A Right To Die?

Mrs. Jesse Jones, a 25-year-old mother, is contesting a court order which doctors credit with saving her life. She and her husband filed a petition in the U.S. Circuit Court of Washington, D. C., to quash the order under which doctors at Georgetown University Hospital subjected her to a blood transfusion against her will. The couple belong to the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect.

Protestant Panorama

United Presbyterians will take up a special offering next February 9 to provide bail and meet other legal costs for those arrested in civil rights demonstrations. The money will also be used to relieve the financial distress of the families of those arrested.

Louisville Presbyterian Seminary dedicated its new $4,500,000 campus last month. Nine buildings are located on the site overlooking a park.

Church of the Nazarene is climaxing a quadrennium of evangelistic emphasis with an eleven-day national campaign to distribute more than two million copies of the Gospel of John.

A secretariat for the North American Christian Convention is being established in Cincinnati. Leonard G. Wymore was named convention director.

The first Lutheran church buildings in Ghana will be built near Accra and in Kumasi. Missionaries of the Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America started work in Ghana three years ago. There are now four congregations meeting in public school buildings.

Miscellany

The Tunisian government ordered the North Africa Mission, an evangelical group with headquarters in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, to stop seeking converts among Muslims. The mission’s bookstore in Tunis was ordered closed and its Bible correspondence courses discontinued.

The hierarchy of the Orthodox Church in Greece, in a surprise decision, unanimously agreed to the establishment of a “dialogue” with the Roman Catholic Church “on equal terms.” The action amounted to endorsement of an agreement reached at the Pan-Orthodox Conference held at Rhodes in September. The assembly’s decision came as a surprise because the Holy Synod, top administrative body of the church in Greece, had been strongly opposed to holding the Pan-Orthodox Conference and declined representation.

Dallas Theological Seminary and Graduate School of Theology is establishing a department of world missions with authority to offer a major in the field toward the master of theology degree.

The closing of 200 churches and prayer houses in one section of the western Ukraine in the past three years was reported last month by the Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda.

The Christian Crusade led by Billy James Hargis scheduled an all-night radio marathon with the emphasis on “encouraging the conservatives of America to fight communism through conservative Christianity.”

Mrs. Madalyn Murray, successful litigant in the U. S. Supreme Court’s Bible reading-prayer case, filed suit in Baltimore against tax exemptions for church-owned property.

The Supreme Court of Canada upheld the Lord’s Day Act in rejecting an appeal of two Hamilton bowling-alley operators who were convicted and fined for opening on Sunday.

The U. S. Senate passed a college aid bill with an amendment designed to test the constitutionality of grants and loans to church-related schools. Biggest hurdle for the measure, review by a House-Senate conference, is still ahead.

Deaths

DR. CHARLES DUELL KEAN, 53, writer on religion and rector of Epiphany Episcopal Church, Washington, D. C.; in Washington.

DR. JACOB S. PAYTON, 79, retired Methodist minister known for his editorial work with the Christian Advocate; in Arlington, Virginia.

Cigarette vending machines on the sprawling Columbia University campus in New York now carry a warning that “there is medical evidence that cigarette smoking impairs health” (see editorial, page 28). The notices were posted at the request of the university by the company which services the machines. The trend toward recognizing the dangers of smoking also was evident in the fact that, beginning this fall, most cigarette manufacturers withdrew advertising from college newspapers.

Personalia

Dr. Ralph M. Johnson resigned as president of Berkeley Baptist Divinity School to become pastor of First Baptist Church, Everett, Washington.

Dr. Clate A. Risley is resigning as executive secretary of the National Sunday School Association, effective December 31.

Robert Geerdes named general director of the John Haggai Evangelistic Association.

Miss Carman St. John Wolff named director of the Protestant Episcopal Church’s Department of Christian Education.

Dr. Francis E. Wright named president of Union University (Baptist), Jackson, Tennessee.

Dr. Robert Markwick Skinner named vice-president of Princeton Theological Seminary.

A Methodist minister apparently ousted as chaplain of the North Carolina Senate said he would continue to be on hand “every morning with my prayer ready.” The Rev. E. C. Dunham said that the Senate president had no authority to fire him during a special session.

James F. Bunting, Methodist layman, named general secretary of the National Board and National Council of YMCA’s in America.

They Say

“We don’t know whether to pray in it, for it, or at it.”—Ben Martin, Air Force football coach, on the academy’s ultra-modern chapel.

“We think it is manifestly unfair to let tax-free organizations fight us [since] they themselves produce none of the revenue required to run our government.”—Statement of the Texas Brewers’ Institute protesting a Federal Communications Commission permit for a new broadcasting station, KDRY, to be operated by temperance leader Sam Morris.

What is the role of thanksgiving in God’s pattern of things? Cary Weisiger shows it to be indispensable in the divine purpose. The editorial on page 29 points to the apparent tendency to secularize the Thanksgiving holiday.

Several articles focus upon communication: God to man and man to man. And be sure not to miss “The Minister’s Workshop,” highlighted by Paul Rees’s plea for the concrete.

Frank Farrell reports on the annual convention of the Disciples of Christ (page 38).

This issue exceeds 210,600 copies.

Telstar II, the communications satellite whirling around the earth at 15,000 miles per hour, served to promote the ecumenical dialogue last month. It brought together on television four leading churchmen and selected questioners from Rome, London, and Princeton, New Jersey. They were able to look each other in the eye and talk almost as if they were all in the same room. And people across North America and Europe saw them on the same television screen. The broadcast, second such “Town Meeting of the World,” was dubbed by some visionary “The Christian Revolution.”

How was it, asked a Newsweek correspondent in Rome of Dr. Franklin Clark Fry in Princeton, that less than two years ago the World Council of Churches’ New Delhi assembly was lamenting widespread indifference among the laity, and now church leaders were purportedly enjoying “a Christian revolution”? Could it be that ecclesiastical activity is largely confined to the higher echelons and that the laity is more aloof than ever?

Fry ignored the disparity between the two themes cited by the correspondent. He limited his reply to a denial that very many churchmen are promoting institutionalism.

As if reflecting church history, Fry and Bishop Lesslie Newbigin in London lost contact for a time with Rome. When communication was restored, a Princeton Theological Seminary student from India asked whether “all Christians everywhere” should be involved in some kind of a “meaningful program of family planning.”

The query drew laughter from both sides of the Atlantic, and the comment from Father Hans Küng that it was “one of the most difficult questions you could ask.” Küng noted changes in Catholic thinking on the subject in recent years, but added: “You can’t expect that we can find all solutions now in one day.”

Fry asked Laurian Cardinal Rugambwa of Tanganyika, first and only Negro Roman Catholic cardinal, what could be done to lessen competition among Christian missionaries, presupposing that Rugambwa favored reduction of such competition. Rugambwa did not indicate whether he accepted the presupposition—much less suggest steps to lessen competition. He merely cited good relations in “hospitals, social centers … in things in which we need to cooperate.”

Moderator Eric Sevareid of the Columbia Broadcasting System, which put on the program with the British Broadcasting Corporation and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, might have sharpened the debate had he asked the churchmen to comment on Christendom’s numerical retreat. Of all the reasons given for the current unity and reform movement, not a few observers feel this to be singularly significant. Christian forces, like an army being outnumbered, are trying to regroup.

Accommodation For Reunion

The Vatican Council’s determination to express doctrines in words more acceptable to separated brethren became clearly apparent last month.

Albert Cardinal Meyer of Chicago declared the present teaching on “The People of God” neither adequate nor realistic. A proposed chapter stresses that “we are all sinners” who sometimes fall even after baptism. Another cardinal, Leo J. Suenens of Belgium, one of the council’s four moderators, emphasized that “this is the age of the Holy Spirit, who is given not only to pastors but to all members of the Church” and that any treatment of bishops and hierarchy saying nothing of the gifts of the Holy Spirit would be defective. He urged the council to avoid giving the impression that the church is no more than an administrative machine cut off from the influence of the Spirit of God.

Archbishop Lawrence Shehan of Baltimore, speaking in the name of the U. S. bishops, asked clarification or deletion of the phrase “regrettable separation,” interpreted to refer to church and state. Another bishop said the real problem was the separation of the church and the world, and a theologian explained that this opinion coincided with Protestant teaching on the separation of the Church and the world-system or cosmos, of which the state is only one phase.

All amendments to the schema on liturgy were approved overwhelmingly. Most were technical, but were intended to popularize some forms of worship. One designed to meet criticism by Protestants and others states that extreme unction would be better called “the anointing of the sick” inasmuch as it involves prayer for health.

There is no reason to expect that any real change will be made by the council in the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church despite desire for “reunion.”

Catholics believe that their dogmatic doctrines, once promulgated by the pope, comprise “revealed truth.” To amend or revoke one of these doctrines would be a tacit admission that it was not truth in the original instance, that it was in error when promulgated by the pontiff.

Theologians of various Christian communions have understood this from the outset of the council’s deliberations, but it was brought into sharp focus for the lay mind when a Catholic theologian, in response to a news writer’s remark during a press conference that he could detect “no change” in a certain doctrine, said:

“We don’t want change. We want the removal of erroneous understanding.”

Many leading Catholic theologians take the position that the doctrines are not, per se, obstacles to ecumenism, but that erroneous interpretation of them bars the way to “reunion.”

LANCE ZAVITZ

Voice And Visibility

Martin E. Marty’s latest role as journalistic pundit landed him in a literary skirmish with one U. S. Protestantism’s leading editors.

