Page 6315 – Christianity Today (2024)

In dealing with American history for the benefit of a well-informed American reading public, this French-born and French-educated writer is admittedly bringing coals to Newcastle. His justification for so doing is a growing awareness that the time in which we live impresses upon us all the urgency of emerging from our ivory tower. The hour is so very late.

It is generally taken for granted nowadays that the dream of a purely objective, so-called scientific history, cherished by a previous generation, has faded away into the limbo of dead ideologies. To say that we study the past for its own sake, and without the slightest intention of fitting events into our presuppositions, cannot possibly imply that we are in a position to rid our mind of all such presuppositions. The plain fact is that it is impossible to write history without presuppositions. No one may be said to think in a vacuum, especially when crucial issues are at stake. Some kind of faith-principle is necessarily involved. The better this is realized, the less danger for a personal equation to deflect the course of an honest quest after truth.

HERITAGE AND DESTINY

Let me therefore, at the outset, state the basic assumption upon which I am going to proceed. It may be summed up in the simple statement that our destiny as a nation is forever conditioned by our heritage. However bold our forward look, our progress can only be safe if we keep a steady eye on the landmarks of the receding past. Khrushchev has it that these United States are suffering from the incurable malady of old age. His persuasion once more bears witness to the Russian Communists’ propensity to take credit for every invention. In this particular case, Edward Gibbon happens to have preceded Khrushchev. Gibbon was credited with the view. Yet wrongly so already, for the nation of mundus senescens had long before him provided Graeco-Roman rhetoricians with some of their choicest arguments. This fact puts that notion into its right place, that of empty speculation. Whatever the many reasons currently adduced for the fall of any great civilization in ages past, a constant element in the actual process of decadence will inevitably be found in the failure of that civilization to understand itself. This all-important truth should draw and retain the attention of a responsible American leadership today. It clears our basic assumption of any suspicion of having been born of wishful thinking. Rather it singles it out as having immediately proceeded from the most undeniable feature history has ever brought out.

Standing on the firm ground provided by this conviction then, the American historian owes it to his sacred call to be a prophet in his own country, a country now in dire need of the guidance it is his duty to provide. At the core of this need lies the detection of the ultimate reference of American history. According to our basic assumption, then, the task requires a fresh look at our American heritage.

POLITICS AND ORGANIZED RELIGION

The notion is in the air about us that if ever the biblical interpretation of history were to be tied up with even the loftiest of all current interpretations of national purpose, a link between the two should be forcibly wrought out by some artificial device. The very thought of it suggests a questionable fabrication. In the public mind, the only thing that matters is the motivation at work in the everyday happenings of our national life. Accordingly, if the Hebrew-Christian view of history is to be taken into consideration in the process, it has to be brought in through the back door as it were, the implication being that it had better be left alone as controversial matter. It would be an understatement to say that a missing link is thereby postulated. Even the elements to be linked together are at the outset assumed to have little, if anything, to do with each other.

It would be preposterous to challenge this view. The historian’s task is not to argue about realities but to allow the same to quicken his quest for understanding. Any well-ascertained situation constitutes a precious pointer. In the present instance, the view currently prevailing in the public mind of our day and age points to feelings of long standing on the part of the American Founders. It should never be forgotten that our forefathers lived, moved, and had their being in a highly secularized, rationalistic climate that had given rise to the deism of the Age of Enlightenment. Let us further keep in mind that many Philosophes and Idéologues of the Auteuil group were personal friends of men like Franklin and Jefferson, and that quite a number of them were inducted into the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia; and further, that the same society had been established by Franklin “for the promotion of useful knowledge,” not for the promotion of particular theological or metaphysical tenets. However religious its American members may have been in their own heart and mind, it is a fact that they never mixed their politics with organized religion. They followed in this the precedent set by the Royal Society of London, and declined to deal with subjects inviting theological or ecclesiastical controversy. One of their strongest feelings was hate of bigotry. That such a feeling was widespread in the early day of American history finds further confirmation in such instances as the Massachusetts Experiment, when the Presbyterians, obsessed by a Calvinist notion of theocracy vainly tried out by them in England, attempted to fasten it on their land of adoption. It is true that they succeeded for a few decades, but the Royal Charter of Massachusetts put an end to their quest, which incidentally provided a splendid education in democracy. There is indeed ample precedent to account for the feeling still prevailing in our day that politics should be kept apart from any form of organized religion or set of theological doctrines. The principle of separation of church and state is here to stay. Far from generating controversy, it should be taken for granted in a mood of serenity.

With the overall situation thus clarified, we feel all the more at ease as we prepare to take a closer look at our charter-documents and at the intentions that brought them into existence. If we mean to understand the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, we must realize that, while they do reveal strong rationalistic trends, they are essentially Hebrew-Christian documents. Even men like Franklin and Jefferson, who particularly liked to assume a rationalistic attitude, would fight oppression in the name of the Lord. To them, rebellion against tyrants was obedience to God. To them, the Creator of heaven and earth was the Giver and remained the Guarantor of the rights of man. To them, admittedly, the framework of government and the maintenance of social order were the things of Caesar; yet the rights of man per se were not Caesar’s, but the things of God.

Truly, there can be no question of forging a missing link at this point. In considering our national purpose under God, we are dealing with a matter of symbiosis in the original Greek etymological sense of the word, which simply asserts the fact of living together. A still closer scrutiny of this fact may prove valuable toward further constructive understanding.

THE RELIGIOUS PREMISE

Clearly, the religious view and its moral implications were at the root of the Founding Fathers’ innermost convictions. Whatever political principles they laid down were directly derived from the religious view and its moral implications—in that order. But what do I say? The religious view and its moral implications were more than convictions. They were stated as matters of elementary evidence. The very first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence held “these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Strong language indeed, this!

The point which invites scrutiny is the assumed self-evident character of the religious presupposition of “these truths” here apprehended as undergirding the charter of our rights, and as owing to God the Creator and Preserver, their inalienable nature. This assumed self-evident character, then, is but one aspect of the self-evidence of God as stated in the opening words of the Westminster Confession which in those colonial days constituted the sum of Christian doctrine—and I quote: “The light of nature, and the works of creation and providence, do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable.” This evidence had been drawn directly from the Bible by the Westminster divines in very much the same way as the substance of the New England Primer to which our forefathers owed their first initiation to the truth that makes men free.

There was however in the evidence under consideration an extra-biblical element which made it eminently accessible to the Founding Fathers, and this element has not, to my knowledge, drawn the attention it deserves. The conception according to which some knowledge about God is available to all men through “the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence,” is designated by theologians as natural or general revelation, the further designation of special revelation being restricted to the disclosure of truths said to be necessary for salvation. The plain fact is that the notion of a so-called natural or general revelation was not originated by the Bible but by the philosophers of ancient Greece. What actually happened was that the early Christians welcomed it because it provided a useful and much needed point of contact between classical views of religion and the Hebrew-Christian view. To wit, Paul’s speech to the Athenians from Mars Hill on the theme, “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.” In that speech the point of contact to which reference has just been made may be detected in the sentence: “For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring” (Acts 17:28). On the classical side, we have such statements as that of Plato to the effect that the inspiration of the poet, no less than that of diviners and holy prophets, is the word of God. And for this reason, Plato adds in Ion, 533, “God takes away the mind of poets and uses them as his ministers.” To make a long story short, as indeed must be the case here, what the deists of the Age of Enlightenment did more or less consciously, was to revert to a kind of evidence that proved most congenial to their highly secularized rationalism. Such was their way of keeping whole an intellectual heritage traced back to both Athens and Jerusalem—Tertullian notwithstanding.

This once granted, however, it would be historical nonsense to ignore the Hebrew-Christian overtone of our Declaration of Independence. Even the most rabid rationalist of our day who happens to speak of God cannot forget what he once heard in Sunday school. How much more so in the case of our Founding Fathers when we recall the intellectual and spiritual climate in which they lived! The God they knew was the Creator and Upholder of his creation, sitting at the roaring loom of history, directing its course to its appointed end.

This end throughout the ages had increasingly been brought into focus in terms of the kingdom of God. In the fullness of time, the man Christ Jesus had become the living sign of that kingdom as detected through his person, his proclamation, his movement. The very fact that we designate time as B.C. and A.D. leaves no doubt as to the unique significance of Jesus Christ in the divine plot, and to a considerable extent confirms the reality of that plot. History, then, is oriented as the universe is oriented; better still, in our contemporary language, as the space-time continuum is oriented. The faith-principle of this prophetic view is henceforth summed up in the Kingdom concept. Lending reality to this concept are the already present powers radiating from the One who mediates them. Impinging upon us from a dimension hardly accessible to our human makeup, the kingdom of God is able to penetrate and transform our total situation. Thus the heavenly realm is already present to eyes of faith, even as its full manifestation is expected by Christian hope. The kingdom of God may accordingly be characterized as both a present experience and a future consummation. Augustine, the original formulator of the Christian philosophy of history, summed up these implications in his symbol of two cities—the earthly city given to greed and the lust of possession, essentially motivated by a self-assertive egotism, and the City of God where all power comes from the realm of things invisible to displace self-will through divine love. As he saw it in the light of Scripture, these two cities were both alike in that they were enjoying temporal good and suffering temporal evil. Otherwise they stood in sharp contrast. They had a faith that was different, a hope that was different, a love that was different (De Civitate Dei, XVIII, 54).

The reader will not ascribe to me, I am sure, the intention of implying that our Founding Fathers were aware of the whole background just sketched out. The reason I have recalled it to attention is that our own awareness of it is a prerequisite to the understanding of our charter documents with special attention to the opening sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. Adequate detection is always conditioned by a high degree of familiarity with the elements under consideration.

What impresses one as he reads the text at hand against the background henceforth acknowledged as its true setting is an unmistakable outline resemblance between the biblical view of the kingdom of God and our forefathers’ burning vision—that of a delectable country upheld by the benevolent Creator who had endowed its inhabitants with such inalienable rights as “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The haziness of this profile-resemblance may be accounted for by the fading away, in an age of enlightened deism, of the scriptural vision of an earthly city impinged upon by the heavenly City. It is in the direction of that fading vision that we should look to realize the original import of our Hebrew-Christian heritage in terms of our national purpose.

A SECULAR KINGDOM?

In conclusion, then, let me suggest that the ultimate reference of American history may well be a secularized intimation of the Scripture’s teaching concerning the kingdom of God. And further, that this same intimation may yet find its justification in actual fact. In this case, the tension between Augustine’s earthly city and City of God would account for many of our unrelieved tensions. To illustrate, it would explain how, once the Christian view has been lost sight of, all that is left of our original heritage is a kind of Americanism so poorly aware of the true nature of its loss that recourse is taken to commercial advertising to urge prospective customers to go to church the following Sunday. Surely a more pertinent reminder would be that it should not take more nerve to be an avowed Communist than a professing Christian in this land of ours.

Were our heritage only apprehended by the kind of leading minority which has always determined the national will-to-live through the crises of the past, a renewed awareness of our ultimate reference under God would help restore the perspective of our destiny. Only in the measure as we apprehend the true nature of our heritage may we escape the general fragmentation of our national purpose as witnessed by our deficiencies, partialities, and unhappy divisions. What is involved in all such declensions is nothing short of a deflection of both our heritage and destiny, a barter of vision in our understanding of history. A shrunken outlook can only result in varieties of split-loyalties finally amounting to disloyalty. Once the ultimate reference of our history is lost, the landscape of our reality is bound to turn into a wasteland where genuine historians yield to highly-paid popularizing newscasters. In the measure our nation gets out of touch with its own history, it is likely to witness a transvaluation of values according to which the idols of the day, whether pros, crooners or other entertainers, are called upon to fill the void brought about by the loss of our true vision.

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

It is not unusual these days in America to find a Christian waxing sentimental about his country and his flag. Events of the past five decades have convinced us that the American dream is made of very precious stuff indeed. What is really unusual is to find an American waxing eloquent about his Christian roots.

In 1799 Jedidiah Morse of New England wrote, “Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which flow from them, must fall with them.” Today as tourists stroll the avenues of Washington, D. C., “sightseeing capital of the world,” and study its magnificent edifices and marble monuments, the words of Morse seem to be an anachronism. The structure of our expanding Big Government appears in sooth to be eternal. Can one seriously support today the thesis that democracy’s survival is contingent upon some sectarian religious belief? Is not this bigotry carried to the ultimate?

When modern statisticians claim that the percentage of church membership is higher in America today than it was in Colonial times, they are clouding the scene by throwing squid’s ink. The fact is that our forefathers held an idea completely lost to a vast segment of our society today. It may be found simply stated by the Psalmist: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”

“I don’t know how long America will be here,” observed Dr. Louis H. Evans recently. “As long as it is a servant of Jehovah, surely. After that it simply moves on the chessboard of history. We may have stronger guns than Russia, but we no longer have stronger goals than Russia. Not what we have in our hearts but only what we have in our hands is now our strength; and if we are overpowered there, we have nothing.”

In an effort to explicate the nature of the American dream, as well as its drift and its destiny, CHRISTIANITY TODAY has asked some well-known historians to present their views on these pages. Is a pagan concept of man and government now finding general acceptance even in the United States? Is it true that no one much cares whether God has this land or any other in his protection or not?

We are convinced that a scarlet thread runs through the story of democracy, beginning with the Decalogue on Mount Sinai and the teachings of the New Testament, and moving through the German and Swiss Reformations to England. Wycliffe, John Locke, Black-stone, the Petition of Rights, the Bill of Rights all are knots on that thread. So are Jamestown and Plymouth and Philadelphia. Notice, however, that these are not the names of warriors or of battlefields. The real victories have always been God’s through his conquest of the rebellious human heart. “If we will not be governed by God,” said William Penn, “then we will be governed by tyrants.” The man set free by Jesus Christ is the real hero of this Fourth of July.

Dr. Robert Boyd Munger, on his recent return from a preaching mission in Latin America, declared that “the intoxicating ideas of liberty, equality, and freedom, so long proclaimed by Americans as inalienable rights, are burning like fire in the hearts of the underprivileged.” Adds Dr. Munger, “The unrest does not have its rise primarily in propaganda from Moscow, but rather in explosive pressure on the part of the common man and the little nations, demanding that they be permitted to stand among their brethren without shame, politically and economically free. Certainly the long-delayed revolt of the disinherited masses is underway.

“Yet even more revolutionary in its effects is the gospel of Jesus Christ, declaring the worth of the individual to God and the length he has gone to reach and redeem him. No man who has been set free spiritually from sin and death is content to remain socially in bondage, nor can he tolerate the oppression of those for whom Christ died.”

God can create in us a new heart and set for us a new goal. God can give America the will and the heart to serve mankind in the twentieth century.

There is no three-mile limit to the American dream.

May this be our earnest prayer on Independence Day, 1961: “Lord, send us a vision worthy of Thyself. Let it be that vision bequeathed to our forefathers, but let it be for all men—not to enslave, not to exploit, but to set free!” For without the vision of God and his will, and a dedication to righteousness, the people perish.

THE SIDE OF LIBERTY-LOVING MEN

For a century and a half the spirit of 1776 was the picture of America held by most thinking people the world over. It was represented by the three Revolutionary soldiers with fife and drum: men of courage and conviction, wholly committed to the cause of human freedom. Americans believed in the dignity of man, endowed by the Creator with natural rights. Therefore they were willing to sacrifice themselves for the downfall and destruction of tyranny of any kind—political, economic, social, ecclesiastical.

But that image of America has become badly defaced. Communists have caricatured the American image by clever and diabolical deceit. Now Uncle Sam is pictured as Uncle Shylock, a Mr. Moneybags, wealthy, greedy, disinterested in the welfare of struggling masses of humanity in other lands. America is made out to be callous, careless, even cruel and cunning. Despite every program such as the Marshall Plan, Point Four, and others, American aid is suspiciously viewed as a potential instrument of “Yankee imperialism.”

Does not America now often appear to support the status quo? American foreign policy favors aristocratic classes and the static Roman church in Latin America. Until recently, America seemed on the side of decadent European imperialism in Africa and Asia. Have Americans forgotten their heritage of freedom? Are they no longer champions of human liberty?

The Communists express concern for illiterate and inchoate masses. All the while their program is one of ultimate dictatorship, an imperialism far more destructive of human rights than anything the peoples of Africa and Asia have ever known.

America’s true image must be restored.

And it can be.

It will take courageous statesmanship and solid support from the American people to be on the side of liberty-loving men the world over.

Our part is to be genuine, sincere, and forthright in our quest for domestic freedom both for ourselves and for the masses abroad, and accordingly to unmask the cruelty and covetousness of the conspirators in the Kremlin.

—DR. V. RAYMOND EDMAN,

President,

Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

STRONG PROSPECT OF DOOM

The United States of America in the past 50 years has been dominated to a large extent by persons who do not understand the spiritual heritage bequeathed by their own ancestors. When our great nation was founded during the period from 1775 to 1787, the following statement by Benjamin Franklin was still widely accepted: “The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of man.”

But in recent years our leading statesmen seldom have recognized in official speeches and documents the nature of divine Providence.

In our public schools in many parts of the land it has become fashionable to undermine respect for orthodox Christianity. The evolutionary concept of human history has crept into nearly all the textbooks being used in the big survey courses, including those given in our Christian universities and colleges.

