Why Thanksgiving?

In nearly 15,000 American homes this Thanksgiving, empty chairs and heavy hearts will speak of young lives lost in Viet Nam in a war which an estimated 20 million citizens now consider a mistake, and of which 45 million disapprove—at least in its present course. And in almost 50,000 more homes the holiday table talk may be of battle injuries sustained by a loved one.

Yet despite doubts over the war, Americans are unconvinced that totalitarian Communism is a benevolent historical force, ecumenical semantics to the contrary. But Christian families of servicemen nonetheless will find little Thanksgiving consolation in “kill ratios,” however encouraging from a military viewpoint. Christians know that in God’s sight a North Vietnamese mother’s son has as much value as an American teen-ager, and also that the Communists little care how many persons they sacrifice to totalitarian objectives.

Thanksgiving conversation about domestic affairs will be no more gratifying; in fact, the mere thought of thanksgiving may seem like a disconcerting intrusion. Public leaders now so often defensively emphasize the values of dissent that one wonders whether they think national unanimity on principle and action would be a liability.

Why Thanksgiving? The cost of living keeps going up, taxes are going up, and the purchasing power of the dollar is dropping. After a strike that cost Ford employees an average of $1,000 in wages, labor leaders forced a 7 per cent wage increase. But the nation’s 45 million payroll workers are discovering that generally their pay-checks today are buying less than did smaller checks two years ago. Hospital costs are sky high. Today’s economy lunch costs almost twice as much as it did a few years ago, and is half the size; every time one turns his back, the price of his favorite sandwich goes up another dime. The dollar’s value will drop 37 per cent in a decade if the present trend continues. The federal debt has soared to $340,391,615,507.81; many departments are begging Congress to approve funds to keep them going; and the Social Security program is financially unhealthy.

Except for coverage of special events, not even television has much to offer by way of diversion—from the problems of the world or even from its own highly unimaginative entertainment.

Why Thanksgiving?

The Pilgrims never associated thanksgiving with an absence of hardship. They were grateful for God’s reality and providence that had escorted them to a land of freedom and bright opportunity … and well may Americans be today, when totalitarian governments presume to dictate the tenuous rights of vast multitudes in half the earth. The Pilgrims were thankful for bountiful harvests … and well may Americans be today, when a third of India’s 510 million people have insufficient protein while religious taboos discourage their eating of available beef. The Pilgrims were thankful for modest shelter in a land of opportunity … and well may Americans be today, while bloody revolution staggers China, refugees languish homeless in the Middle East, guerrilla violence rages along Communist borders, and turmoil sweeps Nigeria and other nations. The Pilgrims were grateful for the chance to be citizens of “the new America”—and they had no intention of compressing their thanksgiving to God into a single day.

America is still the land of unparalleled opportunity and blessing, though its heritage is hardly secure. Whatever its problems—and they are legion, including present-day race tensions—multitudes of persons in many lands today would leap at an opportunity to live in this land. America stands before the world as a nation of freedom—of religious tolerance, political liberty, economic opportunity. But the national image is becoming tarnished. Our ideological commitments are being clouded by those who turn freedom into spiritual and moral laxity and who place self-interest above all else. Yet even those extremists who castigate the United States as most evil of the modern nations are free to do so only because their rights are defended with blood.

Thanksgiving is nothing if it is not a time for glad and reverent praise to God for all the blessings of this life. But in 1967 it will be much less than it ought to be if Americans do not also make it a special occasion for serious reflection on the purpose of life, the conditions of peace, the ground of hope, and the need of renewal.

Shakespeare calls thanks “the exchequer of the poor.” But thanklessness may be the special temptation and vice of those who have much though they deserve little.

Let us not make this Thanksgiving season an evidence of American ingratitude.

Let us be thankful, first and foremost, for God, who provides all things temporal, and who “spared not his own Son” so that penitent sinners could gain a life fit for eternity. Let us be thankful for life and health and shelter and food. Let us be thankful for a land of liberty, and for courageous young men still ready to put patriotism above self-interest. Let us be thankful for a land in which, despite the malcontents, persuasion and law still count for more than disorder and violence. Let us, as Americans, be thankful for one another.

