Page 6128 – Christianity Today (2025)

“What kind of man are we training for the ministry? How can men supposedly called by God be indifferent to the Bible?”

This article began, though I did not realize it at the time, in a random conversation with some colleagues. We were a committee of five, and we virtually ran our intercollegiate and interdenominational post-graduate school. Rather grandly we were called “directors of graduate studies.” On this particular afternoon we had finished our formal meeting. Reports had been received, new applications “screened,” subjects for theses approved, and examiners appointed. Our business was over, and it was time to go home. But we lingered, enjoying the informal talk.

The subject of our teaching came up. Students were complaining that they could not see the relevance of their biblical studies. They were given a mass of material to be mastered, and they generally did master it; but they could not see what it had to do with their subsequent work in church and parish. For years I had held—and still hold—that the best theological colleges do not give their students a copious supply of sermons to take with them into the ministry. The task is rather to give the men the tools of their trade. If they have these, they can produce the sermons and Sunday school lessons. They will know the message with which they have been entrusted and will be able to deliver it in all its wide variety, provided that they walk with God and do not spurn the illumination of the Holy Spirit.

Now the students were unable to see how the tools were fitted to the job. In other words, they could not use the tools they had been given. It was all rather disquieting.

This was still fresh in my mind when we were invited to a “consultation” on the teaching of biblical subjects. A consultation on systematic theology had been held a short time earlier. Now it was our turn. We listened with respect to an eminent professor who had been invited to speak first. No names need be mentioned; it is enough to say that he has an international reputation.

He told us—and it was new to me—that in his experience he had to “sell the Bible” to his students. “Why do we have to learn all this biblical stuff?” they complained. “Show us its relevance to our later ministry.”

I pricked up my ears. What he said brought back our discussion in the directors’ meeting. Apparently we were not alone in our troubles. But this was worse. Our men did not see how to use their tools in the parish. This professor’s students, however, did not see the need for the tools at all. The implication was that the Bible would have a very small place in their ministry.

The professor went on to say that in the written work required from his students he would not allow anything in the nature of “relevance” (though he added, a little facetiously, that he had relented to the extent of allowing an appendix on “Thoughts of Relevance”). In the main he insisted on a strict scientific exegesis. This corresponds to the method of the Interpreter’s Bible, where we are given both exegesis and exposition. The exegesis is academic and scientific; the exposition presumably aims at the elusive relevance.

The discussion became general. Nobody disagreed violently; we shared the professor’s academic ideals. But we still had this problem of relevance on our hands. My disquiet continued to grow, and in time I could stand it no longer. “Mr. Chairman,” I began, “whatever kind of man are we training for the ministry? How can men supposedly called by God be indifferent to the Bible?”

There was a dead silence. The matter could not be left there; some further contribution to the discussion had to be made. I thought rapidly and then blundered on. “In our teaching could we not do something like this? Take the parable of the Prodigal Son. [I pulled out my Greek Testament.] ‘Bring out quickly the best robe and dress him in it. Put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet.’ Could we not link the best robe with the robe of Christ? ‘Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.’ In the background there is the doctrine of imputed righteousness. As slaves went barefoot, the shoes suggest that the believer is no longer a slave but a son. The ring confirms it. The ‘family ring’ or signet ring points to the doctrine of adoption. Grace, justification, adoption—it is all there if we have the eyes to see it.”

The professor protested that I was leaving nothing for the professor of homiletics to do. And a friend of mine with whom I had worked for years summed up his opposition in a forthright statement: “I don’t agree with your exegesis, and there is no theology of the Cross in Luke’s Gospel!”

So that was that. I have long pondered these problems—the one concerned with the professor of homiletics and the other with Synoptic interpretation. There was not the time or opportunity to debate the matter further during the “consultation,” but further reflection has yielded certain conclusions.

We must not leave too much, as I see it, to the professor of homiletics. His business is to help men preach. He may be a master of speech and may have read hundreds of sermons and most of the books about preaching. But he may not be an expert in biblical studies. In a Christian seminary, it is surely the business of the department of New Testament to show how the text of the New Testament can be treated by the preacher. Listeners to sermons used to say (and may do so still, for all I know) that the preacher had such and such a text and “took it another way.” Some “other ways” are legitimate and some are not. Some are spiritually true and some are merely ingenious, and it is the New Testament expert who ought to be able to make the distinction.

The other objection is more serious. Even if the professor of homiletics has the necessary biblical skill, he cannot deal with all the passages that the professor of New Testament covers. This is a matter of organization and a matter of degree. My friend’s comment, however, touches on the interpretation of a text.

Now, I am prepared to admit at once that my exegesis was not primary exegesis and was thus not “scientific.” But I submit that the primary exegesis was implicit and the secondary exegesis justified. When a sensitive Christian reads the story of the Prodigal Son, and in particular the words already quoted, does he not rub his eyes and say in wonder; “Why, that is exactly how God has treated me. He gave me new clothes and dressed me in the righteousness of his beloved Son. He raised me from the level of servant or slave and made me a son. I have the Spirit of adoption in my heart, and I cry ‘Abba, Father.’”

It may be argued that this opens the door to all sorts of odd interpretations. Of course it does, and the uninstructed preacher will bring his odd interpretations into the pulpit. Only the enlightened common sense and spiritual insight of a competent department of New Testament can determine where to draw the line.

Our academic ideals and our ambitions for New Testament scholarship, especially in a university setting, may restrain some teachers from going on to secondary exegesis. But it can be done and ought to be done, and it need not involve a lowering of academic standards.

There is still the question whether there is a theology of the Cross in Luke’s Gospel. Luke has obviously not given us an Epistle to the Romans, but he does suggest a theology of mediation. “I say to you my friends, do not fear those who kill the body … fear him who has authority to cast into hell.…” God the Destroyer and Christ the Friend: this is an implicit mediation. An analogous interpretation is possible with the lament over Jerusalem and the passage about confessing before men.

But suppose some insist there is no theology of the Cross in Luke? Then it is still legitimate to interpret in the light of our experience. God has dressed us in the robe of Christ and has given us the Spirit of adoption. Support for this line of argument comes from an unexpected quarter.

Lord Eccles has just published a book, Half-way to Faith (Geoffrey Bles, 1966), in which he declares that the Gospels are great works of art. They stand, he says, on an equal footing with the great masterpieces of literature. We ought therefore to look at them from this standpoint, and Lord Eccles hopes we shall.

His point of view is not totally new. In 1952, Dr. E. V. Rieu spoke of the Gospels as “the four masterpieces which conquered the world.” They constitute a miracle “unique in the history of literature,” he said. Their literary and spiritual values are interdependent.

The views of Lord Eccles are thus supported. The Gospels are works of art and should be studied as such. James Denney’s dictum that the New Testament Scriptures are not to be regarded as an Act of Parliament to be interpreted by lawyers has become a commonplace with many. But has our “scientific exegesis” taken on something of the spirit that Denney was speaking against? Let us take another look at the Gospels. Dr. Rieu speaks of “the feelings they evoke” and “their over-all effect.” Such considerations should always be in our minds when we are dealing with great literature. If we are believing men, can we fail to recognize in the Jesus of the Gospels the same Lord Christ of the epistles who has laid his hand in mercy upon us? Are we not moved as we read and see the Synoptic Jesus doing at the Cross what the epistles said he did? Such feelings, such an effect, are appropriate to works of art.

Those of us who are engaged professionally in teaching the New Testament, especially to theological students and future ministers, ought indeed to begin with scientific exegesis; but we should not stop there. Let us not put our own faith into cold storage when we teach. It would be sad indeed if we were to be described in words used of F. C. Baur after his death: “His was a completely objective nature. No trace of personal needs or struggles is discoverable in connection with his investigations of Christianity.…” Sir William Robertson Nicoll even said that Baur was a stranger to the requirements of his own soul and his own need of a Saviour.

If faith were given its place in scholarship, who can calculate what relevance might be discovered? Who knows what spiritual exegesis might be produced? In the long run we might have an upsurge of love of the New Testament and a burning desire to preach it—and this on the part of those students to whom the Bible had once to be “sold.”

A former leader of the United Nations discusses some ultimate convictions that shape his life

I am a Christian. I believe in God, the Creator from nothing of heaven and earth and of everything visible and invisible. This Creator-God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who is also identically the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. There was a man, born in Bethlehem of Judea, born of a virgin whose name was Mary, a virgin who did not know man. This man’s name was Jesus. He lived for about thirty years in a little town in Galilee called Nazareth, with his mother and a man called Joseph who was espoused to his mother and who remained faithful to both of them, though Mary remained ever-virgin. He was a carpenter.

Then, at about the age of thirty, this Jesus of Nazareth began to gather around him disciples. He taught them many things about themselves, about God, and above all about himself. He also moved about with his disciples in those idyllic Galilean villages only about a hundred miles south of where I was born, villages not much different from the villages that I know perfectly in my own region. He moved about teaching, preaching, provoking, challenging and doing many miracles. By miracles I mean such things as causing a man who was born blind to see exactly as you and I do, and raising the dead—yes, the dead!

He said wonderful things—things pure, powerful, deeply moving, and immediately convincing. And the strange fact about many of the things he said is that they convince you only because he said them. But the totality of what he said is such that there is nothing, nothing like it in any literature. There may be approximations to it, distant rumblings of it, as in some places of the Old Testament, or in some of the teachings of Zoroaster or the Buddha, or in some of the sayings of the Muslim Sufis who came a thousand years after him, or even in some things that Socrates and Plato and the Stoics said; but when you come to what he said, you find here’s the thing, here’s the original, here’s what everybody else before him and after him was straining after and did not quite attain, so that all these others were imitations of him, intimations of him, reflections, more or less impure, of him, fallings away from him, yearnings for him. So what he said was uniquely wonderful. But what he did was also uniquely wonderful.

He chose simple fishermen, very simple, as his disciples, and he loved them to the end. He performed the miracles to which I have referred. But above all, he willingly and knowingly accepted death on the cross outside the wall of Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate. And nobody crucified him, nobody crucified him there except my fears and compromises and calculations and bigotries and sins—fears and compromises and sins that existed identically and in abundance in the hearts of those who cried “Crucify him, crucify him,” so that I am in no wise better than they, so that if I chanced then to be among them I would almost certainly have joined their chorus.

It was inveterate human sin, then, sin which abounds in my heart, including my lust and my forgetfulness of God, that killed Jesus of Nazareth on the cross outside the wall of Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate. And if my heart is slightly better, and to the extent that it is better, it is so because he washed away my sin on his cross through his blood, and because he rose from the dead on the third day. Lo, I meant to kill him, but I did not succeed; lo, he triumphed over my evil design; lo, he liveth now and sitteth gloriously on the right hand of God. I am cleansed from my sin, then, because he did not die, although I meant him to; or rather, because he actually and completely died exactly as I meant him to, but through the power of God he actually and completely rose from the dead on the third day; and because before this absolutely humiliating defeat of my intention—although for three days I thought I had triumphed—I am shattered, I bow my head in shame, I beg his forgiveness, and—and this is what overpowers me—he forgives me. I say to him after his resurrection: “Thou hast triumphed; I will not do it again; I will not hate thee again; I trill not scheme against thee again; I trill not love my pleasures and my self-will over thy trill; I know better.” Do I really know better? Ah, that is the question! And if I do not know better, if I deny him again, he is faithful; he cannot deny himself. He keeps on forgiving me despite my sins, because that is his nature, and because he needs me no more now after his triumph. And that is why, with Peter, I weep bitterly, and that is why I love him all the more.