The existence of Adam and Eve is usually overlooked, and as a result practically all the boys and girls coming from fine Christian homes are informed in their textbooks dealing with the history of civilization that the best monkeys called apes in their own power turned themselves into human beings. In this subtle manner the chief basis of the Christian religion is discarded: the atonement of Jesus Christ is no longer needed by a single human being.

Is it any wonder that in such a time and situation our leading newspapers cater to the whims of pagans and infidels? The most highly touted historian in the world (Arnold J. Toynbee) has recently stated in The New York Times that Christianity and Mohammedanism are both children “of a spiritual marriage between Greece and Asia.” Unless a marked change takes place in the United States of America, it is doomed, just as surely as was ancient Babylonia—DR. ALBERT HYMA, Professor of History, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

GODLY POWER OF A MINORITY

The American dream is best expressed succinctly in Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, in the Latin inscription on the Great Seal of the United States which we find on every dollar bill, and in America and America the Beautiful. It goes back to minorities—and they were always minorities—in the early settlements in this country. It is clearly of Christian—and of Protestant—origin, and is based on the conviction that God who revealed himself in Christ is central in history and has his purposes for this country. America was written by a Baptist theological student and America the Beautiful by the daughter and granddaughter of Congregational ministers.

The dream has never fully shaped American life, but it has helped to mold the democracy of the country and, among many other fruits, has contributed to the anti-slavery movement, the temperance and prohibition campaigns, the achievement of a more equitable position for women, improved care for the insane, and efforts for international peace, including the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations.

The dream is still with us. As has always been true, it is cherished in its frankly Christian form only by minorities, but those minorities still make their influence felt in the nation, both in its international outreach and in its domestic affairs. Even though its Christian rootage is not always recognized or acknowledged, it is probably as potent as it has ever been. We who are indebted to it and cherish it must endeavor to see that it helps to shape every aspect of our local and national policies and programs.—DR. KENNETH S. LATOURETTE, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Missions and Oriental History, Yale University Graduate School, New Haven, Connecticut.

COMPROMISE AND DECADENCE

The American dream is vanishing in the midst of the terrifying realities and visible signs of decadence in our contemporary society. But it would be false to infer that the crisis of the present is the cause of its disappearance as a vital factor in American life.

The dream itself was built on an unstable foundation, for it did not emanate fully from that biblical outlook which guided colonial life. There was a colonial dream for the New World which the colonists brought with them as a part of their heritage from the Reformation, and which motivated them as they forged a new civilization out of the wilderness. It was their desire to found a society which would be based on biblical principles.

But this colonial dream of the early settlers with its biblical orientation gave way before the onslaughts of the Enlightenment and the rise of the democratic philosophy of the American Revolution. Out of the War of Independence there arose a new American dream whose chief architects were Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. This American dream was not derived from biblical principles, but reflected the naturalism and humanism of deism and the emerging democratic philosophy. Thus it contained the elements making for its own dissolution. For it was based on an optimistic view concerning the nature of man and a belief in the perfectibility of the race. Not only was it unbiblical, but at the same time it encouraged a type of political, social, and economic action which could only hasten the destruction of any society which accepted these false views.

At first glance the democratic insistence on the equality of all men may seem to be little more than a political and social expression of the biblical doctrine of the priesthood of the believer. But such is far from the case. Underlying the democratic philosophy is the humanistic insistence on man’s sovereignty and inherent goodness.

The crisis which has overtaken not only the United States but Western Europe is but the unfolding of the catastrophic nature of the Enlightenment of which the American dream soon became the offspring. The awesome conflicts of our era are not the cause of the dilemma, but rather are they the outward manifestation of the deadly cancer which is in fact eating away the very soul of the West.

—DR. C. GREGG SINGER,

Professor of History,

Catawba College, Salisbury, North Carolina.

THE RIGHT TO HOPE

The American dream has perhaps never been better expressed than it was almost a century ago by Abraham Lincoln in his Message to Congress on December 1, 1862. He concluded with these words: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.”

In a very real sense it is within the power of every generation—not the least our own—either to preserve or squander this rich heritage of freedom which is so much a part of the American dream.

Americans have given much thought in recent months to the question of their National Purpose. What has not as yet been demonstrated is whether we as a people are prepared to approach our problems and explore our purposes in a spirit of humility and self-criticism which is certainly essential to greatness and may be equally necessary to survival. Those of us in the Christian tradition ought never to lose sight of the fact that good and desirable as are many aspects of our official policy, both stated and implied, “there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.” Vox populi is not always vox dei, but “where there is no vision the people perish.”

Only if we see the American dream clearly in the light of God’s love, his power and his judgment, do we have a right to hope, with Lincoln, that this nation under God may yet experience a new birth of freedom, with the result that government of the people, by the people, and for the people may not perish from the earth.

—DR. ROBERT M. SUTTON,

Associate Dean and Associate Professor of History,

the Graduate College, University of Illinois.

SIGNS OF A RENEWAL

The American dream and the destiny implied in it have received official and secular expression in such documents as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address. Though expressed in secular terms, they were of Christian origin and nurture.

Our national destiny has been and is threatened by secularism, but there are signs of a return to biblical evangelical Christianity which is the fountainhead of democracy and without which democracy is distorted. The return to such Christianity, however, must not be on the theological level alone but must be brought to bear on the racial, social, and international issues which confront us.

The people of the nation, instructed and inspired by Christian leadership rooted in Scripture and Church, must overcome racial discrimination in spite of welfare state tags and charges of socialism, must understand and assist foreign peoples on the Christian ground that we are our brothers’ keeper, and must not allow theories of national sovereignty to block constructive efforts at building the kind of world in which order and justice can prevail.

If the American dream is for Americans only, it will remain our dream and never be our destiny. Will we have the courage to see this and act accordingly, in spite of foreign and domestic enemies? There is a chance that we will and be counted among those who really hunger and thirst after righteousness even when we are persecuted for it.

—Dr. RENE DE VISME WILLIAMSON,

Chairman, Department of Government,

Louisiana State University.

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE stress the indispensable role of public information and education if republican forms of government are to thrive.

Yet, strange as it may seem, few Americans today really grasp either the distinctive political premises that have nourished the nation, or the religious and moral ideals inherent in the American vision.

Writing on April 25, 1799, Jedidiah Morse spoke pointedly of the spiritual foundations: “In proportion as the genuine effects of Christianity are diminished in any nation, either through unbelief, or the corruption of its doctrines, or the neglect of its institutions, in the same proportion will the people of that nation recede from the blessings of genuine freedom, and approximate the miseries of complete despotism. I hold this to be a truth confirmed by experience.… Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which flow from them, must fall with them.”

Professor F. F. Bruce has put us all in his debt by giving us a book, fresh from the Oxford University Press, titled The English Bible, subtitled A History of Translations. The Christian public—I speak chiefly of the United States—is ill-informed as to how the Holy Scriptures have fared at the hands of their translators and revisers as they have passed within the medium we call the English language, from one reproduction to another. Moreover, we are equally ill-informed as to how these succeeding versions have fared at the hands of those first to receive them. On both of these counts, Dr. Bruce’s work makes highly-informative and exciting reading.

At the same time it provokes questions. Dr. Bruce himself raises some of them. After a particular version has been in use for some time there is mounting pressure for revision. Why? The desire for greater intelligibility. English, being a living language, is a changing language. The New York Times English is a far cry from Elizabethan English. Give us the Bible in the contemporary vernacular. This is the cry.

Agreed, says Professor Bruce, in effect. But let us not be trapped by a fallacy. Because the Bible is the book that it is, intelligibility is not altogether a matter of verbiage and idiom. Hence the professor’s query, “Is the proper inference (from the inability of normally intelligent persons to understand this or that version of Scripture) that a more idiomatic translation would be more intelligible and remove the difficulties? Or may the trouble not lie in a certain inability to understand some of the things the Bible deals with, no matter how up-to-date the idiom may be in which they are expressed?” (The English Bible, p. 200). These are questions, Dr. Bruce suggests, “which should be made the subject of further investigation.”

Thus provoked, one ventures to indicate several questions that invite more searching and precise treatment than most current books on the Bible as authority and revelation have produced:

1. What are the relationship and interaction between divine revelation through the medium of inspired writings and such reproductions thereof as may be made in languages other than the original? However dear a doctrine of verbal inspiration may be—and I am one to whom it is dear—if we could prove it to everyone’s satisfaction, even in the fold of faith, we might then be found to have proved too much. For if the validity and sufficiency of the revelation are made to depend on the precise words as originally inspired, then we are deprived of the revelation God wanted us to have. The reason is obvious: not any of the original documents is available to us. All the autographs are lost.

Yet massive evidence shows us that the manuscripts we do have are so substantially identical with the original as to leave us with a revelation that dependably serves the purpose for which God gave it. Is it otherwise with the translations that are produced within the medium of the English language? Name any of them—from Wycliffe and Tyndale through the King James to the Revised Standard and the New English—and, regardless of the praise or dispraise with which they have been hailed, can you demonstrate that any of them fails of the criterion offered in the “Thirty-nine Articles,” namely, that “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation?”

2. Consider a second query: What in fact is the vital connection between Scripture as originally inspired and responsible renderings thereof in other languages, with particular regard to the authority associated with both? The answer, says Professor Bernard Ramm, is the Holy Spirit or, more exactly, what the Reformers called the testimonium spiritus sancti, the witness of the Holy Spirit. The testimonium is a theme that Dr. Ramm has fruitfully explored in his The Witness of The Holy Spirit. The source of the believer’s certainty that the Scriptures are the Word of God is always and ultimately the Spirit of God. He is not the ground of such persuasion (that indeed is the truth of God as inscripturated) but He is the cause of it. This testimonium is no substitute for critical and historical investigation into matters canonical, textual, or linguistic. On the other hand, competence in investigation is no prerequisite for the certainty that comes through the testimonium.

3. Another question: What is the limitation that surrounds, and will continue to surround, the finest efforts to make Bible linguistically intelligible? It is the blindedness, the twistedness, the pridefulness, of what St. Paul calls the “natural man.” As Professor Packer puts it, “Sinners are no more ready to acknowledge God in their thinking, by allowing His utterances authority over their judgment, than they are to acknowledge God in their actions, by allowing His utterances authority over their behavior” (Fundamentalism and the Word of God, p. 139). The clearest idiom may be clouded—and balked—by a tainted conscience.

4. Or this problem: What confusions are perhaps inherent in the dialogue over the formulation that may be given to theMODEof biblical inspiration? They are semantic confusions, and no one is likely to put a full stop to them. Theological controversy over the Bible produces in the disputants a polemical posture. A polemical posture is almost invariably strained. We want to explain more than is explainable. We wish to insist on formulations that are more rigorous than all of the facts will warrant.

When, for example, a Professor Warfield (in his half-century-old The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible) or a Professor Packer (in his current volume just mentioned) tries to differentiate between a divine inspiration that dictates words and a divine inspiration that controls words, he is grappling with a problem in semantics so subtle that his own words are under strain.

The effort is laudable. To regard it as definitive is unwarranted.

The Church has never classically defined the modus operandi of inspiration. It has simply confessed the majestic fact of divinely-inspired and trustworthy Scriptures.

Karl Barth: Teacher And Preacher

Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, by Karl Barth (John Knox Press, 1960, 173 pp., $3), and Deliverance to the Captives, by Karl Barth (SCM Press Ltd., 1961, 160 pp., $3), are reviewed by Gordon H. Clark, Professor of Philosophy, Butler University.

Finally—although Carrère’s French translation also came as late as 1958—Barth’s Anselm, first published in 1931, has been translated into English by a man so modest that his name does not appear on the title page—Ian Robertson.

Barth’s detailed analysis of Anselm’s argument, including the reply to Gaunilo, aims to show “That Anselm’s Proof of the Existence of God has been repeatedly called the ‘Ontological’ Proof of God, that commentators have refused to see that it is in a different book altogether from the well-known teaching of Descartes and Leibniz, that anyone could seriously think that it is even remotely affected by what Kant put forward against these doctrines—all that is so much nonsense on which no more words ought to be wasted” (p. 171).

According to Barth, Anselm did not try to prove the existence of God a priori, from the definition of God—as Descartes did, nor is Anselm’s proof based on some neutral proposition acceptable to an unbeliever. A thesis, such as the existence of God or why God became man, is taken as an unknown x, and its proof consists in deducing it from propositions a, b, c, which are taken as known parts of the Creed. Thus, proof of x depends on showing its necessary connection with the remainder of the Christian faith. Obviously Kant’s remarks are irrelevant to such a procedure.

Even within this framework Barth denies that the existence of God is deduced from his nature. He holds that it is deduced from the revealed name of God—than which nothing greater can he conceived. But can a name that is not a mere name like Charles, but is rather a descriptive phrase, be so sharply separated from the nature of God? Does not such a phrase tell us something of what God is? The answer to this question depends on one’s view as to the locus of Gaunilo’s foolishness.

One may also doubt that Barth’s view of the creedal framework of the proof, even though it describes Anselm’s actual procedure in Cur Deus hom*o, does justice either to his procedure in the Proslogion or to his avowed intention in Cur Deus hom*o: “Leaving Christ out of view, as if nothing had ever been known of him, it proves by absolute reasons the impossibility that any man should be saved without him,” and that Christ’s death must be proved “reasonable and necessary” so as to convince one “unwilling to believe anything not previously proved by reason.” At the end of his work Anselm makes his pupil say, “By this solution … I see the truth of all that is contained in the Old and New Testaments, for in proving that God became man by necessity, leaving out what was taken from the Bible … you convince both Jew and pagan by the mere force of reason.”

But in any case Barth’s book is a major contribution to medieval studies.

After one has read Barth’s scholarly Anselm and perchance some of his profound Church Dogmatics, it becomes a matter of lively interest as to what kind of sermons such a great man preaches, particularly to the prisoners in the Basel jail.

But how does one review a book of sermons? Naturally these are quite a come-down from his great writings. Some will strike a reader as good, others as poor. The first sermon of the collection seems strained at the beginning, rescued only by a peculiar shift to a pertinent application at the end. The second is a thoroughly delightful Christmas message that could hardly be improved upon. And so on.

The message of the sermons seems to be that all men are totally depraved sinners who can be saved only by the grace of God exhibited in Christ’s vicarious atonement. Therefore no one should be anxious about anything, least of all hell, for God has mercy on all, and even the unrepentant thief was saved: “Peter and the remaining disciples could only ‘get in line behind’ the two criminals who were first and up front. This is true for men of all times” (p 82).

GORDON H. CLARK

Unity In Communion

The Bread Which We Break, by G. D. Yarnold (Oxford, 1960, 112 pp., 10s. 6d.), is reviewed by Lewis B. Smedes, Professor of Bible, Calvin College.

The moment at which all Christians are most really united and most obviously divided is the moment when the one loaf is broken. The bread which we break is the one loaf, but we break it in isolation from one another. How long shall we go on acting as though there were many loaves?

Dr. Yarnold’s book is a small contribution to a better understanding of the meaning of the one loaf broken in commemoration of the death of our one Lord. He has, as an Anglican, given a charitable and lucid account of the sacrament in Scripture, in history, and in implications for the future. Though I have put several question marks in the margins of Dr. Yarnold’s exposition, I have also put several Amens. Take, for instance, the matter of the real presence of Christ. “Sacramental grace is essentially and really a personal influence mediated through covenanted means Christ is personally present to faith in the sacrament, and so imparts Himself personally to those who apprehend His presence” (p. 92). It is this real personal influence of our Lord on the faithful which creates the basis for the unity of faithful Christians across denominational borders. God grant that it may be more widely realized in visible fact.

LEWIS B. SMEDES

Conversion Analyzed

The Battle for the Soul, by Owen Brandon (Hodder & Stoughton, 1959, 94 pp., 4s. 6d.), is reviewed by John Gwyn-Thomas, Rector, Illogan, Cornwall, England.

Interest in the topic of conversion has recently been further stimulated by Dr. Sargent’s The Battle for the Mind, and Mr. Brandon, who lectures in pastoral psychology at the London College of Divinity, has felt it the right moment to set forth the fruits of his own studies and wide reading on the subject. His aim is to give “a psychological and pastoral study of conversion in order to raise the most important questions for pastoral practice.” Although written from an evangelical standpoint, not everyone will be satisfied with the author’s interpretation of the experiences of some of his cases nor indeed of the angle of approach to what he calls “the special type of religious propaganda which we generally call evangelism.” Forthright comments are given, specially on pages 69–77, on the serious consequences of some types of modern evangelism, and these are reinforced by Mr. Brandon’s own pastoral experience. All engaged in the task of soul winning will profit from the discussions on Premature Decision, The Lapsed Convert, and Ethical Standards in Evangelism. The conclusion is that “the best evangelistic work can be done by the resident minister who is trained for the work and who has behind him all the spiritual reserves inherent in the life of the Church, in its fellowship, its worship, its sacraments and its services.”

This is a timely book which will be valuable for Christian workers. But though it was far from the author’s intention, an uneasy suspicion lurks that with an emphasis on psychological analysis and methods, the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit is relegated to the background.

