America Faces Critical Decisions

Clergymen plummet in prestige in a climate of confusion

The new year will be a critical one for Americans. The Viet Nam war almost certainly will expand, given Hanoi’s unwillingness to negotiate. Nuclear-armed Red China mutters in threatening tones, while some nations seek its admission to the United Nations. American militarists must decide whether to “go” with a $15 billion anti-ballistic-missile defense system, while the Great Society program runs into mounting competition with expenditures for the Asian buildup.

Even those politicians who excused past race riots, as a justifiable expedient are not likely to make a large issue of civil rights, with a presidential election coming in 1968, and with public indignation over black-power demands increasing. Since political leaders are jockeying for strategic positions in the party conventions, any promised social millennium will now have to wait until the morning after the next presidential election.

Many people can recall no time in recent memory when the economic weather reports were as confusing and uncertain as they are now. The now-you-have-it, now-you-don’t climate of tax cuts and increases, the cost-of-living rise, and the steady shrinkage of the dollar are part of a discouraging fiscal pattern. Labor unions meanwhile ready demands for new contracts to carry forward 1966 wage increases, the largest in a decade. Yet few Americans seem indignant over the evils of inflation. And few seem aware that there is a limit to this world’s goods, and that not even an infinity of them can provide human well-being.

Does the United States, long a symbol of hope and progress in a distraught world, now increasingly appear a symbol of confusion and indecision? Has the competition for national office deteriorated to a tug-of-war between aspirants marked mainly by political ambition? Are Americans so obsessed with material things that what now matters most—to poor and rich alike—is simply to be “blessed” by more of this world’s “goods”? Are even the Christian churches, whose great contribution to the American vision in the past few can doubt, forfeiting an irrecoverable opportunity to renew the spiritual vision of the people?

Americans are troubled in conscience about racial tensions, the widening crime wave, the unpredictabilities of rampant government incursion into the voluntary sectors of society. There is an uneasy sense of the wrongness of things and uncertainty over how to right them. Surely Christianity has a dramatic word to say on the rightful priorities of a worthy civilization, including the elimination of pockets of poverty and racial discrimination and the promotion of public righteousness. But churchgoers complain that the ministers either are silent on the social implications of Christian commitment or sketch those implications in an essentially secular rather than authentically biblical way.

That religious activists are supplying more confusion than guidance in the present social crisis is increasingly evident to interpreters of the American scene. In remarks to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, of which he is co-president, Dr. Paul Weiss, Sterling professor of philosophy at Yale University, attributed the ineffectiveness of “religious activists” in public affairs to their confusion about the nature both of religion and of social and political processes. He mentioned as an example of this double confusion the attempt of church groups like the National Council of Churches to influence government policy on Viet Nam and civil rights. The religious activist, he added, “does not have a knowledge of man’s actual state, and is not trained in effective social action.… He has nothing by which he can distinguish himself from seasoned workers except an irrelevance and ineptitude which his charisma may enable him to hide for a while. A genuinely religious man sees others as having most meaning when in relation to God.…

Sometimes it seems that Christianity is no longer correlated with public issues through the bold pulpit proclamation of God’s commandments and the earnest pursuit of the will of God in modern life. Instead, it is invoked as a symbolic device serviceable to propaganda groups promoting secular objectives—socialism, pacifism, legislative proposals, and whatever else the top echelon advocates. The related exploitation of mass media gives the irreligious masses a gross misimpression of what the Christian religion is and what it demands. When these modern utopian schemes falter, the Church will inevitably inherit the resentment of the deluded multitudes.

While Christians were in the mood for Christmas caroling, a delegation at the hub of the Great Society marched on Sargent Shriver’s suburban home to sing anti-poverty carols as a protest against proposed budget cuts. The Action Coordinating Committee to End Segregation in the Suburbs (ACCESS) organized a series of Christmas Eve carol vigils using the theme “no room in the inn” to protest Washington-area apartment developments not yet integrated.

Racial demonstrators have long held conspicuous outdoor prayer meetings as part of their strategy of defiance and have gotten their mass-media reward; now the secular use of sacred forms to promote direct political ends has multiplied. Spokesmen for institutional Christianity are in no position to deplore a trend they themselves have encouraged. On Christmas Eve, newspapers carried the UPI report that the National Council of Churches was urging affiliated organizations to mobilize support for U. N. pressures for a cease-fire in Viet Nam. It was a Christmas Eve evangel barren enough to make the Bethlehem angels weep.

