Page 6347 – Christianity Today (2024)

This title will cause some eyebrow lifting. To many people it is nonsense to put “Christian” before “psychotherapy” as a modifier. It is like saying “Christian surgery” or “Christian dermatology” or like prefixing the term “Christian” to any other branch of science, medical or not. It implies that there can also be a non-Christian variety, like a Mohammedan or Atheist psychotherapy. It might further be inferred that psychotherapy can be differentiated along even finer sectarian lines such as Protestant or Roman Catholic. And this is reducing science to an absurdity.

Psychotherapy is generally thought of as a scientific discipline practiced by an adequately trained person with the proper professional degrees and credentials, and it makes no difference whether he is a Christian, Mohammedan, or Atheist. It is a healing technique for mental illness. When a surgical operation is needed the patient or his family do not look first for a doctor of their own faith but for one with skill in surgery, a specialist in the type of operation needed. Other things being equal they might prefer the surgeon of their own faith, but they would be fools to insist on it. Similarly it is thought that the person who needs a psychotherapist should look for the one with the best scientific skill rather than one with a particular religion, philosophy, or Weltanschauung. It is enough that he be “Christian” in the broad sense of being a decent, responsible, and honest person, but his specific religious beliefs are irrelevant. “Christian” is understood to refer to a set of beliefs, ethical values, moral goals, which in their nature lie outside the field of scientific enquiry.

It is conceded by this common view that the adjective “Christian” can be a proper modifier in some areas related to psychotherapy, such as Christian guidance and Christian (pastoral) counseling. In such context “Christian” refers to the facts and values of the Christian tradition. Guidance is thought to be educational or informational, giving facts as a basis for decision. Counseling is thought to be psychological, dealing with “normal” mental processes, to help a person to make decisions and pursue values agreeable to the Christian tradition. In distinction from these, it is thought that psychotherapy is psychiatric, a healing discipline to correct “abnormal” mental processes and patterns of behavior.

AN OVER-SIMPLIFICATION

While there is some validity to the distinctions given, it is wrong to suppose that they can be completely separated in actual practice. They overlap and may even merge. In a genuine person-to-person encounter something occurs which cannot be fitted into one particular mold. Insofar as an “abnormality” is functional (not due to known physical causes), ethical and moral concepts, religious and cultural values are involved. For example, a washing compulsion may be a feeling of being “dirty” arising out of early sexual behavior. But the “dirty” feeling can also have deeper reference in the person’s feeling about God. The biologically oriented therapist might try to encounter this patient in terms of the libido and Oedipus concept, the sociologically oriented therapist in terms of the interpersonal situation, the existentialist in terms of his concept of finitude and the threat of non-being, but the Christian would be concerned with the God concept and God relationship of the patient. The orientation or the presuppositions of the therapist and patient are determinants in the therapy.

It seems an over-simplification to say that counseling is psychological while psychotherapy is psychiatric. The very words used indicate that they deal with a common area. What is “Psyche”? Call it “mind” or “soul” or whatever you like, it refers to the unifying and integrating faculty, and judgmental values, the goals and moral aspects of life. The difference in suffix is hardly a distinction. Is psychology then a theoretical science, the “Logia,” the word-knowledge about the psyche, and is psychiatry then applied science, the therapeia (service, treatment) and iasis (healing) of the psyche, and is counseling then not an applied science and therapeutic? Is counseling really so different from psychotherapy? Does the psychiatrist’s M.D. give him skills which a properly trained counselor cannot have? The psychiatrist has to deal with goals, values, beliefs, yes, religion, and he has no exclusive claim on this field. The trained nonmedical person can be helpful in treating the psyche as well as an M.D. Indeed, a prominent psychoanalyst told the writer recently that his M.D. was a “pure luxury.” Of course, this is not to deny that much mental illness has a physical cause or may be associated with an organic trouble. A physical and neurological examination is essential in most cases, and the diagnosis should be done by the medical profession, and the physical symptoms must be medically treated. But the psychical aspects of the illness, whether somatic symptoms are present or not, are outside the field of empirical medicine because they involve value judgments, moral standards, religious and philosophical concepts.

IDOLATRY OF TECHNIQUES

In the early days of psychoanalysis there was considerable debate about who could be an analyst. Freud himself felt strongly that it was not the exclusive domain of the medical profession. In fact, one of his most ardent disciples was a Swiss pastor, Oskar Pfister. The American analysts disagreed with him, and the reason may be that Americans are generally not so alert as the Europeans to philosophical implications and ultimate goals. We seem to be more preoccupied with techniques. However, this attitude has been changing. The growth of counseling—pastoral, vocational, marital, and so on, is indicative of this change. Lewis R. Wolberg, in his book, The Technique of Psychotherapy, includes in psychotherapy guidance and counseling as well as psychoanalysis. He recognizes their overlapping and that the lines of separation can become so thin that they are practically imperceptible. So long as a psychiatrist only dispenses tranquilizers and administers electro-shock treatments he is much like his colleague who treats kidney disease. But when he seeks out the dynamics of his patient, when he studies the mental life in its development from infancy on and considers the social and cultural forces, including the religious beliefs that have shaped his patient, then he is entering the field of values, of religio-philosophical concepts. Furthermore, as he helps his patient to understand himself, to uncover his deep motivations and achieve a meaningful and satisfying life, he cannot avoid questions of right and wrong, true and false, with respect to a person’s drives and behavior and the mores of his cultural, social, and religious milieu.

ILLUSION OF NEUTRALITY

Psychiatrists, especially the psychoanalysts, usually insist that they are “neutral” with respect to a patient’s moral and religious values. Their technique is designed to create a free and nonjudgmental atmosphere in which a patient can “open up.” The doctor tries to “understand” the patient not for the purpose of then telling him what he must do to be cured, but rather with the purpose of helping the patient to understand himself and to make the necessary changes in the direction of health. This is also the technique of counseling, whether it be the nondirective method of Carl Rogers or the more active method of the existentialists. The therapist tries to “experience with” the patient, to empathize so completely that both patient and therapist have what Rogers describes as a sort of trance-like experience. In an article in the American Psychologist, reprinted in Pastoral Psychology (March and April 1959), Rogers describes a conflict within himself between the therapist and scientist. He is troubled lest the scientist thwart the therapist by depersonalizing the patient. He is aware of his subjectivism as a therapist, while at the same time he wants to be objective as a scientist. He finds a modus operandi in suggesting that the scientist cannot be completely objective after all, that he “experiences,” lives “organismically” in his field in somewhat the same way that a therapist “experiences” his client. He concludes: “For science too, at its inception, is an ‘I-Thou’ relationship with the world of perceived objects, just as therapy at its deepest is an ‘I-Thou’ relationship with a person or persons. And only as a subjective person can I enter either of these relationships.” Thus if the therapist is a Christian (not merely a nominal one) his commitment comes with him into the therapeutic situation, and likewise the scientist who is a Christian cannot lock God out of his laboratory. Some analysts are frank to admit that they are not neutral, that their goals are religio-philosophical (for example, Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion; Viktor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul).

VALUES AND HEALTH

These considerations would suggest then that “Christian” is a proper adjective for psychotherapy. Values, moral standards, ethical goals, religious beliefs, a world-and-life view are involved in personality health or wholeness. If health be narrowly defined within a particular cultural situation, then the therapist is only concerned with adjustment, conformity, or the massman. But this is precisely what many modern psychotherapists fear and shun. “The courage to be,” the acceptance of personal “freedom” and “responsibility,” the willingness to be ourselves—these qualities are our uniqueness, and are what make us genuinely whole. But they confront us with the fundamental religious problem of the meaning of human existence. What is man and why is he here? What makes his life worth living, and what is the use of his three score and ten or four score years of which the strength is labor and sorrow?

Jacob J. Vellenga served on the National Board of Administration of the United Presbyterian Church from 1948–54. Since 1958 he has served the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. as Associate Executive. He holds the A.B. degree from Monmouth College, the B.D. from Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Monmouth College, Illinois.

Christians at times get themselves overworked about the state of the world. This is not a sign of faith but the exact opposite. They should relax and trust Christ more. And so we set about, with the best of intentions, no doubt, and calling upon the power of Christ, to save the world from prejudice, ignorance, backwardness, corruption, injustice, war, sin: in short, from the grip of the devil. Christians in position of responsibility, whether civil or ecclesiastical, must certainly try to do all this; they cannot face their Lord in his day having been unprofitable and delinquent in their tasks. But it is eminently possible to lose oneself in the cares and worries of the world and therewith to lose Christ. The cry of “Martha, Martha” (Luke 10:41) keeps ringing in my ears when I behold people, including above all myself, busy day and night trying to save the world; especially as I am not sure that in our business we are adoring Christ enough; and our adoration of him is the most important thing possible.

It is perfectly clear that we can save nobody and nothing if we are not first sure of ourselves. In these matters we can never bluff, we can never hide away our truth. To have the world maddeningly on our mind all the time is not the way to be sure of ourselves. It is rather the way to be distracted, to be unsure, to be impotently spread all over, for the world is completely uncontrollable and there is absolutely no end to what can and should be saved. The dike of corruption cannot be plugged at every point, because the points are infinite. And so to be busy at this point and that point and that other point is often the way of escaping and fleeing from ourselves and therefore from Christ. It appears that the contemplative method of Mary is preferable. I think it is the Marys more than the Marthas who are going to save the world, although the Marthas are indispensable in the process.

Only those who stay very close to Christ can help others who are far away. Only those who prefer him to everything else, even to the call of the needy world, can be used by him for the need of the world. Only those who are not lifted by pride to suppose that they must carry the whole burden of the world will be pitied by him, who does in fact carry the whole burden of the world, and given a humble part of that burden to carry with Him.

A TASK IN THE WORLD

And yet Christians live in the world and Christ never meant them to live out of it. In the world they must work out their own salvation and as much of the salvation of the world as possible. They cannot wash their hands of what is going on in the world. On the contrary, they must take the most active interest in it. This is especially true of the American Presbyterian Church with its wonderful missionary epic, ventured forth and accomplished purely in the name of Jesus Christ. What a crown of glory this church has laid up for herself as a result of her prayers and exertions and vision and loving sacrifice and service over the world.

Now the importance of the emergence of Asia and Africa from the Christian point of view is threefold. First, it is good and proper that these nations take their destinies in their own hands. A Christian can only rejoice at the sight of people asserting and exercising their dignity and independence. Second, new perfections of the spirit are called for to work out the proper creative fellowship between equals. The fellowship of equals is the end of all fellowship, and therefore it should be looked upon as the norm and rule. Once perfected it becomes far more stable and enriching. And third, Christians under the new conditions will have to demonstrate their faith in Jesus Christ in the teeth of five trials. 1. They have to stand firm as they face the resuscitated tribal and national deities. 2. They have to stand firm as they see old great religions rediscovering and reasserting themselves. 3. They have to work out creative dialogues based on our common human nature and need. 4. Their own governments often find themselves embarrassed by them and by Christ. Now the Church should never meddle in political affairs; she should never make the truth of the Gospel dependent upon the fortunes, which are more often misfortunes, of systems and regimes and persons. But in the impersonal formal order of international relations, Christians could find themselves a cause of embarrassment to their own governments. This is their trial and their cross, and they should bear it courageously, keeping in mind that governments and politics and cultures come and go, but Jesus Christ endureth forever.

And 5. alien anti-Christian movements also have to be faced. It could be said a hundred years from now, it might be said in heaven right now, that the Christians, whether by default or by folly or by sheer stupidity or because they were comfortable and relaxed, lost in the competition for the soul of Asia and Africa in the sixties of the twentieth century. For ours is a most crucial decade. We can only say with Paul, God forbid! But let me tell you, there are situations in which the issue is very delicately poised. The Christian debacle in China is a sobering warning. I am not thinking of competition between political systems: that is an affair of governments, and that is a realm completely other than what I am considering, a realm with its own honourable rules and laws. I am thinking of competition for the soul and mind of the people. I am thinking of whether Christians, not governments, can relax if the mind of the people is poisoned with respect to the name of Jesus Christ. Mighty forces are moving fast into whole spiritual vacua. Surely history will say a hundred years from now—in so far as there will be history then—surely heaven is saying right now, what was the matter with the Christians, where were they? Nothing therefore is more necessary than to rouse responsible Christians from their lethargy and slumber into both the infinite dangers and the infinite possibilities of the moment.

At the heart of the whole matter is faith in Jesus Christ. Do we believe in him as passionately as others believe in their own ideas and systems? If we do, then we ought to do better than they. For we worship a Person, they worship an idea. We worship life and strength and love and victory; they worship negation and hatred. Christ can do without us; he can raise up children to Abraham from these stones; he may be doing so already in the vast spaces of Asia and Africa. And if we fail him it cannot be that he failed; we will only have proven that we are unprofitable servants. Nothing puts our faith to the ultimate test more than the concrete challenge facing us all in Asia and Africa.

Christians all over the world are mingling with other religions, outlooks, and points of view more than ever before. Their faith could be easily overwhelmed and overawed by the gods and religions and mythologies of Asia and Africa, as well as by the new fads and outlooks sprouting in the West. Jesus Christ becomes one among many. He becomes even a weak one, one of whom we might be ashamed. We begin to see the good in these other outlooks—and there is plenty of it—and we lose our hold on Christ, or, better, he lets go his hold on us. The result is confusion, uncertainty, and loss of faith. You and I must know of cases where people began with the stoutest Christian faith, but upon prolonged mixing and exposure and living with other religions and cultures, they ended with the haziest notion of Jesus Christ and began to preach some vague eclectic or pantheistic or humanitarian form of religion.

It is a bounden Christian duty to love and serve our fellow men, whether Christian or un-Christian; indeed to love and serve our enemies. It is our sacred duty to promote justice, give everybody his due, educate the ignorant, tend the sick, recognize the good everywhere, and salvage and rejoice in the truth wherever we find it and regardless of the error and darkness in which it may be embedded and with which it may be overlaid. The Lord said to Jeremiah, “If thou take forth the precious from the vile, thou shalt be as my mouth” (Jer. 15:19). Surely we are to identify the precious everywhere and take it forth from the vile to become like unto the mouth of God. But if the price we pay for all this is loss of faith in Jesus Christ, estrangement from his presence, then that is too heavy a price, at least because without him we cannot love our enemies, or serve kinsman and stranger alike, or know what justice is, or recognize truth and goodness where we find them. When I see all this attempted without faith, I wonder if it is not all sentimental and human and political; and these will not only soon decay and degenerate, but they will never last. If Jesus Christ exists, and if he is what we believe him to be, what he himself says he is, and what our fathers have handed him down to us for 2000 years, then I can only be loving and helpful and just and profitable to others through him and with him. I certainly do not expect this to be understood by diplomats or politicians or businessmen or philanthropists or educators who are only what their name connotes; I expect it to be understood by Christians who know and believe in Jesus Christ.

