Scholars’ Panel Identifies Contemporary Idols

Each year, in the anniversary issue ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY,the news section features a panel of the world’s foremost religious scholars asserting their views on a significant, timely question. This year’s question is:

What are the most prevalent false gods of our time and how do you assess their relative significance?

KARL BARTH, professor, University of Basel: “Today, and at all times, precisely the church is the place on which false gods are established and worshipped. For the church has succumbed to the temptation to believe in the goodness and power of her own tradition, morality, and religious activity. So the church has come to believe in images of man, of the world, and of God, which she has fabricated of her own means. She believes in the excellency of the Christian and in the depravity of the indifferent, the atheists, and the Communists. Thus she does exactly the same as those believing in money, in sports, in technics, in sex, or simply in the glory of affluent and comfortable living. It is the church’s high calling to demonstrate that she believes in that God who has redeemed man from all false gods.”

ANDREW W. BLACKWOOD, professor emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary: “In America today false gods abound. They call for perversion of things ideally good. In an order of descending prominence: self, money, pleasure, sex, romance (as in marriage), amusements (commercial), sports (professional), education (secular). Collectively, secularism and humanism. We need a return to the First Commandment, in the light of the Cross.”

F. F. BRUCE, professor, University of Manchester: “The most prevalent false gods of our time are the ‘status symbols’ cherished by Christians and non-Christians alike. On the personal level some of them may seem harmless enough, but their pursuit absorbs much of the energy which should be devoted to the extension of Christ’s kingdom. On the national and international level they are too often the very things that threaten the annihilation of mankind; yet their fatal attraction obscures a proper recognition of the things which belong to our peace.”

EMILE CAILLIET, professor emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary: “The false gods of our time are born of a pride of life that now pervades some of our oldest seminaries, so that the Christian proclamation is poisoned at its source. Our most immediate concern should be for that source, that is, for the kind of seminary a dedicated Christian should support.”

EDWARD JOHN CARNELL, professor, Fuller Theological Seminary: “Power and pleasure, or the vanities of self-sufficiency and self-gratification—just as they have always been. Each assumes that man can complete his life by his own resources. The god of power draws on science’s penetration into the elemental forces of nature, while the god of pleasure thrives on the traditional fruits of material prosperity and a general decay in moral standards.”

GORDON H. CLARK, professor, Butler University: “The phrase ‘false gods’ suggests polytheism; and indeed modern society has many gods. One of the most powerful is the secular, anti-Christian welfare state. No other modern god or demon so nearly controls all of life. Totalitarianism is today’s rival of the sovereign God.”

FRANK E. GAEBELEIN, headmaster, The Stony Brook School: “Speaking of the false gods of our time, I believe that prominent among them are the gods of materialism and self-indulgence set up by advertising, the entertainment world, and the popular press. The present slippage in morals reflects an ominous removal of restraints of good taste and moral standards. Through the stimuli of advertising, films, and the press, the false gods of materialistic glamor and sensual pleasure have invaded all areas of our society. America has already traveled far down the road of secular materialism. Unless there is repentence, judgment may be in store for our nation.”

JOHN H. GERSTNER, professor, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary: “There is and ever has been one and only one I-dol. The things or images which pass for idols are what I have made for Me. The civilized man, unlike the ‘primitive,’ dispenses with the intermediary image and makes himself directly the sole object of his own concern. ‘Deny thyself’ is the first sign of the new man in Christ.”

CARL F. H. HENRY, Editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY: “The false gods of our age are scientism, communism, and political democracy. All trust man’s warped passions to shape a paradise on earth. One thing sure about these gilded idols is that Christ will scatter their broken fragments in judgment and fill the vacuum left by their unkept promises.”

W. BOYD HUNT, Professor, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary: “In the West the most influential false gods are a secularized form of education—the delusion of man’s ability to save himself; materialism—the practical atheism which confuses immediate wants with ultimate needs; nationalism—the provincial obsession which denies the oneness of the world; and conservatism—the inordinate worship of what one already has. At the heart of each of these false religions is the effort to achieve a cheap security—the chiefest of the false gods, and the self-destroying refusal to accept the venture of biblical faith.”

