Ministers who are obliged to preach Old Year or New Year sermons are usually hard put to know what to say. To preach about the year as something forever gone and past is a rather melancholy business. For there is something sad about year’s end; melancholy does linger through the last days of a dying year. For some this haunting feeling has the sharp edge of despair, as the sudden increase in suicides so tragically indicates. After all, a year is not just a year, but a year of a man’s life, and the end of the one echoes the end of the other. Old Year sermons consequently tend to be funereal.

A sober realism similarly prevents the maker of New Year sermons from speaking with unbounded enthusiasm about the glowing possibilities often superficially associated with the dawn of a new year. Memories of past years hinder hope that the new year will be all shining and bright.

Why is it difficult even for the Christian minister to make good sermons about the ending of one year and the beginning of a new one? Chiefly, because neither Old Year’s Day nor New Year’s Day is a Christian holiday. Neither day commemorates a great act of God or a significant event in the life of Christ. Our calendar is a Roman calendar, and the origin of its division of time stems from paganism at worst, or from the movement of the stars at best. Consequently, he who feels obliged to preach Jesus Christ “in season and out of season” has peculiar difficulties in his sermonic efforts because he can find nothing distinctively Christian to say about the thirty-first of December or the first of January. Under the circumstances he does the best he can. He either philosophizes about time and its passage, or preaches a sermon equally appropriate to any day of the year, based on a biblical text that knows nothing about Old or New Year days.

Yet there is a distinctively Christian understanding of time that is old and past, and of time that is new and coming. Strangely, few Christians have a clear understanding of it, though even non-Christians constantly pay it silent tribute. And it has to do with Christmas, the most celebrated of Christian holidays. It is the birth and life of Christ that divide the times, ending the old and beginning the new. Christ’s birth has divided our time and history; his death and resurrection have determined what is Old and what is New. He rendered all things before him Old, all things that come after, New. The division he made is absolutely decisive; what he did can happen only once, and, once it has happened, cannot be undone.

The peculiar way the Western world numbers the years is a mute but powerful testimony to this significance of Christ’s birth. The familiar B.C. and A.D. express a deep theological insight. Numerically the years before Christ can be counted either forward or backward. Yet the West counts them backward, thereby expressing the theological understanding that what happened before Christ is not only past but also finished and complete. And the countback begins with Christ, from the center, for he made them old and past. But the years after Christ are counted forward, for as the New they are always new; pulsating with eternity, they open out upon an authentic, never-ending future. This theological understanding of Christ’s birth as a division of time so decisive as to be the only point of departure for any meaningful count of the years, is the significance of B.C. and A.D. It is something to which every newspaper, check, business transaction, every piece of correspondence daily bears silent witness.

Christmas and New Year’s are but a week apart. But how often within a week men forget the meaning of Christmas and celebrate their own division of the times, haunted as it is with melancholy and unable as it is to sustain a new departure toward better things.

As 1963 dies, let Christians not sorrow as those having no hope; as they enter 1964, may they enter it carrying the memory of the meaning of Christ’s entrance into our time and knowing that he who divides time gives those trusting in him the power to redeem time. For each year and each day falls under the division of B.C. and A.D.

At this season of the year, there is but one Christian affirmation: Our times are in Thy hand.

The ancient land of Portugal is yielding in a slow but gratifying way to evangelical Protestant penetration. Much Spanish and Portuguese Catholicism remains hostile and intolerant of evangelical Christianity, some of the most “conservative” churchmen participating in Vatican Council II coming from this European peninsula. Yet believers are daring nonetheless to pray daily that Portugal may be stirred by divine blessing upon the courageous witness of united evangelical forces.

The Portuguese are in fact adrift from their traditional Romanist moorings. Some Dutch Catholics are said to consider Portugal a mission field. In a land the size of Indiana, with almost ten million inhabitants, some 70 to 90 per cent of the people are not attending Catholic churches, the figure varying with the provinces. Of Catholic candidates for the priesthood, proportionately fewer arrive at the goal from seminaries in Portugal than in any other country in Europe. Some 40 per cent of the population remains illiterate. In some sections there is but one priest to every 12,000 inhabitants. In this land of the legends of Fatima, religious life is crassly superstitious, and for many Portuguese Catholics the doctrine of Mary’s assumption into heaven has become more significant than the ascension of Jesus. When the Baptist Convention of Portugal during an evangelistic effort in Porto paid for billboards proclaiming Christ the hope of the world, Catholic zealots superimposed the words “Christ and the Virgin.”

Despite the deterioration of their own religious position, some Catholic leaders repeatedly exert subtle political pressures to repress Protestant evangelistic efforts. A Keswick convention of sorts was held annually at Carrascal until Catholic pressures forced the Y.W.C.A. to discontinue building a rest home there in 1948. Jesuits in Portugal as well as in other lands label evangelical workers as Communists or as political agitators and through the hierarchy’s publications discredit them as pernicious and dangerous. Evangelical pastors are denied the vocational identification card granted to priests and to bricklayers and barbers because their category is nationally “unrecognized.” Alongside this religious prejudice against Protestants, new restrictions have recently been placed on the importation of evangelical books—even Bibles. In some cases postal and customs authorities have turned back as much as 75 per cent of such literature, and some Sunday schools now lack quarterlies for lesson studies despite repeated appeals to Portuguese authorities. Government funds are used to build Roman churches, and church-state relations are interpreted specially to benefit Catholicism. A papal concordat exempts Catholic priests from paying income taxes.

Although Portugal’s long history has many anti-papal facets, and neither the prime minister nor the people want to be “stepped on” by the Catholic hierarchy, the present situation is ambiguous. The hierarchy’s anti-evangelical temper flashed hot in the aftermath of a sudden and in some ways amazing evangelical breakthrough in Portugal earlier this year. A cooperative evangelical thrust in Lisbon, with the Lebanese evangelist Samuel Doctorian as speaker, resulted in nightly crowds of 3,000 persons, a cumulative attendance of some 70,000, and at least 1,400 decisions—including priests, atheists, and persons from all walks of life. After the meetings had run twenty nights they were halted by police. A protest to the civil governor of Lisbon was unavailing. Orders to intervene (reported reliably to have come from the Cardinal of Lisbon) were provoked by anxieties lest all Lisbon become unsettled by evangelical preaching.

Then evangelical workers in the southern province of Algarve near the Straits of Gibraltar (where evidence is still found of the Moorish invasion and five centuries of occupation) united for a small but successful evangelistic effort. But most spectacular was a thirteen-day crusade to the north that for the first time united virtually all evangelical workers in Porto, the nation’s second city. There were some 400 decisions. After the first week a Methodist minister invited workers to a tea which, they discovered, was arranged by twenty-two young people converted during the opening nights.

Evangelical leaders contend they can hardly be charged with proselyting since the masses have neither heard the Gospel nor maintained their church ties, and the people themselves are showing signs of new interest in Christian realities. Among Protestant leaders a few express fear that mass evangelism will provoke Romanist countermeasures. But these same spokesmen seem also to oppose foreign missionary effort and mass evangelism under any circumstances.

While there is little open persecution of Protestants, there is underground opposition, and evangelicals are disallowed full freedom of public evangelistic meetings. For about two years new congregations have been unable to gain “legal personality” as corporate entities with property rights except as missions of older efforts previously recognized.

What marked the evangelical breakthrough in Portugal was a vivid sense of sin and shame which overpowered those attending the special meetings and constrained many to cry out for divine salvation. At one banquet even the waiters were convicted and filled with a longing for deliverance, and several were converted.

Although the Portuguese are outside the churches, they respect God and are open to the Gospel. But the hunger of the people is now awakening more rapidly to material than to spiritual desires in a land of much hardship and poverty. The fact that many evangelicals are themselves “have-nots” gives them special appeal in speaking of blessings beyond the material.

Pentecostals have the largest church in Lisbon (seating 1,500) and are active in personal work and diligent in stewardship, But vigorous churches are also maintained by the Brethren, Independents, Baptists, Lusitanians (Episcopal), Methodists, and Presbyterians. The number of evangelical believers is now thought to exceed 30,000. Baptists have the most seminary-trained ministers. In one Presbyterian church in Lisbon twenty-two persons recently responded to a Communion Sunday call for converts, and prayer-meeting attendance has multiplied several times.

The growing interest of Protestant pastors and evangelists in a united “evangelism in depth” effort on a nationwide basis is one of the significant developments, since the divisions among Protestants are an obstacle which Catholics exploit. Interdenominational activities have helped prepare the way across the years, under sponsorship such as the Evangelical Alliance, the Comissao Inter-Edesiastica Portuguesa, Christian Endeavor, the Portugal Sunday Schools Union, and in some areas the Y.M.C.A. also. There are now 600 Protestant churches and missions and 300 pastors and evangelists in Portugal. A large number of missions are led by laymen, many because of a shortage of ministers or lack of financial ability, although the Brethren prefer a lay ministry. Among Portugal’s 70,000 gypsies a growing company of converts now includes numerous voting people determined to prepare to preach the Gospel to their own people. Another hopeful factor is the emergence of an organization of Christian businessmen meeting periodically in Lisbon and aggressively interested in an evangelistic thrust.

