The Triumph of Christ’s Gospel

No generation of students has faced a world so divided and disturbed as ours, and no generation in modern times has been so poorly equipped with the enduring spiritual realities. The majority of students take it for granted that the interest Christisanity holds for people is primarily a matter of history—that is, of medieval history, or at best, of the past generation. For their pious grandparents it was indeed still a living concern, and perhaps even for a rather surprising number of parents. But in the present influential realms of academic learning, many students seem to assume, it is now established that Darwin and Christ, or Dewey and Christ, or Marx and Christ, belong to two wholly distinct worlds whose interests never bisect. And it is Jesus of Nazareth who is escorted to the world of feeling and fancy, while the real world of the hard realities of this life is associated with the names of contemporary idols.

Whoever thinks in such terms, however, is simply uninformed. For Christianity has as much to say and to offer this generation, and particularly its centers of thought, as any. In fact, the dire need of Christian perspective was never more pronounced than now.

Christianity has indeed lost its hold on large segments of the modern mind, and the shaping philosophy of most of the American universities and colleges doubtless sags far below any respectable Christian orientation. The need for a great Christian university remains, in fact, one of the indispensable priorities of this century, if an adequate evangelical leadership is to be rallied in the world of learning. The influence of the intellectuals upon any generation is always a decisive force in the charting of cultural compass-bearings and the direction of institutional life. What the DEW line is to the military and civil defenses of the nation—by supplying a radar shield which, when detecting hostile missiles, gives warning that permits their interception and the consequent survival of the masses—the university or college classroom is in its critical interception of controlling ideas which would elevate or enervate the cultural outlook.

Yet not because of irrelevance or because of incoherence has Christianity lost its hold upon much of the world of learning. Relevance and reason are wholly on the side of the Christian religion, and only the irreligion of the world of learning conceals these facts.

Why are the claims of Christ and the Bible bypassed in the centers of worldly wisdom?

1. Because modern man (professor and student included) seeks first the satisfaction of desires other than life’s spiritual needs. His recognized appetites are primarily this-worldly: economic, political, scientific. He stumbles at the Nazarene’s exhortation, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God … and all … shall be added” (Matt. 6:33).

To consider it a defeat for the Gospel that modern man’s basic attitudes have become so materialistic that Madison Avenue shapes his gods, or so sensate that the mass media best reflect where his heart and treasure lie, is a failure to understand the biblical truth that the loss is not the Gospel’s but man’s. How does one “get through” to the conscience and spirit of those whose souls are given over to the things of this world? Surely not by any compromise of Christ’s “seek ye first …,” but rather by its reassertion to those who think of kingdom or empire only in terms of men and things.

2. The young intellectuals, or the so-called “angry young men,” delude and then comfort themselves with the notion that Christianity is academically discredited. The claims of Christ are more disowned than disproved, however. Even in the great centers of learning the truth of the Gospel is not without its confident witnesses today. There are professors of stature in the Big Ten universities, and in the Ivy League, as well as in the broad stream of American universities and colleges, who own Christ gladly and openly as Saviour and Lord. There are probably even more such disciples in the science departments than in the humanities, incredible as that may seem to the propagandists for naturalism. And in respect to the campuses generally, students tend to run ahead of their professors—and especially of college administrators—in the matter of interest in spiritual things. During Billy Graham’s Madison Square Garden Crusade, talk of a Christian university in the New York area was actually precipitated by the fact that of the thousands of university and college students who made the first commitment of their lives to Christ, many expressed an interest in higher education that would supply a cohesive and coherent integration of all the disciplines of learning. The virtual polytheism implicit in their college courses (each professor spawning his own god-concept) and the spiritual indifference pervading the campus often have a dulling and chilling effect upon the spiritual interest of all except those students whose religious vitality is drawn from outside the campus atmosphere. The religious emphasis week attracts a pathetic response. But those who on this account consider Christianity a fossil-religion in need of replacement simply misinfer its mortality from their own ignorance of Christianity’s vitality.