JOHN GWYN-THOMAS

Campbell Morgan Lectures

The Word of God for Abraham and Today, by Donald J. Wiseman (Westminster Chapel, 1959, 20 pp., 1s. 6d.) and The Dead Sea Scrolls and St. John’s Gospel, by Leon Morris (Westminster Chapel, 1960, 21 pp., 1s. 6d.), are reviewed by Gervase E. Duffield, Manager, London Office, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

These two lectures seek to shed light on the Bible by means of recent discoveries. Mr. Wiseman of the British Museum explodes the scholars’ legend of Abraham as a mythical tribal hero. He describes Abraham’s background and the customs of the ancient Near East, but his precise date is still uncertain. Genesis 23 reflects an accurate and early knowledge of Hittite law, and Genesis 15 tallies with ancient Babylonian ideas of inheritance. A detailed picture of life at Ur is given, and throughout specialist knowledge enlivens the background of God’s dealings with the patriarch.

Dr. Morris weighs the difference and similarities between Qumran and John, and concludes that Christianity’s uniqueness remains unchallenged because Christ makes the difference, but that the Fourth Gospel is Palestinian, now that the ideas and vocabulary—previously thought by some to be Hellenistic—have appeared on the shores of the Dead Sea. Ample quotations are given to enable the readers to judge the degree of harmony for themselves.

GERVASE E. DUFFIELD

Medical Analogies

The Heart of Things, by Nathaniel Beattie (Victory Press, 1960, 119 pp., 8s.6d.), is reviewed by Stanley H. Gould, Medical Practitioner, Cambridge, England.

Dr. Beattie is both doctor and minister, and therefore well qualified to write on spiritual analogies from medical science. The book is informative, interesting and without any rivals. The author takes a series of vital human organs, discusses their structure and function, and then deduces spiritual applications. Thus he writes on the human blood, explains its main functions, and then takes the word in Scripture and shows its vital importance in the Christian faith. In this way, the heart, the nerves, the eye, the ear, sleep, and dietetics are handled. Dr. Beattie includes a very useful chapter on fear and the Gospel answer to it. Faith in Christ, he insists, has a healing influence on the whole man, body and spirit. Lack of a vital link with God and neglect of the spiritual life are the most serious causes of nervous disorders. The book is not a scientific treatise: the facts are essentially basic. Nevertheless, it is full of robust common sense, evangelical fervor, and biblical teaching. It should prove particularly valuable to young people.

STANLEY H. GOULD

Mission To Children

The Good Seed: The Story of the Children’s Special Service Mission and the Scripture Union, by J. C. Pollock (Hodder and Stoughton, 1959, 254 pp., Illustrated, 12s. 6d.), is reviewed by F. K. Drayson, The Wirral, Cheshire, England.

Founded on a Welsh beach in 1867 by Josiah Spiers, an eccentric with a real gift for Christian work amongst the young, the Children’s Special Service Mission is now one of the most influential evangelical organizations in the British Commonwealth. One of its offshoots is the Scripture Union, a worldwide Bible reading system with literature in more than a hundred different languages, and with over a million members. It is easy to criticize the work of the CSSM and the views of the characters who appear in the pages of this book. Particularly with the earlier men, one wishes that they had worked in closer co-operation with the local churches, and that they had pondered more carefully the biblical teaching on the work of the Spirit in conversion. Nevertheless, it was a work which God honored, and the quality and devotion of the men who guided it are self-evident. Throughout, it has remained faithful in its evangelicalism, and there must be few Christians, at any rate in Great Britain, who have not learned to their profit from its workers or from its literature. Many owe their conversion as children to its work on beaches, at camps, in schools, and elsewhere.

Those who look for a critical history will be disappointed, for Mr. Pollock does not set out to write this. Instead, he gives us a series of sketches of men and events which have shaped the story of the CSSM, though sometimes he tends to describe what is interesting rather than what is important. With the overseas work, one almost feels that some topics are brought in largely for the sake of mentioning another country. In a book of this sort, opinions will vary on the choice of subjects; the reviewer would like to have read more of the work in the English Public Schools and of the Caravan Mission to Village Children. Perhaps some day a fuller history will be published, and it is to be hoped that it will include an apology for the existence of a mission to children. Some of our forefathers would have preferred to seek to influence families through the parents rather than through their children, and who shall say if their method was not wiser?

F. K. DRAYSON

Disorder, A Sign Of Life

The Spirit of Protestantism, by Robert McAfee Brown (Oxford, 1961, 264 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Edward John Carnell, Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion, Fuller Theological Seminary.

To appreciate the scope of this work, one need imagine what would be involved, were he to undertake a defense of Protestantism. The author of this sparkling book has done a good job. He sees Protestantism as an ongoing dialogue between those who have received Christ as Saviour, and who thereby accept God’s judgment against their lives, that they may live by grace alone.

Since the author is so consistently charitable in his judgments, I can only assume that he enjoys a remarkable freedom from personal hostility. Many writers (myself not excluded) would be tempted to vent their spleen when they face elements in Protestantism which have little respect for classical traditions, and which place the Protestant position in a bad light by their contempt for an educated ministry, their disparagement of liturgies, their separation from the communion of the saints and general culture, and their endless proliferation into splinter denominations and demagogically-controlled sects.

The author deftly reverses the field by insisting that the disorder in Protestantism is really a sign of life—like a house which is being occupied by an active family. He contends that Protestants should find ways to manifest the unity they already have (unity in Christ), rather than rushing about looking for ways to create unity.

The major weakness in the book, as I see it, is in biblical authority. We are left with the vague criterion that “the Bible witnesses to Christ.” How this criterion can illuminate difficulties in exegesis and hermeneutics is not clearly explained.

The extensive notes in the back of the book are a gold mine of bibliographic references and parenthetic comments. And when the author deals with the dialogue between Protestants and Catholics—well, he is simply superb. May this book enjoy the wide reading that it justly deserves.

EDWARD JOHN CARNELL

Sober Lesson From Kagawa

Kagawa of Japan, by Cyril J. Davey (Abingdon Press, 1960, 150 pp., $2.50), is reviewed by Calvin D. Linton, Professor of English Literature and Dean of Columbian College, The George Washington University.

This is one of those rather rare products in the world of religious publication: a book of genuine literary merit, professionally competent in all departments of the writer’s craft. And to those who believe that Christianity is primarily an ethical system, not a plan of redemption, it will be doubly gratifying, for, as all know, Toyohiko Kagawa consistently emphasized service over doctrine. “To Kagawa,” writes Dr. Davey, “Jesus Christ has never been a subject for theological argument. He would have found it possible to worship God, in love, even without the revelation of Jesus.” Jesus’ own words to the contrary will echo in the minds of many readers, but even for them there is in Kagawa’s life a sober lesson. This man’s hope for the restoration of the world may ultimately have rested upon the insecure foundation of man’s innate goodness working through constantly improved social instruments, but his works far outshone those of many who, while more scripturally rooted, have forgotten the warning that faith without works is dead.

Dr. Davey, who has published some forty books and plays in England, is minister at Epsom, in the Sutton (Surrey) Circuit of the Methodist Church of England. He has here written what is at once an exciting narrative, a sensitive and illuminating book about Japan and its people, and a stirring account of what power is generated when only one human being truly tries to put the ethical teachings of Christ into practice.

CALVIN D. LINTON

In A Manly Way

Man to Man, by Richard C. Halverson (Cowman, 1961, 259 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Charles Ferguson Ball, Pastor, First Presbyterian Church, River Forest, Illinois.

It is not given to many men to be able to speak in a manly way to the hearts of men. It seems quite evident from reading this book that Dr. Halverson is gifted beyond many in saying the vital things to meet the need of the hour. His messages are pungent and they reach home. His vast experience in personal work has fitted him to reach the hearts of people who think and seek the answers to life’s great questions.

Here are 92 pithy two-page articles arranged in eight chapters, covering questions that are uppermost in a man’s thinking today. They all call for a verdict. They are refreshing and they get quickly to the point and also straight to the heart.

CHARLES FERGUSON BALL

Bibliography Limited

Introducing Christian Ethics, by Henlee H. Barnette (Broadman, 1961, 176 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by Bert Hall, Interim Dean and Professor of Philosophy, Houghton College.

The problem of any systematic treatment of ethics is to state principles and suggest applications so that the reader may clarify his own views of the good life. The author has nobly accomplished this in a straightforward style and has produced a readable work for the beginner in ethics.

The two parts of the book are by no means equal in value. Part I discusses the “Principles” of Christian ethics. The author paraphrases through the Old Testament books and briefly introduces us to ethics of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. In scattered references he reveals an objective bias by adherence to the theory of evolution (pp. 16, 88), the views of higher critics (p. 35), and the heavy Stoic influence on Paul (p. 74). The author never clearly builds the New Testament ethic upon the new man in Christ, but sees the example and teaching of Jesus as His chief value.

The chapter on the Holy Spirit well covers the action of the Spirit in personal life and conduct, but sadly neglects His work in Christian witnessing and evangelistic power.

The second part of the book, discussing the “Problems” of practical Christian ethics, is intensely valuable for the systematic collection of principles in concrete areas of action. The chapter on “Marriage and the Family” is especially helpful.

Each chapter is documented with footnotes from current books and periodicals, but the evangelical reader will note with apprehension the complete lack of evangelical authors in the references or recommended readings. Was Mr. Barnette left in ignorance of outstanding evangelical works such as Carl F. H. Henry’s Christian Personal Ethics and John Murray’s Principles of Conduct while he did his research at Harvard?

BERT HALL

Work Remains To Be Done

A Christian Approach to Education: A Bibliocentric View, by H. W. Byrne (Zondervan, 1961, 362 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by C. Adrian Heaton, President, California Baptist Theological Seminary.

There is a deep hunger among evangelical Christians to find a comprehensive, consistent philosophy of education growing out of the authoritative Bible. H. W. Byrne, Dean of the Fort Wayne Bible College, presents in this volume his attempt to be comprehensive, definitive, and thoroughly biblical. The publishers state on the book’s jacket that “He deals specifically with every phase of the educational picture in this comprehensive work—vast in scope, practical in application, concise in presentation, and almost limitless in its broad understanding of the educational process.” With such a lead, the reviewer read this book in happy expectation.

There are three major sections. The first attempts to state the Christian theistic world view and its implications for the construction of a Christian philosophy of education. The second part of the book deals with the educational process and the school system. Aims, teacher-pupil relationships, the curriculum, and methods are given special attention. The final section of the book is an attempt to delineate the special contributions of five fields of study: biblical studies, social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, and communicative skills. The volume also has an extensive bibliography, a glossary of philosophical terminology, and an index.

In spite of the soundness of the assumption that the Bible is authoritative and is the basis of educational philosophy, the book was a great disappointment to the reviewer. Many sentences were simply incomprehensible. Some were not true to fact. Here are just a few illustrations of the inadequate statements that appear in the book.

“Protestantism resulted from a revolt against the Roman church. It advocated a return to Christian theism as advanced by Jesus and the early church” (p. 26). Surely the author must know that the Roman church has perhaps done as much as any other to formulate Christian theism.

“Non-rational creation is that part of creation without the power of exercising the qualities of personality, primary of which are intelligence, reason, including all levels of creation below that of man” (p. 47).

“Having the conviction that God has revealed Himself of mankind, the Christian educator begins both his concepts and practices in education with God, believing as he does that Christian education is actually a re-interpretation of God’s interpretation” (p. 67).

“The principle of self-activity demands that the teacher control the activity of the pupil in the right direction and often in that direction” (pp. 142, 143).

It is our hope that others will attempt to spell out a comprehensive Christian philosophy of education based on a sound biblical faith.

C. ADRIAN HEATON

Tempted To Envy

A Psychology for Preaching, by Edgar N. Jackson, (Channel Press, 1961, 181 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by Andrew W. Blackwood, Sr., Professor Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary.

This is an able book by a “liberal evangelical” who excels in clever negations. The first two chapters, in content and form, show all sorts of welcome insights. The other seven chief parts move on a more familiar level. As a whole the volume should awake many a conservative minister and send him to his knees before the open Bible to ask God why he cannot make his Bible-centered pulpit work as practical and, in the right sense, as “hearer-minded” as that of this master in applied psychology. Many of us learn far more of value by careful perusal of such a book than by enjoying one that tells us only what we already know and believe. In time this man should take a worthy place among liberal authors whose books tempt the rest of us to envy mastery of the writer’s art.

ANDREW W. BLACKWOOD

Sermons By A Master

Can I Know God?, by W. E. Sangster (Abingdon, 1960, 176 pp., $2.75), is reviewed by C. Philip Hinerman, Minister, Park Avenue Methodist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The recent death of W. E. Sangster, beloved evangelical pastor of Westminster Central Hall, London, caused the entire Christian world to feel its sense of loss. No other British preacher in this generation preached to such large congregations with a heart more warm and more truly evangelistic than this great soul.

In the lingering months of his life, in the midst of great suffering and pain, his faith did not fail him, but through a ministry of prayer and intercession he did keep the faith.

All of this is relevant to this review, for the book glows with the warm faith of the author. This is evangelical preaching and also evangelistic preaching. When these sermons were preached they doubtless moved the auditors deeply.

In The Path to Perfection (his Ph.D. thesis, revised for publication), Sangster proved his scholarly ability. Although he wrote rather voluminously in a popular vein thereafter, he resisted almost to the end the temptation to publish a book of sermons. In the preface to this volume, he makes an apologetic defense for the publication of the book. These sermons in printed form are transparently simple, full of tempting illustrations—and easy to purloin!

C. PHILIP HINERMAN

Joy In Reminiscence

Out of My Life, by V. Raymond Edman (Zondervan, 1961, 224 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by C. Ralston Smith, Pastor, First Presbyterian Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

A college student who cancels a summer steamship job to keep his contract with the Lord—a doughboy who successfully seeks assurance from God concerning his assignments—a professor who avoids the meeting which might open up a new job for him—an educator who waxes enthusiastic about religious experiences—a president who joins the student body in seasons of prayer—all these are included in the sketches which trace the interesting life of Dr. Edman. The book of reminiscences is not exhaustive nor entirely autobiographical. It is rather a series of interesting experiences, mostly subjective and personal, showing the guidance of God which is given to those who walk close with him.

Anything coming from the pens and hearts of the official family at Wheaton College would be conservative in its theological tenor. So is this book, but without the rigidity which is sometimes ascribed to those who believe in the fundamentals of our faith. The predominant note struck in recounting these episodes is that of joy. While there is the over-all feeling that “the good guys always win in the end,” yet the testimony of the faithfulness of God prevails when the desire is unrealized, too. One or two instances of intimate experiences with God are told without maudlin sentimentality or vulgar boldness. Scriptural references and phrases are sprinkled throughout. Jeremiah 29:11 is quoted repeatedly, “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.” This epitomizes the main thrust of the book.

The poems of Amy Carmichael and a few others are used wisely and with effect. The book should have a warm reception among evangelicals generally and within the Wheaton family especially.

C. RALSTON SMITH

Book Briefs

In Christ, by E. Stanley Jones (Abingdon, 1961, 380 pp., $2.50). Short devotional meditations on the New Testament for each day of the year.

The Treasury for Special Days and Occasions, compiled by E. Paul Hovey (Revell, 1961, 317 pp., $3.95). More than 1,200 inspirational anecdotes, quotations, and illustrations.

Lift Up Your Life, by Morris Goldstein (Philosophical Library, 1961, 194 pp., $4.75). Practical rules for daily living by a rabbi who has taught for more than a decade at Pacific School of Religion; how to capitalize on “chance and luck.”

Bible Light on Daily Life, by Philip E. Howard, Jr. (Baker, 1960, 213 pp., $2.50). Pithy counsel of wisdom and grace for daily devotions.

Effective Readings for Special Days and Occasions, by Laura S. Emerson (Zondervan, 1961, 118 pp., $1.95). For various church-related occasions, from bridal shower to missionary convention.

How Can These Things Be?, by Bill H. Lewis (Zondervan, 1961, 87 pp., $1.95). Sermons on Christian maturity by a Southern Baptist evangelist.

Time Out, by Al Bryant (Zondervan, 1961,182 pp., $1.95). A year’s daily devotions for the young.

Monser’s Topical Index and Digest of the Bible, by Harold E. Monser (Baker, 1960, 681 pp., $5.95). A volume which makes more widely available the valuable topical analyses in Monser’s Cross-Reference Bible.

Children and Religion, by Dora P. Chaplin (Scribner’s, 1961, 238 pp., $3.95). A realistic and practical educational guide for parents and teachers.

Reprints

Handbook of Denominations in the United States, by Frank S. Mead (Abingdon, 1961, 272 pp., $2.95). Second revised edition of a fair and concise record of U. S. denominations’ history, doctrines, organization, and present status—a most helpful volume by the editor-in-chief of Fleming H. Revell Co.

Near to God, by Abraham Kuyper (Eerdmans, 1961, 108 pp., $2). Selected meditations from the devotional classic To be Near unto God (trans. by John Hendrik de Vries) by the great Dutch theologian and statesman.

Life of John Knox, by Thomas M’Crie (The Publications Committee of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, 1960, 294 pp., 8s). Reappearance of a premier nineteenth-century biography of Knox as part of Scottish Reformation fourth centenary observance.

History of Interpretation, by Frederic W. Farrar (Baker, 1961, 553 pp., $6.95). The 1885 Bampton Lectures, comprising what Bernard Ramm has called “the only great history of hermeneutics in English.”

Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible, edited by Leslie F. Church (Zondervan, 1960, 784 pp., $9.95). Monumental commentary abridged to one volume.

Paperbacks

The World’s Great Scriptures, by Lewis Browne (Macmillan, 1961, 559 pp., $2.95). Anthology of sacred books of ten principal religions (first published in 1946).

