How To Plan A Teaching Sermon

A teaching sermon calls for a careful plan, clearly visible. Let us assume that a pastor has begun in good time, that he has a worthy goal with a royal text, and more than enough materials, from both his passage and outside Holy Writ. In the spirit of prayer he sits down to figure out the best way to use the materials in meeting a need today.

Mentally, planning starts with a purpose, as it concerns the hearer, one of many. This aim a man does well to write out, word for word, and then keep in view. He may wish to win the unsaved hearer. Then may come the phrasing of a topic, with both the divine and the human, often in this order. A good topic shows how the minister interprets his text, and how he will proceed in the sermon. This kind of topic dominates all that follows. The topical use of materials from a Bible passage! Unity!

As often with F. W. Robertson, the facts may call for two main divisions; with C. E. Macartney, four; or R. E. Speer, in a long address, five. No more! What about three, which Maclaren is supposed to have preferred? In one of his ablest books, The Secret of Power, thirteen out of twenty sermons have a four-point plan. If the facts call for three, have three. Let the purpose and the materials guide in making the plan. Whatever the number, let the headings stand out like piers in a suspension bridge.

To aid both speaker and hearer, in each main heading use the gist of the topic. Phrase all the headings in a like form, often in sentences, easy for the layman to remember because of parallelism. Each main part may call for subheads, easy for the speaker to recall, but not for the hearer to notice. Somewhere determine which of the main divisions, if any, call for illustrations.

With the main body now in view, decide about the path of approach. Before this consider more than one sort of introduction, but make the final decision after you know what to introduce. The effectiveness of a spoken discourse depends largely on the content and tone color of the opening paragraph. As the senior girls told me at Mary Baldwin College, “On Sunday with a visiting preacher we listen for a sentence or two. Then if he does not interest us we think about something nice!”

Why not put in the opening sentence the gist of the sermon, or the theme? A Simple declarative sentence, once known as the proposition, tells the substance of the discourse. Here listen to John H. Jowett, the most popular evangelical preacher thus far in our century: “No sermon is ready for preaching, ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as a crystal. I find the getting of that sentence the hardest, the most exacting, and the most fruitful labor in my study” (The Preacher, His Life and Work, p. 133).

At last the plan lies here, all complete. Tomorrow how make it better? By using four oldtime tests. 1. Unity. As with the Master’s seamless robe, is there unity, or only patchwork? Does everything in the message have to do with the topic? Does the topic relate directly to everything in the sermon? Because of faults here, one cannot preach without notes, and a hearer cannot recall the main parts of a message.

2. Order. Do the various parts follow a visible pattern? After a brief introduction, does the basic idea come first? Does each part lead up to the next? If so, both speaker and hearer can easily follow; the latter can gladly remember.

3. Symmetry. The last important test, in the least conspicuous place. Does the plan call for equal work, relatively, on each main division? Or does it tend toward anti-climax? Many a message at first full of promise oozes out into mediocrity. The reason? Not planned with sufficient skill and care!

4. Climax. Not in spectacular fashion but with growing intensity a real sermon builds up. Since a typical hearer thinks much about himself, the climactic order may be that of our Lord: Love God first, your neighbor next, and yourself last. Then by the grace of God you will begin to have a self with which to love both God and neighbor.

As in a newspaper article, put to the forefront what you wish the hearer to learn. Then make him long for such an experience. At last lead him to do what the Lord desires, in the light of this message from God’s Book. With all sorts of variety, this is the way the masters have planned teaching sermons. Who follows in their train? (For fuller treatment see the author’s The Preparation of Sermons, a teaching book, Abingdon Press, 1948.)

ANDREW W. BLACKWOOD

The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones (Ezek. 37:1).

Prophecy often comes as the gift of God to the imagination. When Ezekiel told the Hebrews about dry bones they had gone into exile. Through this vision they learned to hope in God. Without pushing the analogy too far we may think of that valley as like many a portion of earth today. Could any place seem more God-forsaken? Nevertheless, into that valley came the power of the Holy Spirit. What else do we need today?

I. Power from the Spirit. The prophets often write in terms of power, the power of God. Here the power comes from the Spirit as a Person of the Triune God. Power to bring life and hope here in the homeland, as well as in Africa and Asia. Herein lies the world’s only hope before the end of the present age.

II. Power through Preaching. In terms of today, “Preach to dead souls.” So the fathers spoke of a sermon as “thirty minutes to raise the dead.” The Spirit alone has the right to determine who shall preach and where, as well as what and how. Here he calls for a message of hope. Hope for dry bones? Ah, yes, life from the dead!

In early life Charles Darwin visited one of the Fuegian Islands so besotted he declared that no power could change them in a thousand years. A few decades later he sent the London Missionary Society five pounds as an unbeliever’s testimony that in less than a generation the simple Gospel of Jesus Christ had transformed the island.

III. Power through Prayer. In an oldtime valley after the preaching came a commotion, but the valley still was full of bodies dead. Such a commotion we have witnessed of late in Africa, largely because of preaching by our missionaries. But preaching alone can never bring life to dead souls. Life comes from power, and power comes from God, often in response to prayer. Why is it that we do not pray?

My friend, do you ever feel helpless in our atomic age, Yes; except when we look up, we all feel so because we forget the super-atomic power of Almighty God, waiting now to be released through the right sort of preaching, in response to the right sort of prayer. Pray for the Holy Spirit to bring life into many a valley of dry bones, and first of all, here at home.

If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses? and if in the land of peace, wherein thou trustedst, they wearied thee, then how wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan? (Jer. 12:5).

[The first sermon Gossip preached after his wife’s “dramatically sudden death.” Perhaps the most noteworthy pulpit message in our century thus far. No one can fitly reduce it to halting prose. The two main parts, equal in length, have to do with how a believer shows faith while in the hour of testing.]

In the providence of God—

I. Every Man Has an Hour of Testing. “Never morning wore to evening but some heart did break.” When yours breaks, what then? How are you, so querulous and easily fretted by minor worries, to make shift at all in the swelling of the Jordan? With the cold of it catching away your breath, and the rush of it plucking away at your footing?

So many people’s religion is a fair-weather affair. I do not understand this life of ours. Still less can I see how people in bereavement can fling away peevishly from the Christian faith. In God’s name, fling away to what? By and by the gale dies down, and the moon rises, and throws us a lane of gold across the blackness and the heaving of the troubled waters. It is in the dark that faith becomes biggest and bravest, that its wonder grows yet more and more. So that by the grace of God—

II. Every Man Can Meet the Hour of Testing. The faith fulfills itself, is real, and the most audacious promises are true. The glorious assertions of Scripture are not propositions and guesses. There is about them no mere perhaps. These are splendid truths that human hands like ours have plucked in the garden of actual experience. Further, one becomes certain about the life everlasting.

One thing I should like to say, which I never have said before, not feeling that I had the right. In the mass we Christian people are entirely unchristian in our thoughts about death. We think aggrievedly of what it means to us. That is all wrong. In the New Testament you hear little of the families with the aching gap, huddled together in their desolate little homes on some back street; but on the other hand you hear a great deal about the saints in glory, and the sunshine, and the singing, and the splendor yonder.

And so, back to life again. Like a healthy-minded lad at some boarding school who after the first hour of homesickness resolves that he will throw himself into the life about him and enjoy every minute of it, always his eyes look for the term’s end, always his heart thrills at the thought of that wonderful day when he will again be with the loved ones.

You need not be afraid of life. Our hearts are frail. Ofttimes the road is steep and lonely. But we have a wonderful God. Who can separate us from his love? Not death. No, not death. Standing in the roaring of the Jordan, cold to the heart with its dreadful chill, and conscious of the terror of its rushing, like Hopeful I too can say to you who some day will have your turn to cross it: “Be of good cheer, my brother, for I feel the bottom, and it is sound.”—From The Protestant Pulpit, compiled by A. W. Blackwood, Abingdon Press, 1947.

Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon (Isa. 55:7; read vv. 1–13).

This verse is central to the chapter. The chapter comes from a supreme moment when the seer is borne aloft into the future. Here he beholds people who suffer because they have forgotten God and have rebelled against Him. Then he shows the breadth and the blessedness of God’s will for his disobedient children. Let us deal with the message as it relates to conditions here and now.

I. Two Conditions of Life Today. On the one hand, men in the desert, thirsting for water, hungry for bread, a picture of life, hot, restless, feverish, without water, without bread, without peace. In the garden men listen to the anthem of the hills, the applause of the trees. What does all of this mean?

A picture of the godless life! There are men whose birthright is among the mountains, men who have lost the rivers of God. This is a picture, not of Babylon alone but of our city today.

II. The Wicket Gate into the Garden. The text reveals God’s way of salvation.

Let a man forsake his evil way, by giving up his thoughts of evil, and by returning to God. A man does not come back by giving up specific sins, but by giving up his own ways and his own thoughts, for they are not those of God. A man sins as long as he chooses his own path. He never worships, never prays, has no commerce with heaven, no traffic with eternity, no fellowship with God. But God’s thoughts are higher by far. He thinks a great deal more of you than you do yourself if you think you can do without him. The difference is that between the height of heaven and the meanness of earth.

III. The Way Back into the Garden. Return unto the Lord. This is the Evangel. I wish I could put into words all the music in my soul when I say: “He will abundantly pardon.” “He will have mercy.” My brother, had it not been easy for you and me, we could never have found salvation, but it was not easy for God. In this hour we are gathered under the shelter of the Cross. Turn back to Him, knowing that by the touch of thy weak hand the gate will swing open and thou shalt pass into the garden of God. But know this also, that the very heart of God, the God who was in Christ, was bruised and broken to make sure thy welcome home.—From The Westminster Pulpit, London, March 3, 1911.

… Thy God whom thou servest continually, he will deliver thee (Dan. 6:16b; read vv. 12–23).

In a den of lions this believer hears words of hope from an unbelieving king. In ways far different each of the two shows that in time of extreme peril belief in God affords the only sure protection. A case study for everyone likely to meet peril today.

I. The Believer’s Trust in God. “My God is able!” Note here the believer’s Loyalty to God—Fixity of Purpose—Certainty of Deliverance—and Clarity of Statement. “Let the redeemed of the Lord say so!”

II. The Lord’s Care of His Believer. Note God’s Miraculous Deliverance—Complete Deliverance—Instructive Deliverance—Convincing Deliverance. “My God will deliver!” And so he did! He always does, according to his holy will, when a would-be believer trusts.

My friend, is your God able? Your answer: “Of course my God is able!” If so, how completely do you trust him? Trust him for eternity, and begin by trusting him now.—Adapted from Mark These Men, London, 1949.

… Is thy servant a dog …? (2 Kings 8:13; read vv. 7–15).

“Who would have thought it?” The exclamation comes to mind when you think, not only of military disasters, but of those crushing moral ambushes that suddenly overwhelm the soul of a man. The passage before us affords a case.

I. The Ignorance of Yourself. “Dog or no dog, he did it!” Mere disinclination is no guarantee against doing evil. The worst doer of evil may be the man who thinks he would never do such a wrong. “Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.”

II. The Inside Man of Sin. This is not complimentary to human nature, but a preacher is not here to praise human nature, alienated from God. Because you share the common nature of mankind, God warns you to be always on guard. Every man has his own ladder down to hell.

III. The Desire that Leads to Sin. With any suppressed desire to do wrong the opportunity to gratify that desire may soon arise. What in the distance may seem unthinkable and detestable takes on a far more appealing guise when desire and opportunity meet. In a moment ambition and opportunity to meet it are married. The issue of that marriage is sin.

IV. The Way of Unconscious Deterioration. As with a rotting log, the collapse comes suddenly, under a new stress. But the log has been rotting for years. Beware! “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my thoughts.”

With fear and trembling accept the Bible account of your heart. In order to be secure against sin, have Christ in your soul. Pray that he may dwell in your heart. Since all of your resolutions have failed, try the Lord. He is able to keep you from falling and to present you faultless before the presence of God.

“Well,” you say, “what a strange sermon in a theological seminary!” But remember our alumni. They had hardly put on their armor before some fell into perversions of Christianity. Others have become highly paid vendors of the small talk of the world. Still others have fallen into unspeakable sin, as though they never had been anointed with holy oil. These are facts, facts that ought to burn into your heart. You have a soul to be saved, a soul to be lost. “My soul, be on thy guard, ten thousand foes arise!”—From The Protestant Pulpit, ed. by A. W. Blackwood, Abingdon Press, 1947.

Luther Sans Lutheranism

Faith Victorious: An Introduction to Luther’s Theology, by Lennart Pinomaa, translated by Walter J. Kukkonen (Fortress, 1963, 216 pp., $4.75), is reviewed by Herman C. Waetjen, assistant professor of New Testament, San Francisco Theological Seminary, San Anselmo, California.

During the past eighty years the quadricentennial of the Reformation as well as of Martin Luther’s birth and death have been celebrated. These three celebrations have provoked and stimulated a great Luther renaissance whose beginnings can be fixed by the publication in 1883 of the first of the now one hundred volumes of the authoritative, critical Weimar Edition of Luther’s works. With the aid of the exacting application of the historical-critical method, Luther scholarship has effected an entirely new appreciation and understanding of the German Reformer’s thought and work. Until very recently American Lutheran denominations have remained aloof of this movement and have preferred to understand Luther through their own tradition, which, as is now evident, involved an almost complete misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Luther’s theology in terms of seventeenth-century Lutheran scholasticism.

Gradually American Lutheranism has been yielding to this Luther renaissance, and the result has been a resurgence of theological vitality and activity. This is immediately evident in the fifty-five-volume American edition of Luther’s writings now being published jointly by the Fortress Press and Concordia Publishing House. It is also manifest in the scores of books about Luther and his theology by Americans as well as translations of German and Scandinavian works on the same subject that are rolling off the presses every year.

Faith Victorious is one of these books belonging to the Luther renaissance and presenting a critical introduction to Luther’s theology. It is a European contribution written by Lennart Pinomaa, a Finnish professor of theology at the University of Helsinki, and consists of lectures the author gave on an American tour at various Lutheran seminaries under the auspices of the Lutheran World Federation.

Faith Victorious is an enthusiastic book about Luther’s thought by a Lutheran. At the same time, however, it does not present Luther as a Lutheran but rather as a Christian theologian who answered questions asked by life itself and drew those answers from the Bible. Pinomaa unfolds the richness, profundity, and complexity of Luther’s theology, and he does so in a precise, compact, concentrated manner. Each chapter deals with a part of the Reformer’s thought, relating it at the same time to the whole.