A Campaign Against Christianity

Placed in the hands of church authorities in London last month was a detailed document describing what it tails the “dreadful persecution” of Russian Orthodox believers in Byelorussia and the Western Ukraine.

Brought by a British tourist who visited the Soviet Union, it was signed by a group of “parishioners and pilgrims of the Orthodox churches throughout Russia” and addressed to the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul and to the Patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem, “and others.”

Church sources said they regarded the document as exceptionally important not only in describing the atheistic policies of the Soviet regime—as reflected in two important areas of Russia—but in indicating the courage and tenacity of great masses of Orthodox believers in resisting all attempts to wean them from religion.

One source said that “while many visitors to the U.S.S.R. have reported on evidences of the strong religious devotion still found there, this document offers a tragic but inspiring insight into precisely what this means in terms of personal courage and fortitude.”

Although undated, the document appeared to have been written subsequent to August 6, the most recent date mentioned in the text.

The document confirms reports last December that monks at the Pochayev Monastery in the Tarnopol region of the Western Ukraine have been subjected to severe persecution at the hands of Soviet secret policy.

In Byelorussia, it charged, churches and monasteries have been ordered closed and torn down, ruthless campaigns of persecution have been carried out against parents who seek to give their children a religious education, clergymen have been forbidden to conduct religious services, and monks have been hounded and vilified.

The document also charged that “in order to exterminate the Orthodox faith and to speed up the closing of the churches, the government is secretly training its godless Communists as priests. They appoint them as heads of churches and cathedrals and make them bishops and priests.”

Worse still, it said, some priests through weakness, have become servants of “the Anti-Christs who may well convert the Orthodox Church into a heretical church.”

According to the document, the current anti-religious campaign began in 1959 when children of school and pre-school age were forbidden to serve as acolytes to bishops anywhere in Russia. This was done, it said, on orders of Vladimir Kuroyedov, president of the State Council in charge of Russian Orthodox affairs.

Between 1960 and 1962, it said, three churches were closed—two of them were later demolished—in Minsk, Kozyrevskaia, and Semitskava. In 1961 authorities in Byelorussia forbade the reception of Holy Communion and church attendance by children under eighteen.

“The mockery has gone so far.” the document said, “the strict representative stands next to the church of the Minsk archdiocese, spying on the children. If he finds any children in the church, he speaks to the churchwarden and this servant of Anti-Christ collars them and knocks their heads against the wall.”

The report said one of the children was the son of a pious widow, whose house was later visited by state investigators who stripped the walls of all ikons, and took away all her religious books. The agents also threatened to send her son and her other children to a boarding school where they would be protected from the “contamination” of religion.

Citing similar cases, the document said many parents in Minsk had pleaded with the civil authorities “not to drive their children out of church.” Some, it said, even went to Moscow to plead before Premier Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders, “but their appeals were ignored.”

On May 30 last, the document recalled, many pilgrims from all over Russia came to venerate a famous ikon of the Blessed Virgin in the village of Zhirovitsy in the Grodno district, but local authorities barred clergymen from conducting services.

Minsk and Grodno authorities also sent agents to intimidate young men planning to enter a monastery in Zhirovitsy, the report said, and as a result none of them enrolled.

Pentecostal Aid

How Pentecostal churches may help other denominations receiving gifts of tongues was one of the keynotes of the sixteenth annual convention of the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America, held last month in Montreal. The Rev. Thomas Zimmerman. general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, said the Pentecostal movement has the responsibility of guiding those experiencing this phenomenon to prevent the tendencies to excess which often characterized the Pentecostal movement in its own early days.

The $500,000 Virgin Of Kazan

The Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of America, at its quadrennial Sobor (general convention) in New York City, agreed to purchase a 500-year-old ikon of the Virgin Mary from a private collector for $500,000.

Measuring 10 by 13 inches and encrusted with some 1,000 diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and pearls, the ikon, known as the “Virgin of Kazan,” is named for the Russian city where it was painted in about 1400.

Plans call for the ikon to be displayed in the New York World’s Fair pavilion of the Russian church, which does not recognize the Moscow Patriarchate. The painting was shown at the Holy Virgin Protection Cathedral in New York during the convention, and before that was on a tour of the United States and Canada.

Credited with many miracles, the ikon is believed to have been in a Moscow Orthodox cathedral until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. It was sold by the Communists and is now owned by Miss Anna Mitchell-Hedges of Farley Castle, Berkshire, England, who agreed to sell it to the Russian church in America.

Depicted in the ikon with the Virgin Mary is the Child Jesus resting in her arms. The gems around the painted wooden panel are encrusted in a silver gilt rizza which covers all the ikon except the faces of Mary and Jesus. It is believed that this rizza was added to the picture in about 1600.

“When the king, having ended the time of fasting, kept his Easter, the queen and her followers were still fasting, and celebrating Palm Sunday.” This intriguing domestic vignette, in which the principal characters were the Anglo-Saxon king Oswy and his queen Eanfleda, described by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History, was enacted thirteen hundred years ago, in the middle of the seventh century. It serves to remind us of the fact that the question of the proper date of Easter has been a center of much controversy in the history of the Church.

The question has been brought to the fore once again by the announcement that the Vatican Council, now in session in Rome, has by an overwhelming majority (2,058 to 9) agreed to fixing the date of Easter in the event that civil authorities adopt a calendar reform. As things are now, the date of Easter changes from year to year, falling on the first Sunday after the full moon which occurs on or next after March 21. This involves variations of date between the limits of March 22 and April 25, so that Easter is at present very much a moving feast. (The Eastern churches follow a different system for computing the date of Easter.)

In the early Church, controversy was aroused when some Christians, especially those of Asia Minor, maintained that Easter, the Christian Passover (see 1 Cor. 5:7), should coincide with the date of the Jewish Passover, which fell invariably on the fourteenth day of the lunar month Nisan. The rest of the Christian world insisted that Easter should always fall on a Sunday. Thus in the middle of the second century Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the bishop of Rome, Anicetus, to conform to the usage favored in Asia Minor. Later in that same century Anicetus’s successor Victor actually excommunicated Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, for holding to the Jewish date—an action which called forth a rebuke from Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons. By this time it had become normal to celebrate Easter on the Sunday following Nisan 14; but even so the issue was complicated by a further controversy over the method of determining the date of the paschal moon.

The First General Council, held at Nicea in A.D. 325, sought to resolve this conflict by making the regulation that Easter should be observed throughout the Church on the Sunday following the full moon next after the vernal equinox. But the continuing use of different paschal cycles, in particular in Rome and Alexandria, meant that confusion was still not eliminated. Between the Roman and the Alexandrian Easter there was a difference of a week, as there was also between the Roman date and the date observed by the Celtic churches of the British Isles—hence the intriguing situation in which one and the same day was Easter Day for King Oswy and Palm Sunday for Queen Eanfleda. This divergence continued until the Roman system was formally approved by the Synod of Whitby in A.D. 664—a decision which at first applied only to the territory of Northumbria, but which five years later was extended to the whole country.

Of course, the calculation of the date of Easter by reference to lunar cycles means that it is not a fixed festival, but shifts constantly within the limits that have been mentioned. This is not a particularly convenient arrangement, and the advantages of a fixed date are widely acknowledged. The fact is that there seems to be no good reason, apart from predilection for old-established custom, why there should not be universal agreement over a proposal for a fixed date.

The proposal is not a new one. For instance, to glance at more recent years, in 1928 the British Parliament approved what is known as the Easter Act, in accordance with which Easter would fall on the Sunday following the second Saturday in April. But this act will not come into force unless and until the general agreement of the churches has first been obtained. In 1949 the proposal that a perpetual world calendar should be approved was discussed by the United Nations, but was subsequently put into cold storage. It will be as well for the Christian Church if it is left there permanently, in view of the fact that a universal calendar is unlikely to find anyplace for the great festivals and seasons of the Christian year.

The British proposal is a sensible one, though it would mean that Easter was only virtually fixed: the actual date would still vary, but the variation would be within the limits of a few days instead of, as at present, five weeks, and complicated calculations would no longer be necessary.

A scheme has in fact been suggested which would have the effect of making Easter an absolutely fixed date; namely, Sunday, April 8. This would be achieved by dividing the year into four quarters of thirteen weeks each. But there is a loose end to this scheme, for there would be a blank day to be added in somewhere each year to make up the 365 days (two days would have to be added in a leap year); this awkwardness is unlikely to commend itself.

