According to an old legend, the Cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified was set at the center of the world. And so it was—historically and spiritually. The Cross is the center of the divine continuum of redemption. For it, God caused the Incarnation; as a result of it, the Resurrection occurred, the Ascension took place, and the Second Advent will usher in the consummation of the Kingdom.
Good Friday, or in earlier usage “God’s Friday,” is a day of deepest meaning. It reveals the enormity of sin and the greatness of God’s love. It was a brutal business done at Golgotha, the place of a skull, that April day early in the first century. The shame of public execution, the pounding of nails through hands that had healed the afflicted, the cruel mockery of him “who did no sin” and “who when he was reviled, reviled not again,” the bitter sponge pressed to the parched lips and swollen tongue that had spoken words of life, and, most profoundly of all, the dereliction of soul during the three dark hours—these show the awful actuality of sin. Yet out of such suffering endured in love for the lost, the Sin-bearer spoke seven words—words of forgiveness, assurance, filial concern, agony of soul, bodily thirst, triumphant victory, and committal of spirit.
The Crucifixion is unique. And its uniqueness derives from the Person who was crucified rather than from the Cross itself. In the words of Cecil Alexander’s hymn,
There was no other good enough
To pay the price of sin,
He only could unlock the gate
Of heav’n, and let us in.
Yet unique though it is, the Crucifixion does not stand in isolation. Not only is it the center of God’s redemptive plan; it is also related to the Resurrection as cause to effect.
According to the writer of Hebrews, “The God of peace … brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant.” Here in words of surpassing beauty is the inevitable connection between the Cross and the empty tomb. Good Friday had to be vindicated by Easter. “The blood of the everlasting covenant” which was “shed for many for the remission of sins” had to be ratified by the mighty power of God in raising up him who could not be held by “the pains of death.” Had there been no Good Friday, there never would have been an Easter; and had there been no Easter, the death of Christ would have had no saving efficacy. Therefore to deny the Resurrection is to deny the Gospel itself.
Like a priceless jewel with its facets, the Atonement has its different aspects. Down through the ages theologians have variously seen the work of Christ on the Cross as a ransom paid to Satan, as moral influence, as an expression of God’s moral government, as mystical, or as victory over sin and the devil. Despite some real elements of truth, these theories, even taken together, are not a complete explanation of the Atonement. Although theology must continue to search the meaning of the Cross, Christ’s saving work is never exhaustively defined by any human theological statement.
The substitutionary understanding of the Cross is not just one of a number of alternate views of what took place at Calvary, an optional interpretation to be accepted or rejected as one wishes; according to Scripture, it is the very heart of the Atonement. The “great Shepherd of the sheep” actually took the place of the sheep. As Isaiah wrote, “All we like sheep have gone astray.… He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter.… He bare the sin of many.” When Paul said, “The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me,” he put the fact of what Christ did at Calvary in personal terms that are as true today as in the first century. Granted that in depth of meaning the fact is inexhaustible, it is not irrational nor beyond all comprehension. One need not be a theologian to apprehend its personal meaning. The individual who looks to the crucified Saviour and says in faith, “He died for me,” affirms the Good Friday fact that God vindicated at Easter.
The death of Christ in the place of sinful men, the suffering of the just for the unjust, is a once-and-for-all event. Yet its proclamation continues “till he come.” It is good for the Church to take time on “God’s Friday” to recall the Lord’s suffering and death. But it is also dangerous. To see the Crucifixion as a moving religious spectacle and nothing more is to join the Roman soldiers of whom Matthew said, “And sitting down they watched him there.” No man has the right just to look at Golgotha; through his sin he is a participant in what happened there. And only by faith does he have life through Christ’s death. The power of the Cross is not confined to the solemn festival of a single day but is ever available to all who believe.
For the preacher, the truth he proclaims on Good Friday is truth for every day. There is not the slightest indication that Paul came to Corinth on a Good Friday. But we have his passionate avowal to the Corinthian church, “I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” For Paul the Cross was always at the center. For us too it can occupy no other place.
