This issue has to do with educational concerns beyond the formal academic program.

Co-editor Frank E. Gaebelein deals critically but constructively with the gap between evangelical convictions and aesthetic values (page 3). Other essays discuss the sensitive areas of communication with youth, drama and the Church, and the training of handicapped children.

Editor Carl F. H. Henry concludes his assessment of evangelical issues in Europe (page 20).

NEWS: Special Report

For the National Lutheran Council, it appeared that day was dying in the west. Meeting on the West Coast for the first time since its organization in 1918 as the cooperative agency of American Lutheranism, the NLC continued the process of dismantling itself while looking toward the probable formation of a larger and more inclusive agency. The three-day process in Hollywood’s Knickerbocker Hotel appeared painless enough, the warm breezes from the Hollywood hills offering some compensation.

But the calm was broken one day by fifty-mile-an-hour winds, and as if in accompaniment, the NLC in perhaps its penultimate meeting cut loose with some of its biggest news of the past decade: endorsement of proposed Lutheran-Roman Catholic theological conversations. By unanimous action, the thirty-eight councillors representing churches comprising two-thirds of U. S. Lutherans approved official co-sponsorship of such talks along with the recently established Catholic “Bishops’ Commission for Ecumenical Affairs.”

Lutheran participation will be sponsored by the NLC in its capacity as the U. S. National Committee for the Lutheran World Federation. The theological conversations are expected to begin after concurrence by the LWF and expected authorization by the Catholic commission.

The NLC also invited the 2,700,000-member Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod to participate as it does in current Lutheran-Reformed conversations. Though not a member of the NLC, the Missouri Synod cooperates in some NLC agencies and is now negotiating with the two churches that compose the NLC—the 3,227,000-member Lutheran Church in America and the 2,544,000-member American Lutheran Church—toward possible formation of a new cooperative agency for common theological study and Christian service. To be known as the “Lutheran Council in the United States of America,” the new agency will begin to function January 1, 1967, if approved at church conventions this year and next.

In Hollywood, the NLC took steps toward disengagement of its function as the American Committee for the Lutheran World Federation. A continuing though restructured U. S. National Committee is in prospect. Neither the Missouri Synod nor the Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches—also expected to join the new agency—belongs to the LWF.

The NLC also moved toward setting up its campus ministry as a separate entity, to be conducted bilaterally by the LCA and ALC. Although the new agency as proposed will have a Division of Educational Services, these services will not include a combined campus ministry. Lack of doctrinal agreement is the major obstacle to joint works at colleges and universities. This, it is felt, must await the establishment of pulpit and altar fellowship between the church bodies.

Church-state relations drew major attention in addresses and division reports. Following the American tradition in this area more than Martin Luther himself, U. S. Lutherans traditionally have been more cautious than many other Protestants in this country when it comes to breaching church-state separation.

NLC’s executive director, Dr. Paul C. Empie, pointed to the need for a philosophy that “will articulate explicitly and succinctly the reasoning according to which the churches, by the various nature of their God-given mission, are obligated to exert spiritual influence on national life.” The Economic Opportunity Act, he said, confronts all church bodies with decisions. He noted that Lutheran World Relief stood alone in its opposition to provisions in the recent congressional revision of Public Law 480, which, in addition to surplus commodities, would make government counterpart funds available to voluntary agencies for use in their relief programs. “This opposition,” be added, “did not signify that LWR is less concerned about the world’s needy than are other agencies, but rather was consistent expression of its conviction that additional dependence upon government resources in its work would place it in the position of being virtually an instrument of government.”

Dr. Robert E. Van Deusen, Washington secretary of NLC’s Division of Public Relations, warned that federal aid for church-supported programs posed a threat to the witness of the church. “Public subsidy will sooner or later be accompanied by some degree of public control,” he stressed.

Floor discussion pointed up a difference of approach between the two NLC churches on a point of church-state separation that has long agitated Lutherans—compulsory chapel attendance at military academies. The ALC convention has approved freedom of choice of religious service for students, while the LCA executive committee has opposed any compulsion upon the student to attend services at all. The council declined to decide between the two viewpoints.

In other action, the council elected as its new president Dr. George F. Harkins of New York City, who is assistant to the president of the LCA. He replaced Dr. Raymond M. Olson, president of the flourishing new California Lutheran College of Thousand Oaks, California. The college, whose board of regents is evenly divided between members of the LCA and of the ALC, signals growing Lutheran strength in the West and indicates that, regardless of the NLC’s impending demise, the Lutheran day definitely is not dying in the west.

The Tables Turned

The Rev. A. Q. Morton, a clergyman of the Church of Scotland who used a computer to argue that six authors wrote the New Testament epistles commonly attributed to Paul, saw his method backfire last month. Dr. John W. Ellison, rector of the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, told a Yale University computer conference that he had subjected Morton’s own writing to a similar computer analysis and found it indicated multiple authorship. The Morton method involves the presupposition that the frequency with which a writer uses certain common words is a key to his style.

Confronting A Milestone

Dr. Joseph Martin resigned last month after serving five years as president of Taylor University, Upland, Indiana. A successor has not yet been named.

Taylor trustees will meet March 12 to reconsider a decision to move the campus to a site near Fort Wayne. Negotiations are continuing, meanwhile, to affiliate the school with The Methodist Church.

Taylor, historically an evangelical school with an Arminian emphasis, has recently taken on a more ecumenical orientation.

Biblical Airlift

A rebuilt airliner was commissioned for service with Wycliffe Bible Translators in a special ceremony at Philadelphia International Airport this month.

The plane, a twin-engine DC-3 equipped with weather radar and long-range fuel capacity, will be used to ferry Wycliffe personnel and supplies between the United States and mission fields in South America. It is comparable in size to two PBY Catalina flying boats used by Wycliffe. Its 5,000-pound payload is the largest among planes owned by missionary organizations.

As presently equipped, the Douglas-built plane will carry sixteen passengers and a crew of three. Wycliffe spokesmen say it will mean a substantial savings in transportation and inventory costs. Supplies that now take up to eight months to reach Wycliffe’s task force of 1,000 missionaries in South America will be transported in a matter of hours.

The plane was built shortly after World War II and saw service with the now defunct Capital Airlines before being turned into an executive transport. It was rebuilt in 1960. The cost to Wycliffe: $40.000.

Faith And Emotion

A group of pastors and laymen in the Detroit area met last month to form a new organization to be known as the Christian Foundation for Emotional Health. A research program in emotional health has been established, as well as “an intensive mental health program to help churches and Christian organizations.” In addition, the new group has taken over the operation of the Detroit Christian Counseling Service, with its six clinics. Next month a three-day workshop in pastoral counseling is planned in cooperation with the National Association of Evangelicals.

Episode At Sea

Two professional vocalists en route to a concert appearance at Bob Jones University were abroad the airliner that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean south of Long Island this month. The two, Joan Gaboorian and Lillian Garabedian, were part of the “Four for Tonight” quartet.

Mr. Karl Stahl, head of the organ department at Bob Jones University, had had a ticket for the ill-fated flight but was persuaded to change his reservation for “a better flight.”

All eighty-four persons aboard the airliner perished.

Ministering To Migrants

More than a million “Gastarbeiters” (migrant workers) from around the world have rushed into Germany’s manpower vacuum. From Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, the Arab countries, Iran, Pakistan, and Japan—and now from Africa also—has come this rising tide.

To minister to the nearly 200,000 Greeks, the Greek Orthodox Church has mobilized priests despite the anti-clerical bias of the Greek workers. Orthodox priests generally oppose those outside their church who seek to reach the Greek immigrants with the Gospel.

In Cologne this month, the Roman Catholic archbishop gave permission for a Muslim service to be held in the historical cathedral there. Several hundred Turkish workers with prayer mats attended.

The usual social problems that follow mass migrations of the working class hit Germany hard. Social service agencies offer assistance to the workers, but their program is devoid of the Gospel.

New agencies have arisen to evangelize the migrants on the premise that the mission fields have come to Germany. Alongside already existing churches and agencies, the Alliance of German Missions for the Gastarbeiter is now active.

HAROLD LINDSELL

Oriental Reunion

“For centuries past our Orthodox churches have been without contact. Perhaps that which still divides the two groups is a matter of some importance. Perhaps it is not. In any case, we live in a time when even political differences are discussed around the conference table and peaceful and amicable solutions sought by all. The church can afford to do no less.”

So said Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia last month in a historic conference of Oriental Orthodox church leaders at Addis Ababa.

Replying to the emperor’s address was Patriarch Ignatius Jacob III, who observed that “though we have a common heritage of Orthodox faith, our churches have not had an opportunity of meeting together in this way for many long centuries.”

The meeting was convened by the emperor and was originally planned as a joint conference of Eastern Orthodox and Oriental churches. Some Eastern Orthodox churchmen subsequently announced, however, that they could not attend because of the “time element.” That left the representation limited to five Oriental Orthodox churches, those in Ethiopia, Egypt, Syria, India, and Armenia. All are members of the World Council of Churches.

Separation of the Oriental and Eastern Orthodox families dates back to the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451.

Perhaps the most significant step taken at Addis Ababa was the creation of a standing committee with the responsibility of setting up a secretariat. One of the duties of the secretariat will be to seek closer contacts with non-Orthodox members of the World Council of Churches, the Roman Catholic Church, and particularly with the Eastern churches.

A year and a half has passed since the last major Supreme Court decision on school devotions. A number of surveys, including a CHRISTIANITY TODAY poll of educators, indicate that state and school authorities have responded in conflicting ways:

—Some have ignored or tried to circumvent the rulings;

—Some are avoiding everything religious;

—Some are cautiously exploring the court’s invitation to teach objectively about religion.

One out of four school officials responding to the CHRISTIANITY TODAY sampling indicated that his school or district has changed its prayer and Bible-reading policies since the Supreme Court rulings of 1962 and 1963. (Some of those reporting “no changes” said their policies necessitated none.) Court records show that a few school boards refused to comply until ordered to do so.

The majority of states with mandatory Bible-reading laws now hold them invalid, implicitly or explicitly. But a congressional survey made last year failed to turn up any state rulings against the Bible-reading requirements in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, or Tennessee.

Four days after the Supreme Court’s 1963 decision, the Illinois House of Representatives passed a “Trojan horse” bill that would have permitted the daily recitation of four lines of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” including the words “In God is our trust.” But Governor Otto Kerner said the bill amounted to circumvention and vetoed it. In a New York case, the Attorney General issued a similar ruling. The Supreme Court’s dictum that what is being used is less important than what it is being used as is now widely applied.)

Some states, such as Mississippi, simply advised schools to continue Bible readings; others left the interpretation of the rulings up to local school districts. Authorities in Florida, Maine, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Washington have now discouraged or ruled against distributing Gideon Bibles in schools, and Michigan has enjoined a “Rural Bible Mission” school program.

