Theology

A New Johannine Manuscript

R. Schippers

According to Professor Kurt Aland, whose task it is to keep track, there are now 4,678 known manuscripts of the New Testament. With microfilm more than a hundred manuscripts can be placed at our disposal at one time. An expedition to Mount Sinai in 1949–1950 brought back more than 150 New Testament manuscripts, photographed and microfilmed in the St. Catherine Monastery. In the midst of this volume of manuscripts comes a single papyrus manuscript of the Gospel of John, published toward the end of 1956 by Professor Victor Martin, chairman of the Association Internationale des Papyrologues. It is called papyrus 66, and we immediately ask, what is the special significance of this new manuscript?

Age And Text Significant

Its significance and value lie in the following:

This manuscript is a papyrus, and there are only 68 papyri known, with fragments of the Greek text of the New Testament.

It is extraordinarily well preserved, by far the finest and most intact papyrus manuscript I have known. Letter for letter, all 108 pages of the fine Greek handwriting are very readable.

For a papyrus manuscript, it is extensive. With the exception of 20 verses of chapter 6, virtually 14 chapters of the Gospel of John are in the publication. This is two-thirds of the chapters and about 70 per cent of the whole text. This is next to the largest papyrus manuscript of the Greek New Testament in our possession. When we recall that our smallest fragment of biblical papyri totals only 32 words or fragments of words and that most papyri dating from the third century give us a good deal if they offer two chapters in more or less damaged pieces, we may understand the enthusiasm of the experts over papyrus 66.

The manuscript is old. More than 1700 years ago it was placed, by order of a church or an individual, in a scriptorium. Conservative estimates place its origin about A.D. 200, perhaps earlier.

It is a codex, not a roll. The earliest Christians in Egypt were among the first users of this early form of book. This we already knew, but we were not so certain what an old Greek codex looked like. Papyrus is very brittle, and what remained of ancient papyrus codices were only loose, numbered pages, usually torn and broken at the edges. This newly discovered papyrus fills a lacuna in our knowledge. It is the extensive remains of a firmly bound book and thus lets us see how the most ancient of Greek books appeared.

The publication of papyrus 66—or Papyrus Bodmer II, its library designation—is significant, then, first, because of its age and, second, because of its text. A good Greek text is imperative for Bible translation. It is common knowledge that there is nothing preserved of the autographa, of the handwritten copies that the evangelists and the apostles or their secretaries wrote. Until the modern art of printing books, the text was patiently copied by hand. The medieval monks were illustrious for this work. It is also well-known that in the copying mistakes and even willful changes and additions were brought into the texts. It is the task of textual criticism to discover the best manuscripts and from these to bring together a text of the Greek New Testament as close to the original texts as possible.

The Number Of Manuscripts

We are a good deal further along in this task than were the students who published the Greek New Testament in the era of the great Reformation Bible translations. When Erasmus published the first printed Greek New Testament in 1516—the one used by Luther for his translation—he used no more than four manuscripts. He knew of a few more, but felt that his four were enough. Gradually, the number of manuscripts known to the critics grew. In the sixteenth century there were 22. In the eighteenth century there were already 330. There are now more than 4,500. Most of these date from the thirteenth and fifteenth century. The farther we go back to ancient times, the fewer are the manuscripts. As a general rule, the oldest texts are the best. Considered the best of all have been the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus, two excellent parchments. They have been available for scientific study for only eighty years. The best text that can be constructed is based primarily on these two manuscripts, which date from the first half of the fourth century.

The oldest and best manuscripts, then, date from about 250 years after the original New Testament was written. If we recall that the Gospel of John was written probably around the year A.D. 90 [some authorities now defend an even earlier date—ED.], we will understand how important the recently discovered papyrus 66 is. It dates from about 125 years before the great parchment manuscripts and about 100 years after the writing of the Fourth Gospel. It is from the time of Clement of Alexandria and Origen, who died in A.D. 212 and 245, respectively.

The question that interests us most is the relationship between the text of papyrus 66 and the text forming the basis of our present translations. Does papyrus 66 support our present most dependable text of John 1 to 14? Or must we revise our opinions of the value of our best texts? What about certain passages, such as the pericope of the adulterous woman in John 8 or the verses containing the descending angel of the Bethesda pool in John 5? These well-known passages in the first fourteen chapters of John are usually placed between brackets in the newer translations because they are missing in the best manuscripts. These passages are missing as well in papyrus 66, and, at least on this point, we seem to have been on the right track in our search for the original text.

We might also compare the famous Chester Beatty papyrus, papyrus 45, which contains chapters 10 and 11, and the same chapters of papyrus 66 with the text of Nestle. Nestle’s text is universally regarded as being a very good one, offering a profile of the best and most important manuscripts. Putting the variations within these three texts in parallel columns, we are able to view the divergences. First, the differences in themselves are minor ones. They are on this order, for example: “gathered” or “gathered together”; “once again” or “anew”; “to give his life” or “to offer his life”; “he said” or “he spoke.” This sort of variation constitutes about 99 per cent of the cases in which variations occur. Now, after putting these minor variations in parallel columns, we may underscore with red pencil the places where papyrus 66 and Nestle agree, with blue pencil where papyrus 45 and Nestle agree and with green pencil where papyrus 66 and papyrus 45 agree. If we now count the pencil underscores, we see that there are 50 red, 13 blue, and 20 green underscores. This means that our present published text is generously supported by the oldest witness that we have. The basis of our present textual criticism, the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus, is sound. With papyrus 66, we are now 125 years closer to the original than with these two famous codices. Yet the text is practically the same.

Such confirmation is sensational in a way. It is also something for which we can offer believing thanks.

R. Schippers holds the Th.D. degree from Free University of Amsterdam, where he now serves on the faculty in the New Testament field. He has ministered in Dutch Reformed churches in Rotterdam and Amsterdam and has written two books in the area of New Testament studies.

Cover Story

Working for Christ on the Job

Samuel M. Shoemaker

The vast majority of Christians are, of course, laymen. It is often said that they are closer to “the world” and its concrete problems and evils and opportunities than clergy. And it is certainly true that “the world” will take its measure of our Christianity, not so much by what ministers say in church on Sunday, as by what laymen do from Monday till Friday on their jobs.

This may make the work of a minister seem remote and even a little irrelevant. And, unless a minister is talking right to the practical minds of his laymen, dealing with life situations such as they meet day by day, and (as they would put it) “talking sense,” his work may indeed be very far removed from the life his people must live and especially from the work that they must do. Unless the minister is close to people—people in the raw, people in their shirt sleeves—he may very well spend his major time in a little church world of his own, from which he emerges for an hour on Sunday morning and about which he talks, sometimes interestingly, sometimes dully; but often seeming to belong to a completely different world from his hearers.

A Coach To Laymen

Now the minister is supposed to know more about the technicalities of the Christian religion—its beliefs, its history, its relation to modern thought—than a layman will probably have time to know. He ought to be invaluable to laymen as a kind of research expert, helping to avoid mistakes, bringing historic corrective, et cetera. He ought to do more than this, and specifically two things: first, he ought to know human nature, and to be familiar with God’s ways with men, not alone from books on religious experience and psychology, but from continuing firsthand experience of his own; and second, he ought to act as a kind of coach to his laymen, teaching them the rules of the game because he plays it himself and knows what they are, taking a group of them aside from time to time for a real course of study and application. Besides these things, he ought to be constantly talking with individual laymen and bringing them to deeper understanding and experience of Christ. He ought always to have their daily jobs as much in his mind as they have. He may not know its technical problems, but he will know some of the more general ones, especially the whole matter of their getting along with other people.

