And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.… Every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused.” “They … worshipped and served the creature more than the creator.… If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”

The Church has always had to work out its life in the tension of these principles: the goodness of God’s gifts, coupled with our proneness to subvert them and to be subverted by them.

One of his gifts to us is the ability to pray, the capacity for committed and integral exertion. Another is the ability to play, the capacity for detached and aesthetic pleasure. To deny either is to risk falling short of being fully human. Out of both, out of mimicry and mystery, out of laughter and ritual, the theater, in Grecian times, was born. Although it never fully died, its eclipse was so great that one can almost speak—and this is quite remarkable—of a rebirth, following the same pattern, about a thousand years ago under the auspices of the Christian Church.

Pagan survivals reflected in superstition in young Christian cultures, folk entertainment in village and countryside, minstrels, jongleurs—all exerted pressures comparable to those of Broadway and Hollywood today: pressures toward devotion to false gods or complete abandonment of the pursuit of any gods whatever. The medieval Church was able to harness these energies to its own purposes, channeling the torrent, as it were, to drive its mill. This was possible in part because the mighty acts of God recorded in Scripture are inherently dramatic, and so are our acts of worship whether they are viewed as sacrament or as ordinance.

A great flowering of liturgical drama resulted. Earliest was the embellishment of parts of the service itself with costumes, pageantry, gesture, dialogue, role-playing. Then came the great cycles of mystery plays celebrating the macrocosmic history of God’s dealings with mankind, from The Fall of Lucifer to The Judgment. Miracle plays sought to honor God in another way, showing him at work in the lives of the saints.

In the fifteenth century, as a response to a shift in devotional theology (perceptible also in art and literature), morality plays such as Everyman focused on the microcosmic history of the individual soul from birth through the vicissitudes of life to ultimate salvation.

As early as the fourteenth century, religious reformers were condemning the new drama. “This playing of miracles nowadays is … idolatry”—such is the crowning argument in one treatise (Brit. Mus. MS. Add. 24202). By honoring them above sermons, thus implying “that such playing doeth more good than the Word of God when it is preached,” men “say blasphemy.” The Puritan attack in England reached its height around 1580 and again in the Civil War, resulting in the closing of the theaters in 1642.

True, the theater was then no longer under the aegis of the Church. In some ways it was making the most of its independence. Undoubtedly 1642 stamped out some evils—temporarily.

Yet at the same time the religious heritage was a powerful influence on Elizabethan drama. One of the finest specimens, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, belongs unmistakably to the morality play tradition. Marlowe “presents us with the paradox of a man confessedly irreligious using a religious theme to write a masterpiece of religious drama” (R. Speaight, The Christian Theatre [Burns and Oates, 1960], p. 48). Written at a time when a Christian world-view was still, for most people, viable, the best plays of the age—Shakespeare’s included—show us the heights literature can reach within such a framework.

To continue a history of Christian drama we should turn to seventeenth-century Spain and France; but this is not our aim. We live in a world many call “post-Christian.” What relation can there be between Church and theater in such an age? Contrariwise, we see a revived use of drama in the work of the Church and a revival of religious values in the theater—after two centuries of divorce. What are the implications of these trends?

Christian significance is found in three different kinds of modern drama. Some plays have a clear, direct Christian message; others have an indirect one; still others are written on religious themes but lack Christian insight.

When the term “religious drama” is used, it is often limited to the first type. Here we are closest to the kerygma, and the trumpet must sound clear. Most of these plays are used primarily by, if not in, churches.

To Group 1 belong plays analogous to the various forms of medieval drama. Many of them are basically homiletic, only a step away from the pulpit. Elements of plot and characterization are undeveloped, the emphasis being rather on the epigrammatic proclamation of a message and perhaps on pageantry. Historical vignettes may be loosely linked by the device of a narrator. Dramatic force may be lent to passages of Scripture by an arrangement for speech choir or for several speakers. This dialogue of Dusty and Rusty in James Broughton’s The Last Word partially illustrates the style:

It’s cold in here.

United Nations, have mercy upon us!

Elizabeth Arden, deliver us!

General Motors, have mercy upon us!

Sigmund Freud, deliver us!

Batten Barton Durstine and Osborn, have mercy

upon us!

In the name of Mutual Life and Cold Storage.

Amen.

Silence

There’s no answer.

The Mysteries Today

The mystery play, reenacting Bible stories, has its analogues today. Modern stagings of the medieval mysteries themselves have contributed to the current upsurge of religious drama. At the annual Festival in York, England, the pageants are carted through the streets much as they were centuries ago.

But the medieval versions, though still very much alive for us, are not enough. The old story, ever new, each age must retell in its own way. Striking parallels between the world of Herod and that of Hitler are at the heart of W. H. Auden’s Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being; but that work is more poetic than dramatic. The same sort of thing was done dramatically by Stephen Vincent Benet in A Child Is Born. Dorothy Sayers’s BBC radio series on the life of Christ, The Man Born to Be King, is a more sustained effort. Those who have written with distinction in the genre of the modern biblical play make a long list—too long (as with the other categories) for me to attempt to include it here. Andre Obey, Henri Gheon, Charles Williams, and Ronald Duncan are outstanding.

Philip Turner’s Christ in the Concrete City (1953) is an interesting blend of the kerygmatic with the narrative approach. Its powerful evocation of Passion Week, ending with the Resurrection, owes something to the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht as well as to T. S. Eliot.

Signs Of Sanctity

If Bible stories have their perennial appeal, the lives of saints are also fascinating. As the term “miracle play” indicates, the Middle Ages emphasized the supernatural signs by which saints were identified. From there the pendulum could only swing toward discrediting these signs, and growing adeptness in psychology encouraged entirely human explanations for “saintliness.” But now, no less interested in understanding them as people, our age is again ready to recognize the saints. Sanctity is recognized to be as much a human possibility as adultery—and very nearly as interesting, to a public which has perhaps had enough of the latter to be bored with it.

The definitive study of the saint in modern drama is Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, produced at Canterbury in 1935 just a few steps from the scene of Thomas Becket’s assassination in 1170. In the subtlety of its character analysis, Eliot’s study of martyrdom—of the meaning of “bearing witness”—meets the highest demands of the art.

Of several worthy successors in this genre, three may receive particular mention. Christopher Fry wrote The Boy with a Cart in 1939 expressly for church presentation. But the recent play of Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, is proof enough that the appeal of the saint, even when presented as heroic, is not limited to ecclesiastical precincts. A saint closer to our own times, the great Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson, is the subject of Albert Johnson’s Conquest in Burma.

In the morality play, abstract moral and theological concepts or representative figures (e.g., Everyman) are given personality and made the protagonists in a drama. The idea has a medieval aroma about it, but Guenter Rutenborn in The Sign of Jonah has succeeded in giving it an unmistakably modern treatment. So has Charles Williams, whose Grab and Grace pits Pride and Hell against Faith, Grace, and Gabriel, with Man as both the object of contention and the one who must decide. Such a lineup could be dull, but the play turns out, on one level, a rollicking farce. Fry’s A Sleep of Prisoners is another play that has strong ties with the morality tradition.

With the emphasis of the moralities on the proclamation of abstract truth, we have come full circle and are again close to the homiletic style.

To Group 1, plays with a clear, direct Christian message, also belongs a class of purely fictional dramas. Here plot and character development must carry the weight, and they can do so superbly. For God has the answer to every problem of man: this is surely implicit in the Christian “good news.” Set the problem, then, as realistically as art can do it, and let the answer be worked out.

For example, Cry the Beloved Country by Felicia Komai (from Alan Paton’s novel) faces the problem of race; The Zeal of Thy House by Dorothy Sayers, that of the artist and morality; Turner’s Cry Dawn in Dark Babylon, that of a child’s death. Turner says he found that the Christian symbolism he had used in Christ in the Concrete City was not meaningful to a “post-Christian” audience; “I have therefore asked the questions in terms of a human story.”

A second significant group of modern plays comprises those in which Christianity is positive but veiled. These are the plays we associate more closely with the commercial theater than with the Church.

An indirect evangel rarely wins converts. I should be surprised to hear of anyone’s being led to Christ by T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. That is not its purpose. The value of the Christian message obliquely presented is that it can gain a hearing where the direct evangel is shut out. Its accomplishment (setting aside the purely literary and aesthetic and concentrating on what pertains to the Church’s work) is the creation of an atmosphere of presuppositions and expectations in which a Christian message may be received. The plays of Group 2 may be welcomed as a praeparatio evangelii.

A Mysterious ‘Cure’

The Cocktail Party, enormously popular in New York and London, is perhaps the best example of this group. Four well-to-do and creative people whose lives are badly mixed up are “cured” by a trio of mysterious acquaintances, one of whom is a psychiatrist. The average theater-goer who found himself watching The Cocktail Party was reassured by a familiar situation and deft comedy lines. He was not put entirely at ease, however, for once Eliot’s strategy had captured his audience there were deviations from the theatrical formula. The “psychiatrist” concluded each office call with a little ceremony that was uncomfortably like a liturgy. Strange words like “sin” and “atone” were used—apparently with the author’s approval—to diagnose the needs of one patient; and her “cure” was to become a missionary and to die, in a native uprising, by crucifixion.

Some viewers doubtless missed these hints and were entertained. Others must have felt that the playwright, obviously trying to do something to them besides provide an evening’s entertainment, had betrayed them. But what he was trying to do was not exactly plain—not clearly enough Christian to trigger the defense mechanism of rejection that many seem to have developed. Eliot went on to repeat this strategy in other plays.

Another author of dramas that are markedly Christian in this way is Christopher Fry. His play, The Lady’s Not for Burning, is a fine example. To attempt to communicate directly in theological terms with many of our contemporaries is to fail to communicate at all. This is a major problem of the Church. Perhaps Eliot and Fry point the way.

Modern plays belonging to the third group cannot be described as “Christian,” even indirectly, but nevertheless deal significantly with religious themes. Interpreting the word “religion” broadly—for which there is New Testament as well as Tillichian authority—we are offered the definition of “religious drama” as that which “seeks to relate man to the totality of his being” (H. Ehrensperger, Religious Drama: Ends and Means [Abingdon, 1962], p. 67).

At any rate, the fact that popular interest in their themes has sustained such recent plays as The Deputy, J. B., Gideon, Anouilh’s Becket, The Crucible, The Visit, Waiting for Godot, and Long Day’s Journey into Night is significant to the Church. It is not entirely a contemporary phenomenon. Shaw’s Saint Joan and O’Neill’s Lazarus Laughed are examples from earlier in the century.

Reading For The Questions

Some may prefer to call this play or that play Christian and move it from Group 3 to Group 1 or 2; I will not argue. What the plays I have just mentioned have in common is a clear and honest presentation of a problem that is religious—individual or social guilt, personal emptiness or despair, the cry for salvation. Many church study groups find this a good starting point; they read Ionesco and Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and Duerrenmatt and Sartre, profitably—not for their answers but for the questions inescapably posed in their treatment of a fallen humanity. The catalogue could go on, for every serious drama delves into questions into which it is also the Church’s obligation to probe.

Not that the value of the answers offered is always—or ever—nil. Marvin Halverson’s remarks on D. H. Lawrence’s David are interesting: “His employment of Biblical imagery penetrates to the heart of meaning. While one might credit this freshness of insight to Lawrence’s powerful imagination, it is also testimony to the renewing power of the Biblical image itself” (Religious Drama I [Meridian, 1957], p. 8). We have, perhaps, a situation close to that of Marlowe’s Faustus.

An encouraging aspect of the popularity of such plays is that there may be a growing readiness in our culture to face religious issues and to admit that they are religious issues.

This last group of plays leads us to note what may be the most important point of all in the modern dialogue of Church and theater: the discovery that theological meaning lies at the root of the very concepts of tragedy and comedy. Modern Western civilization, guilt-ridden and threatened with extinction, is developing an openness to the concepts of sin and the suffering Saviour. Many Christian scholars, the Chicagoan Nathan Scott perhaps foremost, see tragedy itself as an expression of these concepts. But Christian hope provides another perspective. The world we live in is enough to cause despair, were it not for “the narrow escape into faith.” That is Fry’s description of comedy.

How should the Church today consider drama? With concern—and open-mindedness; as a challenge and an opportunity.

A young and prosperous businessman suffered a stroke that severed the vital link between brain and tongue. A speech therapist was requested by the state to determine the seriousness of the damage. In a heartbreaking interview the man stuttered and stammered, straining to answer simple questions. The emotion built up until in desperation the man burst out, “I can’t … I want … I … Do you understand … There’s nothing wrong … I just can’t.…” His stroke had left him desperate to communicate.

Each of us finds himself in a similar predicament. We Christians do not know how to make clear the message of Christ to a disinterested generation. Helplessly we watch modern youth grow up and leave the Church. National statistics take on flesh and blood in our own congregations. We know that probably 90 per cent of those who arrive at the age of twenty-five without Christ will never be reached. We know, too, that of the more than 22,000,000 teen-agers in America, almost 70 per cent have already made up their minds to have little or nothing to do with religion in any form. Census experts estimate that by 1966 one-half of our population will be under the age of twenty-five. What a mission field! Where can we turn to discover answers to help stem the flood of youth who drop out, rebel, quit in disgust, or never even enter the doors of their local church?

