Page 6064 – Christianity Today (2024)

Would it not be wonderful if a hundred million listening ears would hear the rallying cry issued by CHRISTIANITY TODAY (June 9 issue) under the heading, “Somehow, Let’s Get Together!”

Possibly it can be done. At least the time for a try is upon us, and the wind is in our favor. Existing religious orders are shattering. The bankruptcy of modern religious organization is evident. On every hand there seems to be an ecumenical spirit.

When men long for unity, dramatic new dimensions of fellowship are possible. Dreams of unity are omnipresent, but the pain of working out the problems of making it a reality is so great that few will really attempt the task. The sweet fruits of unity grow on the highest limbs, and we have to climb for them.

First of all, we must recognize that division, in itself, is no sin. If it were, then any who have ever protested against the errors of apostate religion would have become sinners in their protests. This would include Martin Luther and John Wesley. All who have been forced to separate from apostate orders to preserve the New Testament message would be classed as sinners.

Division may be the result of sin, but division is not sin. Some, like Moses, would rather suffer affliction with the people of God than enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. When division comes because of departure from God’s word, it is lamentable; when it comes in an attempt to depart from departure and return to New Testament teaching or pattern, it is commendable.

Perhaps this is a good time to ask just where unity can be found. It cannot be achieved by tying together conflicting ideologies in a loose federation. Nor can it be found in diversity. Unity and diversity will forever be antithetical.

If we all are to sit together under one umbrella, what is that umbrella? If it is nothing more than the “Christian world,” then we already have that. All heathenism lumps us all under that umbrella. And under it we will continue to have all the division and strife we have always had. We must do better than that.

If that umbrella is to be a federation of denominations, we already have that in the World Council of Churches. Even Roman Catholicism shows interest in getting its head in that shade. But what a hodgepodge of division and strife we would have under that umbrella. What would we have gained?

Churchmen may claim unity under almost any umbrella, but their claim will be denied by their actions until they all become willing to give and take. The current attitude seems to be to hold on to what you have and force everyone else under the umbrella to make room for you. If each could give what truth he has to all the rest, and take what truth others have to himself, it would not be long before real unity would begin to work like leaven.

Most approaches to unity have proposed an organization that would make room for all the diversity possible. This approach is wrong, because unity is found in faith, not in machinery. If we had a common faith, we would have unity. Our great diversity results from our lack of a common faith. On the single items about which we all believe the same thing, we already have unity. We will have more only when we believe the same thing at more points. Unity does not come from merging organizations; it comes from merging faith.

Therefore there will be no cause for excitement about attempts to get together until we show a willingness to reason together. Unity will become real when various faiths melt into one. When that happens, unity will be automatic. Biblical faith comes from only one source—the Word of God (Rom. 10:17). Christendom is divided because it has been unwilling to go to that one source for its faith. Martin Luther’s cry of “the Bible only” has gone unheeded. Regardless of what umbrella we gather under, we will still have all the division we ever had, so long as we insist upon the unimportance of the Bible as the sole and sufficient source of religious authority. There will be no more unity than when we were scattered upon a thousand hills. A huddle of diverse elements isn’t unity. We may fight together, vote together, petition together, and plan together, but unity will elude us until we believe the same things.

How can we do something about unity? First we must find where biblical unity lies. Merging ecclesiastical machinery and cutting across party lines is not a step in the right direction. We do not need to cross party lines; we need to remove them. So long as a unity cry recognizes party lines and pleads that we ignore them, it circumvents the very thing that made a plea for unity necessary.

It is perfectly clear to the Bible student that the Lord who gave himself to purchase the Church intended that all his followers be gathered together in one undenominational and undivided body, the Church. It is so constituted that it is now, and forever will be, one. The question is, Who is ready and willing to be identified with it? Party loyalties have kept professed followers of Jesus following something other than Jesus. It is these party loyalties that nullify our cries for unity. Retaining them will make unity impossible. Only when they are surrendered completely, and all partyism has melted into the very being and reality of Jesus Christ, can the Church be one. Crossing party lines or ignoring party differences is no substitute for the eliminating of them.

The Lord does not require that we give up any truth we may ever have had. He does ask us to give up any error we have. Possibly we can get together. But it can happen only when each of us is willing to give up any error he may have to walk in the light of the more noble truth that his neighbor may have, or that the Bible most surely teaches.

“What’s the Value of Work?” is one of thirteen films in the series on “God and Man in the Twentieth Century,” produced by Educational Communication Association (P.O. Box 114, Indianapolis, Indiana 46204) for institutional and television use. The subject is discussed by three panelists, with Editor Carl F. H. Henry of CHRISTIANITY TODAY as moderator. Dr. Jean Austin, like her husband, became a surgeon to serve as a medical missionary in the Congo. Her husband was killed on an Air Force mercy mission in World War II, but she went to the Congo as a widow; after a span of service, she married another surgeon, whose wife had died on the mission field. Today the Drs. Austin practice surgery in Alexandria, Virginia, where Jean Austin is mother to six children. Dr. Leo Eddleman served as a missionary in Palestine, then as president of Georgetown College in Kentucky. For some years he has been president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Sherwood Wirt, editor of the monthly religious journal Decision, is author of numerous books. During studies at New College, Edinburgh, where he received the Ph.D. degree, he wrote his thesis on Christian vocation.

Henry: More and more people seem to be having fundamental doubts about the value of work. Dr. Eddleman, what do you think accounts for their skepticism?

Eddleman: One thing is the vast amount of work that people are doing today in which they lose themselves. They become almost a statistic, in view of mass production of almost everything that is made in our country. The individual tends to lose a perspective of his own individual relationship.

Wirt: You must realize, however, that people have always had a hard time working. Work has never been easy. And the fact that we have complicated modern conditions does not alter the fact that it’s always a hard job to earn a living. Aristotle demeaned work. Karl Marx exploits work. But work has always been a part of our lives.

Austin: Dr. Eddleman said some people have lost the end-view of work, and they are more or less on a treadmill—the pickax without a useful purpose, which makes work a prison to them. They’ve had to look for a new end, and so they’ve set up the dollar as the status symbol and money as their god, rather than work in itself as an end.

Henry: Dr. Eddleman, do you think inflation, and the whole trend in the modern world of big government as the emergency support of all human exigencies, contributes to this in any way?

Eddleman: Certainly inflation underscores what Dr. Austin has just said. It keeps the dollar decreasing in its value to the extent that one or more segments of our population are always behind in what they are supposed to be earning. This causes a tendency to look on the government as the Big Mother, and as a result we get into this treadmill of monotonous work. We lose our sense of meaning in life.

Henry: What do you think about the big labor movements of our time? Do you think these have helped or hindered the quest for meaning and worth in the worker’s life?

Eddleman: At least they’ve done one thing: they have produced better wages and better working conditions. And to this extent the workers have been freed from some of those aspects of the old way of doing things in the factory that kept a man from finding some measure of self-realization.

Wirt: Yes, the labor movement has been a blessing to mankind by and large despite factors which detract from it—such as the handicaps we’re now going through in strikes here and there. The fact remains that mankind has been blessed, and I feel that the Church has not realized this sufficiently. The Church has worked toward charity for the worker rather than justice. This, I think, was a tragic mistake, particularly in the nineteenth century, and resulted in a great divorce of the working man from the Church. I hope that the Church is now becoming more aware of this.

Austin: Big labor tends to reduce men to only the instrument for making more dollars. They are nothing; they are just being used. This tends to frustrate them and adds to their spiritual misery. They get no enjoyment out of their work, and we should have joy.

Henry: Do you mean that onesided emphasis on the financial reward for a man’s work ignores a great many of the moral and spiritual factors.

Austin: Yes. I think Kipling said it, “But each for the joy of the working.” Where joy is gone, there’s frustration. When you’re just an instrument of the big labor union, that’s the other side of the coin. Unions may be good, but so many unions tend to inhibit initiative and in doing so, they frustrate.

Wirt: Joy is not the reason for work. We don’t work because of the joy in it. We work because we have to. We work for survival. And a man has to work in order to eat. That’s what Paul said.

Austin: Yes, but don’t make it a prison.

Eddleman: That is only true of certain people. You and your husband both are surgeons. You love your work, and therefore you go ahead and do it. But a great many people are working simply because this is the way they get their livelihood.

Austin: Yes, and this is what I say brings up the greatest frustration in man.

Eddleman: I want to take issue with one thing. There are a great many laboring people, union members, who are members of churches and actively engaged in the church work. I pastored a church for ten years that had 2,500 members, and many of them were union members and actively engaged in the labor movement.

Wirt: I don’t think, however, that the issue is whether a working man belongs to a church or not. I would say that the great issue is, Does the worker have a sense of vocation in his work? This gets one out of this hole you’re talking about, Dr. Austin, because when a man knows he has been called by God, then he can serve God in his work. That is to say, the work serves God, man serves the work.

Henry: Well, what of the notion that you get, sometimes, in an offbeat theology, that work is a result of the Fall of man and that in an ideal world nobody would have to work? Or the old Greek idea that work is a penalty for ignorance, and that in a thinking man’s world nobody would have to work, that the slave class is the only group that ought to do manual work? You get it again in the modern emphasis that science is going to lead us out of our ignorance and into the cybernetic age when computers are going to do all of our work, and men ought to draw a living wage whether they do any work or not. What about this?

Eddleman: Yes, but, Dr. Henry, even the most avid supporters of automation do not claim that automation is ultimately going to free everybody from having to work. We find that automation simply creates more jobs for more people. If I want to take a non-offbeat theological viewpoint, the Scriptures plainly state that before the Fall man had the responsibility of tending and dressing the trees and the vines and other growth in the Garden of Eden. Then after the Fall, work became a toilsome affair: Six days shalt thou labor and earn thy living by the sweat of thy brow.

Wirt: I think that the meaning of this passage in Genesis is that work is not necessarily evil. It’s true that work became a curse after the Fall, but then all aspects of life came under that same curse. The concept of work itself is good. Man was given hands to work with. He was given a brain to think with. And I think it’s a natural thing for man to want to work. But until he receives his call from God, until he is empowered by the Holy Spirit to carry through his function in life, his work is a drudge, a bore, simply a method of survival.

Austin: This is the redemptive feature of work, in that we are all born with hands and we are all born with our job, as J. S. Lowell said. But we must harness our heart as well as our hands. We must get our attitudes as well as our actions to working. This is what raises work to a spiritual level, and takes it out of the Fall, and the Greek idea of ignorance, and the treadmill.

Wirt: I think, Dr. Eddleman, that when a worker has given his life to Jesus Christ, at that point God gives him a sense of vocation. This comes through not only at the lathe or wherever he is working—in the office or in selling—but also in the relationships he has with the people among whom he works. It also comes through in the efforts he makes through his union or through his association to improve the working conditions. It comes through when he votes as a citizen. It comes through when he goes to church and teaches a Sunday-school class. All this combined gives him his sense of vocation.

Henry: Do you think that the problem of meaning is especially acute only for the assembly line worker.

Austin: No. All sorts of work, I believe, may be an assembly-line type of work. Even in the doctor’s office we occasionally feel that we’re on an assembly line, and that the end is just to finish the day’s work. But this is not the true meaning of our work. It goes deeply beyond this. We are called to serve people, and the resources we have within us must be constantly available. This is not an eight-hour-a-day job, nor a five-day week. We are not called to this. We are called to serve, if we have a true sense of vocation, and twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, we should be available. Now I know there are limits to this.

Henry: Dr. Austin, how many babies did you deliver last year?

Austin: Well, between 200 and 250. And that is not all of my work. I take care of those babies after they come. That is a good deal of work, too.

Henry: Along the line of what you have been saying, I remember driving to Mayo Clinic once with one of the surgeons there. More or less as devil’s advocate, I said to him, “Now don’t you feel that it demeans your human dignity to have to do the same type of surgery week in and week out? You have this assembly-line responsibility—doesn’t it demean your dignity?”

Austin: No. No, not at all, because every person that comes to me needs me; he does not come unless he needs me. This I feel is my biggest asset within myself. My deepest spiritual resource is that I know that, if in the morning I lift my life to the Lord, during that day he can use it as he brings people to me, and that I am his to be used as he would have me used that day. No, it cannot be an assembly line. Only when fatigue comes in, as it does in all lines of work, do we ever think we are on a treadmill.

Wirt: If I may break in here, I must say that you have a very favorable type of work, Dr. Austin. But what about the man who is engaged in monotonous work, or the man in trivial work, or the man in useless work, or the man in immoral work—the man whose work is hampered by restrictions or by unfavorable working conditions? Where does he come through on this great feeling that he’s needed, and so on?

Henry: Don’t you think that you’ve got to define immoral work? This, from the biblical point of view, can never be justified as a calling, because, as Dr. Eddleman said, on the basis of creation God wills work for man in order to extend the moral and spiritual purposes of God in the universe. You can’t ever justify immoral work. But the real question is whether work has to be glamorous in order to have meaning and worth. Isn’t much of the work that’s worthwhile significant even though it’s routine?

Eddleman: This is where I would want to underscore the statement of a few moments ago. Work does not have to be glamorous in order to have divine significance and meaning. A man who is making automobiles, although he just turns one screw all day long eight hours a day, almost 365 days out of every year; is contributing to the well-being of society. He also has an opportunity to work in his church and say, as I’ve heard people say, “I get my meaning in life out of the combination of these two facts: I make my living here and I serve humanity over here.”

Austin: I remember the Scottish housewife who had written over her sink—and I believe Mrs. Billy Graham does too—“Divine service conducted here every day.” How unglamorous, housework and washing dishes! But it can be a divine service.

Eddleman: Dr. Austin, it is estimated that a woman will wash over 1,100,000 dishes in a lifetime.

Wirt: But what about the man who cleans out the septic tanks, the man who takes away the trash? Are you going to put a sign on his car saying “Divine service conducted here”? I just raise this question because there is a lot of nasty work that has to be done.