Especially worthwhile are the chapters entitled “Justification and Sanctification” and “The Spirit and the Word.” In the former, Pinomaa uses Luther’s own writings—as he always does in this book—to refute clearly the oft-repeated charge that Luther taught only justification and not sanctification and that Luther’s emphasis on justification leads to antinomianism. The author also demonstrates how Luther differentiated between the Word of God and the Word of God. For Luther the former is the outward Word, the Bible; it is an instrument of the Spirit, indeed, an incarnation of the Spirit. The latter Word of God is Christ. Through the Spirit’s influence Christ is in the external Word; “the Bible is the spiritual body of Christ” (p. 105).

American Lutheranism would do well to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest this fine book. As a matter of fact, every Christian would benefit by reading it; for from the very beginning he is assured of a fine analysis and presentation of Luther’s thought, which is still remarkably relevant for Christian life and reflection in the twentieth century.

HERMAN C. WAETJEN

How They Buried Eschatology

The Last Judgment, by James P. Martin (Eerdmans, 1963, 214 pp., $4), is reviewed by Andrew J. Bandstra, assistant professor of New Testament, Calvin Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

While this book concludes with the consideration of A. Ritschl’s rejection of judgment and eschatology, investigation on this subject, as the author states, actually started at this point. How was it possible for Ritschl, who sought to return to the New Testament as the sole source of theology, to virtually eliminate eschatology and the last judgment from his theology when these figure so largely in the New Testament? The answer to that question, contends the author, lies in the exegesis employed by Ritschl. It is the burden of this book to show that exegesis takes place not above history, but in history, and is therefore influenced by philosophical, theological, and cultural factors. In this work, Martin, professor of New Testament at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, seeks to expose those presuppositions—presuppositions of which exegetes may be unaware—in order to expose their influence in the exegesis of the biblical teaching of eschatology.

The modification—and the possibility for further modification—of biblical eschatology had its beginning in the theology of the Protestant Orthodoxy of the seventeenth century, as represented, for example, in J. Gerhard and F. Turretin. While these men held to the divine authority of Scripture, their view of the actual authority of the content of Scripture was weakened by their assuming the equivalence of the message of Scripture with tradition and confessions. They did not use this formal principle as the starting point for a fresh consideration of the biblical teaching of eschatology and, consequently, did not make it an integral part of the redemptive message.

This neglect of eschatology as an integral part of the message of salvation opened the door for an invasion of rationalistic individualism, which, indeed, came about in Later Orthodoxy as well as in Puritanism and Pietism. In various ways natural theology was assumed to be a necessary foundation and complement to revealed theology, and thus “Reason” began to dictate that which was necessary, important, and useful to know. In this respect eschatology fared badly, since Reason could “establish” the need for the immortality of the soul but had little use for the rest of eschatology as revealed in Scripture. While formal acceptance of Scripture as the norm for theology and Christian living staved off complete rejection of biblical eschatology, the last judgment became less and less an essential part of the understanding of the message of salvation.

In the third chapter, the author investigates the impact of rationalism and its concomitant, subjectivism, on such items as man, God and the world, and history.

The nineteenth century, while it contains also a reaction toward confessionalism and attempts at biblical theology and realism which reassert the importance of eschatology to some degree, exhibits the impact of rationalism and the failure to come to the New Testament view of eschatology. Indeed, this century exhibits most clearly the extreme reduction and virtual elimination of the last judgment in the positions of Schleiermacher, the Hegelian theologians. and A. Ritschl. Martin demonstrates this to be the result of the theological and philosophical presuppositions which governed their exegesis.

This is an important book. It is an important warning against an exegesis controlled by dogmatical presuppositions as well as an appeal, be it indirectly, for allowing the New Testament first of all to speak for itself and with its own categories. It might have been better had the author included in brief compass—perhaps an impossible task—the salient features of the New Testament eschatology to which he frequently alludes and in terms of which he assesses the exegetical results of the various periods.

It is not a book for laymen, but as the Foreword, furnished by T. F. Torrance, states, it “cannot be ignored by anyone who professes to engage in scientific work in the fields of biblical interpretation or systematic theology.”

ANDREW J. BANDSTRA

He Didn’T Say

The Reality of the Resurrection, by Merrill C. Tenney (Harper & Row, 1963, 221 pp., $4), is reviewed by Robert H. Gundry, assistant professor of biblical studies, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California.

In the first half of this book the doctrine of the resurrection is historically surveyed from pre-Christian concepts, through the Old Testament, and on through the New Testament and church history. The author’s prevailing method is to list passages from various sections of the Bible and to comment briefly on them. At times the resurrection in general is in view, at other times the resurrection of Jesus in particular. The latter half of the book contains apologetic and theological material.

There is a certain amount of sermonic padding on topics not closely related to the resurrection. This reviewer also felt a lack of careful exegesis and a failure to consider or even mention other, perhaps more probable interpretations. For example, David’s cry over his son, “I shall go to him, but he will not return to me,” may express despair over a common destiny in the grave rather than yearning for immortality. Jacob’s statement, “I will go down to Sheol to my son mourning,” may be similarly understood. Psalm 16:10 probably voices confidence that God will deliver the righteous sufferer from death before it occurs, not after.

Jesus’ argument for the resurrection from Exodus 3:6 is passed over in a cursory manner. There is no discussion of Job 19:25–27, of the questions surrounding 2 Corinthians 5:1–9, of the chronological problems created by the “three days and three nights” of Matthew 12:39, 40, nor of the exact nature of “the sign of Jonah,” which has caused so much comment. The discussion of Jesus’ predictions about his death and resurrection ignores form-critical studies which would claim that Christians read their post-Easter faith back into Jesus’ mouth. The treatment of the resurrection accounts does not consider alleged contradictions which are used by some to destroy reliability and by others to establish the main features of the accounts inasmuch as the “contradictions” disprove collusion. One must avoid criticizing the book for not being what it was not intended to be. Yet the Preface states an intention to be relevant which would require more interaction with contemporary scholarship.

The strengths of this work are that it freshly states traditional orthodox arguments, shows that the doctrine does not stem from pagan sources, and emphasizes Jesus’ resurrection as an event “as truly historical as Cornwallis’ surrender at York-town” (against Bultmann’s de-objectivizing). Tenney also makes a good point that the resurrection was not so essential a part of Jewish theology generally, much less of Messianism, that Christians would have felt a necessity to fabricate the Easter story.

ROBERT H. GUNDRY

Scholarly And Fair

American Christianity, Volume II: 1820–1960, edited by H. Shelton Smith, Robert T. Handy, and Lefferts A. Loetscher (Scribner’s, 1963, 634 pp., $10), is reviewed by C. Gregg Singer, professor of history, Catawba College, Salisbury, North Carolina.

The second volume of this comprehensive work picks up the story of American Christianity in 1820 and brings the account up to the events and movements of 1960. These two volumes form a monumental collection of documents dealing with nearly every aspect of the history of the organized church in this country from its early days up to the questions which are agitating Christian people at this very hour. Together they are an invaluable collection of documents, not only for a serious study of American church history but for any study of American history which involves, even remotely, the thinking of Christian people on social, economic, and political issues throughout the history of this country. In this second volume the authors have furnished very adequate introductions to the documents they present as illustrations of the trends in American Christianity.

Reading for Perspective

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:

★ The Holy Spirit, by Wick Broomall (Baker, $2.95). Author sketches the person and work of the Holy Spirit from the Old and New Testaments, presenting a sharply etched picture.

★ The Challenge of the World Religions, by Georg F. Vicedom (Fortress, $3.50). Author stirs the Church’s sense of mission because he believes that Christianity’s future will be decided as it confronts the religions of Asia.

★ Tradition in the Early Church, by R. P. C. Hanson (Westminster, $5.75). A careful study of the abundant literature comprising the tradition of the first three centuries. Author attributes more “inspiration” to some rejected letters than to some canonical books.

The authors are to be commended for the broad sweep of their material and for their willingness to include pertinent documents dealing with fundamentalism as a movement and with such great conservative leaders as the late J. Gresham Machen. Equally gratifying is the treatment accorded to the founding fathers of the Southern Presbyterian Church: Thornwell, Dabney, and Palmer. They have made available large sections from pertinent Roman Catholic material, particularly from papal encyclicals which have a direct and important bearing on the life and place of the Roman Catholic Church in this country, many of which are not always easily available to Protestant students. The attention which they pay to the rise of neoorthodoxy and the development of the ecumenical movement is not out of proportion to the importance of these movements in contemporary Protestantism in this country. However, this reviewer regrets a tendency to dismiss historic orthodoxy as something from which Protestantism has, and should have, departed. Although this is certainly not the author’s dominant theme, at times traces of this kind of thinking are visible. On the whole, the work is characterized by scholarly thoroughness and a genuine fairness as to both the documents included and the accompanying remarks. No important movement has been omitted, and no group has been neglected.

The average minister, whatever his theological position, should have this work, for it is an invaluable collection of source material which he would have great difficulty in obtaining on his own.

C. GREGG SINGER

Not For Reading?

The Church’s Use of the Bible: Past and Present, edited by D. E. Nineham (S.P.C.K., 1963, 174 pp., 21s.), is reviewed by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, professor of church history and historical theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

It was a happy idea, on the occasion of the reconstruction of the theology department at London University, to arrange a series of public lectures on the Church’s use of Scripture. With one or two changes due to unexpected circumstances, the essays in the present volume are the lectures delivered in this series. Seven authors contribute historical studies relating to the successive stages from the New Testament world and the Greek and Latin fathers, through the Middle Ages and the Reformation, to the eighteenth century and the modern period. The editor, Professor Nineham, then winds up the series with lessons for the present day.

With a series of this kind, it is natural that there should be great diversity of presentation. All the authors are scholars of repute, but they have different conceptions of their task and enjoy varying levels of success in achievement. Drs. Chadwick and Kelly tell us very little about the actual use of the Bible; they are more concerned with theological issues, and spoil the patristic reputation of Anglicanism by disliking the early understanding of Scripture. Miss Smalley seems to be leading us to a revolutionary view of medieval exegesis, but it turns out that the Renaissance and Reformation campaign for literal exposition was needed after all; again we learn very little of the common use of Scripture. Justifiably, perhaps, Canon Carpenter and Professor Lampe restrict their review of modern developments to the British scene, though it may be doubted whether we can attain to true understanding by national concentration. Perhaps the most uniformly successful contribution is that of Gordon Rupp, a Reformation scholar who shows a fine appreciation of the Bible in the Reformation age, and who is still convinced that the basic insights of the period were right.

The final essay by Professor Nineham is a disappointing conclusion. It is well written, and displays considerable reading and thought within a restricted sphere. Its starting point, however, is wholly within the liberal Protestant tradition. Hence it is not surprising that the argument moves in this circle, and that the tentative gropings after a solution of the biblical problem bear little relation to orthodoxy, whether in patristic. Reformation, or indeed biblical form. The ultimate conclusion as far as it concerns the use of the Bible is, in fact, both gloomy and sinister. Dr. Nineham apparently disapproves of the modern inculcation of individual Bible reading. Only scholars apparently can be trusted to read the Scriptures with understanding. The principle “who runs may read” is perhaps a passing one, linked to a passing understanding of Scripture. Even if some measure of understanding can be expected, how are ordinary men to relate these ancient things to modern issues?

Along the lines of this essay, we may indeed agree that little understanding will be possible and that the relevance to the modern age will remain obscure. For if one thing is certain, it is the fact that scholarship and human philosophising alone will not produce true exposition or application. Yet need we be so gloomy? Are not things hidden from the wise revealed to babes? Can not the Father in heaven make clear that which eludes flesh and blood? Is not the Holy Spirit the internal Master who breathes upon the page which he has given and brings its truth to light? In spite of Dr. Nineham, we hope that the modern rise of Bible reading, in Roman Catholic as well as Protestant circles, will continue and increase, for in prayer and seeking it is likely to contribute more to genuine knowledge and piety than the self-encircling antiquarianism or theorizing which does not truly begin with God, revealed and self-revealing.

GEOFFREY W. BROMILEY

Another Is Needed

The Reformation in England, Volume II, by J. H. Merle D’Aubigne (Banner of Truth Trust, 1963, 507 pp., 21s.), is reviewed by P. H. Buss, lay tutor, London College of Divinity, Northwood, Middlesex, England.

This second volume is as easy to read and as rich in illustration as the first, which appeared some months ago. The same flowing style whisks one from the court to the shop, from Rome to Canterbury, from the King to a humble subject. The reader almost takes part in the seesaw of power and contrasting influences in the critical years 1530–1547.

We read how authority was abolished and of the multiplication of the Word of God in English, yet how at the same time Roman Catholicism seemed as firmly entrenched as ever, with evangelicalism fighting for its very life. Papist and Protestant alike in these bewildering years fall to ax or flame. More gospel heroes, such as Bilney, Frith, and Tyndale, appear and disappear. Great men of state and church—More, Cromwell, and Fisher—topple. Queens are humiliated, divorced, and beheaded. Over them all looms Henry VIII, like some Tudor Herod: attractive and repellent, cultured and barbaric, with one hand gripping the heritage of medieval Catholicism and the other encouraging the progress of reformation. Throughout stands the enigmatic Cranmer, working for renewal, timid and bold, faithful and wavering, under the regimen of an authoritative Scripture and a sovereign liege at one and the same time. Slowly and painfully the Church of England edges towards reconstitution, and D’Aubigne charitably describes its position, so anomalous to some branches of Christendom.

Our generation is so fact-and-figure conscious that this classic history of the Reformation cannot be a standard textbook in the mid-sixties. A new D’Aubigne, with all his warmth, life, sympathy, and excellence, is needed for this task.

This volume contains the index to both volumes.

P. H. BUSS

Being As Revelation

The Later Heidegger and Theology, Volume I of “New Frontiers in Theology,” edited by James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, Jr. (Harper & Row, 1963, 212 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by William Childs Robinson, professor of ecclesiastical history, church polity, and apologetics, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia.

This volume, edited by two professors in the Southern California School of Theology at Claremont, is the first of a series on “New Frontiers in Theology.” Projected in the same series are discussions of The New Hermeneutic centering in the theology of G. Ebeling and E. Fuchs of the Bultmannian School and of Theology as History revolving around W. Pannenberg’s emphasis on the mighty acts of God in Christ Jesus. The series aims to remove the time lag between German and American theological thought and to bring American scholars into the maelstrom of Continental discussions.