A recent scientific sampling by Lou Harris and Associates of the views of 2,000 Americans shows that clergymen are down in public esteem and confidence to a rating below that of doctors, bankers, scientists, military leaders, educators, corporation heads, psychiatrists, and even local retailers. Their rating of 45 per cent, in contrast to 74 per cent for doctors, 66 per cent for scientists, 62 per cent for educators, and 57 per cent for psychiatrists, as reported by Newsweek, suggests disturbing things about the direction in which Americans are turning for a solution to human problems. The clergy ran a scant 1 per cent ahead of congressmen and federal government leaders. If the main reason for ministers’ decline in popularity were their bold proclamation of the revelation of God—a proclamation that brought down the cutting edge of God’s Word and exposed man’s corruption and his need of divine rescue—that would perpetuate biblical loyalties. But the cadre of ecclesiastics who have emerged as sacred specialists in political, economic, and military strategy have unfortunately scarred the image of the clergy. By them Christianity is reduced to a pragmatic theology and an absolutist politics, and under their inspiration much of the institutional church’s main business is now simply secular. Can university students be wholly blamed for espousing situational ethics when churchmen shun the task of expounding the enduring principles of revealed morality, and repeatedly involve the churches on public issues simply on an ad hoc basis? When churchmen enthrone their own fallible opinions as the high will of God, they inevitably encourage public distrust and unbelief that the Church truly bears any sure Word of God.

So routine is ecclesiastical politicking that on a single day the Washington Post reported how a group of churchmen led by the Rev. Robert Johnson, former president of the Presbyterian Interracial Council, tried to block the appointment of Dr. Edward G. Latch as chaplain of the House of Representatives because of a previous misunderstanding about a substitute Negro soloist in his church, and the Evening Star reported that a group of Negro ministers called the Committee of 100 accused congressmen of playing with the fires of racial discontent in their effort to unseat Adam Clayton Powell.

During the Christmas season Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, imputed blame to the United States for not trying hard enough for peace talks in Viet Nam and implied that the war there turns on a desire by the United States to expand its objectives. He stated the moral issue in Viet Nam this way: “Is it right for us to use our overwhelming technological power to get our way in Southeast Asia?”

The day after Christmas, clergymen picketed the residence of Secretary of State Dean Rusk with placards bearing the legend, “Let’s Take a Risk for Peace,” in an application of action taken by the NCC triennial assembly in Miami Beach early in December. (Anybody who thinks that is successful Christian communication needs an elementary lesson in religious journalism.)

The same day, twelve nationally known clergymen, including Dr. George Docherty of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D. C., addressed a letter to President Johnson denouncing U. S. military forces for killing civilians in Hanoi, requesting a halt in bombing of North Viet Nam, and urging disengagement without additional commitments by the Viet Cong. There was not a word about the savage and inhumane Viet Cong attacks upon South Vietnamese people. Former President Eisenhower has emphasized the difficulty of avoiding every non-military target, and Dean Rusk has stressed, contrary to any implication of deliberate inhumanity, that American targets are only military and not civilian.

In a sharp word of rebuke for critical churchmen, the widely read columnist David Lawrence wrote: “To give aid and comfort to the enemy used to be called treason. Today it is described as righteous protest.… There are clergymen in America who evidently think that Communist commanders are humane, that their forces in Viet Nam didn’t violate the Christmas truce this year or last year and that they never kill any civilians in their raids, skirmishes and midnight assaults in South Viet Nam. This is an example of what has been called the ‘valor of ignorance.’ ”

America faces a year of critical decisions. If the churches hope for a continuing role as guardians of the consciences of men, their moment has come to speak with a clear word from God in an hour of great confusion.

A Theologian’S Verdict On His Church

The decision of Jesuit theologian Charles Davis to leave the Roman Catholic Church breaks with startling impact upon a religious world torn by theological tension and uncertainty. The Roman church, Davis says, has lost its concern for truth, subordinating truth to authority. And genuine regard for persons has been lessened by an excessive preoccupation with the papal system. Protestants will see in Davis’s move evidence of an increasing intellectual turmoil within the Roman church. They should also see it as a challenge for Protestantism to accompany its rightful interest in humanity with an equally sincere desire for Christian truth.