I beg you not to be offended by the language I am using, language that is quite honorable and has been in use for centuries. I am sure that you are above making fun of me when I speak of Jesus Christ as sitting now at the right hand of God the Father. I am not speaking of this three-dimensional space where you speak of right and left, and above and below, and in front and behind. Ah, “sitteth at the right hand of God” is a wonderful phrase that has meaning only in the order of love and suffering and death. He who has loved much, and has suffered much, and daily faces his death, and has known Jesus Christ, understands perfectly what is meant by Jesus Christ rising from the dead on the third day and sitting now at the right hand of God the Father. Whatever is the “ontological place” of God the Creator, Jesus Christ is exactly there; Jesus Christ has exactly the same mode of being as God the Creator. That is why we also use the phrase “God the Father.” Never was this wonderful phrase, “sitteth at the right hand of God,” meant except in this ontological sense, which arises wholly in the order of suffering, love, and death. I know this is how you take it, and this is how you will take everything else I shall say that might otherwise appear scandalous. In the perfect transparency of the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Truth, everything is perfectly clear; and when we are together attuned to him, there can be no possibility of misunderstanding.

His words were wonderful; his acts, including his resurrection, were wonderful; but he himself is far more wonderful. He makes astounding claims about himself, claims that no German higher criticism can possibly completely void or explain away, claims that I believe to be wholly true.

“You have heard that it was said by them of old time … but I say unto you.…”

“The Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins.”

“… my Father, which is in heaven.”

“He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”

“In this place is one greater than the temple.”

“For verily I say unto you, that many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.”

“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”

“When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory.”

“Take, eat; this is my body.”

[“I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God.”] “Thou hast said.”

“All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.”

“All things are delivered to me of my Father: and no man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal him.”

“Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me.”

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.”

“I am the bread of life.”

“I am the light of the world.”

“I am the door.”

“I am the good shepherd.”

“I am the true vine.”

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life.”

“The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.”

“I am from above. I am not of this world.”

“I proceeded forth and came from God.”

“I and my Father are one.”

“Ye believe in God, believe also in me.”

“All things that the Father hath are mine.”

And when the woman of Samaria would again and again change the subject, he would again and again bring her back to it, until he finally told her bluntly that it was he who was speaking unto her who was the Christ who should come into the world.

And when Martha would change the subject by wandering off into some general cosmological expectation of the resurrection, he would bring her back to it by telling her, “I am the resurrection, and the life.”

And when Thomas would change the subject by declaring that he did not know the way, he would bring him back to it by telling him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

And when Philip would change the subject by asking him to show them the Father, he would bring him back to it by telling him, “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”

I should like to know what German higher criticism would make of these things. In fact, I think I know, but I also know that, far from this criticism’s being able to judge these things, they in truth judge it.

His words were wonderful, his acts were wonderful, but these claims that he made about himself are infinitely more wonderful. And what is even more wonderful than these claims is that there have been innumerable people throughout history—normal people, sane people, useful people, responsible people, in full possession of their minds—who actually believed them. Wonder of wonders—countless decent people, some of them great scientists and great philosophers, have actually believed these unbelievable claims! And these people who understood him and believed him and came to love him know that he said what he said, and did what he did, only because he was who he said he was!

Theology is exactly that discipline which tries, in all humility and in all seriousness, and without any spirit of cleverness, to make sense of all these astounding claims, to make sense of them, not by explaining them away, nor by reducing them to nonsense—as so many so-called theologies do—but first by believing them, and then by trying to relate them among themselves and to the other propositions of Holy Writ, as well as to the deliveries of sound reason and healthy human experience. Genuine theology cannot subordinate God and how he chose to reveal himself to what it calls reason and human experience, because, if God exists, it is he who first created both reason and human experience. Genuine theology must take equally seriously all three—God, reason, and experience; keeping always in mind, however, that, if God exists, he must in the nature of the case always come first. And it is a very strange discipline indeed that entertains even the slightest doubt about the existence of its object.

Religion is the realm of the authentically personal, and I have been telling you what I believe. For there is nothing more authentic and more personal than what we ultimately believe. You may not be a Christian, but you are a man and therefore you certainly believe something; and your rock-bottom beliefs, even if you do not know them, or even if you know them but cannot express them, or are shy or ashamed of expressing them, constitute precisely your religion. Nay, you are identically your ultimate beliefs. All these silly conversations and affected smiles that we daily and hourly carry on with one another, no doubt very innocently and well-meaningly, are so many ways of “changing the subject” from our fundamental beliefs, either because we are not sure of our beliefs, or because we are ashamed of them, suspecting in our heart that they may be hollow, or because we are never quite thrown together into that peace and grace of the Spirit which alone enables us to be personal and authentic without being and appearing at the same time sentimental and silly. Common worship is precisely the means of inducing this peace, this grace of the Holy Spirit, whereby we can be authentically transparent with each other. This is the wonderful significance of the great liturgies, such as that of St. John Chrysostom with which I am best acquainted. It was only when “they were all with one accord in one place” that the disciples were all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak with other tongues. And I am sure you agree with me that we in our hearts crave nothing more than such an experience of absolute power and illumination and certainty from above whereby we would perfectly understand each other even if we spoke “with other tongues,” or even if we did not speak at all. The “other tongue” with which I am speaking is the tongue of simple, personal conviction, which is faith in Jesus Christ. Believe me, all else is trash and dung by comparison, as Paul would say.

And so, moving on now a bit faster, I further believe—hoping and trusting that I will shock none of you, and that if I do shock you, you will forgive me—I further believe that “all things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made”—a tremendous statement, certainly to be most carefully explained. I believe that this same Jesus of Nazareth who now sitteth at the right hand of God is going to come again—to come again! When? I haven’t the slightest idea. How? I do not know. But, most assuredly, he is going to come again, to judge all mankind, the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, Lord and giver of life, whom Christ sent to our hearts, so that we will not be without him, and who inspires the faithful, and comforts them, and revives them, and reminds them of Christ, and God, and all truth, and empowers them to do wonders, a mighty token of God in our midst. I believe in one Church, holy, catholic or universal or all-embracing, and, most especially, apostolic. Finally, I believe in the resurrection of the body and in the life everlasting.

I beg you, once again, not to misunderstand me. I do not believe these things in the order of physical science or cosmology, that is to say, not because physical science and cosmological speculation can prove them to me. I studied under the greatest cosmologist of this century, Alfred North Whitehead; it is not in his sense that I believe these things. I cannot demonstrate them to you mathematically, or scientifically, or through sense perception, or as I might argue from the truth of some political or historical proposition. Oh, I most emphatically and assuredly believe in the actual, historical, physical, certain death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This wonderful deposit of faith, which I have received, and of which I must prove worthy, and to which I must remain faithful, belongs to the order of suffering, anxiety, love, and death. He who suffers understands what I mean. He who daily wrestles with the devil understands what I mean. He who is anxious understands what I mean. He who loves intensely understands what I mean. And he who faces his death and all that this death actually and concretely means in his own life understands what I mean. Faith is grounded in the order of suffering and love, an order more original than any other order, an order from which every other order, including science, philosophy, history, and politics, flows and emanates.

What now, I ask, are the reasons for my faith? After asking us to “sanctify the Lord God in our hearts”—people often forget this preamble—St. Peter adds: “Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” Obviously I cannot go into my reasons in great detail, but the kind of reasons I would argue from are the following:

First: The teaching of these things from my earliest life by people, both religious and lay, who loved me most purely and who had absolutely no axe to grind save to witness to the deepest they knew. Therefore I trust them.

Second: The authority of the Church in its teachings, its traditions, its doctrines, its liturgy, for 2,000 years. Here again I believe the motive is absolutely pure; therefore I believe the Church.

Third: The authority of the Bible which I love most dearly, and which, the more I read it, increasingly means everything to me.

Fourth: The witness of the saints, and I can name twenty of them, in whose intellectual and spiritual company I crave to live more than in the company of any other crowd of men, including the greatest nonreligious philosophers, whom I also love.

Fifth: The testimony of what I have called the order of suffering, loneliness, love, and death, in its daily, hourly, minutely, cumulative impact upon the whole of my life.

Sixth: In a sense, this is the most important reason: the Holy Spirit in my heart, when it is there and to the extent that it is there.

To the question, what is the reason of the hope that is in me, I answer—I trust in meekness and fear and after sanctifying the Lord God in my heart—these are my reasons, than which I cannot imagine anything more solid or more dependable.

Why have I plagued you so far with my personal faith? Why have I bored you with this queer recital of the Nicene Creed, which all of you know by heart? Because religion is the realm of the authentically personal; and because the current crisis, at its deepest, has to do precisely with these priceless articles of faith which were first formulated more than sixteen centuries ago and which have been faithfully confessed by the Church ever since. Today God is denied, or watered down, or changed beyond recognition. Creation is denied, or at least the world is conceived as self-creative. Jesus of Nazareth has become a “gallant young man,” as Mr. Hammarskjöld called him in his book that all of you must have read. His claims about himself are either denied outright or passed by in magnificent silence. His passion is denied, the cross is denied, his resurrection is a myth, and who would dare speak today of his second coming, or of the Holy Ghost, or of the apostolicity of the Church, or, in this age of science, of the resurrection of the body, without being ridiculed?

Washington’s lovely cherry blossoms faded even before the annual festival began, and summer almost routed spring. To confirm that the calendar’s out of joint, I might mention that I’ve already given a commencement (trimester) address at Gordon College. Just weeks ago, while the Indiana winter caught its last wind, a lively panel discussion with Anglican Bishop John Robinson took me to Wabash College. Then I had the honor, at Ohio State University, of addressing 300 members of the academic community at a prayer breakfast, and of delivering a university-sponsored lecture on current theological trends.

I recently addressed two audiences on the theme of “Christianity in politics.” In a three-way discussion at the American committee of the World Council of Churches, I urged a halt of continuing ecumenical involvement in political expediencies. Next day, stressing the difference between the corporate church and the individual churchman, I spurred young scholars at Eastern Nazarene College to get politically involved to the limit of their knowledge, competence, and opportunity.

Jet travel is a marvelous gift endowing us, almost, with ubiquity. Too bad the drug industry hasn’t yet produced a pill that promises omniscience.

