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In these candid comments on the American scene, Dr. D. Elton Trueblood, the distinguished Quaker philosopher, discusses the unconscious assumptions that now shape the American outlook and the new opportunity this offers for evangelical advance. This issue ofCHRISTIANITY TODAYalso carries an excerpt from his book “The Incendiary Fellowship.”
Dr. Trueblood is now in London for a year of research and writing, and the interview below was taped in Washington just before his departure. He served Earlham College for twenty years as head of its philosophy department and is now professor at large. For two years he was religious adviser to the Voice of America. He was interviewed by Editor Carl F. H. Henry.
Question. Dr. Trueblood, in 1944 inThe Predicament of Modern Manyou singled out two ideas ruling the American outlook that had undergone recent revision, the inevitability of progress and the essential goodness of man. Do you think either of these controlling ideas has regained some of its former influence on the American mind?
Answer. I would not say that neither of these tenets has come back precisely in its earlier form; but I do think that we now have unargued assumptions that have some affinity with these, and that we need to know what these new unargued assumptions of our time are.
Q. What would you single out as the reigning tenets of our time?
A. The first of these is the extreme belief that all our problems are new. I would call this, really, the disease of contemporaneity. Shall I give you an example? Last winter I was speaking to a group of pastors in a certain state, and I advised these men to study Augustine’s Confessions and the Imitation of Christ and Pascal’s Pensées, and John Woolman’s Journal. Right away one of the leading clergymen said, “Oh, those were all very well for another day. But so much has happened now that their appeal is utterly undermined. We are in a new world, and these books have nothing to say to our situation at this moment.”
Q. What does this point of view imply for tradition, and for the Judeo-Christian heritage? And what does it imply for the relevance of our own discoveries or commitments to the generation that comes after us?
A. It means that we cut ourselves off from the wisdom of the ages, including that of the Bible. It means that, if this is taken seriously, we are really an orphan generation—an orphan generation that takes itself far too seriously, that is too much impressed with changes that may be only superficial. And of course, if this is true of our generation, as your question indicates, there is no reason why it will not be true of another generation. Therefore, whatever we gain would naturally be rejected by our descendants. No civilization is possible this way. Contemporaneity when it is a disease is a very damaging disease, because it destroys the continuity of culture.
Q. Besides this passion for contemporaneity, do you discern some other ruling tenets of our time?
A. Yes. Associated with it is a really terrible conceit. I actually hear people say, “What could Abraham say to us? After all, he never went faster than a few miles per hour. And any of us can go 600 miles an hour if we want to now.” “What can Socrates say to us? He never saw a university with 30,000 students. He never saw a really big city. He didn’t see any advanced technology. Therefore obviously his answers are not answers that are relevant to our day.” This, if it applies anywhere, is bound to apply all across the board. And what I want to say to these men is this: they have not really considered carefully enough the nature of the human problem. I want to say to them that a man can hate his wife at 600 miles an hour just as much as at six miles an hour, and that the temptations to compromise with integrity are not really changed at all. Men have always had them; men will always have them. They are part of the predicament that man is man. And the notion that we are living in such a fresh time that wisdom has “come with us” whereas nobody ever had it before—this I find to be an absolutely intolerable conceit.
Q. Would it be fair to say that in place of the notion of the inevitability of progress the man of the 1960s is prone to substitute the notion that progress has now reached its peak or its near-peak?
A. Yes.
Q. And for the notion of the essential goodness of man he is prone to substitute the idea that no experience is superior to his?
A. I think that is very well said. You see, this modern heresy is stated for many people in Bonhoeffer’s terms, that “man has come of age.” Now, I have pondered that statement a long time, and I have heard a good many efforts to defend it. I want to say that, so far as I can see, it is absolutely errant nonsense. It would be far better to say that man is in the kindergarten. It would be more honest and it would be more humble. In fact, this tendency to erect every word of Bonhoeffer’s into a new orthodoxy seems to me to be one of the chief evidences of the faddish mentality. I do not believe that man has come of age. I recognize that there are a great many people who believe this, and I think that probably no threat shows both the superficiality and the wrongheadedness of modern man more than this one.
Q. You seem almost to suggest, Dr. Trueblood, that all our scientific advances and modern insights amount to a vast backdrop that spectacularly exhibits the fact that modern man has really fallen from the heights rather than risen to new glory.
A. Yes. The notion that human life is made good because of technology simply will not stand examination. Now, I am glad for technology. I’m glad that we have antibiotics; I hope that they will be available to as many people on earth as possible. I’m glad we have hybrid seed corn. I’m glad I can raise hybrid tomatoes in my garden. I am grateful for every one of these advances. But at the same time I want to warn people against the notion that these of themselves bring the good life. They simply do not.
Q. Do you see a third mass idea that tends to shape modern American life?
A. What is that?
Q. What about the notion that the essence of life is to be found in things—in the infinitude of things. Or possibly in an infinitude of sex. Do you think that these ideas tend to shape our culture?
A. They probably do, but in a special way. It is not merely the old paganism, nor merely the old materialism, which both sound a little bit out of date now. All this has a particular slant that is represented, let us say, by the computer. This is our new idolatry. And I would like to say that I think that these are very poor idols. I buy a great many books, and I find that the book companies that have instituted computers now are three times as slow in delivering books as they were when they had people. Only yesterday, Dr. Henry, I was at a New York airport trying to arrange to come down to see you. The computer kept sending back no answer, and the poor chap back at the desk finally had to call on some human being to find out whether the plane was going. They discovered that there had been an error in printing in the whole system, and that the flight they told me about didn’t even exist! Well, I believe it’s a good thing for us to find this out. You see, when you have false gods the thing to do is to find out that they are false. So the notion that just by having bigger cities and speedier planes and more expensive cosmetics we will therefore have a good world—this just won’t hold water.
Q. In these last twenty years, have you sensed any significant change in the American outlook on security and the attitude toward big government?
A. Oh, yes, I certainly have. Of course, I have had to interview a great many young men wanting to come to teach. And I’m a little bit shocked to find that the first question they often ask is “What is the retirement plan?” Now thirty-nine years ago, when I began teaching in North Carolina, this didn’t even enter my head. Little did I care, because I was perfectly sure that if one thing didn’t work out, another one would. And I had not supposed that it was up to other people to take care of me. I thought perhaps I’d better get to work. But today we find that security is a dominant idea, apparently in all classes of society.
Q. What of the attitude toward work?
A. At the same time we see this decay. We owe a great deal to the Protestant—or more specifically, the Puritan—ethic in this country, concerning the dignity of work, and the notion that each man has a holy calling and that his task is to render a good account before God of the powers that he has. I still think that this is the noblest conception of work that there is. And I think our whole civilization here in the West owes much more to this ideal than we know, or than we admit. But today I see this breaking down at many points. I know a great many people who don’t feel that they have any real responsibility in their work. The main thing is to put in the time; leave as soon as they can; get as long vacations as they can. Work is something in which they do not rejoice. It is something from which they would like to be emancipated.
Q. Can we gather together, perhaps into some single motif, these elements of the longing for security, the exaltation of material priorities, and the increasing emphasis on leisure and particularly on the life of sex? Can we correlate these into another unconscious force that gives form to the American view of life today?
A. Yes, I think that all of them can be united under the idea of an oversimple view of freedom. Freedom from worry, freedom from work, freedom from moral inhibitions. All of these are delusive. The more we think about it, the more we see that although freedom is a great thing, and we are right to mention it as a very important element in the Gospel, it is always wrongly seen when it is seen by itself. Absolute freedom is absolute nonsense because then there is no inner control. If freedom means the freedom to seduce the other man’s wife, if it means the freedom to steal if one thinks he can get away with it, the time will come when we will have no stable civilization. I’ve just been talking with some businessmen who tell me that the stealing by employees in department stores is now getting to be a serious problem. Have you heard that, Dr. Henry?
Q. Yes, shoplifting not only by customers but also by employees.
A. In fact it has gotten so bad that many prices go up because of this. You see, we as Christians ought to be hardheaded enough to see that many of the so-called economic troubles are really moral troubles. If the stealing increases, then the prices will have to go up for every one of us. I’ve just been in a town where they have to keep the high school students in the school all through the noon hour because they stole so much from the nearby stores during that hour.
Q. What has happened to religion, and particularly to the religion of the Bible, in American life today?
A. Well, for many people this is simply old hat. It has ceased to seem exciting. It is something that they think was relevant only years ago. It was all right for the little church in the wildwood, but has no significance for people in great modern cities. The majority simply think it obsolete. This bears on our earlier point about contemporaneity.
Q. Do you think that the trend is also encouraged by the readiness of men in public life to dismiss Christianity as a religion of personal piety only, without any significant implications for national or public life?
A. Precisely. You see, they are wholly willing to be tolerant of this kind of religion. I would call this “segregation religion.” If they can segregate it to one’s own personal wishes or even to one’s own personal prayers, nobody objects. Hitler didn’t object to that, you know. The Communists in Russia don’t object to this. They say, “This is fine if you want to do it; we want you to be free.” What is objected to is that kind of vital religion that affects the way men work and the way they govern and the way they teach and the way they learn and the way they make love and the way they keep up their families. Intolerance never arises until our religion is pervasive of the whole social order.
Q. Do recent rulings of the Supreme Court encourage this segregation of religion?
A. The attitude of the Supreme Court is very striking on this. I have read over and over the Supreme Court decision, based upon the cases in Pennsylvania and Maryland, on whether Bible reading and prayers are legal in the public schools. You will remember that the decision was that this is forbidden—at least this is the way the language seems to read. I admit it has a certain ambiguity. But the strange thing about this is the statement of the court that the state must be neutral in regard to the religious life, neither for nor against—tolerant, if it is kept in its place, within the church, say; but it mustn’t be in the schools. You see, Dr. Henry, that this is exactly what we mean by tolerance of segregated religion, and obviously I’m not talking about race at this moment. I think too often we have thought of segregation only in regard to race.
Q. Since you were religious adviser to the Voice of America in 1954 and 1955, let me take another tack. What emphases compatible with separation of church and state can properly be made to reflect the great realities of our religious heritage on the world scene?
A. The main thing is to tell the truth. And if you are going to tell the truth about America, you have to tell the truth about a man like William Penn, who set so much the tone of our lives when he called his commonwealth “an holy experiment” in government. We cannot explain why it is that we want liberty and justice for all, equality before the law, due process of law, the dignity of the individual, unless we explain the deep biblical roots from which these came. The fundamental ideas that we call the ideas of democracy today did not come from Greece, important as ancient Greece was. They came much more from the biblical heritage, and if we do not say this we are not getting the truth told.
Q. Are you wholly convinced as a professional philosopher that it is impossible to sustain these convictions on the basis merely of evolutionary naturalism?
A. I’m sure that it is not. I believe with all my heart in the organic metaphor, namely, that you cannot keep the flowers alive if they are separated from their sustaining roots. I said more than twenty years ago that our great danger is that of trying to establish a cut-flower civilization. I believe this now more than I did then, because the evidence has accumulated. Look, for example, at our immense growth in crime, when we have poured out billions for education and for the renewal of our great cities. In many places we are doing worse instead of better, and I think this is exactly what we can expect if we are not naïve. I believe that much of the danger of modern man lies in naïvely thinking that you can get something for nothing. I do not believe that you can.
Q. An associate professor in the humanities in Stanford University, where you yourself once taught, has written that the controlling philosophy of the American campus is naturalistic; that the most influential faculty members on our campuses are committed to the philosophy that nature is the ultimate real, and hence that man is essentially only an animal, that there is no immortality, that there are no enduring moral values or unchanging truths—that God is not. If this be so, is there within the American university milieu the intellectual resource for an effective confrontation of the Communist alternative?
A. There is, but it is not now united. Scattered around are men of great intellectual powers and very deep reverence. But they are very conscious of being out of the mainstream. And I can hardly think of anything more important than to help them to have a sense of buttressing one another. They are a minority, of course, but remember that Christianity was a minority in the ancient pagan world. This is the role that Christians can play and play very well. But they need to know what they are, and they need to be able to have the help of one another. This will not be done by voices crying in the wilderness.
Q. Recently there have been proposals for an Institute of Advanced Christian Studies that would bring together evangelical scholars so that they would be able to give time not only to completing their creative projects but also to an exchange of mind and heart and a sharing of mutual concerns and convictions about the contemporary scene. Do you feel that this proposal has anything to commend it?
A. I think it has a great deal to commend it. In fact, something like this will have to be done. We must interpret and speak to the intellectual life of modern man. Just giving nice little devotional talks won’t do the trick. For one thing, the opponents of Christianity don’t mind these nice little devotional talks. They write them off and are perfectly satisfied. What we need is somebody to challenge naturalism with all the toughness exhibited by the late Archbishop William Temple in Nature, Man and God. I think this can and must be done by men in our generation now, as it was by Temple a generation ago.
Q. Do you think that evangelical scholars have a remarkable opportunity now that the liberal and neo-orthodox wings of contemporary Protestantism have largely taken an anti-intellectual tack?
A. Yes. You see, both of them are clearly in decay, and the reign of neo-orthodoxy is over. We are now in a kind of intellectual vacuum in which somebody could fill the space if he would. It would probably have to be a group, a group who are strongly rational at the same time that they are deeply committed and unapologetic in their Christian commitment. Now I believe here is the new style of leadership that is just on the edge of coming to the front—and, oh, I want to see this in the coming days! I hope to live the last third of my life in the period in which this is emerging, and I shall do all I can to further its emergence.
Q. What about the role of religion and the teaching of religion on the state university campuses?
A. Here is where there is probably real hope. I believe in the small college, of course, as you know; this is why I left a very large university to go to a small college twenty years ago. And I’m glad I did. But I will have to admit that today some of the most vigorous Christian intellectualism is to be found on the state university campuses rather than in the old-line denominational colleges. Many of the old-line denominational colleges think of Christianity as old hat, so they revolt against it.
Q. And they tend to peddle the contrary ideas of the secular university climate against which the best advocates of historic Christian theism are able to hold the line on some state university campuses.
A. Now isn’t this a paradox? So that perhaps the great secular state university is coming to have people who are in revolt against it and the natural revolt would be that of those committed to Christianity.
Q. How acceptable do you think evangelical scholars will be in the religion departments of state universities? Do you think the pluralistic emphasis tends to discriminate, especially against anyone committed to an absolutist point of view?
A. It probably does. This is why my biggest hope lies in having such scholars stationed in a great variety of departments. I want to see them in biology, in psychology, and in philosophy. Professor Jellema’s great work at Indiana University is a marvelous example of how this is possible. I think he probably did ten times as much in philosophy as he could have done if he had been teaching religion, where all of these prejudices that you mention might have appeared.
Q. Do you think that America can fulfill its highest national destiny if its people are unfamiliar with, and do not care about, the great biblical teachings?
A. Oh, there is no chance whatever. For example, they cannot even understand the great issues, if this is the case. How in the world can a person really appreciate our best literature, including that of Shakespeare and Milton, if he does not know the biblical images? How in the world can we understand what is meant by the assertion that all men are created equal—which is what the Declaration of Independence says—unless we have some idea of the meaning of creation? So, the notion that we can cut ourselves off from all of this and do just as well—this is an example of the naïveté that I mentioned earlier. You see, the Christian today doesn’t have to be the representative of obscurantism. He is the representative of rationality. What he is objecting to is superficialism and mere emotionalism and naïveté. Isn’t it nice to have the tables turned this way?
