Review of Current Religious Thought: January 16, 1961

We have noted a move toward a union of enough denominations to make a great Big Church of 18,000,000. This will impress people who are impressed by this sort of thing. In the denomination of which I am a member, we have just passed through an experience of merger and the end is not yet; it makes us a little nervous to think that we have to get all wound up for the same sort of thing again.

My own views on the merger of churches seem to satisfy no one. I suppose I picked up the clue from an old minister friend of mine, Dr. Homer Henderson who had a sizeable church in Grove City, Pennsylvania, and who was at one time big enough in our league to be Moderator of General Assembly. During the merger discussions, he passed a judgment on the excitement as follows: “Union will not be nearly as good as the proponents say nor nearly as bad as the opponents say.” And I think that on the whole his judgment was pretty sound. There are days when it is easy to say “what’s so wonderful about church union?” As one contemplates the possibilities set forward by James Pike and Eugene Blake, one concludes that there lies before us mountains of committee work, mass meetings and speeches, maybe a procession or two, and when it is all over the work of the church will still be done by the thousands of ordinary preachers in ordinary congregations who start out again on a Monday morning hoping to possess their souls and protect their integrity as they walk into their studies and wonder once again if maybe this week they might not be able to say or to live the Word of Life among their people.

I turn aside to give you a quotation but I shall be back. The quotation comes from a book called City of Wrong by Kamel Hussein. The subtitle of the book is A Friday In Jerusalem. The whole book has to do with the black Friday which we have come to call Good Friday, the day on which Christ was crucified. The book gives a general setting for the day in Jerusalem and then takes us into the lives and backgrounds of the Jews, the disciples, and the Romans before, bringing us to the climax of the book at Golgotha. But here is the quotation:

“The throngs made their way to the palace of the Roman governor to demand the blood of the teacher and his disciples. Yet there was not one among them who knew any evil about him, none who sought his death out of belief of personal conviction. Thus was accomplished the greatest of crimes of history, the crime of the condemnation of Christ to crucifixion as one who had denied God, without anybody in Jerusalem knowing who it was who wanted his death nor upon whom the guilt of this foul deed really fell.… Thus was Christ condemned to die on a cross for having denied God! Can anyone thereafter feel the slightest confidence in human wisdom?… The fact that God raised Him to Himself in no way mitigates the iniquity of what was done.”

Let me now say a few things about this quotation and about the book.

1. The book was in its Arabic version awarded the State Prize For Literature in Egypt and was therefore highly acceptable to a Mohammedan government in a Mohammedan land.

2. The author is Dr. (M.D.) Kamel Hussein, a devout Moslim. His Netherland publishers assure us that this is the first book ever written in the world of Islam which makes the cross of Christ an object of thorough and sympathetic study.

3. The quotation is not taken out of context nor even out of the general theme and spirit of the book. Furthermore, the quotation makes clear what lies at the heart of the book, namely, a recognition of the depth and universality of the sin which puts to death the Lord of Life, and the sinlessness of this One who is crucified. Christ is spoken of in the highest possible terms short of full deity, there is no hesitation on matters theistic, supernatural, or spiritual, and the treatment of the ethic of the Sermon On The Mount is absolutely toplevel.

We can return now to the question of church union. How much agreement do churches need to have in order to get together in organic union? Just for fun, on the basis of this book by Dr. Hussein, why not try union with the Mohammedans? We are in agreement on the following items: Monotheism, the depravity of man, the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount, the Virgin Birth, the miraculous powers of Christ, the return of Christ to the Father, the historicity of the Gospel narratives, and a slight difference of opinion between fatalism and predestination. We must be careful to emphasize our areas of agreement and minimize, for the sake of unity (and unity is always a good thing) the areas of our disagreement. If we find so many things on which we can agree, would it not be well then to proceed to union and work out the “details” later?

To even speak of such a union seems almost a blasphemy—what about the deity of Christ, for this is of the essence of our belief. What about other “essentials” of our faith? But it seems to me that as soon as we begin to talk about essentials, especially essentials of belief as opposed to essentials of church structure, we have opened up the whole question of church union on a different foundation. What, essentially is a Christian, theologically defined? If theology makes a difference between Christianity and Islam, then it makes a difference, and there is nothing obscurantist about those unfortunate people who want to raise questions about sharpness of theological definition before being satisfied with church union at any level. There are differences and the differences ought to be listened to.

The review is prepared in sequence by Prof. G. C. Berkouwer of Free University, Amsterdam; Dr. Philip E. Hughes, Editor of The Churchman (England); President Addison H. Leitch of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Pennsylvania; and Dr. Paul S. Rees, Vice President of World Vision.—ED.

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