Austin: Yes, but if he takes it that he is doing the nasty work in the Lord’s will, his attitude more than his actions is what counts here.

Eddleman: Think how much nastier the world would be if he didn’t do that.

Henry: And this is the service of God and of his fellow man. Regardless of how routine and mechanical and unglamorous work may be, the turning of the right screw by a person who knew how to turn it has saved many a human life. And the wrong turning of a screw by somebody who didn’t know how to turn it has exacted many a human life.

Wirt: And caused a few automobiles to be recalled.

Henry: I want to get back to the surgeon at Mayo Clinic, because his reply was so much like yours, Dr. Austin, that I think it’s worth mentioning. What he said to me was: “Every morning when I come to the clinic I remind myself that I can say either ‘Here comes another chunk of humanity down the line’ or ‘This is my patient and I must handle him as if he were the only patient I shall ever have.’”

Austin: Yes.

Henry: Well, now, what meaning and purpose has work according to the Bible?

Wirt: I don’t think that you can solve that question of work until you solve the question of the individual man. You get the man’s life straightened out, get him on cue with the Lord, and then his work falls into its natural place, no matter what it is. If he is doing the wrong kind of work—if he’s setting type for a p*rnographic magazine—he’s going to get out of that kind of work. We had a man in London who was showing obscene pictures in the Soho district during the Billy Graham crusade; he came forward at the crusade. That man had to give up his work.

Eddleman: Dr. Henry, we mustn’t undersell the fact that the Bible is very realistic. While Christ may have seemed to have had his head in the clouds, he always had his feet on the ground. Now, our Russian friends, who themselves are very realistic, have come up with a system whereby over 60 per cent of all their physicians are women, like Dr. Austin here. They are convinced that women’s innate tendency toward compassionate concern for humanity makes them capable of being better doctors.

Austin: Oh, but I think that I have to speak for women in general, not just specifically as doctors. I believe women are called just as men are. There may be a fifty-fifty relationship, so to speak, with men. We’re in the day of equality and, especially with our present administration, of raising the status of women. I believe that God calls women just as much as he calls men—perhaps not to as glamorous work, as you say, but he gives gifts to all. I’m not to hide my light under a bushel, whether I’m a man or a woman. He did not say “Come, follow me and I will make you fishers of men” just to men. Nor did he say “Go ye into all the world” just to men—as all our women missionaries on the field will testify. I believe that with the creativity that a woman has—and what larger creativity than to produce children?—she bears the highest of qualities for work. And to be in her home and to produce there is the first place that she should work.

Wirt: I can’t help feeling that if Paul the Apostle were living today he would not have said quite the same things he said about women in the New Testament. I can’t help thinking that he would have lifted the restriction on women preaching. After all, he did open the Gospel to the Gentiles. Why would he not open the pulpit to women?

Austin: Oh, I want to answer you, Dr. Wirt. I’m so glad you said that, because while I am a woman—and I am a feminist, I hope, but not too much so!—I do firmly believe that the man is still the head of the home. I believe this will never change. This is biblical to the end of time. Women are subordinate in authority and should be; and I find women find happiness only in this relationship. I want my husband to be the head of my home. I definitely want him to be the leader and the children to look to him. And I need him as the leader to lean upon. I feel that then, from this basis of home and security and leadership, I can better go out into the world and do the work I have there. Perhaps when we go into the office—his office is right opposite mine—there we are more equal. And in the operating room the same way. And certainly in dealing with our patients, there is no difference in authority or subordination. But in the home, yes.

Henry: Let’s ask Dr. Eddleman: What do you think of Paul’s admonition in the letter to Timothy, “I suffer not a woman to teach or to usurp authority over her husband”?

Eddleman: One of the most obvious sociological facts of life is that wherever “open-Bible Christianity” has prevailed at one time or another, equalitarianism between women and men has prevailed. This is not true of the rest of the world. So Paul and the rest of the Scriptures elevate womanhood. Secondly, any statements in the Bible, particularly from the pen of Paul, that seem to circ*mscribe womanhood must be taken in their context. For example, at Corinth and several other places in Asia Minor there were temples that had processionals led by temple prostitutes, and it was in this kind of context that Paul would make such a statement as “Let the women keep silence in the church.”

Wirt: And keep their heads covered.

Eddleman: Yes. These prostitutes went in this processional without anything on their head.

Henry: So that this admonition grew out of exposure to possible misunderstanding of integrity and dignity.

Eddleman: It was an effort to avoid any resemblance to the heathenism that was right next door to them.

Wirt: That’s why I feel that under different circ*mstances Paul might have said something different about women.

Henry: You know, we have emphasized on the panel that every person, not just the minister or professional religious worker, ought to justify his work as a divine vocation, a divine calling. I’m wondering, then, why the Christian Church ordains some men, or women, and not everybody. What is the significance of ordination?

Eddie man: This lies in the fact of a divine-call concept which prevails throughout the Bible, both Old Testament and New Testament. A man who is called of God has had an experience, if he is called to the gospel ministry, that is difficult to understand; it’s difficult for the layman to understand it, and certainly the world at large does not even appreciate it. But it is nevertheless true that some men come and say, “I’m called of God to the gospel ministry.”

Henry: And so they are set apart for a specific task. What is the peculiar glory of the ministry? What is the task of the minister?

Eddleman: The peculiar glory of the ministry is the handling of the Word of God, rightly dividing the Word of truth. We’ve had men come and enroll at our seminary—one man abandoning the position of hospital administrator, another this year with a Ph.D. in history from a great state university—saying simply, “I’m called of God to preach and I must come and get my theological education and prepare myself for this particular ministry.”

Austin: Irrespective of the ordination of women, I must say a word for women here. If every woman would consider that she is called and that marriage and motherhood don’t require her to thwart her creative gifts, how much greater a task force for the church we would have.

Henry: We’d just multiply our task force, wouldn’t we? We would double it.

Austin: We have a terrific wasted potential in the waste of women’s talents for the Lord.

Wirt: But the vocation of church leadership, I think, will always probably be primarily in the hands of men, don’t you think?

Austin: Yes, and I believe that women should be subordinate in the church. I don’t mean that women can’t preach. I’ve spoken many times. But I believe that as far as leadership is concerned, here again man should be the head.

Eddleman: Primarily so; yet in South Russia there are numerous women who are pastors of churches.

Henry: Just the fact that a man goes to seminary doesn’t mean that he qualifies, at least in our time, for ordination. Aren’t there large numbers of young men studying for the ministry today out of quite different motivations than in the past? Don’t you find this a problem among your seminary students?

Eddleman: This is a problem to a degree, but it largely depends upon the seminary. There are institutions that have replaced the Gospel of redemption with the “gospel” of social action. Numerous students coming to these seminaries may not be coming out of this sense of call. But largely in an evangelical seminary the men will come to prepare themselves for this ministry of the Word.

Wirt: I don’t think the word is social action any more, Dr. Eddleman; I think it’s political action.

Henry: Some people today are attracted to the ministry because it’s a good, clean profession where you don’t get tangled up in some of the demands of other frontiers of modern life. So there seem to be all sorts of motivations for going into the ministry today.

Austin: And they have a captive hearing; they have a pulpit, and they have prestige and dignity, and people will listen. I wonder if some men don’t go into it just for this—that they have a hearing?

Eddleman: We notice them every year, Dr. Austin, as they come in, first-year students at the seminary. And we can detect a few men who were called into the ministry either by their mother or by some social-action program. But we have a system that usually separates the men from the boys early. We require Greek and Hebrew of every student, and before the first semester is up we usually know who is called by the draft board and who is called by the Lord.

Henry: Dr. Wirt, what do you think of the Communist thesis that capitalism necessarily degrades the worker and that Communism dignifies him?

Wirt: Well, insofar as capitalism exists in a free society, I think we’ll have to say, Dr. Henry, that the man is better off—the worker, that is to say. He is a free man in his work. But looking at the whole problem of modern industrial society, whether behind the Iron Curtain or this side of it, the fact remains that the worker has a problem. He is caught in the spokes of a great machine.

Henry: There are assembly lines behind the Iron Curtain also, aren’t there?

Wirt: Of course. And the problem of finding meaning in life is just as great there. In fact, it’s greater, because there the worker is not considered a free man. He is considered a servant of the state. I think, however, that the real issue here in finding meaning and significance in a man’s work does not ultimately depend upon whether he works in a capitalist society—whether he works for General Motors or whether he works for Aeroflot, let’s say, in the Soviet Union. The question is, Does God come into his life and invade and pervade his life with meaning?

For four and a half centuries world history has felt the influence of the Reformation. Today that influence is more potent than ever, and it is growing. This seemingly preposterous statement can be amply justified if seen in historical perspective.

We need to remember that for at least its first century and a half, the heart of the Reformation experience—what from the standpoint of the Gospel was its essence—was shared by only a small minority in a mere fragment of the inhabited earth and was almost eliminated by persecution and by compromise with factors that denied or distorted the Gospel.

The heart of the Reformation experience as expressed by Luther was salvation by faith, as he had discovered it through the Scriptures after prolonged inner struggle. In other words, it was the new birth into an eternal life of fellowship with God wrought by the Holy Spirit in response to faith in what God had done through his Son. The history of God’s preparation for the decisive act through his Son and the record of that act and of the effects of that act in the first century after Christ are in the Scriptures.

In the sixteenth century, partly through contagion from Luther and his written report of his experience and its implications, several thousands entered into the new birth through faith and by the study of the Scriptures. However, they were mostly in Northwestern Europe. Northwestern Europe is only a part of the western peninsula of the continent of Eurasia, and these thousands were at best a minority of the inhabitants of that small segment of the globe. Many of the thousands were members of the Anabaptist movements, whose designation arose from their insistence that the new birth was wrought in response to the faith of the individual, not by the baptism of infants. All the Anabaptists except the Mennonites were stamped out by persecution. Moreover, although Protestantism, which began with Luther, became the professed faith of the peoples of Northwestern Europe, it was mainly espoused by kings and princes, who used it to enhance their power. Only a few of them and a minority of their subjects really appreciated what had come to Luther. Compromised by the selfish ambitions of kings and princes, Protestantism contributed to wars that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries laid waste much of Western Europe.

But the vital experience Luther had shared did not entirely disappear. Again and again it broke out in individuals and groups, most of them humble, and gave rise to movements, also of minorities. Among them were the Puritans, Quakers, Independents, and Baptists in the British Isles, and many varieties of pietism on the continent of Europe.

Then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there began the geographic expansion of peoples who were Protestant in name and by heredity. At first the major settlements were in the thirteen colonies from which the United States developed. Some of them—those in New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey—were made by refugees who held to the new birth, but these believers mere small minorities. Although the colonists were quickened by the Great Awakening in the mid-eighteenth century, when the United States became independent only about five out of a hundred of the population were church members, and not all of these had really been born anew.

The nineteenth century witnessed the further migrations of people, a majority of whom were Protestant by ancestry. They settled in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Evangelicals—if we may so designate those who had experienced the new birth—sought to witness to the new birth to these migrants and their descendants. Among other means used were the British and Foreign Bible Society (organized in 1804) and several Bible societies in the United States, of which the largest was and is the American Bible Society (begun in 1816). These societies sought to distribute the Scriptures “without note or comment,” thus bringing to the reader the full impact of the inspired message free from distortion by other readers.

During the nineteenth century, European peoples and peoples of European ancestry penetrated all the globe and brought much of it under their control. Evangelicals sought to use this penetration as an opportunity to spread the Good News and to be the channel for bringing into existence communities of those who had experienced the new birth and would witness to it.

Following the two world wars of the twentieth century, most of the non-European peoples freed themselves from the political control of European peoples. For a time it looked as if the churches founded by evangelicals in Asia and Africa would disappear because of their association with Western colonialism and imperialism. In some countries, notably mainland China and North Korea, they have dwindled. However, in most of the non-European world the opposite has happened. The so-called “younger churches” have grown in numbers in Asia and Africa and in nominally Roman Catholic Latin America. More significantly, they are developing their own leaders and are spreading the Good News among their neighbors. Thanks largely to evangelicals in the British Isles, Western Europe, and the United States, the Scriptures in whole or in part have been put into more than a thousand tongues. Hundreds of languages have been given a written form to make that possible. Although those who have had the experience of the new birth through faith are still a small minority of mankind, an increasing proportion of the total population have in their own languages at least the heart of the Scriptures in one or more of the Gospels.

We need also to remind ourselves that the effect of the Reformation has extended far beyond the minorities who have been introduced to the new life through faith and reading the Scriptures, significant though these have been. The Reformation has contributed, often as the chief creative cause, to movement after movement whose influence has permeated all mankind.

One of these movements has been democracy. Democracy has many roots, not all of them from the Reformation or even Christian. Yet the Reformation has been a major source of democracy. The democratic idea was implicit in Luther’s emphasis on the right and duty of individual judgment arising from the new birth. At the Diet of Worms before the magnates of church and state, when summoned to recant what he had written, Luther declared that unless he was persuaded by reason and the Scriptures he could not disavow anything that had come from his pen. By reason he did not mean private judgment. He was familiar with much that Christians had written through the ages. However, he was convinced that he must use his individual judgment, enlightened by the Scriptures, to ascertain basic truth. Luther was not consistent in applying this principle. He sought to enlist the help of the state in eradicating what he thought was contrary to the principles he believed he had discovered.

From the radical wing of the English Reformation came major contributions to modern democracy. These were from the Puritans and especially from the Independents, Baptists, Quakers, and others akin to them but even more extreme. John Locke, a moderate whose writings did much to shape English and American democracy, was in many ways the spiritual heir of these groups. In Great Britain, including Scotland, and on the continent of Europe, the Reformed wing of Protestantism was a major source of democracy. From these streams came much of the “American dream” and the democratic ideals of the United States. British and American democracy has had repercussions throughout much of the world.