Q. Despite rising church membership, competent studies show that the laity by and large have been increasingly critical of the institutional church. Do you think that the strong emphasis on political and social matters in preaching has been a cause of this?
A. No doubt it has been part of the cause. I believe that the period of rising memberships is all over, and it is perfectly clear that the period when it was easy to get good crowds in public worship is over. We are in a period in which committed Christians are clearly in a minority and will be more so. And I want to take this as our basis of hope and not of despair. I believe that what we will need is the kind of preaching in which people are not afraid of dealing with the fundamental issues of the human heart. If preaching is merely political, of course, it is very mixed up. Now, you know I am not saying that we must avoid the permeation of the world. I’m saying we must permeate the world, but we must permeate the world from a solid center.
Q. Are Sunday school materials also to blame for the prevalent unfamiliarity with the Bible?
A. I think they are. Now some effort is being made to change that in the various denominations. But I will admit that some of the Sunday school materials have been almost purely naturalistic, and mostly about flowers and birds.
Q. To what extent does the secularization of the public school contribute to the decline?
A. Oh, it contributes very greatly, because if people are convinced that the biblical heritage has nothing to do with the world of knowledge, of course they are not going to pay any attention to it. And everything we are doing makes it seem as though it doesn’t have anything to do with the world of knowledge.
Q. How much of the fault belongs to the American home, rather than external agencies?
A. A great deal. The Jews are right, of course, that the chief religious education ought to be in the home. The fact that our modern homes have capitulated is a very great basis of sorrow.
Q. In recent years working hours have diminished and leisure hours increased, and this tendency is being greatly accelerated by automation and cybernation. Do you think that as a result Americans are becoming a pleasure-seeking and fun-loving people? Are we Americans using leisure time responsibly?
The committed Christian is not now thrown to the lions, as were the Christians in Rome long ago, but there are nevertheless, subtle forms of contemporary persecution. A man who takes Christ seriously is often looked upon as a hopeless fossil and is considered an enthusiast or a fanatic. In short, he is an oddity. This is not because Christian values are entirely rejected in the contemporary world. Indeed, there are many evidences which show that several Christian values survive for a while after the abandonment of the faith from which they first emerged. A striking illustration of this is seen in the contemporary drive for social justice. Much of this effort clearly stems from Christian roots even though the connection with those roots has now been severed.
It would be foolish to deny that many of the characteristic men and women of our age are decent people. Though they would find it fairly laughable if they were accused of being unapologetic agents of Jesus Christ in the world, they are often fair, and they try to be just. Though we do have, in our time of unparalleled affluence, a striking rise in the crime rate, most of the people are not criminals. They give to the community chest; they maintain an uncostly membership in some church; they have some degree of fidelity to their marriage vows. Very few of these people would steal your purse if you made the mistake of leaving it behind and not many are extreme in cheating the government of its lawful revenue. The strange fact is that these people, who constitute the obvious majority, are almost universally opposed to the kind of Christianity represented by the New Testament. The claims are too strong; the price is too high; the fire of evangelism is too hot. The crucial fact is that all evangelism is faintly embarrassing. The spirit of the Book of Acts makes us uncomfortable. We are discomfited by the young Mormon missionaries who come to town and we find it necessary to minimize the effectiveness of Billy Graham. Though the New Testament describes a hot fire, we prefer the damp wick.
One possible response to the minority status of the Christians is for interpreters of the Gospel to try to make the Gospel conform to what the world already respects. Thus we are told very loudly that Christians must give up all of their ancient language, including the language used by Christ himself. The advice is that we must no longer speak of sin, though we can perhaps speak of maladjustment. We must not speak of truth, for that is too harsh. There are high officials in the churches who now express the view that the Christian message must be altered to make it acceptable to the men and women who, they affirm, live in a wholly new age.
The Human Situation
It is time to challenge the confident talk about the radical discontinuity between our generation and all the preceding ones. It is true, of course, that we move physically with greater speed, but this is only one phase of the total situation. A little thought should make us aware that a man can hate his wife just as much while traveling six hundred miles an hour as when traveling six. We have, indeed, some education, but only the very immature suppose that we are consequently wise. Furthermore, technical knowledge does not necessarily make men good or compassionate or loyal. It is time for someone to say clearly that the ultimate human situation has not changed at all. Undoubtedly, we shall place men on the moon, but only the naïve could suppose that such a feat would alter human motives. All thoughtful readers can be grateful to James Burnham for his contention in The Suicide of the West that, in the words of Billy Graham, highly educated people “have inward drives, greeds, compulsions, passions and a lust for power that are not eliminated by any known process of education” (World Aflame, Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1965, p. xiv).
The truth is that modern man is overimpressed by his own achievements. To put a rocket into an orbit that is more than a hundred miles from the surface of the earth takes a great deal of joint thought and effort, but we tend to overstate the case. Though men who ride a few miles above the earth are called astronauts, this is clearly a misnomer. Men will not be astronauts until they ride among the stars, and it is important to remember that most of the stars are thousands of light-years away. The Russians are even more unrestrained in their overstatement, calling their men cosmonauts. Someone needs to say, “Little man, don’t take yourself quite so seriously.”
It is clear that if Christians are to bring the power of Jesus Christ to the world, they must make themselves understood, and this involves difficult intellectual labor, but this is not the same as making the lines fuzzy in order to make the Gospel acceptable. We are far more effective if we know that the Gospel will never be entirely acceptable, and that the Christian Movement will continue to be a minority movement. The Gospel must seek to penetrate the world and all of its parts, but it cannot do so unless there is a sense in which it is in contrast to the world. Herein lies the central paradox.
The denial of the paradox comes in many ways, the chief of which is the increasing tendency of the Church to be identical with the world. To many outsiders the Church appears to be a thriving business, the appearance of worldly success accentuated by our constant emphasis upon promotion. The pastor often becomes more a business executive than anything else, with the operation seeming to center on the mortgage or the budget. People who are urged to give to God are naturally disturbed when they find that they are chiefly giving to human salaries. Those who attend worship out of a deep sense of personal need are often disappointed when they note the importance of the announcements and realize the extent to which these are frankly promotional. Attendance is being whipped up for the next meeting or the next dinner.
The stranger who is visited by a representative of the Church frequently gets the impression that he is being viewed as a prospective customer, a potential addition to the numbers or the income, rather than a person who is approached for his own sake. Part of the shame of the contemporary Church is that it seems to be motivated by self-interest. We need to be reminded that the Church exists for men and not men for the Church.
Never Optional
One of the great theological gains of the twentieth century has been widespread recognition of the necessity of the Church in any vital Christianity.… The fellowship is intrinsic and is never optional, if the life of Christ is to make an impact on the world. But it is possible for the Church to exist, with a show of success, and still fail in its essential function. It is always failing when it becomes an institution which is bent on saving itself. It cannot save the world if it demonstrates an obsession with material things.
When the pastor is an entrepreneur and the Church is a business, the Christian community develops a majority consciousness and thereby ceases to be the saving salt. As Christ predicted, it is easy for the salt to be dissolved away. Without its salty character the Church is not good for anything, because it has lost its reason for being. To be distinctive it must recognize its minority status and accept the consequences of that recognition. What the world desperately needs is a redemptive fellowship centered in Jesus Christ, as an antidote to the evils of civilization. The problem is not that of organizing a congregation, which is easy, but rather that of seeing to it that salt does not lose its savor. The crucial question now, as in the beginning, is “How shall its saltness be restored?” (Luke 14:34).
A. Here you’ve got a great topic. Going into New York I noticed by the side of the road a great big board with the words, “Swing a fun loan!” Fun is now the center of everything. I see page after page in the newspapers advising of places where one can have more fun and pay nothing down. Well, this really is very convenient.
Q. Credit is legitimate and to a certain extent necessary within a capitalistic system, but do we not tend more and more to go into debt for recreation?
A. Oh, yes. Buy now, pay later. This is the whole message. So then, we are getting a group of people who are made frenetic by the fact that they have more bills at the end of the month than their salaries will cover. But then they have to borrow more in order to go out and have fun, so you see it just gets worse and worse. What a sad people it must be that must put this much emphasis on fun!
Q. Automation is creating unemployment and yet increasing the possibilities of leisure. What is the way out?
A. The way out is for those of us who care about culture to see these free hours as the hours in which we do the real human job. The time is coming when we won’t need very many hours to raise enough food for everybody or to make enough clothing for everybody. In this we stand in great contrast to our ancestors, who had to use all their hours to survive. But all this means that the real business of mankind can now be our business: truth, beauty, goodness. The alternative to unemployment is employment in a higher sense.
Q. The humanities and philosophy and literature have taken a back seat to science and technology. To a considerable extent, this result has been encouraged by government grants.
A. Yes. Now that also must change, because if you have technologists who don’t know what life is about, instead of making life better they may make it worse. Again, you see, it’s a kind of adolescent view of what the human situation is. The adolescent is always more concerned with gadgets than with anything else.
Q. The young people of today are in many ways a rebel generation. Is this a causeless rebellion? Is relativism its byword? Is cynicism increasing? And what can be done?
A. What I think is that young people simply have responded to propaganda—and part of the propaganda, including that of the advertisements, is that youth is a better thing than age. So they conclude that seventeen-year-olds naturally are wiser than their fathers and mothers. They really believe this, you understand. Now, they’ll get over it. The wonderful thing about cockiness is that it can be overcome by a little maturity.
Q. What do you think of the new pacifism—pick and choose your war?
A. Well, I think this is just plainly immoral. The Christian kind of pacifism, which is that of my Quaker tradition, is one of very great courage, in which one is convinced of what the will of Christ is for him. This is a very different thing from picking and choosing your war. Picking and choosing is like saying that all moral values are subjective, and that we may choose whatever we prefer. Well, I don’t believe that for a minute. I believe that the moral values are objective.
Q. What are the possibilities for world peace generally?
A. The possibilities now as always are dim. We will go through long turmoil before we have anything like a really established peace on earth. This is hard to accomplish, and anybody who has the simple answer is bound to be wrong.
Q. Is the conflict between races worsening on a world scale, or are you optimistic about the progress we have made?
A. Well, I would say every intelligent person has to combine some hope with some fears. I see places where we’re gaining, cases of real development of equality of opportunity. But on the world scale, I think the danger is immense.
Q. Theology seems to be fishing around for a pond in which it can catch a following. Where do you think theology will go in the next generation?
A. I think it will go in the direction of an unapologetic theistic realism. I think the day will come when the fellow who calls himself a Christian atheist will be regarded as a confused child, and we will almost forget that there ever were such people. It will seem so crazy! I believe in the truth, in short, and the real issues are too solemn to be faddish.
Q. Where do you think the Gospel of Christ most effectively cuts across modern man’s outlook?
A. Especially in this, that Christ says the wise householder brings forth things new and old. This is a strangely overlooked text. He combines humble respect for the ancient wisdom with the contemporary statement of the truth. Here is where Christ transcends both the obscurantist and the merely contemporary existentialist.
Q. You have traveled around the world a great deal, Dr. Trueblood. What virtues still characterize the American man and woman?
A. The chief virtue that I see is that, in spite of the moral rot, the majority of our wounds are still the wounds of fidelity. The majority of our people are honest, and have a sense of trying under God to do the task to which they are called. The leftover of the biblical view of man is really strong, and for this I am extremely grateful. I want to be sure that we do not become complacent and lose it. And I want to be sure that we keep renewing it, because it will not renew itself. So you see, my life is a life of both memory and hope. I thank God for the memories of the wise and good from whom we can learn. And I hope that we can apply this to our own present generation. I believe if enough of us think together, we can.
Q. On the university campuses many students seem to be ahead of their professors in a reaching for spiritual ideals and for religious reality. Is there any exhortation that you would present such young people in regard to their commitment to Christ and the opportunities for Christian penetration in the oncoming generation?
A. Yes. I think that the way they will “make a difference” is by binding themselves into small groups where they pray together and share together their way of penetrating the academic society around them. I believe that the strength will come in these small cells and that these can be established anywhere. I would like to get as many young people as possible to follow the practice of reading reverently, thoughtfully, humbly, and intellectually a passage of Scripture every day of their lives. I’d like to build up a hard core, a kind of Gideon’s band, of people who accept such a discipline, and I believe that they would “make a difference” wherever they are.
Q. If the young people in our universities were to commit themselves fully to Christ, how much of an impact do you think they could have in the molding of a new generation?
A. They could have an enormous effect, especially if at the same time they are among the most hardworking and able scholars—so that nobody can pooh-pooh them. Then they will make a real difference, because they will be respected.
Q. Your plans will now carry you to London for nine months. How will you invest your time there?
A. My major task in London is to write a book on Robert Barclay. I have had it in mind for a long time. Barclay has not been fully appreciated by subsequent generations. He was appointed the first governor of East Jersey because of his high moral standing. He wrote a book called An Apology for the True Christian Divinity Held by the Quakers (1608). This very able book gives as deep an insight into God and man and Christ as I know in all of our literature. What I want to do now is to make something as big and strong as this really available. I want many of our people to begin to realize that some of the very best things are not things that have come out during the current year, but things that have weathered the generations, and that people who lived in another stormy time have something to say to us in our stormy time. I want to tell as many people in our generation as I can that there is a sound center. Archimedes said you could lift anything if only you had a solid fulcrum. I will say frankly that I find this fulcrum in Jesus Christ. This is the center from which I start. I believe the One who said, “Come unto me.” I do not think that this is the least bit outdated or that it is any less relevant to our time than to other times.
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A few days before this issue went to press, our editorial staff welcomed Dr. James M. Boice, whom the masthead now lists as editorial assistant. For two summers during his Princeton Seminary days, Jim served us as an efficient editorial aide. Then he went abroad for further studies. Now, with a Harvard B.A. in literature, a Princeton B.D., and a Basel D.Theol. (insigni cum laude), he is well equipped for an exciting career in the world of words and the Word. His doctoral dissertation, hopefully soon to be published, is on The Idea of Witness in the Fourth Gospel.
Readers of our fortnightly feature Current Religious Thought will soon discover a new participant: Dr. Reginald Stackhouse, professor of philosophy of religion at Wycliffe College (Anglican), Toronto, Canada. Since 1967 is the Canadian centennial year, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will devote its March 31 issue to that important dominion. And during the centennial year Professor Stackhouse will contribute to the January 20, April 14, and July 7 issues. Other writers of the highly readable reviews of Current Religious Thought are G. C. Berkouwer, J. D. Douglas (now editor of The Christian and Christianity Today as well as our British editorial representative), Harold B. Kuhn, Addison H. Leitch, and John W. Montgomery.
Harold B. Kuhn
These are times of searching for persons interested in relating Christianity to higher education. Those involved with secular institutions of learning are deeply concerned with projecting an authentic Christian presence into their academic sphere. Those with professional relationship to frankly evangelical institutions, on the other hand, are concerned with embodying in their curricula an adequate intellectual presentation.
Such movements as the World Student Christian Federation, the Inter-Varsity Fellowship, Campus Crusade, and the denominational foundations share the desire to penetrate the halls of secular learning with a Christian witness. They are eager to present to those learning the “knowledge of this world” the claims of Him in whom, they profoundly feel, “are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” But they are keenly aware that the movements of campus revolt are no less inhospitable to historic Christian faith than to other forms of Establishment.
