Marriages are being murdered so often that the statistics no longer shock us. As couples both inside and outside the churches separate and divorce, ministers and congregations are hard pressed to decide how they will minister to these bruised lives.

Many Christian leaders have chosen to ignore this touchy subject. One man said, “I have been a Christian for forty-nine years and have never heard a sermon on divorce.” A minister of seventeen years’ experience admitted he had never preached on the topic though he has definite views. Many individuals and congregations are paying the price of this painful silence. Christians want and need instruction. Many of the divorced are being hurt because they remain in limbo while the leaders stand mute. There are some constructive steps that ministers can take to help everyone involved.

1. Take a stand. Dare to furnish guidance based on careful study and Christian conviction. Merely to present all possible views may lead to further confusion rather than light. Be loving in the presentation and anticipate opposition. Many notable church leaders have expounded a position on divorce, among them Martin Luther, John Wesley, and Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

2. Teach a Christian attitude toward the divorced. Some Christians feel that if we teach that divorce can be forgiven we will encourage it. If this is true, then we dare not teach the story of the thief on the cross or Paul’s conversion. Cyril Garrett reminds us that Christians often communicate judgment rather than forgiveness and consequently fail to be agents of redemption (Adult Education in the Church). Paul Tournier says in The Reborn Person that if a person gets divorced against my standard, “he will need my affection all the more, and this is the assurance I must give him.” Some Christians want to push divorce and remarriage to the top as the worst of all possible sins. We need to keep our perspective. Paul said, “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (Rom. 5:20). If God forgives, can we do otherwise?

3. Explain the plight of the divorced. It is easy to picture divorced persons as cold-hearted and insensitive to both God and man. Many unjust and cruel things are often said about them. We often forget that they had the same dreams and hopes that the rest of us have. Now their marriages are shattered, and their lives can never be the same. Some Christians do not want to hear about this, but they must. We cannot be sensitive to the needs of people whom we do not understand. Through conversation, reading, and other means, those who have not undergone divorce can learn to understand the particular needs of those who have. (An example of a book to read is Suzanne Stewart’s Divorced.)

Divorce can cause grief equal to or worse than the grief caused by the death of a spouse. In the case of death, many persons surround the bereaved with love and concern. When divorce kills a marriage, both partners are often abandoned by the Christian community.

4. Develop a program to build good marriages. Churches can take a positive step toward erecting sturdy families. Instruct young people in the principles of a good Christian home. Deliver sermons on the family (the attendance usually goes up for a series of this type). Insist on premarital counseling with a pastor. Encourage couples to seek counseling when the marital road becomes rocky. Conduct classes for couples. Befriend couples who are having difficulties.

5. Minister directly to the divorced. The church of Christ can help the divorced person resolve his guilt or guilt feelings as it would help anyone else. Most married people can look to some glaring mistakes they have made. Others blame themselves for sins they have not committed. We can help heal some of these wounds.

Extend sincere, non-judgmental fellowship. Many of the divorced are among the loneliest people in our society. A special effort should be made to reassure them that we are not angry at them, we are not afraid of them, and our fellowship is open to them.

Garrett lists a number of ways to minister. Some churches have begun “Parents Without Partners.” One has developed “sponsors” for children living with one parent. A church on the West Coast has a special group of single adults who find different ministries in order to work together. Other churches are giving financial assistance, which is often needed. A Sunday-school class on “Divorce and Its Problems” might be greatly appreciated. Amputation is not a ministry; forgiveness, restoration, and incorporation are.

6. Teach the healing of repentance. Part of our personal ministry to the divorced is to lead them to the freedom offered by facing their problems and coming to terms with God. Have they sinned? If so, how? What can be done about it?

By dealing with sin and guilt, persons remove obstacles to their fellowship with God (1 John 1:9) and help repair their personal wounds. “I said, LORD, be merciful unto me: heal my soul; for I have sinned against thee” (Ps. 41:4).

When the minister applies the medicine of repentance and forgiveness, he must avoid several errors. First, he must not push for greater repentance for marital sins than for other sins. Second, he must resist members of the congregation who demand an added pound of flesh.

A compassionate minister will not take unfair advantage of persons who feel guilty by making their guilt seem worse than it is. However, he will have indeed ministered if he can convince them that “the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance” (Rom. 2:4).

7. Give the divorced a ministry. The divorced person is very unlikely to corrupt the people in the church by his conduct or his doctrine. Often he is far more tender and caring because of the tragedy he has experienced. He is a member of the body of Christ—one of those eyes, ears, feet, or hands that Paul told us about.

The church of Jesus Christ cannot consist of only the pure; if it did, it would lie vacant. It consists of those being purified.—WILLIAM L. COLEMAN,pastor, Aurora Evangelical Free Church, Aurora, Nebraska.

The Sources Of Judaism

A Rabbinic Anthology, by C. G. Montefiore and H. Loewe (Schocken, 1974, 961 pp., $20, $7.50 pb), is reviewed by William Sanford LaSor, professor of Old Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

The Old Testament closes prior to 400 B.C. The New Testament opens around the turn of the era. The literature of Judaism—the Talmud, comprising the Mishnah and the Gemara—came into existence in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era. Both Christianity and Judaism claim the Old Testament, but what happened in the centuries following the close of the Old Testament that led to the development of Judaism? We, as Christians, know—or think we know—what happened that led to the development of Christianity. We sometimes forget that Christianity was at first considered to be a Jewish sect (Acts 24:5, 14; 28:22), and although we confess that Jesus Christ was born a Jew according to the flesh (cf. Rom. 1:3), we usually make no effort to understand his Jewish background. We do little better when it comes to understanding the Apostle Paul.

A Rabbinic Anthology is a selection of passages from the Mishnaic and Talmudic literature arranged according to topic. The work was originally published just after Montefiore’s death in 1938 (Loewe died in 1940) and truly deserves to be reprinted in this clear and easy-to-read form. The editors were an unusual pair, for Montefiore says plainly, “I am a Liberal Jew,” whereas Loewe states, “I am an Orthodox Jew, but I am not a fundamentalist.” From time to time there is interaction between the two positions in their notes to the text, but always there is tremendous respect for the other and for his views. As a result we get to see something of the ways in which Jewish scholars of differing positions handle rabbinic material.

Montefiore, who was largely responsible for the selections included, drew almost exclusively upon Haggadic material. He describes this as “certainly not first class literature, though it contains many fine and notable things … without form or artistry … literature, not of a caste, but of a small set of professional people.” This is basically true, but there are passages that truly soar, and many passages are well known (even though we may be unaware that they are Talmudic in origin) because they have become part of our literary heritage. They have their distinctive form and artistry. As Christians we find numerous passages that sound strangely familiar, even though we cannot quite place them until we realize that the same thoughts, sometimes almost the same wording, can be found in the New Testament.

The Mishnah was codified by Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi around A.D. 200—but this does not give us a true picture. The Mishnah consists of sayings of rabbis, beginning perhaps as early as 200 B.C. The well-known names of Simeon ben Shetach, Hillel, and Shammai belong to the pre-Tannaitic period (Hillel, who died A.D. 10, is often considered the last of this period). The early Tannaites (“teachers”) included Rabban Gamaliel I (Acts 5:34) and Johanan ben Zakkai, who founded the Academy at Jamnia. Loewe suggests that Naqdimon ben Gorion, one of the early Tannaites, may have been the Nicodemus of John 3:1–21; 7:50; 19:30. Later Tannaites included Rabbi Akiba (died A.D. 132) and Judah ha-Nasi. Following the Tannaites, the Amoraim (“speakers”) completed the Talmud, some in Palestine (c. A.D. 21–359) and some in Babylonia (c. A.D. 219–500). The selections in the Anthology are from rabbis who lived between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500, but mainly from those who lived A.D. 100–350.

The subjects are covered in thirty-one chapters, such as “The Nature and Character of God and His Relations with Man,” “The Law,” “Divine Mercy and Divine Judgment,” “On Prayer,” “The Family” (three chapters), “On Proselytes,” and “The Life to Come: Resurrection and Judgment.” Typical rabbinic exegesis of scriptural passages will possibly come as a shock to those who are not already familiar with it, and sometimes we may be tempted to ask, “How can they do that with the word of God?” But it is precisely because they believed it to be the word of God that they attempted to wring out every possible meaning—including some meanings that to modern scholars, Jewish or Christian, are impossible. Thus “ ‘belial’ means yokeless, i.e. beli, without, ’ol yoke,” and refers to a man who has “broken off heaven’s yoke”; actually it means “worthless, useless.” Or again, “ ‘Esau took Mahalath (i.e. forgiveness), the daughter of Ishmael, to wife.’ But her original name was Bashemath [daughter of shame]; the new name shows that Esau was forgiven all his iniquities.”

The sharpness of the rabbinic mind is often apparent. “R. Eliezer said: ‘Repent one day before you die.’ His disciples said, ‘Who knows when he will die?’ ‘All the more, then, let him repent to-day, for peradventure he will die tomorrow. The result will be that all his life will be spent in repentance.”

Christians have often completely misunderstood the Jewish attitude toward the Law. Many passages will show that the Jew is depending not on works but on the grace of God. “All need grace, for even Abraham, for whose sake grace came plenteously into the world, himself needed grace.” Yet, even as among Christians, there is a frequent reference to good works and to the stored-up merit of the righteous (see pp. 218–32). As Montefiore pointed out, the rabbis were not systematic theologians or philosophers.

It would also be of value to study the rabbinic teachings on the Holy Spirit, who (despite the editor’s warning of a “weakening thereby of the doctrine of the Unity”) is often distinct from God: “Then God said to the Holy Spirit.…” Likewise we should study passages on the Life to Come, where the “days of the Messiah” are to be distinguished from “the world to come.” Christian chiliasm (or historical pre-millennialism) is in agreement with the rabbinic teachings on this point, for the “days of the Messiah” (= the Millennium in chiliasm) precede the general resurrection and the last judgment, and following these events is the “world to come.” But again, as in Christian doctrine, there is considerable confusion about the details. In Chapter XXXI, where these selections are presented, there are a number of passages dealing with the suffering Messiah. But Judaism never developed a doctrine of the suffering Son-of-David Messiah, and the careful reader will note that the suffering Messiah is “Ephraim the Messiah of my righteousness” (p. 584 and again on p. 585). Ephraim was the son of Joseph, and the Messiah ben Joseph is developed as a person entirely distinct from the Messiah ben David, as careful study of this passage will show.