CHRIST AND OUR DILEMMA

The German philosopher Kant emphasized the theoretical and moral nature of man and made everything in the universe depend on him. Hegel attempted a deduction of everything from pure reason which, regardless of what he said, was only the reason of man. The Communists emphasize man alone (in the sense of the collectivity) and want him to take everything into his own hands (in the sense of absolute political control), even to the extent of deriving all science and all culture, including religion and God, from the class struggle. The existentialists know nothing absolutely except man and his miserable existence. Here is this tremendous convergence upon man from every side. But we Christians have been affirming man ever since God himself became man. Could we not therefore show Kant, Hegel, the Communists, and the existentialists that their attempt to concentrate everything in and derive everything from man represents a sound instinct, but that it is our God-Man who is really the Alpha and Omega of all this impulse; Alpha, because he started it in the first place, whether directly or indirectly; and Omega, because the perfect man they pant after and long for and desire to create in history our God-Man already is?

We tend to think that this very culture and civilization in which we enjoy ourselves and take so much pride has created itself; that it subsists by itself and is self-sufficient. We thus lose sight of how much it owes Christ.

The life of slothfulness and satisfaction and relaxation is certainly a life of death: try it and see what I mean; it makes you forget God, it causes you to tend in the end towards nothingness; for nothingness is exactly that where God is forgotten. Whatever the value of a relaxation of tensions in the international order, such a relaxation is disastrous in the order of the spirit. Nobody understands the mysterious depths of man and God who does not understand what James meant when he shouted: “Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness” (James 4:9). In mourning and affliction we come much nearer God than in laughter, and that is why they that mourn are called blessed, seeing that their reward is the comfort of God (Matt. 5:4).

Frustration because of imperfection and sin?! O yes! But thank God, Jesus Christ is without sin and he is our Lord. Only the Christian can say this. All others are just as sinful as, or they may even be much less sinful than, the Christians, but they do not have somebody to look up to who is without sin. It is not sin or sanctity that differentiates a Christian from a non-Christian; it is the Lord Jesus Christ whose mercy the poor Christian trusts. And you and I have known his power, how in the twinkling of an eye he is able to change everything and make us into new creatures. And then, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Cor. 2:9).

And so faith has been tested and through God’s grace it has emerged triumphant over hell and the devil, when it can say with Paul, simply, quietly, and without guile: “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38 f.).

Jacob J. Vellenga served on the National Board of Administration of the United Presbyterian Church from 1948–54. Since 1958 he has served the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. as Associate Executive. He holds the A.B. degree from Monmouth College, the B.D. from Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Monmouth College, Illinois.

Sometime between 1000 and 2000 B.C. (depending on who does the dating) the intellectuals of India concluded that “we live in an impersonal world.” They adjusted this concept of an impersonal world, however, to meet man’s practical needs. The myths and myth-cycles of Hinduism (and later Buddhism) were launched with intellectual sophistication because something in man, whether philosophically sophisticated or ignorant, makes living in an impersonal world intolerable. The word “god” has in itself a certain sense of the personal, and so the word “god” was used by the thinkers of the East in order to cushion the concept of an impersonal universe. But since the “wisdom” of the East is centered in the final loss of personality, it was natural to minimize personality in ourselves, and to have little care for it in others. To the religion of the Orient, sin is simply “lack of understanding,” and sin passes as man accepts “the fact” that he and dung are brothers.

THE PLIGHT OF THE WEST

Many have come to such a position in the twentieth century post-Christian Western world. Lawrence of Arabia, in fact, said that the highest purpose of man’s body is to become manure on the fields. Dominated by this concept, he later committed intellectual suicide, having turned off his mind long before he brought his death to pass on his motorcycle. Historian Toynbee says that while northern European culture is based on Christianity, it no longer believes it, but is trying to keep the moral-cultural concepts built on it; therefore there is now no real relationship between what the Western world is trying to keep and what it believes. Toynbee then seems to say that communism is, by contrast, in the position of resting its culture on what it believes, and that thus communism will win since it is unified in itself as opposed to the divided present culture of the West.

I doubt that communism will win, for it seems to me that it contains even greater divisions in itself. But that is a secondary point. Communism does not have to win for us to lose. We are losing to ourselves.

Many intellectuals of the West have come to the conclusion that we live in an impersonal world, so that we have arrived back at the more than 3000-year-old world view of the East.

In the race of fission versus fission, fusion versus fusion, missile versus missile, what reason is there to think that those conceiving and engineering these things on “our side” believe anything basically different concerning the personal versus the impersonal view of the universe from those on the “other side,” the Communists?

THROUGH THE CURTAIN

We here in Switzerland have been in touch with certain young intellectuals who have escaped from behind the Iron Curtain. Some have come out at great cost. One, for example, spent several years in a concentration camp for a previously attempted break. When he did get out, he left his shoes behind in a swamp, and some of his family were in the camps for two years or more because of his successful escape. But he says, “I’m glad for the freedom, but I have not found what I thought I would—I have not found in the West any base for the freedom.” I can hear the shouts, “ingrate, haven’t you freedom, haven’t you shoes?” But he is only saying out of the rough and tumble of a personally displaced life what Toynbee has said.

Or think of it another way. In the Brussels Exposition last year, a modern art exhibit was titled “Ensor to the Present.” There was an unusually representative cross section of Western paintings of the past 50 years; and more unusual still was a certain scattering of Russian canvases since the revolution. In every room the Russian canvases stood out immediately, for they pictured the world as a world of order. True, each was in some way a political tract saying that the individual only has his meaning in relationship to the State; but it was a world of order. In contrast, the Western canvases of the past 50 years, almost without exception, spoke of a universe of disorder, of purposelessness, of disintegration, of “no one home,” an impersonal universe. And if we were facing the decision of which of these two worlds to accept, and we knew of no third alternative, would we automatically accept the freedom plus shoes plus chrome on the automobiles, plus chaos and reject the meaningful order of the individual, if only in the nauseating context of his relationship to the total State? Freedom is like bread—it needs a base to replenish it, or it rots. And when freedom rots, the only choices left are chaos or dictatorship.

ATOMS WITHOUT A SOUL

So twentieth century man visualizes himself as living in an impersonal world—a universe with no one home—a nightmarish De Chirico painting, where there are chugging machines, endless rows of houses, but the lone figures in the midst of it all only point up the lesson—“There is no one home,” personality has no real meaning. It is worse than a painting, for it is four dimensional—it stretches away to the light years which measure the cosmos; it reaches back to an origin by chance on one end and forward not only to a personal oblivion but the oblivion of all conscious life on the other end, and it embraces the view that man is only the atom contemplating itself, and the atom is finally only energy. It is nobody home—nowhere in the wide universe is there anything which can be rightly termed personality.

Twentieth century man is learning the lesson of the Hindus of 1000–2000 B.C. that man cannot take the naked concept of an impersonal world. With Camus it is a moral sense which damns; with others it is the aesthetic, the sense of beauty, which will not fit into a world of chance; with still others it is the love they feel toward their beloved which cannot be equated with the mere sexual urge, which will not fit into this impersonal universe which the Eastern mind and the twentieth century Western man say is the universe that exists. Consequently, some smash schools as the Teddy Boys of England and the juvenile delinquents of the United States; some paint a universe of chaos; some write Music Concrete and some write equally relative novels and drama; some become alcoholics; some sleep under the bridges of Paris; some just endlessly read the newspapers so they will not have to think; and some mouth religious slogans, not to think but to keep from thinking.

Huxley, in the Brave New World, knew that his “new world” would face this problem, and so he suggested soma, a nontoxic drug, to provide a controlled, needed escape.

But now the leaders of our culture are rethinking their attitude toward religion, as the Eastern thinkers did long ago. We who are Bible-believing Christians should of all people not be surprised at this trend. If biblical prophecy is read in the historical grammatical sense of the words, the antichrist will himself be the object of worship in a world-wide religion, a world-wide “Brave New World,” with a total religion in the place of soma.

Recently a professor in one of the European universities expressed himself this way: “As a natural scientist I find myself in a dual position—I see man from a naturalistic viewpoint; but I find that this materialistic phenomenon of man, as he has been produced by chance, has functional needs. It is necessary for him to fill these functional needs; this is a kind of truth. Thus, we see now that man needs religion.”

Shall we who are biblical Christians shout that a victory is won? Not a bit of it. Instead, we ought to weep, for all he means is that man is the atom contemplating itself by chance, and in the chance relationship of the atoms we are, we find that we have unexplained functional needs and these needs are best met by religion, so, they say, let’s have religion, the tranquilizer supreme. Any religion which meets this functional need is “truth.”

I am convinced that the Eastern type of religious thinking is winning the Western religious world today. Of those I meet from many Western lands who have some interest in religion as opposed to the “pure” materialists, existentialists, and so forth, many more have their basic religious thoughts rooted in Eastern thinking than in Christianity.

Anthroposophy (Rudolf Steiner), Theosophy, Unity, Christian Science, Bahai, and many sects like them are Eastern and use varying degrees of Christian terminology to express that which is contrary to Christian thought. The rush to Yogi everywhere, the growth of an almost untouched-up Buddhism in Britain, have had an influence beyond the numbers of those who would call themselves their followers. Wagner’s operas and Goethe’s poems were born in Eastern thought, and have had great, if only partially understood, influence in our twentieth century world.

LIBERALISM AND IMPERSONALITY

Protestant liberalism is in its own way a strongly contributing factor: it has been depersonalizing Christianity for varying lengths of time, from 250 years ago until the present, depending on which country is inundated. The new current shaped by Barth, Brunner, Niebuhr, and the Scandinavian Lund Theology twists and turns, but it has not changed the direction of the flow. For example, a Hindu or Buddhist well understands the myth-cycle treatment which much of the new liberalism imposes on the first three chapters of Genesis: it is in method what the Hindu-Buddhist myth-cycles are. Yogi Yogananda in his autobiography deals extensively with Genesis 1–3, and using the myth-cycle method he turns this passage into a Hindu-Buddhist tract for Western consumption. By the myth-cycle method, one can come with equal efficiency to the conclusions of the new liberals or to Yogi Yogananda’s conclusions.

The new liberal attitude toward apologetics is a part of the pattern. All we can do, we are told, is “witness.” Religious truth is pushed back out of the test of time, space, and history. When both the modern liberal Protestant and Hindu witness to their religious “truth,” no one can be sure whether they witness to someone, or even something there, or whether they witness only to an abstract idea. On this basis Yogi Yogananda’s interpretation of Genisis 1–3 is as good as anyone’s. Take the first steps in removing the Bible out of space, time, and history, and soon it can be lodged as one more myth-cycle in a Hindu temple, to be circumambulated and meditated upon while one waits for “the lightning to fall.” Who then is to say which is “more right,” the Hindu or the modern liberal Protestant witness? Perhaps lightning strikes deeper in the Himalayas, or Rome, than in Basel, Zürich, or New York.

THE BATTLE FOR TRUTH

In our shrinking, close-knit world we are now facing the most basic of all questions: “Do we live in a personal or impersonal universe?” and the related question of whether religion is merely functional or whether it deals with truth. What is the framework of reality? What is the universe really; what is it objectively?

As one meets Protestants from many lands, one finds them troubled because Protestantism is, in country after country, now an almost entirely middleclass phenomenon. Neither the intellectuals nor the workers are being touched. To reach them we must deal in a gentle yet rough and tumble way with the ideas involved in Christian truth. We must be able to defend the historic creeds of the Christian Church without embarrassment or reservation.

Yet all too often orthodox creeds are used not as keys to understanding, but rather as slogans to escape from the tough business of facing ideas and truth. It is so comforting in the circle of our applauding friends to slay Hinduism, the old and new liberalism, and all else, without an honest effort to understand the problems and the statable Christian ideas in answer to those problems. Slogans will not do. Nor will it do to say that the intellectual questions are unanswered, but as “a blind act of faith” we accept the Bible. Such an assertion tends to confuse the question as to whether Christianity deals with objective truth or only with the functional needs of man.

The writers of the Bible held that truth is to be intellectually considered in the broad daylight of history, or it is nothing. To Paul the resurrection of Christ was physical, testable in history and coherently statable, or the Christian faith was to be declared vain, not true. We must hold this firmly, or we feed the rushing river of the functional and relative concept of religion. We should worship the living God because the Bible has statable answers to man’s bone-crushing, ruthless, intellectual questions.

GOD AND THE INDIVIDUAL

As we seek to understand the problems of our age, we shall see that something is needed in addition to the intellectual answer. There needs to be a demonstration that God is and that he is personal. Christianity is not just “the best intellectual system” the world has ever known; it is truth. It will not do simply to pay lip service to Scripture as to some mechanical truth, and assume that cold logic and common sense are all that is needed. The Bible does not say that such an attitude is enough, and the writers of the creeds did not say it was enough. We ought to note again how carefully the writers of the Westminster Confession balanced the truth of the objectively inspired Word of God with the work which the Holy Spirit does in relationship to the individual.

Again we are back to the central problem, “Is anyone home?” in the universe. The Bible says that someone is very much at home. The Bible teaches that there is a Triune God, and that this personal God deals individually with the finite creatures he has made. Thus, individuals have significance when they fulfill the purpose of their existence in fellowship with him. When man by sin revolted against God, this infinite God loved man enough to send the Saviour who really saves, so that finite creatures might return individually to the purpose of their creation, and, in fellowship with this personal God through the finished work of Jesus Christ, find their significance as finite personalities restored.

SUBJECTIVITY AND OBJECTIVITY

The Christian answer includes the biblical exposition of the universe, the full supernatural system of the Bible, stated without compromise and without embarrassment; and it includes the work of the Holy Spirit in history today. That answer is not the subjective without the objective Bible, as the new liberalism teaches; neither is it simply the objective Bible, if that is taken to imply that only mental assent to the best intellectual system is necessary. It is the objective Bible and the Holy Spirit, the latter dealing not only in an abstract world of religious concepts but in history, and not only history from 1500 B.C. till 100 A.D. but history in every generation.

If there is going to be a convincing statement that God exists and is personal, there must be a demonstration that the Bible’s statements and promises concerning God’s acting in history in relationship to the individual are more than mere words. It will not do to shut up the Holy Spirit’s work merely to regeneration, which cannot as such be seen; nor will it do to carry on Christian work with the means or techniques of the world (which so admirably sell cornflakes, cars, and strange sects), and then expect men to be convinced that God exists and that He is personal. The need involves first the objectively inspired Word, the Bible, from which comes a statable system based in history, set forth in history, not completely comprehended but truly comprehended, and proclaimed without compromise; and second, some demonstration that God does deal with the individual Christian in our generation.