No person can hope to project the Christian witness on the secular campus if he does not have a thorough and (as far as possible) sympathetic understanding of the dynamics of radical student protest movements. The “new student left” comprises a minority of politically conscious persons, often from affluent homes, who seek to gain prestige by advocating what they believe to be the interests of the disadvantaged in their circles.
It must be said that some student leftists have a deep sense of integrity and a fine degree of social consciousness. Most of them fail to realize that the economic comforts they have known in their homes have come from The Establishment, whose benefits mean much to their parents and others who lived through the Great Depression. The revivalists of the campus left have little or no idea of the economic situation that prevailed in those days; and it is their lack of awareness of this that makes their behavior appear so unreasonable to their elders.
The Christian student or teacher concerned with the Christian witness needs to take a long look at the conditions against which the typical campus rebel protests. He will not always agree with the leftists’ case. He will recognize some of the brash attitudes and acts of the far-leftist as bids for attention or as part of a quest for an identity he lacks. He will also be aware of the very real nature of some of the frustrations that underlie the pejorative use of such words as “organization,” “bureaucracy,” and “power structure.”
Much of the success of the Christian’s efforts to penetrate the felt-alienation of his non-Christian associates will depend upon his ability to overcome, in his own personal bearing and in his presentation of his Lord, the resistance he will inevitably encounter in them. Any pose of formality, or of self-righteous withdrawal, will only remind the campus rebel of the worst traits of the “organization.”
The vexing question arises: Does effective Christian campus work depend primarily upon proclamation or upon dialogue? There is no standard answer. One cannot discount the value of careful, Spirit-directed witnessing; but in some situations careful and respectful discussion is clearly indicated. The Christian who takes seriously the task of campus evangelism must also reckon with the probability that the secular institution will be, at best, benevolently neutral toward his efforts, and at worst, indifferent or actually hostile.
Problems of a quite different type confront the educator in the institution whose position is frankly evangelical. While administrators of such schools cannot take the spiritual life of their students for granted, yet they do operate from a base of faith within faculty and student body. But if they can feel fairly certain about the authentic Christian presence, they must usually acknowledge difficulties in the matter of an adequate intellectual presentation.
Most of our evangelical colleges are middle-sized and must operate on budgets somewhat lower in terms of per-student costs than those of secular institutions. Competition for well-trained and professionally effective teachers is keen and promises to be increasingly so. Many schools must, for now at least, use many faculty members of below-professional rank—some of whom may be superior to their “ranking” colleagues in dedication and ingenuity. But the limitation in number of teachers will dictate a smaller spread of course offerings than is possible at the larger institution. With the so-called information explosion, it remains that there is a body of knowledge, the mastery of which must be regarded as minimal to the educated person. How can this be presented by the evangelical college with fewer resources than those of the secular universities?
During a leave-of-absence from my usual post for post-doctoral studies, I have had the privilege of serving as visiting professor of religion at Eastern Nazarene College in Wollaston, Massachusetts. The college has for three years presented a curriculum structured upon a vertical model, featuring six semesters of carefully articulated and integrated courses, so arranged as to present a coherent pattern of the cultural and intellectual heritage of the race. This Main Currents Sequence involves specialists in the several fields, working in an inter-disciplinary manner.
Academic contacts with upperclassmen suggest to this writer that as students progress toward their final year, they show a broader and better articulated grasp of the basic academic disciplines than is usual among their counterparts in similar institutions. Quite possibly some adaptation of curriculum to the achievement of this result would be beneficial for colleges of similar size and spiritual outlook.
Both of the forms of problem and challenge noted in this survey suggest the need for a revitalized approach to the educational pattern of our day. While attacking the problem from opposite ends of the scale, the witnessing Christian in academic circles and the witnessing Christian college engage a common front and share a common compelling task.
- More fromHarold B. Kuhn
Christianity TodayDecember 23, 1966
Jew and Christian face each other at Christmas. The Christian recalls that his Saviour was born a Jew. The Jew, who has chosen across the centuries to live largely in Christian nations, often recalls the past sufferings that have been his lot as he sees symbols of Christianity glittering in annual array.
In cities where the two faiths confront each other, Christmas is a time for problems in public policy. Pittsburgh’s City Council ponders whether it should put a $4,500 Nativity scene in downtown Mellon Square. The Albuquerque, New Mexico, schools decide whether pupils should sing what the Civil Liberties Union complains “are very clearly Christian hymns.”
When Jewish youngsters shun roles in school Nativity playlets, they are sometimes considered uncivil. When they do take part, it is often in the bit parts, like one of the wise men—a role sometimes reserved for the local rabbi’s son.
In the context of church-state court rulings in recent years, the school plays and carol-singing raise the question to what degree public education should become a medium for mirroring sectarian beliefs. But Christmas is also a fact, cultural and otherwise, and is part of the American heritage. The Yuletide haggling is thus part of the broad debate over how public education should handle religion, which is one of the major cultural forces in American life.
To some Gentiles, this public side of Christmas is homage to the world’s Messiah. To others, it is a purely secular phenomenon. But to most Jews it is an irritant of minority sensitivities. The objections to public notice of Christmas are one result. Another is the fact that “Hanukkah is loved by the Jewish people in a measure out of all proportion to its position in the ceremonial round of the Jewish religious year.” The words are those of Rabbi Solomon Bernards of B’nai B’rith, in an Associated Church Press article.
Hanukkah marks the dedication of the Temple in 165 B.C., but to a great extent it symbolizes the nationalistic side of Judaism, for the Temple was saved by the exploits of the Maccabean warriors. Bernards says that if the Jews hadn’t fought the Syrians, “Judaism would have disappeared, and Christianity and Islam would not have come into being.”
Perhaps. But a Christian can forget this historic debt, and show the smug superiority of numbers as he looks at his Jewish neighbor’s awkwardly relabeled “Hanukkah bush.” And he may also be irritated by the fact that Jews can be very upset about a school Christmas concert while making full use of the same festival’s sales potential in their stores.
As a reminder that anti-Semitism is not a problem restricted to Christian countries, an ad hoc panel of U. S. religious and civic leaders this month said that since the officially atheistic Soviet Union is depriving its Jews of their “character, dignity, and future,” it should permit large-scale emigration of its Jewish citizens to Israel. And ninety of the 100 U. S. senators urged the Soviet to grant its Jews full rights.
While in Paris this month, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin said Russian Jews “can be reunited” with their relatives in other nations, while at the same time denying charges of anti-Semitism. Jewish leaders in the United States and Israel welcomed the possibility of emigration.
If petty tensions at Christmas 1966 sometimes counteract the ideal of “on earth peace, good will toward men,” the year just ending has done much to apply the idea to Jewish-Christian relations.
The American and British Roman Catholic hierarchies formed commissions to implement the Vatican Council decree which made clear that Jews have no more collective guilt for Christ’s death than mankind in general. Guidelines for U. S. interfaith relations were drafted by Monsignor John Oesterreicher, himself a convert from Judaism, who believes the council decree “will lead to a grace-filled coexistence.” Catholics in Belgium and Austria are checking references to Jews in religious textbooks, and Jewish relations led the agenda at last July’s German Catholic Day Congress at Bamberg.
Protestants joined with Catholics in a major August conference in Cambridge, England, attended by many leading Jews, which explored interfaith relations. Participants said anti-Semitism is on the rise in some parts of the world. At that meeting, it was revealed that the National Council of Churches in the U. S. A. has been holding unofficial, off-the-record monthly discussions with Jewish leaders for nearly two years. In America, interfaith conferences were held at Lutheran St. Olaf College and Harvard Divinity School.
At the Harvard session, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee proposed an International Center for Advanced Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations. Tanenbaum admits “there has been a considerable amount of anxiety in the Jewish community” about theological dialogues with Christians.
Striking evidence of such anxiety came late last month at the meeting of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. The most conservative of Judaism’s three branches said Jews must reject “any endeavor to become engaged in dialogues concerning our faith and its theological foundations. We do not deem it proper or appropriate to discuss our eternal verities with members of other faiths, nor do we see such discussion as serving spiritual or social weal.”
Back To Bethlehem
The continuing agitation this month between Jewish Israel and Muslim Jordan casts a pall upon Christians celebrating one of their two great festivals. In a rare moment of cooperation, however, Israel and Jordan agreed to grant passes to about 5,000 Christian Arabs who live in Israel to spend thirty-six hours in the holy cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Jordan this month symbolized the status of its Christians by ordering all private schools (most of which are Christian) to close on Friday—traditional Muslim day of rest—as well as Sunday.
Westerners among the more than 15,000 visitors to Jordan will find that there is literally no room at the inns of Bethlehem or Jerusalem unless bookings have been made months in advance—despite the fact that Christmas is celebrated three times. Protestants, Greek Catholics, and Roman Catholics mark the traditional December 25; the Greek Orthodox follow the January 7 of the Julian calendar; Armenians celebrate on January 19, Epiphany on the Julian calendar.
In Bethlehem’s brightly lit square at the Church of the Nativity—Christendom’s oldest church still in use—the pilgrim is greeted with popping flashbulbs, the low rumble of buses loaded with tourists, and bands playing carols under bobbing colored lights. If he resists the wiles of shopkeepers with their olive-wood camels, Crusader scarves, carved Dead Sea stones, and mother-of-pearl crèches, he may yet manage to salvage the Christmas spirit.
The worshipers come from all lands. There are shepherds and princes, the dark- and the light-skinned, their voices swelling in a babel of tongues but with one spirit. After an hour of chanting in the Nativity Church, the Patriarch of Jerusalem moves into the grotto where a golden star inlaid in a slab of pure white Italian marble marks what is thought to be the spot where Christ was born. The patriarch reads the Christmas story. Then for hours men, women, and children kneel in wonder and place their lips to the star. The heat from a thousand candles, incense pots, and human bodies is suffocating, but every face radiates adoration.
DWIGHT L. BAKER
The Orthodox Jews were but little warmer toward the Vatican’s decree, which was said to contain “a gratuitous undercurrent of absolution and a complete absence of any open and frank acknowledgment by the church of her historic guilt for the unspeakable atrocities committed by her adherents.…”
In other segments of Judaism more interested in dialogue and more optimistic about the Christians, the younger faith is often misunderstood. For instance, proclamation is one of its essential characteristics, and Christians are not supposed to discriminate against Jews by withholding the Gospel.
At the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin, observer Rabbi Arthur Gilbert said “a significant dialogue can now begin between Jews and evangelical Christians,” but that the latter would have to recast their theology because “Christians need not convert us.” And at the St. Olaf’s consultation, Rabbi Myer Kripke of Omaha, Nebraska, said Christians should declare a moratorium on seeking to convert Jews. Two Roman Catholic-Jewish dialogues were held this month, and at one of them St. Louis Rabbi Joseph Rosenbloom said Christians need to “recognize the right of Jews to remain Jews.”
A halt in evangelism is as unlikely as judicial review of the trial of Jesus Christ, which has actually been discussed in Jerusalem. It was revealed this fall that Israel’s first Supreme Court Justice, Moshe Smoira, considered the possibility carefully after appeals from Christian theologians, but decided the matter was outside the court’s competence.
But unofficial retrials continue, and latter-day Israeli Justice Haim Cohn asserts that the trial was exclusively a Roman affair in which Jesus was executed for being a pretender to the kingship of the Jews. Cohn theorizes that the Jewish priests and scribes met at night with Jesus to implore him to save his life by denying his kingship.
This reconstruction of history is as imbalanced as the Middle Ages canards from Christians which gave Jews all the blame. The centuries of unchallenged anti-Semitism have left their mark within Christianity, and this history overshadows the search for the elusive meeting point between the two Semitic-based world faiths.
Personalia
After taking 23-year-old Kentuckian William Minor to the scene of the crime, Columbus, Ohio, police charged him with first-degree murder in the brutal bludgeoning of noted clergyman Robert W. Spike (Nov. 11 issue, page 57). Police said the two met while Minor was burglarizing the Ohio State University United Christian Center.
John Cogley reportedly will resign as New York Times religion editor for health reasons.
The Rev. Charles Blakney, 38-year-old United Church of Christ missionary, was fined $42 by a court in Southern Rhodesia for a sermon last summer deemed likely to expose police to “contempt, ridicule, or disesteem.”
The Rev. Stuart G. Turner, 41, hired at $9,000 a year to investigate prisoner complaints after a Maryland prison riot in July, was charged by a grand jury with taking $930 from two inmates in return for seeking paroles for them.
The Rev. Jose Chavez, Baptist pastor in San Antonio, Texas, was permanently crippled by a gunshot wound in the spine during a youth gang battle near his home.
V. Raymond Edman, 66, former president of Wheaton College, suffered a heart attack just before Thanksgiving and was expected to be in a St. Charles, Illinois, hospital most of this month.
President of the new Lutheran Council in the U. S. A., which opens its New York office January 1, is Malvin Lundeen, former full-time secretary of the Lutheran Church in America, who outlasted twelve other candidates at last month’s organizing convention. Missouri Synod’s C. Thomas Spitz, Jr., continues as general secretary.
President Oliver Harms of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod wired President Johnson to commend him for the holiday ceasefires in Viet Nam and urge him “to pursue permanent peace in this tortured land.”
President Johnson was elected an elder of First Christian Church (Disciples) of Johnson City, Texas, where he has belonged since 1923. The post purportedly will be an active one, not honorary.
One Roman Catholic priest preached at a Thanksgiving service in Dallas’s North-lake Baptist Church; another has been chosen social-service advisor at Meredith College, a North Carolina Baptist women’s school.
U. M. Dorairaj, a Hindustan Bible Institute missionary in Alwar, India, has been missing two months and is feared kidnapped by religious enemies.
A four-man committee is administering Abilene Christian College during the recuperation of President Don H. Morris, who had a stroke last month.
Dr. Elmer L. Severinghaus, long-time teacher at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, was elected president of the United Church of Christ’s Board for World Ministries.
J. Manning Potts, editor of the Upper Room—which has the largest paid circulation among devotional literature—will become executive director of the Methodist assembly center at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, January 1.
Deaths
WALTER POPE BINNS, 71, Roanoke, Virginia, pastor who became a veteran leader of the Southern Baptist Executive Committee and president of William Jewell College; retired two months ago as chairman of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs; in Falls Church, Virginia, of a heart attack.
ANATOL KIRUKHANTSEV, 41, pastor of the Leningrad Baptist Church and one of the Soviet Union’s key Protestants: of a heart attack.
HUGH D. FARLEY, 52, executive director of Church World Service from 1961 to 1965; in Key Biscayne, Florida, of a heart attack while playing tennis with his wife.
President Arnold T. Olson of the Evangelical Free Church says the Roman Catholic move for a common Christian Bible could be used for “carrying out the Great Commission.” Noting evangelicals’ zeal in spreading the Bible, he said “our sincerity to this commitment will now be tested.”
Miscellany
Spain’s Roman Catholics formed councils for lower clergy and laymen seen as a liberalizing move, and bishops told voters to follow their consciences in voting this month on a constitution which widens rights of non-Catholics. The nation’s Supreme Court acquitted five Jehovah’s Witnesses fined for holding a Bible study.
At a week-long meeting in Chiang Mai, Thailand, leaders from twenty nations in the World Fellowship of Buddhists discussed international peace and a proposal that the organization’s constitution prohibit political involvement.
