America on Its Knees?

Nations rise and fall. The list of those whose stars flashed across the skies only to disappear into obscurity is long: names like Babylon, Assyria, Greece, Medo-Persia, Egypt, and Rome evoke textbook memories of virile peoples whom we now encounter only as archaeologists continue to uncover remains of their cultures.

Among perceptive observers of the American scene, more and more the question is asked: Will we soon need a new Gibbon to write The Decline and Fall of the United States of America? Signs of decay are not hard to find. The showy facade of affluence, technological advance, great knowledge, military might, and a high standard of living cannot hide the internal rot. The words of the Apostle John seem apt for this hour: “You say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked” (Rev. 3:17).

No one of America’s ills is in itself sufficient reason to predict the death of the patient. The frightening thing is the combination of ailments coupled with the patient’s disregard for his symptoms, and his unwillingness to seek a true cure. Is this not a way of committing suicide?

We are engaged in a war that has terribly divided our people, brought near anarchy to some college campuses, and elicited a flood of obscenities, half-truths, name-calling, and irresponsible rhetoric. Emotion and fear and weakness, rather than reason and courage and strength, now seem to characterize our people. The social fabric is wearing thin and the holes are visible to all. Drug addiction, alcoholism, discrimination, crime, pornography, political corruption, racism, and sexual license are found on every hand.

We cannot claim that we are guiltless or that a few isolated people and groups are responsible for the plight of the nation. A few unprincipled people motivated solely by the desire for money may control the drug traffic, but this does not excuse the millions who buy their wares. IAm Curious (Yellow) may be a product of Sweden, where license and immorality prevail, but it could not succeed at the box office if millions of Americans did not plunk down their money to view it. Playboy magazine with its sophisticated pornography would have to cease publication if it weren’t for the millions of subscribers who like what it prints and are willing to pay for the privilege of becoming voyeurs. The slaughter on our highways caused by alcohol would not take place if multiplied millions of Americans did not tip the bottle. Illegal abortionists could not stay in business if their services were not sought by unwed mothers and by wives who do not wish to be encumbered by another mouth to feed and more diapers to wash. Race riots and the shooting of people in the back as they flee from the guns of soldiers and policemen could not happen if men loved their neighbors. Inflation would not be a pressing problem if men were unselfish and if they sought not their own gain but the welfare of others. Our land would not be raped, the rivers polluted, the birds decimated, and the atmosphere filled with smoke if men did not do these things knowingly and by choice.

But these problems of drugs and alcohol and pornography, of dishonesty and injustice and indifference, are only symptoms. The underlying cause is that we have turned away from God and his law. We have broken God’s commandments. The retiring moderator of the United Presbyterian General Assembly recently remarked that a seminary president had told him “theology today is in a shambles.” So it is, and so it must be, when men have turned from the revelation of God in Scripture. They have found a false freedom in deliverance from God’s absolute. They have enthroned man in the place of God.

Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, editor-at-large of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, told the delegates attending the sixty-third annual meeting of the American Baptist Convention:

Philosophers in ancient Greece and Rome wrote at length about a just and peaceful society, yet their great empires collapsed for lack of will to do the right and confusion over the right thing to do. God’s commandments still offer the profoundest wisdom that Christian churchmen can bring to the modern political world, and the Gospel of Christ still proffers the most potent dynamic for actualizing these commandments in daily life. No new society can be successfully grafted on a race of unregenerates, and no civilization that spurns moral imperatives will long endure.

Does all this mean there is no hope? Is there no way out, no road back? Are the processes of history inexorable so that America has no future? If so, then all we can do is wring our hands, wait for the cataclysm, and perish in the ruins of a once great culture. But there is hope. There is a way out. It is possible only if America goes to its knees, not in a posture of defeat brought on by judgment, but in repentance brought about by the deep conviction that God can and will do something for a nation in distress.

History provides examples of this. Professor Kenneth Scott Latourette in his History of Christianity points to eighteenth-century Britain as a place of “widespread vulgarity, drunkenness, obscenity, and calloused cruelty” as well as “a large degree of religious illiteracy and scepticism.” The nation was being forced to its knees; it seemed unable to stay on its feet. Strangely, this marked decline of Britain occurred not long after one of the greatest spiritual advances in its history. In 1647 the Westminster Confession of Faith had been adopted. Later embraced by the Congregationalists in their Savoy Confession and the Baptists in their London Confession, it provided powerful motivation for spiritual vitality and awakening. Yet within fifty years after its adoption Britain had sunk into a deep moral and spiritual lethargy. But along came John Wesley and George Whitefield and the Evangelical Awakening. The Church was revived, and thousands were drawn into its fellowship by the new birth.