Prior to the 1962 Engel decision banning state-composed prayers, an estimated 42 per cent of the nation’s schools conducted Bible leading, 33 per cent had homeroom devotions, and 43 per cent allowed the distribution of Gideon Bibles. Now many educators are evidently avoiding anything that might be construed as devotional or sectarian. “Frankly, most teachers are scared to death to do anything with religion,” the Arizona State Superintendent of Education has said.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S survey indicated that some educators are “ignoring the Supreme Court’s invitation to teach objectively about the Bible and religion.” The court emphasized: “… the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program … may not be effected consistent with the First Amendment.”

The sampling also showed that some teachers, parents, boards of education, and administrators are still “greatly confused” about what is allowed and what is not. But some schools have begun to experiment with the “objective” approach:

The Cornwall-Lebanon Joint School Board in Pennsylvania has voted to draft a twelve-year objective Bible-study program.

A high school teacher in Massachusetts is using the Bible as a “sourcebook for the humanities.”

In North Carolina, the Attorney General has approved an extra-curricular, off-school-grounds religion program using a mobile unit.

Thirty seniors at a Fort Wayne, Indiana, high school have enrolled in “The Bible as Literature,” a new elective course being offered in a number of Indiana schools.

And the confusion now is less—or at least quieter—than it was. Evidently the House Judiciary Committee hearings last year have helped to clarify the issues, as the committee chairman, Representative Emanuel Celler, believes. The hearings dealt with the proposed “Becker amendment” to the Constitution, which would have overruled the Supreme Court’s decisions on school devotions. Opponents argued that it would also have weakened the constitutional separation of church and state. (For an editorial opinion on the Becker amendment, see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, June 19, 1964.)

Frank Becker (R-N. Y.) did not stand for re-election in 1964. In his last act as a congressman, he wrote a letter to his constituents referring to the “still unfinished task of returning the right to pray in our public schools”; but enthusiasm in Congress has clearly waned. Some twenty “prayer resolutions” have been submitted to this Congress (there may be more to come); last Congress the total was over 150. Supporters of a constitutional amendment have been unable to keep the issue alive.

What began in 1962 as a highly serious debate seemed last year to be getting dangerously close to anticlimax when the focus shifted to such pre-brunch invocations as “God is great, God is good, And we thank him for our food.” A federal court in New York ruled that particular invocation legal in December, 1963; but a federal district judge in Michigan ruled a lunchtime prayer unlawful early this year, and the American Civil Liberties Union has contested the practice in a Virginia school district.

“Out of the clamor of voices—‘by free trade in ideas’—a free society distills its own consensus,” said Mr. Celler last fall after the hearings.

The year and a half since the Abington decision banning devotional Bible reading and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer (“both the practices at issue and the laws requiring them,” in the language of the court) has shown how hard it is to reach consensus on terminology: One man’s “neutrality” seems to be another man’s “secularism.” The attorney general in one state ruled that school Nativity scenes are proper “so long as no religious significance is attached thereto,” apparently implying that the “religion” is in the eye of the beholder. The line between “teaching about” religion and “the teaching of” religion was found hard to draw: “When instruction turns to proselyting and imparting knowledge becomes evangelism is, except in the crudest cases, a subtle inquiry,” Justice Douglas wrote in a 1947 opinion. Experts did not always agree on where “establishment of religion” ends and “the free exercise thereof” begins. When a state “permits,” it may actually be promoting, an attorney general held.

Such semantic problems have enabled partisans on both sides of church-state debates to play the game of selecting isolated “proof texts” in Supreme Court opinions in order to emphasize one principle at the expense of another.

So far, the movement toward consensus appears to be largely negative, though the practices the court eliminated had more “symbolic value,” perhaps, than spiritual meaning.

Last year the court, in a Florida case, dismissed a complaint concerning baccalaureate services “for want of properly presented federal questions” (thus not ruling on the constitutionality of the practice) and declined to hear an appeal in New York contesting the use of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance when recited in schools.

The question arises whether the court is serving notice that it does not intend to accept the role of a “super board of education for every school district in the nation”—Justice Jackson’s words in a 1947 case—or to enlarge the scope of its strictures against religious exercises in public schools.

Another question is whether the present cautious experiments in objective religious instruction, as sanctioned by the court, will allay educators’ fears that any religion in school is too much religion and will pave the way for widespread study of the Bible for its “literary and historic qualities.”

The President’S Ecumenical Circuit

Mirroring the dominant religious spirit of the age, Lyndon Baines Johnson seems bent on earning the reputation of “an ecumenical president.” In a recent span of five days, for example, he (1) showed up at St. Matthew’s Cathedral (Roman Catholic) for an annual “Red Mass,” (2) announced before a Jewish dinner his proposed exchange of visits with Soviet leaders this year, and (3) participated in his second Presidential Prayer Breakfast as Chief Executive.

In attending the St. Matthew’s “Red Mass,” so-called because of the color of the vestments worn, Johnson was making his first public appearance since his illness. With him were Mrs. Johnson, their younger daughter, 17-year-old Luci, and Paul Betz, 20-year-old pre-medical student at Mount St. Mary’s College. (Betz is Luci’s boyfriend and apparent prompter in her decision to begin instruction in Roman Catholicism.) The “Red Mass” is held for the purpose of invoking God’s blessing on the courts and the administration of justice.

Three days later, at a dinner meeting of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in Washington’s Shoreham Hotel, Johnson was plugging away for a “Great Society.” He cited Ecclesiastes 11:4, “He that observeth the wind shall not sow, and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.” An exchange of visits with Soviet leaders, he said, “would reassure an anxious world that our two nations are each striving toward the goal of peace.” The international Jewish human relations and welfare organization presented him with a citation for “distinguished contribution to the enrichment of our democratic heritage.”

Back at the Shoreham by eight the next morning, the President appeared on two International Christian Leadership prayer breakfast programs—one for men, the other for women. He addressed both briefly.¹On Inaugural Day, Johnson ignored a public ecumenical prayer service hastily arranged after he had invited evangelist Billy Graham to preach a private inaugural sermon. The White House later invited inter-faith participants to share the service with Graham but left the ecumenical effort (which had announced to the press an invitation to the President) to paddle for itself.—Ed.

The men’s breakfast, thirteenth and largest of these annual events, did not attract as many upper-echelon government figures as had been seen in previous years. But among the 1,400 who did attend, along with Johnson and Vice-president Hubert H. Humphrey, were House Speaker John McCormack, Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, and three Cabinet members: Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon, Commerce Secretary John T. Connor, and Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Anthony J. Celebrezze. All were at the head table in the Shoreham’s spacious new Regency Room.

As in most prayer breakfasts of the type now being held in key cities, there was a minimum of praying and a maximum of speaking. The invocation by retired Lieutenant General M. H. Silverthorn, the “intercession for national leaders” by ICL founder Abraham Vereide, and the benediction by the Rev. Richard C. Halverson totaled little more than five minutes of the eighty-minute program. Nonetheless, the prayers (see editorial pages) were spiritually powerful interludes. Between them were breakfast (scrambled eggs and lamp chops), three speeches (the President, McCormack, and General Harold K. Johnson, Army chief of staff), Scripture readings (Psalm 1 and Matt. 6:24–33), and a solo by the popular gospel vocalist Tony Fontane, who meshed a stanza of “The Old Rugged Cross” into the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” General Johnson, a survivor of the Bataan death march, spoke of the efficacy of faith in Christ in times of peril and made copious use of Scripture.

President Johnson noted that “in our history, it has been popular to regard with skepticism the private motives of public men—and never more than when they participate in meetings such as this.”

“I am sure such skepticism has been deserved by some,” he declared, “but I am more certain that only the unknowing and unthinking would challenge today the motives that bring our public officials together for moments of prayer and meditation.”

The President concluded with the observation that “we could find no more appropriate way to begin our days and our duties than to pray—for as we are taught, ‘Except the Lord build this house, they labor in vain that build it.’ ”

He then stepped down the corridor to the women’s breakfast, where the program had included remarks by Mrs. Johnson and a rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” by Dale Evans. He said he foresaw problems “too great to be solved by men’s minds or even by women’s hearts.… With the blessings that belong to us, with the duties which rest upon us, we have much to pray for—that we may be just in our strength, wise in actions, and faithful to our trust.”

There was a strange sequel to the events. Less than two hours after the benediction. Dr. Paul C. Aebersold, regarded as one of the world’s leading nuclear scientists, was rescued from the icy Potomac River after a leap from a bridge. Found in the pocket of Aebersold, who has been away from his post at the Atomic Energy Commission because of illness, was a program from the prayer breakfast.

Now that the prayer breakfast has become a national institution, there were almost as many views of its significance as breakfasters. At tabletalk one congressman called it “a mirror of the times, in which everything is done on a big scale—big business, big church, big prayer breakfast. If it doesn’t get folks going back to the obscure prayer meetings that are neglected in the local churches it will fail of its purpose.” McCormack spoke of the event as coming “clearly within the atmosphere of being a divine institution” and as a reflection of “the ecumenical spirit in which people of different religious beliefs are meeting with devotion to God and good will toward each other.” A businessman from Shelby, Ohio, active in a small denominational church, had another view: “It encourages a little fellow like me. We sometimes think the things that are important in our local communities lack effective commitment nationally. Here we see and meet politicians who are honest and stand above their parties, businessmen whose concern for Christian principles exceeds their desire for profits. I’m going back home with new zeal for the right things.”

The Reds’ Debut

Cultivating a taste for Christianity among the Communist elite is a project that only an organization like International Christian Leadership would attempt. In Washington this month, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly F. Dobrynin and diplomats from Poland, Rumania, and Yugoslavia turned out for an ICL luncheon honoring the diplomatic corps. A spokesman for ICL said this marked the first time that representatives of the Communist bloc had attended one of the organization’s functions.

Luncheon guests heard a speech by Vice-president Hubert H. Humphrey. Msgr. Luigi Ligutti, Vatican observer to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, read from the fifth chapter of Matthew.

The luncheon was part of a two-day ICL seminar attended by 350 invited guests, including sixty labor union presidents. ICL has announced a thirtieth-anniversary seminar to be held in Seattle July 4–10. Evangelist Billy Graham, RCA president Elmer Engstrom, and rocket expert Wehrner Von Braun will be among participants, along with leading citizens from Canada, England, France, Nigeria, Greece, India, and Ethiopia.

The Education Bill

A House bill embodying President Johnson’s federal aid plan for primary and secondary education cleared its first hurdle this month by winning subcommittee approval despite a Republican walkout. It was also expected to be approved by the full Education and Labor Committee, inasmuch as Democrats on the committee outnumber Republicans 21 to 10.

Republicans boycotted the subcommittee’s vote on the education measure in protest of what they regarded as “hasty and superficial” consideration.

The subcommittee made some changes in the bill aimed at satisfying those who regard the measure as encroaching upon church-state separation. Under the amended version, parochial schools would not assume title to federally provided text and library books but would get them on an extended loan basis. Another change provides that supplementary educational centers (see “The Christian Stake in Federal School Aid,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, January 29, 1965) be under the control of a public agency.

