Page 6058 – Christianity Today (2024)

Fourth in a Series on the Church in Politics

Social revolt and the revival of the Church often seem to go together. Although a social upheaval does not necessarily cause revival, history shows that a great spiritual renewal usually comes in a time of social and political unrest. Society periodically comes to a point of disintegration: morally, economically, and politically. The result may be simply chaos. But in such an extremity may lie God’s opportunity to revive and reform his Church so that it may be renewed as “the salt of the earth,” or as balm for the healing of the nations. It may well then arrest the tendency towards chaos and bring about a renewal of civilization and culture.

This appears to be true of certain periods of revival in the Old Testament and seems certainly to apply to the New Testament and the early Church. The Apostle Paul does not explain exactly what he means when he refers to Christ’s coming in “the fullness of time,” but there is little doubt that the phrase would apply to the early Roman Empire. A new era had dawned, and many serious problems had arisen in all spheres of the ancient civilization. The old “republican virtues” had largely disappeared. Emperors with their expensive and luxurious courts had become the focus of attention. At the same time, the whole economy of Rome was changing in character. The imperial city was becoming increasingly parasitical, living off the rest of the empire. In religion all kinds of strange doctrines were being accepted. Morals had fallen to a new low, and promiscuity, hom*osexuality, and other forms of debauchery were common. Although for a while it had seemed that the emperors would bring peace and political stability where the republic had failed, within a short time this hope faded.

In this situation Christianity took advantage of the opportunity to evangelize so that by 325, despite frequent persecutions, it largely dominated the scene. And because it gained the victory then, it was the one social entity able to survive the barbarian invasions during the three succeeding centuries. Thus it became the cornerstone of a new culture and civilization.

Much the same may be said about the revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the rise of deism, the concomitant decline of morals, the industrial revolution, the French Revolution, and the imperialist expansion came radical and often violent change. Yet with it frequently went a renewal of the Church. The rise of the Methodist movement, the Swiss revival under Malan and Merle d’Aubigné, the religious awakening in Holland under Van Prinsteren, DeCoq, and Kuyper, and the numerous revivals and renewals in America all indicate that even in modern times a relation has existed between radical social change and revival of the Church. Furthermore, in the countries where renewals took place, society was stabilized and went forward to greater cultural achievements.

The best example of this connection between social upheaval and religious revival, however, comes from the sixteenth century. As the result of the work of many historians over the past century we can see today, probably more clearly than ever before, how the two fit together. Those who interest themselves in the history of the Protestant Reformation should constantly recall that it was a period of most intense social conflict and change. Out of this stirring and boiling came the Reformation, a movement one can really understand only if he takes into full account the social background.

Many recent works on the economic history of the period 1450–1600 point out that it was a time of industrial and commercial expansion unknown for at least fifteen hundred years, if not for the whole earlier history of man. The geographic discoveries in the New and the Old World played a considerable part, while the development of new techniques of production and commerce in Europe itself also stimulated radical economic change. One of the important effects of this “revolution” was a drastic rise in prices; the Reformation era experienced a spiraling inflation so violent that one economic historian has attributed the whole religious revolt to the “Price Revolution.” Partially as a result of this development, the old economic order with its individual merchants who carried their wares from one market to another was giving place to a new type of economic organization: the big company with its permanent representatives in every important city at home and abroad. At the same time governments were intervening increasingly in economic affairs for their own benefit. Economic change appeared everywhere.

With economic revolution went radical social change. The nobility, who often included the upper echelons of the church, faced serious difficulties. Although they were usually well supplied with land, they lacked the liquid wealth necessary for the new day. They could, of course, improve the use of their lands, but this they often found difficult because long-established custom prevented them from making changes, or because they simply did not have the ability or money to take the necessary steps. Some succeeded in obtaining positions at court or in the church that brought them increased revenues. But many who could not do so sought to recoup their fortunes by demanding more work or higher rents from their tenants and serfs. The response of these groups was anything but enthusiastic and was often expressed in riots and attempted revolutions.

The one group that found its lot improving throughout the period was the merchants and industrial entrepreneurs, who profited from the rise in prices and were rapidly increasing in wealth. Marrying into noble families that accepted them because of their money, setting themselves up as gentlemen by buying landed estates, acting as bankers for nobles, ecclesiastics, and kings, they increasingly gained power but always sought for more. In these ways, then, sixteenth-century society experienced a continual economic and social upheaval.

Quite naturally these changes had a profound effect on political organization and stability. No longer was the noble with his retinue of armed servants and vassals of such great importance. More efficient collection of taxes and the use of gunpowder had made the medieval noble as anachronistic as Don Quixote. The rising middle class with its relatively large supply of liquid wealth was quite prepared to support the monarch who would guarantee them protection and peace at home and abroad, who would pay them substantial carrying charges for loans, and who would, on occasion, open the ranks of the nobility to their sons and daughters by conferring titles. As a result, many of the national monarchies experienced a rapid growth of royal power or, in a country like England, of parliamentary authority under the aegis of the monarchy.

At the same time, every European monarch also saw on the eastern horizon the forces of Islam which threatened to destroy Europe, and with it Christendom. Yet this did not deter the Spaniards and the French from making alliances and waging wars to restrict each other’s power and prestige. Thus Europe lay constantly under the threat of both internal wars and foreign invasions now made completely inhuman by the unconscionable introduction of firearms. Politically, Europe seemed to stand on the brink of destruction.

Accompanying, and perhaps basic to, these various changing aspects of European life, was an intellectual and moral revolution every bit as radical. Partially causing and partially caused by other forces operating within European society, it formalized many of the changes taking place in the economic, social, and political spheres. A new attitude toward life, toward one’s neighbor, toward oneself, and toward God had become common.

The new affluent society and changes in philosophical thinking led men to begin to concentrate their interest upon this life rather than the one to come. Taught by the ancient classics now becoming well known through the labors of scholars and publishers, men came to believe they could become almost divine by using their reason. Through discipline and culture they could gain the greatest felicity upon earth; they did not need to dream of a future life. In fact, some, such as Pomponazzi, believed that faith in an afterlife was really immoral. Self-exaltation here was considered to be enough.

Naturally this presupposition brought a change in moral standards. Men began to believe that they should deal with each situation as it arose and formulate a decision on the basis of what reason taught in those circ*mstances. The belief that a divine law existed for the guidance of men, a law to which they had to adhere or take the consequences, disappeared in many circles of intellectual and social leaders. The outcome was that even in the Church standards of right and wrong became very vague and uncertain, while in political, economic, and personal life moral principles seemed largely to disappear, not only for the upper levels of society but even for the common man. Men boasted of their freedom and their liberty to act solely according to their reason or their passions. Rabelais with his ribaldry brings this whole picture into focus.

Yet, while many boasted of the changes taking place on the ground that man was coming of age and entering a new era, many also had grave doubts. If things continued as they were, civilization might well fall apart. Furthermore, many also had gnawing fears that there might be a Day of Judgment, there might be a God of righteousness who would demand that man give an account of himself. To solve the problem some turned back to the Middle Ages, hoping to revive the medieval church with its doctrines and its commands. Others, usually under the influence of Augustine, the fifth-century Bishop of Hippo, turned to the Bible. There they found answers that medieval man had forgotten long ago: justification by faith, salvation by grace, rebirth by the Spirit of God. The result was the Reformation of the sixteenth century.

As one compares the sixteenth century with today, he cannot but feel that contemporary man stands in a situation very similar to that of his brethren of the days of Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer. It looks as though Western culture and civilization is heading directly for collapse. Yet 450 years ago God by his Spirit used a chaotic situation to bring men back to himself. May it not be that he will do the same in our own day and age? Our responsibility is to take our stand as did Luther and leave the rest in His hands.

Will A Believer Steal?

In John Aiken’s Alexander the Great and a Thracian Robber we come on these impressive words: “What is a conqueror?… All that I have done to a single district with a hundred followers, you have done to whole nations with a hundred thousand. If I have stripped individuals, you have ruined kings and princes. If I have burned a few hamlets, you have desolated the most flourishing kingdoms and cities of the earth. What is, then, the difference, but that as you were born a king and I a private man, you have been able to become a greater robber than I?”

Theft wears many faces; it operates in many fields. Were human history given as a drama, perhaps the largest cast of characters would be associated with some sort of thievery. Observing the pirating and plundering that goes on in places high and low, one might suppose that the Apostle Paul had written to the Ephesians, “Let him that stole, steal”!

Almost any kind of wrong involves stealing. The order “Thou shalt not steal” is inherent in any one of the Ten Commandments. By having other gods we rob God of his supreme right to be worshiped alone. Taking God’s name in vain, we rob him of reverence due him. Dishonoring our parents, we cheat them of their rightful respect. Profaning the Lord’s Day, we rob it of its sacredness. Murder is the worst kind of robbery. Adultery is stealing of affection that belongs to another. By bearing false witness we may steal a man’s reputation, his liberty, or his life.

Theft is action emanating from the condition of the human heart. George Herbert said, “He that steals an egg would steal an ox.” Thievery takes innumerable forms. Chicanery, cheating, misrepresentation of commodities, disguising of products—all these are theft. “These traitorous thieves, accursed and unfair,” roared François Villon, “the vinters that put water in our wine!”

In a scriptural sense we are all God’s guests: to presume on his hospitality by regarding his creation as ours unconditionally is a form of theft. Paul not only orders the thief to quit stealing but commands him to go to work that he may start giving (Eph. 4:28). Every non-giver robs somebody. Malachi pictures people who probably wouldn’t have pilfered a piggy bank as cosmic bandits pillaging the bank of heaven! “… Ye have robbed me … in tithes and offerings.… Ye have robbed me, even this whole nation” (Mal. 3:8, 9).

Thievery assumes many forms and operates in many places. But surely it must appear the most dishonorable when it operates in God’s house. One could scarcely play a more ignominious role than that of the thieving believer! How shall we sing psalms in the congregation of the Lord if we have robbed men of eternal hope? If stealing bread from a man is wrong, what if we steal from him the Bread of life? If failure to share our goods with the needy is theft, what is our failure to share with him the Gospel of grace?

Not all believers are thieves. Many have taken up the cross and committed themselves with abandonment to God’s kingdom. With the Apostle Paul they know that God’s love and Christ’s death have made them debtors to “both the wise and the unwise,” and they are bent on paying that debt.

They not only believe that Christ is the Redeemer; they also believe that he speaks the truth when he says, “… unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more” (Luke 12:48). They will not steal from men the most valuable thing of all: the Word of life everlasting.—LON WOODRUM, Hastings, Michigan.

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

Second in a Series

The relation between Scripture and tradition is still the crucial issue in the continuing controversy with Rome. It is the subject of one of the most important documents to emanate from the Second Vatican Council, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. (An English translation of this and the other statements issued by the council has been published under the title The Documents of Vatican II [New York, 1966]. References to this volume will use the abbreviation DV II followed by the page number.) Although the preface to this document declares that the council is “following in the footsteps of the Councils of Trent and of First Vatican” in desiring to set forth “authentic teaching about divine revelation and about how it is handed on” (DV II, 111), yet this document is very far from being a mere reaffirmation of the status quo so far as the Bible is concerned. After many centuries, the Bible has been set free. No development could be more significant and more potentially dynamic than this. Even though, as we shall see, the situation remains officially unaltered so far as tradition is concerned, and the conflict of authority between Scripture and tradition continues as intense as before, yet the setting free of the Word of God in its written form as apostolic witness to Christ and the Gospel, which is the touchstone of genuine renewal in the Church, cannot fail to have a tremendous effect within the ranks of Roman Catholicism. As the light of Scripture shines into minds and hearts prepared by the Holy Spirit, it cannot fail to shine critically on the traditions and structures of the Church itself.

Technically speaking, there is no change in the doctrine of Scripture. Not only is the equality of Scripture and tradition reaffirmed in words practically identical with those used by the Council of Trent—“both sacred tradition and sacred scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of devotion and reverence” (DV II, 117)—but the inerrancy of Scripture, which Rome has ever maintained in its formularies, also receives fresh statement:

Since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching firmly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation [DV II, 119].

Evangelical Christians who hold a high doctrine of Scripture will find in this precise declaration an excellent point of contact, and indeed point of departure, as they engage in discussion with Roman Catholic friends.

It is well to recognize, however, that the situation is complex. Ultimately, the question is one of authority. The simplicity of the sole and supreme authority of Holy Scripture in all matters of faith and conduct (sola scriptura) on which the evangelical Christian insists is foreign to the Roman Catholic temper. The situation in the papal church is complicated by the multiplication of authority that prevails. It is complicated by the addition of tradition to Scripture as a source of authority. Thus, according to the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, “sacred tradition and sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God” (DV II, 117). In itself, this is quite unexceptionable, provided that the two together form a coherent and hom*ogeneous whole; for no one denies the existence, indeed the inevitability, of tradition in the Church. But there must be a governing factor that will ensure the harmony of the two, and that governing factor is, for the Reformed Christian, Scripture itself. Article 34 of the Church of England, for example, though it admits the permissibility of a diversity of traditions in the Church, is yet emphatic that “nothing be ordained against God’s Word.”