The Red Cross clearly sprang from the Reformation. Its founder was Henri Dunant, a businessman who religiously was a product of an evangelical revival in his native Geneva. Dunant was present at a battle in Italy in 1859 and was horrified by the lack of care of the sick and the wounded. He depicted what he had seen in a best-seller. To give continuing effort to preventing such tragedies, he organized the International Red Cross.

The United Nations is an outgrowth of the Reformation. In the nineteenth century, Protestants, chiefly evangelicals, formulated plans for easing international tensions through a world court and international law. The League of Nations sought to give concrete expression to these plans. On the insistence of Woodrow Wilson, the Covenant of the League of Nations was appended to the treaties of Versailles. Wilson’s ancestry and parentage were evangelical. In his teens he made a Christian commitment that he never forsook. From it he drew the inspiration and stamina that forced the league on skeptical and nationalistically self-seeking European statesmen. When the League of Nations disintegrated, it was succeeded by the United Nations. No one person was as influential in the creation of the United Nations as Wilson was in the League of Nations. But those who brought it into being were chiefly men of Protestant—and therefore Reformation—origin. Moreover, the Declaration of Human Rights, one of the major achievements of the United Nations, was formulated and adopted on the initiative of a representative of the Churches’ Commission on International Affairs—clearly of Reformation background.

Besides influencing the movements we have named—and the list might be extended—the Reformation also had an effect on Gandhi. Gandhi was a Hindu, not a Christian. But he frankly acknowledged that he had been influenced by Christ. That influence was first channeled through evangelicals in his South African days, when his ideals and program were being shaped. Therefore Gandhi’s prodigious effect, not only on India but on all mankind, was in part a fruit of the Reformation.

We must quickly note that democracy, the Red Cross, and the United Nations have been largely secularized and the emphasis of the Reformation through them largely obscured. The same was true of Gandhi. Again and again in history this has been true of movements, institutions, and individuals indebted to the Reformation. That need not surprise or discourage us. We recall that Paul spoke about the seeming weakness and folly of the Cross and then, in a contrast fully borne out in history, declared the Cross to be the power and the wisdom of God.

If we are ever dismayed by the forces that threaten the Good News, we will do well to remind ourselves of the source of the phrase “salvation by faith,” which brought peace and triumphant joy to Luther. He found it in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Paul found it in the Book of Habakkuk. Habakkuk was wrestling with the problem of the seeming triumph of evil, of the apparent helplessness of the righteous before the callous cruelty of powerful conquering kingdoms. As, tortured, he struggled with the question why God seemed to tolerate evil, God revealed to him that the righteous shall live by faith.

We of a later age must remember that we are told that our Lord said the gates of hell—on the defensive—should not prevail against his Church. We must also remember that on the eve of the crucifixion, when to human eyes he seemed to have failed, he declared: “Now shall the Prince of this world be cast out.”

Our religious journalism fellow for the September–December term under CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S cooperative program with the Washington Journalism Center will be E. Russell Chandler, religion editor and general-assignment reporter on the Modesto (Calif.) Bee. Chandler is an ordained Presbyterian minister with cresting interest in religious journalism as a career. He holds the B.S. from U.C.L.A. and the B.D. from Princeton Seminary (where he finished second in the class of ’58), and has studied a year at New College, Edinburgh.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S former fellows have put their journalistic experience to good use. O. Wilson Okite is an assistant in the foreign-affairs section of the New York office of Time magazine. Edward H. Pitts is director of administrative services for Laubach Literacy, Inc., in Syracuse. James L. Adams has returned to his position as a reporter and religion writer for the Cincinnati Post and Times Star. William D. Freeland is a reporter for UPI in Columbia, South Carolina.

Our continuance of the program is contingent on the provision, by some interested agency or individual, of a $2,000 semi-annual stipend to cover a qualified journalism fellow’s minimal subsistence during a term at the Washington Journalism Center.

An extraordinary book burst like a bombshell on the British ecclesiastical scene this summer. Its title: Power Without Glory: A Study in Ecumenical Politics (Hutchinson, 30s.). Its author: Ian Henderson, professor of systematic theology at Glasgow University, doctrinally a radical and never slow to acknowledge indebtedness to Bultmann.

Such dubious antecedents have been waived in the welcome given the book in some ultra-conservative circles, who are in this case Churchillian to a man. “If Hitler invaded hell,” said Sir Winston once, “I should feel constrained to say a good word for the devil.” What a potent uniting factor is a common antagonism!

Only brief mention is possible here of some points Henderson raises in his 184-page attack aimed at exposing the tricks of the ecumenical trade. A cosmic swindle is being practiced; ecumenical discussions are never what they seem; the double-think and the double-tongue are inevitable; language is used to conceal rather than reveal motives; ecclesiastical takeover bids have increased, are increasing, and ought to be diminished; failure to recognize institutional churches as power structures is leading to mass delusion; and, far from desiring organic unity, God finds the whole concept as distasteful as does Ian Henderson. The latter, indeed, regards One Church-ness as “the greatest thing we have to repent of,” for it is an expression of power rather than of love. In its name threats of death might one day be made against nonconformity, for Henderson fears that the Coming Great Church will deny to objectors the ordinances of the Christian religion.

“The ascription of his own successful activities to God,” Henderson holds, “is an age-old device of the ecclesiastical power operator.” God, despite any contrary suggestion, does not will unity just because the Lausanne Declaration says he does. In that document Henderson sees “the death warrant of all non-episcopal churches” and “the charter of Anglican imperialism.” Chief conspirator here was the American Protestant Episcopal Church, whose hand can be seen in the present WCC constitution.

In the Evanston Report’s reference to disunity as disobedience and sin, says Henderson, the WCC committed itself to “a ruthless and inveterate attack on denomination.” The problem is exacerbated by a series of mergers—exhortations to “ecclesiastical flies to walk into the webs of ecclesiastical spiders.”

More particularly on the British scene, the professor is infuriated by the pretensions of Anglicans who, he says, are diplomats before they are churchmen. Certainly (I would add), if it is accounted diplomatic virtue to concede as little as possible, the Anglicans who have been conversing with the Scots emerge magna cum laude. The summa must always be out of reach for them because of their tacit presumption that in things ecumenical the churches of the Anglican Communion are negotiating from a position of strength. The durable Anglican fallacy of the “apostolic succession” might be seen to have an interesting parallel in the exasperated Labouchere’s remark about Gladstone: he did not object to Gladstone’s always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve but only to his pretense that God had put it there.

But to return to Henderson. He holds that his fellow Presbyterians in talks with the Church of England are chosen on the basis of “securing the right committee majorities.” The horns of their mitres the professor can detect with prophetic and jaundiced eye. By an appallingly bad argument, he couples them with the seventeenth-century Covenanters as “the will of God men,” hints at dark skulduggery in interchurch conversations, and questions the integrity of some of his fellow presbyters.

Yet some will think that Henderson makes valid points here and there: his indictment of the ecumenical tendency to brand critics as enemies of God, and of the studied and necessary ambiguity of language called for by the WCC’s use of propaganda; his suspicion that “the heathen who marvelled at the way Christians loved one another didn’t know them very well”; his suggestion that a false distinction is made between ecclesiastic and theologian, with the dice loaded against the latter. In one place he makes the mystifying declaration that “the argument of this book does not stand or fall on Bultmann’s view of Gnosticism.”

There may be those who welcome such assurance, but they might also ask where then the crux of the matter is. What does this volume ultimately say? Ian Henderson seems concerned to pull down the walls of Geneva, but what then? He has few constructive bricks laid up for the rebuilding.

Even more baffling, however, is the lack of clarity on what it is Henderson wishes to defend and maintain. His attitude toward the Bible reflects that of his German teacher. He is not in the theological succession of Knox and Melville. And he would be foremost among those who would quietly dispose of the Westminster Confession as a subordinate standard of the Kirk—in which, ironically enough, he would be at one with most of the ecumenical party in the Church of Scotland against whom this book is ultimately directed.

If I were asked to express some of my objections to the ecumenical movement, I would say that it draws a circle that takes in too much and so dilutes the biblical and reformed faith, particularly in its view of the Atonement. I would add misgivings that the ecumenical quest may demand and sap the energies of men to no purpose unless it is regarded, not as an end in itself, but as part of the desire for spiritual renewal as a whole.

Ian Henderson does not argue on this level. If I dare say so and risk misunderstanding, his book shows an odd lack of spiritual dimension. Goethe once said you could assess a man by what he considered laughable, but just as significant is what a man leaves unsaid.

The professor is concerned that the Coming Great Church should make room for a far greater diversity of belief and practice. We seldom connect intolerance with the World Council of Churches, but a recent development makes us think that Henderson might have a case here. Just after the publication of Power Without Glory, the NCC’s Colin Williams said that he simply could not live comfortably in the same church with Billy Graham. This sounds like a staggering confirmation of Ian Henderson’s argument.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Episcopalians. Presbyterians. Lutherans. Methodists. Baptists.

That’s the way the major Protestant groups rank today in education, employment, and income. Reverse the order and you have a listing of loyalty to the Democratic Party—Baptists highest and Episcopalians lowest.

This profile of denominational groups, first of its kind, comes this month from the Gallup Poll and is based on more than 40,000 personal interviews conducted last year. It’s part of a sixty-four-page compendium of findings on U.S. religion since 1955 by Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion.

Besides the denominational comparison, the volume contains the latest survey of church attendance. Gallup provides the only national estimates in this area by asking persons whether they went to church during the previous week. In 1966, as in the year before, 44 per cent had. This compares with 49 per cent during 1958.

Asked how happy they were, 49 per cent of the churchgoing group said “very happy,” compared with 39 per cent of the non-churchgoers.

To a large extent, inclusion of religious questions on the Gallup organization’s weekly surveys is due to Managing Director George Gallup, Jr., who runs the operation when his famous father is out of the office. The younger Gallup, 37, earned a bachelor’s degree in religion at Princeton, basing his 1952 thesis on a national survey of beliefs.

At the time, he was thinking of becoming an Episcopal priest, but he changed his mind after a year’s work with a Bible school in a Negro Episcopal church in Galveston, Texas. But church interest remains. Gallup is a lay reader and Sunday school teacher in his local Episcopal parish.

In the research at Princeton, Gallup was amazed at the low level of religious knowledge in America, despite widespread Sunday school background. Since then, he has been surprised at the high level of belief in God and regular churchgoing in the United States, compared with other Western nations.

In the 1966 Gallup Poll results on religion, churchgoers were compared with non-churchgoers on a variety of current topics. There was little difference. For instance, 53 per cent of churchgoers think “the Johnson Administration is pushing integration to fast,” compared with 52 per cent of non-churchgoers.

About half of each group favors continuing the Viet Nam war, rather than the alternative of withdrawing troops, which was chosen by about one-third of each group. The rest had no opinion. The churchgoers would tend somewhat more to prefer non-military service for their children if this were a legal option. They were 5 per cent more favorable toward the anti-poverty program than non-churchgoers, and 5 per cent more dissatisfied with “honesty and standards of behavior” in the United States.

In a battery of racial questions, about one-third of each group said they would definitely move if large numbers of Negroes came into their neighborhoods. Another third thought they might move. Close to nine out of ten from both groups thought a homeowner “should be permitted to choose the kind of person to whom he wants to sell.” Nearly as high a percentage from both groups believe a white person in a white neighborhood should not be required to sell or rent to a Negro.

A regional breakdown on church attendance showed New England the highest, at 54 per cent, with just one-third attending in the Rocky Mountain and Far West areas. The highly Protestant South, with 45 per cent attending, ranked below the Midwestern states. In the national comparison, 68 per cent of the Catholics and 38 per cent of the Protestants had attended church during the week, which is partly a reflection of Mass obligations.

Gallup’s figures show 67 per cent of the population considers itself Protestant and 25 per cent Catholic. In official membership figures, the comparison is 56–34. Within the Protestant category, the percentages identifying themselves with the various denominational groups are fairly close to the actual membership rolls.

In the nationwide data, 47 per cent of Catholic heads of household make $7,000 or more a year, but only 38 per cent of the Protestants. Thirty-six per cent of Catholics work in professional, business, or white-collar occupations, and 31 per cent of Protestants. The Jews rank by far the highest: 69 per cent are in the more desirable employment brackets, 69 per cent have $7,000 incomes, and 44 per cent are college graduates.

The following are specific figures in Gallup’s comparison of Protestant denominations:

College graduate: Episcopal (45 per cent), Presbyterians (34), Lutheran (20), Methodist (20), Baptist (10).

Professional, business, or white-collar job: Episcopal (53), Presbyterian (46), Lutheran (35), Methodist (35), Baptist (22).

Family head makes $7,000 or more: Episcopal (55), Presbyterian (50), Lutheran (49), Methodist (42), Baptist (26).

Live in urban area of 500,000 or over: Episcopal (41), Presbyterian (30), Lutheran (28), Methodist (21), Baptist (19).

Democratic vs. Republican preference: Episcopal (27 to 42), Presbyterian (28 to 44), Lutheran (34 to 38), Methodist (40 to 34), Baptist (55 to 20).

The percentage of non-whites in the denominations has an obvious relationship to economic and other status. The Baptist group is 24 per cent non-white, Methodist 9 per cent, Episcopal 6 per cent, Presbyterian 2 per cent, Lutheran 1 per cent. The all-Protestant percentage of 11 per cent non-white is close to the national average.

On Campus

A statement from a conference of Roman Catholic educators said church colleges “must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.” It said that the presence of non-Catholics is desirable and probably necessary and that theology “must serve the ecumenical goals of collaboration and unity.” Signers included the presidents of Notre Dame, Georgetown, and Fordham.

Seven Lutheran theologians will have new posts in Roman Catholic institutions for the coming school year.

Woodstock College, Jesuit seminary in rural Maryland, has asked the Vatican for permission to move and affiliate with Yale University. And Colgate Rochester Divinity School has become linked with the University of Rochester. The seminary, affiliated with the Amercan Baptist Convention, was called “interdenominational” in the university’s press release.

