The power of words—In the translator’s obvious preoccupation with language, it is inevitable that he will one day pause to ask himself if this thing called language is worth all the fuss and bother. If—as some claim—the most worthwhile and deepest things in life cannot be expressed in words, why are words important enough that it becomes the goal of a life to understand what a Book means and to transmit its message into a language not yet the vehicle of that message?

If God thought it worthwhile to give us a Book revealing his nature and purposes, then it is certainly worth our time to pass it on to others. This is a good—perhaps a final—answer. Of further interest in this regard are the attitudes towards language expressed or implied in Scripture itself.

Thus, without doubt the focal point of the New Testament is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Is it not this great event which speaks to us, rather than words? If this sounds plausible to us, we need to recollect how things appeared to the women and the disciples the first moments when they confronted the empty tomb. Were they gladdened at finding the sepulchre vacant? Quite the contrary. They were depressed, anxious, even appalled to find Christ’s body gone. But Christ had repeatedly foretold the Resurrection, and when he met them as the Risen Lord he met them as a talking and teaching Christ who “beginning at Moses and all the prophets expounded to them the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures.” Thus the Resurrection is imbedded in a verbal context. It is as an interpreted event that it has significance for us.

Job in the Old Testament desired a personal encounter with God. In the black days of his trial he cried out, “O that I knew where I might find him.” Is this not the real cry of the human heart? Is it not the personal encounter with God that we need rather than words about God? To argue so is to miss an important point of the Book of Job. To be sure, God answered. God gave him the desired meeting with Himself. But is this meeting some ineffable, mystical experience transcending language? Hardly so. When God confronts Job in the whirlwind it proves to be a verbal as well as a physical whirlwind. Job’s trouble and doubts are swept away in a torrent of rhetorical questions asserting God’s superiority to Job in wisdom, experience, and power. After a weak attempt of Job to reply, God continues the healing process with discourse about the hippopotamus and the crocodile. And so one of the wordiest discussions reported in the Old Testament ends in a magnificently wordy manner.

It is especially evident in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament and in the writings of St. John in the New Testament that the authors of these books take a high view of language.

The key word in Proverbs is “wisdom.” In Proverbs 4:7 we are told that wisdom is “the principal thing” and in 3:18 wisdom is called a “tree of life.” Furthermore, wisdom brings the good life. It is not unlike the option between life and death held forth to us in St. John along with promise of the “more abundant life” in Christ. Yet this wisdom resides in, and is communicated by, words. In chapter 1:2, “to know wisdom and instruction” is equated with “to perceive the words of understanding”; while in 1:29 to “hate knowledge” and not to “choose the fear of the Lord” are equated with despising the “counsel” and “reproof” of wisdom. Wisdom calling in 1:23 promises: “I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you”—thus equating the spirit of wisdom with the words of wisdom.

No less emphatic is St. John. Here the principal thing is receiving Jesus Christ, and the key words are “believe” and “life.” But the receiving or rejecting of Christ is closely associated with the receiving or rejecting of Christ’s words in John 12:48 and other passages. In 12:48–50 eternal destiny is seen to hinge on our attitude towards Christ’s words. Striking indeed is Christ’s statement in 6:63: “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.” If “knowledge” rather than “wisdom” is used in St. John, the knowledge of God is seen to be mediated through words in chapter 17: “that they might know thee (v. 3) … I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me (v. 6) … I have declared unto them thy name and will declare it (v. 26).” Even the ministry of the Holy Spirit is represented as one of “bringing all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have taught unto you” (14:26). And finally Christ offers as proof of his union with the Father the fact that he speaks words from the Father (14:10).

What then? Amid scepticism in regard to the adequacy and power of language, amid schools of philosophy and theology that hold to a low evaluation of the word, Scripture maintains a lofty confidence. Can we do less? Can we not here find renewed incentive to study the languages of earth—to work patiently at hearing and transcribing unfamiliar sounds, to unravel mysteries of word and sentence structure, to catalogue the lexical resources, and finally to transmit as faithfully and yet as forcefully and naturally as possible the Word of God into the language of each Bibleless tribe? God thinks words in general and his Word in particular to be of great importance. Shouldn’t we be like-minded?—DR. ROBERT LONGACRE, who is completing the translation of the New Testament in the Trique language of Mexico as a member of the staff of Wycliffe Bible Translators.

During the early decades of the twentieth century theological liberalism gave shape and buoyancy to the hopes and ideals of a multitude of Americans. The force of the movement is now largely spent. No one today suggests turning to W. Adams Brown, H. Nelson Wieman, or to Shailer Mathews for help. Liberalism’s inadequacy has been too convincingly demonstrated, its exuberant estimate of life’s potentialities too battered by life’s actualities.

There was irony in liberalism’s decline, since the very thing with which it sought reconciliation arose to destroy it. Claiming that orthodoxy had forfeited its claim upon modern man by its failure to update Christianity and that no man could any longer be orthodox and intellectually honest, liberalism accommodated Christianity to what it regarded as the demands of modern scholarship. It was therefore ironical that history itself arose to discredit liberalism by demonstrating that the actual world was something quite different from the one to which liberalism had adjusted. History itself undid liberalism’s faith in its character and inevitable progress. In the deep crisis of the twentieth century there appeared a depravity and demonic brutality which demonstrated that liberalism’s morally intact man ever moving toward perfection was nonexistent. Although an estimate of the human situation has rarely been more mistaken, liberalism would still to be very much alive had it been challenged merely by orthodoxy. It has, however, been challenged and discredited by history itself.

The Role Of History

Nevertheless, although history proved to be too much for it, it was liberalism that brought the category of the historical into a large role in theological thinking.

In his new book, The Impact of American Religious Liberalism, W. K. Cauthen shows that liberalism, led by its assessment of advances in epistemology and in the natural and historical sciences, reinterpreted Christianity in terms of three basic tenets. First, God must be regarded as wholly immanent within the world. Liberalism urged that even if orthodoxy’s transcendent God existed, his unknowability would render him of no practical concern. Fortunately, it was said, modern knowledge demanded that God be regarded as one aspect of a single reality, internal, not external, to nature, man, and history. Second, man is autonomous in his knowledge of God. Knowledge of God does not come as a divinely guaranteed repository of truth transcending and judging human experience. Rather, knowledge of an immanent God is disclosed within experience, and by virtue of this immanency, man is morally intact and competent to judge what is authentic knowledge of God. Third, liberalism urged that Christianity must henceforth reckon with the fact of historical evolution. The historical consciousness which emerged in the nineteenth century was said to reveal that reality is not static but dynamic. God, nature, man are all aspects of a single, growing reality, moving in the changes of history toward an ever greater truth and perfection.

These basic tenets in terms of which liberalism reinterpreted Christianity—an immanent God progressively disclosed within man and a world moving toward greater truth and perfection—are obviously an insistence that the category of the historical should play a large role in Christian theology. Yet for all this insistence, the historical consciousness of liberalism was faulty for it contained no awareness of the eschatological and apocalyptic aspects of history so clearly enunciated in the New Testament. Even before it was discredited by history itself, Albert Schweitzer pointed liberalism beyond itself by his insistence that eschatology was an essential ingredient of the New Testament understanding of Jesus. Liberalism’s faulty view of history stems from the fact that it constructed its view of history within the Kantian contention that a rational knowledge of a transcendent God is impossible and within the contention of the prevailing science that the world is a closed system of cause and effect, allowing no intrusion by the divine from without.

