Effective Christian witness springs from Spirit-filled wells, not from broken cisterns; from a divinely given revelation accepted by faith and acted on in obedience, not from accumulated human wisdom or erudite reasoning.

Israel had forsaken God and the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah saying that they, “went after worthlessness, and became worthless … for my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (Jer. 2:5, 13).

Let us beware today lest that which should be a stream of living water proceeding from a Spirit-filled life should in fact prove to be the parched ground surrounding a broken cistern!

In his infinite wisdom God has placed Christians in the world to witness to his saving power. Neither the Christian nor the Church is the agent of redemption, rather they are witnesses to God’s redemptive act in Christ.

Therefore, the Christian and the Church are the channels of the Gospel, the instruments of witness, the repositories of truth to be passed on to others—likened in the Scriptures to wells of living water and streams of blessing. What then can transform a cistern of spiritual life and witness into a broken repository of nothingness? Certainly three things—unbelief, neglect and disobedience.

Unbelief stretches back into the dim shadows of antiquity. “Yea, hath God said”? was the root of man’s downfall in the Garden and continues to blight class rooms and pulpits today.

“Thus says the Lord of hosts: … To whom shall I speak and give warning, that they may hear? Behold, their ears are closed, they cannot listen: behold, the word of the Lord is to them an object of scorn, they take no pleasure in it” (Jer. 6:9, 10). Do these words spoken through Jeremiah have relevance for our time? Surely they can be applied today!

Jeremiah speaks to us again: “The wise men shall be put to shame, they shall be dismayed and taken; lo, they have rejected the word of the Lord, and what wisdom is in them?” (Jer. 8:9).

Do we not need to hear and heed these words of that prophet: “Thus says the Lord of hosts: Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes; they speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord. They say continually to those who despise the word of the Lord, ‘It shall be well with you’; and to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, ‘No evil shall come upon you’ ” (Jer. 23:16).

God’s word is not to be trifled with with impunity: “Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? says the Lord.… Let him who has my word speak my word faithfully” (Jer. 23:24, 28).

Do we long for power as we live and as we witness? Then let us pray to be delivered from unbelief, accepting the Holy Scriptures at face value: “Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer which breaks the rock in pieces” (Jer. 23:29)?

The sin of unbelief empties the cistern through the crack it has created. Following the cunning devices of men who deny the Bible may cater to our own ego and titillate our pride but the cistern of spiritual power is broken and only the dregs of a sandy futility remain.

Neglect. The first cousin of unbelief is that spiritual indifference which pays scant heed to God’s truth and blithely goes its disinterested way.

The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells of God’s revelation of his truth through the prophets and then through His Son. He depicts Him as the Creator of the universe, the One who “reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power” (Heb. 1:3). Then he exclaims: “Therefore we must pay the closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For if the message declared by angels was valid and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?” (Heb. 2:1–3).

Neglect and indifference are just as deadly in their effect as open unbelief. We who know the truth—what are we doings about it? for ourselves; for others?

But God holds us responsible for the truth that He has imparted, and neglect in no way invalidates that responsibility.

Disobedience also takes its deadly toll. The cistern of spiritual power is broken by a disobedience which turns its back on the divine command in favor of our own personal preferences. Strange that we recognize the validity of a military command and recognize the necessity of obedience while we regard lightly the divine command and make its execution optional! Judas disobeyed God and his judgment followed (Jer. 29:19).

The writer knows gifted men who once appeared destined to become mighty channels of blessing, only to have the cistern of spiritual power cracked to its very bottom by the sin of disobedience.

Christianity is, thank God, a positive religion and one can mar its witness by emphasizing the negative. But Christianity is also a religion of, “Thou shalt nots,” and woe to him who disregards these warning signs on life’s road!

The zealous Paul had great advantages of learning, citizenship and social standing. But the risen Christ on the Damascus road gave him a commission which ultimately involved giving up all he had counted dear. To Agrippa he said: “I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision” (Acts 26:19), and he was not.

Suppose Paul had been disobedient. Suppose that he had counted the cost of discipleship and found it too great to pay; what a tragedy for his age and for succeeding generations, for the cistern of his spiritual power would have been broken from top to bottom by disobedience.

Have we been disobedient to the heavenly vision? Has disobedience marred God’s plan for our lives? Are we living right now with no more spiritual power than a broken cistern has water?

Unbelief, Neglect and Disobedience shatter the cistern of life but the cracks often begin with the supposedly “minor” sins of pride, selfishness, temper, jealousy, impurity and other similar sins.

Let any Christian, any minister of the Gospel, ask himself about his greatest need. An honest answer for many will be “spiritual power,” with its attending dependence on organizations, programs, etc. The cistern has been broken but we hate to admit it. The water of spiritual power has drained away and we try to be content with the sands of futile human endeavor.

“He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water’ ” (John 7:38).

L. NELSON BELL

Doomsday Week End

DISASTER PREDICTIONS POPULAR—This business of predicting individual or universal disaster has always had a certain popularity.… This superstition (or science) has prevailed since the dawn of man’s history. It can still depress the stock markets of a great Eastern nation, cause travel bookings to fall by 70 per cent.… Since this particular combination of planets has not occurred since the days of GENGHIS KHAN … we may hope that Indian astrologers will not become quite so excited again for a very long time.—London Daily Telegraph.

ACCIDENTAL POSSIBILITY—Who are we to make light of doomsday forecasts in an era marked by man’s mastery of means to destroy himself and his civilization in some nuclear doomsday of his own making? Nor would we have to await another century or so for a similar conjunction of the planets. An accidental triggering of intercontinental missiles might do the job effectively and quickly, not to mention the dreaded possibility of a calculated attack in some cataclysmic Armageddon.—Washington Evening Star.

PROOF COMES TOO LATE—There is a danger in prophecy of disasters; it is one form of prediction that requires some form of spectacular proof. Recall the plight of William Miller, the leader of Second Adventists in America, who forecast the final coming in 1843.—Washington Post.

CHAOS: FULL DETAILS—A London news-vendor’s billboard.

LESS CONCERN—The last time there was such a conjunction of planets was in February, 1524. Astrologers predicted the end of the world. There was panic in Europe, and many people built arks. England was fairly calm. Western astrologers seem less worried this time. By Western computations, there are seven planets aligned, not eight; and they are in the sign of Aquarius, not Capricorn. Even Brigadier R. C. W. G. Firebrace, former President of the Astrological Association and President of the College of Psychic Science, who does use the Eastern zodiac, is much less pessimistic than the Indians.… “No great disaster. But the initiation of a new phase in world affairs. I think it’s going to be a … difficult year.”—London Observer.

THE GOLDEN STREETS—Despite their professed fears that the end is near, Hindu holy men, astrologers, palmists and almanac sellers were looking to an earthly future. Sitting cross-legged offering prophecies, the holy men and others were reaping a rich harvest—in cash.—Associated Press, Detroit News.

FAITH IN ASTROLOGY—Most of the population of the astrology-minded Hindu world expect something dire.… Contrary-minded are Buddhist astrologers who cite the phenomenon as a good omen of peace and prosperity for the Buddhist New Year which begins Monday.… But astrologers the globe over are predicting everything from a rainy weekend to the Last Judgment.… An estimated 30 million Americans have varying degrees of faith in astrology.…—Frederich M. Winship, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.

MUSLIM LEADERS DISSENT—Muslim religious leaders … ridiculed the prophecy by Indian astrologers.… Sheikh Ahmed Haridi Mufti, the highest religious authority on Islam, said yesterday that according to the teachings of Islam, ‘judgment day’ will be preceded by “a return to earth of Jesus, the son of Mary.”—Amrita Bazar Patrika (Calcutta), India.

STARS IN THE WEST—Millions of people here, no doubt, will continue to believe … that the stars in their courses influence their life for good or evil. But are they so very different from the men in other countries?… One has only to look at astrological forecasts in the mass circulation dailies in the West and the avidity with which millions of readers turn to these.…—The Times of India (Bombay).

END AFAR OFF—Britain’s Aetherius Society announced yesterday that the world has 30,000,000,000 years to go before it ends.…—National Herald (Lucknow, India).