Southern Baptists are seeking 100 preachers for a simultaneous revival crusade in South Africa next September. A South African linguist for Wycliffe Bible Translators, Keith Forster, was denied a visa to work in Nigeria. In New York, the clergy-laden Committee of Conscience Against Apartheid said more than $23 million has been withdrawn from two banks to protest their loans to South Africa.
Three Soviet women, members of the conservative Baptist group that refuses to register with the government, were jailed for three years for holding secret religion classes. A new addition to the U. S. S. R. criminal code now makes even oral criticism of government policies on religion punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment.
In elections last month, Communists in Nazareth, Israel, lost control of the municipal council.
Vatican experts are studying the new Dutch Catechism after conservatives in the Netherlands bypassed their bishops and complained directly to the Holy See. Pope Paul this month issued a warning to the Dutch church.
A survey revealed at a Notre Dame University population conference showed that 53 per cent of Roman Catholic wives in the United States from age 18 to 39 use birth-control methods forbidden by their church. In 1960, only 38 per cent violated the teaching.
The Middle States Association has given St. John’s University, dissent-ridden Roman Catholic school in Brooklyn, one year to refurbish academic standards or face loss of accreditation.
In the United Nations debate before Red China was refused admission, Nationalist China’s Foreign Minister Wei Tao-ming denied that Pope Paul was urging a seat for Red China in his U. N. speech last year.
Mirroring the U. S. economy, the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board is allowing its church-loans division to charge more than 6 per cent interest for loans to finance new church construction.
Joseph D. Morse, 37-year-old odd-job janitor, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of University of Colorado coed Elaura Jaquette (see August 19 issue, page 52).
U. S. Census Director A. Ross Eckler has decided that no question on religious preference will appear on the 1970 census.
Edward E. Plowman
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Current student disturbances at the University of California’s Berkeley campus seem commonplace, but more ominous ferment is under way on a small, eleven-building campus nearby.
Berkeley Baptist Divinity School has survived since 1871. One saddened official of its parent American Baptist Convention says, “I helped nurse that school through the Depression, but now, for the first time, I fear for its future.”
The controversy is hydra-headed, and involves liberal theological trends, personalities, and administrative dealings. Factionalism simmers in all strata—faculty, alumni, ABC officialdom, and the bill-paying constituency.
Despite grass-roots opposition, the BBDS administration won a victory of sorts in a showdown meeting with the Board of Trustees on November 18 and 19. Amid demands for dismissal of President Robert J. Arnott on the one hand, and threats of wholesale faculty and student walkouts on the other, trustees voted to maintain the status quo at least until June.
At that time, they will vote on a five-year development plan now being drawn up by a new committee, which will seek “principal alternatives” to the seminary’s current educational “mission,” program, finances, organization, and faculty. The board appealed to the seminary’s ABC backers for continued, “united” support.
Financial cutoffs by ABC churches have been considerable since May. This year BBDS leased out the two upper floors of its two-year-old academic building, and last year it sold a thirty-two-unit student apartment building.
When President Ralph Johnson quit under pressure in 1964, the board told replacement Arnott to boost academic quality and pursue other “progressive” policies. Veteran teachers were chagrined when new professors were hired with tenure and higher salaries. Some were also disturbed over the newcomers’ left-wing theology, a reflection of Arnott’s own position. Openly expressing disgust, comparative religions Professor Leonard Gittings quit last year and New Testament Professor Taylor C. Smith left this year.
Last month, E. P. Y. Simpson, professor of church history, also resigned, under pressure stemming from a fifteen-page document he wrote analyzing BBDS problems and criticizing the administration. It was intended for the eyes of certain board members, but a copy was leaked. Arnott’s camp published a fifty-four-page rebuttal and handed it out to the trustees at last month’s meeting. But Arnott declined to discuss the controversy with the press.
The most controversial newcomer among the permanent faculty of ten is Bernard Loomer, imported from the University of Chicago Divinity School in August, 1965. His theological naturalism is a focal point for the doctrinal part of the controversy. With Loomer came Arnott’s administrative whip, Arthur Foster, who was a classmate of Arnott at Ontario’s McMaster University.
The newest faculty acquisition, Norman K. Gottwald, kept the pot boiling in his installation speech this fall (“to be fully human” is to be “thus fully Christian.”) Gottwald acknowledged that theological “ferment and realignment that is cutting across existing denominational lines” is “one of the meanings of the unrest” at BBDS.
Another issue for some is campus freedom and the conduct of the hundred-plus students. They are now allowed to smoke on campus, but a few weeks ago Professor Robert Hannen decided freedom has its limits and posted a “No Smoking” sign in the library he runs. Another professor found the new freedom “utterly revolting” earlier this year when a student leader, just back from ABC orientation in Wisconsin, lit a pipe at the Communion table.
Other critics think the Baptist seminarians are immersed too deeply in the ecumenical waters of the Graduate Theological Union, a voluntary cooperative plan among nine Bay Area schools centered on Berkeley’s “Holy Hill.” The union includes not only three Roman Catholic institutions, but the Unitarians’ Starr King School. But BBDS’s official purpose remains to produce “leaders capable of bringing others into a saving knowledge of God in Christ.”
BBDS students have many of their classes on other campuses under the Graduate Theological Union’s pooling of faculty and curriculum. A semi-secret report last year used BBDS as an illustration in suggesting increased efficiency and economy by greater GTU involvement. To assuage suspicions, the BBDS board reaffirmed earlier instructions that Baptist-related courses be maintained on the BBDS campus.
All of these issues have produced a lot of agitation during 1966. Dismayed alumni—many of them liberals—have called for a return to the “mainstream.” From ABC headquarters, theological education chief Lynn Leavenworth implied that the school’s new look was too narrow to serve the denomination and that its ability to attract revenue and students was in jeopardy. Extraordinary alumni caucuses were held during the ABC’s national meeting last May, with Arnott on the receiving end of hostile questions. Tempers also flared during an all-day summer meeting of BBDS administrators with executives of the ABC’s northern California staff.
Despite the outcries, Arnott refused to swerve from his course and injected an issue of his own: academic freedom. In August, while heading a five-member fact-finding mission, Board Chairman Herman Childress discussed with Arnott what the advantages would be if he resigned before the trustees’ annual meeting in September.
Arnott served notice he would not resign and enlisted faculty and student support for the academic-freedom issue. Eight staffers and a majority of the students joined him in a petition upholding current policies. Large walkouts were threatened if the board were to fire anyone. Letters of support were solicited from across the nation.
Warned layman Childress, “If anyone is forced to resign it will mean the death of the school.” The board, he said, must “buy enough time to explore fully all possible avenues of settlement while keeping the school intact.” Faced with Arnott’s show of power in September, the trustees decided on further study, with “definitive action” in November.
The November results are considered by some as more “delaying” than “definitive.” Others see a clear-cut victory for Arnott and his friends. In reaction, a group of leading ABC laymen has been formed to press for “a complete theological overhaul.” Cecil Cooper, normally soft-spoken president of American Baptist Men of Northern California, said, “We represent the view of 99 per cent of the lay people of our churches and many of our pastors, in our call for correction of a bad situation.” Another leader of the group, former BBDS board member Everett Carlson, said that “this is one case where we simply cannot allow an organized minority to have its way. There is too much at stake.”
On December 6, after an evangelism conference, about half the ABC pastors in northern California met with leaders of the lay group. In a secret ballot, 81 voted for a “change of administration” at BBDS, with 18 against.
At the meeting, Gittings broke a year of silence with a harsh warning that “we are witnessing a wholesale abandonment of Christian faith” at the seminary. He said 1965 seniors showed “arrogance and condescension toward Jesus Christ.”
Over the long haul, the major issue is the school’s theological drift as it relates to educational preparation of men for ABC pulpits. Student President Bruce Morgan attested in an interview, “Most of us students are with Dr. Arnott on theology.” But another student body officer said, “I think that most of us are confused as to what to believe theologically. Each one must find his own way to faith. We want the freedom to do this.”
- More fromEdward E. Plowman
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After lying dormant for the first sixteen years of the National Council of Churches’ existence, the subject of evangelism suddenly came alive this month. NCC leaders made evangelism a prime issue in their glittering seventh General Assembly in Miami Beach.
“There may have been a time when the churches thought they could afford to consider evangelism as an optional subsidiary activity of their life and mission,” said outgoing NCC President Reuben H. Mueller. “We dare not harbor such an illusion today.” Evangelism, he said, means in this age “what it has always meant: a call to conversion.”
Mueller’s successor, middle-of-the-roader Arthur S. Flemming, promised to give evangelism major emphasis during his three-year term. But he stressed that new attention to evangelism does not mean a let-up in the flow of social pronouncements by the NCC. The assembly bore him out by producing an ample amount of paperwork on political and economic concerns. By contrast, no consensus on evangelism was issued.
The fact that evangelism was even discussed, however, marked an NCC milestone. Billy Graham’s part on the program underscored the development. He told a luncheon of 2,500 persons that the Gospel is communicated by: authoritative proclamation, holy living, a consuming love for men, compassionate social concern, and the demonstration of unity in the Spirit.
“The greatest words in the Gospel,” he said, “are, ‘Thy sins are forgiven thee.’” He also addressed several hundred persons at a sectional meeting devoted to a review of the World Congress on Evangelism. Half a dozen major denominational secretaries of evangelism hailed the congress as advancing the Christian cause.
Not everyone at the assembly was friendly to Graham (see following story). Some at NCC headquarters opposed the invitation to Graham to participate. The fact that they were outvoted suggests an opening to the right by the NCC. It probably signals as well an intensive tug-of-war within NCC ranks between advocates of the so-called new evangelism and those who favor evangelism keyed to a biblical perspective.
The assembly’s 868 voting representatives were treated to a week of ideal weather in Miami Beach—cloudless skies and seventy-five-degree temperatures. But business prevailed over pleasure, and surprisingly few churchmen ventured into the warm surf.
It was the NCC’s first major meeting without Eugene Carson Blake, now head of the World Council of Churches in Geneva. Two other noted social activists, Vernon Ferwerda and Arthur Thomas, were absent. Their departures from the NCC under unclear circumstances were announced quietly at a General Board meeting preceding the assembly. Ferwerda served the NCC as an assistant general secretary in charge of its Washington, D. C., lobby.1The post is being abolished. Ferwerda will be succeeded by lawyer James Hamilton, whose title will be that of Washington office director. Thomas headed the controversial, freewheeling Mississippi Delta Ministry, whose budget has been cut back sharply.
The central figure in the NCC’s current evangelistic encounter is the associate secretary of its Division of Christian Life and Mission, Colin Williams. In a sixty-four-page book he wrote for pre-assembly study, Williams pleaded for a radical reconsideration of the concept of evangelism. Although 100,000 copies were said to have been issued, the book apparently made little impact.
New Members
The constituent count of the National Council of Churches rose to thirty-four communions with 41.5 million members at the Miami assembly, with the addition of four more denominations: the Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc.; the Antiochian Orthodox Catholic Archdiocese of Toledo, Ohio, and Dependencies; the Church of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian); and the Moscow-led Exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church in North and South America.
Williams, an Australian Methodist, appeared before a press conference at the assembly with Harvard’s Harvey Cox, author of The Secular City. Williams said the new evangelism “takes just as seriously as the old the fact that the Christian faith calls men to a radical change of life. It also takes just as seriously the need for this call to be announced—preached. Where it is new is in its insistence that evangelism must also take seriously the new situations in which men must be addressed.”
Williams, long a critic of Billy Graham, again took issue with him, contending the evangelist does not go far enough in relating individual change of heart to change “of our attitudes to the world around us.” Williams said Graham’s type of evangelism has both good and bad effects. Cox refused to comment on Graham.
Whatever the influence of Williams, the avant-garde idealists seem to be losing their grip on the NCC. The steam has gone out of the preoccupation with the temporal and drive for social action of the early sixties. The mood of things may well be a swing toward personal discipline, and churches may begin taking closer looks at themselves rather than expecting so much of government.
A suggestion to this end came in a speech to the assembly by Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey, who chided American church-goers for their stinginess: “One statistic I have seen puts the total of Catholic and Protestant expenditures on services to others outside the churches, at about $500 million per year—only forty-one cents per month for everyone who belongs to a church in America.”
Humphrey said the essence of his religious conviction was that “the way you treat people is the way you treat God.”
As ecumenical church leaders show more interest in evangelism and biblical priorities, they know they will be in a better position for rapprochement with Roman Catholics2The NCC General Board made a new move toward the Roman Catholic Church by recognizing it is subscribing to the preamble to the NCC constitution. and with evangelical Protestants now outside the conciliar movement. Ecumenists have great respect for evangelical zeal, which takes on new importance as declining church membership becomes a topic of concern.
Freud On Woodrow Wilson: A Delusion Of Divinity
Both Sigmund Freud and Woodrow Wilson were born in 1856, achieved world fame, and died in disillusionment. Beyond that the two had little in common until Look magazine this month ran an excerpt from a forthcoming book in which Wilson suffers second-hand psychoanalysis from Freud and William C. Bullitt, Wilson’s ambassador to Russia, who broke with him in 1919.
Princeton University’s Arthur S. Link, editor of the Wilson papers of which the first volume recently appeared, says the Look piece is “tame” compared to the book, which will claim Wilson was not just neurotic but a psychotic from at least 1907 to the end of his career because he couldn’t solve his Oepidus (father) complex.
Historian Link estimates the book is about nine-tenths “non-fact.… I couldn’t begin to count the demonstrable errors.” Another aspect—Wilson was “a zealous Christian, though not a fanatic,” while Freud believed “any religion was merely a projection of the ego.” Thus Freud asserts Presbyterian Wilson actually believed he was God. Link says that is “the most errant nonsense.” (See Link’s essay on Wilson’s beliefs in the July 3, 1964, issue).
Freud was not only an atheist but also a citizen of the Hapsburg empire defeated by the American Allies in World War I. With co-author Bullitt a political enemy, the combination is potent. Wilson is accused of giving in too easily to Allied demands because “the deep underlying femininity of his nature began to control him.” He was psychologically “destroyed” by his strong-willed father, Presbyterian minister Joseph Ruggles Wilson, and “his identification with the Trinity was in full control of him.”
Most of the nation’s 19,000 psychiatrists disregard the value of such posthumous psychoanalysis, and it appears Freud has provided them as much insight about himself as about Wilson.
Some Freud followers have reacted in disbelief that the founder of psychoanalysis would have done such a thing, and John Fearing, chairman of the public information committee of the American Psychoanalytic Society, said he is upset that the material ever was made public and doesn’t intend to read it.
The 1,200-member APS generally represents classical Freudian psychiatry, while the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, with 700 members, is a more eclectic Freudian group. A member of both, Northwestern University’s Jules Masserman, is “bitterly, totally, unalterably opposed” to the Freud book.
Evangelical Christian psychiatrists generally take a more friendly view toward Freud than Freud did toward Wilson. After all, Freud was a “sick old man,” says John A. Knapp of Charlottesville, Virginia. He believes Freudian concepts are “tools which can be used either to cut away diseased tissue, or to butcher,” and predicts that “all men who are not Freud’s religious slaves will be embarrassed.”
Knapp helped start the psychiatric section of the Christian Medical Society. Its current president, Truman Esau of Chicago’s Covenant Counselling Center, says that Freud’s idea that all religion is neurotic is “generally discarded” but that Freud has helped psychiatry differentiate between religion used in a neurotic fashion and religion as “faith and living reality.”