The Problem In Neoorthodoxy

After the basic tenets of liberalism had been discredited by the historical convulsions and upheavals of the early part of this century, to which it had contributed and for which it had so dismally prepared men, liberalism’s insistence on the crucial significance of the category of the historical in theological thought was accepted in the neoorthodox movement.

Neoorthodox theologians refuse to be identified either as orthodox or as liberal. Because of their peculiar dynamic view of the historical, they accept but reinterpret various orthodox doctrines which liberalism had rejected as outmoded. Nonetheless, the heart of their difference with orthodoxy concerns the historical character of divine revelation. While orthodoxy contends that revelation can be identified with the historical and can therefore exist in the form of the Bible, neoorthodoxy contends that revelation, while always an historical occurrence, cannot be identified with the historical and hence not with the Bible.

Neoorthodoxy also refuses the designation of liberal, and again the heart of the difference lies in the question of revelation and its relation to history. It has uttered a loud NO to liberalism’s immanent God everywhere accessible within human experience and to the concomitant idea that man, being neither a radical sinner nor radically in need of divine grace, possesses the autonomy to discover and evaluate the authentic revelation of God.

Thus it is neoorthodoxy’s peculiar view of revelation and history which accounts for its rejection of both the orthodox and the liberal classification. And it is its peculiar view of the precise nature of the conjunction of revelation and history which, on the one hand, makes it impossible for orthodoxy to accept neoorthodoxy and, on the other, lends credence to the liberal’s claim that neoorthodoxy is in the tradition of liberalism.

Whereas liberalism denied the possibility of a miraculous inbreak into the world’s natural and historical processes, neoorthodoxy insists that God in his act of self-disclosure enters into history from outside and beyond history. Yet the precise nature of the conjunction of the revelational with the historical is in question. God is said to enter history tangentially; revelation is defined as Event, yet as Event is said never to be identical with the historical. Hence the distinctions between Geschichte and Historie, between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, the New Testament life of Jesus and the kerygma, sacred and secular history, between the Bible as something which is and as something which becomes the Word of God, all of which are so common in neoorthodox thought, as is the need for and wide usage of such terms as myth, saga, and symbol.

Where The Answer Lies

This question of the precise nature of the conjunction of revelation and history—and in consequence the question of the nature of our knowledge of God—is the crucial problem of modern theology. In this situation what should evangelical theologians do? Should they take heart, as Cauthen does, because modern physics today is not so certain that the world is a closed system, thus allowing for the possibility of a revelational inbreak of the divine which would violate neither nature nor the continuum in which history occurs? This would not only place theology again at the mercy of science but would be a gross neglect of the very revelation of God to which orthodoxy is committed. It is rather in the Scriptures themselves that orthodoxy must seek light on the admittedly complex question of the relationship of revelation and the historical. The Bible has a vast and rich doctrine of eschatology which liberalism so completely ignored and which orthodoxy has so largely rendered impotent for the solution of this vexing problem by its reduction of biblical eschatology to a number of items associated only with the calendar end-time of the world. Yet it is precisely in the biblical eschatology that one is confronted both with the fact of revelation and with the fact that it both occurs within history and alters history, which means that biblical revelation, on the one hand, is an authentically historical revelation, and yet, to the degree that it alters history, cannot be simply identified with history. This crucial problem of present-day theology is obviously a complex and intricate one, yet orthodoxy can neither afford to ignore the problem, nor surrender the genuine historicity of revelation by taking recourse to the merely mythological or symbolical. Neither classical Protestant Lutheranism nor Calvinism has absorbed into the structural part of its theology the biblical eschatological significance of the Incarnation, Cross, Resurrection, Pentecostal coming of the Spirit, and the dynamic moment of gospel proclamation. Even millennial theologies, with all their eschatological concern with an end-time millennium, do not express that eschatology which in the Bible is grounded in the Cross and the resurrection of Christ. In biblical thought revelation is not merely historical; it is also eschatological, that is, a modification of history. In this profound sense the Bible speaks of the Cross not only as an historical event which occurred some 2,000 years ago, but also as an event which so alters history that the time of its occurrence is described as an event of the end-time. Similarly, the Bible speaks of the Resurrection not merely as a given datable historical event but as an event which is also a new beginning, one which so modifies history that it is permissible to speak of a man within history actually being in Christ, and of a new song, a new covenant, a new society (the Church), a new and eternal life, all of which within history are free from the historical ravages of death, sin, and the onslaughts of hell. And around these central events there are, according to biblical teaching, a whole galaxy of eschatological truths which stem equally from a revelation which at once is historical and yet alters the historical. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is perhaps the classical biblical exhibition of the Gospel as the historical revelation of God in Christ in which the eschatological is shown to be an essential ingredient running through the whole.

The central theological problem of our time cannot and must not be solved in terms of the imagined demands of modern thought, whether of science or of philosophical existentialism. The relation between revelation and history must be learned by listening to the Scriptures, particularly to its eschatology, which deals precisely with this problem. Here lies a field almost untouched by evangelical thought, one rich with promise both for the advance of evangelical theology and for the central theological issue of our time. END

The recent publication of the tenth and final volume of The Sermons of John Donne has brought to a close one of the great homiletic publishing events of the twentieth century. (The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols., ed. by George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953–1962; all volume and page references in this essay are to this edition.) Praises of John Donne the metaphysical poet—most distinguished member of a school numbering George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne—have long been sung; indeed there was no English non-dramatic poet of Donne’s stature between Edmund Spenser and John Milton. But only with the publication of this definitive edition of the sermons is the magnitude of his prose achievement likely to become known. Since 1953 the handsome, well-made volumes containing the 160 extant sermons of perhaps the greatest preacher in England’s history have been issuing from the University of California Press. The editors—Mrs. Evelyn M. Simpson of Oxford, England, and the late Professor George R. Potter of the University of California—have, with a brilliantly exacting scholarship, set their texts from various manuscripts and from the three great folio volumes of Donne’s sermons: the LXXX Sermons of 1640, the Fifty Sermons of 1649, and the XXVI Sermons of 1661. They have also supplied excellent introductory material and critical essays.

Difficult it is to find a more moving example of devotion to one’s calling than that of Mrs. Simpson and Mr. Potter. Mrs. Simpson was publishing material on Donne as early as 1913, Mr. Potter as early as 1927. It was in the mid-1940’s that they determined their collaborative effort, the exciting course of which took on saga-like proportions—a transcontinental, transoceanic enterprise (except for a summer together in 1949), spanning the miles from Berkeley, California, to Oxford, England. Mr. Potter’s lamentable death on April 12, 1954, brought to Mrs. Simpson the full responsibility of completing the task. The measure of her achievement—and of Mr. Potter’s too—lies in ten magnificent volumes.

Born in 1572 in London of Roman Catholic parents—his mother traced her lineage back to the family of Sir (and Saint) Thomas More—Donne was in childhood privately tutored, and then successively attended Oxford University, Cambridge University, and the London schools of law at Thavies Inn and Lincoln’s Inn. During the first decade of the seventeenth century, no longer a member of the Roman communion, he assisted Thomas Morton, later Bishop of Durham, in writing treatises designed to persuade English Papists of some of the errors of their ways. After much casting about for a calling, after full inner questioning and debate, early in 1615 in his forty-third year he took orders in the Church of England. His first biographer, Isaak Walton, a parishioner of Donne’s from 1624 to 1631 at the Church of St. Dunstan’s in the West, wrote that, with Donne’s ordination, “the English Church had gain’d a second St. Austine [Augustine], for, I think, none was so like him before his Conversion: none so like St. Ambrose after it: and if his youth had the in firmities of the one, his age had the excellencies of the other; the learning and holiness of both.”