ASTROLOGY RIGHT OR WRONG—Don’t believe the astrology columns this weekend.… The Ottawa Citizen intends to publish Monday. Watch for the astrology column.—STARE COTE, Ottawa (Canada) Citizen.

ONE LAST FLING—Two 16-year-old boys told authorities today they stole a white Cadillac for a trip to New Mexico because the world was coming to an end.—UPI news item.

THE PREDICTABLE FUTURE—We assert with unprecedented confidence that the world did not end yesterday and will not end today—probably.—San Francisco Chronicle.

THE SCRIPTURE STANDS—We are still alive this morning—the soothsayers and the Jeremiahs notwithstanding.… But as we look at the present-day world, we cannot help recalling the solemn words of the Old Testament: “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth.… And God looked upon the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth … for the earth is filled with violence.”—The Indian Express (New Delhi).

DOOM WILL COME—The Day of the Lord will come; it will come, unexpected as a thief. On that day the heavens will disappear with a great rushing sound, the elements will disintegrate in flames, and the earth with all that is in it will be laid bare. Since the whole universe is to break up in this way, think what sort of people you ought to be, what devout and dedicated lives you should live! Look eagerly for the coming of the Day of God and work to hasten it on; that day will set the heavens ablaze until they fall apart, and will melt the elements in flames. But we have his promise, and look forward to new heavens and a new earth, the home of justice.—2 Peter 3:10–13, NEB.

Ads, Novels, & Paradise

Deep in the artists’ quarter, down an old brick street, he found the auberge. The silver, three-pointed star of his Mercedes floated to a stop with stately grace on the ancient tile terrace. Entering the cool dimness of the old stone walls, he found a primitive antique chair near the smoked timber of the fireplace. The apple-green goblets, the flowered pottery, put him in the mood for rich, cream-and-butter cooking. Entranced by the aromas he sat waiting. His thoughts drifted back to the enchanted voyage: the painting of color and lights, the colossus ship bellowing its deep basso blast, the long glide through a confetti rainbow to the sleepy southern waters …

If, at this point, the traveler noticed a corpse in the corner, you would be reassured. The auberge passage was only standard atmosphere for a thriller. But imagine a novel continuing with the cream-and-butter fare. The luscious language is not original, of course. The paragraph is a blend of excerpts from the travel ads in one recent magazine.

I love them, and would never dream of traveling to discover what these mystical auberges are really like.

The same magazine reflects quite a different view of life in its reviews of books and plays. I note that one new novel finds a savior figure in a pornographer. He hears in the cynical obscenities of his customers the cry of man seeking a lost paradise.

It might be worth a try to get the ad-men to write novels and the novelists to write ads. I wouldn’t suggest having steamship companies sponsor French novels, however.

The slick Utopia of eternal youth and beauty found only in Ad-landis seems to offer the paradise that the messy pornographers of modern fiction have lost. The contrast could not be more dramatic. Ads are works of art. No disorder, filth or death—only dreams come true. Novels are works of art, too. No meaning, satisfaction or fulfillment—only misery and disgust in being human.

I took my magazine to Pastor Peterson. He didn’t agree that we need a more balanced view of man. Neither extreme is drastic enough, he said. The paradise of the ads dreams of too little. The Christian hope sees a risen Christ and a new heaven and earth. The hell of the novels is too mild. It sees misery, degradation, and despair, but not guilt under the wrath of God.

Christian preachers need more realism than novelists or admen.

EUTYCHUS

Critics’ Verdict: Mixed

I have just read the January 19 issue, and could not help wondering whether the person who wrote the first article (“Ambassadors, Not Diplomats”) had ever laid eyes on the next piece (“Against Cowardice”).

The Dibelius excerpt seemed … to be a shining example of all the lead article spoke against: This is not to say that the Dibelius sermon was not worthwhile reading, but how does it qualify as Gospel preaching, as “preaching up Christ Jesus”? A quick scanning does not even reveal a mention of Christ, nor any exposition of the Gospel. In fact, even the text seems to be a pretext.…

NICHOLAS MAY

Trinity Lutheran

Toledo, Ohio

Dr. Dibelius’ sermon is excellent in my opinion. Let us all do what he says, “Pray, pray, pray for God’s grace to be brave in Him.”

ALVIN KIRCHHOEFER

Wisconsin Rapids, Wisc.

Otto Dibelius is a bishop and a notable preacher. Yet his so-called sermon is hardly more than a well-written essay.…

Dr. Kerr is quoted as saying that we are sent to preach salvation, redemption, pardon (forgiveness of sins?), resurrection, the Gospel and Christ. Yet with the exception of a veiled reference to the Resurrection (“the faith of Easter”), Dr. Dibelius deals with none of these heavenly themes. He speaks of many men, … but of Jesus Christ we find no reference.…

DUNCAN S. STEVENSON

Emmaus Lutheran Church

Dorsey, Ill.

Congratulations on “Against Cowardice.” … This sermon shook me down to the soles of my feet. What a message! What illustrations! The rest of the series will have to be very good to top this one.

“Ambassadors, Not Diplomats” was also very much in the midst of time. A wonderful issue.

THOMAS J. BUCKTON

Herrin, Ill.

An article that has stirred my heart to the depths.…

H. HILDEBRAND

Principal

Briarcrest Bible Institute

Caronport, Saskatchewan

Bravo and amen to the proposal and purpose expressed in your editorial “Ambassadors, Not Diplomats.” It is high time and most fitting that CHRISTIANITY TODAY open the door to our homiletical shame and point the way to our faithful resurgence.

As one who listens to a guest preacher every other week, I substantiate the truth of your attack. As one who preaches, I pray a deepening from your challenge.

ALLEN F. BRAY

Chaplain

Culver Military Academy

Culver, Ind.

Face Bitter Fact

Your article (or conversation) “Revival for the Evangelical Press?” (Jan. 19 issue) both delighted and disturbed me. Recently I completed a master’s thesis on the subject of “Christian Fiction for Teen-agers.” My findings agree basically with Dr. Henry’s statement, “… the evangelical remnant is so withdrawn from the mind-set of the day it artificially handles modern life … and … does not speak to our times.” I would enlarge upon this and say that this is not limited to “the evangelical remnant.”

What disturbs me is Dr. Wirt’s charge that “in order to appear to be aware of ‘the changing social situation’ the Christian writer is being pressured to mix filth into his work.” This is undoing that which has just been done. If we are to “enter into the mind-set of the day,” “speak to our times,” it may well be necessary to mix “filth” into our work—not for its own sake, but in order to be realistic.… What need is there for the Gospel if modern man is lilywhite, untouched by “filth”? (And what is “filth”?) … Does the saved man never again have an impure thought? He certainly does! Now he can do something about it, but the problem hasn’t vanished into thin air. How are these things to be presented? As Christian writers, let’s come to the point, stop lifting our skirts daintily aside and face facts squarely.…

MRS. JANE VAN STONE

Shoshoni, Wyo.

For The Record

This note is in reference to an editorial, “Why Not A Federated Campus?” printed in the January 19 issue.

We are happy that Taylor was included … even though it was incorrectly listed as a Methodist college.

Taylor University was organized … by a group of Methodist lay preachers but has never been an affiliate of the Methodist denomination; … since the early 1900’s it has been … interdenominational. Taylor University is operated by a … board of directors, members of nine denominations, and all thoroughly evangelical.

Our student body represents 30 denominations from 40 states and 10 foreign countries.…

EDWARD W. BRUERD

Taylor University

Upland, Ind.

Enter The Village Priest

(Re “Southern Travellers,” “Brotherhood in Rome,” and “Peace Corps Baptists,” News, Jan. 5 issue): In good faith and candor, may I suggest that the above mentioned articles are definitely misleading?

