Page 6144 – Christianity Today (2024)

In Communist lands the notion is widespread (totalitarian dictators foster it) that modern man—simply because he knows science—can no longer believe in the supernatural, least of all in Jesus Christ. But many professional scientists recognize the cliché “either science or Christianity” as slick propaganda serviceable to dialectical materialists. Since evidence is sparse for such arbitrary dogmas, rationalists understandably speak of science rather than of sheer speculation to bolster their prejudices. Such equating of science and anti-supernaturalism, however, has widely confused the student world and encouraged religious skepticism.

All the more gratifying, therefore, is the bold proclamation of faith in Christ and his Gospel by men of scientific learning and stature. Nothing is needed more urgently than a coordination of the powers of science with the principles of true religion and morality. Science has power to destroy civilization; Christ alone has power to give it light and life. In this issue devout men of science declare their faith in God and in the Saviour.

What if machines replace brains?

Great changes are taking place in the Western world as technology comes to full fruit. Machines are replacing men and doing their jobs better and faster. Chemistry is transforming the production of foods and fibers. Automation has led to machines that operate other machines. “Cybernation” is the term used to describe the next generation in machine-development—devices that replace men’s brains as well as their hands. Whole categories of jobs are being wiped out. Before all this is finished, man’s life will have undergone one of the most radical alterations the world has seen.

As always when men think about the future, speculation is rife. Dire predictions are made and desperate remedies proposed. Some of this is echoed in the Church. It is proposed that we should accept as inevitable a society in which large numbers will be permanently unemployed. The incentives for working—income and the respect of the community—should be removed. The idle should, we are told, be guaranteed an income, and the “popular Protestant value concept” that assigns dignity to work and not to idleness should be changed. The vision is held out of a society in which 2 per cent of the population will produce all the needed goods and services, while the rest serve principally as consumers.

To many, however, this is no promise of utopia but a threat of hell. Sociologist Eric Fromm fears that we can now develop societies “in which the inhabitants are well fed and well clad, having their wishes satisfied and not having wishes that cannot be satisfied; automatons, who follow without force, are guided without leaders, who make machines that act like men and produce men that act like machines …” (“The Present Human Condition,” in The American Scholar Reader, Atheneum, 1960, p. 390). Fromm hopes we can do better than this. If we avoid the worst dangers of our changing society, perhaps we can achieve the end of “humanoid history,” which he defines as “the phase in which man has not become fully human,” the state of all history until now. Which will it be? A life that is fully human (or more nearly so, if Fromm is too optimistic)? Or one that is increasingly humanoid?

What does the biblical faith have to say to this world in transition, poised between human and humanoid? It has the only word that will make any difference. Life will be no more than humanoid unless we know what man is. This is not a question of technology or of sociology; it is a biblical question.

That is why the Church cannot respond to this hour with a smattering of technical jargon and feelings of justice and compassion. Justice and compassion are noble virtues, but not exclusively Christian. They are, moreover, difficult to put into practice. Compassion not informed by a biblical view of man may devour the people it hopes to save.

I once knew a young man who was crippled by polio at the end of his senior year in high school. His mother, a loving and compassionate woman, devoted herself completely to him. Her life revolved around the cripple in the upstairs bedroom. There was nothing he could want that she would not get for him. Soon, of course, there was nothing she could get for him that he wanted. But she forgave him his bitterness and despondency, for who would not be despondent in the face of such outrageous misfortune?

Then the boy’s mother died. His father loved him, too, but had a different idea of what a human being is. He forced the boy out of bed and into a wheelchair. He badgered him into enrolling at the state university. The head of the rehabilitation department there was equally loving and pitiless. The result was that the young man got a degree and a job, married a fellow student, and soon had a home and family of his own.

Both parents loved the boy. But his mother saw him only as an object of love. His father saw him more biblically, as a child of God needing usefulness and vocation to be fully human. The mother said, “I love him.” The father asked, “What is a man?”

It is this kind of profound question that Christians must not only raise but also answer, and answer biblically. In fact, it is shallow and potentially harmful to speak of the implications of technology for the Church without raising these questions:

1. What is the relation between man’s dignity as man and his useful vocation? Before we talk about changing the idea that work gives dignity to man, we should ask whether work and human dignity have any deeper connection than custom. If there is none, we can talk sensibly about the right to an income and dignity for those who do not work. We can even rejoice in the opportunity of men to be free of labor. Much of our experience, however, has indicated the opposite. It is fairly well agreed that jobs and sheltered workshops do something for the handicapped that custodial care cannot do. If there is no connection between dignity and work, the difference between the way of life chosen by King Farouk and that chosen by President Kennedy—two rich men who were guaranteed great incomes and could make their own decision about work—is simply a matter of taste. Were this all, we would be quite wrong to respect the one and not the other. The Christian must ask what the Bible says about man, whether employment degrades him, is neutral, or is essential to his character as man. Then we can decide whether custodial care in the age of cybernation will satisfy men—or should satisfy them.

2. What is the economic meaning of the fact that man is a sinner? Only the Christian has a reason to take sin seriously. Civilization is possible, not because man is good, but because it encourages behavior more socially useful than man would ordinarily choose. Every society depends on a combination of incentive and coercion. The balance between the two can be changed; but if their total force is lessened, then the society begins to dissolve. When either incentive or coercion is decreased, the other must be strengthened to give a shape to the social life of sinful man. The Soviet Union provides an interesting example. The end of the Stalin era brought a marked lessening in the use of coercion in that society. As a result, there has appeared an equally marked increase in the use of incentive, such as increases in consumer goods, more individual benefit to farmers, the introduction of the profit concept in industry. Because man is a sinner, the reverse will be true if the two principal incentives in our society, wage and status, are removed. Fewer carrots mean more use of the stick. Both incentive and coercion are to a degree degrading to man, as man is to a degree degraded. But that does not mean there is no choice between the two. Christians have a clear preference for incentive over coercion. If they think they can get along without either, they have not heard that man has left Eden.

3. What is the essential human quality implied in man’s creation in the image of God? This is the question that must guide the search for new jobs. We should look first for work in which man will be employed as man. Until now, survival has demanded that man be employed as less than man. Before the Industrial Revolution, all but a few men were employed as trainable animals, to perform manual labor. Machines gradually took over these jobs, but they replaced them with a different kind of work. Men were then employed as substitute machines—to make inspections, perform repetitive tasks, and compute. These jobs too are disappearing. Man is not needed as either animal or machine. But man is much more than either of these. He now can be employed as man, relating to other humans, offering understanding, response, and fellowship. It is here that employment is growing rapidly; there are more nursery school teachers, fishing guides, shoe salesmen, nurses’ aids, social workers, and airline stewardesses than in the past. We can now afford to employ human beings as human beings. But we need to ask the biblical meaning of this.

4. For what is man responsible beyond survival? Across the centuries, the proportion of man’s time needed for survival has steadily decreased. At the dawn of history, man spent all his waking hours in the quest for food. When he gave up the roving life of the hunter and became a farmer (a change until now perhaps the most drastic in man’s history), he had a measure of free time and developed his first civilization. It is a mistake to speak of this free time only as leisure time. The agricultural Indians of Central and South America used it to raise a great civilization. It will be our own fault if we simply bring shuffleboard to a new peak of development.

So far as possible, Christians have a responsibility for guiding the new society technology is certain to create. A non-working society divorced from incentives may be possible, as a few prophets believe. But the Christian must judge this possible society in the light of his knowledge of man. He must help turn it in directions that will enhance man’s life as man. Significantly, the prophecies that chronic unemployment will unavoidably result from the technological revolution are somewhat like the predictions Marx made about the Industrial Revolution and the accumulation of capital. This does not mean that the prophets are Marxists; indeed, nothing could be farther from their thoughts. What it does mean is that they are repeating a mistake that has been made before. Marx spurned the Christian view of what man is. As a result, what he thought was a prescription for fuller life was in fact a sentence to humanoid existence. But there is no excuse for Christians’ making this mistake. They of all people ought to know what man is.

T. Leo Brannon is pastor of the First Methodist Church of Samson, Alabama. He received the B.S. degree from Troy State College and the B.D. from Emory University.

“Wherever industry spreads, the Church usually does not.…”

An analysis of the “strange mystique” of the technological age

It is a painful fact that wherever industry spreads, the Church usually does not spread. In Britain the smaller community of the rural area expands into a bigger population in the town, and that population does not have a church-centered life. This is equally true of the red-belt around Paris, where the worker-priests sweated from 1943 until the Vatican ordered them to cease in 1954 (after which some complied, twenty got married, and numbers of others carried on quietly). It is true also of the African in the copper-belt and the other industrialized parts of Africa, even though there he may still be a churchgoer in the rural set-up to which he returns.

The Church is still seeking to reach a stratum of society that has never been effectively reached in proportion to its size in the community. In the mid-nineteenth century the Church of England said, If only we had the Methodist free type of service we could reach the industrial workers; the Methodists said, If only we had the Church of England parochial system we could reach them; the Congregationalists said, We think God must have called us to the middle classes, since only they come to our churches. Yet Bishop Edward Wickham points out in his book Encounter with Modern Society that industry is the basis of modern society. If we wish to influence men, we must influence this fundamental influence to which men are subjected. How?

One essential is that we must not be afraid of technology. Some writers give the impression that technology has rubbed out man’s sense of the “vertical.” But I think they are “falling for” technology as men fell for the Darwinian theory of evolution, which everything had to fit or men couldn’t believe any more. Nels Ferré has been quoted in this magazine as saying that “as a description of method, how creation took place, evolution had much merit, but as explanation it is sheer faith, an incredible mystique. And yet hard-headed thinkers fell prey to such a gullible faith in the name of science. As an ideology, educators themselves are now beginning to see the stark and startling nature of this faith, but in the meantime education trained away from the church countless millions, who swallowed this mystique of truth” (italics supplied). And the mid-twentieth century is producing a new “mystique of truth” in terms of technology and cybernetics (the employment of machines in place of muscles, and computers and the like in place of human brains to guide them). If the Lord Jesus tarries, scholars will be explaining in the mid-twenty-first century how men in our era thought of the technological age in terms of this “mystique of truth.” It is no such thing. Technology has nothing to say to the manager of the automated factory whose wife dies in her forties.

Industry has tremendous power. We read in Colossians that God upholds all things by the word of his power, and the upholding agent is Christ, the agent of that power. The Ford assembly line would stop more quickly if the Lord Jesus were to withdraw his power than ever it would if someone were to shout, “All out!” The organist at my former church was horrified because we put a model diesel train in the sanctuary for our industrial harvest thanksgiving (he seemed to think it was somehow a defilement), but what is more religious about two or three cabbages and half a dozen apples?

Looking Under The Mat

We must not forget the soft underbelly of technology—the technologically displaced. A recent BBC program on industrial efficiency showed how slow we British are, and what we have to learn from America. And under the mat, where the lazy sweep the dirt, was hidden “the other America,” in which, we may deduce from surveys by Michael Harrington (1962) and the Saturday Evening Post (December, 1963), something like 40 million people live in poverty. This technological age needs the Gospel and the doctrine of a Holy God who requires justice, as any age before ours did.

A Christian worker remarked that what the working people needed was another dose of unemployment. Really? Did they go to church when there was mass unemployment? When I collected my father’s outstanding dole money from our local labor exchange a few days after his death, I didn’t notice that the line was full of fellow Christians. America has shown that affluence helps churchgoing (although material betterment and spiritual betterment are not to be confused). This does not please the Bishop of Woolwich. It pleases me. Rightly treated, affluence may yet drive its soul-starved slaves to church in Britain; and if the Gospel is preached, some of them may be saved. It would not be hard at times to gain the impression that people who have always known a good measure of comfort find it somehow indecent that working men have such things as cars, television sets, and refrigerators: let’s be careful of this, too. Dr. Zweig in his sociological study Worker in an Affluent Society has shown that the vast majority of those whom he interviewed in a car factory and in an electrical lamp works held to belief in God. Much that is said about modern unbelieving man lacks careful sociological documentation, for it tends to reflect the awful doubts of the speakers rather than of those spoken about!

