Off with our shoes, please, for the Holy Trinity is holy ground. Away with finely figured syllogisms and ordinary arithmetic: here, logic and mathematics do not suffice. The need is rather for a listening ear, an obedient heart (John 7:17), rapt adoration, a careful engagement with the Holy Scriptures.

That the one God is three-personed is an audacious conception. Yet it is the confidence which has possessed us Christians ever since it dawned upon us in the days of his sojourn that Jesus Christ too was divine. We have understood that God is three persons existing in a single, uncompounded nature—in structural togetherness; the mid-numbered one in this eternal society being an actual alter ego, as is the Holy Spirit as well; there being three “hims,” three centers of consciousness, but one nature, essence, substance, Godhead.

Call it an intellectual elixir if it must be called that. Discount it as an “incomprehensible jargon” as Thomas Jefferson did. Throw it off as “the fairytale of the three Lord Shaftesburys” as did Matthew Arnold. Nonetheless, this is our confidence.

We cannot comprehend with our natural faculties this threeness in oneness, oneness in threeness. In part, this is because we have no analogies of it where our native faculties are accustomed to function. No three human persons are structurally one, without any hindrance to a full interpenetration of personal life; always there is a core of privacy about human persons. Nor is a human person, even with his intellect, feeling, and will, of such distinct threeness as we understand to obtain in God. We cannot therefore conceive the One Divine Three in man’s image.

Biblical Basis. The doctrine that God is three persons in one substance or essence is first of all an attempt to explain what is revealed in the Holy Scriptures. The unity of God is certainly the indispensable starting point. In the Hebraic-Christian faith there is but one God. Not three, as Roscellin (condemned for tritheism at Soissons in 1092) was inclined to say, but only one. Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius, Augustine, the Fathers in general and the Schoolmen (excepting Roscellin) and the Reformers—all saw it plainly taught in the Scriptures that there is but one God. Those three New Testament “unity” passages used in the Socinian Racovian Catechism to oppose the threeness (John 17:13; 1 Cor. 8:6; Eph. 4:6) are simply enfolded into the Trinitarian conception, which admits that there is but one God.

And yet the Scriptures differentiate the Deity in a three-personal way. The most common designations are, of course, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The three are referred to at Jesus’ baptism (John 1:27–33). Our baptism too is to be in the name of the three, according to Matthew 28:19. Paul’s benediction enumerates them in 2 Corinthians 13:14. The three are spoken of in John 14–16; Ephesians 2:18; 1 Peter 1:21, 22, and so on. The Son is called God in John 1:1 and 20:28; 1 Timothy 3:16; Hebrews 1:8. That the Holy Spirit is God is implied in Hebrews 9:14; 1 Peter 3:18; 2 Peter 1:21.

After the nature of God was floodlighted by the New Testament revelation, Christians began to see that in the Old Testament there are numerous lesser lights thrown upon God which point to his tri-personality. One of them is the “holy, holy, holy” of Isaiah’s vision in 6:3, when coupled with the “… who will go for us?” of 6:8. Another is the plurality of persons possibly implied in the plural Elohim used so often, even in the Deuteronomy 6:4 “unity” passage; and certainly suggested in such passages as “Let us make man in our image (Gen. 1:26) and “… let us go down, and there confound their language …” (Gen. 11:7).

Creedal Statement. Secondarily, the doctrine of the Tri-Unity has been devised in order to explain our common experience of God. This common experience, shared in great part because of the scriptural disclosure, has been made express in the Apostles’, the Nicene, and the Athanasian creeds. The Apostles’ Creed is not clearly Trinitarian. From that compact formula, taken by itself, you might think that only the Father is God, as in Arianism and adoptionism. You might read into it Sabellianism, with the Creed’s simple, successive mentions of the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. But the formulation does not state that the three are one, nor that Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are divine. It might be taken as implying that they are not, since the Father and only the Father is referred to as God.

But when you get to the second of the three ecumenical creeds which Western Christianity espouses, the Nicene of A.D. 325, and when you read it with what was added to it on the Holy Spirit in 381, you have a Trinitarianism in which the three are divine and are of one substance. The Athanasian Creed centuries later, named for the fourth century figure most vigorous with a “Nay” to Arius, spells out both the oneness and the threeness much as an anthem conveys and re-conveys its message. At one point that creed affirms, “So the Father is God; the Son is God; and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet there are not three Gods but one God.” It contains the important formula, “… neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance.”

In Eastern Christianity, such as Greek Orthodoxy, it is taught, from the earlier version of the Nicene-Constantinople Creed, that the Holy Spirit “proceedeth from the Father,” and not from the Son. In the Athanasian Creed and in Western Christianity in general, it has been taught that the “Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten; but proceeding.” This surely helps to explain why both “the Spirit of God” and “the Spirit of Christ” appear in Romans 8:9—although some say that the Spirit of Christ is Christ’s spirit, meaning Christ himself, which might tend to a binitarianism (as in the Shepherd of Hermas and in the fourth century Macedonian Heresy) but is actually used to a unitarian purpose. The Western view is also suggested in 1 Peter 1:10, 11, where “the Spirit of Christ” (that is, who proceeds from Christ) is evidently the Holy Spirit and not Christ because through the prophets he “testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ.” A passage in John can be taken as teaching either the single or the double procession of the Spirit, for Jesus says, “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father …” (15:26).

Myriad Impugners. There have been opposers aplenty as the centuries have passed. Some have been like Sabellius of the early third century, teaching that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three successive ways in which the uni-personal God has manifested himself. Many have been either adoptian or Arian, the latter being in a sense closer to the Trinitarian view in teaching not simply that a man was adopted as God’s son in a special way, but that Christ was the first and highest created being, of like substance with the Father—and the Holy Spirit a less exalted creature. But in neither of these is there participation in human life on the part of the Deity; in neither of them does a God-man die for our sins. God remains alone and aloof, unhurt by our humanity.

Faustus Socinus (d. 1604) was conspicuous for his anti-Trinitarianism and fathered the Unitarians, who have now joined organically with the Universalists. The English Deists, such as Lord Herbert and John Locke, impugned the doctrine and soon Leibniz and Wolff in Germany were also “enlightened.” That country’s Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel opposed also, generally in the direction of adoptionism or an impersonal pantheism—although Schleiermacher considered himself to be Sabellian.

The late William Adams Brown of Union Theological Seminary in New York figured that the threeness is simply the way we think about God, not the way in which he exists (Dogmatics in Outline, p. 156). One of the most articulate recent oppositions to the doctrine has come from another Union professor, Cyril C. Richardson (The Doctrine of the Trinity, New York, Abingdon, 1958). Richardson likes to speak of the three as “symbols” (p. 111), not persons. Frequently he calls them “terms” (p. 98). He supposes that the doctrine “often beclouds” (p. 14) “the vital concerns of the Christian faith.” To him it is “an artificial threefoldness” (p. 15). If you are a “thoughtful Christian” you are not supposed to believe in it (p. 14).

Richardson properly credits Leonard Hodgson with giving us one of our superb studies of Trinitarian doctrine (The Doctrine of the Trinity, Scribner’s, 1944). But while Hodgson says that there are three centers of consciousness in God, and that this makes for a more “intensive” unity such as obtains in organisms but not in arithmetic (p. 96), Richardson admits the possibility of the three making for a more intensified unity but asks why Hodgson stops with three centers of consciousness. Richardson suggests, “The logic of this should perhaps have driven Hodgson to posit an infinite number of persons in the Trinity” (p. 113). Hodgson posits only three because both Scripture and the creeds stop there—although Hodgson is like many others so vocal in our time in holding that revelation is in events conceived as divine disclosures rather than also in the biblical records of those events. Like Barth, Hodgson is more orthodox on this doctrine than on the Bible itself.

Not as many are impugning the doctrine of the Trinity now as, say, a generation or two ago, although the eternality of the three persons is often lost in merely modal views. During the late summer of 1960, the 90-member central committee of the World Council of Churches voted to recommend to the 1961 New Delhi World Council meeting that all member denominations confess faith not only in “Jesus Christ as God and Saviour,” as at present; but, along with a few other changes, in “… the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

A Prize to Promulgate. The doctrine of the Trinity, scripturally supportable and spelled out particularly in the historic creeds, is no doubt the one basic Christian belief, when it is thought of comprehensively so as to include redemption. In one of the few choice books on the subject, Charles W. Lowry calls the conception “… at once the ultimate and the supreme glory of the Christian faith” (The Trinity and Christian Devotion, 1946, p. xi).

There is a richness in the dogma. It means that God is no bare monad but an eternal fellowship. It is exciting to realize that God did not exist in solitary aloneness from all eternity, prior to the creation of the world and man, but in a blessed communion.

Although Jesus Christ is the proper magnetic center of our faith, and although faith in him distinguishes ours from other religions such as Judaism and Unitarianism, we evangelical Protestants are sometimes prone to relegate the Father and the Holy Spirit to lesser importance. It is to be expected that we would feel close to the one who “pitched his tent” among us; who bit dust for us, wept for us, died for us, is coming to translate us. Stressing the deity of Christ as we need to do, we might tend to make the begotten one the first instead of the second person of the Trinity. The three are of equal dignity, majesty, glory, power, eternity. Each has all the divine attributes. But the Father has a priority in eternally generating the Son, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The fact that the incarnated Son obeys the Father, along with the biblical portrayal of the Holy Spirit as peculiarly characterized by personal self-effacement, also points to a priority of the Father. Whereas Jesus said that he and the Father are one (John 10:30), he also said, “My Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). He declared, “For I have not spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me, he gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak” (John 12:49).

One way in which we have tended to give Christ the first-numbered position is by so often directing our prayers to him. Actually, prayer may be made to any one of the persons. But ordinarily, according to our biblical precedent, we should address the Father in Christ’s name and as the Spirit urges us, both in private and in public prayer. Very frequently, however, our private prayers, and often our public ones, are directed to Christ. Often when directed to “God” or to the “Father,” they are concluded “in thy name”—which probably means that we have thought of the prayer as directed to Christ.

A similar tendency to error in evangelical Protestantism lies in the common practice of asking Christ to forgive. He can forgive sins, according to the New Testament (Mark 2:10). But according to the same New Covenant Scriptures, we are ordinarily to think of the Father as forgiving the sinner because Christ by his death assuaged the Father’s holy wrath (Rom. 3:24–26).

Our tendency to give priority to the middle person may be reflected also in our making next to nothing of Trinity Sunday. It is doubtful if a high percentage of evangelical Protestant ministers even know that this festival falls the first Sunday after Pentecost. Because it was inaugurated in the West in 1305 and universally observed after 1334, and since we of the Reformation faith share the belief that God is triune, we might well mark the festival as do the Romanists and the Anglicans.

Bibliography: Augustine, “On the Holy Trinity,” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, P. Schaff, ed.; R. S. Franks. The Doctrine of the Trinity; L. Hodgson. The Doctrine of the Trinity; C. Lowry, The Trinity and Christian Devotion; B. B. Warfield, Studies in Tertullian and Augustine.

Assoc. Prof. of Systematic Theology

Nazarene Theological Seminary

Kansas City, Missouri

REVIVAL—THE PRICE

The copy for a recent article on this page on “Revival” had been filed less than an hour when there came a communication to our desk enclosing An Open Letter to My Pastor. The urgency of the personal letter which accompanied it made me turn to the other with real interest.

Because the writer spoke to my heart, I believe this letter will speak to many of the readers of this page.