W. HARRY JELLEMA, professor, Haverford College: “Detached from the judgment and grace of God, idolatrous reverence for the self in its solitary and hopeless subjectivity. Two major modes of narcissistic worship then present themselves: Either indulgence of the naturalistic drives toward temporal security, power, and pleasure; or the more sophisticated indulgence in the pathos of the self’s aloneness and inability to find life worth living.”

HAROLD B. KUHN, professor, Asbury Theological Seminary: “In today’s world of the West, the most tempting absolute is ‘our Western way of life’ or ‘life in the free world’, or ‘the best standard of living man has ever known,’ or simply ‘our liberties.’ Taken within a theological frame of reference, there is much to be said for these ‘values’—but taken as absolutes, they serve only to further our confusion. Not one of them can stand alone; none can survive, save among a stable core of persons whose lives are lived according to principle. Such a core of persons can be produced only through the dynamic of the Gospel of Christ. Take this away, and within a few generations, even the character-values will disappear.”

ADDISON H. LEITCH, professor, Tarkio College: “There are many gods—money, status, security, health, and even social adjustment. They become objects of idolatry when we confuse the creature with the creator, the gift with the giver. Their falsity lies in their being limited to this world and finite goals. The false god, therefore, is this world as an end in itself. We have lost the dimension of infinity, the hope of eternity. We forget that we are pilgrims and that we have no final place of abode here.”

CALVIN D. LINTON, dean, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, George Washington University: “From the point of view of one educator, the prevalent false gods are: 1. The cult of automatic human progress. The belief that all environments tend inevitably toward perfection, with consequent search for the novel and the attendant neglect of ancient wisdom. 2. The cult of egalitarianism. The belief that not only are all men equal before God and under the law, but that all are equally deserving of reward, honor, and certificates of achievement 3. The cult of scientism. The belief that all human experience is ultimately reducible to instrumentation and technology.”

CHARLES MALIK, professor, American University, past president, United Nations General Assembly: “I would put them in the following order: Secularism—nature, man and history are self-sufficient, without any reference whatsoever to God as a righteous creator who really cares and who is above all nature, all history, and all men and without whom these things have no meaning and issue in absolute despair. Materialism—the derivation of man from and his reduction to material, economic, social and sensuous conditions with no independence whatsoever and no originality for his mind and spirit. Relativism—no absolute, objective truth valid for all, but each culture, each people, each tradition, each individual his own free judge of what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false, what is ultimate and what is evanescent.”

LEON MORRIS, principal, Tyndale House: “Men’s ideals today are various, but a good sermon might be worked out on the three S’s, success, security, and sputniks. Our generation has an almost pathological fear of failure, and success (variously interpreted) is the dominating passion of many. Others set all else aside in a single-minded pursuit of security. The ideal of scientific achievement attracts multitudes to its shrine. And these gods are failing us. No generation ever felt less successful than does ours. No generation ever felt more insecure. No generation had as much to fear from the results of scientific research.”

J. THEODORE MUELLER, professor, Concordia Seminary: “Perverted human nature never changes and so also the false gods of corrupt mankind never change. John describes them briefly but strikingly as the ‘lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.’ These lusts today manifest themselves in the whole world, outside of Christ’s kingdom of grace, in atheism, materialism, voluptuousness, arrogance, rejection of the divine Word and the precious Gospel of Christ, both among liberal theologians and laymen, as also in the gross outbursts of crime and the constant threat of war and tyrannical oppression.”

REINHOLD NIEBUHR, professor, Harvard University: “What can one do but ‘hold the candle light of the obvious to the daylight of common experience’? The false gods are obvious. The primary one is physical power and comfort.”