What happened in Britain can happen in America. But we cannot bring it about by putting evangelism first. Revival must come, and this has to do with the people of God, not with unbelievers. There can be no revival unless there is repentance, and there can be no repentance until the people of God get down on their knees.

How do we repent? First there must be a change of mind, a fundamental reorientation in our thinking, a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree swing. Second, there must be godly sorrow for sin. We are guilty and we are responsible. Tears must flow, hearts must be broken, spirits must be brought low. Business as usual must cease as we devote time to bringing our souls into conformity to the will of God. Third, our wills and dispositions must be involved. This includes confessing our sin, turning away from our wicked ways, and turning to God for pardon, cleansing, and restoration. When the people of God are revived, when they are right with God, then evangelism will be effective and multiplied thousands of people will come to Jesus Christ for their salvation.

If God’s people in America do not get down on their knees in repentance, then the nation is likely to be forced to its knees in judgment and dissolution by God. The people of God are called to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. What the nation needs above all else is this salt and light.

On our knees in repentance or on our knees under God’s judgment—which will it be?

Made In Germany

The Frankfurt Declaration (page 3) may be one of the most important documents ever published by CHRISTIANITY TODAY. For a hundred years, Germany has been the world’s leading exporter of liberal, higher critical views of Scripture and chief contributor to theological heresy. The Frankfurt Declaration, written by well-known scholars connected with significant German universities, runs counter to this current and shows unequivocally that historic orthodoxy is by no means dead even in Germany. The declaration challenges the assumptions undergirding the Uppsala Assembly of the World Council of Churches and seeks to point to the right direction for the mission of the Church. While we may have a few minor reservations about it, this statement is fresh, timely, and worthy of discussion and acceptance. We hope that thousands of Christians around the world—lay people as well as scholars and mission leaders—will add their names to the ever enlarging list of those who approve what these German missiologists have said.

Sexuality And The United Presbyterians

For some time the United Presbyterian Church has been inching away from acceptance of the Bible as the only rule of faith and practice. Now the General Assembly has widened the gap, not by inches but by feet. We had hoped the commissioners would reject the recommendations of the committee report on “Sexuality and the Human Community” (see “Moment of Decision,” June 5 issue, page 26). But they did not. They received the report for study, thus leaving the way open for its ultimate acceptance, rejection, or burial.

Hopes for faithful adherence to biblical norms were further dampened by the assembly’s vote on an amendment: “We reaffirm our adherence to the moral law of God as revealed in the Old and New Testament that adultery, prostitution, and homosexuality is sin.…” It was accepted by only a nine-vote majority, 356 to 347. Apparently almost half of the commissioners do not agree that adultery, prostitution, and homosexuality are sinful. Had five more of them voted negatively, the amendment would have been lost. It is not unreasonable to suppose that next time around the advocates of the new morality will be victorious.

The real shocker is the statement by the committee that they could “find no systematic ethical guidance for our time from a method of Biblical interpretation which relies solely on the laws or stories of the Bible.” To support a view that puts a disclaimer on the teachings of Scripture is one thing. To say that Scripture does not teach these things is another. How anyone could argue that Scripture is silent about adultery, homosexuality, and prostitution, or that it leaves room for approving them, escapes us.

We seem to be living in days when green is blue and yellow is red and wrong is right. We can hardly feel cheerful about the trend in the United Presbyterian Church.

Oberammergau: Telling It Straight

The Oberammergau Passion Play opened in Bavaria last month amid a cacophony of criticism from Jews, Protestants, and Catholics. Among the critics were six renowned American biblical scholars who contend that the decennial drama is hostile to Judaism and blatantly falsifies the biblical account of Christ’s trial and crucifixion. Harold O. J. Brown examines these charges on page 24.

We agree with three of the critics’ conclusions: (1) Jewish-Christian relations are extremely touchy in this ecumenical era; (2) anti-Semitism by Christians violates the spirit of the Gospel; and (3) to the extent that the play deviates from Scripture, it should be revised and rid of anti-Semitic rhetoric.

But blame for the Crucifixion does not fall strictly on Jews of biblical or contemporary times. All men have sinned and fallen short of God’s commands; therefore all are guilty of betraying Christ. We all had a part in hammering the nails.

