Page 6140 – Christianity Today (2024)

“At the heart of every human problem is the problem of the human heart.”

The American dream of a “Great Society” demands for its fulfillment great men and women. To multiply material comforts, health benefits, and educational opportunities does not in itself produce character and greatness. With all our prosperity and the vastness of our benefits and subsidies, what are we accomplishing? Year after year, with sickening monotony, the statistics reveal further increases in crime, vice, drunkenness, narcotics addiction, juvenile delinquency, and broken homes.

The social gospel seeks the salvation of the individual through the improvement of the social order; the uncorrupted Gospel of the New Testament seeks the improvement of the social order through the salvation of the individual. We cannot build a better society without better men and women, any more than we could build better houses without better materials and workmanship.

If the heart is right, the possibilities for adjusting human relationships and for healing wounds are unlimited. “Out of [the heart] are the issues of life” (Prov. 4:23b). “Every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit” (Matt. 7:17). And if all the evils that afflict mankind could be removed in one grand gesture, the world still would not be rid of evil. Out of the foulness of unchanged hearts the flow of evil would continue unchecked.

Basic to all virtue, morality, and integrity is the knowledge and acceptance of the law of God. If character is not grounded in the fear of God, it is on very precarious footing. Basic to the whole fabric of biblical doctrine is the original pronouncement of the law of God in the Ten Commandments. Moral relativism eliminates the absolutes, making virtue a relative matter and emphasizing how to get along with the group; the Word of God declares the absolutes—“Thou shalt … thou shall not …”—and emphasizes how to get along with God.

The world forgets too easily that God is an eyewitness to every act of cruelty, injustice, and immorality, and every wrong motive that is allowed to take shape within the heart. Ultimately his judgment will descend upon evildoers who have ignored him, and, in great fear, “they shall move out of their holes like worms of the earth …” (Micah 7:17).

“… The Lord looketh on the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7). So it was in the days before the Great Flood. “There were giants in the earth in those days … mighty men … men of renown.” That must have been a Great Society indeed. But “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:4, 5). And the judgment descended.

If it were possible to secure legislation to correct every known evil and every social injustice, even with full enforcement this would leave the heart of man unchanged and his soul unredeemed. Even if the Garden of Eden were restored for human habitation, this would not change the heart. With anarchy in the heart, the Garden of Eden would be, as it became for Adam and Eve, just another hell on earth. One hope remains: confession of sin, repentance, and the complete enthronement of the Saviour in the heart of the individual.

“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”; but this is not enough to save the soul and make one’s destiny secure. There is still a greater commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God” (Matt. 22:37). Here is the only possible breakthrough toward that better world for which all men long in their better moments. Nothing less will solve “the problem of the human heart.”

The preacher of the following sermon is Dr. Benjamin L. Rose, professor of pastoral leadership and homiletics at Union Theological Seminary (Presbyterian Church in the U. S.), Richmond, Virginia.

The sermon deals clearly and helpfully with the biblical basis of all preaching—man’s lost condition and his hope of redemption. Evangelism, which has become so watered down with universalism and reliance upon social reform and the inherent goodness of man, needs the tonic of this emphasis. The fall of man is clearly depicted; sin is revealed as rebellion toward God; and the way back to the bosom of God is shown to be through the reconciling Christ alone. The preacher is simply opening the Scriptures and allowing the Word of God to speak.

Uniting The One Church

Anglicanism in Ecumenical Perspective, by William H. van de Pol (Duquesne University, 1965, 293 pp., $6.75), is reviewed by William B. Williamson, rector, Church of the Atonement, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

As the fourth book in the Duquesne Studies, Theological Series, the editors have chosen a work that is both superficially encouraging and profoundly disquieting. On first glance, a non-Roman Christian is tempted to marvel at the freshness and frankness exhibited throughout. The author is one of the “new breed” of Roman Catholic scholars, interested in “renewal” (a word which seems to mean “reform” as Van de Pol uses it), ecumenical activities, and Christian unity, as well as in a position he refers to as “the full riches of the Gospel as they are found in the whole Bible” (p. 253). Significantly enough, Professor van de Pol writes from a background that included twenty-two years as a member of the Dutch Reformed and Lutheran churches and twenty years as a communicant of the Church of England prior to his reception into the Roman (the editor puts the word “Roman” in brackets in his preface) Catholic Church. It is indeed encouraging to find a “convert” who speaks well of his former brothers, with respect for their beliefs and practices. His good will comes through despite a translation that is not always smooth. How the editor who claims that the text was “carefully revised” missed the long, unclear, and poorly structured first sentence could well be discussed by the publisher.

To those who hold a New Testament and thus primitive doctrine of the nature of the Church as a dynamic, inspired institution, the author’s emphasis on the resolution of the right relation between the Church and the Gospel will be welcome. He says, “The Church herself has a place in the Gospel; in other words, her inmost nature cannot be understood except through the Gospel. On the other hand, the Gospel sounds only within the Church.… The Church and the Gospel postulate each other …” (p. 21). Many will agree with Van de Pol that Christian reunion awaits a new and complete “desegregation” of the Church and the Gospel. In addition to the sympathetic treatment he gives to the nature of the Church, the author quite rightly admits to “the positive value of the reformation” (p. 252 f.) and to the need for dialogue not “chained to a priori conditions and restrictions” (p. 223), and notes that “no single church in its isolation can claim to be fully ‘catholic’” (p. 238). The reader will find excellent history (Van de Pol claims to be a phenomenologist, but he is in fact a capable historiographer), appreciation of the beliefs and practices of non-Roman Christians, and a healthy beginning toward the public self-criticism and humility which he suggests are criteria for reunion.

Unfortunately, however, Professor van de Pol’s work reveals some disquieting flaws of language and logic. He seems not to be sure of his use of “catholic” even though he plays with an analysis of the word (p. 238). For instance, he has difficulty in making up his mind on its capitalization, speaking first of “churches of the ‘Catholic’ type” (pp. 164, 232, 233) and then “of the ‘catholic’ type” (pp. 252, 253, 255), and finally dropping the quotes around the non-capitalized word on page 265. It is obvious that he intends “Catholic” to mean Roman Catholic. Of logical interest is the author’s self-contradiction on his “no a priori” criterion for ecumenical dialogue. He establishes this prohibition, but his conclusion reveals that he has at least one a priori prerequisite—a particular (Roman Catholic) concept of the ministry and thus of the sacraments and church discipline (see chapter 9). Furthermore while the author raises some vitally important questions to be considered in ecumenical encounters toward reunion (pp. 190, 270), and a thoughtful “appeal to Truth” (pp. 243, 244), the reader can hardly imagine that Van de Pol expects a serious answer or any action from his own Roman communion. Indeed, even though he agrees that the witness to the Truth is in both Church and Scriptures, he holds that “every individual interpretation of Scripture must be tested by the common faith of the undivided Church” (p. 244). Only the most naïve could fail to identify “the undivided Church” as the Roman Catholic Church in Van de Pol’s prescriptions.

But, of course, Professor van de Pol has a reunion scheme. He sets the stage for it in his sketch of “the Anglican Communion according to Van de Pol.” Describing the Anglo-Catholic sense of Anglicanism as one of “great confusion,” he calls the evangelical (low church) sense “in accord with the real intention of the ‘English Reformation’ and with the actual content of the text and the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer” (p. 107, italics supplied). The author would like an end to the Catholic-Reformed tension (which elsewhere he calls “dynamic” [p. 98] and necessary), and the admission by Anglicanism that it is really a Protestant sect with one happy feature—a ministry that might be acceptable to Rome as a “connecting link between that large Communion and the community of reformational and ‘free’ churches” (p. 274). To accomplish his scheme, Van de Pol would offer that the claim of infallibility, the question of the Petrine office, and non-biblical dogmas, e.g., transubstantiation, the Immaculate Conception, and the Assumption, “can be clarified, scrutinized and interpreted” (p. 266). To Anglicans he offers a reconsideration of the Bull of Leo XIII that declared Anglican orders invalid, but he plays with words, e.g., the change of “certainty” to “doubtful” (p. 270). The Van de Pol prescription is simply this, that the “special vocation of Anglicanism” is precisely to “help the reformational and ‘free’ churches find the way to the restoration of a complete apostolic office and the apostolic succession of office … to restore completely the ancient Christian ministry in such a way that the entire unified Church [now in communion with Rome] will be able to accept it” (pp. 267, 268). Obviously, since he claims to give no “answers” nor “personal views” in chapter 9, Professor van de Pol is “putting us on.” Anglicans have often referred to themselves as a “bridge” between Catholic and Reformed traditions; however, a sincere Anglican expects any movement over the bridge to be both ways.

WILLIAM B. WILLIAMSON

Glory In Past Tense

Egypt in Color, photographed by Roger Wood, text by Margaret S. Drower (McGraw-Hill, 1964, 160 pp., $25), is reviewed by Frank E. Farrell, adult editor, Gospel Light Publications, Glendale, California.

This book is so good that I must be careful lest I sound more like a salesman than a reviewer. It is an eminently worthy successor to the handsome Greece in Colour, by C. Kerényi and R. D. Hoegler (McGraw-Hill, 1963). The beauty of this second volume’s fifty-nine superb photographs reflects in a measure the glory and grandeur of ancient Egypt. The blue of sky and river, the gold of sun-drenched temple, rock, and desert—these permeate the colorful pages as they range over the familiar landmarks. There is the gigantic hypostyle hall of Karnak introduced by the Avenue of the Sphinxes; Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple blends into towering cliffs; giant figures enigmatically smile down from Nubian temples despite their impending drowning by the High Dam of Aswan.

The text is admirably suited to the photography and points to the close relation of Egyptian art and architecture to religion—“for the whole land of Egypt and its people belonged to the gods.” The use of stone “was the answer to the problem of the search for eternity, the need for a building which would last ‘for ever, like Rê,’” the sun-god of Heliopolis. Yet “with their belief in the importance of bodily survival.” the Egyptians came to realize “the melancholy truth that despite all they could do tombs fell into decay or were robbed, and mortuary services were bound in the end to be discontinued.”

FRANK E. FARRELL

Moral Welfare State

The Enforcement of Morals, by Patrick Devlin (Oxford, 1965, 139 pp., $4 or 25s.), is reviewed by Gordon H. Clark, professor of philosophy, Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana.

In England the Wolfenden Committee recommended that hom*osexual practices between consenting adults should no longer be a crime. Lord Devlin, previously a judge of the Queen’s Bench and now a Lord of Appeal, in the book under review examines the extent to which the law is justified in enforcing morality. He opposes Mill’s libertarian principle that “the only purpose for which power ran be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” This principle is stressed by the Wolfenden Committee, in the words, “There must be a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business.”

In defending the enforcement of morality, Lord Devlin, with the detailed knowledge of his profession, notes the peculiarities of English law. hom*osexuality between males is a crime, but between females it is not. Adultery and prostitution are not crimes; indeed, prostitutes are relieved of all legal obligation to pay rent on the houses they occupy. Incest became a crime only fifty years ago. With many examples, some of which only a lawyer with a technical knowledge of tort and contract could follow, it is no wonder that the author can conclude, “In law making logic will always be defeated by necessity.”

Jurisprudence, however, ought to exhibit some degree of consistency, and Lord Devlin’s principle, the opposite of Mill’s, is: “There are no theoretical limits to the power of the state to legislate against treason, sedition, and … immorality” (p. 14). He cites the 1961 decision of the House of Lords that “there remains in the courts of law a residual power to enforce … the moral welfare of the state” (p. 88). Again, “Can then the judgment of society sanction every invasion of a man’s privacy, however, extreme? Theoretically that must be so; there is no theoretical limitation” (p. 118).

Who then determines what morality is? The author answers, Society. Accepting a thoroughly secular viewpoint, he more definitely indicates that the morality to be enforced is whatever twelve jurymen can agree upon. At present, juries cannot be persuaded to prohibit prostitution, they can be persuaded to prohibit hom*osexuality between males, and they insist that a man must support the wife he divorces for adultery. Furthermore, Muslims residing in England must forego polygamy, and Jews must not open their shops on Sunday. Of course, this does not interfere with the freedom of religion, for there is a sharp distinction between religion and morality, and these moral impositions have no religious basis—they are simply the present decisions of Society.

This theory is, of course, totalitarianism. God is ignored; Society is supreme; individualism is abhorred; morality is relative; and religion, defined by the state, is reduced to a triviality that ought to have no political or social implications. Would it not be highly immoral to vote for or against a candidate on the ground of his religion? England is not the only land in which important judges enunciate the secularism of common opinion. And while in theory Christians may believe that God is supreme, they must in practice recognize that Society has the power, if not the right, to enforce every invasion of a man’s privacy, no matter how extreme. Heil Hitler!

GORDON H. CLARK

As Seen From The Press Box

The Deacon Wore Spats: Profiles from America’s Changing Religious Scene, by John T. Stewart (Holt, Rinehart and Winsion, 1965, 191 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by James Daane, assistant editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The author of these profiles of American religious life is himself a man of many profiles. An ordained Methodist minister who served Methodist and Congregational churches for more than twoscore years, Stewart also taught English and history in high school and junior college, served as area director of the Farm Security Administration during World War II, and was for many years religious editor of the St. Louis Dispatch. His salty book, brilliantly written, will fascinate anyone interested in America’s religious situation from the turn of the century, when the deacon wore cutaway and spats, until the present.

Stewart claims to write as a newspaper man. “I had to tell it the way it was,” he says, “without fear or favor, and most of this book could not have been written except by the reporter in me. It is all factual. I was there.”

Stewart’s book is largely factual and fair, though his own—rather liberal—theology shines through, for on his own avowal he is not a man without religious passion. With the color and excitement that came from being there, Stewart presents his personal account of the days of William Jennings Bryan, of the early athletic revivalists and the tobacco-chewing evangelists, of Pike, Fosdick, Peale, Martin Luther King, and many others. He compares Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, and describes the changes that have occurred in both the theology and the pulpits of the American church.

While one could wish for a similar book by a minister-reporter of a more conservative theological turn, many of Stewart’s assessments are worth pondering. After asserting that in the early 1900s preaching was the first business of a minister, he continues, “The ministry becomes more and more specialized, like medicine and advertising copy, and few general practitioners are left who find their chief satisfaction in the pulpit. (This is the biggest change I have seen in the practice of the old profession.) More young men and women are going to theological seminaries, but the seminaries are turning out fewer preachers. And the members of the younger generation of pastors with churches do not really enjoy preaching; they kiss it off as a quaint chore.” Further, “The current movement for ‘more participation by the laity in church life’ really means that ordained ministers are expendable. They may serve but they cannot lead.”

The Blake-Pike proposal, which, says Stewart, covered the waterfront and whose details are as familiar as the ringing of church bells, lost its blaze and by 1962 was already only a flicker. Speaking of the ecumenical movement as a whole, he says, “The movement for church unity is now in the doldrums. The practical difficulties have proved to be a thousand times more formidable than was foreseen in the recent burst of enthusiasm.”

On sermons, Stewart, who heard many as a reporter, says this; “The tragic sense of life is missing from most American preaching.… Expounding Bible texts and themes is not every man’s dish. In too many sermons the argument bogs down in what might be called the fine print at the bottom of the page.… In most city churches, large and small, the religion editor in search of his story finds that, increasingly, the sermon counts for less and less.… Sermons have no cutting edge that might prick an uneasy conscience or balloon of pride. Some I have heard sounded like edited tape recordings of sessions in pastoral counseling. The language was a jargon of amateur psychoanalysis plus Pollyanna.” Stewart then gives examples he took down verbatim and adds, “It would be fun to see a national contest arranged to bring forth new hymns of the Christian faith expressing this gibberish.” A conservative churchman reading Stewart will have a haunting feeling that the kind of theology Stewart appears to be committed to has made a fair-sized contribution to the situation which even he deplores.

We smile at the cutaway and the spats, but maybe the deacon who had a preacher with a message had something to celebrate. And I suspect that I am here touching an idea that can’t be just kissed off.

JAMES DAANE

The Cross Has Many Faces

The Cross in the New Testament, by Leon Morris (Eerdmans, 1965, 454 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Richard C. Oudersluys, professor of New Testament language and literature, Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan.

The immediately impressive thing about this book is the magnitude both of the subject and of the treatment. The author sets for himself the formidable task of surveying the teaching of the New Testament on Christ’s atonement. Beginning with the Gospels and ending with the Apocalypse, Dr. Morris interrogates each book for its contribution to the subject. Along the way he engages in competent discussion with modern scholars and their findings, not hesitating to express courteous, scholarly assent or dissent with their exegetical findings. The expositions are replete with important word-studies, insights into biblical metaphors, and helpful summaries of the conceptual contribution of each New Testament writing.

Equally impressive are the conclusions Morris draws from his exegetical findings. There is in the New Testament doctrine of the Atonement considerable variety as well as substantial unity, and Morris seeks to do justice to both. While he finds the unity in fourteen principal points of agreement (pp. 364–93), full importance is given also to the individual view of the New Testament writers (pp. 394 ff.). He finds considerable more evidence for the substitutionary view of Christ’s death than most modern scholars allow, and he contends that this substitution is at the heart of what the New Testament says about the Atonement (p. 404 f.).