KENNETH L. PIKE, professor, University of Michigan: “In a system of abstract ideas the intellectual can put his trust; on it base his actions; out of it develop his worldview; through it get his deepest emotional thrust. Secularism (or naturalism, or behaviorism) is such a system. Trust here squeezes out—replaces—trust in God and the worldview which he gives us. Secularism becomes, therefore, the most prevalent false god in our modern academic community—more deeply rooted, perhaps, than is covetousness (or riches? or security?), ‘which is [also] idolatry’ (Colossians 3:5).”

W. STANFORD REID, professor, McGill University: “The principal false god of our time in this land is our standard of living. We are so concerned with material possessions that we forget they are the gift of God and that there are other things more important. We may yet have to lose our standard of living or surrender a large part of it before we become aware that there are much more important values. After all, man’s chief end in life is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever, not to have a house with a swimming pool.”

WILLIAM CHILDS ROBINSON, professor, Columbia Theological Seminary: “In considering false gods, may I raise three questions: Are we worshipping visible success instead of holding on with Job, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him’? Are we insisting on decoding the faith into philosophical systems or mythological symbols rather than admitting mystery and refusing to let the things we do not know upset our confidence in the Christ we do know? Are we bowing to bigness rather than witnessing to the Word and waiting upon God to vindicate his Gospel?”

MERRILL C. TENNEY, dean, Graduate School, Wheaton College: “Prestige, possessions, power, and pleasures are the false gods of modern man. They represent a tragic devotion to material gain rather than to spiritual good, to transient gratification rather than to eternal values. They are as futile and unsatisfying to the spirit as any idol of wood or stone.”

Protestant Panorama

• Merger of the Baptist Missionary Training School of Chicago with Colgate Rochester Divinity School was approved last month by the boards of both. Resources of the two American Baptist institutions will be combined to develop a new graduate program of church vocations for women at Colgate beginning next year.

• The Beaver-Butler (Pennsylvania) Presbytery plans to petition the United Presbyterian General Assembly to take a more deliberate stand on the problem of alcohol. The presbytery has criticized “social drinking” and has asked that abstinence be reiterated as the standard of the church.

• Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann was honored this month for 25 years of service to the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. Hoffmann is director of public relations for the church and speaker on “The Lutheran Hour.”

• Four Pentecostalist leaders in the Ural Mountain region of Russia face possible jail terms after being convicted of engaging in activities “of a character hostile to humanity,” according to Moscow radio.

• The American Bible Society is appealing for $250,000 to supply Bibles for Indonesia before an embargo takes effect December 23.

CORNELIUS VAN TIL, professor, Westminister Theological Seminary: “The historian Toynbee thinks that Christianity first observed the comprehensive character of the general cosmic law ‘proclaimed by Aeschylus’ that learning comes through suffering. Toynbee thinks he does justice to the uniqueness of the work of Christ by asserting that He first recognized the universal character of this law. Thus Christ is made to illustrate Truth which is above Him. This is idolatry.”

GUSTAVE WEIGEL, S.J., professor, Woodstock College: “There is only one God. He is always the same. The gods are many, but no matter how they are called, Zeus or atomic power, Venus or Libido, Mars or war, they are natural powers and they are always the same. They cannot save, no matter in what era their aid is sought.”

WARREN C. YOUNG, professor, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary: “The most serious idol of today is the status quo. Our Christian witness is ineffective because we are trying to witness conventionally to an age which is not conventional. Our evangelical churches are failing to meet the challenge of this changing culture because they have idolized the pattern and program of the dead past. Thus our method prevents us from making contact with the message of the Gospel. Christians and churches must learn again the unconventionality of Christ if they are to break the idol of contemporary conventionality.”

Baptist Men In Memphis

More than 7,000 clergymen and laymen gathered at Memphis, Tennessee, for the second National Conference of Southern Baptist Men held September 13–15, heard Charles Malik, past president of the United Nations General Assembly, plead that communism be recognized as “a total challenge.”