C. Stanley Lowell of Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State observed that the changes are an improvement but that the bill still violates the church-state separation principle. At POAU’s annual conference this month in Philadelphia, the organization’s National Advisory Council adopted a statement urging Congress to delete those proposals that would provide for aid to private and church-related schools.

Dr. C. Emanuel Carlson, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, declared that the committee “now has in hand a bill which seems to please the great mass of organized public opinion. Its passage now seems probable.” He added that the bill “does seem to be an honest effort to meet the needs of our day.”

The bill thus far has had the support of such groups as the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the National Education Association, and the American Association of School Administrators.

Superseding Scripture

The “wildest secret thought” of Dr. Donald Soper, British Methodist leader, was revealed in an article he wrote for his denomination’s newspaper. This “thought” included his desire to ban Bible reading for one year, use political rather than biblical texts every other sermon, and prohibit all “evangelical campaigns” that stress conversion or revival. Unorthodoxy and Dr. Soper are no strangers. More than thirty years ago he was arraigned before the Methodist Conference for denying the Virgin Birth as a historical fact. (He was acquitted.)

Well-known in London for his open-air meetings at Tower Hill, Dr. Soper stated in his article that “the present situation regarding the Scriptures is intolerable. They represent an intellectual incubus that cannot be removed until an almost completely new start is made with this most controversial document.” Thus he wished that reading of the Bible could be barred for a trial period of one year, with exceptions being made for weddings, funerals, and teaching in some schools.

“Every other sermon preached in a public place should take a political text,” continued the 62-year-old preacher, who wants these texts expounded “in relationship to the government of the day, and in the light of the teaching of our Lord.” Believing that the words “conversion” and “revival” were “incorrigibly misunderstood,” Dr. Soper mentioned his desire for all evangelical campaigns to cease until the words could be used again “in their true meaning.”

One of his less startling statements was the wish to have earlier Sunday morning services. In England such an idea is new. Dr. Soper said it “would get pious lie-a-beds up at a godly hour.”

DAVID COOMES

Taking Them Seriously

“It was an historic event when a representative of the Government of the U.S.S.R. devoted such attention to a Christian peace movement,” said Professor Johannes de Graaf of Holland, after representatives of the Christian Peace Conference had a forty-minute interview in Moscow last month with Mr. A. I. Mikoyan, chairman of the Supreme Soviet. The purpose of the delegation was to deliver the “Appeal to Governments, Parliaments and Authoritative Personalities” formulated last July by the Second All-Christian Peace Assembly (see “Engineering Peace at Prague,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, News, August 31, 1964). The document was handed over by Dr. J. L. Hromadka, with a photograph album tracing the development of the CPC since its inception in 1958.

In his reply Mr. Mikoyan said it was clear from a scientific point of view that war could be abolished. There was no fatal necessity for war, he said, but neither was there any automatic assurance of peace. “We take your endeavors very seriously,” continued the Soviet leader. “It is important and just work you are performing.… Your ideas and appeals will find support from our Parliament and our government.”

The delegation included also Metropolitan Pimen of the Russian Orthodox Church and CPC general secretary J. N. Ondra. A notable absentee from this Kremlin occasion was Metropolitan Nikodim, who was attending the WCC Central Committee meeting at Enugu. Dr. Hromadka had expected to join him there but did not receive a visa from the Nigerian government.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Evangelicals and Social Justice in England

The Christian in Industrial Society, by F. H. R. Catherwood (Tyndale Press, 1964, 126 pp., 12s. 6d.), is reviewed by Edgar G. Stride, vicar, St. Mary’s Church, Becontree, Dagenham, England.

The late Archbishop William Temple once made a pronouncement on economic matters to which Montague Norman, head of the Bank of England, replied that the cobbler should stick to his last and the archbishop to religion. Men like Reinhold Niebuhr, E. W. Wickham. Rodger Charles, S. J., and, looking much further back, F. D. Maurice and Scott Holland have sought to relate the Christian faith to modern society. The thing about each of these men that is not true of Mr. Catherwood is that they were speaking in a field which in practical terms was foreign to them. Catherwood, who is the son-in-law of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “sticks to his last,” for he was managing director of British Aluminium before he became chief industrial adviser at the new Ministry of Economic Affairs in London. In the making of this book he worked with a group of Christian men, all of whom are in their forties and have climbed the industrial ladder.

At last we have an authoritative attempt by conservative evangelicals to apply biblical insights to modern technological society. Their position is disclosed in the introduction: “There is, therefore, no ‘social gospel.’ The gospel is addressed to the individual. Society collectively cannot be redeemed. It can, however, be reformed according to the law of God.” We are thus assured that we are not going to be treated once more to the unbiblical idea that the Kingdom of God will come through environmental alterations, political actions, and human innate perfectibility. Instead, in the tradition of men like Augustine, Aquinas, Wycliffe, Latimer, Baxter, and many others, we are to see certain principles in the biblical revelation applied to the vast complex of modern society. The modern voodoo of “economic laws” is treated with the disrespect it deserves. The biblical principles of righteousness, justice, love for the weak, and other virtues should, it is claimed, be a feature of social as well as of private practice.

This leads to chapters on the stock exchange (of which the author approves), trade unions (the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress advised here), responsibilities between government and governed, fair trading, and Christian attitudes to work and wealth. The author takes issue with the present system of income tax, believing that it works unjustly in favor of inherited wealth. He deals somewhat kindly with the trade unions, an area of British society which, this reviewer believes, needs some hard thinking on social responsibility. However, we are glad to note an evangelical publication shrewdly showing real appreciation of the great contribution that movement has made to the cause of social justice. The book closes with an appendix on the Weber-Tawney thesis, in which we see how the Protestant countries invariably rise to the top in industrial power and wealth compared with the Roman Catholic and non-Christian communities. An index in the next edition would be a great asset. Incidentally, the book deals not only with broad issues but also with personal ones, such as social drinking, firms’ dances, tipping and bribery, and the proper way to work for promotion. This is a thoroughly good book which all ministers and all theological students should have on their list of compulsory reading.

EDGAR G. STRIDE

How Shall We Educate Ministers?

The Making of Ministers: Essays on Clergy Training Today, edited by Keith R. Bridston and Dwight W. Culver (Augsburg, 1964, 225 pp., $5.75), is reviewed by David A. Hubbard, president, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

What place should religious courses have in the undergraduate training for ministers? What kind of seminary curriculum best prepares ministers for the tremendous task that our decades thrust upon them? What kind of man should a minister be in our society? These tough questions are tackled in a series of essays that grew out of a study of pre-seminary education sponsored by the Lilly Endowment and directed by the editors.

Serving as an introduction is an essay by Paul Holmer, “Can We Educate Ministers Scientifically?,” which makes a strong plea that theological education ought to be devout as well as scientific and related to the life of the Church through an active two-year internship. Arnold Nash in a concluding article argues that the whole debate about whether a pre-theological student should major in religion or not misses the mark, because it views religion as part of the curriculum along with botany and literature “rather than as a ‘standpoint’ or a ‘perspective’ from which knowledge in any field is seen and understood and appreciated.”

“College Preparation: Cultivation of Christians” is the title of the first section of the book, which contains four essays pushing hard for the place of religion in undergraduate studies. The argument is pressed from several angles. John A. Hutchison makes the point that humanism and religious faith need each other: faith will bring focus to liberal education and will in turn benefit from the breadth of expression and application such education gives. William Nicholls claims that, despite the separation of church and state, religion lies within the province of any true university because of its importance to the life and history of mankind. Paul Ramsey needles both colleges and seminaries for not taking seriously the teaching of religion at the undergraduate level. Colleges have often used part-time teachers who doubled as pastors or chaplains and were not a match for the scholars in other disciplines. Seminaries have contributed to the mediocrity of college courses in religion by not holding high standards nor requiring basic courses in Bible, Greek, and religion at entrance.

In Part II, “Seminary Education: Training of Theologians,” back-to-back chapters by Ernest Colwell and Martin Marty form a kind of running debate. Colwell argues that seminaries should require a pre-theological major from entering students just as medical schools require extensive pre-professional training of their would-be doctors. This would allow theological training to be genuinely graduate work. Marty pumps hard for reserving cultural studies for college level and theology for the seminary in order to keep separate the minister’s true specialty from these earlier studies that undergird it.

A call for seminaries to relate to the real world is issued by Gibson Winter, who chides them for preparing ministers to serve a religious establishment that no longer exists. In underscoring this point, he calls attention to the fact that most ministering today is done by shop stewards, foremen, office supervisors, and a host of other specialists. What contribution is a seminary making to their ministry?

Part III, “Church Edification: Maturation of Ministers,” calls attention to the pastor’s need for scholarly equipment and prescribes a balance between “excessive contemporaneity” and “provincialism.” C. Umhau Wolf’s “Theology for the Parish Ministry” contains some pointed proposals; one is that seminary professors be required to spend part of their sabbatical leaves working in a parish in order to forge tighter bonds between church and school. “Dialogical education” is the concept expounded by Reuel Howe in his attempt to shape an adequate image for the ministry in our day, an image that centers in the person of the minister and his personal relations inside and outside the church.

All in all this is a first-rate book for pricking the consciences and jogging the imaginations of Christian educators. Parish pastors will find within it a treasure of enriching ideas as they meditate on the methods and motives of their own ministries.

DAVID A. HUBBARD

History With Color

A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church, by Raymond W. Albright (Macmillan, 1964, 406 pp., $12.50), is reviewed by William B. Williamson, rector, Church of the Atonement, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

It is not often that a man is asked to review a major work of his former teacher. Raymond W. Albright is a distinguished church historian and a superior teacher. Both estimations are acknowledged by the former Evangelical Church, which his grandfather founded and in which Dr. Albright retains a ministry, by the former Temple University School of Theology, where he taught and inspired this reviewer, and by the Episcopal Church, in which he now serves as the Huntington Professor of Church History at the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church is an excellent, easy-to-read, comprehensive, and accurate record of the life and development of a dynamic organism. As such, it is superior to the several one-volume histories previously published, in spite of the survey-like quality of the chapters on the contemporary period. The superiority rests upon Dr. Albright’s competence as a historiographer. He is at his best, therefore, in his historical analysis and interpretation: “Had all the lines of communication [between Methodists and Anglicans] been open … separate organization … might have been averted” (p. 156); “Hereafter there would be less concern about enforcing uniformity in either doctrine or practice” (p. 245); “… the real genius of Anglicanism [is] … creative tension between varying shades of … reasonableness [and] … comprehensiveness” (p. 287). His analysis of the controversy on regeneration in baptism is masterful.

The book is full of much fine and colorful writing: “… the Virginia planters with no hesitation bought twenty negroes offered for sale in 1619 by the Dutch traders, who had, ironically, brought them … on the ship Jesus” (p. 21); “Those who opposed the Church of England … counted it a divine vindication … when it was discovered that mice had attacked John Winthrop’s one volume Book of Common Prayer and the New Testament and had eaten up completely the Book of Common Prayer section leaving the New Testament unharmed” (p. 47); “… a typical Anglican desire for finding and holding the best of all possible positions” (p. 235).