The dangers of subjectivism are always present, but the Bible’s explicit teaching of the “power” of the Holy Spirit, its teaching of the individual leading of the Holy Spirit to individual Christians, and the relation of the individual Christian to other Christians without chaos or machine rule, on the basis of the blood of Christ and the gifts of the Spirit—these things must mean something in A.D. 1960. If they do not mean something real and tangible in our moment of history, not only will the world ask us but we must have the courage to ask ourselves, “Is there a personal God who does exist?” And we must face the question both from the world and from ourselves on the honest background of the only alternate universe which could exist, an impersonal universe of chance and consequent meaninglessness of both the individual and the human race.

The promise and emphasis of God’s acting in history are a part of the Christian system. The objective Word makes these statements and these promises. We did not originate them; they are there, as much a part of the Bible as anything else. Remove the statements and promises, and the biblical system no longer remains.

We have to leap-frog over the trivial half-systems to the basic problems of life and the universe. Because the universe is personal; because the living God exists; because after we have come to him on the basis of the finished work of Jesus Christ we are in fellowship with him; and because his promises to us as Christians have meaning in our moment of history, it is not vain to say before the world:

To eat, to breathe

to beget

Is this all there is

Chance configuration of atom against atom

of god against god

I cannot believe it.

Come, Christian Triune God who lives,

Here am I

Shake the world again.

Jacob J. Vellenga served on the National Board of Administration of the United Presbyterian Church from 1948–54. Since 1958 he has served the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. as Associate Executive. He holds the A.B. degree from Monmouth College, the B.D. from Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Monmouth College, Illinois.

Those who wish to be abreast of what is happening in the Roman Catholic church today could hardly do better than turn to a book recently published by Macmillan titled Modern Catholicism, by Walther von Loewenich. The author, a member of the German Lutheran Church, is professor of church history at Erlangen University. His is an authoritative work, written with admirable clarity and organization, and showing him to be thoroughly versed in the movements and documents which go to make up the contemporary Roman Catholic scene. He achieves with distinction his aim “to combine sympathetic understanding with critical acumen.”

“Modern Catholicism” is defined by Professor von Loewenich as meaning “Catholicism since the first world war”; but he rightly takes us back to the sixteenth century Council of Trent as the starting point for its study. In the current debate it must not be forgotten that the edicts and anathemas of that Council against the doctrines of the Reformation have never been rescinded. By the nineteenth century an important milestone is reached in the promulgation by Pope Pius IX in 1864 of the Syllabus Errorum, “Ultramontanism’s most impressive document, a study of which is indispensable for the understanding of Catholicism today.” The intransigence of its condemnation of “indifferentism” shows that the papacy is “opposed at every turn to liberty of worship and freedom of the press.”

This was followed by the momentous event at the close of 1869 of the summoning by the same Pope of the Vatican Council, at which, during the following year, the dogma of the Infallibility of the Pope was proclaimed. As Dr. von Loewenich pointedly observes, “since 18 July 1870 the Church of Rome has never held a general council. There is no need for one.” The Vatican Council “represents the final victory of papalism within the Church of Rome,” and a lamentable result of its decrees is that “the gulf between the Churches has been immeasurably widened.”

In discussing the question of the sources of Catholic truth, Dr. von Loewenich aptly points out that “in practice the equating of Scripture to tradition results in the subordination of the former to the latter.” The correctness of this observation could not be more plainly attested than in the promulgation by Pope Pius XII on 1 November 1950 of the new dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, for it is acknowledged even in Roman circles that scriptural proof in favor of this dogma cannot be found. Furthermore, as is the case also with other doctrinal definitions from the papal throne, the evidence of tradition is neither unequivocal nor primitive. But an infallible church (and now an infallible pope) can decree pretty much what suits the mood of the moment without being overscrupulous about the evidence of Scripture and tradition. The authoritarian church “has given itself an absolute status. So far from standing under the truth, it controls it, and in so doing advances the further claim of infallibility.” This means, moreover, that “the Catholic idea of the Church excludes all possibility of reformation.”

Professor Loewenich points, however, to “two movements which can be regarded as positive signs of vitality and devotion in modern Catholicism.” These are the biblical and liturgical movements. There are indications, on the one hand, of a desire to turn to the Bible once more and of an increasing (though officially guarded) availability of the Scriptures in the languages of the people, and, on the other hand, of a demand for forms of worship which are more congregational and more suited to the conditions of modern life, such as the celebration of Mass in the evening and in the vernacular tongue, the substitution of tables for altars, and a new emphasis on hymn singing. But the liturgical movement was rebuffed by Pius XII’s encyclical, Mediator Dei, of November 1947, by which its liberty was drastically restricted. The Church was not to be turned into “an experimental laboratory.”

Two other movements which have come up against the restraining hand of authoritarianism are the so-called “New Theology,” representing a determined attempt to break away from the shackles of medievalism, and the “priest-worker” movement, which was an imaginative approach to the problem of reaching the unchurched masses of the world of industry. The former has been narrowly confined and the latter surely halted.

In the modern era of Roman Catholicism nothing has been more notorious than the advancement of the cult of the Virgin Mary, bolstered by the extravagant dogmas of 1854 and 1950, the popular pilgrimages to places like Lourdes and Fatima, and the utterances of contemporary popes which have assigned her a place and a function not inferior to that of Deity. It requires no flight of fancy to predict that in the foreseeable future a further dogma defining the Co-Redemptorship of Mary with Christ may be expected. This whole trend is not only unscriptural and irrational but also uncatholic, and there are many in the Church of Rome who are deeply disturbed by it. Indeed, Dr. von Loewenich asserts that “a devastating picture could be drawn of the searchings of heart now going on among catholics.”

“We are convinced,” he says, “that the Catholic Church is not only out of touch with the modern world, especially in the concern for truth, but has actually fallen away from the Gospel itself.” At the same time, the fact that there is evidence of genuine unrest within the hearts of many and yearnings for something better, not least among the intellectual leaders, represents an opportunity for Protestant witness.

I venture to advise that Reformed theologian Dr. G. C. Berkouwer’s excellent work The Conflict with Rome should be studied in conjunction with this book by Church historian Dr. W. von Loewenich. Theological strength will he added to historical acumen.

Romanist View Of Redemption

Redemption Through the Blood of Jesus, by Gaspar Lefebvre, O.S.B. (The Newman Press, 1960, 233 pp., $4), is reviewed by Emile Cailliet, Stuart Professor of Christian Philosophy Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary.

Only with a sense of awe fraught with an inward shuddering may a reviewer attempt to evaluate a book written under the above title. The physical presentation of the volume immediately suggests a work of love. The scarlet and gold binding, the quality of the paper, the fine ancestry of the linotype face in which the text is set, convey the preciousness of the matter at hand. The opening pages confirm that first impression as the Benedictine author approaches his subject through liturgy. The reader is reminded that the liturgical cycle centers around the Eucharistic sacrifice, thus establishing the entire life of the faithful as a Calvary-centered life. Ample quotations from the Roman Breviary invite participation in the sensible symbols of the hidden realities pointed to by the anniversaries of the liturgical year. The very words of patriarchs, prophets, and New Testament witnesses are put on the lips of worshipers. To open Dom Lefebvre’s book is to be led into the sanctuary, to be ultimately confronted by the Holy of Holies where the Crucified One of Calvary is offered on the altar in a sacramental way. The meaning therein invited is that the Redemption can be viewed in two ways: objectively it is the realization of man’s salvation by the Father through the Son without any participation on our part; subjectively, it is the application of the objective redemption to our souls through the mediation of the Church. It is noteworthy that there is no controversy whatsoever in these pages.

Although the author’s purpose is to inspire rather than to convince, the whole structure of this well-articulated work is grounded in a tradition guarded and fostered by the teaching authority of the Church Fathers, the Councils, and the Popes. What we have here is a masterly introduction to the Roman doctrine of redemption within the larger context of the divine economy of salvation. Dom Lefebvre is obviously aware of the fact that only he who is theologically informed can be truly devotional, and this persuasion is shared by Edward A. Maziarz, C.PP.S., if we may judge from his flawless translation from the original French.

What then does a Roman Catholic mean when he asserts that the various aspects of the Redemption obtain on both the Cross of Calvary and the Eucharistic altar? Essentially this: The redemptive work accomplished on the Cross for man’s salvation is continued on the altar. A re-presentation of Calvary, the Mass stands for the fact that what the Redeemer did there and then, He is still doing through the mediation of the Apostolic Church here and now—namely, shedding his Blood, the Blood of the New Covenant, as material ransom, as a sacrifice for sins, as instrument of atonement for us men and for our salvation. Hence the great importance of devotion to the Precious Blood. Although the expression “precious blood” is only used once in Scripture (1 Pet. 1:19), its equivalent and clarification is found in 1 Corinthians 6:20, “You have been bought at a great price.” The word “precious” then indicates the incommensurable price of our redemption. It is carefully pointed out that while the blood of Jesus constitutes the price of our salvation, it is not its source. The source of its redemptive value is God. It is God alone who saves us.

The reason I have devoted so much of the space allocated to me to an objective presentation of this reverent and well-documented book, is that it gives our readers a unique opportunity to familiarize themselves with the Roman Catholic view of redemption at its best. In so doing, they are likely to feel ill at ease, more perhaps with reference to the context than to the text. The truly “Roman” language of the Catholic hierarchy will give them the impression of a climate forever foreign to them as they read, for example, that the Sacred Congregation of Rites has “improved upon” the scriptural phrase, “precious blood,” by the use of the superlative as it instituted the Mass and Office of the Most Precious Blood, a feast fixed on July 1 and destined to be elevated by Pope Pius XI to the rank of “a double of the first class” (p. 151)—whatever that may mean. Again, even the beauty and relevance of many a page in Part One will hardly reconcile Protestants to a thesis presented under the general title, The Person of the Redeemer and His Helpers (italics mine), and according to which the Virgin Mary is singled out as “our Co-Redemptrix.” The author knows not only that she was preserved from original sin by the merits of the Passion of her Son, but that “this was in view of her divine maternity” (p. 22). In so doing he obviously heeds Pope Pius IX’s declaration by the bull Ineffabilis Deus, that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception “must be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.” Again he insists with Roman Catholic theologians, that only by utilizing the notions of merit and satisfaction (or reparation) can one “fully (italics mine) explain why and how the sacrificial death of Christ redeemed us” (p. 163). “God wished His Son to become man in order that He might be the cause of our deliverance in the four ways (italics mine) which have been discussed” (p. 173). These four ways, incidentally, are those distinguished by St. Thomas (p. 171). We Protestants shrink from such final definiteness. It is our view that the saving power of the cross of Christ can hardly be reduced to theoretical concepts fully accessible to our human infirmity, and as such likely to betray the possibility of human infiltration. To us, the basic assertion that the sacrifice of Calvary is continued and made effective by its representation in the Eucharistic sacrifice, amounts to an implicit denial of the once-for-allness of the work of Christ. Not only is the evangelical element lost in the Roman Eucharistic view, but so is, by the same token, the nature, personality, and true operation of the Holy Spirit, Christ’s alter ego. On the one hand, then, we have the Roman assertion that the apostolic succession through the Popes is the medium of continuity between what Christ did two thousand years ago, and my present plight as a sinner. On the other hand stands the fact of the continued presence and ministry of the Holy Spirit—of Him who is the true Vicar of Christ, and re-presents to my soul being penitent the good news of its salvation. Between these two there is no point of contact.

Redemption Through the Blood of Jesus makes it crystal clear that the Roman tradition and the Reformed tradition are forever incompatible. Their true call is to live side by side in peace, charity, and mutual respect. In approaching the mystery of the Atonement as a loyal, devout son of his own tradition, our Benedictine brother seems to have challenged whom it may concern to go and do likewise.

EMILE CAILLIET

Church History

Early Christian Doctrines, by J. N. D. Kelly (Harper, 1958, 500 pp., $5.75), is reviewed by William C. Robinson, Professor of Historical Theology, Columbia Theological Seminary.

Principal Kelly of Oxford has placed the student of early church history greatly in his debt by this careful and judicious presentation of Early Christian Doctrines. The work covers the period from 100 to about 455. It distinguishes the thinking of the Eastern from the Western parts of the Church, and that from the period of persecution from that after Constantine. The philosophical background in Stoicism and Platonism is exceedingly useful. The work is divided in its treatment so as to present in separate chapters different themes or loci of theology. Such matters as the Church, the sacraments, and eschatology receive fuller treatment than in other texts.

If one dared to offer criticism of a work which he expects to draw heavily upon, it is that the understanding of Hennas Christology ought to be drawn more from the clear parable of the Tower than from the secondary interpretation of the parable of the vineyard, and that Tertullian’s Trinitarianism could be somewhat better understood with a richer treatment of his usage of the Fourth Gospel. The student of patristics will not be without this work.

WILLIAM C. ROBINSON

The Minister’S Handbook

The Minister and His Ministry, by Mark W. Lee (Zondcrvan, 1960, 280 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Faris D. Whitesell, Professor of Practical Theology, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Do you wish to be more efficient and up to date in the pastoral ministry? If so, you will be glad you read this book. If you are a young theological graduate beginning your first pastorate, this book will save you numerous mistakes.

Designed as “the minister’s complete handbook of professional guidance,” the professor of speech at Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington, also an experienced pastor and preacher, has assembled a vast amount of sound, sensible, solid material on all areas of ministerial life.

To the reviewer, the most helpful chapters were those on the minister in his study, on performing weddings, and on conducting funerals. These chapters are studded with specific information and valuable suggestions. The 21 chapters of the book also cover the minister’s ethics, his relation to the Master, his message, professional growth, dealing with people, handling social problems, the church board, the budget, the church building, conducting services, youth work, special problems, and books.

Professor Lee has slanted his material to pastors of all evangelical denominations, but especially to the nonliturgical groups. His discussions are comprehensive and detailed though somewhat heavy. His style is clear but lacks rhythm, warmth, and fervor. More illustrations from successful ministers would help, and perhaps a few more biblical quotations would add spice.

FARIS D. WHITESELL

Positive Proclamation

The Old Testament Speaks, by Samuel J. Schultz (Harper, 1960, 488 pp., $7), is reviewed by Clyde T. Francisco, Professor of Old Testament Interpretation, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

It is refreshing to read a book written by someone who not only respects the faith of Israel but loves its Scriptures. The author clearly takes the position that the original manuscripts of the Old Testament are inerrant, if one understands that often they were written with a world view that was valid at the time of writing. Therein do the biblical writers teach truth without error. Although many scholars would not agree with such a view, and would insist that God can use an imperfect instrument to communicate his word (and man is certainly such a being), it cannot be denied that the result of Schultz’s approach is a positive proclamation of the spirit and purpose of the Old Testament.