In a recent survey, hundreds of typical American young people were asked to tell why they were not in church. Let us review briefly the five answers they gave. Possibly in their own complaints we shall find some clues to how we may reach them.

First, young people complained, “The Bible doesn’t touch my life in a practical way.” Youth are interested in God’s Word. They are thrilled by a pastor who can make it live from the pulpit. They say, in the words of one girl interviewed, “We don’t want to learn about how Christian people live. We want to learn about God.”

This is an age of specialization. The young person goes to his doctor or his teacher for authoritative answers. He can immediately perceive unpreparedness or superficiality in the professional man.

The pastor is a professional man. Scriptural research goes with his calling, and young people have a perfect right to demand professional excellence from him. If the pastor is not a specialist in communicating God’s Word, who is? If the pastor cannot make it live, who can? When the pastor is absorbed in a passionate search for scriptural truth, the excitement of that quest will rub off on his people, young and old. Genuine biblical research is a lost art in the Church, and youth have unwittingly placed their finger on a sorry situation. Ask young people what they would like to study in church school, and seven out of ten replies will be, “What do we believe?” It may well be time for the minister to stop asking more from his people for God’s sake and to start asking more from God and himself for his people’s sake.

Our young people have warned us. They don’t know what they believe. If they don’t, the next generation will be ruled by others who do.

Secondly, youth complained, “The Church makes no provision for my real social needs.” Rather than rushing out to organize new baseball leagues and skating parties, let us examine this complaint on a deeper level than “fellowship” by asking, “What are youth’s basic social needs?” Nevin C. Harner in Youth Work in the Church lists these six basic needs (pp. 31–60):

1. The need for a vital Christian faith.

2. The need for self-understanding.

3. The need for Christian vocational guidance.

4. The need for Christian sex education.

5. The need for Christian social education.

6. The need for rootage in the Christian fellowship.

Obviously, the complaining young people could not isolate and identify these needs but simply knew that something was missing. The historic Church has pioneered in the most practical of social services: education, medicine, libraries, the arts. Yet youth now say the Church does not care about their social needs.

Strangely, there are ministers who believe that their task has no social dimensions. Like Time magazine, they confine religion to one page or so of life. Most of us do not want to make that mistake. Yet we think that, because each week we have only five hours of youth’s 168, we should limit our concern to “spiritual things” and let the home, school, and job take care of the rest of their lives. Thus we produce the vicious circle (as with sex education) of the parent trusting the school, the school trusting the church, and the church trusting the parent. As a result young people receive nothing but evasions and misinformation.

Needed: Confusion Control

All of us are guilty of camouflaging our social concern under a barrage of meaningless phrases, worn-out metaphors, and out-dated allegories. It is our job as communicators to come up with language pollution controls that will enable us to eliminate the smog of confusion and bring about a return to clean air and clear communications.

One pastor had the courage to turn his Sunday evening service over to a group of articulate laymen to evaluate and criticize his morning sermon. An easier but no less painful technique is simply to ask any young person in the congregation what he received from the sermon, or from any sermon in the last year. Peter Berger asserts in Noise of Solemn Assemblies that the greatest delusion among ministers is that “what they preach on Sunday has any influence on what their listener does on Monday.”

Too many pastors are also guilty of adhering to out-dated social patterns instead of developing contemporary ones. Why not spend an evening with your young people participating in an exciting political rally, or riding through an economically depressed area, or viewing a controversial film or television program, or discussing the biblical philosophy of sex, or visiting a juvenile prison, a mission in the slums, a maternity ward, or a mortuary? Such life-sharing experiences in company with the pastor followed by times of frank, Christ-centered discussion can bring insights a thousand Sunday school classes or youth fellowship meetings could never provide.

Obviously, we must not resort to being different for difference’ sake. And the old forms are still vitally significant. Nevertheless, until some of us begin to find practical ways of providing help for the social needs of our young people, they will continue to turn away from the Church in ever-growing numbers.

Thirdly, youth accused the Church of being “uninformed about our problems.” All of us know the kind of problems young people face today. Or do we? When was the last time you read a sociological depth study of American youth and their problems? When was the last time you sincerely asked a young person to share with you the kinds of problems he and his friends might be facing?

Let us use senior high youth as an example. I still hear sermons preached by harassed pastors in youth fellowship sessions (a horrible place for sermonizing) against necking or dancing, when in reality those same young people regularly face the pressures of pre-marital sexual relations or illicit sex in forms we find difficult to believe.

The major social activity on the average senior high campus is the prom. When that important night arrives after weeks of exciting preparation, when the gym is a blaze of color, when the boys sport rented tuxedoes and the girls are radiant in carnations and new formals, Joe and Mary Christian sit at home desperately alone, or sneak away to neck in a lonely park, suffering from guilt and confusion. What provisions have we made, what responsibility do we take to help these young people mature in sex attitudes and controls? At least the school is doing all it knows to do!

Some ministers still preach against movies, a taboo that went out the day they brought home a television set. But which of us can honestly claim to have helped our young people in developing television or theater selectivity, in interpreting and deciding quality for themselves?

What about dope addiction? Seventy-eight per cent begins during the teen years.

What about misused sex? Forty-seven per cent of America’s illegitimate babies are born to teen-agers, and there is one new case of venereal disease among teen-agers every minute around the clock.

What about honesty? The average age of a car thief in America is fifteen, and shop-lifting and cheating are common among youth.

What about alcoholism? Seventy per cent of drinkers begin during the teen years.

What about pornography? This is a multi-million-dollar industry that feeds on youth.

Whether we understand youth’s problems or not, we are often guilty of putting off practical, face-to-face encounters with our young people about these problems. Yet all the time their lives and attitudes toward the Church may depend upon what help they receive in these areas.

When The Bubble Explodes

The Church and the churches’ well-meaning families can shield their offspring only so long. What happens when young people take their places on a secular campus or on a military base? Don’t we ever wonder why so many of them never come back to the Church? Haven’t we seen enough of what can happen to them? Faith built on a false bubble of enthusiasm can explode at the first prick of a cynical professor or the first goading of a sex-ridden comrade. What have we done to equip our youth to face their world, the world of Bultmann and Barth, Darwin and Nietzsche, Salinger and Hemingway—the world of moral license and existential revelation?

Fourthly, youth complained, “There is no challenge to responsibility within the Church.” They were not complaining that we underemphasize evangelism. On the contrary, we often use all kinds of guilt and pressure techniques to force young people to be evangelistic before they are even sure of their own salvation. In fact, some of us who witness professionally are guilty of demanding more from young Christians than we demand from ourselves. We challenge youth to witness in their world when day after day we fail to witness in our own, except as professionals when and where it is expected of us.

The Church seldom implements its challenge with a suggested course of action that is practical, exciting, and demanding enough for the challenge. Who of us have gone to the trouble of implementing the challenge of Christian witness by demonstrating realistically how it’s done through role-playing, Bible studies, films, or visitation programs? Who of us have taken the trouble to incorporate our youth into the boards or committees of the local church, thus giving them realistic places of responsibility and on-the-job training? Who of us have taken key young people into our offices to share with us a day on the job, watching the heartbreak of death, the drudgery of details, the agony of decision?

Every morning before regular classes begin, thousands of Mormon youth meet to study the mysteries of Mormonism. At this moment in West Germany there are approximately two thousand American Mormon missionaries, intelligent, well-trained, well-dressed, spreading their faith in that area. What would happen if the Protestant church gave her older youth similar training and opportunities? Do they have any less courage, less potential, less ability? Do our Christian young people have to turn to the American government for service? No! Together, we could create a Christian Service Corps (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, July 17, 1964) for short-term volunteer service through existing foreign and home missions boards. We could use the talents of hundreds of dedicated youth to provide reinforcement and assistance for the existing missions programs. Their support could come through their families, friends, or sponsor contacts; their transportation could come through the local church; their projects could be administered through the regular missions organizations.

The fifth complaint youth made was, “There is too much adult inconsistency in the Church.” What can one say to this indictment? We can only face our failure in the clear light of Scripture and, having seen it, confess it and pay the price of more disciplined Christian living.

In the light of these five complaints of young people, nothing less than a new attitude on the part of the Church and its ministry is required. We need an attitude that will destroy any smug feeling of accomplishment when our twenty loyal young people are finally together in one place for fellowship or recreation. We must keep ever-present in our prayers, preparation, and promotion the many thousands of youth within easy reach of our urban churches who have never been touched even by the shadow of these churches. We need to work at our peak of creative and spiritual powers on a local, state, and national level to reach the youth around us. We need to want desperately to communicate with them before they, too, are far from the Church and from Him in whose name we labor.

In recent years, evangelicalism has been coming of age intellectually. With the strengthening of academic standards in many of its schools, colleges, and seminaries, its tendency toward anti-intellectualism has declined. More evangelical educational institutions have been accredited by the great regional associations since 1950 than in the preceding half century. An increasing number of scholarly books are being written. And one of the major developments in religious publishing during the past decade has been the willingness of leading secular publishers to bring out the work of evangelical thinkers.

But a parallel tendency toward what may be called “anti-aestheticism” remains. In Dorothy Sayers’s introduction to “The Man Born to Be King,” an essay every Christian student of the arts should know, she speaks of “the snobbery of the banal.” It is a telling phrase, and it applies to not a few evangelicals. They are the kind of people who look down upon good music as highbrow, who confuse worship with entertainment, who deplore serious drama as worldly yet are contentedly devoted to third-rate television shows, whose tastes in reading run to the piously sentimental, and who cannot distinguish a kind of religious calendar art from honest art. For them better aesthetic standards are “egghead” and spiritually suspect.

The arts pose uncomfortable problems for many evangelicals. There are those who question the relevance of the arts to Christian life and witness in these days of world upheaval. “Why,” they ask, “spend time in this tragic age talking about such things as aesthetics?” The answer is that art belongs to human life. Pervasive and influential, it is an essential clement of man’s environment. And when art is unworthy, man’s spirit is debased. “The powerful impact of modern culture upon modern man … discloses,” as Professor W. Paul Jones of Princeton says in an important essay, “… the overwhelming degree to which contemporary man is being formed by an ‘art’ not really worthy of the name” (“Art as the Creator of Lived Meaning,” The Journal of Bible and Religion, July, 1963).

Art, though aesthetically autonomous, has deep spiritual and moral implications. Like the capacity for worship, the aesthetic sense is one of the characteristics that set man apart from the animals. Evangelicals turn away from art as a side issue or frill at the peril of their own impoverishment and at the cost of ineffectiveness in their witness. For art, which is the expression of truth through beauty, cannot be brushed aside as a luxury. We who know God through his Son who is altogether lovely must be concerned that the art we look at, listen to, read, and use in the worship of the living God has integrity.

Our God is the God of truth. According to the Gospel of John, “He that doeth truth cometh to the light.” This great principle is just as valid aesthetically as in doctrine and in practical living. Art that distorts the truth is no more pleasing to God than any other kind of untruth. Surely it is not too much to say that the God of all truth looks for integrity in artistic expression as well as in theology.

Some evangelicals may not like art. Because of their cultural illiteracy, they may be ill at ease in the presence of worthy artistic expression. In their discomfort they may want to say to the aesthetic side of life, “Go away, I’m not interested. I don’t want to be bothered by you.” But it will not go away. Through millions of radios and television sets, through the printed page, through advertising, through the architecture and furnishings of public buildings, churches, and homes—in a thousand and one ways art is here, though often in unworthy forms, and no one can run away from it.

Moreover, Christians have an aesthetic problem not merely because of the ubiquity of the arts but because in one way or another much in the contemporary use of literature and the arts is debased and opposed to the truth and to the values to which Christians are obligated. Evangelicals had better be concerned about the aesthetic problem, if for no other reason than that a tide of cheap and perverse artistic expression is constantly eroding the shoreline of noble standards and godly living.

The situation is complicated by the multiplication of leisure hours in this automated age. How many now use their extra hours wisely? Gresham’s law may well have an aesthetic counterpart in that bad art like bad money drives out the good.

Surveying The Situation

As background for some answers to the problem, consider a very brief survey of the aesthetic situation among many evangelicals today with particular reference to music, the visual arts, and literature.

Music is an area in which “the snobbery of the banal” stands in strange contrast to the doctrinal discrimination of many conservative Christians. Not only does the mediocre drive out the good; there is also a certain intolerance of the excellent that refuses to see that great music can be a far more true expression of a biblical theology than piously sentimental music. Or it may be that certain kinds of music finding ready acceptance in some churches reflect a theology that, despite its high claim to orthodoxy, yet leaves much to be desired.

Religious music, however, is not the only music we hear. Much of non-religious music—serious and not just popular in character—betrays the spiritual rootlessness and moral anarchy of the times, as in the strident and heartless works of some of the atonalists or the irrationalities of the avant-garde composers. Thus there is all the more reason for inculcating in God’s people higher standards for this great art that speaks so directly to the emotions and to the spirit.

Look next at the visual arts. Here, as in music, there are great riches. Granted that much in modern painting is related to the spiritual alienation of the day (although not all abstractionism is unworthy), how slight is the acquaintance of many evangelicals with the masters, past and present. How many know the works of American masters like Stuart, Inness, Ryder, Winslow Homer, Cassatt, Marin, or Andrew Wyeth? And what of the priceless treasures of great Christian art through the ages? There is vastly more in religious painting than the ever-present head of Christ that seems almost to have become a Protestant icon.