Less commendable still would be an absolutely fixed date, which would mean the incidence of Easter on a different day of the week each succeeding year. It can hardly be a matter of doubt that Christian churches throughout the world very rightly insist that Easter Day should fall invariably on a Sunday. Each Sunday is in itself for the Christian a little Easter, reminding him of the first day of the week on which his Lord rose triumphantly from the dead. In the words of Isaac Watts’s Sunday hymn:

Today Christ rose and left the dead,

And Satan’s empire fell;

Today the saints His triumphs spread,

And all his wonders tell.

While preaching doctrine from the Gospel of John, make ready to deal with Bible ethics, based on doctrine. The Bible contains almost as much ethics as doctrine. After Easter, believers new and old need doctrine and ethics. The latter more difficult! Commentaries: G. C. Findlay (Exp. Grk. Test.); H. L. Goudge (Eng.). The lists here suggest too many sermons before midsummer. Save time for the later parts.

Introductory: “The Welfare of the Local Church” (12:27, RSV). I. Present Perils. II. Moral Problems. III. Christian Ideals. Like the Apostle, answer local questions, and lead up to vital doctrines. Unless local conditions call for the first topic, pass it by. In such a course, begin and end strongly.

“The Folly of Church Cliques” (1:10). “The Supremacy of the Cross” (2:2). In Columbia, South Carolina, during World War I, the government closed the red-light district. Later the city fathers planned to let it open. After an evening sermon, “The Folly of Segregating Sin” (Rom. 14:13, Augustine’s text), I received an anonymous card: “1 Cor. 2:2 is better than segregation. Preach the Gospel!” Paul did so by looking at city sin in the light from the Cross. Only a pulpit coward would ignore such a local issue. Incidentally, the red-light district did not reopen.

“The Christian a Farmer for God” (3:6, in a rural church). “The Believer a Builder for God” (3:10b). When the Apostle employs the singular, as here, do likewise. Who can “improve” a Bible text about one person? “The Holiness of the Believer’s Body” (6:10). Church-coiners often think that goodness has to do only with a soul, an idea foreign to the Gospel. “The Declaration of Christian Dependence” (8:12. RSV). In dealing with a matter neither right nor wrong, a believer should refrain for the sake of a weak brother. This principle has to do with current games, such as pool, in itself harmless. In Louisville the church people keep away from Churchill Downs and its horse races.

“The Christian a Spiritual Athlete” (9:25). In writing to a sports-minded city Paul used athletic terms. “The Way to Deal with Temptation” (10:13). “The Christian in Ordinary Affairs” (10:31). “The Sermon in the Lord’s Supper” (11:26). In the New Testament the word here rendered “show” usually (fifteen cases out of seventeen) means to preach. The Supper the most wondrous sermon since the Ascension of Christ! In a church where university students filled a long balcony, we had on Communion Day no sermon or meditation. But more students then applied for membership than on any other day. A sermon!

“The Church the Body of Christ” (12:27, NEB). A lofty ideal for the local kirk! “The Greatness of Christian Love” (13:13). Sometime deal with the chapter: I. Great by Contrast with Things Good. II. Greater Still in Itself. III. Greatest of All in Permanence. Love lasts: from infancy to manhood, youth to old age, time to eternity. Find this love supremely in Christ and his Cross.

“The Wonders of the Heavenly Harvest” (15:20). In the Mediterranean world harvest comes early, and brings joy. If feasible, deal with the two parts in separate sermons: I. The Resurrection of Christ Marks the Beginning of the Heavenly Harvest. II. The Resurrection of Believers Will Mark the Completion. As for the resurrection and judgment of unbelievers, that calls for another sermon.

“The Resurrection of the Believer’s Body” (15:44). The hardest part of the Apostles’ Creed for many an adult to say. The message calls for no proof, argument, or attack, but for clear, kind, radiant teaching of what the Bible reveals, and what difference the truth makes now, as well as hereafter. “The Resurrection in Everyday Living” (15:5–8). “The Christian as God’s Trustee” (16:2), as a consequence of believing in the Resurrection. The term “steward” has lost its pristine luster, but a trustee of church or college is somebody. What an honor to serve as one of God’s trustees, according to his Book!

Why does Christian ethics not now bulk so large in evangelical pulpits as in the New Testament and in other golden ages of preaching? Partly for three reasons: (1) Such pulpit work is difficult, too much so for a beginner. (2) Appeals to conscience may not prove popular; they hurt. (3) Some orthodox persons think it unwise to preach anything but Good News. Such an idea would have astounded Paul and his Lord. On the other hand, many “moral sermons” are not based on doctrine, and are not blessed of God.

If you wish to meet the needs of laymen, learn to do the most difficult sort of preaching from the Bible. (Abridged from an article in Southwestern Journal of Theology, October, 1960. Used by permission.)

I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2).

What is this Cross of Christ? The master thought of eternal God, the symbol of devotion, the measure of duty, the impulse to righteous living. There is no sin to which we must surrender, no habit that cannot be shattered, no victory that cannot be won through Christ and his Cross.

I. Witnesses to the Supremacy. A. The supreme emphasis of Paul, the master preacher in the Christian Church, and of thoughtful, devout men and women across the centuries. The greatest preachers of the Church have found this passage of Scripture stored with teaching. Devout men and women have rekindled their ardor at the flame of this declaration. Uncounted millions have recited it in their last prayers.

B. The Compelling Power of Great Convictions. “I determined”—the language of the man who has thought his way through to great convictions, and is now ready to suffer the consequence of loyalty to those convictions. “Determined.” however, is not the chief word in the text. The key word is “I know.” C. The Voice of Christian Experience. It is much easier to know things said about Christ than to know his Cross, than to know him about whom they are said, and to bring total life under the mastery of the Christ of the Cross.

II. The Consequences of This Experience. Three major results follow. A. To know Christ and him crucified is to know God. Jesus came into the world to show us God, to bridge the gap that separated us from God, to bring man the sinner back into the family of God. Men knew that God was great; they did not know that he was good. Jesus came to say that God is Father, a new name for the One who sent him on his earthly mission. On the Cross Jesus unveiled the face of God the Father.

B. The Cross Gives a New Philosophy of Life. If you come under its spell you say that it is better to be the servant of a hundred people than to have a hundred servants. You find life by giving it away for the glory of God and the good of others, not by hoarding it for yourself. This Cross is the revelation of redemption to us all through the revelation of God.

C. The Cross Holds the Secret of Triumphant Living. Once you know the Cross you have learned how to live, how to put first things first. When we have found the Cross, life is a new experience. We know God. We have the correct philosophy of life. We have the secret of creativity and effective living. But if we miss the Cross, ours is the deepening darkness of men gone blind. As for me, I am determined to know Christ, and him crucified.—From The Mighty Saviour, by permission of Abingdon Press.

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?… So glorify God in your body (1 Cor. 6:19, 20).

Every member of the church in Corinth needed to know the Christian teaching about the body. So does every person in this congregation and this community. We live in a time when everyone tends to think much about the body. Would that all of this thinking were according to Christ!

I. The Christian Doctrine about the Body. In a city where men loved architecture, especially in temples, Paul wrote about the body as a temple of God. A. The most wonderful thing God ever has made. The body not so amazing as the soul, but both made of God for each other. Nothing visible seems to be so dear to the heart of God.

B. The Ravages of Sin. Especially in a city like Corinth, a body may become a stench in the nostrils of men, worse than a sty for hogs. How much drunkenness and adultery offend the holy God! Also, overeating and other forms of bodily excess. How many of a man’s sins have to do with his body? Does he repent, confess, quit?

C. The Re-creation. When Christ redeems a man, that includes his body, with pardon, cleansing, and peace. Then the Holy Spirit continues to transform this place where he dwells. All the while he wishes you to serve as the God-appointed custodian of this temple that he has made. What a privilege, an honor, and a responsibility!

II. The Christian Use of Your Body. Deal with it as you wish the custodian to care for the home church edifice. A. Dedicate your body to God. Have you ever done so, as a definite act of worship? How often do you renew such giving of the body to the One from whom it came? As really as the minister, the right sort of custodian looks on his calling as holy unto the Lord.

B. Use the body in ways pleasing to God. During the Revolutionary War British troops used the Old South Meeting House as a stable for horses. Later men restored it for the worship of God and the service of men. By His grace let your body be useful every day. As a start, have a bodily check-up tomorrow.

C. Look forward to the Resurrection. In some mysterious way that body will share in the resurrection and the life everlasting. Meanwhile regard it as precious to the Redeemer, who in his own body died to redeem you, both sold and body, and by his Spirit waits to guide in using this body for the glory of the One from whom it came.

After a few words of prayer, we are all going to sing the noblest of our evangelistic hymns, “Just as I Am.” In the spirit of that hymn, and of our text, now dedicate your body to Christ, and seek his blessing that you may use it here in such a manner that it will become worthy to share in the Resurrection.

Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept (1 Cor. 15:20).

The introduction obviously would have to do with the harvest as the culmination of life on the farm, and the happiest season of the year. With a different topic the approach could be through the idea of “first-fruits.” An introduction ought always to depend on the thought-forms of the hearers now. Here the brief approach leads up to the Resurrection of Christ, a mystery of light, about which we as yet know only in part.

I. The Resurrection of His Body. When young I thought I believed only in the resurrection of His soul. Then I discovered his soul did not die (Luke 23:43b). If I did not believe in the resurrection of his body, I did not believe in his Resurrection, but only in his Immortality, a truth different. Now I believe in the Resurrection of his entire Person, as the Bible clearly shows.

II. In a Sense the Same Body. The same in the sense of continuity. The Bible stress does not fall on the empty tomb, save as it shows the continuity between the body on the Cross and that of the Risen Lord. By the resurrection of that dear body our God shows how much he cares for the body of every person whom he has created.

III. And Yet Not the Same. In the earthly life of our Lord, the body did not remain the same. It grew and developed perfectly, according to the Father’s will. And neither did the body of the Risen Lord seem to his dearest friends the same as the one they had laid in the tomb. Here again we enter into mystery, which we cannot hope to fathom until we again see Him face to face, and begin to know as we are known. Meantime we ought gladly to accept the facts that God has revealed (Deut. 29:29), and leave with him these that he yet waits to reveal.

IV. The Fact of His Continued Life. In all the biblical accounts of His post-resurrection appearances the stress falls on his living then, as it ought today to fall on his living now. About the Resurrection, as often on other Bible truth, too much of our preaching and thinking has been in past tenses. According to James Denney, “The Church lives, not only by what Christ was, but by what He is; not only by what He did, but supremely by what He does.… Faith always has its object here and now, and without faith there is no Christianity” (Studies in Theology, pp. 20, 154).

In the New Testament records of our Lord’s mission on earth the center of gravity lies beyond the grave. In the fact of his Resurrection and his living Presence the early believers found their joy, their power, and their radiance. If as believers today we have lost the radiance, the power, and the joy of the early Church, we can find all of this where those early believers found it, in the living Presence of the Risen Lord. Let us seek this blessing now in prayer.

Spirit of the laving God, shine upon the open page and bring the truth to light in the face of Jesus Christ, the Risen Lord.

Every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming (1 Cor. 15:23).

The introduction has to do with the Resurrection in terms of harvest joy. All of this should be interesting to those who attended church a week ago, and clear to anyone who did not. Every sermon ought to be a complete unit, with no overlapping.

Today we consider the difficult words in the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” What then should you believe? Only what the New Testament teaches, and ideally all that it teaches. Here we shall deal only with the truth as that truth is related to believers, one by one.

I. A Heavenly Mystery. The truth here comes by revelation of God, and largely through the Resurrection of Christ. This truth we accept, not because we can understand it all, but because we believe in it and in His Holy Book. After all, how much do we mortals really comprehend about life, either here or hereafter? But all of this God knows.

II. More than Immortality. We likewise believe what the Bible reveals, but does not strongly stress, that Christ came to bring life and immortality to light. The noblest of the Greeks believed what George Eliot later sang about “the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again in lives made better by their presence.” But Paul led believers in Corinth to accept what we today rejoice to hold true: that “the souls of believers do at their death immediately pass into glory, and their bodies, being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves until the Resurrection,” “the one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves.”

III. The Sleep of the Body. As a rule the New Testament refers to the end of a believer’s earthly life as a sleep, and beyond that sleep, the awakening in the Father’s home. Here we must think of heaven in terms of earth, and not push any such figure too far. In so far as we can tell, the soul does not ever sleep, but is changed, in the twinkling of an eye, into “such full-grown energies as suit the purposes of heaven,” and for a while awaits the reunion with the body, which God will glorify. “Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?” (Acts 26:8).

IV. The Resurrection Body. As for the “spiritual body” after the resurrection of believers, we shall have to leave the understanding to our God. After all, what does it often mean for a child of God to have faith in him? Surely to trust him and his goodness when one cannot begin to comprehend what he will do for the body of one redeemed at the Cross, and afterward transformed into perfect completeness for the life everlasting in the unseen City of God. What a source of comfort, peace, and joy to you as a believer in Christ, as you “nightly pitch (your) moving tent a day’s march nearer home.

Does some one whisper fervently: “I wish I could be sure of all that”? My friend, you can! You will, if you come close to Christ in the Book, and live close to him in prayer. Little by little, it may well be, but surely he will lead you to testify with “the holy Church throughout all the world: I believe in the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”

The Debate Continues

Essays on Old Testament Hermeneutics, edited by Claus Westermann (John Knox, 1963, 363 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by Charles F. Pfeiffer, professor of Old Testament Literature, Gordon Divinity School, Wenham, Massachusetts.

The interpretation of the Old Testament and the relation between Old and New Testaments have been the subjects of lively debate since World War II. Claus Westermann has assembled fifteen essays, originally published in German, to provide a basis for discussion of these important themes. The contributors include the best-known names in German Old Testament scholarship: Gerhard von Rad, Martin Noth, Friedrich Baumgartel, Walther Zimmerli, Westermann himself, and a number of others.

Although the scholars differ among themselves at numerous points, they agree in insisting that the text of Scripture must be studied in the light of contemporary knowledge of history and philology. Westermann seeks to deal with two problems: (1) the relation between the story of the acts of God as testified to by the people of God and the history of Israel as seen by historical research; and (2) the relation of the Old Testament to the New Testament, particularly the search for a valid concept for establishing the unity between the two Testaments.

Zimmerli, writing the chapter “Promise and Fulfillment.” sees faith in Christ as an answer. While rejecting the idea that an apologetic proof for Christ can be derived from the Old Testament, he suggests that the believer may recognize in the Old Testament a book of genuine allusions to Jesus Christ. Rudolf Bultmann in his article “Prophecy and Fulfillment” is more negative in his conclusions. He affirms that the New Testament writers used the same exegetical principles as did Philo. Even to Bultmann, however, there is a valid way of seeing Christ through the Old Testament. The “miscarriage” of Old Testament history itself provides a ray of hope. The history of failure so prominent in the writings of the Old Testament is to the eye of faith, says Bultmann, a promise.

Von Rad, writing on “Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament,” disowns the practice of focusing attention on historical or biographical details, but insists that typological interpretation rightly understood is valid. He says, “… typological interpretation has to do only with the witness to the divine event, not with such correspondence in historical, cultural, or archaeological details as the Old Testament and the New may have in common.” It is the kerygma, rather than narrative details, that finds expression in Old Testament typology.

The variety of ideas gathered together for our instruction by Westermann underscores the gulf between scientific biblical study and popular understanding. Baumgartel in his article “The Hermeneutical Problem of the Old Testament” notes the tension existing between biblical science and the Church, and makes it clear that the fault is not all on one side. Research has as its aim the discovery of truth. Westermann’s collection of essays will provide no pat answers, but it will provide food for thought in the hands of mature scholars of both Old and New Testaments.

CHARLES F. PFEIFFER

With Vigor And Clarity

Four Prophets, by J. B. Phillips (Geoffrey Bles, 1963, 161 pp., 15s.), is reviewed by J. A. Motyer, vice-principal, Clifton Theological College, Bristol, England.

No book can escape without some adverse criticism. However, since it is the object of this review to accord warm praise to this translation of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah 1–35, and Micah, it may be well to dispose of the complaints first. It is a pity that the introduction, which displays such sensitivity toward the requirements of the Hebrew language, should give the impression of textual disorder in these prophetical books, and should suggest that it is but a moment’s work for “scholars” to diagnose and cure the complaint. In the same way, we can only regret that translations have been offered of amended texts without any annotation of the fact in footnotes, and that the verse order of the Massoretic text has been sometimes upset without, be it said, either a word of justification or a compensating advantage in clarity. The translator allocated the task of historical introduction to the Rev. E. H. Robertson, but the resulting prose-poem, dwelling on the contemporary movements in pagan thought as much as on the state of the people of God, and urging that “over the whole world the Spirit of God stirred the spirit of man,” not only seriously damages the uniqueness of these inspired prophets, but leaves the general reader without a sharp awareness of the situation they faced.

In the translation itself, it is a major tragedy that no attempt was made to represent the Divine Name (even the traditional device of capital letters is absent), with consequent loss of accuracy and of theological and devotional flavor. And, of course (though subjectivity is necessarily rampant here), there are times where one is forced to say that “the old is better”: for example, “Make yourselves ready to meet your God” is inferior to “Prepare to meet thy God” (Amos 4:12); the passover reference is missed in, “I will not relent again” (Amos 7:8); “Husks will be your food” (Isa. 1:20) both manhandles the text and loses robustness. One matter, however, where the old has been retained to the detriment of clarity is the divine appellation, “of hosts.” Could not Phillips have turned his skillful hand to paraphrase this?