Presbyterians will serve the causes of unity, biblical truth, and theological depth by deliberate caution

For the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., 1967 is a year of destiny. Its adoption or rejection of a new confession may well mark the most significant turning point in its history.

The church’s 188 presbyteries are now considering whether the Book of Confessions, highlighted by the controversial Confession of 1967, will replace the 300-year-old Westminster Confession as the constitutional doctrinal foundation. If two-thirds of the presbyteries ratify it and the General Assembly votes its approval next May, United Presbyterians will have a new confessional standard.

Although the proposed book includes seven historic Christian confessions, its final statement, the Confession of 1967, will, if adopted, undoubtedly serve as the dominant definition of the church’s beliefs. Hence, for the past two years discussion and controversy have focused on this contemporary confession, both in its original form (1965) and its revision (1966). The most recent concerted attempt to defeat the proposal was seen in a large advertisement placed in major newspapers by the Presbyterian Lay Committee, Inc. Contending that the last General Assembly did not offer adequate opportunity for effective criticism of the new confession, the lay group appealed directly to fellow Presbyterians to study the confession along with the Westminster Confession and urge ministers and elders in presbyteries to vote “No” on the measure “with the understanding that it will be returned to General Assembly for further study and review.”

The Lay Committee registered two major criticisms of the Confession of 1967: (1) it departs from the view that the Bible is the inspired and infallible word of God and (2) it calls for the institutional church’s involvement in political, social, and economic matters.

The committee contrasted the humanizing of the Bible in the Confession of 1967 with the high view of Scripture found in the Westminster Confession:

New confession: “The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times in which they were written. They reflect views of life, history and the cosmos which were then current. The church, therefore, has an obligation to approach the Scriptures with literary and historical understanding” (Part I, Sec. C, No. 2)

Westminster: “The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof; and therefore it is to be received because it is the word of God” (Chap. I, No. 4).

They further cited passages in the new confession that would give denominational leaders carte blanche for engagement of the church as an official body in political, social, and economic controversies:

4a. “The church is called to bring all men to receive and uphold one another as persons in all relationships of life: in employment, housing, education, leisure, marriage, family, church, and the exercise of political rights. Therefore, the church labors for the abolition of all racial discrimination and ministers to those injured by it. Congregations, individuals, or groups of Christians who exclude, dominate, or patronize their fellow men, however subtly, resist the Spirit of God and bring contempt on the faith which they profess.”

4b. “… The church, in its own life, is called to practice the forgiveness of enemies and to commend to the nations as practical politics the search for cooperation and peace. This requires the pursuit of fresh and responsible relations across every line of conflict, even at risk to national security, to reduce areas of strife and to broaden international understanding.”

4c. “… a church that … evades responsibility in economic affairs … offers no acceptable worship to God” (Part II, Sec. A, No. 4).

While the 1966 revision of the new confession is, from an evangelical and reformed viewpoint, stronger than the original version, it nonetheless falls short of the work of the Westminster divines. Its ambiguity at crucial points will allow many ministers and ordinands whose theology may deviate from that of Westminster (which remains as a historic document in the Book of Confessions) to justify their positions as denominationally acceptable. It will also serve to push the church into greater activity as a political pressure group and thereby shift the direction of the mission of the church. Anyone acquainted with the man-centered theology that has swept through United Presbyterian seminaries in recent years can plainly see that the document subtly gives the go-ahead to the new theologians while decisively moving against evangelicals who hold to biblical infallibility and insist that the institutional church concentrate on biblical proclamation rather than direct political action.

The Presbyterian Church has long been the great bastion of Reformed theology—oriented to biblical revelation, systematic in theological formulations, and lucid in their exposition. Although the Confession of 1967 has many impressive passages, as a whole it is inferior to its predecessor in content, clarity, and long-range relevance and is unworthy of the reputation of Presbyterian theology. If the framers of the new confession would seriously consider the valid criticisms of such groups as the Presbyterian Lay Committee and take more time to formulate a statement that would remove the present doubt about and opposition to the new confession in the minds of many church members, the UPUSA Church might well produce a mighty Christian confession that would have both modern and timeless appeal.