Marty fired the first shot in a new book, The Religious Press in America (see review, October 11 issue, p. 44). He asserted that “in the public life of the nation” the Protestant press “is well-nigh invisible.”

“Is the self-nurture of a denomination through a house organ the highest goal the Protestant press should have?” Marty asked.

Henry L. McCorkle, editor of The Episcopalian and president of Associated Church Press, promptly took issue.

“As the editor of an officially-sponsored publication,” he said, “I am weary of having my publication automatically classified as a ‘house organ,’ and thus dismissed from any important role—potential or otherwise—in American life.”

McCorkle’s forum was a publication called Dynamic, which Marty would undoubtedly label a house organ since it is the official publication of the Associated Church Press, largest fellowship of religious periodical editors (more than 160 member publications).

Added McCorkle: “Religious publications today, for the most part, are far more than ‘house organs.’ They attempt to relate their readers not only to organizational machinery but to many of the most important contemporary issues before us.”

He conceded that “we do not speak with a common voice. But is this a sign of weakness? On the contrary, I think it is a sign of strength.”

He questioned the necessity of public exposure such as newsstand sales, and cited the fact that the Protestant press reaches nearly twenty million families through the mail. “These families collectively may be our own kind, compartmentalized and stratified, but they are plunk in the middle of our society. In serving them, we help to carry the Gospel of Jesus Christ into much of North America without the necessity of direct, frontal attack.”

To Marty’s defense, implicitly at least, came the booming editorial voice of The Christian Century, the magazine which Marty serves as an associate editor. In an unsigned lead editorial stretching over nearly a page and a half, the Century tried to mollify McCorkle. He was right, the editorial said, when he characterized Protestantism’s lack of a common voice as “a sign of strength.”

“On the other hand,” the Century added, “it seems to us a rationalization to assume, as our respected friend apparently does, that the status of specialized denominational publication justifies acceptance by them of a position of ‘invisibility’ …”

The editorial concluded on a cheery note: “If our dialogues and debates convey the impression of a multiplicity of sounds, with melodically independent and individual parts or voices, we can still give forth simultaneously in contrapuntal harmonies, to the greater glory of God.”

Strangely, the Century failed to mention (1) Dynamic as the source of McCorkle’s remarks, and (2) that a book by Marty had occasioned his comments.

A dispute over evangelism is leaving theological scars on the Protestant and Orthodox Center now under construction at the New York World’s Fair grounds. Two key officials have already resigned. At least one exhibitor may seek a contract cancellation. And a protesting church in the Bronx threatened to withdraw from the sponsoring agency, the Protestant Council of the City of New York.

They are objecting to a film now being produced for showing at the center when the fair opens next April 22. The film, a pantomime, depicts Christ in the role of a donkey-riding circus clown who dies suspended from a tent pole.

First to resign was Emilio B. Knechtle, Swiss-born layman who served for two years as board chairman of the Protestant Council and more recently was chief fund-raiser for the fair project. Next to leave was program director J. Marshall Miller, for many years a professor at Columbia University’s School of Architecture. Both charge that the film smacks of sacrilege.

Ironically enough, a film featuring similarly sophisticated imagery caused a row at the Protestant Pavilion of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. The film was edited to accommodate those who objected. At that time, Miller, a Baptist layman, was taking up his duties for the New York fair and vowed to work for a more positive evangelical witness.

“While we did not succeed in achieving the goal we had visualized,” he says, “it was perhaps better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all.”

Miller and Knechtle declare that the attempt to present an evangelical posture failed because the Protestant Council’s steering committee is predominantly liberal in its theological outlook.

The Rev. Dan M. Potter, executive director of the Protestant Council, denied that the dispute was along conservative-liberal lines. He said it was a case of traditional preaching methods, which purportedly fail to attract the unchurched, versus the use of modern art forms. He declared that in the council’s democratic voting process the modern art approach won out.

Potter recalled that the council lost some liberal support when it chose to support Billy Graham’s 1957 evangelistic crusade in New York.

The controversial film, with a projected running time of only fifteen minutes, is one of a number to be shown at the center. The others, according to Potter, will be traditional types produced by the denominational exhibitors.

Another sore spot in the theater program is the steering committee’s reported decision not to use Todd-AO despite Miller’s contention that the center “will have the finest theater in the world for the use of Todd-AO films.”

Visitors to the center will find, in addition to the theater and displays, a chapel, a bookstore, a children’s center, and a “music garden.”

Evangelical representation elsewhere at the fair will include pavilions sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the Moody Institute of Science, and Wycliffe Bible Translators.

Some evangelical observers are discouraged over the adamant attitude of would-be liberals in insisting upon approaches which lack consent of those who contributed support on the basis of a wider appeal. The film disputes in Seattle and New York will dampen prospects for evangelical participation in future Protestant fair efforts. Most likely upshot will be the creation of an Evangelical Center at the next world exhibition—slated for Southern California.

Potter, a Presbyterian minister, said that the film now being produced is designed to appeal to a broad spectrum of the unchurched. The circus setting, for instance, is supposed to capture a child’s fancy while the subtle symbolism is intended to communicate the Gospel to the intellectual.

The film writer, Chicago artist Rolf Forsberg, borrows his motif from the French artist Georges Rouault (1871–1958), a Roman Catholic known for his paintings of clowns as well as his paintings of Christ. Forsberg says the connection is aesthetic, not literal. He describes the film as expressionistic rather than theological: “It doesn’t define, but it expresses.”

To Knechtle, the allegorical image is wrong. Moreover, the evangelistic message is missing. Knechtle, young and aggressive, would like to have seen a direct appeal for conversion, one not unlike the message he heard from a Methodist missionary in the Dominican Republic ten years ago which led to his own spiritual commitment (he is now with a country day school in New Canaan, Connecticut). He also objects to the film’s implication that Christ was hated and killed because of good deeds rather than because he claimed to be God.

Miller dislikes the approach despite his own artist’s eye. A long-time member of Calvary Baptist Church in Manhattan, he is now a real estate developer. His pet project is a vastly complex plan for “Lake Europa” as a cultural and commercial capital for the Common Market countries.

“As the issue sharpened concerning the type of witness,” Miller says, “we realized that the liberal majority of the steering committee for the center were not greatly interested in what we felt was the threefold objective for the center—to glorify God, to spread the Gospel, and to try to win souls to Christ. It appears that these leaders prefer sophisticated confusion to an evangelical witness.”

Miller has been especially careful to avoid bitterness. While espousing his own convictions without compromise, he nonetheless retained a gentlemanly spirit, expressing continued sympathy with the overall fair project. He emphasized that a number of evangelically oriented groups are exhibitors in the center and that their presence may help to offset the adverse effect he expects from the film. Several days after the Protestant Council rejected his plea for a revised approach and accepted his resignation, the council reported receiving a personal gift of $300 from Miller.

An Octogenarian’S Lament

“The last of the old-time evangelists” turned eighty on October 30, still going strong and having few kind words for the leader of a new generation.

Though the university he founded gave the younger evangelist an honorary degree once, Dr. Bob Jones now calls Billy Graham “the worst thing that ever happened to United States religion.”

Jones is currently preaching in various churches whose pastors are graduates of Bob Jones University. He elaborated on his views of Graham at a meeting in the First Independent Church of Wilmington, Delaware:

“He is destroying evangelism in this country.… His Los Angeles meetings were the greatest curse in the history of the city.”

Jones said he thinks Christ will return before the metropolis is able to recover.

Mennonite Foibles

For a year now, the talk of the Mennonite community has been a 239-page first novel by Rudy Henry Wiebe, Peace Shall Destroy Many. The book fell like a bomb among Mennonites, and many promptly decided the author had been too frank. Wiebe probably understates the impact of his novel when he says it was “a contributing factor” in his resignation four months ago as editor of the weekly Mennonite Brethren Herald in Winnipeg.

One thing seems certain: the book deserves a place on the sparse shelf of true Christian literature.

Illicit sex, hypocrisy, and prejudice apparently play a greater role in the lives of Mennonites than many of them like to think, and these are themes around which the talented Wiebe weaves his highly readable tale. As is any young writer, he was doubtless tempted to exploit the themes. Most literary critics will agree that he resisted the temptation.

Wiebe, now twenty-nine, was born on a farm in northern Saskatchewan shortly after his Mennonite parents had resettled there from Russia. The family moved to Alberta when he was twelve, and young Wiebe came under the influence of a high school teacher who encouraged him to try creative writing. Later, at the University of Alberta, he was taken in tow by an English professor, Dr. Frederick M. Falter, who guided him through the manuscript preparation of Peace Shall Destroy Many. Meanwhile, Wiebe was reading Faulkner, Graham Greene, and Frederick Grove, a Canadian writer. He found Faulkner overpowering, but he counts Greene and Grove as two writers who most influenced his own style. His education includes a graduate dip into theology at the University of Tübingen.

Wiebe’s novel takes place in a Canadian Mennonite community during World War II while the young people are wrestling with traditional views on pacifism. No American publisher has yet chosen to reprint the book, but it is hardly more than a question of time. Once it wins attention, the story will probably end up on movie and television screens as well.

Some who protest the writer’s approach will find it difficult to believe, but Wiebe is still a dyed-in-the-wool Mennonite who embraces pacifism as strongly as ever. He now teaches English at Goshen (Indiana) College and is trying to get started on a second novel—with Mennonites.

England, Home, And Duty

Having spied in its midst the fourteenth incumbent of a historic Scottish earldom, the General Assembly invited him to address the fathers and brethren of the Church of Scotland. “Let us all take part in the great search to discover God and know God,” said the distinguished stranger, “and we may yet claim to be a God-fearing and a Christian country.”