Turning away, in the second place, from adverse criticism, there is no doubt that we have here a notable addition to Bible translations. The prophetical books offer to the general reader a sort of literary Sahara, and to the translator the biggest challenge in the Bible. In so ably meeting the latter, Phillips has gone far to overcome the former. He has broken up the text with his own system of shoulder-headings, and usually has illuminated the meaning of the passage by setting its direction in this way. We would expect a vigorous translation, and we find it: “… compose melodies as though you were David himself” (Amos 6:5); “… seen, seized, and swallowed all in a moment” (Isa. 28:4); “No, we must have horses to ride, Very well, you shall ride—in full retreat! We must have swift horses, you say; Your pursuers will be swifter still!” (Isa. 30:16).

Phillips is too experienced a translator to try to reproduce the Hebrew puns of Micah 1, but, because he is not afraid of the accusation of paraphrasing, he carefully makes each clear: “In Aphrah, the house of dust, grovel in the dust” (1:10), and so on. In individual matters readers will be interested to know that in Isaiah 7:14 is found “maiden”; that “Adam” is retained in Hosea 6:7. However, the messianic reference is virtually excluded in Isaiah 4:1 and 32:1. To vigor and clarity, Phillips often adds moments of rare feeling and beauty. Isaiah 33:17–24 is outstanding, but is only one of many places where the reader is moved to read again and again, and always with profit.

The translation is, on the whole, accurate, although, of course, there are points at which a different view of the meaning could be urged. For example, Hosea 13:14 is translated as a question, and the passage is not held to express a hope after death. This sort of difference of opinion is inevitable, but the over-all excellence of this work remains.

J. A. MOTYER

Belief And Unbelief

Atheism in Our Time, by Ignace Lepp, translated by Bernard Murchland (Macmillan, 1963, 195 pp., $5), is reviewed by Carl F. H. Henry, editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This remarkable and readable analysis of the psychology of unbelief comes from the pen of French priest-psychotherapist Ignace Lepp, onetime Marxist atheist, whose career as journalist and professor pays sound dividends in the organization and exposition of his theme. Dr. Lepp warns that atheism today is “well on the way to becoming the common norm of society” (p. 6), and surveys types of atheism represented by Marx, Rostand, Sartre, and Nietzsche.

Modern atheism differs from atheism in earlier times by its extension and absoluteness. Most atheists recognize Christianity as their chief ideological enemy, although the ground of unbelief is existential rather than rational. They are occupied more with counterattack than with elaborating an alternate positive view of reality.

Although he lived in Western Europe during his first twenty-five years, Lepp met not a single believing Christian. He did meet numbers who had forsaken their churches. He joined the Communist party at fifteen without a prior religious commitment, and fell in line with its anti-religious crusade. Harnack and Feuerbach and Nietzsche were quoted to undermine faith in Christ’s deity. In university studies he was taught Aquinas’s five-fold proof of God’s existence, but “they prove nothing to one who does not have the faith” (p. 16).

He had no fear of death, no hope of personal immortality, no troubling “metaphysical unrest.” For Communism had become his all-engaging “religion,” and supplied for him that “transcendent” or “absolute” which every life must serve (p. 24). “This unshakeable faith in the future of communism was in fact the positive component of my psychological synthesis as an atheist” (p. 27). “Existentially, the subjective transcendence communism provided for me performed exactly the same psychological function as divine transcendence.… Precisely this awareness of living for something very great … makes the conversion of a sincere Communist to religious faith almost impossible. There is no room in him for supernatural grace” (pp. 28 f.). “Acceptance of divine revelation presupposes in the subject a natural awareness of insufficiency or dissatisfaction” (p. 30).

It was disillusionment over the Communist party (the treason of Stalinists) that led to Lepp’s defection and preceded his conversion, which occurred after a period of “metaphysical anxiety.” “It did not seem logical that being endowed with a capacity for thinking and loving could be thrown into an absurd universe, where there was nothing to think, nothing to love, nothing to hope for. It was with these psychological dispositions that I encountered the Christian message” (p. 34).

The author reflects his Catholic perspectives in the ready categorizing of other religious groups as “sects” (p. 14), his minimizing of medieval superstitions (p. 17), and his implication that Protestant churches are less hostile to Communism than Catholic churches (pp. 17 f). He still derives man and monkey from a common ancestor (p. 25), but does not now exclude “creation” (p. 26).

The missionary challenge of Lepp’s book is inescapable. “Believers, in the old countries of Christianity,” he writes, “have no idea how firmly shut off they are from the mental world of unbelievers” (p. 23). Nowhere had he been confronted with the works of Christian beliefs. Worse yet, it is “the unbelief of believers” much more than that of the genuine atheists which is “the real cause of the desacralization of the modern world, of its descent into the most sordid of pragmatic ‘materialisms’ ” (p. 190) because their attitude toward the concrete problems of life is “exactly the same as that of … atheistic or agnostic colleagues.”

CARL F. H. HENRY

The Nature Of Church Unity

The Dynamics of Christian Unity: A Symposium on the Ecumenical Movement, compiled and edited by W. Stanley Mooneyham (Zondervan, 1963, 116 pp., $2.50), is reviewed by James Daane, editorial associate, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This book contains the messages about Christian unity delivered at conferences sponsored by the National Association of Evangelicals. While it glows with the spiritual warmth of men committed to Christ, theologically it is a strange book.

The Church is confessed to be one, and unity to be of her essence. Yet the unity is only organic, spiritual, not organizational, structural. She is one, it is maintained, in the “sole way” that Christ prayed for her unity. “The Pauline doctrine of the church refutes the common ecumenical argument that somehow [sic!] separated denominations lacerate our Lord’s body.” It is urged that “the possibility of a fragmented body because of separate organizations is an absurd idea.…” One conference lecturer urges, “We can manifest spiritual unity regardless of continued organizational diversity. We can manifest it by fellowship together, worship together, study together, prayer together, witness together, service together, and perhaps suffering together.” This statement sounds like a dream talking. Separated denominations that can do all these things together have no reason or justification for being structurally separated. They have lost, or never had, the right of separate existence. Moreover, there are many denominations that take their distinctive doctrinal positions seriously and cannot do these things together, and are therefore separated. When the World Council churches meet and celebrate Holy Communion in several different ways, they are revealing a seriousness of conviction that makes this view of theological differences look like utter indifference.

The contention that the New Testament churches were not organizationally united is, on many scores, misleading. For one thing, these churches did not exclude the members and ministers of other churches from their pulpits and from celebrations of Holy Communion. To assert that modern denominationalism is simply a reflection of interchurch relations obtaining in the New Testament period is to romanticize the facts. Is the Church really empirically one in the way that Jesus prayed for it? Did Jesus really pray for a structurally divided Church of separated parts that would rival and compete with each other on the mission field, for a divided Church whose parts would not honor one another’s sacraments and ministers? To ask the question is to answer it; yet it is a question that this symposium on the ecumenical movement does not ask. The writers simply assert that Christians of all churches can together, as a matter of fact, do everything necessary to express the unity of the Church. It is even asserted that “loyalty to the New Testament may compel us to fight against organizational unity.” And even more incredibly: “loyalty to the New Testament does not necessitate organizational union. Quite the reverse! It warrants a continued plurality of churches.” One of the basic weaknesses of the book is that it persistently thinks of Christians rather than of churches, a weakness that disqualifies it from the very start to deal with the ecumenical problem.

It just happens, by Christ’s own ordination and by apostolic injunction, that the Church in this world consists of more than individual Christians. She is also comprised of “offices,” which grant their occupants authority within the Church. These “offices” bespeak organizational and ecclesiastical structure which cannot, without violating the teaching of the New Testament, be “spiritualized” in the sense of dissolving structure and organization, for such spiritualization dissolves both the office and the authority it carries.

Since God alone is the Lord of the conscience, the right to oppose the authority of the Church must ever be allowed as an open, legitimate possibility; but it is by no means a desirable state of affairs. It is a measure to be employed only in extreme circumstances. Moreover, the act of separation (as distinguished from the separated existence) is always illegitimate. He who in the name of conscience opposes the authority of the Church may be put out, but he may not, by his own choice, get out. The act that separates is always an evil and sinful act, and whoever causes it must bear the responsibility. Whenever it occurs, something is profoundly wrong with the Church. When it is urged in this book (not consistently) that separation is a normal and biblically warranted thing, a quite legitimate thing because it occurs, in distinction from schismatic action, on the basis of the essentials rather than the details of the Gospel, then separation is unbiblically legitimatized and schism is given new definition.

