Eutychus and His Kin: February 28, 1964

SOME DANGEROUS DETAILS

Just this week a boy in our community was killed in an automobile accident, and the only thing the newspaper considered worth discussing was whether he died immediately from the accident or was burned to death. With 40,000 people being killed in car accidents every year and many thousands more being maimed for life, there isn’t much news about another high school boy turning his car over while going full speed.

This particular boy had had some other troubles, and people weren’t surprised that he might have been traveling 100 miles an hour. “Just like him,” they said—but I wasn’t quite ready for the dear good Christian woman who said to me, “Well, that was a good thing. He got what he deserved.” With that remark I have been living restlessly ever since.

If I understand anything about our most Holy Faith, it is that it rests on one absolute and clear doctrine: that we are saved by grace. This idea of grace, as I get it, is that it is the unmerited favor of God. We are the objects of God’s love and his patience, not because of what we are but in spite of what we are. As I review my own life and think about drowning or crashing in an airplane or wrapping my car around a pole, about the only thing my religion teaches me is that I have some hope, because the one thing I will not get in this world or the next is what I deserve. My religion has nothing for me except the belief that He will not deal with us “after our sins or reward us according to our iniquities.” Who are the people who go around announcing to the rest of the world that all those other people got just what was coming to them?

And the other side of all this is those demanding ones who keep telling me they are going to get what is coming to them—that is, get their share. I think they should look out. Maby they will get what’s coming to them if that’s the deal they would really like to have.

EUTYCHUS II

CHRISTIANITY AND THE ARTS

Recently someone sent me a gift subscription to CHRISTIANITY TODAY. While I was pleased, my general reaction was, “Here’s another periodical to try to find time for.”

That was before … picking up the latest issue (Jan. 31) to “glance through” it. Four articles later, I found I was still standing up and the “glancing” had been more like “devouring” what Elmore, Cooper, and Reynard had been saying about the relationship of the arts and Christianity.…

Berrien Springs, Mich.

ETHEL TRYGG

The January 31 issue … has given me the courage I need to express my genuine appreciation for two articles. One of these is the article by John C. Cooper, “Reading and the Faith.” Professor Cooper has stated succinctly the sentiments of many of us who are engaged in preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and he has done so without mincing any words. We are only too aware that we fall short of preaching what we should be preaching.… How much of the printed page is totally wasted in attempting to wend our ways back to the historical Jesus rather than seeking the Jesus of faith. There is a definite place for biblical scholarship, but not the pulpit on Sunday morning. Our people need to be reminded that God gave us a perfect world, that we have distorted it into what it is today, and that in spite of all this God still loves mankind and offers him full salvation through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Christian writers could be such a tremendous help in this—if they would but try. We need books which point out to us our own failures and inadequacies—not literary criticism!

The second article which pleased me immensely was that of Robert Elmore, “The Place of Music in Christian Life.” I am pleased to know that at least one competent church musician has the courage to say publically what so many of us feel and have been hesitant to say. Great music is one of the important aspects of our Christian heritage; yet we persist in mouthing any and all kinds of sentimental hogwash in our worship services. I feel rather sure that God gets very tired of the same superficial wordiness Sunday after Sunday, and the same sickly-sweet “masterpieces” so many of our church musicians pass off as good music.

KENNETH G. HENDRIX

Westboro Congregational Church

Westboro, Ohio

Robert Elmore … fails to reckon adequately with the fact that many people are capable of appreciating only the “third-rate” music. To these good laymen, such music is not “ashes.” The true test of the worth of any music is the same as for a sermon: Does it communicate, does it “get across” to the people? If it does not, then its value is to be questioned, even if one of the three B’s did write it.…

His suggestions on how to increase music appreciation are splendid.

W. THOMAS LEE

First Church of God

Tulsa, Okla.

Explains with such perfect insight the meaning and necessity of good sacred music in the life of a Christian. Music has always been and still is a very integral part of our form of worship, and to abuse it is to detract from the value and meaning of our worship—both public and private.

DAVID SHOVER

Edinburgh, Scotland

Bravo and thank you for the splendid article by Grant Reynard. More!

ROBERT L. SMITH

First Baptist Church

Pine Bluff, Ark.

The January 31 issue is excellent—the articles are so relevant to Christian living today.…

JOHN E. ELIASON

Siler City, N. C.

Please, Mr. Cooper. You raise some questions, but you fail to give us answers. A postive solution more adequately spelled out would be helpful.

ENNO KLAMMER

Concordia College

St. Paul, Minn.

The article … will catch the eye of many fellow bookstore-haunters. At last a fellow must-sniffer has come out and admitted it. Give me more men and articles like Cooper.

GARY MAJOR

Minister of Education

The First Baptist Church

Twin Falls, Idaho

RETARDED … AND NEGLECTED

I read … the article by Mrs. Hampton, “Retarded Children and Christian Concern” (Jan. 31 issue).…

I am sponsoring a minister’s orientation conference for local clergymen.… I would like to reproduce … about thirty-five copies of this article for distribution on that day.…

Mrs. Hampton conveys well a parent’s feelings concerning the Church’s opportunity to serve the retarded child and his parents. For this reason, I recognize in this article a contribution I desire to share with my fellow clergymen.

V. RONALD SIMPSON

Chaplain

Frankfort State Hospital and School

Frankfort, Ky.

Thank you … for taking the time and the space to include an article on the mentally retarded. Only one who lives close to the problem could write in the way that Mrs. Dorothy Hampton did. However I disagree with her on one statement—“Loving the Unlovely.” I have yet to meet a mentally retarded child who is unlovely.

Letchworth Village is a state institution caring for 4,500 patients. All are retarded. I have been the full-time Protestant chaplain for six years.… The Protestant churches have a “head in the sand” philosophy—what we do not see does not exist—but mental retardation does exist, and its area of concern should be as important to the churches as African and Asiatic missions. In six years I have yet to receive a dollar from any church to be used for my retarded children. Our children do not want much—they just want to be remembered!

CARL J. ROTE

Protestant Chaplain

Letchworth Village

Theills, N. Y.

A TIME TO DISMOUNT

You will never know how much Mr. Ross Coggins’s article, “Missions and Prejudice” (Jan. 17 issue), meant to me, or how deeply touched I was when he said, “In a day when Marxists are calling every man comrade, let us not refuse to call any man brother.”

I am a recent seminary graduate with plans to serve on a Latin American mission field. I thought that while serving a church here I would be wise to remain silent on the racial issue, as so many churchmen want us to do. If I did, I would be joining the crowd of those who are making Christianity the laughing-stock of the whole world by attempting to reconcile missions abroad and racial segregation at home. So, if I give silent assent to discrimination while I am here, conscience would certainly make a coward of me on the foreign field.

My conclusion is that we American churchmen are sick—sick with a deadly sin called pride. Our pride creates second-class humans. Our pride relegates the Negro to “his place.” Our spiritual and racial pride makes a shambles of our Christian witness, being “… not of the Father, but … of the world” (1 John 2:16). Before it is too late we must get down from our ecclesiastical high horses and repent and turn to God!

Thank you again for this and several other plain-spoken articles on this subject.

ROBERT ARMISTEAD

St. Paul Presbyterian

Tuscaloosa, Ala.

At last! You finally passed through the period of “theory and perhaps” in the question of race relations and the Church.

Ross Coggins gets down to the facts of trying to live with a race-divided Christianity.

Our thanks to Ross Coggins for showing us that our church business here at home must be Christian if his missionary business is to succeed.

Our apologies to him for being so willing to pretend that what happens in our community is no one’s business but our own.

JOHN M. COLLINS

Franklin, Spring Grove, Laurel Methodist Churches

New Richmond, Ohio

Your article by a Southern minister is most heartening—though some of his Southern brethren may accuse him of having been duped by Communist propaganda. His article reminds me of [the] defense Peter made of his radical step of regarding Gentile Cornelius and family as full Christian brethren. Peter asked how he could resist God. Ross Coggins really is asking us the same question—how dare we resist God with our racial prejudices?

MARCIUS E. TABER

Centenary Methodist Church

Pentwater, Mich.

No honest person will deny that America’s sins are great. Our national departure from the Son of God and his Word is apparent to all. However, Mr. Coggins apparently has failed to realize that he has taken up the seed of Communism and the line that is trumpeted from Moscow to Peiping.

When the colored folks in America have a national income greater than any other people of any race in any country, when barriers are falling, we need spiritual leaders who will lead with the truth and not get so upset by the international socialistic lie. It was not surprising to find in the article that he got his information from a Moscow agent.

HAROLD MCCLURE

Oak Hill Baptist Church

Minneapolis, Minn.

Was a special blessing to me.…

CLAUDE W. JACKS, JR.

First Baptist

Cotulla, Tex.

I could not concur more heartily with this Southern Baptist minister’s statement of the case and his conclusions.

TED W. ENGSTROM

Executive Vice-President

World Vision, Inc.

Pasadena, Calif.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY is to be commended for publishing … the forthright statement by Ross Coggins.

If a few more articles like this are published, the idea that evangelical Christians are afraid of social issues will have to be carefully re-examined.

FRED R. MANTHEY, JR.

Emanuel United Church of Christ

Philadelphia, Pa.

I have known the embarrassment that Ross Coggins mentioned.… My patriotic feelings toward my country, the United States, are as fierce and loyal as the nationalistic devotion that my Mexican co-laborers have for their country. I don’t think they would understand me or respect me if it wasn’t so. It really hurts when one of them brings up the race situation in the United States.… One can only acknowledge a black eye that is so obvious.

Of course the Latin countries have some black eyes, too.… In Bolivia one hears the shout, “Camba!” and the retort, “Colla!” The Indian highlander and the white lowlander are at it again. Much blood has been spilled over the situation through the years. It seldom is billed as race rioting, but it is. Similar situations exist in some other Latin countries.…

JAMES H. MUMME

Coordinator

Mexican Evangelistic Mission

Phoenix, Ariz.

Most excellent.… However “… Tuan to others as we would have them Tuan to us” … oh, brother!

FLETCHER BENNETT

Methodist Church

Fennimore, Wis.

One way American mission boards can help is to utilize the great unused resources of Negro and Latin evangelicals who have been conspicuous by their absence on foreign fields. Some countries are already closed to all other American missionaries but would be open to these persons if we would only send them.

VERN MILLER

Lee Heights Community Church

Cleveland, Ohio

WOE

Woe is me! I have the unenviable, yet exalted privilege of belonging to one of your so-called “cults.” Unenviable, because no true-hearted soul enjoys being at odds with his fellows. Exalted, because Jesus would doubtless have been called a cultist had that unsavory word been in the vocabulary of his contemporary theologians.

Harold Lindsell, book reviewer of The Four Major Cults, should be brought up to date. The Brinsmead brothers have now been repudiated by the Sanctuary Awakening Fellowship. They were repudiated probably for no greater crime than that practiced by Author Hoekema—distortion of truth.

Also in [the] same issue, I was happy to observe that Seventh-day Adventists have a proven, practical approach to the problem of cigarettes, a Five Day Plan to Stop Smoking. A rather unique and laudable contribution from your cultist friends!

