Page 6268 – Christianity Today (2024)

Two dates in October tell the story of a divided Christendom. October 11, 1962, marks the beginning of the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church. October 31, 1517, signals the coming of the Protestant Reformation. Today the Protestants, among others, are being beckoned “homeward.” The general thesis of Pope John XXIII concerning the council he has called has often been repeated: The One True Church of which the successor of St. Peter is the Shepherd, must be purified in truth, charity and unity. It must be without spot or blemish and reinforced and made more relevant to the present age. Then one can say to those who bear the name of Christian but are outside the fold, “The way is open, this is our Father’s House, take or retake your place in it.”

A call to return home can conjure up delectable visions which brighten the eye and quicken heart and step. But will this one? Protestants are not readily inclined to identify home and Rome. If home is where the pope is, then where have the Protestants been all these years, and where are they now? Evangelical Protestants confess to be pilgrims pressing toward a city whose builder and maker is God. They have in view not Rome but the New Jerusalem. They trace their pilgrim procession back to a sixteenth-century light which crashed upon a darkly glowering face of Europe. The flashes of light had names: sovereignty of God, supremacy of Scripture, human depravity, God’s grace, justification by faith, sole mediatorship of Christ, priesthood of believers. But the pilgrimage of grace goes back behind the Reformation, for the Reformers sought not innovation but a restoration of the primitive excellence of Apostolic Christianity, and were at home in the writings of the Fathers as well as the Apostles.

Pope John’s invitation to Protestants embodies a certain historic irony inasmuch as the hierarchic structure which is climaxed in his office was among the prime Romanist offences in Protestant eyes. The Reformers prevailed against it in England, Scotland, Scandinavia, and much of Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, and elsewhere.

But Spain, strongest military power of the day, became the secular arm of the Counter-Reformation, a movement spearheaded by the newly-founded Jesuit order and aided by the Inquisition, papal nuncios, the Index, skilled manipulation of the constitutional machinery of the Holy Roman Empire, and the conversion of several important princes. While some good moral reforms were achieved through Trent, the council engraved the character of exclusive Romanism upon medieval Catholicism, hardening the anti-evangelical strands of the medieval Church. There were names symbolizing Roman doctrines which to Protestants spelled gloom and frustration: church tradition, concupiscence, works, saints, indulgences.

Between Trent and Pope John, there have been added papal infallibility and the Assumption of Mary. And when Pope John speaks of purification of the “One True Church,” he gives no hint that this involves changing doctrines which are protested by Protestants.

The Reformers prayed for the unity of Christ’s Church, a unity in truth. Calvin wrote to the Reformed Churches of France in 1566 that a “free and universal council” was needed to end the divisions of Christendom. But to one who had returned to the Roman Church, Calvin wrote that he would rather die than approve his action. Luther looked upon the doctrine of justification as a “matter of life and death.” Earlier, when under pressure resulting from his 95 theses, he said, “I will not turn a heretic by revoking the opinion which made me a Christian.” Peter Martyr voiced the Reformers’ conviction that they had not departed from the Church but returned to it: “We go unto the catholic and apostolic church, because the church from which we separate ourselves lacks both. For it is no longer catholic, since it has transformed the universal church into the Roman Church; and apostolic it is not, since it differs so far from the doctrine and ordinances of the apostles.”

We may not deny the fact that Protestantism stands in need of continual reforming and repentance, particularly in regard to its modernist infection. On the other hand, the probing behind Trent on the part of Roman theologians is to be applauded. Devoutly to be desired is an openness to the teaching of Scripture on the part of both Catholic and Protestant toward the end that happily they could walk together in the bonds of apostolic Christianity. But in days of ecumenical passion, it is good to remember that unity in spite of the Scriptures is no homecoming. Those who engage in it run the risk of losing identity as pilgrims to the New Jerusalem to become vagabonds across the face of the earth.

END

Are the Old Testament writings Christian, pre-Christian, sub-Christian, or un-Christian? If we may judge from the letters on the subject which recently appeared in the correspondence columns of the London Times, a state of considerable confusion exists within the Church on this issue. The correspondence was sparked off by a letter from the president of St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, who raised the question of the place of the Old Testament within the context of public worship, in which lessons from both the Testaments are customarily read. Complaining of having to listen to “extracts containing genealogies, fragments of Jewish history, military operations, and anecdotes or exhortations which are not always edifying,” and that as isolated readings they mean little to the average congregation, he asked whether it would not be possible to have a selection of passages for divine reading “chosen from among the great devotional books of English prose” for occasional use at the minister’s discretion—mentioning by way of example the writings of Donne, Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Traherne, and Dr. Johnson.

A dignitary from Bedford suggested that the following passage from Jeremy Taylor, one of the authors recommended by the president of St. Catharine’s, might be a good one to start with: “That the Scripture is a full and sufficient rule to Christians in faith and manners, a full and perfect declaration of the will of God, is therefore certain, because we have no other. For if we consider the grounds upon which all Christians believe the Scriptures to be the Word of God, the same grounds prove that nothing else is.…”

Dr. Leslie Weatherhead, Minister Emeritus of London’s City Temple, spoke up for the extremist opposition to the Old Testament. “Again and again,” he wrote, “one would like to rise in church after the Old Testament lesson and say, ‘My dear friends, do not pay any heed to the irrelevant nonsense which has just been read to you. It has no bearing whatever on the Christian religion.’” Referring to Joshua’s conquest of Palestine and destruction of his enemies “as the Lord commanded him,” he unburdened himself of this startling viewpoint: “One wonders whether the Israelites had any better reason for going into Palestine which God allegedly gave them, than Italy had for going into Ethiopia, or Russia into Hungary, yet false religion pervades the rape of Palestine because it is “in the Bible.’”

A London rabbi rubbed his eyes in astonishment and pain on reading this effusion, “because such a view is bound to stir up religious feelings and heap fresh coal on the fires of hatred stoked by Nasser and his facade of the U.A.R.” He affirmed that by his bigotry Dr. Weatherhead had “joined the ranks of those who hate the Jew by hating his Bible, the matrix of all that is noble in civilization.” Another rabbi pointed out that “one cannot fairly extract from the Bible, which alone tells of the events, the unpleasant half of death, while ignoring the moral half of Almighty-judgment.” A layman pointedly observed that Dr. Weatherhead hoped to attract people to church “by treating the Scriptures as Dr. Bowdler treated Shakespeare, and for much the same reason, namely, that he finds parts of them embarrassing”; and a dignitary from the North of England inquired whether he had never read in the New Testament what Christ said ought to be done to the man who caused one of His little ones to offend, adding that “it would be very interesting to know how Mr. Weatherhead accommodates his faith in the redemptive power of the slaughter of the Man of Calvary with the beliefs he declares in his letter.” Another Anglican clergyman, however, applied the terms “repellant myth” and “savage saga” to the account of the Exodus from Egypt, which is appointed to be read in church on Easter Day.

The Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge emphasized the unity of the two Testaments and warned that “the fate of the Old Testament, the bible of Jesus, is bound ultimately to affect the fate of the New Testament also”; while the Archdeacon of Oxford offered the mordant comment that “from the earliest days the Church has regarded the Bible as a whole, but there have long been those who, like the heretic Marcion, have wished to choose out certain portions and to reject others.” A layman from London remarked: “These veiled attacks coming from the quarters they do go to show what a decline is taking place in current thought. The Old Testament is history and requires to be accepted as such.… To pick out certain passages for attack is no help to Christians and is perfect food for the pagans all around us.… A sound and regular Bible teaching in the home and school would obviate much of this empty criticism.” Another from Eastbourne noted that cathedrals and churches hold services of thanksgiving to commemorate the Battle of Britain, and that back in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I “both Church and state saw the Hand of God in the storm which carried to completion the defeat of the Spanish Armada”: indeed, the medal struck for the occasion bore the words from the Song of Miriam celebrating the overthrow of the Egyptians in the Red Sea: “Thou didst blow with thy wind and they were scattered.”

The epistolary exchange was brought to a conclusion by a sane leading article which contained the following comment: “It would be interesting to determine when some Christians first began to find much of the Old Testament shocking. The date is comparatively recent, and it is to be noted that this moral sensibility has sprung up in an age which is responsible for acts of inhuman cruelty on a scale as great as anything to be found in all previous recorded history, let alone the restricted annals of ancient Jewry.… Much of the sensitive humanitarianism alive today springs more from the eighteenth-century enlightenment, with its extravagant over-estimate of man’s moral capacities, than from Christianity with its realistic attitude to the world. No man who believed that God is ‘Lord of history,’ as Christians do, should flinch from hearing the chronicles of the past.”

It is at least important to recognize that the unsympathetic attitude of many today towards the Old Testament indicates a radical departure from the undeviating verdict of historic Christianity that, to quote from the seventh of the Church of England’s 39 Articles, “the Old Testament is not contrary to the New,” and from the position uncompromisingly maintained by our Lord—who expounded to his disciples in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27)—and the Apostles—who taught that the writings of the Old Testament are divinely inspired (2 Tim. 3:16; 1 Pet. 1:11; 2 Pet. 1:21).

The Christian And The State

Caesar’s or God’s?, The Conflict of Church and State in Modern Society, by Peter Meinhold, translated by Walter G. Tillmanns (Augsburg, 1962, 170 pp., $4), is reviewed by Clifford L. Stanley, Professor of Systematic Theology, The Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary, Alexandria, Virginia.

The main theme of the book is the relation of church and state, a relation which, as the subtitle suggests, often nowadays takes the form of conflict. A familiar threefold approach is used in presenting the subject—exegetical, historical, systematic.

Besides the major theme there are two closely related minor inquiries, “Revolution in the Name of Christ,” and “The Church and War.” The threefold outline is used in presenting each of these also. A word may be said about them in passing. Though insisting that “the traditional opinion that Luther rejected without qualification any resistance or revolution … must be modified thoroughly” (pp. 107, 108), the author admits that “the whole complex of the right to resist and of revolution … was not probed sufficiently within the Lutheran Church” (p. 111). The author admits candidly that totalitarianism presents a new order of problem for which adequate precedents are not to be found in the tradition.

In presenting “The Church and War,” Meinhold gives a great deal of weight, as does the ecumenical movement, to the “historic peace churches.” Nevertheless he follows the major churches in their acceptance of the Augustinian “just war.” The result is a complicated attitude in which there is little complacency. Meinhold tests the “just war” concept by the new atomic weapons and finds it to be valid still.

In 1959 Bishop Otto Dibelius published a book entitled Higher Authorities. The book aroused a discussion in which Hanns Lilje and others participated and in which the present volume finds its occasion. Dibelius’ book deals with Romans 13, the primary passage concerned with political government.

The following is an interpretation of Meinhold’s exposition of Romans 13. God’s relation to the state is twofold, direct and indirect. God expresses his vengeance through the state. The Christian, on the other hand, is supposed to express only love, never vengeance. The state therefore contemplates the existence of sin. It is an anticipation of the Last Judgment. The existence of the state is consequently provisional and temporary. The state is according to the will of God when it acts lawfully, whether according to the “tables of the law” or “the law written on the heart.” The state stands between God above and man below. It is faithful to God when it is lawful, to man when it protects liberty. These are the two criteria of the state. It is interesting to conjecture how much the emphasis on liberty derives from Meinhold’s stay in America, to which he alludes on page vi.

The state serves the demonic powers as well as God, but God has overcome the demonic powers and so rules the state indirectly in this way.

The role of the state is to protect human life from chaos resulting from human sin. When it does this it has its limited justification and is to be obeyed by the Christian as part of his duty to God. When it denies its limits (between law and liberty) it becomes a rival of God and is to be denied, as in Revelation 19:20.

Meinhold traces the relation of church to state in the centuries between New Testament times and the present. There is the “Caesaro Papism” of the Eastern Church of Constantine, paralleled by the supernational church conception of the West. The rising Germanic tribes preferred national or territorial churches. Charlemagne combined the imperial and national ideas. The struggle between pope and emperor was a contest between Charlemagne’s idea and the old western supernational church conception. The end of the middle ages saw a return to the national territorial conception of the church. With Luther, the ruler, for the period of the emergency, was to be a kind of “emergency bishop.” Calvin both separated church and state more than Luther (as under Bible and natural law respectively) and united them more (the church as the conscience of the state).

In recent times both state and church have altered. The church has increasingly become or let itself be made into “an association of believers” rather than “a spiritual entity.” The state has cut itself off from the Christian revelation and become secular, based on natural law, the consent of the governed, its own inherent powers as an end in itself. The modern totalitarian state represents a difference both in degree and kind from the secular power state which preceded it. For Meinhold the Christian at the best lives in a tension between the “now” and the “not yet,” between church and state. He is bound to both. Government as such belongs to this time. But the totalitarian state is not a “higher authority” (p. 61) and the Pauline words about obedience are no longer valid (pp. 62–67).

Reading for Perspective

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:

* The Word in Worship, by Thomas H. Keir (Oxford, $3.50). A solid exposition of the Reformed liturgical tradition which boldly defines preaching as: Hear the Word of the Lord! and worship as actual response to God.

* Man: The Image of God, by G. C. Berkouwer (Eerdmans, $6). A leading Christian theologian puts the light of Scripture to man, the image of God who has now become a danger to himself and his neighbor.

* The Impact of American Religious Liberalism, by Kenneth Cauthen (Harper & Row, $6). Excellent presentation of American theological liberalism in which author measures its impact on post-liberal theology.

The book is stimulating, informative, and useful. It suggests, as is generally the case, a few questions and problems. Something might have been said about the deepening crisis of secularism which furnishes the larger context of Meinhold’s immediate concern. The secularization of the state is not self-explanatory nor is it the only instance of secularization. Furthermore there are different degrees and applications of secularization. Archbishop Temple remarked that Nazism was apostasy whereas Communism was heresy.

Second, church is defined a lot less adequately than state in the volume. Meinhold suggests rightly that the church is “a spiritual entity” rather than a mere “private association of believers.” But of what sort is the spiritual entity? If church means the holy People of God, the folk called into being by the revelation of God in Christ, is church any closer to ecclesiastical institution than to political? There is to be a “church” over against a “state,” but is the former indiscriminately “God’s” whereas the latter is admittedly “Caesar’s”? We get the same indefiniteness in the case of Augustine’s two “Cities” (see Barber’s introduction to The City of God in the Temple Classics edition).

Finally, is there no more positive evaluation of man’s political life to be derived from Christian revelation than St. Paul gives us in Romans 13 and that Augustine and Luther, for their reasons, give us? I have in mind the state that Christians make or could make. Here the state, while not perfect, is intended for man’s welfare, a positive goal. The Greeks understood it so, as in Aristotle’s political philosophy and Plato’s Republic. Do Christians have to impart such a positive attitude to the state if they are to have it, as in Thomas Aquinas or some form of “natural law”? Of course it is a little awkward to ask the question just now. The ages of faith when Christians might have labored more positively were under the domination of negative conceptions of man’s political life. Now the state, as in New Testament times, is increasingly in unchristian or even antichristian hands.

CLIFFORD L. STANLEY

Superior Fiction

The Eternal Fire, by Poul Hoffmann, translated by David Hohnen (Muhlenberg, 1962, 432 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Roderick H. Jellema, Instructor of English, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.

This book, the second part of Hoffmann’s Moses trilogy, is a sequel to The Burning Bush, which was published last year. The massive, panoramic vision which Hoffmann attempts to create moves on in this volume from the plagues in Egypt through the building of the Tabernacle.

