Page 6007 – Christianity Today (2024)

Last january four dozen suffragan and assistant bishops wrote to the London Times warmly commending the current Anglican-Methodist unity scheme. Possibly the reason why it took so many of them to do it was that, like the old lady whom the Boy Scouts helped across the street, the Church of England doesn’t want to go (see “Being Ambiguous on Purpose,” Current Religious Thought, July 19, 1968).

At least a substantial part doesn’t. A vote taken this year in rural deaneries of the influential London diocese has shown that 53 per cent voted against the proposed Service of Reconciliation, and 51.6 per cent against the scheme as a whole. In many other dioceses there is a majority in favor, but overall the result has fallen short of the 75 per cent majority their church has fixed as a prerequisite of the scheme’s implementation. Both churches will take the vital vote on July 8.

Let no one imagine, however, that the establishment has admitted to backing the wrong horse. Too many episcopal shirts have been put on it. As well as the lesser luminaries mentioned above, all but one or two of the forty-three diocesan bishops favor the scheme. The loftiest Methodist brass concurs; like Winston Churchill on an occasion almost as momentous, they are not interested in defeat or retreat. As usual, my friend Dr. Jim Packer of Oxford, following Bernard Manning, has le mot juste, warning against an unthoughtful ecumenical rush. He tells of the Way-side Pulpit outside a church that displayed the stirring words: “Anywhere, provided it be forward—David Livingstone.” Underneath someone had added: “And so say all of us—The Gadarene Swine.”

Most of the objections to the present scheme are centered around the Service of Reconciliation, particularly the vexed point of whether this constitutes ordination for Methodist ministers. Objections to the original wording were considered, and a revised version published two years ago. It did little to resolve the controversy, which chiefly concerns the following section:

Then shall the Bishop lay his hands on the head of each of the Methodist ministers in silence. After he has laid hands upon all of them the Bishop shall say, “We receive you into the fellowship of the Ministry in the Church of England. Take authority for the office and work of a Priest, to preach the Word of God and to minister the holy sacraments among us as need shall arise and you shall be licensed to do. We welcome you as fellow Presbyters with us in Christ’s Church.”

Therein is the sore point. That Dr. Ramsey appreciates this was seen in his January convocation address. Here was one occasion when the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury could not have been accused of sitting on the fence. His clear partisanship on a religious occasion is a rare spectacle, and I am glad I was present to hear him. He wanted this merger to go through. In saying so he mercifully did not reiterate that if-we-can’t-unite-with-the-Methodists-who-can-we-unite-with line, out of which he has got good mileage in the past.

In its place, however, was another massive question-begger, another primatal “if.” Said Dr. Ramsey: “It won’t be surprising if other churches in the Anglican Communion do not take us very seriously if, having exhorted them to seek unity on these lines, we are unwilling or unable to do it ourselves.” This unhappily worded statement suggests a wrong motive for action, implies that the Church of England is already in some sense morally committed to the scheme, leaves no room for a courageous change of heart, and advocates uniformity more than unity.

But this point came later in his address, almost as an incidental. Very properly the archbishop spent much time discussing the Service of Reconciliation. “Of course it resembles an ordination,” he said, in reply to a common objection. Instead, however, of going on to say where it is not an ordination, he veered off to put the whole matter on his own terms. Three questions, he suggested, are important: “What is God asked in this service to do?” (which seems to me to be the very point in dispute). “Is God able to do what he is asked in this service to do?” (Who could possibly say no to the question in that form?) “What will be the result for the recipients if God does what he is asked to do?” (All right, but what will be the result if he doesn’t?)

“If we can answer these questions,” continues Dr. Ramsey (how they are answered is evidently of no moment), “we shall be saying a great deal, and perhaps saying as much as needs to be said, even though we disclaim saying within the service what the relative needs of the recipients are and what particular gifts God gives in each case to meet those needs.” The point Dr. Ramsey is tortuously trying to make here is dependent first on the validity of, and lack of ambiguity in, his questions—and then on his getting to them the answers he wants.

Thereafter he says that bishops, elsewhere referred to as “the historic episcopate,” are “necessary for a reunited Christendom.” This means that conversations with the Church of Scotland should be concerned chiefly with the terms on which the Kirk will accept bishops, so that what is lacking in Presbyterian ministers may be put right. While appearing to state that ministers of non-episcopal churches are “real ministers of God’s Word and sacraments,” Dr. Ramsey more than appears to concur in the view that all ministries are not “equally sufficient.” All must be made “equally and acceptably” presbyters in God’s Church. “I have done a good many things of doubtful morality,” admits the Archbishop of Canterbury, “but I am sure that if I am allowed to share in the Service of Reconciliation this will not be one of them.” There is an element of the bathetic in that. The primate’s past is his own affair, and is a red herring here.

Toward the end of his convocation address we find Dr. Ramsey hitting an eschatological note. This might at other times be welcomed, but I doubt if it is really helpful at this stage to make tendentious allusions to “the judgment” in the context of those who reject the merger with the Methodists.

Moreover, the primate admits that “our present understanding of the episcopate and of the Eucharist may be but a shadow of the understanding which may be ours in the future plenitude of the Church.” Precisely. If present understanding is indeed so shadowy, one might ask why earlier, in order to build up his argument, he had advocated hardline Anglicanism with regard to bishops and intercommunion.

The archbishop’s closing sentence, which immediately followed on the words quoted above, is: “It is in these ways that I think a voice is saying, ‘Speak to the children of Israel that they go forward.’” While hesitating to question any special archiepiscopal revelation, one might ask whether the same children of Israel did not discover the folly of going forward when the cloud was still.

J. D. DOUGLAS

We are approaching the Easter season with its message of triumphant resurrection and the forgiveness of sin. In a world that is torn by war, racial conflict, injustice, and hatred, no one can avoid asking whether Christianity is relevant and, if so, why it hasn’t resolved these problems. But two things must be considered. The first is that Christianity has never been embraced or tried by most of the people. The second is that no one has ever articulated a religious option that equals or betters the Christian one. It is still the world’s only hope because it is God’s only way. Wherever Christianity has been welcomed and tried, it has answered man’s spiritual quest and improved his environment.

We welcome Carl F. H. Henry back to our pages with an essay on process-theology as well as with a column entitled “Footnotes,” which he will write every other issue. As yet he has not announced what he will do when his sojourn in Cambridge, England, comes to a close at the end of the summer.

We thank our readers for their interesting letters with suggestions as well as criticisms and commendations. Keep them coming!

The second Africa Evangelical Conference gave the Association of Evangelicals of Africa and Madagascar a clear, moderate position between the rightist and leftist forces at work in the Christian Church in Africa today. The position, roughly comparable to that of “neo-evangelicals” in the United States, allows for creative scholarship and social responsibility without compromising the Gospel.

The 160 delegates, representing eight national evangelical fellowships and several missions and churches in nineteen African countries, met in the lush green hills of Limuru early last month to appraise the evangelical thrust on the continent and to discuss the opportunities and problems of communicating “The Unchanging Word to a Changing Continent.”

Africa’s first continent-wide conference of evangelicals, also held at Limuru, gave birth three years ago to the AEAM, because delegates felt the need for an active fellowship among those who hold the same Bible-based doctrines, as a means of united witness and action.

But this second conference (concurrent with the association’s General Assembly) has given the association its form and program, and may prove to have been its real founding. Confidence and hope, observed acting Secretary General Eric Maillefer, replaced the uncertainties and doubts of the first conference; and Africans came forward to make the evangelical cause in Africa their own.

Declaring their “solemn responsibility before God to ‘earnestly contend for the faith’ in Africa and Madagascar,” the conference issued strongly worded statements against the “current dangerous trends of the Ecumenical Movement as evidenced in the increased efforts of liberals and neo-universalists to capture Africa and Madagascar,” and against “the dangers inherent in the United Bible Societies’ present policy of collaboration with the Roman Catholic Church.”

While rejoicing in the use of Scriptures by Catholics on a wider scale than ever before, the conference warned that the societies’ present policy will endanger evangelical Africans’ support for the societies, and may interrupt the cordial relationships in translation and distribution.

The ecumencial movement, the conference said, has been mounting steady pressure to break down the distinction between orthodox evangelical theology and liberal theology and practice. It has also been enticing African Christian youth by offering them scholarships for training in institutions with theologically liberal tendencies.

The conference therefore urged the association to establish a scholarship fund for theological studies and asked all evangelical Bible colleges and institutions to make a concentrated effort to instruct their students concerning the dangers of ecumenism and liberalism. It also called upon Christian workers to increase their knowledge of biblical theology. It urged the Association of Bible Institutes and Colleges, an AEAM affiliate, to move rapidly toward establishment of an accreditation association.

Papers and discussions centered on how the young evangelical church in Africa can reshape itself to better serve and challenge this rapidly changing continent, and what workable guidelines it should give for young Africa’s anguished search for stability and fulfillment.

“Africa is going through her teething period,” observed the Rev. David I. Olatayo, outgoing president of AEAM. “You can scarcely predict who your head of state will be tomorrow,” he added lightheartedly.

Deep-voiced and confident, Olatayo occasionally broke into the broad, engaging smile that often belies this Nigerian’s deep spiritual agony for the current suffering in his country. He outlined the political, economic, social, and religious consequences of the rapid wind of change blowing across the continent, “showing Africa’s need for the unchanging Word of God.”

General Director Donald R. Jacobs of the Mennonite Board in Eastern Africa drew excited comments, especially from Africans, when he said the modern missionary movement in Africa has given the Gospel a Western tint. “Unless the life of Christ finds expression in local cultural terms,” he said, “the task of evangelism and nurture cannot go forward.”

In the discussion that ensued, it became plain that the traditional definition of the indigenous church—self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating—is deficient in Africa. Many churches in African hands are distrusted because they still remain essentially foreign in form and content. To indigenize the form and content of church life and teaching is a delicate task. It might lead to syncretism, in which Christ shares the throne with other gods, yet it remains the most urgent and challenging obligation for the AEAM.

“Forces Opposing the African Church” were listed by incoming AEAM President Samwel O. Odunaike. paganism, Islam, Communism, Roman Catholicism, materialism, nationalism, and schism.

Criticizing missionaries who have presented Christianity as an exclusive preserve of the white man who has come to share his inheritence with the unfortunate black man, Odunaike acidly added that his African brethren have not helped the situation very much. “At times,” he said, “we have relied overmuch on funds from our foreign missions and at the same time we get annoyed when he who pays the piper begins to dictate the tune. At other times, we have shrunk from accepting responsibility because of the price it involves.”

This combination, Odunaike said, spurs extreme nationalists to call for complete Africanization of religion. Islam and paganism have also cashed in on these circ*mstances, claiming that Christianity is a foreign religion. Odunaike called on Christians in Africa and foreign missionaries to accept this sobering truth: True Christianity is foreign to any country or race; therefore no church leadership can look toward color or country of origin. ‘Then we shall begin to talk about the church in Africa and not the African church.”

The conference urged an annual day of prayer for personal heart-searching, submission to the Holy Spirit, and total commitment to evangelism.

At business sessions the association established a literature board in Nairobi to improve training and distribution and work toward an international periodical; a seminary extension program; scholarships for theological studies; a relief fund for the distressed; a committee for evangelism; and an information service on suitable Christian-education materials available in English.

African evangelicals face a future of unlimited opportunities and monumental problems. Some mission fields are closing, but new ones are springing up among city-dwellers, university students, refugees, and others. The government radio head in the Congo-Kinshasa is reported to have told a missionary: “Our people have heard too much politics; they need to have something to calm their hearts, so we are giving you free radio time.”

“Our main purpose is not just to oppose dangerous trends,” said the incoming secretary of AEAM’s executive committee, Joash Okongo, “but to exploit the existing opportunities in order to advance the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.”

