Christianity introduced a concept into the thought of the West which is alien to the thinking of Plato and Aristotle, the two major political thinkers of the ancient world. This new concept has been called, after Augustine, the idea of the two cities: the City of God and the City of Man. Man, it is asserted, holds his citizenship papers in two realms, the earthly and the heavenly. He is to negotiate this life as best he can, seeking as much justice and such happiness as this world permits, but in full awareness that his ultimate felicity may be attained only in another order of existence. “The world is a bridge,” an Oriental sage remarked. “Cross it, but do not build your houses on it”.…

Christianity introduced another concept into Western thought which has had an effect upon our thinking about government: the concept of the Fall. Christian thought distinguishes between the created world as it came from the hand of God, and the fallen world known to history; between the world of primal innocence we posit, and the world marred by evil, which we know. It follows from this original premise that Christian thought is nonbehaviorist; it is based on the idea that the true inwardness of a thing—its real nature—cannot be fully known by merely observing its outward behavior. Things are distorted in the historical and natural order, unable to manifest their true being. Man especially is askew. He was created in the image of God, but now he is flawed by sin.

Some political implications may be drawn from these premises. It has been a characteristic note in Christian sociology, from the earliest centuries, to regard government not as an original element of the created world, but as a reflection of man’s corrupted nature in our fallen world. Government, in other words, is a consequence of sin; it appears only after the Fall. But if government is the result of original sin, it follows that governmental action cannot be a remedy for sin. By the same token it follows that sinful man will try to employ government for this impossible task, as well as for lesser purposes. In other words, the Christian rationale for government is incompatible with the total state required by collectivism. When the Christian rationale for government is understood and spelled out, the only political role compatible with it is the modest function of defending the peace of society by curbing peace-breakers. When government is limited to repressing criminal and destructive actions, men are free to act constructively and creatively up to the full limit of their individual capacities.

A third Christian doctrine which is politically meaningful is the idea of free will. Man’s fall, according to theology, resulted from an act of choice—an act of disobedience, as it turned out. The kernel of this story as related in Genesis is the conviction that the God who created man gave him at the same time sufficient freedom to deny his Maker. It is but a short deduction from this belief to the conclusion that the God who gave us inwardly such complete freedom that we could either accept or reject him wills that the relationships between men should be voluntary. The despot who repudiates individual liberty usurps a role which God even denies himself! The despot may be a majority, but this doesn’t alter matters. Outer and social liberty, in other words, is the necessary completion of inner and spiritual liberty; the free society is implicit in this reading of man’s nature. Man cannot be deprived of his spiritual liberty without being de humanized; this liberty survives under adversity, inside prison walls, and in totalitarian countries. This may be admitted, while at the same time we affirm to the hilt that man’s nature is such that anything less than a free society involves a denial of some part of it.

We arrive at a similar conclusion by contemplating the second half of the Great Commandment, where we are en joined to love our neighbor as ourselves. The bonds that should unite people, it is here implied, are those of unyielding good will, understanding, and compassion. But in collectivist theory, on the other hand, people are to be put through their paces by command and coercion. This is the nature of the means which must be, and are being, employed in even the most well-intentioned welfare state. In practice, every collectivized order careens toward a police state whose own citizens are its first victims. The love commandment of the Gospels brought down to the political level implies justice, parity, and freedom. There is no way whereby these basic premises may be twisted into a sanctioning of the operational imperatives of a collectivist society.—Remarks by EDMUND A. OPITZ of the Foundation for Economic Education to a seminar in Carmel Valley, California.

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges today, one particularly evidenced in our large cities, is to face and overcome the neglect of our heritage in law. The great legal principles that swayed our people and upon which our country was founded were based on inward convictions of the heart and persuasions of the mind. Our ancestors were born and raised on the sanctity and authority of law and order.

The moral law has a basis not only in religion and ethics, but also in intuition, instinct, and reason. We are in dire need, as a society exploding not only in population but with social problems, of recapturing its importance in American life.

We are living at a time when many conceive it to be no wrong to violate the law, but rather think that the wrong lies in being caught.… This is the direct antithesis of the moral law, which applies sanctions or penalties only because it recognizes there is a duty to obey the law. The law, under moral precepts, should be obeyed not because there are penalties. It should be obeyed irrespective of whether a violation would ever be detected or not.…

The Greatest Lawgiver gave us a Decalogue through Moses. “Thou shalt not kill” has after it a period. It does not read, “Thou shalt not kill, for if you do and are convicted of first degree murder in Pennsylvania in 1963, you’ll be sentenced to death or life imprisonment; or, if it’s second degree, a maxi mum of ten to twenty years’ imprisonment; or, if it’s voluntary manslaughter, a maximum of six to twelve years’ imprisonment.” “Thou shalt not kill,” period; whether you’re apprehended or not, whether you can get away with it or not, thou shalt not kill.

The same is true of the law, “Thou shalt not steal.” It doesn’t read, “Thou shalt not steal; if you do, and are convicted, you can get a maximum of two and one-half to five years in prison.” Whether you can get away with it or not, “Thou shalt not steal.”

Unless we as a nation can restore again among our people the persuasive force of moral and spiritual convictions, our people, multitudes of whom are growing morally soft and hungry with greed, will be overcome by their degeneracy.

A sense of duty to obey the law must be re-taught and re-learned. We afford our young people, for the most part, good and adequate recreational facilities, and these are needed. In addition to these, however, we must develop means to strengthen the moral fiber of America. This work cannot be left to the exclusive function of the schools, churches, and national youth organizations. Many, many are not reached by any of these. Greater encouragement should be given to neighborhood civic associations, clubs, forums, and other groups, where problems of moral responsibility are discussed. This should be not a piecemeal program but one that is carefully planned by competent individuals. Especially should such groups be developed, encouraged, and sponsored among young Americans in crowded areas of our large cities. The building of moral stamina and character is as much needed as are physical and intellectual growth.—The Hon. EDWARD J. GRIFFITHS, Judge of Common Pleas Court No. 1, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

NORWEGIAN CENSORSHIP—A ban against the Lutheran motion picture Question 7 is creating a major national issue in Norway. The state censor ruled that young people under sixteen may not view the film, which depicts the Christian struggle against Communism in East Germany. He said the film would expose young people to a “one-sided impression” and would be a “confusing” and “harmful” influence.

PROTESTANT PANORAMA—First Methodist Church Society of Boston plans to restore the city’s famous West End Church, forced by the British in 1776 to remove its towering steeple so it could not be used to send signals to Yankee rebels. The church has been used as a branch of the Boston Public Library since 1896.

A new liberal arts college with Presbyterian roots is taking shape on a 300-acre site at Seneca Falls, New York. It will be named Eisenhower College in honor of the former U. S. president, a Presbyterian. The college, expected to open in 1965, has already been endorsed by the Geneva-Lyons Presbytery and will eventually seek affiliation with the United Presbyterian Synod of New York.

Irish Methodist Conference voted to begin conversations with the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and to welcome inclusion of other Christian denominations that may wish to join in the unity talks.

Lutheran World Federation reports that the number of German Evangelical overseas missionary personnel has more than doubled since 1952—from 499 to 1,155.

A draft constitution for a United Congregational Church of Southern Africa was approved at a meeting of representatives of Congregational groups in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.

MISCELLANY—A Christian Communications Center to train future ministers in the use of radio and television is being established by the Church Federation of Greater Chicago and eleven denominational seminaries in the area. The center’s initial curriculum will be a course on “The Church’s Broadcasting Minis try” in the fall, for which seminarians will receive credit from their respective theological schools.

Four hundred thousand bushels of wheat are being made available to cyclone victims in East Pakistan through Church World Service. The World Council of Churches said its member denominations had donated nearly $50,000 to help the stricken area. Some 10,000 lives were lost in the storm.

A Venezuelan-born Roman Catholic priest, in making his last will and testament, remembered the “happiness I have enjoyed” in the United States and left $6,000 to the federal government. Father Jesus de Corcugra, a naturalized American citizen, died in March at the age of eighty-eight. He had been assistant pastor of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church in Schenectady, New York.

Christian Committee for Service in Algeria is stepping up its tree-planting program to provide work for the unemployed and to arrest soil erosion. The committee hopes to plant 70,000,000 trees and to continue its program until mid-1965. Some 1,200,000 have already been planted.

President Kennedy accepted honorary chairmanship of the sponsoring committee for the American Churchill Memorial, a war-damaged London church to be relocated at Westminster College, a United Presbyterian school in Fulton, Missouri, where Sir Winston Churchill made his now famous “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946.

Melkite Rite Archbishop George Hakim of Akka, head of the largest Christian community in Israel, called on President Zalman Shazar to offer congratulations on his election. The call marked the first official meeting between the new president and a leader of the Christian community in Israel.

A special plaque was presented by the Boy Scouts of America to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the denomination’s scouting program.

PERSONALIA—Screen star Dolores Hart, a convert to Catholicism who played a nun in a film on St. Francis of Assisi, says she is forsaking her film career to enter a convent in Connecticut.

Dr. Kenneth Watson resigned as executive director of the Religion and Labor Council of America.

Dr. Jon L. Regier appointed chief of staff of the National Council of Churches’ emergency Commission on Religion and Race.

Dr. Clemens C. Granskou retiring as president of St. Olaf College.

Dr. Wallace N. Jamison elected president of New Brunswick Theological Seminary, succeeding Dr. Justin Vander Kolk.

Resignation of Dr. Henry Bast as professor of theology at Western Theo logical Seminary to return to the pastorate was accepted by the General Synod of the Reformed Church in America.

Dr. Casper Nannes, religion editor of the Washington Star, presented with the annual Award in Religious Communications by Religious Heritage of America.

The Rev. Francis Kirkegaard Wagschal named chaplain of Waterloo Lutheran University.

The Rev. William J. Boone, 32-year-old Methodist minister, named chaplain of the Protestant Chapel to be built at New York International Airport.

Pastor Gerhart Nordholt elected president of the synod of the Evangelical Reformed Church of North-West Germany.

The Rev. Jaroslav J. Vajda appointed editor of This Day, monthly family magazine of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.

Dr. James Allen Knight appointed professor of psychiatry and religion at Union Theological Seminary, New York.

Dr. Martin E. Marty appointed associate professor of church history at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.

Chaplain (Rear Admiral) J. Floyd Dreith appointed Chief of U. S. Navy Chaplains. He is a minister of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.

Dr. W. A. Adams retiring as professor of New Testament at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The Rev. William Havenkamp elected president of the Christian Reformed Church.

Dr. Stewart Winfield Herman appointed first president of the new Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.

WORTH QUOTING—“Roman Catholicism has moved further in the past three years than Protestantism has moved in the past fifty years.”—Dr. Samuel H. Miller, dean of Harvard Divinity School.

“It just swells a white man’s pride that he has integrated his church by inviting one Negro.”—The Rev. Denzil A. Carty, rector of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Deaths

DR. GEORGE P. MICHAELIDES, 70, director emeritus of the Shauffler Division of Christian Education at the Oberlin Graduate College School of Theology; in Oberlin, Ohio.

DR. E. GRAHAM WILSON, 79, retired general secretary of the United Presbyterian Board of National Missions; in Bronxville, New York.

DR. T. J. BACH, 82, general director emeritus of The Evangelical Alliance Mission; in Yucaipa, California.

RUTH F. WOODSMALL, 79, retired general secretary of the Young Women’s Christian Association world headquarters in Geneva; in New York City.

Majority Opinion (Justice Clark)

In light of the history of the First Amendment and of our cases interpreting and applying its requirements, we hold that the practices at issue and the laws requiring them are unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause, as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment …

It is true that religion has been closely identified with our history and government.… The fact that the Founding Fathers believed devotedly that there was a God and that the unalienable rights of man were rooted in Him is clearly evidenced in their writings, from the Mayflower Compact to the Constitution itself. This background is evidenced today in our public life through the continuance in our oaths of office from the Presidency to the Alderman of the final supplication, “So help me God”.… Indeed, only last year an official survey of the country indicated that 64 per cent of our people have church membership, Bureau of Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 48 (83d ed. 1962), while less than 3 per cent profess no religion whatever.… This is not to say, however, that religion has been so identified with our history and government that religious freedom is not likewise as strongly imbedded in our public and private life.… This freedom of worship was indispensable in a country whose people came from the four quarters of the earth and brought with them a diversity of religious opinion. Today authorities list 83 separate religious bodies, each with memberships exceeding 50,000, existing among our people, as well as innumerable smaller groups.…

The wholesome “neutrality” of which this Court’s cases speak thus stems from a recognition of the teachings of history that powerful sects or groups might bring about a fusion of governmental and religious functions or a concert or dependency of one upon the other to the end that official support of the State or Federal Government would be placed behind the tenets of one or of all orthodoxies. This the Establishment Clause prohibits. And a further reason for neutrality is found in the Free Exercise Clause, which recognizes the value of religious training, teaching and observance and, more particularly, the right of every person to freely choose his own course with reference thereto, free of any compulsion from the state. This the Free Exercise Clause guarantees. Thus, as we have seen, the two clauses may overlap. As we have indicated, the Establishment Clause has been directly considered by this Court eight times in the past score of years and, with only one Justice dissenting on the point, it has consistently held that the clause withdrew all legislative power respecting religious belief or the expression thereof. The test may be stated as follows: what are the purpose and primary effect of the enactment? If either is the advancement or inhibition of religion then the enactment exceeds the scope of legislative power as circumscribed by the Constitution …

Applying the Establishment Clause principles to the cases at bar we find that the States are requiring the selection and reading at the opening of the school day of verses from the Holy Bible and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer by the students in unison. These exercises are prescribed as part of the curricular activities of students who are required by law to attend school. They are held in the school buildings under the supervision and with the participation of teachers employed in those schools.… We agree with the [Pennsylvania] trial court’s findings as to the religious character of the exercises. Given that finding the exercises and the law requiring them are in violation of the Establishment Clause.…

