Page 6338 – Christianity Today (2024)

October 10, 1960, marks the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of James Arminius (1560–1609), the Dutch theologian whose name has been given to the Protestant theological tradition of Arminianism. It is appropriate that attention be given again to this late voice of the Reformation whose influence has been so great and about whom so little study has been done. Noteworthy is the fact that in the persistent “Arminian-Calvinist” controversy of the intervening centuries, neither side has had much to say about Arminius himself. He seems to stand somewhat aloof from the later battle, and those who have gone to his writings commonly report that they do not find what they expected to find; that is, they often come to the conclusion “he isn’t really an Arminian.” Some suggest that he was in transition, not completely liberated (or backslidden, as the case may be) from his early Calvinism. Others have held that he was a clever dissembler whose published works were scripturally based and orthodox enough but whose “beliefs were worse than his writings” or who taught many grievous errors in private.

Who was this enigmatic figure? Born in South Holland of simple people, orphaned at an early age, and raised by pious Reformed guardians, he was educated at Marburg, Leiden, Basel, and Geneva, his teacher at Geneva being Theodore Beza, the celebrated successor of Calvin. He was a brilliant student and later distinguished himself as pastor for 15 years of the Reformed churches of Amsterdam. He spent the final six years of his life as professor of theology at Leiden. During his pastoral and professorial years he became engaged in the controversy which gave rise to Arminianism.

AUTHORITY FOR ARMINIUS

He always regarded himself as a Reformed thinker. In common with the earlier Reformed leaders, he opposed the exclusive claims of the Roman church by appeal to the sole authority of the Scriptures. He asserted that “we now have the infallible word of God in no other place than in the Scriptures,” which were written by “holy men of God … actuated and inspired by the Holy Spirit.” He pointed out that the authority of Scripture is not dependent on the testimony of the church nor subject to its dogmas, but that the church “is not a church unless she have previously exercised faith in this word as being divine, and have engaged to obey it.”

Arminius was not unaware of the remaining problems of tradition and interpretation. At this point again he followed the Reformers in giving a certain priority to the patristic church and to Augustine (but expressing misgivings about some of Augustine’s later writings). When it came to the Reformed tradition itself, he professed allegiance to the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, the only Reformed symbols with any sort of binding authorities in the Low Countries at that time. He had a high regard for the exegetical work of Calvin, and in a letter written two years before his death he said, “I recommend that the Commentaries of Calvin be read … for I affirm that in the interpretation of Scriptures Calvin is incomparable …, so much so that I concede to him a certain spirit of prophecy in which he stands distinguished above others, above most, yea, above all.”

Insistence upon the sole authority of Scripture prevented Arminius, however, from ascribing to Calvin the kind of ultimate authority allowed him by the Leiden professor, Francis Gomarus. Gomarus had tried, unsuccessfully, to make Beza’s extreme predestinarian reading of Calvin mandatory in the Dutch churches.

BY GRACE ALONE

Arminius warned that Calvin and the other Reformers were men, and that “they may deserve well of the Church, and yet be entangled in some error: and the illustrious restorers of the Churches perhaps did not spy out everything with which the Church was deformed, and perchance themselves built a superstructure of some errors on a true foundation.”

This implies that Arminius found in the Reformers some points which could stand correction in the light of the word of God, but it also means that he found in them “a true foundation.” This common ground which Arminius shared with Calvin, for one, included the doctrine of the total inability of man as sinner to save himself, with salvation made possible by grace alone. Calvin had said, “When the will is enchained as the slave of sin, it cannot make a movement toward goodness, far less steadily pursue it. Every such movement is the first step in that conversion to God, which in Scripture is entirely ascribed to divine grace” (Institutes, II, III, 5). Arminius said, “Free will is unable to begin or to perfect any true and spiritual good without grace.… I affirm therefore, that this grace is simply and absolutely necessary for the illumination of the mind, the due ordering of the affections, and the inclination of the will to that which is good” (Writings, 1956 printing, II, 472). Calvin, following Augustine, had said that there is no “apportionment between God and man, as if a proper movement on the part of each produced a mutual concurrence.… Whence it follows, that nothing is left for the will to arrogate as its own” (Institutes, II, III, 11). Arminius said, “But this [cooperation], whatever it may be of knowledge, holiness, and power, is all begotten within him by the Holy Spirit” (Writings, I, 529). Both are agreed that grace alone is the ground of salvation.

PREDESTINATION AND CHRIST

Calvin and his disciples had used the biblical figures of election and predestination to express the truth of sola gratia and to combat the Roman doctrine of works. Theological literature often gives the impression that Arminius simply “denied predestination.” It was his well-grounded fear that Beza, and Gomarus, the supralapsarian interpreters of Calvin, were in danger of divorcing the doctrine from Christology and making Christ the mere instrument or means of carrying out a prior, abstract decree. Arminius sought to state the doctrine in the light of Scripture and in integral relation to Christology, and he referred often to Malachi, Romans 9, the “universalist” texts, and particularly the emphasis of Ephesians 1:4 that God “hath chosen us in him.” For his contention that election must be understood “in Christ” he found considerable support also in the Dutch confessions and in Calvin himself.

The “first decree,” then, for Arminius, was that by which God appointed “his Son, Jesus Christ, for a Mediator, Redeemer, Saviour, Priest, and King, who might destroy sin by his own death, might by his obedience obtain the salvation which had been lost, and might communicate it by his own virtue.” Christ is thus not merely the agent but the very foundation of election. The second decree was to receive into favor sinners who are “in Christ” by repentance and faith, and the third had to do with “sufficient and efficacious” means of grace. The final decree was the election of particular individuals on the basis of the divine foreknowledge of their faith and perseverance.

Arminius thus affirmed the doctrine that Christ is the foundation of election and adumbrated the position that He is the content of election. He retained the position that this makes man responsible for his own believing. It would seem, however, that Arminius built his doctrine of election on the notion of foreseen faith, and thereby made man’s decision the cause or concurring cause of salvation (man electing God). It should be noted, however, that Arminius put the latter notion in a position subordinate to the appointing (or electing) of Jesus Christ, and that election in terms of foreseen faith can stand neither alone nor first. Arminians have not always kept this distinction clearly, and the Remonstrance of 1610 itself begins with what Arminius put in fourth place. This tendency, carried to its conclusion, leads to a defection in emphasis from free grace to free will (a point made forcefully by Robert E. Chiles, “Methodist Apostasy: From Free Grace to Free Will,” Religion in Life, Vol. XXVII, No. 3, 1958).

The free grace of God in Jesus Christ did confront sinful man with a “decision-question” for Arminius, but the response of faith was not done in strength which is some sort of residue of goodness. Apart from Christ there could be no response, but the response of faith is nevertheless man’s act, an act to be sure not of achievement and merit but of surrender and acceptance. In this act man gives all glory to God, but for it he himself is responsible. Grace, for Arminius, created freedom and responsibility; it did not destroy or displace them.

SOME CONSEQUENCES

Predestination in Christ was the heart of Arminius’ contribution to Reformed thought, and from it he drew certain consequences or supporting corollaries. Free will, for instance, is bound in the sinner and needs liberation; yet it actually concurs in this liberation. Grace, moreover, is not an irresistible force. There is the possibility of falling from grace, although Arminius pointed out that properly speaking it is impossible for a believer to fall from grace, but that it may be possible for a believer to cease believing. Where Arminius’ contemporaries had made a rigid distinction between common and peculiar grace (as against Calvin’s more cautious distinction between a universal and a special call), Arminius affirmed a continuity of grace in which qualitative distinction between prevenient grace and following grace is erased. Denying, however, a universal election, he pointed out that saving grace is given only to those who are saved, that those who are saved are not so because they will to be saved, but that they are saved because they are in Christ by faith. Commenting on Romans 9:16, Arminius said that “it is not he that wills, or he that runs, who obtains righteousness, but he to whom God has determined to show mercy, that is, the believer.” Finally, Arminius showed a concern for the problems of assurance and holiness. He held to a necessary assurance of present salvation on the basis of faith, but to no present assurance of final salvation. Herein he maintained that “believers” and “the elect” are not interchangeable terms inasmuch as election includes within it the notion of perseverance in faith. These positions have continued to characterize much of subsequent Arminianism, especially in its Wesleyan development.

BEFORE AND AFTER ARMINIUS

Arminius differed with some of his contemporaries, but he was not exactly an innovator. He was thrust into the role of spokesman for a stream of Reformed thought found broadly in Sebastian Castellio, Jerome Bolsec, Heinrich Bullinger, the Second Helvetic Confession, the early Dutch confessions, and the early Dutch pastors under the influence of the Reformed church of Emden. The humanist element in this stream must be acknowledged, but Arminius was perhaps even more influenced by Calvin himself. His articulation of the liberal Reformed tradition was extremely conservative; he attempted to express what was valid in the humanist dissent in the context of a biblical theology of grace.

After his death his influence was felt in a diversity of movements. The Remonstrants retained less and less of his dogmatics, stood more in the liberal tradition, and preferred to remember Arminius for his concern for religious toleration. The Arminian label in England became attached to an already existing opposition to Puritanism and then to any dissent from any Calvinism. In New England looseness of terminology permitted the identification of Arminianism with Unitarianism. The most faithful appropriation and development of the primitive Arminian dogmatics is found in the Wesleys and the early Methodist writers.

Although much has taken place in theology in the intervening centuries, there are many Christians today whose religious thinking has been molded by the Arminian tradition. They would do well to examine the careful work done by the founder of that tradition, and they will find there firm support for resisting an easy-going, culture-Protestantism which confuses man’s work with God’s. And those who call themselves Calvinists will discover that it is too simple to dismiss Arminius as a Pelagian who did not see clearly the issue of sola gratia. They may find themselves closer to him than they had supposed.

What the Communist party is in the vanguard of the world revolution, the evangelical movement must be in the world revival.

What is an evangelical? An evangelical is a Christian “holding or conformed to what the majority of Protestants regard as the fundamental doctrines of the Gospel, such as the Trinity, the fallen condition of man, Christ’s atonement for sin, salvation by faith, not works, and regeneration by the Holy Ghost.” A subsidiary definition is “in a special sense, spiritually minded and zealous for practical Christian living, distinguished from merely orthodox.” Another secondary definition is “seeking the conversion of sinners, as evangelical labors or preaching.”

The doctrinal position of an evangelical is that of orthodox or creedal Christianity. This doctrinal basis is stated in the incorporation papers of the Church, namely the New Testament, and in the great creeds and confessions of Christendom. It is the Chalcedonian Creed and the later reformed confessions such as those of Heidelberg, Augsburg, and Westminster. Only those who embrace these objective truths have the right to the name evangelical.

Evangelical Christianity should be differentiated from other movements. First, it must be differentiated from Roman Catholicism, or sacerdotal Christianity, which emphasizes a salvation mediated by sacraments and erected on tradition rather than on the Word of God. Second, it must be distinguished from liberal or modernist Christianity. Many modernists appropriate the name evangelical merely because they are non-Roman Catholic, but do not embrace the basic truths of historic orthodoxy. It is a misnomer to call a modernist an evangelical. Third, an evangelical must be distinguished from a fundamentalist in areas of intellectual and ecclesiastical attitude. This distinction was made by Dr. J. Gresham Machen who was often called a fundamentalist. Said he, “The term fundamentalism is distasteful to the present writer and to many persons who hold views similar to his. It seems to suggest that we are adherents of some strange new sect, whereas in point of fact we are conscious simply of maintaining historic Christian faith and moving in the great central current of Christian life” (cf. Valiant for Truth, by Ned B. Stonehouse, pp. 40, 337, 343, 405, 428).

The evangelical depends upon the Bible as the authoritative Word of God and the norm of judgment in faith and practice. This brings him into tension with Romanism which, while giving lip service to the Bible, exalts tradition and papal infallibility above the Bible; with modernism which exalts the autonomy of the human mind; and with neo-orthodoxy which identifies the Word of God with something above and beyond the Bible but witnessed to in the Bible.

ECLIPSE OF EVANGELICALISM

Has evangelicalism fallen into eclipse? The history of the last five decades has been largely under the aegis of a triumphant modernism. Basically, modernism is evolutionary naturalism applied to the Bible and to Christianity. By it the supernatural in the origins and nature of Christianity was sacrificed by the accommodation of Christian theology to the data of the scientific method and the dicta of the scientific mind. Hence, by presupposition, there could be no Virgin Birth, no miracles, and no Resurrection as the Bible taught. Modernism was based on higher criticism’s view of the Bible. The books are redated in accordance with evolutionary naturalism; ethical monotheism is tolerated only later than polytheism, and the writing of the prophetic sections is placed after the events. Modernism developed a new theology concerning Christ, man, sin, salvation, the Church, and the Church’s mission. To say the least, the content of modernism was not the content of biblical theology. The departure from biblical concepts was radical.

Against this came the fundamentalist reaction. The name fundamentalist was derived from a series of treatises written by leading orthodox scholars on various biblical doctrines and published in 1917 by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles with the aid of Lyman Stuart Foundation. The contributors to The Fundamentals were men like Melvin Grove Kyle, James Orr, George Robinson, W. H. Griffith Thomas, F. Bettex, George Frederick Wright and others, all recognized biblical scholars of their day. The resistance to modernist attack upon biblical Christianity precipitated the modernist-fundamentalist controversy which raged for several decades following publication of The Fundamentals. This reached its height in the successful effort of the Presbyterians, led by Clarence Edward Macartney, to oust Harry Emerson Fosdick from the pulpit of a Presbyterian church in New York City. In the controversy there arose the emphasis upon the essentials or fundamentals of the Christian faith, such as, the inspiration of the Scriptures, the Virgin Birth, the miracles of Christ, the vicarious atonement of Christ, and the bodily resurrection of Christ. On the wave of this controversy Dr. Macartney was elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1924. Shortly thereafter a group of Presbyterian ministers signed the so-called Auburn Affirmation which denied that these doctrines were essential to the Christian faith. Not all signers of this document disbelieved the doctrines, but they held they were not essential to the Christian faith. What happend in the Presbyterian church repeated itself in almost every other denomination, and the Protestant Church was divided between modernists and fundamentalists.

SOME COSTLY WEAKNESSES

Time revealed certain weaknesses in the fundamentalist cause. First was the diversion of strength from the great offensive work of missions, evangelism, and Christian education to the defense of the faith. The fundamentalists were maneuvered into the position of holding the line against the constant and unremitting attacks of the modernists or liberals. Gradually the liberals took over the control of the denominations and began a series of acts of discrimination, ostracism, and persecution of the evangelicals. Many evangelicals suffered at the hands of ecclesiastical modernism. This reduced fundamentalism to a holding tactic, impotent in denominational machinery and indifferent to societal problems rising in the secular world. The Christian Reformed Church was a notable exception to this trend.