The church of Rome, however, brings in a third factor, namely, the teaching office (magisterium) of the Church, to which is assigned the ultimate authority of judgment regarding both Scripture and tradition. The claim is made that “the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written [i.e. Scripture] or handed on [i.e., tradition], has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church.” The qualification is indeed added that “this teaching office is not above the word of God,” but nonetheless it is in effect the determinative authority in the Roman Catholic Church, since on its pronouncements depend not only the admissibility of traditions but also the very sense in which Scripture may be understood. Consequently, the source of authority for the Roman Catholic is not single (Holy Scripture), nor twofold (Scripture plus tradition), but threefold (Scripture plus tradition plus the Church’s teaching office), as in fact this Dogmatic Constitution states:

It is clear, therefore, that sacred tradition, sacred Scripture, and the teaching authority of the Church, in accord with God’s most wise design, are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others [DV II, 117].

Once again, Reformed Christianity has never denied that the Church possesses authority; but it has insisted, with logical coherence, that the authority of the Church, like the authority of traditions, must be subject to the supreme authority of Holy Scripture, since the Scriptures embody the authoritative Word of God to man. Thus the twentieth of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion grants the authority of the Church, but with the important proviso that “it is not lawful for the Church to ordain anything that is contrary to God’s Word written.”

It is only fair to admit that there is a logic in the Roman Catholic position, given the premises on which it is based. If it is true that the pope is the vicar of Christ on earth and his bishops the successors of the apostles, then it follows that the authority and infallibility of Christ and his apostles is inherent in their office across the centuries and, therefore, that the teaching office residing in them is invested with absolute apostolic authority. Further, if this be granted, then a complete consistency among Scripture, tradition, and magisterium must be expected. But it is precisely here that the papal pretensions are found to be altogether inadmissible. For one thing, it is demonstrable that in the Roman church both sacred tradition and the teaching office, which are dependent on each other, are at important points incapacitated by internal contradictions and incompatibilities and irreconcilable with the teaching of Scripture. For another thing, the concept of bishops as the extension of the apostolate and of tradition as the extension of the canon makes nonsense of the recognition in the early centuries of the canon of Holy Scripture; for the very idea and meaning of the term canon is that of a measuring-rod or rule to which all else must conform. The books of the New Testament were acknowledged as canonical precisely because they and they alone constituted the authentic deposit of the apostolic teaching and witness under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The definition of the canon of the New Testament deserves, then, to be adjudged the most significant development in the history of the post-apostolic Church. It drew the line of demarcation between the teaching of the apostles now contained in the pages of the New Testament (authoritative in the ultimate issue because it is the teaching not merely of the apostles but of Christ himself, our supreme and infallible authority, whose teaching they were enabled to record faithfully under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, as Christ had promised) and all other teaching in the Church. It set the standard (canon) by which all else—teaching, tradition, everything—must be governed.

Again, one would never wish to deny that the Church has a teaching office or function that is a very important element in its life. But we cannot assent to the claim that the teaching office of the Church enjoys a finality of authority, which in effect the Second Vatican Council claims when it reaffirms that the interpretation of Scripture “is subject finally to the judgment of the Church” (DV II, 121); for this claim is tantamount to the usurpation of the teaching office of the Holy Spirit.

Demise Of The Drugstore

A druggist has been defined as a man who stands behind a soda fountain and sells ball-point pens. I can barely remember when the corner drugstore was a place that majored in medicines and minored in ice cream. The other day I went into a drugstore and had a hot lunch, bought a note pad, and priced garden hoses. Then, out of curiosity, I set out to find the prescription counter. After walking down a long aisle of hardware and past the liquor department, I made a left turn at a men’s jacket display. I passed the toy counter, and suddenly I found it: nestled comfortably between chocolates and greeting cards was the sign that read, “Prescriptions.” Behind the counter the man with a white coat seemed so busy with his bookkeeping that I probably would have hesitated to ask him for a bottle of aspirin had I needed it.

The Church also has made some startling changes since the days of the old-fashioned drugstore. We used to preach individual redemption through Christ; now, except for a few obscurantists, we are redeeming social structures instead. We used to proclaim boldly, “Thus saith the Lord”; now we timidly ask, “Hath God said?” We once tried to point secular man to the “city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” But not being able to lick him, we have joined him in a secular city whose builders and makers are Cox, Altizer, and Fletcher. We used to proclaim the Gospel as the power of God unto salvation; now we have made it so “relevant” that it is not even necessary. The Gospel used to be good news; now it’s good advice. Clergymen used to go to jail for preaching and teaching in the name of Jesus; they still go to jail, but for other reasons.

Yet the Church still has its religion department. There are still a few diehards who haven’t yet seen the light and are living back in the dark ages of Pentecost, Wittenberg, and Enfield. While drugstores and churches race toward relevance, there will always be those who offer the healing balm for needy bodies and souls.—The Rev. W. NORMAN MACFARLANE, Calvary Baptist Church, Springfield, Vermont.

At this point the much misunderstood Reformed doctrine of the right of private judgment comes into the picture. This does not mean, as it has so frequently been caricatured to mean, a carte blanche for uninhibited individualism. It does mean, and might be better expressed as, the right of the Holy Spirit to guide and illumine the ordinary Christian in private as he studies and prays over the sacred text. It asserts the final authority of the teaching office of the Holy Spirit, in accordance with the apostolic instruction of First Corinthians 2:11 ff. (as translated in the recently published Jerusalem Bible):

… the depths of God can only be known by the Spirit of God. Now instead of the spirit of the world, we have received the Spirit that comes from God, to teach us to understand the gifts that he has given us.… An unspiritual person is one who does not accept anything of the Spirit of God: he sees it all as nonsense; it is beyond his understanding because it can only be understood by means of the Spirit. A spiritual man, on the other hand, is able to judge the value of everything, and his own value is not to be judged by other men.

Thus St. Paul defines the right of private judgment under the final teaching authority of the Holy Spirit. This does not rule out the profitable teaching office of instructors, scholars, and commentators in the life of the Church; but it does make it subservient, not dominant.

The most significant chapter in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation is the last one, “Sacred Scripture in the Life of the Church,” for it is here that the very striking breakaway from the restrictions of past centuries receives clear expression. Although both Scripture and tradition together continue to be proclaimed as “the supreme rule of faith” and the “primary and perpetual foundation” of sacred theology, yet this chapter is a powerful appeal for unshackling and opening up the Bible. The admonition is given that “easy access to sacred Scripture should be provided for all the Christian faithful” (DV II, 125), and, though all is to be done “under the watchful care of the sacred teaching office of the Church,” ministers of the divine word are counseled to be diligent in study so that they may be “able effectively to provide the nourishment of the Scriptures for the people of God”; biblical scholars are encouraged to “continue energetically with the work they have so well begun”; and “all the Christian faithful” are urged to “learn by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures the ‘excelling knowledge of Jesus Christ’ (Phil. 3:8)” (DV II, 126). It is resolved, further, that “editions of the sacred Scriptures, provided with suitable comments, should be prepared also for the use of non-Christians and adapted to their situation,” and that “both pastors of souls and Christians generally should see to the wise distribution of these in one way or another.” To this the concluding exhortation is added:

In this way, therefore, through the reading and study of the sacred books, let “the word of the Lord run and be glorified” (2 Th. 3:1) and let the treasure of revelation entrusted to the Church increasingly fill the hearts of men [DV II, 128].

No matter how much the dogmatic status quo may be entrenched and safeguarded, the placing of the Scriptures in the hands of the people must lead us to expect a liberating movement within the ranks of Roman Catholicism. There are indeed convincing signs of such a movement in many different places. We can help it forward by encouraging our Roman Catholic friends to “take up and read.” There are still many Augustines for God to pierce with the Sword of the Spirit!

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

All aspects of community life fall within its vision

Is Reformation Protestantism really relevant to the social crisis of contemporary America? One writer suggests that by 1900 “Protestantism … had ceased to protest.” Similarly, historian Henry Steele Commager, writing in The American Mind, reports that the typical twentieth-century Protestant “inherited his religion as he did his politics, though rather more casually, and was quite unable to explain the differences between denominations. He found himself a church member by accident and persisted in his affiliation by habit.…” Commager believes that for many Protestants the Church has become something to be “supported,” like an aged relative whose claim is vague but inescapable.

Is Protestantism impotent? Or does it have a meaningful word for our times? We can find the answer to these questions by looking back at the leaders of the Reformation and considering the consequences of their doctrine, to see whether their achievements are applicable to the social problems of our day.

A Social Theology

One important outcome of the Reformation was the appearance of a biblical social theology. John Calvin laid a basis for Protestant social teaching in his affirmation of the absolute sovereignty of God over all aspects of life. According to H. Richard Niebuhr, the concept of the “Kingdom of God” is the central theme in American Protestantism. It is fitting, therefore, for Protestants in the United States to reconsider Calvin’s insight that society is to be theonomous, not autonomous, and is to be ordered in accordance with the will of God.

Closely related to this thought was the doctrine of Luther and Melanchthon that God established five “natural orders” in creation—the state, the home, the Church, work, and culture. In their genesis, these institutions are not achievements of man but gifts of God and agencies of his Spirit. This is evident from the Scriptures in five ways:

1. The “natural orders” were inaugurated by divine initiative because the Creator realized that “it is not good that the man should be alone.” Man was made to live in communities of meaning. He was to talk with God in worship. By having dominion over the earth he was to find self-expression in work. Placed in a garden, the symbol of civilization, man was called to develop a culture. Endowed with speech, he was enabled to share thoughts and sentiments with others and thus to develop language, literature, and the liberal arts. The provision of a sabbath, a day of rest, sanctified man’s leisure and gave opportunity for renewal through recreation. But preeminently through the home the Lord laid the basis for social life, for the family became the first church, state, school, and place of labor and relaxation. Society, therefore, is as much a work of God as the physical world.

2. The intention of the “natural orders” through the ages has been to prevent chaos and to further the perpetuation and perfection of human life.

3. The justification of the “orders” resides in the very needs of man as created by God. For a healthy and full life, man requires work, worship, play, and love.

4. The institutions of life found a sanctification in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. After creation, God had seen “everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” The fall of man into sin corrupted both individual character and the corporate life. Consequent abuse and misuse of the “natural orders” caused some to consider them evil. The assumption of manhood by the Master and his full participation in the “orders of society” demonstrated that they were salvable. By his birth in the home of Joseph and Mary, Jesus sanctified the family. Through his work in the carpenter’s shop, he revealed the sacred aspect of labor. Obedient to both state and synagogue, the Saviour prepared the way for their transformation.

5. By his death and resurrection, Christ made possible the regeneration of men, and through them the reformation of society. As the inscription on the cross was in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, so the Son of God was rejected by the highest state of his time (Rome), the revealed church of his dispensation (Judaism), and the purest culture of antiquity (Greece). But, by his victory over sin and death, Christ liberated men from futility and fear for a new and vital fellowship with God. In his resurrection and ascension he demonstrated the sovereignty of God over the world. Because of the salvation Christ offers men, “the creation,” as St. Paul reported, “waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” The “natural orders” will participate in the benefits of Christ’s triumph.

The Christian, filled with the empowering pardon of Christ, becomes a “new creation” and is called and commissioned at baptism to be a minister of Jesus Christ within the institutions of society. Freed from the way of works, the believer has as his motivation for social action a sense of thankfulness to Christ for his salvation, a fuller understanding of what it means to be obedient to God’s commands, and a sensitive appreciation of the needs of his neighbor. This attitude expresses itself in the Christian’s daily life. Dr. Matthias Loy, a nineteenth-century Lutheran theologian, wrote, “Every Christian is to look upon the labor of his earthly vocation … as a service that he renders in gratitude to his Redeemer.”

A Peaceful Revolution

The Reformation social ethic, incorporating the concepts of the sovereignty of God, the “natural orders,” and the “royal priesthood of the faithful,” had a revolutionary effect on sixteenth-century society.

One intriguing example was the impact of Protestantism upon the towns. In the one hundred years after 1500 there was an urban explosion in Germany, accompanied by an increase of nearly 8,000,000 inhabitants in the Holy Roman Empire at large. Primitive Protestantism, like apostolic Christianity, found not a perplexity but a ripe opportunity in urban areas. As the ancient Church spread rapidly in the metropolises of the Roman Empire—Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, and Rome—so the Protestant Reformation flourished in the towns of early modern Europe—Zürich, Basel, Berne, Geneva, Strasbourg, Wittenberg, Leipzig, Prague, Nürnberg, Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, and a host of others.

Harold J. Grimm, the Reformation historian, observes, “There is little doubt that the Christian ethics fostered by Luther, Melanchthon, and their colleagues had a profound effect on the development of German townsmen.” The career of Savonarola in Florence and of Calvin in Geneva show the significant effect of Protestant preaching upon the cities. A study of the Reformation and its vital role in the towns could very well suggest insights and provide inspiration for twentieth-century Protestants in their struggle to penetrate the American megalopolis with the Gospel.

Another sign of the social significance of the Reformation was its ability to bridge the “generation gap” and give the Christian message a vivid appeal to young people. Apostolic Christianity had been a young man’s movement. Jesus was only thirty-three when his earthly ministry ended. Paul was still in his thirties when he was converted on the Damascus road. The youth of the earliest disciples is indicated by one of Paul’s observations in the First Corinthian letter: he notes that of the five hundred to whom the risen Christ appeared, “the greater part remain unto this present.” Similarly, Protestantism attracted the young. Luther was but thirty-three when he posted the Ninety-Five Theses, and Zwingli was in his middle thirties when he began the reform of Zürich. John Calvin was twenty-six when the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion was published. The Reformation had a message that challenged a young generation. A recovery of that spirit could reinvigorate contemporary Protestantism.