It sometimes seems a terrific drop from what we hear and say on Sunday mornings, to the things that go on during the week downtown. Some laymen have accepted this gap completely, and become fatalistic about it. Worship is for them a kind of escape from the worries of mundane life into the upper ether of the ideal. Surely we need to bring our lives back again and again, in worship, to the perfection and love and grace of God; but having received from Him there, we should certainly return to Monday morning with more hope and love and prayer and expectation in our hearts than many of us have. We seldom hear sermons directed at the daily job, and sometimes when they are, they don’t hit the mark. So we have separated Sunday from the rest of the week, thereby doing no service to make Sunday more “spiritual”—only more remote—and leaving the daily job as if it were a hopeless “necessary evil” to make a living with which to care for the family.

The first thing we need is some new thoughts about the practicalities of daily life in relation to our religion. We often behave as if God were interested in religion, but not in life—in what goes on in church, but not in what goes on in a mill or a farm or a broker’s office. This point of view overlooks something. It forgets that Christianity began, not when religion got carried farther up into the skies, but precisely when it was brought “down to earth.” It has often been called the most materialistic of all religions, because it is constantly concerned, not with a God above the skies, but with a God who came to earth and lived here. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.…” That’s where Christianity begins and where it must always look to set its sights aright. Some of us are seeking after a false spirituality: we might almost better seek after a true materialism, in the sense of a better interpretation of the business and politics and industry on which most of our waking hours have to be spent.

Using Things For God

As Christians, we are not called to leave behind us the body, money, work, amusements, statecraft: we are called upon to redeem these things by using them for God. Unless we hear this kind of teaching in churches, we are not hearing an authentic preaching of the religion of the Incarnation—which means the enfleshment of the Son of God. Jesus’ coming into the world has forever banished the idea of the incompatibility of material with spiritual things. They are not the same, of course, and materialism without God is pure paganism. But letting God into the material is something quite different. I say it without hesitation: there is nothing more “spiritual” or holy about going to church than about going to the office, if you go to both places to serve and obey God.

But how is this spiritualization of the material to come about? Business is so vast, so impersonal, so hard at times—where shall anything spiritual take hold, or seem other than a sentimental intrusion? If anything is to happen, to Christianize business, it must concern, first, the changing of the individuals who are part of the business scene, in some of their basic attitudes and beliefs; and, second, it must manifest to them that there can be a different kind of human relations in business, and that this is the primary situation where God enters the picture of business.

Extension Of Conversion

Our first need, then, is to let our conversion extend to our job. We cannot close this gap between “God” and “the world,” but we can lessen it. There is no use in our saying we are even attempting to be “converted” when we live as if our faith and our job were in two irreconcilable compartments. Much nonsense has been talked during the last seventy-five years about the need for a “social gospel” as well as a “personal gospel.” Christ made no such distinction. But it certainly did not occur to him to stay up on the Mount of Transfiguration with Peter, James and John where they had had a transcendent spiritual experience together, when, down at the foot of the mountain there was a boy in an epileptic fit who needed to be healed. One wonders whether the openness to God which made the Transfiguration possible on the top of the mountain was not also the identical openness to men which made the healing possible at its base. Jesus surely hated slavery, and political injustice as practiced by Rome. However, he seems to have said little about them, but instead to have released forces that would one day effect the reform he wanted to see. We can’t talk pious on Sunday and then treat our employees or our boss like objects and obstacles during the week. We cannot have the kind or relations some of us have on a spiritual level with our colored friends, and then run up a practical barrier that excludes them as if they were inferior to ourselves. We cannot profess Christ on Sunday, unless we are willing to let that profession get down into the bones of weekday practice. The least we can aim for is common justice. Yet many Christians dare not raise their eyes and look at the actual situations—bad housing, poor pay, inadequate recreational facilities—which they tolerate and even profit by. The conversion must extend to the job, or else it will wither. “If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?”

A New Motivation

The second thing that can happen is: God can give us a new motive for business. To be sure, we must be practical and realistic concerning “profits,” for unless a business is successful enough to be making money, it cannot meet its own payroll, let alone anything due to investors. Making things, selling them, and receiving money for them, is of the essence of business. Do no let us fool ourselves here: schools sell education, hospitals sell health, churches sell faith, and all of them—however noble their motives—are in some sense in business. They must exist in a practical world where we find ourselves all together and all interdependent. But the things we sell may have a very true value to the person who buys it, and it may be a real service to him that we make it available. No man ought to market anything he knows is inferior to what he says it is. We can put honesty above sales.

Pursuit Of General Justice

A third thing which can happen is that an individual, or group of individuals, can go to work to establish more of what may be called general justice. We have already seen how one young man, convinced about his Christian faith, started to change the practice of one smaller company in relation to the employment of members of another race. Manifestly, justice demands that in a free and democratic society a qualified person should be given a chance to do any work of which he is capable, without regard to religion, color, or anything else that differentiates him from the majority or from the ruling group.

A fourth thing that every individual can do is to release a new spirit in an office or business. We all know what a wrong spirit can do.

Teaming Up For Christ

A fifth possibility is starting a group within the company. A man’s influence is not doubled, it is multiplied, when he gets into fellowship with another man, and they pray, and feel their way with God and act. Start praying for a spiritual teammate. Get into solid fellowship with him. Draw in one or two or more as it seems guided. Soon there will be a nucleus with which God can begin doing business in the company.

There seem to be three natural steps in such work: first, the enlisting of the interest of an individual; second, the manifestation of a new attitude on his part toward people; and third, the winning of people to Christ and his program.

Making Business Christian

I believe business is meant to be a channel of God’s power, the main and chief extension of the church in the world. God may never have any other access to certain people except that one who believes in him happens to work alongside them. When they see peace, poise and power they will become curious and be persuaded that religion is not a “racket,” but a source of light. Obviously, life and deeds have to precede words—the life and deeds, not of a great and mature saint, but of a sinner who has quit bluffing and is trying to do what God wants him to do. The spiritual opportunity that confronts a man in any kind of job whatever is unlimited, if he has the imagination to see it, and the courage to grasp it.

It is a very great task to attempt to make business Christian throughout, to serve God effectually on the daily job, and to make our profession or business work for God. Our daily work, like our human nature, cannot be made statistically good. No hope can come from the superimposition upon business of “systems” which sound and look good, but do not reckon with the ever-present problem of human nature. We can only hope to make real progress in the Christianizing of business by the Christianizing of the men who manage and work in it. If this is carried far enough, these men will use their freedom to obey God more fully in their business relations. I am convinced that God enters the business scene in two ways: first, through converted men and women whose hearts he has touched and changed and who carry his Spirit with them at all times; and second, in human relationships that are different because he has become third party to them. Slowly Christian persons and Christian relationships permeate the business situation. Prayer, good will and fellowship are a powerful combination. The Spirit of God uses them to change man’s mere self-interest into the wider interest of the whole. Slowly, but (under these conditions) steadily, “the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.”

A Pastor’s Sermon To Himself

A pastor must be truly great, but in humility;

Of noble bearing as of royal descent,

Yet willing to bow down to the sorrow-bent.

A sinner who with sinners has trod

The road to forgiveness after wrestling with God.

A source of strength for those who are weak,

A scholar who for truth must seek.

Never influenced by money or might,

Always defending the poor man’s right.

A beggar with outstretched pleading hands,

An ambassador who richly Christ’s substance commands.

A man at the battlefield where men are led,

A woman when he stands at a hospital bed.

Old in experience, yet young in ideas,

Reaching for the sky while crushed to his knees.

Clear in his thoughts, true to his word,

A faithful servant to his Lord.

Dedicated to God until he die:

O so different, so different than I.

ADAM SCHREIBER

(Translated from the German)

Samuel M. Shoemaker was rector of Calvary Episcopal Church, New York City, before his move to Pittsburgh in 1953 as rector of Calvary Episcopal Church there. He is author of many books, most recently The Experiment of Faith, the story of the principles and practice behind “the Pittsburgh Experiment.” This abridgement of the chapter “How to Work for Christ Through Your Job” is reprinted by permission of Harper & Brothers.