Majesty In Preaching

Donne’s first major charge as preacher came with his invitation in 1616 to serve as Reader in Divinity at Lincoln’s Inn, England’s greatest law school; here for over five years he preached to the academic community twice every Sunday during the terms of study, resigning his post shortly after his induction as Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral on November 19, 1621. The Dean-ship he graced with fullest distinction until his death on March 31, 1631. To gain some sense of Donne’s preaching majesty we may turn once again to Walton, who describes him as preaching the Word so, as shewed his own heart was possest with those very thoughts and joys that he laboured to distill into others: A Preacher in earnest; weeping sometimes for his Auditory, sometimes with them: always preaching to himself, like an Angel from a cloud, but in none; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to Heaven in holy raptures, and inticing others by a sacred Art and Courtship to amend their lives; here picturing a vice so as to make it ugly to those that practised it; and a vertue so, as to make it be beloved even by those that lov’d it not; and all this with a most particular grace and an unexpressible addition of comeliness.

Man’S Calling Under God

Donne’s awareness of this significance of a man’s calling under God was immense. And he was—certainly in all measurable respects—fit for his vocation. He had some facility in Hebrew and Greek; knew well the various translations of the Bible, particularly the Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, and the various English versions; had a thorough knowledge of the Church Fathers, especially St. Augustine; was well read in the Medieval and Renaissance biblical commentators and theological controversialists. His control over his own language has seldom been equalled, and he was, judging by contemporary reports (including Walton’s), a moving and commanding speaker. The preparation of a sermon was to him a true discipline in devotion, for he knew a sermon’s purpose to be the proclamation of God’s saving power:

There is no salvation but by faith, nor faith but by hearing, nor hearing but by preaching; and they that thinke meanliest of the Keyes of the Church, and speake faintliest of the Absolution of the Church, will yet allow, That those Keyes lock, and unlock in Preaching; That Absolution is conferred, or withheld in Preaching, That the proposing of the promises of the Gospel in preaching, is that binding and loosing on earth, which bindes and looses in heaven (VII: 320).

The center of preaching, Donne asserts on another occasion, is “Christ Jesus, and him crucified; and whosoever preaches any other Gospell, or any other thing for Gospell, let him be accursed” (IV:231).

Piercing Into God’S Revelation

To speak of Donne’s greatness as a preacher is to speak also of his literary craftsmanship and his theological acumen. He is a master of organization. The basic pattern of his sermons (the written texts average 9,000 words, though the preached sermons were in most cases shorter) is to begin with a brief introduction, to move to a minute division of his text, and to proceed to a most detailed exposition of each part of the division. One is impressed again and again by his sure sense of architectonics, by his ability to unfold his exegesis layer by layer, piercing deeper and deeper into God’s revelation and holding everything firmly in its ordered place, moving from beginning to middle to end and keeping his reader (or hearer) in constant touch with the development of his exposition.

As it is with the whole, so it is with the parts, for Donne exercises the same control over each section, each paragraph, each sentence. A superb rhetorician, he constructs his phrases and clauses and chooses his words to fashion a gloriously rhythmical style. Note for example the following quotation (a passage describing a man spiritually ill), in which there is just enough parallelism to make for an exhilarating flow of language and just enough asymmetry to prevent monotony:

Every fit of an Ague is an Earth-quake that swallows him, every fainting of the knee, is a step to Hell; every lying down at night is a funerall; and every quaking is a rising to judgment; every bell that distinguishes times, is a passing-bell, and every passing-bell, his own; every singing in the ear, is an Angels Trumpet; at every dimnesse of the candle, he heares that voice, Fool, this night they will fetch away thy soul; and in every judgement denounced against sin, he hears an Ito maledicte upon himself, Goe thou accursed into hell fire (II:84).

Still another compelling aspect of Donne’s style is his seemingly endless treasury of apt and striking figures of speech; he forges his images from the fields of medicine, law, cosmology, exploration and discovery, commerce, agriculture—and the list could go on. A few examples must suffice. To distinguish between the original sin and our daily sins, he invokes a commercial image: “In Adam we were sold in grosse; in our selves we were sold by retail” (II:115). He draws from agriculture to trace the growth of the Kingdom within a human being: the Kingdom is “planted in your election; watred in your Baptisme; fatned with the blood of Christ Jesus, ploughed up with many calamities, and tribulations; weeded with often repentances of particular sins …” (II:337). And how well, through bodily analogy, he describes woman’s proper place in the world! “[Eve] was not taken out of the foot, to be troden upon, nor out of the head, to be an overseer of him [Adam]; but out of his side, where she weakens him enough, and therefore should do all she can, to be a Helper” (II:346).

Theological Perspective

If Donne was a great stylist he was also a sound Anglican theologian. In the immediate tradition of such towering Anglicans as Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes, he is a supreme exponent of the via media, dead center between Rome and Geneva. In ritualistic and ceremonial matters Rome was superfluous, the Puritan offspring of Geneva deficient. The fount of right practice is to be found in Canterbury, not “either in a painted Church, on one side, or in a naked Church, on another; a Church in a Dropsie, overflowne with Ceremonies, or a Church in a Consumption” (VI: 284). In doctrinal matters Rome also asked too much, demanding assent not only to what Donne deemed certain fundamental beliefs to which every Christian must adhere, but also to nonfundamental matters, assent to which or dissent from which was peripheral to the determination of a man’s salvation. “Certainly nothing endangers a Church more,” Donne writes with a glance toward Rome, “then to draw indifferent things to be necessary” (II:204). And how could the very heart of the Christian faith be succinctly stated? Donne would affirm that “there is one God in three persons, That the second of those, the Sonne of God, tooke our nature, and dyed for mankinde; And that there is a Holy Ghost, which in the Communion of Saints, the Church established by Christ, applies to every particular soule the benefit of Christs universall redemption” (V:276).

Basic Christian Themes

The themes on which Donne’s sermons play constant and mighty variations are the great themes of the Christian tradition: sin and redemption, grace and free will, death and resurrection. Original sin is “that snake in my bosome … that poyson in my blood … that leaven and tartar in all my actions” (II: 120). Cursed and ravaged as we are by the fall, however, we may look with joy to one of the many paradoxes of our faith, knowing that “if I say my sins are mine own, they are none of mine, but, by that confessing and appropriating of those sins to my selfe, they are made the sins of him, who hath suffered enough for all, my blessed Lord and Saviour, Christ Jesus” (II:102).

In his views on grace and free will he threads his customary way between the Roman Catholic and Reformed positions. The Catholics think too highly of man’s freedom of will, of his intrinsic powers: witness the Roman belief in works of supererogation, those good deeds of the saints which go beyond what is necessary for their own salvation and which may consequently serve to help effect the salvation of their less virtuous brothers. To Donne the blood of Christ alone is sufficient for salvation; no man can begin to atone for his own sins, much less for those of others. And Donne was equally dismayed by the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, which would seem to deny any freedom of the will. Beautifully expressed is Donne’s conviction that the flow of grace is continuous and that man, through the response of his heart, may in his freedom accept God’s inexpressibly gracious gift:

… As his mercy is new every morning, so his grace is renewed to me every minute, That is not by yesterdaies grace that I live now, but that I have Panem quotidianum, and Panem horarium, My daily bread, my hourely bread, in a continuall succession of his grace.… God made the Angels all of one naturall condition, in nature all alike; and God gave them all such grace, as that thereby they might have stood; and to them that used that grace aright, he gave a farther, a continuall succession of grace, and that is their Confirmation; Not that they cannot, but that they shall not fall; not that they are safe in themselves, but by Gods preservation safe … (VIII: 368).