The Reformation also had a great influence on culture. The involvement of the Reformers in education, for example, can stimulate us in our efforts to preserve and perpetuate the faith in a mass society.

Chief among the German Reformers in his grasp of the close connection between church and school was Philip Melanchthon, the “Teacher of Germany.” He was convinced that Protestantism would fail unless it educated both the clergy and laity in biblical Christianity and the literary arts, and he purified, enhanced, and extended education on all levels in his country, from the elementary school to the university. So thorough was Melanchthon in his promulgation of Christian education that, according to J. W. Richard, “when he died in 1560 there was scarcely a city in Germany that did not have a teacher or pastor who had not been a pupil of Melanchthon.” At the same time similar projects were promoted by Johannes Sturm in Strasbourg and Theodore Beza in Geneva. And it was through the Reformation emphasis on Christian higher education that the United States obtained its first university. The Puritan fathers, imbued with the Reformers’ zeal for learning, established Harvard College in 1636, after having been on this continent only six years.

Early Protestants were aware that the Reformation was born in the university, that it was raised by professors who professed the evangelical faith, that it was explained by doctors who knew biblical doctrine, and that education and zeal must go together in creating a Christian social order. In our time of crisis in Christian education (from the Sunday school to the seminary) we can find an example and encouragement in the Reformation emphasis on uniting faith and learning.

The Reformers believed that the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost in the gift of tongues had sanctified the vernacular languages, and they labored to translate the Scriptures into the speech of the people. In this process they made another contribution to culture. Although their primary intention was to promote the Gospel through vernacular Bible reading and preaching, they helped lay the foundations of the languages of contemporary Europe. Luther created modern German, Calvin modern French; and the British divines gave shape to our mother tongue.

The Reformation also had a profound influence on the family. By abolishing monasticism and the celibacy of the clergy, the Reformers took a giant step toward restoring the high status of marriage found in the Scriptures. Marriage ceased to be inferior to asceticism and was re-established as a divinely ordained basic unit of society. The example of the marriage of Luther and the other Reformers, the creation of the Protestant parsonage, and the insistence on marriage as the “school for character” did much to articulate a theology of the home that has endured into the twentieth century. Concern for the family as the initial congregation of believers is seen in such things as Luther’s preparation of The Small Catechism for the use of fathers in their house devotions. The Reformers strove to establish the spiritual and social significance of the family and to bolster its dignity and durability.

Politically, the Reformers took action that was to be vitally important. The state was given a “declaration of independence” from ecclesiastical domination. Luther commented on this development one day at table with his friends when he said, “The world is a vast and magnificent game of cards, made up of emperors, kings, and princes, and so forth. The pope for many centuries beat the emperors, kings, and princes. They yielded and fell before him. Then came our Lord God. He dealt the cards: he took the lowest [Luther] for himself, and with it he beat the pope, that vanquisher of the kings of the earth.… This is the face of God.”

Although the state was freed to be itself, statesmen were considered accountable to God for their service as the Lord’s instruments on earth to preserve justice. As the Church was entrusted with the proclamation of the Gospel, so the state had been charged with the establishment of law. The state was to maintain justice, not simply by police power, but also by provision of necessary services. Melanchthon wrote, “It is a mistake to suppose that the state is maintained by arms only, and by power. Of greater value to this end are the arts of peace, justice, moderation, constancy, care of the public safety, diligence in proclaiming the law and in settling the disputes of citizens, patience in bearing the faults of the people, vigor in punishing transgressors, kindness in sparing those who can be reclaimed.”

Finally, the Church was purged to make its principles and practices meaningful within the social order. This was done in two ways. First, the Church was recalled to its primary task—preaching the Word and administering the sacraments. Second, participation of the people in the worship, witness, work, and welfare of the Church was earnestly sought through such reforms as the vernacular translations of the Scriptures, the introduction of hymn-singing and responsive liturgies, and, in certain places and among certain varieties of Protestantism, popular self-government through congregational polity. The Church was not to be an institution, nor was it a hierarchy. It was to be a “beloved community” of believers.

The social significance of the Reformation can be seen, as Harold Grimm suggests in an essay in Luther and Melanchthon (edited by V. Vajta, Muhlenberg, 1961), in the letters between Luther and Melanchthon with the leading citizens and councils of German towns and cities. In these letters, the opinions of the Reformers were “sought on such questions as the disposition of church property and incomes from religious endowments, the establishment of common chests, provision for income for clergy and teachers and aid for the poor, regulation of morals, observance of laws on the taking of interest, correction of abuses involved in the publication of Luther’s books, treatment of left-wing evangelicals and Jews, clarification of doctrines, provision of evangelical clergymen and teachers, setting up of liturgies, and church discipline, and reform of old and establishment of new schools.” In short, there was no aspect of community life to which the Protestant faith was not relevant.

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

“Out of love and zeal for the elucidation of truth, the following theses will be debated … in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” wrote an obscure monk at the head of a series of propositions four and a half centuries ago this week. Those theses were posted not simply on a Castle Church door (which the ravages of time have long since claimed) but on the conscience of Christendom. Both the formal theology and the practical church activity of Luther’s day were leading men away from, rather than to, Christ’s salvation, for the Church had embraced the greatest error of all: the belief that man can earn his own way to Life. On the Eve of All Saints, 1967, “love and zeal for the elucidation of truth” demand that this same fundamental error—today appearing in a different but no less deadly form—be revealed for what it is. (Readers of these theses may enjoy comparing them, number by number, with the originals, some of which have been freely used here in various degrees of modification. Concordia Publishing House publishes an English translation of the theses in attractive booklet form with introduction by E. G. Schwiebert.)

1 Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, in saying: “Repent ye,” etc., intended that the whole life of believers should be penitence.

2 In the sixteenth century, indulgences diverted men from a life of repentance; in the mid-twentieth century, “secular religion” achieves the same purpose.

3 Then the world was kept from the Gospel by hyper-religiosity on the part of churchmen; now, by their hyper-irreligiosity.

4 Which is another way of saying that false religion and irreligion amount to the same thing.

5 The lamentable condition Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” can result either from selling grace cheaply (as then) or from cheapening the very idea of grace (as now).

6 Grace is cheapened and man becomes his own pseudo-saviour when God is considered dead—either metaphorically or literally—for as God diminishes, man assumes his place.

7 Yet true religion begins with the Baptist’s affirmation: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

8 A world without a name for God is a world without a name for salvation; all hope in such a world is man-made hope and therefore chimerical.

9 Secular towers of Babel, built over the alleged coffin of Deity, invariably produce confusion of tongues.

10 A “secular Christ” is a contradiction in terms, for he plainly said: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

11 The way is narrow and the gate strait leading to that Kingdom; to enter it, one must give up all hope of saving oneself and rely fully upon the Christ.

12 To rely on Christ is to take him at his word.

13 To question his teachings at any point is to stand in judgment upon one’s Judge and Advocate.

14 To translate the Christ of the New Testament into a secular “man for others” is to re-do God in our image instead of permitting him to re-do us in his image.

15 If the Christ in whom one believes is unable to say, “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” he is no Christ at all.

16 A “fully kenotic Christ” is by definition unknowable.

17 If nonetheless believed in, a “fully hidden Christ” will necessarily turn out to be the mirror-image of his worshiper or of the times in which the worshiper lives.

18 Salvation through such a Christ is self-salvation, which is in reality damnation.

19 If we are on the threshold of a “new age of the Spirit,” we had better be sure which “spirit” he is before we worship him; the spirit of the age is generally “the god of this world.”

20 “Test the spirits,” says Scripture, intending that God’s Word judge the spirit of the age.

21 But when Scripture itself is judged, what ultimate judgment remains?

22 Human judgment of Scripture assumes that we know more than God and must in the last analysis save ourselves.

23 Indeed, all “secular theology” is grounded in an optimistic view of man’s abilities.

24 How quickly has theology in our century come the full circle from modernistic optimism to secularistic optimism!

25 How very fast sinners forget the piles of eyeglasses and teeth and the bodies of naked children at Dachau.

26 How readily sinners forget that apart from the living God of Scripture and his Son’s death in our behalf, we turn our secular existence into a seething cauldron of hell and hatred.

27 They preach human doctrine who say that the soul achieves bliss as soon as the divine truths of biblical Christianity are reduced to “secular cash-value.”

28 What is achieved is “sinful cash-value,” nothing less, nothing more.

29 One wallows in secularity, without hope of a solution for its self-centered condition.

30 In the words of Tillich, one destroys proper theological correlation by turning revelational answers into existential questions.

31 Unless a clear and unimpeachable Word from outside the human situation is available to man, his existential predicament will remain overwhelming and secular optimism will stand revealed as naïve folly.

32 Those who believe that they are made sure of their own salvation by “finding God where the social action is” will be eternally damned along with their teachers.

33 We must especially beware of those who say that such social and political action is that inestimable gift of God by which men are reconciled.

34 The “horizontal” reconciliation of man with man depends squarely upon the “vertical” reconciliation of God and man at the Cross, even as the Second Table of the Decalogue follows and rests on the First.

35 They preach no Christian doctrine who teach that contrition and faith in Christ are not necessary for doing God’s will in society.

36 Every Christian who feels true compunction over his sins has plenary remission of pain and guilt, even without involvement in social and political causes.

37 Involvement in politics and society will follow as a fruit of faith, for “we love because he first loved us.”

38 But when the Christ-relationship is not seen as the ground of Christian social action, Law is confused with Gospel, and neither faith nor properly motivated social action remains.

39 It is a most difficult thing, even for the most learned theologians, to exalt before the people the great riches of political action and, at the same time, the necessity of true contrition.

40 True contrition seeks and loves punishment for its sins, while stress on changing society makes it seem relatively unimportant.

41 It is well to remember that the Great Commission had to do with the proclamation of the Gospel, not the reformation of the Roman Empire.

42 The Empire was much transformed through the Gospel, but where this occurred it happened because believers “sought first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness.”

43 Christians should be taught that he who proclaims to a man an eternal word of grace does better than he who participates in a sit-in.

44 For by a preachment of God’s Word, which never returns void, man becomes better, while by sit-ins he does not become better but only less subject to adverse social conditions.

45 Christians should be taught that he who substitutes political lobbying for the proclamation of divine grace is not obtaining God’s favor but calls down upon himself God’s wrath.

46 Christians should be taught that he who does not perform charitable acts to his immediate neighbor accomplishes little in attempting to improve the lot of those at a distance.

47 Christians should be taught that while they are free to engage in social and political action, they are not commanded to do so for their soul’s salvation.

48 Scripture nowhere sets forth a normative political or social system; Christians are to proclaim the eternal riches of Christ under political systems of the “right” and of the “left.”

49 Christians should be taught that political and social philosophies are useful if they do not put their trust in them, but most hurtful if through them they lose the fear of God.

50 Adherence neither to the “American way of life”—conservative or liberal—nor to socialism nor to Communism will save or damn a man; adherence to Christ, and Christ alone, saves, and rejection of him, and him alone, damns.

51 To demand that all Christians accept a given political or social philosophy as a test of “consistent Christianity” is to elevate man’s word to the level of God’s word.

52 Vain is the hope of salvation through secular activity, even if a divinity-school dean—nay, the President of the World Council of Churches himself—were to pledge his own soul for it.

53 They are enemies of Christ and of the Church who, in order that a secular salvation may be preached, condemn the Word of God to utter silence in their churches.

54 Wrong is done to the Word of God when in a sermon as much time is spent on secular topics as on God’s Word, or even more.

55 If secular participation by Christians is celebrated with single bells, single processions, and single ceremonies, the Gospel should be preached with a hundred bells, a hundred processions, and a hundred ceremonies.

56 A theology derived from the sinful human situation will be humanistic and sinful, likewise an ethic stemming from man’s situation instead of from God’s revelation.

57 A “contextual” or “situation” ethic foolishly assumes that proper norms will automatically arise from descriptive action; this is a precise example of what G. E. Moore called the “naturalistic fallacy.”

58 If human “contexts” and “situations” are self-centered, will not the ethic found there have the same qualities? Can water rise above its source?

59 The importing of agape-love into a situation as a norm is of little help apart from God’s revealed law, for agape is a motive, not a guide for specific action; it will be interpreted in whatever direction the sinful interpreter wishes.

60 How ironical that churchmen today combine “absolute” social and political programs with relativistic situational ethics! Is this not the predictable imbalance of Paul’s “natural man”?

61 Only the eternal Word of God can show the relative to be truly relative (e.g., political systems) and the absolute to be truly absolute (e.g., God’s moral law).

62 The true treasure of the Church is still the holy Gospel of the glory and grace of God.

63 This treasure, however, is deservedly—today as yesterday—most hateful because it causes the first to be the last.

64 But the treasure of secular salvation is deservedly the most acceptable because it causes the last to be the first.

65 Hence the treasures of the Gospel are nets wherewith churchmen of old have fished to save men from a sinful society.

66 The treasures of secularity are nets wherewith churchmen now fish for acceptance by a sinful society.

67 Those activities which the preachers loudly proclaim to be the greatest graces are seen to be truly such as appeal most to unregenerate standards.

68 They are in reality in no degree to be compared with the grace of God and the piety of the Cross.

69 Christians ought to receive with all reverence exhortations to racial justice, open housing, and equality before the law, for these are demonstrably the will of the God of scriptural revelation.

70 But they are still more bound to open their eyes and ears lest churchmen preach their own fancies in place of the biblical Word.

71 He who speaks against legitimate and proper social action, let him be anathema and accursed.

72 But he, on the other hand, who is seriously concerned about the wantonness and licenses of speech of the preachers of social action, let him be blessed.

