Fiber is the tough substance that gives texture and body to plants and trees. From it cloth is spun or woven. And it is fiber that makes trees useful for lumber and other products.

In man, character is the fiber that determines behavior and reaction to the strains and stresses of life. It has been said that a man’s real character is shown by what he does when he is alone, but that is only part of the picture. Whenever temptations come, pressures rise, and decisions have to be made, character or its lack is very evident.

There is a form of good character that is not necessarily based on the Christian ethic. Until the Red take-over in China, there was evident (and there still is, in Chinese communities abroad) a praiseworthy character rooted in respect for family and a sense of family responsibility. No doubt this is why there is so little crime and delinquency in Chinese communities. Obedience to and honor for parents results in law-abiding character.

When the Communists took over China, one of their first objectives was to destroy the age-long sense of family loyalty, and the day came when children’s denunciation of parents was commonplace.

America, which was founded on the Christian ethic, has also experienced a marked decline in character. Now expediency often triumphs over right, and immediate gain is thought by many to justify almost any act. Even among some religious leaders, “situational ethics” has supplanted the absolute of God’s moral law. Never has there been greater need for Christian character than now.

We do not have to look far to find what has largely led to the moral and spiritual decline of American life (which is, of course, a reflection of individual lives). The biblical concept of good and evil has been dimmed or lost, and men no longer have the moral fiber necessary to stand up against the multiplied temptations of today. The faith and conviction that form the basis of character have deteriorated. And the values that make men and nations great are under external attack everywhere. On every hand evil is called good and good evil.

If one has no inner standard of values, why should he oppose what is wrong? If one’s source of reference is no higher than the behavior of others, he can travel to disaster without ever sensing the danger ahead. Without a God-oriented sense of values, there can be no Christian conscience.

Years ago, when I was a medical student in Richmond, I had the privilege of helping in the Seventeenth Street Mission on Sunday afternoons. One day a young Negro boy was arrested and brought into court. When he was asked, “Did you steal that box?,” the little fellow replied: “No sir, Judge, that would be sin.”

The bemused judge asked, “What is sin?” He received the immediate answer, “Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God.” Needless to say, this case was investigated and the honesty of the little boy proved beyond doubt. He had character developed by Christian teaching and a loyalty to what he had been taught.

How tragic that so few young people are learning the foundation of Christian character today! Even in many Sunday schools, the development of a strong sense of right and wrong, of man’s responsibility to God and the teaching of Scripture, is slighted in favor of development of “social consciousness.” The result: anti-social behavior on every hand.

Why are so many people unwilling to “get involved” when others are in trouble, even before their eyes? Because character has been supplanted by selfishness.

Why is there so little righteous indignation against those who are actively destroying the values that made our nation great? Why is there no firm reaction against those who have lost all patriotism and who actively engage in sedition and acts of treason?

Recently a well-known folk-singer was refused the use of an auditorium in Washington because of her encouragement of draftcard-burners and draft-dodgers. The news media made a heroine of her while those who refused the use of their auditorium were held up to ridicule. Could this have been possible without the undermining of the foundations of national conscience by an insidious propaganda that rejects all restraint? “Freedom” has become license, and in that grievous perversion conscienceless men are spelling the doom of a nation.

But there is hope. That hope lies in people who have consciences controlled by the living Christ. One develops such a conscience by becoming thoroughly saturated with the Word of God, by learning to look at the world in the light of God’s holy laws.

Let young people read and reread the Book of Proverbs, for there they will learn the basis for right behavior. Let them receive Christ into their hearts and they will, through the help of the indwelling Spirit, know how to react to temptations and the insidious propaganda of Satan, to which they are constantly subjected.

Young people need to learn of Daniel, whose strong character was reflected in his resolve “not [to] defile himself with the king’s rich food, or with the wine which he drank” (Dan. 1:8); of Timothy, to whom Paul wrote, “Take your share of suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 2:3); and of Isaiah, who could say, “The Lord GOD helps me; therefore I have not been confounded; therefore I have set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame” (Isa. 50:7).

One step toward developing a God-oriented conscience in America would be to institute the reading of the Ten Commandments each day in all public schools. God’s moral law, common to the heritage of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, read without comment, would be a blessing and help to all, particularly those who have never learned the meaning of right and wrong. If attendance at this reading were made optional, even the mouths of avowed atheists would be stopped.

The American heritage is saturated with the recognition of God and our responsibility to him. How can we continue to permit the frittering away of our most precious possession in the name of a “freedom” that is actually bondage to evil?

If we are to regain the character that once made us great, we must have a source of reference—God’s holy law, which enables us to distinguish good from evil. When character is founded on Christ and his Word, men see through the blandishments through which we are being led down the path to oblivion.

Christian character, the fiber that makes men and nations great, is desperately needed today. For a generation there has been a growing tendency to let men set the standards, with disastrous results. We have forgotten that “righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Prov. 14:34).

Character makes the difference.

L. NELSON BELL

Dear Enemies Of Lucifer:

To fulfill my pledge to keep you abreast of the follies and phonies found on the religious scene, I recently visited the Church of Satan in San Francisco. Armed with a hefty imaginary inkpot, a la Luther, I attended a black arts lecture given by Anton Szandor LaVey, the cult’s high priest. My meeting with the Mephistophelian-bearded, Yul Brynner-shaven, black-velvet-robed ambassador from the nether regions convinced me, however, that a chuckle was my best protection.

In the black-walled living room of a black Victorian house, LaVey leads ritualistic services, lectures on the black arts, and gives charm courses for witches. Bizarre objects fill the house: a skeleton, a stuffed “werewolf,” an operating table, a tombstone coffee table. Over the fireplace-altar (where a nude reclines during solemn celebrations) hangs the cult’s red medallion, a goathead enclosed in a star at whose five points are Hebrew letters representing biblical names of Satan.

LaVey’s Satan-worshiping cult promotes a message of lust so crass that the appeal to self-indulgence becomes untemptingly banal. He advises his witches to entrap a man by dressing in “modified-prostitute” style, enticing him with a secret aphrodisiac and high-cholesterol food for virility, and hexing him by burning his picture while thinking erotically of him during pre-dawn sleeping hours when his ESP is most receptive. What attracts would-be witches and warlocks most to his lectures ($2.50 admission) is the hope of gaining amazing occult powers. Both the henna-haired lady who introduced herself as Lenore the “head witch” and a former Russian Orthodox seminarian, now a minister of Satan, told me of their belief in sorcery. Among the twenty-five present was a black-clad fifteen-year-old boy, referred to as the first member of Youth for Satan.

Sex symbol Jayne Mansfield, a follower of LaVey until her recent death, had sought his help allegedly to stop harrassment by her boyfriend, attorney Steve Brody. To oblige her, LaVey claims he put a hex on him. Shortly thereafter Brody, along with Miss Mansfield, was killed in an auto accident. LaVey “reluctantly” takes credit for his demise. When I asked about LaVey’s responsibility for Jayne’s death, his beautiful blonde wife replied, “When lightning strikes, sometimes the innocent also are killed.” What careless devils!

Shocking to some, a novelty to others, the Satan cult is just too corny to make it big. Satan himself is too clever and deceptive to bother much with LaVey’s sideshow.

Eutychus III

An adversary of the Adversary,

On Being Likeminded

The article by Reuel Lemmons, “Possibly We Can Get Together” (Sept. 1), makes more sense on the subject of ecumenism than anything else I have seen. By now we agree that there is a great deal of merit in at least talking about the subject, and a great deal has been said pro and con about it. This brief article succinctly provides a pattern which seems to have the basic elements of a successful method.

JOHN A. SCOTT

Church of Christ

Memphis, Tenn.

Possibly the sect that Mr. Lemmons represents could instigate a move back toward Bible unity, if they would begin the move by renouncing a few of their hard-core doctrines, such as salvation by water, the non-biblical name they have attached to the church, their dogged teaching of a “sin you must” religion, and—last but not least—a thing that seems second nature to them, their bent to argue over the most insignificant matters of doctrine and dogma. I’m waiting to see if Mr. Lemmons is really interested in unity of the Church, or if he means only to use his words as a decoy for other Christians, whom he hopes to draw into useless and unprofitable debate.

HERBERT O. FAIN

Yakima, Wash.

Mr. Lemmons’s religious group, which calls itself “The Churches of Christ,” claims to be undenominational. I will not be surprised if they take you to task for referring to them as a “denomination.” But in reality they are the most denominational of the religious groups I know about, divided into numerous warring factions, each claiming to be the exclusive “church of Christ.” On three things they seem to be in agreement: that water baptism by immersion by one of their ministers is absolutely essential to salvation; that instrumental music in worship is sinful; and that all outside their religious communion are apostates and not a part of the body of Christ. Mr. Lemmons’s kind of union, as I see it, would be if all other evangelicals dropped any scriptural interpretation different from the accepted “Church of Christ” viewpoints and accepted the interpretations of his particular group.

T. F. MCNABB

Fort Dix, N. J.

It is obvious that the person who wrote the descriptive paragraph on Reuel Lemmons knows little of the Churches of Christ. It is further plain that this same person either did not read or did not understand the article by Brother Lemmons: “It is perfectly clear to the Bible student that the Lord who gave himself to purchase the Church intended that all his followers be gathered together in one undenominational and undivided body, the Church.”

In view of this, whence the reference to the Churches of Christ as a “denomination” and Reuel Lemmons as a “denominational” evangelist?

TIMOTHY W. DUNN

Austin, Tex.

We are placing so much emphasis on mergers that church members are coming to believe that nothing less than one great, universal, outward church is acceptable to God.…

One cannot be naive enough to believe that further mergers are not forthcoming, but one can continue to wish for leaders and pastors who would rather spend themselves in emphasizing sin, repentance, forgiveness, and a sinless heaven awaiting true believers in Jesus Christ—members of the true Church.

The strength of any denomination is not in its numerical size but in congregations which contain many born-again, individual believers who are completely “sold out” to the greatest King, and the greatest cause, in all the world.

EARL K. BRISSMAN

Moline, Ill.

The Working Church

I am enjoying your panel discussions.…

I would like to add to the discussion “What’s the Sense of Work?” (Sept. 1). The Christian Church, properly conducted, is one of the most proficient production-line operations. But in most cases the minister does most of the producing. In some cases the minister wants it that way. In others there is no other alternative. He has to be the financier, chairman of the church board, and sometimes … may even … be the custodian.

It is really a production-line job and will take the talent of all.

WILLIAM H. BELT

Elyria, Ohio

Not A Speck

We who believe the doctrine espoused by the Reformers are grieved … at the article by Kenneth S. Latourette (“The Influence of the Reformation on World History,” Sept. 1).…

Luther never suggested that the Holy Spirit gives men new hearts in response to their faith. He expressly taught the contrary in the strongest possible terms in his “bondage of the will”.… Reformers uniformly taught that faith is the response of man to the new birth sovereignly wrought by the Holy Spirit.

This is no little fly speck in the salt of Reformation doctrine. The grace of God is the sovereign power by which impotent sinners are saved, and not the impotent wish of a God awaiting the response of man’s sovereign will.

WALTER J. CHANTRY

Grace Baptist Church

Carlisle, Pa.

Can We Retrieve It?

The position taken by Harold H. Lytle (“They Are Taking My Church Away from Me,” Aug. 18) is one that I have longed to see in these times of theological revolution. It is the case of an informed layman who has become outraged with the easygoing drift of the Church today. More and more, our churches are becoming outraged at social injustices, domestic moral problems, and war. While these and other related occurrences are of great importance and demand that Christians take a stand based upon the teaching of the Scriptures, they must not do so by denying, doubting, and degrading the infallible record of the revelation of God, the Holy Bible. If this does occur, and it is now doing so, the problems of sin can never be solved.… When confessions of faith and pulpit preaching, along with classroom teachings in colleges and seminaries across this land, begin to cast doubt upon the reliability of the Bible and upon the divine nature of Jesus Christ, the world is in for some sad days.

ROBERT E. SELF

Harlands Creek Baptist Church

Lexington, Miss.

He represents a great company of Presbyterian elders and laymen who have had no adequate opportunity to express their loyalty to historic Presbyterianism. Too many have simply walked out and left our beloved church.… However, we must hope and pray that men like Harold H. Lytle will stay for the swinging of the pendulum.

CLARENCE A. KIRCHER

First United Presbyterian Church

San Mateo, Calif.

As a “displaced” Presbyterian, I concur with his appraisal of the current status of the Presbyterian Church.

What can now be done to unite those whose persuasion is soundly Reformed and Presbyterian under a common banner once again?

JOHN B. CULVER, JR.

Kenosha, Wis.