One could wish that he had given more credence to the work of literary criticism over the last few centuries. His use of the discoveries of archaeology is extensive, but he cites the work of literary critics only to identify himself with the traditional views of authorship. He allows for no canonical writing after 400 B.C. To him Isaiah is a unity, and no discussion is given to the problem of the authorship of the Pentateuch. Conservative scholars should not fear the discoveries of biblical criticism. The essential battleground is not what human wrote a certain book but the authority of God in the message of the book, whenever it was written. To be sure, Dr. Schultz observes this in his treatment of the Book of Job, but he would do well to recognize the same truth in some of the other more controversial areas.

It appears to the reviewer that the book could profitably be used in our colleges, for it presents basic facts to the student and is carefully documented as a guide to further study. It will not undermine the reader’s faith, although it will give him little help in resolving his doubts.

CLYDE T. FRANCISCO

The Humanist Answer

Literature and Religion: A Study in Conflict, by Charles I. Glicksberg (Southern Methodist University Press, 1960, 265 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Calvin D. Linton, Professor of English Literature and Dean of Columbian College.

This is an excellent and an appalling book. Excellent, because Warsaw-born, United States-educated Dr. Glicksberg (Professor of English at Brooklyn College) writes with such perception and learning of the haunted condition of modern man, the rebel, the alien, the doomed; appalling, because the picture of despair is so pitilessly painted, and because the dubious light of an outdated humanism is the only alternative at which the author hints.

As stated in the first chapter, the purpose of the book is to study, as it appears in literature, the “dilemma of modern man … who remains alone and apart, marching without a sense of God or direction on a journey the meaning of which he cannot comprehend.”

Drawing on his deep reading and keen critical faculties, Dr. Glicksberg quietly (and somewhat repetitively, since several chapters are overlapping essays previously printed separately) presents his evidence. Sartre, Kafka, Auden, Céline, Colin Wilson, Tennessee Williams, Camus, Jeffers (to pick a handful of names at random) all come forward, with many others, to testify to the lostness of man, to the fact that “never in the history of his race have the intellectuals been so affrighted by the specter of non-being.” After viewing the evidence, Dr. Glicksberg can properly ask, “Is it any wonder that in our time writers, convulsed with fear of the great god Thanatos, have joined in the collective danse macabre?”

It does not suggest a flaw to say that the book, although flavored by humanism, presents no solution. (It is the jacket, not the book, which speaks confidently of a “reasoned humanism.”) The author’s purpose is the Arnoldian one of seeing “the object as in itself it really is.” For himself, he assumes, without argument, that “Christianity … cannot be revived as a practical measure of salvation.” Indeed, theism in any form is unacceptable: “The conception of God fails radically to fit the complex facts of modern experience, to explain why we exist, why there is a universe and not a nothing.… To rely on God and to invoke his sacred name—that is to indulge in a species of fairy-tale magic.” Naturalism has long since taught that “man stands alone and his destiny is at the mercy of time and fate and circ*mstance. He is a victim, not an immortal soul; a creature of earth and death, not a dweller in eternity; a biological organism doomed to extinction, not a child of God.”

It is in this environment that the writer of the twentieth century must live, and from this doomed air draw his breath. We had not thought that death had undone so many.

CALVIN D. LINTON

World Missions

A Glimpse of World Missions, by Clyde W. Taylor (Moody Press, 1960, 128 pp., $1.50), is reviewed by Harold Lindsell, Professor of Missions, Fuller Theological Seminary.

This is a quick summary and personal report on the mission fields of the world. Taylor is in the Washington office of the National Association of Evangelicals. He has traveled widely and has acquired a stock of information which is not generally available to the average reader. The book is synthetic, interpretative, and statistical. The maps which show the population figures, missionary personnel, and compare the number of workers to national populations are of great help to ministers and laymen generally. For anyone who wants a quick, popular, and fairly reliable summary this is a fine volume.

Unfortunately the book is marred by grammatical defects and poor English, as well as questionable phrases. These should have been corrected by the editors. Examples are legion: here are some: (1) “Korea has been a prime example to the world in the indigenous church development” (pp. 75, 76; (2) “… many of the Japanese are not only Buddhists but worship Shinto (??) as well” (p. 76); (3) Concluding sentence on Formosa, “They have an excellent staff to do the work” (p. 74) has no discoverable antecedent and to whom the author makes reference cannot be determined.

Despite the criticism the volume is readable, interesting, and has valuable insights and information.

HAROLD LINDSELL

Effective Commentary

The Letters to the Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians, by William Barclay (Westminster, 1959, 253 pp., $2.50), is reviewed by Ralph A. Gwinn, Associate Professor of Religion, Knoxville College.

Thanks to Westminster Press, Dr. Barclay’s unusual combination of scholarship and popular appeal is becoming as well known in this country as in Scotland where he lectures in Trinity College of the University of Glasgow.

The introductions to each of the biblical books in the volume make exciting reading. In the introduction to the Thessalonian letters, for example, Barclay speaks of Alexander the Great’s divine sense of world mission. “He was almost the first universalist. He was more a missionary than a soldier.…” As Paul approached Macedonia for the first time, an area so impregnated with memories of Alexander, again he “must have thought, not of a country, not of a continent, but of a world for Christ.”

One of the very strong points in Barclay’s comments (the translation of the biblical text is his own, and it is good) is his explanation of Greek words used by the Apostle. Indeed, a defect of the volume is that there is no index of these terms provided for reference.

Many commentaries deal with the text from one particular point of view. Barclay combines effectively the explanation of the text and an application of the text to the reader’s life.

RALPH A. GWINN

Isaiah Speaks?

Isaiah Speaks, by S. Paul Schilling (Crowell, New York, 1958, 148 pp., $3), is reviewed by Edward J. Young, Professor of Old Testament, Westminster Theological Seminary.

The title of this popular work would seem encouraging. Modern negative criticism has so divided Isaiah’s prophecy and denied so much to him that one wonders if it is possible to hear any of his words. One scholar even tells us that we cannot obtain the original words of the prophets. Hence, when we open this book we expect to be confronted with the message of Isaiah, a prophet who lived in Judah in the eighth century before Christ.

But the title is somewhat deceptive, for not only does Isaiah speak but so do other people—a so-called second Isaiah and a third Isaiah. In other words here we have a popularization of the results of a certain type of scholarship. And that is frankly discouraging. If anything in this world is sublime and grand, it is the message of Isaiah the prophet. If anything in this world is dull and trite, it is the book of Isaiah after certain critics have finished with it. And so the little book which we are now considering misses much of the deep and rich truth of Isaiah because it has followed the teaching of a certain type of negative criticism.

Fortunately, the author does not follow consistently the “critical” principles to their logical conclusion, and consequently offers many useful and helpful comments. He writes in a pleasing style and says much of value. At important points, however, one feels that he often misses the true meaning of the prophet. One glance at his treatment of some of the Messianic prophecies proves the case. Isaiah 7:10–17 is not taken as a specific foretelling of the birth of Jesus. We are told that the Hebrew word almah is correctly given in the Revised Standard Version as “young woman.” But if Isaiah had wished to speak of a young woman, why did he not employ the common word na-arah? And we are told that there is a perfectly good Hebrew word, even bethulah, which means “virgin.” Again we must demur. Bethulah would not have been a good word to use at all. Also the wondrous titles of Isaiah 9:6 are said not to designate a “king who is himself divine, but one who, because he is endowed for his task by the Lord, is the human embodiment of God’s kingship” (p. 55). True enough, that is the interpretation of certain critics, but the prophecy calls the Child “Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God.” There is no reason for departing from the true meaning of the text at this point.

The servant songs are not a prediction of Jesus Christ but “an inspired portrayal of the true meaning of the history of the covenant people” (p. 118). Nevertheless, their deepest meaning is fulfilled in Christ. At this point the author is simply following the present line of criticism which talks much about the servant passages being fulfilled in Christ yet not being direct predictions of him. But the question of the Ethiopian eunuch is still relevant: “Of whom speakest the prophet this?” (Acts 8:34). And there is only one answer. The prophet speaks of Jesus; he was uttering predictive prophecy.

There is much that is good in Schilling’s book, but the author shows no evidence of having grappled with the great problems that abound in Isaiah. He gives no evidence of having worked carefully through the great commentaries. His bibliography contains references only to “liberal” works, with the possible exception of Kissane’s commentary. This is not satisfactory. We want to hear Isaiah speak.

EDWARD J. YOUNG

On Philippians

The Epistle of Paul to the Philippians, by R. P. Martin, (Eerdmans, 1959, $3), is reviewed by Merrill C. Tenney, Dean of the Graduate School, Wheaton College (Illinois).

Compact, concise, and popular is this new addition to the Tyndale series of Bible commentaries by R. P. Martin. Beginning with an introduction to the church at Philippi, the author sketches adequately and lucidly the circ*mstances which led to the establishment of the church at Philippi, and traces the history of Paul’s relations with the church until the writing of his letter. Although brief, the introduction is full and clear, and its footnotes contain the references that the professional student will want for further investigation.

The body of the commentary is based on an orderly outline which is quite faithful to the text. Comments are given verse by verse, with numbered headings so that any passage can be easily located. The author is acquainted with modern theological and exegetical literature, and makes good use of it. He explains the Greek usage underlying the English translation in such a way that the reader unfamiliar with Greek can profit from his comments.

In treating Philippians 2:5–11 he suggests that the Incarnation means that Christ “could have grasped at equality with God by self-assertion, but declined to do so and embraced rather the will of God in the circ*mstances of the incarnation and of the cross.” This is a more satisfactory interpretation of harpagmon (2:6) than Lightfoot’s explanation of it as “a thing to be grasped” or retained. Martin is not, however, an Adoptionist in theology, for he says, “In His preexistent state Christ already had as His possession the unique dignity of His place within the Godhead.”

This commentary should have a wide field of usefulness. It is readable, scholarly, and yet not too technical.

MERRILL C. TENNEY

A Gospel Of Despair

The Devil and the Good Lord, by Jean-Paul Sartre (Knopf, 1960, 438 pp., $5), is reviewed by Edward John Carnell, Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion, Fuller Theological Seminary.

This book contains three brilliant plays by France’s leading existentialist. Sartre uses the legitimate theater as a medium to develop the thesis that man’s “being” and “becoming” amount to the same thing. Man does not exist (inwardly and responsibly) until he chooses to out of an autonomous sense of deliberation and ownership. This means that God, like other objective criteria, is a hindrance to selfhood. If God exists, man must choose what God has already chosen for him. Sartre wall have none of this. “You see this gap in the door?” asks Sartre, through one of his main characters. “It is God. You see that hole in the ground? That is God again. Silence is God. Absence is God. God is the loneliness of man. There was no one but myself; I alone decided on Evil; and I alone invented Good. It was I who cheated, I who worked miracles, I who accused myself today, I alone who can absolve myself; I, man. If God exists, man is nothing.…”

If the reader can stomach the blatant irreverence, the wholesale lust, and the cultural and political extremes that are laced into these plays, he will enjoy a rare glimpse into both Sartre’s creative genius and the destructive outworking of a philosophy that disregards the laws of God, and that pictures man as a creature who stumbles through life crying “Invictus!”, but who is bereft of grace and forgiveness, and thus of personal hope. Sartre’s man can only be saved by deliberately remaining lost. This is a gospel of despair, not joy.

EDWARD JOHN CARNELL

Apostle Of Literacy

Thirty Years With the Silent Billion, by Frank C. Laubach (Revell, 1960, 383 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by William A. Smalley, Associate Secretary for Translations, American Bible Society.

Dr. Frank C. Laubach has been called the apostle of literacy. Thirty Years With the Silent Billion is the account of his missionary journeys.

The first eight chapters of Thirty Years With the Silent Billion (nearly one-half of the book) is reprinted with minor changes from an earlier book, The Silent Billion Speak. These chapters portray the development of Laubach’s early experiments with literacy, his early success among the Moros (a greatly feared Muslim group of the Philippines), and the spread of his techniques into India, parts of Africa, and Latin America. The story of these first eight chapters is an absorbing one, the personal account of a great man wrestling through enormous problems to find a workable solution to the need of people around him to learn to read.

The rest of the book is disappointing. It gives the impression of having been hurriedly put together from the diaries of Dr. Laubach’s extensive journeys. It is the year by year itemization of his travels and activities which become more and more routine as they go along. The picture of the missionary grappling with the literacy problem and gradually evolving a technique of operation fades and is replaced by the picture of a globe-trotting promoter chronicling his day by day activity with little selectivity as to what is trivial and what is important. Dr. Laubach describes literacy campaigns, such as the one held in Haiti (p. 141 ff.), with glowing optimism. Actually this campaign was a dismal flop and left the missionary and government forces which were interested in literacy utterly discouraged. Dr. Laubach mentions, for example, that the “American Bible Society furnished 20,000 copies of the Gospel of Mark in Creole, and has asked to provide a second edition of 70,000 copies.” Actually the book involved was Luke; 85,000 copies were printed, and very few have ever been used. Since then a new writing system has been developed, a new translation prepared, and a much more carefully planned literacy campaign is to begin soon.

Literacy has been called the handmaiden of Protestant Christianity. Its apostle is a great man, but unfortunately his sweeping vision of the need of humanity does not always take into account his own limitations. The techniques which he has developed have not been universally applicable in the rigid way he seems to try to make them, although they have been enormously stimulating to workers who have experimented with them. The help which he has given to some literacy campaigns has been pathetically superficial to the point where it has aroused great hopes which have later been dashed to the ground with failure. After the first few chapters (which have been previously published anyhow) the apostle’s followers will get little help from his book.

WILLIAM A. SMALLEY

Evangelical Apologia

The Story of the Church, by A. M. Renwick (I.V.F. London, 1958, 222 pp., 4s. 6d.), is reviewed by Owen J. Thomas, Lecturer at London Bible College, England.

This small volume by Professor A. M. Renwick is more than welcome. It serves two purposes. First, it gives a comprehensive picture of the development of Christianity from Pentecost to the present day, under an aegis and with an emphasis which will reassure evangelical readers that here they have a thoroughly reliable and fair view of it—fair, that is, to evangelicals. Every writing of “history” must have some bias; otherwise it is reduced to a mere reporting of news”—and very stale at that. History, and especially Church history, makes it impossible for us to be impartial observers of it, if only because we are part of it, as inalienable legatees of the past. Merle D’Aubigne is surely right when he criticizes Ranke’s handling of the history of the papacy as, in certain instances, too favourable, though written from a Protestant point of view, simply because he is overanxious to be impartial. There is a polarity about the truth which forces us to be either for or against it. This is above all true in recounting the history of biblical Christianity in the world. We welcome therefore a Church history which is quite unashamed in its conservative evangelical bias.