The rich diversity of African evangelicalism is at once its great strength and great weakness. Scattered all over this vast continent, the evangelical churches were founded by men from many different countries, many cultures, many mission boards, and many denominations.

But, as the AEAM’s chief founder, the Rev. Kenneth L. Downing, observed at the end of the conference, “The concept of spiritual fellowship among evangelical believers is spreading throughout the continent; denominational boundaries are forgotten when they come together in this way for ‘Fellowship in the Gospel.’”

Miscellany

Notre Dame University President Theodore Hesburgh said any campus protesters who substitute “force for rational persuasion” will be subject to suspension, expulsion, or action by civil police.… The Roman Catholic club at the State Agricultural and Technical College, Farmingdale, Long Island, was suspended for reciting a voluntary Mass in a dormitory lounge.… Girls at Queens College (Southern Presbyterian) are boycotting required chapels.

The federal war on poverty granted the National Council of Churches’ Mississippi Delta Ministry $367,777 for education, housing, and day care.

A Minnesota district judge barred Hamline University (United Methodist) from joining a lawsuit over the finances of the late Scotch Tape millionaire Archibald Bush. The school claims Bush promised it $10 million.… South Carolina’s Supreme Court ruled a United Methodist congregation can’t take its property when it secedes.… Six Protestant agencies filed U. S. Supreme Court briefs supporting the FCC’s “fairness doctrine” for broadcasters. Broadcast powers have filed on the other side, backing a fundamentalist station in Red Lion, Pennsylvania.

Indian members of the Native American Church want Idaho’s legislature to legalize their rites, which use peyote. And some Pueblo Indians seek exemption from “due process” legislation because their villages are theocracies.

A Catholic-opposed bill in Montana would permit voluntary sterilization of the mentally retarded.

The Luis Palau team recorded 814 professions of faith in two local church crusades in Mexico City.

Two dozen Catholic bishops, meeting in Rio, urged Brazil’s military to return the nation to democratic control.

A poll in Communist Yugoslavia showed 39 per cent of those over 18 believe in God.

British biologists took human eggs from ovaries removed for medical reasons and successfully fertilized one in a test tube. A Vatican spokesman called it “immoral and absolutely illicit.”

A poll among engaged Swedes showed 92 per cent of those in the state Lutheran church do not oppose premarital relations, and 80 per cent in the free churches.

Catholic sources claim Pope Paul refused an audience to South Viet Nam’s Vice-President Nguyen Cao Ky.

Italian cults led by an ex-priest and a prophetess said the world would end February 20. It didn’t. Their new deadline is March 17.

Personalia

President Charles Boddie of American Baptist Theological Seminary, Nashville, will be the first Negro professor at a Southern Baptist seminary. He will teach ethics at the New Orleans school.… Theologian Clark Pinnock announced he would leave that campus for Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, weeks after a resigning teacher charged Pinnock with sparking a conservative turn at the New Orleans seminary.

Lawrence Cardinal Shehan asked Monsignor F. Joseph Manns, pastor of Baltimore’s second-biggest Catholic parish, to quit because he hasn’t carried out Vatican II-type renewal.

The Texas Council of Churches, joined last month by Roman Catholics, has fired migrant-worker organizer the Rev.

Edgar Krueger and is pulling out of the VISTA program that Krueger boosted. The council also backed off from a lawsuit against the Texas Rangers for brutality against Krueger in a May, 1967, incident.

The leaders of U. S. Inter-Varsity, Canadian Inter-Varsity, Campus Crusade, the Navigators, Youth for Christ, and Young Life met three days in Denver, then “declared their desire to love, aid, and strengthen one another and the movements they represent.”

Anglican Bishop C. Edward Crowther, who was expelled from South Africa for opposing apartheid, is replacing Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore as director of Operation Connection.

Retiring Director Stanley Stuber of the YMCA’s Association Press was replaced last month by veteran staffer Robert W. Hill.… Managing Editor Ron E. Henderson of motive (which just lost its editor) will become a religious book editor at Macmillan.

Jennifer Albright, 19, is belly-dancing at private parties to help put husband Stephen through Bangor Theological Seminary.

Baptist minister Joseph T. Wingate, 35, was found guilty of embezzling $1,429 from a war-on-poverty child center in Virginia which he directed.

Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Hatch of Westmont, New Jersey, read in the American Baptist Crusader about a 7-year-old who needs a liver transplant to live, and made plans to donate the organ of their young son, who has a malignant brain tumor.

Josiah H. Beeman V, long active in Northern California Democratic politics, was appointed international-affairs secretary of the United Presbyterian Church. Beeman, noted for leftist views, is slated to help the church “shape its ministries and public influence to help bring peace and healing to the nations.”

James A. Christison was promoted to executive secretary of the reorganized American Baptist Home Mission Societies. Christison, a lay accountant, succeeds retiring William H. Rhoades.

Dr. Harvey Henry Guthrie, Jr., was installed as dean of the Episcopal Theological School at Cambridge, Massachusetts. The 45-year-old Guthrie has taught Old Testament at the school since 1958.

Thirty-seven-year-old Johannes Gultom is the first Indonesian to be elected a Methodist bishop.

U.S.-trained United Church of Christ minister Ndabaningi Sithole was sentenced to six years in prison on charges of conspiracy to murder Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith. Sithole, a leader in a banned black party, denied the charges.… The UCC’s U. S. social-action agency recently backed the “legitimate claims” of black liberation units in Portuguese colonies.

Two American rabbis joined 2,000 Soviet Jews in a seventy-fifth birthday tribute to Moscow’s Chief Rabbi Yehuda Leib Levin, but eight Israeli rabbis declined invitations.

DEATHS

KARL JASPERS, 86, German-born creator of a major strand of existentialist thought which sought a course of “philosophical faith” between the irrationalism of Kierkegaard’s “leap” and Heidegger’s brand of existentialism whose logical outcome many saw in Heidegger’s espousal of Nazism. Jaspers’s anti-Nazism cost him a philosophy chair at Heidelberg, which he regained after the war, then left for a post in Base!, where he died last month.

Southern Presbyterian conservatives claimed a major victory last month when the denomination’s presbyteries voted down measures to permit piecemeal merger with the more liberal United Presbyterians. Hopes rose, meanwhile, for presbytery approval of a plan of union, with the smaller, theologically conservative Reformed Church in America.

The defeated amendments to the Form of Government of the 960,000-member Presbyterian Church in the U. S. would have authorized local presbyteries and regional synods to unite with corresponding units of the 3,–300,000-member United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. Opponents saw the proposals as a backdoor merger plan. A full-fledged effort to bring together the nation’s two biggest Presbyterian bodies was tried in the mid-fifties and failed.

Not all presbyteries have yet voted, but more than enough have already turned down the amendments to assure defeat. President Kenneth S. Keyes of the conservative Concerned Presbyterians hailed the defeat as a sign that “when informed regarding issues which vitally affect the future of the Church, ruling elders as well as ministers will assume their responsibilities and vote their convictions.” Keyes called upon the 1969 General Assembly to follow up the decision by recognizing “the futility of continuing our participation in the Consultation on Church Union.”

The COCU matter is one of a number that complicate the other key question in the current poll of presbyteries: whether Southern Presbyterians should merge with the 377,000-member RCA. With six of the seventy-seven presbyteries still to cast ballots, the vote at the beginning of March stood at 53–18 in favor. An affirmative vote from fifty-eight presbyteries, plus ratification by the General Assembly, is necessary for union.

On the RCA side, a two-thirds vote of the forty-five regional units known as classes is needed for merger. Early returns showed a 9–2 margin for approval.

What considerations are influencing the vote? Among Southern Presbyterians, most observers agree there is no one overriding issue. The most discernible pattern is that presbyteries opposing the RCA merger are clustered in traditionally conservative areas of the Old South (see map).

The voting has produced strange bedfellows, however, and some strongly conservative presbyteries have come out in favor of the merger. A number of liberals, on the other hand, have sided with conservatives who oppose merger. Said one churchman after he had cast his ballot at a presbytery meeting, “That’s the last time we vote together.”

Liberals against the merger feel it will delay and perhaps even prevent union with United Presbyterians or COCU. Some liberals contend that a Southern Presbyterian-RCA union will produce a theology too narrow for them.

Conservatives who oppose the RCA merger point to a much greater assortment of reasons. They fear theological integrity will be sacrificed in the writing of a new confession for the merged church. They are also considerably troubled that the plan of union does away with deacons and lowers ordination standards. Some feel that merger is undesirable because the RCA is relatively small, yet geographically spread out.

In one presbytery that defeated the measure by a very narrow margin, the ministers and laymen voted as separate blocs almost to a man.

An unusual provision in the plan of union that would permit individual congregations to withdraw from the merged denomination after a year’s trial has not had as much effect as many had expected. Congregations at odds with the denominational agencies were expected to jump at the chance to get out. But the strongest objections to the merger are being recorded in presbyteries where conservative dissatisfaction has been acute. Some conservatives are wary of the “escape hatch,” and have voiced concern that legally the move would be too tricky to chance.

Some Southern Presbyterian conservatives obviously see the RCA merger as a means of strengthening their ecclesiastical position. The RCA does not participate in COCU, and a coalition of conservatives could keep the merged church out of it. Both denominations, however, belong to the National and World Councils of Churches.

World Vision’S New Chief

The Rev. W. Stanley Mooneyham, who says his “heart interest” is in the Orient, gained a big chance to do something about it last month when he was named president of the enterprising World Vision International, an evangelical welfare organization having its principal work in the East.

At 43, Mooneyham already has an impressive list of evangelical credentials, among them direction of the big 1966 World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin. After that job his pace was slowed by an ailing heart. But proof that he has fully recovered from that was seen in November when he coordinated the Asia-South Pacific Congress on Evangelism—there undoubtedly laying a good foundation for his service at World Vision, which begins July 1.

Currently overseas vice-president of the Billy Graham team, Mooneyham early in his career became the youngest moderator of the Free Will Baptists. Since then he has also been editor of United Evangelical Action of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Concord At Concordia?

Student protest came in a big way to the world’s biggest Lutheran seminary, Concordia at St. Louis. During an assembly last month, the more than 600 students voted to ask the fifty-five teachers and administrators to call a three-day moratorium on classes to join with students to discuss grievances.

The moratorium was held off one week, then called despite some strenuous faculty objections. On opening day seminary President Alfred Fuerbringer and two students laid down guidelines for the two dozen “buzz sessions” at a general meeting: no holds barred, no forbidden subjects, but a confrontation between Christian brothers.

Students considered more than 100 resolutions, adopted twenty-five, and kept the others for further study. They called for sweeping top-to-bottom changes in seminary program and structure. The faculty agreed to consider the ideas, implement as many as possible now and others later, and present valid reasons if recommendations aren’t followed.

Students think too many courses have “no current relevance or practical application,” too many courses are required, and too few electives are allowed. There is little chance for small-group guided research, they say. Also, faculty salaries are so small that some teachers moonlight to make ends meet and are not available to students for counseling. Students themselves hope to start an endowment fund to hike pay and to solicit funds from families, friends, and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which owns and runs the school.

The students also expressed strong preference for pass/fail grading in place of the “unfair and inhuman” system of A,B,C,D,F. The third-year student internships under a parish pastor may be broadened to include such alternatives as the Urban Training Center in Chicago.

When it was all over, Missouri Synod President Oliver R. Harms said, “We have had a fine Christian confrontation at Concordia, and when the membership of the church at large knows the facts, they will approve of what has been done here.” He said some student proposals would be implemented, some “tabled indefinitely.” Fourth-year student David Yagow said students won’t let the proposals “lie in somebody’s basket to die,” and the seminarians hope for regular dialogues with the faculty.

Second-year student Richard Koehneke commented, “I feel that a paternalistic system, by which the seminary was operated, has apparently been replaced by a fraternalistic system, and I am encouraged by the progress we have made—though I wish it might have been more.”

