AS THINGS HAVE turned out, 1963 is a year for Methodism to remember for two reasons, one historical and the other contemporary: first, it brings round the 225th anniversary of John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience—an occasion which is being widely celebrated in Methodist circles; second, this year of grace has seen the publication of the report on the conversations between the Church of England and The Methodist Church. The former points back to the true heart of Methodism; the latter places Methodism before the crossroads of decision as it faces the future.

John Wesley, as is well known, was not a separatist. He was born, lived, and died in the Church of England. And the same was true of his brother Charles—though Charles considered it unlawful to separate from the Church of England, whereas John considered it inexpedient.

In the earlier years of his ministry the Rev. John Wesley could justly be described as a “high” churchman. He was a strict legalist, earnest in his devotion to duty and the observance of formalities, exemplary in his own high standard of morality, a disciplinarian of himself as well as of others. But the one vital thing was missing: a religion of the heart. In 1737, for example, when he was in Georgia, the exclusive view of episcopacy which he held caused him to insist on rebaptizing the children of dissenting families, to refuse admission to Holy Communion to all who had not been episcopally confirmed, and to decline to bury any who had not been baptized in the episcopal church. This discrimination extended even to the Moravian missionaries whom he so greatly admired for their piety. Thus, referring some years later to a letter he had received from the Austrian pastor, John Bolzius, he wrote in his journal: “What a truly Christian piety and simplicity breathe in these lines! And yet this very man, when I was at Savannah, did I refuse to admit to the Lord’s Table, because he was not baptized; that is, not baptized by a minister who had been episcopally ordained. Can any one carry High Church zeal higher than this? And how well have I been since beaten with mine own staff!”

By a kind of poetic justice it was the Moravian brethren whom God used to convince Wesley of the central deficiency in his spiritual life—so much so that in reply to the question as to what he had learned from his visit to Georgia he felt bound to say: “Why (what I least of all suspected) that I, who went to America to convert others, was never myself converted to God.” A conflict raged within his breast until that memorable twenty-fourth day of May, 1738, when, unwillingly attending the meeting in Aldersgate Street, he felt his heart strangely warmed as he listened to one reading from Luther’s preface to Romans, and came to personal faith: “I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for my salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me.…”

Now at last he had a religion of the heart, and a Gospel to proclaim of personal salvation through faith in the finished work of Christ. Now the high churchman became the evangelical churchman. Now the formalist became the itinerant preacher, forced to improvise for the sake of the Gospel. Cold-shouldered by bishops, shut out from churches, he preached in rooms, in the streets, in the fields—wherever anxious souls could be found to hear.

Today in England, Methodists and Anglicans are planning to heal the breaches of the past. The report now published of the official conversations which have taken place has many commendable features. It reflects the excellent spirit in which these conversations were conducted. Yet the recommendations launched by the report seem to be headed for the rocks, for of the Methodist delegates four, all distinguished members of their denomination, have tabled a dissentient view. This in itself is an indication that the report is certain to divide the ranks of Methodism.

The issue may perhaps be summed up as follows: Which John Wesley do the Methodists now intend to follow—the high churchman or the evangelical churchman? For the main bone of contention in the proposed Service of Reconciliation is precisely the intrusion of the high-church doctrine of episcopacy. This service is expressly designed to provide a way by which “Orders such as Anglicans have inherited from the undivided Church may be given to those who have not previously received them”; and the distinctive character of these Orders may, apparently, be designated by the term “priesthood.” Accordingly prayer is offered that the Methodist ministers on whom episcopal hands are laid may be endued with “grace for the office of priest,” and after the laying on of his hands the bishop authorizes them to “exercise the office of priest.” This leads the dissentient four to conclude that “it is impossible to doubt that whatever else the rite implies it confers episcopal ordination.”

The exclusive doctrine of episcopacy which they condemn coincides in general with the doctrine of Wesley during his early high-church period. It is not the doctrine of classical Anglicanism, and there are very many in the Church of England today who deplore the fact that this narrow theory of episcopacy is becoming so constant a stumblingblock in the way of full and free communion with fellow Christians. Unless this obstruction is removed, it is difficult to see how there can be any hope of true progress towards unity. At the same time it is commonly accepted that the form of a reunited church in England should be episcopal: but it will have to be a moderate type of episcopacy which does not hopelessly prejudice the issue by exclusive theories of ministerial validity.

More important, however, than the question of order is the question of faith. If the Church is to make a spiritual impact on our contemporary world, then the way forward is still the evangelical way that starts at Aldersgate.

Dust In A Land Of Gold?

The Inspiration of Scripture, by Dewey M. Beegle (Westminster, 1963, 223 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Frank E. Gaebelein, Headmaster, The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York.

This is a book with a purpose. As the author declares in his preface, “There are few areas of Christian life and thought that do not lead back eventually to the issue of the inspiration of the Scripture” (p. 9). Therefore, every generation of Christians must determine what it believes about inspiration. Past convictions regarding the Bible must be reexamined in the light of new knowledge. And, Dr. Beegle continues, “The purpose of this book is to make such a reexamination. All the relevant data possible, both Biblical and non-Biblical, will be reckoned with, in order to ascertain the truth of the matter concerning the inspiration of Scripture” (p. 9).

Does the book actually make this reexamination, reckoning with “all the relevant data possible”?

Dr. Beegle’s wide acquaintance with the literature of his subject is evident. Likewise his personal concern is apparent; he writes with all the fervor of a convinced man who is out to convert others to his position. And his position is essentially this: The Bible is an inspired but errant book. Any thought of errorless autographs of Scripture must be given up once and for all. Not only are there errors of fact in Scripture, but certain canonical books are of questionable value and, in some cases, of lesser spiritual worth than apocrypha or well-known hymns. Biblical writers are sometimes mistaken in their exegesis of the Old Testament, and they have also erred in doctrine. Such a writer as Luke is no more inspired than any other Christian historian. The “fringes” of the inspired Book are “tattered.” The process of inspiration must be extended to the translations of Scripture beginning with the Septuagint, for the view that inspiration applies only to the autographs and not to translations is untenable. Moreover, as in the new Reformation theology, “revelation must be defined subjectively if the term is to be in accord with the facts” (p. 126). In short, just as the Church had to come to terms with science in the time of Galileo, so evangelicalism must submit to a Copernican revolution in its view of the Holy Scriptures.

Such, very briefly stated, is Dr. Beegle’s position. In fairness let it be recognized that none of us who studies and uses Scripture is without presuppositions. Just as Dr. Beegle writes from conviction, so his readers cannot consider his views apart from their own convictions. But truth is truth, and, despite different convictions, each of us should beware of falling into fear of the truth.

It is to the credit of the book that it presents for reconsideration some of the difficult, yet by no means unrecognized, problems relating to the doctrine of inspiration held by the Reformers and more recently defended by such scholars as Warfield and Machen and, in our day, by writers such as Clark, Kantzer, and Packer. Dr. Beegle deals at length with such points as the chronological difficulty in the reign of King Pekah, the problems of Stephen’s quotations from Genesis, and Jude’s use of the pseudepigraphic Book of Enoch. It is indeed necessary to look phenomena like these in the face. Certainly no scholar committed to what Bromiley has called “the church doctrine of inspiration” can fail to see that inerrancy has its thorny problems, some of which are beyond our ability to solve. Consequently evangelicalism should continue to reexamine in the light of all the data the concept of inerrancy as applied to Scripture. To the extent to which Dr. Beegle’s book leads to contemporary renewal of the debate between Hodge and Warfield on the one hand and Orr and Henry Preserved Smith on the other hand, which Camell called “possibly the last great dialogue on inspiration in America” (The Case for Orthodox Theology, p. 102), it will have served a purpose.

Granting these things, however, this reviewer must say that Dr. Beegle has failed to convert him. The reason lies not in the abundance of data and quotations but in the methods used. The book goes beyond a reexamination of the conservative evangelical view of Scripture; it is a relentless polemic against that view. Dr. Beegle presses his argument with evangelistic zeal and in so doing not infrequently goes over to the subjectivity of special pleading.

To be specific, consider the belittling of The Song of Solomon, because Christ did not refer to it [nor did He refer to seventeen other Old Testament hooks], because it is not quoted by the other New Testament writers [nor did they quote from five other Old Testament books], and because its frank expression of human love is hardly, according to Dr. Beegle, to be interpreted as an allegory of Christ’s love for the Church. Furthermore, when he asks us to imagine that “all religious literature has been destroyed except the canonical Song of Songs and Isaac Watts’s beautiful hymn, ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,’ ” and, in answer to the question “Given only one choice, which of the two would one choose?,” replies that “it is doubtful that most Christians would choose Song of Songs,” and when he goes on to say that the admittedly beautiful hymn of the eighteenth-century nonconformist “has far greater value in and of itself than does the Old Testament love song,” Dr. Beegle has allowed his own taste to demote canonical Scripture (p. 140). Moreover, to contrast a hymn of the Atonement written in the full light of the New Testament revelation with a pre-Christian poetical book violates the elementary basis of analogical reasoning. Dr. Beegle may not care much for Solomon’s Song, but it spoke deeply of Christ to some of the greatest saints, including St. Bernard, Rutherford, McCheyne, Finney, and Spurgeon (who took more texts from it than from any other portion of Scripture of like extent).

Similar to the treatment of the Song is the downgrading of Ecclesiastes, through comparing it with the apocryphal Ecclesiasticus. And what are we to make of this statement? “Some of the psalms are simply an exhortation to praise God because of his dealings with Israel.… Some of the great hymns are practically on a par with the psalms.…” Then referring to Matheson’s “O Love that Wilt Not Let Me Go,” Dr. Beegle passes judgment thus: “This is the kind of inspiration of which the psalms were made. There is no difference in kind” (pp. 140, 141). To the Christian for whom Scripture is the infallible Word of the living God, such subjectivism which presumes to put the God-breathed devotional manual of the ages on the same plane with the writings of uninspired men is utterly unconvincing.

The same kind of dogmatic subjectivism is carried over to the New Testament, as Dr. Beegle asks: “When Luke felt the urge to write ‘an orderly account’ was his inspiration of a different kind [italics author’s] from that of the Holy Spirit’s activity in the hearts and mind of God’s servants down through the history of the church?” Whereupon he almost jauntily answers, “Not likely,” and goes on to say that the only reason why Luke’s account was chosen above that of others was because it was more accurate, but this “hardly comes under the category of unique inspiration. Therefore, it is (1) his association with Paul [a novel theory of ‘inspiration by association’] and (2) his own experience in that crucial period of history, which constitute Luke’s uniqueness as a Biblical writer” (p. 135). In other words, Paul was uniquely inspired and Luke was not.

Revealing also is the treatment of the trivialities of Scripture. Here the author chooses several examples from Judges, including the “Shibboleth” incident (Judges 12:5, 6), about which he concludes that “from the standpoint of God’s revelation the text could just as well have omitted the ‘Shibboleth’ episode with vs. 5–6 reading as follows: ‘And the Gileadites … took the fords of the Jordan against the Ephraimites … and there fell at that time forty-two thousand of the Ephraimites!” (p. 88). This comes uncomfortably close to telling God how he should have written an Old Testament passage! What the author overlooks is the fact that the Bible is, as Patton said (Fundamental Christianity, p. 169), “an organism and not a miscellaneous collection of writings.” And because it is an organism, parts of it are “connective tissue”—minor, but not to be exscinded without damage to the living whole.

It would seem that once having concluded that the Bible is not entirely true, Dr. Beegle feels constrained to find error wherever it seems to him that error might be postulated, even though not proved. Consider his highly suppositional treatment of our Lord’s teaching in Matthew 24 about His return. Here Dr. Beegle actually admits the inconclusive nature of his argument, yet uses it to declare that error in Scripture extends to doctrine: “Although it is difficult to give conclusive proof of contradiction, some of the verses noted in the three Gospels were in all likelihood inserted out of context, and, accordingly, they constitute erroneous elements of doctrine” (p. 172). “All Biblical doctrine is not infallible, but it is sufficiently accurate as a whole to achieve the goal that God would desire” (p. 174). But surely the doctrines of Scripture are to be believed, and if, as Dr. Beegle asserts, “all Biblical doctrine is not infallible,” what becomes of the great Reformed principle that Scripture is “the infallible rule of faith and practice”?

A further question about the author’s method relates to what seems to be a certain disingenuousness in using supporting authorities. While this may charitably be attributed to his zeal to persuade others to discard plenary inspiration, it is questionable. For example, Dr. Beegle introduces Dr. Patton’s well-known passage about inerrancy by referring to Machen’s dedication of his book What Is Faith? to Patton, thus using Machen to bolster up Patton (p. 66). But What Is Faith? appeared a year before Patton’s Fundamental Christianity, and in his two last books, published in 1935 and 1936, Machen flatly affirmed the inerrancy of Scripture.

It is strange that in attacking the principle of errorless originals Dr. Beegle excerpts a passage from the King James Preface, for, after making the common-sense point that just as the King’s speech in Parliament is still the King’s speech though translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and Latin, so “the meanest translation of the Bible in English containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God,” the Preface includes this affirmation of the perfection of the original, the very point Dr. Beegle is arguing against: “For what ever was perfect under the sun, where Apostles or apostolic men, that is, men endued with an extraordinary measure of God’s Spirit, and privileged with the privilege of infallibility had not their hand?”

But what about the author’s discussion of the phenomena of Scripture—the difficult problems relating to King Pekah, Stephen’s defense, Jude, and the like? Before considering particulars, let us recall Dr. Beegle’s purpose as stated in his preface: “All the relevant data possible, both Biblical and non-Biblical will be reckoned with …” This is not a promise of encyclopedic completeness, but it does imply a balanced presentation.

Yet while Dr. Beegle’s presentation of difficult phenomena, including some very hypothetical discrepancies, is highly detailed, his consideration of the other side is less full. The phenomena of Scripture, however, are positive as well as negative. To be sure, he deals with some great texts, such as 2 Timothy 3:16, 17 (the basic meaning of theopneustos is strangely passed over as mere interpretation); 1 Peter 1:21; Matthew 5:17, 18; and John 10:35. But of the evidence of Scripture’s self-authentication in the multitudinous repetition of “Thus saith the Lord,” “God spoke,” “The Scripture says,” and so on (as dealt with, for instance, by Warfield), he has practically nothing to say.

Reading for Perspective

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

★ Faith Victorious, by Lennart Pinomaa, translated by Walter J. Kukkonen (Fortress, $4.75). An assessment of Luther’s view of major theological themes supplemented by résumés of other recent leading studies.

★ The Reality of the Resurrection, by Merrill C. Tenney (Harper & Row, $4). The resurrection of Christ is vigorously defended as a hard, unshakable historical reality, and full treatment is given its many facets.