We talk glibly about “revival.” We frankly admit that it must begin within the Church. But few of us are willing to face the cost of revival in our own personal lives.

Believing this letter has a message which may, by the grace of God, do something to awaken us, we herewith give some extensive excerpts:

An Open Letter to My Pastor

“May I please crowd in here somewhere between Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, etc., etc.? Who am I? I am a voice from your congregation!

“Every week I listen to your message—now I am asking you to take time out from your busy schedule and listen to this message.

“I pray to God that I might speak with all the force and intensity, all the urgency of the feeling within me!

“Several months ago, heavily burdened with the complacency and indifference of our Christian people, I was led to pray for a spiritual revival. I had never prayed a more earnest or sincere prayer. It seemed I would give my very life. Then, like a flash across my thought, God asked me, ‘At any cost?’

“I thought for a moment; it was frightening, but I could not escape—I had to answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ If I said ‘Yes,’ it could mean anything—a cost beyond all comprehension. If I said ‘No,’ it would mean my faith was nothing more than shifting sand and my usefulness to God would be finished. I said, ‘Yes, Lord, at any cost.’

“It was not long before I knew a part of the price I was to pay. I, the least of the least, a Christian only two years. So here I stand—nothing more than an instrument-competing with the ‘great’ theologians for your attention—but I stand, and I must be heard!

“The world is filled with people—lost, searching, dying without a knowledge of Christ; while our people—God’s people—go along indifferent, unconcerned, each wrapped up in his own little world of self-indulgence. Every pastor has probably many times asked the question, ‘What will it take?’ Only God knows the answer, but a part of that answer lies with you, right here and now. Will you step out and stand and say ‘Yes, Lord, at any cost’?

“I know you have given your life to serve Him, but will you, right now, allow God to search your heart and see if you are truly committed to Christ? I know about the meetings, the planning, the organizing, the visiting, the counseling, the preparation, the phone calls, the emergencies, the constant interruptions—I am not talking about what you do for Christ; I’m talking about what Christ does through you. I’m talking about the work of the Holy Spirit. Does he have his rightful place in your life? Are you truly committed to his will?

“Do you lay aside all self-sufficiency, go to your knees and seek his will? Do you do this before or after your schedule or sermon is all planned? I believe that every Sunday, in every congregation, there is some person whom God has prepared for a definite message. Are you open to the voice of the Holy Spirit to receive and deliver that message?

“Will you be completely candid and open before God? Will you allow him to reveal the truth to you regardless of what it means or how much it hurts?

“Do the thoughts and actions of other pastors (or ‘great’ theologians) influence your decisions? Does such influence ever supersede the actual spiritual needs of your people? Please do not be trapped by Satan’s plan of collectivism. Christ is not only a personal Saviour, he is personal concerning your purpose and mine. To know and fulfill that purpose, we must each individually seek and follow his will. No, this does not mean we would each take off in separate ways; instead, we would see a unity of purpose unknown in the Christian world today. Nor does it mean we would all band together under one impressive ‘title’ for the furtherance of man’s power. ‘Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.’ Unity comes from within, not from without, and God’s plan can never be improved upon: We are to serve God, not God serve us!

“Are you prepared to prepare your congregation? Will you stop pampering us and try Paul’s method of preaching, ‘not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: that your (our) faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God’?

“We have a choice, which must be made now. We either take our stand with God—prepared for battle with love, faith and courage, determined to follow his commands regardless of what it may mean; or we drift until we are made to wake up through tragic circumstances.

“The most important man in our nation today is not the President; it is you, the man in the pulpit! Through you the Holy Spirit must bring this nation to its knees before God.

“As you now stand at the place of decision, do you stand with Joshua and Caleb ‘who hath fully followed the Lord’? Do you have enough faith in God’s promises to walk with him against all odds? Do you have enough love for Christ to humble yourself before God and man?

“The future of this nation hangs in the balance and you will decide its course! Where is the fight Paul speaks about? Are we all concerned? Are we all afraid not to conform? Are we more afraid of man’s opinion than of God’s judgment? ‘God is not a man that he should lie; hath he said and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?’

“God is ready; he is waiting; he must begin with you. God has set before us a ‘blessing and a curse.’ Which shall it be?”

The author of this “Open Letter” is a faithful church member and a loyal supporter of her pastor. And she has the spiritual insight and concern to realize that if we are to have a spiritual awakening it must begin in the Church.

The writer of this column has a similar burden and also the highest possible regard for the Christian minister by heritage and by present family ties.

Because of this, we long to see a spiritual earthquake take place in the pulpit and in the pew, a new Pentecost in which the Holy Spirit will be given his rightful place in the life of the Church.

“A form of godliness, but denying the power thereof” stands under the judgment of God. Nevertheless, God is both willing and anxious to transform such sham into a mighty spiritual power if we are willing to pay the price.

The question of this “Open Letter” is, Are we willing?

L. NELSON BELL

JESUS AND ANASTASIA

A learned Areopagite

Who held a Ph.D.,

Awarded him kat’ exochen

By the Academy,

Was pleased to spare a moment when

The preacher had been heard

To take aside the little Jew

And offer him a word:

“You’re right, of course, about the gods;

Homeric fable can’t

Be credible here on the Hill

We willingly will grant.

“We much admired your reasoning

Well seasoned with quotation;

With training in philosophy

You’d gain a reputation.

“It was the more unfortunate

You closed with such a blunder;

Your resurrection concept is

As crass as Zeus’ thunder!

“I do not mean you should refrain

From preaching Anastasia;

The Hellenist finds deeper truth

In all the gods of Asia,

“And Resurrection as a myth

Is one with Plato’s Real;

The legend of an empty tomb

Has popular appeal.

“You need not change your discourse much,

If only it is clear

That Jesus’ body is quite dead

For myths can’t happen here!”

This poem is fresh from Pastor Peterson’s study. I told him that it had only one thing in common with the verse of T. S. Eliot: the need for footnotes. An “Areopagite” is a member of the council that met on Mars’ Hill, the Areopagus. Kat’ exochen is Greek for par excellence; here it means he graduated summa cum laude. “Anastasia” is the Greek word for resurrection made into a proper name. According to the pastor, Acts 17:18 suggests that the Greeks thought Paul was preaching two foreign deities, Jesus and “Resurrection.”

EUTYCHUS

FROM FIELDS ABROAD

Your magazine will have its place in helping to mold the religious thought of our new Republic. We do not have complete religious freedom but we do have a lot of guaranteed freedom, if we use it. No one can change his religion without his parent’s or guardian’s consent until he is over 21 years of age. The greatest restriction at present is the fanaticism of the villagers and their leaders.…

T. M. HUTCHESON

American Academy

Larnaca, Cyprus

I … find help in the suggestions it offers.

ROBERT E. ANDERSON

Beirut, Lebanon

We always hope and pray for the growth of this magazine.

SARE ISAAC

Myitkyina, Burma

We increased in worship, since we have read your CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

LABWE HTINGNAN

Myitkyina, Burma

I am writing this at a youth conference—about 100 miles from my home. We are having good times with these youth and Sunday School leaders. Here is one of the questions asked last night: “You tell us we should use illustrations to get across the truth to the young, but I have not got a single picture, leave alone other equipment. What ways would you suggest I could use to get the Bible truths across to the children?” This is not the exception to the rule here. It is the rule. How we would value supplies of flannel-graphs, pictures of the right kind, children’s simple lesson books which we can translate into other languages, simple daily readings for families, etc. Things which may seem trivial in the States are regarded as very essential in this young country. The prayers and fellowship of the American Evangelical Christians will be of tremendous value to us all in these times of upheavals—and staggering spiritual needs.

FESTO KIVENGERE

P. O. Box 3

Kabale, Uganda, East Africa

It is one magazine that I … keep on file here in my office.… I share it with my two co-pastors here in Bethel Temple, and they, too, enjoy reading it.

ALFRED CAWSTON

Bethel Temple

Manila, Philippines

Have derived help and blessing.… I often enjoy the excellent poetry.

HELEN KORNFIELD

Grace Christian High School

Manila, Philippines

Especially appreciate your coverage of events which concern every evangelical Christian.

HERBERT KRETZMANN

Manila, Philippines

As I visit evangelical student groups in countries throughout the Far East (Korea to Malaya) … and as I seek to strengthen the fellowship between the different groups … it has been helpful to get the wider perspective which comes through reading CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

DAVID H. ADENEY

International Fellowship of Evangelical Students

Hong Kong

I must admit that there is very little time left in each day for me to do real constructive thinking on the basis of the articles in your magazine. I suppose I’m not too much different than other missionaries.…

HUGH AUW

Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan

You are demonstrating by your periodical that there is a wealth of serious and responsible theological scholarship available in the evangelical Christian community.

LEONARD SWEETMAN, JR.

Christian Reformed Mission

Tokyo, Japan

High value … for me and my service in every relation.

TRISTAN BOETTCHER

Herford, Germany

When I was in Moscow … last spring I saw CHRISTIANITY TODAY on one of the desks in the office of the Baptist Union.

EARL S. POYSTI

Buchen, Odenwald, Germany

Being appointed to conduct divine services at a mission festival … I and the audience shall benefit by the accumulated inspiration from your publication.…

The modern German rationalism prepared the way for Hitler, and any detraction from the word of God will automatically prepare the way for other aberrations also. Watchmen are needed on the walls of Zion and instruments for sounding the signals. Here it seems … CHRISTIANITY TODAY has [its] … task. And the signals must be plain though profound.

SIVERT NESDAL

Loen, Nordfjord, Norway

FROM LAODICEA, NO SAINTS

In your article on the drop in seminary enrollments (News, Jan. 16 issue) you quoted Dr. Charles L. Taylor, executive director of the American Association of Theological Schools, as saying that one reason for the decline in seminaries is the growth of Bible schools which offer a “short cut” to ordination. Then, in seeming support of this allegation, you added in parentheses the fact that this year the member schools of the Accrediting Association of Bible Colleges have a seven per cent increase in enrollment over 1959–60.

The juxtaposition of the allegation with the growth of enrollments in Bible colleges is extremely unfortunate, for there are no known facts to establish a relationship between the drop in seminary enrollments and the growth of Bible schools.… It is the denominations that maintain standards for ordination, not Bible schools, and those standards in terms of formal preparation have not been lowered.

… Because Bible colleges are undergraduate institutions, they are profiting along with colleges generally from the increased birth rate of the 40’s.… Another reason for their growth is that most Bible institutes and Bible colleges are operated and in turn serve dynamic evangelical bodies, many of whom are identified with the “Third Force” rather than with the conventional denominations. There is no stultifying liberalism among them nor their schools.…

As for short cuts to ordination, there has been very substantial upgrading in quality and length of Bible college programs in the past two or three decades. A growing number of Bible colleges require five years of work beyond high school for their pastoral training programs. This includes two years of liberal arts and three years of theology.…

At the risk of being considered presumptuous, I should like to make a few comments on the drop in seminary enrollments.…

The one critical admission requirement of AATS is that no more than 15 per cent of students may be admitted from other than regionally accredited colleges and universities.… This 15 per cent limit excludes all but a few Bible college graduates even though they may be prepared for seminary by sound general education and a conditioning of heart and mind for theological studies.…

The test of the life of a church is in the number of its young people who dedicate themselves fully to the service of Christ. A Laodicean church gives birth neither to saints nor to soldiers of the Cross. The answer to a dearth of ministerial candidates is revival.

S. A. WITMER

Executive Director

Accrediting Association of Bible Colleges

Fort Wayne, Ind.

