Leslie R. Keylock
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“The greatest theological event in the Western Hemisphere in our times.” Thus the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C. S. C., president of the University of Notre Dame, acclaimed the International Conference on the Theological Issues of Vatican II, held on the South Bend, Indiana, campus March 20–26.
There leading Catholic theologians who had worked on the constitutions, decrees, and declarations of the recently concluded Second Vatican Council met with 350 foremost Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish theologians to study the meaning of the council’s final statements. Simultaneous translation of major addresses into French and German (by United Nations translators) was provided for European scholars.
The tone of the conference was that of the “open door” Catholicism that emerged triumphant (but not triumphalistic) at the council.
The council’s most important document was Lumen Gentium, the Constitution on the Church, and the conference used nearly two days and several of the best theologians to discuss its eight chapters.
Canon Charles Moeller, recently appointed undersecretary of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Office), said council fathers had refused to identify the institutional Catholic Church with the Mystical Body of Christ. Two words repeatedly described as the most important in the whole document define the Church as a society that “subsists in” rather than “is” the Roman Catholic Church. This subtlety makes possible the full-fledged entry of Catholicism into the mainstream of the ecumenical movement, an entry that was clearly evident at Notre Dame.
Catholic Boom, Protestant Spasm
While Vatican II produces a “theological boom” for Roman Catholics, Protestantism enters a theological slump, in the view of Dr. Albert C. Outler, a Methodist leader at the Notre Dame theological conference.
In the “aftermath of a time of titans,” he said, Protestants have the “death of God hullabaloo,” which is “a noisy spasm of theological colic.” Outler also suggested Protestants have reached the end of sola scriptura as their authority. The Church, he said, has become the matrix of truth as well as redemption.
Marked proof of the tremendous variety within Catholicism today emerged in discussion of the people of God and the hierarchical structures of the Church. The well-known French Dominican Yves Congar stressed the recovery of a more dynamic view of the Church as the elect people of God and gradual elimination of a view with juridical overtones. In contrast, Bishop Carlo Colombo of Italy provoked widespread reaction with his somewhat wooden, traditional exposition of the hierarchical offices of priest, bishop, and pope as relatively independent from the people of God.
Youthful Lutheran George A. Lindbeck, a Yale professor, criticized “irresponsible use of Scripture” in treatment of episcopacy and primacy and of the Virgin Mary. He said there were better Catholic ways of discussing many Vatican Council topics.
Among the most moving and “Protestant” papers were one on the laity by Congar and one on holiness in the Church by Bernard Häring. German Redemptorist who is a visiting professor of theology at Brown University. Vatican II has been called the council of the laity because it clearly emphasized that the laity as the people of God is, above all, the Church. “I am not saying this because I am speaking in the United States,” Congar said. “I am saying it because it is true.”
The open revolt against legalism is a dominant characteristic of the young American Catholic today. Häring said holiness stems from the Holy Spirit, who delivers men from a false legalism and allows a “dangerous” variety of charismatic gifts: a legalistic stress on ascetic self-perfection is less dangerous only because it is “close to the graveyard.” Several theologians protested that it is hard for laymen to appreciate such an emphasis on love, grace, and the Holy Spirit when they are regularly confronted with a whole battery of laws.
The conference frequently echoed the clash between traditional Greek philosophical categories and a revival of biblical categories, as in the debate over static dogmatic absolutes and the relativism of history and sociology, and over the opposition of an ascetic otherworldliness to a “passionate devotion to this world.” Secularization was welcomed as a great opportunity for Christianity rather than a threat. The Syllabus of Errors mentality of Pius IX is clearly a thing of the past.
On revelation, the Abbot of Downside, Christopher Butler, said it is a combination of word and deed. Similarly, Passionist Father Barnabas Ahern said that “the I-and-Thou dialogue of living faith … means more than merely intellectual assent to doctrinal truth.” Insisting on the “truly historical value of the saving realities of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection,” he also said “the history of Jesus, like salvation history in the Old Testament, differs from history in the modern sense of the word.”
He described biblical faith as “the people of God responding to his voice with the self-committal of living faith,” and he proposed “soteriological inerrancy” to avoid defining biblical inerrancy in a merely negative way.
Dr. Paul Minear of Yale made a deep impression by pleading for a concept of divine revelation and inerrancy that stressed more “the life-giving act of God” than the “objectified concept.” Minear’s “Protestant view” of the revelation schema referred to the “intricate complex of problems” centering in what he called the “quadrilateral” of revelation, Scripture, tradition, and the magisterium.
Minear criticized Vatican II for encouraging “an accent on the words rather than the life-giving fellowship with God on the ‘deposit’ of Jesus’ teaching rather than the living presence of the Crucified Lord.” His questions focused on what one listener called the danger of “creedless spirituality.” Minear replied he would reject both the Scylla of non-verbal spirituality and the Charybdis of highly verbal dogmatics, but his suggestion that “faith conveys its own certitude and is not based on a prior certainty” seemed not to eliminate a non-verbal spirituality.
The man responsible for much of the work on Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, the Rev. Godfrey Diekmann of the Benedictine Major Seminary, Collegeville, Minnesota, discussed possibilities for joint celebration of the Eucharist with non-Catholic Christians. Although Diekmann maintains that the sacrament is a sign of unity achieved, several other Roman Catholics said that in the New Testament it is also a means of achieving united public declaration of a shared faith. Diekmann replied that central questions of the visibility of the Church and ecclesiastical orders also are crucially involved.
A full house greeted the Rev. John Courtney Murray, S. J., of Woodstock (Maryland) College, as he discussed the Declaration on Religious Freedom. Seeming tired and worn out from his years of work and suffering for this cause, Murray lamented that the church took a step forward that had long ago been taken by the rest of the civilized world. In a press conference, he said the next step will be freedom within the church, especially for priests whose vows of obedience have been abused by the hierarchy.
German Jesuit Karl Rahner, probably the most widely respected Roman theologian, spoke of the impact that “a pluralistic, scientific, technically-oriented society” will make on future Christian theology. Unless the Church wants to become a “historical relic of the sociological past,” Rahner said, it must formulate a theology of atheism, a Christology that embraces all humanity, and an ecclesiology that “aims at union and not at a more and more subtle justification of the separation of the churches.”
The conference concluded with an analysis of the impact of Vatican II on the theologies of various Christian traditions. The Rev. John Meyendorff of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary gave a speech that bristled with the hurt of nine centuries of separation, but was also able to conclude that “Vatican II has begun a new era.”
The Notre Dame conference brought together the greatest “constellation of theologians” America has ever seen. To confront the modern world, Roman Catholicism unquestionably has let in the fresh air of biblical thought. At the same time it feels the impact of historical relativism. If it does not do so already, Catholicism will soon contain almost as broad a spectrum of theological outlook as Protestantism. The result for the ecumenical movement will clearly be increasing cooperation and perhaps even union.
Conference Sidelights
Anglican Bishop John Robinson dropped in on Notre Dame’s big theological conclave last month. The controversial churchman had no official part on the program but made an unscheduled appearance and brought a brief greeting.
The conference itself got under way with the announcement that Notre Dame plans to establish a new graduate school of theology and a new institute for advanced religious studies.
The conference was held in the university’s newly opened Center for Continuing Education, built with a grant of $1,543,000 from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. Twenty top religious scholars were awarded honorary doctorates in a special ceremony.
Bishop Robinson Veers
In a panel confrontation with American theologians at Wabash College last month, Anglican Bishop John A. T. Robinson yawed and rolled on several facets of his “new theology.” Robinson indicated he has now abandoned the term “ground of being” as too subject to misunderstanding. He said he believes in supernaturalism after all (although he still proceeded to define this largely in terms of Tillich’s antisupernatural transcendence!).
On the panel with the controversial English bishop, author of the best-selling Honest to God, were Professor J. V. Langmead Casserly of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary; Professor David H. Kelsey of Yale Divinity School; Editor Carl F. H. Henry of CHRISTIANITY TODAY; and Professor Martin E. Marty of Chicago Divinity School, moderator.
“It would be helpful if you would define supernaturalism the way other people do,” Dr. Langmead Casserly counseled Robinson. In another appearance on the Crawfordsville, Indiana, campus, Robinson said he is not committed to Tillich’s ontology: “on the whole I’m veering away from it.”
Henry expressed “great relief” that Robinson now avoids the “ground of being” formulation, and asked whether in abandoning this notion the bishop “now returns to the supernatural, self-revealed God of the Bible, or has some other alternative to offer as the object of Christian worship.”
In a luncheon with Episcopal clergymen, Bishop Robinson said that while he considers the “death of God” phenomenon “a bubble that will soon burst,” he thinks “this is the kind of protest we should listen to.” But he said Altizer’s view is “heretical, and difficult to square with anything I find in the New Testament.”
The bishop was less ambivalent when he turned from theology to interpret ecumenical trends in Britain. Ecumenical conversations are in the last phase before intercommunion between Anglicans and Methodists, he reported.
The method of union is still debatable, Robinson said, and none will be perfect. Enthusiasm has now passed from “top ecumaniacs” to the level of the pew, hastened by the conviction that “if we don’t live together we shall hang separately.”
“There’s going to be a hell of a row from a lot of people if things get held up,” he said.
Robinson stressed the “remarkable change from a generation ago when two sides existed in the Church of England, one looking hopefully toward Roman Catholics and the other toward Protestants.” With the exception of Baptists, he said, there is “a real chance of further merger in Britain in the next generation and a new open front toward the Roman Catholics.”
Asked about Anglican “establishment” in England, he remarked that “establishment is a bastion we should not batter against, but sooner or later it will fall.” Robinson added that he does not want to see “disestablishment for its own sake” and “dreads the Church of England becoming a sect,” but thinks a strategic stance similar to that of the Church of Scotland would not be unwelcome.
The “new development,” Robinson reported, is that “for the first time the real opposition to union is being led by the low church rather than the high church,” with evangelicals in the ecumenical movement and conservatives in the free churches standing together against episcopacy.
“This won’t stop it going through,” he said, and “it won’t seriously split the Church of England, but it may leave divisions in its wake.”
Robinson was highly critical of the reading habits of his fellow British clergymen. “On the whole the clergy of the Church of England do not read, and have not read since they left theological college, and are dying on their feet.” He conceded, however, that “some real dialogue” is going on.
Robinson expressed real doubt that the “new Reformation” will be “born in song or whether we shall be a ‘hymnsinging generation’ at all. We are in a transient culture, and we shouldn’t expect new hymns to last for a century. It will be enough if they last for a few years.”
American theologians generally found Robinson disappointingly ambivalent and evasive of “long term” responses, and his continuing failure to state his criterion of religious truth raised the question whether, as Langmead Casserly put it, “the Bishop had done his homework.”
But Robinson replayed his now routine remarks: “So much of our God-language has become irrelevant to the deep chords of our spirit that we must strive to make these words become resonant again with depth of meaning.”
CARL F. H. HENRY
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In months ahead CHRISTIANITY TODAY will strengthen its editorial reserves by several significant staff additions.
Coming in August as editorial assistant is Dr. Robert L. Cleath, professor of English at California State Polytechnic College in San Luis Obispo. Dr. Cleath holds his Ph.D. in speech from the University of Washington in Seattle. He has also taught at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Westmont College, and Whitworth College. He holds the B.A. degree from Northwestern Schools and the M.A. from the University of Oregon. A lifelong Presbyterian, he was graduated from San Francisco Theological Seminary.
Two distinguished writers will spend most of the month of June with us, serving as editorial associates during part of our staff vacation period.
One is Dr. George S. Bird, chairman of the Graduate Division of the School of Journalism at Syracuse University. Dr. Bird is a specialist in communications theory and has written four books, numerous articles, and a score of monographs. A revised edition of his Modern Article Writing and Editing is soon to appear.
During the same period Dr. Leon Morris, author of several important theological works, will also join us. An Anglican churchman, he is the well-known principal of Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia.
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Rome And Freedom
Freedom Today: Theological Meditations, by Hans Küng (Sheed and Ward, 1966, 176 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by James Daane, assistant editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
One would have to do a lot of reading of both liberal and evangelical writings to find, in the present state of theology, as satisfying a book as this of Hans Küng. I dare say that Küng, a Roman Catholic professor of theology at the University of Tübingen, comes closer to clarifying the meaning of Christian freedom than most authors of either liberal or evangelical persuasion. He struggles with the concept of freedom as expressed in the biblical assertion that “for freedom did Christ set us free.”
Küng illustrates true Christian freedom in a delightful essay on Sir Thomas More. He shows that More, in his whole life—and death—demonstrated that a saint who is freed by Christ is, as a saint, free to live and work in the secular world. He then shows that the Church is the community of those who live in freedom, for it is for freedom that the Church has been set free by Christ. But if the Church is the community of the free, then its theology must also be a theology of freedom, and a theology of freedom can only arise from and be carried forward by theologians who are free to develop such a theology.