Reinhold Niebuhr, edited by Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall (Macmillan, 1961, 486 pp., $1.95). Essays of interpretation and criticism of Niebuhr’s work by 20 scholars (first published in 1956).

The Quest of the Historical Jesus, by Albert Schweitzer (Macmillan, 1961, 413 pp., $1.95). The famed Alsatian’s first important work, published in German in 1906, interpreting the life of Christ on the basis of “thoroughgoing eschatology,” which attributed to Jesus a crude, mistaken apocalypticism.

The Sacred and the Profane, by Mircea Eliade (Harper, 1961, 256 pp., $1.45). Treats the significance of religious myth, symbolism, and ritual within life and culture (trans. into English from French in 1959).

The Great Religions by which Men Live, by Floyd H. Ross and Tynette Hills (Fawcett, 1961, 192 pp., $.50). A study of world religions which unfortunately purports to “point the way to a larger faith”; primary allegiance given to “that pattern of divinity as it emerges in all things human” (first published in 1954).

The Protestant Reformation, by Robert G. Torbet (Judson, 1961, 96 pp., $1). Rather brief survey published for the Cooperative Publication Association, an interdenominational agency to provide study materials for older youth and young adult groups.

Love and Conflict, by Gibson Winter (Doubleday, 1961, 200 pp., $.95). An attempt to understand modern strains upon family life. The deepest ill: anxiety which keeps us from talking out our conflicts (first published in 1958).

The Next Day, by James A. Pike (Doubleday, 1961, 197 pp., $.95). A “how to” book for personal crises, including how to: know yourself, sleep, stay married, die (first published in 1957).

Directory of Christian Colleges in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific, Latin America, and the Caribbean, compiled by Clara E. Orr (Missionary Research Library, 1961, 38 pp., $1.50). Expanded revision of a monograph first published in 1955.

What is the significance of the Peace Corps for churches in general and the Protestant missionary enterprise in particular?

To learn the answers, CHRISTIANITY TODAYwent to Bill D. Moyers, a graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas, who is now an associate director of the Peace Corps. Here is an exclusive interview with Mr. Moyers:

Q: Just what is the purpose of the Peace Corps?

A: The Peace Corps will provide talented Americans to do needed jobs in newly-developing countries of the world. Many of these countries have leadership at the top—people trained at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and other institutions in the West and in the Communist bloc—and there is usually an abundance of unskilled labor at the other end of the economic ladder. The missing link is manpower at the middle level: teachers, electricians, home economists, government clerks, nurses’ aides, farmers, water and sanitation experts, medical technicians, and so on. Peace Corps volunteers will go to do this work—and I emphasize very strongly that they will be doers, performing operational functions—and in the process will teach local people to do the work themselves.

Perhaps Senator Humphrey has best summed up the basic purposes of the Peace Corps. In a discussion in the United States Senate, he stated: “… the purpose of this bill is to develop a genuine people-to-people program in which talented and dedicated young Americans will teach basic agricultural and industrial techniques, literacy, the English language, and other school subjects, sanitation and health procedures in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”

Q: To what extent will there be co-operation with private agencies?

A: Some of our projects will be administered by private agencies. Thirty projects, for example, have already been proposed to the Peace Corps by various agencies. These projects will be reviewed in the light of Peace Corps standards and criteria to see if the selection, training and compensation of the volunteers meet established standards and to determine if the project is in fact worthwhile and efficiently administered. We are anxious to encourage and co-operate with these private agencies.

Q: Will you co-operate with religious, sectarian, or semi-religious agencies?

A: No project which meets Peace Corps criteria and standards will be barred from receiving Peace Corps support because it is sponsored by a religious or sectarian group, provided the project does not further any religious, sectarian, commercial or propaganda cause or releases funds for such purposes.

Q: Will you encourage liaison with U.S. missionaries and missions boards?

A: We have already been in touch with many missionaries individually and with several of the boards. I recently discussed at length methods of personnel selection with the chief personnel official of one of the larger Protestant mission boards. Just the other day three members of our staff conferred for more than two hours with two missionaries returning from Africa. I cite these examples to illustrate how deeply we feel that the Peace Corps can learn from the experiences of dedicated missionaries.

Q: Will personnel be assigned only on request from a foreign government?

A: That’s correct. The Peace Corps will not send volunteers unless a host government wants them. And they will go to do the jobs which that government believes are definitely needed for economic development and social progress. The initiative must come from an interested country.

Q: Does the Peace Corps welcome applications from people currently in church-related vocations? From ministers and priests? From members of religious orders?

A: We welcome questionnaires from all Americans. Whether or not a certain person is accepted for service will depend on the need for his skill in the countries having projects and on his meeting standard Peace Corps criteria.

Q: Will the training program include a briefing on America’s religious complex?

A: One of the important emphases in the training program will be courses in American culture and history. This will include study of all phases of our national life—labor, business, government, and, of course, religion.

International Diplomacy And The Church

The philosophy behind establishment of the Peace Corps has won much enthusiastic support among some churchmen, but others have expressed deep anxieties. Some observers contend that the Peace Corps program further secularizes the orientation of the notion of “peace” by associating it one-sidely with physical aid rather than with the spiritual dynamism promulgated by the Christian religion. In other words, these observers say, for the Church’s saints-to-sinners program it tends to substitute a sinners-to-sinners helping hand.

Certain religious leaders are now concerned over the future of church activity in this area if government becomes recognized as the prime arbiter of peace. Some churchmen who view Christian missionary activity as primarily sociological are not especially troubled, except for the possibility of secular competition devoid entirely of Christian idealism. Others who recognize that the problem of peace is primarily theological hesitate to see a growing theological government monopoly of humanitarian programs on a secular basis. If religion is made irrelevant and excluded, they ask, are not the Communists thereby given an opportunity to fill in an ideological gap?

Some Protestant spokesmen state the dilemma this way: If the churches stay out of the Peace Corps, it is bound to be secular. If they jump in, it will ultimately be exploited for sectarian ends.

Q: What are the most important qualifications you are looking for in personnel?

A: Peace Corps volunteers should have a level of intelligence sufficiently high to meet the job demands of a particular project and to cope with certain basic challenges they will encounter wherever they serve. They should be able to learn rapidly in a stepped-up training program of three to six months. They should be adaptable in the face of unexpected demands. We want them to know enough about American history and our social and political institutions to be able to answer questions intelligently.

We are looking for men and women who have the physical condition that will enable them to sustain the stresses of their work. Emotional stability will be important, too; a volunteer should be able to handle periods of heightened stress that might be involved in cultural shock, isolation, danger, and physical discomfort.

A volunteer will also need personality qualities that will enable him to establish effective relationships with people in other countries. Is he friendly? Patient? Sensitive? Dedicated to the service of others? Willing to look at problems from others’ viewpoints? Does he have a sense of mission coupled with good judgment? Does he respect other people regardless of their race, religion, or origin? These are essential questions.

And of course, the volunteer will have to demonstrate a level of competence in giving a service or performing a task.

Q: Will an anti-Communist or loyalty oath be required?

A: During the pilot phases of the Peace Corps, volunteers will sign contracts for their service with the Peace Corps. The law does not make any provision for anti-Communist or loyalty oaths by contractors, and none will be required. However, a careful examination of the references, qualifications and background of all volunteers will be conducted to assure that any volunteers eventually going abroad for service in the Peace Corps will be the finest examples of American men and women.

The Peace Corps plans to submit legislation to Congress permanently establishing the Peace Corps. That legislation will propose that volunteers be employees of the United States in a Peace Corps volunteer service. As such, volunteers would take the oath required of all Government officers and employees, pledging loyalty to the United States. If such legislation is enacted, the Peace Corps would still propose to conduct careful background examinations of all persons accepted for training in the volunteer service.

Q: Who will supervise Peace Corps representatives in the field?

A: Peace Corps volunteer leaders—older and more experienced people—will be on hand to provide counsel in time of need, to handle logistic support for the projects, and to be on the lookout for difficulties in job relations or personal adjustment.

Q: How will you insure against exploitation of Peace Corps activity by private and religious agencies?

A: By carefully selecting each agency with whom the Peace Corps signs a contract. One of the criteria will be that agency’s past experience in the administration of overseas projects. Even though each contract carries an option of termination, we believe these agencies will demonstrate good faith.

Q: Can you give specific examples of what the Peace Corps volunteers will do?

A: Let’s look at the first announced project. The government of Tanganyika has requested Peace Corps volunteers to survey feeder roads that will enable the small farmers of Tanganyika to bring their produce to the main market centers. Construction cannot go forward until critical surveys and alignments have been made. The Minister of Finance for Tanganyika told the Peace Corps that his country can produce only two Tanganyikans trained in land survey work in the next five years. He said this is hopelessly inadequate for the basic planning in many of the development schemes.

Peace Corps volunteers will survey these roads and will also conduct some geological surveys in selected areas of Tanganyika. In addition, they will train young Tanganyikans in the methods of surveying and engineering.

Incidentally, the Government of Tanganyika has indicated that without Peace Corps assistance it would have to cut back seriously the presently-planned feeder road program.

Q: What is your own biggest apprehension?

A: I am anxious to see if the response to the Peace Corps in this country will match the requests for service from abroad—in other words, can we find enough competent and dedicated young adults to meet the demand? I guess the big question is, are we willing to demonstrate in peace the measure of sacrifice and self-discipline we have exercised twice this century in war?

People: Words And Events

Deaths: Dr. Harold Paul Sloan, 80, retired editor of the Methodist Christian Advocate; in Camden, New Jersey.… Miss Elisabeth E. Turner, 61, executive secretary of administrative services of the United Presbyterian Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations; in New York.… Mrs. Emma Bailey Speer, 88, honorary president of the national board of the Young Women’s Christian Association; in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.… Dr. Herman H. Hohenstein, 67, pioneer Lutheran radio preacher; in St. Louis.

Appointments: As president of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Dr. Clifford E. Barbour. He will retire in June of 1962 … as Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg, Dr. Leslie Edward Stradling … as president of Oklahoma Baptist University, Dr. James Ralph Scales … as professor in preaching and worship at the Saint Paul School of Theology (formerly known as the National Methodist Theological Seminary), Dr. Lee C. Moorehead … as professor of Protestant theology in the School of Religion of the State University of Iowa, Dr. George W. Forell … as Lutheran tutor at Oxford University, the Rev. Franklin E. Sherman … as editor-in-chief of American Baptist publications, Dr. Glenn H. Asquith … as secretary of publicity for the General Council of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S., William P. Lamkin … as director of the Methodist World-Wide Prayer Life Movement, the Rev. G. Byron Deshler … as executive director of the Missouri Council of Churches, Dr. Stanley I. Stuber … as editor of The Sunday School Times, the Rev. James W. Reapsome … as director of the Interchurch Center in New York, Dr. M. Forest Ashbrook … as minister of National City Christian Church, Washington, D. C., Dr. George R. Davis.

Quote: “Never before have we had as many causes to blow the trumpets as today. It would not be possible to enumerate all of the victories, for they are too many, but Christianity is neither dead nor dying. If you believe it be dead or dying, then I would examine myself and not Christianity”—Bishop W. Angie Smith, in an address before the Methodist Board of Evangelism.

Protestant Panorama

• A Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama, drew world-wide attention last month when it became the scene of one of a series of race riots. National Guardsmen evacuated 1,500 Negroes from the church where they had remained overnight after a howling white mob of 1,200 to 1,500 persons attempted to invade the building. The mob descended on the church in protest of an anti-segregation campaign rally being held there.

• Long-standing plans for joint operation of Austin (Texas) Presbyterian Theological Seminary by the nation’s two largest Presbyterian denominations were cancelled last month. The cancellation was attributed to lack of sufficient financial resources on the part of the Council on Theological Education of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. Seminary control will revert to the Presbyterian Church in the U. S.

• Methodism’s new “Cathedral of the West,” the First Methodist Church of Glendale, California, was opened last month. The contemporary, $1,300,000 structure has been under construction for 18 months. Dr. Kenneth A. Carlson is minister.

• A new monthly magazine sponsored by Protestants and Other Americans United made its debut last month. Titled Church and State, it will succeed an eight-page monthly news bulletin, Church and State Review, which the organization has published for 13 years.

• HCJB, world’s first missionary radio station, announced last month the establishment of the world’s first missionary television station. A pact with the Ecuadorian government provides for television transmission from Quito. Programs already are being aired three nights a week, and the schedule will be stepped up to a six-night week within six months.

• Dr. Geoffrey Francis Fisher declared shortly before his retirement as Archbishop of Canterbury, May 31, that differences between Roman Catholics and other churches are “dissolving rapidly.” He made the remark in a television address.

• More than 4,000 persons registered decisions for Christ in evangelistic campaigns conducted by Hyman Appelman during the first four months of 1961.

• Statesmen and churchmen joined in a memorial service at the Interchurch Center in New York City that eulogized the late John Foster Dulles. The service of remembrance was held last month in the center’s chapel in connection with the dedication of the John Foster Dulles Library and Research Center.

• Donald Ethington, 28, winner of a Carnegie medal for heroism, says he will turn over the accompanying $500 check to an Assemblies of God church for missionary work. Ethington, of Brownfield, Texas, helped to rescue a youth who had slumped in a window and was about to fall from a grain elevator 163 feet above the ground. The rescued youth subsequently died.

• The Congo Protestant Relief Agency announced last month that at least seven medical doctors would be leaving this summer for service in Congo.

• Headquarters of the American Scientific Affiliation, a national organization of evangelicals engaged in scientific work, are being moved to Mankato, Minnesota, from West Lafayette, Indiana.

• Officials of the Far East Broadcasting Company dedicated the facilities of a new radio station on Okinawa last month. A four-tower directional antenna system will beam Christian programs into mainland China.

• The Mennonite Church of God in Christ is establishing missionary work in Nigeria. Four couples are expected to be assigned by next fall.

• A ceremony marked the setting of a date stone last month at the American Baptist national office and graphic arts building now under construction at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The $8,500,000 structure is said to be half-completed. Complete occupancy is scheduled for next spring.

Cohen and Christianity

Details of an apparently unsuccessful attempt to see the conversion of ex-gangster Mickey Cohen were disclosed in a Los Angeles courtroom last month.

William C. Jones, publisher and noted Christian layman, testified that he had spent more than $4,500 on Cohen in the course of trying to convince him of his need of Christian regeneration.

The testimony was given during a trial in which the government sought to prove that Cohen has evaded payment of $400,000 in taxes.

Mrs. Eleanor Churchin, a press agent, testified that the change-of-religion idea was hers. She said she sought to make it a publicity stunt—against Cohen’s wishes—for a book on Cohen’s life that she wanted to write.

Jim Vaus, former underworld colleague of Cohen but now a noted Christian youth worker, said he also had loaned considerable money to the ex-gangster.

Jones told the court that in 1957 he met with Cohen in a restaurant for nearly five hours.

Jones said he asked him:

“Mickey, would you like to make this decision now?”

“He said yes.”

The two then drove to Cohen’s apartment where, Jones said, they prayed together for 20 minutes and “he turned his life over to Christ in my presence.”

“I said, ‘Mickey, if what you’ve done is not from your heart you are in for trouble.’”

Twice Cohen’s attorney approached the bench seeking to halt the testimony. Cohen’s teen-age girl friend fled the courtroom, crying.

Jones said he told Cohen: “You are my Christian brother and I want to share your needs.”

The money included $400 for plane fare to New York, where Cohen was to make a formal confession in the presence of evangelist Billy Graham.

But in New York Cohen backed down and Jones “berated Mickey for misusing the intent of the trip.”

Jones said he also paid a $507 hotel bill for Cohen’s suite in the Waldorf-Astoria, and a $1,299 attorney fee. In addition, Jones declared that he had given Cohen more than $1,000 spending money.

“It was all an outright gift,” Jones said, “not a loan.”

“I considered it a privilege to try to turn this deficit on society [Cohen] into an asset.”

The Korean Coup

All Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries in South Korea were reported to have safely weathered the spectacularly efficient and virtually bloodless coup d’etat which overthrew the democratic government of Prime Minister John Chang.

Chang, a Roman Catholic, ruled for less than a year after the fall of the Rhee regime and failed to win wide popular support.

Dr. Lan Robb, a medical missionary of the United Church of Canada, was said to have been injured in the revolt and treated at a hospital.

Leader of Korea’s new military government is Lieutenant General Do Yong Chang, widely respected as “one of the most honest officers in the ROK armies.” He is a Presbyterian and his wife a Methodist.

Popular opinion, which had been increasingly critical of government corruption and growingly apprehensive of the rise of Communist influence in South Korea, quickly swung to the support of the new regime in spite of strong efforts by American military and government officials to save the old government. American concern was to preserve democratic freedoms and to keep the military out of politics. Koreans are more interested in stability and security.

For a time following the revolt, some threat of civil war hung over the Far Eastern peninsula. Some observers had feared that continued American support of the fallen government might arouse the First ROK Army, which is led by a Catholic general, to oppose the Second Army coup and to seek to restore the Catholic prime minister.

Crusade in Tokyo

SMOKE OF BATTLE STILL HANGS OVER TOKYO, BUT LIGHT OF GOD SHINES THROUGH.

So cabled a World Vision spokesman at the mid-point of the Tokyo Christian Crusade.

The month-long evangelistic campaign led by World Vision President Bob Pierce, scheduled to draw to a close June 4, had been launched amidst controversy exploited by leftists.