Then there is another purpose to this excellent little compendium. It serves as an apologia for the evangelical faith, especially in Professor Renwick’s treatment of the modern period. Nonevangelical readers, after they have overcome their initial reaction to its bias, will discover that the evangelical movement is far from being just a coterie of small-minded deviationists. Here it is shown to be as broad as the Church itself in true catholicity, and as intensely loyal to the Word, Written and Incarnate, in true apostolicity.

As for style and method of presentation, we are well served. Such a wide survey in such a small compass demands terseness and clarity. We also behold an admirable example of restraint in the fact that only half as many pages are devoted to the Scottish as to the English part of the Reformation. Moreover, the author’s well-known gentleness of character comes out clearly in his treatment of what to a Calvinistic Scot must be a most distasteful subject. Of Mary Queen of Scots he writes: “The truth is that the young and charming Queen, who could dissemble so easily, was held from childhood in the grip of an evil system. She was a martyr to what she had been taught.” Her life was “surrounded with a pathos which will never be forgotten” (p. 145). His sound judgment is displayed in his brief treatment of the Al-bigenses (p. 98) and the Anabaptists (p. 115).

His treatment of the modern scene is excellent in its perspective. Here the reader can gain a well-balanced view of the main lines of development in the World-Church of today. His analysis of the reason for the Church’s loss of grip on the people is striking. It is refreshing to read a sacred historian who faces up to the evils of the protean complexion of modern Christianity. “Doctrinal chaos,” and “revolt against dogma” are claimed to be responsible for recession in church life. On the other hand, the picture is by no means unrelieved by a vigorous evangelical movement and, above all, as his final words proclaim, by the fact that “the Lord has not forgotten His believing Church in these modern days.” One cannot help adding “and the emphasis is on believing!”

A pocket Church history which all should possess.

OWEN J. THOMAS

A serious and concerned band of 992 United Presbyterians from 50 states, one commonwealth (Puerto Rico) and three foreign countries (Cuba, Chile and India) sat down in Cleveland’s Public Auditorium May 18 for their 172nd General Assembly. After eight days of singing, worship and debate, they adjourned with some problems overcome and other solutions seemingly more distant than ever.

The Presbyterians were troubled initially by the world political crisis, for the summit meeting had just erupted in disaster and incoherent Russian frothing still filled the skies. A sober audience gathered that first Wednesday to hear Dr. Charles Malik, former president of the United Nations, ask, “How can there be coexistence with incalculable forces beyond the scrutiny of mankind, that may suddenly erupt without pretext?” He called for “Presbyterian coolness” in viewing the crisis, for “closing of ranks,” and added, “If these events mean that the scales have fallen from the eyes of some people who are now waked up to the realities of life, they have done a great service.”

Ethiopian Challenge

The Presbyterians were soon acquainted with an acute situation of their own. A heartening invitation from Emperor Haile Selassie to begin new missionary work among tribes in western Ethiopia (where Russia has just imported 1,000 technical experts) ran into a boar’s nest of budgetary troubles. The record $42,950,838 budget for 1961 (one-third of which lies beyond the expected operating funds) would allow for expansion in Ethiopia, Brazil and Indonesia, where conditions are ripe; but last year only $24,713,340 came in. To meet the challenge of these “unmet priorities,” and to accept Haile Selassie’s bid, a special November offering was approved. However, skyrocketing costs of maintaining a world-wide mission establishment, plus ever-expanding theological seminaries, had the 992 commissioners shaking their heads in puzzlement.

The uneasiness was not limited to material problems. After a stout speech by Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, formerly of South India, and now general secretary of the International Missionary Council, the Presbyterians wondered whether their word “fraternal worker” was really an adequate substitute for the time-honored term “missionary.” Newbigin maintained that missions and missionaries were needed more than ever; that it was as wrong to say that the Church’s task was all “mission” as to say it was all “education” or all “evangelism” or “stewardship” or “worship.” He pointed out that Asian churches have already sent out 200 missionaries and are planning an Asian mission to western Europe.

Too, the Presbyterians were bothered about their evangelistic emphasis. They sounded what may be death knell of the annual pre-assembly evangelism conference by voting to permit “other phases,” notably Christian education, to move into the spot alternately. One commissioner asked whether the very fact that the church had to parade its evangelistic interest did not reveal “how sick we are.” The assembly subsequently amended the evangelism committee report to strengthen its doctrinal content, and voted to continue to emphasize evangelism.

Problem of Bigness

Another concern of the United Presbyterians was their church’s growing tendency toward institutionalism. Dr. Arthur R. McKay, president of McCormick Seminary of Chicago, asked, “Does the church not suffer from the same ailments as the society it is called to serve: sleek and prosperous, popular as never before, proud of its possessions, revelling in its status …?” And Dr. Newbigin added, “There is a dangerous question whether after we get all the churches together—after all our ecclesiastical joinery, we will still have an evangel left to proclaim.” He concluded it could happen “only when our egotism—including our fierce and terrible ecclesiastical pride—has been broken in the presence of the Crucified.”

In one area, however, the United Presbyterians showed confident and aggressive convictions to wit, social education and action. They expressed “horror” at the results of South Africa’s apartheid; called for “continued efforts to achieve an honorable understanding with the Soviet Union” and for disarmament “with adequate inspection and control.” They approved “peaceable and orderly disobedience” and “disregard” of such “laws and customs requiring racial discrimination” as “are, in our judgment … serious violations of the law of God,” thereby recognizing most Negro student demonstrators in southern lunchrooms and libraries as having conducted themselves in ways “consistent with our Christian heritage, the Federal Constitution, and the moral consensus of the nation.” They declared it “an act of irresponsible citizenship” to support or oppose a candidate for public office “solely because of his religious affiliation.”

The General Assembly found itself thwarted in continued conversations with the (southern) Presbyterian Church, U. S., regarding merger, and had to content itself with proposing official committee meetings when the officers could jointly “begin some new work together.” Proposals for opening merger negotiations with the new United Church of Christ were tabled for the present, out of respect to the latter Church.

A comprehensive report on faith and health criticized Christian Science and Unity, as well as faith healers who “open themselves to the danger of a self-aggrandizing career in which sensationalism replaces spirituality and healing is emphasized out of all proportion to the other important aspects of the gospel ministry.”

The assembly elected as its moderator Dr. Herman Lee Turner, pastor (for 30 years) of Covenant Church, Atlanta, and author of the “Atlanta Manifesto” urging peaceful racial integration. In the closest election in history, Dr. Turner defeated by two votes his Negro opponent, Dr. Edler G. Hawkins, pastor of St. Augustine Church in the Bronx, New York. The tally was 471 to 469. Dr. Hawkins accepted Dr. Turner’s invitation to become vice moderator.

Worship Revision

The assembly also dealt with some unfinished racial business of its own: a Negro church in Alexandria, Va., which has yet to be brought into Washington City Presbyter, and a Sioux Indian Presbytery (Dakota Presbytery) which still overlaps the synods of North and South Dakota and Montana. Final action remains to be taken.

A revised directory for worship was accepted, paving the way for a coming revision of the Book of Common Worship. The assembly rejected, however, a liturgical move to establish the proper place for morning offering and pastoral prayer after the sermon, rather than before as is customary.

Moderator Turner and Stated Clerk Eugene Carson Blake wired the assembly’s encouragement to the President.

The assembly noted that membership in the denomination increased by 50,120 to a total of 3,209,682 during 1959. Ordained ministers increased by 240 to 12,041.

Next year’s General Assembly will meet in Buffalo, New York.

Exodus: How Many?

So the whole number of the people of Israel, by their fathers’ houses, from twenty years old and upward, every man able to go forth to war in Israel—their whole number was six hundred and three thousand five hundred and fifty.

—Numbers 1:45, 46 (RSV)

Israeli rabbis rebuked Premier David Ben-Gurion last month for questioning the Scriptural account of the Hebrew exodus from Egypt. The ultra-orthodox Agudath Israel Party introduced before the Knesset (Parliament) in Tel Aviv a non-confidence vote on grounds that Ben-Gurion had forfeited his right to lead the nation when he voiced the theory that only 600 Jews left Egypt, instead of more than 600,000 as recorded in the Bible.

The move was defeated 61 to 6, but observers suggested that the parliamentary test may have strained the premier’s coalition of socialist and religious parties.

Ben-Gurion originally advanced his views in a Bible discussion circle which met regularly in the home of President Itzhak Ben-Zvi. He contends that there had been Hebrews in the land of Canaan before Abraham and that only a few besides Joseph’s relatives migrated to Egypt during the great famine. He observed that the Scriptures record that 70 males went down to Egypt. Noting that the Bible names all the male descendants of Levi up to the generation of the Exodus, he pointed out that 25 males were born to this tribe in Egypt. By doubling the figure to account for females and multiplying the result by 12 to account for other tribes, he obtained the total of 600.

Zionist Lobbying

Jewish leaders are up in arms over Democratic Senator William Fulbright’s attitudes toward Zionist lobbying.

“We think that Senator Fulbright owes the U. S. Jewish community an apology,” said the National Jewish Post and Opinion last month.

Fulbright, in the course of Senate debate on foreign aid, charged that U. S. foreign policy in the Middle East “is being directed by minority pressure groups.” The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warned against annoying Arabs by taking sides with Jews in the U. A. R.-Israel dispute.

The Arkansas senator incurred further criticism in commenting on charges of Democratic Senator Russell Long of Louisiana to the effect that “one of the principal causes of the overthrow of the [Korean] government appears to have been local dissatisfaction with the management of the $200 million a year we have been spending there.”

“If this is the cause of corruption,” replied Fulbright, “then Israel ought to be the most corrupt of all nations, because the total of our aid—Government aid, not private aid—has been $310,304,000 for a population of approximately 2 million.

“It is estimated that private sources have provided—and these amounts are tax exempt for those who give them—approximately the same amount.”

The National Jewish Post and Opinion, in a lead article, subsequently reported this inaccurate inference: “The Jerusalem Post called Senator William Fulbright’s remark that Israel is one of the ‘most corrupt of all nations since Israel had received so far some $600 million for only two million people’ something ‘unprecedented in the annals of the U. S. Senate.’”

Largest Crusade?

Evangelist Billy Graham and his associates are studying the prospect of a crusade in Tokyo, world’s largest city, in 1963.

An invitation which is perhaps the most challenging of his career was presented to Graham last month at the Southern Baptist Convention. Shuichi Matsumura of the Japan Baptist Convention travelled to Miami Beach to present the invitation personally. Meetings would be held in a huge stadium which is also scheduled to be the site of the 1964 Olympics. Graham accepted the invitation “tentatively,” saying he must confer with his team about it.

Graham’s next major campaign is in Washington, D. C., June 19–26. Meetings are scheduled for Griffith Stadium, home of the Washington Senators baseball club, Sundays at 3 p.m. and nightly at 8 p.m. The evangelist also plans to address special gatherings in the Pentagon and elsewhere. Crusade leaders are hoping for wide radio and television coverage.

Next month Graham will speak at conferences in South America and Europe. In August and September, he and several associate evangelists will conduct crusades in Switzerland and Germany.

Fire Losses

Church losses from major fires rose sharply in North America during the past year, according to a report from the National Fire Protection Association. Ten major church fires in 1959 caused some $3,000,000 damage. Only four major fires were recorded in 1958, with damage totalling $1,170,000.

Neglected Warnings

Churches of Hilo, Hawaii, the city hardest hit by last month’s seismic sea waves, miraculously escaped damage. The Rev. Paul Toms, CHRISTIANITY TODAY news correspondent who lives in Hilo, says no churches are located in the coastal area which suffered the most severe pounding.

Toms said that the heavy loss of life was largely attributable to neglected warnings. Tidal wave alerts were broadcast just before residents retired for the night. Some chose to ignore them. The first wave struck at 1:25 a.m. Others followed soon after.

Churchmen’s Appeal

Thirteen prominent Protestant church leaders¹Signers of the petition: Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.; Dr. Edwin T. Dahlberg, president of the National Council of the Churches; Dr. George L. Ford, executive director of the National Association of Evangelicals; Dr. Herbert J. Gezork, president of the American Baptist Convention; Bishop Gerald H. Kennedy, president of the Council of Bishops of The Methodist Church; Dr. Louie D. Newton, minister of the Druid Hills Baptist Church in Atlanta; Dr. Harold John Ockenga, minister of Park Street Church in Boston; Dr. Norman V. Peale, minister of Marble Collegiate Church in New York; Dr. Daniel Poling, editor of The Christian Herald; Dr. Ramsey Pollard, president of the Southern Baptist Convention; Dr. Fredrick A. Schiotz, president of the Evangelical Lutheran Church; Dr. Ernest Trice Thompson, moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S.; Dr. Thomas F. Zimmerman, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and general superintendent of the Assemblies of God. are asking Congress for “immediate action” on proposed legislation to ban drinking on commercial aircraft.

“It is difficult to understand why no decisive action has yet been taken to eliminate the service and consumption of alcoholic beverages on commercial airlines,” said a letter from the clergymen. They urged the lawmakers to close this “glaring gap in air safety.”

Within a few days after the letter was made public, a Senate commerce subcommittee favorably reported a bill which would make illegal the serving of alcoholic beverages on aircraft in flight. This action brought the bill before the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, where similar measures have repeatedly been stalled in recent years.

Short-term Missionaries

A California obstetrician’s decision to spend a year in Africa exemplifies a growing trend within the Christian missionary enterprise.

Dr. William H. Wickett, Jr., leaves with his wife and five children this month for a remote missions hospital in Southern Rhodesia. Already another doctor in the Los Angeles area has expressed an interest in relieving Wickett next year. Methodist missions officials say a pattern might be established whereby specialists can serve at overseas missions for short periods. The missions hospitals could use the arrangement to best advantage by timely scheduling of treatment and surgery. Chest operations, for example, might all be scheduled for a month during which a thoracic surgeon is anticipated.

Wickett is setting a “tremendous example,” says his pastor, Dr. Winston Trever of the First Methodist Church of Fullerton, California. “We are beginning to see that the church has a great, untapped asset in laymen with professional training and experience in medicine, agriculture, education, and engineering. Many might be able to serve overseas on a short-term basis where they could not give three to five years.”

Protestant Panorama

• A record distribution at home and abroad last year of 17,650,917 portions of Scripture was reported by the American Bible Society at its 144th annual meeting in New York last month.

