Book Briefs: March 13, 1964

What’S Behind The Fourth Gospel?

Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel, by C. H. Dodd (Cambridge, 1963, 464 pp., $9.50), is reviewed by Andrew J. Bandstra, assistant professor-elect of New Testament, Calvin Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

This book is not of the “meaning of St. John for today” type; it deals with the rather technical area of historical criticism in the Fourth Gospel. The Cambridge professor emeritus presents this volume as a sequel to his earlier one, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel.

In view of the increasing sterility of “the quest of the historical Jesus” by the “liberal critics,” Dodd feels that the negative reaction against such “historicism” by what has been called the “biblical theology” movement was largely justified. The author, nonetheless, reckons that the time is right to renew the search for the historical tradition in the Gospels. Why? Among other things, Dodd reminds us that history was extremely important to the Gospel writers and that it was not for nothing that the early Church decisively repudiated gnosticism with its high degree of disregard for the historical.

The central aim of the book is to demonstrate that “behind the Fourth Gospel lies an ancient tradition independent of the other gospels, and meriting serious consideration as a contribution to our knowledge of the historical facts concerning Jesus Christ.” Marked by the author’s usual careful analysis, sane judgment, and moderate critical views, this book has the material for the historical quest divided into two main parts, “The Narrative” and “The Sayings”; the former is subdivided into sections dealing with “The Passion Narrative,” “The Ministry,” and “John the Baptist and the First Disciples.” Dodd thinks that the early Church was not so “bookish” as many have represented it; oral tradition played a dominant role. While it might at first appear that in many instances John used one or more of the synoptic accounts, this, on further examination, Dodd thinks to be most unlikely. It is more probable, he feels, that John used an independent tradition, the basic part formed in a Jewish-Christian environment in Palestine, prior to A.D. 66.

Specifics aside, the main problem of such a study revolves around methods, types of evidence, and validity of conclusions. Dodd recognizes that “absolute proof” cannot be achieved in such a study but offers what he calls a cumulative argument that establishes a high degree of probability. Dodd contends that the hypothesis that best accounts for all the facts is that all three Gospel writers used three independent strains of tradition. This reviewer feels that Dodd has the better of the argument on this point; nonetheless, the two disparate conclusions indicate that the criteria for making such judgments are not uniformly acknowledged.

Another item may illustrate a related point. Dodd does not regard the author of the Fourth Gospel to be John, the son of Zebedee, and admits that if this could be established, his conclusions, though still retaining some value, would have to be modified. Yet not a few scholars have contended that this John is the author. In support of this contention they regard the Qumran literature to be significant, while Dodd regards it of little consequence and rather summarily rejects it. Thus another matter of dispute is the question about which evidence is pertinent and significant.

In this light one might wonder if a study such as this is profitable enough to be worth the while. Yet one can hardly dispute Dodd’s contention that the historicity of the redemptive event in Jesus Christ is of basic importance to the Christian Gospel. While Dodd’s proposed answers to certain questions are debatable, he raises many problems with which every New Testament scholar must grapple.

ANDREW J. BANDSTRA

Into The Teenagers’ World

Young Life, by Emile Cailliet (Harper & Row, 1963, 120 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by Pierson Curtis, senior master, The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York.

“Teen-agers live and move largely in a world of their own. If communication is to be established with them, it has to be in terms of that world, its tradition, and its vernacular.”

This, according to the author of this book, is the firm conviction not only of the leaders of Young Life, a movement to reach teen-agers untouched by churches, but also of the rising generation of social scientists.

Dr. Cailliet, Stuart Professor Emeritus of Christian Philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary, has long been in contact with young people. Several years ago he lectured at the Young Life Institute. To gather the material for this study, he spent months visiting Young Life clubs and camps, talking with leaders and club members, and studying many case histories.

“My own interest in Young Life,” he says, “was awakened by the fact that here was a company of persons who, instead of lamenting the plight of our teen-agers, were doing something about it. It may also be that a man in his late sixties experiences increasingly that mysterious affinity between the old and the young which has found such wonderful expression in Victor Hugo’s The Art of Being a Grandfather. Possibly, too, having as a college professor freely indulged in the writing of philosophical treatises, I have felt a certain debt to my fellow man, an obligation to do something practical when the chance offered.”

Professor Cailliet begins this interesting book by telling first how Jim Rayburn, a young home missionary in the Southwest, was led to Dallas Theological Seminary. When sent to help in the youth program of a Gainesville church, Jim was told by the pastor that since most of the local teenagers never came to any church, “your parish is the high school.”

Most churches, Dr. Cailliet points out, are contented with, “Come ye.” But “Go ye” is Christ’s command. Our God is the seeking God. And in America nine million high school students, 70 per cent of the total in high schools, never come to church and must be sought.

But how does one reach teen-agers in their world? How does one really communicate the Gospel to them? There were no books to guide Jim Rayburn. He had to feel his way. For over a year he tried weekly meetings in a schoolroom after school, and got nowhere. Then he tried evening meetings in a private house. He learned the teen-agers’ native language and traditions. He put no pressure on them but respected their right of choice. In four months his first club grew from 12 members to 175. He had his troubles; but though some snickered and scorned when he spoke of Christ, there were conversions and a growing interest.

That experimental beginning in 1940—incorporated in 1941 as Young Life, with a staff of five recent seminary graduates—initiated a chain reaction. After twenty-five years the work has a central staff in Colorado Springs and six regional staffs in the States and Canada; some 225 trained men and women (with 500 volunteer helpers) in charge of half a thousand clubs; several beautiful regional camps for weekend groups and summer sessions; an institute for training club leaders; and a yearly budget to meet of over $800,000.

Anyone who wants to know how thousands of non-church-going young people have been reached with the Message should read this book. It is hopeful, inspiriting, and informing. And it is an honest book, recording distressing failures as well as heart-warming successes.

Dr. Cailliet answers the critics who claim that Young Life clubs compete with and hurt local churches. He answers those who condemn Young Life leaders for taking no rigid doctrinal stands but only preaching Christ crucified.

The whole secret of the work, he tells us, is constant dependence on the Spirit, who can still enable some to be all things to all, that by all means they can save some.

PIERSON CURTIS

From The Pressroom

The Way and Its Ways, by George W. Cornell (Association, 1963, 251 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Russell T. Hitt, editor, Eternity magazine, Philadelphia.

The accepted stereotype of an American newspaperman is a carefree person with a battered hat sitting at a poker table, finding time only occasionally to check with the city desk or to take another drink.

George Cornell, religious news editor of the Associated Press, demonstrates that he is a journalist of another breed. In this book he proves that journalism and theology can mix. Indeed, his explanation of Christianity might even break up the game in the pressroom.

Actually Cornell is trying to do something more than present Christianity in a way that the average man can understand. He also sets out to show that in spite of the differences of stress in the three major traditions—Protestant, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox—these expressions of Christianity have much more in common than the theologians would have us believe. Cornell jostles those who, to him, are quibblers, and again and again seeks to show that they are saying about the same thing.

Theologians will accuse him of oversimplifying the issues, but Cornell dares to insist that even on the controversial subject of baptism “all the definitions are virtually the same in emphasis, and quite similar in terminology.”

For Cornell, traditional explanations of doctrine have contributed to the divisions of Christianity. “The tedious habit of drawing party lines, where they are a matter of emphasis or semantics, has contributed to the distorted trademarked portrayals of faith,” he declares.

Yet he does not dodge the basic issue of man’s sin and estrangement from God. He forthrightly stresses the provision of God for our redemption in the Person of Jesus Christ, who died on the Cross and was raised from the dead.

The wide range of quotations from leaders of the Church in all generations, but especially from contemporary theologians, indicates that the author has read widely. His eclectic approach undoubtedly springs from a deep desire for Christian unity, and his presentation will please those with longings for ecumenical dialogue.

Thus it does not come as a surprise that Episcopalian Cornell does a commendable job with the doctrine of the Church.

My battered hat goes off to a fellow journalist who truly loves Jesus Christ and his Church and seeks to be a faithful witness.

RUSSELL HITT

To Vex The World

Reuben, Reuben, by Peter De Vries (Little, Brown, 1964, 435 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Roderick Jellema, instructor in English, University of Maryland, College Park.

Examining the relations between the sexes in Reuben, Reuben, humorist Peter De Vries gives stronger notice than usual that his purpose is to vex the world as well as to divert it. The farce and satire are as devastating as usual, and the laughs about the foibles of the “worldly, effortless, delinquent, and suave” suburbanites come easily. But De Vries skillfully blends his zany comedy of smart psychologizing with enough of the horror of grim reality so that the reader feels ashamed for laughing at something that really is very funny. As compassion conspires with laughter (uneasily) to drown out disgust and contempt, and as the characters bumble along toward divorces and a suicide, De Vries commits himself to nothing. But he again makes a shambles of an ultra-clever “faith” by which modern men attempt to live.

RODERICK JELLEMA

Booklover’S Delight

The 500th Anniversary Pictorial Census of the Gutenberg Bible, by Don Cleveland Norman, with an introduction on the life and work of Johannes Gutenberg by Aloys Ruppel (Coverdale Press, 1961, 263 pp., $100), is reviewed by Herman C. Waetjen, assistant professor of New Testament, San Francisco Theological Seminary, San Anselmo, California.

Only a few bibliophiles can afford every book they would like to own, and even they are not always able to buy this or that particular one. This is especially true of the book that every collector regards to be equivalent to the pearl of great price, and to obtain which he would sell all he possessed: the Gutenberg Bible, the king of all incunabula.

Only 47 of 185 copies originally printed by Gutenberg between 1450 and 1455 are extant today; twelve are on parchment or vellum and thirty-five on paper. They are described in great detail through word and picture in this magnificent census commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Gutenberg Bible.

This volume is a collector’s item. In recent years only one man in the world owned a complete copy of the Gutenberg Bible (Carl H. Pforzheimer, to whom this book has been dedicated, and who died in 1957). Here, however, in this pictorial census, published in a limited edition of 985 copies, a bibliophile can compensate very nicely for his yearning to possess a Gutenberg. In a sense he can have all of them. He can own a richly bound and boxed volume—in red morocco leather with the Gutenberg coat of arms on the cover—that presents an encyclopedia of knowledge on the location and condition of every one of the forty-seven Gutenberg Bibles in existence. He can read the life of Gutenberg and the extraordinary story of the first printing of the Bible. Finally, he can share the experiences and journeys of another bibliophile, the author Don Cleveland Norman, who traveled extensively to gather all this material together into a very splendid book, one that is without question a booklover’s delight.

HERMAN C. WAETJEN

Good Potpourri

Truth for Today, by John F. Walvoord (Moody, 1963, 255 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by Steven Barabas, professor of theology, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

This is a commemorative volume, a compilation of twenty-three articles that have appeared in Bibliotheca Sacra during the thirty years that it has been published by the faculty of Dallas Theological Seminary. Of the twenty-three contributors, sixteen either are or have been teachers at Dallas; the others are Wilbur M. Smith, Kenneth S. Kantzer, Merrill C. Tenney, Earle E. Cairns, and Donald P. Hustad. The articles are divided into the following groups: systematic theology, apologetics and contemporary theology, Old Testament, New Testament, church history, and practical theology. Articles with a dispensational emphasis naturally predominate, like Charles C. Ryrie’s “The Necessity of Dispensationalism” and J. Dwight Pentecost’s “The Relation Between Living and Resurrected Saints in the Millennium.” There are, however, also interesting articles on Barthian theology, the importance of the Septuagint for biblical studies, Calvin and Servetus, the Book of Job and Ugaritic literature, and church music. If they have a defect it is their brevity: their average length (eleven pages) hardly allows for thorough treatment.

STEVEN BARABAS

Theologians Of History

Prophets in Perspective, by B. D. Napier (Abingdon, 1963, 128 pp., $2.75), is reviewed by Charles F. Pfeiffer, professor of Old Testament, Gordon Divinity School, Wenham, Massachusetts.

Professor Napier’s brief study of the Old Testament prophets is an expansion of the article on the same subject that he wrote for the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. He does not attempt to analyze the ministries of individual prophets but rather seeks to gain an understanding of the prophetic movement itself, particularly as it found expression during the period of classical prophetism (800–600 B.C.). In broader terms, however, Napier recognizes biblical prophetism as extending back to Moses and forward to New Testament times. He notes that the Bible presents a prophetic concept of history, revealed in terms of God’s concern, the divine purpose, and even Yahweh’s participation in the events of history.

A sharp distinction is drawn between the cult prophet—the type of prophet Amos renounced in saying, “I am no prophet nor a prophet’s son,” and the great prophets who saw the events of Old Testament history as parts of a process willed by God. Napier does not, however, like much of the older biblical scholarship, see the prophets as enemies of the cult per se. Rather he sees them as enemies of the cult in the guise in which they saw it—an externalism devoid of spiritual power.

After surveying the prophetic movement throughout Israel’s history, Napier concludes with a chapter on the faith of classical prophetism. His key words here are election, rebellion, judgment, compassion, redemption, and consummation. It begins with the election of Israel, but ends with a consummation that transcends national distinctions, bringing God’s salvation to the ends of the earth.