The conclusion follows that in both cases the laws require religious exercises and such exercises are being conducted in direct violation of the rights of the appellees and petitioners. Nor are these required exercises mitigated by the fact that individual students may absent themselves upon parental request, for that fact furnishes no defense to a claim of unconstitutionality under the Establishment Clause.… The breach of neutrality that is today a trickling stream may all too soon become a raging torrent and, in the words of Madison, “it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties”

It is insisted that unless these religious exercises are permitted a “religion of secularism” is established in the schools. We agree of course that the State may not establish a “religion of secular ism” in the sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion, thus “preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe”.… We do not agree, however, that this decision in any sense has that effect.… It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistent with the First Amendment.…

Finally, we cannot accept that the concept of neutrality, which does not permit a State to require a religious exercise even with the consent of the majority of those affected, collides with the majority’s right to free exercise of religion.…

In the relationship between man and religion, the State is firmly committed to a position of neutrality. Though the application of that rule requires interpretation of a delicate sort, the rule itself is clearly and concisely stated in the words of the First Amendment …

Concurring Opinion (Justice Brennan)

The Court’s historic duty to expound the meaning of the Constitution has encountered few issues more intricate or more demanding than that of the relationship between religion and the public schools.… Americans regard the public schools as a most vital civic institution for the preservation of a democratic system of government. It is therefore understandable that the constitutional prohibitions encounter their severest test when they are sought to be applied in the school classroom.…

The fact is that the line which separates the secular from the sectarian in American life is elusive. The difficulty of defining the boundary with precision inheres in a paradox central to our scheme of liberty. While our institutions reflect a firm conviction that we are a religious people, those institutions by solemn constitutional injunction may not officially involve religion in such a way as to prefer, discriminate against, or oppress, a particular sect or religion. Equally the Constitution enjoins those involvements of religious with secular institutions which (a) serve the essentially religious activities of religious institutions; (b) employ the organs of government for essentially religious purposes; or (c) use essentially religious means to serve governmental ends where secular means would suffice. The constitutional mandate expresses a deliberate and considered judgment that such matters are to be left to the conscience of the citizen.…

I join fully in the opinion and the judgment of the Court. I see no escape from the conclusion that the exercises called in question in these two cases violate the constitutional mandate. The reasons we gave only last Term in Engel v. Vitale, 370 U. S. 421, for finding in the New York Regents’ prayer an impermissible establishment of religion, compel the same judgment of the practices at bar. The involvement of the secular with the religious is no less intimate here; and it is constitutionally irrelevant that the State has not composed the material for the inspirational exercises presently involved.… While it is my view that not every involvement of religion in public life is unconstitutional, I consider the exercises at bar a form of involvement which clearly violates the Establishment Clause.…

Whatever Jefferson or Madison would have thought of Bible reading or the recital of the Lord’s Prayer in what few public schools existed in their day, our use of the history of their time must limit itself to broad purposes, not specific practices. By such a standard, I am persuaded, as is the Court, that the devotional exercises carried on in the Baltimore and Abington schools offend the First Amendment because they sufficiently threaten in our day those substantive evils the fear of which called forth the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It is “a constitution we are expounding,” and our interpretation of the First Amendment must necessarily be responsive to the much more highly charged nature of religious questions in contemporary society.…

Not every involvement of religion in public life violates the Establishment Clause. Our decision in these cases does not clearly forecast anything about the constitutionality of other types of interdependence between religious and other public institutions.

Concurring Opinion (Justice Goldberg)

I have no doubt as to the propriety of the decision and therefore join the opinion and judgment of the Court. The singular sensitivity and concern which surround both the legal and practical judgments involved impel me, however, to add a few words in further explication, while at the same time avoiding repetition of the carefully and ably framed examination of history and authority by my Brethren.…

The attitude of the state toward religion must be one of neutrality. But untutored devotion to the concept of neutrality can lead to invocation or approval of results which partake not simply of that noninterference and noninvolvement with the religious which the Constitution commands, but of a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious. Such results are not only not compelled by the Constitution, but, it seems to me, are prohibited by it.…

The practices here involved do not fall within any sensible or acceptable concept of compelled or permitted accommodation and involve the state so significantly and directly in the realm of the sectarian as to give rise to those very divisive influences and inhibitions of freedom which both religion clauses of the First Amendment preclude.

Dissenting Opinion (Justice Stewart)

I think the records in the two cases before us are so fundamentally deficient as to make impossible an informed or responsible determination of the constitutional issues presented. Specifically, I cannot agree that on these records we can say that the Establishment Clause has necessarily been violated. (Footnote: It is instructive, in this connection, to examine the complaints in the two cases before us. Neither complaint attacks the challenged practices as “establishments.” What both allege as the basis for their causes of actions are, rather, violations of religious liberty.) …

As a matter of history, the First Amendment was adopted solely as a limitation upon the newly created National Government. The events leading to its adoption strongly suggest that the Establishment Clause was primarily an attempt to insure that Congress not only would be powerless to establish a national church, but would also be unable to interfere with existing state establishments. See McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U. S. 420, 440–441. Each State was left free to go its own way and pursue its own policy with respect to religion. Thus Virginia from the beginning pursued a policy of disestablishmentarianism. Massachusetts, by contrast, had an established church until well into the nineteenth century. I accept without question that the liberty guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment against impairment by the States embraces in full the right of free exercise of religion protected by the First Amendment, and I yield to no one in my conception of the breadth of that freedom.… I accept too the proposition that the Fourteenth Amendment has somehow absorbed the Establishment Clause, although it is not without irony that a constitutional provision evidently designed to leave the States free to go their own way should now have become a restriction upon their autonomy. But I cannot agree with what seems to me the insensitive definition of the Establishment Clause contained in the Court’s opinion, nor with the different but, I think, equally mechanistic definitions contained in the separate opinions which have been filed.…

There is involved in these cases a substantial free exercise claim on the part of those who affirmatively desire to have their children’s school day open with the reading of passages from the Bible.…

If religious exercises are held to be an impermissible activity in schools, religion is placed at an artificial and state-created disadvantage. Viewed in this light, permission of such exercises for those who want them is necessary if the schools are truly to be neutral in the matter of religion. And a refusal to permit religious exercises thus is seen, not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism, or at the least, as government support of the beliefs of those who think that religious exercises should be conducted only in private.…

The Elusive Money Line

Decisions in the Supreme Court chamber last month built a higher wall of separation between church and state. But elsewhere in Washington, breaks in the wall provided increasing involvement of denominational agencies in government funds. Yet cases to test the constitutionality of such involvement seemed ever more elusive.

A seven-week campaign by the United Presbyterian Board of National Missions was climaxed when the federal government approved a $3,900,000 grant for the purchase of five United Mine Workers’ hospitals in Kentucky. The board is setting up a non-sectarian, independent corporation to buy the hospitals to keep them open. United Presbyterian officials originally sought $9,500,000 in federal funds from the Area Redevelopment Administration to purchase ten hospitals which the UMW planned to close. The other five reportedly will remain open for another year, pending additional grants.

Approval of a loan of $4,000,000 to Southern Methodist University, the largest yet approved for a private institution under the college housing program, was announced last month by the U. S. Housing and Home Finance Agency. The money will be used for dormitory and dining facilities and for enlargement of the campus power plant.

Statistics made available by the Housing and Home Finance Agency also disclosed extensive federal investments in denominational retirement homes. A survey of the statistics by the National Lutheran Council indicated that ten Luther an projects for senior citizens have received direct government loans totaling $7,987,784 since 1961, when this type of financial aid became available. In addition, agency officials were quoted as saying that they either have committed or are in the process of approving mortgage insurance totaling $26,457,890 for twenty-four Lutheran housing projects for the elderly.

Meanwhile a research grant of $823,159—one of the largest ever made to a private institution—was awarded a few days ago to Baylor University for a study of the structure of human viruses. The grant to Baylor, largest of the Southern Baptist universities, is for five years.

Toward Transition

As racial unrest mounted across the United States last month, President Kennedy summoned to the White House some 243 religious leaders to discuss integration processes. The meeting, held in the East Room, was historic, for it marked one of the most representative gatherings of high-ranking U. S. church leaders ever held anywhere.

“Even if we disagree,” said Kennedy, “it is our responsibility to make this transition as easy as possible.”

The upshot of the meeting was the creation of a national advisory council of clergymen on civil rights. Kennedy asked J. Irwin Miller, president of the National Council of Churches, to act as chairman. Other churchmen who were present suggested further implementation through the creation of local committees.

“Let us see,” said Kennedy, “if we can make a significant break-through this summer … church by church … and community by community.”

The meeting with church leaders was one of a series the President has conducted during the race crisis. Other meetings brought together educators, businessmen, and labor leaders.

Two clergymen from the South were reported to have made pro-segregation comments in a question-and-answer period with Kennedy. One asked him whether he sought to promote racial intermarriage. Kennedy denied it.

Detailing Charity

Ecclesiastical cannons rained sharp criticism on the Internal Revenue Service last month. The provocation was a proposal to tighten charitable deduction provisions of the income tax code. At a three-hour hearing in Washington, representatives from the National Council of Churches, the American Council of Christian Churches, assorted Lutheran bodies, the United Presbyterian Foundation, and several Jewish interests peppered the government agency with charges of “unnecessary,” “discouraging,” “detrimental,” and “burdensome.”

Two aspects of the proposed additions to the tax law, the avowed purpose of which is to “require the furnishing of additional information to establish the deductibility of contributions of property, other than money, to charitable organizations,” seemed to draw greatest fire. One was a requirement that taxpayers submit with their returns “the name and address of each organization to which a contribution was made and the amount and date of the actual payment of each contribution.” The other was a demand that all donors report the specifics of non-monetary contributions, including “circumstances under which the taxpayer acquired the property” and the date.

“The effect of these amendments is to discourage giving to charitable institutions, to make the existence of these institutions more difficult and to reduce their effectiveness,” said the Rev. Robert B. Gronlund on behalf of the American Lutheran Church.

The regulations must not, declared an NCC statement, “have the long-run effect of discouraging what heretofore has been encouraged by the tax laws of the Federal Government; namely support of the broad variety of voluntary associations of our citizens.”

ACCC representatives were more direct. “There is no doubt whatever that the proposed new regulations will deter, restrict or detrimentally influence property gifts,” declared a statement which had been submitted previously by John Wesley Rhoads. “The income tax as presently administered has been used to harass independent churches and religious institutions and agencies.”

Only the United Presbyterians appeared unruffled. “We’ll manage somehow,” declared George W. McKeag, who represented the denomination’s trustees. Nevertheless, he suggested that the proposed revisions be shelved pending the outcome of President Kennedy’s current efforts to modify the tax structure.

‘Christian Oscars’

The Tony Fontane Story, an evangelistic film chronicling the conversion of a popular singer, won top honors in the National Evangelical Film Foundation’s 1963 competition. Fontane and his wife were chosen best actor and best actress for their roles in the film. Billy Zeoli was selected best producer and Jan Sadlo best director. Fontane also was voted best male singer in the record awards.

Other film winners were Savage Flame (Cathedral), best missionary film; One Nation under God (World Wide Pictures), best musical film; Jonah (Film Services), best children’s film; Prophet From Tekoa (Broadman), best Bible story; Christian Faith In a Confused World (Family Films), best Christian life film; Beyond These Skies (Ken Anderson, Inc.), best Christian witnessing; The Minister (Video Productions), best documentary film; and Survey of the Scriptures (Moody), best filmstrip; Bob Jeffries (Gospel Films), best sup porting actor.

Record awards went to “Auca Story” (Diadem), best documentary record; the White Sisters in “Brighten the Corner” (Word), best trio record; Kurt Kaiser in “Preludes of Faith” (Word), best instrumental record; Don Lonie (Word), most unusual record; “Teen World” (Sacred), best choir record; the Melody Four Quartet in “Cascades of Blessing” (Word), best quartet record; Mary Jayne in “I Believe in Miracles” (Capitol) best female singer; and Lorin Whitney (Christian Faith), best organ record.

Testimony Revision

The Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, a tiny U. S. denomination which believes that the Constitution should have a Christian amendment, weathered an intense debate at its 134th Synod at Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, last month. Key issue was over a proposal to revise the church’s official testimony on Christian citizenship, particularly a chapter which discourages participation in non-Christian, civil elections. Synod delegates were divided on how proposed re vision might be implemented. The proposal was adopted, however, by a vote of 72 to 34. It still needs approval by two-thirds of the church’s sessions and a majority of voting elders before becoming valid.

A Qualified Urge

Although it spoke brightly of its urge to merge, the Reformed Church in America tiptoed hesitantly down the ecumenical road last month. The church’s annual General Synod voted to continue ecumenical conversations with the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern), but also gave considerable hope to overtures from two Michigan classes (North and South Grand Rapids) which requested that in the event of merger, individual congregations which decided by a two-thirds vote “to retain their identity” could remain out of the merger without loss of property rights. The requests were referred to the church’s committee on ecumenics.

Dr. Bernard Brunsting, pastor of the First Reformed Church of Holland, Michigan, and president of the synod for the past year, took his eye off the ecumenical highway, urging consideration of churches not affiliated with ecumenical organizations. He urged the synod to go on record favoring closer relationships with such churches in order to recognize “our oneness with them in Christ.”

The questions of the Communist influence in the World Council of Churches since admission of Russian Orthodox churches and the role of the WCC in regard to national policy, “particularly in view of its unfortunate declaration with regard to the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba in October, 1962,” were referred for study to the denomination’s own committee on the WCC.

CHALLENGES FOR THE POPE

Pope Paul VI may be obliged to turn his attention rather quickly to Viet Nam and Spain, where incidents in recent weeks had a Middle Ages flavor. Suppressed religious minorities in these two countries have yet to feel much relief as the result of Roman Catholicism’s new posture of good will.