• The Assemblies of God plan to erect a new $2,500,000 headquarters building in Springfield, Missouri.

• Establishment of compulsory dancing courses in Norwegian public schools is being protested in a number of Protestant quarters.

• The Southern Baptist Convention’s Sunday School Board will begin publication next October of a monthly magazine in Braille for use by blind teen-agers.

• The Central Methodist Mission in Sydney, Australia, will use a newly-acquired $250,000 site in the downtown section for expanded facilities.

• An African Anglican clergyman from Mombasa, Kenya, the Rev. Edwin Adinya, is beginning a year’s duty as assistant to the rector of St. Peter’s, one of the most select Church of Ireland parishes in Belfast.

• The Knoxville (Tennessee) Presbytery is resolving a race controversy over its new $243,000 camp ground near Watts Bar Lake with a program of one integrated session and two segregated sessions this summer.

• Anglican Bishop Frederick H. Wilkinson of Toronto says his diocese, largest in Canada, will make special efforts to befriend the large number of Italian immigrants who have recently arrived in the area. Most of the newcomers are said to be unchurched.

• American University, burgeoning Methodist school in Washington, D. C., is launching a 10-year campaign to raise $40,000,000 to prepare the campus for an anticipated enrollment of some 12,000 students by 1970. The campaign got its initial impetus with a $1,000,000 appropriation for the next four years voted by the Methodist General Conference in Denver.

• The Council of Churches of Greater Houston (Texas) is changing its name to the Association of Churches of Greater Houston. Officials say the change was made to stress the autonomy of the group, which is nonetheless affiliated with the National Council of Churches. The officials admitted privately that recent charges of Communist infiltration of the NCC was a factor in the name change, Religious News Service reported.

• The all-Negro National Christian Missionary Convention was merged with the United Christian Missionary Society last month. Both groups have been associated with the Disciples of Christ brotherhood.

• The Soviet Embassy in Washington is releasing 8,000 feet of film showing worship services in Moscow’s First Baptist Church. The films were taken by the National Broadcasting Company and the Southern Baptist Convention for 30-minute telecasts in this country. Another 2,000 feet of film was withheld by the embassy.

• A dispute over segregation prompted the resignation last month of the Rev. Philip Gresham, rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Roanoke, Virginia. Gresham favors racially-integrated church functions. A number of his vestrymen have been opposed.

• Ground will be broken this month for a $150,000 fine arts building on the campus of Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. Cost of erection is being borne by an anonymous Santa Barbara resident. The gift is the largest in Westmont’s history.

• The first volume in a series of newly-translated Calvin commentaries was released last month by the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, which is observing its 50th anniversary year.

• A call for 300 new missionary candidates came out of The Evangelical Alliance Mission’s 70th annual conference in Chicago last month. The mission, commonly referred to as TEAM, now has 807 missionaries in active service.

Celebrity Tyme

When H. P. Sconce, 54-year-old Baptist minister, died last December, he bequeathed an unusual asset to the radio broadcasting industry: some 300 15-minute tape recordings in which he had interviewed noted personalities in government, industry, sports, and other fields as to their Christian convictions.

Each of the tapes is a complete radio program ready to be aired under the title, “Christian Celebrity Tyme” (Sconce applied old English spelling for effect). One of the most remarkable aspects of the program is that no appeal for funds is made. Support is raised privately.

“Christian Celebrity Tyme” began six years ago this month while Sconce was a pastor in Hermiston, Oregon. He subsequently moved his family to Sun Valley, California, where his wife still coordinates distribution of the tapes to radio stations across the country.

Musical theme for “Christian Celebrity Tyme” is “Just for Today.” Following the theme, Sconce introduces the guest (a different person for each program) and asks for a Christian testimony. The scope of the interviewing is such that some are more Christian than others. The program closes with the playing of the guest’s favorite hymn.

Merger on the Left

Governing assemblies of the American Unitarian Association and The Universalist Church of America, meeting simultaneously but separately in Boston last month, approved a merger to become effective in May, 1961. The Unitarian vote was announced as 725 to 143, and the Universalist as 365 to 65, meeting a two-thirds majority requirement in both cases. The consolidated organization, to be known as the Unitarian Universalist Association, will have a constituency of some 200,000.

Judicial Council

The 36th quadrennial General Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which attracted nearly 2,000 delegates to Buffalo, New York, last month, voted to create a judicial council to interpret church law and to consider appeals between sessions of the General Conference. Establishment of such a council—which would include five elders and four laymen—must first be ratified by the 49 annual conferences of the AME Zion Church.

Four new bishops were elected: Dr. Felix S. Anderson of Louisville, Kentucky; Dr. William M. Smith of Mobile, Alabama; Dr. William A. Hilliard of Detroit; and Dr. S. Dorme Lartey of Liberia.

The church’s Board of Bishops urged the United States to take immediate steps “to integrate the Negro into every phase of American life at all cultural and skilled levels.”

Among speakers at the 15-day conference were Vice President Nixon and Dr. Edwin T. Dahlberg, president of the National Council of Churches. The keynote address was delivered by Bishop Herbert B. Shaw of Wilmington, North Carolina.

The AME Zion Church has more than 3,000 congregations with a total membership of approximately 780,000.

Hailing Integration

The 17 bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church hailed increasing progress toward racial integration and church unity in a statement presented to the 36th session of the denomination’s quadrennial General Conference, held last month in Los Angeles.

Some 5,000 delegates and visitors heard the statement read by Bishop Joseph Gomez, secretary of the church’s Council of Bishops. The 144-year-old denomination has nearly 6,000 churches and more than a million members.

The statement said the time was not yet at hand for union of the AME body with The Methodist Church, whose “jurisdictional feature involving Negro Methodism … grows less satisfactory to a large and growing Methodist liberalism.”

In a resolution, delegates called for a “Universal Year of Human Rights” to coincide with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963. Delegates also voted to subsidize salaries of 700 ministers who serve small parishes with amounts ranging from $600 to $1,800 a year, depending upon scholastic preparation and tenure of the ministers.

Two new bishops were consecrated in ceremonies conducted by Senior Bishop Sherman L. Greene: the Rev. Joyn D. Bright of Philadelphia and the Rev. George N. Collins of New Orleans.

The conference opened with a sunrise service in Pasadena’s famed Rose Bowl.

Missions and Theology

The 63rd General Council of the Christian and Missionary Alliance voted to establish a graduate school of theology the location of which is yet to be determined. The Alliance now operates undergraduate schools in Nyack, New York; San Francisco, California; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Regina, Saskatchewan. A graduate school of missions is scheduled to begin classes in Nyack this fall.

The council, held annually, drew 694 delegates to Portland, Oregon, last month. The delegates approved a record foreign missions budget of $3,876,000, used to support 824 active missionaries in 22 foreign countries. In North America, the Alliance has 1151 churches with a combined membership of about 60,000.

People: Words And Events

Deaths:Professor Hans-Joachim Iwand, 60, one of Germany’s leading Lutheran scholars, in Bonn … Bishop L. L. Baughman, 61, of the Evangelical United Brethren Church; in Wellington, Kansas … Dr. Thorvald Olsen Burntvedt, 72, retired president of the Lutheran Free Church; in Minneapolis … Dr. Francis Shunk Downs, 74, former secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.; in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania … Dr. Wade C. Smith, 91, associate editor of the Presbyterian journal; in Weaverville, North Carolina … Dr. William A. Phillips, 69, retired Baptist missionary; in Denver.

Appointments: As dean of Wittenberg University’s Hamma Divinity School, Dr. Bernhard Hillila … as dean of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, Dr. Jerald C. Brauer … as academic dean and professor of church history and New Testament at Pacific Bible Seminary, Harold W. Ford … as president of Shelton College, Dr. Clyde J. Kennedy … as dean of women at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Mrs. Andrew Q. Allen … as minister of evangelism for the Reformed Church in America, the Rev. Herman J. Ridder … as executive secretary of the Council of Churches of the National Capital Area, the Rev. Virgil E. Lowder.

Resignations: As president of Cascade College, Dr. Edison Habegger … as president of Shelton College, Dr. Jack Murray … as executive director of Christ’s Mission and editor of Christian Heritage, Dr. Walter M. Montano.

Citation: To George W. Cornell of Associated Press, the fifth annual Faith and Freedom Award for excellence in religious newswriting by the Religious Heritage of America.

Mild-mannered Methodist

Korea’s Acting President, Chung Huh, who already has popular approval, is a devout, mild-mannered Methodist.

The new national leader, who is also Korea’s Foreign Minister, comes from a non-Christian family background. His introduction to the Gospel, he recalls, was in a tiny Australian Presbyterian missions school which he attended as a boy.

Later baptized in The Methodist Church, he is now, with his wife, a member of the Ehwa University Methodist Church in Seoul and also serves as vice-chairman of the board of directors of the Seoul YMCA. During his years in America he helped to found the Korean Methodist Church in New York City.

Declined Appointment

Dr. Albert G. Huegli, academic dean and director of the graduate division of Concordia Teachers College, is turning down an invitation to become executive director of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. He reportedly prefers to remain on the educational “front line.”

Southern Baptists, meeting in Miami Beach during the somber Paris summit crisis, reviewed a record year in membership gains and stewardship and chartered further advances in evangelism and missions.

Goals for 1961 include 600,000 baptisms and a $2,100,000 budget increase (to $20,013,000). However, such strides will be relatively meaningless, speakers warned, unless churches begin to weigh members as well as count them, seeking quality along with quantity.

The outstanding personality at the sessions was evangelist Billy Graham, who drew the week’s biggest crowd to the weakest program spot. Graham also helped set the mood of the meetings by calling the summit smash-up perhaps the most serious crisis civilization had ever faced. “This is no time for business as usual,” he declared.

News dispatches from the superb new Convention Hall were dominated by a flurry over veiled charges of heresy in at least one seminary and a lengthy debate over the religion-in-politics issue.

The seminary issue flared up during the annual address of President Ramsey Pollard, a blunt pastor-evangelist who recently succeeded Dr. R. G. Lee as pastor of the second largest Southern Baptist church, Bellevue in Memphis. Pollard loosed a broadside against any professors who doubt the miracles of the Bible or water down its inspiration. “If you don’t believe … get out!” he thundered as hundreds of messengers applauded.

The fat was really in the fire when Pollard added that he had suspicions about one professor in a seminary he did not name. “I’m not sure,” he said, “but when I am sure I’m going to the president and the board of trustees.” The blaze was fanned next morning when a Miami newspaper quoted a local pastor as “indicating” that the suspect is at Southeastern Seminary, Wake Forest, North Carolina. The story also said a general inquiry into theological soundness at the seminaries is planned.

Convention leaders quickly scotched the story that a general inquiry is in the works. A survey of seminaries and other institutions is under way, they said, but it is confined to organization and procedures, looking to a manual to avoid overlapping. However, it was reliably reported that certain members of the study group had intended to co*ck a weather eye for heterodoxy.

President Syndor Stealey of Southeastern Seminary told the convention it is news to him if any member of his faculty is suspect. The newspaper reporter stuck by his story although his informant denied having told him anything to justify the implication that Southeastern was the target. President Pollard told a press conference meanwhile that he had not intended to attack any of “our five seminaries” but merely wanted to stress the need for “eternal vigilance” against the inroads of unbelief.

A Virginia Baptist editor, Reuben Alley, challenged Pollard’s entire assumption that one Baptist can call another a heretic. “Where is our creed?” he asked at the press conference. Pollard started listing some “fundamentals,” such as the Virgin Birth and the miracles. A reporter helped him by recalling a quasi-creed adopted by the Convention in 1925. Another bystander asked if the Baptists’ creed is not still the New Testament.

Editor Leon Macon of the Alabama Baptist asked seminary presidents for a plain and simple answer to the question whether unbelief and mythology are being taught. The reply was twofold: 1. All the seminaries have orthodox statements of faith which professors are sworn not to contradict and 2. “We can trust our seminary presidents.”

Macon noted the claim, by some, that the American Association of Theological Seminaries was involved in the situation as a potential supporter of “liberal” professors who might be fired. The seminary presidents unitedly indicated they would reject any such AATS pressure. None has been experienced, they said. But one seminary president indicated that a new and supplementary accrediting agency might be needed as a cushion in case AATS affiliation should become untenable.

Resentment against Pollard’s statements bubbled up on the convention floor. A Texas pastor introduced a resolution calling it inappropriate and inadvisable to express “vague and generalized doubts and suspicions concerning the integrity” of Baptist professors. Scores of messengers applauded. The resolutions committee, however, declined to report out the motion, holding that it tended to limit freedom of discussion.

Later, a handful of messengers almost succeeded in preventing publication of the convention president’s address. They objected when the question arose at a time when unanimous consent was required. A special order of business was then set and a motion to print the address passed handily.

The resolutions committee took some of the force out of a blow aimed indirectly at any Roman Catholic candidate for the presidency. The resolution was further watered down from the floor. The implication that any candidate is inescapably bound up in his church’s stand on public issues was challenged on the ground that Baptists have no dogmas. The resolution as passed said a candidate is suspect when he is bound by a church which denies freedom. Thus a Catholic who breaks with the hierarchy in this area might be approved The resolution reaffirmed support for the constitutional ban on religious heads for public office.

At a press conference arranged by convention officials, Billy Graham declined comment on the religion-in-politics resolution. Citing a recent opinion poll which indicated most Catholics would support any Catholic candidate, Graham said this was “just as bad” as voting against a man solely because he is a Catholic. The evangelist said he agreed generally with a recent Look article by Eugene Carson Blake and G. Bromley Oxnam.

The real issue, said Graham is the seriousness of the world situation. The nation’s leader should be a man of experience and world stature. “This is no time to experiment with novices,” he commented. Some reporters, ignoring Graham’s direct statements that he was not taking sides and that both parties have experienced candidates, interpreted his statement as an endorsem*nt of Vice President Nixon.

The convention took no direct action on the racial issue. Several speakers said Southern Baptists’ numbers and position give them a special responsibility in the field. The Christian Life Commission, whose pronouncements often have been challenged, was given a small budgetary increase. The commission’s report, which was received as information, called on Baptists to use every opportunity to help Negroes obtain equal rights, especially the right to vote, and to “thoughtfully oppose any customs which may tend to humiliate them in any way.”

A proposed resolution against federal grants to schools of nursing was referred to the Public Affairs Committee after it was pointed out that its phraseology might be in conflict with the current policy of some Baptist institutions to accept low interest rate government loans.

The question of moving the convention’s executive committee headquarters out of Nashville was postponed by committee action. Members are divided over where to go. In the background are two factors: Nashville’s efforts to tax denominational properties and a desire to underscore the executive committee’s neutral, supervisory role by separating it physically from major agencies which it guides or evaluates.