Calling the present world situation “in its deepest dimension a spiritual crisis,” he said that “anything less than total response to it is a fraud.”

Malik stressed the futility of the Peace Corps and similar responses against “forty million dedicated people (Communists) working day and night in every nation in the world … using every conceivable means, to attain its ends, world domination.”

He challenged the Church to pursue its particular part of the struggle: To convict of sin by confronting mankind with the Cross; to wield the weapons of the Spirit in the face of all that is spiritually neutral; and to remain absolutely faithful to Christ. “If—God forbid—the world should go up in smoke,” he said, “let the name of Christ remain above every name, and the Cross above every symbol.”

Keynote speaker, the Rev. Roy McClain, pastor of First Baptist Church of Atlanta, spoke on the conference theme “That the World May Know.”

“Militant Christianity is beating a cowardly retreat to the safe shelter of organized religion,” he said. “If the present trend continues, it is not unthinkable that the organized church could become Christianity’s greatest enemy.”

Calling the redeeming love of Christ a weapon that has never failed when properly and wholeheartedly launched, he stressed that “the best argument for genuine Christianity is not a sermon, song, service or statistic, but a Christian.”

The Rev. Louis Evans, minister-at-large for the Board of National Missions, United Presbyterian Church, declared, “We are too busy burning incense to the Goddess Production.… Now we must be at His work all the time—at the bench, in the field, shop and forest, on the campus and on the run.

“The church is running scared,” Evans said. “But the right sort of fear does not end in paralysis or panic, but in a new’ passion and a program.”

Seminars on timely and timeless topics from “Separation of Church and State” to “Effective Christian Witnessing” were held throughout the conference.

The following report was prepared forCHRISTIANITY TODAYby the Rev. T. Robert Ingram, rector of St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church and School in Houston:

Working with unruffled precision, the 60th triennial General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church at Detroit, September 17–29, solidly endorsed every move put before it deemed at “the goal of unity of the church of Jesus Christ.” No voice raised the profound question whether ultimate defection from Christ’s sovereignty may also be inherent in visible unity.

The convention turned down a resolution introduced in its House of Deputies asking that it withdraw from the National Council of Churches of Christ, accepted the invitation of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. to join in an invitation to The Methodist Church and the United Church of Christ “to explore the establishment of a united church,” and did what was necessary to extend recognition or encouragement to a myriad of churches around the world, either in existence or on the planning boards, in the expectation that they will participate in the “coming great church.”

The convention moved under the ubiquitous eye of Bishop James A. Pike of California, whose public endorsement of the Presbyterian invitation as put forth by Eugene Carson Blake had caused the proposal to become known as the Blake-Pike plan. The names of Blake and Pike were deliberately dissociated from the invitation for propaganda purposes, and the convention was told to refer to it as “the Presbyterian invitation.”

Pike himself has been under fire for months for his questionable stand on fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith and was expected to be faced with charges instigated by other bishops, who alone can take such action. When it became clear that Pike’s dominant influence in the House of Bishops would prevent any such action, an effort was made in the House of Deputies to pass a resolution “that this house reassure the faithful that the belief and teachings of this church have not changed.” The resolution was tabled in what was clearly regarded as a personal victory for Bishop Pike.

A resolution originated in the House of Deputies endorsing the NCC’s stated purposes and reaffirming the Protestant Episcopal Church’s intention to remain in it was also approved by the bishops without change.

The resolution took note that “serious questions have been raised in some parishes about the manner in which certain pronouncements and statements on controversial topics have been issued from the office of the [NCC] with the authority therefore of the General Assembly and the General Board not made clear; and that certain of these pronouncements and statements have seemed to many to have been issued as if they carried the endorsement of the several constituent churches; when in fact they did not.

“Now be it resolved, the House of Bishops concurring, that this convention recognizes the importance of having the [NCC] speak to the churches about the Christian implications of contemporary, social, economic, and political issues, but also declares that no pronouncement or statement can, without action by this church’s authority, be regarded as an official statement of this church.”