Exceptionally interesting chapters are “The Struggle for the Episcopate,” “Division and Unity,” and those that contain biographies of Episcopal leaders such as Bishop Hobart of New York and the missionary bishops Chase and Kemper. Of special interest to the general reader is Dr. Albright’s “story of orders” in the Episcopal Church (p. 316 f); his mention of Mrs. Seaton, who, after her conversion to Rome became the first Roman Catholic saint from the United States (p. 242 f); and his valid assessment that the Episcopal Church has not always been a perfect example of liturgical excellence (p. 246).

Several minor difficulties of a mechanical sort are nonetheless distracting, even though they do not detract seriously from the over-all impact. Dr. Albright sometimes produces over-long sentences; the first paragraph on page 96, for example, contains two of them. He also uses vague terms of reference with some regularity: among them are “here” (p. 48); “that” (p. 276); “recently enacted” (p. 272); “last two” (p. 290). “Irenic is a persistent “word for the day.” Further, Dr. Albright persists in using the title “Dean” for Bishop Berkeley even though he seems to avoid titles beyond the first mention elsewhere. On his speculation that the impact of Christian Science stimulated Episcopal Church interest in the healing ministry, he may rightly expect some challenge. (See p. 360.)

This volume is essential for all who would know, look beneath the surface of, and thus come to understand, the history of the Episcopal Church.

WILLIAM B. WILLIAMSON

Religion And The Press

Religion in Action: A Report in Depth on How America’s Faiths Are Meeting New Challenges, by Lee E. Dirks (The National Observer, 1965, 212 pp., $2), is reviewed by James Daane, assistant editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Only a few decades ago religion received, not a bad press, but almost no press. Today there is a public interest in religion, and Christianity receives the most extensive coverage it has ever received in the United States.

Religion in Action points up this change. It is the fourth in a series of Newsbooks produced by the Dow Jones and Company family of publications, which also publishes the Wall Street Journal.

For several years the National Observer has covered religious events, and this book contains some of the most interesting of this reporting, brought up to date, and enhanced by many photographs. The emphasis is on the change that is occurring in all sectors of religious life in America. The coverage is eminently fair: the smaller as well as the larger faiths are covered, and the conservative no less than the more liberal. Each is presented to show how it is facing up to the new social, political, and theological movements of our times.

The National Observer and Lee E. Dirks, author of Religion in Action, are to be commended for their recognition that religion is news and for their ability (a talent more scarce than is generally supposed) to report it fairly. Any minister, priest, rabbi, Christian layman, or student of the American scene can read this with pleasure and profit. Religion and American life have rarely been so finely blended in press reporting, and rarely so interestingly packaged.

JAMES DAANE

Higher Than Midway

Agrippa’s Daughter, by Howard Fast (Doubleday, 1964, 371 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Calvin D. Linton, dean, College of Arts and Sciences, George Washington University, Washington, D. C.

The field of the historical novel is very thoroughly plowed these days. The range of competence among the literary agriculturists is tremendous, extending from the very few genuinely gifted writers like Oldenberg, Prescott, Druon, and the late Alfred Duggan all the way down the scale to the sensation-mongers who offer little but inaccurate history, unrealistic dialogues, and an overheated imagination. The prolific Howard Fast undoubtedly belongs higher than midway in the scale. Although he does not here produce that atmosphere in which disbelief is willingly suspended and the reader senses how it must have felt to be alive in the period depicted (the mark of a writer genuinely immersed in his period), yet he brings considerable learning, a fecund imagination for plot, and a sincere moral purpose. As to the latter point, indeed, most of his novels fit rather naturally into that category called the “propaganda novel,” using the term without any bad connotation.

In Agrippa’s Daughter the theme is pacifism, and Berenice, somewhat unexpectedly, is its prophetess. Covering a period of Berenice’s life from the age of sixteen to her death, the narrative describes the progress of a brilliant, beautiful, sophisticated, cold, and incipiently cruel woman toward a belief (gained through a third marriage) in the teachings of Hillel, which are here construed chiefly as those of non-resistance and beneficent socialism. Her brother, Agrippa II, is depicted as a gentle, sensitive, but rather futile king whose incapacity to rule is matched by the inability of his well-dressed army of youthful, aristocratic Jews to fight. At the heart of the moral lesson is the husband of Berenice’s only marriage for love, Shimeon Bengamaliel, grandson of the great Hillel and the chief figure of the Hillel community. From him Berenice learns not only a philosophy but physical love, and Mr. Fast makes his gesture toward the fascination that clinical detail has for our age.

The crux of the well-handled plot is the murder of a number of children in Jerusalem by the Procurator Gessius Florus and the consequent outbreak of rebellion involving the killing of hundreds of Roman soldiers. Within the city, now sealed and awaiting the descent of Roman wrath, a civil war is waged between the advocates of violence and war and the followers of Hillel led by Shimeon. Berenice, outside the city and now revered by the Jewish populace for her benevolence and courage, is permitted by a highly romanticized Titus, deeply enamored of the older Berenice, to visit Shimeon in Jerusalem after he has lost his inner battle and is imprisoned, witless and filthy, in the dungeon. After her departure, Shimeon is killed and his body tossed over the city walls.

The last third of the book is devoted to the efforts of Berenice to raise the huge sum necessary to buy the thousands of Jews to be sold into slavery after the fall of Jerusalem, and to the thwarted promise of love and happiness as the wife of Titus back in Rome. With the death of Titus, Berenice, in the odor of sanctity and costly perfume, returns to Palestine to die in the community of Hillel. (Incidentally, Paul’s appearance before Agrippa and Berenice is not mentioned, nor is Paul’s existence ever referred to.)

An interesting book, with all the right ingredients for popularity. It is always dangerous to guess how a writer writes, but one would guess that this book was written rapidly. The prose is workmanlike but never stylistically remarkable. There are frequent little awkward turns of phrase, such as “She was not of a time where …,” and a number of minor off-key notes. The Roman soldier’s shield is referred to as “huge,” for example, and the Greek-Syrian Cleopatra is characterized as typically Egyptian.

CALVIN D. LINTON

Blessed Are The Uneducated

The Nature of Healing, by Arthur Guirdham (George Allen and Unwin, 1964, 181 pp., 28s.), is reviewed by Stephen S. Short, evangelist, Weston-super-Mare, England.

This is the fifth book the author has written on the general topic of disease and healing. His aim is “to demonstrate that there are innate gifts of healing which function independently of the science and art of medicine.” He disclaims possessing any healing gift himself and states that he has based his opinions “on a study of four people I know to be healers.” These healers, all women, have much in common: each has powers of clairvoyance and believes in reincarnation, and three of them are hostile to organized religion. But he contends that the possibility of natural healing depends on the patient as well as on the healer, and that it seldom occurs among well-educated people “because the patient’s fundamental egoism inhibits the abnegation of personality which would enable him to establish contact with the universal consciousness.”

The author alleges that the cures wrought by Jesus were of this type, and he claims that the emphasis in the quotation just given was a prominent feature of our Lord’s teaching. “Christ tells us that it is necessary to achieve a state of inner emptiness, that is to say that we should be swept clean of the desires and ambitions which constitute the fabric of our personalities.… The more we are able to diminish the power of our personalities, the more we free the universal mind, and the more these gifts are added unto us.” Chapter and verse from the Gospels for this alleged dominical instruction is, however, not provided.

About the manner in which healing may be granted in response to prayer, the author writes: “The mechanism by which prayer can heal is, in part, telepathic. It is an attempt to infuse the soul of the patient with our love of him.… If, among those praying on the patient’s behalf, are a number with telepathic powers, the results may well be gratifying.”

The reviewer feels little need to comment on these observations. Most readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY will be able to draw from them their own conclusions about the book and how it stands in relation to God’s inspired disclosures to mankind contained in the Bible.

STEPHEN S. SHORT

For Unlazy Critics

A Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion, Volumes I and II, by James Oliver Buswell, Jr. (Zondervan, 1962 and 1963, 430 and 600 pp., $6.95 per volume), is reviewed by Edward John Carnell, professor of ethics and philosophy of religion, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

With the appearance of this set of books it is appropriate to observe that Buswell has successfully refuted the charge that no living evangelical can equal the scholarly standards of existential and neo-orthodox theologians. Every serious student of Buswell’s theology is bound to be stimulated in both heart and mind.

Although Buswell makes generous use of many important historical and contemporary theological sources, he clings steadfastly to the crucial evangelical conviction that the Bible is the only infallible rule of faith and practice. In addition, he draws heavily upon classical Reformed standards: The Westminster Confession of Faith, The Westminster Larger Catechism, and The Westminster Shorter Catechism. Buswell’s reliance on Reformed standards does not mean, however, that he is unwilling to submit himself to the total witness of the Church when searching for theological truth. He goes wherever the facts lead him.

Some readers may be disappointed in Boswell’s high respect for consistent philosophical thinking, but their disappointment merely betrays a want of appreciation for the ingredients of a genuinely stimulating work in systematic theology. Actually, Buswell’s rigorous logic merits the highest praise. I have reference, in particular, to his repeated insistence that a univocal meaning unites the mind of God with the mind of a Christian. This defense of univocal meaning implies a forthright rejection of all species of theology, ancient or modern, that either openly assert or tacitly consent to the hypothesis that truth signifies one thing for God (because he is almighty) and another for a Christian (because he is merely human). “As for me, although ‘we know in part’ … yet what we see we see, and what we know we know, and what we say we mean, in the plain univocal sense of the words” (Vol. I, p. 29). When so many contemporary theologians and apologists are drifting toward equivocal meaning as well as careless biblical exegesis, meditation upon Buswell’s approach inspires me to shout “Amen!” as loudly and clearly as I can.

The laws of logic, insists Buswell, are not external to God; rather, they reside in the very character of God himself. This in no way goes against the plain historic fact that Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) successfully formulated and defended these same laws. A fit explanation emerges the moment we acknowledge that Aristotle, like all other people, lived and moved and had his being in God. The natural man cannot discern the deeper truths of the Spirit, but this does not close off his access to formal truth. In brief, special revelation takes in all that is true, and this includes the formal truth to which the natural man has access. “… if we study what the Scriptures have to say about truth and falsehood, it will become abundantly evident that all the basic laws of logic are implicit if not explicit therein” (Vol. I, p. 21). This is a sample of some very clear thinking.

Not only does Buswell have the knack of writing very perspicuous sentences; he also insists that the Bible be interpreted in its simplest and most obvious meaning. These virtues bring a welcomed relief from the tendency of some contemporary theologians to use frightfully complex terms, and to dismiss the biblically revealed plan of salvation as nothing but a religious myth.

At this point the reader may wonder why I fail to give a pithy review of Buswell’s theological system, let alone why I fail to name the specific reasons for my remaining convinced that the last word on systematic theology has not yet been said. I am sorry if this planned silence proves disappointing, but I trust that there is motive in my madness.

I am convinced that every reader of this review should personally and individually undertake the task of studying and evaluating Buswell’s contribution to systematic theology. The responsibility cannot be discharged by proxy. Christians must either learn to think for themselves or add plausibility to the charge that followers of the Lord—especially pastors—are intellectually lazy.