In regard to theories of the Atonement, Morris contends only for “a decent humility in this matter” (p. 401). Narrow partisans of particular views are gently rebuked. “The atonement is too big and too complex for our theories. We need not one but all of them, and even then we have not plumbed the subject to its depths” (p. 401). The book closes with full registers of authors, subjects, and Scripture references, and a short classified statement of all the New Testament references to the death of Christ, borrowed from Dr. Wilbur M. Smith.

This is the kind of book the evangelical reader has come to expect from Dr. Morris. It is a model of clarity, biblical scholarship, and balanced, conservative theology. Here is unfolded the meaning of the Cross in the New Testament for the Church then and now. One matter of methodology concerns me, and that is this kind of concentration upon the Cross in separation from the Resurrection of Christ. Even in a scholarly study, is it biblical to view the Cross from a pre-Easter standpoint? From his theology of the Cross it is obvious that Dr. Morris does not take such a standpoint, but I found myself wishing that he had stressed more the significance of the Resurrection for the total view of the Atonement, thereby illuminating for us those eschatological perspectives so important to our redemption and to the reality of the Church.

RICHARD C. OUDERSLUYS

Verse And Verse

Poems of Inspiration and Courage, by Grace Noll Crowell (Harper and Row, 1965, 214 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Calvin D. Linton, dean of arts and sciences, The George Washington University, Washington, D. C.

In every age there is a body of widely popular poetry that serves a mass need: to say ordinary things better (or at least more memorably) than casual utterance does. There are, loosely speaking, two kinds. Pope spoke of one: “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.” This is poetry that gratifies the mind by intellectual agility, rhetorical skill, syntactical competence, verbal felicity. Even more popular is the second kind, poetry that does the same thing for the emotions—what oft is felt but not often so well dressed in imagery, rhythm, rhyme, and so forth. It is almost always a better seller than great poetry, when it is new. (Quarles was much more popular than Milton in the seventeenth century.) It is almost always poetry of “the middle range”—standard prosody, standard rhymes, standard diction, standard values. It is “Trees” (as compared, say, to “Prufrock”). It is decent, quotable (Gray’s “Elegy” is the most quoted poem in the language), and usually quite pleasant. Just like James Whitcomb Riley. It makes no demands the average sensibility is not equipped to supply.

None of this is meant to be derogatory, simply definitive. The verse of Mrs. Grace Noll Crowell is of the sort described. For example: “I shall store within my soul today/ Some precious sunny bit of cheer/ In case tomorrow’s clouds be gray,/ Its wind blow cold, its leaves be sere.…” Or “We come to God by devious ways,/ And who am I to say/ That the road I take is the only road,/ My way, the better way.” Many of her most popular poems are descriptive, seeking the kind of freshness of vision of ordinary things which reminds one of W. H. Davies. “The poplar tree at the garden gate/ Reaches through moonlight, straight and tall,/ A great star quivering at its tip/ Like molten fire ready to fall.” A good deal is simply metrical exposition: “The preparation of an evening meal/ By any woman, anywhere, may be/ A ceremony beautiful to see.”

The present volume is an anthology of the best pieces contained in some thirty-six of her previous publications. Her many readers will surely, in the words of Faith Baldwin, “be grateful that someone has put in words for them what they themselves must often think.”

CALVIN D. LINTON

Book Briefs

No Rusty Swords, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Harper and Row, 1965, 384 pp., $4.50). A volume of collected writings, both theological and autobiographical, by the author of The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together.

Conquering, by Wesley H. Hager (Eerdmans, 1965, 110 pp., $2.95). Practical, evangelical sermonettes.

Did Jesus Rise From the Dead?: A Lawyer Looks at the Evidence, by Albert L. Roper (Zondervan, 1965, 54 pp., $1.95). A lawyer aims to prove the resurrection of Christ by examining only the evidence in John’s Gospel as it appears in the Amplified version of the New Testament. The jacket claims the author “does not leave it all to faith alone,” and thus “makes the Bible narrative applicable to today.” Well-meant confusion.

Learning to Worship, by Edna M. Baxter (Judson, 1965, 255 pp., $3.95). A book dedicated to what few churches teach, on the assumption perhaps that worship comes naturally. Even if worship is more caught than taught, they who project the influence should know what they are doing. A good book.

Word and Redemption: Essays in Theology 2, by Hans Urs von Balthasar (Herder and Herder, 1965, 175 pp., $3.95). A great Roman Catholic theologian writes theology in the grand style, i.e., with religious passion.

The Kingdom of the Cults, by Walter R. Martin (Zondervan, 1965, 443 pp., $5.95). Though the author does not believe Seventh-day Adventistism is among the cults, he gives it extensive treatment in an appendix in an effort to do it justice and set the record straight.

Christian Faith and the Church, by H. Jackson Forstman (Bethany Press, 1965, 190 pp., $3.50). An interesting theological writing, some of whose theological supports may be seriously questioned.

Psychology and Religion: An Introduction to Contemporary Views, by G. Stephens Spinks (Beacon, 1965, 221 pp., $4.95). A study of the psychology of religion in this century with special attention to Freud and Jung.

Faith and the World, by Albert Dondeyne (Duquesne University, 1965, 324 pp., $5). A Dutch Roman Catholic probes the significance Christianity ought to and could have in the whole of human life and history. Recommended reading.

Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, by John T. Noonan, Jr. (Harvard University, 1965, 561 pp., $7.95). The first account of the growth of the church’s doctrine from the first century to the present, the forces shaping it, and its potentiality for development.

Gospel Spirituality, by B. M. Chevignard, O. P. (Sheed and Ward, 1965, 183 pp., $3.95). In an age that tends to externalize religion, Father Chevignard shows the meaning of Christianity for the inner life.

Paperbacks

Jews and Christians: Preparation for Dialogue, edited by George A. F. Knight (Westminster, 1965, 191 pp., $2.45). Although this assessor must dissent at one or two crucial points, these are brilliant essays (the most brilliant: Jacob Jocz’s “The Advantage of the Jew”) that rightly hold to the thesis that an authentic Christian theology must include a theology of Israel, since this is an essential ingredient of a theology of Christ. Highly recommended to all thinking Christians.

On Edge, by Jim Crane (John Knox, 1965, 80 pp., $1.25). Humorous cartoons with a satirical bite. Most have appeared previously in Motive and the Evergreen Review.

Many Dimensions, The Place of the Lion, and Shadows of Ecstasy, by Charles Williams (Eerdmans; 1965; 269, 206, and 224 pp.; $1.95 each). Unusually perceptive novels of the glory and terror of life, by an extraordinary author who deserves to be more widely known.

Repentance unto Life: What It Means to Repent, by J. Kenneth Grider (Beacon Hill, 1965, 80 pp., $1). Popular and substantial discussion of repentance by a Nazarene Wesleyan Arminian.

Architecture and the Church, by the Commission on Church Architecture of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (Concordia, 1965, 104 pp., $3).

Creation and Fall and Temptation (one volume), by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Macmillan. 1965, 128 pp., $.95). Provocative reading that will provoke in more ways than one.

The New Creation as Metropolis, by Gibson Winter (Macmillan, 1965, 152 pp., $.95). “The servant Church is the fellowship of those who are conscious of their freedom as men to constitute the future.… The sphere of religious obedience shifts from the religious organization to the historical decisions of mankind.”

Theology for Everyman, by John H. Gerstner (Moody, 1965, 127 pp., $.39). An evangelical, compact systematic theology. Lucid and biblically grounded.

Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe, introduction by Clyde S. Kilby (Moody, 1965, 256 pp., $.89). An edition of the famous novel that includes many of the Christian elements found in the original but omitted in later editions.

The advocates of the new morality mistakenly think modern man has outgrown moral injunctions

Between the old and the new morality the most striking difference is the novel teaching that no act, whether murder, incest, adultery, denial of the faith, or any other, is always wrong. In his Christian Morals Today, Bishop John A. T. Robinson says, “There is not a whole list of things which are ‘sins’ per se” (p. 16). Any action can be an expression of agape (love) in the right situation.

Bishop Robinson admits, however, that he cannot conceive of situations in which rape and cruelty to children would be expressions of love. This is clearly a serious defect in a morality built on the principle that no act is always wrong. Yet Robinson clings to his new morality and papers over the defect by saying that Christians are persistently unable to conceive of situations in which rape and cruelty to children would be right and that “they [rape and cruelty] are so persistently wrong for that reason” (p. 16; italics his). If Christians could conceive of situations in which such acts would be right, then—and there—they would be right. This is the novel and distinguishing characteristic of the new morality: any conceivable act is morally right if the situation is “right.” It is also the most shocking and, as we shall see, the most deceptive characteristic of the new morality.

This is the version of Christian ethics currently caught by Bishop Robinson, Douglas Rhymes, Joseph Fletcher, and others. In a recent youth conference at Elmhurst College, Professor Fletcher told a group of young people, most of high school age, that neither rape, nor incest, nor any other sexual act, nor indeed the denial of one’s Lord or the violation of the First Commandment by having another god, is necessarily and always wrong. He urged that when the situation is right, any of these is morally right.

This new view of Christian morality rests on the denial of the existence of any permanently binding biblical moral laws and ethical principles. There are, it is insisted, no Christian moral standards that are always valid and of continuing moral force. Robinson says bluntly, “There are no unbreakable rules,” and therefore no “list of things which are ‘sins’ per se” (p. 16). In the words of Fletcher, Christian morality is not a “prescriptive ethic” whose binding moral standards prescribe in advance that certain actions are right and others wrong. Only in the existential situation can the moral quality of any act be determined.

The new moralists contend that permanently binding moral laws lead to legalism. Why? Because, it is argued, an ethical principle that is always binding places the law first and the person second. When law is given this priority, the keeping of the law is said to be more important than the loving of the person. Love then loses its freedom to love the person as the situation demands. A universally binding moral law is legalistically blind to the concrete, peculiar needs of a particular person in a particular situation. A prescriptive ethic that calls for conformity to a code of binding ethical regulations deprives love of its spontaneity, its freedom to be only itself. Love then becomes blind obedience to a moral code. In thus becoming other than itself, it becomes legalistic. The exponents of the new morality reject the possibility that the divine giver of moral law might not be blind at all and might even know better what is good than an overheated couple in the back seat of a car.

This last statement, however, is not quite fair, for it is misleading. The new moralists do not believe that the biblical moral laws were really given by God. Moral laws are not regarded as the products of revelation. The moral laws and regulations found in the Bible, including the Decalogue, are only expressions of the accumulated human ethical wisdom of the past. As the deposit in the bank of man’s moral experience, biblical moral laws are said to have pedagogical, illustrative value, but no binding moral force. They are to be reckoned with and learned from, but they are not to be obeyed. If we regard them as having such character as calls for obedient compliance, we fall into legalism. Robinson says forthrightly that what Jesus taught about divorce and remarriage is not binding on us and, in fact, was not binding on the people to whom Jesus addressed his teaching. And Fletcher was equally forthright when he informed the youth conference at Elmhurst that we through our moral progress have outgrown biblical moral injunctions.

How do the old and the new morality differ? Both agree that agape demands that a man love his neighbor with a self-giving, self-sacrificial love. The new moralists claim to derive this understanding of the nature of love directly from the event of the Cross and not from such biblical statements as both define the nature of love and express its demands. But the Cross, without such definitive statements, is left undefined. Hence the new moralist’s contention that he obtains the nature of love from the bare event of the Cross is a theological sleight-of-hand. The old morality, on the contrary, insists that the nature and demands of the agape of the Cross are defined in moral and ethical biblical principles and laws that are morally binding. These moral laws and principles are God’s own definition of agape (of what he is!) and not the provisional accumulation of man’s moral wisdom acquired through experience, devoid of the quality of a moral imperative, and subject to the modification of further moral wisdom acquired through additional moral experience. Because they are revelatory definitions of the nature of agape, they possess binding moral force, require our compliance, prescribe in advance that some things are always wrong and some always right, and therefore do present a list of things that are always morally wrong. God has not left the nature and demands of agape so wholly undefined that no person can know what is right or wrong until, in the changing situations of life, he himself decides.

Further, the old morality differs from the new in that it recognizes that an ethic in which love is not authoritatively defined but is left to be defined by each person within the situations of life is only one step from tyranny. Though charged with a blinding legalism, the old morality sees what the new morality does not see. When the individual is left wholly to himself to decide what legitimate forms his love for another may take, he soon and often becomes a tyrant and his neighbor the victim. When love has not been codified in binding law, the lover himself becomes the law. The new moralists naïvely fail to recognize that in a world in which there is no list of sins and every man is left to himself to decide whether incest, murder, adultery, or any other act is right or wrong, his neighbor has no defense and no protection against any form of evil. If nothing is inherently wrong and any act right if only the situation is right, then everything Hitler did would in the right situation be morally commendable and proper. In the attempt to avoid legalism, the new morality deprives every man of all protection against his neighbor’s exercise of love without law. For all the vaunted claim of the new moralists to show respect to persons and give persons priority over law, the new morality exposes every man to any unbridled evil that another may claim is an act of love.

Before Christians—or for that matter non-Christians—adopt the new morality, they should take a hard look at the nature of this morality as it reveals itself in practice.

If the new morality were widely adopted, civil law would lose its moral basis and its moral right to bring any man to trial for his deeds. If no conceivable human action is per se immoral and sinful, if there is no prescriptive ethics, if no one but the person himself can decide in his own situation whether any act is right or wrong, there is no moral basis for prosecuting any man at law for any act he might commit. If agape, if the manner in which a man ought to treat his neighbor, cannot be defined and codified into a valid and binding law, then love not only has escaped an unwarranted legalism but also has lost all its obligatory force and sense of ought.

Consider too how the new morality comes to expression in the practice of those who advocate it. In Douglas Rhymes’s book No New Morality, in which he contends that the new morality is as old as Jesus, he illustrates the nature of the new morality. He tells of a boy who came to him for pastoral counsel wanting to know why he could not “have sex” with his girl friend, who “was willing.” Rhymes tells his readers that he asked the boy many questions to increase his moral sensitivity so that the boy himself could arrive at the right answer. Paganism would have had a ready answer to the boy’s problem. But as an advocate of the new morality, Rhymes had to do what he did. And he could do no more. Since the boy was in the situation, he alone could discover whether he ought to “have sex.” Not being in the situation himself, Rhymes the Christian pastor and counselor did not know the answer. As Rhymes himself says, “At the end I told him that no one could really answer this question but himself.”

Suppose the boy had sought counsel about murder, incest, hom*osexual relations, or any other act the reader can think of; Rhymes’s answer, dictated by the new morality, would have been the same. Surely the children of darkness are sometimes wiser than the children of light. The civil courts or a pagan in darkest heathendom would have an answer, but a Christian advocate of the new morality has none.

If this then is the new morality, what accounts for the attraction it holds for some clergymen and even for some seminary professors who assumedly give considerable thought to such matters? How can any Christian minister or professor of Christian ethics seriously espouse it?

By way of explanation it must be said first that after one surrenders the binding character of every biblical definitive assertion of agape in moral law and ethical principles, one is left to himself to define the nature and demands of agape. And what other place is there to do this than in the situations of life? It is the boast of a “situational ethic” that the demands of love can be discovered only in the time and place of a concrete life situation.

Yet it is precisely here that we discover the great delusion and deception that lie just beneath the surface of the new morality. The advocate of the new morality contends that any conceivable act can be an expression of love, in the right situation. But this is a statement without content. The “right situation” is left by the new moralist wholly undefined; it has no context by which it could be defined. The “right situation” is a pure abstraction. It is wholly imaginative, having reference to nothing concrete, to nothing we know or have experienced. The “right situation” exists only in the imagination, which, as Kierkegaard saw so well, is the realm of the aesthetic where an authentically ethical problem never arises. One can, for example, imagine a world where only rotten apples are good apples. But such a world no more exists than does the “right situation” in which rape or incest would be an expression of agape.

Thus the new morality with its deceptively plausible contention that any act is right when it befits the “right situation” floats in an abstract void. This is the consequence of its refusal to accept any binding definitions of the nature and demands of agape. The old morality escapes this deluding fascination with abstractionism by its recognition that the Cross and its expression of agape must, if it is to be meaningful to us, be interpreted for us. This has been done in and through the biblical moral laws and ethical principles. These are, therefore, of permanently binding moral force. As definitive of the nature and demands of agape, they prescribe some actions as always right, and some as never right and always wrong.