To make the work of the greatest possible usefulness, there are a number of useful excursuses and lists. Each selection is numbered (in square brackets, e.g. [904]), and the source (if known) is identified; in any event, the location of the passage in the Talmud is given following the passage. Lists of the rabbis in the Pre-Tannaitic, Tannaitic, and Amoraic periods, with an indication of their “generation” or approximate date, plus references to the quotations that are credited to them are most useful. A glossary of terms such as Baraita, Ger, Midrash, and Mishnah helps one not familiar with such expressions. But best of all is the general index, where we find not only an exhaustive index by subjects but even the key words of a quotation (e.g., “Call no man righteous,” “Do not stand when others sit”) can be located. There are also indexes to the biblical passages, to Greek and Latin passages, and to the rabbinic passages.

All in all, this is a most valuable work and deserves to be used by those who want to know more about either the Jewish background of the New Testament or the rabbinic background of modern Judaism. In some ways the most useful parts are the comments in which the editors explain rabbinic sayings that would otherwise be meaningless to those of us who do not have a rich and knowledgeable background in Talmudic studies.

China Watching

Wansui: Insights on China Today, by Robert Larson (Word, 150 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Margaret Van Buren, librarian, Azusa Pacific College, Azusa, California.

Robert Larson’s latest book gives us a sensitive look at the character of the Chinese as revealed throughout their history. He shows how ignorance of their history and culture twice caused Christian missionaries to fail to penetrate permanently through the wall.

Can Christian missions succeed in China? Yes, Larson says—“if we incorporate them into Chinese ways of ‘the center of the world.’ ” In clear, enjoyable prose he delineates the best way to meet and influence the Chinese. He illustrates this with an analysis of Mao and his tactics, showing why he succeeded and how he will fail.

Larson speaks the Chinese language fluently and has read many of their sacred and popular classics. After years of participating in as well as watching their culture, he now is able to think as a Chinese.

Thirteen hundred years of Chinese culture are dealt with in these 150 pages. This heavy load is lightened with humor and twists of phrase, and the book makes enjoyable reading. By the end, most readers will feel that they like and have begun to understand the Chinese people.

An Elder Statesman’S Challenge

Rethinking Our Priorities: The Church, Its Pastor and People, by J. Sidlow Baxter (Zondervan, 1974, 255 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Stephen E. Smallman, pastor, McLean Reformed Presbyterian Church, McLean, Virginia.

J. Sidlow Baxter, much-loved English Bible teacher and conference speaker, here challenges evangelical ministers in America to rethink their priorities. The author assumes the stance of an elder statesman by virtue of his age (now in his sixties), and experience (twenty-five years as pastor to Baptist congregations in Britain, followed by sixteen years of itinerant ministry and writing, mostly in America). From this vantage point he sees several distressing signs in contemporary evangelicalism and responds by setting forth for the first time in print seventeen addresses grouped in three divisions: Our Bible, Pentecost, and Public Worship.

The first part, “Our Bible,” challenges evangelicals who may be tempted to adopt a weak view of inspiration. For Baxter, adherance to an inerrant, infallible Bible is the “life and death issue for Reformation Christianity.” The six chapters devoted to this topic are of uneven quality and tend to be redundant. If they can be accepted as general exhortations to continued faithfulness to this basic Protestant doctrine, then they have merit. But Baxter seems to think he presents an unanswerable apologetic for biblical inspiration. “To the open-minded the evidence is clear, valid, full.” This is typical of many expressions of confidence that a willingness to master and set forth “the arguments for its divine origin” based on “the well-tested laws of logic” will stem the tide of unbelief in Protestant circles. Contemporary apologists such as Francis Schaeffer, however, would probably respond that such appeals to reason have contributed to the impotence of evangelicals in resisting unbelief. In my opinion, Baxter is at his best when he moves from appeals to reason and evidence to the authority of Jesus Christ (“The King’s Seal”) as the basis for believing in an authoritative Bible.

The second part, “Pentecost,” is a series of talks given to Southern Baptist ministers several years ago. Each one is an exhortation to make the Holy Spirit a vital part of one’s ministry in the local church, the pulpit, personal witnessing, and inner spiritual development. The author is obviously unenthusiastic about the contemporary charismatic movement with its emphasis on “speaking in tongues or some other such abnormality” but at the same time has no problem endorsing the older Keswick-style “post-conversion crisis or special experience such as Finney and Moody and Torrey had.” The major emphasis of the section is not a polemic against charismatics but a positive exhortation for men in the ministry to live in the power of the Holy Spirit.

One suspects that a desire for a platform to say the things he does in the third section, “Public Worship,” was the real reason why Baxter wrote this book. In the introduction to the section, he dismisses British evangelicals, who do not need what he is about to say, and then scolds Americans for their abominable patterns of public worship. “All our criticisms,” he assures his American friends, “spring from a fountain of sincere concern for the preservation and true advancement of the evangelical cause in this beloved land of the Stars and Stripes.”

The most glaring weakness the author has found in his years of ministry to Americans is lack of reverence. “The average church service among the evangelical churches over here is ragged and undignified,” and as a result “they are failing to draw and hold the better class of people socially and intellectually.” Baxter then comments on dress, the behavior of children, electric organs (“How often we wished those instruments had never been invented!”), use of special music, quality of hymns and hymn singing, as well as music generally (with extended comments on “pop” music in churches), anemic Sunday-evening services (including the use of a song leader—an “obnoxious feature”), and a series of “newfangled perils.” American fundamentalists and evangelicals to whom he is appealing (not all are affected, fortunately) would do well to listen carefully to this British pastor. One certainly hopes he will be heeded by those who will not trust the validity of similar criticisms from American churchmen. But even here, Baxter leaves something to be desired. As valid as the criticisms are, the alternatives are not always adequate. There is a feeling that we are being called back to “the good old days” of British evangelicalism rather than to a well thought out biblical philosophy of worship adaptable to contemporary needs.

J. Sidlow Baxter is a true man of God and deserves a hearing, but he is most effective when he stops worrying about analyzing contemporary needs and gets back to preaching the Word (the subject of his final chapter).

BRIEFLY NOTED

Marriage and the Family, by Douglas Jones (Carey Publications, 55 pp., $2 pb), Growing a Life Together, by Fred Wood (Broadman, 126 pp., n.p.), The Christian Home, by Ralph Heynen (Baker, 79 pp., $1.25 pb), God Has a Better Idea: The Home, by Roy Roberts (BMH Books, 144 pp., $2.75 pb), Love: Familystyle, by Clarence Kerr (Good News, 79 pp., $1.25 pb), The Living Marriage, by H. Norman Wright (Revell, 128 pp., $5.95), To Adam With Love, by Douglas Roberts (Revell, 124 pp., $1.50 pb), The Family and the Corporation Man, by Don Osgood (Harper & Row, 148 pp., $6.95), and Marriage: Agony and Ecstasy, by Helen Brenneman (Herald Press, 84 pp., $1.50 pb). After you digest this collection of brief books by evangelicals, yours should be a shining example of a Christian home! Jones offers a basic introduction to courtship and marriage. Wood carries this further in a more detailed account, but it is still like a premarital counseling session. Heynen, R. Roberts, and Kerr each define God’s plan for the home; they differ only on the points they emphasize. Heynen is designed for use in discussion groups; R. Roberts focuses on roles and responsibilities; Kerr stresses love responses to situations. Wright has gathered verses from the Living Bible on family relations and on communication in general and grouped them under a dozen topics such as listening and forgiveness. Be sure also to read them in their biblical context. D. Roberts presents a biblical pattern for the husband-wife relationship in a very down-to-earth, readable form. Osgood traces his struggle to balance a successful career with a happy family. He provides examples of applications and lets the reader formulate the principles. For those who need but feel they cannot afford a marriage counselor, Brenneman summarizes the approach she learned from one.

The Church in Today’s Catacombs, edited by Sergiu Grossu (Arlington, 224 pp., $8.95). Here is an excellent account of what is happening in the “Church of Silence” behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains as taken from writers as diverse as Solzhenitsyn and Lenin. Translated from French into English by a former CHRISTIANITY TODAY employee.

Hell and the Victorians, by Geoffrey Rowell (Oxford, 242 pp., $15.75). A study of the gradual change in nineteenth-century theological thinking about hell, eternal life, and eschatology. While not a totally balanced view of all the thinking of the period, it does provide a look at the certain outstanding figures such as Newman, Coleridge, and Farrar.

Kept by the Power of God, by I. Howard Marshall (Bethany, 281 pp., $4.95 pb). A masterly study of what the Bible has to say about perseverance and falling away by a leading British evangelical scholar. The author is neither a doctrinaire Calvinist nor a thoroughgoing Arminian. He commends each view for emphasizing elements of biblical truth but also finds inadequacies in both. A book for all serious Christians to ponder.

On Behalf of Children, by Linda Isham (Judson, 48 pp., $1.50 pb), Between Christian Parent and Child, by Kenneth and Elizabeth Gangel (Baker, 89 pp., $1.45 pb), What They Did Right, edited by Virginia Hearn (Tyndale, 294 pp., $3.95 pb), and Smart Dads I Know, by Charlie Shedd (Sheed and Ward, 125 pp., $4.95). Parent-child relations from all perspectives. Isham traces child development, especially spiritual, in a rather inductive fashion, asking the reader to recall childhood responses to situations and drawing principles from them. The Gangels offer a Christian response to books like Ginnott’s Between Parent and Child. Some very sound reasoning. To switch the focus from the child to the parent: What They Did Right should be an encouragement to Christian parents struggling to raise their families. Thirty-eight church leaders from across the country share the positive influence their parents have had on them. Charlie Shedd, the popular advice-giver, has some for fathers, supported in each instance with success stories he’s encountered. Some valid points that may apply to moms also.

Judaism and Hellenism, by Martin Hengel (Fortress, two volumes, 313 and 335 pp., $34 the set). A definitive study of the encounter of Jewish and Greek culture in Palestine from the time of Alexander the Great until the middle of the second century B.C. This is an indispensable work for serious students to consult because it corrects some of the basic assumptions of many New Testament scholars concerning the nature of Palestinian Judaism in the time of Jesus and the early Church.