Nothing can be lost by proceeding more slowly. But hurried attempts to push through a new confession still unfamiliar to a great host of laymen and unsatisfactory to a significant number of informed Presbyterians risk the possibility of creating a schism in the church and of clouding the revealed truth of God. At this time, further study of the new confession is called for in order that the United Presbyterian Church, as a truly united church, may go forward with an unmistakably clear, confessional proclamation of the Gospel.

Some Americans are having new doubts over the propriety of our military commitment in Viet Nam.

If, as Pope Paul implies, military victory would be immoral, and if the United States must content itself with a policy of containment while Hanoi maintains its refusal to negotiate, America’s commitment of troops may be increased by 100,000 in 1967—to over 400,000—and casualties almost certainly will rise. Why prolong a (supposedly just) war that it would be unjust to win?

Cardinal Spellman, on the other hand, has described the United States’ role in Viet Nam as a crusade for civilization and declared that “less than victory is inconceivable.” But UPI reports the comment of a high Vatican source that Spellman spoke not “for the Pope or the church” but as “chief military vicar of the U. S. armed forces,” and that Pope Paul “sees the conflict as an impartial observer.”

More than this, the neo-Protestant ecumenical establishment has thrown official weight against the bombing of North Viet Nam, has repeatedly promoted a unilateral cease-fire, and has struck hard against the government’s insistence that it is defending a legitimate South Vietnamese government against Communist aggression. Since these pacifist and neutralist views of WCC and NCC spokesmen simply reflect a long-formulated policy, they lack the surprise value of Vatican criticism of continuing U. S. engagement.

Evangelist Billy Graham, avoiding Spellman’s reported line that American soldiers are “soldiers of Christ,” threw his weight more cautiously behind the American military commitment (see News, page 36).

What has done more, we think, to unsettle American attitudes is the widening of the “credibility gap” by disclosure, after official government dismissal of the reports as unfounded, of the destruction of civilians by American bombings. General Eisenhower later pointed out that some damage to civilian property and life is inevitable when military installations are deliberately located in civilian areas. Government spokesmen would have been wise to follow this course of candor rather than encourage doubts about the trustworthiness of our leaders.

There can be little doubt both that the bombing only of military targets is the official U. S. objective and that the extent of civilian damage—however regrettable—is not to be compared with the deliberate and continuing Communist destruction of civilian life and property in South Viet Nam. But the “credibility gap” serves nonetheless to warn Americans against taking it for granted that, because our nation has long been motivated by high ideals, government leaders are always right in their official deeds and always trustworthy in their official statements.

The Church of Christ, as the gathered people of God, stands on the side of peace on earth, and historically it has required that the case for war be justified by moral principles. Medieval Christianity and Reformation Protestantism laid down quite specific criteria for the “just war.” To what extent, we may well ask, have evangelical Christians—convinced as they may be that the war in Viet Nam is just (because anti-Communist) or unjust (because anti-pacifist)—really familiarized themselves with, and weighed the issues against, such moral considerations?

Something significant has been happening in American religious life in our decade. Past generations of American Christians tended to tolerate the national self-image and were reluctant to speak words of judgment. Now the tide of criticism is rising, sometimes from quite diverse parts of the Church. If evangelical Christians deplore (rightly, we believe) the continuing intrusion of church officials into the public arena with approved or disapproved specifics of legislation or military strategy, and if they insist (also rightly, we believe) that the Church ought rather to proclaim the standards by which God will judge men and nations—if these things are so, do they not impose a special duty upon our churches?

Where and when do evangelical churches provide guidance that will help churchgoers make moral judgments? What light do they give to young men who face problems of military draft, and to office-holders who wish to vote in good conscience on public issues? Is there any evangelical process by which the man in office may receive scriptural guidance on the moral facets of public issues? Or must he be satisfied with evangelical counterstatements shaped only in reaction to neo-Protestant liberal misjudgments? True, the ecumenical preoccupation with political specifics results from neo-Protestant defection from the scriptural revelation; it replaces an authoritative Word of God by a consensus of an interlocking ecclesiastical directorate in secular matters. But how does the scriptural revelation provide guidance as an option available to devout evangelicals who are forced to yes-or-no decisions on pressing problems of the day?