It seems to me that by inference Mr. Lytle’s article is more an indictment of the United Presbyterian laymen and the church’s governmental system than of the clergy and other professionals whom he has singled out as the culprits. Is the Presbyterian system of representative government outmoded or is it too complex and cumbersome for meaningful lay participation?…

As a Presbyterian layman for many years, I can remember the constant efforts of dedicated pastors in local churches to get laymen interested in church work and church affairs, to attend presbytery and other important meetings. The United Presbyterian Church boards for years have exerted considerable effort to get lay people involved. The United Presbyterian Men is just one example. Many laymen have responded and have become involved. Mr. Lytle is obviously one who is sincerely interested in his church.…

To me the sad thing is that so many of us laymen have been too busy with other things we consider more important than the church.… A busy minister once answered a busy layman’s question as to how he could find time for the church by quoting Matthew 6:33.

FRANKLIN FINSTHWAIT

Alexandria, Va.

First Step For Peace?

“The Rising Tide of Violence” (Aug. 18) portrayed the dimensions of violence, probed the causes, and suggested a remedy in “personal obligation”.…

Basic to any control of violence-agitation is elimination of slums, not merely relocation of them.

Why cannot the committed Christian take the initiative in agitating for a “notax-improvement” area corresponding to the community ghetto? As soon as land-owners paid taxes only on land rather than on improvements, labor expended in preserving multiple dwellings would be rewarded, laziness in allowing deterioration penalized. City tax loss could be offset by reassessment of land values, owner loss by limited rent-control release. This simple arrangement would mean more work but no less profit and bring about the peace that alone can preserve the community.

MORTON A. HILL, S. J.

New York, N. Y.

Would You Believe …?

All the words I know like astonishing, shocking, unbelievable, and fantastic would express my reaction to “The NCC Elite: A Breakdown of Beliefs” (News, July 21).…

As an international airline captain for twenty-five years, I wonder what kind of accident statistics we would have, and how good business would be, if 66 per cent of the captains would say on the PA system, “Relax and enjoy the flight, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll probably make it. Two-thirds of your crew believe we will get there safely.”

JAMES O. EVANS

Beirut, Lebanon

Israel’S Answer

The Rev. James L. Kelso (News, July 21), threw into one pot a varied assortment of emotional charges.

The one specific complaint refers to damage caused at the Lutheran Hospital in Jerusalem. These buildings were damaged but not destroyed. The hospital was rapidly put back into operation. Throughout the whole nineteen years of the Israel-Jordan armistice agreement, the grounds of the Lutheran Hospital served as a Jordanian army base despite the demilitarized accord governing Mt. Scopus, on whose periphery the hospital is located. On June 5 and 6, 1967, Jordanian army positions in the area of the hospital were the most actively aggressive, continuously shelling residential areas of Jerusalem and inflicting the heaviest losses on Israelis—all this while the hospital was flying Red Cross flags.

It is perfectly clear that the Rev. Mr. Kelso is an Arab partisan. Accordingly, he does not write that it was Jordan which opened fire in Jerusalem on June 5 and not Israel. Three times on that day Israel agreed to a ceasefire, but Jordan continued fighting. Mr. Kelso does not mention that several hundred buildings in Israeli Jerusalem were shelled by the Jordanians on June 5 and 6.

The tragedy of our times, and the wars which have flowed from it, has been the consistent Arab refusal to recognize, accept, and live in peace with the State of Israel. Because of this, there are Arab refugees who live in deplorable conditions, because the Arab governments on whose territory they are have been indifferent to their plight. Because of this also, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees fled to Israel from the Arab countries for their safety, and it is a source of great pride to the people of Israel that none of these people leads the miserable life of a refugee today.

Mr. Kelso’s charge that Israel regards Arabs as dogs is incompatible with the facts. Some Arab refugees found their way into Israel in 1948. All were successfully settled years ago, and none of them lives as a refugee today. Israel conducted its military operations with the utmost regard for all civilians. The Arab civilian casualties of the war were numbered only in the tens. Most of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip show no sign whatever that a war even took place there three months ago. If there was indifference to the plight of the Arabs it was Arab indifference: the Jordanian decision to wage war on civilian targets; the Syrian refusal to accept a ceasefire when the war was already over; the cutting by the Egyptians of the water pipeline into Sinai, where their defeated troops thirsted in the desert; and the Egyptian refusal to agree as yet to exchange a handful of Israeli prisoners for more than five thousand Egyptians.

All the evil consequences of the last twenty years of conflict have resulted from Arab enmity for Israel and Arab attempts to destroy Israel. The only hope for the future is peace. The great hope of today is that in the wake of the six-day war we have a real chance of realizing peace. This one great aim, so difficult to achieve and yet so simple and glorious in its promise, requires the dedicated efforts and support of all good men of all religions if we are to escape the tragic mistakes of the past.

BENAD AVITAL

First Secretary

Embassy of Israel

Washington, D. C.

The interpretative appraisal of the Arab-Jewish conflict was surely a refreshing change from the one-sided material that has flowed from far too many pens over the last few months.

SILAS H. JONES

Victory Temple

Klamath Falls, Ore.

First of Two Parts

Let us briefly sketch our present-day situation. The presently dominant theological tendencies originated in Germany and from here coursed throughout the entire theological world. When we speak of “modern” theology, we now mean primarily the existential theology founded by Bultmann and his disciples, which claims to be today’s only feasible theology because it alone allegedly meets the demands of modern man’s world view.

The seriousness of the situation is seen in the fact that this theology exerts tremendous influence on the younger theologians, increasingly determines preaching and religious instruction, tries to control the religious press, radio, and television, and disseminates a popular kind of academic literature that the non-theologian can understand. No doubt it has a strong sense of mission. It feels called to win the unchurched person to Christian faith, convinced that if he is unburdened of untenable dogmatic concepts he will more easily and willingly find the way to the Gospel. But those who believed this have been gravely disappointed, for this theology is, as someone has said, a “theology of empty churches.” Although it has gained wide attention, it has enjoyed little success. Hardly anyone has through it come to a living faith in Jesus Christ.

It is a heartening sign that the Church of Christ has become newly aware of its task and responsibility, and is determinedly opposing “modern” theology’s reduction and corruption of the Gospel. I mention only the writings of Professor Walter Künneth and Dr. Gerhard Bergmann; the declaration concerning Holy Scripture by the European Alliance; the extremely significant Braunschweig theses of 1966; and above all, the tremendous witness at Dortmund of the No Other Gospel movement and the evangelistic endeavors, attended by thousands upon thousands of people, in which the message of salvation is proclaimed with authority through the power of the Holy Spirit.

It is symptomatic of the present situation that even a widely distributed secular periodical like Der Spiegel should issue a series of articles on “Jesus and the Churches.” The series, which aroused great interest, came to the shocking conclusion that it is no longer possible to speak of a “uniform” theology and message. The concluding verdict was that “the Church is schizophrenic.”

The Role Of Church Leaders

Church leaders have long refrained from taking a clear position. They have finally come forward, however, with a number of very diverse comments; with these they are trying to be mediators. Their main concern is to prevent divisions within the churches. Therefore terms like “erroneous teaching” or “heresy” are avoided; identifying the radical higher-critical groups in theology and in the Church for what they really are is likewise avoided. It is undoubtedly clear to the leaders that there can be no “theological pluralism” in the Church, and that pastors and congregations must be given a clear and consistent answer to the confusing questions of the day. But how can this be done?

Bishop Hanns Lilje of Hanover spoke to this problem in an article that appeared in his publication Sonntagsblatt in 1966 under the title, “Avoiding Coercion and Pressure.” As I see it, his comments at best simply repeat what church officialism is saying. It is contrary to the nature of Protestantism, says Lilje, to set up a teaching authority like that of the Catholic Church. In place of such a powerful tribunal that issues final pronouncements, there should be, indeed, brotherly dialogue between representatives of the “modern” theology and defenders of the erstwhile accepted biblical truths. Accusations should stop; there should be a mutual listening and a joint finding of some way to expedite the message of Christ in a changed world.

But Lilje—and here he differs from many other ecclesiastical leaders—has also drawn attention to the limits of such dialogue; they occur, he says, where the kerygma (the basic content of the Gospel) of the New Testament “levels off” into what is merely human and where theology is changed into anthropology. Above all, dissolution of the biblical concept of God means the end of theology as theo-logos (“a word about God”).

No doubt this is true. But now one must ask what should be done about those who have actually overstepped the limits Lilje set. To this the bishop gives no satisfactory answer. Must not the teaching authority of the Church step in here? The justifiable question arises, moreover: What happens if the “brotherly” conversations lead to no end result? This danger is very real, for the “modern” theologians consider only themselves to be Christians “come of age” and consider their task to be leading the immature church members to that awareness which alone, they say, is tenable today. On the other hand, the credally loyal cannot surrender the truths of the faith that they consider valid, and cannot compromise. The path Lilje recommends offers no real and no final solution.

Dogmas Of The Existentialists

As we go on to survey the characteristic tenets of “modern” theology, let us begin with a few general observations.

1. Existential theology rejects the supernatural declarations of the Bible; they belong to a world view that moderns no longer hold.

2. It removes all the so-called mythological concepts from biblical content as no longer binding upon us.

3. It rejects the divine acts of redemption as the foundation of salvation and instead considers the Word proclaimed today to be the determinative redemptive event for us. Thus God’s revelational activity in history loses its meaning.

4. Preaching’s first task according to this theology, is to bring man to a proper understanding of himself In the experience of faith man gains access to a new, “a-worldly,” and hence “eschatological” existence.

5. The exposition of Holy Scripture that is basic to proclamation—so it is said—comes through existential interpretation; this is the hermeneutic principle that unlocks the true meaning of the biblical text. But since the decisive declarations of the Bible refer to the human—especially the Christian—being, exegesis has the task of interpreting the Bible in this context. “Mythological” concepts and ideas are to be interpreted anew in terms of this basic acknowledgment.

6. The insights gained from exegesis furnish the content of preaching and of religious instruction. According to “modern” theology, this has the advantage of no longer requiring people of our day to accept dogmatic statements that stem from an understanding of the world and of existence long superseded and no longer valid.

There can be no doubt that existential interpretation leads not only to the reduction but also to the corruption of the Gospel. It transfers the center of gravity in theology to anthropology. As a result, existentialism not only does not do justice to the doctrine of God and to Christology but also does not do justice to soteriology and eschatology. If existentialism is carried to its final conclusion, then Christian faith becomes a religion of total immanence.

Where The New Theology Leads

What is the consequence of all this for understanding the basic truths of the Gospel?

1. Who is God?

To this question “modern” theology has given several answers, which, since faith in a supernatural personal God can no longer be maintained, are essentially concerned with demythologizing the New and Old Testament affirmations that have been binding until now. It is possible, we are told, to speak only of the “absolute,” the “highest principle,” the “being,” or the “depth of being.” God can also be regarded as merely the ultimate reference point of our existence, a point that cannot be more closely determined.

A radical “no” toward transcendence is said when we say that God can be found only in “human relations,” in person-to-person encounters. In doing this, theology falls into a fatal dependence upon abstract philosophical concepts and ideas that are incapable of comprehending the being and revelation of God as declared in the Bible. And it also comes suspiciously close to being atheism. The magnitude of this danger was evident in a lecture at the Cologne Kirchentag that spoke of a “Theology after the Death of God.” Still more alarming is the fact that in America a group of theologians are propagating a “Christian atheism,” a “God-less Christianity,” under the slogan “God is dead.” Here the biblical doctrine of salvation is reduced to practically nothing, for the depersonalization of God means that man no longer stands over against a living Thou to whom he can be personally related and to whom he can pray. No longer does he experience a heart- and conscience-moving confrontation of the external and holy God, who directs and pardons him and, as he believes, grants him new life by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Although Helmuth Frey has taken no position on “Christian atheism,” in his very noteworthy treatise published last year, Die Frage nach dem Zeugnis von Jesus Christus heute (The Question of the Witness to JesusChrist Today) he has passed the following verdict upon Tillich’s and Robinson’s teaching about God: here “God moves out of transcendence, out of metaphysical realm, out of objectivity, out of conceptualization, out of a distinctiveness from humanity—into a functional reference, into mere relation. He accommodates himself to the bounds, the frame of immanence. God is present only in encounter, in faith and in human fellowship; in short, he is present only in the divine-human and human-human relationship.”

God “happens.” That is all that “modern” theology knows to say about him. The Bible teaches us, however, that God is from everlasting to everlasting, that he dwells in inapproachable light, that he has made himself known in his Word and in his Son Jesus Christ has revealed himself for the salvation of the world. Where this is no longer believed and confessed, it is only one step further to declare that God is dead.

2. Who is Jesus Christ?

The problem of Christ also stands in the forefront of contemporary discussion, and here too current thinking is highly divided.