Even Moscow Radio attacked the Tokyo evangelistic effort:

“The true objectives of World Vision, a false religious organization of American business circles, are the strengthening of Japan’s dependence on the United States and expansion of the anti-Communist campaign.”

A small group of Japanese pastors have been protesting the Tokyo government’s decision to lease Meiji Auditorium for the crusade, and leftist elements subsequently took up the cause. The ensuing dispute adversely affected crusade attendance during opening days.

However, at the half-way mark, the crusade had drawn an aggregate total of more than 81,000. Crusade leaders estimate that a reserved seat plan enabled them to establish that the total included at least 60,900 different individuals.

Evangelicals were jubilant that a crusade in a non-Christian culture had also produced in the first two weeks 3,579 persons who stepped forward at the invitation. By May 24, total aggregate attendance topped 120,000 and the total number of those responding to the Gospel invitation rose to more than 4,700.

Ailing Evangelist

For the second time in little more than two years, a disabling illness struck evangelist Billy Graham on the eve of a major crusade.

A throat infection delayed Graham’s departure for England last month. Once in London, the evangelist again became bedfast with a recurrence, and he was forced to forego meetings which had been scheduled as a prelude to the gigantic “North of England Crusade” centered in Manchester. In his place, associate evangelist Leighton Ford addressed a rally of 36,000 in Swansea, Wales.

Early in 1959, Graham’s crusade in Australia was delayed for a week after the evangelist’s left eye fell victim to a rare malady which seriously impaired vision.

At that time, Graham’s doctors forbade him to proceed with the crusade unless he agreed to speak no more than once a day.

Scroll Curbs

The government of Jordan says it will not permit foreign exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A law announced last month prohibits all transactions designed to transport any of the scrolls out of the country.

The law indicated that the scrolls are government property and a Jordanian historical inheritance, and therefore must be kept inside Jordan.

All rental money and down payments previously deposited by archeological institutions for ownership of the scrolls will be paid back, the government said.

African Challenge

Under Hong Kong’s paper lanterns Chinese men and women read Dengta. In the West Indies swarthy plantation workers peruse Caribbean Challenge. In Calcutta and Bombay, Indian readers leaf through Kiran.

All are popular-appeal Christian missionary publications available at newsstands in these cities and in dozens of others throughout the world. They represent a relatively new type of missionary endeavor designed to serve the swelling ranks of new literates. The publication which initiated this missionary literature offensive, African Challenge, marks its tenth anniversary, July 1.

African Challenge was born in Lagos, federal capital of Nigeria located along West Africa’s steaming coast, and was sponsored by the Sudan Interior Mission. It had an unheralded beginning, the first copies having been carted to the post office in a wash tub, but in the past decade it has left an indelible mark on the pages of evangelical Christian history.

Profusely illustrated and designed to reach the African “man-on-the-street” rather than church readership, the Challenge used news and educational features along with true-to-life stories to communicate the Gospel message. Inasmuch as the number of English-speaking literates in Africa seems ever to be on the increase, boys were able to sell the paper on the streets along with daily newspapers. Teachers, recognizing educational and spiritual values, ordered quantities for their schools. Missions and churches of many denominations welcomed its clear, nonsectarian Bible teaching. Sales are now up to 130,000 a month in English, with a local language edition of 40,000. Publication is subsidized by overseas donations to keep the price within reach of the masses.

Readers’ letters pour into editorial offices at the rate of 2,000–3,000 per month, asking advice on everything from fetish worship to sex problems. A follow-up system has been developed, one aspect of which encourages readers who make profession of salvation to enroll in Bible study correspondence courses. A Presbyterian mission pastor formed a “Challenge Reading Unit” to study the Bible and help in the service of the Church, and the idea spread so quickly that there are now more than 300 such reading units across Africa.

A number of other missions around the world have had their eye on the rapidly-rising level of literacy, and the outlook is for more such magazines.

SOUTHERN BAPTISTS PONDER ECUMENICITY

It looked like a massive assault on the St. Louis Blues.

Virtually filling the Missouri metropolis’ mammoth, 13,000-seat Kiel Auditorium, messengers and visitors to last month’s 104th session of the Southern Baptist Convention sang the Gospel hymns they know so well—amplified many times over—and heard the Gospel preaching to which they are accustomed, by eminent preachers of the nation’s second largest Protestant body (9,700,000 members).

Welcoming them were spiritual descendants of the first non-Roman Catholic whites to settle west of the Mississippi, whose Baptist preaching was done (1798–1799) in defiance of Spanish law in St. Louis County (“No preacher of the Gospel, save Catholic, was permitted by law to come into the province”). U.S. acquisition of the Louisiana Territory ultimately made possible the emergence of Missouri Baptists as the state’s “largest non-Catholic organization,” with 450,000 members. Early gateway to the West for Baptists, Missouri can well symbolize current Southern Baptist expansion west and north as the state’s Baptists have moved away from double alignment with northern and southern conventions to an exclusive association with southern which is virtually unanimous.

Southern Baptist leadership is divided on whether there is now something of a spiritual recession within their denomination, slackening its remarkable growth rate. Figures are cited to show such to be the case, but retiring president Ramsey Pollard, pastor of Memphis’ huge Bellevue Baptist Church, will not buy it. In his presidential address, he called for “courageous optimism,” noting the futility of building on “foundations of fear.” He raised aloft the ideal of a “militant church on fire, holding fast to its convictions.” Southern Baptist polity decrees the autonomy of the local church—the convention may not speak for it, nor indeed may the president speak for the convention. But Dr. Pollard mirrored certain grass-roots views, one of which was a disquiet over views of the Bible taught in some of their seminary classrooms. “Southern Baptists are a people of The Book and if we depart from the Word of God we are asking for trouble.… If any school, anywhere, by any name, fosters modernism, infidelity, unbelief … let that school and the guilty parties repent of sin!” An immeasurable aid to school campaigns for funds, he said, “is a continued confidence that our schools will stay by The Book. Otherwise … the Lord’s money is wasted.” Also evangelism, “our Saviour’s marching order,” was tied to the indispensable “thrust of conviction.”

Southern Baptists are noted, and at times derided, for their sensitivity to the Vatican threat to American freedom. Dr. Pollard had a warning for any who thought the religious issue dead, as he pointed to clerical demands for parochial school aid from the federal government: “Our President has shown evidence of courage and conviction in the midst of unrelenting pressure on the part of his church. It will never give up its efforts to dip its hands into the treasuries of all nations.” He warned Protestants against like efforts. “If we will not provide the funds to operate our hospitals, schools, and churches, we ought not to have them.… We have no right to use the tax dollars of the Jew to ‘preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified.’”

Praise for President Kennedy’s stand against federal aid to parochial schools came from the newly-elected convention president, Dr. Herschel H. Hobbs, minister of Oklahoma City’s First Baptist Church, and preacher on the “Baptist Hour” of television and radio. (He defeated W. O. Vaught, Jr., minister in Little Rock, Arkansas.)

The convention subsequently wired Kennedy assuring him of support for his “constitutional stand” and of prayers for him personally.

In his first press conference as president, the highly articulate Dr. Hobbs, author of some thirteen books, expressed these views:

• Communism is the greatest enemy confronting Christianity and cannot be defeated by material weapons; an idea “can be defeated only with a better idea, namely, the Gospel.”

• The activities of sit-in demonstrators and “Freedom Riders” are “extremely unfortunate” and abortive. The Gospel is the answer to the race crisis, not troops, but as leaven it needs time to work and the solutions must be local rather than national, the problems of each state varying greatly.

• On church unity, Southern Baptists cooperate with other churches where denominational principles are not compromised. They are perhaps the most broad-minded of all churchmen as they have historically fought for the right of all church groups to believe as they wish. “I personally do not believe in ecumenicalism. I do not believe that is the solution. Southern Baptists are not thinking of uniting with other groups.”

Even as United Presbyterians, meeting in Buffalo, were pushing ahead on the ecumenical trail, and Southern Baptist leaders were reaffirming their denomination’s historic doctrines, one outspoken Southern Baptist minister made news at the Pastors Conference by a plea to his brethren for more ecumenicity. Carlyle Marney, of Charlotte, North Carolina, in vivid prose lashed out at Southern Baptist aloofness from the ecumenical movement and drew a picture of “9,000,000 people running the road of emotional authoritarianism” into “a new Catholicism,” egotistically believing the salvation of the whole world to depend on them, refusing to converse with their brothers, foolishly rejecting Rauschenbusch’s emphasis on redemption of social structures as well as along individual lines, fearing criticism more than heresy, being caught in a “tragic self-centeredness that cannot endure to be examined.” Commented Dr. Pollard: “He has been making strong statements on this subject for several years, but he has not been on a Southern Baptist program before. Southern Baptists enjoy fine relationships with other bodies. Only a small, insignificant group favor organic union with other churches.”

Professor Dale Moody of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary spoke of Southern Baptist Billy Graham’s contribution to an ecumenical spirit, while Mr. Marney had reportedly drawn attention as a Southern Baptist minister in Charlotte who, of all things, refused to support the evangelist’s crusade there back in 1958.

Prime convention interest was in expansion not by merger but through evangelism and missions. The home mission board reported that next year’s drive aims toward starting 6,000 churches and missions. The foreign mission board reported a 15-year gain in number of missionaries on the field from 519 to 1,500. Of these, 535 are in Latin America and reported 17,219 converts baptized in 1960. In Baptist elementary schools. Graduates included the premier of the western region and four cabinet members.

And announcement came of several Southern Baptist leaders pledging support of a huge Tokyo evangelistic crusade in 1963, the preacher to be, tentatively, Billy Graham. It is planned as a prelude to a series of rallies in other metropolitan areas in Japan and is designed to be the final barrage in a “spiritual offensive” to thwart communism and win the world to Christ.

F. F.

UNITED PRESBYTERIANS IMPLEMENT PLAN

The following report was prepared forCHRISTIANITY TODAYby Dr. John M. Bald, associate professor of Christian ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary:

The 201 presbyteries of the 33 synods of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. sent some 975 commissioners to Buffalo, New York, last month to their 173rd General Assembly, the denomination’s highest court and deliberative body. In eight days of meetings held in spacious Kleinhans Music Hall the work of their church over the past year was carefully reviewed, and a program for the coming year proposed, seriously and prayerfully considered, and adopted.

Among first items of business was election of a moderator to preside over the meeting and to serve the denomination in the coming year as its highest officer. Four names were placed in nomination, and on the second ballot Mr. Paul D. McKelvey, a ruling elder of the Presbytery of Los Angeles who has long served the church with distinction in many capacities of leadership, was elected. Dr. Walter Dudley Cavert, among those nominated for the moderatorship, was named vice moderator. Mr. McKelvey, assisted by Dr. Cavert, conducted the meeting with fairness, grace, and skill.

Most of the business to come before the assembly was first referred to standing committees elected by the assembly. The membership of the 14 standing committees was representative of the whole denomination. They labored long and diligently in reviewing the work of the boards and agencies whose reports had been referred to them, and in considering various proposals concerned with the direction of the work of the church in the future. The committees in turn formulate their reports on the items submitted to them and present them on the floor of the assembly for discussion, debate, and action by the whole body whose members have also had opportunity to study these matters before coming to the assembly. It would be fair to observe that the strength and effectiveness of any such assembly depends upon the character of its standing committees.

Among significant actions taken was a decision that the denomination launch a program of long-range capital development. It was reported that approximately 106 million dollars would be needed by boards and agencies of the assembly to provide for long needed renovation of aging facilities and for new buildings and equipment. Mission hospitals and schools, plus seminary and college buildings, were among facilities for which such capital funds are to be sought.

Most publicized of questions to come before the assembly was the so-called “Blake Proposal” for church union. The proposal had provoked lively discussion in both the religious and secular press, and had moved nearly 50 presbyteries to petition the assembly for action. Overtures from presbyteries were first considered by the assembly’s bills and overtures committee, which then brought a comprehensive report to the floor. An attempt to amend the report by requiring that churches entering into such preliminary discussions recognize one another as true churches of Jesus Christ and as having valid ministries was defeated. Following discussion and debate on the floor, the moderator called the assembly to prayer. The assembly with but a few scattered negative votes then adopted the report which called upon the 173rd General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. to invite “the Protestant Episcopal Church meeting in general convention in Detroit, Michigan, in this same year, to join with us in an invitation to The Methodist Church and the United Church of Christ to explore the establishment of a united church truly Catholic, truly Reformed, and truly Evangelical.”

The committee on bills and overtures called attention of the assembly to the careful wording of the proposed act in which the “explore” was deliberately chosen instead of “negotiate.” One would feel justified in observing that the wording expressed the fact that the United Presbyterian Church was opening the door to fuller possibilities in the ecumenical mood of the time, but that any final judgment must await the results of the conversations called for in the report. The action was a step in the direction of church union. Only the unfolding of the providence of God will indicate how long or short a step it was.

The report of a committee on social education and action elicited spirited and lengthy debate. The committee report was in the hands of the commissioners on the day preceding its presentation to the assembly so that some opportunity for study prior to the discussion was made possible. It is difficult to assess the significance of the pronouncements of the assembly which were called for by the adoption of the report. In some instances the assembly speaks only to the United Presbyterian Church; in others, it addresses itself to the nation and to the world. Unfortunately, it is not always clear as to which is which, so that the intention of the church in its pronouncements is sometimes misunderstood both by the church and by the world. The commissioners were reminded in the preamble of this controversial report that “the action of the General Assembly on the report of this committee is a guide to our churches and their members in their encounter with the world and the persons that Jesus Christ has come to redeem. It is also a witness to the world of our church’s involvement with its Lord and with his world. In speaking to the problem of communism and freedom, of metropolitan society, of race, of Latin America, of alcohol, of crime and juvenile delinquency, and of medical care for the aged, the General Assembly neither binds the conscience of United Presbyterians nor speaks for them as individuals. But it does lay before them and before the world its prayerful judgment about the love of the sovereign God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—with respect to these problems.”

It is from this context that the United Presbyterian Church spoke at Buffalo in its General Assembly. Among its pronouncements were strong statements in opposition both to communism and neo-fascism, a call to resist the temptation to use the freedom-denying methods of these political conspiracies in the struggle against them, a commendation of the U.S. Department of Justice for its action with regard to the riots in Alabama, and the encouragement of voluntary abstinence as an individual practice with regard to the problem of alcohol, at the same time calling for church members who use alcoholic beverages moderately and those who abstain to respect each other and to work together in meeting the problem of alcohol.

Convention Circuit

At Boston, Massachusetts—Culminating more than a century of merger efforts, the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America voted formal union at a joint meeting. The combined organization is to be known as the Unitarian Universalist Association.

About 200,000 persons and 845 churches are involved in the merger. There are 118,000 Unitarians, representing 405 churches and 336 fellowships, and 71,000 Universalists representing 440 churches.

Some 2,000 delegates to the new association’s organizational meeting completed the merger by adopting through a voice vote a set of by-laws and a constitution. These had first been endorsed at a joint conference of the two denominations in 1959. Later the consolidation itself was approved by 91 per cent of the Unitarian churches and fellowships and 79 per cent of the Universalist societies. (Fellowships are groups that have not reached church status.)

Delegates elected Dr. Dana McLean Greeley of Boston as first president. Greeley, president of the American Unitarian Association since 1958, was elected by a 1,087 to 935 vote over the Rev. William B. Rice, minister of the Unitarian church in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts.

The merger does not call for local church union but a consolidation of the two denominations’ headquarters organizations. Unitarian and Universalist congregations will retain their identities unless they decide otherwise.

While bound by no creed, Unitarians and Universalists generally do not believe in the divinity of Christ, but they accept his ethical teachings.

The Unitarian movement started in America in 1794 with the preaching of Dr. Joseph Priestley of Philadelphia. In 1825 the American Unitarian Association was organized.

Universalism was first carried to America in 1741 by Dr. George DeBenneville, a French Huguenot.

At Jerusalem, Israel—Israeli Minister of Education Abba Eban told the Pentecostal World Conference (see also CHRISTIANITY TODAY, May 22, 1961) that the aim of the new state of Israel was not merely an addition of another nation to the international family but “a holy experience in rule by conscience.”

Eban told the 3,000 delegates that “your presence here reflects the conviction that the unfolding of Israel’s career as a modern nation is a matter of deep moment and concern to the Christian world as well as to the Jewish people.”

The Rev. Thomas F. Zimmerman, general superintendent of the U. S. Assemblies of God and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, warned the conference in a climactic rally on Pentecost Sunday that “these are not days to compromise.”

He declared: “Within the past few weeks news releases indicate that three Pentecostal denominations have applied to the World Council of Churches for membership—two from Chile and one from Yugoslavia. We are not personally acquainted with these groups, nor do we know their reason for joining hands with the World Council of Churches … Regardless of efforts of the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches to essay to call us ‘brethren,’ we are miles apart. Nor can we afford to compromise with them on our most basic, sacred, God-given, heaven-blessed position, including the infallibility of God’s Word, the virgin birth, the atoning death of our Lord and Saviour, and his resurrection and bodily return.”

At Milwaukee, Wisconsin—The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod apparently are putting off indefinitely a threat to continuation of the Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America.

Delegates from the two bodies and representatives of the Synodical Conference’s other two members adopted a resolution calling for a restudy and formulation of doctrine.