3. The real reason Christ is bypassed by many intellectuals today is simple: Christianity demands more in the way of spiritual decision than the self-seeking modern man welcomes.

It demands, first, that a man humble himself by acknowledging that he is a sinner. This requirement is as hard for a university professor to meet as it is for some ministerial candidates!

It requires, second, that a man call upon God for grace and new life. “Ye must be born again,” said Jesus Christ. “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit he cannot see the kingdom of God.” A generation interested mainly in controlling or changing its external environment does not easily accommodate itself to Christ’s demand for a new race of men—which is, in fact, a demand for individual rebirth.

It insists, third, that a man acknowledge his dependence upon the supernatural God by affirming the need of divine revelation and redemption. To concede one’s own creatureliness, and to glorify the Creator; to concede one’s own sinfulness, and to worship the Redeemer; to surrender one’s own willfulness, and to serve the Spirit of God—all this is part of a Christian view of life.

Much, indeed—very much, indeed—turns on the response of the university and college world to the claim of the Gospel. The philosopher Rudolf Eucken said prophetically after World War I, when the naturalistic attacks upon Christianity by the higher critics were greeted in the German universities by resounding applause, that the Christian religion would soon be doomed as a force in the life of that nation unless the university mind were gripped anew by the power of the Christian outlook. No modern prophet could have warned more surely of the rise of Hitler and Nazi Socialism in the land of Luther and of the Reformation.

Yet one fact remains. While much depends upon the fortunes of Christianity among the intellectuals, not everything does. The fortunes of the Gospel are not ultimately suspended upon the consent of the intelligentsia, true as it is that Christianity claims to be the one true religion and much as it needs to be emphasized that all the supposed reasons for rejecting Christ are but rationalizations. The Apostle Paul, himself an alumnus of the university in ancient Tarsus, reminded the Christians in Corinth, that old center of Greek learning, that by any worldly standard few among Christ’s converts in that place were men of wisdom. In the well-worn words of the King James Version, “For ye see your calling, brethren, … not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble …; but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise … that no flesh should glory in his presence” (1 Cor. 1:26–29). Paul had himself gone to Athens and pressed the claims of Christ upon the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers of his day, and their world-wisdom marked them indeed as unlikely converts to the truth. But the progress of the Gospel was not subverted because these intellectuals by and large went whoring after false gods. For, as W. E. H. Lecky (himself by no means a partisan of Christian supernaturalism) notes in his A History of European Morals, “the greatest religious change in the history of mankind” took place “under the eyes of a brilliant galaxy of philosophers and historians” who disregarded “as simply contemptible an agency which all men must now admit to have been … the most powerful moral lever that has ever been applied to the affairs of men.” So it was in that first century, and, if there should be a resurgence of the Christian religion in our time, so it may again be in the twentieth.

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American Education: Facts Speak For Themselves

A Saturday Evening Post article on “Uncle Sam’s Rejects” (Dec. 8 issue) by Lt. Col. George Walton, USA, forms an ominous signpost which points accusingly at the American educational system. His facts are geared to shatter widespread complacency. In World Wars I and II, he observes, the combined rate for military rejections of all kinds was about 30 per cent. Last June more than 9,000 of 16,000 men were rejected, an all-time high rejection rate of 58 per cent. And in the past year one of every four young Americans examined for Selective Service was rejected for failing the written Armed Forces Qualification Test, not a difficult one. A study of one group of rejectees showed that more than half of those failing the written test had finished the eighth grade, and some 6.5 per cent were high-school graduates. Even college students have failed, indicating that they are too unlettered to understand even the simplest Army training manuals. Comments Col. Walton: “It is shocking and sickening that this country does not demand a better educational system than the one which has produced more than 1,000,000 illiterates of draft age in the past decade.”

