Text: He was marvellously helped, till he was strong. But when he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction: for he transgressed against the Lord his God.—2 Chronicles 26:15, 16.

Uzziah is one of the most noteworthy of the kings of Judah. He has two names in the Bible. In the Book of Kings he is called Azariah, but in the Book of Chronicles

Uzziah. It is by the latter that he is best known. He came to the throne when he was only sixteen years of age. He reigned for fifty-two years, and his reign was almost the longest and, in certain respects, the most glorious in the history of the kingdom. He began his reign with great promise. It is written that he sought God in the days of Zechariah, the high priest, and that as long as he sought the Lord, God made him to prosper. Yet this long and glorious reign ended in tragedy.

Uzziah: King And Conqueror

When he ascended the throne, the young Uzziah revealed splendid traits and high ability. The fortunes and the defenses of the kingdom were then at a low ebb. The first thing he did was to subdue the Edomites, the congenital enemies of Israel, and to take the port of Eloth on the Red Sea, thus reviving the commerce which had flourished in the days of Solomon. Next he smote the Philistines, capturing their strongholds of Gath and Ashdod. Two other long-time enemies of Israel, and always a thorn in the side of the nation, were also subdued—the Ammonites and the Arabians. These conquests gave Uzziah great renown.

At home he restored the defenses of Jerusalem, building strong towers on the walls to resist a besieging army. He also invented military engines, like the catapults of the Romans, to hurl arrows and darts and to cast stones down upon a besieging army. He organized a great standing army of 307,000 men and had a special crack troop, like David’s mighty men, except that Uzziah’s numbered not 600 but 2,600.

Uzziah was also a great agriculturalist—an asset for any leader of the people. It is written that he “loved husbandry.” He cultivated vineyards in the mountains and developed and operated cattle ranches in the low country and on the plains. For their defense and sustenance he built towers in the desert and sank many wells.

Such, then, was Uzziah until his fall—God-fearing, a great ruler of men, a great general and conqueror, a great inventor, a great agriculturalist, a great organizer. It is written of him that “his name spread far abroad; for he was marvellously helped, till he was strong.”

The Fall Of Uzziah

But when Uzziah had become strong, “his heart was lifted up to his destruction.” Not content with his fame as a warrior, inventor, and agriculturalist, he arrogated the sacred functions of the priesthood. He went into the temple to burn incense upon the golden altar of incense which stood just outside the great crimson veil of the temple. Like the Roman emperors, he wanted to be the pontiff also, the head of religion.

He would have carried out this sacrilege, had it not been for the courageous high priest Azariah, the successor to the one who had had such influence upon the early life of Uzziah. This fearless priest, taking with him a number of other priests, followed the king into the temple. Just as Uzziah was about to offer the incense on the altar, Azariah withstood him to his face, saying: “It is not for thee, Uzziah, to burn incense unto the Lord. This is the work and ministry of the priests, the sons of Aaron, who are consecrated to this office. Go out of the sanctuary, for thou hast trespassed; neither shall it be for thine honor from the Lord God.”

This protest and rebuke by the priest enraged the king, who was holding the censer in his hand to burn incense. From the record we infer that he was ready to strike the high priest with his censer. But before he could strike the high priest or offer the incense, lo, leprosy rose up in his forehead! When the priests saw that he had become a leper, they thrust him out of the holy house. Since no leper could reign as king, he was removed from his throne and spent the rest of his days in a lazar house.

That, then, is the story of Uzziah. “He was marvellously helped, till he was strong. But when he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction: for he transgressed against the Lord his God.”

The Peril Of Prosperity

The tragedy of Uzziah tells us of the danger lurking in success. Everyone wants to succeed. Everyone wants to exert influence in his chosen and appointed place. But there is a peril in success; for often, as in the case of Uzziah, worldly success lifts a man’s heart up so that he loses his humble trust in God.

Waiting once for an installation service to commence at a church in New Jersey, I fell into conversation with an elder in the church. He had been a most prosperous businessman but recently had suffered serious reverses. After telling me of these reverses he said, “I am glad that I failed, for I was getting away from God.” It takes humility to keep a man safe when he has power, riches, or worldly success. Always we must ask for a humble heart.

The great preacher, George Whitefield, just before he began his sermon one day in his Tottingham Road Chapel in London, was handed a note which read “The prayers of this congregation are desired for a young man who has become heir to an immense fortune, and who feels much need for grace to keep him humble in the midst of his riches.” In too many cases, men rising to high places have forgotten to make the prayer of that young man.

Prosperity is always dangerous. It inclines a man’s heart to pride. At the zenith of his power, and ruler of a world empire, Nebuchadnezzar boasted, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built?” God’s answer was to drag him down from his throne and turn him out into the fields, where he ate grass like an ox until he learned that there was a God in heaven.

In his grand farewell address to the children of Israel, recorded in the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses warned the people against the dangers of prosperity. He had told them of the good land, the promised land, to which God would bring them according to his promise, and that when they reached that land, they were to “bless the Lord thy God for the good land which he hath given thee.” Then he warned them to beware lest in the day of prosperity and success they should overlook their part in this promise.

Beware that thou forget not the Lord thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day: lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; and when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the Lord thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; … and thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth.

What is true of the nation is true of the individual. What Moses describes there, and what afterwards took place—the people of Israel forgetting that it was the Lord their God who brought them out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of bondage, and thinking that their own power and might had secured them prosperity in the promised land—that very thing happened to King Uzziah. He forgot that it was the Lord his God who had so wonderfully helped him; he assumed that he had succeeded by his own power and could safely defy God’s commandments.

Although he did not so completely flout God’s will as did Uzziah, another great king of Judah, Hezekiah, in the day of his prosperity let his pride turn him from God. God had delivered him in a wonderful way from the might of the Assyrian despot, Sennacherib. God had also spared the life of Hezekiah when he was sick unto death and had sent the shadow back for him ten degrees on the dial, granting him fifteen more years of life. But as the chronicler says, “Hezekiah rendered not again according to the benefit done unto him; for his heart was lifted up.” Instead of acting in humility and gratitude unto God, he received the ambassadors of the king of Babylon as if they were the friends of his nation, and showed them all his riches and treasures and the splendor of his kingdom. For that pride and presumption Isaiah pronounced upon him the judgment of God, telling him that all these treasures and possessions which he had so proudly shown to the ambassadors of Babylon would one day be carried thither, and nothing left of them in Jerusalem. Thus the Bible, page after page, rings the changes on this great and important truth, that the natural tendency of man’s heart is to forget his obligation to God in the day of prosperity.

During a summer vacation a minister from the city went to worship in a Pennsylvania country town. After the service he fell into conversation with an official of the small church. Learning the city where the minister lived, the elder asked about a college classmate of his who as a young man had gone to this city and entered upon the practice of law. He spoke of the brilliance of his intellect and the expectations which were entertained for his success in life. When they were classmates together, he related, the college was shaken with a revival, and this youth was the leader of all in participating in the meetings and in pressing the claims of Christ upon others. He wondered if his old classmate had kept up that testimony.

The minister knew the man and could tell his story. When he first came to the city, he at once associated himself with the church and became a teacher in the Sabbath school. As the years went by, he rose rapidly in his profession and met with great success, until at length he held a high post in the government. But as his material success increased, his religious life declined. At length he was separated completely from the church. He had risen to high place and had won great success as a lawyer; but, for all one knew, God now was not in his thoughts. The last the minister had heard of him was his appearance as counsel for the liquor interests when a bill for prohibition was before the state legislature.

Human nature does not change through the ages. All that the Bible says about the danger of prosperity without remembrance that it is God who helps us to the prosperity is true today. There is no doubt whatever that in every field of life—business, manufacturing, education, public life, and the arts—there are those who once were earnest and faithful in the church and in the work of Christ but who have drifted completely out of that association. They were marvelously helped until they were strong; but when they were strong, their hearts were lifted up to their destruction, and they transgressed against the Lord their God.

One of the old saints used to pray, “Lord, guard me against a departing heart.” The heart of man naturally declines from and departs from God. As the psalmist said, our souls cleave to the dust. In prosperity, and in adversity too, may God guard us all against a “departing heart.”—From The Man Who Forgot, by Clarence Edward Macartney. Copyright © 1956 by Pierce and Washabaugh (Abingdon Press).

About eight years ago we had William Albright lecturing in the East Liberty Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh on the subject of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The excitement about the scrolls was evident by the fact that East Liberty was almost filled. It is something to contemplate that the accidental find of a shepherd boy in far-off Palestine could fill a church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Albright, as you know, is worth listening to at any time on any subject. He is a very learned and very interesting man, and to hear him makes you feel that you are caught in the happy flow of genuine scholarship. Among other things that night he said this: “Regardless of whatever else the Dead Sea Scrolls tell us, one thing is certain. We know now that none of the New Testament could have been written after A.D. 80.” This was a shocking statement to multitudes of people, especially ministers who had been sharing the debates in the thirties and forties about dating John’s Gospel all the way into the late second century. And there were professors there who had been telling classes that the Great Commission was a late third- and fourth-century interpolation.