AND TO THE CHURCH AT LAODICEA, WRITE …

In Parson A’s stone-steepled church

There’s status, very quo.

The wealthy ones are out in force;

It’s where the best folks go.

At Parson B’s progressive church

All the headlines are dissected;

Though they look at Bibles rarely now

With their own times they’re connected.

At Parson C’s they quote the Book

By verses and by chapters,

But seldom know it means their town;

They do not like adapters.

At Parson D’s they sing off-key,

Sing jarring, thumping songs;

The preacher drones, the organ whines—

Though no half-heart belongs.

To every parson’s proudest church

Or humblest little hall

Stern watching angels speak grave words.

Who hears? Who hears at all?

ELVA McALLASTER

Even more than previous New Testament criticism, the methodology of Formgeschichte has intensified the cleavage between the historical Jesus and the Christ of kerygma (apostolic preaching). It begins by acknowledging that the Synoptic records contain testimonies of the faith of the Church. At first this seems to be a very illuminating thought. But it leads to the assumption that in the Gospel we are dealing not only with the eye and ear-witness reports of Jesus’ acts but also, and primarily, with the theology of the Church that took form after Easter. This means, however, that the Gospels give us no unequivocal picture of the life of the Jesus of history. It becomes the task of research, then, to liberate the figure (Gestalt) of Jesus from the later embellishments of the Church.

The question involved, therefore, is: Who really was Jesus of Nazareth and what was his mission? Bultmann, in his book about Jesus, tried to work out an ancient tradition that presents Jesus as a teacher and rabbi who proclaims the Kingdom of God and summons man to total commitment to God. Jesus, however, did not consider himself to be the Messiah. This idea of Bultmann’s was repeated in W. Marxsen’s recently published book, Die Anfänge der Christologie (The Beginnings of Christology). In his later pronouncements Bultmann went so far as to say that the life and ministry of Jesus have no bearing upon faith; only the fact that he came into the world is of actual significance for us. For, as Bultmann argues, “the character of Jesus, the tangible representation of his personality and life, can no longer be known by us.”

Bultmann’s followers did not go quite that far. Yet Ernst Käsemann, who has concerned himself considerably with the question of the historical Jesus, believes it necessary to assert that only a few statements in the Sermon on the Mount, a few statements in his unmasking of Pharisaism, a number of parables, and various scattered gems actually go back to the historical Jesus. Jesus’ teaching, however, as far as we can reconstruct it, manifests the unique sovereignty and majesty of his person and of his appearing.

In his book Jesus of Nazareth Günther Bornkamm expressed himself even more strongly. He acknowledges that through the Synoptic record we see the historical Jesus in all his unmistakable majesty; the purpose of the Gospels, moreover, is not only to proclaim but also to report.

Very revealing also is the major article, “Jesus Christ,” written by Bultmannite Hans Conzelmann, that appears in the latest edition of Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Conzelmann deals thoroughly with the preaching of Jesus but comes to the conclusion that Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah, and that he never designated himself either as the Son of God or as the Son of Man. His self-awareness, says Conzelmann, is not apparent in the “christological titularity; this was first appended to him by the teaching of the Church. We are to see him only as a great teacher and miracle-worker who was filled with strong eschatological convictions and saw himself as the “last herald” before the dawning of God’s Kingdom. Faith in him as the Messiah and as the Son of God was first engendered, assertedly, under the impact of his resurrection appearances.

That this view is untenable is clear; we need not argue the fact. But it is shocking that so-called scholarship should present a picture of Jesus that in no way corresponds to the truth. Surely it is completely unthinkable that the early Church in Palestine and also that in Greece had so many ingenious theologians that by interpretation, reflection, and deliberate formulation, they, as Marxsen insists, created out of the humble Jesus of Nazareth the mighty Christ-figure to whom the present Gospels attest.

“Modern” theology ignores a further crucial factor, namely, the operation of the Holy Spirit in formulating the tradition of the Jesus of history. The New Testment repeatedly emphasizes that the authors of the individual books were inspired by the Holy Ghost in the recording of their work; and no less an authority than John specifically points out that it was the Paraclete, the Holy Ghost, who recalled to those who were eye- and ear-witnesses of the life of Jesus everything that Jesus taught and did; he revealed all the truth to them and “made it clear.” This does not mean, as Bultmann and his students would say, that a new picture of Jesus was created in the period after Easter; it means, rather, that the person of Jesus was understood in its deepest sense. Full comprehension of Jesus is impossible without the operation of the Holy Ghost. The words and deeds of Jesus were proclaimed, therefore, as acts of divine revelation and salvation.

One final thing must be said in this connection. Essential to a complete understanding of Jesus Christ is the metaphysical setting of his existence. He is the eternal Logos who became flesh, and who after the completion of his earthly redemptive work returned to God, at whose right hand he now reigns in that very glory which was his as the only begotten Son of God from before the beginning of time. This is the witness of John’s Gospel, and also of the hymn to Christ in Philippians 2; they do not convey some gnostic myth of a redeemer but rather bring to expression the true and comprehensive significance of Christ and of the Christ-event. According to Colossians 1:14–20, Christ is the firstborn of all creation, the firstborn from the dead, the Saviour of the world, the Lord in whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead and whose redeeming power encompasses the cosmos.

One has a wrong picture of Jesus, then, if he sees him only as an unusual man who in his lifetime fulfilled a special assignment given by God but whose death was the end of his existence. The statement by extremists of “modern” theology that the historical Jesus is not identical with the Christ of the kerygma has no basis in the New Testament witness to Christ. Above all, we dare not allow Christology to be existentially interpreted and thus dissolved.

3. What significance has the Cross of Christ?

The critical premise that in the Gospels we are dealing with the pre-Christian kerygma that includes relatively few genuine words of Jesus and reliable reports of his deeds (Käsemann) has definite consequences also for the events that led to Jesus’ death, and even for the significance of his death. According to many exegetes, the prophecies of Christ’s passion were not spoken by Jesus but were ascribed to him later. And the words instituting the Lord’s Supper are to be thought of not as coming from Jesus but as a legend that prospered in the cult, that is, as a later addition by the Church (Conzelmann).

If we carefully examine the sources dealing with the last chapter of Jesus’ life, we know very little that is absolutely certain in the true historical sense (G. Bornkamm). The gospel reports of Jesus’ trial before the high priest show so little uniformity that a clear picture of the proceedings is impossible. All that is historically certain, perhaps, is that the Sanhedrin let Jesus be arrested, gave him a brief hearing, then turned him over to the Roman officer so that he could condemn Jesus as a political agitator (Lohse). From one Gospel to another, the scene before Pilate, through the addition of more and more legendary features, becomes a full-fledged drama. Jesus’ death, we are told, is the tragic fate of a great man who became a martyr for the truth he took upon himself to espouse. Bultmann explains further that Jesus suffered the death of a political criminal on the cross “because his ministry was misunderstood as something political.”

Where are we led by this modern reconstruction? (1) We do not know how Jesus understood his death. (2) The gospel narratives give us no clear picture of the death and suffering of Jesus. The historical kernel is encrusted with legends. (3) According to Martin Dibelius, the early Christians in their presentation of Jesus’ agony may also have dipped into the passion chapters of the Old Testament. (4) One must even face the possibility that Jesus “collapsed” (Bultmann).

The conclusion to which radical critical investigation has come is frightening. What is there to proclaim, if Jesus’ death has no redemptive significance? To say that Jesus suffered martyrdom as a witness of the faith helps us about as much as saying that Jesus’ death can be compared to the death of Socrates (Bultmann, Conzelmann). Nor does the insistence of existential theology—that the Cross of Christ becomes salvation to us first in the proclaimed Word—have any meaning if it has no foundation in salvation history. If God was not working for the salvation of the world in Jesus’ death, then the preaching of the Cross is robbed of its distinctive content. The fact of redemption is, therefore, prerequisite to proclamation. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. He gave his son as ransom for the sins of mankind. This, as Künneth stresses, is the great reality of redemption. And this fact is the heart of the salvation message in which the universally valid truth is proclaimed: “The blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanses us from all sin.” Only where this is grasped by faith and confessed is the message of the Cross the power of God.

An analysis of new trends in Eucharistic theology within the Church of Rome

A few years ago the suggestion that Roman Catholic and Protestant clergy might one day have intercommunion would have been thought preposterous by both sides. Today it is not. During the last few years, some developments in the Roman Catholic Church, particularly studies on the Lord’s Supper and on relations with Protestants, have brought about changes in theory and practice that lead one to ask: What next?

As recently as four years ago Roman Catholics were forbidden by canon law to worship with non-Catholics: “By no means is it permitted for the faithful to assist actively in any way whatsoever or to participate in non-Catholic worship” (Codex Juris Canonici, 1258). But the Second Vatican Council gave guarded encouragement to certain forms of common worship:

In certain circumstances, such as in prayer services “for unity” and during ecumenical gatherings, it is allowable, indeed desirable, that Catholics should join with their separated brethren. Such prayers in common are certainly a very effective means of petitioning for the grace of unity, and they are a genuine expression of the ties which even now bind Catholics to their separated brethren. “For where two or three are gathered together for My sake, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt. 18:20). As for common worship, however, it may not be regarded as a means to be used indiscriminately for the restoration of unity among Christians. Such worship depends chiefly on two principles: it should signify the unity of the Church; it should provide a sharing of the means of grace. The fact that it should signify unity generally rules out common worship. Yet the gaining of a needed grace sometimes commends it. [“Decree on Ecumenism,” The Documents of Vatican II, 8].

Four days before the close of the council, the Pope set an example of interfaith worship when he took part in a prayer service with Protestants and Greek Orthodox at one of Rome’s great churches. Joint worship of Roman Catholics and other Christians is no longer news.

But what about intercommunion? To sing, pray, and hear the Word together is one thing; to share the Eucharist is another.

Is it? Some theologians wonder. With the “new look” in the theology of the Mass and the conviction of some theologians on both sides of the ecclesiastical fence that the other’s doctrine might not be so bad after all, the possibility of intercommunion no longer seems remote.

On the Roman Catholic side, there has been in recent years a spate of writings on the Eucharist that sound more like Reformation theology than what most of us have associated with Rome. The old terms are still used, but often the meaning is changed; and there are new terms, too. Paul VI’s encyclical Mysterium Fidei (September 3, 1965), meant particularly as a warning to Dutch theologians, seems not to have slowed them down but rather to have been received as part of the ongoing discussion. The term transubstantiation is used, but transfinalization and transignification—i.e., the idea that the bread and wine have a new finality, a new significance or meaning—continue to be used also. More important, Christ’s presence in the Supper is understood in personal, spiritual categories. The bread remains bread. “The physical reality does not change, otherwise there would no longer be any eucharistic sign,” says Edward Schillebeeckx, one of Rome’s top theologians (“Transubstantiation,” Worship, Vol. 40, p. 337). Kilian McDonnell, a Benedictine whose magnum opus on John Calvin, the Church, and the Eucharist has just been published by Princeton University Press, writes similarly: “Only on condition that the materiality of bread remains can there be a eucharistic reality” (p. 315).

They, and other Roman Catholic theologians, not only interpret the Eucharist in terms more acceptable to Protestant understanding but show positive appreciation for the Protestant celebration of the Holy Supper as well. In doing so they agree with Vatican II, which, though it lamented that separated Christian brethren “have not preserved the genuine and total reality of the eucharistic mystery,” nevertheless conceded that “when they commemorate the Lord’s death and resurrection in the Holy Supper, they profess that it signifies life in communion with Christ and they await His coming in glory” (“Decree on Ecumenism,” 22).

Since the Dutch theologians have been in the center of the Eucharistic debate with Roman Catholicism, it is instructive to hear what they say. Passing over the Jesuit Piet Schoonenberg, whose untranslated Dutch Eucharistic writings caused a considerable stir, we mention the Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx and the Jesuit Frans Jozef van Beeck. Schillebeeckx’s Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God laments the focusing of attention after the Council of Trent (1545–63) on the substance of the elements and on the recipient of the sacrament and his dispositions, while the encounter of the Christian with God in Christ received inadequate attention. Schillebeeckx is a personalist, and he interprets the Gospel and the Eucharist accordingly. Wasting no time, he begins his book by saying:

One cannot help remarking that the theology of the manuals does not always make a careful distinction between that unique manner of existence which is peculiar to man, and the mode of being, mere objective “being there,” which is proper to the things of nature. The absence of this distinction, particularly in the treating of grace or of the sacraments, occasionally obscures the simple fact of encounter with God. The intimateness of God’s personal approach to man is often lost in a too severely objective examination of that which forms the living core and centre of religion, the personal communion with the God who gives himself to men [from Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God by Eduard Schillebeeckx, O.P., © Sheed and Ward Ltd., 1963, published by Sheed & Ward, Inc., New York; this and the following quotations used by permission].