Current Issues in Biblical and Patristic Interpretation, edited by Gerald Hawthorne (Eerdmans, 377 pp., $9.95). A valuable collection of essays by twenty-eight former students of Merrill C. Tenney of Wheaton College, written to honor him. Among the contributions are Carl Edwin Armerding on David’s sons, E. Earle Ellis on Luke 9, Eldon Jay Epp on the purpose of John, George Eldon Ladd on the Spirit in Galatians, and Richard Longenecker on life-of-Jesus research. Should be in every seminary or Bible-college library.

The Book of Revelation, by G. R. Beasley-Murray (Attic, 352 pp., $12.95). A thoroughly scholarly and sane commentary on a very difficult portion of the New Testament. The author, a highly respected British evangelical who now teaches at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, has made eschatology the focal point of his research for many years and now offers the serious Bible student the fruit of his labors in this addition to the New Century Bible series.

Black Belief, by Henry Mitchell (Harper & Row, 171 pp., $7.95), A History of Black Religion in Northern Areas and A History of Black Religion in Southern Areas, both by Lenwood Davis (Council of Planning Librarians [P.O. Box 229, Monticello, Illinois 61856], 13 pp. each, $1.50 each), White Questions to a Black Christian, by Howard Jones (Zondervan, 215 pp., $1.75 pb), Free, White, and Christian, by Donald Shockley (Abingdon, 142 pp., $3.50 pb), and Everybody’s Afraid in the Ghetto, by Keith Phillips (Regal, 182 pp., $1.45 pb). Black awareness, by blacks and whites. The most thorough and searching of the offerings is by Mitchell. A preacher and seminary professor, he projects the thesis that the African influence as well as black folklore interacted with white religion to form the black religious experience. His “folklore” is merely another explanation of grace, mercy, and hell. Davis provides excellent bibliographies. Jones, a black evangelist on the Billy Graham team, shares his views on some of the most frequently asked questions on black-white relations. Shockley stresses the ethnic understanding each person brings to his religion and personal dealings, especially as they relate to black-white differences. More of a cursory sociological study than anything else. Phillips recounts his experiences in the ghetto in establishing a discipleship program. A quiet statement of the need for evangelism in the context of meeting people’s needs.

Diary of Daily Prayer, by J. Barrie Shepherd (Augsburg, 127 pp., $2.95 pb). Sixty thoughtful, well-expressed morning and evening prayers with blank pages interspersed for the user’s own additions. Free of the self-conscious cleverness present in some other modem-language prayers.

In Praise of Leisure, by Harold Lehman (Herald, 199 pp., $5.95, $2.95 pb). Thorough but leisurely reading that investigates the correlation between work attitudes and leisure activities. Provides a biblical examination of the use of time that should challenge any Christian.

A Bag Without Holes, by Fred Eggerichs (Bethany Fellowship, 95 pp., $2.95 pb). We are continually urged to support various ministries through annuities, revocable gifts, life income agreements, and other confusing means. This clearly written book will help you sort out the pros and cons, without promoting any particular organization as the beneficiary. A welcome aid to Christian stewardship.

The Joy of Housekeeping, by Ella May Miller (Revell, 162 pp., $4.95), The Happy Housewife, by Elizabeth Baker (Victor, 144 pp., $1.75), and Talk to Me, by Charlie Shedd (Doubleday, 105 pp., $3.95). So this is what every wife and mother should know? Miller and Baker, both happy homemakers, offer guides to enable every woman to be as they are. Miller is extremely practical, explaining how to organize and cope with everything from accepting one’s role to cleaning rooms. Baker offers more of a biblical answer to wrong attitudes and frustrations. Both only scratch the surface. In the format used for his popular Letters to Karen, Shedd offers thirty-five letters that propose the best ways for a wife to reclaim all levels of meaningful communications (and establish some that never existed) with her husband. Most are the simple things that are forgotten in the midst of a tense situation.

Choral Speaking and the Verse Choir, by E. Kingsley Povenmire (A. S. Barnes, 395 pp., $9.95). The history as well as practicality of implementing this dramatic form are carefully explained, and forty-seven poems are marked for expression and graded for use at various age levels. A good text in an area that is seldom explored.

Travels in the World of the Old Testament, edited by M. S. H. G. Heerma van Voss and others (Van Gorcum publishers [Assen, Netherlands], 287 pp., about $34). Twenty-nine articles on the Old Testament and related subjects, in French, German, English, and Dutch and presented to Professor M. A. Beek of Amsterdam on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. Widely diverse and erudite, these contributions will be of interest mainly to biblical scholars.

Can Ethics Be Christian?, by James Gustafson (University of Chicago, 191 pp., $8.95). Philosophical approach to the question of morality in society. The definition of “Christian” here more closely approaches “religious,” but the theological implications remain the same. Scholarly, readable analysis.

Moltmann: Radical Reinterpretations

The Crucified God, by Jürgen Moltmann (Harper & Row, 1974, 346 pp., $10), is reviewed by Donald G. Bloesch, professor of theology, Dubuque Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa.

In this work Moltmann reinterprets the cross of Christ in such a way as to make it an event within the life of God. He also tries to recover the political significance of the cross. The cross summons us not to fix our gaze on a heaven beyond this world but to follow Christ in identification with the oppressed. Our primary concern as Christians should be not with true belief or pure doctrine or correct morality but with creative love to the politically and economically deprived according to this prominent theologian.

Moltmann sees the cross not as a “divine-human event” but as a “trinitarian event between the Son and the Father.” The cross “reveals a change in God”; it connotes an experience of death in the heart of God. The meaning of the cross is that God in his innermost being has radically penetrated the world of sin and tribulation and identified himself with the poor and rejected. The transcendence of the crucified Christ is not metaphysical but the “transcendence of concrete rejection.”

Moltmann seeks to move beyond the older Protestant conception of the cross as a substitutionary expiation that satisfied the demands of God’s law. Instead the cross is a revelation of God’s boundless love and a sign of His solidarity with the despised and forsaken. Through the cross man makes contact with liberating love, which enables him to enter creatively into the sufferings of others. What happens in the cross is that “the life-giving spirit of love emerges from the death of the Son and the grief of the Father.” Man is saved by being taken up into the event of creative love and thereby experiencing its liberating power. Jesus is not a substitutionary victim but the revealer and exemplar of divine compassion. He was raised not into a heaven beyond this world but into God’s future and was seen and believed as the present representative of this future.

Even more drastic is Moltmann’s reinterpretation of God. Seeking to move beyond both theism and atheism he posits a God who is the living force and dynamic ground of history. Like Hegel he speaks not so much of God intervening in history but of “history in God.” Indeed, he says, all human history is taken up into the “history of God.” He denies a “personal God” in heaven to whom we can pray. We do not pray to God but in God, in the event of creative love. God is not a sovereign being transcendent over history but the power of liberating love which now encompasses and will eventually transform the whole of creation. Again in terms reminiscent of Hegel he says that God is “transcendent as Father, immanent as Son and opens up the future of history as … Spirit.”

Moltmann rejects what he terms “radical monotheism” in favor of a process panentheism in which the travail of the world is necessarily included in God himself. One can sympathize with his criticisms of some traditional views that deny the very possibility of God’s being affected by the suffering on the cross, but he seems to make suffering or pain endemic to the being of God, as can be seen in his criticism of Barth’s retention of the notion of impassibility.

Moltmann says the time has come for differentiating the Father of Jesus Christ from the God of the philosophers. Yet it is fair to ask whether he in fact substitutes a modern philosophy for classical philosophy. While highly critical of Plato and Aristotle he appears singularly open to Hegel and Whitehead. Indeed, it seems that he has given us a theological version of the historical monism that is found in Hegel. He contends that all of reality is a sacrament of God, a bearer of God’s presence. The cross is a prolepsis of the transformation of the cosmos into the spirit of love. All world history is a history of the “transformations of God.”

Finally, I have definite reservations about Moltmann’s doctrine of salvation. The liberation that Christ brings is defined in terms of “democratic human rights,” “identity in recognition,” “peace with nature,” and “the courage to be.” It is doubtful whether any of these can be successfully correlated with reconciliation and redemption, as these terms have been understood in Reformational theology. He continues to speak of the justification of the godless, but his emphasis is on the love that proceeds from the cross in the heart of God to the godforsaken, not the vindication of God’s righteousness through a propitiatory sacrifice in history. I can assent to his view that repressions and enmities are conquered only through sympathy and love, but is this the primary meaning of the cross and of Christian salvation? The pathos of God figures much more prominently in his theology than the inviolable holiness of God and the wrath of God against sin. The conflict of Christ with the demonic powers of darkness is almost totally ignored. Moltmann refers frequently to Luther and Barth to substantiate his position, but the philosophy that he propounds would be repudiated by both those theologians.

Edward V. Hill,pastor, Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, Los Angeles

We need congressmen to return to their district jobs and fulfill their campaign promises. They campaigned on platforms that addressed themselves to bread-and-butter issues such as more employment, better housing, and curbing crime. After getting into office, in recent years, they have become preoccupied with international policies and White House behavior at the expense of their local district needs. An example is a congressman in my area, which has 31 per cent unemployment: weekly he speaks only of national policies.

Steve Monsma,state representative, 93rd District, Michigan House of Representatives

A Christian approach to economic problems will seek to pursue justice—to give all persons and groups in society their due. This is in contrast to the normal approach I have observed time and again of seeking what is good for one’s own self or groups regardless of the effects on others.

We must also move in the direction of either greater freedom and competitiveness in the economic marketplace, breaking up both big business and big labor, or greater government regulation aimed at controlling big business and big labor for the greater good of society. Now we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. The rich and powerful—whether one is thinking of the wealthy individual with his tax loopholes, Lockheed with its guaranteed loans, or longshoremen with their union fighting against more efficient handling of cargo—are protected from the cold world of uncertainty and financial reverses; the poor and powerless are left to take their chances in a world over which they can exert little influence. In such a situation Christian concepts of justice and of human worth—concepts eloquently testified to by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—suggest that either the rich and powerful should be required to compete in the free market as the poor and powerless now do, or the poor and powerless should be given through government action the protection now enjoyed by the rich and powerful.

William J. McFadden,international economist, Washington, D.C.

As followers of Christ we ought to explore biblical responses to the current economic situation. Although we may not have a significant impact on the policymakers or lobbyists, we ought to attempt to do so through our vote, our letters, and most importantly our example.

Unless we are in positions of authority whereby we can ask or demand that others sacrifice with us, we will have to set the example on our own. This will mean an even greater sacrifice to us individually. But sacrifice ought not be something unknown to us as Christians.