The Episcopalian Joint Commission on Ecumenical Relations was asked to make a study of the structure, program, and finances of the NCC.

Further spelling out the fashion of the convention for unity, the House of Bishops originated and the House of Deputies endorsed two resolutions frankly interpreted in the press as “a two-headed club” against its own lay members who had voiced vigorous objections to the NCC, unity, and communism through an unprecedented wave of letters, telegrams and pamphlets. One “head of the club” was a resolution condemning “Marxist communism,” and the other cautioning against “extremist groups, and oversimplified appraisal of our situation which they promote, lest fear and suspicion destroy honest public debate and silence the expression of Christian faith in human affairs.”

The second resolution was beamed at the work of a group of laymen and a few clergymen who distributed tracts and pamphlets in opposition primarily to the NCC but also to communism generally. It had been falsely linked with the John Birch Society. The influence of this group, led by a Grosse Point housewife, was indicated by the venom and heckling turned on them in the booth which they manned. They were cursed, called anti-Christian and one priest flung a pamphlet in the face of a man working in the booth. The bishops thus posed “Marxist communism” as one extreme against opponents of church unity in the opposite extreme.

Concern over bitterness aroused by the unity movement was voiced in the House of Deputies by several speakers who had deplored such high feelings from 1937 to 1946, when conversations were underway looking toward uniting with Presbyterians. They feared it would reappear as unity talks were revived, and one deputy told the House it already had in his diocese.

Integration, or “unity” of race, was put before the Episcopalians in convention at Detroit as a dramatic phase of the overall drive toward totalitarian unity. A group of clergy who had gathered at New Orleans hound for Detroit to pray in mixed groups, managed to get themselves arrested in a Jackson, Mississippi, restaurant. They received their due in headlines, but the issue was soon lost in the tension of more immediate and pressing issues connected with church unity. An effort to have the convention favor mixed marriages was tabled.

A Vote Of Confidence

Does membership in the John Birch Society disqualify a person from interchurch leadership.

The executive board of the Louisville (Kentucky) Area Council of Churches, which reviewed charges of “weak and ineffective leadership” made against Executive Director N. Burnett Magruder, thinks not.

The board declared last month that it found “no justification” to the charges, brought by a group of United Church of Christ ministers who demanded Magruder’s resignation.

“I don’t see how a person who espouses the ideas of the John Birch Society can be an effective leader,” said the Rev. Robert S. Mathes.

Magruder acknowledges the Birch membership but asserts that there is nothing within the society’s principles that would deter him in his council work.

The Louisville council embraces some 250 churches and is one of the most representative councils in the nation. Its member churches range from the Pentecostal to the high-church Episcopal.

Magruder is a Southern Baptist minister. While studying at Yale Divinity School, he won the top scholarship in his class, which enabled him to go on to Columbia University and earn an M. A. in labor economics. He has served as the Louisville council’s executive director for three years. The controversy over him began some 18 months ago with the appearance of a magazine article in which he contended that some Protestant clergy were tinged with “the Marxist virus.”

Fighters Without A Cause?

Rampant chiliasm was one reason advanced by observers for the September launching of a new “pre-millennial Baptist mission society” by leaders of the Conservative Baptist Fellowship, a group noted for stronger separatist views than those generally held by leaders of the Conservative Baptist Association with which all leaders of the new society are also identified. The two bodies are independent. The permanent form of the society is expected to be effected by the time of the next meeting of the Conservative Baptist Association in May, 1962. Both home and foreign missions are to be combined under a single board.

Already in the field are two independent missionary agencies, the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society and the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society, both noted for remarkable vigor of outreach. The former body, for example, has some 380 foreign missionaries on the field after only 18 years of existence. It broke off from the American (then Northern) Baptist Convention in protest against liberalism. With its constituency of some 300,000 Conservative Baptists, its program compares favorably with that of the 1,555,360-member American Baptist Convention which supports some 391 foreign missionaries.

