that the mountain church has been short in social concern, limiting its message to evangelism and the fostering of individual morality. It has not felt either the responsibility or the right to speak to a worsening industrial picture or the exploitation of the land, or to stand in judgment on questionable politics.

But there are signs across the religious landscape that give rise to a cautious optimism. On the basis of the Southern Appalachian Studies, the Southern Baptist Convention has produced a strategy for Appalachia.

The Methodist Church, at a 1962 Lake Junaluska meeting, considered a proposed fourteen-year program of greater service to the Southern mountains, through strategy based on the Ford Foundation study. Included were designs for an increase of a million new Appalachian Methodists in this period. Capitalizing on lay strength, the Abingdon District has made intensive use of laymen’s revivals. But reports of Methodism in Kentucky are discouraging.

The highlands have long been the prize home mission field of the U. S. Presbyterians, who still maintain an able ministry at grass-roots level. At the same time, Rev. Charles S. Sydnor, who oversees the Kentucky mountain ministry, has charged: “There are discouraging evidences that, in these days of critical need and opportunity never before known on such a scale, the Presbyterian Church, U. S., is wearying of its role.” The Board of Church Extension voted to cut appropriations for mountain work, later suspended the cut, and has instituted a restudy of its Cumberland ministry. A realignment of presbytery boundaries is in progress to strengthen this work.

The United Presbyterians, with a permanent committee on Appalachia under their Board of National Missions, are intensifying their concentration of brains, money ($1.5 million annually), and compassion here, evidenced by their alert action in saving the Miners hospitals. They support six area colleges (one jointly with the U. S. Presbyterians) and a complement of welfare services. Of particular interest is the investment of $20,000 annually in a new Appalachian broadcasting program, with headquarters at Maryville, Tennessee. Their strategy includes involvement of local ministers in redevelopment activities.

Significant also is the forthcoming Pan-Presbyterian Appalachian Council, pulling together the divided forces of some thirty-one presbyteries in four or five Presbyterian and Reformed communions. A meeting of representatives at Bristol in February adopted a proposed structure that, subject to ratification by denominational courts, will allow the formal organization of such a council this fall.

He who probes deeply into the ills of Appalachia becomes convinced that the evil is more than just that of evil times. Land and men have been vitiated and sapped of strength. Character, no less than soil, has eroded; no less than coal has it been mined out and exhausted. In place of integrity and self-respect, idleness and defeat have settled across great tracts of Appalachia. Men no less than mountains have been scarred and ravaged. There are indeed some communities where Appalachians have proved themselves men of enterprising character, honesty, industry, imagination, faith, and hope—virtues that are religious no less than civic. Yet where Appalachia is sick—and she is not sick everywhere—her illness is a moral hemorrhage. From industrial ethics little short of robbery, exploitation, and dictatorship, to the scandalous plunder of the welfare system until what was instituted as a blessing has too often become a self-perpetuating curse and rot on society, all abetted by politics of decay, the basic issues are moral.

Caudill concludes his book with the statement: “In their suffering today the highlanders are both a summons and a reproach to the nation’s churches.” Can the individualistic and other-worldly churches rise to a prophetic ministry and concern for social righteousness? It is not simply a matter of roads, hydroelectric dams, forest projects, and new industries, important though these things are; without learning, inspiration, integrity, conscience, and hope for both society and individual, there will be no healing for Appalachia. These virtues, ultimately, only the Church can give. The uphill path for the mountain churches is slow, hard, demanding.

- More from Holmes Rolston III

Ideas

The Continuing Power of the Resurrection

The Editors

The resurrection of Jesus Christ along with his crucifixion is unique among the countless events of human history. The Lord who left the garden tomb empty is personally present in our time just as he has been personally present in every generation since he “died for our sins according to the scriptures, … was buried, and … rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3, 4). The Resurrection is essential historical fact. Among the things that set it apart from every other miracle is its day by day, continuing reality. And it is significant of its abiding power that of all the great Christian festivals, the Resurrection has had not one but fifty-two yearly observances ever since the infant Church began to meet for worship on the first, or Lord’s Day, instead of on the Jewish Sabbath.

The biography of R. W. Dale, the English theologian, tells how well on in his public ministry he “made the discovery that Jesus was alive,” and it transformed everything for him. To know the living Lord is for the ongoing Christian life indispensable. When the risen Saviour appeared to the eleven in the locked room that first Easter night and spoke of his death and resurrection, he said to them, “You are witnesses of these things” (Luke 24:48). Likewise we who “have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20:29) are also witnesses of his death and resurrection.

“But how,” it may be asked, “is it possible in 1964 to be a witness of that which took place nearly two thousand years ago?” The answer lies in the New Testament teaching about the identification of the Christian with his Lord.

Nowhere is this truth more explicitly stated than in Paul’s epistles. Like a golden thread, it runs through his exposition of the Christian life in Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians. The logic of it is this: the believer is identified with Christ in his death and resurrection. “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.… But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.” So Paul declares in the sixth chapter of Romans (5, 8, RSV). And at the beginning of the third chapter of Colossians, he puts the fact of the union of the believer with the risen Lord in words of lofty beauty: “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above.… For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God” (1, 3); while in Galatians the truth rings out like a trumpet, as Paul boldly says: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me …” (2:20).

The Christian’s witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ is more than a matter of apologetics. To say this is not to belittle the value of a careful study and faithful presentation of the biblical and historical evidences for this stupendous miracle. Such study is essential; but it can never be a substitute for that personal identification of the believer with his risen Lord which the New Testament presents as the very norm for Christian experience.

In speaking of union with Christ in his death and resurrection, Paul is not talking about some special, esoteric experience available only to an inner circle of ultra-pious members of the Church. On the contrary, he is teaching the very basis of spiritual experience that normally belongs to the heritage of every Christian. That most profound of Negro spirituals goes to the heart of this truth as it asks the haunting questions, “Where you there when they crucified my Lord? Were you there when they nailed him to the tree? Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?” To these words of the original might well be added the further question, “Were you there when he rose up from the tomb?”

It is, however, a disquieting fact that what for Paul was normal Christian experience is comparatively little understood among church members today. And often when it is recognized, this normative truth becomes the subject of a “Deeper” or “Victorious Life” conference, apart from the ordinary life of the Church. Nevertheless, this truth is for all Christians, young and old. Inseparably linked to the fact of the Resurrection, it assures the believer of power for daily living through obedient submission to the living Christ who dwells in his heart by faith.

Perhaps therein lies the seed of its neglect. The price of submission is not small. It costs nothing less than the freedom to run one’s own life—a price many are unwilling to pay in a day when self-fulfillment is exalted as the ultimate goal.

In an Easter sermon, a leading preacher said, “We are afraid of the empty tomb. It brings up all sorts of questions that we would not like to have to answer.” But why should Christians who believe God be afraid of the empty tomb? To be sure, they may not understand all about it. God clothed in mystery what happened within it. No man saw the Son of God arise. His death was for all to see, his resurrection hidden from every human eye. Alice Meynell speaks of its holy privacy in these lines:

… no solitude had He,

No silence, since Gethsemane.

Public was Death; but Power, but Might,

But Life again, but Victory,

Were hushed within the dead of night,

The shutter’d dark, the secrecy.

And all alone, alone, alone,

He rose again behind the stone.

Yet though the manner of Christ’s rising is known only to God, it is the prerogative of Christians to be certain of its fact. Therefore, instead of fearing the empty tomb, they should rejoice in it as the sign of victory over empty and defeated lives.

Moreover, this victory is meant to be realized in the dust and heat of everyday living. Paul leaves no doubt that the truth of the believer’s identification with the risen Christ has its earthly application as well as its heavenly assurance of personal resurrection, when the believer’s longing to be “clothed upon” will be satisfied in a body like unto Christ’s glorious body. At the end of the seventh chapter of Romans, the Apostle describes the tensions inside human personality with a precision anticipative of the insights of modern psychology. “For that which I do, I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I …” (Rom. 7:15). And then, having dissected the hopelessness of the anguished struggle, he exclaims, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (v. 24). Whereupon he shows in the glorious eighth chapter that through the risen Christ who indwells the believer there is victory indeed. Similarly in Colossians, after reminding Christians of their identification with their living Lord (“If ye then be risen with Christ …”), he speaks with plain practicality about mortifying and putting off the sins of the body and spirit and putting on the great virtues of love and forbearance (Col. 3:1–7).

These truths are the post-resurrection pattern for the daily practice of Christ’s own words: “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me” (John 15:4). Great are the resources of the Christian life. “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Cor. 5:17). The Resurrection guarantees the untarnishable reality of this shining truth.

After the death of Robert Schumann, his wife, a great pianist in her own right, devoted herself to making her husband’s works known. Along with hours of disciplined practice before her concerts, she prepared for the interpretation of the music by reading again the treasured letters the great composer had written her. But Christians have far more than the letters of a dead man. They have the inspired Word of the living Lord, the Book of which he said, “Search the scriptures; for … they are they which testify of me” (John 5:39). Not only so, but Christians also have within them the Spirit of their risen Saviour. And theirs is the obligation to live and walk with him in the discipline of daily life.

In his Aims of Education, Alfred North Whitehead distinguishes between “inert” ideas and ideas that are alive and effective. Held only as a doctrinal fact or accepted merely as a beautiful vision, the Resurrection may be nothing more than “inert” knowledge. But God means it to be otherwise. He appoints Christians today, as in every age, to be witnesses of this event that happened in the first century. He means them to know its continuing power through a committed life, and he means them to speak not from hearsay, but out of personal experience of the risen Lord.

