The Great Transition

What man that sees the ever-whirling wheel

Of Change, the which all mortal things doth sway,

But that thereby doth find, and plainly feel,

How Mutability in them doth play

Her cruel sports, to many men’s decay?

—EDMUND SPENSER

The challenge of change knocks hard in our time. It seems to pound loudest on the door of the Church. Hearing its demands might be a rewarding way to observe the 1970 Easter season, and could help to clarify contemporary Christian responsibility—individual and collective.

But what is so peculiar about change today? Haven’t things always been in a state of flux?

The difference lies in volume and rate. Modern man is called upon not only to absorb changes but to accept more changes sooner. We face multiplied new hurdles before we have cleared the old ones. A backlog develops that is psychological, cultural, and moral. We lose touch without being aware of it.

The Church hasn’t quite caught up with a lot that has already happened. But the really big changes are yet to come. As the result of urbanization and automation, and of developments in transportation, communications, education, and medicine, we may soon have completely new life styles. It appears that we are on the threshold of what might be called The Great Transition.

In some respects we ought to welcome change, for it can make life better and more interesting. But when it comes too thick and fast, change creates grave problems. It seduces man to worship at the altar of newness. It spawns inadequacies, inconsistencies, and incongruities. It breeds maladjustment and prejudice as well as foot-dragging. It produces gaps between conviction and conduct, between potential and action. It separates young and old, the informed and the ignorant, the governors and the governed.

If these are the products of past changes, how are we going to cope with the greater flux yet to come?

The world today offers two main options. Communism seeks to shield the masses from abrupt change; it maintains order by offering “womb-to-tomb” security at the expense of individual freedom. The non-Communist world hopes to pacify people by holding out the hope of affluence for those who produce and behave.

There is a Christian alternative that still waits to be tried. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus lived about the same time as the biblical prophet Malachi. When Heraclitus was propounding his great theme that change is the only basic reality, Malachi was recording the words of the Lord, “I am the LORD, I change not.…” (Mal. 3:6). That is one reason why, for the Christian, despite all the changes in our time and the inevitability of many more in the days ahead, Easter is worth celebrating.

Christ’s resurrection represented the profoundest kind of change because it proclaimed the death of death. It is especially meaningful today, because if we appropriate its efficacy through faith, the Resurrection assures us of the impartation of a divine nature that will enable us to meet the challenge of change and to deal with our constantly altering environment. God himself does not change, and those who choose to cling to him find ultimate, unique stability. In a world of flux, he alone represents hope, and he alone can heal the psychological disorder brought on by sudden and dramatic changes.

With divine permanence as its foundation, the Christian community can face up to change collectively, too. It can bridge the moral and ethical gaps by appeal to the unchanging Word of the God who knows the end from the beginning and can thus see all that lies between in context. Biblical answers are not always apparent, but God never fails to fulfill his promises to honor those who search diligently. And it is a matter of historical record that men whose lives have been guided by Scripture have, in the long run, contributed most to cultural progress.

Christian answers, though often difficult to find, are inevitably easier to arrive at than to carry out. Man’s biggest problem has always been his reluctance to follow the divine precepts. But obedience to the will of God is essential if the Christian faith is going to bridge the gap from change to change. The Church has shown an amazing capacity to adapt itself to widely varying situations; indeed, it is one institution that not only has survived change but has been an agent of change, and has helped the world to accept and adjust to its social upheavals.

For many years our Puritan forebears were disparaged, and their weaknesses magnified. Increasingly, however, historians are acknowledging the great Puritan contributions of discipline, initiative, and sacrifice. The Puritans experienced a Great Transition of their own: they tamed a wilderness in the New World against almost insurmountable odds. A luxury-loving, permissive society would have perished under similar circumstances.

Today we face changes of another kind and of a different magnitude, but they are much more formidable. And to survive these, we need qualities much like those possessed by the Puritans.

Especially in the intellectual arena, evangelicals must exercise new initiative if flux is not to get the best of us. We have hardly begun to see and to show the implications of our faith in varied vocational dimensions. In every discipline, biblical alternatives must be advanced in depth and with scholarly vigor. In social service, deeds must accompany words. No longer will it do for the evangelical community to organize rallies and solicit signatures for causes that are in the long run peripheral.