Foreign secretary then, Lord Home last month became Britain’s prime minister. He is relinquishing his title (so that he can win election to the House of Commons) to assume leadership at a time when recent misfortunes make his party’s future very precarious.

Styled “an elegant anachronism” by the vitriolic tongue of Labor’s Harold Wilson. Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home was educated at Eton and Oxford, and married the daughter of noted Anglican dean C. A. Alington. “A most charming person and extremely kind,” reports Canon A. E. Swinton of the little Scottish Episcopal church (fifty-seven communicants) at Coldstream near the English border, where Lord Home is churchwarden and a regular attendant when residing at his ancestral seat.

Lady Home was in charge of the Mothers’ Union at the church until her husband’s appointment to the Foreign Office involved long stays in London. A few hours after he had been named prime minister-designate and was feverishly trying to form a cabinet against opposition from some of his colleagues, he took an hour out to attend morning worship at fashionable St. James’, Piccadilly.

“The politician,” he had told the General Assembly last May, “must resist the temptation to claim that every political act is approved by the angels. But in politics there must be leadership, and in the leadership of a Christian nation there should be an element of witness.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Reprieve For Chaplains

The U. S. Air Force says it will no longer require its Protestant chaplains to use the controversial “Unified Curriculum” for Sunday schools (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY News, April 13, 1962, p. 31).

A revised regulation permits chaplains to choose their own Sunday school literature, thus removing the objection of many that the prescribed curriculum imposed an undesirable theological orientation. The curriculum is still “recommended,” but a standard thematic development is distinguished from course materials. The “official” designation of the old regulation has been dropped.

The Army and Navy had never made the use of the curriculum mandatory by regulation, as did the Air Force. Some chaplains, however, reported other types of pressure in behalf of the curriculum.

The new policy spells a victory for the National Association of Evangelicals, which has waged a campaign against the mandatory clause for more than two years. Floyd Robertson, executive secretary of NAE’s Commission on Chaplains, termed the changes “consistent with our American heritage of religious freedom.”

Sunday schools at military bases have long been plagued with a problem of continuity in study matter. The Unified Curriculum was introduced to meet difficulties created by frequent transfer of military personnel. Materials are selected in cooperation with the Protestant Church-Owned Publishers Association.

Sex And Sharks

“I imagine that historians will say of us that, since people did not believe in much, they made a pitiful attempt to exalt sex into a religion,” said the Church of England’s Bishop of Guildford, the Rt. Rev. George Reindorp. Among other British episcopal utterances on a similar theme was a declaration in a Sunday newspaper by Dr. F. D. Coggan, Archbishop of York, suggesting that a young man on marrying had a right to look for one who had not indulged in sexual intercourse. He quoted one young person who asked: “What decent boy or girl wants second-hand goods?” This was not regarded as a model of timely utterance by the editor of Prism, Anglican monthly, who wondered if British clergy should not keep quiet on sex for at least a year. Regarding the primate’s “second-hand goods” reference the editor commented: “There is a contempt implied in it, which surely no Christian must ever feel for a fellow human being.”

The subject cropped up again at the fall meeting of York Convocation when Dr. Coggan said in his presidential address: “The attitude of too many that it is bad for young John to be told that he must wait to satisfy his cravings, that if he is denied satisfaction he will be a psychological wreck—does this need to be offset by a reconsideration of such ancient words as self-control, chastity … and purity?”

Meanwhile, at the Convocation of Canterbury, Archbishop Michael Ramsey said the Anglican communion needed to have cohesion in its approaches to other churches. Was it right that in Canada and in the United States there should be entirely separate approaches to the Presbyterians without knowledge or cooperation across the frontier? Should Methodists in Britain be approached without cooperation with the church in Wales? On Anglican-Methodist union proposals the archbishop said: “The months which lie ahead are full of opportunity in the quest of Christian unity.… There will be the urgent study of the Report on Anglican-Methodist relations.… We must realize that if the decisions to be made by ourselves are hard, the decisions to be made by the Methodists are perhaps harder still.”

Both convocations agreed to revision of a canon so that women may become lay readers, despite a stirring rearguard action at Westminster by the Rt. Rev. Basil Guy, Bishop of Gloucester. The bishop pointed out that woman despised the assumption of headship so much that “to be known as one who wears the trousers is both painful and humiliating for her.”

The Archdeacon of Aston, the Ven. M. T. Dunlop, said he had sought for years to understand opposition to women as priests or lay readers. Apart from the usual prejudice, he had had to wait until Bishop Guy’s speech to hear another reason—and that speech was based on a fallacy. He said later: “We are in danger of overemphasizing this notion of the family in the current teaching of the Church. We have the Family Communion; we have Christian Family Year—I sometimes wonder if any bachelor or spinster has any more chance of salvation than an archdeacon.” The archdeacon went on to charge with blasphemy another speaker who, he suggested, had put forward the supposed “maleness” of God who was “neither male nor female, but spirit.”

Both convocations passed resolutions approving full communion with the Philippine Independent Church, the Spanish Reformed Episcopal Church, and the Lusitanian Church of Portugal. Commented the Dean of Chester: “One of the advantages will be that if you are shipwrecked off the Philippines and the sharks do not care whether or not you are members of the Synod of York you will be able to receive the ministrations of the very able local priests and receive Holy Unction from them if necessary.” No one was quite sure what all this meant, but the dean meant it kindly and everybody laughed.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Women In The Balance

Presbyterian church politicians in the South are keeping a sharp eye on otherwise routine presbytery meetings this fall as a proposal to ordain women comes to a vote. The Book of Church Order amendment now before the eighty presbyteries of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. would allow ordination of distaff deacons, elders, and ministers.

In the first month of balloting, with twenty-seven judicatories reporting, sixteen approved the change and eleven turned it down.

Veteran observers say the trend is thus far inconclusive. Many are comparing the votes on female clergy to the votes cast in 1955 on union with what was then the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Of the sixteen judicatories voting for women’s ordination, all except two voted for merger. And of the eleven voting against ordination, all except two voted against union. The merger proposal failed, with forty-two presbyteries supporting the measure and forty-three opposing it.

Another indicator was the early vote of the denomination’s largest presbytery, that of Atlanta, Georgia. It turned down the amendment for female clergy by a margin of one vote—84–83. “As Atlanta goes, so goes the assembly,” has long been a slogan of ecclesiastical vote watchers.

The issue may continue for several months. Some presbyteries do not plan a show of hands until next spring. If forty-one or more presbyteries approve the amendment it will be subject to enactment by the 1964 General Assembly. The denomination’s constitution requires that such changes be approved by one assembly, then by the presbyteries, and finally by a subsequent assembly. Rarely has an assembly failed to go along with a majority of the presbyteries.

Disapproval of the proposed change by forty or more presbyteries would defeat the issue, but not for long. The presbyteries killed a similar plan seven years ago, and proponents are expected to keep trying. Besides suggesting a scriptural basis, those in favor have also argued that women are more “progressive” and more anxious to extend ecumenical contacts. Opponents claim there is no authority in the Bible for women as “rulers” of the church.

ARTHUR MATTHEWS

Baptist Rapprochment

Baptist geographical lines came under the scrutiny of a self-appointed committee of eighty-five pastors and church members in Virginia Beach, Virginia, last month. The group, known as the Baptist Survey and Study Committee, seeks eventual merger of the American and Southern Baptist Conventions.

The committee passed a resolution urging their denominations to avoid competition in establishing and accepting churches for membership. An appeal was made to American and Southern Baptist home missions leaders to “begin between themselves a discussion of ways to work together in the missionary witness to North America.”

In their resolution, the Baptists said the two national conventions must “distinguish between necessary and unnecessary territorial expansion on the North American continent.” They defined “an acceptable form of expansion” as “the ministry to those who lack a Baptist witness,” and an unacceptable form that which “results from the beginning of competing churches in the same immediate area.”

The resolution, approved by conference participants with only one dissenting vote, will be presented to both conventions when they meet in their annual sessions in the spring of 1964.

The meeting was the committee’s second. The first was held a year ago and drew seventy-five participants. Committee chairman is the Rev. Howard R. Stewart of the First [American] Baptist Church in Dover, Delaware.

One of the many fine things in the old Chinese culture was the sense of responsibility. “This thing [or matter] is on your body” means, “The responsibility is yours and you will be held accountable”—and it worked.

There were, of course, times when this acceptance of full responsibility stemmed from fear, while in many instances “face” may have been the dominating factor—the one appealed to felt a sense of pride in being so trusted. On the other hand, it often came from a deep sense of loyalty.

Man’s responsibility to God is a real and abiding precept of the Christian faith, but even the practicing Christian only too often fails to realize how true and how pervading this fact is.

We are prone to think our lives entail a matter of option, choice, personal decision, when in fact the question is one of direct personal responsibility to God and therefore can be determined only in the light of God’s revealed will.

The Ten Commandments are God’s moral and spiritual laws in two areas—man’s responsibility to God and to his fellow man; our Lord summed them up in one word: “love,” toward God and toward our brothers.

Most Christians will acknowledge this thesis in theory, although they fail only too often in practice. But there is another area where we fail miserably and in so doing find ourselves living in frustration.

Responsibility is not merely a question of Christian profession after which we live in a spiritual vacuum, set apart from God as far as daily obligations are concerned. The fact is that every day should be lived in the light of our responsibility to God—every act, decision, thought, and motive should come under this concept.

Once we recognize this and act upon it, our problems are resolved as far as the inner peace and outward effectiveness of daily living are concerned.

