God Make Us Great

Back in the old days of China, the emperor built a gigantic wall to defend the country against the barbarians to the North. It stretched for miles across the border, scraping the sky, and wide enough for chariots to pass on top. It remains one of the wonders of the world—perhaps the one man-made object that will be visible from the moon. But as a defense effort the wall was a dud. The enemy breached it merely by bribing a gatekeeper.

We fork over almost all that’s in our national pocket now to be policed around the clock. It would be suicide not to take these precautions, but foolhardy for us to think that they are adequate. Communist screams distract us from our moral health and Christian obligations. It would be heartbreaking, after all the bankrupting military trouble we have been put to, if the bottom fell out of the integrity of the American people and our monumental “Dew Line” became our gravestone just as the “Great Wall” marks the tomb of the Chinese Empire.

We are not imagining things when we express anxiety over the moral condition of America. The soldiers who welched on us in Korea are symptoms. It made us sick to see the way the communes swallowed up the homes in China, but some monster is gulping them down in this country. It will consume a half million homes this year. What will happen to the children? Former Harvard President Conant is scared of the smoldering “social dynamite” in the slums—the dark-skinned teen-ager out of school, out of work. No employer wants him—not even mother. The “west sides” of our cities are crawling with these young criminals until it is “not safe on the White House steps after dark.” There are more female barmaids (not counting barflies) than college coeds. Those poor girls will not make very good mothers. But the campus is not snow-white. The most impressive classrooms and field houses include cheating. At night the golf course can be a brothel. Even the Communists are complaining about the moral listlessness of our movies. But think of the Americans, fixed night after night to the almost vacant stare of TV. And if the average American can no longer trust his marriage partner to keep the most sacred vow over two times out of three how soon shall we turn up with a dishonest gatekeeper at the wrong place?

On the Fourth, an adolescent republic, grown prodigal and in a pinch, should run back to its founding fathers for more faith and light. Why did we ever leave England in the first place? What did our fathers die for? What heritage is ours “to have and to hold” that our young political playmates down at the U.N. don’t know about? “What makes a nation great?”

Jefferson’s words call us back to our good upbringing: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” How can we take that negatively! That makes us at war with Communism, any Ku Klux Klan or inquisition, too heavy industry, too loud labor, too much government, the chain of sin, the bonds of unbelief.

But liberty was not our father’s first love. Freedom is the fruit of the Christian faith. Was Jefferson a Christian? He said he was. And he was not afraid to admit, “The God who gave us life gave us liberty.” Liberty is not to be taken lightly only as our “unalienable right,” but as a sacred trust for which we must answer to God himself. Our time is not spare time. We pledge our allegiance “under God.” We are free only if subject to him. Our land will be bright with “freedom’s holy light” only so long as we can pray fervently, “protect us by Thy might Great God our King.” Jefferson’s voice cracks like a whiplash across the face of sacrilege: “Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.” There is only one place where liberty could possibly be: “Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” All else is license.

This should send us to our Christian battle stations. Liberty is a way of saying, saving, our opportunity to serve God.

Our country was born believing it was the child of God, convinced it was going somewhere for His sake. “Our Pilgrim fathers by the light of the smoking lamp on the Mayflower, before landing at Plymouth inserted these words into the Mayflower Compact. ‘We whose names are underwritten have undertaken for the glory of God to establish in Virginia the first colony for the advancement of the Christian faith’.” The prayers of George Washington that awful winter at Valley Forge and of Lincoln during the dark, bloody hours of disunion promise something more than this country’s survival; some bigger national purpose than the pursuit of our own happiness breathes in our official documents. We are now engaged in a death struggle to everything we hold dear. Like Lincoln, in those heart-rending days a century ago when brother slaughtered brother, we do not know what else to do than arm to the teeth. But there is one thing about which there can be no mistake. If our beloved land lives to see the light of day dawning a century away, it will not be merely because we were the best bomb makers the world has ever seen, but because somehow, even during this depression, we were able to make God a profit.…

How will the archaeologist read the epitaph of the Americans? ‘The Almost Chosen People’ as one title has it? Or will we manage in the bloodcurdling distractions of television thrillers and international terror to keep this nation “under God” and “be true to Thee ’til death”? From God’s point of view it remains to be seen whether this planet can produce anything more promising than those poisonous “mushrooms,” engulfing and fatal. God did not plant His fig tree to get fungi. Our existence hangs as surely as Israel’s did on whether we can produce godliness in large enough quantities to bring down to earth His dreams of a Kingdom. (David A. Redding, The Parables He Told, Fleming H. Revell Co., Westwood, New Jersey, 1962, pp. 141 ff.)