Cover Story

The Christian Use of Leisure

W. E. Sangster

What is the Christian attitude to leisure? Is the old identification of holidays and holy days still valid, or is the subject of no religious significance at all?

The Opposition To Leisure

Some Christians—especially those in the Puritan tradition—have had little interest in holidays. Holidays to them have seemed largely a waste of time, and in their noble miserliness with their moments leisure has almost been deemed a sin.

John Wesley said as a young man: “Leisure and I have parted company. I am resolved to be busy till I die.” He was busy till he died. That amazing resolution of his youth he kept to old age, and he only ceased to work when he ceased to live.

But I am bold to say that John Wesley’s opposition to leisure was mistaken, and if anybody feels that that is a severe judgment on a great man, I would point them to the greatest example of all. It was Jesus who said to his disciples: “Come ye yourselves apart … and rest a while.”

Leisure Has Its Place

A normal man who never rests (and John Wesley was not a normal man) gets taut, overwrought, strained and ultimately breaks down. Leisure has its place in life. There is a rhythmic law underlying all existence; an ebb and flow; a movement of periodicity. And in that ebb and flow, work and leisure both have a place.

It is with the mind as with the soil. If you want to get the best out of your land, you must change the crops and sometimes even let the land lie fallow. One who never slackens the bow becomes at the last a work-ridden neurotic.

Moreover, modern life is going to provide more leisure than the mass of people have ever known before. The burden of work is to be borne increasingly by the machine. Despite the urgency of the times, many business houses are committing themselves to a shorter work week. Think of it! Only five working days in every week. That means two whole days off—normally, I suppose, Saturday and Sunday.

The Use Of Free Time

How is that leisure to be used? In some ways the battle of free time is over. The harder question—“what to do with the free time”—has now to be met.

A generation ago some people hardly knew what to do with a week’s holiday when they were given it.

A friend of mine, a Christian layman and the proprietor and owner of a chain of provision stores, came to the conclusion some years ago that, as a Christian man, he ought to be giving all his employees a week’s holiday with pay. He told me afterwards, with some amusement, of the reaction of the manager of one of his shops.

The man protested. He told the proprietor to his face that he did not want a week’s holiday, that he wouldn’t know what to do with it when he had it, that he supposed this was a way of pushing him out of his job—and did he think anybody else could run the shop if he wasn’t there? When my friend insisted that he take the week off, he spent the whole week hanging around the door of the shop, nodding to his customers as they went in and out and making rude remarks about the under-manager who was trying to do his job. His happiness when the week was over was unbounded, and when he tied on his apron on Monday morning, he said fervently to his employer, “Thank God, that’s over.”

Personal Preferences

No one with intelligence will deny, I think, that the mass of people seem to make a poor use of leisure now that it is theirs. Not that we must be superior about this. People enjoy themselves in their own way. One man’s fun is another man’s boredom.

Sir Harold Nicolson, in the columns of The Spectator, made a slashing attack some time ago on people who make a hobby of collecting stamps. He stigmatized them as people with an adolescent mind, and I need hardly say that the philatelists took up the challenge with gusto, and the honors were even at the last.

Unworthy Recreation

People differ, of course, in the things that recreate their minds, but surely we can say without offensiveness that the recreations to which the mass of people turn seem somewhat unworthy.

Think of the hours and hours men stand about in saloons engaging—if one judges by one’s recollection of Army canteens—in inane arguments, often on subjects they know little about and in which the honors go to the man who bawls the loudest. When one thinks of the hours spent and the money wasted filling up football-pool coupons (on which it is estimated that in Britain many millions of pounds change hands every year); when one thinks of the attraction and the banality and the dangers of these so-called fun-fairs, one cannot help wondering if nothing can be done to lift the level of leisure time spending and get it into the minds of people that even leisure is not ours to squander but is given us by God for a use in which mind, body and soul may be refreshed and strengthened.

What advice, then, can we give about the use of leisure?

The advice I would like to give would be an adaptation of Augustine’s famous rule: “Do what you like but learn to like the best things.”

If it is something you honestly don’t like, it can’t be leisure. One of the differences between work and leisure is that work must be done whether you like it or not, but leisure ought to allow room for the expression of preferences and the satisfaction of wholesome desires.

Let Leisure Be Healthy

Let your occupation in leisure be healthy.

Some people rush and tear about even on holiday so that they return to their work worse rather than better for the change. Vigorous activities ought to be interspersed with periods of quiet. Even the hearty extrovert, coping with a glut of social engagements and declaring that he “never needs a rest, only a change,” would be all the better for turning his thoughts inward occasionally, correcting the compass of his life, thinking on purposes and aims and taking his bearings in the universe as a whole.

I think it is better for young men to play games rather than to watch them; though the years come soon enough, of course, when it must be bowls rather than football. But if we can keep the parasite of gambling out of sport, I am going to say that it is a grand thing that the normal Christian takes a healthy interest in wholesome games. To see a vast crowd of men sitting in the sun and taking the keenest delight in a match is—to me—a goodly sight.

Some psychologists have said that one of the tragedies of the German people is that they have never learned to play (in the sense that the term is understood in America and in Britain), and that is, perhaps a chief reason why Germany is one of the countries in the world where the suicide of children is a not unfamiliar phenomenon.

Let Leisure Be Cultural

In the second place, don’t be afraid of a bit of culture. I think it was Goring who said, “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.”

None of us wants to copy Goring. The recreational pursuits that give the deepest joys require the most mental concentration.

Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher, said: “Pleasure for pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry.”

You see what he meant? He was saying, in effect, that people who have had educational advantages must not be superior, and that if a simple game like push-pin—which was as common, I fancy, in the 18th century as darts are now—gave the people who played it the pleasure they sought, then it was as good as the most cultural interest in verse.

But that is just the point where I would challenge Bentham. It is not in the power of these shallow little occupations to give the joy that deeper pursuits can give. The people who have known both will bear me out there. Think of the joys a music lover has, or a student of the appreciation of art, or one really informed in the delights of our literature, or a really expert gardener.

Snakes and ladders, and ludo, and whist, and movies and watching other people play games are all right, but the deeper joys make the deeper demands and yield the deeper return.

The effort it takes to understand the best in music—if you have the latent capacity to appreciate it—or the best in art, is all worth it. Be on your guard against always wanting to be entertained. Learn to entertain yourself. Have a mental life of your own. There is bound to be something grand for which you have a latent aptitude. If it is not music, it might be fine art. If it is not books, it might be nature in her deeper ways. Get the bit of education it requires to appreciate the better thing and work at it yourself.

I ask the people reading this who are now in middle life whether it is not a fact that when we were children we were much more ready and skillful in making up our own games than children appear to be today? At the moment when we would have set about making up a game in our childhood, the child of today seems to whimper for the money to go to the movies.

God has crammed life with wonderful joys, but they are not all on the surface. It calls for some effort to nourish the taste, but the taste for higher joys is latent in us somewhere.

Let Leisure Be Spiritual

Finally, in all use of your leisure have a thought for your soul.

It has been a complaint of some people for many years that they don’t go to church on Sunday because it is their only opportunity of recreation in the week. With many, that was plainly not true. It might have been true of some. With others it was nothing but a shallow excuse.

But even that shallow excuse is likely to go now. With increasing leisure there will be opportunity for recreation on Saturday and the opportunity to consecrate time for God on the Sunday as well.

Don’t let us celebrate the acquisition of more leisure by a greater carelessness about our souls. A soul doesn’t grow on its own. It needs nourishment, periods of quiet, food for its sustenance. A man or woman without a concept of reverence is incomplete and without a window open to heaven.

Work is very absorbing in some lives, especially with the housewife and mother. She knows as well as the businessman what the hymnwriter meant when he said:

Around us rolls the ceaseless tide

Of business, toil, and care,

And scarcely can we turn aside

For one brief hour of prayer.

But we must! Frankly—as I see it—this is the first call on our leisure: to maintain our commerce with our God.