Neither students nor faculty have issued threats to date. But the students have made it clear that if a substantial number of their demands are not met they will be heard from again.

CHARLES M. BUNCE

Strike At Stillman

The wave of student disorder moved into the Deep South last month, landing at Presbyterian-related Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

At the heart of the furor, said President Harold N. Stinson of the predominantly Negro college, is an attempt by the militant Black Student Alliance to gain control of the student body from the student government association. “We have noted a great deal of missionary work being done by the BSA,” said Stinson.

This, coupled with whatever movement there was beneath the surface, sparked a subsequent boycott of classes and a student strike. Students presented Stinson with fifteen demands, including:

Firing of a security officer who wounded a student during Thanksgiving holidays and was later transferred to the maintenance department; dismissal or reprimanding of certain faculty members; hiring of at least one professor with a doctoral degree in every department; hiring of more instructors; inclusion of students on faculty evaluation committees; improvement of living quarters and food services; relaxed rules on dormitories and off-campus living; a Negro faculty counselor; and amnesty for all students in the boycott.

This disorder came to a head when students took over the administration building. They left for a Friday-night basketball game on campus. But before the game could begin, a large number of students sat on the gymnasium floor, and the game was canceled. For an inexplicable reason, the students did not return to the administration building.

Stinson officially closed the college Sunday morning and gave students until 1 P.M. the following day to leave the campus. But days later more than fifty students were still occupying the student center.

In November, Stillman got approval from the General Council of the Southern Presbyterian Church to launch a $2.25 million capital-improvement fund drive sometime this year.

In Birmingham, the 325 students at African Methodist-related Daniel Payne College also launched a boycott of classes February 25 over problems they said they would not reveal because they might injure staff reputations. Students say if their demands aren’t met, things “will get a little more dramatic.” The college is in the midst of relocation plans to make way for city airport expansion.

WALLACE HENLEY

Moody Church’S Survival Plan

Most congregations aim their message at a hom*ogenous public: rich, poor, or middle; black, white, or yellow. With a little wit and a lot of prayer, a comfortable method can usually be devised to reach that public, and the pastor and staff are home free.

It used to be that way at famed Moody Memorial Church, a vast pile of brick and mortar on Chicago’s Near North Side. It was established smack in the middle of a then-prosperous middle-class neighborhood. They loved the gospel message of such greats as Dwight L. Moody himself, Torrey, Rader, Philpott, and Ironside.

For today’s pastor, 44-year-old George Sweeting, little is easy in the church’s pantheon of ministries. Time and change have eroded the old public and washed up five new ones, each playing hard-to-get:

• Tenants of rather luxurious high-rise apartments built by urban-renewal benificence.

• The rapidly growing Negro population in public housing, locale of some violent rioting in the past year.

• Young junior executives and secretaries who live (sometimes together) in high-rises or renovated walkups.

• A few old-timers who moved to the suburbs when these revolutions were beginning a few years ago and have returned to work (but not live) where the action is.

• Old Town, which stretches around the church with its far-out night spots and its mixed bag of tourist and suburbanite visitors, pot-smokers, artists, entertainers, and alienated youth.

Sweeting, who succeeded the Rev. Alan Redpath two years ago, has designs on all five publics but so far has programs only for the first four.

“We have had to go slowly, keeping experiments at a minimum, until the church can be built up further. Later, when a solid base of attendance, membership, and finance is established, we will be able to try many new things, whether they work or not.”

But if Sweeting hadn’t tried something the church might be dark and desolate by now. Sunday-evening evangelistic services drew as few as 250 persons to a sanctuary that seats 4,250. Now the typical evening attendance is 1,500, and membership has climbed to 1,700.

Sweeting’s first innovation was no eyebrow-raiser and a bit corny, a church slogan and attitude: “Where old-fashioned friendliness survives.” Apparently folksiness catches on in the lonely city.

The church vowed “to have everything really top-drawer. Mediocrity was out.” It kept the teaching-evangelistic balance with Sunday-morning Bible messages followed by evening evangelism with various forms of invitations to receive Christ.

To crack the high-rise barrier (doormen are polite to pastors but give them the same treatment as tradesmen), the church rented a directory from a mail-order advertiser. Each week it mails out 200 or so soft-sell notices about the church, drawing maybe a dozen responses. One who replied, a 27-year-old engineer who had left his family, later professed faith and now sings in the choir.

For 170 young adults, there are clubs, and evening biblical discussions on topics like Viet Nam, civil disobedience, the Playboy philosophy, and the pros and cons of Sweeting’s sermons.

The church has only a dozen black members (there were just two when Sweeting came), but close to a fourth of the 850 Sunday school students are black. Sweeting thinks many white inner-city churches that feel they can’t have a big Sunday school are really afraid of blacks. “I think our church is prepared to accept more Negroes, though not everyone feels that way, I’m sure.” But with board backing he preaches for an inclusive congregation, with James 2:9 as text.

One problem: blacks in public housing are as hard to reach by visitation as white cliffhangers. “They tell me that in the past the only whites who came were those trying to collect bills or reclaim TV sets.”

For Old Town, Sweeting envisions “a select, trained group capable of communicating” with the types there. One asset is his interest in art. He has in his background a year of study at the Art Institute of Chicago, along with more predictable educational credentials from Moody Bible Institute, Gordon College, Northern Baptist Seminary, Biblical Seminary in New York, and New York University. Sweeting has been a pastor in Hawthorne, Passaic, and Paterson, New Jersey, and spent a decade as a traveling evangelist.

Now he hopes to help Moody Church again chart the way for evangelicals caught in the throes of a changing city. The prospect is frightening, but can be fruitful.

WESLEY HARTZELL

‘Black Power’ In Asia

Black power, often linked with racial hatred in the United States, is taking on an altogether different hue in Asia—at least the type of black power evangelist Robert Emanuel Harrison is promoting. Instead of incensing men, it teaches them to love one another. Harrison’s appeal is attracting crowds of up to 20,000 persons. Even in Surabaja, a Muslim city of two million that hadn’t seen a public evangelist since 1935, some 2,000 Indonesians made decisions for Christ.

Everywhere scarfaced (he was quite a street fighter as a kid) Harrison preaches, yellow-and brown-skinned Asians warm up to him. If it’s not the preaching that wins them over, it’s his singing talent. Few can resist his inimitable style in singing Negro folk songs and spirituals. Here, the big, athletic black man reaches them in the heart, singing and telling it like it is.

“Bob,” as they call him, can’t tell it any other way. He hates phoniness, and people sense it. As one observer put it, “He likes anyone who acts like himself.”

The ten-year veteran of evangelism, who was preacher—choir director—janitor at a small evangelical church in California before meeting Billy Graham in 1958, rose quickly from then on as an evangelist. He held his first city-wide campaign in Germany, where he was a curiosity. After he made evangelistic sallies into most of the European countries, Graham signed him up as a member of his team. Six years later, Harrison went with Overseas Crusades. He has attracted huge crowds in nearly every Asian country from Japan to Viet Nam, and in Oceania’s archipelagos. In the Philippines he has a large television audience.

Harrison wants Asians to develop a spiritual power of their own. He realizes that his dark skin puts him across much better than white skin would, and he knows Asians and the islanders can do a forceful job among their own if they will take up the task. To help this along, he is mapping seminars and long-range evangelism strategy.

Music opens Asia’s hearts, and Harrison is moving to develop local talent for Christ’s cause. Asians, he feels, have a keen aptitude for music, and this must be harnessed for the ministry.

For whatever reasons, the San Franciscan who once fought going into the ministry packs a lot of power. His message, coming from a black man not very different from Asians, attracts attention and empathy among the continent’s suffering and needy millions.

EUSTAQUIO RAMIENTOS, JR.

Defusing Church Disputes

Using the recent Blue Hull Memorial Presbyterian Church decision (see February 14 issue) as its springboard, the U. S. Supreme Court flipped touchy church-property cases back to Ohio and Maryland courts, telling them to abandon their earlier rulings and keep hands off internal church affairs.

The Maryland and Virginia Eldership of the Churches of God asked relief from a state ruling giving control of church property to two breakaway churches. Maryland ruled the majority of a congregation is entitled to own, use, and control local church property when it votes to withdraw from the mother church. Even though a denomination may be hierarchical in structure, Maryland law vests the title to property in local assemblies, not the denomination.

In Akron, St. Demetrius Serbian Orthodox Church refused to accept the bishop designated by the mother church in Yugoslavia, bolted, and by majority vote laid claim to the property. The Ohio court said the Akronites were in schism—although the mother church had not yet gone that far—and ruled in favor of the parent body. The dissidents claimed Ohio had no right to pass judgment on what constitutes schism.

So, too, the Supreme Court. But now that the state ruling has been ordered vacated, the mother church may be able to make good her insistence that the dissidents vacate the church also.

Since churches use different time tables and computation methods, denominational records are not always the most reliable source on what is going on in the Church. But as reports filter in on membership, programs, and finances, evidence mounts that theologically liberal and politically activist denominations are in a period of crisis—not yet major, but growing.

The important fundamentalist and evangelical groups, in contrast, show marked upturns in membership, in finances, and particularly in missionary outreach. Mormons continue rapid growth. So do Roman Catholics (now 47.5 million strong—up 31.7 per cent in ten years), but they still are vexed with depleting educational funds.

The total religious membership gain for the year was less than half a per cent, reaching 126,445,110, or 63.2 per cent of the 1968 population. The 1967 ratio was 64.4 per cent of the population, which means churches aren’t keeping up with the nation’s growth.

Among the major denominations, Episcopalians, United Presbyterians, and Methodists appear to have much of the trouble. For the second year in a row, the Episcopal Church has had to make up deficits caused by undergiving. Less has been pledged this year.

Last month, Bishop Stephen Bayne told the Episcopal Executive Council, “This does not mean the end of the world,” but he qualified the veiled optimism: “We are facing unprecedented problems—unprecedented, at any rate, in our time. To have ten of our eighty-seven continental dioceses unable to meet their commitments in a given year is unprecedented. For our eighty-seven dioceses to pledge less for 1969 than they paid in 1968 is unprecedented.”

As a number of denominational leaders are saying lately, there is no easy diagnosis. “White backlash, resentment of unpopular decisions, a general mood of suspicion of ecclesiastical institutions, uncertainty as to the role of the Church in society, uncertainty as to the reality of the Christian faith, distrust of changes, lack of understanding of what the Church is doing, lack of common agreement as to the Church’s mission—all these enter into the problem, and all these must be faced,” Bayne said.

United Presbyterians nosedived in their giving for the general mission of the church, down by $1.3 million from 1967—the most sizable drop since the Depression. Translated into practical terms, this means sixty retiring missionaries won’t be replaced and the education staff has been cut by ten. It means spending at an inflated 1969 level on a 1963-level budget.

Stewardship Secretary Winburn T. Thomas interpreted an upturn in contributions in the denomination’s program for relief offerings (Biafra) and race relations as a sign of a marked change in the pattern of giving. But the ongoing ministry of the church gets even less, as he put it, “where it is the weakest.” What it also means, probably, is that the activists and the laissez-faire conservative forces have become more polarized: the conservatives hold back funds, while the activists direct them toward pet projects.

Fifty-nine Protestant groups reporting to the National Council of Churches for its 1969 Yearbook of American Churches got $3.6 billion in contributions, up $3.5 million over 1967. This, however, did not offset inflation, nor did it coincide with bigger take-home pay. While most theologically liberal churches showed losses or remained static, many conservative groups showed vitality, nearly all above the $73.95 per member giving recorded by the bulk of Protestantism (see box). Many fundamentalist splinter sects, however, have poor giving records. Of the bigger denominations, Seventh-day Adventists led with $315.62 per member.

