The Power of the Truth

From a Communist country, where the people’s revolt in search of freedom was brutally crushed, a professional man sent this hopeful greeting: “However small the individual may seem among the factors that make up history, he is a factor nonetheless, and he can affect the very course of history. The great ideas and movements have grown from little beginnings, from improbably tiny beginnings. And these great ideas and movements are always set aflame by the realm of the Spirit, and never by the state.” How gratifying that not even the totalitarian tyrants can destroy man’s confidence in the power of the truth.

Yet we who live in the free world sometimes seem stilled and choked by the Communist climate, by the evolutionary temper, by the sensate spirit of our age, when we ought to be trumpeting truth and tidings to our times with courage and faith to stir new hope where the disgust of life now reigns. Sometimes even those who profess to be vitally interested in evangelical education seem skeptical of the power of the truth. If so, one may hope this sin is not visited upon our children and our children’s children.

We may fail our generation in many ways, but few failures will be as devastating as skepticism over the importance and power of truth.

We dare not underestimate Christianity’s stake in the truth. The Bible tells us that God himself is the Truth. Truth is not something independent of God, but the Logos is himself the ultimate originator and the ultimate definer of all reality. The Holy Spirit uses truth as a means of conviction and persuasion. The Truth has become incarnate and inscripturate. And the Truth, so wonderfufly revealed to us, is not simply to be known, but is also to be done.

At no time in Western history has so much depended upon the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the Christian college as in our own day.

Why is it that Cuba, ninety miles away from our shores, can become the symbol of a world political crisis, while a Christian college or university a stone’s throw from a state university or secular college can be wholly overlooked? Why, if the Christian campus is really fulfilling its distinctive mission? Why are our distinctive views not mentioned in secular textbooks, not argued in secular classrooms, not even reflected on their reserve reading shelves? In the modern contest for the minds of men, why is it that our positions are ignored and disregarded? Why? Are we concerned simply to eke out our own academic survival as a Christian community? To maintain a mere holding-operation for the last scattered and surviving remnants of the evangelical view in educational circles?

Or do we understand that if Christ is Saviour and Lord we have a mandate to challenge and to claim all the spheres of learning and life? Do we really understand that the whole of culture soon glides into the service of antichrist, and in our century glides swiftly into enslavement by antichrist, when the dominant cultural forces are no longer effectively challenged and confronted by the claims of Christ? Do we really understand that in our time of transition none of the realms of culture—neither literature and the arts nor politics nor science nor education itself—long vacillates in the twilight zone of the worship of inherited ideas, but all render prompt obedience to new gods, and that we aid and abet this process by our withdrawal from the secular debate and dialogue of the day? In Germany after World War I, when students welcomed every attack on Christian supernaturalization in the chapels of the universities with sustained applause, Rudolf Eucken spoke a prophetic warning: that if Christianity were to lose the university mind and the laboring class in Germany, the Christian religion would be done as a force in national life. The generation after Eucken’s in the land of Luther was the generation of Hitler and the Nazis, of Eichmann and the slaughter camps. In American universities it is not the custom to applaud radical ideas: but it is stylish to absorb them. In this land of Roger Williams and Jonathan Edwards, are you asking yourself whose is the next generation if the university mind and labor continue to hold the Christian view of the world and life at a distance? Eucken saw that a nation in this predicament is only a stride from antichrist. We can hardly think that America has greater immunity to spiritual declension than did Germany.

We are all agreed, if we take Christian education seriously, that the Bible must be treated not simply as a memory object for a multitude of details of past history, important as that may be. The Bible must again become a revelation that provides a living resource of moral integrity and spiritual wisdom for all man’s days, and that supplies integration to the whole of life and thought, including the exploding areas of discovery in our own time. For the man or woman whose calling is that of Christian teacher, this awareness implies a heavy burden of responsibilities in respect to one’s discipline and one’s students.