When we were walking out after the service, one of the outstanding pulpiteers in Pittsburgh, a Baptist, said to me in passing, “Well, after that I guess I’ll have to go home and throw away all my seminary notes.” Whether he did or not I do not know. But this is a parable of our day. So much information has been showered on us that it is pretty hard to find and hold a position in almost any area of theology or biblical study. Men who had gone to seminary in the twenties taught me in the thirties, and I taught on the basis of my notes in the forties and fifties. Beneath that overhang of solidified scholarship there was always the fast footwork of adjusting to the latest book or journal. It was easy to end up with a mishmash; and it was very difficult to end up with a position that would give any assurance or stability to students, especially in a course for which parallel readings were being required.

What was happening in biblical studies it à la Albright is even more prevalent in theology. We live in the time of Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and Niebuhr. This is a new theology constantly being faced with the response of a new movement in theology reviving the classic position of the Church. The counter-thrust of conservative theology, with such names as Hodge, Warfield, Carnell, Ramm, Henry, and Gerstner, is very much alive and kicking; and if it is called, as it sometimes is, “neo-fundamentalism,” the reason is that people are conscious of the “neo” in this movement. The word “neo-evangelicalism” refers to the same sort of thing.

And what shall we do with John A. T. Robinson, Southwark Cathedral, and the new scholars of the Cambridge theology? In addition to being familiar with Honest to God we simply must keep up on John Wren-Lewis and others of similar ilk. Read Jenkins’s Bold Religion; Gregor Smith’s The New Man; the volumes of the Cambridge theologians, Soundings and Objections to Christian Beliefs. Pelz has one entitled God Is No More; Van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel; and Sir Richard Acland, We Teach Them Wrong: Religion and the Young.

These books in turn have their own answers. For good coverage you will want to dip into Leon Morris’s The Abolition of Religion, in which he says that, though Bonhoeffer may be correct in eliminating “religion” if it is merely a matter of forms and rites, he is dead wrong, as are some of the others, if he is eliminating religion as such. Meanwhile in any bookstore you can pick up complete listings on the “new morality,” pro and con, and a list of titles in which a wide variety of men defend the faith—little handbooks that might be called “What a Christian Ought to Believe,” or maybe, “How Goes It with the Presbyterians?”

You are not much better off if you try your strength on some of the side issues. I didn’t say this—the science editor of a metropolitan daily newspaper did: “We still know so little about man that there is no need to accept materialism as a philosophy of life. I believe—and this is only a belief—that we know less about the nature of the mind than primitive tribesmen knew about astronomy. Most psychologists think otherwise—and their view, too, is only a belief based perhaps on their eagerness to achieve physics-chemistry status as a science.” This kind of surprising talk from a science editor can send an experimental psychologist into orbit and can bring crashing down about our heads all kinds of easy acceptances concerning our college psychology courses or even the objectives of our counseling programs.

I get it on pretty straight authority that a great many of our university psychology departments have shifted around in the direction of behaviorism; so what shall we do now with the whole mind-body problem, our definitions of consciousness, or even our happy solutions by way of Gestalt? In spite of what you may think about your last psychology course, the fat is still in the fire. A psychiatrist of the measure of Tournier (The Meaning of Persons) gives one the very encouraging belief that we can still talk about the soul or the heart, but I can warn you that there are a lot of universities where that kind of language will get you laughed out of court.

Pretty soon now someone ought to write a book to explain how it has happened in our day that we can’t be sure of anything or at least must be nervous when the talk gets around to definitions or conclusions. Creeds are one thing in this battle; and what shall we say about the canons of art, the principles of music, the beautiful in aesthetics, the freedom from absolutes in Dewey education, the balance of equity in law, and existentialism in ethical decisions?

In a day when everyone is trying to increase lay participation in the thinking of the Church, the enormous confusion in all intellectual disciplines looms increasingly as the fundamental problem. With all the eagerness in the world, a layman lacking three years’ study in a seminary has an inescapable problem that “popular” treatments cannot answer. A variation on the same problem is the difference of ministers now being graduated from those who were graduated fifteen years ago. Just for fun, and it won’t be much fun, listen to a forty-five-year-old pastor and his twenty-five-year-old assistant as they try to work out the content of a weekend retreat for laity.

Good luck. We are living in a grand and awful time.

Last July WBAL-TV, a Baltimore television station, tried out a series of twenty-second and sixty-second announcements offering a New Testament to anybody who wrote in for one.

Television viewers saw a picture of a church, followed by one of the Testaments, first closed and then open. The announcer explained the offer, and an envelope appeared with the station’s address. A few bars of a hymn introduced the spot, and a sentence identified the sponsor of the offer as the Pocket Testament League. That was all.

There was no “saturation” campaign. In July the spots were on four times a day; now the rate is about fifteen a week.

But the announcements have at times outdrawn “everything else on the station,” says Sydney King, WBAL-TV’s manager of community service, who writes the spots (subject to PTL approval) and handles the series.

People of different faiths have written in from Baltimore, from all over the rest of Maryland, from neighboring states, and from “other unexplainable points such as Ohio, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York,” Mr. King said. The PTL Business Men’s Council in Baltimore mailed 6,000 King James New Testaments last year; another 3,000 requests came in during January; and the council has ordered 10,000 more New Testaments (each costing PTL seventy-five cents to buy and mail).

The station charges nothing for the television time and often puts the spots next to the Huntley-Brinkley newscast, popular sports events, and other prime-time programs. But they drew mail even when put between sections of the 6 A.M. movie.

William D. Smoot, executive director of the Business Men’s Council, said that one-third of those who received Testaments in 1964 signed the PTL pledge card saying they would read a Scripture portion every day. (The television offer has no strings; those responding are “invited” to sign the card.) Hundreds of people indicated they received Christ as Saviour after getting and reading the Testament.

Behind the campaign is an unlikely combination of circumstances and people: William M. Patterson, Jr., a PTL council member who thought of extending PTL’s outreach via television; his wife, professionally known as Ann Mar, strategically placed as a WBAL-TV executive; Mr. King, an active Episcopal layworker, who wondered what would happen if evangelistic colportage were presented in the form of a TV giveaway; the PTL council leadership and its willingness to experiment; and probably, if ironically, Mrs. Madalyn Murray, the Baltimore atheist who was one of the litigants in the Supreme Court Bible-reading and prayer case.

Protestant Panorama

Three thousand persons turned out for a memorial service in London last month for missionaries and others recently slain in the Congo. The service was sponsored by the Evangelical Alliance.

The United Presbyterian Commission on Religion and Race turned over $60,000 of its $321,952 budget for 1965 to the National Council of Churches for use “in the NCC’s race work.” A grant of $5,000 was approved for legal representation of civil rights workers. Another $10,000 was earmarked for a “program of team visitations” to determine conformity of presbytery racial practices to national church policy.

A special study committee will ask the Southern Baptist Convention to approve membership in a North American arm of the Baptist World Alliance. The group will recommend that the new agency be labeled a “committee” rather than a “fellowship.”

Baptists in Brazil launched a nationwide evangelistic campaign with a rally in Rio de Janeiro attended by some 150,000. The service was preceded by a parade that stretched for two miles.

Participants in an exploratory consultation held under auspices of the Methodist Board of Christian Social Concerns recommended that a policy statement on spiritual healing be drafted for presentation to the denomination’s 1968 General Conference.

Personalia

Dr. James Daane, assistant editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, won a George Washington Honor Medal Award from the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for an editorial, “The Ground of Freedom,” which appeared in the July 3, 1964, issue. (Reprints of the editorial may be secured by writing to CHRISTIANITY TODAY, 1014 Washington Building, Washington, D. C.)

Dr. and Mrs. Ulises Hernandez of Mexico became the first Latin American Methodist missionaries last month. They were commissioned for service in Ecuador under the United Andean Mission, a cooperative venture of four major U. S. denominations. Hernandez is both a medical doctor and an ordained minister.

Dr. Masao Takenaka, prominent Japanese theologian and chairman of the lay witness committee of the East Asia Christian Conference, was appointed dean of Doshisha University School of Theology in Kyoto, Japan.

Dr. Orville H. McKay, 51, minister of the First Methodist Church in Midland, Michigan, was elected tenth president of Garrett Theological Seminary, a Methodist graduate school of theology affiliated with Northwestern University. McKay, a graduate of Asbury College and Drew University Graduate School, will succeed Dr. Dwight E. Loder at Garrett.

To the westernmost projection of U. S. soil, Hawaii, Billy Graham last month carried his crusades, and pastors in the fiftieth state agreed that never before in the 145-year history of Christianity on the islands had the churches been so united in a single effort.

From the first, a sense of spiritual urgency was felt in the churches. Some thought it was because the war in Viet Nam had suddenly heated up and the people of Hawaii—many of them from military families—knew they were part of the western defense perimeter. Others regarded it as an answer to more than a year of earnest prayer for the Hawaiian Islands. Strange as it may seem to mainlanders, Christianity is embraced by less than 10 per cent of the state’s population.