★ Dictionary of the Bible, edited by James Hastings, Revised Edition by F. C. Grant and H. H. Rowley (Scribner’s, $15). Thoroughly revised by scholarship ranging the theological spectrum as widely as did its original authors fifty years ago. Excellent new maps.

Again, his references to the amazing accuracy of Scripture as compared with that of all other ancient books are exceedingly brief, as are also his references to the mountainous corroboration of the historicity of the Bible by archaeology. And while it is true, as Dr. Beegle shows, that it was not in support of inerrancy that Nelson Glueck made his famous statement about no archaeological discovery’s ever contravening the Bible, the statement is nevertheless factual regardless of its author’s intent.

On the other hand, when he comes to negative phenomena, Dr. Beegle makes the most of his material. 2 Kings 15:27 states that Pekah reigned twenty years, but according to the scriptural data he reigned only eight years. Even Thiele, whose success in unraveling the tangled skein of most of the discrepant reigns is passed over, stumbles at this problem. Are we therefore to conclude that the problem is, as Dr. Beegle dogmatically insists, insoluble for good and all and that this is a case where the original must have been wrong? Not everyone will agree; witness the suggestion advanced by John Briggs Curtis in the Journal of Biblical Literature (Dec., 1961, pp. 362, 363) that Pekah might have “actually set up a Gileadite monarchy rivaling the house of Menahem during the period of anarchy following the death of Jeroboam II and actually reigned the twenty years credited to him in 2 Kings 15:27.”

This may not be the final answer. But there are those of us who hold more tenaciously to suspended judgment than does Dr. Beegle. We do this on two grounds—first, the enormous complexity of historical events compared with the paucity of our knowledge of the distant past; second, the fact, almost completely overlooked in this book, of the dramatic movement of archaeology in corroboration of Scripture. The reviewer has watched this movement for over forty years and has seen the reversal of one critical position after another. Yet about the only recognition Dr. Beegle accords this trend is a passing reference to the old story of Hartmann’s mistaken notion that writing was not known in Moses’ time. If the situation respecting the phenomena of Scripture were static, then to hold a suspended judgment regarding difficult passages might be obscurantist, but in view of the progressive corroboration of many disputed points, it is a thoroughly reasonable position.

A review, however, has limits, and the temptation to discuss many other details must be resisted. It should simply be said that by no means all the evidence presented is as significant as the Pekah, Jude, and Acts 7 problems. In fact, some is highly unimpressive—for example, the peculiar attempt to read a discrepancy into the accounts of the cockcrowing at Peter’s denial when there is a natural and adequate explanation. This tendency to insist upon error when an alternate explanation is possible appears in a number of instances.

Also unconvincing is the elaborate attempt to explain away our Lord’s explicit authentication of the indefectible character of the Old Testament through recourse to first-century views of the Septuagint. As for the extensive treatment of Philo and of the patristic view of Scripture, here Dr. Beegle seems to be reading back into the Fathers his own views.

Chapters 8–11, dealing with existentialism and “the new Reformation theology,” show a wide acquaintance with such writers as Kirkegaard, Barth, and Brunner, the quotations from Brunner being particularly copious. Although there is some criticism of Brunner and strong dissent from Bultmann, one gains the impression that Dr. Beegle approves in good part of the new Reformation view of inspiration. Certainly it is in accord with the subjectivism with which he so generally views Scripture.

The book leaves one with the feeling of propaganda. The author is passionately convinced of the rightness of his views and is on a campaign to persuade his evangelical brethren that God inspired an errant Bible. While his sincerity is evident, his argument fails to carry conviction.

FRANK E. GAEBELEIN

Theology And Life

Theology and the Cure of Souls, by Frederic Greeves (Channel Press, 1962, 180 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by Gene Griessman, Pastor, Lakeside Baptist Church, Metairie, Louisiana.

The title of this book indicates that the author has selected a neglected field in which to do his work. Current renewed interest in biblical theology along with the great concern about pastoral care means that this attempt to relate these two complex areas of Christian thought and action should evoke considerable interest.

Frederic Greeves’s experience has come in both the pastorate and the seminary. He is presently principal of Didsbury College, the oldest English Methodist school for the training of ministers.

Despite the book’s lack of an arresting introduction and a gripping conclusion, the reader finds that the heart of the work amply rewards the effort spent reaching it. Among the several outstanding sections are an appraisal of the pastoral office today, and an analysis of existentialist theology and its legitimate relation to biblical theology.

One chapter is entitled “The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Cure of Souls.” With this doctrine that too often has been considered of little practical importance to Christian living, the author vividly illustrates that Christian doctrine does have profound implications for Christian living.

The book serves the useful function of pointing out some connecting lines between biblical theology and pastoral care. It deserves a wide reading. It will be unfortunate if its influence is limited to Methodist clergymen, for it deals with a problem which is of vital concern to all Christians.

GENE GRIESSMAN

Interviews With Eichmann

The Struggle for a Soul, by William L. Hull (Doubleday, 1963, 175 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by F. Carlton Booth, Professor of Evangelism, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

This is part of the story that was never told concerning Adolf Eichmann. It embraces the content of many extended conversations which took place in the death cell at Ramleh Prison between Eichmann and his spiritual advisor, the writer of this volume, an evangelical American clergyman. How could any living human being yield himself to be used as such an awful instrument of destruction? How could Eichmann, the assassin of six million Jews, insist during these interviews, “I am in contact with God. He has led me continually”? Eichmann maintained that he was only a cog, a tool of the State, but his crime lay in the fact that he was a willing tool, desirous of being used in the vile work.

His dramatic trial covered a period of four months with 121 court sessions, during which time Eichmann spurned the idea of being visited by a spiritual advisor. But once confined to the death cell, he who had been reared in a Christian atmosphere and had been a member of the Protestant church now expressed interest in having spiritual counsel. It was William Hull, a resident of Jerusalem for twenty-seven years, who offered and gave this counsel, and this is the record of his thirteen interviews with Eichmann. “Do you repent of the things you were forced to do?” asked Hull during the tenth interview. “Yes, I do,” was Eichmann’s reply. What he meant only God knows. This book relates at once the struggle of a soul and “the struggle for a soul.” It is a deep philosophical and psychological study well worth reading.

F. CARLTON BOOTH

The Christian In Business

The Christian in Business, by John E. Mitchell, Jr. (Revell, 1962, 156 pp., $3), is reviewed by Wilbur D. Benedict, Publisher, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Anyone inclined to think of Christianity as something that deals only with “pie in the sky when you die” should read The Christian in Business. Here is a book that portrays in clear, concise language the teachings of Christ as applied to the workaday lives of people. The fact that most of the persons named are connected with one business concern detracts in no way from a general application of the message. Biblical Christianity in action is on display in this volume.

WILBUR D. BENEDICT

New Light On John Wesley

John Wesley, A Theological Biography, Volume I (1703–1738), by Martin Schmidt, translated by Norman P. Goldhawk (Epworth Press, 1962, 320 pp., 30s.; Abingdon, $6.50), is reviewed by Arnold A. Dallimore, Pastor, Cottam Baptist Church, Cottam, Ontario, Canada.

Another biography of John Wesley? Yes, and this one has much to say which others missed.

The book’s unique qualities arise from the fact that Dr. Schmidt, professor of church history at the University of Mainz, was able to use a number of primary documents not available to previous writers. John Wesley, in the years immediately before and after his conversion, was in close relationship with a number of Germans of the Moravian and Pietist schools. From the records of these men, long stored in the archives at Herrnhut and the University of Halle, Schmidt has gathered much information and published many statements heretofore unknown. New light is shed on the early stages of Wesley’s career by these German associates.

Besides providing this fresh factual knowledge, Dr. Schmidt has attempted a penetrating analysis of the mind and soul of his subject. At each decisive point in Wesley’s life the author makes a lengthy pause to probe what lies beneath the surface, seeking to discover Wesley’s basic motives, hidden desires, spiritual conflicts, and subconscious personality. This analysis is continually related to Wesley’s religious beliefs, thereby occasioning and meriting the book’s subtitle, “A Theological Biography.” Having been translated excellently, the book is highly readable, and the ever-fascinating life of Wesley takes on fresh attraction in this attempt at portrait-in-depth.

Nevertheless, Dr. Schmidt’s work has a serious defect. He who would truly depict John Wesley must be prepared first of all to perform the unpleasant labor of the iconoclast; the false must be destroyed before the true may be fully known. Wesley’s early followers, faced with the task of defending his teaching of perfectionism, blinded themselves to his faults and exaggerated his merits; aided by subsequent biographers and artists, they have handed down to posterity a legendary image that is rather bland and always smiling and sweet, and therefore bears little resemblance to the militant heroism of the Father of Methodism. An objective study of the evidence will show John Wesley to have been a man of iron with a fist of steel and a heart of both ice and fire; a soldier of Napoleonic stance, demanding obedience, defying his foes, and overpowering his friends; a mortal subject to internal struggle, fighting and failing, striving and winning; a hero with stains and scars and victories. It is this Wesley, a man of like passions with ourselves, who has a message for us today.

It is at this point that the one failure in Dr. Schmidt’s work appears. He has apparently given full credence to the common assumptions, and his acceptance of the legendary image has colored his interpretations of even the new information which his unique sources provided. One can but wish he had started his study with a clean slate, devoid of any preconceived notions. A much truer and more valuable portrait would have resulted.

Nevertheless, the book, the first of a two-volume set, must be accorded a place among the most important on Wesley, and it is to be hoped the second volume will correct the basic error of the first.

ARNOLD A. DALLIMORE

Meet The Man Moody

Moody: A Biographical Portrait, by J. C. Pollock (Macmillan, 1963, 336 pp., $5.50), is reviewed by Clyde S. Kilby, Professor of English, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

A well-known modern biographer once said that it is almost as hard to write a good life as live one. The difficulty is not simplified, indeed is often increased, when one Christian writes about another Christian. Though the author of this biography, an Anglican rector, obviously admires D. L. Moody, he has not allowed this to disrupt a severely truthful, though appreciative, presentation.

The author believes that his biography of Moody has a threefold advantage over many previous ones: he is the first to make complete use of several vital collections of papers relating to Moody; he has attempted to show Moody’s capacity for growth to the very end of his life; and he has avoided allowing anecdotes to dominate his study.

The biography is replete not only with famous names in the Christian world—Scofield, Revell, Torrey, Gray, C. T. Studd, Hudson Taylor, George Muller—but also with names such as John Wanamaker, Marshall Field, Cyrus H. McCormick, Pierpont Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Woodrow Wilson, Bernard Shaw, and W. E. Gladstone. There are excellent accounts of Moody’s great evangelistic campaigns abroad and at home and of his founding of schools.

Moody the man is pictured well. We see his irrepressible gaiety, his schoolboy frolics to the end of his life, his charm and joviality, his vast appetite and sound sleep, his love of farm life, his directness in everything. Readers not already acquainted with Moody will be shocked to discover the brevity of his prayers and devotions, his subscription to the construction of a Roman Catholic church in Northfield, his bold requests for money to run his schools, and his hatred of ecclesiastical division.

CLYDE S. KILBY

BOOK BRIEFS

Shorter Atlas of the Classical World, by H. H. Scullard and A. A. M. van der Heyden (Thomas Nelson, 1962, 239 pp., also 112 pp. of illustrations and 10 pp. of maps, $3.95 or 15s.). Polished account, fine maps, and excellent photographs convey the spirit of ancient Greece and Rome.

As the River Flows, by John A. Morrison (Anderson College Press [Anderson, Ind.], 214 pp., $3.25). The development of Anderson College reflected through the biography of its first president.

The First Gospel, by Carroll E. Simcox (Seabury, 1963, 311 pp., $5.75). Richly suggestive, well-written discursive commentary on Matthew, occupying the happy borderline between the devotional and the sermonic.

In the Hollow of His Hand, by Kai Jensen (Augsburg, 1963, 128 pp., $2.75). A bishop presents 36 short devotional chapters in language that is the shortest distance between Christian truth and human adversity.

The Protestant Liturgical Renewal, by Michael J. Taylor, S. J. (Newman Press, 336 pp., $5.50). A Roman Catholic looks at the movements (in the Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, and United Church of Christ Churches) toward making the Lord’s Supper more central in Protestant worship. A valuable, non-technical study.

Faith of the Psalmists, by Helmer Ringgren (Fortress, 1963, 138 pp., $3.50). The Psalms interpreted not as expressions of personal piety but as cultic expressions of public worship in the temple.

Predestination, by Howard G. Hageman (Fortress, 1963, 74 pp., $1). A provocative series of letters to young Jan—though they can be read with interest by adults—on the subject of predestination. The language is simple, the thought sharp, the observations shrewd, and the whole rendered even more readable by a dash of humor.

Paperbacks

The English Church in the Fourteenth Century, by W. A. Pantin (University of Notre Dame Press, 1963, 292 pp., $1.95). A treatment of church and state, of intellectual life and controversy, and of the religious literature of fourteenth-century English church history.

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, by Albert Schweitzer (Macmillan, 1963, 124 pp., $.95). Schweitzer’s reminiscences of his boyhood; written with whimsy and charm.

The Sources of Religious Insight, by Josiah Royce (Scribner’s, 1963, 297 pp., $1.65). A major work by the significant American philosopher and religious thinker. First published in 1912.

The Communist Encounter, by Carl Bangs (Beacon Hill, 1963, 94 pp., $1). A “first reader” for those who wish to begin a study of Communism.

Holy Week: A Short History, by J. Gordon Davies (John Knox, 1963, 82 pp., $1.75). An ecumenical study; part of the liturgical renaissance effort to recapture the church year within those churches that discarded it at the Reformation.

Christianity Among the Religions of the World, by Arnold Toynbce (Scribner’s, 1963, 116 pp., $1.25). Toynbee’s allocation of Christianity’s place in the world’s religions. A significant book that disappointed many of his Christian admirers.

The Loveliest Story Ever Told, by Murdoch Campbell (Highland Printers, Ltd., 1962, 94 pp., 4s. 6d.). A running spiritualized commentary on the love story of Isaac and Rebecca. Designed primarily for young people.

Christ, Communism and the Clock, by G. Ray Jordan (Warner, 1963, 128 pp., $1.50). Author believes that the alternatives today are Christ or Communism.

The Great Divorce, by C. S. Lewis (Macmillan, 1963, 128 pp., $.95). Lewis’ story of the bus which travels the route from Hell to Heaven to show that there are absolutes in life, and places where men must choose either/or. First printing 1946.

The Call to Preach, by Clayton Beyler (Herald Press, 1963, 45 pp., $.50). A consideration of the divine call to preach within the context of that call to minister which comes to every member of the Church.