The following excerpts from an article titled “Foreign Aid in Colombia Promotes Clerical Power” (Church and State, Dec. 1961) certainly is a very poor manifestation of the Pope’s statement, “We are brothers in Christ,” or President Kennedy’s “jesting” statement, “I’ll be your John the Baptist.” I quote from the article: “News that the Peace Corpsmen in rural Colombia are to be billeted with Roman Catholic priests appears to supply the final clincher as to the fundamentally sectarian nature of the operation in that country. The Corpsmen will obviously be under the sponsorship and tutelage of the village priest. It is in the rural areas …, that the Evangelical Confederation of Colombia lists 116 known dead as a result of the anti-Protestant persecution there.… This act of official deference to the village priest will undoubtedly be regarded as placing the stamp of United States approval upon his anti-Protestant behavior.… One of the tasks assigned to the Peace Corpsmen is the building of schools whose teaching program will be controlled by the Roman Catholic Church. Some … in areas where more than 200 Protestant schools have been closed in recent years as a result of a concordat between the Vatican and the Colombian government.…”

Yet, in view of these tragic conditions, a Dec. 9, 1961, news item under a “Vatican City” dateline reads: “Pope John XXIII made a powerful plea for Christian unity … into one church, under the authority of the Roman Pope.”

Have we reached the low ebb of American statesmanship when the Congress will submit to scuttling the First Amendment to our Constitution by flagrantly subsidizing Roman Catholicism, or any other religion, in effort to defeat the tyranny of Communism? May God forbid!

MRS. J. G. HANLIN

Oklahoma City, Okla.

Limited Concept

Just what church would Mr. J. A. Paulson (Eutychus, Dec. 22 issue) have “your agitated critical readers” attend who “are still going to ‘the church of their choice,’ after six years in the wonderful wilderness of words”?—the church of his choice?

In the practical world of dollars and cents (sense) we also have a choice of denominations, albeit at the possible risk of finding some counterfeit. One wonders if because of this situation certain brethren would prefer their salaries in undenominational “legal” tender.

C. M. GEORGE

Quakertown, Pa.

Evangelical Mongrels

So far as Philip E. Hughes’ article goes (Current Religious Thought, Jan. 19 issue), it is a clear and essential statement of what Anglo-Catholics believe, but I wonder about the evangelical statement. How many evangelicals would go that theological road? I have yet to find even fractional agreement among evangelicals nowadays—the reason being that the true evangelical is a vanishing breed that has in recent years been married to the so-called broad churchman thereby losing his pedigree.…

RICHARD TURNER

St. Andrews Church

Poison, Mont.

It is true that the liberal-Protestant-broad-church clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church often call themselves “evangelicals,” but the beliefs and practices of these men are not evangelical.… P. E. liberals, Anglo-Catholics, and “shades-in-between” may disagree on many things in their own denomination, but they are solidly united on one subject-evangelicalism (derisively dubbed “fundamentalism” by these clergy) has no place in the “respectable” and “progressive” Protestant Episcopal Church.

CHARLES E. MONAGHAN

Portsmouth, Va.

Still Spirit-Filled

Our assembly stands for loving cooperation with all the servants of God, whatever nationality they belong to, Jews or Gentiles, who were called of God to serve him here. If there have been some who made mistakes, it is not for us to judge them, much less to draw attention to any faults on their part and to enlarge upon those. We recognize our debt to the labors of dear consecrated Gentile Christians, who, under God, were the means of pointing us to our Messiah and of praying us through to salvation.

We take this opportunity to correct a misrepresentation—owing to a misunderstanding—which occurred in your article on “Christian Witness in Israel” (Aug. 28 issue).… You stated that there was no Hebrew-Christian Church as yet in the country, and followed on immediately to describe our work here, designating it “Pentecostal” in brackets. We, however, view our work as an altogether independent, indigenous, i.e., Israeli church, rooted in the country with regard to membership and leadership, since almost all our members, including our pastor, are Jews. We see in our church the rebirth of “the churches in Judea which are in Christ” of the first century A.D., just as the state of Israel can be viewed as the rebirth of the nation prior to its dispersion.

However, as to Mr. I. Ben-Maeir’s presumptuous statement about me in his letter (Nov. 24 issue) that I am no longer “Pentecostal” since coming to Israel: I wish to make it plain that I have always believed and have never ceased to believe, that nothing short of the experience of the first-century Christians, following the Pentecostal outpouring, is to be our aim in building the Church in Israel. Though we do not append any names to our assembly except that of “Israeli” and “Messianic” (i.e., Christian), yet we preach the Gospel and enjoin on our converts to seek the Baptism of the Holy Spirit as exemplified for us in the Book of Acts, Chapters 2; 8; 10, and 19.

W. Z. KOFSMANN

Pastor

Messianic Assembly of Israel

Jerusalem, Israel

Speaking of the Roman clergy, the late G. K. Chesterton said: “The direction of preferment should begin after seminary with the office of Bishop, and only after years of accumulated wisdom and experience should it result in promotion into the parish ministry.”

In the contemporary scene, some students see a movement that, if unchecked, could bring some very undesirable results. I refer to the movement of trained people away from the areas of difficult work, up (?) or into positions of programming and administration; in other words, the movement of skilled people from the areas of the particular and the specific into the areas of the vague and the general.

I have a dentist friend. He has applied at several dental supply houses for a position to sell and demonstrate dental equipment. He is no longer interested (after only a few short years) in the drudgery of office hours, appointments, human beings. This is prosaic and wearying—and no place for a person of talent in search of status, power, and position. He anxiously awaits the chance to leave his working profession for an administrative, selling position. He tells me that within his profession such a change represents promotion, such a change is up on the ladder of preferment. But is this really true? And it so, who says so? And if so, is this as it should be?

Obviously I cannot jump from this one incident to a conclusion about all of life. But I can note something very similar in some areas of the Protestant ministry. Here there is what may well be called a movement away from the parish into areas that have little or nothing to do with ordination vows. Along with this movement away from the parish is also developing the idea that this is a promotion up the ladder of preferment, that those who prefer to remain in the vineyard, both early and late, are untalented dullards capable of only lesser things. But again, is this really true? And if so, who says so? And if so, is this as it should be?

The most obvious movement to be seen within some areas of the Protestant ministry is the one that leads to the college campus. Now I am sure we are aware that “God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.” I am also sure we are all aware of how very understanding the Holy Spirit is in that he “always calls to larger parishes at higher stipends.” My question with regard to this movement is simply this: Is such a move up or down the ladder of preferment? If it is up I should like to know who says so. If it is down I should like to know whence the cause of self-immolation among the brethren. Surely it cannot be maintained that college campuses are the place where all the great issues of life are being met and debated and that therefore they require our best and most talented men. Except for visiting lectures, most campuses (especially church-affiliated campuses) are graveyards of unanimity, peace, and quiet.

My second concern has to do with the results, spiritual and material, that flow from vacancies left by men on the way up (?) the ladder of preferment. Congregations that are left without a pastor simply cease being a church and become a religious club. Such necessities as faith, discipleship, stewardship simply do not flourish in the absence of a pastor, or under an absentee pastor—a supply pastor from another church or from a college campus. As for the material side of this problem: How many congregations will continue in good spirit to support a denomination that allows its ministers to crowd away from the “lesser” tasks of preaching, marrying, burying, and baptizing for the “larger work of the Church”—teaching, or administrative positions within the hierarchy? In plain words, does not this movement up (?) cut off the source of revenue?

Thirdly, I am also concerned with an attitude that is beginning to develop regarding what I consider to be my sacred calling. All through seminary I was assured (and I still have no real reason to doubt it) that the parish ministry is the highest of all high callings. But now I find myself in this present movement the object of such remarks as, “Good that you are comfortable where you are” … “nice that you find your work rewarding” … this from those who are on the move up (?).

Dr. Jacques Barzun of Columbia University has addressed himself to this same problem in the teaching profession, that is, teachers who desert the classroom for “research” have not been promoted and thus have no reason for condescension toward those who remain to plod at mundane chores. Should not something similar be done to reverse the trend away from the parish?

The “macerated ministry” was the subject of much debate in one of our national journals some time ago. Is not the subject of the “decimated ministry” a part of this same problem? While America experiences a population explosion, many churches are without proper leadership because ordained men have moved up (?) to teach, to sell and program, and to administer the organization. Is it not time now to “Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send forth laborers into his harvest,” if not to remain in the parish at least to admit that one becomes defrocked when one moves from an active to a passive role while so much remains to be done?