The doctrine of the resurrection, Donne was convinced, lay at the center of the Christian faith. Death, man’s last enemy, will ultimately die, and the Last Day will be a summoning of the faithful to the Kingdom. The soul’s immortality Donne viewed as so self-evident as to need little argument. The resurrection of the body poses certain problems, but for those who wonder, for example, how a body which has lost some of its members or blood or bones can be reunited on the Day of Judgment, Donne has a ready answer. Picture yourselves, he tells them, seated at a table scattered with coins and effortlessly bringing those coins together as you compute your account; Donne continues: “Consider how much lesse, all this earth is to him, that sits in heaven, and spans all this world, and reunites in an instant armes, and legs, bloud, and bones, in what corners so ever they be scattered” (III: 109). The redeemed and resurrected man may be sure of a bliss unknown in this fallen world:

We shall see him [Christ] in a transfiguration, all clouds of sadness remov’d; and a transubstantiation, all his tears changed to Pearls, all his Blood-drops into Rubies, all the Thorns of his Crown into Diamonds: for, where we shall see the Walls of his Palace to be Saphyr, and Emerald, and Amethist, and all stones that are precious, what shall we not see in the face of Christ Jesus? and whatsoever we do see, by that very sight becomes ours (IV: 129).

A Beneficent Tonic

John Donne knew that the sermon is the proclamation of God’s Word, not an occasion for the expression of man’s foolishness. An expository preacher, he asserted the judgment and the mercy of God as it is revealed in Scripture, realizing that a sermon begins with, develops, and never loses sight of, a biblical text. On the other hand he was not so intent upon biblical exegesis as to lose sight of the congregation to whom he preached; he never forgot that the Bible is an account of God’s ways in history and toward man. He was uninterested in any form of biblical gamesmanship, of displaying ostentatiously his own subtle and acute textual understanding, cut off from the immediate relevance of the text to the hopeful sinner in the pew. He was forever concerned with God’s ways with man, with each man, and with the wondrous possibilities of man’s response to these gracious ways. He preached not of damnation and salvation in general, but of the necessity of each man’s deciding, always with the possibility of God’s grace, for life or for death. And he never forgot that the Christian life, in this world and the next, is one of abundant joy: “See him [God] here in his Blessings, and you shall joy in those blessings here; and when you come to see him Sicuti est, in his Essence, then you shall have this Joy in Essence, and in fulnesse …” (X:228). The contemporary preacher will find a careful reading of Donne a most beneficent tonic.

Writing is a ministry. Surely the Apostle Paul has taught us this truth. It is a form of ministry peculiarly suited to this period of cultural development. For who can predict where a printed word will go? The Christian writer can reach many who will be reached by no other kind of minister.

The writing ministry lacks the exhilaration of public preaching services. There is no choir of voices in the composing room, no lovely Christian symbolism on a typewriter keyboard, no stained glass windows in the editorial offices. There is no beaming parade of well-scrubbed parishioners ready to file by at five o’clock and say, “My, that was a fine editorial!” Writing is lonely work, hidden work, often unappreciated work. It is easier to feel that one is an ambassador of Christ when standing in a pulpit preaching or when counseling in the dead of night with a couple threatening to abandon their marriage than when one sits at a desk alone, searching for the right word, rebuilding a paragraph, or brooding prayerfully over the state of the world. But writing is a ministry, and a highly important one too.

It is a ministry which has many exciting possibilities, many potential growing-points. It always calls for more than we have—more thought, more reading, more prayer, more literary craftsmanship.

“Who is sufficient for these things?” asks the form for ordination. And the answer, plainly, is no one. So the form goes on, “Let us therefore call upon the Name of the Lord in prayer.”

The Christian writer is a teacher, an analyst, a prophet, a comforter, an angry conscience. He needs to be caught up into the presence of God and remain there until something of a divine perspective anoints his spirit and suffuses his work. Format, advertising, circulation, style, illustration, variety—all are important. Unless the hand of God is resting upon the shoulder of the Christian writer, however, his work is vanity. But with this divine accreditation, the Christian writer will be able to transfer the power and the glory from his own vital relationship with God to the printed page. Let me turn to the developing ministry which beckons the evangelical press in our land.

This growing ministry is heightened by the urgent need of help on the part of preachers to discharge their teaching function. Thousands of Protestants in the United States and elsewhere are found in the house of God just one hour a week on Sunday morning. Whatever they learn of the Scriptures and of the life of Christian trust and obedience will have to be gleaned from this one weekly period. This fact places an intolerable burden of responsibility on the pulpit to be a teaching medium.

The home life of those who attend evangelical churches is feeling the attrition of American activism. It is doubtful if the children in our homes have a training in the Christian faith marked by as much regularity and faithfulness as may have been possible a generation or two ago. Today, home is a place where people are fed and bedded down for the night and from which the members of the family sally forth to attend meetings. Regular family worship and religious training have for many been thrown into the limbo of forgotten duties, with a consequent rise in biblical illiteracy in a segment of the Christian church where it would be least expected.

Nor can the Church itself be completely exonerated from all guilt in breaking up the home. One may even wonder how biblical a view of the Church is which equates a member’s consecration with his willingness to abandon the weekday natural communities in which he lives and works in order to involve himself in meetings of the organized church. The Church on the Lord’s Day is summoned together in “family reunion” to meet her Head, even Christ. But between Lord’s days it is ordained to be the “church of the dispersion,” penetrating for Christ’s sake the common life of mankind. Accepting seriously this responsibility of “witness in dispersion” might conceivably reduce the number of church meetings and restore a measure of balance and poise to the life of the pastor.

The teaching responsibility of the Church gets even less help from the school than from the family. We are now committed to the secularization of our public schools, simply because we can see no viable alternative in a pluralistic society. Sunday schools, though improving, are still notorious for their ineffective pedagogy, and further breakthroughs in the understanding of the church school’s role will have to take place before there will be any decrease in the dependence of church members upon the pulpit for training in the faith.

I have no doubt that preaching could do a better job of instructing, even in this one lonely hour per week. Far too much preaching is still problem-oriented rehearsal of human experiences, or highly quotational discourse on the state of the world, or pious inspiration. Biblical exposition is at a premium, possibly because we do not aim at producing it, and partly because everything in the current crowded church program conspires against the concept of a studying minister.

In view of this burden of instruction thrown on the pulpit, and in view of the unlikelihood of reinforcements appearing from other quarters, I would suggest that the writers of the Church should become important teachers of the Church.

Denominational papers and magazines have the frequent advantage of entry into 100 per cent of the homes of many congregations. They come regularly. They come often. Ways must be found to enhance their teaching function.

“Writing is a ministry. It is a ministry symbolized by a desk piled high with work in process … by deadlines, letters to the editor, the anxiety of late manuscripts, reject notices. If a pulpit is an instrument of ministering, so is a sheet of white paper, poised in a typewriter, waiting for the costly fruit of mental toil and prayerful concern, to be yielded up in loving obedience to him who is Lord of all.”

Commentaries on Sunday school materials have long been common. Symposia on controversial social concerns have been done with good effect. Perhaps serialized popular expositions of biblical material, or short series on special episodes in the history of the Church, or consecutive chapters on great Christian personalities of the past might suggest the sort of teaching that is peculiarly adaptable to the Christian periodical.