The Rev. Walter Smyth, director of crusades for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said that the Hawaiian crusade produced a record percentage of ministerial involvement. Dr. Thomas Crosby, pastor of the Central Union Church and co-chairman of the crusade, said more ministers turned out for a breakfast at which Billy Graham spoke than for any other event he had witnessed.

Not everyone was enthusiastic. Two voices were raised in public protest. One was that of an assistant professor of religion at the University of Hawaii who said Graham promoted a “happiness religion” and reinforced “religious prejudice, which is perhaps the most basic prejudice of all.”

A Unitarian minister said the effect of the crusade was to sidestep social reform and added that he suspected certain “unheralded sponsors” were financing the crusade for this reason.

Defense of Graham came from an unusual source. Rabbi Roy A. Rosenberg told his congregation at Temple Emanu-El that the criticism raised a basic religious question:

“Should religious institutions be transformed into secular societies whose primary function will be the debate of social and political issues? Or should religion retain its character as a way of life, teaching man about his God, the relationship of man to God, and, as a corollary, the relationship of man to man.”

The rabbi warned against the danger of churches’ losing their theology while concentrating on a social or political issue. While not agreeing with Graham’s theology, Rosenberg said he respects Graham because “he has a theology, and religion without theology is irrelevant.”

The crusade, held February 14–21 in Honolulu, was extended to three neighboring islands the following week; at each of these, associate evangelists preached for several days and Graham came in for the closing meeting.

The seven meetings held in Honolulu’s 8,300-seat International Center drew a nightly average of 7,100, with a turnaway crowd on the opening night. The closing meeting was held in Honolulu Stadium with 15,500 in attendance.

Crusade officials said 2,907 inquirers were counseled during the eight-day crusade.

STAN MOONEYHAM

A Page One Debut

The New York Times said last month that in considering a report from the United Presbyterian committee drafting a new statement of faith, the denomination’s General Assembly will be taking up a proposal “for the first major doctrinal changes in American Presbyterianism since its establishment in 1706.”

The newspaper, in a page one story in its voluminous Sunday edition, declared that the proposal “would support Presbyterians holding modern theological positions, as well as those with traditional views.” This the committee seeks to do by giving its new statement equal standing with a number of historic creeds (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, October 23, 1964) and including them together in what has been called the “symbolical book of the church.”

A United Presbyterian spokesman says the final draft of the proposed new confession will appear in the denomination’s annual blue book due to appear about April 15. The General Assembly, to be held in Columbus, Ohio, will convene May 20.

The Times carried a complete description of the draft, paraphrasing major sections. It did not quote from the statement but directly attributed a considerable amount of comment on it to Dr. Edward A. Dowey, Jr., professor at Princeton Theological Seminary who has served as committee chairman. The newspaper quoted Dowey as saying that drafts of the proposal were widely discussed last year with seminary and church groups and that they had met with “vigorous criticism of specific points but general acceptance of the main outlines.”

When the proposal reaches the assembly floor, the newspaper predicted, “organized opposition from conservatives can be expected.”

The Times observed that the new statement will “reflect a ‘Christocentric’ rather than a ‘Biblical’ view of theology.”

“Proponents of the revision” were said to be complaining that the doctrines of predestination and the freedom of the Scriptures from error have limited the church’s ability to speak to the modern world. Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, stated clerk, was quoted as saying that the adoption of the proposal would “contribute to the movement for church unity by making our own confessional base more Biblical.”

Time and Newsweek magazines picked up the story the following week. Time asserts that the new confession does not have to deal with predestination because “an amendment to the Westminster Confession way back in 1903 effectively modified the Calvinist doctrine that some men are predestined for salvation while others are damned to hell.” Newsweek observes that “without denying the traditional Calvinistic theories of predestination, the proposed document will focus on salvation as the ‘reconciliation’ of the world to God through Jesus.”

Catholic Developments

One of the world’s leading ecumenists predicted last month that Pope Paul VI will “transform” or revise current Roman Catholic canon law on mixed marriages. The forecast came from Pastor Marc Boegner, for many years president of the French Protestant Federation and a past co-president of the World Council of Churches, after a meeting in Geneva. During that meeting, Augustin Cardinal Bea, president of the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, announced that Roman Catholic authorities had accepted with “great joy” the World Council’s proposal that Vatican-WCC discussions explore the possibilities of dialogue and collaboration.

Mixed-marriage problems were discussed before the Vatican Council as part of a widescale schema on marriage. The bishops voted, however, to remove the schema from the council and send it to the Pontifical Commission for the Revision of the Code of Canon Law. Religious News Service says that during the course of the controversy there has been a general rise in the number of mixed marriages.

In Washington, D. C., last month, a Roman Catholic marriage ceremony was disavowed by the performing priest’s archdiocesan superiors because an Episcopal clergyman had also taken part. The bride is Catholic, the groom Episcopal.

Pressure was also building up for Roman Catholics on the religious liberty issue and the birth control question. A 25-year-old British priest was promptly called to task after he published an article advocating the use of contraceptives by married couples.

The Vatican celebrated something of a victory for religious liberty in the release of Josef Cardinal Beran, Archbishop of Prague, after more than fifteen years of internment and virtual house arrest.

In Rome, performances of The Deputy were banned, and police sought a link with a terrorist bombing at the Vatican.

Authorities in Spain, meanwhile, seem to be taking a harder line against Protestants. Twenty-six churches are reported to be waiting for government authorization. Police in Madrid refused to grant permission for a Protestant fellowship supper. At least two pastors have been fined for distributing Christian literature in recent months. Some Protestant engaged couples have waited from nine to eighteen months for marriage licenses only to be turned down.

Campus Awakening

A spirit of revival came down upon the campus of Wheaton College last month as the climax of a spiritual emphasis week that featured Dr. J. Edwin Orr as guest speaker. At the close of the last evening service, the evangelist-author with an Oxford doctorate invited members of the senior class to step to the front of the chapel to voice personal testimonies. A number did, and they were followed by many other students.

About 1,000 students gathered every evening for services at which attendance was voluntary. So many students lined up to give testimonies on the concluding night that the meeting continued until midnight. The testimonies were punctuated with personal confessions of sin, recalling a larger spiritual awakening that swept the same campus in 1950.

Orr went on to several smaller campuses for preaching engagements and reported somewhat similar responses. At Wheaton, prayer vigils marked a follow-up effort.

Dallas At Forty

Lacking only a charming heroine, the history of Dallas Theological Seminary invites attention from a serious playwright. The backdrop is the cultural center of the American Southwest. The plot is the perennial evangelical struggle to maintain academic respectability in the aftermath of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. The subplot is the determination to expound both the evangelical faith and premillennial dispensationalism in reasonable and scholarly terms. The protagonists are a long list of learned Bible expositors including Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer, Dr. W. H. Griffith Thomas, Dr. H. A. Ironside, Dr. John F. Walvoord, and Dr. Charles C. Ryrie.

Incorporated forty years ago last month, Dallas Theological Seminary has earned a wide reputation for the caliber of its instruction. At least 13 per cent of its graduates now serve as missionaries, 23 per cent as teachers, and 46 per cent as pastors. Among its alumni are some noted evangelical leaders. The campus along Swiss Avenue in Dallas has expanded steadily despite a measure of denominational opposition and a comparative lack of wealthy donors. Some 600 persons helped to celebrate the school’s rich history at a founders’ banquet on February 26.

The seminary is a fountainhead of dispensational theology, a wing of evangelical thought that makes a seven-fold division of biblical revelation. Dispensationalism has vocal critics who charge some of its advocates with dividing churches.

Dispensationalists largely take the Bible literally, and they know their eschatology. A few take off on dogmatic tangents to the distress of more responsible advocates, and Dallas Seminary occasionally catches the backfire. Students once greeted a special lecturer who apparently went overboard on typology with a note on the chapel door, “How many types can you word a minute?”

Is Dallas itself too dogmatic in its promotion of dispensationalism? A scholarly, 256-page defense of the dispensationalist concept by Dean Ryrie of the Dallas graduate school is due from Moody Press April 15. The book, DispensationalismToday, defines dispensationalist teaching, traces its history, and offers detailed rebuttal of its critics. But it is not likely to silence anti-dispensationalists.

Although the seminary does not presently seek accreditation, few doubt its high academic priorities. The faculty members hold Ph.D. degrees from such leading universities as Johns Hopkins, Duke, Illinois, Boston, and Edinburgh. They seek to give students (current enrollment: 327) thorough knowledge of the Bible and to equip them with tools to preach it and teach it effectively. In contrast with three-year courses at other seminaries, Dallas requires four years for its first degree. It is doubtful whether any other seminary gives all its students the extensive grounding in Hebrew and Greek required at Dallas.

But intellectual preparation is not enough, says President Walvoord, “The work of the Holy Spirit is indispensable to effective preparation of the minister of the Word. The seminary, therefore, expects its students to be yielded to the Spirit of God, obedient to his will, and to recognize his divine authority in all areas.”

Anglican Cross Fire

The official responsible for controlling microphones fell asleep during a session of last month’s Church Assembly at Westminster. Under other circumstances it might have been hailed as a merciful release, but the just indignation that descended upon the luckless operator’s head was a reflection of the unexpected utterances of Englishmen on an ecclesiastical occasion.