Business And Life

BASIC AND VALID—Why, from a Christian point of view, should one broadcast religious programs? This is a matter in which I for a long time have had an interest and a concern. Let me as a Christian layman put this in the simplest of terms stating my convictions. First, we should use all practical means to propagate and to give witness to the good news our Lord has provided for us. Mass communications by radio and television are such means. Second, the purpose should be to point men to Jesus Christ. Third, the objective should be to develop in our fellow man a knowledge and an acceptance of His saving grace. These are the basic and the valid reasons.—Dr. ELMER W. ENGSTROM, President, Radio Corporation of America, in remarks at the annual meeting of the NCC Broadcasting and Film Commission.

ALL THE SAME—Don’t ask me please if I’m planning to change my religion. I have no guilts about myself, my religion or my color. I was brought up a Protestant and no matter what religion a person is, he worships the same God. I don’t think changing my religion is going to give me any more peace of mind or inner content, and it certainly isn’t going to change my color. I’m satisfied where I am.—EARTHA KITT, Hollywood star and songstress, who played the feature role in 1960 in the Presbyterian missionary film The Mark of the Hawk.

LAW AND HONESTY—We have always told and will continue to tell our members to live up to the letter of the law.—DAVID DEERSON, chairman of the Board of the New York-Bronx Retail Meat and Food Dealers, Inc., when told that the Department of Markets would seek an ordinance to prohibit dealers from concealing excessive fat by adding beef blood to ground beef. (New York authorities confiscated packages of hamburger containing 90 percent fat, which costs two cents a pound.)

THE CLAMOR FOR CHANGE—In college and seminary during the 1930s, I was persuaded that I had joined a gallant, prophetic band when I myself became a liberal-socialist. And I recall the hope which sustains every prophet, whether true or false, namely, the eventual triumph of his maligned minority view. Well, that earlier ‘prophetic minority’ has been in the saddle now for at least a generation. The Communists … now control a third of the world, and the Fabian Socialists … hold the reins in most of the other two-thirds. If the triumph of an idea is itself the index of prophetic truth, we must be living in the Golden Age! Except that we aren’t! We live in an age of chains.… Either something has gone terribly wrong with the ‘prophetic vision’ of the liberals and progressives, or else their vision was not really prophetic.… The Biblical prophets never thundered for change just for the sake of change. Their visions of the future were built upon insights and principles rooted in the past. Insofar as they offered something new, it was a fresh revelation of verities at once old and new, because eternal. The cry of the Biblical prophets was not simply ‘come up’ but also ‘go back’ to principles and values that were being betrayed and lost.… Liberalism is proving to be morally, intellectually, and spiritually bankrupt, therefore a false prophet. If ‘the conservative demonstration’ can rise to the stature of its inherent genius, it can prove itself the truer prophet of our century.—The Rev. EDWARD W. GREENFIELD, Chaplain of the Church of Reflection, Knott’s Berry Farm, Buena Park, California.

BETTER HEADS—The record of the beer industry during the past decade has been one of slow growth, declining profits, and increasing concentration. Total beer sales advanced only 6% from 1950 to 1960 because the prime age group of beer consumers, young adults between 20 and 39 years of age, remained almost static.… The combined effect of greater overall growth in consumption, continued concentration, and better pricing should permit the leading brewers to operate at higher rates of capacity than in the past and to achieve better profit margins. Between 1960 and 1965 they should average an annual growth of close to 5% in barrel output, of 6% in sales, and of 7% to 8% in earnings.—Fortnightly Review prepared by Carl M. Loeb, Rhoades & Co., New York.

WHAT’S ‘GOOD BUSINESS’?—In the fiscal year that ended last June 30, Playboy magazine … grossed $8, 295, 193 and has a pre-tax profit to sales ratio of nearly 22%—good for any business.… The average net paid circulation in the first six months of 1961 was 1, 223, 328.—Business Week, Jan. 20 issue.

FAITH’S POWER—Faith can move a slab of granite.—From the Warner Brothers film The Young Ones.

THE MINISTRY OF WORDS—We live in a country in which words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up.—JAMES BALDWIN, “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” The New York Times Book Review.

Rudolf Bultmann claims that the New Testament teaches a three-storied universe which modern science has made incredible. Therefore, to preserve Christianity in our day, the New Testament “mythology” must be reinterpreted.

Bultmann writes, “The cosmology of the New Testament is essentially mythical in character. The world is viewed as a three-storied structure, with the earth in the center, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath.… Supernatural forces intervene in the course of nature.… Miracles are by no means rare.”

This introductory statement to his essay New Testament and Mythology, Bultmann expands in considerable detail. The idea of a Holy Spirit, or spirits generally, the mysterious cleansing effect of baptism and the still more mysterious Eucharist, the doctrine that death is a punishment for sin, and the resurrection of Jesus—all these are mythical and incredible. Bultmann locates the source of this mythology in Jewish apocalyptic literature and in the redemptive myths of Gnosticism. Indeed, from Gnosticism came the idea that Jesus was not a mere human being, but a God-man. All in all, Bultmann considers the New Testament to be pervasively mythical.

Therefore, the New Testament as it stands cannot be accepted. Modern science has now discovered the real truth about nature, and the scientific laws of causality prevent modern man from believing in any divine intervention. “All our thinking today is shaped irrevocably by modern science. A blind acceptance of the New Testament mythology would be arbitrary.… It would involve a sacrifice of the intellect which could have only one result—a curious form of schizophrenia and insincerity.”

Fortunately (as Bultmann sees it) “there is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such.” The real gospel, which even the modern man needs, can be obtained by reinterpreting and demythologizing the New Testament. Then we can leave behind the fairy tales of a divine Christ and a bodily resurrection and preach the pure, powerful gospel of Heidegger’s existentialism! (When accused of imposing Heidegger’s categories on the New Testament, Bultmann should rather be startled by existentialism’s independent discovery of biblical truth!)

Bultmann’s view is open to criticism both with respect to the “mythology” of the New Testament and with respect to the state of modern science. First, his picture of the mythical world, allegedly found in the Bible, depends for some of its details on Gnostic sources. Apparently Bultmann takes over the theories of Bousset and Reitzenstein, who claimed that many Christian ideas were borrowed from the mystery religions and Hermes Trismegistus. But while these theories were popularly received in the early years of this century, when Bultmann was a student, they are today completely exploded (see for example The Origin of Paul’s Religion, by J. Gresham Machen, chapters VI, VII). If, now, the New Testament does not in fact teach the mythology of Gnosticism, this latter cannot be used as an objection to accepting the New Testament. No doubt Bultmann would reply that even so the New Testament teaches the existence of spirits, the occurrence of a resurrection, and the doctrines of heaven and hell, and this is mythology enough. To this point we shall return in a moment.

The second and more important criticism strikes closer home: Bultmann’s view of science is defective. His repeated allusions to a “causal nexus” indicate that he conceives of science in terms of eighteenth century, or, at best, nineteenth century mechanism. But science dropped the concept of causality more than a hundred years ago; and in the twentieth century Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle seriously called in question even the idea of mechanism.

No doubt some popular evangelical writers have made too much of indeterminacy by trying to find room, as it were, for God, miracles, and free will in the random motion of the ultimate particles. But at least mechanism can no longer be confidently used as an insurmountable objection to miracles. Indeed, contemporary science cannot be confidently used in objection to anything in the New Testament because contemporary science is in a state of confusion. With the destruction of the Newtonian gravitational mechanics and the introduction of quantum theory, the splitting of the atom, the mutually incompatible formulas for light, and all the wizardry of relativity research, the result has been and still is chaos. The basic concepts of mass, inertia, energy and the like are no longer well defined; and an accepted scientific world view, to be used either for or against the New Testament, simply doesn’t exist. Bultmann’s confidence is outdated.

Furthermore, the most recent philosophy of science, operationalism, denies that science has the purpose of describing nature. According to this theory scientific laws are directions for laboratory procedure and do not give any information at all on the constitution of the world. If therefore operationalism be accepted, there could never be scientific knowledge of nature to compel abandonment of the actual New Testament picture of the world.

This is not to say, however, that no problem remains. After Bultmann’s Gnosticism is removed from the interpretation of the New Testament, the New Testament picture of the world is still not that of the “modern mind.” Indeterminists and operationalists, for all their abandonment of Bultmann’s antiquated view of science, are not about to acknowledge the Holy Spirit, or Jesus Christ as true God and true man, or angels, or devils. They still oppose the teaching of the New Testament, even if they can no longer logically oppose it on the basis of science.