The chapter entitled “Freedom of Theology” is one of the finest in a very fine book. In it Küng suggests that the churches of the Reformation—Calvinist, Lutheran, and Free—which often assert that only they hold to ecclesia semper reformanda, do in fact often act as if the Reformation of the Church happened once and for all time. They also sometimes insist that the Roman Catholic Church does not change, but this, asserts Küng, is simply contrary to history and to contemporary fact. “Which theology is going in the long run to be representative of the Church?” Küng answers, “Not the one that claims to be specially modern. Nor the one that claims to be specially traditional. But the one that is backed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ itself … that theoiogia, in fact, which speaks of God only insofar as it hears his Word and responds to his Word, orientated to it and measured by it.”
In this chapter Küng says many interesting things. With one eye on some dead-weight conservatives in his own church, and the other on some Protestants who join them and say that the Roman Catholic Church does not change (at least, not for the better) and who take tactical refuge in the contention that any theological movement within the Catholic Church occurs only on the periphery—with his eyes on these two segments, Küng asserts that the current renewal and reform in his church is proof that both are wrong. In this chapter he also suggests that a better word than “infallible”—as it relates to the church and the pope—may be found, one that will express “at once the strictly binding character and the profoundly fragmentary character of the Church’s formulations of the Faith.… There is a vast work to be done here by Catholic and Protestant theology.”
Küng has studied Karl Barth. How much has he been influenced by Barth? Who can tell with any exactitude? In any event, in a significant chapter on “The Freedom of Religions,” in which he makes extended appeal to the Bible, Küng discusses Christian universalism. Here one is reminded both of Barth and, more significantly, of many often ignored elements of biblical teaching. Because of what God has done for the whole world in Christ, the freedom wrought by Christ on behalf of the whole world extends also to the non-Christian religions and their adherents. Küng denies that there is no salvation, and no grace of God, outside the Church. The whole question of the truth and validity of the world’s religions must be raised, he says, not from the perspective of the Church, but from the perspective of what God has done for the world of men—though they may not know it—in Christ.
Küng advocates no cheap universalism; but he recognizes a dimension of the freedom of the work and grace of God in Christ that is not bound by the historical limitations of the reality and ministrations of the Church. The Church, as the community of those set free by Christ for service to the world, does not constitute the boundaries of the freedom of God in Christ for the world. There is a kind of cheap universalism that both Küng and Protestant evangelicals necessarily disclaim; yet it will scarcely be overcome by a disclaimer that derives its force from a reduction of the objective work of God in Christ that makes its efficacy ultimately dependent, in Arminian fashion, on subjective individual response.
This book and its author demonstrate the new wind of freedom that is blowing through Roman Catholicism; the free spirit in which Küng writes keeps him from being either a belligerent or a sniveling apologist for his faith. The book and its author also demonstrate that the Church is a community of free men, called to a free pursuit of a theology of freedom—one in which Roman Catholics and Protestants have some common problems and tasks.
Neither superficial nor moralistic, this is theological writing that is devotional, and yet is theology indeed.
JAMES DAANE
Notoriously Difficult
The Anglican Hymn-Book (Church Society, 1965, 8s. 6d. [words only]), is reviewed by J. M. R. Drummond, music master at Christ’s Hospital, Horsham, Sussex, England.
This book is described in the preface as the first “completely new hymn-book” for use in the Church of England to have appeared for some years. It is, therefore, a special attempt to produce a hymn-book entirely modern in both conception and design. This does not mean that traditional material is excluded—indeed, it forms the foundation of the book. It has, however, enabled the compilers to draw freely from varied sources, and several good hymns are included as a result, notably some attractive folksong melodies and carols and some lesser-known hymns by famous writers like John Newton and Isaac Watts. There are also several new hymns by present-day composers, as well as numerous arrangements of and descants to old ones. Despite some excellent contributions, I found these the least satisfactory aspect of the book, with the ghost of Victorian hymnody all too often lurking in the background.
Many of the new tunes achieve only an appearance of modernity by the inclusion of some ill-chosen discords and angularities in the part-writing, and several of the descants and arrangements resort to archaisms like the flattened seventh (see R. Sinton’s descant to hymn 160), which sounds a bit self-conscious when fitted to traditional tunes.
There is a wide selection of the more familiar hymns. The words of the 663
hymns are generally good, and care has been taken to avoid ecclesiastical fulsomeness: the last verse of “Alleluia, sing to Jesus” has been replaced by a repeat of the first verse, presumably for doctrinal reasons. Evangelical clichés have not been so rigorously excluded, however, and the less inspired efforts of such writers as Frances Ridley Havergal have occasionally crept in.
Some fine Victorian hymns have been included, but attempts to improve some of them harmonically are less welcome. The original version of Dykes’s “Dies Dominica” may appear unadventurous, but its modulations lose much of their directness in Sheldon’s more wordy version. It is also regrettable that we cannot have the authentic version of Gibbons’s wonderful Song 13, and something else instead of “Innsbruck New,” which is an affront to the dignity of “Innsbruck Old”! However, we are given several fine examples of chorale harmonizations by Bach, which should please discriminating choir masters! The only serious omission is in plainsong melodies (where is “Jesu, dulcis memoria”?).
The final section of the book contains a selection of choral amens and numerous indexes, including a list of Scripture references and a particularly valuable metrical index that gives the first line of each tune as well as its name. For those who want to know whether “Old Commons” would fit the same words as “Oswald’s Tree,” this will save a lot of time and trouble.
This book merits serious consideration by all those in search of a new hymn-book, and should amply meet the needs of most congregations. Over and above the traditional material, there is much that will provide new scope for adventurous choirs and not too conservative congregations. Occasionally, the magic word “modern” has subverted contemporary composers and arrangers
into rather self-conscious and fruitless intricacies of harmony and rhythm that will, I fear, render their work too complicated for congregational use. But writing music for church is a notoriously difficult task, and this book certainly contains some new successes in this field as well as a great deal that has already established its right to a place in the Anglican hymn-book.
J. M. R. DRUMMOND
It’S Been A Long, Long Time
Amazing Grace, by Robert Drake (Chilton Books, 1965, 156 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Roderick Jellema, assistant professor of English, University of Maryland, College Park.
Anyone looking for a really good piece of fiction among the thousands of titles streaming from the presses gets to feel like a boy at a muddy rapids looking for a trout among rushing schools of spawning bullheads. It is too much for the eyes. If the thing he is looking for is surprisingly there, he is almost certain to miss it. Unlike the boy, however, the reader can come back, prompted by the reports of other readers, and still find what he sought.
1965 produced such a book: Robert Drake’s Amazing Grace. Those of us who missed it ought to go back. It is still available. And it is the best piece of fiction to come out of evangelical vision, not just in 1965, but in a long, long time.
Talking about “religious literature” is dangerous; it is like talking about “political literature” or “therapeutic literature.” That noun literature bristles with anger at the encroachment of any adjective that would modify it. To modify, after all, is to alter, to limit. A modified literature is less than literature as surely as the social gospel is less than the Gospel or a Salvationist church is less than the Church.
Drake’s book is not “religious literature” in that popular and limiting sense. Still, it is religiously oriented, religious in spirit and in its concerns. And it is literature. It is not contrived to be in the service of something else. It is written naturally and unself-consciously out of a sensibility that is essentially Christian. In our secular society, with religion pushed off into a separate compartment, such poise is rare.
As a young professor of English (Tennessee) and a committed Christian, Drake knows the problem of harmonizing the literary and the religious for a world which holds them apart. He is careful not to violate either for the sake of the other.
Amazing Grace does not capture its harmony with formula or calculation. The book’s most impressive device is its honest simplicity. With unabashed warmth and nostalgia, Drake recreates the scenes and thoughts of a boy growing up in a close Methodist county in western Tennessee. The structure is casual. The eighteen sections (tales and sketches—not quite short stories and not quite novel-chapters) can be read independently. But they do at the same time fuse into a cumulative and subtle unity that increases the simple force of the book.
Within this simple format, Drake focuses on the boy’s concern with the meanings of things from within his simple, evangelical outlook. Woodville, Tennessee, loses its fundamentalist oddity because Drake can transform it into something downright normal. Unity is achieved by the dramatic repetition, at different stages of the boy’s growth, of words from plain old Methodist hymns. It is achieved more subtly by the tones of the boy’s voice as he tries to live with the words. He sounds a little like Huck Finn and a little like Holden Caulfield because he is a boy-narrator in the same tradition. But his voice is his own. And his situation is unique: he is not in quest of a community or a father, but is sensitively alive to the fact that he has a community and a father—that he has, in fact, in some growing sense, two of each of them.
Everything in the book works by quiet tones, innocent viewpoint, understatement, deceptive simplicity. There are no moments of high-pitched despair or exultation, no outbursts of eloquence, no grand encounters. Drake’s tender sketches and muted tones create their own kind of power.
Amazing Grace is too good to talk about in the abstract. It is finally the boy who must promote the book. Here he is, for example, writing about the steel engravings that illustrate a fierce and loveless Bible story book:
Whoever made the pictures seemed to be real fond of showing angels coming down to straighten people out and make them mind, like the one that was leading Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden.… You could tell how he felt about it all by the way he looked.… He just looked like he was gwine where he gwine, as my nurse Louella used to say.
And as for the author of the same book,
Somehow I felt like she wouldn’t ever have suffered anybody to come unto her, unless it had been her duty, and then she would have looked just like that angel with Adam and Eve.
Such tones are an excellent vehicle for Drake’s theme: the spiritual growth of a boy through and beyond his quandary about “those hymns where you had to low-rate yourself and say you were a worm” to a ripened spiritual awareness of the grace of God, “always ready to reach out for you and bring you finally to Himself, not for any reason, but simply because it was His good pleasure.”
This is a rare little book: genuinely human, warm and simple, almost brilliant, unself-consciously Christian.
RODERICK JELLEMA
All In One
Exploring Evangelism, by Mendell Taylor (Beacon Hill, 1964, 620 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Kenneth L. Chafin, professor of evangelism. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky.
Although this book is not a major work in evangelism, it has a number of commendable aspects. First, it is the product of a denomination—the Church of the Nazarene—that believes in evangelism and has created a denominational structure to aid and encourage the churches in the work of evangelism.
Secondly, the book bases its understanding of the nature of evangelism on the biblical revelation concerning the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ and the need for a response of faith.
Thirdly, it brings together an amazing amount of helpful factual material on the history of evangelism. True to his purpose of tracing evangelism through the centuries, the author begins at A.D. 100 and concludes with twentieth-century America. Parts one and six are an introduction to evangelism and theology and to the principles of evangelism. The center four parts are history. Mendell Taylor is a distinguished professor of church history in his denomination, and the historical sections, especially the one on the Reformation, are the best parts of his book. He attempts to arrange the historical periods around evangelistic methods (Finney is treated under “cooperative evangelism,” Moody under “team evangelism,” and Graham under “evangelistic association evangelism”) but understandably seems uncomfortable with this rather wooden method of labeling men and movements.
Fourthly, the author is an evangelical. In a day when some are embarrassed at any discussion of evangelism that does not have a sociological orientation, it is good to be reminded that the Gospel still speaks to the deepest needs of persons.
The book has a number of problems. First, the great amount of material collected from many sources often lacks unity. One gets the impression that the author failed either to evaluate the material or to relate it.
Secondly, Taylor’s preoccupation with finding an unbroken chain of persons or movements that have had the evangelical understanding of evangelism causes him to include some rather questionable movements and to omit others that have been significant in the history of the Church.
Thirdly, very little fresh material is presented. This is an excellent reference and resource book, but the person who has even a small library in this field will find the only advantage of this work to be that it is all in one volume.
Fourthly, the book shows little awareness of the contemporary crisis in evangelism. Taylor did not intend the book to be merely an academic history of evangelism. He gives his objective as: “May the Lord of the harvest make each reader a fruitful reaper in a world where the fields are ripe.” The book would have been strengthened immeasurably had he written with the awareness that the evangelical understanding of evangelism in our day has many obstacles to hurdle, both inside and outside the Church.
In spite of these shortcomings, however, anyone who buys this book will find himself going to it for information again and again.
KENNETH L. CHAFIN
Weighty Book
The Church’s Educational Ministry: A Curriculum Plan, by the Cooperative Curriculum Project, Ray L. Henthorne, chairman (Bethany, 1965, 880 pp., $18.75), is reviewed by Frank E. Gaebelein, co-editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
This massive volume weighing 3½ pounds is a result of years of study on the part of the Cooperative Curriculum Project, an interdenominational effort in which the following groups participated: Advent Christian Church, African Methodist Episcopal Church, American Baptist Convention, Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ), Church of the Brethren, Church of God, Church of the Nazarene, Cumberland Presbyterian Church, The Evangelical United Brethren Church, Mennonite Church, The Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church in Canada, Presbyterian Church in the U. S., The Protestant Episcopal Church, Southern Baptist Convention, United Church of Canada, and the National Council of Churches. The administrative committee was headed by the Rev. Ray L. Henthorne of the Disciples of Christ and contained members from the participating groups. A total of 125 persons were engaged during the four years of the project.
This is clearly a resource book, not an outline of any particular course of study, and it should be so judged. It applies itself to principles and seeks unifying factors in planning programs of Christian education in church schools. What the committee has produced after long study is a tool that should help and interest many Christian educators.