Since when do the “appeal of science careers,” “weak recruitment programs,” “competition from industry,” etc., influence men who are called of God to preach the Gospel? The truth of the matter is that such men so influenced, have never received the call to preach the Gospel. They will be better off, as far as the furtherance of the work of Christ is concerned, in some other field.

JACK B. BACHER

Calvary Bible Church

Berne, Ind.

In the second semester which has just begun, our total enrollment for the year has risen to 333. This compares to 318 for the final count for the previous year and represents an increase in enrollment of about 5 per cent. The figure you quoted was … of course the first semester enrollment.

JOHN F. WALVOORD

Dallas Theological Seminary Pres.

Dallas, Tex.

MORAL RE-ARMAMENT

In the interest of freedom of speech, press and religion, please publish the following:

“Preamble to the Articles of Incorporation of Moral Re-Armament in the United States”:

“Riches, reputation or rest have been for none of us the motives of association. Our learning has been the truth as revealed by the Holy Spirit. Our security has been the riches of God in Christ Jesus. Our unity as a world-wide family has been in the leadership of the Holy Spirit and our love for one another. Our joy comes in our common battle for a change of heart to restore God to leadership. Our aim has been the establishment of God’s Kingdom here on earth in the hearts and wills of men and women everywhere, the building of a hate-free, fear-free, greed-free world. Our reward has been in the fulfillment of God’s Will.”

ROBERT W. YOUNG

North Presbyterian Church

Pittsburgh, Pa.

MRA “salesmanship” publicizes policies in terms of divine guidance and direction. On the other hand, any attempt to discover how these policies are determined and financed on the human level, and how their agents are appointed or dismissed, is met with evasion and equivocation. In one breath we are told that the Oxford Group or MRA is a registered company with the names of its officers duly filed; in the next we are told that it is not an “organization” and that no one can join it, resign from it, or be dismissed by it. Nevertheless it admits that it receives financial support from sources which it declines to disclose.

GWILYM O. GRIFFITH

Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, England

PAUL, A PLAGIARIST??

I am sending you herewith a copy of a book of which I am the author, One Fold and One Shepherd. It is my answer to the superficial and erroneous statement about “Mormonism” (December 19 issue). (“The Lord, in his wisdom, directed that the fourth-century Middle-American religious history, the Book of Mormon, be written on imperishable material—gold. The record was to be hidden from the world for many centuries. The hiding and the secrecy were the very essence of the strategic plan of God for teaching the atomic-age world to believe.… It is the only revelation ever given to man concerning tangible things—in it the Lord revealed names of cities and nations.… The cities are now being found” [pp. 340, 350].)

THOMAS STUART FERGUSON

Oakland, Calif.

Dr. Hugh Nibley, head of Department of Religion, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, under whom I took a course entitled: “The Critics of the Book of Mormon,” a man with a Ph.D. in ancient history from U. of California, said in class to me: “Who knows but that Paul plagiarized the Golden Plates?” This statement was in reply to one I asked: “How do you account for the precise wording in Moroni 8:45 f., of the King James Version as found in 1 Corinthians 13:4 f.?”

C. SUMTER LOGAN

Trinity Presbyterian Church

Ogden, Utah

I refer to William Waide’s brief note (Jan. 30 issue) that in India Seventh-day Adventists reported other Christian converts as their converts. This statement sounds a bit ridiculous to one who has been a missionary in India. If Waide knew the process which one must go through to become a Seventh-day Adventist, he would see how utterly foolish is such a statement.

E. A. CRANE

Sturgis, Mich.

DILEMMA DIFFUSED

The “dilemma of the deep south layman” (Jan. 16 issue) has been far more acute and far more painful than any that has been faced by the clergy thereabouts. And the lack of a positive teaching and preaching clergy has only served to intensify the many pains of daily living with these problems.

BELDEN MENKUS

Nashville, Tenn.

The principles and faith of the founders of America are to be found more clearly in the South—and to some extent the Southwest—than elsewhere in the country.

F. H. JOHNSON

Dayton, Ohio

The name “Southern Baptist” implies doctrinal conviction.… The name no longer has anything to do with territory or Deep South sentiments (on segregation or anything else).

PAUL O. CHEEK

Calvary Baptist Church

Merced, Calif.

The Catholics have 34 churches for colored here in Lafayette diocese and 20 missions while the Protestants oppose efforts to evangelize the Negro.

AARON A. BOEKER

American Sunday-School Union

Elton, La.

CRUSADE AGAINST CANCER

Once upon a time a scientist came to the conclusion that the use of hymnbooks caused cancer. He brought his theory to a convention of scientists. A group worked on the project for two years and came to the unanimous conclusion that the correlation between those who used hymnbooks and those who were afflicted with cancer was more than coincidental. Whether it was the peculiar paper used in hymnals, the arrangement of the notes, the lack of syncopation, the dark bindings, or the surroundings in which they were produced, the conclusion was inescapable: there was a direct connection between hymnals and cancer. An independent study by British researchers came to the identical conclusions.…

Of course, the publishers of hymnals insisted that there was nothing to this. They ridiculed its scientific pretensions and set up their own investigating committee, which, not remarkably, came to the conclusion that there was no connection between hymnals and cancer. But even the newspapers in which they advertised lavishly and the magazines which they subsidized were unable to omit all news of the mounting incidence of those with cancer who were shown to have bought, used, or handled hymnbooks.

A crusade against hymnals was quickly organized, with four five-star generals, six ranking industrialists, two labor leaders, four college presidents, and eighteen bishops as leaders, along with a committee of a thousand prominent educators, rabbis, priests, ministers, and congressmen. The committee urged a national campaign to eradicate hymnals. Bills were promptly introduced in both houses of Congress to forbid the use of hymnals, while one measure proposed to classify it as a subversive activity. The committee on un-American activities promptly called witnesses to see if hymnals were not really produced by Russians or fellow travelers. Medical associations warned patients to have nothing to do with hymnbooks.

“We do not sell cancer here” was the sign displayed by church bookstores which refused to stock hymnbooks any longer. Over three hundred colleges announced that the use of hymnals on their campuses were forbidden. More than 4,321 students were expelled for using hymnbooks secretly or keeping them in their rooms. It was made part of administrative policy that any professor who kept a hymnbook would be regarded as incapable of teaching in a college devoted to Christian character of American institutions. Libraries were forbidden to carry any magazines with advertisements of hymnals and newspapers which ventured to defend hymnals were picketed at the newsstands.

Thousands of relatives of people who had died from cancer filed suits against the hymnbook publishers for deliberate poisoning. A nationwide petition with a million signatures listed those who declared that they would never again use a hymnbook. Synods, assemblies, conventions, and classes resolved that no hymnal should ever darken any door of theirs, and one enthusiastic Methodist conference urged that no man be ordained who would not pledge himself to never handle a hymnbook. The FBI exposed a conspiracy to bootleg hymnbooks in from Guatemala, and a former publisher of hymnbooks had to be protected by state police in Richmond. The president of the nation gave a nationwide telecast warning against any sympathy for the sellers of hymnbooks. A national interfaith conference resolved that “hymnbooks must go the way of slavery and polygamy into the limbo of forgotten practices.” The Apostolic Angels, Inc., pointed out that they had never allowed the use of hymnals in their services, and that there was not a verse in the 1611 Bible to sanction such a practice. And a new translator pointed out that the word translated “sin” in the old version should read “The wages of hymnbooks is death.” Hymnbook became an unmentionable word, and teachers urged little children never even to think it. Women who used hymnals were accused of poisoning their babies, and a death penalty was proposed for anyone who offered a girl a hymnal. Farmers were paid by the government not to raise anything that could be used in hymnals, and some country churches excommunicated all who refused to take this money.

The Attorney General noted that the use of hymnbooks was a violation of the 14th amendment in that it denied due process of law, and ordered all federal district attorneys to enforce the statute by filing suits. The governor of South Carolina called out the Southern Secession Sentinels to prevent the destruction of the large hymnbook factory in his state, but federal tear gas promptly dissolved the insurrection. A new amendment to the constitution was hurriedly ratified in special sessions of 46 legislatures, and it was proposed that the United Nations follow suit. There will be no more cancer from hymnals, solemnly proclaimed the American delegation.

… But it wasn’t hymnbooks that the scientists decided caused cancer.

CHARLES G. HAMILTON

Booneville, Miss.

WANTED: ONE COMPASS

Thank you for a little detailed reporting (News, Feb. 13 issue) on the relation of events in the Congo to missions; newspapers have generally ignored this aspect of the situation. Unfortunately, though, you got directions badly mixed in attributing recent chaos to the western sections and saying that the east was stable with no interruption of mission work.

WILLIAM E. WELMERS

Professor of African Languages

University of California at Los Angeles

Los Angeles, Calif.

My defense of orthodoxy is threefold. First there is the argument from history. I can prove from the historical documents that orthodoxy is bona fide Christianity. Dr. J. G. Machen did this in his little classic, Christianity and Liberalism, and in his more elaborate scientific work, The Origin of Paul’s Religion, which the liberals have been unable to answer even to this day. Over against Harry Emerson Fosdick’s evolutionary naturalism—with its dogma of progress and its naïve assumption of the thing to be proved, namely, that the religion of Israel moved from a primitive conception of God to the grandeur of ethical monotheism—Dr. Machen shows that in order to subscribe to the tenets of modern liberalism, one has to get rid not only of the supernatural in Scripture, but of the teachings of Paul concerning Christ and of the Jesus of history altogether. As a case in point there is Rudolf Bultmann who started out to remove the miraculous and now has nothing left of the Gospel. Dr. Machen has plainly proved that the supernatural character of the Person and Work of Christ cannot be eliminated from Scripture without giving up the whole of the Christian message.

The late literary critic, H. L. Mencken, a humanist, wrote of Dr. Machen in the Baltimore Evening Sun:

He saw clearly that the only effects that could follow diluting and polluting Christianity in the modernist manner would be its complete abandonment and ruin. Either it was true or it was not true. If, as he believed, it was true, then there could be no compromise with persons who sought to whittle away its essential postulates, however respectable their lives. Thus he fell out with the reformers who have been trying, in late years, to convert the Presbyterian Church into a kind of literary and social club, devoted vaguely to good works.…

Speaking of the basic postulates of the faith, Mencken continued:

These assumptions were also made, at least in theory, by his opponents, and thereby he had them by the ear. Claiming to be Christians as he was, and of Calvinistic persuasion, they endeavored fatuously to get rid of all the inescapable implications of their position. On the one hand they sought to retain their membership in the fellowship of the faithful, but on the other hand they presumed to repeal and re-enact with amendments the body of doctrine on which the fellowship rested. In particular, they essayed to overhaul the scriptural authority which lay at the bottom of the whole matter, retaining what coincided with their private notions and rejecting whatever upset them.…

It is my belief as a friendly neutral in all such high and ghostly matters, that the body of doctrine known as Modernism is completely incompatible not only with anything rationally describable as Christianity, but also with anything deserving to pass as religion in general.… It is one thing to reject religion altogether, and quite another to try to save it by pumping out of it all its essential substance, leaving it in the equivocal position of a sort of pseudo-science comparable to graphology, ‘education,’ or osteopathy. That, it seems to me, is what the Modernists have done.… They have tried to get rid of all the logical difficulties of religion, and vet preserve a generally pious cast of mind. It is a vain enterprise.