In the study of the sacraments, the consequence of this tendency towards a purely impersonal, almost mechanical approach was that they were considered chiefly in terms of physical categories. The inclination was to look upon the sacraments as but one more application, although in a special manner, of the general laws of cause and effect. Inevitably, the result of this view was that we appeared to be merely passive recipients of sacramental grace, which seemed to be “put into us” automatically. We do not, however, want to divert ourselves with the defects of the theological works of the last two centuries, but positively and constructively to take up the study of the Church’s sacraments, with the concept of human, personal encounter as the basis of our consideration.

Religion is above all a saving dialogue between man and the living God.

The most interesting part of the book is his struggle with the problem of Protestant sacraments’ seeming to be charismatic, life-giving ordinances, and yet being invalid. Reformed communion is not a true sacrament; yet it has a “positive and Christian significance.” The author feels he must examine this “delicate question closely” in the light of Thomistic principles. Thomas did not deal with this question, since he knew nothing of the Reformation, but he shows that whoever is validly baptized “possesses an inner orientation to the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist.” Schillebeeckx goes on:

Are Protestants willing, for the sake of ecumenicity and fraternity, to commune after the manner of the Mass?

Furthermore, valid baptism is implicitly a “Eucharist of desire.” Therefore in virtue of their baptism Christians of the Reformation have an inner orientation to the Catholic Eucharist. For the baptism is truly a Catholic sacrament which in consequence incorporates them not into the separated community but into the Catholic Church [p. 192],

Thomas claims that no single grace comes to us except through a desire, at least implicit, for the Eucharist. With this desire, the essential effect of the sacrament is received. Yet it is not necessary that we receive this effect through the real sacramental reception of the Eucharist. A “Eucharist of desire” is enough, and this is necessary for salvation. Evangelical Christians have this, and so in their communion services they really participate in the res sacramenti, or in the effect of the sacrament, though not to the full. The fathers ate manna in the desert and communicated in a spiritual manner, but this eating of the fathers was more than mere spiritual communion. Likewise Protestant communion is more than that. “It is the spiritual reception of the sacrament itself” (p. 193). As Thomas says, “This is not only to eat Christ spiritually but also to partake spiritually of the [true Catholic] sacrament” (ibid.). Schillebeeckx says such a statement has many and far-reaching consequences, for it is impossible to deny that the Protestant rite is truly a figure of the Eucharist, more so than the manna or the Jewish Passover.

It is not merely a foreshadowing, it is a direct commemoration of the Last Supper, even if not in the full ecclesial sense of the word. Some of the fundamental aspects of the Catholic Eucharist are lacking in the Protestant Communion Service, but others are retained in it. And this is sufficient to enable us to apply with even greater right the ancient patristic and scholastic view of non-Catholic sacraments as vestigia Ecclesiae, traces of the true Church of Christ, to the Protestant sacraments [p. 194].

Schillebeeckx takes his position with reservation, aware that the teaching authority of the church may decide otherwise, but he argues that the Protestant Communion is a “quasi-sacramental manifestation of an explicit eucharistic desire which, moreover, implicitly looks forward to the true fruits of the Catholic Eucharist.” Thus in our Supper there is an “intrinsic tendency towards integration into the Catholic Eucharist” (p. 194).

Van Beeck, writing similarly in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies (Winter, 1966), tells of the common current Roman Catholic theological conviction that the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the Presbyterian church two blocks away is not “nothing.” But if it is not nothing, what is it? Rejecting the categories of valid and invalid as inadequate, he tells of a student who asked Karl Rahner whether a priest would be validly ordained even if in the chain of episcopal consecrations leading up to his ordination there had been an invalid consecration. Rahner’s response was, “One should not think of these things in the manner of an apothecary.” What about the priest, reasons Van Beeck, who learns that he was invalidly ordained after a lifetime of fruitful ministry? Or what about the happy parents who, on the eve of their fiftieth wedding anniversary, discover they were invalidly married? Van Beeck’s response is this: The Roman Catholic Church has a “healthy awareness of the relativity of the notions of validity and invalidity in matters sacramental. Validity is no more (and no less) than the juridical claim to ecclesiastical recognition; it is the finishing touch every normal sacramental celebration needs as its marginal rounding-off” (p. 63). Juridical thinking of the sacraments gets rough treatment from this author, who would have them looked at existentially.

What, then, are the Protestant sacraments? Some Roman Catholic theologians, says Van Beeck, affirm that Protestant sacraments do not celebrate salvation really but only spiritually. Van Beeck rejects this distinction because it assumes that spiritual, as used here, is tantamount to unreal. He shows that this distinction can be traced to scholastic theology, which used physice ambivalently as “real” or “material.” So the spiritual, then, is relegated to the realm of the unreal, or imagination, or metaphor. This led to a material conception of the sacrament at the expense of its value as a sign. Once the choice was put this way, the Reformers opted for “spiritual.” Van Beeck says that if the Protestant sacraments celebrate salvation spiritually, they must be real sacraments (p. 66).

He then draws the consequences of the fact that Vatican II, at its third session, called Protestant communions “churches” and envisioned the whole church as the people of God on its pilgrim way into the future. Since Vatican II, Van Beeck argues, the unity of the church is no longer seen as a “juridically outlined, fixed unity of order; it has also, and pre-eminently, come to be viewed as Christ’s eschatological gift to his perfect community” (p. 70). Protestants, too, are part of this:

The ecumenical mentality provides not just a new political situation among the Churches, but a theological one: it means a conversion to an eschatological view of the Church, putting an end to the exclusive, paradoxical, antithetical situation in which the Churches antagonize each other. The Churches are in good faith, for the differences among the Churches no longer bear the stigma of formal invalidity and heresy [p. 72, n. 87].

Coming to grips with the problem of the “validity” of Protestant sacraments, Van Beeck argues that valid celebration necessitates (1) a church base from which it is administered, (2) proper intentions, and (3) a competent minister. All agree that the first two are met in Protestantism; but what about number three? A history of sacramental practice, writes Van Beeck, shows that the validity of a sacrament has never been one-sidedly linked up with a validly ordained minister. There was always the possibility of the minister extraordinarily. He can administer baptism, confirmation, and even marriage (p. 80), according to canon law. But all the sacraments have been so administered at times, says Van Beeck. The reason for this and for its recognition by the church as valid has been the need, or situation, in the church, and not law (p. 88). The real theological base is the universal priesthood of all believers, which under normal circumstances operates through the recognized ministers but which in emergencies has operated through those deputized by the faithful. Protestants have done this when they have lived in a protracted extraordinary situation. Consequently, he concludes, Protestant sacraments and ministers may be recognized as such by Roman Catholic theology and church order. Dogma and order are essentially provisional. They may never be allowed to tie salvation down to themselves in a univocal way (p. 95). The church is in status viae, and dogma and order are meant only to help her on the way.

Van Beeck criticizes the traditional distinction between joint prayer and the reading of the Word on the one hand and the joint celebration of sacraments on the other:

Prayer and Bible services are all too often permitted “because nothing happens in them,” as if prayer and the Word were not sacramental. On the other hand there is a tendency to view joint celebrations of sacraments as acts of the most perfect communio, which, therefore, would have to be postponed till the day on which official mutual recognition would be achieved. But is not this to forget that the communio in via will never be perfect and that it is also in the nature of a sacrament to be a pledge of salvation? It seems not wholly sound to consider the sacraments so eschatological as to practically deny that they are part of the status viae of the Church [p. 108].

The Protestant response to much of this is: Well and good, but what about the sacrifice of the Mass? Van Beeck suggests that the Roman Catholic “Eucharist as sacrificium Christi” and the Protestant Supper “as sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving carry essentially the same meaning, although viewed from very different doctrinal angles” (p. 109). He does not stand alone; some other Roman Catholic, and Protestant, theologians share his view.

Still there remain a number of unresolved problems. Just what is the nature of the Eucharist? In what manner do Christians feed on Christ? With Rome’s conviction about the infallibility and irreversibility of dogma, allowing for the qualifications made—historical conditionedness of all dogmatic statements, the necessary one-sidedness of all polemical statements, the imperfection of all dogma, and so on—are Protestants finally willing, for the sake of ecumenicity and fraternity, to overlook what their fathers believed to be “a cursed idolatry” (Heidelberg Catechism, Q.80) and commune after the manner of the Mass? Are Roman Catholics likely to forget the anathemas they have heard poured out against Protestant perversion of the “Blessed Sacrament,” and will their leaders allow their people to eat bread and drink grape juice in a typical Protestant setting?

These are only some of the questions that will be asked increasingly with the growth of the spirit of ecumenicity. They will have to be faced in honesty as well as love if there is to be real progress.

Reflections on church, state, and culture in America

Some decades ago American Protestantism quietly retired from its post as acting chairman of our cultural heritage and assumed a nominal emeritus position. The circumstances of this remarkable event, as well as its exact time, remain obscured in mystery. Some have attributed it to ill health, others to mental disease. Yet by all appearances, the Church at the time of its retirement was at the height of its powers. According to its own reports and the best available statistics, it had just completed a “Great Century” and was well prepared to face the era that lay ahead. Yet when confronted with the challenges of rapidly changing social, moral, intellectual, and scientific standards, American Protestantism courteously stepped down with hardly a protest or an apology.

Today Protestants in America live with the consequences of our emeritus status. The churches we support, and even those we rebuke, are notoriously ineffective. They are, by and large, neither loved nor hated; they are merely patronized and ignored. Confronted with little but the evidence of our weakness, we may well ask, Why?

Although all must concede that a large part of the answer is found in the nearly irresistible secularizing forces in modern culture, few will exempt the Church itself from responsibility. Who or what, then, in the twentieth-century Church should be blamed?

A generation ago the answer seemed simple enough. Theological liberals and fundamentalists characteristically blamed each other. Today, however, we seem to have entered an era of reappraisal. Many of the heirs to each of these traditions now concede some weaknesses within their heritage. The vogue of terms like “neo-orthodoxy,” “neo-liberalism,” “neo-fundamentalism,” and “neo-evangelicalism” presumably indicates a desire to be dissociated from the programs of a generation ago.

Yet we err if we place the blame for the weaknesses of the Church in twentieth-century America primarily on the excesses of liberalism and fundamentalism. These after all developed only after the battle against modern secularism had been all but lost. The ineffectiveness of the Church today is not the result of those emergency measures devised in the midst of crisis. Its cause should instead be sought in the era of Protestant success. Only when we frankly confess to the weaknesses characteristic of American Protestantism even in its most prosperous years are we prepared to devise a renewal program that will be more than an attempt to revive the traditions of a lost cause.

Our self-analysis could focus on any one of several aspects of our heritage. This essay will attempt, not to analyze the complex relationships that have shaped American Protestantism, but only to sketch outlines thematically related to one of the contributing factors—the response to legal disestablishment.

The Protestant Ideal

The Protestants who settled America were not champions of religious freedom. Indeed, except among a few radicals—Roger Williams and William Penn, for example—the dominant attitude of the seventeenth-century settlers was honest bigotry. Nathaniel Ward, the first (and perhaps the last) wit among New England’s Puritan clergymen, epitomized orthodox sentiments when in 1645 he wrote, “He that is willing to tolerate any unsound Opinion, that his owne may also be tolerated, … will for a need hang God’s Bible at the Devill’s girdle.” Anglican Virginia was hardly more “enlightened.” There the standing law of 1612 threatened the death penalty for speaking impiously against the doctrine of the Trinity or the known articles of the Christian faith. Such opinions and laws hardly seemed harsh to transplanted Europeans whose tradition of legal establishment was thirteen centuries old and who lived in an age when nations were commonly torn apart in the quest for religious uniformity. Their deepest religious convictions demanded that church and state be allied in ensuring that their society be unequivocally Christian.

Yet the state-church ideal could not long be maintained in America. The land was too large and the population too scattered for effective controls. More importantly, diversity of beliefs among immigrant groups forced recognition of tolerance as the only feasible path. Reluctantly, then, by the early eighteenth century American Protestants had had to give up their hopes for a state-enforced religious uniformity. In most of the colonies, however, they maintained a modified form of establishment, giving tax support and official sanction to the preferred religion, though granting grudging toleration to dissenters.

This is the background against which separation of church and state in the American Constitution should be seen. When the framers of the First Amendment declared that the new federal government “shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion,” they were recognizing an accomplished fact—that America’s religious diversity made federal control impractical. Protestants acquiesced, but not always out of conviction. Separation of church from state support was something that happened to them, not something they had planned. As Perry Miller has said, “they stumbled into it, they were compelled into it, they accepted it at last because they saw its strategic value” (quoted in Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment [Harper, 1963]; Mead’s book and Winthrop S. Hudson’s American Protestantism [Chicago, 1961] provide documentation and elaboration for many of the arguments of this essay).