This first volume in the series concerns itself with a study on systematic theology by Heinrich Ott, the young successor to Karl Barth in Basel. Bultmann used the earlier Heidegger to support his theological program; Ott now claims that the turn in Heidegger’s thought, which gives beingstrict priority, makes his philosophy more relevant to Barthian and to Bultmannian theology.

Modern philosophy since Descartes and Kant has been subjectivistic. This led Barth to reject the analogia entis on the ground that it meant subsuming God under man’s highest generalization, being, and thereby gaining control over God. God became a concept at man’s disposal. But now for Heidegger, being is not a general concept at our disposal. Rather, being is an occurrence of unveiling, so that to speak of God’s being and to speak of his freedom in self-revelation are congruous formulations. “The being of God signifies, in terms of the way we have understood ‘being’ thus far, an occurrence of unveiling, that God unveils Himself to thought as he who is!” (Exod. 3:14). Accordingly, as philosophical thinking is related to being when being speaks to thinking, so faith’s thinking is related to God when God is revealed in his Word. And Heidegger’s primal thinking, as gratitude for the favor of being, becomes thanking, and so is congruent with theology’s reverent awareness that one’s being is God’s creation.

This book is not easy reading. We suggest a second study of the opening discussion, after a perusal of the whole book. And readers will, no doubt, agree with parts and differ in other places, as do the sundry writers themselves.

WILLIAM CHILDS ROBINSON

What Is Truth?

Truth and the Person in Christian Theology, by Hugh Vernon White (Oxford, 1963, 240 pp., $6), is reviewed by Samuel J. Mikolaski, professor of theology, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Many fine things can be said about this book, which is a shortened systematic theology developed around the concept of the person. Dr. White evinces a devout spirit attuned to the issue of salvation: “The heart of the matter is the heart of man, the man himself; the creature made in the image of God; the sinner who needs to be reconciled to God, and to his neighbour, and to himself” (p. 202). He stresses the person as a free, spiritual being created by God, the subject of experiences, not just a bundle of motor-affective responses, who must live in other spiritual selves to be himself (pp. 58–68). He is convinced that only the creatio ex nihilo can adequately account for the world (p. 96); that we must interpret its meaning teleologically, by the will of God; and that the categories of idealism and rationalism are inadequate to the Christian revelation. As an example of the latter, Dr. White cites the work of Dr. Tillich for criticism several times (e.g., pp. 7, 16, 217), paralleling therefore a growing body of literature critical of Dr. Tillich’s philosophical theology.

Essaying to criticize the orthodox doctrine of revelation, Dr. White, who is emeritus professor of Christian theology and world Christianity at Pacific School of Religion, contends that “the revelation is never the communication of truths or doctrines; it is always God making himself known” (p. 45), then proceeds to compound many equally dogmatic and unvindicated utterances. For example: “The immediate knowledge of God is faith itself” (p. 9); “God … reveals himself. He does not produce miraculously a book containing the truth he wants men to believe” (p. 93); justice is the “imposition of an impersonal rule upon the acts and relations of persons” (p. 116); concerning Jesus’ ministry, “it was wholly practical teaching …” (p. 124); “the Reformers were more aware of the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit than were their scholastic successors” (p. 216—but what of the post-Reformation studies of the Holy Spirit, including such English works also as Oman’s early seventeenth-century essay?); “there is no metaphysical knowledge of God” (p. 221). To say that “nature is a ‘whole,’ a complete reality about which universally valid formulas can be made” (p. 33) seems a venture of faith into scientific certainty (which the author is scarcely willing to advance for the Christian revelation) which the scientists of today might wish to call into question. This is not to say ipso facto that the language of Christian faith is more certain, but simply to suggest that perhaps the stance of science is neither so certain (for the content of the statistical method scientists look for a trend or systematic difference which is often blurred by chance or random fluctuation) nor the data of revelation so uncertain (“words … which the Holy Ghost teacheth,” 1 Cor. 2:13) as the author suggests.

Such pronouncements may be true, but they require argument and vindication on more clearly defined grounds. There is a curiously uneven use of Scripture in this book. At times frequent appeals to Scripture are made as authority. Why? In the treatment of certain other subjects—for example the Incarnation, Trinity, and Atonement, not much Scripture is used. Some justification of method seems needed.

Certain tantalizing questions occur to me. If the ultimate nature of the resurrection is to be found in the faith of believers, was it a reportable event (p. 47)? Are there three kinds of truth: historical, scientific, and theological (pp. 74, 75)? If the New Testament and orthodox theologians contend for the just judgment of sin (also in the Atonement), does this mean that justice is the imposition of an impersonal rule upon things and persons (p. 116)—for if relations are personal, can they be less than moral? Is the Incarnation interpreted in adoptionist terms by Dr. White (p. 95)—for do the words “the Word became flesh in Jesus Christ” (p. 219) mean that Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh? Further, with so much valuable stress laid on the person as subject, is it really true that the fourth-century Fathers did not have an advanced conception of the person? And, if personal language in the pronoun usages and forms of address for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is employed in Scripture, can it sustain the apparently modal interpretation of the Trinity that the author suggests (pp. 139–142)? What, then, is the Ascension? What does it mean to say that “man’s essential lostness is sin; sin is against God”? Why not a more concrete definition of sin as rebellion, failure, impiety, pride (to mention but a few realities)? What does universalism do to morality?

My comments may suggest more of criticism than appreciation, yet I have enjoyed this book and profited from it. The nature of the person is delicately and usefully discussed, but the development of the central issue of truth and the person is disappointing, primarily because the voluminous recent discussions of semantics, semiotics, and the truth functions of statements for revelation are not taken into account. Truth seems to be of several kinds involving in certain ways facts and history, yet transcending them as a sort of transcendental, nouminous, non-rational thing. Truth conveyed by language, the truth of factual assertions, seems to be peripheral to Dr. White’s exposition for the doctrine of revelation. Is religion at all important if its statements are not true in the ordinary sense of what is actually the case? This is all the more regrettable because he raises the question of how persons communicate. Beyond physical contact and observable emotional responses, he points out, language is the vital medium for personal communication. What a higher level of immediacy may be in the light of his stress on such a sentence as “the language of personal relations” (p. 83) remains, to me, obscure. What is this language? Can we avoid the basis in fact of faith and the role of language (among other finite factors) for revelation, if our religion is to remain biblical, historical, and graspable?

SAMUEL J. MIKOLASKI

Better On Attack

The Freedom of the Christian Man, by Helmut Thielicke, translated by John W. Doberstein (Harper & Row, 1963, 222 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by John H. Gerstner, professor of church history, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

This volume contains an assortment of lectures, essays, and sermons by the distinguished rector of Hamburg University and pastor of St. Michaelis. The first chapter shows that the author is sometimes thinking of liberty to act rather than freedom to will, while in the next chapter he argues that ideals, if regarded as other than “pen-ultimate” (Bonhoeffer), can be the enemy of the freedom which is only in Christ. Of great interest is Thielicke’s discussion of the question “What Will We Say to the Young Communist on X-Day?” (pp. 109 ff.), in which Western materialism is shown to be no more acceptable than the welfare state of the East. When the Iron Curtain comes down, only the freedom which is in Christ will be worth presenting.

In “Freedom and Love of One’s Neighbor” Thielecke argues that Christian virtue consists not so much in feeling and acting differently as in seeing men differently. This means seeing them as fellow men which, ironically enough, the modern emphasis on “human relations” quite overlooks. The following statement shows not only the substance of Chapter VIII’s analysis of the meaning of history but much more: “Just as I cannot reason a posteriori from the creation to the Creator—as if it were really true that ‘all things corruptible are but a parable’—but can only know the secret of creation if I know the Creator and his heart, so I know that secret of judgment only if I know the Judge” (p. 173). The chapter on preaching presents the best-known Thielecke; that is, the learned professor who loves to defend the “kitsch” or corny. Perhaps a quotation from the last chapter summarizes Christian morality as seen through the eyes of the scholarly author of Theologische Ethik: “When I act in this way (retaliation) I am not free at all; then I am merely a function of my opponent.… [The Christian] does not simply ‘react’; he seizes a creative initiative and thus becomes free” (pp. 216, 217).

Like so many other present-day Christian thinkers Thielecke is better at attacking the enemy than he is at advancing the standard. The reason is that in the attack all the recognized weapons of intellectual warfare are used, but when the Christian proclamation goes forth its paradoxical form makes all these weapons suddenly obsolete, just as the enemy begins to counterattack. This is apologetics according to the rule “heads I win, tails you lose.” We Christians like this game—but can we blame the opposition for not wanting to play? But that this book could be better should not obscure the fact that it is a good book, unless we wish the best to be the enemy of the good.

JOHN H. GERSTNER

Think!

The Christian Mind, by Harry Blamires (Seabury, 1963, 181 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Lloyd F. Dean, pastor, East Glenville Community Church, Scotia, New York.

Not another C. S. Lewis, but strongly reminiscent of him, is this long-time instructor in an Anglican church training college in England. The burden of this provocative volume is that a Christian mind must be developed “in contradistinction to the secular mind” (p. ix). No such “collectively accepted set of notions and attitudes exist.… No vital Christian mind plays fruitfully, as a coherent and recognizable influence, upon our social, political, or cultural life” (p. ix).

In other words, the Christian mind of earlier periods “has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history” (p. 3). The pragmatists and utilitarians are in power both within the Church and without.

To reconstitute the Christian mind, it will be necessary “to reestablish the status of objective truth as distinct from personal opinions” (p. 38). The data of secular controversy must be handled “within a framework of reference which is constructed of Christian presuppositions” (p. 40). The Christian mind will, of necessity, view all of this life in the perspective of eternity, while “secularism is so rooted in this world that it does not allow for the existence of any other” (p. 64). There can thus be no easy coexistence between the Christian and the secular mind.

Through a series of incisive analyses of attitudes characteristic of the world and far too prevalent in the Church, Blamires portrays the desperate need for Christians today to think “Christianly.” Only on this basis can Christian evaluations of the most important areas of life and culture be understood and applied.

To the reviewer, it seems that Blamires is pleading (though it is not stated specifically) for Christian schools, kindergarten to university, that will establish a Christian mind and put this mind in both pulpit and pew.

LLOYD F. DEAN

Book Briefs

The Handbook of Africa, edited by Violaine I. Junod (New York University Press, 1963, 471 pp., $10). A valuable compendium of factual information on the fifty-odd political units of Africa. Gives data on geography, history, government, education, population, industry, and the like.

Philosophy of Education, by Leo Ward (Regnery, 1963, 311 pp., $6). A definitive statement of the character and purpose of education with special application to problems of our time; by a Roman Catholic member of the philosophy department of Notre Dame.

The Deed, by Gerold Frank (Simon and Schuster, 1963, 317 pp., $4.95). The story of the tangled passions and idealism of two Jewish boys who murdered a member of Churchill’s war cabinet on the belief that the act of assassination would change the course of history—and were hanged for their deed.

A Reasoned Faith, by John Baillie (Scribner’s, 1963, 180 pp., $3.50). A collection of selected essays written through the years and heretofore unpublished; simple language shows the relevance of the Christian faith for the problems of personal and social life.

The Dilemma of Modern Belief, by Samuel H. Miller (Harper & Row, 1963, 113 pp., $3). An analysis by a facile pen of the secularity of our world and a probing for a solution to our dilemma. Concedes everything resembling the historic affirmations of Christian faith on the ground that they are idols of our vanity, and worthless in today’s changed world.

Marital Counseling, by R. Lofton Hudson (Prentice-Hall. 1963, 138 pp., $2.95). A wealth of help and information for the pastor engaged in marital counseling. Author believes the cause of most sex problems is other than sexual; his notion of what is abnormal will jar the evangelically committed, and even some of the merely decent.

A Happy Married Life, by William S. Deal (Zondervan, 1963, 117 pp., $1.95). Homespun, sometimes perceptive essays on how to be both married and happy.

Outline Studies on I John, by R. A. Torrey (Zondervan, 1963, 84 pp., $1.95). Evangelical, easy-reading. “Outline Studies” means the material is organized, not that the studies are outlines of the content of I John.

Jesus: The Man, the Mission and the Message, by C. Milo Connick (Prentice-Hall, 1963, 462 pp., $9.25). A thorough work, clearly presented, excellently bound, by an author who constantly backs down from a clear affirmation of miracle, resurrection, and the like. A scholarship that neither possesses nor creates strong conviction or deep commitment.

Christian Worker’s New Testament—Psalms, edited by J. Gilchrist Lawson (Zondervan, 1963, 427 pp., $2.50 for “Regular Edition”). “All subjects connected with the theme of salvation” indexed and underlined in red. Small print, cheap cover, overpriced.

He Spoke to Them in Parables, by Harold A. Bosley (Harper & Row, 1963, 184 pp., $3.50). Very practical sermons whose ethics are far better than their theology. The sermons are too good not to read, and too poor to preach.

Beyond the Law, by James A. Pike (Doubleday, 1963, 102 pp., $2.95). The lawyer-turned-bishop looks back at the legal profession. Pike at his peak.

Religion and Contemporary Society, edited by Harold Stahmer (Macmillan, 1963, 282 pp., $4.95). Catholics, Protestants, and Jews assess the effect of religious pluralism in the U. S. Assessors include W. Pauck, R. Niebuhr, A. A. Cohen, and J. Wicklein.

Paperbacks

Puzzled Parents; Where Did I Come From?; Hour a Family Begins; The Start of a Family; Science and You; Sorting Things Out; and The Christian View of Sex, by Hugh C. Warner (Concordia; 1963; 33, 10, 17, 17, 31. 19, and 31 pp.; $.35 each). Sane, sound discussions of the physical and social functions of sex. For different age groups.

Ethics, Crime, and Redemption, edited by Stanley J. Rowland, Jr. (Westminster, 1963, 90 pp., $1.25). A theological approach to social morality and crime. The author is an editor and feature writer on the staff of the United Presbyterian Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations. The nature of his theological basis? “Creation was an act of faith by God.… God believed in us enough to make his love and redemptive will incarnate in a man as his son.… Christ embodied the Father in that he embodied God’s faith in man.…”

The Christian’s Approach to University Life, by Oliver R. Barclay (I.V.F., 1963, 63 pp., 2s.). A stimulating and scholarly treatment by the Graduates’ Secretary of British Inter-Varsity Fellowship.