Give Children Their Legal Rights

Available statistics on child abuse by parents are sketchy and do not represent the actual situation. When such physical abuse is sufficiently serious but does not cause death, the injured child is often taken to a hospital as an “accident” case. In many appalling cases of scaldings, burns, broken bones, internal bleedings, or concussions inflicted upon children by parents or guardians through brutal and abnormal punishment, doctors and hospital attendants disbelieve the alleged explanation. Yet they usually do not report these cases to police authorities since they are open to civil and criminal suit and would be unable to provide evidence that would stand up in court. Because the maltreatment, usually occurring behind the closed doors of the home, is not easily established as criminal in the courts, most cases of abuse go unpunished, and the same child returns to the hospital with successive injuries.

There is widespread suspicion that cases of parental neglect and brutality are on the increase. To meet this wanton abuse of children, the United States Children’s Bureau, in conjunction with the Office of the General Counsel of the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare, last summer issued model legislation on this subject and sent it to all the states. Eleven states have adopted it, and it is currently before the state legislatures of New York and New Jersey.

The Children’s Bureau’s suggested legislation would make it mandatory that “all cases of child abuse be reported to the appropriate police authority by the doctor who sees the child.” It would grant immunity from civil or criminal action to doctors reporting such cases. Adoption of such legislation by all the states would not only relieve the consciences of doctors: it would give the little children the legal protection that is their right. Christians should support its adoption in those states where parental abuse of children presently evades the law.

In ancient Rome the father had the right of his child’s life, and the practice of leaving unwanted female offspring to die was common and accepted. In conviction, the Western world has since come a long way; but it has not come far in practice if parents can abuse children to a point just short of death and escape legal apprehension.

A Strange Accusation

Are those who claim that the Church should “stick to religion and stay out of public affairs” lending support to Karl Marx’s slogan that “religion is the opiate of the people”? Bishop Reuben H. Mueller of Indianapolis, president of the National Council of Churches, believes that they are. At a special luncheon in Baltimore he told the National Council’s policy-making General Board, “There are those in our day who object to the Church, or the Church’s ministers (whether lay or clergy), having anything to say, or anything to do with life’s issues in politics, in industry, in civil rights, in international relationships. These people say, ‘Let the Church be the Church and stick to religion. Let it be spiritual.’ As I see it, this is a corollary to Karl Marx’s teaching, that ‘religion is the opiate of the people.’ ”

If Dr. Mueller, senior bishop of the Evangelical United Brethern Church, was drinking only of those who believe that neither Church nor laymen nor clergy should have “anything to say, or anything to do” with life’s social issues, he was thinking of a very rare breed of Christian indeed. But as other parts of his address indicate, Bishop Mueller had in mind also those Christians and churches that believe that the Church’s task is to preach the Gospel to men in all their social needs, but not to formulate social, political, economic, legal, and cultural programs and policies, nor to send recommendations on foreign policy to the White House and State Department. The churches and Christians who believe that such implementation of Christianity should be left to individual Christians and to the institutions to which it properly belongs, will not accept Mueller’s appraisal that they hold a religious position that can fairly be associated with Marx’s description of religion. Such a misunderstanding of what many churches and Christians believe to be, and not to be, the proper task of the Church, is no asset to a president of an ecumenical organization.

Bishop Mueller claims only that this is “as I see it.” But he told the General Board of policy-makers (and the official release of the National Council gave it emphasis), “Either way [whether or not he sees it rightly], the intent is for religion to put the people to sleep so they will docilely submit to those who oppress them.” Here Dr. Mueller asserts that those Christians and churches whose view of the Church’s task differs from his have as their deliberate purpose to dupe the people into submitting to oppression. In this judgment Bishop Mueller reveals an even profounder misunderstanding of the theological position of those churches and churchmen with whom he disagrees, and an appraisal of their intention in which there is little charity. Such a misunderstanding of a position widely held by many Christians in the United States, and such a cavalier manner of associating them with Karl Marx and his understanding of religion as an opiate of the people, ill become the leadership of an ecumenical organization that seeks greater understanding and unity among all Christians. Differences will not be resolved by attributing the intentions of Communists to those who disagree with us.

What the Christian churches in the United States need is greater emotional restraint, carefulness of speech, and informed, sympathetic reflection. Without these they will come, not to better understanding of one another, but only to further estrangement.

The Christians’ Stake In Appalachia

The survey of the plight of Appalachia by Dr. Holmes Rolston in this issue (p. 27) may serve as a disturbing reminder to those better placed in our affluent society. And it may remind the parent who has run out of ideas for gifts for toy-sated children that there are penniless parents in Appalachia who send their children to the homes of neighbors at mealtime, hoping they will thus be fed.

There are those, it is true, who extol the advantages of poverty, but these persons are generally well fed. We should perhaps be better advised to hear of these advantages from the poor themselves.

Assuredly, even the poverty of some Americans is the envy of the dispossessed of the Orient and elsewhere, though the stark contrast of pockets of poverty amidst American plenty has provided ready grist for the Communist propaganda mill.

But American hopes of improving our image abroad are hardly sufficient or worthy motivation for the alleviation of distress at home. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that Communist solutions are not basic or profound enough to penetrate to the root of an American problem that is common to all mankind. For the Communist view of man is deficient in failing to sense the deep seriousness of man’s plight. Why will some of the rich pamper themselves while averting their eyes from their starving neighbors? The Bible answers by telling us that we are all without exception members of a fallen race.

Humanitarian ideals alone are inadequate to cope with the problem. Churchly handwringing over the Appalachian predicament can be only a first step. Christian men dare not lag behind politicians in active concern. The Lord of the Church is the one who said: “I have compassion on the multitude, because they continue with me now three days, and have nothing to eat.” His compassion preceded action, which saw him feeding more than 4,000 men, women, and children.

Here the churchman may and must go beyond the politician. True Christian compassion is not content with a dead religious traditionalism, however “orthodox.” The Church, while never forgetting its primary concern for proclaiming the Gospel, must also accept its responsibility for doing something about human need. Appalachia does not stand alone; it is a symbol of the needy everywhere.

- More from The Editors

Theology

Self-Control

L. Nelson Bell

One of the most difficult of all lessons the Christian has to learn is that of self-control. Saying no to self involves clarity of perspective and an exercise of the will, for self-control involves a discipline from which the natural man shrinks.

Who of us is not sadly aware of recurring failures, all because we failed to exercise self-control. Not that self-discipline is accomplished solely by human determination. We Christians know that the control of our lives is possible only as we make use of God-given defenses and directives. We take comfort in the promise, “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (1 Cor. 10:13, RSV).

One of our mistakes is unconsciously classifying necessary decisions into “small” and “great,” into those we like to think of as “minor” as compared with those we call “major”; major battles against the claims of the flesh are thereby lost in minor concessions we like to think are unimportant.

The Christian’s influence is at stake, his health may be involved, and his own serenity of soul may be lost because of a lack of self-control. The primary link of a compromise with self-discipline can in time be forged into a chain that burdens and binds its victim, all because the spirit did not prevail over the body.

Paul was acutely aware of the necessity of leading a disciplined life: “I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Cor. 9:27). In these days of affluence and soft living, few of us have learned this lesson. Because we lack mastery of self, we pay the price of frustration and ineffectiveness where there should be evidenced the presence and power of the living Christ.

Discipline presupposes a goal other than self. Our Lord outlined man’s material needs and then put them in proper perspective with these words: “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matt. 6:33). When man loses the discipline that is involved in putting first things first, the whole of his life falls into disarray.

Let no one think that self-discipline is easy. It involves a battle, a battle against our natural impulses and against the instigator of evil—the Devil.

Self-discipline involves an act of the will. The Bible describes it in these words: “… let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfector of our faith …” (Heb. 12:1, 2). Paid expresses the same thought in Second Timothy 2:5: “An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules.”

True Christianity is not legalistic and the freedom in Christ cannot be bound. Nevertheless, self-control is a vital part of the Christian life. Our Lord is the perfect example of the disciplined life, even unto death; discipline was a part of his perfection. He was subject to all the temptations we encounter, yet was without sin.

Of course self-discipline never reaches perfection even in the best of Christians, but its exercise brings blessings that increase with the experience.

Self-control involves the application of a principle to life. At the same time it carries its own reward: “Blessed is the man who endures trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life which God has promised to those who love him” (Jas. 1:12).

Our Lord was very explicit about the matter of self-discipline. On one occasion he said: “He who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 10:38, 39).

This is not asceticism, for it is not withdrawal from the world and its pressures. Rather it is living as a Christian in a pagan setting, saying no to self and yes to the claims of God.

The “denying of self” of which our Lord speaks involves personal responsibility: “So therefore, whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:33). This responsibility has to do with the effect of our actions, not only on ourselves, but also on others who come under our influence. It is not easy to desist from some action of whose rightness we are personally convinced. But Paul recognizes our higher responsibility: “Therefore, if food is a cause of my brother’s falling, I will never eat meat, lest I cause my brother to fall” (1 Cor. 8:13).

Self-control was one of the subjects of Paul’s defense before Felix: “And as he argued about justice and self-control and future judgment, Felix was alarmed …” (Acts 24:25). To the unregenerate, self-control is alarming. Unfortunately, to too many of us Christians it is distasteful, to say the least. We all need to beware of taking advantage of the grace of God, for at no point does grace relieve us of personal responsibilities. “It is God’s will that by doing right you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish men” (1 Pet. 2:15).