Things got off to a lively start for the Anglicans when Mr. Ivor Bulmer-Thomas, a redoubtable warrior who favors the bludgeon over the rapier, again spoke his mind. “The spiritual state of the diocese of Southwark,” he declared, “is a matter of disgrace.” Amid gasps and some mirth the Bishop of Southwark, Dr. Mervyn Stockwood, asked for the chair’s protection, and finally the Archbishop of Canterbury ruled the remark out of order. But Mr. Bulmer-Thomas had not finished. He turned his attention to the Honest to God author, Dr. John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich. The latter had criticized a measure that did not allow diocesan authorities to dispose of church property; he cited one instance where, if such powers had been held, a good price could have been obtained. Retorted Mr. Bulmer-Thomas, “The answer to the Bishop of Woolwich was given two thousand years ago—you cannot serve God and Mammon.” He criticized a recent statement of the bishop’s superior (Dr. Stockwood), who said he would like to pull down half the churches in his diocese. Mr. Bulmer-Thomas went on to say he had heard the Bishop of Woolwich “putting up a perfectly splendid defense of atheism. It is not from that quarter that we can look for guidance if we wish to proceed, and if the people of England are to return to the Gospel.”

A report on Crown appointments also provoked some word-slinging. The Bishop of Exeter, Dr. Robert Mortimer, objected to the proposal by which a suffragan bishop would be appointed on the recommendations of the two archbishops and the diocesan bishop, rather than (as now) by the latter only. Dr. Mortimer pointed to the absurdity that someone should have a large say in the appointment of a suffragan bishop in the West Country, whose only knowledge of conditions there might be that he had spent his honeymoon in the area some years ago.

This was an important point, and officialdom brought its big guns to bear on this rare episcopal revolt. The Archbishop of York, Dr. Donald Coggan, expressed polite skepticism that he and his colleague, Dr. Ramsey, should “gang up” on a poor diocesan in the choice of a suffragan—and added that even archbishops disagree on occasion. The argument, not a convincing one, was challenged by the Bishop of Southwark. It was not at all clear whether Dr. Stockwood intended a barbed shaft when he stated that if the two present archbishops continued in office, it would be very difficult for a young bishop to stand up against men of such great experience “as they would be in ten years’ time.” Finally an amendment was carried that in the appointment of suffragans left the initiative in the hands of the diocesan bishop, with the endorsement of the archbishop of his province.

The other major item of business came at the end of the week when the House of Laity met to discuss the proposed Methodist merger, and to make recommendations that will be considered when a final decision is made at the joint-Convocations meeting in May. Much of the misgiving voiced by lay speakers centered around the Service of Reconciliation (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, News, March 15, 1963). Supporters of the services said they were not requiring Methodist ordination (cries of dissent from the High Churchmen) but adding episcopal ordination. The result, it was claimed pragmatically, would provide a ministry acceptable to all. The “studied ambiguity” of the form of service, suggested Mr. Jack Wallace, reflected some such prayer as, “O Lord, we know we are acting a kind of charade; please, do thou bless it.” Charade or not, the House of Laity duly approved it by 95–31, approved in principle the proposed merger by 128–8, and recommended the establishment of a joint Anglican-Methodist consultative body to consider and clarify doubts.

J. D. DOUGLAS

A mother’s smothering love for a child sometimes builds resentment. It often prevents any real understanding of the child, who seldom is given an opportunity for self-expression. It is a selfish kind of love that makes the well-intentioned mother feel righteous and reluctant to question her motives until too late: when the child has rebelled.

Such a mother may have told her child about God’s love, but in setting an example of Christian love in her own daily life she has chosen an easy way that required little thought and no sacrifice.

The crisis of the rebellion shatters her dream world and momentarily shakes her faith. But after a period of agonizing self-appraisal, while the rebellious child stings her heart with cutting remarks and intemperate acts, she somewhat wistfully accepts the realities of the situation and sets about to re-establish, with God’s help, the bonds of love on a more mature and satisfying basis that recognizes her child as a person in his own right.

That is the story of Selma, Alabama, a quiet, respectable city struggling to emerge from its legendary past as a charming cotton center of the Old South to recognition in a progressive, industrialized society. The story just now is in the agonizing stage.

The mother in this parable is the 16,000-member white community in Dallas County, of which Selma is the county seat. The rebellious child, which has grown to be larger than the mother, is the 40,000-member Negro community, more than a third of which is within the city limits where there are an equal number of whites.

There is no doubt that over the years the well-meaning white people of the Selma area have loved the Negroes. They have cared for them in illness and flood; they have bought clothes for them and given them food; they have willed them houses and contributed to funds to erect their churches.

But, as a student at Selma University (a Baptist junior college for Negroes) declared: “We don’t want their love; we want our rights!” Or as the Rev. M. C. Cleveland, a high school teacher who also is the pastor of a Negro Baptist church, explained: “We would rather be paid enough so that we can do those things for ourselves, so that we could have a little dignity and be regarded as human beings.”

Selma is well churched, far above average for the nation; in fact, its church-to-population ratio is high even for the Bible Belt. There are thirty-six white churches, of which fourteen are Baptist, six Presbyterian, and four Methodist. At least half a dozen of them have 1,000 or more members. There are thirty-two Negro churches in the city proper. Fourteen of them are Baptist, five are Methodist or A.M.E., and three are Presbyterian.

Yet Christian concern has not spurred most white church members to look beyond the fine new Negro high school and realize that many of its graduates cannot read or write.

There are only three Negro doctors in town, two dentists, and no lawyers.

While some white Christians have questioned the sincerity of Negro ministers who pray on the courthouse steps, they have no question about white owners of shacks in the downtown Negro area where there are community outhouses.

On the other hand, Negro churchmen who have questioned the good faith of white political leaders in handling Negro demands for registering to vote have not questioned the good faith of their own leaders who have refused to accept some concessions from the whites that the Negroes had asked for or who have distorted some events for national publicity purposes. And some Negro ministers excuse the low state of morals in the Negro community by blaming what they consider white-imposed economic conditions.

The Rev. Frank Matthew, the football-player-type minister of St. Paul Episcopal Church, where many of the white community’s political and social leaders attend, feels, as do most of the whites, that the Negroes have exploited their children by taking them out of school to participate in marches on the courthouse.

“Nobody ever says anything when just as many kids are out of school to pick cotton,” observes the Rev. F. D. Reese, a Baptist minister who also teaches school and is president of the Dallas County Voters League, which has spearheaded the drive to get Negroes registered.

“I would have protested if I had known that the Negro children were missing school to pick cotton. They need to be in school,” explained Mr. Matthew, whose ten-year tenure makes him the dean of Selma’s clergymen.

That’s how little understanding and communication there has been between the races in Selma, the city selected by Dr. Martin Luther King as the place where national attention should be drawn to Alabama’s discriminatory voter-registration laws. King was invited into the situation by local Negro leaders. He is considered an outsider by white leaders, who are quick to point out that one of his assistants, an Alabaman like many others, has a record of relations with Communist fronts.

White and Negro ministers have never had an arrangement for working together in Selma. Some attempts have been made, like the one in 1954 when the Rev. C. C. Brown, of the Negro Presbyterian church, got half a dozen ministers of each race together. Within two years, all the white ministers involved had left town. They had been harrassed with such things as twice-a-day arrests for speeding. For a brief time in 1957, white and Negro Baptists had a biracial committee directing a community center for Negroes; the center folded when it became known that the woman in whose home it was operated was a member of the NAACP. The Rev. John Newton, of First Presbyterian Church, has recently tried to get the Negro and white ministers together to talk.

“They’ve got voting rights and others coming to them, and they’re going to get them,” another minister said of the Negroes. “Our cafes and hotels now are accepting them. We’re complying with the law. We’re going to have to integrate the schools. It will be accepted if done gradually.” Alabama Negroes, he feels, are not ready to shoulder the responsibility that goes with all the freedoms they are seeking.

Little has been done by the white churches, though, to prepare the Negroes. The most extensive work by white churchmen among the Negroes of Selma is being carried on by the Edmund Fathers and Sisters of St. Joseph, who operate a twenty-seven-year-old, eight-grade Catholic school, a seventy-bed hospital, and a forty-bed nursing home. The fathers ran a full-page ad in the local newspaper calling for recognition of the dignity of all men.

But the three priests and eleven nuns are considered “outsiders” by Selmans because they are Northerners. And when a group of Negroes recently attempted to worship in the white Catholic church, they were taken outside and beaten.

A year and a half ago First Presbyterian Church opened its doors to Negroes. But resentment was so intense after four Negro girls were seated in the church balcony that the session—over the objections of Mr. Newton—reversed the policy.

Some of the younger Negro leaders are demanding that churches step up their involvement in the civil rights struggle. They also feel they need “outside help” to rouse Selma’s older Negroes to take part. The older Negro leaders tend to be satisfied with the progress of recent years. They look upon Selma’s public safety director, Wilson Baker, as a man who has saved them from bloodshed. Baker, a former Lutheran ministerial student who now is an active Baptist layman, enforces the law impartially, they feel, and has maintained order despite disruptive attempts by both Negro and white extremists.

