Page 6127 – Christianity Today (2024)

Four centuries ago, European priests staked a Vatican claim along the lush green shores of the South China Sea. They overcame occasional hostility and before long were counting converts by hundreds and thousands. Then, as noted religious historian Kenneth Scott Latourette puts it, “Roman Catholic missions became a means for extending European political control over Indo-China.”

In modern times, religious interests have again figured prominently in the land now known as Viet Nam. And 1960 may even see the Vatican playing a decisive role in the effort to bring peace to Southeast Asia.

Pope Paul VI showed new initiative as a peacemaker in year-end pleas addressed to the major powers, especially those now involved militarily in Viet Nam. His public appeals for peace and the consequent effect on world public opinion exerted considerable pressure on East and West to settle the Vietnamese war at the conference table. Vatican diplomats were also reported working behind the scenes to set up negotiations.

(Cardinal Spellman, who is known for globe-girdling missions to American service-men, spent Christmas celebrating masses in Viet Nam and expressing satisfaction over a temporary truce. He told troops, however, that “your service is necessary here.… Our failure to stand firm here would lead to strife on other battlefields.”)

As early as last February, Pope Paul had issued a plea for peace in Viet Nam. He made special cease-fire appeals during the week before Christmas, after the Viet Cong had offered a twelve-hour truce beginning Christmas Eve. As it turned out, U. S. and South Vietnamese units silenced their guns for thirty hours and suspended indefinitely their bombing of North Viet Nam.

Pope Paul also made public requests for a New Year’s truce, but these were unsuccessful. The United States started a peace drive of its own with visits by top-ranking diplomats to major world capitals, including a visit to the Pope by the American ambassador to the United Nations, Arthur Cold berg.

Is it appropriate that religious interests be so closely involved in the Vietnamese political and military situation? Many non-Catholic observers would say no, but the recent history of Viet Nam is interlaced with religious turmoil.

There is no general agreement on key developments in Viet Nam in 1963, and a basic dispute continues over what part religion played in the internal strife of South Viet Nam. The issues are now being widely publicized in book-length interpretations that conflict on what really happened.

The two key figures in the 1963 crisis were Ngo Dinh Diem, lifelong Roman Catholic and Confucian scholar who ruled South Viet Nam for nearly a decade, and Thich Tri Quang, the most prominent and aggressive Buddhist monk in Viet Nam. Which man was the hero and which the villain in Western eyes is a question historians will ponder for years.

Diem was born January 3, 1901, north of the seventeenth parallel, in the same province that produced Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese Communist leader who tried to get Diem to collaborate with him back in 1946. Diem took over the south following the defeat of the French and the Geneva conference in 1954.

He surprised almost everyone by weathering the initial political storms following independence, but his government came under increasing fire for favoritism toward Roman Catholics and persecution of non-Catholics. The fire came mainly from Buddhists, but Protestant missionaries in Viet Nam also complained.

Ironically for Protestants, however, it was under Ngo Dinh Diem that their missionary activity blossomed. The Geneva agreement sealed off North Viet Nam to outside religious influence. But big areas of the south that had been out of bounds to Protestants under the French were thrown open. The Christian and Missionary Alliance. whose work in Viet Nam dates back to 1911. assigned it top priority and built up the missionary task force there to more than 100.

Meanwhile, however, the feeling against Catholics was being intensified. Part of the cause was a big influx of Roman Catholic refugees from the North, which upset the religious balance.

Diem, a product of the mandarin system, had little in his background to equip him to placate critics. He was greatly influenced by a brother and a sister-in-law, the celebrated Madame Nhu. During his younger days Diem toyed with the idea of going into the priesthood. Though he ultimately chose to remain a layman, his life had distinctly monastic overtones, and he never married. His experiences in the United States were colored by a two-year stay at the Maryknoll Seminary in Ossining, New York. He also managed to meet such personages as Cardinal Spellman, Senator John Kennedy, and Senator Mike Mansfield.

One unresolved religious question in Viet Nam (under Diem, as now) is: How many Buddhists are there? The reason the question cannot be answered is that no one can adequately define a Buddhist. South Viet Nam has the problem not only of a pluralistic society but also of one in which individuals share allegiance between two or more major religious faiths. Buddhism is generally considered to be numerically dominant, but the statistics of its followers vary anywhere from 15 per cent to 90 per cent of the population.

Viet Nam Chroniclers

Marguerite Higgins, a key chronicler of the religious and political tensions in Viet Nam, died January 3. Death was attributed to complications of a tropical disease.

Miss Higgins, who was 45, visited Viet Nam a number of times as a correspondent for the New York Herald-Tribune and Newsday. Her dispatches set off a major press controversy with several Saigon-based U.S. correspondents over how the war was going and who was to blame for the problems. She had previously won a Pulitzer Prize for her reports on the Korean War.

One of her targets was David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work as a New York Times correspondent in Viet Nam. Halberstam, 31, has more recently been assigned lo Warsaw, but was evicted by the Polish government this month.

Roman Catholics are said to number about 1,500,000. There are also about 1,000,000 animists, mostly among mountain tribesmen, who have traditionally been at odds with the rest of the population. In addition, there are undetermined numbers who are Hindus, Muslims, Taoists, and followers of Confucianism. Two relatively novel religious mixtures known as the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao also claim significant numbers.

Protestants of varying theological persuasions who were familiar with the situation under Diem shared with Buddhists an anxiety over Roman Catholic domination and, to a lesser extent, over persecution. Some Protestant liberals in the United States were among the first to protest by adding their names to paid advertisem*nts that called upon the United States to deal firmly with Diem.

It was the Vatican flag, however, that coincidentally served to bring on Diem’s first big crisis of 1963. In May of that year Ngo Dinh Thuc, Diem’s oldest brother, celebrated, in the city of Hue, his twenty-fifth year as a Roman Catholic bishop. Diem attended the festivities and subsequently issued a statement saying it had been unlawful to raise the Vatican flag outside a building. Several days later Buddha’s birthday was celebrated in Hue, and there was a similar crackdown against the flying of Buddhist flags. Crowds gathered in protest, violence ensued, and eight or nine persons died.

To this day, however, there is considerable argument over whether they were felled by government troops or whether a bomb had been planted, perhaps by the Viet Cong. Marguerite Higgins, who considered the Buddhist monk Thich Tri Quang a clever anti-American political demagogue, charged in Our Vietnam Nightmare that he created the crisis deliberately.

What brought the Vietnamese religious tensions to world attention were the immolations (Madame Nhu called them barbeques) of Buddhist monks that summer. Miss Higgins was cynical about those, too, suggesting that at least some of the monks had been drugged. She cited Thich Tri Quang, who is still alive, as the foremost authority on the immolations. Mainstream Buddhism does not condone suicide or violence as a means to a good end.

For the Buddhists, the crisis command post was in the three-story Xa Loi Pagoda in Saigon, where Thich Tri Quang held forth with a battery of propaganda-dispensing mimeograph machines humming day and night. Tensions kept building up until one night in August government troops raided the Xa Loi and other pagodas.

David Halberstam of the New York Times contends in The Making of a Quagmire that had the government wanted to arrest the Buddhist leaders “it could have been accomplished in a few moments, but these troops were enacting a passion play of revenge and terror.” Miss Higgins disputed this view, insisting there was a minimum of bloodshed.

The pagoda raids represented a turning point in the struggle, setting off a wave of new reaction against Diem from within the administration of President Kennedy. Diem was overthrown on November 1, 1963, and, with his brother, was presumed to be killed. Following those events came the escalation of the war against the Viet Cong and de-emphasis on religious problems.

Orthodoxy Asunder

Russian Orthodoxy in Western Europe has declared itself independent of Greek Orthodox control. In 1931, the western churches transferred allegiance from Moscow to Istanbul to counter confusion following the mass exodus from Russia. But the Russian émigré aura has now dissolved. Another explanation for independence is that the Moscow church is no longer seen as free.

Meanwhile, the second-ranking leader of that church, Leningrad’s Metropolitan Nikodim, hinted that the recent end of old excommunications between the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches is not accepted by the Russian church.

Nikodim told the Soviet news agency, “This has been a gesture addressed to the Roman church only from one local Orthodox church, and not the whole of Eastern Orthodoxy. Unity between Eastern and Western churches can be achieved only through profound research and mutual cooperation.” Both the Greek and Russian churches cooperate in the World Council of Churches. Nikodim also took a guarded view of the Vatican Council as not meeting expectations.

Anglican Aggiornamento

The Church of England is setting out on the task of liturgical reform. Although called “Prayer Book Revision,” the plan at the moment is not to revise services but to provide alternatives to them. The Prayer Book (Alternative and Other Services) Measure, passed by the Church Assembly in 1964, provides for the experimental use of these alternatives.

For the first time since 1662, services will be used legally in the Church of England that will be alternative to those in the Book of Common Prayer. No past suggestions for revised services have ever had any legal force.

The services to be revised? The new material comprises, it seems, revised Morning and Evening Prayer, Occasional Prayers, Burial Service, and Churching of Women. The text of a revised Communion service is also to be published.

Reasons for the coming changes are that since 1662 language has changed and the meanings of words are different, and it is considered that the present services are imperfect vehicles of worship today.

The worship forms will be discussed at the February 17–18 Church Assembly, assuming the Queen has approved new parliamentary bills. Many non-Anglicans in many lands who love the prayer-book language will watch with interest.

The Anglican updating extends also to the touchy subject of abortion. A seventy-page church committee report recently approved abortion when the birth of a child would threaten the life or health of the mother. Current law permits abortion only to save a mother’s life. The special committee set up by the Church Assembly’s Board for Social Responsibility thus is more limited in its view than Lord Silkin, whose bill, given a second reading in Lords last month, would make abortion legal for women who became pregnant through rape or criminal act. The report states: “The fact that a child ought not in law or morals to exist affords no justification for depriving it of its right to live.”

The report does not represent official Church of England thinking, but the committee feels that the Church of England should “take its part through some accredited body in the discussion of a legitimate national concern.” It is estimated that about 100,000 illegal abortions are performed in Britain every year.

Norway: Easier To Stay Joined

It seemed a harmless enough resolution to come from the Voluntary Church Assembly, a representative but unofficial body within the Church of Norway (Lutheran). The quadrennial meeting in Oslo had strayed from the agenda into a discussion on church reform “so that the church can better fulfill its task among our people.” Finally it was resolved to appoint a commission to “examine the position of the church in society today.”

That this was really a hot potato became clear afterwards in a press interview held by Bjarne Hareide, director of Oslo’s Institute for Christian Education, who was elected to succeed Bishop Per Juvkam as chairman of this influential gathering.

Hareide cited two points stressed during the discussion: (1) For the national church to be autonomous in internal, spiritual matters—“in questions concerning religion”—it must have an official national supreme assembly of its own, or at least a council with official status. (2) “Much more than before, the church must assign responsibility to the state and to society for external matters and tasks which are their duty.” This involves concerns such as church finance, maintenance of rectories, and settlement of ministers.

The Storting (Parliament) hitherto has refused to give churchmen any degree of autonomy in this land where church membership is reckoned at 96 per cent; Norwegians virtually have to make an official declaration of opting out before they can “unjoin.” It has been estimated that the total seating capacity of the nation’s churches is 300,000—less than 10 per cent of the membership. This, says one wit, is a calculated figure of ecclesiastical actuaries, indicating the low average “church attendance risk.” Actual attendance is about 3 per cent on a normal Sunday.

All nine Norwegian bishops are ex-officio members of the Voluntary Church Assembly, which describes itself as “a forum for exchange of religious opinions and for consideration of topical problems.” It has now asked for consideration of the ordination of “persons without theological training.” The wording might be significant in view of the burning controversy about ordaining women. The assembly heard also a call made for a revision of the Norwegian church’s books of public worship (revision is carried out periodically). Commented a theological professor good-humoredly, “We are unlike the English people, who like archaic language.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Serving Without Saving

Sixteen U. S. cities have some sort of training center for inner-city ministries. The newest and in some ways most radical is taking shape in New York City.

Cute abbreviations seem to be a must for action groups, and this one is MUST (Metropolitan Urban Service Training). Since MUST’s birth in a $600,000 Methodist gift last fall,¹$500,000 from the Board of Missions’ National Division, and $100,000 from the Methodist Women’s Division. Syracuse Bishop W. Ralph Ward is chairman of MUST’s tvventy-three-member board. the four staff members, operating from rented quarters at Biblical Seminary, have been talking to hundreds of people who have ideas about what should be done in cities.

The talking continues, but the Rev. George (Bill) Webber, executive director, has three definite student projects in mind for next fall.

The first, a city intern plan for seminary students, grows out of a joint venture carried on for the past two years by Union Theological Seminary, where Webber teaches part-time, and the experimental East Harlem Protestant Parish, which Webber headed before joining MUST. Forty prospective ministers will take secular jobs, live in tenements, work to help the poor, and reflect on “what the Church will be” in cities.

Webber contends that men come from seminaries “disequipped” to be “worldly men in Christ” and that the reforming impact of the internships will be “sensational.” He hopes to draw not only students in accord with his own liberal theology but also students from conservative seminaries.

In a second plan, twenty college graduates who want to help humanity but have no goals will enter similar internships under the wing of another key New York liberal, the Rev. Howard Moody of Judson Memorial Church, who, like Webber, is a minister in the United Church of Christ.

A third program will place five white seminarians as staff members in Negro churches, and five Negroes in white churches.

These programs will consume only a tenth of MUST’s budget, Webber said, and more will come later. “We don’t have a clue as to the shape of the entire program,” said the gray-haired, 45-year-old innovator. “We will throw ten balls in the air, and see how they bounce. We will try quite a few things. The Church’s traditional pattern has been to put all its money on one horse.”

Webber said his center will differ significantly from the 16-month-old Urban Training Center in Chicago, which has regular courses, a student body, and, in Webber’s words, is “in the difficult, threatening battle with the denominations.” The UTC’s $225,000 annual budget comes from thirteen denominations and foundation grants.

Webber said his project is moving “from saving people to serving the world.” He doesn’t object to the saving of souls, Webber said, but his job is to “help churches face their serving function.”

Webber’s colleagues are two Methodist ministers—Randolph Nugent, 31, and Hooker Davis, 47 (on six-month leave from the Southern New Jersey Conference)—and Mrs. Alfred J. Lurie, a Jewish specialist in community action and school problems.

Negroes As Neighbors

About seventy of the students at Malone College in Canton, Ohio, have signed up to tutor Negroes, paint houses in the local ghetto, and in other ways show their neighbors that they care.

Such direct action by so many is unusual among evangelical colleges, where political conservatism often produces distrust of anything liberals do, even if it is good. Many evangelical colleges are also rural or suburban. But Malone, a Quaker school, resettled in 1957 in Canton, an industrial center loaded with problems typical of a big city.