E. Mansell Pattison of the University of Washington thinks Freud was not really against religion per se but the institutional church as he saw it in Vienna. But because of Freud, there was “a lot of anti-religious bias inherent in psychiatry up till the early forties,” and some psychiatrists still have “an anti-religious chip on their shoulders.”
Few psychiatrists seem to take Freud’s latest seriously. The mood of the episode was captured by New York Times humorist Russell Baker: “What this country needs is a legal guarantee of the citizen’s right not to be publicly psychoanalyzed by people he has never met. Violation of this right should be made a crime. It could be called ‘Freudulence.’”
If, however, evangelism retains the attention of the NCC, it will demand definition. Right now there is wide disagreement and even confusion.
Some churchmen found it hard to get excited about human need in the environment of the assembly headquarters, the luxurious hotel Fontainbleau, which claims to be the “leading resort in the world.” Nevertheless, a long list of social concerns was voiced. Some examples:
From a “Message to the Churches”: “We in this assembly call upon the constituencies of this council to concern themselves actively with the great responsibilities that have confronted this assembly, including the basic need of men to know the living Christ and under his Lordship seek the elimination of racial injustice, poverty, hunger, war, and the disunity in the household of Christ.”
From a resolution: The “General Assembly welcomes the action of Pope Paul VI in calling for an extension of the Christmas ceasefire in Viet Nam.… The General Assembly calls upon the United States government to respond affirmatively …”
From a General Board resolution: “We suggest that there are better ways of ensuring our national security and of meeting the manpower needs than the present Selective Service system with its patent inequities.”
Evangelical ‘Demons’
Using the term “demons,” Dr. Willis E. Elliott unleased a scathing attack on evangelist Billy Graham and CHRISTIANITY TODAY Editor Carl F. H. Henry at the NCC General Assembly (story above). He compared them with the New Testament scribes who persecuted and helped kill Christ.
Elliott, a United Church of Christ official, accused Graham and Henry of a “cancerous over-attention” to the Bible, which he said amounted to bibliolatry. Elliott also complained of the “oppressive atmosphere” at CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S recent World Congress on Evangelism, where he was an observer.
“I do not consider the Red Chinese pollution more dangerous than that of John R. W. Stott, the main Bible teacher at the congress,” Elliott said.
“In us and our churches,” he added, “are demonic forces determined to fight off the future, and in this speech I have attacked just one of these demons, namely the scribal mentality.”
The speech was presented to a sectional meeting of the assembly, with several hundred persons present. One denominational official afterward recorded a vocal protest.
Elliott boasted that assembly leaders had not seen his text in advance. Although he kept it from them, he is known to have distributed it to reporters several days before the meeting. He works in the Division of Evangelism and Research of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries.
Canadian Council Revamps
The Canadian Council of Churches, meeting at Geneva Park, Ontario, November 22–25, voted unanimously for sweeping organizational changes. The 150 delegates gave formal approval to a provisional constitution to serve until 1969. The new structures are designed to move away from the traditional denominational patter and make way for greater ecumenical enterprises.
Presbyterian Wilfred Butcher, general secretary, said the council had advanced only a little further “than the threshold of genuine ecumenical movement.… We expect to have quite a different type of council, neither coordinating nor reflecting the departmental action of the churches, but rather based on the very nature and need of ecumenical encounter and action.” The old departments will be replaced by three commissions: ecumenical encounter, research, and education. The council saw itself as an agency working in areas where individual churches could not do the job, including ecumenical talks and cooperation with Roman Catholics.
The council called for action by the Canadian government to secure United Nations recognition for Red China, self-determination on Taiwan, and a halt of U.S. bombing of North Viet Nam on the grounds that “it appears that North Viet Nam will not join in any peace talks unless the United States stops bombing its territory.” A special day of prayer is to be called on behalf of Viet Nam, and member churches will be asked to contribute more effective aid to the suffering civilians in both North and South Viet Nam.
Some evangelicals at the council cautioned against over-involvement in social action when the primary task of the church is to preach the Gospel.
The council voted to meet triennially instead of biennially, and elected the Rev. Reginald Dunn, a Toronto Baptist, as president.
J. BERKLEY REYNOLDS
Cathedral Cards
For forty years Washington Cathedral has been in the Christmas-card business, and this season the demand is greater than ever. Some four million cards produced by the Episcopal national shrine are expected to pass through the mails.
The cathedral isn’t in it just for the money, but a spokesman readily acknowledges that the $6,200,000 gross income since 1926 has been a “significant help.”
The steady growth of the Christmas-card business is obviously a result of the bargain offered: ten high-quality cards with envelopes for a dollar, one hundred for nine dollars. Most of the cards are richly illustrated with traditional religious art. A few cards show contemporary religious art and scenes of the cathedral. Producers search far and wide for suitable art, and last year they scored something of an ecumenical first by reproducing with credit a painting that hangs in the museum of ultra-fundamentalist Bob Jones University.
Despite increasing production costs, the cathedral has been able to keep prices down because of its efficient staff and the increased sales volume. All profits go to the building and maintenance of the cathedral, which is about two-thirds finished. Completion of the building is not expected until about 1985.
The cathedral is said to have started printing Christmas cards when many of its friends complained that commercial ones pictured only Santa Claus or winter scenes and had little or no religious significance. Churchmen of the cathedral say that the success of their cards caused commercial card companies to add religious cards to their lines. These churchmen also cite another rewarding aspect of their card project: it prompts spiritually needy people to write the cathedral about their problems and enables counselors to provide a direct and personal Christian service.
E.U.B. Railroaded?
In the aftermath of last month’s approval of merger by the general conferences of the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren Churches (Nov. 25 issue, page 38) some ecumenically minded Methodists are complaining that the EUBs were railroaded into passage.
Two official Methodist magazines, the missions journal World Outlook and the social action organ Concern, said the 10.3 million Methodists conceded virtually nothing to the 750,000 EUBs. Outlook said it was not “church union” but “denominational triumphalism,” and Concern expressed wonder that the EUBs went along at all (they passed the union plan by a mere sixteen votes).
The handling of negotiations is of significance to the Consultation on Church Union, which both denominations also participate in.
Methodist COCU delegate Albert Outler says he voted against the EUB merger because it was handled by “a small power group with a lay pope as its pyramid” and seemed more like a corporation merger than a spiritual exercise. The “pope” was Charles C. Parlin, lawyer, World Council of Churches leader, and opponent of COCU.
The same week the two general conferences discussed merger, the Methodist bishops also met in Chicago and called for a quick end to the Viet Nam war and proposed a “world consultation” of religious leaders, probably in Asia, to seek a way out. A week later, President Odd Hagen of the World Methodist Council said during a U. S. visit that he was asking other leaders of world confessional bodies, including Pope Paul, to join him in a pre-Christmas appeal for peace. Paul had previously issued an appeal of his own.
Holiness Unity On Tiptoe
Acknowledging ecumenical currents, and concerned over their own lack of a unified front, representatives of thirteen holiness denominations3Denominations represented were: Brethren in Christ, Churches of Christ in Christian Union, Evangelical Friends Association, Evangelical Methodists, Evangelical United Brethren (Northwest Conference), Free Methodists, Holiness Methodists, Missionary Church Association, Church of the Nazarene, Pilgrim Holiness, Salvation Army, United Missionary Church, Wesleyan Methodists. ranging in membership from 1,000 to 350,000, tiptoed toward a working relationship during a closed-door study conference that ended December 2 in Chicago.
The job tackled by the 150 church leaders was ambitious in the light of the differences in size and—at least until recently—a historic attitude of denominational independence. The answer to a closer alliance lay, conference leaders felt, in a “federation in which all of us have an integral part and yet maintain our own identity and carry on our own program.”
The conference came at a time when delegates within the group were involved in both merger and separation. The Wesleyan Methodist and Pilgrim Holiness Churches are in the process of merging. Should the merger between the Methodists and Evangelical United Brethren take place, the EUB Pacific Northwest Conference is likely to become independent.
The federation study grew out of a recommendation last year to the National Holiness Association. The NHA served first to get the denominations together for inspiration but during the last fifteen years has eased members and observers toward ecumenical thinking.
Myron F. Boyd, the Free Methodist bishop who made the proposal in 1965, gave the keynote address in Chicago. He spoke heartily for unity among holiness denominations but reminded the representatives that they were there only to study the feasibility of inter-workings in administration, publication, education, and missions.
To Change The Subject
Should doctors allow one patient to die in order to save another?
The question was put recently to a group of hospital chaplains by Dr. Neal Bricker, professor of medicine at Washington University, St. Louis. At a campus meeting with chaplains of the three major faiths, Bricker posed a situation in which a respirator is turned off on patients who are hopelessly injured so that their kidneys can be used for transplants. The prohibitive cost of an artificial kidney, plus the mounting need of kidneys for transplant, are arguments in favor of such a decision.
When Bricker asked for a straw vote on the morality of the decision, however, the chaplains changed the subject.
The most apparent area for cooperation seems to be publishing. The Holiness Denominational Publishers Association, which is nearly a decade old, produces a Sunday school curriculum for children and youth materials under a common imprint. But even here, the lack of denominational distinctives has been noted with occasional disfavor.
Outside publishing, concrete suggestions for closer working relationships were hard to come by. Long-range projections had to do with standardizing requirements for ministers, the possibility of a common publications board, merging of some educational institutions, and cooperative ministries in the inner city and on secular campuses.
A steering committee of eight men, plus two yet-to-be-named representatives from each denomination, was approved as an “intermediate step” between the study conference and “any future federating convention.” If a federation develops, it would ally thirteen denominations of about 800,000 members in approximately 10,000 congregations.
ELDEN E. RAWLINGS
School Aid Challenged
The constitutionality of aid to church schools under the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act is challenged in a suit filed with the New York State Supreme Court and a federal district court by the New York Civil Liberties Union, American Jewish Congress, United Federation of Teachers, and United Parents Association. The effort is backed by both the Protestant Council of the City of New York and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Half Of A Tv Debate
When Dr. Carl McIntire arrived in Los Angeles, one of his first questions was, “Is he going to show?” The answer was no. Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike had agreed to debate McIntire, a longtime fundamentalist assailant, on Joe Pyne’s TV talk show. But Pike told producers ten days before the November 30 taping he couldn’t make it. McIntire wasn’t told about the cancellation.
The Pyne people then replaced the bishop with the leftish Rev. L. P. Wittlinger of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Palo Alto, California. When he learned this backstage before the show, McIntire said, “If [Pike] is not here I will go on alone, but not with anyone else.” So a solo interview was agreed upon. The results were seen in many cities last week.
Pyne’s program, taped in Los Angeles and syndicated across the nation, is the top-rated talk show in many markets, including New York. Off camera, Pyne is rather likeable, but his program has soared to popularity because of his verbal assaults on guests. The emcee’s strange interest in religion is evidenced by a glance at his guest list. His producer revealed, “Joe was once a Catholic, but now is nothing.”
With McIntire, Pyne was untraditionally lacking in stinging attacks, but things heated up when the show was ten minutes old. Wittlinger made up his mind he was going to appear, pulled up a chair, and moved in on the chat, to the surprise of McIntire, Pyne, and his staff.
After McIntire made it clear he did not accept the boyish-looking clergyman as a substitute for Pike, the arguments over the Trinity and Virgin Birth began. The advocate of Pike-like belief was generally out-debated by McIntire, who at one point told the priest, “Sir, you need to be saved; you need to be born again.” Some of Pyne’s words-in-edgewise dealt with “the funny little stories in the Bible such as Noah’s Ark.” He also pressed McIntire into admitting that a room in his Cape May, New Jersey, conference hotel is dedicated to the memory of John Birch.
There were also some verbal clashes between members of the studio audience. McIntire had gathered about twenty supporters, and they appeared quite upset when others heckled McIntire. When the McIntire segment of the show ended, his followers left.
As McIntire departed, he issued yet another challenge to Pike, and a spokesman for the show said he was confident Pike would appear with McIntire at a future date. But not, an aide said, unless McIntire’s expenses are paid. This time he flew to Los Angeles on his own. Wittlinger’s expenses were paid by the program.
KEN GAYDOS
Christianity TodayDecember 23, 1966
A New Tour Of Genesis
Understanding Genesis, by Nahum M. Sarna (McGraw-Hill, 1966, 267 pp., $6.95), and Worship in Israel: A Cultic History of the Old Testament, by Hans-Joachim Kraus (John Knox, 1966, 246 pp., $6), are reviewed by Edward J. Young, professor of Old Testament, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Professor Sarna’s book will certainly take a foremost place in the current revival of interest in Genesis. In interesting and readable language he takes the reader through Genesis, pointing out step by step the ancient Oriental background against which the book was written. He accepts the documentary hypothesis, although he does not allow it to clutter up his work. Thus we are told, for example, that the narrative of Joseph is mainly assigned to J and E with an admixture of P. Yet even this much of the documentary hypothesis may cause the reader to wonder how the remarkable narrative of Joseph ever arose from such a concoction.
The author has amassed a tremendous amount of archaeological material to illumine the background of Genesis. Those who desire an up-to-date evaluation of the discoveries of Nuzi, Mari, Alalakh, and so on, will find it here. Sarna seems to have overlooked nothing, and no serious student of Genesis can afford to overlook his book.
In dealing with the early chapters of Genesis, Sarna seeks to grapple with the problem of myth. And indeed, this will always be a problem—an insolvable problem—unless one regards the early chapters of Genesis, not as an “Israelite version” (p. 4) with literary indebtedness to ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies, but as a divine revelation, which, though its literary form may include words and phrases that were in use elsewhere, is nevertheless the very truth of God. There is deep need for a thorough study of the relation of the early chapters of Genesis to the cosmogonies of antiquity, a study that will proceed from the assumption that Genesis is sacred Scripture, the inerrant revelation of the triune God. Only upon such a basis can the true relation be established.
Dr. Kraus’s book is of great value as an introduction to the study of recent form criticism. His first chapter is a masterpiece of summary (a field in which he has distinguished himself) and may certainly be recommended to those who wish to understand recent Old Testament studies. Here is a cautious, scholarly, and sane treatment of the cultic festivals of ancient Israel written from a form-critical standpoint. At the same time there is a wholesome independence of approach that makes the work particularly useful.
The book stands as a counter to the theories of Wellhausen and also to the views of patternism so prevalent in recent times. At times Kraus raises a needed word of warning against excesses of emphasis, as, for example, in the use of Hittite treaty patterns to interpret the Old Testament. He does consider carefully the Canaanite background against which Israel moved and feels that in adapting certain Canaanite acts Israel purified them, bringing them into the sphere of personal relation between the individual and God.
For my part, however, I do not think that such a picture does justice to the facts. If there was such a transformation in Israel, what really caused it? I do not feel that the presuppositions that undergird this book provide for a satisfactory answer. What happened in Israel happened in none of the other countries of antiquity. God “made known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto the children of Israel” (Ps. 103:7). Until we accept and understand this fact, we shall never properly understand Israel nor her worship of God.
EDWARD J. YOUNG
For Devotees Of Calvin
John Calvin (“Courtenay Studies in Reformation Theology,” Vol. I), edited by G. E. Duffield (Eerdmans, 1966, 228 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Donald J. Bruggink, associate professor of church history, Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan.