E. A. CRANE

Sturgis, Michigan

WELL, IT’S SIMPLY POIMENOGENIC

I am amused by the manner in which Dr. Ben Mohr Herbster and Dr. William McCorkle (News, Jan. 31 issue) attempt to say that cigarette smoking is not a moral problem—only a health problem. This implies that the moral law was given not out of our health needs but by the arbitrary whim of some pleasure-hating god, surely not the God of our Lord Jesus Christ.…

Moral issues and health issues should never be separated in my view for I know only too well in my work as a mental hospital chaplain, that the patient worsens when you do this. In such a case we might speak of the illness as poimenogenic, i.e., brought about by the illness in the pastor.

EARL JABAY

Princeton, N. J.

SMOKED FOOD

In your editorial in the issue of November 8 in regard to “Cigarettes and the Stewardship of the Body,” and in the letters (Eutychus, Dec. 20 issue) commenting on your editorial I have not noticed … emphasis on … the tendency of a smoker to be inconsiderate. How seldom do we hear, “Do you mind if I smoke?” As soon as a smoker has finished his (or her) meal in a public restaurant he lights his cigarette (or cigar or pipe), never pausing to think that the smell of tobacco smoke dampens the taste of food for others. To my mind, consideration of others should be one of the notable characteristics of a clergyman.

LIVINGSTON BENTLEY

Inlet, N. Y.

C. S. LEWIS

As one of the “Everymen” for whom C. S. Lewis was theologian I want to commend you on Mr. Kilby’s splendid article about Mr. Lewis (Jan. 3 issue). Any theologian who can look at much that is put forward today as Christianity, under whatever scholarly label, and call it “patronizing nonsense,” has a strong appeal to “Everyman.”

It is my belief that this paragraph from Mere Christianity is worth memorizing: “ ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a mad man or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him or kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.”

JOHN S. BECK

Summit, N. J.

Would an American writer who (1) rejected the doctrine of total depravity (Jan. 3 issue), (2) opposed the substitutionary and penal theory of the Atonement, and (3) taught that one could reason oneself into Christianity (Dec. 20 issue), be considered as the “theologian of any conservative man”?

One book omitted from Dr. Kilby’s article is the most unique (and some say uninteresting) autobiography ever written—Surprised by Joy.

My thinking about C. S. Lewis closely parallels his on George McDonald. He pointed me to a real Christ and essential Christianity.

SIDNEY CHAPMAN

Professor of Philosophy

Spring Arbor College

Spring Arbor, Mich.

Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones’s quoted contention (Dec. 20 issue) that C. S. Lewis taught and believed a man could reason himself into Christianity does not square with the facts. Even the most cursory examination of Professor Lewis’s Surprised by Joy reveals his consistent contention that God saves in various ways that are never entirely analyzable to anyone, least of all the “new man.” What Professor Lewis continually fought was the attempt of any person or denomination to lay out a clear pattern of things to be believed or schemes of procedure to insure salvation. Obedience was always more than a matter of reason, for him. On the other hand, Professor Lewis clearly believed that God was capable of using a man’s loyalty to reasoned thought as one of the means of bringing him into the Kingdom, a view which some evangelicals have difficulty in accepting.

EDWARD T. DELL, JR.

Associate Editor

The Episcopalian

Philadelphia, Pa.

Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones of Westminster Chapel in London is quoted thus: “Lewis was an opponent of the substitionary and penal theory of the Atonement.”

Certainly, many of your readers will be shocked by this revelation, even as I am. How can a man rightly lay claim to fame as a friend of Christianity, when he is an opponent of that which is the very “heart of our Faith”?

ERNEST A. HOOK

Pennsylvania Avenue Baptist Church

Warren, Pa.

Might it not be that the apparent incongruity arising in the late C. S. Lewis’s view on the total depravity of man could be resolved by distinguishing between the fact that it is only regenerate man who is in a position to assess his state of moral bankruptcy before a holy God, whereas unregenerate man can never so designate himself? The belief in man’s total depravity is not the outcome of the unregenerate mind of man, but rather the outcome of the regenerate man’s acquiescence to the penetrating Light of Scripture.

Surely the fact that “man has the idea of good” in no way detracts from what we call total depravity, but is rather a proof of our having been made in the image of God. True, that image has been marred in the Fall, our likeness to Him lost thereby; but thank God not entirely has his divine image been obliterated, else there would be no ground of alliance between us.

Sincere thanks to Clyde S. Kilby for a most interesting analysis.

M. P. FARMERY

Salisbury, New Brunswick

Since his death the conservative press in America has joyously claimed C. S. Lewis as “our man.” I am personally delighted that conservatism and fundamentalism have widened [the] door sufficiently to admit such an unclassifiable person as the great Oxford-Cambridge don. I am a little amused at this; Lewis would be hilarious.

C. S. Lewis, though having great love and respect for the Bible, would never embrace the fundamentalist (literal-infallible) view of the Bible.

He would accept no theory of the “total depravity of man.”

He rejected the “substitutionary theory” of the Atonement.

In the social order he leaned a little more to the left than to the right.

He believed that all economic systems, built on the foundation of interest and usury, were illogical, untenable, and corrupt.

He was a beer drinker, and I have it on good authority that he was a heavy beer drinker (noon and evening).

He was strongly addicted to the weed and was never seen without his pipe.

He … married a divorced woman; the conditions of her divorce were not above criticism.

So if conservatism and fundamentalism joyously accept C. S. Lewis, perhaps some of the rest of us have a chance.

W. WESLEY SHRADER

First Baptist Church

Lewisburg, Pa.

OUR KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

Dr. Mikolaski’s article (“Revelation and Truth,” Jan. 3 issue) was most interesting and thought-provoking.… It seems to me that a better question to have asked than “Can we have the knowledge of God without the knowledge about God?” would have been …: Can we articulate the knowledge of God without the knowledge about God? When the verbal representation (structural or logical arrangements of knowledge) is accepted as the real, then reality is proscribed and stands in relation to truth as an image stands in relation to the living God. There is no communication without the knowledge about God. There is no reality without knowledge of God. Knowledge about God never quite reveals what is true about God, just as knowledge about a person is never as complete as knowledge of that person as an intimate friend.…

WALTER B. THOMPSON

Barth Memorial Methodist Church

Nashville, Tenn.

One of the finest and most intellectually stimulating articles on the matter that I have seen.

WILLIAM DORE

Calvary-Asbury Methodist Church

Sudlersville, Md.

SHEVCHENKO

Ukrainian Protestants in the United States have observed and acknowledged for quite some time the intelligently expressed evangelical thought printed on the pages of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Our admiration for you has increased greatly in recent weeks, because of the editorial “A Memorial to Shevchenko” (Jan. 3 issue) which openly opposes the opinions of the Washington Post obviously instigated by those who are against freedom and independence of the Ukrainian nation.

Ukrainian Evangelical Baptist Convention in U. S. A., which unites many churches and through its Missionary and Bible Society reaches thousands of Ukrainian Protestants in all the world, wishes to express sincere thanks to CHRISTIANITY TODAY for its stand concerning the Shevchenko monument in Washington, D. C.

We believe that through this, love and admiration to America and Americans will increase among the Ukrainians.

Ukrainian Protestants support the erection of the Shevchenko monument, not only because he was a champion of freedom, not only because in his writings he praised George Washington, but because he was the one that inspired the first translation of the Bible into Ukrainian … thus giving impetus to the evangelical movement in the Ukraine.

P. BARTKOW

President

The Ukrainian Missionary and Bible Society

Chester, Pa.

BALANCE OF PROBABILITIES

Your correspondent … E. P. Schulze (Jan. 3 issue) is right to question the almost superstitious reverence paid by Tischendorf, Westcott, Hort, and Weiss to the three oldest codices of the New Testament; but need he resurrect the absurdities of Dean Burgon’s pathetic defense of the Textus Receptus, which did not clearly emerge until the fifth century? If we accept the fifth century’s revision of the text, why not also its views on the papacy and the invocation of saints?

Surely it is time to realize that both the third-century “Alexandrine” text and the fifth-century “Received” text were the products of deliberate revisions, the former too much inclined to omission, the latter to inclusion, and that the true text is only to be found from a variety of sources by a balance of probabilities.…

J. M. Ross

London, England

YES AND NO

The appearance of the article, “The Melody Man of Gospel Music” (News, Dec. 20 issue), prompted concern on my part and I hope on the part of many evangelical musicians throughout the country.…

Why, I ask, cannot numerous and previous articles have been devoted to men whose lives are being spent in an attempt to do in evangelical musical circles what you have, at least editorially, attempted to do in theology? Is CHRISTIANITY TODAY a magazine of such narrowed aims as to cry for integrity and fervor in but one arm of the Church’s ministry?…

Who, may I ask, is your choice for every-man’s theologian, everyman’s exegete? About whom would you objectively report whose theological, exegetical, pastoral policies and practices parallel those of John Peterson? I would be embarassed to name them and ashamed to read of them in a journal with the platform you wish to project. How long must the evangelical church try to succeed in a worship structure composed of odd, contrasting, inconsistent, flatulent wisps of anybody’s ideas, while the enlightened and tragically specialized pulpiteer knows and cares all about his pulpit and nothing about his fellow workers?

HAROLD M. BEST

Asst. Prof. of Organ and Music Theory

Nyack Missionary College

Nyack, N. Y.

Regarding the rank criticism of John W. Peterson’s gospel music by John Richard De Witt (Jan. 31 issue), I wonder if he has heard Mr. Peterson’s masterpieces sung by a fine choir, and under the direction of a great chorister.

John W. Peterson’s cantatas, such as “Night of Miracles,” “No Greater Love,” and, perhaps the greatest missionary cantata ever written, “The Greatest Story Yet Untold,” are all the most complete Bible-based musical messages, with Scripture rightly divided, this pastor has heard at any time ever.

OTHA B. HOLCOMB

First Baptist Church

Great Falls, Mont.

Singing psalms is mentioned in the Bible, as are spiritual songs and hymns of praise.

I have had the opportunity to serve as minister of music in a few evangelical churches in the past fifteen years, and have directed such compositions as The Messiah, Seven Last Words, Hear My Prayer, [and] The Crucifixion, which were written by men of the past with outstanding respect in music [though] very little is actually known about their spiritual fervor.…

I have had the privilege of directing three of Mr. John Peterson’s cantatas. It is true that Mr. Peterson does not write as did Handel. We should not forget, too, that neither did Bach write as Beethoven, nor did Beethoven as Mendelssohn.

I know Mr. Peterson through his relationship with WMBI. I also know of his testimony.… His chords may be modern which “tingle” the ear; however, his testimony rings of his fellowship in Christ.

We in church work are out to reach men for Christ, first. Mr. Peterson’s music, I have found, has been most welcomed in even the “starchiest” situations.…

Opposite to Mr. John Richard De Witt’s ending, let’s have more of this.

JOHN A. KOOISTRA

Metropolitan Baptist Church

Washington, D. C.