As for literature, where are the first-rate Christian novels and poems? Evangelicals have made notable progress in scholarly writing, but their achievement in more imaginative forms of literature is mediocre. Christian editors know the paucity of verse by evangelical writers that even begins to qualify as poetry. And in the field of fiction, distinguished novels and short stories written by evangelicals today are almost nonexistent.

Perhaps one thing that holds evangelicals back is a certain cultural parochialism and fear of the world. The moral state of much contemporary literature is indeed appalling. Here the aesthetic problem is a spiritual one that cannot be divorced from the Christian conscience. But there are many books that evangelicals can and must read, including not only the great treasures of English, American, European, and other literature but also representative current writing.

At a Christian teachers’ institute several years ago, I urged breadth of reading and ventured to give a brief list of some of the great works indispensable to a liberal education. In the discussion that followed, a young man asked, “What has Plato to say to a Christian?” The answer is that Plato and every other great writer and artist of the past or present has much to give a Christian not only because it is essential to know the main currents of human thought but also because genius comes only from God. The doctrine of common grace asserts that God distributes his gifts among all kinds of men—unbelievers as well as believers. But the gifts are God’s and the glory is his. Amid the moral corruption of our day, some great and worthy books are being written. Christians need to know them.

In his Concessions, St. Augustine speaks of “the spacious palaces of memory.” It is a wonderful phrase, suggesting Christian responsibility for the furnishing of the mind. But for the fulfillment of this responsibility, there is needed something more enduring than television, the ephemeral popular religious literature of our times, or best-selling Christian records.

Like much else, culture begins at home. Taste is formed by what we live with. The question might well be asked of evangelicals: “What does your home tell of your spiritual and intellectual and aesthetic interests?” Said Rudyard Kipling: “Men and women may sometimes, after great effort, achieve a creditable lie; but a house cannot say anything save the truth of those who have lived in it.” What do the books on the shelves, the magazines on the living room table, the pictures on the walls, the music on the piano, the record collection say of us? What should we read, what should we hear, what should we look at? The Bible has its clear criteria, summed up in the great Pauline phrase, “bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.” In Scripture the truth is paramount. Therefore everything that is shoddy and false, even though piously so, is abhorrent to the God of truth.

Some Areas For Action

But this brief survey, which might well be extended to other arts such as drama and architecture, while necessary as diagnosis, points clearly to the need for action. Let us consider, therefore, three proposals toward evangelical answers to the aesthetic problem: (1) The formulation of a Christian theory of aesthetics based first of all upon the insights of the Bible rather than upon extra-biblical sources; (2) the cultivation of good taste and the development of the critical faculty; (3) revision of educational programs to give a more adequate place to the arts.

Consider first the study by evangelicals of the theory of aesthetics. One of the hopeful signs of the last twenty years has been the development of a Christian and biblical philosophy of education. If evangelical education is experiencing renewal, the reason is that evangelical educators have been seriously occupied in considering the theological and philosophical basis of Christian education and in defining its goals.

But so far very little study has been devoted to aesthetics. Indeed, it is difficult to bring to mind a single published book by a conservative evangelical that deals competently with the theology and philosophy of aesthetics. Only comparatively recently have any Protestants given serious thought to this field. Professor W. Paul Jones, in the article previously referred to, says, “Despite a history of virtual indifference to art, Protestant thinkers within the past several decades have begun to explore in earnest the relation of religion to aesthetic matters.” Evangelicals should be joining in this effort. It faces them with an exciting opportunity to explore new paths in applying biblical truths to their cultural milieu.

The bulk of the work being done in the field of Christian aesthetics represents Roman and Anglo-Catholic thought. Its roots go deep into sacramental theology, Thomism, Greek philosophy, and such great writers as Dante. But in large part it is extra-biblical. There is a radical difference between the thought-forms of the Bible and those of Western philosophy and humanistic culture. And while the Bible says little directly about the arts or aesthetics, its basic insights must provide not only the foundation for an authentic Christian aesthetic but also the corrective for artistic theory derived from other sources, however excellent these may be.

Moreover, what some liberal Protestant thinkers have been doing in the field of aesthetics also needs revision, as Professor Jones clearly points out. For Paul Tillich and others like him, he says, art is important because it is chiefly the indicator or “barometer of the ‘faith’ or ‘ultimate concern’ of a generation or culture.” But the difficulty is that such a view of the function of art fails to discriminate between first-rate, second-rate, third-rate art, the latter of which often reflects the present culture more truly than the first!

Art belongs to the only creature made in the image of God, the only creature to whom is given in a limited but real extent the gift of creativity, even though the gift is marred in fallen human nature. Thus considered, it is much more than the faithful mirror of culture. It is far more importantly a way-shower, leading on under God to fuller visions of his truth.

If there is, as we have seen, tension between many evangelicals and the aesthetic aspect of life, the reason lies in a contented ignorance of much that is aesthetically worthy and a satisfaction with the mediocre because it is familiar. Yet theological roots in the eternal biblical verities which never change do not necessarily imply enslavement to aesthetic traditionalism.

An essential element of true aesthetic practice is the adventure of new ideas and their development in new forms. The great artists of the past had in their day an element of newness and spontaneity, and the greater the art the more abiding the newness. In a time when the ugly and the formless have become a cult reflecting the confusion of the pagan world, the creative Christian spirit in art should be pointing the way forward and upward, but always with reference to the everlasting and ever-present truth of him who is “the same yesterday and today and forever.”

A second proposal is that evangelicals must, if they are really to wrestle with the aesthetic problem, take seriously their obligation to develop critical discrimination in the arts. Good models are absolutely essential for sound aesthetic judgment. Good taste is not expensive; it is just discriminating. And it can be developed. Its formation begins very early.

It matters everything what kind of pictures are looked at by children, what kind of music is heard, what kind of television programs are viewed. Art exists in its own right, not just as a vehicle for moralism. Yet it cannot but affect those who are exposed to it. For young people to live day by day with shoddy literature and vulgar entertainment may tear down what they have heard in church and learned in Sunday school. Evangelical churches have picnics and hikes, athletic games and parties for young people—wholesome means of fellowship indeed. Why not also Christian fellowship in group attendance at a symphony concert, or a violin or piano recital? And it is surely not beyond reason for Christians to visit art galleries together. “The way to appreciate beauty,” said Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale, “is to keep looking at it, to appreciate music is to keep listening to it, to appreciate poetry is to keep reading it.”

Experiences In Nobility

At the end of the first chapter of Romans, after his appalling catalogue of sins within the human heart and life, Paul states the ultimate condemnation of unregenerate man in these words: “They not only do these things but take pleasure in them that do them.” As people look together at what is unworthy and debased aesthetically, they are together debased. But the converse is true. The shared experience of great music or drama, living with good pictures (even in reproductions)—these are group experiences in nobility and, let it be added, in reality. Not all music is joyous, nor does all drama have a happy ending. Yet, as Aristotle shows in his Poetics, tragedy purges the emotions through pity and fear. And at the pinnacle of involvement through experience in the company of others is the reverent worship of the living God, not for the sake of what we get out of it, but because God is God and because worship must be given him.

The time is overdue for evangelicals to outgrow their careless unconcern for aesthetic values and to develop critical standards that will enable them to distinguish good from bad in the art that surrounds them.

The third proposal, obvious but nonetheless important, concerns the more adequate place that the arts ought to have in Christian education. In too many evangelical schools and colleges the arts are little more than poor relatives of the curriculum. Yet in actuality they are not marginal, peripheral subjects; they are close to the heart of Christian life and witness. At present evangelical education is strongest aesthetically in music, although even here it yet has far to go. When it comes to the visual arts like painting and architecture and to the other performing arts, including drama, much of evangelical education is like a fallow field that needs both planting and cultivating. Christian schools and colleges must practice the unity of truth they preach by giving the arts a greater place in the curriculum.

The compelling motive for Christian action in the field of aesthetics lies in the nature of God. Christians are obligated to excellence because God himself is supremely excellent. In the Hall of Fame at New York University, these words are inscribed in the place given Jonathan Edwards, the greatest of American Christian philosophers: “God is the head of the universal system of existence from whom all is perfectly derived and on whom all is most absolutely dependent, whose Being and Beauty is the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence.” It is because of who and what God is, it is because of the beauty and truth manifest in his Son, it is because of the perfection of his redeeming work, that evangelicals can never be content with the mediocre in aesthetics. Here, as in all else, the call is to the unremitting pursuit of excellence to the glory of the God of all truth.

For a Better Understanding of the R.S.V.

Harper Study Bible, edited by Harold Lindsell (Harper and Row, 1964, 2,112 pp., $9.95), is reviewed by Edward John Carnell, professor of ethics and philosophy of religion, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

Many evangelicals, including myself, were delighted when highly qualified scholars of the Old and New Testament, drawing data from the most recently discovered biblical manuscripts, placed the fruit of their labors, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, at the disposal of the Church. The King James Version of 1611, despite its long use in the Church and its occasional lofty expressions, is a time-bound translation, dotted with errors and anachronisms, which ought to be replaced by a work that has kept pace with the exciting science of manuscript study.

Nonetheless, one of the incontestable advantages of the King James Version has been the availability of the many tools for biblical study forged across the years to help the Christian, both pastor and layman, unlock the rich treasures of God’s Word to man; among these tools are the Scofield Reference Bible and Cruden’s Concordance, both of which rely almost exclusively on the received text of the King James Version.

Dr. Harold Lindsell, associate editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY and former vice-president of Fuller Theological Seminary, has refused to sit idly by and do nothing about this problem. With his customary thoroughness and scholarly attention to details, he has successfully completed an attempt to unite useful tools of biblical study with the text of the Revised Standard Version. Christians now have access to a compact spiritual library in one volume, a volume aimed at the single goal of making the message of salvation in the Old and New Testaments clearer and more meaningful, and all to the glory of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

The wealth of features in the Harper Study Bible, let alone the excellent standard of printing, bears a touch that few evangelicals other than Dr. Lindsell could give. Among these features are the following: the complete text of the Revised Standard Version, with self-pronouncing language forms and large, easy-to-read type; meaty, instructive introductions to all of the books in the Bible; topical headings that help create a continuity of meaning; marginal cross-references to assist the reader in his search for biblical unity; carefully composed annotations at the bottom of the page to suggest ways in which seemingly difficult passages can be clarified; a handy index to the annotations; a useful, though by no means exhaustive, concordance of biblical terms; and finally, a set of maps, in full color, of the Holy Land and surrounding countries.

When Dr. Lindsell inserts cither a cross-reference in one of the margins or an annotation as a footnote, he is guided by the solemn conviction that the Bible contains a full and self-consistent body of revelation because its original composition was inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that it is thus free from all error in the whole and in the part. Such a conviction is worthy of the highest praise, for of what value would the Bible be if its doctrines were not true on divine authority? Secular myth and poetry may tell us how to live on this planet, but they are powerless to tell us either what constitutes the mind of God or what we must do to be saved from sin and death.

One of the most commendable qualities of the Revised Standard Version is its deliberate avoidance of the temptation to translate the Bible into the passing idioms of the day. Rather, it draws its expression from more classical usage. This means that when an evangelical becomes permanently attached to the King James Version, he not only is announcing his indifference to biblical scholarship but also is defrauding himself of the intellectual and spiritual pleasure that accompanies the reading of God’s Word in a modern translation.

Although the task of clarifying and defending the text of the Bible must continue until the Lord returns, this fact is not an excuse to neglect the use of a fresh, new translation of Scripture, as well as a fresh, new set of helps in understanding Scripture. We tend to fall into habits of all sorts, including the use of a particular translation of the Bible. Christian Scientists, for example, widely advertise their devotion to the King James Version, as if this gives an official stamp to their Sunday reading of Scripture and the correlative passages from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy. The use of a more contemporary translation of Scripture, along with contemporary assistance in the understanding of Scripture, will go far to deliver us from the error of thinking that our way of dealing with Scripture is the only one. Dr. Lindsell has provided us with this assistance, and for this we ought to be as grateful as we are for the appearance of the Revised Standard Version itself. Arise, fellow Christians, and make full use of the means for spiritual growth that God has so graciously put at our disposal!

EDWARD JOHN CARNELL

How To Spend A Billion Dollars

Protestant Worship and Church Architecture: Theological and Historical Considerations, by James F. White (Oxford, 1964, 224 pp., $6), is reviewed by Arnold A. Dallimore, pastor, Cottam Baptist Church, Cottam, Ontario, Canada.

It is incredible that although “each year a billion dollars are spent on church buildings in America, there is no book available to guide building committees, ministers, and others responsible for new churches, in the theological and historical implications of their work.” This book was written to meet this need.

The author considers first “the theological implications” of ecclesiastical design. A building that houses a church should be fashioned according to the dictates of that church’s theology; thus Dr. White, who is assistant professor of worship at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, begins with a critical analysis of the two chief Protestant conceptions of worship, seeing in the form of worship an expression of basic doctrinal beliefs. This leads to a highly readable enunciation of “The Principles of Liturgical Architecture.”