With commendable artistic vigor, Hoffmann weaves his novel with the stuff of biblical history, archaeology, symbolic foreshadowing of Christ, and disciplined artistic creation. We come to feel the Israelites as real people, sometimes shockingly like us—people who doubt and brawl, who suspect their leaders, who lose faith and regain faith and misunderstand, but who somehow prevail. Their prevailing is more gift than achievement. Moses, God’s leader, comes through as his people must have seen him: silent, angry, powerful, mysterious, and yet, in the loneliness of his misunderstood commission, gentle and slightly pathetic.

The novel gains force and perspective by shifting its focus occassionally to the “outsider” non-Israelites. Their reactions to the stench of sacrificial slaughter and clever arguments against the “foolishly” excessive claims for Jahweh are almost our own. Almost. The strength of Hoffmann’s Christian vision wins out.

This is an ambitious novel. One cannot help feeling at times that it tries too hard for the spectacular and the massive—as though Hoffmann were attempting to interest the late Cecil B. De Mille in picking up the motion picture rights.

But it is definitely superior religious fiction. It—and the other volumes in the Moses trilogy—deserve careful attention and wide reading.

RODERICK H. JELLEMA

Good From Aaron To Zuzim

The New Bible Dictionary, edited by J. D. Douglas and others (Eerdmans, 1962, 1375 pp. plus plates and maps, $12.95), is reviewed by Everett F. Harrison, Professor of New Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

The surface facts about this work can be summarized readily—a single volume of completely new material sponsored by the Inter-Varsity Fellowship and prepared by 139 contributors from various parts of the world, mainly British, but including some American and continental scholars. More important is the quality, and about that there is no question. This is a first-rate production that will have to be reckoned with by students of the Scriptures everywhere.

Here is loyalty to the Word of God without obscurantism. Difficulties are faced courageously and fairly, as biblical data are expounded in the light of the scholarly research of our time. For this reason university students as well as seminarians will find satisfying treatment of the problems they face in the classroom. Some articles may prove a bit heavy for the layman, but in the main he should be able to make his way and find the journey rewarding.

One of the best features of the dictionary is the allocation of adequate space for the handling of subjects which by their nature require extensive treatment. This gives the writer an opportunity to make a contribution rather than merely summarize what has been said elsewhere. To illustrate, the theme of the Messiah, one which is much discussed in our time and which needs careful interpretation, gets superb treatment in this volume. Other subjects, such as archaeology, call mainly for description, and this too is ably done.

It is possible that here and there the driving interest in the historical tends to play down the theological. For instance, in the article on the Church, there is no reference to our Lord’s prediction in Matthew. The Virgin Birth is passed by. Yet on the whole the balance is good.

Some surprises are to be found in the volume, such as an article on Muslim Traditions of Jesus Christ, and a rather elaborate article on Cosmetics and Perfumery.

Let no one recoil at the price; this volume is many books in one. Even the most thrifty will not be disappointed.

EVERETT F. HARRISON

Generally Good

Church and Kingdom, by Raymond O. Zorn (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1962, 228 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by George Eldon Ladd, Professor of Biblical Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

Standing in the tradition of Reformed theology, Zorn discusses the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the Church. The Kingdom of God is defined as the rule of God which will one day come to eschatological consummation but which has also entered into history in the person and ministry of Jesus Christ. The Church is the people of this Kingdom who have become the successors of the Old Testament people and therefore the embodiment of the true Israel. “The Church … is a present manifestation of the Kingdom of God and in her the Kingdom’s transforming power operates and from her its life and blessedness flows to form an oasis in the desert of this world’s sin and misery, darkness and death, to which the thirsty traveller may come and drink deeply at the wellsprings of salvation” (p. 81). Zorn argues that the Church and Kingdom will become synonymous in the eschatological fulfillment. In the mean-time, the Church has a task in the Kingdom of God. In the third section of the book, the author outlines this task in terms of the Church’s battle against the kingdom of darkness and its influence upon the individual, the family, the state, and society as a whole.

Unfortunately the book is marred by over a score of typographical errors, especially in the reproduction of Greek and Hebrew words. In the reviewer’s judgment, the author errs in his interpretation of Oscar Cullmann’s eschatology and of premillennialism. Furthermore, it is confusing to say that the Kingdom of God and the Church ever become synonymous. The Kingdom of God is the rule of God and the realm in which God’s rule is realized, while the Church remains the redeemed people of God who receive the blessings of the Kingdom but can never be identified with it. On the whole, however, this is a very worthwhile and profitable book.

GEORGE ELDON LADD

Theology That Preaches

God Loves Like That!, The Theology of James Denney, by John Randolph Taylor (John Knox, 1962, 210 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by William Childs Robinson, Professor of Historical Theology, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia.

In content this book is great preaching of the Gospel; in voluminous research and able presentation it is the work of a competent scholar; in excellent format it is the work of a careful press.

Denney is pre-eminently the preacher of the Cross of Christ. He bids us come to the redeeming Cross and realize, GOD LOVES LIKE THAT! This is the diamond point; here the cup is drained. Denney was loyal to the New Testament presentation that there was a necessity in the nature of God himself for the whole redemptive work of Christ. The grace of God which is free to us was not cheap for God. It cost him the giving of his only Son for us and for our salvation.

Denney brings back, clarifies, and defends such terms as substitute, satisfaction, penal, sacrifice, redemption, and reconciliation as a past act in which God is the doer and yet the One who is reconciled. God as it were takes our part against himself. In the Cross he meets his own righteous demands and averts the wrath that otherwise hangs over sinners. Denney insists that “propitiation” is the only key to Paul’s Gospel; this is a word which we cannot discard (The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, pp. 152, 161, 236). Moreover, this term can be defined only in relation to God: “to have an overpowering assurance of the love of God as it is revealed in Christ the propitiation and to be filled with the Holy Spirit are the same thing.”

What would James Denney’s reaction be toward a translation of the New Testament which eliminates the word propitiation and replaces it with such weaker terms as “expiation” and “remedy,” or demotes the term “redeem” to “free” or “release,” or “wrath” to “retribution,” and “God’s wrath” to the “day of his retribution”? On the basis of his Foreword one dares to hope that Professor A. M. Hunter and his Aberdeen students will stand with Denney rather than with the New English Bible in these matters.

Neither Denney nor this able account of him is wholly consistent. On page 140 Denney’s testimony is marshalled against the current demythologizing of the Gospel, but on page 149 Denney is cited as describing the early accounts in the Bible as myth. Another matter of concern is Denney’s depreciation of the historical creeds in the interest of such a brief statement as, “I believe in God through Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord and Saviour.” The writer of this book admits that “all that has proceeded in our study” serves to make this brief creed intelligible. But if after several years of research and voluminous reading to make it intelligible to himself, it takes Taylor 161 pages to make this intelligible to us, how great are the dangers for those who without this background take such a brief statement of faith as adequate.

In spite of careful work, slips occur. The Greek word for propitiation is misspelled on page 75, and on page 171 gospels should be gospel.

Yet the purpose of this review is to congratulate the author on his fine workmanship, to acknowledge our great indebtedness to him, and to bespeak for his valuable work the largest possible reading. Among the excellencies are the fine pithy sayings collected from Denney’s writings and oral teachings. Of these, perhaps CHRISTIANITY TODAY will appreciate most the one reported by Hunter: “If kings were philosophers or philosophers kings, we should have the ideal state, according to Plato. If evangelists were our theologians or theologians our evangelists, we should be nearer the ideal Church.”

WILLIAM CHILDS ROBINSON

Behind The Bamboo

The Church in Communist China, by Francis Price Jones (Friendship, 1962, 180 pp., $3.50, also in paperback at $1.95), is reviewed by L. Nelson Bell, Executive Editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The author is probably more competent to write on this subject than any other man in America. For 36 years he was a missionary in China, and since 1951 he has been editor of the China Bulletin. It was in this latter capacity that Dr. Jones amassed the information for this book.

Of necessity much of the blurred picture of the Church in China today must come from current church publications. All of these are published under the watchful eye of a hostile government, and many church leaders have become active and vocal protagonists of Communism. For this reason one must carefully read between the lines to ascertain the true situation. This the author has done.

It is hard for Western Christians to evaluate what is taking place through basic compromise with Christian principles on the one hand, and through the innate ability of the Chinese to “bend with the wind” on the other. That grievous compromises have taken place, we know. That some Christians have stood firm, even unto death, is also known.

The author’s explanation of the collapse of the Nationalist government presents, we believe, a partial and biased viewpoint. Had he lived in the interior of China where the Nationalists were making such marked advances until the outbreak of the war with Japan, his evaluation of their worth might be more favorable.

We believe that all who are interested in how Christianity fares under Communism should read this hook. We also believe that there is a vigorous group of Christians in China, often worshiping and witnessing in secret, and probably growing in numbers.

Boards and individual missionaries can learn lessons from this book. One danger all missionaries and mission boards should guard against: choosing leadership for the Church, rather than waiting for the obvious leading of the Holy Spirit. Many of the most vigorous supporters of the Red regime in China are men whose leadership in the Church was vigorously fostered by missionaries.

The lesson for the future is that the Church has no ultimate hope of anything less than ruthless opposition wherever Communism takes over. Wherever there is “peaceful coexistence” between the two, compromises have been forced on the Church.

Above all else, this book helps one realize the spiritual vigor of Christianity and the folly of opposing that which is of God. It should also lead Christians of the West to a deeper sense of the obligation to pray for our brothers behind the Bamboo Curtain.

L. NELSON BELL

Newman Looked East

Philosophical Readings in Cardinal Newman, edited by James Collins (Regnery, 1962, 446 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by Franklin T. Van Halsema, postgraduate philosophy student at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Mark Pattison, the Oxford don of a century ago, thought that the importance of his contemporary, John Henry Cardinal Newman, as a philosopher was limited by a failure to support his dialectical and rhetorical skills with sufficient philosophical learning. But at least the influential role played by Newman in the intellectual histories of many who have followed him into the Church of Rome attests a continuing philosophical appeal which, while it does not decide it, establishes the relevance of the question about Newman’s philosophical importance, and invites a more philosophical answer to it than Pattison had either reason or opportunity to offer. Pattison would direct those who are much taken with Newman to consider “on how narrow a basis of philosophical culture his great gifts were expended.” Those who undertake the evaluation of Newman’s thought may find it more instructive to ask not simply about the breadth of the base, but about the nature and the intrinsic validity of the expenditure.

Such an assessment of Newman’s thought has been rendered much less difficult by the anthology of his philosophical writing recently compiled and edited by James Collins of Saint Louis University. The selections which he has collected from the wide range of Newman’s writings—theological, ecclesiastical, literary, and personal—and has introduced with his notes and a substantial opening essay, afford a better chance than the several other anthologies of his work can afford for disengaging Newman the thinker from Newman the tractarian, controversialist, and apologete, and for applying steadily to his thought only those criteria which are germane to him as a philosopher. The material organized around four topics displays the unity of his thinking in epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of society and culture, and the philosophy of religion: “the concrete way of knowing,” “human knowledge of the personal God,” “religion and social development,” and “the relation of reason and faith.” Not everything of philosophical significance in Newman is recorded or represented here. Perhaps a section could have been developed, for example, embodying his aesthetic criticism, such as is contained in the extremely suggestive essay on Aristotle’s Poetics. But it is not Collins’ purpose to be exhaustive, and he restricts himself to four areas which, he hopes, “can furnish something new to traditional minds and something relevant to contemporary minds.” His 400-page reader seems certain to advance the understanding of Newman’s thought both within Christianity and without.

The competence and success of editor Collins in planning this book, however, do not alone make it valuable. It has an interest value which derives from the interest intrinsic to its subject. If this volume deserves the close attention of serious students of the current situation in theology and philosophy, it is because of some remarkable features of Newman’s thought itself. Newman’s relevance to contemporary philosophy, particularly linguistic analysis, phenomenology, and existentialism, Professor Collins has pointed out in his opening essay. To spell out his specific relevance for contemporary Protestant theology is not possible here, but it may not be out of place to sketch some reasons why philosopher Newman is worth intensive study by Protestant theologians.

One of the things that emerges from Collins’ anthology is a picture of Newman which destroys any confidence that we might somehow gauge his philosophy by his ecclesiology and churchmanship. It would be difficult to guess, especially from some of the writings elicited by the circ*mstances of his defection from Anglicanism in 1845, how different from the usual Scholasticism his philosophical thinking really is. The medieval sources of his thought are negligible, and although, as Collins justly remarks, “he did not want to stand in contradiction” to the exponents of Scholastic philosophy and sought to avail himself of their constructions, he had little patience with contemporary Scholastic philosophers, and once complained that their “etiquette” sorely impeded the progress of “the free Church of God.” This implied no rejection of Aristotle, for whom Newman had his own admiration, based on firsthand acquaintance with more than the logical and metaphysical treatises which were the main interest of medieval thinkers and a main influence on Latin theology. If Collins’ picture is true, Newman owes considerably more to the Greek East and the Christian philosophers of Alexandria than to Augustine or Aquinas and the Latin West. Medieval civilization he was not so ignorant as to despise, but neither so mistaken as to romanticize. Since Christianity, he once wrote, “has not compelled the intellect of the world, viewed in the mass, to confess Christ, why insist as a great gain on its having compelled the social framework of the world to confess Him?”

Yet he is not more characteristically a modern than he is a Scholastic philosopher. Indeed, when Pattison spoke of Newman’s deficient philosophical culture he had in mind his imperfect acquaintance with Kant and Hegel and his insularity with respect to the main stream of modern thought. Pattison’s Memoirs records Dean Stanley’s remark: “How different the fortunes of the Church of England might have been if Newman had been able to read German.” A more recent observer than Pattison or Stanley, though perhaps not a more perceptive one, thinks that such criticisms overlook that “one of the charms of Newman is his pure Englishness.” Such interpretations aside, it does appear that Newman underwent no important continental influences; and while his philosophy probably owes something to provocation by it, it was not developed under the pressure of rationalism versus empiricism.

Probably one of the reasons for this is that the deepest ground and occasion for Newman’s philosophical thinking is religious; that is, it issues immediately from concern with the problem of the relation of God and man rather than with a problem about the relation of subject and object such as Descartes bequeathed to other modern philosophers. This does not mean that Newman is insensible of the concerns or insensitive to the anxieties of the modern mind. The most striking clue to his part in it is that his most significant philosophical work is performed in the same area which occupies the greatest attention of and costs the most energy to the more celebrated modern philosophers: the examination of the human understanding. In the spirit of his countrymen Bacon and Locke, Newman claims to examine the mind’s operations “not according to a priori fitness, but according to the facts of human nature, as they are found in the concrete action of life.” The crucial distinction between assent and inference, worked out in running dialogue with Locke’s Essay, and the whole doctrine of the “implicit reason” or “illative sense” are won by forsaking perhaps the empiricist school, but certainly not, as Newman sees it, experience or experiential, empirical method. In his jealous protection of faith’s certitude from dependence on reason’s probabilities he bears comparison with Kierkegaard; but also with Kant, in his passion to avoid irrationalistic fideism and in his seeking in the experience of moral obligation the key to the connection between “national assent” and “real assent.” While the context and eventual conclusion of his inquiry concerning and critique of human understanding do indeed distinguish him, it can be said that his recognition of the crucial importance of such a critical task, as well as the fact and the manner of his executing it, show his involvement in modern philosophy even where he cannot be simply identified with it.