A mere chronicling of the facts should be sufficient to produce the necessary editorial opinion in the minds of our readers. For the facts themselves sound a trumpet call for the nation to wake from slumber and do something about an educational system which fails to teach so many students to read adequately and to do simple arithmetic. A gigantic preserver of illiteracy is the least of our needs.

Lines Of A Poet And The Way Of A Pilgrim

Robert Frost is gone. His passing at the age of 88 was the occasion of high praise indeed for both the man and his works. The four-time Pulitzer Prize winner has been hailed America’s uncrowned poet laureate, her finest poet since Whitman.

To review the New Englander’s poetry is to sense his love of nature, his feeling for the common—yet uncommon—things of creation which reserve their great stores of delight for those with sensitivities attuned to behold them and joy in them. He would muse upon the sound of trees, the whisper of his scythe, then explore the crater of an ant. There were rabbits in hiding, yelping dogs, and always woods and leaves. He sought to get “some color and music out of life.” And yet this was coupled in his realism with a melancholic recognition of the bleak. In middle life he wrote:

Now no joy but lacks salt

That is not dashed with pain

And weariness and fault.

In one of his poems Frost pointed to the futility of a life “with nothing done to evil, no important triumph won.…” In his orderly marshaling of the language, the poet dealt vigorous blows to evil as represented by the forces of disorder and chaos.

Frost’s most famous lyric was “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Its last lines carry a hint of death.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

These lines have been applied to many situations. Surely they are richly suggestive for the Christian pilgrim who will one day account for his stewardship of time and talents. One thinks of the Apostle Paul pressing toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. He is seen climbing through the gloomy defiles of the Cilician Gates, pressing westward to Ephesus and Athens across the broad plains of Asia Minor, planting churches as he went.

Our Lord spoke of a broad way and a narrow way. To adapt Robert Frost, Paul could say—to history’s great benefit:

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

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Tax ‘Reform’ Would Lessen Deductions For Church Giving

According to government spenders it will help to balance the overall economy if, in order to achieve long overdue tax reductions, the national deficit is increased by $11.9 billion in 1964. Most citizens are probably too practical to see how such arithmetical gymnastics can be reconciled with the elemental facts of economics. Or has the phantom of paradox invaded the fiscal realm no less than the theological, so that the illogical becomes promotive of strange faith? The widespread conviction that taxes are oppressive doubtless calls for reductions. But if achieving such reductions necessitates deploring the champions of a balanced budget as victims of a puritanical morality, then it is high time to champion puritan virtue above political expedience.

At one point at least President Kennedy’s proposed reforms will work a hardship on religious interests. Deductions for contributions to church and charitable activities up to a 30 per cent maximum will be allowed only over and above a non-deductible 5 per cent base, just as the first 3 per cent is now disallowed for medical expenses, plus a 1 per cent floor for drugs. This seems to us a highly dubious way to promote “reform.” If the Kennedy administration wants to plug tax loopholes, it should look into the matter of (1) large church properties held for investment purposes and not used in the specific mission of the church, and (2) corporations engaged in competitive business enterprises but tax-exempt simply because they produce profits for religious institutions. Such situations are more obviously in need of reform.

It is true, of course, that Christians support their churches as a matter of religious principle, and not for the sake of tax deductions. But the federal government has been penalizing voluntarism in the field of benevolence long enough. More and more the government has taken over welfare activities once carried by the churches, and the rising taxes required to support such federal programs tend to decrease people’s capacity for philanthropic giving. The proposed tax revision would be a further blow; not only would it continue to commandeer burgeoning taxes for expanding programs of government welfare, but it would disallow basic deductions for gifts to religious causes.