Significant also is the Apostle’s statement of the manner of his proclamation of the Cross: “And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom.… My speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.” Today when philosophy is invading the pulpit and when there is a tendency to substitute existential jargon for basic Christian concepts, these words of Paul need pondering. If the message of Christ crucified is for all, young and old, it must be presented so that those who hear may lay hold upon its truth. Today as in Paul’s day the preacher is obligated to reach both the Greeks and the barbarians, both the wise and the unwise. Aside from the power of the Spirit, the greatest gift a preacher may have is the gift of plain speech. To proclaim the Cross with a clarity that reaches the common man actually takes more of concentrated study and disciplined use of language than to speak to an audience of scholars.
A searching test of any minister’s preaching is for him to ask about his every sermon, “Have I in some way preached Christ crucified in this message?” Not that every sermon must follow an evangelistic stereotype nor that it must refer at length to the Cross; preaching must be as various as human life and its needs. But always, whether the sermon deals with social justice, moral problems, life situations, history, or prophecy, Christ crucified must be in it. He must be there if for no other reason than that no minister can know whether his is the last voice to reach some listener whose heart is open to receive new life in Christ. Preaching devoid of the Good Friday truth may be eloquent, learned, fascinating, and even spiritually helpful; but if it contains no reference at all to the central fact of Christ crucified, it is open to the charge of inadequacy and unfaithfulness.
School Boycotts
The use of the boycott as a protest against de facto school segregation is meeting with growing disenchantment among friends of the civil rights movement, including some responsible Negroes. After almost half of New York City’s one million public school children stayed home for a one-day boycott, leaders of the mass truancy were charged by President John H. Fischer of Teachers College, Columbia University, with undermining “the child’s respect for the very school which is his surest hope of attaining equal opportunity.” Dr. Fischer is also head of the Advisory Committee on Human Relations and Community Tensions, created by the New York State Commissioner of Education. Superintendent Calvin Gross of the New York City Schools, apparently seeking to understand the motivation of the boycott, said, “This was the first opportunity for every Negro and Puerto Rican to express—with social approval—everything he feels under his skin about prejudice and discrimination.”
Negro leaders are planning boycotts in other Northern cities in a drive to break up concentration of Negroes and whites in certain schools by transporting pupils from one district to another. But such forced transportation of pupils may yet be ruled illegal or unconstitutional by the courts. New York State Supreme Court justices have ruled in two cases that race could not be a factor in transferring children or in establishing school zones. Basic to the decisions were state laws that had been adopted to protect Negroes from discrimination.
Substandard schooling has too long been the lot of many Negroes. But school boycotts to force more interschool district bus transportation are not an effective answer to that formidable problem. More fundamental and enduring solutions should be sought through expanded housing for minorities, better vocational opportunities, and other such corrective measures reaching beneath the school problem. And continuing conferences among racial groups are preferable to enforced truancy, which only adds to the spirit of lawlessness already so prevalent. Whites in some areas are said to be ready to counter with boycotts of their own; if they do, the public school system could be in jeopardy.
The American Negro rightly resists the tendency of many whites to relegate him to inferior status as a person and to deprive him of basic civil rights. But using mass truancy to force desegregation of pupils by school buses is not an effective way of improving the lot of his children.
A Balanced Ticket?
Until 1960 in a predominantly Protestant United States, only Protestants could get elected to the high office of the presidency. Yet through the years Protestants had proudly declared the great American tradition that a man’s religion neither qualified nor disqualified him for public office.
When Mr. Kennedy was sent to the White House, many regarded his election as a triumph that laid the last remains of religious discrimination to rest. But for some the triumph is now a matter of grave concern because politicians of both parties are thinking in terms of a combination of Protestant and Roman Catholic candidates for the presidency and the vice-presidency. And voices are lamenting that teams of candidates will be chosen best calculated to catch both Protestant and Roman Catholic votes.
Such laments are ineffective. It is unrealistic to think that Protestant and Roman Catholic considerations will not enter into the selection of candidates. Each political party wants to win, and if a “balanced” ticket seems best calculated to win, such combinations will be consciously and deliberately sought. The same forces will operate in respect to religion as now operate in the selection of men to capture the vote of the large city, the Negro, the laboring class, the South, and big business.
Would an attempt to gain both Protestant and Roman Catholic votes be any less American than the situation that prevailed until 1960—when only within the Protestant block was religion not a matter of concern for public office, so that any kind of a Protestant but only a Protestant could become president? And is not the concern being expressed on this matter unrealistic and ultimately as ineffective as whistling against the wind?