Although they accepted official separation of church and state because they had to, few American Protestants gave up the essential aspect of their traditional ideal—that theirs would be a Christian nation. Yet it was now an era of spiritual crisis. The Revolution appeared to have unleashed the forces of Enlightenment skepticism and to have fostered widespread infidelity. With the weapon of state sanction gone, the churches were forced to turn to new strategy. They would Christianize America yet—if not by state coercion, then by evangelical persuasion. (Perry Miller elaborates upon this thesis in “From the Covenant to the Revival,” in Smith and Jamison (eds.), The Shaping of American Religion [Princeton, 1961].) The spearhead of their strategy was the simple gospel preaching and intensive evangelism of the revival. These techniques, having proved effective during the Great Awakenings of the colonial era, seemed ideal weapons with which to face the post-Revolutionary crises of infidelity and disestablishment.

Indeed they were. The American Protestant churches never showed greater sustained vitality than in the first half of the nineteenth century. With all hope of winning America to official state Protestantism now gone, they turned with renewed vigor to their mission of winning men to Christ. As Lyman Beecher, the indomitable general of many of the campaigns of this “Second Great Awakening,” observed when looking back on Connecticut’s disestablishment of 1818, it turned out to be “the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut. It cut the churches loose from dependence on state support. It threw them wholly on their own resources and on God.”

Yet the strategy of the “Second Great Awakening” involved far more than the widespread evangelistic and missionary programs. It was a comprehensive interdenominational campaign to Christianize American society, not only spiritually, but intellectually and morally as well. In the intellectual sphere the churches stood in a strong position, virtually controlling America’s higher education. At mid-century nearly every college in the country still had an evangelical Protestant (usually a clergyman) as its president. As the nation had moved west, Protestant missionary zeal had inspired the founding of numerous new colleges in the frontier communities. Moreover, the Protestant theologians of this era had few intellectual peers, and a vigorous religious press was a formidable part of the nation’s communication system.

Moral reform of the society was to complete the strategy. Militant evangelicals founded scores of “voluntary societies” to aid the denominations in combatting a host of national sins, most notably slavery, intemperance, and Sabbath desecration. When possible, they enlisted governmental support for these campaigns. Having inherited an ideal from the era of national establishment, evangelicals were convinced that the churches should act as moral guardians for the entire society. Not only should Christian ethical standards be maintained among the regenerate; they should be enforced among the unregenerate as well. National social reform, dealing largely with the externals of behavior, thus appeared as an integral part of the evangelical message.

Despite remarkable revivals and respectable intellectual achievements, the most spectacular success of nineteenth-century American Protestants came in this area of national social reform—in the Northern triumph over slavery. Whatever its political causes, the Civil War was to the Protestant churches a Christian crusade. Northern denominations readily adopted resolutions explicitly identifying the cause of the Union with the cause of Christ. The war was God’s judgment on covenant-breakers and sinners, they affirmed. Victory would hasten the millennial return of Christ. His truth was marching on. It was marching, it seemed, under Mead, Sherman, and U. S. Grant. The ideals of church, state, and Northern society were virtually identified.

Identification of Protestantism with Americanism in the Civil War symbolizes both the remarkable success and the great weaknesses of the American churches in the nineteenth century. Their strength was evident in their influence on the culture. By the second half of the century, their effectiveness in shaping the ideals (if not the realities) of the society was perhaps greater than any that official state support could have provided. They set the moral standards for a nation that was notoriously moralistic. At the end of the century, for instance, it hardly seemed incongruous for the President to propose that America should take the Philippines in order to “uplift and Christianize” the Filipinos. “In 1900,” observes Winthrop S. Hudson, “few would have disputed the contention that the United States was a Protestant nation.”

Yet success had its price. In their zeal for national reform, the Protestant denominations had assumed the role of an unofficial American establishment. The cost had been an obscuring of their central message—that men must be redeemed in Christ. Retaining the ideal that the Church should supervise the behavior of the entire society, they increasingly blurred the lines between their message to the regenerate and their message to the unregenerate. Denominational involvements in political affairs, for instance, were indicative of the ambiguity implicit in the churches’ aspirations to act as national moral guardians. By advocating specific legislative measures, the churches inevitably confused their redemptive message with the platforms of American political parties. What’s more, they automatically alienated all those in the population who disagreed with them politically. The Northern denominations’ unqualified endorsements of Republican programs during the Civil War and their general identification with Republicanism throughout the rest of the century were the clearest examples of this confusion. But the legacy of political involvements continued to affect American Protestantism in later eras. The social gospel’s identifications with Progressivism, Prohibitionism, and New Deal Democracy, for example, reflected much the same establishmentarian ideal.

Participation in political programs was, however, symptomatic of a far deeper malady within the successful Protestant establishment of the late nineteenth century. The churches were identifying themselves with the culture. As with all alliances between church and society, the influences worked both ways. While the denominations were successfully acting as moral guardians of the American cultural heritage, they were adopting, no doubt inadvertently, many of the values of American society—particularly the popular moralism of the middle classes. Rather than continuing to challenge the culture with the radical implications of the biblical message, they allowed many of their standards and objectives to appear virtually indistinguishable from those of the “best people” of the secular society. As Sidney E. Mead has observed, “During the second half of the nineteenth century there occurred an ideological amalgamation of this Protestantism with ‘Americanism,’ and … we are still living with some of the results.”

Success had also bred complacency. The methods of the successful programs designed to revive the new nation early in the nineteenth century were continued almost intact, even though industrialization and urbanization were radically changing American life. Successful revivals were still held, but increasingly large segments of the population were left unaffected. Intellectually, “common sense” philosophy designed to meet the challenges of the Enlightenment continued to be the chief bulwark of orthodox apologetics. Only in the moral sphere did the Church appear strong; but its challenge was muffled by its respectability.

The weaknesses of the successful churches became apparent early in the twentieth century as American culture was shaken by the modern cultural, scientific, and intellectual revolutions. The shocks of Darwinism, widespread confidence in the scientific method, higher criticism of Scripture, dynamic philosophies, technological advance, and social reorganization all struck almost simultaneously. Within a generation, from 1900 to 1930, the Protestant cultural establishment collapsed.

The development of theological liberalism and fundamentalism in the face of this impending crisis was symptomatic of the weaknesses inherent in Protestantism’s reliance on the cultural establishment. When the values of the culture changed, the Church was caught in the midst of a seemingly irresolvable dilemma. It could sacrifice either its Biblical message or its cultural relevance. The result was a tendency for American Protestantism to polarize around the two extreme alternatives. Theological liberalism attempted to maintain the churches’ traditional cultural and intellectual relevance, but at the expense of the Gospel. Fundamentalism preserved the Gospel, but often at the expense of relevance.

Despite the basic incompatibility of fundamentalism and liberalism, it is in their similarities that we can best see the characteristic aspects of the American Protestant heritage. The most conspicuous similarity is in their moralism. Of the two, liberalism was by far the more moralistic, defining its gospel almost solely in ethical terms. Yet, as we are all aware, fundamentalism also has been notorious for its moral proscriptions. Often it has also been accused of lacking social concern. But even in this it was not wholly unlike its liberal social-gospel opponents. Few liberals have shown greater zeal for cultural reform than have fundamentalists such as William Jennings Bryan and Carl McIntire. The only difference is that fundamentalism’s social gospel has been defined largely in terms of the nineteenth century, while theological liberalism has moved steadily with the winds of popular twentieth-century political doctrine.

A second common characteristic of liberalism and fundamentalism that also seems typically American was their anti-theological tendencies. Again, liberalism was by far the more anti-theological, often explicitly repudiating all theological constructions. But fundamentalism too had its anti-intellectualist wing that tended to deprecate theological training. In neither movement was this characteristic universal, but in both it was prominent.

Despite a tradition of formidable theologies, American Protestants have always had a tendency to accentuate the practical, activist, and non-intellectual. If we are to believe foreign observers, these same traits have been characteristic of the culture at large; it is hardly surprising, then, that they have affected the churches. Protestantism’s most popular successes in shaping American life have been its practical campaigns for moral suasion. Accordingly, the tendency has been for theological concern, and eventually evangelism itself, to be submerged in fervor for national social reform. Doubtless this is not the sole cause of the weaknesses of the American church, but it does reveal some telling symptoms.

Still The Establishment?

American Protestantism today appears to be recovering from the religious debacle of the era between the world wars. The successors to the liberal tradition now speak increasingly of a gospel that will challenge the culture, repudiating the old social gospel’s confusion of the kingdom and the world. Yet the challenge remains obscured as these same voices call for renewed involvement in political power structures for the purpose of making the nation a better place to live. The American Protestant quest for social relevance (certainly a fine objective, if not the primary one) continues to dominate America’s most respected ecclesiastical councils. The idea still persists that Protestantism is the American establishment and therefore is not essentially in conflict with the best interests of the secular society. The vision of a Protestant America filled with community churches, open to the whole community regardless of creed, remains the prevailing ideal. Indeed there has been something like a theological revival, but certainly not yet a revival of theological relevance. Relevance is still defined in social and moralistic terms. And it is difficult to preach to a culture that it needs to be revolutionized by the Gospel when your practice indicates it can just as well be reformed.

But the conservative successors to the fundamentalist tradition are no less in danger of seeing their recovery revert to a form of Americanism. We too have inherited the ideals of the respectable cultural establishment of the era of Protestant success. We too have our tendencies toward moralism, identification with current political philosophies, and anti-intellectualism. Doubtless there is much in our typically American heritage that is worth preserving, and indeed we must preserve some if we are to communicate to America. But as we do, we must distinguish sharply between that which is characteristically American and that radical challenge which is characteristic of the Word of God.

The problem we as Protestants face today is the same one the Church has faced in every new era. It is the problem of communicating to our culture while not identifying with its values. Two ingredients are especially necessary for such communication today. The first is intellectual relevance. There is no easier or more understandable excuse for today’s American to avoid listening to the challenge of Christ than the prevailing opinion that a biblically grounded Christianity is an intellectual absurdity. To regain an audience we must overcompensate for this with a strenuous promotion of all aspects of evangelical scholarship.

The second and most essential ingredient is genuine Christian love. Love is the foundation of effective communication. It demands an active display of sacrificial concern for all men in all aspects of their existence—socially, morally, and intellectually, as well as religiously. Although American denominations cannot afford to perpetuate the establishmentarian’s confusion of redemptive and political objectives, individual Christians in a democratic society must employ all their political and civil rights, as well as their personal resources, to manifest their self-giving love for all members of their society. To communicate in Christian love, whether intellectually, morally, or religiously, we must be all things to all men. Again, our record is bad and we must overcompensate. By and large conservative American Protestants have been one thing to all men. We have tried to preach the same sermons in the same language to all classes of society the same in 1967 as in 1867. The pious moralisms that appeared so relevant to middle-class America in the Gilded Age are far too often heard to echo in the Great Society. Love would demand as much concern to show the application of the gospel message—both by proclamation and by action—to the changing needs of our audiences as to preserve its integrity. The Gospel is relevant to every aspect of American experience. But until we learn how to communicate it without compromise, we have not witnessed to the love of Christ. We are as sounding brass.

The Protestant Reformation is usually held to date from October 31, 1517, the Eve of All Saints, when Martin Luther, a professor at Wittenberg University in Saxony, Germany, posted on the door of the Castle Church what he called “95 Theses for Disputation … Concerning Penance and Indulgences, in the desire and with the purpose of elucidating the truth.” “If a particular day may be selected as the birthday of the Reformation” said the late Anglican Bishop Herbert H. Henson, “it is perhaps impossible to select any other for the purpose” (Christian Liberty, pp. 104, 105). Why should this strictly academic proceeding—for such it was—of Martin Luther have developed into such a mighty religious upheaval as the Reformation?

The answer lies partly in the explosiveness of the subject with which the theses dealt, partly in the way Luther’s challenge was handled by the church authorities, and partly in the general situation of the church in Luther’s Germany, and indeed throughout Western Europe.

Luther’s theses had to do with indulgences. An indulgence may be described as a draft on the bank of heaven to pay for human sin. The underlying theory was that Jesus and his saints had accumulated a “treasury of merits.” This treasury was at the disposal of the pope, who could draw on it for the benefit of those sinners who were in arrears. Just how much could thus be effected was debatable. The moderate and traditional opinion held that an indulgence could remit only that punishment for sin which the Church had imposed. In 1476, however, Pope Sixtus IV (1471–84) had declared that an indulgence could shorten, and even end, the stay of a departed soul in purgatory. There was also an extreme view that an indulgence could not only remit penalties but could even forgive sin as well. And something like this claim was made for that particular indulgence—it was called a “plenary” one—which provoked Luther’s protest in 1517.