Cigarette Smoking and Cancer (American Cancer Society [521 West 57th St., New York 19, N.Y.], 1963, 32 pp., free). The evidence which has led the American Cancer Society to conclude that “beyond reasonable doubt cigarette smoking is the major cause of the unprecedented increase in lung cancer.”

Christian Issues in Southern Asia, by P. D. Devanandan (Friendship, 1963, 174 pp., $1.75). A readable, informative discussion of the problems of the Church in changing India, Pakistan, Ceylon, and Nepal, by one who believed in the uniqueness of God’s revelation in Christ.

The Holy Spirit of God, by W. H. Griffith Thomas (Eerdmans, 1963, 303 pp., $1.95). One of the relatively few extant fine works on the Holy Spirit. The L. P. Stone Lectures of Princeton, 1913.

Jesus’ Teaching in Its Environment, by John Wick Bowman (John Knox, 1963, 120 pp., $1.75). The message of Jesus as it occurred within its environment. Sober, lucid, and informative, with reference to modern scholarship.

Chrysostom and His Message, selected and translated by Stephen Neill (Association, 1962. 80 pp., $1). A selection from the sermons of St. John Chrysostom.

A Marketplace Ministry

Methodists will erect a new church in the heart of an eighty-acre shopping center neat Phoenix, Arizona. Developer John B. Kilroy sees the church as a return toward making a religious center the focal point of a community. The Rev. James R. McCormick, 27, of Jackson, Mississippi, appointed to lead the congregation, says it will “open a lot of doors for a kind of ministry where there’s no precedent.”

Protestant Panorama

Statisticians for the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ) say they erred in reporting a membership loss of nearly 56,000 for 1962. The decrease was only 14,989. They hope to reduce the chance for errors next year by feeding data into IBM machines.

Southern Baptists now have churches in all fifty states. The last state without Southern Baptist representation was Vermont. The first congregation was established there several weeks ago in the town of South Burlington.

American Baptist-related Chung Chi College of Hong Kong is one of three schools which will form a new degree-granting university. The colony has only one other university.

A joint committee of The Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church is drafting a plan of union for the two denominations. Work on the detailed plan of union follows two years of exploratory negotiations.

Lutheran Church of Sweden’s $100,000 memorial library in honor of the late U. N. Secretary Dag Hammarskjold was dedicated near Kitwe, Northern Rhodesia. The library is located at the Mindolo Ecumenical Center, an hour’s drive from the site where Hammarskjold was killed in a 1961 plane crash.

Miscellany

A lecture series on the four Gospels will be televised in September under auspices of the National Council of Churches’ Broadcasting and Film Commission. The weekly half-hour telecasts will be part of the NBC-TV regular Sunday program, “Frontiers of Faith.” Speaker for the September series will be Dean Robert C. Campbell of California Baptist Theological Seminary.

Congress approved a joint resolution accepting a gift by the state of South Dakota of a statue of the Rev. Joseph Ward, pioneer Congregational missionary and educator of the nineteenth century.

A 1,000-year-old church in Payerne, Switzerland, was rededicated for continued worship. The church had not been used since the Reformation.

Southern Baptist Annuity Board, which currently leases office space to a federal government agency in Dallas, says it will not bid on a new lease agreement which would make the property owner comply with yet-to-be-written equal employment opportunity regulations.

Rock River Methodist Conference will establish a chair of religion at Northwestern University in honor of its episcopal leader, Bishop Charles W. Brashares of Chicago.

Roberts Wesleyan College won accreditation from the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools.

The Cuban government expelled two Southern Baptist missionaries last month following two days of house arrest. Dr. Lucille Kerrigan and Miss Ruby Miller said that authorities would give no reason for the expulsion. Four Southern Baptist missionaries still remain in Cuba.

A statement signed by all heads of major denominations in Great Britain last month called for a Christian day of prayer in view of recent “repressive legislation” in South Africa. The statement also called for financial support for legal actions against the legislation and for “those left in hardship or even destitution because their wage-earners are removed.”

Hebrew Christian Alliance of America appealed to “the people and the government of Israel to grant recognition as ‘Jews’ to all people of Jewish birth regardless of their religious belief.”

Personalia

Dr. Sanford S. Atwood chosen president of Methodist-related Emory University.

Dr. Sidney A. Rand elected president of St. Olaf College.

Dr. Stewart L. Boehmer appointed president and chief executive officer of the Toronto Bible College.

The Rev. Franklin Chestnut elected moderator of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

Dr. Iain Wilson elected first incumbent of the newly endowed William Oliver Campbell Chair of Homiletics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

The Rev. G. N. M. Collins appointed professor of church history at Free Church College, Edinburgh.

The Rev. Thorvald Kallstad named dean of the Union Methodist Theological Seminary at Gothenburg, Sweden.

The Rev. M. A. Thomas named first director of the new Ecumenical Study Center and Lay Training Institute near Bangalore, India.

The Rev. Dudley J. Stroup chosen as rector of the Protestant Episcopal Church of St. James the Less of Scarsdale, New York. The church has been involved in a controversy with a nearby country club over alleged racial bars.

Worth Quoting

“Some of our clerical visitors from Communist Europe, I am certain, are men of God who are trying their best to keep religion alive under very trying circumstances.… [But] it can be taken for granted that at least a small quota of our visitors have been Communist secret police agents in clerical garb.”—Senator Thomas J. Dodd.

“They felt it was a poor investment for the church if I continued at my weight.”—Ministerial candidate Michael Hughes, suspended for a year by St. Paul’s College but promised readmission if he can lose about 200 of his 419 pounds.

DEATHS

DR. ALFRED JAMES GAILEY, 67, clerk of the General Assembly and secretary of the Irish Presbyterian Church; in Belfast.

EDGAR T. WELCH, 82, first president of the Methodist General Board of Lay Activities; at Westfield, New York.

MRS. INA DAVIS FULTON, 89, former treasurer of the Methodist Woman’s Division of Christian Service; in Nashville.

The following report was prepared forCHRISTIANITY TODAYby Dr. Claud Nelson of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, who was an official delegate-observer at last fall’s Vatican Council session:

What can one say, in the light of the first session and of the change of popes, as to the outlook for the second session of Vatican Council II? Will the trends that became marked in the first session continue, and find formulation in papal decrees? Will an ecumenical climate be maintained and encouraged? This reporter lays no claim to clairvoyant foresight, but finds reason to expect, on the whole, affirmative answers to both questions—regarding the first as internal and specific, and the second as more general.

Pope Paul can weight the scales as unmistakably as Pope John did. The impression with which I left Rome in November was that Cardinal Montini, whether from prudence or conviction, was supporting Pope John’s efforts toward aggiornamento, bringing the Roman Catholic Church up to date. On December 5, the cardinal spoke decisively in favor of sending the schema on “The Church” back for revision to the Theological Commission and the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity—the same disposition that Pope John had already made of the chapter on the sources of revelation (following a not quite two-thirds majority vote of the bishops to suspend discussion of that schema as submitted). Montini had written in his weekly diocesan letter to the Milanese that council progress had been hampered because members of the Curia (heads of Vatican administrative “congregations”) had prevented cooperation among the various commissions during the council’s preparation.

The Federal Council of Protestant Churches in Italy has been issuing a well-informed and reasonably balanced bulletin on Vatican II. It has reported rumors (of which I have partial confirmation through Catholics) that the new schema on revelation will avoid any dichotomy in speaking of “sources,” using the formula, Scripture alone in the mouth of the Church (Sola scriptura in ore ecclesiae)—a formula that is obviously elastic, but significant because of what it replaces.

Some probable products or by-products of Vatican II are, I think: restricting the Curia’s determination of policy; emphasizing the bishops’ responsibility and authority, individually, collegiately (in council), and regionally; encouraging lay activity and evangelistic responsibility; supporting the Secretariat for the Promotion of Christian Unity; encouraging ecumenical dialogue by competent theologians on the nature of the Church, traditions, baptism, biblical interpretation, and the work of the Holy Spirit. About mixed marriages and population pressures I am not prepared to hazard any guess. However, Cardinal Cushing’s adoption of a stand similar to that of Hans Kueng evidences that important Catholics see the injustice of the present mixed-marriage regulations.

Will the political irenicism of Pacem in Terris have Pope Paul’s support? His policy in Milan would indicate that he counts more on a friendly pastoral attitude than on anathema. Italian political developments and the presence or continued absence of Greek Orthodox delegated observers may furnish additional clues as to Roman Catholic policy on Communism.

My impression is that after another seven or eight weeks’ session, we shall still have more “climate” than formulas in evidence. Meanwhile, there is much and impressive evidence that the bishops are as earnestly and prayerfully seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit as the delegates to any Protestant or Orthodox assembly that I have known.

Orthodox Anniversaries

Ever since the excommunication of the Patriarch of Constantinople by Pope Leo IX in A.D. 1054, the Orthodox Church has been overshadowed in Western eyes by the more militant and more politically influential Church of Rome. In the West, Orthodox churches have frequently been weak, and the impact of Orthodoxy upon European history has been slight. Despite the somnolent appearance of this third-largest branch of Christendom, however, Orthodoxy has retained a significant degree of intellectual vigor and contemporary relevance. And last month, as if to document this claim, it reflected its vitality by two celebrations which drew the interest and attendance of the ecclesiastical world.

Marking one thousand years as a monastic community, historic Mount Athos, protruding deep into the Aegean Sea on the eastern coast of Greece, drew hosts of ecclesiastical leaders to the famed Great Lavra monastery for a week-long celebration of its founding. Among the first to arrive on the hilly peninsula was Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras of Istanbul, supreme leader of Eastern Orthodoxy. Patriarch Athenagoras greeted monks of Athos from the deck of the Greek warship which conveyed him to the harbor, then joined a long procession which wound up the steep hillside into the monastery yard. In this and other ships came King Paul of Greece; bearded patriarchs from Jerusalem, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Rumania; the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece; and more than one hundred other churchmen from religious centers throughout the Orthodox world. Representatives from other communions included Lutheran churchman Franklin Clark Fry, ecumenical spokesman W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, and Roman Catholic priest-journalists Christophe Dumont and Antoine Veger.

Following a solemn vesper service upon his arrival, Patriarch Athenagoras spoke to assembled cenobites of a need for “intercommunion … for exchange of views … among all Christians.” He noted that the world was divided because of a lack of dialogue between peoples. “We invite all theologians to work for a solution to the problem of spreading Christianity—how will we make it possible for Christianity to live on the face of the earth?”

The invitation was not without a context. Within days of the Mount Athos celebrations the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in Greece announced that its hierarchy will meet on October 1 to determine whether to send delegate-observers to the second session of the Second Vatican Council. The council’s second session—Greek Orthodox observers were not present for the first session—is set to convene on September 29 by decree of Pope Paul VI.

(Several days later, while on a visit to the island of Rhodes, Patriarch Athenagoras announced that “very soon” a permanent Pan-Orthodox Committee will be set up to study Christian problems and promote church unity, Religious News Service reported.)

Soon after the affair at Athos another week-long celebration, also with ecumenical overtones, was held in Moscow and in nearby Zagorsk. The occasion was the golden jubilee of the episcopal consecration of Patriarch Alexei, supreme head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and three hundred foreign guests were invited.

The arrival of the Catholic delegates was preceded by a Vatican announcement that Pope Paul VI had accepted an invitation from the Moscow Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church to be present at the ceremonies honoring Patriarch Alexei. The event, he noted, would mark a continuation of the “dialogue” with the Russian church begun when the late Pope John XXIII asked the church to send observer-delegates to the first session of the Second Vatican Council last fall.

J. M. B.

Ecumenical Education

Formation of a unique Association of Theological Faculties was announced in Iowa last month. The cooperative group embraces the State University of Iowa, the only state university in the country that offers a doctor’s degree in religion, and three denominational seminaries.

University officials said it marked the first time that Protestant and Roman Catholic theological institutions have joined with a state university to further study in theology.

The heads of the State University of Iowa School of Religion and the three seminaries, all at Dubuque, Iowa, said the association was formed to strengthen scholarly programs and resources at the four schools. The seminaries are the Roman Catholic Aquinas Institute of Theology, the Lutheran Wartburg Theological Seminary, and the Presbyterian theological seminary of the University of Dubuque.

The association will enable selected students and faculty members from the Dubuque seminaries to participate in the state university’s graduate program in religion.

Death Of A Sadhu

Crowds estimated at about 50,000 gathered near New Delhi last month to witness what they expected would be the “miraculous” emergence of a sadhu, or Hindu holy man, from a forty-day internment in an airtight sealed pit.

When associates opened the pit they found the decomposed body of eighteen-year-old Gunga Puriji.

Hundreds of devout Hindus, meanwhile, had flocked to pray at the spot where the holy man had had himself buried in order to demonstrate his progress on the path of yoga by suspending all the processes of his body while his mind communed with Brahma.

The sadhu’s body was cremated beside a nearby river. Police had to use force to curb outbursts by the shocked and disappointed crowds.

A Religious War

After some two and a half months of religious strife in Viet Nam Roman Catholic government leaders were still unrelenting. They gave no indication of ending discrimination against Buddhists and Protestants.

And a seemingly obvious question continued to elude American policy-makers most concerned about a settlement: Why does the Roman Catholic Church fail to act within the government dominated by its faithful?

President Kennedy was asked about the effect of the religious strife on military operations against Communist guerillas. He declared that “we’re bringing our influence to bear” in efforts to settle the religious dispute. He did not elaborate, except to say that the Vietnamese have been in war for twenty years.

Meanwhile in Saigon, heavily armed police moved in to break up a sit-down demonstration against discrimination by the Roman Catholic government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Some of the demonstrators were still kneeling in prayer when the police swooped down swinging truncheons. Several Vietnamese girls were clubbed severely and hauled away with blood streaming down their faces.

The incident came after the Rev. Thich Tinh Khiet, supreme Buddhist leader in South Viet Nam, had sent a letter to President Diem declaring the Buddhists would stage non-violent demonstrations to demand enforcement of a religious liberty agreement signed June 16. The letter stated that “officials either have ignored orders of Your Excellency and the government or they have received secret instructions to discredit the joint agreement.”

At the same time, some 150 Buddhist priests and nuns demonstrated for about two hours outside the home of U. S. Ambassador Frederick E. Nolting, Jr., located near Xa Loi Pagoda, the main pagoda in the city. Some of the demonstrators, speaking in both Vietnamese and English, urged the United States to “settle our Buddhist problem.” Others declared the Buddhists would continue their struggle “until we die.”