W. E. Sangster was President in 1950 of the Methodist Church in Great Britain. He is author of numerous volumes throbbing with evangelistic concern, and is an exponent of the relevance of Christian conviction to all the spheres of life and culture. Latest of his writings is They Met at Calvary. His earlier works include Methodism Can Be Born Again, These Things Abide, Ten Statesmen and Jesus Christ, The Pure in Heart, Approach to Preaching, Teach Us to Pray and Let Me Commend.

Cover Story

Through Gates of Splendor

Elisabeth Elliot

At four-thirty sharp Marj Saint eagerly switched on the radio receiver in Shell Mera. This was the moment when the big news would come. Had the men been invited to follow the Aucas to their houses? What further developments would Nate be able to report?

She looked at her watch again. Yes, it was at least four-thirty. No sound from Palm Beach. She and Olive hunched close to the radio. The atmosphere was not giving any interference. Perhaps Nate’s watch had run a little slow.

In Arajuno, Marilou and Barbara had their radio on, too. Silence. They waited a few minutes, then called Shell Mera.

“Arajuno calling Shell Mera. Arajuno standing by for Shell Mera. Any word from Palm Beach, Marj? Over.”

“Shell Mera standing by. No, no word as yet. We’ll be standing by.”

Not a crackle broke the silence.

Clinging To Little Hope

Were the men so preoccupied with entertaining their visitors that they had forgotten the planned contact? Five minutes … ten minutes … No, it was inconceivable that all five would forget. It was the first time since Nate had started jungle flying in 1948 that he and Marj had been out of contact even for an hour.

But—perhaps their radio was not functioning. It happened occasionally. The women clung to each little hope, refusing to entertain the thought of anything’s really having gone wrong. Their suspense was the sharper because most of their missionary friends on the network were unaware that Operation Auca was in progress. In Arajuno, Barbara and little Beth Youderian had primped up a bit, since it had been planned that Roj would come to Arajuno that night, while Pete took a turn sleeping in the tree house. Surely the little plane would come winging over the treetops before sundown. They walked up and down the airstrip, waiting …

Just after sundown Art Johnston, one of the doctors with Hospital Vozandes, affiliated with the missionary radio station HCJB in Quito, came into the radio room in Shell Mera. The radio was still on, but Marj sat with her head down on the desk.

“Is something the matter, Marj?”

She told him the situation briefly, but asked that he not divulge it yet. If nothing serious had actually happened, it would be disastrous to publicize what was taking place. There was little sleep that night for any of the wives.

By seven o’clock on the morning of Monday, January 9, 1956, Johnny Keenan, Nate’s colleague in the MAF, was in the air flying toward the sand strip which Nate had eariler pointed out to him. As he flew, Marj called me in Shandia: “We haven’t heard from the fellows since yesterday noon. Would you stand by at ten o’clock for Johnny’s report?”

It was the first I knew that anything was amiss. A verse God had impressed on my mind when I first arrived in Ecuador came back suddenly and sharply; “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee.…” I went upstairs to continue teaching the Indian girls’ literacy class, praying silently, “Lord, let not the waters overflow.”

At about nine-thirty Johnny’s report came through. Marj relayed it to me in Shandia:

“Johnny has found the plane on the beach. All the fabric is stripped off. There is no sign of the fellows.”

In Shell Mera, a pilot of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Larry Montgomery (who is also a reserve officer in the USAF), lost no time in contacting Lieutenant General William K. Harrison, Commander in Chief of the Caribbean Command, which included the United States Air Rescue Service in Panama. Radio station HCJB, was also informed and news flashed around the world: “FIVE MEN MISSING IN AUCA TERRITORY.” By noon, all possible forces which might contribute to their rescue, including the prayers of thousands of people in all parts of the world, were set in motion.

Ground Search Party

On Monday evening it was decided that a ground search party should be organized, on the assumption that one or more of the men still lived, and Frank Drown, Roger Youderian’s colleague, a man with twelve years of jungle experience among the Jivaros, was unanimously elected to lead the party. Dr. Art Johnston offered to go along in his capacity as physician. Thirteen Ecuadorian soldiers promptly volunteered.

On Tuesday morning I was flown out of Shandia with Nate’s sister Rachel, who had been with me while the men went on the Auca trip. Frank was brought out from Macuma, and many of the missionary men arrived in Shell Mera from Quito, some as volunteers to go on the ground party. Word was received via short wave that a helicopter was on its way from Panama, which lifted the spirits in Shell Mera. That night the pilot of an Ecuadorian airline came to the house to tell the wives that he had flown over the scene at about six o’clock in the evening, and saw, a short distance upstream, a large fire, “without any smoke,” which would indicate perhaps a gasoline fire or a signal flare. Nate always carried signal flares in his emergency kit. This was a ray of hope for the five wives to sleep on that night.

Sighting The First Body

On Wednesday Johnny Keenan took off again in MAF’s second Piper Cruiser, a twin to Nate’s plane, on his fourth flight over Palm Beach to see if there were any signs of life. Marj, who had hardly left the radio since Sunday afternoon, stood by for his reports. Barbara, Olive, and I were upstairs. Suddenly, Marj called: “Betty! Barbara! Olive!”

I raced down the stairs. Marj was standing with her head against the radio, her eyes closed. After a while she spoke: “They found one body.”

A quarter mile downriver from the little denuded plane Johnny had sighted a body, floating face-down in the water, dressed in khaki pants and white tee-shirt, the usual uniform of the men. Barbara felt it was not Roger; he had been wearing blue-jeans.

Some of the land party went over to Arajuno to prepare the airstrip for the big planes which would be arriving soon from Panama. Late on Wednesday afternoon the roar of the planes was heard, and far on the western horizon where the volcano Sangay stands, a smoking pyramid, the great planes were silhouetted. As they drew near and circled the strip, the red, white, and blue of the United States Air Force became visible.

Expectation Runs Low

Dee Short, a missionary from western Ecuador, who happened to be in Quito when news of the disaster arrived, had come to Arajuno. As the party left, Marilou turned to him and said with finality: “There is no hope. All the men are dead.” Probably most of the ground party would have agreed with her but, nevertheless, every time they rounded a bend of the river they looked expectantly for one or more of the missing men.

Back in Shell Mera the radio crackled again. Marj answered: “Shell Mera standing by.”

Johnny Keenan reported: “Another body sighted, about 200 feet below Palm Beach.”

At about four o’clock in the afternoon the ground party reached Oglan, an Indian settlement situated at the place where the Oglan River meets the Curaray. Here camp was set up for the night. Frank Drown organized the group, appointing one man to hire canoes, one in charge of cargo, one to plan seating in the canoes, one as mess chief, two for safety precautions. That night they slept on beds of banana leaves. Watches were kept all night.

Before the party set off on Thursday morning, the missionaries offered up prayer, committing themselves into the hands of God; and the Ecuadorian soldiers, of a different faith, prayed with them. The party moved cautiously down the Curaray; the river was at its lowest, making navigation difficult, and special care was exercised in rounding the many bends, for it was feared Aucas might be lying in wait.

At about ten o’clock Johnny Keenan again flew over the ground party in the Piper, and Frank Drown was able to make contact with him by means of a two-way radio which the Air Rescue Service had supplied. Johnny told them of two canoes of Quichuas, proceding upriver in the direction of the ground party; he feared that in their excitement some one of the men in the party might shoot at the first sight of an Indian on the river. Soon the two canoes of Quichuas appeared. They were a small group of Indians from McCully’s station at Arajuno. On their own initiative they had boldly pressed into Auca territory ahead of anyone else, and had gone all the way to Palm Beach. The ground party was saddened when one of the Indians, a believer who had come to know Christ since Ed had gone to Arajuno, told them of having found Ed’s body on the beach at the edge of the water. He had Ed’s watch with him.

Now the missionaries knew who one of their fallen colleagues was, but a chance remained that at least three others had survived. They pressed on.