Indulgence seekers had to pay for these benefits, of course, and in earthly coinage at that. In view of what indulgences professed to offer, it is not surprising that they were highly lucrative: indeed, Roland H. Bainton has aptly described them as “the bingo of the sixteenth century.”

The Indulgence of 1517 was first issued by Pope Julius II (1503–13) to finance the rebuilding of St. Peter’s in Rome; and this was continued by the next pope, Leo X (1513–22). A German cleric, Albert of Brandenburg, already bishop of Halberstadt and Magdeburg, in 1514 was elected archbishop of Mainz and primate of Germany. This highly questionable arrangement—which even the Roman Catholic historian of the popes, Ludwig Pastor, considered “a disgraceful affair for all concerned”—had to be confirmed by the pope. This the pontiff agreed to do for a payment of some twenty-four thousand ducats. Albert borrowed the money from the well-known German banking house of Fugger; and to enable him to repay his creditors, the pope allowed him to proclaim the indulgence in the areas of his ecclesiastical jurisdiction and in the territories of his half-brother, the Elector Joachim of Brandenburg, as well.

Half of the proceeds were to go to the pope for his building project in Rome and the other half to Albert and his bankers. The indulgence-hawker for these areas in Germany was a Dominican friar named John Tetzel, who in pushing his sales asserted that “as soon as the money rattles in the box, the soul leaps out of purgatory.”

Tetzel was not allowed to hawk his wares in Saxony, where Luther lived. But he set up his mart just over the border, and a number of Saxons journeyed there to purchase indulgences. This situation provoked Luther to make his protest. His theses denied the ecclesiastical doctrine of the treasury of merits on which the efficacy of indulgences depended; but they asserted that if the pope really had the power to empty purgatory of sinners, he should do so promptly and for nothing! Luther also contended that indulgences were spiritually harmful, since they taught sinners to fear the punishment of their sin and not the sin itself as an offense against God.

Luther’s theses were presented in Latin, the language of academic discourse; but they were quickly translated into German and widely circulated, causing a serious falling off in indulgence sales. Luther had at first no thought of separating himself from the Roman church. But various interviews that he had in 1518 and 1519 with representatives of the pope convinced him that the abuses against which he was protesting were not a mere excrescence of the surface of the body ecclesiastic but a cancer that was eating at its very vitals. He concluded that the papal church had departed from the New Testament doctrine of justification by grace through faith, which he believed to be the basic tenet of the Christian Gospel. And since the Church would not correct its teaching and practice on this matter, no reconciliation between it and Luther was possible. When in 1520 he was formally excommunicated by the pope, he publicly burned the papal bull of excommunication. He had passed the point of no return in his controversy with Rome.

By 1520 Luther had become the focus of widespread discontent and had acquired a following large enough to produce what has become known as “the German drama.” Patriotic Germans resented being governed by an Italian pope and sending so much hard-earned German money to Rome. They wanted a German national church governed by German bishops and independent of the papacy. Scholarly humanists applauded Luther because he appealed to the Scriptures and to Christian antiquity and not to the medieval schoolman. And many devout Christians in Germany and throughout Europe resented the all too prevalent vices of the clergy—such as cupidity and sometimes sexual irregularity—and the corruptions of the church system that they administered. Throughout his duel with the Roman church, Luther was strongly backed up by his ruler, Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, whose protection was invaluable to him both before and after his excommunication in 1520. The opposition of these various groups to the papal church had been growing in Germany for some time prior to 1517; and Luther provided it the leadership necessary to bring about the Protestant Reformation.

In the light of this account, the following statement by the late Anglican church historian Norman Sykes is an accurate explanation for why Luther’s academic protest of 1517 led to the Reformation. Said Dr. Sykes: “That [explanation] which best fits the facts is a recognition of the widespread revulsion from the Church and its system, alike in its theological and its financial expression. The old order in Germany, as in the political sphere in France in 1789, though outwardly imposing and strong, was rotten inwardly, and collapsed before the first sharp impact of revolt. Beneath the controversy about indulgences was concealed on the, religious and theological side a growing persuasion of the reality of justification by faith alone, of the impotence of the human will to work out its own salvation with fear and trembling, of the inefficiency of the system of good works and of the Treasury of Merits proclaimed and administered by the Church, and therefore ultimately a doubt of the necessity of either Church or Sacraments to salvation” (The Crisis of the Reformation, pp. 34, 35). Or as the Roman historian Leon Christiani put it, Luther “set a light to the gunpowder.”

One highlight of the World Congress on Evangelism came when the Berlin scholar Johannes Schneider weighed modern theology in the scale of apostolic beliefs and found it an empty wind. In this issue the brilliant German commentator (now writing an exposition of John’s Gospel) introduces a two-part essay assessing contemporary theology in the light of scriptural teaching.

This issue is weighted also by the annual index. When librarians and readers convince Readers’ Guide that CHRISTIANITY TODAY should be included in that index, more space in our end-of-volume will be available for essay content.

October 13 will be our anniversary issue and mark the beginning of the magazine’s twelfth year. Likewise it will signal my twelfth year as editor. Life has been full—a decade as a newspaperman and student, a decade of theology teaching in the Midwest, another in the West, and now more than a decade as editor of a religious periodical in Washington. All in all, life on earth does not hold many decades of service, but the great Editor-in-Chief, who is himself the Word, knows all its imponderables.

A number of Canadians will contribute to the Current Religious Thought series in the year ahead. Dr. William Fitch, distinguished minister of Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto, will be the first, in the up-coming issue.

A LOOK AT THE LIST of subjects to be discussed at the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Uppsala, Sweden, next July may cause the thoughtful believer to wonder about the future of confessional Christianity. The assembly will concern itself with “a shrinking world,” with “a secular age,” with matters of social and economic development, with international affairs—in short, with “a new style of living.”

These subjects are to be scrutinized in the light of the role and mission of the Church. What is surprisingly absent in the agenda is any clear proposal for the consideration of matters historically regarded as “theological”—the being and nature of God, the incarnation of our Lord and his saving mission in the days of his flesh, the doctrine of grace, and so on. Are these doctrinal questions no longer meaningful? Is the body that professes to speak for Christendom now seeking to evade them?

Much will no doubt depend upon the selection of the spokesmen who are to “speak to the Church.” If the doctrinal presentations are made by those who feel impelled to proclaim, for example, that God must die for the sake of man’s promotion, or that the “salvation” of Christian theology demands a comprehensive “dehellenizatiort of dogma, specifically that of the Christian doctrine of God,” then the results may be expected to be dismal.

The real point in question is the starting point in theology. If the prevailing mood proves to be that man cannot (some would say will not) find God “on the way down” (i.e., through His selfdisclosure) and can only hope to discover Him “on the way up,” then the fears of many will probably be realized.

Some persons now feel that historical theology is made up of “copybook answers” and thus is radically irrelevant in an age of nominalistic and empirical science. To these, the prospect of a new beginning—with man and his problems—is tempting. The thesis seems to be that if we are to recover a meaning for theology, we must begin with man’s world, man’s problems, man’s hopes. It is, then, a vital question whether Uppsala will seek to elaborate a global form of culture-religion that derives its “theology” from secular and humanistic sources and interprets its “hope” in merely temporal and one-layered terms.

Major elements in our society are presenting the Church with the challenge of a religion without God and a Christianity without Christ. Will the Church respond to this challenge in secular terms—in terms of a New Worldliness—or confront its age with the vigorous assertion of the Lordship of Christ, with its own challenge of an Incarnate God and a risen Saviour?

Of those who would make a totally “new” beginning in theology, one is tempted to ask: Is it a foregone conclusion that as the human predicament is spelled out, valid theological assertions will emerge? To put the question in another form: Can we suppose that this decade is so pregnant with essential meaning that men can, through cultural analysis, propose answers to human problems so basic that in their very formulation God will necessarily disclose himself and his grace?

Must we accede to the assertion (made, for example, by Leslie Dewart in The Future of Belief) that Modern Man has developed in such a fashion that a completely new theological formulation is mandatory? Or, to state the question in Harvey Cox’s terms, has man in his “urban state” become so completely dependent upon forces and resources within himself that the categories of historic Christian thought, acceptable during the “tribal” and “town” stages, are no longer applicable to him?

If the past is anything of an indicator, the new theology will be some type of universalism in which it is assumed that all men are in reality children of God, and need only to be told so. And there will probably be no mention of any divine negative action toward human sin, such as is implied by the doctrine of the final judgment.

How far may the reformulation of historic Christian faith be expected to go? One is not cheered by the assertion in All Things New (the preparatory booklet for the Uppsala assembly) that “the forgiveness of sins was not merely a spiritual event, but had its consequences in people’s physical lives.” On the surface, this seems a plausible assertion. But can the theological basis for the forgiveness of sins be determined from its empirical consequences? Moreover, precisely what events bear witness to the breaking-in of the “New” that has allegedly occurred?

Few will deny that “the world is being drawn into one consciously common history, united by fear of universal catastrophe”; but can we deduce from this that in the unity of “shared secular hopes” God is being realized in the consciousness of man? Secular hopes and secular despair certainly do exist and merit recognition and respect. But is their articulation a reliable means to the articulation also of a new theological vision?

The WCC agenda seems to imply that the quest for a new literacy in theology must begin with the analysis of secular issues, and that when this analysis has proceeded far enough, God will “break in” and disclose himself. All this, we are led to hope, will issue from the elaboration of the predicament of secular man, despite his flight from a theology resting upon revelation.

Does much or all of this newly oriented “quest for theology” rest upon the hidden assumption that historic Christian theism reflects a relatively naive and infantile state of man’s mental evolution? Is Christian theology the product of underdeveloped cultures (Hebrew and Hellenistic) and thus irrelevant today? It would be helpful to have, prior to Uppsala, some forthright answers to these and allied questions.

This is being written in Munich, where in the sessions of the Goethe-Institut men of linguistic and philological orientation are also concerned with matters that relate to man’s ultimate destiny. One finds among them a certain preplexity about the almost frenetic attempts of theologians to trumpet Nietzsche’s robust proclamation of God’s demise. Few of them feel that God’s disappearance would guarantee a new epiphany of theology, or that “God” must emerge from the exercise of the current secular consciousness.

The Church may be in genuine peril of being remade in the image of the world, and the “one-world kingdom of man” may sidetrack men from historic Christianity’s insistence upon a crucial and personal commitment to Jesus Christ. Certainly, if the WCC assembly expects that an adequate theology must emerge as man focuses his attention upon his problems, many will be tempted to adopt a Socratic skepticism about the outcome.

HAROLD B. KUHN

Negro churchmen say they are convinced U. S. cities need “not more studies of the causes of the ‘civil disorders,’ not more ‘anti-riot’ controls, not more welfare handouts, and certainly not more piecemeal appropriations for limited aid to the cities.”

The real problem, says a statement adopted by the National Committee of Negro Churchmen, is a lack of capital: “Even as Negroes in 1863 saw themselves deprived of necessary land, so Negroes today see capital flow through their communities without capital gain for their communities.”

The NCNC, which in effect is the ecclesiastical arm of the responsible element in the black-power movement, held a meeting in Washington last month that coincided with the one-day conference of the star-studded Urban Coalition.

The Negro churchmen voiced support of the coalition’s bid to “reorder our national priorities” and to establish “earn and learn” centers.

They also endorsed in general the coalition’s call upon Congress “to move ahead on the many proposals already before it which seek to remedy the root causes of our urban crisis.” But that endorsement had a hollow ring, because black-power churchmen seem to be growing increasingly dubious of the effects of government handouts.

“Neither emergency job programs nor any present legislative proposals can be more than palliatives providing short-term relief unless one critical need is placed at the center of the stage,” they declared.

That one need is identified as capital. “The despair and disillusionment among black people in America will not be intercepted—peace will not be achieved—unless the historic wrong which has denied us a stake in this nation’s capital economy is righted.”

To this end, the Negro churchmen called for creation of a “national Economic Development Bank.” Such a bank would use funds from government and private sources to lend money at reduced interest rates for Negro homes, schools, and business. It would be run “by persons who have sensitivity and commitment to meeting the special needs and requirements.”

This veering off from reliance upon government aid is a notable contrast to the course suggested by most liberal churchmen, whose comments have been a can-you-top-this scramble. NCC President Arthur S. Flemming urged Congress to provide full funding of the Office of Economic Opportunity “at no less than 2.1 billion dollars.”