“Outside help” is a special sore spot for some whites. The minister of a large Methodist church, who like many other people in Selma today does not want to be quoted on anything because he feels the press has twisted what has already been said, reported this incident: A Negro representative of the National Council of Churches was stopped by a segregationist usher at the Methodist church. The visitor then went to talk with the pastor, who at least three times invited the Negro to come into the worship service with him. The visitor declined, went back north, and declared in print that he had been refused entrance to the church.

Some white leaders—like Roswell Falken-berry, editor of the Selma Times-Journal and an active Episcopal layman, and Mr. Newton—think that the outside “agitators” probably were necessary to stir the conscience of Selma’s white citizens. But many whites (including reform mayor Joseph Smitherman, an active Baptist layman) feel that the outsiders now must get out and the demonstrations cease before the two races can get together to settle their problems in accord with Christian principles, which hold the only answer.

ADON TAFT

Greenwich Time

The place was Greenwich, and it was time for a change. The Episcopal Church’s Executive Council was in Connecticut, not England, and the meantime was not soon enough. Elements of a full-blown civil rights controversy within the church had been present since last December when the 42-member council—the church’s governing body between sessions of the triennial General Convention—passed a resolution which declared that no Episcopal clergyman could engage in race work supported by the denomination’s Church and Race fund without the approval of the bishop of the diocese or missionary district where the work was to be performed.

Introduced by some Southern members of the Executive Council, the requirement was interpreted as an attack on the National Council of Churches’ civil rights programs, particularly in Mississippi. The Episcopal Church and Race fund, a special $100,000 congregational appeal which was renewed for a second year, has given strong support to the NCC’s Commission on Religion and Race—a unit that has come under fire from some Southern churches and communities.

Since the December meeting, protests had come in from a number of Episcopal organizations, and the new Presiding Bishop, the Right Rev. John E. Hines, called for a special order of business to reconsider or clarify the resolution. Last month in Greenwich the council lost little time in rescinding the previous action and reaffirming support for the NCC programs. Grants for the latter were voted which totaled $65,000. The council included a proviso that whenever possible diocesan officials “be consulted with and advised” when Episcopal clergymen or lay members participate in ecumenical or interdenominational programs in their dioceses or missionary districts.

The result was regarded as a victory for Bishop Hines as well as other civil rights workers.

In other action, the council without discussion readily adopted a statement generally supporting President Johnson’s pending aid-to-education bill, which includes assistance to non-public school students. The council said it welcomes the “inclusion of all non-profit schools in proposals for assistance in the purchase of books for school libraries and for student use.” The statement also supported the proposal that “supplementary educational services, including, but not limited to, special public school courses in science, foreign languages, and other fields, be made available to students who also attend church-related or other independent schools.”

FRANK FARRELL

This issue features several articles on Christology. Dr. Bromiley lists what is to be learned from the baptism of Jesus. Dr. Clowney shows how the whole structure of the Word of the Lord points to him who is Lord of the Word. Dr. Stoessel deals with Christ as the ultimate example, and Dr. Allis discusses the role of the blood at the Lord’s table.

Dean Linton’s essay discusses the fallacies in the dogma of human perfectibility. To try to understand history without allowing for the reality of evil is to make of man’s past a conundrum, he says.

The anecdote in the sermon answers the purpose of an engraving in a book.” So said Charles Haddon Spurgeon in one of his lectures to young ministers. Let’s think that one over a bit, for surely anecdote must be given a place in this excursive series on the pictorial element in preaching.

As currently used, “anecdote” has, to some extent at least, broken company with its etymology. Its Greek components add up to the meaning of “not given out.” Originally, therefore, an anecdote was something hitherto unpublished, something that its teller was releasing for the first time. Even now, when custom has given to the word a much broader definition, most listeners are struck by the vividness that may suddenly light up the sermon when the preacher says, “Yesterday as I was walking down Fifth Avenue.…”

The anecdote, though its purpose is manifestly illustrative, differs from, let us say, an illustration drawn from science in these particulars: (1) it belongs to the realm of event or experience; (2) it is personal (it happened in your experience or that of someone of whom you have knowledge); and (3) it normally can be told with brevity.

On one of those rare occasions when the late W. E. Sangster of London finished a sermon with an anecdote, his text was Genesis 41:51, “God … hath made me forget.” His subject: “Remember to Forget!” This was the ending:

It was Christmas time in my home. One of my guests had come a couple of days early and saw me sending off the last of my Christmas cards. He was startled to see a certain name and address. “Surely, you are not sending a greeting to him,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“But you remember,” he began, “eighteen months ago.…”

I remembered, then, the thing the man had publicly said about me, but I remembered also resolving at the time, with God’s help, that I would remember to forget. And God had “made” me forget!

I posted the card.

Here is the anecdotal form in preaching in its most authentic expression: this happened to the preacher.

The less authentic but still effective form appears when, for example, I take this incident and employ it, of course with due recognition of the facts surrounding it. (Heaven forgive me if I plagiarize it and palm it off as an experience of my own!)

Dr. Hillyer Straton, of the First Baptist Church of Malden, Massachusetts, has a year-end sermon on the Christian view of time that he opens with an anecdote drawn from the life of nineteenth-century scientist Thomas Huxley. The absent-minded savant, according to the story, leaped off a train at Euston Station, London, late for a speaking engagement. Jumping into a taxi, he shouted to the driver, “Hurry, I’m late!” Off they went at a furious speed. Huxley, having momentarily relaxed, suddenly sat up and called, “Where am I going?” To which the driver replied: “I don’t know, sir, where you are going, but we’ll get you there in a hurry!”

A mirror held up to our times!

As for anecdotal sources, Mr. Spurgeon told his students that they may be found anywhere: most obviously in one’s own experience, in biography, in history (whether recorded by Gibbon or the Times). “Dear brethren,” he urged, “do try with all your might to get the power to see a parable, a simile, an illustration, wherever it is to be seen.”

In mood and character anecdotes suitable for pulpit use exhibit a wide variety. They may evoke a chuckle or tug at a tear. They may be tender as a lullaby or piercing as a rapier. They may embody the intuitive insights of innocent childhood or the demonic shrewdness of evil’s old age.

One day, when my only son was less than five, I forbade his going swimming. On my return from an appointment his mother told me that she caught him just before he disobediently reached the water’s edge. When she reminded him that he was under instruction not to go in, his ingenious defense was: “Aw, mother, I wasn’t going to be in long enough for even God to see me!”

It is fair to say, I think, that this episode has never been shared with a congregation without producing a lively response in which the universal tendency to “rationalize” is smashed home to adults and juniors alike.

Are there any anecdotal perils? There are indeed:

Unreality. Anecdotes must be genuine. They must ring true.

Inaccuracy. Some preacher stories in circulation have too many versions. We need to sharpen up on our facts.

Frivolity. The “funny” story can be overworked or it can be controlled. The masterful expositor F. B. Meyer told a friend of mine that he deliberately used something in a lighter vein about midway through his sermon—to rest and refresh his congregation. That makes sense. It is a far cry from the “one-after-another” variety of sermon, the effect of which is to reduce preaching to the frivolous.

Impropriety. Vulgarity should always be shunned. The involvement of persons should be discreet. An incident described in one part of the country may be improper; told in another the effect may be nothing but good. The betrayal of confidences is a danger that must always be avoided.

Anecdotal pitfalls, however, are as nothing compared with the potentials. These potentials, brought to happy fruition by the skilled hand of the pulpit craftsman, mercifully blessed by the guiding Spirit of truth, will go far toward rendering our preaching what Spurgeon insisted it should be—“life-like and vivid.”

Thielicke Speaks to the Fundamentalists

Between Heaven and Earth: Conversations with American Christians, by Helmut Thielicke (Harper and Row, March 24, 1965, 224 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by Carl F. H. Henry, editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The colorful personality of Helmut Thielicke and his engaging comment on current issues supply continuity for an otherwise disjointed volume reflecting the Hamburg theologian’s meetings with American Christians. While a lively relevance pervades much of Between Heaven and Earth, these “conversations” often prove to be lengthy excursions with little opportunity for inquiry at the crossroads.

Dr. Thielicke succeeds most in his secondary aim of biting into some current social problems; in his primary aim, to supply effective theological guidance to American evangelicals, he falls far short. He is at his best in the chapter on “Racial Integration and the Christian.” There he recalls that the race issue between Nazi and Jew was a turning point in German history, and reminds Americans how strongly the race question touches the foundations of the Christian faith and the human conscience. Moreover, he summons the churches to be concerned with their spiritual priorities rather than with a one-sided reliance on political engagement (although his highly readable chapter on the Nazi regime is replete with political storm warnings). Thielicke locates the critical element in the American outlook, however, not in racial or political affairs, but rather in a wrong attitude toward suffering—that is, the widespread notion that suffering is fundamentally inadmissible.