Wives Pray And Trust

As the wives hoped and prayed and waited the procession of flying machines moved slowly down toward Palm Beach, the airplanes circling to keep pace with the slower helicopter skimming along at treetop level and following the bends of the river. The airplanes chose different altitudes to avoid danger of collision as pilots circled with eyes on the jungle below. Johnny Keenan in the little yellow Piper was lowest. A few hundred feet above were the U.S. Navy R-4D (the Navy version of the familiar DC-3), and, higher, the big amphibian of the Air Rescue Service. Close by, Colonel Izurieta in a plane of the Ecuadorian Air Force flew in wider circles ready to help should decisions be needed. The teamwork of the United States Army, Air Force, and Navy and of the government and military services of Ecuador was heartwarming to the wives.

Air Force Major Numberg, riding in the Army helicopter, landed briefly to talk with the ground party, still some distance up the river from Palm Beach. Ed McCully’s name was mentioned guardedly on the radio. Those hearing guessed that somehow Ed’s body had been identified. Was his one of the two bodies that had been seen from the air? Had three perhaps escaped into the jungle? Or been taken captive?

After a few moments the helicopter moved on. Finally, rounding a bend, it came at last to Palm Beach and landed. Nurnberg, carbine at the ready, jumped out and looked around. Anxious minutes went by. Back in the “chopper” he radioed: “No one here.” Hope flickered brighter in those who heard.

The helicopter was off again and started slowly down the river. Crossing to the other side it stopped, hovering, the force of its downwash disturbing the muddy surface of the water. Minutes later it moved on, only to stop again two hundred yards farther on. A third and a fourth time Nurnberg and McGee hung motionless ten feet above the water, rotor blades beating dangerously close to overhanging jungle trees. Hearts sank in the aircraft above as those watching guessed the meaning of those stops.

The aircraft returned to Arajuno. Once on the ground, Nurnberg, his face showing strain, confirmed suspicions. Speaking in low tones to the tight circle of military men, he explained that McCully’s body, identified by the small party of Quichuas the day before, was now gone from the beach, no doubt washed away by the rain and higher water in the night. He leafed through his notebook for a moment. A few Indians stood silent in the tall grass nearby, listening and watching. “We found four in the river,” Numberg said, finally. “I don’t think identification will be possible from what I have here—” indicating his notebook. “One of them may be McCully.”

He did not have to say what was in every mind. There might be one who got away, possibly wounded, still in the jungle.

How To Tell Bad News

How to inform the wives was the question uppermost in military minds. Should Marilou be told? She was right there at Arajuno in the house.

“We’d better wait,” Nurnberg said. “DeWitt is running this show. Let’s get back to Shell and talk it over.” Captain DeWitt in the big Air Force amphibian was overhead, not wanting to risk a landing on the small strip at Arajuno. All returned to Shell and the military men gathered in the cabin of the amphibian. The wives would have to be told. But how?

Someone else had wisely decided to tell Marilou that four bodies had been found. Later in the afternoon Johnny flew her out to Shell to be with the four other wives.

In the end it was the wives who persuaded DeWitt and Nurnberg that there was no need to soften the blow. We wanted to know everything in detail. We gathered in Marj’s bedroom away from the children. Major Nurnberg opened his notebook and in terse sentences described what he had found. It was immediately evident that identification could not be positive. One body was caught under the branches of a fallen tree; only a large foot with a gray sock appeared at the surface of the muddy water. In reading his notes of another, Nurnberg said: “This one had on a red belt of some woven material.” Four of us turned our eyes toward the fifth, Olive Fleming.

“That was Pete,” Olive said simply.

As the Major concluded, it was still not known whether Ed’s body was one of those in the river. There was still the hope that one might have got away.

The Depth Of Trust

The military men, to whom the breaking of such news to loved ones was no new thing, left the bedroom silently. Their news had been met with serenity. No tears could rise from the depth of trust which supported the wives.

Barbara Youderian wrote in her diary:

“Tonight the Captain told us of his finding four bodies in the river. One had tee-shirt and blue-jeans. Roj was the only one who wore them … God gave me this verse two days ago, Psalm 48:14, ‘For this God is our God for ever and ever; He will be our Guide even unto death.’ As I came face to face with the news of Roj’s death, my heart was filled with praise. He was worthy of his home-going. Help me, Lord, to be both mummy and daddy. ‘To know wisdom and instruction …’ Tonight Beth prayed for daddy in Heaven, and asked me if daddy would come down from Heaven to get a letter she wanted to write him. I said, ‘He can’t come down. He’s with Jesus.’ She said, ‘But Jesus can help him come down, and God will take his hand so he won’t slip.’

“I wrote a letter to the mission family, trying to explain the peace I have. I want to be free of self-pity. It is a tool of Satan to rot away a life. I am sure that this is the perfect will of God. Many will say, ‘Why did Roj get mixed up in this, when his work was with Jivaros?’ Because Roj came to do the will of Him that sent him. The Lord has closed our hearts to grief and hysteria, and filled in with His perfect peace.”

Death In Muddy Waters

Starting out again at six in the morning of Friday, January 13, the party was on the last lap of its mission, with a date to meet the helicopter at Palm Beach at ten. The men had to hurry to get there and everyone was jittery from the strain of the trip and the thought of the job that lay ahead.

At last the beach was reached. There was no sign as yet of the helicopter. The ground party set to work, everyone having been assigned different duties: the Ecuadorian soldiers spread out in a semicircle in the jungle behind the beach to act as cover, two Indians set to digging a common grave under the tree house, others waded into the river looking for the men’s possessions. Dee Short and Frank Drown crawled up into the tree house to try to find a clue to what had happened. Some of the men began to dismantle the plane, others looked for bodies. It was not until the helicopter arrived at twelve-fifteen and hovered over the bodies where they lay in the muddy waters of the Curaray, that the ground crew was able to find them. Frank Drown told of the scene:

“First Nurnberg pointed out one body downstream and Fuller jumped into the water and pulled the body across. Then Nurnberg showed us Nate Saint’s body, and we got in a canoe and went downstream, and saw an arm coming out of the water, so I tried to attach a string to the arm and I just could not bring myself to do it. I’d reach out and try and then pull back, and have to try again until finally the man who was in the canoe with me did it. Now we were three canoes with three bodies attached to them, going upstream. We laid all four face down in a row on the beach. We never did get the fifth, which was Ed McCully’s body. Then I got over my feeling of hating to touch the bodies, because a body is only a house and these fellows had left their house and, after the soul leaves, the body isn’t much after all. The thing that is beautiful to us is the soul, not the body.”

Identification of the four bodies was finally positive from wedding rings and watches, change purse, notebooks. Ed was not one of the four, so it was finally definite: all five were dead. In the providence of God the missing body was the one identified by the Quichuas the day before. Not only had they brought back his watch, but also they had taken off one of his shoes (a tremendous shoe—size thirteen and one-half) and thrown it up on the beach. The day before, Nurnberg had picked it up and brought it back to Shell Mera.

While the bodies were being drawn ashore a violent tropical storm was gathering. At that moment the helicopter came in low and fast. Cornell Capa, a photographer-correspondent on assignment for Life magazine, jumped out, camera in hand, and ran across the beach. Then the full fury of the storm struck and the missionaries felt as if the powers of darkness had been let loose.

Earth’s Most Beautiful Cemetery

On Saturday morning Captain DeWitt of the Rescue Service asked us five widows if we would “care to fly over Palm Beach to see your husbands’ grave?”

We replied that if this were not asking too much, we would be grateful. The Navy R-4D took us out over the jungle, where the Curaray lay like a brown snake in the undulating green. Pressing our faces close to the windows as we knelt on the floor of the plane, we could see the slice of white sand where the Piper stood. Olive Fleming recalled the verses that God had impressed on her mind that morning: “‘For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.’ He who has prepared us for this very thing is God … ‘Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord.’ ”

As the plane veered away, Marj Saint said: “That is the most beautiful little cemetery in the world.”