CHARLES F. PFEIFFER

Mind Over Matter

Mysterious Revelation, by T. A. Burkill (Cornell, 1963, 337 pp., $6.50), is reviewed by Robert Preus, professor of systematic theology, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

This book is not a commentary in the ordinary sense, but an attempt to understand the point of view of Mark in writing his Gospel. The author maintains that Mark starts from the conviction that Jesus is the promised Messiah. But Christ’s is not ostensibly a life of divine victory. Rather, his claims were rejected for the most part, and this was as it had to be. His status was a predetermined secret, and Jesus therefore often deliberately concealed the truth from people. This presumes that the nature of Christianity is paradoxical, to be explained, according to Mark, only soteriologically. The author bolsters his thesis with a number of enlightening and convincing studies of Jesus’ parables, his transfiguration, and the like.

It is not so much with the author’s conclusions that the reader may have misgivings as with the way in which he arrived at them, with his attempt to get behind the words of Mark (and of the entire New Testament) to the mind of Mark. This reviewer, for one, has great difficulty with such an approach. We would certainly agree that Mark’s Gospel is not an essay in scientific biography but a religious document written for the edification of the Church and depicting the life of Jesus the Messiah. We might even go along with the author when he says that Mark’s Gospel is “essentially a soteriological document in which history is subservient to theology”—depending on what is meant by the last clause. But we do not agree (if we understand the author correctly) that Mark is merely employing a number of traditions according to a definite or indefinite tendenz, however correct that tendenz may be. St. Mark is first of all a witness, that, one who witnesses to events that have happened and words of Jesus that have been spoken. It is not therefore Mark’s attitude that forms his Gospel, but the works and words of Jesus that form his attitude. It is when one fails to see the role of the evangelist as witness that one often becomes preoccupied with the “theology,” the point of view, the presuppositions and the tradition behind the evangelist, and becomes skeptical, more or less, of the facts that the evangelist is professedly seeking to recite.

A case in point is the author’s chapter on the Lord’s Supper. To him the Eucharist testified to a mystical continuation of the Messiah’s incarnate life. This is well and good; but the Eucharist is more than this. When the author goes on to say that “the essential spirit” of the Messiah resided in the blessed bread just as it had previously resided in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth, he is not interpreting any text in Mark or anywhere else, and his words are unclear. What is meant by “essential spirit”? Jesus speaks of his body and his blood. The sacramental character of the Lord’s Supper is played down by dissociating it from the Passover celebration. And Jeremias’s conclusions to the contrary are rejected on the basis of the latter’s believing too easily in the authenticity of Christ’s words of institution. The Church’s belief in the Eucharist is represented as the result of a development that took place after Christ’s institution. This is hardly in keeping with Paul’s claim in First Corinthians 11:23. These words do not give the impression of a Church seeking to interpret the Lord’s Supper. Too much source criticism and not enough exegesis has gone into this book.

Our criticisms are not offered to question the basic thesis of the author, much less to impugn the value of many of his studies, but to question his approach. An exegetical approach, not isolating Mark, but taking into account the whole analogy of Scripture, is the only right one.

ROBERT PREUS

Book Briefs

The Circle and the Cross, by G. W. C. Thomas (Abingdon, 1964, 144 pp., $2.75). A discussion of the Cross as the restorative power that undoes the consequences of sin; carried on within a conception of the Atonement in which the consequences of sin have nothing to do with legality.

Meditations on Early Christian Symbols, by Michael Daves (Abingdon, 1964, 160 pp., $2.75). Interesting, readable, and informative.

Drastic Discipleship: And Other Expository Sermons, a symposium (Baker, 1963, 116 pp., $2.95).

Reform Movements in Judaism, by Abraham Cronbach (Bookman Associates, 1963, 138 pp., $3). A kaleidoscope of Jewish reforms beginning with the Deuteronomic Reformation and extending to the present; from the liberal viewpoint of Reform Judaism.

The Holy Spirit in Your Teaching, by Roy B. Zuck (Scripture Press, 1963, 189 pp., $3.95). An examination of the role of the Holy Spirit in religious teaching. The treatment is usually true but superficial and meager, and the rejection of competing theological positions often cavalier.

The Relationship of Baptism to Church Membership, by Joseph Belcastro (Bethany Press, 1963, 244 pp., $4.50). A study of a point of controversy within the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ).

Toward an American Orthodox Church, by Alexander A. Bogolepov (Morehouse-Barlow, 1963, 124 pp., $3). From the viewpoint of Orthodox Canon Law, the book raises the question of the establishment of independent churches, with special reference to the one in America. For professional students.

Sing the Wondrous Story, by Ernest K. Emurian (W. A. Wilde, 1963, 148 pp., $2.50). The true stories of how eighteen people came to compose fifty-five of our hymns and gospel songs. Written with zest.

The Form of a Christian Congregation, by C. F. Walther, translated by J. T. Mueller (Concordia, 1963, 200 pp., $5). A translation of an original (1862), one-third of whose title was: “The Right Form of an Evangelical Lutheran Local Congregation Independent of the State.”

Paperbacks

Christianity and the Problem of Origins, by Philip Edgcumbe Hughes (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1964, 39 pp., $.75). An Anglican looks at evolution in the light of the Christian faith.

The Social Teaching of Pope John XXIII, by John F. Cronin, S.S. (Bruce, 1963, 83 pp., $1.35). A commentary on the late Pope’s thinking on social issues by the assistant director of the Roman Catholic Department of Social Action.

The Lamb and the Blessed: Sermons for Lent and Easter Based on the Beatitudes, by William H. Eifert and Daniel A. Brockhoff (Concordia, 1964, 86 pp., $1.50). Worthy sermonettes.

Art and Scholasticism and the Frontiers of Poetry, by Jacques Maritain, translated by Joseph W. Evans (Scribner’s, 1964, 234 pp., $1.45). A pioneer work that develops a theory of art based on the concepts of St. Thomas Aquinas.

The Nature and Destiny of Man (Vols. I and II), by Reinhold Niebuhr (Scribner’s, 1964, 305, 328 pp., $1.65 each). While these volumes raise some serious theological questions, they are a brilliant critique of man and his culture; perhaps Niebuhr’s greatest work.

Visible Unity—What Does the Bible Say?, by J. M. Ross (Friends of Reunion [Little-hampton, England], 1963, 20 pp., 1s. 8½d.). This booklet is recommended by the Faith and Order Department of the British Council of Churches as part of the preparation for the Conference in Britain in 1964. It effectively urges that the unity of the Church is something more and other than merely spiritual.

The Loneliness of Man, by Raymond Chapman (Fortress, 1964, 169 pp., $1.90). Getting behind mere aloneness, the author takes a long hard look at loneliness, how people attempt to overcome it, and how Christianity meets the need. For those who dare to take a look at themselves.

The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version, by C. S. Lewis (37 pp., $.75); The Sermon on the Mount, by Joachim Jeremias (38 pp., $.75); The Old Testament in the New, by C. H. Dodd (33 pp., $.75); The Significance of the Bible for the Church, by Anders Nygren (46 pp., $.75); The Meaning of Hope, by C. F. D. Moule (72 pp., $.85), all by Fortress, 1963. Brief expositions, but each is all substance and no fluff.

In Debt to Christ: A Study in the Meaning of the Cross, by Douglas Webster (Fortress, 1964, 158 pp., $1.75). An extraordinarily provocative and perceptive theological interpretation of the Cross. Easy to read, it will germinate many a sermon.

The Five Points of Calvinism: Defined, Defended, Documented (from “Biblical and Theological Studies”), by David N. Steele and Curtis C. Thomas (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1963, 95 pp., $1.50). A bird’s-eye treatment of position, biblical proof, and a bibliography useful for reference.

The Upper Room Disciplines 1964: A Devotional Manual for Ministers, Theological Students and Other Church Workers (Upper Room, 1963, 372 pp., $1).

Ideas

The Centrality of the Cross

The Editors

According to an old legend, the Cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified was set at the center of the world. And so it was—historically and spiritually. The Cross is the center of the divine continuum of redemption. For it, God caused the Incarnation; as a result of it, the Resurrection occurred, the Ascension took place, and the Second Advent will usher in the consummation of the Kingdom.

Good Friday, or in earlier usage “God’s Friday,” is a day of deepest meaning. It reveals the enormity of sin and the greatness of God’s love. It was a brutal business done at Golgotha, the place of a skull, that April day early in the first century. The shame of public execution, the pounding of nails through hands that had healed the afflicted, the cruel mockery of him “who did no sin” and “who when he was reviled, reviled not again,” the bitter sponge pressed to the parched lips and swollen tongue that had spoken words of life, and, most profoundly of all, the dereliction of soul during the three dark hours—these show the awful actuality of sin. Yet out of such suffering endured in love for the lost, the Sin-bearer spoke seven words—words of forgiveness, assurance, filial concern, agony of soul, bodily thirst, triumphant victory, and committal of spirit.

The Crucifixion is unique. And its uniqueness derives from the Person who was crucified rather than from the Cross itself. In the words of Cecil Alexander’s hymn,

There was no other good enough

To pay the price of sin,

He only could unlock the gate

Of heav’n, and let us in.

Yet unique though it is, the Crucifixion does not stand in isolation. Not only is it the center of God’s redemptive plan; it is also related to the Resurrection as cause to effect.

According to the writer of Hebrews, “The God of peace … brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant.” Here in words of surpassing beauty is the inevitable connection between the Cross and the empty tomb. Good Friday had to be vindicated by Easter. “The blood of the everlasting covenant” which was “shed for many for the remission of sins” had to be ratified by the mighty power of God in raising up him who could not be held by “the pains of death.” Had there been no Good Friday, there never would have been an Easter; and had there been no Easter, the death of Christ would have had no saving efficacy. Therefore to deny the Resurrection is to deny the Gospel itself.

Like a priceless jewel with its facets, the Atonement has its different aspects. Down through the ages theologians have variously seen the work of Christ on the Cross as a ransom paid to Satan, as moral influence, as an expression of God’s moral government, as mystical, or as victory over sin and the devil. Despite some real elements of truth, these theories, even taken together, are not a complete explanation of the Atonement. Although theology must continue to search the meaning of the Cross, Christ’s saving work is never exhaustively defined by any human theological statement.

The substitutionary understanding of the Cross is not just one of a number of alternate views of what took place at Calvary, an optional interpretation to be accepted or rejected as one wishes; according to Scripture, it is the very heart of the Atonement. The “great Shepherd of the sheep” actually took the place of the sheep. As Isaiah wrote, “All we like sheep have gone astray.… He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter.… He bare the sin of many.” When Paul said, “The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me,” he put the fact of what Christ did at Calvary in personal terms that are as true today as in the first century. Granted that in depth of meaning the fact is inexhaustible, it is not irrational nor beyond all comprehension. One need not be a theologian to apprehend its personal meaning. The individual who looks to the crucified Saviour and says in faith, “He died for me,” affirms the Good Friday fact that God vindicated at Easter.

The death of Christ in the place of sinful men, the suffering of the just for the unjust, is a once-and-for-all event. Yet its proclamation continues “till he come.” It is good for the Church to take time on “God’s Friday” to recall the Lord’s suffering and death. But it is also dangerous. To see the Crucifixion as a moving religious spectacle and nothing more is to join the Roman soldiers of whom Matthew said, “And sitting down they watched him there.” No man has the right just to look at Golgotha; through his sin he is a participant in what happened there. And only by faith does he have life through Christ’s death. The power of the Cross is not confined to the solemn festival of a single day but is ever available to all who believe.

For the preacher, the truth he proclaims on Good Friday is truth for every day. There is not the slightest indication that Paul came to Corinth on a Good Friday. But we have his passionate avowal to the Corinthian church, “I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” For Paul the Cross was always at the center. For us too it can occupy no other place.

Significant also is the Apostle’s statement of the manner of his proclamation of the Cross: “And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom.… My speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.” Today when philosophy is invading the pulpit and when there is a tendency to substitute existential jargon for basic Christian concepts, these words of Paul need pondering. If the message of Christ crucified is for all, young and old, it must be presented so that those who hear may lay hold upon its truth. Today as in Paul’s day the preacher is obligated to reach both the Greeks and the barbarians, both the wise and the unwise. Aside from the power of the Spirit, the greatest gift a preacher may have is the gift of plain speech. To proclaim the Cross with a clarity that reaches the common man actually takes more of concentrated study and disciplined use of language than to speak to an audience of scholars.

A searching test of any minister’s preaching is for him to ask about his every sermon, “Have I in some way preached Christ crucified in this message?” Not that every sermon must follow an evangelistic stereotype nor that it must refer at length to the Cross; preaching must be as various as human life and its needs. But always, whether the sermon deals with social justice, moral problems, life situations, history, or prophecy, Christ crucified must be in it. He must be there if for no other reason than that no minister can know whether his is the last voice to reach some listener whose heart is open to receive new life in Christ. Preaching devoid of the Good Friday truth may be eloquent, learned, fascinating, and even spiritually helpful; but if it contains no reference at all to the central fact of Christ crucified, it is open to the charge of inadequacy and unfaithfulness.