The paperback field has not yet been seriously entered by Christian evangelical writers. This market is now booming. It requires a bright, succinct, pithy prose that can be digested on a plane flight or during daily bus rides to work. This is not to imply that substantial material cannot succeed in the paperback field. On the contrary, everything from Marcus Aurelius to Camus is moving through the bookshelves at the Willow Run Airport in Detroit. But with the exception of a few devotional classics, like Augustine’s Confessions, paperbacks with a serious Christian thrust are hardly to be seen. Adults and students are reading paperbacks, no doubt about it. And the field deserves something more than yesteryear’s reprints.

Thoroughness And Accuracy

Returning for a moment to the plight of the pastor, the time the average minister has to read material not related to his current sermonic output is meager. One has to fight for it with something close to a mother bear’s concern for her cubs. A shocking number of pastors apparently do very little serious reading of any kind. For a time they can live off the accumulated biblical and theological capital they acquired in seminary. But for most men there is no such capital in the area of Christian concern on social, political, and international issues. Here the average pastor does little more than repeat what he hears on the street, or he reflects the attitudes of the income level dominant in his congregation, or he gives religious sanction to his own very superficially grounded prejudices.

At this point those who write for the Christian press have a heavy responsibility. Ministers and literate laymen alike depend on what they read to deal with current issues at a level deeper than slogans. Editors and writers on such topics have a clear duty to inform themselves with thoroughness and accuracy before committing opinion to print.

Let us frankly admit that few of those who sit at editors’ desks have had a rigorous training in politics, or economics, or international affairs, or sociology. Most are ministers of the Word with a flair for writing and an appetite for hard work. In this situation, is it not common sense to suggest that what such men need is a willingness to use experts to fill in the gaps in their own knowledge? Every editor would profit from having ready access to a dozen or more men with skill and background in the fields just mentioned—and they need not all be Christians either—to keep him from chronic foot-in-mouth disease. The social and political issues of the day are too complex to allow an untrained person to write out of ignorance and not produce palpable nonsense.

We have seen how the social ethics of theological liberalism have had a profound and unfortunate influence upon American public opinion, and this influence derived from a faulty doctrine of man. Evangelicalism, with a more serious view of sin and a high view of grace, should be able to express itself in a much more biblical social ethic.

A Call To Writing

Here I set my sights high. Some of the most perceptive thinkers of our time are the news analysts who work for the major newspapers and networks. Is it too much to hope for that the writers of opinion in the Christian press shall study and read with such honesty and dedication that they will earn a right to mold Christian opinion in our land?

I would like to propose a sabbatical year for editors of Christian periodicals. A year of travel and study would be a great stimulation to men who take seriously the task of interpreting our time with its complex crosscurrents of thought to a discerning readership. A year of disciplined study in almost any field of special interest, preferably in another country, including some travel to a few well-chosen lands of current importance, would immediately result in wider perspectives, deeper insights, and fresher copy. If some foundation wishes to use its financial resources in a really critical way, it could underwrite the cost of twenty such sabbaticals and study the results.

While most of my remarks have special reference to the Christian periodical, the ministry of writing certainly cannot ignore the novel, the poem, the play, the short story, the television script. If there is a single point on the perimeter of the universe of discourse where the challenge to Christian thinkers and writers is presently the hottest, it is likely not so much the philosophy class, nor even the science lab, but the English department. Faulkner, Hemingway, Camus, Kafka, Tennessee Williams, Robert Lowell, T. S. Eliot—these are the men who are posing the most pointed questions to Christian belief. And the Church’s writers able to write on these same questions with power, insight, and literary skill and out of the resources of Christian commitment are pitifully few. We speak of “a call to the pulpit.” Can there not be a counterpart in “a call to the pen”?

Writing is a ministry. It is a ministry symbolized by a desk piled high with work in process, by the sweet dissonance of the presses, by an endless flow of mail, by deadlines, letters to the editor, the anxiety of late manuscripts, reject notices. If a pulpit is an instrument of ministering, so is a sheet of white paper, poised in a typewriter, waiting for the costly fruit of mental toil and prayerful concern to be yielded up in loving obedience to him who is Lord of all.

The nineteenth century firmly believed that history will climax in a utopia. The world was automatically moving toward ever greater perfection. Although this optimism was shattered by the events of the twentieth century, Communists still echo it in their confident prediction that history will consummate in a worker’s paradise. Some noncommunists fear a nuclear holocaust will reduce the world to atomic ash.

All these views agree that some power other than man thrusts history toward its destiny. Each recognizes that history moves toward a goal that man has neither set nor chosen.

Each view also recognizes that man is a historical being caught up in, rather than in control of, the historical processes in which he lives. Were man the lord of history, he would be able to determine the goal of history, and that of his own life. He could then, for example, avoid death—except by choice. Were he lord of history, he could prevent his achievements from threatening his existence, as his scientific achievements today actually do. But man is not lord; he rides the moving arrow of history, but is unable to determine its direction and goal.

Further evidence that man is not lord of history is his inability to return on the past. He cannot backtrack on history and effect a new point of departure into the future. Even when he does not want to be at the place in time where he is, he cannot undo the past to make a new beginning. He can only go forward. This undemocratic, prescribed, no-choice-given rendezvous with a future conditioned by a past he cannot change, is a grim reminder that the disposition of history is in no sense his prerogative.

Marxism quite agrees and contends that an ironclad, economic determinism inexorably governs and propels history toward a preordained proletariat heaven. Herein lies the basis for Khrushchev’s confidence that Marxism will bury us.

Christians also believe that the movement and goal of history are not in man’s power. But they have heard from God that what is preordained is not economic materialism’s inevitable attainment of the worker’s paradise, but the reign of Jesus Christ as Lord of history and judge of the world. They know that he is God’s Elect, the one into whose hand God has chosen to delegate all power for the governance of all history and the gathering of all its strands for his purpose.

Because God has chosen him to be Lord, Jesus Christ can alter any situation; in bringing history to a chosen goal he can arrest its movement or reverse historical fact. His power to forgive and remove sin out of this world, to bring death to an end, to heal the sick, feed the hungry, still the storm, cast out demons, all demonstrate his power to dispose of all things, to cause former things to pass away, to make all things new. As Lord he can deliver the present from the snare of the past and thereby give the present an authentic future.

This lordship of Jesus Christ the Western world acknowledged in its decision to compute years and divide history in terms of B.C. and A.D.

Christ’s universal lordship is today being demonstrated. In our era of profound change and revolution, “one world” with a universal history is emerging. Whence comes the dynamic for these unprecedented cultural, social, economic, political upheavals that pressure and compress all nations into one world and one universal history?

The West is not being drawn into the history of the East. Rather it is the East which is being sucked into the history of the West. Western wars have become world wars. Western economic prosperity or depression affects the economics of the East as well. Western science, especially its technology, developed in a Christian milieu, is drawing the whole world into its economic and industrial orbit. Although the East wants no part of our wars, nor the undesirable concomitants of industrialization, it cannot escape involvement, nor evade the inheritance.

In Africa, Western ideas, chiefly Christian-oriented ideas of human dignity, freedom, and self-government, have caused uprising and turmoil.

This merging of the East into Western destiny is a remarkable phenomenon of our time. Tribes and nations that for centuries slumbered outside, have suddenly been drawn into one universal history.

Christians who know the Lordship of Christ and the power of his Gospel are not surprised at the revolutionary character of our times. They knew such times would come. They knew that Christ crucified would draw even earth’s remotest peoples to that one place of judgment and grace, the center of history, the Cross of Calvary. Christians are not surprised, for they know that Jesus Christ as Lord gathers all history into his own hand and purpose.