At least part of the explanation why Newman’s thought is not a true specimen either of Scholastic or of modern philosophy lies in its Greek patristic inspiration. Early in his philosophizing as a Christian he took as his prototypes not Aquinas, nor Augustine, but the Alexandrines, Clement and Origen, whose philosophy of a sacramental universe he never ceased to admire. His Apologia records his ecstasy upon first looking into it. “The broad philosophy of Clement and Origen carried me away; the philosophy, not the theological doctrine.… Some portions of their teaching, magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear.” The same work records his debt to Bishop Butler, who along with Locke exerted, according to Collins, the most considerable modern philosophical influence on Newman; yet it is remarkable that half of the debt is for the principle of analogy which Butler fonnulates with the help of his famous quotation from Origen. It is important to note Newman’s stress on “the philosophy, not the theological doctrine,” because it contains a clue to the catholic appeal to Christian thinkers exercised by the Roman Catholic theologian as a philosopher. However regrettable the fact otherwise may be that Augustine played less of a formative role in his development than could have mitigated his incapacity for appreciating the thought of the Reformers, the roots of his thought in the early Greek, Eastern Christian tradition guarantee its relevance to each of the branches of Western Christianity which claim the great Latin doctor as their own. When B. F. Westcott, the renowned Greek scholar, wrote that no sadder fact existed in the history of religious thought than that “Augustine had no real knowledge of Greek,” he was not expressing irreverence for Augustine, disloyalty to the Reformation, or mere pride in his profession. Without pretending that it had no grave defects of its own, he was thinking of that “type of Greek Christian thought which has not yet done its work in the West,” the thought from which are absent many of the typical dichotomies and tensions that, originating in Augustine, characterize Western theology, govern many of the traditional differences between the Roman and Reformation churches, and, among other things, left the Church unprepared for her violent clash with science in the modern age. Newman deserves to be read on his own account. Yet it is not impossible that some students of his philosophy may indirectly be encouraged to take up the writing of the Alexandrians themselves. If so, Westcott would probably encourage us to pardon Newman for not knowing his German.

FRANKLIN T. VAN HALSEMA

A fortnightly report of developments in religion

Who?

Some 2,600 members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy who will be voting, plus observers, consultants, and an assortment of other onlookers.

What?

The Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church.

When?

Beginning Thursday morning, October 11, and continuing through December 8; reconvening after Easter, 1963, and continuing into the month of June.

Where?

In Rome, Italy, with plenary sessions to be held at St. Peter’s Basilica.

Why?

For the announced purpose of bringing about limited internal reform whereby Roman Catholicism may become more relevant to the times and therefore more attractive to those outside the church.

How?

Through parliamentary assembly over which Pope John XXIII has veto power.

The Second Vatican Council, perhaps the most vastly organized and certainly one of the most significant conclaves in church history, opens in Rome October 11.

On that day some 3,000 members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy will march into the architecturally awesome St. Peter’s Basilica, largest church building in the world, to begin what they consider to be their twenty-first ecumenical council. They will be responding to the call of Pope John XXIII, who selected October 11—“the Feast of the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary”—because of its association with the third General Council at Ephesus in 431 when the doctrine of Mary’s divine maternity was upheld.

The first day will doubtless be marked by pomp and ceremony such as only the Roman penchant for spectacle can produce. What will happen thereafter remains a big question up to the eve of the council. Whatever develops, controversy seems an inevitable aftermath, and the ultimate impact is beyond measure. To the 550,000,000 on Roman Catholic rolls the deliberations will be sacred sessions. To other millions they will be a saga of sacrilege. To most ecumenical leaders they will be a prelude to dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches.

First billed as primarily an instrument to help bring about Christian unity, the forthcoming council subsequently came to be discussed more and more in terms of a limited internal reform movement.

The Pope has said that placing church practices and disciplines in step with the times will make for an “appealing influence” toward “those who are separated.”

Thus the preparations for the council consisted of exploring numerous facets of Roman Catholicism to determine if and how they could be brought up to date. Ten preparatory commissions and two secretariats, employing some 1,000 workers, turned out 119 booklets totaling 2,060 pages of study matter. The booklets present 67 topics which will make up the basic council agenda, though some may be deleted and others added.

The 12 general areas of the topics are theology, bishops and government of dioceses, discipline of clergy and laity, religious communities, sacraments, liturgy, studies and seminaries, Eastern churches, missions, laity, communications media, and Christian unity.

Specifically, of subjects which seem to have a good chance of being discussed, the following are of particular interest to Protestants: a clearer formulation of Roman Catholic doctrine (including that on the nature of the Church), religious liberty, a means of dealing with Communism, church-state relations, mixed marriages, and relations with other religious communions.

The most discussed feature of the council is the welcoming of non-Roman representatives who are being given the title of “delegate-observers.” The delegate-observers will have neither voice nor vote, but have been promised access to certain sessions which will be closed to the press. Pledges to secrecy will be required.

This will be the first council with non-Roman representatives. Protestant and Orthodox observers had been invited to the First Vatican Council (1869–70), but declined.

The council will operate as legislative machinery, even though the necessity for a deliberative assembly may seem superfluous in view of papal infallibility.

Ten working commissions paralleling the preparatory commissions will channel proposals to the plenary sessions. It is understood that the Pope has veto power over all matters. The plenary sessions will be attended by some 2,600 members of the hierarchy, and each will be entitled to vote. The voting participants will be referred to as “conciliar fathers.” Every Roman Catholic priest holding the rank of bishop or higher will have the right to sit as a conciliar father and must send a substitute if he is unable to take part.

Final decisions will be made at closed-door plenary sessions, although formal votes will be taken at public sessions. Latin will be the official language. It is uncertain as to how many times the Pope will preside in person.

Also uncertain is the manner and extent to which information will be released about council proceedings. All debate will take place in sessions which are closed to the press. The reporting of interaction among the conciliar fathers will apparently depend on “leaks,” which, in turn, will probably be subject to various influences and controls.

The council’s posture toward the communications media already has precipitated a minor crisis. It has become readily apparent that there are conflicting points of view in official Catholic circles regarding the free flow of Catholic information to the general public. Indicative of the gravity of the tension was the abrupt resignation on August 30 of Msgr. John E. Kelly, who for seven years was press chief for the Roman Catholic Church in America. Kelly, a friendly and efficient public relations expert, was director of the Bureau of Information of the National Catholic Welfare Conference in Washington. He favored easier access to Catholic news by the general press (including Protestant publications), a policy which meets much skepticism in the Vatican.

Liaison between Kelly’s bureau and the Vatican press office was so limited that he held out little hope of being helpful to American newsmen. Only a few days before his resignation, Kelly’s achievements had been cited by the non-sectarian Religious Heritage of America, which conferred upon him its 1962 Communications Award for having “served with distinction in the field of religious information.” The citation noted that in his Washington post he had made “outstanding contributions to public relations and information techniques within the church.”

Contrasting with the open information policy of Kelly is the position of the Vatican press office, which has stipulated that media and newsmen seeking accreditation for council proceedings must “intend to maintain an entirely correct attitude in reference to the Holy See.”

As there are conflicting views toward release of information, so there are contrasting proposals within the Roman Catholic hierarchy as to what the council should do. Some elements favor more severe intransigence, but others are pleading for a new spirit and are winning a measure of support.

Perhaps the most revolutionary proposal comes from a young priest-theologian in Europe in a book which bears endorsem*nt of two cardinals. Says the priest, Dr. Hans Kung: “It would be a truly Christian act if the Pope and Council (perhaps at the very beginning, when they are invoking the Holy Spirit) were to express this truth: Forgive us our sins and in particular our share in the sin of schism! An honest, humble confession of this sort by the leaders of the Church today would be pleasing to our heavenly Father as few words or deeds could be; and one word of repentance would open more doors to us among our separated fellow-Christians than any number of pressing invitations to return.”

Delegate-Observers

Here is a list of non-Roman Catholic delegate-observers designated for the Second Vatican Council:

World Council of Churches—Dr. Lukas Vischer and another representative whose appointment was delayed.

Lutheran World Federation—Dr. K. E. Skydsgaard and Dr. George Lindbeck.

World Methodist Council—Bishop Fred Pierce Corson, Dr. Harold Roberts, and Dr. Albert C. Outler.

World Presbyterian Alliance—Dr. James H. Nichols, the Rev. Hebert Roux, and the Rev. Douglas Shaw.

World Convention of Churches of Christ (Disciples)—Dr. Jesse M. Bader.

Anglican—Bishop John R. H. Moorman, Archdeacon Charles DeSoysa, and Dr. Frederick Grant.

Evangelical Church in Germany—Professor Edmund Schlink.

International Congregational Council—Dr. Douglas Horton.

Friends World Committee (Quaker)—Dr. Richard K. Ullmann.

Old Catholic Church in Holland—Professor Peter Johannes Mann.

Syrian Orthodox Church of Malabar, India—Father Paul Verghese.

An Eye-Opener

Key Protestant observers in Washington are calling for a thorough review of U. S. government relations with religious agencies overseas.

The issuance and withdrawal of a policy determination by the Agency for International Development has raised many eyebrows among church-state specialists, who were unaware that any appreciable amount of tax money was being granted to missionary enterprises abroad. The policy determination made provisions for such grants and, prior to withdrawal, was being defended by government spokesmen as merely the articulation of policies which have been in effect for 10 years.

The Washington Evening Star said foreign aid records show that “almost half of the assistance to educational institutions has gone to schools operated by Protestant denominations, about 35 per cent to Catholic schools, and 15 per cent to Jewish schools.”

Chaplain Chiefs

Chaplain (Brigadier General) Robert P. Taylor, a Southern Baptist, became chief of Air Force chaplains September 1. Taylor succeeded Chaplain (Major General) Terence P. Finnegan, a Roman Catholic, who retired.

The Army will get a new chief of chaplains on November 1 when Chaplain (Colonel) Charles E. Brown, Jr., a Methodist, succeeds Chaplain (Major General) Frank A. Tobey, an American Baptist.

Convention Circuit

Chicago—Delegates to the annual meeting of the National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Inc., voted unanimously to send their president to the Second Vatican Council as a delegate-observer. The vote came following the re-election of Dr. Joseph H. Jackson as president of the 5,000,000-member convention, the nation’s largest Negro denomination.

Jackson, who had an audience with Pope John XXIII last December, will probably be the only Baptist delegate-observer at the council.

In his speech to the convention, Jackson praised the Roman Catholic Church for its contribution to racial justice.

“If a prize were given to the church that did the most to beat down racial discrimination and segregation this past year, that prize would go to the Roman Catholic Church,” he said.

Jackson urged fellow Negroes to rely on their own resources to improve their lot and said it was hypocrisy for Chicago churchmen to demonstrate against segregation in Albany, Georgia: “You wouldn’t need to leave Chicago to fight segregation.”

He asserted that the “first mission of the church today is to help win the peace of the world.” He called for the strengthening of the U. N. and for admission of Communist China.

Delegates voted unanimous approval of the establishment of a 100,000-acre model farm for their Liberian mission program.

Oklahoma City—Need for additional finances to support the work of the National Baptist Convention of America received major emphasis at the Negro denomination’s 82nd annual meeting. Approximately $90,000 was estimated to have been received last year from local churches, associations, and state conventions toward the denomination’s annual budget of $100,000. The convention has some 3,500,000 members.

Plans for establishing a new city a few miles from Phoenix, Arizona, were reported by the Rev. F. J. Winbush, president of the Arizona General Baptist Convention. He said the community would be built around a religious temple and institutions to exemplify race leadership. He added it would have a 30,000–50,000 population and would take ten years to build. The project, estimated to cost $50,000,000, will be supported through the National Baptist Foundation of America, a non-profit group created for the community.

Philadelphia—The first annual meeting of the Progressive Baptist Convention of America drew more than 1,000 delegates from 29 states, the District of Columbia, and Bermuda. The convention was formed last November by a group which seceded from the National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Inc., in a bitter dispute over the presidency. Statistics on the size of the new body were not made public.

The keynote address by Dr. T. M. Chambers of Los Angeles stressed the necessity for delegates to “get into the fight for civil rights.” He urged support for Freedom Riders in the South and for youth engaged in sit-in protests.

Kansas City, Missouri—Development of nuclear weapons as a security measure against Communist aggression was endorsed by the Baptist Bible Fellowship International at its 12th annual meeting.

Next year’s meeting will be held in Detroit, September 29—October 3, just prior to the formation of an International Baptist Congress, which is to embrace some 15 conservative bodies.

Kingston, Ontario—The Anglican Church of Canada placed a final seal of approval on its revised Book of Common Prayer in a unanimous vote of the 21st triennial General Synod.

Final draft of the revision of the 1918 version was approved three years ago. Under canon law, however, major revisions in doctrine, worship, or discipline must be approved by two successive General Synods.

Archbishop Howard H. Clark, primate of all Canada, must now select a date on which the book will go into official use in Canadian churches. At present, there are not enough copies to go around.

The synod rejected a proposal to form in Ottawa a primatial see—a kind of Canadian Canterbury—a special diocese whose archbishop would be Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada. It is likely, however, that Clark will name a committee to study the possibility and report to the next synod.

Delegates engaged in a heated debate on a plan to streamline administration of the church. A committee report had urged that the 136-member executive council be abolished and its work given to a central committee of 34 members. The plan was shelved by a vote of 18 to 17 among bishops and by 154 to 101 in the Lower blouse.

In other action, delegates voted to permit Church of South India bishops and episcopally-ordained clergy to celebrate Communion in Anglican churches while visiting Canada.

A proposal to employ a full-time Anglican lobbyist in Ottawa was defeated.

The Impact Of Values

Responsible elements in psychiatry are affirming that a psychiatrist makes moral judgments.

Dr. Orville S. Walters, director of health services and a lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Illinois, told delegates to the 17th annual convention of the American Scientific Affiliation last month that psychiatry is unique among the medical specialties in its philosophical involvement, and that this aspect is becoming widely recognized.

“Healing efforts lead directly into the philosophic dimension,” said Walters, “since psychotherapy implicates the patient’s value system.”

He declared that a psychiatrist must choose his orientation, however, inasmuch as there are a number of sects in the field. He said the Freudian heritage of naturalistic philosophy still stands between psychiatry and religion at a number of points.

Walters, a Free Methodist, noted that psychiatry “has entered in a limited way into dialogue with theology. Theologians believe that psychiatry’s understanding of man needs the mature conclusions of theology.”

This year’s ASA convention, held on the campus of Bethel College, St. Paul, Minnesota, marked the first time that sessions focused upon a single scientific area. The general theme was “Modern Psychology and the Christian.” Next year’s program will revolve around the social sciences.

Tax Decision

Cafeteria, snack room, and parking lots furnished to employees of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Sunday School Board in Nashville are taxable, says the Tennessee Supreme Court.

Judge Sam Felts ruled that such facilities are not for purely religious purposes and said the City of Nashville may assess those parts of the board’s property.

A lower court had sustained the board’s contention that all of the property was used in its religious function of serving Southern Baptist churches.

The board property was taxed for the first time in 1960, with the original assessment by the city amounting to some $5,000,000.

Friendship Evangelism

Some 25,000 more foreign nationals are arriving this month to study in America, according to International Students, Inc., evangelical agency which seeks to befriend visitors from abroad for the Christian cause.

ISI estimates that the new influx will boost the total number of foreign students in the United States and Canada to well over 100,000.

“God has used our system of friendship evangelism,” says ISI President Robert V. Finley, “to bring scores of brilliant overseas students to himself.”

ISI volunteer “missionaries at home” meet the students at travel depots, steer them into Christian homes, and offer help in a variety of ways.

Finley has been accused of minimizing the importance of foreign missions in favor of evangelism among foreign students in America. He denies the charge and claims that his missionary policy coincides with that of key missionary boards.

Churchmen And The Albany Movement

Once a cotton center and recognized as the “nut capital of the world,” Albany, Georgia, has been chosen by American Negroes to be the testing ground for civil rights in the South.