Secondly, White discusses “the historical implications” of planning a church. Modern construction materials—structural steel, laminated woods, extruded aluminum, structural and ornamental concrete, and the like—have seemingly divorced present-day architecture from any relation to that of the ages that were dependent upon timber beams and stone arches; yet White finds an abundance of lessons for today in the church builders of the past. From “Early and Medieval Patterns” and “Reformation Experiments,” he demonstrates “many liturgical factors which have affected the design of churches”; these he illustrates with sixty small diagrams of basic floor plans, showing especially the location of liturgical centers. A number of “Recent Experiments” are likewise treated, and the book concludes with a chapter on the emotive factors that enter into church construction, and an extensive bibliography.

This work, while useful to the professional architect, is planned especially for the minister and building-committee member who may have little previous knowledge of ecclesiastical design. It does not present ready-made blueprints; rather, it provides the basis for understanding the principles behind ecclesiastical design. On the negative side, it is slanted almost completely to the needs of the liturgical type of service, and a work of this price might well have been adorned with a few full-page illustrations of architectural specimens. Nevertheless, it goes far toward meeting the need created by the billion-dollar expenditure on buildings.

ARNOLD A. DALLIMORE

The Difference Is Better

Love and Sexuality, by Robert Grimm (Association, 1964, 127 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Howard Carson Blake, minister, First Presbyterian Church, Weslaco, Texas.

This one is different. Concise, well written, well translated (from French—the author is chaplain to students at the Universite de Neuchatel in Switzerland), it is refreshing. Mr. Grimm’s approach is definitely theological rather than psychological or sociological. Perhaps that is what makes it easy for anyone to understand the language. Conscientious writers often try to establish basic principles from which they will deduce their findings. Grimm does that. As you read, you feel that the man is honest. It does not seem that he began with his conclusions and then “proved” them.

Many of his viewpoints are also refreshingly different. Unlike some others, Grimm does not set about to establish a formula under which anybody and everybody, deviates included, can find pleasant justification for types of behavior formerly condemned yet now widely practiced. On the contrary, he has a good word for self-control as a form of legitimate birth control (this he discusses positively and compassionately in a carefully written chapter). He even recognizes clearly the possible spiritual values in conjugal chastity and in voluntary or circumstantial celibacy.

The author is thoroughly aware of current trends, yet advocates a high standard of disciplined living for convinced Christians. He also warns them against trying to impose these standards on an unconvinced and unwilling majority.

The author finds a basis for interpreting sexuality in the very essence of the Godhead. Without essential differentiation, personality does not find its full meaning. Grimm gives respectful, even reverential place to the human body; in this he is in company with other contemporary Christian writers, such as C. S. Lewis (in The Four Loves), and in opposition to ancient and modern gnosticism. This body becomes the instrument of self-giving by which a man or woman learns to reflect the pattern of the self-giving of God. The monogamous and exclusive character of this relation is thus derived from the God-given nature of man. Grimm devotes one chapter to the biblical interpretation of the spiritual dimension of sexuality, using Ephesians 5:21–33 and other statements of Paul.

In considering love outside marriage the author says: “Our world, surfeited with eroticism, shows evidence of having a wistful longing for purity. It looks not only for words, but for the evidence of lives that demonstrate the contemporary pattern of Christian love, a pattern that the adolescents can recognize and appreciate. What a splendid task for Christian engaged and married couples!”

An interesting analysis of the loves of Tristan and Don Juan, true “myths of love,” leads to the presentation of “fidelity” as the key to the solution of the problem of time, “the great enemy of love.” Fidelity, the temporal extension of faith, becomes possible with the help of Jesus Christ.

Dr. David R. Mace, an executive director of the American Association of Marriage Counselors, has made a free-flowing and readable translation. He also wrote a brief foreword. The sources quoted in the book are mainly European and include Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant views.

HOWARD CARSON BLAKE

A Study In Biography

Extraordinary Christianity: The Life and Thought of Alexander Vinet, by Paul T. Fuhrmann (Westminster, 1964, 125 pp., $3), is reviewed by Jesse DeBoer, professor of philosophy, University of Kentucky, Lexington.

This little book is a graceful tribute to a Swiss Protestant teacher, writer, and preacher who died a century ago, made by the professor of church history at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. Professor Fuhrmann, being of French and Swiss parentage, is concerned to honor a religious leader who was important in his own immediate tradition. Besides, he found inspiration in the study of Vinet, beginning to study him in the early 1920s and later, as he tells us, using his own manuscript “for my own spiritual upbuilding” (p. xiv). One can only approve of his intention to extend to others the benefits he thinks he derived from Vinet.

But is this book important? I am sorry to have to say that I doubt it, and I offer a few comments, based on the book, to show why. First look at Fuhrmann’s remarks on those to whom he addresses the book. These include (1) “the average man and woman who, finding local preaching inadequate or irrelevant, long for something different” (pp. xiv, xv); (2) ministers who can find in “this book” (or in Vinet?) “innumerable gems—thoughts that can be easily inserted in discourses or expanded into sermons” (p. xv); and (3) “theological students, professors, and intellectuals who may be tired of current ideas” (p. xv). These aims do not justify serious study in biography. A similar unseriousness shows itself in Fuhrmann’s remarks on uses to which his book can be put. He says that people who are “interested in ecumenicity will appreciate Vinet” (p. xvi); but I do not find the issues cleared up. Again, he says: “Professors, Sunday school teachers, and students of theology may find that Vinet corrects today’s excessive objectivism in theology.… How many theologues, after all, realize that today the great problem is not God but man?” (pp. xv, xvi). This is feeble writing, and it contains both inaccurate description and unjustified criticism.

Two final notes. First, Vinet lived from 1797 to 1847. Kant had completed his work before Vinet came to maturity; Hegel died in 1831, Schleiermacher in 1834. This book does not show that Vinet understood their work or faced their problems. Secondly, Professor Fuhrmann’s sketch of Vinet’s education, and in particular of the men who had a major influence on him, fails to recommend him to a student of the serious issues of his time. One was Mme de Stael, whose writings, says Fuhrmann, “abound in … self-contradictions” (p. 34). Two others were Thomas Erskine and P. A. Stapfer; the latter, it seems, knew a bit about Kant but was hardly qualified to cope with him. Last there was Pascal. Vinet did valuable work through papers and studies on Pascal; yet, according to Emile Cailliet (Pascal, p. 350), he did not see that Pascal seriously held to the Roman Catholic view of the authority of the Church, and he incautiously identified the promptings of the heart with the movement of the Holy Spirit. Vinet’s apparent reliance on private feeling, I would judge, is hardly essential to Protestantism. Further, there is no discussion of the logical tangles in such phrases as “heart” or “feeling.” Professor Fuhrmann has to provide us with a more fundamental interpretation of the spiritual problems of European culture one hundred years ago and of how Vinet’s work bears on them, if he is to persuade us of Vinet’s importance. It is, of course, proper to honor Vinet for his role in the history of French Protestantism. But a smaller and less ambitious book than this could do the job.

JESSE DEBOER

Commands Respect

A Psychiatrist Looks at Religion and Health, by James A. Knight (Abingdon, 1964, 208 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by Orville S. Walters, director of health services, University of Illinois, Urbana.

This collection of essays is the work of a psychiatrist who is also a clergyman, trained and ordained in the Methodist Church. Dr. Knight is presently assistant dean of the medical school at Tulane University, having served for two years at Union Theological Seminary as director of the program in psychiatry and religion.

Since most of the articles have appeared previously in various journals, a certain discontinuity is inevitable. However, the essays are grouped under four headings to provide coherence and a logical sequence.

Knight takes a positive stand upon the contribution of Christian faith to mental health. He also recognizes the tendency of psychiatrists to acquire their concepts of religion from mentally ill persons. He sees the influence of humanism and reductive naturalism both in Freudian constructs and in contemporary psychiatry.

The wide scope of the essays indicates the breadth of the author’s interest in psychiatry and religion. One of the best chapters is that on Carl Jung, which includes some of the author’s first-hand experiences and impressions. A long review of suicide and several other chapters cite as illustrations the author’s own patients.

With a wealth of psychiatric wisdom and a perspective that extends across two important disciplines seldom combined in the same person, Knight’s book will attract wide interest and command respectful attention.

ORVILLE S. WALTERS

A Minister Talks Theology

Redemption and Historical Reality, by Isaac C. Rottenberg (Westminster, 1964, 224 pp., $6), is reviewed by James Daane, assistant editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Seminary professors who teach theology to future ministers are often surprised when the student-become-minister knows some theology. Isaac Rottenberg, Jewish, fortyish, born in England, trained in the Dutch universities of Leiden and Utrecht and, in America, at Hope College and New Brunswick Seminary, is a minister in the Reformed Church in America. He should be a happy surprise to some of his former professors, for he has no doubt written a better book on theology than some of them could have done, and he has done so with a subject that is not only the central concern of contemporary theology but also one of the most difficult of theological subjects. Certainly few ministers in this country under the endless demands of the parish could have written a book of this caliber.

An estrangement between the parish and the academic theologians, Rottenberg feels, would be fatal. “It will be a sad day indeed,” he writes, “when the pastor and the professor have little to say to each other.” How right he is, for no theology is worth its salt if it cannot become a theology of the pulpit. Although he does not explicitly say so, I think we have here a clue to his interest in his subject and to his critique of some of the theologies he has known.

His subject is the nature of historical revelation, or, if you will, Heilsgeschichte. What he gives us is, in his words, a “survey” of how this has been understood by Irenaeus, Augustine, Joachim of Fiore, and that most interesting seventeenth-century theologian, Johannes Cocceius; by the theologians of historicism; and by the existentialist theologians in modern times (especially Bultmann). Here all the familiar and some not so familiar names and positions arise. One chapter is devoted to the Catholic-sacramental approach to this problem, an approach that few Protestants realize is an approach to history, one that throws light on the Second Vatican Council’s approach to the worldwide adherents of non-Christian religions. A final chapter, entitled “Word, Holy Spirit, and History,” is described by a subtitle as a search for a “via media” between a sheer historicism and the naked existentialism of the Bultmann brand. Here Rottenberg deals with Barth, Kierkegaard, and some important Dutch scholars whom many Americans could profitably know but rarely do.

Rottenberg with a grin describes his conclusions as being no more than some inconclusive comments about the direction in which we must proceed in order to find more conclusive results. Yet he admits that in writing this survey he has not kept his theological hand entirely under the table.

Early in the book he asserts that revelation is not a body of factual information to be accepted as facts. In his “Concluding Remarks,” he says that “faith does not find its ground and being in factual knowledge.” He also states that the facts of the Christian faith have come to us, not “as inspired factual reports, but as witnesses of faith,” and adds that this faith “in many instances is expressed in the symbolic language of faith.” This echoes his repeated insistence that faith is not fides historica. But here, it seems to me, lies the essential problem of Rottenberg’s approach: How can one maintain, as he does, that faith does not have its ground in factual knowledge, and at the same time maintain, as he also does, that facts do (in fact!) underlie the Christian faith, though the report of them can be uninspired and expressed in merely symbolic language. To put it differently, if faith is not fides historica, can it be faith in Heilsgeschichte, understood as the actions of God?

Whatever is historical is factual. If the task is to relate faith to history because Christianity is a historical religion, then faith as a response to historical factuality can be such a response only if it is confronted with a revelation that can be conveyed as the knowledge and truth that God has acted thus and thus in human history, and therefore revelation is not only divine action (Heilsgeschichte) but also something that can be recorded (as in the Bible), can be factual, can be an object of knowledge, and can be preached. I think that this is what Rottenberg is trying to reach by means of the via media of his last chapter. But if so, then he cannot completely reject the idea that faith is knowledge of historical truths and is grounded in historical facts. For unless faith is at least this, it has nothing to do with history, and the problem of faith and history is unreal.

In any event, I heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants to see the problem clearly, and to any professor who wants his students to see the central concern of modern theology.

Rottenberg adds a note on the theology of Paul Tillich. To abandon the God of history, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to accept Tillich’s “God of the philosophers,” would, says Rottenberg, “seem to involve a loss of meaning.”

JAMES DAANE

The Basic Intent

Church and State: The Story of Two Kingdoms, by J. Marcellus Kilt (Nelson, 1963, 150 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by V. Raymond Edman, chancellor, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country.” Does this simple, non-sectarian prayer prescribed by the New York State Board of Regents for use in the public schools of that state violate the First Amendment of the Constitution? What is the basic intent of the First Amendment? Does the Constitution require a secular state, wholly irreligious?

These questions and others like them are faced by thoughtful Americans who are bewildered and, many of them, angered by the decisions of the Supreme Court against prayers and reading of the Bible in public schools. Church and State surveys in brief compass the development of the American principle of separation of church and state and thus points up the unhistorical basis of such decisions. The author aims to provide a historical outline of the two kingdoms, spiritual and secular, which have always been in conflict, from the early days of the Christian Gospel in its spread throughout the Roman empire until today. Pagan Rome protected the right of Christians to preach the Gospel as long as the Church confined its activities to spiritual matters. After two centuries of persecution of Christians there was domination of the state over the church from Constantine until the middle of the eleventh century. Then followed several centuries of papal domination over empire, epitomized in the abject surrender of Henry IV to Gregory VII at Canossa.