This book reveals a fear that a single unified Church would mean church tyranny, a fear that is easily understood in view of the will to power found in many churchmen of any denomination. The history of the Church, past and current, does little to allay this fear. Nevertheless, our theology of the Church should be derived from the Bible, not from our fears—nor should it be overlooked that the general position of this book on separation and church authority quite accurately reflects the actual condition of the Church today, with its almost total loss of ecclesiastical authority. But if the situation is biblically warranted, then the ecumenical movement, even in its most ideal form, is illegitimate, and any ecumenical concern, rightly defined, is outside the authentic concerns of those who hold the position of this book.

What this book understands by the “spiritual” nature of the unity of the Church leaves no room within the Church for the “offices” that Paul recognized as being part of the reality designated by the term “Church.” In the New Testament view, the Church contains “offices.” These offices bespeak a unity and an organizational structuring of the Church which is other than what this book means by the Church’s “spiritual” unity. They (the offices) exclude as illegitimate what this book means by “separation.” They make every exercise in regard to church unity an exercise of conscience, that is, an exercise over against a duly instituted authority, and not a mere exercise of isolated, individual right.

To support what is designated as the “Biblical Basis of Christian Unity” the book appeals to Emil Brunner. But it is significant that the appeal overlooks, or does not know, that Brunner, in order to maintain his position that the Church is a fellowship and not an organization, renounces the teaching of the pastoral epistles about the offices of the Church as an error. Brunner honestly admits this. This book is apparently unaware that it must attribute the same error to the Bible in order to claim biblical sanction for its view of the exclusively “spiritual” unity of the Church.

With this venture into the study of the nature of the Church, NAE has at last begun to engage in theological studies of ecumenical problems. Like most beginnings, it is not auspicious. But it is a beginning and perhaps a promise of better things to come.

JAMES DAANE

Book Briefs

The International Book of Christmas Carols, by Walter Ehret and George K. Evans (Prentice-Hall, 1963, 338 pp., $10). One hundred and sixty-four carols from all parts of the world in their original languages, with accompanying English translations. With music, explanatory notes, introduction. A book of fine craftsmanship, and an excellent Christmas gift.

The Stars of Christmas, by J. Robert Watt (Abingdon, 1963, 80 pp., $2.50). A warm kindly presentation of the Christmas story. A fine Christmas gift.

When Christmas Came to Bethlehem, by Charles L. Allen and Charles L. Wallis (Revell, 1963, 64 pp., $1.50). Pleasantly written; will be read with pleasure.

Tales of Christmas from Near and Far, edited by Herbert H. Wernecke (Westminster, 1963, 232 pp., $3.95). Thirty-three Christmas stories gathered from many countries the world over, each with its local color.

The Meaning of Gifts, by Paul Tournier (John Knox, 1963, 63 pp., $2). An enlightening little Christian essay on how the giving of a gift expresses the giver, and affects the receiver.

Faiths for the Few: A Study of Minority Religions, by William J. Whalen (Bruce Publishing Company, 1963, 201 pp., $3.75). A Roman Catholic discusses twenty-two “minority religions”—including Free Masonry, Moral Re-Armament, Pentecostalism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Old Catholicism. The treatments are informative and rich with interesting detail; the theological analysis is shallow and fragmentary.

Bible Paradoxes, by R. Earl Allen (Revell, 1963, 128 pp., $2.50). Short, helpful, perceptive essays on the many paradoxical aspects of the Christian faith.

That One Good Sermon, by Alfred Nevin Sayres (United Church Press, 1963, 95 pp., $2.50). A preacher through a layman tells other preachers what goes into and makes a good sermon.

Documents of Democracy: The Declaration of Independence, The United States Constitution, The Gettysburg Address (Revell, 1963, 64 pp., $1). Handy reference book and, of course, good reading for every American.

Sticking To The Church

Methodist services attract larger attendances in Communist East Germany than in the free western division of the country, says a church official in Berlin. Dr. Ernst Scholz, a district superintendent, declares that “it is really wonderful how the people in a Communist country stick to the church and love their master, Jesus Christ.” His report was made by tape recording to the North Glendale, California, Methodist Church, which contributes to the support of churches in East and West Berlin.

Protestant Panorama

Unity commissions of the International Convention of Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ voted last month to seek authority from their respective governing bodies to formulate “a proposal looking toward a plan of union.”

A former nun was among fourteen persons baptized October 20 into the membership of the Baptist church in Warsaw, according to Ecumenical Press Service. The woman had been a member of a Roman Catholic order for twenty years.

Methodist churches which bar Negroes were censured by the denomination’s Council of Bishops in a strongly worded statement calling on all Christians to fight for the equal rights of all racial, religious, and cultural groups.

Two United Church of Canada ministers picketed the city hall in Edmonton, Alberta, last month to protest the election of Mayor William Hawrelak, who had been accused of “gross misconduct” by a judicial inquiry while in office in 1959. The ministers reported receiving threatening telephone calls because of their protest.

The North Central District Association of the Evangelical Free Church of America expelled one of its congregations where the pastor and some members speak in tongues and engage in other “Pentecostal-type practices.” The vote on the ouster of the Vine Evangelical Free Church of Minneapolis was 94 to 10. The pastor, an ordained clergyman of the Assemblies of God, said he felt the basic issue was the sovereignty of the local congregation.

Miscellany

A planeload of sixty Cubans made up “the first refugee air flight in history sponsored jointly by Protestants and Catholics.” The group was taken last month from Miami to Boston, where the Massachusetts Baptist Convention assumed placement responsibilities. All are Roman Catholics. The federal government paid transportation costs. John F. Thomas, director of the U. S. Cuban Refugee Program, called the flight “a historic step in interfaith cooperation to aid victims of Communist oppression.”

At its first congress since it was formed in 1944, the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians (Baptists) in the U. S. S. R. adopted a new constitution. Said one report: “The charter practically has no limitations to the beliefs which Baptists may hold.”

Bible societies in Africa plan to step up Scripture distribution. At their first joint meeting this fall, delegates vowed to place easy-to-read Bible portions into the hands of 150 million Africans each year. Present rate is 50 million annually.

A $50,000 grant from the James Foundation to Princeton Theological Seminary will establish an experimental program to prepare ministers for service in blighted inner-city areas. It will be a pilot project extending over a period of two years.

A new Christian Servicemen’s Center was dedicated last month at Wrightstown, New Jersey. It will serve the thousands of military personnel stationed at nearby Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force Base.

The congregation of Central Presbyterian Church in Des Moines, Iowa, voted to donate up to $4,000 to the city government to cover a portion of the property taxes from which it is exempt.

A fund drive is under way to provide a second campus for Tarkio (Missouri) College. The extension campus for the Presbyterian school would be located in St. Joseph, Missouri, and would offer junior and senior courses.

Representatives of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) and the Reformed Church in America proposed last month that their denominations combine administrative structures of the programs in which the two bodies are now cooperating to make their witness more effective.

The four-million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hannover (West Germany) voted last month to admit women to the ministry. The church thus becomes the thirteenth of the twenty-seven denominations in the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKID) to approve the ordination of women.

The previously all-white District of Columbia Baptist Convention admitted its first Negro church last month. The convention, affiliated with both the American and Southern Baptist Conventions, received into membership the 3,000-member Shiloh Baptist Church by a vote of 600–25. The church will retain its ties with the local Negro conventions and the Progressive Baptist Convention on the national level.

Personalia

The Rev. Theodore A. Aaberg resigned as president of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod because of poor health.

Dr. Jacques Maritain, renowned Roman Catholic philosopher, was named to receive France’s highest literary award, the National Grand Prize for Letters. There has been some speculation that the 81-year-old French layman is about to be named a cardinal by Pope Paul VI.

Dr. Duncan Fraser appointed moderator-designate of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

They Say

“Jerusalem was destroyed only because everybody interpreted the Torah in his own way.”—Mrs. M. Verlinsky, Haifa magistrate, in levying $167 fines against eight ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students found guilty of violent demonstrations against Christian children’s centers.

“The situation which was created by court action can be corrected by court action. Those who have made the long, difficult, complicated, expensive journey to the U. S. Supreme Court to eliminate God from our schools traveled with the aid of organizations and individuals who shared their goal. Others who share opposite goals must be willing to travel a similar arduous road if they wish to regain what they treasure.”—Mrs. Bella V. Dodd, New York lawyer who repudiated her Communist party membership, in Guideposts.

Our Christmas issue features some straight talk by the well-known preacher on the “International Lutheran Hour,” Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann. Also there are the thoughtful discussion of the doctrine of the Virgin Birth by David H. Wallace and an editorial examining the relation of the Christmas observance and family life.

Speaking of holidays, Philip Edgcumbe Hughes discusses in “Current Religious Thought” the proposal to fix the date for the observance of Easter.

The article by Rachel H. King is a personal account of a remarkable theological journey via such institutions as Smith College and Chicago and Yale Divinity Schools.

Circulation this issue 211,046 copies.