Religion in America, by Willard L. Sperry (Beacon Press, 1963, 317 pp., $2.25). The only American edition in print of this work (first published in 1946) by the former dean of Harvard Divinity School. New introduction by D. W. Grogan.

A Guide to the World’s Religions, by David G. Bradley (Prentice-Hall, 1963, 182 pp., $1.95). Brief, uncritical, historically oriented survey of the major faiths. Lacks a satisfactory frame of reference.

The Dying Lord, by Walter C. Klein (Morehouse-Barlow, 1963, 80 pp., $1.25). Brief Lenten meditations; in both form and content extraordinarily fine.

Religious Language: An Empirical Placing of Theological Phrases, by Ian T. Ramsey (Macmillan, 1963, 221 pp., $1.45). Author argues that a philosophical empirical concern with language renders great service to theology and makes possible a new cooperation between philosophy and theology. Not for amateurs. First printed in 1957.

BOLT ON THE NOSE—Lightning struck a TWA jetliner which carried among its 110 passengers 23 members of the Bethel Bible Lands Tour led by Dr. George E. Failing, editor of The Wesleyan Methodist. The plane was hit eight minutes after it left London Airport for New York. It returned to London safely despite a hole in the nose cone. Failing’s party, which included five ministers, was on the last lap of a 17-day tour of Europe and the Middle East. Also aboard were Hollywood actor Warren Beatty and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer president Robert O’Brien. No one was injured.

PROTESTANT PANORAMA—Lutheran Film Associates say the award-winning picture drama Question 7 will be available for church showings beginning September 1. Concordia Films will handle scheduling. Theme of the film is the conflict between Christianity and Communism in East Germany.

A Baptist church in Elche, Spain, closed by the government since 1955, has been reopened, according to Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board.

International Christian Broadcasters, an evangelical group, is calling for a worldwide chain of prayer on Sunday, June 9, “that Christian broadcasting may make great new advances to the glory of God.” Meanwhile, an ecumenically oriented group announced plans for a new World Association for Christian Broadcasting to replace the loosely knit World Committee for Christian Broadcasting organized in 1953.

Evangelical Free Church of America will begin missionary work among Moslems in the Philippines.

Lutheran Synodical Conference closed out work among Negroes in North America with the sale of Immanuel Lutheran College, Greensboro, North Carolina, to the state, and Alabama Lutheran Academy and College, Selma, Alabama, to the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.

Assemblies of God report a 10 per cent increase of contributions for world missions during 1962. Total was more than $7,350,000, which topped the previous year’s figure by some $690,000.

MISCELLANY—U. N. member states are urged to abolish the mandatory death penalty in a resolution adopted by the organization’s Economic and Social Council. Full U. S. support of the “death sentence ban” was promised by Ambassador Jonathan B. Bingham.

Two practice teachers at a Memphis high school say they were ordered to halt discussion of the theory of evolution. Tennessee law prohibits teaching that man descended from a lower form of animals. School officials say the theory can be cited as pertinent thought but not as something to be believed in. A county judge ruled that the American Baptist Convention must pay taxes on about half of its 55½-acre national offices property at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. He said the convention and associated organizations are “purely public charities” but that 28½ acres are taxable because they are not necessary for the occupancy and “enjoyment of said charity.”

Spokesmen for HCJB, Christian radio station in Quito, Ecuador, say listener response during 1962 included 460 pieces of mail from Communist-controlled countries. The station is heard via shortwave around the world. A number of programs are beamed directly to the Soviet Union and its satellites.

Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles refused to allow Father Hans küng, controversial German theologian, to speak at the UCLA campus. Officials said it was “routine” for a traveling Catholic clergyman to seek permission to speak in a local diocese and that Küng made his request too late.

A “Christian Peace Council,” its political orientation uncertain, will be formed at a constituting assembly in Japan next month. Fifteen members of the Diet, meanwhile, introduced a bill to revive the National Party Day and thereby stirred wide protests from Christian groups who say the move would open the way for rebirth of national Shinto.

Federal Communications Commission is investigating a shortwave station featuring daily overseas broadcasts by Dr. Carl McIntire. One report said the Voice of America has complained that the station, WINB in Red Lion, Pennsylvania, confuses overseas listeners and distorts the image of America. WINB currently operates under a temporary authorization to broadcast test programs.

Nine church bodies in British Guiana petitioned the Ministry of Education for a meeting to discuss “a workable agreement to the government’s plan to set up a Teachers’ Service Commission.” Traditionally, schools in British Guiana have been operated under church sponsorship.

PERSONALIA—“Miss Methodist Student Nurse” for 1963 is a Latvian-born Lutheran, 21-year-old Diane Boitman of Clinton, Iowa. She was chosen for scholastic achievement and dedication to a Christian vocation in a nationwide contest sponsored by the National Association of Methodist Hospitals and Homes.

Congressman Adam Clayton Powell publicly withdrew an announcement that he would resign as minister of Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City effective December 31. He said he would continue to serve his Harlem congregation without salary.

Captain James E. Reaves, a Methodist minister, named senior chaplain at the U. S. Naval Academy.

The Rev. William E. Pannell, Negro evangelist, named to the crusade staff of Youth for Christ International.

The Rev. Floyd C. Woodworth, Assemblies of God missionary leader in Cuba, was released from a Havana jail and flown to Miami after being detained for 20 days on an assortment of charges, including one that he spied for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Christian Research Foundation awarded Professor Bruce M. Metzger of Princeton Theological Seminary a $1,000 prize for his book, Chapters in the History of New Testament Textual Criticism.

The Rev. Larry McGuill appointed to the newly created post of secretary of evangelism in the United States for the Pocket Testament League.

Editor Henry L. McCorkle of The Episcopalian elected president of Associated Church Press. The Rev. Alfred P. Klausler, editor of the Walther League Messenger, will resume his position as executive secretary. He had been forced to give up the post during a tour of active duty as military chaplain.

Among 129 personnel aboard the atomic submarine Thresher lost in the North Atlantic this month was Lieutenant Robert D. Biederman, a leader of the Officers Christian Union chapter in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Biederman traced his conversion experience to student days at a naval architecture school on Long Island. An OCU spokesman described him as “a very clear witness for the Lord.”

WORTH QUOTING—“Church and state should have separate sources of income, the state levying taxes on its citizens, and the church receiving gifts from its members. Careful consideration should be given to the question whether state support of churches tends to weaken the sense of responsibility and participation of church members.”—From a statement adopted by delegates to the First European Baptist Conference on Church and State in Ruschlikon, Switzerland.

“I don’t see why only the Communists get all the propaganda value out of their martyrs. It’s about time we Christians woke up to the fact that martyrs have always been the seed of the Church.”—The Rev. Kenny Joseph, American missionary to Japan, in launching a “Martyred Missionaries’ Fund” for widows of two Wycliffe Translator missionaries killed in Viet Nam.

Deaths

THE RT. REV. G. ASHTON OLDHAM, 85, retired Episcopal bishop and former member of the executive committee of the World Council of Churches; in Litchfield, Connecticut.

DR. J. J. HOFFMANN, 92, noted Methodist minister and former professor at Wheaton College; at Penney Farms, Florida.

THE REV. BERNARD SIGAMONEY, 75, first Indian priest of the Anglican church in South Africa and an outspoken foe of apartheid; in Johannesburg.

PAT BEAIRD, 63, executive vice-president of the Methodist Publishing House; in Nashville, Tennessee.

The rumblings are louder. They are echoing across such unlikely places as Grand Rapids, Winona Lake, Wheaton, Colorado Springs, Pasadena, and Santa Barbara. This month, as if to exploit such reverberations over the nature of biblical inspiration, came a 223-page amplifying commentary from Westminster Press.

The Inspiration of Scripture by the sometime evangelical scholar Dewey M. Beegle might not rate a second look under other circumstances. Its fuchsia-and-brown jacket cloaks basic tenets that amount to a rehash of old arguments. A carefully conceived appeal, however, overtly invites evangelicals to forsake their conviction that divinely inspired original manuscripts of the Bible were free from error, and assails the verbal-inspiration view.

In support of his position, Beegle makes clever use of quotations from trusted evangelical sources, without reflecting important differences. That is one reason some observers predict the book will stir wide controversy.

Another reason is the book’s timely appearance. It coincides with discussions and tensions over the authority of the Bible at numerous evangelical institutions scattered across the land. Also, informal discussions between independent evangelical leaders and leaders in the ecumenical movement have now begun to move toward a discussion of the doctrine of Scripture.

A book from evangelical sources arguing against the Bible’s inerrancy could pit conservative against conservative in theological battle. Some ecumenical spokesmen are increasingly disposed to focus upon inerrancy as the vulnerable spot in the evangelical armory. If emphasis on biblical authority can be detached from biblical inerrancy, they feel, the climate will be more amenable to ecumenical discussion, which flourishes in an atmosphere of theological openness and inclusivism.

The problem is not new. Evangelical Protestant ministers themselves divide on the issue of inerrancy. A poll taken by CHRISTIANITY TODAY as far back as 1957 indicated that 74 per cent of Protestant clergymen chose to be called conservative or fundamental rather than liberal or neoorthodox. The poll distinguished fundamental and conservative in that, apart from doubts about biblical inerrancy, the latter believed all evangelical doctrines. The survey indicated that 48 per cent of all evangelical ministers affirm, while 52 per cent are unsure of or reject, the doctrine of inerrancy. Those who champion inerrancy stress that an authoritative Bible is the watershed of theological fidelity.

The book by Beegle, 44-year-old associate professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at the Biblical Seminary in New York, is a key indication that the debate over inerrancy not only embraces conservatives in the old-line denominations but is now moving into independent evangelical groups. Some see the drift as a counterpart of recent disputes over Scripture in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and in the Southern Baptist Convention, both traditionally conservative bodies.

NEWS / A fortnightly report of developments in religion

A BEEGLE SAMPLER

“It is not the purpose of this book to unsettle the faith of any Christian, but the risk must be taken in order to remove the ‘needless barrier’ which has kept many more from exercising faith in Christ.”

“As a result of a running battle with science during the last fifty or sixty years, many conservative groups within Protestantism have made the doctrine of verbal-plenary inspiration their primary apologetic. This view, which usually lays stress on inerrant autographs, is not in accord with either the Biblical or the non-Biblical facts. I wrote the book in the hope that it would help this segment of Christianity come to a fearless faith which can honestly investigate any new data. On the other hand, some liberal segments of Protestantism have tended to take a dim view of the essential trustworthiness and relevance of Scripture, a view that enervates the gospel and the sense of commission. I wrote with these Christians also in mind.”

“With the aid of the Holy Spirit the Scriptures have always been able to communicate sufficient truth to meet the needs of the sincere, inquiring reader. On the other hand, since language is incapable of absolute communication, we are hardly warranted in describing Scripture in terms of inerrancy.”

“Although facts confirm the Biblical record in many instances, they also disprove it in other cases.”

“Some of the great hymns are practically on a par with the psalms, and one can be sure that if Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, Augustus Toplady, and Reginald Heber had lived in the time of David and Solomon and been no more inspired than they were in their own day, some of their hymns of praise to God would have found their way into the Hebrew canon.” (Italics are Beegle’s.)

“If the facts account for anything, they show that God rejects the inference that translations cannot be inspired because they have some errors.”

“Yes, the great issues of our day demand even more than the ‘formula’ of inerrant autographs. If we can get through this ‘sound barrier,’ as it were, without shattering too many theological windows, we will be ready to challenge the tremendous moral and spiritual problems that confront us …”

Beegle attempts to demolish the doctrine of inerrancy by a curious procedure. He is outspoken in his direct intent to win evangelical converts to his position. Yet he largely addresses the fundamentalist clergy from without. His medium is the United Presbyterian publishing house, which is not known for evangelical best-sellers. Beegle is an elder in the Free Methodist Church (with “one foot out, and one in,” he says). But he graduated from the Free Methodists’ Seattle Pacific College in 1938, went on to Asbury Theological Seminary, then earned a Ph.D. under Dr. William F. Albright at Johns Hopkins University. He has taught at the Biblical Seminary since 1951.

He is also a graduate of the Coast Guard Academy, and served as a line officer during World War II.

A sincere and friendly individual, Beegle regards his role as that of enlightener to those to the right of him theologically. At Biblical, he is known for a rapport with students which he goes out of his way to win, including in his schedule regular workouts on the basketball court.

Beegle’s wife is also a Free Methodist, the daughter of a minister.

Although his church is affiliated with the National Association of Evangelicals, Beegle has never taken an active role in NAE. He has also shied away from the Evangelical Theological Society, explaining that he cannot sign the group’s clause affirming belief in inerrancy of the biblical autographs.

There is a new searching of the problem of inspiration in evangelical schools and movements today. No scholar denies the profundity of the problem. But many evangelicals insist that problems are not automatically resolved by discarding the doctrine of inerrancy. They are prone to regard the concession of an errant Bible as an apologetic convenience ventured hopefully—but unfruitfully—in order to proceed at once to theological debate on other doctrinal concerns.

Beegle’s book is disappointing because of its lack of positive structure and its mainly negative emphasis. He implies that many more persons would put their faith in Christ if the “needless barrier” of inerrancy were removed—an essentially pragmatic argument. But not even the most extreme fundamentalists have preached “Believe on inerrancy and the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved!” Nor have the opponents of inerrancy made converts by preaching “Believe in the errancy of the Bible and in Jesus Christ and be saved!” If converts are won, it is through the proclamation of the Christ of the Bible.

Drawing The Line

The editor of the Baylor Line, a bimonthly magazine published by the Baylor University Ex-Students Association, resigned this month in a dispute over how to report incidents resulting from the cancellation at Baylor last December of the play Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The editor, Mrs. Frances Provence, charged association executives with censorship. They denied it.

The Baptist school’s officials had objected to profanity in the play.

Southern Baptist Crisis—Climax Awaited

“The history of war does not know of any undertaking so broad in concept and so grandiose in its scale and masterful in its execution.” So said Joseph Stalin of the Allied invasion of Normandy. However, Old Joe never spoke in terms of spiritual warfare, and though a Georgian, had never attended a Southern Baptist Convention. Of all American church conventions, none other has the size, the color, the organization, the sweeping momentum reminiscent of a mighty, driving thrust to establish a beachhead of righteousness on some Satanic shore.

The drama of salvation is soon to be enacted once again at the annual Southern Baptist Convention, to be held in Kansas City’s mammoth auditorium, where some 15,000 “messengers” will seek inspiration from music, sermonic oratory, and pageantry, will hear reports of denominational progress, will conduct convention business and pass resolutions which will not be formally binding on the component autonomous churches.