The effect of a lack of self-control can be devastating. The Apostle Peter writes: “Beloved, I beseech you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh that wage war against your soul” (1 Pet. 2:11); this “abstaining” is nothing more or less than self-control. He says further, “Live as free men, yet without using your freedom as a pretext for evil; but live as servants of God” (1 Pet. 2:16).

Lack of self-control is bringing a grim harvest in America. Beginning with parents who fail to lead disciplined lives, the process extends to their children. This is a question not merely of juvenile delinquency—the elongated shadow of adult delinquency—but of a generation that gives increasing evidence of ignorance of God-ordained restraints. We speak of “will power,” but what is often needed is “won’t power.”

We are so accustomed to seeing advertising that appeals to self-gratification that we take it for granted. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the subtle appeals to young people to take up the smoking of cigarettes. A long overdue warning of grave danger has now come from medical and governmental circles, but great damage has already been done our present generation. The American Cancer Society, for instance, states categorically that one million young people living today will die of lung cancer because of cigarettes. Those who have fostered this habit, by example or for financial gain, now face the herculean task of a reform movement, not based on self-control but for self-preservation.

But self-control extends into every area of life—eating, sins of the tongue, desire for wealth, and all other temptations to which the flesh and spirit are subjected.

A new standard of comparison is necessary. We must ask, not “What are others doing?” but “What would Christ have me do?” In him is found the wisdom and the power of self-control.

- More from L. Nelson Bell

Eutychus and His Kin: March 27, 1964

WHERE IS THE WISE?

Robert E. Fitch has a review in the New York Times, late January, of John Gardner’s book Self Renewal. I hope that by the time these comments of mine get into print I have found a way to get to that book. Fitch says that the impact of the book is downright converting. The book is not on religion, I judge, except insofar as religion has all kinds of things to do with the renovation of society.

There is this statement, for example: “Once it was the skeptic, the critic of the status quo who had to make a great effort. Today the skeptic is the status quo. The one who must make the effort is the man who seeks to create a new moral order” (italics mine). This says something that has needed saying. I never knew before quite how to express my suspicion of the hardened conformity of non-conformity in our day; my suspicion of the condition of the heart of a man who is endlessly skeptical, whose negative, sometimes called “radical” approach can so easily be sophomoric. All kinds of people know all kinds of things that are wrong; anybody can break an egg, but who will put Humpty Dumpty together again?

The best-known verse in Scripture is John 3:16. One of the least known is John 3:17: “It was not to judge the world that God sent his Son into the world, but that through him the world might be saved.” The world is already under judgment. The plot of the Bible is that something went wrong very early in the game and that the problem even for God Almighty is how to get the wrong righted. It took a Cross, and it will never take less.

Preachers have a wonderful habit of viewing our world with alarm, of looking off into the far corner of the sanctuary and trying to look burdened, telling us that they have read Camus and Tennessee Williams and that these writers are probably neo-something. They hardly help the human heart. Anyone knows what’s wrong. Who will pay the price to right it?

EUTYCHUS II

LUTHER AND ROME

Norman V. Hope quotes Karl Adam (“The New Look’ in Roman Catholic-Protestant Relations,” Feb. 28 issue) as saying that if Martin Luther had lent all of his “magnificent qualities to the removal of the abuses of the time …, had he remained a faithful member of his Church …, then indeed we should today be his grateful debtors.” Dr. Hope calls Adam’s words an example of an “increasingly sympathetic” appraisal of the Protestant Reformation by Roman Catholics.

Has not Dr. Adam ignored the fact that Luther did not separate from Rome, but Rome from Luther? The Reformer’s consistent attitude was that “the worse things are going on within it [Roman Catholic Church], the more should we cling to it; for it is not by separation that we shall make it better” (History of the Reformation, D’Aubigne, II, 23).

Perhaps Dr. Hope has forgotten that the Roman church highly esteemed Luther’s qualities at the very time that they excommunicated him and called for his death. We should at least be hesitant about accepting the word of a church which has traditionally allowed her end to justify her means.…

JAMES HAMILTON

Wilmore, Ky.

Dr. Norman V. Hope, the distinguished professor of church history at Princeton Theological Seminary, seems to be totally unaware that his argument … is an extended example of begging the question.

The official doctrinal standards of Princeton Seminary say, “such as profess the true reformed religion should not marry with infidels, Papists, or other idolaters.” The same standards also say, “The Lord Jesus Christ is the only head of the Church, and the claim of any man to be the vicar of Christ and the head of the Church, is unscriptural, without warrant in fact, and is a usurpation dishonoring to Christ.”

The original standards, still held by denominations of greater doctrinal fidelity, slate clearly, “There is no other head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ: nor can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof; but is that anti-christ, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the church against Christ, and all that is called God.”

Dr. Hope’s article simply assumes, without giving any evidence, that the Roman Catholic organization is a Christian church. But the Apostle Paul argues that a profession of faith in Christ is absolutely useless, if the person trusts in circumcision, the treasury of the saints, prayers to Mary, and the bowing down before idols.

What the eminent professor describes as a decided turn for the better in the relations between “two branches of the Christian faith,” is not to be explained, as he does, by the policies of Hitler and Stalin, but by the decline of “the true reformed religion” to a point at which Romanism can be regarded as a branch of the Christian faith.

GORDON H. CLARK

Professor of Philosophy

Butler University

Indianapolis, Ind.

Norman V. Hope is to be commended for his astute analysis.… A happy by-product of his article might be the development of greater understanding among conservative Protestants. As one standing in the Wesleyan tradition, I would find it difficult to improve upon his statement of Protestant principle: “Protestants believe in justification by grace through faith, which means that in Christian salvation all is of God, and that the only thing man can do is gratefully and humbly accept the salvation that God freely offers in Jesus Christ.”

WILLIAM S. SAILER

Evangelical Congregational School of Theology

Myerstown, Pa.

AMEN, BUT ALAS

How appropriate (or, perhaps, fortuitous!) that on pages 4 and 5 (Feb. 28 issue) the reader is stirred as author Bower writes: “An educational ‘climate’ must be created within the church.… The pastor and other church leaders [must] give the educational task the time and consideration it deserves.… The educational program makes [a] God-given contribution to the total evangelistic effort of the church in a very significant manner” (Amen!); and on page 27 the reader then must attempt to escape from under the gloomy pall which has quickly settled over him as a result of being abruptly confronted with the shudderingly relevant facts soberly set forth under the incredible heading: “Church Schools: Symptoms of Decline” (Alas!).

Can it possibly be that our Sunday schools have outgrown programs, presents, promotions, parades, and picnics? Perhaps, here and there, can be found some who are actually awaiting a national re-emphasis upon the Sunday school as the reaching, winning, training, and teaching arm of the church.

RICHARD W. COOKE

Acting Administrator

National Sunday School Association

Chicago, Ill.

ECUMENICITY AND THE MASS

I have been concerned about the substance of the paragraphs under the heading “Too High a Price” (Editorials, Feb. 14 issue). You view with alarm the language of the report on “Witness” of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the WCC issuing from their recent meeting in Mexico City.

I feel that the language quoted in your paragraphs, particularly the italics “is offered continually for and to the world … its redeeming reality” is suggestive of the Mass. On the other hand, at Montreal last summer the Faith and Order Commission in its report or Consensus On the Eucharist seems firmly to have stood on good Protestant ground when it said, “What God did in the incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ, He does not do again. The events are unique; they cannot be repeated or extended or continued.…” It may be the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism is out of its field in this particular view and that it needs to examine the Consensus of the Commission on Faith and Order.

First Corinthians 11:17–19 has something to suggest to us in this Protestant-Catholic debate, namely, that “heresy” has its place in the Church (it is not inherently evil but may be essential to the Church), but heresy should not lead to schism! It is becoming more and more wrong to divide the body of Christ into a no-crossover schism; but the Church must be brought to the place where it recognizes the value of heresy and does not anathematize and excommunicate in schism, however difficult the maintenance of fellowship may be.

In this year of the Vatican Council II (it is Loo late for their Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy already promulgated, with its language in Chapter II, paragraph 47, “a paschal banquet at which Christ is eaten”) it would seem that Protestants must continue to draw the attention of Catholics to some undeniable religious facts, (1) that the Jews had a long-standing tabu against eating blood (Lev. 17) which the First Council of Jerusalem confirmed (Acts 15); (2) the realism of John 6:53 is modified significantly by the realism of John 6:63; (3) that the frequent use of the metaphor, “the cup” for the contents, in the critical passages suggests the sensitivities of Jesus and the apostles to the Levitical tabu (1 Cor. 11:23–34); (4) the undeniable fact that after the Words of Institution, according to the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus referred to the “cup” (blood) by use of the phrase, with the specificity of the demonstrative pronoun-adjective, “this,” “I shall not drink again of this fruit of the vine …” (ek toutou tou genematos tes ampelou) (Matt. 26:29); and (5) Peter is on the side of the Protestants in his first letter, when he said, “Christ also died once for all” (Latin semel does not mean iterum et iterum) (3:5).