The relevance of the Christian Gospel is shown by its social implications. H. L. Ellison pointed out (The Churchman, December, 1960) that one of the expectations of the Messiah’s coming was social righteousness. He said that the Jew, when faced with Jesus of Nazareth today, is hindered by the lack of concern for this in the Church. That same lack has hindered the industrial masses, too—and evangelicals have this matter at their fingertips because they take seriously the Old Testament and the whole biblical revelation of a Holy God who requires justice in society because he is just. God cares about justice for the widow and the fatherless and, we may add, the old-age pensioner. He cares about right prices (see Amos and proper weights). He is the original inspector of weights and measures. When workers are not paid properly, their cry, James tells us, is heard in heaven, though it may pass the ears of the boardroom en route. Paul urges the Colossians to pay their slaves properly. He exhorts the Ephesian workers not to be clock-watchers, or crawlers (men-pleasers working when the boss is looking), and he advises employers that their boss is in heaven. When evangelicals lay hold on the element of social righteousness in a new way, people will see its relevance.

In his book The Christian in an Industrial Society, H. F. R. Catherwood says, “Society cannot be redeemed, but it can be reformed according to God’s law.” We need a theology of work, too. We need to see that there is nothing more religious about teaching than there is about industrial activity. How many of us are likely to encourage our young folk to what we might call “nicer” jobs, and away from industry?

The relevance of the Gospel is shown because it meets my deepest need. What I have in common with the highest in the land is sin, the great leveler. But others must know God has cleansed me from sin. They must know I have needed the cleansing. Do congregations know that their pastor needs cleansing, or do they think, “He wouldn’t have the thoughts I have …”? He does, and they ought to know that he does, and that he is repenting. I know they haven’t much sense of sin in some of our work places, but it can come. I think we need this awareness more in the Church. We are a fellowship of sinners, albeit redeemed sinners; but because we are regarded in some sense as a fellowship of saints, a lot of people feel our company is no place for them. Bonhoeffer is right when he says that the Church should be the place where people are allowed to fail.

An English bishop said recently in a Sunday newspaper that people are no longer afraid of death. I don’t know where he does his homework. As a parish minister I am not aware of any real disappearance of the fear of death. The relevance of the Gospel is further shown by its triumphant answer to death in the name of the Crucified who conquered death.

Problems Of Proclamation

Among the hindrances to the proclamation of the Gospel in industrial areas is language. In October, 1963, an Anglican weekly featured an article, “Hands Off the Prayer Book.” It claimed to prove that the majority of people do not want much change; but of those who had expressed views, the chief age group was forty to fifty-nine.

None will deny that some of the sentiments expressed in our Anglican worship (rightly, I believe) need careful explanation. In another Anglican newspaper a curate whom God had blessed in work among tough teen-agers (some of whom have been led to Christ) said that when he got them to Evening Prayer and began, “Dearly beloved brethren, the scripture moveth us in sundry places …,” one of them said, “What’s happened to old Jack?” We desperately need language people can understand; yet a major Church of England conference regularly begins with a service in Latin.

Another difficulty concerns ministerial personnel. Jesus did not have the attachment to the academic ministry that we have. His disciples were chosen from a genuine sociological cross section. It is said that Bishop Selwyn hindered the work among the Maoris of New Zealand because he insisted on academic standards, thus ruling Maoris out of the ministry. That emphasis has had the same effect on the Church’s outreach to the working masses of Britain.

I am sure that Bishop Wickham is right when he says the actual encounter of the Church with the world of industry must be by laymen. And they will earn the right to speak by their social concern. In the Church of England we do not really respect laymen; and here some evangelicals seem as bad as our priestly brethren. As the laity get much more responsibility, including a share in the area of doctrine (such matters are at present dealt with by bishops and clergy), they will become more accustomed to shouldering their burden for witness in the world. My warden changes places with me at alternate meetings of the parochial church council, and I join the church on the “floor.” This helps to put things in their right perspective. There is much more that needs to be done. We will never meet the challenge of proclamation of the Gospel in industry until we practice what we preach in the matter of the priesthood of all believers.

One last thing. I believe that if we can get people from the industrial sphere of society to hear Billy Graham when he comes to Britain in 1966, many of them will hear the still small Voice speaking forgiveness of sins and eternal life through his Name. And if the posters and publicity that come out seem gaudy to my fellow clergy, if they feel they might not want them on their church notice boards, they might remember that such posters are not designed for the dear old lady who has sat faithfully in her pew for the past fifty years: they are designed for the people who live in the gaudy, noisy world outside.

T. Leo Brannon is pastor of the First Methodist Church of Samson, Alabama. He received the B.S. degree from Troy State College and the B.D. from Emory University.

Things are stirring in the United Presbyterian Church, and it will be interesting to see how many cooks get a spoon in the broth. As is well known in the States, and perhaps increasingly known overseas, the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. presented a new confession, “The Confession of 1967,” to the General Assembly meeting in Columbus, Ohio, last May. Under the chairmanship of Professor Dowey of Princeton Theological Seminary, the committee had been at work for seven years drawing up this document. The action of the General Assembly was to receive this proposed new confession and to commend it to the church for a year of study. At next year’s General Assembly in Boston, a vote will be taken to say whether the confession is to be sent to the presbyteries for a vote. If this is done, the presbyteries, it is assumed, will vote favorably, and the confession will then became part of the church’s confessional standards.

During the year of study in which Presbyterians are now engaged, individuals and groups, particularly presbytery groups, will come up with suggestions for revising or amending the new confession. A Committee of Fifteen has been selected by the moderator, attorney William P. Thompson of Wichita, Kansas. This committee, under the chairmanship of Dr. W. Sherman Skinner of St. Louis, will review and study these suggestions and make recommendations to the 1966 General Assembly on “The Confession of 1967.” It is generally understood that the findings of Dr. Skinner’s committee need not have any greater weight than the weight of suggestions and recommendations, and quite possibly the confession as now written will be the confession on which the church will vote. It is apparent from the makeup of the Committee of Fifteen that Moderator Thompson made a sincere effort to have every shade of theological opinion represented on it. It is also apparent that he attempted to represent both laity and clergy and to include a cross section of the nation.

Some have questioned whether Dr. Skinner’s committee can finish its work in time for the next General Assembly. If the members do their work seriously, and if there is any measurable response from the church, they are faced with an almost insuperable task. In the first place, most of the presbyteries may be a little slow in getting under way. My own presbytery, having met in June, is still attempting to get some kind of a study committee going before the September meeting. This is proving a little difficult because of the vacation plans of both clergy and laity. Our moderator, for example, was not present at the June meeting because his vacation had already begun, and the appointment of the committee necessarily awaits his word. It is also likely that, with other vacations coming during the summer, little real study will be done before the September meeting. Assuming that this committee will not be ready to make any recommendations in September, we can reasonably guess that any action will be impossible until about November, and then only if the presbytery can reach a consensus on the recommendations of its own committee.

What I am trying to point out is that, if other presbyteries operate like this one, recommendations from presbyteries will begin to take firm shape very late in this calendar year. If we work from the other end, that is, from the next meeting of the General Assembly in May, we must keep in mind that the “Blue Book” has to be ready at least three weeks before the General Assembly and that material for this “Blue Book” has to be ready sometime in March. We can reasonably expect, therefore, that the pressure of this committee work will fall sometime between January 1 and March 15, 1966.

There are almost two hundred United Presbyterian presbyteries in the United States. Let us assume for the sake of argument that each comes up with at least one suggestion (and we suppose that if presbyteries look at the whole new confession, they may well come up with more than one). Can we picture what a committee of fifteen will do with 190 (or many more) suggestions and changes in the new confession? The time problem is aggravated by the possibility that variations of the same suggestion may come along to the committee from many different presbyteries. If, for example, ten presbyteries make one suggestion on one point of the confession and these suggestions offer the shadings of the variety of the minds that have worked on them, and, if the Committee of Fifteen has to debate wordings as well as substance, we need no great imagination to see what kind of a task they face.

We are assuming throughout this that the committee will take its assignment seriously, and those of us who know Dr. Skinner know that his work will be faithful, concerned, and meticulous.

Taking the new confession seriously is the only way it can possibly be taken. Many concerned churchmen are convinced that the whole theological atmosphere of the new confession is going to give a new nature to the church. If this be true, and I for one think it is, then the Presbyterians are facing a new departure in their theological life. It seems to me, then, that the United Presbyterian Church is caught in a very serious bind, much more serious and much more basic than the time pressure on the Committee of Fifteen.

Professor Dowey has an excellent mind and excellent training, and he has been studying and teaching creeds, and all material relating thereto, at the seminary level for a long time. I doubt very much whether there are half a dozen men in our country as well versed in these matters as he. Anyone who has ever heard him speak on creeds or even talked with him on these things knows how well versed he is and how interesting and relevant he can make these matters appear.

But the Presbyterian bind is this: In a confessional church that also prides itself on its concern for an educated clergy and an intelligent laity, and that prides itself equally on its democratic (or, more exactly, republican) form of government, just how will judgments on the new confession be made? In a “representative” form of church government, we can do one of two things. We can turn over the decision on the new confession to the experts, admitting that it would take perhaps three years of study for most clergymen and ten years of study for most laymen to understand what is actually being said. The other choice is to take whatever time is necessary to do the serious study. This might make the “Confession of 1967” the “Confession of 1977.”

Unless Presbyterians are ready to turn their theology over to the experts (a Roman Catholic principle), then even by 1967 most Presbyterians will have to admit that they do not know enough (a) to put the Westminster Confession on the shelf with other confessions in the tradition, or (b) to pass judgment on the value of the new confession, or (c) to say that the new confession is better than Westminster.

ADDISON H. LEITCH

A statement on civil rights, the first ever made by the National Association of Free Will Baptists, calls on churches “to bring every person into a right relationship with God, regardless of race or national origin.” The statement was adopted last month by an overwhelming majority at the association’s annual convention, held in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The statement recognized “the right and privilege of the local church to conduct its own affairs in the area of human relations.” but added, “We recognize throughout the denomination there are human relations problems—we must learn to be tolerant.”

Free Will Baptists, known for their Arminian theological outlook, now number about 200,000. There are churches in some forty states, but they predominate in the South.

The civil rights resolution was drafted by a special committee set up at the start of the four-day convention by the denomination’s General Board. The committee was instructed to implement the principles of the statement in the work of the denominational agencies.

Hottest debate of the convention centered on a resolution to study relations of Free Will Baptists with “other associations, organizations, persons or institutions.” The resolution asked that a committee be named “to review the attitude of the National Association of Evangelicals, the ecumenical movement. Roman Catholicism, and the National Council of Churches.” It was defeated.

In Watertown, Wisconsin, delegates to the thirty-eighth biennial convention of the 358,000-member Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod received an overture for peace talks from Missouri Synod President Oliver D. Harms. The two synods have been at odds for several years. Wisconsin delegates turned the proposal over to their Commission on Doctrinal Matters, which asked for time to study developments at Missouri’s last convention.

In Estes Park, Colorado, General Conference Mennonites joined the protest over U. S. policy in Viet Nam (see “The Unsettling War,” p. 47). At their triennial sessions, the General Conference Mennoniles adopted a statement calling for negotiations to end the war in Viet Nam and to unify the country. Increased governmental economic aid was also suggested. The statement acknowledged, however, “the complex nature of the problem and the ambiguities involved.” The U. S. government was thanked for its efforts to negotiate a settlement and urged to “explore every possible means to end the war.”

In other business, the General Conference Mennonites (current constituency: about 55,000) adopted a resolution on ecumenical relations and appointed an inter-church-relations committee to seek understanding and friendly contacts with “other Mennonite groups as well as with non-Mennonite churches and inter-church agencies.”

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church has historically avoided pronouncements on non-ecclesiastical matters. At its thirty-second General Assembly last month in Portland, Oregon, however, a spokesman noted that “it felt compelled” to express opposition to a bill calling for national elections on Sunday. “Activities such as political elections on the Lord’s Day are contrary to the constitution of this church and of many other Christian churches in our land,” a resolution declared.

The Orthodox Presbyterian assembly also adopted a resolution indicating its desire “to serve those in the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. who wish to continue adherence to the historic Christian faith as summarized in the Westminster Standards.”

Miscellany

Membership in North American Lutheran churches climbed over the 9,000,000 mark in 1964, according to a statistical summary released this month by the National Lutheran Council. The 9,002,969 total represents an increase of 1.4 per cent over 1963. For the twentieth consecutive year, the highest numerical increase was made by the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, which accounted for 45.8 per cent of all the new members reported.

Representatives from more than two dozen Canadian religious bodies met in Ottawa last month in the interests of the nation’s forthcoming centennial celebration (1967). The day-long conference was hailed as the most representative gathering of Canadian religious leaders ever held. Only the Jehovah’s Witnesses declined the government’s invitation to attend. Numerous joint and individual projects, including evangelistic crusades and missionary recruitment campaigns by evangelicals, are planned.