Such questions require affirmative answers because the fears they express are grounded in an abstract and unworkable commitment to an absolute separation of religion (not church) and state. To be sure, it would be un-American to nominate a man for office just because he is a Roman Catholic or just because he is a Protestant. But there are more than 40 million of the former and even more Protestants. There will always be men of presidential quality in both groups, and it is therefore highly unlikely that a man will ever be chosen solely for his religious affiliation.
The election of John F. Kennedy indicated a change in the politico-religious climate in the United States. Protestants and those committed to an unworkable absolute separation of religion and state may bewail the change, but they cannot do so as Americans. They can only bewail the change because of a religious commitment that violates the principle of religious non-discrimination for which they plead.
Balanced tickets do not warrant tears, but they do require balanced thinking.
Evangelism Or Confusion?
The strange notion that the evangelistic task of the Church is to save, not individuals, but the social, political, economic, and cultural structures of life, is currently being urged upon the churches. One advocate defines evangelism this way: “Evangelism is social legislation.” Such a view makes the United States Congress a formidable missionary society, surpassed only by socialistic governments. Another advocate defines it like this: “first economic security and then spiritual revival.” This view is based on that lost biblical text, “What shall it profit a man, if he save his soul, and lose the whole economic, political, cultural world?”
The Rev. Dr. Jitsuo Morikawa, secretary of evangelism of the American Baptist Convention, is an outspoken advocate of this novel conception of evangelism. At the recent meeting of the National Council of Churches’ Division of Christian Education in Cincinnati, he declared, “The redemption of the world is not ultimately dependent upon the churches we build, the missionaries we send, and the souls we win to Jesus Christ.” If this meant that the redemption of the world depends on God’s grace rather than our action, it would be in the classical Christian tradition. But Dr. Morikawa means that the world’s salvation depends on the salvation of life’s social structures. Last year in Huntington, West Virginia, he told Southern Presbyterians: “The redemption of the world is not dependent upon the souls we win for Jesus Christ.… There cannot be individual salvation.… Salvation has more to do with the whole society than with the individual soul.… We must not be satisfied to win people one by one.… Contemporary evangelism is moving away from winning souls one by one, to the evangelization of the structures of the society.” Dr. Morikawa also told the recent Cincinnati meeting that if we Christians assume that our primary task is to “win souls to Christ,” we presume to take “upon ourselves powers which belong only to God.”
On what theological position does this view rest? Surely not on that of the Apostle Paul, who tried desperately to “save some.” It rests rather on Dr. Morikawa’s theological assumption that since “God has already won a mighty redemption … for the entire world,” therefore “… the task of the Church is to tell all men … that they already belong to Christ” and that “men are no longer lost.”
On this view, Paul endured hardship and persecution to save the Roman Empire, or, in modern terms, to save such social structures as the United Nations, the Democratic and Republican parties, the AFL-CIO, and the Screen Actors’ Guild.
The view of evangelism represented by Dr. Morikawa is not only unbiblical; it is also internally inconsistent and contradictory. Why is the effort to save individuals presumptuous but the effort to save social power structures not? If “all men are already in the kingdom of fellowship and love” and the contemporary task is therefore “the evangelization of the structures of society,” how can it be held that these social structures must be saved to make possible the salvation of individuals?
Passing Out The Guilt
An article, “The Anatomy of Anti-Semitism,” in this issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY states that Jews often blame Christians for anti-Semitism, and that Christians often find its cause in Jews. The article asserts that neither group may judge the other.
Dr. Frederick C. Grant, professor of biblical theology at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, appears, however, to have found a scapegoat. In an address to Christian clergy delivered at the Washington Hebrew Congregation, Grant, according to The Washington Post, declared that the Jews “were innocent of Jesus’ death.” He placed the blame for it on the “weak, vacillating Roman governor, Pilate,” and said that anti-Semitism originated with pagans. The tendency in Gentile Christians to blame only “pagans” and “Romans” for the death of Christ and for anti-Semitism reveals a spirit that differs in no essential way from religious anti-Semitism; it is only another instance of putting one’s guilt on the shoulders of another. It is also folly; in biblical thought pagans are Gentiles.