Which is to say that while the manner of the Supper or Eucharist is variously understood and stated by Protestants and Catholics, the substance, namely, that God in Christ through the Spirit communicates with the communicant in the Supper, is the same, and the unity of Christians lies in the substance not in the form. Further, none of us can or may say that God is limited in the manner of his self-giving nor that the believer is limited in the manner of his self-surrender and receiving God’s self-giving. While I incline to the views above spelled out, I would be the last one to deny the reality of the God-self-giving or of the receiving of Catholics any more than I would deny the reality of the God-selfgiving and the receiving of Protestants, of which I am one.

I have my reservations regarding the appropriateness of the “sacrifice of the Mass” for almost any and all occasions conceivable to the Church, in view of their interpretation that in reality Christ is both Priest and victim at the Mass. Their practice seems to dictate the time, places, occasions, when Christ shall sacrifice himself in the Mass! Making the sacrifice on the Cross central and inclusive is good enough, but this Mass business seems to me to be almost profane.

DANIEL L. ECKERT

Danville, Ill.

WIDENING THE CANON

Professor John C. Cooper in “Reading and the Faith” (Jan. 31 issue) seems to have missed an essential point with reference to modern or recent literature. Does he expect each author to grind an axe for Christian polemics? Awareness of an author’s intention is indispensable to an understanding of his book.

Tennessee Williams has accurately delineated the pseudo-evangelical who “slips away” from the stark reality of alienation, separation, and nothingness. These representatives of the Gospel, like the Lutheran pastor in John Updike’s Rabbit Run, just do not perceive the need for reconciliation amidst the brokenness of the tragic human situation.

We should not expect non-Christian authors to see the Christian dimension in the Gospel, because they stand outside of it. Nevertheless they are the real “nabi” of our time. The Church bears full responsibility for alienating these prophets. Many of them are altogether too perceptive about the “Reverend Tookers.” James Baldwin disrobes such evangelism in Go Tell it on the Mountain. Whereas Lorraine Hansberry, who has suffered just as deeply from being a Negro, does speak to us of reconciliation, restoration, and love in her Raisin in the Sun. Here the Gospel is truly preached and truly practiced! Just as effectively as in the New Testament, no doubt!

Albert Camus’s The Fall tells the story of man’s willful separation from God as effectively as the myths of Genesis. In Franz Kafka’s The Trial the theme is Judgment; William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the theme is Suffering or the Cross; Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, the theme is Love; James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the theme is Vocation; and Ignazio Silone’s A Handful of Blackberries, the theme is the Remnant. Truly these are Christian themes and highly biblical, even if cast as negative witness after the manner of Amos, Hosea, and Jeremiah.…

If Christianity is being spit out rather than chewed and swallowed it is because we lack the sensitivity to see judgment nailed to the door of the Church, where it must begin first.…

HERSCHEL G. MILLER

Chairman, Department of Religion

Norwich University

Northfield, Vt.

Impressed was I, by Mr. Cooper’s brilliant display of wide reading. Depressed however, by his shallow thinking and over-generalized conclusions.

The ancient sport of taking pot-shots at the Church is a tempting game. But it is at best, a sad game. It is difficult to sing a song about “why Christianity is being spit out.”

If the contemporary Christian scene must be castigated, Mr. Cooper’s choice of ammunition leaves me cold. Has the Church completely failed in its witness, because it is “laughed off” in Lolita? Are we justified in writing off Christian compassion using Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as resource material? Are we to feel distress because modern drama ignores Christianity? There have been other ages besides ours in which the world hasn’t exactly been a friend of grace, notably the first century.

I am a little troubled that “today’s prophets,” “churchmanship,” and “mainstream denominations” should be named as the guilty culprits for the world not embracing Christianity. I wonder why the world of a few years ago “spit out” the Christ?

C. S. COWLES

Church of the Nazarene

Santa Maria, Calif.

THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD

I was very glad and also uplifted to read “The Place of Music in the Christian Life” (Jan. 31 issue). Actually I was a bit surprised too. From your article praising Composer John W. Peterson (“Hallelujah, What a Savior”; “Over the Sunset Mountain”; “It Took a Miracle”) and your music advertisements, I had assumed that your editorial policy toward music favored the so-called gospel hymn. This “gospel” hymn (music and words) is offensive to my musical taste. As a Lutheran I take tremendous pride in the German chorale which was given impetus by the settings of the Lutheran composer and theologian Johann Sebastian Bach. The theology of these chorales has more gospel message (Christ-centered) than the “gospel” hymn (man, emotion-centered). The ecumenical movement also recognizes the excellence of the German chorale. The leaders have asked the Lutheran Church to make a contribution of their powerful chorale tunes. Thanks to author Elmore, who speaks of the place of the gospel tune, but also “the profound utterances of … Johann Sebastian Bach, who expressed out of his heart the deep things of God.”

PAUL T. PRANCE

Our Savior Lutheran Church of Satellite Beach

Eau Gallie, Fla.

STEWARDSHIP: BODY AND LAND

A well-deserved “thank you” for the excellent, thought-provoking reading material contained in [the January 31 issue].

My “preacher-pastor-minister” husband has limited time to read all the religious periodicals that come to him, completely and thoroughly, so whenever we are in the car together, I generally take along CHRISTIANITY TODAY or our own denominational magazine United Church Herald and read to him the various articles of interest to both of us. Your January 31 issue is excellent, and I read every essay, article, news item to him, pausing briefly to comment on the authors’ presentations or ideas.

My husband is a devout advocate of proper use of leisure time, being an ardent bow-hunter and archer. He loves God’s woods, hills, streams and is an earnest supporter of Christian stewardship of the land, the waters, the wildlife, as well as of the body and mind. He is also an artist and in the “hectivity” of today’s living, particularly among the clergy, he finds great peace of mind and soul through his paintbrushes. He has done much to encourage appreciation of the arts among the youth as well as adults, and is at present teaching oil painting to a class of adults in the state-sponsored adult education school on Tuesday evenings. We love good music and in the church here, we have started a good library of audio-visual aid filmstrips, records and books.…

The article “Retarded Children and Christian Concern” was well written … and should be in other magazines for many others to read who do not subscribe to your magazine.…

HELEN WALKENHORST

Potter, Wis.

I thought the article by Dorothy L. Hampton was very good and wish every parent of a retardate could read it. I am the mother of an older retarded daughter and am thankful that my husband and I were able to face and accept this years ago because we had the Christian faith. Mrs. Hampton’s article can be a help and blessing to many distraught parents.

HELEN E. BEARDSLEY

Denver, Colo.

Concerning the Robert Elmore article—how about giving us a practical article on music some day, written by someone who is doing something with music in a church (I wonder what Mr. Elmore does besides play the organ in Bethlehem).

RONALD M. LUNDY

First Baptist Church

Bend, Ore.

• Dr. Elmore is not lacking in practical experience. At the Central Moravian Church of Bethlehem he directs a choir every Sunday. For seventeen years he conducted a cantata or oratorio each week at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. He was also in charge of all choral groups at the University of Pennsylvania.—ED.

ESCHATOLOGY-GREAT DIVIDER

My letter is prompted by Dr. Harold Lind-sell’s recent remarks in his review of [Hoekema’s The Four Major Cults] (Jan. 31 issue).…

I have been a continual subscriber since the first issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.… I enjoy the strong evangelical emphasis and the fair treatment given to most controversial issues. It disturbs me, however, to see that the attitude of the editors toward Seventh-day Adventists remains as yet unchanged. I feel that with a careful examination of Adventist writings a change of attitude would result. A careful perusal of the writings of Mrs. Ellen G. White helped me to understand the Seventh-day Adventist emphasis as a continuing witness to the evangelical tradition with substantial help in the area of eschatology. Considered in the light of all the existing evidence, I truly believe Adventists stand with the strongest evangelical witnesses of our day.

This conclusion I was forced to make a few years ago when I studied at the feet of evangelical scholars at [a non-Seventh-day Adventist] seminary. During those three years I came to see that the differences between Adventist teaching and basic evangelical theology were almost entirely of an eschatological nature. On the basic doctrines concerning the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, his sinlessness, the authority of the Word of God, salvation by grace alone, the Second Advent, to name only a few points of our common body of truth, we are in essential agreement.

Our differences lie in the realm of eschatology, the investigative judgment, the millennium, the realization of conscious immortality at the final resurrection, the Sabbath, etc.

The name-tag “cult” I have noticed is never applied to other evangelicals with definite eschatological teachings. Often a spirit of charity and open-mindedness is cherished here, even though scholars may take opposite sides on certain questions. Why should Adventists be classified as cultists because of their eschatology?…

I earnestly believe that God is at work today to prepare his people in Christendom for his imminent return. We must continue to pray that we may be divinely led into all truth.

ARTHUR J. ESCOBAR

Chaplain

Pacific Union College

Angwin, Calif.

GAIN

I write … to commend especially the increased serviceability of your annual index (Sept. 27 issue) which is far superior in its depth or breadth of entries over the … indices of earlier years.

ROBERT E. BELL

First Presbyterian Church

Portville, N. Y.

To the Desert—To the World!

Floyd Doud Shafer

The persecution of Christians in North Africa was brutal at the start of the fourth century. There Christians raised the cry: “To the desert!” Many left the “world” and headed for the desert, and monasticism was born. Monasticism was an escape, but it did save many lives, preserve learning, and ultimately produce some of the men who led the Reformation.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, when the Church’s effort to dominate all life was at its zenith, some Christians, in and out of the monasteries, went all out to take Christianity “to the world.” As Johan Huizinga says in The Waning of the Middle Ages, “All life was saturated with religion to such an extent that the people were in constant danger of losing sight of the distinction between things spiritual and things temporal.” Dr. Huizinga relates that some zealous Christians ate their food in three portions in honor of the Trinity and drank in five draughts to commemorate the five wounds of the Lord.