American Negroes are an honored elite compared with the distraught Buddhists of Viet Nam, where Roman Catholics dominate the government. The Buddhists, to underscore their protests, have been staging severe demonstrations. At a street corner in Saigon, an aged monk poured gasoline over his body, then burned himself to death as thousands of horrified Vietnamese looked on.

In Spain, five Protestant churches are still padlocked; sixteen new ones are seeking permits to open but so far have been unsuccessful. Fines totalling some $125 have been levied against Protestant congregations within the past six months for unlawful assembly (groups of twenty or more persons outside a church building are forbidden). A young couple was arrested in Barcelona several weeks ago for distributing Gospel tracts. Two other Protestant couples, meanwhile, were denied permission to marry.

Protestants in Spain are nonetheless hopeful in view of some recent developments. The Spanish army no longer requires troops to attend Roman Catholic services, although the navy and air force still make it mandatory. Protestants still are barred from military officer-training schools.

Protestant spirits were lifted during May when Fernando Vangioni and Charles Ward, associates of evangelist Billy Graham, conducted thirty days of meetings in Madrid, Barcelona, and Galicia province. They were greeted by capacity crowds at every church. Aggregate attendance totalled 12,000, 253 of whom professed conversion. Observers said the Protestant meetings were the largest since the advent of the Franco regime.

Delegates also decided to take no action on an overture from Classis California requesting reconsideration of the church’s relationship to the WCC and the National Council of Churches in the United States.

The synod met on the campus of its Central College, at Pella, Iowa, a Dutch community which celebrates its origin with annual tulip festivals and sale of souvenir wooden shoes. Delegates faced the question of smoking, and the question of dancing on its college campuses—which has been shunted back and forth between synods and college boards in recent years—and gingerly referred both questions to its Christian action committee for study.

Meeting in its 157th regular session, the synod elected Dr. M. Verne Oggel of the Community Reformed Church of Glen Rock, New Jersey, as president for the coming year, and Dr. Justin Vander Kolk, past president of its New Brunswick Theological Seminary, as its vice president.

The Synod made forthright and dramatic decisions on the problem of racism. It decided to “convey to the President of the United States its hearty agreement with all steps taken by his administration to eliminate racial injustice,” and to “commend the negro sit-inners and non-violent demonstrators for their courage, their willingness to suffer for the sake of freedom, and their self-discipline and non-violence in the face of extraordinary provocation.” It further decided that “a gift of money accompany our expression of commendation and encouragement to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” headed by Dr. Martin Luther King.

In an address to the delegates, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale challenged the wisdom and the value of the synod’s race pronouncements and gift in view of the fact that they come from a church which is outside, and remote from, the area into which they are projected.

J.D.

Family Facts

Nearly two-thirds of American women are now married before age 21, according to the Population Reference Bureau, a private research agency.

But the bureau reports indications that “early marriage and early parenthood are becoming less popular than they were in recent years.”

In a statistical account released last month, bureau researchers also noted a downward trend in the expectation of family size.

At present, average family size is approaching 3.4 children per married woman, the bureau said. If the birth rate dropped to an average of 2.27 population stability would be attained, it claimed. However, the population is continuing to grow at a rate of more than 3,000,000 per year with the present birth rate.

The bureau predicted that 1,600,000 marriages will take place in 1963 and that nearly 400,000 will end in divorce.

Although the divorce rate is now only half of the post-war peak reached in the early 1950s, almost 3,000,000 children have divorced or separated parents, the agency said.

Women are not letting early marriage interfere with their education to the extent it formerly did, the bureau said. About 12 per cent of all women attending college, or 162,000, are married, and there are 77,000 married girls attending high school.

The rate of illegitimate births continues to increase. One baby out of every twenty born in the United States this year, the bureau predicts, will be born to an unmarried mother. That would total about 224,000, compared with 141,000 in 1950 and 80,000 in 1940.

The average woman has her last child by age 28, the bureau reported. Increasingly, women with older children are entering the labor force, with more than one-third of all wives today having jobs outside the home.

Another Honest John

The Anglican diocese of Southwark, undoubtedly the liveliest if seldom the most orthodox in England, added yet another colorful character to its staff, which includes the Bishop of Woolwich. During his installation as vice-provost and canon-residentiary of the Thames-side cathedral, the Rev. John Pearce-Higgins interrupted the service to make a spirited protest against his required as sent to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Addressing the bishop, Dr. Mervyn Stockwood, Mr. Pearce-Higgins described the Articles as “a Reformation document originally set out in all sincerity within the limitations of thought and under the stress of the theological and social pressures of the time” and as “a theological fossil embedded in the constitution of the Church of England.” He quoted a former Archbishop of York in support of his position, delineated on several of the Articles he found particularly offensive, but finally gave the general assent which is required of him by law.

The new canon is vice-chairman of the Churches’ Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Research, and chairman of the Modern Churchmen’s Union. Speaking to pressmen after the service he said the Article on the Resurrection was “absolute nonsense,” and added: “I say that Christ’s physical body did not rise again. His spirit rose certainly. But what is this Article suggesting … that they were practicing rocketry on the Mount of Olives in those days?”

Lord Fisher of Lambeth, former Arch bishop of Canterbury, agreed publicly that the Articles badly needed revision. Answering the criticism that the Articles reflect the beliefs of 400 years ago, Prebendary Colin Kerr, a prominent evangelical, pointed out that in fact they reflect the beliefs of nearer 2,000 years ago, being based on the Scriptures. Ventured a correspondent in the Church of England Newspaper:

“A newly installed canon must be fired sometime.”

J.D.D.

It was 11:30 a.m. by the bronze clock which hangs over the Supreme Court bench. Justice Tom C. Clark had been drawling over a zig-zag sewing machine patent when, with scarcely a pause, he shifted to cases 119 and 142. Clark talked for another 25 minutes. His voice trailed off as he finally announced the court’s decision against a 150-year-old American tradition of prayer and Bible reading in the public schoolroom. The decision was regarded in some quarters as imposing a restriction upon the religious practices of more Americans than any prior government action.

The court’s decision on June 17 was 8 to 1, with Justice Potter Stewart, an Episcopalian, voicing the lone dissent, just as he did in 1962 when the court struck down the 22-word interfaith prayer approved by the New York Board of Regents for use in the public schools of that state.

The court’s opinion in the 1962 case stressed that the Regents’ prayer was governmentally composed. Curiously, in the 1963 decision, one of the justices forsakes that line, and views recitation of prayers as unconstitutional irrespective of whether or not they are governmentally composed.

While banning required Bible reading and the Lord’s Prayer even as it had earlier disallowed required non-sectarian prayer, the court nonetheless put no roadblock in the way of the teaching of religion as a cultural and historical influence or in the way of objective study of the Bible as part of the instructional program. Thus it made a clear distinction between the compulsory corporate practice of religion and the objective teaching of religion (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY editorial, March 1, 1963 issue, “Is the Supreme Court on Trial?”).

Another significant aspect of the latest ruling is that the justices differ sharply on why required public school devotions are unconstitutional. Clark’s majority opinion was shared only by Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice Hugo L. Black, and Justice Byron White.

Clark’s argument against devotional exercises in the public schools rested largely on the contention that the government must maintain an attitude of neutrality in religious matters. He said the test may be stated as follows:

“What are the purpose and the primary effect of the enactment? If either is the advancement or inhibition of religion then the enactment exceeds the scope of legislative power as circumscribed by the Constitution.”

The longest opinion—nearly 25,000 words—was delivered by Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., the only Roman Catholic member of the court. Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, the only Jewish member, wrote a separate concurring opinion, and was joined by Justice John Marshall Harlan. Justice William O. Douglas, exponent of a far more strict separation of church and state, also wrote a concurring opinion.

The decision incorporates an element of indeterminacy in respect to devotional practices in the classroom in the absence of governmental legislation, which is the context of the latest decision. Some observers argue that a principal’s or teacher’s introduction of classroom devotions would reflect the same objection able element of compulsion, since school employees are also agents of the state and public servants. Others insist that this contention rests upon inference, is not explicitly based upon the court decision, and ignores the right of “free exercise” which is fully as constitutional as that of “separation.” Yet the conviction is widening that required public school devotionals are objectionable from the standpoint of a sound philosophy of religion, education, and freedom.

But already there is a dispute over whether the court ruled out schoolroom devotions altogether or merely banned religious exercises when state laws require them. Some state education officials said they would ignore the ruling.

With the obvious air of precluding radical interpretations, Brennan wrote: “Our decision in these cases does not clearly forecast anything about the constitutionality of other types of inter dependence between religious and other public institutions.”

In a similar vein, Goldberg declared: “Today’s decision does not mean that all incidents of government which import of the religious are therefore and without more banned by the strictures of the Establishment Clause.”

In a related case involving various religious observances in Florida’s public schools, the court issued a per curiam order vacating that state’s Supreme Court ruling upholding some of the practices and ordered re-hearings in that court “in the light of the decision” on prayer and Bible reading.

Case 142 originated in the Philadelphia suburb of Abington, where a Unitarian family protested a Pennsylvania law requiring the daily reading of passages from the Bible. The case was brought by Edward Lewis Schempp, his wife, Sidney, and their three children. The Supreme Court upheld a federal district court ruling in the Schempps’ favor.

NEWS / A fortnightly report of developments in religion

IMPACT OF THE RULING

If considerable reaction to the 1962 Supreme Court ruling against the New York Board of Regents was ill-informed and intemperate, the response to this year’s decision on schoolroom devotions marked a puzzling retreat.

The decision against prayer and Bible reading came as no surprise. The United Presbyterian Office of Information had confidently distributed a three-page advance comment for release when the court ruled. Without knowing what the ruling would say, Presbyterian officials were quoted as saying that “the court’s decision underscores our firm belief that religious instruction is the sacred responsibility of the family and the churches.”

Although this year’s ruling represented a far more extreme separation of church and state than the 1962 Regents’ prayer case, fewer church men spoke out. Many had obviously changed their minds.

Some observers predicted that practical effects of the latest ruling might be disillusioning for the laity and divisive for the church in general. Do rank and file laymen really understand why many ecclesiastical leaders countenance and even support the suppression of prayer and Bible reading in public schools?

Case 119 was brought by a Baltimore divorcee, Mrs. Madalyn Murray, on behalf of her son, William. Both professed atheists, they objected to practices in the Maryland schools such as Bible readings from the King James Version usually followed by class recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. The Supreme Court upset a Maryland Court of Appeals ruling which had upheld the practices.

Still apparently in question are such things as public school Christmas pageants and baccalaureate exercises. Many observers think they will be sacrificed next.

Several Congressmen introduced bills to amend the Constitution to provide for religious exercises in public schools, but most observers doubted that they had any chance of passage.

One immediate development will be the exploration of the larger scope the majority opinion allows to religion as content matter in the public school curriculum. Clark remarked that “nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistent with the First Amendment.”

Some educators say it may take 8 to 10 years to evolve a program of public education that does full justice to the religious ingredient. But others think this judgment greatly exaggerates the difficulties. Yet a single additional course embodying religious facets is viewed as a mere makeshift. More ideally the religious element would be injected throughout the curriculum wherever it is relevant. Such a program, it is widely held, would be administratively preferable to shared time proposals which in recent years have been under study by various religious leaders.

Many observers concede that were a national referendum to be held on the issue of Bible reading and prayer in public schools, the exercises would prevail.

Under proper legal procedure, the justices based their decision on the evidence submitted. The arguments in favor of retaining schoolroom devotions were presented by legal officials of the jurisdictions involved. The arguments were largely void of historic and theological foundations. Not a single church group or Christian organization availed itself of the opportunity to file a brief in support of their arguments; their case was sacrificed by default.

By contrast, six organizations went to the trouble of filing briefs against public school devotions (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY News, April 12, 1963, page 39).

Stewart commented: “I think the records in the two cases before us are so fundamentally deficient as to make impossible an informed or responsible determination of the constitutional issues presented.”

Sabbatarian Victory

The U. S. Supreme Court ruled that denial of unemployment benefits to a Seventh-day Adventist because she was unavailable for Saturday work infringed on the free exercise of her religion (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, June 7, p. 33).

The 7–2 ruling in the case of Mrs. Adell H. Sherbert reversed the decision of South Carolina’s Supreme Court. Justice William J. Brennan declared there was “no compelling state interest” to justify “the substantial infringement” of Mrs. Sherbert’s constitutional right.

Appellants’ Views

“I’m a trouble-maker at heart and don’t give a damn what people think.”

So says Mrs. Madalyn Murray, one of the appellants in the prayer-Bible reading case in whose favor the Supreme Court ruled.

Mrs. Murray and her two sons, aged 8 and 16, are professed atheists. She claims she was “converted” from Presbyterianism when she was 13.

The Murrays have undergone considerable abuse since the litigation began. Vandals marked up their back fence with the line, “Murrays are Communists.” The sons have been repeatedly heckled, the older one so much so that he brought charges against a fellow student.

Mrs. Murray is a law graduate. She was divorced from her husband, a Roman Catholic, several years ago. She supports the family with contributions that happen to come their way, plus the proceeds from articles she writes for atheist and humanist publications.

Religion channels people into inaction, she says, adding that “I would turn every church into a hospital, a sanitarium, or a school” so it would accomplish some good.

Concurring opinions were delivered by Justices William O. Douglas and Potter Stewart. Stewart said the finding for Mrs. Sherbert was inconsistent with the majority opinion in the Schempp-Murray Bible reading-prayer cases handed down the same day, and with the Sunday Blue Law decision of 1961. But since he disagreed with the majority in those decisions, he added, he now finds no difficulty in supporting Mrs. Sherbert’s claim.