73 We should justly thunder against those who by rationalization (“I’m for the slow evolution of fair housing”) impede the advance of social justice.

74 And, much more, we should thunder against those who, under the cloak of social programs, depreciate the proclamation of divine grace and the gospel message.

75 To think that secular involvement has such power that it can absolve a man even if he denies the atoning death and bodily resurrection of God’s Son, is madness.

76 We affirm, on the contrary, that all of man’s good works cannot take away even the least of venial sins as regards its guilt.

77 The saying that Jesus was “the most”—the ideal man and “the place to be”—but not, as he claimed, the very incarnate God, is blasphemy.

78 We affirm that the true grace the Lord Christ has to grant is not a program but himself: his death for our sins and his resurrection for our justification.

79 To say that any earthly goal is of equal rank with the Cross of Christ is blasphemy.

80 Those bishops, curates, and theologians who allow such ideas to have currency among the people will have to render an account for this.

81 The preaching of “secular Christianity” today makes it no easy thing, even for learned men, to protect the reverence due to the visible church against the calumnies of unbelievers and the criticisms of the laity.

82 For instance: Why do the secular theologians always claim credit for jumping on social bandwagons that have been put into motion outside the Church?

83 Again: Why bother with all the theological jargon if Christianity really reduces to humanism?

84 Again: Why not study sociology or politics or psychiatry instead of attempting to be a sloppy representative of these fields with irrelevant theological training?

85 Again: If the Church’s beliefs are derived from the fallible human situation like everyone else’s, why does the Church presume to judge others or declare grace to them?

86 Again: If God is ipso facto “where the action is,” was he motivating the action of the Third Reich, as National Socialist theologians said he was?

87 Again: If the theologian judges the Bible and its Christ, who judges the theologian?

88 Again: When Christ demanded fidelity to the “once for all” character of his saving work, how is it that the contemporary Church is satisfied only when it continually proclaims “some new thing”?

89 And how does it happen that faithful preaching of the eternal Word of grace is despised, while the most bizarre theological and ecclesiastical innovations are lauded to the skies as a true mark of “relevance”?

90 Repressing these scruples and arguments is to expose the Church to the ridicule of her enemies and to make Christian men unhappy.

91 If, then, churchmen would subordinate themselves to God’s Word, and seek first to bring their wills into accord with Christ’s will, and make his Gospel their Gospel, all other things would be added, and the troubles of today’s Church would be resolved with ease; nay, they would not exist.

92 Away, then, with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, “Peace, peace!” though there is no peace.

93 Blessed be all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, “The cross, the cross,” and there is no cross.

94 Christians should be exhorted to strive to follow Christ, their Head, through pain, death, and hell;

95 And thus to enter heaven through the tribulations of his cross rather than in the pseudo-security of optimistic secularity.

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

Forty prominent leaders met recently for a Thursday–Saturday discussion of possible areas for larger evangelical cooperation, prodded by CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S editorial plea, “Somehow, Let’s Get Together!” Their Key Bridge Meeting in Arlington, Virginia, may signal a bright new advance for biblically oriented Christianity. (For reports, see pages 25 and 42.)

They have projected for committee consideration a 1973 campaign that would engage local churches nationwide in simultaneous community evangelistic effort.

Equally significant at the Key Bridge Meeting was the reflection of widening dissatisfaction among evangelicals over the idea of cooperation for evangelism only. That Christianity is engaged in a global battle for the minds of men gives new urgency to the ideological and theological facets of the contemporary struggle. Nearly every evangelical conclave that meets today to consider the imperatives of New Testament strategy senses a deepening obligation to confront the world of thought and learning more effectively with the urgent claims of the truth of revelation.

Oliver wendell holmes in one of his more flippant moments urged his friends to be sure to wear a good hat: “The secret of your looks lives with the beaver in Canadian brooks.” Fortunately, good hats are easy to obtain in Canada. But other desirable things are not. Take evangelical unity, for example. You travel far in Canada before you find any evangelicals making a good effort to cooperate with their fellows. The bitterness of evangelical unity above the forty-ninth parallel is tragic and inglorious.

For some years now an effort has been under way to form an Evangelical Fellowship of Canada similar to the National Association of Evangelicals in the United States. So far progress has been practically nil. Perhaps one of the mistakes was to start in Ontario—this always evokes the suspicions of the Maritimers and the provinces to the west. Whatever the reason, there is still no coordinated impact of evangelical Christianity upon the Canadian scene.

A tenuous unity has been created by movements like Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, which has brought together many who would otherwise be totally separated by the fences that divide the common ground of biblical faith. And the results of the IVCF work in raising up ministerial candidates in many churches have been heartening. But this is just a slight whisper of response to the clamant need of the hour. Evangelicals need desperately to reach wholehearted agreement on statements of their common biblical faith and to discover some organizational form for general cooperation in fellowship and service; but the response to all such appeals has been nugatory.

Canada is a land of vast distances. And the population is scant—a mere 20 million, of which nearly a third are French-speaking and Roman Catholic. Yet there are undoubtedly a most significantly number of evangelicals in all the provinces outside Quebec; witness the unusually large number of Bible schools found across the prairies. The pietistic movement of the late nineteenth century left large residual deposits of Bible-believing Christians in many parts of the country, particularly in the west, and the testimony of these groups today is still very strong. It cannot be overemphasized however, that evangelical distinctives are often blurred by sheer distance even when they are not nullified by indifference, apathy, and ignorance of the urgent issues that face our generation.

No Gallup Poll has been taken to determine the size of the evangelical constituency. But I do not hesitate to say, that, if it were united, its influence would be impressive, uplifting, and challenging both to government and to the Church as a whole. Evangelicals can be found wherever you look—among Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, Mennonites, Anglicans, and Baptists of every shape and form, in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, United Church, Associated Gospel Church, and Salvation Army, as well as in a host of independent congregations. And during evangelistic crusades, all such people join hands naturally—they meet and pray and sing and work together. The tragedy is that when the campaign ends they all troop back to their own places and scarcely see one another again.

One result of all this is that there is no united voice of evangelicals in the council chambers of Canada. Lobbying is out, for there are no united objectives for which to lobby. Meanwhile, the historic communions—through their carefully articulated reports, their press conferences, and their penchant for creating the impression that they and they alone rightly represent the people of Canada on the religious level—are making yardage all the time. And though the advances they make often seem to the evangelical to be in fact dire losses (for example, the Anglican proposal that a general break-up of marriage be grounds for divorce), yet evangelicals as a group have nobody who can speak on their behalf.

The attempt to create an Evangelical Fellowship of Canada has not been abandoned. Dr. J. Harry Faught, a gifted Pentecostal preacher, heads the committee. More than two hundred ministers attended the annual meetings held in Toronto in the spring, and their common concern was evident. But the right kind of idea man has not yet appeared, and we must continue to pray and work for a great united testimony to the glory of the Gospel and the incomparable excellencies of Jesus Christ.

Possibly one of the greatest barriers to an organizational form of cooperation is the reluctance of evangelicals to become involved in anything other than the preaching of the Word and the saving of souls. But how long can we continue in this kind of isolation? Surely there is an urgent need for evangelicals to involve themselves in social issues, in the communications media, in the arts, in government. Or is it really true that the evangelical does not accept such things as live options? Must they all be handed over to the devil? Or must we depend entirely on those of the ecumenical-liberal persuasion to voice concern over slums and slum landlords, ghettos, victimization of every kind? Surely not!

Attempts to foster evangelical unity in Canada must rise from among us Canadians. We are a proud people, and contentious, too. We have resolutely turned our back on all bondage to British parliaments and are natively antagonistic to outside suggestions about what we ought to do.

One of the factors that may yet force Canadian evangelicals to strike out for a corporate identity is the only thinly concealed determination of Anglicanism to sit in the driver’s seat in every form of church merger. On this, Ian Henderson has some very pertinent things to say to Canadians in Power Without Glory. “Scotland and Canada have important positions in the Anglican power drive,” he says. “They represent the soft underbelly of Protestantism.”

The prospect of developing mergers in Canada between the United Church and the Anglican Church should serve as a warning signal to all who are concerned for a strong and united evangelical faith in this great dominion. The day may not be too far distant when our choices will be reduced to two: identification with an ecumenically oriented, theologically liberal church, or identification with all who own an overriding allegiance to Jesus Christ and the biblical revelation.

For those who receive the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the authoritative and sole revelation of the mind and plans of God and who confess Jesus Christ as Son of God and Saviour of the world, there surely can be only one choice: to stand with all of like precious faith and join hands across denominational lines to attain evangelical goals.

The first returns from the biggest sociological poll ever made of U.S. Protestant clergymen show considerable disagreement on traditional beliefs, the National Council of Churches reported last month. Its results lead Western Reserve University sociologist Jeffrey Hadden to conclude that ecumenism has little to do with doctrine but concerns rather “a common understanding of the church’s place in contemporary society.”

The extensive questionnaires from the 7,441 out of 10,000 clergymen¹There are 240,000 active Protestant clergyman in the United States. who answered the poll indicate to Hadden that “the ecumenical movement proceeds not from any doctrinal unity but in spite of it.”

He also finds that “all denominations except the Lutherans have a substantial body of clergymen who reject dogmatic literalist theology. It seems appropriate to speculate that this more liberal group is leading efforts toward ecumenical cooperation. Having rejected a literalist theology, these liberal ministers may stand ready to cooperate with others of different theological traditions in pursuit of common goals.”

Appropriately, the Hadden study, first published in Trans-action, is entitled “A Protestant Paradox—Divided They Merge.”

Hadden surveyed clergymen from only six denominations, which he categorizes as follows: “liberal,” Episcopal and Methodist; “moderate,” United Presbyterian; “conservative,” American Baptist and American Lutheran; and “fundamentalist,” Missouri Synod Lutheran.

Hadden’s thesis that theological liberals are taking the ecumenical lead is supported by the fact that of poll’s six denominations, the three most conservative theologically have decided to remain outside the Consultation on Church Union, which is attempting to effect a mass merger of U. S. Protestants. In fact, the two most conservative bodies polled, Missouri Synod and the American Lutherans, have even stayed outside the National Council of Churches itself.

In contrast to the theological disarray (see chart), there is considerable agreement among the six denominational groups on the Church’s social responsibility. For instance, ten percentage points or less separate the six in Hadden’s questions on the Church’s role in civil rights and urban problems. This lack of difference on what Hadden calls “social sources of ecumenism” seems to discredit the sociologist’s conclusion. Only three of the six denominations are wholeheartedly in the ecumenical and merger movement. In fact, the Missouri Synod Lutherans, whose social attitudes in the report vary little from those in the more liberal groups, have even boycotted the Lutheran World Federation.

But Hadden says the complete poll indicates that beyond the general questions on social responsibility, which show widespread agreement, there is much disagreement on specifics. Liberals are interested mainly in humanitarianism, while conservatives tend to see social concern as a means of saving souls.

With answers to more than 500 questions, the 31-year-old sociologist has data for books and articles for years to come. Several volumes are already in the works. Hadden’s Ph.D. project at Wisconsin was in urban sociology. He says he came by the immense religious project, financed by a private foundation, “by accident” while at Purdue.

Hadden, raised a Quaker, joined a “pretty fundamentalist” American Baptist church in Kansas in his teens. He recalls that at the time he “didn’t see any difference” between his home pastor’s ideas and those of his neo-orthodox clergyman at the University of Kansas. But he was startled to hear a discussion between historian Robert Torbet and a member of the Christian atheist school. He could find “no apparent conflict” between the two Baptist speakers, he said, and this led him to realize that common goals exist among churchmen of widely different theologies.

In his study he had the help of eight full-time assistants for the mailing and processing of questionnaires in the first half of 1965. Several theologians helped prepare the questions. Forms went to every fourth name on the parish clergy lists of the six denominations. An extensive program of as many as six follow-ups produced the high return rate, which Hadden believes makes his study unique in religious sociology. The only previous wide-scale study of Protestant clergymen, done long ago at Yale, had only a 5 per cent return rate, which makes it scientifically worthless.

The six denominations for the study were chosen partly “by chance.” No answer came from his initial contact with the Southern Baptist Convention. The United Church of Christ was cool to the idea because it had its own study (still unreported) under way. The Unitarians weren’t very interested, either.

Despite omission of the giant SBC, Hadden says the South is fairly well represented in the poll. The bias in the returns, he said, is that the big city churches with hard-pressed senior pastors and the rural, lower-educated churches are under-represented.

MISCELLANY

The Jesuit weekly America says that in its judgment the Roman Catholic Church should recognize “the compatibility—and even necessity—of some use of contraception” in Catholic families.

A new conservative national Catholic weekly newspaper is slated to publish its first edition November 1. Twin Circle will be edited in Denver by Frank Morriss, former news editor of the National Register, with Dale Francis, former executive editor of Our Sunday Visitor, as editor-at-large. The new paper, published by a subsidiary of Eversharp, Inc., will refute “modernism in certain Catholic circles,” an apparent reference to the liberal National Catholic Reporter.

The Wheaton (Illinois) College board decided to let students and faculty attend movies and the theater. The school’s famous “pledge” still prohibits drinking, smoking, gambling, dancing, and secret societies.

Toronto’s evangelical Richmond College, (see Sept. 1 issue, page 42) opened last month with sixty-one of its one hundred hoped-for students. Five part-time professors are teaching night classes. Financial support is lagging.