In the current socio-economic milieu, job rather than price is the variable that must adjust in an economic downturn. What better example can we establish than to share some portion of our income with those most directly affected by a recession? There are numerous household heads whose income stream was terminated because his employer could not afford to meet the high salary demanded by a union contract. The aged and others on fixed income continue to be adversely affected by the still high rate of inflation. Missionaries in the field have been forced to tighten their belts even further because their support is drying up.

Christians have a responsibility to be what we are called to be and thereby set a living example of Christ. In addition to the more obvious ways of sharing our income, i.e., giving to established organizations, we could have love feasts with Christian families whose income has been terminated; we could support an aged couple by doing some work for them that would ordinarily mean a cash outflow for them. In situations when there is more than one source of income in a family and something less than the current level of income is sufficient, perhaps temporary voluntary unemployment by a household member would free that income-producing position for someone who is currently involuntarily unemployed.

There are numerous ways each of us can share what he has. Some will think of and act upon bolder measures than I have proposed. But the last thing we ought to do is be anxious for ourselves with respect to tomorrow.

Whatever you do, don’t expect a reward for your sacrifice. But if you get bundles of joy in return, don’t be surprised.

Jaroy Weber,president, Southern Baptist Convention

Giving is a spiritual and not an economic response of the Christian life. During days of depression and stress people have turned to God, and their increased commitment brings a comparable increase in giving. The Christian Church has no need to fear financial inadequacies. The Church has always done better in a time of adversity.

Accurate reporters of the flow of news find it hard to write with lightness and optimism about world events these days. Words such as “sorrow,” “pity,” “agony” follow each other accompanied by pictures of wounded and dying men, women and children, homes being reduced to rubble, cities and farms being devastated, while the living stumble in any direction that seems to promise some measure of safety. The great promises of people who were sure that the world was getting better and better, that peace was just around the next corner and violence soon would disappear, have become blurred words lost in the roar of cold and hot wars and in the rumble of diverse disasters. Screams of fear, calls for help, cries of alarm pierce the constant undercurrent of general noise. Who has ears to hear?

“Wherefore, when I came, was there no man? when I called, was there none to answer? Is my hand shortened at all, that it cannot redeem? or have I no power to deliver?” (Isa. 50:2). God is asking a question: why, when he calls, do people not answer? God has spoken through the ages, and many have responded with only silence.

“I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them; because when I called, none did answer; when I spake they did not hear: but they did evil before mine eyes, and chose that in which I delighted not” (Isa. 66:4). It was not only Eve and Adam who did evil before God’s eyes, and it was not only Cain who chose that in which God did not delight; but streams of people through the centuries have responded to God’s call by turning away and acting as if they did not hear. It was not only past centuries of people who did not listen to the word of God as his prophets verbalized it to them, nor was it only those who heard the Second Person of the Trinity when he walked on earth who seemed deaf to his call. Now, in this moment of history, his call so often brings no response.

“Hear the word of the LORD, ye that tremble at his word: your brethren that hated you, that cast you out for my name’s sake, said, Let the LORD be glorified: but he shall appear to your joy, and they shall be ashamed.” (Isa. 66:5). Is there a trembling on the part of Christians to hear His word? Does it matter more to us that we have the good opinion of men who might cast us out, or are we literally ready to listen so that we may glorify the Lord while there is yet time, and experience one day his appearing, to our joy, when we will not be ashamed?

There is a double thing in the call of God. First he calls, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” He calls with redeeming power, and his hand is not today shortened. Second, he calls his children to live according to his word, to do his will, to speak the words he has given us to speak, rather than speaking in human cleverness or in our own strength. Because his children often do not respond to his call, the lost ones of the world to whom his call for redemption comes are further confused. They are without the “relay” of that call. People who are meant to be sounding trumpets so that the lost may hear are themselves ignoring God’s call. “When I called, none did answer; when I spake, they did not hear.”

The silent response of the lost and the silent response of many of God’s own people is a contrast to the promises of God himself to hear and to act upon the call of those who honestly cry out to him. “The LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of them that fear him: he also will hear their cry, and will save them” (Ps. 145:18, 19). There is a condition here: The Lord will come close and be with those who call upon him in truth. It cannot be a nebulous scream out into an empty universe using the name “god” to express a need of an unknown something.

To call upon God in truth, one must believe that he is, that he is there, that he is the triune God of the Bible who created heaven and earth, that he is who he has said he is. One must call upon God, not “a god.” The mouthing of words must have a reality behind it. The call cannot be a piece of acting, turned on and off with only a surface involvement. The attitude “I tried but it didn’t work, so now I’ll try this other thing” is in itself a cancellation of any reality. To call upon God in truth is to realize that there is no other place to go, no substitute, no other solution. It is a cry to which we must echo, “Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.”

A Malay boy found himself in the midst of a truly demonic attack in the early weeks of his new walk with Christ. Allah had been put behind him, the occult things that had been woven together with Muslim faith had been renounced, but his walk was as wobbly as a tiny child’s first steps. A fall is an easy thing in the first walk across a room, even in the presence of a loving family. This boy went through what he had experienced before in his life, demon activity, and his call went forth to God, “O God, help me.” However, there was no immediate visible, feel able change, and he fell into Satan’s trap. “It isn’t working, it isn’t working” was the next cry of his heart, and his old pattern of reaction came forth. “I’ll try this—and this.… And so he called, “Allah be praised” and used some other “magic” Arabic words of a formula handed down for generations. This young Christian had called but not in truth, not feeling that “there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.” The attitude of the call in truth must be Job’s attitude, “Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him.”

Now we are ready to consider the promises of God’s answer to our calls. Now we can meditate upon the wonder of his response to people’s calls, so different from the response of people to his call.

“And it shall come to pass that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear” (Isa. 65:24). “Thus saith the LORD the maker thereof, the LORD that formed it, to establish it; the LORD is his name; call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not” (Jer. 33:2, 3). “Hold up my goings in thy paths, that my footsteps slip not. I have called upon thee, for thou wilt hear me, O God: incline thine ear unto me, and hear my speech” (Ps. 17:5, 6). “I will call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised: so shall I be saved from my enemies.… In my distress I called upon the LORD, and cried unto my God: he heard my voice out of his temple, and my cry came before him, even into his ears” (Ps. 18:3, 6).

We live in a moment of extreme need. Our time may be very short before the Lord’s return, or before freedoms are removed from us in areas of speech and action. God is asking us a question: “When I called, was there none to answer?”

The Age Of Reason

At what age does the human being (fondly designated homo sapiens by naturalists, at least by human ones) become what the philosophers used to call an animal rationale? According to Roman Catholic tradition, one attains the “age of reason” at about seven years of age. After that it is possible to receive the other sacraments, in addition to baptism, and also to commit actual sin.

But reaching the age of seven does not guarantee the attainment of reason. According to Jonah, in the Nineveh of his day (as the capital of a powerful but hard-pressed and much disliked empire, no doubt comparable to Washington, D. C.) there were “more than six-score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand” (Jonah 4:11). Some interpreters take this to mean that there were 120,000 children, no doubt plus the necessary associated adults—but this would be a bit unusual, for it is more common in the Bible, when listing only a part of the population, to give the number of “men who draw the sword,” rather than children. Others, less charitable, assume that the Ninevites as a group had some difficulty distinguishing between right and left, and this would fit in to the parallel with Washington. Be that as it may, it is evident that the mere attainment of a certain chronological age does not guarantee that homo will be rationalis, much less sapiens.

On the other hand, being below the “age of reason” does not mean that one cannot understand important things. Parents frequently wonder at what age their children can begin to grasp spiritual truths, and most people who have talked seriously and frequently with little children are convinced that they frequently understand even rather subtle theological ideas at a younger age than is generally thought. We thought that our five-year-old had grasped something important when, after praying for God to help a friend who was in a difficult situation, she stated, “God can make good things out of bad.” We had hardly a second to reflect on this grasp of the concept of God’s power when she regrettably added, “… and bad things out of good.” The seeds of heresy sprout quickly.

We cleared up, to the best of our ability, that particular theological misconception, and on another occasion, after there had been some unpleasantness about not sharing toys with other children, she prayed as I was putting her to bed that God would help her to be unselfish and to share. Pleased with that, she ran downstairs to tell her mother, who was outdoors. Her mother called in to her, saying, “God will help you, dear.” To which came the five-year-old answer, “I know he will, and I’ll let him.” A little reminiscent of Mary’s response to the angel? At the least it is a practical understanding of prevenient grace. (It’s too early to take up the question of irresistible grace and synergism.) And she must have understood, because he did, and she did, and—at least for the time being—sharing is in. It may not be the official “age of reason,” but it sounds a good deal more sapiens than much that we hear from older heads.

Help For Thinking Through

CHRISTIANITY TODAY is the most helpful periodical that I receive. I have especially appreciated several of the most recent issues. It seems that I am going from cover to cover consistently. These are great days to be alive! You all at the magazine help me with the struggle, and I’m grateful.… Thank you for helping me think through important concerns, while keeping my attention on the Lord.

Malvern Hills Presbyterian Church

Asheville, N. C.

The Nature Of Psalms

The Refiner’s Fire has provided some excellent food for thought since its inception, and “A Now and Future Hymnody” (May 9) is no exception. However, a couple of points invite response.

First, Richard Dinwiddie is rather dogmatic in listing three criteria by which to evaluate hymnals, with no hint of the rationale behind them. They are by no means self-evident; they may be compatible with his own theology, but not with that of others.… Second, Dinwiddie’s comments on The Book of Psalms for Singing reveal that he does not understand the Psalms. The subjects for which he wants newer hymns (e.g., Christ, the Church) simply permeate the Psalms. Jewish Christians are often much more aware of the messianic and eschatological nature of the Psalms than are most Gentile believers; we can/should learn something from them. Moreover, this book is not a paraphrase but a translation. While the Psalms are often translated from Hebrew poetry into English prose, it is foolish to assert that taking them from Hebrew poetry to English poetry makes the result a paraphrase instead of a translation. This metrical Psalter is a closer translation of the Hebrew than is, e.g., the King James Version.

Assistant Professor of Music

Mid-America Nazarene College

Olathe, Kansas

In reading Mr. Dinwiddie’s comments on The Book of Psalms published by the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America (not by the Reformed Church of North America as stated in the article) my attention was drawn to this statement: “We need to sing more than the Old Testament Psalms; we need specific hymns on Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Church.” I would refer Mr. Dinwiddie to the 1950 edition of The Book of Psalms, which contains a topical index (a lack in the 1973 edition). Here one may find numerous references in the Psalms to the aforementioned topics.

