Between Midnight and Four

T. S. Eliot talks of the “twisted things” that come to life on city streets between midnight and four. Bent upon what Reinhold Niebuhr calls “mutable goods,” these “twisted things” use twisted means to fulfill fleeting, sensual, and twisted desires.

Long ago God promised to “make … crooked things straight” (Isa. 42:16). And it was John the Baptizer who recognized that “the crooked shall be made straight” (Luke 3:5) through Christ. By his saying grace Jesus Christ can straighten the souls of “twisted things” that haunt the streets and dark alleys. By his refining Spirit he can also straighten the twisting forces that curl and squiggle into the church. Through the Saviourhood and Lordship of Christ “whosoever will” may grow more and more into the fullness of the measure of the stature of the Son of God.

City streets and late hours have no monopoly on twistedness. It lurks in the pews of churches. Indeed, it visits in pulpits. To be sure, its pew and pulpit demeanor may seem relatively proper. But twistedness is there nonetheless.

When people shake hands with the pastor at the door, for example, is it not twistedness that custom dictates only complimentary comments about his sermon? All week long people live in a world of feigned friendship and back-slapping opportunism. All week long people hear from Washington and London and Moscow, from Wall Street and Main Street, from Hollywood. On Sunday they hope to hear from heaven. They want to discover God’s pertinent word for their hopes, their fears, and their sins. They require something prophetic and apostolic and piercing. If the pastor’s telephones, his car, his organizations, even his tongue, have pre-empted his energies all week long, he may not be able to provide that kind of word. Shall the people simply continue in their hunger, and for politeness’ sake never reveal their spiritual yearnings to their minister? More than this, are they expected to twist the inadequacies of their preaching diet into something praiseworthy? Does the pulpit abet this twisting of honest reaction by not providing people with some avenue of expression, such as a suggestion or comment box?

What about the active even turbulent spirit in which the Church was born and grew? Is it so well suppressed and twisted now that in places the Church appears lethargic compared to other organizations? If someone feels himself God’s lay Luther to stir up the situation, more often than not he is warned to quit rocking the boat. Actually, a good upset is sometimes necessary and refreshing. The same sleepy pew-warmers who insist on an uneventful church atmosphere would never tolerate such a hanger-on and do-nothing spirit in their everyday business affairs. The fact that the Church does not founder and fail more often at human hands attests that its ultimate being, like its Lord, is surely divine.

Twistedness plagues church members in other ways also. Sometimes men on the job have been ruled more by the late Dale Carnegie than by Christ. Or their idea of ultimate security is a fall-out shelter. Or even a snowfall—for all its beauty and spiritual reminders of God—they impatiently disparage as an irksome hindrance to driving speed.

Or take twistedness in the pulpit. The man of God is called to proclaim high and holy things; he himself is to soar and to lift his people into the heavenlies. It belongs to his calling to handle, to be awed by, grace and glory and God. But alas! too often he handles but the earthly things of the material world. What he cannot touch he considers too remote. What he cannot weigh and analyze has too little practical merit. Trivial and clever talk excites him. Gadgets and gimmicks are his favorite concern. How conversant he is about cars and other material things! He exchanges jokes with aplomb and spirit and perhaps even toys with introducing jazz into the worship services. Sometimes he itches to be a rancher instead of just a shepherd. So he keeps one eye on the public press and the other on the Recording Angel. He may broadcast an anti-Communism crusade and here and there tuck in the Gospel where it’s convenient. Such twistedness violates matters of grace and glory, of God’s kingdom and righteousness, of the world to come. There is twistedness in the pulpit when its major concerns are but those of a materialistic, unregenerate world.

Outside the church there is twistedness, too, of course. What about the crooked guardians of the law in Denver and Chicago? What about a metropolis whose corruption may have tipped a presidential election?

Someone has noted that the illusory symbols of modern hope—the Nazi swastika, for example—are twisted crosses. They are man-made images in which the bent and warped character of modern life still shines through. These contemporary symbols—Marx’s hammer and sickle among them—are banners of desperation raised between midnight and four. They are to be judged by the tree of life, a tree of God’s planting whereon a Saviour died. In the daytime turned to darkness between high noon and three he illumined with enduring the twisted things in which a fallen race sinks its spirit in its “midnight to four” struggle for meaning and survival.