To accommodate these who disbelieve in spirit, who dislike vicarious atonement, who ridicule the Lord’s return, Bultmann proposes to reinterpret the New Testament so as to accord with modern existentialism. But sober thought, whether Christian or not, must reject this fanciful reinterpretation. No better reason exists for finding Heidegger in the New Testament than for finding Hegel there. Bultmann’s method of reinterpretation is on a par with the old allegorical method. If Bultmann finds Heidegger in the New Testament, so did Philo find Plato in the Old.

Honest examination of the text disallows demythologization. The Bible plainly teaches that the Almighty Spirit created the world, that mankind disobeyed God’s commands and became guilty of God’s wrath and curse, that the second Person of the Trinity was born of the Virgin Mary in order to satisfy divine justice by his death, and that he rose from the grave the third day for our justification.

This message is offensive to the modern mind. But this is nothing new. It was offensive to the Pharisaic and Epicurean minds as well. And it will remain offensive no matter what new philosophies of science may become popular in centuries to come.

It goes without saying that the sincere Christian wants to communicate with the modern mind. But the question how to communicate is not to be answered by substituting a different message. Heidegger is not Paul or John. And however much we agonize over the difficulty of reaching our contemporaries, we want to reach them, not with the message of a passing philosophy, but with the eternal New Testament message of Christ’s satisfaction for sin.

We Quote:

“… Perhaps one of the contributions of the post-Bultmannians will be to free the new research from a use of the Heideggerian analysis which gets perilously close to absolutizing it. Otherwise, Renan’s ‘Amiable Carpenter,’ Tolstoi’s ‘Spiritual Anarchist,’ Schweitzer’s ‘Imminent Cataclysmist,’ Klausner’s ‘Unorthodox Rabbi,’ Otto’s ‘Charismatic Evangelist’ may become Marburg’s Heideggerian Christ; and the new quest may leave as its bequest an ‘existential Jesus,’ and just as the old quest broke Jesus of Nazareth loose for ecclesiastical dogma, the next few decades may find scholars trying to release the Jesus of history from existential philosophy.”—Dr. J. BENJAMIN BEDENBAUGH, Professor, Biblical Department, Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, Columbia, South Carolina.

Twelve years have passed since my escapes from the Communists in Rumania and Hungary. For a long time I refrained from writing of these experiences for fear of reprisal on those who risked themselves to help me. But now that danger is largely past, and I would like to share this story with those who may be reminded through it of the providences of God in the lives of us all. And more than this, I share it in the hope of providing one more bit of evidence that no middle ground exists between freedom and slavery, and hence no place in these decisive days for cowardice, complacency, or compromise.

In late 1944 when Russian armies drove into the Balkans to defeat the Nazis, I was a history professor in northern Transylvania, which then belonged to Hungary. The state university where I taught was in Kolozsvar, the capital of Transylvania, a beautiful city of 100,000 inhabitants. Today the Rumanians, to whom Transylvania was given, call the city Cluj.

Since I had worked in the anti-Nazi underground, I received identification with Marshal Malinovsky’s signature on it to show that I was acceptable to the Russians. But the Russians were far from acceptable to us. Their atrocities and intrigues confirmed our fears that they would place a permanent stranglehold upon us. After a conversation with Ferenc Nagy, who was then Hungarian prime minister, I began to gather evidence of Russian activities in Transylvania. With such material we hoped to prove to the western world what Russia really was doing. Soon the files became sizeable. Names, dates, photos of unbelievable killings and riots incited—we had them all.

In April, 1946, the Russians allowed an American newspaperman to visit various Balkan cities. Each of the persons he contacted disappeared mysteriously in the months that followed. In Kolozsvar he talked with me. A few weeks later I received a written invitation to meet an American colonel in a secret rendezvous. The meeting turned out to be a Communist trap, the colonel a fake. To make sure that I would not be seized on my way home, I offered to bring five friends to a meeting the following evening. I needed time to hide the files.

Early the next morning I packed the files in a large homespun knapsack and boarded a bus going south to a small college town where I had friends. Here I left the files and careful instructions with one of the professors. Two days later, as I was returning to Kolozsvar, soldiers stopped the bus on a winding mountain road and arrested me. In a pig sty, stripped naked, I waited until the chief of the secret police arrived to take charge.

Sixty Fantastic Charges

After 17 days of torture and interrogation in the secret police headquarters in Kolozsvar, I was moved to the army prison to await trial. Sixty fantastic charges were listed against me, but the basic one was that I had worked as a spy with the American underground to overthrow the people’s democracy. Meanwhile, ironically, Russia and the United States were officially allies, and the council of their foreign ministers was meeting in Paris.

Mine was the first spy trial in the Balkans after the war, and the Communists made front-page propaganda of it. The trial lasted a month, and was recessed three times to allow time for more torture and questioning. Death was the sentence, but two new lawyers volunteered to barter for my life if I would sign over to the Communists all my properties and goods. And so the sentence was commuted to eight years’ imprisonment. In the fall of 1947, after 14 months in Kolozsvar army prison, I was led in chains through three miles of city streets to the railroad station. People, many of them my friends, gathered to watch. Their faces were full of sympathy. The “iron train” took me to the fortress prison at Gherla to serve my sentence.

A sentence to Gherla was as good as death. Each day the living dug graves for the dead. There was hopelessness in every heart and a longing to be done with the cold, the hunger, the lice, the loneliness. No one lasted long at Gherla. I struggled to stay alert and hopeful. And I prayed.

It was a pickpocket named Paul Kokas who was my deliverer. Paulie himself had only a six months’ sentence, but he said to me one day, “Professor, sometime I will help you escape.” At the moment I did not believe him. No one escaped from Gherla.

In Search Of Liberty

One December morning, two months after I had come to Gherla, a guard took me from my cell. Without explanation he brought me out through the three gates, across the open street, and into the home of the Rumanian prison director. Here I found Paulie scrubbing floors for the director’s wife, the domnisoara. Paulie had asked the domnisoara to send for me to help him. The Russians had used the house and left it in filthy conditon. The next day again we were scrubbing dirt from the parquet floors when the director came home and found me there. He was enraged that a famous prisoner was so poorly guarded. Paulie overheard the man berating his wife in the kitchen and heard the domnisoara promise not to use me again.

Quickly the plan was devised. At noon, while our guard crossed the street to get his lunch, only the domnisoara would be watching us. If she left us alone, I would slip downstairs and out the door. Paulie put my cap, coat, and shoes in the vestibule, and we waited. When the guard left, the domnisoara appeared. “Carasho, carasho,” (very good) she said in Russian and disappeared into her kitchen. In seconds I was downstairs and out of the door, the coat over my shoulders, the shoes untied on my feet. At the prison gate our guard was talking with his back to me. I turned right, toward the village. As I passed along the prison walls, a guard above called, “Psst!” The third time he called I looked up, lest the man shoot me. Instead, amazingly, he pointed to my shoes. I knelt in the shadow of the wall and tied them.

When I gained the woods beyond the town, I remembered that Gherla is on an island in the River Szamos. Avoiding the two bridges at opposite ends of the island, I tied my clothes into a bundle around my neck and plunged into the water. The Szamos River is wide and swift, and that time of year it had ice in it. I thought I would never reach the other side. Struggling, panting, clawing, I inched my way up from the river to the top of the steep wooded ridge. As I lay exhausted at the top, I heard the great siren of the prison, and looking down, I saw two lines of armed guards bicycling furiously from the prison gates toward the bridges.

What Freedom Is

High in the woods I found a shepherd’s summer but where I spent the night. There was straw in the hut, and I covered myself gratefully. For a long time I lay thinking. Certainly this night on the mountain was a turning point in my life. I saw so clearly there in the but that freedom was more than being out of prison, and that I could never be a free man unless I was free also in my soul. Free to speak the truth and free to live by it in honesty and integrity. I thanked God for saving me not only from the fortress prison of Gherla, but also from a life of compromise, of teaching history for history’s sake. God had saved me for a purpose. Of that I was sure, even though I could not yet see what His plans for me included. But this I knew—that a man doubly saved from death had a message to bring and a work to do for the God who had saved him.