It’s not surprising that the Passion drama offends some in 1970 even as it did in the first century. The Christian Century recently editorialized regretfully that Christians and Jews “did not work together more effectively to help the scene at Oberammergau become what it ought to be: a benediction to all men of faith instead of an affront to their common humanity.” We say that authentic presentation of Christ crucified is necessarily a stumbling-block to Jews, and foolishness to Gentiles. But it is that proclamation of the Cross that is the wisdom of God to those who heed the divine call. Let the Passion Play tell it like it is, for a neutralized Gospel loses the power of God and becomes only the empty foolishness of men.

The Christian Stake In Dollar Power

Charles Wilson’s remark that what’s good for General Motors is good for the country has come back to haunt that great industrial giant. GM’s annual meeting this year had to deal with an organized effort to make the company more responsive to public interest. The effort, known as Campaign GM, has something to be said for it. The idea of stockholders, the owners of the company, having a real say in company policy is legitimate and desirable. To the extent that they have failed to make their convictions known in the past, they have been delinquent.

What is questionable is the so-called church support Campaign GM drew. United Presbyterian agencies count a total of 114,000 GM shares, and the church’s General Assembly directed that the votes of those shares be cast for two proposals advanced by Campaign GM. Other blocks of stock lined up for the proposals were owned by the United Methodist Board of Missions and the National Council of Churches. Overall these votes counted for little, but one might well wonder about the economic clout that may be available when the Church of Christ Uniting pools the holdings of its predecessor denominations.

Dr. H. Leroy Brininger of the National Council of Churches said that “great corporations make decisions that affect everyone in our society, yet few people have an effective voice in shaping those decisions. It is not clear that even the stockholders have such a voice.” That is true, but ironically the same thing can be said of the lay people in the mainline denominations that make up the NCC. How many of the churchgoers whose gifts were used to buy the stock were consulted prior to the vote?

The use of church-owned stock, not subject to income and capital-gains taxes, to promote a particular strategy in corporate affairs is questionable. (M. A. Larson and C. S. Lowell, in a recent book, demonstrate the potential church economic power.) It tends to cloak that strategy with the mantle of being the Christian option. There may actually be sub-Christian motivations behind the strategy, and then such bloc voting will do little more than alienate people.

If the Church put more emphasis on its biblically endowed teaching function and less upon its humanistically based power factor, the cause of Christ might be advanced a great deal more. Most American stockholders, corporation executives, and union leaders are church members in good standing. Let the churches make them aware of their biblical responsibilities, and urge them to put these principles into practice in the vocational sector. This is the way the Church has always exerted its greatest influence.

America’s Young People

No one can deny that many young Americans exhibit clear signs of alienation from Middle and Old America. To intensify this alienation, to write all youth off as irresponsible, to judge them as though the fault is theirs alone—these are not signs of a thoughtful maturity. But as yet there are few indications that their elders feel they are in any large measure responsible for what has happened. This is tragic. The younger members of our society have put their fingers on what may be the sorest and most vulnerable spot in the value system of their elders: the desire for affluence and a deep-seated materialism. In the present flux, many youth have turned away from material values, and in so doing some of them have also turned away from the churches that represent the same worldliness.

There are some healthy signs to be found within the boundaries of student unrest and disaffection. A significant number of young people are saying, whether they realize the full implications of what they say or not, that there are some absolutes. When they cry out for justice, call for the end of war and the beginning of peace, and label American participation in Southeast Asia immoral, they are doing the cause of evangelical Christianity a service. Like their elders, they are ambivalent and inconsistent at times. They may not always be right in their understanding of situations, and some of their judgments are disputable; but their insistence that there are moral values should not be overlooked. We have long asserted that there has been an erosion of moral values in American life. The students are saying that this is true. And they are in fact declaring their own desire for a return to some moral standards. Maybe these young people are begging their elders to adopt and practice a system of ethics that is consistent and not self-contradictory.

Evangelical conscience professes to be subject to truth wherever it may be found and bows its head to Scripture. Perhaps what students are saying may lead the older generation to repent of its shortcomings and to find grace to admit failures openly. Then all of us, young and old alike, would be in a position to point the way to a new life more closely identifiable with that of Jesus Christ—a life based on the law of God and the Sermon on the Mount; a life in which we become again the true pilgrim people of God.

Wanted: Donors For Christian Colleges

Christian colleges are experiencing financial stringency. They, as well as private secular institutions (including giants like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton), have been beset by constantly accelerating costs, the persistent inroads of inflation, declining government aid, and, more recently, increasing skepticism on the part of donors who are unhappy with student unrest and radicalism.