It was a deliberate choice, as many white people in Albany view it. The presence of two military installations—Turner Air Force Base and the Marine Corps Supply Center—and the fact that the Albany school system receives federal aid insured the interest of the U.S. government, if not its pressure.

In addition, old economic and social patterns were in a state of flux in Albany. The population had more than tripled in less than 20 years. Many newcomers among the city’s 55,000 residents were from outside the South. Others were economically and educationally destitute, sucked into the whirlpool of change from an agricultural to an industrial economy, for Albany now is becoming a center for manufacture of textile products or farm machinery, and for food processing plants.

On the other hand, Negro leaders, who acknowledge that the “Albany Movement” has become the focal point for expression by members of their race throughout the country of suppressed desires to be “first-class citizens,” nevertheless say the struggle began as a determined, but limited and local effort.

No two people, whether white or Negro, seem to agree on just how the whole thing started. But everybody agrees that it was the arrest of a group of “Freedom Riders” last December and the entrance of Dr. Martin Luther King into the situation, which made Albany a symbol of the racial tensions gripping not only the entire United States, but the whole world.

If the churches had not been involved in the problem before that point, the visits to the troubled city by the controversial minister—and later by groups of northern clergymen on “prayer pilgrimages”—would have made Albany a test of the relevancy of the message of Christianity.

Negro churches have been in the fore-front of the Albany Movement. The Rev. Benjamin Gay, pastor of the Bethel A.M.E. Church and president of the Ministerial Alliance (Negro), helped organize the movement. The chairman of the group, Dr. W. G. Anderson, an osteopath, is one of the leading laymen in the Mount Zion Baptist Church. Most of the movement’s strategy has been formulated in the churches, which are the only meeting halls the nearly 20,000 Negroes have.

Still, some white ministers and many laymen “did not regard as a religious problem,” explained the Rev. Archie C. Smith, executive secretary of the Presbytery of Southwest Georgia. “The laity felt it was a social problem with political overtones. And they still do.”

However, the presbytery meeting in Albany last April adopted a resolution expressing deep concern over racial relations, declaring, “We deplore the fact that, on the one hand there are those who take advantage of this situation for political profit and others for material gain.”

The resolution calls for individuals to offer “a personal ministry of good will, patience, and endeavor at understanding” and urged leaders of both races to get together to work out a solution to the problem which had erupted into violence, including Negro church burnings, brought economic hardships, and given the city a black eye for a world-wide radio, television, and newspaper audience.

The strife was big ammunition in this month’s primary election for governor which was won by a moderate. And it has provided plenty of opportunity for James Gray, the editor of the city’s daily newspaper, to display his racist views.

Some white ministers, like the Rev. J. Frederick Wilson, of the large First Methodist Church, did not see the trouble coming. One of the most respected men in the community, inside and outside the church and on either side of the racial barrier, Wilson felt the relationship between the white and the Negroes was good beyond just being cordial. The fact that his own church helped Negro brethren in church building projects, that a biracial hospital chaplains’ group met monthly, and that he personally had friends among the Negro clergymen, left him surprised when the Albany Movement began.

Yet he was one of the leaders in the Ministerial Association’s bid to be a mediating force when trouble broke out. He was the only white clergyman on an ill-fated, six-man biracial committee, hastily appointed by the city commission and quickly disbanded. About the only moderate voice on the commission has been that of Mayor Asa Kelley, a devout Roman Catholic who once aspired to the Methodist ministry.

Wilson has distributed in his church mimeographed copies of “A Prayer for These Troubled Times,” asking God to help the people to be tolerant, empty of hatred, and a good example.

“But I could not get up in my pulpit and say that one group is all right and the other all wrong,” said the soft-spoken minister, voicing objections to the “kneel-ins,” which he said were admittedly carried out “to embarrass” ministers who had not been openly sympathetic to the Negro cause, and to the excesses of some of the other demonstrations.

His congregation includes some of the most rabid segregationists among city officials.

Some white pastors, nevertheless, saw trouble coming. Among them was the Rev. Brooks Ramsey, pastor of the city’s largest church, First Baptist. It was obvious to him that Negro grievances over voting restrictions, bus segregation, and other matters were coming to a head.

Little did he know, however, that he would be catapulted into the hot glare of controversial publicity surrounding the racial struggle. Despite a temperate policy directive from the Board of Deacons of his church, an excited usher called police when three Negroes attempted a “kneel-in” at the church a month ago.

When he learned what had happened, Ramsey publicly stated his regrets and added, “This is Christ’s church and I can’t build any walls around it that Christ did not build, and Christ did not build any racial walls.… The church doctrine of love to all men transcends any racial consideration. We need to respect people for being the children of God, regardless of race.”

There was an uproar in some quarters over the statement and pressure was brought to bear—mostly from outside the 2,700-member church—although included among the leadership of the congregation are men who have attended Ku Klux Klan meetings. But the church has twice voted its confidence in its aggressive young pastor, an Ivy-League dresser from Memphis, who does not approve of all the message the city’s Negroes have used in their struggle.

His stand has warmed the Negro community whose clergymen have been greatly heartened by the vote of the members of First Baptist Church. “It’s one of the greatest moves in the right direction so far,” commented the Rev. E. James Grant, of Mount Zion Church. “If others do the same, we can get this thing settled.”

Perhaps more laymen would be behind such a stand than many white ministers seem to think. Horace Caldwell, a leading businessman who is an Episcopal layman, said, “The churches missed their chance 15 or 20 years ago. This problem could have been met with a gradual education program and if Negroes came to worship today, they would be accepted.”

But nearly everybody is agreed that the big test lies with the resumption of Federal Court hearings on an omnibus case involving all that the Negroes are pressing for.

A. T.

State Welfare A Blessing?

Growth of government care is a “resounding victory for the churches,” according to the Rev. Sheldon Rahn, executive director of the National Council of Churches’ Department of Social Welfare.

At a Washington banquet sponsored by Methodist social welfare administrators this month, Rahn said that tax funds now make up a record 65 per cent of all money spent for health and welfare services in the United States.

“There are people who worry about this dramatic growth in the assumption of responsibility by government for meeting the health, education, and welfare needs of the nation’s families,” he declared. “I would prefer, however, to look upon it as a resounding victory for the churches and for the spirit of concern and compassion which was in Jesus Christ, was before him proclaimed by the Old Testament prophets, and is finally finding its way into public policy.”

He said he considers the present proportion of giving from the church to social welfare to be “about right.”

Rahn cited transfer of personal income from the affluent “to those not as fortunate” and observed that “the distribution of this growing abundance will be achieved in several ways, including increases in statutory minimum wage, negotiated wage increases, the operation of market forces in resisting inflation and in holding prices down, the extension of public and private insurance payments, and finally the appropriation of tax funds for the direct care of those dependent upon public assistance and home relief checks.”

He gave 1975 as a target date for the reduction or elimination of “a significant portion” of grief and human distress.

Bishop John Wesley Lord, who presided at the banquet, implicitly endorsed Rahn’s principles and went on to suggest possible implementation through a “national domestic Peace Corps.”

Religion And Radicalism

Why does aversion to church attendance seem to go hand in hand with radical political attitudes?

The answer may be hard to pin down, but a California sociologist took a bold stab at it this month.

Armed with data from a British poll taken in 1957, Dr. Rodney W. Stark rejected theories that the middle class tends to “do” more about religious expression while members of the less-educated lower classes simply “feel” their religion. Stark, associated with the University of California’s Survey Research Center, cited his own studies which show that a person’s feelings toward various religious concepts and his rate of church attendance bear a close correlation.

He suggested that perhaps political radicalism offers an individual a more attractive outlet for his frustrations or his idealism than does organized religion.

Stark’s theory was advanced in an address delivered at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Washington, D.C. He did not entertain the possibility that a lower-class standing might result from lack of a Christian orientation.

“The church, basically, can offer relief to those near the bottom of the social hierarchy by emphasizing the relative unimportance of the material world,” Stark observed, “and by promising surcease in the world to come ‘where the first shall be last and the last first.’

“The church cannot usually offer any changes here and now and, in fact, generally lends legitimacy and sanction to existing status arrangements.

“Leftist parties on the other hand offer change here and now and challenge the legitimacy of the status quo,” he noted.

Stark said that among members of the Conservative party in England 62 per cent attend church “now and again” while only 36 per cent of Labor party members do. Among those who support the liberal party or who classify themselves as independent, 50 per cent attend church at least on occasion.

Britons who were asked in which class they considered that they belonged socially, showed that 73 percent of those in the “upper class” attend church and 71 per cent of those in the “upper middle,” while only 56 per cent of those in the “middle” class and 52 per cent in the “lower middle” attend church and only 39 per cent who identify themselves as members of the “working class.”

Among Conservatives who classified themselves in the upper middle class, 74 per cent attend church at least occasionally, but only 32 per cent of Labor party members in this class do so.

In the middle class the survey showed 62 per cent of the Conservatives and 40 per cent of the Laborites attend church. In the lower middle class there was only a small difference—56 per cent of Conservatives and 47 per cent of Labor supporters. But in the working class 54 per cent of those who vote Conservative attend church and only 33 per cent of those who support Labor.

Equally revealing was the response to a question of which was more important in bettering man: religion or politics. Among Conservatives 75 per cent of middle class voters and 63 per cent of those in the working class said religion was more important, while in the same social classes only 62 per cent and 55 per cent respectively of Labor adherents thought religion more important.

Stark suggested that more research be done on what he termed the “extraordinary correlation” between political attitudes and church attendance and religious values. He observed that a “long tradition exists in Western thought of viewing religion as a haven for the dispossessed.” He noted “the particular salience of the Christian faith for those disappointed and frustrated.”

Another Phoney Barrier

“As artificial as the Berlin wall” is how priest-astronomer Patrick Trainer describes the purported barrier between science and religion. The religious background of a scientist, he suggests, is often confined to a schoolboy acquaintance with a few Bible stories.

Added Trainer, who works out of the Vatican Observatory: An immature knowledge of this kind “in a man whose professional standards and critical ability have become highly developed, dissolves rapidly into a caricature of religion, which intellectual honesty obliges him to reject or at least to lock away in a dusty corner of the memory with the dates of the Wars of the Roses and the Greek irregular verbs.”

In these circ*mstances, he went on, it is not surprising that many scientists shut their eyes to such things as the ultimate purpose of life and their responsibility to God and man, and devote themselves instead to the next examination, the next patient, or the next problem.

Trainer spoke at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Manchester.

J. D. D.

Youth And The Left

From London’s secondary grammar schools came some 700 teen-agers for a meeting organized by the Inter-School Christian Fellowship to discuss Christian-Communist coexistence. The fact that they met during school hours—and wore school uniforms—indicates that British education authorities are increasingly welcoming the work of ISCF, which is part of the Scripture Union movement in Great Britain.

Rarely does any evangelical youth gathering in England attract so many non-Christians. About one-third of the questions put to the speakers were overtly hostile. More than one asked, “Why isn’t there a Communist speaker on the platform?” Another questioner drew applause when he suggested that it had been an “afternoon of Christian anti-Communist indoctrination.” A number of the youth wore badges which identified them as associated with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Mr. Geoffrey Bull, author of When Iron Gates Yield, left a deep impression on the assembly in telling how his faith in Christ had been tested by three years as a prisoner of the Communists in Red China.

Said the Rev. C. H. D. Cullingford, chaplain of St. John’s School, Leather-head: “Communism appeals to what is best in man and perverts it … we have something better … but are we wholehearted enough to commend it?”

J. D. D.

Latter Day Scots

“What has pleased me immensely is the changed attitude of the Scots,” said Mormon president David O. McKay, in Glasgow for a weekend to preside at the formation of Scotland’s first “stake” of ten churches.

“Sixty years ago, when I was a young missionary here,” Mr. McKay recalled, “I used to be told: ‘Awa ye go hame. Ye canna get our lassies.’ But now the Scots seem to understand we are only trying to make a better world.”

Then, remembering a national characteristic, he added slyly, “And paying our own expenses, too.”

Mormon missionaries plan an intensive five-year campaign in Scotland, and are prepared to spend millions of dollars to achieve their aim of establishing 100 chapels throughout the country which now has some 11,000 Latter Day Saints. On ecumenical trends Mr. McKay nailed his colors to the mast—“I’m all for unity,” he said, “provided everyone joins the Mormon Church.”

J. D. D.

“The currents of life are running deep—in bewildering confusion, in wild abandon to pleasure and lust, in commitment to demonic purpose, in yearning for redemption from lostness and guilt and weakness, and in searching quest for values that can survive nuclear chaos. The Gospel speaks to life like this, at the deepest and highest levels. But the most agonizing concern, the most daring thinking, and the most skillful portrayal of life seem to spring from sources unacquainted with the truth that makes men free. Here is a challenge to the Christian writer—to tell the good news so convincingly that there will be a new birth of faith and hope and love.” With this timely definition of the Christian writer’s task Dr. Clifton J. Allen, Editorial Secretary of The Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, recently convened the annual writers’ conference at Ridgecrest, North Carolina.

If the Spirit of God is creative and re-creative, should not Christian writing pioneer new motifs and patterns that impart new glory to the written word? For evangelicals a special theological connotation attaches to “the Word of God written”: the Living God has in-scribed his thoughts into the language of the sacred writers. Ought not this confidence, therefore, to challenge the evangelical writer in each generation to utilize language as the colorful marketplace of spiritual truths? If Christianity is a message for all people, for the masses—as indeed it is—each succeeding year brings greater responsibility to Christian writers for creative material that tackles life, in Dr. Allen’s phrase, “at the deepest and highest levels.”

Even the secular press currently voices a growing demand for something fresh and worthwhile.

Evaluating the 1961–62 television season, Associated Press reporter Cynthia Lowry noted: “For a second year in a row, it has been a period rarely sparked by creativity—a period dominated by formula writing and production line entertainment containing very little that was fresh or novel.… It was a time when there were few original dramas, and most of those were second-rate and seemed to have been scripts found at the back of an author’s desk drawer.”

Jenkin Lloyd Jones, editor of The Tulsa Tribune, has said: “It’s time we quit giving page one to the extra-marital junkets of crooners.… time we stopped treating as glamorous and exciting the brazen shack-ups of screen tramps.… time we asked our Broadway and Hollywood columnists if they can’t find something decent and inspiring going on along their beats.”

Constantine Brown writes in her syndicated column: “Today in America, any teen-ager can drop into the corner store to buy a magazine from a wide selection of obscene literature which can subvert the young mind and possibly leave a lifelong scar.… America’s children are her future.… What great wrongs are being perpetrated against the souls of our young people! Many of the thrills of life have been refused them.… They must find their inspirations in forbidden evils to satisfy the exuberance of youth.… Where are the sons of America who can inspire our youth and our people? Who can renew our faith …? (The Evening Star, Washington, D. C., May 8, 1962).

A recent essay in Motive listed truth, love, and power as qualities of good writing that indicate craftsmanship-plus. Who is capable for these qualities but writers of maturity, of insight, of feeling, and above all of Christian devotion and depth?

Our generation thinks of power mainly in terms of the capacity to control, to manipulate, and to destroy; it knows little of the power of the Gospel, of the tender pressure of the Holy Ghost, of the majestic might of the Lord of Glory. Can Christian writers so frame contemporary life against the sacred realities that the sin-scarred nations of the world will see bloodshed and hear the thunder of our times overshadowed by the blood of the Cross and God’s shaking of the heavens?