Before I fell asleep in the hut, I thought again of Paulie Kokas. In the split second when I had taken my things from the domnisoara’s vestibule, I had noticed that my fur cap and the detachable lining of my coat were missing. I chuckled to myself. Paulie, my deliverer, had been a pickpocket to the end.

It took me three months to work my way northwest to the Hungarian border. Everywhere placards offered a large reward for my recapture. I went from village to village where there were Reformed pastors who would hide me. In the first village, the pastor and his people bought me a horse and peasant’s cart. Without my prison beard and in my peasant’s clothes, I did not so much resemble the picture on the placards. But the Russians required passes for entering and leaving towns. I began to use the ruse of offering Rumanian soldiers a ride in my cart. The guards would then let me enter a town as the soldier’s driver. Sometimes I had to wait a day or two in the open country until a Rumanian soldier came that way.

When I came to Satu-Mare, the city nearest the Hungarian border, I had no idea how to evade the border guards. A Satu-Mare pastor provided the man to accompany me out of the city so that near the border area I could leave the cart and proceed on foot. That afternoon the sky became black with storm. Soon the rain fell in torrents and the wind blew fiercely. The poor horse plodded on; the man and I were drenched. But the storm had been sent to protect me. When I came on foot to the border guardposts in early evening, no one was there. Even the bloodhounds had been taken in. Covered by the storm, I passed the empty guardposts and crossed the border into my native Hungary.

It was in Mateszalka the next day that I ate the torte. Through the delicatessen window I saw it—the dobos tone, the Hungarian favorite, eleven thin layers put together with chocolate. After the first piece, I asked timidly for a second. The waitress set the whole torte before me. Suddenly there flooded over me a realization of my freedom. “I am a free man … eating dobos torte … in my own country … God be praised … it is a miracle.”

A Look Of Terror

But the Communists had headlined my escape in Hungary, too. They were watching to see where I would appear. For a few weeks I hid myself in the bigness of Budapest where I had many friends. One of them, Dr. Simon, arranged for me to have lunch at the home of another friend. As I approached the friend’s home in the suburbs, I saw his small boy kneeling behind the iron railing that fenced the yard. The boy’s hands were clasped tightly and on his face was a look of such terror when he saw me that I knew instinctively that something was wrong. Walking on, I turned a corner and disappeared.

The next day I learned that at the moment I passed the house, secret police were hiding inside to arrest me. The boy, hearing the police speak harshly to his parents, had gone outside to watch for me. And through the look on the face of a child I had been warned. But who had informed the police? This I had to know for my own satisfaction before leaving Budapest. There was one suspect. Dr. Simon, who had made the plan, had a sister-in-law, Agnes, living in his house. She was an ugly unloved woman who worked in the Communist-controlled Ministry of Culture. Could she have overheard and betrayed me?

I telephoned Agnes at her office to say that I was nearby and to invite her to coffee. After a long pause which heightened my suspicions, she replied that she could meet me in an hour. I realized that this gave her time to arrange to have me followed, but I decided to risk the meeting anyway. As I suspected, two men appeared and trailed us, following even when I doubled back under pretense of finding a better coffee shop. Having proved beyond doubt my suspicion about Agnes, I had next to escape the trap. I knew that in the next block the tram slowed to turn a corner. Walking slowly, I timed our walking to arrive at the corner just as a tram did. Shaking Agnes from my arm so that she lost her balance, I leaped for the rear platform of the tram and rode it triumphantly around the corner while Agnes picked herself up and the two pursuers stopped openmouthed to watch the tram sweep me out of sight. That night I left Budapest on my way to Vienna.

Again it was the pastors who befriended me from town to town. They all helped except the last one, a pastor in Sopron, the old city at the Austrian border. I could not blame this man. He was not Hungarian and he did not know of me, but his refusal left me standing helpless in the street. It occurred to me that in this area where many Germans lived, someone might help because of his dislike for the Communists. I had to do something. In a restaurant I found two men speaking German. When I cautiously told them my predicament, Fritz, the blonde one, agreed to help. I offered him the 2,000 forints my Budapest friends had collected for me. They were worth about $500, but no price was too great for freedom. Fritz Friedl left to make arrangements and returned an hour before midnight. As we went out into the street together, I saw two policemen standing at the corner. When we came to them, Fritz stopped and said, “Here he is.” This time I had been betrayed by a stranger and I had paid him well for his double dealing.

The Sopron prison was full of anti-Communist demonstrators, so the police put me into the basement of their headquarters where 40 other people already were crowded into a room. We stood up all night, listening in stunned silence to the cries from another room where drunken gypsies had shut themselves in with nuns who had been among those arrested. The sounds of that night still haunt me.

The next morning, when it was my turn to be interrogated, I had my story ready. During the night I had dropped beneath 40 pair of feet in the basement the papers I was carrying in my briefcase. The local police chief looked up as I was brought into his office. His eyes widened in surprise, and he asked the attending officers to leave the room. “Sandor Ungvary, what are you doing here?” he said softly. It was my turn to be surprised. The man was the brother of an underground comrade of mine in Transylvania.

“If you are not carrying money,” he said after we had talked, “I can give you a pass to cross the border. But we have strict orders to detain anyone with money.” “I have no money at all,” I replied honestly. Fritz Friedl had done me some good after all.

Late that evening in August, 1949, I stood at the electrified barricade which separates Hungary from the free world. Two policemen opened the gate and locked it behind me. I stood there in the warm night air. All I possessed in the world was in my briefcase—one Hungarian sausage, an ounce of famous Hungarian paprika, and three books: the Bible, the book I had published against Hitler in 1939, and a book by my favorite professor. Nothing more.

It was not an auspicious beginning. But a beginning it was, the beginning of a new life in the free world. Part of me reached eagerly toward that new life. And part of me stood still, while in my ears the cries of the nuns in the night became the cries of all the captive people I was leaving behind.

Somewhere, faintly, a bell tolled midnight. I began walking toward Vienna.

A good friend of mine who rather shies away from systematics in theology wrote to me a word of criticism about one of history’s greatest theologians and gave his criticism a nice turn of phrase: the theologian had the ability, my friend said, “To paint himself into a corner.” We all know the picture: a man begins to paint a room, and is doing very nicely, whistling a merry tune, concentrating on the swish of the brush immediately in front of him, only to discover to his chagrin that he has painted himself into a place where his only escape must be messy and embarrassing. You have probably caught yourself in an argument, especially in a theological argument, slowly closing yourself into a spot where you have no longer a neat logical outlet. Preachers have been known to raise more questions in the introduction than they can answer in the next twenty minutes—or the next twenty hours! Sometimes we dig up more snakes than we can kill.

I am wondering in all this about whether the World Council of Churches is not painting itself into a corner, and I mean a theological corner. Concern over the New Delhi sessions has centered primarily on the acceptance of the Orthodox Church of Russia. Will the Russians be able to be churchmen first and communists second or the other way around? Will the orthodox churches generally, simply by virtue of their numbers, carry too much weight in Council policies? Has the Council taken on a different total character by the nature of this new heavily liturgical thrust? Others have raised mild demurrers over the ease of the Russian entrance and the difficulty of the Pentecostal entrance at the time of voting. Does the spirit of ecumenicity really move happily in only one direction? So the questions go. But the real problems are theological.

“All our problems,” said William Temple (and Douglas McArthur said it too) “are theological ones.” The Council has recognized, however, and correctly, from the very beginning, that serious theological issues can be and usually are, divisive. The effort has been, therefore, to keep theological statements as bases for unity at an absolute minimum. But an indivisive movement can’t have it both ways: either you take a sharply delineated theology and have disunity, or you press for unity and loosen up your theology. The “unfortunate” nature of truth is its interrelatedness; no truth stands by itself. Therefore, as soon as an organization, the World Council, for example, makes one statement for sure, that statement is immediately related to many other statements. In other words, to say anything for sure, may lead to saying a great many other things for sure, and to denying other things with equal surety.