Justice John Marshall Harlan, joined by Justice Byron R. White, dissented, calling the majority’s decision “disturbing both in its rejection of existing precedent and in its implications for the future.” Harlan found no religious discrimination because South Carolina denies unemployment benefits to all who are not available for work whatever the personal reason. He concludes: “I cannot subscribe to the conclusion that the State is constitutionally compelled to carve out an exception to its general rule of eligibility in the present case.”

An Evaluation

A group of prominent educators, lawyers, editors, and religious leaders,¹Assembled as part of thc Religious Freedom and Public Affairs Project of the National Conference of Christians and Jews: Dean Edward Barrett, Prof. William Brickman, Dan Callahan, Dr. C. Emanuel Carlson, the Rev. James Denecn, Rabhi Ira Eisenstein; the Rev. Kyle Kaseldon, Dr. Carl F. H. Henry; Dr. David Hunter; Dr. Wilber G. Katz; the Rev. William J. Kenealy, Dr. Dumont F. Kenny, Rabbi Norman Lamm, Dr. Joseph Manch, Dr. Theodore Powell, the Rev. John Reedy, the Rev. John S. Sheerin, the Rev. Roger Shinn, the Rev. John M. Swomley, Jr., the Rev. Norman Temme, Thomas J. O’Toole, the Rev. Charles Whelan, Tobe Acker, Miss Lillian Block. Dr. Sterling Bronsn, Richard Horchler, Dr. Claud Nelson, Rabbi Arthur Gilbert. The Rev. Gustave weigel and Dr. Thomas Van Loon, though not present at the meeting asked to have their names added to the statement. representing diverse religious commitments and reflecting varied reactions to the Supreme Court ruling, met in New York two days after the ruling was issued. They agreed that the court’s principle of “wholesome neutrality” is not only cognizant of religious liberty, but aware that American institutions presuppose a Supreme Being and looks favorably upon the chaplaincy, Congressional prayers, and other national practices.

The group noted that 1. the court has clarified the relation of the public school to religion; 2. its decision does not endorse irreligion or atheism in America; 3. although devotional exercises are forbidden, the court clearly allows for the objective study of religion and particularly of the Bible in the public school; 4. in a pluralistic society religious and civic groups should be encouraged to use the instrumentality of dialogue to resolve conflict; and 5. the decision challenges parents and religious leaders to shape and strengthen spiritual commitment by reliance on voluntary means, and to resist the temptation to rely on governmental institutions to create religious conviction.

During debate the Greeks threatened to pull out, Negroes responded to other action with high praise. It was not a United Nations meeting. In view was not the East River but the Hudson. The site was New York City’s Riverside Church hard by the Interchurch Center in Morningside Heights. It was the regular June meeting of the policy-making General Board of the National Council of Churches, and the usual placid air of the assembly had been thrust aside by cleavage-revealing debate which bore the threat of disruption of the body politic.

Waging a strong battle against long odds was retiring Union Seminary President Henry Van Dusen, who is becoming in some respects a prodding NCC conscience that sometimes prevails but often as not doesn’t. Allied preeminently with him was New York attorney and board member Charles Rafael, who painted with vivid strokes the Greek Orthodox viewpoint in his role as representative of absent Archbishop Iakovos, primate of North and South America.

At issue was a proposed NCC statement opposing devotional religious acts in public schools. Dr. Van Dusen strenously attacked the document for two “inexcusable” omissions: the realities of God and of truth. “The premise that lies behind this document,” he charged, “is that we are not a religious people, that religion is a past phenomenon of history and does not have a vital role in the education of a child for life.” He opposed the document’s endorsement of the United States Supreme Court Regents’ prayer ruling.

Yale Divinity School’s dean emeritus Luther A. Weigle called for revamping of the statement to eliminate misunderstanding of its content, and asked: “Do we need to beat the Supreme Court to it on its decisions?” (The revamped form did—see News, p. 29. The General Board has been criticized for not earlier issuing a statement on this vexing problem which creates divisions that cut across theological and denominational lines.) Concerning the NCC statement, Charles Rafael read in behalf of Archbishop Iakovos a memorandum which noted repeated references in the press to the statement as “representing efforts ‘by leaders of major Protestant and Orthodox churches to prepare the public for calm acceptance of a Supreme Court ruling which they expect will hold religious exercises in public schools unconstitutional.’ ”

For Orthodoxy this seemed a calm before the storm: “We find this disturbing.… We are not at all certain that this represents the Orthodox point of view, or the point of view any religious body should take. The NCC policy statement is apparently largely based on a forecast of results of two [Supreme Court] cases.… The results may well be as our policy statement assumes, but why should we capitulate so readily be forehand? Why should we play so directly into the hands of those whose interest it is to have Bible readings and prayers banned, when this is not in the true Christian and God-abiding interest?

“Our policy statement says that ‘major faith groups have not agreed on a formulation of religious beliefs common to all.’ But all sincere faiths must agree on belief in and dependence on God. If every mention of this profound truth is to be stricken from our educational processes, especially in our Elementary Schools, the loss will be great and eventually fatal.…

“… Should a well-intentioned desire to separate devotional religion from education go so far as to ban the mention of God in teaching, and to cast disrepute on the one great work which best pays tribute to and encourages respect for God?… This is not a case of a particular religious doctrine, which no man has a right to try to impose on another. It may well be a struggle involving whether or not the concept of God is to be fore most in our civilization, or whether step by step it is to be renounced. Therefore we believe that any policy statement by the NCC on this subject should exercise the most extreme care that it is not interpreted to be leading, however subtly and ‘progressively,’ to the repudiation of God Himself.”

After reading the memorandum, Rafael indicated that NCC adoption of the policy statement could mean Greek Orthodox withdrawal from the council. (A board member said later that Iakovos’ objections were based on a reading of preliminary documents rather than the policy statement itself.)

Van Dusen’s motion for revision of the statement passed, and the modified resolution was presented on the following day. The final draft added a preamble which acknowledged God as the ground of truth and stated in an exploratory mood that “the place of religion in public education must be worked out” within the “recognition of the prevailingly positive attitude of the American people as a whole toward religion.…” The pronouncement acknowledged the valid educational purpose of the Bible, especially in those studies “related to character development,” but also gave assent to “the wisdom as well as the authority” of last year’s Supreme Court ruling on the use of the Regents’ prayer in New York State. This endorsement of the Supreme Court ruling was much less direct than it had been in the original document. The revised resolution concluded with a query as to whether possibilities should not be investigated “for more adequate provision within the public schools of opportunities for the study of religion where desired, fully within the constitutional guarantees of freedom of conscience and of religious expression.”

Van Dusen indicated reluctant approval of this revised pronouncement and expressed the hope, somewhat optimistically, that Iakovos would be satisfied. Rafael, the Greek Orthodox representative, abstained in the final voting however (the motion passed 65–1), and by week’s end the Greek Orthodox Church had formally dissociated itself from the NCC pronouncement.

As the nation smoldered under the increasing tide of racial violence, the General Board moved in this area to urge member churches to effective social action, “even costly action that may jeopardize the organizational goals, and institutional structures of the Church, and may disrupt any fellowship that is less than fully obedient to the Lord of the Church.”

In a series of specific proposals, the church leaders voted to set up a twenty-five-man Commission on Religion and Race “to focus the concern, the conviction, the resources and the action of member communions” and “to provide a national interdenominational liaison with inter faith and other concerted efforts.” The authorization to the commission included the encouragement of direct action in places of particular crisis and the mobilization of church resources to advance racial equality both within and without the participating denominations. Accompanying measures authorized the council to invite Roman Catholic and Jewish leaders to joint action and admonished members of the board “to engage personally in negotiations, demonstrations, and other direct action in particular situations of racial tension.” Such demonstrations, according to Stated Clerk of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, who gave the report, could include “being on the receiving end of a fire hose.”

During the two-hour discussion which preceded adoption of the pronouncement, several Negro delegates rose from the floor to affirm their belief that the measures were a significant advance for the policies of the NCC and would doubtless find an echo in the hearts of Negro Christians throughout the nation.

Turning aside a strong protest from the broadcasting industry, the National Council challenged the course of television and radio broadcasting by urging that federal control over local and network advertising and programming be extended. The report, which highlighted “a disturbing lack of candor on the part of communications officials and commercial sponsors,” was seen by the National Association of Broadcasters, represented by Vice-President Paul B. Comstock, to “favor extreme changes in our system of governmental regulation of broadcasting” and to favor action which would “greatly increase federal control in the vital area of freedom of expression on the air.” A request by the NAB to table or defer action on the pronouncement was defeated by a majority vote, and the pronouncement was adopted despite some debate on whether or not the council should act due to the small number then in attendance.

At a testimonial dinner on the first night of the gathering friends and delegates paid tribute to Dr. Roy G. Ross, the retiring general secretary of the National Council of Churches, who has held this position since 1954. He is succeeded by Dr. R. H. Edwin Espy, associate general secretary of the NCC since 1958, formerly associate executive secretary of the council’s Division of Christian Life and Work.

The World Council of Churches’ Commission on Faith and Order meets in Montreal for its fourth world Conference on Faith and Order from July 12 to 26. The discussions will indicate what new doctrinal guidelines ecumenical scholars influential in the four international theological commissions are proposing, and the resultant decisions may influence the ecumenical strategy for church unity during the remainder of this decade.

The conference sends its conclusions to member churches “for study.” Prevalent theological positions often supply the presuppositions of the denominational press, and sometimes become swiftly determinative for denominational commitments at the hierarchical level. But more often they are wholly ignored by ecclesiastical machinists who wish to “get on with the real business of merger.” A standing indictment of the World Council, now voiced even by some of its earlier enthusiasts, is that merger more than mission, or more than message, has come to absorb some of the movement’s main energies. The political cadre regards doctrinal considerations as marginal if not disruptive, and even uses its favored position to advocate controversial policies in international affairs quite outside the Church’s competence and mandate.

A look at the agenda of the Montreal conference indicates the overwhelming task before the delegates, who cannot hope to arrive at truly definitive positions in two weeks of discussion. The sessions can give a barometer reading of the theological climate in 1963. Ministers wanting to keep abreast of the times or to set the modern mood in the framework of post-Reformation dialogue will be satisfied with this.

But some confessional churches voice increasing demand for more earnest doctrinal discussion, for less programmatic and more systematic theology, and for a more definitive theological commitment by the World Council itself. They are distressed to see even some ecumenically active bishops calling for fuller confessional emphasis while they show little indignation over heresy, fail to watch over the doctrinal fidelity of their communions, and even fete and honor churchmen who are radical opponents of biblical theology. This they cannot excuse on the ground that many of these church leaders themselves had extreme liberal teachers. Nor do they understand why ecclesiastical leaders who speak of the rediscovery of the Church’s confession, or of the doctrine of the Reformation, or of the Bible as the Word of God, should at the same time allow the influence of religious philosophers like Bultmann and Tillich to run rampant in the seminaries and life of the churches. Why, for example, do Bultmannians occupy so many German pulpits? In New Delhi, WCC adopted a “trinitarian basis,” but it does not on that account exclude churches tolerant of unitarian views.

If the tragedy of many Protestant churches is not only their loss of the sola scriptura, sola fide, and sola gratia, but the loss as well of other basic doctrinal elements of New Testament Christianity, perhaps Montreal will indicate whether this has also become the continuing tragedy of WCC, and if so what is to be done about it. Is there any heresy within member churches of which the World Council is intolerant? Much more is at stake in the matter of doctrinal purity than the Church’s inner health and peace. For whenever the line between Christian truth and heresy is blurred, the borderline between Christianity and the non-Christian religions soon becomes indistinct, also.

The Lutheran World Federation’s theological quarterly Lutheran World suggested recently that the Faith and Order movement might better achieve its purposes if it were not so closely linked to the World Council. In part such a proposal arises as a reaction to the danger of propagating and superimposing positions which really lack rootage in the uniting churches. But it also reflects a protest against disproportionate attention being given the “younger churches,” and the consequent breakdown of sixteenth-century Reformed emphases. At any rate the ecumenical movement’s weak confessional basis is a source of widespread dissatisfaction among those who insist that the Church cannot be the Church if it is not evangelical and biblical.

An equally insistent problem facing Faith and Order is the precise definition of the World Council’s ecclesiological significance. The confusion and contradiction on this point among WCC constituents is so extensive as to be either ludicrous or tragic. Twentieth-century churchmen have conceived in the World Council a species of ecumenical reality over whose essential character they increasingly differ. Unaffiliated evangelicals—who are being urged to identify themselves—tend more and more to regard such invitations in the “pig in a poke” category while WCC’s “church status” remains obscure.

Many ecumenical spokesmen insist that the World Council has no significance whatever as church. The Toronto document declares that WCC is a “fellowship of churches,” and hence implies that the council has no church-status of its own. With the sentiments of Bishop Dibelius (interviewed elsewhere in this issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY) many ecumenical leaders concur, some for reasons quite different from Dr. Dibelius’. The Russian and Greek Orthodox Churches emphasize with the Roman Catholic Church that apart from apostolic succession and the hierarchy there is no true church. Many Protestant churchmen, on the other hand, simply deplore the prospect of any dynamic merger wherein a single super-structure (particularly if hierarchical and sacerdotal) swallows up all plurality of order.

FAITH AND ORDER AGENDA

The major study documents of the Montreal conference will be the reports of four international theological commissions which have been at work for the past decade. These reports, which have been issued to participants for advance study, deal with Christ and the Church, Tradition and Traditions, Worship, and Institutionalism.

Study at the conference itself will be organized in five sections: The Church in the Purpose of God; Scripture, Tradition, and Traditions; the Redemptive Work of Christ and the Ministry; Worship and the Oneness of Christ’s Church; and All in Each Place: The Process of Growing Together.