The cause of the fundamentalist defeat in the ecclesiastical scene lay partially in fundamentalism’s erroneous doctrine of the Church which identified the Church with believers who were orthodox in doctrine and separatist in ethics. Purity of the Church was emphasized above the peace of the Church. Second Corinthians 6:14–17 was used to justify the continuous process of fragmentation, contrary to the meaning of the passage itself. Emphasis was upon contention for the faith rather than the commission of missions, evangelism, education, and worship. The number of competent scholars declined in evangelical ranks as the decades passed.

Then came the rise of neo-orthodoxy under the influence of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner in which theology professed a return to biblical concepts without the acceptance of biblical authority. Neo-orthodoxy accepted the Word of God as revelation but differentiated this from the written Word. It spoke about the creation of man but repudiated the historical Adam. It believed in immortality but not in the physical resurrection of Jesus. Due to the aridity of modernism and a nostalgia of people for biblical ideas concerning God, man, sin, and redemption, the influence of neo-orthodoxy grew rapidly. Nevertheless, its attitude toward evangelical Christianity is essentially hostile because of its refusal to accept the biblical authority as the ground of its theology. The watershed of modern theology remains one’s attitude toward the Bible as the ultimate and final authority for faith and action.

THE EVANGELICAL REVIVAL

Is evangelicalism reviving? Is it emerging to challenge the theological world today? A new respect for the evangelical position is evidenced by the emergence of scholars whose works must be recognized. Westminster Press recently published a trilogy on The Case for Liberalism, The Case for Neo-Orthodoxy, and The Case for Orthodoxy. Here Protestant orthodoxy was again recognized as a live option. Great publishing houses today are not only willing to publish books by evangelical scholars, but several are actively seeking such books.

This may be due to a change in the intellectual climate of orthodoxy. The younger orthodox scholars are repudiating the separatist position, have repented of the attitude of solipsism, have expressed a willingness to re-examine the problems facing the theological world, have sought a return to the theological dialogue and have recognized the honesty and Christianity of some who hold views different from their own in some particulars.

Simultaneously, all branches of theological thought have felt the impact of mass evangelism under Billy Graham. In him we have seen the phenomenon of an evangelical who crossed all theological lines in his work while maintaining a strictly orthodox position. His work has not been disregarded by those of other theological convictions and has compelled them to rethink the basis of their approach.

EVANGELICALS AND FUNDAMENTALS

Evangelical theology is synonymous with fundamentalism or orthodoxy. In doctrine the evangelicals and the fundamentalists are one. The evangelical must acknowledge his debt to the older fudamentalist leaders. It is a mistake for an evangelical to divorce himself from historic fundamentalism as some have sought to do. These older leaders of the orthodox cause paid a great price in persecution, discrimination, obloquy, and scorn which they suffered at the hands of those who under the name of modernism repudiated biblical Christianity. For decades these fundamentalists were steadfast to Christ and to biblical truth regardless of the cost. They maintained the knowledge of orthodox Christianity through Bible schools, radio programs, Christian conferences, and Bible conferences. In the true New Testament sense, they were witnesses, or martyrs. Most of these leaders were well known to me personally. I speak of men such as James M. Gray, Lewis Sperry Chafer, Arnold C. Gaebelein, I. C. Haldeman, Harry Ironsides, J. Gresham Machen, J. Alvin Orr, Clarence Edward Macartney, Walter Meier, Robert Dick Wilson, W. B. Riley, Charles E. Fuller, Robert Schuler, Oswald T. Allis, Harry Rimmer, to mention only a few. These were great defenders of the faith.

The evangelical defense of the faith theologically is identical with that of the older fundamentalists. The evangelical believes in creedal Christianity, in the apologetic expression of Christianity, in the revelational content and framework of Christianity. Therefore, he stands by the side of these fundamentalist leaders. He differentiates his position from theirs in ecclesiology. These men were driven by controversy and discrimination to various shades of separatism. Some were compelled to leave their denominations, some operated as autonomous units within their denominations. Through controversy, in suffering, they sired a breed of fundamentalists who, in following them, confused courtesy in contending for the faith with compromise of the faith; academic respectability with theological apostasy; and common grace with special grace. They developed the theory that any contact, conversation, or communication with modernism was compromise and should be condemned.

Let it be repeated that there is a solidarity of doctrine between fundamentalism and evangelicalism. They are one in creed. They accept the inspiration and dependability of the Bible, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the creation and fall of man, the vicarious atonement by Christ on Calvary, justification by faith and not by works, regeneration and sanctification by the Spirit, the spiritual unity of the Church, the evangelical, educational, and societal mission of the Church, and the kingdom of Christ experiential, ethical, and eschatalogical. The evangelical and the fundamentalist could sign the same creed.

Moreover, they have a common source of life, for they belong to one family. Christian life comes from the Christian faith and cannot be divorced from it. The repudiation of Christian truth cannot eventuate in a Christian life. In this the evangelical stands with the fundamentalist. But the evangelical goes a bit further and condemns doctrinal orthodoxy which does not result in a life of love and service. The test which Jesus gave to his disciples was that of brotherly love but it was given in the framework of an acceptance of his Deity, his miracles, his messiahship, and his imminent death as Saviour. If, therefore, the fundamentalist criticizes the evangelical or vice versa, that criticism should be within the family relationship and demonstrate the spirit and attitude of love which is a test of true discipleship.

EVANGELICAL OBJECTIVES

The evangelical has general objectives he wishes to see achieved. One of them is a revival of Christianity in the midst of a secular world. The world is helpless in the presence of its problems. Its attempt at solutions totally disregards the orthodox message and answer. The evangelical wishes to retrieve Christianity from a mere eddy of the main stream into the full current of modern life. He desires to win a new respectability for orthodoxy in the academic circles by producing scholars who can defend the faith on intellectual ground. He hopes to recapture denominational leadership from within the denominations rather than abandoning those denominations to modernism. He intends to restate his position carefully and cogently so that it must be considered in the theological dialogue. He intends that Christianity will be the mainspring in many of the reforms of the societal order. It is wrong to abdicate responsibility for society under the impetus of a theology which overemphasizes the eschatalogical.

The specific goals of evangelicalism are definite. It seeks evangelical cooperation. This was expressed in the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942. The NAE insisted on a positive position toward the then Federal Council of Churches and later National Council in distinction from the position later adopted by the American Council of Christian Churches. The NAE gathered evangelicals in fellowship for articulation of the evangelical cause in a score of different fields without attack upon other cooperative movements of diverse theology. It summoned together a fellowship in action of many of those denominations not in the Federal Council, and for the first time it gave them a sense of unity and strength. Many individual congregations whose denominations were in the Federal Council of Churches were received into the NAE in order to articulate their convictions and give them an opportunity of cooperative action on an evangelical and orthodox base. The influence of this movement was great. While the parent organization of the National Association of Evangelicals has not reached a numerical strength which some had expected for it, it nevertheless has stimulated many subsidiary movements which originated as commissions within the National Association or were bound together with the National Association. Many of these are powerful organizations and movements in their own right, such as the National Sunday School Association, the National Radio Broadcasters, the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, Youth for Christ, World Evangelical Fellowship and other related movements such as Child Evangelism Fellowship, the Christian Business Men’s Committee, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, and so on. It was, in fact, the parallel organizations to the NAE in England, India, and other areas that sparked the great Billy Graham campaigns in other parts of the world. Thus, the influence of the NAE has been far greater than its numerical strength.

Another objective was the training and feeding of evangelical ministers into the churches. Since the seminaries determine the course of the Church, it was felt necessary to fortify existing evangelical seminaries with additional professors and funds. As a result, several new evangelical seminaries were established. Here was adopted a positive attitude in inquiry, teaching, and proclamation of biblical Christianity. The students who passed through this training came forth with a certainty and knowledge expressed by “Thus saith the Lord” and with a practical program joined with a passion. In addition, there was inculcated an understanding of the connection of Christian principles with political and economic freedom.

It was the intention of evangelical strategy to reach evangelical churches who were pastored by ministers uncertain in their theological conviction. There are many ministers who have been trained in liberal theological seminaries who want to believe biblical Christianity but cannot because they lack theological education which supports the position. To reach these ministers with the rationale of biblical Christianity is the objective of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. The editorial contributors to this magazine have been selected with their theological and intellectual training in view. The success of CHRISTIANITY TODAY in articulating this viewpoint and in influencing the thought of ministers has been notable.

EVANGELICAL STRATEGY

An up-to-date strategy for the evangelical cause must be based upon the principle of infiltration. We have learned from modern militarism that the frontal attack has come to an end with certain notable exceptions. The French Maginot line was circumvented and thus antedated. The Communists in their battles in Korea, Indochina, and Tibet used the principle of infiltration. Once the line was infiltrated, defenses crumbled and a new line had to be established. We evangelicals need to realize that the liberals, or modernists, have been using this strategy for years. They have infiltrated our evangelical denominations, institutions, and movements and then have taken over the control of them. It is time for firm evangelicals to seize their opportunity to minister in and influence modernist groups. Why is it incredible that the evangelicals should be able to infiltrate the denominations and strengthen the things that remain, and possibly resume control of such denominations? Certainly they have a responsibility to do so unless they are expelled from those denominations. We do not repudiate the reformation principle, but we believe that a man has a responsibility within his denomination unless that denomination has officially and overtly repudiated biblical Christianity.

Evangelicals need a plan of action. The pressing demand is for an over-all strategy instead of piecemeal action by fragmentized groups. The younger evangelicals are determined to join hands with evangelicals everywhere in testimony and in action. They want to defend and maintain the institutions, endowments, and organizations which remain within the evangelical theological position.

It demands that each one of us make a personal commitment. We should examine our activities to make sure that we are engaged in intelligent service. Let us ask ourselves what is this organization accomplishing? Does this organization fit in with God’s plan? Is this movement advancing God’s cause? We must not dissipate our energy and money by serving on and supporting every work which is called to our attention. We must take an inventory of our investment of money. We should ask, is this institution or movement contributing to the ends which I seek? Should I continue my support of this movement? It is folly for businessmen and foundations to support institutions, movement, and individuals which subvert that for which the businessmen and foundations stand. This is paramountly true in Christian organizations. It is our responsibility to implement the strategy of evangelicalism by personal commitment.

An evangelical makes no apology in asking the help of convinced and committed Christians. This commitment is essential in developing evangelical leadership. Every evangelical should find his place in the implementation of the modern evangelical resurgence in Christianity.

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

The relationship that is to prevail between the organized Church and the informal groups which arise from time to time, seeking to bring about deeper spiritual experience, is an important subject. The voice of the organized Church has often warned that such groups do not constitute themselves a church, that they check their plans and work with leaders in the church, that they remind their people how important it is to join a church, and in general treat the church as the final authority. Undoubtedly there is wisdom in all this. But I think it is high time that someone remind the Church how important it is that she treat these groups with understanding and welcome, and remember how the organized Church stands in continuous need of awakening, and realize that the small group may be both a judgment and an answer from God.

Exception must be made, of course, in the case of groups that become deliberately inimical to the historic Church, or patently disloyal to her basic ethos. But that is something quite different from being dissatisfied with the ways and customs of some one local parish or minister that may be falling down in giving people what they need spiritually. It is right for the Church to “try the spirits whether they be of God.” Now and then a group arises that is not basically in line with historic Christianity; or it may begin so, but veer in unhealthy directions. Its leaders can become too much impressed with their own inspiration and importance, and the movement tends to become “the Church.” The awakening group may evince more power at some given time than the historic, accepted Church; but it has no more right to “unchurch” the organized Church than the organized Church has a right to “unchurch” the informal group. Untrue and unhealthy signs may appear in the utterances and from the leaders of movements that claim unique powers and do not see themselves in the long stream of Christian history.

But many of these groups are not heretical in any sense. They are doing Christ’s work, honoring his Name, and winning people to him. They are trying to be loyal to his Church, not only because hostility to the churches can go a long way towards putting them out of business but because they are aware that the conserving job of the churches cannot be overemphasized. My experience is that most of these movements lean over backwards to keep the good will of an organized church (which often has not enough spirituality to discern the working of the Holy spirit in the groups) because they happen to be personally distasteful to the church leader or the ethos of his group. It is dangerous ground to forbid men “because they follow not with us.” Every year I live, I am more impressed with the way God greatly uses some people that I question whether he ought to use at all! My own tastes, even the predilections of my own denomination, may not be sufficient grounds to rule out someone who is being blessed and used by God.

THE SCOPE OF THE KINGDOM

Perhaps I can say something on the whole question. I have dedicated my own services to that of being a parish minister and an evangelist. I have never felt any impulse to go out with a suitcase and travel around making speeches. I have wanted the Church, the old, organized Church, to be part of any awakening in which I was involved. I have wanted the continuous impact of the Church’s history and stored wisdom to be on my own work. I know that in the end the Church should be the conserving force for anything that evangelism turns up; and that, while the Church will seldom start an awakening herself (the settled clergy and people are not good at this), she can easily pour cold water on what the awakening does accomplish. I know the value of a local “laboratory,” where spiritual research is being done, and that what is said elsewhere is validated principally by what is happening at home. I know the need of spiritually new-born people for what the Church can give them, as, for example, the responsibility of Christian leaders to see people through, not only the early stage of new birth but the later stages of growth and spiritual habits which sustain the new birth, and the applications in life which give it contemporary validation.

However, I know that the local church and denominational exposure are not enough. If some kind of urging had not sent me, as a school boy and college student, to Northfield and there to come under the spell of the giants of those days (Speer and Mott especially), I suppose I should have been as churchy an Episcopal parson as could be imagined. I needed to learn something of the size of the Kingdom, its scope, and to see some of its great leaders in other communions. I needed to discover the constant influence in the direction of awakening which such conferences, with their steady evangelistic impact, represented vis-à-vis the old, settled Church. In constantly emphasizing the priestly and pastoral aspects, my own church is always in danger of minimizing the evangelistic and prophetic ones. Yet Anglicanism means both, or it means nothing: it has always claimed to be both, and we are ministers “of the Word and of the Sacraments.” More and more clergy of all communions rcognize this double nature of our calling and task. But many of them drift too easily into those aspects of the ministry which fail to emphasize evangelism. It is because the genuine awakening power of the churches is so rare that these cell groups, prayer groups, life-changing groups, are becoming widespread.

Sometimes these groups are local and unknown, and meet in houses and offices as well as churches. Although they often are out of touch with any other groups, they feel the need for fellowship between groups, as individuals have felt the need of fellowship between themselves. Sometimes these groups are of a different kind, large and necessarily organized, like the Yokefellow Movement, International Christian Leadership, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Faith At Work, Young Life, and many more that might be mentioned. Wherever men or women are given the charismatic gift of evangelism and can speak to large numbers of people with decisive spiritual results—like Graham, Peale, Sheen, and others whose names are yet more controversial to ultra-conservative, settled churchmen—the same need is evidenced and begins to be met. (When I say “ultra-conservative,” I refer, of course, not to doctrinal conservatism, but to plain stuffiness of spirit.)