The broad spread of theological conviction represented in the cooperating groups is necessarily reflected in the volume. In certain disputed areas of theology and scholarship, the book is neutral or silent. Some may find it at various points lacking in doctrinal explicitness. On the other hand, its avoidance of dogmatism allows room for the expression of theological distinctives by the particular groups that will use it as a help in developing their own programs of Christian education. Therefore, one should not seek in this volume strong denominational distinctives. It makes little use of technical theological and educational terminology and is thus well within the layman’s comprehension.
As a source for curriculum planners at various levels in the churches, the work represents a worthy effort to present principles of Christian education.
The book is well printed and attractively bound. The price, while very high, probably reflects the restricted circulation of a volume of this kind.
FRANK E. GAEBELEIN
Toward Rationalism?
The Religion of Israel, by Henry Renckens, S. J. (Sheed and Ward, 1966, 370 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by J. Barton Payne, professor of Old Testament, Graduate School of Theology, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.
The book jacket of The Religion of Israel praises it for “insights of the biblical theologian.” The author himself demurs, because he prefers to emphasize Israel’s institutions and practices (p. 50). But the blurb is the one to believe. In Protestant circles at least, these historical phenomena are normally included within Old Testament theology; and Renckens reiterates his significant belief that Israel’s religion possesses “authenticity” (pp. 49, 305) as “revealed” and “unique” (pp. 10, 24, 53, and so on) and that the Old Testament is “standard or canonical” and represents what God said in the past (pp. vi. 49, 241). Such a stance is what the Catholic scholars De Vaux and Dulles sought a year ago to preserve for Old Testament theology, in opposition to the merely historically descriptive definition of Krister Stendahl, at the 100th meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (see The Bible in Modern Scholarship, ed. by J. Philip Hyatt, pp. 210–16). The Jesuit Renckens’s Religion of Israel appears to say more about normative revelation than does the liberal Protestant’s biblical theology.
But while Renckens’s study is “aimed at believers” as “an appeal to our faith” (pp. 3, 11), it also demonstrates the negative side of Rome’s modern sacrifices to harmonize profession and practice. Let me explain. Catholicism previously professed two bases of authority, tradition and Scripture, but in practice it tended to disregard the latter. Now we see a change, as lay Bible reading is advocated and Roman professionals are making serious contributions to biblical scholarship; witness this author’s penetrating sections on monotheism and the character of God (pp. 33, 127), the centrality of the covenant (pp. 67–71, 183–86), and the development of “church” within Israel (pp. 39, 223–26, 309–312)—disregarding careless Arabic and Hebrew (pp. 80, 84, 86, 87, 220, 248).
Yet this harmonizing has been achieved through a downgrading of theoretical profession as well as an upgrading of practice. Thus while evangelicals have rejoiced in Rome’s retreat from certain traditions, whether Latin liturgy or Mariolatry, we are given pause by its similar withdrawal from former professions of biblical commitment. John McKenzie. first Catholic scholar to be elected president of the Society of Biblical Literature, has advertised his biblical criticism, opposing “theologians who have tried to tell … others how to do their work” and concluding simply that “intellectual liberty … is limited by the truth as the scholar perceives it” (Myths and Realities, p. 10); this with a nihil obstat! Little wonder that Renckens feels free to disparage “improbable things” in Scripture, such as its view of life after death (pp. 12, 90), and to espouse JE, D, and P as separate strata of religion, each of which has read its own understandings back into Moses (pp. 44–46, 68). One wonders, however, whether, if “scholarly perception” is made the ultimate criterion. Altizer and Van Buren could not rate a nihil obstat too.
Rome’s ecumenical Bible study thus arises from its increasing abandonment of both tradition and Scripture in favor of this third rationalistic alternative, cf. liberal Judaism and Protestantism. But Rome is tardier. Renckens, for example, still combines sections of JE, D, and P into one chapter entitled “Patriarchs.” Evangelicals can therefore maintain commitment to Genesis, believe that the whole is true, and reap positive insights from Renckens’s “revealed” Religion of Israel.
J. BARTON PAYNE
715 Or 728?
The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (New, Revised Edition), by Edwin R. Thiele (Eerdmans, 1965, 232 pp., $6), is reviewed by Gleason L. Archer, professor and chairman, Old Testament division, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.
When this study of the chronology of the Divided Kingdom of Israel was first published in 1951 by this outstanding Seventh-Day Adventist scholar, it was almost immediately recognized to be the most adequate treatment of the subject yet produced. One proof of its wide acceptance is the frequency with which it is referred to by writers of varied persuasion, both liberal and conservative. Another is the fact that a second, revised edition has been published to meet the continuing demand of the public. The revision was so minor, incidentally, that the author himself makes no mention of it in his introduction. He says only, “No evidence has been forthcoming that has given me cause to change my views on any item of major importance.”
It is interesting to note that Dr. Thiele assumes a militantly defensive posture in this “Preface to the Second Edition.” Mentioning that both left-wing liberals and some right-wing conservatives have condemned portions of his work, he explains that they both represent “an a priori bias.” “The common factor in both these categories,” he says, is a prejudgment of the questions at issue. Rather than permitting truth to be determined by the results of objective investigation, precursory judgment is pronounced. Such, however, is not the attitude of true scholarship in its finest form, nor is it in accord with sound principles of religious faith and practice” (pp. xii, xiii). Perhaps this very severe judgment upon all and sundry critics of his work may indicate a hyper-defensiveness, stemming from the fact that his position is basically vulnerable. This reviewer, at any rate, must risk incurring the charge of bias, prejudgment, and lack of scholarship by venturing to raise some questions about some important details in what is otherwise a very fine and solid piece of work.
The most questionable portion of this book has to do with the chronology of King Hezekiah. Thiele holds to 715 as the date when his reign began, even though Second Kings 18:1, 2 affirms that his rule began in the third year of King Hoshea of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Thiele rightly dates Hoshea’s reign as beginning in 732/1, and this would point to 728 as the beginning of Hezekiah’s reign, a good thirteen years before 715. Again, Second Kings 18:9, 10 states that Shalmaneser of Assyria began his siege of Samaria in the fourth year of Hezekiah, and captured it in his sixth year. Since Samaria fell in 722 (as Thiele himself proves in chapter 7), this means that Hezekiah began in 728. But to this date Thiele objects that Second Kings 18:13 states that Sennacherib invaded Judah in the “fourteenth year” of Hezekiah’s reign; and since the Assyrian invasion is firmly datable in 701, this would point to 715 as the commencement of his rule. Unless we resort to the rather improbable explanation that the “fourteen” refers to the fourteenth year of Hezekiah’s second reign (i.e., the extra fifteen years granted him on the occasion of his near-fatal illness—Second Kings 20:6), we are left with a clear contradiction between this verse and the other passages cited above, which unmistakably point to 728.
Thiele’s solution to this contradiction is to conclude that the Hebrew historian committed an error. “He was a man who was deeply concerned about truth but who did not understand all the truth” (p. 140). In other words, we have here a demonstrable error in the original autograph of Holy Scripture; but if this is so, we are compelled to surrender belief in the inerrancy of Scripture, and are left with all the grave consequences ensuing from a partially erroneous Bible. Fortunately there is a much simpler solution, which the author does not even mention or discuss. That is to say, in the original spelling of the numerals fourteen and twenty-four in Hebrew, a scribal error in copying a single letter (substituting a he for a mem) would cause “twenty-four” to become “fourteen.” If we accept this textual emendation, there is no difficulty in reconciling this statement with the rest of the data in Second Kings. If the twenty-fourth year (according to the emended reading just suggested) is reckoned from 725, the year of the death of his father Ahaz (with whom he was co-regent for three years—cf. Second Chronicles 27:1, 8), the result is 701 B.C., the date of Sennacherib’s invasion.
To support the 715 commencement of Hezekiah’s reign, Thiele has to assume other errors in connection with the reign of Hezekiah’s father, Ahaz. Thus, he rejects the statement of Second Kings 17:1 that Hoshea of Samaria began his rule in the twelfth year of Ahaz (p. 120), since this would involve a twelve-year co-regency with his father Jotham. But actually, if Hoshea’s reign began in 732, and this year was both the twelfth year of Ahaz (2 Kings 17:1) and the twentieth year of Jotham (2 Kings 15:30), the co-regency would amount to only seven or eight years, for Jotham ceased ruling in 736/5, and apparently lived on in retirement until 732. If he began as co-regent with his father, Uzziah, in 751 (as Thiele maintains), then Jotham’s sixteen years (2 Kings 17:1) of rule ran from 751 to 736/5, and Ahaz began as co-regent with Jotham in 743. Since Ahaz reigned for sixteen years, this means that he ended his active career in 728/7, although he lived on for three more years (cf. 2 Kings 18:1), until 725. By this interpretation all the data can be harmonized, and there is no need to assume that any of the statements made in Second Kings are erroneous, apart from the one point (2 Kings 18:13), that seems to require the textual emendation suggested above (and this is not chargeable, of course, to the original manuscript itself).
On the credit side, it should be pointed out that Thiele’s solution of the puzzling data about Pekah is very convincing and in harmony with all the facts recorded: that Pekah had set up a rival dynasty in Gilead back in 752 (for he reigned twenty years [2 Kings 15:27]) and spent his earlier years there (2 Kings 15:25) but did not succeed in overthrowing Menahem (752–742) or his successor Pekahiah, who ruled in Samaria, until 740/39. Hence it is accurate for Second Kings 15:27 to state that Pekah began his rule (i.e., as sole ruler of all Israel) in the fifty-second year of Uzziah, i.e. 739 B.C. It was only natural for Pekah to maintain that he had always been the only legitimate king of Israel, even from 752, once he had established himself as supreme over the whole realm. As for the date of the fall of Samaria, and the claim of King Sargon to have accomplished this feat in the first year of his reign, Thiele shows quite compellingly that the destruction of Samaria must have occurred in 722 B.C., and that Shalmaneser V deserved all the credit for this victory. It may well have been, however (although Dr. Thiele does not mention this possibility), that Sargon was the commanding general under Shalmaneser’s authority at the three-year siege of Samaria, and thus may have felt justified in claiming the glory for the achievement.
One final comment is in order concerning Thiele’s argument that Hezekiah’s Great Passover, to which worshipers came from such northern tribes as Asher, Manasseh, Ephraim, and Issachar (2 Chron. 30:11, 18), could scarcely have been held during the reign of Hoshea (say, in 725), who had sternly forbidden any such pilgrimage from his territories, especially when the returnees from Jerusalem are said to have destroyed the images and altars of the Northern Kingdom on their way home (2 Chron. 31:1). Thiele therefore prefers to date this event 715/4, after the fall of Samaria, when there was no longer any ruler over the Ten Tribes (p. 151). Yet he fails to mention the far greater difficulty of supposing that there were any significant number of North Israelite inhabitants left in the land after their extermination and exile by the Assyrian power in 722. It seems to this reviewer far more likely that the last-minute panic that must have gripped the hearts of the North Israelites as they saw the inexorable vise of Assyria closing in upon them may have rendered them especially open to Hezekiah’s invitation to worship at Jerusalem and to overthrow the idols and false sanctuaries in which they had vainly put their trust. Conditions in Hoshea’s dominions may have been so unsettled and confused that he was not able to maintain perfect control over all that his subjects cared to do along this line. More powerful evidence than this is necessary to demonstrate the fallibility of the scriptural record.
GLEASON L. ARCHER
Book Briefs
The Magnificent Defeat, by Frederick Beuchner (Seabury, 1966, 144 pp., $3.50). Devotional essays, by a man who can both think and write, on Christian surrender, the triumph of love, and the mystery and miracle of grace.
Documents of Lutheran Unity in America, by Richard C. Wolf (Fortress, 1966, 672 pp., $2.50). Documents that show the pursuit of unity among Lutheran churches in America between 1730 and 1965.
The Philosophy of Religion, by Thomas McPherson (Van Nostrand, 1965, 207 pp., $5.95). Essays for the scholar only.
Protestantism in America: A Narrative History (Revised Edition), by Jerald C. Brauer (Westminster, 1965, 320 pp., $3.95).
Glauben unci Verstehen, Vierter Band, by Rudolf Bultmann (Mohr [Allemagne, Germany], 1965, 198 pp., DM 18). Essays in which Bultmann continues to prove his “decision philosophy,” which is that human existence is historical existence, the key of which is “decision.”
Shaw and Christianity, by Anthony S. Abbott (Seabury, 1965, 228 pp., $4.95). Excessive in its admiration for Shaw’s oldhat liberalism, this book unintentionally makes Bultmann a dull late Victorian. Shaw is a sharp one. Excellent grist for the apologists’s mill.
The Lure of the Horizon: Poems of Aspiration and Vision, by Marion Gerard Gosselink (W. A. Wilde. 1965, 119 pp., $4.50). Conventional verse about “aspiration and vision,” somewhat stiff and mannered but mildly pleasant.
Henry VIII and the Lutherans: A Study in Anglo-Lutheran Relations from 1521 to 1547, by Neelak Serawlook Tjernagel (Concordia, 1965, 236 pp., $6.95).
Al-Anon Faces Alcoholism (Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters Inc., 1965, 285 pp., $4.50). A series of essays dealing with the fact that alcoholism is the problem not only of the alcoholic but also of those who live with him.
Religion and Politics in Burma, by Donald Eugene Smith (Princeton University, 1965, 350 pp., $7.50).