Building slowed down—Southern Baptists by $25 million—according to Department of Commerce figures, although this is tempered by the fact that the previous fiscal year set an all-time high of $1.17 billion. Fiscal 1967’s total was 6.9 per cent lower, at $1.09 billion. Tight money and church crash programs for the poor account for the building slowdown.

Forty-nine per cent of members go to church at least once a week—not as high as ten years ago, but considerably higher than in the forties and fifties.

Episcopalians and Southern Baptists have shown appreciable drops in Sunday-school attendance. Methodists, while showing church membership gains since 1930, “have gradually ground to a halt and for several years have been trailing behind population growth,” laments former Indiana Bishop Richard C. Raines. Methodist giving is near the bottom among major denominations ($64.61 per member). Raines said “such a record would have caused a shakeup in administration” if it happened in business or education.

Although 350 Methodist clergymen retired or resigned last year, Episcopalians and their Anglican counterparts in Great Britain also are having leadership problems. Southern Presbyterians, too, have had fewer seminary graduates entering parish or church-related ministries. Southern Baptists report that more than 10,000 of their pastors hold other full-or part-time jobs.

A real problem may be in the making for Episcopalians. Although there are 11,362 Episcopal clergymen, baptisms fell to their lowest since 1947 and confirmations are at their lowest since 1955. Future problems in leadership are suggested by a sharp drop in ordinations to the diaconate (down 11 per cent) and to the priesthood (down 9 per cent). Attractions of specialized and non-parochial ministries might account for part of this, but one editorial indicated “a lack of unanimity on our priorities” might be the clincher.

By contrast, the 465,000-member Church of the Nazarene is riding high with a budget ($6 million) twice what it was ten years ago. Nearly 80 per cent of this goes to foreign missions.

It is in missions that the conservative churches and likeminded independent forces are making their biggest contributions. Of the top fifteen sending agencies (see box), most show strong conservative theological leanings. The same is true of the myriad smaller boards.

During the first eight years of the sixties, missionary activity increased far out of proportion to other church programs. Income for all American and Canadian agencies went from 1960’s $170 million to an impressive $299 million last year—a 75 per cent rise. The rate of inflation, meanwhile, was 20 per cent. Agencies affiliated with the Canadian and National Councils of Churches fared well in their efforts, even though their percentage of the overseas force is down to 32, compared to 38 eight years ago and 43.5 fourteen years ago, when the start of a big shift became noticeable. Their income went from $92 million to $127 million. Thus, for 32 per cent of the personnel, they have 42.5 per cent of the funds.

The United States and Canada send 33,270 Protestant missionaries, with the two national councils accounting for 10,930—up 670 from 1960. Almost all the other increase is in fundamentalist-evangelical groups such as Evangelical Foreign Missions Association and the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, which foster 13,500 missionaries.

Independent boards account for more than half the increase of 6,051 personnel since 1960, and now count 8,406 in their ranks.

The United Church of Christ is evolving away from the didactic and spiritual mission functions to the boosting of economic programs. A new investment program will help in abetting the gains. Methodists are looking in much the same direction.

Although some statistics appear static, big church changes are under way.

Nevada ‘Marriage Industry’

Couples who pay a $1 marriage license fee to any Nevada county clerk may no longer need the ceremonial services of a preacher or judge. That is the gist of legislative proposal SB 81, backed by virtually all of Nevada’s clergymen.

Prime mover of the bill is Deputy Attorney General Don Winne, 38, a Methodist and president of the Nevada Council of Churches. He predicts two benefits: improved images of the Church and of marriage.

Rector Henry Jesse of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Reno traced the measure to the “degrading operations of self-ordained wedding-chapel profiteers” and the “uncomfortable clergy role as [marriage] officer of the state.” The couple can still have a religious ceremony if they want it, he noted. They simply arrive at the church already married in secular eyes.

A spokesman for Episcopal Bishop William G. Wright said he hopes it is “the start of a national movement.”

“The churches and chapels should have the integrity to do away with the clever ruses that encourage people to enter when they would not otherwise choose to do so,” editorialized the Carson City Appeal. It concluded that justices of the peace should again be judges instead of “marriage brokers” (some reportedly earn over $100,000 annually in fees).

In urging legislators not to heed opposition from Clark County (Las Vegas) justices and the chapel operators, the paper assured them that the move “will not interfere with Nevada’s marriage industry.”

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Presto—A Million Ministers

California Attorney General Thomas Lynch has declared war on Universal Life Church minister-maker Kirby J. Hensley, 57, who is delighted with the action. Hensley, arrested on charges of illegally dispensing honorary Doctor of Divinity degrees, hopes to take his case to the U. S. Supreme Court. The publicity en route, Hensley says, will help accomplish his five-year goal of “ordaining” one million “ministers.”

The ULC—America’s biggest little church—operates out of a ramshackle garage in Modesto, California. Seldom do more than fifteen persons (mostly relatives) show up for Sunday-morning discussions, but since 1962 Hensley has ordained more than 20,000 mail-order applicants. Business has been brisk since he gained recent national news attention. He makes no charge for ordination certificates, though “love offerings” are often enclosed.

The honorary degree is sent with a series of ten lessons costing twenty dollars. Whether he is serious or just lucratively lampooning the establishment is anybody’s guess. Conceivably, the certificates could be used to gain clergy benefits.

Born of devout Baptists, the semiliterate Hensley was ordained by an independent Baptist church in North Carolina. He later tried Pentecostalism (“I liked the getting turned on part but not the supernatural takeover or authoritarians parts”), then worked his way through several cults while devising his own brand of back-woodsy humanism blended with epicureanism, pantheism, and reincarnationism.

Nobody has a corner on theological knowledge, he will claim in his forthcoming book Heaven Here Now. He reckons Billy Graham “is always laying his egg in somebody else’s nest.” But Graham’s day is over, he asserts, and the day of Hensley has dawned.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

The Vatican Issue Again

“Don’t do it, Mr. President!” an Americans United ad warned. Appended were signatures of a potpourri of worried Protestants from Andover Newton’s James Adams to the National Association of Evangelicals’ Clyde Taylor. Then the Southern Baptist Executive Committee issued its own statement. All enjoin Richard Nixon not to let them down by committing the biggest diplomatic faux pas conceivable to church-state separatists: recognition of the Vatican.

Columnist Marquis Childs spurred the current phobia, and others read their own conclusions into Nixon’s planned visit with the Pope. President Kennedy scotched the recurring phobia early by declaring strongly against recognition; Nixon has played it mum. The question has flamed anew with each change of administration in Washington since President Franklin Roosevelt’s hotly debated recognition entrees and a more brazen, poorly executed approach by Harry Truman.

Canada’s Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, overt in his Vatican intentions, has brought sharp reaction from Protestants, especially Lutherans. New Democratic (Socialist) Party leader T. C. Douglas, a Baptist preacher, scored the Liberal government plan. In the States, West Coast Seventh-day Adventists said recognition would relegate non-Catholics “to second-class status.”

Religious News Service’s man in Rome, Jesuit Robert A. Graham, thinks that any recognition overtures will have to come from Nixon: the Vatican was not overly pleased with the “arrangements of convenience” under Roosevelt and Truman.

Lesser Of Two Evils

Free Presbyterian Church preacher Ian Paisley, on leave from jail, nearly made the Catholic-Protestant tinderbox of Northern Ireland go aflame last month as Prime Minister Terence O’Neill narrowly averted an election upset. Paisley, with boosts from Bob Jones, Jr., and the American Council of Christian Churches, capitalized distrust of Catholics, and even though the Presbyterian Church of Ireland does not recognize him—they say Paisley “stole our good name”—many of them voted for him.

O’Neill, of the recognized Presbyterian body, had his hands full because he espoused a more tolerant stance toward Catholics, many of whom want to reunite with Ireland. Despite their dislike of O’Neill, many Catholics chose him as the lesser of two evils.

In an eleventh-hour performance, Jones described the “fumes of hell” to Paisley’s congregation and donated $1,000 toward a “flashy” national Church. Paisley, whose fiery style incited countrymen to riot against Catholics and landed him in jail for three months, had earlier been awarded an honorary doctorate from Bob Jones University.

For almost a decade now Christian scholars interested in theology have been taking soundings of the religious scene. The giant ship Oikoumene has run into doctrinally shallow waters; for so long have her ecumenical steersmen put mission ahead of truth, momentum ahead of direction, that the World Church, so-called, finds herself adrift from the high sea of universal truth and swept off course by the shifting winds of modernity. Few ecclesiastical interpreters would venture to say just where the institutional church is now traveling, in relation to either the supernatural realm of biblical faith or the history of our times.

In 1962, when a group of Anglican theologians published the small volume Soundings (Cambridge University Press), the book’s editor, Dr. A. R. Vidler of King’s College, Cambridge, remarked by way of introduction that “it is a time for making soundings, not charts or maps.… We can best serve the cause of truth and of the Church by candidly confessing where our perplexities lie, and not by making claims which, so far as we can see, theologians are not at present in a position to justify.”

The sixth decade of this century has almost run out, but many ecumenical theologians—not only in England, but also in the United States, throughout Europe, and even in Asia—are still taking the pulse of the contemporary world. Soundings in its annual reprints still carries the widely held verdict: “Our task is to try to see what the questions are that we ought to be facing in the nineteen-sixties.… The authors of this volume cannot persuade themselves that the time is ripe for major works of theological construction or reconstruction.” Today the decks are crowded with theological navigators who admit that the Church may be not only in dire trouble but actually in danger of being beached and stranded.

This plight recalls another occasion of soundings, when Paul, hoping to plead his case before Caesar, was on board a Mediterranean vessel caught by headwinds. “For a good many days,” Luke reports, “we made little headway, and we were hard put to it to reach Cnidus” (Acts 27:7, NEB). Soon the ship began “hugging the coast” and “struggled on” to a place where—even though “by now much time had been lost”—the Great Apostle warned that it would be “disastrous” to continue, for it would mean “grave loss, loss not only of ship and cargo but also of life.”

Now I must say that I am not addicted to allegorical interpretation of Scripture; the last thing I would want any reader to infer is that God arranged a first-century shipwreck off the island of Malta to warn the Twentieth-century church against theological vacillation. Warnings against deserting the apostolic faith are plain enough in the New Testament that no one needs the help of allegories to make the point.

But I am interested in the Acts narrative because, when things worsened (a “‘Northeaster’ … tore down from the landward side” and “caught the ship” in its fury), the sailors were driven to taking soundings. They lightened the vessel by jettisoning her gear in “very heavy weather.” “For days on end there was no sign of either sun or stars, a great storm was raging, and our last hopes of coming through alive began to fade.” On the fourteenth night they were “still drifting” when, in the middle of the night, the sailors suspected they were dangerously near land. We read, “They sounded and found twenty fathoms. Sounding again after a short interval they found fifteen fathoms.” With that turn of things, even the pagans on board would suddenly get interested in the Ground of All Being.

There is, of course, abundant reason today for making soundings. The twentieth-century world is drifting, and only God knows where. Where are the nations headed? Where will science take us? What is happening to marriage and the home? Where are literature and television going from here? What is the future of Communism? Will the United States be a second-rate power by 1990? And, closer home for the Christian theologian, has the institutional church finally had it? Will the crisis in theology be overcome, or will Christianity fall victim to modern secularization?

Religious literature today reverberates with soundings. Thomas Altizer professes to have held an autopsy on God and pronounces him dead. James Pike claims to have talked with an invisible spirit world and reassures us that something out there is alive. John Robinson declares that what’s “up there” is no longer “in” here. And Paul Tillich insisted that what’s “down under” is it, not he. Karl Barth reported a clap of thunder in the Swiss alps that echoed personally right from heaven. Rudolf Bultmann said it sounded more like a rumble in man’s heart. Harvey Cox thinks he sees God standing on a picket line in the secular city. Small wonder that Cambridge professor Donald MacKinnon in his new book Borderlands of Theology, alludes to “the purveyors of dubious apologetic wares for the edification of Church congresses and ecumenical gatherings.”