THE ROOTS OF CRITICISM

Let me say that the clergy, especially those in settled parishes, are inclined to think their own strictures and objections to the informal group as pure concern for upholding the Church’s true message and the Faith. But in many cases I am sure that the origin of their criticism is not so lofty. Frequently their censure arises from (1) jealousy that the movement is able to win and begin to change people who have not been changed by the routines of parish life, and (2) stung and troubled consciences over these things that happen elsewhere but do not happen with nearly enough regularity in the old organized Church. Let’s face it: we do not do very much in a spiritual way with the rank and file of our people, and the fruits of the average “young people’s groups” are certainly nothing to brag about. When one of our official “children” goes out and finds a shining and enlivening faith and experience, the home clergyman just doesn’t like the judgment implied upon his own ministry. He retreats stuffily behind his ecclesiastical defenses, and talks about his people being “taken away” from the church! It is a shabby and contemptible rationalization. They have not been “taken away” from the Church if they have been brought nearer to Christ. And what is more, when a person with such an experience comes back to the church, the minister may subtly or openly undercut what has happened to the person, which is another instance of his own jealousy and stung pride. I have seen it too many times not to recognize it and call it by its right name. I remember going to an opening night of a play in New York and sitting behind a large company of actors. Their clapping and comments proved they were so generous and appreciative of the play, that it made me ask myself why the reverend brethren were not more often generous about what some other brother (or sister) has been enabled to do.

You know the little doggerel,

I hate the guys

That criticize

And minimize

The other guys

Whose enterprise

Has made them rise

Above the guys

That criticize

And minimize …?

THE NEED OF SPIRITUAL POWER

The old, organized Church needs the challenge of the small group. Theories about the Holy Spirit do not constitute an experience of him. While he works through official channels, he is certainly not confined to them; and there are times when he must work through something other than the established channels if he is either (1) to awaken the people in the churches, or (2) to reach those outside who are often disappointed and let down by the want of spiritual power in the churches. What he finds usable may be something or someone who is anathema to the old, plodding, organized Church. I often feel that any spiritual lash sharp enough to whip the sluggish beast of ecclesiastical organization into any semblance of spiritual life will also be so sharp that the organized Church will seek to retreat beyond its reach. What true awakening has not started in a despised individual or group on whom the Church turned thumbs down? How many such have been squelched before they ever got anywhere because the Church lacked imagination and sympathy? The Church often prays for awakening, but when God actually sends it in a form which the organized Church finds uncongenial, it is repudiated. The Holy Spirit is wider than we, more democratic, more “functional,” He seems to look rather for faith and dedication and expectancy than for right formulas and proper ecclesiastical ancestry.

If Irenaeus was right, that the Church is where the Holy Spirit is, we may need to revise some of our notions about the spiritual priority of the organized Church. What we think is the Church, and what God thinks is the Church, may be very different. I should greatly suspect that any person or group whom He can get through and use to reach his world is probably considered by God to be a genuine part of his Church. Punctiliousness about historical continuity and careful ecclesiastical arrangements sometimes have to give way to immediate usability. I know this can lead to anomaly at times: but I know also what failure in reckoning with this truth has done again and again in the life of the Church. When the Church does nothing but sit on her prerogatives and criticize the emerging group or movement that demonstrates the Holy Spirit, and when subsequently she refuses to accept the challenge and the judgment of God upon her own powerlessness which the fresh group represents, then the group tends to be driven outside the Church, all contact is lost with the authentic elements in the organized Church which the group needs for growth and sustenance, and the Church loses the value of new life which might have been infused into her. It is a loss both ways, and a loss to the world. The fresh movements need the breadth, balance, wisdom, and Sacraments of the ancient organized Church. That same Church needs the new fire of fresh awakening. Both constitute the Church, really. The organized Church cannot stand back and wait to be sought for and courted by the new movements, as if they were upstarts and the organized Church alone were the authentic thing: this is pride, and cuts the power of the Spirit. Neither can the fresh movement go on alone, critical and indifferent to the Church, as if itself were now the authentic thing, and the old Church outworn: this, too, is pride, and cuts the power of the Spirit. They have something for each other. I believe they are two sides of the same shield—the “ecclesia” and the “koinonia.” The mark of the true Church is always the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

It is always the high hope of those who help to initiate a new movement of the Spirit that this one may never drop to the level of routine and organization. Yet we know of no movement in history that has not to some extent suffered this fate. There seems to come a “hardening of the arteries” with age, and it appears to occur within about two decades of the real beginnings of the movement. When the Church proposes herself as the agent to prevent this deterioration, one is inclined to ask whether the accepted and familiar arteriosclerosis of the organized Church is any real improvement upon that which crops up in the new movement.

THE PERIL OF STERILITY

Dr. Henry P. Van Dusen of Union calls it “the logic of spiritual vitality,” and says we have seen it “re-enacted again and again in the pilgrimage of the Christian Church, whereby a period of intense and creative religious renewal is unfailingly succeeded by an aftermath of diminishing spiritual vigor but increasing theological and organizational rigidity, then by a time of comparative sterility—until revival bursts forth afresh, and the curve of descending life and power is re-enacted” (Spirit, Son and Father, Scribner’s, p. 27). In this remarkable book he gives a summary of “the fate of the Holy Spirit at the hands of the theologians and Church officials across the centuries,” and calls it “on the whole, a pathetic and tragic story” (Op. cit. p. 125). He goes on to explain something of why this happens: “… the Holy Spirit has always been troublesome, disturbing because it has seemed to be unruly, radical, unpredictable. It is always embarrassing to ecclesiasticism and baffling to ethically-grounded, responsible durable Christian devotion. And so it has been carefully taken in hand by Church authorities, whether Catholic or Protestant, and securely tethered in impotence … professional ecclesiasts constitutionally distrust the novel, the unconventional and, even more, the reproachful and the challenging.”

THE SPIRIT OF SUPPRESSION

I find it hard not to believe that much of the ecclesiastical fear and suppression of emerging groups is due not to greater wisdom or deeper realization of the meaning of the Gospel and even of the Church but more to spiritual snobbishness, shallowness, and pique. It isn’t as if we had a counter full of awakenings from which we might take our pick. Real awakening is rare. It never comes unmixed with the temperamental and theological limitations of its first stimuli and its leaders. The “ideal” awakening, temperamentally congenial and theologically satisfactory, only exists in somebody’s wishful imagination. But wherever we see genuine spiritual awakening, whether or not it falls in with our own predilections, we do well to welcome it warmly. Only a Church which takes that attitude towards the struggling group deserves respect and loyalty from the group, or is likely to receive it. Much of the loss which often follows the first fire of awakening is due to the fact that a church unfamiliar with conversion in her own daily life will tend to be all fingers-and-thumbs when it comes to ministering to converted people. When a person, especially a young one, has been exposed for years to the rather lifeless routines of a church, but without anything approaching a personal spiritual experience, meets up with individuals or groups that lead him into an experience that is dynamic and meaningful, though such may occur within a framework ecclesiastically or theologically uncongenial to his clergyman, he will, if he has any spiritual gumption, put his first loyalty where the challenge is greater and the experience deeper. If his fresh experience is greeted by his home church and minister in the attitude that he must have got caught in the toils of a bunch of fanatics from which he needs to be rescued as a brand from the burning, then I think the church is stupid enough to deserve to lose his loyalty. If on the other hand, the person’s new experience is treated with seriousness and respect, and the home pastor has grace enough to ask and seek humbly for something that may have been missing from his own ministry, but which the young person found in the other group, the church runs little risk of losing him at all. In such a situation, the two work in harmony, which I believe is God’s will.

The fresh group which brings about awakening is like an obstetrician who is needed at birth. The Church which nourishes the new life of the convert is like a pediatrician who takes care of the child after it is born. One has the feeling that the Church is very busy trying to act as pediatrician to large numbers of people who have never been born again at all. But both functions are essential, though they are different. The happy arrangement is for each to fulfill his function well. Surely the whole church needs to be engaged, both in bringing about the new birth and in nurturing that new life with the “means of grace” of which she is the custodian.

Dr. Hendrik Kraemer, has said (A Theology for the Laity, p. 86), “… the whole Church is constantly called to renewal. As we have got into the habit of not (as the Bible insists) considering Renewal the perennial and constant rule for the Church, but regard it as a miraculous episode which befalls us from time to time, self-assertion and self-affirmation are still very prominent in the confrontations of the Churches with each other.…” The small group, not being primarily doctrinal nor liturgical, may be, and I think very often is, the ecumenical movement at its grass roots levels, bringing people into fellowship in Christ across the barriers of denominations. And they are at least an honest effort to keep the Church mindful that renewal should be “the perennial and constant rule for the Church.”

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

First in a Series

At the invitation ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY, the distinguished director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, speaks his mind on the Communist threat to the Christian heritage. Based on his long experience in dealing with subversive forces, Mr. Hoover here relates forCHRISTIANITY TODAY’s wide readership how the Communist Party operates against the American religious heritage. He expresses some firm convictions on how churchmen and churchgoers may effectively confront the Red menace in prayer, thought, and action. Scheduled in three successive issues, Mr. Hoover’s future themes are “Communist Propaganda and the Christian Pulpit” and “Communist Domination or Christian Rededication.” Readers of Mr. Hoover’s best-selling book Masters of Deceit have found it to be a definitive analysis of the Communist menace facing the world today.

The twentieth century has witnessed the intrusion into its body fabric of a highly malignant cancer—a cancer which threatens to destroy Judaic-Christian civilization. One-fourth of the world’s land surface has been seared and blackened by this cancer, while one out of every three human beings is caught in its tentacles. At this very hour, some are wondering whether we as a free nation can survive the frontal and underground assaults of this tumorous growth of communism.

Just 100 years ago communism was a mere scratch on the face of international affairs. In a dingy London apartment, a garrulous, haughty, and intolerant atheist, Karl Marx, callous to the physical sufferings and poverty of his family, was busy mixing the ideological acids of this evil philosophy. Originally of interest only to skid row debaters and wandering minstrels of revolution, Marx’s pernicious doctrines were given organizational power by a beady-eyed Russian, V. I. Lenin, who, with his Bolshevik henchmen, seized state power for communism in 1917. From that wintry day in St. Petersburg, communism began to flow in ever greater torrents. After Lenin came the crafty and cunning Joseph Stalin and now the ebullient master prevaricator, Nikita Khrushchev. Communism is today literally a violent hurricane, rocking not only the chanceries of the world but seeking to capture the bodies, minds, and souls of men and women everywhere.

UNIVERSAL DOMINATION THE GOAL

The full implications of the Communist challenge are shocking. The ultimate Communist goal—as defined by Marx, Lenin, and other Communist leaders—is the ruthless overthrow of our Judaic-Christian heritage and the establishment of a world-wide Communist society. By its very nature, communism is expansionist and universalist. In fact, the Communists feel that they can find their true fulfillment only by conquering non-Communist areas and bringing the whole planet under their dominion.

This overriding Communist goal of universal domination becomes the key to Party activities. Feeling that history has destined communism for ultimate victory, the Communists believe that permanent peace with non-Communists is impossible, that life must be an inevitable struggle between the two. “It is inconceivable,” Lenin proclaimed, “that the Soviet Republic should continue to exist for a long period side by side with imperialist states. Ultimately, one or the other must conquer.”

REJECTION OF OBJECTIVE MORALITY

Hence, there arises the ugly manifestation of Communist “ethics”—namely, the Communist belief that morality must be subordinated to the class struggle, the inevitable conflict between communism and its opponents. What is moral? Anything which serves to destroy the enemy and promote communism. Lenin was most explicit: “Morality is that which serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the toilers around the proletariat, which is creating a new Communist society.”

Communist morality, of course, is rooted in total rejection of a belief in God and in the values of the Christian moral code. Supernatural concepts and divine revelation play no role in communism. “We repudiate all morality that is taken outside of human, class concepts,” Lenin proclaimed. “We, of course, say that we do not believe in God, and that we know perfectly well that the clergy, the landlords, and the bourgeoisie spoke in the name of God in order to pursue their own exploiters’ interests.”

This rejection of God gives communism a demonic aspect—transforming it into a fanatical, Satanic, brutal phenomenon. Morality is not determined by ethical standards grounded in an Absolute, but in the expedient interpertations of the Party—meaning, in actual practice, the whims and desires of the ruling clique or Party leader. This leads to the terrifying doctrine that “the end justifies the means.” Proof of the cynical ruthlessness of such morality is the following description by long-time American revolutionaries:

With him the end justifies the means. Whether his tactics be “legal” and “moral,” or not, does not concern him, so long as they are effective. He knows that the laws as well as the current code of morals, are made by his mortal enemies.… Consequently, he ignores them in so far as he is able and it suits his purposes. He proposes to develop, regardless of capitalist conceptions of “legality,” “fairness,” “right,” etc., a greater power than his capitalist enemies.…

A SOCIETY WITHOUT GOD

Hence, under communism we see a decisive break from and thrust against the Judaic-Christian heritage. Communism is not just another political party, social organization, or economic philosophy which can be understood within the framework of our traditional Western heritage. So to regard communism is radically to misunderstand its terrific driving power, insidious persuasion, and terrifying intent. The Communists are not interested in remodeling or reforming our society, but in organizing a completely different society—a society which by denying God hopes to create a new type of man: Communist Man. St. Paul, the great Apostle, could say, “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.” The Communists would pervert this profound truth to say: “If any man be in the Communist Party, he is a new creature.”

CONFRONTING THE RED CHALLENGE

The question arises: how can a philosophy so anti-God, anti-religious, anti-human be so provocative and appealing to some people in our country? Perhaps in this strategic question we can find some of the challenges of—and answers to—this demonic way of life.

Let’s take a look at some of the Communist challenges today and see what we as Christians can do about them.

1. The Communists appeal to man’s idealism, and ask the very best of his life. Communist propaganda proclaims Marxism-Leninism “the greatest cause in the history of mankind,” worthy of man’s highest devotion. The Communist appeal is always to the noblest, the best, the most admirable in man. “The great vision and courage of us Communists has never been matched by that of any past heroes in the annals of mankind. In this respect we have every reason to be proud.…”

Answer: Have we in America and in the Church given sufficient emphasis to Christian ideals, and called for heroic effort in the attainment of great goals? In particular, have we imbued our young people with the moral idealism which helps to mold their lives for Christ? Perhaps we have contented ourselves with catering to man’s mediocrity, rather than attempting to bring out the noblest and deepest strands of character. Like Isaiah of Jerusalem, we must ever keep the awe, the majesty, and the holiness of God before us—and call men to ever greater efforts in His service. Are we pressing on toward the high calling in Christ, toward the goals of a Christian society? The Christian Church—as history has proved—has the power to capture men and lead them to divine levels. By exalting God and His purposes in the lives of men, the Church can unmask the utter falsity of communism’s siren calls.