After long efforts to get fundamentalist Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, to sign compliance with the 1964 civil-rights act, the federal government cut off any future aid. School President Bob Jones, Jr., replied that aid is unconstitutional anyway. The school had received $774,442 in student loan funds.

Church Panorama

Executives of the 80,000-member Presbyterian Church of Taiwan decided to stay in the World Council of Churches despite its statements on Red China and Viet Nam. However, they said that if future resolutions oppose Chiang Kai-shek’s policies, “we will be forced out of our spiritual convictions to withdraw.”

Roman Catholic and Dutch Reformed Churches in the Netherlands announced they will recognize each other’s baptism as valid.

The 14,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas began a year-long centennial observance July 30.

Planner Robert L. Wilson predicts that the slump in new congregations over the past six years will be reversed by an increase of church construction in the 1970s, particularly in Negro communities.

Research psychologist and Lutheran pastor Merton Strommen disputes the Glock-Stark survey, which found that conservative Christians have more prejudice. Strommen studied youths in The American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and found the greatest sensitivity to human need among conservative believers.

Personalia

Swiss theologian Hans Küng, commenting on Pope Paul’s reaffirmation of the celibacy requirement, said “there will be no peace on this point in the Catholic Church until celibacy is left to the voluntary decision of the individual, as it originally was.”

Charles Davis, famed English priest who quit the Roman Catholic Church, will teach religion at the University of Alberta.

Father James E. Groppi, Milwaukee Roman Catholic priest, was fined $100 for obstructing a policeman during a civil rights disturbance.

Little Rock priest James F. Drane was suspended and removed from the faculty at St. John’s Seminary by his Roman Catholic bishop after writing newspaper articles favoring birth control.

E. S. James, 67, recently retired editor of the powerful Baptist Standard in Texas, was listed in poor to fair condition at Baylor University Hospital after a massive coronary attack.

Ernest A. Payne, 65, is retiring after sixteen years as general secretary of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland. His replacement is former Principal David S. Russell of Northern Baptist College, Manchester.

R. Gordon Spaugh of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was elected president of the presiding committee of the International Moravian Synod at its every-ten-years meeting in Czechoslovakia.

Paul M. Van Buren, Episcopalian and “death of God” theologian, has won both a Fulbright lectureship and a Guggenheim Fellowship at Oxford University, England, for the coming year.

Primate Howard H. Clark of the Anglican Church of Canada will move his official residence from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Toronto, site of church offices.

Yale University Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, a Presbyterian, is one of four clergymen organizing a Committee for Draft Resistance to encourage youths to refuse military induction as a protest against Viet Nam.

Louis Cassels, Washington-based religion editor of United Press International since 1964, won the Religious Newswriters Association’s Supple Award for “general excellence in the reporting of religious news in the secular press.”

Miscellany

The Evangelical Defense Committee presented Protestant criticisms of Spain’s new religious-freedom law to the new government agency handling the statute, but a public statement on the situation is not expected for several months. Various restrictions were put into the law before final passage. Meanwhile, a French radio broadcast said sixty-seven Spanish Jehovah’s Witnesses may face a life in prison for refusing military service, since they can be tried and sentenced repeatedly for the same offense.

The 686 clinics of Britain’s Family Planning Association now give birth-control advice and contraceptives to all applicants over 16, married or not.

Iowa’s legislature voted to exempt the Old Order Amish church schools from regulations if approved by the state school board.

The National Council of Churches’ United Church Women turned its name around to Church Women United and brought Roman Catholic laywomen into a “permanent” ecumenical structure. New president is Mrs. James Dolbey, a Methodist, who was once acting mayor of Cincinnati.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said that unless employers prove undue hardship, workers are entitled to “reasonable” time off for regular worship. Meanwhile, some clergymen fear a further drop in church attendance if the U. S. Chamber of Commerce succeeds in getting a law to put five national holidays on Mondays and create more three-day weekends.

Gideons International distributed a record five million Bibles and New Testaments throughout the world during the past year. A special drive announced at last month’s convention will supply 80,000 Testaments to school children in Africa.

The strict, disciplined Nichiren Shoshu (“True Buddhism”) sect—an American rendition of Japan’s Soka Gakkai without nationalistic overtones—claims 40,000 adherents in the United States, with 2,000 converts a month.

New Guinea missionary Robert Holst says in the International Review of Missions that there is scant biblical evidence to support opposition to polygamy by Christian missions.

Deaths

ALBERT J. LUTHULI, 68, son of an African Congregational minister who became a Zulu chief in South Africa; winner of the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize for nonviolent opposition to his nation’s racial separation; in Stanger District—where he had long been kept under government restriction—of injuries after being struck by a freight train while he walked across a railroad bridge.

CHRISTOPHER II, 92, patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church in Egypt and much of Africa for three decades; supporter of Arab positions on refugees and recognition of Israel; in Athens, where he had lived for four years in poor health.

SHERMAN L. GREENE, 81, senior bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; in Atlanta.

JOHN COLTRANE, 40, perhaps the greatest tenor saxophonist in jazz, who experienced a “spiritual awakening” to God in 1957 and expressed his beliefs in “A Love Supreme,” Down Beat magazine’s record album of the year for 1965.

The conservative Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod edged toward closer ecumenical contacts at its New York City convention last month. A decision on joining the Lutheran World Federation, under discussion since the early 1950s, was again postponed, but supposedly the showdown will come in 1969. At the same time Missouri plans to study possible membership in the World Council of Churches. The 2,816,833-member synod is the largest Lutheran body outside both the LWF and the WCC.

The general interchurch stance of the synod was explained in a document on “Theology of Fellowship,” in preparation for eleven years. The statement called “unionism” and “separatism” equal dangers. The synod’s basic ecumenical strategy continues to be “doctrinal discussions carried on with a view to achieving doctrinal unity.” But the document endorsed cooperation with other Christian groups “to the extent that the Word of God and conscience will allow” in “necessary work on the local, national, or international level.” Executive Secretary Richard Jungkuntz of the Commission on Theology and Church Relations said this means Missouri could join the WCC and the National Council of Churches if they are just “federations,” rather than churchlike groups where affiliation implies pulpit and altar fellowship.

The synod expressed continued willingness to talk theologically with Roman Catholics and appears ready to go beyond the talking stage with The American Lutheran Church. “A basis exists” for sharing the communion table and exchanging preachers, the delegates said, but as with other ecumenical issues, they postponed action till the 1969 Denver convention. Despite agreements reached in discussions with the ALC, the resolution noted that “disturbing diversities still exist, particularly in reference to un-Christian and anti-Christian societies,” apparently meaning ALC tolerance toward Masonic lodges and similar organizations.

Bids for fellowship with the Lutheran Church in America went to the theology commission, since the two denominations have not held doctrinal discussions on the matter. The LCA’s stand is that it is ready for fellowship with any group that accepts the Lutheran confessions, so there is no need for further discussions.

Missouri already has new ties with the LCA as well as the ALC through the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A., whose general secretary, Thomas Spitz, Jr., is a Missouri Synod clergyman. Spitz said the council does not “even within Lutheranism provide for or acknowledge that unity which is our Lord’s prayer for his Church and gift to his Church.” Longings for a stronger united front were also expressed in speeches by ALC President Fredrik Schiotz and LCA President Franklin Clark Fry.

As signs of a more cooperative spirit, the Missouri Synod approved an inter-Lutheran version of Luther’s Small Catechism in time for the 450th anniversary of the Reformation; a previous attempt had been voted down in 1965. And though Missouri insisted on its own campus ministries when the Lutheran Council was formed, it now expresses readiness to have the council head a pan-Lutheran work at colleges and universities. Inter-Lutheran welfare agencies were also encouraged.

Missouri’s moves toward other Lutheran bodies caused the Wisconsin and Evangelical Lutheran Synods to pull out of the Synodical Conference. At this year’s convention, the conference was formally dissolved.

The Missouri Synod, last major denomination to set up a social action agency, became the last to give its agency a full-time director. In resolutions, the delegates overwhelmingly approved a program of “education and action” for open housing, and attacked prejudice in employment. The “action” will include loans and grants from the welfare board to enable victims of discrimination to acquire homes. The synod opposed selective conscientious objection because it “tends to promote chaos and anarchy in time of national emergency.” It said capital punishment is not prohibited by the Bible. Delegates also approved a statement that said nonviolent civil disobedience is a Christian means of protest against laws that are clearly unjust, but should be used only after legal remedies have been exhausted.

A group from the floor that included the Christian Century’s Martin Marty got through a statement on Viet Nam and the Middle East that said, “As a church body, we are not a political influence group,” and urged the synod to provide prayer and “support for the government while at the same time serving as an instrument of God’s grace and healing.”

The delegates rejected a bid to require members to accept literal interpretations of such biblical matters as the six-day creation. But they reaffirmed the synod’s belief that “the Holy Scripture is the inerrant Word of God.” At the previous fiftieth-anniversay convention of the Lutheran Laymen’s League, where inerrancy was also supported, synod President Oliver R. Harms said he spent 60 per cent of his working time answering mail complaints, many of them about tolerance of teachers of “false doctrine.”

In other matters, the delegates:

• Voted to let women serve as advisory members by appointment to national boards, though they are still prohibited from preaching. The all-male delegates ordered a study on whether women should vote in church matters.

• Decided to keep the present geographical name for the denomination rather than change to the “Lutheran Church International.” But a study will be made on whether to move offices from Missouri.

• Endorsed federal aid for private and church schools.

• Favored a fixed Easter date.

• Established a new eleven-member board to review synod publications for conformity to the Bible and confessions.

Missouri Synod has been one of the fastest-growing major denominations over the past fifteen years. But last year’s gain was just over 1 per cent, and leaders warned of possible membership losses and economic woes in future years.

Merger Bug Biting Baptists?

Last month’s assembly of the Baptist Federation of Canada came face to face with the fragmentation confronting the nation’s Baptists, who have shown little growth since World War II.¹Baptists were 4.2 per cent of the population in 1941 but only 3.3 per cent in 1961. The federation has 150,000 members. Although a motion to unite the three conventions of eastern, central, and western Canada was deferred, it was quite evident that delegates were on the threshold of favoring a fully unified Baptist Union of Canada.

A resolution called for “closer understanding and working relationships with other Baptist bodies now carrying on a ministry in Canada.” Retiring President Edgar J. Bailey applied the idea specifically to the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches and raised the hope that the fellowship and the federation would come into one fold. The fellowship, now one of the fastest-growing evangelical groups in Canada, looks upon the Baptists in the federation as being more or less of liberal persuasion.

Although the federation has not entered any serious negotiations with other denominations, the merger bug may yet bite Baptists. The same resolution that smiled at other Baptists declared that the federation is ready to enter talks with other denominations “in response to the moving spirit toward new dimensions of unity in the larger Christian fellowship.”

But home-missions secretary J. K. Zeman said Baptists ought to have closer identification with the smaller evangelical denominations rather than the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches, with their “concepts of infant baptism, mixed church membership [by which he meant committed believers plus nominal members] and … respective forms of government.” Zeman said Baptists were caught in a middle-of-the-road position that hindered an evangelistic outreach. “We have soft-pedaled our convictions to such an extent that in the eyes of the public we have lost identity.”

The 700 delegates at the four-day Ottawa meeting elected farmer J. J. Arthurs of Dauphin, Manitoba, as president and passed resolutions in favor of: Authority for their national council to speak for the federation between the assemblies, which are held every three years; abolition of capital punishment except for treason; and taking no sides on the Viet Nam war, while calling on the Canadian government to work through the United Nations to bring about peace.

J. BERKLEY REYNOLDS

Tragedies For Bishop Pike

Personal tragedy continues to dog the steps of theologically controversial Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike. On July 24 his wife, Esther, won an uncontested divorce decree on grounds of mental cruelty. In the five-minute hearing she testified the bishop had remained away from home many times when she didn’t know where he was.

In an earlier joint statement, the couple, wed in 1942, said they were ending the marriage due to “outside factors beyond the control of either.” Mrs. Pike was given custody of two teen-age children. The Pikes also have a married daughter. James Jr. committed suicide in a New York City hotel last year.

As for the bearing of the divorce on Pike’s church status, Suffragan Bishop Richard Millard said, “This is more a P.R. problem for us than a canonical one.” Pike, 54, who resigned as head of the Diocese of California in May, 1966, to join the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, can remain a bishop at least as long as he does not remarry. Pike was divorced from his first wife, but that separation was sanctioned by the Episcopal Church through an annulment.

In June, Pike’s appointments secretary at the Center, 43-year-old Maren Gergrud, died of an overdose of sleeping pills. She phoned Pike, who lived in the same building, and he went to her apartment and notified police. Investigators questioned the bishop at length about the torn-off missing portion of a suicide note. Pike conjectured she had destroyed it herself.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

A Representative Seminary

Evangelical Covenant Church delegates voted to make their North Park Seminary in Chicago more representative of the denomination. One plan is to appoint a qualified teacher who holds conservative views on the Bible. After two years of study, a committee found no faculty members now believe that “the Bible as originally given is the Word of God, can always be trusted, and is reliable in its statements of fact, history, science, chronology, and in all points of theology and ethics.” Similarly, no one in a recent graduating class held this view either. Seminary President Karl Olsson said the report would produce “a healthier intellectual and spiritual community.”

A report on interchurch relations asked continued study of joining interchurch bodies, merger talks with other denominations, and the possibility of a cooperative federation of churches wherein each body would maintain its own identity.

Pentecostals In Rio

The eighth Pentecostal World Conference last month in Rio was probably the fervent movement’s biggest gathering since it began at the turn of the century. Now with 12 million followers worldwide in a plethora of denominations, Pentecostalism has attracted the attention of several recent book-writers.

Brazil, the conference host, is a startling example of Pentecostal success. Numbers there have doubled to 2.6 million in recent years, which is the largest total among the ninety nations where Pentecostalists are now found.