One of the great myths of our day, and one of the hardest to dispel, is that evangelical Christianity is not a thinking man’s religion. Many persons uncritically assume that non-Christian thinkers have worked out all the problems of life in a neat little package. The truth is, of course, that twentieth-century thought-life, largely dominated as it is by non-Christian presuppositions, is in a state of profound confusion. There is no consensus worth talking about and nothing on the horizon to enable modern man to adjust to change more effectively.

Biblical principles are still foundational and are compelling and rationally satisfying, but their relevance to life today must be shown—by each believer in his own station of life as he contributes to the good of all by living his faith. That’s the genius of Christianity, and contemporary culture may one day soon discover it, if Christians fulfill their mandate.

School Disruptions

Sadly we have watched the disruptions that have overtaken public schools as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision requiring immediate integration in the middle of the present school year. The children have been the chief sufferers. Their education has been neglected, and in some places, such as Lamar, South Carolina, they themselves have been assaulted. What are we to think?

Several things are plain. First, there can be no second-rate citizens under our constitution, and equal rights and opportunities belong to all irrespective of race or color. Secondly, school integration both in the North and in the South has often moved with glacierlike slowness. This is no time to apply any law more stringently in one geographical area than in another. Thirdly, neighborhood housing patterns that cannot be easily changed lie at the heart of the school imbroglio. There is no immediate way, for example, to achieve thorough integration of schools in the District of Columbia, where more than 90 per cent of the students are black. Fourthly, the Supreme Court made no distinction between those regions that have honestly sought to solve the problem and those that have been sitting on their hands since the passage of federal and state civil rights legislation. Fifthly, indiscriminate busing is only a stop-gap measure that has not yet shown it will lead to what we all want: first-rate education for all of America’s children.

There are lessons we need to learn from the inequitable and thoroughly reprehensible situation that now confronts us. The first is that the passage of any law or series of laws is not in itself a final solution. We like to think it is, however. Once a law is passed we are inclined to shelve the problem; we lack the persistence to see the law through into practice.

A second lesson, simple yet significant, is that housing patterns will probably never reflect even approximately the black-white population percentages. Ideally, if the Negro population were evenly distributed among the total population, the school integration problem would be solved virtually overnight. But quite the opposite is taking place. More and more of the large cities are experiencing a greater influx of Negroes, and it is statistically plain that many if not all of them will shortly be predominantly Negro. Washington is now almost 70 per cent Negro; in 1950 the figure was 35 per cent; in 1960, 54 per cent; in 1965, 66 per cent. In Chicago the Negro population was 14 per cent in 1950, 23 per cent in 1960, and 28 per cent in 1965. In Philadelphia it was 18 per cent in 1950, 26 per cent in 1960, and 31 per cent in 1965. The census of 1970 will undoubtedly reveal higher percentages.

A third lesson comes from a perceptive Negro columnist, William Raspberry: “It may be that one reason why the schools, particularly in Washington, are doing such a poor job of educating black children is that we have spent too much effort on integrating the schools and too little on improving them.” The point is well taken. Integration is of little value if it leads to inferior education or does not lift substandard education to proper levels.

A fourth lesson we need to learn is that all of us must live together, and the sooner we learn to do it gracefully the better for us all. Clinging to obsolete notions that prevailed in a vastly different day must end. So must the intolerable delay in making adjustments that will themselves be far easier to bear than the current unrest and dissatisfaction of both Negroes and whites. We need to generate somehow a lot of love, something that has not so far been a dominant characteristic of our people. Legislation makes no provision for motivation. What we need is acceptance of the Gospel—real acceptance, in which we apply its principles to our lives. This will lead us out of racial disharmony into a peaceful living together in which racism becomes the exception rather than the rule.

COCU, Racism, and Biblical Truth

If the Church of Christ Uniting becomes a reality (see News, page 30), local congregations of the union partners will have a chance to withdraw from the projected super-church. A plan of union officially presented to the Consultation on Church Union in St. Louis this month permits any local congregation of a uniting denomination to withdraw from the united church within one year of the national service constituting it.