On the theological side he lends necessary emphasis to the indestructibility of the divine image in man, the reality of general revelation, the centrality of God’s saving acts consummated in Jesus Christ, the resurrection as constitutive of faith in Christ’s person, and the Holy Spirit’s enlightenment. Only now and then (“Here this faithfulness of God is by no means an anthropomorphic expression for an indifferent metaphysical principle that stands unmoved above the antitheses of faith and unbelief, good and evil, embracing them all beyond polarity”) does Thielicke’s presentation become abstruse.

But Thielicke’s primary objective is to furnish theological guidance to American fundamentalists. “Because the American churches have so many fundamentalists, and because these hold in their hands an essential portion of their spiritual substance, I regard the question of how American Christianity deals with the problem of fundamentalism as nothing short of fateful for its destiny.” Regarding fundamentalists as “much of the best, but frozen, spiritual capital of the church,” he earnestly hopes they will come to terms with these “conversations” and hence proposes that the book be used in study groups. He commends the spontaneous religious interest and concern for practical piety among fundamentalists but is rightly troubled by their neglect of such concerns as the Gospel’s relation to culture, philosophy, and society. Yet in this circle he has found “brothers in the faith” who want “to preserve the substance of the Christian faith,” who are “not infrequently the most dependable and self-sacrificial members of the congregations,” and who have too often been unfairly criticized “from the high horse of Enlightenment.” “If American Christianity loses these people, who are often the most vital members of its body … this could be fatal to its cause.”

Thielicke considers himself as bearing a “special responsibility … with evangelicals and fundamentalists”—and his main aim is to detach them from a commitment to the verbal inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible. He proposes to rescue them from “the dichotomy of their life” and from “many repressions” presumably springing from this commitment. To further this goal he adopts an attitude promotive of dialogue (avoid intellectual arrogance which only hardens positions; reflect the desire in common with them to draw spiritual life from the mighty acts of God; love them, and stress one’s interest in their spiritual good). “They are naive,” says Thielicke, but sincerely so, since their positions spring from a desire to protect their faith; hence discreet dialogue requires reiteration that the proposed alternative is truly pro fidei. What momentarily disarms some of Thielicke’s fundamentalist interrogators is his employment of the attack on verbal inspiration assertedly to support and mature faith and to honor rather than depreciate or relativize the Word of God. In the subsequent dialogue he not only attacks biblical inerrancy and verbal inspiration and champions biblical criticism, but also hedges almost to the point of denial on the virgin birth of Jesus and faintly reflects other turning points of his own theological blend of liberal, neo-orthodox, and evangelical elements.

Thielicke conducts only a running raid on certain fundamentalist positions; he does not clearly reveal his beliefs on substitutionary atonement, bodily resurrection, and Christ’s visible personal return—though the Resurrection is centrally important to his thought. Nor does he present his listeners with a coherent alternative in respect to religious authority. None of Thielicke’s hearers or readers will doubt his vibrant personal faith; all will esteem his role of resistance to the Nazis and admire his effective ministry to university students abroad. But many, interested in the larger framework of his thought, are equally eager to pose counter-questions, and doubt that the truth of God holds adequate place in his system.

In the opening dialogue Thielicke handles the question “Are there errors in the Bible?” evasively; he calls it “a false and oversimplified way of putting the question,” ascribes it to the theological immaturity of the inquirer, and appeals to Jesus’ use of counter-questions to justify his own evasion.

In answer to another question (whether the Bible and the Word of God are identical), he caricatures verbal inspiration as mechanical dictation, as requiring a legalistic view of Scripture, and he depicts reliance on Scripture as a distrust of Christ and a denial of God’s gracious accommodation (hence, in principle, the Incarnation). This line of assault on the high view of Scripture has so often been rebutted in competent evangelical literature that informed conservatives in America are quite immune to it. They frankly concede problems in their view of Scripture, but they are unpersuaded that such difficulties are not greatly multiplied by the modern alternatives.

Thielicke moves from the worthy premise that God meets us in history that is subject to historical study, to rationalistic conclusions that smuggle preconceived critical theories into the scriptural narrative. He finds borrowed elements of pagan myths in the biblical account of Creation and makes the asserted dependence of the Bible writers upon the science of their time a “sign” that God’s Word truly becomes flesh. If for Barthians the Bible is the book through which God speaks, for Thielicke it is the ship in which Christ sleeps. From the fact that sinfulness and self-sufficiency seep into man’s historical work, he concludes that even the content of Scripture is necessarily distorted—rather than stressing that contemporary critics reflect this fallibility and allowing that Scripture is uniquely inspired. For Thielicke, Lessing’s insistence on historical relativism apparently makes the historic evangelical outlook impossible.

Thielicke protests any “caricature” of Bultmann as a heretic, yet freely caricatures verbal inspiration as mere mechanical dictation. He holds that Christianity should not be immunized against Bultmannism, for Thielicke’s intention, like Tillich’s, is the radical contemporizing of the Christian faith. Yet Thielicke considers that the triumph of Bultmann’s theology would be disastrous for the Church, and proceeds to a discerning critique of that theology, criticizing Bultmann’s enclosing himself within philosophy of science with the result that the factuality of Christ’s resurrection vanishes.

Thielicke deplores historical-critical study of the Bible on rationalistic motivations but encourages its pursuit with the motive of discerning what the biblical writers intend to say. Here he distinguishes the means of expression of the biblical writers from their intention, arguing that it would be wrong for us to take over the biblical concepts and presuppositions (as in the Genesis cosmology). Yet for him historical criticism of the Bible assertedly enriches Christian faith by dislodging one’s own presuppositions and allowing Scripture to speak for itself, whereas verbal inspiration levels the Bible by eliminating J, E, P, and D from the Pentateuch!

But historical criticism is not “a method of spiritual discipline which will necessarily lead a person by logical and absolutely sure steps to fullness of faith,” since this is the Holy Spirit’s work. At this point Thielicke properly distinguishes between psychological certainty and historical probability. Nevertheless, for him this spiritual enlightenment of the believer is a matter of spontaneity of faith and does not involve the establishment of an objective external authority. But elsewhere Thielicke criticizes Bultmann because the miracle of the Spirit, instead of merely helping the believer to understand, becomes determinative and supplies the object of understanding.

According to Thielicke, the Virgin Birth is not a dogma constitutive of the person and work of Christ and of Christian confession of him as Lord and hence is of secondary importance. He refuses to make the Resurrection merely a commentary on faith, insisting that it belongs to faith’s foundation. Likewise, “the miraculous birth of Jesus Christ is constitutive of faith in his person; it is the conditio sine qua non for my being able to say ‘Christ is Lord’ ”—he was “conceived by the Holy Ghost.” But the Virgin Birth is not an indispensable condition of belief in the miraculous birth, Thielicke insists. He states that he is uncertain and undecided whether the primitive Church originated the Virgin Birth story. Possibly it is a metaphorical commentary on faith (and Thielicke himself repeats the phrase in the Apostles’ Creed only in this mood). But he buttresses his disbelief of the Virgin Birth narratives of Matthew and Luke by gratuitiously contending that “in John and Paul the entrance of Christ into our humanity is presented in quite a different way,” and by other rationalizations, including a highly distorted appeal to Luther.

Helmut Thielicke is an accomplished scholar and a fascinating preacher, but he is at his best when he is proclaiming the great truths rather than discoursing about his doubts. Perhaps the closure of the space-time gap between the United States and Europe has once again made Machen’s The Virgin Birth of Jesus relevant reading.

CARL F. H. HENRY

Protestants In Russia

The Faith of the Russian Evangelicals, by J. C. Pollock (McGraw-Hill, 1964, 190pp., $3.95), is reviewedby Paul A. Zimmerman, president, Concordia Lutheran Junior College, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

This little volume provides a wealth of material for those interested in the fate of the Christian Church in Russia. On the basis of firsthand information and historical research, J. C. Pollock has provided a moving account of the development of Protestant Christianity in Russia, its severe persecution, and its amazing vitality.

The author, a British clergyman, first sketches the way in which Christianity is repressed by Communism. Although a small measure of freedom to worship is permitted, the scales are heavily weighted against Christians. Atheistic propaganda presents Christianity as an evil brand of unscientific fanaticism. Christians are not free to reply publicly to such attacks. They may not teach openly. They may not carry on mission activity. Every effort is made to discourage faith, to harass members, to stamp out the life of the Church.

Pollock also traces the amazing genesis of the evangelical movement. The beginnings go back 125 years to a Russia under the tyranny of the Tsars and the dead hand of a fossilized Russian Orthodox Church. As a result of the influence of German colonists planted in the Ukraine in the eighteenth century, there arose an irrepressible group of stronghearted people who preached a simple theology of sin and grace. The Russian Baptists emerged as the strongest of several hardy pioneer groups professing the simple faith of the Bible. Others included the so-called Stundists, Pentecostals, and the Seventh-day Adventists.

The Communist revolution in 1917–18 first brought religious freedom to the evangelicals. But the atheistic bias of Communism soon brought repression. Although some tolerance and relief was secured by a decree of Khrushchev in 1954, this was largely reversed in 1963 when atheistic propaganda and pressures were revived.

The reader will note with interest the patriotism of the Russian evangelicals and their comparison of their state to that of the Christians in the Roman Empire in the days of the Apostle Paul. It is interesting to learn that many of them have no quarrel with the Russian economic system. Some groups oppose anything Communistic. Others ask only the right to worship in peace.