Conscientious objector David Ovall returned home to Los Angeles last month after accepting the Army’s offer of a general discharge. Ovall, who belongs to no church, had been fasting in a pacifist protest. (See “Ready to Die,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY. July 30, 1965.)

National Religious Party leaders in Israel gave up efforts to seek enactment of a bill that would have imposed fines for Sabbath violations.

Personalia

Dr. Andre Appel was elected general secretary of the Lutheran World Federation.

The Rev. James D. Ford, a Lutheran, was named cadet chaplain at the U. S. Military Academy, West Point, New York.

The Rev. Edmund P. Clowney was appointed acting president of Westminster Theological Seminary.

The Rev. Richard E. Troup was appointed chairman of the Department of Christian Education of Southeastern Bible College.

They Say

“He did not believe that all non-Catholics would (or should) go to hell. He felt neither self-conscious nor superior about his religion, but simply accepted it as part of his life. He resented the attempt of an earlier biographer to label him as ‘not deeply religious,’ for he faithfully attended Mass each Sunday, even in the midst of fatiguing out-of-state travels when no voter would know whether he attended services or not. But not once in eleven years—despite all our discussions of church-state affairs—did he ever disclose his personal views on man’s relation to God.”—Theodore C. Sorensen, in Kennedy, as excerpted from the forthcoming Harper book by Look.

At age 66, they’re not checking out of the hotel Bible business. But it’s a different movement today, with American classrooms and 71 foreign countries at stake

The Gideons, whose Bible has become a landmark for spiritually hungry Americans, are just as zealous about schoolrooms as hotel rooms. Despite court dictums limiting religion in public schools, Gideons were able to distribute free of charge to the nation’s pupils a record 1.3 million New Testaments in the year ending June 30. The success of the campaign has surprised even the Gideons themselves. So far, they have been the only group to mount such a massive assault.

The hotel heritage hasn’t been forgotten. When Gideons International met in Washington last month, 1,200 Bibles were dedicated for the new $30 million Washington Hilton. Reasoned dapper hotel manager Peter Howard, “Every first-class hotel has Gideon Bibles.”

It used to be a fight to get Bibles into hotels (and still is in most of the seventy-one foreign lands where Gideons work). But today the challenge in America is to meet the need, which is twice the supply.

Perhaps more than any other evangelical cause, the Gideons’ work has won a place in Americana. But the school issue has the potential for jarring this acceptance, and it is pondered at every Gideon cabinet meeting.

The Gideons themselves were a party in a pioneer school case in 1953. The New Jersey Supreme Court decided the Gideons’ New Testament (with Psalms and Proverbs and without helps or commentary) was a “sectarian” book, and barred its distribution through the public school apparatus, even when limited to students who requested Testaments. The idea was later repeated by then Attorney General “Pat” Brown in California and—most recently—last December in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County Court.

It isn’t the law of the land yet, so school projects still abound, particularly in the South and Midwest. But “camps” (Gideonese for local units) are told to shun publicity when they go to school.

Gideons counter the sectarian charge by citing the universality of the Bible and the variety of denominations that supply Gideons. Yet the group is unabashedly Protestant and evangelical, which is no secret in chats with such leading Gideons as:

• Clarence H. Gilkey, Jr., the heavyset, sincere new president, who went to college determined to be a minister. “Shortly after that,” he recounts quietly, “God showed me this was not my calling—in a graphic way. I went blind.” Doctors said that his eyes could not withstand college studies. Now forty-seven and a paint salesman in Butler, Pennsylvania, he can see through thick lenses. The fervor of “a real experience with Christ when I was twelve” has been rechanneled into lay ministries with the Gideons and the American Lutheran Church.

• Jacob Stam, jolly lawyer and leader in a dozen evangelistic causes, who was born in 1899 two months after the Gideons got going. He completed three years as president at this year’s convention and was briskly enlisted as new chairman of the key International Extension Committee. Stam made an unsuccessful bid to get the U. S. Supreme Court to review the New Jersey Supreme Court decision.

• Bill Arey, who in April, 1930, was a thirty-year-old alcoholic bum just out of jail and unable to land a job. He wandered the Atlanta streets for four days in tattered clothes. Then, wallowing in depression, he stole a revolver and sought out an unlocked room in the Piedmont Hotel, bent on suicide. With the gun at his head, he somehow obeyed a last-minute impulse to leave a note for Dad. Unconsciously, he opened a Gideon Bible for something to write on, and these words leaped at him: “God is our refuge and strength.…” Arey says he spent an hour in the room, reading a Bible for the first time, and became a Christian. He is now retired from the vice-presidency of a Southern bonding firm, and despite what doctors consider a terminal case of kidney cancer, he was on hand at street meetings in downtown Washington where various businessmen told of their encounters with God.

The Gideons are as proud of personal evangelism as impersonal witnessing through Bibles strategically planted along the routes of human activity. They say more than 300 persons made professions of faith last year through the work of members. As for Bible placements, files at the new Nashville headquarters are crammed with tales of faith born and death averted.

The keeper of these records is Executive Director M. A. (Joe) Henderson, a silver-tongued Southerner who heads the fulltime staff of twenty-five. This cadre keeps track of nearly two million dollars and four million Scripture placements a year.

Henderson reports that a move from Chicago to Nashville nineteen months ago has whittled administrative costs by $16,000 a year—this despite inflation and a 50 per cent increase in mail. The savings are used to buy more Scriptures.

Though Gideons don’t like to be called a “society,” their very name has a lodge-like air. Rights to that name (taken from the Israelite hero in Judges 6–8) and the flaming-pitcher emblem are guarded jealously.

Like that of a lodge, membership in the Gideons is selective, with strict screening on belief as well as business. The group’s stated aim is “to win men and women for the Lord Jesus Christ,” and members must have received Christ as “their personal Saviour.” Eastern Orthodox and Adventist adherents are kept out, as are all clergymen. Membership is limited to a business elite—owners, salesmen, or those on a list of other allowable professions. The idea is to get men already honed by business to be incisive Gideons.

In recent years, membership growth has been stimulated from the top through the national office’s New Member Plan, a recruiting effort that requires months per city and moves to Boston in September.

The traditional method—old members choosing new—has meant, among other things, that Negroes don’t become Gideons in the South. In the North, apparently, Negroes aren’t interested. Personable John T. Leeson III, former Plan director, said that in the last target city, Detroit, hundreds of churches were asked to provide prospects—liberal and conservative, white and Negro. But of the 100 who finally joined, none were Negroes.

The Southern Gideons’ approach is “common sense,” Leeson explains. Not that they wouldn’t welcome Negroes, but they’re afraid integration would offend local churches. After all, the Gideons depend on church offerings for the bulk of their Bible funds. That is also why members sent to churches to drum up support are coached on such things as wearing shiny shoes and smiles.

Leeson now manages the overseas wing. Fully one-sixth of the 5,500 internationals were signed up in the past year by an expanded version of the domestic Plan. The Gideons’ globe now ranges from New Zealand to the Faeroe Islands (the newest camp, founded in June). One of the most arresting convention attractions was reports from the thirty-one foreign delegates.

Priority is being put on 40,000 New Testaments in Vietnamese for native soldiers. Nguyen Van-My, secretary of the Saigon camp, fought through his halting command of English to tell the convention banquet of “hundreds of soldiers who go into eternity daily without knowing Jesus Christ.” Leonard D. Crimp, former vice-president of H. J. Heinz in Canada and president of Canadian Gideons, added that Van-My and six other “big little men” in Saigon had distributed 13,000 Scriptures in a year. Impressed, the audience of 1,700 contributed $18,500.

From the British Isles, Arthur Rousham, national secretary, reported that government schools are “wide open” to Bibles except for one problem: “Headmasters increasingly want a modern translation.… We need to give the youngsters the Bible in their own language.” But the Britons feel obligated to follow the wishes of their American progenitors. “American Gideons are opposed to modern translations to a remarkable degree,” he laments. “It’s a pity.”

Pioneer Gideons used the American Standard Version, but the King James Bible later become sacrosanct because: (1) it’s cheaper, (2) it’s the most widely used translation, and (3) the Revised Standard Version, the most likely successor, was produced by a team on which some members didn’t believe in word-for-word inspiration of the Scriptures.

Conditions could alter this conservatism, and even force use of a version acceptable to Catholics—a thought that makes many Gideons blanch. The matter could depend on how far the school perimeters shrink.

Stam’s final report as president criticized the courts for reinterpreting the Constitution to fit “their ideas of what should be modern practice.” If schools refuse Testaments, he advises, don’t press the issue, but “withdraw and pray.”

And he has other advice, with an eye co*cked to the future: “We should be praying for wisdom to do some planning in advance as to what methods or plans to use if and when the doors may be closed.”

The Gospel Via Opera

The power of sacred opera as an evangelical art form was evident in West Coast performances last month of Jerome Hines’s I Am the Way, which broke all attendance records for forty-one years at the Redlands (California) Bowl. Enthusiasts hope the opera, which also played to capacity crowds in San Diego, will be invited next year to the Los Angeles Music Center with full orchestra.

Although the opera consists of ten half-hour scenes, only four were presented this summer. The conversion of the singer taking the role of Mary Magdalene was a striking development during the Redlands performance. She came to Hines, famous Metropolitan Opera basso, tearfully acknowledging she was not a believer, and they knelt in prayer behind the stage.

Hines’s ambition in composing such operas is to raise the level of Christianity in the arts and of the arts in Christianity. I Am the Way has been performed forty-five times in nine years, with Hines often singing the role of Jesus Christ. Many viewers think it has television possibilities.

The present stage director, Derek De Cambra, was converted in Newark in 1960 during the Last Supper scene. In Farmingdale, Long Island, more recently, a singer cast in the role of Lazarus was converted.

Hines, after his own conversion, ministered part-time for twelve years in Skid Row situations “as an apprenticeship.” His only music study was two years of piano. He then began writing music to Scripture and has now produced a moving operatic masterpiece.

CARL F. H. HENRY

To ‘Highlight’ The Spirit’S Role

United Presbyterians and Roman Catholics held their first formal ecumenical encounter July 27 in Washington and decided that “reform and renewal” should be the theme for future discussions. Chief item on the agenda was the formation of this diffuse agenda for the next meeting. The twenty participants said they wanted to avoid “premature conclusions,” and no details of the closed-door discussions were announced. It was the third in a series of meetings between Catholics and Protestant denominations, but the first to include women.

The clergymen and laymen not only talked but also worshiped together in a small colonial chapel of Georgetown Presbyterian Church. Dr. Marion de Velder, stated clerk of the Reformed Church in America and a “participating observer,” prayed, “Deliver us from sectarianism.” The priests, ministers, and laymen also joined in an enthusiastic rendition of “Holy, Holy, Holy.”

Beaming Bishop Ernest L. Unterkoefler of Charleston, leader of the Catholics, said everyone “felt a bond of friendship and unity.” He said the same delegations might next meet in November, which would mean the Catholics would have to leave the Vatican Council. It was the council’s Decree on Ecumenism of last November that sparked the series of talks and provided the “reform and renewal” slogan prominent at the Washington meeting.

A formal statement after the day-long conference said the two groups are seeking to “highlight … the role of the Holy Spirit, and to search for signs of His activity within the Church … and in a fresh encounter with what He is saying to us through the voice of the secular world.” As an example, spokesman agreed that the Holy Spirit is speaking in the current racial revolution.

The future agendas will encompass “doctrine, worship and social action,” the statement said.

De Velder was joined as an observer by Dr. James A. Millard, Jr., stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern). Monsignor William W. Baum of Washington, director of the Bishops’ Commission for Ecumenical Affairs, said the Catholics hope next to meet with leaders of Eastern Orthodoxy and the National Council of Churches.

From Headhunter To Soul-Winner

Tariri, Chief of Seven Rivers in the jungles of Peru, admits he has beheaded at least ten chiefs of his own rank and twenty of their warrior followers.

“But now that I follow Christ,” he says, “I no longer kill and hate. I only want to love people and tell them about Jesus.”

The chief was brought from the jungles by Wycliffe Bible Translators to testify to the transforming power of Christ in his life.

He participated in the Wycliffe Day program, which coincided with Peruvian Independence Day, at the New York World’s Fair, and spoke in New York, Philadelphia, Charlotte, and Dallas before returning to Peru August 12.

Wycliffe missionaries introduced Christ to Tariri and his people in the Shapra group of the Candoshi tribe some fifteen years ago, as they learned the Indian dialect and translated the Bible into the native language.

“The ancients told us about a God who sent a great flood to destroy men,” the chief said in an interview in Dallas. “We knew God was good and holy, but we did not know he was coming to earth. We had no idea that we could know God or, even if we could, that we would be able to live good enough to please him.”