The major impetus to action was a two-day seminar on “Christians and the Negro Revolution,” held at Malone last month. In this first fruit of a plan for annual seminars on social problems, participants attempted to relate the Christian imperative, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” to the civil rights struggle.

The main speaker was the Rev. William Pannell, a Negro evangelist from Detroit who is on the staff of Youth for Christ. Speaking on the “love” theme in his first chapel talk, Pannell said, “Don’t ted me you love me ‘in the Lord’ while you’ve got your foot on my neck!” The question, he declared, is not “Who is my neighbor?” but “Whose neighbor am I?”

Those who claim scriptural grounds for their opposition to direct action often misunderstand the Bible, Panned said. Reference to Romans 13:1 and the Christian’s responsibility to obey authority, he contended, sidesteps the real issue: What is the law of the land? Is it federal laws backed by the Constitution, or the words of local policemen?

The civil-disobedience discussion continued at a bud session where two Malone professors played devil’s advocate and argued against ad civil rights activity. They were countered by Panned and the Rev. Vern Miller, a Cleveland Mennonite whose church is integrated. The situation was artificial, but some students needed answers to the questions raised and admitted it was the first time they had contemplated what the Christian’s role in civil rights should be.

In another session, Panned said white men’s fears rest on two false presuppositions: (1) that there are separate, distinct races, a theory dismissed by contemporary anthropologists, and (2) that every Negro man is “panting for a white woman.”

Panned was articulate, honest, and occasionally (and unintentionally) bitter. He had blunt criticism of evangelicalism for “dragging its heels” in fighting prejudice. Although the churches’ “White Only” signs are down, “11 o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week,” he said, in a phrase made familiar by such diverse spokesmen as Billy Graham and Bishop James Pike.

Panned impressed many students who had never met a well-educated Christian Negro. Others said they wanted to walk out of the sessions. Comments from this camp included: “Why, he was even trying to talk like a white man!” and “Long live Dixie!” Many students were apathetic.

The seminar did not reach all of Malone’s students and did not stir up sensational demonstrations. But it did stimulate thought and prod some to act. And it also illuminated the feelings of the few Negroes on campus.

JUNE E. STEFFENSEN

Americans As Human Beings

The Oxford History of the American People, by Samuel Eliot Morison (Oxford, 1965, 1,122 pp., $12.50), is reviewed by Earl Strikwerda, professor of history, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Good one-volume histories of the United States become more difficult to produce as our national experience lengthens. In 1904 Professor Elston could quite easily encompass the whole account and include a bit of homily and anecdote along the way. Similarly Wertenbaker, Becker, Bassett, Harlow, and others did the job four or five decades back, and they all did it well.

But events have been heaping up since the thirties. The revolutionary happenings of the Great Depression and the intricate story of our role in World War 11 add many pages to the bulk of our history. Moreover, contemporary historians add sections or chapters that survey the social and cultural aspects of our past.

Nevertheless, induced by his friends as he was. Professor Morison has attempted a one-volume account once more. And he has succeeded beautifully. It will be a courageous writer who will think that he can do it better, Morison kept the weight of the book under four pounds; a heavier book cannot be held comfortably.

The writing is even and intelligible, and the lines of chronology are as clear as can be. Moreover, the author covers or touches on practically everything from the Hudson School to sports, while skillfully keeping his work from being textbookish or encyclopedic. This Oxford history is intended for the intelligent patriot; and one could do few things more worthwhile this winter than reading a few hours a week in this sprightly written explanation of how we behaved and why.

Apparently Professor Morison has not attempted to set up and establish a tight thesis. There seems to be no hard effort to show that some single factor explains Americans. There is no press on Puritanism, nor on the frontier’s feedback into our politics, nor on manifest destiny, nor on our reverence for the Constitution, nor on the dynamics of free enterprise, nor on the Protestant ethic, nor on the immigrant ingredient, nor on the determinism of economics. It is just possible that the author wanted his keynote to be our dedication to experimenting with democracy. But there is no hard sell even on this theme; it is not necessary, because the theme is patent in our political history.

My impression is that Morison has striven mainly to get at the downright humanness of the American people. Throughout we are shown that we rise above ourselves and that we fall, but that in everything we have remained merely human beings—people. Characterizing the account is a constantly emerging candor, with scores of side glances. Added up they do not make the reader swell with false pride, but neither is he stricken with cynicism. As he is faced steadily with the actual, he develops a feeling of identity. We arc a many-faceted people who have worked and argued and fought—fought in revolution, in rebellion, in strikes. We have shot our way out of all of them, and we have shot down four presidents too.

Similarly, our national heroes were human beings who showed different sides. Even Patrick Henry was negative about the Constitution, saying as he did, “My head, and my heart, shall be at liberty to retrieve the loss of liberty, and remove the defects of the system.…” Alexander Hamilton too was critical of the Constitution; he called it a “weak and worthless fabric” that would have to be superseded.

Here and there Morison is a bit preceptive, as when he ventures the suggestion that the days of the witch trials could be likened to the times when Joseph McCarthy was abroad in the land and good men felt constrained to remain silent. And know this, says the historian in another context, that the words, “We hold these truths to be self evident …,” are “more revolutionary than anything written by Robespierre, Marx, or Lenin.…”

The book is therefore about humanity, and the author is humane. In his distress in writing of Lincoln’s assassination, he bursts with “ten thousand curses on the foulest of assassins, John Wilkes Booth.” Elsewhere his disgust peeps through, as when he relates that a prominent industrialist of the early 1930s was willing to have the depression go “right to the bottom,” because the liquidation of the farmer and of labor would lead people to live more moral lives. But everywhere one senses that Morison reads our history constructively and affirmatively. The debunker finds nothing here.

Too, this Harvard man is solicitous for those who have taken a rap. So he wants Woodrow Wilson to be seen in context. Wilson’s virtuousness would not have been so irritating were it not for the isolationism in the Senate and the disillusionment among the public. Similarly, Colonel House is treated with decency; his “realism complemented Wilson’s idealism, and when they parted, the stature of each was diminished.” There is the human touch when the New England historian pays tribute to Senator George W. Norris, “whose career is a standing reproach to those ‘tired liberals’ who give up after defeat.…”

Hoover is handled fairly. F.D.R.’s success in coping with the depression was due in part to the fact that early cautious remedies were demonstrably unsuccessful. The New Deal, says the writer, was as “American as a bale of hay—an opportunist, rule of thumb method of curing deep-seated ills.” The tracing of World War II is excellent but not superior to what Morison previously wrote with Professor Commager in their Growth of the American Republic. In this earlier work the story of the war builds with more suspense, and to me it remains the unexcelled short account.

By way of innovation, and for good reason, this Oxford history includes brief resumes of Canadian history at six or eight turn-outs. This courtesy to a people whose history dovetails our own was long overdue.

It has been hinted that Morison writes the viewpoint of the Eastern seaboard, that in a way he is a Brahmin. So what? The tint or the tincture is pleasing. So long as he is fair to everyone from the Puritans to Douglas MacArthur, the historian has a right to a stance. I liked his reminiscences that begin with the election of 1912; I liked the paternalism with which he suggests that we not be too critical of President Eisenhower; I liked the manner of an older person when he warns that we must halt short of having every American adult on the government payroll.

In the conclusion of the section on the sexual upheaval, Morison expresses his concern for the “pure in heart”; why could not the “filth” have been left in the subconscious where it was, he asks. I was pleased by his willingness to use colloquialisms, as when he speaks of General Ludendorff’s “getting the one-two” in World War II. His neat way of citing dates (e.g., 21 December 1938) is refreshing. And so on.

All in all, here is the story of the actual, written in the manner of the humane without special pleading.

EARL SIRIKWERDA

Not Little Ministers

Pre-Seminary Education: The Lilly Study Report, by Keith R. Bridston and Dwight W. Culver (Augsburg, 1965, 257 pp., $4.75), is reviewed by Addison H. Leitch, assistant to the president and professor of philosophy and religion, Tarkio College, Tarkio, Missouri.

We have come to expect good things from the Lilly Foundation, and again we are not disappointed. Under the direction of the foundation, Bridston, a Lutheran theologian, and Culver, a trained sociologist, have teamed up to give us an interesting study of pre-seminary education marked by scholarship, breadth of understanding, and verve.

The decision to place a sociologist on the team gives a clue to the approach. Concern is frequently expressed that men who become ministers are too often products of a kind of religious “ghetto.” They come from homes marked by Christian commitment where they have been conditioned, and in many ways protected, by a religious atmosphere (89 per cent of seminarians are church members before the age of twenty-one, 83 per cent had Sunday school attendance constantly urged upon them). Over half of them came from church-related colleges where many have served in vacant pulpits and taken courses of study “almost-seminary” in character. They have already participated in youth conferences and area religious conferences, and they move on to denominational seminaries where statistically they tend to continue their studies with other men of like training and background and under professors probably prepared for their tasks in the same milieu. When they enter their pastorates, the “ghetto” of separation from which they have come puts them in a “ghetto” of separation from the people whom they are to guide, and from a highly secularized “world” which they are to reach.

The writers are very sympathetic to the religious cultivation that a man called of God will need. They also recognize, however, that the hurdy-gurdy of today’s world may not listen to a man who very evidently does not know what the score is. On the other hand, must the seminarian sin “in order that grace may abound”? This is not a new dilemma in the training of the “religious.” It is to the credit of Bridston and Culver that they see the problem clearly and meet it fairly. Any criticisms the reader may have of their solutions will in no way minimize the central problem. Somehow the minister (indeed, every Christian!) must be in the world but not of it, a man of the world but not a worldling.

The writers believe that the best time for “secular cultivation” is the period of college preparation. There are excellent discussions on the advantages and disadvantages of a Bible-philosophy major as over against a major in some more “secular” field, and of great value are the recommendations of how religion may be taught with intellectual decency instead of as a case of special pleading. For those looking in passing for good material on the advantages of liberal arts education, the section titled “Secular Cultivation” (pp. 55 ff.) is very rich indeed.

Perhaps a word from the authors themselves will clarify their approach:

For the college and university, the purpose of teaching religion is to provide its students with a full education.

For the pre-seminary student, the reason for studying religion in college is to be fully educated and not to anticipate his theological study on the seminary level.

For the seminary, the purpose of pre-seminary education is to produce educated men—not little ministers [p. 80].

This last phrase, “educated men—not little ministers,” gives the clue to the whole book. The authors see three stages in the pastor’s training—college, seminary, and post-seminary, and although the book is entitled Pre-Seminary Education, the three key sections of the book really cover these three stages. How is this justified? In terms of the “educated man,” the “whole man”; the authors argue that we are dealing, not with three systems or three levels of training—pre-seminary, seminary, and post-seminary—but with a triple-entwined cord. We must think of what happens in pre-seminary days as constantly wrapped in and around what the trained pastor does during and after seminary. Thus the whole training of the whole man for his total task is all of a piece. It is a good thesis well done in sections entitled “Secular Cultivation,” “Professional Training,” and “Vocational Integration.” These sections are followed by Recommendations herewith recommended.

This book should be read by all educators, whether or not their interest is theological. It is packed with information and is rich and varied in some of its always relevant bypaths. Those who like to browse may spend fruitful hours with the research data that take up about the last third of the book. This timely and relevant book is much needed today.

ADDISON H. LEITCH

Whole Person

The Whole Person in a Broken World, by Paul Tournier (Harper and Row, 1964, 180 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by Lars I. Granberg, acting vice-president for academic affairs, Hope College, Holland, Michigan.

Reading a book written by Paul Tournier is like conversing with a wise, compassionate man who walks with God. Dr. Tournier neither glosses over human foolishness and sin nor identifies man exclusively with these. Rather, he perceives the person as he could be.

In this book, written in 1947, he seeks understanding of factors in today’s life that bring fragmentation rather than wholeness to persons. To describe this crisis he treats the history of man as the history of a single life: the childhood of man is antiquity, his adolescence began with the Renaissance. Adolescence is characterized by negativeness, the disparagement of parental values. So also has it been in the centuries since the Renaissance. Rather than moving toward personal integration, the modern world seems to be in the prolonged state of adolescent crisis described by some psychiatrists as the “neurosis of defiance.” Neurosis, which Tournier sees as the typical sickness of our time, is linked to spiritual irresolution. Quoting Stocker’s definition of neurosis—“an inner conflict between a false suggestion and a true intuition”—he argues that man’s current predicament stems from a false suggestion from the modern world and a true intuition of the soul. In particular he suffers from a repression of conscience (i.e., spiritual hunger), which he seeks to assauge by a preoccupation with reason and the scientific method. With his moral struggle thus driven underground, modern man is anxious, confused, fragmented, lacking direction; he suffers a terrible spiritual yearning. Neither his myths of progress nor his Nietzschean power myths have brought utopia.

Healing involves recovery of the sense of personhood. The rift between body and spirit must be mended. The efforts of science must be subordinated to faith, for only God can restore body and spirit to harmonious synthesis. Only the surrender of the whole being to the Lordship of Christ restores true personhood. Spiritual hunger is universal. Man-made messiahs abound. Since these arise from a truncated view of the person, they can only further man’s sense of fragmentation, disillusionment, and terror. Science has proven to be a vain hope. The Church’s hour has come!

But if the Church is to bring healing to a broken world, it must learn to heal its own divisions and establish spiritual unity among believers—not a unity that glosses over real differences with sentimentality but one based on a common awareness of having been gripped by Christ, on humility, and on a compassionate humanity. The Church must also learn to go wherever needy humanity is and speak out what the Gospel means for economic, social, political, and intellectual life. Only men changed under the influence of God’s grace are-likely to change the world, men willing to accept the necessary sacrifices that go along with faith, men who present a picture of true community.

This is Dr. Tournier’s message. Written with the death camps and atomic destruction of World War II still raw in his memory, it was a prophetic book. His themes have preoccupied ecclesiastical and theological conversations for more than a decade, and the discussion in psychology and psychotherapy almost as long. Hence the English-speaking world encountering this book seventeen years after its original appearance may regard it as quaint and cliché-ridden. Several of Tournier’s books were made available in English first, and they represent more developed stages in his thinking. Thus if the inveterate Tournier reader picks up this book in search of new themes, he will be disappointed.

But if he wants once again to stroll companionably and listen to a humble, compassionate man speak with penetration and concern about the plight of his fellow men and the ministry of healing, he will not fail to add this book to his Tournier shelf. For those who have not met Paul Tournier, this is a good place to get acquainted. But they must beware! They will probably get “hooked” on him, too.

LARS I. GRANBERG

By The Grace Of The State?

A Study in Survival: The Church in Russia, 1927–1943, by William C. Fletcher (Macmillan, 1965, 168 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Ralph L. Lynn, professor of history, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.