Besides the Missouri and Wisconsin bodies, the conference includes the Evangelical Lutheran Synod (Norwegian) and the Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (Slovak). The combined membership of the four groups is about 2,804,000.

The Rev. Oscar J. Naumann, president of the Wisconsin Synod, told an adjourned convention that his group has not retreated from charges that the Missouri Synod had engaged in “unionism” by working with other Lutheran bodies not in doctrinal agreement.

Dr. John W. Behnken, president of the Missouri Synod, countered that his denomination’s position was consistent with biblical instruction and the Lutheran Confessions.

Behnken also said that the Missouri Synod “in all probability” would not become a member of the National Lutheran Council.

Noting that the Missouri Synod was scheduled to open doctrinal discussions with the new American Lutheran Church in January, 1962, he added: “We will not compromise God’s truth.”

Behnken declared that the Missouri Synod would not condone ALC membership in the National Lutheran Council, the Lutheran World Federation, and the World Council of Churches.

At Milwaukee, Wisconsin—A “State of the Church Conference” sponsored by a group of Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod pastors and laymen, heard charges that the traditionally orthodox body has in recent years experienced some chinks in its spiritual structure.

More than 500 persons attended the conference. Some 54 per cent were said to be clergymen, 37 per cent laymen, and 9 per cent teachers.

Protests were voiced alleging that the synod has gradually been infiltrated by some liberal professors at its synodical institutions and at its associated Valparaiso University and that certain publications circulated within the synod have wittingly or unwittingly propagated the social gospel and have taken a “decided anti-anticommunist stand.” Also criticized was the alignment of the synod’s Board for North and South American Missions with the National Council of Churches.

A volume of some 200 pages was distributed to delegates as documentation for the charges.

Twelve resolutions designed to strengthen the hands of synodical officers to deal with the problems were adopted.

At Columbus, Ohio—Continued negotiations toward merger with the 7,500-member Missionary Church Association were endorsed by delegates to the 64th General Council of the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

It was disclosed that the 68,000-member Alliance, which now sponsors 830 missionaries in 27 countries, plans to open for the first time permanent stations in Brazil. The society’s overseas constituency currently includes some 130,000 baptized members in 2,733 churches.

A record number of 1,268 delegates were registered for this year’s council. They adopted a budget of nearly $4 million (approximately $60 per capita) for the ensuing year and voted (1) to organize regional offices around the world to co-ordinate missionary literature work; (2) to establish a graduate program in theology by 1965 “if possible”; and (3) to shift publications responsibility from an elected official to an appointed clergy-lay committee.

At Rockford, Illinois—The annual conference of The Evangelical Alliance Mission, which sponsors 820 missionaries on 16 foreign fields, heard a plea for 300 new workers.

“TEAM needs 300 new missionaries right now,” said General Director David H. Johnson, “including evangelists, Bible teachers, doctors, nurses, teachers, builders, radio technicians, and many others.”

He said that 39 new missionaries were dispatched last year, but that the additional number was needed to fill vacancies and to enter new fields and to care for expanding ministries.

A new field was opened in Arabia last year at the invitation of the ruling sheikh of the Buraimi Oasis in the Trucial Oman States.

At month’s end Dr. Herbert C. Jackson becomes director of the Missionary Research Library, a resource center for basic study in missions. A professor of comparative religion and missions in Southern Baptist Theological Seminary since 1954, Dr. Jackson is a member of the North American Advisory Committee of the International Missionary Council, and served in India for six years as a missionary of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society. These circ*mstances lend special interest to Dr. Jackson’s address last September on the theme of “The Forthcoming Role of the Non-Christian Religious Systems as Contributory to Christian Theology.”

Today’s missionary confrontation of pluralistic mankind, Dr. Jackson reminds us, requires something radically new. His convictions are shaped by a sabbatical spent in studying Buddhism in Asia, and his determination to communicate Christianity to the Orient is surely commendable. He feels that the much-discussed “encounter” between Christianity and the non-Christian religions is not really taking place. The Church seems isolated from dynamic movements in non-Christian religions and from devotees of renascent faiths. This lack of encounter is doubly serious because “the Church impresses the non-Christian world by its own consciousness of importance before the dynamic life and brilliant intellectual activity of the ancient culture religions.”

Unless we seriously misunderstand what Professor Jackson is urging, however, Christian missionary effort is headed for a time of theological turmoil—and that with Dr. Jackson’s explicit encouragement. We hope that this judgment is not too harsh, and invite our readers to consider the facts for themselves.

“The next several generations,” Professor Jackson tells us, “will see the appearance of what might be designated another ‘Age of Heretics’.” Such a development, he goes on to tell us, “is inevitable in a period of creative theological advance.” Although Dr. Jackson thinks that “real fidelity to the Scriptures” (a formula he does not further define) will provide “protection” in a time of theological mutation, he insists that the appearance of heresy is necessary. Indeed, as we shall see, Dr. Jackson is inclined to run interference for some quite novel views in asking Christians of the West to champion a rash sort of modern theology (Dr. Jackson would not wish to label it as such) in order to make Christianity attractive to Oriental religionists.

We are aware, of course, of two divergent emphases in the theology of missions: one, that the biblical categories are relevant to all cultures; the other, that the biblical categories must be adapted to various ‘logical’ structures (especially in the presentation of Christianity to Eastern peoples). Many who champion the latter view would contend that the Greek-Latin development is valid for Westerners (at least within limits), but in expounding biblical theology they would ally themselves with the recent Hebrew-versus-Greek emphasis and insist on the alogical structure of Semitic thought. Advocates of an anti-Greek thrust seem sometimes to forget that Oriental categories too may be quite unbiblical. Worse yet, they tend in our day to disintegrate the role of conceptual and propositional relevation, thereby threatening the meaningfulness of biblical disclosure.

Lest our anxieties seem unjustifiable, we shall quote Professor Jackson’s own remarks as a missionary interpreter in a great denomination whose task force of 1400 missionaries is spread around the world. Professor Jackson’s address does not lean much upon what the prophets and apostles had to say, although he does drop the names of several dozen contemporary thinkers, at the rate of almost one a paragraph.

What is really needed, Dr. Jackson declares, to make the Christian faith universally valid and relevant, is the creation of “an ecumenical theology” which, in turn “will require no less than a radical mutation in theology.” Is Professor Jackson’s thesis, now to be developed, simply that we must get beyond our many denominational theologies back to the one biblical revelation of divine truths and sacred doctrines? Hardly. The developing theology of which he speaks leaps beyond the ecumenical creeds of the past, which supply a precedent for ecumenical theologizing. “Today the Holy Spirit is leading into a universal matrix out of which further development and enrichment of Christianity will take place.”

Dr. Jackson concedes, as we must, that the Gospel is more than a recital of God’s mighty acts; the saving deeds must be interpreted. But he apparently denies a once-for-all revealed interpretation, a divine disclosure of the meaning of salvation history in logical terms. Primitive Christianity, we are told, “intellectualized” the Gospel within Greek categories. Modern Christianity must not, we are told, be hampered by this intellectual structuring and “the categories that issue from this mind structure.”

Dr. Jackson seems not to be protesting simply against post-biblical rationalizations of the Gospel. If he were concerned only to avoid the Platonizing, or Aristotelianizing, or Hegelianizing, or Kierkegaardianizing of the Gospel, we would gladly applaud him. While he expresses himself cautiously, and at times appears to put the Greek influence at the patristic period and beyond, rather than in the New Testament itself, his objection is aimed also at the New Testament formulation. Apparently in the interest of some pre-intellectual form of revelation, he tilts toward the neo-orthodox notion that there is a revealed Person but not a revealed theology. He deplores the “failure to recognize the radical variants in differing modes of mental activity and in the semantic connotations which necessarily are involved in the linguistic expressions of the several modes of mentality.” The so-called “Greek structuring” is to him objectionable because it assumes the functioning of mind according to logic or reason, and brings everything to the test of logical rationality. As Professor Jackson sees it, “there is more than a single structure of the mind.… Climatic, cultural and historical conditioning determine the psychological, and to a large degree even the physiological, patterns by which the ‘structure of the mind’ functions.”

Nor is Dr. Jackson’s revolt against reason in religion and revelation simply cast along recent dialectical lines. Indeed, he thrashes contemporary dialectical thinkers for half-heartedness in their repudiation of logical rationality! Paul Tillich is merely a backslidden Greek; he “and others of like position seem not to be aware of the fact that the Logos concept, that is, the concept of Universal Reason by whatever term it might be designated, is a concept unknown in any other system of thought except the Greek.” Likewise, Bultmann’s “real dis-service to Christianity” is his “subservience to Greek rational apprehension” and to empirical science. D. T. Niles, former secretary of evangelism for the World Council of Churches, also comes in for criticism. Evangelical observers have sometimes voiced disappointment that the evangelical thrust in Dr. Niles’ proclamation is sometimes coupled to neo-orthodox influences, but that is not Dr. Jackson’s complaint; the Southern Baptist professor criticizes Niles for not breaking through “to an ecumenical freedom from the fetters of a strictly Greek formulation of the Christian faith.” And he additionally criticizes the evangelistic ministry of Abdul Akbar Haqq, Billy Graham’s interpreter in India, “who cannot reach the non-Christian at all (so Dr. Jackson says) because the only ‘Christianity’ he knows is the Judaic-Hellenic, which does not ‘speak’ to those whose mental categories are not of that stream.”

This remarkable “discovery” that no real affinity exists between Western mind and Eastern mind (if this is the truth) has come so tardily as to indict the whole course of modern missions. May not the fact rather be that Dr. Jackson is predisposed to Oriental speculation and Occidental sophistries when he dismisses as deplorable the emphasis that “clarity calls for a logical frame” and scorns those who “cannot conceive of any mental process than that of Greek logic!”? Evangelists like Akbar Haqq are reaching Orientals not by the promulgation of a Hellenized religious philosophy but by the proclamation that “the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin.” Surely the Logos doctrine of the New Testament (the Logos Who not only “lights every man” but Who also “became flesh”) has its roots in Hebrew revelational sources rather than in Greek philosophy. Does not Dr. Jackson tend actually to dismiss logic and rationality as a mere Greek invention or cultural conditioning? Can he, in fact, press his own argument without relying on the law of noncontradiction as something more than Aristotelian bias? True as it is that the Christian revelation is not locked up to Greek (or Oriental) modes of thought, and that the Christian apprehension of God forms its own “mind,” unless truth is universally valid it is nonexistent.

According to Dr. Jackson, a really ecumenical theology must compromise the last vestiges of logical rationality. “There has never been either a rejection or an amplification of the basic union of biblical ‘facts’ and Greek interpretation. Hither this circ*mstance must now change,” he tells us, “or Christianity will be foredoomed as a tiny and insignificant minority movement in a multi-religion world.… It is the writer’s considered judgment … that such restriction of the Christian faith … is a positive determent to the violation of what God is seeking to do in our day.” Now it is true that Professor Jackson says that Christian theology must enlarge its tents to embrace the contributions that come from “other mind structuring … without abandoning the contributions that logical conceptualism can make to it.” But these enlarged tents would surely need to be of circus variety, it seems to us, if they are to shelter both logical and illogical views.

We do not at all dispute Dr. Jackson’s premise that profound and basic differences exist between Eastern and Western thought, nor for that matter even profounder differences between biblical thought and non-Christian thought in its entirety. But Dr. Jackson’s proposal seems to us in the long run to accomodate the Gospel to speculative pagan categories while abandoning the rational and propositional structuring of scriptural revelation. What Dr. Jackson seems to want is a faith which is paradoxical in character—and paradoxical at that in a pro-religious nonlogical way! “In a theology constructed within a framework of the Oriental mode of thought,” he states, “paradox as an intellectual problem would be removed, while at the same time the tension of the ‘encounter’ with God would remain, since the latter is personal and existential and grounded not in any mental apprehension but in the fact that our human nature is against God—the God revealed in Jesus Christ—and therefore decision, a kind of decision which is related to the will and not the intellect, continues to be the primary factor in the ‘salvation’ that Christianity offers. Thus the Gospel would still be a ‘scandal’ but would not be ‘foolishness’ except to those who persisted in being ‘Greeks’!” Since the Gospel would no longer be stated “in the mental world of logical rationalism” the Oriental mind could then accept it “without violating the mental sense of propriety.” Indeed, as Dr. Jackson sees it, this reconstruction “produces a sincere seeking after ‘the whole truth’ with a total absence of the belligerent and divisive ‘defence of truth’ which characterizes the Occidental understanding of truth as propositionally stated. This Oriental approach presents a far more Biblical spirit than does the theological warfare that has marred, and still mars, Occidental Christianity.”

While Dr. Jackson’s reconstruction of the missionary message in these terms is buttressed by the declaration that it does justice to the total personality of man (“… The God of the Bible is a total personality who is related to the total personality of man, or not related at all, and … this relationship of totality can, for instance, come to men more accurately in a milieu that emphasizes Being than in one that stresses rationalism in the Greek sense”), the clear impression is that his anti-intellectual restatement of the Christian faith demeans the proper and necessary role of cognition in revealed religion. Despite Dr. Jackson’s protest against Greek rationalism, we have the impression that he nonetheless loses the simplicity of the Gospel in the world-wisdom of the modern Greeks. Indeed, if paradox is accepted a bit more zestfully in modern missions philosophy, the Christian message to the Orient may soon displace the Good News that Christ died for sinners by the garbled news that Jesus is Lord and Mohammed is his prophet, or that heaven is real and Nirvana is my home.

THE BASIC SINFULNESS OF THE ‘FREEDOM RIDERS’ RIOTS

The rash of race riots underscores the fact that brotherly love cannot be legislated, nor have laws and court decisions any power in the face of mobs whose prejudices have been taunted.

Moreover, our tendency to lament these riots because of the reaction they elicit abroad is almost as distressing as the violence itself. A parallel can be drawn of the couple who regret having quarreled because they lost their neighbors’ respect.

The race riot problem stems from our reluctance to recognize the remedy for sin. Even church legislation will not resolve the sin question.

CHURCH UNION IN CEYLON: IS AMBIGUITY A VIRTUE?

The scheme for the union of the Protestant denominations in Ceylon (the proposed Church of Lanka) has been brought before the public eye by the recent debates in the Convocations of Canterbury and York of the Church of England. As long ago as 1940, at the invitation of the Methodist Church in Ceylon, a negotiating committee was formed for the purpose of exploring the possibilities of union. All the Protestant Churches co-operated, though after two years the Dutch Reformed Church withdrew from the discussions. In due course a scheme for union was drafted. At the 1958 Lambeth Conference the Lanka proposals received the careful consideration of the 300 bishops present and were in fact approved without any dissenting voice. The Anglican bishops there assembled recommended full communion from the outset with the Church of Lanka.

The report of a joint committee appointed by the Church of England failed, however, to display a like unanimity, for a minority of this committee expressed grave doubts about the Lanka scheme. When introducing the debate in the Convocation of Canterbury, the Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr. Allison, emphasized that the members of convocation were about to take an historic and momentous decision which was likely to have a decisive influence on future reunion negotiations in other parts of the world. The alarmist tone of the reference in the minority report to the danger of the disappearance of the Anglican communion particularly shocked him. The fact had been accepted by successive Lambeth Conferences since 1920 that the reunion of separated churches in any part of Christendom must involve the disappearance of Anglicanism as such in the area where the reunion takes place. Dr. Allison warned that for convocation to decide against full communion with Lanka might prove to be the death-blow to the reunion movement for many years to come. Be that as it may, neither convocation was able to make up its collective mind over the Lanka proposals, the bishops, with one exception in the northern province, being in favor and the clergy being seriously divided.

The present church situation in Ceylon is as follows. Out of a population of 8 million there are only 800,000 church members, 700,000 of whom belong to the Roman Catholic church; of the remaining 100,000 the Anglicans claim 60 per cent, and the Methodists 30 per cent, with 10 per cent distributed between the other ecclesiastical groups. As the bishop of Chester, Dr. Ellison, pointed out in the Convocation of York, Christians in Ceylon are under intense pressure because of the resurgence of a militant nationalistic Buddhism which threatens their very existence and therefore makes Christian unity a matter of urgency. Nonetheless, the scheme faced strong opposition.

The real bone of contention is the proposed rite of unification which would mark the inauguration of the Church of Lanka. This novelty would involve the submission by the ministers of all the uniting churches to the laying on of episcopal hands with the somewhat vague intention of communicating to each whatever might be lacking of the fullness of Christ’s grace.

The crucial question is: Is this rite of unification an ordination, or is it not? The Anglican high churchman rebels against any suggestion either that his own orders are invalid or that nonepiscopal orders are valid. Therefore he insists that if this is a rite of ordination, then only nonepiscopalians should receive it. The nonepiscopalian, on the other hand, is not disposed to acknowledge any invalidity in the orders he possesses. And in this judgment he would have the support of evangelical and liberal Anglicans. Accordingly, the precise nature of the unification rite has been left undefined, so that those who wish to interpret it as an ordination and those who prefer to regard it as no more than an integrating symbol may do so. As the bishop of Exeter, Dr. Mortimer, has observed, the rite will be at one and the same time an ordination if and where that is needed, and, where it is not, a public act of “identification.”

