That indefatigable searcher for facts, Wilbur M. Smith, reports some interesting findings in Moody Monthly (Aug., 1956). An analysis of the 29th volume of Who’s Who in America, that is, of pages 13–112, yields this result, namely that 30% of those listed indicated some religious affiliation. Of the 1650 biographical sketches 53 were of clergymen. “The list reveals more Episcopalians and Presbyterians than all the other denominations combined.” However, “by far the greater number of the more prominent educators, scientists and writers do not indicate any religious affiliation. The same goes for playwrights, musicians, radio and TV men.” What mean these figures? Has religion become peripheral among those who mould the American mind? Or are they merely too shy to disclose their deepest loyalties?

“All this, and Revival, too” thus runs an article in The Christian Herald (Sept., 1956) on the Sector Plan of the American Baptist Convention. This plan is helping the churches utilize their total resources in new communities. During the past five years more than 3000 churches, Baptists and other communions, have used the plan with remarkable results in spiritual growth and power.

Canon Wedel writes a welcome warning in The Journal of Religious Thought (Spring-Summer, 1955) on “The Meaning of the Church”:

The phenomenal growth of the Pentecostal ‘sects,’ which ignore, for a time at least, the call to erect Gothic shrines, could remind us of the fact that “Church” in the New Testament, meant first of all a people of God united by a common faith and the living presence of Christ as Holy Spirit and not by institutional ambitions.

Wedel decries the mania for pompous church buildings in America. Air-conditioning, luxurious appointments, expensive side chapels and streamlined nurseries are the order of the day. But can they ever be a substitute for what really matters in the house of God? Wedel speaks prophetically when he says that “the body of Christ is something more than genial sociability. It stands under the judgment of holiness.”

Cross Currents, a Catholic journal, contains a challenging article by Father Henri Dumery on “The Temptation to Do Good” (Winter, 1956). It is a serious and eloquent plea for full religous liberty. Read and ponder: “What faith finds is God Himself, and not dogmas”; or: “But we do not become believers by assimilating a theory, reciting a history or riveting together syllogisms”; or: “Faith does not recopy a formula, and it does not blindly underwrite a formula; Faith opens itself to a presence, it receives a new life, and is bound to a new significance of existence of history.” But what elates both mind and heart are words like these: “Only the belief that liberty of conscience is inalienable will re-establish true faith; with the correlative paradox of a sincere unbelief and an apparent incredulity which is faith within non-belief.”

Will some of the Catholic bishops in beautiful Spain take Father Dumery’s words to heart? This Catholic priest is absolutely opposed to any form of coercion against unbeliever, schismatic or heretic. Truth, argues Father Dumery, is always ready to hear St. Paul; it will refuse to listen to Torquemada.

Professor Bela Vassady, an exile from stricken Hungary, in an article in Theology Today (July, 1956) plows a deep furrow as he writes on “The Power of Christlike Living.” Over against the cults of assurance Vassady stresses the need of negative thinking in terms of the Gospel’s call for self-depreciation, self-denial, humility and repentance. But though we are summoned to lose our lives for Christ’s sake, this demand “is always embedded in the proclamation of a new, divine positiveness.” The bootstrap strategy of the cults of assurance, Vassady rightly maintains, cannot lastingly dissolve man’s feelings of loneliness, emptiness and insecurity. But where men experience by faith the divine pardon of their sins, wondrous powers of the spirit are being released. In view of man’s introvert face-saving, that is, bribing one’s own conscience or the ever present extrovert or manward face-saving—“the selling of lies, the playing up of vices for virtues in the sight of others,” or, what is by far the worst, Godward or vertical face-saving—“the most stupid as well as wicked act of man the sinner to strive to deceive God and to believe in the success of his Godward camouflage,” there is but one remedy, namely saving faith! Concludes Vassady: “Saving faith is just the reverse of the complex of facesaving. Whoever dies and is risen with the Lord is saved by faith, and no longer needs to take refuge in a technique of face-saving. The crisis of facing the loss of faith is by such a man again and again overcome by a voluntary act of face-renunciation in the sight of the Lord who died for him.” This is sound pastoral theology because these insights are rooted in God’s holy Word.

Writing on “The Literature of the Fulton Street Prayer Meeting” (Moody Monthly, Jan., 1957), Wilbur M. Smith is convinced that “the Revival of 1858 is the kind of revival America preeminently needs today: caused by a mighty outpouring of the Spirit of God, on every city and hamlet, from the Atlantic to the Pacific; a time of contrition and confession of sin; a time when waves of prayer will sweep over our land; when noonday meetings will see greater audiences than Sunday morning services now see; when ministers with even few gifts well speak with new power never before known by them, and will see hundreds coming forward to receive Christ in an otherwise ordinary service. This could be more nation-wide than any religious movement ever known in America, if a great work of God results from the Billy Graham campaign in New York, and millions are allowed to see, watching televised services in their own homes, the mighty working of the Spirit of God bringing eternal life to those who are receiving Christ as their Saviour.”

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Indeed! Be it so! The Lord’s arm is not shortened that he cannot revive his people and with them this great land of ours. Though we perceive it not, spiritual battles are going on in our midst. God’s Spirit is striving mightily with the minds of men. May we acknowledge Christ’s absolute Lordship in all of life, whether in school or shop, home or hearth, in national and international relations, or in our relations with our neighbours of another race. Sursuam corda! Lift up your hearts! Regem habemus! We have a King, His name is Immanuel, God with us, the herald and bringer of life, joy and grace.

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