Beaver Falls, Pa.

Nee’S Knowledge

I was glad to see Carl F. H. Henry’s Footnotes, “Sharper Focus on Watchman Nee” (May 9). Within the last year I have discovered this man and his writings, and they have been a tremendous blessing to my life and balance to my Christian experience and faith.… I do not know his theological background, but Watchman Nee appears to me to be a deep man of God with insights on the Scripture that many of us do not have today. The Scriptures he particularly deals with literally come alive, not putting experience above truth as Dr. Henry suggests, but putting truth into action where it can be experienced as the truth and as the Word of God.…

Keep on publishing good articles such as this and making us think.

Westmoor Church of Christ

Kingston, Pa.

Carl F. H. Henry’s evaluation of Watchman Nee’s dynamic concept of revelation as a blending of evangelical and liberal views is incompatible with the historical evidence. Nee’s Christian epistemology is an outgrowth of the Keswick movement. One need only compare the contents of A. T. Pierson’s The Bible and Spiritual Criticism and Nee’s Ye Search the Scriptures. In both writers “spiritual criticism” of the Bible is applied in conjunction with historical-grammatical concerns of the text. In Nee this is evident by his knowledge of the Greek text and his high regard for Henry Alford’s critical and exegetical methodology.

Hamilton, Mass.

Full Equality, But …

I was quite concerned about your lead article in the May 23 issue, “Women as Preachers: Evangelical Precedents.” On such a controversial topic, the Daytons would have been much wiser to have stuck with scriptural exegesis than with historical precedents.… To classify those who stand against women as preachers with those “conservatives who built a ‘Bible defense of slavery’ ” is singularly unfair. Advocates of slavery stand in clear violation of Scripture while opponents of preaching women have clear scriptural injunctions upon which to base their views.… Don’t get me wrong! I strongly affirm Galatians 3:28 and the full equality of men and women before God in Christ Jesus. However, when it comes to a woman’s function and place in the church and home, let’s stick with the clear and authoritative teaching of God’s Word.

Dallas, Tex.

I was certainly disappointed to read the Daytons’ article. If the Daytons (obviously in favor of “egalitarian” relationships) were just presenting an historical review of women preachers in the Methodist-Holiness traditions, one would find their study interesting. But they are clearly writing to show that “enlightened” evangelicals have for several centuries acted in the best and most spiritual way in recognizing and promoting women as preachers and ministers. And the decline in numbers of women engaged in these activities indicates unspiritual accommodation “to the dominant culture”.… Do we get our standards of practice from history (which so often shows our sin, not our righteousness) or from the Scriptures?

Philadelphia, Pa.

Despite the rightness or wrongness of ordaining women to the ministry, the logic used in the article disturbed me. First, the authors used happenings in history to prove the issue right. Just because something has happened does not make it good or right.… Perhaps even more disturbing was the authors’ use of hermeneutics. If the Bible actually has an objective message, sometimes called the truth, and if it actually can communicate to people what the Author intended, then hermeneutics should be employed in such a way as to arrive at that truth.… Instead the authors indicated that if what is wanted today does not seem to agree with twentieth-century desires, then one is free to create a new hermeneutic by which the Bible’s meaning can be changed so it agrees with what we want. In my own Bible study, I find that I am the one who needs changing from time to time, in order to bring my thoughts, words, and actions into conformity to the Word.

Zion Mennonite Church

Bridgewater, S. Dak.

Leax’S Lucid Lure

You and John Leax may have made history with what is possibly the clearest, most lucid glimpse of the contemplative life yet to appear in a popular magazine (“The Inner War of Thomas Merton,” The Refiner’s Fire, May 23). In a few paragraphs Leax has opened up the subject superbly. His quotations from Merton’s effortless prose could hardly have been better chosen to lure the reader into an area generally thought cold, hard, and forbidding.

The matter is of more than academic interest. Today we are inundated with articles and paperbacks on prayer. How much more quickly we should learn to pray if we had some notion of the discipline of contemplation! Our hymnals are filled with rousing anthems to the glory of God clearly composed in the glow of mystical ardor. To us who are ignorant of mystical language they might as well be Greek! Yes, Merton was a Romantic—a Charles Williams type Romantic—and so should we all be if once our hearts were kindled with the fire of Christian love!… Let’s have more of mystics like Merton from writers like Leax.

Columbia, S. C.

To Inform

Since your magazine has now accepted an advertisement from the Review and Herald Publishing Association (May 23), is it out of order to suggest that you also inform your readers that this publishing house is Seventh-day Adventist?

West New York, N. J.

Patterns Of Evil And How To Break Them

“Milly, dear Milly. Beware of formulas. If there’s a God he’s not a God of formulas.”

Our Man in Havana “You try too hard to make a pattern, father.”

A Burnt-Out Case

It is tempting to let Graham Greene’s characters speak for their creator, to say that they summarize the theme of his long writing career. But of course review of a career spanning forty years and thirty works is not that simple. In the first place, there is a sort of formula in what critics like to call Greeneland: settings tend to be foreign (to English-speaking readers) places like Africa, South America, Viet Nam; main characters tend to be whiskey priests, revolutionaries, atheists, juvenile delinquents, and the like. But the people expound the evidence of Greene’s pattern-breaking. It is his conception of God that defies easy formulation—and invites particular interest.

The break from pattern reaches a peak in Greene’s 1973 novel, The Honorary Consul, where a priest-turned-revolutionary suggests that God is evil as well as good:

If I kill him it will be God’s fault as much as mine.… He made me what I am now. He will have loaded the gun and steadied my hand [Simon and Schuster, 1973, p. 261].

Another rather unexpected idea appears in A Burnt-Out Case, where an atheist who is a doctor in a Roman Catholic leprosarium muses about the place of Christianity in human evolution:

We are riding a great ninth evolutionary wave. Even the Christian myth is part of the wave, and perhaps, who knows, it may be the most valuable part. Suppose love were to evolve as rapidly in our brains as technical skill has done. In isolated cases it may have done, in the saints … if the man really existed, in Christ … [Viking, 1961, p. 153].

It would be all wrong to assign the characters’ beliefs to their creator, but one can scarcely avoid wondering about Greene’s relation to the Roman Catholic Church he embraced. His own description of his early life and conversion appears in A Sort of Life (Simon and Schuster, 1971). He was the fourth of six children of a schoolmaster—the branch of the family known as the “intellectual Greenes.” Certainly his was not a religious family, although he had a grandfather who was a clergyman. Graham Greene’s own interest in Catholicism stemmed not from any interest in spiritual things but from his interest in a woman.

It occurred to me … that if I were to marry a Catholic I ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held. It was only fair, since she knew what I believed—in nothing supernatural.… I didn’t disbelieve in Christ—I disbelieved in God [pp. 164, 165, 167].

Clearly something happened that winter of 1925–26 or the young man fresh out of Oxford would have gone on to write very different books. There was no blinding light, as he tells it, and his description of his conversion sounds appropriate for someone who writes as Greene does about God:

My friend Antonia White many years later told me how, when she was attending the funeral of her father, an old priest who had known her as a child tried to persuade her to return to the Church. At last—to please him more than for any other reason—she said, “Well then, Father, remind me of the arguments for the existence of God.” After a long hesitation he admitted to her, “I knew them once, but I have forgotten them.” I have suffered the same loss of memory. I can only remember that in January 1926 I became convinced of the probable existence of something we call God, though now I dislike the word with all its anthropomorphic associations and prefer Chardin’s “Noosphere,” and my belief never came by way of those unconvincing philosophical arguments [pp. 167, 168],

He says little else about his faith or his church in his autobiography except to remark that the church with all its answers couldn’t always meet his needs—much as the organization called church is rarely the source of hope in his books.

For him, intellectual and anthropomorphic conceptions of God fall meaningless before the gracious love of God. When that love somehow gets to a Greene character, people change. Querry, in A Burnt-Out Case, is one who changes. Bombarded by pompous chatter about the love of God, haunted by the outside world’s pursuit of scandalous stories, Querry comes to feel interest in other people and to laugh. Small signs, to be sure, like negative skin tests signaling the reversal of leprosy in a patient. And of course there isn’t anything uniquely Christian about either interest in others or laughter.

Querry’s genuinely Christian act was his containment of evil. The natural human reaction to ill treatment is to get revenge, or, if that is impossible, to mistreat someone else. But that is doing unto others as we have been done unto, and the avenger falls into the same pit as the initial wrongdoer. The more noble, loving—and difficult—reaction is epitomized in the crucifixion: when evil is absorbed or contained it is stopped, and good is done instead of evil. The Golden Rule is in effect.

In Querry’s case the harm he had inflicted in his life before retreating to the leprosarium had involved women: one had even committed suicide when his interest in her waned. But one noon, lying on his bed in the African heat, he found he could promise “never again from boredom or vanity to involve another human being in my lack of love. I shall do no more harm, he thought, with the kind of happiness a leper must feel when he is freed at last by his seclusion from the fear of passing on contagion to another” (pp. 142, 143). Ironically—or perhaps with some justice—Querry’s death comes at the hand of a jealous husband enraged by his wife’s false claim that Querry fathered the child she is expecting. Querry had kept his promise.

Greene stated the problem of revenge in his earlier book, Our Man in Havana (Viking, 1958). He labeled that book an “entertainment”—ostensibly, at least, treating less serious matter than a novel, which is how he describes A Burnt-Out Case. Perhaps there are—or were—some distinctions (though the list of his books in a recent novel is not divided between “Novels” and “Entertainments”), and there might be some academic interest in pursuing them. But a writer of Greene’s ability is bound to put some meaty chunks in his gravy. “Childhood was the germ of all mistrust,” he writes in Our Man in Havana (p. 31). “You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.”

Many inhabitants of Greeneland are children (most of the rest are fathers—biological or clerical) but not naïve innocents. Having apparently been “joked upon” particularly cruelly, they respond as children typically do, imitating what they see. Greene seems to imply that hope lies in maturity: when one grows up he will be less inclined to pass on the cruel jokes done to him. It may be more precise to say Greene wishes that were true but believes there’s more involved than aging. In Brighton Rock (Viking, 1938) a young girl has been badly mistreated by a boy she thought loved her. Planning her death, he had convinced her to join him in a suicide pact. As it turned out, he died and she lived, and Rose, feeling guilt for Pinkie’s death, goes to confession to repent for not dying with him, to wish herself damned with him, even though she suspects she is pregnant with Pinkie’s child.