I have used the words of an eminent critic at some length to clarify the fundamental opposition between orthodoxy and modernism. The latter is a total reinterpretation of Christianity in that it rejects all those elements which make Christianity an historical phenomenon on the ground that the supernatural and the historical are incompatible with science. As Machen proved, modernists have a different concept of the doctrine of God, of man, of Christ, of salvation, and of the Church. Therefore, orthodoxy alone has the right to call itself Christian from any historical or logical consideration. It is the only continuation of the religion of the apostles and the primitive New Testament Church.

THE SCRIPTURAL PRESUPPOSITION

However, I am not so naive as to think that I can convince the liberals with an appeal to history. For the real issue between orthodox Christianity and its enemies is the factness of a fact. What constitutes a fact? My opponents will not accept the facts I marshal. They bridle at the mention of an infallible Scripture or the fact of the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection. And behind the facts are laws. Who is author of these laws of nature and of laws of thought? Is it God or the void of irrationalism? Is nature the whole show, as the naturalist presupposes? Can we tear the sacred robe of truth and allow a nature independent of God, operating through blind irrational forces beyond the control of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? Is religion a sphere by itself, in the realm of value and of personality, in which God has some squatting claims—but divorced from nature and science? Is man a creature of God depending for his being and for his knowledge on the self-revelation of God, or is he autonomous in his being, and the final reference-point for truth and experience? These are some of the crucial issues.

GOD AND HIS CREATION

Orthodoxy treats seriously the doctrine of a literal divine creation, which implies that all the facts as well as the laws of the universe are God-created. But the facts were also God-planned, they are God-controlled, and they are God-glorifying. It is our contention that this biblical presupposition is the only ground for meaningful human predication. Those who reject this basis for meaning and knowledge must ultimately land in irrationalism. They indeed defend their position with an appeal to man’s reason, but they have assumed an ultimate reality which shuts God out. Or, if God is enclosed within the system, he becomes finite so that the same categories that are applied to the things of time and space are applied to God. Man becomes the judge of truth and of being. Man becomes autonomous.

But what of human reason? If nature is the whole show, what guarantee is there that man can transcend his environment? No account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be real and valid, says C. S. Lewis; and, “no thought is valid if it can be fully explained by irrational causes.… Obviously then, the whole process of human thought, what we call Reason, is equally valueless if it is the result of irrational causes. Hence every theory of the universe which makes the human mind the result of irrational causes is inadmissible, for it would be a proof that there are no such things as proofs” (Miracles, New York, 1947, p. 28). Naturalism, like skepticism, cancels itself out. If we say that man cannot know, then how can he arrive at such a conclusion? If nature or reality is ultimate, how can we arrive at a rational person out of irrationality?

The point of all this is that one either begins with the scriptural presupposition that God is the ground of being and of knowledge, namely, that he is Creator, Provider, Redeemer, and Judge of his universe, or one is, willy-nilly, reduced to some form of irrationalism. Paul said, “Other foundation can no man lay, than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 3:11). I believe this not only applies to salvation, but also to the knowledge situation, for in Christ all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden (Col. 2:3). As Christians, we gladly admit that our reasoning is circular—we begin with God and we thereby have assumed the whole case, for if one seriously says “I believe in God, Creator of heaven and earth,” he cannot back down at the question of miracle or the inspiration of Scripture or the deity and sacrificial death of Christ. It is all involved in the starting point. This is something the liberal does not see. He wants to begin neutrally. He wants to keep the mind of man autonomous. He wants to be judge of the facts. His appeal is to reason. It is a vain enterprise! If God does not enter at the level of human consciousness he has no place at all in man’s thought. The starting point method, and conclusion are involved in one another If one starts with the assumption of modern science that man’s mind is autonomous and has the power to interpret the brute facts of the universe, one is actually starting with a naturalistic assumption. Es gibt keine Voraussetzungslosigkeit, as the Germans say. There is no such thing as starting without a presupposition, there is no neutral mind in science or religion. Emil Brunner has remarked in his Gifford Lectures, “The metaphysical dimension of the mind never remains empty, but must always have a content.… Metaphysical neutrality simply does not exist, because neutrality in itself is a kind of skeptical metaphysics” (Christianity and Civilization, II, p. 24).

Now the point is simply that if we are to have human science and history at all, in the sense of meaningful knowledge, interpretation, and control of nature we need the Christian presupposition, namely, of personality and law and fact. On any other presupposition, we fall into the void of irrationalism. My contention, therefore, is that human predication is impossible and meaningless except on the presupposition of the truth of the Bible. It is only within a God-created, God-controlled universe that science and history can operate. In other words, every form of denial of orthodoxy is implicitly operating with a borrowed capital. A world without the God of Scripture is impossible, for it would have no plan, no structure, no meaning—it would have to be accounted for from the void, the contradiction of irrationality producing Reason.

THE GOSPEL AND CULTURE

Finally, there is the ethical-moral consideration. When Christianity came upon the scene, human culture was at a low ebb. Ichabod was written across the gates of the Academy and the Lyceum. Men said, “Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die”; or they resigned themselves to the outrageous pangs of fortune; or drained the blood from their veins in despair and hopelessness. Then, in the fullness of time, God sent his Son.… The Gospel spread over Europe and brought new hope and vision. Later, the Reformation gave a new impetus to culture and to every human endeavor by a return to the purity of the Gospel.

However, the evil fruit of the Renaissance with its paganism and the principle of nature and freedom could not be contained. In the French Revolution it broke forth with its cry, “No god, no master!” and in the nineteenth century in Nietzschean nihilism the cry was, “God is dead!” As a result the world is today at the end of its tether. We are groping in a Götterdämmerung, resulting in the decline of the West. Cochrane suggests that we have been robbed of our man-made idols by the Russians, just as Micah of old was by the Danites. We have nothing left. Our gods of power and science have been taken over by our foes, and our great spiritual heritage is eroded.

ART AND DESPAIR

This despair of modern man, cut loose from God, is apparent especially in his art. The loss of religion results in loss of depth; with man’s ladder to heaven gone, the movement of the spirit is no longer vertical but only horizontal; all surfaces are flattened, all values are removed. As Brunner says, art has become barbarous and crude, dehumanized, and irrational. And Paul Tillich tells us, “The decisive event which underlies the search for meaning and the despair of it in the 20th century is the loss of God in the 19th century.… It drives one either to nihilism or to the courage which takes non-being into itself” (The Courage To Be, p. 139).

This courage of despair, which is said to be our only hope in an age of anxiety, is like the whistling of a boy in the dark, man pulling himself up by his own bootstraps out of the mire. This is truly the sickness unto death. In this world of anxiety, says Tillich, the ordinary categories, the structures of reality, have lost their validity. Thus modern art saw the meaninglessness of existence and participated in it.

Now, that is exactly my point. The anxiety of modern man is real. Why? Because he has lost his faith in God! To all intents and purposes, so far as man’s culture today is concerned, God is dead! Man is without God, hence without hope. Paul used those very words of his contemporaries. But Paul preached the power of God to such men, the Gospel of salvation by Grace. Without the Gospel, man’s only comfort is some sort of idealistic pantheism as reflected in Bryant’s Thanatopsis, or the defiant stoic humanism of Henley’s Invictus, or the sad, plaintive anguish of Russell’s naturalism:

The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death.

Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power” (“A Free Man’s Worship,” in Mysticism and Logic, London, 1950, pp. 46 ff.).

Over against these utterances of man’s heroic despair, of his whistling in the dark, let us take our stand with the saints of God throughout the ages who have spoken with assurance of faith. Let us say with Job: “For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God” (Job 19:25, 26).

Let us jubilate with Paul: “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea, rather that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us” (Rom. 8:33, 34).

Sunrise

Malachi 4:2

The sun comes up and all the dark earth yields

Itself in dedication to the light.

Gray shadows scuttle through the waking fields

And slink away. Forgotten is the night.

Each tree on tiptoe now awaits the kiss

Of warmth and beauty in the green-gold way

Of light with leaf. All night is but for this:

The glorious appearing of the day.

Burst on my soul, O Sun of Righteousness,

With healing in Thy wings! The night is long

Indeed; but after darkness and distress

Earth-shadows flee away. There will be song,

There will be warmth and light, and love and grace,

Eternal sunrise—in Thy blessed face.

HELEN FRAZEE-BOWER

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

There was a time, about three generations ago, when the minister was known as the parson. Parson, in those days, was not a nickname but an honorific title, and it meant The Person. More often than not the parson was the best educated man in the community and he ranked with the physician, the pedagogue, and the lawyer in eminence. But our time has seen a complete switch in this situation. The minister is no longer a parson. The advent of a highly educated public has put the minister close to the bottom of the listings of educated persons. Our reaction to this turn of events should have been a determined and disciplined effort to regain and maintain superior excellence in the things which pertain to God. Instead, the clergy retreated in mad scramble behind the breastworks of administrative detail, ecclesiastical trivia, and community vagrancy. Whenever our conscience bothered us, we simply ran off to another meeting to make arrangements for succeeding meetings to flee to. We are no longer parsons, now we are “good Joes”; and in place of providing the Church with her needed “scholar teachers” who are equipped to bring God and man together in reasoned relation, we now find ourselves among those who need to be reached by the “scholar teacher” and wise men of God. What is the resolution of this ridiculous farce?

MINISTER OF THE WORD

The answer ought to be obvious. Actually, it is in the nature of a cabala. Here it is in its taunting simplicity: Make him a minister of the Word! But what does that mean? What could be more esoteric? Very well, we’ll say it with more passionate bluntness.

Fling him into his office, tear the office sign from the door and nail on the sign: Study. Take him off the mailing list, lock him up with his books—get him all kinds of books—and his typewriter and his Bible. Slam him down on his knees before texts, broken hearts, the flippant lives of a superficial flock, and the Holy God. Force him to be the one man in our surfeited communities who knows about God. Throw him into the ring to box with God till he learns how short his arms are; engage him to wrestle with God all the night through. Let him come out only when he is bruised and beaten into being a blessing. Set a time clock on him that will imprison him with thought and writing about God for 40 hours a week. Shut his garrulous mouth forever spouting “remarks” and stop his tongue always tripping lightly over everything non-essential. Require him to have something to say before he dare break silence. Bend his knees in the lonesome valley, fire him from the PTA and cancel his country club membership; burn his eyes with weary study, wreck his emotional poise with worry for God, and make him exchange his pious stance for a humble walk with God and man. Make him spend and be spent for the glory of God.

A LIFE AFLAME

Rip out his telephone, burn up his ecclesiastical success sheets, refuse his glad hand, and put water in the gas tank of his community buggy. Give him a Bible and tie him in his pulpit and make him preach the Word of the living God. Test him, quiz him and examine him; humiliate him for his ignorance of things divine, and shame him for his glib comprehension of finances, batting averages, and political in-fighting. Laugh at his frustrated effort to play psychiatrist, scorn his insipid morality, refuse his supine intelligence, ignore his broadmindedness which is only flatheadedness, and compel him to be a minister of the Word. If he wants to be gracious, challenge him rather to be a product of the rough grace of God. If he dotes on being pleasing, demand that he please God and not man. If he wants to be unctuous, ask him to make sounds with a tongue on which a Holy flame has rested. If he wants to be a manager, insist rather that he be a manikin for God, a being who is illustrative of the purpose and will of God.