While every staff member shares in projection and production of the successive issues of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, a special burden falls each issue on editors with long experience and competence in special areas. This issue devoted to world evangelism reflects the helpful contribution of Associate Editor Harold Lindsell, who has spent a quarter of a century teaching and researching in missions. Dr. Lindsell has visited many of his 250 former students at their mission stations on far-flung fields of service. He is currently editing a volume to appear in the aftermath of the Congress on the Church’s Worldwide Mission just concluded at Wheaton, Illinois.

The news section carries out the theme with a broad survey of current developments on evangelistic frontiers. Two pages of illustrations include some striking work by Sam Tamashiro of World Outlook, who has generously aided our experiments in photojournalism.

This issue supplies important background perspective for the World Congress on Evangelism, which CHRISTIANITY TODAY is sponsoring in Berlin from October 26 to November 4 as a tenth-anniversary project. Participants have already been invited from ninety-two countries, and the number of nations represented may well exceed one hundred by the time the full quota of 1,250 participants is approved.

Some christians are moved to tears by romanesque basilicas; three stanzas of a Toplady hymn rouse others to emotional heights. As for me, the Reformation era turns me on. Luther before the Emperor or Knox before the Queen sends my blood tingling. I would rather catch pneumonia in Wittenberg than dysentery in Joppa any day. Therefore I am especially sensitive to criticism of the Reformers or of the seventeenth-century Protestant systematicians who followed close on their heels.

Particularly excruciating is criticism of the Reformation that has some basis in fact. That Luther “left the monastery to marry a nun” is an allegation over which little sleep should be lost. But what about the following claim, made by the great Protestant missiologist Gustav Warneck of Halle: “The comprehension of a continuous missionary duty of the Church was limited among the Reformers and their successors by a narrow-minded dogmatism combined with a lack of historical sense. They knew of the great missions of the past, but according to their ideas the apostles had already gone forth to the whole world and they and their disciples had essentially accomplished the missionary task. Christianity, therefore, had already proved its universal vocation as a world religion” (The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, VII, 404).

When Count Truchsess inquired of the Wittenberg theological faculty as to the scope of the Great Commission, the faculty issued an official document declaring that the command to go into all the world was only a “personale privilegium” of the apostles, and had already been fulfilled; were this not so, the faculty reasoned, the duty of becoming a missionary evangelist would fall to every Christian—an absurd conclusion! World evangelism would violate the creative orders (Schöpfungsordnungen) by which God gives each man a stable place in society, sets rulers over their subjects and requires a definite and limited call for ministerial service. In his Abriss einer Geschichte der protestantischen Missionen (Berlin, 1905, p. 65), Warneck states the sobering fact that the Moravian Herrnhutters established more missionary posts in two decades than did all of Reformation Protestantism in two centuries.

But it is possible to miss the forest for the trees in dwelling on such considerations. The historical and cultural situation in the Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is a necessary explanatory backdrop to the facts just adduced. The religious wars of the Reformation era, culminating in the unbelievably brutal Thirty Years’ War that devastated Germany and cast a pall over the whole seventeenth century, attenuated the perspective of Protestants and left them with little energy for world evangelism (cf. C. V. Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years’ War and Sir George Clark’s War and Society in the Seventeenth Century). The uncritically accepted ideological framework of the “great chain of being” (see Arthur Lovejoy’s superlative treatment of the theme) led to a basic conservatism in social outlook and to a natural predilection for the state church. And the Protestant states, unlike the Catholic ones, were not much engaged in overseas expansion; thus they did not benefit from the alliances between crown and church that led to the early introduction of the Catholic faith into America, Africa, and Asia.

Admittedly, the main thrust of the Protestant Reformation was intensive, not extensive. Lutheranism was an outlaw faith prior to the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555), and Calvinism remained in this unenviable position in the Empire until the Peace of Westphalia, concluding the Thirty Years’ War (1648). Protestants had to fight for their very existence and for the basic truth of the Gospel, that salvation is indeed by grace alone and not by the deeds of the law. Rome had formulated her theology over many centuries; the Protestants were compelled to perform the herculean task of systematizing and competently defending newly recovered biblical truth in a matter of decades. Calvin’s Institutes and Chemnitz’s Examination of the Council of Trent demonstrate how well they succeeded, but this expenditure of energy left little for other tasks, even important ones.

One can legitimately argue that had the Reformers not set Protestantism on so firm a doctrinal footing, the great missionary activities of late seventeenth-century Pietism, the eighteenth-century evangelical awakenings, and what Latourette has called “the great century” of Christian expansion (the nineteenth century) would have been impossible. Like individual members of the Church, who each have their gifts and should not depreciate others or say “I have no need of thee” (1 Cor. 12), so the eras of church history are part of one body and do not perform identical functions; at the last trump we shall find (as Charles Williams put it) how much the ages have “co-inhered” and been dependent upon one another.

Indeed, the anti-evangelistic criticism of the Reformation seems particularly unfortunate when we recall that the Reformers were above all concerned to recover and proclaim the “evangel”! Werner Elert (The Structure of Lutheranism) has rightly taken Warneck to task for missing this point: “How could Luther, who expounded the Psalms, the Prophets, and Paul, have overlooked or doubted the universal purpose of the mission of Christ and of His Gospel? From Col. 1:23 and Mark 16:15 he concludes that the Gospel is not to be kept in a corner but should fill the whole globe.” Elert cites such orthodox dogmaticians of the time as Jakob Herrbrand: “We are intent, so far as is humanly possible, on winning for the Lord Christ many for eternal life, and we do not want to neglect any opportunity of which we are aware.” Examples of the practical outworking of this zeal included the Jews at home, the Turks in the Balkans, and the Laplanders in Scandinavia.

Though such evangelistic activity may seem small in comparison with Catholic work, in qualitative terms the picture is far different; the recovery of the Gospel among the Protestants eliminated in principle such ex opere operato methods as Xavier’s aspersion (Christianizing tribes by mass application of baptismal water). The Reformers’ stress on lay Bible reading and the priesthood of all believers inevitably led to a sense of personal responsibility for those who had not heard of Christ, and the Wittenberg faculty’s provincialism evaporated as better demographic information replaced the faulty data that had convinced Philipp Nicolai, Johann Gerhard, and others that the apostles had virtually evangelized the globe.

George Forell, in his fine work, Faith Active in Love, has shown how fully the Reformation dynamic impels believers to social action. Precisely the same motive—Christ’s gracious love—constrains heirs of the Reformation (as the Student Volunteer Movement put it) to “evangelize the world in this generation.” For, in the last analysis, who will evangelize our generation if we do not?

The Consultation on Church Union, intent on real consultation, released the proposed “Outline Plan of Union” to encourage discussion a month ahead of its meeting May 2–5 in Dallas. Despite the tentative nature of the document, this proposed approach to uniting seven denominations with 23 million members¹In order of size: The Methodist Church, the Protestant Episcopal Church, the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., the United Church of Christ, the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ), the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Evangelical United Brethren Church. is breathtaking.

If all seven eventually go along, the COCU united church will encompass nearly one-third of U. S. Protestantism. But it will take time. Episcopal Bishop Robert F. Gibson, Jr., chairman of the COCU executive committee, estimates that the job might take five decades.

The COCU document describes six stages toward union, with Stage 2 ending when the current outline or an amended version of it is accepted as a “basis for future work.” Preparation of a specific plan, Stage 3, is tagged at four to ten years, but the document stresses the “danger of an interminable period of debate.” The fourth stage, preparation for union, is estimated at one to three years.

COCU planners see this as the end of the basic task. The final two stages—preparation and ratification of a constitution, and final processes—might take “a generation or more.”

The 105-page outline plan generally repeats previous work completed on biblical authority, worship, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and the ministry.

The letter to member churches preceding the actual union proposal echoes the basic paradox in wide-ranging unity: “We know that we need a more soldierly discipline, but also a greater freedom within that discipline. We know we need deeper cohesion, but also a more enriching diversity.”

The e pluribus unum idea, applied to baptism, means member congregations will practice both infant and believer’s baptism. Thus one paragraph permits infant baptism as an ancient form that “manifests truly our helplessness and God’s grace on our behalf, and is also a witness to the corporateness of the Christian life.” But the next paragraph insists in contrast that “baptism requires the conscious dedication and commitment of awakened faith. By God’s gracious acts the individual is led to make a responsive decision that involves faithful obedience to the call of God in Jesus Christ.”

On the proposed church’s second “sacrament,” the “Lord’s Supper,” the document repeats agreements reached in the 1964 Princeton meeting.

The COCU plan states that “the final test of any statement of Christian belief must be its faithfulness to the Scriptures and the living Lord to whom the Scriptures bear witness.” The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are accepted as doctrinal bases, and the united church will also have a “responsibility” to produce “new formulations as relevant as possible to new times and situations.”

The most significant new material is that which concerns church structure, and the document stresses that it is merely “a hypothetical scheme … a framework for conversation.…”

As expected, the plan calls for “historic continuity with the episcopate of the undivided Church” as a “symbol and means of the Church’s unity.” Among the duties of the bishops are “the transmitting of the Biblical faith and Christian Tradition through teaching and preaching. Collectively, the bishops safeguard the faith; they are the principal teachers of the faith both within the Church and to the world.” The “order of presbyters (elders)” includes both professionally trained, full-time ministers—as, for example, the parish clergyman—and such non-professionals as the Presbyterians’ ruling elder and the Disciples’ lay elder. Both form a “single priesthood” (since all believers are priests), both are ordained, and the presbyterate reflects “the new forms of the ministry which may well lie ahead.” Deacons will be treated not as fledgling presbyters but as persons of a “distinctive vocation” with special responsibility for representing the Church in helping “the sick and the outcast, the hungry and the helpless, the dishonored and the disadvantaged, whether or not those in need are members of the Church.”

A major innovation is the proposal of two types of local units: “parish-congregations, organized on the basis of the residence of their members,” and “task groups for mission, education, and service.”

“Districts” of 40 to 120 of these local units will be governed by a bishop and a representative council. The nation will be divided into “regions,” each led by a council and a “presiding bishop” chosen from among bishops in the district.

On the national level, a full convention will be held every four years, made up of representatives from each regional council and all the bishops. The bishops will also meet yearly, and a “general council” chosen by the convention will meet twice a year.

The “chief executive officer” of the united church will be a “presiding bishop” chosen for a term of five to ten years, depending on his retirement age.

As the document says, many questions are unanswered, such as: “Should parish-congregations be responsible for the election of their own pastors and lay representatives, should district units be responsible for approving the installation of pastors, should the pastors themselves be responsible for what they preach, should bishops be responsible for the appointment of ministers in parish congregations and of directors and staff to the specialized ministries?”

The whole question of discipline will be of great significance in a body attempting to unite episcopal, presbyterian, and free church forms. Under the plan, bishops have “the right to speak collectively for and to their whole constituency.” And while “taxation” as such is ruled out for support of the national united church, “appropriate penalties may be determined against any who fail to support programs representatively agreed-upon and established.”

