The Best There Is in the World

Speaking of the Bible, Woodrow Wilson declared that a man who has deprived himself of this has deprived himself of the best there is in the world. When the Archbishop of Canterbury presented the Bible to Queen Elizabeth II, he called it the greatest thing in the world. President Theodore Roosevelt made bold to say that if a man is not familiar with the Bible, he has suffered a loss which he had better make all haste to correct. Dr. Robert Millikan regarded a knowledge of the Bible as an indispensable qualification of a well-educated man, and was convinced that only in the Bible can a man come into contact with the finest influences that have come into human life. President Calvin Coolidge, a man of no reputation for extravagance in speech, told the American people that the foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if these teachings ceased to be practically universally known in this country.

Is this Book, once the principal textbook in our schools, and now generally excluded from the schools, as important as these great men have indicated?

I think so. I read both testaments through before my fourteenth birthday, and thought them the greatest thing I had ever seen.

Doubtless, many will disagree, for an estimated fifty million Americans have never read the Bible and make no effort to include its teachings in the education of their children.

Ernest Gordon, now dean of Princeton University Chapel, but once a prisoner of war, has related how under his eyes men reached great depths of degradation in a prisoner-of-war camp. On the point of despair, he experienced spiritual rebirth in prison camp when he was reading the Bible. At the darkest hour, when men fought one another for scraps from Japanese swill pails, stole from fellow sufferers, robbed the dead, and became almost indistinguishable as human beings, Ernest Gordon began reading to some of them the New Testament. It spoke to the smothered greatness so cruelly crushed within them; attitudes were changed, and they discovered there in their darkness the validity of the redemptive miracle. It was a new birth, but nothing foreign to the history of Christianity.

The Christian enterprise in its beginnings and in its later development needed and fortunately often had leaders who spoke with the boldness of conviction that comes of a personal encounter and commitment. Strange it is we have forgotten how many became such from reading the Scriptures. It was by reading the Scriptures that Justin Martyr (A.D. 114–167), Tatian (contemporary of Justin), and Theophilus of Antioch (second century), men a mere generation removed from the Apostles, became Christians. Hilary of Poitiers, Veronius, one of the earliest Western exegetes, and Augustine of Hippo, the great theologian, are among the men converted from paganism by the reading of the Scriptures. Their names have claimed large space in the Who’s Who of the social and religious history of the world for more than sixteen centuries.

What of moral and social reform? Wilberforce rose from reading the Greek New Testament and went forth, in an atmosphere of disdain and in the agony of ill health, to shame the British Empire into the abandonment of the slave traffic, and to be remembered as “The Attorney General of the Underprivileged”; he is in the long line of public benefactors.

Before I heard in any impressive way of Wilberforce, Justin Martyr, Tatian and his Diatesseron, Augustine and his Confessions, or Martin Luther and his theses, I read the Bible. Somehow during the reading, the Saviour appeared as an ever-increasing reality and in such a manner as to claim my loyalty. I became aware, overwhelmingly aware, that the love of God revealed in Christ was for me—an obscure little boy in a great world of important people. It was a never-to-be-forgotten experience, vivid enough to me, but an experience that set me wondering how anyone else could believe that so obscure and immature a person could claim the personal attention of the Saviour of the World.

Then two years later, and while reading the first chapter of the Prophecy of Jeremiah, I was overwhelmed with the impression that Almighty God was speaking to me in that Book and indicating his purpose that I should be a minister. It has never ceased to overwhelm me, and seeing how little I have accomplished, it would not be surprising now, as it was not surprising then, that to others it might seem impossible to believe. In a tumultuous generation, in two world wars, the Korean conflict, and in the “piping days of peace,” it has caused me to make decisions my closest friends interpreted as “against interest,” and has caused some of them to confide to me that they thought I was a fool. But when I have “run with the footmen and they have wearied me” so that tasks ahead have seemed too prodigious for even God to undertake with so unlikely an instrument, and in anguish of soul I have cried out to him, “Ah, Lord, God! Behold, I cannot speak: for I am but a child”—there has been no discharge, but another “Thou therefore gird up thy loins and arise … be not dismayed at their faces, lest I confound thee before them.” For those who are made of my kind of “dust of the earth,” the Bible can be a very disturbing book. It may be that you are in need of the disturbing Word that awaits those who search the pages of the Bible in earnest desire for the meaning of life. Well, for me this Word has been the enchiridion of disciplines and the charter of a blessed freedom.