This does not mean that the way becomes easier; it may become much harder, for the loving will of God for us often includes difficulties, even persecutions. But being obedient to God’s will and recognizing our basic and ultimate responsibility to him transforms this allegiance into obedience and enables us to act and react with God as our companion and helper.

There is not a day but what we are confronted with decisions which must be made, problems having to do with the intimate details of our own lives as well as those which affect our relationships with others. The obedient heart, deeply aware of ultimate responsibility to God, makes decisions which will glorify God and bring honor to His name. Where others are involved, decisions will be blessed at the level of interpersonal relationships.

We can verify this simply by looking at the world and its problems. Man is a responsible creature, responsible to God. When this basic truth is either unknown or violated, chaos results—chaos in individual lives and in nations as a whole. The converse is equally true.

“In God We Trust” on our currency is a tacit admission of our national responsibility to God. Current trends which will make our national life purely secular confuse the issue with the separation of church and state. The fact is that men and nations are responsible to God and evade this responsibility to their own undoing.

We have known Christians who, while fully aware of their personal responsibility to God, were nevertheless utterly miserable. This came from their failure to understand the nature of that responsibility. In every minor detail of their daily existence they would stop to ask God what he wanted them to do, then look for some leading or omen which would reveal his will for them. The result was often a life of vacillation, uncertainty, and frustration. They failed to use sanctified common sense.

When we surrender our lives to Christ, a Pilot comes on board the ship of life; the Holy Spirit takes up residence in our hearts, and he makes the decisions for us. This is not to decry the repeated instances in which we need and receive specific leading for specific problems. But it is to say that the person filled with and directed by the Spirit will make the right decisions as a rule; he has already made a complete commitment to God, a recognition of personal responsibility to Him, so that certain attitudes and actions are fixed in the light of God’s revealed will about them.

The Bible is filled with illustrations of those who were aware of their responsibility to God and because of this acted for his glory and their own good.

Joseph was tempted by Potiphar’s wife. There was the occasion, the place, and the pull of the flesh. But Joseph’s answer was, “How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” His decision was predicated not on his own desires but on responsibility and obedience to God.

Daniel and his friends were offered the dainties of the king’s table; but a sense of higher responsibility was theirs, and they chose a simpler fare.

Later, confronted with another choice—worshiping the king or dying in a fiery furnace—they recognized their responsibility to God and defied the king.

In his later years Daniel had to choose between hauling down his colors and refraining from open worship of God for a season, or the consequence of such an act. He chose God and found himself in a den of lions. He had a sense of his responsibility to God above all else.

In the Acts of the Apostles we read of the arrest of Peter and John and the officials’ demand that they cease preaching in the name of Jesus. Their reply rings down through the centuries as a challenge to Christians today: “Whether it be right in the sight of God to harken unto you more than unto God, judge ye. For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19, 20).

Cultivating a sense of responsibility to God is both a definite act and a process. On the one hand it is involved in regeneration, when we consciously accept Jesus Christ as Saviour and make him the Lord of our lives. It is also involved in the work of sanctification, wherein we grow in our apprehension of God, our obedience to him, and our willingness to serve him.

Basic to all is man’s recognition of the complete sovereignty of God. We are responsible to Him because we are his by creation and redemption. If we admit his sovereignty, we must recognize our own responsibility to know and do his will. This should not be an onerous duty: rather, it is a joyous privilege, for God requires nothing of us for which he will not at the same time supply the wisdom, guidance, and strength.

Frustrated? Uncertain? Miserable? The answer is not to be found in man-made panaceas or in multiplied activities. Rather it is to be found in this command: “Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth” (Psalm 46:10).

Admit God’s right to command and guide. Recognize our responsibility to him. Act on this basic truth, and life will assume its proper perspective.

Since Celsus of the second century, a recurring criticism of Christianity has been that it is too narrowminded to listen to the voices around it. Without doubt a prima-facie case can be established. Tertullian of North Africa raised the question, “What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?” The medieval Church was as brusque in its reaction to the new thought forms arising from the rediscovery of the writings of Aristotle. In the nineteenth century some Christians violently opposed the use of chloroform in childbirth.

But the truth is that the Church has not been unwilling to listen to voices around it; she has only been slow to do so. That is why critics have been able to make the bigoted characterization stick, for the Church has been one of the great conservative forces in Western life. Novelists of the 1920s such as Sinclair Lewis, and the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean Paul Sartre attacked the Church. But the Church listened even to their views. She only appeared not to, because she failed to respond quickly.

The Church has sometimes fooled both herself and her detractors by insisting that her ear is attuned only to the voice of her Lord. On the contrary, she has sometimes resembled those referred to in Second Timothy “who will listen to anybody and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth.” She has even been like a King Jehoiakim, putting a penknife to the document to which she claims to listen, while in fact listening to voices from elsewhere.

By the time a new intellectual movement reaches its peak it begins to infiltrate the Church—or the Church, in an attempt to oppose the new philosophy, accepts its premises. The difficulty is that about the time the Church accommodates to the current fad new intellectual currents arise, rendering the adjusted views obsolete. But the Church for at least another generation feels obligated to defend the fad along with the faith, and is therefore more bigoted than she ought to be.

In our time, effort is being expended in the Church to eradicate narrowmindedness, and this has something to commend it. But there is cause for concern, because that effort has been directed not only against thought molds of obsolete philosophical systems, but against the biblical faith itself. The result has been that in becoming openminded the Church has become innocuous so far as her real message is concerned. There is a great need in our time that the Church discover her own voice, so that she will know how to react to other voices.

This charge against Christianity is a serious one. What evidence is there to support it?

First, we might point to Augustine, whose reading of Neo-Platonic philosophy paved the way for his conversion. Even after becoming a Christian, he found Neo-Platonism compatible. In Against the Academics, he wrote: “I feel sure at the moment that I shall find truth with the Platonists, nor will it be at variance with our sacred mysteries.” Augustine, therefore, listened not only to his Lord but also to the voice of Plato.

Scholars today are not so certain that Neo-Platonism and the Scriptures say the same thing. In fact, it is popular in some circles to make a radical distinction between Greek and Hebrew ways of thinking. But the fourth-century Church heard the certain voices that were incorporated into the life and thought of Christendom.

In the thirteenth century, the voice heard by the Church was that of Aristotle, but not until the tenacity of Augustinian thought molds had relaxed. In the twelfth century, the works of Aristotle were rediscovered, and Thomas Aquinas, now the official theologian of a major segment of Christendom, prepared his monumental synthesis, but not without opposition. The medieval Church opposed but then accepted Aristotelianism, and its influence continues in the theology of Christendom even to this day.

As Protestants we tend to think, “It is true, Christianity did listen to other voices, but all that was remedied by the Reformation.” But many remnants remain. Plato’s proofs for the immortality of the soul may still be heard; but as contemporary biblical scholars tell us, the early Christians affirmed not the immortality of the soul but the resurrection of man in bodily form. Also Aquinas’ five arguments for the existence of God, three of which he borrowed explicitly from Aristotle, have had a continuing place in Protestant apologetics. But most theologians in our day agree that these arguments are not Christian after all, because they prove a god who is an object, an “It,” rather than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who must be addressed as “Thou.”

Of greater significance to the contemporary scene is the battle which the Church has fought with modern science. At first the Church clung to such views as the earth being the center of the universe and matter consisting of four elements. But a later generation of churchmen decided that these views were not necessary to the faith. By this time, however, science had moved even further. The sun was now the center not of the universe but only of the solar system, and the number of elements kept multiplying. Many Christian thinkers have now rightly concluded that it is not the business of the Church to make pronouncements in science.

Even now, however, the Church is characterized as seeing red when the word science is mentioned, but the truth is that she has listened avidly to the voice of science. Henry Wieman, professor emeritus of the University of Chicago Divinity School, even went so far as to employ the scientific method in constructing a Christian (?) theology.

These examples of the influence of the ongoing intellectual life of man upon Christianity are selective rather than exhaustive; yet they are sufficient to show that, contrary to the usual opinion and often to her own chagrin, the Church, however slowly, has tended to listen to most of the voices around her. As Basil Willey of Cambridge University has written:

Nothing more clearly illustrates the impingements of secular thought upon Christianity than the history of the successive changes in the mode of arguing the case for the Christian religion. Each change has the aspect of a phase in a rear-guard action; driven from one position after another, religion seeks to entrench itself in surer and surer ground. If religion has been thus largely on the defensive it is because religion long occupied territory not properly its own; as Arnold put it: “Religion has attached its emotion to certain supposed facts, and now the facts are failing it” (Christianity Past and Present, p. 11).

Willey goes on to say that now, due to our increased knowledge of history and the fact that the faith has been laid bare to its very foundation, we are in a better position than ever before to determine what is uniquely Christian. But by and large, the Church goes on her way listening more to the voice of her age than the voice of her Lord.

Christians in our time are shockingly unaware of the nature of the biblical faith. The concern of college students from Christian homes is not so much, What is the nature of the faith?, as, Should one believe? Some time ago as a student waited in my office for a conference he read a book. My curiosity was aroused, and when his turn came I asked what he was reading. It turned out to be a book on the philosophical bases of faith. He said that discussions in the dormitory at night revolved about religion and that he was attempting to find the answers to some of the problems raised. Most students are more sophisticated in questioning than in their knowledge of what the faith is all about. A person should be at least as concerned about the content of his faith as he is about whether he should believe. But most students seem much more concerned about the latter. Unfortunately, it is more popular to read books about belief that often take their cues from voices other than Christian, than it is to read the biblical documents or books about the biblical faith.