Vatican Rejects Protestant View Of Church Unity

A Vatican announcement that its concept of Christian unity views the Roman Catholic Church as “the paternal house” to which all “dissident Christian communities” must return disappoints more observers than it surprises.

Nobody expected Pope John XXIII to cast his vote for Franklin Clark Fry, Eugene Carson Blake, or Bishop James A. Pike in settling the shape of a new era of world Christian amicability. In approaching the Roman Catholic ecumenical council which opens October 11, the Vatican quite properly deplored the current ecumenical tendency to view no presently existing church as “the one true church of Christ” and to work toward a “completely new” church resulting from the union of presently existing groups.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY has said that the effort to overcome the ailments of existing denominations by a process of merger into a giant church need not be viewed as the divine ideal. In fact, merger momentum may simply substitute “ecclesiastical elephantiasis” for Protestant fragmentation, and the leprous-like condition would be no improvement.

But if contemporary Protestant ecumenism unsatisfactorily dilutes the church taken as a body of regenerate believers, the Roman error is fully as perversed, for it compromises the headship of Christ over the church. The lordship of Christ is virtually suppressed in the dogma of papal infallibility and deference to the Pope as his earthly vicegerent. Between “ecclesiastical elephantiasis” and “ecclesiastical encephalitis” the pickings often seem slim for those who search the Scriptures for insights into the nature of the redeemed body that Christ heads. Hence reiteration that only the return of “separated brothers” to the Roman Catholic hierarchy promises an acceptable ecumenical development is frustrating.

Sunday Union Meetings Pose Dilemma For Protestant Workers

The increasing tendency of labor unions to schedule meetings for Sunday morning and to fine those members who place church attendance above union meetings for failure to attend has created a new and significant dilemma for Protestant churchgoers. The fines are frequently high, and many cannot afford to pay them.

The minister often feels unjustified in requesting loyalty to the church when job security may be at stake. It must be noted, however, that the individual’s loyalty in this situation is not to be judged only in respect to the local church but to God the Father who enjoined believers not to forsake the assembling of themselves together.

Our God is a loving God. He does not forsake his children, and he honors our small attempts at obeying him. But Christians have always suffered persecution; and they may suffer more in the years ahead. Yet in joy or in sorrow, in plenty or in want, we serve a God who has promises to supply all our needs according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus.

Graham Crusade Demonstrates Link Of Evangelism And Ecumenism

Those who make ecumenism the mission of the Church in our time need to take a lesson from the remarkable crusade just concluded by Billy Graham in Chicago. Even leaders of the city’s church federation, which withheld its official support of the campaign, acknowledged that Christians of all denominations who lost themselves in the task of cooperative evangelism gave a display of spirited ecumenical cooperation.

“I was impressed with the ecumenical character of the witness,” said Dr. Edgar H. S. Chandler, executive vice-president of the federation, “in the sense that the evangelist was dealing with the central truths of the faith.”

The way to biblical ecumenism, in fact, is through biblical mission anchored to biblical theology and ethics.

Living Within One’S Means Rejected In Current Fiscal Theory

In recent weeks significant speeches by government officials have given added impetus to the mistaken but increasingly popular notion that living beyond one’s means is virtuous. Living within one’s budget is now regarded as old fashioned, a reversion to outdated labels in an age demanding fresh, dynamic economics.

Purchasing on credit is, of course, essential to a free enterprise economy, in which mass production depends for its market on the increased purchasing power which credit buying supplies. But credit may be abused. It may be abused by pledging away the future in order to gain unnecessary comforts for the present. And it is most abused when, under the captions of “offsetting inflation” and “demonstrating our confidence in the economy,” one is encouraged in the notion that failing to meet his yearly expenses may even be a virtue.

Such an attitude cannot avoid perverting the sense of individual responsibility. What has become of the Reformation virtue which viewed a man’s financial activities as accountable to God? In a day when financial maxims are changing and when the nation’s confidence in the government and business is wavering, it is incumbent upon Christians to be noted for their economic solidarity and seriousness with which they take their debts.