CHRISTIAN LOGOTHERAPY

I was disappointed with the review you gave Dr. Tweedie’s recent book, The Christian and the Couch (Jan. 3 issue). It seems to me that the message of the book centers on the author’s discussion of the etiology of mental illness. On page 109 Dr. Tweedie states, “… at the root of every [psychogenic mental illness] lies a significant amount of sinful action.” It is this concept that lends integration and a degree of credibility to this development of a “Christian logotherapy.” Whether or not Dr. Tweedie has leaned too heavily on O. H. Mowrer may be debated. It would seem, however, that such a critical point in the development of a leading Christian psychologist’s philosophy of mental illness ought, at least, to be discussed.

ROBERT W. FERRIS

Hamilton, Mass.

SHAKESPEARE, BUT NOT SOLOMON

There is an excellent article … under “Current Religious Thought” (Dec. 20 issue) regarding the impact of secularism upon the school children.…

I have heard it reported that the reading of wisdom from such as Shakespeare or some of the philosophers may be used as an opening day meditation, while passages from the greatest of all wisdom books must be omitted. This makes no sense at all to me. If ever we needed to reflect upon words of wisdom, it is in this, our generation, and the crying need is for a greater reading of and reflection upon the Bible [message] than has ever been given it in the past in the public schools, homes, churches, and elsewhere. This, in turn, will lead to sincere, inner heart prayer. (I cannot read the Bible without praying.) The banning of the reading of the Bible in the public schools, to me, completes the picture of a twisted, warped, and degenerate generation.

MARION WALGER

Baltimore, Md.

I would like to see copies of the articles about the Bible which are in the November 22 issue … go to anyone who seeks to delete the Bible readings from our public schools.

NORMAN H. SANDERS

Fort Worth, Tex.

Evangelical Colleges: The Race for Relevance

David L. Mckenna

Will the Christian liberal arts college survive? This question, popular with secular experts, causes Christian educators great concern. Its basis is found in the fact that the crisis in American higher education has been reduced to the common denominator of shortages in faculties, funds, and facilities. When these resources are accepted as the criteria for survival and status in American higher education, many small, evangelical Christian liberal arts colleges are expected to test out the high cost of dying in the academic world.

But have we been asking the right question? Without glossing over the need for teachers, money, and space in all our institutions, perhaps it is time to suggest that the fundamental problem facing the evangelical Christian college is not existence but obsolescence. “Are we in a race for survival when we should be in a race for relevance?”

Lewis Mayhew, a man who is known for asking the right questions, presents this problem in his book The Smaller Liberal Arts College when he states that the Christian college is “in conflict with some of the major values held by contemporary American society” (p. 11). These conflicts, he says, are between the values of the Christian religion and American secularism, between a liberal arts education and the vocational orientation in American life, and between the small, independent college and the trend to large, centralized organizations in American institutional structure. Within the framework of these basic value conflicts, Mayhew identifies the small, Christian liberal arts college as a minority institution in higher education that is out of step with the prevailing social values of our time. Although he does not specifically make the statement, both the import and the implication of his analysis suggest this nagging question, “Is the small, evangelical Christian liberal arts college obsolete?” This hard-nosed question demands an equally hard-nosed answer.

The evangelical Christian college is exclusively an American product of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As such, it reflected the temper of its times and became known as the “gem and genius” of American higher education. In response to the prevailing philosophical, social, and educational climate of the times, the evangelical Christian college met a unique need and produced distinguished products. Today, however, both the nature of the need and the demands for the product have changed.

The Shifting Climate

In the nineteenth century the philosophical climate in which the evangelical Christian college flourished was essentially idealistic, humane, and Christian. This climate was particularly conducive to the liberal arts emphasis upon the humanities with a strong social service sense and a widely accepted pietism in personal values. Fundamentalism in theology, conservatism in politics, and essentialism in education were the supporting value systems for what could be called the evangelical Christian college. Richard Hofstader, in Anti-intellectualism in American Life, notes the transition, however, that marked the decline of the evangelical spirit. The shock troops of Darwin, Freud, Marx, and Dewey led the way with a succession of attacks supported by such social phenomena as the American enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the scientific renaissance, the urban migration, and the rising national state. It was only a matter of time until the philosophical climate had changed to such an extent that a new liberalism won the day in theology, politics, and education. The momentum of continuing change now appears to have taken us to the point where Sorokin’s sensate culture overbalances our ideational past, secular values have priority over Christian principles, and the pragmatic mind dominates the pietistic spirit.

The long-term result of this radical change in the conscious or subconscious American philosophy is that the evangelical Christian college has lost its position as the “college of the culture.” Today, it is idealized as an institution that preserves the values of our past but does not speak with full meaning to the present.

Sociologically, the cultural environment of which the evangelical Christian college is a part has been transformed as radically as the philosophical climate. By location, size, and number, the evangelical Christian colleges represent the rural, personalistic Protestantism of the nineteenth century. With the motives for the founding of the church colleges centered in denominational preservation and aggressive evangelism, these institutions performed a meaningful function as followers of the frontier. They were rural institutions in a village-and-town society. They were Protestant institutions in a ruggedly evangelistic religious atmosphere. They were autonomous institutions in a society where centralized government did not extend beyond the township hall or the county seat. The match was perfect. Evangelical Christian colleges were the institutional embodiments of independence, stability, and integrity.

In contrast, twentieth-century America is an urbanized polyglot of religious species where the most effective action is taken by the centralized organization and the collective group. This means that the sociological currents have moved past the evangelical Christian college to the extent that the point of social impact is no longer rural, the revered voice is no longer Protestant, and the agency for forceful action is no longer the individual. The conclusion would seem to be that the evangelical Christian college was well founded according to the needs of the social climate of its time, but that while the point of need has changed locations, the colleges have not.

As a part of the revolution in philosophical positions and sociological patterns during the past century, education itself has undergone drastic changes. The evangelical Christian college developed in an educational climate that placed a premium upon the highly selective liberal arts programs of the private college. Higher education served to prepare selected persons for the prestige professions through a background in the liberal arts. Hence, the private college could play this role without serious competition from the public domain. The corollary shifts in the philosophical outlook and the cultural milieu, however, were not without their educational counterpart. Whether the change took place from so ideal a motive as “The Great American Dream” or from so practical a stance as the “New Technology,” the base for higher education began to spread. With creeping certainty the demand for higher education increased among the masses and outstripped both the purposes and the programs of the church-related liberal arts college.

Caught In A Squeeze

With this rising tide of demand, the nature of higher education has undergone profound changes. The focus has shifted from the selective purposes of the private, liberal arts college to the mass-oriented, professional purposes of the public college and university octopus. Caught in the squeeze of this shift of emphasis in American higher education, the evangelical Christian college represents a vestige of an era when private higher education was king.

A review of these philosophical, social, and educational changes brings us back to the basic question, “Is the evangelical Christian liberal arts college obsolete?” A partial answer now seems clear. It is obsolete if its purpose demands support from a compatible climate of thought that is unified in its espousal of Christian idealism and its humane concerns. It is obsolete if its social impact is limited to a rural world with a Protestant ethic and a single, stubborn frontier voice. It is obsolete it its role and scope are dependent upon a favorable educational environment that defines the evangelical Christian college as the majority institution and the “Who’s Who” leader in purposes, programs, and products.

If, on the other hand, the changing climate of higher education is recognized, the answer to the question resolves itself into the problem of defining the contemporary purpose of the evangelical Christian college without depending upon the nineteenth-century assumptions that were supported by a nineteenth-century world.

Change Without Neurosis

In response to the change in the philosophical climate from Christian idealism to the current pragmatism, the evangelical Christian college must first determine how it can be Christian without being defensive. Having enjoyed the status of being the majority institution in American higher education, it must now adjust to the position of the minority. The test will be whether or not the adjustment can be made without developing the neurotic responses of the minority mentality. When a college and its leadership get caught in the vicious circle of suspicion and self-pity, the results are self-destructive. Purposes are rationalized in unrealistic claims in the college catalogue, failures are projected on the home or the church, weaknesses are compensated by the recitation of “quality” shibboleths in advertising, and a ready-made scapegoat is found in the “liberalism” of the state university.

If the evangelical Christian college is to avoid the masochistic implications of the minority mentality, it must accept its change of status and become the center for seeking those points of impact where Christian perspective and Christian values can still affect the thought life of America. Where can the superiority of the Christian ethic over secular values best be demonstrated? What is the relevance of the Christian commitment in a post-Christian world? Can Christian idealism bridge the gap of the “two worlds” of humanities and sciences? How does the truth of Christian revelation meaningfully relate to the content and the method of the liberal arts?

Second, the change from a rural Protestant society with its individual ethos to an urbanized religious pluralism with a collective ethos puts the evangelical Christian college into a race for relevance. The challenge is to determine how the evangelical Christian college can be contemporary without being submerged. In the past, the accusation leveled at evangelical colleges was that they tended to an attitude of being “holier than thou.” The tendency now is to succumb to the pressures of a cultural complex or a “worldlier than thou” attitude. In the desire to be acceptable (sometimes considered synonymous with accredited), the college moves full swing from a radical cultural conservatism to a level of cultural competition. Students bring their urban values with them and manufacture major social issues on dress, entertainment, and privilege. Faculty members bring their status values from the graduate school and demand comparable cultural symbols. Alumni bring their secular values from the business world and insist that the college give priority to marketable products. The end result is that the evangelical Christian college becomes almost indistinguishable from the secular institution when it comes to social issues, cultural expectations, and contemporary values. While having the overlay of a “believing mode” for the students and a “pious sanctity” for the faculty, the attitudes of status-seeking, pyramid-climbing, and security-consciousness are entertained without a sense of contradiction.

The evangelical Christian college must avoid the cultural complex by again seeking out its areas of impact in a revolutionary society. What is the responsibility of the Christian college to the teeming metropolis? to the factory? the secular college? the depressed area? the “haves” and the “have nots”? What is the role of evangelical Christianity when it is only one among religions and religious commitments? What is the relation of the small evangelical college to the complex, centralized, and collective action groups in education, politics, and religion? The changing social scene means that the evangelical Christian college cannot be a college of a “location”—it must seek out its locale for action by keeping a finger on the pulse of contemporary need.

The Survival Syndrome

Third, the changing educational scene in America during the middle 1900s may well be the most significant social change of the century. With the shift in higher education from the selective, privately controlled liberal arts college to the public institution with a broadened base for admissions and an emphasis upon professional programs, the small evangelical Christian college seems to be thrust into competition with the giants. By its location, its cost, and the extent of its programs, the Christian college will always run last. Therefore, it must determine how to be creative without being compromised. At times, the evangelical Christian college seems to be caught in the whirl of the survival syndrome. This is a view that sees the future of the Christian college either in competition or in compromise with public higher education. Existence becomes more important than the reason for existing. To paraphrase a current slogan, “We would rather be led than dead.” As imitators rather than creators, Christian college educators who accept this view relax because the tidal wave will take care of the problem of enrollments, the federal programs will solve building needs, and the evidence of increasing size and new facilities will attract a top-ranked faculty. This is the survival syndrome that can plague the Christian college as its leaders compromise their programs by lowering the level at which they will compete and pretending to keep pace with excellence by imitation.