Modern Varieties of Judaism, by Joseph L. Blau (Columbia University, 1966, 217 pp., $6). Historical essays on Judaism in the last two centuries.
Paperbacks
Neo-Orthodoxy: An Evangelical Evaluation of Barthianism, by Charles Caldwell Ryrie (Moody, 1966, 64 pp., $.95). A flutterby treatment that quickly comes to the conclusion that “neo-orthodoxy is a theological hoax.” Recommended to all the theological despisers of Barth.
History of Church Music, by David P. Appleby (Moody, 1965, 192 pp., $1.95). Even more than the title suggests.
Two Confessions: The Westminster Confession of Faith and the Proposed Confession of 1967 Compared and Contrasted, by J. Marcellus Kik, Mariano Di Gangi, and J. Clyde Henry (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1966, 56 pp., $.50).
American Quakers Today, edited by Edwin B. Bronner (Friends World Committee, 1966, 111 pp., $1). A presentation of the uniting and divisive elements of the five groups of Friends.
A Hungry World, by Paul Simon (Concordia, 1966, 100 pp., $1). The author, an Illinois state senator, speaks as a Christian about the poor and hungry.
Formative Ideas in American Education: From the Colonial Period to the Present, by V. T. Thayer (Dodd, Mead, 1965, 394 pp., $3.95).
Wildfire: Church Growth in Korea, by Roy E. Shearer (Eerdmans, 1966, 242 pp., $2.95).
Kierkegaard’s Pilgrimage of Man: The Road of Self-Positing and Self-Abdication, by Harvey Albert Smit (Eerdmans, 1965, 193 pp., $3). An extensive analysis of Kierkegaard’s thought that is a worthy addition to the Kierkegaardian literature.
Not By Might: The Story of Whitworth College, 1890–1965, by Alfred O. Gray (Whitworth College, 1965, 279 pp., $3.50).
Contemporary Currents of French Theological Thought, by Georges Crespy (Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, 1965, 36 pp., free). An informative survey of recent French religious literature, and of some of its central concerns.
Crisis for Baptism, edited by Basil S. Moss (Morehouse-Barlow, also SCM Press, 1965, 189 pp., $3). Essays on baptism by men of diverse religious traditions.
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One can’t play the bishop’s tune on Gabriel’s horn
Bishop John A. T. Robinson has been visiting American campuses trying, with limited success, to tell the academic community precisely what he disowns in biblical Christianity, and precisely what he would put in its place. The longer the dialogue continues, the more it appears that precision is not one of the bishop’s gifts. Those who take hold of his position are reminded of the man who, according to Stephen Leacock, mounted his horse and rode off in all directions. In his latest appearances, the bishop has said that he is not bound to Tillich’s ontology (see News, p. 43) and that he is a supernaturalist after all, and yet he continues to spell out his view in essentially non-supernaturalistic Tillichean terms.
An Indiana clergyman put the issue neatly when he asked Robinson, who objects to a God “up there” and “out there” as mythological and prescientific, whether the man in the pew can be expected to have any less difficulty with the philosophical niceties of the theology of the immanent ground of being than with a theology of celestial navigation and divine postal zones. We can hardly think of a more comprehensible view of God than the biblical representation, nor one subject to so much misunderstanding—as Bishop Robinson has already conceded regarding the ground of being—as the ambiguous alternative he proposes in Honest to God.
We remain wholly unconvinced that Robinson’s new medium for communicating the Christian faith can achieve this objective as clearly and surely as the Scriptures do. We do not regard his view as a revised version of biblical theology in the modern idiom. If one prefers a modern house with biblical landscaping, that is his privilege; but he should not so readily assume that Moses and Jesus are eager to move into this theological suburbia. One cannot play the bishop’s tune on Gabriel’s horn.
We are troubled by Dr. Robinson’s oversensitivity to public opinion polls. What the world thinks is always of Christian concern and is a proper stimulus to evangelistic passion and apologetic engagement; but it ought not to dictate the content of theology. If the prophets and apostles had bent to these winds, multitudes in the past would not have turned from polytheism or turned to Christ. In his letter to the Romans, Paul tells us that sinful man has a natural antagonism to the Gospel of the Living God; all the more imperative it is, therefore, that the Christian vanguard proclaim the supernatural God who has revealed himself, the living God supremely manifested in Jesus Christ. If the bishop’s alternative is especially acceptable to modern man (not the Communist man, certainly; nor the Asian or African man either; but the Western secular man, presumably)—and in our generation this sales pitch has already been made for the widely varying formulas of Barth and Bultmann and death-of-God deviants—we must not forget that any view mainly distinguished by attachment to, rather than transcendence of, the mentality of a particular period is a sure candidate for early obsolescence. Theologians indeed ought to not add incredulity to revealed religion; but neither ought they to diminish the truth of God addessed to all ages, our own included.
As a result of his statistical orientation of theology, Bishop Robinson’s views reflect an ambiguous approach to the nature of truth. We can well share his stated positive concern, that of “removing that which removes God, at any rate for a lot of people.” But the merely functional reality of God is repeatedly stressed above and to the exclusion of his ontological reality. We have searched Bishop Robinson’s writings in vain for any sure indication of what genuine cognitive or conceptual knowledge of God man has or can have on the basis of God’s self-revelation. In the bishop’s view, do we have any universally valid knowledge of God, and revealed truths about God that bind men in all ages and places? In Honest to God one finds statements in which Bishop Robinson seems, with Tillich, to view all affirmations about God as symbolic rather than literal, and this sword is wielded with great vigor against the biblical revelation of God as supernatural, personal, and independent of the universe. But this sword is double-edged. If Bishop Robinson wields it, we shall require its use against any statement he himself makes about the Unconditioned, whose reality and immanence are no less a matter of faith than that of the supernatural, personal God of the Bible; we shall require its use even when he says “God is Love,” and when he speaks of the function of God no less than when he speaks against his existence. If our affirmations about God are not universally valid cognitive truths, if they are merely symbolic, we see no reason for taking Bishop Robinson literally whenever he speaks about God, and particularly not when he seems to want us to understand him literally.
In short, we should value a clear statement of the epistemological ground on which the bishop proposes that all of us base our affirmations about God. What reason controls his rejection of the reality of a supernatural, personal God, other than its unacceptability to modern unbelief? Over and above appeals to modern consensus, or apart from God’s intelligible self-disclosure and an authoritative Bible, which Bishop Robinson disallows, is he saying that sensory verification is the arbiter of all knowledge, or that modern science excludes the reality of the supernatural, or that experience is the final test of truth, or that whatever coincides with his emotive preferences is theologically admissible? Or just what?
In the Bible, God is self-revealed as literally the Living God, whose transcendence as the supreme personal Spirit means that, however closely related to the universe, he is free of all external limitations and distinct from man and the world, and in some ways even opposes his fallen creation. The biblical view contains no trace or taint of pantheism; none of the forces of nature or of man is assigned a divine function or power. But the notion of a non-supernatural deity, of a wholly immanent deity, has specially attracted speculative philosophers who doubt whether God made the universe. In the biblical understanding, it is an abuse of the name of God to refer this to the abstract idea of the Unconditioned, to the idea of our own limits; this postulation has no sure connection with the Living God who reveals himself personally and intelligibly. This mythological humanism or naturalism is a time-bound, twentieth-century speculation about God that substitutes systematic mythology for systematic theology, and postulation for revelation.
We are greatly relieved, therefore, that Bishop Robinson now avoids speaking of the “ground of being” because it too is subject to misunderstanding. But our question, then, is whether, in abandoning the notion of this ground of being, he now returns to the supernatural, personal, self-revealed God of the Bible or has some other alternative to offer as the object of Christian worship. Many of us think that, despite all talk about the Unconditioned, anti-supernatural theology trapped God in nature and put him on a leash, and that he has been so long coming of age—until the day of Tillich as the new Moses, Bonhoeffer perhaps as John the Baptist, and Bishop Robinson as the apostle to the Anglicans—that we are very eager to learn what the modern secular mind is right now demanding by way of theological substitution. Who are the theological troubadors now energetically blowing God’s trumpet?
Assuming that the bishop still rejects the supernatural personal God of the Bible, it will be well to recall the New Testament strategic situation. Stoic philosophy, which was in existence more than three centuries before the ministry of Jesus, denied that God is personal and supernatural (or independent of the universe). Now, Jesus in his prayers almost invariably addresses God as Father; in the Gospels the title is on his lips 170 times. Jesus’ life is centered in God as a supernatural personal reality; and we affirm that the person and work of Christ are the supreme revelation of God. Matthew 11:25 f. and Luke 10:21 f. indicate that Jesus’ knowledge of the Father was grounded in a special divine relationship transcending that of all other men. If the philosophy of the non-supernatural, impersonal unconditioned had been propounded to Jesus, would he have indebted himself to it, or would he have repudiated it as pagan idolatry? In brief, was Jesus mistaken about the nature of God, despite his unique relation and communication with him? And when the Apostle Paul encountered the Stoic philosophers, and on Mars Hill propounded a supernatural creator distinct from the world and man, ought Paul instead to have followed them to the Stoa (the colonnaded porch from which the Stoics taught in ancient Athens) and struck a theological compromise with them?
Clouded Judgment
There was a strange paradox in one of Dr. Eugene Carson Blake’s first major addresses in America after his election to leadership of the World Council of Churches. In the first James J. Reeb Memorial Lecture at Princeton Theological Seminary last month, Dr. Blake described the “militant Christian faith” and said “conservatives among us” are properly and legitimately worried about the drift from the historic Christian faith. Although he contended that these fears had more ground fifty years ago than today, which is debatable, he affirmed a theology that undergirds all Christians—Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic—including “a transcendent God, who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ.” But in a curious inconsistency, Blake, when he got to the topic of the day, said that James J. Reeb, a Unitarian, “was a martyr of the Church of Jesus Christ.”
The question whether Unitarian humanism has a place in the Church of Jesus Christ and in the ecumenical movement has been raised from time to time. At the local level, many councils of churches have admitted Unitarian churches into membership; this has led to the formation of evangelical councils of churches, since conscientious convictions kept some evangelicals from becoming part of ecclesiastical organizations that included Unitarians. Those who had been concerned about the theology of the World Council of Churches and who thought the Unitarian issue had been settled by its trinitarian doctrinal commitment were astonished at Blake’s remark.
James Reeb was martyred in Selma, Alabama, little more than a year ago. He died for a constitutional issue in which he believed. We honor him for the courageous expression of his deepest convictions. No one can justify or excuse his brutal murder, from which there are lessons still to be learned. But Blake’s address raises important questions that pertain, not to civil rights, but to the heart of present-day theological dialogue and to the posture of one of the leading ecumenical spokesmen.
Blake said that Reeb, who left the Presbyterian Church to become a Unitarian minister, entered a ministry “that at a critical point of Christian theology is at sharp variance from the system of theology taught here [Princeton Seminary].” The difference in theology between the Unitarians and the historic denominations is indeed “sharp”—so sharp that Unitarians are not members of the National or the World Council of Churches. The trinitarian standards of the WCC exclude them from membership. Yet Blake called Reeb “a martyr of the Church of Jesus Christ.” That he was a martyr no one will deny. That he was in the Church of Jesus Christ is another matter.
In his biography of Reeb, No Greater Love, Duncan Howlett examines his subject’s theological pilgrimage. He describes Reeb’s visit to a denominational official who told him: “Well, if you don’t believe in God, I don’t see how you can be a minister, and I think you had better get out” (p. 89). Reeb said, “I discovered my integrity was being undermined by the very confessional nature of the [Presbyterian] Church” (p. 98). And “I have clearly progressed in my views until I am much more of a humanist than a deist or theist” (p. 87). “He was,” says Howlett, “no longer troubled by the fact that he did not believe the doctrines set forth in the Westminster Confession” (p. 86). A Presbyterian minister friend told him: “Stay in the church. There are many who believe as you do. I myself am one. You are not expected to take the Confession literally. Few of us do. The winds of change are sweeping through the church today. Stay and help us change it. The church will be bogged down in its ancient theology if all who outgrow it abandon it” (p. 87). But Reeb chose the course of honesty by becoming a Unitarian.
The church’s answer to Reeb’s action was given by the Philadelphia Presbytery when in June, 1960, it “deposed him because he ‘had renounced the jurisdiction of the United Presbyterian Church and joined an heretical body’” (p. 131).
By placing James Reeb in the category of a “martyr of the Church of Jesus Christ,” Blake may have opened a Pandora’s box. By recognizing as within the Church one who unequivocally denied the Christian faith and who would not be admissible to any historic denomination holding to its confessional standards, including the United Presbyterian Church, Blake is at variance with action of a presbytery of his own church, of which he is still the stated clerk, and with the trinitarian formula of the World Council of Churches, of which he is shortly to become secretary general.
In recent years, the World Council has sought dialogue and fellowship with “conservative evangelicals” outside its membership. Again and again the “conservative evangelicals” have expressed their reservations about the doctrinal fidelity of the WCC. It was a cause for rejoicing when the WCC enlarged its doctrinal commitment with respect both to the Trinity and to the Scriptures. Now it is regrettable that the new secretary general has cast a shadow over the basic doctrinal commitment of the ecumenical movement.