The chief accepted Christ about twelve years ago. As the gospel message was unfolded to him, he wondered how he could follow someone who was dead. Then the vital truth of Christ’s resurrection dawned upon him.

One day as he returned from the hunt, having pondered for hours these new revelations, Miss Lorrie Anderson, a Wycliffe missionary, read to him John 1:12, which she had just rendered into the chief’s language.

She asked him: “When are you going to become a child of God?” He answered, “I want to become one now.”

“Now that I love Jesus I can live a good life,” Tariri said after telling of his conversion. The glow on his face outshone his crown of brilliant red and yellow toucan feathers.

Of the 2,000 Shapras, the Wycliffe missionaries, Miss Anderson and Miss Doris Cox, know about 600. Of these, 150 to 200 have been converted, partly as a result of Tariri’s testimony.

The arrival of the Gospel already has had a tremendous influence on life in Tariri’s jungle: there is far less killing and hatred. Still, the chief believes the full impact of Christianity will come in future generations. It is hard for tribesmen to break with ancient customs, he explained, but the young receive Christ more readily.

The chief displayed keen observations about American culture. He perceived that metal was a fundamental difference between his Stone Age world and that of the United States.

He also believes Americans are too preoccupied with pleasure-seeking and material things. “How can they have so much that God has given them and not think about God?” he wondered.

JIMMIE R. COX

Evolution: What Are The Issues?

In the historic English university town of Oxford over a century ago, T. H. Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce debated the scientific and religious implications of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species. The reverberations have scarcely ceased. This summer, in the shadow of history, scientists with evangelical loyalties met to consider the challenge offered to the Gospel by a modern, secular, science-conditioned culture. Their aim was to formulate positive principles of a Christian philosophy of science and to clear the ground of misconceptions on both sides as to the exact issues.

The sponsoring body was the Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship, affiliated with British Inter-Varsity Fellowship, and the driving force behind the project a group of professional men in Canada. The program committee was headed by Professor D. M. Mackay of England, known for his competence in physics, information theory, and philosophy. About thirty-five specialists from ten countries were present. Most of them had prepared papers and circulated them among the other participants beforehand. No joint statement was issued, but a compilation of the papers and a distilled version of the discussion will be put into book form by Dr. Malcolm Jeeves at Cambridge. Some of the participants will also be publishing their papers separately.

Fifty hours of discussion over nine days polarized between general principles relating science to theology, and technical issues raised in one or a cluster of disciplines. The range of topics: determinism, cybernetics, cosmology, origins, language analysis, hermeneutics, evolution, religious psychology.

The key problem was how one should conceive of the relation between the sovereign God and the natural creation. The consensus was, in the view of this observer, as follows:

The extremes of deism and a “god-of-the-gaps” on the one hand, and pantheism and naturalism on the other, were studiously avoided. Since the entire space-time universe is the product of God’s creative word and is at every single point upheld in existence by him, Christians cannot hold to a piecemeal conception of sovereignty. A miracle alters the mode but not the factof divine activity. The term “creation” does not describe a mechanism by which our world order reached its present form: it is a relationship rather than a past event. The so called laws of nature are nothing more or less than the principles along which God “wills” the universe to proceed moment by moment. It is the domain of science to explore the mechanisms God has established in his universe. There are no limits to its investigations, and no one may determine in advance the results. The word “creation” should not be applied to gaps in our scientific description of the past. Yet it is important to remain self-critical and cautious in extrapolating theories, especially regarding the remote past which no one observed, and to resist the demonic temptation of worshiping the current idols of the “church scientific.” “Creation” does not offer us explanations in biology, anthropology, or geology. It speaks of a dependency of the natural order upon God, and its ultimate rationality found only in his purposes.

Conference participants accordingly felt that Christians have no stake in particular conclusions reached under the empirical method. For science treats nature from its mechanical and organic phases, and its descriptions are complementary, not competitive, to the theological understanding. There is a Christian manner of teaching geology or biology, but there is no Christian geology or biology. There is no discrepancy between admitting the truth of creation and providing a biological model that explains the origin of life.

Two views came under fire in a discussion on evolution: fundamentalism, which confounds creation with instantaneous appearance and confuses evolution with naturalism, and scientism (as represented, for example, by Julian Huxley and Teilhard de Chardin), which mocks both science and philosophy.

In the quest for a new apologetic to meet the challenge of the technocratic age, members sought a sharp cutting edge. They saw that evolution cannot offer any clue from mere biological development as to the meaning or value of human life. All the bridges humanism attempts to build across the chasm between science and values eventually collapse. The Christian cannot put forward objectively valid proofs for commitment to Jesus Christ. But he can insist that every non-Christian face up honestly to his own commitments, within which so often meaningful life is unsupportable.

The conference closed with discussion on how to tear down false images of scientism and build up a biblical understanding of reality.

CLARK H. PINNOCK

Standing Fast In Freedom

The bells of more than eighty German Evangelical churches rang out last month to welcome the twelfth Kirchentag to Cologne. Said the new president, Dr. Richard von Weizsäcker: “Anyone can take part and listen, praise, criticize and cooperate.… Here every speaker and member of a discussion group speaks for himself.” Referring to the movement’s task in a divided Germany, he said that no other organization had been so much affected by the absolute division of the country in 1961. Where people had before come from both parts of Germany, this was no longer possible. The Kirchentag “can now no more surmount the Wall than we ourselves can.… And the political handling of the German question is not the work of the Kirchentag.”

The president nonetheless urged the necessity for clarifying how this division came about, what it means for Germans today, and what practical possibilities there are for cooperation and help. In this connection it might be added that in 1965 the synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKID) had for the first time to have separate meetings in Magdeburg and Frankfurt, for Eastern and Western members respectively.

The Kirchentag, of which the main theme this year was In der Freiheit bestehen (“Stand Fast in Freedom”), offered the customary variegated fare: lectures, Bible studies, sermons, discussions, evening events, an extensive cultural program (including Arthur Miller and Jean-Paul Sartre plays), and what an official press release called “the possibility of private discussion with a priest.” One of the opening services featured jazz-type music.

This was not the only departure from the conventional. In connection with a radical address by Dr. Dorothee Sölle of the University of Cologne (who candidly acknowledged that she stood outside the Church), the working, group discussing church reform circulated to members a series of questions about “unchurchly people.” One query ran: “But don’t they belong to Christ too, since they hope and love?” A young Scot from Glasgow stood up to point out that Paul had in First Corinthians 13 said something about faith, too.

Other impressive things about this Kirchentag included: the increased number of youths in their teens and twenties; sessions and discussions which testified that the haunting concern of Germans regarding the Jewish people is still there as it was at Dortmund in 1963 and at earlier gatherings (the assembly approved what the Vatican Council had done); the absence of representation from East Germany; growing interest in the more intellectual type of meeting, which trend (coupled with an emphasis on higher biblical criticism) may have contributed to the non-appearance of certain more “fundamentalist” sections in West Germany; several joint Protestant-Catholic church services, at one of which Cardinal Frings was present; the references to Protestant Christians as “a vanishing minority,” though Cologne itself has more than doubled its pre-war Protestant population of 200,000.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Harassment In Israel

A mob of young zealots broke into the home of a Hebrew Christian family in Haifa, Israel, this month. They damaged furnishings and threatened the occupants, demanding that they cease propagating the Christian faith.

The father, 62-year-old Peter Gutkind, came from Poland seven years ago. He is a representative of the American Board of Missions to the Jews.

Gutkind said the youths, members of a fanatical Yeshiva religious sect, harassed his family for ten days. Six of the demonstrators were arrested, but Gutkind claimed that police had not given him adequate protection.

What is religion’s role in ‘Great Society’ program for labor, welfare, education?

A legislative blitzkrieg hit the Capitol this summer. It pleased many churchmen who support welfare causes, but long-range implications of government’s increasing involvement were disquieting to others.

Bills approved—or likely to be—covered voting rights, public housing, Medicare, immigration, poverty-program extension, and aid to higher education.

When the dust had settled, one casualty was the Senate attempt to block reapportionment of state legislatures on the “one man, one vote” principle. The National Council of Churches had testified against the bill.

Another casualty, in the House, was a religious exemption in the repeal of the “right to work” law. But the Senate labor subcommittee voted August 12 to include such an exemption in its version of the bill.

With the new federal thrusts, Baptists are pondering what to do about college aid, and Lutherans are asking aloud whether churches still belong in welfare work at all.

And strict church-state separationists are going to court in Kansas City, challenging use of Catholic schools for pre-school training under the anti-poverty program.

That project, however, is paled by a $7 million blockbuster in Mississippi, described by Director R. Sargent Shriver of the Office of Economic Opportunity as the “boldest” project yet. A non-profit corporation formed by the Catholic Diocese of Natchez-Jackson plans to train 25,000 adults now considered unemployable.

About 100 religious organizations already have enlisted in the war on poverty. John J. Adams, lawyer in the Kansas City suit for Americans United for Separation of Church and State,¹The agency is separating the “Protestants and Other” from the front of its name. said the poverty bill was rushed through without proper scrutiny of church-state issues.

Rep. John H. Buchanan (R.-Ala.), a Southern Baptist minister, sought unsuccessfully to get an amendment to the law barring religious groups from grants.

The House’s blanket right-to-work repeal would affect many Seventh-day Adventists and others whose faith forbids union membership. Rep. Edith Green (D.-Ore.), a strong labor supporter, sponsored the exemption and told the House that national legislation is needed because Adventists “often run up against a stone wall” when negotiating with locals. Under her plan, and the Senate proposal, objectors would contribute to non-religious charities in lieu of dues.

A furor developed when the three-man First Presidency of the Latter-Day Saints wrote Mormon congressmen asking votes against repeal because it violated man’s “right to free agency.” But the legislators asserted their own free agency and protested the Presidency’s move.

In contrast to House action on “right to work,” the Medicare bill signed by President Johnson included careful safeguards for minorities. Christian Scientists will get virtually the same coverage in their sanitoria as is provided for conventional institutions. Old Order Amish and other sects that believe insurance shows lack of faith are now freed from all Social Security assessments.

The bill also reopened until next April 1 the deadline for ministers to elect coverage. And it included a “living in sin” amendment that allows widows to keep Social Security benefits if they remarry. Previously, many couples had cohabited without marriage to keep the payments rolling in.

Growing dimensions of church-state interaction are dramatized in a study by the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs that shows aid is available to churches under at least 115 current federal programs.

Nearly half of these involve education, and Dr. C. Emanuel Carlson, committee director, said Baptists are rethinking not just aid as such, but whether distinctly Baptist schools should assume broader functions. He noted that the proposed higher education bill views colleges as wide-ranging community service centers.

For Lutherans, welfare is the problem. Missouri Synod leaders will confer in Chicago September 16–17 to consider the church’s role in the light of the poverty, housing and medical care programs. Synod self-examination is spurred also by plans to merge welfare efforts with other Lutheran groups.

Dr. Henry F. Wind, executive secretary of Missouri Synod’s welfare board, said this month that “churches are beginning to wonder whether they still have a place in the welfare field,” especially administration. If members don’t provide money, says James C. Cross, Wind’s assistant, “we are driving our agencies into the arms of the government.”

Crime And Cigarettes

President Johnson has declared another war—on crime. He named a national crime commission to spend eighteen months deciding what to do about the growing problem. The nineteen-member panel, headed by Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, includes no clergymen.

The commission was established the same day the FBI reported that major crimes increased 13 per cent during 1964. The study is to consider prevention and rehabilitation as well as enforcement.

The President also signed a bill requiring all cigarette packs, after January 1, to warn that “cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health.”

The measure is not considered a major blow to tobacco interests, since they could have fared worse if regulation had been left to the Federal Trade Commission.

The Unsettling War

Viet Nam dominated August’s news. As President Johnson sent 50,000 more soldiers to Viet Nam with his right hand and floated a new peace balloon with his left, the war bothered Protestant leaders.

The National Council of Churches, paying its customary attention to headlines, formed a committee to work up a new policy statement on Viet Nam. The study group is headed by President Arthur S. Flemming of the University of Oregon, NCC vice-president and former secretary of health, education, and welfare in the Eisenhower Cabinet.

NCC President Reuben H. Mueller said August 11 as he appointed the committee, “There is no real consensus on Viet Nam among American Christians.”

The difficulties of Christian ministry in the midst of battle were highlighted by the murder last month of a young native pastor in the resettlement town of Le Thanh, near South Viet Nam’s border with Cambodia. The town was “turned over” to the Viet Cong as too difficult to defend. The pastor, unwilling to leave his flock, was slain by Red terrorists.