Today, many feel they must again cry: “To the desert!” With or without persecution, this cry has an appeal. Those who voice it point out the insidious attrition of Christianity that accompanies association with the ways and wiles of the world. Some persons do compromise their convictions under pressure to conform to the world. Or, resisting the world by assuming, or attempting, an inhuman pietism, they may come to the conclusion that the only way to avoid catastrophic hypocrisy is to get out of the “world.” So, in the ensuing times of soul-searching, “To the desert” possesses genuine enchantment.

Others are crying: “To the world!” They say the Church has become a desert. They speak of the Church’s ingrown institutionalism, its civic-club camaraderie, and its pathetic striving for status-success symbols. They state that while the Church hides in its comfortably appointed, safely insulated desert, its Lord is still at the intersections “where cross the crowded ways of life.”

However, the so-called “desert” Christians have sharp rebuttal for the “to the world” Christians. They call this excursion into the world an involvement with a cultural kick, an avocational martyrdom down occasional dusty roads, a flirtation with a hugging bear, and an ecclesiastical secularity inspired by flashbulbs and hot news wires. They say this flight “to the world” is actually an escape from the world, a kind of leaping from a tall building because one is afraid of falling.

Here, contemporary Christianity reaches an impasse. We now have the spectacle of two Christian groups, one running for the desert and the other plunging into the world—and in the process both groups merely succeed in knocking each other down.

If this mutually destructive encounter is all we can expect from Christianity, then we must agree with curious spectators who say that the whole business is a ridiculous comedy. But many of us in both groups see the contradictory methods and objectives as unrelieved tragedy. We are seeking a way out of the impasse. We are trying to salvage the values of both cries: “To the desert!” and “To the world!”

Strength Through Tension

We believe that Christians must live in the tension created by both cries, and that Christians are made strong by this very tension. We understand that our first allegiance is to the city of God, but that such allegiance can only be expressed within the city of man.

We are not seeking the unbothered peace of dogmatic isolation, or the false excitement of alien entanglements. Instead, we are eager to grasp the live wire of intelligent action, a wire electric with danger and opportunity simply because it unites the two poles of the desert and the world. We want to be the lights in the world that our Master said we should be. We shall persist even though we know the blown fuse of indifference and the short circuit of rashness can mean electrocution.

How do we propose going about this arduous task?

Look! Here we stand in the middle of the hurly-burly world. Around us roar the clamors of greed, guilt, and yearning. Here lives are caught up in trivia, tied down to false standards, gagged by meaningless routines. Yonder, skyward points a cross-topped steeple. About us the cries mingle: “To the desert!,” “To the world!”—and we stand centered to it all.

While enmeshed in the world, we walk to the desert. We enter the Church. We see it now as the beachhead of eternity in time, as the aperture of God on life, and as the body of Christ in the world.

Within the Church we plead: Have done with the trivialities, get off the defensive, and do away with personal pettiness; sound the trumpet, up with the lights—let us worship God!

Spell out the Word of God that equips our reason for the challenges of the marketplace, the home, and the bustling highway. Speak of grace that creates new human energies. Tell of faith that flourishes under the stress of trial and success alike. Talk of hope that spells help for humanity. Speak! Our time is short: we must soon go to the world.

Our lives are covered with the soot and grime of life. Is there water for cleansing here? If so, give it for the washing away of sin. Wash us and make us clean. Send us out to confess: We have been baptized. Send us back to the world with clean hands, that not soiling but cleansing shall come from our touch on other lives.

The Mark Of The Cross

We hunger and thirst after righteousness. Is there food and drink within this place? Break the bread that feeds the soul, and shows that all material things can be whole. Pour out the wine that quickens the spirit and calms the hurt of the heart. Give us, O Christ, thyself, broken for our mending and poured out for our renewal. Put upon us the mark of the cross, for soon we must go where cross those crowded ways, where tempted lives await a helping touch, and where challenged hearts expect a lifting start.

Give us a joy set to a tune for singing. Thrust a victorious hymn into our minds, and impose a ringing hope atop our halting fears. Put on us the mantle of discipleship, and within us the dynamo of prayer. Sadness and folly shall soon demand our attention, and trifling success consume our time. We must go back to our work in the world: show us here how work can be worship. Enthrone thy praises, O God, upon our daily lives.

No, thank you, you in the desert who have twisted fellowship into fun fests, and the King’s business into ecclesiastical parlor games. We’ve no time for that. We’ve become a conversation with the Man of Galilee. We’ve seen common things made holy for the uses of the Master’s love, and ours. Cleansed, forgiven, and nourished by His life, we go back to the world.

No, thank you, you in the world who call us to your prejudices, your sick pride, your bitter scorn for brother man. We do not flee from you. We share your load of anguish and raw despair. We are among you to help you care, and bear, and forbear. We seek with you the loosing that is finding. We are neither your judges nor your saviours. But we company with One who is in our midst to serve and forgive, and who wills to save us both. Together let us find in him the reason that leads out of befuddlement, the purpose that lifts lives off the treadmills of anxiety, and the love that rescues the fallen from futility.

The great Luther was right, the Luther who loved both the desert with its preaching of Christ and its melodic worship of God, and the world with its varied and vexing human ways; he was right when he grasped both the desert and the world within his hearty vigor and said: “And so I will give myself to be, as it were, a Christ to my neighbor, just as Christ has shown himself to me.”

“To the desert” or “To the world”? Which? Both! But halt a moment and think: Only those can reach the “desert” who come to it through the “world”; and only those can reach the “world” who stop betimes at the way-stations of the “desert.”

THE SOLDIER

The soldier’s job is grim—

But strength is not revealed in easy tasks.

His hammer is to drive the heavy nails

Into the hands and feet of men who soon

Will curse him savagely as death prevails.

A scene familiar now.

His duty soon begins.

Now hard, from knowing death’s companionship,

Ignoring hatred in the eyes of two—

The soldier startles at the voice he hears,

“Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Forgiveness from condemned?

He stands transfixed and stunned.

No sword could penetrate as do the eyes

At which the soldier stares; his heart is bound

Far tighter than his victim’s yielding hands.

The spike is placed; the hammer’s blows resound.

The task is soon complete.

The crosses then are raised.

As enemies revile and while friends weep,

He watches silently as Jesus dies.

One speaks, “This truly was the Son of God.”

The soldier’s stoic countenance belies

The echo in his heart.

JANE W. LAUBER

Floyd Doud Shafer is pastor of the Salem United Presbyterian Church, Salem, Indiana. He holds the A.B. degree from Hanover College, the B.D. from Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, and the S.T.M. from Union Theological Seminary, New York. From 1943 to 1946 he served as a chaplain (major) in the United States Army.

- More from Floyd Doud Shafer

Theology

Is There a Need for Demythologizing?

David H. Freeman

There is a widespread conviction that the miracles recorded in the Scriptures are no longer acceptable to an educated person living in the twentieth-century world of jets, TV, and cancer clinics. Even when the “laws of science” are interpreted as statistical averages and not as the invariable workings of nature, miracles may still be regarded as stumbling blocks to Christian faith, rather than as supporting evidence.

The notion that the testimony of sincere and honest witnesses is incapable of establishing the fact of a miracle is in part due to the influence of David Hume, who argued that a miracle can be established by testimony if, and only if, the testimony is of such a kind that its falsehood would be even more miraculous than the fact it seeks to establish.

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined [David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, The Open Court Publishing Co., 1945, p 120].

Let us examine Hume’s objection to miracles. Note that his definition of a miracle as “a violation of the laws of nature” rests upon a misleading analogy. For what does the expression “laws of nature” mean? Congress makes laws, legislatures make laws, and “nature makes laws.” An uneasy feeling is aroused. When motorists are caught violating the laws made by the legislature, they are punished. Miracles should also be caught; they are troublemakers. Imagine violating nature’s laws, especially since they have been established by a firm and unalterable experience.

Hume’s definition of a miracle implies a world in which God is not necessary. It gives the unfavorable impression that some injury has been committed, that some obligation has been violated. However, to the Christian the “laws of nature,” which are to be distinguished from the “laws formulated in the positive sciences,” are simply the usual way in which the world is governed by God, and a miracle is simply the exertion of the same divine power in a way different from that which is common. The biblical record of miracles is never accompanied by a scientific explanation of what took place. Moreover, ordinary “natural” means that are as yet undiscovered may have been utilized to accomplish the divine purpose. The description given is merely a report of what happened; nothing is ever said in Scripture about the violation of a “law of nature.”

Perhaps Hume prejudges the case because he does not believe in a God-controlled universe. It is doubtful that Hume would believe in a miracle even if he saw one. Could he trust his senses to accept what did not conform to his usual experience? And what about the next day, or a year later? Could he then believe the testimony of his own memory? Would Hume not find it more probable that he had suffered a hallucination?

The Appeal To Experience

There is an ambiguity in Hume’s appeal to experience. Does he mean his own experience? Does he wish to say that no fact is to be taken on testimony unless he, too, has experienced it? Anyone who took this as his criterion would cut himself off from the greater part of human knowledge. Or does Hume mean to refer to the experience of the whole world? If the term “experience” refers to the experience of mankind, then how does Hume know that a “dead man has never come to life”? The question in debate is whether miracles have ever been experienced. Hume simply begs the question.