School Boycotts

The use of the boycott as a protest against de facto school segregation is meeting with growing disenchantment among friends of the civil rights movement, including some responsible Negroes. After almost half of New York City’s one million public school children stayed home for a one-day boycott, leaders of the mass truancy were charged by President John H. Fischer of Teachers College, Columbia University, with undermining “the child’s respect for the very school which is his surest hope of attaining equal opportunity.” Dr. Fischer is also head of the Advisory Committee on Human Relations and Community Tensions, created by the New York State Commissioner of Education. Superintendent Calvin Gross of the New York City Schools, apparently seeking to understand the motivation of the boycott, said, “This was the first opportunity for every Negro and Puerto Rican to express—with social approval—everything he feels under his skin about prejudice and discrimination.”

Negro leaders are planning boycotts in other Northern cities in a drive to break up concentration of Negroes and whites in certain schools by transporting pupils from one district to another. But such forced transportation of pupils may yet be ruled illegal or unconstitutional by the courts. New York State Supreme Court justices have ruled in two cases that race could not be a factor in transferring children or in establishing school zones. Basic to the decisions were state laws that had been adopted to protect Negroes from discrimination.

Substandard schooling has too long been the lot of many Negroes. But school boycotts to force more interschool district bus transportation are not an effective answer to that formidable problem. More fundamental and enduring solutions should be sought through expanded housing for minorities, better vocational opportunities, and other such corrective measures reaching beneath the school problem. And continuing conferences among racial groups are preferable to enforced truancy, which only adds to the spirit of lawlessness already so prevalent. Whites in some areas are said to be ready to counter with boycotts of their own; if they do, the public school system could be in jeopardy.

The American Negro rightly resists the tendency of many whites to relegate him to inferior status as a person and to deprive him of basic civil rights. But using mass truancy to force desegregation of pupils by school buses is not an effective way of improving the lot of his children.

A Balanced Ticket?

Until 1960 in a predominantly Protestant United States, only Protestants could get elected to the high office of the presidency. Yet through the years Protestants had proudly declared the great American tradition that a man’s religion neither qualified nor disqualified him for public office.

When Mr. Kennedy was sent to the White House, many regarded his election as a triumph that laid the last remains of religious discrimination to rest. But for some the triumph is now a matter of grave concern because politicians of both parties are thinking in terms of a combination of Protestant and Roman Catholic candidates for the presidency and the vice-presidency. And voices are lamenting that teams of candidates will be chosen best calculated to catch both Protestant and Roman Catholic votes.

Such laments are ineffective. It is unrealistic to think that Protestant and Roman Catholic considerations will not enter into the selection of candidates. Each political party wants to win, and if a “balanced” ticket seems best calculated to win, such combinations will be consciously and deliberately sought. The same forces will operate in respect to religion as now operate in the selection of men to capture the vote of the large city, the Negro, the laboring class, the South, and big business.

Would an attempt to gain both Protestant and Roman Catholic votes be any less American than the situation that prevailed until 1960—when only within the Protestant block was religion not a matter of concern for public office, so that any kind of a Protestant but only a Protestant could become president? And is not the concern being expressed on this matter unrealistic and ultimately as ineffective as whistling against the wind?

Such questions require affirmative answers because the fears they express are grounded in an abstract and unworkable commitment to an absolute separation of religion (not church) and state. To be sure, it would be un-American to nominate a man for office just because he is a Roman Catholic or just because he is a Protestant. But there are more than 40 million of the former and even more Protestants. There will always be men of presidential quality in both groups, and it is therefore highly unlikely that a man will ever be chosen solely for his religious affiliation.

The election of John F. Kennedy indicated a change in the politico-religious climate in the United States. Protestants and those committed to an unworkable absolute separation of religion and state may bewail the change, but they cannot do so as Americans. They can only bewail the change because of a religious commitment that violates the principle of religious non-discrimination for which they plead.

Balanced tickets do not warrant tears, but they do require balanced thinking.

Evangelism Or Confusion?

The strange notion that the evangelistic task of the Church is to save, not individuals, but the social, political, economic, and cultural structures of life, is currently being urged upon the churches. One advocate defines evangelism this way: “Evangelism is social legislation.” Such a view makes the United States Congress a formidable missionary society, surpassed only by socialistic governments. Another advocate defines it like this: “first economic security and then spiritual revival.” This view is based on that lost biblical text, “What shall it profit a man, if he save his soul, and lose the whole economic, political, cultural world?”

The Rev. Dr. Jitsuo Morikawa, secretary of evangelism of the American Baptist Convention, is an outspoken advocate of this novel conception of evangelism. At the recent meeting of the National Council of Churches’ Division of Christian Education in Cincinnati, he declared, “The redemption of the world is not ultimately dependent upon the churches we build, the missionaries we send, and the souls we win to Jesus Christ.” If this meant that the redemption of the world depends on God’s grace rather than our action, it would be in the classical Christian tradition. But Dr. Morikawa means that the world’s salvation depends on the salvation of life’s social structures. Last year in Huntington, West Virginia, he told Southern Presbyterians: “The redemption of the world is not dependent upon the souls we win for Jesus Christ.… There cannot be individual salvation.… Salvation has more to do with the whole society than with the individual soul.… We must not be satisfied to win people one by one.… Contemporary evangelism is moving away from winning souls one by one, to the evangelization of the structures of the society.” Dr. Morikawa also told the recent Cincinnati meeting that if we Christians assume that our primary task is to “win souls to Christ,” we presume to take “upon ourselves powers which belong only to God.”

On what theological position does this view rest? Surely not on that of the Apostle Paul, who tried desperately to “save some.” It rests rather on Dr. Morikawa’s theological assumption that since “God has already won a mighty redemption … for the entire world,” therefore “… the task of the Church is to tell all men … that they already belong to Christ” and that “men are no longer lost.”

On this view, Paul endured hardship and persecution to save the Roman Empire, or, in modern terms, to save such social structures as the United Nations, the Democratic and Republican parties, the AFL-CIO, and the Screen Actors’ Guild.

The view of evangelism represented by Dr. Morikawa is not only unbiblical; it is also internally inconsistent and contradictory. Why is the effort to save individuals presumptuous but the effort to save social power structures not? If “all men are already in the kingdom of fellowship and love” and the contemporary task is therefore “the evangelization of the structures of society,” how can it be held that these social structures must be saved to make possible the salvation of individuals?

Passing Out The Guilt

An article, “The Anatomy of Anti-Semitism,” in this issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY states that Jews often blame Christians for anti-Semitism, and that Christians often find its cause in Jews. The article asserts that neither group may judge the other.

Dr. Frederick C. Grant, professor of biblical theology at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, appears, however, to have found a scapegoat. In an address to Christian clergy delivered at the Washington Hebrew Congregation, Grant, according to The Washington Post, declared that the Jews “were innocent of Jesus’ death.” He placed the blame for it on the “weak, vacillating Roman governor, Pilate,” and said that anti-Semitism originated with pagans. The tendency in Gentile Christians to blame only “pagans” and “Romans” for the death of Christ and for anti-Semitism reveals a spirit that differs in no essential way from religious anti-Semitism; it is only another instance of putting one’s guilt on the shoulders of another. It is also folly; in biblical thought pagans are Gentiles.

- More from The Editors

Theology

The Alternatives in “If”

L. Nelson Bell

For the christian, belief in the Resurrection is an imperative, a doctrine, a component part of saving faith. The Apostle Paul states this with perfect clarity: “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved” (Rom. 10:9).

There is no sadder commentary on contemporary theological deviations than the contortions of those who try to evade, “spiritualize,” or frankly deny the fact of the Resurrection. What some will not admit is that without the Resurrection there is no Christianity.

The “ifs” in Paul’s affirmations of the Resurrection, as found in First Corinthians 15, are arresting (here we are using Phillips’s translation): “Now if the rising of Christ from the dead is the very heart of our message …” (v. 12). Here Paul is asserting that the Resurrection of Christ was the very heart of his preaching, and of that of the other apostles.

This is confirmed in the Book of the Acts, where it is recorded that Peter, on the Day of Pentecost, said: “Christ is the man Jesus, whom God raised up—a fact of which all of us are eyewitnesses!” (Acts 2:32). It may be worth noting too that eyes do not see spirits. The early disciples were witnesses to One whom they had seen after his Resurrection.

Peter noted also David’s prophetic witness: “While he was alive he was a prophet.… He foresaw the resurrection of Christ, and it is this of which he is speaking” (in Psalm 132:11).

Earlier, when choosing a successor to Judas, the apostles agreed: “This man must be an eyewitness with us to the resurrection of Jesus” (Acts 1:22b).

In their first clash with the religious authorities following Pentecost, the temple guards and the Sadducees were “thoroughly incensed that they should be teaching the people and should assure them that the resurrection of the dead had been proved through the rising of Jesus” (Acts 4:2).

Later, threatened by the council, they refused to cease preaching Christ crucified, dead, and risen. Their answer to their tormentors was to pray for more boldness to proclaim the message. As a result there came a new infilling of the Holy Spirit, and we are told: “The apostles continued to give their witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus with great force” (Acts 4:33a).

Paul, in his memorable witness to the pagans of Athens, excited both the curiosity and the derision of the philosophers: “ ‘What is this cock sparrow trying to say?’ Others said, ‘He seems to be trying to proclaim some more gods to us, and outlandish ones at that!’ For Paul was actually proclaiming ‘Jesus’ and ‘the resurrection’ ” (Acts 17:18).

In his subsequent sermon on Mars Hill he said: “ ‘Now while it is true that God overlooked the days of ignorance he now commands all men everywhere to repent. For he has fixed a day on which he will judge the whole world in justice by the standard of a man whom he has appointed. That this is so he has guaranteed to all men by raising this man from the dead” (Acts 17:30, 31).

Paul’s ministry was so fixed on the fact of the Resurrection that when he was arrested in Jerusalem, he cried out to the assembled Pharisees and Sadducees, “It is for my hope in the resurrection of the dead that I am on trial!” (Acts 23:6b).

All through Paul’s letters there is the triumphant note of the fact and effect of our Lord’s Resurrection.

Peter has the same theme in his letters, “Thank God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that in his great mercy we men have been born again into a life full of hope, through Christ’s rising from the dead!” (1 Pet. 1:3).

Paul’s second “if” is stated: “For if there is no such thing as the resurrection of the dead, then Christ was never raised” (1 Cor. 15:13).

In other words, man’s hope of resurrection rests in the prior fact of Christ’s having risen, a form of logic hard to gainsay.

Paul continues: “And if Christ was not raised then neither our preaching nor your faith has any meaning at all” (v. 14).

Is preaching that explains away the Resurrection, or denies its reality through some legerdemain of “spiritualization,” irrelevant and meaningless? Apparently so. Is faith in a Christ who did not actually rise from the dead so that he could be touched and handled—a Christ who did not eat in the presence of his disciples—a Christ who did not explain the meaning of the Scriptures to men whose hearts were left burning with a new understanding of the Old Testament—is faith in such a Christ useless? Apparently so.

The “ifs” continue: “Further” (if Christ did not rise) “we are lying in our witness for God, for we have given our solemn testimony that he did raise up Christ …” (v. 15a).

One is forced to make a decision: shall the testimony of men who had intimate personal contact with the risen Lord, men who knew of his Resurrection through the testimony of their physical senses, be accepted at face value? Or shall we believe those who, separated from him by nearly twenty centuries, do not choose to accept this testimony?

That man’s salvation rests in faith in the resurrected Lord is clear in the next “if”: “If Christ did not rise your faith is futile and your sins have never been forgiven” (v. 17).

And finally, “Truly, if our hope in Christ were limited to this life only we should, of all mankind, be the most to be pitied” (v. 19).

Can there be any connection between an unresurrected Christ, or one who rose in spirit only, and the present confusion of temporal with eternal concerns? The confusion of reformation with regeneration? Of humanitarianism with evangelism and missions? There can be!

Paul gives a final solemn warning which seems relevant today: “Don’t let yourselves be deceived. Talking about things that are not true is bound to be reflected in practical conduct. Come back to your senses, and don’t dabble in sinful doubts. Remember that there are men who have plenty to say but have no knowledge of God …” (vv. 33, 34).

The Cross is the central event of history. The Resurrection is the cornerstone of the Christian’s hope, for the open tomb sealed once for all the validity and efficacy of the death of the Son of God for the sins of the world.

Why try to explain it away? Why try in any way to becloud its reality? Had there been a camera present as the stone rolled away and the risen Lord walked forth, it could have recorded the event for all history.

But God does not work that way. He speaks to us today: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20:29b, KJV).

Ours is the privilege of believing the testimony of those who saw and knew; of knowing Him today.