The vitality of the Church is painted in words that pay tribute to the faith and endurance of the Christians of Russia. One is thrilled by the raw courage and enduring confidence of these men and women of God. Equally inspiring is the fact that the power of Christ and his Gospel is felt also among the youth. The Church is not dying out. It is alive and growing.

This book is good reading. It makes clear that atheistic Communism will never tolerate the Christian faith. And it makes clearer that even the “gates of hell” will not conquer the Church of Christ. The age and the faith of the martyrs is not a thing of the past!

PAUL A. ZIMMERMAN

Athens Speaking

Christianity and History, by E. Harris Harbison (Princeton University, 1964, 292pp.,$6.50), is reviewed by C. Gregg Singer, professor of history, Catawba College, Salisbury, North Carolina.

This series of twelve essays is divided into two parts: the first six deal with the problems involved in the Christian understanding of history and the last six with the Christian approach to history as shown in the Protestant Reformation. Underlying all is the question Tertullian raised seventeen centuries ago: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Professor Harbison, well-known historian of Princeton University, seeks to answer this question, which has haunted Christian scholars in all fields of learning from Tertullian to our own day. But as the author explores the relation that binds faith and knowledge, the Church and the university, he arrives at conclusions quite different from those that Tertullian affirmed as guiding principles for Christian thought.

Professor Harbison is quite sure that the Academy has something of value to say to Jerusalem. Knowledge, whether it comes from Athens, Moscow, or Mount Wilson, from Plato, Machiavelli, or even Karl Marx, is of value in itself, and the Church must listen to what pagans, ancient or modern, have to say. Part one treats one question: Is there a Christian philosophy of history? In his answer, Professor Harbison’s willingness to allow Athens to speak to Jerusalem blunts his belief in the possibility of a Christian philosophy of history. At this point he seems to become a skeptic and to deny such a possibility. His conclusion is that the Christian who is also a historian will be known, not by a full-rounded philosophy of history, but by his attitude toward history. The Christian historian will see a divine purpose in history that is only partially revealed, “a destiny which is religious in the deepest meaning of the word, in which human freedom and divine guidance complement each other in some mysterious way” (p. 33).

In part two, which assesses the Reformation, it seems to the reviewer that Professor Harbison misses the real nature of the doctrine of the sovereignty of God in the thinking of the Reformers, and thus fails to differentiate between the voluntarism of the modern totalitarian state and the voluntarism inherent in the Calvinistic doctrine of the sovereignty of God. In fact, the author makes it quite clear that he does not follow Calvinistic theology, in which he was apparently reared, for he accepts the conclusions of critical scholarship and rejects the infallibility of the Scriptures and the doctrine of election. His explanation of the position of Calvin and Luther is far from convincing and quite unacceptable to those who believe that in the Reformation a sovereign God was calling his Church back to those great truths of the Scriptures that lay buried under layers of medieval sacramentalism and sacerdotalism. Professor Harbison insists that Calvin saw the need for disciplining and rationalizing the emancipated religious will and that he accomplished his purpose in his doctrines of the sovereignty of God and divine election. Yet while these doctrines may have been socially necessary in the early sixteenth century, they are revolting to the modern mind. For such reasons the author’s conclusions in the chapter on Calvin’s sense of history fall short of that view of history which is inherent in historic Calvinism.

In this collection of essays the author manifests a burning passion to find a Christian answer to the problem of history; yet he fails to achieve the answer because he allows the Academy to speak too loudly to the theology of the Reformation which he professes to uphold. Nonetheless, the book has much value and expresses many brilliant insights. It reflects the author’s yearning for a Christian view of culture and history and the inability of liberal theology to furnish it. The Academy fails to come to his aid in his search for answers to these crucial questions.

C. GREGG SINGER

Between The Testaments

From the Exile to Christ: A Historical Introduction to Palestinian Judaism, by Werner Foerster, translated by Gordon E. Harris (Fortress, 1964, 247 pp., $4.85), is reviewed by Jakob Jocz, professor of systematic theology, Wyclifje College, Toronto, Ontario.

The author, professor of New Testament at the University of Munster, West Germany, is known to scholars as one of the contributors to Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. The field this book covers has received repeated attention, and it is no longer easy to make an original contribution. Professor Foerster very wisely attempted to write, not a learned work, but a useful one for ministers, teachers, and Bible readers. In this he has largely succeeded. Furthermore, by paying special attention to the Dead Sea documents he has provided us with a wider perspective on the history “between the Testaments.” For his documentation he relies on the traditional sources such as the Pseudepigrapha, Josephus, and Philo. His rabbinic quotations are culled from Strack and Billerbeck’s commentary to the New Testament from Talmud and Midrash. His interpretation of Pharisaism is therefore second-hand and occasionally tinged with prejudice. But on the whole he is a fair critic who tries to be just to the opposite party.

Some problems raised in the book receive no answer, chiefly because none is possible. But the author seems to leave it at that without a word of explanation. Foerster tells us, for instance, that the Samaritans “were circumcised, possessed the Law and yet stood in irreconcilable opposition to the Jews” (p. 40). The reader, naturally, would like to hear his opinion of why this was so, especially since completely alien groups like the Idumeans and Pereans were incorporated into Jewry after their forced conversion.

Similarly puzzling is the statement that the meals of the Qumran community “appear to have been regulated by certain purity rules, judging by the buried animal bones discovered in Khirbet Qumran” (p. 64). If Foerster means that the bones are of animals sanctioned by Mosaic law, he is simply saying the obvious; but if he has something else in mind, then the reader is left guessing.

This reviewer found the most interesting part of the book to be the elucidating remarks on New Testament texts, especially with reference to the historic situation: Acts 5:36 in connection with Theudas the rebel leader; Second Thessalonians 2:4 in connection with Caligula, who ordered his effigy to be placed in the Temple; Acts 21:38 and Mark 13:22 with reference to the “Egyptian Jew” who assumed messianic leadership; Mark 12:14, the question regarding taxes to Caesar; and many others.

The statement that women could not offer sacrifices (p. 127) needs to be qualified, for according to Leviticus 12:6–8 they were under obligation to offer the sacrifices peculiar to women. It is not quite fair to blame the Pharisees for misinterpreting the doctrine of election as if national superiority were not a common human trait (p. 174).

On the whole, the author tends to take rabbinic sayings too seriously and to interpret them as if they were authoritative expressions comparable to the doctrinal statements of the Church. The rabbinic mood varied with the circumstances, and hostility or friendship toward Gentiles depended upon the political condition of Jewry.

The book reads smoothly, though the translator has not always managed to resist the influence of German syntax. At the bottom of page 174 we have a typical German sentence though the vocabulary is English. There are some other minor blemishes: “Lehrschriften” are not “doctrinal writings” in this context but didactic writings (p. 27, n. 11). Nietzsche’s “Lust” means not “desire” but pleasure (p. 29); “novelettish” (p. 33) is an unusual adjective and leaves the reader guessing what is meant.

These few blemishes, however, ought not to detract from the usefulness of the book as a background for the New Testament.

JAKOB JOCZ

Not That Black

Black Religion: The Negro and Christianity in the United States, by Joseph R. Washington, Jr. (Beacon Press, 1964, 320pp., $5), is reviewed by Donald H. De Young, pastor, Elmendorf Reformed Church, New York, New York.

“Separate education facilities are inherently unequal.” The Supreme Court decision of 1954 has brought the rush of a civil rights movement that has blown the fog away from many of the inequalities in American life. The Church has not escaped the judgment. In Black Religion Mr. Washington brings to the door of the Church this verdict: Racially separated churches are inherently unequal.

The author is a Negro with a doctorate from Boston University. He is presently chaplain and assistant professor of religion and philosophy at Dickinson College. The thesis supporting the verdict is that Negro religion not only is organizationally divorced from mainstream Protestantism but is divorced in content as well. In fact, the author insists that the content is so vaguely related that Negro religion should be classified separately along with Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism!

Negro “folk religion” is not to be confused with black religion as seen in the Negro church. Folk religion is the spirit of freedom-loving men. It is mainly social, economic, and political, and its highest loyalty is the advancement of the race. As for the Negro denominations, “there is still absent any theological depth to provide meaning beyond the era of protest.” Dr. Martin Luther King is honored as a leader in the folk-religion tradition of civil rights but is considered not to have any real theological influence on Negro religion.

What has happened is summarized on page 234:

Having outlived its usefulness as a community center and never having been permitted to attune its life to the dynamics of the Protestant tradition of the Christian faith, independent Negro religion is a most extraordinary phenomenon. As we have seen Negro religion is an attempt to develop fraternalism in response to paternalism of white Protestantism. Although it intended to imitate Protestantism, it developed solely into racial fellowship with no other reason for existence. The pervasive spuriousness has so confused its interpreters that nearly all have concluded that “the Negro church is an ordinary American church with certain traits exaggerated because of caste.” But the contrary is true. Negro religion was never steeped in the theological, Biblical, cultural and historical reality of Protestantism. Negro religion would wither away were it not for the forces of segregation and discrimination which demand its existence as an option for Negro outcasts.