Religion as the private and widely varied experience of unguided individuals may survive in any sort of world. But the Church or the denomination as a well-knit group may not be able to survive in a Communist state. The degree to which the Church can prosper in a Communist state is determined by the degree to which it can make itself useful to and needed by the state.

These statements summarize, though inadequately, the arguments advanced by this research assistant at the Research Institute on Communist Strategy and Propaganda, a division of the School of International Relations of the University of Southern California. Professor Fletcher reads and speaks the Russian language, has lived in Russia for extended periods, has talked with Russian people, has examined the available relevant documents, and has presented his findings in reasonable, restrained critical fashion.

To him, the record indicates that the Church openly opposed the Communist government in the years just after 1917. The Church then sought refuge in a nonpolitical stance from about 1920 to 1927. In 1927, the acting patriarch, Sergii, concluded that the Church could survive only if it became a sincere supporter of the Communist government. The Church reaped little profit from this Machiavellian approach until World War II made the Church necessary to the success of the Communist state. During the war years, with 1943 a significant date, the Church reaped a helpful harvest in the form of increased freedom of action and support by the state. But after the war the Communist state no longer needed the Church and was unwilling to continue the wartime coexistence. Therefore, the book closes with the unanswered question: Can the Church survive in a Communist state?

This is a model monograph, with all the standard scholarly paraphernalia. Fletcher has mastered his materials and writing skills. A brief introduction offers definitions and delimitations, orients the reader, and foreshadows the body of the book. There is a spare, succinct summary of the period from 1917 to 1927. The chapter divisions are clearly dictated by the facts. The conclusion offers no surprising deductions and no dogmatic statements. It is convincing without being argumentative.

This reviewer would be happier with a critical bibliography than with a mere listing. He would also have welcomed at least some comment on the effects upon the Church of Russian industrialization, to which the author makes only a tantalizing reference. Other readers would welcome some anecdotal material; there must be wonderful stories behind the bald statement that Sergii often consecrated several bishops in each area so that one could succeed the other as the thrones were made vacant by arrests and imprisonments.

But none of this is necessary for the purposes of this “study in survival.” And the author refers the reader to the imposing annotated bibliography in one of his earlier works, Christianity in the Soviet Union (Los Angeles, 1963). This book and Timasheff’s Religion in Soviet Russia (New York, 1942) will probably furnish answers to the questions most readers will have.

Especially at this time of renewed discussion of church-state relations, many readers will welcome the author’s emphasis upon survival. One suspects that any church or denomination anywhere can prosper only to the degree that its program is in harmony with the host nation’s program. Some will mourn that so many United States religious groups, without the excuse of their Russian brethren, have narrowed the Gospel to refer only to spiritual, other-worldly matters.

RALPH L. LYNN

What’S Wrong?

Search for Reality in Religion, by John Macmurray (Allen and Unwin, 1965, 81 pp., 15s.), is reviewed by Martin H. Cressey, minister, St. Columba’s Presbyterian Church, Coventry, England.

Why should a distinguished philosopher who for most of his life had been detached, both in belief and in practice, from the organized Christian tradition become after retirement from university work a member of the Society of Friends? This most attractive lecture gives the answer and with it a rewarding insight into the mind and spirit of a sensitive thinker. Professor Macmurray aptly describes his lecture as “more like a musical composition, a series of movements, each with its own tone and temper” (p. 4).

He begins by a sincere tribute to the Calvinistic piety of his parental home, vitalized by contact with the Moody and Sankey mission. As a boy he himself spoke at evangelistic meetings, but he soon began to feel that this religious activity was secondhand. So he set out on a search for reality in religion—a search which led him first to criticize dogmatic theology in the light of Scripture and then to shy away from the unchristian spirit of many church members. In 1916, while a soldier in uniform, he preached on reconciliation as the post-war task of Christians; the congregation took it badly, and no one spoke to him after the service. It was then that he resolved never to become a member of any Christian church.

He yet remained, throughout his career as a teacher of philosophy, “in conviction religious and in intention a Christian” (p. 29). He looked and still looks for a reformation of Christianity that will take it back to the active concern of Jesus for true community. Philosophical or religious idealism is, in the biblical sense, vanity. What the world needs is not ideas but true human fellowship, created by Christian love. The future of the Church must be in a unity of faith not defined by doctrine but expressed “in a way of living which cares for one another and for the needs of all men” (p. 71).

It will now be clear why Dr. Macmurray felt drawn to the Society of Friends. A careful reading of the lecture will also lead more orthodox Christians to ask themselves what is amiss with them, that so generous and perceptive a mind has found Christian orthodoxy so unattractive.

MARTIN H. CRESSEY

Book Briefs

111 Days in Stanleyville, by David Reed (Harper and Row, 1965, 279 pp., $4.95). Deep in the dark heart of the Congo, brave and frightened men faced the dread Simbas. Here is the hour-by-hour account of what really happened and the tragic story of how each man faced the terror.

Christian Faith and Practice, by Leonard Hodgson (Eerdmans, 1965, 113 pp., $2.50). Thoughtful reading for thoughtful people. First published in 1950.

J. Hudson Taylor: A Biography, by Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor (Moody, 1965, 366 pp., $4.95). An abridged version by Phyllis Thompson of the two-volume original.

The Hour of the Tiger, by Induk Pahk (Harper and Row, 1965, 184 pp., $3.50). The moving story of Induk Pahk’s lively and heart-stirring struggle to make a dream come true—to establish “Berea in Korea,” the first self-help vocational school for boys in Korea’s 4,000 years of history.

American Jewish Year Book, 1965 (The American Jewish Committee and Jewish Publication Society, 1965, 652 pp., $6.50). A comprehensive record of events and trends in the United States and the rest of the world related to all matters of interest in Jewish life.

All the Bandits of China: Adventures of a Missionary in a Land Ravaged by Bandits and War Lords, by Barbara Jurgensen (Augsburg, 1965, 184 pp., $3.95).

Christian Counseling and Occultism, by Kurt E. Koch (Kregel, 1965, 299 pp., $4.95). A book on counseling that concerns itself with the demonic aspects of human experience.

The Holy Spirit at Work in the Church, by Lycurgus M. Starkey, Jr. (Abingdon, 1965, 160 pp., $3). A study of the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church, conducted from within the life of the Church.

Discover Your Destiny, by Dave Breese (Word Books, 1965, 98 pp., $3). An extensive personal testimony to challenge young people.

The Road Sack to God, by O. P. Kretzmann (Concordia, 1965, 125 pp., $2.50). Thirty-one uncommonly good meditations.

The Church in the Community: An Effective Evangelism Program for the Christian Congregation, by Arthur E. Graf (Eerdmans, 1965, 207 pp., $3.95). A clear-cut basic examination of the Church’s missionary task.

The Schweitzer Album: A Portrait in Words and Pictures, by Erica Anderson (Harper and Row, 1965, 176 pp., $17.50). A production of fine craftmanship.

The Horizon Book of Ancient Greece, by William Harlan Hale (Horizon Books, 1965, 415 pp., $18.95). The glory of Ancient Greece: its history, its art, and passages from its great writings. Three hundred and sixty illustrations, many in color. A book of excellence, to treasure and enjoy.

Studies in Church History, Volume I, edited by C. W. Dugmore and Charles Duggan (Nelson, 1964, 257 pp., $8.50). This book contains the main papers and shorter communications read by members of the Ecclesiastical History Society at its first meeting in 1962. Subjects range from Donatism to the origins of liberal Catholicism in the Church of England.

Psychological Studies of Clergymen: Abstracts of Research, by Robert J. Menges and James E. Dittes (Nelson, 1965, 202 pp., $5). Brief descriptions of more than 700 abstracts of psychological studies on clergymen.

Melancthon, by Robert Stupperich, translated by Robert H. Fischer (Westminster, 1965, 175 pp., $3.95). A portrayal of the man and his work by one of the greatest authorities on Melancthon.

Outsider in the Vatican, by Frederick Franck (Macmillan, 1965, 253 pp., $7.50). A dramatic narrative by a Dutch artist who was an uninvited observer of the Vatican Council.

Paperbacks

A Survey of the Old Testament, by W. W. Sloan (Abingdon, 1965, 336 pp., $1.50). A generally evangelical synopsis of the Old Testament. Though the book’s last clause says about the Bible, “It is infallible,” the author concedes that other peoples “made many of the discoveries that the Hebrew people made,” thus confusing (divine) revelation with (human) discovery. First published in 1957.

On the Growing Edge of the Church: New Dimensions in World Missions, by T. Watson Street (John Knox, 1965, 128 pp., $1.95). A sober discussion of the missionary task of the Church and a warning against “our modern infatuation with the practical.” The author is dean of the faculty of Austin Theological Seminary.

The Holy Spirit, by Charles Caldwell Ryrie (Moody, 1965, 126 pp., $1.75). A discussion of the Holy Spirit that is much wider than deep. Includes a discussion of common grace and of the sin against the Holy Spirit, and a history of the doctrine.

The Parables of the Kingdom, by C. H. Dodd (Scribners, 1965, 176 pp., $1.45). Discusses the nature and purpose of the parables and their setting, and traces the place of the parables in Christian teaching. Revised in 1961.

The Living Word: A Theological Study of Preaching and the Church, by Gustaf Wingren (Fortress, 1965, 223 pp., $2.25). A serious discussion for the preacher who wants to keep his sermons and tasks from being trivial. Excellent for the thinking pulpiteer.

Ethics, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Macmillan, 1965, 382 pp., $1.45).

From Tradition to Gospel, by Martin Dibelius (Scribners, 1965, 311 pp., $1.65). The work that started on its course a new German school of theology—form criticism. The author coined the term Formgeschichte. A translation of the revised second edition of Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums.

God and Temple, by R. E. Clements (Fortress, 1965, 163 pp., $3.75). A scholarly discussion of the theological significance of the Jerusalem temple as a witness to God’s presence.

The Making of a Mind: Letters from a Soldier-Priest, 1914–1919, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Harper and Row, 1965, 316 pp., $5). Teilhard’s letters to his cousin Marguerite. For the admirer who wants to know everything about Teilhard de Chardin.

Abandoned to Christ, by L. E. Maxwell (Eerdmans, 1965, 248 pp., $2.25). First published in 1955.

Baal or God: Fantasy vs. Truth, by Herman J. Otten (Leader Publishing, 1965, 351 pp., $.75). On many fronts the author delineates the principal differences between biblical and liberal theology. Although he sometimes oversimplifies and makes too facile evaluations that result in imprecision, he achieves a cool and sturdy defense of the Christian faith and shows by extensive documentation how, and by whom, it is threatened in our time.

The Unity of Philosophical Experience, by Etienne Gilson (Scribners, 1965, 331 pp., $1.65). First published in 1937.

The Twelve Steps: Spiritual Recovery Through the Principles of A. A., by a member of Alcoholics Anonymous (Upper Room, 1965, 48 pp., $.35).

What Christians Believe, by Georgia Harkness (Abingdon, 1965, 72 pp., $.75).

Religion and the Public Schools, by James E. Loder (Association, 1965, 128 pp., $.50). A very concrete discussion of how religion can be handled in the public schools.

Despite the trend toward “collective guilt,” man is still personally responsible for his individual actions

Historians looking back on our decade may call us the generation that absolved itself of personal responsibility when collective guilt could be claimed.

The tendency is all too familiar. The assassination of President Kennedy was not, it is said, the work of a demented man: instead it was the inevitable manifestation of America’s public prejudices and private hatreds. The 1964 triple murder in Mississippi, the assault on the Reverend James Reeb in Selma, the deaths of Viola Liuzzo and Jonathan Daniels were not acts of a handful of fanatical racists: they represented American apathy over injustice that began with the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619. The Negro riots of past summers in New York, Rochester, Philadelphia, Chicago, and especially Los Angeles were not the irresponsible outburst of a minority hoodlum element: they were the justified expressions of despair at oppression by a white society that would not listen until a stunning number of adults and children lay wounded in the streets. The murder of a defenseless woman by a vicious assailant is almost lost from view in the general condemnation of the cowardly witnesses who chose not to get involved.

To be sure, these acts of violence and all such crimes against persons and the state do have general underlying causes. The incendiary literature that swept the nation during the Kennedy-Nixon campaign, continued throughout President Kennedy’s three years in office, and still persists today reveals how seriously hatred has poisoned parts of American thinking. And there were surely other places in this country that might have been as dangerous to John F. Kennedy in November, 1963, as Dallas proved to be. For this the hate-mongers are culpable.

But Lee Harvey Oswald alone aimed and fired the rifle that ended President Kennedy’s life. Not the Minute Men nor Dan Smoot nor Fred Schwarz nor Billy James Hargis nor George Lincoln Rockwell nor Robert Shelton nor Cyrus Eaton nor Corliss Lamont nor Gus Hall. Whatever the influence of these spokesmen, right and left, the blame must rest on one man.

So too with the deaths of the civil rights workers. In each case, blind hatred for those who sought to overturn social inequities caused bigots to react like the primitives they are. They struck out and killed, then fled. They are the ones responsible, not the whole of Southern society.

The ghetto conditions of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, of Chicago’s South Side and Los Angeles’s Watts, are undeniably awful. Man by nature prefers kittens and parakeets to rats and co*ckroaches. Slum landlords, self-serving politicians, brutal police conspire against community pride. Something must indeed be done. But what? Surely stealing from neighbors is not the answer. Surely bombarding passing automobiles with bricks or shooting at will along the Harbor Freeway is not the answer. The martyrs of Mississippi and Alabama deserved a better monument than the gutted ruins of a supermarket on Avalon Boulevard, destroyed in a frenzy to be free.

Brazen attackers are encouraged by the knowledge that a man’s concern for his own safety will often keep him from interfering in the affairs of someone else, even if that other person has been stabbed before a score of witnesses. And since skillful defense attorneys have cudgeled juries into believing themselves to be as weak as the cowards who stood by, assailants know they stand a chance of getting off lightly.

Enough of this distortion! Man is responsible for his own behavior, even if all the currents around him seem to surge toward a new morality of license and libertinism. The Nazi war criminals convicted last summer in Frankfurt, like those before them at Nuremberg, were held accountable each for himself. No man could say, “Hitler told me to do it.” The four million who died at Auschwitz were put to death by the Third Reich, yes; by the Nazi hierarchy, yes; by the orders of Adolph Hitler or of one of his stooges, yes. But the man on the scene who pulled the switch or pushed the button or fired the trigger—ultimately he must be blamed.