NCC radicals have derailed responsible ecumenists in social concerns

Never before has organized Christianity had more money, more manpower, more technological means, and more freedom with which to make an impact upon the world. All these resources wait to be tapped for the cause of the Lord Christ.

Yet with such great potential, the institutional church still fumbles and gropes for a way to arrest the spirit and mind of modern man. Specific goals and long-range strategy continue to be elusive, almost to the point of frustration for church leaders. As a result, these leaders seem more and more open to the way-out whims of young radicals who think the Church is up for grabs and are trying hard to seize it.

The United States Conference on Church and Society, sponsored by the National Council of Churches in Detroit October 22–26, is a major case in point. The conference was designed to develop strategy for social action, in contrast to the many previous ecumenical meetings that were supposedly devoted merely to issuing resolutions. The procedure for developing such a strategy was not the traditional, universally accepted method of committee work followed by plenary consideration. Rather, the Detroit conference was broken up into twenty-nine miniconferences or “work groups,” each assigned topics on which it was to produce strategies and each responsible only to itself.

By circumventing traditional procedures, the radicals were able to give their views wide visibility. To begin with, work groups were stacked with leftists. A conservative (whether of the theological, political, or economic variety) did not have a whisper of a chance to exert influence. He did not even have recourse to a minority report. Each work-group strategy was developed informally, and in the key Viet Nam group no formal vote was taken. The written recommendations—the outworking of leftist dominance—were then released to the press. Not only the Viet Nam document but a number of others also lacked a numerical mandate even from their own work groups of twenty-five or so members—to say nothing of the conference’s total of 700 participants.

Neither the chairman of the conference, Bishop B. Julian Smith of Chicago, nor co-chairman Harvey Cox seemed concerned about the lack of democratic process. One would have thought that perhaps they did not feel committed to this process, had not Cox, in a public statement issued outside the conference, deplored the “aberration of justice and democratic process … to ask a young man to violate his conscience or to go to prison.”

Cox was present for a noisy caucus of the young radicals one evening at the Statler-Hilton Hotel. There the Rev. Wayne Hartmire feebly attempted to carry out established parliamentary procedure only to be reminded from the floor by an angry student participant that Robert’s Rules of Order had no standing with the group. The caucus seethed with anti-Americanism. One participant—who said she was from South Africa, of all places—was loudly applauded for saying that the United States was “doing more evil in the world than any other nation on earth.”

Then there were the hippies. Several of them attended the conference on their way back from the Pentagon demonstration to Haight-Ashbury. One took advantage of the caucus to distribute copies of the mimeographed “Free City News,” which included a listing of eighty-seven erotic postures.

Another contributor to the radical mood was Professor Henry Steele Commager, historian at Amherst College, who reportedly was paid $500 for his hour-long historical harangue against the corporate evils of the United States. Four of five “reactors” to Commager’s speech gave him unqualified praise. Only President Franklin Clark Fry of the Lutheran Church in America dissented. He diplomatically expressed his dismay at Commager’s one-sided invective.

Another sideshow was the purportedly coincidental release during the conference of a statement prepared by the National Committee of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Viet Nam. Fifty conference participants were said to have signed the statement, which vows support of draft-resisters even to the point of arrest.

This was the wild backdrop against which the Detroit strategies were formulated. It was almost as if the whole thing had been planned to condition the participants in a negative way so as to derive the most radical kind of thought.

One incredible suggestion that came out of the Detroit conference was the advocacy of open violence as a legitimate means by which the Church can help to transform society. One of the twenty-nine work groups was devoted entirely to “The Role of Violence in Social Change.” Four leaders of this group held a news conference, and three of them thought that snipers in the steeple might one day be a valid tactic. The group’s official report reflected this same support of violence (see News, Nov. 10 issue), all the harder to believe because it was issued in Detroit, where only weeks before violence had taken the lives of 43, destroyed the property of innocent people, and closed businesses, thus stripping many needy people of their jobs.