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Evangelical Tensions And Liberal Objectives

Ours may be the first generation in which unbelief at times tries to parade an evangelical banner. The term “evangelical,” in fact, has undergone some interesting changes. A generation ago liberals held nothing but contempt for the word and yielded it without protest to newly founded organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals. In more recent years some ecumenical spokesmen have cherished the evangelical ingredient for a breath of fresh theological rejuvenation. And no less a giant than Karl Barth has captioned his private brand of neoorthodoxy Evangelical Theology: An Introduction.

Now that ecumenical inclusivists are specifically trying to penetrate evangelical effort, the ensuing theological ferment that now and then plagues certain conservative institutions should come as no surprise. Supportive constituencies, of course, have one sure way of dealing with institutions whose perpetuation of cherished convictions is in doubt: withholding their gifts. At the same time, the importance of academic freedom needs to be protected.

This need not, however, contribute to academic delinquency. Any institution worth its mettle has come into being because of fundamental convictions which those on the payroll have no license to destroy. In some religious institutions, regrettably, much criticism is leveled against administrative authority in the name of academic freedom by staff members who simultaneously cloak their revolt against the scriptural authority long espoused by their institutions.

For evangelical Christianity the high view of Christ, the high view of Scripture, and the high view of the Church stand or fall together. Only sad confusion and delusion enable anyone to profess that he serves Christ or Church by degrading Scripture, that he serves Scripture or Christ by degrading Church, that he serves Church or Scripture by degrading Christ. Such a one may claim to be evangelical; in truth he is but conjuring up new and deadly meanings for theological terminology.

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Exposition Of Sex Problems Calls For Something Better

Many pastors are hoping a pamphlet published by The National Council of Churches for The United Christian Youth Movement will not find its way to their young people. The over-priced brochure (25ȼ for 14 pages) by William Graham Cole is titled Called to Responsible Freedom: The Meaning of Sex in the Christian Life. Not only does the presentation reflect nothing of the stern New Testament condemnation of sex sins: it hardly touches the biblical teaching on the subject of sex. The material is sociologically oriented without any concept of scriptural obedience. In some respects it might even be considered an unfortunate invitation to sexual promiscuity; at any rate, it promotes an attitude of sexual permissiveness.

1. The booklet espouses an antinomian approach to the freedom of sex life. It implies that the life of sex need not be controlled by divine moral laws, nor defined in terms of scriptural standards. It deplores as Pharisaic those who would impose any rules whatever upon sex mores; they are caricatured as persons who would permit holding hands in the theater, or a chaste goodnight kiss at the door “provided only the lips met without further bodily contact,” or necking in a parked car “for six minutes and thirty seconds, but no longer” (p. 5). The scriptural disclosure of the divine will, which is very specific in respect to some sexual practices, is minimized by the pamphlet. “As long as we are men and not God,” we are told, “we never can be absolutely certain that anything we think or do is absolutely right” (p. 6). “Life is a series of grays and not pure blacks and whites” (p. 7).

2. The booklet virtually makes “love” a cover for doing what may not be right; sexual behavior must answer only the simple requirement that others be treated as persons rather than things. “The crucial question … about any sexual contact—from holding hands to complete intercourse—is not so much what is done as what is meant. A relatively mild necking session can mean a crude and selfish abuse of a person as a mere object while a more intense type of petting can mean that two human beings are expressing a genuine and deep love for each other.… We are interested in the quality of interpersonal relationships and not simply in their quantity” (p. 10). “What justifies and sanctifies sexuality is not the external marital status of the people before the law but rather what they feel toward each other in their hearts” (p. 11). “No one outside yourself can tell you … it is ‘all right’ to go so far in expressing affection for a member of the opposite sex and all wrong to go farther” (p. 12). “You have got to make up your own mind, in the best light of your own conscience, what your own standards of conscience are going to be.… No one else can tell you” (p. 13).

Not many young people in Protestant churches will be helped by a treatment of this sort. But at least it does not promote the reading of obscene literature, as does one other publication of the National Council of Churches. This is not much of a compliment, however, for an effort that professes to speak to one of youth’s most urgent and critical problems.

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