In Germany, such a man is still responsible. Why not in America? Because America has been weakened by a philosophy of economic and social determinism that abandons man’s relation with God and with his fellow men. We think that if a child is born and reared on East 100th Street in Manhattan, he will through no fault of his own be a parasite on society. But if he is born in Westport, Lake Forest, or San Marino, he will be a credit to society. Moreover, our decline into relativism has blurred the absolutes of our ethics and corrupted our mores. We have convinced ourselves that, in New York State, killing an armed policeman is worse than killing a helpless child, and that only that sort of crime can justify the right of the state to electrocute the guilty; and we have burdened ourselves with a stricken conscience because in the past we have settled with those who took the lives of others.

We have been duped into believing that society is all at fault for the thousands of drug addicts who must obtain their daily supply by prostitution, theft, or murder. Our clinics and doctors, some tell us, should dispense the drugs in recommended doses.

For too many sociologists, the pat solution to mankind’s problems is to legalize the forbidden. Gambling, prostitution, abortion, and euthanasia have all been proposed as candidates for legality. The individual is freed from his obligation to the state by the state’s abrogation of its responsibility to sit in judgment. Rather than single out the individual offender, society moves to cover his crime with a blanket woven of alleged social progress and outright moral laxity.

Mankind’s collective guilt is more than a theological presupposition; it is an observable fact. But this must never obscure the greater truth for the individual; I am responsible before God and man for what I do. The alternative to acceptance of one’s own accountability is the situation that followed the fall of man in Eden, when each blamed the other. Is it any wonder that the first child of Adam and Eve asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Refusal to accept personal responsibility can have in our time only the same result it has had throughout human history—separation from God and from his goodness.

The God Nobody Wants

The “modern man” for whose sake contemporary theologians reject historic Christianity and substitute an alternative has no objective “identity.” As Professor Kenneth Hamilton, of the United College faculty in Winnipeg, Manitoba, observes in a new paperback (Revolt Against Heaven, published by Eerdmans), theologians disagree among themselves on what modernity demands—dialectical theology, existentialism, linguistic theology, the “death of God,” or whatever else. Each faddist says that those who advocate rival views are guilty of self-deception.

Lacking is an agreed standard of meaning. The frontier movements seek an antisupernaturalist “theology of meaningfulness” and refer the term “God” to man and the world. They reject not only a God “up there” (precluded by Copernicus) but a God “out there” or independent of the cosmos (precluded by naturalistic philosophy). Instead, God is found “down here” or “in here” in the depths of everyday non-religious experience—a theological turn that earlier Christians would have deplored as a reduction of deity to illusion. No genuine continuity remains between the God of traditional Christianity and this “god of the depths.”

Hamilton exposes the long series of deviant theologians who have sought to make Christianity understandable to the contemporary mind by naturalizing it. And he rightly protests that they beg the question of a criterion of meaning.

For the present generation the dialectical theology has largely determined the background of debate, but concern for a theology of meaningfulness really reaches far into the past. Returning to the kind of rationalism characteristic of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the frontier theologians enthrone an earthbound god. But their vaunted immanence of God is no less a matter of faith than his transcendence. Whether in the nineteenth or the twentieth century, moral-pragmatic approaches to religious faith disclose an antisupernaturalistic bias that conceals their metaphysical presupposition of an immanent, earthbound God. To his credit, Bonhoeffer did not think antisupernaturalism gives relevance to Christianity but insisted rather that our beliefs must remain a response to revelation.

In a hurried yet readable survey of contemporary religious thinkers, Hamilton scores many good points against opposing views: “The disadvantage of founding a theology on relevance is that it may suddenly become irrelevant and die.” A theology agreeable to the spirit of the age is unlikely to be the theology of the Bible. Hamilton recognizes the neo-liberal revival of a theology of excessive immanence in a pro-metaphysical mood, and ventures a sturdy critique of its positions. In the emphasis this kind of theology places on direct knowledge of God available from general human nature, and its notion that Jesus is the Son of God not as Jesus but rather in his overcoming human limitations, he finds an unacknowledged debt to Schleiermacher. Moreover, he contends that the thought of the Niebuhrs, Tillich, Ferré, and Daniel Day Williams is largely rooted in this same modernist subsoil.

So far so good. Hamilton skillfully rejects metaphysical theology that is based on excessive divine immanence and that views transcendence simply in terms of a limit (the unconditioned ground of one’s being and meaning). But when he contrasts the biblical and speculative interpretations of transcendence, Hamilton disowns any conceptual scriptural understanding and confines its biblical sense to the non-spatial, non-figurative awareness of divine mystery recognized in worship. He rejects the unconditioned character of God on the ground that God conditions himself in speaking to man. To argue for God’s metaphysical transcendence is said to suspend God’s reality upon human reasoning and a particular cosmological system. He apparently excludes the possibility of rational revelation and of a revealed world-view.

Revelation as a ground of faith is thus introduced with no sure relationship to reason, and a complete disjunction is encouraged between the truth of revelation and the truth of philosophy. But the attempted deduction of the nature of divinity from a study of the world by contemporary theologians actually gives Hamilton no solid basis for disconnecting revelation and reason. His absolute contrast of theology and philosophy perpetuates an error that underlies dialectical-existential theology. What destroys the biblical sense of terms like transcendence and immanence is not their place in a metaphysical system, since they have meaning only in an implicative whole. The only requirement is that the universe of discourse be biblically controlled.

Just because a theology of revelation is received by faith, must right reading of the evidence be denigrated or deplored? Does the Spirit of God use truth as the means of persuasion, or contradiction as the goal of human inquiry? Is the truth of revelation valid whether men respond to it or not, or is its truth established by subjective decision? In much contemporary theology the relation of faith and knowledge is left obscure. It is regrettable that Hamilton follows Barth’s total disjunction of the truth of revelation and philosophical truth, so that faith and philosophy must necessarily espouse different deities.

With good reason Hamilton opposes the natural theology of Aquinas. But he does less than justice to Augustine, understates his differences with Greek philosophy, and misses the force of his “I believe in order to understand.” Kant is said to be an ally of the Augustinian tradition of metaphysical theology because he supports a “mystical” theology. One finds here no awareness of the recovery of the Augustinian principle by the Reformers; instead, we are told only that they rejected rational formulations. While evangelical Protestants found faith not on human reason but on divine revelation, they insist on the rationality of revelation and faith against contemporary irrationalism. A recognition of the importance of this emphasis, and of the consequences that flow from it, is regrettably missing in a paperback that has much to commend its reading.

Problems Of Evolution

News Report, publication of the National Academy of Sciences, in its October, 1965, issue gives the following echoes of a day-long ‘Symposium on Time and Stratigraphic Problems in the Evolution of Man”:

“What we need are more competent fossils. We have plenty of competent anthropologists but not nearly enough specimens.…”—DR. G. L. JEPSON, professor of vertebrate paleontology, Princeton University. In his closing remarks, Professor Jepson warned that uniform rates of evolution cannot be assumed. He has been working with the skeleton of a bat 50 million years old, and he said that if it were restored to life it would be impossible to detect any difference between it and a modern bat.

In contrast to most other mammals, “the direct or fossil evidence for primate and hence for human evolution is relatively scanty and largely incomplete, too frequently consisting of mere fragments or even only teeth.”—DR. WILLIAM L. STRAUS, JR., professor of physical anthropology, Johns Hopkins University.

A challenge was directed toward the recent statement of an astronomer that “there are many worlds in space and we may be sure that a considerable number of them will duplicate the conditions of our earth. On these men will be found.” “If man was so ubiquitous, so easy to produce, why had two great continental laboratories [Australia and South America], worlds indeed, failed to reproduce him? They had failed simply … because the great movements of life are irreversible, the same mutations do not occur, circ*mstances differ in infinite particulars, opportunities fail to be grasped, and so what once happened is no more.”—DR. LOREN EISELEY, professor of anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.

Selling Cigarettes Overseas

Since January 1 every pack, box, and carton of United States cigarettes has carried a conspicuous label: “Caution, cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health.” This mild statement is part of a federal law that, curiously enough, forbids the Federal Trade Commission from requiring a similar warning in cigarette advertising.

Now we discover that what may be bad for Americans is good for non-Americans. Uncle Sam is currently spending American tax money to convince the people of Thailand, Japan, England, France, Austria, Denmark, and other countries that they ought to smoke—especially cigarettes made from American tobacco. With a discretion bordering on hypocrisy, the pro-cigarette propaganda does not indicate that it is sponsored and paid for by the United States government. In addition, European movie-goers will view a Warner Brothers twenty-three minute technicolor “soft-sell,” distributed overseas, not knowing it is subsidized by Uncle Sam and the tobacco industry. The theaters will have to show it as a short subject along with Warner’s theatrical features.

Must this double standard continue? Certainly not. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman need only return—this time for good—to the former ban on government-sponsored cigarette promotion abroad. It is time to remove all doubt that what the American government wants abroad is the well-being of the people, and not simply their dollars.

Protestant Confusion

Protestant Christianity is currently beset by a confusing inner turmoil and a search for an authentic identity. Indeed, it may be that the Church is faced with its gravest crisis since the Reformation. The January 3 issue of Newsweek, in dealing with the Church’s struggle, shows how deep the cleavages are and how diverse the suggested remedies.

Part of the Church’s present predicament obviously comes from the rejection by many of the full integrity and authority of the Scriptures—a rejection now bearing its inevitable fruit of dissatisfaction, unbelief, and the desire to remodel what some feel to be irrelevant and outmoded structures.

Some of the loudest voices have shifted the emphasis from a sovereign God to self-sufficient man; from the apostolic Gospel of personal regeneration along with involvement in society, to involvement in society without personal regeneration. Humanism has crept into the Church in the form of a gospel that rejects historic Christianity, necessitating this frantic search for a new and relevant image.

No one should sidestep the issues or avoid involvement in this struggle, and the view that prevails will determine the shape and the ministry of the Church in the years ahead. CHRISTIANITY TODAY is a part of the struggle. We cannot prevent change nor do we wish to do so. But we are wholly convinced that the Bible remains a timeless guidepost in an age of transition and change.

The form of the building being erected may differ markedly from what we have known in days past. But it is our business and mission to see that the foundation of the building is the “one foundation,” the Jesus Christ of the Holy Scriptures.

The Paralysis Of A City

The transit strike in New York City brought about virtual paralysis involving more than eight million people whose right to work and to get to work depended upon the ailing Michael J. Quill and his Transport Workers Union.

New York State’s Condon-Wadlin Act, which prohibits strikes by public employees, did not deter Mr. Ouill; neither did a court injunction. When Quill was taken into custody he told newsmen that the judge “can drop dead in his black robes.… I’ll rot in jail.… I won’t appeal. I don’t give a damn.” What he said is reminiscent of another day when one capitalist said, “The public be damned.” In this case the issue does not involve labor and capital; it involves labor and a municipal utility owned and operated by an agency of the City of New York.

A strike of this nature involving so many people is intolerable. Calling such a strike was senseless. No real stalemate had been reached, nor had any evidence emerged to show it was impossible to reach some kind of compromise. Moreover, the union struck in open defiance of the law, a defiance that bodes ill for the future in destroying respect for the law and encouraging further breaches of it by others.

The fantastic demands made by the union and the bombastic approach to the problem taken by Mr. Quill were the surest guarantees for preventing a prompt and just settlement. Unionism is legitimate, and it is here to stay. But such irresponsible labor-union activities could bring about restrictive legislation that would hurt unions that have acted fairly and responsibly across the years.

A Significant Venture

The American Institute of Holy Land Studies, first planned a decade ago, became a reality in 1959 with the arrival of its first students in Jerusalem, Israel. Since then, this interdenominational educational and research organization has flourished. Under the leadership of Dr. G. Douglas Young, it has outgrown its present facilities and is moving to a new location atop Mount Zion.

The institute has included on its faculty a number of competent Israeli scholars, who, along with evangelical American personnel, have provided post-graduate Hebraic and archaeological studies as background material against which to understand the Bible. It has been highly endorsed by leading Israelis, educators, students, and American Embassy personnel. More and more European and American colleges, universities, and divinity schools are granting transfer credit for studies the institute offers.

The return of the Jews to the land of Palestine and the emergence of the State of Israel make the work of The American Institute of Holy Land Studies highly significant, especially in the light of the prophetic Scriptures. CHRISTIANITY TODAY offers its best wishes for the success of this new venture and commends the institute to its readers.

The term “evangelist” might cause a shudder in some sophisticated congregations by suggesting a vociferous pulpiteer “preaching up a storm.” Nevertheless, the word means “a publisher of good news.” The dictionary has a definition for the corresponding verb: “make known the gospel to; bring under the influence of gospel truths; convert to Christianity.”

Should this send a shudder through the ranks of believers? Indeed not. It should elicit a robust “amen.” For who in the Church is not, scripturally at least, obligated to be an evangelist? There may be evangelists who are not apostles, bishops, or pastors; but every apostle, bishop, or pastor is supposed to be an evangelist. For twenty centuries the historic scribes—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—have been called “Evangelists.” In liturgical language, he who rises to read the Gospels is designated an evangelist. In a true New Testament sense every believer is an evangelist, every churchman a Gospeler. The ecclesia is evangelical; and, as the late G. Campbell Morgan used to say, to call a man “evangelical” who is not evangelistic is an utter contradiction.

The Church has ever been under orders to evangelize. Are the orders less urgent in this time of apocalyptic siftings and transitions? We claim to see in our domestic and international upheavals, in our plunge toward the abyss of unbelief, an inexorable movement toward the great denouement of the human story; it would thus be tragic if we were to soften the thrust of evangelism in this fateful hour.

Choruses of despair sound from all sides. And why not? One need not be a prophet to discern the signs of the times. “We have now made it possible to destroy the human race, to reduce to the time of Cain and Abel man’s position on earth; to scatter to the four winds in a matter of seconds the civilization it has taken centuries to build”—the United States Atomic Energy Commission speaking. “Utter and unrelieved gloom awaits us. It is likely that during this present generation all our large cities in every part of the world will be destroyed”—the voice of the skeptic Bertrand Russell. “The handwriting on the wall of five continents now tells us that the day of judgment is at hand”—the voice of the scientist William Vogt. “Our civilization is doomed”—the voice of the missionary physician and scholar Albert Schweitzer.

But why, as evangelicals, should we be surprised at all this? After all, we have loudly maintained that we believe everything Jesus said. And what did he tell his disciples when they asked, “What shall be the sign of your coming, and of the end of the world?” A question like that today could get you a chilling brushoff in many a church or seminary by many a religious leader! But Jesus did not brush off the question. In fact, two big chapters in Matthew are needed to contain his answer. And that answer, taken seriously, is rather terrifying.