If imitation of the majority in higher education is taken as the frame of reference for the future of the evangelical college, it will neither survive nor deserve to survive. Rather, an existence with meaning will result from the development of creative thrusts in the colleges toward the gaps that secular education cannot fill. What are the particular qualities of the learning experience that only the Christian liberal arts college can fulfill? What should be the basis for the selection of students in the evangelical college so that there can be a concentration upon a quality product? How can the continuity represented by the liberal arts curriculum in the Christian college be used to create a program of common education that retains its classical roots but gains its contemporary wings? How can the purpose of the evangelical Christian college be so defined that the totality of campus life takes on the earmarks of integrity?

Secular higher education has little to say about most of these questions because it is assumed that they are either passé or irrelevant. Yet the fact remains that the secular institution is in serious trouble because of the changes that have taken place in the philosophical, social, and educational climate for higher education. In the philosophical sphere, the evangelical Christian college has the opportunity to make its idealistic stance relevant to the changing thought climate, but the secular institution appears to be operating in a “value vacuum.” Therefore, the non-committed college is faced with the burden of maintaining the meaning, the hope, and the morality of Christian idealism in a materialistic, secular, and scientific age without making a Christian commitment. The dilemma is best described by the baby and the bath water.

Problems for the secular college continue to mount when the changing social context is considered. While the secular institutions usually have the advantage of urban locations, diverse student cultures, and organizational alignments that give strength to their voice, they have the difficulty of trying to maintain the individuality, the freedom, and the identity of the Protestant rural culture in a pluralistic and yet centralized urban situation. This problem is evident in the similarity that exists among the institutions at various levels of public higher education, in the directions that their expansion must take by public pressure, and in their frantic search for a distinguished profile. If these problems are compared with the need for an updated viewpoint in the evangelical Christian college, the balance of opportunity again swings in favor of private higher education. Rather than having to respond to the culture in its broadest scope, the evangelical Christian college can pick and choose those areas of critical need that are most closely aligned with its purpose.

Then again, the changing educational scene is not solely favorable to the cause of secular and public higher education even though they represent the majority culture. As a result of changes in educational expectations, the secular institution must try to maintain the quality, the continuity, and the integrity of the curriculum in the Christian liberal arts college while being forced into a mass-oriented, professionally directed, and fragmented curriculum.

At a recent meeting of educators, the featured speaker discussed the implications of automation and leisure for higher education. The pertinent point was that the colleges must provide a general education for the new “leisure masses” that will be directed to the creative use of additional leisure time automation will give. In the small group discussion that followed the address, the basic question was whether or not higher education could come to accept a common set of liberal and humane values that could be used to organize and integrate the educational experience for the forthcoming “leisure man.” As usual, there was more heat than light generated by the discussion. Finally, the time for discussion expired with the conclusion that we had the means for training the masses, but little hope for educating them.

This experience added weight to the conviction that the evangelical Christian college has a continuing role to play in American higher education if it can build its case for existence at the creative rather that the imitative level.

Change is with us and will continue at accelerating speeds. The climate for higher education no longer favors the evangelical Christian college. As a response to the prevailing values of secular thought, we may develop the self-defeating defenses of the minority mentality. In the clamor to be contemporary, we may accept the conforming attitudes of the cultural complex. Because the wish to live is legitimate, we may succumb to the compromising imitations of the survival syndrome. To choose any of these options will probably guarantee existence, but it will also make the explanation for our existence difficult.

The only genuine option for the evangelical Christian college is to move into the city in order to test the contemporary meaning of our Christian purpose and the contemporary relevance of our Christian liberal arts curricula. With this pattern of action, the question of survival for the evangelical Christian college will become secondary and the charge of obsolescence will be dropped—unclaimed.

God’S Sword Thrusts

As a high-schooler many years ago I happened to meet my Sunday school teacher on the street and walked along with him for a while. He was a lawyer by profession and a gifted teacher. In the course of our conversation he asked, “John, if I were to preach a sermon, what text do you think I should use?” I replied that I had no idea. He said, “I would like to preach on the words of Nehemiah, ‘I am doing a great work so that I cannot come down.’ ” These words led me then to reread the story of Nehemiah, and they became a living part of the Bible for me. Again and again through the years they have inspired within me the faith, courage, and determination with which to confront the temptations and problems of life.—The Rev. JOHN L. GREGORY, general secretary, Vermont Church Council, Burlington.

David L. McKenna is president of Spring Arbor College, Spring Arbor, Michigan. He holds the A.B. degree from Western Michigan University, the B.D. from Asbury College, and the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Before becoming president of Spring Arbor College, Dr. McKenna was director of The Center for Higher Education at Ohio State University.

- More from David L. Mckenna

Federal Aid to Christian Education: No

V. Raymond Edman

In considering any problem, and in particular that of federal aid to education, one’s convictions must be based on principle rather than on expediency. Such convictions are especially needed in this day when the national government is encroaching in areas that historically and legally have belonged to the states or to private citizens. While I write as president of a Christian college, my argument against federal aid for Christian education is based on broad principles that apply to all private higher education, secular as well as religious, and also to primary and secondary education, both public and private.

“Federal aid” is a political euphemism for funds taken in taxes from the people and, after an appreciable diminution through the multiplicity of departments, returned to the states and various agencies. Aid is not new wealth; it is our money, handled and directed by government officials for purposes determined by themselves.

Our discussion of federal aid to education does not include the service academies, ROTC, the distribution of surplus property, and student aid programs such as the GI Bill and the loan programs established by the National Defense Acts of 1958. By the same token, government research projects are not included in the concept of federal aid to education. Federal support of research projects constitutes the government’s purchasing the abilities and facilities of the universities to do research for the fewest dollars possible. (Subsidy of scientific research is, however, an illusory “aid” to education, because of its diversionary effect upon research and scholarship and because of its tendency to draw able teacher-scholars into government research projects.)

Educational costs are mounting, but is federal “aid” the best way to meet those needs? The easy way is often the wrong way. We need more and better educational opportunities for the rising generation; but are they to be supplied at any cost?

The case for federal subsidy to education is predicated on two chief assumptions: (1) A centrally planned society is the best for all the people, and (2) the colleges cannot meet the rising costs and other demands upon them. These assumptions are contrary to fact. We have never believed that the government knows the best interest of its people better than the citizens themselves, nor that bureaucratic planners are more intelligent than the people themselves. The American government was established with a “division of powers” between the federal and state governments and the citizens. Furthermore, federal responsibility for education was discussed in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 when a national university was proposed and was rejected as being outside the province of the national government. At that time education was considered to be the responsibility of the states and their citizens; the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 required new states formed beyond the Appalachians to set aside public lands for public education. And even then there were private colleges in that area.

Colleges And Continuity

In meeting expenses and balancing budgets, the colleges have been far more successful than the federal government. Since the founding of Harvard in 1636, American colleges have had the responsibility of providing for their own needs. For more than three centuries they have come through periods of financial panic and prosperity, through war and peace, and today are continuing steadily on their course. It is late in the day for the national government to think that it can better provide for higher education than the people themselves.

I suggest six main considerations against federal aid to higher education:

1. It is unnecessary, despite the enthusiastic advocacy of politicians and some educators. The American people as individuals and through help from foundations, business, and industry are providing increasingly for higher education on the basis of merit. Lloyd Morey, president emeritus and former comptroller of the University of Illinois, observed:

No adequate case can be made for additional nationwide appropriations by Congress for education at any level on a broad scale for any purpose. There may be a few areas in which local resources are sufficiently behind the general average and local educational conditions sufficiently in arrears to warrant temporary and selective outside assistance.… Such aid may be warranted from the federal government. To make these few situations the excuse for general federal grants to all states is both financial and educational folly.

There is a rising tide of opposition to federal intervention, as shown by the stand the National School Boards Association and many local Parent-Teachers Associations have taken. The colleges can help themselves by economies carefully considered and courageously undertaken. They should continue their studies in the efficient and effective operation of each institution, in the use of facilities, in extension of the school day and the school week, and in curtailment of the curriculum.

2. A subsidy is an unwarranted assumption that money is the answer to quality education. A study by Harold Orlans on “The Effects of Federal Programs on Higher Education: A Study of Thirty-six Universities and Colleges” (Brookings Institution) showed from standardized tests that the quality of undergraduate students is highest at liberal arts colleges. There followed in diminishing order of quality private universities receiving large federal grants, private universities receiving less federal money, public universities with large federal funds, and public universities with lesser federal amounts. A similar sequence was found to apply to graduate students. Thus it appears that federal aid to education does not buy scholars any more than foreign aid programs buy friends abroad.

The Brookings report, declaring that “quality must come first,” observes: “Even at the most eminent institutions, there is constant danger that intellectual standards will deteriorate from the too-ready availability of too much money. The danger will be greater at lesser institutions if programs are established solely to hand out dollars on the basis of a mechanical formula.”

3. Federal subsidy involves inevitable standardization. The department that dispenses federal funds for education will establish the kind and quality of education subsidized. For many years diversity of educational philosophy and practice have marked higher education in its independence of outside control and dependence upon the merit of its own program for support. In reporting to a congressional committee, President John A. Howard of Rockford College declared:

At the present time the variety of sources of funds for colleges and universities reinforces the diversity of educational programs and educational philosophies among the various institutions: one college now attracts funds because of the religious nature of its programs, another because of its freedom from religious influences; one for its conservative views, another for its liberalism.… As the various colleges turn more and more to a single source of revenue—the federal government—the differences that set one college apart from the next will inevitably be reduced.

Authoritarian control of education requires standardization and raises Jefferson’s uncomfortable question: “Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched?”

4. Subsidization means inevitable control of education, a prospect of particular concern to the Christian college. Such control is stoutly denied by politicians and bureaucrats, and also by some educators blinded by their wish for more federal aid. Again the Brookings report: “The danger of federal control should not be dismissed as a myth designed simply to serve the interests of local and sectional forces. It is and will remain a continuing danger to the independence of academic institutions which must be guarded against more vigilantly as the role of the federal government in higher education grows.” When questioned on this point at a conference in Chicago, President Nathan Pusey of Harvard said: “It seems obvious that, over a period of years, in their power to grant or withhold funds, the agencies of government are likely to have much to say about the direction research is to follow. Many educational leaders continue to believe this kind of decision had best be left to the colleges and universities.”

A Federal Duty

It is the responsibility of the government to set up controls for the expenditure of public monies. In a decision in 1942 (Wickard vs. Filburn), the Supreme Court stated that “it is hardly a lack of due process for government to regulate that which it subsidizes.” What the national government finances it must of necessity control. This is required by the Constitution and recognized by every honest lawmaker and thoughtful citizen. One should weigh therefore the observation made by Congressman Watkins Abbitt (D-Va.) in his statement against federal aid to education: “There is here demonstrated an all-out effort to federalize the schools and nationalize the lives of American citizens.… History teaches us that when the central authority gets control of the education of our youth, it is a long step toward a totalitarian government and dictatorship.… Federal Aid means Federal Control.”

5. Subsidization will demand secularization of education—again a cause for concern to the Christian college. Separation of church and state according to the First Amendment to the Constitution is intrinsic in the American way of life. Over the years, and especially in the last few years, the courts have reinforced this. To expend federal funds for higher education will plunge the nation headlong into the problem of whether public money can be used to promote religion. The alternatives will be religion and no federal money, and federal money and no religion.