But lately, the bugle sounding the attack has been emitting unmistakable sounds of discord. Phenomenal Southern Baptist growth has slowed somewhat, and while the front has not broken, reconnoiterers have called for regrouping of forces and reexamination and perhaps reaffirmation of old battle plans. They seek to avert a sundering of their own army along a tearing edge provided approximately by the mighty Mississippi.

There are some who will tell you that last year’s convention clash in San Francisco was simply a skirmish, prelude to what could become civil strife in Kansas City. Others say the controversy can be safely contained, given wise handling of the administrative controls. Many point fearfully to the specter of a wrong battle fought in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Southern Baptists are familiarly known as “people of the Book.” The internal struggle now disturbing the denomination swirls around the issue of how the Book shall be believed, whether it is indeed infallible as historically held by Southern Baptists—a claim now challenged in a day of epistemological innovation. San Francisco did not settle the issue, ramifications of which have been mushrooming ever since.

Interest in the controversy is by no means limited to the South. For one thing, Southern Baptists are no longer simply Southern but press all borders as the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. And for another, the theological and academic implications press to the borders of Christendom. Liberals in other churches may watch, fascinated, expecting to see the history of their own denominations cycled among Southern Baptists. Conservatives in the same churches may watch fearfully, sensing possible eventual loss of the greatest remaining denominational bastion of Protestant orthodoxy. And Protestant seminaries look on as a sister seminary struggles with the age-old problem of harmonizing academic freedom and responsibility.

The seminary, as everyone knows, is Midwestern in Kansas City, which will help to host the coming convention, and in so doing will doubtless receive many a quizzical stare. For the key name of the controversy is that of a former professor there, Ralph H. Elliott, whose book The Message of Genesis (published by the denomination’s Sunday School Board) drew repeated attacks at last year’s convention for what conservatives called its destructively critical approach to the Scriptures. Among objectionable features cited were these: stories of the first eleven chapters of Genesis are described as parables which are profoundly symbolical but not literally true; Melchizedek is designated as a worshiper of Baal though the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews both exalts Christ and refers to him as “an high priest after the order of Melchizedec,” and refers to the latter as a “priest of the most high God” (5:10; 7:1).

Elliott was subsequently dismissed from Midwestern, and there are those who feel the whole story of this action has never been told. Apparently the final breakdown in relations between Elliott and the Midwestern trustees came from his refusal to withdraw his book from publication voluntarily, that is, without being asked to do so by the trustees.

Some conservatives feel the trustees evaded the real theological issues of the case and looked for other ground on which to dismiss the controversial Elliott, who is said to be more conservative than others on the same faculty who have adopted more radical critical views but have not put them in print. The same is said of some professors at Southern and Southeastern seminaries, the New Testament department of the latter having been charged in some quarters as being strongly Bultmannian. In any case, Elliott’s “liberalism” is not to be equated with the “modernism” found in some northern denominations.

The theological situation at Midwestern in connection with the Elliott case has presented some confusing aspects. A dissenting trustee wrote: “The trustees approved the historical-critical method [of Bible study] but took action to put a prohibitive fear in the mind of any competent professor who might desire to write a manuscript by that method in the future. The trustees were informed that the president of the seminary and other members of the faculty had identified themselves with Dr. Elliott in his use of the historical-critical method; yet the trustees dismissed Professor Elliott but took no action against his associates. The trustees evaded the content of the resolution approved by the Southern Baptist Convention at San Francisco, but sought an appeasement by using Professor Elliott as a symbol of escape.” (The San Francisco resolution, overwhelmingly adopted, reads: “That we express our abiding and unchanging objection to the dissemination of theological views in any of our seminaries which would undermine such faith in the historical accuracy and doctrinal integrity of the Bible, and that we courteously request the trustees and administrative officers of our institutions and other agencies to take such steps as shall he necessary to remedy at once those situations where such views now threaten our historic position.”)

Editorial opinion in Baptist state convention papers has been sharply divided on the merits of the Elliott dismissal as it relates to academic freedom, and rumblings of dissent have been heard in Southern Baptist colleges particularly. Last December, 37 professors of Bible and religion from eight Southern Baptist colleges in southeastern states released a statement charging that the Southern Baptist Convention and its agencies and boards are acting under an “authority … which is in opposition to the authority of Scripture.” It spoke of the “crisis” resulting from Elliott’s dismissal and the raising anew of the issue of the “limited, relative, human” nature of authority in the Convention. Action of the Midwestern trustees was termed a “flagrant abuse of this derived authority because it clearly gave priority to such unscriptural criteria as unity and peace within the Convention which clearly contradict the witness of Christ and prophets.”

In February an organization calling itself Baptists for Freedom came into being with publication of a newsletter. Centered in the Kansas City area and headed by an 11-man steering committee of pastors, laymen, and seminary students, the group claimed a mailing list of 5,000 Southern Baptists in 27 states. It described its raison d’être in terms of a threat to “our traditional liberties … by the rise of authoritarianism in our Convention.”

Conservatives have not been silent. The Rev. K. Owen White, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Houston, said that Elliott’s dismissal was only “the first step in a movement to slow the trend to liberalism in our denomination.” “We were asleep,” says the Rev. Ralph Powell of Beaumont Baptist Church in Independence, Missouri. “This was just like Pearl Harbor. They almost got us. I understand 90 per cent of the students who graduate accept this kind of teaching. Why, in three or four years they would have multiplied like rabbits.”

Liberals tend to read the current crisis in Southern Baptist theological education partly in cultural terms of the old segregationist South holding out against modern scholarship and against its proponents who are unwilling to “commit intellectual suicide in order to uphold an infallible Bible.” Conservatives respond that the present large extension of Southern Baptist work in the North shows that the conservative element (which is credited with the lion’s share of evangelistic expansion) adapts itself very well to other ways of life in the interests of the Gospel. They point not to culture but to theology as the basic issue—the veracity of God’s Word—and attribute phenomenal Southern Baptist gains to forthright, unapologetic preaching of the Bible as the infallible Word of God.

Again, liberals tend to see the current denominational debate on theology in terms of an attempt of a fundamentalist action group to take over the denomination, success of which would sound a death knell for honest intellectual pursuits. Conservatives respond that the liberal wing is a closely-knit power bloc, intent on winning the denomination gradually by means of the seminary classroom. They point to a large body of young, intellectually alert Christians who are growing distrustful of “academicians who talk in riddles” and seem to be “promoting religion for sociology’s sake and experience for psychology’s sake.” Conservatives say further that they need not resort to bloc action, for they tend to dominate the recognized channels of denominational activity—conventions, pastors’ conferences (which precede the general convention and weigh heavily in setting the convention tone)—by sheer weight of numbers.

Ninety per cent of the Convention leadership is estimated to be theologically conservative. Liberalism is said to exist primarily in certain pulpits especially in the East (north of Georgia) and to be widespread in the eastern colleges.

There are indications that Southern Baptists are no longer primarily a rural people. Convention leadership, including the key heads of the boards, has been described as “well-educated, informed, and conservative.”

Completing a second term as Convention president is able conservative Herschel H. Hobbs, pastor of Oklahoma City’s First Baptist Church, author, and radio preacher on The Baptist Hour, which reaches 50 million listeners weekly. In his presidential address at last year’s convention he noted that Southern Baptists were scarcely touched in the modernist-fundamentalist controversy but rather chose the occasion to reaffirm, under the leadership of famed theologian E. Y. Mullins, the “fundamentals” and “supernatural” characteristics of Christianity. The later rise of neoorthodoxy, said Hobbs, “received scant notice from Southern Baptists. But in recent years a few of their theologians have recognized the contribution which it seeks to make to the theological scene. There have been some efforts to adjust Southern Baptist faith to its position.” But neoorthodoxy represents only a “half-way” return from extreme liberalism toward “a Bible-centered theology.” He said Southern Baptists had a “right to be concerned” about their educational institutions inasmuch as they “have seen the departure of many denominations from their historic faith begin in their colleges and seminaries.” Hobbs went on to defend the majority of seminary professors.

National significance of the Southern Baptist theological situation is reflected in the astounding fact that some 30 per cent of all students in all accredited (by the American Association of Theological Schools) theological schools are in the six Southern Baptist seminaries. Indications are that the more conservative of these seminaries are enjoying the greatest public acceptance. The general theological situation is mixed, but a northern theologian who has had close and extensive contact with Southern Baptist seminaries and their professors drew the following picture of certain weaknesses: “There is a noticeable reticence on the part of some in the academic community to speak and write as conservative theologians. Many will admit to being conservatives in theology when pressed, but it is not the public, driving thrust of their utterances. This is due in part to the notion that it is unpopular to admit a ‘position’ or that it is unsophisticated. Much of this is due, I think, to the fact that Southern Baptists just have not had an articulate theology for over a generation.

“Professors have not been productive during this period. Too much writing of articles and some books is done out of reaction, not out of faith. There is a spirit of destructive criticism abroad in educational circles, and this has created its own reaction of which the educators are now fearful.

“As for Elliott’s book, though it is being reprinted by Bethany Press [publishing house of the Christian Churches] its director has noted it is ‘not a major scholarly work.’ I would go further and say that it is poorly written and poorly argued. He begins with conjectures that emerge from certain critical approaches and indicates that such conclusions are tentative, then he proceeds to build interpretation on these conclusions as factual and binding. It’s a sort of second-hand scholarship.

“A common tendency amongst academicians in filling the thought vacuum is to import the theological problems from Germany and Switzerland especially, wrenched out of theological, sociological and political context, and then to superimpose them upon the Southern Baptist scene.

“Some professors at heart are resenting the current focus of attention upon them and seem to have the idea that their profession should give them an automatic immunity from any criticism or attack. At the same time, suspicious persons on the fringe of the Convention make capital of the many crises. It is an open possibility that the theologically illiterate and temperamentally obdurate fringe element may divide the Convention and destroy the wonderful effectiveness of the Cooperative Program in home and foreign missions, education, etc.

“Southern Baptists are a wonderful people, vibrant, generous, and loyal to their work. They have a passionate desire to establish New Testament churches. They tithe and give financially in fantastic ways. They have been unusually effective as soul winners. I pray God may preserve this great denomination and make it a power for the evangelical cause, both in this country and throughout the world.”

The great need for expository preaching from Southern Baptist pulpits has been noted by many, including President Hobbs. Yet the foregoing criticisms must be tempered by the reminder that Southern Baptists (followed by Missouri Synod Lutherans) constitute the largest theologically-conservative force in America. Judged by the same norms, other major U. S. Protestant denominations would fare poorly indeed.

But what of Kansas City and thereafter? Is the Southern Baptist Convention to split under its own massive weight, to which have been added mounting theological disputes? Some well-informed sources think not. They draw the following picture: (1) Only 10 per cent of the Convention, described as militant conservatives, favor a split now, taking “what few institutions” are still wholly conservative: “The longer we wait, the more we’ll lose.” (2) Some 10 per cent are estimated to be liberal and neoorthodox, these favoring avoidance of a split as long as possible. Then if it must come, say in six or eight years, “we’ll carry the key institutions.” (3) About 80 per cent say, “Avoid a fight and keep the peace. Southern Baptists are generally conservative and moderate. We must keep our institutions, rather than leave the convention without them, and very few of them would now go out.” Some have commented that the cooperation on which the Convention is built is not theological but evangelistic and missionary. “ ‘Conservative’ means to conserve this spirit. As long as professors conduct revivals and win souls, they meet this requirement.”

As the convention draws near, leaders point to the harmonizing effect upon various factions being wrought by the recently released “Statement of Baptist Faith and Message” (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Mar. 29 issue). However, conservatives have noted two additions to the basic 1925 statement on the Bible which lend themselves, they say, to neoorthodox interpretation: (1) “The Holy Bible … is the record of God’s revelation of Himself to man” (the Bible is not itself called revelation); (2) “The criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ.”

Past Southern Baptist controversies are recalled by words like Landmarkism, Norrisite fundamentalism, and evolution. But President Herschel Hobbs, whose considerable peacemaking talents could be sorely tested in Kansas City, points to problems as a sign of life. His address at last year’s convention concluded: “Yes, this is an age of crisis. But Southern Baptists are not afraid of crises. They were born in crisis. Their history reveals that they have passed through seven major crises. And Southern Baptists emerged from each stronger and more resolute than ever before. They have always turned a crisis into a conquest. God grant that they shall do so now!”

F.F.

Cardinal Bea Goes To Harvard

Augustin Cardinal Bea bluntly told a rapt Cambridge audience that the “fundamental teaching of Roman Catholicism will not be changed. There is no possibility of this.” “There is no likelihood,” he specified, “that the dogma of the infallibility of the Pope will be revised,” and he warned that “unity based on a least common denominator would not be a blessing but a curse.” “Loyalty to truth,” he said, “is loyalty to Christ.” But, breathing good will from every pore, he asserted that the “Church’s hands are not tied” in the pursuit of unity with Protestants.

Cardinal Bea, president of the Vatican’s permanent Secretariat for Promoting the Unity of Christians, met last month with about 150 Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars at the invitation of Harvard Divinity School. The invitation came from an appropriate source: Harvard is the first Protestant seminary in the United States to establish a chair of Roman Catholic studies. The purpose of the colloquium, according to its chairman Professor G. Ernest Wright, was “exploration in areas of common interest and concern, not with any ulterior purpose in mind other than mutual understanding. It is for this reason that only scholars have been invited to attend seminars and to participate in the discussions.”

The 81-year-old, German-born cardinal, a competent biblical scholar and a bit of a pixie, gave three public addresses in Harvard’s Sanders Theater before closed-circuit TV cameras to full-house audiences. Admission, through police-guarded gates, was by ticket only.

Bea told his audience that joint scholarly probings by Christians of different persuasions would “doubtless produce good results,” by eliminating much misunderstanding and creating new awareness of what Roman Catholics and Protestants have in common. He warned, however, that the interests of unity will not be furthered by compromise of doctrine and that “authentic love for truth demands that our differences are not glossed over.”

Bea discussed the significance of the more important happenings of the Second Vatican Council, expressing particular happiness for the presence of the Protestant observers in Rome and for the felicitous effects it had upon them and upon the council itself. He emphasized the sudden, near-miraculous change in Protestant-Roman Catholic relations. Two years ago, he said, none would have even dreamed of the possibility of such an interfaith meeting at Harvard.

He attributed the surprising change in the Roman Catholic-Protestant climate as a work of the Spirit of God, and he reminded his audience that the Holy Office Instruction of 1949 regarding the Protestant ecumenical movement “did not hesitate to declare that these efforts are sign that the Holy Spirit is moving among our non-Catholic Christian brethren, a sign that Christ is acting in them and through them.”