Bexley Hall, an Episcopal seminary in Ohio, is talking about moving to Rochester and merging with Colgate Rochester Divinity School (American Baptist) and St. Bernard’s Seminary (Roman Catholic), into a Center for Theological Studies.

Three Soviet Baptists last month flew from Moscow to London for training at Spurgeon Baptist College. Two previous groups enrolled there seven years ago, Religious News Service said.

PERSONALIA

The Rev. B. Davie Napier, dean of the Stanford University Chapel and officiant at the wedding of Margaret Rusk, daughter of the Secretary of State, and Guy Smith, called the union a “significant event in the hard, rocky road of race relations.” The United Church of Christ minister is an outspoken foe of U. S. policy in Viet Nam. He said he counseled the couple at length about the added difficulties of inter-racial marriage.

With Senate confirmation September 21, Walter E. Washington became “commissioner” (mayor) of Washington, D. C., and the first Negro to head a major U. S. city. The former housing administrator served four years on the board of the area council of churches and belongs to the city’s Third Baptist Church, where his late father-in-law was pastor.

Kenneth L. Wilson, executive editor of Christian Herald since 1960, assumed editorship of the interdenominational monthly October 1, succeeding Ford Stewart, editor for the past two years and an official for thirty.

Dave Simmons, a 6’4”, 245-pound hardhitting linebacker for the New Orleans Saints in the National Football League, was ordained at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, where he is a candidate for the master of theology degree.

The Rev. Charles S. Spivey, Jr., will become executive secretary of the National Council of Churches’ activist Department of Social Justice November 1. A member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Spivey has been dean of Ohio’s Payne Theological Seminary.

Dr. O. P. Kretzmann, president of Lutheran-related (Missouri Synod) Valparaiso University, Indiana, has resigned, effective next June, after twenty-seven years at the institution.

Heinrich Albertz, 52, a former Reformed clergyman, quit as mayor of West Berlin after less than a year in office. His Socialist Party refused to back his choices for city jobs.

PROTESTANT PANORAMA

Seattle’s Hillcrest Presbyterian Church is believed to be the first to seek withdrawal from the United Presbyterian Church because of the Confession of 1967. The session claims to operate as an independent congregation. A surprised General Assembly spokesman said the move violates Presbyterian polity and no local church holds title to property.

Hitler and Mussolini are among fifty figures shown falling into hell in a new stained-glass window at Trinity Episcopal Church in Tulsa. The controversial, contemporary scene is part of a series of fourteen panels illustrating the Apostles’ Creed.

The “conservative” lay group Concerned Presbyterians and the “liberal” clergymen’s Fellowship of Concern, both within the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern), agreed to get together for the first time for a discussion.

Dallas Methodists will build a million-dollar apartment complex near the airport in an attempt to learn how to interest apartment-dwellers in religion.

The Christian and Missionary Alliance announced purchase of a new thirty-eight-acre headquarters site overlooking the Hudson River at Nyack, New York. The present headquarters building in the heart of Manhattan’s theatrical district will be sold.

After the state Baptist convention turned down permission for a $5 million fund drive, trustees of Maryland Baptist College asked to sever convention ties and go it alone as a private evangelical school.

The California Southern Baptist says on Viet Nam: “Let Congress make a decision, let Thieu and Ky take the Vietnamese case to the U. N., and let the President tell the people exactly what is happening and where we are. Otherwise, let’s get out of Viet Nam, now.”

Protestant groups in Burma, cut off from outside missionary support, have formed a negotiating committee to work toward a united national church.

Officials of two Presbyterian groups and the Methodists of Korea signed a pact with Japan’s United Church of Christ (Kyodan) to cooperate in mission from a “wide ecumenical point of view,” the World Council of Churches reports.

Half of Australia’s 600 Baptist churches joined a national crusade that resulted in more than 2,500 commitments to Christ. The nation’s Baptist Union named former U. S. Southern Baptist Jack Hymer as evangelism director.

Protestant mission stations in the Portuguese colony of Angola have dropped from 250 to 65 since 1961, when the government blamed Protestants for a nationalist insurrection. New missionaries have been barred since 1964, and veteran missionaries cannot return if they leave the country, the New York Times reports.

Deaths

T. CHRISTIE INNES, 58, named research associate of CHRISTIANITY TODAY this year to complete a study of Calvin begun by the late J. Marcellus Kik; native of Scotland who held Presbyterian pulpits in Toronto, San Francisco, Toledo, and Pittsburgh; in Philadelphia, after a brain tumor operation.

JOHN ROBBINS HART, 78, former chaplain of the University of Pennsylvania and rector of Washington Memorial Chapel (Episcopal), Valley Forge, Pennsylvania; in Philadelphia.

J. B. GREEN, 96, former moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. and theology professor at Columbia Theological Seminary; in Atlanta.

The Shrine circus left Seattle just before the Episcopal convention (main report, page 40) opened complete with a popular side-show attraction of its own: Resigned Bishop James A. Pike. The nation’s press, in fact, was inclined to treat him as the main feature, much to his delight and the privately voiced dismay of many delegates.

Pike caused ecclesiastical jitters with his on-again-off-again demands for public “judicial proceedings” over charges his fellow bishops lodged against him last fall at Wheeling, West Virginia. The flare-up in the convention’s second week was settled in an after-hours, behind-the-scenes compromise move. Pike agreed to drop his demands in exchange for the convention’s passing a canon (law) that tightens procedures governing official heresy accusations. The House of Bishops also agreed to include special provisions for “due process” in any future action of censure. Both measures were overwhelmingly approved.

Pike had been denied a formal hearing last year. The House of Bishops’ 1,200-word censure described his unorthodox public statements as “irresponsible” and “cheap vulgarizations.” The infuriated prelate called for open investigation of the charges, thus initiating the same process as in a heresy trial.

Concerned about the embarrassment of such a trial, Presiding Bishop John E. Hines in January appointed an advisory committee on “theological freedom,” and Pike said he would not press for trial if the committee’s report was “adequate” and ratified by the bishops.

The resulting document presented to the bishops in Seattle suggested that the term “heresy” be declared obsolete and asked that censure be levied only for “acts” and not for “opinion or teaching.” The bishops affirmed it and referred it to church agencies for study. They also asked that an ad hoc committee be appointed to prepare canons to implement it.

All seemed well until Bishop J. Stuart Wetmore of New York asked whether the action had revoked last year’s censure. Hines replied it had not. Pike began scribbling feverishly, later arose and read a letter in which he renewed his call for a trial. Missouri Bishop George L. Cadigan moved to “erase” the previous censure, but a frantic motion for adjournment took precedence and carried.

Hines called a huddle of advisors, including Bishops Stark, Craine, Myers, and De Witt. At De Witt’s hotel room they hammered out the plan to enact the canon (suggested by the original report) and to add the “due process” clause. Pike agreed behind closed doors early the next morning.

The “due process” provision is the key to Pike’s change of mind. Although it does not erase last year’s censure, it casts a shadow of irresponsibility on it (Bishop George Barrett of Rochester, among others, admits there was “real lack of due process at Wheeling”). The entire incident left some observers wondering aloud whether Pike has somehow censured the House of Bishops.

At the convention’s outset, Pike was granted—84 to 30—a seat, seniority, and a voice in the House of Bishops, but not a vote.

White House Wedding

Which clergyman would marry Lynda Baines Johnson and Marine Captain Charles S. Robb in the White House December 9 was still unknown late last month. The two most likely candidates denied they had been asked. The Rev. Charles A. Sumners of St. David’s Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas, who baptized Lynda as a child, and Captain L. M. Lindquist, Protestant chaplain of the Marine Corps Commandant, both said they had “no information.” Another possibility, former Rector William Baxter of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Washington, D. C., said he hadn’t been asked but knew who had. The military wedding, with fourteen members and about 700 guests, will use the Episcopal service.

His voice was much in evidence both inside the House and outside. Inside he defended COCU’s all-inclusive stance on baptism from attack by Bishop William Brady of Wisconsin, by endorsing “adult believers’ baptism” as the authentic early practice of the Church. On therapeutic abortion he said: “Killing is not always wrong.… It is a case of balancing out relative merit.” He debated his chief antagonist, Florida Bishop Henry Louttit, on TV; scolded the bishops for not dealing with theological reforms; and dismissed as “nonsense” the Archbishop of Canterbury’s criticisms of his writings.

Most startling was Pike’s revelation in Seattle that he believes he communicated last month with his dead son through a medium, onetime Disciples of Christ minister Arthur Ford, 71, of Philadelphia. The seance, set up by Toronto Star religion editor Allen Spraggett and TV producer Charles Templeton, a former evangelist, was taped for coast-to-coast telecast in Canada. Ford says the audience heard his contact, a deceased Canadian named “Fletcher,” repeat words from some acquaintances of Pike, among them the late Bishop Karl Bloch of California.

Ford said Pike’s son was more confident he would win his fight in the House of Bishops than Pike himself was. Some of the discussion relating to the son’s suicide last year was so personal that it was cut from the actual broadcast, Spraggett said.

Pike, who wrote the forward for Spraggett’s new book entitled The Unexplained, began looking into spiritualism after his son’s death. Reportedly, he asked the opinion of a psychoanalyst friend who said his psychic experiences could not be attributed to his grief reaction.

When fundamentalist gadfly Carl McIntire strode into Seattle and called a press conference, Pike dropped in to say hello. When Pike was picketed by two Bible Presbyterian ministers he chatted with them, picked some flowers nearby (an illegal act), handed them to the pair, and said “may the peace of the Lord be with you.”

Pike’s most vehement critics, however, are fellow Episcopalians. They are distressed that his much-publicized views are mistaken by many to be the teachings of the Episcopal Church. Bishop Richard S. M. Emrich of Michigan, for example, thinks that if less is said about and by Pike, the church will fare better. This issue was aired in the Committee on the State of the Church. One Florida rector said he could spend more time trying to increase membership if he did not have to spend so much time reassuring his own members that the Episcopal Church still believes the historic doctrines. Another Florida pastor declared, “I’m so damned sick of hearing about Pike I could throw up.”

But some in the charismatic wing of the church have a different viewpoint. They feel Pike is embarked on a desperate spiritual quest for reality. They say they are praying for his “conversion.”

SVETLANA’S RELIGIOUS ROOTS

Svetlana Alliluyeva’s eagerly awaited book traces the origins and motivations of her search for religious faith. In Twenty Letters to a Friend, Stalin’s daughter tells of the influence of a Protestant grandmother on her mother’s side. The grandmother, Olga, whose mother had come from a family of German settlers, was brought up in a Protestant church.

“She was always religious,” Svetlana recalls, “and the revolutionary life she and Grandfather led only cleansed her religious faith of any narrowness or dogmatism. She could see no difference between the Protestant, Gregorian, or Armenian, and Orthodox churches and considered such distinctions a waste of time.”

Despite this syncretism, Olga apparently held her religious ground. Svetlana says the children would make fun of her and ask, “Where is God?,” or, “If man has a soul, where is it?” The questions angered Olga, Svetlana says, and she would reply: “Wait till you grow up and you’ll see where. Now stop it! You’re not going to change my mind.”

Svetlana notes that “she was right. By the time I was thirty-five I realized that Grandmother was wiser than any of us.”

BEATLES OFF BEAT

Attention of the Beatles is currently focused on a squat, jovial, mystic of the Kashmir who proclaims a transcendental message of the offbeat (for a fee) and has shaggy locks only slightly longer than those of the mop-headed singers. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the rage of London’s young intellectuals, expounds a spiritualist meditation, insists his mission is not mass conversion à la Billy Graham but more custom-made salvation for the intellectually chosen few. The Yogi’s philosophy is less lucid than his explanation for charging admission to hear the Word: “I need the money.”

Despite his medium of exchange, the Beatles four shower His Holiness with higher praise than LSD.

BOO HOO’S BOO BOO

The 25-year-old Chief Boo Hoo (high priest) of the Washington, D. C., chapter of the Neo-American Church took a trip—to the district police station. Mrs. Judith Kuch, spiritual adviser for fellow “church members” who use LSD as a sacrament, was charged with possession of LSD, marijuana, hashish, peyote, and obscene photos, including nude pictures of herself.

And in Toronto, Canada, the Anglican bishop confirmed that one of his priests is the leader of a cult that attempts to exorcise the devil from people through bizarre practices bordering on witchcraft. Katherine Globe, 18, died a “screaming death” last June in the rectory of Canon Moore Smith during a “prayer meeting” while members of the cult sought to “pray the hell out of her.” An inquest was ordered last month.

MEMORABLE SERMON AT WHEATON

On September 22, V. Raymond Edman set out for his first chapel sermon of the new school year to the students of Wheaton College. Upon arrival at Edman Chapel—built for the Illinois evangelical college’s centennial and named for him—two students carried the 67-year-old educator onto the platform in a chair. Doctors had told him not to climb stairs after his heart attack last December, and this was his first public speech since then.

When he was in his twenties and a missionary in Ecuador, Edman credited widespread prayer back home with bringing him a miraculous healing. After he returned from the field, he earned a Ph.D. in history from Clark University and served as a Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor. He then joined the Wheaton faculty and four years later became the college’s fourth president.

His twenty-five years as president were marked by considerable growth, even in physical plant, though he was an outspoken foe of federal aid. When he retired two years ago and was named college chancellor, he became editor of the Alliance Witness, succeeding the late A. W. Tozer. He had written nineteen books and in 1947 even found time to visit Ethiopia to survey its educational system and offer advice.