To argue that a belief in miracles cannot be produced by testimony because it opposes uniform and unalterable experience presupposes that we already know what universal experience is. But apart from our own personal experience, we know what others experience (universal experience) by testimony. To destroy the testimony in favor of miracles, Hume must in fact appeal to testimony. For otherwise he would not know what “universal experience” is.

When Hume is confronted with testimony that a particular “miracle” occurred, he does not produce witnesses who testify that this particular miracle did not occur. He simply introduces witnesses who testify that they never saw anything like the miracle in question.

Hume pretends to consider the probability of miracles when he has assumed the impossibility of miracles. If there is any probability of an event, then one must allow for its possibility; whereas Hume rules out the possibility that miracles can be established by testimony and yet still talks about their probability.

The evidence of testimony admits of conceivable degrees. However, the degree of certainty of a conviction does not necessarily depend upon the number of witnesses. Several reliable witnesses who agree and are uncontradicted by other evidence are frequently sufficient. To disbelieve in the veracity of certain witnesses is to believe in their untruthfulness. A person who never considers objections to the other side of an issue often appears to have a strong case. Even the most firmly established facts of history can be made to appear highly improbable, if objections are introduced without allowing for any consideration of the evidence for the opposite view.

The person who objects to Christianity frequently ignores the difficulties involved in accepting the consequences of his own position. To deny the evidence for Christianity and to deny that miracles ever occurred necessitates that the existence of the Christian Church be explained on other principles.

Thirty years after the death of Christ there were many Christians in Rome who were willing to die for their faith in what the Gospels teach. The writings of the apostles were accepted as authoritative by the early Christians; they contain numerous references to the geography of Judea, to the manners and customs of the Jews; and although their words are Greek, their idiom is Syro-Chaldaic, the vernacular of Judea at the time of Christ and the apostles.

Not only is it an established fact that the books of the New Testament are the genuine production of the apostles and contain their testimony to the miracles described; it is also true that these books have not undergone any material change since they were written, as is evident from the general agreement of many copies, versions, and quotations from other sources.

The authenticity of the New Testament documents does not in itself establish the credibility of their testimony. Many events described are miraculous—the raising of the dead and healing of the sick, the feeding of thousands with a few loaves and fishes, the resurrection of Jesus three days after he had been crucified.

The apostles could not have repeatedly suffered illusions. For the most part the miracles were performed in public, under the observation of learned, intelligent enemies, in a variety of circumstances, and for several successive years. The miracles performed are characterized by dignity, propriety, and kindness, not by ostentation, and were not performed for personal gain. There is every indication that the writers claimed to be truthful and honest. What they relate is set forth as the unadulterated truth; they do not seek to magnify themselves, nor do they show any sign of evil purpose.

Truth Or A Fraud

Either the historical accounts given by the writers of the New Testament are true or they are false. If they are false, is there any alternative other than to hold that the record is an intentional fraud, the product of premeditated deceit? And then, what motive could the gospel writers have had for their willful intention to perpetrate a fraud upon the world? What caused these men to embark upon a dangerous enterprise, to provoke the fury of mobs, and the wrath of civil and religious authorities? Their leader was executed. Why did they say he was miraculously alive and had performed miracles? Why were they willing to be persecuted for what they knew to be a lie? Did they expect to become famous by proclaiming a lie? If so, why did they not point to themselves? Were they simply enthusiastic fanatics? Do their writings appear to have been written in a frenzy? Suppose, even, that they were motivated by some unknown reasons. How could they gain adherents in the very country and city where the miracles were said to have been performed, among those in a position to know whether what they said was true? Only a few weeks after the death of Jesus their testimony was received as true, and multitudes became disciples.

The conclusion that the Christian reaches by such considerations is that the testimony for the miracles of the New Testament renders them credible to an intelligent person living in the twentieth century. The Christian does not believe that the New Testament needs to be demythologized,” simply because it does not contain myths, or cunningly devised fables, but is rather a declaration of those things that are most surely believed by those who were from the beginning eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word.

The discoveries of modern science, the advances in technology, and the arguments of the philosophers are simply irrelevant to the question of miracles. An acceptance of the biblical record rests upon the unalterable conviction that the world is God’s world; its laws are God’s laws. A person is not a Christian simply because he believes in miracles; rather, he believes in miracles because he is a Christian, i.e., because God has performed a mighty work within his heart and has called him according to His eternal purpose. The Christian in the modern world is not separated from the love of Christ by tribulation, persecution, or the cavils of philosophers. The Gospel remains foolishness to the Greeks, but the foolishness of God is wiser than men. And to those who are called, both ancients and moderns, Christ is the power and the wisdom of God.

David H. Freeman is professor of philosophy at the University of Rhode Island. He holds the B.A. degree from Calvin College and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Freeman is the translator of the four-volume work by Herman Dooyeweerd, “A New Critique of Theoretical Thought.”

- More from David H. Freeman

The Church and the World Today

James Mcdowell Richards

There has been an amazing change of mood within Christendom in recent years. Less than a decade ago a spirit of optimism and assurance permeated the life of the Church in America. A great interest in religion seemed to be abroad. Never had religious books and articles been more in demand. Newspapers were devoting more attention to stories of ecclesiastical events and movements than at any other time in our century, and most of the treatment was favorable. Belief was popular. Church membership was growing steadily, both in numbers and in proportion to the total population of our country. The supply of candidates for the ministry was at a record high; new churches were being erected all across our land. It seemed as if we might be on the verge of a great religious revival.

But something has happened to the Church. In many quarters today we find a spirit of discouragement and defeatism within its leadership. Growth continues but at a slower rate. We are constantly reminded that Christianity is becoming more, rather than less, of a minority movement in the midst of the world’s population explosion. The Church and its ministry are increasingly the object of criticism in the press, the literature, and the conversation of our day. There is bewilderment and uncertainty where formerly there was confidence. It is not so easy to arouse enthusiasm, to secure new members, or to sound the advance as it was.

Quite obviously the optimism that prevailed a few years ago was not well grounded, nor was a great triumph for the Church at hand. By the same token, there is no real reason for dismay. Our task is difficult, but it has never been otherwise. It is well that we should examine the situation before us, and that we should understand the nature of our tasks. It is neither necessary nor right that we should be depressed.

One of the accusations constantly made against the Church and the ministry today is that our message lacks relevance; that we are not dealing with the true problems and the real issues of life. Perhaps the accusation is just in its application to much of the preaching we have done. Nevertheless, the Gospel is eternally relevant. It is as applicable and as necessary now as it ever was and as it always will be. It is a Word of the Lord that teaches men how to live and how to die. That Word is our need—and the need of all men. We must learn how to preach it effectively in the troubled and chaotic society of this latter part of the twentieth century.

First of all, ours is a Gospel that teaches men how to live. It applies to all the problems of thought and of conduct today. Therefore, it applies to the problem that is never far from our minds in these times—that of racial relations.

A Test Of Faith

Here is an acid test of our Christianity. As Dr. George M. Docherty has said, it is the crisis confronting the Church. Quite obviously the problems here are many and complex. Anyone who claims to have all the answers does not really understand the facts. Nevertheless, in our willingness and in our desire to solve this problem according to the mind of Christ is to be found a real indication of the nature of our faith.

The minister in the South is faced with a difficult task if he seeks to deal with matters of race. Emotions are high and tempers are short. Many people are unwilling to listen to any discussion of the subject that does not agree with their own ideas. What should the minister do and say? The question is not easy to answer, and many criticisms leveled at us for our silence are unfair. It would be a rather simple thing if one had only his own popularity or his own position to consider. I believe that most of our ministers are willing to suffer if need be. But love for the truth must be combined with love for one’s people and with the responsibilities of a pastor. How far should one go in interposing a barrier between himself and his people, so that there is no longer the possibility of ministering to the flock for which one is responsible? What should one do when loyalty to what one most surely believes will mean splitting a congregation? What if preaching the truth dries up the source of our benevolent giving and impoverishes the total program of the church?

There is no simple answer. My heart goes out to those who are constantly living with this issue. Certainly we must, if possible, retain the love and the confidence of our people. Otherwise we cannot hope to serve adequately as pastors. We must surely avoid the rending of a congregation when we can find proper ways to do so. At the same time, our ordination vow requires us “to be zealous and faithful in maintaining the truths of the Gospel and the purity and peace of the Church.” Purity is necessary to any peace that is real. There are things even worse for a congregation than controversy and division. It can be true for a congregation and for the Church as a whole, as it is for the minister, that “he that saveth his life shall lose it.”

One point seems basic. Whatever discrimination is practiced elsewhere, we have no right to shut any man out of the church and away from the preaching of the Gospel. The teaching of Scripture is clear. “Mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.” “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” “God is no respecter of persons.”

“My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons,” writes the Apostle James. “For if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment; and ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool: are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts?” It seems not to have occurred to James that, beyond being assigned to a low place, a man might even be barred entirely from the congregation of God’s people. Is the color of a man’s skin any better basis for such action in the sight of God than the nature of his clothing?

Yet, for so simple a thing as holding that everyone who comes to God’s house should be admitted, many ministers are suffering today. They have not harped on this subject in their preaching; they have not agitated the issue nor raised it unnecessarily. They have simply voiced their convictions when the question could not be avoided. For this cause men, and sometimes their families, suffer persecution.