Dr. Blake has let his admiration of Reeb’s devotion cloud his judgment. But let him speak for himself: “Yet this seminary … honors one of her sons by establishing this lectureship in his memory. Some would say that this is an embarrassment both to the seminary and to the Presbyterian Church. And so it is.”
A Bursting Bubble?
There are rumblings that the “death of God” camp is fragmenting, despite the fact that Thomas J. J. Altizer of Emory University and William Hamilton of Colgate Rochester Divinity School have collaborated on a new book, Radical Theology and the Death of God, scheduled for publication April 18 by Bobbs-Merrill. In it they contend that the new theology strives for both “a whole new way of theological understanding” and “a pastoral response hoping to give support to those who have chosen to live as Christian atheists.”
Some of the radical theologians have been seeking to isolate Altizer as a liability. Even the controversial Anglican Bishop John A. T. Robinson, who recently visited Hamilton, Harvey Cox, and other theological extremists, told Indiana Episcopalians last week that he considers Altizer’s notion that God died in A.D. 29—in its emphasis that God ceased to be transcendent and through death became immanent and secular—“heresy,” and that he had urged Hamilton to move away from close identification with Altizer.
Robinson predicted that the death-of-God theology is “a bubble that will soon burst. It is unstable; it does not have a future.”
At Temple University, Paul van Buren is reportedly already taking a somewhat more cautious line. He increasingly disowns the phrase “the death of God” and instead emphasizes that “the word of God has died; the God of Christian tradition is not subject to death.”
He May Also Kiss The Bride
The easement of Roman Catholic mixed marriages issued recently by Pope Paul will do much to resolve a great pastoral problem within the Roman Catholic Church. Few people realize how many Catholics involve themselves in mixed marriages. In 1964, according to the Official Catholic Directory, nearly one-fourth (24.9 per cent) of the marriages performed in the Catholic churches of twenty-seven archdioceses were mixed—40,000 out of 161,000. The recent declaration that those who engage in such marriages are no longer under threat of excommunication will ease a serious situation.
Pope Paul’s Matrimoni Sacramentum will do little, however, to ease Roman Catholic—Protestant ecclesiastical tensions. It allows the Protestant minister at the mixed wedding ceremony to be there, like the bridesmaid. After the marriage has been celebrated by the priest, the minister is permitted to make some appropriate remarks and join in common prayer. As long as the Roman church regards marriage as a sacrament and the priest as its only valid celebrant, and the Protestant clergyman is little more than a member of the wedding party with the right to make some remarks just before kissing time, the public image of “getting together” is little more than a facade.
Nor will the Pope’s new declaration do much to ease the conscience of the serious Protestant considering marriage with a Roman Catholic. He must still “openly and sincerely” promise to place no obstacle in the way of the Roman Catholic education of his future children. If he cannot do this in good conscience—and how can he?—the case must be referred to the Holy See.
Thus the Vatican has issued easements for the solutions of its own internal pastoral problems but has made no concession of any substance to non-Catholic Christians or non-Catholic churches.
Lift The Standards
The Tuesday morning quarterbacks are reviewing the recent Supreme Court decision that sent Ralph Ginzburg and Edward Mishkin, purveyors of pornography, to jail. News media have both cheered and jeered.
Having left its intentions unclear by its earlier Roth decision, the court apparently sought to provide some curbs. It did—even though nine justices, in three decisions, wrote fourteen opinions and decided against Ginzburg by a 5–4 vote.
The court has given the community a standard by which to take action against salesmen of filth. For this we should be grateful. It has ruled that the manner of peddling and advertising, and the intention of the seller, can be grounds for conviction. Although manner and intention cannot be defined without risks, cities and towns can move vigorously to clean up newsstands and bookstores.
Behind the divisions of the Supreme Court, and the acuteness and complexity of the judicial decisions, lies the fact of which Christians should be aware—a major cultural change has taken place in America and much lower moral standards prevail.
Ultimately the solution of the obscenity problem will not come from court decisions, for wherever there is liberty there will be license. It is license that tests liberty. However, just as freedom of speech does not include the right to cry “fire” in a crowded theater, neither does it include the right to poison men’s minds with unbridled obscenity. We need not change the test set forth in the 1957 Roth decision, whether “to the average person, applying contemporary standards, the dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest.” What we need to do is lift prevailing standards to higher levels that censure the anything-for-profit vultures and prevent decadent and immoral people from publishing their filth.
It has been done before. The Evangelical Awakening of the eighteenth century profoundly changed the moral and spiritual climate of England. Today also the Gospel accompanied by the Christian ethic, vigorously applied to a decadent society, can bring renewal.
Ideas
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Someone has suggested that those who do not believe in ghosts should visit Washington. Ghosts abound there—busy ghosts who write speeches for almost everyone whom the people send to the Capitol. It is further said that sometimes those who deliver the speeches not only do not write them but do not even read them before delivery. While this may be an exaggeration, many a speech does sound as if it had never been seen before.
History might have missed something if Patrick Henry had had a ghostwriter. In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln wrote his Gettysburg Address on two small sheets of paper. It is reported that Churchill labored hard over his speeches, even while alien planes dropped destruction. But these days, we hear, leaders are too busy to write their own speeches.
Pulpits also have their ghosts. A clergyman need not sweat over his Sunday sermon; ghostwritten messages are not hard to come by. True, much of this material in these sermons is pretty weak stuff theologically; and even when it is biblical, where is the power in warmed-over doctrine? (If the truth be told, by no means all preachers who profess evangelical doctrine resist the ghostwriters.)
Such human ghost writing evidently was not the kind Jesus had in mind when he ordered his disciples to go into all the world and preach. Those disciples were influenced by a Ghost; but he was not a scribe turning out stuff to suit a materialistic world. This Ghost is also called Holy, and he is not a professional speech-maker. He is “the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive” (John 14:17), who issues from the Father and bears witness to Christ (John 15:26), and who guides men into all truth, even showing them the future (John 16:13). He is the source of Scripture.
The man in the pulpit is not his own messenger but God’s. He has not been delegated the right to declare any message but the Lord’s. The whole idea of man’s redemption is God’s, not the preacher’s. Not only are ministers commanded to speak; they are also told what to speak and through what dynamic to speak it. They are to preach the Word through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Throughout the week people listen to words on radio and television, words put into the mouths of men and women by unseen scribes, the words of songs, dramas, comedy acts, commercials, news—earthy words of this world. On one day a week would it not be refreshing for them to attend God’s house and hear a different Word from another higher world?
This has been called the age of the atom. It is also the age of cynicism. We are being conditioned to unbelief. Many religious writers and speakers, evidently having surrendered their own faith, hammer at us with their unscriptural biases, slowly shattering hope. God is dead; the great birth was not really different from other births; the cross was not an atonement for sin; the resurrection of Christ did not happen; the Church should be a secular institution, or a political and social system; the Bible is largely myth.
Cynicism washes on the pulpits, and many are covered by its waves. Those pulpits that still sound the Word of God with conviction and power are islands in a noisy ocean of unbelief. A national newscast states that 75 per cent of the American people will steal, but nothing is said about those who steal the truth from congregations assembled in the house of the Lord.
The inspiring journal of the primitive Church known as the Acts of the Apostles affords us a look at believers, under the order of Christ, getting on with their mission to the world. Gamblers would have given odds that the apostles’ mission would fail. All publicity was against them. Their organization and administration were faulty. They had no political power, no social status, no financial rating. They were a handful of believers in an unbelieving world. The legalists of Israel, the intellectuals of Greece, the forces of Rome, were against them. Yet they not only survived; they prevailed. Their exploits still haunt history.
Their secret certainly was not that they had the material to please a sophisticated and secularistic audience. The learned chronicler who told their story noted that their enemies marveled at their being “men with no special knowledge and no special qualifications” (Acts 4:13, Barclay).
However, they had two things: the Word of God and the Holy Spirit. Again and again it is reported that they “took the Word of God” to the people. A divine dynamic backed their actions. They were never alone when they faced the world. Someone was with them as they went, fulfilling the Master’s pledge, “I will send him to you. When he comes, he will confute the world, and show where wrong and right and judgment lie” (John 16:7, 8, NEB).
No man who stands in the pulpit has a sermon good enough for any occasion—without divine help. He is not running for office, or making an after-dinner talk at a club. To him has been committed the awesome word of reconciliation; he has come to direct men out of the ways of death into eternal life. His listeners are weary of speeches, appeals, histrionics. Words in themselves are inadequate for the moment, especially when they are given with less passion than that of a street-corner huckster selling souvenirs.
Only one Word is fit for that time when a mortal faces other mortals in the temple of the Lord. “Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear ye the word of the Lord.… Thus saith the Lord of hosts …” (Jer. 7:2, 3). Only one influence will enable the speaker to move men Godward: not writings produced by men who themselves lack biblical faith, but the living Spirit who is God. He stands behind eternal truth. It is not worth a man’s time to attend church and hear anything less than this truth.
The Bible keeps insisting which message should issue from the sacred desk. “… he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully.… Is not my word like a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?” (Jer. 23:28, 29). “If they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them” (Isa. 8:20b). More than we need architecture, administrators, full treasuries, ecumenical dialogue, or facile sermon-makers, we need an outpouring of the Holy Ghost on pulpits that sound the Word of redemption.
The Apostle Paul explained what his ministry had been in Corinth: “My brothers, when I came to proclaim to you God’s secret purpose, I did not come equipped with any brilliance of speech or intellect.… It was my secret determination to concentrate entirely on Jesus Christ himself and the fact of his death on the cross. As a matter of fact, in myself I was feeling far from strong; I was nervous and rather shaky. What I said and preached had none of the attractiveness of the clever mind, but it was a demonstration of the power of the Spirit of God! Plainly God’s purpose was that your faith should rest not upon man’s cleverness but upon the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:1–5, Phillips). Paul and the other apostles possessed an indwelling Ghost who empowered their missionary thrust. They were Word-people, faith-charged and flame-touched; and the eagles of Caesar would flap in the dust before what they gave the world would fail.
In this fateful and tormented time, may the pulpit again communicate to mankind the mighty tidings of the incarnation, the cross, the resurrection, and the second advent of Christ. May it waken again with the ancient and authoritative message found in the First Epistle of Peter: “You are born anew of immortal, not of mortal seed, by the living, lasting word of God; for all flesh is like the grass, and all its glory like the flower of grass; grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of the Lord lasts forever—and that is the word of the gospel for you.”
L. Nelson Bell
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A favorite phrase of the day is, “Where the action is.” Some people and places appeal to many because they are centers of activity.
The constant source of comfort and joy for the Christian is that Jesus Christ is always found where the need is, and that he makes full provision for that need.
At the very beginning let us make clear the distinction between “using God” for our own purposes—a reflection on our concept of God and of Christianity—and appropriating the things God has made available for those who trust in him.
If a person in need refused to make use of something that was his for the taking and that would meet his need, he would seem foolish, to say the least.
While the world has no right to demand for itself blessings that accrue only to believers, Christians owe it to themselves to appropriate all that they have in Christ. No Christian, having received by faith forgiveness of sins and the redemption offered in the Gospel, should continue to live as a spiritual beggar.
First of all, we need daily cleansing. The world tarnishes, the flesh besmirches. On every hand we are confronted by the allurements of Satan. Sometimes we succumb, and the result is a soiling no earthly detergent can remove. Day by day we need cleansing and forgiveness, a renewing of spiritual concepts and perspectives. All this is available through the Holy Spirit.
There is not a day that we do not also need guidance to lead us out of uncertainty. The promises for such help are found all through the Bible. For example: “In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Prov. 3:6, RSV). And from James: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God who gives to all men generously and without reproaching, and it will be given him” (1:5).
Besides cleansing and guidance, God offers the Christian help for specific problems. Impatience! How common, and how detrimental to the Christian’s witness! God supplies serenity in the midst of pressures, quietness in turmoil, to those who seek it. For the Christian, the meaning of the phrase “inner resources” should be experienced and exhibited.
Who has not experienced an overwhelming sense of weakness when confronted by the many temptations and problems which are a part of living in the world? God supplies strength to those who are weak. Realizing this, the Apostle Paul was able to make the paradoxical statement: “For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:10).
Few indeed are the Christians who do not have a lack of genuine love for others. This lovelessness has one cure, an infilling of the Holy Spirit, who brings love. It is a discredit to Christians that so few obey the Lord’s command: “This I command you, to love one another” (John 15:17). He will supply this love that we need.
Never in the history of the world have people been subjected to such tensions as they are today in this contracted, complicated society. What a glorious opportunity for Christians to demonstrate quietness of spirit and of heart! But this is not something we contrive for ourselves. Rather, it is a blessing God grants when we rest in him and avail ourselves of such promises as, “Thou dost keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusts in thee” (Isa. 26:3); or, “In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for thou alone, O Lord, makest me dwell in safety” (Ps. 4:8). Idealistic? Theoretical? Impractical? Try it and see!
For some, doubt is a problem. Satan raises questions about the validity of faith, through a book, perhaps, or a conversation, or a sermon. However it happens, the experience is disturbing; but our Lord is very willing to settle it for us. Faith is the answer to doubt. To those who are willing to receive it, God gives the assurance of the reality of himself and his promises. Faith should be so firm that with the Apostle Paul we can say, “What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means! Let God be true though every man be false, as it is written, ‘That thou mayest be justified in thy words, and prevail when thou art judged’” (Rom. 3:3, 4).