One does not need to be an astute observer to conclude that the Church is having too little impact on the intellectual climate of our time. Part of the reason may be that the Church is no longer clear about what her message ought to be. Furthermore, she has taken so seriously her obligation to listen to anyone that she no longer feels that anyone should listen to her.

Last spring we invited my advisees into our home for the evening. Among those present was a pre-ministerial student who told of plans to transfer to a Bible college, and the subject turned to religion. Represented in the group were some from various groups in Christianity and Judaism. What was significant and is germane to this article is that, except for the pre-ministerial student, each soon conceded any uniqueness or finality of the Christian or Jewish faiths. These students seemed as committed to listening to anyone as to the biblical faith. Our generation includes very many who will listen to anybody and who thus can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth.

The Church is in this predicament precisely because she does not know the voice of her Lord. Even Paul Tillich can write;

Certainly, every real Christian is gripped by the power of the biblical words and even of the classical creedal statements of the Church. They mediate something to him that is more important than logical understanding. And nobody can be a theologian who is not gripped in this way by the Christian message (Religion in Life, Winter 1955–56).

But, as G. Ernest Wright observed, Tillich leaves off where he must begin. Wright’s task is to determine the nature of the biblical faith as reflected in biblical literature. It is also the task of the Church if she is to be the Church of the Lord, for if she spends most of her time listening to other voices, then she is something else.

When the Church has discovered who she is by listening to her Master, then she will find that it is her obligation to speak as well as listen when confronted by the voices of our time. And it is the word and work of her Lord that sit in judgment on all other words and works.

It is not for the Church to listen to anyone but her Lord. It is in this way that she arrives at a knowledge of the truth. He declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The lesson the Church needs to learn from her own history is that she must more sharply distinguish His voice from the other voices.

Thomas M. Olbricht, assistant professor of speech at The Pennsylvania State University, received the M.A. and the Ph.D. degrees from the University of Iowa and the S.T.B. degree from Harvard Divinity School.

SPACE AND TIME

Ever since I heard about a friend of mine who wrote a whole book either on the Pennsylvania Railroad riding, or in the Pennsylvania Station sitting, I have been hurt deep down with a renewed awareness of my inadequacies. My wife points out that whereas this other man improves each shining moment, I am apt to read a paperback or take in a movie. There is something here that points up the difference between genius and the unwashed multitudes.

One of my best ways of wasting time is watching how other people waste time. You can put it down as one of life’s finalities that any man who finds time to read a bulletin board, for example, just doesn’t know what to do with his time. He stands with his hands behind him and swings back and forth on the balls of his feet. Watch the man who sits in a meeting and reads the material in the front and back of the hymnal. I have been known even to look up the name of the publisher of a hymnbook. Another loafing opportunity is to take the docket of a meeting and read it all the way through. When that man down the row reads it with great intensity, you can be sure that he is bored beyond comprehension. How much time have you spent on your date book recently, especially those lovely tables of troy weights or that list of birthstones for all twelve months! There is a special thesis to be written on the reading of memorial windows and memorial plaques.

Marney has a great sermon entitled “In the Meantime,” and the simple word is that if we do not live in the “meantime, we do not live at all,” because life is made up of “meantimes.” I suppose the only thing worse than killing time is conquering space. Time is such a marvelous gift. Space is such a lovely thing. I hate to see my time run out, and I think it is a terrible ambition to want to conquer space. There may be a better thing in having the immensity of space conquer me. But that is another story.

EUTYCHUS II

TO BANISH THE PULPIT CLICHÉ

Since I am a preacher turned writer I found profitable pleasure in your September 27 issue.… Since Mr. Albus (“Why Don’t More Ministers Write?”) can remember a few impression-forming sermons from a lifetime of listening, one should rejoice that so few sermons get into print. Probably the percentage of printworthy sermons is quite small.

After evaluating sermon manuscripts along with several other types of free-lance writing I’m convinced of one preacher deficiency—most men don’t have the ability to communicate the Gospel to either their local or their printed-page congregations.…

Putting a sermon into an idea-communicating article would do more to improve the preaching of some men than ten years of theological jargon studies. Ridding a manuscript of the fluent pulpit clichés takes talent. But the end result—a fresh approach to an old truth—is most rewarding.

May I also suggest that ministerial self-importance hinders many others from writing. The busy-preacher image can’t be maintained when a man admits he has hours to labor over a manuscript for publication. Rejection slips that say your stuff isn’t so great also challenge this ego factor.

WILLIAM J. KRUTZA

Staff Writer

Harvest Publications

Baptist General Conference

Chicago, Ill.

MARCH AND COUNTERMARCH

The condescending, flippant article “Churchmen on the March” (News, Sept. 13 issue) was certainly no credit to your usually fine publication. Your readers deserved a more thoughtful analysis of this significant demonstration, and you missed an excellent opportunity for meaningful comment on a major moral issue in American life.

If, as you imply, some of the religious overtones betrayed muddled theology, this only reflects the absence of evangelical leadership in the civil rights movement. This absence is truly puzzling, for justice in human affairs is a well-attested biblical theme.

SANFORD V. SMITH

Washington, D. C.

This is certainly the most amateurish reporting that CHRISTIANITY TODAY has ever sponsored. I cannot conceive of treating a significant event as that in such a childish fashion.

JERRY BEAVAN

Vice President

DeMoss Associates

Valley Forge, Pa.

A masterpiece of neutrality.…

SHIRLEY S. ACKLEY

Warwick, R. I.

“Churchmen on the March” leaves the impression that my activity in opposition to the march, August 28, in Washington, was a personal affair and that I was disappointed “that he had been refused an interview with President Kennedy.”

The opposition headquarters which was established in the Hotel Washington on March 26 was an activity of the American Council of Christian Churches. This council believes that the whole approach now being made to civil rights is wrong and that you cannot legislate love nor can the golden rule be made a statute of the federal government, and your own report of “some civil wrongs” and “the earmarks of a garrison state to enable a freedom rally to be held” is most appropriate.

In regard to the White House, the President declined to receive a delegation of some 200 churchmen affiliated with the American Council of Christian Churches. Previously he had sent invitations to 243 churchmen in the country to meet him in the White House on June 17, and most of those invited came, and he sought to enlist them in behalf of his political proposals on civil rights. We felt that a contrary opinion needed to be presented to the President and sought to exercise our right as petitioned.

We object strenuously to the President’s use of religious organizations to promote his political programs. He sent the Hon. Averell Harriman, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, as his personal representative, to Rochester, to the meeting of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, where Harriman used the platform of the WCC to denounce the cut made by the House in the foreign aid bill; and now the National Council’s General Board has announced that the President will be the honored speaker at the Triennial Convention of the NCC in Philadelphia, the first week in December. All religious groups should be treated alike by the White House, and the President, whether he be Kennedy or John Doe, should not use the platforms of religious bodies in this country to serve his political ends.

CARL MCINTIRE

President

International Council of Christian Churches

Collingswood, N. J.

Let me ask you this, sir: what would be your reaction, ignoring the years of slavery, to the assertion “from our tenth-story window view it appeared that the marchers were moving much too fast to accomplish their sociological objectives” (Editorial, Sept. 13 issue), when you view the pace for the last one hundred years? At what pace would you have us go? Is it possible for an oppressing majority to assess, with any objectivity, how fast a suppressed minority should move?

The editorial seems worried about an apparent demand for preferential treatment. This is what the Negro has been receiving for the last 350 years. Have not evangelicals been guilty of offering others who have come to these shores preferential treatment? I saw the evangelicals of Lynchburg, Virginia, making herculean efforts to assist Hungarian refugees get jobs and housing when they would not lift one finger to help Negroes born in America and who had gone to foreign battlefields in America’s cause.

As a Negro who was in the march, I view our pace as much too slow and the evangelical’s response tragically inadequate.

W. J. HODGE

President

Kentucky State Conference of NAACP Branches

Louisville, Ky.

We were appalled at the article … and the writers’ serious acceptance of some of the leaders of the Negro march. A. Philip Randolph has, according to this article, equated himself with Jesus Christ; NAACP leader Roy Wilkins equates the march with a religious crusade; Eugene Carson Blake equates Negro “suffering” with the suffering of Christ! It is impossible to articulate adequately the blasphemy of such utterances. If this article was merely meant to expose rather than condone, the irony escapes us, because of what was left unsaid.

M. MCCORMACK

Louisville, Ky.

The National Council of Churches’ call for support of the march on Washington was of considerable interest.

It is particularly noteworthy to us because it denotes (1) a doctrinal position purporting to be that of the churches it represents, (2) a political voice and authority that belie its original express purpose of “meeting for discussion and fellowship,” (3) a spiritual dearth resulting in distortion of priorities and ethical means.

It is particularly disturbing to note that by espousing this cause in obedience to the “call,” we give assent to the NCC’s usurping of these realms, yet if we do not, now, we will be accused of bigotry, prejudice, and divisiveness.

Personally, I strongly believe in the Christian, ethical principle of integration, and have enjoyed much good fellowship and compatibility at intellectual, emotional levels, etc., with Negro brethren. But I fear this belief, and the action I may feel I should take as one freed by the grace of God, are far from the present militant cries and demands.

Likewise I believe the true Church must be vocal and active to show here Christ’s love, and strengthen the hands of our missionaries abroad.

TIM STAFFORD

Birmingham, Ala.