Basil Hall of Cambridge opens this impressive volume of essays with “The Calvin Legend,” in which he shows how Calvin suffers from both the calumnies of his enemies (inside and outside Protestantism) and the distortion of his theology by his friends. Hall does not hesitate to say that “when Calvin died in 1564 the synthesis of biblical studies, humane learning, and the welfare of the small city state of Geneva, died with him. A change of emphasis came with Beza, his successor …” (p. 2). This assertion is further substantiated in the next chapter, “Calvin Against the Calvinists.” Beza is found guilty of subordinating biblical exegesis “to a restored Aristotelianism” (p. 25).
William Perkins, one of the most influential of early Puritan writers, likewise contributed to the distortion of Calvin’s carefully balanced theology, first by setting forth a more speculative and less biblical doctrine of election, and then, in an effort to give a greater assurance of grace, by urging a close inspection of one’s own feelings to ascertain the evidences of grace. Calvin had pointed the individual not to self but to “Scripture, Christ, the church and the sacraments for assurance of salvation” (p. 29).
Basil Hall clears away a good deal of misinformation, and following essays give a more detailed look at Calvin. Ford Lewis Battles presents the young Calvin who wrote the Commentary on Seneca and shows how the careful scholarship behind this commentary constituted the tools for Calvin’s later exegesis of Scripture—a useful warning to those who would exegete Scripture purely by the “spirit.” A look at the humane, always concerned, and remarkably elastic Calvin is provided in “Calvin the Letter-Writer” by Jean-Daniel Benoit, who also provides an essay on “The History and Development of the Institutio: How Calvin Worked.”
G. S. M. Walker’s “The Lord’s Supper in the Theology and Practice of Calvin” recognizes that for Calvin “the Lord’s Supper was central in the church’s life …” (p. 131). Not only was the practice of the proclamation of God’s Word recovered at the Reformation, but Calvin was among those who also attempted to restore sacramental usages to biblical norms. In terms of biblical and Reformation history, one must agree with Walker that it is a “tragedy that for [Calvin’s] spiritual descendants … the scriptural ideal of weekly celebration has not yet been adequately realized; the result has been an unnatural divorce between word and sacrament to which the whole theology of Calvin is opposed” (p. 143).
Of timely concern is the essay of Jean Cadier, “Calvin and the Union of the Churches.” In marked contrast to many contemporary Christians who would claim Calvin’s name, Calvin was concerned with the unity of the body of Christ and was willing to discuss this unity not only with the church at Zürich, where his efforts succeeded, and with the Lutherans, where they did not, but also with the Anglicans, where a hoped-for meeting never took place, and even with the Roman Catholics! In the heat of the Reformation Calvin went to the conferences at Ratisbon in 1540 and 1541 to attempt a reconciliation of Protestant and Roman Catholic positions. The attempt failed for lack of theological agreement, but the attempt was made! Something of the theological perspective of Calvin that explains these efforts for unity is set forth in his letter to Archbishop Cranmer in 1552:
Amongst the greatest evils of our century must be counted the fact that the churches are so divided one from another that there is scarcely even a human relationship between us; at all events there is not the shining light of that holy fellowship of the members of Christ, of which many boast in word, but which few seek sincerely in deed. In consequence, because the members are tom apart, the body of the church lies wounded and bleeding. So far as I have it in my power, if I am thought to be of any service, I shall not be afraid to cross ten seas for this purpose, if that should be necessary [pp. 126, 127].
This first volume of the “Courtenay Studies in Reformation Theology” lives up to its dust-jacket description: “A Collection of Distinguished Essays.”
DONALD J. BRUGGINK
The Cross And The Flag
Colonialism and Christian Missions, by Stephen Neill (McGraw-Hill, 1966, 445 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Harold Lindsell, associate editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
Bishop Neill, professor of missions at the University of Hamburg, here plows new ground: he shows the relation between the cross of the Church and the flag of the colonial powers during the period when the Church was bringing the Gospel to the heathen world and the Western powers were extending their hegemony all over the globe.
Neill traces the progress of the Gospel in India, China, Japan, Indonesia, the Pacific, and Africa. He shows clearly that cross and flag were distinct strands that often intertwined and that missionaries were, after all, creatures of time and environment who sometimes thought Western culture was intrinsic to the Gospel and who were not above confederacy with the state to advance the cause of the Church. Nor was the state always averse to using the missionary arm of the Church to forward political and “imperialistic” ambitions.
What emerges from his treatment is the balanced judgment that neither Church nor state was wholly bad or wholly good. The permanent values flowing from Western penetration far exceeded the destructive aspects of that penetration. Indeed, the author shows that God overruled again and again to bring good out of evil.
Neill has brought to his work knowledge, a fair attitude and an irenic spirit that are highly commendable. His book is indispensable for an accurate understanding of the missionary advance since 1792.
HAROLD LINDSELL
The Secularization Kick
The Secularization of Modern Culture, by Bernard Eugene Meland (Oxford, 1966, 163 pp., $4.75), is reviewed by John C. Howell, professor of Christian ethics, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri.
This is a particularly relevant study in light of the increasing influence of secular concepts on American Christianity. Even though Bernard Meland was addressing an Indian audience in the Barrows Lectures, which form the basis for the book, his perceptive treatment of the many forms of secularism, both Western and Eastern, is interesting and illuminating.
Meland defines secularization as “the movement away from traditionally accepted norms and sensibilities in the life interests and habits of a people—a departure from an historical order of life that presupposes religious sanctions” (p. 3). He is aware that secularization may act as a healthy corrective to religious expressions that are piously dogmatic but that ignore the larger dimension of man’s human needs. To become secularized in this sense means to understand that religious faith must exist in a secular world and that religious people must seek to discover how God may be leading individuals to serve him through the secular structures of society. This should be encouraged.
However, when secularization leads man to abandon allegiance to the historic values that have motivated and restrained human acts, then it can be destructive of man’s basic need for recognizing the limits of his own existence. This is the secularism Meland finds developing in Eastern and Western concepts of science, technology, and the secular states.
His chapter on “The Dissolution of Historical Sensibilities” impressed me as being most helpful, in light of the moral confusion over the use of violence in the civil rights movement and the popularity of the “new morality” in American life. Although most of us would reject his belief that no world religion can “presume to speak with finality about ultimate aspects of man’s nature and destiny” (p. 157), we can find value in his treatment of the interrelatedness of knowledge gained through science, philosphy, and religion. Meland is indebted to the work of A. N. Whitehead and reflects Whitehead’s position that a clash of doctrines is not a disaster but an opportunity for deepened understanding of one’s own beliefs as well as those of others.
Although the book will be rejected by some as being too liberal theologically, it offers the discerning reader many incisive contributions to our understanding of the world in which Christian faith must be proclaimed today.
JOHN C. HOWELL
Reading for Perspective
CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:
• Pentecostalism, by John Thomas Nichol (Harper & Row, $5.95). A well-documented history of “the tongues movement” that sets forth its genesis, its distinctive character and competing camps, and its growth throughout the world.
• The Church’s Worldwide Mission, edited by Harold Lindsell (Word, $3.95). Papers read at the recent Congress on the Church’s Worldwide Mission, including the important Wheaton Declaration, and an historical overview of the congress. A vital work for everyone interested in missions.
• Basic Types of Pastoral Counseling, by Howard J. Clinebell, Jr. (Abingdon, $6). Methods of pastoral counseling that encourage the troubled person to face his problems realistically and act directly to solve them.
Here’S A New Twist
Your Pastor’s Problems: A Guide for Ministers and Laymen, by William E. Hulme (Doubleday, 1966, 165 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Lars I. Granberg, president, Northwestern College, Orange City, Iowa; former professor of psychology and Counseling Service Director, Hope College, Holland, Michigan.
This book is like one of those coffee cakes that start out as two strands of dough. The baker twists the two together and pops them in the oven. When the coffee cake is ready to eat, only a hint of the original strands can be seen, for they have fused.
As a long-time fan of William Hulme’s, I have come to expect his books to be perceptive, compassionate, biblical in orientation, and good reading. This one is no exception. What is exceptional is the disconcerting fusion of strands. If I may be forgiven a lapse into my students’ mode of discourse, what bugs me about this book is that I don’t know whether he’s talking to me or my pastor. Usually I know whom he starts talking to, but in the middle of his point I get the feeling he has shifted to the other fellow. Whether this means that Dr. Hulme, as a pastor and teacher of pastors, cannot really detach himself from the pastor’s perspective and responsibility, or whether he is underscoring the inextricable linking of pastor’s problems with laymen’s as well as inner with social factors in solution, I cannot say. But it’s a small matter. Most of what he says to my pastor applies to me. Maybe the reverse is true, too.
The book sets out to explain to laymen what it’s like to be a parish minister. If, for example, your pastor leaves the ministry or suffers emotional breakdown, chances are you’re no innocent bystander. You may well have been a factor, through either commission or omission. Therefore, there are some things not only nice but necessary for you to know as a responsible layman. Not to know them has a stunting effect upon Christian maturity—yours and, possibly, your pastor’s. Hulme discusses common problems arising in congregational life: tensions arising out of unresolved authority problems; the local congregation as a status-conscious club; family tensions in the manse and their roots in neglect; the need for friendship and its pitfalls; overwhelming busyness; professional jealousy; problems in personal Christian growth; and many related matters.
This is a difficult kind of book to write—the more so when one is trained in some form of therapy, for this causes hypertrophy of the sense of obligation to begin treatment. Moreover, Dr. Hulme must have sensed that most of his readers would be clergymen. Why not? Aren’t people mainly interested in problems with which they’re familiar? With both these factors operating, it is very hard merely to write a description of the life of the minister in such a way as to give the layman the inside “feel.” It is as though the clergyman reader kept demanding attention, diverting the author into “See, here, can’t you see that it’s this way?” passages interspersed or combined with those “Yes, I know this is troubling, but you can fix it like this!” passages to which any conscientious pastor or therapist is prone.
What I hope I have said is that the book isn’t objective description. What I hope I have not said is that it would be a better book if it were. Something of the sense of loneliness that plagues the manse grips the reader. The anguish of the pastor as he struggles to avoid professionalization, his frantic sense that he should be everywhere serving everyone simultaneously, or his gracious efforts to fend off the idolatrous adulations of certain parishioners—these involve the reader’s fellow feeling. The ambiguous focus sometimes distracts, but it gives the writing a convincing quality as well.
My principal criticism of the book arises out of a dilemma. A small book like this has a better chance of being read than a larger one, especially, I think, by laymen. On the other hand, a book of this size does not allow the author to amplify his suggestions for dealing with problems. Pointing out the problems created by an overweening need to please is not the same as helping the person eliminate this source of mischief. Neither is it likely to be news to the chronically too-busy pastor that he should delegate responsibility. Probably he knows this. Neither is it enough to point out that he probably has too much to prove. Dr. Hulme knows all this, of course. To transcend the space limitations that give rise to what seem like too-pat answers, he has provided a workable list of supporting references. To help us transcend these nagging problems, he reminds us that God is neither dead nor unconcerned nor out of touch with life as it is lived today.
The book lends itself to discussion. It could help bring mutual understanding and a deeper sense of koinonia if a group of clergy and laity would use it as the basis for regular sessions on what it’s like to be a pastor and how laymen can be helpful—hence better helped.
LARS I. GRANBERG
Good News For Moderns
Today’s English Version of the New Testament, translated by the American Bible Society, edited by Robert G. Bratcher (Macmillan, 1966, 568 pp., $3.95) and The Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: Revised Standard Version, edited by Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (Oxford, 1966, 1922 pp., $10.50), are reviewed by J. Harold Greenlee, professor of New Testament Greek, Graduate School of Theology, Oral Roberts University, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Today’s English Version, prepared by a staff member of the American Bible Society and based on the new edition of the Greek New Testament sponsored by major Bible societies of the world, is a somewhat simplified version but without rigid limits of vocabulary or style. It is part of a proposed series of such versions in various strategic languages (a Spanish version has recently been published). The rendering is readable and avoids some technical terms without becoming wooden or colorless. The text is presented in paragraph form, with section headings and cross references to parallel sections based upon those in the new Greek edition.
Bratcher’s simplified style is illustrated by his rendering of John 7:17, “Whoever is willing to do what God wants will know whether what I teach comes from God or whether I speak on my own authority.” He uses “men who studied the stars” for “Magi,” “make you completely his” for “sanctify,” “put right with God” for “justify,” and “the means by which our sins are forgiven” for “propitiation.” One may feel that “not guilty” (Rom. 4:5; 8:33) should be “forgiven,” and that “change your ways” is too weak a rendering of “repent.”
This version, also published by the American Bible Society in inexpensive editions as Good News for Modern Man, is generally acceptable and may be especially helpful for those who are learning English as a second language.
The Oxford Annotated Bible (1962) and the Oxford Annotated Apocrypha (1965) have now been made available in one volume, with brief notes to the RSV text, short introductions to each Testament and each book, selected special articles, indices, and a series of maps. The introductions to the Old Testament books, and many of the annotations, follow the common liberal point of view—e.g., the non-Mosaic four-source origin of the Pentateuch and multiple authorship of Isaiah. The Gospels are granted some connection with their traditional authors; Timothy, Titus, James, and Second Peter are assigned to anonymous authors.
The annotations consist of brief observations, sometimes merely references to parallel or similar passages. Miracles are largely passed over with neither denial nor acceptance. In the Fourth Gospel, however, miracles seem to be received at face value.
The availability of the books of the Apocrypha may be appreciated even by those who do not regard these books as canonical.
It is of primary significance that this edition of the Bible, including both its notes and the RSV text, has been approved for use by Roman Catholics by the imprimatur of Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston. This reflects a change of attitude that a short time ago one would hardly have thought possible. No changes in the wording of the RSV text were required for this ecumenical approval. Fourteen adjustments in the notes were made in order to set forth Roman Catholic views, including the question of the perpetual virginity of Mary (Matt. 1:25; Luke 2:7, et al.) and comments on certain passages that are generally not considered original but are regarded as Scripture by Roman Catholics (e.g.,Mark 16:9–20 and John 7:53–8:11).
This edition of the Bible is a significant work, although its usefulness will depend somewhat upon the reader’s agreement with the biblical views of the various contributors.
J. HAROLD GREENLEE
In The Man Or The Bottle?
Ministering to Alcoholics, by John E. Keller (Augsburg, 1966, 158 pp., $4.75), is reviewed by Owen C. Onsum, pastor, The Union Congregational Church, Shafter, California.
This book, by the chaplain for the Foundation for Human Ecology in Park Ridge, Illinois, is largely an endorsement of and commentary on Alcoholics Anonymous. “The greatest number of recovered alcoholics have been restored to sobriety within the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous,” the author claims. He lays great emphasis upon the twelve steps in the A.A. program, devoting an entire chapter to “The Fourth and Fifth Steps.” The reader may well see in these procedures a prescription for dealing with all sorts of problems, bad habits, and vices.
However, Keller, an experienced counselor of alcoholics, views alcoholism not as a vice but as a disease. It is only one of the symptoms produced by the disoriented ego of man that is a result of the Fall. This is pointed up in chapter one, which deals with the need for “Understanding Alcoholism and Accepting Alcoholics.” Through the Fall man became estranged from the proper relationships with God, with himself, and with others, as set forth in the two great commandments. “After the fall man’s problem wasn’t that he was too human, but that he couldn’t be human enough.” He is “incapable of letting God be God.… Egocentric, hostile, defiant towards God, the created person perceives himself to be the Omnipotent one …” (p. 4). “Such a person finds it well nigh impossible to function happily on an ordinary level” (p. 45).