As long as we confine our diet to the pabulum of either denominational propaganda or shallow books on Christian devotion and witnessing, we shall fail to become thoroughly mature believers. At some point in our spiritual excursion we must find an occasion to reflect on such deep topics as God, man, Scripture, salvation, and eschatology from a scholarly, evangelical point of view. We should be grateful to God that Buswell has provided us with such an occasion.

EDWARD JOHN CARNELL

Book Briefs

A Synopsis of the Gospels: The Synoptic Gospels with the Johannine Parallels, by H. F. D. Sparks (Fortress, 1964, 265 pp., $6.50). The aim of this English synopsis is to enable the Greekless student of the Gospels to read through any one of them continuously, in the English of the Revised Version, with the parallel passages alongside.

Diamonds, Persimmons, and Stars, by Howard E. Kershner (Bookmailer, 1964, 163 pp., $3). Sermonettes by the editor of Christian Economics which earlier appeared in that paper.

Living Doctrine in a Vital Pulpit, by Merrill R. Abbey (Abingdon, 1964, 208 pp., $3.50). Sprinkled with bits of doubtful theology is some powerful and good advice about sermon-making. Most men of the pulpit could profit much from this book.

Society and Love: Ethical Problems of Family Life, by Roger Mehl (Westminster, 1964, 224 pp., $4.50). A book that speaks on many things and often well, though it does not hesitate to inform the reader not to be hesitant about correcting the Apostle Paul.

Vatican II: Last of the Councils, by Rock Caporale, S. J. (Helicon, 1964, 192 pp., $4.95). A priest-sociologist studies the Second Vatican Council and raises the question whether it may not be the last of its kind. Aside from his answer, the book gives insight into the nature and history of councils in a papal church.

The Showing Forth of Christ: The Sermons of John Donne, edited by Edmund Fuller (Harper and Row, 1964, 230 pp., $5).

Monastic Tithes from Their Origins to the Twelfth Century, by Giles Constable (Cambridge, 1964, 346 pp., $9.50). Volume X of the New Series of “Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought.”

Crises in Morality, edited by C. W. Scudder (Broadman, 1964, 156 pp., $3.50). Discussions of social and personal moral crises that attempt to put the pastor and counselor within the situation, so that he can help from a position of understanding.

Structures of the Church, by Hans Küng (Nelson, 1964, 394 pp., $7.50). A deep and searching discussion of a theology of church councils.

Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion: A New Introduction, by Richard R. Niebuhr (Scribners, 1964, 267 pp., $5.95). A series of characteristic moments in the thought of Schleiermacher. The author, the son of the late H. R. Niebuhr, believes Barth misunderstood Schleiermacher. For the serious student only.

The Reader’s Adviser, edited by Hester R. Hoffman (R. R. Bowker, 1964, 1,292 pp., $20). Listing the best available works of more than 2,500 of the world’s greatest authors, spanning literature from antiquity to the present day. Tenth edition, revised and enlarged.

The New Churches of Europe, by G. E. Kidder Smith (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964, 291 pp., $17.50). Photographs, descriptions, and plan sketches of sixty of Europe’s newest and most modern churches. An elegant book.

Paul on Preaching, by Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, O. P. (Sheed and Ward, 1964, 314 pp., $4.50). A Roman Catholic seeks to “share St. Paid’s insight into the structure of a key element in the life of the Church, the proclamation of the word of God.”

Popes Through the Ages, revised edition, by Joseph S. Brusher, S. J. (Van Nostrand, 1964, 530 pp., $16.50). Vivid biographies and hundreds of illustrations spell out the panorama of the whole list of the popes of Rome. Pope John XXIII got into the index, but not the table of contents. First published in 1959.

The Trouble with Being a Mama, by Eva Rutland (Abingdon, 1964, 143 pp., $2.95) Told with sparkle, humor, and those other things that go with being a Negro mother of children in a white world.

The Ancient Way: Life and Landmarks of the Holy Land, by J. Franklin Ewing, S. J. (Scribners, 1964, 224 pp., $4.50). Clean-cut explanatory comment on many aspects of biblical life which seem remote and strange to the man of the twentieth century.

Scepticism, Man, and God: Selections from the Major Writings of Sextus Empiricus, edited by Philip P. Hallie (Wesleyan University Press, 1964, 236 pp., $8).

Meditations on the Book of Job, by Christine L. Benagh (St. Thomas Press, 1964, 144 pp., $3.95). A deep-plunging, hard-hitting, provocative discussion of the great themes of the Book of Job.

With God in Russia, by Walter J. Ciszek, S. J., and Daniel L. Flaherty, S. J. (McGraw-Hill, 1964, 302 pp., $5.95). A Pennsylvania-born priest tells of his twenty-three years’ detention in Russia, fifteen in prison as a “Vatican spy.”

The Religious Experience, two volumes, edited by George Brantl (George Braziller, 1964, 1,144 pp., $17.50). A sweeping cross section of religious writings from many men of many ages. The author’s four-fold divisions—regarded as stages in religious experience—are of limited value even to those who accept his religious presuppositions. The volumes are well bound and well printed and are of value for anyone who likes to take short mental dips into a variety of authors.

A Book of Comfort, by Elizabeth Goudge (Coward-McCann, 1964, 384 pp., $6.95). Prose and poetry drawn from any and all sources to afford comfort for “our mortal weariness.”

Satan hates the bible, the Word of God. He never ceases to attack and attempt to downgrade its integrity and authority. His aims vary from person to person, ranging from rejection, unbelief, neglect, and disobedience, to the substitution of books about the Bible for the Bible itself.

There are many good and helpful books that can lead us to deeper insights into spiritual truth. But there are many others that leave the soul empty and the heart unsatisfied because of the unbelief or the shallowness of faith of their authors. And there are some books about the Bible which deny clearly stated truths and wander off into vain speculations.

For many reasons the Devil tries to turn Christians away from a faithful study of the Bible itself. As a final compromise he will settle for our studying books about the Bible, but not the Bible itself, since he knows that even those whose authors have the deepest spiritual understanding and appreciation are not an adequate substitute for the Word itself. This is not anti-intellectualism, and it does not involve making a fetish of the Bible. It simply means that the “God-breathed” witness of the Holy Scriptures carries with it a living power unknown to any other book.

There are those who speak disdainfully of “Bible worshipers,” of an “obscurantism” that “rejects the findings of advanced scholarship,” of a “pietism” that is “static and irrelevant to our day.”

In rare instances such descriptions may be true; but in general the attitude of the evangelical is to let the Bible judge him, not the reverse. We thank God for reverent scholarship that has delved into history, anthropology, and linguistics, and in so doing has made God’s Word more easily understood. But we must reject the “assured findings” of a scholarship that is built on the critical foundation of presuppositions against the supernatural and miraculous, a scholarship that reduces the Bible largely to a compilation of human documents, some of them no more than pious frauds.

Why does Satan hate the Bible above all other books? Because it tells of the Saviour and is able to “instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15, RSV).

To the accusation that some “worship the Bible” we would reply: We do not worship the Bible but the Christ of the Bible, and by faith and experience we know that he and his Word can be trusted. The surgeon does not worship the scalpel by which he brings relief from suffering and disease, but he trusts it.

Satan will settle for books about the Bible as substitutes for the Word because at their best and highest they are the work of men. He knows that the Bible is different. He knows that “all [and the word is all] scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16), and he desires to interpose anything between it and the would-be reader.

It is strange how in an enlightened, inquiring, scientific, and sophisticated age men are unwilling to be instructed in the true wisdom of the ages. Only in the Bible do we learn reverential fear of and trust in the living God—the beginning of knowledge. The Devil is willing for every possible scientific breakthrough, every advance in art, literature, and philosophy, if only man is kept from the knowledge of God.

The Bible is profitable to us for reproof, and Satan does not want us to be reproved. He wants us to walk blindly in sin, whether the sins of the flesh or the sins of the mind and spirit (pride, jealousy, avarice, hate).

Satan fears the convicting work of the divine X-ray that shows us how God sees us. He desperately wants to keep us from the Book which is “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4:12).

Under no circumstances does Satan want us to realize our nakedness before God, the ultimate Judge: “And before him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do” (v. 13). From the Devil’s standpoint, how much better for us to continue in the fig leaves of self-delusion, in the rags of our own imagined righteousness!

Nor does Satan want us exposed to the correction to be found in the Bible, for this means change. It means leaving the wrong road and walking the right. It means leaving the broad way for the narrow one that leads to life eternal. It means changing bad habits for good, evil companions for righteous ones, earthly values for eternal. Correction means a change of destiny.

The Devil also wants to shield us from the training in righteousness that is a part of God’s gracious ministry as we study his Word. In that Word we learn how God wants us to live, and we learn of the power available to help us to live this way.

The writer would like to bear this simple testimony because he knows whereof he speaks. Faithful reading of the Bible brings blessings untold. It can become the brightest spot in all the day, the source of unending comfort, joy, and hope, because within the Bible’s pages one finds his every need supplied in the person, work, and promises of the triune God.

Our unending battle with Satan against consistent Bible reading can only be met head on. There are seemingly valid excuses. There are multiplied interruptions. All of the devices of the Devil are arrayed against us until we silence and defeat him with the Word itself.

Set aside a definite time each day, and let nothing interfere with that time. This may require getting up earlier in the morning: then get up. It will require discipline of mind and will: exercise that discipline. It will pay rich rewards. Try it!

A few practical suggestions: Use several versions of the Bible—at least four of the New Testament. Get a small plastic ruler and fine red and black pencils. Underline those verses that speak particularly to you. Study and check references. Get and use a good concordance. Among other things get a copy of Nave’s Topical Bible. Use a notebook. Follow through on a particular doctrine or teaching of the Bible. Before long you will find that there simply is not the time you would like to use in such study. In all of this the Bible will become a new book, a living book.

Before you begin your study, ask the Holy Spirit to make the Word clear to your heart. Then pray for a receptive mind and an obedient will. The writer is convinced that we must present an attitude of faith as we approach the Bible. There is much we cannot understand, much we would like explained. The first step to blessing is a simple faith in the Book—faith that in its pages God speaks to the humble, believing, and obedient heart.

Satan will seek to make us compromise somewhere along the line, and his last offer may be books about the Bible. They have their place; but none of them—nor anything else—can take the place of the Word itself.

The Supernatural Christ

It would be easier to believe the story of a mere religious teacher without the miracles than with them. That goes without saying. But not to believe the story of the life upon earth of the incarnate Son of God. The whole appearance of such a divine Person upon earth is itself a stupendous miracle. The individual miracles, with their individual attestation, do make it easier to believe that great central miracle. They are proofs of it. They are exactly what the Bible represents them as being—true testimonies to the truth of that stupendous claim of Jesus to be very God.

It is interesting to observe the way in which the miracles of the life of Christ have been treated in the history of modern unbelief. The cardinal principle of unbelief is that miracles have never happened.