- More from L. Nelson Bell

Eutychus and His Kin: March 13, 1964

LITTLE BOXES, LITTLE FOXES

For those of you who know the difference between folk and country music let me recommend the song called “The Little Boxes.” A careful hearing of this number will take you right back into Ecclesiastes; and, by the way, there are a lot of “Bible-believing Christians” who spend so much time on five or six verses in Paul that they miss the fine astringency of that excellent Old Testament Wisdom:

The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it.…

Negro spirituals were probably part of the internal bleeding of a cruelly oppressed people. No program is complete now without a Negro spiritual and some amateur baritone embarrassing us with “Old Man River,” trying to pump feeling into the song but never quite coming off with it because he never really did “tote that bale.”

“The Little Boxes” is something else. This is music in our day coming out of the sadness of middle-class, respectable, successful, all-American living. If we can no longer identify with “Old Man River,” we can sure nuf identify with “The Little Boxes.” The little boxes are all those little houses on the hillside that are painted pink and yellow and blue and green and that all look more or less alike in a housing project where $15,000-a-year people have ganged up. The plot to the song is that you build your little box and raise your children and put braces on their teeth and send them to college and start them in business and they end up buying another little box on another hill. Meanwhile the little foxes nibble the vines.

In Ecclesiastes the fear of the Lord is the solution. Or in the modern scene, “What does it profit us if we gain the whole world and lose our soul?”

EUTYCHUS II

THE MAJOR TASK

Re … the Spring Book Issue (Feb. 14): It is a great issue. It is very well done. It covers very relevant areas and material. It will be much appreciated. Thank you all for it.

But, as I sat back and reviewed the impressions of the whole issue, I tried to determine just what had been accomplished. In the light of the objectives of Jesus Christ, of his Church, of the Word of God, what progress has been made?…

Is missions the main job of the Church? Is the evangelization of the world the main task of the Church? Did Jesus and then Paul project a plan—in fact the only plan—for taking the Gospel of salvation to all the world?…

In the list of Choice Evangelical Books of 1963 there are two books, possibly three if we include the one on Young Life, that deal directly with missions. Bob Evans’s book on Europe is one of the most significant books to come off the press dealing directly with the subject of missions for two or three years.

And this is all we have to offer.

You are right when you reply that one cannot review books unless they are written. I too deplore the dearth of books in this area.

But my concern is that the theologians, the biblical commentators, the historians, the religious philosophers and psychologists are not relating their thinking and their writing to what God has revealed is his major purpose in himself, for his Son, and in behalf of his creation—missions.

RAYMOND B. BUKER, SR.

Professor of Missions

Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary

Denver, Colo.

I have enjoyed the issue. F. F. Bruce’s knowledge of New Testament studies is absolutely marvelous.

ROBERT H. MOUNCE

Assoc. Prof. of Biblical Lit. and Greek

Bethel College

St. Paul, Minn.

SMOKING AND COMMANDMENT SIX

You are most certainly right in declaring smoking, in the light of recent scientific findings, to be a moral issue (Editorials, Jan. 31 issue). Smoking is a slow form of suicide which is a violation of the sixth commandment.

The body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, and it is far more wrong to desecrate it than to desecrate a church dedicated to the worship of God.

Congratulations on your stand!

DUNBAR W. SMITH, M.D.

New York, N. Y.

Re the article, “Churchmen Speak Up on Smoking” (News): It would have been fine if they had.

I noted six of the selected comments showed grave concern for the youth and their exposure to the promotion, use, and addiction to tobacco, but apparently there is little concern for the adult. Why is it any different for the youth than the adult as a violation of the temple of God?

The answer is clear—adults are the smokers, the investors, the manufacturers, the promoters, the poor witnesses. And this is the crux of the entire problem of youth—the poor adult image and the absence of the witness to the young.… Let’s be honest with ourselves and admit that we are miserable witnesses to our young people.

We say, “Don’t do as I do, but do as I say,” and the youth say, “What you do speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you say.”

KARL O. NYBERG

Moorhead, Minn.

THE MISSOURI CHAPLAINS

The letter by Joseph MacCarroll (Eutychus, Jan. 31 issue) is a masterpiece of confusion.

The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod has a distinctive doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. In the light of the same it believes that Communion may be received not only as a blessing but “unworthily,” bringing a “judgment” upon him who does not “discern the Lord’s Body.” Hence it cannot engage in joint celebrations with those who deny the Real Presence. Therefore, also, it is love rather than lovelessness which insists on instruction before communing.

Nowhere does The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod indicate, as the Reverend MacCarroll states, that it believes all others eat and drink unworthily.

High-ranking military chaplains of various denominations constantly tell the undersigned of their respect and regard for their colleagues of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, not of “stiffness of heart and mind” to which the writer referred.…

Is a church body to be faulted for having learned to participate in civic and patriotic affairs without compromise of principle? The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and her chaplains are far from perfect, but, thank God, they do stand for something.

ARTHUR M. WEBER

Chaplain

Armed Services Commission

The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod

Washington, D. C.

BISHOPS WAIT LONGER

The article on John Jewell (Current Religious Thought, Feb. 14 issue) was stimulating and proved the author’s introductory paragraph that history is not irrelevant. In fact, history is sometimes phenomenal. Jewell, born in 1552, became Bishop of Salisbury in 1559. Is this a theological child prodigy? No, this is a typographical error; he was born in 1522.

STEPHEN BOARD

Philadelphia, Pa.

SOURCE OF RELEVANCE

I just finished reading the splendid article by young Peter Marshall on “Billy Graham at Princeton: A Student’s View” (Jan. 17 issue). I thought the ideas expressed were both stimulating and inspiring.

All of us hear many people talking about relating the Gospel to our day, and about making Christ relevant. I quite agree with Marshall that the problem is not in making Christ relevant, but rather becoming “channels through whom God himself will make Christ relevant”.…

B. THOMAS TRIBBLE

Benbrook Methodist Church

Benbrook, Tex.

To quote Peter Marshall, I too “feel that Dr. Graham struck at the very heart of the needs of the ministry in the modern Church.”

D. C. RICHARDSON

Cumberland Presbyterian Church

Kenton, Tenn.

POSSE TRACKING A SHEPHERD

We thought we heard a couple of jarring notes in Mr. DeBoer’s “The Parable of the Restless Shepherd” (Jan. 17 issue).

First, and most obviously, he makes it clear that the hero became a better man by trying to become a more successful man. He practiced his piety before men in order to be seen of them, and ended up a true shepherd. Starting—and continuing—with a less than lofty motive, he became, we are told, spiritually alive.

Our own experience has been that when we operate from low motives, we get about what we deserve. Look at those men who make a show of their religion, says Jesus; and with a touch of irony he adds: “They have had all the reward they are going to get”.…

The other jarring note is the complete absence of visiting pulpit committees. Did this pastor live in Patagonia or in Red China? If he wrote that many letters today, the church would have to rent extra parking space for the out-of-town visitors every Sunday.

The unseemly zeal with which pastors seek other sheepfolds (it was different in my case, of course!) is matched only by the posse-like vigilance of pulpit committees in tracking down a new shepherd. I’m afraid that Mr. DeBoer’s parable promises more than it can deliver.

FRED MANSFIELD

The United Presbyterian Church

Benkelman, Neb.

WE NEED MORE

I want to congratulate you on publishing the article, “The Biblical Certainty Of Christ’s Return,” by Robert J. Lamont, in the January 17 issue of the magazine. Mr. Lamont expresses the views I have held for sixty years, and for fifty years I have taught it and preached it in my ministry. We need more preaching on this subject.

W. F. SMITH

United Presbyterian Church, U. S. A.

Chattanooga, Tenn.

IT SOUNDED RIGHT

I have a little comment of purely microscopic proportion. In Elva McAllaster’s poem on “Jephthah’s Daughter” (Jan. 17 issue), on line 18, I am at a loss to understand the form “than them all.” I should think that the sentence would require “than they all.” I wonder whether Miss (or Mrs.) McAllaster has felt that grammar of the sentence should be sacrificed to the euphony. Of course another possibility is that she feels that by now “than” can be considered as a preposition.… I make bold to present this question which is quite secondary in the midst of the total excellence of the poem and of the whole issue.

ROGER NICOLE

Gordon Divinity School

Wenham, Mass.

• Let our poetry editor reply to Dr. Nicole: “Dr. Nicole is undoubtedly right grammatically. According to Fowler, ‘himself more outcast than them all [were]’ is indefensible. Than is never a preposition except in expressions like more than twenty, possibly.

“Elva McAllaster’s only, and poetic, justification is that ‘himself more outcast than they all’ sounds awkward. I’m usually very sensitive to cases after than, but because of the himself, ‘than them’ sounded right.

“One up to Dr. Nicole, but I like the sound of her line still.”—ED.

SALT

Your editorial … “Evangelicals and Public Affairs” (Jan. 17 issue) discusses issues which very much need to be brought to the forefront of Christian thought. To be socially irresponsible or socially unconcerned is not to be “the salt of the earth.” Well done—keep up the good work in this area.

JOHN A. KNUBEL, JR.

Oxford, England

Let me … comment on the fine quality of recent articles whose timeliness and relevance have been marked not only by fidelity to New Testament Christianity but also by real courage, not only on doctrinal matters, as we have come to expect, but also in such delicate areas as race and politics.…

L. ARDEN ALMQUIST

The Evangelical Covenant Church

Chicago, Ill.

Your editorial said a lot that should have been said long ago. In the struggle for survival against liberalism several lamentable phenomena have developed. Among them is the fact that the very real fear of evangelical Christians for the fate of our spiritual message has had the tendency to blind us to other areas of life. Civic concern and responsibility for the great social issues of our time are easily brushed aside with statements about spiritual welfare, leaving the field to those whose message seems to have a social focus alone.

Certainly the foregoing should not deny the spiritual imperative, but it would seem as though oftentimes Christians have the feeling they have told the world to stop while they got off. To be sure we must remember that the greatest need of men is for Christ, and we have a spiritual responsibility to share this treasure. But how are we to answer to God for the other resources with which we have been entrusted.…

Basically the Christian’s problem is one of dual citizenship, and it is very easy to become preoccupied with the one at the expense of the other.… What is called for seems to be a recognition that not all our work is spiritual, or better that our responsibilities for public and social concerns is a spiritual work. But lest we become discouraged we need to remember that this work too can redound to the glory of the God we love and serve: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 5:16).

PENELOPE L. MITCHELL

Los Angeles, Calif.

MIGRATION SOUTHWARD

Your article on “South Africa’s Race Dilemma” in the January 31 issue (News) was very refreshing indeed.

Most of what we hear and read about South Africa these days is emotional and sentimental hogwash based on a preconceived and idealistic philosophy. Very few people in this country realize that South Africa was virtually uninhabited until the whites of England and Europe founded the coastal trading centers in connection with the Far Eastern trade and gradually the blacks migrated southward from central Africa. The slogan: “Africa for the Africans,” by which is meant the blacks, has no application to South Africa.

You have done a good job in objective, factual reporting. This does not solve South Africa’s complex problem, but it at least helps correct the misinformation which is in the minds of the American public and thus helps to make them … more sympathetic.

HAROLD T. COMMONS

President

Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, Inc.

Philadelphia, Pa.

TIME FOR PREPARATION

I appreciated John Holum’s article (Jan. 3 issue) so much that some response to later comments in letters (Feb. 14 issue) may be appropriate. His purpose, as I understand it, was to prepare pastors and laymen for the day when newspapers will proclaim that a scientist has created life. This will mean that research workers have synthesized a type of molecule which (given suitable raw materials) is able to make more molecules of the same type. “Life” in this sense will mean “self-reproducing molecule.”

Such an announcement will be no surprise to scientists, for it will be a natural extension of current research in molecular biology. Futhermore, there is no evidence whatsoever for any divine limit or restriction on such lines of research.

What will this news report tell us about God? Some people, no doubt, will claim that these findings represent another argument against God, but they have no logical basis for doing so. This is the crucial point. New information about biosynthetic processes can lead to more sophisticated speculation about the origin of life but cannot provide direct evidence as to what actually did occur. The basis for our faith in God as Creator will be unchanged—his revelation, the Scriptures.

It is the misinterpretations, not the experiments themselves, that will concern us as Christians. At such a time the general public will give extra weight to statements by persons on the research team itself. I hope that several devoted Christians will be on the active forefront and thus able to bear a unique witness to their faith. We ought to encourage our able young people to enter such a field, rather than counsel against it.

V. ELVING ANDERSON

Assistant Director

Dight Institute of Human Genetics

University of Minnesota

Minneapolis, Minn.

THE SILENT ONES

While I cannot accept your theological platform, I think you deserve praise for taking a stand in your January 17 issue (Editorials) which most editors and leaders dodge.

You condemn the silence of those who will not follow the admonition of the Apostle and “approve the things that are excellent,” but accept without protest books and movies without moral or artistic value, paintings which violate a fundamental principle of pictorial art by being deliberately “non-representational,” singing by those who have no voice and never learned to sing. Do all these silent folk really enjoy these distortions of art?

WILBUR L. CASWELL

Patterson. Calif.

Those theologians who have lost confidence in the basically sound witness of the New Testament and who replace historicism with theoricism are in danger of producing an “abstract” type of religion, matching the abstract poetry, music, painting, and sculpture with which we are now afflicted.