National Rites

On August 15 the Japanese government will begin the first of a series of annual memorial services for the war dead. The decision by the cabinet to inaugurate the commemoration is fraught with religious precedent, say Japanese Christians.

The government says the service, to be witnessed by the Emperor and Empress, will be held for two reasons First, it is to fulfill a moral obligation of later generations to demonstrate their remembrance of those who died in behalf of their country. The government also argues that the service affords some opportunity for reflection on past wars and for expressing a desire for peace.

Although the government has declared, in keeping with a constitutional provision for separation of religion and state, that it will exclude all religious rites, officials have nonetheless admitted that the program will include a request to the nation to do mokuto, that is, to offer silent prayer. In the context of a Japanese memorial service it will be understood to be prayer to or for the spirits of the dead.

Christians in Japan are said to be suspicious that the government may be reviving a kind of state religion, or at least a state-sponsored religious rite, by this annual mokuto service. Such a rite could open the door for accusations of unpatriotic attitudes against Christians who refuse to participate. Some fear that even a revival of persecution could follow.

The president of the Japan Bible Christian Council, Dr. John M. L. Young, appealed to the Prime Minister to eliminate the mokuto service. A letter from Young also suggested that if the government called for mokuso, a moment of silent meditation, it would be more in keeping with the announced intention of avoiding any religious rites and with the practice of Western democracies at war memorial services.

The decision to hold annual memorial services for the war dead was made at a meeting of the Japanese cabinet on May 14. At that time, the welfare minister urged that the nation offer condolences to the war dead. Authorities have indicated, however, that they are sensitive to reactions from clergy and lay leaders.

The Montreal Faith and Order Conference, which gathered five hundred participants from fifty countries July 12–26, faced the World Council of Churches with the thorny question of whether to widen or relax the role of theology in its quest for church unity. In the first world theological study conference of its kind on the North American continent, the 270 delegates from 138 Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican churches sensed from the outset that doctrinal issues may be cresting toward “a moment of truth” in the ecumenical movement. They hoped before the final days of their dialogue to clarify the ecumenical role of faith and order concerns.

Not a few ecclesiastical leaders saw Montreal as essentially “a holding operation” by delegates trapped between conference fever pressures to “say something manifesting unity” and the theological urge to probe doctrinal debate in depth. Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, chairman of WCC’s Central Committee, characterized the conference as “transitional” and stayed for two days. Anglican Bishop Oliver Tomkins of Bristol, England, later elected conference chairman, reminded the opening press conference that the World Council has been “trying to elucidate the causes of church disunity for twenty years.” The Montreal conference, he added, was “simply an incident in a long continuing process.… Faith and order is not the only nor even the chief effort in the ecumenical field.”

Delegates and sixteen observers from nine churches outside the World Council assessed reports summarizing the ten-year effort of four theological study commissions named at Lund in 1952 to explore Christ and the Church, Tradition and Traditions, Worship, and Institutionalism.

Most theological world giants were notably absent. Now in retirement, Karl Barth and Emil Brunner bequeath ecumenical participation to younger men, content to have given them “a pointer.” The conference sent greetings to Leonard Hodgson, long an active participant. Anders Nygren of Sweden towered above most theologian-delegates. Unconvinced that theology holds adequate scope in the structure of WCC, not a few European theologians point to the mass of theological research still undigested by the ecumenical movement, while program-planners continue to move from theme to theme on the edge of journalistic relevance.

Edmund Schlink of Heidelberg contributed one of the outstanding papers, but sent an alternate, deciding that Rome in September would be more important than Montreal in July. Oscar Cullmann and A. Koeberle were preoccupied, and T. F. Torrance of Edinburgh and Hendrikus Berkhof of Leiden wanted summer respite from the ecumenical circuit. Norman Pittenger and Otto Piper were absent, too. But Roger Mehl of France, N. H. Soe of Denmark, and Albrecht Peters of Heidelberg were among those who came.

Only a small number of American participants are widely respected by Europeans as theologians. Paul Minear, who went from Yale to the WCC Geneva staff for two years, Jaroslav Pelikan, J. A. Sittler, Floyd V. Filson, Walter M. Horton, G. M. Lindbeck, R. Johnson, Bernard Ramm, and C. J. I. Bergendoff were among the American contingent. A group of younger theologians took a competent part in discussions.

When questioned about “theological greats” one American delegate after another would apologize for the lack of “scintillating greatness” in his own denominational circles and point outside his own communion. The pragmatic temper of American ecumenism has been doctrinally debilitating. Ecclesiastical leaders continually ask how theological contributions serve “the cause of unity.” Theological interest is largely confined to such consensus as promotes ecumenism. The fortunes of dogmatic theology are at low ebb (Princeton’s bookstore no longer stocks Hodge’s Systematic Theology). Seldom are achievements in biblical studies worked out in relation to dogmatics and ethics. “What can we say together,” asked French theologian Mehl at Montreal, “to help the Church to manifest on the doctrinal plane, more clearly and more courageously than in the past, that unity in Christ whose mystery is already known to us?”

The Montreal conference got off to a hopeful, if anxious, beginning. Methodist theologian Albert C. Outler of Texas noted that “Faith and Order is a risky business.… We are never further away than two bigots from disruption or three diehards from a deadlock.” And he added: “In this conference and its outcome, Faith and Order is on trial.… On the one hand, our colleagues in the WCC must form a judgment as to our distinctive contributions to the ecumenical movement as a whole. On the other hand, a sizable number of ecclesiastical statesmen have thus far regarded our enterprise as rather more arcane than practical.… This conference is almost certain to tip the balance in the verdict as to what function we have to perform in the WCC and in the larger cause of Christian unity.”

This was the first time in eleven years—since Lund—that Faith and Order was speaking to some of its concerns. Consequently, any statement by the Montreal conference (overall cost: at least $150,000) was sure to be judged, not simply by its easy generalities reaffirming the urgency of the Christian world mission or the desirability of Christian unity, but by the presence or absence of new commitments and specific evidences of increasing theological and ecclesiological unity.

Bishop Tomkins, in his conference address, said he lacked courage to poll the delegates on whether they had read the advance theological reports. “I have long believed,” he added, “that one of the main effects of Faith and Order work lay not so much in its printed results (indeed I am rather skeptical about how far these laboriously produced volumes and reports are in fact very widely read), but in the transformation that it produces in the outlook of those who take part in person.” That turn of things gave theologians eager for theological revival in the local churches little encouragement. But the bishop urged that “within the structure of our organization” WCC make room for “such sustained, intensive, serious theological discussion as to justify us in asking the leading theologians of Christendom to give their time and energy to meet with one another on occasions which will vindicate themselves by their own inherent value.” There was a word also for church politicians aspiring to theological competence: “We may be in danger of developing a sort of stage army of ecumenical activists who, wearing different hats, dash about the world meeting each other in a variety of guises.”

Dr. Minear was hopeful that reflection on the study document “Christ and the Church” would issue in a statement elaborating “what WCC believes.” That document contained two unreconciled reports by American and European sections. Professor Ernest Kaseman, who with Eric Dinkler of Bonn gave ardent support to Bultmannian positions, deplored the fact that the European report was written from the standpoint of Cullmann’s salvation-history rather than of Bultmann’s existentialism. A similar plea for the mirroring of Bultmannian perspectives came from the conference chairman, Bishop Tomkins, in the opening address: “Are we in danger of developing a kind of theological provincialism in our Faith and Order work?… Certain theological voices that are speaking amongst us today have not been sufficiently attended to in our work in recent years. To name only one, the kind of thought associated with Professor Bultmann is not reflected in our studies as effectively as it should be.…”

Mobilization For Integration

O freedom! O freedom!

O freedom over me!

And before I’ll be a slave

I’ll be buried in my grave

And go home to my Lord

And be free!

Hands clapping, voices raised in song, the seven hundred pastors and laymen echoed Negro minister Andrew J. Young as verse after verse of the freedom song surged across the crowded auditorium. Some persons pondered the current racial crisis. Many yearned for measures which would successfully counter the swelling tide of racial and ethnic bigotry. The event might well have been a freedom demonstration in any one of a dozen Southern cities, but it was not. The setting was the Grand Ballroom of the Denver Hilton Hotel. The churchmen were predominantly white. And the occasion was the final evening session of the fourth biennial meeting of the United Church of Christ.

The event itself was not unusually significant, but it was expressive of a deeply felt need which had dominated the eight-day convention of the two-million-member denomination—a need for formative action in the current racial crisis. President Ben Mohr Herbster had taken the floor on opening day to set aside the scheduled program of events and to call for immediate and effective action in the race-relations crisis. “The situation present across America, the way in which … our Negro brethren are treated, economically, politically, and socially, constitute a blight from which we must be saved,” said Dr. Herbster.

“We have had too many words that changed too little. We must act, and we must act now.”

His proposals, approved overwhelmingly by voice vote of the delegates, called for uprooting of intolerance and bigotry in the life of the individual, universal integration of the United Church of Christ, mobilization of the manpower and means of the church for racial justice, establishment of a special fund to cover the cost of such a program, and prayerful dedication on the part of church members to the cause of justice and good will. President Herbster did not mention a specific total for the proposed fund, but a pre-convention document had suggested §1,000,000. By convention’s end $5,530 of this goal had been collected. In implementation of these proposals, President Herbster called for formation of a bi-racial committee which would direct the administration of funds and coordinate specific action in the struggle for racial equality.

The program was not allowed to rest only with the committee or with church officials. On Wednesday night soon after the singing of the freedom song, the newly formed committee for effective racial action, the Committee for Racial Justice Now, challenged the delegates to sign a pledge installing them in “The Fellowship of the Committed.” The pledge, signed by 580 of those present, committed the delegate to work for inclusive membership in his church, to seek for enactment of civil-rights laws, and to engage in non-violent demonstrations for racial justice when necessary.

The same night saw first defeat and then approval of a controversial measure which will require economic sanctions against dependent churches of the denomination if by July 1, 1964, they have not declared “a policy of openness without respect to race, national background or ethnic origin.” Rejected by a vote of 232 to 204 after an hour of heated debate, the proposal was subsequently revived and passed by a vote of 308 to 129. A number of those present declared that they had been swayed by the succession of Negroes who had risen to speak in favor of the economic sanctions and by President Herbster, who concurred, noting, “If we really mean what we say we mean … we must do this though we do it with a heavy heart.”

The General Synod took further steps toward racial integration by presenting citations for distinguished service in the cause of racial equality to Chicago Negro physician Dr. Theodore K. Lawless and to former Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star Jackie Robinson. The General Synod also elected a Negro woman, Mrs. Robert C. Johnson, to the post of assistant moderator for the next biennium. Dr. Gerhard W. Grauer, pastor of St. Paul’s United Church of Christ in Chicago, was elected moderator.

Other business on the agenda was a pronouncement on the Relation of Government to Freedom and Welfare submitted to the General Synod by the Council for Christian Social Action. This document, approved only after acute debate which extended through several sessions on the floor of the synod, declared that the Christian conception of freedom requires law and order but justifies civil disobedience whenever governments become “tyrannical or oppressive.” The document also tended to encourage government welfare, noting that “government must meet the changing needs of the people without being bound by the assumption that the growth of government is inherently a threat to freedom.”

One proposal particularly provoked the opposition of individual delegates and, in its final form, differed significantly from the original statement submitted to the synod. The original statement had declared the right of Christians and citizens “to safeguard the right of freedom of expression as guaranteed in the First Amendment, including the constitutional right to express opposition to our government or to advocate alternative political and economic systems without being intimidated and harassed by legislative or other instrumentalities of government.” The latent apprehension of many was further aroused when a member of the Council for Christian Social Action declared that “alternative political and economic systems” might conceivably include “communism or anarchy.”

In its final form, after this portion of the 147-line pronouncement had been repeatedly challenged and at last returned to committee for rewriting, the sentence read: “to safeguard the right of freedom of expression as guaranteed in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, including the right within constitutional limits to express opposition or commendation to our government or to advocate peaceful change to alternative political and economic systems without being intimidated or harassed.”

On the second day of the convention the United Church of Christ took further steps toward Protestant consolidation by authorizing its delegation to the Consultation on Church Union to join with the Methodist, Protestant Episcopal, Christian Churches (Disciples), United Presbyterian, and Evangelical United Brethren representatives in a comprehensive plan of ecclesiastical union.

In further action by the 700-member General Synod, approval was given to a denominational emphasis for the next biennium on “The Church and Urbanization,” and authorization was accorded the Executive Council to establish the national headquarters of the United Church of Christ in New York City. The instrumentalities of the church, some of which have offices in Philadelphia and Cleveland, were urged to relocate at or near the national headquarters.

J.M.B.

The following report was prepared forCHRISTIANITY TODAYby Dr. George E. Failing, editor of The Wesleyan Methodist:

At its thirty-first Quadrennial General Conference, convened at Fairmount, Indiana, June 26-July 2, the Wesleyan Methodist Church of America reported modest gains in church membership and finances in North American conferences and phenomenal membership increases (10 to 1) in overseas conferences. National conferences were organized during the preceding quadrennium in Haiti, Central India Jamaica, and Puerto Rico.

Major changes made in the administrative structure of the church at the 1959 conference were solidly reaffirmed in the return to office of all general officers of the church and by endorsement of a continuing progressive program in establishing indigenous overseas churches, in implementing an aggressive evangelistic outreach at home, and in making financial provisions to secure a better-trained ministry.

Introduced on the floor of the conference, and received by the conference to be placed in the minutes, was a statement offered by five delegates from the North Carolina and South Carolina conferences: “The current social revolution that is sweeping the country is of grave concern to us. As Christians we cannot condone the strife that is resulting from racial unrest in our beloved Southland. Neither can we condone nor be a willing party to the heinous system of racial segregation that has so long plagued us. It is our firm belief that, as Christians committed to evangelization of the world, we must seek out and win our black brothers to Christ.… Central (S. C.) Wesleyan College has never refused admittance to a bona fide applicant because of race. Recently the Academic Committee unanimously went on record as being opposed to racial discrimination in the admission of students to Central.…”

The General Conference also adopted a resolution calling upon all Wesleyan Methodists to “respectfully petition legislative leaders to recover for us and the great majority of our people some adequate lawful redress from the growing inclination to ban from public life all worship of God and recognition of Him. We presume that such may require a constitutional amendment.…”

In other action, merger negotiations were reopened with the Pilgrim Holiness Church. Delegates ordered formation of a committee charged with preparing a merger plan, to be presented at the 1967 conference.