Sabbatical Leave For Ministers Has Much In Its Favor

From a college professor, Dr. W. Harry Jellema, has come the suggestion that local churches plan to give their pastors a paid sabbatical term for research and study. We think the suggestion is a good one. It may discourage some ministers from looking too hurriedly for greener pastures; it will bring them back to familiar fields with fresh material and new insights. The congregation will benefit indirectly as the minister does directly. A three-month sabbatical would permit a minister to enroll for a term’s study in seminary; coupled with his summer vacation, it would provide additional creative opportunities. Some churches have already approved such a program, and CHRISTIANITY TODAY hopes many other congregations will reward their ministers in the same way.

Addressing the Evangelical Press Association, President Harold N. Englund of Western Theological Seminary recently proposed a sabbatical year of travel and study for religion editors. “If some Foundation wishes to use its financial resources in a really critical way,” he said, “it could underwrite the cost of twenty such sabbaticals.” Men in the word business (or ministry) can run as dry when they write as when they preach.

Letters To The President Will Register Your Views

The political importance of voluntary organizations was emphasized recently in a two-day briefing conference sponsored by the U.S. State Department. One of President Kennedy’s cabinet members referred to the (invited) leaders of voluntary groups as most representative of the views of the American people. During discussions on disarmament, United Nations, foreign policy, the Common Market, and other subjects, discontent was registered at several stages over Congressional roadblocks to administration programs and objectives. The executive branch is encouraging representatives of voluntary organizations to convey their convictions on important national issues directly to the White House, and not simply to Congress. This would give the executive branch a means of pressure against the legislative, since the views of Congressmen reluctant to go along with administrative proposals could be depicted as out of step with grass-roots conviction.

The encouragement to voluntary groups to register their views as widely as possible is commendable. But the implication is unfortunate for a republic that Congress is no longer the most representative body reflective of grass-roots political conviction! And it would be doubly unfortunate if only a few voluntary organizations shared in the wider reflection of their convictions. Propaganda and picket techniques ought not to be surrendered to the minorities. The disarmament conference was told that one group of pacifist-promoting women meets regularly for luncheon, carrying their typewriters with them. They do not adjourn until each has written letters to the President, to Congressmen, and to newspapers expressing their (spontaneous grass-roots) views.

The time may indeed be for American Christians to carry both Bibles and typewriters to prayer meeting, staying an extra hour to register their petitions in Washington as firmly as in heaven. The price of neglect will be to yield the political scene to unrepresentative minorities.

Echoing In An Empty Church: Some Questions That Remain

If the Presbytery of New York insists upon denying the pulpit of Broadway Presbyterian Church to Dr. Stuart H. Merriam, there is one way—and perhaps only one—by which that Presbytery can lend an aura of credence to its claim to be motivated wholly by nontheological considerations.

Assuming that Presbytery is not simply seeking to moderate a historic conservative pulpit in the heart of New York, it remains that Presbytery badly mishandled its case from the outset. It chose poor grounds (probably the only grounds not wholly elusive) to institute Dr. Merriam’s trial: his disclosure of a U. S. State Department official’s confidential remarks about corruption in the Iranian government. Viewing Dr. Merriam’s case in its worst light—as an appeal to doctrinal differences that obscures personality issues and irregular antics—the fact remains that by putting a neoorthodox substitute in Merriam’s pulpit the Presbytery lent support to charges that it was impelled by liberal theological bias more than by good faith.

Broadway Presbyterian Church has a tradition of conservatism, and men of large capacity and caliber have ministered to its congregations. Dr. Walter H. Buchanan, a scholar and leader in the best fundamental tradition, served as minister for 34 years. Presbytery concedes in its own report that his successor, Dr. John Hess McComb, was a man of scholarly attainment albeit “narrow” from their point of view.

The New York Presbytery now has an empty church; it is about to lose a congregation; and it has no pastor in sight. If in utter disregard of Broadway’s conservative tradition it imports a new membership and new minister to utilize this strategic center for inclusive theological positions it will confirm every suspicion that its proceedings against Dr. Merriam were biased punitive actions against evangelical conservatives. Presbytery will greatly fortify its position and will demonstrate traditional presbyterian fairness by endorsing no candidate but a strong young conservative who, while courteous and cooperative to Presbytery, will fully maintain the historic evangelical position of the Broadway church. It might even accord such a minister freedom not to use the theologically-objectionable New Curriculum—acceptance of which was one of the prices Dr. Merriam would have paid in becoming Broadway’s minister.

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