When one has caught a vision of the reality of God and the finality of his revelation, faith rests in him regardless of what may happen.
Often going hand in hand with doubt is discouragement. Thank God for the words of encouragement in his Word. God is sovereign, faithful, able, willing. We have only to appropriate what he has provided for us, and our discouragement will be replaced by a renewed joy as we realize the truth of Paul’s affirmation: “What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him?” (Rom. 8:31, 32).
Nowhere is our need more evident than in the temptations that confront us continually. And for this need also God has a clear answer: “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (1 Cor. 10:13). How it helps to realize that our Lord “was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin”! He knows. He understands. He delivers.
Sorrow is a part of this life. At times it can become so overwhelming that life hardly seems worth living. But for sorrow Lord offers comfort; for mourning he gives joy. There may be sorrow for sins, which should bring repentance. There may be sorrow over personal loss or over the actions of others. But there is no sorrow that a loving Lord cannot heal.
Some suffer from a sense of inadequacy. This is a psychological matter that can be met in the presence of our Lord. Paul spoke to this problem when he said that we are not “sufficient of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our sufficiency is from God” (2 Cor. 3:5). A feeling of our own adequacy is dangerous. But when we realize the complete adequacy of our God and put our faith in him, what a difference, and what a sense of his overwhelming power!
How often we go down in defeat before the enemy of souls. Yet how wonderful that defeat can be changed into victory. The words of the old hymn, “Each victory will help you some other to win,” can prove a reality. We all are in a continuing battle, but the victory is assured if we use the resources God offers.
God’s provisions are to be found at the point of the believer’s need. There is no circumstance for which he has not provided.
Some may be eager to be “where the action is.” Christians have the privilege of being where the needs are met.
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Eutychus
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Send this skeptic the living Liz
What The Fool Said
They tell me it is one of the basic rules in the legal profession that when one is engaged in cross-examination he should never ask a question unless he is sure what the answer has to be. Otherwise the argument might just get out of hand.
This is an equally good rule when you are dealing with youngsters. Never ask them a question unless you know what the answer has to be, or they might just lead you down the garden path. I remember one time giving a children’s sermon on light, and I kept switching the light on and off to illustrate my point (whatever the point was). At the very end I switched the light off and asked the youngsters, “Now where has the light gone?” A big bass voice far beyond its years answered from the front row, “Out in the hall. I can see it out there.”
One time at a boys’ camp I had a Mason jar full of beans of various sizes. My point was that if you shook the jar of beans long enough, the big beans always came to the top. “See,” said I, “the big beans always come to the top; so remember that, if you have a big bean, no matter how much shaking up there is, you will always come to the top.” Whereupon one of the more helpful boys in the audience asked, “What if the jar is full of nuts?”
Considerable shaking has been going on in theological circles recently, and the question before the house is whether the big beans or the big nuts are coming to the top. This is not just an academic question.
One of my readers (how do you like that?) wrote in to suggest that in the death-of-God controversy we have an interesting parallel with the late Vatican Council. After centuries the Romanists have condescended enough to say that the Jews are not “Christ killers.” Now what will they do in Protestant circles with those men with the big beans who have killed God? Maybe they aren’t big beans. “The fool has said in his heart, There is no God.”
EUTYCHUS II
Who Wins The $5,000?
I am both amused and astonished at Louis Berger’s $5, 000 offer to you (Eutychus and His Kin, Mar. 18 issue) for “irrefutable and realistic proof that there ever existed a supernatural person named Jesus Christ.” Of course, two absurdities underlie the offer. First, the supernatural nature of our Lord is not empirically demonstrable.… Secondly, proof of our Lord’s deity cannot be purchased with money. That comes only through self-commitment to him as divine Saviour and Lord.…
DANIEL W. WARD
Temple Baptist Church
Ellsworth A.F.B., S. Dak.
Two letters in your issue for March 18 should be brought together. Louis Berger offers you $5,000 for “a single irrefutable and realistic proof that there ever existed a supernatural person named Jesus Christ.” Eutychus II mentions Gert Behanna, who wrote the book The Late Liz. Since Berger doesn’t like books, send him the living Liz. He will have his proof, and possibly get converted at the same time.
THOMAS R. TEPLY
Aldrich Avenue Presbyterian Church
Minneapolis, Minn.
If Mr. Berger … can furnish me with a single irrefutable proof that his judgment will be irrefutable, I will furnish him with an irrefutable proof that Jesus Christ existed (no books).
If, however, he cannot guarantee that his judgment is irrefutable, how will he know that my proof is irrefutable? Philadelphia, Pa.
PAUL SEELY
It is obvious that this correspondent is an avowed atheist or he would not write as he does!…
JOHN F. PALM
Port Charlotte, Fla.
To prove to you that he is a dream—or a myth—I agree to donate $5.00 to your library fund for books published at Tübingen from 1825–1875 if you will furnish me with a single irrefutable and realistic proof that there ever existed a natural person named George Washington (no books).…
JAY C. ROCHELLE
Ascension Lutheran Church
Pittsburgh, Pa.
The letter … reminds me of a question asked by one of our X-ray students … “Can you prove to me there is such a thing as an X-ray?” Sometimes you can’t see the woods for the trees.…
The very existence of the Church is a miracle that could satisfy [Berger].…
JAY W. MACMORAN, M.D.
Penn Valley, Pa.
I am sure you will get numerous replies to Louis Berger’s $5,000 offer, but I thought the offer so tempting I would take him up on it—just in case.
There is only one condition to his whole proposal which will have to be cleared up first before anything is proved or gained. Mr. Berger has to prove first that he himself exists as well as his $5,000, and if he can do that and will grant the same privilege of his basis for proof to us in proving Christ existed—supernaturally—then I know he can be taken, and I am sure you know this, too.
It becomes more amazing to me each year in the ministry how those who attempt to refute Christ and Christianity bear the burden of proof themselves; God’s revelation has been that unique! I hope you claim the $5,000.
HOWARD C. MOELLER
Lutheran Church of the Resurrection
Waterville, Me.
A Great Contribution
“God: His Names and Nature,” by Harold B. Kuhn (insert, Mar. 18, issue), is an outstanding contribution to the science of theology.
I have presented the previous essays in our “discussion period,” and they have been well received by our people.…
JAMES B. BUTLER
Palestine Baptist Church
Jackson, Miss.
We read [it] with joy and profit.… Oak Lawn, Ill.
D. KORT
Tit For Tat
I was very grateful for your publishing the article “The Church and Social Problems,” by Howard E. Kershner (Mar. 4 issue).…
MRS. J. W. PATRICK
Harrington Park, N. J.
It disturbs me a great deal.… His article … is a perfect example of the reason why many of my fellow ministers and I have stopped our subscriptions to his magazine.…
ROLAND MULLINIX
Minister of Education
First Methodist
Charlotte, N. C.
Your decision … to select such a miserably inept and theologically faulty article to represent a viewpoint is inexcusable on your part.…
The greatest crime is yours for reprinting it and doing great injustice to a problem that needs scholarly treatment. Alexandria, Va. EUGENE W. WIEGMAN
Praise From A Pacifist
I want to express my warm appreciation for “Problems for Pacifists” (Mar. 4 issue). This is a more thoughtful and more accurate treatment of Christian pacifist matters than has usually been the case in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and I am most grateful for it.
EDGAR METZLER
Executive Secretary
Mennonite Central Committee
Akron, Pa.
Baptists And Cocu
In re Eugene Carson Blake’s comment on the American Baptist Convention’s avoiding joining COCU (News, Mar. 18 issue): Hoorah! Dr. Blake understands Baptist polity better than many American Baptists—he realizes one association or convention of Baptist churches cannot extend the alliances of those churches. Maybe our constituency will hear him.
T. R. SISK, JR.
Highlawn Baptist Church
Huntington, W. Va.
Daniel Still Lives
“Come Alive, Daniel!” (Mar. 4 issue) is a very unique approach in answering the “Critics,” and I am in favor of coining a medal for Dr. Grider, to honor and hold in commemoration this re-criticism.…
ELBERT R. CEARFOSS
Calvary Baptist
Drayton Valley, Alberta
In my book Daniel is more alive than he has been for more than two thousand years.…
JAMES MCD. CRAVEN
Brooklyn, N.Y.
I appreciated the article.… If Dr. Grider has any more such articles, I think they ought to be in print.…
BERNARD GILL
South Flint Church of the Nazarene
Flint, Mich.
[The article] very adroitly scathes the higher critics and the modernists with their “new morals”.…
MCKINLEY ASH
Executive Director
Miami Rescue Mission
Miami, Fla.
More On Christian Science
Thank you for the splendid article, “Ten Questions to Ask Christian Scientists” (Mar. 4 issue). This is as a complete article as I have ever read on this subject, logical, truthful, and to the heart of the matter.
CHARLES R. BEITTEL
Harrisburg, Pa.
Mr. Hoekema has not studied the writings of Mary Baker Eddy; if he had he could not possibly have reached the conclusions he set forth.…
This letter is not to clarify the opinions of Mr. Hoekema … because I’m sure that the Christian Science Committee on Publication has already taken care of that by this time as they are very alert to such matters.…
FERN M. PERIN
Middletown, Ohio
I have received sufficient blessings from my experience with students of Christian Science and their teachings that I cannot sit idly by when I feel that they are being totally misunderstood if not maligned.…
No, I’m not ready to give up my Reformed faith for the teachings of Christian Science; but I have the feeling that much of our difficulty is with language, and that too many of the critics of Christian Science pass quick judgments without trying prayerfully to understand. I am proud of the fact that Presbyterians have met for discussion. The body of Christ cannot be severed, and I for one will never attempt it.
Mrs. Eddy was the beloved pastor of many sincere, devout students of the Word of God: people who love God, and their neighbors. I am a pastor, a student of the Word, who also tries to love God and his neighbors. That rather puts us all on the King’s Highway.…
CHARLES W. BATES
First Presbyterian
Titusville, Fla.
Greatest Since Denney
Thanks for such a wonderful periodical as yours. Of all the things you have ever published nothing compares with Leon Morris’s “The Centrality of the Cross” (Mar. 18 issue). In fact it is the greatest theology on the death of Christ since James Denney’s The Death of Christ. I can hardly wait to get the book. Kingsport, Tenn.
F. M. BROWN
Leon Morris stated, “It comes as something of a surprise, for example, to find that, apart from the crucifixion narrative and one verse in Hebrews, Paul is the only New Testament writer to speak about “the cross.’” Although the word “cross” is not specifically used by Peter, it is certainly implied in First Peter 2:24, “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree.” Likewise there are three references to “the tree” in the Acts of the Apostles (5:30 and 10:39, spoken by Peter; 13:29, spoken by Paul).…
RALPH GIANNONE
Wyckoff, N. J.
One Man Or Two?
On page 33 (Mar. 4 issue), is not Stacey E. Woods, general secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, really C. Stacey Woods?…
PEGGY JEAN TOWNSEND
Darlington, Pa.
• He really is.—ED.
Those Cartoons
The “What If …” cartoons are wonderful. They are satirical without being bitter, and funny but not overdrawn.…
M. DUNCAN MURRAY
Occidental College
Los Angeles, Calif.
A ‘Snap’ For Ridicule
Your report on “McIntire at the Capitol” (Mar. 4 issue) is not as we in Pennsylvania understand it. Also, the picture of this man looks as though your photographer, no different than many of our secular reporters and photographers, went out of his way to “snap” for ridicule.…
If one of your little reporters must ridicule or belittle someone, send him in the direction of Bishop Pike, who sounds [like] Anti-Christ.
I, for one, would appreciate a full and true report or story on Carl McIntire by an unbiased person.…
I do trust your magazine will not come under the influence of the NCC or WCC.…
ELSIE A. GLASS
Fayetteville, Pa.
After reading your article, I would not have your magazine. Dr. McIntire is one of our great patriots who is trying to save America from the takeover by Communism and stands for the Bible as a real part of our American heritage. He is working hard to preserve your freedom too.…
PETER RUF
Santa Cruz, Calif.
Readers Say …
I still find the “Deaths” section the only section I can trust. I commend you for it!
HENRY ERVIN
Richardson, Tex.
As a Bible professor in a Methodist theological seminary (its name is not really germane!), I reject much of what I read in your journal. Yet I am richly stimulated by its many well-written articles and editorials, and my judgment is that the quality of your publication is steadily improving. The January 1 issue was a superb example of the same.
J. ROY VALENCOURT
Hood Theological Seminary
Salisbury, N. C.
Your paper becomes the only rallying point for level-headed, emotionally sound, evangelical, and scholarly men to share.…
PAUL M. MUSSER
Pioneer Memorial Church (United Presbyterian)
Solon, Ohio
I credit your magazine with making a major contribution in keeping Christianity out of the twentieth century.…
DONALD E. INLAY
Keolumana Methodist
Kailua, Hawaii
A Bold Effort
Recently I have been disturbed by [your] … permitting the Orthodox Presbyterian Church to use such Christian ethics as [is] in evidence in its advertisement “A new confession—or a new faith?—the Presbyterian predicament.” This seems to be a bold effort to confuse, disturb, and proselyte.…
ZION ROBBINS
United Presbyterian
Cedarville, Ohio
Whose Blake?