ONE THING NEEDFUL

Form a choir and raise a chant and haunt him with it night and day: “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” When, at long last, he dares assay the pulpit, ask him if he has a word from God; if he does not, then dismiss him and tell him you can read the morning paper, digest the television commentaries, think through the day’s superficial problems, manage the community’s myriad drives, and bless assorted baked potatoes and green beans ad infinitum better than he can. Command him not to come back until he has read and re-read, written and re-written, until he can stand up, worn and forlorn, and say: “Thus saith the Lord.” Break him across the board of his ill-gotten popularity, smack him hard with his own prestige, corner him with questions about God, and cover him with demands for celestial wisdom, and give him no escape until he is backed against the wall of the Word; then sit down before him and listen to the only word he has left: God’s Word. Let him be totally ignorant of the down-street gossip, but give him a chapter and order him to walk around it, camp on it, suffer with it, and come at last to speak it backwards and forwards until all he says about it rings with the truth of eternity.

Ask him to produce living credentials that he has been and is true father in his own home before you allow him license to play father to all and sundry. Demand to be shown that his love is deep, strong, and secure among those nearest and dearest to him before he is given contract to share the superfluity of his affability with all sorts and conditions of persons. Examine his manse whether it be a seminary of faith, hope, learning, and love or a closet of fretting, doubt, dogmatism, and temper; if it be the former, let him go abroad, conquering and to conquer; if it be the latter, then quarantine him in it for praying, crying, and conversion, and then let him go forth converted, to convert.

SIGN AND SYMBOL

Mold him relentlessly into a man forever bowed but never cowed before the unconcealed truth which he has labored to reveal, and let him hang flung against the hard destiny of almighty God; let his soul be stripped bare before the onrushing purposes of God, and let him be lost, doomed, and done that his God alone be all in all. Let him, in himself, be sign and symbol that everything human is lost, that Grace comes through loss; and make him the illustration that Grace alone is amazing, sufficient, and redemptive. Let him be transparent to God’s grace, God himself. And when he is burned out by the flaming Word that coursed through him, when he is consumed at last by the fiery Grace blazing through him, and when he who was privileged to translate the truth of God to man is finally translated from earth to heaven, then bear him away gently, blow a muted trumpet and lay him down softly, place a two-edged sword on his coffin and raise a tune triumphant, for he was a brave soldier of the Word and e’er he died he had become spokesman for his God.

And who shall return us to this ministry?

“Therein the patient must minister to himself.”

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

First in a Series by Evangelical Scholars

The theological way proposed by Rudolf Bultmann has many attractions. It seems to maintain the essence of the Gospel. It incorporates insights won from Kierkegaard and existentialism. It gives a warm and dynamic preaching in realistic terms. It has its solution for problems raised by biblical study. It frees the Gospel from the language and thought forms of the past. It permits academic inquiry and takes away the offense of peripheral phrases and factors. In short, here are the advantages of the liberal program apparently without the mistake of open distortion or destruction of the substance of Christianity. Why should we not follow Bultmann?

CENTER OR PERIPHERY?

Some subsidiary reservations suggest themselves. Perhaps it is not so easy as assumed to separate the center of the Gospel from the periphery. Does not the Empty Tomb, for example, really belong to the center even though not itself the Resurrection? Again, is the link with existentialism really an asset? In his acute study Rudolf Bultmann (Evangelischer Verlag, 1952), Karl Barth points out that there are probably “not many ‘modern’ men who will really feel that they are adequately understood” in Heidegger’s thought (p. 39), and in any case the fashion in philosophies changes quickly. Moreover, the concept of myth is surely an importation to the Bible’s own standpoint, and where are the criteria to differentiate the supposed mythological factors? As Barth asks, “is not Bultmann’s concept too formal to cover what we call myth either in the past or the present?” (ibid., p. 31 f.). Indeed, is there not here the deeper hermeneutical mistake of bringing the Bible under a general rule instead of making it “the model and norm of all hermeneutics” (ibid., p. 50)? May it not be that after all the Bultmann structure rests on seriously insecure foundations?

BULTMANN’S SELF-SPUN MYTH

More deeply, however, the proposed demythologization of Bultmann entails a genuine mythologization which makes true theology quite impossible. As Bultmann seems to see it, the reality of the Gospel consists in a so-called existential proclamation leading to an existential death and resurrection in terms of the end of a false view of life and the dawn of a true. If so, then ultimately the factuality of the New Testament incidents and records matters little. Many things may be endorsed, but many others may be freely discounted as mythical accretions. What finally matters is the message and actuality of the Christ event alone. To be sure, this is an improvement on the older liberalism in its call for total involvement and in its assertion of the centrality of death and resurrection. But for Bultmann the gospel record, and even Jesus Christ himself, can be only a starting-point, medium, and representation of the true reality which lies in the existential death and resurrection of believers. As Barth shows, this is not really “a doctrine of Christ, but essentially and properly that of an event of conversion which has merely found its beginning in Christ and simply bears his name and title” (ibid., p. 18). The Gospel is here a salvation myth depicting and mediating the true salvation which is existential. The minor attempts at demythologization disclose a radical mythologization. What Bultmann proposes is in fact real mythology.

LOSS OF A DATED REDEMPTION

It is mythology in its severance from genuine historicity. Certainly Bultmann emphasizes the words Geschichte (history as occurrence) and Geschehen (event), especially in contrast to Historie (history as record). But for him Geschichte is not so much the history of past, objective fact; it is the dynamic history what happens here, now, in me. The event of crucifixion is not basically the death of Jesus on Golgotha under Pontius Pilate about 30 A.D.; it is my death to sin and error. The event of resurrection is not the raising of Jesus from the tomb; it is the message of new life and my awakening to it. Of course, these things are important. There must be an event of preaching and an event of response. But are these the true salvation event? Does not the Gospel differ from all mythology in the very point that its essence is a dated event, an enacted work, an accomplished salvation? Does not Bultmann silence the chief note of the Gospel by not letting it say that “it has pleased God to humble himself, and therefore to become earthly, this-worldly and, horribile dictu, datable” (ibid., p. 32 f.)? What is crucifixion without Calvary? What is resurrection without the rising of Christ and the Empty Tomb?

BARTH’S FIVE QUESTIONS

The latter point is particularly important. For, while Bultmann accepts the death of Christ, he dismisses the Resurrection as one of the mythical intrusions, as a “nature-miracle,” as a “miraculous proof” which demands interpretation. “For our part,” says Barth, “we maintain the direct opposite.” The statement that Christ is risen “is valid in its simplest sense, and only in that sense is it the central affirmation of the whole of the New Testament.” The weaknesses in Bultmann’s reasoning are exposed in five questions which Barth then proceeds to address to him: “1. Is it true that a theological statement is valid only when it can be proved to be a genuine element in the Christian understanding of human existence?… 2. Is it true that an event alleged to have happened in time can be accepted only if it can be proved to be ‘historical fact’ in Bultmann’s sense?… 3. Is it true that the assertion of the historicity of an event which by its very nature is accessible to (this) ‘historical’ verification … is merely a blind acceptance of a piece of mythology?… 4. Is it true that modern thought is ‘shaped for good or ill by modern science’?… 5. Is it true that we are compelled to reject a statement simply because this statement, or something like it, was compatible with the mythical world-view of the past?” (Church Dogmatics, III, 2, pp. 443 ff.). Until Bultmann produces solid answers to these questions, Barth is confident that we both may and must continue to “accept the resurrection of Jesus, and His subsequent appearances to His disciples, as genuine history” (ibid., p. 447).

BIBLICAL STUDY BECOMES FUTILE

The content of this history is that God himself has acted in human affairs in a series of events, culminating in the Crucifixion and Resurrection, by which salvation has been definitively accomplished. Nor is this Geschichte divorced from Historie. In and with the events he has given an authentic record, Holy Scripture. To reject this Geschichte is to throw away the kernel of the Gospel; to reject this Historie is to condemn biblical study to final irrelevance and futility. In the last analysis, indeed, it is to imply a final Docetism (cf. Rudolf Bultmann, p. 34) no less grotesque and unconvincing than that of Gnosticism: a crucifixion, but no necessary or significant Cross; a resurrection, but only the myth of an Empty Tomb; an event of salvation, but no historical enactment; a kerygma, but no true record; a Christ, but an unimportant and uncertain Jesus.

THE BREAK WITH OBJECTIVITY

Again, the Bultmann view is mythology in its non-objectivity. This point is obviously linked with the first. Without datable events in a true record there can be no objectivity. Yet in view of Bultmann’s presuppositions, the break with objectivity may well precede and underlie that with history. We have only to consider his approach to the Bible and its message. Bultmann knows in advance what the real theme is. He knows without consulting Scripture that there is myth in it. He knows of himself how to differentiate between the factual and the mythical. He knows without learning from Scripture how to understand Scripture. To Barth, this is perhaps the most radical and depressing feature in the whole program: “In distinction from many others who cannot follow him, I find the greatest difficulty, not in his massive anti-supernatural negations, excisions and transmutations, but in his underlying—how shall I put it?—pre-Copernican attitude” (ibid., p. 53). By contrast, Barth approvingly quotes the objective principle of Luther: “The Sacred Scriptures desire a humble reader … who always says, Teach me, teach me, teach me!” (ibid., p. 50). If he had practiced this objectivity at the outset, Bultmann could have been kept from his mythologizing “de-historicization.”

The basic nonobjectivity, however, is matched by nonobjectivity of understanding. If the record is not an object in its own right, neither is the event recorded. The real reconciliation is not effected in first century Palestine; it is only represented. The revelation of God has not taken place; a mere mode of communication has been established. The new life has not come in the Resurrection; a mere sign has been given. The pre-eminence of Christ, his representative work, objective justification, faith in him—these are only a manner of speaking. The substance is existential. No one, of course, would minimize the importance of the application of Christ’s work. But here is a subjectivization which subverts and destroys the Gospel. The point of the Gospel, without which it is nothing, is that Christ “has already suffered the penalty of death for the salvation of all men, that he has already accomplished their transition from the old man to the new, that he has already effected their transposition to existential being, that he has not merely initiated but completed this process” (ibid., p. 21). If we dismiss the objectivity of this finished work, it avails us little to make it the sign or theme of preaching and understanding. No myth can be the Good News. The Good News is real news, that is, News of what God has concretely and definitively done for our salvation.

CROWDING GOD FROM THE CENTER

Finally, it is mythology in its substitution of anthropocentricity for biblical Christocentricity or theocentricity. Myths are stories of the gods, but man is their true theme. So it is with Bultmann. The terms and concepts have changed, but in the main liberal stream man is still the center and measure of all things. Man declares the nature of the Bible. Man distinguishes the mythical. Man demythologizes. Man decides the theme. Man is the substance and center of the salvation event. Jesus Christ belongs to the periphery. He is a cipher. He is a point of departure. He is a summons to man to actualize his salvation by his own faith and obedience. “How far is this really Gospel?” asks Barth. “How far is it any more than a new law?… How far in the usage of Bultmann can the pro nobis (for us) mean anything more than that the kerygma applies to us, that it is significant for us, that it is accepted by us as the law of our decision, that it is to be realized in the act of our faith, in the imitatio Christi?” (ibid., p. 19). In short, man not only controls his theology; he is its primary subject.

The true Gospel, however, is very different. God controls it. God is its subject. The story is his, the work, the power, and the glory. To put man in the center does not just pervert the Gospel, it displaces it. It makes it impossible. It substitutes a human word which is no less illusory in content than fictional in form. It implies reversion from Gospel to myth.