Science And Man’S Future

The pronouncements of distinguished scientists are often startling. An example is a proposal of Dr. Charles C. Price, president of the Americal Chemical Society, to set “the synthesis of life as a national goal” under “a separate national program” similar to those of agencies like the Atomic Energy Commission or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Speaking at the national meeting of the society in September, Dr. Price said, “We have been making fantastic strides in uncovering the basic chemistry of the life process and the key components of living systems. It seems to me that we may be no farther today from at least partial synthesis of living systems than we were … in the 1940s from a man in space.… Success could lead to modified plants and algae for synthesis of foods, fibers, and antibiotics, to improved growth or properties of plants and animals, or even improved characteristics of man himself.” According to the news service of the American Chemical Society, Dr. Price asserted that the laboratory creation of life is a timely question of great public importance to which the scientific community and the government should be giving serious consideration. “The job, he said, “can be done—it is merely a matter of time and money.”

Granted that Dr. Price’s remarks have a valid scientific basis, they bring to mind the irony of modern man. Beset with national and international problems of unprecedented complexity, living as it were on the edge of a seething volcanic crater, unable to master his own fears, frustrations, and hatreds, he contemplates the synthesizing and controlling of life itself. Dr. Price himself is rightly concerned about who would control these new processes having to do with life and for what purpose they would be controlled. And surely there is the further question: Does any man or group of men (not excluding our own nation) have the wisdom to exercise this control? One part of the world or one race shudders at the prospect of another part of the world or another race’s having such power.

To stay the progress of science is neither possible nor right. But the prospects being opened up for man, who has failed so utterly in controlling himself and who by and large remains in rebellion against the living God, are profoundly disturbing. The terrible schizophrenia of modern man lies in his accelerated scientific achievement and rapid moral deterioration. The question has long since moved from how much man can discover to whether he is capable of using his discoveries responsibly and constructively.

Yet the sovereign God who summons men to the scientific task of discovering the mysteries of nature has not yet closed the door of hope or consummated his strange work of judgment. The living God is the Redeemer of all who turn to him. Scripture offers no guarantee that God will let man go on indefinitely; on the contrary, it has clearly in view the end of all things in judgment and the establishment of a new heaven and a new earth. Meanwhile, through Christ it offers man, scientists included, rectification of the terrible imbalance in which knowledge has so tragically outrun morality. Like every other man, the man of science needs humility.

Evangelicals And Their Critics

Some ecumenists are vexed because evangelical clergymen and laymen in many denominations are increasingly interested in transdenominational cooperation in evangelism, education, and other mutual concerns. As they see it, evangelicals who are unenthusiastic about theologically inclusive ecumenism—embracing Roman, Orthodox, and Protestant (modernist, dialectical, existential) views—ought to retreat into silent isolation.

Evangelical spokesmen are caricatured as mouthpieces of fallen angels, while the ecumenists assertedly dispense the oracles of eternity. These ecumenical leaders would deny to churchmen and laymen even as individuals any conscientious expression of points of view contrary to left-wing ecclesiastical commitments. Their tactics ought not to obscure the growing political intervention of the institutional church through ecclesiastical approval of specific legislative items. CHRISTIANITY TODAY firmly insists that the institutional church has neither a divine mandate, nor competence, nor jurisdiction in such matters as these.

The fundamental flaw of contemporary ecumenism is transparently clear. A movement of Christian unity that began in evangelical transdenominational zeal to evangelize the world has resulted in a theological conglomerate in which evangelism is muffled and the evangel confused. No one alert to biblical priorities should be surprised that evangelicals will get on with this neglected task. In fact, the World Congress on Evangelism holds promise for the widespread recovery of this transdenominational mission.

Protesting Anti-Semitism In The Soviet Union

Throughout history the Jews have been persecuted as no other people. In present-day Spain there are only 3,000 Jews, whereas some centuries ago the city of Córdoba alone had 100 times that many. Today almost 43 per cent of the world’s 13 million Jews reside in the United States, where they enjoy equal rights, equal opportunity, and religious, political, and economic freedom.

Russia has the second largest Jewish contingent, numbering almost 2.5 million. It is for these Jews that deep concern is mounting among men of good will here and in other countries. Anti-Semitism is one of the darkest elements in Russian history, both Czarist and Communist, and now its cruel face is again unmasked as the Jews in Russia are denied elementary human rights and their very existence is threatened.

To speak of the Russian treatment of Jewry is not to imply that other religious groups have full religious freedom. Yet the catalogue of Jewish grievances is impressive. In 1956 there were 450 synagogues in Russia; today there are 60. For a quarter of a century, Jewish children have been denied the right of learning something of their unique literary and historical heritage. Russian anti-religious efforts seem specially directed against Jews.

The Jews and their sympathizers in the United States are calling attention to the plight of Judaism and its adherents in Russia. They have secured one million signatures on a petition they wish to present to the Soviet government—a petition calling for the right to enjoy Jewish education in all forms, the reopening of Jewish cultural institutions and the use of Yiddish and Hebrew, the free establishment of religious and cultural bonds with Jews outside the Soviet Union, and permission for Jews to emigrate from the U.S.S.R., in addition to an educational campaign directed against anti-Semitism.

The struggle to secure these rights for Jews in Russia found recent expression in a movement in Washington. Newspaper advertisem*nts appeared to enlist support, and a mass meeting was held. Men of many faiths endorsed the project, although few if any names of leading evangelicals appeared in the advertisem*nts, not necessarily because they are lacking in sympathy but perhaps because they were not asked to help.

Evangelicals everywhere should be united in opposition to anti-Semitism wherever and in whatever form it may be found. The Bible wholly condemns it. Indeed, any movement designed to perpetuate or tolerate anti-Semitism bears the mark, not of the Christ of Scripture, but of the antichrist of the Book of the Revelation. The Abrahamic covenant still stands: “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.” Let Russia face this biblical word and realize that history has time and again demonstrated its truth.

Collegiate Shoplifters

The “Back to College Issue” of Esquire is as unpleasant to read as its cover, portraying a man’s face composed of four faces, is to look at. Christians may dismiss this issue of the magazine as mere sensationalism. It is more than that. Behind the shocking façade are clinical details of the rebels on the American campus that should be heeded not just by beleaguered college administrators but also by Christians whose business it is to know what is going on.

The most disturbing article is not the one about the morally and intellectually disorganized life of non-students on the fringes of the multi-university. It is the feature story entitled, “Stealing Their Way Through College.” Taking as a point of departure the meeting of the 1,400-member National Association of College Stores in New York last May, it explores their problem with what is euphemistically called “shrinkage.” Not only the college store but also the neighborhood supermarket, bookstore, drugstore, and other smaller establishments know all too well that students steal and that they steal persistently and in large numbers. Few institutions are exempt; in great and small universities, private and public, religious and non-religious, Ivy League and non-prestige schools, the pilfering goes on. Those who shoplift are not simply campus hangers-on but students in good standing, holders of scholarships, members of fraternities, graduate as well as undergraduate students. If even a fraction of the report is true, stealing is fully as serious a campus problem as cheating.

Simply to deplore the situation is useless. It is necessary to go deeper. For this the magazine itself provides a clue on the cover and in an inside full-page illustration composed of faces of “twenty-eight people who count.” They are a strange assortment, ranging from Malcolm X, Paul Tillich, Bishop Pike, and Caryl Chessman to the comic-strip characters, “The Hulk” and “Spider Man.” The picture is one of confusion, of reality mixed with fantasy, and it points to a pathetic and moving search for truth and reality. On the campus today there is the paradox of students arguing fiercely for what they conceive to be intellectual honesty and going all out for some cause they may not fully understand, yet having set before them no ordered system of values but only a kind of moral and intellectual cafeteria.

The tragedy is that hosts of students never have had the chance to learn that integrity is indivisible. Stealing students reflect stealing fathers and mothers: witness the problems of supermarkets with thieving housewives, the prevalence of income-tax dodgers, petty smuggling by travelers, and inflated expense accounts. But students themselves must also bear their personal guilt.

Too few American youths have ever faced authentic Christian reality. Yet it is there for them to see, in some homes and communities and on the campus, as in Inter-Varsity, Campus Crusade, and some denominational campus ministries. The student world is no different from the world at large; in it God still has his minority, and out of that minority must come moral leadership for the future.

From Crisis To Crisis

The world squeezed by another major crisis last month, only to await the next one. We seem to be living in a time when crisis follows crisis with distressing regularity.

The swift succession of dramatic events relating to the Indian subcontinent was reminiscent of the Cuban missile crisis. At stake in the war between Pakistan and India was the political future of Jammu and Kashmir; China entered the turmoil on another frontier in the Indian protectorate of Sikkim. Yet out of it all emerged a ceasefire agreement engineered at United Nations headquarters and culminating in a pre-dawn appearance of Pakistani Foreign Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. The truce, coupled with Red China’s assertion that the conditions of her ultimatum to India had been met, brought at least a temporary relaxation of tension.

Both Kashmir and Sikkim are economic liabilities, but their geographic locations and political inclinations make them desirable pieces of territory for the contending powers. Behind this consideration lies the implicit ideological conflict. India is largely committed to Hinduism, Pakistan to aggressive Islam, and China to dynamic Communism.

We must commend the governments involved for coming to their senses in time to prevent the spread of the conflict and for preserving, at least momentarily, the peace of the world. The faltering United Nations gained much-needed prestige for its role in peacemaking, in good part through the efforts of its Buddhist Secretary General U Thant.

The crisis raises important questions about the future role of the Soviet Union in East-West tensions. To what extent will Soviet fear of the Chinese result in realignments? How strong would the pressures be for the Soviets to side with the West in the event of military confrontation between the free world and the Communist East? Is Communism as a viable ideological force losing momentum as a result of the growing Sino-Soviet estrangement?

One could hope for some present-day prophet with the ear of the world to utter a clear “Thus saith the Lord.” Yet Christians retain their confidence that God is sovereign over the affairs of men and of nations. Theirs is still the obligation to work for world peace. To agencies like the United Nations belongs the responsibility for initiating emergency peace measures. To Christians belongs the unchanging task of pressing the claims of Christ in every corner of the globe regardless of outward circ*mstances of peace or of conflict.

Rome And Religious Liberty

After living for centuries by the half-truth that error has no rights, the Roman Catholic Church took a forward step through the Vatican Council’s preliminary vote on the Declaration on Religious Liberty. The church now appears ready to add to its conviction that error has no rights before God, the recognition that man and every institution, including the Church, must recognize the right of error to exist between man and man.

Does a person have the right to believe and practice a non-Christian religion? Before God the answer is No; but on the horizontal line the answer is Yes, for on this level every man must allow his fellow man the right to be wrong. If one wonders why it took the Roman Catholic Church until 1965 to become what the secular press is designating as “modernized,” the answer lies in the way the Roman Catholic Church has viewed itself. Believing itself to be the true representative of God on earth, the vicegerent of Christ, and the power to which all other temporal powers are subject, it too often functioned as God and denied the right of error to exist in its presence. Since nothing is a greater terror to freedom than something that thinks itself divine, the history of the Roman church has been muddied by its use of coercion and even persecution to further its aims.

The text, approved by a 1997-224 vote as the basis for the final declaration, acknowledges that both the dignity of man and the free character of the act of faith in God are the grounds for the recognition of religious freedom; and that such freedom belongs to both individuals and groups and includes the right of the practice of religion in both private and public life and the right of its propagation. This year’s statement, which is still subject to amendments by conservatives as well as liberals, and is finally subject to promulgation by Pope Paul, declares: “It is the desire of this Vatican Council that the right of the human person to religious liberty be universally recognized by all states and be surrounded by proper safeguards.…” While the document warns that society is entitled to protection against abuses committed under the guise of religious liberty, it includes the significant provision that nothing may be done in the maintenance of public order against such abuses “for religious considerations.” Unless further “refinements” of the document take the heart out of it, the council is to be commended for taking this stand for which many Catholics and Protestants alike have long waited.

In relation to Pope Paul’s scheduled United Nations address (see News, p. 56), the Vatican Council’s preliminary vote on a religious liberty statement came at the right time. For his church still to be debating religious liberty could be embarrassing to a pope speaking before the United Nations in a world where many wars have religious backgrounds. One wonders also whether a precedent has been set for the United Nations to invite other religious leaders to make speeches before its assemblies.

“The just shall live by his faith.” Thank God for that one condition laid down for our salvation. But the seal of that faith, the evidence of its genuineness, is love and compassion for others. There is no such thing as a Christian with a right vertical relationship to God but without a right horizontal relationship to his fellow men.

One day a man asked our Lord which was the great commandment of the law, and Jesus replied: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matt. 22:37–39).

For some of us this is very strong meat. We think we love God deeply because we have an unquestioning faith in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But we look around us and find it exceedingly difficult to love some of the unlovely, cantankerous, unwashed people with whom we come in contact.

Yet it is precisely at this point that we exhibit the validating seal of our faith. When the Apostle James wrote, “As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also” (Jas. 2:26), he was in no way contradicting the Apostle Paul’s affirmation, “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast” (Eph. 2:8, 9).

It is clear as crystal that a faith content with mere affirmations is spurious, dead. True faith has a seal of its genuineness—love, concern, and action for others.

The story is told of a German church destroyed during World War II. Later, when the rubble was being cleared away, a statue of Christ was found with only the hands missing. A famous sculptor offered to restore the hands, but the officers of the church declined, saying that here was a symbol of our Lord’s dependence on the hands of his followers to serve him in loving concern and compassion for others.

How does this concern differ from that associated with the so-called social gospel? The difference is this: The latter can be an end in itself, but true Christian love and compassion is a by-product of the Gospel and a fruit of the Holy Spirit.

Our Lord illustrated our need of compassion by the story of the Good Samaritan. A man was beaten, robbed, and left wounded, unable to walk. One religious leader came along and, seeing the victim, passed by as far as possible from where he lay. Another came close, took a look, and also left the man unattended. But a despised Samaritan came, sensed the situation and the need, and did something about it; he bound up the man’s wounds, carried him to an inn on his own animal, and made full provision for the days needed for recovery.

“Which of these three, thinkest thou,” Jesus asked, “was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves? And he said, He that showed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.”

Does this make some of us uncomfortable? It should. We all too often wrap around ourselves the robes of orthodoxy while failing to exhibit love and compassion where it is so desperately needed.

The twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew gives us our Lord’s prophetic account of a coming judgment. What rivets our attention is the basis of the judgment: how men have responded to the needs of others. Here what matters is not what men have professed but how they have practiced it. The genuineness of faith is exhibited by love and compassion. Here in its stark nakedness one sees faith without works—dead, useless, spurious faith. Our Lord will recognize then—as he does now—the extent to which men are nothing more than pious frauds.

Our Lord’s depiction of this judgment scene makes plain the humility of those who serve him through their acts of mercy and the self-satisfaction of those who deny him by inaction.

The necessity of validating faith by actions of love in no way detracts from the prime necessity of faith, nor does it bypass the basic role of preaching in the ministry of the Church. Furthermore, it is our conviction that social concerns can become distorted into a humanism that has no relation to Christianity. To repeat a statement we made in another article not long ago: it seems that today the Church is often more concerned about making the prodigal comfortable and happy in the far country than about bringing him back to his Father through faith in Jesus Christ.

Where then is the dividing line between a faith validated by Christian action and social works centered in physical rather than spiritual welfare? Is not this division clearly found at the Cross? True Christian love and compassion should be a by-product of our love for the One who died for us.

It is possible to engage in all kinds of social action, not only without any Christian motive, but even to the detriment of the recipients of the action. It is also possible to call ourselves Christians but show neither love nor compassion to those who so desperately need both. Yet faith without works is dead, and social concern without spiritual concern is just as dead. Both are insidiously dangerous because they generate within us a satisfaction with ourselves that is wholly unjustified.

For twenty-five years the writer shared in the work of a large mission hospital in China. We had good buildings, good equipment, and well-trained doctors and nurses, and we tried to practice the best medicine and surgery possible in those days. But this humanitarian work was not an end in itself. In every way possible—by example, by word of mouth, by the printed page—we endeavored to preach and teach Christ as men’s basic and ultimate need. The cup of cold water was accompanied by the message of the saving Gospel. This long experience in “social work” has convinced the writer both that Christian love and compassion are an integral part of the Christian faith and that humanitarianism as an end in itself is a denial of that faith.

This is an area where Christians should search their own hearts and motives. Too often we pass by on the other side. And too often we look at human need without thinking of the need of the soul that Christ died to save. A hard orthodoxy without love and compassion is a travesty of the Christian faith. A sentimental humanism is likewise a travesty.

As Christians we must beware lest we belittle the efforts of some with whom we do not agree. After all, God is their judge. At the same time let us beware lest we deny our Lord by failing to love those about us with a love expressed in action.