Three concerns ought to move us deeply in this matter. One of them is concern for freedom of the pulpit—for the right to declare the Word of God according to conscience. We had better stand by our brethren in their struggles, whether we agree with them in their positions or not. If our brother’s freedom to preach the truth as he understands it is at one point taken away, our freedom to preach some other truth—vital to us—may be gone tomorrow. Moreover, if a congregation can silence a man on one point of conscience, how can it ever be confident that he will be faithful in proclaiming the Word of God in any other area? Peace secured in this way is purchased at too high a price—at the peril of men’s souls.

A second concern should be to assert that there is no area of the believer’s life that can be excluded from subjection to Christ. On the detailed applications of Christ’s teachings good and faithful men may differ. We have no infallible interpreter of Scripture. Neither the minister nor the Church can claim to have all wisdom, nor can we bind the consciences of men by our own dictates. One thing, however, we can declare with certainty: The Christian must earnestly seek to know and to do the will of Christ in every sphere of life. Neither personal desires, nor prejudice, nor tradition, nor experience can be chosen in preference to Him. We must seek to base our racial practices, as our conduct in all others matters, upon the revealed will of our risen Lord. We must say with Luther: “My conscience is captive to the Word of God; … to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.” This is true for every realm of thought and of practice.

Let Us Love

A third concern must be that in all our efforts to-know and to do the right the spirit of love prevails. We must preach the truth as God gives us to see it, but we must preach it in love. Congregations similarly should hear the preaching in love. Anger, name-calling, and bitterness have no place in the church. We must strive to understand those with whom we differ, avoiding pride in our own positions. None of us is fully Christian; we are only seeking to become so. Scorn and ill will toward those with whom we disagree will not advance our cause. Let us pray with and for one another, that together we may more perfectly understand and do the will of Christ. Let us love one another.

But there are other pressing issues that confront us in teaching ourselves and others how to live. There is the matter of purity and chastity. Sexual license is increasingly prevalent in our world. Impurity of thought, of speech, and of action is encouraged by the literature, the movies, and the other amusements of our day. Seldom if ever in history has there been such an outpouring of filth and such an effort to destroy standards of sexual morality as now. My hat is off to the Roman Catholic priest who recently went on a fast in New York to compel enforcement of the law against the traffic in pornography. This is a traffic that is corrupting the minds and destroying the souls of youth. We may not adopt his method, but we would do well to emulate his spirit. Let us combat the evil of impurity with all the power we possess—beginning with ourselves. In the atmosphere of our day no man is safe. “Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall.” We must indeed beware lest when we have preached to others we ourselves should become “castaways.”

We can only mention some of the other areas that demand our prayerful thought and our preaching. There is the question of honesty in all our personal and business relations. There is the need for teaching about temperance, or Christian abstinence, in a day when the use of alcohol is wrecking millions of individual lives and destroying countless homes. There is the respectable but deadly sin of covetousness in a day when most Americans seem almost persuaded that a man’s life, after all, does consist “in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.” This temptation to covetousness is one of the most insidious dangers confronting us in the ministry. It can make us soft and unwilling to sacrifice. It can rob us of all spiritual power.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ has much to say about all these matters. Not its irrelevance but its everlasting relevance troubles our souls.

And this Word that teaches men how to live contains the only real answer as to how they can die. This also is an aspect of the truth much of our preaching has neglected. One wonders sometimes whether the Church really believes its own message on this subject. Certainly we have not declared it with the urgency and the conviction the issue demands.

The world does not like the subject of death. Men put it as far out of their thoughts as possible. If they face it at all, it is seldom in the light of God’s Word. Like Omar Khayyám they are inclined to “take the cash and let the credit go,” assuming that God is “a good fellow and twill all be well.” When death intrudes to take a loved one or a friend, it is the popular custom in some of our civic clubs and assemblies or in private to declare the merits of the person gone and to express the belief that one so decent must assuredly have entered into a better life. The philosophy of our day in the matter is expressed in the inscription over the entrance to a popular American cemetery—“Dedicated to Belief in a Happy Immortality.” This soft and easy philosophy of escape is based upon nothing whatever but wishful thinking and an unwillingness to face the ugly reality of sin.

Does the Church believe its own message? Do we know that “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”? Do we really accept the teachings of Christ as to the eternal consequences of sin? Do we heed his words: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me”?

If there is another way, if all is really well with those who forget God and live as they please, then we need not be overly concerned about the state of the Church or of the world. In this case our faith may be a pleasant luxury, but it is by no means essential. There is no reason for us to be any more concerned about evangelism and missions than we have been. We can be comfortable in our present attitude that suggests we are more than half-way convinced that the world is right and that it does not really matter how we live or die.

We must re-examine our convictions. We must recapture the sense of urgency our Lord teaches. In a world of dying men we must be concerned that so many know nothing of him who is the Resurrection and the Life. We must heed anew the Great Commission of our Lord. We must learn to preach again that “the wages of sin is death” but that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

The Gospel is supremely relevant. There are other teachers who have shown men fairly well the way to live. There is only one who can show them how to die. There is no other way but Christ.

Let us not be discouraged or become weary in well doing. The task of the ministry has never been easy. It will not be easier tomorrow. But God is on the throne.

It is popular in many quarters to speak of ours as a “post-Protestant” and indeed as a “post-Christian” world. I dare to assert that it is not so. On the contrary it is a “pre-Christian” world. The world has never been Christian. It never will be fully Christian until our Lord returns to reign. But the world is in his hands. The future is as bright as his promises. We may fail, but he will not fail. His is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory. His will shall be done, despite the folly and the rebellion both of men and of devils.

THE RACE

Jerusalem’s streets had never seen

Anxiety at such a race

As that which whirled through morning mist

At reckless pace.

In fear, in hope, in unbelief—

Scarce knowing whom or what they faced—

Competitors from Galilee

Set out in haste.

An eagerness born out of love

Was impetus enough for them

To speed—impatient for the truth—

Toward Joseph’s tomb.

They ran. The younger finished first,

But stopped short of the victor’s view.

The older persevered to find

The news was true.

D. BRUCE LOCKERBIE

James McDowell Richards is president of Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia. He holds the B.A. degree from Davidson College, the B.A. and M.A. from Oxford University, the B.D. from Columbia Seminary, and the D.D. from Davidson College. In 1955, Dr. Richards served as the moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S.

- More from James Mcdowell Richards

Theology

The New Morality

Howard Carson Blake

Last week I was talking with a brother minister in a nearby town. I found him writing an appreciation of Bishop John Robinson’s book Honest to God because, he said, he had “long been troubled by the out-of-date vocabulary we so often use to describe our faith.” I had three things to suggest to him: the popular picture of the faithful old bishop disturbed by intellectual doubts is a false one; the “new morality” for which the bishop pleads would open the door to gross immorality and make it respectable; the bishop is not putting old truth into new language but is repudiating the basic doctrines by which our church lives.

This colleague of mine is a big, hearty fellow, a powerful preacher, the possessor of a Th.M. degree. Young enough to have been thoroughly exposed to “contemporary theological thinking” in recent seminary years, he has survived all that. He is typical of so many fine men in the church, a healthy-minded soul who finds it next to impossible to believe anything but the best about anyone. Least of all would it occur to him to doubt the bona fides of a bishop.

Men like my friend easily accept the picture emerging from the veritable welter of reviews of Honest to God—a picture of the good bishop as an honest laborer toiling away in his vineyard beside the Thames, while beset with gnawing doubts as to God’s whereabouts, whether to look up, down, or within. (The bishop seems to have ended halfway between “down” and “within,” without shedding any particular light on the problem of how to express the idea of transcendence.)

The real trouble is that this simply is not a true picture. It fails to do justice to the scope of Dr. Robinson’s rather considerable abilities. Dr. Michael Ramsey, whose office as Archbishop of Canterbury would remind him to think three times before rushing into print (especially to attack the motives of one of his own bishops), seemed to find Dr. Robinson somewhat less innocent and ingenuous than he is painted to be by most reviewers on this side of the Atlantic.

The Church Times (May 10, 1963) quotes Archbishop Ramsey as saying:

We are asked to think that the enterprise [of presenting these ideas] was a matter of being “tentative,” “thinking aloud,” “raising questions,” and the like. But the initial method chosen was a newspaper article, crystal clear in its argument and provocative in its shape and statement, to tell the public that the concept of a personal God as held both in popular Christianity and in orthodox doctrines is outmoded and that atheists and agnostics are right to reject it.

Dr. J. D. Douglas, British editorial director of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, did refer in an early article (see Current Religious Thought, June 21, 1963) to the archbishop’s strictures, quoting Dr. Ramsey’s statement that he was “specially grieved at the method chosen by the Bishop for presenting his ideas to the public.” Subsequent reviewers, however, seem to have paid little heed to this aspect of the matter.

We cannot understand the background of the archbishop’s strong words without knowing more about the activities and ideas of a whole group of men who have been in one way or another associated with Bishop Robinson. This, incidentally, is not the first time that the bishop has fallen afoul of the Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1961 Dr. Robinson was rebuked by Dr. Geoffrey Fisher, then Primate, for giving evidence in the trial arising out of the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and thus becoming “a stumbling block and a cause of offence to many ordinary Christians.” In his defense of this book Robinson had used the phrase “a kind of holy communion” to describe an adulterous relationship of Lady Chatterley.