The Rt. Rev. John E. Hines, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, who was billed as spokesman for the religious community at the Urban Coalition meeting, echoed ecumenical appeals. He declared that “we of the churches have demonstrated that we do not have the answers, at least not in the form of discernible specifics.” He went on, nevertheless, to quote a resolution of the National Council of Churches’ 1966 assembly that asked political leaders to give highest priority to equal-opportunity programs. He also quoted from a report of the World Council of Churches’ 1966 Geneva conference that poses the question whether “violence that sheds blood in planned revolutions may not be a lesser evil than the violence which, though bloodless, condemns whole populations to perennial despair.” Hines’s own view was that “no anti-poverty program will work unless and until poverty itself is re-defined, and ministered to, in human rather than material terms alone.”

The Urban Coalition brought together nearly 1,000 prominent political, business, labor, religious, and educational leaders. The mayors of a number of the biggest American cities were on hand. The coalition met in the plush Shoreham Hotel in Washington, prompting civil-rights leader Marion Barry to take the rostrum even though he hadn’t been invited. “When you hold these meetings,” he said, “please don’t have them out here at the Shoreham. Hold them down where the people are, get down there and try to get to the nitty-gritty. When that time comes we’ll begin to scratch the surface of the urban problem.”

From the ecclesiastical bureaucracy has come an eighteen-point program on what local churches and ministers can do before, during, and after racial riots. The plan was drawn up by the United Presbyterian Commission on Religion and Race and has won endorsement from the counterpart commission in the Southern Presbyterian denomination and from Foy Valentine, executive secretary of the Southern Baptists’ Christian Life Commission.

The plan includes such suggestions as planning meetings with local authorities and with ghetto leaders and getting out “interpretative materials” for white congregations to exert political pressures. Procedures are also described for what can be done during and after crises.

Triumph, a monthly put out by well-informed Roman Catholic conservatives, devotes a portion of its first-anniversary issue to analyzing the political and religious factors in the rioting of the past summer. Triumph editors say the riots prove the American Negro has rejected both the political and social premises of secular liberalism.

They say that “Islam seems to have something to offer the Negro, something that Southern Puritanism because of past associations cannot offer, and that secularized, liberalized Protestantism rejects out of hand: time, and some plausible instructions in what to do with it. Time to rebuild the family; and Islam teaches him the discipline and gives him the ethical rationale for the job. Time to stand on his own feet; and Islam teaches courage, perseverance. Time to show the white man a distinctive culture; and Islam offers a proud heritage.”

The Roman Catholic Church, Triumph declares, “has been hiding from the Negro.”

Protest From Arkansas

First it was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Now the Viet Nam war has an even less expected opponent: the official Arkansas Baptist Newsmagazine. Last month, Erwin McDonald became the first Southern Baptist editor to advocate that the United States pull out.

His editorial said South Viet Nam is “dominated by military junta” and that Premier Ky’s regime had no intention of permitting a fair election this month. The vote was to be monitored by a group of U. S. citizens named by President Johnson, including a last-minute addition, the Rev. Edward L. R. Elson of National Presbyterian Church.

The Arkansas paper said “there may have been a time when the big question for us was how to get out and save face.… The question now is how can we save our soul if we stay in?”

Miscellany

Appeals for a papal encyclical against racism came from the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice and Urban League chief Whitney M. Young, Jr. After talking with the Pope in Rome, Young had “great hopes” he would comply; but officials unofficially told Religious News Service not to expect an encyclical in the foreseeable future.

Southern Baptists asked for 100 volunteers to go to Fairbanks, Alaska, before freezing weather sets in to help repair nine Baptist churches hit by hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage in last month’s floods. The floods began the day before the state convention was to meet. United Presbyterians also issued an emergency appeal.

In the first half of this year, church construction dropped 4 per cent from the 1966 level, the Commerce Department reports, with the dip intensifying in June. Private-college building, however, took a major upswing.

Internal Revenue Service warns that “contributions” normally paid for admission to charitable fund-raising activities are not tax deductible.

Evangelical Press Association, which recently won tax exemption, is talking with Associated Church Press about a joint convention in Washington, D. C., in 1971. EPA will also meet there in 1970 and ACP in 1968.

The Columbus, Ohio-based Bible Meditation League decided its work will be better described by a new name, Bible Literature International. It distributes tracts, Scripture, and correspondence courses in 175 languages to 100 nations.

Spokesmen for the National Council of Churches, U. S. Catholic Conference, and Synagogue Council testified in support of the proposed 1967 federal fair-housing law.

The legislative arm of the LCA-ALC college-student group passed a unanimous resolution urging Lutheran denominations to “seek organic reunion with the Roman Catholic Church.”

The general committee of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students met in Wuppertal, Germany, last month and surveyed its work in thirty-seven nations, including eleven added since the last committee meeting in 1963.

After years of tumult, the last Christian missionaries were to be evacuated from Aden by September 9, when the British colony becomes independent. Church of Scotland, Danish, and Red Sea Mission leaders issued a statement asking prayer for the now-isolated “infant Church of South Arabia.”

A survey of 4,710 people in Kazan, Soviet Union, showed 21 per cent believed in some religion. Only 3 per cent of the believers were under 30 years of age, and 81 per cent were women. But one-third were members of the working class.

Protestant Panorama

Methodists will decide next year whether to order conference votes on joining the proposed united church of North India in 1969. Methodist conferences—and other denominations—rejected a 1962 union plan, and rejoined negotiations in 1965.

The International Council of Christian Churches says it will help build 200 new churches for those who pulled out of the Church of South India, charging liberalism.

Although the Southern Baptist Convention withdrew official support of the project, thirty SBC pastors willing to accept limits on political commentary will aid an evangelistic drive by South African Baptists this month. The 45,000 Baptists there, who worship along racial lines, include more blacks than whites. Overseas Baptists rarely visit.

More than 100 Mennonites left Canada’s far-north Peace River area for Bolivia to seek “greater fulfillment of customs and traditions,” and more are expected to leave. The group, which had hoped to get a government-supported school of its own, disliked modern pressures in public schools.

At the foot of a statue of Christ during the Pentecostal World Conference in Rio, leaders of two Wesleyan denominations in Chile with 680,000 members and the 63,000-member Pentecostal Holiness Church of the United States signed a pact of doctrinal agreement and mutual membership.

Personalia

The Rev. David G. Colwell, chairman of the Consultation on Church Union, will be in Seattle this month while the Episcopal Church votes on COCU. He has taken the pulpit of Plymouth United Church of Christ there, moving from First Congregational, Washington, D. C.

Harvard Divinity student Sam W. Brown, 24, after leading the first ballot, lost last month’s vote for president of the National Student Association. The winner was activist Oberlin graduate Edward Schwartz.

Washington columnist Jack Anderson claims Richard Cardinal Cushing chuckles at recalling how he and Joseph Kennedy “made strategic contributions to Protestant ministers in West Virginia to help win friends and influence voters for Jack Kennedy in the crucial 1960 West Virginia primary.” Amounts supposedly ranged from $200 to $ 1,000, depending on the size of congregations.

Army Captain Colin Kelly III, 27, son of America’s first hero in World War II, enters Philadelphia Divinity School this month to study for the Episcopal Ministry with an eye on the military chaplaincy.

The Rev. Kenneth M. Lindsay, executive director of the Greater Detroit Council of Lutheran Churches, was elected public-relations director of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. Unlike New York-based predecessor Norman Temrne, now with the American Bible Society, Lindsay will locate in St. Louis.

Miss Lillian Tookman, former publicity chief for Decca Records and later a staffer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was appointed public-relations director for the Armenian Church of North America.

World Vision named the Rev. Spencer De Jong (Reformed Church in America) as acting director of its thirty-seven orphanages in Indonesia. He will also direct the relief program suspended during the attempted Communist coup in late 1965.

James W. Reapsome, editor of the defunct Sunday School Times, this month becomes chaplain and religion professor at Malone College (Quaker) in Canton, Ohio.

At New York’s Constitutional Convention, former Bronx probation officer John Carro told how he couldn’t get an orphanage to accept fatherless Lee Harvey Oswald when he was 12 years old because he was a Lutheran. The convention then passed a provision ending nearmandatory matching of religion in adoption, guardianship, and custody cases.

Deaths

A. RAYMOND GRANT, 69, bishop of Portland, Oregon, and president of the Methodist social-concerns board; in Portland, of cancer.

GEORGE L. MORELOCK, 87, former chief of Methodist laymen’s activities; in Miami.

GEORGE HANDY WAILES, 100, who taught Bible for half a century at Reformed Episcopal Seminary, Philadelphia; in Salisbury, Maryland.

Under the skilled leadership of Primate H. H. Clark, son of a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman and onetime insurance salesman, the biennial synod of the Anglican Church of Canada met in late August in the capital of Ottawa for the second time in the church’s history.

The urgent problems of Canadian unity were clearly on the minds of both the Primate and Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson on opening day. Said Clark, “We must catch a vision of what Canada can be—a land with two founding peoples, French and English.” In like vein, Pearson urged “full recognition by all Canadians that the culture, language, and tradition of the French-speaking minority are essential—a distinctive and equal element of our national life.”

In obvious reference to French President DeGaulle’s recent sally into the Canadian political scene, he added that “all Canadians repudiate interference in our affairs by those who mistakenly believe that we are not Canadian Frenchmen, Canadian Americans, Canadian Englishmen, or Canadian something else.” Clark was even more pointed in his reference to the deep rupture DeGaulle created with his famous cry of “Vive Quebec Libre” in Montreal: “The visit of General De-Gaulle to Canada showed us that a problem we thought solved, or at least hidden under the carpet, is still with us.”

The 300 Anglican delegates from twenty-eight dioceses met at Roman Catholic St. Paul University. The synod’s upper house of bishops has veto power over the lower, composed of clerical and lay delegates elected by dioceses, but winds of change are blowing. Even the primate urged abolition of the upper house. Gordon Baker, retiring editor of the denomination’s Canadian Churchman, added his support by remarking, “Up to heaven or down to earth, any change in the upper house will be an improvement.”

Broadening of the grounds for legalized abortion is to be urged on the Canadian Parliament by the church, and remarriage of divorced persons in Anglican churches will now be possible under a canon ratified overwhelmingly. Till now, most divorced Anglicans have remarried in the United Church of Canada and then returned to the Anglican fold, where normally they have been granted the sacrament once more. The professed aim of this canon is the strengthening of marriage, but it is not difficult to see the strong public pressure behind it. Criticism of the new measure, though limited, was incisive. Noteworthy was the fact that the two Eskimo delegates spoke vehemently against ratification. It was clearly with much heart-searching that the synod made this historic departure from Lambeth.

After a high-caliber debate that a capital reporter said equaled anything in Parliament on the subject, the synod urged the United States to stop bombing North Viet Nam and both North and South to move to the negotiating table.

Membership in the church declined by 67,000 last year, continuing the trend begun in 1963. Parish rolls indicate 1,292, 762 persons registered, but of these scarcely 500,000 partook of Easter communion this year. In quest of solutions, the synod veered strongly toward radical policies. Public relations and communications by radio and television will henceforth be handled jointly by teams from the Anglican, Roman Catholic, and United Churches, under the direction of broadcaster Roy Bonisteel. Big-business streamlining of headquarters under an efficiency plan from Price-Waterhouse will update the secretariat of Church House.

Evangelism—apparently the Cinderella of the synod’s operations, since many left when its report was introduced—lifted the remaining delegates to a new dimension of debate. With humor and deep concern, the report called for the training of seminary students on how to lead a soul to Christ. The Metropolitan of Ontario cited this debate as a great highlight of the synod, and the report was received with applause that seemed unending.

Clearly there is still an evangelical voice among Canadian Anglicans. Equally clearly, in the sacred cause of Anglican unity, this group is silent on ecumenical issues. Be it the mystique or the genius of Anglicanism, its successful unification of extreme Anglo-Catholics and ultra-evangelicals continues to be one of the mysteries of our ecumenical age.

At the synod, ecumenical relations was an interweaving theme in every issue, and in the eyes of most Anglican leaders the trends are clearly God-ordained. As a report put it, “With a distraught and divided world badly needing a demonstration of charity and good-will, and a clearer understanding of the common destiny of all mankind as brothers in one family and sons of one Father, the Church cannot evade the supreme task of restoring its visible unity.”

No less than four committees are operating in this field: Christian unity, the Church universal, ecumenical affairs, and Roman Catholic relations. The assurance with which the guidance of the Holy Spirit was claimed hallmarked every report on ecumenical themes. One could scarcely help reflecting on words both cynical and penetrating: “Le bon Dieu, c’est moi.”

Union with the United Church of Canada moved a step nearer as the synod, in response to UCC requests, approved a fifth joint commission on “The Church and the World.” Principles of Union has already been passed, and other commissions are at work on constitutional, legal, doctrinal, and liturgical matters. UCC Moderator Wilfred Lockhart received a conqueror’s welcome. Both he and Clark later admitted they see no great grass-roots movement in support of the union. And leading layman Derek Bedson served notice that one Anglican group does not regard Principles as “a sufficient statement of the faith of our church.”