A review of these five sections issued in advance to participants suggests that some of the contemporary ecumenical problems to be discussed by the conference will include the following:

What is the nature and task of the Church? What is the extent of the churches’ agreement on the attributes of the Church: its oneness, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity? What are the chief points of development and tension in the view of the Church among the main traditions of Christendom? And what is the significance of such diverse new forms of Christian community as councils of churches and movements which reject the need for ecclesiastical institutions?

What is the theological meaning of revelation, Scripture, and tradition and their relation to one another? How can this relationship be stated in new forms to avoid use of conventional descriptions? What are the particular problems when church traditions are transplanted from one region to another and how can tension between “daughter” and “mother” churches be resolved?

What is the relation of Christ’s ministry to the Church’s ministry and what is the status and function of the ordained ministry? What current doctrines and practices impede or enhance the ministry?

What is the place of the diaconate in the ministry and what is the attitude of the churches towards the ordination of women to the ministry? (One of the background papers in this section will be a new WCC survey of women in the ministry.)

What are the basic patterns of Christian worship and how can these best reflect the catholicity and apostolicity of the Church? How are recent moves toward liturgical renewal coping with the estrangement of modern man from the transcendent realm? What new guidelines are required for the “indigenization” of worship in both old and new culture? What are the implications for unity of the recognition of one Baptism for all Christians, the character of the Eucharist, the question of intercommunion, and the celebration of the Eucharist at ecumenical conferences.

What are the chief obstacles for advance toward unity “in each place”? What institutional factors impede or advance this unity and what are the racial and ethnic factors which create division? How does the disunity of the Church affect popular concepts of personal and social morality, national politics and international affairs, and even population mobility? What are the “responsible risks” churches should take in seeking unity? How can the great bulk of church members who yearn for unity but who are generally inarticulate in expressing themselves on the issues be educated to become a more potent and intelligent force in moving towards unity?

But if WCC’s “self-understanding” involves a denial of all ecclesiological significance for the movement, there are many signs of impatience and of aspiration toward church-status, particularly on the part of some of the ecumenical hierarchy and salaried staff. More than one observer has complained about the “church politics” of Geneva. There assurances that no super-church is envisaged go hand in glove with ecclesiastical claims made in Lucas Vischer’s article in the Ecumenical Review (1962), that WCC “fulfills some functions of a church which are not fulfilled by the separate churches. For instance, it expresses their universality.… It bears a common witness.…” Dr. Henry P. Van Dusen, retiring president of Union Theological Seminary, insists that WCC has at least as much right to be called a church as any of the historical denominations. To this point councils of churches have not normally had creeds, nor have they directly determined theological issues, nor administered sacraments or ordination. Dr. Van Dusen’s proposal would change all that. If the World Council is assigned ecclesiological significance, that same moment other councils of churches—national, state, regional, local—will assert a churchly character.

Currently there is before the General Board of the National Council of Churches a general policy statement on its nature and structure affirming that “the Council is not a church.” The NCC study commission is expected to register in Montreal the present view of its present majority that “councils of churches are not and should not claim to be churches.” Such a claim, it is contended, would not further the cause of Christian unity, but merely add a new denomination or denominations to the spectrum.

In an article in Christianity and Crisis (March 4, 1963), Dr. Truman B. Douglas, a member of the General Board, asks nonetheless whether “councils of churches must forever be discouraged … from recognizing and taking up their churchly responsibilities.” Dr. Douglas grants that councils of churches “are not the Holy Catholic Church in its wholeness and universality.” Moreover, he lampoons the “artificially generated bugaboo” of a “super-church.” But he finds in the councils a transcendent “super-denominational conscience” and a function far exceeding their original consultative nature. Dr. Douglas asks whether councils of churches may not be a real manifestation of the Church’s unity, a new mode or form of the Church, and he answers affirmatively: “It is my contention that the councils of churches have become new forms of the Church. Obviously they are not the Church; nor is any denomination the Church. But the councils, like the denominations, partake of the nature of the Church, and in some respects do so more fully than any denomination. They can do this because in some areas they are the Church relieved of its insupportable burden and apostasy of dividedness.”

It is probably too much to ask that Montreal tell us what WCC believes—and how it overcomes the apostasy of inclusiveness. But is it too much to expect that Montreal state unambiguously what WCC is—church or non-church, or some entity intelligible (or unintelligible) only in terms of paradox?

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Compulsory Devotions Banned; Bible Retains Classroom Value

Since pagan influences increasingly shape American institutions, it is noteworthy that the Supreme Court set its prohibition of compulsory devotional exercises in the context not of irreligion but of the nation’s religious heritage. The court banned legislated Bible reading and prayer in public schools, and its logic likewise would ban legislated irreligion. Neither majority nor minority should use the machinery of government to implement religious beliefs or unbelief.

The decision did not explicitly cover a principal’s or local teacher’s individual classroom use of Bible reading or prayer, but was somewhat indeterminate. Among students of diverse faiths corporate devotional exercises remain a delicate problem whose solution touches both on free exercise and on church-state separation. Required devotions, sectarian or non-sectarian, however, seem an imprudent and controversial public school activity. Yet atheistic forces are not to exploit the Court ruling. Some group acts of theistic affirmation remain congruent with the nation’s historic political documents.

More important, the ruling allows a role for the Bible and its religious teaching in the instructional program. To prevent the court’s interpretation from encouraging godless education and a secular state—which in its public life always acts as if there were no God—America’s devout masses must now insist that the Bible and our Christian convictions be reflected accurately in the instructional program of our public schools. The classroom is no place to evangelize, whether for atheism or theism. But a student unfamiliar with the Bible remains an outsider to the best ingredients in the American heritage and purpose.

The decision multiplies the responsibility of American parents and churchmen to promote spiritual decision not through the machinery of the state but through voluntary agencies.

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THE FORTUNES OF CHRISTIANITY IN LATIN AMERICA

Interest in Latin America has been generated by the crisis in Cuba and the threat that the Communist take-over will spread. CHRISTIANITY TODAY will devote its July 19 issue to an up-to-the-minute analysis and evaluation of contemporary Christianity south of the United States border.

The phenomenal growth of the evangelical movement (at a rate five times that of the population explosion), the paradoxical relations between Catholics and Protestants, the wild fire spread of Pentecostalism—these and many other significant and timely themes will be treated in a series of area essays by outstanding national and missionary leaders.

Contributing editors will also scrutinize the basic social problems of Latin America from a Protestant perspective. They will point out strengths, weaknesses, and potential of the evangelical movement in lands on their way to becoming the world’s most important secondary power bloc today.

It would be difficult to overstate the contemporary significance of Latin America in either the political or the religious scene. We may be witnessing a new Protestant Reformation.

Assisting in the preparation of the July 19 issue is the Rev. W. Dayton Roberts, assistant general director of the Latin America Mission. He counts over twenty years of intimate acquaintance with the progress of the Gospel in the Ibero-American world. A second-generation missionary, he has authored articles on Communism, Romanism, and the Latin American scene. Other contributors include Dr. Benjamin Moraes, Presbyterian minister and professor of criminal law in Brazil; Dr. Herbert Money, New Zealand-born executive secretary of the Evangelical Council of Peru; Argentine evangelist Fernando Vangioni, of the Billy Graham team; Dr. Hector Valencia, headmaster of a large secondary school in Colombia; Dr. R. Kenneth Strachan, general director of the Latin America Mission; Dr. Gonzalo Baez-Camargo, distinguished Mexican educator; Dr. Wilton M. Nelson, rector of the Latin American Bible Seminary in San José, Costa Rica; and the Rev. Rubén Lores, pastor of the Templo Biblico Church of the same city.

The special Latin America issue represents the continuation of CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S series of analytical studies of the state of Christianity overseas.

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Evers’ Murder Signals Eventual Burial Of Segregation

Medgar Evers’ murder marked a turn in the civil rights struggle. Southern spokesmen openly deplored the NAACP leader’s snipe-murder, rightly refused to blend the States’ rights cause with a murder mentality, and stressed the South’s traditional hospitality toward the Negro. They noted too that political leftist approval of mob pressure against law inevitably implies a wave of counter-lawlessness.

The sneak gunshot that silenced Evers discloses an anti-Negro tide running deeper than States’ rights currents. States’ rightists have shown a weak sense of duty to national law alongside their legitimate protest against mounting federal power. Obstructing constitutionally guaranteed rights supplies no durable assist to States’ rights but makes them an excuse for irresponsibility. In respect to civic rights a state goes either color-blind or constitution-blind. States’ rightists have much to deplore about integrationists’ methods of advancing the Negro cause, and equally much to regret about their ambiguous objectives. They resent mob demonstrations that flout local statutes, the Washington political approval of mob clamor, the promotion of coercive formulas in the absence of supportive community con science. They long warned integrationists that lawless ness breeds lawlessness, and pleaded for juridical procedures rather than revolutionary techniques.

Nonetheless Evers’ murder haunts the conscience of more and more Americans with the conviction that the midnight hour has struck in the clamor for full Negro rights. President Kennedy’s direct personal appeal to voluntary interests has come late, after complicating and divisive political pressures, but mistakes in theory and technique must not be made a ground of inaction. More is at stake than Negro rights (there are no “Negro” rights) and Christian virtue (justice is another’s due as a man, not as a Christian only). Human integrity is at a judgment bar on the American scene. And the Christian citizen had better consider himself doubly obliged to protest injustice and promote justice, or a sharp cutting edge of his religion will rust away.

Regrettably, liberal propagandists clouded the air by their ambiguous cliché of full integration (including “total equality” and racial intermarriage). Although extremists continue to foment discontent, wise Negro leaders espouse more sensible objectives: equal opportunities in public affairs, public education, public employment, public housing, and use of public facilities, especially. No Southern city has desegregated schools, parks, theaters, restaurants, hotels, and swimming pools as swiftly as has Washington, D. C., yet some Negro spokesmen warn of impending pro-integration violence in the nation’s capital. Washington is now a symbol of large American cities whose balance may shift from the white race. Negroes constitute 56 per cent of the population and have opportunity to demonstrate whether they can carry the responsibility for public safety and rise above race discrimination.

President Kennedy now emphasizes that race solutions are moral more than legislative. Yet in the peculiar political idiom of the times he trumpets that violence is the only alternative to the legislation he advocates. Pressures to force all businessmen to serve all persons promise to carry the debate beyond States’ rights to private property issues. Senator Richard B. Russell emphasizes: “The outstanding distinction between a government of free men and a socialistic or communistic state is the fact that free men can own and control property, whereas statism denies property rights.”

May God grant community leaders facing the problem of neighbor-rights understanding and courage. What the Negro needs now is not more laws—indispensable as these may be—but more room in the white man’s heart. That need is “as old as the Scriptures.” And it is uncomplicated by coercion of private property whose political overtones are highly debatable.

END

Prayer is a supernatural phenomenon, a direct communication between man and God, and must be approached as such.

Without question prayer is the greatest untapped source of power in the world, for through it the power and resources of God are released.

That He should have placed this privilege in our hands is an evidence of his love and concern. That we neglect or disregard this blessing is an evidence of the ignorance and perversity of human nature.

We are not speaking of the failure of a pagan (be he American or aborigine) to pray, for that is to be expected; we are thinking of the Christian’s neglect of prayer.

Prayer opens up a new dimension, one which reaches into the depths and intricacies of the unknown, but a dimension where God lives and moves and has his being.

Because prayer is a two-way communication system between God and man, and because the channel is of God’s devising, not man’s, it is imperative that we understand what our side involves.

The writer has used long-distance telephone communications extensively, frequently from other parts of the world to America. Only recently we talked (with an excellent connection) from Jerusalem to a loved one in Alabama. In each case certain laws were observed.

First of all, we knew telephonic connections were available. We also knew there were procedures to be followed, such as giving the operator our credit-card number, the area code and number of the person called, and the person’s name. In a remarkably short time such calls can usually be completed. In every case the available means are used by people trained to render such service.

That which science has made possible in the field of communication today fades into insignificance when we realize that man can communicate instantly with his God, and that where it is for God’s glory and the good of the one praying, there can come an instant reply.

In the book of Nehemiah we find an illustration of such communication and reply. The king first asked Nehemiah the cause of his sad countenance, and then what he requested for his ruined city, Jerusalem. The Bible tells us of Nehemiah, “So I prayed to the God of heaven”; he followed his prayer immediately by a request to the king that he be sent to Judah. God heard that prayer, and the king granted Nehemiah’s petition.

Basic to a fruitful prayer life is the necessity of keeping the connections open. “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me,” the psalmist declares (Psalm 66:18). Unconfessed and unrepented sin can break the circuit. James tells us, “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts” (4:3). Let us never forget: When communications fail it is man that has failed, not God. We say it reverently—God is always waiting at the other end of the line, anxious that we should pray to him.

One of the basic misconceptions about prayer is that it is primarily asking God for things. The closer we live to God the more prayer becomes a way of life, a realization of his nearness and availability at all times.

But this side of heaven prayer will always be mysterious, although very real. Today we make seemingly unlimited use of electricity even though we find its nature difficult to fully understand or explain. So it is with prayer—mysterious as it is, it is nevertheless real and available to all.

That effective prayer depends on the attitude and spiritual condition of the one praying is axiomatic. Not that the sinner cannot pray, for it is God’s will that he should pray; but basic to the unregenerate’s prayer is the plea for forgiveness. “God be merciful to me, a sinner” is a prayer God is always anxious to hear and answer.

The mystery of prayer is wrapped up in the very nature of God, for it involves every aspect of his being—his sovereignty, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, love, and mercy, to mention but a few.

What comfort to us with our limited power to know that we can pray to the sovereign God of the universe, the One to whom belongs all power! It is he who created all things and who holds all things in his hand.

What a comfort to know that the One to whom we pray is omnipotent! And what a deep mystery that finite man can commune with such a one.