Thus the alcoholic’s fundamental problem is one we all share more or less, although it manifests itself in a variety of ways. The counselor who realizes this will be humble and not censorious. Lack of understanding is a great barrier to genuine helpfulness.
Alcoholics Anonymous holds that “there is a valid spiritual awakening, not necessarily Christian, in which alcoholics receive from God what they need to be sober.” This is not intended to preclude a genuine Christian experience, however.
Keller devotes one chapter to the “Progressive Symptoms of Alcoholism” and another to “Counseling the Spouse.” The closing chapter deals briefly with “Alcohol Education.” Although the author calls attention to “the distorted significance alcohol has in our culture,” he is not a champion of total abstinence. Believing that alcoholism is in the man and not in the bottle, he is an advocate of Christian liberty in regard to drinking, restrained only by an enlightened and responsible Christian conscience. Interestingly, he lists good reasons for drinking as well as bad ones for not drinking, and vice versa.
OWEN C. ONSUM
Book Briefs
The Healing of Sorrow, by Norman Vincent Peale (Doubleday, 1966, 96 pp., $2.95). Helpful thoughts, biblical passages, hymns, and poetry that provide comfort and assurance for those who sorrow.
The Little People, by David Wilkerson, with Phyllis Murphy (Revell, 1966, 159 pp., $2.95). The author of The Cross and the Switchblade relates experiences gained in ministering for Christ to children who inhabit New York’s asphalt jungles.
The Church on the Move: The Characters and Policies of Pius XII and John XXIII, by W. A. Purdy (John Day, 1966, 352 pp., $6.95). Purdy shows how the stamp of Pius XII and John XXIII can be seen on the Roman Catholic Church today.
The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life, by Norman Pettit (Yale University, 1966, 252 pp., $5.75). A prize-winning Yale historical study that shows how the concept of conversion by degrees entered the covenantal theology of Puritanism.
The Christian Centuries: From Christ to Dante, by Robert Payne (W. W. Norton, 1966, 438 pp., $8.95). A popular history of the first thirteen centuries of Christianity. Includes excellent plates of Christian art.
Philosophy, Religion, and the Coming World Civilization, edited by Leroy S. Rouner (Martinus Nijhoff, 1966, 504 pp., 54 guilders). A Who’s Who of scholars offer essays on metaphysics, religious philosophy, and civilization in honor of William Ernest Hocking.
Expendable!, by W. Phillip Keller (Prairie Press, 1966, 224 pp„ $2.95). The story of the Prairie Bible Institute and its principal, L. E. Maxwell; a testimony to the faithfulness of God.
The Gambling Menace, compiled and edited by Ross Coggins (Broadman, 1966. 128 pp., $2.95). A full house of Baptist professors of social ethics lay their cards on the table as they deal with the moral, economic, social, psychological, and legal aspects of the gambling problem.
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The Beatles—bless their shaggy heads—have plunged into the murky and turbulent waters of theology. Headlines trumpeted John Lennon’s belief that the Beatles have become more popular than Jesus Christ. Some think this is a correct observation. But the real contribution of the Beatles and of other popular singers to theological dialogue is their songs. Listen to the words. Listen and you will learn how lots of people look at life.
As the father of five children, I have become, perforce, a student of popular music. At latest count, five radios are to be found from the basement to the attic of our parsonage. At almost any time of the day or night, “pop” music (or so they call it) pours from one if not all of these radios.
For a long time I tried to shut my ears to the caterwauling and the frenetic beat, beat, beat. But after a while my middle-aged eardrums capitulated, and I began to listen. What I heard caused me to listen seriously. For the “go-go” music that blares from millions of radios proclaims a popular philosophy of life—and sometimes a theology as well.
Evangelical Christians need to be listening, painful as this suggestion may seem, because pop music reveals what many, many people are thinking; what sort of values they admire; what idols are worshiped by the pagans in our midst. Pop music gives us an important clue to where the action really is—or should be—in our apologetics these days.
Take the perennial favorite, “I Believe”:
I believe for every drop of rain that falls,
A flower grows.
I believe that somehow in the darkest night,
A candle glows.
I believe for everyone who goes astray,
Someone will come to show the way.
I believe. I believe.
Here we have the essence of religion for many, including, alas, not a few church members. What counts is belief—any kind will do. The object of belief doesn’t matter. You just have mystical faith in (fill in the blank for whatever seems important to you). This popular concept of belief gropes and stumbles in a swamp of subjectivism, where it matters not whether one believes in the girl next door, America, or the “Man Upstairs.”
What has caused this theological vacuum? How have so many people gotten the idea that belief has no fixed, proper object? This sort of mellifluous heresy could achieve popularity only in a Christ-less culture, where the world’s Saviour has been forgotten or relegated to the Sunday school quarterly.
Listen closely to the radio, evangelicals. Listen and shudder:
Every time I hear a newborn baby cry,
Or touch a leaf, or see the sky—
Then I know why I believe!
Who says all the pagans live in darkest Africa?
Not long ago, the disc jockeys were spinning a little number that contained these lines:
The purpose of a man is to love a woman;
The purpose of a woman is to love a man.
Is that so? Is eros the real reason for human existence?
According to this philosophy of life-a-go-go, man’s destiny is fulfilled when two lovers meet, kiss tenderly, and live together happily ever after. Having each other, they need nothing else.
But eventually the honeymoon ends. And in the daily task of shared existence the couple face the grim reality of unpaid bills and nasty tempers. The challenges and tensions mount as the years roll by. Eros wears mighty thin by age fifty. And agape never gets in the front door. For divine love comes into a home as God’s gift, and who needs God in the dreamland existence of popular music?
The purpose of a man is to love a woman;
The purpose of a woman is to love a man.
That millions hear and apparently heed such drivel goes far to explain why divorce courts are busy. Why mental institutions bulge and psychiatrists have waiting lists. In this inane ditty we can perceive the tragedy of secular man, living in total oblivion to the reality of God. But then we are advised that “God language” is no longer relevant. We learn that man, in his advance toward intellectual freedom, has left far behind such antiquated ideas as that of Man’s purpose being to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.
The plaintive words of one Beatle favorite go like this:
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.…
I believe in yesterday.
A broken romance is the occasion for the singer’s lament. But the nostalgia over lost love broadens to a “looking backward” view of life as a whole. Today is nothing; tomorrow contains no possible hope or joy. Yesterday and its memories—this is all that matters. As I was listening for the hundredth time to the Beatle exaltation of “Yesterday,” another set of words came to my mind. Whether or not Paul, by inspiration, foreknew the Beatles, his words do diagnose their basic problem:
“… you were living utterly apart from Christ; you were enemies of God’s children and He had promised you no help. You were without God, without hope” (Eph. 2:12, Living Letters).
The Christian looks to yesterday—but with gladness, not mourning. For yesterday God sent his Son. Yesterday his Son came, spoke everlasting peace, and died on the cross so that my sins, even mine, might be cleansed by his blood. Yesterday I was forgiven. So I rejoice in yesterday. I also rejoice in today. For this same Christ—now ascended in glory to the Father’s right hand—sends his “loving Spirit into every troubled breast.” The presence of his Spirit illuminates today and promises a tomorrow of glorious liberation and freedom. Today I am with him. And tomorrow. And all the tomorrows. But without Christ, tomorrow is a blurred question mark. Without Christ, I can only weep about yesterday’s memories—along with the Beatles.
A POEM FOR MY FATHER
I heard your feet on the stair
Come slowly, slowly,
And the sound knocked at my heart.
For I remembered them
Swift and sure, treading
A sure way, the true way
For my feet to follow.
And I remembered how
Nothing could hold you,
Divert or ensnare you
From the sure straight way
That led to God’s Throne.
Those were the years
Of battle, and strength for it.
Now the years lie heavy,
And now we praise God
For courage that never
Quailed at a reckoning,
For a heart that never
Grew cankered and cold
In the bitter world,
And for feet still treading,
But slowly now, the same path,
And leading me still
Toward where the light grows brighter
Around the Throne of God.
EVANGELINE PATERSON
For months, the radio has been emitting the nasal voice of a young man stridently declaring,
“I cain’t get no satisfaction!
I cain’t get no girlie action!”
This puts it a bit crudely. But the young man with the twanging guitar has articulated the material orientation of our culture. Satisfaction, it seems, comes from gratification of the senses. Cigarettes. Cars. Boats. Ranch houses. Color television. “They satisfy”—or do they? Never has any culture known so high a level of satisfaction of material wants. But where is the fruit of this satisfaction? Its fruit is borne in jam-packed divorce courts, in decaying structures of authority in home, classroom, and community.
“I cain’t get no satisfaction!”
So Watts erupts in an orgy of anarchy.
So Charles Whitman becomes the mad marksman on a Texas tower.
So a couple come to my study wanting to be married—he for the fourth time, she for the third.
“I cain’t get no satisfaction!”
Naturally. You are looking in the wrong place. You are looking for satisfaction of the wrong sort. Long, long ago God gave his children some wise counsel about satisfaction:
“Stop loving this evil world and all that it offers you, for when you love these things you show that you really do not love God. For all these worldly things, these evil desires—the craze for sex, the ambition to buy everything that appeals to you and the pride that comes from wealth and importance—these are not from God. They are from the evil world itself. And this world is fading away, and these evil, forbidden things will go with it, but whoever keeps doing the will of God will remain forever” (1 John 2:15–17, Living Letters).
We dare not chew our fingernails and lament about popular music as an affront to the soul and the senses. We have to hear the loneliness, the despair, the awful futility and triviality of which popular music is but a symptom. “Pop” music may be God’s way of telling us how desperately millions of people need Jesus Christ. Who else can fill the terrible vacuum this music reveals?
L. Nelson Bell
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A man is lost in the desert, desperately in need of water, food, and a way out. He has with him a two-way radio in perfect condition. By it he could learn where to find water, food, and a compass to lead him home.
But the man does not use the radio! He pays no attention to the clearly printed instructions on how to turn it on, tune in, and maintain a two-way conversation. The batteries are fully charged, and at the other end there is an operator always on the job; but because of his utter foolishness, the wanderer remains lost, parched, and famished.
Christians must acknowledge that they are “strangers and exiles on the earth” (Heb. 11:13, RSV) and constantly need God’s help and guidance. Strange indeed how often we are confused, lost, spiritually thirsty and hungry, despite the promise: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you” (John 15:7).
We are told that our Lord “marveled” at the unbelief of those who should have heard and obeyed him. Isaiah tells us of God’s reaction to man’s blind perversity—he “wondered that there was no one to intervene” (Isa. 59:16b).
Certainly one of the strangest things in all the world today is the Christian’s failure to avail himself of the privilege and power of prayer! True, the prayer-less Christian is not “lost” in terms of eternity. But all of us experience daily need for spiritual blessings that come only through communion with God.
Prayer is not using God for our own ends. It is not, “O God, do this or that for me.” Prayer is something infinitely higher and more precious than that. Prayer is two-way communion with God, praising his name, glorifying him for what he is and what he has done. Prayer is bringing our worship to him and seeking his glory in all circumstances of life.
Some may say, “How pietistic.” “How far removed from our world and its problems.” “How impractical in the face of the demands of the twentieth century.” “How utterly removed from the real problems that trouble men in this space age.”
But wait a minute. Does any problem ever take God by surprise? Is any issue of today too big for him to solve? Has he made promises to his children that he is now unable to fulfill? Has the space age left God behind? Are we living in a maze of problems from which even the Creator and Sovereign God of the universe cannot extract us?
Perhaps the best way to answer these questions is to take God at his word and give him a chance to make it good.
Jesus has made us a tremendous promise: “Ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you.” Are there conditions? Of course; otherwise prayer would prove to be our destruction, not a blessing. But there are only two conditions, our abiding in him and having his words abide in us. Abiding in Christ means resting in him, obeying him, having our old lives replaced by lives filled with his presence.
The Apostle Paul expresses this thought of “abiding” in Christ in words all of us can understand: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).
Is this something too high for us? Did Paul have an experience with Christ denied to others? Can we have our old natures crucified with Christ and live by a new and supernatural power—the power of the crucified and risen Christ? Yes, we can. And in this experience we become new creatures, spiritually born again, with a new line of communication with the living God opened to us.
How can his words “abide in” us? Jesus simply meant that his teachings, his truth, his revealed will, must be kept fresh in our memories and be the basic motivation in our lives. Christianity is not a dreamy, mystical religion. It is a faith to be believed and a life to be lived according to God’s revealed truth.
In the time of Ezra there came upon the people a mighty conviction of sin. They had neglected the Word of God and disobeyed its teachings, and we are told that they “trembled” when they realized what they had done. It would be well for us to tremble also at the way we have neglected, ignored, and disobeyed the revelation God has given us in his written Word.
Every Christian can fulfill these two conditions, abiding in Christ and having his words abide in us. Then why live as beggars in the midst of plenty? Why neglect the privilege and opportunity God has opened to each of his children? Some day, in heaven, we will look back in amazement at our present failure to use prayer as we should.
For Christians the horizon of prayer is unlimited—not simply for us to get things from God but for his will to be done both in our individual lives and in the circumstances of life.
We do not pray alone. Paul tells us that Christ “is at the right hand of God” and “intercedes for us.” And “likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we know not how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom. 8:34 and 26).
Prayer is intensely practical. There is not an hour of the day that we don’t need the wisdom, strength, and guidance God alone can supply. There is not a problem, a concern for others, a sorrow, or a joy that should not be shared with the One who has the answer, the hope, the balm.
Because prayer is such a power for good, Satan hates it. He and all the real though unseen demons of hell conspire to keep us from communing with God.
First of all Satan would interpose between us and God sin that we have not confessed and repented of. “If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened” (Ps. 66:18). Satan tries to make us doubt the love and power of God and to make our thoughts and desires selfish. Pride, one of his most frequently used weapons, is often our downfall. Or it may be an unloving heart or an unwillingness to forgive that stands between us and God. We must not forget that as Christ has forgiven us to the limit, so we must forgive others to the limit.
Let me conclude on a note of personal witness. I know that God hears and answers prayer, sometimes before we pray, in the way that is best, and for his own glory.
There are times when the answer seems to take a long time coming, but God knows best. And there are times when the answer is so miraculous that one’s heart nearly bursts with wonder and praise.
Prayer is more powerful than nuclear fission, and as wonderful as creation itself. Little wonder that Paul tells us to “pray without ceasing”—that is, to keep communications open all the time.
- More fromL. Nelson Bell
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The Christmas season is a time of glorious celebration not only for children but also for all truly wise men, childlike in faith, who rejoice that God in his saving grace took on human flesh and entered history as a baby born of the Virgin Mary. The joy of Christmas is a reality for Christian believers because they know God has acted miraculously and decisively for them in the literal fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).