In the lectures and public meetings it was evident that an attempt will be made by scholars of both sides to resolve the seemingly irresolvable differences regarding Scripture and tradition. Roman Catholics, on their side, urged that infallibility adheres to the substance of tradition and not to its form of literary expression. They also pointed out that there are many things in the Church’s life and practice which have not been definitely defined in either Scripture or tradition. Cardinal Bea pointed to the situational character of the Church’s confessions, and also urged that the partial character of the confessions does not mean that what is not said is therefore error.

Protestant scholars with special sensitivity for the relative character of the historical and a special penchant for historical research saw some hope that Roman Catholic recognition of the relativism that adheres to the historical could lead to a softening of the absolute, authoritative character of the church’s tradition.

James M. Robinson, of the Southern California School of Theology at Claremont, in his lecture titled “Interpretation of Scripture in Biblical Studies Today,” expressed hope that Rome would reinterpret its understanding of that “literal sense” of Scripture whose application resulted in the excommunication of Alfred Loisy. He baited Rome to do so by confessing that Protestants today no longer absolutize the validity of the historical criticism of the Scripture, and are more concerned now about the truth content of Scripture, He reminded his audience that at least one Roman Catholic scholar can be cited for the position that some biblical stories are not true but do tell the truth. It was not difficult to sense that there were deep differences at Harvard in the very area where there would seem to be the greatest possibility of rapprochement. It was also evident that on the matter of Scripture, Rome has far more in common with that conservative evangelical scholarship which was largely absent at Harvard. The Harvard colloquium was another instance of the truism: where differences are greatest, the movement of rapprochement is easiest.

In a lightly attended, scintillating lecture spiced with good humor, Father Gregory Baum, O.S.A., of St. Michael’s College, spoke out of a similar respect for the historical. He pointed out that there are two schools of thought in Romanism on Scripture and tradition, one of which does not regard the latter as a second, independent source of revelation. He too urged the need of interpreting the teachings of the Church in reference to their historical context. He reminded his audience that Pope John has said that “one thing is doctrine, and formulation of doctrine is another.” “No other Pope,” he urged, “ever said this.” Moreover, he added, it is a distinction that has been especially suspect during the last fifty years because of theological modernism.

The invited theological experts met three mornings in four tightly closed seminars, discussing: (1) Biblical Studies: Record and Interpretation, (2) Symbol and Sacrament, (3) “Reformatio,” and (4) Conscience in a Pluralistic Society: Theological and Sociological Issues.

The last and least touchy of the four topics was selected for a public panel which concluded the four-day efforts and was publicized as a reflection of the closed seminars. Professor Krister Stendahl gave an interesting paper on the “westernized” conscience, and Dr. Paul L. Lehmann, with such shortened time as he had, made some telling thrusts. For the rest the panel was both dull and disappointing. It remained as far from a genuine confrontation of Protestant and Roman Catholic thought as Harvard Square is from St. Peter’s Square. If the panel reflected the thinking of the closed seminars, the guarding of admittance was an expendable procedure. Sheer boredom would have amply protected the experts from the public.

The panel did perhaps reflect the seminars. One invited delegate said of the latter, “Most discussions could have taken place between Protestant and Protestant, or between Roman Catholic and Roman Catholic. They were afraid to come to grips.”

The conference added to the growing feeling of good will. This is all to the good, after a four-century wall of silence. Harvard’s interfaith gathering again pointed up that a certain liberalizing movement is occurring within Roman Catholicism. There will be a thaw, it seems, on such things as the language and rites of public worship, use of the Bible and the vernacular—possibly on mixed marriages, and perhaps in a combined Roman Catholic-Protestant effort to relieve the sufferings of mankind. But it will be more akin to the liberation associated with the Reformation than to a later theological liberalism. What will happen as an essentially conservative Roman church and a more liberal Protestant church achieve greater rapport is something, to quote an early church father, “God only knows.”

In a special convocation April 5 the Catholic University of America in Washington, D. C., honored Cardinal Bea with the degree of Doctor of Sacred Theology honoris causa. In conferring the degree Patrick Aloysius O’Boyle, archbishop of Washington and chancellor of the university, hailed Bea as a “champion of Christian unity.” Earlier this year Fathers Gustave Weigel and Hans Küng, leading advocates of rapprochement between Roman Catholics and Protestants, were denied the right to speak at the university, known for its conservatism. The rousing applause given Bea by the students of the university was perhaps a happy sign of our times.

J.D.

A Private Mission?

Augustin Cardinal Bea dismissed as “mere invention” a press report that his trip to Washington this month had diplomatic or political overtones.

In a statement issued at the Catholic University of America, Cardinal Bea replied to a news story carried in the April 5 issue of Time magazine.

The article stated that Cardinal Bea “comes with a private diplomatic mission from Pope John. In Washington, through unofficial intermediaries, Bea will let the Wffiite House know the reasoning behind Pope John’s surprising new willingness to negotiate with Communism, perhaps explain what further diplomatic moves are afoot.”

Cardinal Bea’s statement also dismissed as “invention” the article’s report that in speaking with “a friend in Rome before his trip,” he had said: “The U. S. is angry now. I’m afraid they will soon be angrier.”

The prelate said he was “on no diplomatic mission whatsoever.”

The visit to the United States by Cardinal Bea included lectures in the Boston area, New York, Baltimore, and Washington. As for as is known he did not visit the White House before returning to Rome.

Catholic Committal?

White House press aide Andrew T. Hatcher, appearing at the annual meeting of the Associated Church Press in Nashville, was asked if Democrats had not now committed themselves to nominating Roman Catholic presidential candidates exclusively.

In replying to the question posed by Editor Sherwood E. Wirt of Decision, Hatcher said he recognized the pressures of big-city politics.

“But I can’t see why they would adopt a policy like that,” he added. “I think we have many Protestants who are capable of running for the presidency.”

Hatcher, a Baptist, cited Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a Presbyterian, as possible presidential timber.

Hatcher’s speech to the editors described how the Kennedy administration has broadened news accessibility at the White House. He did not venture an opinion on the ethical propriety of issuing false information to deceive an enemy, and none of the editors thought to ask him about it.

Five publications were honored at the ACP’s awards dinner. Motive, a controversial magazine of the Methodist Student Movement, was applauded for its graphic appeal. “Editorial courage” awards went to Presbyterian Survey, official magazine of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern), and One, published by the American Lutheran Church. Cited for “notable improvement” were the United Church Observer, published by the United Church of Canada, and Church and State, published by Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Man’S Specialties

In the United States on his annual visit, noted British anthropologist Louis S. B. Leakey suggests that man is overspecialized in his hands and brains. As a result man has created the tools of his own self-destruction. But Leakey sees a ray of hope in that man may save himself if he properly uses his overspecialized brain.

At a news conference in Washington last month, Leakey averred that his continued fossil findings in East Africa present “no major conflict” with the Scriptures. He has written, nonetheless, that “the stock which eventually gave rise to man separated from that of the great apes and the gibbons, at least in Lower Miocene times, perhaps 25,000,000 years ago (The Progress and Evolution of Man in Africa, 1961, p. 37).

Leakey, son of Anglican missionaries, also has said that the African continent was “the main evolutionary center” for the higher primates and the birthplace of man himself, because there is “far more evidence concerning apes and ‘nearmen’ ” from that continent than any other area (Adam’s Ancestors, 1953, p. 185).

Leakey and his wife, who now work under the auspices of the National Geographic Society, are widely regarded as the world’s foremost prehistorians.

Meanwhile, in New York, the National Council of Churches issued a press release which concludes that “in most people’s minds there is no longer any conflict between the teachings of the Bible and those of Charles Darwin on man’s origin.”

The release cited weekly NCC telecasts “which accept and explain the theory of evolution.” It said that heavy mail from viewers shows that “scarcely one in 1,000 still finds any conflict between the Darwinian theory and the Book of Genesis.”

A Kind Of Cheating

Exciting new variations on reactionary old hymns are currently heard in England as a result of the paperback Honest to God by John Robinson, Anglican bishop of Woolwich. “O Mathematics, our help in ages past” suggests the full-throated opening praise when Cambridge’s radical theologians meet together to plan their next bombshell. Future missionaries will be sent off to the tender strains of “Ultimate Reality be with you till we meet again.” Some of Robinson’s fellow bishops have ventured mild protests, but most of them have followed the lead of Oscar Wilde’s famous character who “knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.”

The philosophers and scientists have not been so uninhibited. Dr. Robinson is surely right in concentrating on the problem of God, states Sir Julian Huxley, “for God is central to Christianity. But he seems to me wrong in stating that ‘God is ultimate reality.’ “

“This is just semantic cheating,” continued the 75-year-old biologist, “and so vague as to be effectively meaningless.”

Said noted philosopher Antony Flew: “Does Dr. Robinson appreciate that (one section of his book) must make Tillich’s theology, in all but Tillich’s own peculiar sense, atheist?” A correspondent in The Observer suggests that the bishop should demonstrate the courage of his convictions by ceasing “to accept a secure living from the Church whose main traditional doctrines he now repudiates, and cast his bread upon the waters of this secular world, which, in his opinion, is so mature as to be able to dispense with a ‘Father-God’ and to look after itself.”

Dr. Michael Ramsey, archbishop of Canterbury, declared that he thinks it is “utterly wrong” for the bishop “to denounce the imagery of God held by Christian men, women and children: imagery that they have got from Jesus himself, the image of God the Father in Heaven.”

One minister wondered how the bishop celebrated Easter Day. The possibilities are boundless.

J.D.D.

‘Pacem In Terris’

The Vatican displayed its political initiative openly this month with the issuance of a 20,000-word papal encyclical suggesting creation of a global authority to guard the peace.

Some observers are convinced that Pope John XXIII is now making a forthright bid to interact more creatively on the world scene. His friendlier posture toward the Communists seems to confirm such speculation, and many Catholics are reported to be disturbed over this turn.

A measure of Protestant anxiety also appears evident. The Federal Council of Protestant Churches in Italy issued a statement of concern following the meeting between the Pope and Khrushchev’s son-in-law. The council attributes to Roman Catholicism “a widespreading and farlooking policy that aims at reconstructing the mediaeval and theocratic union between Throne and Altar … Catholicism is conscious of the growing opportuneness of post-war conditions for its universalist ambitions … and now is expanding its relationship with secular powers ready to take up again the reins of spiritual direction for humanity.”

Here are significant excerpts from the papal encyclical, Pacem in Terris:

Today the universal common good poses problems of worldwide dimensions, which cannot be adequately tackled or solved except by the efforts of public authorities endowed with a wideness of powers, structure and means of the same proportions: that is, of public authorities which are in a position to operate in an effective manner on a worldwide basis. The moral order itself, therefore, demands that such a form of public authority be established.

A public authority, having worldwide power and endowed with the proper means for the efficacious pursuit of its objective, which is the universal common good in concrete form, must be set up by common accord and not imposed by force. The reason is that such an authority must be in a position to operate effectively yet, at the same time, its action must be inspired by sincere and real impartiality: in other words, it must be an action aimed at satisfying the objective requirements of the universal common good.

The encyclical did not say what kind of relationship the Vatican might want with such an authority.

Back In The Pulpit

Evangelist Billy Graham returned to the U. S. mainland this month after two months of convalescence in Hawaii. He plans to resume preaching on Sunday, May 12, at the opening of a week-long crusade in Paris. Prior to that Graham and his wife will attend the wedding of their oldest daughter in Switzerland.

The evangelist has been recovering from an intestinal ailment which forced him to cancel a Far Eastern tour. Local committees in 14 cities agreed to proceed with scheduled crusades, using other evangelists on Graham’s team. Akbar Haqq, an evangelist from India who is one of Graham’s associates, was a speaker during the first phase of the Japan Baptist New Life Movement in Tokyo. At the closing Tokyo rally, 10,000 Japanese heard a sermon by Baker James Cauthen, Southern Baptist missions official.

Evangelist Grady Wilson’s crusade in Manila saw 20,000 turn out for the closing service. A similar number heard evangelist Roy Gustafson in Hong Kong. Crowds of up to 8,000 heard evangelist Joseph Blinco in Taipei. Some 3,000 U. S. servicemen and dependents assembled for a service in Okinawa and heard Cliff Barrows preach.

Westminster Press has just issued a volume on The Inspiration of Scripture by Dewey M. Beegle. This publication holds special interest through its issuance by a denominational publishing house at a time when ecumenical discussion is centering on Scripture and tradition; through the fact that its author is associate professor of Hebrew and Old Testament in Biblical Seminary in New York, whose founders emphasized that the Bible should stand at the center of the theological curriculum; and through the fact that many evangelical institutions and movements are presently engaged in spirited conversations on the subject of Scripture.

The author “frankly acknowledges his genuine belief in the inspiration and authority of Scripture” and concedes that “few areas of Christian life and thought … do not lead back eventually to the issue of inspiration.” He urges “by the inductive method … a reverent approach to Scripture that resolves at all costs to let God’s Word speak for itself.” Christian theology can in fact become endangered through “superbelief” (such as a docetic view of the Incarnation or a dictation view of inspiration). “Is one justified … in claiming more than Scripture does? Can there be in actuality a higher view (of inspiration) than the biblical view?”

Evangelical scholars will not hesitate to reappraise their regard for the Bible in the light of Professor Beegle’s claims and comments. Most evangelical Christians hold the plenary-verbal view of the Bible’s inspiration; they affirm, in other words, that the whole Bible is inspired by a divine superintendence extending to the very words. They stress the Old Testament’s “thus saith the Lord,” a phrase found some 1,200 times, and New Testament passages on the nature of inspiration such as 2 Timothy 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:19–21. They hold that the original writings teach nothing contrary to fact.

Evangelical theologians acknowledge that inerrancy is not formally claimed by the biblical writers. But they assert that it is a proper inference from the Bible’s teaching about its own inspiration, and from the character of the self-revealing God.

It must be granted, as Professor Beegle insists, that the scriptural writers do not expound the doctrine of inspiration (or any doctrine) with “the detail and completeness of systematic theologians”—including, we might add, of Beegle’s own treatise. “Scripture does not tell us the mode or means by which God revealed his message to his inspired servants.” It may be noted that evangelicals do not adduce verbal inspiration as a full answer to the question of method, but rather as a verdict on the inspired end-product or sacred writings.

Dr. Beegle declares the biblical teaching and data to be “so complex and many-faceted that it is virtually impossible to formulate the doctrine of inspiration in any concise, general statement.” We are therefore hardly prepared for his own attempt to account for the Bible in the main by an “extraordinary help of the Holy Spirit” which here sinks to mere intuition and there to mere illumination. No precise definition is given of the nature and content of inspiration, but disturbingly general statements appear: “While there is some justification” for a distinction between inspired men and the inspiration of a compiler of a book, “the idea has been carried too far in some instances.” Or, “inspiration had to do with the understanding of the historical record, not the inerrancy of every word incorporated from the sources.”