Further points of detail might be raised. Can the Gospel, for example, really be proclaimed in any other form than that which it has been given? Bultmann is no good advertisement here, as Barth dryly comments (ibid., p. 34). Such matters, however, are derivative. We cannot follow Bultmann because the presupposition of his demythologizing is a true and devastating mythologization. For all his good intentions and appearances, Bultmann accomplishes nothing for faith, understanding, preaching, or salvation. He finally leaves us neither with God nor Christ, neither with kerygma nor faith, neither with true death to sin nor true resurrection to life, but only with man in the existential message and moment of assumed knowledge and self-centered conversion. On what grounds and to what end should we follow?

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

It is always a risk to divine the future, but perhaps it is not foolhardy to say that theological controversy in the next quarter century will be centered in the questions put by existentialism. It is true that denominational lines still persist and their respective theologies will continue to occupy the attention of scholars. It is also true that the ecumenical movement will continue to grow and discussions of faith, order, life, and work will press for a hearing. But the real stage of theological controversy must necessarily be where the great battle of our entire age is being fought. The locus of this critical struggle may be found where the creative minds of our day are shaping the sounds, the colors, the forms of the brave new world that is coming to birth.

The plays of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Jean Paul Sartre, the poetry of W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, the painting of Picasso, Bracque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, the music of Bartok, Milhaud, Hindemith, the architecture of Saarinen, Rudolph, Le Corbusier—these are some of the forces that have been shaping the structure of the world in which we live. These in turn have been shaped by nineteenth century iconoclastic thinkers like Sören Kierkegaard, Fedor Dostoevski, and Franz Kafka. If we are to understand the times in which we live, we must come to know what these names mean and what has been said about them, otherwise we will be shouting against the wind and our preaching will be what Dean Inge said it is: “Merely spouting water over a host of narrow-necked bottles.”

Theology properly speaking is not an aspect of culture, but culture is the product of basic theological underpinnings. Nevertheless, there are certain theological movements which follow the pendulum swing of history, and in this sense we may say that the theology of Kierkegaard, Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Tillich, and Niebuhr is largely the existentialist reaction to the liberalism of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Harnack.

Liberalism, grounded in the work of Lessing, is an idealist philosophy with a historical method for ascertaining truth. Lessing said two things: 1. revelation is the education of the human race, and therefore truth is to be found by studying the historical relations of things; and 2. no historical event can be the basis of eternal happiness, and therefore one must find truth in a rational, idealist philosophical system. Thus it happened that, in the liberal line of theology that followed, historicism, fully appreciating the relativities of history, was coupled with a naïve faith in the inevitability of social progress as well as the optimism of individual moral perfectability. Moralism found expression both in the search for a genuine experience of personal piety and in the social gospel.

The liberals busied themselves with the search for the real Jesus in an attempt to find what is essential to Christianity so that they might attach themselves to this historical Lord and bask in his moral influence. Harnack concluded that the essence of Christianity is the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the kingdom of Christ as a community of love. Clearly the Bible was not understood as the gift of God in which he declares news of salvation through his Son. Rather the Bible was seen as an achievement of human history. But the quest of the historical Jesus ended in failure. By 1901 Schweitzer was ready to admit that the historical Jesus is forever lost and that all we can say about him is that he was a mistaken apocalyptic visionary.

LIBERALISM WEDS EXISTENTIALISM

Liberalism is dead today because it had within it the seeds of its own decay. When the quest of the real Jesus failed we might have expected the liberals to abandon their historical methodology, but this did not occur and historicism still dominates the modern mood. The side of liberalism which did collapse, however, was its cavalier optimism, exposed as it was by the two wars and the great depression. But out of its shallow grave arose a new spirit for our age. This is the principality or power which we call existentialism. The term is vague and almost indefinable. As diverse views as those of Eastern Orthodox Nikolai Berdyaev, Roman Catholic Gabriel Marcel, Swiss Reformed Karl Barth, Lutheran Rudolf Bultmann, Atheist Jean Paul Sartre, Jew Martin Buber, and non-Christian Martin Heidegger have all been jammed into the same theological closet.

The broadest definition of existentialism is that it is a realist reaction against the shallow optimism and easy rationalism of the nineteenth century liberals. But this does not say enough. Actually the existentialist spirit, in spite of its sophistication, is naïvely realist and therefore historicist. In that it adheres to historical methodology, one would not be wrong to say that existentialism is still fundamentally liberal, howbeit a chastened form of liberalism. It follows the old nominalist tradition in saying that existence is prior to essence. Indeed all reality is in historical experience. Essences are only abstract names. There is no real existence beyond history, neither in an ideal or mystic sense above history nor in an eschatological sense in future at the end of history.

This being the pervading spirit of our age it becomes necessary for us, says Bultmann, to interpret the Christian message in terms which are relevant. This he ventures to do in his realized eschatology which makes both forgiveness and judgment present realities. He applies all the resources of his abundant genius to manipulate the tools of form criticism to demythologize the New Testament so as to strip away irrelevant offense. All pre-scientific myths, he says, must be cut away, such as the Jewish myth of an apocalyptic cataclysm, the gnostic myth of the pre-existent Lord, the futurist myths of heaven and hell, the historical myths of angels, demons, miracles, virgin birth, empty tomb, and resurrection. What is left is the Cross and the kerygma of justification by grace through faith.

REDEFINING BASIC DOCTRINES

A great amount of energy and erudition has been expended by the existentialists on the subject of sin. Even the term original sin is accepted, but it is redefined to mean the limitation of human existence. Man finds himself bound by the all-pervasiveness of death, guilt, and meaninglessness. Sin does not enter through a fall in a mythical garden of Eden. Sin posits itself. Man is thrust into an existence in which he suffers a desperate calamity. He is inextricably the product of his past, yet he must accept full responsibility for himself as he is and not shift blame to either heredity or environment. He needs freedom from the past for his future within history. This he can find in the decision for Christ which brings him a believing self-understanding, a release from the powers of this world for service of that Power which man cannot control. Redemption is not through the objective work of a personal Lord but through the human decision made possible by the event of God’s grace in Christ. In this moment we stand before God and accept our acceptance, thus freeing us from the dead past for a living future in history.

How does existentialist theology affect some of the historic doctrines such as Christology, Resurrection, the Church, the Word?

1. According to Bultmann the historical Jesus is the Christ, but not in the traditional sense as the personal Lord whose body was raised from the tomb. Rather Jesus is the occasion for the encounter between the Cross and the sinner who makes the decision for the Ultimate. Apart from this encounter there is no more significance to Jesus than any other martyr in history. Really it is not the Jesus of history that concerns the existentialist theologians, but the revelation we meet in the moment of decision.

2. Resurrection is redefined to mean not a future life in an incorruptible body in a new heaven or eternal age, but a regenerate life here and now free from the frustration of death. Although death is inevitable we do not fear it because we accept it. As Niebuhr says: “Because of original sin man’s destiny is to seek after an impossible victory and adjust himself to an inevitable defeat.” Redemption is not a future victory. It is a present adjustment.

3. The concept of the Church is quite radically changed by the existentialists because of their category of Inwardness or Subjectivity. This subjectivism is not the romantic subjectivity of the liberals which was centered in a feeling of dependence upon God. Such a feeling would make God a projection of the human heart. Existentialists would consider this the idolatry of using God as a disposable object, and God is never an object. Always he is Subject; always Thou, never It. The divine Thou can never be manipulated. He can only be spoken to in answer to his call. The call comes to me inwardly, not objectively or mechanically or casually. God always treats me as subject too and never as an object. Hence the relation between man and God is neither a cognitive one which can be apprehended by means of a set of propositions nor an emotional one which can be grasped by a genuine feeling. The relationship is rather one of speaking and responding to God’s Word, hence it is one of decision. But no man can make this decision for another. Each must do his own believing just as he must do his own dying. The result of this doctrine, which is a one-sided truth, is an extreme individualism with no proper place for the sacramental community of the Church. Indeed for most existentialists the Church, as a visible structure, only gets in the way of the decisive conversation between the I and the Thou. There seems to be no place for the Church as the body of Christ, as Paul teaches, the living, historically continuous organism with prophets, apostles, martyrs, and saints in personal communion with the risen Jesus as head and Lord.

4. The same observation applies to the relation between the living Word and Scripture. The existentialists find the written Word to be a troublesome obstacle in the way of their decisive moment. How can an I meet a Thou if he has the written Word in between? The existentialists take the same offense in the written Word that the Jews took in Jesus: “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” So they look at the written Word and say: “Is not this document of human hands, whose historical antecedents we know?” As a result the living Word is separated from the written Word and we are left without a rule or norm of authority. This is a new subjectivism, voluntaristic rather than intellectual or emotive, but just as earthbound as either rationalism or pietism. Moreover, as we might expect, the sacraments are embarrassing to Bultmann and the existentialists because in their concern to worship the hidden God they find the sacraments too terribly visible. The existentialists separate what they call Christ from Jesus, from the Church, from Scripture, and from the sacraments.

RELEVANCE VERSUS CONFORMITY

Is there anything good that can come from existentialism? We must go back to Sören Kierkegaard for answer. It is salutary that we should avoid alliance with rational systems whether of Aquinas or Hegel. Quoting Shakespeare, Kierkegaard said it is better to be well hanged than ill wed. But we may extend this to include the liaison with existentialism too. In our well-meaning concern to make the Gospel relevant, we must be careful not to identify the Gospel with any of the periods of the historical pendulum.

Kierkegaard was a much needed theological gadfly. It was good for him to awaken us from our dogmatic slumbers and ask us what it means to be a Christian. The resulting new emphasis upon inwardness and the hidden God is also helpful so long as we keep it free of subjective voluntarism, and so long as we recognize that the hidden God is only the God of wrath whom the Jews and the muslims also have. Nor does the hiddenness of God preclude his general revelation in nature, history, and conscience. We are Christians and our God is the revealed God, our Lord Jesus Christ, the babe in the manger and the man on the Cross. The realistic correction of liberalism’s optimism and moralism has certainly proved acceptable. It is good for the Church to be reminded that she is still in this world and she may indeed get in the way between man and God. The Church like the Christian man is simul Justus et peccator. One of the most alarming but nevertheless true judgments is that the world often articulates the kerygma more effectively than the Church as in the case of Sartre’s play The Respectful Prostitute. This is the world’s way of telling the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. It is time the Church learns to speak her message in the clear idiom of our day lest by default we give the message to the world and allow it to be perverted by the silky deception of Satan.

Dare We Follow Bultmann?

“Germany is just as nearly ‘Bultmannian’ today as it was ‘Barthian’ a generation ago, ‘Ritschlian’ half a century or more ago, and ‘Hegelian’ still earlier; and Bultmann’s works and ideas have become Germany’s dominant theological export throughout the world.” That is the verdict of Dr. James M. Robinson, in A New Quest of the Historical Jesus (1959). And Dr. Nels F. S. Ferré, reviewing Dr. Karl Barth’s The Humanity of God (1960), remarks that “for the alert the age of so-called ‘Neo-orthodoxy’ is over” (Interpretation, Oct. 1960, p. 455).

In this issue CHRISTIANITY TODAY publishes the first of an important series of essays on the question: “Dare We Follow Bultmann?” The articles will appear at intervals during the remaining months of 1961, and will be contributed by outstanding evangelical scholars in Europe and America.

The series is prefaced in a general way by the preceding article, “Existentialism and the Christian Faith,” by Dr. Robert P. Roth, Professor of New Testament Theology in the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, Columbia, South Carolina.