2. The Communists do not doubt the validity of their cause; they press ever onward for their secularized Utopia, confident of ultimate victory. ‘We Communists must possess the greatest courage and revolutionary determination of mankind.… While we clearly see the difficulties confronting the cause of communism, we are not in the least daunted by them.…”

Answer: Are there too many pessimists, waverers, and people of little faith in the ranks of the Church today? Is there the enthusiasm among our people to match this Communist aggressiveness and certainty? The Church of Christ has a great message to sing, a great responsibility to fulfill. Never must she feel pessimistic, daunted, or uncertain.

3. The Communists expect from their members a deep sense of personal sacrifice and dedication. “To sacrifice one’s personal interests and even one’s life without the slightest hesitation and even with a feeling of happiness, for the cause of the Party … is the highest manifestation of Communist ethics.” This is a sacrifice of the members’ time, talents, and personal resources, financial and otherwise. Casual effort is not a Communist trait.

Answer: Do we in the church and society really expect a deep sense of personal sacrifice and dedication? Do too many individuals come to church exerting only a “casual effort” and not giving sacrificially of their time, talents, and personal resources? The Communists have discovered that a demand for the very best actually brings forth the very best from the individual. If the Communists can create such responses on the basis of a cold, cynical materialism, just think of the accomplishments which can be wrought by the power of the Holy Spirit!

4. The Party stresses the need for fidelity and loyalty to the mission of communism and the necessity of members to shun all temptations which would distract them from their assigned tasks. “But if for the sake of … the Party … he is required to endure insults, shoulder heavy burdens, and do work which he is reluctant to do, he will take up the most difficult and important work without the slightest hesitation and will not pass the buck.”

Answer: In our society today is there too much tendency to “pass the buck,” to let George do it. Do we not often start out enthusiastically in civic or church work, and then let temptations sidetrack us from our task? Are we embarrassed when we are criticized for doing Christ’s work? Are we ready to shoulder heavy burdens? Are too many following the easy road of conformity with secularism and not holding sufficiently high the banner of Christ?

5. The Communists proclaim that working for the Party brings internal peace, joy, and happiness to the member. He finds here creative achievement and self-fulfillment. “He will also be capable of being the most sincere, most candid, and happiest of men.”

Answer: The Christian Gospel tells of the deep joy, peace, and blessings which come from belief in Christ as Saviour and Lord. Is the Church doing enough to overcome the loneliness of contemporary man, his feelings of insecurity and frustration in a world growing more secular every day? Fear, personal unhappiness, and uncertainty stalk the streets today. Crime, juvenile delinquency, and disrespect for law and order are rife. Are we meeting these challenges in the Christian spirit, offering with maximum effort the true answer of the Gospel, telling people that belief in God is the true way to a peace of mind which passes all understanding?

PERVERSION OF THE TRUTH

These are some of the challenges of communism today, and the problems they pose for Christians. Communists, in fact, attempt to capture the historic values of Christian civilization, such as love, mercy, and justice, and after grossly perverting their true meaning, they actually turn these values against their parent!

With shameless perfidy, the Communists hail themselves as the great exponents of love—most truly, one of mankind’s most sublime virtues. Under communism, it is proclaimed, “there will be no oppressed and exploited people, … no darkness, ignorance, backwardness. In such a society all human beings will become unselfish.… The spirit of mutual assistance and mutual love will prevail among mankind.” We know, in fact, however, that communism means terror, fear, and slavery. Communism represents a new age of barbarism, which is repealing the centuries of progress of Western man toward tolerance, understanding, and human brotherhood. Communist Man—the product of this system—is a brute, ideologically trained, who unhesitantly conducts purges, runs concentration camps, butchers the Hungarian Freedom Fighters. He is immune to the emotions of pity, sorrow, or remorse. He is truly an alarming monster, human in physical form, but in practice a cynically godless and immoral machine.

ROLE OF THE MINISTRY

If communism is to be defeated, the task must rest largely upon the theologians and the ministers of the Gospel. Communism is a false secular religion with pseudo-theological explanations of the great verities of life, such as the creation, life on earth, and the world to come. Communism is an all-encompassing system with explanations—though wrong ones—for this great universe of God. The Party offers answers—though perverted ones—for the hopes, joys, and fears of mankind.

In the final analysis, the Communist world view must be met and defeated by the Christian world view. The Christian view of God as the Creator, Sustainer, and Lord of the universe is majestically superior to the ersatz approach of dialectical materialism concocted by Marx and Lenin. The task of our clergy today is to translate this Holy Truth into the daily lives of our men and women. This truly is their responsibility as Christian clergymen.

Strong, responsible, and faithful Christians, wearing the full armor of God, are the best weapons of attack against communism and the other problems of our day. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness.” In this way you will be playing a vital role also in helping defend our cherished way of life.

What Did He Write?

What message did the Master write that day,

As stooping down He traced on shifting sand,

What was the mystic meaning in the signs

Inscribed there by the finger of His hand?

The trembling woman standing alone

Was terror stricken, longing to be free;

No doubt she feared His answer might uphold

The death by stoning, Moses’ stern decree.

Self-righteous, vengeful men were waiting there—

Did His brief theme to their black hearts refer?

Or did He carve Love’s answer with the words:

“She need not die, for I will die for her.”

FLORENCE FRENCH

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

My distinguished confrere, Dr. John Gerstner, is frequently a man worth quoting. A short time ago he said, “The ministers today are not so much poisoning their people as they are starving them to death.” He went on to add, “One of the hopes of orthodoxy is that we can fill up the void.”

As is frequent with Dr. Gerstner, his thinking sets me to thinking, and I remembered something which had come to my attention in J. B. Phillips’ most recent book, God Our Contemporary.

It is not, I repeat, that the thinkers, the writers, and the leaders of popular thought, in whatever media, have for the most part studied Christianity and rejected it as un-historic, impractical and outdated. It is simply that they have not studied it at all! I believe their attitude of almost total ignorance to be quite indefensible, and I find myself in agreement with a friend of mine who was discussing on television the Christian position with four leading London journalists. He asked them simply whether any of them had given five consecutive minutes (minutes, mark you!) to the serious study of what Christianity had to say, and every one of them admitted that he had not. Whereupon my friend remarked kindly but firmly that if that were the case no real discussion could possibly take place. In my own experience I find it perfectly extraordinary that men and women of unusual ability in their respective spheres have rarely taken the trouble to give their adult attention to such a unique way of life as that proposed by Jesus Christ.… Such people are worse than “grandstand critics,” for not only are they criticizing a game in which they are not themselves involved, but they have seldom taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with the rules!

Another quotation comes from a book by Denis De Rougemont, The Devil’s Share. Rougemont, as you know, has done as enthusiastic reporting on the devil for the continentals as C. S. Lewis has been pleased to do for the English-speaking world. Rougemont is closer to doctrine than is J. B. Phillips, but he is thinking along the same lines.

I know few occupations more decried in our century, few words which hold less appeal for our contemporaries, and I am not speaking of the uncultivated out of the intellectual élite. You meet great scientists, philosophers, moralists, writers, known throughout the world; nine times out of ten, these masters of modern thought confess to you without the least blush, slightly astonished at the question, that they have not read in their lives a single theological treatise. They would be even more astonished if they were told that this is evident in all their work: they would not quite see the connection. I consider that this involves a retrograde attitude, more alarming for the future of culture than the misdeeds of the fascist hordes.

If we can read “communist hordes” for “fascist hordes” (and I am certain that fascism is far from dead) we can update what Rougemont has to say. Reading Gerstner, Phillips, and Rougemont, we arrive in all three cases with the same answer, and if we are doing any serious thinking we know that what they are saying is desperately true. Trueblood put his finger right on it and we have all read his diagnosis of the “cut-flower civilization.” The roots have either been cut or they are in a sad state of atrophy. It is not only a question of whether we are giving theological content in places where we can carry on theological conversation; it is the wider question of the apparent total irrelevance of all our theological concern in the intellectual world which we long to penetrate. We have a double problem: first, what is the content of what we have to say; second, what is the relevance of what we say to the world in which we live?

There are some things we ought to be doing. The times cry for expository preaching which, in its simplest form, requires just four things: (1) what does Scripture say (2) what does Scripture mean (3) what does Scripture mean to me (4) what do I plan to do about it? Expository preaching ought to be orientated to some doctrinal system and, if you like, the emphases of our preaching should lie in doctrinal content.

We need more training schools for laymen and for teachers. One successful Texas minister with a church so large he “cannot do it all” does fundamentally two things: he preaches at public worship services, and he teaches his teachers in an inclusive teachers’ training program.

Laymen’s classes in theology are springing up in various parts of the country-people are hungry!—and so many of them are ready for stronger meat than what has been given them from so many pulpits. In Pittsburgh successful classes in just plain ordinary theology are being organized every fall and spring, and the demand for more such classes is almost endless. Among the signs of our times here is a sign. “If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.”

Seeking an evangelistic breakthrough in Switzerland, where the Protestant Reformation once struck deep roots, Dr. Billy Graham’s experiment with two-day crusades in Berne, Zürich, Basel and Lausanne provided the most extensive mass meetings for evangelism in Swiss history. The spiritual hunger of the masses was attested not only by crowds running into the tens of thousands, but by the fact that hundreds in each city overcame their natural and traditional reticence and registered public decisions for Christ.

Although Barthian theology crippled the hold of liberalism on Swiss church life, Barth’s notion that all men are already saved in Christ, and need merely to learn the news, is one of the factors retarding evangelism. Graham and Barth spent a day together in advance of the crusades, and while Barth acknowledged no hope for this world other than in the return of Christ, he also expressed lack of enthusiasm for Graham’s evangelistic invitation asking sinners to “accept Christ in order to be saved.” Graham said that the revival of theological thought and the awakening interest in evangelism could once again profoundly affect social and political life.

In a meeting with ministers in Basel, Editor Carl F. H. Henry of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, who also addressed well-attended gatherings of the clergy in Berne, Zurich and Lausanne on the rim of the Graham meetings, gave a spirited critique of neo-orthodox theology from the standpoint of evangelical apprehensions.

Graham’s pattern of two-night outdoor meetings in Switzerland was an experimental venture to conserve his strength while multiplying the strategic centers of his ministry. In Berne he was preceded by associate evangelist Roy Gustafson who conducted one-night services in nearby churches; in Zürich his meetings in Hardturm Stadium came in the midst of an unaffiliated but cooperating crusade nearby by the Janz Brothers; in Basel his meetings in St. Jacob Stadium followed four services led in Sporthalle by associate evangelist Joe Blinco; in Lausanne, Graham followed meetings by associate evangelist Leighton Ford. The briefer crusades involved many organizational problems. In Berne, the amplifying system was so unsatisfactory that on the opening night Graham had to stop his sermon, forsake the platform, and speak to 16,000 persons from an improvised microphone in the grandstands. Hundreds had to stand without a view of the speaker, who had to contend even with dogs snarling at each other during the service, and with part of his congregation constantly on the move for a better view. Yet when Graham, unperturbed by these obstacles, turned the inner wall around the turf into an alter rail, hundreds stepped forward.

Switzerland: Religion By Canton

Switzerland is a confederation of 22 cantons, each of which are states asserting for themselves full religious sovereignty.

While on a national scale no one religious group has favor, a number of the cantons do maintain state churches, even to the extent of supporting them with tax monies.

Some 54 per cent of the population is Protestant. About 43 per cent is Roman Catholic.

Swiss Protestantism is generally of the Reformed variety, tracing its roots to Zwingli and Calvin. The Protestant state churches are linked together in the kirchenbund, the equivalent of a national council. But a number of free churches also are active in Switzerland, and these operate under a constitutional guarantee of religious liberty, the state churches notwithstanding.

Although their lay constituency is smaller, Roman Catholic priests far outnumber Protestant clergymen. Swiss Catholics maintain five dioceses and dominate 10 cantons.

University education is largely in the Protestant tradition. The oldest of the seven cantonal universities, at Basel, dates back to 1460. At Basel, Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel, and Zürich the theological faculties are Protestant. At Berne there are Protestant and Catholic faculties. At Fribourg, the “newest” (1889), there is only a Catholic one.

Graham’s fervent outdoor preaching to Swiss throngs in the rain and cold was not without its physical toll. After the Lausanne meetings he mentioned reoccurence of an ear malady which has troubled him periodically. He received medical aid in Heidelberg.

Entrenched indifference to evangelism springs not only from the Barthian theology, but from other factors. The liberal element is still strong in some Swiss churches, and many State churches have a multiple staff representing conflicting theological views. State church disdain for evangelism grows in part out of the fact that the call for “decision” implies that the distinction of “saved” and “lost” remains even for those who have been baptized and confirmed. And yet, although in most cantons all Swiss people are baptized and confirmed, and automatically come into the membership of the churches, for which they pay special taxes, only 10 per cent are really active members. Someone has described the majority as “four wheel” members—coming for baptism, confirmation, then in the wedding coach, and next in the funeral hearse. Even Barth has caricatured the situation, saying that at confirmation the young men boast that they can now be like their fathers: “wear long pants, smoke, and stop going to church.”

Whatever its inadequacies, Barth’s theology must be credited with a remarkable influence on Swiss church life, which was pervaded by the older liberalism a generation ago. Barth provoked many of the clergy to a searching of the Bible in quest of its unique message. Before his impact, week-night Bible meetings were scorned as an activity of “narrow-minded pietists,” Sunday School classes and youth guilds were to be found only outside the “regular” churches, which administered the Lord’s supper only four times a year. Today a congregation (even in a liberal church) is considered abnormal if it lacks a Bible meeting, Sunday School classes and youth guild, and many churches are introducing a monthly communion service. The softness of the hymns inherited from the 18th and 19th centuries led to a movement for a new hymnal with more of the doctrinal strength of Reformation times.

Even so, the Swiss church is scantily stocked with invitational hymns. Graham’s impact, moreover, has set the Gospel call squarely in the open arenas of the great cities, where multitudes go their way indifferently to the churches, and he has confronted them with the necessity for a personal and open acceptance of Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.

Protestant Panorama

• The Protestant Episcopal Church plans to erect a 12 to 14 story headquarters building on a newly-acquired site two blocks from the United Nations Building in New York City.

• Dr. W. Wesley Shrader, former Yale Divinity School professor, resigned as pastor of the University Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, this month, stating that “my integrationist views on the race question make my pastoral leadership of this church impossible.”