But there is a brighter side. A month-long series of tent meetings in the university town of Hue repeatedly drew overflow crowds. The location was strategic—right in the center of a city just 100 kilometers from the seventeenth parallel—as was the time, the traditional celebration of Buddha’s birthday.

The Rev. Gordon Cathey, minister of Saigon’s International Protestant Church, returning to the United States after his first year there, expressed cautious optimism. Cathey, who hitched a ride across the Pacific with retiring Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, said the war has created new spiritual introspection among the Vietnamese and the American soldiers who are filling the capital city to overflowing. Many Vietnamese now view both Buddhism and Roman Catholicism as political movements, he said, which has left a new opening for Protestant advance.

The NCC’s special study committee probably won’t be ready to formulate a new policy statement on the war until sometime this fall.

The council’s current position—a general endorsem*nt of America’s hopes for negotiations with United Nations assistance—necessitated profuse disclaimers when the NCC hosted five Japanese pacifists last month. The five, claiming to speak for the bulk of Japanese Protestants, visited several cities to pray with U. S. Protestants and to present their views on foreign relations.

In the opinion of this delegation, oriented to the Socialist view of Red China as a benign tigress, America should stop bombing North Viet Nam immediately, negotiate with the Viet Cong and pull out all troops.

The quintet landed in Washington the day President Johnson doubled the draft call and dispatched the new troops to Viet Nam. Nevertheless, in visits to the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, the Japanese thought the Americans seemed more flexible than before, according to Professor Yoshiaki Iizaka, political scientist who was spokesman for the team.

Stars, Stripes, and Evangelism

That American flag flanking Albert Tompkins as he shouts the Gospel to his transient congregation on Times Square is no patriotic ploy. City rules have required it since some asphalt preachers were locked up for losing control of their crowds several years ago. The local Civil Liberties Union, backstopping a Socialist who broke the flag rule, hopes to get it revoked. Some of the evangelists also consider it a rein on their freedom. But Tompkins, a 71-year-old Baptist layman, thinks that “if you don’t have such a requirement, every Communist, every atheist, every Tom, Dick and Harry will get up and preach.” (Photo by Sam Tamashiro)

Iizaka told an audience in Washington that Americans suffer from “self-imposed ignorance about Communism.”

Dr. Vernon L. Ferwerda, head of the NCC’s office in Washington, was agitated by what he considered the Japanese’ naïveté about Communism’s designs in Southeast Asia. But he thought talks with such policy spokesmen as Walter W. Rostow had at least exposed them to an accurate view of American policy. “American pacifists had given them the worst possible view of our policy,” said Ferwerda, who is also a political scientist.

Other members of the Japanese group were Dr. Isamu Omura, moderator of the United Church of Christ; the Rev. Sekikazu Nishimura, a Methodist who is a member of the Japanese Diet and who talked with Ho Chi Minh earlier this year; Professor Kosaku Yamaguchi; and Mrs. Hatsue Nonomiya, peace chairman of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. (War is as big a concern to the Japanese WCTU as liquor, she said.)

No Need To Say It Twice

Colleagues predicted a great future for Edward Heath when for six hundred days, from January, 1948, to October of the following year, he worked as news editor of the Church Times, an influential Anglican weekly. Heath was remembered as one who easily digested facts and figures and who never had to be told anything twice. His coverage of the Anglo-Catholic Congress of 1948 indicated, moreover, he had an understanding of high theological arguments.

Heath, who last month became leader of the British Conservative Party, did have some problems on the Church Times. Ecclesiastical terminology sometimes baffled him, and he was even more bewildered by the schism caused by the creation of the Church of South India. Rival definitions of priest and presbyter caused him some consternation, too.

Speeches he planned to help him on in the political world were often prepared in the office of the Church Times, and on occasion Heath became irritated at being sent on assignments when there were, to him at least, more important matters needing his attention.

Eclipsing the hint of ruthlessness in his makeup were his friendliness, fairness, and generosity. But colleagues of those journalistic days have been puzzled by Heath’s reluctance to mention his stay with them in Who’s Who.

DAVID M. COOMES

Presbyterian Worship: Its Meaning and Method, by Donald Macleod (John Knox, 1965, 152 pp., $3.25), is reviewed by Edward L. R. Elson, minister, The National Presbyterian Church, Washington, D. C.

This book arises out of two pressing needs: first, the need of an adequate textbook for theological education (the last one being C. W. Baird’s Presbyterian Liturgies, published in 1851), and second, the need of parish ministers for a convenient reference manual. Dr. Macleod’s book admirably meets both requirements. On the whole, the book is historically, theologically, liturgically, and functionally authentic.

At the outset the author properly points out that the Presbyterian or Reformed church, when true to itself, is a liturgical church: “The issue in Presbyterian churches is not, nor can it ever be, a matter of liturgical versus a non-liturgical service. The problem has been bad liturgy—shapeless and formless—and the search for proper means by which it might be reformed and improved” (p. 11). Accordingly, Dr. Macleod takes note of the corruption and distortions that have come into Presbyterian worship from non-Presbyterian sources as the Presbyterian Order of the Holy Catholic Church has moved through the centuries since the great sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation.

In his first chapter, which has to do with “meaning” in worship, the author outlines the theological basis of common worship as being anchored to the creeds and confersions of the Presbyterian Church. He emphasizes the teachings and practices of the Great Reformers, especially John Calvin, Diebold Schwarz, and Martin Bucer. Common worship is the “one distinctive and essential task of the Church,” the high occasion for the people who are the body of Christ.

Based upon the intention of the Great Reformers, Presbyterian worship is catholic in origin and evangelical in spirit. The Church is the whole family of God’s people, redeemed by Christ, gathered around the table over which the living Christ presides as host and feeds his people by Word and sacrament. In this worship, the Word of God from Scriptures and the Word mediated to the people by the sermon are relieved of the medieval practice of prayers to saints, exultation of the Virgin, and the mass as a sacrifice. Presbyterian worship restores both the sermon and the spirit and practice of the Upper Room. John Calvin and other Great Reformers of the sixteenth century doubtless would be appalled at what they might observe on entering some contemporary churches. For What they might observe is not what they intended—one holy catholic and apostolic church reformed. Dr. Macleod recovers the Presbyterian heritage, interprets its meaning, and points the way for valid Reformed worship today.

The second chapter outlines worship as including preparation, the liturgy of the Word, the response by offering and sacrament, the prayers, the benediction, and reverent withdrawal. The author enhances this discussion with many practical suggestions. Another chapter has to do with the sacrament of baptism as the symbolic act of the new life in Christ and the admission badge for a member of the church. Dr. Macleod’s chapter on the Lord’s Supper is one of his chief contributions. The actions by minister and people are seen in proper sequence, and the practical suggestions for ruling elders and musicians are very helpful. We wish there could be a renewal of the practice of the preparatory service, which in its own way was the Protestant equivalent of the confessional.

There are chapters on weddings and funerals which, though in part elemental, contain many profitable instructions for the elimination of non-ecclesiastical procedures. Throughout the book the author touches upon many overlooked little items that can add to the refinement of the minister and the people at worship.

The discussion of the minister’s vestments is helpful. In the Reformation, sacerdotal and eucharistic vestments were discarded and the cassock retained as the basic dress, along with the “Geneva gown” for the service. This was an essential part of the Reformation. Dr. Macleod’s comments on the use of stole, scarf, or tippet need further clarification.

The book contains a glossary of terms that is sufficiently inclusive for Presbyterian churches, and an ample bibliography. The author is familiar with the vast number of works on various aspects of worship, and he draws upon his bibliography in almost every paragraph. Indeed, though he writes precisely and clearly, Dr. Macleod’s book would read more easily with more of Macleod and less of his sources.

This book is thorough in concept, structure, movement, and expression. There are inspiring passages for the active pastor. Let us hope that it will be used to improve both the understanding and the practice of worship where it is lax or defective, and to bring deepened appreciation where Presbyterian worship is already authentic. Its title, Presbyterian Worship, will not limit its usefulness to that family of churches. It ought to and will appear in the studies of pastors and teachers in many denominations.

Trimmed To Fit The Task

The Office of Bishop in Methodism: Its History and Development, by Gerald F. Moede (Abingdon, 1964, 250 pp., $6.50), is reviewed by Gerald Kennedy, Bishop of the Los Angeles Area, The Methodist Church, Los Angeles, California.

When Methodism was founded as an independent church in America, it separated from John Wesley’s control. It established general superintendents with power to direct and supervise the ministers and their work. These men soon came to be called “bishops,” and the Methodist episcopacy was established and became, in many ways, a unique office. While Wesley was to all intent and purposes a bishop, he shied away from the title, probably because of some unfortunate experiences with bishops in the Church of England. In a letter to Francis Asbury, the first Methodist bishop in America, he wrote: “Men may call me a knave or a fool, a rascal, a scoundrel, and I am content; but they shall never by my consent call me Bishop!” That is plain enough.

Gerald F. Moede has written a history of the development and changes in this office from the beginning to the present. It is a good, scholarly job that will please students of church history. Yet its style is easy enough to carry the interest not only of specialists and experts in the field but also of serious-minded laymen. And in discussing one office in the Methodist Church, the author tells the wider story of Methodism. For the episcopacy has been the center of the church’s life, and in the conflicts around it, the main advances and modifications of Methodism are apparent.

There is, for one thing, the power struggle and the decisions concerning final authority. Over the years the principle was established that the General Conference is the ultimate authority in the Methodist Church and that the bishops are subject to its directions and restrictions. This was done gradually and in a sense naturally, as the church adjusted its life to the new land. It is quite clear that the practical nature of Wesley carried over into the life of his spiritual children who separated themselves from him. The main thing was to get the job done, and because Methodist bishops were important for this accomplishment, their office has grown and been trimmed to fit this main task. The Methodist doctrine of the itineracy has left the appointment of ministers in the hands of the bishops.

It is significant that the episcopal office was at the center of the church’s growing recognition of itself as a world church. The concept of “missionary” bishops proved inadequate, and Moede shows how the polity was adapted to recognize Methodists in all countries as of equal status. Methodist bishops find their equal status affirmed by membership in the Council of Bishops with the privilege of voting on all matters affecting all parts of the church. Moede calls one of the sections of his book “A True International Methodist Episcopacy.”

But the place toward where all of this is pointing, according to the author, is union with the Anglicans. He believes that this is God’s will and that the episcopacy is the first hurdle that must be leaped. I got the impression that nothing is important enough to stand in the way and that Methodists ought to yield gladly to the Anglican doctrine of “apostolic succession.” While both traditions would benefit from union, it is plain enough that the adjustment would be pretty much on the Methodist side. Personally, I would find it very easy to accept consecration or ordination from any other tradition, if it would help the others to receive me as a brother. I remember that the late Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam said the same thing to an Anglican bishop one time. But the answer was that he not only must go through the ceremony but also must believe that something important has happened. This is where I would find the difficulty, because, like Wesley. I do not believe it has ever been proved, and, even if it were proved, I do not think it is very important. Certainly it is not essential.

Indeed, I think it may be true that the Methodist doctrine of the episcopacy may be nearer the New Testament thought and practice than the later doctrine of “apostolic succession.” But this young man is zealous for the cause of union, and he wants Methodists to put no stumbling block in the way. I do not find myself quite so anxious to discard something that works for a new arrangement that is theoretically enticing but still untried.

GERALD KENNEDY

She Returned To Tell

Beyond All Reason, by Morag Coate (Lippincott, 1964, 227 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Ralph Heynen, hospital pastor, Pine Rest Christian Hospital, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

This is an autobiography of a person who, having faced and overcome the frightening experience of schizophrenia, is now able to tell in a graphic way of the struggles of her soul. Many of us have observed persons with delusions and hallucinations, but it is particularly valuable to have a first-hand account of such experiences.

In the second half of the book the author interprets many of her feelings and thoughts, laying special emphasis on the spiritual factors in her illness. She had moved away from the “safer realms of organized religion” and gradually drifted off into rationalism. At the onset of her first attack she felt that she was given special powers to commune with God, and even with the spirits of the dead. But she had a problem of communication: God did not speak to her. She then lost the solace of her childhood faith and moved through spiritual doubts to an open denial of the existence of God.

She had five schizophrenic breaks in fourteen years. During the last hospitalization she established a very warm therapeutic relationship with her psychiatrist and gradually was led back to sanity. When she recovered, she found a strange existential view of religion. “I may convince myself that I do not believe there is a God, but I find that I love him still.”