False Christs will abound; they will mislead multitudes. War-talk and wars will increase. Nations will be at one another’s throats. World famine will take a frightful toll. Earthquakes will shake many places. Persecution will fall heavily upon God’s people. Many will be “offended” and lose their faith. Traitors will appear everywhere. Hatred will intensify. Many false prophets will deceive the masses. Wickedness and immorality will increase. Love will grow cold. The abomination of desolation, predicted by Daniel, will desecrate God’s temple. A horrifying terror will sweep the earth, more fearful than has ever been or shall ever be again—so fearful, in fact, that were its time not curtailed, no man would be left living on the earth. More false prophets will emerge, this time with dazzling signs and marvels. Disturbances will jar the solar system. Still, the Gospel as a witness to the approaching Kingdom will be preached. And men will reject the truth, as they did when Noah prophesied.

But Jesus, facing his followers with this eschatological pronouncement, did not offer them a future of nihilism. They were to raise their heads; their redemption lay beyond the world terror. For them the end was the beginning. God’s day would dawn; his righteousness would rule. Meantime, they were to get to work. The Gospel had to be pressed home to men. The disciples needed the dynamic of the living Spirit; only his divine compulsion in them could move them out to their fateful mission to the world.

So with us now, and even more so. For those men stood millennia away from the fulfillment of those apocalyptic sayings; we stand perhaps within the first framework of their fulfillment. The time seems brief; the buds burst on the tree. We are cast, perhaps, somewhere between the beginnings of the apostasy and the terror, between the early fall of faith and the rise of Antichrist.

This is no time to be beguiled by unbelieving scholars who disown God’s Word and dishonor his Son; it is rather a time for men to match the mission of evangelism. In a day of incredible unbelief, those who still believe must fill a vast vacuum. Evangelicals, like Nehemiah’s masons who worked with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other, have much to do; they must not allow the Sanballatian jeers to jar them from their task. They must endure the charges of “obscurantism,” bear the sneers of the existential nihilists and demythologizers of the Word, withstand the pulpiteers and professors who make war on the side of Antichrist, and carry on like men who under devastating fire still have orders to advance. And when the odds appear insuperable, may they, like Zerubbabel confronted with his task, hear the word from heaven: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts.”

Only minds clouded by spiritual and prophetic oblivion can fail to discern the down-thrust of our world toward ruin; yet, as Bishop Fulton J. Sheen has said, in the death of a great civilization the masses are always unaware of their tragedy. So it remains for those not yet blind, nor led by the blind, to gird on the sword of the Lord. Ours must be the deepest social concern—the concern for men’s redemption. Others will labor at the secular level. But none will seek to save the lost except those who are saved. Here must we, even in tormenting loneliness, fill the yawning gap. So many depend on so few! This, in the language of Churchill, could be our finest hour. To us has been given the burden for a dying age. The divine messenger warned Daniel, “Many shall be purified, and made white, and tried; but the wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand” (Dan. 12:10).

Time moves on swift wings. The eschatological tempo is accelerating. The order of the day comes down from the top to men twice-born: Evangelize! Thin-ranked and hard-hit though we be, the order is not lifted. “You will bear witness for me … away to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8b, NEB).

Let evangelicals not only proclaim redemption in the face of impending judgment but also “preach, saying, the Kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Never was evangelism more needed than in this apocalyptic age.

The “pick off” is one of the most exciting plays in baseball. But it is humiliating for the player who is victim either of the pitcher’s expert timing or of his own carelessness in straying too far from base.

The Church is in danger of finding herself the victim of a “pick-off” play, that is, of becoming so wrapped up in secondary or extraneous affairs that she is “out,” no longer a part of the game to which her Lord called her.

No one questions the duly of the Church to become “involved”; but she should be very sure of what it is that God has called her to be involved in. Just as a surgeon would prove useless to an ill patient if he spent his time clerking in a haberdashery store, so the Church fails in her primary mission when she becomes involved, as a corporate institution, in social, economic, and political matters, which are outside her jurisdiction and competence.

Recently the pastor of one of America’s great churches preached a sermon from which, with his permission, we quote extensively, because of its clarity and vital importance. He said:

“What is the primary responsibility of the Church? To preach the Gospel of God’s redemption and the renewal of the individual through Jesus Christ, or to reform society? According to the Bible, the Church is basically and inescapably committed to the proclamation of the Gospel. Along with its proclamation of the Gospel message, the Church is, through its redeemed members, obligated to be the salt of the earth.

“For Christians and the Church, the recognition of spiritual and moral sickness is only the beginning and not the end. To be sure, the national and international situation is alarming; but it is not beyond the reach of the Lord of men and nations. It is the glory of the Gospel that Christ came precisely to minister to man’s needs. He didn’t come to save the righteous but sinners. Flagrant sin, social upheavals, political uncertainties, international tensions abound, but these are only symptoms of the disease Christ came to cure.

“And this message is committed to his Church. Today, many leaders in the Church choose to emphasize ‘social engineering,’ but it remains the imperative duty of the Church to preach redemption through Christ, and reconciliation to God. For too long some loud ecclesiastical voices have stressed ‘social problems’ and minimized sin in the human heart. Until this process is reversed, the Church will continue to fail in her primary task.

“Out of this shift in emphasis some strange attitudes to law have emerged. Law, the very basis of an orderly and just society of free men, is openly flouted in the name of ‘social justice.’

“There has been altogether too much disrespect for the laws of the land, both in social protest and in the administration of justice. Lawlessness is no answer to injustice. When citizens tolerate, condone, and foster breaking the laws openly, or by non-violent disobedience, they are only undermining the one social structure that can best serve their own causes. The trouble is that non-violence often leads to violence.

“Personally I deplore the participation of some of my fellow ministers who feel it necessary to break just laws or take to the streets in order to register their social convictions in a democratic society. Christian leaders are ill advised when they take the law into their own hands, for whatever reason, or encourage and support others who do so.

“Today, the American people are inviting a flood of riots and rebellion by the cracks they themselves are putting in the dam of their own laws and constitution, by the disrespect for law and order and for the police which many Americans, including preachers, arc encouraging.

“Then, too, in the administration of justice, we have become altogether too lenient with law-breakers at all levels. All too often the sympathy of the courts and the religious community seems to be on the side of the criminal.… We blame society for creating the criminal—it’s never his fault—and we use all manner of excuses and legal loopholes to keep the wrongdoer from being punished.

“Believe you me, as long as this soft policy towards criminals is maintained, there is little hope of conquering the crime wave. History records that many civilizations have been destroyed from within. Let us heed that warning lest we succumb to the tyranny of criminal anarchy.

“Again, we Christians ought to have the common sense to realize that, with all our respect for minorities and provision for minority opinion, our democratic culture is based on the rule of the majority. We seem to have forgotten that majorities have civil rights as well as minorities.… The rights of minorities must be respected, of course, except where the exercise of those rights infringes upon the rights of others.

“This applies to many areas other than the race issue. We see it on university campuses … in groups of vocal faculty members … in the work of a tiny minority of atheists.… Our common sense should tell us that the techniques of agitation and protest by clamorous minorities need to be heavily discounted.… Protest has its place in a free country, but it can be carried to extremes.…

“Once more, we Christians need the common sense to know that there is nothing wrong with love of country, and that our nation deserves our devotion and support, and that freedom is worth defending against all enemies within and without.

“I am thoroughly convinced that the Christian Church should exert its peculiar power in society as an instrument of God to change the hearts and attitudes of men, and not as a social or economic pressure group or as a legislative body.… The Kingdom of God simply can’t be equated with the welfare state or the civil rights movement.… Just now the Church is in grave peril of an increasing deviation from its divinely assigned task. It is in danger of fanning the flames of futility when it should be earnestly striving to bring individuals to a reconciliation with God, and a saving knowledge of his Son Jesus Christ.

“Let the Church be what God has called it to be—a worshiping community of believers, proclaiming the Gospel of redemption and reconciliation with God, seeking to observe all things its Lord has commanded it. This, and nothing less than this, is what the Church of Jesus Christ is for.”

When we consider these clear statements about the mission and the message of the Church, we can see her danger: caught off base because of her preoccupation with secondary matters, because of her shift from her God-ordained responsibility in the things of the Spirit to a primary concern for social matters. Should her proposed social changes and adjustments be made, men outside of Christ would still be lost—without God and without hope.

The Church must not become the victim of the Devil’s “pick-off” play.

Open season on God-slayers

Know Your Ropes

Do you know what Harvey Cox says about Rudolph Bultmann in The Secular City: “He fails to reach the man of today because he translates the Bible from mythical language into metaphysical rather than into today’s post-metaphysical lexicon” (page 252). How would you like to get off a sentence like that? It sort of gets you.

It also reminds me of something Bishop J. A. T. Robinson wrote in the Listener for February 21, 1963: “… the besetting sin of the radical is self-righteousness as complacency is of the conformist, and ruthlessness of the revolutionary.” I think that is a pretty fine sentence, and the more I think of it the more correct it seems to be; but it leaves something out, namely, the self-assurance of some of the things Cox says in The Secular City, and a whole lot more of the same self-assurance that I keep finding in the new theology and new morality writers. How do these men know so much? How can they be so sure? Wouldn’t it be awful if they found themselves classified as conformists when Bishop Robinson himself defines the “complacency of the conformist”?

Two days ago I was looking up something in our unabridged dictionary and fell into the usual trap of being caught by illustrations and definitions of all sorts of words that I had had no intention of reading about. I stumbled on a whole page on ships, and to my amazement I discovered that there were 167 parts on a sailing ship. Being an able-bodied seaman apparently demanded a whole lot more than I ever thought it did. It might take years for a young fellow to learn the ropes, and not many people around him would be safe until he had or until somebody else had. If you don’t like sailing ships, look up the word “apple”; it will take you a week just to learn the names of the different kinds of apples, let alone any skill in growing them.

So what do we have today? Barth is wrong for Bultmann. Bultmann doesn’t come up to Bonhoeffer. Robinson from “up there” looks down in judgment on all three of them. And so we get all kinds of complacent news on heaven, hell, society, judgment, sex, and God, just as if everyone knew what he was talking about. “Thou, therefore, which teachest another, teachest thou not thyself?” “The Word of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no open vision.”

EUTYCHUS II

God And Nietzsche

I have read the December 17 issue (“The God-Is-Dead Stir”).… Last October 15 and 16 I went to Berkeley, California, to observe and photograph the anti-Viet Nam demonstrations.… There was a ray of encouragement. A Christian group on campus erected a booth right in the middle of the accumulation of left-wing booths. I enclose a picture showing their attack on the atheism of Marxism-Leninism.

You can see in the picture:

God is dead—Nietzsche

Nietzsche is dead—God

How true it is. Nietzsche is dead and gone, but God lives forever.

JOHN FIELDING

Monrovia, Calif.

If “God is dead” and may have been dead for some time, we Presbyterians are going to be hit harder than the rest of the church members, for we depend so much on predestination. If the One who does the predestinating is dead, what shall we Presbyterians do?

If God is dead, then the sovereignty of God has come to an end. If the Potter is dead, what shall become of the clay? We can no longer say,

Mould me and make me after thy will.

While I am waiting, yielded and still.

ROBERT L. ROBERTS

Scottsdale, Ariz.

Mark Twain, reading a report of his death in the paper, chuckled that the report was highly exaggerated. “He that sitteth in the heavens” must chuckle at the present furor of reports that God is dead.…

TRUETT COX

Barboursville Baptist

Barboursville, W. Va.

I pray that those who read and write the articles in CHRISTIANITY TODAY will not be so naïve as to believe that the current “God-is-dead” revival is not logically and organically connected with the theological existentialism founded on Kant, developed by Kierkegaard, and finding expression today in Barth, Brunner, and in the late Dr. Tillich.… It is nothing more or less than a consistent understanding of the Kantian disjunction between the phenomena and the noumena.

EDWARD R. GEEHAN

Malverne, N. Y.

Do you suppose that all of the publicity that is being given to those whom God’s Word classifies as fools … could be doing more harm than good?… It seems that Mr. Altizer is enjoying the publicity.… Lovejoy Baptist Church

J. S. BROWN

Lovejoy. Ga.

Normally I do not read your magazine because I find it a little too “Protestant” for my part. But I read and reread your latest one because of the “God-is-dead” articles and must extend my heartiest congratulations. I am sick and tired of hearing these so-called preachers of the Gospel give forth with their nickel knowledge and proclaim to the world that they believe this and they believe that and we poor know-nothings must accept it.…

A. W. EVANS

All Souls Episcopal

East McKeesport, Pa.

Will our hymns survive? “Spirit of the dead God, Fall kerplunk on me.…”

DONALD L. ROBERTSON

Westminster Methodist Church

Harrod, Ohio

You have shown wisdom, all of you, in dealing with the latest bid for attention by the “God-is-dead” thinkers as you have—not making a cause célèbre of it, but regarding it as indicative only of the end-product of a “death of faith” which must inevitably follow two generations of “liberal” attack upon the foundations of our faith.…

HAROLD B. KUHN

Cambridge, Mass.

Who is dead? God or the “God-is-dead” advocates?…

FRANK M. WHITCOMB

Silver Bay Baptist

Silver Bay, Minn.

Thank you for the good work you are doing in answering the “God-is-dead” commotion. May I suggest a way in which this may be met in our regular worship?

It has become common to use the Apostles’ Creed in the Sunday morning worship. Now this statement is gloriously objective. It magnifies the mighty acts of God and encourages us to put all our trust in him and what he has done, is doing, and will do for us in Christ.

But there has also developed the custom of introducing this great affirmation with a subjectivizing phrase. The minister usually begins, “Let us confess our faith.…” Now the “death-of-God” philosophers would have no objection to admitting that the creed expresses our subjective faith. Then, of course, they would dismiss the same as theologizing myth. For us it summarizes the revelation which the true God has made of himself.

In the face of their challenge, why not rethink our introduction and use some terminology which will make it unmistakably clear that for us this is not a mere mystical myth? I suggest something like the following: “Using the Apostles’ Creed, let us confess together The Living God in his great and gracious acts for us and for our salvation: I believe in God the Father Almighty, etc.…”

And that leads me to dare mention another matter in connection with the use of the creed. One notes that the creed is used in differing places in the service, and no doubt something may be said for each usage.… One of our attractive ministers in this state uses the creed at the conclusion of the sermon. That is, the minister has proclaimed the Gospel as adequately as he can. Now he asks the congregation to add to his their proclamation as a united or corporate testimony in this comprehensive affirmation of the living God as our almighty Father, our loving Saviour, and our holy Comforter.

WILLIAM C. ROBINSON

Columbia Theological Seminary

Decatur, Ga.

Digging In At Da Nang

Re your article, “Is the Chaplaincy a Quasi-religious Business?” (Dec. 17 issue): I cannot imagine why anyone would wish to disparage the work of military chaplains.… Only this morning I had a letter from a young man with the Marines at Da Nang—not particularly active when in his home church—who wrote, “The chaplain here is really digging in. He has erected a nativity scene in front of his tent and has loudspeakers playing Christmas carols. So much can be said for our chaplains here. They are working earnestly in the civic action programs, providing spiritual guidance for the troops, and pitching in, with sleeves rolled up, wherever help is needed. They are all wonderful men.…”

IAIN C. G. CAMPBELL

First Congregational Church

Weeping Water, Neb.