The first essay in the series also appears in this issue (turn the page), by Dr. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, a translator of Barth’s Church Dogmatics and a constructive critic of Barth’s theology from an evangelical perspective. Bromiley’s specific assignment was to summarize Barth’s criticisms of Bultmann.

The next essay in the series, scheduled in an early issue, is by Dr. Herman Ridderbos, Professor of New Testament in the University of Kampen, The Netherlands.

The third essay will be from the pen of Dr. Johannes Schneider, Professor of New Testament in Humboldt University, East Berlin, East Germany. Other essays by European and American scholars will follow.

ED.

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

It was a little old lady who said it (and sometimes little old ladies are better to have around than children when you are looking for something to the point), but it was a little old lady who said, “Sometimes, you know I just don’t understand God.” Me too! It’s pretty hard to say ahead of time just exactly how things are going to turn out. And if you will think along such lines for a little while, let your mind run from Amos to Bultmann—the whole gamut from A to B.

What ever happened to that wonderful preaching of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.? There can be no argument that we have in Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah four of the greatest preachers that ever lived. And the end product of all their preaching, by the success standards of our own day, was nothing but failure. They came to preach the truth of God to the existential situation, they preached with skill and with a desperate zeal, and the end of the matter was that the people were not converted and the nations north and south were not saved, and about the only thing left was gruesome suffering all around. Did they need instruction in methodology? Did Hosea fail somehow to identify? Was there something wrong with interpersonal relationships? Did they need group dynamics? (What has happened to that term?) Was it a failure of mimeograph machine? Maybe they should have organized. God moves in mysterious ways, so there came a root out of a dry ground. It was not quite the way we would have figured it.

It is almost impossible to open up a discussion with lay people on the subject of religion without the moot question of predestination coming out in the first two or three questions. This is as true of college and university students as it is of the after-meeting inquirers in the local church. “What about predestination?” they say. “What about it?” you counter. “Well, if God does everything, every little thing, do we have to do anything, does it matter what we do, are we only machines?” the questions tumble out. It seems pretty difficult so long as you keep the question an academic discussion to evade the conclusions they are pressing. The only trouble is that predestination works its way out a different way. Paul was a predestinarian thinker and tried endlessly to make everything different. Think about the Puritans, the Beggars, the Covenanters, the Huguenots; believing as they did surely that God is absolutely sovereign in the small things as in the large, that times are always in God’s hands, that no man comes to Christ except the Father draw him, they nevertheless gave themselves up to change people and to change events. Says Fairbairn in The Cambridge Modern History and very bluntly, “Calvin saved Europe.” Why work so hard at things when God does it all? Somehow as the discussion moves into action, true Calvinism remains predestinarian and at the same time bears no relationship to Kismet or Fate. It’s not what one would expect, but there it is.

There are other things which never cease to give me wonder, just little things which are full of suggestion. Why for example do the same people like new versions and old liturgies? They read Phillips, but they announce a Gregorian chant and recite a prayer from an ancient prayer book, and all in one service and all quite proudly from all appearance. Conversely, why do the exponents of the King James Version keep feeding us the modern jump tunes in the same service? Whatever they may think is especially pious about reading the KJV they immediately cancel out by getting me to sing (always under the leadership of the O-so-personable song leader) “I’ve got the peace that passeth understanding down in my heart, down in my heart.…” ad nauseam. How can anyone sing about “the peace that passeth understanding” to that kind of tune? Apparently because he has never really experienced it.

Take time to ponder the conservative liberals and the liberal conservatives. Have you ever been abashed and astounded to find a liberal completely illiberal especially in an argument with a man he thinks is a conservative. He acts as if he had forgotten all about loving the unlovely, that agape core to his theology. And it isn’t just a question of his attitude, it is also a question of his ignorance. In Wilbur Smith’s Wherefore Stand (and one would expect this from a man of his wide reading), every liberal is given his due. In books from liberal authors I search in vain for recognition of, understanding of, or plain dealing with the whole tradition from Hodge to Henry. If there is an answer to James Orr’s Problem of Old Testament History or Oswald Allis on the unity of Isaiah, I haven’t found it yet; but I have found sneers, jeers, and catcalls. Or try the conservative arguments proving that Song of Solomon is an allegory and that Jonah is sober history, and then try the liberal arguments proving that Song of Solomon is to be taken at its face but that Jonah is an allegory. Now reverse the arguments and it looks as if you have been dealing with movable parts, cut to fit any problem.

If this weren’t such a rainy, slushy, dull day, I could do better, but just as a parting shot, let me ask this: Is there anyone in the field today who quotes Scripture more than Bultmann does and in suspiciously proof-text fashion on occasion too? When he gets us finally to his basic kerygma, when all the demythologizing is over, will that kerygma be, just maybe, just possibly, just perhaps, a CREED?

The Church And Social Action

Politics and Evangelism, by Philippe Maury (Doubleday, 1960, 120 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by Edward L. R. Elson, Minister, National Presbyterian Church, Washington, D. C.

Here is a book which ought to be read by every social action “expert” and by all who are unhappy over the absolutisms of the social action “cults.” Philippe Maury, French Protestant layman, now General Secretary of the World Christian movement, stakes down his case on the premise that both evangelism and political action, for the Christian, arise from the Word of God and the eternal gospel of Christ. “For the Church,” says Maury, “the meaning of history is the history of salvation, and no historical event can be understood outside this perspective, and especially that of the coming kingdom of God.”

Maury contends that the Church can and must speak, but must be certain that it is the Word of God which is spoken. The Church should be courageous but also prudent. It should always be cause for alarm when there is not a large concensus when the Church is disposed to speak. Prudence is also a form of courage, and to be silent when there is not a large concensus is more eloquent than speech. It must never be forgotten that the Church speaks by simply being the Church. Her very existence has a prophetic meaning, a missionary dimension.” Political, economic, and social declarations are derivatives; they are not the Gospel nor are they necessarily prophetic. The Church is a divine institution, but the Church is not God. To her has been committed one specialty—the proclamation of the gospel of redemptive love made known in time for all time by Christ Jesus our Lord.

EDWARD L. R. ELSON

New Phase Of Old Quest

Jesus of Nazareth, by Günther Bornkamm (Harper, 1960, 239 pp., $4), is reviewed by Everett F. Harrison, Professor of New Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary.

For many years the so-called quest of the historical Jesus has challenged German scholarship. Schweitzer made him out to be an apocalyptic dreamer. Bultmann retained the eschatological emphasis but stressed also the ethical imperative in Jesus’ teaching. In his attitude toward the possibility of precise knowledge concerning our Lord’s person and ministry, Bultmann was highly skeptical on the ground that we depend for our knowledge upon the testimony of the early Church, which has pictured Jesus in the light of her own situation rather than as he was.

Bultmann’s disciples have been somewhat disturbed that he held so lightly the importance of establishing a solid connection between the kerygma and the historical Jesus. Now, 30 years after the appearance of Bultmann’s Jesus, one of his circle has written on the same theme and opened a new phase of the old quest. Bornkamm is obviously in debt to Bultmann for his basic approach, which is theological and existential rather than historical in the usual sense of the word. He frequently sets aside the testimony of an Evangelist on the ground that it has been shaped or distorted by the early Church and therefore does not portray what Jesus said or did with reliability. “The extent to which the Church’s faith and theology have formed and added to the tradition of the history of Jesus appears most clearly in the legends and in a story’s legendary embellishments, as these increase from one evangelist to another” (p. 19).

What, then, it may be asked, is new in this presentation as opposed to Bultmann’s? One thing is the concern for grappling with the historical data instead of dismissing such data. Consequently there is a chapter on “Period and Environment” as well as one on “Discipleship” and another on “Jesus’ Journey to Jerusalem.” But the main thrust is to deal with Jesus’ teaching and seek for indications of the actual man embedded there. Bornkamm finds a solid bit of historical reality in the sovereignty and independence with which Jesus deals with persons and situations, as for instance his frequently acting contrary to people’s expectations and hopes (pp. 58–59).

The author comes to grips with the tension between the future hope of the kingdom of God and its present reality in the teaching of Jesus. Dismissing several attempts to handle this, including realized eschatology, he adopts something which has affinity with the latter viewpoint. “The future of God is salvation to the man who apprehends the present as God’s present, and as the hour of salvation. The future of God is judgment for the man who does not accept the ‘now’ of God but clings to his own present, his own past and also to his own dreams of the future” (p. 93). Jesus came to a people who had no present, who were preoccupied either with their traditions which recalled the past or their apocalyptic hopes for the future. “To make the reality of God present: this is the essential mystery of Jesus” (p. 62).

Bornkamm differs from Bultmann in placing the transition of the aeons between John the Baptist and Jesus rather then between Jesus and Paul. “The way to Christ and into the kingdom of God did not merely lead at one time—in a moment of past history—through John the Baptist, but it leads once and for all only along that path of repentance shown by him. Faith in Jesus Christ is only there where the believer, for himself and within himself, lets the shift of the aeons take place in his own life” (p. 51).

Bornkamm sweeps away the Messianic titles of our Lord as imposed on him by the early Church. In their stead he puts his own reconstruction, “that the Messianic character of his being is contained in his words and deeds and in the unmediatedness of his historical appearance” (p. 178). No answer is given to the ultimate question, Who is Jesus of Nazareth? None is attempted.

EVERETT F. HARRISON

One-Worldism

In Place of Folly, by Norman Cousins (Harper, 1961, 224 pp., $3), is reviewed by Dr. Howard E. Mather, Minister, First Presbyterian Church, Amenia, N. Y.

The publishers assert, “Now Norman Cousins brings together in a single book the essential facts concerning the present danger …;” and they call attention to his continuous writing in advocacy of a “sane nuclear policy” since 1949. That is exactly what this book is: A compendium of all Cousins’ previous cliches in advocacy of “one world government” and the bromides of the pseudo-pacifists who “even in self defense, will not engage in a war that would destroy the world” but would use the force of federal world government, “from which no state could withdraw or be expelled,” to coerce the nations.

The author’s chapters on the horrors of nuclear, biological and germ warfare are considered by many scientists in the “know” as exaggerations. The summary to every chapter is the same: The answer to all our racial and cultural and ideological problems, is federal world government. That powerful and unscrupulous forces might and would sieze tyrannical dictatorship of such a government never seems to occur to the proponents of “the human commonwealth of the whole.” Cousins’ “check list of enemies” includes the selfish and ignorant who do not go along with his “one world” ideology; the politicians and statesmen who do not accept his philosophy of “freedom under world law”; and the clergymen who interpret their religious obligations and responsibilities as spiritual rather than political.

The one supreme and controlling thought that is missing in this pessimistic evaluation of the world order is that of God who “holds the whole round world in His hands.”

HOWARD E. MATHER

Values Underscored

Scientism and Values, edited by Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins (D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960, 270 pp., $6.50), is reviewed by Arthur F. Holmes, Associate Professor of Bible and Philosophy, Wheaton College (Illinois).

The advent of the nuclear age brought to focus perhaps the keenest problem posed by modern science. Industrialization, technological advance, organization man, and the threat of human annihilation have stressed anew the urgency of conserving the uniqueness of man and his values in a scientific age. A respectable body of literature on the subject is rapidly accumulating, the present volume being one of the most significant.

Two philosophers, four sociologists, two literary figures, an economist, an historian, a political scientist, and a biologist present a colloquium on the subject. In particular they attack the “unity of science” thesis that the study of man can be conducted with the same methods, presuppositions, and supposed objectivity as are employed in the physical sciences. The term “scientism” is used to denote such a fallacy. It does not connote any antiscientific attitude; rather it underscores the uniqueness of man, the value-centric predicament of the investigator, and the creativity of the free human spirit. It exposes the over-simplified generalizations of those who treat human values as purely natural phenomena.