A new procedure designed to forestall development of a clerical hierarchy began going into practical effect at the convention. Adopted last year, the new rule requires that at least one-third of the members of each board must be laymen.

A proposed resolution asking the Sunday School board to sever alleged ties with the National Council of Churches died aborning after a vigorous statement by executive secretary James Sullivan, who said the board had no more affiliation with the NCC than with the Atomic Energy Commission. It is true that the board pays copyright fees for use of a uniform lesson plan, but all Baptist lesson materials are written by Baptist editors and participation in the lesson plan does not involve membership in the council, he said.

The two greatest cohesive elements in Southern Baptist life are the foreign mission board and the Sunday School board. As usual, foreign missions night was a major convention attraction. The Sunday School board’s unlimited offer to be open to inspection enhanced its already high standing. A wordy, dull presentation of home missions was rescued by fresh testimonies from converts and grass roots workers and by Bev Shea’s singing and Billy Graham’s preaching. Seminaries are generally conceded to be doing a good job but there are rumblings of discontent and not all of them can be dismissed as age-old differences between scholars and country preachers.

President Pollard was renamed without opposition to an expected second term. Two pastors, W. O. Vaught of Arkansas and John Slaughter of South Carolina are the new vice presidents. The pastors’ conference elected Roy McClain of Georgia, who was in a run-off for the convention presidency last year.

The convention, which already had 19 boards and commissions, got another when the stewardship committee of the executive committee was given independent commission status. The Relief and Annuity Board became the Annuity Board with the dropping of part of its name.

Nearly 10,000 new churches and missions have been established since 1956, but new life is needed for a “30,000 Movement” if its goal is to be reached by 1964.

New satellites have opened a golden age of communications, making world-wide radio and television realities instead of possibilities, according to Paul Stevens of the Radio-TV Commission who said “Southern Baptists must be alerted and must prepare themselves adequately to make use of these facilities at once.” The convention rushed passage of a resolution calling for Christian patience and an emphasis on spiritual foundations and moral regeneration in world peace negotiations.

Gathering 350 pastors and workers from Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador, an epochal World Vision conference May 9–13 prodded evangelical forces to a deeper sense of their spiritual task in a time of unrest in Latin America. In the newly completed auditorium of the Interamerican Mission Seminary campus in Medellín (second in size to Colombia’s capital city in Bogotá), delegates heard Dr. Bob Pierce, Dr. Paul Rees, Dr. Kyung Chik Han of Korea, and Editor Carl F. H. Henry of CHRISTIANITY TODAY press the burning relevance of the Gospel to the plight of modern man and contemporary culture.

Colombia has been a center of Romanist repression, and not infrequently of persecution, of Protestant missionary effort.

Chafing under press reports of Romanist intolerance, spokesmen for the U. S. Catholic church, steadily expanding a drive for political power, have commented ambivalently. Some have waved aside the accounts as “mere propaganda”; others have deplored the tendency of Protestants to identify Romanism with “Spanish Christianity” (without themselves repudiating it); others have spoken of religious liberty as a proper expectation by non-Romanists.

Evangelical workers in Latin America have steadily sharpened their evangelistic focus, aware that Roman strategy changes frequently. Colombia today has the fastest growing evangelical population in the world. In Medellín the 350 delegates included 30 from Western Venezuela and 30 from Ecuador; the others were from Colombia (50 missionaries, 240 nationals). This was more than four times the number of full-time Protestant workers ever gathered in assembly in Colombia. Roman Catholic persecution has purified the Church and stimulated growth. Baptized church members increased 51 per cent during the five worst years of persecution, and the Protestant community now numbers about one per cent of the population. A survey of evangelical work in Colombia by the Evangelical Confederation and the National Pastors’ Conference now shows 192 organized Protestant Spanish-speaking churches, 401 congregations with regular services, 119 Protestant-sponsored schools, 22 hospitals, dispensaries or clinics, and 13 seminaries or Bible institutes. But there is still only one worker for every 24,000 inhabitants.

World Vision arrangements were implemented by the Rev. Robert W. Lazear, Jr., of Bogotá, executive secretary of the Evangelical Confederation, and the Rev. Bert Biddulph, rector of the Interamerican Seminary in Medellín. Following the conference, the seminary dedicated its new building—a gift of World Vision—and carried on another week with study courses. The background, education and intellectual level of Colombian pastors are extremely varied, from rural worker to city pastor. Cultural background too is varied, with diverse mixtures of Spanish, Indian and Negro blood. Almost all denominations active in Colombia were represented, Southern Baptists largely remaining aloof.

Larger in size than Texas and California combined, Colombia has 13,500,000 inhabitants, mostly Spanish-speaking. The nation has maintained a high cultural level, mostly Spanish in orientation, its colonial foundations having been laid by Dominican, Franciscan and Jesuit priests. Secondary schools are still largely private, the majority being maintained by Roman Catholic religious orders. The Constitution of 1886 confers civil rights and social guarantees upon all residents of Colombia, including the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of conscience, and the liberty of all “cults” (provided they do not contravene Christian morality or the laws). Religious teaching in all educational institutions was made compulsory by a concordat signed with the Vatican in 1887.

No direct pressures were put upon the conference. Medellín province is the center of Colombian Catholicism, supplying two-thirds of the nation’s priests. A news report in El Tiempo said that Protestants were meeting to discuss the Holy Father’s invitation to them to return to the church of Rome. The final night a priest dedicated an image of the Virgin directly in front of the second Interamerican Church and fanatics then stoned the church.

In Nutibara Hotel, the World Vision team heard a documented report on Roman Catholic persecution and intolerance in Colombia. In the past 12 years, 116 Protestants were killed, 66 Protestant churches or chapels were destroyed by dynamite or fire, and 200 Protestant schools have been closed. Since 1948 there have been several thousand cases of persecution. A summary of 2000 statements signed by victims and eye-witnesses shows that Roman Catholic priests participated directly in 30 per cent of these cases. Believers have been beaten, made to move by threats against their lives, deprived of civil rights (civil marriage opportunities particularly), ejected from hospitals when in need of care, denied burial permits for deceased loved ones, their homes arbitrarily searched, their children discriminated against in schools, their church services interrupted by priests and police, and their cause publicly condemned by civil officials as well as priests using loud speakers stationed at Catholic churches.

A poll of the evangelical workers at the conference yielded its own sordid story of Romanist intolerance and persecution aimed at their pastoral activities. Sixty-two pastors have been imprisoned, 26 shot at, for preaching the Gospel. Twenty-three members of their congregations have been martyred. Many reported that churches they had served were set afire or dynamited. The Christian and Missionary Alliance Bible Institute in Armenia, Caldas, will soon graduate as pastor-evangelist a lad who is the only survivor of an evangelical family of seven whose lives were brutally stamped out.

The strategic situation has improved somewhat with the election of President Alberto Lleras, a compromise candidate serving until 1962. Lleras’ personal sympathies are with the liberal party (which is mildly anticlerical, favors a disestablished church, decentralized government, popular education). The conservative party has the support of the Roman church, and favors centralized government, an established church, and the great landed interests. But as the head of a coalition government, Lleras’ personal power is limited, and his championing of civil rights does not come to full expression.

After 50 years of conservative power, the liberals won in 1930 and during the next 15 years Protestantism moved ahead. In 1946 the conservatives won. From 1948–58 Colombia was in a state of siege. Persecution of Protestants coincides with this period of conservative political control. In 1950 harassed Protestants formed the Evangelical Confederation, uniting 16 denominations and missions, which then regularly issued press information when the government ignored many memorials and it was evident that police in many places were working with the clergy to suppress Protestantism. These persecutions left orphans, suffering, and hardship, but they united the Protestants.

A turn for the better is seen in the recent advocacy by the Bishop’s Council of a “soft policy” toward Colombian Protestants. Some spokesmen are championing an “ecumenical” attitude, urging prayer that the “separated brethren” will return to the fold. Some 35 Indian territory churches, shut down by Catholic demand, have been reopened. The “stick and stone” era seems to have come to a halt.

Yet the basic causes of persecution remain, so that the peace is an uncertain one. These basic causes are the Concordat of 1887 (Colombia is the only country in continental South America bound by such a concordat), and the mission treaty of 1953 (a personal agreement between an acting president and the Vatican, never approved by the Colombian Congress) which gives Catholics exclusive rights to evangelize vast areas. Quasi-legal means of repression are used. In the past four months a dozen visas have been refused Protestant missionaries and teachers by a Jesuit-trained immigration officer. Most of these are staff replacements. At the peak of Protestant effort there were 300 missionaries in Colombia; the number is now down to 200. Meanwhile, Colombian priests freely get visas in great numbers for many activities in the United States.

Colombia is more Roman Catholic than the other 20 Latin American countries. There is one priest for every 3,750 of the Catholic population. The Jesuits were the apparent intellectual authors of the persecution of Protestants in what seemed a thoroughly prepared and fomented assault. Their articles in the press charged that Protestants are bringing in communism, or unwittingly serving it (by destroying religious and national unity); that Protestants favor a loose morality, are advance agents of U. S. imperialism, and are allied with revolutionaries; that Protestantism is an exotic movement which uses foreign funds to buy converts. They even proposed annual observance of an anti-Protestant day. Their main premise was that Protestantism is a heresy that must be stamped out.

More recently both Catholic and secular writers have questioned the spiritual (in contrast with political) strength of Romanism in Colombia. One leading Romanist estimates that 25 per cent of the population is “practicing Catholic.”

En route to Colombia, the World Vision team held a five-day conference on Barbados, where 325 workers from 29 denominations gathered from 20 nearby islands. The program was implemented by the ministers of Barbados, one of the tiniest but most populated of the islands of the British West Indies. In an area of isolated islands, with scattered missions and many independent and non-cooperating churches (130 denominations are listed), the sessions served as a reminder of the unity of evangelical purpose as well as an encouragement to workers in lonely outposts. Many workers seemed largely uninformed and unconcerned about the destiny of the Christian movement elsewhere in the world, but they seized their opportunity before the conference closed to present an offering to Dr. Han for the Christian churches in Korea. Delegates represented Methodist, Pentecostal and holiness groups in strength, these being most active in this missionary theater.

The sight of an insolent, shouting Slavic bully is never attractive, whether fictionally in Dostoievsky or in the flesh in Paris; and the deliberate twisting of the spy plane incident into a cause for international misbehavior is a piece of “brinkmanship” that Satan alone could have devised.

The Communist strategy strains at a gnat while it asks the Free World to swallow a camel. We whose spiritual ancestors bled and died to win the only freedom the human race has ever known should be the last ones to concede an inch to the great twentieth century brainwash known as Marxist socialism. Years ago Time magazine accurately diagnosed communism as simply a technique for gaining and keeping power. It has achieved its power not by persuasion and reason, but by the rack, the wheel, the screw, and the marathon-discussion technique of eroding the mind and will. Its leaders are not elected by a multiple party system; they concede no natural rights to their citizenry. Comrade Ivan may think that life in Magnitogorsk is “not bad,” but he is like the slave chained in Plato’s cave, to whom shadows are the only reality. For in truth Comrade Ivan has never risen to his full height as a free man. The prisoner who unhappily falls into the hands of the state police is informed, “Your defense is not necessary for we never make a mistake. When we arrest you, you’re guilty. A defense is necessary only in corrupt bourgeois society where they have corrupt officials.”

In the light of the charges now being hurled at our own country, it is well that we recall the nature of the ruthless and ungodly system with which we are dealing. Communist espionage for 42 years has been poking under every tent in the inhabited world. The U-2 flights over Russian territory during the past four years were not ordered by irresponsible and aggressive leaders, but were a vital part of Free World defense for which we should be thankful. America would be in much graver danger but for multiplied activities designed to protect us from surprise attack. Espionage is evil only as it is carried out with aggression in mind. Neither we nor our leaders contemplate aggression against anyone in the world. But we are face to face with forces which plan to destroy us if possible.

Khrushchev’s rage and his subsequent scuttling of the summit seem to spring from two facts: Soviet humiliation from the world’s discovery that at least 50 flights of the U-2 had taken place over Russia before mechanical failure intervened May Day to bring down one of the planes; and a serious rift within the Kremlin which may have sent Khrushchev to the summit a virtual prisoner of those he had dominated up to that time.

Having said this, we are now forced by events to take stock also of the fact that America stands morally humiliated before God. Not before Russia, not before the world, but before God. We have been trapped in attempting refuge in a lie. We have even encouraged men in our armed forces when facing torture to commit the act of self-destruction—which clearly violates the commandment of God and may send the victim unprepared into his presence. We announce to the world that we will defend our country with espionage and then we say that we will not. We have chosen to rely on human prudence rather than on the wisdom that comes from counsel with the Almighty. The high moral principles upon which our government was founded, and the righteousness and justice which have been the invisible structure of our foreign policy, are being sabotaged by the relativistic and utilitarian ethics of a cynical age.

But God will not be ignored! If we forsake the springs of living water for broken cisterns, and if we substitute subterfuge for rectitude and divine trust, this nation which has known God will surely feel the rod of judgment. Many Christians have been praying fervently for something to happen to America that would wake her up, that would bring our nation to her senses before it is too late. Scripture does not teach that we will be saved by miracle fabrics or the four-day week; by the U-2 or the United Nations. For the Christian there is comfort in the thought that God may have spared us yet greater evil through the collapse at Paris. Many have felt that any meeting of minds with the Communists must lead inevitably to our own detriment. A collapsed summit is to be welcomed more than another Teheran. Scripture teaches that God will meet America at only one place: at the Cross, and that is the way of repentance and spiritual humiliation.

True, God wills government and abhors anarchy, but he is not overly concerned to “salvage the chestnuts” of our Western civilization. His Church, in fact, has already extricated herself from three dying cultures in her two-thousand-year history. In the modern crisis of the nations we have seen the breakdown of the strategy of power blocs, of the League of Nations and United Nations, of personal diplomacy. Neither flexibility nor intransigence has overcome the Cold War; the spirit of modern civilization remains chilled with fear of destruction. God does not provide survival insurance, he provides only himself. He wills a nation and its people under himself; and if the Deuteronomic philosophy of history is correct, the living Lord has never and will never ultimately abandon his own.

In the strange, apocalyptic times in which we live, where safety, as Winston Churchill said somewhere, is the sturdy child of terror, even Khrushchev recognizes the fact that rockets and missiles will not provide the answer the world is seeking; that they will only destroy all possibility of further seeking. Yet all this was known before Paris. What has come to light since is the sad deterioration of the Western position before the onslaught of the devil’s preaching. Were we to send a man or a platoon into space tomorrow, our position would not be improved. We need to do exactly what a football coach does when he sees his fair young hopefuls pushed around by an opponent: schedule some sessions in fundamentals. America needs a drill in right thinking and right acting according to God’s Word.