The “quest of the historical Jesus,” as it has been called—this effort to take the miracles out of the Gospels—has proved to be a colossal failure.

At first, it seemed to be quite easy to get the miracles out of the Gospels. All we shall have to do, said the skeptical historians, is just to take the miracles out and leave all the rest.

David Friedrich Strauss published his Life of Jesus in 1835. His book remains to the present day perhaps the fullest compendium of what can be said against the truthfulness of the Gospel narratives. Yet such a book had at least the use, in the providence of God, of demolishing the rationalizing method of dealing with the miracle-narratives in the Gospels. In those narratives, Strauss said, the miracles are the main thing; they are the thing for which all the rest exists. How absurd, then, to say that the narratives have grown up out of utterly trivial events upon which a supernaturalistic interpretation was wrongly put!

Then an attempt was made to repair the damage done by Strauss. I am not referring to the defense of the Gospels by believing scholars, but I am referring to the attempt by men of Strauss’s own way of thinking—men, that is, who like Strauss denied the occurrence of miracles—to discover and make use of the modicum of truth that might be thought to remain in the Gospels after criticism had been given its rights.

Possibly, it was supposed, that modicum of truth might be discovered by what is called “source-criticism.” The Gospels, it was admitted, contain much that is untrue, but if we could discover the earlier sources used by the writers of the Gospels we might get much nearer to the facts. Well, an imposing attempt was made in that direction. The Gospel According to John was rejected as almost altogether unhistorical, and then the two chief sources of Matthew and Luke were held to be (1) Mark and (2) a lost source composed chiefly of sayings of Jesus as distinguished from accounts of his deeds.

On the basis of that theory a supposedly historical account of a purely human Jesus was constructed. People became quite enthusiastic about it. The troublesome miracles, it was supposed, were all removed; the theological Christ of the creeds was done away. But, it was said, something better had been rediscovered—a really and purely human Jesus.

But alas for human hopes! The imposing reconstruction of the Liberal Jesus has fallen to the ground. I think the first thirty-five years of the twentieth century might almost be called, in the sphere of New Testament criticism, the period of the decline and fall of “the Liberal Jesus.”

The great trouble is that the miraculous in the Gospels is found to be much more pervasive than it was at first thought to be. It runs through the Gospels as we now have them. That is clear. But it also is found to run through the sources supposed rightly or wrongly to underlie the Gospels. Suppose we go even back of those earliest written sources and examine supposed detached bits of oral tradition out of which they are sometimes supposed to have been composed. Alas, we obtain no relief. Those supposed detached bits are found themselves to contain the objectionable miraculous element. There seems to be no escape from the supernatural Christ. At the very beginning of the Church Jesus was regarded not just as a religious teacher or just as a prophet but as a supernatural Deliverer.

Very well, what shall we do about it? The earliest view of Jesus that we know anything about represents him as a supernatural person. It is found to exhibit a remarkable unanimity at this point. There are only two things to do. We can take it or we can leave it.

Modern skeptical historians are saying we must leave it. All our information about Jesus is supernaturalistic, they are saying; therefore all our information about Jesus is uncertain. We can never disentangle the real Jesus from the beliefs of his earliest followers. The only Christ we really know is the supernatural Christ of Jesus’ earliest followers. We can never rediscover the portrait of the real Jesus.

Skepticism like that is easily refuted by a mere reading of the Gospels. Read the Gospels for yourselves, and then ask yourselves whether the Person there presented to you is not a living, breathing person.—J. G. M.

PHOTOGENIC

P. T. Forsyth once said, “The natural man makes a good Catholic.” What he was getting at was the difference between a spiritual man and a natural man, and the reason he tied this in with Roman Catholicism was that he was criticizing the necessity of all the sense experiences that mark the Catholic faith—lighting, incense, action, the kind of grace a man can almost hold in his hand.

But this is not merely a criticism of Catholicism. We all need physical signs for spiritual realities, and we all are subject to the danger of worshiping the signs instead of the realities they represent. This is idolatory; it is as if a girl should fall in love with her engagement ring and forget about the man who gave it to her. Signs are necessary because we are physical as well as spiritual beings, but we too readily slip over into a satisfaction with our own symbols.

The late Sam Shoemaker once told me a story about Bishop Creighton, of St. Paul’s in London, who was a low churchman. One day he was invited to speak for another bishop who was very high church. After the service they were in the host bishop’s study, and the bishop asked Creighton, “Well, how did you like the service?” Creighton replied, “I didn’t care much for that incense.” To which the other bishop replied, “I don’t blame you, but it was the best I could get for two and six.”

Protestantism is beginning to run toward symbolism, and as one old preacher once said, “The more crosses we put on our buildings, the less we have in our hearts.” I am becoming increasingly suspicious of anything in religion that you can take a picture of. If salvation is by faith alone, just how are we to arrange the camera and the lighting to get a picture of a man being saved?

Spiritual things are spiritually discerned, and church magazines lately are filling up with pictures.

ECUMENISM

Varied and many are undoubtedly the replies to your January 29 issue given over to the “Appraisals of Ecumenism”.…

The building of the ecumenical church is likened to the building of the Tower at Babel. Its motivation was to find a paradise that was lost, and, being frustrated, a building to reach heaven that could not be gained in the efforts of the flesh. Only at God’s intervention is his program advanced. At the coming of Christ in glory, the Church will be complete in visible union with her living Head, even Jesus Christ our Lord. Neither man, nor his mammoth organization, nor his political skill in maneuvering will be allowed to represent Christ—as he is.…

The unity we seek is not in uniformity but in diversity. This unity must be of the Spirit who sovereignly gives his gifts unto his servants. The body is one, but the functions are many. The real unity is spiritual—by those born of the Spirit, led of the Spirit, filled by the Spirit, and mightily used of God by the Spirit. In the last analysis, our business is not to “make unity,” but to acknowledge that there is already unity of the Spirit by whom all believers are baptized into One Body. This unity must be kept in the bond of peace.

Let us purify the Church and pray for oneness of all believers.

Brae Burn Heights Community Chapel

Trenton, N. J.

Your issue … was thought-provoking and most timely.

The deepest note in the New Testament is spiritual unity. We read again and again “… and they were of one accord.” That’s what we need between churches, not more organizational unity. We have too much organization now, which is eating up the spiritual church.…

Brighton, Ill.

I was surprised to find little if any mention of the involvement of the National Council of Churches and the member churches in politics, especially the way they support so many of the same positions taken by the Communists and other false liberals. These activities, which seem so strange for Christian churches, are apparently well authenticated.…

For over thirty-three years I was an official member of the local Methodist church of about 1,100 members, but the support that our pastor and the NCC gave to continuing the present corruption in Washington was so disgusting to me that I resigned from my positions as a trustee and a member of an important commission, and will discontinue my membership as soon as I find a suitable church to join, possibly before.

So far as I know, it has been traditional from the beginning for Protestant churches to stay out of politics, and for my church and the council to which it belongs to plunge into politics on the side of those who have been so active, and who promise to continue to be active, in destroying our constitutional form of government, was just more than I could stomach.…

Alliance, Ohio

It would seem that in the interest of fairness, accuracy, and information, you would have allowed a present member of the ACC and the ICC to present the work of the organization.… There are many qualified men who could have contributed much more than what we received from Dr. Buswell.

First Baptist Church of Ogden

Boothwyn, Pa.

“Southern Baptists and Ecumenical Concerns” is highly enlightening.…

Muncie, Ind.

Hurrah for J. Lester Harnish! His article on the ecumenical movement is a jewel in a trash heap.

First Baptist Church

Ness City, Kan.

Among other things, Dr. J. Lester Harnish states, “… then there is no reason why you shouldn’t … cooperate with others who are not Baptists.…”

We do cooperate. Dr. Wayne Dehoney, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, clearly points this out in his article in the same issue. But the second part of this quote is what we distrust—and with reason. The logic contained there is that once we start “joining,” the momentum therefrom would lead some to want to join organizations composed of anything and everything that puts the stamp of “Christian” on themselves. This is one thing that restrains us. We realize that in these times the grandiose American theme of a monolithic organization, the bigness, the importance, and so on, does have a tremendous appeal; to some Baptists perhaps that would be the right answer.…

Fenton, Mo.

Catholicism has not changed. Did you ever talk to a converted Catholic regarding his relief from the terrible fear of purgatory? Can a priest who enriches himself on the fear of a season in purgatory burning be a brother in Christ? Is the mythical body of the blessed mother of Christ in heaven acceptable to the Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ?…

I have a love and pity for Catholics and have Catholic friends. I cannot fellowship with their misleaders (2 John 10).

Gary, Ind.

Your issue with its objective and relevant appraisal of ecumenical and evangelical Christianity on a worldwide front is a welcome source of collateral reading for this missions instructor. Thank you.

Chairman, Missions Department

St. Paul Bible College

St. Paul, Minn.

HE WAS PROPHETIC

I have just read … the stirring and remarkable “A Short Story of Antichrist,” by Vladimir Solovyov (Jan. 29 issue).

If it is possible, I would like to know if this story is in print now in booklet form.… I think it is truly remarkable that an article based on Bible prophecy written over sixty-five years ago is so accurate in its description of present-day world events. It reminds me that “the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.” Jesus said, “When ye see these things come to pass, look up, for your redemption draweth nigh.”

Crestline, Calif.

I was deeply impressed.… I wish that CHRISTIANITY TODAY could publish it in tract form. It contains a message that should have a very wide distribution.

Duluth, Minn.

• We regret that the following acknowledgment was inadvertently omitted from the paragraph introducing “A Short Story of Antichrist”: From A Solovyov Anthology (SCM Press, London). Used by permission.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY is not planning to print the story in pamphlet form.—ED.

PROBLEM GRAVE AND GROWING

L. Nelson Bell’s article “Cults Made Respectable?” (Jan. 15 issue) treats a grave and growing problem with an incisiveness which etches the evil in bold relief.

Thanks to all concerned for its publication—it deserves the widest possible circulation.

Church of Christ

Liberty, Tex.

PLAIN DUTY, CHRISTIAN DUTY

Reference the report in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, January 15, entitled “Abandoning the Pretense” (News), may I be allowed to correct a possibly false impression.

My resignation from the Church of England is not directly connected with the secessions on the ground of baptism which, in the present situation, I regard as a peripheral issue. It is in fact due to the move away of the Church of England from the Reformed basis enshrined in the Thirty-nine Articles, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal. This trend is not new, but now has the official backing of the Lambeth Conference (e.g. the Doctrine of the Eucharistic Sacrifice), and has been rubber-stamped by Parliament in the recent Canon Law debates regarding the permissive use of the Mass vestments, stone altars, and so on. I find only one authority for my faith, namely, a fully inspired Bible which I believe to be the revealed Word of God, and only one ground for my faith, which is justification through faith in the atoning work of Christ, by an act of grace.

I have not refused to baptize any infants whatever, as you imply, though others have, for I acknowledge myself bound by my oath until my resignation becomes effective. I therefore need no reminding of my plain duty, for my plain duty I regularly accept as my Christian duty!