There came stirrings of liberty in the rising revolt against papal pretensions by Renaissance scholars and in particular by the Reformers. The author of this book should have stressed more the contribution of Lutheranism in blasting the medieval foundations of papal domination by the scriptural doctrines of justification by faith and the priesthood of every believer. This work was preparatory and indirect, while that of Calvinism, with its emphasis on the authority of the Scriptures, the independence of the clergy and the limitation of magistrates, pointed more directly to the separation of church and state. In the centuries-long struggle, biblically based doctrine broke ecclesiastical bondage to an allegedly universal church and to the political absolutism of European monarchies. The seeds of Calvinism sown in American colonial soil had, by the late eighteenth century, produced the basic constitutional provisions against the establishment of a state church and for freedom of worship.

Are the decisions of the Supreme Court based on law or on sociology? Do they represent the twentieth-century drive toward the complete secularization of the state? Church and State argues cogently that the decisions ignore the historical background and the basic intent of the First Amendment.

Pre-millennialists will not agree with the amillennial position that the covenant with Abraham and the Great Commission are fulfilled in the Christianizing of the nations. They should, however, agree with the author’s conclusions. This is an incisive historical survey against which to read the signs of secularization.

V. RAYMOND EDMAN

Not Just Another Book

All the Kingdoms of the Earth, by Norman K. Gottwald (Harper and Row, 1964, 448 pp., $7), is reviewed by Clyde T. Francisco, professor of Old Testament interpretation, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky.

This is not just another book on the Hebrew prophets but a work with a special purpose: to examine only those passages in the prophets that will help us understand their approach to international affairs. The problems to which the study addresses itself were first raised in 1903 by Hugo Winckler, who contended that the prophets were politicians first and religionists only incidentally. In fact, claimed Winckler, they were professional agitators who received their orders from foreign powers. In direct contrast, E. Troeltsch in 1916 claimed that the prophets were Utopians who had no real understanding of politics and who put their trust in divine miracle rather than in logical military and political strategy, thus being the despair of sensible statesmen.

Gottwald rejects both views, although he has some sympathy for certain aspects of the latter. He contends that the prophets worked from a real encounter with God that related itself in a creative way to the traditions received from Israel’s past. Rather than bringing predetermined concepts to the present historical involvement, the prophets met the tension of the moment with new insights that were rooted in the old. Thus practical theology was always being legitimately reborn.

This book is in many ways provocative. The author frequently challenges the traditional respect for Scripture by making such assertions as, “The Deuteronomist who records their [the prophets’] words has, to be sure, shaped the stories in such a fashion as to stress their cultic concerns, and he has occasionally smothered their original message in his verbiage” (p. 54). Again, he insists that Jezebel’s drive to destroy the Yahweh prophets occurred only after they tried to destroy her worship first. All she wanted was to be left alone!

However, the view most likely to cause comment is his observation that Christian expositors have lauded Second Isaiah’s missionary zeal without seeing that it is rooted in a restored Jewish community. “The same interpreters would be troubled at the suggestion that the best way the early Christians could have celebrated the resurrection of Christ was to disband their churches” (p. 346).

CLYDE T. FRANCISCO

‘I Crucified Him’

Pathways of the Passion: Daily Meditations for the Lenten Season, by Per Loaning (Augsburg, 1965, 148 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Leslie Hunt, principal, Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada.

A substantial number of Lenten books come off the presses each year, some stimulating and helpful, others making little or no contribution. Although this book covers well-trodden ground, it has much to commend it. The author is a Norwegian theologian of some repute. And since he is also dean of the cathedral in Bergen, he is in close contact with worshiping congregations who seek spiritual help. This dual background of the author is apparent in his book. While his writing has sound theological content, it is clear, crisp, and readable for people everywhere without theological training.

The author feels that full benefit of the story of the sufferings of our Lord and Saviour can come only to him who becomes an active participant, and he achieves this by drawing the reader into the drama that is being unfolded. We are not bystanders on the Via Dolorosa or mere spectators at Golgotha, nor are we permitted any cheap emotion. Says the author, “Only when I realize that it was I who dragged Jesus before the judgment, can I rightly weep over his sad fate.”

The book provides a chapter for each day in Lent, from Ash Wednesday to Easter. Each has its topic and just the right amount of reading material to stimulate thought and meditation.

The devotional usefulness of the book is enhanced by the relevant prayers at the end of each chapter. I believe many readers will find inspiration and insights in these Lenten meditations, and I heartily commend the book.

LESLIE HUNT

Innovator, Not Corrupter

The Theology of St. Paul, by D. E. H. Whiteley (Fortress, 1964, 295 pp., $5.25), is reviewed by F. F. Bruce, Rylands professor of biblical criticism and exegesis, University of Manchester, Manchester, England,

The author of this book, a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, has given us a fresh and comprehensive study of Paul’s theological teaching. His aim is to let Paul speak for himself, and not to impose on him the categories of twentieth-century thought. This means not only that Paul should not be judged by the standards of an age widely removed from his own but also that we need not expect him to give explicit answers to questions in which we may be more interested than he was. Some passages in his writings, for example, have come to be regarded in the course of Christian history as loci classici for the doctrine of predestination (especially Rom. 8:29 f.; Rom. 9–11; Eph. 1); we therefore tend to approach them in order to discover Paul’s answer to the question of why some men receive God’s salvation while others do not. But Paul may in fact be providing answers to quite different questions from those we put to him.

This is as much as to say that the treatment of Paul’s theology in this book is thoroughly exegetical, as indeed it ought to be. Mr. Whiteley has not only read Paul to good purpose; he has read his interpreters, too—interpreters of every school. F. W. Grosheide, Leon Morris, and John Murray come up for consideration along with commentators of Roman and liberal allegiance and others on whom it would be difficult to tie appropriate labels.

Paul’s debt to Jew and Greek, and to pre-Pauline Christianity, is discussed in a preliminary chapter in the light of such recent studies as those by H. J. Schoeps, W. C. van Unnik, and A. M. Hunter. While Jewish and Gentile thought had undergone considerable cross-fertilization in the generations before Paul, the evidence for purely Hellenistic influences on his thinking is remarkably scanty. As for his relation to pre-Pauline Christianity, he was an innovator in the good sense—“the greatest innovator the Christian church has known”—but he was no corrupter.

Paul’s theology is then studied under nine headings: (1) the created order (including supernatural beings as well as mankind), (2) the Fall and its results (under this are discussed the questions of solidarity in Adam, general revelation and natural morality, and the wrath of God), (3) preparation for the Gospel (including Paul’s teaching about the Law and about predestination), (4) the Lord and the Spirit, (5) the work of Christ, (6) the application of the work of Christ, (7) Church and ministry, (8) Pauline ethics, (9) eschatology.

How central were the “principalities and powers” to Paul’s scheme of things? What was the chief element in Paul’s Christology? Did Paul speak of Christ as “God blessed for ever”? Did he believe that all men would at last be saved? What was the baptism for the dead? Did Paul expect the Second Advent to take place within his lifetime? Is there room for a millennium in his eschatology? These and other important questions are discussed exegetically. To the last question the answer is negative. In First Corinthians 15:25 “Christ is like a general whose command lasts only during the period of the military emergency. As soon as victory is won he must hand over to the civil ruler.” In fact the verse “is really more significant for Christology, since it might appear to suggest subordinationist thought, than it is for Eschatology.”

Even when the details of Pauline theology are expounded exegetically, there will inevitably be differences of interpretation between one expositor and another, so complex is the Apostle’s personality and mind. But Whiteley has put all students of the Apostle in his debt by this careful study. Its usefulness is increased by its indexes, particularly the index of Scripture references. It is good to have a book like this which systematizes the abundant work that has recently been done on Paul and assesses it from a sympathetic and acute view of the Apostle’s writings.

F. F. BRUCE

Book Briefs

Villains on White Horses: Sermons on Passages from Paul, by W. A. Welsh (Bethany Press, 1964, 158 pp., $2.95). The author, looking back, was surprised to discover that so many of his sermons were based on Paul. Looking at the sermons, Paul would be surprised too.

The Primal Vision, by John V. Taylor (Fortress, 1964, 212 pp., $3.25). The author tries with success to make the Western Christian see reality as an African sees it. He rightly pleads for a sympathetic understanding of non-Christian religions, but he tends to undercut the character of Christianity when he claims that non-Christian religions can properly be adjudged only within and by reference to their own authentic religious content.

Administering Christian Education, by Robert K. Bower (Eerdmans, 1964, 227 pp., $3.95). A discussion of principles and methods that will make for an effective department of church education.

The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Volume XV, edited by Charles Stephen Dessian and Vincent F. Blehl, S. J. (Nelson, 1964, 576 pp., $15). This book continues the flow of materials from the papers which the great apologete left stuffed in the cupboards of the Birmingham Oratory. The background of the Achilli Trial and of the lectures that now constitute the first part of The Idea of a University dominates this volume. It is caviar for the scholar: a unique experience, not easily procured, appetizing, rich, and pleasantly salty.

The Oxford Annotated Apocrypha, edited by Bruce M. Metzger (Oxford, 1965, 298 pp., $3.50). The Revised Standard Version of the apocryphal books of the Old Testament, with notes.

Paperbacks

The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ, by Martin Kahler (Fortress, 1964, 154 pp., $1.75). Material first published in 1896.

A History of Latin Literature, by Moses Hadas (Columbia University, 1964, 474 pp., $2.45). Has a section on Christian writers.

And Pilate Asked …: Sermons for Lent, by W. A. Poovey (Augsburg, 1965, 96 pp., $1.75). Refreshing and stimulating sermonettes that turn on the role of Pontius Pilate.

Atheism, Humanism and Christianity, by Hanns Lilje, translated by Clifford Davis (Augsburg, 1964, 80 pp., $1.75). Short essays, long on value.

The Upper Room Disciplines 1965, edited by Sulon G. Ferree (Upper Room, 1964, 375 pp., $1). A devotional manual for ministers, theological students, and other church workers.

While I Live, by Otto Gruber (Cowman, 1964, 128 pp., $1.50). A book that appears to give far more than it actually does—religiously and otherwise.

The Gospel of Luke, by Bo Reicke (John Knox, 1964, 89 pp., $1). The author defends Luke on historical grounds against those doctrinal and philosophical attacks so fashionable today. Originally published in Swedish in 1962.

The Philosophy of Science and Belief in God, by Gordon H. Clark (Craig Press [Box 13, Nutley, New Jersey], 1964, 95 pp., $1.95). For the philosophically minded.

Development of Modern Christianity Since 1500, by Frederick A. Norwood (Abingdon, 1964, 256 pp., $1.95). A portrayal of the development of Christianity in the context of modern history.

The ability to speak both lucidly and interestingly to a non-professional audience on a theme that concerns abstract concepts is a rare gift. C. S. Lewis is an outstanding example of a man who had this ability and used it to good effect. This facility of communication is apparent also in the writing of Paul Roubiczek. Mr. Roubiczek is a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and his most recent book, entitled Existentialism: For and Against, is an admirable example of the art of instruction in what is to so many a difficult and abstruse subject. The book is based on a number of university extension lectures that were attended by persons with widely varying backgrounds.

The existential philosophy has assumed a variety of forms, but in general it represents a desperate attempt to assert the dignity of man in the face of the sense of futility and hopelessness that gripped the inter-war and post-war generations. In what Roubiczek calls its “absolute” form, existentialism has denied the existence of universal standards and values, affirming that the only reality is that which belongs to my own individual existence. This means that the only absolute is that all is relative; in other words, man is engulfed in meaninglessness. “Obviously,” observes Roubiczek, “man loses his foothold in reality once he loses his belief in values, once he cannot trust anything higher than man, once there is no transcendental basis for his spiritual experiences.”

The phenomenal advance of both relativism and materialism in our day can be attributed to the general acceptance of the theory of evolution as the basis for the explanation of all things. Roubiczek emphasizes that it is only a theory, but that, nonetheless, it has been made the basis of a complete philosophy. The consequence is that “for the first time in human history, mind and reason are no longer seen as some mysterious higher power, as part of a supernatural, divine sphere breaking in upon human existence, but as the product of lower, biological factors, and nothing has done more to fortify materialism.” Indeed, “the lowering of the status of reason has lowered the status of man and undermined the foundations of his dignity.” It is of course plain that “if man is to be entirely understood as the product of biological evolution, everything he does has to be explained as an effect of his physiological make-up; moral standards and values must be shown to be relative, because they are dependent on these conditions.”

Psychology, to which so many have turned today as a substitute-gospel, cannot help, because, by explaining value-judgments, ethics, and even faith as the effects of inner complexes, social pressures, and hereditary factors, it too makes everything relative. In fact, far from liberating man, it places him under a tyranny of determinism that robs him of his true personal freedom. No more can reliance on history deliver man. “We never discover basic truth. All values and all beliefs, right and wrong, religion, Christianity, simply become historical phenomena; history as such cannot tell us anything about their validity.”