The “escape clause” apparently was a concession made by the drafters to sell the plan. Without that provision, some churches might not vote for union, the drafters reasoned. But the vice-chairman of the eighteen-member drafting commission made it clear at St. Louis that many of the commission members had opposed the escape clause.

Dr. John Satterwhite, a member of the A.M.E. Zion Church who is professor of ecumenics at Wesley Seminary in Washington, D. C., said such defection by local congregations would amount to “white racism.” “We know there are racists in the churches,” he said at a press conference. “Why should we make it easier for them to walk out?”

We wonder, though, why Dr. Satterwhite wants to keep racists in the new church. Those who oppose black bishops or integrated services are hardly likely to be assets.

But it is unfortunate that the racist tag already is being applied to all Christians who oppose the COCU plan. Dr. Satterwhite didn’t seem to recognize any other reason why congregations of the COCU partnership might decide, by a majority vote of their communicant members, to pull out of the giant merger.

We believe COCU’s fuzzy theology could well lead some congregations to prefer to stay out. Some evangelicals may balk at COCU’s lack of a firm statement on the authority of Scripture, or its low-key position on the creeds. Or its meager confession. And high-church Episcopalians may feel they cannot go along because the apostolic succession is not continued in the historic Anglican form.

Racism—in evangelical circles or anywhere else—is a contradiction of the Gospel. But let it be clear well ahead of voting on the plan of union that the blanket racist charge won’t stick. Let’s not allow such an insinuation to conceal conscientious motives for staying out—motives that have everything to do with biblical truth and nothing to do with skin color.

A Call From The Blue

A New York City police sergeant who is also a Ph.D. candidate has been recruiting Ivy Leaguers for his own and Washington’s police forces. “If you really care about cities, if you really care about individual people … become a policeman,” he says. He makes a good point. We suggest that Christians seriously consider the possibility that God might lead them into this vocation. To be a good policeman requires rare virtues, and Christians who represent the God of justice and mercy are (or should be) better equipped than most men to carry out the exacting duties of policemen amid the indifference or hostility they commonly face.

The ‘Watchman-Examiner’ Ceases Publication

After fifty-eight years of service to the cause of Christ, the Watchman-Examiner has died. A case could be made that this periodical was the single most important factor in creating and sustaining the fundamentalist movement within the Northern Baptist Convention.

Discerning the need for a weekly paper that would stand firmly for the historic faith, Curtis Lee Laws (1868–1946), after twenty-five years of pastoral ministry in Baltimore and Brooklyn, purchased the ailing eighty-nine-year-old, New York-based Examiner in 1911 and soon added to it the Boston-based Watchman, which had been founded in 1819. Under his editorship, which lasted until 1938, the Watchman-Examiner built up a nationwide readership. It was Curtis Lee Laws who, with other New York ministers, called upon J. C. Massee in 1920 to spark a protest on the national level against the modernism within the Northern Convention; and it was Laws who coined the term fundamentalist to designate this movement.

In 1928 Laws had the foresight to establish a trust fund, the income from which he hoped would insure the magazine’s continuance and its independence from denominational officialdom. This enabled it to survive the depression, when even the convention periodical folded. In 1911 there had been nine Baptist periodicals of fairly general circulation in the northern states; a couple of decades later, only the Watchman-Examiner was left, though in the forties the convention was able to revive an official periodical.

Throughout its life, the Watchman-Examiner sought to keep fundamentalist Baptists within the convention, hoping to accomplish desired reforms in time. During the early 1940s, under the editorship of John W. Bradbury, the magazine publicized and editorially supported the new Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society, even as earlier it had supported the establishment of thoroughly conservative seminaries to supplement the older schools that were no longer teaching the same doctrines they had taught during the nineteenth century. When the convention’s leaders refused to allow the CBFMS the same kind of standing the conservative seminaries had enjoyed, the supporters of the new society were divided. The Watchman-Examiner (and all but one of the conservative seminaries) chose to remain with the convention, but much of its readership formed the Conservative Baptist Association in 1948.