No Truth In Isolation

Take the theological starting place of the World Council: “Jesus Christ is Lord.” This simple statement should cause no trouble, but surely the knowing ones in the upper echelons of the Council must have suspected that even this simplicity is heavy with theology and even with orthodoxy. Jesus of Galilee was or was not an historical person—there have been strenuous debates about the historicity of every item in the record of his life—but when “Christ” is added to his name we are already talking about “The Anointed One,” or “The Messiah,” or “the Logos” (the authority of Scripture is now forcing itself into the discussion) and we are facing theological questions on deity and kenosis plus the centuries of debate on how Jesus Christ is fully man and fully God and still one person. And is this person the Jesus Christ of the Gospels, or of Paul, or of the Church, or of the creeds, or the One made known by the Spirit through the Scriptures in the existential situation? And how does the Spirit get into this? We were simply talking about agreeing on Jesus Christ. Furthermore, the “lordship” of Christ raises other creedal constellations far from simple, and, says Paul (1 Cor. 12:3) “no one can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Spirit.” The Scriptures and the Spirit seem somehow essentially related to any simple creedal statement—“Jesus Christ is Lord”—around which we can unite.

The World Council began to venture into a systematic theology when “Jesus Christ is Lord” was changed to “Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour.” The idea of “Lord” now has its interpretation defined specifically by the word of “God.” There is no wobbling here over the deity of Christ and, if memory serves, this theological tightening was pressed into the Council by the European churches, American churchmen, at least in worldwide junkets, being generally a little more lenient on such points for the sake of unity. But the addition of the word “Saviour” was the real addition. Now we are by necessity in the doctrine of man (and this means eventually a viewpoint on psychology, sociology, and even democracy vs. communism!) which is saying that man is lost, which means something very definite and very desperate, and man is to be saved from something to something. At the same time the word “Saviour” says something about God. Shall we speak of wrath? satisfaction? substitution? love? The many views of the atonement did not arise because men thought the matter unimportant. Our forefathers, who seemed to take undue pains with theological niceties were surely not motivated by the desire to get together for another committee meeting. And they were not naïve: many of them were very learned and all of them were playing for keeps. In all seriousness they made the discovery that one thing leads to another, that no single truth can stand in isolation. There followed, therefore, by necessity, systematic theologies, systems of ways of looking at things, looking at everything. These were not academic matters: a man could get burned at the stake for getting himself involved in the wrong system. There are differences, the differences are real, and one does not evade the problem by dreaming up a simple statement, because there is no such thing as a simple statement.

“The World Council will be forced by the nature of truth itself along a road not of their own devising; the organization men feared, and rightly, what theology could do to unity.… They can’t have it both ways: either unity without theology, or serious theology and disunity.”

One bemusing incident along the way illustrative of all this, was the Council meeting in Evanston where an apparently unifying theme, the hope of the world, was to lead to helpful answers on how Jesus Christ is the answer to war, vice, bad housing, and the like. We were to “take the incarnation seriously” (a fine idea being worn to a frazzle in most contemporary Christian literature) and the Christian hope lay in bringing Christ to bear on the totality of life, and of all this I think we all approve. But the theologians from Europe almost ruined everything by making Christian hope something apocalyptic and eschatological. The findings at Evanston became quite wordy as two ideas of hope, for the sake of unity, were wrapped up together. One way and another the findings didn’t have much of an audience and really didn’t give people much more hope in this world and the next.

Recently I sat in on a group attempting to draw up a theological statement for one of the denominational confessional groups and I heard one of our best theologians, rather plaintively, I thought, suggest that possibly we had been tending recently in theological circles to a kind of Christological unitarianism, by which he explained that constant Christ-centeredness (a thing nevertheless to be greatly emphasized) could lead to the neglect of other great truths like the Fatherhood of God and the Person and Work of the Holy Spirit. Exactly. We cannot speak the truth about Christ without being forced into the truth about God, thus the Trinity, and maybe after that such theological specialties as the procession of the Trinity or even infra-lapsarianism.

So what happened at New Delhi? The so-called “simple” statement “Jesus Christ is Lord” now has trinitarian theology imbedded in it and a fine phrase, “according to Scriptures”—not the “Word,” not “Word and Spirit”; that sort of thing will have to come later. Remember how Luther and Calvin said at first that the “notae” of a church are the word preached and the sacraments administered, but soon had to say the word “rightly” preached and the sacraments “rightly” administered. So now we confess together “the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to Scriptures (that is, “rightly”!) and therefore seek to fulfill together their common calling (it’s a long way down that road) to the glory of the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

Truth Separates And Unites

Well, what is my argument with all this? Nothing at all except that they ought to say much more and I believe that they will have to say much more and that when they say the much more they will be creating ground for division and not for unity. All of us have to agree that we see “through a glass darkly,” so we do not see everything and we do not see clearly, but the fact remains that we must be true to what little we do see and we cannot be true to what we do not see. Men and churches get themselves really united around things they see together, and since men and churches do not see everything and do not see clearly, they are not together on all things. The fact of getting together on one thing does not eliminate eventually the built-in divisiveness of truth, at least as men see truth now. The World Council will be forced by the nature of truth itself along a road not of its own devising; the organization men feared, and rightly, what theology and theologians could do to unity. What they feared is beginning to show itself—and inescapably.

One truth leads to another. The simple statement of creed will force a system. The proponents of inclusive ecumenism cannot have it both ways: either unity without theology, or serious theology and disunity.

A word from Donald Day Williams (the italics are mine) seems relevant here:

It is even necessary to see that the work of the Holy Spirit may create new divisions among men. Christ asserted a new perspective upon life against others. So we may understand the saying about his bringing not peace but a sword (Matt. 10:34). Men have some of their profoundest disagreements over what the Lord requires of them. Consider the divisions among the Christian churches. The Spirit does not blot out such divisions, though in the Spirit we are required to search for the misunderstandings and the sin which is in them. The Holy Spirit will be found where we learn to live in creative conflict, respecting one another’s humanity and faith even where we have profound differences over fundamental issues. (The Minister and the Cure of Souls, Harper and Brothers, p. 131.)

We are repeatedly hearing the statement that we are living in the post-Christian, and especially the post-Protestant era. The data adduced to support this analysis are sobering. But to generalize from them is to be blind both to history and to the current global situation. Indeed, the opposite is true. If mankind is viewed as a whole, never has Christ been as great a force in the human scene and never has Protestantism played as large a part in the human drama.

One Side Of The Story

The evidence for the sombre diagnosis is obvious. If we are to appraise the world situation in its full dimensions we must not dodge it. We must face it in all its stark reality. The march of atheistic communism across much of Europe and Asia and now with its footholds in the Western Hemisphere is a grim fact. Within the past 45 years, communism has brought approximately a third of the human race under its sway. Wherever it has control the Church has been beleaguered and has lost in numbers. Less spectacular but in some respects more ominous is the growth of what we call “secularism”—the dismissal of religion and especially of Christianity as irrelevant and intellectually untenable. In Western Europe, the traditional heartland of what we have been accustomed to call Christendom, church attendance has sharply declined. That is true not only in the cities, where the forces of the revolutionary age in which we are immersed are centered, but also in many rural districts. It is common to both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. In Latin America the process of de-Christianization of what in an earlier era was seemingly the most successful Roman Catholic mission field has continued. The overwhelming majority of the population regard themselves as Catholics, but only a decreasing minority can be regarded as “practising” their religion. The two devastating world wars of the present century were fought with weapons and methods that were first devised in “Christendom.” The first of the wars broke out in “Christendom.” The second can be said to have begun with Japan’s attack on China in 1931 and 1937, but it attained global dimensions with the explosion in Europe in 1939.

Most of the forces which have challenged Christianity had their inception among peoples regarded as Protestant. The deism which contributed to the skepticism of the eighteenth century and to the French Revolution was first formulated by men who conformed to the (Protestant) Church of England. Communism was given its classic formulation in predominantly Protestant England. That was by Marx and Engels. They had been reared as Protestants but believed that the stubborn facts of contemporary society and scientific knowledge made necessary the abandonment of the faith. Much of the scientific achievement which has undermined the faith of millions, including especially the formulation of the theory of evolution, has been by men of Protestant upbringing. Two among many were Charles Darwin, who had once intended to enter the ministry of the Church of England and Herbert Spencer, who had his boyhood and early youth in a strongly Evangelical atmosphere. The Industrial Revolution with its creation of machines and the factory system and a type of urban society which has made difficult the maintenance of church life, had its inception in Protestant Great Britain. The atomic bomb, with its threat to civilization and the survival of the human race, was first developed in what we once regarded as Protestant America.