J. N. BECKSTEAD

Ottawa, Ont.

GUSTAVE WEIGEL

Many thanks for your statement about Father Weigel (Editorials, Jan. 31 issue). Your closing sentence is another of your profound concepts very aptly put, “… the pursuit of truth must never be disengaged from the practice of love.” Many of our “defenders of the faith once for all delivered” quickly forget this.

G. WILLIS MARQUETTE

The Methodist Church

Spring City, Pa.

Your editorial on Gustave Weigel was very moving. Conservative Protestants have much in common with thoughtful Roman Catholics. Roman Catholic jurists, along with CHRISTIANITY TODAY, really open up this problem of church-state separation. (… I am a member of the D. C. Bar.) Liberal Protestants and the Supreme Court continue to muddy legal and historical waters. The American Bar Association has evidently been intimidated to the point of abject submission.

ROY STRICKLAND

Sterling, Va.

IT HAUNTS ONE

I sincerely appreciated your editorial on “Youth and the Church” (Jan. 3 issue). As I had tried to think through the reasons for failure some time ago I concurred with your diagnosis. However this lack of communication has struck me with new force. Here in a foreign culture and culture in transition this confrontation is felt.…

The sense of inadequacies to properly communicate this wonderful Gospel message to the few teachers, scientists, and doctors and especially the young disturbed teens floods my soul. I cannot but feel that God’s message is so relevant to this age, but the how-to-make-it-so haunts one.

W. NORMAN BARRAM

Unalakleet, Alaska

ECUMENICS

Under the heading of Current Religious Thought (Jan. 17 issue) Addison H. Leitch wrote an excellent article on some of the problems faced in “church union”.…

I firmly believe in biblical Christian unity and I pray for “a united Church for a divided world.” But true Christian unity must take place on the basis of a deep common faith and truth firmly believed rather than upon the compromise of truth in order to have a statistical union. And after all, statistical union is a long, long way from the biblical unity for which Christ prayed (John 17).

Let’s all work toward Christian unity, but not for a church union based on a creed of the lowest common denominator.

DWIGHT L. DYE

Westridge Hills Church of God

Oklahoma City, Okla.

I really do not see why Addison H. Leitch should cavil at C. H. Dodd’s statement that in ecumenical discussion the intractable issues are at a deeper level than the theological. This is common sense to most candid Englishmen. Thus in the present “conversations” between the Church of England and the British Methodist Church the differences are in church order, not in doctrine properly so called, though sharp differences in order can in some cases indicate differences in doctrine of the church. But if there are doctrinal differences they can be reasonably argued about, and argued among the few who are seriously interested in theology. There is hope of agreement, not indeed by compromise on principle, but by comprehension of complementary principles in a richer whole. The real obstacle is that embedded in the inchoate “group mind” there is the irrational heritage of the past—the unconscious assumption of superiority on the one side, and of defensiveness on the other. It is far harder to dispel lack of charity than lack of understanding. Thus the issue is “deeper.”

JOHN LAWSON

Associate Professor of Church History

Candler School of Theology

Emory University

Atlanta, Ga.

The highest evidence of intelligence, and for that matter, scholarship as well, is revealed in simplicity of expression.… He has taken a profound problem facing [Christendom] today, which gives promise of being with us for some time, stripped it of the ecumenical verboseness and nonsense, and reduced it to simplicity itself.…

ERLING C. OLSEN

New York, N. Y.

SEMINARIES AND MOVIES

I was surprised to see that [Eutychus II is] … “inclined to visit movie theaters,” calling it “modern relaxation” (Jan. 17 issue).…

CHRISTIANITY TODAY declares to be orthodox and anti-modernist. But theological modernism has many subtle ways of expounding its views—in theory and life, and one of them is the movies. Its script-writers often pretend to expound biblical history, but they change God’s historical Word to suit their carnal inclinations or outlook on life, past and present.…

Mental modernism in seminaries [is] less dangerous than the philosophy of life expounded in the movies.…

OLAV EIKLAND

Brooklyn, N. Y.

TO HALT THUMB TWIDDLING

Mr. R. P. Marshall’s article on the liturgical movement in the Church (Dec. 20 issue) said much that is very relevant to those of the “informal” denominations of Canada. I cannot agree, however, that an introducing of congregational responses will improve the interest and understanding of those present. It does not take long for any congregation to become used to repeating prayers written on the church calendar or printed in the church hymnary. Surely unique individual efforts would be far more effective!

May I suggest that the “preliminaries” be taken by a member of the congregation and that frequent changing of personnel be introduced? A reviving of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds in this part of the service would certainly help to make it more interesting, but only an intermittent usage would prevent congregational boredom.

If perhaps the pastoral prayer was said from the heart of an elder or deacon, less twiddling of thumbs would take place under the church pews.

The Holy Spirit works through more than one individual, and the more individuals used (in a logical manner) would help inspire the whole congregation by its unifying collective effort. A church inspires its members in proportion to the members’ inspiration. What better way may a man grow in Christ than through responsible service on his Lord’s behalf?

DEANE PARKER

Port Credit, Ont.

Theology

The Cost of Being a Christian

Andrew W. Blackwood

The cost of being a Christian—that sounds strange. “ ’Tis heaven alone that is given away, tis only God may be had for the asking.” “Jesus paid it all; all to him I owe.” “Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to Thy cross I cling.” Herein lies the heart of all that we Christians believe and cherish. “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.”

On the other hand our Lord clearly teaches that it costs much to live as a soldier of the Cross. Again and again he warns us not to enter his service without first counting the cost. “If any man will come after me,” he said, “let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me” (Luke 9:23). He is not thinking here about money, and neither should we, at least not first of all. He is saying that being a Christian costs much in everyday living. From this point of view the text suggests four lines of thought.

Being a Christian begins with an act of decision: “If any man will.” In the Greek, this word “will” is strong. It points to the one consuming passion that fills a man’s heart and dominates his life. The Lord says that a man’s Christianity begins with a definite act of the will.

Being a Christian calls for more than knowledge. In order to become a follower of Christ a man needs to know him as the Son of God. All the devils seem to know that, but still they cannot qualify as believers. Christians need also to feel kindly toward Christ; but not until such feelings burst into flame and cause one to yield the will does one become a believer. The will here means the entire person in action. When a man becomes a believer, he says to the Lord, “Here I am. Take me, just as I am. Make me what I ought to be, all because thou hast died for me.”

Being a Christian also calls for a spirit of unselfishness: “Let him deny himself.” These words mean exactly what they say. When a man becomes a believer, he begins at once to deny himself, no longer insisting on having his own way. One of the leading religious thinkers in Scotland says that the sin of the typical man today is pride. Pride here means “insisting on having one’s own way, on doing as one wills.” When a proud man thinks of God, he says in his heart, “Not thy will, but mine, be done.” From childhood and onward he has insisted on having his own way, and when he has failed, he has felt hurt. To submit his will to God, and no longer to insist on doing as he pleases, is the most difficult act of his life. For a Christian this spirit must prevail day after day.

When ordinary people hear about self-denial, they think of giving God petty sums, and those grudgingly. When these persons become Christians, they learn that God loves a “hilarious giver” who gives in the spirit of one of our noblest hymns, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”: “love so amazing, so divine, demands my life, my soul, my all.” Money and time given to the Lord grudgingly may do good, because he can bless others in this way. But not until a man learns to give freely and gladly, out of Christian gratitude, does he begin to understand our Lord’s call for self-denial.

The time has come for most churches in the United States to set up higher standards for membership. According to a survey in one of the larger denominations taken in Ohio, 20 per cent of the “church members” never pray; 25 per cent never read the Bible; 30 per cent never attend divine services; 40 per cent never give through the church; 50 per cent never attend the church school; 90 per cent never have family worship; 95 per cent never invite others to become Christians. In view of such facts a leading churchman says that only about 5 per cent of our church members in America seem to have any grasp of what being a Christian really means. Surely we need a revival! Meanwhile, we ought to make the rolls of church membership correspond with the facts, for under existing conditions most membership statistics convey false impressions.

Being a Christian requires a habit of sacrifice. When our Lord says his follower must “take up his cross daily,” what does he mean? In the midst of his work for Christ in Africa, David Livingstone once declared, “I have never made a sacrifice.” He meant that only the sinless Son of God could ever give himself as the Redeemer from sin. So we Christians all believe; still, our Lord speaks about the cross of the Christian. We can think of this cross as calling for sacrifice. This sacrifice is not at all redemptive; still it is a sure proof of our love. It also costs—and far more than what 95 per cent of our church members seem willing to pay.

Burden, Thorn, And Cross

A well-known minister says that we sometimes get confused about three Bible terms: a “burden,” a “thorn in the flesh,” and a “cross.” A burden is something that a man bears because he must. As soon as he can do so with honor, he lays it down. For instance, he goes into debt to secure an education. As soon as possible he pays back the last dollar, and then he has more money for Christ and the Church.

As for the “thorn in the flesh,” it means something bodily, painful, sometimes excruciating. It is chronic. If in answer to prayer the Lord guides a man to a surgeon in a certain hospital, the thorn may be removed. If that proves not to be the will of the Lord, a Christian accepts his thorn until he dies. But a thorn is not a cross. A man never willingly chooses to have a thorn in his flesh.

The cross of a Christian is voluntary. Morning after morning, year after year, he takes it up; perhaps not always the same cross, but some cross. “Must Jesus bear the cross alone, and all the world go free? No, there’s a cross for everyone, and there’s a cross for me.” It may be easy to sing about bearing the cross, but it is never easy to take it up, and to keep doing so until at last it gives way to a crown of glory.

No one can feel sure about the cross of anyone other than himself. Only the Lord can surely reveal to a believer the nature of his cross. The same Lord stands ready to bless the Christian who accepts the cross as the gift of the heavenly Father’s love and then bears it day after day, not because he must, but because he can. In cross-bearing, as in the giving of money, the Lord blesses the person who responds gladly. For such a self-sacrificing spirit we can look at our missionary heroes and heroines. We should also find living examples here at home.

A large city church had an active Bible school, with a flourishing beginners’ department. When the officers needed a new superintendent for this work among little boys and girls, the pastor was asked to invite a woman who belonged to the church and worked all week as an expert kindergartner. She thanked him for the invitation, but declined. “After I deal with little boys and girls all week, I am worn out. On my rest day I need a complete change of thought and feeling. Please excuse me.” On the way home the pastor received a word from the Lord, which led him back to see the woman again. “Don’t you think that this work may be your cross?”

“Why, pastor, what do you mean?”

“The cross of the believer,” said the pastor, “is hard and heavy. Usually it has to do with persons near at hand. You do a certain thing day after day, not because you find it easy, but because you love the Lord and know that for you this is his holy will. ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.’ ”

“Oh,” said the woman, “that puts the matter in a new light. Let me think about it and pray over it.” Soon she accepted the new opportunity to show what it meant for her to be a Christian.

Being a Christian issues in a life of service. Our text ends in what may at first seem like an anticlimax: “And follow Me.” The cost of being a Christian consists partly in doing the will of God, day after day, gladly and well, even though the work thus done be far from spectacular.

Days Of His Flesh

To follow Christ may mean to live now as he did in the days of his flesh. He went about doing good, whereas some of us simply “go about.” As the matchless Teacher he did good. Anyone who has ever done God’s will as a teacher can testify that this way of serving the Lord proves far from easy. So do the rewards prove far from light. According to a correct rendering of the Hebrew, “They that be teachers shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever” (Dan. 12:3).

Christ also served God and men as the ideal Physician, the Healer of body and mind. As the son of a horse-and-buggy doctor I can testify that this work too involves much drudgery, often with no reward save that from above. In terms of today our Lord also served God as a preacher. “Never man spake like this Man.” Here, too, anyone worth his salt in the ministry can bear witness that the work calls for all of a man’s time and strength, with powers that come only from God.

The Lord does not wish every believer to serve him as a teacher, a healer, or a full-time minister or missionary. He does wish every Christian to serve as devotedly as though the Lord had called him into what we know as “full-time Christian service.”

If you do not already know this text by heart, commit it to memory now: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” Remember that being a Christian begins with an act of decision; calls for a spirit of unselfishness; leads to a habit of sacrifice; and issues in a life of service.

If you have not yet entered the path that leads to God “through peril, toil, and pain,” kneel down right now. Give yourself into the hands that once were pierced, and trust in the heart that once was broken on the Cross. When once you find pardon, cleansing, and peace, then you will begin to know what our Lord teaches about the cost of being a Christian.

Andrew W. Blackwood is emeritus professor of homiletics of Princeton Theological Seminary. The author of many books on preparing and delivering sermons, he has served recently as editor of “Evangelical Sermons of Today” and of “Evangelical Special-Day Sermons.”