The eleven-page document issued by the Viet Nam work group expressed indignation that the voice of the dissenter is having little or no effect upon U. S. policy. The recourse: more drastic and demonstrative dissent. The document suggested that if the United States further escalates the war, perhaps clergymen should lead a tie-up of all American business, education, and transportation for a full day. Extensive boycotts of arms-producing firms were called for also, and churches were urged to become sanctuaries for draft-resisters.

There are two major points of irony or contradiction in this Viet Nam statement. The first is that it is purportedly in the interest of peace for that embattled Southeast Asian land, even while supposedly peace-promoting radicals are mapping strategy for violence on the domestic front. The second is that although it describes in detail what the U. S. government should do to de-escalate the Viet Nam war, it inconsistently offers no advice at all on what Americans should do if the Viet Cong escalates the war.

There was irony in the statement on violence, too. At a time when the Church’s resources are at an all-time high and when technological developments offer a staggering potential for Christian advance, religious strategists are beginning to revert to the most primitive of methods—open violence—to implant their views in society.

It’s really too bad about Detroit, because the conference had some real possibilities. Among the themes assigned to work groups were some legitimate fields of inquiry and indeed some crucial issues that demand discussion and, if possible, consensus from the Christian perspective. But these possibilities never saw the light of day.

What course remains for evangelicals? Those outside the National Council of Churches will surely be grateful that they are not part of such irresponsible goings-on as the Detroit conference. Those whose denominations are in the conciliar movement must grieve because the views of evangelicals are still suppressed and trampled upon even while ecumenists continue to seek larger evangelical support.

Our complex world demands decisions on issues of tremendous social importance. That these issues were irresponsibly handled in Detroit gives evangelicals no excuse for avoiding a confrontation of the issues on their own premises. But the more ecumenical councils give a free hand to New Breed radicals, the more they can expect evangelicals to develop their consensus on social issues independently. As talented and dedicated laymen get their fill of Detroit-type escapades, “ecumenical” will become an increasingly less accurate word to describe the conciliar movement.

The secular theologians of social revolution who shaped the National Council of Churches’ Church and Society strategy conference in Detroit sang a strange song: U. S. force in Viet Nam is deplorable; ecumenical violence for socio-political goals is justifiable.

This idea, if acted upon by neo-Protestant clerics, may bring on the biggest wave of anti-clericalism in the history of American Christianity. Separation of church and state still remains too prized an ideal for Americans to welcome the prospect of New Breed clergy’s controlling—as they apparently aspire to do—the machinery of political power, by violence if by no other means.

Distressing in every way was the attitude toward the role of violence in social change voiced by one of the work groups in Detroit. There was no disposition to accept suffering as a fundamental aspect of fallen man’s lot. The work group’s refusal to disown violence, and insistence instead that violence may be justifiably used to redress wrong, thereby sanctioned the condoning, encouraging, perpetrating, and perpetuating of violence as ecumenical patterns. Contemplation moved beyond “mere marches or picketing” to massive campaigns of civil disobedience, non-cooperation with government, economic boycotts and strikes, and physical disruption. Property rights were demeaned as secondary.

Discussants conceded that big-city riots are pre-revolutionary to the extent that they breed a spirit of revolution among discontented masses. Social-action agencies were encouraged to use churches as sanctuaries for those who violently resist the police-military arm of the state in ecclesiastically approved conflict.

To be effective in social change, the work group reported, violence needs strategy, action troops, people willing to sacrifice lives, and a high degree of secrecy. Snipers lodged in church steeples even got consideration as a possible tactic. Ecumenical strategy, it was said, might also include the mobilization of face-to-face television “truth squads” and “one shot” newspapers to give authoritative New Breed interpretation of major crisis involving violence.

The New Breed churchmen are groping for a theology of revolution; to few people’s surprise, they find that the Bible offers them none (or else at this one point they might consider invoking biblical “authority”!). Their announced objective is to change the machineries of power in the large American cities, on the assumption, apparently, that a cadre of church politicians would function as incorrupt and infallible social engineers. Some seem wholly unaware that violence is self-defeating, that violence carries no guarantee of the results its sponsors seek, that perpetrators can easily lose control of it, and that no process of violence can ever provide the new society that mankind needs.