GLOSSOLALIA

Mr. Farrell states (“Outburst of Tongues: The New Penetration,” Sept. 13 issue) that exponents of classical Protestantism point out that Paul stated a preference for intelligible words and that there is no record of a specific instance when he used the gift. The fact is that Paul stated a preference for intelligible words when teaching in the church. It seems to me a mechanic prefers a wrench but if he is doing carpentry he would prefer a hammer and saw. To my knowledge there is no record of a specific time when Paul took communion, though obviously we know he did.…

There is a growing minority among Full Gospel people who do not believe that tongues is the “only” or “necessary” evidence of the initial receiving of the Holy Spirit. We do accept that it is an evidence.

J. E. STILES, JR.

Neighborhood Church

Pacoima, Calif.

This is the most complete summary and evaluation I have seen to date.

One subject Mr. Farrell did not touch upon and that I have not seen discussed is the relation of the tongues movement to the inspiration of the Scriptures. My limited and local observation has been a light view of the authority of the Scriptures and the meaning of “inspiration” as applied to Scripture on the part of glossolalics—both the older Pentecostals and the newer converts from more formalistic churches.

Does not the logic of “tongues” indicate that this is revelation from God by and through the Holy Spirit? If so, how does it differ in kind and in authority from the sacred canon? My experience has pointed to a foggy distinction on the part of those who practice speaking in tongues. Does this not account for the readiness with which Pentecostals have entered into and been accepted within the ecumenical movement? In fact, is not one of the psychological appeals of the ecumenical movement the substitution of a “super-church” authority for [that] God’s holy inspired revelation?

WILLIAM L. WOOD

State Line Baptist

Milton-Freewater, Ore.

Felt compelled to say a hearty “Amen.” … As an evangelist I have found much confusion over the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, especially his work after conversion. Huntington, W. Va.

ARNOLD WILLIS

“Outburst” reads like the elder brother’s reaction to the return of the prodigal son. His wordy assault is more like an outburst than an analysis. His references to the Scripture are not fair to the truth contained in Scriptures cited.

JAMES C. KOFAHL

Assembly of God

Prichard, Ala.

Voodo, which elevates the satanic, is particularly attracted to glossolalic experience. In the Middle Ages a group psychotic form known as the “dancing madness” reports glossolalic experience. We cannot ignore anthropology and psychology in understanding the new movement which is sweeping middle-class Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. In the framework of every culture it appears that symbols of the unconscious as well as the conscious are universal.…

Our time is spiritually defunct and sees tremendous need for group identity, and thus a group psychopathology can offer security on a level slightly less than chronic mental illness. We saw this happen in the warped ideology of Nazism which was as satanic and foul as voodoo, happening to supposedly civilized Christians. There is no premium or sanctity to being white, Anglo-Saxon, or Christian for group psychopathology. In the need for present conformity the new cultural schizophrenia has occurred in the pentecostal experience, and in some ways has little actual connection with the [U. S.] Pentecostalist Churches.…

We are not witnessing a valid biblical experience of God encountering man in history as he did on the shores of Pa-hahiroth in Exodus but a group psychopathology. All this reminds me of C. S. Lewis’ reminder that the main task of Satan is to make you think he is not there.

Perhaps the symbol of cloven hoof and horns is medieval, and he is disguised as some middle-class respectable gentleman who gets up on an Anglican pulpit and breaks into open hallucinatory clatter which is finally found to be nonsense syllables.

(THE REV.) HENRI M. YAKER

Consulting Psychologist

Highland Park, N. J.

Thank you for so balanced a coverage of the subject.

RAYMOND H. LIBBY

Seventh-day Adventist Church

Modesto, Calif.

Perhaps a preponderance of those during the past fifty or sixty years who have received the baptism of the Holy Ghost have been of the less educated, but perhaps, too, they have been the ones who were “simple enough”—in faith and acceptance of God’s Word to believe he would do just what he promised: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my spirit upon all flesh …” (Acts 2:17), and finally, “For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off …” (Acts 2:39).

CARL G. CONNER

Springfield, Mo.

Comment can be little more than supplementary, but a little seems appropriate.

The citation of First Corinthians 14:14–19 from the AV without indicating italics is deceptive. Nowhere does the Greek speak of “an unknown tongue”; the word “unknown” is an interpretative addition by the translators. It may or may not be a valid interpretation. Thayer (in his Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament) is very sure that Paul uses glossa here with reference to the physical organ, and that the activity consists of making speech-like noises rather than using a language, known or unknown. Yet Paul’s words in First Corinthians 13:1, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels,” seem to imply that language as a system of communication is involved, and not merely ecstatic babbling. The possibility of interpretation reinforces the idea that something definable as “language” (a secondary meaning of glossa) is indeed intended.

Not all of the references in Acts to being “filled with” or “full of” the Spirit can be taken to describe a special “outpouring” of the Spirit. Certainly Acts 13:52 is one of Luke’s typical summary sentences.… The outpouring of the Holy Spirit is never once described with reference to an individual, but always in connection with the Church of Christ: first the Jews, then the Samaritans, then the Gentiles, and finally the strange group in Ephesus, with one foot in each dispensation. In each of these cases, the gift of speaking in tongues was clearly given to every person; even the number is mentioned in some cases. The “baptism” of |he Holy Spirit belongs to the Church as a body, the body of Christ, with absolutely no individual selectivity, and with the ability to speak in new languages as an initial evidence of the supernatural character of this universal Church. This was communication; in Corinth it must potentially have been, if interpretation was possible. At worst, it was a highly specialized type of ecstatic glossolalia.

Farrell refers to a minister who claims to have witnessed to foreigners in their own languages. Polish is mentioned; fine, I hope he did. Also mentioned is Coptic Egyptian. The latter must have been in a spiritualist seance, because there have been no native speakers of Coptic Egyptian for a good many years. I fear this is typical of the mistaken, though perhaps sincere, claims of modern glossolalics.

I am the more concerned about the statement that “a group of government linguistic experts sought to analyze for CHRISTIANITY TODAY a tape of his glossolalia but found it unrecognizable, though one said it sounded like a language structurally.” The fact that there are some 3,000 languages in the world, many of them unknown (to most of us, that is), is not entirely relevant. We do know something about representative languages of every known language family in the world. I am by no means unique among descriptive linguists in having had direct, personal contact with well over a hundred languages representing a majority of the world’s language families, and in having studied descriptions of languages of virtually every reported type. If a glossolalic were speaking in any of the thousand languages of Africa, there is about a 90 per cent chance that I would know it in a minute. Now, I have also had the opportunity of making a sympathetic study of an alleged instance of speaking in tongues. And I must report without reservation that my sample does not sound like a language structurally. There can be no more than two contrasting vowel sounds, and a most peculiarly restricted set of consonant sounds; these combine into a very few syllable clusters which recur many times in various orders. The consonants and vowels do not all sound like English (the glossolalic’s native language), but the intonation patterns are so completely American English that the total effect is a bit ludicrous. My sample includes an “interpretation.” At the most generous estimate, the glossolalic utterance includes ten or eleven “sentences” or stretches of possibly meaningful speech. But the “interpretation” involves no less than fourteen distinct and independent ideas. There simply can be no match between the “tongue” and the “interpretation.” I am told that Dr. E. A. Nida of the American Bible Society has reported similar impressions of glossolalic recordings. Our evidence is still admittedly limited, but from the viewpoint of a Christian linguist the modern phenomenon of glossolalia would appear to be a linguistic fraud and monstrosity, given even the most generous interpretation of First Corinthians 12–14.

I have spoken as a linguist; let me also speak as a theologian (an ordained minister of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church). In the sample of glossolalia I have, the speaker speaks in the name of God. His “interpretation” begins: “My people, why do you doubt? Why do you fear? In my Word I have said to you, you can do nothing without me.” But God has already spoken in his inspired Word, the Holy Scriptures. Any presumption to add to this Word, even to reinforce it with a new Spirit-breathed message, is falsehood and blasphemy. I do not accuse this alleged speaker in tongues of being deliberately fraudulent; I rather believe (and the recording includes other evidence of this) that he is an emotional and possibly unstable mystic. I am persuaded, however, that he is the victim of a deception that will ultimately be a spiritual detriment rather than an advantage, to himself and others. When he speaks for God, his “tongue” is condemned on the surface.

I dislike being a “debunker.” Frankly, I have my own private spiritual experiences which I cannot entirely explain, and which I (perhaps wrongly) consider precious. But when Christians publicize, propagate, and endeavor to perpetuate an apparent manifestation of psychological instability and an obvious blasphemy as a special “gift of the Holy Spirit,” I cannot refuse to apply my knowledge and training to the problem. So far, I can only conclude, with all the sympathetic Scripture-centered scholarship I know how to apply, that modern glossolalia is a sad deception. Even if I am wrong, we had all best heed Paul’s admonition not to play it up, but to control it most carefully.

WILLIAM E. WELMERS

Prof. of African Languages

University of California at Los Angeles

Los Angeles, Calif.

Deals quite fairly and adequately with a subject which is currently of great interest to biblical Christians throughout this country, and perhaps the world.

There are several of us (graduate students in various fields) in this area who have been meeting for fellowship during the past six months. Your article on tongues answers and clarifies some of the questions which have been raised and discussed.

CHARLES E. HUNT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, Mass.

THANKS FOR THE THANKLESS

Your “Books in Review” section is superb. Your reviewers are selected, from what I can judge, for being familiar and concerned with the fields with which the books deal. Furthermore, they represent the finest of influential, evangelical scholarship. This is a service to the whole Christian community, for one can often learn more of a scholar’s views when he is assessing another’s work than when he is speaking in his own right. This is particularly true when key books are discussed.