Making Marriage Stick

Would it be possible to get the article “What Has Gone Wrong with Marriage?” by Chaplain W. Norman MacFarlane in the December 17 issue … in tract form? That is one of the best of its kind that I have read for a long, long time.…

V. A. JENSEN

Kenyon, Minn.

• Permission to reprint can be secured by writing to CHRISTIANITY TODAY.—ED.

This is the best presentation on the subject which I have ever read. Are reprint copies available?… I would like to have copies to use in counseling with students and parents.…

DR. LUCILE BURRALL

Counselor

Pasadena City Schools

Pasadena, Calif.

MacFarlane’s [article] puzzles me. How can marriage be a “union for life” when it can be sundered, especially by evangelicals? Expositors may have declared that “unfaithfulness is the Bible ground for a marriage divorce,” but did Jesus? Was he not referring to espousal divorce? Jewish practice required contracts for both betrothal and marriage, and it also required divorce decrees to break cither of these. Jesus could never violate the marriage union, which is based on physical union and is for life, but he could certainly allow for an espousal divorce since there had been no physical union (and therefore no marriage) except in the case of the offender. Matthew alone gives us this “exception,” and he also is the only one who gives the illustration for this, in chapter one. Also nowhere is remarriage after divorce countenanced. It is forbidden, for death alone dissolves the marriage union.

I have no difficulty in counseling folk from the Bible. The only difficulty I have is with expositors.

O. H. BUBLAT

Christian and Missionary Alliance

San Bernardino, Calif.

As to the wearing qualities of marriage, Mr. MacFarlane’s quoting a divorce lawyer, that “he was absolutely convinced that any two people who had made the wrong marriage could be reasonably happy if they had enough maturity really to try,” shot close to the mark. It was a bull’s-eye for realists.…

PAUL E. SHOOP, SR.

Bloomsburg, Pa.

Equal Time Wanted

I am just a voice and I can’t be heard very far away; but I think someone with a bigger voice like CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Billy Graham, the National Council of Churches, or the National Association of Evangelicals, or maybe all of us together, ought to demand equal time of all the major TV and radio networks. The Pope and his followers had plenty of free time. Church of the Nazarene

DWIGHT KELLAR

Durand, Mich.

Tell It On The Mountains

Speaking only for my own denomination, I would hope that a copy of Cordon Clark’s essay, “Revealed Religion” (Dec. 17 issue), could be distributed to every student in a Southern Baptist seminary.…

RONALD NASH

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Western Kentucky Stale College

Bowling Green, Ky.

Clark’s “Revealed Religion” is superb!

BEN TUININGA

Minneapolis, Minn.

I must say it was worthwhile reading, but nevertheless disappointing. When I first began the article, I had strong hopes that Dr. Clark would produce some new evidence to support his stand on verbal, plenary inspiration. And yet, his only conclusion is that the multitude of biblical references to inspiration must be taken to mean verbal, plenary inspiration. I am forced to disagree.…

CORDON E. PENNER

Annisquam, Mass.

Civil Rights And Southern Wrongs

You attack many sinful things. This you should do. But why when you write concerning such things as civil rights do you try to make it appear that the people of the South are all wrong and we of the North arc always right? Since much of your relationship is in the North, you know better than others the sins we have up here. Why do you not cry out against us? Why do you and the other writers always “slur” the Christians of the South. When will we let the Civil War end?…

I applaud your zeal for truth. But I am dismayed at the way you take to defend it.…

‘THOMAS E. SEXTON

First Church of God

Erie, Pa.

A BAPTIST LIKED IT

Though every copy of CHRISTIANITY TODAY abounds with timely, instructive, and inspiring articles, I am particularly grateful for the December 3 issue.

Relative to the report on “American Baptists: COCU on Ice?” it was refreshing, as an American Baptist pastor, to read it and the splendid articles of John W. Bradbury and Thomas B. McDormand concerning the need for vital witnessing and the danger of modern ecumenism.…

STEWART H. SILVER

First Baptist Church

Seymour, Ind.

Pray For Us, Too

In the editorial, “Let’s Not Write Off the Professors” (Dec. 3 issue), you call your readers to pray “for the campus witness of such agencies as Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship.” It seems incongruous to be so supportive of traditional denominations in the former article (“The Overriding Ecumenists and the Restless Laity”) and apparently oblivious to the campus ministries of these denominations in the latter. Or do you feel these ministries to be too hopeless for your readers’ prayers?

CHAD BOLIEK

University Pastor

The Westminster Foundation at the University of Idaho

Moscow, Idaho

• No. We gladly recommend prayer for these, too.—ED.

Prayer And p*rnography

Perhaps the average citizen like myself is not supposed to analyze or understand the actions of the United States Supreme Court. However, our little ones in kindergarten, our teen-agers, our homes, and our entire society cannot escape the practical results of the court’s decisions, whether these decisions come in the form of an unsigned order or a lengthy opinion with several dissenting views.

The United States Supreme Court by a simple majority decides which cases it will or will not hear on appeal from lower courts. Recently it decided to hear the appeal of Ralph Ginzburg, a twice-convicted peddler of the vilest type of p*rnography. During the time that the court was diligently studying the salacious garbage in the Ginzburg case, it decided not to hear the appeal of fifteen parents of twenty-one children (including Protestants, Roman Catholics. Jews, and Armenian Apostolics) who thought their kindergarten children should be allowed to say voluntarily, “God is great, God is good, and we thank him for our food,” before they ate their cookies and milk. I he court seemingly set in bold relief the relative evaluation it places on prayer and p*rnography. The two cases make an interesting study in contrast.

In November, 1963, U.S. District Judge Ralph C. Body found Ginzburg guilty as charged in a twenty-eight-count indictment, fined him $28,000, and sentenced him to five years in prison. The facts in the case were never in dispute. Ginzburg admits that he put in the U. S. mails certain copies of an obscene publication called Eras, a smutty biweekly entitled Liaison, and an erotic autobiography known as The Housewife’s Handbook on Selective Promiscuity.

The District Court’s opinion is explicit. It notes that Eros was a craftily compiled mixture of obscene material; Liaison was perverse, superficial, prurient, and entirely without restraints of any kind; and the Handbook was “a vivid, explicit and detailed account of a woman’s sexual experience … patently offensive on its face, astounding in its depiction of sexual misbehavior.”

One (among many) of the exhibits that shocked Judge Body most deeply was a series of photographs giving “a detailed portrayal of the act of sexual intercourse between a completely nude male (Negro) and female (white), leaving nothing to the imagination.” The Third U. S. Circuit Court unanimously affirmed the sentence by the District Court. For reasons not yet clear, the United States Supreme Court decided to hear the appeal of Ginzburg and has had it under consideration for weeks.

If the Supreme Court had not already been involved in the kindergarten prayer case, its decision not to hear the appeal might have been understandable. But it was the court’s previous decisions that set the stage for the controversy which developed in the school room of Public School 184 in Whitestone, Queens, New York, between the school principal, Elihu Oshinsky, and the parents of the pupils. Federal District Judge Walter Bruchhausen ruled in favor of the parents, permitting the little tots to recite together the childhood verse before they ate.

An overwhelming majority of people would never have imagined that the saying of one of the best-loved and internationally known nursery] rhymes would be prohibited in a free country. It is recognized that these children were in a public school, but the simple prayer was being said voluntarily. No one was compelled, coerced, or even encouraged to say it. No part of the school curriculum was changed or affected by it. Neither was anyone offended or complaining about its being said. It was a clear case of free exercise guaranteed by the First Amendment. But the Second U. S. Circuit Court reversed the decision of the District Court to let the children pray together, and the Supreme Court concurred with tacit approval.

No one with any sense of decency could fail to see the criminal act of Ginzburg, its devastating effect on our society, and the potential it has for crippling if not indeed wrecking thousands of lives not directly involved in the act itself. It takes even less ability to see the innocence and beauty of what the kindergarten children wanted to do. Yet the Supreme Court has said in effect that so long as prayer is suppressed it will remain silent, while giving full attention to those cases where an attempt is made to suppress p*rnography.

In the prayer case there was a difference of opinion at the functional level and a serious disagreement between the lower courts. In the p*rnography case there was no question about the law or the facts. Not a single dissenting voice was heard in the lower courts. Yet the court had no time for the prayer case, but the crocodile tears of a twice-convicted criminal demand the attention of the court for weeks on end.

One may well wonder how long the prayer (“God save these United States and this honorable court”) by which each session of the Supreme Court is opened will continue to be answered.

FLOYD ROBERTSON

Office of Public Affairs

National Association of Evangelicals

Washington, D. C.

We Can’T Win Them All

CHRISTIANITY TODAY is the most practical, timely, and vital organ for the dissemination of Christian truth available today. No other periodical is written on such a high intellectual plane and at the same time committed to such an unbiased and yet conservative viewpoint.…

EARL L. POUNDS

Mary Ann Baptist Church

St. Ann, Mo.

I find your magazine very hard to read. In trying to analyze why, I ran across the enclosed article (“Giving Wings to the Page,” Decision, Nov., 1965, issue). I thought you might take some hints from it.

LYDIA M. BEILER

Salisbury, Md.

Thanks For The Help

I especially enjoyed “It Happened at Bethlehem,” by R. E. O. White (Dec. 3 issue). I drew on it heavily, giving appropriate credit, for one article of my pre-Christmas series. At this time my twenty-four-year-old weekly column for newspapers becomes a daily column.

Editor

R. BARCLAY WARREN

Canadian Free Methodist Herald

Kingston, Ont.

Well Done

Howard Snyder’s parable of the baker (Dec. 3 issue) was a literary masterpiece. His relating “neo-baking” to “neo-orthodoxy” was a terrific depiction of the current theological perversion, which wastes time debating instead of believing and imparting the faith that saves and works.…

ELTON O. SMITH. JR.

Canasawacta Valley Free Methodist

Norwich, N. Y.

Yes, Even Darwin!

Dr. Stob’s fine article “A Firm Foundation for Modern Science” (Oct. 22 issue) does an injustice (probably unwittingly) to the life sciences, it seems to me. By failing to mention any of the great biologists who were believers. Dr. Stob may be implying that biology is the science of infidels.

Linnaeus’s passionate pursuit of order in living things was nourished by Christian motives. Religious convictions prompted Louis Pasteur to disprove the theory of spontaneous generation. Louis Agassiz was a deeply religious man. Even Charles Darwin (forgive me!) had some religious convictions before organized Christianity lined up against him. The list could be a long one.

ALAN MARK FLETCHER

Science Editor

J. B. Lippincott Co.

Philadelphia, Pa.

The contention of Stob that the Reformers laid the foundation for modern science, which heathen philosophies can never do, is a contention we have been working to establish in our Bible-science program.…

John Warwick Montgomery in “Cross, Constellation, and Crucible” establishes clearly that the Reformers favored the Copernican theory, were interested in alchemy, which was the chemistry of that day, and truly laid the groundwork for modern science.…

We would like to have permission to quote from the article by Henry Stob in our newsletter.…

WALTER LANG

Executive Secretary

Bible-Science Association

Caldwell, Idaho

Disappointed Disciple

I am acquainted with it [CHRISTIANITY TODAY] and not only do not appreciate it—I find its content worthless!…

EDWIN LEE STILES

Director of Interpretive Materials

Disciples of Christ

The United Christian Missionary Society

Indianapolis, Ind.

It Applies

Without overstatement I find without exception that the page “A Layman and His Faith” is a rich inspiration in application to our family experience as we try to grow spiritually.…

JOHN TREMAINE

Director of Music

Mulberry Street Methodist Church

Macon, Ga.

Swept But Unchanged

The actions of the Roman Catholic Church in the Vatican Council are making sweeping changes in the way the public sees that church. It should not be assumed, however, that the Catholics will emerge with a church that is closer or more faithful to the scriptural foundations of Christianity.…

RONALD J. P. PRIGGEE

Louisville, Ky.

A Reader Reports

When it comes to religious journalism, yours ranks second to none.…

GERALD DENNY

Clinton, Ill.

Few men have had better relations with their pastors than President Abraham Lincoln had with his, Dr. Phineas D. Gurley. The two men were very close. And yet, during a Sunday morning service, Lincoln slowly rose to his feet and before the entire congregation boldly opposed his pastor with a few carefully chosen remarks.

Dr. Gurley knew Lincoln was right, and the opposition only strengthened their warm friendship. To understand this we must go back to the time when Lincoln first moved to Washington as President. Immediately after the inauguration, the Lincolns began to attend the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, where Dr. Gurley was the minister. Mary Lincoln chose pew number fourteen, in the sixth row from the front.

Lincoln’s parents were Primitive Baptists, and although Mary Lincoln had been a Presbyterian in her youth, she had joined the Episcopal Church in Spring-field. Perhaps the Lincolns began to attend the New York Avenue Church in Washington because of the great kindness of Dr. James Smith, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Springfield, which they had attended before the election. Dr. Smith had preached the funeral sermon for their second son, Eddie, during the absence of the Episcopal rector, the Reverend Charles Dresser. His help and understanding during their days of sorrow had led them to attend his church.

From the very beginning the Gurleys and the Lincolns found strength in one another’s company, and their friendship grew. Lincoln liked his pastor’s preaching and remarked to a friend, “I like Gurley. He don’t preach politics. I get enough of that during the week, and when I go to church I like to hear the Gospel.”

The President especially enjoyed the pastoral prayer and made a habit of standing when Dr. Gurley began. He also attended the prayer meeting during the week. To avoid the excitement his presence would cause if he sat in the sanctuary, he listened carefully from the pastor’s study, with the door slightly ajar so that he would not miss a word.

The ups and downs of the war years deepened Lincoln’s love for the church and his pastor. Dr. Gurley’s daughter, Fannie, made it a point to greet the Lincolns at the close of each service. This they appreciated, and they developed an intimate friendship with her. Before long Mrs. Lincoln noticed that Fannie was falling in love with a West Point cadet, William Anthony Elderkin.

When the news of the fall of Fort Sumter reached Lincoln, he summoned Dr. Gurley to the White House for prayer. After several hours of earnest conversation, during which the two sought to discover God’s will, the pastor got up to leave. “What about your daughter?” asked Lincoln, suddenly changing the subject. “She’s engaged to young Elderkin, is she not? And he is a member of the graduating class at West Point, and must be called to the front at once. It will be hard for the little girl.”