It was this trip that provided his illustration for his chapel sermon this day. After painstakingly making his way to the pulpit, he began in measured tones and low voice to describe the awesome feeling he had had when he was ushered in to Emperor Haile Selassie to make his report. Yet every day in Edman Chapel, he told the students, they come into the presence of God the King to worship.

At 10:53 A.M., as he reached the climax of his sermon on the purpose of worship, Edman suddenly raised a hand to his chest, then slowly fell to the platform. He was dead of an apparent massive coronary attack even before he hit the floor. While nurses attempted artificial respiration, his successor as president, Hudson Armerding, dismissed the stone-silent student body in prayer.

Two days later the college’s best-known alumnus, Billy Graham, spoke at a memorial service. The family held a private funeral the day after that.

TWO FOR PHILADELPHIA

Well-known evangelical churchmen have been named to lead two of Philadelphia’s seven Protestant seminaries. Stuart Barton Babbage assumed the presidency of Conwell School of Theology last month, and J. Lester Harnish will take the helm of Eastern Baptist College and Seminary on January 1.

Jonah (Ho Ho)

Is the biblical book of Jonah a comedy? No, but T. J. Spencer of Catholic University has attempted to make it so in his new play Jonah, which opened off Broadway last month. Spencer, a speech and drama professor at the Washington, D. C., school, thinks the entertaining qualities of comedy can best convey the message of God’s love for all mankind.

The unfortunate finished product is a series of long, blustering dialogues between ship captain Jonah, numerous shipmates, and Ulysses of ancient Greece. Spencer put Ulysses in the belly of the fish so he could enlighten us on the difference between Hellenistic and Hebraic thought, but he succeeds only in introducing a confusing tangent in a play that would be forced and illogical without it.

Spencer’s Jonah is not good drama; it is not even fair drama. The professor means well. He throws in a miraculous conversion on board ship (only to explain it away later in the play) and tries to tell us of God’s love, but all this is lost in the midst of contrived non-humor. In addition to the faults of the script, this New York performance had all the professionalism of a rural high-school play, with actors bumbling through lines and missing cues. The play was directed by Hal Thompson, a United Presbyterian elder long involved in the drama world.

A Catholic nun who saw the play said this script and production could not be “put over” on any theater audience, let alone the sophisticated New York drama crowd. It can only be hoped that those in the sparse audience at Jonah will read the original version—if only to find out whether the book could possibly be as bad as the play.

JOHN EVENSON

The choice of Harnish means that Eastern, largest seminary aligned only with the American Baptist Convention, will continue its conservative stance. In fact, Eastern had also approached Harold Fickett of Van Nuys, California, whose mammoth church is dually aligned with the ABC and the Conservative Baptist Association. More than Fickett, Eastern alumnus Harnish has been active in the ABC and was its president two years ago. He was once pastor of Philadelphia’s Belmont Avenue church and has also held pulpits in Detroit and Los Angeles. His present pastorate is in Portland, Oregon.

Babbage becomes the first president of Conwell, a struggling interdenominational school formed after the demise of Temple University’s seminary in 1960. But Babbage has big plans. He envisions a new campus—perhaps downtown, next to Temple—a faculty of “top rank evangelical scholars,” and an eventual student body of 500. “We want to plan boldly,” he explains.

Babbage’s background for building is impressive. An Australian Anglican, he was appointed dean of the Sydney cathedral at thirty years of age and established its first clinic for marriage guidance and pastoral counseling. Later, as dean of the Melbourne cathedral, he started “Deano’s Crypt,” a much publicized pioneer coffeehouse. He also served as head of Ridley College and the College of Divinity in Melbourne.

Babbage holds the Ph.D. from the University of London as well as a Th.D. In 1961 he won a Fulbright scholarship to America and remained to teach at Columbia Theological Seminary (Presbyterian Church in the U. S.). For nine years he was associate editor of the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Review, and he was a leader in the Australia Council of Churches and the national Faith and Order Commission. He is the author of several books and a contributing editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Conwell Dean Aaron Gast, who recently took the pulpit of First Presbyterian Church in Germantown, was considered conservative, and the choice of Babbage undoubtedly fixes this orientation for the future. The Philadelphia area already has three conservative seminaries, none accredited: Westminster, Reformed Episcopal, and Faith (affiliated with Carl Mclntire’s American Council of Christian Churches). Also in the city are the Episcopalians’ Philadelphia Divinity School and the Lutheran Church in America Seminary at Mount Airy.

GRAHAM CONTRADICTS PRESIDENT

Billy Graham was in the audience when his sometime host Lyndon B. Johnson told the International Association of Chiefs of Police that America is morally strong. The next day evangelist Graham told a Kansas City crusade audience that the President is wrong—the nation is riding a “moral toboggan sled.”

On its last two days, Graham’s Kansas City crusade broke Municipal Stadium attendance records with 50,000 persons, then 53,000, making the ten-day total 364,000. More than 11,000 inquirers were reported. At the end of the series Graham revealed he had been so sick four nights he wasn’t sure he could preach. One night he spoke even though he had a temperature of 101.

By high-church standards, last month’s General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church (or, if you now prefer, The Episcopal Church) at Seattle was a swinging affair. The ten-day meeting was the shortest in years but crammed with more business and debatable issues than ever—so much, in fact, that some housekeeping was postponed to a special session in 1969.

Arguments and significant actions concerned everything from church unity and evangelism to war and sacking of bishops. And there was enough to make everybody happy about something.

Presiding Bishop John E. Hines, chairing his first convention, got the budget he wanted and, with minor lumps, his “urban crisis fund” of $3 million a year, which includes $1 million from the church women. United Presbyterians plan a similar fund. After a long struggle and with a big assist from the clergy, women were granted the right to sit as lay deputies (delegates) beginning in 1973.

The youth of the church were heard in John Dillon, national Episcopal youth president. He urged the church to provide leadership in the “great moral issues of the day.” He warned against the “moral idiocy” of both extremes in the Viet Nam dispute, though he pleaded for a strong statement. The bishops and deputies later debated hotly a statement on Viet Nam and adopted a watered-down “dove” stance, containing the usual pleas for peace. Twenty-one bishops called separately for a bombing halt.

The youth were seen, too: young nuns in garb strumming guitars while staging “happenings,” peaceniks distributing handbills, hippies admiring the clerical garb of high-order monks and nuns, ordained beatnik types in clergy dress replete with bells and beads debating fundamentalist pickets, and the straight types seriously taking notes in the visitors’ galleries. Buttons were in abundance: “Wise Up O Men of God” (a special order for the convention), and “Write Your Theology Here” (followed by a small square).

The real “action,” of course, was inside (the 157 bishops in the Playhouse, the 678 deputies in the Arena).

Both Bishop James A. Pike and the House of Bishops seemed pleased—though perhaps with some reservations on both sides—about their carefully lubricated compromise that rid them of their heresy hang-up (see story, page 44). It now will take charges from ten bishops and consent of two-thirds of the House of Bishops to start a heresy trial.

Through amendments, the Consultation on Church Union was made palatable to the high-church faction, which would prefer first-line talks with Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Lutherans. Most of the debate and word changes occurred in the House of Bishops. Bishop Robert Gibson, Jr., of Virginia, head of the Ecumenical Relations Commission and former head of COCU, assured his colleagues that participation in COCU did not commit the church to any final agreement. An amendment was passed making vote by the convention mandatory before anything beyond talking takes place. A section was added calling for the Episcopal Church to talk with non-COCU groups.

The bishops and deputies did commend COCU’s “Principles of Church Union” as a “significant advance” in “certain matters” that have “long divided Christians.” The final wording passed overwhelmingly in both houses and, surprisingly, with little debate in the House of Deputies. Two delegations, instructed by their dioceses to vote against COCU, said they could now vote affirmatively because of the “safeguards.” Montana Bishop Chandler Sterling, head of the high-church American Church Union which lobbied against COCU participation, said the vote was as he had expected but predicted the COCU goal will never be achieved. “There are too many fundamental differences,” he said. Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey, in addressing the convention, hoped aloud that the COCU section on the episcopate would be rewritten to make it more Anglican in viewpoint.

In a crowded press conference Ramsey fielded questions on such other subjects as Viet Nam (he wants the war to end quickly), Pike’s books (“superficial”), and the recent Billy Graham crusade in England (“There have been converts and many people have been helped, but the crusades have not altered the religious situation in England very much.”)

He predicted a world church in the “distant future” with “little formal organization, a variety of customs and rituals and national expressions but in which there would be agreement in the essentials of doctrine and in the sharing of the same sacraments and ordained ministry.” He even allowed for the possibility that the pope would be some sort of presiding bishop, but he warned against giving too much power to any central bureaucracy.

A number of bishops and deputies said in interviews that the emerging issue in their church is evangelism. Until action in Seattle, the Episcopalians, along with Unitarians and Greek Orthodox, had no national department of evangelism. Sterling, like others, believes the church will soon become disillusioned with its “sociological kick,” with a resultant boom in “personal religious life” and the “communication of the good news to persons outside the church.”

In Deputy deliberations, the Committee on the State of the Church and the Committee on Evangelism talked the same language: The church was in deep trouble theologically, financially, and spiritually. Some members expressed resentment of the church’s “preoccupation with fringe groups.” The State of the Church Committee went so far as to express from the platform its alarm at the “distressing situation.” The report was front-page material for both convention dailies.

A report to the House of Bishops described what evangelism is not. “It is not basically the teaching of Christian faith and life, principles of social and moral responsibilities, stewardship, world mission, recruitment to membership. Evangelism is personal human commitment to Jesus Christ and witnessing to other persons about Christ and his power,” the spokesman said.

In other action, the convention:

• Adopted a $14.6 million budget for 1968, a 10 per cent increase, with even higher budgets for 1969 and 1970.

• Created a Board for Theological Education.

• Made provision for lay administration of the Chalice, and approved three-year trial use of a revised liturgy.

• Elected Dean John B. Coburn of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as president of the House of Deputies.

• Amended the original resolution on abortion so it would condemn “abortions of convenience.”

THE ‘SELMA OF THE NORTH’

The Rev. James Groppi, known to Milwaukee’s Negroes as “Ajax, the White Knight,” has become the foaming cleanser with the agitating action. The militant, new-breed white priest has marched his way into national civil-rights prominence (See Sept. 29 issue, page 26).

With each daily march, more religious leaders, representing virtually all major churches, swing into line behind the fervent, messianic-minded man whose strategy matches the non-violence of Martin Luther King’s “We Shall Overcome” but whose philosophy more nearly resembles the black-power militancy of H. Rap Brown.

Groppi’s insistence on tension tactics until open housing is won has split Milwaukee’s Catholics. But the Senate of Priests of his diocese has supported him and the housing bill. The movement picked up momentum when district leaders of the three major Lutheran denominations backed lawful open-housing demonstrations.

While in Washington, D.C., to testify before the President’s Commission on Civil Disorder, Groppi—flanked by two husky youth commandos of the NAACP—called on the Johnson administration to cut off federal funds to cities that promote segregation.

Later, in a news conference held in the Rev. Edward Bauman’s historic Foundry Methodist Church in an integrated section of the capital, Groppi said he had no doubt Jesus would be marching with him. “Every march is a prayer,” the wiry priest affirmed, drawing nervously on a cigarette.

Wisconsin Methodist Bishop Ralph T. Alton, National Council of Churches representatives, and churchmen of varying stripe and hue swelled the ranks of activists hustling to the “Selma of the North.” Milwaukee, a city of 750,000 persons, 10 per cent of whom are Negro, meanwhile continued to teeter on the edge of violence.

Father Groppi’s message is that the thin cords restraining the black community and its sympathizers from open violence are about to snap.

The pugnacious priest told newsmen: “If we keep coming home with an empty bag, well …” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

N.C.C.: NEW DOLLAR DYNAMIC

“It’s time to put our money where our mouth is,” said Treasurer David B. Cassat of the National Council of Churches. A resolution adopted by the NCC General Board in Atlanta last month asserted:

“Christians cannot be content with words; they must back their words with money.”

Nothing new about that. But for the U. S. ecclesiastical elite it seems a big discovery. Sudden interest in finance as a social lever dominated the two-day General Board meeting. The board suspended standing rules to create a special five-member investment committee with power to divert at least 10 per cent of “unrestricted capital funds” into ghetto development.

The Washington Post’s William MacKaye said similar efforts by denominations aim to donate money to Black Power groups in major cities “virtually without strings attached.”

How much of the NCC’s $25 million annual budget will go to the ghettoes once initial enthusiasm wears off is anyone’s guess. With designated contributions increasing, the “unrestricted” NCC funds are a fading asset. The NCC again this year must borrow to meet operating expenses. At first, the board ordered only “high risk” ghetto investments, but this requirement was made optional the next day as the NCC cast a wistful eye on federally insured investments.

Also before the board was a proposed policy statement sanctioning economic boycott “to secure justice.” Lawyer William P. Thompson, United Presbyterian stated clerk and a member of the General Board, pointed out that the statement, if it urged member denominations to boycott, might run afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibits combinations in restraint of trade. The board voted to ask a reaction from NCC communions before it decides.

A report to the board brought out the fact that last December’s NCC General Assembly, held in Miami Beach at an estimated cost of $450,000, has proved to be an embarrassment. “There was for many in attendance something rather incongruous about meeting in luxurious surroundings to discuss the plight of victims of poverty,” the report said.