Many contemporary existentialist theologians, however, are propagating erroneous ideas that, if accepted, would rob Christmas of its historical and universal significance. These men deny that the biblical narratives of Jesus’ birth refer to historical happenings. They view the accounts of Matthew and Luke strictly as mythological literary forms concocted by the early Church to convey the truth of the availability of God’s grace to all. Their thesis appears similar to Dr. Seuss’s moral in his minor classic, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, telecast by CBS this season. The Grinch removed all of Whoville’s outer trappings of Christmas—the ribbons, wrappings, tinsel, and trimmings—but despite this loss, the inner spirit of Yuletide prevailed. In a way analogous to the story’s delightful lesson, these demythologizing theologians claim that the biblical birth narratives are mere symbolic trappings that modern man can discard in the historical sense while he yet retains the real essence of the Christmas message. But their removal of the objective factors in the Christmas message, unlike Dr. Seuss’s moral, will not allow them to preserve the “good tidings of great joy,” for without the actual virgin birth of Christ there is no real Christmas.
The novel theories of these theological Grinches—whose motives are quite different from those of Dr. Seuss’s conniving character—were recently set forth by Professor Rudolph Bultmann in an interview published in the German magazine, Der Spiegel. Claiming that “it is an error to believe that the Apostles’ Creed is a dogma to which the Christian must subscribe,” Bultmann undercut the historical basis of the miraculous events of Christ’s life recorded in the Scriptures. He affirmed that Jesus was not “born of the Virgin Mary”: this phrase is “the legendary expression for the dogma that the source of the meaning of the person of Christ may not be seen in his natural, earthly advent.” He further suggested that Jesus was not pre-existent deity descended from heaven to earth but that his “God’s-sonship consists in the fact that he was obedient to God as his Father.” Belief in the pre-existence of Christ in the traditional sense, he said, weakens the significance of the cross. Regarding the resurrection, Bultmann is “convinced that a corpse cannot come back to life and climb out of the grave” and asserted that the bodily resurrection of Jesus was the “legendary concretization” of the belief of the early Church that God had exalted the crucified one.
Bultmann and his followers formulate a theology that denies the supernatural saving acts of God in Christ attested to in the Bible and substitutes for them an emasculated, non-historical, irrational, subjective message that is man-made. While Bultmann correctly says that faith is the believer’s response “to the Christian proclamation that promises God’s grace to men,” yet there is no message of God’s grace to which men may respond if they deny the historically fulfilled events of the incarnation, vicarious death, and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Gospel of Christ is based not on the speculations of contemporary theologians but on what God has supernaturally accomplished in his eternal Son and revealed in his eternal word. To reject tire historicity of the critical Christian doctrines is to contradict the Bible and deny the uniqueness of the Gospel. If Jesus is not in reality the pre-existent Son of God who as the son of the Virgin Mary became man, he is not the Saviour who by his death reconciles men to God. If Jesus did not arise bodily from the tomb and show himself alive to his disciples, he is not the triumphant, exalted Lord who offers hope and eternal life to men.
Existential theologians who contend that only the “that” of Christ’s advent and not the “what” of his advent is crucial for faith are men whose teaching would rob the Christmas message of its significance. But the formulations of these well-meaning theological Grinches are destined to fail, since the Scriptures that testify to Christ’s amazing birth in Bethlehem and his atoning death on Calvary cannot be broken.
All wise men who follow the light of God’s Word need never worry about Christmas being stolen from them. Its beacon will always direct them to the virgin-born Son who is Immanuel, God with us. Christmas then will be as the Grinch finally found it: Merry! Very!
Missing The Mark!
The Church of Jesus Christ exists in the world primarily to bring people to know Jesus Christ as Saviour from sin. As new creatures in Christ, they are to make him Lord of their lives.
Only as the Church is true to its mission can it hope to have a healing effect on society. It is no more possible to build a good society with unregenerate men than it is to make a good cake with rotten eggs. Furthermore, a righteous social order cannot be brought into being by pronouncements of the Church. It comes from the influence of redeemed men and women, going out into the world as “salt” and “light.”
When does the Church fail in its mission? When it fails to preach the things that are essential to salvation—repentance, confession, faith, regeneration, sanctification, and the grace of God.
When does the Church fail? Whenever it denies man’s need of the new birth and offers a diluted gospel of love with universal salvation that is no gospel at all.
When does the Church fail? When it substitutes for the clear statements of Scripture the opinions of men which run contrary to the divine revelation; and when it falls for cleverly devised or deliberately obscure statements, wise sounding but empty of true meaning.
When does the Church fail? Whenever it becomes more concerned about the material welfare and happiness of the prodigal in the far country than about his need to be led back to his Father through faith in Christ.
The powers of darkness are pleased when individual Christians (or the Church as an organization) major on minor issues, skirt around the periphery of basic Christianity, and neglect the things that are distinctive and essential for Christian witness and living.
Let’s stop missing the mark. Let’s emphasize proclamation and service, always remembering that proclamation is primary and that service may accompany proclamation as a means to an end or as an expression of Christian compassion rising from a personal experience of Christ’s love.
Irresponsibility In High Office
The nation, the House of Representatives, and the citizens of Harlem have for the past twenty-two years patiently endured the playboy antics and questionable political demeanor of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. Now unless he soon clears himself of contempt charges pending against him, Powell will face a challenge from Lionel van Deerlin (D-Calif.) that could result in his loss of the right to be seated in the Ninetieth Congress. We endorse this effort to bring pressure on Powell to fulfill his responsibilities as a citizen and elected official.
The people of Harlem deserve exemplary personal conduct and faithful representation from this Baptist minister they have sent to Congress twelve times. Throughout his political career, Powell has been criticized for chronic House absenteeism, nepotism, and other conduct unbecoming to a man of his sacred calling and lofty position. His wife now draws a $20,500 salary as a member of his staff and lives in Puerto Rico. But it has been Powell’s dodging payment of the $164,000 judgment against him for slandering sixty-eight-year-old Mrs. Esther James that has made the pot boil over.
Unless Powell gives evidence of a new determination to conduct himself properly, House members should block his seating as a United States congressman.
The New Spirit Of Defiance
The increasing frequency of militant protest against constituted authority by groups of American youth is furrowing the brows of thoughtful citizens dedicated to an orderly society. Recent happenings at Harvard University, Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, and the University of California at Berkeley give evidence of a new spirit of defiant hostility among many young people that overshadows the usual activism of other younger generations. In these rebellious outbursts, coercive techniques have replaced democratic processes and mob action has been substituted for calm, reflective argumentation.
What accounts for the unruly conduct, at the nation’s most renowned university, of students whose threatening protest forced Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to exit through an out-of-the-way tunnel to escape harm? How do we explain the violent action of teen-agers in smashing store windows, burning buses, and injuring policemen as they enforce a curfew law on juvenile after-hours habitués of the glittering thoroughfare formerly frequented by Hollywood’s stars? What prompts a recurrence of sit-in activities and classroom boycotting by Berkeley students led by non-student Mario Savio, who told his followers it is “necessary to coerce the administration to seriously consider our demands.” Regardless of the validity of their demands, these young peoples’ methods of registering protest are distinctly irrational and undemocratic.
While we cannot diagnose with certainty the underlying causes of these complex situations, we can suggest contributing factors—both good and bad—that influence such mob protest. American youth desire to be personally involved in the issues of our day. Today’s students do not merely want to learn history; they want to make it! They have witnessed the effective use of large demonstrations in the civil rights struggle and believe that such social pressure can be applied to correct any grievance, real or imagined. At the same time, the vociferous critics of American society, including Communists, have adversely influenced certain segments of the younger generation by sowing the seed of anarchy against duly constituted authority. They loudly assert that what they want must be achieved now, at any cost, even violation of the law. Millions of our young people caught in the shifting tides of our restless world have no moorings for their lives. Facing a world in transition and having no personal faith in the unchanging Christ, they seek release for their frustrations by striking out blindly against those who seem to inhibit them or stand for ideas and policies they do not share.
To be sure, “the defiant ones” are a small minority. Yet taken as a whole the present younger generation is quantitatively and qualitatively different from those preceding it. These young people need to find purpose in life so that their passion for action may be expressed constructively. The Christian Church must intensify its efforts to show our youth that real meaning for life can be found only in Jesus Christ; that only his cause is worthy of their undivided loyalty; that only in his plan can lasting solutions be found for the problems that plague mankind.
The present younger generation with its better-trained minds and stronger bodies has greater potential than any other in history. By precept and practice the older generation must encourage our youth to live responsible lives before God and their fellow men.
Spain And Religious Liberty
The Spanish Cortes has just approved a constitution that includes a provision that “the state will assume the protection of religious freedom, which will be guaranteed by an effective juridical system that, at the same time, will safeguard morality and public order.” This is to be followed by a law on the freedom of religion, ten years in preparation, that will be voted on by the Spanish people not long after this editorial is written.
Of all the western European countries, none has been more rigid in its opposition to religious liberty than Spain. Church and state have been interlocked for centuries, and Protestants and Jews have suffered greatly in this priest-ridden country. The statement of Vatican Council II on religious liberty helped to change the Spanish situation, despite the obstructive tactics of the conservative members of the country’s Roman Catholic hierarchy.
General Franco and the Spanish parliament are to be commended for what they have done. The action is a major breakthrough. But it would be premature to suppose that the final victory has been won. Evangelical leaders in Spain know the battle is not over. The practical outworking of the legal principle of religious liberty will take considerable time. Friends in Spain tell us that three things stand in the way of obtaining in practice what has been legally granted:
1. Freedom of religion will be subject to the same kind of limitations common to other spheres of national life because of the paternalistic structure of the Spanish state.
2. The powerful, conservative Roman Catholic hierarchy is, in the main, opposed to religious liberty and continues to believe in and press for religious unity, which means the exclusive domination of the Roman Catholic Church.
3. Discrimination and intolerance are based largely on strong social traditions that have favored Catholicism and militated against other religions. These social restrictions will yield slowly, particularly in non-urban areas where prejudice and clerical power are greatest.
Spanish evangelicals rightly caution their friends around the world not to blow the lid off things by rushing in many missionaries to combat the errors of Romanism. They feel that more progress will be made by approaching the problem indigenously. Missionaries who do come must be prepared not to attack Roman Catholicism as such but to present a positive message and to raise interest in looking at the Christian message through the eyes of the Scriptures. This is particularly true because the Spanish authorities view the change as an arrangement to help the existing Protestant community in the country, not as an invitation for the entry of a large number of missionaries.
Aid For Distressed Brethren
Many of the people of the Waldensian Church, the oldest Protestant communion in the world, have lost their homes and possessions in the floods that have plagued Italy recently. So disastrous have been these floods that the American Waldensian Aid Society has issued a call for help in a situation where a loaf of bread is worth more than a million-dollar painting to the man who has lost everything.
Christian compassion calls for a response to help not only those of Waldensian heritage but also other Italians who are likewise engulfed in suffering.
Dry Socks And Letters From Home
More than a third of a million of America’s finest men will spend this Christmas in Viet Nam’s guerrilla-infested jungles, grimy foxholes, or unfamiliar Oriental communities. But their thoughts will be centered on their loved ones and homes half a world away. Their only consolation as the holidays draw near is the hope that the Viet Cong will respect the two-day moratorium so that Christmas and New Year’s Day may bring brief periods of peace.
We who enjoy the security and comfort of our safeguarded homes must stop and consider our personal responsibilities to these 360,000 fighting men. What are we doing to lighten their heavy load? A former First Lady once said that there are two things that keep up the servicemen’s morale more than any other: dry socks and letters from home. We can encourage our men in many ways: (1) by faithfully writing letters to those we know—or perhaps to some we don’t know—to tell them that we are thinking of them; (2) by sending appropriate newspaper clippings, church bulletins, personal items, and nonperishable foods; (3) by providing materials that will aid them spiritually—Bibles, practical Christian literature, books on prayer; (4) by informing the chaplain of a man’s unit of our interest in a particular person whom he might help in specific ways; (5) by interceding with God daily for our men and letting them know that we are doing so; (6) by praying that this grievous war may soon be ended in such a way that the cause of freedom in Asia may be advanced.
Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines in Viet Nam are devoting the best years of their lives—and in some cases their lives themselves—to the defense of freedom and justice in a world of revolution. Can we do less than remember them in a personal and tangible way, not only at this Christmas season but every day they remain in Viet Nam?
The cost will be high if evangelicals ignore study of the human personality
Psychiatrists at this year’s meeting of the Academy of Religion and Mental Health rebuked clergy for not setting out clear-cut standards of faith and morals. The recently emphasized “situational ethics,” it was pointed out, leaves people in a state of uncertainty. Since they have to work out everything for themselves in the light of the concrete situation, with no guidance other than the primacy of love, they can be faced with agonizing decisions. Most persons simply do not have the equipment with which to make such decisions.
Our generation needs guidance on the great moral principles of the Bible, and evangelical professors and pastors must give that guidance. It is unrealistic to expect it of those who have no great respect for the Bible.
But we must not give that guidance as men standing aloof from the struggles of life. It is all too easy to content ourselves with laying down detailed codes of behavior and condemning all who fail to agree with us or to reach the standards we set. Devoted servants of God, when faced with men in deep distress of soul, sometimes simply add to the distress by confronting the sufferers with moral platitudes. This is deplorable. We need much more than the statement of the principles on which men ought to have acted.
If it is true that the psychiatrist needs the churchman to set forth great moral principles, it is also true that the churchmen cannot well neglect the insights God has given the psychiatrist. Evangelicals must not ignore the modern study of the human personality. Many evangelicals have a deep-seated suspicion of all that psychiatry stands for, possibly because of the destructive philosophies and naturalistic premises that underlie much of the recent work in psychology and psychiatry. But we should not overlook a great deal that is good, simply because in the hands of unbelievers this particular discipline can yield unwelcome results. Of what discipline is this not true?
It has been estimated that fewer than 9,000 out of 235,000 clergymen in this country have had clinical pastoral training. Yet the emotionally troubled most often turn first to their ministers for help, rather than to psychiatrists. Pastoral counseling is doubtless the single most important activity of the clergy in the mental health field. That they be properly prepared for this is surely not too much to ask. This ought to be a special concern for evangelicals, for they are more concerned with personal salvation and all that goes under the general heading of “the cure of souls” than are those secularistic clergy who concentrate more specifically on social structures and public affairs.
Dr. Orville S. Walters, director of health services at the University of Illinois, makes two suggestions to point the way to a more profound evangelical interest in psychiatry. More evangelical physicians, he thinks, should choose psychiatry as a vocation. “The healing of personality is bound so intimately with physical healing that psychotherapy should keep a tie with medicine,” he says. “It would be unfortunate if the evangelical movement should identify itself too exclusively with lay or non-medical psychotherapy. Non-medical healing movements easily become anti-medical.”
His other suggestion is that the training of evangelical pastors and seminary students in counseling and pastoral psychology be broadened. He adds the point that more direct acquaintance with psychiatry and psychiatrists would resolve some prevailing prejudices. “Just as objective theological scholarship outdates the disparagement of evangelicals as ‘obscurantist,’ so interpretative writing and the blending of evangelical faith with professionally competent psychiatric practice must abolish the idea that vital Christian devotion and psychiatry are incompatible.”
We must be on our guard lest we fall into the error of thinking that modern techniques are a substitute for the power of the Gospel. And our sympathies are with those in our seminaries who are always being urged to add new courses to their already lengthy lists. Evangelicals must never do anything to alter their emphasis on training in Bible and theology.
Nevertheless, when we recall those figures—only 9,000 out of 235,000—we confess to an uneasiness. It would be well if evangelicals could establish leadership in a field so closely related to their traditional concern for persons.