A State Department career man remarked recently that the strategists seem so preoccupied today with the science of weaponry that they forget that persons are the ultimate weapons. What tragedy to have had in class the promise of a Kepler or a Calvin, a Moody or a Machen, and to have dulled that promise, or to have contributed nothing to his personal mission. Yet even the Christian teacher seeking to inspire students with a high sense of calling or vocation often does them an unwitting disservice. For the interest in vocation is translated wholly into present preparation for a future task, while all the while the student neglects his present calling as a Christian student. Unless he inspires young learners to see that while they are on campus they have a present calling, a divine vocation, as Christian students, the Christian teacher fails in his own vocation. Their future calling may be in doubt, but there must be no doubt about this calling, it is sheer calamity when a young person enrolls in a Christian college and is challenged by everything else—challenged to maintain personal piety, challenged to preserve evangelistic fervor, challenged to keep Lip church attendance (that is, challenged to do everything that being a Christian off campus already implies)—without being challenged specifically with what being a Christian on campus demands: the calling of Christian student. A campus that does not make this matter plain to students when they enroll, nor sustain it throughout their college years, not only dilutes its academic stature but evades a Christian duty.

Much of the student skepticism about the power of Christian truth follows upon the fact that too few teachers require them to earn their heritage, and too many are content if they simply parrot the inherited tradition. Our educational institutions are primarily concerned to keep the student clean morally (an ideal that often is mostly diluted to not doing certain things) and to shelter him from the pagan theories of the day. Now, education unconcerned for moral purity is a sham; it sacrifices the comprehensive character of truth, and it can lay no claim to be genuinely Christian. But students ought to know the commandments of God before they get to campus, if local churches and parents have done their job; the special purpose of a college is to sift out truth from error, to set the Christian view alongside its competitors, and to drive students to earn their heritage, not simply to memorize it. First and foremost the academic effort exists for the victory of truth. In the final analysis, neither spiritual nor moral victory is secure apart front the triumph of truth. Meeting this special responsibility of the Christian college lies not in ringing doorbells for Christ (although something is amiss about evangelical education if it dulls that desire, and fails to produce more competent evangelistic conversation); it lies, rather, in mastering the realm of truth and error. No amount of evangelistic zeal can compensate for the evasion or neglect of genuinely academic concerns. An institution that trains parakeets may be a devout bird sanctuary, but academic enterprise requires more than an assembly-line production of orthodox cheeps and chirps.

Here is tomorrow’s task force, charged to learn and to live by the light of God’s Word.

Does this young person in the classroom realize what it implies that God has privileged him with a knowledge of His Word as a student at a time when genuine faith no longer lights the path of most students in the academic world?

Does he realize that his being an evangelical scholar is a strategic divine step in our generation’s comprehension of the unity of truth in Jesus Christ?

Does he understand that a binding commitment to the Scriptures as God’s authoritative revelation—to the Logos as the first principle of all things (the Creator, the Redeemer, the Sanctifier, and the Judge of life) implies not only that Jesus Christ is the Saviour and Lord of one’s life, but that he is the only adequate answer to the persistent problems confronting human civilization and culture?

Does the professor set him an example—vocation for vocation—Christian teacher to Christian student—of a passion for the whole body of modern learning illumined and informed and integrated by the light of God’s Word? On this campus, if the faculty is true to its mission, an array of competent scholars will daily mirror the modern mind and allow the winds of modernity to blow full fury through these windows of learning, so that the student will feel the very pulse and heartbeat of the diverse and divergent credos of contemporary man. But is it sufficient—is it evangelical education—to imply that one can combine the modern faith with the faith once for all delivered to the saints? That is to say—and it is being said on church-related campuses whose Christian moorings are loose—that the apostolic and secular perspectives may be held alongside each other, provided only that the biblical view is not replaced; or that only the matter of personal salvation is important. Students and faculty, administrators and trustees are easily misled into this dangerous disjunction where there is no maturing to a Christian view of the totality of things.

Students trained in this climate appraise one facet of Christianity or another in a developmental or relativistic way, and readily accept an alternative to the Christian view under the pressures of scientism. Turn the classrooms of our evangelical colleges over to this atmosphere of learning, and the winds wafting over our campuses today will become the whirlwinds sweeping tomorrow’s once-evangelical institutions. For then Jesus Christ is no longer the Truth; rather, he is demeaned into some truth alongside other truths. Now there is a diversity of truths; the oneness of truth is gone, and the Logos no longer seen as the unity of meaning. Now truth is compartmentalized into separate, isolated realms. Evangelical education thereby lapses into the inner predicament of the world of secular learning—the university whose uni- is lost in diversity, and whose college is no longer a co-legio. The consequences of such evangelical default would be disastrous for the future of Christianity, as for the academic world generally. For the Word of God is deprived of a directive role in the world of learning. As Christian affirmations are attenuated to the tolerances of scientism, evangelical ambition is no longer seeking to guide the course of events by the sure light of biblical imperatives, but is content to escape demolition through isolation and shelter from the forces of antichrist.