It is precisely this unwillingness to define what is taking place that critics of the rite find objectionable. In the opinion of one speaker in the Canterbury Convocation, it is not only intolerable but morally wrong for anyone to be placed in such a position of double meaning. This is the view also of Bishop Lesslie Newbigin who is so prominent and experienced a figure in the ecumenical movement. And it is indeed a most important issue. Is ecumenism to succumb to the temptation to exalt ambiguity into one of the cardinal virtues? Are difficulties, and especially cruces of division such as this concerning the validity of orders, going to be left behind by refusing to face them squarely and by covering them over with double-talk? We believe that they cannot be facilely circumvented and that resort to such devices will not set forward the cause of true Christian unity either in Ceylon or elsewhere. In the coming together of Christians of different affiliations there is paramount need for frank theological definition that is fully scriptural, honorably charitable, and not made suspect by ecclesiastical wool-pulling.

One could wonder about the propriety of setting demonology within a series on basic Christian doctrines. Satan, the dark power of evil, who appears sometimes as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14), and whose designs are not unknown to us (2 Cor. 2:11)—where does he fit into the system of Christian doctrine? Doctrine is an attempt to set forth the inter-relatedness of the Word of God. But do we not have in demons the power that breaks the unity seen in the Word? In dogmatic theology we speak of our task as that of systematic reflection on the message of the Word. What can we systematize in the work of demons? Is not the diabolos the very personification of destruction and confusion, the direct opposite of system and order, especially the good order of God’s creation?

When we try to be systematic and orderly in regard to a study of Satan and his works, we are tempted to fit Satan into a legitimate and proper place within creation. We may also be tempted to use him as an explanatory principle of evil, a principle which leads, if we are not careful, to an excusing of ourselves. For instance, the dualistic schemes of Persian religions set two eternal powers of good and evil in opposition, the good one causing the good and the bad one causing the evil of the world. This was a simple scheme. But the net result in practice was the same as that of any rational explanation of evil. The personal guilt of men was hid in the shadow of the explanation of evil. And where personal guilt is obscured, the grace that frees men from guilt is obscured also.

Evil has often been systematized so rationally that the chaotic world of evil actually looked orderly. When evil is brought into a rational system that explains its existence, its evilness is always toned down. At times, thinkers have dared to seek the origin of evil in God, in spite of the Church’s most emphatic conviction that God may never be called the cause of evil. (Deus non causa peccati.) This conviction comes from the Bible which states the point with perfect clarity. “This then is the message which we have heard of him … that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). When one is inclined to excuse himself on the ground that he is tempted of God, he is warned by the Word: “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God” (Jas. 1:13). The point is made in many ways by the Scriptures: sin does not find its origin in God.

We see this in God’s wrath against sin, in his judgment upon sin, and especially in his redemptive action by which he brings grace to light in the punishment of sin upon the Cross. The Cross reveals the soundness of the Church’s conviction that God is not the origin of evil. We also see in the Cross that the dualism which hypnotized Augustine for nine years is wholly unacceptable. For the Cross reveals that God does not eternally face an independent power of evil, but rather that God conquers evil and sets it within his service. The terrible evil accomplished by Judas, Israel, and the Gentiles around the Cross is taken up into the triumphant fulfillment of God’s redemptive plan.

The Powers of Darkness. In regard to all this, it is still possible to speak about the powers of darkness with real meaning, as long as we speak the language of the Bible. It is not our concern to pursue an academic curiosity about evil. This kind of interest in evil has often been too keen. Consider the large Roman Catholic book on Satan which fills 666 pages with a huge attempt to shed light on the demonic powers afoot in all phases of life. One gets an impression in such a book that evil is a triumphant, dynamic force crusading unhindered through history. The Bible, to be sure, calls us to be aware of Satan’s craft. But the biblical summons in regard to Satan is not at all like an answer to our curiosity. The Bible sounds a warning. It never suggests that evil is an invincible power to which we are hopelessly and fatally captive. We hear indeed of the reality of temptation and rebellion, of resistance and disobedience, of confusion and destruction—but these are a reality over which God is surely triumphant.

God’s triumph is particularly manifest in the New Testament where the apostles tell us that Christ has conquered and dethroned Satan (Col. 2:15). Resistance again arises threateningly at the appearance of the antichrist. But his very name suggests that Satan is not a primary figure; he gets his significance only as an opponent of Him who has already conquered. When Satan falls out of heaven as lightning, he rebels against the defeat that the cross and resurrection of Christ inflict on him (Luke 10:18).

This is why we meet Satan and his demons in the environment of Jesus Christ. Satan manifests himself especially during the earthly ministry of our Lord. He is active among the people of Israel and in the world of the Gentiles whom he blinds (2 Cor. 4). In the Book of Revelation, the dark appearance of the dragon on the scene is set back of the foreground of the Lamb who conquers. And it is the Lamb, to whom it is given to open the locked book of history—who is the central figure of the spiritual course of human history.

But we still have to reckon with the power of Satan. “Your adversary the devil goes about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Pet. 5:8). But this is not dualism, as though we were pawns in a battle between God and Satan with the outcome still uncertain. For there is, in Christ, the power of resistance to Satan. “Resist the devil and he will flee from you” (Jas. 4:7). We must not fall prey to a superficial judgment that underestimates the power of Satan. Resistance to him is possible only in the immediate fellowship of the Lord of lords and King of kings. Without Him we should discover to our woe that Satan is a foul spirit who possesses the power to overcome us (“how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil, for God was with him.” (Acts 10:38).

Satan’s Frustration. But at the same time, given the fellowship of Jesus Christ, there is no reason to overestimate the power of Satan either. He is not free to pursue his own destiny. He cannot and has not frustrated God. God has frustrated him once and for all at Calvary. Our only danger is that we try to frustrate Satan within the limitations of our own power.

In our day, largely because of the many catastrophic outbreaks of evil in the world, theology has turned its attention anew to demonology. This concern with demons has not always been biblically oriented. But the old optimism about the conquest of evil is surely gone. (Long before Bultmann, Schleiermacher insisted that modern insights made serious acceptance of the reality of demons untenable, even though Satan still kept a place in the Church’s hymns.) Attention is also once again directed to the antichrist figure of the New Testament. The question is asked how we are to relate the victory of Jesus Christ over Satan to the present power that Satan seems to exercise in the world. Does it not seem that evil is a constantly resurgent power? Are not we and all the world subject to this power? In considering such questions, we can easily be overcome with pessimism and lose sight of the triumphant theme of the Gospel. We must not, however, forget that when our Lord saw Satan fall from heaven, the triumph over Satan was already at hand. The preaching of the Gospel in our time must be clear at this point. Against human optimism, it must point up human inability to resist the power of evil, while at the same time proclaiming the full power of the Gospel to accomplish this.

The Christian’s Strategy. The Bible, in reference to the demons, calls us to responsibility and prayer. Think, for instance, of the Lord’s prayer. The last petition asks for deliverance from evil. But the prayer does not begin with evil; it speaks of evil only after guilt has been confessed. Satan is not an explanatory principle that does away with our guilt. The reality of Satan’s power does not undo the reality of our personal responsibility in evil. But when we have prayed for forgiveness of our own sin, we also pray for resistance against the evil power—against him who has only a little time left (Rev. 12:12), who seeks to lead men astray, who accuses the brethren before the throne of God, and who strives mightily to blind men to the great salvation that has really come into the world.

For this reason, we shall not be able to do battle with the evil of the world in our own time by means of the armament of human morality and plans for world improvement. For Satan’s ways are not unknown to us—so says Paul (2 Cor. 2:11) in warning the congregation. His designs can be summed up in one word: anti. He is anti-creation and anti-redemption. The antichrist shall appear to be for many things. He shall be for culture, for human religions, for the earth, for development of life. But he shall be anti-Jesus Christ. In this sense, the power of Satan is a negative power. It is a power that shall be revealed as nothing when the parousia of Jesus Christ confronts the parousia of the antichrist (2 Thess. 2:9). The basic weakness of Satan since the Cross will then be made manifest.

We fail to see this now. The power of Satan appears undiminished and Satan appears unconquerable at times. But our failure lies in part with the fact that Satan appears now as an angel of light. The false prophets, against whom Paul warns, bring this to the apostle’s mind. Satan stands before the entrance to a dry desert and proclaims it as the gateway to Paradise. He witnesses to the light with signs and wonders, but is really bidding men to follow him into darkness. Only in the light of Him who is the Light of the world does it become wholly clear that Jesus Christ is indeed the powerful Conqueror of Satan.

Scripture and the faithful preaching of the Church warn us against doing away with evil by finding an explanation of it. We are warned against explaining evil away by saying that God is its origin. We are warned against any dualism which makes a minor god the cause of evil. We are warned against making Satan an overpowering force who takes away our responsibility for our own sin. The Bible does not give us a rational explanation of everything about evil. But it is gloriously clear in showing the way that a man can travel in life. It is the way of faith and prayer and, in the power of the Gospel, the way of resistance to evil. In the perfect prayer the right perspective is beautifully manifest. We pray for forgiveness of personal guilt and then go on to a doxology. “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.” Whoever prays this prayer with his whole heart has grasped the inner meaning of the doctrine of evil.

Bibliography: Besides the many handbooks of theology, see: B. Noack, Satanas und Soteria. Untersuchingen, zur N.T. Dämonogie; R. Leiverstad, Christ the Conqueror, Ideas of Conflict and Victory in the New Testament; K. Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, III/3; G. C. Berkouwer, De Zonde I.

Professor of Systematic Theology

Free University of Amsterdam

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

THEOLOGY OF PRESUMPTION

One has but to glance through theological literature today to realize that much of it is based on human speculation which is at variance with revealed truth. Denying the validity and authority of the divine revelation, and at the same time denying the finality of both the Living and Written Word, such theological speculation is limited only by the imagination of those who have lost, or never had, faith in that which God makes plain to men willing to believe.

It is out of this speculative approach that the theology of presumption emerges. Out of presuppositions against the reality of simple truth, men’s imaginations run riot in a field which ought to be directed and controlled by the Holy Spirit if right conclusions are to be reached.

The assumption that modern scholarship demands these deviations from historic Christian beliefs is unwarranted, for there have been no discoveries of recent years which have invalidated one basic doctrine of the Christian faith. Furthermore, the discoveries of science, while dazzling in their effect on every phase of life today and seemingly unlimited in their potentials for tomorrow, have in no way changed man’s sinful nature nor his need for God’s love and redemption in Jesus Christ.

What then is the theology of presumption? Basically, it is the substitution of human reason for divine revelation. It is man’s presuming to deny the clear teachings of Holy Scripture because they do not fit in with his concept of what God is and what he has done and will do.

Nowhere is this more evident than in a distortion of the personality of God. The theology of presumption teaches that the love of God overrides his justice, holiness, and righteousness. None of us now can ever fully understand or appreciate the ineffable love of our Heavenly Father. It was love which sent his Son into the world to die for our sins. But God’s love surely does not offend His holiness.

The theology of presumption affirms that God’s love negates his holy anger and the necessary punishment of evil. It looks on God as incapable of anger, although the Bible affirms that he is angry with the wicked every day. Substituting human emotion for divine revulsion against sin, man presumes to assess sin through sinful eyes rather than through God’s estimate of what really separates man from God.

It is the same human philosophy that leads to the growing school of universalism. Affirming that because He is the “perfect pedagogue,” universalism declares that all mankind will somehow, sometime come to repentance and faith.

The theology of presumption denies the reality of hell and the eternity of separation of the unrepented sinner from God. It is this same presumption that inveighs against the fear of eternal punishment as one motive for fleeing from the wrath to come.

The theology of presumption denies that Satan is a person, malignant, active, and aggressive, as referred to again and again from Genesis to Revelation; and it declares that sin, manifest on every hand, may be attributed to psychological, environmental, and other causes amenable to human correction rather than requiring divine intervention.

There are many variations in this theology of presumption. Some affirm the redeeming work of Christ but make it apply to all men, whether they accept it or not. For such persons, affirmations like our Lord’s in John 3:16 have to be modified to suit their theory. Man is not a lost creature. He is a saved individual who needs to be told of his salvation, not of his lost condition without a Saviour. “Whosoever believeth in him” is very inconvenient to such a thesis, as are the multiplied New Testament affirmations that faith is necessary to salvation.

In this theology man’s perilous position as a sinner is questioned. Instead of a recognition of the consequences of sin, “The soul that sinneth, it shall die,” there is heard the soul-destroying assurance, “Ye shall not surely die,” and in that assurance the nerve of evangelism and missions is cut.

It is this same theology which accords to man’s philosophical presuppositions precedence over the clear statements of the inspired prophets and apostles.

Let it be clearly understood that the theology of presumption is not the “statement of old truths in a new and different way.” Rather, it is the denial of the validity of Holy Scripture and the substitution of human philosophy for revealed doctrine.

It is insufficient to affirm, as some do, that Christianity is not a set of doctrines but a Person. Pious as this may sound, the question must be asked—What Person? For the Christian there is but one Christ, the Christ of Holy Scriptures. For the Christian there is but one Cross, the Cross of Calvary with all that is implied in the death of the Son of God for the sins of mankind.

No one man is capable of producing a theology which does full justice to all the implications of Christian truth. At the same time, it is dangerously presumptuous to formulate a theology which does violence to that which God has revealed through his inspired prophets and apostles.

The Apostle Paul warns of a day “when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power; when he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and to be admired in all them that believe (because our testimony among you was believed) in that day.”

The writer to the Hebrews warns: “He that despised Moses’ law died without mercy under two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace? For we know him that hath said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge his people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

Our Lord uttered some of the most solemn of all warnings: “Then shall he say unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: … And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (Matt. 25:41, 46).

Is it not presumption, yes, and folly, to deny these truths repeated so clearly and frequently in Scriptures? Who of us can understand all that is implied? Who of us can assume to have all of the truth? But God has made many things so plain that wayfaring men may not err. How much better it is to be a “fool” in the eyes of the unregenerate world, if our foolishness leads us to faith in the Holy Scriptures.

L. NELSON BELL

ACROSTIC

After reading your discussions of modern theology I decided that what we need is simplification and dramatization. How about a Miracle Play for Children’s Day? I have space only for an introduction to set the stage.

Hi there, dear neighbors,

We’re here to present

Modern response to

Redemptive event.

Each of our stories

Has meaning for you:

This is the viewpoint

That makes them all true.

If you should think that

We really believe

Miracles happen,

Then you’d be naïve!

Let us recall that

Psychologists know

Faith is assurance

Of what isn’t so.

Simply relax if

You feel any strain

This is all true on

A different plane.

Give up the thinking

That tends to restrict a

Full field of play for

The myths of geschichte.

Even if we are

Not perfectly clear

Just where this leaves us—

We know it’s not here.

So, with this verse to

Declare our intention,

We must be off to

Another dimension.

Carefully choosing

From J, E, and P,

Legends and sagas

Of pre-history,

Here we present for

Your edification

Tales that were spun out

In campfire narration.

If you’re confronted,

Confused, or just dense,

Hear our recital

To meet existenz!

Even in German

A word ends at last;

That’s our acrostic,

Now let’s have the cast!

EUTYCHUS

CONFIRMING THE CRISIS

I speak to … your fine review section on “A New Crisis in Foreign Missions?” (Apr. 24 issue).… To disavow the limitations of human reason and assume the opinionated role of small gods who proclaim the absolute character of the Christian revelation by giving it the exclusive blessing of God is to fumble and fall in the face of penitent humility which alone preserves the Christian from an arrogance which separates him from the world and gives him shelter with only those of his own kind.

JOHN C. HEIDBRINK

The Fellowship of Reconciliation

Nyack, N. Y.

I still get the feeling that you as many other evangelicals will be unhappy unless millions of souls are damned, that unless millions are damned you would not be happy in heaven!

DANIEL L. ECKERT

Danville, Ill.

Students of political science had their Das Kapital and their Mein Kampf. They were late in recognizing the revolution in political government, until it is now too late, and we have our Red China and our Red Cuba. As we so glibly give up our freedoms to a World Council of Churches to screen out and to send missionaries suitable to their likes to the foreign fields, we may look forward to the destruction of the work of our missionaries of the last two hundred and seventy years. We can look forward to a parallel chaos to that which we have in the political sphere, as authoritarian bureaucracy and world church government is the accepted modus operandi.

JOHN C. HANSE

Peoples’ Park Reformed Church

Paterson, N. J.

MORAL RE-ARMAMENT

Re little being known of MRA (News, Apr. 24 issue): There are factual reports on its birth and development year by year. One of these is Remaking the World, first published by Robert M. McBride and Co., N. Y., 1949. Another is Report on Moral Re-Armament, edited by R. C. Mowat, Senior Lecturer in History at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, first published by Blandford Press, Ltd., London, 1955.

… Statements on MRA doctrine need an answer. Let me quote from Dr. Buchman, speaking at Caux, Switzerland … 1960. “‘The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin’—until you reach that place with men, you haven’t begun.” This fundamental truth is at the heart of everything planned and done in MRA.

MRS. J. S. NICKERSON

Arcadia, Nova Scotia

TRANSLATING THE PRONOUNS

Current translations of the New Testament use a rule which applies thou and thee to God and you and your to men. In the light of this rule, which are the preferable pronouns for Christ? What are the Christological implications of the first five books of the New Testament and which pronouns better translated these implications?