Without truth and love, the power of words is destructive dynamite that sears the souls of saintly men and triggers the temper of weary and over-wrought nations. Without truth and power, the love of words is but an adolescent blush of immaturity. Without love and power, the truth of words is merely the echo of Sinai’s wrathful thunders; its lightning flashes earth ward to vanish forever into blackness. There is no hint of respite from the storm, of a rainbow in the sky, of the strong Son of God who to the soul’s dark midnight brings the abiding glow of triumph. To join words in truth, in power, and in love is to articulate and to mirror the central reality of the Christian faith, namely, the eternal Word become flesh.

Answerability to truth, therefore, is a sure plus hallmark of the Christian craftsman.

Dr. Charles Malik, former president of the General Assembly of the United Nations, has said: “The Christian seeks to know the facts. This is not easy these days, with so much hearsay, sentimentalism, and prejudice; and so he cannot be too wary against propaganda and falsehood. Nothing is more comfortable than to be swept with the current, especially when the current is so strong; but a Christian fights stupidity, superficiality, and tendentiousness like hell. There is truth, his duty is to seek it, and his destiny is to find it and feed on it. The difference between the attitude of the Christian and that of so many others is that, whereas others may wish to transform the nature of things to suit their own purposes, the Christian only wishes to discover that nature so as to conform to it himself. Their attitude is more one of will and power; his attitude is more one of understanding” (Christ and Crisis, p. 88, Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1962).

No one is entitled, of course, to a spirit of arrogance that presupposes omniscience of all learning and experience; profound humility in the presence of truth in its wholeness ought always to characterize a truly devout spirit. But the Christian need not apologize for his distinctive beliefs, and has no reason to calculate how little rather than how much he can believe of his heritage and still remain Christian. It was John himself, the apostle of love, who stamped upon his epistles the radiant refrain: “We know.… we know.… we know that we know!”

Our age of propaganda finds it difficult to discern and to tell the truth; its capacity for misjudging love is equally profound. The problem is not simply that the unregenerate world identifies the Great Lover with some character in a paperback and not with the central figure of John’s Gospel. After all, ignorance of God’s redemptive mercy characterizes much of the unregenerate world. Nor should Madison Avenue, despite its odd focus on Christian motifs, bear the whole blame. The secular world often is confused about the meaning and role of love because its exposition and portrayal by Christians is ambiguous. Even evangelical writers sometimes present the Gospel with a wideness that strains the quality of mercy. Scripture clearly registers the meaning of love in the life of Christ; somehow love in the life of the Christian often seems to change with the times. In one generation it-may mean support for socialism; in another, promotion of pacifism; in still another, propagandizing for higher minimal wages or for Red China’s admission to the United Nations, and so on. A divinity student in Washington, D. C., murdered a young woman because he “loved” her so much. How important it becomes then for Christian writers to distinguish apostolic compassion from post-Christian sentimentalism.

The Bible sets the exposition of love in the context of God and neighbor. Broad generalizations like “universal brotherhood” and “one world” too easily lose the vertical and the horizontal dimensions of the scriptural guidelines of love. Granted that the Great Commission is global, and that the evangel is for everyman, yet it is specific deeds of love and mercy to the needy neighbor at our side that confirm or compromise our confession of faith and love.

For this reason Christian writing—be it fact or fiction—lends itself so remarkably as a concrete mirror on the abstract idealism of our age. The Gospel demands to see love “close up”; to hear the truth “close up”; to experience power “close up.” Jesus lingers to talk with the Samaritan while others shun and pass her by. Friends lower the sick man through the housetop for healing. Matthew invites his neighbors to supper. We see the priest bypassing the man who fell among thieves. The Gospel reveals me, too. I may deplore the gross sexuality of our sensate age, but may be enjoying some lustful look. I may deplore the evils of big business, but may undermine my fellow-worker’s advancement to a superior position. This is the stuff of daily life, the sordid stuff that new life in Christ helps to erase. By taking hold of life in all its concrete expressions one steps into the boudoir of one’s own soul and into that of one’s neighbor. How to move within those private chambers to the bedside of prayer and penitence and wholeness is the craftsman’s task.

One sign of evangelical literary skill must lie in the way a writer strikes his point of contact for the Gospel with his intended reader, particularly if that reader is predisposed against Christianity by the prevailing bias of the age. Granted that one falls short of New Testament theology unless he includes such facts as atonement, justification, regeneration, and sanctification (whether in contemporary or in classic vocabulary), does the novelist suddenly squeeze his unchurched character into a church service (in which the latter would otherwise scarcely be caught alive) in order to “get across” the full three points of a Bible-packed sermon? Does he flay the sinner with God’s wrath, hammering away at the sinner’s sense of guilt? Or is he aware that the sense of guilt may be defensively repressed or long disowned? Is he then alert to speak to the sinner’s existential need, until its frontiers can be extended to include the need of forgiveness and faith, the need of atonement and reconciliation?

Does he hurry the unrepentant character’s confession of Christ, so that instead of sharing the Apostle Paul’s disappointment over Agrippa’s “with a very little (evidence) you seek to persuade me,” the reader is astonished that the stubborn obstacles to belief are so swiftly overcome?

Do we see the whole man—mind, feelings and will-locked up at last for a commitment to the whole Gospel? And what is the totality of the “good news”? Is the sinner’s reception of Christ as Saviour the main or only climax? Is this not the beginning-point rather than the end-point of Christian experience? If Christianity implies the triumph of Christ in history, is it not fully as important to show how virtue informs the new man’s decisions and deeds where once vice deformed them both?

The lifeblood of Western civilization has become infected with a death-dealing virus. In a recent address Karl Brandt of Stanford University noted that “many of the strands of suicidal thought in the minds of the Western community have their roots in the flood of negatively criticizing or muckraking literature on nearly all phases of the history of the West during the last 150 years.” Dr. Brandt adds: “How can the West win the battle of the coming decade if our young generation is ashamed of the history of our whole Western civilization? How can a civilization prevail if instead of having faith in its greater values and a missionary spirit of expanding its rule, the main emphasis is on liquidation, an abandoning, on retreat?” The lesson for Christian writers is all too apparent, unless we are reconciled to the continuing spiritual and moral suicide of the West. If the Western urge to suicide is to be replaced by yearning for new life, the twentieth-century man so inaccessible to the evangelical preacher may first have to be reached by the evangelical writer. And for this stupendous task the times call not merely for craftsmen, but for craftsmen plus.

Ncc Social Welfare Head Promotes Government Programs

The executive director of the National Council of Churches’ Department of Social Welfare, the Rev. Sheldon L. Rahn, recently traveled to the District of Columbia to address the Methodist Division of Temperance and General Welfare and carried along an endorsem*nt of government welfare that stacked almost as high as the Washington Monument.

In contrast to the New Testament writers, Mr. Rahn had little if anything to say about social justice and righteousness, or concerning the gift of repentance as a cure for social evils. As “the four great problems in the field of social welfare” today, he named dependency, poverty, illness, and maladjustment (a collection of concerns that, we might add, neither the prophets nor apostles assigned priority, and which they failed to nominate for total eradication in fallen history). Mr. Rahn more than compensates for this scriptural omission, however. By 1975, he assures the Methodists, “a significant portion of this grief and human distress can be reduced or eliminated” if the United States avoids war, accelerates public as well as private insurance against unemployment, old age hazards, physical illness, and work accidents, and implements nationwide the objectives of the 1962 Public Welfare Amendments. In addition, Mr. Rahn urges Methodists to “strengthen the work of commissions on Christian social concern at the annual conference and local church level along with their counterparts in every denomination (and) organize and finance 100 new social welfare departments in city and state councils of churches.”

Many Protestant churches are already splintered by debate over whether the Church should implement its Christian welfare and health (or education) objectives through government programs and public taxation. Mr. Rahn’s passing comment for the rising tide of critics of the NCC’s policy was: “This (matter of church-state issues) is a major subject in itself and cannot be treated here.” But Mr. Rahn’s own mind is obviously quite made up: “In 1962, the United States is spending $95.2 billion for health, education and welfare, an increase of 122 per cent since 1950. About 65 per cent of this $95.2 billion comes from the public sector.… There are people who worry about this dramatic growth in the assumption of responsibility by government for meeting the health, education and welfare needs of the nation’s families. I would prefer, however, to look upon it as a resounding victory for the churches and for the spirit of concern and compassion which was in Jesus Christ, was before him proclaimed by the Old Testament prophets, and is finally finding its way into public policy.”

Those churchgoers who think that Christian compassion is to be voluntarily ventured and supported, rather than compulsorily legislated and tax-supported—and they are legion—had better speak out before this Big Government “victory for the churches” widens until (as in East Germany) welfare activity becomes wholly a state affair and no longer remains a church prerogative.

The National Council is eager to secure a social action committee in every local church, and Mr. Rahn wants “full and free discussion of contemporary problems within the local church itself.” There is nothing wrong in principle with, and much to commend, such a development, although it would be better were the prayer meeting and the social action committee one and the same. But Mr. Rahn asserts that “the primary responsibility for social education in the churches does rest with denominational boards of social education and action.” If they take their cue from Mr. Rahn, it should be obvious that they are in for a very liberal education indeed.

A Bulgarian Communist Sights In On America

A professing Communist official happily engaged in PTA work and willing to offer helpful words of criticism on the American way of life. Such is the retiring Minister of Bulgaria, Dr. Peter G. Voutov, now departing from Washington, D. C., after a stay of more than eight years.

His views on America are properly mixed. He ranks American farmers the world’s finest, and American scenery as surpassing Europe’s in some respects.

But on the standard of American education he quite justifiably sounds like Admiral Rickover: “You teach here in the sixth grade what we teach in the third.” He rightly deplores our lack of stress on languages.

The Bulgarian praises American square dancing and other folk arts but has “nothing but condemnation for the Twist. It’s not a dance. It’s something savage.… It presents a distorted picture of this country.” Shades of Khrushchev on the cancan!

Early in life, Dr. Voutov spent six years in a religious seminary so rigorous that he could speak to his mother only through an iron grill. “Today,” he says, “I am an atheist. I feel that when I die that will be the end of existence for me. My mother does not agree with these opinions.”

That America is vulnerable to criticisms of the foregoing nature from a “puritanism” bred in violence, is due in part to weakness of Christian witness. Let us heed Voutov’s words and at the same time hope that upon his return to Bulgaria he continues to apply cultural insights critically. We may give thanks for his freedom to do so here.

Protests Mount Over Sterilization Of Mothers

More than 50 indigent mothers have been sterilized at their own request since January under the voluntary sterilization program at Fauquier Hospital, Warrenton, Virginia. Evangelist Billy Graham agreed with a Roman Catholic prelate’s declaration that sterilization of people “is morally wrong whether it be voluntary or compulsory in nature.” But the Archbishop of Washington antagonized Fauquier County authorities when he said that the sterilization program has as its “obvious and crudely selfish and materialistic purpose … to reduce the tax rate.” The chairman of the Board of Supervisors indirectly told the Archbishop to mind his own affairs (Fauquier County officials “tend to our own business”), pointing out that a multitude of citizens would have to be sterilized if tax reduction were the objective.

The Fauquier program is aimed primarily at married women who have several children and whose physical condition makes future pregnancies undesirable. But it is also offered to women without a husband and home who continue to bear children, and only to those who have borne three or more children. That which differentiates a decision like this from other forms of birth control is its irrevocability. And that which renders one uneasy in the presence of such a far-reaching and unalterable decision is the temporary and fluctuating character of some of the circ*mstances which prompt it. Not only childbearing but the capacity for childbearing is eliminated. And what then of a new dawn which may take place in the soul, bringing Christ’s own light, and with it a new set of motives and desires?

Life is a stupendous gift. It gives us qualms to see a darkened conscience make decisions which later illumination is powerless to counter.

If We Must Always Win, The Race Indeed Is Grim

If the future of the world depended on a certain team in the National League winning the pennant, and winning it every year, baseball would not be a sport but a thing of desperation. It appears that we live in this kind of world.

President Kennedy recently asserted at Rice University that if the vast seas of space are not to be filled with instruments of mass destruction, the U.S., not the U.S.S.R., must win first place in the space race and retain first place. He vowed we will. We like the spirit, not the picture.

Yet the picture seems accurate. Once the nation that ruled the seas ruled the world. Then it was the skies, then the nation first with atomic weapons. Today it is space. The nation that controls space will control the world. Yet it is a grim and unthrilling race if the peace of the world demands that we win, and always win.

Once it was poor sportsmanship to hit a man when he was down. But in the space race there is no place for sportsmanship. All blows must be delivered from above in this grim contest where peace is the pennant and peace depends on one nation always being in first place. The posture demanded by the necessity of always being first in space conjures an image unpleasant and disturbing. But in this kind of race one either towers above his opponent, or looks up at him from below.

Amid Political Turbulence, The Quiet Power Works

While the world watches Cuba and what the United States will do about this Russian outpost, and the Brazilian Premier and his cabinet resign amidst political turbulence, the Gospel of Christ works its quiet leavening action largely unnoticed by governments and secular press. Since mid-August a five-man team has been making final preparations for the second Graham crusade in South America this year. The crusade opens this week in São Paulo, Brazil, fastest growing city in the world. It will also be carried into Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay in what will be the greatest evangelistic effort in the history of these four countries.

Dr. Graham reports that the Brazilian crusade has the support of all the country’s Protestant churches. May this display of existential, grass-root unity not go unnoticed either by the Church of Christ or by that divided and fragmented other America. May the greatest power in the world continue to save.

Every sensitive person, facing the question of human destiny, must surely long to be a universalist. No one could desire to see another person brought to the end of all existence, whether at death, as conditional immortality teaches, or by the judgment of God after death, as annihilationism teaches; no one could wish to think of the bitter pains of eternal death consciously and eternally endured by sinners, as traditional orthodoxy insists. Hence, the tremendous human attractiveness of a belief which assures eternal life and bliss to every soul of man!

However, sentiment cannot be exalted into a theological norm, and when one sees the extent to which universalist writings lean upon analogies of human love, one realizes that there is at least a danger of the wish being father to the thought. For the truth is that man as such possesses no yardstick whereby to measure eternal issues. We do not know by instinct what the love of God is like, and therefore we need to beware of the human analogy; we certainly do not know for ourselves what the holiness of God is like, and therefore we must beware of giving much weight to what sinners think of the seriousness of sin. Only God can say what precisely are the facts, and what are their implications. We must rigidly adhere to the principle: “To the law and to the testimony!” What has the God of truth written for out learning?

Old Testament. The Old Testament insists on the fact of human survival of death. This is asserted as true of godly and ungodly alike. The life in Sheol, the place of the departed, is the expectation of the patriarch Jacob (Gen. 42:38) and of King David (2 Sam. 12:23); equally it is the lot of the heathen king of Babylon (Isa. 14:9) and of “the multitude of Egypt” (Ezek. 32:18 ff.). All alike die, and all alike take up their abode in Sheol.

A most important observation follows. It is widely urged by advocates of conditional immortality and of annihilation that death may be defined as “the loss of life or existence” (H. Constable, The Duration and Nature of Future Punishment, p. 16). Man is not possessed of an immortal soul; this is only the possession of some, on condition of faith in Christ; for the rest, death is the end. The slight modification of this statement made by adherents of annihilationism—that the soul survives bodily death until it is extinguished by act of God in judgment—is unimportant at the moment. The question is: May we define death as “loss of life”? Clearly not! The Old Testament shows us that death is rather to be seen as an alteration of place, from earth to Sheol, and of state, from the body-soul unity of life on earth to the separate life of the soul in Sheol. Death is defined by God himself as “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3:19), but by virtue of creation man is more than dust (Gen. 2:7). Consequently the correct balance is set forth in Ecclesiastes (12:7): “Then shall the dust return to the earth … and the spirit … to God.…” This meaning of death seems to stand firm throughout the Bible.