• A new public elementary school in Levittown, Pennsylvania, is named for Dr. Albert Schweitzer, famed Protestant medical missionary in Africa. The school has two murals depicting Schweitzer and his work which were given by Dr. Frederick Franck, one of his associates.

• Two of Canada’s leading religious publications, The Observer (United Church) and the Canadian Churchman (Anglican) came out this month with a double editorial blast against obscene literature and films.

• Anglicans in Australia are helping to circulate a petition which will be presented to Queen Elizabeth II as a protest against the governments Matrimonial Clauses Act, which reduced the number of grounds of divorce from 30 to 14.

• The pastor of a Protestant church near Hamburg, Germany, made his sanctuary available to a French Catholic group which had been banned by the management of a camp for the homeless from celebrating mass.

• Dr. Henrik Kraemer, a leader of the Netherlands Reformed Church and former director of the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Institute, is touring Japan for a series of conferences with Protestant leaders.

• The Lutheran World Federation’s Commission on World Mission is postponing its second All-Asia Lutheran Conference, originally scheduled for October, 1961, in Prapat, Indonesia. No new date has as yet been set The Lutheran conference was to have coincided with the centenary celebration of the host body, the 717,000 Batak Protestant Christian Church, largest Lutheran church in Asia. One reason for the postponement, a spokesman said, was the proximity of the originally scheduled date to the time set by the World Council of Churches for its Third Assembly next fall in New Delhi.

• The International Youth Fellowship of the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) plans to establish a camp on the island of Trinidad.

• An anonymous grant of $11,000 will help the New York City Mission Society to extend its “cadet corps” program among adolescent Puerto Rican boys.

• Among dignitaries scheduled to be on hand for the Nigerian independence celebrations October 1 is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Geoffrey Fisher.

• The Latin America Mission plans to hold its second “Evangelism-in-Depth” effort in Costa Rica in cooperation with all the country’s evangelical groups. The effort begins immediately and runs through next April.

• Dr. C. Adrian Heaton, president of California Baptist Seminary, delivered the guest sermon on CBS radio’s 30th anniversary broadcast of the “Church of the Air” this month.

• Production is under way on a new dramatic television series for 1961 on documented experiences of conversion and Christian development, sponsored by the Highland Church of Christ in Abilene, Texas. Entitled “Living Christianity,” the series will have 26 half-hour episodes and will be presented on the church’s nine-year-old “Herald of Truth” program over 74 television and 240 radio stations in the United States and abroad.… A new radio series, “Take Time for Thought,” is being launched by the Presbyterian Church in the U. S.

• Protestants and Other Americans United are premiering a new film, “Boycott,” showing how a Maine merchant lost his business under Roman Catholic pressure.

In spite of persistently bad weather, the aggregate attendance for Graham’s eight Swiss rallies totalled 118,000. Nearly 6,000 of these recorded decisions for Christ.

The opening service in Basel came on a cold, windy night. A heavy downpour soaked thousands in Zürich. Rain also fell during both meetings held in the Olympic Stadium at Lausanne, but crowds totalling 38,000 sat through. Graham’s biggest reception came in French-speaking Switzerland.

A Divine Amen?

Mentally keen though obviously aging, Karl Barth modestly declined to predict (“I am not a prophet”) the future of Continental theology, but nonetheless spoke eagerly about current trends in the Church and the world in an interview with Evangelist Billy Graham before attending the opening meeting of Graham’s two-night crusade in Basel. “Bultmann is right now most influential,” he said, “but his followers are already diverging, and much depends on the direction they go. Lutheran Confessionalism is also aggressive and this would mean an authoritarian, liturgical and sacramental Church.”

Barth did not comment on reports that his possible successor at University of Zürich may be either Heinrich Ott, who veers toward Bultmann, or Fritz Buri, who has swung from liberalism toward neo-orthodoxy.

At the hour-long interview in his study, in which Editor Carl F. H. Henry of CHRISTIANITY TODAY and Evangelist Joe Blinco participated, Barth warned that Christianity’s worst enemy is not Communism “but our own feeble living and preaching. It is unfruitful just to look at the outside world—whether Moscow or Rome—and deplore the godlessness only of other atheists and naturalists and to overlook ourselves. Communism is a sort of ‘call to repentance’ for us, much as the Old Testament prophets warned of the menacing pagan nations.”

On Romanism, Barth said that the Church of Rome “retained many elements of real Christian faith that Protestantism has lost, alongside a misunderstanding and destruction of Christian faith. But we must not face Romanism with ‘Protestant self-righteousness.’”

Barth stressed his view that faith is “an answer to God’s call” and not a choice between two horizontal decisions, and also his conviction that all men are already included in Christ. He dissented especially from the evangelistic invitation and the “follow-up” apparatus, and urged

Graham to close his meetings simply with “a Divine Amen.” But Graham—who expressed the hope that a spiritual methodology with less “statistical technique” might develop, recounted to Barth the testimony of an eight-semester divinity student from Heidelberg and Basel who had stood to his feet in the ministers’ meeting that morning and told how he had skeptically attended the crusade the previous night, responded to the invitation, and for the first time knew Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.

Barth had received an unprecedented dispensation from the city government to continue teaching when he reached the retirement age of 70. Now 74, he is currently completing his Dogmatics IV/2, on the sacraments and Christian ethics. He has said that Dogmatics V, on eschatology, will appear in a single volume because “I have been speaking of eschatology also all through the earlier volumes.”

C.F.H.H.

Visit with Brunner

Recovering at his Zürich home from a stroke, Swiss theologian Emil Brunner thinks sex is one of the world’s great problems today and hopes, if he writes another book, to shape a Protestant theology of sex. “None of the Protestant theologians,” he says, “has yet worked out the relation between sex, eros and agape.”

Conversing with Evangelist Billy Graham during the latter’s Zürich meetings, Brunner agreed that “one cannot have a dedicated life unless one’s sex life is dedicated.” Against those who tend to minimize the modern sex revolution, Brunner spoke of “the terrible loss of the sense of personality” as at the bottom of vagabond sex relations as well as at the basis of the totalitarian state. He specially commended CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S article by P. A. Sorokin on “The Depth of the Sex Crisis” (July 4, 1960 issue).

Brunner faces the possibility that the third volume of his dogmatics, now being translated, will be his last work. In it he contrasts the situation in Europe (“The Crisis of the Church”) with the situation in America (“The Boom of the Church”), and also reinforces his criticism of both Barth and Bultmann. He has had to discontinue all preaching, and paralysis of his right hand has crippled his ability to write and type. He is currently “scribbling and dictating” his overcomments on the appraisal of his outlook in the “Living Theology” series.

Graham told Brunner that he thought his theological impact, which helped undermine the liberal theology of immanence, had prepared the way for evangelism.

Brunner acknowledged that the theological impact associated with his name and that of Karl Barth is now somewhat on the defensive in Europe. “Bultmann is now king among the young intellectuals. But this will not last long,” he predicted, “because he has a very meagre Gospel. His theology is a passing fad. Some say we are already in the post-Bultmann era. We should not take Bultmann so seriously.”

As to Barth, Brunner had this word: “Bultmann reduces the Gospel to a point so thin it has no content; Barth gives the Gospel so much volume that it includes everything.”

But Brunner insisted that theology must remain existentially oriented. He grinned when asked about the future of systematic theology, which he regards as “a very dangerous instrument. Its real value is to produce a dictionary of theological terms.”

“The great danger in the world today,” Brunner added, “is Communism.” He thinks that “two totalitarian powers—Romanism and Communism—may yet fight it out with each other.”

C.F.H.H.

Medical Mission Aid

Plans for a “partnership” between U. S. church mission agencies and the American Medical Association to help keep missionary doctors overseas abreast of the latest developments in medicine were formulated at a meeting in Chicago last month.

Attended by Protestant and Roman Catholic missionary leaders and AMA officials, the meeting concluded with a recommendation that the association’s trustees formally adopt the program.

Under the proposal the AMA would become a clearing house of medical information for mission outposts, some of which are so remote that medical missionaries have difficulty keeping themselves informed of the newest findings in medicine.

Teams of specialists would be organized to bring mission physicians up-to-date on new developments and expedite the post graduate education of those coming to the United States for additional training.

Among mission representatives at the sessions were Auxiliary Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the Roman Catholic church’s missionary arm; Dr. Frederick G. Scovel, secretary of the Christian Medical Council for Overseas Work, National Council of Churches; and Dr. Paul S. Rhoads, editor of the AMA archives of internal medicine and chairman of the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations’ medical committee, United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Also the Rev. Edward F. Garesche, head of the Catholic Medical Mission Board; the Rev. Roland G. Metzgler, liaison officer for the Congo Protestant Relief Agency in the United States; Dr. Harold Brewster, secretary of medical work, The Methodist Church; and J. Raymond Knighton, executive director, Christian Medical Society.

Dr. Julian P. Price, chairman of the AMA’s trustees, said the conference marked the first time organized medicine had attempted to study the problems facing some 1,000 English-speaking medical missionaries. He explained the sessions were convened as the result of a resolution adopted by the association’s house of delegates.

The AMA may even form a department of international health to aid overseas doctors, Price added.

People: Words And Events

Deaths:Colonel Wayne Lindsay Hunter, 52, commander of the Army Chaplain School at Ft. Slocum, New York; at Ft. Slocum … Dr. Corliss P. Hargraves, 81 Methodist minister and retired administrative official; in Los Angeles … Dr. Orville L. Davis, 60, director of church relations at DePauw University; in Greencastle, Indiana … Dr. Merrill Thomas Macpherson, 69, former president of the American Council of Christian Churches; in Weyburn, Saskatchewan … Carl A. Warden, 56, controller of the United Lutheran Church in America; at White Plains, New York.

Elections: As first president of the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul), Dr. Ruben H. Huenemann … as president of the Board of Education of The Methodist Church, Bishop Paul N. Garber … as president of the Lutheran Student Association of America, Bruce Johnson, a Stanford University senior.

Appointments: As secretary for synods and presbyteries in the United Presbyterian Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations, Dr. Winburn T. Thomas … as extension director of the Canadian Bible Society, J. Allan Upton … as professor of theology at the Nazarene Seminary of Tokyo, Dr. Mildred Bangs Wynkoop.

Vatican Envoy

Sir Peter Scarlett, British ambassador to Norway, will succeed the late Sir Marcus Cheke as minister to the Vatican.

Sir Peter, 55, is a member of the Church of England. He has served in Iraq, Latvia and Belgium, and has been Britain’s permanent representative on the Council of Europe at Strasbourg.

The practice is that the British minister to the Holy See is always a Protestant, and that the first secretary at the British Legation in Rome is always a Catholic. The first secretary at present is Brian MacDermot, a Downside-educated Irishman.

Catholic Efficiency

An overall rating of 9,010 out of a possible 10,000 points for administrative excellence was given to the Roman Catholic church this month by the American Institute of Management.

The non-profit AIM audit showed that the church has had a “marked improvement” in administrative efficiency since the 1958 election of Pope John XXIII.

The church’s new rating, according to the AIM, puts it in the same ranks—as far as administration is concerned—with such firms as General Motors and Procter and Gamble.

A similar audit in 1955 gave the church a rating of 8,800 points out of an optimum of 10,000. Minimum rating for excellence is 7,500 points.

“There is less of a Roman clique behind today’s decisions in the church, and more of a hard-working cardinalate,” the institute said.

Bigotry at the Olympics

A Roman Catholic prelate used his position as an Olympic Games official to bar all Protestant clergymen from the Olympic Village.

Msgr. Nicola Pavone, head of the Olympic Committee for Religious Assistance, did not relent until he had provoked an international incident. On August 26, Danish Lutheran cyclist Knut Enemark Jansen collapsed during competition and died four hours later. It was another four hours before a Lutheran pastor was informed, according to the Federal Council of Italian Evangelical Churches.

The Danish Embassy and the Federal Council lodged a sharp protest with Pavone’s committee.

Noting that the great majority of the Olympic participants were Protestants, the council charged that these had been “totally deprived” of religious counsel. As far back as March 22, the council said, it had requested that a pastor be assigned for spiritual assistance to non-Catholic Christians taking part in the games. The request was rejected.

Another formal request was made July 22, the council said, asking that a Protestant pastor be included in the Committee for Religious Assistance. Pavone again turned down the request, saying “the committee didn’t exist.”

The council also charged that listings of services in Rome’s Protestant churches handed to the committee were not distributed to the athletes.

Again on August 27 authorization was requested for Protestant pastors to visit any Olympic athlete who might want to see them, the council said. This request was likewise rejected, on Sptember 1.

The council stated that subsequently its president, Methodist minister Mario Sbaffi, requested an interview with Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee, together with Methodist Bishop Sante Uberto Barbieri, a president of the World Council of Churches, and Italian pastor Pier Luigi Jala.

The Olympics had just one more week to go when Pavone received the Protestant churchmen. Only then were the entry permits granted.

Help for the Congo

America’s largest Negro church body was urged to dispatch a core of educated youth to the Congo to live permanently, “some as missionaries and others to work in other fields and serve as ambassadors of the free and democratic way of life.”

Dr. Joseph H. Jackson, who has been president of the National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Inc., for seven years, urged world opinion to “place the blame for the civil war in the Congo where it belongs—on the Belgians, and their long subjection of the Negro, for what they could get out of them.”

Jackson’s remarks were delivered to the opening session of the denomination’s 80th annual meeting in Philadelphia. The meeting subsequently turned into confusion with two factions claiming to have elected a president. Jackson’s re-election was challenged by Dr. Gardner C. Taylor of Brooklyn, president of the Protestant Council of New York.

The dispute was taken to court. Sessions were temporarily suspended.

‘A Mightier God’

A Michigan pastor told delegates to the annual sessions of the National Baptist Convention of America that they had a God mightier than all their problems. The meeting was held this month in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The Rev. John V. Williams of Grand Rapids, Michigan, took his cue from the theme of the convention, “Mighty Problems, Mighty Challenges, but a Mightier God.”

“During these days of problems that have become mighty and challenges that have become mighty,” Williams said, “I feel it is necessary to remind you that our God is mightier than any problem or challenge that may face us individually or collectively.

The Crime Trend

Serious crimes reached another all-time high last year, according to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and still another sharp rise is indicated for 1960.

“This ominous rise in crime cannot be explained away as being due to population increase,” said Hoover. “Crime has been rising four times as fast as population. Unless positive steps are taken to check this rising crime trend, this country will face a crime problem of emergency proportions in the years ahead.”

Offenses during 1959 are catalogued in the latest Uniform Crime Report, published annually.

“The mighty problems of today are marriage, working wives and mothers, handicapped children, retarded children, and retiring at a young age. For each of these mighty problems, we have a mightier God. American homes need God as their head, for law-breaking homes will produce law-breaking children.”