NCC officials insist, meanwhile, that income is insufficient to cover the $35,000 required annually to publish the Religion in Communist Dominated Areas newsletter. Accordingly, Managing Editor Blahoslav Hruby’s salary was slashed in half this past summer when he refused a purportedly temporary offer of an additional part-time position to take up the slack. After a bit of a hassle on financing, the board reaffirmed, in a unanimous voice vote, a June resolution to continue publication. RCDA’s future is still bleak, however, without outside financial support.

Between budgetary battles, the 147 board members (out of 257 eligible) who registered for the Atlanta meeting expressed support of open-housing ordinances in Milwaukee and elsewhere but stopped short of endorsing the militant priest James Groppi. They also urged a halt to the bombing of North Viet Nam and an appeal to the United Nations or some “other international agency” to take up the question of possible steps toward peaceful settlement of the war. Another resolution commenting on current public-assistance bills before Congress detected adverse attitudes toward the poor. A policy statement urged legislation to curtail severely the sale and possession of firearms.

RITES MAKE WRONG

The worship mood was “early Christian.” The congregation, mostly young Roman Catholic adults, encircled a second-floor apartment living room in Highland Park, New Jersey. A Rutgers University student distributed sixteen crystal glasses carefully filled with St. Emilion 1959 while another passed a wooden tray containing quartered slices of whole wheat bread. The celebrant, an ebullient 40-year-old priest with neatly combed black hair, explained that the rite was not the means by which forgiveness was granted but rather the “celebration of the fact that we are already forgiven through Christ.”

The sins of the Rev. George Hafner’s flock—who have been attending the impromptu Masses embellished with guitar-accompanied folk songs and free prayer—may be forgiven, but Hafner apparently is not. His diocese has suspended the priest, who until recently was assistant at St. James Church in nearby Jamesburg.

Being stripped of authority to offer Mass and hear confessions—and threatened with excommunication if he does not repent—bothered the determined clergyman not at all. He responded by blasting his church for “narrow thinking” and told his bishop, “You can’t cut us off from God.” The unusual services, kept “underground” for a year, are part of the Christian Laymen’s Experimental Organization in the Diocese of Trenton.

School-Aid Tactics

New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, who is getting increasing attention as a dark-horse candidate for president, said he would support repeal of the present state constitution’s ban on state aid to church schools.

But Rockefeller had a condition: the Constitutional Convention must let New Yorkers decide separately on the school-aid question when they vote next month on a new state constitution. But the convention didn’t split the issues on the ballot, meaning Protestants and Jews who oppose such aid must vote down the entire constitutional reform.

Under deadline pressure, the convention passed a ban on state funds for “general academic buildings for non-public elementary and secondary schools.”

In predominantly Roman Catholic Rhode Island, the Superior Court ruled unconstitutional a 1963 law requiring cities to lend science, mathematics, and language texts to private-school students. The attorney general plans to aid an appeal to the state Supreme Court.

Another free-wheeling group of Catholics who call themselves “The People” was reprimanded by Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle, archbishop of Washington, D. C., for “borrowing chapels” in the capital area for “roving Masses.” The cardinal also censured the group, said to number more than 400 persons, for using drums and electronic instruments.

Informal house meetings are symbolic of a rising tide of liturgical renewal in which the Catholic Church is awash. Groups of all sorts and sizes, searching for more personal religion, are springing up spontaneously, often unknown to one another. Evidence of the strength of the movement was seen at the recent National Liturgical Conference in Kansas City, which was attended by 11,000 persons.

“Which will it be, anarchy or approval?” asked delegates, pointing to a critical junction in liturgical renewal. Will new forms be developed with the bishops’ approval and blessing or as “liturgical undergrounds,” illegal and unauthorized experiments that could produce “liturgical anarchy” in worship? Even church officials who warn against clandestine experimentation see liturgical reform in the small, worshiping community as a movement whose time has come. The thaw of frozen ritual quickened when Vatican II authorized a simplified Mass.

Last June U. S. bishops submitted an English translation of the Canon of the Mass to the Vatican, but by the end of last month approval had not been granted. Insiders believe snags have developed. But in Canada, bishops authorized interim translations in English and French for the Mass, beginning October 1.

In an unprecedented move at the liturgy conference, the Rev. David Bowman, the first Catholic priest on the staff of the National Council of Churches, asked U. S. religious leaders to permit intercommunion among all Christians during next year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The board approved, 18 to 1.

Curiously, some Protestants—particularly Presbyterians—appear to be moving toward Roman worship characteristics. Yale’s theologian Roland Bainton, a leading church historian, notes many Presbyterian ministers now turn their backs on the congregations, some churches of the Calvinist tradition are installing crucifixes, and some choirs sing entire hymns in Latin.

Hafner’s liturgical mutations in New Jersey bumped against opposition from his superior, Bishop George Ahr, who threatened him with excommunication for inciting “scandal and schism.”

After thirteen years at St. James, Hafner resigned to take a part-time job as an anti-poverty worker. The rebel priest says he feels “impelled by the Spirit of Jesus” to continue impromptu Masses—with or without the hierarchy’s consent.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

MISSIONS: MOTHBALLS OR MANDATE?

Roman Catholic missionaries should pack up their bags, dismantle the missions structure, and start “humanizing” mankind through secular evolution. The era of the foreign missionary is gone forever. Missionary, go home!

Such were the themes of a Catholic University missions expert who addressed 1,000 delegates representing more than 200 American Catholic mission-sending societies during the Mission Secretariat’s meeting in Washington, D. C., last month.

But the Rev. Ronan Hoffman, associate professor of missiology, hardly had popped the upsetting words before another speaker sharply disagreed and championed a more traditional view of Roman evangelism.

“The Christian missionary effort should not be dismantled but greatly intensified … to assist in the conversion of men to God in Christ and to gather them together into the one Church.” So said Catholic convert Avery Dulles, professor of systematic theology at Woodstock (Maryland) College and son of the late Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

The debate sounded curiously like the current forensics among Protestants: What is evangelism? Is everything the Church does, per se, evangelism?

Hoffman apparently thinks so. In suggesting that the traditional goals of the missionary movement are passé, he called for the laity, rather than religious missionaries and clerics, to assume an ever-increasing missionary role. But the mission, he said, is the evolution of human society. That makes evangelization—including propagating the faith, converting pagans, and bringing the benefits of Christianity to a non-Christian culture—not only unnecessary but actually undesirable.

In turn, Dulles pointed out huge areas of the globe where the Gospel has not yet penetrated. And although he agreed with his colleague that “ours is a revolutionary era,” he cautioned, “I should be very much afraid of any revolution which attempted to achieve the true good of humanity apart from the knowledge and love of God in Jesus Christ.”

BALANCED BAPTISTS

The Progressive National Baptist Convention, a Negro group that held its sixth annual meeting in Cincinnati last month, has seemingly hit that delicate balance between the personal demands of the Gospel and the Christian’s responsibility to society.

The convention included a workshop on civil rights and an anti-Viet Nam address by the PNBC’s best-known pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But it ended with a foreign-missions rally at Zion Baptist Church in the predominantly Negro community of Avondale, scene of the summer’s race riots. Some $14,000 was raised for missionaries. And the convention voted to participate with Southern Baptists and others in the Crusade of the Americas evangelistic drive, a step the American Baptist Convention is unwilling to take.

Zion Church’s Rev. L. Venchael Booth was one of the leaders in pulling the Progressive Convention out of the huge, socially conservative National Baptist Convention, Inc. The soft-spoken Booth, now executive secretary of the 516,400-member denomination, says his group left the NBC because “we wanted to be cause-centered rather than political. We wanted to take away the lure of church office.”

Booth, called an “Uncle Tom” by Cincinnati Negro militants, said Progressive churches are “evangelistic with a social emphasis—as could be expected of a minority group. We believe you begin with individual salvation and then show that salvation has taken place in group activities.” He says he preaches for decisions in his church.

JAMES L. ADAMS

The Legitimacy Of Biblical Criticism

The New Testament and Criticism, by George Eldon Ladd (Eerdmans, 1967, 222 pp. $3.95), is reviewed by David H. Wallace, professor of biblical theology, California Baptist Theological Seminary, Covina.

For more than a century the battle over the legitimacy and necessity of biblical criticism raged. Now it is all over, except among a rear-guard sector of Protestantism that is either openly hostile or else uneasily querulous about the whole venture. Dr. Ladd, professor of New Testament exegesis and theology at Fuller Seminary, attempts in this volume to redefine the word “evangelical” so as to secure for biblical criticism a rightful place within the spirit of this adjective.

The eight chapters endeavor to confirm the central thesis that “the Bible is the Word of God given in the words of men in history.” The introduction views the rationalistic criticism of the radical school as motivated by metaphysical, not scientific or historical, considerations. Therefore criticism itself is neutral; its acceptability is determined by the presuppositions that animate it.

The first chapter asserts that the Bible is properly called the “Word of God” in that it faithfully discloses God’s saving acts in history plus their authoritative interpretation. That is, divine event plus interpretation yields revelation. Chapter 2 is a statement of the nature of historical criticism: it involves evaluation, sifting, analysis, and scrutiny, not negative judgments against the Bible. Ladd swiftly reviews the history of criticism as stemming from the Enlightenment, and discusses its rationalistic origins. Last, he shows the positive results of the historical-theological method, which is not merely tolerable but mandatory for all competent study of sacred Scripture.

Textual criticism is the subject of the third chapter, in which the general problem of text transmission and accuracy is spelled out, especially in relation to the King James Version. The author states that “the careful reader will doubtless discover a few undetected errors in the present work” (p. 56), and the prophecy is fulfilled two pages later, where Pope “Damascus” instead of Pope Damasus is cited. Another error, in Greek, appears on page 65. Linguistic criticism shows that the Word of God is couched in human speech, which is itself the legitimate object of scientific inquiry. Language, which is a human phenomenon, is not static but dynamic, and so words change their meaning; thus scholarly criticism is necessary for ascertaining the meaning of a text. The fifth chapter deals with literary criticism, especially in connection with the Gospels. The doctrine of inspiration does not demand as a precondition any independence of one Evangelist from another; on the contrary, Luke states that he made use of other sources.

Form criticism, that bête noire of con-temporary biblical criticism, is the subject of the next chapter. Naturally the Bultmann school comes under close review. Ladd handles it deftly pointing out its weaknesses of presupposition and method and yet casting light upon its value and contribution. I wish he had said “some form critics” instead of “form critics” (p. 163), for not all form critics are driven by the foundational ideas to which Bultmann and his school subscribe, especially in respect to historical skepticism and the gospel tradition.

Reading For Perspective

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

• Christy, by Catherine Marshall (McGraw-Hill, $6.95). Readers of A Man Called Peter will heartily welcome Mrs. Marshall’s first novel, a warm and moving story set in the Appalachian hill country, scene of her own upbringing.

• Who Speaks for the Church?, by Paul Ramsey (Abingdon, $2.45). A brilliant critique of the procedures in political policy-making exhibited by the World Council of Churches at its Geneva Conference on Church and Society.

• The Davidson Affair, by Stuart Jackman (Eerdmans, $3.50). In the vivid immediacy of a news documentary, novelist Jackman grippingly re-creates the events surrounding the death and resurrection of Jesus “Davidson.”

The seventh chapter is given over to a discussion of historical criticism. Ladd shows that the mighty acts of God took place within history and are therefore historically contingent. However, this contingency does not compromise the finality of the divine act itself but affects only its human circ*mstance and expression. This chapter is a sound defense of the historical method. Ladd assesses its necessity and utility but also delineates its limitations for determining final revelational truth. That is, historical criticism by reason of its nature and method can neither confirm nor disestablish the fact that God was in Christ.

The final chapter, entitled “Comparative Religions Criticism,” is an analysis of the so-called religionsgeschichtliche Schule of Bousset, Wrade, and Reitzenstein. This hypothesis, which has been brought over en bloc into the Bultmann school, is highly vulnerable because of the cluster of uncriticized assumptions lying at its heart. This school may itself be brought under criticism by use of the very tools that many reject as destructive of the validity of the Gospel.

My greatest reserve about this timely and scholarly volume concerns not the subject nor the author’s skill but rather his persistent use of the word “evangelical.” Apart from a few comments on pages 32 and 171, Ladd gives no exact definition of the word. Wasn’t it Augustine who once commented that he knew what time was until he was asked to define it? Many positions Ladd claims as “evangelical” could be affirmed also by many modern Roman Catholic biblical scholars, or by the “chastened liberal,” or even in some cases by members of sects or heretical groups that also claim a “high” view of Scripture. Is “evangelical” used in contrast to sacerdotal (Roman Catholic) or to liberal (Harnack or Bultmann)? It seems to me that the word points to a mood generally gathered around a loyalty to the Bible but is incapable of much precision of thought beyond this. The larger and prior question of Christology is undiscussed. Can one be “evangelical” and subscribe to a failing or indifferent view of Christ? Or can one have an orthodox Christology and yet fail to meet the standards of the “evangelical”?

This book was written for those who consciously identify themselves as evangelicals in the hope of stimulating them to gain a larger and more coherent understanding of the science and art of biblical criticism. It therefore deserves a wide reading within this element of Protestantism.

Double-Barreled Attack

Enemy in the Pew?, by Daniel D. Walker (Harper & Row, 1967, 240 pp., $1.95, paper), is reviewed by William E. Boslough, chairman, division of biblical studies, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California.