“You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone—the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God,” the priest tells her (p. 357). “The Church does not demand that we believe any soul is cut off from mercy.… We must hope, … hope and pray.”

“I want to hope,” Rose responds, “but I don’t know how.”

“ ‘If he loved you, surely,’ the old man said ‘that shows … there was some good.…’ ”

Rose leaves, promising to return, and Greene writes, “A sudden feeling of immense gratitude broke through the pain—it was as if she had been given the sight a long way off of life going on again” (p. 358). It will not be an easy life, as Greene suggests in the final words of the book, but the reader feels as though Pinkie’s child will grow up with less pain inflicted on him than his father felt.

Not all the childish characters in Greene tales are teen-agers. Many are adults who have not grown up to the desire not to hurt others. Dr. Edward Plarr, in The Honorary Consul, is one of those. Content to while away his time amusing himself, he is little concerned about the effect of his actions on others. And then he finds himself in the unlikely position of having helped a band of revolutionaries kidnap, instead of the American ambassador, a relatively unimportant British honorary consul named Charley Fortnam.

Throughout the book Plarr exhibits, subconsciously, an almost filial attitude toward Fortnam. A psychiatrist might have a field day with the father-son imagery in this novel, but Greene seems less interested in the psychological implications than the spiritual ones. On the one hand is Fortnam, who calls himself the father of the child his wife is carrying, although, as he learns in his captivity, his friend Plarr is actually the father. On the other hand is the revolutionary leader Rivas, who is called Father by his companions although he has married and turned from the priesthood. On the one hand, Charley Fortnam accepts the baby as his own, and on the other, Father Rivas accepts to say mass and hear confessions before the police arrive at the hideout.

But Plarr is the one who turns around: “He wondered … about his child. The child too was the result of an error, a carelessness on his part, but he had never before felt any responsibility” (p. 251). And with his last breath the doctor who believed he retained none of his childhood faith offers absolution to the priest who had been his childhood friend.

Graham Greene writes compellingly about the “strangeness of the mercy of God”—mercy that rises above formulas and patterns to great heights of beauty:

“Christ was a man,” Father Rivas said, “even if some of us believe that he was God as well. It was not the God the Romans killed, but a man. A carpenter from Nazareth. Some of the rules he laid down were only the rules of a good man. A man who lived in his own province, in his own particular day. He had no idea of the kind of world we would be living in now. Render unto Caesar, but … our Caesar uses napalm and fragmentation bombs.… The Church lives in time too. Only sometimes for a short while, for some people.… I think sometimes the memory of that man, that carpenter, can lift a few people out of the temporary Church of these terrible years, … into the great Church beyond our time and place, and then … those lucky ones they have no words to describe the beauty of that Church” [The Honorary Consul, p. 261].

JANET ROHLER GREISCH¹Janet Rohler Greisch is a free-lance writer who lives in Ames, Iowa.

Newly Pressed

Take Me Back, Andraé Crouch and the Disciples (Light, LS-5637). This album adds two new members to the group, Fletch Wiley and Bill Maxwell. Most of the songs have the sound normally associated with Andraé, close harmony and lots of soft back-up. But “It Ain’t No New Thing,” the best cut on the album, is straight Dixieland jazz, with lots of trombone, clarinet, trumpet both muted and unmuted, and piano. Even the vocal harmonies sound brass-like. It’s a unique center for the lyrics, “You may think the Jesus movement/And the Jesus revolution/Is a new thing/But Jesus started moving, a long time ago.” An album of Andraé performing nothing but Dixieland would be worth owning.

I Have Returned, Marijohn (Myrrh, MSA-6537), and Roy Clark Sings Gospel (Word, WST-8654). Those who like country and Western music will want these two albums. Marijohn avoids the hard, nasal quality of too many big-name country female singers; her voice is low-pitched and rich. She seldom sings with a twang, except when the effect of the song depends on it, as in “God Is Love,” which has the best lyrics on the album. Roy Clark mixes new and old gospel songs. His rendition of “Why Me,” from Gospel Road, isn’t as moving as Kris Kristofferson’s arrangement of it. “Jesus Is the Bridge Over Troubled Water”—it’s not the Simon and Garfunckel song but a weak one that appropriated the idea from S & G.

Sorrow Come Pass Me Around: A Survey of Rural Black Religious Music (Advent [P.O. Box 635, Manhattan Beach, Calif. 90266], Advent 2805). An unusual collection of privately recorded rural black music for anyone interested in primitive American religious music, and for historians in several fields. Includes a ten-page booklet providing dates for the recordings and the background of songs and performers. Primitive, but moving.

A Concert of the Russian Synod Choir in Jerusalem (The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, 1190 Park Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10028). Beautifully sung and directed. The music is all Orthodox liturgical sacred music, both ancient and modern, all sung a capella. Two songs were written by the choir’s director, Boris M. Ledkovsky, and one by Sergi Rachmaninoff. An insert provides translations. A good addition to any person’s religious music record library.

CHERYL FORBES

Younger Christians today tend to view the academic and the spiritual as opposing spheres, as an either-or choice, at best as a relation of inferior to superior. Let me illustrate this with a few examples. (1) After three years in seminary, a student recently confessed that he had come to the seminary to “grow spiritually” and to become a more mature Christian person, but that all he had done was “learn theology.” The implication was that the seminary had failed him, that the spiritual had been sacrificed to the academic. (2) In a conference on the ministry, several persons expressed fear that their newfound faith in Christ and their intense personal commitment to him might be weakened or even lost in the halls of academia. The assumption was that somehow books and learning and critical thought threaten faith and commitment and devotion; that spiritual is opposed to rational; that reason is the enemy of faith; that critical inquiry and reflection is a dragon that constantly threatens the faith that God by his grace has created within us. (3) A student recently said that he saw no connection between the critical investigation of a biblical text and his spiritual life, and that the study of historical theology was really irrelevant to his Christian faith and his experience of Christ. The implication was that the experience of faith is the ultimate good, that understanding a biblical text or a historic Christian doctrine with the mind is not essential.

These examples suggest the mood in America’s young Christians, a mood that is paralleled in American life generally. The historian Richard Hofstadter calls it an anti-intellectualism that manifests itself in a demand for immediate relevance and in an indifference toward academic disciplines. E. Earle Ellis expressed it well:

One no longer is to “learn theology” of a past age; rather, one is to “do theology” in the present.… It is like making a lemon meringue pie with a purchased pie-shell, ready-mix filling, and aerosol topping—one is “doing cooking” without having to bother with “learning to cook” [“What Good Are Hebrew and Greek?,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, May 26, 1972, p. 8].

In this mood, “doing theology” is judged superior to “learning theology.” And since the “doing” often grows out of an intense personal experience of the grace of God and the Lordship of Christ, it is generally judged as more “spiritual” than the academic venture of biblical exegesis, of historical study, of critical theological thinking. This latter is then seen, at best, as a sort of inferior forerunner, a John the Baptist preparing the way for subjective, personal experience and faith.

Why this dichotomy? Why this divorce between reason and faith, between mind and spirit, between the order of understanding and knowledge and the order of faith and devotion and commitment? Why this suspicion of intellectual activity, of man’s rational capacities, of his thirst for knowledge, of the thoughtful exploration of all areas of his life, including faith?

There is really nothing new in this antithetical approach. Indeed, it may be said that the history of Christianity, and particularly the history of Christian thought, is the history of a conflict between faith and reason, between the so-called spiritual and rational aspects of Christian faith.

As early as the second century, when Christianity came into increasing conflict with Greek philosophy, the great church father Tertullian posed the historic question: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? The Academy with the Church? What is there in common between the philosopher and the Christian, between the pupil of Hellas and the pupil of heaven?” For Tertullian, Athens and Jerusalem represented two ways of man’s attempts to know God: Athens the quest of the mind, and Jerusalem the quest of the heart. Tertullian was not anti-intellectual as such; he was one of the most astute thinkers in the early Church, employing his intellect in vigorous debate with the opponents of Christianity. For him, “Athens” represented primarily pagan philosophy rather than reason. Yet pagan philosophy was so closely identified with the rational quest for God that in the ongoing life of the Church “Athens or Jerusalem” was used to signify the antithesis reason vs. faith.

The Church has made many attempts at trial marriages between Athens and Jerusalem. But these marriages have never been altogether happy. There have been all manner of squabbles and fights, separations and threatened divorces, the dominance of the one or the other partner, or the complete subjugation of the one to the other.

It seems to me that we are seeing a revival of the rejection of Athens in favor of the purity of Jerusalem. Personal faith, experience, and spiritual enthusiasm have been elevated to the throne. From this perspective, reason and critical inquiry into one’s faith are judged as inferior, and often as unspiritual. It is often implied that one who thinks about his faith, and sometimes even wonders if his faith is true, must be slipping in his spiritual life. To the question “How do you know that Christ lives—that is, that your faith is valid?,” the contemporary Tertullian enthusiast answers, “I know, because He lives within my heart!” Emotions and feelings are considered the foolproof means of validating one’s belief.

The assumption beneath this is that the mind of man was affected by the Fall, that his reasoning capacity is perverted and depraved, and that the quest of the mind cannot therefore be trusted. At the same time it is apparently assumed, though never stated, that the emotions and feelings, and man’s capacity for experiences, have not been affected by the Fall, and that these therefore continue to provide us with a valid index of spirituality.

It seems clear to me that this assumption is basically unchristian. Both head and heart are subject to the imperfections and limitations of human existence. Both head and heart are dust. But—and in this “but” lies the difference between despair and hope, between death and life—both head and heart also stand under the grace of God. Both head and heart are the objects of the redemption wrought by Christ. Both head and heart can be transformed into the image of Christ, and can reflect into our world the light of the knowledge of the glory of God. Conversion, said St. Augustine over a millennium ago, unites the heart with the head! And unless I am mistaken, the biblical perspective leaves no room for a dichotomy between head and heart, between faith and reason, between what we call spiritual and intellectual. We are admonished to give reasons for the hope that is within us. We are asked to love God—that is, to serve him, to be at his disposal—with both heart and mind. We are called upon to undergo a transformation of our minds and to subject our all, body, soul, and mind, to the Lordship of Christ.