Liberal clergy have long shared the utterly naïve notion that the way to eliminate poverty is to force redistribution of wealth. But that method is neither the best (for the best is based on human initiative and compassionate stewardship), nor the most efficient (salaries are less vulnerable to corrupt mishandling than public funds), nor the most durable (inflation can play havoc with financial gains, social-security expectations, and the solvency of nations).

The strategy of the New Breed is painfully obvious. Instead of challenging unregenerate man and society with the biblical demand for regeneration, it seeks rapid ways of gratifying the self-interest of the secular spirit. All who want more of what others have earned are offered ecclesiastical aid in achieving political means of self-aggrandizement. Young men seeking to avoid military service are counseled on how to dodge the draft. Perhaps next, those who wish extramarital sexual fulfillment will have the sanctuary of the temple as well. Such causes, obviously popular among the unregenerate masses, are then identified with the “morality” of dissent from the status quo. The New Breed is transparently willing—even by violence—to conform the Church to a secular culture in the name of Christian social action.

The greatness of his theme was greater than his finished composition, but very few additional criticisms can rightly be directed against John Milton’s Paradise Lost. For grandeur of style, breadth of vision, and impressive erudition, nothing in the English language quite matches it. And few writers have even dared to try. As one moves through the vastness of the poem—from “man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree” to the final lines, which tell how “hand in hand with wandering steps and slow through Eden” our first parents “took their solitary way”—an overwhelming sense of the tragedy of a fallen and rebellious creation and the glory of divine redemption overtakes him.

This year marks the 300th anniversary of the publication of Paradise Lost, and it is an excellent time to take stock of Milton’s great achievement. In the first place, he managed an exciting fusion of Christian and classical elements in this poem, as in his other most important poems—Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” and “Lycidas.” Occasionally this results in a distortion of pure biblical Christianity, but not often. And by this method Milton claimed the classical tradition with all its rich imagery and themes for Christianity.

Secondly, Milton strove to embrace all the learning of his time and to transform it by his Christian perspectives. In Book III, for instance, the old blind poet writes a much lauded passage on the sun. He notes that it “gently warms” the universe, suggesting both its power and its distance from the earth; he alludes to sunspots recently discovered by Galileo, the imagined role of the sun in alchemy, its effect in forming colors, the angel Uriel, which means “fire of God”; he meditates on a world free from shadow; he uses the sun as a symbol for Christ, the light of the world; and he does all this in a way that makes very stirring verse. In A Preface to Paradise Lost, C. S. Lewis comments on this passage that “this is not, of course, the sum of modern science; but almost everything which the sun had meant to man up till Milton’s day has been gathered together and the whole passage in his own phrase ‘runs potable gold.’ ”

Milton is also to be praised for a bold restatement of Christian doctrine. Many commentators have objected to particular elements (the rule of hell by Satan, the portrait of the pre-incarnate Christ, lines that might be taken to imply an Arian theology), and many more have distorted Milton’s statements. Yet the basic elements of the Christian Gospel are unmistakable. Milton was generally an Augustinian in his theology; he portrays accordingly the reality of the Fall and its significance, the divine origin of man’s redemption, the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ, the revealed character of Christian ethics, and many other doctrines. Few writers have been as faithful to the teachings of the Christian Church as he.

Where are the Miltons of today? In Milton’s own day quite a few Christians made their impact upon the literary world—George Herbert, Henry Vaughn, John Donne, and others—and they are still read. But the line of notables has grown thinner since. Hawthorne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and Graham Greene span two centuries. And not all these are strongly Christian. Even fewer are Protestant.

In the fall issue of Discourse magazine, Dr. Emmanuel Gitlin, acting associate professor of religion at Drake University, bemoans the bias toward atheistic or nihilistic literature in many universities, particularly for the period from the French Revolution to the present, and notes that many Christian works are overlooked. Camus is read, he argues. So are Sartre and Nietzsche. But Christian authors like Pascal and Kierkegaard are often neglected. T. S. Eliot is read for his early and least Christian works.