It amazes me … that CHRISTIANITY TODAY favorably presents … the new [general secretary] of the World Council of Churches, Dr. Eugene Carson Blake! Isn’t he known on an international scale as being in sympathy with Bishop Pike and his denials of basic Bible truths? How can you, an evangelical, present Dr. Blake in a favorable light as a trustworthy spiritual leader?
ERNEST A. HOOK
Pennsylvania Avenue Baptist Church
Warren, Pa.
I am appalled by the vicious attacks (implicit and explicit) on both the World Council of Churches and Eugene Carson Blake.…
A. H. HARRY OUSSOREN
Toronto, Ont.
The Continuing Debate
In his column, “Priorities First” (Mar. 4 issue), L. Nelson Bell aptly answers the letter of Robert D. Bulkley (“Not Either/Or”), contending that the Church must hold to its central mission: the conversion of individuals to Jesus Christ. Bulkley, in his emphasis on changing social structures, obviously wants to assure us that he still believes genuine conversion is basic. But it seems equally obvious that his own priorities lie elsewhere and that he regards as “superficial” the conversions of those Christians who do not happen to hold his own enthusiasm for the present-day civil rights movement. There are tens of thousands of dedicated Christians who share a vital social concern but who cannot endorse much of the current civil rights movement with its disturbing exhibitionism, frequent defiance of law, and pseudo-Christian overtones.
At the same time I wonder if Nelson Bell has not sidestepped Bulkley’s very legitimate charge that conversion does not necessarily always bring the change in social attitudes which should follow. Especially has this been true in the area of race and segregation. Racial prejudice still holds sway in too many Christian hearts. Worse yet, some have even appealed to the Scriptures for support of their segregative views. The majority, of course, simply have gone along with the status quo. Thus when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, some evangelical Christians found themselves jumping onto the bandwagon at the last minute because it would have been too embarrassing to do otherwise. Their social conscience had been awakened not so much by inner Christian conviction as by the long overdue social legislation that finally gave the Negro his voting rights as an American citizen. The tragedy that many Christians have been the last to face such social issues head-on will hurt the evangelical cause for years to come.
These facts, while they must be acknowledged, in no way undercut the main thrust of Bell’s reply. Bulkley says that “there is no evidence that the kindest and worthiest motives are what emerge from what we label the conversion experience.” Has he never heard of the dramatic social changes that swept England following the Wesleyan revivals, or the social concern that grew out of the First and Second Great Awakenings? Has he forgotten the roots of the Salvation Army, the YMCA, the rescue missions, and a hundred other works of their kind?
If society truly is to be transformed, let alone souls saved from eternal loss, the priorities of which Bell and the Scriptures speak must be kept. Otherwise, the social reforms which Bulkley so earnestly desires will be as “superficial” as the conversions he would like to invalidate.
ROBERT G. FLOOD
Chicago, Ill.
Evangelism and evangelists that make the winning of converts the prime mission of the Church sometimes remind me of the efforts of the Pharisees which were so roundly condemned by Jesus (Matt. 23:15). To insist that the Church as the Church has no responsibility to speak and work to promote justice, righteousness, and peace in the earth is to deny the testimony of the Scriptures.… The principle enunciated in the Constitution does not forbid mutual interests and concerns of church and state; [it was only intended] to prevent any one church or combination of churches becoming a state church.
H. GLENN STEPHENS
United Presbyterian
Adena, Ohio
Although Dr. Bell says it is all a matter of priorities—first, the Church must change the hearts of men through the proclamation of the message of redemption in Christ—I find it difficult to see a second priority clearly. My guess is that he doesn’t really have one.…
We still wait for some explanation why so often “born-again” Christians dramatically change their attitudes toward the use of Sunday, toward tithing, drinking, smoking, dancing—but not toward the racial prejudice and injustice that secular (and Christian?) society tolerates and perpetuates all around us.…
Although he too is much afraid that the liberal church leadership today is promoting socialism, Howard Kershner, in his article in the same issue, “The Church and Social Problems,” at least has a clearer answer to my dilemma: “… reborn men and women go out and remake society.…” Can we believe him? Does Dr. Bell agree?
GEORGE A. HODGKINS
First Congregational Church
Stratford, Conn.
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For each dollar of liquor revenue collected, taxpayers are paying out more than $11 to offset the baneful results of the alcoholic beverage traffic
Darkness was falling in Connecticut on November 18, 1949, as a sedan left Wallingford for Massachusetts. Douglas Shepardson, teacher of English at Choate School, was driving, and beside him rode his wife, Ruth, headmistress of St. Margaret’s School for Girls in Waterbury. As the car sped along, Doug and Ruth had not an inkling of the tragedy ahead. They passed through Hartford and reached Vernon.
Suddenly out of the west roared a coupe. Doubtless its driver was usually a responsible citizen; but he had been drinking, and alcohol had robbed him of steady hands and keen vision. Overtaking the Shepardsons, he tried to pass their car but sideswiped it instead. A crash of rending metal as the cars tangled! Then, silence.… Ruth was dead of a fractured skull; Doug, unconscious, had severe injuries. The driver of the coupe lay bleeding.
The coroner’s verdict, as published later in the Wallingford Post, declared: “I find … that the manner in which said———operated his car … in consequence of his intoxication, caused the loss of life of said Ruth Chandler Shepardson.…”
Ruth Shepardson was my only sister. All my life I have been a total abstainer, but in this accident I received a crushing blow from John Barleycorn. When fooling the American public, this deceiver has a charming expression; but if we strip off his mask, his face appears in its shocking brutality. Barleycorn has hurt me in other traffic accidents also. Mr. and Mrs. Don Lee, old friends of mine, started from Pullman, Washington, one January evening in 1954 to drive to a city eight miles away. They had barely left home, according to Lee, when a drinking driver’s car wrecked theirs. Lee’s left hand was crushed and his left foot crippled. His wife’s face was so disfigured that it required plastic surgery.
Here is another kind of outrage. A young couple, whom I will call Jim and Linda, lived near me while Jim was attending college. They had two sons, aged about eight and six. In a popular campus club Linda soon became a leader, but unfortunately the pair began to drink. Domestic friction increased; neighbors called police one night to quell a family fight. Jim left home, and the court warned Linda that, unless she reformed, she would lose custody of her children. Nevertheless she could not stay sober. At last reports her sons had a guardian, and Linda had returned to her mother’s home. In wrecking this family Barleycorn struck me hard.
Moreover, Barleycorn is also holding me up and taking my money. Old John’s friends vow he is a profitable source of revenue. Yet in certain states the figures belie this. For example, the California Council on Alcohol Problems declares, “For every dollar of beer and liquor taxes received, California spends $5.23 on direct measurable costs.” A few years ago the Alcohol Problems Association of Washington State stated that, for each dollar of liquor revenue collected, we taxpayers were paying out more than $11 to take care of the results of the alcoholic beverage traffic. For me personally this meant handing over extra taxes of $132 a year.
Now look briefly at liquor’s nationwide toll. Recent data from the National Safety Council warrant the conclusion that about 6,100 of the 47,700 traffic fatalities in 1964 involved the “contributing circumstance” of drinking. The aggregate of reports covering the seventeen-year period 1948–1964 justifies the estimate that, in this period, Barleycorn littered our highways with 59,832 dead—more than the population of Atlantic City, New Jersey.
“Injury accidents” in 1964 are reported by the National Safety Council as having totaled 1,100,000, and alcohol may have been involved in 91,300 of them. For the six-year period 1959–1964, a conservative estimate of the total number of “injury accidents” in which drinking may have been “a contributing factor” is 436,700.
Likewise appalling is the havoc wrought by old John among American homes. Some authorities blame drink for many of the nearly 400,000 divorces recorded annually. Judge Donald R. Long of the Oregon Circuit court says, “A study of 1,000 [divorce] cases reveals liquor involved in approximately 40 per cent.”
As for alcoholism, it is spreading like an epidemic. Already approximately 9,000,000 Americans axe chronic alcoholics, and the number may be growing by as many as 200,000 a year. Some experts now consider this ailment to be the nation’s “No. 3 health problem”; most alarming perhaps is the fact that one-fourth of our alcoholics are women.
Pointing out the part alcohol plays in crime, Conrad S. Jensen, former New York city police inspector, says in a recent book, 26 Years on the Losing Side, “Our jails, at tremendous expense to the taxpayer, are filled with people who are there because of ‘booze.’” He quotes a statement that alcoholics may eventually comprise half of the jail population, because of offenses committed in connection with drinking. At this rate, alcohol-flavored crimes would total more than 1,000,000 annually.
THE MIRACLE OF THE PIGS
(After a sermon illustration by Paul H. A. Noren)
Ten thousand oinking swine are a lot.
On a clear hot day they are frightful, huge beings rushing without seeing down a hill in a hurry to be killed.
Imagine, ten thousand pigs running, screaming.
You might think you were dreaming hearing them shriek into the water one atop another.
Mother, sister, father, son, and brother goaded, prodded, pushed, pulled into oblivion.
“What a waste of pork,” you think.
Or, “How the water will stink with dying, rumbling pigs.
Too bad.”
But on the hill, no longer mad, two men leave their chains and look toward life.
RONN SPARGUR
Finally, consider the financial waste in America because of alcohol. We squander $13.5 billion a year on the liquor itself; absenteeism and various other industrial losses devour another billion; and the states, in taking care of the results of alcohol with hospitals, asylums, jails, police protection, and welfare grants, drain the public purse unmercifully. Clearly, America’s No. 1 thug is running amok, and every citizen—abstainer or drinker—is suffering from his attacks.
Scientists long ago disproved the notion that beverage alcohol is only a stimulant. It is actually an anesthetic drug, a depressant, related to ether and chloroform. Even some popular publications have warned the public of this. Pageant, for example, published “The Big Lie About Moderate Drinking,” by William Rambo, who says that as little as half a drop of alcohol in 1,000 drops of a person’s blood will affect “higher brain centers.”
Contrary to popular belief, even small amounts of alcohol can be dangerous. Two drinks of whiskey can make a concentration in an average-sized person’s blood of one-half drop per 1,000, and two bottles of ordinary beer will do the same. Tests have proved that this can double the reaction time needed for braking a car. Moreover, even the first drink impairs judgment and may cause a driver to become just over-confident enough to cause an accident.
Why do we take this dreadful punishment? Perhaps it is because the masses are still shackled by the tradition that alcohol is just a “stimulant.” Or it may be that many dare not face the truth that alcohol is a narcotic drug. It is also possible that numerous nondrinkers, deceived by misleading advertising, are apathetic.
What can we do? Is not our first step to promote education—education in the widest sense, determined and sustained? By every means possible let us saturate America with the truth. The call is to strip liquor of its glamour. Unmask John Barleycorn. Expose his real image, revealing the traffic deaths and injuries, divorces, crimes, disease, and financial waste he causes.
To be sure, most public schools already teach the facts about alcohol. But much more needs to be done. There must be unremitting exposure of the toll alcohol is exacting in America today. The plain fact is that through pressures of advertising and social conformity, America has slipped into a thoughtless and callous acceptance of the appalling human losses caused by alcoholism. What is needed is a torrent of public indignation that will work not only through churches but also through PTA’s, service clubs, press, radio, and television to keep the facts about alcohol and its social and moral consequences before the nation. But above all, Christians must themselves see the problem in the light of the Bible. For Scripture demands reverence for our bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit, as well as personal examples of temperance and abstinence before friends and neighbors. We need to get down on our knees before God in the battle against John Barleycorn.
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“It was the Christians’ psalm-singing that alerted the Roman world to the revolutionary new force in its midst”
We are living in an ecumenical age, when almost every day, it seems, Protestants, Catholics and Jews are taking some tentative steps toward greater understanding. We are turning with renewed devotion to the superb hymns of adoration, confession, and supplication that for 3,000 years have shaped the public prayers and private meditations of mankind. These are contained in the Book of Psalms, the world’s best-loved and longest-loved poems. In the Psalter, millions of people find a message that gives meaning to life.
The Psalms may be found in any Protestant, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, or Jewish Bible, in every prayerbook and hymnal, and even separately, published as supreme examples of world literature. They are read in all churches and synagogues; they are quoted in the milestone ceremonies of individual life, from baptism, confirmation, and bar mitzvah to marriage and the final rites. There is hardly anybody who does not know one or more of them by heart.
In the early days of Christianity, Christians banded together in communities so that they could sing the Psalms according to the Psalms’ own rule: “Seven times a day do I praise thee.” Following the example of Jesus, who quoted the Psalms throughout his ministry, sang them with his disciples after their last meal together, and spoke them front the cross, Christians made the Psalms their way of expressing hope, or joy in good news. “Is any among you afflicted? Let him pray,” advises the epistle of James. “Is any merry? Let him sing psalms.”
It was the Christians’ Psalm-singing that alerted the Roman world to the revolutionary new force in its midst. Astonishment deepened to awe when the martyrs went to the lions joyously singing Psalms. Later, as Roman civilization crumbled and the barbarians moved in, art, culture, and learning survived in cloisters attached to abbeys built as shrines for the Psalter.