★ This issue closes out the sixth volume year of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. The annual index (pages 55–63) is the most exhaustive yet attempted. For the first time references to the news section are included. Bound copies of Volume VI will be available soon ($6.50 postpaid).

★ This is the Fall Book Issue, complete with forecast and several features on communicating the Gospel effectively through the printed page.

★ Editorial Associate James Daane contributes the threshold essay, the book forecast, and the article on “Eschatology and History” to this issue.

The 100-year-old controversy concerning the age of man has been stimulated in recent years by the very early dates (such as 1,750,000 years ago) assigned to the remains of Zinjanthropus, presumably a form of early man. Zinjanthropus was uncovered by Louis B. Leakey in Olduvai Gorge, Tanganyika, in 1959.

Even after 1859, the date of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species, discussion of an early age of man, stimulated by the discoveries of the Neanderthal finds in the late 1840s and the 1850s, was confined almost totally to limited academic circles. Darwin’s work made general evolution a public concern, but because he was silent about human origins the problem of man’s age as well as of his evolution was still not widely raised. It was not until the publication of The Antiquity of Man by Sir Charles Lyell in 1863 that this subject emerged into the limelight of popular discussion.

Although Lyell was reluctant to commit himself to definite dates, it was abundantly clear from his discussion that he envisioned a very considerable extension of the traditional biblical chronology, based largely on the work of Archbishop Ussher and found in the margins of many Bibles. Many Christians of conservative persuasion felt that Lyell’s views were an attack on the inerrancy and the historicity of Scripture. Other churchmen of more liberal persuasion did not view the disintegration of biblical chronology as a theological catastrophe. Thus a line, though not a sharp one, was drawn between conservative and liberal elements concerning an early date of man.

In the decades that followed the Antiquity of Man, archaeological and anthropological discoveries continued to give strong evidence for an earlier age of man than the traditional biblical chronology. A number of leading conservatives, men who without the slightest reservation stood for the inerrancy and the historicity of Scripture, accordingly reexamined biblical chronology. Such was the work of William Henry Green and B. B. Warfield, both of Princeton Theological Seminary.

Accommodating Scripture

Today Christians working in the fields of science have been often criticized for their constant willingness to accommodate Scripture to scientific discovery. In many respects perhaps this is a justified criticism. It must be recognized that accommodation to scientific discovery is not a valid reason for giving up traditionally-held beliefs and for reinterpreting Scripture, but it is not less true that scientific discovery can and should serve the valuable function of stimulating our thinking, demanding an investigation of our current interpretation and understanding. Is it in accord with a valid biblical exegesis? This was the desire of Green and Warfield, not merely to accommodate Scripture to scientific discovery, but to interpret biblical genealogies and chronology from the best principles of biblical interpretation. The first step in evaluating the age of man is thus to examine the biblical evidence.

Hebrew literature is characterized by a high degree of structuralization. This is particularly true of the sections which were memorized and where various mnemonic devices were used—the poetical sections (Psalms 107; 119, Lamentations, and so forth) and the genealogies (Genesis 5; 11; Ruth 4). A notable example of such structuralization is the genealogy of Matthew 1, which is arranged in three groups of 14 generations. That this genealogy is artificially structured is made obvious by the fact that four kings are omitted in the second group and that Jechonias is counted twice (at the end of the second group and at the beginning of the third) in order that each group might have 14 names. These three groupings are clearly an artificial structure used as a mnemonic device.

The second relevant characteristic is the frequent omissions in Hebrew genealogies. Again Matthew 1 serves to illustrate the point, in that the years from Abraham to Christ have been given in only three “generations.” These omissions can be seen in three ways: (1) By comparing genealogy with genealogy (1 Chron. 6:3–14 with Ezra 7:1–5, etc.). (2) By comparing the number of names in a given genealogy with the elapsed time between the first member of the genealogy and the last. For example, note the genealogy of Pharez in Ruth 4, where the ten names cannot cover the elapsed time. These years probably require from 14 to 18 generations. It should be noted that these ten names are included in the first section of the Matthew 1 genealogy, implying thereby that even in this section names are probably omitted. (The same phenomenon is noted in a comparison of 1 Chron. 24:24 with 1 Chron. 23:15, 16.) (3) By comparing elapsed time with chronologies established by archaeology. According to Ussher’s chronology, the time between the flood and the days of Abraham was only 292 years, but an unbroken archaeological sequence in Egypt extends back much more than 300 years before Abraham. Moreover, it would be impossible to consider the Egyptian culture of Abraham’s time as the result of a mere 300 years’ development.

A look at the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 will reveal that they have identical structures, consisting of ten generations, if one accepts the Septuagint rendering of Genesis 11:12. (This reading includes the name of Canaan, quoted in Luke 3:36, and has strong evidence of being in the earliest Hebrew manuscripts.) The number 10 is used as a structural device in other places in Mosaic writing—in the structure of the book of Genesis as a whole, the divisions being marked by ten toledoths (“and these are the generations of …”), and in the Decalogue. It is also used for the genealogy in Ruth 4, which can clearly be shown to have missing generations. Therefore, it may be reasoned that these genealogies do not imply the inclusion of all names and would not have been understood to do so by the Hebrews of that day. The thinking of Archbishop Ussher and later Christians is a product of our Western conceptions and of our basic literary frame of reference. The genealogies must be considered trustworthy for the purpose for which they were given, but this purpose was not that of supplying a comprehensive chronology.

Theology and Man’s Antiquity

The first full theological treatment of the interpreting of genealogies was by William Henry Green in the April, 1890, issue of Bibliotheca Sacra. This article set the tenor of conservative Christian thinking for quite some time. After an extensive consideration of biblical genealogies, Green drew the following conclusion: “… that the Scriptures furnish no data for a chronological computation prior to the life of Abraham.” In 1911, in an article published by the Princeton Theological Review, B. B. Warfield says that “the question of the antiquity of man has of itself no theological significance. It is to theology, as such, a matter of entire indifference how long man has existed on earth.” These are the conclusions of biblical scholars, whose convictions concerning the infallibility and accuracy of Scripture cannot be denied, and they are based entirely on sound exegesis. They are not the conclusions of scientists who were seeking to accommodate Scripture to scientific discovery. Therefore, with this as the background of the scriptural demands, it is possible to look at recent scientific discovery concerning the age of man.

What is man? Many of the reproductions of ancient man that are given in newspapers and popular periodicals are so far out of line with the picture Christians have of early man that their authenticity is immediately rejected. But Scripture teaches us nothing concerning the physical appearance of early men. Our basic definition of man, both from the standpoint of Scripture and of science, is functional rather than structural. That is, we define man in terms of what he can do rather than in terms of his appearance. A basic characteristic of man is his ability for conceptural thought. Theologically, this may be considered an aspect of the “image of God.” Anthropologically, this ability may be logically deduced by evidence of such cultural practices as toolmaking. Man’s ability to conceptualize also gives the psychological base for his use of language. It is largely for these reasons that the Australopithecines, represented to us by Zinjanthropus and more popularly known by the non-endearing terms of South African Ape-Men or Man-Apes, have recently been considered to be men.

Most recent interest in the dating of man was raised when the geological strata in which Zinjanthropus was found was dated by the potassium-argon method at 1,750,000 years.