Does a non-Christian bias enter into this picture, as Professor Gitlin maintains? Undoubtedly. But there is another cause as well. Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Eliot have a lasting claim to fame. But there is not much in recent Christian literature that is excellent. Although many want to write, few are willing to take the time, the study, and the necessary patience to write well. Milton’s achievement is a reminder of the task before the Christian writer: to paint an enduring portrait of the achievements and frustrations of modern man—fallen, yet made in God’s image—while at the same time conveying a sense of timeless values and a glimpse of God’s compassion and benevolent intervention in time for man’s salvation.

DEFUSING THE BOMBSHELL

The social-action hierarchy is attempting to defuse Paul Ramsey’s ecumenical bombshell—Who Speaks for the Church?—by verbal magic. “Good medicine for those who are too heedless in making pronouncements on specific matters of policy,” writes John Bennett in Christianity and Crisis. He then goes on to defend ecclesiastical endorsements of legislation and to carry forward his theology of an anti-American, pro-Communist God.

Roger Shinn says Geneva 1966 was a formal academic exercise having no more official endorsement than a professorially-approved term paper; yet he hails it as a landmark of Christian social thought comparable to Oxford 1937! Shinn thinks caution is needed but insists that Ramsey underestimates the number of Auschwitz-like situations that the Church should address officially and specifically.

Shinn emphasizes that Geneva participants spoke to the World Council of Churches, and not for the Church, and Bennett says, “It is on rare occasions that anyone speaks for the Church.” Why then should not the radicals pay for their own world conferences? Why should the ecumenical movement provide a world platform for revolutionary opinion-makers?

Bennett thinks “the greater part of what church bodies should say should be in the middle area where theology and social ethics overlap.” “Middle” guidelines extrapolated out of the circumstances have long been Bennett’s forte—revelation aside, revolution ahead! However effective such casuistry has been in providing socialist goals with ecclesiastical prestige, its weakness is apparent: Christians are obliged to obey what God says and wills, not supposed middle premises and dubious conclusions. Bennett could “go very far” in leaving “the most specific” policy judgments to others, he says, if churchmen “have more to say to guide them” in this way.

The tragedy of ecumenical Christianity—in the midst of its social-action fanaticism—is more than methodological miscarriage; it is the ideological loss of the truth of revelation.

Shinn notes that the secularists, for whom whatever happens in history is God’s activity, cannot distinguish authentic from false revolutions (or, as we would prefer to say, legitimate from illegitimate alternatives).

But the secular theologians are not alone in their chaos. Writes Shinn: “Nobody knows what justice is.…” One would think that, given this major premise, churchmen would either forego pontificating in the public arena or else return to the revealed will of God. Unless they do so, they may be speaking the vocabulary of redemption while fueling the fires of godless revolution.

LOVE, HONOR, AND OBEY?

It’s not really Lynda Bird’s fault that the promise to obey will be omitted from her vows to Captain Charles S. Robb on December 9; the Episcopal marriage ceremony no longer calls for obedience. And neither do the services outlined in the Methodist Discipline, the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship, and the standards of many other denominations.

Presumably, most Christians consider the change a justifiable accommodation to the modern mind. But is it? Obedience in marriage is not grounded in social patterns, even those of the biblical period. It is grounded in the scriptural revelation of the relationship between Christ and his Church. Women are to submit themselves to their husbands as unto the Lord because “the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church” (Eph. 5:23). And husbands are to love their wives “even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Eph. 5:25).

Wouldn’t a new sense of the need for obedience be welcome in light of the anarchistic spirit of our day? It should be felt at many levels of society, of course. Yet recovery of Christian perspectives in the home would do much to check the spiraling rate of marital problems, and would eventually strengthen order and respect for authority in other areas of our national life.

NEW YORK’S GOOD EXAMPLE

Rejecting the counsel of Governor Rockefeller, Senator Kennedy, and Cardinal Spellman, New York voters this month showed wisdom in decisively defeating a new state constitution that weakened the ban against state aid to parochial schools. Let us hope the entire nation will follow New York’s example of church-state separation and thereby help to preserve our great religious freedom.

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