Peace And Power

How good it is to turn aside

Each night and day

From fearsome clamoring of men

To praise and pray!

What a relief it is to be

With Him our Lord;

When nations o’er the earth have drawn

The steel of sword!

O what a privilege is prayer

In such an hour!

From bended knee alone

Come peace and power.

—EVA GRAY

The swift-moving epic of the five missionaries martyred in the attempt to evangelize the Auca Indians of Ecuador has just been published by Harper & Brothers under the title Through Gates of Splendor. The author, Elisabeth Howard Elliot, is already familiar to readers of Christianity Today through her inspirational article “The Prayer of the Five Widows” (Jan. 7). The above portion of the new book, reprinted by permission of the publishers, is an abridgment of the chapter tided “Silence.” The chapter is more than a graphic account of the tense hours in which the missionary wives—Marjorie Saint, Barbara Youderian, Olive Fleming, Marilou McCully and Elisabeth Elliot—first learned of the loss of their men; it is a story of heroic faith in a time of trouble. This book is a missionary drama moving with godly devotion. More than holy heartbreak, it is gethsemanic glory reflected anew. Reminiscent of the missionary stamina and sacrifice of the apostolic age, this twentieth century saga proclaims the high courage of Christian dedication and the high confidence that the risen Christ walks amid life’s shadows keeping watch over his own. The families of the five men are still at work in the jungle.—Ed.

Cover Story

Dare We Revive the: Modernist-Fundamentalist Conflict?

The Editor

Whoever evaluates the modernist-fundamentalist controversy from the standpoint of the sixth decade must sense the current distaste for religious contention, must sense the deference to ecumenical cooperation. In the face of present pressures for unity and unanimity, the ministry no doubt reflects an increasing impatience with controversy because of its apparent historical fruitlessness and futility. Ecumenical inclusivism rolls on; each passing year registers new mergers and numerical gains while the outside minority diminishes.

An added pressure is the destructive impact of religious controversy upon the unchurched multitudes. For more than half a century liberal preaching defined the evangelical message as irrelevant and meaningless for modern man. Conservative pulpits, in turn, affirmed that whatever else modernism might be, it was not Christianity. As the decades passed, increasing multitudes detached themselves from the churches. All the while modernist inveighed against fundamentalist and fundamentalist against modernist. Unchurched multitudes have been watching from the sidelines, justifying their detachment from a pugilistic spirituality.

Alongside these pressures against church strife engendered out of consideration for the larger Protestant witness and for the unchurched masses, evangelicals within their own camp experienced disappointments due to religious controversy. Deploring the strategy that delivered one influential post after another to liberal denominational leadership, conservatives saw some of their own leaders fall prey to the lust for ecclesiastical prominence. Theological controversy got out of hand; not only was it appended to personal ambition, but it was made to serve unnecessary discord and division. The positive side of theological controversy (the case for great Christian beliefs) was yielded swiftly to the negative. Pulpit and convention became a platform for the denunciation of personalities and organizations.

Another reason to resist a renewal of modernist-fundamentalist debate centers in the present upsurge in church attendance by the spiritually illiterate. Stabbed by an inner uncertainty, insecurity and fear in the aftermath of two global wars, the American people now throng the churches in record numbers. Most of these churchgoers are unfamiliar with the specifics of the modernist-fundamentalist controversy. Shall they learn unhappy details of past theological and ecclesiastical tension and trouble before they are invited to saving faith in Christ? To keep the fire of faith burning brightly for those who throng the tabernacles of God today, dare we neglect a new perspective on the recent past?

Thus far we have dealt mainly with a mid-century ministerial mood and mind-set, namely, an aversion to perpetuating the modernist-fundamentalist debate. Because of the modern premium on ecclesiastical unity, because of the inelegant impression church controversy makes upon the world, because of the easy degeneration of theological conflict into negation and lovelessness and because of the rising generation of churchgoers who must be linked swiftly with the first generation of Christian faith, today there is a growing impatience with the effort to preserve the edge of past-generation theological debate as the permanent center of Christian polemics, apologetics and evangelism.

The Great Divide?

This impatience is by no means universal, however. In some circles the ecclesiastical encounter still follows the same lines shaped a generation or two ago.

Some vocal fundamentalists consider the modernist-fundamentalist divide the permanent razor edge to which all the destinies of twentieth-century Christianity must be exposed. This view is encouraged by men of influence in a variety of opinion-forming media—church councils, periodicals, schools, exclusivist movements.

The fundamentalist wing is not alone, however, in the tendency to perpetuate the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Even some liberals draw the lines of ecclesiastical dispute much as they were drawn a generation ago. They refuse to share Karl Barth’s and Emil Brunner’s sharp criticism of classic liberal theology.

No less a modernist than Harry Emerson Fosdick believes that the fate of Christianity still reduces to a necessary conflict between the old liberalism and fundamentalism. In 1927 Dr. Fosdick’s sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” made him the storm center of American preaching. Three decades later his highly readable autobiography The Living of These Years (Harper, 1957) spins a halo of self-justification over Dr. Fosdick’s vagabondage and endeavors to vindicate the liberalism to which he raised an altar. Dr. Fosdick guards his cherished liberalism from any need for repentance and radical revision. Likewise his verdict on fundamentalism is identical to that of thirty years ago.

If another example is needed of a modernist tendency to freeze the modernist-fundamentalist debate as the permanent center of ecclesiastical life, we may refer to that influential journal of liberal opinion The Christian Century, which has so unmistakably established fundamentalism as a color word, while vindicating a role of ecclesiastical dignity and respect for such terms as liberalism and modernism. The Century’s outlook today is little different: nothing good can come out of fundamentalism; the hope of the church and of the world is liberalism. Fundamentalist missionaries may die as martyrs, but they are dismissed as misguided; fundamentalist evangelism may strike into the barren churches of our centuries like lightning from heaven, but it is naive and socially irrelevant; fundamentalist scholarship may produce worthy textbooks and religious journals, but they are suspect and dangerous because they are not liberal; fundamentalists may even criticize fundamentalists but unless they defect from evangelical Christianity to liberalism they are still unacceptable.

Essence Of Christianity

The modernism of the past generation is therefore still regarded as the essence of Christianity. Liberalism thus confronts contemporary Christianity once again with two important and interrelated issues: (1) Is modernism acceptable as expressive of Christianity? and (2) Is the Christian church ideally inclusive of both modernists and evangelicals?

Dr. Fosdick gives us a recent answer to these questions, but it is not new. He describes himself as an “evangelical liberal.” And he so defines the term “tolerance” as virtually to mean the acceptance “of a church inclusive enough to take in both liberals and conservatives without either trying to drive the other out” (The Living of These Years, p. 145).

Today, on the other hand, the contrast between modernism and evangelical Christianity is being sketched anew from a quite different standpoint by theologians of former modernist sympathies to show the radical perversion of biblical Christianity of which classic liberalism was guilty.