Christian colleges for the most part have not made headlines. Their students have not revolted, they have not seized or burned buildings, they do not have SDS chapters. Unfortunately, however, donors who are disenchanted with college radicalism do not always make this distinction. At a time when Christian colleges are desperately needed, it is likely that some will have to close their doors or at least operate on a shoestring basis until the public regains its confidence in higher educational institutions.

Even Christian colleges solidly committed to biblical revelation are going through times of severe testing. They are having to take a hard, fresh look at parietal rules, educational processes, racism, social action, and traditional fundamentalist taboos. Not all they have endorsed in bygone years can be supported biblically; yet when even minor changes are made, they sometimes pay a heavy price in the loss of support. Idealistic students tend to feel that even in marginal matters, honesty requires immediate change, and that the attitude toward supporters of the college must be: let the chips fall where they may. This shortsightedness not only embarrasses administrations; it also produces unbalanced budgets.

If Christians cop out on their support of Christian colleges and the colleges find they must close their doors, then higher education will be left in the hands of secularists. This is too high a price for Christians to pay, no matter how great their pique over what they feel is atrocious behavior either by determined minorities in secular schools that are out to destroy the government or by Christian students who in their zeal for justice, honesty, and personal integrity sometimes say and do things that their elders cannot accept. We need to get solidly behind our Christian schools, supporting them with our money as well as with our prayers. If they are to survive and do a creditable job spiritually and academically, they need our help.

Does Rejection Mean Failure?

Christians sometimes feel they have failed because of the negative response to the message entrusted to them. They need to remind themselves of the experience of Christ in his home town, Nazareth (see Luke 4; Matthew 13, and Mark 6). The Nazarenes were impressed by Jesus’ teaching and by his reputation for doing mighty works. But because they saw him as a man just like themselves, they were not able to grant the truthfulness of his proclamation. Their conception of God was such that they could not imagine his using ordinary means and a seemingly ordinary man to be his spokesman. When Jesus compared their rejection of him to the negative response of their ancestors to the ministries of Elijah and Elisha, they got so angry that they tried to kill him.

To this day, one of the biggest hindrances to the acceptance of the Gospel is that men do not believe such an important message would be entrusted to ordinary people like Christians. They reject the idea that God has something to tell them using frail mortals as his spokesmen. Rather than consider the truthfulness of what is said, they consider the ordinariness of the one saying it, and they apparently find it too great a humiliation to accept truth from an equal or a subordinate. How tragic!

Yet we must not give way to despair simply because so many reject the message. We ought to live lives that are consistent with our high calling, but at the same time remember that Christ’s sinless life was not sufficient to authenticate his testimony to his neighbors. And we also need to remember that even in Nazareth there were some who believed. Witnessing is not judged a success or a failure by God on the basis of how many, if any, respond. Rather, God wants us to be faithful in proclaiming the truth, and not to give up, not to grow silent, just because people don’t respond. Our Lord himself persisted in faithful witness despite repeated rejection even by those who had long known him. We are to do likewise.

Oberammergau: Is It Anti-Semitic?

Amidst a flurry of charges of anti-Semitism from Jewish, Roman Catholic, and other quarters, the traditional decennial Oberammergau Passion Play opened in the small Bavarian town on May 18. A special performance for the diplomatic corps and the press was held May 16, and despite remonstrances by the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League, it was inaugurated by Julius Cardinal Döpfner, archbishop of München-Freising, at a special early Mass that morning.

There is ample evidence of the public’s interest in the 1970 performances, for 1,500,000 applications have been received for the 520,000 tickets available this season, and only a few returned tickets are still available on a day-to-day basis. The play, performed once a decade since 1634 (with some fluctuation in the date because of wars), is the biggest thing in the life of the countryside for miles around, and even across the border in Austria, people are aware of the protests and generally puzzled and resentful of them. To what extent are the charges of anti-Semitism justified?

To protest to Christians that the Oberammergau Passion Play is anti-Semitic is first and positively to admit that the New Testament itself is not anti-Semitic. (It is of course sometimes charged that the New Testament and Christianity are fundamentally anti-Semitic, usually by people who either misunderstand them or deliberately misrepresent them for polemical purposes.) Otherwise anti-Semitism would be proper for Christians, and the charge against the play would not make sense. As it is, the accusation is that the Passion Play deviates from Scripture and from historical truth in order to exaggerate the Jewishness of Jesus’ admittedly Jewish opponents and to fasten the blame for his death on the Jews as a race or a religious community. Therefore we should ask where and how the Passion Play differs from the scriptural accounts of the Lord’s Passion.