We are told that “only a general statement of the range or extent of revelation and inspiration can be given.” Our dissatisfaction is doubled by Professor Beegle’s downgrading of past discussions of inspiration from the second through the nineteenth centuries as “essentially general affirmations of the divine and human aspects of Scripture in which these two facets are nowhere “explicitly reconciled.” If, as Beegle thinks, “the data of Scripture do not warrant the ‘fixed’ meanings” which evangelical theologians assign to the terms “revelation” and “inspiration,” their intelligibility demands a clear statement of what fluid meanings define these supernatural activities.

Beegle is far more explicit in stating the position he rejects: “The sovereignty of God, the honor of Jesus Christ, and the trustworthiness of biblical doctrine are not at stake in accepting a view of inspiration that rejects the qualification of inerrancy.” “We can speak of the Bible as being inspired from cover to cover, human mistakes and all.” Yet “there is no need to posit unique inspiration for every word of the Bible. There are degrees of something in Scripture, and it is more than just degrees of revelation.”

The author at times overstates conservative counter-claims in seeking to discredit them. Champions of the high view are made to say that “without a perfect original text one could just as well turn to Buddhist or Hindu literature.” They are sometimes pictured as requiring repudiation of the entire content of the Bible once its inerrancy is surrendered, and as holding that the whole edifice of belief in revealed religion thereby collapses. The author should stipulate those “groups within Protestantism” which “during the last seventy-five years” have made inspiration “the pivotal doctrine of the Gospel” and hold as “popular opinion … that Christian faith is impossible without belief in the inerrancy of Scripture.” Again Beegle identifies as “a major contention” the view that whoever abandons inerrancy “will eventually … become an extreme liberal.” Yet Beegle himself quotes Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield as emphasizing that the rejection of scriptural inerrancy does not destroy the case for theism and that the burden upon unbelief remains fully as great. Surely evangelical theologians do not make an inerrant record the primary purpose of inspiration. Taken simply as trustworthy records the Scriptures confront the reader with adequate evidence for biblical theism and for faith in Jesus Christ. While the author finally concedes that evangelical leaders “now acknowledge” that belief in scriptural inerrancy is not necessary for salvation, he attacks an alfalfa dummy in making evangelicals contend that inerrancy is the ground of the whole Christian faith.

Beegle’s announced objective is to demolish the premise of inerrancy. A. G. Hebert’s view is endorsed that inerrancy is “a new doctrine” and that “the modern fundamentalist is asserting something that no previous age has understood in anything like the modern sense.” He links the doctrine of inerrancy to a “deterministic definition of divine sovereignty” and insists that it “leads eventually into the mechanical or dictation theory of inspiration”: “Unless God dictated his revelation word for word, there is no assurance that the Old Testament writers caught all the nuances or overtones of God’s self-disclosure.” Thus to advocates of inerrancy he imputes what they disown and repudiate. Temporary retention of the belief, he tells us, may be psychologically valuable in a transition time while one is filling it with new meaning. Since evangelicals ordinarily refuse to detach psychological value from objective truth, and consider reprehensible the retention of terms or doctrines through the device of redefinition, it is remarkable to find an evangelical scholar thus justifying the doctrine.

But Professor Beegle’s hostility extends also to the plenary-verbal inspiration of the Scriptures. He deplores not only inerrancy, but identification of the position of Scripture and of the Apostolic Church as “verbal plenary”: “Only when Scripture and history of doctrine are read with the presupposition of inerrancy is it possible to extend the twentieth-century formulation of verbal plenary, inerrant inspiration back through church history and even into Scripture itself.”

In rejecting verbal inspiration—that is, an inspiration that extends to the words themselves—Beegle views Matthew 5:17, 18 as an attack by Jesus upon the Pharisaic tendency to stress the letter rather than the spirit of the law. But Beegle does not even consider that spirit and letter are not necessarily antagonistic, or that Jesus may seek spiritual fulfillment of the letter. Hence espousal of verbal inspiration is subtly but unconvincingly equated with Phariseeism in contemporary form. The Apostle Paul’s “uncertainty” over whom he baptized (1 Cor. 1:14–16) and his contrast of spirit and letter (1 Cor. 2:1–16) are held to preclude his verbal inspiration. But no mention is made of 1 Thessalonians 2:13, “For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God.…”

For Beegle Scripture’s function is to record and transmit that portion of redemptive history which suffices for belief in Jesus Christ and thus for eternal life. “By proper methods of interpretation human reason can distill the relevant aspects of Scripture.”

Obviously the author narrows the Bible’s profitability from apostolic indications of its value (cf. 2 Tim. 3:16). The statement that “humble submission to the Christ back of Scripture is far more crucial than one’s doctrine of revelation and inspiration” is disappointingly oblique in a book presumably expounding not salvation but inspiration. And the rejection in principle of scriptural revelation is evident from Beegle’s emphasis that “technically speaking … the Bible is a record or witness to revelation,” in contrast to the Church’s traditional position that the Scriptures “are special revelation.”

The Phenomena of Scripture

The author specially aims to construct his view not primarily from the teaching of the sacred writers about their inspiration, but from the textual phenomena (which Dr. Beegle calls “the facts” in contrast with “the doctrinal statements”).

The author faces us with a series of dubious disjunctions. When he states that “aside from the ultimate authority of the triune God, Scripture is our highest authority,” he apparently deprives the Bible at any point of full divine authority. Against an appeal to divine sovereignty in expounding inerrant inspiration, Beegle argues that a sovereign God would achieve his purposes through variety rather than through one method.

In sweeping departure from 2 Timothy 3:16, Beegle passes this judgment on the Old Testament canon: “The books of the Old Testament range from works of unquestioned authority and revelational content to those of questionable authority and rather insignificant value. Some portions of the apocryphal books appear to have greater worth than some sections of the canonical books.…” As Beegle sees it, mere intuition (religious genius or spiritual insight) may account for the historical investigations represented in the writing of Luke’s Gospel and the Acts. Nothing more than illumination is needed to account for a number of other scriptural passages.

From this verdict the distance is not far to an attribution of inspiration to some non-canonical writings alongside the denial of inspiration to elements of the canonical. Does the setting of canonical limits, Beegle asks, “mean that every word within these limits is uniquely inspired of God, while every word outside the canon is not inspired?”

Yet in discussing the New Testament canon, Beegle tells us that the book of Jude (despite its alleged citation of apocryphal literature as authoritative) “has an authoritative ring which sets it apart from … apocryphal books and from the writings of the early church fathers.” But if both canonical and non-canonical literature are inspired, and if Scripture is errant, does not the designation of canonical rest simply upon arbitrary authority or subjective preference?

Original and Copies

We are told that “the Bible makes no essential distinction” between autographs, copies, and translations, and that all three “derive ultimately from God and that all are authoritative.” If this assertion implies as it does a biblical denial of the unique inspiration of the original writers, or an equivalent inspiration of copyists and translators, it is wide of the facts. Inerrancy of autographs would assertedly require identical inspiration for compilers of early sources and for scribes. Since Jesus and the apostles appealed to the extant Old Testament manuscripts as inspired, they assertedly assigned no greater authority and accuracy to the autographs than to the fallible copies, so that inerrant originals are dispensable.

This theory discounts the biblical emphasis on the Spirit’s unique superintendence of the original writers. Beegle ignores the fact that the inspiredness of the translations is not inherent but derivative from the original autographs. The Holy Spirit’s use of errant copies to bless the Church is made to dispense with the need of inerrant originals. But one might as well as dispense with the sinlessness of the God-man because the Spirit blesses the ministry of devout but errant saints. The argument that if God could have given inerrant originals he could also have provided inerrant copies is irrelevant; if God could have become incarnate in Christ he could also have produced sinless believers. The life and the activity of the Church are not set in the dimension of perpetual miracle, but presuppose the once-for-all prophetic-apostolic disclosure. The translations are indeed uncorrupted by error, and are adequate for the Church’s mission in the world, but their value derives from their fidelity to the best manuscripts, and hence ultimately to their fidelity to the autographs. The apostles speak of the divine inspiration of the writers of Scripture, not of the transmitters of it. The assertion that New Testament writers “were not concerned about the autographs as such, nor were they exercised over the difficulties in transmitting the original text” is a misguided verdict of deductive speculation, and is contradicted by an inductive study of the Bible (cf. Rev. 22:18, 19).

Beegle emphasizes that “God did not purpose to maintain in transmission the accuracy of the autographs” but trusted the fallibility of devout human channels to maintain “the level of truth necessary for achieving his purposes.” The admitted “sufficiency” of the present translations is made to imply the superfluousness of superior autographs; presumably only the corruption of all translations would constitute an argument to the need of inerrant originals! So the Westminster Confession’s statement that divine providence has kept the Scriptures “pure in all ages” is turned into evidence against an original inerrancy while the Confession’s related emphasis that the autographs were “immediately inspired by God” is ignored.

The testimony of Jesus and the apostles is bent to support the errancy of the autographs. Beegle disregards Paul’s assertion that the glory of the Jews was their entrustment with “the oracles of God” (Rom. 3:2) and instead asserts that inerrancy of autographs is a modern apologetic artifice arising from a discovery of errors in the copies. Inspiration is said, quite properly, to be “involved in” a process that includes a chosen speaker or writer and his message, whether oral or written, so that the end result, or sacred writings, are to be viewed as inspired. But Beegle shies away from the inspiredness of the writings, in order to throw the primary force of inspiration upon the person. Once this step is taken, the divine intention to produce a corpus of sacred literature is inevitably obscured.

Beegle’s position is that Scripture does not teach the doctrine of inerrancy, and that the biblical phenomena require errancy of the original manuscripts and a doctrine of inspiration that conjoins the revelation of a perfect God with an imperfect Scripture. Those who argue for inerrancy, he claims, abandon induction for deduction. But Beegle himself concedes that “perfect objectivity is never achieved” in interpreting the evidence; deduction therefore is also an element in constructing his view. Besides, not a single text lines up the teaching of Jesus or the apostles on the side of the errancy of Scripture which Beegle proclaims. Beegle denies that Jesus believed and taught the inerrancy of Scripture. Yet nowhere in Jesus’ teaching does one find a hint of the errancy of the sacred writings; he deplores those who misinterpret or who neglect or who depart from the Scriptures, but his appeal to the Old Testament is always to adduce and enforce its authority rather than to question its reliability. Nowhere does Jesus teach or imply the divine revelation or inspiration of error. When Jesus speaks of error, he criticizes the current traditions in the light of scriptural revelation; he does not promote doubt over the full accuracy and trustworthiness of the narratives, but rather invokes them to rebuke those who hold speculative views: “Ye do err, not knowing the Scripture.” The emphasis on error leads Beegle to the incongruous insistence that Jesus’ rebuke of the Sadducees for not knowing the Scriptures (Mark 12:24) and his emphasis on the inviolability of Scripture (John 10:35) presupposed errant Scripture because our Lord’s appeal was to extant manuscripts.

The emphasis on the errancy of the apographs, or transmitted texts, places Beegle in a neat dilemma. On the one hand he stresses that the present texts are Scripture; on the other, he repeatedly emphasizes the fallibility of these texts (thinking thereby to discredit the premise of inerrant autographs). He concedes that the Dead Sea Scrolls attest that the text of the standard Hebrew Old Testament available today is “essentially” the same as Paul’s. Textual variants ought then to be as distressing to Beegle as to advocates of a higher view of Scripture, since he assimilates the quality of the autographs to that of the present texts.

The Nature of Inspiration

Beegle initially describes the original writers as “uniquely inspired” in distinction from the scribes who share the “degree of inspiration common to all devoted men of God” (whatever that may be!). But this difference of subjective inspiration assertedly makes no difference in the written records as between autographs and copies.

We are told, for example, that Luke did not consider his Gospel inspired. Beegle does not mention the significant fact that Paul (who wrote 2 Tim. 3:16) in 1 Timothy 5:18 quotes a passage from Luke’s Gospel and designates it “Scripture.” And when Paul depicts Scripture as inspired of God, is not his primary reference to the original writings? And is it not to the written product that he attributes inspiredness? If Paul is mistaken at these points, his unique inspiration would seem inferior to the “common inspiration” of twentieth-century theologians who supposedly can put us right about the matter. Mr. Beegle nowhere tells us what inspiration uniquely accomplished in and through the original writers. He simply rejects “the idea that inspiration is the constant factor throughout Scripture.” And he repudiates the close connection between inspiration and canonicity. We are told that the inspiration of Luke was “not likely” of a different kind from that of God’s servants down through church history nor from that of any man today, and the same is said of Mark. In fact, Professor Beegle finally dissolves “unique inspiration” for some Bible books. “If Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, Augustus Toplady, and Reginald Heber had lived in the time of David and Solomon and been no more inspired than they were in their own day, some of their hymns of praise to God would have found their way into the Hebrew canon.”

At this level inspiration—unique or otherwise—seems hardly any longer to retain any element that is identifiably scriptural. Beegle contends, however, that as the record of sacred history consummated in Christ the canonical Scriptures are distinctive and in this general sense “equally inspired” and that “the canon as a whole will always rank as uniquely inspired literature.” But the introduction of this claim after the earlier deflation of both canonicity and inspiration leaves one with a feeling of rhetorical profuseness.

When he contends, moreover, for the inspiration not of translations as such, but of “all reasonably accurate translations,” one wonders why inspiration should be linked with the precise repetition of mistakes in supposedly errant originals. Yet Beegle goes further, and invokes as a confirmation of inspiration a translation’s pragmatic serviceability—however faulty it may be—in bringing readers under the Spirit’s conviction.

The value of all creedal statements on inspiration formulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is questioned on the ground that they were “precritical in nature and … neither elaborated nor reconciled the divine and human elements of Scripture in any systematic way.” One wonders what the implications of this judgment would be were the doctrine under scrutiny that of divine incarnation rather than divine inspiration.

Twentieth-century champions of inerrancy have included Charles Hodge, B. B. Warfield, Edward J. Young, and others. Mr. Beegle in passing quotes a number of contemporary evangelical scholars—Bernard Ramm, Edward Carnell, James Packer, Kenneth Kantzer, Philip Hughes, and Carl Henry—where their statements are somewhat serviceable to his view. But none of these scholars would endorse the main positions of the book, and their differences are unmentioned.

While Beegle deplores the “all or nothing” view of most evangelicals, whose position he overstates, he himself acts on the principle he condemns. He affirms “inspiration—translations—copies and originals in the same sense” over against “translation—no inspiration”—thus distorting the evangelical distinction between the mediate inspiration of copies and translations and the immediate inspiration of the autographs. If the present errant manuscripts are trustworthy and authoritative, we are told, inerrant originals are superfluous. This position reaches ludicrousness with the implication that the apostles made error authoritative, and we should follow their example: “If Jesus and Paul and Peter considered the errant manuscripts of their time as trustworthy and authoritative, should we not …?”