What a comfort to grasp the truth that the one to whom we pray is omniscient, knowing all of the past, present, and future at the same time, so that he can and does answer in the light of his totality of knowledge.

What a comfort to know that the One to whom we pray is omnipresent! Human communications and agencies break down because of technical or human failure, but God is always present, anxious to hear and answer his children.

And what a comfort to know that the One to whom we pray regards us with infinite love and compassion. “How precious are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!” says the psalmist (Psalm 139:17).

One of the mysteries of prayer is the necessity of using a password: the name of Christ. Our access to God is through the name and merit of his Son. How often we hear prayers offered without reference to the name that is above every name. Do men—yes, Christians—forget that only in the name of the living Son of God can we come into the presence of our heavenly Father?

It is a mysterious and glorious fact that prayer changes things—that in this sophisticated scientific age prayer continues to bring about changes for God’s glory and man’s welfare.

If the reader will pardon a personal reference: Some time ago the writer included on his prayer list the names of persons in positions of great prominence within a certain denomination. The prayer has been that these individuals, and many other unnamed ones, might be emptied of self and filled with the Holy Spirit, and might in that power go out to do great things for the spiritual welfare of the church and God’s kingdom. It has been a joyous experience to see this prayer being answered; again and again, often apparently by “chance,” we have seen or heard of God’s doing things in the lives of these men which demonstrated beyond a doubt that these prayers were being answered.

Coincidence? Not one bit of it. God, in his mysterious way and for the glory of his name, has been answering prayer.

The Christian should make part of his prayer life seasons of thanksgiving and praise, for such is God’s due. And along with giving praise and thanksgiving, he can let his wants be known.

Prayer is mysterious. It is also gloriously practical in its results.

There are five personal devils the modern preacher must fight: indolence, snobbery, emotional instability, sycophancy, familiarity. “Get thee behind me, Satan” has its present-day counterpart. Many a minister has felt that the devil has not only his street number but a key to his parsonage as well. The temptations themselves are not new, of course, but the clergy man’s position and responsibilities make him susceptible in ways often quite unfamiliar to the layman. Awareness of these major temptations may provide laymen with greater understanding of, even sympathy for, their pastor. Let us look at them.

1. Indolence. The lazy preacher is not very common. There is something about a minister’s high calling which keeps him quickened and motivated. Many pastors, indeed, do not know the word “restraint,” and provide poor risks for insurance companies. A high sense of urgency, inner compulsions which laymen seldom know, and a spirit of dedication drive the average pastor on. Every minister knows, however, that without a time clock to punch and without boss and counselors to exact from him his total capacity, he can become lazy.

The slothful minister becomes a master of alibi and evasion. Under the guise of, “Oh, I pride myself on being an administrator,” he likes to set up his program so that the other fellow does the legwork. Not willing to work too hard, he dodges responsibilities rightfully his with the protest, “Why, my program is overloaded right now.” He may even cry, “Hasn’t a preacher a right to be human?”—then putter around the house while others are sweating out the day.

2. Snobbery. Instead of being a man of prayer, he may be a prima donna. Snobbery is the second devil a preacher must fight with all his might. Being much in the public eye, he may receive too much adulation. Many preachers have become vain and conceited, and were it not for the humanizing influence of their wives, they would forget from whence they came, and where they are heading.

A pastor’s wife, fed up with her husband’s temperamental nature, once exclaimed, “I tell you, you preachers can be a spoiled lot!” Because their position grants immunity from certain responsibilities and allows privileges often denied others, preachers may come to present an unlovely front. They may sniff at the opinions of others, hold infringements of the niceties of life up to undue scorn, and regard themselves as superior to those who do not fit into their personal pattern of thought and action.

It is refreshing to see a spirit of humility and gentleness in a man so set aside by life. And it may be said to the credit of most of the brethren that they are the soul of unselfishness and selflessness. They have long since learned to prefer others to themselves. Of each of these it may be said, “Here was a man sent from God.”

3. Emotional instability. In a recent lead article in a pastoral journal this modern problem was spotlighted by the author’s insistence that “there are thousands of disabled ministers.” Here again, the circumstances in which the preacher is compelled to live are accountable for so much of the difficulty. Here too is a devil which ministers—and priests and rabbis—must fight almost constantly. With no shoulder to cry on, with few to understand, with pressures which only fellow pastors can know, the present-day minister must stand a lot of emotional gaff.

Unfortunately, unsympathetic and unimaginative laymen, leaders of his church, sometimes add fuel to the flames. They literally “raise the devil” with him. Although his leaders may be inexperienced, untrained, hard-headed, and ambitious, the pastor must bear the brunt of their impossible demands. Preachers used to be about the best health risks in the professional world; not so anymore. They have to fight against hypertension and its consequences with every known means. How many have cried out, “My nerves are my devil!” Their families know how truly they speak.

4. Sycophancy. “Licking the boots of others” is one of the modern devils a preacher must fight. So often, the man must seek and—he hopes—find security and favor by flattering people of means, position, and influence. Something within him cries, “Oh, God, if I could play the man!” His fears and justifiable anxieties eventually may drive him to stoop to conquer—and how low he must stoop! Servility and flattery are paths which lead to the altar with the golden calf.

The servile pastor hides this sycophancy under the guise of a superior expression or pose—only to know that he is doing something beneath his manhood. The devil in this army—as in others—tempts him to fawn at the one above him, and boot the one beneath him. While he is feeling high and mighty, he rides the pack. When novelty wanes and familiarity begins to breed contempt, he yields. And here again, he does so under the personal justification of, “There are those whom one must respect, aren’t there?” “There are those who do not cause men to respect them.” How far one may stray from his Master in this regard! The minister at this stage reads the story of the temptation of Christ with profound humility.

5. Familiarity. By the very nature of the ministry, the preacher is confronted with yet another devil: a too free and intimate behavior. Familiar with divine things, the preacher may say with Lord Lytton, “The devil, my friend, is a woman.” Drawn to close family relationships, which often include the tenderest of friendships, the minister may find the line of demarcation between propriety and unprofessional behavior growing dim. And then, as Emerson put it, “Alas for the unhappy man that is called to the pulpit and not given the bread of life.” It is hard to be a living sermon of the truth one teaches. As with Uzzah and the Ark, there is danger in treating sacred things with careless hands and thoughts.

Be this said, however, to the glory of hosts of men of the cloth: they are honest and pure in a sincere cause, and this is the high mark of their calling.

The miracle of the ministry is this: how many escape the encroachments and the dangers of devils which are distinctively those of the preacher! But nonetheless those devils are there as big as a woodchuck, and most preachers know it. Longfellow once said, “It is by the vicar’s skirts that the devils themselves climb into the belfry.” Well, a new breed of men, with virtues and awareness, together with a sincere dedication, are by their very lives declaring, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” Belfries are for the birds, anyhow.—F. B. McAllister, retired Baptist pastor, Cincinnati, Ohio.

For some decades now it has been a vogue to disparage the confession that the Scriptures are the very Word of God with the claim that since the Bible is made up of “propositional truth” it cannot constitute the living, dynamic, existential, and therefore real Word of God—which is, it may be added when this claim is made, exclusively Jesus Christ himself. The claim has a certain plausibility, the line of reasoning being apparently something like the following: the Bible is full of statements; there is something fixed about a statement; much that is fixed is inert and dead; but the real Word of God is “living and active.” The claim has also notable conveniences. No particular assertion need be faith fully adhered to as a word of God. It is also fraught with fearful liabilities. For instance, even in regard to Jesus Christ, what single definite promise can he be said with assurance ever to have made? Or, for that matter, how can we be sure that even he deserves to be called the Word of God? It is a cardinal truth that the Scriptures cannot be known apart from Christ. But it is just as true that Christ cannot be known apart from the Scriptures. Fantastically presumptive is the readiness of the past one hundred years and more to delineate Christ, both popularly and academically, right out of the blue of fancy and prejudice.

The claim is also sophistical, and it is its sophistry that I would like to expose.

Actually, better words than “propositional” can be used in this connection. By common usage, that is “propositional” which can be entertained for assent or denial, such as a list of resolutions for debate. But though interminable lists of propositions for debate can be formulated out of biblical material, the Bible itself is no such list; it consists of assertions made simply in order that all men might believe them to be true. Thus when the reader of the Scriptures comes to the words, “And it came to pass that …,” the intention is that he should believe that “it came to pass that.…” I shall therefore speak of “assertions,” “statements,” and “predications” rather than “propositions.” My argument is with those who claim that the Bible cannot be the true Word of God since it is made up of definite and repeatable statements.

It is to be observed that one implication of this claim is that no utterance of the Incarnate Logos made in the presence of his disciples or the multitudes was the Word of God except perhaps the syntactically amorphous groans that he emitted before the grave of Lazarus.

The metaphysics corresponding to this claim is the view that reality is not truly comprehended by predication. But this is fallacious. Surely there is no part of reality that does not have its true account as opposed to false accounts. Indeed, even he who disputes the possibility of covering all reality by predication rejects the predicationist’s account only by assuming that there is a better account—but any account is only assertion or predication. Nor need we be troubled over the adequacy of the account that is possible for any part of reality, the whole of which has been seen to be accountable, for if no part of reality is without its true account, no part of any part of reality is without accountability. The possibility of predication thus covers indeed all being. For cognitive purposes it is all a matter of associating all subjects with all their proper predicates, and in the nature of the case there is nothing that cannot be known.

But the association of all subjects with all their proper predicates is a work of God. With him, however, speech is more than reporting. It is itself causative of its object, creative, for before he spake there was nothing, and when he speaks it is neither a lie nor futility. “For He spake, and it came to be” (Ps. 33:9a).

God’s “I AM” is a speech particularly pregnant with marvel. The case is not that God at the commissioning of Moses said, “I am, and I send you to the people of Israel to deliver them from Pharoah.” It is that He in response to Moses’ request for the Commissioner’s self-identification directed him, “Say to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ ” This “I AM” is the preeminent characteristic of God. God does not utter it only when addressing an inquirer like Moses; it is God’s eternal speech, Moses or no Moses, the eternal soliloquy apart from which there is no God. Of the manner of its utterance as divine monologue we can form no just notion; by consideration of its meaning we soon plunge ourselves into the dizziness of a mental fainting spell; but of it we can nevertheless affirm nothing less than that it is true speech, apart from which God is not God, and by which he is what he is. His “I AM” is his essence. So far is God from indulging in anything anthropomorphic when he says, “I AM,” that we should rather say that man, reflecting on his wholly derivative being, is faintly theomorphic when he weakly and falteringly echoes, “I am.” There is no cause to be condescending when talking about assertion and predication!

Patently much of God’s speech besides his soliloquizing “I AM” is transcendent. How his Son is his Logos is a mystery. Even much of what he addresses directly to our hearing is beyond our full comprehension. If he works and creates by speech, consider how thoroughly all our existence and sustenance and every movement are taken up in his speech and to how much of it we are totally deaf!

Speech from the Transcendent

But not all God’s speech is transcendent. Capacity to speak transcendentally does not imply incapacity to speak untranscendentally, nor is it beyond God to say something that is not beyond our hearing and understanding. A biochemist can talk for days entirely beyond the comprehension of his little son, but he can also say, “Johnny, when we get to the park you shall have a sandwich.” Nor are the to-Johnny-understandable words about the sandwich unworthy of his bio chemist father. To love children is to want communication with them. He who can speak exclusively over the heads of angels would be a poor father of men and a poor communicator to them if his speech to them were such that even those who prayed for his help to understand what he said would have to say that though it was all very vibrantly over whelming, not a single assertion could be captured by man for exact retention and repetition. In view of our obtuseness and fickleness we need words of God that can be gone over again and again in the mind, and in view of the dark silence as regards divine truth that prevails over the majority of mankind we need words of God that can be repeated to the ends of the earth with assurance that we know exactly what God has said. Therefore God has to speak to us as to men. Speech to men need not be restricted in such a way that in its upper reaches of meaning it does not far outdistance man’s grasp, but unless in its lower levels of intention it makes such sense to man that he can distinguish it from variant speech and repeat it, it is not beamed to man’s kind of receptivity nor can it be a speech to man. But if the kind of hearer man is places a limitation of a kind—the presence of a reachable nearer boundary—upon the transcendency of God’s word to him, the kind of speaker God is places the necessity of being unreservedly true and good upon all his word to man. Even talk about sandwiches must be true to be his talk. After all, claiming for something that it is the Word of God in the normative and authoritative sense is claiming for it something more than that it is the word of godly men, even men most thoroughly instructed, for instance, in the facts and meaning of the whole course of God’s saving work in Christ for man and most sensitively participant in the Christian community. We have whole libraries of the latter category of words.

God’s Word and the Time Barrier

Another point about which there is confusion that has led some to reject the possibility of definite Scripture statements’ being the real Word of God is the relation of statement to time. It is asked, “How can statements two and more thousand years old be the contemporary Word of God?”

Whatever the time of the making of a statement, that statement is of course repeatable as true for as long a time as the fact to which it gives expression remains a fact. If anything ever was true, it will obviously always be true that it was true, and thus true history will always be true history. But of ongoing situations it may always be said not only that at one time the situation did obtain, but also that for as long a time as the situation obtains, a statement of it as current situation is repeatable as true. The continuing force of once-made statements of continuing situations underlies the principle that laws once gazetted are deemed binding until repealed, without the need of repeated gazetting. Nor do we require that the sign “30,000 Volts!” be painted freshly every morning in order that its deterrence may have a current force. Written words have a particular character in this regard. Though the act of writing is definitely dated, the words have a quality of being uttered afresh every time they are read. Thus written words have a peculiar fitness for the in definitely repeated expression of definite and unaltered statement. Where the speaker has veracity and adequate knowledge, including, where it is relevant, knowledge of his own power, whatever he says is true for whatever time he says it, regardless of the time he says it.