What does all this mean for what happens in a seminary? It means that we cannot divorce Athens from Jerusalem, for both stand under the sovereign Lordship of Christ, in whom all things adhere and come together. It means that Christ must continually enter not only our Jerusalem, but also our Athens. It means that both library and chapel, both classroom and closet, are “holy of holies” in which we penetrate ever deeper into the mystery of God revealed in Christ. It means that what we do in the classroom, in the study, and in the library can be as “spiritual” as what we do on our knees; conversely, what we do on our knees can be as “academic” as what we do in the classroom. A prayer spoken at the beginning of a class period does not necessarily make what goes on in the classroom more spiritual; nor is a half hour spent in Bible reading, meditation, and prayer necessarily more spiritual than spending time in critical reflection on a problem in theology or exegeting a text in Romans for a class in New Testament theology. A hard-hitting discussion in the student lounge on the implications of Christian faith for the American political scene can be as spiritual as a prayer session in a dormitory room. Jerusalem must be superimposed on Athens, and Athens must penetrate Jerusalem, and the Lordship of Christ must be allowed to penetrate every nook and cranny of both.

At its best, a seminary is subject to the will and Spirit of Christ in all its ways. It is both a community of inquiry, of reflection, of critical thought and a community of conviction, of commitment, of faith. If the seminary is indeed a community of inquiry, then what ought to be going on in it is the full performance of a first-rate intellectual endeavor, the conduct of academic life to the glory and praise of God! The fact that the seminary is also a community of conviction means we will bring to the work of teaching and learning a transforming diligence and a vision: any kind of slovenliness or mediocrity is not just a lapse but a kind of blasphemy!

The emancipating effect of the Gospel in this area means that the truly Christian student is freed from the temptation to second-rate scholarship and half-hearted commitment—and that he is freed for exuberant acceptance of the rigors of the scholarly task, done to honor God with the best service of the mind. But the freedom for this task comes only as we open the gates of both Jerusalem and Athens and give Christ a triumphal entry!

As evangelicals we maintain that the Bible is for us the only infallible rule of faith and practice. It is our final authority in all matters of doctrine (faith) and ethics (practice). Yet the Bible was not written to evangelicals living in the twentieth century. The science—or better, the art—of interpreting the biblical text so that the revelation of God written centuries ago is meaningful and correctly understood today is called “hermeneutics.” The basic principle of hermeneutics, to be somewhat simplistic, is that the question “What does it mean for us today?” must be preceded by the question “What did it mean for them yesterday?” If we do not seek first to understand what the text meant when it was written, it will be very difficult to interpret intelligently what it means and demands of us today.

My subject here is the use of the term “wine” in the New Testament. Some readers may already be thinking, “Is he going to try to tell us that wine in the Bible means grape juice? Is he going to try to say that the wine mentioned in the New Testament is any different from the wine bottled today by Christian Brothers or Chateau Lafite-Rothschild or Mogen David?” Well, my answers are no and yes. No, the wine of the Bible was not unfermented grape juice. Yes, it was different from the wine of today.

In ancient times wine was usually stored in large pointed jugs called amphorae. When wine was to be used it was poured from the amphorae into large bowls called kraters, where it was mixed with water. Last year I had the privilege of visiting the great archaeological museum in Athens, Greece, where I saw dozens of these large kraters. At the time it did not dawn on me what their use signified about the drinking of wine in biblical times. From these kraters, cups or kylix were then filled. What is important for us to note is that before wine was drunk it was mixed with water. The kylix were filled not from the amphorae but from the kraters.

The ratio of water to wine varied. Homer (Odyssey IX, 208f.) mentions a ratio of 20 to 1, twenty parts water to one part wine. Pliny (Natural History XIV, vi, 54) mentions a ratio of eight parts water to one part wine. In one ancient work, Athenaeus’s The Learned Banquet, written around A.D. 200, we find in Book Ten a collection of statements from earlier writers about drinking practices. A quotation from a play by Aristophanes reads: “ ‘Here, drink this also, mingled three and two.’ DEMUS.‘Zeus! But it’s sweet and bears the three parts well!’ ” The poet Euenos, who lived in the fifth century B.C., is also quoted:

The best measure of wine is neither much nor very little;

For ‘tis the cause of either grief or madness.

It pleases the wine to be the fourth, mixed with three nymphs.

Here the ratio of water to wine is 3 to 1. Others mentioned are:

3 to 1—Hesiod

4 to 1—Alexis

2 to 1—Diodes

3 to 1—Ion

5 to 2—Nichochares

2 to 1—Anacreon

Sometimes the ratio goes down to 1 to 1 (and even lower), but it should be noted that such a mixture is referred to as “strong wine.” Drinking wine unmixed, on the other hand, was looked upon as a “Scythian” or barbarian custom. Athenaeus in this work quotes Mnesitheus of Athens:

The gods has revealed wine to mortals, to be the greatest blessing for those who use it aright, but for those who use it without measure, the reverse. For it gives food to them that take it and strength in mind and body. In medicine it is most beneficial; it can be mixed with liquid and drugs and it brings aid to the wounded. In daily intercourse, to those who mix and drink it moderately, it gives good cheer; but if you overstep the bounds, it brings violence. Mix it half and half, and you get madness; unmixed, bodily collapse.

It is evident that wine was seen in ancient times as a medicine (and as a solvent for medicines) and of course as a beverage. Yet as a beverage it was always thought of as a mixed drink. Plutarch (Symposiacs III, ix), for instance, states. “We call a mixture ‘wine,’ although the larger of the component parts is water.” The ratio of water might vary, but only barbarians drank it unmixed, and a mixture of wine and water of equal parts was seen as “strong drink” and frowned upon. The term “wine” or oinos in the ancient world, then, did not mean wine as we understand it today but wine mixed with water. Usually a writer simply referred to the mixture of water and wine as “wine.” To indicate that the beverage was not a mixture of water and wine he would say “unmixed (akratesteron) wine.”

One might wonder whether the custom of mixing wine with water was limited to the ancient Greeks. The burden of proof would be upon anyone who argued that the pattern of drinking wine in Jewish society was substantially different from that of the examples already given. And we do have examples in both Jewish and Christian literature and perhaps in the Bible that wine was likewise understood as being a mixture of wine and water. In several instances in the Old Testament a distinction is made between “wine” and “strong drink.” In Leviticus 10:8, 9, we read, “And the LORD spoke to Aaron, saying, ‘Drink no wine nor strong drink, you nor your sons with you, when you go into the tent of meeting.… Concerning the Nazarite vow Numbers 6:3 states that the Nazarite “shall separate himself from wine and strong drink.” This distinction is found also in Deuteronomy 14:26; 29:6; Judges 13:4, 7, 14; First Samuel 1:15: Proverbs 20:1; 31:4, 6: Isaiah 5:11, 22; 28:7; 29:9; 56:12; and Micah 2:11.

The 1901 Jewish Encyclopedia (Vol. 12, p. 533) states that in the rabbinic period at least “ ‘yayin’ [or wine] is to be distinguished from ‘shekar’ [or strong drink]: the former is diluted with water (mazug’); the latter is undiluted (‘yayin hai’).” In the Talmud, which contains the oral traditions of Judaism from about 200 B.C. to A.D. 200, there are several tractates in which the mixture of water and wine is discussed. One tractate (Shabbath 77a) states that wine that does not carry three parts of water well is not wine. The normal mixture is said to consist of two parts water to one part wine. In a most important reference (Pesahim 108b) it is stated that the four cups every Jew was to drink during the Passover ritual were to be mixed in a ratio of three parts water to one part wine. From this we can conclude with a fair degree of certainty that the fruit of the vine used at the institution of the Lord’s Supper was a mixture of three parts water to one part wine. In another Jewish reference from around 60 B.C. we read, “It is harmful to drink wine alone, or again, to drink water alone, while wine mixed with water is sweet and delicious and enhances one’s enjoyment” (2 Maccabees 15:39).

In ancient times there were not many beverages that were safe to drink. The danger of drinking water alone raises another point. There were several ways in which the ancients could make water safe to drink. One method was boiling, but this was tedious and costly. Different methods of filtration were tried. The safest and easiest method of making the water safe to drink, however, was to mix it with wine. The drinking of wine (i.e., a mixture of water and wine) served therefore as a safety measure, since often the water available was not safe. (I remember drinking some water in Salonica, Greece, that would have been much better for me had it been mixed with wine or some other purifying agent.)

When we come to the New Testament the content of the wine is never discussed. The burden of proof, however, is surely upon anyone who would say that the “wine” of the New Testament is substantially different from the wine mentioned by the Greeks, the Jews during the intertestamental period, and the early church fathers. In the writings of the early church fathers it is clear that “wine” means wine mixed with water. Justin Martyr around A.D. 150 described the Lord’s Supper in this way: “Bread is brought, and wine and water, and the president sends up prayers and thanksgiving” (Apology I, 67, 5). Some sixty-five years later Hippolytus instructed the bishops that they shall “eucharistize [bless] first the bread into the representation of the Flesh of Christ; and the cup mixed with wine for the antitype of the Blood which was shed for all who have believed in Him” (Apostolic Tradition XXIII, 1). Cyprian around A.D. 250 stated in his refutation of certain heretical practices:

Nothing must be done by us but what the Lord first did on our behalf, as that the cup which is offered in remembrance of Him should be offered mingled with wine.…

Thus, therefore, in considering the cup of the Lord, water alone cannot be offered, even as wine alone cannot be offered. For if anyone offer wine only, the blood of Christ is dissociated from us: but if the water be alone, the people are dissociated from Christ.… Thus the cup of the Lord is not indeed water alone, nor wine alone, unless each be mingled with the other [Epistle LXII, 2, 11 and 13].

Unmixed wine and plain water at the Lord’s Supper were both found unacceptable. A mixture of wine and water was the norm. Earlier in the latter part of the second century Clement of Alexandria stated:

It is best for the wine to be mixed with as much water as possible.… For both are works of God, and the mixing of the two, both of water and wine produces health, because life is composed of a necessary element and a useful element. To the necessary element, the water, which is in the greatest quantity, there is to be mixed in some of the useful element [Instructor II, ii, 23.3–24.1].

To consume the amount of alcohol that is in two martinis by drinking wine containing three parts water to one part wine, one would have to drink over twenty-two glasses. In other words, it is possible to become intoxicated from wine mixed with three parts of water, but one’s drinking would probably affect the bladder long before it affected the mind.

