Eutychus and His Kin: August 1, 1969

Scorning The Base Degrees

Some years ago one of our weeklies featured a striking cartoon. Two passengers were shown leaning over the rail of an ocean liner as it passed within a short distance of a tub containing a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker. Puffing thoughtfully on his pipe, one of the men was saying to the other, whose face registered blank incredulity, “Now, there’s a sight you seldom see.”

A capricious memory recalled the words to me at an evangelical conference when a discerning pastor criticized the sloppy grammar of one of the proposed findings. D. L. Moody’s views on grammar are well known, but he would probably have agreed with Herbert Spencer who pointed the value of education in the formation of character. Moody was far from indicating that illiteracy ought to be sought after or that education should be despised.

Letters and comments received from time to time, however, suggest that one astounding fallacy encountered in evangelical circles holds that a pastor with a liberal arts training is thereby suspect, while a Ph.D. is indicative of a basic character flaw. This view is based on the text, “God was never particular about giving his favorite children a good education”—a word somehow omitted when they came to put the Bible together.

Once I listened to a fine sermon marred by the false choice par excellence. “Who are we to believe,” cried the young minister, “the Word of God, or the man with letters after his name?” That was the only time in my life that I have remonstrated with a preacher about something said from the pulpit. He was a little bewildered and shortly departed for the mission field with no visible sign of repentance. Maybe I put it badly, suggesting that the unlettered preacher is no more and no less the recipient of special grace than the graduate who rises above the crippling disability of his magna cum laude.

May it be accounted to me for righteousness that I did not add something I hold profoundly: that the absence of degrees often means the presence of dogmatism in a more than usually virulent form. Goethe in his day came up against something similar in pietistic brethren. “Terrible bores,” he called them, “… exclusively people of moderate understanding, to whom their religious sensibility brought the first thinking they ever did. Now they think that what they know is all knowledge, because they know nothing else.” They say that he who speaks the truth should have one foot in the stirrup. That Goethe should have survived till he was well into his eighties speaks volumes for his agility.

Influential Infiltration

In your article, “Education at the Crossroads” (July 4), you have provided food for thought for all seriously concerned persons who have in fact, or potentially, any opportunity to influence either … teachers or students.…

Your realistic statements concerning the impossibility of returning to the previous status quo and the underlining of the fact that “law and order” is “only ameliorative, not curative” with the words “removal of the present symptoms … will produce no permanent cure” should be repeated, broadcast, televised, and headlined. And then, having digested that sound analysis, your counsel to “infiltrate” academia with sound, witnessing Christians should be heeded on a massive scale.

First Congregational Church

Marseilles, Ill.

It is dismaying to witness the unenlightened and belligerent response of a presumably moderate Christian periodical to the problem of student disorder. Mr. Lindsell’s thesis seems to be that student unrest is the immediate result of the loss of a “theocentric life-and-world view” and that a return to the halcyon days of a uniformity of opinions would effectively end the problem.… But it is fallacious to view the problem in simple cause-and-effect terms. The restructuring of ideals in educational institutions which you imply took place quite recently ought more properly to be traced back to the Reformation, where the rejection of papal authority betrayed forever the hopes of a uniformity of opinions among Christian believers and laid the groundwork for the modern liberal education.

But it needs more than the addition of a historical perspective to amend the errors.… Most appalling about your program for reformation is your determination to root out those “atheists, agnostics, theists,” et al. who dangerously “sow confusion among the students who have come to learn.” No doubt the key to the revitalization of our colleges lies in the imposing on them of the benevolent regimes of Dr. Hayakawa or the several Bob Joneses, who could at their earliest conveniences arrange for the burning of a few injudicious books.… Obviously, some elements in the student rebellion are intemperate. But dissent in a free society is the surest sign of that society’s basic health and is worthy to be commended.

Madison, Wis.

Thank you, Dr. Harold Lindsell, for your very good, honest, and correct article. You know what’s going on, which, I’m sorry to say, so many Christians and Americans do not know. I wish your article could be made available in reprints … Perhaps also you might delve a little deeper in the subject of the Communist threat to our Christian faith and liberty.