One of the seven chapters in Honest to God is entitled “The New Morality.” This phrase, already well known, has become a sort of trademark of this whole group of men of whom Bishop Robinson is one. The central conception of Christian ethics that runs through all the various expressions of the “new morality” is a complete rejection of any divine sanction for any specific law, rule, or regulation. This idea is not, of course, original with these men. A good many modern theologians have been deeply impressed with the contrast between law and grace and have tried to reconstruct all of Christian ethics in terms of grace, without any law. In one form or another they end up with some variation on the theme that the only test for any action is whether or not it is inspired by love.

Nothing ‘Wrong’ Per Se

Archbishop Ramsey discusses all this in his recent booklet, Images Old and New, and concludes: “It is on a deductive theory from the concept of love, and not upon a full examination of Christ’s teaching, that the conclusion is being drawn that ‘nothing of itself can be labelled as wrong.’ ” This agape-act morality has thus been taken up by these men around Dr. Robinson. What distinguishes the “new morality” group is the drastic way they have pushed application of the idea to its limits, especially in regard to sexual morality.

In his chapter on the subject Robinson refers to an article by H. A. Williams in Soundings, a symposium edited by A. R. Vidler and published by the Cambridge University Press in 1962 (see the CHRISTIANITY TODAY book review, January 18, 1963). Williams is dean of Trinity College, and Vidler is dean of King’s College. Inasmuch as Robinson was formerly dean of Clare College, a sort of “Cambridge Group” is suggested.

The article by Williams that Robinson cites gives a sample of what is meant by the “new morality.” “Sexual intercourse outside marriage,” he says, “may be often, perhaps almost always, an exploitation, unilateral or mutual. But there are cases where it need not be and is not.” He takes examples from two recent films. The first portrays how a nervous sailor acquires confidence in himself through the way a prostitute gives herself to him. “What is seen is an act of charity which proclaims the glory of God,” says Williams. “He [the sailor] goes away a deeper, fuller person than when he came in.” The second film shows how a man strongly attracted by small girls finds the courage to go to bed with an older woman. He does it, and “they sleep together, and he has been made whole,” Williams concludes, adding: “and where there is healing, there is Christ, whatever the Church may say about fornication. And the proper response is—Glory to God in the Highest” (pp. 81, 82).

It is little wonder that Mr. Williams refused to accept the challenge of the Archbishop of Wales, in correspondence in the Church Times, to state categorically that fornication is wrong. He obviously believes that it is right—sometimes.

Another member of the group who has repeatedly made the headlines on the “new morality” is Douglas Rhymes, canon of Southwark Cathedral, seat of the very diocese in which Robinson is a suffragan bishop. Rhymes preached a sermon in the cathedral last March that attracted considerable notice. Time magazine (July 26, 1963) quotes him as saying: “Christ nowhere suggested that marriage was the only place where sexual relationships could take place.” Also in that sermon he declared: “A great deal of the prejudice against homosexuality is on the grounds that it is unnatural. But for whom? Certainly not for the homosexual.” What Rhymes makes of Paul’s remarks in Romans 1:26 and 27 was not stated, but he evidently does not consider Paul an authority.

The extent and spread of the cult of the homosexual in our times is hard to grasp for those who do not meet the force of its drive. The New York Times of December 17, 1963, carried a report covering almost a full page on the alarming spread of “overt homosexuality” in New York. A book written by a homosexual under a pseudonym pleads for acceptance of homosexuality as normal and right in Britain. The writer names many well-known men as homosexuals and claims there are at least two million of them in his country. The British public is more aware of this problem than the American, and in the popular mind the “new morality” group is considered the champion and one of the great hopes of these deviates in their campaign to win popular acceptance. They want to become respectable. This is the door we are helping to open when we accept Bishop Robinson as a guide in faith and morals.

My minister friend is not alone in supposing that Bishop Robinson has performed a service to the Church in suggesting an overhaul of our Christian vocabulary. Typical of this soft-headed thinking was the item in the Presbyterian Outlook editorial on the highlights of 1963 that said: “Bishop Robinson called the Christian community to re-examine the language it uses in expressing its faith and to new efforts to relate this to the real world” (issue of December 23, 1963).

Making Truth Fit

This idea, however, calls for further examination. Every thinking Christian wants to translate the expression of his faith into language that can be understood by his hearers. On that we all agree. But when we adopt a system of thought that will admit no room at all for a personal God who exists as a Being in his own right, then the translation of our knowledge of God into that language becomes meaningless. It is like undertaking to describe a cube to a being whose whole universe contains only two dimensions. Bishop Robinson’s language does not represent a translation of an old conviction into a new idiom. It is rather the complete attenuation or distortion of the truth in an attempt to fit it into an idiom that offers no possible place for such truth.

Many of us have been content to go on about our business as pastors, while allowing the theologians to play around with their complicated cerebrations, as if it were a sort of game. We knew that Paul Tillich’s ideas of a non-theistic God would have been utterly destructive of faith if people had understood what he was saying. But we did not lose sufficient sleep over it, for we were sure his ideas would never be understood by more than a very few of his fellow theologians. Now Robinson has done what Tillich failed to do. He has made these ideas popular, and even to a certain extent understandable. Instead of shouting “Heresy!” now, we should have fought that battle energetically at its source in our theological faculties.

Canon Theodore O. Wedel, reviewing Honest to God in The Episcopalian (August, 1963) puts it thus:

The Bishop is not committing a crime in revealing to a wider public what has been going on for a generation and longer in the world of advanced theological learning.… Honest to God is simply a bold, and as some theologians may say, premature opening of a Pandora’s box of theological novelties under debate among doctors of the schools behind the scenes.

But Canon Wedel seems ready to accept these ideas himself, and wishes that people could be anesthetized before being exposed to them so that they could be absorbed less painfully. Indeed, few say simply and clearly that this is heresy, and we will have none of it.

The ordinary Christian reader feels himself swamped under the avalanche of words that greeted this volume. Most church papers were not content to review it in the ordinary way, but assigned a whole squad of reviewers to produce a symposium. Thus, even though perhaps the majority of the reviews reject or partially reject the basic premises of the bishop’s heretical attack on theism, the rejection is all done so tentatively and tactfully that the reader is left with the impression that here is an epochal book. The God about whom Robinson is talking is not the God the Bible reveals. It is not the God of the creeds of the Church. It is not God.

The question of the part in all this taken by Westminster Press, the American publisher of a paperback edition of Honest to God, needs asking and answering. The clearly heretical character of the teaching of the book prompts an enquiry about the function of a denominational press. In the case of a volume assured of a whirlwind sale, is it enough to argue, “If we don’t publish it, someone else will”? Is there no responsibility to see beyond commercial opportunism and to be alert to the forces of evil at large in the world?

And now the sequel is out, also published in this country by Westminster Press: The Honest to God Debate (see Current Religious Thought, January 31, 1964). Among the essayists who contributed to it is Alasdair MacIntyre, fellow of University College, Oxford, whose short chapter begins: “What is striking about Dr. Robinson’s book is first and foremost that he is an atheist.” Yet the bishop is given the last word, and he smooths over the cracks and rough places so that a general euphoria prevails. Both books will make money. But useful though money is, that money would burn a hole in my pocket.

Freedom That Really Frees

“Freedom” is a much used and abused word, as is “imprisonment.” A man can be imprisoned and yet be free. Or he can be free and yet imprisoned. Man is imprisoned only when he is imprisoned within himself.

Bars of past failure, regret, and self-pity cage more men than do bars of steel. Prisoners do not become free when their keepers release them into a so-called free society. They become free only when they have found peace within themselves.

In prison you find many hopeful men. However, many of them were once hopeless. Suffering for their past mistakes, they needed something to free them from their guilt and shame, something to fill the void in their lives. They searched the prison over, trying all kinds of physical things to satisfy their need; but no wordly thing could satisfy. They went to psychologists and educators in order to fill the void; but mortal words would not suffice. Their need could be met and their void filled only by the Word of God.

Most prisoners realize that there is something better in life than greed, violence, passion, and prison. When brought in contact with the Bible, many find that to be good, to be respectable, to lead worthwhile lives, is what they have really wanted all the time. The Bible points the way. Daily Bible reading can give prisoners the strength to overcome the evil influences of their environment. Often their longings for the good things in life are buried under layers of evil thoughts and deeds, but the Word of God can bring these longings to the surface.

In God lies the Perfect Rehabilitation. Outward rehabilitation is often brought about through educational, vocational, or recreational programs, but this type of rehabilitation always leaves room for doubt. If education, vocational skills, or athletic prowess is the answer to the problem of criminality in man, why then do college graduates, skilled tradesmen, or athletes come to prison? No, these things can only improve man, not reform him. True rehabilitation can come only through the heart, and only the Eternal Word of God is capable of piercing man’s tough skin.

Men who have found God through his Holy Word are free. No prison regulation, no legislative act, can make them more free. When prisoners have found God, his guiding presence pierces the gray specter of meaninglessness and gives them dignity, meaning, and hope.

When a man has found God, he walks in freedom within prison walls.—Dr. H. Park Tucker, chaplain, Atlanta Penitentiary, Atlanta, Georgia.

Howard Carson Blake is pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Weslaco, Texas. He is a graduate of Princeton University with highest honors in classics and membership in Phi Beta Kappa and has also studied at Princeton Theological Seminary and Oxford University.

- More from Howard Carson Blake

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