- More from Andrew W. Blackwood

The Anatomy of Anti-Semitism

James Daane

The question of responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ continues to be an irritant in Jewish-Christian relations. Its long, unresolved history and the current interest in the problem of racism combine to make the question particularly lively. A preliminary report of a continuing five-year study of anti-Semitism in the United States has recently been issued by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. The report, based on questionnaires sent adult members of Protestant churches, shows that 69 per cent of those questioned believe that the Jews are the group “most responsible” for the death of Christ, and that this view is held more extensively in conservative, fundamentalist churches than in liberal churches. Benjamin R. Epstein, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, reported that this view continues to be a “cruel, critical factor in perpetuating anti-Semitic prejudice.” He declared that the report’s preliminary findings “merely reinforce us in our long-time speculation on the role of church institutions in developing ambivalent and often tragic attitudes toward Jews—a speculation that led to the study itself.” And he added that the treatment given Jews by Christians represents a “failure” of Christendom.

How should the Christian churches meet this charge of “failure”? Can they dismiss it by asserting that the study was prejudiced to prove the speculation that initiated the study? Can they appeal to the historical records of the New Testament and prove that the Jews are in fact “most responsible”?

There is an answer to anti-Semitism, and although it is neither simple nor easy, the Church owes it to herself even more than to the Jews to make the answer clear.

While the Church cannot expect Jews to accept the theological interpretation given to the history of Christ’s death in Scripture, it can expect the Jews to acknowledge the actual historical facts. A Jewish denial of history is, as any denial of history, in the long run futile. There is no justification for a denial of the recorded history of Christ’s death, for the authenticity of the records is not doubted by responsible scholarship.

According to the New Testament records, it was the Jews who desired, plotted, and promoted the execution of Jesus (Matt. 27:1). No rewriting of history by scriptwriters of modern movies placing the responsibility on the Romans will effectively conceal these historical facts. The records reveal, moreover, that it was not the “common people,” nor the “publicans and sinners,” nor the Jewish drunkard or woman of the street who demanded the death of Christ. Not a lunatic fringe, nor a religious extreme right or left, nor the denizens of an ancient skid row brought about the execution of Christ. It was rather the Jewish religious leadership—the scribes and Pharisees, the priests, men of the holy place—that took council together to put Jesus to death. It was the chief priests and elders who moved among the rabble on the night of Jesus’ trial, inciting them to cry, “Crucify him” (Matt. 27:30). It was the Jewish religious hierarchy that pressured Pilate and brought false witnesses into court to testify against Jesus (Matt. 27:59; Mark 14:55, 56). All this is not a fabric of prejudice against the Jews but historical record.

According to the same historical records, Jesus was betrayed to his death. Now no one is ever betrayed by his enemies; one can be betrayed only by a friend, for a betrayal is by definition a turning against a friend. Jesus was a Jew; his friends were Jewish. He was delivered into the hand of the enemy by one who sat at his table and ate with him (John 13:18). And eating together, then even more than now, was an exercise of friendship. A betrayal has to be an “inside job”; a betrayer must be one called “friend,” one from whom a kiss is customary. The New Testament record repeatedly stresses that Jesus was betrayed by “one of the twelve” (Matt. 26:14; Mark 14:20). It was to his own that Jesus came, and it was his own who received him not.

These historical data relate the facts of the Jewish role in the crucifixion of Christ. If the destruction of another carries responsibility, then Jewish responsibility is a matter of historical fact. Even from the Jewish point of view, a man was destroyed; and it is better to face the fact of history than to suggest, as the Anti-Defamation League study does, that the similarity between the words “Judas” and “Judaism” tends to perpetuate anti-Semitism. Judas was a Jew, and a people as conscious of its unity as the Jews are cannot dismiss him, nor play with the accident of his name. The Jewish people would help eliminate anti-Semitism if they would admit, as honesty could do without violating the terms of the Jewish faith, that they did destroy a man. There is little, if indeed anything, of such an admission in current Jewish concern about anti-Semitism. Let Jews, if they must, regard Christ as only a man; but let them admit what honesty and integrity demand—the destruction of a man by their ancient leaders’ insistence that he be put to death.

Sharing The Guilt

Before the question may be raised as to the theological interpretation that must be placed on these facts, the Gentile Christian Church must also face the historical facts of the Gentile role and responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus.

According to the New Testament, Jesus himself declared that he would be “delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on; and they shall scourge him, and put him to death …” (Luke 18:32, 33). If Jews tend to ignore their historical role, honesty compels the admission that few sermons are preached in the Church on this text. The same records assert that he was tried in a Roman court—the highest structure of justice in the Gentile world of the day—and condemned under Pontius Pilate, a Roman judge. He died at the hands of Roman soldiers and in the Roman manner, on the cross. Although Pilate was reluctant, his wife uneasy, no Gentile rose to protest the injustice of Christ’s condemnation. The reality of Pilate’s responsibility and its creedal significance were recognized by the early Church, which recorded in its Apostles’ Creed that Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” By Jewish insistence and by Gentile instrumentality, Christ was crucified. Jewish insistence alone was impotent, having no authority to put a man to death. Roman power alone was also impotent, being reluctant and without motivation to complete the betrayal of one who was not their Messiah. Together Jew and Gentile accomplished the deed; neither is without guilt.

But is one group more guilty than the other? Are the Jews “most responsible”?

This is the crucial question. It is interesting to observe that the report shows it was the membership of the liberal churches rather than that of the conservative, fundamentalist churches that more frequently gave the right answer, that the Jews are not “most responsible.” But the question of the greater responsibility and guilt is crucial only within anti-Semitism, for the question itself is the source of all religious anti-Semitism. There would be none of that anti-Semitism which concerns the Anti-Defamation League study if the question had not been asked at all. And it ought not to be asked, because the question is illegitimate.

Nowhere in the New Testament are the Jews condemned and rejected by God, or by the early primitive Church, for crucifying Jesus. Jesus himself prayed for their forgiveness. On New Testament grounds Jews are under the judgment of God for rejecting the crucified and living Christ as he came to them in the proclamation of the Gospel. The Jew is condemned only if he believes not—as is the unbelieving Gentile. Peter in his Pentecostal sermon recognizes the guilt of the Jews when he says that they took the Christ and with wicked hands slew him—but when he says this, he is not condemning them but preaching the Gospel to them (Acts 2:23). It was only after the Jews rejected the Gospel that Paul turned to the Gentiles. For the Christian Church to blame and to urge the guilt of the Jews for crucifying Christ is to entertain an attitude that disqualifies it for its task of preaching the Gospel.

Secondly, the question is illegitimate because the Gentile, being also responsible for the death of Christ, is in no moral position to blame the Jew, and is especially not in a position to charge him with greater culpability. He who shares guilt with another for an evil act cannot condemn the other—not even if the other’s guilt is greater. Penitent for his own role in crucifying the Son of God, cognizant of the infinite guilt of such an act, the Gentile can, in the spirit of true repentance, condemn only himself. As regards other sinners, he can only say, as did Paul, “of whom I am chief” (1 Tim. 1:15). Through the knowledge of its faith, the Church knows what it did when it nailed Christ to the Cross. With this knowledge it can only say with Paul that had the Jews known what they were doing, “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8). Confessing its own sin, the Church cannot impute the “most responsibility” to the Jews without denying the genuineness of its own confession. By casting stones at the Jews for the crucifixion, the Gentile Christian reveals the spirit of the New Testament Pharisee, the spirit that desired, plotted, and promoted the crucifixion of Jesus.

The Cross Misunderstood

Thirdly, ignoring the fact that the Jews are not rejected in biblical thought for putting Christ to the Cross, the Church has often fallen into anti-Semitism because, like the unconverted Paul, it misunderstood the Cross. Prior to his Damascus experience, Paul remembered the teaching of the Book of Deuteronomy, “… he that is hanged is accursed of God” (21:23b). From the fact that God in his providence allowed Christ to hang on the tree of the Cross, Paul concluded that Christ was cursed and rejected by God; and if God rejected him, Paul felt he should do the same. He thought he did God a service when he persecuted those who preached Christ for acceptance by others.

According to the Scriptures, the Jewish rejection of Christ as proclaimed in the Gospel brought on the temporary rejection of the Jews by God. Christians have sometimes reasoned like Paul before his conversion: they have felt that if God rejected the Jews, they were justified in doing likewise; and they have sometimes practiced anti-Semitism on the ground of this alleged right.

This is a profound error. Christians are not God. God may curse; they may not. God may damn; they may only bless—and curse not. Vengeance, judgment, and rejection belong to God alone. God may punish the Jews for rejecting the Christ of the Gospel; the Church may not. God may punish his enemies; the Church may only love its enemies and pray for them.

How can the Church possibly justify anti-Semitism when the Jews, according to the Bible, are enemies of the Gospel “for your [Gentile] sakes” (Rom. 11:28)? In the inscrutable wisdom of God, whose ways are past finding out, the Gentiles have entered into salvation through the Jewish rejection of it.

In Ephesians, Paul admonishes Gentile Christians: “Wherefore remember … that ye were at that time separate from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:11, 12, ASV). The Gentiles, according to Paul, have entered into the covenant and inheritance of the Jews, into their salvation and glory. “Salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22b), and Gentiles are saved through the Jews’ Messiah. Christ was a Jew. In coming to the Jews, he came to “his own.” He is Israel’s glory.

From Aliens To Citizens

How did Gentiles, who were “aliens” and “strangers,” become “fellow citizens” and members of “the household of faith” (Eph. 2:19)? How did the outsider become an insider? This historical transition is one of the basic themes running through that great epistle of Paul to the Romans. The transition was a historical event. It is therefore real and must be taken seriously. What is revealed is not a timeless, eternal truth but rather one that became real in the historical happening. The historical movement in which this truth becomes truth and is revealed as truth is not simple and direct; it is an uneven movement, a historical zigzag. The truth thus revealed is not simple and immediate, but one that calls for a deep and sensitive spiritual comprehension.

The Gentiles, according to biblical teaching, enter into the Jews’ glory and inheritance only after, and on the occasion of, its rejection by the Jews. God’s act of turning toward the Gentiles is also his act of turning from the Jews. The divine election of the Gentiles has as its other side the divine rejection of the Jews. If Gentile branches are grafted in, it is only after, and on the occasion of, the break-off of Jewish branches. Through Israel’s fall, salvation comes to the Gentiles. Gentiles are saved only after, and because, Jews are lost (Rom. 11:17, 19).

Paul, moreover, also teaches that Gentiles have been saved, not for their own sakes, but to provoke the Jews to jealousy that they too may be saved (Rom. 11:11). As the Gentiles obtained mercy through Jewish disobedience, so the Jews are to obtain mercy through the mercy shown to the Gentiles (Rom. 11:31). As the Jews did not stumble that they might fall but that salvation might come to the Gentiles, so Gentiles are saved, not for their own sakes, but for the sake of the salvation of the Jews.

Paul urges that if the Jewish disobedience is the reconciling of the world, i.e., the means through which the Gentile is saved, the coining reception of the Jews will be like a resurrection from the dead! In Paul’s explanation of the Gospel, the Gospel is for the Jew first; and even the purpose of Gentile salvation is the ultimate salvation of the Jews.

In view of this, how can a Gentile church or the individual Gentile Christian regard the Jew with religious prejudice? Can he underscore and urge the special guilt and disobedience of the Jew through which he himself and the Church have been saved? Can he condemn those through whom and for whom he himself has received his redemption? Can a Christian be anti-Semitic and reject the Jews without rejecting the Gospel? Anti-Semitism is anti-Gospel, and ultimately anti-Christ, for it is a rejection of God’s method and means of saving the Gentile and the Jew.

If the Gentile Christian truly understands the Gospel of his salvation, he cannot judge the Jews as “most responsible” for the crucifixion of Christ without condemning the Gospel, and the Lord who bought him.

Gentiles are saved, and the Gospel has come to them, not apart from the Jews and their particular history, but as a part of their history. For Gentiles to reject the Jews because of their history is to reject Jesus Christ himself, because Christ, as does their own salvation, exists not apart from but only in that history, and apart from that history is unintelligible.

Instead of measuring Jewish guilt for the crucifixion, the Gentile who knows the time of his salvation will break into doxology to God. Paul saw God’s historical-revelational dealings with both Jew and Greek as his method of having “mercy upon all” (Rom. 11:32). Seeing this he condemned neither Jew nor Gentile but raised a doxology: “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Rom. 11:33a).

The basis for this doxology is the final, positive answer to all anti-Semitism. When the Gentile Church recognizes it and lives accordingly, she will be close to that moment in her history that will be as a resurrection from the dead: the reunion of Jew and Gentile in the oneness of the Church. For anti-Semitism hinders the Gentile’s calling to provoke the Jews to jealousy.

The ecumenical movement is rightly concerned about the disunity existing among the various Gentile segments of the Church. But this disunity will be overcome, as Barth reminded Evanston, only when the Church understands the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a way that excludes all anti-Semitism. Without the renunciation of all anti-Semitism, the Church will lack the quality of spirit that can achieve the unity of all Christians.