The potassium-argon (K/A) dating is a radioactive method based upon the chemical decomposition of Potassium 40 to Argon 40. The assumptions underlying this method are the same as for all radioactive methods of dating, such as measuring the decomposition of uranium to lead and Carbon 14, and have been well verified by the general consistency of various radioactive methods and by other geological methods of dating, often aided by historical and archaeological means. The actual applications of the method have often encountered problems of contamination, applicability to certain types of material, and so forth, but these are practical problems which have not disproved the basic assumptions of the method. (There is a significant difference between the laboratory techniques used to measure decomposition in K/A age determination and other radioactive methods, and it is thought that these methods are much more exacting.) Without question, when it is sufficiently refined and capable of consistent and accurately reproducible results, this method promises to be a major advance toward the dating of human prehistory.

The results of K/A dating have been differentially received by various individuals—some being very receptive and others highly critical. Two of those most critical have been W. L. Straus and Charles B. Hunt of Johns Hopkins University. In Science (April 27, 1961) they concluded:

“Because some of the Olduvai Gorge dates are inconsistent, some must be inaccurate; they all may be. Until further tests determine which materials give dependable dates, we do not know which dates are accurate. Until this is learned, the indicated ages must be taken cum grano sails.”

Caution in accepting these precise dates at face value may be well warranted, but they do seem to suggest that the general magnitude of man’s age is very great. Nor does a date of man which is measured in terms of hundreds of thousands of years rest alone on the potassium-argon dating of the Olduvai Gorge. In Europe and Asia, as well as in Africa, fossil men can be given Middle Pleistocene dating by faunal association, stratigraphic position, and by correlation to glacial formations. Glacial chronology is so well established for Europe that fossil correlations must certainly place man’s age at several hundreds of thousands of years. So the problem of whether we accept an early date for the appearance of man does not rest only on the validity of the few uncertain K/A dates of Zinjanthropus which we have at present, but rather rests upon the entire construction of Pleistocene geology.

In conclusion, it may not be necessary as yet to think of the age of man in terms of millions of years, as some recent articles would have us believe. But it certainly is necessary to think of man’s origin in terms of tens of thousands of years and with very high probability in terms of hundreds of thousands. It is certainly not accurate to think in terms of the thousands of years which our traditional chronologies have taught us.

DONALD R. WILSON

Visiting Instructor

Calvin College

Grand Rapids, Michigan

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” rhapsodized Wordsworth on the French Revolution, “but to be young was very heaven.” A trace of the same exultant note can be found in WCC circles here in Paris. Never has the ecumenical star shone so brightly. The Central Committee has just recommended for membership seven new churches, and has been happily discussing the prospect of sending observers to the Vatican Council. At the local Church of Scotland on Sunday I heard a sermon on “Thou art Peter,” to which a Roman Catholic could have breathed Amen. Meanwhile Cardinal Bea said in England: “The fundamental issue is the teaching of the Church.… Here is the deepest challenge which divides us. If this problem is solved there will not be great difficulty in admitting a Papal infallibility.” Here again is that monumental presumption that in church unity discussions Rome is negotiating from a position of strength.

To criticize any of the current trends is unfashionable, but I’ll risk it, for I’ve just been reading Edmond Paris’ The Vatican against Europe, published in London by P. R. Macmillan. Born a Roman Catholic, Paris investigated the official version given of certain historical facts, and produced this volume which is a model of patient research, cross-checking, and scrupulous documentation. Ecclesiastical circles tried to smother it, happily without success.

Paris shows how since Charlemagne the Papacy has leant upon the Germans as a secular arm to impose its authority. He quotes from René Boylesve’s Feuilles tombées: “Are you then surprised at her [i.e. Rome’s] predilection for Germany, despite the latter’s crimes? The Church and Germany? But they are sisters. Both love themselves for themselves alone and are hypnotized by their own powers; both exercise dissimulation and hypocrisy.” The mass of evidence produced by Mr. Paris is positively frightening.

In Germany, it is shown how Hitler was voted full rights in 1933 when German Catholics heard that the Pope himself was “favourably disposed” towards Hitler; thus Catholic youth organizations combined with those of the Nazis. The Concordat made between the Vatican and Germany was carried out under the aegis of Msgr. Pacelli (the future Pius XII) who was in Munich during the rise of Nazism. This Concordat gave the State the right of veto over episcopal nominations, and required the bishops to swear allegiance to Hitler. After his election Pacelli was referred to as “the German Pope.” His entourage, his confessor (Msgr. Bea, now cardinal), were German, and he regarded Germany’s role as the “sword of God.”

Steadily, country by country, Paris exhibits his terrible proof. In Italy, secret negotiations between papal agents and Mussolini put the dictator in power; in 1929 the Lateran Treaty effected the union of Fascism and the Papacy, and ensured the clerical blessing when poison gas was later used against Christian Ethiopia. In Austria, the “Christian” chancellors succeeded one another, beginning with the Jesuit, Msgr. Seipel, and ending in 1938 with the country’s absorption by Hitler when eight million Austrians swelled the ranks of German Roman Catholics. In Belgium, Catholic Action nurtured a local Nazism which paved the way for Hitler. In Spain, the Vatican recognized Franco in 1937 and later decorated him with the Supreme Order of Christ. In France, the hierarchy in 1939 urged the faithful to “collaborate” with Hitler whose war Cardinal Baudrillart declared was “a noble undertaking.” A side-glance is directed at Father Coughlin and the Christian Front movement in the United States, and at Father Walsh and Senator McCarthy. One year after Pearl Harbor, La Croix, greeted by Pius XII as the organ of “pontificial thought,” said: “It is very understandable that these states [Germany, Italy, Japan] should have agreed to establish a front against a danger which, particularly in the West, is threatening civilization and our Christian ideals.” Eight months later it said: “Nothing good can come of the intervention of troops from across the Channel and from the other side of the Atlantic.” On another occasion the editor-in-chief declared that “the New Order will bear the imprint of the Christian character.…”

Most pathetic of all is the account given by Paris of the Roman Church’s share in war crimes in the present Yugoslavia, where 600,000 Serbian Orthodox and Jews were massacred with the approval of clerical members of the Croatian Parliament, including Msgr. Stepinac. In addition, 240,000 Orthodox Christians were forcibly “converted.” Though Stepinac was in 1946 sentenced to 16 years’ hard labor for war crimes, Paris comments: “The wondrous deeds of the Archbishop of Zagreb could not fail to bring their reward: the Cardinal’s hat.” Referring to the massacred, Paris says: “If Abel has a bad press in the heart of the Roman Catholic Church, Cain on the contrary has always been the subject of an endless mansuetude there.”

Other clerical war criminals include Msgr. Tiso, prelate Gauleiter of Slovakia, who held that Catholicism and Nazism were “working hand in hand” to refashion the world. (Tiso was hanged in 1946 after conviction by the Prague Tribunal.) Oswald Pohl, Nazi official who ordered the concentration camps to be equipped with gas chambers, also received the apostolic blessing from Pius, and the comforting words: “Unjustly condemned by men, thou shalt find thy reward in Heaven. This I assure thee.” On the Nuremberg verdict on Franz von Papen, privy chamberlain to Pius XI, L’Ordre de Paris comments: “It is both painful and shameful to have to say it, but von Papen’s acquittal is Pius XII’s condemnation.” Von Papen had claimed that the Third Reich was the first power in the world to put into practice “the lofty principles of the Papacy.” So far was the Vatican from disowning such sentiments that in July, 1959, John XXIII nominated him again as privy chamberlain. Documentary evidence is adduced also of how the Vatican sheltered and financed other fleeing war criminals.