The COCU designers assert their ecumenical pre-eminence by stating that after the constitution is written, “we will still be a uniting church” and “we could confidently ask other companies of Christian people to join us in losing their separate identities in this wider, visible unity.”

It is interesting to speculate on the effect of such a united church on the National Council of Churches, since this one church would suddenly become half the organization. Such membership is approved, provided conciliar ties do not compromise “the new unity itself.” There is potential for either overlap or rivalry in the task of the church that the document calls “confession in mission,” which includes “speaking to the contemporary issues of public life.”

Protestant Panorama

The Church of the Nazarene doubled the acreage of its international headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri, by purchasing a fifty-seven-acre estate for $1.4 million. The land had been sought for a city campus by the Metropolitan Junior College of Kansas City. The sale apparently ends a decade-long struggle between the two groups to obtain the land.

The Washington City Presbytery is backing one of its clergymen, Dr. Robert P. Johnson, to succeed Dr. Eugene Carson Blake as stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church. Johnson is believed to be the first Negro candidate proposed to the nine-man nominating committee.

A Richmond, Virginia, chancery court used a legal technicality to dismiss a suit challenging admission of two Nigerian students to First Baptist Church.

Eighty young people stepped forward to volunteer for missionary service at an experimental Southern Baptist missionary rally in First Baptist Church, Columbia, South Carolina, that may be the prototype for annual rallies in each state.

New York City post office officials refused to mail medicine and relief supplies to the Red Cross and schools in North Viet Nam from a group of seventy-five Quakers.

Personalia

The Rev. Nemesio Garcia, former president of the Baptist Convention of Western Cuba, has been released from prison by the Castro government. The fate of thirty-four other Baptists imprisoned with him a year ago, including two American missionaries, is unknown.

Dr. Arthur E. Steele, who left as president of New Jersey’s Shelton College last summer in a dispute with board chairman Dr. Carl McIntire, plans to head a new institution, Clearwater (Florida) Christian College, which opens this September. Dr. Nathan Willits, former Shelton dean, will manage academic affairs.

A “Christian Hall of Fame” opened on Easter in the Canton (Ohio) Baptist Temple. The initial group of forty-three honorees are all men and mostly fundamentalists. The only living member is evangelist Bob Jones, Sr.

The new North American Fellowship of the Baptist World Alliance chose the Rev. V. Carney Hargroves, an American Baptist of Philadelphia, as chairman. Vice-chairman is U.S. Senator Jennings Randolph (D-W.Va.), a Seventh Day Baptist.

The Rev. Kenneth E. McDowell, assistant treasurer of the Church of the Brethren, becomes director of the denomination’s material-aid services, which serve the needy in sixty countries.

The Rev. Warren P. McPherson, of Parsons, Kansas, is new public relations supervisor for the Assemblies of God.

Airwaves

Italian television carried back-to-back ecumenical assessments, filmed separately, from Pope Paul, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, and World Council of Churches leader W. A. Visser ’t Hooft.

The Independent Television Network in Britain produced a controversial documentary on “The Vatican’s Millions,” which studied property not only in Rome but also in London and the United States. The program, seen only in the northern half of the country, called the church “the richest nongovernment institution in the world.”

The All-Africa Conference of Churches on May 11 opens a comprehensive training course in radio techniques for African churchmen in Nairobi, Kenya. The first class of sixteen comes from twelve nations and eight denominations, and includes one Roman Catholic.

The Congo Protestant Council has begun operating radio station ECCO, which broadcasts in French and several Congolese languages. The Rev. and Mrs. Daniel Ericson, Evangelical Covenant Church missionaries, are in charge.

The Methodist Television, Radio, and Film Commission plans to move offices from Nashville to New York City before 1968.

On Campus

Eight students were dismissed from Boston’s strict St. John’s Seminary after demonstrating against school policies while Cardinal Cushing held a pastors’ meeting. Then Catholic laymen joined seminarians in picketing, fasting, and other protests.

Harvard Divinity School marks its 150th anniversary April 20 and 21 with a series of lectures, discussions, and a commemorative concert.

San Francisco Theological Seminary has recruited two new teachers: Dr. Dieter Georgi from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and Dr. E. David Willis from Princeton Theological Seminary.

Baylor University this fall becomes the first Baptist institution to offer a Ph.D. in religion. Three new teachers will be added to the Department of Religion as part of the program.

Asbury Theological Seminary has established a “Church in Society” department to “interpret the biblical message of salvation in terms of the needs and understanding of people in diverse cultures and social classes.”

A Farewell To Brunner

At ten minutes before two the great bell of Zürich’s Fraumünster began to toll. The fifteenth-century cathedral was bathed in sunlight the Tuesday after Easter at the funeral of Emil H. Brunner, eminent Swiss theologian who died April 6.

On the hour, the bell ceased and the strains of Bach’s Fantasy in C signaled the beginning of the service for the capacity congregation.

Although he was honored throughout the world as a leading exponent of “crisis theology” (see editorial, page 28), Brunner’s local reputation was that of a popular preacher whose monthly sermons were known for their simplicity. The Swiss said that when he spoke, Fraumünster was a place you could send your housemaid.

Dr. Arthur Rich, Brunner’s successor at the University of Zürich, said he was “a theologian through and through, but he always took seriously his responsibilities toward all men and the world.” The cathedral pastor, Peter Vogelsanger, lauded Brunner as an inquirer, saying “the strength of Christian man lies not in doctrine, influence, or intellect, nor in the strength of the institution he represents, but in the spirit of Christian liberty.”

The inscriptions on floral arrangements surrounding Gothic portals at the eastern end of the nave testified to the extent of Brunner’s impact, but the congregation was mostly elderly, part of the 77-year-old professor’s generation, and no reference was made to younger theologians. The organ closed the two-hour service with the “Halleluia Chorus.”

JAMES BOICE

Miscellany

Grape-pickers in California won recognition of their labor union this month from Schenley Industries and the Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic order that operates a profitable winery. The breakthrough followed eight months of agitation by the farm workers, who received significant aid from Protestant and Catholic clergymen.

The Food and Drug Administration has asked college executives to try to prevent students from using the hallucinogen LSD. New York officials also expressed concern during a one-day conference on how to curtail usage. In that state, police link the drug to a homicide case, and fear permanent personality damage in a girl who ate an LSD-soaked sugar cube of her uncle’s by mistake.

The Gallup Poll reports widespread support for sterilization under special conditions: if a woman has more children than she can care for and asks to be sterilized (64 per cent approve); if parents have mental or physical afflictions and ask to be sterilized (76 per cent); if a mother’s health would be endangered by her having more children (78 per cent).

Canada’s House of Commons voted 143 to 112 to retain the nation’s penalty of death by hanging for treason and premeditated murder, despite strong support for change from some churchmen.

Chairman Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani said the Pope’s new birth-control study commission may make its final report before summer. Leading Canadian theologian Gregory Baum asserted this month that since churchmen are divided on the issue, Catholic families may obey their own conscience on contraception.

On Easter Eve, thousands of jeering teen-agers milled and shouted “God is dead” as Patriarch Alexei, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, led a ceremonial procession at Yalokhovsky Cathedral in Moscow.

Permanent, official liaison has been set up between the Roman Catholic Bishops’ Commission for Ecumenical Affairs and the National Council of Churches. A thirty-six-member “Working Group” will meet regularly, chaired by Catholic Bishop John H. Carberry and Dr. John Coventry Smith (United Presbyterian).

Deaths

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS, SR., 83, founder (fifty-six years ago) and owner of the firm that bears his name, the most influential evangelical publishing house of his generation; also collector of rare books on Calvinism; in Grand Rapids, Michigan, of a heart ailment.

RAY LEE, 21, student body president at Free Will Baptist Bible College, Nashville, Tennessee; of a cerebral hemorrhage during an intramural basketball game on campus.

DR. BOB INGERSOLL, 80, Baptist minister and former superintendent of Chicago’s Pacific Garden Mission; in Grayling, Michigan.

COLONEL IRA A. PALM, 53, member of the National Council of the Officers’ Christian Union; in Walter Reed Army Hospital, of Hodgkin’s disease.

This article is based largely on dispatches from two religious reporters in Saigon who have interviewed informed Vietnamese in recent weeks: Ernest Zaugg of Religious News Service and Dale Herendeen of Christianity Today.

The Buddhists of South Viet Nam were at it again this month, fomenting a power struggle that could have major effects on America’s troubled commitment to the Southeast Asian nation. Rarely has a militant religious group waged a political campaign with such worldwide ramifications.

Not all Viet Nam’s Buddhists were involved in the move to oust the reigning military junta and form an elected civilian regime in which Buddhists might have the controlling hand. Half of the nation’s 12 million Buddhists are nominal, and the others are not a cohesive force. However, the biggest, best-organized religious body in the country is the Unified Buddhist Church.

Zaugg says Buddhists are divided between the “nationalists,” who are anti-Communist and want their faith to gain official predominance, and “a more astute and mysterious minority” of Communists who have infiltrated Buddhist ranks. But most observers, including U. S. experts, emphasize that while some Reds were involved in the rash of Buddhist-run demonstrations and threats of civil war, the major impetus came from nationalists.

Other observers define two basic Buddhist groups: intellectuals, who want their church to remain only a spiritual force and are not very influential; and activists, who sense the needs of their masses and are willing to do something about them.

South Viet Nam has had recurring rivalries among its religions, particularly Buddhists and the 1.6 million unitary Roman Catholics (see “A Heritage of Religious Turbulence,” January 21 issue, page 36). Although old enmities remain, it is significant that Catholics have given general support to the Buddhist drive for a new constitution and civilian regime within the next few months.

Leaders of the tiny Protestant minority are silent in the current turmoil, apprehensive about their numerical weakness and what the future will hold. Some young men who would like to pitch in and help whatever government survives fear such activity might bring more trouble for their church. And Protestant leaders have argued so long for a “hands off” attitude toward politics (for understandable reasons) that few have any significant opinions to offer either their fellow believers or outsiders.

The new crisis, which threatened at mid-month to bring down the reign of Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, began March 10 when Ky fired popular First Corps Commander Nguyen Chanh Thi, a Buddhist who was overlord of the nation’s five northern provinces. His replacement was a nominal Roman Catholic and night-lifer, Ton That Dinh.

Buddhist activists seized this strategic moment to stir street protests and then called for a civilian government. The leading strategist was the Venerable Tri Quang, an enigmatic 44-year-old monk credited with the downfall of no less than six other Saigon regimes.

The street demonstrations began with an orderly, almost festive tone. With typical Oriental strategy, the one in Saigon on March 31, for instance, coincided with a national holiday honoring an early king, Hung Vuong. The Buddhists tacked on honor for one of their own martyrs, Quach Tri Trang, who was shot by police in a 1963 protest against President Diem.

Things snowballed, and during the Christians’ Holy Week the mobs grew bigger and angrier. Injuries and property damage mounted, and American soldiers were confined to quarters for their own safety.