The life of the soul in Sheol is revealed as continuous with the present life in terms of character and personality. David expects to meet his lost child and to know him (2 Sam. 12:23); Samuel, recalled from the grave, is recognizably the Samuel who was known on earth (1 Sam. 28:11 ff.); and Job (19:25–27) and the Psalmist (49:15) expected personal survival of death.

This at once leads us to ask if the Old Testament recognizes and provides for distinctions of moral character in the world to come. Only the beginnings of such teaching are to be found. Certainly, in the case of the wicked, there is only the hint of adverse lot after death. There are, for example, certain passages which associate Sheol rather specifically with notable wickedness of life (Ps. 9:7; Prov. 5:5; Ps. 88:7–12; Job 31:12). In the same way, whereas the threat to the wicked (Ezek. 3:18) that he shall die in his iniquity may only mean that his iniquity will speedily terminate his life on earth, the general tone of the context rather suggests that there is a special doom awaiting a man who dies unrepentant. Daniel 12:2 is explicit.

The teaching on the reward of the righteous is rather more prominently stated. Of the passages which relate to this point (e.g., Isa. 25:8; 26:19; Prov. 14:32; Dan. 12:2; Ps. 16:8 ff.; 17:14 f.; 49:14, 15), Psalm 73:23, 24 is undoubtedly preeminent. The problem of this psalm is the familiar one of the prosperity of the godless and the suffering of the godly. The psalmist’s solution is this: that at every point of life and in all circ*mstances, the man who has God is richer than the man without God. In the verses mentioned the godly man counts his wealth: for the present, he has the assurance that God is with him, and will not let him go (v. 23); and as he looks ahead, he sees a life ordered by divine providence (24a), and “afterward” entrance upon “glory.” The verb “receive” is also found in Psalm 49:15 and in Genesis 5:24; it is virtually a technical term for the divine act of glorification of the saints.

New Testament. As soon as we set foot in the New Testament we find a plain declaration of the bliss of the people of God and the condemnation of the unsaved. Without prejudice to the task of exegesis, surely the Lord Jesus illuminated immortality when he said, “These shall go away into eternal punishment: but the righteous into eternal life” (Matt. 25:46). Along with the clear assertion of opposite eternal destinies, the New Testament is adamant that death, the termination of life on earth, is the end of man’s probationary period. As a man dies, so his eternal destiny is decided. The Lord Jesus Christ is once more our teacher in this matter, for in his story of the rich man and Lazarus he laid particular stress on the fixity of the great gulf, and the impossibility of reversing that situation which death initiated (Luke 16:26; cf. Heb. 9:27; Rev. 20:12).

What, then, does the New Testament teach about those who die without Christ? It is useful to notice first the emphasis placed on the absolute justice of the judgment which God will pass on such. Revelation 20:12 ff. tells us that it is a judgment based on exact evidence: there is not only the “book of life,” there is also the book of human works. Often the judgment throne of God is wrongly construed at this point. It is fancied that before God’s throne those who formerly rejected God, actively or passively, will meantime have undergone a change of mind, will see the error of their ways, and desire to repent and be saved, yet be cut off from all hope. A picture containing all the poignancy of helpless anguish is thus conjured up. But Scripture in fact insists on a very different picture: that of the dead appearing before God in exactly the character of God-denying, Christ-rejecting sin which they evidenced on earth. The rich man in the Lord’s story bore in hell the same personal marks as he did in life: desire for sensual gratification, subjection of the welfare of others to his personal whim, absence of any regard for the law of God.

The judgment which God passes is in its quality “eternal” (Matt. 25:46; 2 Thess. 1:9; Rev. 20:10), and in its form “fire” (Matt. 25:41; Rev. 20:14, 15), “punishment” (Matt. 25:46), “destruction” (2 Thess. 1:9), and “the second death” (Rev. 20:14). It would seem unavoidable that the word “eternal” rules out universalism. It answers to the “great gulf fixed” in the story. While every sympathy flows like a tide towards the goal the universalist is trying to reach, he is none the less impotent against the stark assertion that the judgment passed by God initiates an eternal state of affairs. Neither of the two positions adopted by universalists effects anything at this point. They may oppose Scripture to Scripture, urging that in 1 Corinthians 15:28 the hope is held out that “God may be all in all,” and that this cannot be so if some of God’s creatures are eternally alienated from him. Or, additionally, they may urge that if any are eternally lost, the divine love is deprived of its object and is not almighty. But this is all unbiblical thinking. In the first place, in the Corinthians passage, the “all” who die “in Adam,” and the “all” who are made alive “in Christ” are not identical, and therefore the interpretation of the total exaltation of God is wrongly made out. Secondly, the Bible teaches holiness as the essential characteristic of God, and displays the truth which, possessing only a sinner’s defective notion of holiness, we find unpalatable: that God is glorified in judgment (e.g., Ezek. 10:4; Isa. 2:10; and so on). Thirdly, as against the assertion that omnipotent love guarantees the salvation of every sinner, and will after death produce such evidence of love as will win the free response of every heart, Scripture asserts that this evidence has already been given and nothing more can be expected (Rom. 5:8; cf. Mark 12:6) and that this love is specifically that which prompted God to save a people he freely and mercifully chose for himself (1 John 4:9–14).

However, accepting that an eternal issue is settled, what is the subsequent state of those condemned? Following the word “eternal,” annihilationists urge the words “death” and “destruction”: the eternal state of the unsaved is to be totally and eternally extinguished or disintegrated so as to cease to be. But firstly, it does not concur with the meaning of “death” already indicated: not annihilation, but alteration. On this meaning, just as death terminated this life but ushered in the life of the separation of body and soul, so “the second death” will terminate that existence and usher in the “lake of fire.” Secondly, it does not concur with the meaning of “destruction” in two of the other three places where the New Testament uses it (1 Cor. 5:5; 1 Thess. 5:3), where it certainly does not mean a final and complete end of conscious existence. Thirdly, such annihilation is not the lot of the devil, who in the lake of fire is “tormented day and night for ever” (Rev. 20:10), and with whom in the same fire, according to the Lord Jesus, the wicked have their portion (Matt. 25:41). Fourthly, annihilation is not necessarily—perhaps not at all—“punishment.” Conceivably the thought would bring nothing but relief to some! And, finally, annihilation is not consistent with the principles enunciated by our Lord himself in the case history of the rich man. It was his lot to know his lost eternity and to experience the pangs of it.

These things are no joy to write, and nothing but a burden to contemplate. Let them urge us on in the task of proclaiming the saving word, and all the more when we appreciate afresh the glories which God has reserved for those who love him (1 Cor. 2:9). “The souls of believers are at their death made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory; and their bodies, being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till the resurrection” (Westminster Shorter Catechisim), wherein “the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord” (1 Thess. 4:16 f.). Thus, there is the immediate prospect of the believer at death, and the ultimate prospect at the final resurrection. We are taught by the New Testament that death is followed at once by conscious enjoyment of the presence of the Lord. This was the expectation of Paul, to whom to depart and be with Christ was “better by far” (Phil. 1:23), for he would be “at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:6 ff.). It seems innate in these sayings of the apostle that he did not expect any “sleep of the soul” after death. Such was clearly not the experience of Lazarus (Luke 16:23 ff.; cf. Rev. 6:9 f.).

But even this blissful enjoyment of the Lord does not exhaust God’s purposed blessing of his people. The redemption accomplished by the Lord Jesus was total in its efficacy, the redemption of the whole man. Therefore the New Testament holds before us the prospect of “the redemption of the body” (Rom. 8:23; Eph. 1:14), the consummation of glorification, when we shall see Him and be like Him (1 John 3:2).

Glory of the Lamb. As regards the personal element in this life, the life beyond will be marked by continuity and transformation (1 Cor. 15:35 ff.), so that just as Moses and Elijah were recognized on the Mount of Transfiguration (Luke 9:30), in the same way we shall see and know our loved ones. As regards the toils of this life, there is the promise of blessed rest (Rev. 14:13); as regards its deficiencies, clothing (2 Cor. 5:1–2); as regards its trials and uncertainties, provision and security, and for its sorrows, comfort and joy (Rev. 7:14–17); in exchange for the imperfectly realized fellowship of God’s people now, there will be “the church of the firstborn” (Heb. 12:23), with their common testimony to the blood of the Lamb (Rev. 7:9); and, more than all else, there will be no longer the intermittent fellowship of the Lord, blighted by sin and defeat, but, there, the Lamb will be all the glory—sin and Satan, death, sorrow, defeat, and even temptation will be banished—the song of the redeemed will proceed not from faith but from sight, and the brightest jewel will be the word fulfilled, which says: “Forever with the Lord.”

Bibliography: H. Constable, The Duration and Nature of Future Punishment (annihilationism); J. A. T. Robinson, In the End, God (universalism); L. Boettner, Immortality; H. Buis, The Doctrine of Eternal Punishment; L. Morris, The Wages of Sin; The Biblical Doctrine of Judgment; C. Hodge, Systematic Theology; L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology.

Vice-Principal

Clifton Theological College

Bristol, England

Wash, cleanse, and pure, and their derivatives are words of deep significance in the Bible.

In Proverbs 30:12 we read these words: “There are those who are pure in their own eyes but are not cleansed of their filth” (RSV), and this describes many of us who bear the name of Christ.

Recently a group of businessmen were talking about a minister who had moved from their town to another assignment. Their chief memory of him was that he had a long string of stories, most of them smutty in their implications.

On the other hand, the comedian Joe E. Brown was once entertaining a group of soldiers. One of the boys said, “Joe, tell us some dirty stories.” Like a flash Brown replied, “I have never told such stories anywhere and I have no idea of starting now.”

Impurity is the consuming curse of America today. Art, literature, and the average movie are increasingly cesspools of rottenness, and men and women, boys and girls are drinking in this filth with untold damage to their souls.

The Gospel message tells of God’s offer of cleansing from sin, but this is often perverted to a system of ethics with the improved relationship of man to his fellowman as the primary objective.

That cleansing is of basic importance is clear from many references in the Bible. For example, our Lord upbraided the Pharisees because of their concern over outward appearances and ceremonial observances without attention to the rottenness within. Are not we guilty of the same perverted standards today? We forget that it is sin which pollutes.

That the unregenerate man needs cleansing is the recurring theme of the Bible, and that this can never be effected by his own endeavor is equally clear. The best of our efforts are as “filthy rags” because our thoughts and our ways are diametrically opposed to God’s.

Little wonder that our Lord proclaimed the necessity of regeneration: “Ye must be born again” is imperative if man is to enter the Kingdom of God, for only by a completely changed nature can we stand in God’s holy presence.

That this change is a supernatural one is also clear. David, guilty of adultery and murder, cried out to God, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me” (Ps. 51:10, RSV).

One of the basic objectives of preaching should be that of confronting man with his own uncleanness, and such preaching begins with the preacher. Isaiah, speaking to the preachers and religious workers of his day, cried out: “Depart, depart, go out thence, touch no unclean thing; go out from the midst of her, purify yourselves, you who bear the vessels of the LORD” (Isa. 52:11, RSV).

As we read the Scriptures and study the repeated references to purity and impurity we are forced to the conclusion that there is nothing we can do about it but accept the cleansing offered so freely in the atoning work of Christ.

Isaiah spoke of this hope in these words: “Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool” (Isa. 1:18, RSV).

Our Lord speaks of the cleansing effect of his word, while the purity of God’s precepts is affirmed repeatedly in the Psalms.

John makes it plain that a prelude to cleansing is confession of sin: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9, RSV).

Just preceding this he indicates the agent of this cleansing: “… and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7, RSV).

Impurity is sin and with sin there is guilt. Jeremiah speaks of God’s offer of forgiveness in these words: “I will cleanse them from all the guilt of their sin against me, and I will forgive all the guilt of their sin and rebellion against me” (Jer. 33:8, RSV).

John, caught up in the spirit, speaks of Christ’s redemptive work: “… Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood” (Rev. 1:5, AV). Again, “… these are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (7:14, AV).

How far removed from our theology and preaching today! One wonders whether our modern sophistication which eliminates such “crude” references to the cleansing blood of Christ is not in fact a denial of our Lord—nailing him to the cross afresh?

“Who,” the Psalmist asks, “shall ascend the hill of the LORD? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart …” (Ps. 24:3, RSV). Should not such allusions make us cry out like the lepers of old, “Unclean, unclean!” By the clear pure light of the Holy Spirit we realize that we are filled with unclean thoughts and guilty of impure acts.

But such realization can be the threshold of redemption, for Christ’s love and sacrifice are sufficient for the vilest sinner. Corny? May God have mercy on those who so regard it!

Naaman the leper was offended by the suggestion that he dip seven times in Jordan. The rivers of his homeland were probably much more attractive than the puny stream of Jordan, but it was in Jordan that he had to be cleansed. So today the rivers of reformation and sophisticated reasoning seem much more attractive than the cleansing offered on Calvary, and many turn from the place where redeeming love and holy justice meet to the broken and empty cisterns of a man-made religion.

Blindness to our own filthiness is a characteristic of the unregenerate. Like the man born blind who washed in the pool of Siloam at our Lord’s command, we too need the cleansing He alone can give, that spiritual blindness may give way to God-given sight.

It is the Word of God through which such insights come so often. As the Psalmist says: “The precepts of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes; the fear of the LORD is clean, enduring forever; the ordinances of the LORD are true, and righteous altogether” (Ps. 19:8, 9, RSV).

The Apostle Paul diagnoses the case and prescribes the cure in these incisive words: “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor hom*osexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:9–11, RSV).

We of this sophisticated century need the same cleansing.

Breakthroughs

For Rally Day in our Sunday school we have varnished the chairs in the primary department, and the Ladies’ Aid has sewed new drapes for the basem*nt windows. This renovation falls somewhat short of the rebuilding program of the local school district. Two new elementary schools have been added to the system. I hear rumors of new teaching methods, too. Ungraded primary classes are scheduled so that individual children can learn at their own rate, and Russian is at the present time included in the high school curriculum.

Of course our church primary department has been upgraded from the beginning, but I’m not sure that this accelerated individual learning. Perhaps that was because no one knew how progressive it was. Our equipment has never seemed very dramatic, either. Breakthroughs in education are always made with teaching machines, or visual aids, or tactile alphabets made of sandpaper, or perhaps by three-year-olds on electric typewriters.

Our biggest innovation came ten years ago when Miss Brownstone discovered the flannel board. Even that didn’t seem as exciting as it did when I read about it last month in an audio-visual magazine. Perhaps it was because Miss Brownstone didn’t have enough figures, and the children remembered Jonah and insisted that he wasn’t Peter and hadn’t walked on the sea but had sunk down to the big fish. In any event, after most of the sets were scrambled and lost we stopped having a flannel story every Sunday.

Group dramatics has lasted a little longer. We always bring down the walls of Jericho with a shout. But it takes three or four years to get back to Jericho and action lags in the interval.

With new equipment and teaching materials we could accomplish much more—at least for a while. And there is always George Parker’s class of Juniors. I don’t know what he has discovered, unless it’s the Bible. Teaching takes more than faith, hope, and love, but not much more. George’s breakthrough seems to be in matching love of Christ, love of the Bible, and love of boys.