There are many books on schizophrenia, but few so well describe the terrifying feelings and thoughts that are part of a schizophrenic break. Miss Coate’s constructive comments on psychiatrists, psychologists, hospital chaplains, nurses, and mental hospitals show the deep desire of a patient to be treated as a real person.

This absorbing and well-written book should interest all pastors, as well as psychiatrists, psychologists, and others concerned with mental health. Although we would not agree with her conclusions on religion, the author makes an important contribution to the subject of the relation between religion and psychiatry.

RALPH HEYNEN

Feel The Winds Blow

Journal of a Soul, by Pope John XXIII (G. Chapman, 1964, 453 pp., 42s. [also by McGraw-Hill, $7.95]), is reviewed by Angus W. Morrison, minister, St. Ninian’s Priory Church, Whithorn, Scotland.

This is a good book, well illustrated, well translated, well compiled. It is neither an autobiography nor a balanced collection of material for a biography. The “Journal” is two-thirds of the book, and this is a spiritual diary sometimes full, sometimes scanty. Half of it covers the years of formation, 1895–1904, and the other half the long working life, 1905–63. The last third of the book contains spiritual testaments, considerations, maxims, and, above all, prayers. There is a full chronology. The book is a model of its kind, but the impression Pope John has made on the world will give it wider range.

The whole volume is alive with invocations, to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, to his “Fathers in God.” Without them, and without the warm sunshine and shade, the yoke of the seminarist would have been heavy indeed. “Sic decet …” said the decree of Trent, in establishing the system of clergy training: “Thus it is fitting in every way that clergy … should so order their lives and habits that in their dress, gestures, gait, conversation and all other matters they show nothing that is not grave, controlled and full of religious feeling; and let them also avoid minor faults which in them would be very great.…” Obedience does not always bring peace, in its fullest sense, to men under discipline; but the conjunction “Obedientia et Pax” can be seen from these pages to have been a rightly chosen motto of life. With obedience to the rule came obedience to military service, to “monotonous years” at apostolic delegations, to old age, to “allowing others to dress me.”

There are few references to world events. In 1903 he is at Rome when King Edward VII and Emperor William have papal audiences within days of each other; to say that the latter was “willy-nilly” a source of distraction may be the translator’s joke, though in the Johannine spirit. But the echoes of war are for the reader to supply. One might catch a change of note when we reach the years after the Second World War in France; perhaps he feels exposed to a colder wind within the church than among the Muslims and schismatics of the East. Those same winds were blowing in industrial Milan: may all the successors to the “Chair of Peter” feel them also!

If we are grateful for the inspiration that brought the Second Vatican Council to birth, we might reasonably include this spiritual diary in our background reading. Its author, looking on his first writings some sixty years after “as if they had been written by someone else,” blessed the Lord for them.

ANGUS W. MORRISON

Good Critique

Toward a Theology of History, by J. V. Langmead Casserley (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965, 238 pp., $6), is reviewed by C. Gregg Singer, professor of history, Catawba College, Salisbury, North Carolina.

The neo-orthodox and existentialist emphasis on history and its meaning has called forth a more general quest for the answer to the meaning of history. Many of these efforts are of little value because they proceed on the assumption that the meaning of history is to be found within the stream of human events; that is, that history supplies its own meaning. Dr. Casserley is to be commended for repudiating this assumption and for looking for the meaning of the human past in theology. He rightly sees all these other approaches as misleading and futile.

He takes the positivists and the behaviorists to task for their failure to interpret the facts of history, and he also rejects the approach of Bultmann and his school because they fail to give an adequate historical foundation for biblical revelation. Although he pays high tribute to Toynbee’s Study of History as the best approach to the problem of the meaning of history since Augustine’s City of God, he also criticizes him for sharing some of the weaknesses of Spengler and for leaning too heavily on the position assumed by the comparative religionists. Casserley is at his best in his careful criticisms of the various contemporary schools of historical interpretation.

Although the author rightly sees that the real key to the understanding of history is to be found in the theological approach, it is at this very point that his own weaknesses begin to appear. The basic weakness is apparent in the first pages, where we find a denial of the orthodox view of revelation and of the inspiration of the Scriptures. Insisting that his view of revelation is not that of neo-orthodoxy, he nevertheless holds that the Scriptures do not teach doctrines but only present the revealing acts of God by which he becomes known to man. On the other hand he rejects the favorite cliché of the neo-orthodox school that revelation is non-propositional in form and prefers the term “non-oracular” to describe his view of revelation, asserting that the idea of an oracular revelation from God is a scandal.

This nebulous view of the authority of the Scriptures allows Casserley quite a bit of freedom in his interpretation of the content of the biblical message, and he uses this freedom to reject the orthodox doctrine of creation in favor of the theory of evolution and the idea that the account of Adam and Eve is a myth (despite his insistence elsewhere that revelation must take place through historical events).

The author does set forth a theology of history (particularly on pages 152 to 185), which he builds around the concepts of sin, eschatology, time and eternity, and freedom. But it leaves much to be desired and will be quite unacceptable to evangelicals in general. In his theology he fails to do justice to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, and he falls far short of the biblical position on the sovereignty of God, human sin, election, and the second coming of Jesus Christ.

The real value of this work lies in its criticisms of contemporary approaches to the meaning of history apart from the Scriptures. This reviewer could wish that the author had built upon the sure foundation of the inspired Scriptures in his effort to correct current philosophies of history which he rightly regards as false.

C. GREGG SINGER

Preaching Is Bifocal

Preaching To Be Understood: The Warrack Lectures on Preaching, Church of Scotland, by James T. Cleland (Abingdon, 1965, 128 pp., $2.75), is reviewed by James D. Robertson, professor of preaching, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.

The 1964 Warrack Lectures on Preaching came from a Scot who is currently professor of preaching and dean of the chapel at Duke University. Here is a stimulating treatment of problems of vital interest to the contemporary pulpit. In our age of many voices, the writer in an opening chapter places strong emphasis on the Word as the activity of the living, personal Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer made known in the Bible, in the Spirit, and in the tradition of the Church. Not everyone, however, will agree with the statement, “The Bible is not the Word of God, but the Bible contains the Word of God” (p. 16). The chapter dealing with sound principles of biblical interpretation is interlaced With witty but conscience-smiting examples of the homiletical sin of eisegesis.

Perhaps the richest part of this slender volume is that which discusses the need for the minister to realize that contemporary preaching is bifocal—it concerns itself with both the historic faith and the people in the pew. Together these constitute the Word. “The Word of God is constantly, in the biblical records, the linking of revelation with a Contemporary Situation” (p. 43). The preacher must understand that his immediate job is to relate the sermon to the hearer, with a conscious purpose in mind. A final chapter seeks to show that communication is possible only when pulpit and pew are aware that each depends on the other. If thorough preparation of the sermon is the sine qua non of the pulpit, earnest, cooperative listening is the responsibility of the pew.

Drawing on his experiences in pastorate and classroom, Dr. Cleland stays close to the daily experiences of today’s minister. Not least commendable in these lectures is his fertility of imagination and wit, which again and again conspire to kindle truth into a flame.

JAMES D. ROBERTSON

End Of The Line?

Hume, Newton and the Design Argument, by Robert H. Hurlbutt, III (University of Nebraska, 1965, 221 pp., $5), is reviewed by Carl F. H. Henry, editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The author’s penetrating thesis is that natural theology and its prime support, the design argument, have reached the end of the line as a logical proof for the traditional supernaturalistic God. He concedes that theology and religion in general do not share the fate of the design argument, since they may be defended on other grounds. Misled, however, by neo-orthodoxy’s skepticism concerning the role of reason in its appeal to revelation, and by linguistic philosophy’s surrender of a cognitive basis for theology, he excludes reason as one of biblical religion’s resources, since the only cognitive justification he allows is empirical and scientific.

CARL F. H. HENRY

A Miss

The Reformation of the Church, edited by Iain Murray (Banner of Truth Trust, 1965, 414 pp., 15s., paperback), is reviewed by Geoffrey S. R. Cox, vicar of Gorsley with Clifford’s Mesne, Gloucestershire, England.

One is sometimes disappointed by the contrast between the promise of a title and its fulfillment. An instance of this is The Reformation of the Church. The blurb boasts such scriptural writers as Martin Luther, William Cunningham, Charles Hodge, and John Owen, and hopes are further raised by the claim that “among the subjects dealt with [my italics] are: The Regulative Principle and Things Indifferent … Episcopacy … New Testament Church Government, etc.” Alas for such hopes!

This “collection of Reformed and Puritan documents on Church issues” purports to be based on “the principle that Scripture is a sufficient and perfect rule for the ordering of the Church of Christ”—the regulative principle of Scripture—but in fact it never submits the question fully to the test of Scripture. It is therefore weak on what should have been its strongest point, the scriptural evidence; and, although intended primarily for the English situation, it never grasps the heart of the English problem. GEOFFREY S. R. COX

How To Serve

Servant of God’s Servants: The Work of a Christian Minister, by Paul M. Miller (Herald Press, 1964, 236 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Gordon J. Spykman, associate professor of Bible, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

This book is not laboriously academic but prevailingly practical. Its claim upon the reading public rests not upon intensive research but upon its broad scope of commentary upon parish service. It is not, however, shallowly pragmatic. The author explores pastoral problems within a sustained biblical-theological framework.

This book’s emphasis is quite consistent with its title, and it is a proper one: the minister is a servant to all God’s servants. Miller’s concept of Christian “servanthood” is, however, free of any syncretistic sell-out of congregational conviction to “worldly” accommodation. Ministerialism is neither jovial fraternalism, nor stuffy professionalism, nor aloof clericalism. The pastor’s calling is to help those servants of God whom he serves to help themselves in the fulfillment of their callings.

Miller reflects a vital awareness of the congregation as a community, a worshiping, serving community. The book is not strong in relating the life of the Christian community to the affairs of the community that surrounds it. But Miller’s organic view of the structures of the Christian Church offers a healthful antidote to the religious individualism all too characteristic of large segments of American Christianity.

This book on pastoral theology grew out of the Conrad Graebel Lectures of 1963. The author introduces himself frankly as a Mennonite, and he orients himself generally to Mennonite church life; yet his perspective is applicable to other communions as well. Many critical readers will question such points as the author’s views on infant innocence and on the universal atonement of Christ, the exclusion of infant baptism, the depreciation of the eucharistic presence of Christ, the view of man as “soul,” the tendency to ecclesiasticize Christian life, and the easy reference to “worldly” culture as secular.

No serious reader will fail, however, to benefit from the many keen biblical-pastoral insights, the pointed exposure of uncritically adopted patterns of parish practice, and the sane advice on the work of the minister.

As a starter or refresher, Miller’s book should prove to be a helpful servant to the servant of God’s servants.

GORDON J. SPYKMAN

Witness At Second

The Bobby Richardson Story, by Bobby Richardson (Revell, 1965, 159 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by L. Nelson Bell, executive editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Now and then there appears on the sports scene an outstanding athlete who is also an outstanding Christian. Such is Bobby Richardson, star second-sacker of the New York Yankees.

The highest tribute that can be paid any Christian comes from those who live with him and see in his daily living the Gospel he professes. This book is a testimony to what Christianity made of Bobby Richardson, a man his associates highly admire.

Ralph Houk, general manager of the Yankees, says: “He is the best second-baseman I have known. In short, he is the type of person I think all fathers would like to see their sons grow up to be.”

Tom Tresh, star outfielder of the Yankees, says, “He is an example of everything fine, not only as an athlete, but as a person.”

Richardson is an unashamed and articulate Christian, blessed with a fine Christian wife and four children. The frankness of his Christian testimony makes this book refreshing and inspiring. L. NELSON BELL

Tears Down Idols

The Greeks and the Gospel, by J. B. Skemp (Carey-Kingsgate Press, 1964, 123 pp., 25s.), is reviewed by J. Neville Birdsall, lecturer in theology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England.

This book presents in publication dress the W. T. Whitley Lectures for 1962. These lectures were founded in 1949 to “encourage Baptist scholarship, primarily in Great Britain.” The first four lectures, which form the first four chapters, were delivered to student audiences; the last chapter, an epilogue, has been specially written for the published work. From this history arise two features of the book: it is written in as simple and unpretentious a way as its subject matter allows, and it is frequently concerned with contemporary and denominational questions in the ecumenical setting. It may very well be that these two inevitable facets will detract from the book’s reputation in circles of pure learning. It will be a pity if this prediction is justified, for the book is founded on the secure scholarship which the tenure of a chair of Greek by the author implies.