- More from James Daane

The Space Age—A Threat or a Challenge

Raymond W. Albright

The essence of the Christian religion and the heart of its message may be found in two questions from the Bible: “Adam, where art thou?” (Gen. 3:9) and “What think ye of Christ?” (Matt. 22:42). Here is the evidence for the long-held conviction that God is constantly seeking man in all that he has created and directed through the centuries and that man’s greatest opportunity in response is to accept the full revelation of God and his purposes in Jesus Christ.

A boy of six disillusioned with Santa Claus said, “I’m going to look into this Jesus Christ business.” Good. It is well that we constantly examine the ground of our faith. This is our Protestant heritage! Insofar as the space age forces us to maintain this critical attitude and helps us make this examination by providing better tools to do it, it is a proper challenge and at the same time a great blessing.

But the space age can easily be a threat. It can drive us to an over-defensive position where we ignore its challenge and reject its claims. To be unwilling to have our faith tested in the severest heat and under the most corrosive and abrasive tests of modernity is to be threatened from the conservative right.

Or we may be threatened in another way if in our agreement to hear fairly every point of view, in our attempt to be completely objective and so to curry the favor and confidence of scientists, we become unwilling to make any assumptions or to defend any positions we cannot logically explain. This is the threat from the left, and it leaves us impotently and idly standing by while the race is won by those whose mastery of this technique exceeds our own and whose results are far more significant than ours for man’s material interests. How can anyone possibly be interested in a God who we have brilliantly proven by the best scientific method is neither “out there” nor “down here” and therefore perhaps is not at all!

In this modern age, so feverishly busy in probing the vast areas of space that under increasingly proficient observation seem to be approaching almost infinite limits, it is thus readily possible that many Christians may be threatened by pressure from the right to be overly defensive and from the left to be overly neutral.

One of our responsibilities, in addition to our natural concern for those outside the churches, is to speak to those in the churches who fall into both threatened groups. In each case we can show that the Gospel need not be defended to retain intellectual respectability, but that it may indeed, if declared with confidence and clarity, become the way of hope and salvation for all men.

In response to our opportunity to assert the Christian faith for those who have not come into the Church the illustrations will be varied, but the central declaration of the Gospel remains the same.

Confronting Modern Life

Moreover, we must face squarely all the facts of life; seek out honestly the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary living, including space ventures and all other perspective-stretching experiences; and thus see whether indeed the Christian faith has anything to say and, if it does, what.

It is an altogether fascinating experience to be alive at this moment. The understanding of our universe and our ways of life in it has changed more since my boyhood days in Pennsylvania than it had previously in all the years since Roger Bacon opened Pandora’s scientific box in the thirteenth century. And now we have just seen the pictures of the greatest galactic explosion man has ever observed, giving birth to galaxy M-82, in every dimension larger than our Milky Way. The explosive force equal to some five million suns has propelled these cosmic particles at a speed of 20 million miles per hour. The specialists at Mount Wilson observatory estimate that this explosion had been going on at least 1½ million years at the time the light impressed on their photographs left there. And since M-82 is 60 million, million, million miles from earth or ten million light-years away, the explosion recently photographed actually occurred ten million years ago.

On this scale of thought it does not matter much that the soup was cold at lunch or that the Dodgers beat the Yankees; but it is important that cosmic causes and absolutes be considered in relation to ourselves and all that we experience and learn.

In the face of such inexplicable infinite forces it makes good sense to assume a common source for all our being and a common goal and constant purposive direction in history toward that end. This means the assumption of one we call God, one who is of an infinitely higher order than ourselves but who intends that in all this vastness man is of supreme worth. He limited his own will in us and for us risked his own perfect love in Christ, even though it inevitably led to a cross.

How does one bring a faith that seems so natural at the level of the cosmic mysteries to reality in a finite situation? What can God mean to men who are accustomed to supply their needs and desires by instruments and materials of their own devising and to die of a heart attack if the production schedule lags?

Through the years Christian thinkers have sought this ultimate meaning in life by trying to separate the irreconcilable elements from their faith. This has led to an appreciation of reason as a proper instrument to examine the truth of experience, even though man’s unaided reasoning is necessarily limited by his finiteness. But no matter how erudite he has become or how far he has traveled into or photographed the vast areas of space, man has never been able to escape the eternal questions: “Adam, where art thou?” and “What think ye of Christ?” The faith that God is concerned for man and is eternally searching for him, and that in Christ he has provided the best and most complete way to find him, makes life meaningful and worth living in our exciting space age.

As we come more and more to see that all being in macrocosm or microcosm is one, the assumption of one common source of truth becomes as satisfactory as the assumption of one source of being; indeed, we see that they are the same source. It follows that both being and truth exist by proceeding from their source; this we call creation in matter and revelation in knowledge.

To discover matter is not to create it; to perceive truth is not to invent it. Only the most presumptuous among us would dare to assert that man creates truth. That which man discovers has long existed and has long been giving the evidence that only now man has perceived. The religious man names his source of being and truth, God. The disclosure of God’s will and way to man is revelation, and faith is the activating agency by which reason perceives the eternal truth. Faith holds the truth in embryo until the Holy Spirit illumines it to become fully revealed truth.

Since the Middle Ages men have been struggling to place reason and revelation in a satisfactory perspective, and Vatican Council II is still debating the issue. Scotus asserted that what one cannot attain by reason one must accept on the authority of tradition in the Church. Ockham held that Scripture is the final authority in such a dilemma. Aquinas was probably nearer our position when he admitted that the truth of God cannot be fully known by man through reason. Yet he came as close as anyone to writing a rational defense of Christianity, only to leave it unfinished and to admit it could never be done. After an ecstatic religious experience while celebrating the Holy Communion, he declared that what he had seen that day made all he had written mere trash, and that he would not write another word. Written from such a rich empirical background, the Summa of Thomas Aquinas became the most adequate thirteenth-century statement of Christian truth. Our neighbors wait eagerly and anxiously for someone with an equally valid experience of Christ to tell about His significance for our space age.

Apex Of Revelation

A sleepless crying boy told his mother he was afraid. “God is here with you,” she said. And he replied, “But I want somebody with a face.” Just so. For many men God is a very vague concept; but the situation is very different when we say God and think Jesus Christ! The Christian position through the centuries has been that God’s revelation of his truth is to be found in his creation indeed, but more specifically and most perfectly and completely in his Son, Jesus Christ. Even though here, too, we have never fully perceived God’s truth and love in Christ, yet in him he had a face, and through Christ we hear God’s voice and know his love, so that we may respond more confidently in faith and prayer and commitment.

The good news of the truth of God in Christ is ours, not to alter or to explain or even to supplement or annotate, but to declare with clarity. Let the trumpet give no uncertain sound! Here is the terrible danger in the space age: that Christian ministers may be found vainly trying to win the acceptance of scientists and philosophers by using only their limited tools and limited inductive methods.

Equally dangerous it is, of course, to refuse to come to terms with our times, to live on in only the inherited thought forms of Geneva, Augsburg, or Canterbury, in the vain hope that in maintaining old ways we are certain to defend the old eternal truth. Not so! It is possible, however, to live by the essence of the eternal truth of God and to state this truth in our modern language and concepts, so that the Gospel may be so understood that we live by it in faith.

The Gospel centered in God’s love for all men, when it is announced with maximum clarity, will satisfy not only the mind of the scholar but also the heart of the saint.

Raymond W. Albright is the William Reed Huntington Professor of Church History in the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Professor Albright has served as visiting professor at the University of Marburg (Germany) and at Boston University. His most recent books are a biography of Phillips Brooks and “A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church.”

- More from Raymond W. Albright

Theology

That Immortal Sea

Lon Woodrum

It must be so—Plato, thou reason’st well!—

Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,

This longing after immortality?

So said Joseph Addison, and indeed Plato did reason impressively on the theme of immortality, the survival of the invisible entity that was housed by the physical temple. The inward man would outlast the outer man.

The “immortality of the soul” is not only an ancient idea; it is also found in the ages that came after Plato. Charles Darwin, who had much to say about man’s physical being, wrote to a friend: “Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of the world will not appear so dreadful.”

That eloquent agnostic, Robert G. Ingersoll, standing over a dead friend’s coffin, while contending that immortality was a “dream,” admitted that it was an inescapable dream, that it was “like a sea that ebbed and flowed in the human heart, beating with its countless waves against the sands and rocks of time and fate.” It was “not born of any creed, nor of any book, nor of any religion. It was born of human affection, and will continue to ebb and flow beneath mists and clouds of doubt and darkness, as long as love kisses the lips of death.”

Many of us have been caught in Wordsworth’s haunting web of poetry:

Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither.

But these voices that refer to immortality speak from without the framework of reference found in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Among Hebrew writers, even when the ships sail in from “that immortal sea,” not many sail out upon it again. Immortality is not an Old Testament word. Some of the Hebrew scribes, to be sure, lift curtains on man’s existence beyond death; but few manage to sound the haunting theme clearly. At times questions stand out for all to see, dark and unanswered—“If a man die, shall he live again?”

Immortality is there, of course, in the old books, if often only like a candle glimmering before the sun comes up. Even one of the most pessimistic Hebrew scribes sounds almost Platonic in his poetry: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Eccles. 12:7).

Among the long-ago nomads of the Lord immortality is a little lantern flickering over a long dark night, gleaming momentarily as a firefly glowing; but the glowings are not numerous, and they are sometimes far apart. A prophet in Israel who was also something of a renegade cried, “Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his!” (Num. 23:10b). Commendable as his wish is, only voicelessness lies beyond that “last end.” In the Old Testament the trumpets do not ring brightly beyond the gulf of the tomb.

We must wait until we come to the New Testament to discover immortality appearing full orbed. It comes to men in the person of Jesus Christ. True, he never used the word as the philosophers of the world used it; nor did any of the Gospel writers. But the fact of it is there in the Gospels, and as more than a bright theme. It is embodied hope. Immortality walks on scuffed shoes, shines in a Man’s look—“… the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).

Yet even the appearing of him who “came forth from the Father” was not enough to make the picture entirely clear. This Man from God’s bosom had to grapple with the old enemy that had made men so concerned with the idea of immortality. That enemy was death. Life had to overcome death, and do it with one awful, definite, heart-shaking act!

We have said that “immortality” is not an Old Testament word. It is scarcely a New Testament word! Therein is another word—and perhaps Plato would not have known what to do with it. It is the word “life.” It speaks of a forever-something, something given as a gift from Someone who alone has the power to give it: “… the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings, and the Lord of lords; who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see; to whom be honor and power everlasting …” (1 Tim. 6:15, 16).

Writers of the New Testament story never seem disturbed over the lack of “immortality” in the old religion, the religion with which theirs must be forever associated. It was God’s way. God had waited, and so had man; and then Dawn burst almost blindingly upon the world. The act of the Eternal, it came by “the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Tim. 1:10).

This is not that Greek thing. It is not that immortality pictured by a lily-seed bursting under mud and pushing forth a victorious white bloom. Something else is here—and who blames the supernaturalist for reaching for his bugle?

Here we have a plundered tomb. We are confronted by a resurrection. A crack shows in the grave. Vast vistas appear beyond the crack. We are looking out on everlasting deathlessness—but no! We are looking out on the eternal aliveness that is in God!

The New Testament immortality is bound up with an act of heaven, an act as definite as cosmic creation. It is God’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes. Immortality is a fact embodied in him who walked out of the sepulcher, while the sepulcher stood open-mouthed as if in a silent cry of confession that Christ is the Lord of life.

“That immortal sea” surged, mysterious but gloriously visible, before those men who were “in Christ.” In him they heard the singing waves break on the earthly beach.

Henceforth no Christian should be idle on that beach, before the shouting glory of that sea. The Story must be published! Believers must hurry to the “inland souls” with the Good News. Mankind must be summoned aboard the Homebound ship. Immortality, as a mere deduction, is dull when compared with this trumpet of the Resurrection!

Immortality in the New Testament is not confined to a distant future. It has a voice saying, “Today is the day of salvation.” The immortal sea is sunbright and calling; but it calls men to face an open tomb beyond a naked cross, and to join with the primitive Church in its double-cry: “Christ the Lord is risen! He is risen indeed!”

Immortality is not something we wait for. It is here, now, in Christ. God has made good his pledge with a resurrection. In Christ he has “abolished death, and … brought life and immortality to light.…”

“Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” Wordsworth sang. Indeed it lies about us and lives in us all our days—when we walk with him who is the Truth, girded by his grace, led by his Spirit. Christians are men who have their immortality, not in heaven only, but also in their hearts.

God’S Sword Thrusts

Concerned about my standing before God, I sought forgiveness and felt sure God must have heard and answered. Yet for three years afterwards I became increasingly doubtful about my salvation. The transaction seemed so intangible, and I kept on repeating the prayer to try to get some assurance.

Then on a spring morning, feeling the old ache for a sure word, I picked up a rarely used Bible and flicking over the pages alighted on a portion of Colossians. I had no recollection of having read it before. My eye fell on the words, “Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, [He] took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross” (Col. 2:14). My heart leaped in the spring sunshine. My spirit at last had found its rest. To this day the words have an undimmed radiance for me.—FRANK R. FINCH, London, England.