Vancouver, British Columbia—Delegates to the eighty-fourth annual meeting of the 85,000-member Baptist General Conference adopted a resolution calling for prayer for peace and support of reduction of armaments, “thereby lessening the tensions that lead to war.”

Joplin, Missouri—The Pentecostal Church of God of America went on record at its biennial General Convention as being opposed to the Supreme Court ruling against Bible reading and prayers as devotional acts in public schools. In another resolution, the 500 delegates declared their opposition to “every form of social violence resulting from both race and religious prejudices.”

New York—A resolution condemning the U. N. as a symbol of “idolatrous worship” was approved unanimously by nearly 85,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses at their International Convention. The resolution pledged that Witnesses would never worship an organization which “stands for world sovereignty by political men.”

Convention Chairman Milton G. Henschel cited a membership increase which makes the Witnesses claim to be one of the fastest-growing religious bodies. In 1939, he said, there were 41,000 Witnesses in 2,425 congregations in the United States, compared with a current total of some 308,000 in 4,708 congregations. Witnesses now claim a world membership of about 1,000,000.

MISSIONS STRATEGIST

The war made him a missionary. Beginning September 1, he will man the strategy switchboard for a global network of nearly 8,000 evangelical missionaries.

Edwin L. Frizen, Jr., newly appointed executive secretary of the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, got his missionary vision while serving in the Pacific with the Seabees during World War II. He was one of a group of servicemen who founded the Far Eastern Gospel Crusade. Following the war he and his wife served as missionaries to the Philippines.

Frizen, known familiarly as “Jack,” fills a post made vacant last year by the resignation of Dr. J. O. Percy. As administrative chieftain for IFMA, he will coordinate strategies and operations for 46 interdenominational “faith boards,” ranging from Arctic Missions, Inc., to the Soldiers and Gospel Mission of South America.

World conditions tend to be less forgiving of missionary policy blunders and disputes, which makes Frizen’s job even more strategic. One of his biggest challenges will be the possibility of closer cooperation with the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, which represents the interests of 59 missionary boards with 6,500 missionaries. Some measure of cooperation has already been achieved between IFMA and EFMA, but the opportunities are broad. Discussions between the two groups thus far have been fruitful, as evidenced by the fact that they have scheduled their first joint retreat at Winona Lake, Indiana, this fall.

A cartoon in a July issue of Punch shows a board meeting of the “British Travel Association” with one director asking in all apparent seriousness:

“Have we ruled out the tourist appeal of a decadent and dissolute society?”

Indeed, the cynical tourist sizing up Piccadilly Circus might think it small wonder should Great Britain wind up in a moral morass. Here, hovering over the recognized national meeting place, is an aluminum statue of Eros, the old Greek deification of passionate love and fertility.

Is it a memorial to sex? Well, hardly. The statue at Piccadilly was Sir Alfred Gilbert’s memorial to the philanthropic Lord Shaftesbury and, remarkably enough, was tagged the “Angel of Christian Charity.”

The British clergy have exhibited a great deal of restraint in reacting against the country’s recent vice scandals, perhaps too much. Not a word came out of either the Anglican Church Assembly or the British Methodist Conference last month. A number of Roman Catholic prelates did express concern, and some called for immediate efforts to counteract what they said was the country’s “declining public morality.” Bishops were reported preparing a pastoral letter to define more clearly the hierarchy’s attitude toward the scandals involving Profumo. Keeler, Ward, et al.

Evangelist Billy Graham, in London for a brief holiday, saw a note of encouragement for religious leaders. “The thing that has encouraged me is the moral shock,” he said. “It shows that the British have more moral and spiritual strength than many people thought.”

Rebel Bishop

July 10 was a landmark in the defiance campaign being waged by Dr. Francis Walsh, 61-year-old Roman Catholic Bishop of Aberdeen. It saw the expiry of the three-month period within which he was to have dismissed by Vatican order his housekeeper, Mrs. Ruby MacKenzie, the former wife of a Church of Scotland minister (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY News, May 10).

In a statement which he directed to be read without comment in every church of his diocese, the bishop says: “I have from the beginning insisted that the order to turn Mrs. MacKenzie out of my house is unjust and cruel. Early on I thought I must obey. Now I have come to the decision that I cannot act against my conscience. I have informed my superiors. Mrs. MacKenzie has offered to leave of her own accord. I cannot acquiesce. Nor do I see why she should be allowed to sacrifice herself to satisfy malice and spite. Let the troublemakers go about their own business, their prayers and their duties.”

Bishop Walsh blames “a jealous woman and … a number of priests” whose attitude has allegedly led to a spate of filthy accusations, anonymous letters, and threatening telephone calls.

Last month the bishop dismissed his vicar-general because they disagreed on this subject. Said Mrs. MacKenzie, a Catholic convert: “I put my trust in God throughout these difficult times. I am quite sure he will deliver me from my ordeal in the best way possible.”

The MacKenzie marriage was dissolved last year on the ground of the 42-year-old wife’s desertion. The Rev. A. Ian MacKenzie, who was given custody of their two children, is now minister of a Glasgow church.

J.D.D.

Perfect Husbandry

“I heard a woman say once that she did not want to marry a perfect husband; she wanted to marry a husband and make him perfect.” This intriguing reference in support of the proposed Anglican-Methodist merger, made by Vice-President David Foot Nash in an address to the British Methodist Conference, was a complete change of front on the part of one who had earlier condemned the union proposals as a retrograde step. Nash had written a booklet in support of the dissentient minority. It was already being printed when an article by Professor Thomas F. Torrance of Edinburgh so impressed him that he suppressed the booklet and distributed instead the article, entitled “Reconciliation in Christ and in His Church.”

A similar note was touched on in the presidential address by the Rev. Frederic Greeves, who said: “Hosts of those whom we call outsiders are wondering how we Christians will deal with our problems and controversies. Some are watching us with a somewhat evil glint in their eyes, hoping to find in our quarrels yet another excuse for having nothing to do with us. Others are, more wistfully, hoping that in spite of all the evidence to the contrary in Christian history, it may be possible for Christians to differ in charity and to come together in faith and love.”

The conference heard that at the end of 1962 the church’s membership stood at 719,286, a decline of 4,243 from the previous year. The number of lay preachers (these are responsible for three-quarters of Methodist services throughout the country) fell by 272, to a total of 21,788.

J.D.D.

Unbelief is paralyzing the Church, destroying the effectiveness of Christians, and excluding men from the kingdom of God. It has been characterized as a “capital and fountain of evil,” and probably no generation more than our own has been guilty of this offense against God, an offense which goes to the very heart of man’s relationships with God and God’s revelation to man.

That unbelief is a grievous sin, an offense of the greatest magnitude, we are loathe to admit; but such is the case, and it rests as a pall across our world today.

We are prepared to accept the discoveries of science and to avail ourselves of the advantages proceeding therefrom, but only too often we ignore or reject the God of Creation. In so doing we live in a jeopardy of our own making.

Unbelief is based on man’s rejection of God’s revelation of Himself. It consists of evaluating Him by our own limitations and, yet more serious, sitting in judgment on God and his Word.

“Your God is too small” is an accusation which can be leveled at every human being, and in a very special way at those of us who have limited him by our own unbelief.

Unbelief stems from ignoring the nature of God—his sovereignty, power, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, love, and mercy, to mention but a few of his attributes.

Probably our greatest mistake is a concept of God which, because of this age of science, rejects his supernaturalness and continuing miraculous manifestations.

Unbelief is seen in our treating prayer as a mere “pious exercise” rather than as a God-given privilege whereby the very battlements of heaven are stormed and captured for God’s glory and man’s immediate and eternal benefit.

Unbelief runs rampant as man ignores or rejects the clear promises of God. Not for naught has God filled his Word with specific promises and principles having to do with the contingencies and problems of life. By our neglect of these we make God a liar and lose immeasurable comfort and blessing.

Unbelief is highlighted as we forget that the supernatural God can and does act today in supernatural ways. What man considers “miracle” is merely God acting naturally, either within or beyond the capabilities of our understanding. Nowhere do we fail more than in our refusal to recognize the power of God, even though we cannot comprehend the scope of that power.

We live in a time when “honest doubts” are often considered an end in themselves, rather than a state which must be resolved by surrender to the Living God. “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” is still a valid prayer. The capitulation of Thomas’ unbelief in the affirmation “My Lord, and my God” is the only God-blessed end of doubt.

The Bible makes it clear that unbelief restricts the work of God. Confronted with Christ and his mighty works the people of his own country rejected him, and we are told that “he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief” (Matt. 13:58). Unbelief is restricting God’s work today, an unbelief which gives to anything the priority in the place that is rightfully His.

The disciples found themselves powerless because of unbelief; only too often the Church and individual Christians find themselves equally powerless because they trust in man-devised methods and programs without reference to the Holy Spirit, who alone can make them effective.

Unbelief in the face of divine revelation in his day caused our Lord to “marvel.” How much more must he marvel at an age of sophistication and discovery which ignores the fact that creation itself is day by day and night by night declaring the glory of God and offering his handiwork for all to behold.

Our Lord’s resurrection was contrary to every man-accepted law of nature. But it was a glorious reality on which man’s hope of immortality rests. Because of their unbelief in the testimony of those who had seen him, Christ “upbraided them with their unbelief” (Mark 16:14). Does he regard an unbelieving world with any more tolerance today? The fact and presence of the risen Lord is a current reality, and to ignore or reject it insures to the unbelieving the righteous judgment of God.

One truth of desperate importance is that unbelief in no way invalidates the faithfulness of God. It is a grievous fallacy to hold that God’s truth is valid only as man accepts it. Paul meets this squarely in writing to the Roman Christians: “For what if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith [or faithfulness] of God without effect?” (Rom. 3:3). A favorite pastime of some theologians is to argue the pros and cons of some of the key doctrines of the Christian faith as though truth could be converted into error, or the finality of God’s revelation held in abeyance pending man’s decision in the matter.

Abraham stood the test in a marvelous way. He was confronted with a situation and a promise impossible from a human standpoint. Faith in the faithfulness of God made him the “father of the faithful.” When tested about Isaac he acted with faith and obedience, “accounting that God was able.” How puny is our faith today! How far removed from an understanding of the God with whom we have to do!

Paul catalogues some of the acts of the “children of unbelief”—immorality, impurity, covetousness, filthiness, silly talk, and the like: “It is because of these things that the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience” (Eph. 5:3–6).

Our day is characterized by just such a situation. Because of unbelief in the pulpits and in the pews, in the corporate life of the Church and in the individual lives of so many of her members, the world sees too few who exhibit the evidences of the living and indwelling Christ, who bear faithful testimony to his saving and keeping power.

The Bible records the exclusion from God’s presence of those who failed to “enter in” when the Gospel was preached to them, and rejected it by unbelief. That which He required of them and which he requires of us today is faith in who he is and what he can do.

But unbelief is not a binding state from which man cannot escape. Those who have become unshackled are legion and continue to develop as trophies of God’s grace. Faith can develop just as the light of day reveals things hidden by the night.

Faith does not have to be large, nor is it fully developed from the beginning. It is often the unspoken “Yes” to God, feeble but real, searching but honest.

True humility can be the first step from unbelief to belief, the change of attitude which enables God to reveal himself as he yearns to do.

Many of us know by experience that unbelief has faded away to be replaced by a quiet faith as we have yielded our minds and hearts in obedience to God’s revealed truth. Yielding has been the key.

They Called The Pulpit Vacant

Last year, if my card index serves me well, I preached in fifty different churches; and every place I went they said, “The pulpit is vacant.” This could well be a comment on my preaching, and we can take that up on another day. What I am really worried about is who the take-charge guy is when a pulpit is vacant—especially who the man or woman is who is supposed to take charge of me when I appear on the scene.

Carnegie Simpson once said that you can change anything in the church except the order of service. This is not to say that the people are aware of what is going on in the church service. It simply states that if you change the order, it will be very noticeable and there will be great decibels of resistance. It happens, therefore, that when you show up at a different church every week, the odds are that you will cause flurries of excitement by being different—not because you want to be different, but because no one really knows how the service ought to be run. They only know when you run it the wrong way.

Try sometime to get anyone in the church to tell you whether the prayer comes before or after the offering. Even the deacons and the ushers will not know. And if you have some really interesting variations, such as baptisms or communion, you will probably get the answer I got in a country church once when I asked them to coach me: “Why, Reverend, we just have communion here the way they do in any church”—only they didn’t. In one church they brought the offering forward and put it on top of the organ, and I suppose the symbolism was that the organ was still to be paid for. For complete confusion, have candle lighting and the chiming of the hours. These things are very pretty, but it is hard to find the person in the church who knows exactly how they are done and the order of events.

When you give directions to strangers, they really are strange. And, incidentally, you might save them a parking place.

EUTYCHUS II

War

As a biblical pacifist I found the discussion “Is Nuclear War Justifiable” very ably presented by the two traditions (June 21 issue). Of the four reasons by General Harrison why nations are peaceable rather than aggressive, probably “they may be relatively so well off that they are satisfied with the status quo” fits our country best. But isn’t the present status quo a cause of war? The population of the United States is about one-sixth of the total world population. Yet we have one-half of the good things of life. If we are not aggressive in the war against hunger, we will be labeled by God as the aggressors in the war caused by hunger.

Just how can the “just war” doctrine subscribed to by Professor Stob defend a war fought to maintain an unjust status quo?

Editor

Missionary Bulletin

Blountstown, Fla.

I question the decision that William Harrison reached when he extends the guilt of aggression to an entire populace when that people has no opportunity, as we know it, to choose its leaders and is kept under control by a hardened core of fanatical rulers who will not tolerate interference with their goals. If it be true that “a ‘moderate’ nuclear attack on the territory of the United States would kill half the population, destroy 75 per cent of its buildings and 90 per cent of its intellectual and material possessions,” as Lippman puts it in the June 24, 1963, Newsweek, then as Henry Stob declares, the nations of the world simply must learn to live together. Even a passively approving citizenry in the U. S. S. R. should not be the target in a nuclear war whose outcome will affect all of mankind in one way or another. The next war might indeed be a war to end all wars!

St. Paul, Minn.

The defects in our culture have not been exposed as anti-Christian; rather there seems to have been a rationalistic attempt to use Christianity as a means for defending our culture as it is without trying to change it.

The Methodist Church

Norway, Iowa

General Harrison is a great man, to be sure. But can anyone imagine Jesus Christ taking a gun to defend himself, or his disciples?

Berlin Bible Church

Narrowsburg, N. Y.