Congo: No Casualties

No missionary casualties were reported in the eastern Congo, where government troops fought rebels last month. Most missionaries were evacuated to the capital of Kinshasa or to nearby nations.

There was one indirect fatality. Emile Makesi, head of a Protestant secondary school, died with his three children when a commercial truck in which they were riding plunged off a bridge into the Konzi River. Makesi was traveling by truck because the government had grounded all missionary and other private planes during the insurrection. Before the fighting began, night raiders in Kisangani had shot to death 26-year-old British Baptist missionary David Claxton.

Anglican-Methodist Union Stalls

Buried by hundreds of letters and faced with delicate negotiations, the joint commission of the Church of England and Britain’s Methodists will not be able to make its final union proposal next February, as scheduled. The likely date is Easter, too late for Methodists to act at their June, 1968, conference, so decision will be delayed until 1969.

Meanwhile, the Church Union, which speaks for “high church” Anglicans, attacked the proposed “Service of Reconciliation” for uniting the ministers of the two denominations and said no priest or bishop should join in without a “more positive statement” on the priesthood “as traditionally understood in Catholic Christendom.” Also critical is former Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher, an initiator of the union idea.

Defending hom*osexuality

Jesus might have been a hom*osexual, suggests the vicar of Cambridge University’s main church. Canon Hugh Montefiore told a Modern Churchmen’s Conference at Oxford that Jesus need not have been hindered from marriage by lack of money or possible mates. “Women were his friends, but it is men he is said to have loved,” the vicar added. He apparently didn’t mention that under rabbinical law a known hom*osexual would have been stoned to death, whereas Jesus was tried on other charges. The Archbishop of Canterbury said Montefiore’s ideas have no historical basis.

Meanwhile, publishers of hom*osexual-pitched publications were acquitted in Minneapolis after defense testimony from Methodist minister R. Theodore McIlvenna. Until recently McIlvenna headed the National Young Adult Project in Nashville, and before that he was chairman of San Francisco’s Council on Religion and the hom*osexual.

McIlvenna said he wouldn’t hesitate to let his young children view pictures of nude males sold by the defendants, and expressed amazement at the charges since “there is so much material available that goes beyond this.” McIlvenna said social attitudes against hom*osexuality are liberalizing. But Maryland Roman Catholic priest John F. Harvey, who has counseled hom*osexuals for twelve years, testified that the material definitely was obscene.

In another bizarre case, a Roman Catholic priest in Rotterdam, Holland, admits he permitted a Mass for two hom*osexuals although he suspected that they considered the event a church “marriage.” During the service the two men exchanged rings and their families were present. Many considered the “wedding” a publicity stunt for the men’s night club.

Rome, Istanbul, Moscow

Pope Paul, who is getting as much of a reputation for traveling as his first-century namesake, made his fifth trip abroad last month, to visit 81-year-old Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras in Istanbul. The patriarch’s status as “first among equals” of the Orthodox hierarchy pales before Paul’s exalted claims, the chief obstacle to Catholic-Orthodox unity.

Symbolizing this gap as well as repression of Orthodoxy in Turkey, the Pope journeyed from the splendid Vatican palace in Istanbul to the Orthodox citadel, a small, rundown cathedral in a rundown part of town.

Athenagoras is not without honor, except in his own country. The Turkish government’s announcement of the pontiff’s visit made no mention of the meeting with Athenagoras, which was the major purpose. Turkey’s struggles with the Greeks led by Orthodox Archbishop Makarios on Cyprus have been one reason for the bad feeling. Government pressure has made it difficult for Athenagoras to travel. But after the Pope’s visit, he announced that this fall he plans to visit Orthodox prelates in the Soviet Union, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia—and perhaps the Archbishop of Canterbury and leaders of the World Council of Churches—and then to pay a return call on Paul in Rome.

Besides discussing relations with Catholicism, Athenagoras has another project to promote. Taking a leaf from Pope John XXIII, onetime papal delegate to Turkey, Athenagoras plans a Pan-Orthodox Council to discuss renewal of Orthodoxy and Christian unity. The Paris Catholic daily La Croix speculates this month that the Pope might now visit Moscow’s Patriarch Alexei at Athenagoras’s suggestion, since Alexei is pivotal in any more for Roman-Orthodox unity.

By one account, the council would be the first gathering of leaders from all Orthodox communions in 1,200 years. When the Pope first met Athenagoras in the Jordanian section of Jerusalem in 1964, the meeting was the first between Orthodox and Roman leaders in 500 years. And when the Pope joined Athenagoras in prayer in Istanbul, it was believed to be the first time a reigning Pope had prayed in an Orthodox church.

An impromptu prayer by the Pope caused a flurry after he had left the country. He had bowed for a brief silent prayer in Hagia Sophia, remarkable shrine built in the sixth century when Christians were still united, and turned into a mosque in 1453 by Muslim invaders. A papal bull of excommunication posted there in 1054 completed the Orthodox-Roman schism. Today the building is a museum and worship is prohibited, so Paul’s praying was illegal.

Besides meeting Athenagoras, the Pope conferred with Turkish President Cevdet Sunay, the Grand Mufti, the Chief Rabbi, and Armenian Patriarch Shnork Kaloustian, whose 120,000 believers are not in communion with either Rome or Orthodoxy because they refuse to accept the Council of Chalcedon and subsequent councils.

The Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431) declared Mary to be Mother of God, and Paul traveled to that ruined city in honor of Jesus’ mother. In Catholic tradition, the city is also the site of Mary’s assumption into heaven. Marian veneration continues as a major motif of Paul’s pontificate.

Paul had said he and Athenagoras would discuss “the best means of promoting theological and canonical studies with the end of laying a road towards the establishment of a perfect communion between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church,” and the fate of holy places in Israel. No dramatic announcements were made on either topic.

Athenagoras, unlike some other Orthodox leaders, is willing to grant that the pope of Rome is “first in honor among us.” Even some Anglican and Protestant voices are echoing this view (see June 23 issue, page 36). Joining in last month was Disciples theologian W. Barnett Blakemore, new president of the Church Federation of Greater Chicago. He suggests that “eventually the shape of primacy for a united church would be a council together with the pope whose powers will be constitutionally defined,” something like the U. S. President and Congress.

Stanford theologian Robert McAfee Brown, a Presbyterian, wrote in Commonweal that “the primary possibility of allegiance which non-Roman Catholics can now offer to the bishop of Rome centers on the relationship of the church to the world.”

Evil spewed out of the urban ghettos this summer in a torrent of violence that battered at the consciences of even the most complacent Christians. Riots in dozens of cities left scores dead and hundreds maimed and injured, as well as untold property destruction. An alarmed Lyndon Johnson became the first U. S. president in many a day to call a special day of prayer for a domestic crisis. And even before the smoke cleared, new misery stalked the inner city as thousands of homeless sought food and shelter. It was hard to believe that this was really happening in America.

In the inevitable effort to assign the blame, a wide assortment of factors were cited: subversion, the new morality, plain old mischief, the liquor traffic, lack of firearms control, and Christian indifference. The truth undoubtedly lay in a combination of some of these and others. But the fiery glow of the fury made the dust jacket of Billy Graham’s best-selling World Aflame all too real and pointed with new force to the cause that underlies all the rest: human sin.

Many Christians responded to Johnson’s prayer plea on Sunday, July 30, and some went a step further, searching their own hearts in a spirit of repentance, realizing that the summer’s sin was not exclusively that of the sniper and the slum lord but extended as well to the insensitive suburbanite.

Christians may not condone violence but “must understand it,” and will be “gravely in error” if they seek a “scapegoat in order to feel relief from our own guilt in all of this,” said Methodist Bishop Dwight E. Loder of Michigan.

A number of other individual churchmen spoke out on the causes and effects of the riots. But corporate ecclesiastical statements were few and far between. Normally vocal ecumenical and social-action groups, preoccupied with Viet Nam, were silent.

Among personal viewpoints expressed, none is more to the point than that of the Rev. Louis Johnson, pastor of Friendship Baptist Church in Detroit. “We need a new boldness in the preaching of the Gospel, and a new emphasis on love to counteract the hate proclaimed by militant black-power advocates like Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown,” he says. But Johnson also pleads for evangelical churches to turn their eyes back to the city and to attack the problems of inadequate housing, education, and employment. “Churches have been closing down Christian centers in the inner city while the government is opening them up,” he said. He is critical of denominational programs that emphasize social action to the point that the presentation of the Gospel is either shallow or non-existent.

According to Johnson, Detroit rioters spared churches and public buildings. He said attendance at his church was up the Sunday following the riots. He gave credit to both Negro and white church people who acted quickly after the unrest to provide relief. And he urged suburbanites to identify with inner-city dwellers in normal times as well as abnormal.

In Minneapolis, St. Joseph’s Catholic church and school were extensively damaged by arsonists, who set fires to both ends of a tunnel connecting the two plants. Clergymen attending a “post-mortem meeting” on the riots were urged by one speaker to declare a moratorium on church building projects for 1968 and use the money for social improvements. A pastor told the group, “Your stained-glass windows keep you from seeing the scum of our society. If you didn’t have the cold winters of do-nothing, you wouldn’t have the long hot summers of violence.”

The biggest church controversies rising out of the rioting resulted from the use of Episcopal Church property for black-power meetings in Newark, New Jersey, and Washington, D. C. The National Conference on Black Power, planned for Newark long before the rioting there, was held July 20–23 with the Episcopal diocesan headquarters as its administrative center. Episcopal Bishop Leland Stark later mailed “a letter of explanation” about the meeting to the 32,000 families in the diocese. He said that “neither the diocese nor its urban department was in any sense a sponsor of the conference” and expressed his disappointment at the outcome.

In Washington, extremist H. Rap Brown spoke at a rally in St. Stephen and the Incarnation Church the day after his arrest in connection with a burning in Cambridge, Maryland. Rector William A. Wendt said “the church should be a place where differing opinions can be expressed and discussed, where dialogue can take place.”

At a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee rally held in the church, Brown was quoted as calling President Johnson an “outlaw” and saying, “I agree there should be more shooting and looting. If you’re going to loot, you’ve got to arm yourselves, brothers.… If Washington, D. C., don’t come around, Washington, D. C., should be burned down.”

The man behind the black-power meeting in Newark was actually a relatively conservative Episcopal churchman (see story following) whose five degrees included one earned at Harvard under Pitirim Sorokin. Dr. Nathan Wright, Jr., 44, chairman of the meeting, currently serves as executive director of the department of urban work of the Episcopal diocese. He contends that the meeting was a responsible gathering that was poorly reported and given a distorted image.

‘Creative’ Black Power

Dr. Nathan Wright, Jr., who chaired the controversial black-power meeting in Newark last month, is an open advocate of black power, and is probably its most articulate spokesman. He argues that the term “black power” is widely misunderstood, that basically it symbolizes merely the Negro’s chance to seek his own identity and rightful place in the economic and social structure. His thesis is that black power creatively used can and should be a movement vital to the growth, development, and peace of the entire country. The riots, he emphasizes, are in no way related to the term.

Wright was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and raised in Cincinnati. On July 14, Hawthorn Books came out with his Black Power and Urban Unrest, an analysis of the Negro’s plight in the inner city. His next volume, Ready to Riot, is due soon.

Wright calls the riots a “form of insanity,” and quotes Negroes as saying, “We don’t want anything. We just want to be people.”

He is severely critical of the reaction of civil authorities toward the rioting Negroes and points out that virtually all of the actual killing was done by the whites at the expense of the Negroes.

Wright’s black-power book takes sharp issue with long-term government relief: “The conservatives are right when they decry a growing bureaucratic trend which is self-perpetuating, and which is beyond both critical re-examination and curtailment … At some point a determined assault on useless or destructive functions in government must be made. There is no better point to begin than with our present far too highly involved and debilitating system of long-term relief.”

Sour Grapes In California

With the peak of harvest only a few weeks away, an “ecumenical conciliation service” worked out at least a temporary truce between the warring United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (AFL-CIO) of Cesar Chavez and the powerful Teamsters in California. The rival unions had argued bitterly for months over which was to organize farm workers in the nation’s most populous state. But even before a formal pact was signed, a new and equally acrid controversy erupted between religious leaders and the Council of California Growers.

Many teeth have been on edge in California’s sprawling San Joaquin Valley since the Delano grape strike—spurred by organized church support—soured on the vine late in 1965. The strike, which later affected other crops, was transformed into a civil-rights struggle by outside groups. The debate as to whether the churches should take sides in the farm-worker unionization drive raged hot and heavy. Later demonstrations and altercations and the activities of the Migrant Ministry (which lent some of its staff to Chavez’s union) received national attention.

Last spring, an ad hoc committee of prominent San Francisco Bay area clergymen began a series of quiet, private meetings to “resolve the situation” that existed between the AFL-CIO farm-worker group and the Teamsters. Both unions were vying for the loyalty—and dues—of the state’s estimated 80,000 field hands.

Union representatives met with the clergymen and agreed that Chavez’s union would organize field workers and leave cannery and creamery workers, employees of frozen-and dehydrated-food plants, and warehousem*n and truckers to the Teamsters.

The truce paved the way for the world’s largest wineries to agree to union elections. It also provided a vitriolic response from many vintners and growers, who called the mediation effort “a cleric-union cartel … designed to literally bludgeon California farmers until they respond to the whims of the powerful bosses of organized labor.”

The growers’ spokesman, California Growers executive O. W. Fillerup, said that the same church people who for the past two years have “attempted to exert their influence in all phases of the farm-worker organizing drive” apparently now have “appointed themselves the ultimate authority as to who will decide what contracts are valid, who should be boycotted, who should be picketed, and literally who does what to whom.”