I cannot believe that any doctrine of Scripture—least of all the doctrine of Atonement, which is represented in Scripture as the revelation of the innermost heart of God to man, the central and supreme manifestation of his love to the world—was ever meant to lie like a dead weight on our understanding, incapable of being in any degree assimilated by our thought. Certain it is that any doctrine which is treated in this way will not long retain its hold on men’s convictions but will sooner or later be swept out of the way as a piece of useless theological lumber. The Atonement, as Dr. John M’Leod Campbell was fond of putting it, must be capable of being seen in its own light. I grant, indeed, that the fact of the Atonement is greater than all our apprehensions of it. We are here in the very Holy of holies of the Christian faith, and our treatment of the subject cannot be too reverential. The one thing a priori certain about the Atonement is that it has heights and depths, lengths and breadths, greater than any line of ours can fathom or span. It is this which should make us patient of what are called theories of the Atonement. I do not know any one of these theories of which it can justly be said that it is unmixed error, which has not rather in the heart of it a portion of the truth, which does not apprehend some side or aspect of the Atonement which other theories neglect or have thrust into the background. Instead, therefore, of being too keen to scent error in these theories, our wiser plan will be to be ever on the outlook for an enlargement of our knowledge of the truth through them.

If I might indicate in a word what I take to be the tendency of the modern treatment of the Atonement, I would say that it consists in the endeavor to give a spiritual interpretation to the great fact which lies at the heart of our Redemption; not necessarily to deny its judicial aspect—for that, I take it, will be found impossible—but to remove from it the hard, legal aspect it is apt to assume when treated as a purely external fact, without regard to its inner spiritual content; and, further, to bring it into harmony with the spiritual laws and analogies which obtain in other spheres. There is the attempt (1) to find spiritual laws which will make the Atonement itself intelligible; and (2) to find spiritual laws which connect the Atonement with the new life which springs from it. I may add that this is a department of the truth in which I think that the theology of our own country [Scotland] has rendered better service to the Christian view than the theology of the Continent.

In accordance with my plan, I am led to study this subject of Atonement through Christ especially from the point of view of the Incarnation. There is an advantage in this method, for as, on the one hand, we see how the Atonement rises naturally out of the Incarnation, so that the Son of God could not appear in our nature without undertaking such a work as this term denotes; so, on the other, we see that the Incarnation is itself a pledge and anticipation of reconciliation. It is evident that such an event could never have taken place had there been no purpose or possibility of salvation, had humanity been a hopelessly ruined and rejected race. In principle, therefore, the Incarnation is the declaration of a purpose to save the world. It is more: it is itself a certain stage in that reconciliation, and the point of departure for every other. In the Incarnation, God and man are already in a sense one. In Christ a pure point of union is established with our fallen and sin-laden humanity, and this carries with it the assurance that everything else necessary for the complete recovery of the world to God will not be lacking.

A complete view of Christ’s work will include the fact that in the Incarnation a new divine life has entered humanity; will include the fact that Christ is our perfect Representative before God as the new Head of the race, and wearer of our humanity in its pure and perfect form; will include the fact of an organic relation of Christ with all the members of the race, in virtue of which he entered, not merely outwardly, but in the most real and vital way, into the fellowship of our sin and suffering and truly bore us on his heart before God as a merciful and faithful High Priest; will include the idea of a vocation which Christ had as Founder of the Kingdom of God on earth, though this vocation will embrace, not only the revelation of the Father’s character and the performance of his will among men, but also the making of reconciliation for the sins of the people; will include the fact of a holy and perfect and continuous surrender of Christ’s will to God, as an offering, through the Eternal Spirit, in humanity, of that which man ought to render but is unable in his own strength to give—the presentation to God in humanity, therefore, of a perfect righteousness, on the ground of which humanity stands in a new relation to God and is accepted in the Beloved; will include, finally, a dealing with God in reference to the guilt of sin, which is a positive entrance into the penal events of our condition and, above all, into death as the last and most terrible of these evils, in order that in these also he might become one with us and under that experience might render to God what was due to his judicial righteousness.—

Now that the Episcopal House of Bishops, meeting in Glacier National Park last month, has cleared the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California, James A. Pike, of charges of heresy, and thereby tactfully disposed of an emotionally charged issue, it may be well to examine objectively some of the bishop’s teachings to see whether they conform to the evangelical and biblical heritage of the Church.

The promoters of the so-called new theology, of whom Bishop Pike is one, herald it as a continuation of the Protestant Reformation, which brought new life and growth to the Church. If this be so, then we should expect the major themes of the Reformation to be expressed in this highly publicized approach to the basic doctrines and creeds of the Christian faith.

Two of the most important elements of the sixteenth-century Reformation were the breaking of the stranglehold of scholastic, Aristotelian philosophy on theology and the return to recognition of the Holy Bible as the authoritative source of Christian teaching and life. A brief analysis of the major theme of Bishop Pike’s book entitled A Time for Christian Candor shows that he not only disposes of the classic doctrines of the Christian faith but also clearly repudiates these two important elements of the Reformation.

The theme, as stated on page 2, is taken from the words of Paul the Apostle: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us” (2 Cor. 4:7). Its argument is presented in the form of an Aristotelian syllogism. Therefore, if we isolate the major and minor premises of the book, we can have no doubt of its meaning.

The major premise of Bishop Pike’s book is that “earthen vessels” are relative, contingent, and non-essential means of carrying the “treasure” of the Christian religion. They therefore can become outdated, irrelevant, excess luggage.

Churchmen in the meanwhile have, in this regard as in other regards, exalted the temporal as the eternal, the contingent as the final, the ad hoc as the universal, the finite as the infinite. Overlooked is the Apostle’s reminder that “we have this treasure in earthen vessels” [p. 32].

A minor premise of the book is that the classic doctrine of the Trinity is only an “earthen vessel.”

The same point applies to the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, regarded as so central to the Christian Faith that the explanation of it requires two-thirds of the lines of the Athanasian Creed … [p. 34].

The conclusion is now clear. Ergo: The classic doctrine of the Trinity is relative, contingent, and non-essential, and has indeed become outdated, irrelevant, excess luggage.

The Church’s classical way of stating what is represented by the doctrine of the Trinity has in fact been a barrier with the well educated and the less educated alike. And it is not essential to the Christian faith [p. 124].

It is further evident that the philosophical structure underlying the thought of A Time for Christian Candor is the speculative philosophy of Aristotle. In the light of the author’s early training, this is not strange. He states:

I was raised in a religious tradition which claimed to be able through scholastic philosophy, based primarily on St. Thomas Aquinas (and through him, on Aristotle), to prove the existence of God and certain other basic premises of Christianity [p. 20].

Aristotle, in dealing with any reality, distinguishes between its substance and its accidents. In general, substance refers to the permanent, underlying reality of a thing. Accidents refers to attributes that may either belong or not belong to any one thing.

These two Aristotelian categories are the focal points of Bishop Pike’s thought in this book. When he speaks of the “treasure,” he means the substance of the divine revelation. Among the many other synonyms of this term are the “absolute,” the “ultimate,” the “essential,” and the “product.” When he speaks of “earthen vessels,” he means the accidents of the divine revelation. These are described as being “relative,” “non-essential,” “secondary,” and the like. This scheme of rationalistically dissecting the Gospel is followed throughout.

This Aristotelian mold is then placed upon the textual theme of the book, Second Corinthians 4:7, and used to force from it the opposite of its true meaning. For Bishop Pike, the divine substance, or “treasure,” is a vague, subjective belief in a philosophical concept called the “Ultimate Ground of Being.”

Consciousness of being geared into the Ultimate Ground of Being, openness to the strength and joy and grace of His Presence, has enabled many boxed in by evil to survive in joy.… Persons who have known this strength and power with distressing limitations have come to greater involvement with the Ultimate Ground of their—and all being [p. 90].

The accidents of the divine revelation, or “earthen vessels,” are taken to mean not only the doctrine of the Holy Trinity but also everything else a Christian holds sacred to the faith, including the creeds, the Holy Bible, the apostolic ministry, the commandments, and the sacraments.

Anything else, whether a particular doctrinal formulation, a particular book, or books, a particular scheme of church government, a particular office or person, a particular ethical rule, a particular way of worship. None of these is an essential of the Gospel [p. 24].

But the true meaning of the biblical text is precisely contrary to the interpretation set forth in A Time for Christian Candor. The “treasure” St. Paul speaks of is the glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ, revealing God in his threefold activity of creating, redeeming, and sanctifying the world, and including in itself the essential elements of the creeds, the Holy Scriptures, the apostolic ministry, and the sacraments. And the “earthen vessels” spoken of by Paul are the ministers who go forth to proclaim this Gospel. According to the Apostle, it is the ministers who are fallible and secondary, not the “knowledge of the glory of God” (2 Cor. 4:6) that it is their privilege to proclaim.

Floyd V. Filson comments on Paul’s meaning in this passage as follows:

Perhaps to crush any temptation to pride, and certainly to keep his readers from misunderstanding, he confesses that we have this treasure of the glorious gospel in earthen vessels, a figure suggested perhaps by Gen. 2:7, and used to show how humble, fragile, and transient weak mortal bodies are [The Interpreter’s Bible, X, 318].

And Professor W. F. Howard says:

The contrast between the priceless treasures and its humble, fragile casket emphasized the relation between the divine power and the human messenger. The apostle survives humiliations and sufferings by the life of Jesus within him [The Abingdon Bible Commentary, p. 522].

It is obvious that the Apostle is not dealing with subtle Aristotelian distinctions of substance and accidents, i.e., product and packaging. What he is really saying is that the wonderful good news of salvation through Jesus Christ is communicated by such weak specimens of humanity as we clergymen are, in order to show us that its splendid power belongs to God and not to us.

The questionable practice of bringing one’s own philosophical presuppositions to a biblical text, in order to use the text as an illustration rather than as an objective source of God’s truth, is rejected by the major biblical theologians of today. This type of exegesis has been the greatest cause of misunderstanding and misinterpretation of doctrine throughout the history of Christianity.

Karl Barth, the great pioneer of modern biblical theology, speaks of the way to teach from the Holy Bible:

What one may be moved to say concerning God, the world, and man because he must say it, having let the Scriptures speak to him—the Scriptures themselves, and not the Scriptures interpreted by any particular tradition; the whole Scripture, and not a part of them chosen to suit a preconceived theory … what, after those Scriptures have spoken to him, one may be moved to say in fear and trembling concerning the things about which man of himself may say nothing, or only foolishness, that, if we may judge from our beginnings, is Reformed doctrine [The Word of God and the Word of Man, p. 241].

The speculative, non-historical approach to theology based on the teachings of Aristotle was condemned by every Reformer, from John Wycliffe to Martin Luther, and was rejected by the Anglican church at the time of the Reformation.

Luther, in his characteristic way, has this to say: What are the universities, as at present ordered, but as the book of Maccabees says, “schools of Greek fashion and heathenish manners” (2 Mac. 4:12, 13), full of dissolute living, where very little is taught of the Holy Scriptures and of the Christian faith, and the blind heathen teacher, Aristotle, rules even further than Christ? [“Address to the German Nobility” in Harvard Classics, XXXVI, 321].

The position of the Episcopal Church on the classical dogmas of the Christian faith is clear. As recently as 1960 the House of Bishops in a pastoral letter to the church took a definite stand:

Thus our Church is irrevocably committed to the historic Creeds and regards the Nicene Creed as it was affirmed at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D. as an indispensable norm for the Christian faith.… The historic Creeds of our Church affirm the indispensable dogmas of the Christian faith.

It is certainly commendable to attempt to state the Gospel in terms that are relevant to the mind of today. But to do so by introducing again into theology the speculative, unbiblical categories of Aristotle, coupled with inaccurate exegesis of the Bible, is questionable. It represents a deviation from the position of the Episcopal Church and also a radical break with the evangelical and biblical heritage of the Reformation.

St. Augustine wrote, “Not every error is heresy, though every heresy which is blameworthy cannot be heresy without some error.” Now that the House of Bishops has disposed of the heresy charge against Bishop Pike, let us hope that the philosophical and biblical error of his teaching will become evident and be corrected before it is too late.

Sigmund Freud’s major polemic against religion, The Future of an Illusion, was published in 1928 when Freud was seventy-two. In a letter to Oskar Pfister, the Swiss Protestant clergyman with whom he had a long correspondence, Freud wrote that he had postponed publication of this “declaration of war” out of consideration for him, “but the impulse became too strong” (Psychoanalysis and Faith, New York: Basic Books, 1963, p. 109). Freud correctly predicted that the essay would create distrust and ill will toward psychoanalysis. Although he later owned the views as his personal philosophy, the anti-religious image of psychoanalysis has persisted down to the present. Some analysts who have openly identified themselves with religious faith acknowledge that many of their colleagues agree with Freud’s view of religion.

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud carried on with an imaginary critic an argument concerning the truth of religion. Religious ideas have exercised the very strongest influence upon mankind, he acknowledged, but he asserted:

… It would indeed be very nice if there were a God, who was both creator of the world and a benevolent providence, if there were a moral world order and a future life, but at the same time it is very odd that this is all just as we should wish it ourselves [The Future of an Illusion, New York: Liveright, 1928, pp. 58, 59, 77].

Freud’s conclusion from the “discovery” that religious doctrines are illusions was that “by accepting a universal neurosis the true believer is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.”

Pfister replied to Freud’s attack in a paper entitled “The Illusion of a Future,” published the same year in Freud’s psychoanalytic journal, Imago. In it he chided Freud for echoing old arguments against religion and for disregarding the answers to them that had been made by its defenders. He criticized Freud’s logic and cited able theologians, as well as devout philosophers and scientists, to refute Freud’s claim that religion stifles free thinking. Christianity required the giving up of wishful thinking, Pfister declared, while Freud’s optimistic expectations of science seemed themselves to embody wishful thinking.

In 1934, five years before his death, Freud published his own “Philosophy of Life” (New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, London: Hogarth Press, 1933). In keeping with his habit of ignoring critics, his Weltanschauung repeated many of the ideas in The Future of an Illusion with no notice of Pfister’s point-by-point answer. He considered religion to be “a really serious enemy” of science. He asserted that psychoanalysis is competent to trace the origin of religion. The idea of God he reduced to a childish intellectual construct, and he concluded that the truth of religion could be altogether disregarded. While recognizing that a world view based upon science is incomplete and essentially negative, he enunciated an affirmation of faith in its ultimate sufficiency and categorically accepted what is purportedly the scientific Weltanschauung.

Roman Catholic apologists were not long in replying to Freud. In 1936, Dalbiez, in a two-volume critique of psychoanalytic method (Psychoanalytical Method and the Doctrine of Freud, New York: Longmans Green, 1941), pointed out that Freud alternated between rationalism and empiricism even while he denied any concern with philosophy. Rather than allow that science’s grasp of reality is partial, leaving room for metaphysics and religion, Freud embraced the philosophy of scientism, which rejects both. Dalbiez declared that, considering the breadth of competence that it assumed, Freud’s verdict of the delusional character of religion was a notable example of “psychiatric totalitarianism.”

Rudolf Allers also represented the Thomistic viewpoint in a long critique published in 1940 under the title, The Successful Error. In an examination of the logic underlying psychoanalysis, Allers declared that the fallacy of petitio principii is inherent in the method, since observations are introduced as evidence to prove the very theories that must first be accepted in order to gather the evidence. Psychoanalysis, while professing to be science, actually has underlying it a series of axioms metaphysical in nature. In its assumption that mental and material phenomena are essentially of the same kind, psychoanalysis espouses a philosophy of materialism and determinism. Its ethics, Allers concluded, is hedonism.

In 1943, Gregory Zilboorg published Mind, Medicine and Man, writing from the unique viewpoint of a Roman Catholic psychoanalyst. He recognized that “all religious denominations were and for the most part still are opposed to Freud and to psychoanalysis.” Freud erred, Zilboorg asserted, in confusing neurotic belief with religious faith, and in basing his opposition to religion upon scientific psychology. What Freud did, unbeknown to himself, Zilboorg contended, was to establish empirically that love is the proper basis of life, a finding that is in harmony with the Christian ideal. Freud was thus the true descendant of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, even though he would have been the last to admit it. Zilboorg concluded that when terminologies are reconciled, religious dogma is supported by Freud’s factual psychological findings.

The burden of maladjustment and psychopathology accruing in World War II gave sharp impetus to psychiatry and clinical psychology. Psychoanalytic psychology and its deviant offshoot, client-centered psychotherapy, were pressed into widespread use in civilian as well as military situations. Both systems were widely accepted and applied within the pastoral counseling movement, which had also been growing rapidly.

Rabbi Joshua Liebman’s 1946 best-seller led to a spate of Peace of Mind literature. He called enthusiastically for collaboration between “revealed psychology” and “prophetic religion,” but insisted there must be a division of labor. On behalf of psychotherapy he repeated the Freudian disclaimer of ethical involvement:

Psychology and psychotherapy are scientific disciplines not basically concerned with moral judgments, whereas religion inevitably lives in the realm of ethical concepts. Psychotherapy is committed to utter neutrality in moral affairs and goes beyond its province when it makes “value judgments” about the total meaning of life [Peace of Mind, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946, p. 177].

Liebman pictured psychiatry and religion as “twin angels, bending in unison to lift up ailing bewildered man.” “Only in the mighty confluence of these two tides,” he declared, “shall we find peace of mind.”