Premier Ky called a national political congress to pave the way for an elected government and invited representatives of all the religious and political blocs, as well as provincial and city officials. The Unified Buddhist Church boycotted the session, reportedly because it felt such a meeting would downgrade its strength. But the Buddhists considered the meeting’s call for civilian government a victory.

Despite anti-American signs and shouts in recent weeks, religious leaders know Reds would fill the vacuum overnight if America pulled out. Buddhists are as mindful of the fate of fellow believers under Communist China as the Catholics are.

America has been caught in a sticky predicament. It feels that only the South Vietnamese military has the strength to govern the country in the present war situation. Thus, despite an over-all commitment to self-determination for South Viet Nam, it backed a non-elected military junta of fading popularity.

There is a natural grass-roots opposition to all foreigners, American and otherwise, and a centuries-old tradition of stubbornness against accepting Westerners. The sight of GIs—many young and noisy—running around the streets irritates the people, particularly intellectuals who cherish quiet contemplation. These know less about Viet Cong terrorism than about the graft and greed resulting from the war and the United States’ involvement. America becomes the scapegoat for such things as galling high prices and the black market. The U. S. planners know these problems and in recent months have worked hard for economic reform, moving beyond mere military aid toward a cross-cultural attempt to give real aid to the Vietnamese, not for selfish reasons but to help build the nation.

For America the stakes are high. Its commitment includes the lives of 100 American soldiers a week (during the week of riots more Americans than South Vietnamese were killed in the war for the first time). The economic burden is well over $200 million a week. On top of religious unrest, reports of growing rebellion came from areas dominated by the “Montegnard,” a general term for 700,000 hill tribesmen who dominate two-thirds of the countryside.

More important than governmental changes this spring may be the World Buddhist Conference, which begins May 28 in Saigon. Tri Quang has worked hard for international power within this group, and some interpreted his anti-Ky machinations as a drive for new prestige in advance of the meeting. A resurgent pan-Buddhist bloc across Southeast Asia could rewrite the history books.

Herendeen says, “The future lies with the youth, and this is not lightly said. The young people of Viet Nam are looking for leadership—for someone or ones who will step forth with a powerful program for the total need of Viet Nam, whether Buddhist, Catholic, or whatever. The day of the ‘old man’ is over here. They don’t want Communism, by and large, but they might get it by default if nothing greater, and better, comes along.”

‘Aid’ For The Unwed

Public birth-control programs have expanded quietly in many cities during recent years. Now the stimulus is coming from the top. An unpublicized memo from Welfare Secretary John Gardner in January spelled out the new emphasis, and last month President Johnson said is his health message to Congress:

“It is essential that all families have access to information and services that will allow freedom to choose the number and spacing of their children within the dictates of individual conscience.”

The most controversial element in that statement, and subsequent explanations from the Executive Branch, is that unmarried mothers are not prohibited from receiving aid. The director of the Children’s Bureau, Mrs. Katherine Oettinger, told a Planned Parenthood meeting in Boston that if Johnson’s program is carried out, “it will not be the role of the federal government to dictate which women shall or shall not have family planning services if they desire them.”

Critics of such an open policy, most notably Roman Catholics, contend that the government subsidizes and encourages promiscuity by giving unwed mothers the means to have sexual intercourse without fear of pregnancy.

Gardner’s rather daring new policy proved none too bold for Alaska’s Senator Ernest Gruening. Gruening, an M.D., was editor of the Nation in the 1920s and fought for Margaret Sanger’s birth-control cause. When Gardner appeared before a Senate subcommittee last month, Gruening told him, “Instead of facing it frankly, you are continuing to do it under the table.”

The Senate hearings concerned a Gruening bill that would set up population assistants in the State and Welfare Departments. Gardner opposes the idea.

The testimony revealed the following federal programs: The Children’s Bureau is spending $3 million in thirty-two states on family planning this year, with $5 million scheduled next year. The Office of Economic Opportunity, which prohibits birth-control devices for unwed mothers, has spent $1,250,000 in the past fifteen months. In fiscal 1966, $6.5 million is being spent on population researeh. The government now has 165 staff specialists in population.

Besides the touchiness of the unwed-mother problem, the methods of contraception are undergoing close medical scrutiny. Mechanical methods are not foolproof in preventing pregnancy. Pills, which are more expensive, are more reliable, but some experts are wary about their side effects and unknown results on future generations.

To answer second thoughts, a fourteen-member committee under the World Health Organization surveyed medical complaints. Last month it reported that no causal relationship has been established between the pills and such maladies as cancer of the uterus, blood clots, strokes, or permanent infertility. But it said long-range effects won’t be known for years.

The experts urged caution in use of the pills for women with a history or symptoms of cancer or of liver or kidney disease, and said more research is necessary on many questions.

‘Monkey Trial,’ 1966 Style

A county judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, is scheduled to rule in May whether the state’s law against teaching of evolution in public schools is constitutional. The brief hearing on the issue April 1 was in marked contrast to the long, circus-like Scopes “monkey trial” in Tennessee forty-one years ago.

The 1925 defendant was science teacher John Scopes, now 65, who became a geologist for a gas company and lives in Shreveport, Louisiana. This time the evolutionists are on the offensive, challenging the law through the person of Mrs. Susan Epperson, 24, a Presbyterian. She teaches biology in Little Rock’s Central High School, where school integration achieved an anxious first victory in 1957.

Mrs. Epperson is backed by the Arkansas Education Association, which represents the state’s 15,000 teachers; the Arkansas Council of Churches, whose nine denominations have 275,000 members; and Winthrop Rockefeller, who hopes to become Arkansas’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction this November.

Evolution is an issue in New Mexico’s gubernatorial campaign. Republican candidate David Cargo accuses the State Board of Education of “coaching” students in their beliefs because it orders biology texts to have a pasted label stating that “evolution is being taught as theory and not as fact.” A state board official called on Cargo to retract his complaints and explained the disclaimer had been added after “many and widespread objections from church groups.”

Tennessee’s anti-evolution law still is on the books, and after the Scopes trial it was echoed by Mississippi and Arkansas. The law’s partisans in Arkansas include many Protestant fundamentalists, whose most visible organizational voice, the Arkansas Baptist Bible Fellowship, asserts that “the forces of Communism, liberalism, and modernism seek to undermine the historic faith of our fathers by fostering the theory of evolution.”

Mrs. Epperson, who says she believes in both God and evolution, is fighting the law because of the hypocrisy involved, since most science teachers conscientiously break the law.

Another contrast with the Scopes trial is that Judge Murray Reed has ruled out all discussion of evolution and religion. The narrow question of constitutionality is thus the only issue on trial.

Mrs. Epperson told the court it was her duty as a teacher to discuss “various scientific theories, including the Darwinian theory of the origin of species.” But if she does her duty, she becomes a criminal. The law, she said, perpetuates “ignorance, prejudice, and bigotry.”

Whatever Reed’s May ruling, an appeal to a higher court is likely. The National Observer asked Scopes what he thought about the fuss, and he mused, “I don’t think the world changes very rapidly.”

The largest ecumenical strategy conference of Protestant missionaries ever held in North America took place at Wheaton College in Illinois April 9–16. More than 900 missionaries and national leaders from seventy countries gathered for the Congress on the Church’s Worldwide Mission.

The congress was called by the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association and the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association (arm of the National Association of Evangelicals), which together represent more than 13,000 missionaries, two-fifths of North America’s Protestant missionary force.

Ten major study papers were presented and discussed in preparation for the key “Wheaton Declaration,” addressed to “our constituencies, to fellow believers beyond our boundaries, and to a non-believing world.” The Declaration was voted by delegates before the closing communion service.

Congress Co-chairmen Vernon Mortenson, general director of The Evangelical Alliance Mission, and Louis L. King, foreign secretary of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, stated, “The greatest hope in our worldwide mission is our confidence, based on the Bible, that God himself does not despair of our times.” They noted that the latter half of the twentieth century finds “disturbing secular forces at work in the lives of those who are Christians, eroding their commitment to Christ and to his missionary purpose.”

The delegates listened intently as national leaders evaluated the world situation from within their own perspectives. African, Latin American, Japanese, European, and Southeast Asian delegates read papers and delivered inspirational addresses. Their recommendations weighed heavily in determining the final shape of the Declaration.

Vietnamese pastor Dan Mieng, speaking through an interpreter, moved his listeners at the Sunday afternoon rally as he described war conditions in his country, the sufferings of the churches, and the needs of his people.

Ruben Lores, evangelism-in-depth leader for the Latin America Mission and a delegate to the forthcoming World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin, was a fiery and well-received but unofficial spokesman for the delegation from Latin America. Nigerian James Kayode Bolarin, editor of African Challenge, said Africa’s current turmoil presents unusual dangers and challenges to Christians everywhere. “Persecutions, violence, threats and even deaths,” he said, “are sometimes directed against the adherents of Christianity in Africa.… One good result is that faithful Christians are standing firm in their confession, while the masses are falling away.”

Sitting in as an observer of the meetings was Dr. Eugene L. Smith, head of the United States section of the World Council of Churches and former missionary executive of The Methodist Church.

Smith called the congress “a notable gathering, superbly organized, representing a larger number of missionaries than any previous missionary assembly in North America, seriously and creatively considering the evangelistic task of the Church in today’s world.”

Bible expositions each morning before the study papers were presented, laid biblical foundations for the Church’s mandate to evangelize the world. Dr. Kenneth Kantzer, dean of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, tied the missionary mandate to an authoritative, infallible Scripture. “To all of [our] questions,” he said, “the answer of our Lord is not to [look to] an infallible church or human leaders who may rise up in the church. Our Lord directs his disciples to Scripture, the written Scripture … of the Old Testament and … the New Testament. The evangelical Christian who would be faithful to his Lord dares turn nowhere else.”

Dr. Arthur Glasser, home director of the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, centered his Bible exposition on the Church’s message. He tied the missionary mandate to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the need for personal decision. “God needs men he can control,” Glasser said. President John Walvoord of Dallas Theological Seminary in Texas developed the biblical doctrine of the Church. He said Christ’s prayer for unity “is already answered, and no organizational structure can add one tie to improve it.”

Eric Fife, of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, linked the Great Commission to the second advent of Christ and pleaded for a heightened awareness of current trends that bespeak the closing days of this age and the impending return of Christ. He suggested that God may be calling some young people to remain celibate in the interest of the Gospel, or at least to postpone marriage until their late thirties.

The preamble of the Wheaton Declaration called for an evangelical consensus on: the Roman Catholic Church; contemporary movements in Protestantism, such as universalism; the pseudo-Christian cults; and such non-Christian systems as Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. The Declaration itself:

• Affirmed the uniqueness and finality of the Christian faith and warned against syncretism.

• Reaffirmed belief in eternal punishment, repudiated universalism, and warned evangelicals against practicing a form of universalism by failing to take the Gospel to all men.

• Called for careful, patient researeh on why and where churches grow, and wide dissemination of findings.