According to the Gospels, Jesus conceives of his own conduct as God’s goodness in action calling near to him sinners who apart from him would have to flee from God. “His transcendent claim stands behind his every word and each of his deeds” (J. Jeremias). His receiving sinners to the eschatological meal is a parable of God’s grace bringing salvation (Luke 15). His calls for decision with regard to his own person are at the same time words of promise, of grace. Or, as Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/1/161, writes, “There is no discernible stratum which does not in some way witness that it was felt that there should be given this man, not merely a human confidence, but that trust, that respect, that obedience, that faith which can be offered only to God.”

He is the embodiment of the Kingdom of God in conflict with the forces of Satan entrenched in the scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Herodians, and the iron hand of Rome. In the face of this tremendous opposition only those who are moved by the supernatural grace of God answer his call for decision, confess his messiahship, and supplicate his mercy. As only the Son knows the Father, so only the Father knows the Son (Matt. 11:27). And only as Jesus is revealed by the Father, or his Holy Spirit, is he confessed as the Christ, the Lord, the Son of God (Matt. 16:17; 1 Cor. 2:11; 12:3). Suzanne de Deitrich recognizes the issue (God’s Unfolding Purpose, p. 181): “This is a crucial decision, for between human admiration for the person of Jesus, and faith in Jesus as the Son of God and Saviour of the world, there is all the difference between heaven and earth, between a divine revelation and a human sentiment. Only the grace of God enables us to recognize this difference, by revealing the Son of God to us (Gal. 1:15–16; 1 Cor. 12:3).

Now when this revelation is proclaimed and this confession is made, ought it not to be phrased in terms which indicate that the same is not mere human admiration but faith in Jesus as the Son of God given by the revealing work of the Father? Ought not Peter’s confession be read, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God?”

By the resurrection, their companion of former times has “become the Lord,” he before whom men bow and adore (John 20:28; cf. Matt. 28:17; Luke 24:52). From now on, the difference between Jesus and his disciples is the difference that separates men from God,” ibid, p. 193). Ought not Jesus then, even more after Thomas’ confession, be addressed as thou? Yet in the blinding, theophonic appearance from heaven, the recent versions make Saul address the ascended Christ as you. And this despite the ego eimi language of deity used by the Lord of Glory in this encounter: “I, even I myself, am Jesus of Nazareth whom you are persecuting.”

The first four books of the New Testament are not biographies composed to satisfy the curious. They are Gospels written from faith for faith. Through the reading and the preaching of the Gospels and of the Acts, as well as of the Epistles, the Lord Jesus Christ proclaims himself and calls men to the decision of faith in him. Accordingly, the English-speaking fellowship of faith is responsible for authorizing only those translations which present our Lord and Saviour with pronouns appropriate to faith’s portrayal of him in the Gospels and Acts—as also in the other Scriptures of the New Testament.

WILLIAM C. ROBINSON

Columbia Theological Seminary

Decatur, Ga.

DIVISION OF THE HOUSE

The proposal for realignment made by G. Aiken Taylor in The Presbyterian Journal, April 5, 1961 … is a very practical suggestion and deserves full consideration in any proposals for church union considered by the Presbyterian Churches (News, Apr. 10 issue).

E. CROWELL COOLEY

Calvary Presbyterian Church

Norfolk, Va.

My fundamental faith recoils at such little immature concepts of His Church which is both ecumenical and evangelical … Ecumenicity means to me at least that we put people primary in our preaching, and such things as programs, policies, politics, principles, processes, possessions, products, and presbyterians are secondary considerations!

WILLIAM ALBERT SMITH

Luxemburg Presbyterian Church and Berkshire Valley Presbyterian Church

Wharton, N. J.

If no such readjustment can be made in the near future I fear for the continued existence of the Presbyterian and Reformed faith. For while extreme ecumenists are as yet, I believe, in the minority in the United Presbyterian and Southern Presbyterian churches, yet the ceaseless propaganda and tireless activity of this minority will eventually prevail. Such tactics carried on tirelessly for twenty years finally succeeded in engulfing the United Presbyterian Church of North America, and silencing her unique testimony to the complete inspiration of the Holy Scriptures and the true deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, which for one hundred years she unwavingly held and faithfully proclaimed. San Diego, Calif.

JAMES A. GORDON

ETYMOLOGY AT WORK

A simple etymology can help us to see the distinction between Historie and Geschichte. Geschichte (which definitely does not, for Barth or anyone else, “denote that which is above history”) comes from geschehen, to happen, and means “that which happened in the past.” Historie comes from the Greek historein, to inquire, to narrate what has been learned by inquiry, and means “a present narration of such facts about the past as can be obtained by critical methods.” It is unfortunate that our English word “history” can mean both, either “the past as such or “a book about the past.” (R. H. Fuller in Kerygma and Myth, p. xi, suggests making the distinction in English between historic = geschichtlich and historical = historisch.) One may or may not accept the distinction, but to fail to recognize it in others is to abandon any attempt to understand them. The result can only be … a travesty of Barth’s and Brunner’s theology.…

For example, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not an “historical” event at all, but it definitely is for all believers the most important “historic” event of all history. That is to say, the most an historian using all the means of critical inquiry can say about it is that the early church pointed to certain witnesses who said they had seen Jesus after his death (1 Cor. 15:3 ff.). In the light of Matt. 28:15, he could also say that it is probable that the tomb was empty. But only the Christian can say with Peter (Acts 2:24; 3:15; 4:10, etc.) that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Our certainty of this historic event is not based on the probabilities of the historians but on the revelation of God in the appearances then and in the witness of His preachers and the internal witness of the Holy Spirit now. We cannot prove it, for even an eyewitness of this event could have given it his own unbelieving interpretation, but we can believe it and confess it.

LLOYD GASTON

Hightstown, N.J.

NCC SOCIAL ACTION MANUAL

It is not fair for Mr. Anderson to cry out so sharply (Eutychus, Feb. 27 issue) against the recommendations of a book which in the nature of the case can only cite a limited number of case studies. If he were to consider the book more carefully … he would doubtless discover … that the results of its use have thoroughly justified the work of its author.

MALCOLM E. PEABODY

Retired Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York

Cambridge, Mass.

LOGIC OF THE SADDUCEES

I was shocked by the lack of objectivity and twisted logic of John F. C. Green’s letter (Feb. 27 issue). To make only one point in answer: To argue that the Confessing Church under the Nazis, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer as one of the leading figures of that movement, simply represent a “power-block” in defiance of government and church and to conclude: “Their martyrs—at least a number of them—deserved to be executed for collaborating with the enemy of the country: one of them Bonhoeffer,” is to follow the precise logic of the Sadducees who threatened Peter and John, favored the stoning of Stephen, and nailed Christ to the Cross for insisting on the principle, “We must obey God rather than men.”

KARL T. SCHMIDT

Wartburg College

Waverly, Iowa

Hebrews 5:9; 13:8

The Preacher:

Gideon B. Williamson has served the Church of the Nazarene in its highest office as a General Superintendent since 1946. A native of Missouri, he was graduated from John Fletcher College and then took graduate studies at McCormick Theological Seminary and Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, both in Chicago. From 1936–46 he was president of Eastern Nazarene College.

The Text:

And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him.… Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever.

The Comment

The homiletician nominating Dr. Williamson’s sermon as representative of evangelicial preaching in the Nazarene tradition is Dr. James McGraw, Professor of Preaching and Pastoral Ministry at Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. His evaluative overcomment appears at the conclusion of the sermon.

Jesus Christ is the world’s only universal figure. He rises above all barriers of time, he is ageless, he has been called the Eternal Contemporary. Today it is all but forgotten that he was a Jew. The world claims him. Jesus Christ is international and super-racial.

Millions of men of all classes have traveled far to Bethlehem, the scene of His birth, and lingered long at Nazareth to walk where he walked. And they have followed the sign of the Cross in lives of undying devotion to his teachings. He has ever been perfectly identified with men of all walks of life. Oswald Chambers said, “Jesus Christ is the representative of the whole human race in one person.”

His words were so engraved in the minds and spirits of those who heard them that they could not forget them. His message is so filled with truth and vitalized by love that it is deathless.

He is the only light in this world’s darkness. He is the only guide to lead us out of confusion. Amid the tumult of our times, his will is our peace. He is the Author of eternal salvation—Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever.

HE MUST BE SINLESS

The Author of eternal salvation must be perfect. He must provide a perfect salvation. Salvation that is imperfect could not be eternal, for its imperfections would ultimately cause its breakdown. Jesus Christ being made perfect became the Author of eternal salvation.

Jesus was perfect in his character and in his obedience to the Father, “being in the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (Heb. 1:3). Many are the witnesses to the perfection of Jesus Christ. Pilate confessed, “I find no fault in him.” Pilate’s wife called him “a just man.” The thief on the cross said, “This man hath done nothing amiss.” The centurion in charge of his crucifixion cried, “Certainly this was a righteous man.”

The most telling testimony for Jesus is that of God the Father who, at the Baptism and at the Transfiguration, said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” As the Son, he demonstrated obedience in the things which he suffered, and being made perfect he became the Author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him. To his character nothing could be added; from it nothing need be subtracted. In his personality all the divine perfections shine forth like light reflected from the myriad facets of a sparkling diamond.

Jesus Christ is qualified to be a perfect Saviour because he was perfectly identified with our humanity. “He took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham. Wherefore in all things it behooved him to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted” (Heb. 2:16–18). Therefore, “we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15).

Christ is the Word made flesh. He was bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. God sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin to condemn sin in the flesh. “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21). “Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men (Phil. 2:6–7, RSV). In the Incarnate Christ we have God completely identified with man. To many people of ancient times, and of the present, God is the far-away, unknown, impersonal Being to be feared. But Jesus came to bring God near in a personal, intimate experience of mutual love, so man could say, “I know whom I have believed.”

A little boy, child of missionaries, was in school in the United States one Christmas time. The principal said to him, “Son, what would you like to have most for Christmas?” The boy looked at the framed picture of his father on his desk and remembered acutely he was in a far-off land, and then quietly said, “I want my father to step out of that frame.” This is the cry of humanity. Men want God to step out of the frame of the universe. In Jesus, God did step out of the frame, he stepped out of eternity into time, out of mystery into the certainty of human experience. He stepped out of the great unknown into the reality of a blessed personal nearness.

While Jesus was perfectly identified with our humanity, yet he was very God as well as very man. In him dwelt the fullness of the Godhead bodily. He maintained himself in such perfect obedience to God that he had perfect acceptability and accessibility to God. “Wherefore he is able to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them. For such an high priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens” (Heb. 7:25–26) … “who is made, not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life” (Heb. 7:16).

HE MUST BE CHANGELESS

The Author of Eternal Salvation must be changeless. Jesus Christ is “the same yesterday, today, and forever.” As we see Jesus among men in the days of his flesh, so he remains forever. When we know the Jesus of history, we know the Christ of the ages.

Jesus is forever the same in his attitude of mercy and pardon toward the sinner. When he was hanging upon the middle cross and his tormentors were deriding him, he prayed, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” The whole purpose of his coming and dying was expressed in his own words: “The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.”

Christ is the same in his attitude of compassion toward human suffering. Jesus had compassion on the hungry, on the ignorant and untaught, on those diseased and burdened of body and mind, and on those stricken with grief.

For the hungry millions of the world Jesus still has compassion, and to those who are his followers he imparts that compassion also. We of this land of abundance must give of our bounty or classify ourselves with Dives, and the hungry of earth with Lazarus the beggar. And we had better beware lest our fates be comparable to theirs.

Jesus has compassion today upon the millions who are illiterate. The foreign missionary enterprise of the Church is not based on sickly sentiment; it is grounded in eternal principles. Neither is the foreign policy of our nation to be considered only a defense for free enterprise, the value of the individual man, and a stop-communism theory. A spirit of true internationalism is an essential of true Christianity.

Jesus still has compassion upon the sick and the sorrowing, and he comes with healing and health for body and mind. He still gives “beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.”

Jesus Christ is unchanging in his attitude of hope and faith for the future. When he told his disciples that he would die on a cross, he also said he would rise again the third day. His resurrection prophesied the triumph of his kingdom.

In the darkness, discord, and impending doom of today, the Christian looks for “a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”

The character of this changeless Christ has won for him many beautiful and meaningful names. To Moses he was the Great I Am. To Balaam he was the Star of Jacob and the Sceptre of Israel. To Jacob he was Shiloh, the Peaceful One. To Solomon he was the Lily of the Valley and the Rose of Sharon. To Isaiah he was Immanuel, which is God with us. To Jeremiah he was the Lord our Righteousness. To Daniel he was the Ancient of Days. To Haggai he was the Desire of All Nations. To Malachi he was the Sun of Righteousness risen with healing in his Rays. To John the Baptist he was the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world. To St. Luke he was the Son of Man. To St. Matthew he was the King of Israel. To St. John he was the Only Begotten Son, the Light of the World, the Bread come down from Heaven, the Well of Water springing up into everlasting Life; he was the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the Good Shepherd who giveth his life for sheep, he was the Teacher sent from God, the Resurrection and the Life and our Advocate with the Father. To Paul he was Jesus, the Saviour, Christ the Anointed One, the Mediator between God and man, the Grace of God that bringeth Salvation, the Foundation other than which no man can lay, the Unspeakable Gift, the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, the Only Wise God. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, he is the High Priest after the Order of Melchisedec, the Altar and the Sacrifice upon the altar. To Peter he was the Prince of Life. In the Revelation he is the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the King of kings, the Lord of lords, the Bridegroom of the Church, the Bright and Morning Star, and the Lamb who is the light of that city where they need no sun.

HE MUST BE TIMELESS

The Author of Eternal Salvation must himself be timeless—eternal. Most frequently our concepts of Jesus are based upon his manifestation in the days of his life on earth. But a full understanding of him cannot be gained without our seeing him as eternally existent in the bosom of the Father. He was the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. The Book of Genesis opens with the familiar words, “In the beginning God.” The Gospel of John starts, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Paul wrote to the Colossians: He “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible … And he is before all things, and by him all things consist” (1:15–17). He was there when the universe was set in order. He was present when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. He was of the Godhead when pronouncement was made, “Let us make man in our image.”

Unto the Son, God said, “Thy throne … is forever and ever.” “Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands: they shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail” (Heb. 1:10–12).

We were in the Bible lands to visit our mission stations. Late one afternoon we drove to the site of old Samaria, capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. As we climbed the steep ridge, we came to the ruins of the Palace of Omri with some of the centuries-old stone pillars still standing. A little further toward the setting sun and nearer the blue sky we came to the ruins of the temple dedicated to the worship of Augustus. It was only a mass of tumbled stone except for some half-buried walls. Down there amid the accumulated debris I saw a lovely blood-red Palestinian anemone, believed to be the Rose of Sharon of which Solomon sang. Our guide climbed down and picked it for me. But I said as he did, “Yes, the civilizations of men pass away, the works of mighty kings all perish, and the false religions prove futile; but amid all the wrecks of time and the ruined glory of the past, the Rose of Sharon stands stately, lonely, beloved, yielding His eternal fragrance.

There is the story of a man who saw little to inspire him in Thorwaldsen’s statue of Christ. An observing child said to him, “You must come close to it, sir. You must kneel down and look up into his face.” Let us kneel down and look up into his face. Such a look in humility and faith will bring peace to our souls. It will inspire devotion. It will call for a living sacrifice.

Comment On The Sermon

The sermon “Author of Eternal Salvation” was nominated forCHRISTIANITY TODAY’s Select Sermon Series by Dr. James P. McGraw, Professor of Preaching and the Pastoral Ministry in Nazarene Theological Seminary. His overcomment follows:

“Author of Eternal Salvation” is typical not only of Dr. Williamson’s preaching, but is typical in many respects of the preaching ministry of his church. The peculiar greatness of this sermon lies in its central emphasis: Jesus Christ is exalted! The message is Christ-centered, and Christ is seen as timeless, eternal, changeless, and perfect. He is presented as human, so that he is able to reach low enough to help fallen, sinful humanity. He is presented as divine, so that he is indeed the Author of our Salvation.

The distinctiveness of this sermon goes beyond its matchless theme, the eternal Christ. There is simple and stately dignity, and a powerful appeal in the plain style. Some may question this description, thinking it rather to be elaborate or at least moderate in style. But it is as plain a style as one can employ when preaching on such a great theme. One syllable words are many; polysyllabic words are rare. Attempts to achieve effect through ornate language are few and far between. The eloquence is an eloquence of clarity, purity, simplicity. This sermon is presented therefore as an example of a truth which evangelical Christianity must never forget; that is, we do not need to be abstruse to be profound. We can best express deep truths in simple language. And the power that is our Christ-centered message is best communicated without attempts at shallow sophistry, clever words, flowery oratory, or ornate style—all of which might divert attention from the truth and focus it upon the sermon itself or upon the preacher who delivers it.

Beyond the greatness of theme and style, there is another mark of quality in this sermon. It demonstrates the power of the Word of God woven into the warp and woof of the content. There are at least 21 direct quotations from the Bible, and there are many more instances where words or phrases from the Book have been used as though they belong in the vocabulary of the preacher. The tone, the mood, the very “flavor” of the preacher’s style is biblical. His words seem more like The Word than the expressions of his own ideas. It is by this kind of preaching that the kerygma is communicated, that the message becomes God’s message, the words are God’s Word, and the preacher is God’s messenger. This is the heart and soul of effective evangelical preaching. This preacher’s steps are firm, his direction is straight, his purpose is clear, and in his words there is a note of certainty. This certainty is born of the divine power which comes to the man who identifies himself with the Living Word and who bases his message in the Written Word.

J. McG.

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.