The Quality of Bible Doctrine

The importance evangelicals attach to inerrancy, Beegle notes, has to do with doctrine. He rejects the emphasis that the biblical writers can hardly be considered trustworthy teachers of doctrine if they err in their doctrine of inspiration. He argues that they are not untrustworthy because they are trustworthy only in much rather than in all. But he does not demonstrate (nor can he) that if mistaken about their own inspiration their doctrinal trustworthiness is unimpaired, nor how the strands of truth and supposed error are to be segregated.

Beegle no more defends the infallibility of Bible doctrine than the full trustworthiness of Bible history. Take the difficulties in the synoptic record of the Olivet discourse. These are “likely” explained on the premise that the disciples “confounded some of Jesus’ statements about the destruction of Jerusalem with some of his remarks about his second coming,” unless “the difficulty lay in the original statement of Jesus.” In any event “erroneous elements of doctrine” existed in the original Gospels. The implications of the view that Jesus’ teaching was ambiguous, or of the view that his disciples inaccurately understood him, cover a territory that only the author’s personal surmise holds within quite narrow boundaries. He limits it to the fuzziness of “details of doctrine … as one nears the fringes of truth.” But Beegle finds a “diversity of doctrinal data” in respect to the Atonement no less than eschatology. Fuzziness thus encroaches on biblical truth itself.

When Beegle tells us that “in all essential matters of faith and practice Scripture is authentic, accurate and trustworthy,” he bequeaths us the problem of discriminating what is essential. He asserts that according to the New Testament “Christ and the gospel” (not the Scriptures) are the determinative standard of trustworthy and authoritative doctrine. But we know no Christ nor gospel other than the Christ and Gospel of the Bible. And Beegle asserts their errancy, and the possibility of Jesus’ ambiguity and of his disciples’ misunderstanding. The valid procedure, he now tells us, is “to accept the view that accounts for the most Biblical data related to the subject.” But how often need a truth be affirmed in Scripture in order to be biblically true? For Beegle the Kerygma is obviously not “what the Bible teaches.” The doctrinal content of the revealed Gospel seems disappointingly unprecise when we are told that “the Biblical writers shared unequivocally some doctrines that cluster around Jesus, the incarnate Christ, and the way of salvation.”

Although acknowledging “the validity of concern” over the admission of error in Scripture, Beegle replies obliquely that spiritual security can be found only in daily commitment to God. This reply, if adequate, would dissolve any value whatever in Beegle’s insistence on the (limited) trustworthiness of Scripture.

The important role of revealed truths is understated: “The only protection God has provided (against doctrinal deviation) is the Holy Spirit’s working dynamically in a committed heart, mind, and body. This is sufficient protection for salvation, but it is still not certain protection against false doctrine.” But the real issue is glossed over: it is not whether the Bible can be misunderstood, but whether the Bible, properly understood, informs the mind with revealed truths.

We are told that “all of Scripture does not come under the category of supernatural revelation” and that “all Biblical doctrine is not infallible.”

Logic and the Truth

The logic of the book is sometimes woefully weak. Beegle deplores the syllogism “God is perfect, God revealed himself in the autographs, therefore the autographs had to be inerrant”—or the assumption that God, if he truly reveals himself, must “reveal himself inerrantly”—without examining the alternatives. The claim is made that the Bible is both human and divine, but logic should compel him to ask how it can be both divine and erroneous. Beegle rejects the alternative “either the autographs were inerrant, or else human fallibility infected all of Scripture.” If there is another alternative, it would greatly enhance Beegle’s argument if he would actually segregate the infallible from the supposedly fallible elements and indicate on what objective principle this determination is made. If divine revelation is intelligible communication, Beegle can hardly mean that God conveys propositions that are partially true and partially false, and that he inspires both inerrant and errant words. When Beegle proclaims that “the Bible … does not teach that unless a thing is totally true it cannot be inspired,” the word he italicizes is dispensable, and the alternative he implies is that God inspires untruth. The untenable position to which Beegle is led is seen in his assertion that “Stephen, even while under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, probably made a mistake …” and evidently “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit to let Paul use” erroneous figures “without informing him that he was technically wrong.”

In effect Beegle espouses the view that under the Holy Spirit’s inspiration a chosen divine servant may blend truth and error while a twentieth-century scholar without such unique inspiration is able to distinguish the truth from falsehood. Since Beegle disowns the assumption that “God had to reveal himself inerrantly,” is not the incongruous theological alternative that divine revelation deviates from the truth? The outcome of any such religious epistemology must surely be skepticism.

Yet the author does not hesitate to assail the logic of the biblical writers. Of Matthew’s application of Hosea 11:1 to the return of Jesus from Egypt, he writes: Matthew shared the “Jewish mode of thinking”; “his logic in this instance bears the marks of his day”; and he used a “method of proving (that) does not conform to all the facts.” Instead of concluding from this that Matthew was illogical and reached a false conclusion from assertedly improper premises, Beegle champions “essential truth” (devoid of “erroneous nonessentials”) while repudiating “absolute truth.” “By shifting the line of defense from ‘absolute truth’ to ‘essential truth’ it is possible to reckon with all the phenomena and teaching of Scripture and to have a sound view of authority as well.” “Essential truth” is illustrated to include fallacious conclusions resting on illicit premises.

In an error-leavened Bible the author distinguishes God’s Word (which always accords with the facts) from man’s word (which reflects fallible opinion). But on what basis is the distinction between these strands of truth and error made? Surely not on the ground that a statement is biblical, since even the autographs are held to err. Even statements undiscredited by scientific considerations may still come into question, and if confirmed by science, these scientific verdicts are revisable and reversable. Yet Beegle tells us that “the key events of redemptive history are to be … authenticated, insofar as is possible, by the same criteria employed in checking all other historical data.” It is no real solution to insist, as Beegle does, that “one must decide which parts of the Bible are mistaken or else one is unwittingly accepting error as truth.… Everyone who believes in the validity and indispensability of Scripture is confronted with the inescapable duty of using one’s rational powers to ferret out the mistaken elements in Scripture.” If this is indeed an inescapable duty, Beegle needs to be reminded that both the prophets and apostles, and Jesus of Nazareth, neglected to enjoin this responsibility upon the children of God.

Beegle is finally driven to espouse a highly unsatisfactory theory of truth no less than of revelation and inspiration. He tells us there is “certainly some truth” to Kierkegaard’s notion that a heathen praying passionately to an idol is actually “in the truth.” Beegle thus detaches true worship not simply from Scriptures in-errant and verbally inspired, but from true concepts of God as well.

Existential interpretation is dignified as “new Reformation theology.” It seems hardly fair to credit this “new Reformation theology” with reminding the Church that revelation and inspiration “must be actualized in the lives of persons” while the evangelical tradition is depicted as stressing the role of the Book (presumably unconcerned about appropriation). Beegle never really criticizes Barth for his refusal to affirm the inspiredness of Scripture.

Beegle’s break with the evangelical-biblical view is evident in his declaration that contemporary theologians are “technically accurate in defining revelation and inspiration in terms of personal communication between God and man,” alongside his revolt against the intellectual or doctrinal element. In common with much recent religious philosophy he apparently rejects the unity of truth: “There are two different kinds of truth: objective and subjective.” He assures us that so-called “it-truth,” which deals with “the impersonal world of things and objects,” is not untrue. This does not, however, grip important questions such as: is divine revelation communicated in the form of truths?, and does man have valid knowledge of God as the object of religious experience? The section on “Revelation and Doctrine” is disappointingly imprecise. It repudiates in principle, however, the possibility of revealed doctrines: “It is imperative … that revelation and doctrine be distinguished.”

The assertion that “propositional truths, like doctrine, cannot he considered as revelation because they cannot save” is misleading. No evangelical scholar holds that doctrine saves. But evangelical Christianity contends that there are revealed truths or doctrines, and this Beegle denies. Evangelical scholars contend also that revealed truths have been objectively inscripturated by divine inspiration, and that they have the status of divine revelation—whether or not the contemporary man accepts or rejects them—and this Beegle also denies.

Beegle does affirm that Scripture contains objective truths (must not whatever truth it contains necessarily be objective?). If the “elemental ideas of God and Christ” set forth in the scriptural record are “classified … as doctrine, then a minimal core of doctrine is basic to genuine faith.” In a prize understatement we are told that “Paul recognized that teaching had a part to play.” The essential point, says Beegle, is that “the objective truth of Scripture, whether defined as doctrine or not, is the means by which the Holy Spirit leads to subjective truth”—and it is the latter, Beegle has earlier assured us, that is revelation.

In this century, Beegle acknowledges, the inseparability of ideas and words has become increasingly clear. But inerrancy of ideas does not, he contends, require “the inerrancy of all words”; rather, it necessitates only “correct key words.” Beegle realizes that the wedding of words and ideas drives him to the further admission of “incorrect ideas” in Scripture, and his next apologetic artifice is to contrast “correct key ideas” with “erroneous non-essential ideas,” which are linked in turn with “correct key words” and “erroneous words” leading finally to a distinction between “the essentials and the non-essentials in Scripture.” This obviously settles nothing, since Beegle will hardly concede that everything unessential in Scripture is expressed in erroneous ideas and words, and on his theory he can hardly protect essentials from error.

If skepticism is a consequence of Beegle’s view of revelation, it is also a consequence of his view of language. We are told that “words are symbols that cover areas of meaning, and the area varies from individual to individual.… Consequently no two people speaking the same language necessarily mean the same thing by the same word.… Scripture is no exception.” Such passages deny any identity of meaning in the use of words (and contradict Beegle’s earlier assertion of the wedlock of words and ideas). Nonetheless the author expects evangelical readers to understand his assault on canonical inspiration or he would not have bothered to write this book. In a more cautious statement Beegle adds that “language cannot possibly convey … all the facets of personality and character.” From this he draws three conclusions: first, that despite the symbolism of metaphorical language the human mind is able to distill concepts which amount to literal truth (would not this feat be fully as miraculous as inerrant inspiration?); (2) the necessity for exalting Jesus above the Scriptures (could this superiority then be expressed in words?); (3) Scripture cannot he described as inerrant since language is incapable of absolute communication (why does Beegle then assume that Scripture’s supposed errancy can be absolutely communicated?). Beegle downgrades the God who intelligibly speaks his revelation, and the adequacy of human language to articulate will and word—and the reason he does so is his lack of a theistic view of language. The Creator who fashioned human nature as wholly serviceable to the Incarnation also fashioned human speech as a wholly serviceable medium of divine revelation and inspiration.

Faith and History

The crucial issue, Professor Beegle says, is one’s estimate of “fact and history in Scripture,” or perhaps better, the soundness of that estimate. With an eye on Bultmannism, he insists that subjective faith is threatened once we surrender the key elements of sacred history. “Faith is rooted in fact.” Evangelical Christianity stands with Paul’s “bold” affirmation that faith is futile apart from Christ’s resurrection (although the equally bold prophetic affirmation “thus saith the Lord” is not taken literally). Beegle repudiates the liberalism of R. H. Pfeiffer, who divorced faith from all miracle, and not simply (as Beegle does) from the miracle of scriptural inspiration. Conceding that no history is absolutely objective, and that all history involves subjective elements, Beegle notes the “new Reformation” theology’s dual definition of history and its dialectical relating of time and eternity. Quoting J. Gresham Machen’s statement that belief in the Virgin Birth may not be necessary to every Christian, he asserts that Machen “has shown the impossibility of prescribing a minimal core of biblical events to which assent must be given before saving faith is possible”—which does violence to Machen’s intention and his conclusion. The thrust of Beegle’s exposition is to excuse doctrinal doubts and to stress how little Christians may believe.

The final appeal for belief in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection is merely pragmatic. “As a general rule, churches with ministers and leaders who have consistently denied, or at least minimized” these particular doctrines “have tended to lose the sense of mission.”

The complaint can be registered no less effectively against those who have abandoned the high view of the Bible, which carries these miracles with it. Beegle quotes contemporary adversaries of the high view approvingly despite their rejection of it for divergent reasons which often cancel each other out. If the author had followed a different course, asking where the repudiation of the high view leads contemporary theologians in their conflicting expositions of the essential content of the Christian revelation, the result might have been therapeutic. In the closing words of the book Beegle shifts the argument from the theoretical question of the nature of inspiration to the pragmatic serviceability of extant translations and copies, and he attributes divine inspiration to devout but fallible ministers in every age of church history.

The conclusion of Beegle’s discussion of the historical trustworthiness of the Bible is distressingly imprecise. He discards as extreme the view that faith in Christ can coexist with doubts about “the truth and relevance of much” that Scripture declares. He wants “a mediating view” between Bultmann’s rejection of trustworthiness and the view that the Gospels are reliable stenographic reports. Yet he minimizes even the importance of this broken historical truth: “Submission to Christ is primarily a matter of decision, an exercise of our will, not knowledge.” One who begins (rather than ends) here will not kick long against the pricks of Bultmann’s demythologizing.

Beegle declares that “minor historical errors in Scripture invalidate neither our faith not true doctrine.” But since biblical history is not to be taken as accurate simply on the ground that it is biblical (part of the record), no reason remains for assuming any event not independently confirmed to have actually occurred. One cannot confidently distinguish major and minor events as significant and trustworthy and as unsignificant and untrustworthy as Beegle does except by an act of will. The history of theological debate has a way of bypassing such hesitancies and inconsistencies, and of urging the same compromises with less timidity and with great loss to the Christian heritage.

Concluding Remarks

Much of the difficulty over inspiration may in fact lie in the theologian’s attempt to enforce too rigid a pattern of divine superintendence upon the Spirit of God. The Scriptures assert that inspiration extended not only to chosen persons, but to their sacred writings, and that the very words derive their unique authority from this supernatural superintendence. But the Spirit is no less free and creative in the realm of special than in the realm of natural disclosure of God, and no one method is adequate to account for the end-product. Verbal inspiredness is to be attributed to the writings, but their production presupposes a variety of activity—divine dictation, in the writing of the law on stone, or in Jesus’ teaching, greater or lesser precision as the purpose of God requires, with correspondingly less or more reflection of the personality or stylistic differences of the writers. That copyists and translators have often erred is beyond dispute; textual criticism aims to undo their deviations. But that a perfect God reveals himself in half-truths is a thesis that cripples Christian theology far more than the problems facing the view of an authoritative Bible.