And what is the Christian Church contributing to the moral renaissance America needs in her desperate hour? How is she meeting the nation’s need? Heroically, with sacrificial toil, burning the brand of God’s truth and righteousness into every man, woman, and child? Filling each convert with a loyalty and a sense of destiny under God that would call forth the ultimate measure of devotion? Or are we spending our best efforts railing at “the liberals” or “the fundamentalists,” shaking our heads at the human race, choosing carpeting for the new building, begging for money, pushing for ecclesiastical status, and following the priest and Levite down the other side of the road while America is bleeding to death?

There is no use sending up a wail of self-pity over our lot, any more than there was in Israel’s time of affliction. As Jeremiah told them, they “had it coming.” Our task as Christians and as Americans is therefore quite simple: to ask divine forgiveness and to gird up our loins and set our hearts to serve the living God. Not an easy prospect or a pleasant one, to be sure, for it means an overhauling of much that we have been prone to take for granted as “the American way of life.” Our spiritual diet may change from upside-down cake to hardtack, but that, too, will be to the good. If we seek revival now, it may still not be too late. For while God’s judgment is terrible, his mercies are yet infinite, and Jesus Christ remains Lord of history. Any other road points straight to oblivion.

CHICAGO THEOLOGICAL TROUBLES RECALL AN UNFULFILLED VISION

In May death came to the great philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and, by coincidence, dissolution also to the federated divinity faculty at University of Chicago (founded in 1890 by J. D. R., Jr.’s father under the misimpression of establishing a great center of Christian education). The son’s death at 86, and disruption of the Federated Theological Faculty, provide instructive opportunity to recall the distortion of his father’s objectives for Chicago by liberal advisors.

Noted Baptist theologian A. H. Strong had persuaded J. D. R. of the need of a great Baptist university. Ecclesiastical counselors encouraged him, instead, to establish University of Chicago with a Baptist divinity school attached. Before long the seminary not only ceased to be Baptist, ceased even to be Christian, but also became intolerantly naturalistic; there was more supernaturalism in philosophy than in theology classes.

In time Chicago Divinity School (American Baptist in name) had three neighbor seminaries: Chicago Theological Seminary (Congregational), Disciples Divinity House, and Meadville Theological School (Unitarian). In 1943 an ecumenical experiment merged these schools into a loose but complex amalgam. While the experiment often showed signs of strain, new professors and Sealantic Fund grants extended its life. But tension continued. Chicago Theological Seminary supplied most of the B.D. students while the unified I acuity dominated the curriculum and the University sought more controls. Soon debate over faculty appointments and study programs was openly publicized. Now three institutions have indicated impending withdrawal. The actual detachment date is still to be set.

The Rockefeller fortune exemplified a noble dedication of wealth. Serving the unstable cause of liberalism, however, and in fact the interests of many creeds, it tended especially to neglect J. D. R.’s basically evangelical vision of a great Christian university. It is still not too late to fulfill a holy vision, conceived but abused 70 years ago, to guard America’s high heritage.

CLARITY AND THE GOSPEL IN THE POST-MODERN AGE

The basic concern that confronts us as Christian believers is the difficult task—daily it grows more difficult—of reaching the world in the 1960s for Jesus Christ. The fact that we are in a time of transition and turmoil nullifies the simpler sketchings of our problem of communication. The real world around us is a very complex world. Harvard historian Crane Brinton, in A History of Western Morals, may write of complacent intellectuals who see the United States only as a land of “identical Main Streets tied together by the same interstate highway of mind and body,” but he notes also that the social alarmists see the diversities: “the incredible variety of … institutions of higher education; the hundreds of organized sects, Christian, Jewish, Enlightened, theosophic, faddist … the sometimes appalling course of fashion, the uniformity of the desire to be different … the continuing American lust for experiment, including socio-economic experiment, which has meant that even in the mid-twentieth century … there still try to crop up little groups that try to live without machines, or bring up children without a single ‘No!,’ or make a university out of one hundred Great Books, or control the flesh by going nude.…”

This real world around us is a very complex world; speak of it as “wide,” “wild,” “lost,” or “doomed,” the big problem remains with us of finding living touch for the Gospel in the experience of the post-moderns among whom we live. The Greek and Roman “barbarians” (the pagans of New Testament times) were closer to the Christian outlook, not only in time and space but in mind, in their basic view of Reality, than modern beatniks and conformists. The ancient pagan mind, however dim and dark it was, was “closer to the Kingdom” than the post-modern pagan mind. What does that imply for you and me as disciples of Jesus Christ in 1960? Do we therefore forsake this “beat generation,” or are we under heavy obligation to the generation of which we are a living phase?

If we are going to communicate properly, we shall have to communicate intelligibly as well as relevantly and faithfully. It is more than ever a tragedy when the Gospel gets sunk in semantic swamps, for Christianity is still a message for the masses, for the millions. Giant business and political movements have learned to address the masses. Billy Graham has grasped the significance of clarity in gospel presentation better than Barth, Niebuhr, or Tillich, who often seem to the masses as obscure and ambiguous as the Delphic Oracle. We have an obligation to make the Christian message as clear as the sky in a California travel ad, so that the truth stares our generation in the face as clear, unambiguous, and recognizable, and is communicated in the plain speech of even man. A generation whose responses are so skillfully manipulated by Madison Avenue that the reader can enjoy on paper the sizzle of a steak, thrill to the speed of a jet without actually stepping off the ground, experience capital gains in a mutual fund before investing a cent, splash imaginatively in the satisfying style of a new Cadillac, safely carry the money he doesn’t have by traveler’s cheques—such a generation has been reached by precision in thought and by effectiveness in wording and imagery that places new responsibilities of articulateness upon all of us. Whatever else we do in the 1960’s, the message must be intelligible.

THE TEMPEST OF RELIGIOSITY AND THE DECLINE OF FAITH

“Religion in American Life” posters present a comfortable and appealing picture: Sunday School children gazing upward, a thoughtful man occupying a church pew. Such images subtly suggest that “a little religion never hurts anybody.” Within the very limited context of “pure religion” the cliché is not altogether devoid of merit. Indeed, no Christian would deny that some wisdom can be found in other spiritual traditions, nor would he insist that Christianity has a monopoly of truth and virtue. As good Americans, moreover, we believe in freedom of religion, and we do not like it when any group arrogates primacy to itself because “error does not have the same rights as truth.”

In the midst of a wave of “religiosity,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY is committed to a vigorous evangelical witness. It maintains that the gospel of Jesus Christ cannot be accommodated to the spongy atmosphere of “syncretism” and “inclusivism.” The “religious” wave currently sweeping America may carry some earnest seekers into the stream of historic Christianity, but champions of non-Christian points of view are exploiting the movement most actively. Millions are being swept into cults where the evangel of Jesus Christ is ignored or distorted to the point of unrecognizability.

We are disturbed that so many people are seeking God everywhere except where, according to his Word, he is assuredly found. We do not hold that what a person believes “really does not matter so long as he is sincere about it.” Rather, we affirm that the choice is still between true religion and false religion, pure religion and impure religion, and not simply between some religion and none at all. The New Testament does not say that there are many paths to the kingdom of heaven. It does not liken the Word of God to a shotgun that scatters its pellets but to a sword that pierces sharply and deeply.

The lack of spiritual discrimination shown by devotees of these cults is often accompanied by a lack of moral discrimination. Thus the well-known practice of “sheep stealing” among some groups suggests a doctrine that the end justifies the means; and the habit of “disaffiliating” from the world and repudiating the obligations of citizenship, indulged in by some groups, denies in effect the social responsibility of the individual. What are we to say of a sect or a “religion” that confirms a man in his sins and worsens his plight?

The common target of all these cults seems to be the churches. It is in part a judgment on the church at large that great numbers, dissatisfied with her current teaching and works, have taken up “strange fire” and esoteric doctrines. The man who has found “fulfillment” in nudism, in Zen-Buddhism, or in existentialism usually has nothing but pity and scorn for the unenlightened Bible-reading Christian. Herod and Pilate can still be counted on to agree on one issue. But we are led to ask the question: were the Gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation, faithfully preached, would there be this new diaspora of our day? As Christians we are not so much concerned which particular church the people choose to attend as we are that the churches of our land be found holding forth faithfully the Word of life.

There is a curious likableness about the American religionist and his determination to coexist with anyone and everyone, whether he worships in a church, shrine, mosque, tent, store front, temple, synagogue, joss house, high place, or lodge meeting. But the modern tendency of putting faith on a subjective basis (e.g., “What is true and good for one need not be true and good for another”; “Your religion is real only if it is real to you”; “The important thing is that what I believe comforts me”; and so forth) has called in question the objectivity and reality of God himself.

We have arrived not just in the post-Christian era where Christ is rejected while his ethics remain; we have reached the “post-modern” era where even the morality is gone. Who are the new “spiritual” leaders now beckoning America? They are marijuana-smoking beatniks, blob artists, composers of offbeat anthems, and pantheists from the East. What is the revised version of the Mosaic code we are now asked to adopt? Acceptance of cheating, lying, corruption, and laziness as normal behavior; contempt for law itself; indifference to immorality and even to sex deviation. And what are the sanctions for such behavior?—anything under the name of “religion” that does not interfere with our selfish drives.

Popularizers of social studies freely admit that a connection exists between the increasingly invertebrate state of American character and the flight from the historic Christian faith. The task of the Church is to show that “religion” itself is no solution; that the road to hell is paved with religious fetishes.

In the days ahead, according to observers, Christian faith and other religions will be confronting each other in unprecedented ways. We welcome all such encounters. After centuries of “holy” warfare, an era of religious understanding and brotherhood is long overdue. Together the theistic religions should be speaking unequivocally to the hedonistic naturalism and the militant atheism of our time. But we have no reason to stop evangelizing. The Great Commission has never been revoked, nor has the Father’s purpose altered. It is still true that nothing less than spiritual awakening and a fresh obedience to God in Christ will save America and the nations.

‘I’LL SEE YOU IN THE MORNING’

“And … it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Heb. 9:27).

Before us there unfolds the drama of death. Men in history meet their death, whether they be great or small, and become names memorialized in art and literature perhaps but no longer in flesh and blood.

New drugs and techniques in surgery, improved diets, and higher living conditions are of course contributing to lengthened life expectancy; but the added years are nothing in comparison with the eternity that lies ahead and in which all of us should be concerned. Death may be postponed, but it is still unavoidable.

A Christian, in the words of the Apostle Paul, can know, however, that it is better to be “absent from the body, and present with the Lord.”

Not that many of us really want to die. But, we can face the certainty of the event with the absolute assurance in our hearts that we belong to Christ, and he has done for us the thing which makes death a transition from faith to reality.

There are some who look on Christianity as a movement designed to make the world a better place in which to live. But such is not the case, although the more real Christians there are the better the world will be, for it will have more “salt” to preserve the social structure and more “light” to show men the way of eternal life.

Our Lord makes perfectly plain in his words, “should not perish” the reason God sent his Son, and the transition from death to life that is conditioned on one thing alone—faith in him.

The central thought in the story of the Prodigal Son is not the betterment of the “far country” but the return of the son to his father. This is the central theme of the gospel message. The question, after death what? is answered when we know him whom to know aright is life everlasting.

Is it morbid? Not the least bit. It is with privilege of every Christian to live with assurance, hope, and peace.

Is it realistic? Yes, for internal collapse or external violence is possible to any of us at any time; and if it is not disaster, then the slow, inexorable process of physical deterioration will lead to the same end.

Some of us have lived part of our lives with the knowledge that any moment could be the last. Is the thought frightening? No, not if one knows he is ready to meet God because he personally trusts in the finished work of Christ and thereby belongs to him.

Death is going to happen to everyone of us. Those who are Christian will pass immediately into the presence of the ever-living Christ who has redeemed us unto himself. The cocoon of earthly existence will be transformed into the butterfly of eternity; the body of our worldly existence will be changed into the likeness of his glorious resurrection body, and we will see him as he is.

With the Apostle Paul every child of God can say, “For I know whom I have trusted, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.”

Whom shall we meet at death? Few of us stop to realize that in meeting Christ we shall meet our Creator and Redeemer. All things were made by him, and it is the same Christ who is our Saviour. The unbeliever will meet him, but he will be his Judge. The Christian’s judgment has been met on the Cross, and he is thereby safe and free.

We so often complicate the gospel truth by unbelief or foolish imaginings.

But why do we need a Redeemer? The nature of sin, its universality and fatal consequences, can never be overstated. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” is the statement of fact in Holy Scripture. We are also told, “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

What does this have to do with death? The unrepentant and therefore unforgiven sinner will meet the Christ whom he has rejected as Saviour and is to be his Judge.

Faith in Jesus Christ as Saviour from sin and Lord of life makes all the difference in this world—and in the world to come. To a believer, there accrue blessings which are possible to no one else.

For one thing, there is security—eternal security.

We live in a day when security is almost a fetish. Men want it more than freedom itself. We have social security which lasts until death—with some $200 additional to assist in burial expenses. Men may amass fortunes, but the security of money is only for this life.

The security we have in Christ is eternal and nothing can take it from us. Jesus said: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; and I give them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any (man) pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand. I and my Father are one.”

Another blessing which the Christian has is peace. We live in a world of turmoil. All about us there is unrest and uncertainty. No one knows even the immediate future. But in the midst of darkness the Christian can have absolute peace, for he knows who he is and where he is going. He knows that nothing can happen to him which is outside the will of Cod. He lives in the certainty that: “All things work together for good to them that love God,” and there is infinite peace in that assurance.

Not only does the believer have security and peace, but also has righteousness. Such righteousness is not of his own endeavor or achievement, for human goodness is as filthy rags. Rather, it is the imputed righteousness of Christ which, for the Christian, becomes a spiritual garment. Only then can he come into the presence of God, the Holy One. Knowing that God the Father accepts us for his Son’s sake, we have assurance to the fullest extent.

A third blessing of the Christian is hope—the hope of heaven itself.

The Bible tells us: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” Neither our present experience nor that of others—not even our wildest imagination can picture the glory which will be ours in heaven. We do know that heaven will be a place where there is no sickness, sorrow, or death; and we know we shall be in the presence of God himself forever.

One final blessing which is ours is freedom from fear.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me” was David’s assurance and one which is ours through faith in the living Christ.

Like Peter Marshall we can contemplate death and say to all who are Christ’s: “I’ll see you in the morning.”

L. NELSON BELL