Existentialism is a reaction against facile philosophies of inevitable progress and quasi-omniscient scientific techniques—and also against optimistic proclamations of the deification of man. Brutally and brilliantly it was shown by Nietzsche (the thrust of whose thought is penetratingly, if unfashionably, expounded by Roubiczek) that “man as god still cannot explain his origin, nor understand his destiny, nor master the universe. Instead, he is plunged into despair.” The existentialist thinker has sought refuge in subjectivism; he has tried to limit his world to himself, to the essence of his own existence. But subjectivism is synonymous with relativism; for the rejection of objective reality is at the same time the rejection of absolute values. The fact of the moral consciousness alone is incompatible with the pretensions of the mere subjectivist. The fallacies inherent in the arguments whereby psychologists, historicists, philosophical skeptics, and existentialists think to explain away the authenticity of morality are incisively exposed by Roubiczek. “When man,” he concludes, “observing himself, discovers the presence of a moral order within his very being, he also becomes aware, whether he likes it or not, of a connexion with an objective order.” In any case, “the fact that morality raises so many problems arises precisely because it is absolute; otherwise there would be no need to pay so much attention to it.”

The existentialist, insulating himself as the only focus of reality, ruthlessly analyzes and accepts the absurdity and hopelessness of life. He sees himself surrounded by an abyss of nothingness. He looks the ultimate negation of death full in the face. He proudly seeks to assert his self-sufficiency, however, by passionately choosing that over which he has no choice: the hopelessness of his life, which he did not originate, and the annihilation of his death, which he cannot avoid. But this too is attended by nemesis, for the denial of objectivity is the destruction of true subjectivity. The choosing of the inevitable has not even the dignity of Attic tragedy; it is sheer futility—the disintegration of man.

This, then, is the type of “absolute existentialism” which Roubiczek declares himself against. There is, however, another kind of existentialism which he is for, namely, the philosophy of personal relationships expounded by the Jewish thinker Martin Buber, particularly in his small book significantly entitled I and Thou, Far from being able to understand myself in the isolation of pure subjectivity, I can understand myself only, Buber insists, in my relation to others—and not to others as things (the I-It relation, which involves only superficial knowledge of an impersonal nature) but to others as persons (the I-Thou relation, which involves knowledge in depth and fellow-feeling and love). Were it not for the I-Thou relation, not merely between ourselves and others but supremely between ourselves and God, we should have no knowledge of ourselves and no content to our existence.

The finitude (even leaving out of account the fallenness) of man is enveloped by the mysterious, the impenetrable, the infinite—the transcendental world that is beyond his understanding. Roubiczek makes a plea, finally, that this “irrational” aspect of existence should be equated, not (as the atheistic existentialist equates it) with “senselessness,” but with what is “supra-rational”—“something transcending reason which can yet be seen as meaningful.” This is the reality that lies behind the paradoxes of biblical doctrine, such as judgment and grace, and predestination and free will.

One cannot help wishing, however, that Mr. Roubiczek would reveal his own position more frankly. It is plain that he writes as a Christian; but there are indications of pragmatic and Pelagian tendencies that would involve his outlook in a measure of religious relativism. Is his impressive diagnosis of the illness of contemporary philosophy matched by the only adequate cure in all its absolute uniqueness?

With the distribution of twenty-seven red hats at a special Vatican consistory on February 22, the Roman Catholic College of Cardinals will assume new proportions both in overall size and in non-Italian strength.

Out of a total of 103 cardinals, only 32 will be Italian. For centuries the college has been dominated by Italians.

Two North Americans were named, Archbishop Lawrence J. Shehan of Baltimore and Archbishop Maurice Roy of Quebec.

There was surprise in some quarters that Archbishop Patrick A. O’Boyle of Washington, D. C., was not elevated. The American capital city has never had a cardinal despite the fact that the administrative machinery of Roman Catholicism in the United States is headquartered there. The fact that the senior see, Baltimore, is so close to the politically prestigious see of Washington is a complicating factor.

The new cardinals include the second Negro African prelate to be elevated to cardinalitial rank. He is Archbishop Paul Zougrana of Upper Volta. Another cardinal-designate is Archbishop Owen McCann of Capetown, South Africa.

Archbishop John C. Heenan of Westminster, England, and Archbishop William Conway of Armagh, Ireland, were among the occupants of primatial sees who were elevated. So was Roy of Quebec.

Three prelates from the “Church of Silence” won red hats: Ukrainian Rite Archbishop Josyf Slipyi of Lwow, Poland, who was released in 1962 after eighteen years of Soviet imprisonment; Archbishop Josef Beran of Prague, Czechoslovakia; and Archbishop Franjo Seper of Zagreb, Yugoslavia. Beran was released after twelve years of Communist detention in 1963, but still remains under virtual house arrest and has not been permitted to resume his archiepiscopal post. Seper’s see was the one occupied by Aloysitts Cardinal Stepinac, who died in 1960 in strict Red-imposed detention and isolation following his release from prison after serving one-third of a sixteen-year term for alleged offenses against the state.

Three Eastern Rite patriarchs also were chosen: Melchite Rite Patriarch Maximos IV Saigh of Antioch, Maronite Rite Patriarch Paul Peter Meouchi of Antioch, and Coptic Rite Patriarch Stephen I. Sidarouss of Egypt.

Six of the new cardinals are Italians and three are French. In addition to the three patriarchs and the new members of the college from the United States, Canada, Africa, Poland, England, Ireland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, there is also one cardinal-designate each from Germany, Ceylon, Brazil, Spain, Belgium, and Switzerland.

Pope Paul VI broke precedent by elevating three priests drawn directly from the ranks: Father Giulio Bevilacqua, the pontiff’s confessor; Msgr. Charles Journet, a Swiss theologian and sociologist; and Msgr. Joseph Cardijn of Belgium.

Protestant Panorama

Moderator Felix B. Gear of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) ordered that the denomination’s General Assembly this spring be shifted from Memphis, Tennessee, to Montreat, North Carolina. The change is the upshot of a racial controversy at the Second Presbyterian Church of Memphis, where the meeting was to have been held. The church session has been excluding Negro and white demonstrators from worship services. Commissioners had been guaranteed, however, that the meeting and accommodations would be on a nonsegregated basis.

American Baptist Convention President J. Lester Harnish issued a “Call to Witness” to be observed March 7 through April 18. The call is based on First Peter 3:15.

Miscellany

Is Luci Baines Johnson about to become a convert to Roman Catholicism? White House spokesmen have confirmed that the President’s 17-year-old daughter has been taking instructions in the Roman Catholic faith, but added that “no definite steps have been taken.” She still attends an Episcopal high school in Washington.

Dedication services were held last month at the new Christian Union Baptist Church near Jackson, Mississippi, which replaced a Negro church burned last summer. The church was the first to be rebuilt through the assistance of the Committee of Concern, an interfaith and inter-racial committee of Mississippi religious leaders.

Asbury Theological Seminary is establishing a “Department of Prayer and Spiritual Life.” A spokesman said that the new department is “based on the premise that the total life of the minister or missionary, both personal and corporate, must be built around his devotional experience and that this must find proper implementation in the total life of the local church and the world church.”

Two North American ministers who work at the Italian Bible Institute in Rome won a court case last month in which their right to preach outdoors had been in dispute. They had been convicted and fined for holding a street meeting, but an appeals court threw out the charges.

Personalia

Dr. Kermit Long was named general secretary of the Methodist General Board of Evangelism.

Dr. Lee Edward Travis was appointed dean of Fuller Theological Seminary’s new graduate program in clinical psychology.

Dr. Myron F. Wicke was elected general secretary for higher education of the Methodist Board of Education.

Lt. Col. Floyd M. Patterson, a Methodist Air Force chaplain, was chosen “Armed Forces Chaplain of the Year” by the Reserve Officers Association.

Dr. Adolfo Ham was named first full-time executive secretary of the Cuban Council of Evangelical Churches.

Dr. George L. Ford was elected president of Los Angeles Pacific College.

They Say

“Ours is the terrifying honor of having been called by God as servants and fellow-heirs of the Lord Christ in the most unpredictable, exciting, and frightening era in recorded history. How we discharge this grave responsibility is crucial, and will be decisive for our souls’ destiny.”—The Right Rev. John E. Hines, in a message at his installation as presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.

The newest member of the Federal Communications Commission is urging fellow commissioners to throw out the long-standing policy that encourages radio and television stations to devote a segment of program time to religious topics. Lee Loevinger, apparently embarking on a campaign to revise FCC regulations, says he regards the policy on religious programming as unconstitutional. His statements mark the first time the commission’s policy has been put on the spot.

Loevinger fired the opening barrage in a speech before a National Association of Broadcasters’ meeting. He followed that up with an address last month at the twenty-second annual convention of National Religious Broadcasters, an evangelically oriented group, in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel.

“The commission has gone far beyond the limits that have been marked by the Supreme Court as permissible government action in the field of religion.” Loevinger told the NRB.

For years the FCC has granted and renewed radio and television licenses only to companies and individuals that show evidence of serving community needs. The FCC has consistently regarded religious programs as one of the community needs. Station owners have therefore assumed it necessary to carry at least a few religious programs in order to retain a license to operate.

Loevinger is a Unitarian. A Kennedy appointee, he took oath as a member of the FCC on June 11, 1963. His outburst against the prevailing FCC policy coincided with an article in the Reporter magazine by Marcus Cohn, a lawyer who specializes in communications cases, also challenging the policy on religious programming. Loevinger’s forty-minute NRB speech was a condensation of a specially prepared paper, “Religious Liberty and Broadcasting,” which covered twenty pages of text and a dozen pages of footnotes, all single-spaced.

Said the 51-year-old Loevinger:

“The FCC rushes in where government agents are forbidden to tread when it requires religious programming and determines that a certain amount of religious broadcasting is or is not adequate or excessive, or that the public interest is or is not served by the broadcasting of particular views on religion or of the views of particular church or sects, and when it awards a preference or demerit on the basis of an official judgment as to the quantity, quality, or content of religious broadcasting—all of which it has done in reported cases.

“It is notable that most of the public criticism of Supreme Court decisions in this area urges that the court has been too stringent in forbidding government relations with religion. All commentators agree that both the words and principles of the Supreme Court decisions in this field warn government agencies against any intrusion into the area of religion. Surely if the Supreme Court is in error in its views, it is not for the FCC to declare or correct that error. The plain and unavoidable duty of the commission is to follow the letter and the spirit of the law as declared by the Constitution, enacted by Congress, and interpreted by the Supreme Court.”

Loevinger’s presentation does him justice as a lawyer, but it omits at least one key consideration. It can be argued that the FCC is not requiring religion as such but is upholding the rights of religious interests in an industry that is legally subject to federal control exerted in the public interest. The policy protects religious interests against discrimination.

Battle Over Air Rights

A wide-ranging controversy erupted over a bid by Faith Theological Seminary to acquire control of a Philadelphia area radio station. Among protests received by the Federal Communications Commission in Washington were statements from some forty Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish groups charging that the proposed transfer of ownership would put the station under control of Dr. Carl McIntire of the International Council of Christian Churches. They said that McIntire already airs widely enough over numerous stations “his frequently irresponsible and unwanted criticism of religious groups and political figures with whom he disagrees.”

The Minneapolis Star came to McIntire’s defense by rebuking the protesting groups in an editorial. The editorial, subsequently endorsed by the Christian Century, said:

“You cannot convict the man in advance, however much you may disagree with his views or distrust his intentions. It is a strange situation indeed when religious and civil rights organizations, which ought to be—and usually are—in the forefront of the battle for tolerance in public life, behave so intolerantly themselves.”

The Century said the charges against McIntire’s application to purchase the station “are understandable but irrelevant.” The magazine declared that for years it “has been one of McIntire’s whipping boys,” but added that “none of this weighs for or against McIntire’s right to own or control a radio station.”

The president of the Greater Philadelphia Council of Churches came back at the Star with a letter to the editor. The Rev. Herbert G. Gearhart said that his council is “concerned that the license to operate a substantial public property in our area, serving our people, be vested in a responsible person.”

“In our opinion, McIntire has shown himself not to be such a person, though he will have ample opportunity to defend himself against our opinion,” Gearhart wrote.

Flying Mishaps

Churchmen were involved in several airplane accidents during recent weeks.

Robert C. Neal, 50, a member of the Methodist Board of Missions, and a son, Robin, 22, were killed in the crash of a rented Piper Cherokee near Terry, Montana. The single-engine craft disappeared in bad weather and was found two days later.

James H. Drake, 50, field director of the Broadway Plan of Church Finance for the California Baptist Foundation, was found dead in the wreckage of his single-engine Cessna 150 in a vineyard near Caurthers, California. Drake was flying alone to fulfill preaching engagements, and his plane had been in the air only ten minutes when the crash occurred.

A Mooney Mark 21 crashed at Woodville, Texas, killing the pilot, Len Rogers, and injuring Southern Baptist evangelist T. V. (Corky) Harris. In the Bahamas, Assemblies of God missionary Finis E. Bradshaw survived the forced belly landing of his Beechcraft Bonanza. Both are single-engine planes.

Efma-Ifma Congress

A week-long Congress on the Church’s Worldwide Mission is being planned jointly by the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association and the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association. It will be held at Wheaton College, April 9–16, 1966.

The congress will be designed to promote an intensive study of current issues facing the Church in world evangelization.