EUTYCHUS

Resurrection Of The Body

I have just completed the reading of the article “Death and Immortality” by J. G. S. S. Thomson (Aug. 3 issue). It is, I believe, a good brief treatment of the subject from the traditional viewpoint. You are to be commended for your continuing interest in the presentation of theological materials—this is, I note, #40 in the series, many of which I have read.…

The sentence “Christ taught the possibility of the loss of the soul in hell” is not supported by any cited references or evidence. I suppose the passage that would be used [is] … Matthew 10:28. Yet in this passage we do not find “the soul in hell” but rather “both soul and body in hell,” thus maintaining the O.T. and N.T. picture of the nature of man as a psychosomatic unity. It is man who is affected, as body-soul togetherness, for good or ill in the NT portraits of death, judgment, eternal life and resurrection. This is recognized by Dr. Thomson when he writes: “The body is essential to the self.” One could have avoided a watering down of the belief in the resurrection of the body potentially present in his last section. If full bliss is granted the Christian at death, then no resurrection is needed and the doctrine is made an unpleasant hangover of a bygone era and the belief in the immortality of the soul (in some form or other; not necessarily a natural or inherent immortality, but as a gift of God) becomes the proper view. I do not think such is the case nor that it is the intention of Dr. Thomson to indicate such a belief in either his or the teaching of the N.T.

ROBERT E. BAILEY

Prof. of Bible

College of Liberal Arts

University of Dubuque

Dubuque, Iowa

Prayer And The Court

This letter is being written to commend the editorials “Supreme Court Prayer Ban” and “The Church’s True Head” (July 20 issue).… I wish that every professing Christian in the world, and especially in the United States, would read them.…

A. A. PAGE

President

Pikeville College

Pikeville, Ky.

The Bible says, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” It also says, “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.”

What saith the law? Quote: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Even this does not in the least debar individual states from doing it.

So it is clearly shown that this is a matter for the states to decide for themselves. The law does not forbid any from honoring God in prayer, be it official or otherwise.…

In all fairness, is not the action of the Supreme Court … showing favoritism to the non-Christian [by] allowing … lewdness, lasciviousness and p*rnography and … depriving all others from exercising their God-given rights and privileges?…

N. P. GATES

Free Will Baptist Temple

Detroit, Mich.

Let me express my appreciation to you for actually including … the statement of the majority opinion and Justice Stewart’s dissent.… So much of the public discussion has neglected to consider the precise wording of the Supreme Court opinion.…

IRWIN W. JOHNSON

Bettendorf, Iowa

Congratulations on your editorial.… Also for printing texts.…

JAMES A. ADAMS

First Baptist Church

Salisbury, Mo.

In all of the tempest over the Supreme Court’s school prayer decision, one of the chief points has been missed: The whole of the affair would have been non-existent if America had not committed the major error around a century ago of succumbing to the idea of what theretofore had been largely an alien institution on our soil of freedom—a Prussian-style governmentally-operated educational system.…

Inevitably, in any government-run school system the time will come when there will be no recognition that God is supreme in the process. That being so, and with school life being of the vastest importance in the formative years, then most youths will have this belief deeply implanted in their hearts: God does not really matter in life.

ROBERT M. METCALF, JR.

Memphis, Tenn.

It would be presumptuous for a Canadian to criticize the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court on the New York school prayer issue, except to say that it is perplexing to find that a custom practiced for more than a century and a half suddenly becomes illegal. We have no state church in Canada either, but the acknowledgment of God, as he may be understood by the various religions, as the source of man’s blessings, finds expression in devotional exercises in the schools—this is not considered to be in the same category as preferential treatment of one particular religious group.

ROBERT K. EARLS

Cobden, Ont.

Those citizens who have accepted without protest the recent … decision banning prayer from the public schools would do well to take note of the fact that in the case, “The Church of the Holy Trinity vs. the United States,” (143 U.S. 457) this same Supreme Court, of course with different personnel, decreed that “this is a Christian nation.”

VERNE P. KAUB

President

American Council of Christian Laymen

Madison, Wise.

In the mountain fastness of the old Presbyterian and Reformed Review, which was then antecedent of the Princeton Theological Review, and in the issue of July, 1891, I came upon this excerpt from that sage and prophetic figure, Dr. Benjamin B. Warfield of Princeton Seminary. His statement has marked applicability to the current controversy of Bible reading and prayer in the public schools.

In a review of a book, Must the Bible Go? A Review of the Decision of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, in the Edgerton Bible Case by W. A. McAtee of Madison, Wisconsin, Dr. Warfield wrote as follows:

“An admirably clear and satisfactory discussion of the issues raised by the novel and intolerable decision of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, excluding the reading of the Bible from the public schools. There seems to be abroad a very unnecessary confusion of mind on this great subject, even among Christian men. It would not be Christian to compel others to violate their consciences; but it certainly is not Christian to permit others to forbid our recognition of God in all our functions. As Christian men, acting in our organized relation as a Christian state, we must retain the Bible and Christian worship in our public schools, lest we should sin against our children and the nation’s welfare” (Vol. II, p. 534).

Characteristically, Dr. Warfield speaks with as much significance to our generation as to his readers of seventy years ago.

G. HALL TODD

Arch Street Presbyterian Church

Philadelphia, Pa.

Doctrine Of The Trinity

Re the letter from Mr. Flanigen of Pinopolis, S. C. (July 20 issue) in which he questions your statement that the doctrine of the Trinity is a New Testament doctrine (Editorials, May 25 issue).

To my mind this raises the question of what is meant by “New Testament doctrine” or “biblical doctrine.” As I see it, God’s revelation was given in divine acts to which the biblical writers bore witness. Whether or not a doctrine is a biblical doctrine depends on whether it is a true understanding of that to which they gave their witness. Whether or not they themselves grasped the significance of the evidence they provide is comparatively unimportant.

I myself maintain that the doctrine of the Trinity is definitely a New Testament doctrine, meaning by that that it expresses what God has revealed himself to be in the activity to which the New Testament bears witness. I think it was and is a doctrine implied by the passages to which you refer (Matt. 16:16; 28:9; 2 Cor. 13:14; Rom. 1:4), but I do not think it was consciously held as a theological doctrine by St. Paul, by whoever wrote the first gospel, or by any of their contemporaries. We have to distinguish between the immediacy of the revelation of the doctrine in the activity of which from the first the New Testament has been the enduring record, and the successiveness in the process of its realization by the Church. LEONARD HODGSON Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England

Church Property Grab

CHRISTIANITY TODAY (News, July 20 issue) reports that Dr. Glen W. Harris, fraternal delegate from the UPUSA to the Cumberland Presbyterian Assembly, apologized for his denomination’s suing and closing Cumberland churches 55 years ago. “We are conscious that 55 years ago and in the years immediately following, our church appeared to be more interested in church property and legal rights than in Christian love and witness. For this too we ask your forgiveness.”

Fine words these! Maybe 55 years from now the UPUSA will ask our forgiveness for its continued interest in church property and its lack of Christian love.

Before the merger of the UP and USA churches in 1958 our congregation asked for and received a quit claim deed to our property from the old UP church. The congregation voted unanimously not to enter the merger, and then requested admission to the Reformed Presbyterian Church. But after the merger, the big church instituted suit against us. The matter is still in court. Maybe they are waiting to win the suit before apologizing.

GORDON H. CLARK

Indianapolis, Ind.

Chicago Crusade

I have read with interest … “Like a Mighty Army” (News, July 6 issue). [Re] your statement: “Ministers of the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches were the most aggressive in their opposition, sowing virulent attacks against the evangelist”: … do you have any documentation for this?… I live in Chicago, and I have not heard of any such incidents.

We are not against Mr. Graham, and it is our definite policy not to attack him. I am sure that he is frequently the object of the prayers of our brethren.… I have been in contact with Dr. Graham in an effort to arrange a conference with him, whereby we could sit down face to face and discuss the differences of methods that divide us.…

We are strongly opposed to the inclusivist policies which Dr. Graham follows as they relate to his sponsoring committees and the assignment of decision cards.…

PAUL R. JACKSON

National Representative

General Association of Regular Baptist Churches

Chicago, Illinois

• Our news source has been unable to put into our hands the material on which he based his verdict. If he misread the material, then an apology is certainly in order. Since we have been unable to confirm the facts, we hereby gladly make it.—ED.

A Pentecostal’S Reaction

Being a minister of the Pentecostal faith, I am deeply thrilled over the article by Philip Hughes in Current Religious Thought (May 11 issue).…

W. R. COLE

St. Petersburg, Fla.

Each spring and fall CHRISTIANITY TODAY presents a forecast of religious books. These forecasts are not made to sell books—we leave the commercials to the publishers. They are presented for the convenience of those who want to know what is coming in their particular fields of interest, and to alert the lovers of religious books. Many ministers, students, and professors of religion have found it helpful to post these forecasts in their studies to avoid missing significant books as they come from the press.

Anyone who looks to the hand of the future will sometimes see things that are not there, and some things out of proportion. Some of the books here listed as significant on the basis of advertising claims and promises may not be such at all. On the other hand, some omitted may be significant—but then some of the future always slips through the fingers of those who try to judge her hand.

In the category of THEOLOGY there appears to be a full hand. Holt, Rinehart and Winston promises Evangelical Theology: An Introduction by Karl Barth (the lectures Barth delivered in America) and Basic Christian Doctrines, edited by Carl F. H. Henry. Inter-Varsity Press promises K. S. Kantzer’s An Interpretation of Karl Barth (apparently for college students), and Macmillan, C. W. Kegley’s The Theology of Emil Brunner. From the presses of Concordia will come The Structure of Lutheranism by W. Elert, and from Westminster: the third volume of E. Brunner’s dogmatics, The Christian Doctrine of the Church, Faith, and the Consummation; J. B. Cobb Jr.’s Living Options in Protestant Theology: A Survey of Methods; and—this must be far out for I see dimly now—D. Jenkins’ Beyond Religion. Zondervan predicts the appearance of the first volume of J. O. Buswell Jr.’s Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion and W. R. Martin’s handbook Essential Christianity; and Eerdmans will publish The Elope of Glory by Dale Moody and The Last Judgment by J. P. Martin.

The hand of the future is also full of promise for CHURCH HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Association Press is ready with The Place of Bonhoeffer edited by Martin E. Marty, and Holt, Rinehart and Winston with a novel on the life of Calvin, The Master of Geneva by Gladys H. Barr. Harper & Row will publish The Twentieth Century Outside Europe, by that dean of American church historians, K. S. Latourette; E. P. Dutton, The Catholic Reformation by H. Daniel-Rops; and Eerdmans, The Reformation by W. C. Robinson. Looking back, David McKay will publish K. Burton’s Leo XIII: The First Modern Pope; Harvard University Press, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists by L. W. Spitz; Baker, Paul the Missionary by W. M. Taylor; and Hawthorn, The Church in the Eighteenth Century by M. Braure. Westminster promises what should be an interesting book, The Presbyterian Ministry in American Culture by E. A. Smith.

In the category of ECUMENICS Association Press promises to publish two books, The New Delhi Report edited by W. A. Visser ‘T Hooft and The Vatican Council and All Christians by C. D. Nelson. Morehouse-Barlow will publish An Anglican View of the Vatican Council authored by B. Pawley, and Westminster, a historical study by A. J. Lewis, Zinzendorf, the Ecumenical Pioneer. Also scheduled is Ecumenical Beginnings in Protestant World Mission by R. P. Beaver (Thomas Nelson).

In OLD TESTAMENT AND ARCHAEOLOGY Harper & Row promises The Prophets of Israel by Abraham Heschel, and again promises (cf. Spring Forecast) Old Testament Theology by G. von Rad, who does to the Old what Bultmann does to the New Testament. Abingdon is on promise to publish The People of the Covenant by M. Newman, and McGraw-Hill, Our Living Bible by M. Avi-Yonah and E. Kraeling. There will be at least two books of archaeological interest, Eerdmans’ The Bible and Archaeology by J. A. Thompson and Thomas Nelson’s Archaeology and the Old Testament World by J. Gray.

Of special interest in NEW TESTAMENT: D. Guthrie’s General Epistles and Revelation (Volume II in his New Testament Introduction) will be published by Inter-Varsity Press. Scribner’s will present F. C. Grant’s Roman Hellenism and the New Testament and C. K. Barrett’s intriguing title, From First Adam to Last. Hawthorn promises to publish H. Daniel-Rops’ Daily Life in the Time of Jesus; Westminster, T. W. Manson’s Studies in the Gospels and Epistles; Revell, S. E. Wirt’s Open Your Bible to the New Testament Letters; and Harper & Row, John Knox’s The Church and the Reality of Christ, which, according to advance promises, reconciles the Christ of faith with the Jesus of history.

The promises of the future for PASTORAL THEOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY are few: Abingdon will give us J. H. Ziegler’s Psychology and the Teaching Church; Zondervan, J. B. Wilder’s The Young Minister; and Seabury, R. N. Rodenmayer’s I John Take Thee Mary.

The future promises to be nigg*rdly also in the area of APOLOGETICS, PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE. A. N. Well’s The Christian Message in a Scientific Age will be published by John Knox, W. E. Stuermann’s Logic and Faith: A Study of the Relations Between Science and Religion by Westminster, and C. Tresmontant’s The Origin of Christian Philosophy by Hawthorn.

Reflecting the problems and agonies of our time, the following will appear in the area of ETHICS AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS: The South and Christian Ethics (Association) by J. E. Sellers; Albert Schweitzer’s Peace or Atomic-War? (Holt, Rinehart and Winston); The Christian in Politics (Oxford Press) by W. James; The Christian in Business (Revell) by J. E. Mitchell, Jr.; Ethics and Business (Scribner’s) by W. A. Spurrier; and Christianity and Sex (Inter-Varsity) by S. B. Babbage.

A clutch of books are promised in LITURGY AND WORSHIP, reflecting the continued growing interest in this area. Bethany Press will print L. R. Smith’s Four Keys to Prayer; Revell, Michael Daves’s Famous Hymns and Their Writers; John Knox, The English Hymn by L. F. Benson; Augsburg, Altar Prayers for the Church Year by C. H. Zeidler; World, Christian Hymns edited by L. Noss; and, finally, Hawthorn promises These Are the Sacraments by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.

The wide interest in missions and in the crucial problems which arise as Christianity encounters non-Christian religions is pointed up by the forthcoming books in MISSIONS AND EVANGELISM: Why Christianity of All Religions (Westminster) by H. Kraemer; Upon the Earth (McGraw-Hill) by D. T. Niles; To the Whole Creation: The Church Is Mission (Judson) by J. P. Skoglund; The Ministry of the Spirit (Eerdmans) by Roland Allen; The People of God (Seabury) by A. D. Kelley; Apologetics and Evangelism (Westminster) by J. V. Langmead; and, of a different type, The Home Front of Jewish Missions (Baker) by A. Huisjen, These Too Were Unshackled by F. C. Bailey, and Spurgeon on Revival by E. Hayden (the latter two by Zondervan).

SERMONS—few are offered. Baker will present Expository Preaching Without Notes by C. W. Koller. As the late Clarence Macartney so eloquently insisted, preaching without notes is great. But what about the man who needs not only notes but also sermons? Eerdmans will take care of that by offering these three books: In the Midst by G. D. Gilmore, The Forty Days by G. R. King, and The Inevitable Encounter by Edward L. R. Elson.

In the needy field of RELIGIOUS EDUCATION the offerings are again few. Eerdmans will publish Bernard Ramin’s The Christian College in the Twentieth Century, and Westminster, The Teaching Office in The Reformed Tradition by R. W. Henderson. The University of Pittsburgh Press will issue Wider Horizons in Christian Adult Education edited by L. C. Little, and Abingdon, Religious Drama: Ends and Means by H. Ehrensperger.