Criticism and correction are a necessary task of Christian learning. But criticism and correction, according to Archbishop William Temple, reflect essentially a negative role in antithesis, and as such lack creative and constructive power. In history any forward movement, any true advance, comes with thesis (cf. Henry P. Van Dusen, God in Education: A Tract for the Times, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, pp. 89 ff.). By choosing between thesis and antithesis evangelical higher education indicates whether its interest lies only in defending its positions, or in realizing as well the triumph of the truth.

In the struggle for the minds of modern men, there are some feasible and practical ways to discharge evangelical dedication to the triumph of truth.

1. By pursuing full regional accreditation, all evangelical liberal arts colleges will assure themselves of at least minimal academic standards and will enable graduates seeking higher degrees to continue their work at outstanding secular universities.

2. Each fully accredited college could distinguish itself by specializing in a given field of undergraduate and graduate studies.

3. Cooperative summer institutes of graduate studies could offer concentrated studies in special areas, such as Christian philosophy, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of education, and so on.

4. Qualified evangelical scholars from both Christian and secular faculties can prepare joint literary symposia that are not only serviceable to evangelical colleges, but also acceptable in secular schools as “viewpoint books.”

5. Qualified evangelical authors in the various departments of learning must prepare textbooks for publication by standard secular publishers.

6. A rotating faculty selected cooperatively from several leading evangelical colleges could provide specialized instruction on several campuses at one and the same time.

7. A particularly strong evangelical college could develop a specialized institute of graduate research and studies.

8. An international, interdenominational Christian university is not only desirable but imperative.

9. Translation of evangelical textbooks into other languages would augment intelligent understanding and communication among evangelicals.

10. University extension campuses manned in part by mobile and in part by resident faculty could be established in countries like Japan, Switzerland, and India.

These are but some of the ways to realize evangelical dedication to the triumph of the truth. Let us be heartened by the fact that evangelical Christianity more than any other movement believes in the triumph of the truth. But let us be sobered by our failure to practice effectively what we believe in this regard. The three main cultural forces of our time are Communism, which believes in the triumph of the proletariat; political democracy, which believes in the triumph of representative government; and scientism, which believes in man’s triumph over nature. Christianity has always affirmed, and even in these turbulent times still affirms, the triumph of the truth. To assert that God’s interest in the triumph of truth is limited only to the life to come is as profoundly unbiblical as to insist that God’s interest in the triumph of virtue is entirely future. The final and complete vindication of truth and righteousness awaits our Lord’s return, of course. But it would be nothing less than tragic, even pathetic, were evangelicals to allow this sure sense of the far future to justify intellectual and social indifference, particularly when secular forces, imbued not with the true but with a false view of triumph, struggle day and night to conquer this world for their cause.

The Sins Of Sodom—1963

The sins of Sodom are the sins of the world today, and like the inhabitants of Sodom, we stand in danger of a far-reaching judgment by a holy God.

Had there been paperbacks in the days of Lot, we can imagine the shelves of newsstands and bookstores filled with books such as are to be found all over America today. Had there been movies, many of the current “realistic” and “adult” films would have been main attractions.

Lest we continue in a smug complacency, we will be wise to remember the words of our Lord; “I tell you … except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”

The Ministry And The Church’S Consent

One anxiety voiced by independent evangelicals over the ecumenical movement is that through sheer size it may acquire coercive power over smaller constituencies. Churchmen making much of the corruptive potential of corporate power in social ethics seldom apply this thesis to the ecclesiastical realm. But the Bible is replete with illustrations of misuse of religious authority.

Evangelical circles are in fact not themselves immune from perils of the kind they sense in ecumenically inclusive agencies.

The World Council’s Faith and Order Conference in Montreal raised the subject of ecclesiastical controls in a variety of contexts. In plenary session the report of Section III on “The Redemptive Work of Christ and the Ministry” was challenged for its statement that “in any case the exercise of the special ministry requires the consent of the Church.” Dr. Hillyer H. Straton, pastor of First Baptist Church of Malden, Massachusetts, put the question: “Consent of what church? Should we understand the word ‘church’ with a small or a capital C?” Then he scored his point: “Roger Williams found himself driven into the wilderness because he would not bow to the ‘consent’ of a local church in Massachusetts. Under such control John Wesley would never have been able to make his witness that has so blessed the church. Nor could Dwight L. Moody have carried his gospel message around the world.” Dr. Straton noted that while the report acknowledged the guidance of the Holy Spirit, such a restriction actually constricts the Spirit’s work. He might have noted also that Jesus’ refusal to bow to the ecclesiastical authorities of his day was one of the factors leading to his crucifixion.