Secondary Criticisms

Modern churchmen who permit only secondary criticisms of classic liberal theology make its adequacy a contemporary issue through continued espousal. Dr. Fosdick himself enumerates certain criticisms: liberalism adjusted Christian thought to the standard of secular culture, so that “the center of gravity was not in the gospel but in the prevalent intellectual concepts of our time” (p. 245); it was “too blind to the tragic sinfulness and plight of man” (p. 248); “it took too negative a view of the Bible” (p. 243). Although the first of these criticisms would be sufficient to discredit modernism as the bearer of the essence of Christianity, Dr. Fosdick nevertheless refuses to bring under vigorous criticism the liberalism that he represented. While conceding that he “took the optimistic color of our generation” (p. 237), he declines to be classified with main-stream liberalism, or rather, with those “extreme” liberals whose views are now under fire (p. 231). There were varieties of liberalism, and his variety, says Dr. Fosdick, did not share these objectionable features which later invited a criticism of liberalism as secular and non-Christian. He identifies himself with that “very considerable number” of liberals who rejected “automatic, inevitable social progress” (p. 237); who denied that the “Kingdom of God could fully come in human history on this planet” (p. 239); who refused to reduce Christianity to mere ethicism but widened it rather to include Jesus’ world view and his faith in God as well as his morals (p. 242). While extreme liberalism doubtless propounded an excessive divine immanence, Dr. Fosdick defends his as the New Testament view (p. 253). Moreover, notwithstanding European criticism and rejection for more than two decades of Dr. Fosdick’s diminution of divine revelation to prophetic initiative and insight, he evades any acknowledged support of liberalism’s exaggerated confidence in human reason (p. 256). Although writing appreciatively of neo-supernaturalism’s stress on a divine initiative in our religious experience (p. 236) and on the necessity and primacy of God’s self-revelation (p. 256), and although voicing his debt to Niebuhr for the emphasis that even our best good is corroded by egocentricity and pride, Dr. Fosdick nonetheless repeatedly declares his own brand of liberalism (p. 251) without need of neo-orthodox revision, since he did not join the “optimistic extremes” of other modernists.

Evangelicals will not lament some dangers (such as an excessive divorce of faith and reason, an unhealthy pessimism) that Dr. Fosdick senses in neo-supernaturalism. But protest must be made when he protects Fosdickian liberalism from criticism, when he insists that even neo-supernaturalism is best sanctified by liberalism and when he concedes that neo-supernaturalism attracts him in its disavowal of any final theology. Herein an unrepentant liberalism of the 1920’s is seeking immortality for itself in the 1950’s.

An Unchanging Modernism?

Curiously enough, Dr. Fosdick throughout his lifetime has professed the conditioning of every generation’s theology by its social matrix. Therefore, each theology sooner or later is destined for discard (p. 232). “Static orthodoxies,” he tells us, “are a menace to the Christian cause” (p. 230). “Theologies are psychologically and sociologically conditioned” (p. 231). “Theological trends … are partial, contemporary” (p. 232). “Dogmatism in theology, whether ‘liberal’ or ‘orthodox’ is ridiculous” (p. 231).

In view of Dr. Fosdick’s representations of theology as necessarily relative and changing, is it not incredible that he should wish for his own views a durability and an exemption from criticism which he denies to the views of others? Is it not amazing that Dr. Fosdick is unwilling to refer his own prejudices to this principle of inevitable change, which he has so confidently invoked against the orthodoxy of the past? It was on the ground of the supposed inevitability of theological change that Dr. Fosdick had in fact contended that “creedal subscription to the ancient confessions of faith is a practice dangerous to the welfare of the church and to the integrity of the individual conscience” and, moreover, is “hampering to the free leadership of the Spirit” (p. 172).

Dr. Fosdick even seems to arrogate to his views a veiled prophecy of finality: “neither the extremes to which liberalism often went nor the extremes to which neo-orthodoxy goes today will be the final word” (p. 265). Are we not, in context, to regard the stable view of Dr. Fosdick as that final word? Yet has he not elsewhere firmly disowned the possibility of any final word in theology? Are we not to expect that, as in the mid-20’s he urged the church to go beyond fundamentalism, and as in the mid-30’s he pleaded that “The Church Must Go Beyond Modernism,” so in the mid 50’s he would require that it go beyond Fosdick?

Dr. Fosdick himself complains that other liberals, after rejecting biblical positions, too often fell prey to a static orthodoxy of their own (p. 246). Assertedly, there is no genuine protection from theological relativism. Yet hesitancy and half-heartedness characterize his own application of this concept. Now and then Dr. Fosdick ventures to write not merely of “the basic Christian experiences,” but of “revelations of truth”; indeed, he insists that he himself maintains “the timeless values and truths of the gospel” (p. 147), and that liberals agree with the historic denominations “in the abiding substantial truths” they support (p. 163). The impression is unavoidable that Dr. Fosdick more consistently observed the limits of his approach when in decades past he spoke of theory rather than of truth in words like these: “In theology I hold the opinions which hundreds of … ministers hold” (p. 172). However halting the application to his personal positions, Dr. Fosdick has cut himself off in principle from any privilege to propose lasting truth.

This fact puts us on guard when we overhear Dr. Fosdick, quite indifferent to the limitations of his theory of knowledge, pleading with modernists to stop conforming Christ to contemporary culture but rather to challenge modern culture in the name of Christ (p. 246). Elsewhere he pleads for “well-thought-out, positive statements of liberal convictions in the realm of Christian faith” (p. 243). But where, within Dr. Fosdick’s approach, is the minister to find fixed and final concepts and ideas wherewith to challenge the prevalent intellectual concepts of the times? If the liberal minister is to avoid both a revealed theology and an adjustment to contemporary culture, in the name of what is he to discriminate permanent truths from impermanent opinions? For not only are dogmatic certainty and static creed elsewhere affirmed to be unnecessary and impossible, but dogmatism is dogmatically alleged to be a source of religious ruin (p. 233).

Prevailing Prejudices

Dr. Fosdick’s autobiography reflects the speculative assumptions that determine his readiness to delete the sacred doctrines of evangelical Christianity from his conception of vital religion. Two such controlling prejudices, contradictive of biblical Christianity, stand in the forefront: (1) the notion that man’s experience of God is immediate, without a necessary dependence upon past mediation; and (2) the notion of the human mind’s incompetence to grasp spiritual realities. It is not amiss to comment briefly.

Dr. Fosdick writes of “direct, immediate, personal experience as the solid ground for assurance” (p. 234). Stated this bare way, we seem to have here the reiteration of an important New Testament emphasis, namely, that Christianity involves no mere second-hand relationship to God. Assurance of salvation is not suspended upon the word of some priest or hierarchy, but rather is subjectively ascertainable through the immediate witness of the Spirit. Actually, however, Dr. Fosdick virtually excludes any historically mediated revelation and redemption in his emphasis on man’s present relationship with God. The implications stand out when we inquire into Dr. Fosdick’s conception of the Gospel. He tells us: “The essence of Christianity is incarnate in the personality of the Master, and it means basic faith in God, in the divinity revealed in Christ, in personality’s sacredness and possibilities and in the fundamental principles of life’s conduct which Jesus of Nazareth exhibited” (p. 269). Read these words often as one will, one cannot escape the conviction that Dr. Fosdick’s statement contradicts the New Testament view that the essence of Christianity is the good news of the saving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for doomed sinners (cf. 1 Cor. 15:1–4). Instead of depicting Jesus Christ as the redeemer of all men, Dr. Fosdick tells us simply that Jesus of Nazareth was the first and finest Christian.

Dr. Fosdick’s restriction of the relevance of reason in the spiritual world accounts for his concessions to metaphysical agnosticism; this weakness the newer neo-supernaturalistic views carry over from the older modernist tradition. It is curious to note Dr. Fosdick’s apprehension over Barth’s divorcing of revelation and reason, while yet he approves Barth’s emphasis that “our concepts are not adequate to grasp this treasure.” Nonetheless, Dr. Fosdick disallows us any final theological knowledge. Curiously, he tells us: “Ideas of God change and ought to, but that fact does not mean that anything has happened to God [How Dr. Fosdick came by this latter bit of fixed information he does not inform us].” Nowhere does Dr. Fosdick harmonize his own incidental references to enduring spiritual truths with his denial of the competency of reason in the spiritual world, and with the consequent assertion of theological relativity. While he appeals deferentially to “the life and words of the historic Jesus” (p. 247), he does not indicate why even those teachings of Christ which pass Dr. Fosdick’s censorship are exceptions to the rule that divine truths cannot be infallibly grasped and communicated in the dimension of humanity.