Philpot, Ky.

I just wanted to commend you on a well balanced article on the current crisis in higher education.… There was only one point in your article I thought somewhat unfair. During the crisis [at Harvard] there were two clear caucuses in the faculty. Rosovsky, Galbraith, Bruner, and Barrington Moore served as the focus of the liberal caucus. Oscar Handlin, more than any other, represented the conservative caucus. There was a larger body of faculty not clearly identified with either caucus, though the liberals were clearly dominant and won most points that were debated. Whether or not Galbraith and Rosovsky decided to leave after the events of the crisis is a debatable issue.… There are many professors in the liberal caucus whose stature outside the university is not as widely known as Rosovsky or Galbraith who are staying and fighting for reform. Nor do I think the conservatives at Harvard (turning Mr. Capp’s line of reasoning around) should be viewed with approbation because a number are leaving next year.…

All in all, though, I thought your article sounded the basic notes behind the SDS “rite of spring.” I only hope in future years Christian alternatives to the sin-pregnant system of our society will increase in clarity lest we also fall at the very point the radicals have difficulty: offering a viable alternative to replace what needs to be destroyed in our current culture.

Cambridge, Mass.

Explaining Temptation

Among the good articles in your July 4th issue I would like to single out “Does God Lead Us into Temptation.” What the author says in explanation of the second-last petition of the Lord’s Prayer is thought-provoking.… We Lutherans have almost to a man learned Luther’s explanation which could be used to summarize the article:

God tempts no one to sin, but we ask in this prayer that God would watch over us and keep us, so that the devil, the world, and our sinful self may not deceive us and draw us into false belief, despair, and other great and shameful sins. And we pray that even though we are so tempted, we may still win the final victory.

Olive Branch Lutheran Church

Okawville, Ill.

No Other Nation

The refreshing editorial “Is Patriotism Dead?” (July 4) could be the resurrection.… I have heard many Christians say, “I can not say as Stephen Decatur, ‘Our country, right or wrong.’ ” However, I can truthfully say, “My country right or wrong.” God commanded us to pray for our leaders. Today we need to pray for our leaders and nation thanking God when it is right, and praying that God will help us to get right when we are wrong.

Furthermore, even with all its faults there is no other nation I would choose.

Castleberry Baptist Church

Castleberry, Ala.

Idealism is a necessary virtue if we are to be men of vision, men with a future. But an idealism that depends upon veiling reality is a tyrant of oppression. I believe that the patriotism that you proffer verges on such an idealism. I challenge you to show biblical sanctions for your contentions.

I find no flag-waving in Paul. He accepted his Roman citizenship as his responsibility and privilege because he was born with it. So should Americans.… This does not include a personification of one’s country into a beloved fatherland! America is not some great hypostatic unity. The love of Christ is reserved for persons, not for a rhetorical Camelot of our imagination.…

Let’s face it. We are turning more and more to the emptiness of surface rhetoric to hide the ugliness of our true nature: our militarism, our materialism, our self-centered individualism, our self-righteous class consciousness, our smug self-satisfaction, our ticky-tacky comfortability.… This is not a time to advise “pride in country.” … There is a time to speak and a time to keep silent. Ours is a time of action in which verbal flag-waving is an evasion of responsibility.

Wheaton, Ill.

Concern And Companionship

Your editorial, “Church and the Single Person” (June 20) was one of the very few such items I have seen in evangelical periodicals of a national circulation.… Concern for college students and college-age non-college individuals rates dozens of articles and editorials. But, as you point out, post-college-age adults between, say, twenty-one and thirty-five are seldom taken seriously.…

A pleasant exception to this trend is First Presbyterian Church of Fresno, California—the Koinonians.… [In that group] more than one confused individual has “found himself” and has discovered his place in God’s world.… Thanks for the editorial. Why not give us a full-blown article or a series?

Urbana, Ill.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.