In reply, the religious leaders said they regretted the “unwarranted attack” and insisted they only intend to bring peace to farm-labor disputes. Members of the committee include the Rev. Eugene Boyle of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco, the Rev. Richard Byfield of the Episcopal Diocese of California, Rabbi Joseph B. Glaser of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Methodist Bishop Donald Tippett, Episcopal Bishop C. Kilmer Myers, United Church of Christ executive Richard Norberg, and United Presbyterian executive J. Davis Illingworth.

How were the clergy able to press the two union giants to a jurisdiction settlement when even the state conciliation service had been unable to break the deadlock? Informed sources believe the clergy pitch appealed to Teamsters International Vice-president Einar O. Mohn, a leading Missouri Synod Lutheran layman. Observers on the labor scene see Mohn’s church-influenced move as a step toward national reaffiliation of Teamsters and the AFL-CIO.

Meanwhile, Glen Hofman, a legislative advocate hired by the California Council of Churches, asserted that the Church must get more deeply involved in politics, labor disputes, and “the legislative process on all levels.” This appears to advocate church backing for mandatory collective-bargaining laws, unemployment insurance, and higher minimum wages for farm workers.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Graham’S Rousing Red Welcome

Extraordinary scenes accompanied Billy Graham’s visit last month to Zagreb, second city and biggest economic, cultural, and scientific center of Yugoslavia. Never has the American evangelist known a welcome quite like what he received on this first preaching visit to a Communist country, made on the invitation of Christians working with Dr. Josip Horak, president of the Yugoslav Baptist Union.

Among the 10,000 who heard Graham during the two-day meetings were some who had made long, tedious journeys by coach from east and south, and even from other socialist republics. They surged round him after each meeting with tears of joy and kisses of welcome, holding copies for autograph of Peace with God, newly translated into Croatian. One woman from Macedonia gave the American an enormous bag of walnuts, another some fragrant roses.

At a press conference attended by local secular journalists, among others, Graham invited questions of a nonpolitical nature. In a most friendly atmosphere (characteristic of his whole visit) he dealt with relations between Christians and atheists, follow-up work, why he had come, by what authority he preached, and his attitude toward Roman Catholics.

The Yugoslav hosts had arranged a reception for him at the Esplanade Intercontinental Hotel, at which local government officials were present. Earlier the Roman Catholic archbishop had cordially greeted the evangelist after a crowded meeting in the Lutheran church.

But it was those Sunday meetings that were most memorable. Held on a football field owned by the Roman Catholic Church, beside an army hospital administered by that church, these first open-air services in Zagreb for many years drew more than 7,000 people. The rain poured down relentlessly that morning, but no one moved. From the hospital balconies, pajama-clad convalescents (Graham wished them a speedy recovery) saw and heard the proceedings with nuns and other staff. “Such a wonderful opportunity,” murmured a choir member. “Praise the Lord!”

By afternoon the weather had cleared, and the sun was shining when Graham mounted the temporary rostrum with Dr. Branko Lovrec, who shared the work of interpreting with Horak. The evangelist spoke for forty-seven minutes on Luke 14, citing some of the excuses men still have for not heeding God’s invitation, one that should be accepted above all other demands. As in the meetings that morning and the previous night, scores of hands were raised on all sides when he invited people to make a commitment to Jesus Christ.

“We never dreamt that such meetings would be possible,” said a greatly moved Horak in the closing minutes. He proffered a strong invitation to return, and the resounding response from the audience left no doubt that he was speaking for all.

After the Lutheran pastor had pronounced the benediction there was a poignant scene when everyone linked hands for “Blest Be the Tie that Binds,” led by the choir first in Croatian, then in English. That Graham is a truly ecumenical force was seen in one platform group, hands linked, that consisted of five clergymen: a Roman Catholic, a Lutheran, two Orthodox, and a Presbyterian.

When Graham left Zagreb two hours later, a great crowd filled the railroad station, singing and waving. Some had a banner: “DR. BILLY GRAHAM, COME BACK SOON TO ZAGREB.” It was clear from his response that the evangelist would like nothing better.

Earlier that week Graham had spoken twice and given a press conference in Turin, Italy—a country that was another first for him. An enormous crowd crammed into the Waldensian church, stood in the aisles, overflowed the adjacent hall, and spilt into the courtyard, to which the service was relayed—3,000 or more, according to press reports next day. At a morning session, chiefly for churchfolk, he had spoken by request on the communication of the Gospel in a secular age.

In contrast to the recent London crusade, during which certain minor incidents occurred, there was no hint of hostile demonstration toward the evangelist in either Italy or Yugoslavia.

J. D. DOUGLAS

East Europe: Open And Shut

Billy Graham’s trouble-free visit to Yugoslavia (story above) was evidence of considerable freedom for evangelicals in that Communist nation. Last month more than 800 Yugoslavs attended the dedication of a new Baptist theological school and church in Novi Sad that will train Protestants of other denominations as well. The nation’s Baptists have also been able to run a youth camp in Pomer, where about fifteen youths accept Christ each year. This summer a young man from a Balkan country was baptized at the camp.

During Graham’s trip, the Vatican disclosed that neighboring Albania had closed its remaining Roman Catholic churches and turned the main cathedral into a museum. Pushing the closing were youth bands similar to those in ally Red China.

Meanwhile, a study mission from the American Jewish Congress reports that Jews have considerably more freedom in Eastern Europe than in the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia had “the most vibrant Jewish community.” Albania was not included in the survey.

Whatever problems Soviet Jews face are shared by dissident Baptists, who favor complete separation from the state. Religion in Communist Dominated Areas—a National Council of Churches newsletter that recently was shifted from the coexistence-minded International Affairs department to the Overseas Department—reports on a year-old protest from Baptists in Kiev. They ask government recognition for their nonconformist group and charge persecutions that amount to “genocide.”

The statement criticizes the government for “systematic repressions, assaults, arrests, trials, searches, destruction and confiscation of prayer houses, removal of children, breaking up of services, discrimination against believers in factories and educational institutions, the incitement of public opinion against believers by false and libelous concoctions in the press, etc.”

Soviet Anniversary

On August 20 the Baptists in the Soviet Union mark their 100th anniversary. The celebration date, which was announced rather late, is several months earlier than had been expected by Western Baptists, so the number of overseas visitors is likely to be limited.

European Baptist Press Service speculates that the purpose of the early date for the observance is to allow an interval before the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in November.

According to EBPS, Russian Baptists trace their origins to Tiflis, Georgia State. The first convert was merchant Nikita Voronin, 27, raised in a group of dissenters from Eastern Orthodoxy, who began studying the Bible on his own. He was counseled and eventually baptized by Martin Kalvaitis, a Lithuanian who had joined a Baptist church in East Prussia. The first Russian baptism occurred at night on August 20, 1867, in the Kura River. Separate Baptist movements began in later years in the Ukraine and Leningrad. The movement today has about 500,000 followers.

India Bars Missionaries

Three Britons brought to fourteen the number of missionaries refused entry to India since March 1. No reason has been given for the ban. Last November the government issued new regulations requiring a minimum of five years’ residence in India and return within three months. All the latest missionaries refused had served in India previously.

However, the Parliament rejected laws proposed by Hindu militants that would force all funds of foreign Christian agencies to be funneled through the government and prohibit conversion of Indians under age 21 to Christianity.

Despite a good harvest this year, food tensions remain. In Kerala State, Father Joseph Vadakkan, the only Roman Catholic priest in the nation who favored the state’s Communist-led coalition, thinks Catholics should withdraw support if the government doesn’t get surplus rice and stop inflation of rice prices. The Lutheran World Federation announced plans to feed 137,500 more persons in Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal with a shipment of 8,000 more tons of U.S. government food.

A recent report showed that 160 Protestant hospitals, half the national total, have joined a birth-control drive of the Christian Medical Association. The central government has approved one state’s request for compulsory sterilization of parents with three or more children. Those who refuse would lose government aid.

Missions Plane Missing

Loss of a plane with three persons aboard in the Territory of New Guinea was reported by Missionary Aviation Fellowship. Government representatives and Australian MAF officials concluded that the plane went down in a storm. A three-week search failed to locate it. The area is mountainous jungle country.

An MAF announcement said the apparently fatal accident was the third in the twenty-two-year, thirty-million-mile history of specialist-operated bush aircraft for missionaries, and the first involving a passenger fatality. Both others occurred within 250 miles of the latest accident, and weather was also presumed to be a factor in each.

The plane, a single-engine Cessna 185 belonging to the Australian MAF, was piloted by John Harverson. Also aboard were two New Guinea Bible school students. They were last heard from by radio on June 23, when Harverson reported difficult weather conditions at Olsovip, where he intended to land.

Harverson, an Australian and a second-generation missionary, leaves his wife, Joan, and two children, aged two and three. The family went to New Guinea in June, 1966.

The Idolatry Of Situational Ethics

The New Immorality, by David A. Redding (Revell 1967, 156 pp., $3.50), and The New Theology and Morality, by Henlee H. Barnette (Westminster, 1967, 120 pp., $1.85, paper), is reviewed by Milton D. Hunnex, professor of philosophy, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon.

David Redding’s The New Immorality is a series of sermon-like essays that reveal a profound grasp of what the old Christian morality is all about. The First Commandment is given its proper priority, and love is kept under law. Moral principles are not scrapped because their application may vary from situation to situation. Nor are they scrapped because “only God Himself knows the difference between right and wrong in each unique instance.” “Every man is forced finally … to wait upon God,” Redding writes; yet “God never needs to sacrifice principles to satisfy any situation.” On the contrary, he implements his love with his principles “so that love [will] not be a spineless lump.”

What of the relevance of the Bible? Redding believes we are spiritual contemporaries of biblical and Reformation man. “The chief end of man in A.D. 3020, as it was for Calvin, will be ‘to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’” The alternative to legalism is not a God-forsaking ethic of “love and nothing else,”; it is a life tuned to God’s will. “We cannot state the necessity of the First Commandment strongly enough,” Redding writes. Jesus said, “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart …” (Mark 12:30). And to the lawyer who questioned him about how he might gain eternal life, Jesus said, “Keep the commandments.” (Matt. 19:17).

To speak of loving one’s neighbor without also speaking of loving God is idolatrous. “This Command,” says Redding, “never strays near the subject of neighbor until after the love of God has been underlined.” One may not be able to love God without also loving his neighbor, but he cannot love his neighbor in the way Jesus did without also loving God. “Love of God and neighbor are two sides of one coin,” argues Redding. “Destroying one destroys the other.”

The situationist reveals his idolatry in his eagerness to speak of love without also speaking of God, or his eagerness to substitute love for God, or his eagerness to eliminate reference to God altogether. He is no better off than the legalist whom he rightly condemns for failing to love neighbor if he in turn pursues “love and nothing else.” Either love includes love of God first or it is not Christian love.

The primary theological error of the new morality is its neglect of the First Commandment and its failure to follow Jesus in obedience to it. Redding rightly sees this and shows with uncommon grace that the new morality is itself part of the moral confusion of our time rather than its remedy.

Reading for Perspective

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:

• Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Volume IV, edited by Gerhard Kittel (Eerdmans, $22.50). The fourth installment of a monumental eight-volume work provides invaluable research on key New Testament words.

• The Church of the Lutheran Reformation: A Historical Survey of Lutheranism, by Conrad Bergendoff (Concordia, $9). The history of a world-wide communion that for centuries has emphasized Scripture, the Gospel, and the sacraments and by so doing brought Christ to men of all nations.

• Setting Men Free, by Bruce Larson (Zondervan, $2.95). In a personal, biblical, and inspiring way, Larson describes the art of living as a Christian and the gifts God gives to believers for “The Great Adventure.”

The special merit of Professor Barnette’s The New Theology and Morality is its attempt to survey under one cover all the “exciting new developments emerging in contemporary Protestant thought.” Barnette offers the reader everything from perceptive observations on the new bondage of Hefner’s Playboy freedom to the meaning of the “man for others” idea for the Church today. But his pursuit of the let’s be kind to them” approach makes him hesitant to attribute to the secular theologians ideas that they themselves are perfectly willing to acknowledge. He cleans his fish with a dull knife. For example, he notes that “secular theologians stress the humanity of Jesus to the neglect of his unique, divine nature,” when it should be clear to him that they forthrightly reject “his unique, divine nature.” Radical differences are toned down for the sake of appearing objective. A good example of this is his attempt to cope with “the new ethics.” Here he examines the arguments of Bultmann, Robinson, and Fletcher. Significant points are scored, but the essentially idolatrous character of situational ethics never gets pointed up as it does in the Redding volume. Nor is there any attempt to unscramble the hideously confused logic and language of situationist writers. Barnette sees that Bultmann’s insistence that “the moment contains all that is necessary to understand the will of God” strips away all means by which the Christian can carry out love of neighbor, but he does not see that the danger in Bultmann’s existentialism arises from his repudiation of the very kind of revelation his ethics must have if it is to do its job. Also, the notion that the “old morality starts with principles, the new with persons” is simply a caricature of both Bible and logic. The old morality starts with God, and putting persons before principles is itself a principle that is no less liable to legalistic corruption that any other principle.

Situationists often use the term “legalism” to apply to any use of principles or rules, but the use of principles and rules is not per se legalistic nor is their use per se “putting principles before persons.” Also, the idea that since every moral situation is unique, rules are inapplicable, is simply misconceived. If what the situationists said were so, moral language would be impossible. Barnette does identify an illogical element of situationist ethics that Plato long ago found to be the Achilles heel of all forms of relativism. If no judgment can be ventured prior to the actual moral situation, than not even the assertion that one should respond to the demands of love—whatever that may mean—can be prescribed in advance of the actual making of a moral decision. To say, for example, that one should commit adultery rather than ignore the unconditional demands of love is to impose a legalism no less binding than the older and more obvious forms.

The new moralists are in trouble. They have ruled out the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit; yet their ethics calls for, indeed necessitates, the very kind of thing they have ruled out. Although their ideas may make sense if one is talking about a spirit-filled Christian, they make no sense if applied to the men “come of age” for whom they are intended.