• Urged evangelicals to evaluate their methods, improve their missionary effectiveness, and make the best possible use of available means to communicate the Gospel without sacrificing face-to-face involvement.

• Asserted the right of religious freedom, the right of men to change their religion, and the biblical need and right to win men from unbelief to faith in Christ.

• Warned of the dangers in a Roman Catholicism that, though it shows signs of renewal, has not changed its basic theological stance and is still a legitimate field for evangelism.

• Called on evangelicals to work for unity of the faith without compromise and suggested that some missionary agencies might increase their effectiveness by closer cooperation and common use of facilities.

• Acknowledged the need for social concern and involvement but within the context of proclamation: social action should point men to, not away from, the Gospel.

• Drew attention to a world that is hostile to the Christian faith and warned that evangelicals are wrestling against “principalities and powers.”

This is what is written: that the Messiah is to suffer death and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that in his name repentance bringing the forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed to all nations.

—Jesus Christ

(Luke 24:46, 47, NEB)

Not many rocky hillsides are emblazoned with “Jesus Saves” any more. There are fewer tent meetings and sawdust trails. Altar calls in evangelical churches are probably hitting a new low this year.

To some Christians, these are ominous trends of spiritual decay. To others they are evidence of a blessed revolution in biblical evangelism. Traditional evangelistic methods based on hit-or-miss, take-it-or-leave-it proclamation of the Gospel are seen to be giving way to more specialized, in-depth approaches. Evangelicals in North America and abroad are realizing anew that deeds are fully as important as words, that positive dialogue is more effective than legalistic argumentation, and that winning converts is not primarily the task of paid clergymen.

In the spring of 1966, the revolution in evangelism was evident in an assortment of cultural patterns:

At Daytona Beach, Florida, two Bob Jones University-trained folk singers roamed the sands with an inter-religious entertainment and evangelism team during Easter week. Many hundreds of the 75,000 vacationing college students were counseled, and some (including at least one Hebrew) professed initial commitment to Christ. At Fort Lauderdale, some 250 miles south, where thousands of other students were soaking in the sun, an Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship team set up an evangelistic effort.

In New York, Pentecostalist youth worker David Wilkerson planned to open a new training program for converts this week. His Teen Challenge organization, meanwhile, has begun holding Saturday night rallies at a theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

In Colorado, evangelist Jack Wyrtzen conducted a three-day camp retreat attended by cadets of the Air Force Academy. A spokesman for Wyrtzen said “many cadets responded to the gospel invitation to receive Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour.”

Fresh approaches notwithstanding, the prospect of mass “revival” seems as remote as ever, at least in the sense of a dynamic, overt phenomenon. Untold numbers of rank-and-file evangelicals are still apathetic toward the evangelistic mandate. The indifference is stiffened by some of the very spokesmen for evangelism, who, despite their verbalizations, do little by way of personal example in winning commitments to Christ.

The current revolution in evangelism, however, may make some important inroads on the problem of non-involvement and unconcern, and the world may yet see a quiet awakening with more long-range impact than the much-publicized revivals of bygone days.

If local churches are able to get over the barrier that the old way is the only way, they may become party to just such a quiet awakening. But as of now, many traditionalists are skeptical about Christian witness within the framework of a fashion show, or Sunday morning coffee hours, or dialogues with homosexuals.

The most crucial issue facing evangelism today, however, lies with its definition. Ecclesiastical and theological liberals are attempting to redefine the term to fit universalistic presuppositions. Under the assumption that all men are already saved, the new evangelism often boils down to a mere effort to make men aware of it. Energies are then shifted toward a change of social structures.

In mainstream denominations and in the major ecumenical organizations, considerable attention is being given to the necessity of new institutional forms in the churches. One debate in this area promised to be waged this week at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) at Montreat, North Carolina. The big topic of conversation before the assembly was a controversial, twenty-seven-page committee report, “New Wine Skins?”

“The history of God’s people reveals a perennial unwillingness to assume the burden of ministering to a changing world,” the report declares. “So it is with our Church today, which is failing to minister like Christ the Servant to the persons of the hungry, the naked, and the oppressed, a fact which must cause us to question seriously whether our denomination is aware of its true mission.”

The report raises the question of the mission of the Church and evangelism but does not attempt to give explicit answers.

Evangelicals, in and out of the mainline denominations, tend to accept the definition of evangelism generally associated with the late Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, who died in 1944:

“To evangelize is so to present Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit, that men shall come to put their trust in God through him, to accept him as their Saviour, and serve him as their King in the fellowship of his Church.”

Due to twentieth-century population shifts, the big city is numerically the major frontier for evangelism today. And it is a frontier on which the individualized, situational, action-oriented evangelistic method is especially significant, whether the outreach be toward the poverty-stricken, neglected slum-dweller or toward the affluent sophisticate who seeks seclusion in high-rise apartments.

“Our evangelism is one-to-one, and in depth,” says 25-year-old Bill Milliken, congenial, hard-working director of the Youth Life Crusade’s Lower East Side branch in Manhattan. Among churches cooperating with Young Life and Harlem’s influential Church of the Master and the Church of the Sea and Land, a few blocks from the tenements where Young Life offers housing to homeless youths who are interested in Christianity.

In Philadelphia, the American Sunday School Union, which for 149 years has been working in the now nearly forgotten area of rural evangelism, is expanding a relatively new urban program and hopes to launch similar efforts in other major cities. Work in rural areas, where some 1,500 Sunday schools are currently being maintained, will continue.

Apartment-dwellers are probably the biggest challenge to the evangelistic outreach of the church today. A survey made in the Washington, D. C., area, last year showed that fewer than 5 per cent of apartment-dwellers belong to any church. Many apartment buildings, especially those of the luxury type, are sealed against visitation programs by locks and guards. The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod tried to meet the challenge by assigning a minister to live in Chicago’s plush Marina City. Says the Rev. Roy Blumhorst, who lives with his wife and three children in a forty-seventh-floor efficiency:

“I agree with locking the salesman out, and locking out the clergyman who would be a door-to-door salesman. If somebody is going to have a brush with Christianity, it should be in the person of a Christian layman who is interested in him, his neighbor or co-worker.”

This principle of Christian witness is the subject of a film produced by the National Association of Evangelicals. Without disparaging institutional church structures, the film points to the great need for every Christian to be a living witness in his own situation.

Such person-to-person confrontation is the object of the non-church International Christian Leadership groups, famous for their prayer breakfasts in which persons well known in government and business are exposed to soft-sell evangelism. These breakfasts, along with ICL-sponsored Bible studies in homes and offices, have spread across all of North America and to major world capitals.

But what will happen to the more traditional forms of evangelism? Many are still valid but are becoming more specialized and intensified. A prime example is the evangelism-in-depth concept developed by Latin America Mission. Large public rallies resemble evangelistic meetings of long ago, but preparation and follow-up on a vast scale have been added.

Even that lowly symbol of evangelicalism, the gospel tract, is getting new treatment. More and more tracts are aimed at particular audiences and situations. An example is that put out every four years by Washington Bible College for Presidential inaugurations, with interesting historical data supplemented by a spiritual message. Last Inaguration Day WBC students distributed 110,000 copies.

The basic way of evangelizing, giving out Scripture portions, is a bigger enterprise than ever and is undergoing some updating of its own. The American Bible Society now distributes Scriptures in assorted translations—some illustrated—with attractive bindings. The society opened a series of 150th-anniversary ceremonies this month with the dedication of a new twelve-story Bible House along Broadway. President Johnson recently was presented with a special commemorative Bible representing the 750 millionth copy of Scripture distributed by the society.

With little doubt, the most crucial frontier in evangelism today is youth work. And here evangelist Billy Graham is becoming increasingly effective. Whether by design or not, Graham’s mass-evangelism techniques are arresting teen-agers far more than any other age group. This month, the evangelist is preparing for what he says will be his best-organized, most intensive crusade yet, a thirty-two-day effort in London beginning June 1.¹Decision magazine reports there is a “distinct posibility” that Graham and his team will hold four meetings in Warsaw, Poland, in September of 1967, at the invitation of evangelical churches in that country. Other 1967 meetings are scheduled across Canada and in Puerto Rico, Tokyo, and Kansas City, Missouri. Graham has also been invited to conduct a summer crusade in 1968 in the new Madison Square Garden being built in New York.

Later this year, as a prelude to the World Congress on Evangelism, Graham will be holding a crusade in Berlin. He will also be a featured speaker at the congress, of which he is honorary chairman. The congress, scheduled for October 26-November 4, will climax years of praying and planning for an event to summon the churches to the fulfillment of their spiritual priorities. It is a tenth-anniversary project of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, with the aim of facing the duty and need of evangelism, the obstacles and opportunities, the resources and rewards, and encouraging Christian believers in a mighty offensive for the Gospel in the remaining third of the twentieth century.

Salvation In Saigon

An opening night crowd of more than 6,000 on April 2 witnessed the start of a ten-day preaching crusade in Saigon, South Viet Nam, believed to be the first of its kind. Although the campaign took a back seat to political turmoil (see story, page 44), the contrast with the riots and near-riots could not have gone unnoticed by military rulers who were the brunt of Buddhist agitation. On opening day, evangelists and church leaders met with Chief of State Nguyen Van Thieu at Gio Long Palace. The meeting was cordial and Thieu, a Roman Catholic, expressed the nation’s thanks for the visitors and their purpose.

The all-Asian team was led by the Rev. Gregorio Tingson of the Philippines, chairman of Asian Evangelists Commission, founded in 1964 with the aim of “Asians Winning Asians for Christ.”

Communists were interested, since the word “campaign” in Vietnamese has both military and political connotations. A Red cadre met a local pastor to ask what was going on, and was assured the meetings had no political purpose.

When a 9 P.M. curfew was clamped on the city, meetings were held earlier. This, and limiting of U. S. soldiers to quarters, kept attendance down. Many who went had to make long detours to avoid the widespread street demonstrations; some were accused of being demonstrators, others went home weeping because of lingering tear gas.

At week’s end, some 700 decisions for Christ had been made at Cong Hoa Olympic Stadium, which seats 20,000. Meetings were extended for another week at the large Saigon Protestant Vietnamese Church.

Many poor Christians across the country who had lost everything in last year’s flood or through war devastation gave amazing amounts to back the Saigon crusade. Before it opened, the goal of 700,000 piasters ($10,000) had been far surpassed.

Spiritual forces in the war-torn land were also shored up last month at a retreat in Dalat that drew 400 delegates, nearly every native pastor and missionary in the country. The session did much to create understanding between Vietnamese and foreigners. Many came to Dalat from Red-held areas.

A ‘Future’ In Their Future

Roman Catholic conservatives are about to get their own magazine—by June if the founders can get body and soul together by then. The fortnightly thought journal, with headquarters a few blocks from the White House, is called Future.

The editor is red-haired lawyer L. Brent Bozell, 39, who has been associated with another prominent Roman Catholic, William F. Buckley, Jr., on the slick right-wing political journal National Review.