White Protestant denominations need to face the verdict of this book. In effect it is a Macedonian call to stay in racially changing areas and share the historic faith. We have fled areas with the justifications of “they have their churches.” There are the ridiculous myths like “all Negroes are religious.” It is time we face the tragically detrimental effects of segregation in the Church. The establishment of racial churches was an admission that our faith was not the inclusive structure its Founder had claimed. Not only could it not close the gaps of the world; it even extended and deepened those divisions. In this way the Church becomes another aspect of the world!

Although I accept the validity of this plea for inclusion in the historic stream of the Protestant tradition, I cannot accept the presentation of the Negro church as an institution and fellowship with dynamics completely external to itself. The author describes black religion within the limitations of man and society. But certainly the Holy Spirit does not call a man to Christ purely for protest or negative manifestations in the Lord’s Body! I feel the author lets his ax fall too harshly on black Christianity, limited, frustrated, and distorted as it may be through segregation. It may be that he has lived so close to it that he cannot see the positive gifts the Holy Spirit gives to believers. I have lived within the structures of the white denominations, and I have felt the same disgusting sterility and inadequacy within all the rich tradition, culture, and theology, since all this was so often divorced from the dynamic ethic of application in society. When I came to the inner city I found Negro Christians willing to help me apply some of this rich tradition! Yes, the Negro church needs the white church; but the white church desperately needs the Negro Christian just as much. The book did not emphasize this part of the inequality. The Negro church I have met does have something vital to give.

Whatever measure we want to use, the Church remains the creation of the Holy Spirit. Recognizing this truth, we need each other. Christ is not divided, and even though his Body may be influenced by external forces it is never completely determined by social, economic, and political factors. Yet this book makes a vital contribution to the revolution of our day. “For we are not separate units but intimately related to each other in Christ” (Eph. 4:25, Phillips).

DONALD H. DE YOUNG

Book Briefs

The Heidelberg Story, by Edward J. Masselink (Baker, 1964, 121 pp., $2.50). The story of the birth of the sweetest religious document of the Reformation. Lucid language, good pictures.

Contraception and Holiness: The Catholic Predicament, by Thomas D. Roberts (Herder and Herder, 1964, 346 pp., $5.50). This book is a plea to Roman Catholic authorities, and especially to the Second Vatican Council, to alter the position that contraception is intrinsically immoral.

Last Things First, by Gordon Rupp (Fortress, 1964, 80 pp., $2). Four provocative essays which do many things, always with literary grace.

The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, by Peter G. J. Pulzer (John Wiley, 1964, 364 pp., $5.95).

My Friends, the New Guinea Headhunters, by Benjamin T. Butcher (Doubleday, 1964, 272 pp., $4.95). The story of a missionary who put the conversion of the Papuans far down on the list of his objectives.

A Shortened Arrangement of the Holy Bible (Revised Standard Version), edited by Robert O. Ballou (Lippincott, 1964, 773 pp., $7.95). For the person too busy to read the Bible.

New Hymns for Church and Home, by Leland Merrill Miller (self-published, 1964, 154 pp., $1.95). All the hymn tunes were composed by the author, who also wrote 115 of the 129 texts. Others by such men as Charles Wesley, Kipling, Cowper.

The Teacher’s Yoke: Studies in Memory of Henry Trantham, edited by E. Jerry Vardaman and James Leo Garrett, Jr. (Baylor University Press, 1964, 320 pp., $4.95).

One Small Candle: The Pilgrims’ First Year in America, by Thomas J. Fleming (W. W. Norton, 1964, 222 pp., $4). A fascinating story that begins in London with the Pilgrims’ signing a contract with the crusty captain of the Mayflower and ends with the first Thanksgiving. With repeated looks at those basic problems that confront the beginning of a new nation.

The Wesleyan Bible Commentary, Volume IV: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, by Ralph Earle, Harvey J. S. Blaney, and Charles W. Carter (Eerdmans, 1964, 749 pp., $8.95). A good practical commentary on the Bible as seen from the Wesleyan theological tradition.

Paul Tillich in Catholic Thought, edited by Thomas A. O’Meara, O. P., and Celestin D. Weisser, O. P. (The Priory Press, 1964, 323 pp., $5.95). Fifteen essays by about ten Roman Catholics on the thought of Tillich, and an afterword by Tillich himself.

Officials of the World Council of Churches, attending a central committee meeting in Nigeria, told the press they believe the new Soviet regime “may be undertaking a major conciliatory shift in its attitude toward Christianity.” Evidence presented to The Star indicates that the World Council officials, to put it bluntly, were talking through their clerical hats.

In their statement in Nigeria, the World Council leaders cited and quoted an article which appeared last fall in Kommunist, an official mass-circulation publication of the Soviet Communist Party. The author was M. Mchedloff.

The story from Nigeria, by the New York Times News Service, summarized the Kommunist article as “a call for a completely fresh re-evaluation of Christianity.” An emphasis on growing possibilities for cooperation between Marxists and Christians was cited. Some quotations were used.

The gist of the interpretation of the article was that official Soviet policy now finds that Christians are not such bad people, after all. One expression was that “The article appeared to go a long way in justifying Marxist tolerance of Christian churches within the Communist world.” Several churchmen at the meeting were said to have hailed the document “as signaling an increased relaxation of restrictions on churches in the Communist bloc.”

A friend has provided us with a full translation of the Mchedloff article, from the October issue of Kommunist. After reading it through, we wonder what on earth the World Council officials in Nigeria read, or what color of glasses they were wearing at the time.

The article does indeed suggest a new look at Christianity. The reasoning we find in the article, however, is far different from that which the churchmen seemed to find. Mchedloff does not speak of, or remotely suggest, any conciliatory shift of Soviet attitude! The exact opposite is the case. Mchedloff’s logic is that Christianity is falling apart and losing its adherents, and therefore Communists need no longer fear its influence.

“Side by side with the aspiration of the ruling capitalist circles to fully use clericalism in all its spheres of religious and public life,” he says in an early paragraph, “and with the outcome of capitalist reality itself, of the religious illusions in the consciousness of exploited people, one can see as never before an intensive process of failing and weakening of the traditional influence of religion upon the believers.”

“There is a straight breaking with the religion,” he says, “growth of atheism, anti-clericalism and free-thinking among different classes of the population, first of all among the working class.”

It is the clergy, he says, which is making a conciliatory shift. “In order not to lose definitively its control over the decreasing flock, the clergy is obliged to find a new approach, new ways and possibilities for the ‘dialogue with the world.’ ” This new approach, he says, is a discovery that Communism is not so bad, that it aims toward goals common with those of religion. This new attitude is supposed to enable the remnants of believers to remain despite their discovery that Communism is the real truth of life.

The Nigeria story quotes from the article. “A movement or an activity cannot be classified as counter-revolutionary or reactionary simply because it appears among Christians, runs one quotation,” “Such a simplification has nothing in common with the Marxist aim of an objective analysis of the facts.”

Our translation of that same passage goes like this: “It is impossible to consider every movement, every action or statement as anti-revolutionary, reactionary, only because they appeared among religious people. Such simplification has nothing to do with the objective, Marxist analysis of facts.” The difference is subtle, but it is meaningful. The meaning becomes more clear if we read on.

“Due to various reasons,” says the next sentence, “insufficient standard of consciousness, lack of knowledge of scientific theory, traditions of the present country, religious education, and so on, the democratic progressive motives or actions can take a religious form.” In other words, when the church is credited with progressive goals, it’s because people don’t know any better.

As the conclusion of the Kommunist article, the Nigeria story quotes this sentence: “The absence of the revolutionary role from religious ideology is no argument against close collaboration of Communists and believers in a common fight for progress and humanity.”

That sentence appears toward the end of the article. Again we find elucidation, suggesting a different interpretation of the conclusion, a little farther on. Consider this quotation:

“Being convinced on experience that the scientific socialism in fact is trying to obtain humanitarian aims of surpassing and elevating the man, to eradicate all kinds of social injustice, all the greatest masses of believers understand the necessity of close collaboration with the Communists. The ideologists of Christianity must admit that with regret.”

Kommunist does not say that Communism needs Christianity. It says that Christianity needs Communism. There’s a world of difference.

The November issue of Agitator, a party magazine for the leaders, rather than for the masses, also discusses the religious question. It has this to say:

“The religious moral is completely contrary to the Communist one.… The attempts of the supporters of religion to adapt themselves to the present epoch show that the positions of religion are weakening every day, that the number of believers is steadily decreasing.… The party and various public organizations, agitators, propagandists must perfect much more and enlarge the atheistic work, trying to obtain a complete overcoming of religious survivals.

“The religious ideology is strange to our society in any kind, any form. The task of our agitators, of all workers of ideological front, is to know how to tear down the rosy cover from the teaching of the ideologists of religion, unmask their time-serving, strengthen the Communist world outlook in all Soviet people.”

Does that look like a conciliatory shift? We fear the World Council leaders have looked at Communist writings and read into them what they wanted to read.

It wasn’t there.—Reprinted by permission from THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR, February 8, 1965.