Mr. Ivor Bulmer Thomas of London did not care much for the message of the world Anglican Congress held last summer in Toronto and rudely said so in the Church Assembly at Westminster when a bishop formally moved that the message be commended. Full of pious clichés, scoffed Mr. Bulmer Thomas, heaping “inanity upon inanity.” He had other objections too, and he put them together in an amendment which, according to the workings of the Church of England, had to be voted on by the three houses separately. The clergy carried his amendment easily, the laity more narrowly, but it was vetoed by the House of Bishops (from which no voting figures were supplied).

A hardy annual reappeared when an archdeacon raised the question of the church commissioners whose income from extensive property interests often brought the accusation of “dirty money.” A bishop rose and said that such lies should be nailed—the commissioners did not grind the faces of the poor as was popularly supposed; to say so was virtually an attack on the church itself.

Another familiar scene was re-enacted in the House of Laity when the evangelicals sought once more to remove all barriers between Christian people at the Lord’s Table. The strictures of the 1604 canons, pointed out Mrs. C. Tebbutt of Peterborough, were aimed against notorious evil livers and schismatics, not against fellow Christians; by its vote the house would stand in the judgment of history and of God. Another lady cited an appalling situation where an Anglican incumbent was compelled to turn away his own father from Communion because the latter was a Baptist minister. The suggested amendment foundered on the rock of the legal point that only those confirmed “or ready to be confirmed” were to be admitted, but the voting (95 to 72) indicated a less rigid attitude on this point.

The assembly resumed discussion of proposals which would set up in the Church of England a general synod to unite the separate legislative bodies. The chief effect of this would be to give laymen, for the first time in the church’s history, a voice in making decisions about the worship and teaching of the church. Evidence suggests that the bishops are generally in favor of this, but that the clergy have grave doubts. A commission has been proposed to work out details.

Ecumenical Etiquette

The high hopes expressed for the Church of England-Methodist merger report (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, News, March 15, 1963), are described by a prominent English evangelical merely as “the hyperboles of ecumenical etiquette.” Dr. J. I. Packer goes on to say that both churches have dwindled considerably during this century, and that neither is noted for either soundness of doctrine or sanctity of life. To expect that reunion would invigorate them is “to expect two consumptives to get better simply through getting married.”

Packer was contributing to a paperback symposium (published last month by the Marcham Manor Press) in which six Anglicans give “a straightforward biblical evaluation of the Report.” Packer, who also edits the essays, agrees that it is a Christian duty to seek reunion, because denominationalism is anomalous by biblical standards. Nevertheless, the quest for unity must not be divorced from the quest for truth and holiness, he went on, and must be conceived as a quest to be reformed by the Word of God.

Paulus Ex Machina

With the aid of a Mercury computer and half a million words of Greek prose, a Scottish minister-mathematician believes he has proved conclusively that Paul wrote only five of the Epistles attributed to him.

Andrew Queen Morton, who serves the historic Church of Scotland parish of Culross, collaborated with New Testament professor G. H. C. Macgregor (who died last July) in examining the view that an author could be identified by word-patterns and ingrained habits of style. After detailed investigations they discovered that five of the allegedly Pauline Epistles were indistinguishable: Romans, the Corinthian letters, Galatians, and Philemon. These were accepted as genuine on the basis that no one has ever challenged the view that Paul wrote Galatians. (One scholar remarked that this was unscientific, and that for many centuries no one had ever challenged the view that the earth was flat.) The nine other Epistles, concluded Macgregor and Morton, emanated from at least five other hands.

Outlining these findings in The Observer, Morton claims that the greatest consequence of all this is to “cut the ground from under any notion of absolute religious authority—whether this is expressed as Church or Bible.” He is at great pains to illustrate the “inertia and opposition” encountered from fellow theologians, and criticizes by name three of Scotland’s best-known New Testament professors and two of the country’s most respected, religious journals which failed to publish material submitted to them. Roman Catholics and fundamentalists are also indicted in his article, which is written with all the arrogant assurance of the lawyer who has hit upon a winning case. “Theologians all over the Christian world have now to face the implications of this discovery,” he claims.

Theologians in Britain have been slow to take the hint, although many of them have known of Morton and his work for some time. The Bishop of Woolwich. Dr. John Robinson, condemned as unscientific the statement that “all that needs to be done is to discover some unconscious literary habits,” and ridiculed the idea of absolute religious authority trembling before the computer. Father Thomas Corbishley, S. J., points out that his church accepts the teaching of the Bible not because of the writer or writers, but because of the divine inspiration operating through whomever the human author may have been. Said one prominent evangelical scholar: “It seems to me a computer can only tell infallibly what a computer would write, and that it would be even less successful in charting an apostle than an ordinary man. A computer doesn’t even have brains enough to be unregenerate.” Scholars who have examined this kind of approach in the past have generally agreed that Paul is too big a man to be squeezed into a statistical straitjacket.

Morton is currently in North America, lecturing and demonstrating his $2,250 machine. He said that only in Chicago was a theologian interested: elsewhere his hosts have been linguists and scientists.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Roman Catholic theologians like the phrase “unity in diversity” to signify their singleness of faith and diversity of opinion. But as scheduled adjournment drew nigh, the emphasis in Vatican Council II appeared to be on the diversity.

True, the council had begun discussion of a schema on ecumenism. The introduction to the schema, which has five chapters, including a declaration on religious liberty, affirms that “the Unity of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit is the principle and the supreme model of the mystery of the unity of the Church.”

Other recent developments in council sessions and at conferences behind the scenes, however, tended to divert attention from the church’s proposed expression of joy over the spread of ecumenism.

For one thing, the doctrine of infallibility—admittedly a major stumbling block in the path to reunion with the “separated brethren”—had been dropped squarely into the midst of a council discussion, with almost complete irrelevancy, in the opinion of some theologians.

For another, a German cardinal had directed a pointed attack at the procedures of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, citadel of conservatism in the Roman Curia, and had evoked an even more barbed defense from the cardinal-secretary of the Holy Office.

There had been other outright demands for “decentralization” of the church’s administrative power, and so much acerbity had been displayed that a cardinal had spoken sadly of the need to “tolerate no shadow of division.”

Four American cardinals divided evenly on the question of juridical or legally binding powers for national conferences of bishops. Richard Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston, had returned to the United States and took no part in the debate.

The discussion of ecumenism began amid a veritable welter of reports and rumors—of threats by Curia officials to resign; of conferences and special audiences granted by the Pope; of petitions submitted to the Pontiff; and of statements issued by various council fathers.

It was in this atmosphere that Vatican Council II began discussion of ecumenism—the movement and activity which has church unity as its goal.

The diversity had been present from the opening of the session last September, but it became an issue only when the four cardinal-moderators appointed by Pope Paul proposed that the council vote on four guidelines, or directives (a fifth was added later), to assist the council’s Theological Commission in revising a chapter of the schema De Ecclesia treating the hierarchy.

What happened behind the scenes may never be known accurately, but many days elapsed before the proposals were brought to a vote. Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani. 74-year-old secretary of the Congregation of the Holy Office, is also president of the Theological Commission. He subsequently made it clear that he was incensed because the moderators had bypassed his commission and submitted the guidelines directly to the council, which clearly indicated its approval of the “short cut” and of the principle of decentralization.

A few days later, Joseph Cardinal Frings, Archbishop of Cologne, Germany, who is seventy-six years old and a recognized leader of the progressives in the council, took sharp exception to the idea that the moderators should have submitted their proposals first to the Theological Commission.

From that point of departure he extended his criticism to the Holy Office. As his remarks were summarized officially for the press. Cardinal Frings said:

“No Roman Congregation should have authority to accuse, judge, and condemn an individual who has had no opportunity to defend himself. With all due reverence and gratitude for the devoted individuals who spend their lives in the difficult work of the Holy Office we feel that its methods should be basically revised.

Billy Graham At Belmont Abbey

Evangelist Billy Graham made headlines by accepting his first invitation to speak at a Roman Catholic institution, and he chose the occasion to preach “a straight Gospel sermon.”

The 1,500-seat gymnasium of Belmont Abbey College near Charlotte, North Carolina, was packed to capacity to hear the Baptist minister call for personal commitment to Christ and to warn against a “second-hand faith.” Included in the audience were Belmont Abbey’s 600 students and novices as well as its faculty, plus students, priests, nuns, and monks from nearby Protestant and Catholic institutions.

Graham cited passages in the writings of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen that assert the principle of the New Birth. He also quoted an Eastern monk whose book insists on a similarly personal relationship with Christ.

Graham issued an implicit invitation at the close of his 35-minute address but did not ask students to step forward or raise hands. He usually foregoes this practice at educational institutions unless the sermon is part of an evangelistic crusade.