The 4,000,000-member NBCA met at the same time that another Negro Baptist body—the National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Inc., with 5,000,000 members was holding its annual sessions in Philadelphia.

Dr. C. D. Pettaway of Little Rock, Arkansas, was reelected president of the NBCA.

Baptism Goals

Southern Baptists hope to record more than 2,000,000 baptisms by the end of 1964. The figures represent a revised goal announced this month by C. C. Autrey, director of evangelism for the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board. Previous goals for the 1961–1964 period were more than 1,000,000 higher.

Autrey said the revision was made after reports indicated that baptisms this year would fall below last year’s peak of 429,063.

“We feel that these goals are realistic and well within reach,” he declared, “if Southern Baptists respond to the challenge.”

The new goals were formed through meetings of the secretaries of evangelism for the denomination’s state conventions.

‘The Gospel We Preach’

Representatives of Canadian Lutheranism, meeting in Winnipeg this month for two days of doctrinal discussion, unanimously adopted a seven-point statement on “The Gospel We Preach.”

Present at the conference were 28 representatives from 12 Canadian districts or synods of seven parent bodies in the United States.

Here is the text of the statement:

1. The Gospel is the good news of God’s promises and their fulfillment in Christ, who by his perfect obedience, suffering, death, and resurrection, has redeemed man from the fall and its consequences.

2. The Gospel is the central message of God’s unchangeable Word through which God offers, conveys, and affirms the forgiveness of sins, thus imparting life and salvation to those who believe it.

3. The Gospel is the true, divine, saving means of grace. It gives to the sacraments, Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, their saving power. It creates faith to accept what it offers.

4. The Gospel is God’s unconditionally free offer of salvation to all men; its rejection seals man’s condemnation.

5. The Gospel is the means whereby God gives, together with faith in Christ as Saviour, the desire and the ability to do His will by giving us both victory through Christ in the struggle with our sinful nature and grace to grow in the virtues which characterize the new life in Christ.

6. The preaching of the Gospel is the proclamation of the Christ of the Scripture; God incarnate, who died for our trespasses, rose for our justification, and lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, who together with the Father sends the Holy Spirit; He is the head of the Church, which is His body, and He will return to judge the living and the dead.

7. The Lord, who builds His church through the preaching of the Gospel, has expressly commanded, that they who believe in the Gospel must bear witness to it; “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation.” Mark 16:15.

The doctrinal talks were arranged in place of unity discussions which the Canadian groups had held annually for five years up to 1959. They were temporarily suspended last year pending completion of merger negotiations among several parent bodies in the United States.

THE EPISTLES OF EUTYCHUS (YEW’-TI-CUSS)

… The jet take-off of your first issue is going to be something to see!

But sir, you need a Pseudonymous Letter Writer, for which position 1 herewith make application. I can hear you muttering, “The pseudonymous, while not synonymous with the anonymous, is equally pusillanimous …” I wish you wouldn’t talk that way. Where would American literature be without Mark Twain? Besides, as that great master of pseudonymity, Sören Kierkegaard, has explained, using a pseudonym may show too much courage rather than too little! My nom de plume suggests not a personality but a picture. Easy slumber under sound gospel preaching was fatal for Eutychus. The Christian Church of our generation has not been crowded to his precarious perch, but it has been no less perilously asleep in comfortable pews …

So began the epistles of Eutychus (cf. Acts 20:9) in the very first issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

For more than 100 issues, the “epistles” have led off this magazine’s letters-to-the-editor section, known as “Eutychus and his kin.” Now, Eerdmans is bringing out a collection of these humorous but pointed features under the title, Eutychus (and his pin).

Basically a series of theological reflections, the Eutychus essays won popularity and stature in the annals of religious journalism with terse wit and a premium on timeliness. When toothpaste additives seized advertising headlines, Eutychus saw the chance to dramatize redemption as the basic ingredient of Christianity. When togetherness began to beckon for intellectual attention, he compared it to the “crowded emptiness” of life outside of Christ. When Sugar Ray Robinson regained ring acclaim with a spectacular knockout, a quip of the champion was applied to a brief dissertation on communications.

Sometimes Eutychus becomes a poet, sometimes a playwright, and occasionally a cartoonist.

No topic has been beyond his reach. The commentaries have embraced every major holiday (“Sirens on New Year’s Eve chill us with prospect of atomic war, but bells speak of peace”), the electronic organist (“Beware of blasting”), insects at a picnic (“Are we to choose, then, the liberty of the rebel fly, or the burden of the adjusted ant?”), fashion (“The toughest assignment is to ignore fashion for the sake of truth”), collage (“now regarded as a fine art as well as a kindergarten pastime”), and pastoral clinics (“Many contemporary sermons are lacking in organization. Give your sermons the Connective Test”).

With the appearance of the Eutychus collection ends the mystery of authorship. The hitherto anonymous scribe is a 43-year-old father of five, the Rev. Edmund P. Clowney of Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, upon whom CHRISTIANITY TODAY has prevailed to carry on his fortnightly frolics for another year of publication.

Clowney (A. B. Wheaton College, B. D. Westminster Theological Seminary, S. T. M. Yale Divinity School, candidate for Th. D. Union Theological Seminary, New York) is associate professor of practical theology at Philadelphia’s Westminster Seminary. His gifts in the lighter vein can be traced back to the days in which he edited a campus weekly, The Wheaton Record. But his writings readily take on a serious air, as Eutychus readers well know. Clowney’s second book, due next year, is titled Preaching and Biblical Theology. Also an amateur pastel artist, he illustrates his own copy.

“It would be much beyond the competence of the author to present an adequate apology for this edition of pseudepigraphical literature,” says Clowney in the introduction to his first volume. “Eutychus was summoned to his post as a symbol of Christians nodding, if not on the window sill, at least in the back pew. He has sought to prove, in this emergency, that the pin is mightier than the sword. His supreme accolade came from a fellow-correspondent who sent a genuine straight pin to use in deflating ecclesiastical pretense.”

Clowney recognizes “hazards in withdrawing from the aloofness of pseudonymity.” Why the mystery? “May I plead that the shelter was designed as a cloister and not a duck-blind! Since drowsiness in my case is in no sense fictional, perhaps I may hang up a ‘Do Not Disturb! sign’ and retreat to my window seat.”

Ever one to sense the lighter side, Clowney found he could not resist the injection of a Eutychusism even in the sober formality of a CHRISTIANITY TODAY biographical data form. Asked his knowledge of languages, Eutychus replied that he could read Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, Dutch and some German. And English? “Reading, speaking—some writing.”

Islamic Defense

Ten thousand South African Moslems gathered for a rally near Capetown heard one of their leaders defend Islam this month against what he said were “attacks which spared no effort to vilify it.”

Ahmed Deedat directed his remarks in particular against Dr. Joost de Blank, Anglican Bishop of Capetown, for allegedly “trying to poison the minds of Christians against Islam” by describing Mohammed as “a sincere man but a false prophet” and asserting that there was no need for any religion in South Africa save Christianity.

Deedat said Islam was the only non-Christian religion which believed in Christ and his miraculous birth, and accepted him as a messiah.

He said he deplored the attack on Islam made by Archbishop de Blank because “Christianity and Islam have so much in common.”

He answered the charge that Moslems reject Christianity by observing that various denominations of the Christian Church also reject one another.

In addition, he denied the “so-called menace of Islam” by asserting that there was not a single Moslem mission in Southern Africa.

“Who is it, then,” he asked, “who is doing the attacking? Could not Moslems claim our faith is menaced by Christianity? To describe Mohammed as a sincere man but a false prophet is a contradiction in terms. Could a false prophet found a religion that has 500,000,000 adherents, and create a true brotherhood of man throughout the world irrespective of race or color?”

Bishop’s Deportation

Two days after his return from five months’ voluntary exile, Anglican Bishop Richard Ambrose Reeves of Johannesburg, a foe of South Africa’s apartheid policies, was secretly deported to England.

Surrounded by nearly a dozen security branch detectives, Reeves was placed aboard a South African Airways plane while it was still in the hangar at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg. His seat had been reserved by authorities under a different name.

The 60-year-old church official had been served with the deportation order and given 30 minutes to pack.

Reeves fled South Africa earlier this year to escape feared arrest when a state of emergency was declared following racial riots. He first went to the British protectorate of Swaziland, then to Southern Rhodesia, before going to London.

A Briton, the bishop was deported under a law providing for such action “in the public interest.”

The World Council of Churches asked its South African churches for a full report. Reeves is a member of the WCC’s Central Committee.

A Cabinet Christian

In the cabinet of Japanese Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda is Mrs. Masa Nakayama, the welfare minister, who has a Christian educational background. She is the first woman ever to become a member of the Japanese cabinet.

A member of the Liberal-Democratic Party, Mrs. Nakayama has served as the chairman of the Special Committee for Repatriation of Overseas Japanese and as the parliamentary welfare vice-minister.

After graduating from a mission school in Nagasaki, Mrs. Nakayama went to Ohio Wesleyan University, where she earned a B. A. degree.

Although Mrs. Nakayama, a Methodist, is not an active church member today, the fact that her upbringing and education is Christian is attracting the attention of many Japanese, Christian and non-Christian alike. Especially, her future success in the office is a great concern to Japanese Christians who remember a bitter experience of having had a Christian prime minister, Tetsu Katayama, whose term ended in failure.

Forgotten Candidate

A cloud on the horizon no larger than a man’s hand threatens to take on dimensions in the 1960 national election that presage a storm in the years ahead. The “weather prophet” in this case is a distinguished and dignified Baptist minister, Dr. Rutherford L. Decker, who is candidating for the presidency of the United States on the Prohibition Party ticket.

A revived and revitalized party with an aggressive young campaign chairman (Earl F. Dodge) and a municipal victory in Winona Lake, Indiana, to boost its morale is looking toward tremendous increase over its 10-state, 41,937-vote showing in 1956.

“We are experiencing a 100 to 150 per cent increase in interest at our national headquarters in Winona Lake,” says Decker. “We are planning to be on the ballot in 23 states.”

A staunch evangelical and pastor of the Temple Baptist Church of Kansas City, Missouri, Decker has been a member of the Prohibition Party since he was 14 years old, and is convinced that his service to his country is best expressed through this political leadership. “America,” he says, “is still basically a Christian nation. Our morality is derived from the Hebrew-Christian heritage.” His party receives support from Jews, Christian Scientists, and some Roman Catholics, although its origins are Protestant, and its national motto is the biblical text, “Righteousness exalteth a a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Proverbs 14:34).

Alcohol is only one segment of the national problem, Decker is quick to state; and the Prohibition Party has its views well formulated on such subjects as civil rights, assistance to backward nations, etc. But the party’s unique emphasis has always been symbolized in its name, and for 91 years it has unwaveringly championed the view set forth in its first political platform:

“The traffic in intoxicating beverages is a dishonor to Christian civilization, inimical to the best interests of society, a political wrong of unequalled enormity, subversive of the ordinary objects of government, not capable of being regulated or restrained by any system of license whatsoever, but imperatively demanding for its suppression effective legal Prohibition, both by State and National legislation.

“… In view of this, and inasmuch as the existing political parties either oppose or ignore this great and paramount question, and absolutely refuse to do anything toward the suppression of the rum traffic, which is robbing the nation of its brightest intellects, destroying international prosperity and rapidly undermining its very foundations, we are driven by an imperative sense of duty to sever our connection with these political parties and organize ourselves into a National Prohibition Party, having for its object the entire suppression of the traffic in intoxicating drinks.”

A former president and executive director of the National Association of Evangelicals, Decker says that his religious affiliation in no way interferes with his political candidacy. “I have always known that the grace of God is not limited to any one church,” he avers. “There is no human person or institution to whom I owe anything except love, sincerity and justice.” Raised in an Anglo-Catholic home, where drinking was customary, he now believes that “the only ultimate answer to the alcohol question is prohibition.”

Decker points out that today a fourth of all alcohol consumed in the United States is bootlegged and illegal. More significantly, he quotes Dr. Andrew C. Ivy of the University of Illinois medical school, to the effect that a new wave of prohibition sentiment may be expected in America about 1965. By that time, according to Ivy, it is expected there will be one or two severe alcoholics in every American family, and the public may be roused to action.

Toward such a goal the Prohibition Party is pointing. When the Volstead Act was passed in 1918, Decker explains, the people wanted Prohibition overwhelmingly, but governmental machinery was lacking to implement it; therefore Prohibition failed and repeal followed. This time, he says, “We want to be ready to take over the government. Then we will be sure that it will work.”

The way is not easy, for many states frown on political third parties and by requiring thousands of signatures, make it almost impossible for them to get on the ballot. In some states it is quite legal not to bother to count third party votes, so that the Prohibition Party will never know exactly how many votes are cast for its candidates.

Yet Decker says, “We have every reason to believe that the great majority of the people of the United States are enlightened, decent people, living in good families, who need a political party to raise the standard of righteousness concerning the vital issues facing our nation to which they can rally. We are not so much interested in winning elections as we are in providing that standard.”

Whither Alcoholism?

The 86th Congress virtually ignored the problem of alcoholism, which now claims more than 5,000,000 victims in the United States.

In the House, eight bills were introduced to curtail drinking aboard planes, two to set up education programs on the perils of liquor, one to establish a medical advisory committee in Health-Education-Welfare Department, and another to abolish alcohol advertising. All died in committee.

In the Senate, Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina also sponsored a bill which would have outlawed the consumption of alcoholic beverages aboard commercial and military aircraft. An interstate commerce subcommittee held a brief hearing on the bill shortly before the political conventions this year and favorably reported the bill to the full committee headed by Democratic Senator Warren G. Magnuson of Washington. The full committee took no action.

The Federal Aviation Agency opposed passage of the bill on the grounds that it had already established a regulation of its own to deal with the problem of drunken airline passengers. The FAA rule forbids a passenger to bring his own drinks and places at the discretion of stewardesses the amount of liquor to be served. The FAA’s authority over passengers is limited, however, and there is a legal question as to whether the regulation may be adequately enforced.

Pilots and stewardesses had collectively favored enactment of the Thurmond measure. Thirteen top-ranking Protestant churchmen did, too, in a letter to Congressmen.

The National Temperance League cites grass-roots apathy in the failure of Congressmen to take action against liquor traffic even though it poses a major health and safety problem in addition to moral implications.

“Unless Congressmen see a strong upsurge in temperance sentiment,” says Executive Secretary Clayton M. Wallace, “they can hardly be expected to risk their political futures.” Wallace called for “more fight” in local option issues.

Day of Prayer

President Eisenhower is calling upon Americans to observe the 1960 National Day of Prayer on Wednesday, October 6.