But besides being good scholars and writers, your reviewers take positions for and against books—an increasing rarity in the reviewing business. Judging the intrinsic value of a book is difficult sometimes, but necessary to an adequate review. Other aspects of reviewing—such as the length of the article and the proximity of the review to the date of publication—together with those mentioned above, make CHRISTIANITY TODAY required reading for the lay Christian or the theological scholar.

Thank you for engaging writers for the thankless task of book reviewing.

DONALD G. DAVIS, JR.

School of Librarianship

University of California

Berkeley, Calif.

TO HEIGHTEN THE TIDE

The burning issue of “The Fourth R” (Aug. 30 issue) should not be permitted to flicker out and turn to ashes through lack of oxygen! In a similar vein, at the Los Angeles Coliseum on the closing night of the recent campaign, Billy Graham evoked a thunderous ovation from 140,000 people with an almost offhand remark that maybe such a crowd might make a march on Washington protesting the outlawing of religion in the public schools.

Can’t something practicable be devised to preserve and express this tide of sentiment?

For example, there are at least a couple of protest bills languishing in the Congressional hopper. Evidence of powerful public concern may be all that is needed to spur the committee to get one of these bills (say Senator Williams’ bill) to the top of the pile. This would be a good place to start.

How about doing something? How about testing the sinews of American Protestantism?… Invite readers to reply personally or through signed petitions circulated in their churches.

HARRY JAEGER

Youth Editor

Gospel Light Publications

Glendale, Calif.

Dr. Billy Graham has called for a march on Washington to demand our legislators pass an amendment to the Constitution and thus give American youth God’s Holy Word in our nation’s schools. It has occurred to me that if your great magazine would publicize and aid this challenge of Dr. Graham, that Christian Americans would march on Washington not 200,000 strong, but 2,000, 000 strong.

S. MCMASTER KERR

First Presbyterian Church

Harlan, Ky.

GO NORTH, YOUNG MAN

Re “The Ministry of All God’s People” (Editorial, Sept. 27 issue): If there are almost 1,000 seminary-trained graduates reportedly “biding their time” in the Dallas-Fort Worth area “waiting for pulpits,” why don’t some of them come to New England where there are numerous pulpits waiting for seminary-trained graduates?

DOUGLAS A. ELLIOTT

Trinity Baptist

Lynnfield, Mass.

THE YOKED AND THE UNYOKED

Dr. Samuel Shoemaker’s article “A Personal Word to the Clergy” (Aug. 2 issue) is a most stimulating personal witness to all who are yoked by the Holy Spirit. This well puts “Why I Left the Ministry” to sleep in its rightful place

FRANCIS E. NELSON

St. Mark Lutheran

Circle Pines, Minn.

AUTHORITY AND TRADITION

For the first time in centuries, a Roman Catholic pope (Pope John) recently confronted the tradition of the church openly with some of its own problems. In the ecumenical council and in the deliberations of the Curia, these challenges were publicly spoken of in the form of dialogue.

Prior to the council, the essence of authority in tradition was that the communicant of the church transferred his religious opinions to an institution, which was in a better position to determine what was truth or error than he was. Justification for such authority was found in the liability to error in the individual mind. An organized church, responsible for the determining of truth, was to be preferred to a single person concerned with any inquiry into it. Tradition was something which has “stood the test of time”—that which has emerged and endured out of the deliberations of the past.

Now the question which Pope John raised in the last council was that if the individual was capable of error, does it have to follow that tradition was incapable of error in every point? Accordingly, the raison d’être for the calling of the council was to determine if any error was perpetuated by tradition—for if such were true, then it would be far more costly than the mistakes of any one individual, past or present. If tradition can preserve truth then it can also preserve error, that is, any tradition not spoken ex cathedra.

It was always postulated in the Catholic Church that tradition is good if it can survive. This was one of the premises of the scholastic mind. But church history has shown, and Scripture is full of it, that the evil as well as the good can survive.

There is no better proof of the fallibility of tradition than in the recounting of historical judgment.

The story of mankind is replete with illustrations. The independence of a man like Socrates against the claims of the state was recounted by certain scholars on the floor of the recent Curia. Again, in the story of the Vatican, it was called to remembrance that the judgments of Galileo against the church were not in error. “Recanto! Recanto!” the pope told him to say. He recanted, but he uttered under his breath, “But the earth does go around the sun anyway.”

Pope John’s council revealed that when authorities are in conflict, it is impossible to happily resolve the dialogue by the method of authority itself.

Here perhaps is the most pleasing prospect of the coming council. Pope Paul himself in the last council took a position that authority and faith may be distinguishable.

WILLIS BERGEN

Hermon Presbyterian

Cabin John, Md.

CONTRASTING ATTITUDES

The concluding paragraphs of your report on the Billy Graham crusade in Los Angeles (News, Sept. 27 issue) mention that “Graham is still implicitly snubbed by some denominational and ecumenical leaders” and cite evidences of this.

The one interdenominational group which has consistently and prayerfully supported Mr. Graham from the beginning of his crusades is the National Association of Evangelicals. On the eve of his New York City crusade in 1957, when he was being sniped at from both sides of the theological fence, NAE passed a resolution which declared our “profoundest regard for our beloved brother” and assurance “of our united prayerful support as he prepares to pour forth his very life in the proclamation of the glorious Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”

It seems to me that this support on the part of NAE, contrasted with the attitudes of the ecumenists and neo-fundamentalists, is worth noting.

W. STANLEY MOONEYHAM

Director of Information

National Association of Evangelicals

Wheaton, Ill.

ANOTHER STRATEGY

Re “Strategy” (Eutychus, Aug. 30 issue): There is already a wealth of radio programs in Canada and the States, and if only a tenth of what the churches and other organizations spend on this were allocated for radio work abroad the national churches and missionary societies would be able to expand their present programs on an unprecedented scale.… May I suggest that our Christian radio programs at home need an “agonizing reappraisal” as to their value, and that it would be a mark of real Christian grace for a number to get off the air and get their sponsors to donate for radio and TV work on the mission fields of the world.…

LEONARD A. STREET

Toronto, Ont.

IT BEGAN IN ST. LOUIS

“Give Me Back My Child!” (Aug. 30 issue) is precisely the rallying cry of Citizens for Educational Freedom. As far back as August of 1959, when CEF was founded, there was the realization that the financial structure of education made compulsory by various state laws was saying to the parents of the nation, “You must send your child to this school, where he will be taught this, that, and everything else, but will not be allowed to receive training in morality based on belief in God.”

Five “citizens” in Saint Louis, meeting in like reaction to a single letter-to-the-editor, said as one, “Enough of this nonsense. We are the state, you will do what we say!” And like-minded citizens across the nation have been picking up the cry on a non-partisan, non-sectarian basis ever since.…

As a Roman Catholic, I would be unfair to my personal convictions if I did not take exception to the Stuart journey to “Spain (and) some of the South American nations.” But as an American citizen, I would have been most happy to have had Rev. John M. Stuart to nearby Bernardsville, New Jersey, last Sunday to be present at a dedication program. There, he would have seen for himself a fifteen-room Christian education building constructed before the church which would eventually serve the Presbyterian congregation in the Bernardsville area.…

Implement CEF philosophy by making the total tax fund set aside to foster education made compulsory by state law available to the parents of the nation for education of their children in the school of their choice and those educational facilities will receive full, five-day-week use “teaching right concepts to the children” who would attend them.

J. B. MCCAFFREY

Morris Plains, N. J.

LUXURY OF THE MOAN

The recent Supreme Court decision respecting church-state relationships in the public schools has brought forth considerable debate, some of which has been found in your pages, especially your August 30 issue. None of these articles mentioned the possibility of civil disobedience, however, even though they seemed seriously disturbed over the meaning of these decisions. All assumed that the decisions of the state determine the nature of church-state relationships.

Yet certain pronouncements I’ve read in the papers suggest that civil disobedience is in fact occurring.…

Are there possibly student prayer groups which insist on meeting on state property, for example, or parent groups? Are there evangelical teachers who insist on their rights as priests in the faith of the “priesthood of all believers”—rights to openly spread the Gospel wherever they may be? If so, are these things only happening where they have political support, or the support of tradition? Do they happen only in the South and in the East?

If, in fact, no meaningful civil disobedience is occurring, can this be because the “faithful” do not actually want to suffer anything for their “faith”? Could it be that the movements which determine the structure of our society are secular because the secularists have the courage to raise a meaningful issue in the society they live in? Could it be that the meaning of the present situation to the evangelical world is that their readiness to despise the state has led to their willingness to surrender the power of decision to it in order to have the pleasant luxury of moaning about it afterwards?

ROBERT S. JACKSON

Kent, Ohio

THE RENAISSANCE POPES

Mr. Karl Fr. Hering said that a Lutheran pastor—at his ordination—confesses that the Book of Concord is in agreement with the one scriptural faith (Eutychus, Aug. 30 issue). That is quite right. But merely the dogmatical propositions of the Book of Concord and the Smalcald Articles which are a part of it have binding character. The historical statements are not to be believed unanimously.

Now the quoted statement concerning the pope as the Antichrist is a historical one. Directed against the Renaissance popes, I am quite willing to subscribe to it. But I am not under ecclesiastical discipline bound to do so.

The Book of Concord quotes dicta of other popes as references to their authority. It would never have quoted an Antichrist. Now if the popes before the Renaissance era have not been Antichrists, it is quite possible that popes after that era are something other than Antichrists, even true believers of the justifying grace and destined to enter into eternal life. To classify Benedict XV or John XXIII as Antichrists, destined to enter hell, is a bent of mind from which may God prevent us.