Lon Woodrum is conference evangelist in the Evangelical United Brethren Church and resides in Hastings, Michigan. He is the author of a number of novels, devotional books, and volumes of inspirational poetry.

- More from Lon Woodrum

Theology

The Cross as Transaction

Walfred Erickson

In rural Europe the traveler frequently comes to a crossroads and finds a crucifix in a shrine at one of the corners. So the Christian Church today, as in every day, stands in her pilgrimage before the Cross of Christ.

In any discussion of the Atonement, oversimplification is a pitfall. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this study, which deals with current views of the meaning of the Cross, two categories are suggested: the “transactional” and the “revelational.” A view of the Cross that is true to biblical insights must have some characteristics of the transactional category. On the other hand, an exclusively revelational view stands in profound tension with certain aspects of biblical thought, a tension that has far-ranging implications.

By “revelational” is meant any view of the Cross in which its significance consists of its making known to men a timeless, divine truth. In such a view the key “happening” takes place within the minds of men. In the minds, or souls, of men, as they perceive the truth and respond to it and decide to act upon it, is the locus of reconciliation. Insofar as the Cross so considered is an event, it is an event in communication. Consequently the Cross in itself cannot be the reality that the good news tells about. Instead, the Cross is the means of disclosing good news, which may not be news in the strict sense but as old as God himself. What is new is only that God has said it and that men have learned of it.

By the transactional category, however, is meant those views of the Cross affirming that something happened at Calvary, something great and even cosmic, a change affecting and involving God. The change is something that happened objectively and not merely in the minds of men. It is not simply a timeless truth but rather an event on the basis of which God can say things to men about himself and his relation to them that he could not have said before.

Let the reader endeavor to forget any commercial or legalistic connotations the term “transaction” may have for him. For the transactional view of the Atonement has often been crudely and crassly stated. Nevertheless, certain aspects of biblical, Christian thought constrain us to see the Atonement as transaction. To be sure, this view also has revelational facets. The revelational and transactional are not mutually exclusive; it is possible to find both revelation and transaction in the Cross, both message and event. But any understanding of it as only revelation is deficient.

First, a merely revelational view fails to do justice to the fact that in biblical thought sin is against God and that atonement therefore must involve some kind of reckoning with sin on his part. As God, he cannot let sin pass. It is a challenge to his deity that he must respond to and put in its place. His love may prompt him to forego judging the sinner and to continue with the individual sinner as though nothing had happened. God may very well want to forgive and forget, although it is of course inconceivable that he should be indifferent to what sin does to the sinner. But there is another side to his being that must be satisfied and reconciled. And it has to do with the fact that he is the God of the man sinned against as well as the God of the sinner.

Behind the biblical picture of the problem of sin is a simple fact that the modern mind (with its democratic ways of thinking) tends to forget. The biblical conception of Deity, especially in the Old Testament, is closely tied to the conception of kingship. Etymologically, the Hebrew roots behind such words as “glory” and “majesty” refer to the materialistic splendor and pomp with which an earthly monarch is wont to surround himself. Now a king is in a way responsible for the well-being of his subjects. If during his reign the life of the kingdom flourishes, he is considered a good king. This is especially true of law enforcement. Under a good king, law-abiding citizens have protection and the righteous prosper. Under a poor king, robbery and brigandage abound.

Crime Against The Crown

Thus, when one man sins against another, more is involved than the impairment of a man-to-man relation. The glory of the ruler is called into question. He cannot be a good ruler and let such evil go unnoticed. Indeed, he should not have let it happen at all. He must therefore choose between the guilty and the innocent and set his face in some recognizable manner against the former, thus depriving the sinful subject of the presence from which all blessing emanates. This is why a crime is a crime not only against one’s fellow men but also against “the crown,” why the state pays for the prosecuting attorney, and why in former days something more than correction seemed to motivate the sentencing of the guilty to punishment. Something like this underlies the fact that in biblical thought sin is “against thee and thee only.”

Certainly our common ways of thinking support this. There is nothing to which the unbeliever points with greater effectiveness than man’s inhumanity to man, and the fact that the inhumane man does not always receive his just deserts. This is the prime datum of the atheist. And every thinking believer admits a real problem with his faith at this point.

The sinner, then, is a standing assertion that there is no God. He is against God, and God therefore must be against him. For God to ignore the sinner as a sinner would be an unacceptable compromise, although God’s love may preclude all desire for personal vengeance. His love for the victim of the sinner has been called in question by what he, the Sovereign, has allowed to happen in his realm. Thus, as has been so often said, the love and holiness of God are two sides of the same coin. To the sinner, God’s love for the man sinned against appears as holiness, or even wrath, because God’s love for the man sinned against requires him to turn his face from the sinner. And if God, the Source of all life, withdraws from us, our inevitable destiny is death.

Accordingly, it seems reasonable that even though God may want to relate himself to the sinner in ways of love, that relation must at least be veiled—to use a biblical term—until there has been an objective reckoning and the record has been put straight. That, we may believe, is what God was doing at Calvary. He was there in human flesh submitting to that ultimate humiliation to which his bearing with sinners leads. The Cross was an event, something that had to happen, something that could happen only by his taking the form of a human creature. Only by dying as a man could God be true to himself as the living God. But once he has died as a man, the veil between him and sinners can be put away.

This idea that the Cross made possible a change in God’s relations with men is not congenial to many twentieth-century Christians who like to think of his love as being too patient and enduring to be affected by sinners. Only men, they say, need to be reconciled, not God. And to substantiate their assertion they point to the various texts in the Bible using the word “reconcile.” However, there is one massive biblical fact that outweighs all these texts. It is that in the Bible record the Holy Spirit does not come to man unreservedly until after Calvary. Biblical theologians have often pointed out that under the old covenant the enduement of the Spirit always seems to have been qualified, as the prophets looked forward to the time when the Spirit would be “poured out.” On the other hand, under the new covenant men are baptized in the Spirit. The Spirit comes upon “all flesh.” Whatever our theories about the Atonement, the Bible testifies to a change in God’s relations to sinners as a result of Calvary; and this is attested by the very order of the books of the Bible. It is unthinkable that the Book of Acts with its account of Pentecost could be placed ahead of the four Gospels with their crucifixion story.

Transaction And Incarnation

Secondly, it is a fact that only a transaction-type of Atonement requires an incarnation. Here is another aspect of biblical thought that transcends any exclusively revelational view of the Atonement. For the revelational function could be served by any means that communicated the idea; an illusion or a theophany would suffice. If we epitomize the revealed message of the Cross as “God forgives sinners,” then we need on the Cross only an object that suggests God to our minds. This could be done by a remarkably good man or by a god who appeared to be a man, as extreme liberalism on the one hand and ancient gnosticism on the other hand have advocated with logical consistency. Both heresies stressed a God of love while tending to minimize his wrath and holiness, and neither needed an ontological incarnation.

The position that the Atonement is merely revelational and that this revelation of God’s love for us cannot occur except in an act of incarnation, fails to carry conviction. Let us give credit to the proponents of this view for wanting to take the Incarnation seriously and for stressing the fact that God was in Christ, but it is not required by their view that the Atonement consists of historical fact. All that is needed in this view is the story of the Cross. The real Cross, the Cross of history with a real God-man hanging upon it, is in the end superfluous for the revelational view.

Nowadays we often hear that one of the distinctions, if not the distinction, of the Christian faith is its basis in history. The assertion, with some allusion to the “mighty acts” of God, is almost a cliché. But if we limit our view of what God has done for us to revelation, we are jeopardizing this distinction. Thus we have another aspect of biblical thought with which our understanding of the Atonement should be in tune.

When the redemptive work of God is described solely in terms of revelation, the truth about God that has been revealed must inevitably become more important than the means by which it is revealed. For example, in the study of prophecy, the psychology of prophecy usually fascinates us for a while; but eventually we find that we must wrestle with the message on its own terms. When we shift focus altogether from the event to the timeless, we necessarily demote the event from the essential to the secondary.

Anyone who reads between the lines of contemporary theology can see that the currents of rationalization are slowly undercutting the offensive, historical particularities in which the Christian religion has hitherto been rooted. These currents erode the finality of the historic Christ. They treat theology in a framework of subjectivity. They describe salvation as an exercise in existential decision. The danger is real that the tree will lose its hold on history altogether and topple into the stream of immanentism and generality, and this at a time when, paradoxically, it is recognized as never before that the uniqueness of Christianity lies in its grounding in history.

If it should ever happen that Christian theology becomes detached from history, there is nothing to prevent the rapprochement of Christianity with Buddhism and Hinduism. Both these religions accommodate timeless, suffering saviours, and both may assent to the timeless divine love revealed by the Cross of Christ. Many no doubt look upon this eventuality with composure; winds blowing in that direction are evident. But as long as Christians see an indispensable transaction in a particular Cross, syncretism cannot come to pass, for such a Cross still remains an insurmountable stumbling block.

The twentieth-century Church indeed stands at a special “crossroads” as she ponders the meaning of the Cross. The integrity and identity of her heritage are at stake. The Cross is still crucial. As we form our judgments about it, God through the Cross is judging us.

Walfred Erickson is pastor of the Clyde Hill Baptist Church, Bellevue, Washington. He holds the B.A. degree from the University of Minnesota, the Th.B. from Northwestern Bible School and Seminary, and the B.D. and Th.D. from Northern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Erickson is dean of the Lay School of Theology of the Greater Seattle Council of Churches.

- More from Walfred Erickson

Theology

Victor Not Victim

If sixteenth-century man was disturbed by a deep sense of guilt, twentieth-century man is also disturbed by a debilitating sense of defeat. Whereas Luther saw human existence as needing forgiveness, a modern German theologian sees it as requiring courage. Doubtless modern man understands Tillich’s observation at least as well as he does Luther’s, for his life is haunted by defeat, and he regards himself more the victim of life than the bearer of it.

How can the Cross be presented as helpful to a generation victimized by dark powers within and by massive, uncontrollable historical forces without? Is not the Cross itself a symbol of defeat? Surely a figure nailed to suffering and death is not a symbol of victory. Is not the Cross a symbol of man’s problem, rather than a symbol of its solution?

Too often Christians have presented Christ crucified as though he were a victim, one more to be pitied than believed in. On the pages of Scripture nothing sanctions this view of Christ. In death no less than in life he is always the Lord. It was not a victim but the Lord who died. The Cross bespeaks a sacrificial death, a voluntary act. Christ’s death was self-chosen; it was accepted and has therefore the character and value of a sacrifice.

Jesus himself determined the fact of his death. He said it forcibly: “I lay down my life.… No man taketh it from me.… I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.” He himself poured out his own life in death; he gave his life, and thus it was a sacrificial ransom for many.

While nothing in the biblical record suggests that Christ was a victim, many things in its story reveal that his destiny was not really in the hands of his enemies but in his own.

Jesus determined also the time of his death. Those who took counsel to put him to death decided that it must not occur during the Passover, lest it precipitate a riot. But Jesus had set his date and would keep it. He himself stirred up the people to high-pitched messianic expectations by raising Lazarus from the dead, by requisitioning a donkey with no permission asked; and intentionally fulfilling Old Testament prophecy, he himself provided the acclaiming crowd of Palm Sunday. He prompted Judas to act “quickly”—and the chief priests, having their man suddenly thrust upon them, had to use him at once or not at all. Christ determined that on the day the traditional paschal lamb was chosen, the Lamb of God would also be chosen. By Jesus’ own plan he was chosen on Thursday and died on Friday.

Nor was Jesus the victim of Judas. Jesus himself announced that he would be betrayed by one of the twelve. He did not expose Judas but prompted Judas to expose himself. Compelled to follow suit when the betrayal was suddenly announced, Judas too had to ask, “Lord, is it I?” And Jesus answered, “You yourself have said.”

Confronted in Gethsemane by an armed mob, he again dramatically revealed that he was no helpless victim caught in a web of circumstance. He spoke, and the mob reeled backward in impotence.

On the Cross, he remained the Lord, Lord of the Cross itself and of the hatred that fixed him to it: “Father, forgive them.” From the throne of his Cross he commanded, “Woman, behold thy son!” And to John, “Behold thy mother!”

Even in the jaws of death, he remained Lord. All death and hell could not reduce him to a passive victim. He remained the acting Subject. Strange paradox, in his very dying he was functioning as Lord, pouring out his own life. He remained in command of his anguish, rejecting the preferred intoxicant that in full consciousness he might truly give himself sacrificially in an act of love.

How strangely he died! Death did not come to him; he went to death. At the time he willed, he with a strong, “loud voice” himself committed his spirit into the hands of God. His death was his own; in dying he was still in command.

How else could the Lord die but in this royal manner in which death itself became the victim, and the Resurrection was assured? Small wonder he arose—it was already disclosed on the Cross that he would. Let the Church again proclaim the Cross as the Lord’s self-chosen place and time and manner of death. It will then become again a symbol of triumph, and men will lift up the Cross with courage and declare once more: In This Sign We Conquer.

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Mind Over Matter

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Apex Of Revelation

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God’S Sword Thrusts

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Crime Against The Crown

Transaction And Incarnation

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