The Bible is a word of release for victims of fear. One does not read far to discover that the problem of despair is not peculiar to the space age. Nor need one go far to discover that light penetrates the darkness. The pages are aflame with what a man can do when he allows God to direct his way. A thief in flight becomes a patriarch. A plowman becomes a prophet of social righteousness. A man of unclean lips becomes a herald of redemptive grace. A hated tax collector becomes St. Matthew the Evangelist. A woman whose days were dogged by dingy nights in dark streets becomes a city missionary. An afflicted slave girl becomes an instrument of healing. An intolerant bigot becomes the world’s most impressive apostle of brotherhood. The Bible is the world’s great storehouse of unfolding possibilities. It is a story of grace abounding wherein all people are important people. People who want to remain as they are will find it disturbing. People who want to fulfill their higher destiny will find it a lamp to their feet, and a light upon the way to “the glorious liberty of the Children of God.”

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THE BIBLE AND MODERN LIFE

THE WARFARE OF IDEAS—In our efforts to compete with the Communists in the cold war, we Americans have not been sufficiently interested in ideas.… We have stressed, for example, our free enterprise system and the American market.… But these things do not reach the heart of the problem in the ideological warfare. It is necessary that we endeavor to inculcate the ideals of liberty, freedom, justice, equality and rule under law and faith in God.… The use of the Bible will determine what kind of Christian heritage will be passed on to this new age of rockets and astronauts. It will determine whether God will still remain in our lives; whether this is still his world that we are learning more about.… The peace and security of the nation—the hope of millions of people around the globe—is in the balance. We must accept the responsibility of leadership in giving them the strength they need, which will come from the guidance of the Holy Spirit as they study the inspired Word of God.—Judge LUTHER W. YOUNGDAHL, Vice-President of the American Bible Society, in an address given at the 146th annual meeting of the society in New York City.

HOLY SLANG—The Rev. H. Hartley, Rector of Solihull, said that a member of his congregation expressed her opinion of the Gospels in the new Bible “very cogently when she said to me: ‘I think The New English Bible is excellent for the Epistles, but when I read the Gospels I expect to turn over the page and find Our Lord saying O.K.!’ ”—Report on Canterbury Convocation meeting in the Daily Telegraph, London.

AFTER EDEN—The Church of Scotland, which was once the garden of the Lord, is now a howling wilderness.—Young People’s Magazine, Free Presbyterian Church.

IN THREE DECADES—Two aspects of this action concerning Professor Hick [who refused to affirm belief in the Virgin Birth] are of significance in indicating the changes of thought in the church [Presbyterian, U.S.A.] since the 1920’s. One is that this decision has stirred up very little controversy. The other is that it was a member of the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary, fully defended by his institution, who was accused of heresy. This … clearly dramatizes changes in the theological map that have been taking place in the past three decades.—Dr. JOHN C. BENNETT, in Christianity and Crisis.

NEVER ON THE ADVENT—As far as I remember I have never written nor have I preached on the Second Coming of Our Lord.—Professor J. G. MCKENZIE, veteran Congregational minister, teacher, writer, in The British Weekly.

A DEEP ABYSS—Risking the danger of being considered doctrinal spoilsports, we must insist that the abyss dividing the belief of the Dutch Reformed Church and Roman Catholic dogma is deeper than many Catholic theologians think when they state that the Reformation can be integrated into the whole of Catholic truth.—Statement of the Dutch Reformed Church, quoted in The Universe, Roman Catholic newspaper.

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