Take the case of a well-operated airline. The published schedules of services and tariffs are conclusive for the period concerned regardless of date of printing. One learns as much from these printed schedules as from the viva voce proclamations of the announcer, or indeed from the very roar of the jets warming up on the apron. If fussy travelers with a light opinion of printed timetables insist on face-to-face encounter with the executive, they may be admitted to the inner office or they may not. If they are, it may well be only to be told: “It’s all in the published schedules. Let’s see what they say.… I wish you a very pleasant flight.” In fact, reading a timetable is a true encounter with the executive as regards his present will in all the essentials of the services as far as they concern the prospective traveler. If the latter will conform to the announcements, he will find the executive and his organization doing everything that was said in the printed word.

Misapprehension may also exist in regard to the motive potential of the indicative mood. It may be asked, “How can a book so largely written in the inert story-telling mood have a dynamic appropriate to the true Word of God?” But consider, for instance, that in the former British colonies of Africa—as, presumably, elsewhere in the Common wealth—a large “L” (for “Learner”) displayed on the front and back of a car actually means, “Give this driver a lot of room.” So imperative is this indicative that it is printed in bright red. I have read somewhere that in the Chinese Revolution of 1911 the wells of the great Manchu garrison cities were stopped with the bodies of Manchu women and girl suicides. It is probable that the stimulus to this tragic wave of self-destruction was—perhaps next to example itself—more often the plain but terrible indicatives, “The Revolutionaries are now in the next compound,” or, “They are breaking down the gate,” than the formal imperative, “Go, jump in the well!” The difference between “30,000 Volts” and “Beware of High Tension Cables” is entirely formal; one is as deterrent from careless action as the other. Indeed, imperatives are powerless apart from sanctions that can be directly described only in the indicative. Hearing the cry “Jump in the well!” no one will comply unless he is ready to put this (mistaken) evaluation on his case: “Something worse than perishing by my own leap is overtaking me.” The dynamics of words therefore depends on the hearer’s view of the relation between the matter they indicate, or seem to indicate, and his own well-being, not on grammatical mood, nor on the actual time of enunciation, nor yet on decibles, except insofar as these bear upon the attention-getting property of the words. Did men and women not fade so quickly, a marriage proposal of forty years past might be reread with more inclination to acceptance now than when first received. “You are beautiful, my beloved, truly lovely” (Cant. 1:16)—these are probably the most consistently moving words of courtship ever expressed. And of course no wooer uses a mega phone.

Not only does the dynamics of words depend upon the hearer’s estimate of their bearing on his own welfare: their motive power will be in proportion to the degree of such bearing. The things that the Scriptures say make them the most dynamic words ever addressed to men. In fact, no more powerfully moving words are conceivable than those of the Bible. By way of warning they threaten the ultimate in woe: everlasting destruction of man’s being, body and soul, through eternal separation from the Source of life and bliss, and this plight consciously sustained forever with the self-judgment that it has been justly imposed by the holy and perfect wrath of God in retribution for breaking his holy and perfect law and for spurning his offer of full and free forgiveness through Jesus Christ. By way of heart-lifting assurance they offer the ultimate in weal and bliss: everlasting salvation of man’s entire being through the forgiveness of sins, the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, and the imparting of the life of God which is victorious over the flesh, the world, Satan, sin, and death, the enjoyment of this life of God and with God to begin right now, to be consummated at the end of the world and at Christ’s return in fullness of glory, and to endure ages without end, all for the sake of Jesus, who through the eternal appointment of God’s love died on the cross in payment of the penalty of sin and in appeasement of God’s righteous wrath—all this to be had for the mere taking in faith, the very faith for acceptance being offered with the object to be accepted! Surely these are words to raise the dead. If any heart is stonily deaf and impassive to such words, what kind of words could it possibly hear? Were the rejecters of the possibility of definite statements’ constituting the true Word of God not spared from compliance by the very terms of their rejection, we should certainly press them for a sample of what they consider a more dynamic word, a true Word of God.

But we face the enigma that these most powerful words that can be conceived do in fact bring only the minority of men to repentance and faith. In further definition of the dynamics of words we may distinguish between the estimate hearers actually make of the bearing of the words in question on their own welfare and the estimate which that bearing ought to lead them to make, for as far as most men are concerned the motive power of the words of the Scriptures can be said to be the greatest possible only with the latter estimate in mind. This distinction may help one to see how it is true both that the Word of God is always efficacious unto salvation—God has said things that should always move men to repentance and faith and with such words he offers the grace to be so moved—and that nevertheless it does not always accomplish the effect of salvation. But the distinction does nothing to solve the mystery of men’s various responses to God’s saving Word. Why some are alerted by repeated flashings of timetable particulars on the closed-circuit screens of their innermost consciences or by the solicitous tap of an attendant’s hand and so come to with a start and a dash for the ramp, while others doze glassily on right through their whole day at the airport—this is one of the abiding mysteries of theology, one of the most baffling and most inscrutable. The management has offered no explanation.

Outer or Inner Word?

An explanation has been attempted by distinguishing between an inner and an outer word: the outer word fails to effect a hearing; the inner word, on the contrary, or the word that reverberates in the innermost tympanum of the ear of the soul, that gets through and awakens a man from the sleep of death and brings him to spiritual response. Those who are saved have all heard the inner word; those who are lost have heard nothing but the outer word.

This explanation implies one of the strangest confusions in theology and if consistently followed through is seen to embrace the most pernicious tenets, for it involves a transfer of the blame for man’s monstrous unresponsiveness from himself to the Word of God. Actually it is compounded confusion. In regard to man, while recognizing his deafness, it locates this affliction not in the inner ear, where it belongs, but in the outer ear, where his hearing is quite perceptive. Market reports, political forecasts, lascivious stories, prudential ethics, even Red Cross appeals and formal religion—these all get through and move to appropriate action. It is the inner ear, an ear for the things of the Spirit, or rather for things spiritually reported, that is utterly deformed in natural man. Further confusion lies in a division of God’s Word that that Word will not bear. It is true of God’s Word that it has an aspect which is naturally, not supernaturally, grasped, and to which no man is deaf. Thus a devoted Buddhist might make political and ethical observations of considerable penetration on reading the biblical account of the Jewish monarchy—he might even make religious observations of some truth and insight. But the same Word, even that relating to the history of the Jewish monarchy, has another aspect by which it calls unto a thorough brokenness of heart and a living confidence in God, which aspect is spiritually perceived and to which natural man is totally deaf. But there are also words of God of which the former aspect is so largely swallowed up by the latter that one is driven to ask, If they are not addressed to man as intended for the most spiritual communion with God, how else could they be addressed to him? Such words are, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength,” and “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” These words touch a man only at a point where he is dealing with his Creator, Judge, and Saviour, and if words which resound through that location do not deserve to be called “inner,” what words would? Even if a man rejects them, that is where he does so. And if God would have all men be saved, why should he first employ a word which has no chance to get in where the critically important hearing must take place if it is to take place? Why should he not immediately have recourse to the only suitable medium, a better word? The doctrine of the inner word exalts man and degrades both God and his Word.

But a turning from the Scriptures to the chimera of a better Word of God that is more dynamic, more penetrating, more compulsive, is inveterate with man. God, however, has denied the existence of such a word. In answer to Dives, who in his post-mortem missionary interest distrusted the Scriptures and showed strong existentialist leanings, our Lord puts into the mouth of Abraham the categorical dictum that where Moses and the prophets are not heard, nothing will be heard even if it comes straight from the other side.

A True Means of Grace

Where God does get himself a hearing, it is not apart from Moses, the prophets, and the evangelists, but by them as a true means of grace. Why some remain deaf when others do not is a mystery, but why any at all hear is simply because the Scriptures, like the voice that cried, “Lazarus, come forth!,” themselves confer upon the dead and the deaf the hearing by which they are heard, and this hearing God is always pressing to confer by them. The Word accomplishes its own hearing and reception. Luther’s preface by attention to the reading of which Wesley’s heart was strangely and determinatively warmed was to the Epistle to the Galatians. The words the great saint and doctor of Tagaste read at the personalized command, “Take up and read”—by which words he was introduced to the City of God—were from Romans 13, verses 13 and 14: “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh.” Even our Lord, Jesus Christ, whose word was directly and authoritatively God’s without his quoting the Scriptures, nevertheless deigned to use the Scriptures. The matter he “opened” by his talk to the Emmaus-walkers was the Scriptures. Indeed, he, the Personal Word, by whose opening of the written Word they were brought to such a pleasurably burning state, charges their whole befuddlement and sadness to the folly of being slow of heart to believe all that the prophets had spoken.

There is an existentiality without being smitten by which the soul goes on in death, but it is an existentiality of the Scriptures, an overpowering aliveness of the continuing relevance of what the Bible says, a peremptory self-assertion of the Scriptures as the speaking of God, as God’s talking to me, as his calling for my trustful obedience to what he tells me, and that in the moment that now is, and with the momentous issue of eternal life or eternal death.

H. DANIEL FRIBERG

Lutheran Theological College

Usa River, Tanganyika, Africa

Countdown On Cholesterol

Dr. Grandiose Slugs, who is a friend of Bill Vaughn (and if you don’t know Bill Vaughn, you are completely uneducated—you probably live a provincial life on the East Coast or the West Coast), makes the following statement: “You ask me what is the future of science, sir, and I reply that science is going to be a con founded nuisance, sir.” This is a view point with which I heartily concur.

Two weeks ago we put in our air conditioning and switched over for a couple of hot days; then the temperature dropped to around freezing, and we switched back. That, it seems to me, makes sense. But the new air conditioning blew out the pilot light; and when they came to fix the pilot light, they cracked the furnace; and when they fixed the furnace, they had to re-do the air conditioning. In the meantime, something has gone wrong with the TV, and the men who were fixing the furnace stepped on two of our petunias.

The Atlantic Monthly, some months ago, described the ultimate traffic jam in New York City, with the traffic backed up for over four miles in every direction. It looked to them as if the ultimate solution might be to have a perfect traffic jam and then to pave over the tops of the cars and start all over again. At times it does seem as if we are not far from the ultimate solution.

People are killed by thrombosis. I am beginning to theorize that this is the way nations die, too. It could happen to education; and if you don’t think religion is getting complex, you haven’t been reading the papers when they sort out for the news mediums what it is that actually goes on in assemblies and conferences. It isn’t much, but there is a tremendous “heave and ho,” not to mention salaries and travel accounts, just to keep circulation going. Whether we are keeping things in circulation fast enough to get rid of the poisons and pass out the nourishment is a question that worries me even on my better days. Life is such a wonderful thing that it will be a shame if it turns out to be nothing but a confounded nuisance.

EUTYCHUS II

Mission To Military

Your last issue, “Ministering to the Military” (May 24 issue), is the best yet. Never before have I been privileged to see such a great problem covered so completely.… One testimony in particular was wonderful: the testimony of General William K. Harrison.…

Cedartown, Ga.

While I enjoyed your issue … I was a little disappointed at its lack of insight. It seemed to repeat over and over again with plaintive voice that these are just boys away from home and that they are an above average group of Americans. I am not so sure that it is all that simple. To begin with, this is the worst “above average” group I have ever been in; no less than five of the men in my basic training platoon had the choice of either jail or the Army. Even educational and awareness levels were below those of men with whom I worked as a laborer during summers between academic years. Interests in the world and this country were very slight, and the Army presentation of any important issues or events was so watered down or dry as to not stir any one’s concern—even more dogmatic statements were not able to stir the intelligent.

Chaplain’s Assistant

Ft. Belvoir, Va.

Chaplains in the military certainly have a fertile field in which to operate, but it is pure hypocrisy for religious leaders to advocate “praising the Lord, and passing the ammunition.” It is not possible for mature Christians to reconcile Christ’s teaching and militarism.

New Bloomfield, Mo.

Though like most of its undertakings, it is exceedingly well done, on the part of the editors of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, it nevertheless … appears that though the field to be approached is the enlisted man, the opinions of the enlisted man are not sought out. I think this one factor is what has been wrong with the church over the centuries as well as what is wrong with all sectarian magazines, including non-sectarian magazines—the thoughts, the meditations, the concepts of the little man in the street … are not sought out.…

Philadelphia, Pa.

A word of congratulation.… This issue was outstanding.

Chaplain

Second Training Regiment

Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.

Christian Servicemen’s Fellowship, Officers’ Christian Union, Navigators, and Christian Businessmen’s Committee are all doing their share in reaching the military for Christ. I think your readers would be interested and inspired to know just how.

For instance, the Navigators focus upon developing all-out Christian leaders as they witness generally.

The Christian Businessmen sponsor Christian Servicemen’s Centers all over the world where men are challenged for Christ in a social and recreational setting.

The Officers’ Christian Union, to which my husband (an Army colonel just retired) belongs, operates through small prayer and Bible study groups plus, of course, personal witnessing seven days a week. Led by Lt. Gen. William K. Harrison, U. S. Army (Ret.), this Union includes commissioned and warrant officers of all branches of our Armed Forces and students training for commissions who subscribe to the following affirmation of faith:

“Inasmuch as I am a sinner and deserve the wrath of God, and since Jesus Christ died for my sins, was buried and has been bodily resurrected, according to the Scriptures, I have accepted Him as my personal Saviour and am saved by His grace alone.”

Because Union members are in positions of authority in the military as the powers that be scatter them around the globe they have unique opportunities to obey the great commission, “Beginning in Jerusalem … to the uttermost parts of the earth.”

OCU Bible study groups operate in eighty-four of the state-side military installations. There are Bible study groups in the Washington, D. C., area, thirty-six states (including Alaska and Hawaii), Bermuda, Greenland, Iceland, Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Guam, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Okinawa, and the Philippines. Also, our OCU cooperates with the OCUs of Great Britain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Fin land, Sweden, South Korea, and Ghana.