In setting aside the day, Eisenhower asked his countrymen to remember:

“First, that it is not by our strength alone, nor by our own righteousness, that we have deserved the abundant gifts of our Creator;

“Second, that the heritage of a faith born of hope and raised in sacrifice lays upon its heirs the high calling of being generous and responsible stewards in our own and among the kindred nations of the earth;

“Third, that in this time of testing we shall ever place our trust in the keeping of God’s commandments, knowing that He who has brought us here requires justice and mercy in return;

“And finally, that as we lift our thankful hearts to Him, we will see clearly the vision of the world that is meant to be and set our hearts resolutely toward the achievement of it.”

The annual National Day of Prayer was proclaimed by President Eisenhower under a joint resolution approved by Congress in 1952. It provided that the President “shall set aside and proclaim a suitable day each year, other than a Sunday, as a National Day of Prayer on which people of the U. S. may turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups and as individuals.”

It is the nature of regenerated man to voice his praise of God in poetry and song. Music and verse are natural handmaidens of true worship—that outpouring of soul in which the Christian seeks to express something of the worth-ship of God, of his adoration for and delight in his Creator and Redeemer.

Praise and worship require words, and these words more often than not take some form of poetry. Throughout the long ages saints have sung of the mercies of God in verse, and one of the richest heritages of Christianity is its shining treasury of poetry. Each age in Church history and each branch of Christian thought and experience has added its own peculiar riches to the story. What treasures are we twentieth century Christians contributing to the storehouse of worship? What inheritance are we passing on to our children and to our children’s children?

The Dearth of Praise

The truth is that Christian praise has fallen upon sorry times in our generation. Much contemporary evangelical verse lacks creative power, fresh imagery and literary artistry. Our songs, while published in greater quantity than ever before, are often weak, immature, subjective, lacking in skill and beauty, unworthy, sometimes even irreverent. If they speak glowingly of Christian experience, it is likely to be Christian experience of the most elementary type. Many of them seem to have but a nodding acquaintance with theology in its truly scriptural sense, and display little or no familiarity with the great doctrines of the Christian Church. Why?

The gravest and most basic reason for the poverty of our praise today is the shallowness of our Christian experience and our contentment with our spiritual status quo. We live in an age when contemplation is almost unknown; when bustle and rush are the order of the Christian day; when feverish activity is equated with true Christian service; when organization and modern methods of advertising and salesmanship are sought in place of the Spirit’s breath; when record-breaking crowds and dazzling statistics are accepted as hallmarks of spiritual success. Small wonder, then, that there is so little true poetry among us, that our mass-produced songs have so little depth. True praise is the outgrowth of long, silent, steadfast, adoring gazing upon the face of God: and few there be these days who know very much about such worship.

Even so, it would seem that Christian verse has suffered more than other forms of Christian literary expression. Why?

Editorial Policy

I wonder if much of the blame may not lie at the door of our contemporary religious journalism? Christian journalism has not failed to grow with the years. Some Christian periodicals now compare favourably in general editing and exterior qualities with the best in the secular field, while still retaining the Christian grace of restraint and the impress of true spirituality essential to a magazine of their calling. All honor to the clear-thinking and hard-working editors who have brought about such literary improvement.

Somewhat less sanguine, however, is the situation with regard to Christian verse. Many editors, quick to see in our contemporary poetry the sloppiness, sentimentality and poor workmanship that have made it an embarrassment to thinking Christians and a poor witness to the world, have sought to stem the flood of mediocrity by adopting a policy of publishing no verse at all. Others have so sharply restricted the space allotted to poetry that they might as well have banned it outright.

Thus has been brought about a situation which has not only failed to enrich the treasury of Christian praise, but has actually impoverished it. The door is virtually closed upon the Christian poet who, aware of the deficiencies of present-day Christian praise, would earnestly and intelligently seek to produce on a higher level. Good contemporary verse that might have followed the natural course of appearing in a conservative Christian periodical, attracting to itself a worthy musical setting, thence passing in time into a good hymn book and so entering the treasury of Christian worship, has no longer any outlet. After the same fashion the beautiful and worshipful hymns of the past which for generations have been kept before the Christian public by frequent reprinting in periodicals are brought before them no more; and so the grace and benison of good and timeless verse, which might have served as inspiration and model to new writers as well as food for the souls of all readers, is denied us.

Yet verse of one kind or another will always be written, for it is a natural expression of devotion to God. And Christian poetry need not be unworthy. Despite the compulsion of the times, there are still among us those of a contemplative turn of mind, possessed of a natural felicity of expression and a capacity for hard, self-critical work. These Christians seek the face of God, and on seeing it, cannot but burst forth in song. But what happens to such souls?

Compromise of Standards

Most of the magazines whose standards they respect use no poetry. Periodicals of lesser standing publish verse, but in so undiscriminating a manner as to repel a sensitive writer. Some verse-writers turn to the gospel song field, where a sort of success may readily be found; but many thoughtful writers, unable to reconcile themselves to the type of music involved, either leave the field or continue in it with a sense of unhappy compromise. Still other poets, unable to hold back their natural tide of song, turn to the secular field, albeit regretfully. Here, if he is able, a serious writer can find an outlet with satisfying artistic standards, but must publish with the knowledge that he is doing nothing for the cause of Jesus Christ whom he loves and truly desires to serve. No matter what compromise he makes, the Christian poet of any serious standards is unhappy.

Most such writers eventually turn to writing prose. If a man has anything real to say in verse, he will have something to say in prose; if he has any real skill as a poet, he can develop a facile and compelling prose style with a little effort. Editors of the best Christian periodicals will welcome his manuscripts, will pay him well, and will ask him for more work than he can do. His profession will possibly lay claim to his gifts, and before he knows it he will probably have produced a book or two, perhaps even in the Christian field. But although he may have found a worthy sphere of service, even of Christian service, he will never be wholly satisfied in such work.

If he has a singing soul, he will still want to write poetry. He will steep himself in the best of the secular and Christian writers, and will long to lift up his heart to God in song—good song, worthy song, true Christian praise. If he is a persistent person, he may have a private notebook, known only to a few kindred spirits, wherein his unrestrained songs lie hidden; or he may publish an occasional poem in an obscure paper; but he can never find his highest happiness in his writing, nor make his truest contribution to the devotional life of the Church of Christ.

The Waste of Talent

Artistic expression demands outlet if it is not to stagnate, and this is especially true of poetry. As one song finds outlet, another wells up within the heart of the singer. I venture to say that many of the most glorious and uplifting hymns of the Church might never have been written had not the authors had reasonable assurance of a suitable outlet. If for lack of such outlet today our contemporary stream of worthy praise is dried up at the source, who can measure the effect on the Church of the future? “Protestantism’s greatest gift to Christianity is, I think, its hymnody,” writes Dorothy Thompson in Reader’s Digest (Feb., 1960). The Christian Church of today needs, and sorely needs—needs as it has seldom needed before—the strength and inspiration of its singing souls. How little can we afford such waste of leadership in devotion, in worship, in praise!

What Solution?

It is up to our leading periodicals [had they courage to take the ban off Christian poetry,] to allot sufficient space to verse to allow its writers the scope they require. If they would then set up high standards and adhere steadfastly to them, would return all poor verse without comment and publish what is good; if they would regularly bring before their readers the best in Christian poetry of other ages, they might be surprised at the number of singing souls among us still, their melodies all but quenched by discouragement, who would lift up their hearts with a thrill of joy and begin anew again. And there might yet be produced in our generation contemporary songs that would become true and worthy instruments of God’s most holy praise, songs that would live to bless forever the hearts of worshiping believers everywhere.

E. MARGARET CLARKSON

Toronto, Canada

The current discussion about the Church’s ability to communicate seldom touches the theme of the rich possibilities of Christian writing. Hundreds of young Christians presently enrolled in Bible schools, colleges, universities, and seminaries should be contributing to the stream of Christian literature. Many of them have the gifts, the imagination, the inner warmth that come from personal knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. Why are not these young people being trained to write and to write well? Why do they have to die as martyrs, like Jim Elliot, before their diaries and testimonies can become part of the Church’s heritage?

Schools of Christian writing are held throughout the nation each summer, with commendable results, although some of them are a bit heavy on market consciousness. English instruction in Christian schools is uniformly good, but the classical academic lines do not always encourage free expression. Where has there appeared in our day a genuine heart-cry from the lips of youth? Who is the David Brainerd or the Henry Martyn of our time? Where is the Christian counterpart of the beatnik literature? We would not encourage our young writers to ape the standard Christian authors of our day. We want to see them develop their own idiom, to make Christ real for their own generation, to articulate their own spiritual hunger and then to look with fresh eyes at the New Testament.

Ours is an age totally different from that in which some of us grew up. It is an atomic age, a space age, in which death sits with the children at dinner; in which long-range life plans are made one day and cancelled the next; in which the foreseeable future seems seldom foreseeable. Who will inscribe with a pen of fire what it means to come to maturity at such a time? What Christ means to a generation suffering from the over-burgeoning machination that someone has called “electronic cancer”?

We call upon young ministers and theological students to help build this fund of devotional literature: but not to glorify themselves, not to satisfy ambition, or impress us with their mastery of the language. We ask them to tell us what Christ means to them, in words and phrases not parroted, not hackneyed, not flabby with some new heresy; in words that are as gripping and exciting as if God himself were guiding their pens. Coming off the presses should be Christian fiction that is literature, that does not sound as if it were written in a cyclone cellar 100 years ago, that sets up believable culture-crisis situations and does not try to soak them in saccharine pap.

Such literature should inculcate a deep love for the land, for its heritage of freedom and for what it offers to every man, woman, and child. It should grapple with, life’s themes with the honesty of Job, yet with the faith of First Peter. Instead of the cynicism and despair that engulfs the whole Faulkner literary tradition, it should offer hope: hope that is not easy, flimsy, man-made, or superficially pious, but hope that comes from the wellspring of God. Above all, it should breathe throughout a consuming personal passion for Jesus Christ.

It is time, too, for publishers to become spiritually literate. The shelves of CHRISTIANITY TODAY are lined with books, not a few from Christian presses, which we hold unworthy of review. Many publishers, Christian and otherwise, seem unaware that America is counting on them not just to evaluate manuscripts, but also to encourage writers to embark on spiritual themes, and to lift the whole tone of the literature of faith. The religious market is overflowing with potential, yet many publishers are afraid to touch it, while others now in it show little inclination to venture into new approaches. They prefer to traffic with mediocrity rather than take risks with untried genius.

We have not yet begun to realize in these United States the power of a Godly pen. Even those who do not write can spread the Gospel through literature by means of tract and book. The unprecedented and deadly challenge facing us should be sending every writing Christian to his typewriter, and every reading Christian to the bookstore.

TRUJILLO CASE HEIGHTENS HEMISPHERIC IDEOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES

United States severance of diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic, along with imposition of economic sanctions against Trujillo-land, roused debate as to the effectiveness of such action in halting the further spread of Communism in this hemisphere.

Administration supporters pointed to the necessity of outgrowing the U.S. reputation among Latin American countries of supporting rightist dictators for economic purposes. Only in this way, it is said, can this country gain a united support of southern neighbors in dealing with the Communist threat posed by Castro’s Cuba.

Admittedly, U.S. action trailed by a few days an identical move previously voted by the Latin American countries represented by their foreign ministers at the Organization of American States gathering in Costa Rica. The United States reportedly would have preferred to postpone sanctions and take immediate steps to guarantee free elections.

And for some observers, this highlighted basic differences in political ideology between the United States and Latin America, not seen in the field of governmental process nor even in the cultural distinctiveness of the Anglo-Saxon and Latin races, but rather rooted in the Protestant heritage of the United States and the body of jurisprudence evolved in a Protestant climate. While our neighbors to the south can with justice accuse us of many political sins, they generally fail to grasp three basic viewpoints that make us seem greater sinners than in reality we may be:

(1) The North American has an innate respect for the “powers that be.” This is a concept lifted directly from the 13th chapter of Romans, an acknowledgment of the sovereignty of God. The average Latin American does not share this viewpoint. He is more accustomed to seeing corruption and nepotism in high places. He does not identify human authority with God. He has seen his church jump from one bandwagon to another. His history and his temperament combine to give him a disposition for revolution. In most countries revolutions are more common than elections, and violence has bred violence. To the North American, violent revolution is repugnant. To the Latin American it is an accepted way of life.

(2) The U.S. citizen has a deep-rooted respect for the due process of law—“Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake” (1 Peter 2:13). And while he recognizes that legality and justice are not always synonymous, nevertheless, if he must choose between them, he will prefer legality because in the long run it is the only permanent and impersonal guarantor of justice. This attitude makes the North American extremely patient with individual gangsters or racketeers whom the law has as yet been unable to touch. The United States is tolerant of its Costellos, its Hoffas.

When extended into international relationships, this same attitude makes the United States more indulgent toward the “naughty” members of the Pan-American community. Admittedly, the United States will say, “Trujillo is a bad man, but he must be removed legally and peacefully, not by revolution or extra-legal intervention.” Likewise, Batista was formerly the legal ruler of Cuba, and as such he had to be respected until the Castro revolution could clearly demonstrate that it, rather than the Batista regime, truly represented the collective will of the Cuban majority. In both cases, of course, the U.S. attitude led to the further culpability of active support—something our neighbors to the south find it difficult to forgive.

The Latin American, on the other hand, is impatient with the due process of law—perhaps because he has seen it too often warped and thwarted. His preference is for flaming justice. The greatest historical flashback in North American memory is to those scenes in Philadelphia where the fathers of our country signed the Declaration of Independence and later forged the articles of our federal constitution. In Latin America, however, the memory flashes back to Simón Bolívar or to José San Martín, mounted on white charger, brandishing sword, leading the liberating charge against the colonial troops of the Spanish emperor. North of the Rio Grande, “law” is the watchword—to the south it is rather a concept of impassioned justice.

(3) The final and most aggravating characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon diplomat which most Latin Americans find difficult to understand is the dry, cool-headed approach to problems on every level, be they local or international. Latin Americans cannot understand why there are no shootings on election days in the United States. They ask whether or not all bars and liquor stores are closed at times of political contest as they are in Central and South America. A calm acceptance of majority rule seems to show lack of conviction, of sincere feeling.

For generations the biblical principles of self-control have been drummed into the Anglo-Saxon peoples. “He who controlleth his temper is greater than he who ruleth a city.” This is a part of our culture. We feel it is basic to democratic action. And probably it is. But it is foreign to the experience of the Latin American. Passion is glorified in his culture. Passion should not be repressed, he feels, but should be channeled into glorious love affairs or expressed in uninhibited bursts of silver-tongued oratory. To indulge in passion is somehow to be more virile, more sincere. And the North American approach is “muy seco” (very dry), “sin gracia” (unexciting), undynamic. Cuba’s bearded Fidel Castro, haranguing his people through long telecasts, or her Foreign Minister Raúl Roa, pounding the table in the San José meeting of ministers, seems more nearly to embody the burning aspirations of Latin America’s underprivileged masses than does the impassive figure of the United States’ Secretary of State.