The two sponsoring groups represent the bulk of the evangelical missionary task force. They will invite to the congress some 600 missionary executives, professors of missions, and other key personnel.

New High For Low Churchmen

Regret that some evangelical clergymen had recently left the Church of England was the reaction of many who attended the Islington Clerical Conference this month at Westminster. “The call to us as evangelicals,” said the Rev. R. Peter Johnston in his presidential address, “is to stand fast and stand together, to resist all that we believe to be contrary to the teaching of Scripture, to see that our voice is heard at every level of church life.”

Referring to the tendency of many to regard the Church as a kind of “exclusive middle-class club,” Mr. Johnston suggested that there were two ways of keeping people out. One was to display a “No Admittance” notice; the other was to let them in but make them feel thoroughly out of place. But Christ was a working-class man who preached in the language of common life, Mr. Johnston said.

Another prominent evangelical, the Rev. Maurice A. P. Wood, pointed out that the humanists were not in fact asking the sort of questions that the Bishop of Woolwich set out to answer for them. He quoted from the 1965 Rationalist Annual to illustrate that the topics which concern humanists deeply are precisely those to which the “orthodox” Gospel is most relevant—pain, death, the cross, sin—and added, “We can speak to these conditions from the strong citadel of the Word of God.”

London is far from the geographical center of England, but the 600 clergy in attendance constituted the largest gathering in the history of this 136-year-old annual meeting of evangelicals. One onlooker attributed this to “the post-Graham bulge in the evangelical theological colleges.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Altering The Approach

Are anti-religious forces in Moscow changing their tactics?

The Soviet ideological organ Kommunist is now urging a revision of the attitude toward Christians. According to Religious News Service, the January edition of the Communist journal says that it would be “shortsighted” not to accept the changes within the church in recent years.

It pointed out the “deep changes” within the Roman Catholic Church “which tries to rejuvenate by a crisis of religious doctrines.”

Kommunist held that it must be the aim of Marxist studies of religion “to find an objective analysis of reality,” charging that some atheist indoctrinations continue to emphasize the “antiquated qualities of the church” at a time when some changes are apparent.

The Communist organ pointed out that “the clergy try to find new solutions and possibilities in a dialogue with the world in order not to lose their faithful.” It added that “realistic representatives” of the Catholic clergy recognized the necessity of peaceful co-existence between different social and political systems. “Pope Paul stands in the middle between these realist members of the clergy and reactionaries.”

“Such developments cannot be rejected with slogans that they are counterrevolutionary or reactionary,” the journal said, urging atheists to give up “their primitive generalizations.”

Kommunist advocated “close collaboration between Communists and church people in the struggle for progress and humanity.” The solemn warning, however, was that “the changing church must be considered a dangerous foe.”

Greece: The Clergy Payroll

The politically moderate government of 77-year-old Premier George Papandreou is extending a salary increase to Greek Orthodox priests. The priests are considered as public employees under Greece’s union of church and state.

As of January 1, priests who minister in villages of fewer than 1,500 people (5,000 out of a total of 8,000 priests) became eligible for wage hikes of 500 drachmas ($17). Their last increase was in April, 1963, when all priests received an increment of $10 in their monthly pay.

For purposes of remuneration the Orthodox priests of Greece are divided into four I categories. Education is one of the things taken into consideration. It is estimated I that 6,500 of the priests have not had a high school education, and it is the priests in this category who are now getting an increment that will give them a total of $59 to $77 a month. A bishop in Greece gets $600 a month.

The income of all priests is augmented by the revenue they collect for administering ordinances such as infant baptism, marriage, funeral, and prayer for the dead.

G. Z. CONSTANTINIDIS

Adjournment of the ten-day meeting of the World Council of Churches’ Central Committee held in Enugu, Nigeria, came shortly before noon on January 21. Within twenty-four hours, Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, chairman of the Central Committee, was in New York giving reporters his version of what had taken place. The big item:

Within a few months, machinery will be established for continuing rapprochement between the WCC and the Roman Catholic Church.

At its meeting in Enugu, the 100-member Central Committee approved plans for a “Working Group” composed of eight persons appointed by the WCC and six named by Roman Catholic officials. The group will be expected to foster greater cooperation and collaboration.

Fry, looking fresh and acting amiably despite his having spent the entire night cramped in a jet, showed considerable restraint in reflecting upon the development.

“This is not a great milestone,” he said. “All of us are rather keeping our hopes in suspense.… One has to wait to see how the course of history flows.”

There seems to be some uncertainty about the level in the Roman Catholic hierarchy from which approval of the Working Group must come. Fry was confident, however, that the Catholics would win complete sanction for their side of the compact. Thus far, the World Council has been dealing with the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, probably the most free-wheeling agency in Rome.

Fry gave no background on the events leading up to the formation of the Working Group idea, beyond saying that key roles in negotiations were played by Dr. W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, WCC general secretary, and Roman Catholic Bishop Jan Willebrands of Holland, secretary of the Vatican unity secretariat.

“They’re both Dutchmen,” he quipped, “and they discussed it in Dutch.”

What will the Working Group discuss? Fry observed that there would be “something to be gained” if the first talks do not touch on “too complicated” subjects but rather explore topics where “results” are likely to be produced. One possible area for exploration, he said, is the setting of a fixed date for Easter.

Why the eight-six ratio in the makeup of the group? Fry would only say that it had been arranged in preparatory meetings and that, although “we would have been happy with an equal number,” the Catholics recognized the “dissimilar” nature of the two parties. There is no presumption, he added, of negotiations on equal terms.

Not nearly so dramatic as the initiative shown by the WCC toward Catholics but noteworthy in its own right is the new bid for evangelicals. Fry commented that “churches of this character” are welcome in the World Council but contended that the organization is “never in the business of soliciting members.”

The touchiest questions put to Fry concerned the battle within the World Council over who is to succeed the retiring Visser ’t Hooft as general secretary. The Central Committee had given its fourteen-member Executive Committee the job of nominating a successor, and the Executive Committee came up with the name of the Rev. Patrick C. Rodger, a Scottish Episcopal priest who has been executive secretary of the WCC Faith and Order Department. Rodger’s nomination was then publicized as if it were tantamount to election, and a storm of criticism rose up in WCC ranks. The Central Committee did not act upon the Executive Committee’s recommendation. Instead, it appointed a special nominating committee of eighteen to recommend a candidate.

Although Rodger formally withdrew his candidacy, Fry said he could be renamed. Fry conceded that there are political considerations in the choice of a new general secretary. Other qualifications being comparable, a person from a “neutral country” is more likely to get the post, Fry declared.

Enugu: No Fixed Position

While Enugu’s air-conditioned $3 million Hotel Presidential kept out the Harmattan dust blowing down from the Sahara, the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches meeting in the Eastern Nigerian capital was conscious of the shifting sands of the ecumenical movement.

“The whole position of church relations is upset,” Dr. Lucas Vischer, research secretary of the Department of Faith and Order, told a CHRISTIANITY TODAY reporter. “There are no longer any fixed positions.”

Dr. Vischer, who has been a liaison in dialogues with the Vatican, reported on the changing positions which came from the Second Vatican Council. He felt it was now up to the World Council to take the initiative in responding. “The non-Roman churches cannot look at the Roman Catholic Church as impassive observers,” Dr. Vischer told delegates. “Whether they like it or not, they find themselves in fellowship.” The Central Committee enthusiastically approved setting up a fourteen-man joint “Working Group” with the Roman Catholic Church to study methods of collaboration.

Significantly, a proposal to strengthen relations with “conservative evangelicals” immediately followed the Vatican discussion, although Dr. John Marsh, head of the Division of Studies, asserted that this was “not a means of setting off or counterweighing the approach to the Roman Catholics.” There was significant reaction to an introductory paragraph that defined the conservative position with surprising candor: “One of the vital movements of our time is found among Christians who may be called Conservative Evangelicals. This name is used for Christians who differ from one another at many points, but lay their own distinctive emphasis upon Scriptural authority; the experience of the new life in Christ; purity in the Church, and missionary zeal.”

Dr. Ernest A. Payne, WCC Executive Committee member from Great Britain (Baptist Union), objected to the definition, which he felt implied that others lacked these elements.

Jumping to his feet, Dr. Martin Niemöller, a WCC co-president who celebrated his seventy-third birthday during the sessions, exploded: “If we included this paragraph, fundamentalists in my country would say, ‘Now you have confessed yourselves!’ ” However, Professor H. Berkhof of the Netherlands Reformed Church defended the paragraph, pointing out that church purity is the main evangelical concern.

Sir Kenneth Grubb of the Church of England thought the paragraph should be deleted. “It is a highly delicate subject,” he told the committee. “Only recently have we been able to come out into the public with some of the informal discussions being held with conservatives.”

The Central Committee eventually agreed to substitute for the entire statement an earlier one made by the Executive Committee calling on the WCC to strengthen relations with conservative evangelicals and to give more expression to such elements in their member churches.

The committee also took note of evangelical activity in the distribution of the Scriptures and Bible correspondence courses and in the formation of “little congregations”—cells of Christians gathered in homes and factories for witness and service. These are people living “an authentic Christian life where they live.” The committee felt this was an answer to the increasing secularization of the world and asked whether the parish structure of missionary work limited Christian witness.

Although there were only five Africans on the Central Committee (compared with twenty-two from the United States), siting of the sessions in Africa pointed up the WCC’s increasing interest in the continent.

The committee approved an appeal for a $1 million African fund chiefly to aid refugees, youth, and rural development. A committee report on race singled out South Africa and the United States for censure, and made no reference to the Congo massacre.

Expressing “deep appreciation” for missionary work, Sir Francis Ibiam, governor of Eastern Nigeria and a president of the World Council, appealed to the Church to continue sending missionaries. “The Commission of Jesus Christ will not be complete until he returns again,” he stated. He also pointed out the need for missionaries to integrate themselves fully with the life of the people and not to represent their own culture.

Looking to the future, the committee (1) discussed plans for next year’s World Conference on Churches and Society; (2) laid plans for the next World Assembly (August or September, 1968) with the theme, “Behold I Make All Things New”; (3) appointed a committee to renominate a successor for retiring General Secretary W. A. Visser t’ Hooft. Strong opposition, mainly from the Orthodox churches, to the first nominee, the Rev. Patrick Rodger, deadlocked the sessions for two days.

The increasing influence of Orthodoxy on the World Council was noticeable. With the committee’s acceptance of the Serbian Orthodox Church (eight million), only one of the fourteen autocephalous Orthodox churches remained outside the WCC. On the one hand Orthodox members brought more respect for the Word of God (“We feel closer to the fundamentalists than the liberals,” said one); but on the other hand they increased the accent on sacramentalism and ecclesiology (“Talk about ending up in Rome—we are already there!” said one evangelical observer). Orthodox members feel that the Church in the future will take on their pattern.

In their zeal to woo conservative evangelicals as well as Roman Catholics, committee members obviously did not understand the evangelical viewpoint—that unity must be based on doctrinal veracity, not the desire for dialogue.

“The WCC is a club for debating,” Dr. D. T. Niles of Ceylon explained. “If you don’t agree with it, you should come inside and make your point. We don’t bother about doctrine—that should not keep a person out.”

Surveying The Road To Merger

Back in the pulpit of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral where four years ago he issued his dramatic call for a super-denomination embracing more than 20 million Americans, Dr. Eugene Carson Blake reflected on what has happened since. He also talked of “the developing insights from the Gospel as to what Jesus Christ requires of any church which would bring its whole life under subjection to his Word.”

Blake, the ecumenist par excellence, noted the enthusiastic response his call had elicited in many church circles. Significantly, however, he made no attempt to allay the apprehensions of other ecumenical leaders such as Dr. John Mackay, who casts a wary eye on “the dramatic approach to unity” and asserts that “the pursuit of unity can be mere escape from reality and from concern about the Church’s mission.”

Blake voiced obvious disappointment over the “clear tendency upon the part of all churches to become more and more engaged in world-wide confessional relationships.… This development, if it continues, will make any widespread reunion of Protestant and Anglican churches in North America less and less likely.”

A key figure in the civil rights lobby during 1964, Blake said the racial issue has had an ambiguous effect upon his plan of union for United Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, and the United Church of Christ—and now also the Evangelical United Brethren and Disciples of Christ.

The effect of the crisis in race relations, he declared, gave to some “hope that church union could come by moral renewal of the churches’ relevance to real life. For others, it gave pause, wondering whether ecumenical and racial integration would divide parts of denominations from those in the same denominations who were ‘evangelical’ and ‘conservative’ on all social matters, including race.”

Blake said unity must not be achieved at the expense of truth, nor should acquisition of power be a motive. But he offered no guidelines on how to reconcile the patent unitarianism of Bishop James A. Pike with the evangelistic zeal of Harry Denman. Nor did he suggest how a 20,000,000-member denomination can resist power.

The following sermon was preached by the Rev. Gilbert M. Beenken, pastor, at the Oliver Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It is structurally excellent and scripturally undergirded throughout. It is set in the “basic pattern”: the introduction leads to the thesis, and the elaboration of the thesis is the body of the sermon. The thread of thought is exceedingly easy to follow.