Union in our time seems sure, but how soon, no one will predict. And whether the ultimate union will carry all Anglicans with it is open to doubt also. Clark pleaded for temperate and wise teaching of all the people at the parish and diocesan levels and spoke of Christ as “the great Divider as well as the great Uniter.” Not so Moderator Lockhart. Calling himself a frustrated ecumenical, he said he can scarcely wait for the final consummation. And under him the decision will be at the council level, not congregation-by-congregation as in 1925, when the United Church was formed.

It is certain that the union of the two Canadian churches will presage the shape of things to come elsewhere. In the opaque world of ecumenical politics so vividly described by Ian Henderson in Power Without Glory, Canada obviously has a role to play that far transcends her geography or her population.

For the Christian not so confident that the Holy Spirit is guiding him into these ecumenical expressways, the words of Jesus seem particularly apt in Ottawa and elsewhere: “What I say unto you I say unto all: watch.”

WILLIAM FITCH

Making Non-Pacifism Official

In the year the world fell apart, various Pentecostal churches came together to form what in fifty-three years has become the largest Pentecostal church. Although its leadership has long denied the church’s commitment to pacifism, the biennial General Council of the Assemblies of God put ground under the denial by repudiating its constitution’s Article 22 on military service.

This article appeals to such biblical passages as “resist not evil” and “love your enemies” and declares, “These and other scriptures have always been accepted and interpreted by our churches as prohibiting Christians from shedding blood, or taking human life; therefore, we, as a body of Christians” are “constrained to declare we cannot conscientiously participate in war … since this is contrary to our view of the clear teachings of the inspired Word of God.”

Meeting in the arena of Long Beach, California, the council’s 2,880 voting delegates decided to adopt a new Article 22, which declares, “As a movement we affirm our loyalty to the government of the United States in war or peace. We shall continue to insist, as we have historically, on the right of each member to choose for himself whether to declare his position as a combatant, a non-combatant, or a conscientious objector.”

True pacifism among Pentecostals has never been strong. The Assemblies are aggressive in grooming chaplains and help prepare military chapel lessons.

Because “some difficulty and embarrassment have been reported by various District Councils,” the council also rewrote Section 1 of Article 23. The new formulation retains the church’s rejection of “the unconditional eternal security position which holds ‘once saved, always saved,’ ” but indicates its basis for this rejection by asserting that in biblical teaching, “the security of the believer depends on a living relationship with Christ” and on the “Bible’s call to a life of holiness.”

The new formulation also retained disapproval of Seventh-day Adventist teaching but omitted the earlier article’s citation of Titus 3:10, which exhorts avoidance of the “heretic” or “factious man.” Many delegates movingly proclaimed their rejection of “once saved, always saved” but expressed embarrassment by the quote from Titus, which clearly suggests that others with whom the Assemblies work and are affiliated are heretics. The Assemblies belong to the National Association of Evangelicals, the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America, and the Pentecostal World Conference.

The newly proposed and adopted article cites Romans 16:17, which exhorts turning away from those who cause division by teaching “contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned.” (Verse 18 goes on to declare that such people do not serve Christ “but their own belly.”) But by amendment, the Titus reference was also reinserted. The heading of the article was changed from “Heresies Disapproved” to “Doctrine Disapproved.”

By an overwhelming vote, the council then adopted a motion of the Rev. Wesley P. Steelberg of Long Beach to appoint a committee to study Article 23 in its entirety “for further possible amplification and change.”

Thomas F. Zimmerman, the church’s general superintendent, announced plans for a Five-Year Program of Advance for the fast-growing denomination, whose U. S. membership is well over half a million, whose foreign membership is well over a million and a half, whose publishing house prints more than eleven tons of literature daily, and whose denominational budget for the past two years was $29 million.

JAMES DAANE

Everybody And Brother

If magazine formats were open to lawsuits for plagiarism, Newsweek would have a good case against Acts, a new bimonthly reporting news of the interdenominational charismatic movement. Though it might feel complimented by having a look-alike, Newsweek might also blanch at typographical errors, including one in a headline on the cover.

Smoother and infinitely broader in ideological scope is a Canadian entry in the religious magazine field, Ferment ’67, which is the ultimate in journalistic ecumenism. Contributors and staff include liberals, conservatives, and fundamentalists with such widely varying affiliations as Pentecostalist, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Unitarian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim.

Editor John Burbidge, a liberal pastor in the United Church of Canada, says the magazine “is to act as a catalyst; out of the interplay and clash of opinion within its pages will emerge the choice open to reasonable men …”

The Rev. Leslie Tarr, a staunch evangelical writer who is business administrator of Toronto’s Central Baptist Seminary, is an associate editor, along with Roman Catholic Paul Harris. Along with the liberals and humanists on the advisory board stand the Rev. J. Harry Faught, president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, and the Rev. Paul Smith of the well-known Peoples Church in Toronto. Smith sees Ferment as “a good opportunity to expose the liberals, and other religions, to the evangelical position” and doesn’t view his participation as an ecumenical venture.

The lead item in the first issue is a debate on conversion. Burbage contends that evangelism is “unchristian” and “just another means of manipulation.” But Mennonite psychology professor Frank C. Peters of Waterloo Lutheran University says, “Evangelism that does not make Christ and his salvation central, that does not invite conversion and definite decision, has fallen short of its purpose. Evangelism without commitment is no evangelism at all but only a kind of religious activity.”

Ferment’s publisher and initiator is A. C. Forrest, editor of the United Church Observer. Free copies of the first edition went to 25,000 Canadians, mostly clergymen, and staffers are confident that there will be a Ferment ’68.

Acts is put out by a group of Los Angeles Pentecostalists, most notably David DuPlessis. The ad-less forty-eight-page first edition covers charismatic events around the world and includes a major survey of Brazil, site of this summer’s Pentecostal World Conference. No fewer than twenty-three columns go to doings at a single Baptist church in Mobile, Alabama. A report on charismata at Wheaton (Illinois) College is explicit, but specifics are missing in a roundup from denominational seminaries. The final article is a description of “baptism in the Holy Spirit” by Harold Horton that avoids mention of charismatic distinctives and contends that the experience is meant for “every child of God.”

Integrating The Power Structure

Negro Methodists and Disciples took steps last month to phase out their racially segregated power structures. But both denominations still are a long way from a completely integrated hierarchy.

The Central (Negro) Jurisdiction of The Methodist Church, created in a 1939 merger as “a rank concession to prejudice,” as one Negro Methodist leader puts it, will pass out of existence next April when Methodists merge with the Evangelical United Brethren Church. The Negro Methodists held their last jurisdictional conference in Nashville and elected as their last bishop the Rev. L. Scott Allen, editor of the Central Christian Advocate. Future Negro bishops must be elected by regional jurisdictions, at least two of which will continue segregated annual conferences into the indefinite future.

Negro Disciples have thus far been concentrated in the National Christian Missionary Convention, which held its fifty-first annual assembly in Indianapolis and adopted in principle a plan for merger within the racially inclusive but predominantly white International Convention of Christian Churches. The plan provides, however, for a continuing Negro organization that, according to a Disciples spokesman, would meet “primarily for fellowship.”

The Curia’S New Day

Come New Year’s Day things will be different at the Curia, the 400-year-old organization of Vatican agencies berated by church liberals for its traditional views.

In the long run, the most important change initiated in Pope Paul’s VI’s 11,000-word reorganization decree last month is a five-year limit on Curia terms. Staff members can be returned for additional terms by the pope. Till now, Curia work had been considered a lifelong vocation. As in the U. S. Cabinet, agency heads will resign when a new pope is elected so he can choose his own “cabinet” members if he wishes.

The decree strengthens the Secretary of State as the pope’s closest administrator. The office became virtually the only channel to Pope Pius XII in his later years. Its functions have been ill-defined, and it has tended to assume authority. The Vatican reorganization may actually restrict its power. Speculation is increasing that the current secretary, 84-year-old Cardinal Cicognani, will soon step down.

A new Economic Affairs Office headed by three cardinals will undertake central administration of the sprawling Vatican holdings, estimated at a minimum of $5.6 billion in securities alone. Worldwide administration will also be tightened up through an informationgathering Central Statistics Office. Nothing was said about what statistics would be revealed to church members.

This second major reorganization in the Curia’s history (the other was in 1908) was proposed by Vatican II and promised by Paul four years ago. Vatican rumors had said it would be announced on Pentecost, but the final date was the feast of Mary’s Assumption. Insiders blamed the delay on rivalries that had to be ironed out between leading Vatican personalities.

To ease the pain, Paul’s decree said that the Curia is absolutely essential and that its basic structure and its closeness to the pontiff must be retained. After the document was released, the Pope said the reorganization confirms the Curia’s “necessity and excellence.” But this will be scant comfort to what the St. Louis Review describes as “dozens of clerics between forty and sixty” who are “too young to retire and too old to adapt. Many are fearful about the future, depressed about the present, bitter about the recent past. Pope Paul has somehow to move them away from the levers of power, yet at the same time keep them useful and sustain their morale.”

Previously, Paul reoriented the “Holy Office,” now the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, toward a less authoritarian handling of discipline and scholarship. He has appointed several non-Italians and younger clerics to Curia positions, including little-noticed, middle-echelon posts. Just before the reorganization was announced, he ordered that diocesan bishops be made full members of the “Congregations” (the major Vatican agencies) while retaining their dioceses, by attendance at annual meetings at the Vatican.

Besides closer coordination of the bishops throughout the world and the Curia, regular “cabinet” meetings and processes for resolving disputes will promote collaboration among the various Curia agencies.

These points were made at a press conference by Monsignor Giovanni M. Pinna, judge on a Vatican court, who turned out to be secretary of the top-secret commission of cardinals on Curia reform. Pinna said merit—not seniority—will now be the key to promotions.

The Pope himself will no longer head three of the Curia departments but will place them under cardinals. Instead of twelve, there are now nine Congregations for:

DOCTRINE OF FAITH—Safeguards the doctrine and morals of Catholicism; examines new opinions and writings.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SACRAMENTS—Handles matters connected with the seven sacraments that do not come under other agencies; its work has ecumenical implications in handling sacramental discipline, for instance in mixed marriages.

RITES—Handles all aspects of worship not relating to doctrine or juridical discipline; besides the liturgical section, a second section handles beatification, canonization, relics, and recognition of miracles.

ORIENTAL CHURCHES—Administers Eastern churches in communion with the Vatican; consults with other offices concerning other Eastern Christians and Muslims.

BISHOPS—Organizes geographical divisions, names bishops and other administrators, surveys work and personal affairs of bishops and national and regional episcopal conferences.

CLERGY—Administers all clergy and property not under the orders, including assignment, discipline, duties, education, pay and fringe benefits.

RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR INSTITUTES—Does the same for all the orders.

CATHOLIC EDUCATION—Holds responsibility for seminaries and universities as well as parochial and diocesan schools.

EVANGELIZATION OF THE NATIONS (OR PROPAGATION OF THE FAITH)—Handles all missionary work.

Three Secretariats are formally absorbed into the Curia: For Promoting Christian Unity (ecumenical relations with non-Catholic Christians, and with Jews); For Non-Christians (study and dialogue with adherents of other major faiths, including a special office on Islam); For Non-Believers (study and dialogue with atheists).

Two new agencies established in January are put in the Curia on a trial basis: the Council for the Laity and the Study Commission on Justice and Peace.

The three tribunals are the Apostolic Signatura (decisions on canon law and administrative disputes); the Sacred Roman Rota (all matters on annulments except doctrine); and the Apostolic Penitentiary (indulgences, absolutions, dispensations, commutations, graces, and condonations).

Besides a series of offices for administering the Vatican, there are the two new offices: Economic Affairs and Central Statistics.

The decree reminds the prelates that “no serious and extraordinary business may be conducted before the appropriate heads have notified the Supreme Pontiff. Furthermore, all decisions require the Pope’s approval.…”

Art Ebb

Mankind faces one of its worst periods in the history of art and architecture, contends architect-woodworker George Nakashima. “It is a sad statement of our civilization when art styles are obsolete in five years and the buildings themselves in twenty years,” he told last month’s Catholic Art Association meeting.

Nakashima is a noted designer of furniture and has built churches in Japan and India. A recent work was the Christ of the Desert chapel in Abiquiu, New Mexico.

Nakashima says church architecture is no better than the rest, though “it should be.” “There is a basic immorality, I think, in spending $100,000 for a church bell tower which is built on status symbolism,” he said. “Simplicity and poverty in church architecture is a question of the spirit. It is basically a humble and aspiring spirit resolved into a method and a high technology.”