CORNELIUS FRH. V. HEYL

Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church

Bad Toelz, Germany

BIBLICAL INFALLIBILITY

As I read Professor Seerveld’s article “Perspective for Christian Colleges” (Sept. 13 issue), I found myself feeling happily that here is a man who realizes the contemporary needs and imperatives of Christian education. But as the article went on, it began to dawn that underlying the professor’s condemnation of the “compartmentalization of reality,” of “the spirit of accommodation,” of the “spirit of scientific Modern Freedom,” and of “lingualized analytic philosophy,” and behind his commendation of the “reforming spirit,” of “something earth-shaking and important to say ourselves,” and of “a Septuagint approach,” underneath all this lies the assumption that characterizes most of the articles that appear in CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This assumption appears in various and sundry guises, but it always amounts to the same thing—biblical infallibility. From the tenor of Professor Seerveld’s article, one might feel that he was trying to escape this assumption. But then we read, “… all the theories and products we develop must conform to biblical specifications, no matter the measure of the day” (italics mine). I sympathize with and pray for this man’s vision of the need for the uniqueness, vitality, and transformation of Christian education. But this assumption of biblical infallibility—if he does hold it—will vitiate his whole position in the eyes of those who he is trying very hard to convince the most, namely, highly intelligent, morally sensitive, and technically competent Christian educators.

DUANE WILLARD

Madison, Wis.

A TIMELY TRUMPET

Warmest congratulations on the September 13 issue and in particular its editorial, “The Power of the Truth” … This word is most timely and meaningful. It is a trumpet blast for all who are in Christian higher education.

V. R. EDMAN

President

Wheaton College

Wheaton, Ill.

As s a form of literature, the letter holds a central place in communicating the Christian faith. One-third of the New Testament is made up of letters or epistles. Thus the modern Christian owes much to the practice of letter writing. It is therefore difficult to imagine the Christian minister misusing or distorting the values of letter writing. Yet this is frequently done with that special kind of letter called the letter of recommendation.

Perhaps the following sardonic quatrain is relevant:

A clergy letter penned with tongue in cheek

Is like a cup of tea that’s pale and weak—

For tea it is, as you can plainly see,

But sipping it reveals from taste it’s free!

Undoubtedly many clergymen write what appear to be letters of recommendation but are really little more than aggregations of pale words, devoid of real meaning.

At a recent meeting of college and university admission officers, one official remarked, “We require two letters of recommendation, not including the one from a clergyman.” When asked to explain, he pointedly said, “Experience has shown us that the letter from the minister is useless, little more than a string of platitudes and worn-out clichés.”

The pastor may claim that he has far too many other demands on his time to be particularly concerned about writing good letters of recommendation. But that is hardly a satisfactory answer. For after all, some conscientious ministers do write letters which are exceedingly helpful, individualistic enough to show close knowledge of the candidates and realistic enough to show that the writers have not adopted the all too prevalent attitude, “If I can’t say something good about a person, I won’t say anything.”

The traits of a good letter of recommendation are not hard to identify:

A letter of recommendation should be honest. The recipient of the letter does not expect the clergyman to offer expert judgments on another person’s emotional, intellectual, and physical conditions. Other sources yield this kind of information. But the letter can give important facts about character as honestly perceived by the writer.

Without doubt ministers are generally honest in their letters of recommendation; the trouble is that they are not honest enough. The generalized list of virtues, no matter how idealistic the writer or reader might be, does not come close enough to reality to be taken seriously. “No one can be that perfect!” is the only realistic response to the pyramids of complimentary words stacked high in too many letters of recommendation.

Honesty merely means that the writer tells what he believes the recipient of the letter should know. Probably the best way to handle this crucial judgment is to ask ourselves what we would wish to know about this person if we were on the other end of the corresponence. Most of us would appreciate honesty, even if it were not always flattering to the candidate.

A letter of recommendation should be concrete and specific. It is about a particular person, not generalized mankind. The form letter has no place in this area of writing; every sentence ought to be about the person in question.

Truths about honesty and other virtues need to be individualized. This can often be done by relating a concrete illustration of honesty, or loyalty, or whatever the virtue might be, as practiced by the candidate. A specific illustration, briefly stated, is worth a hundred generalizations.

A letter of recommendation should be brief. There may be circumstances which warrant giving three pages of information, but generally such a length is not only unnecessary—it is frightfully ineffective. There appears to be a direct relationship between knowledge and verbosity: the less we know, the more we write.

Vigorous writing is concise. George Orwell once took a biblical passage and attempted to rewrite it with the verbosity and pedanticism too often characteristic of our writing. Here is his translation of Ecclesiastes 9:11:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must inevitably be taken into accounting.

The biblical passage reads:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

The “sighted sub; sank same” radio message from the aircraft pilot of World War II fame may be an overemphasis, but it nevertheless demonstrates that a great deal can be said concisely and with vigor.

A letter of recommendation should be invitational in tone. There are times when a letter cannot possibly tell the whole story, not even an important part of it. This is a good reason to invite the reader to ask further questions.

Too often letters of recommendation show anger and curtness between their lines. They say: “Look, this is time consuming! Here’s a letter! Now forget it, will you?” But such an attitude does not express our deepest responsibilities as pastors. There are many reasons for the letter of recommendation, but the most important one from the writer’s point of view is that it can be of assistance to other persons, especially the person about whom we write.

In analyzing our letters of recommendation, we can well reread Paul’s letter to Philemon. True, this cannot serve as a pattern; no one letter can. But it does offer much in the way of illustration. For it is honest: “I mean Onesimus, once so little use to you, but more useful indeed, both to you and to me.” It is concrete and specific: it deals primarily with the life of one person, the slave Onesimus. It is brief: the shortest book in the New Testament; and note the concise but completely descriptive sentence: “And if he has done you any wrong or is in your debt, put that down to my account.” It is invitational in tone: Paul will be seeing Philemon in the future—“Have a room ready for me, for I hope that, in answer to your prayers, God will grant me to you.”

Honesty, specificity, brevity, and an invitational tone are simple characteristics, but they will greatly improve most clergymen’s letters of recommendation.

Orlo Strunk, Jr., is dean of West Virginia Wesleyan College, from which he received his A.B. He also holds the S.T.B. and Ph.D. degrees from Boston University.

Have you ever heard one Christian reminding another Christian to preach only what he has experienced? Or one preacher advising another preacher, “Don’t preach above your experience!”

It will be a sorry day for Christianity and our world when a Christian layman or clergyman tries to preach no higher than the level of his own experience. True, one must have had a personal encounter with God in Christ, and know that whereas once his back was to God, now he is facing Him. He must know that though once he was outside in the cold without Him, now he is inside the warm shelter of His love. Once in, we are told to go on to perfection, to an ever deeper experience in the grace of God, and communicate to others our experience.

As laity and clergy, we are called to proclaim not only our own experience but the message of God in its entirety. Shame on us for not having a higher experience; but more shame will come to us and to those who hear us if we preach only our experience, and not the highest to which we must heartily and everlastingly aspire! “Preach only what you’ve experienced!” To do that we shall have to omit much of the highest and best in the Bible. For who but the most presumptuous person could claim to have attained the complete surrender God demands in Galatians 2:20—“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me”? Or who has ever found all God desires for him as expressed in Jesus’ words: “If anyone wants to follow in my footsteps, he must give up all right to himself, carry his cross every day and keep close behind me. For the man who wants to save his life will lose it, but the man who loses his life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:23, 24, Phillips)?

“Preach only what you’ve experienced!” Then the Sermon on the Mount would never have been proclaimed after Christ, for who among us has ever experienced all God is calling us to in this message? In all the centuries past, if Christians had proclaimed only what they had personally experienced, much of the Bible would never have been proclaimed to the local communities. For within the local group, there is always some experience missing which needs to be supplied by other members of the Church elsewhere. If Christians were to herald only what they had personally experienced, then probably no one but Paul would have preached on some of the greatest themes in Christian experience. If the prophets and apostles had proclaimed only what they had experienced, we would have only half the Bible, with no prophetic word, and with whole passages and chapters and possibly even whole books of eschatology missing.

To Timothy, who was young and somewhat inexperienced, Paul wrote, “Preach the Word.” Paul himself proclaimed “the whole counsel of God,” not only his experience. What a deadening, provincial, perfunctory Gospel would be proclaimed if a man preached only what he experienced, if he kept silent about what prophets and apostles and other Christians experienced and recorded, if he said nothing about what God revealed and man may experience in the future.

As Christians, we must aspire, “go on to perfection,” reach for the highest God has for us in Christ Jesus. To do this, we must hear and preach not only what is ours in experience, but the whole message of God—the whole of his Word.

To preach only what one has experienced is to assume that all who listen are on the same level with us or have not yet reached our level. Some who listen, however, may have reached a higher level of experience than ours. To proclaim only what one has experienced would be to ignore these worthy persons or continually to preach below their experience, and never give them anything to which they could aspire. Both the herald and those who listen must reach for higher things. This can be done only through proclaiming a higher experience than that which both preacher and hearer have attained. Paul wrote to Timothy, “Preach the Word.… Prove, correct, encourage,” because he knew that the proclamation of the Word leads to more godly living on the part of those who hear it.

Richard G. Dunwoody, pastor of the Grace Evangelical United Brethren Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is a graduate of Lebanon Valley College (B.A.) and of the Temple University School of Theology (S.T.B.).