Theologians who are taking soundings find the great ship Oikoumene still in danger of being cast ashore on a rugged coast, or of being trapped between crosscurrents. Some think the vessel has already run aground, its bow stuck fast and its stern being pounded to pieces by the breakers. Not a few passengers are jumping overboard, forsaking the non-terrestrial life for safe footing in the secular city. Others are clinging to wreckage of the ship and going it alone, certain that corporate Christianity—both Christendom and the institutional church—has had its day, that ecumenical Christianity in the conciliar sense has spent its force; if Christianity has an immediate future, they feel, it will be as the church in the home. Others think that the present ecclesiastical nightmare has a brighter day-after-tomorrow, even if this means that tomorrow the Christian task force may be temporarily grounded and imprisoned in Rome. For still others, Rome offers no safer haven than a cold windswept island whose warming firewood hides a serpent.

Is there nowhere in all this some confident soul to discern that the Living God is yet near, to declare that authentic hope can and will ride out every storm? Where is a voice to say, what few ecumenical steersmen want to hear, that this ship may in fact go down? And to say what everybody needs to hear: that nevertheless we can—if we meet the conditions—all get to shore safely?

To deny that Christ’s Church is invincible is to disown Jesus as Lord. But when it is theoretically and spiritually off course, the Church as a cultural phenomenon has no built-in guarantee of survival. Neither the chaos in culture nor the crisis in the Church is ecumenically manageable. Ask the once flourishing Christian community in North Africa that had even Augustine in its ranks.

If in our time faith is precarious, in our day also return to the true and unchanging Object of faith is indispensable. It may already be much too late for soundings.

Stop Rapidly, Go Soothingly

An English police chief has pointed out that traffic offenders are not now treated so severely as when Sennacherib was king of Assyria. That resourceful monarch placed no-parking signs along the processional way to Nineveh, with the inscription: “Royal road, let no man lessen it.” Offending charioteers were slain and impaled on a stake in front of their own dwellings.

The Japanese, a remarkable people whose prime ministers have views on wife-beating, bring their own politeness to the same vexed problem. Spurning archaic references to a postilion struck by lightning, they offer today’s travelers a traffic manual, claiming to be in English, which should be required reading in these United States. “At the rise of a hand from a policeman,” it says, “stop rapidly. Do not pass him or otherwise disrespect him.” (Chicagoans may find this helpful.) “When a passenger of the foot hove in sight, tootle the horn trumpet … with vigor and express by word of mouth the warning, ‘Hi, Hi.’ Beware of the wandering horse that he shall not take fright as you pass him. Go soothingly by, or stop by the roadside till he pass away.… Doesn’t that do your heart good, bringing as it does courtesy into an area where it is not normally found?

It’s odd how the secular boys often get these things more in perspective than those who profess to speak the truth in love when neither truth nor love is easily discernible. The poet Dryden had strong views on the subject. “I won’t say that the zeal of God’s house has eaten him up,” he remarked of a certain bishop, “but it has taken away a large part of his good manners and civility.” By contrast there was the character in Sheridan’s The Rivals who awarded the ultimate accolade: “He is the very pineapple of politeness.” I could think of worse epitaphs.

Discourtesy seems, alas, a necessary adjunct to a certain sort of evangelical endeavor. A medical friend once told me feelingly how the main street of his small town used to empty in the most astonishing way at the appearance on the scene of the local pastor’s spouse, a lady of impeccable life and insufferable zeal. My friend cited with relish a remark made to him by a fellow citizen who had not been spry enough to elude Mrs. Pastor in proselytizing mood. “Oh dear, Doctor,” she sighed, “I do so much hate being worked amongst.”

I hazard the guess that Sennacherib of Assyria would have known just how to deal with such lesseners of the royal road.

Archaeology And Silence

Kudos to Edwin Yamauchi for his carefully documented study of erstwhile externally unconfirmed biblical historical statements (Feb. 14). He has reminded us again how fragmentary is the archaeological evidence that we possess and how unscientific is the tactic of argumentum a silentio that we often use. Material of this type needs to be called to the attention of both lay and professional students of the Bible.

Let’s have more of the same.

Associate Professor

Bethel Theological Seminary

St. Paul, Minn.

Student On Students

Your editorial “The Student Revolution” (Feb. 14) was both inaccurate and misleading.… Your conclusion that “the student war is being fought by a small minority of irrational revolutionists” is wrong on several accounts: (1) Surveys of student leaders active in protest movements show them to be more “intellectually oriented” than the mass of students. (2) These leaders have the sympathy if not active support of a large number of students (witness the large turnout of students protesting on the Madison campus). (3) The plethora of articles about student unrest point to two central social issues—violence abroad and racism at home—and two campus issues—educational irrelevance and autocratic administration—as the causes Of student unrest. You fail to mention any of these issues.

Aside from your failure to present the issues we students face on campus, the most distressing aspect of your editorial is the nature of your response to a social and educational issue. You speak of students as “threat” and of the danger of concessions but nothing of ways of creative change within the system to meet legitimate demands. I suspect the reason students act is because those of us in the evangelical church are silent or reactionary in the face of social injustice and educational dehumanization.

Eugene, Ore.

It was a disappointment to have you overstate a case, in however small a way, in order to prove a point. I refer to the opening paragraph of “The Student Revolution”.…

Not “buildings” [at Swarthmore] but part of one floor of one building was occupied, surely a significant difference to those involved. Nor does the word “violence” apply to the demonstration at Swarthmore. A letter signed by the chairman of the board of managers and by the acting president includes this sentence: “The occupation had disrupted the work of the Admissions Office but no violence was involved and no records were disturbed or property damaged.”

One need not condone campus demonstrations in order to want accurate reporting about them.

Drexel Hill, Pa.

Rational Stand

I do thank you for printing Dr. Elton Trueblood’s fine article “Rational Christianity” (Feb. 14). In my own modest publications I have long been struggling to maintain just this vital stand, but one often seems to be swimming against the tide. It is encouraging to find oneself in company with a first-rate authority.

Associate Professor of

Church History

Candler School of Theology

Emory University

Atlanta, Ga.

On A First Issue

I have received my first issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY (Feb. 14).… Your theological “bias” is troublesome and foreign to me.… I am, nevertheless, open and receptive, and wish to follow Truth wherever “it goes”; and your pages do contain rays of truth. I must reject, however, your editorial regarding anti-Semitism.

Here you state that “God has had a special hand upon the Jews.… In some sense they continue to be his special people.” You are, as my high-school students are wont to tell me, “way off base.” … If anti-Semitism is repugnant, and I believe that it is, this repugnance is based upon the principle of equality before God of all men and women.

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Publishing Prayers

Thank you very much for publishing the 1969 Protestant Inaugural prayers (Feb. 14). Now, how about publishing the prayers of the other clergy who participated in the Inaugural ceremonies? This would be most appropriate and in keeping with the religious spirit of today. The Inaugural prayer of Archbishop Iakovos is particularly worthy of publication. I believe that it was the most moving and profound of all the prayers offered, and it avoided the temptations of lobbying God, preaching in prayer, and over-praiseworthy phrases of the other prayers.

The Methodist Church

Berkeley Springs, W.Va.

The Religious Pulse

“What Is the Gospel?” by L. Nelson Bell (Feb. 14) came to my desk at the right time. I was looking for something such as this for my next sermon.

I like your magazine because you give us the truth, the latest in religious review. You are like the M.D. who holds the pulse, counting the heartbeat of the religious world.

Fillmore, Calif.

Absolving Absolution

Julius Mantey’s article, “What of Priestly Absolution?” (Jan. 31), shows a good understanding of the New Testament which, unfortunately, does not carry over to the knowledge of the Catholic (whether Roman, Anglican, Orthodox, or other) teaching about sacramental or priestly absolution.

This doctrine in fact corresponds directly to Dr. Mantey’s exegesis of John 20:23 (and the Matthaean passages fall into line with this), for the priestly absolution is an authoritative declaration of God’s forgiveness of sins under those circ*mstances (i. e. repentance and faith) where the Scriptures assure us that this forgiveness is available. That the absolution is only this, and not an attempt to “determine the policies of heaven,” is made clear by the form of the declaration, which limits the authority of the Church (and her priestly representative) to those “sinners who truly repent and believe in Him.” Further, should there be some doubt as to the penitent’s actual faith or repentance the priest is directed to make this condition explicit in counseling or, with more serious doubts, to delay absolution.…

There is one relevant passage which is passed over in the article: Second Corinthians 2:5–11 describes an incident where Paul calls upon the Church to restore a sinner to their fellowship, adding that he (Paul) forgives this sinner “in the presence of Christ,” which at least suggests that the Apostle is talking about something which resembles absolution as we know it today.…

The article is quite right in holding that a doctrine of priestly absolution in which such a formula either (a) replaces or (b) forces the divine forgiveness of sins is indefensible. The author errs, however, in assuming that sacramental absolution claims to do either of these, or anything other than declare and make present God’s remission of sins as mediated by the one, “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice” of Jesus Christ.

(THE REV.) WM. D. LORING

Jamaica, N. Y.

Timely Confrontation

I am especially grateful for the very timely and well-written editorial on “A Better Way to Confront Poverty?” (Jan. 31). I thought it was excellently stated and greatly needed in this hour.

Royal Haven Baptist Church

Dallas, Tex.

I am in wholehearted agreement with the thrust of the editorial, but the statement, “High taxation necessitated by welfare statism is one factor contributing to inflation,” is not accurate. It would be more accurate to say that “high spending associated with welfare statism.…” It is a well-accepted economic reality that high taxation is a deflationary tool in the hands of the government.

West Lafayette, Ind.

Wrong Song

CHRISTIANITY TODAY for November 8 has just arrived here. I have read with great astonishment the protesting letter of Eugene L. Smith in which he lists Rev. C. S. Song, principal of Taiwan Theological College of the Presbyterian Church of Formosa, among churchmen he calls “conservative evangelicals.” Song is well-known here as a universalist who disbelieves in hell and eternal punishment, and believes all will be saved.

Taipei, Taiwan

There has been a great deal of confusion about the mission of the Church and the responsibility of individual Christians in regard to political, social, and economic involvement. A popular sport in some circles has been that of berating the evangelical wing of Christendom as though it had no social conscience, and as though it advocated Christian non-involvement in the problems of Caesar’s kingdom. This idea has embedded itself solidly in the thinking of some critics of evangelical Christianity and will not easily be dispelled in closed minds. But it has no substantial foundation in fact.

It seems to some of us that, for those who are really seeking the truth, the problem arises largely from a failure to understand the distinction evangelicals make between what the Church as Church ought to do and what Christians, as members both of God’s kingdom and of Caesar’s kingdom, ought to do. Evangelicals emphatically affirm that there are some things individual Christians cannot and ought not to do because these things are within the sphere of the Church’s mission. Likewise evangelicals insist that there are some activities that fall within the compass of individual Christian responsibility and are not part of the mission of the Church as Church.

Baptism, for example, obviously belongs to the Church. Individual Christians have neither the biblical basis nor the personal right to go about baptizing people, no matter how strongly they feel that people ought to be baptized. Baptism is a function of the Church, not of the individual Christian. So also with the sacrament or ordinance of the Lord’s Supper; this belongs to the Church, not to the individual Christian.

Ordination to the gospel ministry is a church function, too. Whether one considers it necessary for a bishop to lay hands on the candidate in episcopal form or whether one follows the Baptist practice in which the congregation ordains the candidate, this much is clear: Ordination does not fall within the sphere of activity belonging to the individual Christian.

Discipline, too, is a church, not an individual, responsibility. A member of any church who assumes this function acts unbiblically and thus wrongly.