In the introduction, the preacher warns against triviality in the pulpit; the display of scholarship and “knowledge of the times” as a substitute for the communication of saving truth; reliance upon rhetoric as a substitute for content; and inadequate preparation.

He indicates the reasons for inadequate preparation: laziness; excessive pressure of pastoral concerns; discouragement over non-appreciation and non-attendance on the part of church members.

He then proceeds to his thesis, that preaching demands and deserves the utmost in preparation and prayer. The development is logical and easy to follow, and the sermon could readily be preached without notes. When it is finished, the preacher has clearly made his case.—Charles W. Koller

Text: I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; Preach the word.…—2 Timothy 4:1, 2.

When a preacher asks, “Is preaching important?” in his sermon title, the congregation expects him to answer affirmatively. I plan to do just that a little later, and to give you three biblical reasons why preaching is important, most important.

First, however, I want to point out that much preaching today is not important; it is trite and trivial. I am thinking now of those preachers who insist on using a major part of their messages to bring their congregations up to date on current events, economics, politics, metaphysics, philosophy, psychology, science, and almost every subject other than the Word of the Lord. It seems to me as I read modern sermons, hear some on the radio, and hear laymen talking about them, that many preachers spend a lot of their time trying to convince their congregations that they are well read, intellectually capable, and fully abreast of the times.

I have never felt constrained to convince my congregations of these things. I have always felt that the congregations that called me to be their preacher did so because they believed me to be called of the Lord, intellectually capable, properly trained and prepared, and willing to give myself to the study and presentation of the Word of God. They called me because they believed I would be able to lead them in the things of the Lord.

There is, of course, a place for all the aforementioned subjects—even in the pulpit. They can be used as illustrative material. But the Word of God is to be the heart of our preaching. Important preaching is biblical preaching, preaching at whose heart stands a Person—Jesus Christ.

Another type of preaching that is less than important and pains many people is the type we might call “much ado about nothing” preaching. Words, words, words, and more words! And when one analyzes these words, he finds that little or nothing has been said. Charles Haddon Spurgeon, sometimes called the “prince of preachers,” has written:

The true minister of Christ knows that the value of a sermon must lie, not in its fashion and manner, but in the truth it contains. Nothing can compensate for the absence of teaching: all the rhetoric in the world is but as chaff to the wheat, in contrast to the gospel of our salvation. However beautiful the sower’s basket, it is a miserable mockery if it be without seed. The grandest discourse ever delivered is an ostentatious failure if the doctrine of the grace of God be absent from it: it sweeps over men’s heads like a cloud, but it distributes no rain upon the thirsty earth; and therefore the remembrance of it to souls taught wisdom by an experience of pressing need is one of disappointment or worse.

A little later in this same message to young preachers he adds: “It is infamous to ascend your pulpit and pour over your people rivers of language, cataracts of words, in which mere platitudes are held in solution like infinitesimal grains of homeopathic medicine in an Atlantic of utterance.”

There is another type of preaching that is offensive to many and, I fear, also to God. It is the preaching of the truth, the preaching of God’s Word—but preaching that is poorly prepared and dully done. He who preaches in this way is very unlike an ambassador; he is apart from unction, without conviction. The Gospel of Christ should come forth from the mouth of the preacher and strike the ear of the hearer as a glorious, heavenly, joyful sound!

Why do we have gospel preaching poorly done? Why is the message of God’s grace often delivered with a total lack of graciousness? The easiest answer is that preachers are lazy, and some are. A better answer is, I believe, that these preachers have not given sermon preparation, Bible study, reading, thinking, and meditation a proper place in their lives.

Last Friday afternoon I had a telephone call from a pastor of a sizable evangelical church. He asked me what I was doing, and when I said I was preparing my Sunday morning sermon he answered, “I haven’t had time to get at either of my sermons yet.” Here it was Friday afternoon and this preacher to a large congregation had not started preparing either of his sermons. He had been too busy with such things as organization, administration, counseling, calling, social engagements, and fund-raising to get to what ought to be a minister’s primary task.

A third reason why even gospel preaching is often poorly done is that some ministers (and this will probably surprise you) feel it is unimportant. Preaching, they say, is futile business! Why sweat over sermons? People don’t appreciate them. The most laughed-at jokes are those about preachers and preaching. Run here and run there, let your congregation see you on the run (even if you’re just running in circles), and they will be happy with you even if your preaching is at best mediocre.

This is the cynical attitude of many preachers today. And they have reason for their cynicism, for on the average Sunday morning seven out of ten Protestants don’t come to God’s house to hear a sermon. I am sure that on Sunday nights nine out of ten Protestants don’t attend.

There is a reason for the great shortage of preachers in our denomination. And there is a reason why this church of ours doesn’t have a single son in seminary this fall. The office of the preacher is not an honorable office in many of our homes. On Sunday evenings many so-called evangelical Christians prefer television to a second message from God’s Word. Mind you, dear congregation, our children know what our feelings are on these matters. It is a vicious circle: preachers don’t properly prepare their messages because they feel that their congregations don’t appreciate them, and the less they prepare the less their preaching is appreciated.

Whether preaching is appreciated or not, the preaching of God’s Word is important and therefore ought to be done with much care, preparation, and prayer. The Apostle Paul, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote to the young man Timothy, “Preach the word.” All through history, according to the Bible, God’s great men have been preachers. Moses was a preacher! Noah was a preacher! The prophets from Elijah to Malachi were preachers! John the Baptist was a preacher! Our Lord Jesus Christ was a preacher! The apostles were preachers! Paul, in the great tenth chapter of Romans, wrote,.… how shall they hear without a preacher?”

According to our Scripture lesson (2 Tim. 3:16–4:5), preaching is important for three reasons.

I

In the first place preaching is important because of the Word that we have to preach—God’s Word. In Second Timothy 3:16, 17 we read: “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.” The word “inspiration” comes from a Latin word that means “to breathe into.” The Scriptures are God-breathed. Because they are God-breathed they are true, for God is the Truth. Because they are God-breathed they are also authoritative, for God is our Sovereign King. The Scriptures, being God-breathed, truthful, and authoritative, are therefore “profitable.”

Let us note the areas in which this divine Word that we are to preach is profitable. First, it is profitable for doctrine. Christians need to hear Bible preaching because it grounds them in the fundamentals of the faith. When the Bible is preached the following great doctrines are set forth: (1) the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture; (2) the Trinity; (3) the deity and virgin birth of Christ; (4) the creation and fall of man; (5) the substitutionary atonement; (6) the bodily resurrection and ascension of Christ; (7) the regeneration of believers; (8) the resurrection of all men and their assignment to eternal blessedness or eternal woe.

This is biblical truth! Many professing Christians are straying doctrinally because they do not give ear to Bible preaching.

Secondly, the Bible and Bible preaching are profitable because we are reproved by them. The Word of God convicts us of sin, convinces us of our need of Christ, calls us to repentance, and turns us back to God.

Thirdly, the Bible and Bible preaching are profitable for “correction.” The word means “improvement.” We are helped, through the Word, to correct our spiritual wrongs and lacks and weaknesses. Who of us does not need such correction?

Fourthly, the Bible and Bible preaching are profitable “for instruction in righteousness,” that is, for training, for education in righteousness. As parents through their words train their children to behave properly, so God through his Word trains his people to live righteously.

All this is to the end, as verse 17 puts it, “that the man of God may be perfect [complete], throughly furnished [or completely equipped] unto all good works.’ One of the marks of modern Christians is that they are not properly equipped for spiritual service. Many of them can’t pray, give a testimony, show the way of salvation to a sinner, or teach a Sunday school class. Dear friend, one of the ways to get equipped to work for God is to spend much time with the Word of God. Yes, biblical preaching is indeed important.

II

In the second place, biblical preaching is important because of the charge that we have to preach. Listen to it! “I charge thee therefore before God. and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine” (2 Tim. 4:1, 2).

Here we find Timothy solemnly commanded to pass on the testimony of the Scripture through preaching. He is charged before the great God and his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who on the day of his appearing and kingdom will judge all. What an incentive to preach the Word faithfully! Note that we are charged to preach the Word “instant in season, and out of season,” which means that we are to preach it whether it be convenient or inconvenient. We are also charged to “reprove” and “rebuke,” which means that we are to point out, convincingly and fearlessly, the errors and sins of Christians and non-Christians alike, calling on them to turn from their sins to the Saviour. Furthermore, we are charged to “exhort” our people. This means that we must earnestly entreat them to repent and to return to the Lord Jesus. A good illustration of this kind of exhortation is found in Romans 12:1, 2. Where we hear Paul pleading: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”

This whole ministry of preaching is to be carried out “with all longsuffering and doctrine.” We are to teach God’s Word with the patience of Job. This is our charge! This is God’s demand of his ministers!

III

Finally, preaching is important because of the time in which we are living. “The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry” (2 Tim. 4:3–5).

Our country is dotted with churches that once were centers of orthodoxy, churches that preached the Bible but now dilute the Word of God and turn wine into water. Preaching God’s Word is important today because this is a day of apostasy!

It is surely true that many professing Christians do not want to hear sound doctrine. They want to hear only sermonettes that will not challenge their sinful desires. They do not want to hear about the wrongness of their worldliness. They do not want their lack of righteousness revealed. They do not want to be confronted with the need of being born again. They speak disparagingly of “firer-and-brimstone” preaching, and when they hear about the precious blood of our Lord Jesus they dismiss it with a shrug, saying that it is one of those old clichés that behind-the-times fundamentalists insist on keeping.

But what is the preacher of the Word to do when the people “turn away their ears from the truth”? We find the answer in the fifth verse of this chapter. First, he is to watch in all things. He is to be alert. We need wide-awake, discerning preachers of the Word. We need men who know the signs of the times. Secondly, he is to endure afflictions. Paul uses the same word in Second Timothy 2:3 and 2:9, and it is translated “endure hardness” and “suffer trouble.” In these difficult days God’s servant must learn to take persecution patiently. He must expect and be ready for any type of trial if he is faithfully preaching God’s Word. Thirdly, he is to do the work of an evangelist. He is to keep on preaching Christ and reaching souls for the Saviour. While some apostatize he is to evangelize! And finally, he is to make full proof of his ministry. He is to give his best in fulfilling all that God would have him be and do. Then when he comes to the end of his life and ministry he will be able to say with Paul, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day …” (2 Tim. 4:7, 8).

Yes, preaching is important because of the Word we have to preach, because of the charge we have to preach it, and because of the time in which we are living. It is my prayer that God will keep me true to his Holy Word and that he will always give you desire for both the milk and the meat of that Holy Word of God.—From The Oliver Pulpit, published by Oliver Presbyterian Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

T. Leo Brannon is pastor of the First Methodist Church of Samson, Alabama. He received the B.S. degree from Troy State College and the B.D. from Emory University.

Good preaching may be rare, and this may often account for poor attendance. Good singing, by choir and congregation, may likewise be rare. But what is so rare as intelligent church ushering!

The importance of good ushering has never been adequately emphasized, nor has the importance of the usher. A person visiting the church for the first time may forget many things about the service, but he is not likely to forget the usher who met him at the door, or the minister who stood in the pulpit.

If the usher presents a neat appearance and is alert, friendly, and helpful, the newcomer is off to a good start. He is comfortably seated; he has an order of service and a hymnal; and he is ready to worship and to listen to the preacher, and possibly to come again. But if the usher at the door is expressionless and unbending, or fails to perform graciously all the functions of a good usher, something has been lost that cannot easily be recovered. The outcome of a church service and the blessing received depend largely upon trifles, and the quality of ushering is often decisive.

For effective ushering, a certain amount of preparation is necessary. Let there be, first of all, a carefully selected group of ushers who are always in place and who have been fully instructed in their functions. Because of the importance of his office, the head usher should be elected by the church subject to the approval of the pastor.

An ushers’ manual is practically indispensable. Excellent manuals are available at small cost at denominational bookstores. If the ushers’ group has not been formally organized and trained, the head usher might hold a number of training sessions in which the manual would be studied and discussed. Thereafter, any new usher would begin with a careful study of the manual. This is especially important in a church that seeks to have every male member within a certain age span take his turn at ushering for a month at a stretch. This procedure has certain values for the fellowship of the church, and certain hazards as well.

It might be good on occasion to have an usher sit on the pulpit platform and have some part in the worship service; he could thereby observe the functioning of the ushers from a new angle. If every member could occasionally be the minister, this might have a profound effect on the seating and might greatly simplify the work of the usher. The member who has been sitting off to one side, as a spectator, might see how much more he could mean to the service if he moved over into the group. And the usher who wedges the late-comers into the rear pew so tightly that they can scarcely breathe might find ways to distribute the audience more judiciously.

An audience of three hundred may look like a mere handful in a sanctuary built for one thousand, but with careful ushering the sanctuary can, with the same attendance, give the impression of being “comfortably filled.”

The work of the usher includes far more than leading a worshiper to a pew and “lifting the collection” later in the service. A priceless asset to any church is the usher who dignifies his high office by warmly welcoming and wisely seating the visitor, and then looking after his comfort until the service is over. He will be particularly concerned about temperature, drafts, lighting, acoustics, and other physical factors that might make the difference between an hour of rich spiritual blessing and an hour of physical discomfort and frustration.