What Barnette and Redding both seem to point up is the ugly fact that situationist ethics is itself a part of the very moral confusion to which it addresses itself as a remedy and that those who would bolster morality in the new terms are themselves party to the very immorality they are trying to ameliorate.

Casting Spells And Working Charms

Wizzards That Peep and Mutter, by Paul Bauer (Revell, 1967, 160 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Andre Bustanoby, pastor, Arlington Memorial Church, Arlington, Virginia.

Would you believe that you can run down to your corner drugstore and pick up a book on how to cast spells and work charms? Wizzards That Peep and Mutter, a book that reveals the fantastic growth of superstition and occultism, tells of the existence of books like The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, a “how to” book on witchcraft. Books on astrology have littered drugstore magazine racks for years, but now along with your high-priced antibiotics you can buy books telling how to cure every kind of ailment—including weak eyesight—through the use of witchcraft. The most startling cure is the one recommended for syphilis: have yourself buried up to your neck in fresh horse manure!

Wizzards That Peep and Mutter, whose catchy title comes from Isaiah 8:19, discusses from the Christian point of view a fantastic variety of superstitious beliefs. The author has spent a lifetime researching superstition. He writes about charms, spells, telepathy, clairvoyance, soothsaying, dreams, ghosts, hauntings, spiritism, flying saucers, spiritual healing, demons, witches, angels, the divining rod, astrology, and the miracles at Lourdes, Fatima, and Konnersreuth. The case studies make interesting reading, and Bauer usually offers rational explanations for the astounding stories he relates. But the reader is often left up in the air wondering if there is, after all, something supernatural about it all.

Bauer’s critical examination of clairvoyance is a good example. He notes that chance may play a large part in this phenomenon: “A thousand people may dream of an accident. If one happens in reality, the other 999 cases are forgotten.… It is not the clairvoyant who makes the phenomenon remarkable but the credulous public who are always ready to believe anything.” Yet, having said that, he closes his discussion with this observation: “There are, however, some spontaneous cases that are so remarkable that they deserve further examination.”

The author’s explanation in the preface of the why and the what of superstition is most enlightening. Men are dissatisfied with the materialistic view of the world and are looking for another explanation. Some turn to the Scriptures. But millions are turning to superstition. The essential difference between biblical Christianity and superstition is this:

Faith is the devoted service of the creature to his Creator. It is lived out in trust, obedience and love. In superstition, the deep-rooted will of man seeks to seize hold of the divine and make the powers of the invisible world serve his own needs and desires. It offers directions and methods for getting these powers into our clutches so that we may control and use them.

The Word From The Stratosphere

New Directions in Theology Today, Volume V: Christian Life, by Paul Hessert (Westminster, 1967, 192 pp., $1.95), is reviewed by Charles E. Hummel, president, Barrington College, Barrington, Rhode Island.

Today there is little active dialogue between the theologian and the church. This series, edited by William Hordern, aims to bridge the gulf. For the busy pastor and concerned laymen who cannot keep pace with an ever-expanding theological literature, New Directions in Theology Today presents concise descriptions of the current theological scene.

Paul Hessert recognizes that though some ages have had a clear picture of Christianity, ours does not. In periods of theological uncertainty, he says, “prior to the creation of theological systems, Christianity can only be described as a life.” Here he notes the precedent set by Augustine, the Reformers, and the Puritans, including William Ames, who “held that theology comes out of life as shaped by Scripture, not out of Scripture as shaped by logic.” Modern theologians such as Barth, Brunner, the Niebuhrs, and Bonhoeffer have cast their thought in the form of ethics.

Hessert faces a formidable task as he attempts to survey theological literature on the complex subject of the Christian life. He deals with Christian life as sanctification and describes the current demand for reinterpreting the questions of God, Christ, and the Bible. Chapters on “The World Come of Age” and “The Living Body of Christ” bring to the fore pertinent questions about the nature of the Church and the place of Christianity in a secular world.

Hessert gives an excellent survey in readable language. He summarizes questions raised by contemporary theologians. He also provides a historical panorama in which he aptly characterizes the major theological eras in church history. Of necessity, such a survey offers few clear answers. Yet the chapter entitled “Personal Life in the Body” does yield—all too briefly—concrete suggestions and a sense of direction.

The author makes two critical assertions about the contemporary theological scene:

One common theme running through nearly all current discussions of the Christian life is that somehow the period in which we now live is separated by a watershed from all that has gone before.

[The modern situation puts] the Christian life in a different context from the days when men could assume that God had spoken in Scripture to give them the clear plan for a way of life leading to sure salvation. In view of the recognition of historical relativity as it encompasses the Bible and traditional theology, what does the Christian life mean? Has it any characteristic style of its own?

But we may well ask whether our age really is unique in this respect. Despite assertions by modern theologians, millions of Christians today are finding in Scripture clear direction for meeting the problems of daily life. Furthermore, how can we arrive at any settled conviction about the Christian life without confidence in the Scripture as authoritative and normative?

Kierkegaard complained of Hegel that when one asked for a street address in Copenhagen, he was given a map of Europe. Hessert gives a map of European and American theological trends from a perspective of 30,000 feet. And often the theologians he quotes also resemble pilots surveying the landscape from 30,000 feet. Here lies much of the reason for the gap between the theologian and the church. Most modern theological writing rarely reaches down to ground-level reality. Hessert’s volume is informative as a strategic survey. One wishes, however, that he could have found a way to come down and travel with the reader on foot for a longer distance, up hill and down dale through the tactical issues of Christian living.

Religious Liberty And Vatican Ii

Religious Liberty: An End and a Beginning, edited by John Courtney Murray, S. J. (Macmillan, 1966, 192 pp., $4.95) and Paul Blanshard on Vatican II, by Paul Blanshard (Beacon, 1966, 371 pp., $5.95), are reviewed by James Leo Garrett, professor of Christian theology, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky.

For Americans especially, Vatican Council II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty was one of the most significant products of the four-year council. The council’s principal expert on religious liberty, John Courtney Murray, has edited nine essays that were originally read at an Institute on Religious Freedom at Loyola University in February, 1966. The authors are Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish.

In his own essay, Murray traces in detail the various schemata on religious liberty considered by the council, from the early emphasis on “freedom of conscience” to the final emphasis on religious liberty as a juridical immunity from coercion that derives from the dignity of human persons and is limited only by “the necessary exigencies of the public order.” David Noel Freedman finds religious liberty in ancient Israel in the very existence of the prophetic movement, while John L. McKenzie, S. J., finds Christian freedom rooted in the non-coercive nature of love and calls for more internal freedom within the Roman Catholic Church. Francis J. Canavan, S. J., thinks that the conciliar declaration should have said more about constitutional government. Jerald C. Brauer concludes that the American churches have almost totally rejected Enlightenment concepts of man, nature, and God, on which religious liberty as a natural human right was earlier constructed, but have not provided another ideological matrix for religious liberty as a human right. J. V. Langmead Casserley omits separatist Puritan motifs in reviewing the earlier bases of toleration but rightly calls for religious freedom to be based—at least partly—on the nature of the act of faith. For Victor G. Rosenblum, government aid to religious institutions and the actual enforcement of the entire conciliar declaration are issues of importance, and Philip S. Denenfield of the AAUP strongly stresses the former. George van Massenhove, a Dutch Jesuit, defends government subsidies of religious bodies, whether by tax exemptions or appropriations.

No writer dealt more trenchantly with the Roman Catholic Church during the fifteen years before Vatican II than Paul Blanshard, a Unitarian, and probably no other American aroused such strong Catholic resistance. Predictably, Blanshard’s evaluation of Vatican II is more critical than that of most writers; still, his work does contain elements of commendation. His stance is confessedly that of an advocate of American democracy; therefore he stresses events within U. S. Catholicism during 1962–65. Readers should not allow this declared position or Blanshard’s occasional defenses of Protestantism to obscure the fact that his value-judgments are derived from secularism or secular humanism. In this vein he concludes that Vatican II brought the Roman Catholic Church from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century.

Blanshard is more commendatory of John XXIII, especially in regard to Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris (though he cites evidence of John’s return-to-Rome stance on ecumenism), than of Paul VI, whom he calls “the institutional man” yet commends as an advocate of world peace. Paul VI was right, according to Blanshard, in forcing a conciliar vote on religious liberty but wrong in lifting birth control, mixed marriage, and clerical celibacy out of conciliar discussion.

Blanshard offers a “balance sheet” on Vatican II that includes four major credits and four major debits. The credits are: (1) liturgical reform; (2) “admission of possible mistakes” (though not dogmatic ones) by the Roman church in the past; (3) support of “limited religious liberty, in principle”; and (4) commitment to social reform, especially regarding race, war and Communism, and poverty. As debits he lists: (1) “continued opposition to birth control,” as in Paul VI’s United Nations speech, despite the population explosion, the inadequacy of the rhythm method, and the council’s stress on “conjugal love”; (2) “reassertion of Catholic claims on the public treasury” in the framework of the moral argument for “distributive justice” and contemporaneous with the capitulation of many American Protestant leaders (John C. Bennett et al.), the Johnson administration’s success in breach-of-the-wall legislation in 1964 and 1965, and the rise of liberal lay Catholic questioning of the Catholic school system: (3) “continuation of papal autocracy” (i.e., infallibility, primacy, diplomacy); and (4) continuation of “discrimination in mixed marriage,” especially in the pledge required of the non-Catholic party.

Blanshard mentions three other issues that he feels are now of indeterminate significance: (1) the collegiality of bishops, with priests and laymen yet unrepresented in Roman Catholic polity; (2) ecumenism, of which he takes a rather dim view; and (3) the statement on the Jews, with its unfortunate “deicide” debate and in the light of Hochhuth’s play, The Deputy. He also criticizes the council’s failure to deal effectively with “the miraculous underworld” (indulgences, purgatory, saints, and relics) and the church’s internal censorship (though changes by Paul VI in regard to the Holy Office are acknowledged).

That Blanshard discusses both Mariology and the Scripture-tradition issue at length but includes neither in his balance sheet seems consonant with his anti-theological bias. Having avowedly refused to discuss purely theological issues in his preceding books on Roman Catholicism, he now swallows antiquated views of the authorship of the New Testament Gospels, attempts to deny that the virgin birth of Jesus belongs to “the original New Testament attitude,” and uncritically climbs aboard the Bultmann bandwagon.

Blanshard’s theological inadequacies should not blind American Protestants to the major service his report on Vatican II renders: it shows clearly—in the midst of today’s “euphoria” and often sentimental ecumenism—the gulf that remains between official Roman Catholic policies and American constitutional principles on church, state, and the freedoms of citizens.

Riding A Merry-Go-Round

Three Philosophies of Education, by Henry J. Boettcher (Philosophical Library, 1966, 248 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by John W. Snyder, vice-president and dean for undergraduate development, Indiana University, Bloomington.

In this book Henry J. Boettcher, a teacher at Concordia Theological Seminary, examines the roles in education of three conceptions of reality: materialism, idealism, and theism. One by one he takes up the problems of defining reality, the nature of man, truth, values, ethics, self-fulfillment, and education and attempts to show the differences of approach to these questions from the perspectives offered by these three systems. He approaches his task from the point of view of a thoroughgoing believer in the Scriptures, in the revelation of God in Christ, and in the redemptive power of Christ crucified and risen. And he neglects no opportunity to state his theological position.

I hold essentially the same views of revelation and redemption that he holds and agree with what I understand to be his position, one based ultimately on the authority of Scripture. I feel constrained to make that point as clearly as possible, for I have some questions about other aspects of the book.

Boettcher is greatly susceptible to the other edge of the sword unsheathed by C. S. Lewis (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, June 9, 1967), in that he purports to analyze idealism, materialism, and theism simply by stating his own position. The writing is tragic for a book obviously intended to reach audiences outside evangelical circles. One has the feeling of riding a merry-go-round as the author reiterates the same positions in all his chapter headings, leaving the reader to wonder what the difference is between such things as epistemology and axiology.

Some terms and phrases are defined pages after their first use, as “born again” (remember the lay audience!); not defined at all, as pasa graphe theopneuston (though the meaning is hidden in the translation appearing on the next page); or ridden to death, as “the heirs of historic Christianity,” which occurs passim with slight and often redundant variations. The style is reiterative, laborious, and often special, as the reference to the Incarnation as “God’s historic thrust into the life of mankind” (again, remember the audience!). Consider what fun one could have with the commas in his sentence, “The eternal, pre-existent, spiritual, non-physical God created in time, ex-nihilo, by divine fiat, heaven and earth, both visible and invisible, spiritual and material, existences.”

This is trivial criticism, though the author’s style does hamper reading. More serious are such things as his statement that existentialism originated with “Kierkegaard’s quest for truth and epistemological certainty.” That hardly defines existentialism. And worse, it has nothing to do with the material preceding or following it. Worse still, it seems to say that “truth” and “epistemological certainty” are not identical; yet this whole chapter treats epistemology as though the term referred only to sources of objective truth.

To argue with a work so clear in its insistence upon redemption as the touchstone of true education is difficult; it might, however, have better met the demands of its subject had it served opposing views with clearer logic.

The Popular And The Critical

The Century Bible: The Gospel of Luke, edited by E. Earle Ellis (Nelson, 1966, 300 pp. 45 s.), and An Exposition of the Gospel of Luke, by Herschel H. Hobbs (Baker, 1966, 355 pp., $6. 95), are reviewed by Stanley D. Toussaint, assistant professor of New Testament literature and exegesis, Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas, Texas.

The main difference between these two commentaries is that one is a popular exposition and the other a more critical approach to the Scriptures. Both Ellis and Hobbs perform their tasks well.

Hobbs is the expositor. His introduction is only 2½ pages long, whereas Ellis’s is sixty. The bibliography in Hobbs is a “basic” one of half a page; Ellis’s covers 9½ compact pages.