Each independent college and university is free to establish its own spiritual standards and practices according to its own persuasion, either religious or irreligious. However, to accept federal aid is in time to be required to become irreligious and secular.

6. Federal subsidization, especially long-range scholarship aid, will mean a shift in responsibility for the education of the children from parents and students themselves, from colleges and their constituencies, to the national government. No one knows better than educators the financial needs of students, the sacrifices made by parents, the strenuous efforts at self-help made by young people. Educators do not favor making the acquisition of education an unduly onerous and practically impossible task for those of limited means.

Yet the family is the unit of human life established by the Almighty in his wise provision for the welfare of mankind. The family that faces its responsibilities for its children, that perpetuates the affection and confidence between parents and children, that prays together and works together and sacrifices together, will find that its children can be educated. The effort to do so will help unite the family. There are numerous forces in our land acting against the integrity and strength of the family. These are to be resisted for the best interests of the American people and the nation as a whole. The philosophy of the welfare state includes detaching children from the family unit by making provision for them beyond what the family itself can provide. The ultimate purpose of socialism is to make all citizens dependent upon the national government. Federal aid to education is part of the battle for the minds and souls of Americans.

For our Christian schools in particular the question of federal encroachment into the field of education finally resolves itself into the choice of aid or independence, subsidy or standardization and secularization, support from the government or continued dependence on God through his faithful stewards. The passage of Higher Education Facilities Act (now Public Law 88–204) in December, 1963, accentuates the need for Christian colleges to take a stand. If the principle is wrong, so is the practice. The alternatives are the hard and good way of progress based on the merit of our programs and the quality of our graduates, and the apparently easy way of giving in to mammon. It may even be necessary at times to walk in the rags of self-determination of our own plans and programs under God rather than to be clothed in the dubious riches of dependence on federal support.

V. Raymond Edman is president of Wheaton College, Illinois. A former professor of political science at Wheaton, he holds the Ph.D. degree from Clark University, the LL.D. from Houghton College, and the D.D. from Taylor University. He has written fourteen books.

- More from V. Raymond Edman

The ‘New Look’ in Roman Catholic-Protestant Relations

Norman V. Hope

Some years ago Reinhold Niebuhr declared that “the acrimonious relations between Catholics and Protestants in this country are scandalous. If two forms of the Christian faith, though they recognize a common Lord, cannot achieve a little more charity in their relations with each other, they have no right to speak to the world or to claim that they have any balm for the world’s hatreds and mistrusts. The mistrust between Catholics and Protestants has become almost as profound as that between the West and Communism” (Essays in Applied Christianity, p. 220). As recently as 1959 Jaroslav Pelikan wrote an article in Presbyterian Life deploring the “cold war” between Christians and asserting that Protestant-Roman Catholic relations were smirched with “slogans and slanders” on both sides.

Within recent years, however, relations between those two branches of the Christian faith have taken a decided turn for the better. So great has been the increase in mutual charity and understanding that it may be said that the relations between Protestants and Roman Catholics have become almost Christian in character.

There are many illustrations of this increase in mutual respect and charity. For one thing, Roman Catholic appraisal of the Protestant Reformation, and particularly of Martin Luther, has become increasingly sympathetic. For example, in 1947 Karl Adam, the well-known German Roman Catholic theologian, wrote a book entitled One and Holy, in the foreword of which he said:

It cannot be doubted that at the present moment, under shattering impact of two world wars, a bridge is being built between Catholics and Lutherans, at least in the sense that the unreality of mere polemic is being abandoned, that Luther on the one hand and the Papacy on the other are being seen in a clearer and more friendly light, and that real efforts are being made by Christians everywhere to bring about if not a unio fidei, at least a unio caritatis [p. v].

Adam’s own estimate of Luther, as given in the course of his book, is this:

It was indeed night in a great part of Christendom.… Had Martin Luther then arisen, with his marvelous gifts of mind and heart, his warm penetration of the essence of Christianity, his passionate defiance of all unholiness and ungodliness, the elementary fury of his religious experience, his surging soul-shattering power of speech, and not least that heroism in the face of death with which he defied the powers of this world—had he brought all these magnificent qualities to the removal of the abuses of the time and the cleansing of God’s gardens from weeds, had he remained a faithful member of his Church, humble and simple, serene and pure, then indeed we should today be his grateful debtors. He would be forever our great Reformer, our true man of God, comparable to Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi. He would have been the greatest saint of our people, the refounder of the Church in Germany, a second Boniface [pp. 25, 26].

Hans Küng, one of the most influential of younger Catholic theologians today, makes the same point when he says:

Catholic understanding of the Reformation has developed to a significant degree. Consider the progress in the judgments passed on Luther himself, from Eck, Cochlaus, and Bellarmine via Mohler, Döllinger, Jansen, Denifle, Grisar, and Reiter, down to Lortz and Jedin. For Döllinger, in his earlier writings, Luther was a criminal; for Denifle, a man in whom nothing godly can be found; for Grisar, a psychopath. But for Lortz, a tragic individual caught in almost insoluble interior and exterior difficulties, and living by faith [The Council, Reform and Reunion, pp. 103, 104].

Again, there has been an increasing interchange of courtesies between various Roman Catholic and Protestant groups. For example, Methodist Bishop Fred P. Corson recently received an honorary degree from St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic College in Philadelphia; Baptist Dr. Billy Graham has been invited to speak in several Roman Catholic educational institutions; Baptist Dr. Martin Luther King received the 1963 St. Francis Peace Medal from the North American Federation of the Third Order of St. Francis, a national organization of 100,000 Roman Catholic clergymen and laymen. On the other side, the late President John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, not long before his untimely death received an award from the Protestant Council of the City of New York.

At the local parochial level, the flow of information between congregations of the two faiths has increased. For example, in November, 1962, the New York Times carried an item, datelined Minneapolis, which stated:

About five hundred members of the St. Charles Borromeo Roman Catholic Church here visited Mount Carmel Lutheran Church where they had a reception and tour. It was part of a project in which congregations learn the doctrines and practices of others. Members of the Lutheran Church had previously paid a similar visit to the Catholic Church. A similar quest for understanding was undertaken in a two-part program in West St. Paul.

These exchange visits are going on in many parts of the United States and can hardly fail to produce greater understanding between members of the two religious bodies.

Again, dialogue has been and is being carried on between scholarly and responsible representatives of the two faiths. In November, 1963, Presbyterian Life carried an article entitled “Faith to Faith: Breakthrough in Baltimore.” It described a television program that began in January, 1963, and lasted for fifteen weeks, and that in response to popular demand was rerun during the summer. This program featured a frank and courteous discussion of the two faiths, their agreements and their differences, between Dr. John Middaugh, minister of Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church, and Father Joseph Connolly, curate of the Roman Catholic parish of St. Gregory the Great. According to the article, the two participants “talked about Roman Catholic authority, Protestant concepts of authority, confession, penance, purgatory, veneration of the saints, the priesthood of all believers. The nature and number of sacraments (two or seven?), worship, mission, the Virgin, Protestant piety, and the resurrection. Without belligerence or rancor they explained, questioned, ruminated, laughed, occasionally protested a suspected unfair remark, and altogether displayed an on-camera, unrehearsed poise that proved a delight to the whole community.”

Along the same line, in October, 1963, it was announced in the public press that a World Center for Liturgical Studies would be constructed at Boca Raton, Florida. There, it was explained, Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox theologians will be able to examine together the public worship of their churches. It is believed that this will be the first institute of its kind in the history of Christendom.

Also, recent world conferences of each of the two groups have welcomed representatives of the other. At the (predominantly Protestant) World Council of Churches’ Third Assembly (New Delhi, 1961) there were official observers from the Roman Catholic Church. And when Vatican Council II was convened in 1962, Protestant observers were invited to attend and were shown every courtesy by their Roman Catholic hosts.

A Mutual Concern

More than that, in some places there has been a movement of practical mutual aid between the two churches. Some years ago Oscar Cullmann, well-known Swiss Protestant theologian, proposed that Protestant and Roman Catholic congregations should take up offerings for the poor of each other’s parishes. Such action, he believed, would underline the solidarity of Roman Catholics and Protestants in their concern for one another as persons, even when they cannot affirm their unity as churches. Concerning this Robert M. Brown says, “The experiment has been tried in a number of places in Europe, and is perhaps the most feasible ‘next step’ toward greater understanding” (The Spirit of Protestantism, p. 169). Some such projects have been tried in the United States. For example, in September, 1963, the Massachusetts Baptist Convention announced it would undertake in the Boston area a “Good Samaritan” resettlement of Cuban Roman Catholic refugees temporarily living in Miami, Florida. The official spokesman for the Baptist Convention said, “We will assume the responsibility for the refugees’ initial welfare, including home and job placement, as well as related service, but will not intrude in any way with regard to the religious belief and practice of these newcomers to our shores.”

What these happenings add up to is this: there is a “new look,” a new climate and atmosphere in Protestant-Roman Catholic relations, not only in the United States but elsewhere in the world. Why has this profound change taken place? What reasons can be assigned for it?

Reasons For The Change

First, the challenge of atheistic totalitarianism in Europe has driven the two Christian churches together in order to protect and defend their common Christian heritage. For example, the menace of Nazi paganism during Hitler’s brutalitarian regime (1933–1945) eventually, though not immediately, brought the two Christian groups together in Germany. Thus “in the general destruction wrought by enemy bombings so many church buildings were damaged or obliterated and such migrations occurred that Roman Catholics permitted Protestants to hold services in their churches and Protestants extended similar courtesies to Roman Catholics” (K. S. Latourette, Christianity in a Revolutionary Age, IV, 229). And this Roman Catholic-Protestant solidarity has continued into the postwar period in East Germany, where atheistic Communism has taken over.

Secondly, during the last generation or two, secularism—practical atheism which believes that this life is all there is, and that God, if he exists, does not really matter—has become widespread throughout the world. The challenge of this secularism has taught the two Christian churches to realize how much they have in common as believers in Jesus Christ, and to appreciate the fact that, as Theodore O. Weddel has put it, “what Protestants and Roman Catholics have in common by way of basic belief in God and His revelation of Himself in the Biblical salvation drama, far transcends their differences” (The Gospel in a Strange New World, p. 104). Therefore they have become aware of their joint responsibility to stand together in witness to their basic Christian loyalties as over against secular neopaganism.

Thirdly, the attitude of Pope John XXIII during his all too brief pontificate (1958–1963) has wrought something of a revolution in Roman Catholic attitudes toward Protestantism. Pope John, while not compromising his Roman Catholic principles in any way, began a crusade of determined friendliness toward the “separated brethren” of Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy. In 1960 he set up a Secretariat for the Promotion of Christian Unity, “as a special sign of esteem and affection for separated Christians.” He received in audience such leading Protestant dignitaries as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U. S. A., and—shades of John Knox!—even the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. He accepted the invitation of the World Council of Churches to send official observers to the New Delhi Assembly in 1961, and he invited Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Christians to send their observers to the Second Vatican Council, which began in 1962. This attitude of Pope John has been continued and even accentuated by his successor, Pope Paul VI. For instance, when he opened the Second Session of the Vatican Council in late Sepember, 1963, “he made an appeal for Christian unity that went far and beyond the approach of his predecessor. He asserted that the long range aim of the Council was no less than the complete and universal union of all Christians, and he declared: ‘If we are in any way to blame for that separation, we humbly beg God’s forgiveness’ ” (New York Times, October 6, 1963). There can be no doubt that the stand of these two most recent popes has wrought a virtual revolution in Roman Catholic attitudes toward Protestants.