Introduction of a new mission society at this time highlights a division within the Conservative Baptist movement which has outwardly revolved about an eschatological question: the extent to which pre-millennial views shall be required of Conservative Baptist staff and convention “messengers.” Practically all Conservative Baptists are pre-millennial anyway, and those working for reform are generally those of dispensational convictions who believe in a secret rapture of believers before the tribulation.

Enthusiasm for the new society on the part of the two general directors of the existing societies was notably lacking. Said Vincent Brushwyler of the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society: “I don’t think a new missionary society is needed. Ours for all practical purposes is a pre-millennial society.”

Said Rufus Jones concerning the Conservative Baptist Home Mission Society: “I believe it remains true to the basic doctrine and ideology which brought the movement into being, and it is my opinion that those who are forming the new society would be able to find other missionary agencies already existing which share their ideology.”

Degree of separatism is another point of division among Conservative Baptists. The declaration of purpose of the society now forming reads: “… the impact of Neo-Evangelicalism and its twin evil of ecumenical evangelism has had a divisive and deteriorating effect on the schools, societies and churches of our movement …” Key issue here is whether Billy Graham’s evangelistic campaigns merit support. Also, some are opposed to co-operation with the National Association of Evangelicals.

Some observers both inside and outside the movement sadly read the division in terms of underlying personality clash and power struggle. They speak of “fighters without a cause” and see the doctrines of soul liberty and the priesthood of believers imperiled by factional strife. Said one: “I don’t believe in unbiblical inclusivism, but neither do I believe in an unbiblical exclusivism.”

A Baptist Split

Controversy among North Carolina’s Original Free Will Baptists resulted in a split in the denomination last month when 61 delegates, refusing to accept a “statement of faith and discipline” at the 49th annual convention of the North Carolina State Association of Original Free Will Baptists, walked out and formed another state association.

That organization—to be known as the Conservative Fellowship of the North Carolina State Convention of the Original Free Will Baptists—claims it represents an estimated 18,000 of the 40,000 Original Free Will Baptists in the state. The Rev. Frank Davenport of Goldsboro was elected moderator.

The walkout climaxed a controversy involving the ouster of the Rev. Donald Creech as pastor of a church in Durham over doctrinal differences and against the wishes of what was claimed to be a majority: of his congregation.

The focal point of controversy in North Carolina has been the question of whether a denominational conference has the right to intervene in serious local disturbances.

Subsequently, a history teacher at Mount Olive (North Carolina) Junior College, which is supported by the Free Will Baptist Church, resigned his post, admitting he had “made use of the Fifth Amendment and other constitutional privileges protecting individual rights against governmental encroachment.”

The resignation of William McKee Evans followed an investigation at the college which was made after a protest was voiced on the floor of the state convention.

18-Month Respite

Among the last bills passed by the 87th Congress before its adjournment Sept. 27 were measures extending (1) the school aid program for federally-impacted areas and (2) the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Enactment of the legislation likely means that federal aid to parochial schools, opposed by most Protestants, will not again be a live option for 18 months or more.

The debate over parochial school aid was the most intense to come before the first session of the 87th Congress. President Kennedy stood his ground in opposing such aid, even in the face of intense pressure from Roman Catholic party colleagues, but the price he paid was his own proposal for federal aid to public education, which was defeated along with parochial aid plans.

The extension of the National Defense Education Act for two years did not entail any amendments. Some observers charge that the program violates the principle of church-state separation when appropriated for scholarships for seminarians.

Baptists In Government

Dr. Paul F. Geren, former Baptist missionary and educator, is now second in command of the U. S. Peace Corps operation. His appointment by President Kennedy to the office of deputy director was announced last month.

Geren succeeds Bill D. Moyers, another Baptist clergyman, who now becomes associate director for legislative relations. Moyers is an ordained Southern Baptist minister and a graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary who was on the staff of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson when appointed to the Peace Corps earlier this year.