In concluding this brief article I would like to emphasize two points. First, it is important to try to understand the biblical text in the context in which it was written. Before we ask “What does the biblical text mean for us today?” we must ask “What did it mean to them originally?” Second, there is a striking difference between the drinking of alcoholic beverages today and the drinking of wine in New Testament times. If the drinking of unmixed wine or even wine mixed in a ratio of one to one with water was frowned upon in ancient times, certainly the drinking of distilled spirits in which the alcoholic content is frequently three to ten times greater would be frowned upon a great deal more.

The scene: the little Lakeland town of Keswick, in the heart of the most beautiful mountain scenery in England. The time: the last week of June, 1875. From all over the United Kingdom a few hundred men and women converged for an informal convention of Bible readings, addresses, and prayer meetings designed to “promote practical holiness.”

They came because the vicar of Keswick, Canon Dundas Harford-Battersby, had issued a general invitation. He and the close friends at his elbow offered no elaborate plans; indeed, the intended principal speaker, Robert Pearsall Smith, had canceled his acceptance and was about to sail back to America after a nervous breakdown compounded by suspicion of infamous conduct. But Harford-Battersby refused to give up. A year previously his Christian life had been transformed by a discovery that he wanted to share. He would have been astonished and gratified had he known that what he began in 1875 would become an annual event, and celebrate its hundredth birthday, and turn a placename into a universal word.

The Keswick Convention arose in an England stirred by the evangelism of D. L. Moody, but the first steps owed nothing to him and everything to a Quaker glass manufacturer from Philadelphia, Robert Pearsall Smith, one of the oddest characters to blaze briefly across the religious scene. He arrived in London’s rich and cultured Mayfair in the spring of 1873 to create a quiet sensation with his message that a devout Christian need not lead an existence of gloom and defeat. Most of his early disciples were clergymen and upperclass laymen—the only people in that age with leisure to attend “conversational breakfasts,” where Pearsall Smith and his wife, Hannah Whitall Smith, expounded Scripture to prove the possibility of an unbroken walk with God. This, as the title of Hannah’s famous book put it, was The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life.

The following year a large number, including students, met at the Hampshire mansion of Broadlands, which had lately been the home of that jaunty pagan prime minister Lord Palmerston, and today is that of Earl Mountbatten. They met again at Oxford a few weeks later with many more. To that conference the shy, sensitive vicar of Keswick went with grave disquiet and doubts about this “higher Christian life.”

Harford-Battersby noticed at once a distinction from other conferences: “a definiteness of purpose and a direction of aim.” At first he dismissed the teaching as scripturally unsound, but while a London clergyman, Evan Hopkins, expounded a New Testament passage, Harford-Battersby wondered for the first time, “Has not my faith been a seeking faith when it ought to be a resting faith? And if so, why not exchange it for the latter? And I thought of the sufficiency of Jesus and said I will rest in Him—and I did rest in Him.” Despite a rooted distrust of emotion, he found next day an overwhelming sense of the presence of the Lord Jesus, a desire for full consecration, and afterwards a new effectiveness in daily living and parochial ministry. His had been a classic “Keswick” experience.

In 1875 a conference took place on an even larger scale at Brighton on the South Coast, where Pearsall Smith reached the pinnacle of his fame and toppled soon after into a sad anticlimax that does not invalidate his right to a niche in Christian history. Meanwhile smaller conventions, as they were beginning to be called to distinguish their specific purpose, sprang up in many parts of the country. That first Keswick of 1875 and the Keswick Conventions of the following years were not unique. But the beauty of their surroundings, the calibre of their speakers, and the wise leadership they had in face of misunderstanding and hostility from eminent evangelicals gradually gave them pre-eminence, until exposition of the “higher Christian life” or “the life of faith” became known as “Keswick teaching.”

It arose at a time when evangelicalism held apparent dominance in British religion. Yet joy too often gave way to anxious conformity; too many calling themselves evangelicals were like the clergyman Patrick Bronte, whose daughters, the novelists, had a grim childhood; or like the foster-mother whom the young Rudyard Kipling justly loathed.

Such a parody of the New Testament faith was well described by one of the early Keswick leaders, Hanmer Webb-Peploe:

Was not the old Evangelical teaching something like this: that I was perfectly justified in a moment and had then a standing before God; then at that moment sanctification commenced and I had to go on, struggle and strive and call in the aid of the Holy Ghost—which one too often forgot to do. I was continually expecting defeat and if I conquered, I thought it wonderful.

Against this dreariness Keswick set the truth of Christ the Victor.

The difference He made soon caused Webb-Peploe’s parishioners to comment that the rector did not seem “as fidgety as he used to be.” It was even more noticeable in Henry Bowker, the elderly retired schoolmaster who became chairman of Keswick on Harford-Battersby’s death in 1882. Bowker was a layman, and had once been so cantankerous that later a friend visiting his home was astonished at the contrast between the face of his kindly host and the portrait hanging behind him, taken in pre-Keswick days.

The teaching was not new. In all ages men and women had discovered it, here and there, for themselves. Hudson Taylor had entered this “exchanged life,” as he termed it, in 1870 in China, and he later became Keswick’s warm supporter. Dwight L. Moody had learned it during his spiritual crisis in New York in 1871.

When the rediscovery caught on in London and Broadlands, rail travel allowed a sharing to thousands together for the first time in church history. Keswick teaching had a tenuous, barely recognized link with the American “camp meeting” and with Wesleyan perfectionism; yet the emphasis differed. Methodist holiness taught the believer to aim at the entire eradication of sin; Keswick taught him to rely on the counter-action of the indwelling Victorious Christ to defeat sin. Sin would not be destroyed in this mortal life, and so every Christian could, like Simon Peter, fall, however close he had walked with Christ. One of Keswick’s opponents who later became its foremost theological spokesman, Handley Moule, bishop of Durham, described this paradox succinctly. Looking back in old age he said: “God knows how imperfectly I have used my secret. I repent before Him in great humiliation. But I know the secret, His open secret of victory and rest. And I know how different life has been for that secret.”

Keswick quickly forged strong links between Christians of different denominations. The text “All one in Christ Jesus,” a sentiment much ignored in that day of warring sects, became the motto at the convention. Keswick saw itself as the servant of every Protestant church, not the hub of a new one. Moreover, Keswick attenders have not regarded themselves a conscious elite within the denominational framework, in the manner of the Oxford Group (Moral Rearmament.) Although Keswick speakers are asked to teach no opinions from the platform that are not held generally amongst them all, they do not subscribe to any code of doctrine or polity: in unity, not uniformity, lies strength.

Keswick also emerged, more slowly, as a strong force in overseas missions. The early leaders excluded missionary advocacy on the supposition that this would disrupt devotion, until in 1885, in the aftermath of the young Cambridge Seven, they were forced by popular demand to admit the Great Commission, rather gingerly and unofficially. Hudson Taylor of the China Inland Mission had long taught that the best way to evangelize the world was to deepen the consecration of those already evangelized. He would have been amused had he read a letter of 1888 from his friend the chairman of Keswick to the lay secretary in the Church Missionary Society: “A new thought has been given me: Consecration and the Evangelization of the world ought to go together.”

Thereafter the last full day of each convention saw one of Keswick’s most influential features: the Missionary Meeting. Its first organizer’s brilliant strategy is still followed while the hours flash by: no long addresses by missionary statesmen but a succession of briefly recounted personal experiences, and the pinpointing of needs known at first hand. Thus hundreds of listening young men and women over three generations have come to the moment of their response to God’s individual call to serve beyond their own shores. As the growth of overseas churches gradually changed the pattern of world evangelization and made Keswick an increasingly international gathering, the Missionary Meeting became a platform for presenting the claim of the Great Commission, whatever each speaker’s color or race or homeland.

Keswick further helped world evangelization by financing annual tours by Keswick missioners to carry the distinctive message to Australia, the United States, India, and many other parts. Thus the world became familiar with the idea of a “Keswick” for the deepening of spiritual life; for as someone wittily put it, “any conference has a subject but a convention has an object”—to bring every participant to learn for himself the “open secret.”

But Keswick stood aside from Pentecostal phenomena such as divine healing or speaking in tongues. The Welsh Revival of 1904 stemmed from “a Keswick in Wales”; yet when three hundred Welshmen came to the Keswick of 1905, and paroxysms were experienced in the Young Men’s meeting, and enthusiasts ran through the town throwing up windows of the lodging houses crying “All-night prayer meeting tonight!,” the leaders, ably helped by wise old A. J. Pierson from the United States, channeled the intensity into a sober, quiet consecration. Whether Keswick should have let the Welsh tide flow unchecked is one of the imponderables of history. Perhaps the Welsh revival would have become an all-British, or even world, revival.

Keswick shared the doldrums of the period between the First and Second World Wars, and at times it seemed that Keswick had added to its basic teaching a lesson that holiness involved conformity to the cultural habits of middle-class England. Yet the convention, and especially its attraction for students, undoubtedly helped keep alive throughout the world the claims of the Great Commission, the authority of Scripture, and a grasp of the larger possibilities of Christian consecration. Thus by the 1950s, when all Britain was stirred for Christ by the Billy Graham crusades, Keswick was well placed to fulfill an important role in nurturing converts, and in spreading and strengthening the spiritual forces released by Harringay and after. Keswick has traditionally invited at least one North American main speaker for each convention. It is fitting that Billy Graham, so often invited, will attend for the first time in 1975.

As it celebrates its hundredth birthday with the two consecutive conventions that large numbers have made necessary for some years now, Keswick may aptly express its role for the future with a comment from the past, by Handley Moule: “Keswick stands for … a message as old as the Apostles but too much forgotten: the open secret of inward victory for liberty in life and service through the trusted power of an indwelling Christ.”

Sonnet XVIII

Today is a day for praising the sun in the meadow,

And the high wind, the sky-wind that’s blown from snown peaks to our faces;

A day for the swift-gliding races of cloud-cast shadow,

For leaf-wing, bird, all things that move to be put through their paces.

A day for the laughter of maidens, the giving of graces;

A day for the splashing of singing-stream, rock-tumble water,

And the blooming of sweet mountain-laurel in seldem-seem places.

A day for hot sun in the desert to shine even hotter,

A day for clay cliffs to be shaped by the wind-handed potter.

Today, is a day for the thunder and lightning to battle.

And roar in high passes until the great stone-boulders totter,

And send down the swift-ending rain while the storm windows rattle.

It’s a day for singing, for telling the oft-told story,

For parising the ancient, twy-nature Enfleshment of Glory.