The Protestant Response

How should we Protestants respond to this situation? What is our properly Christian attitude? We should applaud every interchange of courtesies. We should welcome every opportunity to enlighten our Roman Catholic brethren about our faith and practice, and to learn about theirs. We should encourage informed and frank discussion of views by competent theologians of both groups on the differences that divide them. We should cooperate with our Roman Catholic brethren in expressing, and seeking to implement, Christian attitudes on such social questions as housing, race, and world peace. We should take seriously the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, instituted under Roman Catholic auspices some years ago, which sets aside the week of January 18–25 each year as a season of special prayer for the reunification of the Church of Jesus Christ.

But at the same time we should never forget that we as Protestants have a distinctive testimony to bear, on which there can be no compromise. The Reformation interpretation of the Christian Gospel includes three principles. First, Protestants believe in justification by grace through faith, which means that in Christian salvation all is of God, and that the only thing man can do is gratefully and humbly accept the salvation that God freely offers in Jesus Christ. Secondly, Protestants believe in the priesthood of all believers, which means that all Christians are created in the same divine image, redeemed by the same divine sacrifice, and called to the same divine destiny; that all have equal standing in the sight of God, and therefore have equal responsibilities and privileges in the Christian life. Thirdly, Protestants believe in the final authority of the Bible as the only rule of faith and life, unobscured by “traditions” which may, or may not, agree with the mind of Jesus Christ as revealed in the New Testament. To dilute this testimony would be for us Protestants a repudiation of our heritage, and a betrayal of the trust committed to us. And since Roman Catholicism, for all its new friendliness, does not seem in the least ready to accept this interpretation of the New Testament Gospel, any union between Romanism and Protestantism is not on the horizon in the determinable future.

Norman V. Hope is professor of church history at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is a graduate of Edinburgh University with the M.A., B.D., and Ph.D., and author of “One Christ, One World, One Church.”

- More from Norman V. Hope

The Educational Ministry of the Church

Robert K. Bower

The Supreme Court of the United States has within recent years rendered decisions that have no doubt contributed to a growing secularism in our country. To say that the Church must double her educational efforts and become a bulwark against secular forces is but to declare what is already known. The handwriting on the wall can be read by each member of the Church: a sound, comprehensive educational effort must become a part of every church program if the Church is to meet the needs of her people.

Although the public schools have manifested some degree of interest in character training (see Moral and Spiritual Values in the Public Schools, National Education Association, 1951), this has been nominal at most. After the home, it is the churches that must carry the primary obligation to train youth in moral values and develop the spiritual dimension of their personalities. Thorough Christian instruction has now become so urgently needed that the Protestant church must consider new techniques for laying a moral and spiritual foundation for both her youth and her adults. For years, Roman Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues have provided for their people, and particularly for their youth, just such programs, and with relatively good success. It is now time for those churches that claim the Protestant heritage to expand their educational programs far beyond their present offerings.

Despite past criticism of education in the Church—criticism aimed at ineffective teaching, inadequate facilities, poor curricula, and weak administration—increasing numbers of people have been reached for Christ. History will show that the educational arm of the Church has been a powerful instrument for building and strengthening the “household of faith.” Whenever there has been faith in the ministry of education so that it has received strong support, the Church has grown; whenever faith in education has lagged, the Church has remained static or declined. The Apostles and the early Church placed great emphasis upon both the teaching and the preaching ministries (Acts 5:42; Eph. 4:11), and this emphasis is needed today no less than it was then.

One area to which church education should address itself without delay is family values and relationships. At one time Christian husbands and wives perceived their respective family roles clearly. But with the highly technological and medical advances experienced by our society in recent years, there are now more job opportunities for women, fewer domestic duties requiring skill and intelligence, and fewer children in the typical middle-class Protestant family. As a consequence, child-caring, dispersal of family monies, final authority in disputes, and the general division of labor have become serious, if not critical, issues in the home. Fearful of becoming dependent upon the other person, husband and wife compete for leadership in the home and thus increase the role-confusion in the minds of their children. Even those with a strong religious background appear to have encountered these problems in no small measure. In his Psychodynamics of Family Life (Basic Books, 1958), Nathan Ward Ackerman has spelled out the problems of many of our modern American families in very explicit terms.

Also, it has become painfully obvious to students of marriage and family life in our country that a moral revolution has occurred within the past twenty-five years. Subjects discussed only in doctors’ offices a generation ago are now openly dealt with in magazines and newspapers and on radio and television. Juvenile delinquents now quote the Kinsey Report when apprehended by the police.

When lawyers, judges, and physicians turn to the Church for principles to help them in their counseling and decision-making, they are often faced, not with clear-cut guide lines, but with highly complex and individualized explanations that require the training of a doctoral candidate in theology to be understood. This is not to say that the Church should offer simple solutions for complex problems to those seeking assistance. The need, rather, is for a double offensive: (1) to teach Christians how to apply the biblical principles of morality to situations that are not necessarily complex, and (2) to press the search into the true nature of scriptural exhortations on the more difficult family and individual problems.

Challenge Of Mental Illness

Another area in which Christian education may function effectively is combating mental illness. In 1962 the Joint Commission on Mental Illness estimated that more than seventeen million Americans suffer from some form of mental disorder. Are church members immune to mental illness? It appears not. Richard V. McCann, in his report to the Joint Commission (The Churches and Mental Health, Basic Books, 1962), indicates that there is as much mental illness among those who attend church regularly as among those who do not. The significant factor is the home life.

Christians are subject to the same stresses in modern life as non-Christians. Some have a low threshold for withstanding pressures and become ill. This may be true of either adults or children; but children, especially, suffer from environmental forces and may feel the effects for years to come. Of this much we are certain: children from intact homes experience less general distress, fewer marital difficulties, and more marital stability than those from homes disrupted by either separation or divorce (but not by the death of a parent).

The point at which the educational program can contribute to the improvement of mental health is in helping parents build a positive Christian philosophy of life—one that will promote more stable families and foster attitudes and relations that lead to healthy personalities. Parents must be taught that underlying much (though not all) of a child’s behavior is the desire to be accepted and loved. Biblical principles of understanding and forgiveness need to be explained in terms of specific situations. And the importance of helping a child toward independence and maturity so that he can be a responsible and self-directing adult must be emphasized.

The keen interest of the American people in assisting the mentally ill is evidenced by the fact that in an opinion poll in 1958 they declared themselves more willing to be taxed for this than for any other major public service, with the exception of education (Nina Ridenour, Mental Health in the United States—A Fifty Year History, Harvard University Press, 1961). The Church, through its educational program, can also demonstrate concern in this area by providing help to those in need.

The educational ministry also has, or should have, an evangelistic dimension, reaching out to the unchurched with the Gospel of Christ.

To say that Americans have become markedly church-conscious is not to say that the need for evangelism has passed nor that the American church is any more vital than it once was. All we can state is that a greater proportion of the population now claims church membership than in previous generations. In 1850, some 16 per cent of the population was recorded on church rolls. By 1950 this percentage had surged to 57 per cent, and by 1962 it had reached over 63 per cent. These statistics are not to be taken lightly, for they indicate the general religious orientation of our people.

Statistically, we should have cause for rejoicing. However, apart from the fact that some might question the validity of commitment of many of our church members, there remain the 37 per cent who have not allied themselves with any church. In a country of over 185 million, this means that 67 million people are a field for the redemptive news of salvation through our Lord.

If it is true that 85 per cent of all church members come out of the Sunday school enrollment and that the great majority of the uncommitted attending worship services have first taken part in the educational program of the church (J. N. Barnette, The Place of the Sunday School in Evangelism, Convention Press, 1945), then the crucial role played by the educational program for reaching those outside of Christ must be recognized.

Underlying the hesitancy of the unchurched to attend worship services are at least two factors: (1) they may not experience a sense of “belonging” to the church until they become members, whereas in the educational program they are given membership status after several weeks of attendance; and (2) they may not grasp what the people are like spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally as accurately as can be done in informal, interacting situations within the educational program. In short, they want to know what a “church family” is like before they decide to become part of it.

Toward Full Commitment

After an unchurched person has attended one of the educational groups of the church, he begins to understand not only what the people are like but also what they believe. The more he studies the Bible directly and witnesses the love and acceptance of Christians within the educational program, the more he is drawn toward full commitment to Jesus Christ as Saviour. After a time he probably will begin to attend the worship services to learn more about the church and its purpose until finally he makes full commitment to Christ and the church. In this fashion, the educational program makes its God-given contribution to the total evangelistic effort of the church in a very significant manner.

Pastors and laymen have asked, “But what can be done to recruit the needed leadership for an expanded educational thrust?” Many answers could be given. Perhaps the most important is this: An educational “climate” must be created within the church, so that people will become conscious of the teaching ministry as one of the important functions. This will require a long-range effort of at least three to five years. Why? Because new attitudes and motivations are not developed overnight: they take months and years to form. Once they make their appearance, however, they become stable and persistent and so provide their own momentum.

Thus it is essential for the pastor and other church leaders to give the educational task the time and consideration it deserves. If the church boards give only a minimum amount of time to the discussion of educational matters, if only a limited amount of space in the church bulletin is devoted to education, if laymen and pastors rarely give attention to the educational program in the announcements on Sunday, church members will develop, at least subconsciously, the impression that education is a relatively insignificant activity within the total church program. The outcome will be a general reluctance of members to serve in the teaching ministry.

However, if an educational atmosphere is created that complements the church’s evangelistic program, then it will become much easier to approach lay people about serving in the church. Church members will recognize that the Church is truly the Body of Christ (1 Cor. 12) and that each person is responsible for carrying out the plan of God through service in his own local church. With laity and clergy working together, there is every reason to believe that the American churches can see a reversal of the secularism, materialism, and skepticism that have been steadily eating into the life of the Church over the years. And surely the spiritual renewal, increased attendance, and, most of all, additional commitments to Christ that result will bring glory to the One whom we love and serve.

Robert K. Bower is professor of Christian education at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is a graduate of Wayne State University (B.S.), of Northern Baptist Theological Seminary (B.D.), and of the University of Chicago (Ph.D.). Some material in this article will appear in his forthcoming book, “Administering Christian Education,” which is scheduled for publication this year.

- More from Robert K. Bower

Theology

Sharing God’s View of the Cross

Wallace D. Chappell

God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, that everyone who has faith in him may not die but have eternal life (John 3:16, NEB).

The Cross is of God. Before it ever appeared as a visible torture, it was an invisible burden on the heart of God. Man may bypass the Cross, but our Lord would have us look at it from God’s point of view. When we do so, what should we see? First of all:

I. The Method of Atonement. To us this Old Testament term means reconciliation with God, made possible by the death of his Son. Christ took upon himself the sin of the world, and became obedient unto death. He did so to reconcile the world unto God. Thus the Atonement becomes the gateway into the Kingdom.