In Section III, devoted to the discussion of “Christ and His Church,” one delegate, emphasizing the answerability to the Church of all who are called to preach, declared that the World Council ought to curtail unaccredited seminary training that feeds into the “store-front churches”; he contended, moreover, that an ecumenical responsibility exists to make impossible the existence of such movements. Since the speaker was a Negro serving on the theological faculty of a Methodist institution, this display of intolerance was quite surprising. Dr. Eugene Carson Blake immediately countered the suggestion, declaring that the ecumenical movement must avoid any impression that by unity it intends a monolithic authoritarian structure that would repress all independent expression. While the wide variety of preaching is one of the prices the Christian church is paying for its divisions, he added, the Christion church must be willing to risk such possibilities.

In the years ahead questions such as church-relatedness and church-consent are sure to come in for increasing ecumenical discussion. It would be well for all Christian bodies, whether in or out of the ecumenical movement, to consider them both constructively and critically. The special ministry doubtless requires the Church’s consent in some sense. But no recourse should be taken against those who act without such consent. For preaching without the Church’s consent is but another aspect of the right of conscience, of the right to protest as well as to preach, and perhaps, in some instances, of the right to be wrong. It would be a worse wrong, however, to undo the right to preach by ecclesiastical force.

Scripture And Tradition: New Horizons

Recent developments indicate that on the questions of the authority of Scripture and tradition the World Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church may now be moving toward each other at clearly discernible if not rapidly accelerating rates. Some WCC leaders, enamored of modern theological traditions, had lost the Protestant concern for sola scriptura long before the admission of Orthodox bodies at New Delhi in 1961, with their renewed emphasis upon ancient tradition. At the Montreal Faith and Order Conference, for instance, sole traditione at one stage came near to replacing sola scriptura in the theological reports, and even in the final revision the Gospel was designated as the Tradition.

Within the Roman church, noted historically for its emphasis upon ecclesiastical tradition, a new feeling for Scripture appears to be emerging, involving (according to Karl Barth, who writes for the current issue of The Ecumenical Review) increased interest in the Gospels and renewed emphasis upon the Bible in the Church.

To the Christian who acknowledges the supreme authority of the biblical canon these developments are hardly reassuring. Despite the possibility of a renewed concern for Scripture within the church of Rome, the continuing centering of revelation within the teaching office of the Roman hierarchy restricts the freedom of the Word and discourages its critical application to prevailing doctrines. Within Protestantism, the World Council of Churches’ drift from sola scriptura evidences a progressive abandonment of crucial theological credenda.

Scripture does not tolerate coexistent sources of authority. The earliest mention of tradition in the New Testament—“the traditions of the Elders” (Matt. 15:1–14 and Mark 7:1–13)—soundly condemns all attempts to add the opinions of sinful men to the commandments of God. And Paul, who admonishes his churches to continue in the Gospel tradition, does so on the basis of that tradition itself being set forth in Scripture (1 Cor. 15:3). Traditions must not judge the Scripture. It is Scripture which shall judge traditions. Those who love the faith once delivered unto the saints can rightly deplore any position short of an authoritative New Testament canon and can see abandonment of sola scriptura as possible prelude to an eventual melioration of the Reformation’s other great and unfluctuating standards—sola fides, sola gratia.

The Washington March And The Negro Cause

With conflicting emotions Washingtonians watched from office windows as multitudes of demonstrators swarmed through their streets for the “march on” the nation’s capital. Were these the convulsions of a new age in which all Americans would freely recognize one another’s rights irrespective of color? Were they rather a portent of revolutionary mob pressures that presage the decline of a republic, and possibly a time of bloody violence?

Any sure answer to those questions seemed exasperatingly elusive. The massive demonstration was more orderly than its critics prophesied, less constructive than its champions contended (see news coverage, page 34).

But there were other questions not wholly without an answer.