President Lincoln approached Fannie and suggested that she get married immediately. “But I don’t have any wedding clothes,” she objected. “Well, I’ll see what I can do about that,” said Lincoln, his eyes shining and a crooked smile forming on his haggard face. Without delay he sent his carriage around the city to borrow a trousseau, and by evening the entire outfit had been gathered. The wife of one of his secretaries lent a veil and some lace that had a long, interesting history; another woman sent a fan that had been presented by a distinguished ambassador to the United States; and another lent some satin slippers that had been worn by a girl during a party with Lafayette. Dr. Gurley performed the ceremony, and the President stood with the bride as she received the guests.

Early in 1862 young Willie Lincoln developed a heavy cold. Complications developed, and as his illness worsened Dr. Gurley was summoned to his bedside. Willie sensed that God was calling him home, and toward the end he whispered to his mother while Dr. Gurley was visiting that he wanted the contents of his little bank to be given to the church, and that it should be spent for Sunday school missionary work. The five dollars was sent to the church and spent as Willie had asked. The record of this contribution is in a faded book at the New York Avenue Church.

An interesting letter from Mrs. Lincoln to the pastor’s wife has been preserved. The letter, sent to the manse along with a turkey, said this:

EXECUTIVE MANSION

MY DEAR MRS. GURLEY:

It affords me much pleasure to hear that your family are recovering. We had so serious a time with our little Taddy, but we can deeply sympathize with you in any such trouble.

We have received from Baltimore a small supply of poultry, am I taking too great a liberty with you, to ask your acceptance of a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner? Hoping soon to have the pleasure of seeing yourself and the Dr. remain.

Very truly—

MARY LINCOLN

No. 25, 1864

For some reason Lincoln always presented his gift to the church by a check made out to Dr. Gurley. Perhaps it was an indication of his confidence in the man. As the war dragged on, Lincoln sought more and more the comforts and strength of the church. Often before a battle he would send his carriage for Dr. Gurley, and the two of them would get on their knees and pray that God’s will would be done.

In an uncompleted manuscript Dr. Gurley wrote about one of his visits with Lincoln:

One morning, as Mr. Lincoln’s pastor and intimate friend, I went over to the White House in response to an invitation from the President. He had me come over before he had breakfast. The night before we had been together, and Mr. Lincoln had said, “Doctor, you rise early, so do 1. Come over tomorrow morning about seven o’clock. We can talk for an hour before breakfast.” This I did, as before stated.… As I passed out the gateway which leads up to the White House and stepped on the street, I was joined by a member of my congregation. “Why doctor,” said my friend, “it is not nine o’clock. What are you doing at the Executive Mansion?” To this I replied, “Mr. Lincoln and I have been having a morning chat.” “On the war, I suppose?” “Far from it,” said I. “We have been talking of the state of the soul after death. That is a subject of which Mr. Lincoln never tires. I have had a great number of conversations with him on the subject. This morning, however, I was a listener, as Mr. Lincoln did all the talking.”

President Lincoln felt that the church and its doctrines were most essential. But one morning as he sat in the family pew, Dr. Gurley shocked him and the rest of the congregation with the announcement that there would be no more church services at New York Avenue “until further notice.”

Lincoln had undoubtedly wondered at the piles of lumber just outside the sanctuary. Now he learned the reason. Dr. Gurley was worried about the need for space to care for the wounded who were pouring in from various battlefields. Since many schools and churches had been transformed into hospitals, he proposed to do this with New York Avenue Church. The newly cut lumber would be placed on top of the pews to make a temporary floor for hospital beds. He probably felt that his action would please the President, who was deeply concerned over this problem, and perhaps because of this had not mentioned the matter to him.

The announcement was barely finished when Lincoln was on his feet. “Dr. Gurley,” he said in his high-pitched voice, “this action was taken without my consent and I hereby countermand the order. The churches are needed as never before for divine services.” The President’s order was, of course, final, and everyone rejoiced—especially Dr. Gurley.

Lincoln knew that neither he nor the nation could get along without Jesus Christ. He was a constant student of the Bible and spent much time studying the old family Bible from which his mother, Nancy Hanks, had read to him in his early boyhood.

The confidence of the Lincoln family in Dr. Gurley was shown when he was chosen to preach at the President’s funeral. Later, Mrs. Lincoln presented him with the hat her husband had worn when he gave his second inaugural address.

Both “saints and sinners” can have mentally retarded children; the problem is to achieve acceptance along with understanding

The saddest of all cries is that of a mother tenderly holding her retarded child and asking, “Why?” A cry of hunger can be satisfied with food, a cry of poverty alleviated with money, a cry of pain soothed with medicine, a cry of loneliness silenced with companionship; but a cry from a parent of a retarded child is a cry of futility for which there is no easy solace.

We who are parents of normal children cannot understand how the parents of a mentally retarded child feel. While we are nagging our children to get higher grades, they are hoping their child will learn to dress himself. While we are concerned about getting our children into college, they are delighted when their child can give a correct answer to two plus two. While we are looking forward to our children’s entrance into business or professional life, they are pleading for their child to be given an unskilled job opportunity.

Daily we thank God for blessing us with normal children and interpret this blessing as an act of God’s love. But how can a parent of a mentally retarded child believe that God is loving?

Recently, the mother of a child who is not only mentally retarded but also deaf and dumb confided to me the heartaches surrounding her beautiful child. Seeking answers, she had gone to her clergyman, who told her, “God had so much love to give you that he blessed you with this child.” I asked her how she reacted to his statement. This was her answer: “I simply said to him, ‘I wish God had distributed this love a little more evenly. Why did I have to have such a big chunk of it?’”

Why do some clergymen feel that they must always say something, even though there may be nothing to say? Many times a warm handclasp is more than sufficient and a gentle nod of the head more expressive than many words.

For counseling parents of retardates, a clergyman needs great understanding. And in listening one finds understanding. In the New York Times (Jan. 4, 1959), Dr. Howard S. Rusk cited a transcription of an interview with a twelve-year-old boy, blind since birth, who was having difficulty at school because he was said to be “out of touch with reality.”

But then it isn’t the darkness that I should blame. Because darkness can be either friend or enemy. If wishes could come true, I’d wish I could see. But if I only had one wish, I would not waste it on wishing I could see. I’d wish instead that everybody could understand one another and how a person feels inside.

What the parents of a mentally retarded child need is acceptance along with understanding. Somehow, they must learn to accept their special problem. They might never learn to understand fully why they were given it, but to survive they must learn to accept it. To achieve this requires skill, patience, understanding, prayer, and guidance on the part of the counselor.

Parents of a mentally retarded child often have a feeling of guilt. They think that somewhere in the past, either remembered or unremembered, there was a transgression that God is now punishing them for. They must be ever so gently led to see that God is not vindictive and that the birth of a mentally retarded child is something that could and does happen to both sinner and saint. Before acceptance can be reached, the sense of guilt must be removed.

Recently I buried a severely brain damaged infant. Later the mother wrote me saying: “There were many times that I felt a sense of security in the knowledge of the fact that you did possess a ‘special love’ for all of our children. And now God has seen fit to take her unto himself and make her perfect in mind and body. For this we are grateful even in the sense of loss.”

This mother had learned to accept her problem. Her secret was that she did not allow self-pity to engulf her. Like Job when he said, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him,” she held fast her faith in God.

Quite different is the mother who wrote this letter to the editor of the New York Daily News (Jan. 24, 1965):

As the mother of a mentally retarded child, I agree with you, they shouldn’t be allowed entry to this country from abroad. Not only would the country end up paying for their care, they’re potentially dangerous. I could write about my child; the things he’s done and the strength he had in him at the age of four. As adults, the strength and viciousness of the retardeds is even worse. Sorry, but we’ve enough mentally retarded adults in this country without the imported variety.

In more than seven years as resident chaplain in a state institution with over 4,300 mentally retarded patients, I have yet to find a child of four who is potentially dangerous or an adult who is vicious. The retardate is no more dangerous or vicious than the normal person. Yet without proper training and discipline he can become a delinquent, as can also the normal child.

Mental retardation is an enigma. How can we reconcile Genesis 1:31 (“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good”) with the tears of a mentally retarded child who has just been called a “dope” by a brighter child of the same Creator? Why should so much intelligence be bestowed upon one and so little on the other?

Various theories have been put forth in an attempt to reconcile the perfection of God with the imperfections of mental retardation. All of them have one thing in common; they are merely rationalizations.

One theory may be called “The Other Side of the Rug.” Look at a beautiful, valuable rug with an intricate pattern. Turn it over and you will notice the roughness of the underside. The rougher the underside, with its ugly knots and scraggly ends, the finer the finished side. Needless to say, proponents of this theory consider the retardate to be the side devoid of beauty and pattern, a bothersome necessity.

Another theory may be called “The Garden.” When compared to a weed, a flower is full of beauty and fragrance. Just as we need sorrow to appreciate joy and darkness to enjoy light, the weed is necessary to show the flower in all its splendor. The mentally retarded child has value as a foil for the normal child.

Still another theory is that of “The Sins of Our Fathers.” This rests on a misunderstanding of Numbers 14:18: “The Lord is slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of fathers upon children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation.” The “iniquity of fathers” has been thoughtlessly identified by many amateur biblical interpreters as syphilis. I am reminded of four young men from a conservative Bible college who came to visit the institution. Briefing them on mental retardation, I was informed by the four that all mental retardation was caused by this disease.

Would God that mental retardation were so simple it could be explained with one word! The truth of the matter is that syphilis accounts for only a very small percentage of mental retardation. If it were the sole cause, then by successfully attacking this disease we could eliminate retardation. But to date there are some seventy known or suspected diseases or mishaps causing mental retardation. In only one out of five cases can we identify the cause with any certainty.

Traditional Christianity has taught that God is responsible for all creation and that everything he created has a purpose. Even the mentally retarded were brought into existence by the Creator and should not be considered a curse; the all-wise Creator has a purpose for even the “least of these.” The soul of a mentally retarded child is just as precious as that of a normal person; both were made in the image of God, the only difference being the degree of intelligence.

As created beings with souls, we are pilgrims on our way to heaven. The greater the intelligence, the greater the responsibility. The retarded child, because he will never arrive at the age of responsibility, is blessed by being assured a place in heaven.

A purpose God might have for the mentally retarded is that of being our teachers. As a result of my work as chaplain to retardates, I shall forever be indebted to them. They have taught me more than I can ever tell through their childlike simplicity, their cunning candor, their yearning for affection, their unstinting love. Theirs is a world where hypocrisy is banished, a Never-Never Land where honesty reigns, where a smile is their passport to affection and the light in their eyes melts the coldest heart. Perhaps God is reminding us that we must rediscover these attributes that the mentally retarded have never lost.

Each morning upon arriving at my office, I pray that I shall find some small answer to one of the many questions of mental retardation. And each day I am disappointingly met with further questions. But, thank God, the answers are beginning to appear. Today research in mental retardation is like a train emerging from a long dark tunnel. Cretinism is now a page of past history; the RH factor has been curbed; the phenylketonuric (PKU baby) condition is now controllable. The admonition of our Saviour is valid for this area: “Ask and it will be given to you. Search and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened for you. The one who asks will always receive; the one who is searching will always find, and the door is opened to the man who knocks” (Matt. 7:7, 8, Phillips).

However, many parents of mentally retarded children are well acquainted with these verses. Never can it be said that they have not asked, searched, and knocked. They have asked countless doctors what can be done; they have searched for the one specialist who might by some miracle have the right answer; they have knocked on the doors of many medical centers. So much time consumed, so much money spent—only to be told there is absolutely no cure for their children.

More than seven years’ experience as a resident chaplain to retardates gives me the right to express certain opinions. They are as follows:

As we learn more and more about mental retardation, less blame will be given God and more will be placed where it belongs, upon man’s limited knowledge. We now know that some babies are born mentally retarded because the mother contracted German measles during a critical period of pregnancy. Unfortunately, many babies were born retarded before we discovered this fact. Man must plead guilty because of his limited knowledge.

We still remember well the scare that thalidomide gave our nation. This drug should never have been released to the public until exhaustive tests had been made to assure safety. The drug companies released it prematurely. Who is to blame for all the malformed babies caused by this terrible drug? Surely not God.

Perhaps some types of mental retardation can be explained as a result of man’s breaking of natural and physical laws. God must have certain laws and rules if this world is to be carried on in an orderly manner. If I chose to step off a high ladder in defiance of the law of gravity, I could very easily receive a brain injury that would leave me handicapped. Have I the right to blame God for not suspending this law when I was falling?

The mentally retarded are not asking for much. All they want is a chance to grow and develop within their own limitations, a chance to be useful, a chance to love and to be loved, and a chance to know God as we have had a chance to know him. As Helen MacMurchy has said in The Almosts:

Give them a chance. The Golden Rule applies to them. We are to do for them what we would others should do for us. Give them justice and a fair chance. Do not throw them into a world where the scales arc weighted against them. Do not ask them to gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. But give them one chance to bring out the best that is in them. This is but a fair request on behalf of human beings who nevertheless are permanent children.

Have you ever noticed that the reading of the Scripture lesson often reaches a low point in listener attention? This happens in Sunday school classes, women’s and men’s meetings, and other gatherings as well as in formal public worship. The Word of God is a sharp two-edged sword capable of penetrating to our spiritual-intellectual-emotional marrow and joints. But ministers and laymen alike often handle it as if it were a putty knife.

No matter how great its inherent force, a passage can become dull and spiritless if read in public casually and without preparation. “Ho, every one that thirst-eth; come ye to the waters …” (Isa. 55:1) can be droned in ho-hum fashion as if the reader had never known spiritual thirst—or the boundless joy of receiving “wine and milk without money and without price.”

There is a widespread assumption that anyone with average education and competence can read Scripture in public with little or no effort. And the next step is to conclude: “I have to spend my time on my lesson, my talk, my devotional, or my sermon.” The result is that many persons read Scripture in public without any previous preparation.

I should like to propose a rather radical idea. No matter what the occasion, the public reading of Scripture is of crucial importance. Therefore it requires careful preparation. The following five suggestions can help one wield the two-edged sword so that it achieves high listener attention and lasting results.

1. Write out the Scripture lesson—on the typewriter or by hand—and read from the manuscript rather than from a printed page. There are good reasons for suggesting this. One is that printers arrange their type so that the margins are straight. Therefore words must often be divided at the ends of the lines, and the reader’s eyes must jump from the right margin all the way back to the left in order to see the whole words. Equally important, the arrangement of material in lines of equal length tends to interrupt the natural flow of meaning. When one is reading from a printed page, it is easy to pause at places that ought to flow on and to skip by other points where the listeners need a brief stop.

Preparing a copy of the Scripture lesson will also foster union between you and the Word. As you copy, you will find meanings leaping toward you that would be overlooked in a casual reading. You will, in a sense, be made a captive of the Word. When that happens, your public reading becomes a pouring out of something that has become part of you. You are merely a channel through which the vital, living Word flows out to others.