Ellis is a master at summarizing the critical arguments and is thoroughly acquainted with contemporary scholarship. He accepts the Lukan authorship of Luke-Acts and asserts that Luke used Mark as a basic document to which he added materials from Q and L. Significantly, Ellis discusses the problem of holding to a document with such a tenuous character as Q; he resolves it by taking the more tenable position that Q was not a single document but probably a series of short, independent tracts.

Believing that Luke was a Hellenistic Jew, Ellis goes on to suggest the possibility that Luke was identical with the Lucius of Romans 16:21 and even conjectures that he might have been a cousin of Paul.

According to Ellis, the primary purpose of Luke is to point out God’s continuing program by describing the relation of Judaism and Christianity. Secondary purposes are instruction—with the special purpose of counteracting the influence of such doctrinal aberrations as Gnosticism—and correction of the notion of the immediate return of Jesus. The latter purpose could be disputed, especially in the light of such passages as Acts 3:20–21. Ellis dates the book around A.D. 70. He rejects the chronological and geographical method of finding structure in Luke’s Gospel. Instead he uses “thematic patterns” with a combination of six episodes in each block. I was impressed with the structure he found in the book.

The text Ellis uses is the RSV. His comments are very brief and are divided into sections marked by short discussions of the structure and teaching of the passage. His viewpoint is conservative, though he does not hold to verbal infallibility; for instance, he alleges that Quirinius may mistakenly be associated with the account of the enrollment in Luke 2. As for eschatology, he makes room for the possibility of a future Jewish kingdom but steps back from taking a dogmatic position on it.

The commentary by Hobbs is a simple and straightforward interpretation with occasional practical applications. He thinks that the book was written for the Gentile world by Luke, the companion of Paul, sometime between A.D. 55 and 63. Hobbs feels that Luke follows a chronological order, and he treats the Gospel accordingly.

The text he uses is the Authorized Version. He is acquainted with the Greek text and presents a cursory treatment of certain problem passages, such as the census under Quirinius, the genealogy, and the problem of the two blind men at Jericho. Not enough consideration is given to the kingdom concept, a paramount theme in Luke’s Gospel.

The pastor would do well to have both these volumes—the one by Ellis to keep him abreast of current views on the Gospel of Luke and to suggest some fresh approaches to the arrangements of the book, and the one by Hobbs for a simpler discussion. Laymen will find Hobbs very useful for a personal study of Luke, the loveliest of the Gospels.

Theist Meets Atheist

Concilium, Volume 23: The Pastoral Approach to Atheism, edited by Karl Rahner, S.J. (Paulist, 1967, 181 pp., $4.50), and With Good Reason, by Chester A. Pennington (Abingdon, 1967, 157 pp., $2.75), are reviewed by Frank Sargent, minister of counseling, Calvary Presbyterian Church, and assistant director, The Counseling Center, Willow Grove, Pennsylvania.

The question of belief and unbelief is explored in these two works. Karl Rahner, S. J., a brilliant German scholar, has edited a series of essays that attempt “to approach the problem of atheism spiritually and pastorally.” And Chester A. Pennington, minister of Hennepin Avenue Methodist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, presents his own “honest and searching quest for a personal God.”

The essays in The Pastoral Approach to Atheism vary in quality and in relevance for Protestants. For those interested in the Roman Catholic position on the status of the atheist in the church, Rahner’s essay, “What Does Vatican II Teach About Atheism?,” and Möeller’s, “The Theology of Unbelief,” give good introductions. And Adler’s essay, “Basic Tendencies in Atheistic Propaganda Literature,” is an excellent bibliographical survey of the literature of atheism.

But for the pastor who is confronted with the atheist or the individual struggling with unbelief in any of its multiplicity of forms, the essays by Karl Lehmann (“Some Ideas from Pastoral Theology on the Proclamation of the Christian Message to Present-Day Unbelievers”) and Paul Matussek (“The Function of the Sermon with Regard to Repressed Unbelief in the Believer”) may be the most helpful.

Lehmann notes that all too often the theist and the atheist have no meaningful encounter; rather, their meeting “degenerates into shadow-boxing, in which neither partner has really ever properly seen the other.” The psychological threat posed by someone of a variant theological position is often met by a defensive reaction that prohibits an honest, open “listening and understanding.” Often this defensive reaction shows itself as a compulsive desire to convert the other person or to convince him of the “truth” of one’s own position.

Lehmann notes that a valuable antidote to this defensiveness is the admission that all Christians have some measure of “doubts and problems of unbelief,” and that the free acceptance of these is part of a healthy faith.

Matussek succinctly describes the person who has repressed “specific ideas” about God and the church and gives some excellent insights into unbelief in relation to preaching. He feels—and I agree—that often a preacher unwittingly encourages this repression by denying unbelief in himself and prohibiting it in his parishioners. However, if doubts and distresses are fully dealt with in sermons, a person can be released from his fear of losing God and can find a meaningful place in the church.

All in all this volume, though it suffers from the lack of a systematic treatment of several of the themes of unbelief, nevertheless contains many helpful insights that can contribute to a Protestant’s understanding of unbelief.

In With Good Reason, written on a popular level, Chester Pennington tries to give a rationale for belief. He tries to show that the Christian position is “reasonable.” After a general survey of our secular culture he attempts to update the teleological argument for the existence of God and also to point out that this ultimate reality must be personal. However, while such arguments may strengthen the faith of the believer, I feel that an approach of this sort will usually be meaningless to the unbeliever. Unbelief seems so often a matter of the emotions rather than of the intellect.

Pennington also argues that this ultimate personal reality discloses itself personally. While this is true, the author does not seem to give many helpful directions about how one appropriates this self-disclosure or what it is that prohibits appropriation of it.

There are several other weaknesses in this work—such as the inadequate Christology and the modalistic view of the trinity—that all in all tend to create more problems than the volume as a whole answers.

Paperbacks

Christianity, Communism, and Survival!, by David V. Benson (Regal Books, 1967, 202 pp., $.95). A clear exposition of Communist theory and plans that should remind us of the continuing threat posed by Marxist revolutionaries.

Sex and Sanity: A Christian View of Sexual Morality, by Stuart Barton Babbage (Westminster, 1967, 98 pp., $1.45). An Anglican clergyman stoutly defends Christian teachings on sex; a good antidote for those leaning toward contextualism in sexual affairs.

Christianiy and the Arts, by Donald Whittle (Fortress, 1966, 157 pp., $1.50). A Cambridge scholar discusses problems of “Christian” art with specific attention to painting, architecture, music, fiction, poetry, drama, and cinema.

Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, edited by D. B. Robertson (World, 1967, 309 pp., $2.45). Pithy essays selected from over three decades of writing by an influential theologian whose crowning glory is that he never bores.

The Church Parking Lot, by G. Curtis Jones (Fortress, 1967, 97 pp., $1.75). Not exactly a great theological treatise but well worth the money for churchmen responsible for purchasing and planning the place where dented fenders often arouse the lower nature!

Myth, Sacred History, and Philosophy: The Pre-Christian Religious Heritage of the West, by Cornelius Loew (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967, 284 pp., $2.95). A competent introduction to the religious and philosophical bases of ancient cultures: Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Israelite, and Greek. The life of Israel is shown to center in her sacred history, but supernatural historical events are soft-pedaled.

Darwin: Before and After, by Robert E. D. Clark (Moody, 1967, 192 pp., $.89). An evangelical surveys Darwinian thought, concludes that evidence for evolutionary changes within species is overwhelmingly strong but evidence for constructive, genetical evolution between species is negligible.

The Font and the Table, by Elmer J. F. Arndt (John Knox, 1967, 88 pp., $1.95), The Joy of Freedom: Eastern Worship and Modern Man, by Paul Verghese (John Knox, 1967, 91 pp., $1.95), and The Worship of the Reformed Church, by John M. Barkley (John Knox, 1967, 132 pp., $2.45). Three more scholarly treatises in the “Ecumenical Studies in Worship” series.

The Nature of Faith, by Gerhard Ebeling (Fortress, 1967, 191 pp., $2.25). The first paperback edition of the 1959 Tubingen lectures by a Bultmannian theologian who denies the historical veracity of the biblically attested salvation events and yet contends that faith arises from the preaching of the Church’s “contrived confessions” contained in Scripture. Erroneous critical judgments are treated as fact; intricate arguments are advanced that result in an essentially irrational basis for the Christian faith.

Your Life Together, by Elof G. Nelson (John Knox, 1967, 126 pp., $1.95). A skilled counselor offers sane, biblical advice on marriage: the choice of a mate, satisfying sex relations, maintaining communication, planning and managing the family.

The Christian in Business: Thoughts on Business and the Social Order, edited by Andrew J. Buehner (Lutheran Academy for Scholarship, 1966, 104 pp., $2). Papers and reactions from a conference on business ethics at Valparaiso University; has a good discussion by Dr. B. A. Rogge on whether economics can be Christian.

In his timely little book, God Hath Spoken, J. I. Packer has an introductory chapter called “The Lost Word.” He likens our day to the period of which Amos prophesied: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord GOD that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD” (8:11). He goes on to say that these words “show us the present state of much of Christendom.… Preaching is hazy; heads are muddled; hearts fret; doubts drain our strength; uncertainty paralyzes action.… Why is this?” Dr. Packer answers his own question by asserting that “for two generations our churches have suffered from a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.”

Only a little while ago one of the greatest preachers of our day bared his heart to a group of ministers when he said: “I am appalled by the lack of true expository preaching today.”

To my mind, expository preaching is the most inclusive and rewarding means of communicating divine truth. Experience has taught me that to go through the Bible in this fashion covers more ground in doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness than is covered in any other method of preaching.

Three things should determine the spirit and content of all preaching. In order of importance, there is first the minister’s ordination. The call to the ministry and “the ordination of the pierced hands” should serve as a constant and humbling reminder of one’s responsibility before God. In his Epistles to Timothy, the Apostle Paul solemnly reveals the true nature of God’s ordination to the ministry of the Gospel, and he concludes by saying: “I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; preach the word.… do the work of an evangelist” (2 Tim. 4:1, 2, 5). How I wish that fellow ministers all over our land who are leaving the pulpit today and giving attention to matters of secondary importance would seriously consider such words as these, lest they fail to fulfill their vows of ordination.

Next in importance to the ordination is the minister’s preparation. There is, of course, such a thing as physical preparation. To be at one’s best, both in the study and in the pulpit, one must carefully watch such matters as diet, sleep, and exercise. A workout at a local gymnasium or regular participation in some active sport will do much to keep the minister fit. Reading John Wesley’s Journal and observing the habits of his life have been of enormous value to me in this matter.

Beyond the physical, however, is the spiritual preparation. To fail here is to fail in every other area of the ministry. The preacher should see to it that his devotional life is safeguarded at all costs. God is far more interested in what he is than in what he does. During the daily “quiet time,” the soul is bared before the presence of the Holy One, and the minister seeks—through prayer, the reading of the Scriptures, and the filling of the Holy Spirit—to enter into a deeper fellowship with his Lord. To me, this daily appointment with God is the barometer of my spiritual life.

Then there is the practical preparation. I see this as a twofold requirement. First, there must be general preparation. A minister should read widely, for reading feeds the soul, stimulates the mind, and begets all sorts of ideas for sermon material. The second requirement is specific preparation. This has to do with the choice of the subject, the construction of the skeleton, the collation of the substance, and the composition of the sermon. To accomplish these aims, he must spend many hours in prayer, reading, and meditation. During this period God’s message unfolds and the sermon begins to take shape.

I try to make sure that the introduction is designed to arrest attention, clear prejudice, and place my subject in the right perspective. Then follows exposition, application, and peroration. Truth, when understood, demands a verdict; so to interpret rightly is to apply divine truth. My sermonic construction normally has three main headings with two or three subheadings. All these are carefully designed to represent the natural divisions of the text and to relate to the main theme or subject, so as to carry perfect sequence. When I feel I have my material sufficiently mastered, I dictate the entire sermon at one sitting. By this means I not only impress the message upon my own soul but also test the sermon for what I call “preachable material.” It is one thing to write an essay but quite another to proclaim a message!

All this preparation takes place early in the week. By Tuesday I usually have my subjects, outline, and appropriate readings ready for publication in our weekly bulletin. Wednesday is given over to preparation of my midweek Bible lecture. During the rest of the week I add the final touches to the sermons. Late Saturday and early Sunday I set aside to pray through each sermon until the Word truly becomes flesh; only then do I feel that I am ready for the pulpit. I always prefer to preach without notes; when preparation has been thorough and anointed by the Spirit, it is a liberating experience to stand up and deliver God’s message.

As in my reading, so in my preaching I seek to observe a balance in the content of truth. For instance, some time ago I delivered a series of sermons on the Ten Commandments. I followed this with expositions of God’s love. When I have been in the Old Testament for some time, I balance this with a season in the New Testament. In my present church, Sunday morning is regarded as worship hour with an emphasis on the devotional. In the evening, the accent is on witness and the evangelistic approach. Wednesday evening is given to a teaching ministry. While I prefer to maintain an announced series on each of these occasions, I do interrupt the sequence to preach appropriate sermons at Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, and other significant days of the year.

My concluding word is on the minister’s declaration. Ordination and preparation mean very little if there is failure to communicate. For this reason great attention should be given to such matters as voice production and projection, good diction, and pleasing gestures.

Along with this must be the preacher’s set purpose in declaring the truth of God. He must see to it that each sermon is designed to satisfy the mind, stir the heart, and strengthen the will to respond to the claims of God in Jesus Christ. All preaching should be the declaration of the grace of God to human need on the authority of Holy Scripture with a view to claiming a verdict.

Finally, let it be said that the power to declare truth is entirely dependent upon the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Only he can bring about the combination of truth, clarity, and passion that makes a sermon live. In a day when the lamp of witness bums low, it is my prayer that God will raise up his Samuels to appreciate and communicate the only cure for personal, social, and national ills by preaching the Word of God.—The Rev. Dr. STEPHEN F. OLFORD, pastor, Calvary Baptist Church, New York City.