II. The Power of Surrender. Jesus could have summoned twelve legions of angels to set him free. Instead he yielded to his Father’s will, took the cup, and saved the world. The night he was seized our Lord prayed: “For their sakes I consecrate myself.” That prayer was for his disciples then. It is for his disciples now. Through his giving of himself, we have the blessed opportunity to give ourselves daily, one by one.

III. The Channel of Discipleship. “If any man would come after me, let him take up his cross.” To each of us abandonment of self to the eternal God for the sake of others is the meaning of the Cross. Hence the believer sings: “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”

IV. The Doorway to Eternal Life. The Cross, writes John Milton, “is the key that unlocks the gate of glory.” “It has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake” (Phil. 1:29, RSV). Here Paul says it is a wonderful joy to know the Lord, but an even greater joy to have the privilege of bearing a cross, of being a suffering disciple. Only through that shadow can you come into the light of eternal life.

Christ gave himself for us, one by one. His death brings us life, here and forever. This is what God would have us see at Golgotha.

- More from Wallace D. Chappell

Theology

Current Religious Thought: February 14, 1964

Philip Edgcumbe Hughes

A sense of history is important. One of the tragedies of the present generation is that it has become uprooted from the past and has been taught to believe that all history is irrelevant except the “contemporary” and “existential” history of individual experience. But history is not irrelevant: a sense of the past gives proportion to the present. And in any case we cannot isolate ourselves either from the past or from the future, for constantly and inexorably our “present” is becoming past and the future is becoming present. We are all in the midst of history, and we are all the makers of history.

These thoughts have been prompted by the appearance of a new edition of John Jewel’s celebrated Apology of the Church of England, edited, appropriately and commendably, by an Episcopalian, the Rev. J. E. Booty of the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia. The work, last published over a hundred years ago, was first published four hundred years ago. The question, therefore, is sure to be asked: Has this writing of a bygone age anything relevant to say to us today in the twentieth century?

Our answer to this question is an unhesitating affirmative. It must surely be admitted that the condition of the Church today is not such that it can afford to ignore the lessons of the past. Like us, John Jewel knew what it was to live in troubled times. Born in 1552 in Devon, he was still a young man when Mary came to the throne, and during her persecuting reign he, together with numerous other British Protestants, sought refuge in Reformed circles on the Continent. On the death of Mary and accession of Elizabeth he returned to his native land, and shortly after (in 1559) he was appointed Bishop of Salisbury. His Apology, in Latin, was published in 1562; two years later an English translation appeared, entitled An Apology or Answer in Defence of the Church of England, with a Brief and Plain Declaration of the True Religion Professed and Used in the Same. This translation had been spontaneously prepared by Lady Ann Bacon, the mother of the famous Sir Francis Bacon.

There were two main reasons for its publication. It was intended, first to repudiate false slanders concerning the conduct and ministry of the English clergy, and, secondly, by demonstrating the necessity for the Reformation, to vindicate the Church of England against the charge of schism. Furthermore, it was the Protestant-Roman Catholic dialogue that called forth Jewel’s Apology—a dialogue which, under changing circumstances, has become very much a live issue in our day. The Apology was designed to present a defense of the scriptural and catholic character of the Church of England, as Reformed, over against the Council of Trent, which was then in session. One of the objects of the present Vatican Council, of which there will be further sessions this year, has been described as the completion of the work that was begun at Trent. This, too, is a reason why the Apology should be studied afresh in these days.

Incidentally, it is worth remarking that the judicious Richard Hooker appraised John Jewel as “the worthiest divine that Christendom hath bred for some hundreds of years.”

The vital principle of the Reformation of the sixteenth century was the Word of God mediated in the power of the Holy Spirit through the Holy Scriptures—“the Holy Scriptures,” writes Jewel, “which St. Paul saith came ‘by the inspiration of God,’ which God did commend by so many miracles, wherein are the most perfect prints of Christ’s own steps, which all the holy fathers, apostles, and angels, which Christ Himself the Son of God, as often as was needful, did allege for testimony and proof.”

He affirms the conviction, accordingly, that the Holy Scriptures are “the heavenly voices whereby God hath opened unto us His will; and that only in them man’s heart can have settled rest; that in them be abundantly and fully comprehended all things, whatsoever be needful for our salvation, as Origen, Augustine, Chrysostom, and Cyril have taught; that they be the very might and strength of God to attain to salvation; that they be the foundations of the prophets and apostles whereupon is built the Church of God; that they be the very sure and infallible rule whereby may be tried whether the Church doth stagger or err and whereunto all ecclesiastical doctrine ought to be called to account; and that against these Scriptures neither law, nor ordinance, nor any custom ought to be heard: no, though Paul himself, or an angel from heaven, should come and teach the contrary” (cf. Gal. 1:8). This statement defines admirably the importance which the Reformers attached to the authority of the written Word.

Jewel rejected the charge of schism on the ground that the Reformers had been forced to depart from Rome in order that the essence of the true and original Church might be restored and preserved. “We truly have renounced that church wherein we could neither have the Word of God sincerely taught, nor the sacraments rightly administered, nor the name of God duly called upon.” Theirs was, indeed, an affirmation, not a renunciation, of the Church of Christ: “We have forsaken the church as it is now, not as it was in old times.”

And surely the following words come down as a challenge to us today: “Truly we have sought hereby neither glory, nor wealth, nor pleasure, nor ease.… Neither do we eschew concord and peace, but to have peace with man we will not be at war with God.… Neither ought we to be ashamed of the Gospel. For we set more by the glory of God than we do by the estimation of men. We are sure all is true that we teach, and we may not either go against our own conscience or bear any witness against God. For if we deny any part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ before men, He on the other side will deny us before his Father. And if there be any that will still be offended and cannot endure Christ’s doctrine, such, say we, be blind and leaders of the blind. The truth nevertheless must be preached and preferred above all.”

This is indeed a voice which speaks with solemnity and significance to the Church of our day. Still today it is the truth that matters supremely; and while we welcome the new spirit of geniality and understanding that is developing between the churches, we must never forget that the peace and unity which we seek are only to be found in the truth as it is in Christ Jesus. To this, John Jewel is a witness.

The Church today, both Roman and Protestant, stands in need once again of reformation. Nothing would be more wonderful, no undertaking more fraught with blessing, than if unitedly we were to submit our systems afresh to the light of God’s Word and earnestly intercede for a new experience of the fire of the Holy Spirit, to burn up what is unworthy and to set us ablaze once again for Christ.

- More from Philip Edgcumbe Hughes

A Plan for Fellowship

The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and the American Lutheran Church are planning for pulpit and altar fellowship.

A joint statement released by the two denominations disclosed that the latest move was inaugurated at a meeting in Chicago on January 20. Officials from the two bodies said they regard it as a continuation of contacts between Missouri Synod and the smaller American Lutheran Church which was party to the merger creating the present organization with the same name.

A joint agenda committee meeting to map out future action was scheduled for March 20 in Chicago.

The statement said participants at last month’s meeting “expressed their continued readiness to welcome participation of other Lutheran bodies” in the fellowship discussions.

It was expected that at least one more Lutheran group, the Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (Slovak), will join the talks. However, the Lutheran Church in America with 3.2 million members has declined to participate; its representatives were nevertheless reported as stating they find no reason why the ALC and Missouri Synod “should not feel free to proceed.”

Pulpit and altar fellowship means that the churches involved are in substantial doctrinal agreement and that they permit their pastors to exchange pulpits and their members to partake of Communion at services of the other church.

The 2.5 million-member ALC and the 2.6 million-member Missouri Synod, along with the LCA and the 20,000-member SELC, are currently participating in the Inter-Lutheran Consultation, which is planning a new cooperative association to succeed the National Lutheran Council.

Officials at the Chicago meeting stated emphatically that the inter-church fellowship discussions are independent of the Inter-Lutheran Consultation. “The structure of this proposed agency includes an on-going program of theological study,” their joint statement said, “but explicitly places church fellowship conversations outside the framework of the agency.”

The ALC and Missouri Synod, after tentative plans in recent years to start the fellowship talks, last year announced temporary suspension of the proposal. This action followed the LCA’s decision not to participate and came as formal negotiations on the new agency were starting.

Members of the Inter-Lutheran Consultation met in Chicago immediately following the fellowship talks. They recommended that the name “Lutheran Council in the United States of America” be given the new agency and that its headquarters be established in New York.

Protestant Panorama

New categories of missionary service are being established by the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. In addition to the traditional lifetime career missionaries, the denomination’s Board of World Missions will sponsor three to five-year salaried appointments, one to two-year volunteer appointments with limited support, and additional specialized arrangements.

A Protestant chapel was dedicated in Moscow last month, the first since before the Communists came to power. The chapel is located in a small room in the home of the Rev. and Mrs. Donald V. Roberts near Moscow University. Roberts is an American Presbyterian minister who serves the English-speaking community in the Soviet capital under auspices of the National Council of Churches of the United States.

Episcopal Church Foundation is establishing a series of graduate fellowships in sociology, social planning, psychology, and anthropology “to equip clergy of the Church better to meet today’s social problems.”

Spanish Protestants prepared a joint statement explaining “the common faith” of their churches in a move designed to win legal rights. The statement was drafted for presentation to the government by representatives of the Spanish Evangelical Church, the Spanish Reformed Episcopal Church, the Union of Baptist Churches, the Federation of Independent Baptists, and the Brethren. Meanwhile, ten more Protestant places of worship were authorized to reopen in Spain last month.

Miscellany

The prospect of an inter-faith marriage in the White House presents “a serious test of the ecumenical intention of the Roman Catholic Church,” according to Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The Catholic hierarchy is urged to grant a dispensation to allow Lynda Bird Johnson, the President’s daughter, to choose her own clergyman to officiate at her forthcoming marriage to Bernard Rosenbach, a Roman Catholic. Miss Johnson is a communicant of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

Recordings by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir will continue to be sold in retail stores of the Lutheran Church in America despite objections by one of the denomination’s synods. Members of the LCA Board of Publication denied a request by the Western Canada Synod that sales be stopped. The board said sales are not to be construed as endorsement of theology.

Establishment of a Joint Graduate Consortium among five universities in the District of Columbia—three of them church-related—was announced last month. The plan will enable graduate students to take courses at American University (Methodist), Catholic and Georgetown Universities (Roman Catholic), George Washington University, and Howard University. Faculty and research also will be coordinated.

Two Christian colleges on the West Coast won accreditation last month. Now fully recognized by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges are Azuza College and Southern California College of Costa Mesa. The latter becomes the first school of the Assemblies of God to attain accreditation.

The Canadian Council of Churches came out strongly against legalized gambling last month. A statement adopted by the council’s executive committee urged that churches and other charitable organizations avoid games of chance in fund-raising.

A new missionary radio station in Burundi went on the air in late December. The station is operated by the evangelically oriented Central Africa Broadcasting Company.

Personalia

Dr. Harold E. Fey will retire as editor of The Christian Century August 31. A report from England identified Managing Editor Kyle Haselden as editor-designate. Fey will become visiting professor of Christian social ethics at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis.