York, England

I find great stimulation in reading CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and as an Episcopal priest I should like to comment on “Abandoning the Pretense.” Herein are described certain Church of England clergy who refuse to baptize infants in favor of an Anabaptist position on Baptism.… In baptism, it is not so much a matter of what we can do for God as much as what God does for us. “You did not choose me, but I chose you” is Scripture which the Church affirms in the baptism of infants. The Philippian jailor heard this faith asserted by Saint Paul, and he had his whole house baptized (Acts 16:32). Mrs. Wesley had John and Charles baptized as infants because she knew that God would do a good work in them. Infant baptism is not a pretense, and, thank God, it is not being abandoned.

St. George’s Church

Central Falls, R. I.

WHISPERED PORTENT?

Your plea for an interest in spiritual health as contrasted with the craving for creature comforts (on page 30 of the Jan. 15 issue, in connection with your comments on the Harris Survey) was most helpful.

Many of us have long waited for an important publication like yours to come out with a strong expression on what we regard to be a major problem in Christendom today—materialism. No more than a casual comment is what we usually get.

Maybe this tiny whisper is a portent of better things to come.

Board of Bible School and Youth

Baptist General Conference

Chicago, Ill.

ANOTHER OPINION

Jerry H. Gill, in “The Meaning of Religious Language” (Jan. 15 issue), presents the premises of the logical positivists—that meaningful language is either definitional or empirical, and that religious language is neither—and refers to various persons who accept at least one of these premises. He failed to present another option, denial of both of the premises, which has been the usual position of conservative theologians.

Lecturer in Philosophy

Los Angeles City College

Los Angeles, Calif.

WEIGHING A DOCTRINE

Concerning your news item in the January 15 issue about Dr. Harleigh Rosenberger: You quote him as saying of his movement to the United Church of Christ that there are no “major theological differences” between that group and the American Baptist Convention.

Yet Dr. Rosenberger notes that he will now have to begin the baptism of infants. Since the 1640s Baptists have held to the theology and practice of “believer’s baptism by immersion.” To those who consider Scripture and theology a serious matter, this concept of regeneration is of crucial importance. We affirm in this practice that a person becomes a Christian only when he takes the step of repenting his own sin and believing and confessing the Lord Jesus as his personal Saviour.

While I do not wish to begin a controversy with the many churches which practice infant baptism, I do wish to strongly disagree with Dr. Rosenberger about the importance of the difference between these two concepts of spiritual regeneration. This is central to the Christian faith. However, this seems to be only another instance where one is so involved in ecumenical spirit that the serious questions of scriptural interpretation and church practice are dismissed with a wave of the hand.

Gosport Baptist

Gosport, Ind.

THE LAST OUTPOST

Your recent editorial comment on Mississippi (Jan. 1 issue) … was too much for me to take! Your “holier than thou,” so typical of northern demagogues and hypocrites, was not at all unusual, but many of us had hoped that you would keep out of this rabbinical, devilish debacle and defend the last outpost of white respectability and decency.

I will not renew my subscription.

Tryon, N. C.

I do not like the extremes of ultra-liberalism; neither do I appreciate the extremes of ultra-conservatism. I feel that CHRISTIANITY TODAY does not follow either extreme but is true to the essentials of our wonderful faith.

San Diego, Calif.

Sixth in a Series (Part II)

In a campus atmosphere of many viewpoints, students easily become skeptical of theological truth as something beyond their reach; instead, considerations of professional status and ecumenical eligibility bulk large. Even if the diversity of faculty perspectives does not result in the systematic destruction of their faith, evangelical students still must “struggle not to be drowned,” because conservative scholarship on the Continent lacks dynamic centers for comprehensive propagation of its convictions.

Almost a century ago there was a great debate over whether evangelical isolationism rather than evangelical penetration would result from the participation of evangelicals in Free University, Amsterdam, the only Calvinistic university in the world. Today it is clear that in the seminaries at German universities no community of evangelical scholarship has arisen and that evangelical forces have been largely isolated from the ecumenical dialogue, which mainly reflects what is currently fashionable. While the traditional conservative scholars did not gain a large platform in Germany during the Barth-Bultmann era, it is noteworthy that Rengstorf, Michel, and Jeremias have been popular guest lecturers in Sweden. Discussion of demythology and of dialectical theology has been more marginal in Sweden than in Denmark, which has been aligned mainly on the Barthian side.

In the past century, as rationalistic liberalism began to pervade the seminaries, Bible institutes were established within the state church framework. Among these were Missionsbibelschule Liebenzell in the Black Forest, which now enrolls sixty students annually, and St. Chrischone near Basel, which has eighty students and became quite widely known through Fritz Rienecker’s writings.

But doctrinal dilution is a problem not only of the university theological faculties; most free church seminaries also reflect a considerable measure of theological diversity. They make little decisive contribution to the main currents of European theology. Their literature program rests upon too few professors. Even the well-equipped Southern Baptist seminary in Ruschlikon outside Zürich is being strengthened against criticisms of a mixed position on the inspiration of the Bible and against some past intrusion of Barthianism into its theological emphasis.

Needed: A Counter-Attack

Although evangelical scholars in Europe readily support on scriptural ground their conservative positions against dialectical theology, they are more timid about turning their theological presuppositions into a vigorous counter-attack. As a result their work tends more to demonstrate the inadequacy of Bultmann’s, Barth’s, and Brunner’s deformed dogmatics than to formulate a comprehensive alternative that grapples with problems posed by contemporary theology.

It is significant that evangelical scholars in America have formulated their objections to neo-orthodox theology more extensively and more fully than have European conservatives. Yet the writings of Gordon H. Clark, Edward John Carnell, Cornelius Van Til, Paul K. Jewett, and other critics of neo-orthodox theology are largely unknown or are brushed aside on secondary grounds. German theology, for all its comprehensive character, is actually very provincial; in many respects it is a closed corporation indifferent to foreign competition and comment. An exception is G. C. Berkouwer’s constructive critique of The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth, which has been translated from Dutch into German and of which Barth has taken appreciative but unrepentant note. But as a general rule, notes an American observer, unless outside comment comes from a Germanic name like Niebuhr or Tillich, it will be ignored as theologically insipid. And if it comes from conservative sources, it will be overlooked as dealing with questions of no special interest to European theologians.

This tendency to ignore conservative Protestant thought is not particularly German; it is characteristic of liberal Protestantism in general. Contributors to the recent work The Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ simply ignore the painstaking American efforts in historical research by J. Gresham Machen and B. B. Warfield in New Testament studies or relevant work on the British side by men like James Orr and James Denney. Dr. John Baillie, the late principal of New College, Edinburgh, and a gifted scholar in his own right, once rejected a proposed assessment of Orr’s writings as the subject of a doctoral dissertation on the ground that Orr was “not really a scholar.” The prejudice that biblical Christianity cannot and will not be defended by a true scholar is a widespread denigrating notion in some liberal circles. Actually, however, it merely reveals the illiberality of liberalism. The reading and reference lists in ecumenical seminaries and the books proposed for translation by ecumenical literature committees reflect much the same temper, as do the reviews in such journals as the Journal of Bible and Religion, the Journal of Biblical Literature, and indeed, the Christian Century.

Pietistic Concern

European church life also includes a pietistic force, one alertly evangelistic and concerned with the practical side of the Church’s mission. Although it, too, deplores the impact of Bultmann upon German church life, its opposition is more polemical than comprehensively dogmatic. Its most conspicuous achievement has been the sponsorship under the German Evangelical Alliance of large-scale evangelistic crusades in which evangelist Billy Graham has called the masses in major German cities to faith in Christ. The alliance is an organizational rallying point for conservative leadership from both the people’s church and the free churches. It has also sponsored community evangelistic efforts by the Janz Brothers, Gerhard Bergmann, Anton Schulte, and others. At the level of the local churches the German Evangelical Alliance has exerted a formidable influence for spiritual renewal. In Paris, encouraged by a similar French group, more than 200 pastors and workers now attend an annual three-day conference of evangelical leaders from French-speaking countries.

Unfortunately, the evangelical witness is impeded by a lack of coordination of independent and interdenominational efforts that cling to desires for private glory: nevertheless, greater association among leaders of diverse projects is noticeably increasing. The strength of independent evangelical effort still lies in its vigorous appeal to the God of the Bible expounded in an unqualified way. “We are not surprised,” says René Pache of Institut Emmaüs, Lausanne, “when neo-orthodox positions crumble, since even those theologians who revived a theology of ‘the Word’ insist that the Bible is not the Word of God.” The task, he adds, is “not to create a competitive new theology, but to train a ministry concerned for a full hearing and full obedience of God’s Word.”

The conservative Bible schools in Europe, however, tend to move outside the theological dialogue. Most faculty members feel that the debate as now carried on is so marginal to evangelical concerns that to bog down in these discussions would mean inevitable neglect of biblical and evangelistic priorities.

Growth of the Bible school movement has been a conspicuous feature of European evangelicalism. Dispensational interests accounted for the early establishment of German schools like the Bibelmissionsschule at Beatenberg, an independent venture whose 200 students supply reserves for missionary, pulpit, and evangelistic endeavor as well as for other church work. In Wiedenest the Bibelmissionshaus, known beyond its Open Brethren circle through the writings of the late Erich Sauer, has thirty-five students. In Switzerland the Institut Emmaüs at Vennes, near Lausanne, with its fifty French-speaking students, has become rather well known through the writings of René Pache; the school has missionary alumni throughout the non-Communist world.

Using the French language and sponsored by four European Bible institutes, a new European seminary is being projected in Paris for students with a baccalaureate diploma; hopefully, it will succeed the seminary at Aix-en-Provence, now slowed almost to a standstill. Cooperating in the project will be the institutes in Brussels (mostly Flemish-speaking), Beatenberg (German), and Nogent-sur-Marne in Paris and Emmaüs in Vennes (both French-speaking). The doctrinal basis is to include an unqualified position on the inspiration of the Bible and will also be moderately premillennial.

The most comprehensive Bible school program has been ventured by Greater Europe Mission, whose American leadership was encouraged by Continental evangelicals. (Its field director, Robert Evans, is author of the volume, Let Europe Hear!) This group now sponsors the European Bible Institute in Lamorlage near Paris (founded in 1952; now has thirty-nine students); Bibelschule Bergstrasse in Seeheim, Germany (founded in 1955; has forty-four students); and Instituto Biblico Evangelico in Rome (founded in 1960 and soon to graduate its small first class). The objective of Greater Europe Mission is to give nationals who want to enter Christian service a biblical foundation and a sense of evangelistic urgency. From these coeducational institutions the men go out to become assistant pastors in the national churches, pastors of free churches, and evangelists, while the women become youth and children’s workers.