By 1950, when the Northern Convention changed its name to the American Baptist Convention, the Watchman-Examiner had lost much of its former influence. It was blamed by convention loyalists for fomenting schism and by those in the CBA for betrayal of the cause of a consistently conservative association of churches. Thus it was only a matter of time before the periodical’s expenses would overtake its endowment and other sources of income. By 1969 it had 3,300 subscribers, only one-eighth as many as it had had in the twenties. During its lifetime it contributed mightily to the maintenance of the historic Baptist faith in the northern and western states, but, to its regret, much of this faith is now in congregations which are outside the American Baptist Convention.

Evaluating Christian Colleges

A few weeks ago our news section published a list of twelve Christian liberal-arts colleges that eighteen deans had designated outstanding when questioned by Biola College’s dean (see January 30 issue, page 36). Predictably, letters arrived from omitted colleges with some valid protests (see March 13 issue, page 21).

Well, which are the “best” Christian colleges? How can we evaluate them? One way, of course, is to use only the criteria by which one ranks the “best” colleges regardless of ideology. The New York Times Almanac for 1970 goes out on a limb to divide institutions into five groups, A through E, according to the demonstrated academic potential of the student body. The Ivy League schools, Stanford, Chicago, and a few others are in group A. Wheaton manages to make group C (where it keeps company with such schools as Berkeley and Michigan). Baylor, Calvin, Gordon, Houghton, Taylor, Westmont, and Whitworth are among the colleges in group E.

Certainly any Christian college would want to be within the minimum standards for all colleges. However, it is also necessary to evaluate Christian colleges by additional criteria that will have relevance at the judgment seat of Christ. There individual Christians will be examined to separate the “wood, hay, and stubble” from the “gold, silver, and precious stones” of their lives. Commendation will be determined, not by comparing one person with another, but by comparing a person’s achievement with his potential. Christian institutions such as colleges will not be judged directly, but individuals connected with them will be. We suggest that a necessary basis for evaluating a college that is trying to be Christian is the extent to which its students appear to have been helped to increase the “gold, silver, and precious stones” that God desires to produce through them. Equally relevant is the degree to which the college academically and vocationally helps to equip Christians to use their own particular and varying talents in their lives and careers to the greater glory of our Creator and Redeemer.

A college should do its best to develop the academic potential of its student body (and some colleges with bright students might do worse at developing their potential than colleges with less promising student bodies). But to be rightly considered Christian, a college must also be concerned about helping to develop the fruit of the Spirit. No accrediting agency inquires about that save the one at which our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ will preside.

Making The Census Scene

On April Fool’s Day, the United States will sit for a national portrait. The photographer will be census-bureau counters and computers—a composite of personal and impersonal fact-finders. The sitting itself will not take long; most Americans will merely fill in twenty-two circles. Developing the picture, however, may take a while. And, despite precautions to focus carefully and to get everyone in, the finished picture will surely be imperfect. It may not capture us at our best; perhaps it will show us as we are. Then, in the tradition of unretouched “before” pictures, we can begin to firm up the flabby parts of our national figure.

It would also be wise on April 1 to count—and begin to eliminate—personal failures that help make the national scene. We may be able to fool the other fellow some of the time, and we may be able to fool ourselves most of the time, into thinking all the fault for national problems lies elsewhere. But there is one observer whom we can’t fool any of the time—an omniscient God.

The Christian As A Visitor

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (Jas. 1:27).

James assumes with good warrant that one cannot really understand and sympathize with those bereft of the family breadwinner unless one is in contact with them, visiting them and seeing for oneself their distress. If journalists and social workers seem to be more sympathetic toward the poor, doubtless it is because their professional responsibilities call for them to see the situation themselves. Christians who make pronouncements about those on relief (almost none of whom are able-bodied adult males) without having gotten to know some of them by visitation would do well to review the inspired writer’s test for pure religion.

James takes second place to no one in his valuation of the Word of God. But he also tells those who likewise profess to value it to “be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (1:22). When is the last time you did something about the call to visit, and hence learn the needs of and minister to, those who are without husbands or fathers? It need hardly be added that death is not the only thing that can leave a household without a fully functioning husband and father, permanently or temporarily. Perhaps there are more “widows” and “orphans” in our communities and in our congregations than there might at first appear to be. We may not feel we can do much to improve the world, but we certainly can do a lot to help a family.

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