“Why another magazine?” asks an editorial in a thirty-four page mock-up edition. The answer, essentially, is that the church is in trouble, and “existing Catholic journals of opinions are increasingly a monolith harnessed to the assumptions of liberal ideology.… Our immediate task is to fill a void, to right a scandal, to make sure that at least one journal of opinion in a nation of 45 million Catholics is open to the traditional voice of the Christian Church.”

Bozell, who has the accent and blunt elegance of his fellow ex-Yalie Buckley, asserts that “no Catholic journal outside the scholarly publications is intellectually impressive.” That includes Commonweal, for instance, and he says America makes no “pretensions” to scholarship. He thinks the Catholic who wants to know what’s really going on can do no better than the National Catholic Reporter, but “in many ways, it is a scandal sheet.”

Future will be edited by laymen but will seek advice and contributions from clergymen. And while “we will have political commentary, this is emphatically secondary,” Bozell says.

The issues of interest to Future can be sensed in quotes from advance publicity: “We will have much to say about the scandal of a third of the Church suffering Christ’s Cross behind the Iron Curtain … we shall be urging policies looking toward its liberation.… Our editorials will be concerned with the alarming drop of conversions in this country in recent years.”

Future contends that “spiritual exhaustion” is parading under the banner of ecumenism, and that the culture is in danger of “total secularization.” It is “tired of attacks on the Catholic school system, that marvel of the modern Church.”

Bozell shuns comparison with Father Gommar DePauw’s Catholic Traditionalist Movement, saying that DePauw is too narrow in focusing on liturgy and that “it is imprudent for such reaction to be spearheaded by a priest.”

The editor says there is nothing wrong with the sort of cooperation with Protestants that existed before Vatican II, “but I am very much alarmed by the current tendency to pretend doctrine is insignificant. We are serious about our Catholicism, and we expect others to be serious about their beliefs.”

On the church-state question, Future will favor the nineteenth-century doctrine stated by Bozell as follows: “Where Roman Catholics form a large percentage of the population, it is right and proper to represent officially the nation’s religious commitment. Only where there is marked pluralism should civil authorities remain neutral.”

The new magazine will have twenty-eight to thirty-two pages with slick paper and an urbane appearance. Some articles by writers opposed to the editorial policies, including Protestants, will be published. Those who work on other religious publications will be surprised to learn that Bozell thinks his magazine can pay its own way through advertising and subscription income.

Poor Showing

Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, general secretary-elect of the World Council of Churches, closed a Citizens’ Crusade Against Poverty convention in Washington, D. C., April 14 when things got out of hand. As leaders of 100 organizations, including many churchmen, worked on resolutions urging more participation of the poor in the federal war on poverty, unruly poverty victims took over the meeting and hurled complaints and insults.

Poverty war director Sargent Shriver quit the meeting commenting. “I will not participate in a riot.” Blake, crusade vice-chairman, told the crowd, “There won’t be anything left to take over when you take over.” But he and other leaders said after the debacle that frustrations of poor people are understandable and the crusade will continue.

Death Of God Again

New fuel for the death-of-God debate is being fed into bookstores this spring. From Bobbs Merrill comes a 202-page paperback, Radical Theology and the Death of God, containing a series of essays by Drs. Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, and from Westminster Press comes a 157-page paperback that is the product of Altizer alone.

Altizer et al. were treated to big play in major pre-Easter articles in Look, Time, and Newsweek, and in an infinite number of Easter sermons, pro and con. Now attention shifts again to the bookshelf. Dr. Robert McAfee Brown opens the debate with a blurb on the cover of the Westminster book, entitled The Gospel of Christian Atheism. Says Brown, “It is not a gospel …; it is not Christian …; and it is not atheism.… In an attempt to celebrate the ‘death of God,’ this book succeeds only in demonstrating the death of the ‘death-of-God theology.’”

Facts And Trends

Religion in America, by Winthrop S. Hudson (Scribners, 1965, 447 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Robert G. Torbet, dean, Central Baptist Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Kansas, and president, American Baptist Convention.

This is a survey of the development of American religious life. It is the story, not of denominations, but of the unfolding of a religious witness brought to this new land from Europe and nurtured and modified by a people who were building a new nation under God. The organization follows the major segments of our national history: I. The Formative Years, 1607–1789; II. The New Nation, 1789–1860; III. Years of Mid-passage, 1860–1914; IV. Modern America, 1914—.

Four features characterize the author’s approach. First, he regards religion as a part of American life and therefore of the American scene. For this reason there is in his story a generous interlacing of the facts of our social, economic, and political life. Religion is seen in proper perspective, as an important dynamic in the development of the nation. But it is also seen as modified by the several European traditions developed in a new world setting.

Secondly, the author achieves a remarkable balance in selection and interpretation of his facts. He moves with ease from the beginnings of the major denominational groups in American life to the Great Awakening, “when America experienced its ‘national conversion’ and achieved a common pattern of evangelical cooperation in the enormous task of Christianizing a continent and expanding the Christian witness overseas.” He succeeds in describing, without confusion to the reader, the proliferation of the denominations in the early nineteenth century in the midst of a religious ferment that produced utopian communities, Mormonism, Millerism, spiritualism, and humanitarian crusades. When he comes to the period of 1860–1914, he again demonstrates his skill in summarizing a rich and absorbing era in American history. The Civil War is seen as “a watershed between an old and a new America” (p. 207). What followed was a greater heterogeneity in background, an intellectual climate altered by modern science, and new centers of power in national life created by the quickened pace of industrialization. On this broad canvas he deftly outlines the new frontiers along which the churches were working in response to rapid technological and urban change: the institutional church, an emerging Christian social ethic, the social gospel, the “Progressive” movement in American politics, which translated many social concerns of the churches into legislation, and the impetus that the new imperialism following 1898 gave to world missions.

Thirdly, Dr. Hudson does not attempt too much in Part IV, which is an analysis of religious trends in modern America since 1914. Unlike many other books familiar to this reviewer, this work does not lose force and value in an effort to predict the future. Instead, the author carefully delineates the shifting religious configuration in this post-Protestant, pluralistic society. After this he describes the reassessment and recovery of Protestantism after its “religious depression” of 1925–35. The reader will find an able and fair description of fundamentalism, the theological reconstruction since the 1930s, and the manifestations of renewed religious vitality in vocational evangelism, peace concerns, anti-McCarthyism, and leadership for the racial crisis. The maturing of Roman Catholicism is treated with equal fairness. A concluding chapter traces the reversal of the centrifugal force in favor of the centripetal in American religious life as ecumenism becomes a major concern of many Protestants and Roman Catholics alike.

A fourth feature characterizing this work is a reliance upon a wide variety of recent studies in the history of American religion. The documentation provides an excellent bibliographical guide for the serious student who wishes to pursue the subject further.

The author is James B. Colgate Professor of the History of Christianity at Colgate Rochester Divinity School. He has achieved in this book an enviable scholarly insight, literary skill, and impartial interpretation that will enhance his reputation as historian of American religious life.

ROBERT G. TORBET

Pike’S Peregrination

What Is This Treasure, by James A. Pike (Harper and Row, 1966, 90 pp., $3), is reviewed by John Warwick Montgomery, professor and chairman, Division of Church History and History of Christian Thought, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

Whatever else may be said of Bishop Pike, no one will say he is non-controversial. His prolific writings have placed him in the maelstrom of contemporary social dialogue (The Church, Politics, and Society; Beyond the Law; Teen-Agers and Sex; and so on; the Blake-Pike proposal has made him famous in American ecumenical discussion; and his theological radicalism (“There are several phrases in the Creeds that I cannot affirm as literal prose sentences, but I can certainly sing them”) has involved him in three heresy charges since 1961, all dismissed by his fellow Episcopal bishops. In the February 22 issue of Look magazine, Pike—whose religious peregrination has taken him through Roman Catholicism, agnosticism, neo-orthodoxy, and Anglican neo-liberalism—is described as a bishop “searching for a space-age God.” Then visiting his confrere Bishop John A. T. Robinson in England, Pike told Look that he had “jettisoned the Trinity, the Virgin Birth and the Incarnation,” and said of those who had made the latest heresy charge against him: “If they only knew what I had in my briefcase.” This was the manuscript of What Is This Treasure, and now the eager theological public—properly prepared by the Bishop of Woolwich and the death-of-God school—can examine Pike’s portfolio for themselves. Is it Pike’s peak?

We are told that “What Is This Treasure opens wide the door left ajar by A Time for Christian Candor” and informs us of “what to keep—not what to throw out—to make today’s church more vital.” Both books have as their theme Second Corinthians 4:7a (“we have this treasure in earthen vessels”), and Pike’s aim is to distinguish between the treasure and the vessels. The bishop’s conclusion displays him, not as an original thinker, but as a poor man’s Tillich: only “God, the Ultimate Ground of all being” is the treasure, and all earthly expressions (including Jesus, Scripture, all doctrines and creeds) are but fallible and conditioned vessels. “The answer is more belief, fewer beliefs.” Thus Pike eviscerates the New Testament treasure (for Paul, the Gospel of Christ):

“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” we read in the Fourth Gospel (14:6). While, as we have already seen, the negative conclusion of the sentence (“No one cometh to the Father but by me”) won’t do, the opening clause beautifully reflects the experience of the early Christian community of the role of Jesus in their lives. To sum up, in Him they saw what a man is to be; and since Jesus was Himself fully this, they saw showing through Him the fullness of God as Truth (which in good measure we can see also through Socrates and Buddha as “free and open” men) and, certainly as important, as Love [p. 80].

In this way the Bishop of California stands in judgment upon Scripture, upon its apostolic authorship—and upon “the Shepherd and Bishop” of his soul (1 Pet. 2:25). By arrogating the right of final spiritual judgment to himself, Pike’s pilgrimage has ironically brought him to a caricature of his starting point. His favorite verse ends “that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.” The bishop has, however, by refusing to allow God to reveal himself adequately, elevated himself to the powerful role of arbiter of revelation. The power is now “of Pike.” Now it is he who speaks ex cathedra.

JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY

Help For Parents

Understanding Your Teen-Age Boy: A Psychologist Opens His Casebook, by William J. George (Sheed and Ward, 1966, 163 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Marvin W. Goldberg, director of studies, The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, Long Island, New York.

This small book is a refreshingly frank attempt to provide parents and teachers with practical instruction in guiding teen-age boys. William J. George, a Roman Catholic psychologist who besides his impressive professional credentials has the qualification of being the father of six children, loses no time in getting to the problems of the young man’s world. “Drinking,” “Driving,” “Car Theft,” “Drop Out,” “Violence,” and “Sex” are some of the titles of the thirty-six short chapters.

Readers will be pleased by Mr. George’s lucidity and reasonableness. The book is written in non-technical language and is remarkably readable. As soon as one opens it, he finds himself immersed in the lives of teen-age boys. Here is Anthony, 16, who wears his hair long and persistently skips school. And Eddie, 15, two years behind in school, who loves his beer and wine. What can be done to help Terry, 13, who has just stolen a car? In the course of the book, the reader meets twenty or more boys along with their parents and friends.