This rising popularity of psychiatry was marred by a rumble of opposition that evoked a defensive response front psychiatry. In May, 1946, an elite group of 150 prominent psychiatrists established the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, now generally known as GAP. The group began publishing a significant and constructive series of studies relating psychiatry to a broad range of disciplines and problems. In response to critical newspaper and magazine articles claiming conflict between psychiatry and religion, GAP issued a statement in 1947 affirming human betterment as the common aim of medicine and religion, with special mention of psychoanalysis. The statement concluded:

We also recognize the important role religion can play in bringing about an improved emotional and moral state. The methods of psychiatry aim to help patients achieve health in their emotional lives so that they may live in harmony with society and its standards. We believe that there is no conflict between psychiatry and religion. In the practice of his profession, the competent psychiatrist will therefore always be guided by this belief [American Journal of Psychiatry, 1947, 104:214].

This reply from psychiatry was the real beginning of dialogue. Nine years were to pass before a presidential address of the American Psychiatric Association called for a better working relationship with religion, but the GAP statement was a quasi-official acknowledgment of such a need.

The prospect of an impending partnership between psychiatry and religion stimulated two Protestant theologians to formulate the terms of such an alliance. In Psychotherapy and a Christian View of Man, published in 1950, David Roberts declared that man cannot be brought into harmony with nature and with his fellow man until he reaches a harmonious relation with God. A Christian view of God and man is needed, he insisted, to help psychiatry understand its task. The psychiatrist cannot adequately evaluate his patient’s religious views without an understanding of religious experience, preferably at first hand.

Albert Outler, in 1954, followed with Psychotherapy and the Christian Message. These two are natural allies, he acknowledged, but the premises of psychotherapy, presupposing reductive naturalism and secular humanism, are in conflict with Christian theology. Both are basic faiths, hence are no more scientific than theology, which is grounded in revelation and tested in human experience. Christianity offers the truest wisdom about human nature and destiny, Outler maintained, providing an adequate context for the scientific study of man.

Also during the fifties, studies were published by Roman Catholic, Jewish, and Lutheran groups, examining psychiatry as it related to their distinctive theological systems (J. H. VanderVeldt and R. P. Odenwald, Psychiatry and Catholicism, 1952; S. Noveck, ed., Judaism and Psychiatry, 1956; What, Then, Is Man?, published by Concordia Publishing House, 1958). Another important event of this period was the organization of the Academy of Religion and Mental Health, which has since maintained a program of interaction and established a journal.

The most significant official overture from psychiatry came from Dr. Finley Gayle, president of the American Psychiatric Association, in his 1956 presidential address. Referring to the fact that psychiatry had been under attack by clergymen, and religion under attack by psychiatrists, Dr. Gayle commented that “some psychiatrists are as apprehensive about clergymen ‘doing therapy’ as some clergymen are about catching psychiatrists in the act of ‘forgiving sin.’” He described the current status as one of peaceful coexistence, in which the attitude on both sides was, “We won’t bother you if you won’t bother us.”

Active cooperation, Dr. Gayle insisted, is necessary for the welfare of the patient, for religion reaches the very depths of human motivation, even the “heart,” out of which are “the issues of life.”

If healing and the forgiveness of sin could be always neatly separated, with neither having anything really significant to do with the other, the problem might be a minor one.… But that health and the release of feelings of guilt are intimately related, there can be little doubt.… We … need to recognize the big motion toward a religious solution of many human difficulties … [“Conflict and Cooperation between Religion and Psychiatry,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 1956, 113:1].

One year later, in 1957, the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry met to hear a panel of psychiatrists and clergymen present a symposium which appeared later in a GAP monograph titled, “Some Considerations of Early Attempts in Cooperation between Religion and Psychiatry.” Both psychiatrists and clergymen offered presentations in which common goals and the value inherent in cooperation were affirmed. Divergent postulates and methods of each discipline were reviewed, and the question of proper boundaries for the work of both clergyman and psychiatrist was touched upon.

Dr. Clemens Benda, a psychiatrist, contrasted the areas of psychiatry that do not involve religion with those that do:

As soon as psychiatry is confronted with problems of character, personality, maturity and the meaning of life, it becomes clear that these questions can only be understood within a framework of values which has developed from religious beliefs.

Dr. Kenneth Appel, another psychiatrist, remarked upon the great progress in the ten years since the “timid pronouncement” of GAP in 1947. “We have 100 million people who are said to be related to churches, related to religion. They somehow or other officially say they are interested in religion.… Psychiatrists have been timid in meeting and trying to help these people.”

In the same symposium, the Catholic psychologist William Bier made this comment on experimental cooperative programs then being introduced in four theological seminaries: “Clergymen are considerably more willing to learn about psychiatry than psychiatrists are to learn about religion.… I wonder whether something comparable cannot be done to give to psychiatrists a better understanding of religion.”

The GAP symposium was primarily the transcript of a conference and was not intended as a definitive statement by psychiatry in the dialogue with religion. GAP Report No. 48, published in 1960 under the title, “Psychiatry and Religion: Some Steps Toward Mutual Understanding and Usefulness,” is an authoritative statement of the current position and outlook of psychiatry as conceived by GAP.

Since the report is intended to reach clergymen, it begins by introducing the psychiatrist. He is a medical specialist offering skill in dealing with unconscious conflict. His concern is to help correct mental disorders, the report explains, and he cannot take responsibility for deciding what the patient is to be like after treatment. Ideally, the psychiatrist will refrain from attempting to persuade his patient toward any particular attitude other than a generally realistic one, but all psychiatrists make compromises with the ideal. Examples of such compromise are: (1) being satisfied with less than a cure, or (2) using stringent authoritative measures to influence the patient’s acceptance of a particular solution.

Turning to the psychiatrist’s own religious and ethical attitude, the report recognizes that he may or may not have clearly defined religious or philosophical views, but declares that he should have fullest awareness of his own attitude toward religion. The psychiatrist cannot be temperate and objective with patients unless he knows when or where he is himself unsettled. As a practitioner and a researcher, he may well cultivate suspension of judgment, but he should not confuse this attitude with skepticism as a philosophic viewpoint. He should not attempt to impose skepticism or any other philosophic viewpoint on any patient. To do so is to exploit the psychotherapeutic relationship and to depart from his role as psychiatrist.

When the psychiatrist’s ethical position is under scrutiny, the report continues, the assertion of a “value-free” technical proficiency is inadequate reassurance. What he believes about the nature of man and about the transcendental meaning or lack of meaning in human existence will influence his concepts of normality and maturity. The psychiatrist may not be religiously inclined, but he must come to terms with the fact that our world is pervaded by religious values. If religion is involved in the patient’s illness or in his psychological functioning, it will be influenced by the treatment. Some psychiatrists may think the religious “defenses” need to be eliminated; others, that religious faith should complement therapy. With some patients, religion may not be involved in the neurosis and may be bypassed.

The report then turns to the clergyman. He is a person with a relatively intense investment in religious faith and practice. His suspicion of psychiatry derives in part from Freud’s avowed atheism. While it simply is not true that all modern psychiatrists are atheistic, the report asserts, it shouldn’t make any difference in treatment if they were, since the psychiatrist’s task is to strive for cure and not to interfere with his patient’s belief. The clergyman may be uneasy about the psychiatrist’s tolerant attitude toward acts that from a religious viewpoint are regarded as sinful. In contrast to the clergyman, who believes that morality is something revealed or referable to a transcendental power, the psychiatrist is a relativist. He “is concerned only with treating illness and not with making moral judgments.…”

This disclaimer, which would exempt the psychiatrist from the necessity of making value judgments, conflicts with earlier statements in the report which acknowledge that the psychiatrist’s very concepts of health and normality are tinctured by his personal philosophic views. This inseparability of treatment from value judgments precludes any such tidy division of labor as having the clergyman deal only with ultimate questions such as the meaning of life and of death, leaving “illness of the mind to the psychiatrist.” The ambiguity of such a cleavage is apparent, as the report acknowledges: “In occasional instances the division may not be clear and collaborative effort is called for.”

The latter third of the report is devoted largely to an examination of psychodynamics and religion in which the authors employ classical psychoanalytic concepts and terminology “to illuminate religious phenomena.” A concluding section encourages ongoing collaborative study of current moral and ethical issues in psychiatry, religion, and community life.

The progress represented by Report No. 48 and the extent of its concessions should not be diminished by recognition of its internal inconsistencies and its limitations. The responsibility toward religion here acknowledged can be fully appreciated only when seen in historical perspective. Psychiatry has traveled far from Freud’s “declaration of war” to the self-admonition included in the GAP statement.

For example, while advocating that the therapist strive for “doctrinal neutrality,” the report recognizes the limited degree to which this is possible by reminding the psychiatrist that his own philosophy of life colors his attitude toward religion. Moreover, the report emphasizes that the weight of the personal authority of the psychiatrist is great. Therefore, he must take into account the influence he inadvertently exerts upon his patients. He is called upon to make moral decisions in his daily work and must acknowledge them for what they are. Although the report tends to be somewhat patronizing toward the clergyman, there is unqualified acknowledgment that his collaboration is desirable and useful.

At two points the report invites criticism, even after its importance as a milestone in the convergence of psychiatry and religion is fully recognized. The first is a sectarian bias toward psychoanalysis. The radical turnabout in psychoanalytic theory and treatment that has followed the overhauling of classical id-concepts by ego psychology necessarily raises doubts about many of its other fundamental premises. Will psychoanalysis, along with Rogerian counseling, survive primarily as a technique rather than as a system? The manner in which this report reduces elements of religious worship to “nothing but” human defenses against instinctual forces demonstrates the omnicompetence assumed by psychoanalysis and the sheer texture of some of its constructs.

The report may also be criticized for the fallacy of looking at religion in a context of psychopathology. No psychiatrist who bases his evaluation of religious faith, as Freud did, upon the neurotic entanglements encountered in the consulting room can ever understand religion in its healthy and wholesome expression.

The willingness of psychiatrists to learn about religion doubtless still lags far behind that of clergymen to learn about psychiatry. Nevertheless, that these documents have originated within psychiatry and that psychiatrists are included in their admonitory comment bespeaks deepening understanding and encourages continuing dialogue.

Although this survey has emphasized particularly the quasi-official pronouncements of psychiatry in response to broadly based overtures and reactions from religion, recent years have also seen a remarkable increase of institutes, conferences, and curriculums bringing together representatives of both disciplines. This progress is being augmented by a parallel movement in general medicine, emphasizing the importance of collaboration between physician and clergyman. The momentum of these efforts offers substantial promise for a closer working alliance in the future.

From Canada to Mexico runs the continental divide, along which two raindrops falling just a few inches apart can end up in two different oceans. There is also a continental divide in contemporary theology. Certain truths and doctrines characterize historic Christianity and, if rejected, necessarily involve its repudiation.

The present state of contemporary theology is certainly one of confusion. Whom are we to believe? Weimann with his natural theism? Bultmann with his demythologized New Testament but existentially impassioned kerygma? Barth with his massive tomes quarried from a dozen different pits? Berkouwer with his scintillating restatement of Calvinism? Bishop Robinson with his theological first-aid kit? Ebeling with his vast historical learning used to buttress the new hermeneutic? What makes the situation really confusing for the layman, the seminary student, and the average minister is that all these theologians use the same Bible and the same or similar terminology, tackle the same or similar problems, teach in historic Christian schools, work in the same historic denominations, and practice the same sacramental life.

In a preliminary way we can find three different strands in contemporary theology. (1) There is the orthodox strand, which includes the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox theologian, the traditional Calvinist, and the Methodist. It is characterized by the belief, common to all versions of orthodoxy, that Christianity is essentially a religion of supernatural salvation wrought by the death and resurrection of Christ and appropriated through faith (and the sacraments). (2) There is the modernist strand, which believes centrally that Jesus revealed perfect spirituality; this may be interpreted according to Schleiermacher as perfect God-consciousness, or according to Ritschl as perfect filial trust, or according to Tillich as the norm of new being. In modernism there is no supernatural salvation to be appropriated by a definitive act of saving faith. (3) There is also liberalism, religious faith which is built on some form of philosophical idealism or existentialism but which denies that there is anything crucial in the person of Christ or the Holy Scriptures. The liberal may include Jesus and the Bible in his system, but only because he shares in Western culture—not from principle or necessity.

It is obvious that, though modernists differ from liberals in that they insist on the centrality of Jesus to their theology and with it some normative status for the Bible, nevertheless modernism and liberalism are one in rejecting orthodoxy as the only valid version of Christianity. In a sense the modernist believes that all versions of Christianity are true. In so far as every version of Christian theology attempts to preserve the Jesus mystique (using the term, as Betty Friedan does in The Feminine Mystique, for something very real but yet so elusive that it defies precise definition), it is true Christianity. It may be surrounded with the heavy timber of antiquated theology, as in Roman Catholicism, or by experiential phenomena, as in Pentecostalism. But it is still there. And it is this pervasive Jesus mystique in all Christian bodies that is the rationale for the modernist’s participation in the ecumenical movement. We are all Christian brothers, because each in his own way embodies the Jesus mystique. But of course the modernist believes that his version is the best to date as it is supposedly freest from those elements that offend educated and cultured people.

According to modernism, all men really or potentially have this mystique. In the “unchurched” it lies dormant, but the Christian is the person who has positively responded to the Jesus mystique and conducts his life accordingly. God is every man’s Father, and each man is brother to every other man. The human race is thus one great household of God divided into the obedient sons and the ignorant or even disobedient sons. The historic notion of men as lost sinners is rejected. The world is not divided into saved and lost, regenerate and unregenerate. The “new look” in evangelism is not reaching the lost or rescuing the heathen by Christian missions. Evangelism and missions are now creative sharing! Thus according to Tillich all men share to some degree in new being. Therefore, all men (in the older terminology) are saved; evangelism is the attempt to stir up a little more new being in the Christian West, and the missionary enterprise is creative sharing with non-Christian religions our mutual experience of new being.

On one side of the continental divide in contemporary theology stand the orthodox; on the other stand the modernists and liberals in their common rejection of supernatural salvation. But theologies do not come neatly labeled. Criteria must be used to evaluate them. The following criteria are meant to be representative rather than exhaustive as guides for finding this divide in theology.

1. Revelation. Theologians have tried to show that revelation is dynamic, not static; event, not information; existential, not intellectual; God’s personal presence, not a piece of writing; holy history, not holy writings. Certainly no orthodox theologian wants a dry, flat rationalistic, intellectualistic view of revelation. If the orthodox doctrine of revelation was becoming arid because doctrinaire, it can profit from recent writings on revelation and correct its deficiencies. But what is the critical issue in any theology of revelation? It is this: Revelation may be many things but it must at least be truth. There must be a conceptual or a propositional element in revelation or otherwise revelation is no more the Word of God as truth.

Orthodox theology in all its versions believes that theology can originate only in truth, be the explication of truth, and be controlled by truth. If revelation is not at least truth, then Christian theology is impossible, for no reliable and authentic theology can be built from non-truth materials. There can be no logos of that which is by principle non-logos. The frequent attack in contemporary theology on “propositional revelation” never gets around to explaining how theology can be written from “non-propositional” revelation. Thielicke in Between Heaven and Earth sees the fundamentalists’ drive for verbal inspiration and inerrancy as a fanatic bid for religious certainty, but he fails to see that pulsing beneath this doctrine of Scripture is a tremendous passion for truth.

Whenever revelation is defined exclusively as insight, or religious experience, or existential communication, or a felt Presence, then that view is unorthodox. It is not true that the orthodox theologian is an unreconstructed rationalist and therefore fears the existential, the symbolic, the mythological, the divine as a Mysterious Presence. The orthodox theologian believes that religion may have many such overtones, and he would not wish to rob Christian faith of depth by being an unreconstructed rationalist. His point is that theology is logia and that a logia is possible only when there are logia materials. No logia is possible from the non-logia of intuition, religious experience, existential leap, or encounter. Therefore, he insists that revelation must at least be the Word as truth.

Certainly Tillich with his notion of revelation as ecstatic and Bultmann with his notion of revelation as a new self-understanding have broken with the historic doctrine of revelation. Barth and Brunner have a theology of the cracks! In that Barth stresses revelation as the personal presence of God, God as subject, as encounter and not as knowledge, his view is in the Ritschlian tradition and therefore is modernist. In that he stresses the objectivity of revelation in the Incarnation and the authoritative witness to revelation in Holy Scripture, he assents to revelation as truth. Thus his view of revelation is in the crack between modernism and orthodoxy.

In that Brunner emphasizes God as mystery, God as subject, revelation as address and encounter, he continues the modernists’ view that revelation is not truth. In that he insists on the Incarnation as the supreme event of revelation and sound doctrines as the necessary presupposition for Christian faith, he assents to revelation as truth. So his theory of revelation also is in the cracks.