Graham was invited to the college by a student organization and was introduced by a student leader. Following Graham’s address, the Very Rev. John Oetgen, college president, noted that his school had been praised for being the first Roman Catholic institution to invite the evangelist. “But after hearing your talk,” the priest declared, “we should be blamed for having waited so long.”

Graham took several minutes at the beginning of his address to discuss Vatican Council II. He said he considered his first message to a Catholic institution “a very important part of my ministerial career.”

George Whitefield said in another era: “If the Pope invites me to Rome to preach. I’ll go.” Billy Graham probably would, too.

“It would be advisable to diminish substantially the number of bishops working in Curial offices. No one should be consecrated bishop just in order to honor him or the office he holds. If a man is consecrated bishop, then he should be bishop and nothing else. No one is ever ordained to the priesthood as a mark of honor or gratitude. Not a few of the tasks of the Roman Curia could be performed by laymen. Consequently, efforts should be made to use fewer bishops, fewer priests, and more laymen.”

Before Cardinal Ottaviani could reply, the tall, dignified Laurian Cardinal Rugambwa, Bishop of Bukoba, rose to declare that the social structure of modern times and a genuinely “redemptional” vision of the entire world call for establishment of a permanent body of bishops in Rome. The council, he said, has a duty as well as a right to make possible such an establishment.

As envisioned by many bishops, such a “senate” of bishops would supersede the Curia in administrative authority.

Permanent representation of the world’s bishops in Rome is involved to a degree in the extent of the powers to be granted—or “restored,” as some theologians insist—to the national conferences of bishops. Given judicial powers, the conferences would have fewer problems to refer to Rome—to a permanent council of bishops, or to the Roman Curia.

The fiery but nearly blind Cardinal Ottaviani minced no words in his reply. A theologian who was present remarked later:

“The cardinal seemed to me to be pretty mad!”

The criticism of the Holy Office, the cardinal said, according to an official summary of his remarks, proceeded “from lack of knowledge, not to use a stronger term, of the procedures of this Sacred Congregation.”

Cardinal Ottaviani categorically denied that anyone had ever been “accused, judged and condemned without a thorough previous investigation carried on with the help of competent consultors and experienced specialists.” However, a distinguished theologian said later that he knew of two persons who had been condemned without being given opportunity to defend themselves.

The cardinal followed long-established custom in noting that “all decisions of the Holy Office are approved by the Pope personally, and thus such criticisms are a reflection on the Vicar of Christ.”

However, he himself sharply criticized the cardinal-moderators—personally appointed by Pope Paul—for submitting the five points to the council without first having them reviewed and approved by the Theological Commission.

The doctrine of papal infallibility, carefully avoided since the start of the session because it is recognized as an irritant in efforts to promote ecumenism, was injected into the debate on bishops’ powers by James Francis A. Cardinal McIntyre, Archbishop of Los Angeles. Opposing juridical powers for national bishops’ conferences. Cardinal McIntyre said, according to the official summary:

“Wanting to give a national conference juridical character could be interpreted as an attack on the Roman Curia and thus an indirect attack on the infallibility of the Pope. This proposal brings clouds on the horizon. No one knows better than the Pope how to provide for the needs of the Church. His natural talents are elevated by supernatural protection which make him the one best qualified to understand problems and find their solutions.”

Francis Joseph Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York, also opposed the granting to bishops’ conferences of “authority to issue decisions which would be juridically binding on all individual bishops.”

Albert Gregory Cardinal Meyer, Archbishop of Chicago, and Joseph Cardinal Ritter, Archbishop of St. Louis, spoke in favor of granting juridical powers in varying degrees.

Dr. Lorenz Jaeger, Archbishop of Paderborn, discussing papal infallibility in an article in Echo der Zeit on the Ecumenical Council, wrote:

“If the Pope acts alone to decide questions of faith or to introduce measures of reform, then this divine assistance (infallibility) will indeed protect him against any error in doctrine. But it is not necessarily the case that he will hit upon the best possible formulation of a doctrine, or that he will institute the most effective possible reforms, such as will be most beneficial in given circumstances. The cooperation of the episcopate gathered together in council will often bring to light points of view of which the Pope had not thought.”

It was pointed out in council circles that an individual bishop who wished to follow a certain course of action might find it easier to convince key members of the Roman Curia, or even the Pontiff himself if he were granted a special audience, than to persuade several hundred fellow bishops in a national conference of the wisdom of his course.

Enrollment at accredited Protestant seminaries in the United States and Canada totaled 20,622 on October 1, compared with 20,727 on the same date in 1962. Release of the new figure by the American Association of Theological Schools was accompanied by an expression of concern. Said Dr. Jesse H. Ziegler, associate director of AATS:

“The total theological educational enterprise feels no comfort in an enrollment that has not changed significantly in the last seven years. All other educational and ecclesiastical indices are rising. There is widespread concern for an adequate supply of men for the ministries of the church.”

The statistics failed to reflect any upward trend which might logically be expected as a result of the World War II baby crop.

Ziegler’s analysis of fall seminary enrollment made the following points:

—Student enrollment in programs oriented to the parish is reduced 391 from 1962; enrollment of students preparing for teaching increased by 286.

—Number of students enrolled in the B. D. program or its equivalent decreased by 2.6 per cent while enrollment in Christian-education degree programs increased by 7.6 per cent.

—Denominations (with at least 100 students) showing the largest increase of enrollment in their schools were the Anglican Church of Canada with an increase of 15.8 per cent, the Christian Reformed with an increase of 10.7 per cent, and the Missouri Synod Lutheran with an increase of 8.3 per cent.

—Denominations (with at least 100 students) that show a continuing decline in number of students enrolled are Southern Baptist, Church of the Nazarene, Disciples of Christ, Evangelical United Brethren, while the two major Presbyterian bodies stand at 91 per cent of their 1956 enrollment.

The AATS does not release enrollment figures for individual schools without the schools’ consent.

The accrediting association has 124 member schools and represents perhaps more than 95 per cent of all Protestant students in schools conducting theological education in North America at the post-A. B. level.

AATS figures showed total enrollment of 20,720 in 1956, 20,554 in 1957, 20,700 in 1958, 21,088 in 1959, 19,976 in 1960, 20,466 in 1961, and 20,727 in 1962.

‘A New Kind Of Seminary’

A retired Presbyterian educator came up with an idea last month for “a new kind of seminary” (see also the editorial on page 27). Such a seminary, said Dr. Ilion T. Jones, would meet three needs:

1. The need for a “conservative” theological seminary in the true sense of the term “conservative”;

2. The need for a seminary where young ministers can be trained by veterans who have had long and successful experience in the active practice of the calling for which the young ministers are now being prepared; and

3. The need for some practical way of making use of the experience and ability of the increasing number of retired ministers who are still capable of rendering outstanding service.

“Unquestionably there is a mounting tide of conservatism in Protestantism,” Jones said in an article in the November 4 issue of The Presbyterian Outlook, an independent weekly. “I am convinced that an ‘Evangelical Undertow’ is rapidly building up in our century, and that it must be reckoned with sooner or later.”

Jones suggested that the interests of the evangelicals might be best served by a seminary patterned after California’s Hastings College of Law, where all faculty members are past the retirement age of 65 (no one is eligible for faculty appointment below that age).

“By the time most ministers reach retirement age,” Jones observes, “they are likely to be true conservatives.”

He suggests that each major Protestant denomination establish such a seminary. “The denomination that first accepts this challenge will set an enviable example to all other denominations.”

Jones served from 1941 to 1945 as chairman of the Presbyterian (U. S. A.) General Assembly’s Special Committee on Theological Education. From 1945 until his retirement in 1960 he was a member of the faculty of the San Francisco Theological Seminary (Presbyterian) at San Anselmo, California.

His article declares that there is a “widespread and increasing dissatisfaction with our theological seminaries. So far as I am able to discover this dissatisfaction exists in all denominations.”

Jones noted that “young theological liberals seem to be trying to ‘take over’ the seminaries just as a group of young political liberals are trying to take over the government.… Conservative Christianity is not tolerated.”

Lutheran Coordination

A joint theological-education program for the training of ministers for America’s three major Lutheran bodies was proposed last month by Dr. Conrad Bergendoff, executive secretary of the Lutheran Church in America’s Board of Theological Education.

The Bergendoff proposal, contained in a 38-page report to the board, was also sent to all 6,913 LCA pastors. It suggested that the LCA reduce the number of its seminaries in the United States from nine to four, and raise the academic standards of its theological education.

The continuation of separate seminaries by the LCS, American Lutheran Church, and the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod is not justified on theological grounds, he asserted, because “fundamentally the theology of all Lutheran seminaries in this country is the same.”

Bergendoff’s proposal and accompanying observations are expected to elicit widespread controversy. The Missouri Synod’s theological viewpoint is known to be considerably more conservative than that of the other two bodies. The LCA, moreover, is generally regarded as the most liberal of the three.