These indisputable facts could be given in more detail and to them others could be added. Were they the entire picture, we Christians, and especially we Protestants, would have to acknowledge, regretfully, that we are in the post-Christian, and especially the post-Protestant era. Were they all, we would be forced to say that Christianity, notably Protestantism, had been giving rise to forces which are destroying it—that Christianity has been digging its own grave.

But those who focus their eyes on these facts ignore both important features of history and significant movements of our day which tell a very different story.

First of all, there has never been a Christian era. To be sure, the first five centuries after Christ witnessed the winning of the nominal allegiance to Him of the large majority of the population of the Roman Empire. We have rightly called it an amazing achievement. But the Roman Empire embraced only a small fraction of the earth’s surface. Most of mankind was outside its borders. It included only a minority of even civilized mankind. To the east of it were Persia, India, and China, together far more populous and certainly as highly civilized. In the first five “Christian” centuries the first two were touched only slightly and the third not at all by the Christian faith. Even the Roman Empire was only superficially Christian. The morals of the majority of its population had been affected very slightly. The rise of monasticism was a protest against the non-Christian lives of the millions who bore the Christian name—the earnest attempt of minorities to lead the full Christian life.

For several hundred years even this superficial Christianity seemed to be on the way to extinction. In the seventh and eighth centuries a new religion, Islam, espoused by the followers of Mohammed, became the dominant religion in about half of the erstwhile “Christendom.” Not far removed from them in time, hordes of “barbarians”—the ancestors of most of those who will read these lines—swept down from the North in successive waves which lasted for about six centuries and threatened to obliterate the portions of “Christendom” which had not come under Moslem rule.

In time these barbarians were “converted.” But for the majority conversion entailed no thorough commitment to Christ. We are often told that the European Middle Ages witnessed the high-water-mark of the Christian tide. But Medieval Western and Southern Europe, nominally Christian, and containing the majority of those who bore the Christian name, embraced even a smaller proportion of civilized mankind than had the domains of the Caesars and only a very small section of the land surface of the globe. Moreover, although Christianity made a deeper impress upon the culture of medieval Western Europe than it had on that of the Roman Empire, Western Europeans were far from fully conforming to the standards of Christ. For example, recall the Crusades. The Papacy stimulated these successive wars of conquest which in the name of the Cross cost the lives of hundreds of thousands and left a legacy of hate which still embitters relations between the West and the Arab world and which deepened the gulf between the Orthodox East and the Roman Catholic West. By a strange irony, Pope Urban II, noted for his efforts to reform the Church, initiated the First Crusade and Bernard of Clairvaux, esteemed one of the outstanding saints of all time, preached the Second Crusade.

The Reformation, both Protestant and Catholic, raised the level of the lives of the Christians of the West and was followed by emigration and missions which planted the faith over a wider area than in any preceding era. But even then, in Asia, the most populous continent, Christians remained small enclaves and until the present century numbered only a few thousand in Africa south of the Sahara.

In the sense of mankind’s conformity to the Christian faith, there has, then, never been a Christian era.

In Pursuit Of A Goal

As a second fact we must recognize that in no previous age has that goal been as nearly attained as it is in the present century. This is seen in at least six ways:

1. Never has the Christian faith been as widely accepted as it is today. Indeed, no other religion has ever had as extensive a geographic spread as has Christianity in the twentieth century. It is true that the world contains more non-Christians than at any previous time, but that is because of the population explosion of the past two or three centuries. In the past 50 years the percentage of those who bear the Christian name has mounted in land after land—notably in India, Indonesia, and Africa south of the Sahara. In the United States the proportion of the population who are church members has grown from about one-twentieth at the time of our independence from Great Britain to nearly two-thirds in 1961.

Significantly, in contradiction to the assertion that this is the post-Protestant era, in the past 150 years the spread of Christianity has been more by Protestantism than by any other branch of the faith. Much of the geographic expansion has been through Roman Catholics, but more has been through Protestants. A century and a half ago Protestantism was confined almost entirely to North-western Europe. Today it is the prevailing form of the faith in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and it is increasing by leaps and bounds in Latin America, the Philippines, Africa south of the Sahara, India, and Indonesia. Much of the growth has been by migration from North-western Europe, but it has been chiefly by “home” and “foreign” missions.

2. Christianity is more deeply planted among more peoples than ever before. Until the last half century the churches among non-European peoples were mostly dominated by Westerners. The anti-colonial, anti-imperialist surge of the past four decades might have been expected to have weakened these churches; but because of the inner vitality of the faith in land after land indigenous leadership has been emerging. Among some peoples, the faith continues to spread with little or no help from the churches of Europe and America. We are seeing this, for example, among the Bataks in Indonesia, in the Southeast Asia Christian Conference, and in the Pentecostal movements in Brazil and Chile. The circumstance which we accept as axiomatic that the churches of peoples of European origin in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa produce their own leaders, lay and clerical, and do not depend on Europe for them, is evidence of the manner in which the faith has become rooted in these lands.

Here, too, although the Roman Catholic Church has made striking advances, the gains have been more pronounced among Protestants. For example, the Roman Catholic Church in the United States still depends in part on Ireland’s Catholic South for its clergy, and only a few clergy come from Europe to the Protestant churches of this country.

3. In no country—with the possible exception of North Korea (where we do not have data)—has Christianity been erased by communism. In Russia both the Orthodox and the Baptists persist and attract adherents from the younger generation. On the mainland of China, although diminished in numbers, the churches go on and baptisms of adults as well as children are known to be taking place.

“No other religion has ever had as extensive a geographic spread as has Christianity in the twentieth centzkry.… In the past 50 years the percentage of those who bear the Christian name has mounted in land after land–notably in India, Indofzesia, and Africa.…”

4. New movements are appearing in the churches—proof of continuing vitality. Often they enlist only a few and are what Toynbee has called “creative minorities.” Some are much larger. In the Roman Catholic Church are the liturgical movement, the increase in Bible study, and Catholic Action, all of them engaging growing numbers of the laity. In Protestantism are the Evangelical Academies in Germany, Kerk in Wereld in The Netherlands, Iona in Scotland, “house churches” and “retreat centers” in England, and numberless movements of many kinds in the United States.

5. As never before Christians are approaching an answer to our Lord’s high priestly prayer “that they all may be one.” In a day when our contracting globe with the emergence of a world neighborhood—tragically quarrelsome—challenges them to a united witness, Christians are coming together. That is happening in a variety of ways—partly through the “Ecumenical Movement” and partly through other channels. Christians are still far from attaining to the unity implied in our Lord’s command that his disciples love one another as he loved—and loves—them, but advances are being made. These, too, are primarily among Protestants and on Protestant initiative.

6. Christ is having a wider effect upon mankind than ever before. That, too, is chiefly through Protestantism. Among the many examples are the Red Cross and the United Nations, both clearly of Protestant parentage, and the influence upon Gandhi, and through him on all India, this through Gandhi’s contacts with Protestants.

What is the meaning of this strange and striking contrast—on the one hand between the growth of movements antithetical to the faith and chiefly through a perversion of Protestantism, and, on the other hand, the amazing vitality and growth of the Christian forces, also largely through Protestantism?

Both are foreshadowed in the teaching of our Lord. On the one hand is his breath-taking Great Commission to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them, and teaching them to observe all that he has commanded. On the other hand his parable declares that both wheat and tares are to grow until the harvest. As Christians seek to obey the Great Commission they witness the progressive fulfillment of the prophecy in the parable. “The children of the Kingdom” increase in numbers and in their fruitage in the life of mankind. “The children of the wicked one” also multiply.

Is God to be defeated? We are told that he sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world—the world which crucified his Son—but that through his Son the world might be saved. Clearly, as the Church has long known, we are living between the times. God’s purpose is to sum up all things in Christ, whether in heaven or on earth—a staggering promise of cosmic significance. The “all things” must embrace this vast universe. It was through “the Word” that “all things” were made—through his Son God created the world—and the Son has been appointed “heir of all things.” We are warned against seeking to establish a chronology for the attainment of God’s goal or for a resolution of the contrast. But our faith is in God. He will not allow his Word to fail in the mission to which he has sent it. In his own good time and his own way, not ours, he will accomplish the purpose which he has in Christ.