If we could see our country once more, not on our own or at the whim of Communism, but as the servant of God, Creation would stop shaking and begin again to make some sense. The chaos of our national philosophy would come clean and clear. We would rediscover our place, our importance to God, recover the precious relief of security. The shrieks of bullies would shrink to size in that perspective. Panic would be inconceivable among a people who knew firsthand that they could trust their King. The editors of Christian Herald embraced this quaking year with words worthy of our heritage: “The future is as dark as the threats of men. Or the future is as bright as the promises of God.… Does Khrushchev tower above Christ? Do we say, ‘This one, God, is too tough for You—we’ll handle it ourselves’.” Perhaps our trouble today is that men fear men rather than God. Christianity could put our cockeyed picture right side up and restore to God responsibility which only his shoulders are broad enough to bear.

Our belief begins with God, but it brings out the best in men and finally boils down to greatness. Ours is not a “do nothing” faith. “The Christian’s strength,” as the Herald’s editors said, “is not in having done nothing to stand; but in having done all to stand.” To believe means to obey—go back to church, get under the covers of The Book again. We will have to restore the ways as well as the walls of Williamsburg. Today’s extremity is our tutor—to teach us that carrying a nuclear knife is not enough to keep a nation safe. Tennyson said of Galahad: “His strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure.” We could use a Galahad at every gate. For we have to be ready any minute now not only to fight, but to outlive, outlove, outlast the foe, and able to say, “such as we were we gave ourselves outright” (Robert Frost).

And if we can look up from checking our ammunition long enough to practice up on this old faith we can get through this jagged knothole as our fathers got through theirs. If we actually depend upon God we can depend upon each other to put up a Christian fight inside and out. Fear will freeze us to death. But faith, if followed out, will find the practical way. And then, when we look back upon these “Sixties” we too shall be able to say what George Mason said about our newborn country after the “Seventies” were safely over, almost two centuries ago; “It seemed as if we were treading on enchanted ground.”

Presbyterians Depart From Geneva In Headlong Flight

“They came to the Delectable Mountains.” So runs the narrative in Pilgrim’s Progress. And as the Presbyterian pilgrim journeyed to Denver and gazed upon 170 miles of unbroken Rocky Mountain grandeur, he would surely think of Geneva and the towering Alpine splendor in view there, somehow reflecting the nobility of John Calvin’s stress upon the sovereignty of God. And were a May visitor to doubt that he was indeed an observer of the 174th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., he would have but to meet a Baltimore delegate whose name for pure Presbyterianism outshone all the rest: the Rev. Dr. John Calvin Knox Jackson—a name unlikely to be borne by any future pope apart from a sensational ecumenical breakthrough.

Also on hand was the eloquent Scots Presbyterian preacher of New York City’s Madison Avenue Church, Dr. David H. C. Read, who challenged Presbyterians to a recovery of “theological guts” in order to speak clearly to the world. “What we need,” he said, “is simply more time and emphasis given to the Bible and the doctrines of the Church. There is something wrong when a Church begins to carry a load of organization, promotion and committees beneath which its theological base is scarcely showing.” Indeed, a committee on theological education reported its concern about a “reported widespread lack of competence among candidates for ordination in their knowledge of the form and content of the English Bible.”

Read pointed to the Reformers as he rejected the idea that the Protestant heritage can be reclaimed simply by complete opposition to alcohol and gambling, coupled with a rigid separation of church and state: “Whatever our personal views may be on any of these questions, by no stretch of the imagination could they be identified with the Reformed tradition. Calvin, Luther and Knox would have been astonished to hear any of them.”

This, however, did not deter Read’s pragmatic American cousins from largely bypassing theology in favor of deep involvement with church-state problems and the alcohol question. Indeed, a special committee on church and state, authorized in 1960, brought forth a report which took a far more radical step on church-state separation than has been historically associated with Presbyterians or with any other major denomination. Acknowledging that Calvin assuredly was not the source of the report’s position, the committee called for a “secular” state by which it assertedly meant “impartial” toward Church and not hostile toward religion. The report thus opposed, among other things: (1) Bible reading, prayer, and celebration of religious holidays in public schools; (2) use of public property for religious displays and pageants; (3) special tax privileges for the church, with local churches urged to make contributions to local communities in lieu of taxes, in view of existing tax exemption laws; (4) special tax exemptions for ministers; (5) exemption of ministerial candidates and clergymen from military service except as conscientious objectors; (6) stiffening of existing Sunday closing laws and passing of new ones; (7) use of civil authority to censor on religious grounds material offensive to religious groups.