Dr. Kendig Brubaker Cully resigned as professor of religious education at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary to assume the chair of Christian education at the Biblical Seminary in New York.

J. Fred Parker appointed book editor for the Nazarene Publishing House. He succeeds the Rev. Norman Oke, who resigned last year to become pastor of the First Church of the Nazarene, Washington, D.C.

Dr. Harold E. Mayo elected president of the Lord’s Day Alliance.

The Rev. Justin A. Wilton, pastor of the Christian Church of Lebanon, Kansas, was named Disciples of Christ “Minister of the Year—Town and Country” for 1963.

They Say

“The Sunday School may not be the basic school for religious education in the 1970s. With a four-day work week and two homes in a family, it is not practical to place primary emphasis on the church as the center of religious education. We may have to concentrate on the home.”—The Rev. Howard F. Reisz, in an address to Lutheran educational specialists.

“The ability of the church to keep up with its young people is the acid test not only of its readiness for renewal but even of its capacity for survival.”—Dr. Eugene L. Smith, Methodist missionary executive, in a consultation in Malaysia.

“If the Christians are not the conscience, morals, and ethics of society, then it doesn’t have any.”—Dr. Clyde W. Taylor, general director of the National Association of Evangelicals, at the NAE’s first Washington seminar.

“There is today in America a widespread belief … that the government should be neutral concerning religion or non-religion—should be neutral and indifferent to the presence or absence of faith in the hearts of the people.”—The Most Rev. John J. Russell, Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Richmond, in a sermon at Washington’s annual Red Mass heard by an audience including President Johnson and Chief Justice Warren.

God’s Handyman in Washington

The closest thing to an evangelical lobby in Washington is located in a modest mezzanine suite overlooking Fourteenth and G Streets. But influencing legislation is only part of the operation in these offices, for the man in charge is 59-year-old Dr. Clyde W. Taylor, who has had the dual role of public affairs director for the National Association of Evangelicals and executive secretary of the NAE-related Evangelical Foreign Missions Association. Taylor’s jobs and interests are so varied that he himself finds them hard to spell out. It was only logical, therefore, to tap further his colorful resources when a serious vacuum developed in NAE leadership.

NAE lost its general director at year-end with the resignation of Dr. George L. Ford. But Ford had given several months’ notice, and the NAE Board of Administration was grooming the Rev. W. Stanley Mooneyham to take over eventually. Mooneyham has been editor of United Evangelical Action, official NAE monthly, and has had church administrative experience as executive secretary and moderator of the National Association of Free Will Baptists. However, about the time Ford was moving out, Mooneyham announced that he too was resigning, to join the Billy Graham team.

The upshot was that the NAE board got the good-humored Taylor to take on the general directorship in addition to his other jobs. He will continue to reside in Washington, in a fashionable split-level overlooking picturesque Rock Creek Park in the Northwest section.

Taylor’s dedication and multi-faceted Christian service have earned him the respect of many as God’s handyman in Washington. His coming in 1944 gave NAE the distinction of being the first Protestant interdenominational organization to open an office in the capital city. Since then the operation has performed a myriad of services for U. S. evangelicals ranging from visa aid to tax counsel and chaplain placement. Taylor seldom fraternizes with Washington’s elite, but he holds the confidence of a host of knowledgeable contacts in echelons where most decisions are made. Perhaps the most dramatic in a long chain of achievements was Taylor’s successful intervention in behalf of a foreign student slated for deportation and almost certain execution for his Christian stand.

Taylor’s acumen on the Washington scene is surpassed only by his grasp of the complexities of the foreign missions enterprise. Chief coordinator for fifty-nine independent missionary boards comprising EFMA, Taylor represents a task force of some 6,100 missionaries. He has flown over 650,000 miles in the last decade and has visited more than 100 countries.

Taylor is a robust, towering (over six-feet-four) man. Born in Arkansas, ordained a Baptist, and educated at Nyack Missionary College, Gordon College, and Boston University, he served as a missionary in South America for thirteen years. Frugality was the rule in those lean years, and Taylor still counts his lunch money carefully, sometimes preferring to bring sandwiches from home.

He seizes every opportunity to brief the rank and file on the status of evangelical advance. In the heat of delivery he is sometimes given to overstatement, but those who know him best say it is almost inevitable in one who is such a vivid thinker. His latest thoughts are on NAE’s future: “We plan to re-examine our whole purpose and policy to see how we can have a more dynamic testimony in society.”

A Cry for the Oppressed

An appeal to the world’s political and religious leaders to protest against the persecution of Christians in Communist countries was sounded in London last month at an Epiphany service attended by Eastern Orthodox.

Participating in the service—held in conjunction with a Christian unity rally in Trafalgar Square in which Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Orthodox, and others joined—was Archbishop Antony, exarch in Western Europe of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church.

His presence created a stir, for it was believed to be the first time that a prelate of the Moscow Patriarchate had been publicly associated with complaints of Soviet anti-religious persecution.

Chief speaker at the service was Russian-born Archpriest Vladimir Rodzianko of the Serbian Orthodox Church of St. Sava in London. He declared that “we do not want to interfere with Soviet laws,” but “we appeal to [the Russians] to follow at least what they themselves set as their own laws” guaranteeing religious freedom.

Father Rodzianko also appealed to the United Nations “to reconsider again the question of religious freedom and liberty.”

Meanwhile, he added, “we the Orthodox gathered here in London, appeal to our Patriarchs and bishops, to the Holy Father of Rome and all his bishops the world over, to our host here—the Archbishop of Canterbury—and all Anglican bishops the world over, to all bishops and ministers of other churches, and to the World Council of Churches to show our Christian unity in this our common concern for our suffering brethren.”

The Orthodox service was held in the Anglican church of St. Dunstan-in-the-West, with the permission of Dr. Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Canon John Satterthwaite, his secretary of foreign affairs.

“We all know,” said Father Rodzianko, “how Christians suffer under the persecution of the godless in Russia, in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, China and elsewhere. I myself—though I would prefer to remain silent on this particular point—stand today in front of you, a Russian-born priest of the Serbian church, as a witness. I was personally privileged to be brought to trial in Yugoslavia together with my church warden, members of the church committee, and some parishioners, for, as it stated, ‘illegal excessive religious propaganda.’ My church warden died in prison—he was beaten to death—and the rest served various terms. I spent two years in prison and labor camps.”

Declaring that although ten years have passed since then, the persecution of religion still continues, he said, “A terrible new wave has started again.”

He related details of a document describing the “dreadful persecution” of Russian Orthodox believers in Byelorussia and the Western Ukraine. The document was prepared by a group of believers and entrusted to some British tourists.

First made public last November, the papers related instances of forcible removal of children from religious instruction and church services, threats against seminary students, harassment of monks and pilgrims, diversion of church funds, and the closing of churches.

“Information we have received from other sources confirms the charges made by these fearless Russian believers who are asking help from the universal church,” Father Rodzianko said. “If we close our ears to that appeal, we will be siding with those who are called ‘the servants of anti-Christ,’ and thus destroying the unity we want to build. But what can we do? We can cry out. We can make the situation known throughout the world. The united Christian opinion throughout the world is a powerful weapon.”

New ‘Pauline’ Document

A Church of England report on deployment and payment of clergy says that under the present system most of the parsons are in the country while most of the people live in the towns. Main proposals of the 300-page document, authored by 58-year-old sociologist Leslie Paul, include direction of ordinands for the first five years of their ministry, creation of new parishes with a team ministry, abolition of patronage and of the anachronism that makes it all but impossible to remove a clergyman from his living except for criminal offenses or immorality.

Scheduled for discussion this month at the Church Assembly, the report quickly came under fire. An archdeacon referred to “a planner’s Pelagian paradise where administrative techniques are substitutes for faith in God and prayer.” Layman Ivor Bulmer-Thomas suggested the new proposals would bring about the reverse of much-needed revival in the Church of England, the decline of which he attributed to “clergymen denying the basic truths, from [Thomas] Arnold in 1832 to the Bishop of Woolwich and the Cambridge theologians in 1964.” But the report has influential supporters, including Dr. Kenneth Riches, Bishop of Lincoln, who insisted that the reforms are long overdue.

J. D. DOUGLAS

The Power Of A Curse

An unscheduled item at Morning Prayer startled worshipers this month in the rural parish of Bramber in Southern England. Dressed in vestments and with outstretched arms, 76-year-old rector Ernest Streete faced his congregation and declaimed: “I pronounce a curse on those who touch God’s acre in this churchyard. May their days be of anguish and sorrow, and may God have mercy on their souls.”

The clerical curse resulted from a raid on the church’s graveyard, variously attributed to vandals and to Black Magic devotees. A stone cross weighing a hundred pounds had been wrenched from a grave and propped up against the church door, tombstone angels had been beheaded, and black mass signs were scrawled on the porch. Attempts to break into the 900-year-old church itself had failed.

“My curse shall stand,” Mr. Streete said, “and I will not relent until they apologize and ask for forgiveness. What they have done is a tremendous insult to the Almighty.”

Next morning, finding that much of the damage had been repaired, he announced that he would arrange for the curse to be lifted the following Sunday. Though Mr. Streete later heard that police had done the repair work, he professed himself in no doubt of the efficacy of his curse.

This is not the rector’s first successful curse: in a former parish a similar malediction pronounced on thieves who rifled the church money boxes was followed by the return of most of the cash, anonymously.

The Bishop of Chichester, Dr. Roger Wilson, commented that the rector had done this on his own initiative, and added: “There is nothing in church ritual that allows this sort of thing.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Making It Legal

“It would seem that certain positions of influence are sometimes barred to men who are determined to remain loyal to the Prayer-Book,” said the Vicar of Islington, the Rev. R. Peter Johnston, in his presidential address to the 130th Islington Clerical Conference at Westminster this month. Illustrating the kind of action involved in such loyalty, he cited evangelical opposition to a bill, due to come up for final approval at the February meeting of the Anglican Church Assembly, which would legalize the wearing of Mass vestments (Anglo-Catholics have long ignored the present prohibition, which is never enforced).

“Granted that to many these garments have no doctrinal significance,” continued Mr. Johnston, “to some at least they are closely linked with Eucharistic teaching which undermines the doctrine of justification by faith.” Should this measure become law, evangelicals will experience increasing difficulty in playing their full part in the life of the Church of England. If the Church Assembly gives its expected sanction the bill will be submitted for approval to Parliament where, despite lobbying by the hierarchy, considerable opposition is anticipated.

Mr. Johnston summarized evangelical objections to the proposed Anglican-Methodist merger (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, News, March 15, 1963). He denied the implication in that report that episcopal ordination was essential for a valid ministry, and asserted that its view of the priesthood stemmed rather from the Oxford Movement than from the formularies of the Church of England. Mr. Johnston predicted that many Methodists would refuse to participate, and that opposition would close the door to reunion with the other English free churches for many years to come. He suggested that all the major denominations in England might explore the possibility of reunion along the lines of the Church of South India, a feature of which is the acceptance of one another’s ministries as they are. “We should do all in our power to avoid wounding the consciences of those who differ from us,” he concluded; “on the other hand, Tractarian principles must not be allowed to determine our relationship with other branches of the Church of Christ.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

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New ‘Pauline’ Document

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