Geren, who was executive vice president of Baylor University, a Southern Baptist institution, from 1956 to 1958, has been serving in the State Department as deputy director of the Office of International Finance and Development. The son of an Arkansas Baptist minister, he attended Baylor as a student and later received a master’s degree at Louisiana State University and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

In 1941, Geren went to Judson College in Rangoon, Burma, as a missionary and economics teacher for the American Baptist Convention. His work there was cut short by the Japanese invasion of Burma.

He then joined the staff of Dr. Gordon Seagrave, famous Burma surgeon.

Peace Corps Problem

Peace Corps volunteers were already at work in Ghana and ready to begin in several other countries, but back in Washington the administration was still tussling with a principle: Should the Peace Corps sign contracts to work through sectarian agencies?

As of late September, the Peace Corps had not as yet signed such a contract, but policy makers were known to be toying with the idea.

President Kennedy has already signed into law the bill which establishes the Peace Corps as a permanent agency, but Congress did not specify any safeguards against intrusion upon the principle of separation of church and state.

The Hard Way Home

The only home he ever knew was the Baptist orphanage at Petah Tiqva and Edward Salim Zoumut, now 16, wanted to return. But authorities in Jordan took a dim view of allowing the boy to cross the Jerusalem border to get back into Israel. So, for more than eight months since he came to the Old City to pay his refugee parents a Christmas visit, the young Arab has been stranded. What’s more, he had been placed in a Roman Catholic boarding school, where, according to Religious News Service, “he complained of being unhappy.”

The Israel Baptist Convention, meanwhile, sought desperately to have the boy returned legally, but to no avail. The situation took a strange turn one day last month when Jordanian police picked up two men who had been seriously injured in a land mine explosion in no man’s land. One was Dr. Robert Lindsey, a highly-respected Southern Baptist missionary from Norman, Oklahoma. The other was Edward Salim Zoumut.

Lindsey was arrested on charges that he had tried to smuggle the boy back to Israel. He was placed in the prison ward of a government hospital, where subsequently one of his feet was amputated. The boy suffered an eye injury.

Lindsey, a noted Bible scholar, has served as a missionary to Israel for the past 16 years. He had been translating the New Testament into modern Hebrew and had served as a judge in the international Bible contest held in Jerusalem in 1958. With his wife and six children, Lindsey lived in Tiberias.

Israeli authorities requested officials in Jordan to return Lindsey to Israel. They indicated they would not prosecute him for the illegal crossing in view of “his sincere motives.”

People: Words And Events

Deaths: Dr. Conrad Arthur Moehlman, 82, retired professor of church history at Rochester Theological Seminary (now the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School); in Avon Park, Florida … Herman Fisk Bell, 81, author of three books on religion and theology; in Brooklyn, New York … G. Sidney Phelps, 86, former YMCA executive in the Far East; in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Appointments: As dean of Illinois Wesleyan University, Everette L. Walker … as director of graduate studies at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, Dr. Ray Summers … as professor of Old Testament literature at Princeton Theological Seminary, Dr. James Barr … as faculty members for the initial term of the Near East School of Archaeological and Biblical Studies in Jerusalem, Dr. Bastiaan Van Elderen, Dr. R. Laird Harris, Dr. Stanley Horton, and Dr. Joseph Free … as professor of Christian education, English, and drama at Pacific Bible Seminary, Miss Mary Harding … as editor of the Scripture Union publication, Every Girl’s Magazine, Mrs. J. Hills Cotterill.

Resignation: As executive secretary of the Associated Church Press, the Rev. Alfred P. Klauser, a Reserve Army chaplain whose unit began a tour of extended active duty October 1. Klauser was recently promoted to the rank of full colonel.

Retirement: Dr. Ralph W. Sockman, minister of Christ Church, Methodist, New York, effective December 31. Sockman has served the church for more than 44 years—and thereby holds a record among Methodist ministers.

Election: As president of the House of Deputies of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Clifford P. Morehouse, New York publisher of literary materials for the church.

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