If the reviewer has one major complaint and regret, it is that in this book Skemp has not subjected his fellow students of classical antiquity and the Bible to bibliographical bombardment and to the impact of argument in the language and full accouterments of scholarship. It is a book that demands further pursuit of the questions which it raises or reraises. I venture to think that not only the professional scholar will suffer from this defect but that the student still learning the rudiments may also suffer, because his tendency is to accept the printed word rather than to be challenged to examine again the matters under discussion. It should be added that the absence of such features may derive from economic publishing reasons rather than from the desire of the author.

The four lecture chapters deal with the subject primarily in the historical perspective. In the first chapter, the author takes issue with the fashionable dismissal of the Greek dress of the New Testament and the heritage of Greek thought and culture in the Church, forcibly arguing that while the Gospel is evidently not Greek, neither is it Jewish, for both Jew and Greek when encountered in the New Testament have as Christians been baptized into Christ. In the second chapter, he traces the contacts of the “ordinary Greek” with the Gospel, suggesting that he brought to the Church a valuable political awareness and that his often rehearsed vices were offset by some neglected virtues.

The third chapter deals with the “intellectual” Greek and rightly emphasizes the importance of speculative thought in the growth and maintenance of Christian understanding. “If we regard as perversions the Greek influences … we have to deny that the very language and forms of thought in which the New Testament writers wrote are a sufficient vehicle for the word of God” (p. 56). Chapter four deals with the “religious Greek” and is significant for its discussion of resurrection and immortality and of the meaning of baptism in the light of the mysteries. The final chapter summarizes the preceding and urges, though guardedly, the value of Plato for the Christian thinker. One is also refreshed to see emphasis on the Greek heritage of the Eastern Orthodox churches.

In all, Professor Skemp, true to the heritage of learning, is not afraid to challenge shibboleths and to tear down idols, and this he does to open his readers’ eyes to the truth—historical, philosophical, theological, spiritual. In this his book will succeed, and he is to be thanked for it.

J. NEVILLE BIRDSALL

Book Briefs

Two-by-Fours, by Charles M. Schulz and Kenneth F. Hall (Warner, 1965, 40 pp., $1). Whimsical counsel to adults dealing with children in the two-four age group, particularly in relation to church; fortified by two dozen cartoons with captions like: “Just when I was getting strong enough to defend myself, they start telling me about sharing!”

Great Heresies and Church Councils, by Jean Guitton (Harper and Row, 1965, 101 pp., $4). A Roman Catholic philosopher muses over seven crises in the Roman church (the sixth is the Reformation; the seventh, the present day), seeing in all of them a similarity that in the flow of history tightens and concentrates. He detects a receding of the negative element in every heresy, and a converging of the affirmative elements which, under God, may surprise most of us. A kindly spirit and keenly perceptive mind provide provocative reading. A book that is utter delight for the thinking Christian.

A Synoptic Philosophy of Education, by Arthur W. Munk (Abingdon, 1965, 276 pp., $4.50). Dr. Munk’s book is partially described by its title and does not fully live up to its subtitle, A Unified and Adequate Philosophy of Education for Our Times. Eclecticism, particularly when advocated by one so deeply committed to theological liberalism as Dr. Munk, is not the answer to the desperate need for a consistent God-centered and biblically oriented philosophy of education.

Write the Vision!: A Biography of J. Edwin Orr, by A. J. Appasamy (Christian Literature Crusade, 1964, 254 pp., $2). The informative story of thirty years of evangelistic itinerating by the evangelist who left Belfast to purvey the Gospel by bicycle, train, and jet in 140 countries.

Paperbacks

Of Sex and Saints, by Donald F. Tweedie, Jr. (Baker, 1965, 73 pp., $1). The author says much more with much less fuss than most.

The Church of the 21st Century: Prospects and Proposals, by Richard Sommerfeld (Concordia, 1965, 103 pp., $1.50). A critique of the Church by one who loves it. Good reading, especially for laymen.

Declaration of Dependence: Sermons for National Holidays, by John H. Baumgaertner (Concordia, 1965, 135 pp., $2). Good sermons in a category where good sermons come hard.

The Epistle to the Colossians: A Study Manual, by Charles N. Pickell (Baker, 1965, 70 pp., $1.50).

The True Bounds of Christian Freedom, by Samuel Bolton (Banner of Truth Trust, 1964, 230 pp., 4s. 6d.). A discussion of the place of Law in the Christian life. Though first published in 1645, it is remarkably relevant in the current climate of opinion about Law.

A Christian Introduction to Religions of the World, by Johannes G. Vos (Baker, 1965, 79 pp., $1.50). Brief, lucid; good for church study groups.

Anti-Semite and Jew, by Jean-Paul Sartre (Schocken Books, 1965, 153 pp., $1.45). First published in 1946.

The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, by P. T. Forsyth (Eerdmans, 1964, 357 pp., $2.25). Almost a Christian classic.

Invasion Alert: Rising Tides of Aliens in Our Midst, by Mary Barclay Erb (Goetz Company Press, 1965, 100 pp., $1.50). “Documented exposé of the army of aliens and foreign born in our midst.”

Outlines for Preaching, by Walter L. Moore (Broadman, 1965, 80 pp., $1.50). A preacher who profited much from the sermon outlines of others gives some of his own.

Stewardship Illustrations, edited by T. K. Thompson (Prentice-Hall, 1965, 112 pp., $1.50).

The Body of Christ: A New Testament Image of the Church, by Alan Cole; Called to Serve: Ministry and Ministers in the Church, by Michael Green; and Confess Your Sins: The Way of Reconciliation, by John R. W. Stott (Westminster, 1965; 90, 95, and 94 pp.; $1.25 each). Scholarly and biblical. Good reading for both ministers and laymen.

Earlier this year freshmen at Ohio University were forecasting the changes likely to occur before their graduation in 1968. The population of the United States will surpass 200 million. Scientists will have landed a man on the moon and drilled a hole to the center of the earth. Distilled sea water will turn deserts into farmlands, and hurricanes and tornadoes will obey the commands of weather satellites.

President Vernon R. Alden of Ohio University noted that the biggest change will be in what men know. In a single day modern man now undertakes enough research to fill seven complete sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Robert Oppenheimer estimates that half of all the knowledge we have today was acquired over a period of ten thousand years. The remaining half has been acquired in the last fifteen—and this acquisition may be doubled in the next four or five years.

If American college students no longer view 1970 as a target date for Communist takeover and if, despite the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, they fully expect to live out most of their lives in the twenty-first century, there remains one development whose outcome is wholly predictable. Western intellectuals are losing God from their storehouse of knowledge through neglect of the most precious aspect of their heritage. This loss of an articulate relationship to transcendent reality—including changeless truth and fixed values—is stripping human life of a sense of durable meaning, purpose, and destiny. Scientists are spending millions trying to simulate the origin of life, while their fellow human beings still cannot govern the life they already have; immorality seems to escalate as scientific knowledge expands. Neither an infinity of sex nor leisure nor affluence compensates for the gnawing emptiness and dull monotony of sensual gratification. The quest for assurance that human life makes sense, that it has a goal beyond the round of daily cares, that the things that seem to matter more than bread and pleasure are not illusions—this uneasy search is the hallmark of modern living.

The great tragedy of the West is that the universities are not filling this vacuum. Philosophy departments are dominated by teachers who, if their devotion to the ultimacy of the scientific method is sound, ought in the quest for truth to be replaced by scientists. Even some theologians who seem often to be on speaking terms only with themselves (and surely not with God or the laity) are busy burying the Bible. College students are in search of a flag to fly, and long to be conquered by a commanding cause. But if the Christian heritage retains any meaningful challenge in the face of modern problems, few of their campus professors offer the slightest hint that this is so. All the more remarkable, therefore, is the fact that scientists themselves are speaking out as men of devout faith at a moment when a host of non-scientists tend to make science the pretext for their unbelief, and thereby show themselves naïve victims of scientism.

The campus revolution in America today carries ominous overtones. There is evidence that students are sometimes manipulated from outside, as well as confused inside the academic sphere. The serious implications of this manipulation have prompted former Congressman Walter H. Judd to comment that the Viet Nam crisis has brought to light a frightening public evidence of the highly organized apparatus “ready for the day of take-over.” One day 16,000 students showed up in Washington, paraded in protest, then melted away and went home. The promoters had felt the Viet Nam situation was threatening enough to take the risk of surfacing their effectiveness for the purpose of demonstrating. An army general who has been entrusted with the movement of thousands of men was shocked in disbelief over the efficient manipulation of student participants. “The very logistics of such an operation,” he said, “are fantastic.”

The professional agitators are obviously in our midst—smart, devious, and persistent. They capitalize on unrest in many areas of life, and those who become their unknowing dupes become the unwitting agents of national disintegration.

Why have some of our institutions of higher learning, once the very bulwark of the nation, become obstacles to patriotism and national preparedness and defense? Surely there is a connection between this and the fact that most of these institutions, once founded on Christian principles, have now lost their commitment to unchanging truth and fixed values. Deny God his rightful place and the life of the nation is soon destroyed. Ignore God and we shall most certainly find ourselves ignored by him when judgment comes.

Contempt for discipline in the home, in the university, and in the streets is but an elongated shadow of this separation from God.

When one adds the specter of men who manipulate the natural idealism of youth and who organize this into a revolt against virtues on which the nation was founded and by which it became great, he sees that we have reached a time of unquestioned peril. In times like these, institutions of higher learning are needed where God is given his rightful place in every area of life. Unless the student world finds Christ, it may soon discover that it has lost its freedom as well as its faith, and that its forecast of the future would have been sounder had students read the Bible as well as the Communist Manifesto.

It is noteworthy that the student body president at the University of California, Berkeley, made his personal commitment to Christ during the restless days of riot and revolution on the West Coast campus. He has, in fact, now joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ, to carry the good news of true freedom in Christ to other university students in America.

With Religious Liberty For All

The World Council of Churches is to be commended for the strong and clear position on religious liberty adopted by the Executive Committee of its Commission of the Churches on International Affairs at its annual session in New York. The resolution lists seven “essential requirements” of religious liberty. The first asserts that while there is a distinctively Christian basis of religious freedom, there is a civil freedom of religion that Christians not only claim for themselves but recognize as rightfully belonging to all men—of whatever religion or faith, or of none at all. Such freedom, the resolution urges, includes the right to manifest one’s religion in teaching, preaching, worship, and everyday private and public practice. No legal restrictions should be imposed upon this except such as are “solely in the interest of public order.”

The formulated statement is presented as the basis for the development of an international standard of religious liberty. It appeals to the nations of the world to alter their constitutions and their laws wherever necessary so that religious freedom will be a right enjoyed by all men.

The universal granting of religious freedom would be no more than a recognition of every man’s elemental right. This right of a man to be what he chooses before God would also pay rich dividends in the removal of internal causes of national political tensions that often break out into strife and bloodshed.

Adoption of a universal standard of religious liberty would also serve a reconciling purpose between Protestants and Roman Catholics. The WCC’s resolution indicates that members of the Executive Committee of its CCIA “at various times had expressed concern about situations in which Roman Catholicism is the dominant religion.” The action is doubtless intended as a friendly nudge in the ribs of the Second Vatican Council, which last session failed to vote on its own resolution on religious liberty because of differences of opinion over the theological basis of such liberty. The Vatican would do better to speak out on religious liberty even before it can find its theological basis, than by Its silence to undercut what—as late as 1965—it cannot yet theologically justify. Here too it holds true that justice delayed is justice denied.

Confessional Troubles

Many Protestant denominations are re-evaluating their traditional doctrinal positions. The multiplicity of confessional statements from all corners of Christendom seems to equal that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the denominational boundary lines were drawn dividing Romanist, Lutheran, Anglican, and Reformed. While the older statements had teeth in them and were accompanied by the traditional damnamus as a warning to those who dared to disagree, the newer ones have a more friendly tone in their attempt to be more embracing. Conventions adopting the newer statements of faith bend over backwards explaining that there is only a minimum of obligatory nature in them. The lack of any serious confessional commitment is seen in that members of certain denominations are given a choice on which statement of faith will be the norm of their faith—even if such statements are so different as to be obviously contradictory.

A clue to Christendom’s confessional troubles has been given by Dr. Peter Brunner, professor on the Protestant Faculty at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Dr. Brunner claims that confessional troubles are really rooted in a denomination’s attitude to the Scriptures.