So interesting are these and other stories that one has to be careful to avoid being superficially absorbed with the real-life episodes and overlooking the serious text that accompanies each case study. At times the interchange of case studies and explanations is bewildering. A second reading in which one can largely skip the case studies is helpful.

Many will like the straightforwardness of the chapters on “Homework,” “Religious Doubts,” “Comparison with Others,” and “Under Achievement.” The author’s practicality is at its best in these pages. George goes so far as to promise that parents can help their sons improve their school grades by following his five-step program in the supervision of homework. His advice is excellent and, if followed faithfully, could produce a revolution in some households!

The chapters on “Drinking” and “Smoking” undoubtedly will evoke a negative response from some readers. Here the author, in his earnest attempt to be reasonable, allows himself to be placed in a rather awkward moral position. “As a means of helping your son into adulthood,” he says, “consider offering him his first drink in your kitchen even if you abstain yourself”; and “I’m sorry for the family in which teetotalling parents look upon alcohol as completely black.” Has George seriously taken into account the risks involved here? Surely many experienced parents and teachers have found more effective methods than this in handling the problem of alcohol.

This readable and comprehensive book (an index would have been a great help) is also noteworthy for the warmth of the counselor’s personal interest. His dialogues with boys merit study. George very obviously loves young men and believes that they can, with spiritual strength, rise above their entangling problems. His book can be a great help to every parent and every teacher of boys.

MARVIN W. GOLDBERG

Trend Sampler

A Religious History of America, by Edwin Scott Gaustad (Harper and Row, 1966, 421 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Carl F. H. Henry, editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This overview of American history from a religious perspective is more a “sampler” of trends than an interpretation of events in terms of controlling ideals and convictions. It has the merits of direct quotation from many sources and of photographic illustration, but it can hardly be considered a comprehensive study of American life and culture in regard to its religious heritage.

The evangelical ingredient of the book is woefully weak; the author’s interest in liberal and interfaith concerns, and in social matters more than in personal religion, is evident. In a chronology of important dates in America’s religious history, those cited for the last few years are: 1957, formation of

United Church of Christ by merger; 1958, Martin Luther King writes Strides Toward Freedom; 1960, first Roman Catholic president elected, and Blake-Pike plan proposed; 1962, Vatican II opens in Rome; 1963, Pope John issues encyclical Pacem in Terris and Supreme Court rules Bible reading unconstitutional in public schools; 1964, King gets Nobel peace prize; 1965, final session of Vatican II and Paul VI celebrates mass in Yankee Stadium.

The author, a historian at the University of California at Riverside, has produced a work that will be helpful as background reading but many American churchgoers will consider it an inadequate reflection of religious dynamisms.

CARL F. H. HENRY

Book Briefs

Memos for Christian Living, by James L. Sullivan, compiled by Gomer R. Lesch (Broadman, 1966, 125 pp., $1.50). Little essays on Christian matters. The language, clear and succinct, conveys practical wisdom about Christian life.

A Social and Religious History of the Jews: Late Middle Ages and Era of European Expansion, 1200–1650, Volume IX: Under Church and Empire and Volume X: On the Empire’s Periphery, by Salo Wittmayer Baron (Columbia University and Jewish Publication Society, 1965, 350 and 432 pp., $8.50 each). Revised and enlarged.

All Things Common: The Hutterian Way of Life, by Victor Peters (University of Minnesota, 1965, 233 pp., $5.75). A thorough introduction to the Hutterians of Canada and the United States who practice Christian communism and reject dancing, movies, radio, television, and military service.

Dynamic Psychology, by George Cruchon. S. J. (Sheed and Ward, 1965, 278 pp., $5.95). An up-to-date guide to the understanding of modern man: Who is he? What does he want—and why? A substantive analysis of motivations.

The Work of Thomas Cranmer, edited by Gervase E. Duffield (Fortress, 1965, 425 pp., $6.25). A window on England’s first Reformed archbishop. With an introduction by J. I. Packer.

The Old Testament: An Introduction, by Otto Eissfeldt (Harper and Row, 1965, 861 pp., $9.50). Including the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and also the works of similar type from Qumran.

Get in the Game!, by Bill Glass (Word Books, 1965, 150 pp., $2.95). The viewpoint and life story of a Christian who is the great defensive end of the Cleveland Browns.

Give Joy to My Youth: A Memoir of Dr. Tom Dooley, by Teresa Gallagher (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1965, 238 pp., $4.95). A tribute by a co-worker of Tom Dooley. Good reading.

Extraordinary Living for Ordinary Men, by Sam Shoemaker (Zondervan, 1965, 160 pp., $2.95). Excerpts from Shoemaker’s writings.

The Other Dimension: Meditations on the Disciples’ Prayer, by Ralph L. Murray (Broadman, 1966, 96 pp., $2). Fresh, perceptive, and very practical.

The Jewish Caravan: Great Stories of Twenty-five Centuries, edited by Leo W. Schwarz (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965, 831 pp., $8.95). An anthology of Jewish writings. A revised and enlarged edition of the first (1935) edition.

Theological Dictionary, by Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, edited by Cornelius Ernst, O.P. (Herder and Herder, 1965, 493 pp. $6.50). A good Roman Catholic dictionary of theology. The definitions are lucid and ample. First published as Kleines Theologisches Wörterbuch.

Challenging Careers in the Church, by Joseph E. McCabe (McGraw-Hill, 1966, 180 pp., $4.50). The author talks to young people about the many vocations—other than the pulpit ministry—within the Church. Too many young people, he feels, discover these vocational possibilities too late to do anything about them.

The United Nations and How It Works (Revised Edition), by David Cushman Coyle (Columbia University, 1965, 256 pp., $6).

Unchanging Mission: Biblical and Contemporary, by Douglas Webster (Fortress, 1965, 75 pp., $1.50). Reading that induces thinking.

Called to Be Free, by Angus MacDonald (Hallberg, 1965, 126 pp., $2.95). Lectures, yes; sermons, no.

The Romance of the Ages: An Exposition of the Song of Solomon, by Paul LaBotz (Kregel, 1965, 291 pp., $3.50). A highly spiritualized exposition that scarcely looks at the “bride.”

The Christian Agnostic, by Leslie D. Weatherhead (Abingdon, 1965, 368 pp., $4.75). A self-styled “angry old man” who has lost more and more fundamentals across the years now, as minister emeritus of London’s City Temple, devotes his thirty-first book (interestingly written) to his patchwork of beliefs.

Mary in Protestant and Catholic Theology, by Thomas A. O’Meara, O. P. (Sheed and Ward, 1966, 376 pp., $7.50). A presentation that includes the thought of Calvin and Luther, and of Barth, Brunner, and Bultmann.

The Quiet Corner: A Devotional Treasury from the Pages of Decision Magazine, edited by Sherwood Eliot Wirt (Revell, 1965, 116 pp., $2.50).

The Cambridge Bible Commentary on the New English Bible: The Gospel According to Mark, commentary by C. F. D. Moule (Cambridge, 1965, 134 pp., $3.50). A very fine little evangelical commentary. In thought, clear; in form, attractive.

The Cambridge Bible Commentary on the New English Bible: Understanding the New Testament, edited by O. Jessie Lace (Cambridge, 1965, 168 pp., $3; also paper, $1.65). A book for pleasure and profit for laymen and clergy.

Scandinavian Churches: The Development and Life of the Churches of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, edited by Leslie Stannard Hunter (Augsburg, 1965, 197 pp., $4.50). A series of essays by seventeen Scandinavian and British writers.

Dare to Live Now!, by Bruce Larson (Zondervan, 1965, 126 pp., $2.50). Very readable religious essays with a warm devotional strain.

A Dictionary of Biblical Allusions in English Literature, by W. B. Fulghum (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965, 291 pp., $4.95).

Conflicting Images of Man, edited by William Nicholls (Seabury, 1966, 231 pp., $4.95). Eight essays on the nature of man as seen by contemporary theologians. The book shows more what men are thinking than what they are.

Log Cabin to Luther Tower: Concordia Seminary During One Hundred and Twenty-five years Toward a More Excellent Ministry, 1839–1964, by Carl S. Meyer (Concordia, 1965, 322 pp., $7.95).

Modern Christian Art (from “The Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism”), by Winefride Wilson (Hawthorn, 1965, 175 pp., $3.50). A survey of the art of turbulent eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showing how today’s artists are in debt to the traditional Christian artists of earlier centuries.

No Empty Creed, by Michael Bruce (Seabury, 1966, 143 pp., $1.45). The vicar of St. Mark’s, London, says that the notion that traditional Christianity is impossible for an honest, modern man is “balderdash.” Good reading.

Paperbacks

Meet the Twelve, by John H. Baumgaertner (Augsburg, 1966, 130 pp., $1.95). Evangelical sermonettes; studies in half-depth. First published in 1960.

The ‘We Knows’ of the Apostle Paul, by Holmes Rolston (John Knox, 1966, 101 pp., $1.65). Valuable religious essays that make good reading and may start some good sermons.

Presbyterian Authority and Discipline by John Kennedy (John Knox, 1965, 118 pp., $1.50). A cry for the need and exercise of discipline in the Church. The author contends that there is an irrational prejudice against it, though it is a mark of the Church.

God and Mammon: The Christian Mastery of Money, by K. F. W. Prior (Westminster, 1966, 95 pp., $1.25).

Revolt Against Heaven: An Enquiry Into Anti-Supernaturalism, by Kenneth M. Hamilton (Eerdmans, 1965, 193 pp., $2.45). A searching look into the current belief that Christianity ought to detach itself from supernaturalism. A good piece of work.

Forgiveness and Hope: Toward a Theology for Protestant Christian Education, by Rachel Henderlite (John Knox, 1966, 127 pp., $1.45). First published in 1961.

Fractured Questions, by Warren Mild (Judson, 1966, 125 pp., $1.95). Over a chariot-wheel pizza in the Lion’s Den, some of life’s most significant questions are raised.

Taoism: The Parting of the Way (Revised Edition), by Holmes Welch (Beacon Press, 1966, 194 pp., $1.95). First published in 1957.

Rudolf Bultmann, by Ian Henderson (John Knox, 1966, 47 pp., $1). Bultmann analyzed for the layman who cares.

A Select Liturgical Lexicon, by J. G. Davies (John Knox, 1966, 146 pp., $2.45).

After Death: A Sure and Certain Hope?, by J. A. Motyer (Westminster, 1966, 95 pp., $1.25). An evangelical, enlightening discussion.

The Origin of Paul’s Religion, by J. Gresham Machen (Eerdmans, 1966, 829 pp., $1.95). A classic with continuing relevance.

Hominisation: The Evolutionary Origin of Man as a Theological Problem, by Karl Rahner, S. J. (Herder and Herder, 1965, 120 pp., $2.50)