Denominational Anxieties

In Lutheran and Reformed churches, conservative pastors are increasingly encouraged to sponsor similar study programs on a local church basis to preserve biblical fidelity and promote evangelistic concern. In the people’s church, for example, the evangelistic youth work of Wilhelm Busch of Essen, now retired, quickened evangelical sensitivity. Others known for evangelistic initiative and preaching are Hamburg pastor F. Heitmuller, active in the German Evangelical Alliance; Hans Brandenburg (Lutheran) of Korntal, J. Grünzweig (Moravian Brethren) of Stuttgart, and Heinrich Kemner of Ahlden; Peter Schneider, general secretary of the YMCA, West Berlin; Arno Page of Köln, leader of the Christian Endeavor effort; and Anton Schulte, a free church evangelist who has held community campaigns in Austria and Germany.

Yet no absolute contrast can be drawn between the free churches and the people’s (state) church. While the free churches are generally lively and aggressive, individual pastors in the older established denominations have equally vigorous groups. Older pastors in the established churches who reflect the influence of Schlatter, Kähler, or Barth tend to be conservative; the younger generation of ministers has been more largely influenced by Bultmann, an influence increasingly compounded with other emphases as well. The free and people’s churches often share similar tendencies. To gain respect or status, many free churches have imitated the state churches organizationally, have become enmeshed in similar theological compromises, have forsaken the proclamation of the Evangel, and have lost their fervor. Yet the people’s church goes further amiss by compounding these unfortunate tendencies with public involvement in decisionless Christianity. Because its members are automatically baptized, confirmed, married, and buried by the church, most of them assume that they belong to the body of Christ irrespective of personal faith. “The churches are state-tax-supported; what other support do they need? And what more do we need than infant baptism and confirmation?” So runs opinion. This lack of spiritual decision in the people’s church created a vacuum into which the Bultmannians could readily insert their existential appeal.

In the interest of personal faith both Barth and Brunner have attacked infant baptism; those enrolled in the churches by baptism, they imply, are not on this ground Christians. The baptismal rite has become an increasing problem for Lutheran and Reformed pastors alike. In some places ministers are no longer required to officiate at infant baptism if they have questions of conscience. Some of them encourage the children to wait. Barth has declared for believer’s baptism. For some Lutheran theologians this assertion was sufficiently provocative to end any and all interest in his theology. Brunner has hesitated to go this far; the religious structure of Continental civilization is such, he feels, that it cannot stand a renunciation of the validity of infant baptism and confirmation.

Handicapped people have left their mark upon the world both for good and for ill. Demosthenes had a speech impediment. Beethoven wrote his greatest music while deaf. Every schoolboy knows that John Milton was a blind poet. Theodore Roosevelt began life as a sickly child. Franklin Roosevelt achieved national and world leadership in spite of poliomyelitis. Kaiser Wilhelm had a withered arm and Hitler a warped personality. It has been said that it is not what happens to us that counts but how we deal with it.

Just who is an exceptional child that grows up to be an exceptional adult? He is the child who is markedly different from other children, one who has a physical, mental, emotional, or behavioral divergence from what is considered normal. He may be blind. He may wear a hearing aid. He may use a prosthetic device or other orthopedic support. His behavior may be seriously anti-social or withdrawn. His intelligence may be so inadequate that he cannot learn to take care of himself. Or he may be so greatly gifted, with talents so far beyond the ordinary, that he is misunderstood and lonely.

This exceptional child could belong to anyone. Any home could have a mentally deficient child. Illness or accident might permanently damage a well-favored youth. The best efforts at control might not prevent behavior distortions resulting in delinquency or mental illness.

Yet some church people take the position that these tragedies indicate God’s displeasure and are sent by him as punishment. The mother of a severely retarded child was once asked by her neighbor, “What terrible thing have you done that God should punish you so?” The feelings of guilt such an idea engenders are cruelly difficult to eradicate.

But another view is that God has made available to mankind ways of overcoming evil. Not enough is known about the abnormalities of human growth and development. Certain viruses may be dangerous to fetal growth. High fevers may damage the central nervous system. Blood incompatibilities leave their mark. Sometimes mistakes are made, as in the use of thalidomide. Man is constantly searching for truth and for ways to put his knowledge to work. And the Church through its compassion has a stake in the study of man’s deviant behavior or condition, whether this study comes from the anatomy class, the nutritional laboratory, or the psychological clinic. Such study ought to reflect human compassion that expresses itself in good stewardship and in patient deeds of love. Yet this compassion is not always evident. Some years ago, for example, an invitation to the spiritual leaders of a small city to visit the city’s program for educating the handicapped brought out only three from among more than forty possible church representatives.

The mother of a mentally deficient child said, “I have not been to church since this little girl was born more than seven years ago.” Another mother speaks of finding little help in her church contacts. She tells of advisers too busy to discuss her son and his problem of limited intelligence and sensory defects. She feels others are impatient with her inevitable questions, “Why did this happen to me? What is the meaning of this child’s life? How can I cope with it all?” Many people are embarrassed by questions like these, and some even think there are no answers.

But another mother said, “God must love us very much to entrust this precious child to our care.” She wrote a book about her endless search for medical help and for proper schooling for her little girl born with cerebral palsy. Raising this child is looked upon as a sacred trust by this family, and the parents derive great comfort from the support of their spiritual advisers. For these people God is actually a “very present help in time of trouble.”

“Is the life of the person with special needs important enough for the Church to match its profession of compassion with patient deeds of love?” The question is posed in a study book for junior high school pupils. Its answer must be clear and unhesitating. Who can estimate the worth of Anne Sullivan’s devotion to Helen Keller?

Although the word “handicapped” does not appear in the Bible, handicapped persons are mentioned in stories of the blind, the maimed, the deaf and dumb, the paralytics, and those possessed of devils or evil spirits. Treatment accorded them varied greatly from the kindness shown by David to Mephibosheth, Jonathan’s son crippled in an accident, to the callous indifference to the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda. It was Christ’s compassion that led to the deepening appreciation of the sacredness of life out of which came the effort to protect and help handicapped persons.

For more than sixty years the attitude of education toward handicapped children has been moving from denial and exclusion to acceptance and provision. Private schools for the blind and the deaf have been operating for many years. Fresh-air schools and hospital classes for delicate and crippled children are also of long standing. Increasing numbers of public school systems have been developing programs for the mentally retarded, crippled, blind, and deaf, and some of these programs go back more than fifty years.

Schools For All The Children

An illustration of what can be done is the Special Education Program provided for handicapped children in the schools of Bellingham, a city of about 35,000 in a rural county of Washington adjacent to the Canadian border. The constitution of the State of Washington declares that “it is the paramount duty of the state” to provide education for all the children of all the citizens. This means all children: blind, deaf, dull, crippled, unruly, disturbed, uncared for, unloved. Special programs of various kinds, suited to particular local situations, are increasing throughout the state.

Under this law for the past thirty years there has been some local provision for children of limited capacity. The present program in Bellingham, now eleven years old, is serving in one way or another more than 250 children who attend schools in Bellingham and Whatcom County and have barriers to successful learning. Emotionally, mentally, and physically handicapped children are included in the program, which is based on the principle that all children are entitled to an education suited to their needs.

Most of our country’s adolescents graduate from high school. Some go on to college, some into the armed forces, and some to work. Other young people cannot meet requirements for high school graduation; yet they too will go to work. There are also children who cannot qualify for high school entrance but who will grow up to take a place in society for which we must prepare them. Still other children lack the ability to attend any public school classes at all. For each group of limited capacity there must be a curriculum suited to their needs—one that recognizes both their limitations and their assets.

City and county schools may provide, as Bellingham has done, programs that facilitate the learning of children with particular problems. The deaf child is more like other children than different from them. His exceptionality is his lack of hearing. His many likenesses to other children ought to be emphasized rather than his one area of difference. Therefore Bellingham’s programs for handicapped children are scattered throughout the schools in the district. The handicapped children are encouraged to mix with other children as much as possible. In fact, by the end of the elementary program, most physically and emotionally handicapped children have learned to overcome or live with their problems so successfully that they can return to the regular classroom.

Another aspect of the special education program is that the class is built around the teacher. Each teacher’s assets are considered when children are assigned to his room. Some children need a man teacher, some a woman. Some require a permissive classroom atmosphere; others thrive in a more structured one. Thus children with several different disabilities may be found in the same classroom. As a result, handicapped children learn with great personal benefit to be considerate of others. The mentally retarded boy feels important and needed as he protects the physically unsteady little girl. The emotionally disturbed girl finds satisfaction and develops self-confidence as she reads to the blind boy. A child’s firm determination to overcome some obstacle has a heartening effect on all who watch.

Certain handicaps receive particular attention. There is, for example, an auditory resource room for children with severe hearing impairment. Itinerant specialists in speech training serve many other children. Books printed in large, bold type and other sight-saving materials are provided for children with limited vision. Crippled children are released from class for physical therapy provided by agencies outside the school system.

Young people whose academic achievement is limited but who have the capacity for social competence continue their education in the secondary schools. Here the general curriculum is adapted to the needs of the individual. He may leave the core room of his special program to compete with other students in such non-academic areas as shop, music, art, or physical education, where his talent may even surpass that of his classmates. Some graduates of this part of the program find limited success in unskilled employment.

One unit is for mentally deficient students who are limited in both academic and social competence. This is a specialized situation—a home as well as a school, a greenhouse, a warehouse, lawns, gardens, and uncleared land—and it is used for teaching simple skills and occupational pursuits. Because these students are unlikely ever to be self-supporting, they will continue to need lifetime care, whether at home or in a residential facility. Some graduates of this part of the local program find satisfaction in a community-sponsored sheltered workshop.

The State of Washington makes provision for serving its exceptional children throughout their lives. As soon as a disability is recognized, professional consultation is available to parents. Special services are added as needed during the years of compulsory education. Various agencies provide help during adult years.

A Heritage Of Compassion

Care for the handicapped in our country is rooted in our Judaeo-Christian heritage. Although special programs for handicapped children have been slow in appearing in public education, the fact that there are such programs means that the citizens support them. And the citizens’ reasons for supporting them, while varied and personal, all go back to the teachings of Christ. Solicitude for the troubled child derives ultimately from the influence of the Christian Church and from man’s response to Christ’s compassion for the unfortunate.

There is other evidence of this relation between religion and education for the handicapped. Some churches have parochial schools for their handicapped children. Some Christian chaplains are working in institutions for the mentally retarded. Sunday school classes for handicapped children are being re-established. Some parents of retarded adolescents look to the local ministerial association to provide leadership and space for a church-related fellowship of teen-age retardates. Among other church-sponsored projects are recreation programs for handicapped persons and Boy Scout troops for handicapped boys.

Another encouraging development is that some denominations now require seminary students to spend some time in clinical practice. Each seminarian spends a specified time on the staff of a medical or mental hospital; or a school for the blind, deaf, mentally retarded, or delinquent; or a prison, or city mission. Such men will know how to minister to parents to whom God has entrusted handicapped children.

Is the life of the person with special needs important enough for the Christian Church to match its profession of compassion with good stewardship backed by deeds of love? Does it care enough to do something for the handicapped? Does it care at all?

I read in a book

That a man called

Christ

Went about doing good.

It is very disconcerting

That I am so easily

Satisfied with

Just going about.