Dr. Beegle states that it is not his purpose “to unsettle the faith of any Christian, but the risk must be taken in order to remove the ‘needless barrier’ which has kept many more from exercising faith in Christ.” But if he thinks either that Christian faith is rendered more secure through the promotion of the errancy of Scripture, or that the real barrier to faith in Christ lies in the doctrine that God reveals himself inerrantly, he is sadly mistaken. The evangelists whose ministries are signally blessed by God are those who confidently champion Scripture as God’s Word written, while the theologians who promote the errancy of Scripture make their converts mainly in the ranks of professing Christians and not among the outsiders. “God chose to make his authority relevant to man by means which necessitate some element of fallibility.… The facts permit no other understanding of Scripture’s inspiration and authority.” Were the premises right, it would be in keeping with them to notch one’s critical pronouncements a shade below the level of infallibility, rather than exempting one’s theory of inspiration from the supposed fallibility which prevented prophets and apostles from accurately interpreting their experiences. We are unpersuaded by the author’s assurances that if we accept his view of a broken Bible “nothing basic is lost,” that “those essential elements which the advocates of the doctrine of inerrancy have cherished … are more firmly supported than ever before,” and that transcending this tradition will ready us “to challenge the tremendous moral and spiritual problems that confront us on every side.”

C.F.H.H.

To recall the street named Aldersgate is to be reminded that the history of the Church is, among other things, the history of the effort to hold in balance correct doctrine and vital experience. Names like Chrysostom, Luther, Zinzendorf, and Kierkegaard signal the struggle, which in 1563 reached a pinnacle in the Heidelberg Catechism of Zacharias Ursinus and Caspar Olevianus, both Reformers of the second generation.

In this year of the 400th anniversary of this acknowledged masterpiece, we do well to celebrate its doctrinal fidelity and devotional warmth. Its first question keynotes the depth, comfort, and beauty of the entire catechism, penetrating immediately to the heart of evangelical piety. Observe well the stress upon personal experience of doctrinal truths:

What is thy only comfort in life and in death?

Answer. That I, with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ, who with his precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and redeemed me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must work together for my salvation. Wherefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me heartily willing and ready henceforth to live unto him.

Modern confessional statements somehow do not sound like this. Nor is ours noted as an age of devotional classics, of Christian saints towering over journeyman Christians. William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God, Richard Baxter’s The Saints’ Everlasting Rest—such titles fall strangely upon the modern ear; they have a distant ring. John Bunyan meant something quite different by the term The Holy War than we do. Theological giants like John Owen and Abraham Kuyper wrote classic works on the Holy Spirit. And names like Athanasius, Luther, Calvin, Andrews, Donne, M’Cheyne, Krummacher represent luminous gifts to the devotional life of the Church which yet shine as lights from the past.

Where are their kindred today? Why is the devotional atmosphere of past days not reflected in the church life of our day? Numerous factors are cited to explain the glaring disparity. Ours is the age of science, a mechanistic age which allows little if any room in our universe for prayer. It is the age of organization, and the Church echoes its age in decreeing priorities, the horizontal so often taking precedence over the vertical even among the saints, who also share to a degree the headlong pursuit of external success so characteristic of their fellow citizens. And they see their ministers acquiring distinction not so much through saintliness as by position, oratory, academic degrees, by size of churches and salaries. Not that these things are wrong in themselves—it is what is omitted that constitutes the vagrancy. Ministers are often discouraged from pursuit of holiness by theological controversies and extremes, ranging from arguments supporting God’s complete transcendence to those affirming his complete immanence. The divinity student finds the biblical balance neither in Otto nor in Schleiermacher.

This is not to say that God or we are chained by these several factors, though it is to recognize them as obstacles along a difficult path. There are the pitfalls of a cold or dead orthodoxy and of a doctrinally diffused pietism. There are those who seem to stop still at the point of justification, shunning progressive sanctification. There are others who seek to skip over justification and try sanctification on their own. There are some who continually look back to an initial sanctification experience and rehearse it, relate it, clutch it, never moving beyond it so as not to lose sight of it—the surest way to lose it. Then there is the florid language of sticky sentimentalism assumed by some, often as not as a substitute for real spiritual growth. This in itself is enough to drive some people right away from the quest for holiness. But this course is just as mistaken, and flies in the face of biblical imperatives. The verbs in these command our attention: we are to fight, to strive, to mortify, to crucify—a holy war indeed. Obstacles or no, the battle is joined. If the level of Christian experience in the Church today falls below that of some periods past, we cannot recoup by simply reaching back to the past: the answer must come from above. For we are not bound to a cycle theory of history which binds us to earth and binds God out. The Cross has been thrust into the earth. The grace of God there manifested cries out for the response of man’s whole being in love and devotion.

Let this not be discounted as an irrelevant individualism, a cryptic mysticism having no answer for the modern crisis. Love for neighbor must follow true love for God. The biblical ethic presumes personal regeneration; the manifestation of this ethic is both personal and social. We may walk with Christ toward Emmaus and wind up serving him in Jerusalem or Rome. But it is our communion with Christ through his Spirit which is basic to our service.

Let those who would confine Christian experience to a mere inwardness without issue listen to famed British historian R. H. Tawney as he declares that democracy in England probably owes more to Puritanism than to any other single movement. Yet he perceptively points behind the outward phenomena to that which lay behind:

But, immense as were its [Puritanism’s] accomplishments on the high stage of public affairs, its achievements in that inner world, of which politics are but the squalid scaffolding, were mightier still. Like an iceberg, which can awe the traveller by its towering majesty only because sustained by a vaster mass which escapes his eye, the revolution which Puritanism wrought in Church and State was less than that which it worked in men’s souls, and the watchwords which it thundered, amid the hum of Parliaments and the roar of battles, had been learned in the lonely nights, when Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord to wring a blessing before he fled (Religion and the Rise of Capitalism [London, 1926], pp. 269, 199).

In the twentieth century as in the seventeenth, the outcome of historic social and military battles, the destiny of men and nations, the survival of civilization—these oftimes rest with those who on their knees make supplication to Providence, almighty in power and in love.

END

Pope Calls For Global Authority To Guard World Peace

For the first time the Roman Catholic Church has codified its doctrine of world peace. In his masterful and historic Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), Pope John XXIII spoke out against racism, denounced colonialism, proclaimed liberty as a human right, and called for general disarmament. More significant was his call for a supernational world authority able to cope with the realities which today threaten the whole of mankind. (See also News, page 37.) Speaking of individual national political communities, he said, “At this historic moment the present system of organization and the way its principle of authority operates on a world basis no longer correspond to the objective requirements of the universal common good.”

It is of special interest to Protestants that the new encyclical rests squarely on the Roman Catholic doctrine of natural law. Natural law is its foundation and the ribwork of its superstructure. The encyclical’s creative possibilities for world peace depend wholly on the existence of and creative moral energies inherent in natural law.

According to the Roman Catholic conception, the moral law is engrained in the created universe and in the nature of man. This universal moral law is grounded in truth, functions according to justice, can be perfected by mutual love and brought to more refined and human balance in freedom. Every man is regarded as essentially rational, possessed of general decency, and able to seek the general good of mankind. On this view of the moral potential of human nature the Pope could, and for the first time did, address his encyclical to all men. On this basis of the universal moral law engrained in every human being, Pope John raised the hope of world peace and called for a “public authority” with which all nations would freely affiliate and by which nations could do what they could not do individually, i.e., cope with the threat of universal destruction.

To this natural law, Karl Barth once uttered his angry Nein. To this “natural goodness” of unregenerate man, Protestants countered with a doctrine of a radical and more pervasive evil, while not denying that the unregenerate man is capable of doing some kinds of civic good. It is this area which some Protestants wholly ignore, contending that there are no possibilities for a more bearable world order except on the basis of personal regeneration—a view sometimes compounded with the naïve notion that if all men were Christian, all mankind’s problems would therewith be solved.

Protestants are not of one mind concerning the possibilities of natural law, yet they may fairly point out that the Pope’s view appears overly optimistic precisely at the point where he argues the inadequacy of individual nations to cope with the threat (posed by individual nations!) to mankind’s universal good. He urges the creation of a “world authority” through a free association of all nations, yet the existence of such an organization and the exercise of its authority depend on mankind’s conformity to natural law.

Pope John had good words for the United Nations and seemed to suggest that it could be broadened to be such a world authority. While it is the best such instrument for world peace we have, it has yet to be demonstrated that mankind is sufficiently moral to transform it into a world authority which could with any greater optimism assure world peace.

END

On Biblical Inspiration, A Frank Look At The Alternatives

Before a Christian departs from the doctrine of the verbal-plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, he owes it to himself to face frankly and honestly the alternatives and their issue. In his Edinburgh classroom, the late Principal John Baillie of New College saw to it that his students were aware of these. He told them that he held to verbal and conceptual inspiration, but in reference to neither did he believe in plenary inspiration. He stoutly maintained that “no reputable theologian” would hold to thought inspiration and not word inspiration. To him it was “absurd” to say that the Holy Spirit inspired thoughts and not words. “We cannot separate Paul’s thought from his language, nor can we deny that words at the end of Romans 8 and in Deutero-Isaiah are inspired.” But Principal Baillie denied that there was plenary inspiration anywhere.

He portrayed the traditional view as maintaining every part of the Bible to be “equally inspired.” The modernistic deviation from this, he went on, was to claim that only parts of the Bible were inspired. He pointed to recent attempts to hold parts of Scripture to be plenarily inspired and others not. Some held the New Testament to be more inspired than the Old Testament. Some held the Lord’s own words to be inspired and not those of the apostles. “But,” said Principal Baillie, “these are modern expedients and do not meet the problem.”

The noted Edinburgh scholar then presented the logical alternative to verbal-plenary inspiration by citing approvingly Archbishop William Temple as holding: revelation is in the person of Christ; He wrote no book and we cannot be sure of any single deed or saying of His recorded, cannot be sure that it has been truly recorded; but we can be sure of the whole picture; when the certainty of infallibility is in, then spirituality goes out; the human element is present as well as the divine in all of the record, so we can never be sure it is free from error.

So much for the alternatives. CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S choice is a matter of record. We do not see certainty and spirituality warring against each other. Lack of assurance on all the parts of the Bible does not produce for us assurance on the whole. And we are not stirred with conviction by a thunderous “Thus saith the Lord … perhaps.” Nor do we feel we can expect the world to be. A faltering, uncertain voice in the pulpit exacts a deadly toll in both the Church and the world.

One can but wonder what Christians living under the repressions of Communism will think of the efforts here to secularize the American government.

We think of Red China, where religious freedom is the freedom to follow the Communist line; of North Korea, where churches no longer exist and believers worship in secret; of Soviet Russia, where every effort is being made to drive Christ and the worship of God out of the hearts of the people.

That responsible Christian leaders should advocate a new policy for America, one which would in effect secularize the State and eliminate from its official declarations and acts an allegiance to God, is unthinkable, but nevertheless true.

That which the United Presbyterian Church does at the meeting of its General Assembly in May will have an effect far beyond that one denomination. For that reason all Christians should be concerned.

The report which will be before that assembly recommends, in effect:

• That the celebration of religious holidays and religious observances shall never be introduced into the program of our public schools.

• That the Bible shall be eliminated from the public schools except in connection with courses in literature, history, or related subjects; and that public prayers should be omitted because they either are meaningless or tend toward indoctrination.

• That in schools there shall be no seasonal activities having to do with religious holidays, such as Christmas.

• That public property shall not be used for religious displays (the Christmas manger scene, for instance); such scenes are thereby eliminated from courthouse lawns, schools, and so on.

• That candidates for public office shall be accepted or rejected solely on their competence to govern and without reference to their religious convictions or lack of them.

• That the State should not take into account religious concepts of sin and guilt in administering divorce laws but should grant divorces when, and only when, there is irretrievable human failure in the area of marriage. The basis of divorce would then have sociological and not spiritual significance, because “the family has been so broken that it is no longer socially desirable to maintain [the marriage].”

• That the State “consider the adoption of children solely on the basis of the temporal benefit to the child; to the family to which the child is being adopted; and, if necessitated by circumstances, the family which the child is leaving.” Here is a proposed recommendation of a church group asking the State to make the decision “solely on the basis of temporal benefit to the child,” ignoring the most important part of all—the spiritual welfare of the child and the fitness of the foster parents to provide such training.

• That all forms of censorship are wrong: “We are convinced that no human being or agency has the wisdom to decide on religious grounds what the general public may see or hear.” This, of course, means that no form of evil may be proscribed on “religious grounds.” This would completely unfetter those who cater to pornography and other smut and filth by film, the printed page, or other devices.

And here we find a decision of the Supreme Court in perfect accord. In this decision, liberty and license were confused. The Post Office Department had barred from the mails three magazines that cater to homosexuals. The publisher had escaped indictment by claiming insanity, and at the time of the court’s decision was confined to a Washington mental institution. The Supreme Court ruled that the magazines, although “unpleasant, uncouth, and tawdry,” could not be considered “so offensive … as to affront current community standards of decency.” By its own admission, the court used as its standards our own current moral decadence—not an offense against decency itself. Here again we find a relativism similar to that found in the report of the committee.

This relativism is expressed in these words: “It must be recognized anew that our God is a dynamic Lord, a truly unpredictable source of ongoing revelation.… We must see these recommendations as provisional for our current witness and realize that tomorrow’s problems may defy today’s solution.” And, “the sole constant in its mandate is the fact of Jesus Christ.” Here the finality of God’s present revelation is rejected for an “ongoing revelation,” which must be revealed to modern man and which may be at variance with the written Word.

Admitting that the Holy Spirit gives us new insights into the Holy Scriptures, many of us believe with all of our hearts that God’s holiness and the principles that flow therefrom are absolute rather than relative.

From these direct references to the recommendations of the United Presbyterian committee, it is obvious that there is envisioned a completely secular or neutral state, acknowledging at no point its responsibility to a sovereign God.

To fill in the vacuum thus created, this report affirms that the Church is the conscience of the State. (The report points out that a new concept of the Church’s obligation in the social order was adopted by the General Assembly of 1910.) This new concept has led to the increasing activity of the Church as such in the realm of social, economic, and political pronouncements. Nor is it strange to note that as a result of this shift from spiritual to secular concern the Church has found herself involved in lobbying for specific legislation, such as medical aid for the aged under Social Security, federal aid to education, recognition of Red China, and scores of other programs on which her members, men and women of equal piety and social concern, often find themselves in utter disagreement.

Not for nought has there rested on the institutions of our land a forthright acknowledgment of God in our heritage, our culture, and our official life. Are all these things to be abandoned through a new doctrine of Church and State wherein the State would be completely secular, owing no allegiance to God?

Nations have rejected God and faded into oblivion. By official action Communism denies Him today. But all nations have stood and now stand under the judgment of him who is King of kings and Lord of lords.

Shall America reject her own Christian heritage? Shall our government remove from her official life every vestige of recognition of Him?

The warning of the psalmist can be for us too: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure” (Ps. 2:4, 5).

God forbid!