2. The Incarnation. The Incarnation is the unpredicted and unpredictable, sovereign, gracious, and absolute entrance of God into this world and our humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. It is God the Son freely, sovereignly, graciously uniting himself with a specific human nature. The verb taking (Phil. 2:7—labōn) affirms that he who was in the form of God and equal with God did of his own sovereign decree determine to enter the human race as Jesus of Nazareth. This has been the orthodox stance in Christology in all the various communions.

This doctrine of the Incarnation was spelled out at Chalcedon. Charges that Chalcedon is the product of the corruption of Christian theology by Greek metaphysics do not weigh seriously with the orthodox. The orthodox believe that Chalcedon can be reconstructed from the exegesis of the New Testament. Tillich and a host of modern theologians with him believe that the term “two nature” Christology is almost a dirty expression.

The real issue is not whether Chalcedon represents a timeless statement of Christology but whether contemporary theologians have remained true to the New Testament in shooting down Chalcedon. We can illustrate this briefly at one point: “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). Here we have the divine expressed by “the Word,” the human expressed by “flesh,” and a union expressed by “became.” It would seem that shooting down the “two nature” Christology of Chalcedon also manages to shoot down John 1:14.

Orthodox theologians believe that contemporary theology is riddled through and through with adoptianism, the belief that Jesus was a Palestinian Jew who existed in his own right, with his own parents, in his own family, and in his own vocation, and that God elected him and adopted him and called him to be the Christ. Thus the ordinary Jesus becomes the special Christ by God’s gracious adoptive act. Orthodox theology resists this with all its power, because this Christology negates the entire scheme of supernatural salvation obtained by the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Schleiermacher’s Jesus as the model example of God-consciousness is adoptianism; the Ritschlian version of Jesus as the model example of filial piety is adoptianism; the Hegelian Christology which sees in Jesus the principle of divine-human continuity is adoptianism; Tillich’s Christology of the man Jesus surrendering himself to the Christ of new being is adoptianism: Bultmann’s Christ-event as the perfect existential example of dying to the world and rising to openness to the future is adoptianism; the new hermeneutic with Jesus as the perfect example of “the word” of existential communication is adoptianism; and all the recent expressions of young theological Turks who destroy traditional Christology but still find some kind of mystique in Jesus are adoptianism.

3. Sin. In orthodox theology, sin is primarily an offense against the holiness of God. It therefore excites the wrath of God. Few concepts of the older theology have been so belittled or so categorically rejected as the wrath of God. In the caricature God is pictured as a peeved deity, or a blood-thirsty deity, or a terrible-tempered Mr. Bang. To the modernists the wrath of God is an unfortunate imputation to God of a human weakness—namely, uncontrolled and ugly temper.

To the orthodox theologian the wrath of God is the proper response of the holy God to the human infraction of the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God. To the orthodox theologian the denial of wrath in God is a denial of all moral fiber in God. The wrath of God stands for the moral integrity of God, and thus, for the orthodox, to deny the wrath of God is to render ambiguous the moral integrity of God.

No orthodox theologian would deny the personal and social evil of sin. The liar damages himself. The racially prejudiced person creates great social evil. The international evils of Stalin and Hitler beggar description. But the essence of sin is not its destructive effect on the self nor its cancerous influence in society but its defiance of the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God. David committed adultery with Bathsheba and caused the death of Uriah, yet in his anguish cried out, “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned” (Ps. 51:4). He furthermore recognized the rightness of God’s wrath toward him for his sin, for he said that God’s sentence was justified and his judgment blameless.

In the modernist, liberal, and existentialist view, sin appears as an expected human foible. It is like making an error in mathematics, or a mistake in an experiment, or a blunder in social conduct. The game of life is complicated; no man can pick his way through it without some mishap. Man is really more a victim of sin than an agent of sin. It is hardly fair to blame a teen-ager for being unruly, if he comes from a broken home; the professional thief is a product of inner-city decay; the drunkard is the hapless victim of destructive psychodynamics; and the hom*osexual is the pitiful product of a pathological home.

This is to say nothing new. Chapters 4–11 of Genesis have been called the greatest theological tract on sin in the Old Testament. They reveal that, once sin is let loose in the race, man as a matter of fact is as much victim of sin as he is agent. This does not lessen our view of sin but reveals its tragic character.

Because man is both victim and agent of sin, the final assessment of a man’s life can be made only by God. God alone can sort out a man’s life and determine that which is victim and that which is agent. An inhuman and graceless moralism or legalism in regard to sin is not part of the orthodox view of sin. No orthodox theologian wishes to minimize the destructive effects of sin in personal and social life. No orthodox theologian wants to judge heartlessly the poor victims of the destructive forces of sin. But the orthodox theologian insists that those theologians who see in sin only human foible, only human error, only human miscalculation, only existential unauthenticity, who do not see sin as defiance of the good and perfect and holy will of God nor the wrath of God as that which corresponds to this defiance, do not measure up to historic orthodoxy or to the biblical revelation. Thus as long as Barth and almost all neo-orthodox and existentialist theologians along with him teach that the wrath of God is merely the inverse side of his love, or, with C. H. Dodd, teach that the wrath of God is merely the personal, social, and historical consequences of sin, they fail the biblical revelation of the wrath of God.

4. Salvation. In all versions of orthodoxy, salvation is the person and work of Christ, particularly his vicarious death and his resurrection. Personal salvation is the faith response to the supernatural salvation in Christ. The entire process from incarnation to regeneration is through and through supernatural.

In liberalism it is meaningless to talk of salvation, for there is nothing to be saved from except an attitude of irreligion, and that cannot be very serious if there is no such thing as lostness or damnation. In modernism, salvation is not really being saved but is merely the arousing of a religious potential that lies dormant. Preaching the perfect spirituality of Jesus sparks to life the religious element in men who previously were irreligious. Thus the difference between Christian and non-Christian becomes relative rather than absolute.

Representative of much current thought is the theology of Paul Tillich. All men have ultimate concern and therefore “new being,” or, in more conventional existential language, “authentic existence.” If they did not have some ultimate concern, some new being, they would cease to be men. Buddhists, Communists, and atheists have ultimate concern in their lives and hence new being. Christians differ from them only in that they believe that in Jesus as the Christ we have the norm for judging all instances of new being. In short, modernism in all its forms is universalism. Nobody is really counted out. As one modernist phrased it, the difference between Hitler and Ghandi was purely relative; Hitler was way down on the scale of spirituality (but not lost!) and Ghandi was way up (but not because he was justified or regenerated).

The continental divide in modern theology is revealed in the varying answers to the Philippian jailer’s question: “What must I do to be saved?” One would say, “Make the existential leap and thou shalt be saved.” Another would say, “You are saved, you fool. Just start living that way.” Another would say, “Clean up the conditions in the jail and go to work on the social injustices in Philippi, and you are being saved.” Still another would say, “My dear man, in view of our present knowledge of the Bible and the modern mentality you have asked a meaningless question. This selfish business of personal salvation was a bit of primitive nineteenth-century evangelism. Christianity is not being saved—perish the thought; it is identifying oneself with the forces of love and justice in the reconstruction of society.” According to such answers, Paul never could have been more wrong than when he replied, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”

5. Sacramental theology. Orthodox theology in all its versions believes that the sacraments either convey supernatural grace or witness to supernatural grace imparted by the Holy Spirit. Sacramentalism and non-sacramentalism in orthodoxy are both grounded in the supernatural grace of God founded in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The consistent liberal must deny the sacraments. His “naturalistic theism” takes the ground from under them. The modernist believes that Christian fellowship must include the liturgical, and so he retains the sacraments as a form of Christian fellowship. But only the most naïve person would ever believe that a modernist intends by baptism and communion what an orthodox person does. When a Lutheran or a Presbyterian in the orthodox tradition baptizes an infant, it is within the schema of the supernatural salvation obtained by Jesus Christ or the covenant relation of God’s supernatural grace. But a modernist Lutheran or modernist Presbyterian cannot baptize the infant on these grounds. To him infant baptism represents the Christian estimation of children, or the responsibility of parents in Christian nurture, or the place of the whole family in the Christian Church. But it is not a witness to the supernatural salvation of Christ realized in the infant by the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit.

One has to ask what a sacrament can possibly mean to Bultmann or to Tillich or to Ebeling, because all these men deny a supernatural act of God either in the deed of Christ or in the sacrament.

6. The Church. In historic orthodox theology of all versions, the Church is based upon the supernatural salvation wrought by Christ in his death and resurrection and communicated in a supernatural act by faith in regeneration and justification, and the supernatural binding of believers together by the mystical but real bond of the Holy Spirit. When modernists deny a supernatural salvation in Christ, deny a supernatural act of salvation by the Holy Spirit, and deny the supernatural connectedness of all believers by the mystical union of the Holy Spirit, they destroy the historic, orthodox Christian understanding of the Church.

What takes its place? The Church becomes a society, a natural, human, non-supernatural religious community. It is bound together by purely natural ties, such as a common heritage in the Bible, a common belief in some sort of uniqueness in Jesus, a common belief in the historical continuity of Christians, and a common ethic of love. Now the Church is a society. But this is secondary to its being the supernatural body of Christ. Modernism in all its forms, the older Fosdickian version or the new hermeneutic, reduces the Church to a religious society, nothing more, nothing less; for it denies the entire supernatural foundation upon which the historic doctrine of the Church was built.

The conclusion is that there is a continental divide in contemporary theology. Despite all the confusion that exists, this divide can be located in “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” Those who really know the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith can differentiate the kind of theology which falls on the right side of this continental divide from that which falls on the wrong side.

The service in the Free Church Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, on May 21, 1874, had centered on the theme of “The Good Shepherd.” Messages by Dwight L. Moody, Horatius Bonar, and others emphasizing the shepherd work of Christ had greatly impressed a responsive audience.

Then Moody turned to his associate, Ira D. Sankey. “Have you a solo appropriate for this subject, to close the meeting with?”

Sankey felt impelled to use a poem by Elizabeth C. Clephane that he had clipped from a paper just the day before on the train, though that would mean composing music, playing, and singing simultaneously.

“Placing the little newspaper slip on the organ in front of me,” he said afterwards, “I lifted my heart in prayer, asking God to help me to sing so that the people might hear and understand. Laying my hands upon the organ, I struck the key of A flat and began to sing:

There were ninety and nine that safely lay

In the shelter of the fold,

But one was out on the hills away

Far off from the gates of gold—

Away on the mountains wild and bare,

Away from the tender Shepherd’s care,

Away from the tender Shepherd’s care.

“After the first verse I was glad that I had got through, but overwhelmed with fear that the tune for the next verse would be greatly different from the first.” But he continued to look to the Lord, who “gave me again the same tune for all the remaining verses. As the singing ceased, a great sigh seemed to go up from the meeting, and I knew that the song had reached the hearts of my Scotch audience.” Years later he recalled, “Note by note the tune was given, which has not changed from that day to this.…”

Thus was born one of the most effective gospel songs of all time. Perhaps it is the most famous of Sankey’s more than eighty compositions. Stories about “The Ninety and Nine” are numerous. One concerns a service in 1875 when, because of overflowing crowds, Moody preached outside the Northfield (Massachusetts) Congregational Church. Sankey then sang this song for the first time in the United States. A Mr. Caldwell, seated on his porch across the Connecticut River, heard it, was brought under conviction, and was saved soon afterward. Some years later, at the laying of the cornerstone of the new Congregational Church building, Sankey again sang “The Ninety and Nine.” Mr. Caldwell, who now lived near the church, lay dying. He called his wife to open the south window, because he “thought he heard singing.” Together they listened to the song that had been used to lead him to Christ, and soon after he died.

“The Ninety and Nine” helped link and publicize the names of Moody and Sankey throughout the English-speaking world. For nearly thirty years they were inseparable, though Sankey’s failing health curtailed his ministry during the last few years.

It was a far cry from Edinburg, Pennsylvania, to Edinburgh, Scotland. Sankey was born in that small western Pennsylvania village in 1840, and at the age of fifteen was converted during revival services. Later the family settled in New Castle, Pennsylvania. Here young Ira joined the Methodist Episcopal Church and became Sunday school superintendent as well as president of the local YMCA.

Brought up in a musical family, he had early learned to read music and was soon exercising his talent. He led the church choir and sang at Sunday school conventions and political gatherings. After serving in the Civil War, Sankey returned to New Castle to take a place as assistant to his father, who was collector of internal revenue, and presumably to lead a quiet life in business and Christian service.

But that was reckoning without the whirlwind of the West, D. L. Moody.

When Sankey journeyed to Indianapolis in 1870 for the YMCA convention, he had no idea that he was soon to begin a career of world prominence. According to the familiar story, it was in Indianapolis that D. L. Moody, the dynamic young Sunday school and city mission worker from Chicago, first met Sankey and heard him sing. Immediately Moody accosted him with a series of rapid questions about his family and business, climaxed by the abrupt order, “You’ll have to give that up.”

Amazed, Sankey asked, “What for?”

“To come to Chicago and help me in my work.”

Further discussion culminated in Sankey’s perhaps half-hearted promise to pray about the matter. But Moody was irresistible, and as Sankey later put it, “It took him only six months to pray me out of business.” A trial period in Chicago clinched the matter. Sankey resigned his Pennsylvania position and joined Moody.

In 1873 the two sailed for the British Isles without fame or fanfare, and with only a vague “invitation.” At York, England, a bare handful attended the first service. The number grew, but with no pronounced results at first. Yet from this small beginning grew one of the greatest revivals of all.

Within two years Moody and Sankey were preaching to multitudes in the British Isles and were seeing great numbers of conversions, consecrations, and other evidences of blessing. Churches, YMCA’s, missions, and similar organizations sprang up or were revitalized. The total attendance at London, 2,530,000, stands as the record for a single city campaign, except for Billy Graham’s 1955 Glasgow crusade. J. C. Pollock calls the estimated 20,000 nightly attendance at Agricultural Hall “unprecedented; to the England of 1875, fantastic.”

The prayers, attendance, and support of men like F. B. Meyer, the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, and many others were significant factors in the success of the meetings. So also was the singing of Ira D. Sankey.

Early in this campaign, a tremendous demand arose for copies of the sacred songs, especially the solos, used by Sankey. At first he would lend his notebook to others, but this was highly unsatisfactory; it could never make all the rounds, and sometimes it failed to get back to its owner on time. Next he had cards printed, but the supply was exhausted immediately.

Then R. C. Morgan, editor of the Christian, visited the meetings to gather material for his paper. He offered to prepare a small paperbound hymnbook, and thus Sacred Songs and Solos was born. The first edition of 500 copies at sixpence each sold out within twenty-four hours. After later printings, the popular volume was advertised and sold not only in bookstores but even at grocery and dry goods stores.

In The Golden Multitudes, the late Frank Luther Mott says, “Perhaps the best selling song book of modern times was Ira D. Sankey’s Sacred Songs, for which the compiler claimed a distribution of 50 million copies the world over.” This of course included many inexpensive paper-bound words-only editions.

But if the phenomenal distribution of the book helped publicize the Moody-Sankey meetings, it also furnished ammunition for the critics who imagined the evangelists amassing riches from royalties and even from the sale of organs. The fact is, however, that neither Moody nor Sankey profited personally. Wisely foreseeing this very charge, they set up a trust headed by William E. Dodge, Jr., New York businessman and philanthropist, to handle hymnbook royalties. The first disbursem*nt from the fund helped complete the Chicago Avenue (now Moody Memorial) Church, an outgrowth of D. L. Moody’s early Sunday school work in Chicago. Later, funds went to other organizations, especially the Northfield and Mount Hermon Schools, which Moody also founded. In escorting visitors around the schools, Moody would point to a building and declare, “Sankey sang that one up.” At Moody’s death in 1899, the total hymnbook royalties were estimated at $1,250,000.

Sankey came in for criticism on other scores. Some Scottish Christians objected at first to his small reed organ as a “kist o’ whistles”; others complained that “solo singing is not worship.” In this country Walt Whitman called Sankey “vociferous and voiceless”—and many other things. Vanity Fair and other periodicals lampooned the bulky 220-pound figure with the magnificent muttonchop whiskers.

What did Ira D. Sankey’s singing sound like? Was it like that of George Beverly Shea or other famous evangelistic soloists today? It is difficult to tell, even if one carefully listens to all known recordings of Sankey’s voice. Recording facilities in that day were so primitive by today’s standards that comparisons are almost impossible. The voice is perhaps best described as an unexceptional “strong baritone of moderate compass.” He had little or no professional voice training. Yet unbiased critics agree on his ability to move audiences profoundly. Generally he accompanied himself on a small reed organ, singing simply but with careful enunciation and much feeling and expression.

A dramatic incident occurred in Agricultural Hall, London, during the great 1875 campaign. After his sermon, Moody asked the audience to bow while Sankey sang the powerful invitational hymn, “Almost Persuaded.” Just before the last word of the final stanza, the singer paused and then prayed aloud, “Oh God, grant that no one in this building tonight will be—lost.” The stillness of death prevailed while many made decisions for Christ.