The criticism and evidence presented provide both a cogent case and refreshing perspectives. The reviewer gains the impression, however, that insofar as the volume poses a constructive view it is closer to a Neo-Kantian Kulturphilosophie than to a distinctly theistic view of man and his values.

ARTHUR F. HOLMES

Pacifism Defended

Christian Attitudes to War and Peace, by Roland Bainton (Abingdon, 1960, 299 pp., $4.75), is reviewed by W. Stanford Reid, Associate Professor of History, McGill University, Montreal.

The title of this work adequately explains its purpose. It provides an historical exposition of various Christian views on war including those of both Old and New Testaments. Professor Bainton holds that Christians have accepted one of three views: the just war, the crusade, and pacifism. He then applies these three categories throughout history although, from the reviewer’s point of view, not always with adequate authority.

As one might expect, the work mainly sets forth the claims of pacifism. Professor Bainton believes that now if ever, pacifism must establish itself, but this he feels will be possible only if a world government arises. His plea to Christians to push for nonresistance in an atomic age has much on its side. On the other hand it seems clear from the Scriptures that because of sin, wars will continue to the end. Perhaps the desire for peace through world government will help bring in the kingdom of antichrist. This book needs much careful study in order that nonpacifists may re-evaluate their position.

W. STANFORD REID

Ministry For The Times

Making the Ministry Relevant, ed. by Hans Hofman (Scribner’s, 1960, 169 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Andrew W. Blackwood, professor emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary.

Harvard’s able young director of the University “Project on Religion and Health” has done well his work as editor. After his own able Introduction, setting forth the difficulties and the outlook, Paul Tillich stresses the difficulty of appealing to our secular age, and the call for vastly more of “the vertical dimension.” To me this is the ablest of all the provocative chapters. Reinhold Niebuhr stresses things ethical. Other experts deal with Depth Psychology, Psychiatry, Pastoral Counseling (Seward Hiltner), and “Theological Education after Ordination.” This last, by Reuel Howe, a specialist on Pastoral Studies, opens up a field of deep concern.

While not easy to read, all of these chapters should prove rewarding. To us of the older orthodoxy they show that we have much to learn from experts with different ideologies. Some day, we hope, such a symposium will include a chapter on making the ministry relevant by basing everything on the Bible.

ANDREW W. BLACKWOOD

Reformed Point Of View

The Way of Salvation, by Gordon H. Girod (Baker Book House, 1960, 157 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by John R. Richardson, Minister, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia.

One of the best books to appear in 1958 was Girod’s The Deeper Faith. It exhibited remarkable theological insight into the Reformed faith. Two years later Dr. Girod contributes another outstanding work pertaining to salvation from the Reformed point of view. The ten chapters deal with the historic Ordo Salutis or the Way of Salvation.

Beginning with the sovereignty of God, the author continues with logical progression of thought till he comes to the subject of glorification which he calls “complete redemption.” God is sovereign but he is specifically sovereign in the area of the salvation of man. With this biblical presupposition, the author proceeds step by step in the explanation of the content of Christian salvation. A cogent argument is presented to show that man is powerless to bring about his own salvation from death unto life, and that he is saved by Grace alone.

Without apology the author insists that election is the sine qua non of salvation. In the exposition of Election, he follows the Canons of Dort. Election is shown to be a matter of practical importance. The author observes, “Only when you realize that you owe God everything will you give to Him the glory. Then you will honor Him as we all should. Then you will accord to God all the glory in your salvation.”

The engaging synopses of the great truths pertaining to our Christian salvation set forth in this volume constitute some of the finest theological and homiletical literature that has come from the press in a long time. The living convictions offered here with such marked simplicity and sound logic should be of tremendous value in today’s life. Laymen seeking to understand the content of the Reformed faith will be enlightened by this work and stimulated to further study in this sphere of Christian theology. Ministers will discover this work to be fresh and moving.

JOHN R. RICHARDSON

History Of Translations

The English Bible, by F. F. Bruce (Oxford, 1961, 234 pp., $4), is reviewed by Merrill C. Tenney, Dean of the Graduate School, Wheaton College (Illinois).

With deft hand and discerning analysis, Professor Bruce has traced the long and complicated history of the English Bible from the first Anglo-Saxon interlinear paraphrases of the Latin Vulgate to the New English Bible which has not yet been released for publication. He has covered adequately the early translations of Tyndale, Rogers, Coverdale, and the Geneva Bible which were the immediate ancestors of the familiar and currently dominant King James Version. The subsequent versions produced by committees, such as the Revised, American Standard, and Revised Standard Versions, and the private translations like those of Moffatt and Williams are discussed at some length. Two chapters on Roman Catholic versions complete the account.

For evangelical Christians the question of translation is singularly important, because the faith of the individual believer rests ultimately on his personal comprehension of the Word of God rather than in ecclesiastical traditions and dogma. Since he is not equipped to read Hebrew and Greek, he is dependent on the versions made for him by scholars. In the multiplicity of these there may be safety, for each will supplement or correct the deficiencies of the other, but the reader may be perplexed by the variety and occasional contradictions that he finds in their renderings.

Dr. Bruce’s excellent review of the history of these translations sets them in their historical perspective, and evaluates them with moderation and keen insight for accuracy, style, and usefulness. Those who have never undertaken to translate the Scriptures, and who consequently have no practical understanding of the difficulties entailed, can profit greatly from the account of the early translators. They risked their lives to give the Bible to the people in their own tongue. Later scholars in more peaceful times struggled with lexical and hermeneutic problems to make the meaning of the first century intelligible to the present day.

One or two translations are not mentioned at all, such as Ballantine’s and Helen J. Montgomery’s. Since these were American products, with rather limited circulation, they may not have been considered important enough to mention. The book is scholarly but not tedious, critical but fair and dispassionate, and occasionally lightened by flashes of humor. The layman will find it informative and enjoyable reading, and the scholar will gain from it new material for reflective thought.

MERRILL C. TENNEY

Steward Of Truth

Expounding God’s Word, by Alan M. Stibbs (Inter-Varsity, 1960, 112 pp., 4s.), is reviewed by Herbert M. Carson, Vicar of St. Paul’s, Cambridge.

This is the third volume of a trilogy, the earlier volumes being Understanding God’s Word and Obeying God’s Word. In the latest book we move from exegesis, with which the author dealt earlier, to exposition; but his contention links the two together, for any exposition worthy of the name is rooted in a faithful exegesis. Thus in expounding, the preacher is endeavoring to declare and apply to his hearers the meaning of the Word before them.

There are two ways of teaching men how to preach, namely, by giving them general principles and by showing them illustrations of these principles. This is the method adopted here. After his valuable emphasis on the importance of faithful exposition, in which the preacher is simply the steward put in trust with the truth of God, he gives illustrative expository outlines dealing with varied types of scriptural exposition. Beginning with six outlines on John 2:1–11, with different audiences in view, he goes on to deal with expounding narrative short statements and longer passages.

This is a valuable book for men in training for the ministry, and for lay preachers. Indeed, it may be that some who are already in the ministry and who are retracing their steps from the barren cul-de-sac of what the author calls “imposition,” rather than exposition, may find here an introduction to a truly expository ministry.

H. M. CARSON

Man Of God

Eivend Berggrav: God’s Man of Suspense, by Alex Johnson (Augsburg, 1960, 220 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by E. E. Ryden, Editor of The Lutheran Companion.

Most of us know something about the heroic role that Eivend Berggrav, Bishop of Oslo, played in the resistance movement during the Nazi occupation of Norway in World War II, but we have little knowledge of the formative years of this man and of the spiritual struggles that helped mould a man of God who in the day of crisis stood firm as a rock.

It is this period in the life of Bishop Berggrav that forms the most illuminating portion of Alex Johnson’s fascinating book, the English translation of which has been done in unusually lucid style by Kjell Jordheim, a Wisconsin pastor.

After eleven long years of doubt, during which he refrained from holy communion, it was the Lord’s Supper itself that furnished the final solution to the many questions that troubled the future bishop’s soul. Says the biographer, “When Berggrav came to realize that Christ was Christ, unique in Himself, and that He was, if not the Son of God, nevertheless the one in whom God was and worked, then he could refrain no longer from the sacrament. For Christ Himself had said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ Berggrav had to obey.”

“The whole maturing process,” the author goes on to say, “had been a gradual resolving of the tensions within him. All the sentiments, thoughts, discussions and experiences had unconsciously united into something organic within him, so that he did not sense his faith until it had become a reality. Thus it seemed clear to him that faith is neither thought, nor emotions, nor intellect, nor sentiment, but activity—a function within the soul, accomplished not by oneself but by God.”

After light had dawned on his own soul, Berggrav became particularly helpful to those who were “searching.” However, he could never quite forget that he himself had doubted so long, and that the “eager ones” had never been able to help him. He never, therefore, tried to “push others into faith. He drew them—slowly.”

How he finally became a country parson, then a bishop, and finally a spiritual leader to all of Norway during the dark days of World War II forms an intriguing story that makes for fascinating and profitable reading.

E. E. RYDEN

Soul Winning

You Can Win Souls, by C. E. Autrey (Broadman, 1961, 160 pp., $2.75), is reviewed by Faris D. Whitesell, Professor of Practical Theology, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary.

A deeply compassionate spirit of evangelism pulsates through this book on personal evangelism written by the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board’s director of evangelism. The reader can easily see why Dr. Autrey holds his present position and why Southern Baptists are spear-heading the Protestant thrust to evangelize America.

In thirteen chapters the author discusses the urgency for personal evangelism, qualifications and equipment of the soul-winner, approach and techniques, and how to deal with the anxious, the indifferent, the Jews, Roman Catholics, Spiritists, doubters, those with false hopes and the fearful.

While the book is orthodox, practical, clear and inspiring, yet it adds little to older books on this subject by such men as Torrey, Evans, Sellers, Scarborough and Wilson. The best chapter is that which deals with the Jews. There is need for a book on personal evangelism combining all the good and true in the older writers with the new insights and techniques of psychology, psychiatry, personality research, and social science.

FARIS D. WHITESELL

Book Briefs

When We Worship, by Robert T. Fauth (Christian Education Press, 1961, 88 pp., $1.50). A guide to effective worship.

Prayers for All Occasions (Baker, 1960, 80 pp., $1.95). Sixty-six evangelical leaders offer guidance in public prayer.

The Patience of Hope, by Spiros Zodhiates (Eerdmans, 1960, 299 pp., $4). Third in a stimulating and searching study of the Book of James.

Selections from Early Christian Writers, by Henry Melvill Gwatkin (Revell, 1961, 196 pp., $3). A Cambridge historian’s compilation of Christian writings (with original text) to the time of Constantine. Happy choice for a reprint.

The Eucharistic Memorial, by Max Thurian (John Knox, 1961, 117 pp., $1.75). An essay on “liturgical theology.” Seventh book in a series of Ecumenical Studies in Worship.

This Faith We Live By, by James H. Jauncey (Zondervan, 1961, 157 pp., $2.50). Practical insights into the real meaning of Christian living. Inspirational without being sentimental.

Introduction to Dogmatic Theology, by E. A. Litton (James Clarke, 1960, 608 pp., 27s. 6d). A new edition of a valuable and scholarly survey of Systematic Theology by a last-century Anglican evangelical.