Mr. Paris’ book should be required reading (as well as Hans Küng’s much vaunted The Council and Reunion) for travelers on the Rome Express, so that what the Vatican is as well as what the Vatican says should thunder in their ears.

Remembering how Wordsworth’s touching faith in the French Revolution vanished when he realized its true nature, we are ultimately confronted by the question: What price are we prepared to pay for ecumenicity? “The claims of the Roman Catholic Church,” says Professor J. W. Draper of New York University, “imply a rebellion against modern civilization and an intention to destroy it, at the risk of destroying society itself. To be able to submit themselves to these claims, men need the souls of slaves!” It is mere wishful thinking to suppose that Vatican policy has changed just because a friendly priest invites us to tea.

Science and religion—Your world will be more of a world of scientism than ours has been. My generation did uncover some amazing scientific data. In fact, much of it became a most disturbing element in the realm of evangelical Christian thought. There developed, therefore, a bitter controversy between science and Christian belief which wrought great havoc in the church. As I look back upon those days, I must confess that those of us who were reared in the fundamentalist tradition did not do a very good job in sincerely and courageously facing up to the scientific data, much of which we must accept today as verified data. By and large, my generation fought and lost many battles with science which not only brought us humiliation, but which have proved detrimental to our Christian testimony. The reasons for this, in my opinion, were several: 1. We maintained an altogether too obscurantist attitude. 2. Oft-times we resorted to ridicule and unwise rebuttal. 3. We fought the battle on too narrow a strip. This was especially true with respect to creation. We grossly oversimplified this complex question so that it was reduced to an either/or matter of instantaneous creationism, or atheistic developmentism. But what is even more regrettable is that we gave the impression that science was an enemy of the Christian faith and that we must do everything in our power to oppose this enemy. What we should have done was to attempt to show that so far from there being ground for any distrust or hostility on the part of the Christian faith toward science, there was actually so close a connection between them that there ought to have been mutual trust, understanding and cooperation between scientists and Christian theologians. We should also have honestly faced and discussed more courageously the real problems and difficulties which arise for our Christian faith in the findings of scientists in their various fields of research. At bottom, the real questions which needed discussion were how any new scientific theories would affect the fundamental doctrines of Christianity about the nature and destiny of man, the fall, and redemption.

But while we are ready to confess that our theology may not embrace everything that we would like to know, we must insist that the scientists do not know everything. More and more I am convinced that one of the main reasons for the view that the relation between religion and science must be envisioned in terms of a conflict is provided by the assumption of the nineteenth century scientist of the virtual finality and immutabilitv of the scientific notions of his day. This was a faulty assumption. I recall having read that the noted philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, said that when he was a student at Cambridge he studied mathematics under the best teachers of his day. He acknowledged every basic presupposition that had been assumed in those days had been either altered or rejected by present-day mathematicians. Scientific views have been altered, and will be altered. Therefore we believe we have a right to confront scientists with the inadequacies of their assumptions and presuppositions as well as the limitations of their methodology. We must insist that they cannot explain the nature of nature itself without a hypothesis which includes God in it. Nor do they have, in fact, an adequate explanation of man as to his origin, his nature and his destiny. Recently some scholars such as Karl Heim, the German theologian, C. E. Raven, the British theologian, and E. L. Mascall, a Catholic theologian who delivered the Bampton Lectures for 1956 (Christian Theology and Natural Science), have made significant contributions in their attempt to relate science and Christian theology. Among evangelical scholars in America we have the work of Bernard Ramm, The Christian View of Science and the Scripture, and also the work edited by Russell L. Mixter, Evolution and Christian Thought Today, which have grappled with this most difficult issue. We are not called upon to subscribe to every position or observation made by any one or all of these authors, but certainly we should be grateful for their having made a long delayed “breakthrough” in the “wall of silence” which has been so long surrounding us evangelicals. But what they have done is only a beginning, and so my generation leaves to you a great unfinished task as a part of your destiny. We sincerely hope you will carry on the dialogue between Christian theology and science and that you will be enabled to demonstrate more and more the harmony which must exist between God’s Word and God’s world to the edification of both the believer and the scientist.—Dr. HOWARD W. FERRIN, President, Barrington College, in remarks to the Senior Banquet in Houghton College.

LET THE BIBLE ALONE—The British scientist who is rewriting Genesis apparently has been demoralized by a peculiarly American admonition: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

The whole idea of Adam and Eve, he says, won’t fit in with evolution, so he’s eliminated the Garden of Eden and his version reads, “In the beginning … God said let matter and energy form atoms and let atoms combine and condense to form solids and liquids and let stars and planets evolve in their millions; and it was so.”

This may be good scientific theory at the moment but it is poor religion and worse literature. We don’t think it will sell. We are not among those who want to fight about whether Adam ate the apple. It may have been a grape, or a pomegranate or a naval orange. But the rich allegory which has come down to us from the nomadic Hebrew poets tells the story of human travail and aspirations accurately enough.

The apparent conflicts between Genesis and scientific fact are minor and probably transient. For the story of Adam’s rib, this humorless scientist substitutes: “So man evolved, male and female, from the higher animals by the spirit of God.” How does he know? Particularly, how does he know the entrancing story of how male and female all began?

The Bible is our richest storehouse of cultural history and tradition. Particularly in the King James version it surpasses in poetry of expression anything else in the language. This scientist should go back to his test tubes and let the Bible alone. Taking with him, if possible, all the other modernizers whose revised and logical versions tend to reduce this inspirational volume to the flat and practical level of a mail order catalog.—Editorial, The Washington Daily News, August 8, 1962.

O Lord, thou hast searched me (Ps. 139: la; read 1–24 as a prayer now).

A psalm we find difficult, because we think of omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, and transcendence. But really a prayer in simple words. Four parts, equal in length, all about you and your God. One part hard to understand.

I. God Knows You, just as you are (1–6). Think of a physician with a fluoroscope, though the Celestial Surgeon sees vastly more. He alone can read the soul that he has made. Whatever is in it of good, he knows. Also, anything evil. How then do you feel under his all-seeing eye?

II. God Goes with You, wherever you go (7–12). On an ocean liner or in an airplane, you are in the presence of the Most High. Hence no region of earth can be God-forsaken. Also at home, in midnight gloom or noontide splendor, the Lord is with you, tender to sympathize, mighty to save. One of the most wondrous facts about God! Learn to welcome his presence!

III. God Has Made You, just as you are (13–18), except for sin, which he permits but does not cause. Body and soul alike come from his hand, perhaps the most wondrous of his created works. You cannot change your stature, or personality. But by his grace you can make the most of yourself as a beloved child of God and, like your Lord, a devoted servant of men. Also, because God has made you a person like himself, you can worship him now in the beauty of holiness, and afterward in heaven live with him to enjoy his presence forevermore, all through Christ.

IV. God Enlists You on his side (19–24). This difficult part we often pass by as though it meant nothing now. But it shows that God is “the Source of the distinction between right and wrong.” Indeed, his only Son “died for the difference between right and wrong.” For that difference he bids you live and, if need be, die. In the world today there is a battle unto death, and God bids you be on his side. What less can it mean to be a Christian today?

How do you feel while under the searchlight of God? Ashamed and sorry for sin and weakness? Yes! But also full of gratitude and zeal because God himself in Christ opened the way to find pardon, cleansing, and peace, as well as joy and endless hope. Meanwhile, if you wish to live with him hereafter, where beyond these warring hosts there is eternal peace, he grants you the privilege of battling for “the crown rights of the Redeemer.” What less does it mean to be a Christian? Are you a Christian? If not, become one now.