RELIGIOUS LITERATURE AND DEVOTIONAL: Harper & Row will present Chad Walsh’s From Utopia into Nightmare; Columbia University Press, H. N. Fairchild’s Volume V of Religious Trends in English Poetry, which covers the period 1880–1920; and Augsburg, three books in this field: Printer’s Devil from Wittenberg by T. J. Kleinhans, A Practical Guide for Altar Guilds by E. Bockelman, and Thy Word in My Heart by F. P. Reid.

The continuing large interest in the study of the Bible is again indicated by the full hand the future holds in the area of BIBLE STUDY, COMMENTARIES, AND DICTIONARIES. With Thomas Nelson’s exclusive publishing rights to the Revised Standard Version of the Bible running out at month’s end, other publishers are quickly moving in. A. J. Holman will issue the Holman Study Bible, and Oxford Press, The Oxford Annotated Bible; both are based on the RSV. Holt, Rinehart and Winston will reissue Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible. John Knox will publish Volumes VIII, XV, XVII, and XXIV of the Southern Presbyterian Church’s The Layman’s Bible Commentary. Baker will issue Thessalonians by H. J. Ockenga and Hebrews by C. S. Roddy, both volumes in the series Proclaiming the New Testament, and The Epistle to the Philippians by W. Hendriksen, a volume in Baker’s New Testament Commentary series. From Thomas Nelson will come The Gospels and the Book of Acts and The New Testament Epistles (Volumes VI and VII of Nelson’s Bible Commentary), both by F. C. Grant; and from Westminster, The Psalms, A Commentary (The Old Testament Library series) by A. Weiser. Moody Press will publish The Wycliffe Bible Commentary co-edited by C. F. Pfeiffer and E. F. Harrison, and Harcourt, Brace and World, The Revelation of John—a translation by R. Lattimore. McGraw-Hill will print The Clarified New Testament: The Four Gospels by E. G. Kraeling. Zondervan will publish Pictorial Bible Dictionary edited by M. C. Tenney; W. A. Wilde, a revision of W. M. Smith’s Profitable Bible Study; Eerdmans, The Spirit of Holiness by Everett Lewis Cattell.

Things have come a long way since Bibles were handwritten and chained to the medieval pulpit lest something so valuable be stolen. Today the printing press produces the riches of scholarship in innumerable inexpensive paperbound editions.

In the field of PAPERBACKS publishers in the next six months will give us Sören Kierkegaard’s Edifying Discourses (2 volumes), Karl T. Schmidt’s Rediscovering the Natural in Protestant Theology, Harupa and Nold’s Advent Day by Day, L. Mero’s My Christmas Book (all from Augsburg); H. Thielicke’s Advice for Young Theologians and G. Stob’s Handbook of Bible History (both from Eerdmans); A. L. Creager’s Old Testament Heritage, R. Hazelton’s New Testament Heritage, R. L. Shinn’s The Sermon on the Mount (all from United Church Press); W. E. Waldrop’s How to Combat Communism, J. Bloch’s Armour of Light, How to Make Pastoral Calls by R. L. Dicks, The Living Christ in Our Changing World by J. Daniel Joyce, and The Delinquent, The Hipster, and The Square edited by A. I. Cox (all from Bethany Press); E. F. Harrison’s John, A Brief Commentary and C. F. Pfeiffer’s The Epistle to the Hebrews (both from Moody). Other paperbacks to appear are Jean-Jacques Von Allmen’s Preaching and Congregation (John Knox), Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison (Macmillan), W. E. Post’s Saints, Signs, and Symbols (Morehouse-Barlow), and H. R. Landon’s Reinhold Niebuhr: A Prophetic Voice in Our Time (Seabury). Oxford is bringing out Volumes IV, V, and VI of Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History, Volume IV bearing the title The Breakdown of Civilizations, V (Part 1) and VI (Part 2) the title The Disintegrations of Civilizations.

If interpreting the past is difficult, interpreting the future is precarious. Yet looking back on these scannings of the future it seems safe to say that the schedule of coming productions of religious books seems to indicate no new significant patterns of change in the religious situation. Areas of busy religious and theological activity in the past will continue to be busy; those that were weak will continue weak. It appears that the Church still has a healthy appetite for biblical studies, commentaries, historical and theological studies, and for missions, and a continuing smaller appetite for the important areas of liturgy, religious education, and ethics. Also lacking is a deep and sustained concern by conservative evangelical scholarship for that central theological-philosophical issue of our time: the question of revelation and history. Matters could, however, soon change for the better, for I have looked at only six months’ worth of the future,

J. D.

2 Peter 3:11–14

The Preacher:

A. Skevington Wood has just been released as minister of Southlands Methodist Church, York, England, to the Movement for World Evangelization. B.A. of University of Leeds, he studied further at Wesley College, Leeds, and was ordained in 1943, thereafter ministering in several English and Scottish towns. Later he earned the Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. A former President of the British Christian Endeavour Union, and a leading supporter of the 1955 Graham Crusade in Glasgow, Dr. Wood is author of several works on church history and evangelism; his latest book: The Inextinguishable Blaze: Spiritual Renewal and Advance in the Eighteenth Century.

The Text:

Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat? Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, without spot, and blameless.

The Series:

This is the ninth in a series by British and European preachers. Future issues will include sermons by Chaplain William R. Mackay of Northern Scotland, the Rev. J. A. Motyer of Bristol, and the Rev. James Philip of Edinburgh,

There is a common question which falls from our lips in one circ*mstance or another most weeks of the year. Each of us uses it often. It is this: “What are you looking for?” Usually it is addressed to someone who has lost something and has instituted a search for it. They are rummaging here, there, and everywhere, and if we break in upon the scene and want to help them or are just plain curious, we enquire: “What are you looking for?”

That is a question the Bible asks too. It challenges every man with regard to the objective of his life. The query relates not so much to something we once had and have unfortunately lost as to something we may enjoy in the future if our heart is truly set upon it. This passage from Second Peter leads up to three verses which all refer to what the Christian is looking for. The verb employed in each instance means to look out for, to await, to expect. It is used by our Lord in the parable of the wise and evil servants to indicate that the master of the latter will come in a day when he is not looking for him and in an hour of which he is not aware. It is used to describe the expectation of the people concerning John the Baptist as they mused in their hearts as to whether he was the Messiah: the Authorized Version margin has “in suspense.” It is used when John sent two of his disciples to enquire of the Lord, “Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?” It is used to denote how the people waited for Zacharias as he tarried in the temple and for Jesus after the miracle at Gadara.

It is used several times in the Book of Acts: of the beggar at the Beautiful Gate who gave heed to Peter and John because he expected to receive something from them, of Cornelius who waited for Peter and the brethren from Joppa, of the passengers and crew in the storm-tossed boat that bore Paul on his Rome-ward way who had tarried and continued fasting for fourteen days, and of the barbarians on Malta who, when Paul was attacked by a viper, looked when he should have swollen up or dropped down dead suddenly, but after they had looked a great while and saw no harm had come to him, they changed their minds and said that he was a god. This verb to look for, then, is an important one in the vocabulary of the Advent hope. We shall do well to ponder it in all its occurrences and allow its significance elsewhere in Scripture to shed light upon the verses now before us.

We live in a generation that sets little store by the expectation of the Lord’s return. Indeed the Bishop of Woolwich, Dr. J. A. T. Robinson, has observed that “the Second Advent and its accompaniments appear to the modern as a simple contradiction of all his presumptions about the future of the world, immediate or remote.” The consequence is that he could hardly care less about the things which mean so much to Christians who live in the daily anticipation of Christ’s coming again. Sadly enough, even the Church itself, which ought to be the guardian of these precious truths, has sometimes allowed them to slip through its fingers in a false and foolish attempt to match the spirit of the age.

The Occasion

Let us then examine the three “look fors” in these verses. First we have the occasion of the Christian’s expectation (v. 12): “Looking for and hasting unto the day of God.” This is the occasion in a double sense. It is at once the event which draws the believer’s gaze and the ground of his hope. It is the occasion which occasions his expectation.

Added intensity is afforded by the verb that follows. Christians are not only looking for but hasting unto the coming of God’s great day. That does not mean, as the Revised Version margin suggests, that they are hastening the arrival of the end, for no man can do that. The times and the seasons are altogether in the hand of God, and nothing we do can either advance or retard them. What the apostle tells us here is that believers are hastening towards that day with eager desire and fervent longing. They are running a race, and this is the goal always in view.

The coming or Parousia of Christ has already been alluded to in verse 4 of this chapter, and the word has occurred earlier in 1:16 with reference to “the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” which was proclaimed by Peter and his colleagues in the Gospel, as over against the cleverly devised myths fabricated by the false prophets and teachers through whom the truth was brought into disrepute. In classical Greek the term “parousia” means basically the presence or arrival of persons or things. But it also had a special connotation, and it is here that we learn what it signifies for Christians with reference to the Lord’s return. It was a technical expression to denote the arrival of an emperor, a king, a governor, or any other Very Important Person into a town or province. Exceptional preparations would be made. Taxes would be imposed to provide him with a suitable gift: in the case of a king it would be a golden diadem. It was quite common for the provinces to date a new era from the parousia of the emperor. That happened when Gauis Caesar visited Cos in A.D. 4 and when Hadrian went to Greece in A.D. 124. A new period of time emerged when the king came. It was also an occasion when petitions were presented and injustices rectified. Often an amnesty was declared and prisoners were released. We can readily realize that in the numerous passages of the New Testament where this word refers to the Second Advent, the secular usage would point up its application to Christ the coming King.

However, here in verse 12 it is the coming not of the deliverer but of the deliverance that is spoken of as the occasion of the Christian’s expectation. What believers are looking for is the day of God. It is mentioned in verse 10 as breaking in as unexpectedly as a thief in the night. This is the day towards which all things move. It is also the day wherein, or by reason of which, the heavens will dissolve in fire and the elements of earth melt with fervent heat. Peter supplies a vivid description of this dissolution. The heavens will pass away with a cracking crash, a sudden, sizzling, spluttering roar. The earth will disintegrate to flames. The advance of scientific knowledge, so far from casting doubt upon the possibility of such a catastrophe, merely serves to underline its literal likelihood. Was not this what our Lord himself declared: “Heaven and earth shall pass away”? This, then, is the occasion of the Christian’s expectation. He looks for the coming day of God, with all its attendant terrors for the wicked.

The Substance

But for the righteous there is something beyond the scene of destruction. They look for a new future. In verse 13 we find the second indication of what believers look for. Here is the substance of the Christian’s expectation. “Nevertheless we—in contrast to the unbelievers—look for new heavens and a new earth.” There are two words in the Bible for new. One means that which has just been called into being, as we speak of a newborn baby. But if we are thinking of what is new not under the aspect of time but of quality, another adjective must be commandeered, and it this that occurs here. It means that which is new contrasted with that which is worn out. Our Lord employs it to speak of a new garment and new bottles. Archbishop Trench said that it carries with it a sense of the unwonted. It speaks of that which is utterly different from anything that has been known before. The tomb in which our Lord lay was new in this aspect. It was not necessarily recently hewn, but it had never been used until that day.

We learn from Hebrews that the present heavens and earth will perish and wax old like a garment. God will eventually fold them up like a vesture, and they will be exchanged for that which is brand-new and unique. The substance of the Christian’s expectation is not renewed heavens and earth, but new heavens and earth. It is not the old article renovated; it is a totally new creation. “For, behold, I create new heavens, and a new earth,” says the Lord in Isaiah 65:17, “and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.”

This is the promise which forms the ground of our hope. “To look for anything which God has not promised,” declared Matthew Henry, “is presumption.” But when we have the assurance of his Word, we can be confident that it will come to pass. The scoffers may ridicule and ask, “Where is the promise of his coming?” but God will vindicate himself and his people. It is in mercy that God prolongs the age of grace. He is not slack concerning his promise, as some make out. He is long-suffering towards all mankind and unwilling that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

How we need to cling to this blessed disclosure of his will and purpose in these testing days! Never was there a time when more scorn was poured upon the evangelical doctrines of our Lord’s return. Never was it more unfashionable, even in ecclesiastical circles, to profess attachment to this testimony. Never was it easier for men to buttress their rejection of God’s revelation with ill-digested arguments from prevalent science. Never did it seem more cultured and clever and up-to-date to decry the Scripture message concerning the end. Never was it harder for true believers to hold on in faith and hope and love. “Nevertheless, we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.” Sin banished, Satan bound, and Christ the righteous King in recognized command—this is the vision that spurs us on.

The Incentive

It leads the apostle to his next consideration. Those who now abide in Christ anticipate that righteousness which is the hallmark of the new heavens and earth. It is not a righteousness of their own, for all our righteousness is as filthy rags. It is the righteousness of Christ himself, imputed to us at the Cross when we were justified by faith alone, but also imparted to us through the Holy Spirit as we grow in grace. So the third “look for” has to do with the incentive of the Christian’s expectation (v. 14). This takes up the theme of verse 11. It would appear that the false teachers had divorced the Christian hope from the Christian life. As Dr. Paul S. Minear effectively puts it: “The victorious Christ had become the object of hope: the crucified Lord was no longer its source and ground and motive power. The hope of glory was therefore separated from the transfiguration wrought by Christ in the Christian.” Now that is a constant peril to those who hold the Advent truth. We must see to it that all who claim allegiance to the blessed hope are endeavoring after the blessed life. Peter says that we must be diligent to this end.

Something that C. S. Lewis wrote in his book on Christian Behaviour is relevant to the issue involved here. “Hope is one of the theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.… It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in: aim at earth and you will get neither.”

This diligence, according to the apostle, is to be exercised in order that we may be found of (or by) Christ at his return living in peace, without spot or blemish. In 2:13 the libertine mockers of the faith are called spots and blemishes. Christians are to be just the opposite, so Peter puts a negative in front of each of those repulsive terms and urges his readers to make it their eager aim to be discovered by Christ when he comes as unspotted and unblemished. Those same words are used of the Lord Jesus himself in 1 Peter 1:19 where he reminds us that we were redeemed “with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.” We are to be as he is in the world. We can be found in him at the end only as we live in him now. “In Christ” should be the Christian’s permanent address. This alone will enable us to weather the mortal storm in these atomic times.

That stalwart evangelical scholar, Principal James Denney of Glasgow, had little patience with any sort of woolly mysticism. He suspected those who talked about being lost in God without reference to the essential mediacy of His Son. He used to affirm trenchantly: “I would rather be found in Christ than lost in God.” We have found Christ because he first found us. May we also be found in him, so that when he comes in power and great glory we shall be found of him without blame.

Awards For Best Sermons On Human Destiny

Universalism with its profoundly unbiblical thesis that all men are already saved is sweeping Protestantism. To arouse active concern over this distorted “gospel” which cuts the nerve of both evangelism and missions, CHRISTIANITY TODAY announces a stimulating venture. More than $1,000 will be awarded for relevant sermons (abridged to 2,500 words in written form) that (1) expose the fallacies of this contemporary movement and (2) faithfully expound the biblical revelation of man’s final destiny and the ground and conditions of his redemption. Selection of winners will be by CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S editorial readers, whose decisions will be final. First, second, and third place awards of $500, $250, and $125, respectively, will he paid upon publication of the sermons. The editors reserve the right to publish two additional manuscripts selected for fourth and fifth place awards of $75 each. All rights to winning manuscripts become magazine property.

All entries must be original sermons actually preached to a congregation sometime during 1962. Two typewritten, doubles-paced copies of each submitted sermon should be postmarked to the Washington office of CHRISTIANITY TODAY no later than December 31, 1962. No manuscript will be returned unless a self-addressed, stamped envelope accompanies the entry. Attached to each sermon (both copies) should be a cover page giving the contributor’s name, address, and present station of service.