This report engendered lengthy and heated debate. Promotion of a “godless state” was charged and denied. The commissioners (delegates) voted to drop the word “secular” and then decided to seek grass-roots sentiment on the report, that a revised version may be submitted to next year’s General Assembly.

An interesting footnote to the above action was the Assembly’s refusal to act on a proposal to prepare for establishment of a Presbyterian system of parochial schools if tax funds should become available for such. After 1870, Presbyterians reportedly abandoned private schools, believing they could accomplish more by opposing the “secularization” of public education. It now appears that some Presbyterians desire just that secularization.

Presbyterians have historically looked upon the ideal of complete separation of religion and state as a gross oversimplification of the human situation. They have seen the goal of moral government apart from religion as unrealistic and unattainable. And they have seen the impossibility of a neutral state. Secularism and naturalism are not neutral.

The Scottish Sunday: A Significant Change

The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland last month discussed the Westminster Confession and the Christian use of Sunday. A radical departure from the traditional standard (misprinted in a national daily as the “Westminster concession”) was seen in the attempt to drive an official wedge between the Confession and a true understanding of Scripture. Certainly the latter is very necessary when some Hebridean islanders who consider it a violation to go for a walk on the Sabbath get around it by a nice legalism which makes it a work of mercy to exercise the dog that day.

Such a situation should stir Christians to renewed witness, for it is profitless to enjoin absence of activity on those who need the presence of God, and useless to demand from them a wooden obedience to one commandment instead of calling for glad surrender to Jesus Christ who came to fulfill the whole law.

Misunderstanding The Sermon A Pacifist Fallacy

Twelve hundred people were recently arrested in London during the Ban-the-Bomb demonstrations on a scale hitherto unknown in the United States. The number undoubtedly included a large proportion of cranks, chronic malcontents, social misfits, confused youths, and potential rebels in search of a cause. But what of others who professed to take part in the name of Christ? The analogy of the ostrich could be off-beam. Might not God in every generation call some of his servants to prophetic witness against the evil of war? After all, war is merely one writ-large manifestation of man’s trying to run his own life without Christ; it cannot be isolated from other forms of sin.

Such a call, however, will assuredly come only to men whose lives are “all-of-a-piece” and who are wholly dedicated to the service of God. Pacifists tend to demand for this single issue an absolute obedience which they are unwilling to give over the whole range of life, and are selective in their appeal to the Sermon on the Mount. Non-violence itself can foster hate unless it is the counterpart of that positive attitude of love which serves a neighbor. War is hell, but in a fallen world the demand for justice no more abolishes the propriety of the one than the other. The real problem is man and society, not guns and bombs.

Moscow Radio Presents A Dual Posture Toward Religious Interests

Radio Moscow skirted the path of a paradox in its posture toward religion this month.

One commentator boasted that a number of Russian and foreign clergymen are expected to attend the Communist-sponsored World Peace Conference in Moscow next month. He declared that four “priests” from the United States and three from Canada had promised to attend. (He did not name them.)

In another broadcast, Moscow Radio said the so-called Summer Festival of the Communist Youth Organization in the Estonian Soviet Republic will be dedicated to the organization’s “struggle against the influence of churchmen.”

Stock Market Tumbles In Confused Economic Climate

The tumbling stock market struck its hardest blow at multitudes of small investors in American business enterprises. Many factors contributed to the decline, not least among them President Kennedy’s tempery rebuke of the steel industry on April 11.

There is widespread fear among investors that a fundamental change has taken place in the nation’s political as well as economic climate. At his April 18 press conference, President Kennedy made clear the Government’s intention to exert greater direct influence over prices than the country has ever before experienced in the absence of declared war.

Does government by men, in contrast to government by law, best serve American ideals and aspirations? This is not just a philosophical or rhetorical question. Government pressures which established the current price of steel were clearly based on the judgment of men and not on the enforcement of law.

What advantages or disadvantages to the future of the country lie in selective price control by the Executive branch? Does not selective price control abridge the right of property on unequal terms, denying freedom to one while permitting it to another? It jeopardizes any business that arouses the ire of officialdom; it invites price conspiracy against the public through collusion between government and business for favors rendered. Few more effective means of concentrating and wielding power can be conceived.

If the freedom of the steel men to name the asking price of their products can be repressed by government, what does the widening image of omnipotent government imply? The force of government can be brought to bear on any wage or any price of any product or service. And the handling of the steel controversy supplies a precedent: nothing more is needed than the decision of a tiny handful of men in the White House. Americans may well ponder the security of their rights and property of every nature under this relationship to government.

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