Apart from some trivial features inherited from Roman Catholic iconography and from sentimental popular piety—such as the extreme youthfulness of Mary and the emotional pathos of the Lord’s leave-taking at Bethany, as well as an all too obvious designation of Judas as the betrayer at the Last Supper—the Passion Play differs from the Gospels in two important respects: (1) It expands and emphasizes the role of the Sanhedrin, led by Annas and Caiaphas, and presents them as vindictive, malevolent, arrogant, and supremely self-righteous. The plotting of the priests really provides the bulk of the play’s dramatic tension: one could almost call it the Passion of the Sanhedrin. (2) The money-changers and traders expelled by Jesus in the cleansing of the Temple are given a major part as henchmen of the priests and as their eager agents for stirring up the Jerusalem mob against Jesus. For this, of course, there is no warrant in Scripture.

Here two observations are in place: (1) It rings true, psychologically and dramatically, that the company of priests and lawyers should have needed to work itself into a frenzy of rage in order to be capable of bringing about the cruel death of Jesus. Further, it is not at all unlikely that precisely those who had a financial interest in the religious status quo, namely the temple merchants and money-changers, should have been eager to stir up trouble among the crowd. This is certainly typical human behavior, and there is a Gentile parallel in the riot caused by Demetrius and his silversmiths at Ephesus (Acts 19:23–41). (2) It does not seem to be the play’s intention to present this malevolent conspiracy as specifically Jewish in nature.

It is at this point that Jewish sensitivities are most likely to be wounded, for Annas and Caiaphas and the other conspirators make frequent appeals to the crowd as “sturdy Israelites” to defend Moses and his Law. But in what other terms could they have appealed? Throughout the play, particularly in the famous “Living Pictures” (posed still scenes accompanied by choral singing), events from the Old Testament are shown as types and prophecies of Christ, and in the final climactic resurrection tableau, he is saluted as the Lion of Judah. If we are to take the references to “sturdy Israelites,” to Moses and the Law, as anti-Semitic, we should also take the vehement passionate appeals to “our holy tradition,” “our religion,” and “our faith” as anti-Catholic and even anti-Christian.

The present text of the play may owe something to the influence of the Enlightenment and rationalism, but surely that is neither its intention nor the impression it makes on the typical spectator. The very fact that the priests and their henchmen have to mount an energetic campaign to bring the Jerusalem mob to demand the release of Barabbas and the crucifixion of Jesus—also a psychologically and dramatically creditable touch—seems to exonerate the Jewish people from any collective guilt.

Pontius Pilate, in the play as in the Gospels, remains an enigmatic figure. On the one hand he seems to reflect the spirit of the Enlightenment, with his haughty pagan contempt for the Jews and their religious zeal and his concern for abstract justice. On the other hand, his ultimate capitulation before mob pressure betrays him—like so many governors of his day and ours—as a man of expediency rather than principle. His culpability is submerged in the mob’s triumphant frenzy, but nevertheless it is clear that Roman justice, like Jewish, has failed.

For this viewer, at any rate, the 1970 Passion Play is remarkable not for its deviations from the gospel facts but for its clear presentation of them. Occasionally there are flaws of inaccuracy, sentimentality, and unfortunate turns of phrase. Still, when one recalls that this play originated in the Middle Ages, was established under the influence of the Counter-Reformation and the baroque style, and has passed through such movements as the Enlightenment, romanticism, modern theology, Nazism, and existentialism, one is amazed that it should nevertheless give so simple and undistorted a presentation of the Passion history. And the fact that the play is performed by the populace of a small mountain town (those who take part must have been born in Oberammergau or have lived there for twenty years) makes it all the more remarkable. To charge the Bavarian Passion Play with anti-Semitism seems excessively sensitive or deliberately perverse.

If the malevolence of the priests is emphasized, they are stigmatized far more as representatives of human self-righteousness and established privilege than as Jews or representatives of Judaism as such. The opposition of the merchants and money-changers to Jesus will strike the modern viewer as an attack on the financial establishment rather than on the Jews. In short, we have here the presentation of human, rather than racial or religious, alienation and tragedy: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.”—HAROLD O. J. BROWN, theological secretary, International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, Lausanne, Switzerland.

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