Sankey was not only a singer but a personal worker as well. A drunkard in Scotland had been greatly affected by hearing “The Ninety and Nine.” After the service Sankey dealt with him and found that he was the lost sheep of his family and wanted to stop drinking. After counseling and prayer, the man trusted Christ. “He was said,” Sankey recalled, “to have been one of the most wicked men of his town, and had given the police more trouble than any other man there, but he became a humble follower of Christ.”

During a Torrey-Alexander meeting in Sheffield, England, about 1905, a man gave this testimony: “I found Christ in this hall in 1882, when Moody and Sankey were preaching the Gospel; I was brought face to face with God, and in the after-meeting Mr. Sankey led me to Christ, and I am happy in Him today.” Alexander added, “As we have gone around the world we have found that the best workers, as a general rule, are either workers or converts of the Moody and Sankey meetings.”

Of course, not all interviews were so successful. During the Hartford, Connecticut, meetings, Sankey dealt with P. T. Barnum, the famous showman, who observed, “Mr. Sankey, you go on singing ‘The Ninety and Nine’ and when you get that lost sheep in the fold we will all be saved.” Sankey later learned that Barnum was a universalist.

But undoubtedly Sankey’s most lasting contribution to the cause of Christ was his writing. He composed some eighty numbers and compiled about ten hymn-books and other volumes. Sacred Songs and Solos is still widely used today, though it is not now published in the United States. Besides “The Ninety and Nine,” Sankey’s best-known hymns include “Hiding in Thee,” “Faith Is the Victory,” “Beneath the Cross of Jesus,” “Under His Wings,” and “Trusting Jesus, That Is All.”

In his later years, Sankey’s gradually failing health curtailed his ministry, and Moody used D. B. Towner, George C. Stebbins, and other musicians increasingly. As J. C. Pollock says, “Sankey in his prime had lasted entire campaigns with few breaks, but now Moody would wear out two or three singers on a tour. Moreover, none had that extraordinary, indefinable quality which could still cause a hearer to exclaim, ‘I would rather hear Sankey with his worn-out voice than the greatest prima donna in the world.’”

Not only his voice failed. For his last five years Sankey was completely blind, confined to the seclusion of his home in Brooklyn, only a shadow of the giant who had helped stir two continents for God.

Richard Ellsworth Day, in Bush Aglow, tells poignantly of a ray of light that brightened Sankey’s life one day in 1907 when Dr. F. B. Meyer visited him: “They talked over the golden days agone, when D. L. was with them.… As Meyer arose to go, he led Sankey over to the little melodeon and whispered, ‘Sing again, beloved.’

“The shrunken fingers touched the yellowed keys; the old voice warmed slowly into something like its ancient beauty. And Meyer sobbed like a child when the faithful words filled the room: ‘There’ll be no dark valley when Jesus comes!’”

Life on earth ended for Ira D. Sankey on August 13, 1908. But what a time of rejoicing there will be when the words of one of his own favorite songs, “There’ll Be No Dark Valley,” are gloriously fulfilled.

MICHELANGELO’S STATUE OF DAVID

From the recalcitrant marble his sure hand

Shaped this live image: See young David stand

Armed for the final conflict, poised to fling

That fateful pebble from the shepherd’s sling

Hung over his strong shoulder: See his brow

Prayer-lifted facing old Goliath now—

The foe of ages to be overthrown.…

Here is the trust of Israel set in stone.

M. WHITCOMB HESS

THE EDITOR

Evangelical Christianity today confronts a “new theology,” a “new evangelism,” and a “new morality,” each notably lacking in biblical content. A “new social ethics” has also emerged, and some ecumenical leaders mainly interested in politico-economic issues speak hopefully of a “new breed of evangelical” in this realm of activity. The red carpet rolls out when even a few evangelicals march at Selma, when they unite in organized picket protests and public demonstrations, when they join ecclesiastical pressure blocs on Capitol Hill or at the White House, or when they engineer resolutions on legislative matters through annual church meetings.

Since most evangelical churchmen traditionally have not mobilized their social concern in this way, non-evangelical sociologists are delighted over any and every such sign of apparent enlightenment. Moreover, they propagandize such church techniques as authentically Christian, and misrepresent evangelical non-participation as proof of social indifference in conservative Christian circles and as a lack of compassion. This favorite device of propagandists is effective among some evangelicals who desire to protect their genuine devotion to social concern from public misinterpretation. The claim that evangelicals as a whole are socially impotent, moreover, diverts attention from the long-range goals of social extremists by concentrating attention on existential involvement on an emergency basis.

That Christians are citizens of two worlds, that a divine mandate enjoins both their preaching of the Gospel and their promotion of social justice, that the lordship of Christ over all of life involves socio-cultural obligations, that Christians bear a political responsibility, are historic evangelical emphases. Evangelicals regard government and jurisprudence as strategic realms of vocational service to humanity. They stress that government exists for the sake of all citizens, not simply for certain favored groups, and that a just or good society preserves for all citizens equal rights before the law. This emphasis has equally critical implications for a society that seeks special privilege for one race above another and for any church that seeks partisan and sectarian benefits from government.

The heritage of evangelical Christianity includes both Jesus’ sermon on the mount and his delineation of the Good Samaritan, and Paul’s account of civil government as an agent of justice. Evangelical Christians recognized the moral claim of these scriptural elements long before Protestant liberalism distorted them into a rationalistic politico-economic perspective. The Evangelical Revival in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain attested the devotion of believers, not only to the observance of public statutes, but also to the vigorous promotion of just laws. The seventh Earl of Shaftesbury headed the movement in Parliament that led in 1807 to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. As a result of his own conversion Wilberforce led great reform programs, including child-labor laws. The Evangelical Revival placed evangelicals in the forefront of humanitarian concerns, not only for an end to the slave trade, but also for child labor laws, prison reforms, improved factory labor conditions, and much else in the sphere of social justice. It was evangelical social concern, in fact, that preserved the shape of Anglo-Saxon society from tragic revolutionary onslaught. An eminent church historian writes: “No branch indeed of the Western Church can be refused the honor of having assisted in the progress of humane ideas, and non-Christians have participated largely in the work of diffusing the modern spirit of kindness; but the credit of the inception of the movement belongs without doubt to that form of Protestantism which is distinguished by the importance it attaches to the doctrine of the Atonement.… History shows that the thought of Christ on the Cross has been more potent than anything else in arousing a compassion for suffering and indignation at injustice.… The later Evangelicalism, which saw in the death of Christ the means of free salvation for fallen humanity, caused its adherents to take the front rank as champions of the weak.… Prison reform, the prohibition of the slave trade, the abolition of slavery, the Factory Acts, the protection of children, the crusade against cruelty to animals, are all the outcome of the great Evangelical revival of the eighteenth century. The humanitarian tendencies of the nineteenth century, which, it is but just to admit, all Christian communities have fostered, and which non-Christian philanthropists have vied with them in encouraging, are among the greatest triumphs of the power and influence of Christ” (F. J. Foakes-Jackson, “Christ in the Church: The Testimony of History,” in H. B. Swete, Cambridge Theological Essays, New York, 1905, pp. 512–14).

Liberal Impact And Evangelical Reaction

For two generations liberal social ethics has been markedly influential in American public life in the areas of education, government, and labor. Liberal ecclesiastical reformers have only themselves to blame for the present lack of fixed governing principles in public policy, and for the declining spiritual influence of their churches in the private sector of national life. One theologian addicted to a radically secular version of Christianity—Professor William Hamilton of Colgate-Rochester Divinity School—tells us candidly that “we are well into the opening phase of the breakdown of organized religion in American life, well beyond the time when ecumenical dialogue or denominational mergers can be expected to arrest the breakdown” (The Christian Scholar, Spring, 1965). Professor Hamilton fails to recognize, however, that the modernist dilution of historic Christian theology was largely responsible for compromising the message and power of institutional Christianity. In no century of recent history have public structures been so directly influenced by American churchmen as they are in our time through the pressures of liberal social thought. Churchmen have increasingly manipulated the machinery of ecumenical Christianity in support of socio-economic objectives, including specific legislative proposals. Not even the breakdown of the League of Nations or the deformation of the United Nations, each endorsed as the world’s best hope for peace, has encouraged “second thoughts” about the efficacy or legitimacy of the nature of their social activity.

This does not mean that evangelical Christians have reason to boast about social alertness on the explosive frontiers of public life. They were undeniably concerned with personal behavior in public social life, and with responsible community involvement in keeping with the standards and vocations of believers. To their further credit they realized that not an ethic of grace but rather an ethic of justice should govern social structures (including international relations, national government, and legal institutions generally). But evangelical Christians elaborated no Bible-based ethic impinging on the basis, method, and function of social structures and groups such as the state, labor movements and business corporations, minorities, and so on.

If excuses for neglect are in order, this may be the right place to note them. Evangelicals could plead, of course, that the “social gospeler’s” neglect of God’s good news of salvation for sinners imposed upon conservative Christianity the burden of biblical evangelism and missions throughout a perishing world—a staggering task indeed. Evangelical capability was decimated by liberal control of denominations, schools, and other ecclesiastical resources. But evangelical withdrawal from the arena of public life came mainly in reaction to the Protestant liberal attempts to achieve the Kingdom of God on earth through political and economic changes. The modernists so excluded supernatural redemptive facets of the Christian faith and so modified the proper content of the Christian ethic that, as evangelicals saw it, they had altered the very nature and mission of the Church. Evangelical Christianity reacted against the liberal Protestant concentration of effort in this area of concern by non-involvement, and this withdrawal yielded the field to the speculative theories of liberal churchmen and largely deprived evangelicals of an ethical witness in the mainstream of public life.

Fallacies Of Liberal Ethics

Precisely what is objectionable in liberal social ethics from the evangelical viewpoint? This is no small matter, for criticism extends to presuppositions, methods, and goals.

The theological presuppositions of liberal social ethics are hostile to biblical theology. A generation ago the “social gospel” theologians deleted the wrath of God and dissolved his righteousness into benevolence or love; today the revolt has been extended. Dialectical and existential moralists surrender the objective being of God, while secular theologians disown his transcendence and, for that matter, his relevance as well. What passes for Christian social ethics in such circles dispenses with the supernatural essence of the Christian religion as foreign to problems of social justice and public righteousness. Evangelicals who insist on obedience to divinely revealed precepts, and who hold that redeemed men alone can truly fulfill the will of God and that only men of good will can enlarge the boundaries of God’s Kingdom, are caricatured as “rationalists,” despite the fact that Scripture specifically associates Jesus’ mission with an era of good will on earth. Yet while existentialists reject the absolutes of a transcendent morality for an absolute of their own decision, thereby making each person his own church, and reject an ethics based on principles because they consider it impossible to achieve moral obedience by decree, they nonetheless agitate for laws to compel others to act in a predictable, principled way.

It may seem pedantic, if not picayune, in a secular society so perilously near doom, to surround the moral demand for agape with a complex of theological distinctions. After all, is not agape itself the central Christian moral motif? But the reply is simple: “agape” stripped of supernatural elements is no longer biblical agape. For biblical agape is first and foremost the love of God. Biblical agape is nowhere simply a matter of humanistic charity toward one’s neighbors. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself”—love them, as a well-phrased prayer reiterates, “with a pure heart, fervently.” Although just laws are desirable and imperative, law has the power only of outward restraint; it lacks power to ensure outward obedience and inner conformity to its command. In the absence of moral men—of men willing to do the good—no body of law, however just, can ensure a good society. Authentic Christian ethics concerns what is done through a desire to do God’s will, in obedience to his command; this is made possible only by spiritual regeneration. No other motivation can counter the selfish drives that haunt the noblest of unredeemed men and correct the faulty vision of an unredeemed society. The current existential appeal for everyman’s “identification with others” naïvely presupposes that the “identifiers” are morally equipped with motivations unthwarted by selfishness. But universal love, even in diluted forms, is a requirement that far exceeds the capacity of unregenerate men; for a Jew to have loved Hitler must have posed a problem not unlike that involved in a Selma marcher’s love for the governor of Alabama, or a Birmingham demonstrator’s affection for the local sheriff. The modern devotion to mankind in place of God, on the premise of “the infinite worth of the individual,” indicates the inability of some Western intellectuals to assimilate the basic lessons of recent history. They blandly overlook the power of evil in human nature and man’s limitations in coping with it—witness not only the patent egoism of individuals and social collectivities and the barbarism of the dictators, but also the tragic fact of two world wars at the pinnacle of Western scientific development and the unresolved threat of imminent universal destruction. As George F. Thomas says, “man is neither infinite nor perfect, and his ideal ends are worthy of devotion only insofar as they are subordinated to the purpose of One who is both” (Religious Philosophies of the West, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965, p. 351).

The evangelical Christian mobilizes for social action in the spiritual context of transcendent justice, supernatural law, revealed principles, concern for God’s will in human affairs, and love of God and man. Against ecclesiastical “young Turks” who propagandize the notion that social concerns cannot be expressed within the inherited theology, the evangelical contends that in so far as social concerns are authentically biblical, they can be adequately expressed and fulfilled only within scriptural theology. What the evangelical does in the social order, as in every other realm of life, he does as a matter of principled spiritual obedience to the Lord of life.

Differences In Goals

It is, moreover, a gross underestimation of differences in social action between evangelicals and non-evangelicals to imply that, beyond motivation, they agree wholly on goals and differ only in method. The liberal Protestant identification of Christian love with pacifism, then with socialism, even with Communism by some modernists in the recent past, is too fresh a memory to allow one to blunder into the notion that the Bible sanctions whatever social goals the liberal moralists endorse. Even the Communist hostility toward supernatural religion as an unscientific myth has moderated into tactical tolerance of religion as useful for promoting a social consciousness agreeable to the Soviet politico-economic ideology. Repudiation of private property, of the profit motive, and of inequality of wealth, and other Marxist ideals have been arbitrarily promoted by liberal social reformers in supposed devotion to the biblical vision of the Kingdom of God. Even their emphasis on equal rights has cheaply surrendered property rights as a fundamental human right, and also man’s right to work apart from compulsory union membership.

Whenever the Church advances a political ideology or promotes partisan legislation, its ecclesiastical leaders are soon forced into the position of impugning the integrity of influential Christians who sincerely dissent from the official views. It should surprise nobody, therefore, that as the National Council of Churches comes under increasing fire, its spokesmen tend to demean critics of its political commitments as reactionary advocates of arrogant nationalism and of social, economic, and racial privilege.

Not a few goals approved by modern social theorists are wholly desirable, and evangelical differences in such cases concern the means of achieving these ends. Elimination of poverty, opportunity for employment, racial equality, and many other goals that stand at the heart of contemporary social agitation are not only acceptable but highly desirable. Evangelicals are not indifferent to the desirability of such objectives even if liberal social ethics mistakenly conceives the Kingdom of God as basically a politico-economic phenomenon and tends to dilute redemptive spiritual forces into sociological ingredients. In fact, as evangelicals see it, such features of social life are essential to a just and good society.

Evangelicals no less than liberals recognize social justice as an authentic Christian concern, despite serious differences over definition and content. If evangelicals came to stress evangelism above social concern, it was because of liberalism’s skepticism over supernatural redemptive dynamisms and its pursuit of the Kingdom of God by sociological techniques only. Hence a sharp and costly disjunction arose, whereby many evangelicals made the mistake of relying on evangelism alone to preserve world order and many liberals made the mistake of relying wholly on socio-political action to solve world problems.

Conflict Over Method

It would be naïve to argue from this, however, that liberals and evangelicals need each other for complementary emphases. Over and above differences of motivation and of goals stand the differences between evangelical and liberal ethics in respect to methodology. Most evangelicals reject outright the liberal methodology of social reform, in which more and more liberals call for a “new evangelism” that substitutes sociological for spiritual concerns. Just as in his theological view of God the liberal dissolves righteousness into love, so in the political order he dilutes social justice into compassion. This kind of merger not only destroys the biblical view of God on the one hand but also produces the welfare state on the other. This confounding of justice and love confuses what God expects of government with what he expects of the Church, and makes the state an instrument for legislating partisan and sectarian ideals upon society. Ideally the purpose of the state is to preserve justice, not to implement benevolence; ideally, the purpose of the Church is to preach the Gospel and to manifest unmerited, compassionate love.

Many sociologists and political scientists dislike this way of stating the case. But it is noteworthy that these particular disciplines are especially barren of evangelical perspectives; they tend to be theologically illiterate in respect both to eschatology and to a basic theology of justice. Current proposals to detach the Gospel from “right-wing” social reaction and current pleas for “political compassion” are rooted in leftist political ideology more often than in an authentic spiritual view of the role of government.

But in the present explosive era of history the problem of acting on an acceptable methodology is an urgent one for evangelicals. It is one thing to deplore ministerial marches and picket lines and well-publicized public pressures; but if evangelical conscience is to be a remedial and transforming social force, then evangelical convictions require articulate mobilization on their own account.