On the other hand, there are some activities that the Church as Church should avoid. They belong to Christians, who have a dual citizenship as members of God’s kingdom and of Caesar’s kingdom. Let it be said as strongly as possible that evangelicals believe that Christians, as members of Caesar’s kingdom, ought to be involved in the affairs of Caesar’s kingdom. They have the duty as well as the right to work to influence the political structures and to speak out on socio-economic issues. They should be deeply concerned about the problems of poverty, race, labor unions, war, the draft. No area of human need lies outside the realm of Christian responsibility. Indeed, believers should be more concerned than unbelievers because they are constrained by the love of Christ for men everywhere.

The Church as Church has no mandate to get involved in these socio-political matters. But it is the duty of Christians to do so. Immediately the question is pressed home (and it is a good one): What is wrong with corporate action? Why can’t Christians get together and do as a church what they are supposed to do as individuals?

The answer to this question should be plain to all. There is nothing wrong with Christians’ banding together to do as a group what they would do as individuals. If Christians want to form labor unions, they are free to do so. If they want to start a Coalition of Christian Students for Academic Liberty and Responsibility, they have a right to do this. If they want to organize an Association for the Alleviation of Poverty, they can do so. If they wish to start a new political party and call it the Christian Demo-republican Association, no one should object. But this is a far cry from corporate action by the Church as Church. Individual Christians or Christians banding together can do what the Church does not have the right to do, and what ought not to be done in the name of the Church. If they do these things because they believe that Christians ought to do them, they may be wrong in their judgments, but they are right in declaring their freedom under God to act. It is possible for Christians to believe that they ought to go out on a strike or engage in legal picketing. Others may believe they should oppose striking or picketing. Whether these views are right or wrong remains to be seen. But for either group to assume its stand in the name of the Church is wrong.

In American political life, multitudes of Christians have served God and Caesar as best they know how. As Christians they sought to enunciate their Christian principles in the legislative halls, in the courts, and in the administration of the government. But they did so as Christians and not in the name of the Church. Christian businessmen have been deeply involved in the political processes as Democrats or Republicans and have supported the candidates of their parties as they have felt led to do so. But not in the name of the Church.

Let’s be done once and for all with the libel that evangelicals support a principle of Christian non-involvement in the world. They do call for the Church to be the Church and for it to keep out of certain spheres of activity which do not belong to it, but which belong to Christians generally. And they call for Christians as Christians, and not in the name of the Church, to be involved in every area of human endeavor, deeply concerned with the reformation of society in accord with Christian principles, and seeking earnestly to improve the conditions of life and the lot of men everywhere.

Beware!

“Beware the ides of March!” cautioned the soothsayer. But Julius Caesar dismissed him as a dreamer, though he did not forget the warning. When Caesar and the soothsayer met again on March 15, Caesar reminded him that the day had come. “Ay, Caesar,” replied the seer, “but not gone.”

Since Eve ate the forbidden fruit, Caesar has not been the only one to ignore wise counsel. Noah’s neighbors laughed at his ark; Lot’s wife turned to look at Sodom in flames; Jonah balked at evangelizing Nineveh.

Moses, reviewing God’s law, admonished the Israelites, “Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God, in not keeping his commandments.” That is a wise warning even for this March’s ides.

Black-Studies Programs

The sudden demand for black-studies programs on campuses all across the country grows quite logically out of the black-power movement. It stands in ironic contrast to the American mood of just a few years back. In the heyday of the civil-rights movement, militants would probably have resisted establishment of such programs on grounds that they were prejudicially motivated.

This is part of the racial quandary of our age. Concepts are about as stable as hemlines. When the National Negro Evangelical Association was founded in the early sixties, it was criticized as a separatist movement at odds with the then-current drive for racial integration at all levels of life. The NNEA withstood the opposition and presumably now represents a theological counterpart of black power in the best sense of that concept.

Black-studies programs are commendable. Every black should know his heritage. His culture has rich elements that deserve to be perpetuated. That much cannot be debated.

What is troubling about the current drive for black-studies program is that it looks too much like a good excuse for creating chaos. The militants have yet to demonstrate the genuineness of their appeals. One wonders how long they will persevere with this campaign. Will they see it through, or will they soon drop it for a “better” issue with which to disrupt?

An interesting parallel to the ethnic consciousness of American blacks is the struggle for identity by the more than 40,000,000 Ukrainians in the Soviet Union. Their effort has from time to time been the target of the Kremlin’s drive for cultural assimilation among the fifteen Soviet “republics.” The latest blows were two mysterious fires last November 26 that destroyed a seventeenth-century church in Kiev and a noted synagogue in Odessa. Valuable libraries were lost in both blazes, including important documents relating to Ukrainian history and culture. There are signs that these fires may be more than just a tragic coincidence.

Ukrainians do not like to be confused with the Russians. Ukrainian writers and teachers have from time to time been supressed by Soviet authorities, who regard their calls for cultural freedom as “bourgeois nationalism.” The special interest for evangelical Christianity is that the Ukrainians are the most Protestant of all the Slav peoples. More than 1,000 evangelical churches are active in the Ukraine today.

The political significance is substantial. The New York Times reports:

The existence of nationalist dissent in the Ukraine is cited by Western analysts as one of the main reasons why the Kremlin decided to occupy Czechoslovakia last August and reverse the liberalization movement in Prague, before its effects spread across the Carpathian Mountains to the western Ukraine.

A Matter Of Size

Good things may come in little packages, but the United States and Russia probably need new proof, now that the superpowers have had ships pirated by mini-nations North Korea and Ghana. Viet Nam is certainly small, but so was Pandora’s box.

The small confounding the great is not a new phenomenon. Three hundred men, led by Gideon, devastated the Midianites, who were “like locusts for multitude.” One small Israelite boy beheaded a Philistine giant. Jesus said faith no larger than a mustard seed can accomplish great things. And only a few are chosen to walk a narrow way.

If the number of those who remain true to biblical principles seems infinitesimal, perhaps it is time to advocate Small Power—like the voice Elijah heard.

Post-Pill Morality?

A small but influential number of so-called Christian ethicists continue to berate the Church for what they call its pre-Pill mentality, its antiquated adherence to the outmoded notion of premarital chastity. Arguments favoring Christian acceptance and endorsem*nt of fornication are varied. One is that the needs of the age require a theology based upon what is rather than what ought to be. This is ethical relativism that rules out biblical absolutes and denigrates the authority of Scripture.

A second argument is that fornicators who know the Church disapproves of their actions won’t enter into dialogue with the Church or enter its doors. Ergo, we should approve of unchastity so that fornicators will come to church. The speciousness of this approach should be apparent. To call a sinful act good in order to get people in contact with the Church neither alters the wickedness of the act nor aids the sinner who needs regeneration. It most certainly does not attract sinners to the Church. Indeed, when the Church approves what sinners do, the need for the Church quickly disappears. And when church morality and secular morality coincide, the Church becomes nothing more than an appendage that is irrelevant at best and irritating at worst.

The charge that the Church’s support of chastity simply manifests a desire to retain the status quo is threadbare and irrational. To retain the notion of the law of gravity, or the arithmetical formula that one and one make two, is to support the status quo, and who will argue that it should not be supported in matters like these? Likewise there are moral absolutes revealed by God that remain forever true. They are not subject to the vicissitudes of time, nor can they be abridged by the moral vagaries of situationists.

Fornication is evil even when it is called meaningful, an expression of mutuality and loving affection, or a recreational pursuit. Sin doused with the perfume and dressed in silken garments is still sin. There are no conceivable circ*mstances when fornication would not be an act of sin. But at the same time we pronounce God’s judgment on sin we should also announce his offer of forgiveness and cleansing through faith in Jesus Christ.

An Unwarranted Rebuke

Two foundation stones of Presbyterianism are its Reformed theology and its distinctive church polity. Both of these fundamental principles have been virtually ignored in a recent action by a Grievance Committee authorized by the 1968 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States.

In acting on a complaint filed by the denomination’s Board of Christian Education, the Grievance Committee has accused the Rev. Dr. G. Aiken Taylor, editor of the independently published Presbyterian Journal, of misrepresentation and irresponsibility in criticizing Christian Doctrine by the Rev. Dr. Shirley Guthrie. The Board of Christian Education participates in the publishing of this volume, which is the adult study book in its Covenant Life Curriculum. A Journal editorial had alleged that the Guthrie text “suggests positions that are radically different from the historic Reformed and evangelical position.”

In its eagerness to chastise Dr. Taylor, an ordained minister in the denomination, and to vindicate the Board of Christian Education, the Grievance Committee omitted mention of several passages in Christian Doctrine that Dr. Taylor had specifically cited in a review as out of accord with the doctrinal standards of the Presbyterian Church. The fundamental tenet of Presbyterian theology is that all statements of doctrine, regardless of source, are to be tested by Scripture. The issue is not only whether Dr. Taylor should have made his criticism (even civil courts repeatly affirm the right of dissent). It is also: Who is guilty of deviation from the Scriptures as interpreted in the confessional statements of the church? Either party is subject to censure on this basis. But this was evidently not the approach of the committee.

The Grievance Committee also committed a glaring procedural error. Its approach to the issue involved a fundamental denial of Presbyterian polity. Presbyterian government is based upon a system of church courts, and in these courts the accused has the right to be heard. This committee, established by the highest court of the church, expressed its opinion without meeting with Dr. Taylor or conducting any hearings before which he could appear. Both the board and the committee failed to show one instance of misrepresentation or irresponsibility on Dr. Taylor’s part.

Attempts to stifle the critics of modern theology within major denominations are not limited to this incident or to this denomination. However, at a time when so many are speaking out against the authority of Scripture, it is illiberal, not to say outrageous, that action would be initiated to silence the voice of one who seeks to uphold this authority that the prophets proclaimed, the apostles endorsed, and Jesus Christ approved.

The approach and procedure of this committee have been detrimental both to Reformed theology and to Presbyterian polity. And “if the foundations be destroyed.…”

Levi Eshkol

The late Levi Eshkol led Israel through a crucial period. Jews will remember him as relatively moderate and conciliatory. True, he was at the helm when Israel took its big gamble in June of 1967—and won decisively. But history will probably show that Eshkol generally kept the more radical elements effectively in tow.

Eshkol’s death raises the possibility of an extended internal political struggle in Israel that could further complicate an already much-too-turbulent Middle East picture. We wish for the Jewish people a leader who will merit broad support, and who will do all in his power to secure peace and justice in that part of the world.

Fair Pay For Preachers

Ministers are rarely at a loss for words, but there is one subject that most of them have difficulty talking about—their salaries. In the midst of spiraling inflation, many pastors find it almost impossible to live on their incomes but feel they must remain tight-lipped for fear of appearing “unspiritual.”

In view of ministers’ hesitancy to discuss their financial situation, those in positions of leadership in local churches are responsible for making certain that pastors (and others on the church staff) are receiving a fair wage. But the fact remains that most ministers are grossly underpaid, and very few church boards are taking steps to correct the situation.

Four major obstacles block the road to fair ministerial compensation. First, the base income of a minister is generally much less than that of other professional men with comparable training (and often is below the earnings of occupations involving considerably less training). This is true even when residence allowance, utilities, and fees are taken into account. A 1963 survey showed that the average annual wage for laymen with seventeen or more years of schooling was $8,434; ministers with similar education earned $5,322.

Second, a minister is seldom adequately reimbursed for expenses he incurs in the course of his work. Many clergymen take a financial beating in auto, travel, office, and other professional expenses. Frequently the pastor finds it necessary to dig into his own pocket to cover expenses that are properly a part of the operating costs of the congregation. The church is probably the only institution that charges business costs against staff salaries.

Third, the minister faces a frustrating lack of opportunity for financial advancement. A recent study showed that the average salary and allowance of a minister with one to four years’ service was $5,814. The average for a minister with twenty to twenty-four years’ service was $7,317, an annual wage increase of $75.15. Frequently advancement comes only as ministers move to larger and better-paying churches. A private industry with this approach would find it virtually impossible to hold talent. Pastors and other church workers deserve the opportunity for annual increments with age and experience.