The United States has a long way to go in order to understand Latin America and to implement that understanding with aggressive leadership in the continent. And Latin America consistently seems to misjudge the motives and actions of the U.S. But meetings like those just finished in Costa Rica—where points of view are expressed and adjusted—give grounds for much hope in the cause of hemispheric harmony. Both as a sounding board and as an instrument for political action the Organization of American States has again demonstrated its effectiveness and its maturity.

NEW SIGNIFICANCE FOR OLD DISTINCTIVES

Few are the sermons ever preached today that are based on Jeremiah’s plea to Israel: “Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ash for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.”

There are distinctives and imperishables which give to the Christian faith meaning and direction, and when they are disregarded it is at great cost.

Many people in our day are unresponsive to the lessons of history. Just as there arose in Egypt a king who knew not Joseph, there are today Christians to whom the Christian heritage has little relevance.

That these distinctives were brought out in blood, sweat, and tears seems to mean little to us who live in a time when secular and immediate considerations have priority.

But our debt to our forefathers is far greater than we realize. Theirs was a faith nurtured in the Holy Scriptures from which came firm convictions, strength in adversity, and courage to witness against any odds.

This faith was characterized by distinctives so clear that they erected a wall between the spiritually free and the ecclesiastically bound.

The first of these distinctives was the final authority of the Bible. On this premise Martin Luther took his stand at Worms, and from there the Reformation blossomed. Some have departed from the doctrine of scriptural authority, and have equated the opinions of men with the divine revelation. In so doing, of course, they have blurred a truth which must be restored if the Church is to regain her power as a witnessing force in the world.

Another distinctive of our Christian heritage is the fact of man’s justification by faith alone. When the full significance of the words “the just shall live by his faith” dawned on Luther, there fell from his heart and mind the shackles of fear and the burden of the law of works which had been for him intolerable.

A third distinctive of our Christian heritage is the truth of the sole mediatorship of Christ. No more do men have to turn to men as their intercessors, for in Christ the veil of separation has been parted and we may come boldly into God’s holy presence in the name and merit of the Son of God, our Redeemer.

A fourth, among many other distinctives, has to do with the matter of separation of Church and State. The Church is a spiritual Kingdom within the kingdoms of men. It consists of those whose citizenship is in heaven. Living in this world, such citizens are not of this world, they are of the Kingdom of God, and act as salt and light in an alien environment. Their weapons are spiritual, not carnal, and their eventual goal is the eternal, not the temporal.

These distinctives delivered our forefathers from ecclesiastical tyranny, and gave them liberty of spirit and freedom of expression which has carried the Gospel message to the entire world.

The “old paths” of which Jeremiah spoke were good paths, ordained and blessed of God. The heritage which is ours today rests firmly on the rock of God’s revealed truth. To be ignorant or indifferent to the distinctives of our faith is disastrous. In the “old paths” there is freedom and blessing.

‘EVACUATION ROUTE’

On all major highways leading from our American cities today, there can be seen a sign—a blue shield with white lettering—“Evacuation Route.”

Where highways divide it is indicated that the evacuation route is in either direction, away from the city.

But as one travels on, one never comes to a sign which says “Safety,” or “You Have Arrived.”

These signs are indicative of the times in which we live. The Civil Defense Office is doing its best to prepare our citizens for possible danger. Air raid centers are designated, procedures in case of attack are outlined, and evacuation routes are mapped out and identified.

That all such planning has a symbolic significance few people appear to realize. The Bible foretells cataclysmic events with amazing integrity, and it should lead men and women to stop and evaluate the state of the world and the divinely prepared “Evacuation Route” by which we may pass from dire jeopardy to the safety of God’s assured salvation.

The evacuation routes indicated on our highways are a cold, realistic provision for a contingency.

We hope and pray that a sudden catastrophic atomic attack will not happen. We doubt if it will. But the possibility of such an attack leads our defense authorities to make the best provision they can under the circ*mstances; and, rather than deride them, we should accept these protective measures with understanding appreciation.

Why then do we view with unbelief, antagonism, or complete indifference the prophetic references to climactic events when God rolls down the curtain of history as we know it?

Why do we seem to resent the clear statements of Scripture with reference to the cataclysm in which the world will some day be engulfed?

If God in his mercy has warned men to flee from the wrath to come, who is man that he should say there will be no wrath from which to flee?

To say that the Old Testament prophets spoke of a tribal god of war, while we affirm faith in the “God of the New Testament” who is an image of Love and Compassion, is a little ridiculous when we find Christ himself foretelling the doom of the world, the wrath and judgment of God, and his own sudden appearance in power and in glory.

The simple fact is that in both Old and New Testaments we are told of the end of the age, warned to prepare for the awesome event, and told of the safe and sure “Evacuation Route” which leads not aimlessly to an uncertain destination but surely to that haven of safety from which not even the demons of hell can snatch the child of God.

Eschatology (the doctrine of last things) has been discredited by those who do not accept the Christ of the Scriptures, by unwarranted “date setters,” and by many Christians who neglect the doctrine and ought to know better.

Strange as it seems, nothing is surer to evoke a scornful cry of “crackpot” than a mentioning of the Second Coming of Christ. Yet no one doctrine in all of the New Testament receives so much space. One reads the clear and repeated statements of Christ that he is to return to this earth.

There are many tortured “explanations” of our Lord’s return, none of which can stand the clear light of Scriptural statement. Among them are:

1. That his coming was at Pentecost—despite the fact that Paul and others wrote of the Second Coming of Christ as a certain and longed-for event years after Pentecost.

2. That the Second Coming of Christ occurs at the death of believers—despite the fact that not one passage of Scriptures can be interpreted thus.

3. That the spread of Christianity is the Second Coming of Christ. The trouble with this concept is that the spread of Christianity is a process while the return of the Lord is an event described in the Bible as the cataclysmic and final denouement of this age.

One reason many good people have neglected the teaching of Scripture with reference to Christ’s return has been the unwarranted, opinionated statements of enthusiasts. This is not a valid excuse, however, for we are not responsible to any man for his interpretation of the Scriptures, but we are responsible to God who has in his mercy told us not only of the certainty of the last days but many of the things to take place.

Christ affirmed his return many times. In Matthew 26:64 we read: “Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.”

On the Mount of Ascension, awestruck disciples gazed at his receding form in the heavens, and two men suddenly stood by their side and said: “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.”

The manner of our Lord’s return is described in these words: “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout.” And again: “Behold he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail, because of him. Even so, Amen.”

Peter describes the event in these words: “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with a fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”

Paul speaks of the same event in these sobering words: “And to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and obey not the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

When we pass the sign “Evacuation Route,” we ought to be reminded afresh of our redemption in Jesus Christ.

We should also be reminded of Isaiah’s warning: “And the haughtiness of man shall be humbled, and the pride of men shall be brought low; and the Lord alone will be exalted in that day.… And men shall enter the caves of the rocks, and the holes of the ground, from before the terror of the Lord, and from the glory of his majesty, when he rises to terrify the earth” (Isa. 2:17, 19, 20, 21).

We in America might possibly have to take advantage of an “Evacuation Route” in our area someday. But one thing is certain: all men outside of Christ will someday be looking for a place to hide from his glorious presence, and they will be unable to find one.

The divinely ordained place of safety—for now and for eternity—is at the Cross of Calvary. It is our sure evacuation route from the judgment of sin.

God grant that the Church may not fail in pointing men to safety.

L. NELSON BELL

FOUNDATION AWARD

With the greatest pleasure we announce the first award of the Eutychus Foundation, a non-profit, non-endowed, unincorporated organization dedicated to the recovery of Good Humor in the Christian world. The noble prize-winner will be cited immediately after this brief message from the Foundation.

The trustees of Eutychus Foundation, J. J. Peterson, Eugene Ivy, Kurt Grundgelehrt, et al, wish to correct several misunderstandings that have already arisen with respect to our work. 1. We do not solicit funds. Door-to-door canvassers claiming to represent the Foundation should be given tracts, not money. Please do not send contributions either to CHRISTIANITY TODAY or to Hybrid, Nebraska. 2. We do not sell frozen custard or operate trucks, or bicycles with or without bells. It is true that our slightly anonymous founder likes ice cream and wears a bell on his academic cap, but the two have no connection, the latter being a medieval tradition associated with his office as fatuus magnificus. 3. Our repeated refusal to insert the word “clean” in our statement of purpose does not imply that we are opposed to Good Clean Humor, but only to redundancy. 4. We are a nonpolitical organization, supporting virtually all candidates for public office in appreciation of their vast, if unintentional contributions to the cause.

To borrow a phrase in an election year, we stand on the Threshold of a New Era in humor. Not a month ago, according to the press, a prominent clergyman called for more humor in a New York pulpit, and proceeded to meet the need with an engaging tale about his being locked out of his apartment in his underwear. Leaf through any copy of Manse Beautiful, or Better Churches and Parsonages, and note the ads for “365 More Snappy Pulpit Stories” and “Choice Chancel Chuckles.”

Our Eutychus Foundation Award is not presented to any of these comedian divines, however, but to a periodical that has made quite another contribution to Good Humor. The first Gold Pin goes to the editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Not the least of his services to Good Humor has been the policy of containment by which this column has been kept mercifully brief. The citation, however, reads: “for his love of the Good News, the message which dissolves pride in humble laughter and leads to joy through penitent tears.”

EUTYCHUS

MISSION AND MISSIONS

I am very much heartened by reading your … thought-provoking editorial “From ‘Mission’ to ‘Missions’” (Aug. 1 issue).

… [This and] Mr. F. Dale Bruner’s article are the two most creative and constructive pieces of writing on Christian missions that I have ever read.

MING C. CHAO

Flushing, N. Y.

The editorial “From ‘Mission’ to ‘Missions’” carries these words: “If history’s next major event is not the Lord’s return—which believers in every generation hopefully anticipate—then the Church’s task becomes more awesome than ever.”

Permit me to say just this: Unless the Church quickly recognizes that Christ is already with us and stops that constant looking over the horizon for relief, she will never do her task. No, Christ is not coming! If we believe what we preach, He is already here!

BOYD E. BONEBRAKE

The Mennonite Church

Deer Creek, Okla.

I cannot help but compliment you on your missionary zeal in wanting to bring the “message of salvation” to all men.… I am glad that you are concerned for the spiritual welfare of man, but I believe that the Gospel speaks also to the physical welfare.…

I am not saying that the Church should merely send some form of technical aid through a specialized personnel that are not dedicated to the service of the Lord, or to send those who are not able to bring the full Gospel along with their abilities to help their fellow man in his physical need. But I cannot comprehend the utterances of divine words of love to a sick or hungry crowd day after day, and take no concern for their physical welfare.…

You know, I wouldn’t doubt if Christ were here right now in his physical presence that He might even help some hungry people to contour farm.

RICHARD E. WRIGHT

New Philadelphia Moravian Church

Winston-Salem, N. C.

Your excellent paper was never finer than the current (Aug. 1) edition. It warmed my heart in a wonderful way, for I was raised in China in a missionary home and I spent my best eight years in Tanganyika Territory as a missionary doctor.

I must obey a whim which insists that I send a copy to each member of my denomination’s (Augustana Lutheran Church) Board of World Missions.…

J. B. FRIBERG

Minneapolis, Minn.

The August 1 issue—loaded with Christian missions—is excellent. I know no periodical anywhere that can touch this fortnightly for power-packed, pertinent information vital to the twentieth-century pulpit.… It is an indispensable aid to us preachers on the battle line.

STUART H. MERRIAM

First Presbyterian Church

Portsmouth, Va.

Before the Lord Jesus Christ there were more than 20 prophets which taught the divine truths when the people had gone astray. But the Christian churches are too stubborn and will not confess their failures in spite of threat of hell and near general judgment. They do not accept any prophet which the Lord has sent to us after His coming upon the earth. It is the question—how many clergymen have read the writings of such great prophets as Jakob Boehme, Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Lorber, … not to mention many others less significant. Before the Lord Jesus Christ, the Jewish priests stoned their prophets. The Christian clergies kill the prophets, keeping them in the grave of silence.

… It is the last time to turn to the buried prophets and learn from them that there is one God Jesus Christ who is the spiritual trinity of Love, Wisdom, Truth, and Power in one person. The Gentiles are mentally sound enough in order to understand that three persons never are one.

All missionary work must be changed in accordance with the writings of the above-mentioned prophets.

HERMAN MIERINS

Chatham, N. J.

One gets rather tired of the kind of thins Dr. Packer says about Protestant Missions policy “that indigenous churches should be given no more than colonial status in relation to the mother church” (Dec. 21 issue).

May I quote from Working His Purpose Out by the Rev. Edward Band, page 335. “In October, 1912, the Swatow Mission Council invited the Presbytery to take an important step towards the goal of an independent church by assuming the financial responsibility for its pastors, etc.…”

That was almost fifty years ago and there is no reason to think that the English Presbyterian Mission was unique in this policy of aiming at a goal of indedepence. From my own experience the statements in this paragraph are just not true.…

It is also a terribly sweeping statement: “… It is in the towns that resentment and suspicion of the mistionary movement are strongest.” It certainly is not true of Malaya.

R. A. ELDER

Johore Bahru, Malaya

HEIRS OF THE COVENANTERS

The letter from Mr. H. M. Weis, of Pensacola, Florida (Aug. 1 issue) caught my attention. It brought out so clearly the tragedy of churches that have wandered away from their moorings, that are floundering in a sea of relativism, that are trying to discuss and solve present-day man’s problems while disregarding God’s answer given to us 2,000 and more years ago. What Mr. Weis says is true—man’s nature and his problems have not changed much since the time of Christ. God is the same, man is the same, sin is the same; the Bible still is applicable. We need only to apply its ageless truths to 20th century problems.

I wish Mr. Weis could have visited our Adult Bible Class while travelling in the Southwest. It is my privilege to teach this class of alert and intelligent adults who study the Bible as the Word of God revealed, who love its truths, who apply its principles to their everyday lives, and who are hungry for more.

We are a part of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America, General Synod, “Heirs of the Covenanters,” established in this country in 1774 and still proclaiming the faith once delivered to the saints.

HARRY H. MEINERS, JR.

General Secretary

Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America, General Synod

Las Cruces, N. Mex.

It is extremely hard to understand why, with so many … capable Christian writers at work, the corporate Churches and their study material can be as far “off” as they are. As an officer and sometimes teacher in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., I feel this very keenly, especially in view of the fact that so many of your evangelically sound articles are written by Presbyterians. It is to be hoped that God wall use your magazine and other such influences to bring about a reformation in the thinking of the Churches.

NORMAN B. ASH

Oklahoma City, Okla.