Enemy in the Pew? was written “to help the layman know his job and feel its challenge.” Its author, an experienced pastor, has read much of the decade’s negative literature on the meaning and mission of the Church but still looks optimistically to the future. His preface sets the tone of the contents:

There are problems but they can be faced and handled. God is not dead. The church is not a pawn in The Secular City. Thousands of churchmen do not find the pew very “comfortable.” Many laymen have already thawed out if indeed they ever were God’s Frozen People. And the ranks of Christian churchmen have been full of people who were Honest to God long before Bishop Robinson ever thought of writing a book by that title.

There is a revolution in the Church so critical that the sincere layman must assay its demands. It calls for a shift from activity to depth, from membership to discipleship, from amorality to morality in matters of human decency. One of the problems is that the Christian layman has forgotten who he is. He has lost his self-confidence and forgotten “the dignity of being a layman.” He must become aware of his worth (Christ died for him) and his royal blood (he is a child of God). With this knowledge a churchman stands tall.

We continually tend to become entangled in the superficial:

It doesn’t seem to get through to us that it is possible for a man to receive a friendly greeting at the door, worship in a strikingly beautiful sanctuary, attend Sunday School in a pleasingly decorated and air-conditioned room, receive a friendly letter from the pastor, and a well-meaning visit from laymen without ever getting the faintest hint of what the Gospel of Jesus Christ is all about.

And so there is need for a theological orientation. Our “major problems are theological. They stem from bad religion.” The Sunday service is essential. Here “encounter with God” must take place. Laymen must become literate:

Real churchmanship involves knowledge of the Bible, familiarity with the workings of one’s denomination, awareness of the emerging world church, and an understanding of the meaning of the Christian faith for our highly technical and complex culture.

What the Church needs is men and women who think clearly and act lovingly.

This is a double-barreled book. One barrel is directed regularly at the clergyman who doesn’t know where he is headed, and the other barrel at the layman who follows blindly and unconcernedly. Walker does not write theology or methodology. The enemy in the pew is the satchel of negative ideas that govern the actions of irresponsible churchmen. Neither layman nor clergyman can read this little volume without being challenged by its clear thinking, its honest analysis of a tragic situation, and its positive approach to down-to-earth Christian responsibilities.

Can ‘God-Talk’ Be Studied?

God-Talk: An Examination of the Language and Logic of Theology, by John Macquarrie (Harper & Row, 1967, 255 pp., $6), is reviewed by William J. Samarin, associate professor of linguistics, The Hartford Seminary Foundation, Hartford, Connecticut.

What bothers me about many proponents of “modern theology” is their ambivalent attitude toward modernity. On the one hand, they declare the need to face up to a secularized world that believes in a “self-regulating cosmos” in which events are described by other events equally immanent in the world. It is for this reason that mythological thinking is obsolete and the word “God” taken from its lexicon is dead. The other side of this ambivalence is a reluctance to adopt the methodology that led to secularism: namely, empiricism—the investigation of the stuff out of which the universe is made.

This book illustrates this inconsistency in modern theology. It is a book about religious and theological language. Its author, professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary (New York), advocates a hermeneutic that is almost as modern as New York’s Museum of Modern Art. All talk of God as another being, for example, a being different in kind from ourselves, must be relegated to an anti-quarium.

But his arguments for the renovation of theology, which are linguistic arguments, are not based on the findings of scientific linguistics. The book contains no reference to any recent study in linguistics proper or in the related disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and psychology. According to Macquarrie, “those who have made language the specific theme of their researches” are philosophers! So his single chapter on “some general reflections on language” is not fact-oriented but conjectural and reflective.

To say that God-Talk is like a chair with a shortened leg is not to say it can’t be sat on. The problem it considers is crucial to theology, and the treatment of the problem is impeccable. The book reads easily in spite of the difficult nature of the subject. Macquarrie reveals himself as an astute logician who can make an excellent case for yet another application of existentialism.

The ostensible purpose of God-Talk is to deal with theological language. And this Macquarrie conceives of as a problem: “how in a human language one can talk intelligibly about a divine subject-matter,” or how one can understand what a theologian means when he talks about God, angels, immortality, sin, grace, and so on. He takes up the problem by first examining how Bultmann, Barth, and Tillich solved it. Their weaknesses demand a better understanding of the nature of language, and particularly of theological vocabulary. For him this means appreciating the context of a discourse—that it involves something said by someone, to someone, about something. The seed of existentialism is planted here, and it bears full fruit in a stimulating discussion of the implications of “linguistic philosophy” (which is philosophy and not linguistics!).

This treatment of religious language is not all in abstract language. One chapter deals with its varieties as exemplified in a specific writing of St. Athanasius: De Incarnatione. And three chapters deal with three modes of expression found in religious language: mythology, symbolism, and analogy. Each of these contributes, the author says, to our understanding of the ultimate nature of things, but analogy is crucial.

If this book were truly about “how” people talk about the divine and what they “mean” when they use words like sin, it would be read by those linguists and anthropologists, even “secular” ones, who are interested in the way humans use language. But God-Talk cannot be recommended to them, because it is, fundamentally, an argument for the validity of religious faith. It is a book in the field of apologetics. These are the author’s own words: In “faith” there can be no certitude, but “the more we can show that God-talk has a coherent logic, the more it is shown that in God is a reasonable faith.”

However, Macquarrie would not like it said that he was advancing another argument for the existence of God, for he rejects the possibility of establishing the “truth” of faith on the basis of empirical arguments. Yet this is precisely what he seems to be doing. His thesis is that human language reveals a cognitive function: it shows that man perceives something about the universe (about being) that is otherwise unknown and unknowable. He would reject the reductionism of secular science, asserting that “man is the ontological entity, because he not only has being, like any other entity, but has his being disclosed to him, so that he has the potentiality to become the being to which Being as such manifests itself, gives itself and entrusts itself. ‘God’ is the religious name for Being as experienced in a faith-awakening revelation.”

But Macquarrie cannot escape the dilemma he so much wants to avoid. If there is anything at all true about language, it is that it is empirical: we hear and use it. In the final analysis, a linguistic-existential understanding of religious beliefs must be empirical. And although we learn much from philosophical exercises like the one demonstrated by this book, we would be a lot better off if we started with a franker appraisal of the empirical foundations of religious phenomena.

From The Unconscious Depths

The Face of the Deep: The Religious Ideas of C. G. Jung, by Charles Bartruff Hanna (Westminster, 1967, 203 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Alvin Quall, professor of education and philosophy and director of graduate studies, Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington.

Dr. Charles B. Hanna, a practicing psychiatrist, has taken key concepts from six of C. G. Jung’s writings and has analyzed them in terms of theological considerations. The theme of The Face of the Deep is that man has failed to use the resources available through his unconscious. To be fulfilled, man must draw from the depths of his being, which consists not only of that which presently impinges upon him but also of a collective unconscious (racially inherited psychic material that is present in the individual unconscious) that profoundly affects what he is and what he may become.

Jung used the term “the powers” in his conception of God; these “powers” go beyond the consciousness of man and show themselves in the events of a person’s life. In dealing with God and the God-image, Jung expresses a faith that God is not only far away but also omnipresent.

To describe “God and the Dawn of Consciousness,” Jung uses much symbolism. Here his approach will be rather unacceptable to those who hold a conservative view of the Scriptures, for he refers to records prior to the creation account in Genesis and frequently speaks of “myth” in describing monotheism.

The Face of the Deep criticizes man’s attempt to gain a rational understanding of salvation. Jung believed that man is too scientific in his approach to the understanding of sin and of the means by which one may be redeemed from guilt.

The book emphasizes that man should give attention to the mysteries that undergird his being, for only in this way can he truly know God and become a completely “whole” person.

Taking The Race Question To Heart

The Segregated Covenant, by William A. Osborne (Herder and Herder, 1967, 252 pp., $5.95), and Black Power—White Resistance, by Fred Powledge (World. 1967, 282 pp., $6.95), are reviewed by Richard L. Troutman, professor of history, Houghton College, Houghton, New York.

When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, many Americans heaved a sigh of relief. The ten years since the Supreme Court decision banning segregation in public schools had been filled with boycotts, marches, demonstrations, and not a little violence. Now the Negro had his rights, and America could return to business as usual.

But the race issue would not down, and the Negro revolution that began in 1955 when Mrs. Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give her seat on a bus to a white man has now grown to the point where it is undoubtedly America’s most painful problem.

In The Segregated Covenant William Osborne describes the role played by the Roman Catholic Church in breaking down segregation in areas where it exercises a dominating influence—churches, schools, and hospitals. Osborne, a professional sociologist, is especially concerned with the efforts of the church ince the announcement by the American bishops at their historic 1958 meeting that “the heart of the race question is moral and religious” and that “segregation cannot be reconciled with the Christian view of our fellow men.” This is a more forthright position, by the way, than many Protestants have taken.

As Osborne points out, however, it is one thing for the hierarchy to state the official position of the church and quite another for the membership, north and south, urban and rural, to respond in practice. Officially, all Catholic institutions everywhere in America are open to Negroes, but population trends have resulted in “more de facto segregation in Catholic parishes than ever before.” And the Catholic response to discrimination in jobs, public accommodations, and housing, even on the part of bishops and clergy, has been halting.

One leaves this book with the impression that whatever progress the Catholic Church has made on the race issue is the result of factors external to the church. Osborne emphasizes that the church moved only after the federal government and the civil-rights movement had created a climate favorable to action.

One would think that in a book on race relations the opinions of Negroes themselves would be important; but virtually none are presented in this book.

It is the wide gulf between words and action that troubles Fred Powledge in Black Power—White Resistance. Whites will not enjoy this book. The author, a native Southerner and a free-lance writer, lays bare the paternalism and hypocrisy that have characterized white response to this “new civil war.”

Powledge is an angry young man. He is angry because the North has adopted the South’s favorite trick, tokenism, as “an excellent device for keeping the neck of the Negro firmly under foot of the white man while allowing the white man to proclaim his belief in tolerance.” He is angry about the way the war on poverty (“the war on poor people”) has been handled, and judges it a “widespread failure” unless the maximum feasible participation of the poor becomes a reality. And he is angry with those liberals who think that “sweet reason” is sufficient to disarm those who frustrate the Negro’s struggle for equality.

Powledge is also a pessimistic young man. He fears that if social change is to come to America, “it is to be ushered in not by sweet reason … but quite possibly by more violence and hatred.” In a moving passage, Powledge writes that “too many years have passed, too many hurts have settled into open wounds, too much blood has flowed, too many people are convinced now … that nothing will change.” And in view of the riots that many Northern cities have recently experienced, one may ponder his observation that America “may well already have become a nation of hate and fear … where riots will be commonplace and where parks will be empty … and where tolerance is ridiculed.”

Black Power—White Resistance is a spirited, moving book with valuable insights into the attitude of the new left. Every concerned American ought to read it.

How Many Parts To Man?

The Biblical Meaning of Man, by Dom Wulstan Mork (Bruce, 1967, 168 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by H. Leo Eddleman, president, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Is man a trichotomous, dichotomous, or unitary being? The author approaches this old question with a freshness of style and a convincing measure of logic. In chapters 1–8 he deals with his subject comprehensively. In chapter 9, however, he is less than convincing in discussing “living wholly.” This may be the result of his monastic background.

At no point does he resolve the problem of biblical terminology in First Thessalonians 5:23. Does the absolutistic nature of man’s unity still hold? Are the terms “spirit, soul, and body” used for descriptive, analytical, and possibly eschatological purposes only? Is there a chronological or temporary disruption of the unified nature of personality from the time of death till resurrection?

On the whole, however, Dom Mork gives evidence of wide reading and deep comprehension of his subject.

Paperbacks

The Dialogue of Christians and Jews, by Peter Schneider (Seabury, 1967, 196 pp., $1.95). A sensitive discussion of the relations between Jews and Christians down the centuries that faces the tragedies of the past with candor but concludes optimistically that mutual understanding will draw the two groups closer together.

God and Evil, by William Fitch (Eerdmans, 1967, 183 pp., $2.65). This study, subtitled “Studies in the Mystery of Suffering and Pain,” throws welcome light on a vexed question: Why does a God of love permit human affliction?—or, at a deeper level, Why is there irrational evil in a God-designed universe?

The Miracle of Mark, by Roy A. Harrisville (Augsburg, 1967, 128 pp., $1.50). An original treatment, written with verve and insight, of Mark’s Gospel, seen as a sermon on the mission, death, and exaltation of Christ that follows the pattern of Philippians 2:6–11; but the author runs into difficulties over Christ’s enthronement, which is absent from Mark’s ending.

The History and Character of Calvinism, by John T. McNeill (Oxford, 1967, 470 pp., $2.75). A paperback edition of a standard work on Calvin and his influence in the old and new worlds. A postscript of four pages, written for this edition, updates the bibliography and annotates source material.

Exegetical Method: A Student’s Handbook, by Otto Kaiser and W. G. Kummel (Seabury, 1967, 95 pp., $2.95). Two notable European biblical scholars aim to introduce the first-year B.D. student to the scientific methods of biblical criticism, and offer much useful information. The approach is moderately conservative—by German standards—but the twenty pages of notes are absurdly technical and off-putting.

The Hermeneutic of Erasmus, by John W. Aldridge (John Knox, 1966, 134 pp., $2.75). A joint Zürich-Richmond, Virginia publication in the series, “Basel Studies in Theology.” Hermeneutics is an O.K. term today, and this historical study may have light to shed on the current debate with the observation that “the basic criterian of any hermeneutic must be the content of the revelation itself”; but we face a different set of problems from those of the sixteenth century.