Fourth, many ministers have recently experienced a sizable reduction in net income because of a law including them in the Social Security program. The minister who was not previously covered under Social Security now finds his income diminished by 6.9 per cent.

These four factors combine to place an unduly heavy financial burden upon many ministers. Most aren’t going to bring up the subject. No labor union or trade association will protect them from exploitation. Dedication will compel most ministers to continue in spite of “long hours and low pay” (though the drop-out rate is alarming). But this doesn’t make the situation right, and it is the moral obligation of leaders in local congregations to take the necessary steps to deal with the problem. Even men of God have to buy bread.

Disproving A Marxist Tenet

To the surprise of authorities, many evangelical Christians in the Soviet Union have shown themselves to be exemplary, productive citizens. According to the Religion in Communist Dominated Areas newsletter, this fact is often acknowledged even in the Soviet press.

It goes to show that Christian believers can be the “salt of the earth” no matter what the circ*mstances.

And does it not rebuke untold numbers of Protestants in the West who are something less than their opportunity provides?

The pity in the Soviet Union is that the Communist party rejects or restricts the participation of the productive Protestants in national efforts simply because of Marxist prejudice. Marx taught that religion is an opiate that dulls the mind and so hinders its creative activity. The deeds of evangelical Christian believers in the Soviet Union are disproving Marx, but party leaders look the other way.

‘Up Tight’ About Holiness

Why are Christians so shy about holiness? What prompts their reticence toward talk of holy living? Is it that the doctrine has been divisive? Is it that we’re so short of holiness we’re embarrassed to talk about it? Or is it perhaps that we have been influenced by moderns who reduce the concept to mere superficial piety and irrelevant withdrawal?

Whatever the reason, it becomes clear that evangelical Christians need to champion anew the essence of holiness as it relates to our world and the life and times in which we live.

The pursuit of perfection can be frustrating, but the idea is well worth the chase, even if the route taken is unnecessarily circuitous. It is an effort that provides fulfillment and meaning, excitement and enchantment, satisfaction and peace. It brings out life’s most creative dimensions.

Personal holiness also benefits society. It encourages wholesome standards. It challenges others toward righteousness. Pascal said, “The serene, silent beauty of a holy life is the most powerful influence in the world, next to the might of the Spirit of God.”

Most important, holiness pleases God. Indeed, he demands holiness. Many balk at the command on grounds that the aim is too high. But could God have said otherwise? “How could a perfect God say, ‘Just sin a little bit’?” asks Francis A. Schaeffer.

The Hebrew and Greek words for holiness mean being set apart for divine use. The first application of the Hebrew term was to the Sabbath. As the term unfolded it has come to be applied in the highest sense to God himself. Holiness is the unifying attribute of all the other attributes of God.

God demonstrated his holiness most meaningfully to man in the person of his Son, who lived a sinless life entirely given over to the will and purpose of God.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of God’s holiness is that he wants to share it with mankind. Yet though God wants us to be saints, we never seem quite ready for it or capable of it.

Very likely our problem arises out of modern antipathy toward the supernatural. Holiness is most certainly a supernatural work, and we have been conditioned to resist any supernatural rationale. This is one of many areas in which prevailing thought patterns have infringed upon Christian truth, deceiving even the elect.

The magnitude of god’s love can be understood only when measured by the extent of his holy wrath against sin. His grace must be seen against the certainty of judgment, his mercy in relation to that from which we have been saved.

We demean the nature and extent of God’s love unless we recognize sin for what it is—with its wages, now and for eternity. The Gospel is perverted if God is regarded as a sentimental being to whom men’s sins are merely offenses against one another, a matter requiring social reformation only and not redemption and a new creation.

Primarily sin is a matter not of man’s inhumanity to man but rather of man’s offenses against the holiness of God—human rebellion against divine sovereignty.

Until we are humbled before the love, mercy, and grace of God so that we cry out to him like the lepers of Israel, “Unclean, unclean,” we have never even sensed the wonder of salvation. Out of this vision of God’s holiness and our own sinfulness there come true worship, praise, and adoration, and from it there have come some of the world’s greatest hymns.

But the man who considers himself worthy of God’s love stands condemned by his own pride and folly. Furthermore, any conception of the Gospel solely in terms of service to others is not Christian but humanistic.

Why is this so important? Because of the very nature of God himself, of sin, of man, and of the salvation that is ours through faith in Jesus Christ.

The Bible tells us that “God is love.” It also tells us that “our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29) and that “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). This seems to be a contradiction. How can both descriptions be true? The answer is found in God’s love for the sinner and his wrath against sin.

There are those who decry the concept of an angry God, but there is no other way to explain the Cross. God’s holy anger is directed against sin, because of its nature and its effect on mankind. In the wake of the sin of disobedience and rebellion flows a stream of sorrow and suffering, of human ills Wrath and spiritual death. God’s love required a holy justice offered to all men vicariously in the death of his Son.

But man’s contempt for the provision of God’s love ends in fearful judgment: “A man who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy at the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the man who has spurned the Son of God, and profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace?” (Heb. 10:28, 29). And after this solemn warning we are told that “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

Because of the nature of sin and the depravity and weakness of the human heart, God had to take desperate measures. He sent his own Son to give man a glorious alternative to “perishing”: eternal life. Our Lord preached the heart of the Gospel in one short statement about God’s love for the world and the sending of his Son: “that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16b).

Why, oh why, has the Gospel been perverted by many into something that hardly resembles its revelation of both the love and wrath of God? The Cross represents an act of redemption, not condemnation: “For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God” (John 3:17, 18).

God is not an angry God demanding justice. He is a holy God who has provided both justice and salvation. He is a holy God who hates sin enough to provide for man an escape from the condemnation under which he stands.

In the Second Psalm the writer describes the revolt of men and nations against God and speaks of the derisive laughter in heaven that is the prelude to God’s righteous judgment. The psalm ends with these words, “Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth.… Blessed are all who take refuge in him” (Ps. 2:10, 11).

The wrath of God is a devastating reality. And his love is a glorious truth, the depths of which can never be plumbed. The Gospel of redemption in Jesus Christ can be understood only within this context.

There is no escape from the doctrines of wrath and love in the assertion that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New are not the same. They are the same God, and some of the strongest denunciations of sinners to be found in all the Bible occur in the New Testament.

The Apostle Paul speaks of the final day when the Lord suddenly appears in glory: “God deems it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant rest with us to you who are afflicted, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance upon those who do not know God and upon those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” (2 Thess. 1:6–9).

There is little comfort here for those who deny that a day will come when Jesus Christ shall be revealed, to judge the unbeliever and take those who have believed to be with him for eternity.

God’s wrath is a holy wrath against the spiritually naked—those who have refused to wear the robe of righteousness offered by Christ. It is directed not only against willful unbelief but against all the works of Satan, and Satan himself. It is he who is the arch deceiver, the tempter. And someday this one who lifts his head in pride against almighty God will be cast into the eternal fires of judgment. So too all who resist God, in the pride of human understanding and achievement, stand in danger of his wrath and judgment.

Today all men continue under the eyes of the One who loves them and who in winsomeness says “Come.” But the day of wrath will surely come. The Prophet Jeremiah speaks to us today: “To whom shall I speak and give warning, that they may hear? Behold, their ears are closed, they cannot listen; behold, the word of the LORD is to them an object of scorn, they take no pleasure in it. Therefore I am full of the wrath of the LORD, I am weary of holding it in” (Jer. 6:10, 11a).

God loves. He also warns: “Your wickedness will chasten you, and your apostasy will reprove you. Know and see that it is evil and bitter for you to forsake the LORD your God; the fear of me is not in you, says the Lord God of hosts” (Jer. 2:19).

L. NELSON BELL

God the Future of Man, by Edward Schillebeeckx, translated by N. D. Smith (Sheed and Ward, 1968, 207 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by John Warwick Montgomery, chairman, Division of Church History and History of Christian Thought, and director of the European program, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

Query: Is the change in posture of the post-Vatican II Roman church a good thing? Answer of most Protestants: Definitely—there is now less superstition, less use of Latin, more toleration, and so on.

But, though we naively dislike facing it, ecclesiastical changes in a sinful world invariably produce gray, not lily white or jet black. Even the Roman church cannot be regarded as an old western movie (despite Bishop Sheen’s famous appearance in a cowboy hat), with the good guys clearly separated from the heavies. A practical example is Dominican Robert Campbell’s survey of Roman Catholic youngsters entering De Paul University; whereas five years ago 90 per cent held that Christ is God and 73 per cent that extramarital intercourse is wrong, the corresponding percentages this year were only 64 and 47.

An equally jolting example of the negative side of current Roman Catholic change is the work of the Dutch theologian Schillebeeckx, whose influence on the controversial new “Dutch Catechism” has been very strong, and who is endeavoring to substitute existential for Thomistic categories of interpretation in such areas as sacramental theology (a perfect example of getting rid of one devil and thereby opening the door for seven others). God the Future of Man is the product of the author’s 1967 lecture tour in the U.S., and further develops his ideas vis-à-vis American radical theology and the new hermeneutic.

Ought the new hermeneutic of post-Bultmannians Ebeling, Fuchs, Käsemann, et al. to be identified (as they claim) with the hermeneutic of the Reformers? I find it to be the inverse of the Reformers’ conviction that Scripture is objectively, propositionally, and perspicuously God’s Word; it was the Roman Catholics who insisted on a “hermeneutical circle” that made the scriptural text dependent on the context (traditio) of the interpreter. Schillebeeckx cheerfully agrees: “Man can never escape from this circle, because he can never establish once and for all the truth or the content of the word of God.”

Faced with the death-of-God thinking of Hamilton, Altizer, and Van Buren, and the epistemological question their work has raised, Schillebeeckx can only offer a future-directed existential experience of God: as to “the ‘verification principle’ … all that we Christians can say, in the light of our faith in God as our future, is that faith is not based on what is empirically and objectively verifiable, but comes under the category of human existential possibility.” This answer is especially ironic when we remember that it was in part the unverifiable identification of truth with subjective immanence that led the death-of-Goders to deny objective divine transcendence in the first place.

Schillebeeckx, in obvious dependence on Ernst Bloch and Jürgen Moltmann, gives himself—and theology—up to the future. God is now the “wholly New”; “the Christian leaves the future much more open than the Marxist”; “the Christian cannot formulate the content of this promise in a positive way”; “the message which Christianity brings to the secular world is this—humanity is possible!” The author cautions his readers not to forget “the biblical basis of this so-called new idea of God;” but in light of Schillebeeckx’s prior commitment to the “hermeneutical circle,” what objective check can the scriptural text have on a new God of futurity?

Is Rome becoming the elephants’ graveyard for Protestant heresies?

Toward A Vital Christianity

Earthly Things: Essays, by Olov Hartman, translated by Eric J. Sharpe (Eerdmans, 1968, 235 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Bernard Ramm, California Baptist Theological Seminary, Covina.

These essays by Olov Hartman, a very perceptive and talented Swedish churchman and author, are divided into three subject groups: personal piety or spirituality, counseling and psychiatry, and the Christian and society (including the arts). The essays rank high in both content and literary style.

Hartman is concerned over the ways Christians foul up their Christian experience and its expression, and summons them to a larger and more wholesome experience and witness. He wants the theologian and the Church to live in the center of the twentieth century with all its problems, not at the edge—and certainly not in some previous century.

But he does not want this for just the sake of being modern. Hartman has no intention of bargaining away Christian substance. What he wants is for Christian theology to bite deeper into our interpretations of modern life. To our understanding of psychology, sociology, art, and drama he wants to add a theological dimension that a pure humanism lacks. Occasionally he seems so anxious to correct an anachronistic orthodoxy that he overcompensates and represents some doctrines—among them the atonement—in a somewhat offbase way.