Several years ago, OCU helped found the Christian Servicemen’s Fellowship, patterned after OCU and made up mostly of enlisted men with a few officers, usually chaplains, belonging also. CSF is now sponsored by the Chaplains’ Commission of the National Association of Evangelicals. OCU and CSF, along with evangelical chaplains, work in cooperation with the Navigators and Christian Servicemen’s Centers whenever their paths cross.

Very significantly, the four lay missions to the military I have described include active church and chapel members from all the major Protestant denominations.

Alexandria, Va.

Thank you so much for your timely [issue]. Among the effective organizations dedicated to reaching servicemen is Overseas Christian Servicemen’s Centers.…

Minister to Youth

First Baptist Church

South Pasadena, Calif.

Agony In The South

Reference in your May 24 issue [Editorials] seemed to reflect one-sided information about the racial disturbances in the South, particularly in Birmingham. You speak of dogs lunging at Negro demonstrators without mentioning the fact that these demonstrations were illegal and were practically turned into riots. You also failed to mention that they threw rocks, bricks, knives, and everything else available at the police, some of whom were seriously wounded.

Here in Nashville we witnessed the so-called non-violent Christian demonstrations. The Negroes blocked doorways of businesses for hours; they shoved the police back against the walls. The police were ordered not to retaliate in any way. They injured several persons, knocked completely innocent white persons down inside and outside of the stores.… Mind you, Nashville is already integrated. The schools have been integrated for several years and most of the stores are. There is practically no Negro unemployment, but nevertheless the rioting and incitement to riot continue making a complete farce of their claims to be guided by Christian motives.

Nashville, Tenn.

A word of appreciation and praise for such a statement of conviction. For myself, as one at work in the Deep South, it rang clear and I might add loudly! It was what needed to be said and was stated thusly! All I might add to this note would be one resounding word … amen!

Back Bay Mission

Biloxi, Miss.

You go altogether too far out in your one sided condemnation of those who sought to uphold the law in Birmingham. You make much of those who were restrained by the police and the means used by the police. But what have you to say about those who caused such disorder—those who recklessly brought about the very scenes you describe?

Lutheran Church of the Epiphany

Montgomery, Ala.

Your recent editorial … amazes me. Could it have been written on the basis of snap-judgment, or a desire to stigmatize the South? Yes, the Birmingham situation is ugly. No one of either race will deny it. But you seem to be oblivious of its background in the radical and subversive social agitation which has produced it. Do you not know that the Communist movement has decided to make a break-through in America, using the race question in the South as the crisis issue?

First Presbyterian Church

Opelika, Ala.

We have integration at our Missouri University in Columbia. Negroes enroll freely and move about the campus without molestation. But, let white students talk to them freely, as though they were human beings, and that is something else.… My twenty-year-old daughter would not date a Negro but believes otherwise in equal treatment for him and speaks as freely with Negro students as white. She must work to eat, and during this semester this is what she has faced: turned away from a number of jobs she was qualified for; accused by a girl who frequented Student Union of being a dope pusher; fired from a job at medical center she was happy in because of her “association with colored students at the Union”; referred to in clandestine student publications as setting up a prostitution business in Student Union; ordered out of Student Union finally, though she went there for company rather than ride around in the dark with amorous swains. In spite of all this she calmly continues to treat Negroes as though they were human beings. There is still a price to pay for being true to your convictions. My daughter does not drink, smoke or dance, is active in church, and church youth work—but it does not save her from the vicious smear campaign that “hate” students are capable of, ridiculous though some aspects of the campaign may be.

The Methodist Church

Fairport, Mo.

God bless you for your editorial. The backing-and-yelling or even outright racism of many Southern leaders, even about Birmingham, has been a disgrace to Christ. Thank goodness you’ve taken this clear, strong stand.

Nashville, Tenn.

Like A Crazy Quilt

We appreciate the writeup concerning Churches of Christ (News, May 24 issue). Having been born and bred within this element of Christendom, I must say that your reporter has made some keen observations.

One problem any reporter faces in talking about the so-called Churches of Christ is to ascertain just what faction among us he happens to be with at the time. Right here in my home state of Texas we must have fifteen or twenty different “loyal” Churches of Christ, hardly any of which will have any fellowship with any other.

We are divided over premillennialism, institutionalism, teaching methods, missionary methods, Sunday schools, cups for Communion, wine for Communion, Freemasonry, divorce and remarriage, and I don’t know what all. Presently a major division is in the making over the Herald of Truth program [you] mentioned.…

And all this is our trouble. As of now, divided like a crazy quilt, we are not fit to unite with anyone, the Christian Church included. First, we must unite ourselves, and from the way things look, that will take a long time. But I am happy to report that from all the segments among Churches of Christ there is a concern to attain the unity for which our Lord prayed. There is a kind of grass-roots underground movement among us that beckons us to join the Christian world. A case in point is that a lot of us read non-Church of Christ stuff like CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and that is really something for us! Give us another generation, then check.…

Professor of Philosophy

Texas Woman’s University

Denton, Tex.

Allow me to commend you for your very fine and fair report of our lectureship at Abilene. L. Nelson Bell was at his best in his article, “Faith and Obedience.” It was excellent, and should call many back to the real New Testament meaning of faith. It is imperative that a man not only have faith but he must live by that faith.…

La Vega Church of Christ

Waco, Texas

Precocious Pair

Re the letter of Willis Bergen (Eutychus, May 24 issue): In 1899, William James was in Germany. Then Karl Jaspers was sixteen years old and Martin Heidegger ten years old. Did they really come in touch and discuss philosophical problems?

Philadelphia, Pa.

A Look Back

The special report on the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (May 24 issue) is most revealing with respect to the divergency which can exist between a denomination’s standards and its practice. When a minister of this denomination, I fought hard to have the church abridge this gap where personal freedom and justice were concerned. The findings of the General Assembly’s Permanent Committee on Christian Relations, as included in your special report, point to a continuing basis for this need in the Southern Presbyterian Church.

Plymouth Congregational Church

Corona del Mar, Calif.

Campus Legislation

I am writing to add my hearty agreement to your editorial, “Morality on the Campus” (May 10 issue). Having recently been graduated from a Christian college, I have seen first hand some of the fallacies of “legislated Christianity” as you described.… One senior from our school told me personally that she did not understand why her denomination believed a certain thing, but was accepting it anyway because “it must be right.” One would think that after four years of Bible training, a person would be able to give something of “a reason for the hope that is within them.”

Spring Lake Missionary Church

Manito, Ill.

The editorial … had a very wholesome emphasis upon freedom and personal conviction as opposed to legalistic systems. In several respects it did not go far enough, but it was a welcome step in the right direction.

Kingston, Ont.

God’s law inherently forbids promiscuity in love, and certainly promiscuous love is a contradiction in terms. But we must recognize the truth, and say so, that normal sex drives are good. It is in the application of properly interpreted biblical truth for the control of these sex drives that balance is attained. This should be our message to both evangelical youth and to the unbeliever. Young people will love, and will inevitably want to express their love. It is our responsibility to show that God’s law is for all men the controlling principle for a full and happy life, and not what it has been made to seem: the law that is impractical, irrelevant, and condemnatory of that which is best in human experience.

The failure of the Church to interpret God’s law for today’s youth is evidenced by growing promiscuity on the campus, backsliding among our evangelical youth, and disillusionment and despair of the young who seek a truth which has living relevance.

Glenside, Pa.

White Face Or Red Face?

To the best of my knowledge, we did not then or at any time recommend the book mentioned in the letter (Apr. 12 issue) to CHRISTIANITY TODAY.…

Assoc. Dir.

Office of Information

National Council of Churches

New York, N. Y.

“A bibliography, ‘The Negro American—A Reading List,’ was prepared in 1957 by the Department of Racial and Cultural Relations of the National Council of Churches. It was intended solely for leaders and students of Negro history, for them to read and determine for themselves whether or not they wished to make use of the books on the list, just as a library makes available its reading material without comment.… It is now out of print, and there are no plans to re-issue the bibliography.… No book on the list has ever been held to be obscene by any duly constituted and competent agency, public or private” (release by NCC Office of Information, April 25, 1961).

“Some time ago an article was written for Eternity, attacking the National Council of Churches for some literature which one of the NCC Commissions seemed to espouse.… We showed it to the proper NCC officials, who were quite red-faced about it. The material was printed without proper authorization, they admitted with some embarrassment … and no more would be printed” (editorial in Eternity Magazine, June, 1963).

“Four ‘shameful, filthy, morbid and obscene’ books should be removed from the Fairfax County Public Library, a lawyer in the county says.… Named as defendants in the suit were Bucklin Moon for his book ‘Without Magnolias’; Storm Jameson, author of ‘A Month Soon Goes’; Margaret Halsey for ‘Colorblind’ [sic], and A. B. Guthrie, Jr., who wrote ‘The Big Sky.’ All four books deal with love affairs between different races …” (The Washington Star, May 17, 1963).

I should like to comment on the letter of Mr. James Moore, associate director of the Office of Information of the NCC, in regard to “The Negro American—A Reading List,” that “to the best of my knowledge, we [NCC] did not then or at any time recommend the books”.…

Mr. Moore says relative to my letter, “We do not know where he got his in formation.” If Mr. Moore had looked on pages 4 and 5 of the reading list which the NCC published, recommended, and promoted, he would have seen where my information came from.

Now as to the NCC contention that “no book on the list has ever been held to be obscene by any duly constituted and competent agency, public or private”: this is refuted categorically by the fact that Llewellyn D. Crandall, acting postmaster of the United States Post Office at Larkspur, California, stated in a letter to Mrs. Anne Smart the following ruling concerning three of the books appearing on the NCC reading list:

“Dear Mrs. Smart:

“Your attention is directed to the mimeographed circular, mailed in this office March 24, 1956; entitled ‘To the leaders of the Community’—sheet number: two—March 12, 1956.

“The material identified above is non-mailable under section 1461 of Title 18 U. S. Code.

“You are cautioned against depositing such matter in the mails in the future. Very truly yours.”

Now, for your information, Section 1461 of Title 18 of the U. S. Code reads as follows: “Obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy publications or writings or mail containing or concerning where, how, or from whom such may be obtained, and matter which is otherwise mailable but which has on its wrapper or envelope any indecent, lewd, lascivious, or obscene writing or printing. Any mail containing any filthy, vile or indecent thing.”

My information, therefore, came from an official source which declared at least three books recommended by the NCC as “obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy publications.” The National Council has evaded this issue repeatedly for apparently they do not wish to acknowledge even the existence of the error.…

I will be happy to document Postmaster Crandall’s letter with photostats if necessary.

Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies

King’s College

Briarcliff Manor, N. Y.

From The Pew For The Pew

I have been sitting in the pews. Due to a throat operation I have been sidelined for four weeks. I have attended a number of churches, large and small, and frankly, I’ve been terribly disappointed.

I have gone hopefully. I have left discouraged. I have looked about me at the people. During the sermon they shift in their seats or study the stained-glass windows. Some sit straight and seem to be listening respectfully, but I wonder whether they really are listening.

Every time the sermon begins, I look for a word from God. I want help. I want to hear something relevant. I don’t hear it. The minister is off in a world by himself. He is talking, but not to me. He is talking about Christianity, but he is not saving anything to me!

Why not? Is it me? What do I want?

I want help. I want forgiveness. I want strength. I want to know how to cope with life; that I have to cope with life I know already. I want to know how to live in this world; that I must not become an alcoholic, I know. That I must not give in to temptation, I also know.

But how do I fight temptation? Nobody tells me. Not in the churches I attended.

Sometimes the minister is biblical. He puts together a number of Bible stories and quotations. But it turns out to be a crazy quilt—many different patches with no one message. It really hasn’t “warmed” me. Sometimes there is so much non-biblical material that it seems like the Reader’s Digest in a backwards collar.

Or the delivery is so monotonous that I can’t believe the preacher himself is interested in the Gospel. Why has it failed to grip and excite him? And when that unimaginative exhortation follows a good anthem—usually the music is very inspiring in our churches today—I could hardly consider what followed, preaching. What did it proclaim?

I also heard a man with a good delivery and impressive voice. The opening five minutes were worth hearing. Then he wandered off and tried to say something about everything from personal sin to race relations, from Christian living to world tensions. I asked myself as I walked out, what was his point? What does he want me to do? To believe? I did not know. I went away confused.

No wonder these churches had everything but filled pews. They were small, large, old, new, one service, two services, suburban, city, and small town churches, with choirs, soloists, preachers (sometimes assistants), teas, clubs, youth activities, and weekday programs—but empty pews.

No wonder! We’re emptying our churches with colorless, unimaginative, unrelated, unnecessary, and irrelevant sermons. And what is worse, we ministers think we know what the man in the pew is thinking. Do we? Then why don’t we help him and talk to his deep problems, his searching questions, his inner self?

This man who comes to visit us some Sunday is really sincere. He wants help. He wants “know how.” But if week after week we fail him, he is going to go elsewhere—or nowhere.

I can’t blame him. If I had to listen to the drivel (excuse me) I’ve been subjected to for these four weeks, I wouldn’t last as long as most of our new members who keep slipping out of our back doors at an alarming rate.

I’m pleading for a resurgence of genuine, Christian preaching. God’s Word to man’s need—simple, direct, challenging, personal, relevant! I’m going to ask myself about every sermon: What is my point? Have I made it clear? Have I honestly faced the problem? Have I given helpful answers? Am I presenting Jesus Christ, not in trite, rote phrases, but with clarity, conviction, and concern for those who come to worship?

I make one other suggestion. Taperecord next Sunday’s sermon. One month later listen to it. Invite a good friend to share in the listening. Ask him to give you his frank opinion. Then, be tough on yourself!

Please, let’s try to do something about our empty pews.

South Hollywood Presbyterian Church

Hollywood, Calif.