2. Read the lesson in its larger context at least once. This will reinforce its grip upon your mind. At the same time, the lesson seen in its whole setting will “come alive” for you. It does not exist in isolation; nerves and arteries and sinews connect it with the whole body of Scripture of which it is a part.

Failure to take account of the larger context is, of course, a prime source of doubtful or even erroneous exposition. Treated as if it were an independent entity, a passage may lend itself to gross distortion. Such distortion is not limited to the sermon or lesson based upon a segment of Scripture. It can take place in the public reading by, for example, emphasis upon some word or phrase that deserves no such emphasis when the larger context is considered.

3. Try to imagine yourself in the situation with which the lesson deals. If action is involved, as it is in most Scripture other than the Psalms and the letters of Paul, try to take part in that action through the lives of the men and women involved. Try to be for a moment a hot and thirsty traveler, fresh from the desert, eagerly looking for a street vendor who will sell a drink of water from his goatskin bag—and in that mood hear the invitation to come without money. Once you have done this, your reading of Isaiah 55:1 will be transformed, and those who listen will catch the note of reality.

Even the accounts of the stirring events in our Lord’s last week on earth, and of what took place at Calvary, can be read in such a distant way that listeners automatically reject the words. But when a speaker begins to tell them about something that he almost seems to have witnessed, they will listen. The reverent use of your imagination will help the narrative portions of Scripture come alive for you and your hearers.

4. With your manuscript prepared so that its physical appearance aids the natural flow of meaning, go back over it and underline and mark for emphasis and shades of meaning. This will make it easier to preserve the very important eye-contact with listeners, while yielding yourself as a channel through which the meaning of the lesson can surge.

In making this suggestion, I am not recommending “theatrical” reading of Scripture. This hollow, phony procedure is the very opposite of what I have been trying to suggest. As someone has well said, “Scripture reading is not a performance but rather communication of the Word.” To the degree that a teacher or preacher or devotional leader becomes concerned with the impression he himself is making upon his listeners, he loses the ability to be a channel for the Word. A Scripture lesson is not a vehicle for showing off the reader’s skill as an actor, or his fine voice, or his power of visualization. To use it this way is to pervert the role of the witness-communicator. But when this ever-present danger is recognized as one subtle way in which the devil appeals to pride, a marked manuscript can help give power to public reading.

5. Finally, I strongly urge that you read your lesson aloud as many times as necessary in order to master it. Many slovenly readings, to say nothing of slips of speech and outright blunders, result from assuming that visual and oral reading are the same. That is far from true; the two forms are really quite different kinds of communication. Word combinations that give the eye no trouble may hopelessly twist the tongue. And in oral reading the voice must do for the listener what punctuation marks and capital letters do for the reader.

By following some of these practices and adapting others to fit your own personality and experience, you may well find that the reading of the Scripture lesson becomes the high point rather than the low point of any period in which you seek to be an intermediary between God and your fellow men.

A son of the Reformation is quite at home in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He finds here a milieu to which his sensibilities are immediately congenial. In the paintings of Pieter de Hooch, Hobbema, the van Ruysdaels, van de Velde, and, of course, Rembrandt van Rijn, he finds a vision of the world that he can share with no difficulty at all. The celebration and immortalization of the bucolic, the tranquil, the humble, and the commonplace responds to the call that he hears in his own sold (and indeed, a call that all men must sense) for a vision of life that is immediate, lucid, and uncomplicated by the demands of sacramental transfiguration which the works of, say, del Sarto, Filippo Lippi, or Fra Bartolommeo make. The clean blue-and-white tile floors of Vermeer, the portraits of Van Dyck, Jan Steen, and Frans Hals, and Rembrandt’s wonderful sketches of biblical scenes that look as though he drew them with a twig—here are things that evoke a world that he can understand and love.

But then he travels south into Bavaria and Austria and tumbles into a world of the baroque: a frantic scramble of gilded altars, painted statuary, frescoes, reliquaries, fonts, and baldachinos that he finds dizzying, if not altogether unsettling. He realizes that he has come upon a vision of God and the world that differs radically from his own, yet one that would call itself above all Christian. He can either decide that the whole thing is an unfortunate botch, or pause to ask himself whether or not it is worth looking into.

And then he comes to Florence and Michelangelo. Here, surely, true religion has flown out the window, and Pan and Cybele and Bacchus have surged through the door. Here is a town, a Paradise, with its warm sunlit stucco set in the enchanting hills of Tuscany, cypress and olive trees and vineyards all about—a town that is crowded with painting and sculpture celebrating at once the celestial and the earthy. He eventually makes the disturbing discovery that the glory of the human form shines more brightly here than does the glory of Christ, the Virgin, and the Apostles. And he asks himself: Have we two antithetical worlds here, with no bridge between them? Is there on the one hand a “religious” world, represented by the churches, and on the other a world that is unapologetically pagan? Or is there a unity of vision here that sees no breakdown between the true worship of God and a profound sense of wonder at all the phenomena of life, that is not embarrassed over its joy in the human form?

The question that finally emerges, and with which these notes are concerned, is whether or not it is possible to have a view that has the proper priorities and hierarchies and yet is able to affirm with joy the Creation and say, “Benedicite, omnia opera Domini.”

Only if the answer to this question is yes can the discussion about evangelicalism and the creative arts go on. For if the answer is no, then we would do well to pack in and concentrate on our mission of discursive preaching. For it comes to this: the creation of great art presupposes a view that sees the stuff of this existence to be radically significant; indeed, that sees it (and not Paradise) to be the only matrix from which high art can rise.

To a non-religious person, this of course presents no problem. There is no other existence to which he can refer, and therefore any commentary must spring from and speak to this one. But to a person with a vigorously eschatological view of things—and I think we evangelicals fit in here—whose theology has taught him that the phenomena of this existence are meaningful only in so far as they find an ultimate point of reference in Paradise, such a view is sometimes difficult.

The water is often muddied in that, without ever having examined just why we look askance at the fine arts—or at least the appropriateness of a Christian’s pursuing them—we argue that time is short and we must get on with the job of winning souls; or that painting, sculpture, and drama are mere embellishment to life, and that people with a task of ultimacy laid upon them cannot truckle with this sort of thing; or that the world of the arts is so rancid with beatniks, libertines, hom*osexuals, and other frightening types that a Christian has no business getting embroiled.

But the philosophical problem is prior to all these. And there is a problem. We must decide whether or not the patent transitoriness of this existence and the heavy urgency of being spokesmen for what we understand to be the Word from God cancel the fine arts as a field for excursion. Put more simply, it is the question that has hundreds of students in evangelical institutions gnashing their teeth: May I—can I—before God, explore passionately my obvious artistic or poetic or dramatic talent, without any immediately utilitarian motives? Or shall I find areas where my talents can be used “for the Lord”?

There is the rub. “For the Lord.” Our understanding of this has been a utilitarian one. To us it means one thing: souls. But how shall we test the work of Dante, Milton, Bach, Rembrandt, Dr. Johnson, G. M. Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, and a thousand others by this? These men were all Christian. Obviously it cannot be done. (One does not think of Dr. Johnson as a soul-winner. Boswell does not have much to say about his witness in the coffeehouses of the city.) So that either we must find warrant for art that is not subject to this test, or these things must retire as candidates for our attention.

This is, let us be candid, a partisan article. I am sure my position is no secret. I do not feel the utilitarian test to be valid. I believe that the radical affirmation of human experience crucial to art is one that can—nay, that must—be made by the Christian. We must have the courage to shape our anguish and our joy into beautiful forms—into poetry, into pictures, into ballet. We must celebrate beauty—all kinds of beauty—on instruments of ten strings, and with a chisel. We must paint the tawdry, the spurious, and the hideous as it is: shall we leave this to Toulouse-Lautrec, Rouault, and Kokoschka? We must try, with all that is in us, to affirm our conviction that form, and not havoc, lies at the bottom of things—and shall we leave this quest to Mondrian, Giacometti, and Larry Rivers?

Of the utilitarian test, I can only say that evangelism is one thing, art another. It is unfair to apply the canons of either to the other. We must have an end of pitting them against each other. They are no more at odds than apples and wool are.

It would be a mistake to suppose, however, that we can begin a concerted effort to produce “evangelical art.” Committees, movements, retreats, and courses have never, in the history of the world, produced art. It can come from one source alone: the soul of the artist. Here is the other side of the question, the personal and non-philosophical side, the side that is not subject to our views pro or con. What of the appearance in our midst of an artist? None of us can make himself an artist. But, anguish of anguish, if one of us, or one of our sons, discovers that he has been assaulted by strange inclinations, and that he must create or die, what shall our religion say to this?

I believe that we can call a loud bravo. I believe this because I believe in three great doctrines: the Creation, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection—three acts whereby God attests to the profound legitimacy of the human, the flesh (I do not use “the flesh,” as St. Paul uses it frequently, to mean a spirit that is anti-God). I do not see it to be our calling to cancel the earthly in the name of the eternal. This is not what the Church has understood its task to be. The Athanasian Creed speaks of the Incarnation as “not [the] conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but [the] taking of the Manhood into God.” It seems to me that there must be a seizing of human experience, with all of its beauty, ambiguity, and tragedy, and a transfiguration of it into forms that speak of the eternal.

And, given that elusive thing called genius, an artist is someone who has been assaulted by these three things: beauty, ambiguity, and tragedy. He cannot fend off this assault any more than he can slough off his own being. And so he is forced to come to terms with it by creation. Michelangelo, Mozart, Tiziano, Gide—what do they all have in common? I believe it is the attempt to exorcise the daemons of human experience; to shape into form the chaos of beauty, ambiguity, and tragedy that they sense. It might have been possible with all of them to have brought about quiescence in purely religious terms, but who will insist that the whole lifelong agony of creation was not God’s way of bringing them to himself?

Beauty, then. What, exactly, is a human being to do when his awareness of beauty becomes unmanageable? We applaud the results when we have the perspective of a few hundred years and can see the sublimity of Michelangelo’s creations. But was the course he took one that would have suited us at the time? How would we have dealt with his intoxication with the nude male form? Would we have tried to huddle him into safer, more obviously utilitarian pursuits? Would we have encouraged his frenzied dedication to his art—this art that has given us the David, an image of a sublimity and perfection and power and sensuousness that can only wrench from us tears of awe and joy. Who has ever said more eloquently than this statue does, “What a piece of work is a man”? And how is it possible, in a dissertation on the glory of the Creator, to say one-half of what this thing says? Then one goes from the Accademia, where the David stands, to the Sagrestia Nuova di San Loranzo, where there are nine marble figures by Michelangelo. Who can gainsay the serenity, the overpowering beauty, of these things? Shall we whittle down a man’s struggle with beauty in the name of religion?

For it is just that: a struggle. Alas for the man for whom the vision of beauty, in whatever form it approaches him (for Michelangelo it was the human body; for Wordsworth it was the Lake District; for Mozart it was music), becomes, no longer a reverie to be indulged at will in sybaritic melancholy, but a searing agony that ravages him daily, hourly, in images too sweet to bear. How shall our religion speak to this sort of thing?

Perhaps here is one difference between the artist and the rest of us. The artist is above all vulnerable. He finds himself wounded with stabbing visions of some aching and elusive joy, some burning fever of desire; and he knows that in order to be true to his own being, he must invite the shafts and ask where in God’s name they come from, while the rest of us must offset and quell these lance-like imaginings with practical considerations in order to make our way in the world and keep our sanity. It would, of course, be havoc if we were all artists; but let us be sure that we have not excluded them from our world.

Secondly, the artist is assaulted with the consciousness of ambiguity. One does not have to look far to find it. What shall we say, for instance, of the dreadful breakdown between aspiration and fulfillment that every human being experiences? or again, of radical limitation imposed on half the human race—blindness, insanity, poverty, injustice, paralysis? or of the awful hiatus between appearance and what we suspect to be reality? or of the jostling coexistence in human life of overpowering sexual desire and moral stricture? All of these things are answerable by theology; but when we have answered them they still make us cry out in anguish, and it is with this anguish that the artist wrestles. He must begin by being haunted, perplexed, astonished, and tormented by life. He must insist on asking the questions, loudly and shrilly, that plague all men, and that most of us try to meet by evasion, platitudes, and neuroses.

Thirdly, the artist senses the tragic nature of life. Shakespeare (in Hamlet), Pope (in the “Essay on Man”), and all artists have sensed the position of man, which is tragic: we are caught—strung—between the animal and the angelic, and we set one against the other to our destruction. Various forms of the hedonistic principle would have us assert the animal to the obliteration of the angelic, and various forms of religious asceticism would have us do the opposite. Both fail of God’s idea for man. We are not angels, but we have their consciousness of the divine and find, alas, our feet in the mud. Animals are free to be wholly animal without guilt; we sometimes want passionately to be wholly animal but are not free to be so. Sometimes (though not often) we want to be angelic, and find that we cannot if we will (cf. St. Paul).

The artist senses as ultimate the tragedy of decay. Fr. Hopkins, a Christian, said it as well as anyone:

… no, nothing can be done

To keep at bay

Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,

Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst,

winding sheets, tombs and worms and

tumbling to decay;

So be beginning, be beginning to despair …

It bothered Keats too:

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs …

One contemplates the marbles of Michelangelo and realizes that here is the highest that we can achieve in immortalizing strength and youth and beauty. The stone is not subject to decay (relatively speaking). And so the stone David outlives the beautiful model, whoever he was; and the figures in the plastered frescoes outlive by centuries their flesh-and-blood originals. And yet, even here there is an ironic twist, for the mere flick of a vandal’s chisel would demolish instantly one of the most sublime things ever—the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

A great scholar and historian of the Reformation, J. H. Merle D’Aubigne, has this comment:

Protestantism has often been reproached as their [the arts’] enemy, and many Protestants willingly accept this reproach.… Let Roman Catholicism pride itself in being more favourable to the arts than Protestantism; be it so; paganism was still more favourable, and Protestantism places its glory elsewhere, There are some religions in which the esthetic tendencies of man hold a more important place than his moral nature. Christianity is distinct from these religions, inasmuch as the moral element is its essence. The Christian sentiment is manifested not by the productions of the fine arts, but by the works of a Christian life … so that if the papacy is above all an esthetical religion … Protestantism is above all a moral religion.… After a man has studied history or visited Italy, he expects nothing beneficial to humanity from this art [History of the Reformation, p. 376].

This is a view widely espoused. It is an unhappy one for an evangelical who finds in himself not only a great love for Florentine painting and sculpture but also a passionate conviction that there is something radically legitimate about the plastic immortalization of human beauty and the effort to shape visibly the chaotic phenomena of life; and who feels that there need be no tension between a vigorous evangelical orthodoxy and an assertion of the significance of the arts.