Dr. Stob states Jesus’ words, “All who take the sword shall perish by the sword.” You would say that Dr. Stob is a pacifist. But he states he is not. For instance, if Canada would want to take Michigan from us he would be in favor of war. He states that war is not illegal. So the text he quotes does not fit here. But when a thermonuclear war would come, he would favor not to fight.… Why is it, if minor issues are involved we may fight, and when God’s cause, God’s church is to be or not to be, we may not fight?

Oak Lawn. Ill.

I suppose Mr. Stob feels his hands are clean because he has denounced “general thermonuclear war” on the one hand and at the same time insisted that we must not “deliver ourselves into Mr. Khrushchev’s hands.”

Perhaps Mr. Khrushchev will consult Mr. Stob to learn what “premium” he and others are willing to pay for freedom before Mr. K. would even consider waging a nasty, “impermissible” nuclear war. Mr. Stob could then assure Mr. K. that the price of our “self-determination” is too high. This, of course, would not “deliver the whole world into Russian hands.” It would merely be an open invitation to Mr. K. to come and take the free world at little cost to him.

If a “general thermonuclear war” is able to destroy the “spiritual treasures of mankind,” then we Christians can have no part in such a “wicked act.” We need merely to give up our freedom and entrust our “spiritual treasures” into the kind hands of Mr. K.

Second Congregational

South Peabody, Mass.

In effect, this thesis would urge that whenever tyrannical violence is able to arm itself with nuclear weapons, the legitimate use of the sword (the punishment of evildoers, the protection of the upright) must be discontinued. Accordingly, the prospect of life under law is to be abandoned whenever it seems probable that the life of the sword-bearer may be conterminous with that of the predator. It would seem to follow that, should Righteousness persist in joining the battle with Evil beyond this critical point, Righteousness is to be forcibly silenced. Where the choice is to be Humanity or Principle, Principle will be expected to yield in the interest of existence under the best terms which can be arranged with the Tyrant.… Such phrases as, “makes sense,” “serviceable to meaningful social ends,” “a lasting peace settled on the foundation of justice,” and “the technical, cultural, and spiritual treasures of mankind” would seem to indicate that Mr. Stob’s deepest interests are more congenial with the longevity of man than with the glory of God.…

Where the sword is the Lord’s and vengeance is his, and where he seeks that vengeance by the hand of those to whom he has delegated his authority, then even that sword is justifiable whose use leaves God standing alone upon the scene of the holocaust envisioned by Mr. Stob.

Signal Mountain, Tenn.

The Christian, it seems to me, is faced with the possibility of a nuclear war or the certainty of mass murder, an unrelenting attack of manifold prongs on religion, the enslavement of mankind, and the determined effort to enslave the soul of all of our children.…

To me it is unreasonable to say that a nuclear war would destroy mankind. No one has any intention, and there would be no need even in a nuclear war, of seeing that every section of the globe is saturated with nuclear bombs. For example, Khrushchev would not waste any bombs on Central and South America, unless we had nuclear bases there—and in that case he would aim only at those bases.

Harding College

Searcy, Ark.

Spare The Laymen!

The June 7 issue devoted to “Preaching” was thought-provoking and well done, as one has come to expect from CHRISTIANITY TODAY. But Editor Glendon E. Harris of Concise magazine might better have written on the subject “Preacher, Spare Us Laymen.” If a preacher enters the pulpit without having given proper time to the preparation of his message to his congregation, he has no one to blame but himself!

Having been in the pulpit almost as often as I have been in the pew, and at the same time leading an active business life, I have gained some idea what a preacher’s life is like and what the pew should expect from the pulpit. Far too many sermons are hardly more than a group of quotations from several authors orderly or hastily put together, revealing that the preacher either had his secretary dig out of his library or files items she thinks would fit into his sermon or he himself had done so. There was little or no evidence of any real thought and preparation given to the message. How much of our present-day pulpit ministry is biblically rooted and relevant to our times?

For twenty-six years I conducted a half-hour radio Bible-study program, of which eighteen to twenty minutes were devoted to the spoken message. On no occasion did I give less than eight hours of preparation and study for each message. The same holds true for any pulpit preaching I have done. Of course it has meant getting up early in the morning and going to bed late at night. But what preacher is true to his calling if he does not do the same thing?

Our Lord said, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” That is the preacher’s primary task. In so doing, it is imperative to make the preaching of the Gospel relevant to our day. Our Lord and his disciples did; likewise all powerful preachers have done so. No preacher should allow anything to interfere with the time required for preparation and study for his pulpit ministry.

One Saturday evening I wanted to verify a statement I had heard some years previously regarding G. Campbell Morgan, whom all informed ministers acknowledge was “the prince of expositors.” If I could have verified the fact, I intended to include it in my radio message the following morning. I promptly thought of Dr. Bonnell, who at that time was the minister of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, in which church I had in past years often heard Dr. Morgan preach. I telephoned his home, apologized for disturbing the household at that hour of the night, when Mrs. Bonnell said her husband was in his study at the church. I telephoned the church, reached Dr. Bonnell, expressed surprise that at 10 o’clock at night he was still in his study at the church, on the eve of his Sunday ministry. He answered that he often was in his study at that hour on a Saturday night. He gave me the answer to my question. I was glad I had telephoned him, for I learned the statement I had heard was not correct. But I was even more impressed that a city preacher, occupying an important pulpit, was still in his study at 10 P.M. on a Saturday evening.

While on the subject of preaching, it is a well-known fact that many men in the secular and governmental field use ghost-writers to prepare their talks, but no preacher has a right to be so busy that he must employ ghost-writers for his sermons. Imagine Paul, or John, or Peter doing anything of that sort.

What is more, preachers ought not to “palm off” as their own what actually was the work of someone else. A distinguished Princeton Theological Seminary scholar and theologian told me last summer of two such instances. A research assistant for a well-known preacher called on this gentleman to refresh his memory of something he had heard this professor give in one of his classes. The professor gave it to him. The next Sunday he heard this well-known radio preacher give word for word (as his own) what this theologian gave to his former student.

On another occasion this same gentleman, arriving somewhat late, sat in the rear of a church on a Sunday morning. The preacher occupying the pulpit gave one of the professor’s sermons, word for word. It was not until after the service was over that the preacher discovered the professor was in the audience. With much embarrassment, he acknowledged to him what he had done! So I say, “Preacher, Spare Us Laymen.”

New York, N. Y.

The Sword … And Gideon

In your recent issue you ran a series of articles on “Ministering to the Military” (May 24 issue).… I failed to find any mention of the Word as placed by and through the Gideons International.… Just for the record … according to the last figures I received … 15,885,175 New Testaments have been distributed to members of the armed forces. We could give to you hundreds of testimonies received of men who have found the blessed Saviour or had their spiritual life strengthened through reading them. And even I am an example of this.… The need of the world for His Word is so great, and we do so need the prayers and support of the Church in this work.

Morristown, Tenn.

I have just left my duty as a Destroyer Squadron Chaplain, and I greatly appreciate your sending CHRISTIANITY TODAY aboard my ships. Many of the officers and men expressed to me their enjoyment of the issues. While the magazine is scholarly, and many of the articles technical, it had wide circulation. Needless to say, CHRISTIANITY TODAY stuck out like a sore thumb among the various magazines found in the average ship’s wardroom—and was a testimony by its very title.… All in all, I devour each issue, and my faith is strengthened by your evangelical stand.

Station Chapel

Beaufort, S. C.

The Gracious Days

It was a pleasure to read the review of Spurgeon: The Early Years (May 24 issue). One of the few book investments which I made at William Jewell College was the four-volume edition of the autobiography. That with a set of The Treasury of David given to my father by Mrs. Spurgeon are prized possessions.

Just one tiny correction in the review. Mr. Robinson writes: “In his final illness the attention of the civilized world was contered on him ‘in column after column of almost every newspaper.’ Opinions about him varied. ‘The sauciest dog that ever barked in the pulpit’ was one.”

The opinion quoted is recorded in such a way that the impression is given that it was made during his final illness. Actually it was made many years before, while he was new in London.

To those of us who have made a lifetime study of all that pertained to Spurgeon the present interest in his life and ministry is most gratifying, and it would be still more gratifying if we could see repeated in Britain the gracious days when Spurgeon preached. A few years ago I stood on the now vacant site of the New Park Street Chapel and tried to visualize the scenes when crowds milled around the chapel trying to gain admittance.

This writer is the son of a Welsh Baptist minister who died in my infancy. Later he spent seven and a half years in Spurgeon’s Stockwell Orphanage and was later a member of the Tabernacle.

San Diego, Calif.

Calvin As Cleric?

With the highest regard for your distinguished contributor to “Current Religious Thought,” I must dissent from his statement that “John Calvin was always a layman, never an ordained minister” (June 7 issue). Against this universal negative, there are the following considerations: Calvin began his service in Geneva as professor of sacred letters. Shortly thereafter he was made pastor and, in replying to Sadoleto, declared, “I accepted the charge having the authority of a lawful vocation.” In Strasborg, he was the regular pastor of the congregation of French refugees. He was recalled to be the chief pastor in Geneva, where he exercised all the functions thereof, preaching the Word, administering the sacraments, ordaining officers, presiding over the Venerable Company of Pastors. As the minister of worship, he led the congregation in their common confession of sin and followed the same by a prayer for or a declaration of absolution. Likewise, on occasion he heard private voluntary confession and pronounced absolution, for “the ministers are ordained witnesses and sponsors to our consciences of the forgiveness of sins” (Institutes III, iv. 12). Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, recognized Calvin as properly fulfilling the ministerial functions with which he was occupied in Geneva by inviting him to share with other evangelicals in composing a Protestant consensus creed.

Moreover, Calvin designates the minister of the Word as the most useful office in the Church (Institutes IV, iii. 3), favors the ordination thereto by the laying on of hands (IV, iii. 16), and with qualification is willing to call this ordination a sacrament (IV, xiv. 20). Then Francis Junius, who came to Geneva before Calvin died, stated in 1608 that those who preceded Calvin ordained him to the ministry.

Decatur, Ga.

Pilgrimage From Rome

The negative is well applied in the title of Mr. John J. Moran’s article, “What I Don’t Understand About the Protestants!” (May 10 issue).…

I was surprised, really, to see the name of John Henry Newman brought forth, once again, in the best tradition of a Roman Catholic college undergraduate, but Mr. Moran might just be interested to know that, according to a study published some thirteen years ago, ten Romans are received into the Episcopal Church in this country, every year, for every one lost to Rome.

Trinity Church

Brooklyn, Conn.

Reflecting On An Option

If all the energy of all the people that is used to try to save the world for the people, instead were used to save the people for the Lord, the world would not be in the fix it is in.…

Phoenix, Ariz.

Albright On Errancy

At the request of my friend, Dr. Dewey M. Beegle, I am writing with reference to his recent book, The Inspiration of Scripture. In general I like it, though sorry to see such a brief Epilogue—otherwise excellent. The author tells me that the publishers deleted most of the positive matter he had included.

I dislike the terms “error” and “inerrancy,” since they now often mean “mistake” and “infallibility.” “Error” formerly meant “losing one’s way, wandering,” and was applied to misguided deviation from sound doctrine; it is now used also for simple mistakes in oral and written transmission, editing, copying, translating, etc.—all inseparable from our human condition, to which God condescends (used in its proper meaning). Actually mistakes resulting from change of meaning are nearly as common as other classes of “error.” For instance, many years ago I heard an address by the pastor of the Moody Church in Chicago, reputed to be a converted prizefighter. He stated with superb dogmatism (using this word in its current meaning) that God had created the world and had then destroyed and recreated it. The evidence? In Genesis 1:28 the King James Version says that God had commanded man to “replenish the earth.” In current English this verb means “fill again.” So it must have been filled once before! RSV agrees with the Hebrew as well as with the Elizabethan sense of “replenish,” rendering simply “fill.”

There are many passages in the New Testament which appear to take opposite sides in doctrinal controversies: e.g., Romans and James on faith. Today there are few theologians who are disturbed by the superficial conflict between faith and works, which belong together in “dialectic tension,” like predestination and free will, and so on. Such tension between opposites (now the basis of Niels Bohr’s famous law of complementarity) is the glory of the Bible, which must be taken as a whole; the Old Testament stands in judgment on the antinomianism resulting from arbitrary choice of proof texts in the New, and the New Testament reminds us constantly to follow the spirit, not the letter (Rom. 2:29; 7:6; 2 Cor. 3:6).

Historical tradition in the Bible presents us with similar cases. Without different, even divergent, accounts of men and events we cannot see personalities and movements in perspective. In other words, we should not have the stereographic effect inherent in the very nature of biblical tradition, which preserves differences, even when they seem to be in direct contradiction. In short, we cannot have a historical revelation of God without transmission through human channels. If we follow the trend today and replace such revelation by existential decisions of individuals, our loss is immeasurable. But we cannot deny the Bible its historical humanity without an equivalent loss in rejecting the humanity of “the Word made flesh.”

Johns Hopkins University

Baltimore, Md.

Ministers Of Tomorrow

Your editorial “The Lag in Christian Experience” (April 26 issue) was greatly appreciated for its emphasis upon the “theological giants” such as Luther, Calvin, Owen, Athanasius, and Wesley whose “luminous gifts to the devotional life of the Church … shine as lights from the past.”

In a recent issue of Time, attention was given to the “ministers of tomorrow” now in their respective seminaries. The article stated that many of these future ministers are deeply skeptical towards the Church and that the contemporary theological giants Barth, Tillich, and the two Niebuhrs are the primary subjects in the classroom. No honest critic of these men can deny the fact that they are serious, dedicated scholars attempting to discover some of the answers to the “human predicament.” However, this is what demands our attention: these seminary students need to be referred back to the “lights from the past” in order to avoid falling prey to the contradiction of relativism. The majority of these students have perhaps read “about” the men of the past and all the contemporary criticisms of their irrelevance to the present age, but they do not go directly to their actual works and evaluate them by what they originally stated. This is certainly contrary to genuine scholarship.…

These future ministers … appear to be completely neglecting the fact that they are going to be ministering to congregations of people deep in “sin” (call it existential conflict if you please). Have these divinity students categorized the experience of St. Paul as irrelevant subjective nonsense, or are Christians still supposed to be able to declare, “For I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day”?

Bethany, Okla.

For Missionary Societies

Perhaps you can convince various missionary societies to appropriate funds for the provision of TV transmitting and receiving equipment for every tribe and nation in order that the event might be hastened and so that not one single eye shall miss it.