At the time of the Reformation, Reformers from Martin Luther to John Knox, Oliver Cromwell, and John Wesley drew strength from the Psalms and commanded followers to sing them out loud and clear. Luther so loved his “old and ragged Psalter” that he preferred it to all other Scripture. “There,” he wrote, “one sees into the hearts of all the saints, as into a fair and pleasant garden—as into heaven itself!”
The Pilgrims sailed from Holland “to sing the Psalmes and pray without a book.” And one of the early Puritan settlements on Cape Cod was named in allusion to Psalm 76:2: “In Salem also is his tabernacle.” Book One in the index of American publishing is the Puritans’ rhymed translation of the Whole Book of Psalmes, published at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640. It is one of the rarest and most precious of first editions.
In 1787 the Constitutional Convention was near failure at Philadelphia because the thirteen former colonies could not agree on a form of effective national government. When the deadlock appeared too great for human power to break, eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin rose to his feet. All his life, he said, he had been convinced that the Psalms were right in saying, “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” He moved that the delegates start the next day’s meeting by inviting a Philadelphia clergyman to come in and offer an opening prayer. The motion carried. So dramatic was the improvement in legislative temperaments and legislative efficiency that even today the United States House and Senate still observe Franklin’s precedent.
The appeal of the Psalms has been analyzed many times, with strikingly similar conclusions. In the sixteenth century, John Calvin of France called the Psalms truly “an anatomy of all parts of the soul. There is no movement of the spirit which is not reflected here as in a mirror. All the sorrows, troubles, fears, doubts, hopes, pain, perplexities, story outbursts by which the hearts of men are tossed, have been depicted here to the very life.”
Prefacing a recent Limited Editions Club edition, critic Mark Van Doren said the secret of the Psalms was that “like any great poems, they are more about the reader than the writer. They sing for any soul that is completely serious, whether religion be present or not.” To Van Doren they are the “supreme lyric poems of our world. This is the verdict of civilization.”
The Psalms are a special kind of poetry, intended to be sung. The word “psalm” is one key to their nature; it comes from a Greek verb meaning “to twitch,” as in plucking a stringed instrument. Although other instruments were also used, the usual ancient accompaniment to the Psalms was probably something like the Irish harp.
The Bible attributes authorship of 73 of the 150 Psalms to David, the shepherd boy, warrior, poet, and king who established the Judean dynasty at Jerusalem around 1000 B.C. David was the kind of powerful, zestful, and subtle man who could have written them, but from the existence of other psalm-like passages in the earliest Old Testament chronicles it has been thought that the tradition of psalm-composing predates David.
Confirmation of this comes now from archaeology. Digging at Ras Shamra in Syria, scholars have unearthed the ruins of the lost city of Ugarit, a Bronze Age center of commerce on the caravan route between Egypt and Mesopotamia. In the library of a choir attached to a temple of a local deity were clay tablets covered with cuneiform characters. When the markings were decoded by code-cracking techniques developed in World War II, they turned out to be fragments of epic poetry similar in style and language to some of the Psalms. They are the first non-biblical poetry antedating the Psalms to be discovered. The Ugaritic epics explained many mythological allusions in the Psalms, such as the Leviathan or great whale and the “bulls of Bashan,” which had long puzzled scholars.
More remarkable were some eighty direct parallels, ranging from partial lines to one three-line Psalm passage. Some of the most memorable phrases in the Psalms, such as “my cup runneth over” and the “hart [that] panteth after the water brooks,” also appear. The language of these Ugaritic writings has now been classified as closely related to early Hebrew.
Religiously as well as ethically, the Ugaritic texts cannot be compared with the Psalms. They are filled with the gross and often cruel demigods of antiquity. But the fact that the Psalms have marked similarities to these ancient poems indicates that in the Psalms man confronts his ancestors not simply at the beginning of his upward reach toward God but in the midst of God’s downward revelation to man.
Part of the Psalms’ power to move people comes from their simplicity. They use short, concrete words, familiar, everyday images—sheep and shepherds, the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, night and day, mountains, valleys, thunder and rain, the proud and haughty and the put-upon. When the Psalm-singer says he thirsts for God as parched earth thirsts for rain, his meaning is clear to everyone. When he says he feels as alone as a solitary sparrow on a housetop, who does not think of a tiny bird he has seen sitting forlornly by itself?
But the chief appeal of the Psalms lies in their themes—life and death, good and evil, justice and mercy—all contained in one overriding theme, the marvelous ways of God with man. The God of the Psalms combines the deepest insights of theology and philosophy with what the simplest person instinctively feels to be true. He created the universe, assigned the stars their courses, appointed the moon its seasons, lifted the dry land out of the seas, still makes the river flow and the flowers bloom.
But he is more than prime cause; he is the personal God of every individual. God’s love surpasses human love, even the purest: “When my father and my mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up.” He is the source and author of all hopes: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” “In thee have I put my trust; let me not be ashamed.”
So exalted is the view of God in the Psalms that one might detect a tendency to make man insignificant. On the contrary, surveying the starry sky, a particularly awesome sight over the Middle Eastern deserts, the Psalmist exclaims:
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
The moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained,
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
Back comes the answer:
Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels,
And hast crowned him with glory and honor.
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands;
Thou hast put all things under his feet.
Julian Huxley, the biologist, has said that this passage is a theological statement of an astounding scientific truth, the biological uniqueness of man. To this view, the Psalms add a positive code of morality. The prudent, the good man loves the law of God’s truth, “and in his law doth he meditate.” Loving the law, he will deal justly with others, keep his word even when inconvenient, befriend the poor, and bridle his tongue. Because God sees even inside, he prays, “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.” If he does all this he will not want to die, but death will hold no terrors for him: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.”
Preacher In The Red
MODERN MIRACLES
Several years ago I was chaplain of a private school for boys. One evening while I was reading the service leading up to the sermon, a black cat wandered into the chapel. The door through which it entered was behind me. Close behind the cat came the headmaster, who cornered the cat on the altar. All this was unknown to me.
As he lunged for the cat I announced my text: “And the Lord said unto Moses, Stretch forth thine hand and take it by the tail.”
There was a tittering among the boys and teachers which I did not understand. But I did understand when I turned my head and saw the headmaster marching down the aisle with the black cat under his arm.
I was tempted to say, “There goes Moses now,” but I didn’t.—The Rev. W. B. MCKINLEY, Boonesboro, Maryland.
As anybody knows, to attain such peace of mind and soul is not easy. There are times, familiar to us all, when the Psalmist is so overwhelmed with the goodness of life that “my cup runneth over.” In such times he delights in comparing himself with sheep led into green pastures beside still water, and he calls on his friends to “make a joyful noise unto the Lord.”
But there are other occasions we all sometimes encounter when the Psalmist contemplates his sorrows, sickness, and sins, and “waters my couch with my tears.” When his agony becomes unbearable, he utters the most piercing cry for help and forgiveness in all literature: “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice.… If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?”
Although the Psalms have never ceased to hold their power, either for the individual or in the liturgies of religion, there is at present an awakening interest in them. New Psalm commentaries are appearing in bookstores and libraries. Some new hymnals and service books are restoring the Psalms for congregational singing. Last year Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the Camerata Singers through the premiere of his latest composition, an oratorio based on Psalms 108, 100, 23, 131, 2, and 133. Sung in Hebrew, the oratorio was commissioned for the Anglican Diocese of Chichester and enters the music repertory as the Chichester Psalms.
Since the Psalms bring a universal message to mankind, how long will it be before people of different religions recite them together? It is partly a question of how rapid is agreement on a common translation. Present translations in use by Protestants, Catholics, and Jews are all in more or less the same Elizabethan idiom. They differ chiefly in the question of which translation of a particular line is most felicitous.
Says Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston, “One may perhaps envision a time when all Christians and Jews may accept a common Psalter. The Psalms contain the prayers in Divine Office of the Eastern and Western churches; they have long been the spiritual sustenance of the Protestant Reformation; and of course they arose from the joys and longings of the Jewish people. How excellent it would be if the Psalms could further unite all of us in some form of public recognition of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
To Dr. John H. Hertz, chief rabbi of England, the Psalms “translate into simple speech the spiritual passion of the profound scholar and give utterance, with the beauty born of truth, to the humble longing and petition of the unlettered peasant. They are the hymn-book of humanity.”
Dr. Norman Vincent Peale has said, “We know that the Psalms are the perfect answer to the problems in any individual life. May it please God that the Psalms now should work their power among people of differing creeds.”
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When Clyde R. Hoey was governor of North Carolina, he visited the western part of his state and met a country pastor. The usual question about how many members there were in the church brought the response “Fifty.”
When the Governor asked, “How many of them are active?” he got the same answer. “My,” he remarked, “you must be an unusual preacher to have a 100 per cent active membership.”
“Well,” the parson admitted, “Twenty-five are active for me and twenty-five are active against me.”
This wry story illustrates the precarious role played by the preacher-pastor. Keeping the flock intact is never an easy task. A true shepherd must have a heart that is compassionate, concerned, and even broken over the needs of his people; but he must be willing to suffer their scorn when he attempts to lead them out of the comfortable rut into which they have settled.
A pastor must first be willing to expend any amount of love and time to rescue the lost. The story is told of how the Italian General Garibaldi one evening met a Sardinian shepherd grieving over the loss of a lamb. The big-souled Garibaldi at once turned to his staff and organized a great search party. Lanterns were lit and the elite of the army went off through the mountain ravines. But no lamb was found, and finally the order was given for the men to retire.
The next morning after the sun had risen, Garibaldi’s servant found him fast asleep. Upon being awakened, the old general took from under the covers the lost lamb. He had searched through the night until he had found the little creature. The heart of a true pastor will drive him to do the same thing. He will preach Jesus who came to seek and to save the lost. And he will seek the lost with love.
But there is another side to the ministry. Besides trying to rescue and comfort the lost, the pastor must also protest and disturb.
The word “preach” comes from a Latin word that means “to make publicly known.” Something needs to be said in defense of righteousness; it burns into the heart of a godly man, and he proclaims the divine message to men around him.
Christian preaching is the proclamation of God’s Word. The Word will not always be preached in the same way. Men differ greatly, and each minister will have his own preaching characteristics. But all who love God will preach the same Bible and the same truth.
Spirit-filled preachers are one of God’s channels for conveying divine truth. Sometimes this truth makes people uncomfortable. This is good. The revealed truth of God’s Word should disturb men’s hearts.
That the preached word is often disturbing caused Billy Sunday to say to someone, “Cheer up, you are not in church.” And J. Edgar Park says that a congregation might be relieved if the man in the pulpit said, “Cheer up, I am not going to preach.” But when all is said and done, God uses the foolishness of preaching “to save them that believe.”
By shying away from the rugged preached word, the finest ministers have faltered in their greatest responsibility. So much needs to be done, and so many have no concern. Some good laymen seem amused when the preacher becomes disturbed about spiritual conditions, for they have decided to stop being concerned and have given way to pessimism.
The story is told about Nathan Bangs, who, as a young minister, became discouraged by difficulties and lack of success. He was about to give up when he dreamed he was working on a rock with a pickax. Blow after blow had no effect. He threw down his pick, and cried, “Useless!”
A stranger came to him and said, “You will work no more?”
“No more.”
“Were you not determined to finish the task?”
“Yes.”
“Why stop it?”
“I make no impression on the rock.”
“What is that to you? Your duty is to use the pick.
Your work is in your own hands; the result is not!”
In the dream Nathan Bangs resumed his task. At the first blow the rock fell into pieces.
In this careless day in which we live, the inclination is to stop crying out against sin, to open the gate and let the marauders—the world, the flesh, the devil—ride wildly into the fields of spiritual grain. It cannot be this way. Let us be on the alert for the trampling, devastating forces of sin.
Walter E. Isenhour tells of an English farmer at work in his fields: “He saw a party of horsemen riding about his farm. He had one field that he was especially anxious they should not ride over. So he sent one of his boys to the field, telling him to shut the gate, and then watch it, and on no account to let it be opened.
“The boy went as he was told, but was scarcely at his post before the huntsmen came up and ordered the gate to be opened. This the boy refused to do, stating the orders he had received and his determination not to disobey them. Threats and bribes were offered, alike in vain.
“After a while one of the huntsmen said in commanding tones, ‘My boy, you do not know me. I am the Duke of Wellington, and I command you to open that gate that I and my friends may pass through.’
“The boy lifted his cap and stood uncovered before the man whom all England delighted to honor, and then answered firmly, ‘I am sure the Duke of Wellington would not wish me to disobey orders. I must keep that gate shut, and not allow anyone to pass but by my master’s permission.’
“Greatly pleased, the old warrior lifted his own hat, and said: ‘I honor the boy or man who can be neither bribed nor frightened into doing wrong.’ Handing the boy a sovereign, the old Duke put spurs to his horse and galloped away.”
All of us are gatekeepers. Let us do our work firmly, kindly, nobly, but well. Don’t be afraid to preach, pastor. The soul that needs to be warned may be your own. By the foolishness of preaching we keep our own hearts pure and bring cleansing to the Church and to society.