What does the Negro want? What racial aspirations are legitimate and illegitimate? He wants only “what the white man has”—so the word goes. An easy reply is that nobody has the right to demand automatically what another qualifies to achieve. But there are larger considerations: has not the white American also set the Negro American an example of seeking economic equality and social status above all else? Assessed by such superlative racial aspirations as moral integrity, spiritual power, social justice, and creative contribution, how does the white American measure up? Is he now perhaps paying part of the penalty for setting an example of putting first things second? If the Negro mimics the white man, is the Negro alone to blame? And if the tide of history catches up with an accumulation of discrimination, is it wholly incredible that the Negro even thinks in terms of simply reversing the process of discrimination?

While Negro spokesmen have sought effectively to stir white conscience, the rising momentum of pressures and demands has also adversely affected some who normally would be sympathetic. In the military a new directive indicates that promotion will be based not simply on effectiveness of military command but also on efficiency in breakdown of racial discrimination in one’s sector—so that military officers are required to become agents of community sociological change. Although President Kennedy disavows a racial-quota approach to job appointments, some government departments have circulated a directive that no opportunities exist for the additional employment of whites, but that there are opportunities for Negroes. If jobs are filled on the basis of race proportions within the population, not on the basis of qualification alone, private business will be required to meet the same quotas once government accedes to such pressure. In view of the chronic unemployment problem, such demand for jobs on a racial basis, and the consequent cancellation of universal work opportunities, is likely to prove far more explosive than the integration of schools and communities. The groundswell of sympathy for Negro rights has a furrow of anxiety over what seems also to be a demand for preferential treatment.

From our tenth-story window view it appeared that the marchers were moving much too fast to accomplish their sociological objectives. There were two tragic elements to the Washington spectacle. One was the optimistic reliance of powerful ecclesiastical leaders upon political mechanisms to promote a new social order. The other was the failure of evangelical Christians at the grass roots to anticipate and help to resolve a crisis in the life of the nation along spiritual lines. All is once again quiet on the Washington front. But evangelical churches across the nation must look into the future and ask themselves what they can and must do to create a helpful and constructive interracial climate.

The massive demonstration was void of official evangelical representation. “Our folks are sympathetic with solving the race problem,” one top evangelical leader observed, “but we feel that this wasn’t the way to go about it.”

But what is the way? Have evangelicals offered any constructive, creative guidelines to curtail oppression of Negroes? Does it not bother the evangelical conscience that there are parts of the country where a traveling Negro cannot even find water?

Wcc And Religious Liberty

For five days just prior to the August meeting of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches in Rochester, New York, a group of some twenty theologians and church leaders met in the same city to ponder the perennially knotty problems of religious liberty. The WCC Committee on Religious Liberty is to be saluted for convoking the consultation. Liberty of no kind is ever to be taken for granted. Moreover, some twenty centuries of Christianity have not arrived at a common solution of certain theological problems involved. And attending this inconclusiveness, all the while, has been a multiplication of historical problems as to application of theological principles to specific instances.

No finality was expected from the Rochester gathering—its discussions and findings were not for publication. For this was but the American version of a series of continent-hopping meetings—Europe last June, Asia and Africa hopefully yet to come—preparatory to a worldwide meeting of the Committee on Religious Liberty in 1964. Forthcoming from the latter is to be a final statement on the nature and basis of religious liberty as understood by Christians, which could be submitted for approval to the next Central Committee meeting in January, 1965.

The 1964 statement will doubtless be of major interest to Christians, and not alone because of the timely importance of the subject. For the World Council embraces within itself a rather staggering number of theological and ecclesiological traditions. Americans are reminded that their zeal for church-state separation is not shared by all. Greeks are reminded similarly with regard to forbidding of proselytism. Then there are the Russians.… And what is to be the stance toward Roman Catholic views in a day of ecumenical gains in relations with that church?

The problems arising from the current trend of Afro-Asian nations to adopt state religions deserve special attention.

The Rochester consultation discussed statements, many of them the fruit of previous WCC meetings, which form the concluding chapter of a newly released book, The Basis of Religions Liberty (Association Press, §3.75), by A. F. Carrillo De Albornoz, head of the WCC Secretariat on Religious Liberty. Points of agreement and points of difference among ecumenists are noted. Syncretism is banished in view of the uniqueness of Christianity.

Primary concern revealed thus far is the relation of Christianity to state and society rather than its internal relations, although one background paper touched on the New Testament view of heresy and its restraint. It is to be hoped that the 1964 statement will distinguish between a true liberty to be extended to all persons in the body politic and a false liberty which would allow error or heresy free entry into the Church. Such free entry results in the exit of true freedom. Such false liberty is the strangulation of true liberty, found only in the Gospel.

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