The author sees a “multiple diaconate” in the ministry of the Church as the only realistic approach in the twentieth century. One pastor simply cannot handle all the complex parish problems. The closing chapters of the book deal helpfully with drama, the arts, and literature. And the book ends with an unusual extended paraphrase of the Apostles’ Creed as it should be read by modern man.

Although it takes some persistence to stay with these essays, the reader who does so will be richer for it.

Distorted View Of Viet Nam

American Catholics and Viet Nam, edited by Thomas Quigley (Eerdmans, 1968, 197 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by John Sawin, pastor, Lombard Bible Church, Lombard, Illinois.

In this volume, sixteen Roman Catholics—including theologians, editors, and philosophers—exercise their literary skills in criticizing their church’s war views and support of the American involvement in Viet Nam. They strum a single string and sing a well-known song. America is the bad boy in Viet Nam, and the Communists are the good guys who wear the white hats. If the bad boy would leave the good guys alone, there would be peace. The writers admit to holding a minority view within their church. They see the Viet Nam war as unjust (in view of “the just war” thesis), and hold that the issues revolve around Vietnamese internal differences and that America turned these differences into a bloody holocaust. Almost nothing substantive is presented to support their views.

The only non-Catholic contributor, Robert McAfee Brown, appends his “Amen” to this semi-pacifist position. In an “Afterword” he writes, “There is scarcely a line in the entire book to which I cannot wholeheartedly subscribe.”

I don’t take issue with the authors when they say that the Vietnamese people have suffered unimaginable pain, sorrow, and loss. Nor would I contend that the American government has shown the keenest insights regarding the Vietnamese people or pursued the best ways to rid South Viet Nam of Communist aggression. And the credibility gap has certainly contributed to the confusion of the American public. What irritates me is the authors’ complete whitewashing of the Communist Viet Cong and North Viet Nam and their wholesale incrimination of America. Haven’t they read about the Tet offensive, or are they ignorant of what Tet means in Viet Nam? Are they unaware that from 1964 through 1967 the Viet Cong killed or kidnapped more than 36,000 Vietnamese officials and civilian leaders such as school teachers, doctors, and nurses? Comparable deeds in the United States would have removed about 400,000 persons from American public life. Do these writers have any idea of the countless atrocities the Viet Cong have committed in their efforts to intimidate villagers?

American Catholics were heavily involved in relief work in Viet Nam during Diem’s regime. Some questionable practices were carried out, but there is not a line in the book about this aid. During the same time Protestant missionaries were denied entry visas for seventeen months. The Diem government repeatedly refused to permit Protestants to buy property and build a church for American personnel. Diem had dedicated Viet Nam to the Virgin Mary. This offended both the Buddhists (numerically superior) and the Protestants. The authors make no reference to this.

At times the writers are in error. For example, Harry Haas (Dutch priest-specialist, free-lance journalist, and authority on Southeast Asia) writes of Diem’s struggle to unite into the central government the great sects—Binh Xuyen, Cao Dai, Hoa Hao—and comments that these sects “had waged an almost independent war against the French.” On the contrary, the sects are better described as French lackeys who controlled certain territories for the French against the Viet Minh. The French continued support of them through the beginning of Diem’s regime and hoped to overthrow him. They failed. They had to use military means to evacuate the Binh Xuyen chief from Viet Nam to France.

This inaccurate and highly disappointing analysis offers little help to the reader who seeks objective information on the complex problem of Viet Nam.

Rocks The Boat

Where Religion Gets Lost in the Church, by C. Edward Crowther (Morehouse-Barlow, 1968, 158 pp., $4.75), is reviewed by Charles Ball, pastor, First Presbyterian Church, River Forest, Illinois.

Here is a real shaker, one that may very well upset the complacency of the Establishment. The author seeks to say from a Christian standpoint what many dissident groups are saying by their anger and revolt.

Although Bishop Crowther repeatedly refers to his frustrations with the church in South Africa and although his remarks are oriented toward the Anglican system, there is here expressed a real concern for the Christian churches of the whole world. He contends that our smugness and unwillingness to act in current crises and problems will endanger the continued existence of the Church as we know it. In thirteen chapters, he analyzes these problems—“the living issues of the world”—and concludes that they can be either a threat or a challenge to the Church. He argues eloquently that the Church should be “a vehicle of involvement and Christian action” and that this action should be based not on emotional reaction to injustice but on what we believe about God.

Crowther addresses himself to the poverty and racism that are all about us, and the Church’s apathy in the face of these problems. He hits hard at our tendency to put the means before the end and to confuse priorities by allowing plans for new buildings and maintenance of the “administrative monster” to be put ahead of the needs of people. He discusses the challenge of the Church on the university campus and the possibilities latent in the rising laymen’s movements, and speaks of our inflexibility in adjusting to the social revolution, which today is aimed at the structured church. “Much that we administer need not even exist,” he says. “Today, more and more clergymen administer work involving fewer and fewer people.”

There is a chapter on sex, an area of life in which the Church’s attitude is greatly at variance with that of secular society.

All in all, this is a frank, hard-hitting book. One is fascinated with the author’s style and admires his courage. In my opinion, the chief weakness of his argument is his assumption that the influence and power of the Church lie solely in its official pronouncements and power structure. He seems not to be impressed by the fact that individual believers, by their influence, their vote, and their Christian activism, are in truth “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world.”

Although it would be possible to criticize certain details of Crowther’s conclusions, in my judgment he has written a great book and administered a dose of medicine that will not be palatable to every one but will do us all good.

Ministry To Senior Citizens

The Bonus Years, by Thomas Bradley Robb (Judson, 1968, 156 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Walter Vail Watson, psychologist, Buffalo Bible Institute, Buffalo, New York.

Here we have the foundation for a ministry to older people. Read it, oldster and take heart, for here is a practical young clergyman who loves you and knows how to meet your “golden year” needs. Dr. Robb, a Presbyterian minister with pastoral experience, has been pursuing studies in a master plan for older adults in the California Bay area. The Bonus Years is well written, soundly analytical, and informative, and has a valuable bibliography. It is remarkably free from the pedantry and piosity so often found in the works of the religious do-gooder.

Robb outlines the aging problem in America and discusses the characteristics and the needs of the aging. In chapter four he considers the role of the church, which should function and focus at the parish level. The final chapter presents a modus operandi, and a warning that personal concern and a great deal of quiet persistence must be present in local study and planning. Something is left to the imagination of the concerned. This book could well be used as a study text preliminary to the instituting of local congregational programs.

It is always encouraging to discover the kind of practical, discerning leader who can write a book like this, whose consecration and insights augur well for the implementation of the kind of social programs that ought to be a chief concern of Christian people who care.

‘Relevance’ Re-Examined

Relevance, by Richard C. Halverson (Word, 1968, 102 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by John F. Walvoord, president, Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas, Texas.

Even those committed to the Christian faith have often been sharply critical of what they see as a lack of sensitivity to the contemporary world on the part of the Church, in its message and in its program.

Dr. Halverson, minister of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington, D. C., responds to this criticism in a thoughtful and provocative way. He concedes that too often Christianity appears to be indifferent to the pressing needs of men and seems out of date and irrelevant. But, he says, such a view reflects misunderstanding by the world and lack of communication by the Church. The relevance of Christianity is to be determined, not by the Church’s involvement in social programs, but by its ability to deal with the disease rather than the symptoms of modern man, and to accomplish, through its transforming Gospel, reconciliation between God and man as well as between man and man. To individuals and to a world groping for solutions, Christianity offers the only real answer, God’s answer.

Beginning with the question of whether Jesus Christ was relevant to the world he lived in, Halverson criticizes the superficial definition of relevance often accepted today, defines the basic mission of Christianity as that of reconciliation, discusses the relation of Jesus Christ to race prejudice, and advocates the modern Samaritan attitude toward one’s neighbors. The book closes with an appeal to recapture the zeal of the early Church, which triumphed over a pagan world by total commitment to its Lord. Such Christianity was relevant then and is relevant today.

Here is a challenging book for both conservatives and liberals.

Book Briefs

The Taizé Picture Bible (Fortress, 1969, 277 pp., $4.95). Stories from the Scriptures, adapted from the Jerusalem Bible, with illustrations by Brother Eric de Saussure of the Taizé Community.

Buried Alive, by Paul G. Johnson (Knox, 1968, 171 pp., $5). Graphically and candidly analyzes the gap between clergy and laity, and offers guidelines for renewed vitality in the life of the Church.

The Infancy Narratives, by Jean Daniélou (Herder and Herder, 1968, 127 pp., $3.95). A Roman Catholic New Testament scholar defends the historical authenticity of the infancy narratives.

Are You Fun to Live With?, by Lionel Whiston (Word, 1968, 143 pp., $3.95). Suggests ways in which to make the most of personal relationships.

Punjab Pioneer, by Charles Reynolds (Word, 1968, 183 pp., $4.95). Challenging story of Dr. Edith Brown, who ministered to the physical and spiritual needs of the women of Ludhiana in the Punjab section of India and eventually established the Ludhiana Christian Medical College to train women doctors.

David, by John Hercus (Inter-Varsity, 1968, 136 pp., $4.50). A fresh, exciting look at David written in a crisp, slangy, first person style that makes for lively reading.

Higley Sunday School Lesson Commentary, edited by Ralph Earle (Huffman, 1968, 580 pp., $3.25). An evangelical commentary on the uniform lessons with questions, illustrations, and other teaching aids.

The Drama of the Cross, by J. Eugene White (Baker, 1968, 111 pp., $2.95). A graphic account of events leading up to the crucifixion.

Faith for a Secular World, by Myron Augsburger (Word, 1968, 96 pp., $2.95). Points modern man to the wholeness of life that can be found only in Jesus Christ. Contends that unbelief is more difficult than belief.

Silent Saturday, by R. Earl Allen (Baker, 1968, 98 pp., $2.95). Ten enriching sermons focusing upon the passion, resurrection, and return of Jesus Christ.

Paperbacks

Tomorrow’s Church: Catholic—Evangelical—Reformed, by Peter Day (Seabury, 1969, 192 pp., $2.95). The ecumenical officer of the Episcopal Church, who is a lay member of that church’s delegation to the Consultation on Church Union, evaluates the thrust and scope of present movements toward church union.

Crisis in the Church, by Everett C. Parker (Pilgrim, 1968, 143 pp., $2.95). These essays, written as a tribute to Truman Douglass, attempt to put the last twenty-five years of church life into perspective and to make some educated predictions about what will happen within the next decade or so.

Biblical Numerology, by John J. Davis (Baker, 1969, 174 pp., $2.95). A careful, sober study of a subject that has fallen into disrepute because of the irresponsible treatment it has often had.

Contemporary Evangelical Thought, edited by Carl F. H. Henry (Baker, 1969, 320 pp., $3.95). Reprint of a series of essays by evangelical scholars reflecting the present-day thought of evangelicalism.

New Directions in Theology Today, Volume IV: The Church, by Colin Williams (Westminster, 1968, 187 pp., $2.45). Reviews the changing ways in which the nature and mission of the Church have been described since the organization of the WCC.

Personal Finances for Ministers, by John C. Banker (Westminster, 1969, 125 pp., $1.65). Details the minister’s special financial position and gives practical advice on the management of his income.

The Call of Lent, by James G. Manz (Augsburg, 1968, 92 pp., $2.25). Seven sermons relating the lessons of Lent to contemporary life.

The Church’s Faith, by Regin Prenter, translated by Theodor I. Jensen (Fortress, 1968, 224 pp., $2.75). A Danish theologian summarizes the classical beliefs of the Church from a biblical and confessional point of view.

The Book of Nehemiah, by Ralph G. Turnbull (Baker, 1968, 109 pp., $1.95). A helpful addition to the “Shield Bible Study Series.”