In a lecture first given before the Theological Commission of the Lutheran World Federation and later printed in a collection of theological writings in 1963 (Das Bekenntnis im Leben der Kirche), he makes the rather blunt statement that Protestant Christianity already “has lost the concrete authority of the Scriptures.” Because of this fact, it is impossible for the Church to arrive at any consensus on the content of the Gospel. He goes on to say that since the Scriptures are unclear to most Protestants, a binding commitment to any sort of confession is senseless.

Speaking of the situation in Germany, Dr. Brunner points out that the Lutheran churches at the time of the Reformation acceped the christological and trinitarian formulations of the early Church for the sake of the Holy Scriptures. They wanted no new confession but desired only to assent to the true ecumenical tradition of the Church. This confessional commitment, as they understood it, deterred them from uniting with either the Roman Catholics or the Anabaptists.

To correct the present situation within the Church, Dr. Brunner calls upon Christendom to do away with what he calls the “paralysis” of the last two hundred years, during which a rationalistic attitude toward Scripture has degraded confessional statements of the past to mere historical documents. In a rather stern warning that contains its own damnamus, Dr. Brunner says: “If the Lutheran church does not dare to assert the central content of the Gospel in an obligatory way according to the church’s obligatory witness to this apostolic Gospel as it is found on every single page of her Confessions, then she has renounced the Spirit of God, who is looking for an expression of our faithfulness to the apostolic Gospel right here and now in our own historical situation. If we cannot do this, then we have no other choice but to beseech the Spirit of God for His mercy.”

In the inner sanctum of high ecumenical meetings, lack of communication has often been made the scapegoat for confessional difficulties within various denominations. Dr. Brunner puts the blame squarely on the attitude toward Scripture. Confessional confusion and the lack of confessional unity can be traced back to a lack of unity on the Bible. Before another denomination writes and adopts still another “confessional” statement updating or replacing the older traditional ones, perhaps it would be best for member congregations to see whether confessional change is really only symptomatic of deeper problems involving the heart of the Gospel and the authority of Scripture.

Uneasy Doubts In A Free Society

While most Americans stand solidly behind President Johnson’s determination to deter Communist aggression in Viet Nam, it is true also that uneasiness is increasingly evident over both foreign and domestic affairs. The fate of freedom in our time is a mounting concern.

In foreign affairs many Americans feel the present stalemate in Viet Nam is due largely to an inherited national policy of “too little and too late” response to Communist initiative. There is complaint, also, over a disposition in high places to withhold information that the public—in a free society—thinks it has a right to know. Assurances about the duration and success of the Vietnamese struggle have been so frequently altered as to cast doubt upon the reliability of official pronouncements. Most Americans want to get out of Viet Nam as soon as possible. But many are convinced that any withdrawal that yields an inch to Communist control is too soon. They are distressed, moreover, over reports that Russia’s debt to the United Nations may be placed on a voluntary basis while other nations remain obliged to meet their bills.

On the domestic scene anxieties are equally conspicuous. While political leaders commendably wave the flag of freedom in the face of Communist ambition abroad, and commendably secure equal voting rights for all citizens at home, they are too responsive to vested political interests, too alert to propaganda benefits, too one-sidedly sensitive to minority ambitions.

The insistent question is this: Is America canceling the legitimate rights of some to advance the legitimate rights of others? Do politicians face the issues of freedom in a sufficiently broad context?

It is disturbing that the voting rights bill in penalizing irresponsibility in voter registration may override constitutionally guaranteed rights of states to determine the qualification of voters. The week the voting rights bill became law, moreover, the House of Representatives voted to destroy state “right to work” laws. Even the editorially liberal Washington Post spoke against the proposed repeal of Section 14 (b): “We doubt that the time is now ripe, and the vehicle being rushed through Congress is far from being an appropriate one.” While labor leaders retain a stifling grip on workers, and their powerful unions remain free from controls imposed on other corporations, the time may in truth never be ripe.

Freedom of conscience is a precious facet of a free society, which dissolves its own will to win where men must fight abroad for what they fear is not being adequately preserved at home.

Mission Or Omission?

“The Church is mission.” This seemingly harmless, if enigmatical, cliché has become a cornerstone for some and a stumbling block for others. It epitomizes a new philosophy of the Church’s nature and task, a philosophy that shifts emphasis in theology from content to context, and in preaching from individual salvation through faith to social reform through action.

Conceived by leaders within the National Council of Churches, this philosophy is now being implemented by many denominational leaders already sold on its validity. Yet in almost every major denomination there is growing alarm as the implications of this new concept become clear. “Mission, the Christian’s Calling”—the slogan for this year—shelves the historic concept of world missions and personal evangelism in favor of social interest in environmental change. The recommended film for this year deals with race relations; that for next year stresses the implications of poverty in the midst of affluence. This emphasis simply coincides at many points with President Johnson’s vision of the Great Society, and its “gospel” scarcely retains any recognizable connection with apostolic evangelism.

Many sincere Christians long for the Church to recapture the warmth of her first love so that she shall preach, teach, and live Jesus Christ as man’s one hope. Evangelical Protestants are not indifferent to the embodiment of moral values in social structures, but they resist ecclesiastical efforts to make the Church an agency of political power that imposes Christian values by legislative compulsion. Renewed emphasis on the spiritual mission of the Church will inevitably activate the sense of social responsibility among individual Christians. Moreover, it will confute the adolescent notion that unregenerate men are the stuff of which a great society can be fabricated.

Questions, But No Answers

Twenty years after Hiroshima, Pope Paul has voiced the sentiments of most of humanity in decrying the terror and depredation of the first atomic bombing. He described it as an “infernal massacre” and an “outrage against civilization,” and added: “We pray that the world may never again see such a wretched day as that of Hiroshima; that never again may men put their confidence, their calculation and their prestige into such disastrous and dishonorable weapons.”

Pope Paul here raises several important and historic questions which he apparently makes no attempt to answer:

1. Was the horror of the bombing such that it proved terribly mistaken President Truman’s decision—with which Winston Churchill concurred—to use the bomb to end the war?

2. Is the Pope refining the just-war theory traditionally held by Roman Catholics by distinguishing between honorable and dishonorable weapons?

3. Is Pope Paul forgetting that, regrettable as it is, the present “peace” is the result of a “balance of terror” and that in maintaining this peace the world’s leading diplomats are even now putting their “prestige” and “calculation” in “such disastrous and dishonorable weapons”?

Everyone should feel the horror of the devastation and human suffering that have become synonymous with Hiroshima. But this can be expressed in most poignant terms without the accompaniment of a myopic vision of present and painful political realities.

While the Communist sphere is officially committed to evolutionary atheism, the non-Communist world is notably uncommitted to anything

The late twentieth-century warfare of ideas aligns Christian theism and modern atheistic naturalism as the decisive alternatives; intermediary options maintain unstable and impermanent lines of battle. The Communist sphere is officially committed to evolutionary atheism. Meanwhile, the non-Communist world is notably uncommitted to anything; its ruling conviction is neither revelational theism nor dialectical materialism but rather an expanding skepticism. Devotion to the values of empirical science, brotherhood, and justice is affirmed in the loose context of a great variety of speculative views, both naturalistic and supernaturalistic.

The Soviet world regards Christian supernaturalism as an opiate of the masses, that is, as restrictive of revolutionary social change, perhaps largely in view of the role of Russian Orthodoxy in the past, although tactically it tolerates Christianity for its potentiality as a secular social solvent. The Western world, meanwhile, relates itself to Christianity sentimentally rather than merely tactically. While its universities neglect traditional Christian theism, most intellectuals are unable wholly to free themselves from its influence, and their world-life view tends to modify rather than entirely displace the inherited religious tradition. This Western welcome for isolated aspects of the biblical theism and retention of remnants of the traditional faith, even within the framework of naturalism, fails to impress Soviet philosophers; they consider, for example, the religious humanists’ appeal to agape as a moral absolute, a needless encumbrance on the achievement of revolutionary objectives.

Since the emergence of nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism, no feature of modern theology has been so obvious on the Continent and throughout the English-speaking world as its instability; the contemporary alternatives to historic Christian theology are predictably short-lived. The dialectical and the existential revisions proposed by modern European theologians have failed to attract permanent attention.

Anglo-Saxon theologians are already tracking new positions in a number of speculative orbits, and vocal spokesmen for the newer alternatives deliberately resist and reject recent dialectical-existential approaches. Neo-liberals are reviving the tradition of speculative metaphysics on a rationalistic base, linguistic theologians relocate the function of religious language to vindicate a role for affirmation about the supernatural, and religious naturalists abandon transcendent reality to concentrate on secular concerns, especially the social value of agape exemplified by Jesus. This reorientation of contemporary religious perspectives presages, in America and England at least, an imminent struggle between evangelical theologians supporting historic Christian theism and a new field of increasingly aggressive competitors.

While linguistic theologians surrender a literal affirmation of the transcendent aspects of religion in order to emphasize instead the therapeutic value of Christianity, neo-liberals promoting the revival of metaphysics stress a universal or general supernatural revelation with Jesus of Nazareth at the zenith. Orthodox Protestants meanwhile stress not only general revelation but also special revelation as a divine confrontation of fallen and sinful man, and over against recent anti-intellectualism they insist upon the rationality of supernatural revelation.

In this intensifying debate, the crucial issue is man’s conceptual knowledge of transcendent Being in an age that relies increasingly upon empirical science to validate its judgments. Despite historic Christianity’s bold insistence on man’s possession of authentic knowledge of the supernatural world, the claim to universally valid religious truths (even on the basis of special revelation) was openly forfeited by Protestant liberalism; post-Kantian thinkers like Ritschl and Herrmann and post-Hegelian thinkers like Schleiermacher were influential in defining the Christian faith in terms of trust independently of revealed truths. This surrender of the role of conceptual reasoning in man’s relationship to transcendent Being was carried forward in the past two generations by dialectical theology (Kierkegaard, Barth, and Brunner) and by existential theology (Bultmann and the post-Bultmannians). Dialectical and existential theologians protested the scientific reduction of man to an impersonal object and the explanation of concrete human existence in abstract scientific terms, outside any climate of enduring meaning and value. To vindicate man’s transcendence of the natural order, dialectical theologians emphasized the special supernatural confrontation of man as an individual person, while existential theologians stressed that the scientific concentration on sense experience ignores man’s volitional, emotional, and subconscious experience, especially the area of personal decision. Despite their fabrication of anti-intellectual theories of divine confrontation aimed to salvage non-cognitive faith from doubt and unbelief, the desperate attempt of dialectical and existential theologians to vindicate the supernatural has crumbled under the weight of conflicting claims, and has failed to earn wide public attention because of its disavowal of universally valid religious truth.

Neither the dialectical insistence on non-propositional revelation nor the existentialist emphasis on individual confrontation could long postpone a full surrender of the supernatural in the absence of objective knowledge of God valid for all men in all times and places irrespective of their personal feelings and response.

The modernist-dialectical-existential failure to insist upon man’s conceptual knowledge of any transcendent reality has, in fact, encouraged some religious thinkers to abandon entirely the case for the supernatural and to insist that scientific empiricism alone supplies valid knowledge. This is the standpoint of the “death of God” school, which brushes aside all interest in transcendent reality; it declares Christian theism outmoded and promotes a secular version of the inherited religion. Thus the modernist loss of biblical theism, and its substitution of radical trust in God for objective knowledge of God, has moved half-circle to the affirmation of religious naturalism, a form of atheism that escapes the harsh features of a thoroughly materialistic view of life only through its lingering attachment to the moral ideals of Jesus. Given the incompetence of reason to know transcendent Being, liberal theology has been increasingly vulnerable to analytical philosophy, which now dominates the philosophy departments in many if not most of the large universities in the United States, England, and Sweden. Its net effect is to make empirical verifiability the criterion of meaning.

The currents of atheism and agnosticism in modern thought flow from an underlying skepticism that has swept over much of Western thought during the past two centuries. The exaltation of the scientific method of gaining knowledge has been accompanied by a parallel distrust of man’s capacity to know God. If this skepticism is not to issue, in turn, in a pervasive nihilism and the loss of all meaning, modern man will need once again to recognize the possibility of knowing transcendent Reality. If beyond his remarkable but revisable insights into how things work (or seem to) he still desires to know anything truly, he will need once more to rise simultaneously to the knowledge of both nature and nature’s God.

Neither Moses, nor Isaiah, nor Paul—and surely not Jesus of Nazareth—would have conceded to the philosophers of our century, or of any other, that man has no rational knowledge or conceptual experience of the Living God. The first Christian apostles went out to face the pagan world of their day in the sure confidence of the knowledge of God; in fact, while the Greek philosophers contrasted faith and knowledge, the Apostle John boldly and repeatedly declared: “We know that we know.”?