The Bible nowhere encourages the notion that the United States is the crux of God’s purpose in history. The course of world history is downward, and for all its glorious heritage, the United States is not exempt from that decline. The Christian Church, which is the strategic minority movement in an alien environment, ought not to give a blank check to any government in the exercise of its power; rather, it ought to insist that the government to which it owes loyalties judge itself continually by criteria of justice. The course of human history is such that one might assume that wars are likely to be unjust, rather than just, and that Christian conscience, in respect to war, is called upon to justify involvement in terms of loyalty to Christ and the revealed will of God.

Most evangelical Christians reject the pacifist doctrine that war is always unjust. Do they unconsciously accept the notion that war is always just? How familiar are we with the traditionally formulated criteria of a just war,To be just, a war must: (a) Have been declared by a legitimate authority, (b) Have a just and grave cause, proportioned to the evils it brings about, (c) Only be undertaken after all means of peaceful solution of the conflict have been exhausted without success, (d) Have serious chances of success. (e) Be carried out with a right intention.—J. H. Ryan and F. J. Boland, Catholic Principles of Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1943), pp. 254, 255. and do these justify American participation in Viet Nam on moral grounds? The New Testament enjoins Christians to live according to a “good conscience,” and a good conscience requires the guidance of the scriptural data and their legitimate application to everyday decisions. The “credibility gap” can serve a good purpose among evangelicals—if it leads them to deepen the moral earnestness with which they respond to twentieth-century imperatives. As they search the Scriptures, they will be reminded that peace is always God’s gift, and not simply man’s achievement; that repentance is overdue even from those of us who consider the Viet Nam commitment just. And they will be reminded also that the Christian believer ought not to derive his ethics from secular sources, but must continually justify his moral responses according to the high claim of God. A Christian community that forgets this sometimes awakens to discover that it has a Hitler on its hands, and that it is Hitler, not God, who then brings the Church to its knees.

Scientific Exploitation Of Nature

During year-end meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Washington, D. C., a California historian suggested that Christianity is to blame for the modern scientific exploitation of nature. Zen Buddhists and beatniks may have a healthier attitude toward man and nature than those influenced by the inherited religious tradition, according to Lynn T. White, Jr., of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA. It is a basic Christian axiom, White said, that “nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.” To the supposedly Christian notion of “man’s monarchy over creation” he imputed blame for an environment that is polluted almost beyond redemption.

We suggest that Dr. White take another look at the biblical evidence to make sure that he is not simply transferring guilt from secular man, and the secular scientist in particular, to a misunderstood scriptural heritage. The Old Testament does not employ the idea of “nature” in the later sense of a self-contained system of things but rather views man and the world as directly created and preserved by God. It is just as false to say that modern scientists (even if formally Christian) derive from the Bible encouragement to exploit nature, as to say that Scripture sanctions pagan notions that natural objects are animated by a demonic life, or philosophical theories that nature is divine spirit.

While acknowledging that many Christians “do tend to be indifferent toward our natural resources,” Elving Anderson, professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota, commented that White’s “understanding of the biblical view of nature is quite superficial.” Furthermore, he said, White’s proposals “might lead to a sophisticated type of nature worship which could be quite detrimental to science.”

The secular attitude of many churchgoers toward nature does not in fact define the Christian view.

As recently as the November 25, 1966, issue, CHRISTIANITY TODAY began a Thanksgiving editorial on “How Not to Give Thanks” with the words: “By despoiling nature, which is a gift of God. By killing our wildlife and polluting our streams. By poisoning our air and burning our forests.… By contaminating our atmosphere with atomic waste materials and blanketing the earth with fallout.”

The biblical view is that man, the apex of God’s creation, is to exert dominion by conforming nature, in its service of mankind, to the moral and spiritual purposes of the Creator. Theological monotheism involves the assertion of God’s supremacy not only over the world but also over man—the modern scientist included. The decisive alternative to secular exploitation of nature for arbitrary and destructive ends is far less likely to be found in a benevolent scientific naturalism or agnosticism (the term “benevolent” is artificially appended) than in ethical theism. Wherever man’s likeness is discussed only in terms of anatomical similarities to lower animals, and the question of the image of God is evaded, the moral and spiritual issues on which the crisis of modern culture hangs will be bypassed.

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