Evangelicals And Social Concern

Despite the present confusion caused by ecclesiastical intervention in political affairs, evangelicals have something socially relevant to say to both the secular man and the church man. The Christian has social duties not simply as a Christian but as a man, and his sanctification therein does not come about automatically without pulpit instruction in sound scriptural principles. Evangelicals as a people consider themselves bound to the Word of God; for this reason they consider themselves a spiritual people with a divine message for themselves and for others in regard to social action. Evangelicals acknowledge a divine call to identify themselves with others—not with social customs or social vices or social discontents, but rather with persons in their survival needs: physical and moral and spiritual. These survival needs include material help in destitution, social justice, and the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

Surely evangelical Christianity has more to offer mankind than its unique message of salvation, even if that is its highest and holiest mission. While it rightly chides the liberal for regarding the world as a unity (rather than divided into unregenerate and regenerate), it also has a message for all men as members of one society. The Christian is not, by his church identification, isolated from humanity, or from involvement in the political and economic orders. Not only is he called to identify himself with society: he is identified, by the very fact of his humanity, and as a Christian he bears a double responsibility in relation to the social needs and goals of mankind. Social justice is a need of the individual, whose dignity as a person is at stake, and of society and culture, which would soon collapse without it. The evangelical knows that spiritual regeneration restores men to moral earnestness; but he also knows the moral presuppositions of a virile society, and he is obligated to proclaim the “whole counsel” of God. He may have no message for society that insures unrepentant mankind against final doom—nor even against catastrophic destruction in our own time, while its leaders insist upon arbitrary human authority at the expense of the lordship of Jesus Christ. But he can and ought to use every platform of social involvement to promulgate the revealed moral principles that sustain a healthy society and that indict an unhealthy one. More than this, the evangelical Christian should be represented, in his personal convictions, on the frontiers of government and in the corporate processes of society. Convinced that the cooperation of godly men in the social and collective order can be decisively influential, he should be concerned about relations between nations and about minority rights. There is no reason at all why evangelical Christians should not engage energetically in projecting social structures that promote the interests of justice in every public realm; in fact, they have every legitimate sanction for social involvement.

Of course the Church is to be ruled distinctively by an ethic of grace. But the Church is also in a world that is to be ruled by justice, an ethic of justice that does not per se require regenerate social structures. In this context, a positive ethic and corrective principles enunciated on the broad world scene by regenerate believers who are engaged in the social struggle can have decisive influence. Such an ethic will include (1) the Church’s faithful exposition of divinely revealed standards of human justice as the only basis for a stable society and as the criteria by which the world will be finally judged; and (2) the Christian’s energetic promotion and support of just laws as the formal hallmark of a good society. When Christian believers become thus involved in the struggle for justice, the world may recognize in a new way the presence of regenerate realities; noting the community of twice-born men that sees the restoration of sinners to fellowship with God and to holiness as the aim of the Gospel, the world may even recognize the validity of regenerate structures through their moral impact.

Any Christian engaged in the pursuit of social justice is painfully aware that, in a tragic world of fallen men, government decisions often involve a choice between greater and lesser evils rather than between absolutes of good and evil, and that only the Church of Christ can witness to a manifestation of absolute good in history. He will, however, avoid both the liberal error of “absolutizing relatives,” as if these were identical with the will of God, and also the fundamentalist temptation to consider any gain short of the absolute ideal in history as worthless or unworthy.

Law And Gospel

But evangelicals must not perpetuate the liberal Protestant failure to distinguish between the social concerns of Law and the social concerns of Gospel. In law and justice—that is, the province of government—all men are obliged to support man’s God-given rights as universally due to human beings whatever their race, color, or creed. The evangelical knows that no improvement can be made on a government that assures every man his rights, and that limits the freedom of citizens where and when it intrudes upon the rights of others. Evangelicals do not view government as an instrument of benevolence or compassion, since love is preferential and shows favor or partiality. Constantly pressing the question, “Don’t you care?,” liberals enlist support for legislating programs of benevolence. Such an appeal to “compassion” in support of legislative programs commits a twofold error, however: it diverts government from an ideal preservation of equal human rights before the law, and it shifts to the state a responsibility for compassion or benevolence that belongs properly to the Church. By concentrating on government to achieve the goals of both state and Church in a “benevolent partnership,” liberalism reflects a reliance on political techniques in society to the neglect of the redemptive dynamisms inherent in Christianity. This reliance on political techniques to achieve ecclesiastical objectives means the loss of a genuine supernatural grounding of ethical concerns, the loss of the Church as Church in society, the loss of the redemptive evangel in deference to secular solvents of social malformity, and the loss of evangelical loyalties in the congregation.

What distinguishes evangelical Christianity is its refusal to impose sectarian obligations upon government, upon government which then employs compulsion to enforce a program of benevolence that individual citizens might or might not approve. Even if they did approve, they might consider the provision of such benevolences moral only if performed voluntarily; or they might consider it immoral to use taxation to compel others to do what they do not think to be right. While liberals justify their breaking of laws that appear unjust on the grounds of sensitivity to conscience, they nonetheless promote other laws that some persons regard as preferential and unjust.

To the evangelical Christian, the best alternative to the “welfare” state is the just state, and the best alternative to political demonstrations is civil obedience. The evangelical champions and strives for just legislation, and for obedience to law and respect for judicial process rather than for directly coerced action. The evangelical sponsors a principled ethic whose course is determined by divinely revealed moral principles. Much of contemporary liberal social action is not a matter of obeying laws; rather, it is a case of everyone’s being on his existential own. Dialectical-existential ethics cannot indicate in advance what the moral agent ought to do, and looks upon any structured objective ethics as mere rationalism.

The evangelical holds that all persons are divinely obligated by the Scriptures to love their neighbors. While progress has been slow in the area of race tensions, nonetheless there has been progress. Yet even evangelical believers fall short of their highest moral aspirations, and laws are necessary to hold just social standards before Christians and non-Christians alike. All citizens should strive to replace discriminatory laws by non-discriminatory laws. The evangelical recognizes, however, that without public enthusiasm only moral earnestness vouchsafed by spiritual conviction and renewal assures the necessary devotion to right that guarantees social fulfillment. While the glory of ancient Rome was its genius for universal law, through its lack of heart for righteousness the Roman Empire sank into oblivion. The problem of racial discrimination can be permanently met only by Christian behavior that faces up to the ugliness of bias, the evils of immorality and delinquency, and the whole complex of problems that surrounds race feeling. The predilection for public issues over personal holiness in liberal social ethics is all the more disconcerting in view of this fact. Although liberal churchmen will throw their energies behind a public health program, they tend to remain silent about many of the personal vices; such concerns are left to the “purity nuts.”

The history of Christian mission in the world makes it clear that evangelicals were interested in education, hospitals, care for the aged, and many current social concerns long before modern secular theory was ever born. Evangelicals were active in social work not only in the slums of America but also on distant mission fields a full century before the rise of modern welfare programs. To this day, rescue missions all across the land reflect a long-standing inner-city missionary concern for people in material and spiritual poverty. Evangelicals have not been as active as they need to be in the social arena; on the other hand, they have been far more active than they are sometimes said to have been.

The weakness of public demonstrations as the approved means of Christian social action is its limitation and externalization of Christian concern. It is arbitrary to imply that only those who demonstrate at a given point manifest authentic social concern. Moreover, since local demonstrations gain national significance through radio and television, the implications of massive civil disobedience are the more distressing. Ecclesiastical demonstrators who never persuade observers to become disciples of Jesus Christ ought to ask how effectively Christian is such amorphous “witness by demonstration.” The motivations for demonstrating are internal, and apart from verbal interpretation might equally well be sub-Christian, non-Christian, or anti-Christian. As a matter of fact, Jews and humanists resent a Christian interpretation of their demonstrating. If authentic social concern demanded the ecumenical chartering of planes to officially designated out-of-town points, it would require a large expense account to enable everybody to travel to somebody else’s home town “to identify.” If every supporter of an item of disputed legislation had to march to Capitol Hill, if every Christian citizen had to put in a personal appearance to let legislators know what laws he thought God specially wanted, what would tourist-jammed Washington be like then? If the representative role of congressmen were superseded by the group pressures of ministers, the whole machinery of American government would soon collapse. The question remains, moreover, Whose conscience answers for whom? These clergy are received by congressmen, not on the premise that they speak only for themselves, but as voices for their churches. No one disputes a clergyman’s right as an individual to picket or demonstrate anywhere he wishes (the right of conscience is a Protestant principle). It is unlikely, however, that pastors can wholly detach themselves from responsibilities to their congregations. When prominent churchmen parade as Reverend Church, moreover, they are simply encouraging future counter-demonstrations at 475 Riverside Drive or the Witherspoon Building.

What many socially sensitive ministers especially deplore is the implication left by the well-publicized minority of marchers that non-marchers are lacking or inferior in social concern. “I don’t mind another minister’s marching if he must relieve his conscience that way,” said one Washington minister, “but I don’t see why my social concern—never before questioned—should now be in doubt because I didn’t engage in this form of exhibitionism.” In Copenhagen, when Evangelist Billy Graham opened his crusade, a heckler interrupted him with the cry: “Why didn’t you march in Selma?” But Graham had been integrating meetings in the South long before some of the marchers had become existentialized and, moreover, had done so in the context of biblical Christianity. It is a neat propaganda device to imply that evangelical social concern is immobile because it does not conform to liberal methods—it merely proves that political propagandism is a technique in which liberal ecclesiastical leaders have become adept. In some ecclesiastical circles, the defense of this one controversial method of action has apparently justified the repudiation of all theological grounds of social concern.

Evangelical Distinctives

When evangelicals manifest social concern, they do so first by proclaiming the supernatural revelation of God and the historical resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus they emphasize the transcendent basis of justice and the divine basis of the Gospel. They declare both the standards by which Almighty God will judge the human race and the redemption from sin unto holiness that is to be found in Jesus Christ. They affirm God’s institution of civil government to preserve justice and order, and the Church as a spiritual fellowship of redeemed men who esteem their neighbors in holy love and dedicate themselves to social righteousness.

The evangelical Christian’s social concern is first directed towards the family as the basic unit of society. He finds a hollow ring in the social passion for “one world” that simultaneously lacks indignation over divorce, infidelity, and vagrancy in the home. Because liberalism fails to see society as a macrocosm of the family, it is bankrupt to build a new society. Liberalism changes ideological loyalties and social perspectives every generation; evangelical Christianity treasures the family bound to the changeless will of God and to the apostolic faith. Hence evangelical Christianity regards the Sunday school, the prayer meeting, and the family in the church as a cohesive social unit that reflects in miniature the ideal social order. No new era of brotherliness and peace is likely to emerge in the absence of a new race of men. Evangelicals consider alliances of nations uncommitted to transcendent justice to be as futile a foundation for future mutuality as premarital promiscuity. As evangelical Christians see it, the vision of One World, or of United Nations, that is built on geographical representation rather than on principial agreement is as socially unpromising as is a lawless home that neglects the commandments of God. Walter Lippmann has somewhere said: “We ourselves were so sure that at long last a generation had arisen, keen and eager to put this disorderly earth to right … and fit to do it.… We meant so well, we tried so hard, and look what we have made of it. We can only muddle into muddle. What is required is a new kind of man.”

Evangelical Christianity finds the most natural avenue for social witness beyond the family circle in the world of work when it is viewed as a divine calling. How sadly liberal Christianity, during its past-generation domination of ecclesiastical life, has failed in the organized church’s social witness is nowhere more apparent than here. Almost all political leaders of the race-torn states are church members; Alabama’s Governor Wallace belongs to the Methodist Church, which is in the forefront of liberal social action programs. Almost all congressmen are church members. Either the religious social activists have failed miserably in inspiring churchmen in political life to view their vocations as avenues for the advancement of social justice, or an elite ecclesiastical cadre is pressuring leaders to conform their political judgments to the partisan preferences of a special bloc of churchmen—or perhaps both are true. Since everyone lives in a world of labor and economics, evangelical Christianity emphasizes that man’s work is a divinely appointed realm in which man is to glorify God and invest his talents for the good of his fellows; it is not only a means of livelihood but also an avenue of service.

This concept of divine vocation, of work as a calling, has all but vanished from the work-a-day world at the very time in modern history when liberal social action commissions have conspired with the labor unions in their skyrocketing material benefits. Meanwhile evangelical Protestants have organized a Christian Medical Society, Christian Business Men’s Committee, Christian Professional Women’s Club, Christian Law Society, Christian Teachers Association, Officers Christian Union in the Armed Forces—even a Christian Labor Union—in order to emphasize the spiritual responsibilities of vocation. It must be conceded that many of these Christian organizations serve mainly an evangelistic role, or one of vocational fellowship; only a beginning has been made in the equally urgent task of shaping an ethic for the social structures in which these groups operate. Beyond fulfilling person-to-person Christian opportunities, such agencies have an opportunity to supply guidance to both Christian and non-Christian on what is implied in a specified social order in the way of justice.

Evangelical Christians consider this recognition of the priestly nature of daily work to be more basic to social renewal than is a reshuffle of economic features that locates the fundamental flaws of society in man’s environment rather than in man himself and his works. The importance of just laws is not in dispute, since civil government is divinely designed as a coercive force to restrain evil, preserve order, and promote justice in a fallen and sinful society. Because there is no assurance that all men will repent and seek the will of God, and because even Christian believers must contend with the remnants of sin, just laws are indispensable in human history, and God’s common grace in the lives of men everywhere matches conscience with law in the interest of social preservation. But evangelical Christianity is not so infatuated with the external power of coercion as to exaggerate its potentialities, nor so skeptical of the spiritual powers of regeneration as to minimize its possibilities. Precisely because law does not contain the power to compel obedience, evangelical Christianity recognizes that a good society turns upon the presence of good men—of regenerated sinners whose minds and hearts are effectively bound to the revealed will of God—and upon their ability under God to influence humanity to aspire to enduring values.

Although society at large has seldom been overwhelmed by the Church’s proclaiming the Gospel from the pulpit, the obedient fulfillment of the Great Commission has called new disciples one by one into the circle of regenerate humanity. The voice of the Church in society has been conspicuously weaker whenever the pulpit of proclamation has been forsaken for mass pressures upon the public through the adoption of resolutions, the promotion of legislation, and the organization of demonstrations. Whenever the institutional church seeks public influence by mounting a socio-political platform, she raises more fundamental doubts about the authenticity and uniqueness of the Church than about the social aberrations against which she protests.

To evangelical Christianity, history at its best is the lengthened shadow of influential men, not the compulsive grip of impersonal environmental forces. A change of environmental forces will not transform bad men into good men—let alone into a good society. But transformed men will rise above a bad environment and will not long be lacking in a determination to alter it.

At the present time, involvement in the race problem is the crucial test of devotion to social justice. Of the evangelical Christian’s love for men of all races the long-standing missionary effort leaves no doubt; from Adoniram Judson and David Livingstone to Hudson Taylor and Paul Carlson, the story is one of evangelical sacrifice of creature comforts, even of life itself, that men of every land and color might share the blessings of redemption. In mid-twentieth-century America, humanism and liberalism and evangelicalism alike were slow to protest political discrimination against the Negro, although evangelical missionaries have deplored the incongruities of segregation. Regrettably, the Negro’s plight became for some liberal reformers an opportunity for promoting social revolution, and for some conservative reactionaries an occasion for perpetuating segregation and discrimination. Evangelical Christianity has a burden for social renewal but no penchant for revolution or reaction. Because it champions the redemptive realities inherent in the Christian religion, evangelical Christianity will in the long run vindicate the judgment that the Negro is not only politically an equal but also spiritually a brother.

Some Governing Principles

A new breed of evangelical? Yes, indeed! But not because evangelicals are switching from proclamation of the good tidings to pronouncements, picketing, and politicking as sacred means of legislating Christian sentiment on earth. Rather, evangelicals are a new breed because redemptive religion seeks first and foremost a new race of men, new creatures in Christ. Whenever Christians lose that motivation, they surrender more than their New Testament distinctiveness; they forfeit the New Testament evangel as well.

In summary, evangelicals face the social predicament today with four controlling convictions:

1. The Christian Church’s distinctive dynamic for social transformation is personal regeneration by the Holy Spirit, and the proclamation of this divine offer of redemption is the Church’s prime task.

In the twentieth century the ecumenical movement has failed most conspicuously in its mission to the world by relying on political and sociological forces, and by neglecting spiritual dynamisms.

2. While the corporate or institutional church has no divine mandate, jurisdiction, or special competence for approving legislative proposals or political parties and persons, the pulpit is responsible for proclaiming divinely revealed principles of social justice as a part of the whole counsel of God.

3. The most natural transition from private to social action occurs in the world of daily work, in view of the Christian’s need to consecrate his labor to the glory of God and to the service of mankind.

4. As citizens of two worlds, individual church members have the sacred duty to extend God’s purpose of redemption through the Church, and also to extend God’s purpose of justice and order through civil government. Christians are to distinguish themselves by civil obedience except where this conflicts with the commandments of God, and are to use every political opportunity to support and promote just laws, to protest social injustice, and to serve their fellow men.