Louisville, Ky.

Assessments

I would like to acknowledge my sincere gratitude for CHRISTIANITY TODAY. With one’s mail box clogged with the jaundiced journals written by men with the “courage of their confusions” and foisted upon pastors and other Christians as “Christian literature,” it is indeed refreshing and rewarding to be able to look forward to CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s fortnightly visit to my study.…

Most religious periodicals are either “boiled watermelon” or caustic soda. Thank you for one that’s both palatable and pungent. Perceptive evangelicals are grateful for and proud of a journal of your calibre and convictions, and its interesting, irenic, and intelligent presentation of the “faith once delivered to the saints”.…

Memorial Baptist Church

San Diego, Calif.

Since we have spent 48 years as a minister and teacher and since a portion of our education was in secular universities, we have learned to be somewhat tolerant, and so we do feel that it is good to know what others think of us, even though we know they are badly mistaken. Therefore, quite largely, in the interest of full religious tolerance, we have decided to spend another five dollars, primarily for the purpose of having a part in your work.…

Avon Park, Fla.

With each issue I have developed an increasing respect for CHRISTIANITY TODAY. I consider it one of the finest, if not the finest, and most helpful of current religious periodicals to reach my desk.

Please accept my renewal subscription for two years and my most heartfelt thanks for your untiring efforts to keep us abreast of the religious thought and challenge of our day.

The Methodist Church

Carrabelle, Fla.

Your magazine is increasingly worthwhile. It deserves my support rather than silent, ungrateful acceptance.

First Methodist Church

Green Bay, Wisc.

I won’t try to tell you how really great I think your magazine is … you’d think I was just trying to soft-soap you into a price reduction.…

The Union of Churches

Almond, N. Y.

In the major denominations the conservatives need rallying standards. CHRISTIANITY TODAY is helping to meet that need.

Ocean Gate Methodist Church

Ocean Gate, N. J.

With neoorthodoxy, liberalism, sectarianism, it is rather precarious sailing for even those who have been born again from above, and let me say here … it is CHRISTIANITY TODAY with its sane, conservative and scholarly approach that helps me steer a straight course.

The Presbyterian Church in Canada

Rose Bay, New Dublin, and Conquerall, Nova Scotia

As long as I have §5, I shall never drop my subscription to your magazine. This sort of publication has been sorely needed for years. With tears in my eyes, I have thanked God for bringing it into being. I have a copy of every issue you have printed.… Because you have intelligently and sanely presented to the world the conservative, evangelical viewpoint, scores of ministers (who have been teetering on the edge of neoorthodoxy and outright liberalism) have been won over to that position.

First Baptist Church

Pine Mountain, Ga.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY means a great deal to me.… Because of a serious eye condition there are many things that I cannot read now. I am so thankful that the magazine that helps me most can still be read.…

Colonial Heights, Va.

I read CHRISTIANITY TODAY regularly, and use your book reviews in helping me select the books I want to purchase for my library.…

Oak Grove Baptist Church

Covington, Tenn.

Your magazine is appreciated and widely read by all who use our library.

Librarian

The Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention

Richmond, Va.

I find the magazine most helpful to me. Also, when the copies are placed in the waiting rooms at the clinic after I have finished with them, the patients seem to enjoy reading them a great deal also.…

Drew Clinic

Drew, Miss.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY is a disappointment. Instead of meeting the need for a realistic confrontation of the dialectic-socialization of the Church by the power-movement centered in the NCC—The World Church, it is going into competing dialectics, in the realm of greater orthodoxy. But doctrine-theology is not the issue: it is the dialectic smoke screen that covers the mundane. Real-Politik; as truly as was the Church-position faced by Luther.…

Evangelical Congregational Church

McKeesport, Pa.

It seems to me that your magazine would be more forthright if it added to its masthead these words: “A magazine for the purpose of discrediting anything or anyone connected with the National and the World Councils of Churches.

Columbia-Union Presbyterian Church

Columbia, Ky.

The chief goal of CHRISTIANITY TODAY is to please everyone including the devil.…

Canoga Park, Calif.

To my mind, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, despite the fact that it has managed to entice a few of the “big name” theologians to write for it, is simply a sophisticated version of American fundamentalism: bibliolatrous, theologically narrow, ethically backward.

Pottstown, Pa.

The attitude of some of your correspondents will keep you from every worry about Luke 6:26. Therefore, let me suggest a saying that is more apropos: “Take heart when you are lambasted by extremists on both sides of the theological barricades.”

First Baptist

Kittaning. Pa.

I have been a subscriber … for years.… I am a retired Lutheran pastor (Augustana). I retired mid-year in 1960 at the age of 79. Even though I do not see quite as well as I would like, I simply cannot shut CHRISTIANITY TODAY out of my life. It has become too much a part of my trying to keep up with theological and other trends of the present times.…

Niagara Falls, N.Y.

Your magazine has been … of tremendous value and encouragement, and not to me only, but to many of my fellow pastors in the former Augustana Lutheran, now Lutheran Church in America.…

Minneapolis, Minn.

I can no longer restrain myself from writing to protest the inane babble that so often fills the pages of your journal. Issue after issue is replete with pseudo-intellectual jibes at “liberalism” or some other mythical enemy of the Christian faith. When will Protestantism cease this adolescent bickering, which in itself is the epitome of sin?

Columbia Baptist Church

Cincinnati, Ohio

CHRISTIANITY TODAY is scholarly, yet it is inbreathed with a heart of Christian charity.

Studio City, Calif.

I do very much appreciate the magazine. You are publishing a very high-grade periodical. I do not always agree with your theological viewpoint, but I do like to read the other side. We should all be open-minded.… I … have ministerial standing in both the Unitarian and the Congregation-Christian denominations.…

Aberdeen, S. Dak.

Though I am not such a strict evangelical as some of your contributors appear to be, I cannot help being challenged and stimulated by the articles.… They are clearly presented and argued with conviction and sustained by biblical evidence. I have gotten fresh angles on a number of points.…

Peradeniya, Ceylon

I consider it probably the best conservative, evangelical religious journal in the field. I am more liberal in my theology and philosophy than is indicated by most of the articles in your journal. However, I like to read a journal which is more conservative, providing it is based on good scholarship and sound reasoning. Your magazine is not as extreme as most conservative journals. Moreover, you give reports of the ecumenical movement and of church life in general which are not found elsewhere.…

Salisbury, Mass.

You win—never thought I’d give in! I was a Christian Century man. “He who perseveres—succeeds.”

Avenal, Calif.

I do not agree with most of your ideas.

Bauxite, Ark.

Please send out my subscription to CHRISTIANITY TODAY so as I can pick you people apart till hell freezes over and the Kingdom of God comes to us.

Philadelphia, Pa.

Of the 100 or so periodicals which come to this house CHRISTIANITY TODAY is easily my favorite.

Penticton, British Columbia

May I say that there is no periodical that I read with greater anticipation than CHRISTIANITY TODAY. I feel you have conferred upon the English-speaking public of the world an outstanding benefit.

St. Paul’s Cathedral

London, England

Briefly put, the argument which I wish to promote is this: (a) that eventually every category of human endeavor, the writing of plays and novels included, must come under the leavening touch of Christianity; (b) that the Christian public can accelerate this leavening if they will participate enthusiastically and with intelligent discrimination in the experiences which the best of modern literature provides; and (c) that some of the confusions which cause the public to turn its back on modern writing can be removed by an understanding of where and how the leaven works.

These confusions, it seems to me, have three sources. First is the suspicion that there exists some fundamental antagonism between Christianity and the creative process. Another is the notion that the vision of life which underlies much recent writing is spiritually barren and therefore unrewarding. Third, there is the vexed question of the relation between literature and morality.

Christianity And Creativity

One thoughtful commentator has this to say about the relationship between Christianity and human creativity:

“For the poets the scandal of Christ is his asceticism. The very element of their experience as men, is the gamut of human living, emotions, drama. ‘Man’s resinous heart’ and the loves, loyalties, the pride, the grief it feeds—these are the stuff of poetry and the sense of life. And the Cross lays its shadow on this; it draws away all the blood from the glowing body of existence and leaves it mutilated and charred in the hope of some thin ethereal felicity. The wine of life is changed to water.… The ‘dramatic caves’ of the human heart and imagination are renounced for some wan empyrean of spiritual revery.… The refusal of religion by the modern poet and by more than moderns and by more than poets, goes back to the apparent denial of human living by religion, to the supposed incompatibility of life with Life and of art with faith” (Amos Wilder, The Spiritual Aspects of the New Poetry, p. 196).

The key phrase is “supposed incompatibility.” Just as the leaven does not destroy the meal but rather alters its chemical essence, so Christianity does not deprive the writer of his subject, man’s “resinous heart” with its “dramatic caves,” but enables the writer to bring to bear upon his work and his life a transcendent ideal which will help him to make sense out of both. And if we accept the idea, as it seems to me we must, that literature, like all the arts, is a technique which creative human beings have evolved down through the centuries as an instrument to aid them in their need to find patterns of order, ultimately of value, in the flux of day-by-day experience, then not only is there no genuine conflict between art and faith: there is an indissoluble connection welding them together. The principle which allows us to interpret experience in a meaningful way is not to be found in experience itself but outside and above it.

The Shaping Vision

The vital relations between Christianity and the shaping vision which underlies any play or novel or poem are outlined by one critic as follows:

“We have said that the work of literary art is a special sort of linguistic structure that traps the attention intransitively; but we have also argued that the intransitivity of the reader’s attention is not absolute. The literary work is a trap, but it is a trap that is oriented toward the world of existence that transcends the work—and the work is oriented by the vision, by the belief, by the ultimate concern of which it is an incarnation: its orientation, that is to say, is essentially religious. And this is why criticism itself must, in the end, be theological” (Nathan A. Scott, Jr., “The Collaboration of Vision in the Poetic Act,” Literature and Belief, p. 133).

Last summer, after reading this passage for the first time, I sat down to fabricate a tool of analysis which would enable me to dissect recent novels and plays in order to discover how much of the leaven may be found at work in the author’s vision of life. What I came up with is this: Each literary work projects a world of people and events much like our “real” world, and just as our world has a distinguishable character because of the nature of the forces which created it, so has each literary world a specific character; by analyzing that character we can infer, though only indirectly, to be sure, the shaping forces, the ultimate concerns of the writer in the act of writing his book or play.

Let me illustrate with Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a modern retelling of one of the oldest of stories—man’s attempt to rediscover and re-enter the Garden of Paradise. Steinbeck erects his plot on five verses in the fourth chapter of Genesis, that very familiar passage in which Cain and Abel bring an offering to Jehovah. The crucial verse is this one: “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.” The word “him” here refers not to Abel but to sin, and the Authorized Version thus promises that man shall someday gain dominion over sin.

The Hebrew verb rendered “thou shalt rule” by the King James translators is timshel, and one of the important characters in Steinbeck’s novel, Lee, the Chinese servant in the Trask family, begins to suspect that buried in that one word is a key to the conquest of human evil. He consults with a group of Chinese scholars about it, and after two years of study they conclude that timshel ought to be translated “thou mayest rule,” not “thou shalt rule.” East of Eden is an attempt to dramatize the difference. One gives the promise of victory; the other gives only the chance of victory, thereby making man totally responsible for his destiny.

Full analysis of the novel will reveal what the above paragraph merely suggests, that the shaping vision behind it is thoroughly humanistic. Thus, since the teachings of Christianity are unalterably theistic, we conclude that there is only a modicum of the leaven at work here.

What We Can Give

But this discovery, it would seem, is not nearly so important as our response to it. Shall we, upon finding only minimal traces of primitive Christianity, turn away from recent fiction and drama because it is materialistic, is spiritually sterile and dry? We probably shall, as many have, if we approach literature primarily in terms of getting something from it—moral inspiration, say. But if we approach it in terms of what we can give, of what we can bring to it in the way of clear thinking and strong, ethical affections so as to enter into a positive, give-and-take transaction with it, keeping in mind that in time every sort of human activity must feel the impact of Christian concepts, then we shall turn not away from contemporary literature but toward it.

This distinction between getting and giving is even more important when we consider the connection between literature and morality, a subject made enormously complex by the number of elements which it comprises. We may speak, for example, of the relationship between the writer and his novel or play and hold up for inspection the idea that only a morally good man can produce a good book. Or we may come at the topic from the other side and examine the relationship between a book and its readers, and here there are a number of things to be distinguished: the words, obscene or not; the behavior of the characters, moral or not; their ideas, evil or not; and the vision of life which forms the entire book, true or not.

Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye may be taken to illustrate these distinctions. Because it contains offensive language, instances of censurable behavior, and a number of reprehensible ideas, many readers would label it an immoral book. But in doing that they may have overlooked the most significant scene in the novel, the one which provided its title, in which Holden explains to Phoebe his vision of standing in a rye field full of small children to guard them from plunging over a cliff. This is his way of making sense out of the terrifyingly chaotic world which envelops him, a world empty of values but full of phonies, and if we accept the idea that literature has some basic part to play in the human search for order, then the worth of this one scene ought to outweigh what we may regard as the worthlessness of the other elements. Catcher in the Rye is thus seen to be a mixed product, one requiring careful thought if it is to be evaluated sensibly.

The Christian Response

Now, the question of whether or not a book is morally contaminating, or potentially so, raises the corollary question, How shall we respond? Politics is also regarded by some to be morally contaminating, but is that justification for insulating ourselves from it? It may be that if the thinking majority in America, including thoughtful Christians, were confronting serious works of literary art—reading them, pondering them, debating them with friends, writing about them—then their enlightened attention would provide a channel through which more of the leaven could reach the meal.

Two qualifications are in order here. Obviously not everyone will have the time to do this; many will be totally absorbed in other duties. Secondly, I am speaking only of books with aesthetic merit. Reading books without it can scarcely be defended. But if a book does show merit, it is worth meeting face to face, just as any human being, because of the potential that is in him, it worth meeting face to face. We meet the book, and then judge it; we may judge harshly, but if this judgment is a genuine act of the intelligence, something worthwhile has occurred.

Let me summarize now with a final assertion. Contemporary literature deserves our concern, and if we will bring to it the best that we possess in the way of wisdom, sensitivity, and Christian conviction, it may well be that in time a literature will emerge that is fully responsive to the leaven of Christian concepts, a literature capable of standing in equality with all else that is good in human experience—capable, as William Faulkner remarked in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, of helping man to endure and prevail on this planet by “lifting his heart.”