NEW YEAR BELLS
Dr. Samuel Jones of Second Church is eagerly anticipating the first stroke of the New Year. Over the traditional din of horns, whistles, shots and sirens will float the inaugural notes of the new Van Dyke Memorial Carillon in the church tower. The system is completely electronic, which in a way is a pity, but then bell ringing is an extinct art in exurbia. Jones himself has a romantic attachment to bells. He has replaced the manse doorbell with imported chimes so that each visitor is greeted with the conclusion of the 1812 Overture.
I imagine his dedicatory address on New Year’s Eve will ring the changes on bells. No doubt he will recite Poe’s poem in passing, allude to the bell ringing theme of his favorite mystery story (The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy Sayers), and recrack the Liberty Bell with resounding oratorical strokes. I just hope he doesn’t lapse into Tennyson’s “Ring out, wild bells” in conclusion.
We will all share his thrill when the midnight noise-making is overwhelmed by the majesty of the carillon. Bells are the voice of a former age, when the church spire marked the village, and there was solemn harmony even in the signal of alarm. This is the time of the siren, the shrieking howl of a maddened mechanical beast. Sirens on New Year’s Eve chill us with prospect of atomic war, but bells speak of peace.
Yet even before the bells were the trumpets. The trump of God heralded the Lord’s presence on Sinai, and the priests were to blow the trumpet of jubilee after the atonement in the fiftieth year. Our Lord declared the realization of the gospel jubilee in his own presence at the synagogue of Nazareth. The church needs trumpets and bells in the pulpit: the warning blast of impending judgment, when the trump of God shall sound; the joyful sound of eternal salvation in Christ’s finished work. The trumpet of the gospel herald has the urgency of an air-raid siren and the harmony of choirs of angels, for it calls not just to a new year but to the new heaven and earth. The jubilee liberty proclaimed in the text on the Liberty Bell is the liberty of sons of God.
THIRD YEAR THRESHOLD
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Evangelical Lutheran Theological Sem. Columbus, Ohio
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Schenevus, N. Y.
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Fort Washington, Pa.
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Burns, Ore.
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Medina, O.
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Buffalo Avenue Baptist Church
Tampa, Fla.
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Minneapolis, Minn.
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Chesterfield, Mass.
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Essendon, Victoria, Australia
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Newton Kyme, Yorkshire, England
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Student Dept., S. C. Baptist Conv.
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Omaha, Neb.
I read your magazine with great interest, and from time to time with not a little protest. This is all to the good, however; therefore I continue my subscription. For, as of this moment, I have not felt that I could equate all of my opinions with truth, nor have I come to that place in life where I can claim perfection in the purity of my motives.
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Chowchilla, Calif.
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Nettleton Methodist
Nettleton, Miss.
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The Methodist Ch., Beech Grove Charge
New Bern, N. C.
I cannot say I am in complete sympathy with “fundamentalism” as even so well described in your paper. Reinhold Niebuhr led me to know sin in my life more deep-rooted than I believed. But at that point, I began understanding Billy Graham! Mr. Niebuhr then went on to prove what he meant by sin in his book by the way he acted in the Christian Century. At that point Christian Century lost a liberal potential subscriber and CHRISTIANITY TODAY gains one.
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President
Olivet Nazarene Col.
Kankakee, Ill.
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Kansas City, Mo.
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Pasadena, Calif.
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American Scientific Affiliation President
Mankato, Minn.
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Moody Bible Institute
Chicago, Ill.
I always like to read “A Layman and his Faith” by L. Nelson Bell.… Because of a lack of higher education sometimes some articles are a little over my head but it is all so true to the Bible.
Bellefontaine, O.
Your magazine has been a tremendous spiritual blessing to me. It has a balance of material even including a touch of humor in “Preacher in the Red.”
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Springfield, Ky.
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Chattanooga, Tenn.
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La Paz, Bolivia
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Bel Air, Md.
On the whole I find the articles profitable.… Why keep the layman tied to only what he hears from his pastor if he is intelligent enough to know the truth in reading?
Timmins, Ont.
Your paper suits me to a T—especially as it stands for the Truth, backs Billy Graham, gives interesting church news and has a number of features that makes it the most interesting religious paper that I have ever read. And I have read plenty, I assure you the last 80 years.
Presbyterian Sunday School Missions
Phoenix, Ariz.
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Campbellsville, Ky.
It is reassuring to read week after week articles of such importance as appear in CHRISTIANITY TODAY.… Many deal … with the implications of the faith for social concern.… The impression that they create is that God is the Lord of all life and not just a tiny fraction of it.
Calvary Baptist
Lowell, Mass.
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Townville, Pa.
LIMITS OF SCIENCE
(The following comment was submitted by request after a private discussion with the research physicist Dr. T. N. Panay on the subject of science and evolution.—ED.)
In the investigation of the ultimate structure of nature, theories are, as everywhere in science, a powerful and indispensable instrument. In the course of research we may occasionally develop a theory which seems very convincing, like Planck’s quantum theory (of quite mathematical character, however). But, generally, these theories are fictitious images—requiring only our knowledge of them, not our faith in them. They are very useful, nonetheless. They allow us to obtain new results and thereby improve those theories or replace them with better ones, still fictitious.
It seems that man, in his present phase, will never be able, by observation and theory, to unveil the true structure of nature. Consequently, it can be implied that the only way to know the truth about nature would be direct revelation by a being who possesses that true knowledge, if such a being were willing to give it to us and could do so, and provided we were able, in our present condition, to comprehend and assimilate such knowledge. Otherwise, advanced scientific considerations show that we cannot detect the intrinsic reality of nature, that is that we are under the limitations expressed in Ecclesiastes 3:10, 11, and that we are unlikely to achieve more than Aristotle sees possible in Metaphysics, Book alpha (II), 993a30–993b5.
If this is the situation with phenomena now at our disposal for observation and experimentation, the situation cannot very probably be better with the investigation of events of past history, which it is impossible to observe. Therefore, it seems that the right attitude toward the theory of evolution would be that its content should be learnt well and understood, and used to obtain results, if possible, but not believed to be necessarily true, and that the scientist should always be ready to substitute a new and better theory for the former. This should be the correct attitude merely on a scientific approach, even if the biblical account were not known.
On the other hand, the right scientific attitude toward the Scripture by one not believing in its authority should be that the probability that the statements of the Scripture be true cannot be considered to be zero; and that these statements should always be kept in mind lest a possible help thereby in some stage of scientific development be missed.
And one who believes in scriptural authority should be careful not to construe the text, under pretext of interpretation, as having a meaning not derived from the text with certainty; an interpretation should not be presented as the exclusively possible one, when it is only probable, and other probable interpretations have been or can be advanced as well.
Washington, D. C.