Dr. Fosdick’s affirmation of the theological relevance of last-generation liberalism comes as a keen disappointment to many evangelical leaders. Prone to assume that liberalism had been chastened, curbed and forced to abandon its defenses by the drift of the times, if not by the authority of biblical revelation, these evangelicals will find in Dr. Fosdick’s The Living of These Days a revelation that he has not really lived through our era with theological awareness; he moves still within the gates of a romanticized experiential Christianity isolated from the realities of history. Casting the fortunes of liberalism in this unrepentant mold will not only evoke wide disappointment, but it will provoke the conviction that the time for theological controversy is once again upon us.

Irrelevance Of Modernism

Evangelicals are not alone in their negative verdict on classical liberalism, Dr. Fosdick’s species included. Influential liberal circles see the necessity of superseding the Fosdickian views if Protestant theology in the 50’s is to maintain its vitality. In fact, the whole initiative in theology is now shaped by leaders who dismiss Fosdick’s The Modern Use of the Bible as a mirror of outdated prejudices. They do not share his reliance on the relevance of classic liberalism but have already conceded the irrelevance even of the Fosdickian version.

A sound theological instinct supports their uneasiness over the classic liberal position. Even at best liberalism reflected the invasion of a secular spirit. It exaggerated God’s immanence, minimized man’s sinfulness, concealed Christ’s supernaturalness and the centrality of his redemptive work, attached utopian expectations to history and ignored the task of evangelism. For half a generation, most centers of the old liberal thought have been compromising, adjusting and refurbishing the views of a generation ago. Their theologians and ministers are eager to get beyond the modernist-fundamentalist controversy. For them classic liberal theology was too strongly leavened with secularism to be cherished as a fixed point of theological debate. The fact that modernism evolved a counter-dogmatics to historic Christianity, a counter-ethics, a counter-ecumenicity, attested the radically different premises with which modernism began. These inevitably spelled out their counter-implications to historic Christianity. That modernism took this course was no reflection on Christianity; it was a commentary, rather, on the fact that modernism quite understood its starting point, rooted in speculation instead of in revelation. What is a reflection on Christianity, however, is that many Protestant leaders did not sense this alien starting point. They chose, rather, to defend it as expressive of the essence of Christianity. Moreover, some influential leaders today still glory in a speculative secular standpoint whose implications are disastrous for Christian faith. Yet neo-supernaturalists like Barth and Brunner have expressed themselves no less pointedly than did J. Gresham Machen, in Christianity and Liberalism.

Barth does not hesitate to speak of modernism as a heresy. “Within the organized unities of the evangelical churches we are faced with the fact of pietistic-rationalistic Modernism” in which, he writes, “we do not recognize faith and the Church,” and in encountering which Christianity is called “to purification, to a rendering of our account, to responsibility.” Over against modernism, “although it has neither been expelled from the evangelical churches nor voluntarily gone over to found a counter-church, we draw the line as definitely as over against Catholicism” (The Doctrine of the Word of God, Vol. I, Part 1, 36 ff.).

In the very year in which Fosdick delivered his great sermon against the fundamentalists, Brunner was delivering a series of lectures in the United States in which he said bluntly: “A first glance at fundamentalism shows its strength to consist in a negative; its criticism of modernism from the standpoint of Christian faith … A fundamentalist, possessed of a reasonably correct knowledge of Christianity, will have little difficulty in proving that the modernist teaches, under the label of Christianity, a religion which has nothing in common with Christianity except a few words, and that those words cover concepts which are irreconcilable with the content of Christian faith” (The Theology of Crisis, p. 9. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929). (TO BE CONTINUED)

This is the first of four abridgments of lectures on Evangelical Responsibility in Contemporary Theology delivered by Editor Carl F. H. Henry at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in May, and at Calvin College during the centennial observance of the Christian Reformed Church in June. The original titles are: “The Modernist Revision,” “The Fundamentalist Reduction,” “The Contemporary Restoration,” and “The Evangelical Responsibility.”

Theology

Review of Current Religious Thought: May 27, 1957

G. C. Berkouwer

In 1956 a book was published by the well-known dogmatician, Professor T. F. Torrance of the University of Edinburgh, with the title Kingdom and Church: A Study in the Theology of the Reformation. It appears to be a study of the eschatology of the Reformers: Luther, Bucer and Calvin. It can be called an important study which will interest all who are involved in the vigorous discussion on “the last things” in our time.

The problem of these last things has more than ever before regained its place in the theological discussion, a fact which is not difficult to understand, because there is no reason in the modern world to accept anymore the optimistic, evolutionistic view of many in the nineteenth century, that in the development of human, social and moral powers there would be a glorious future for the world. In the theology of our time we read again more about sin and corruption, about strange powers and destructive elements in the world and in the human soul and in catastrophic times the last things came more and more to the fore, not as a result of human forces but as the future of God in the coming of his kingdom.

Of course, this does not mean a self-evident renewal of the biblical message of the future. Everybody knows that in our time also the problem of the demythologizing of the New Testament arose, in which also the last things were included: the second coming of Christ belongs according to Bultmann to the mythological elements of the New Testament. And in Holland appeared a study from the side of a non-Christian thinker in which he tried to analyse modern thinking—also theology—as thinking without expectation of a real future. There was a tremendous one-sidedness in his book, but the question is important, whether there is in the changing of the times a real hope for the future.

It is interesting to see, in the book by Torrance, that there was a real eschatology in the time of the Reformation. In a time when the reality of church-life was taking all the time of the Reformers, there was simultaneously an outlook. Apparently there was no competition between being interested in the problems of the day and the expectation of the future.

Often in history we face such a competition: interest in the problems of the day or expectation of the future. But there is according to the Scriptures an inner connection. When Paul is writing on the real problems of the Church, he can do that in an epistle, in which he is preaching the future: his first epistle to the Corinthians. There is no competition, but the outlook for the future influences immediately the real problems of the Church. Exactly because of the coming of Christ there is an actual message for the Church and for every believer in the daily practice of Christian life.

That is what we see also in the eschatology of the Reformers. Their expectation of the future was not a threatening of their work in this world but the strengthening of their activity.

Now Torrance makes a remarkable distinction. He characterizes the eschatology of Luther as the eschatology of faith, that of Bucer as the eschatology of love, and the eschatology of Calvin as the eschatology of hope. In the light of 1 Corinthians 13 (faith, hope, charity) the division seems rather constructive and Torrance himself acknowledges that there was much in common in their eschatology, because their eschatological thinking was connected with faith, love and hope.

Nevertheless it will be good to notice the question which arises from the expectation of the Reformers in their time, which was in their conception an apocalyptic time. They were under the impression of the power of the antichrist, which they saw in the persecutions of the Roman Catholic Church and especially 2 Thessalonians 2:4 had their attention: “that he as God sitteth in the temple of God.” Even a Lutheran confession took up the identification of pope and antichrist and everybody understands that this identification influenced their eschatological thinking. Now there is a remarkable change, as far as this identification is concerned, in the following centuries and already Calvin identified the Roman Catholic Church more with the kingdom of the antichrist than with the personal pope.

But what interests us now is their being interested in the work of the Church (i. e., the unity of the church) and their eschatological outlook. That will always be the question for the Church of Jesus Christ, whether she is not only talking about today or about the future, whether she knows of the task today in the light of the future. The Reformers were occupied all the hours of the day but their eschatology was not a small closing chapter of their dogmatics but the stimulating factor in their difficult life. And when Sadolet reminds Calvin of the glorious future of Christ and asks him what he will have to say to the Lord when he is coming on the clouds of heaven (Sadolet was Roman Catholic), Calvin answers with the perspicuous message of Scripture on the task of the Church.

Love, faith and charity.… Only when the church lives in the richness of all three and never forgets that the greatest of these is charity, she will be able to live in the expectation of the future. Our century is called the century of eschatological thinking. Is the analysis right? The answer is not easy. There is a rethinking of the New Testament problems of the future, but there is also a criticizing of the New Testament message. There is a temptation of secularized eschatology again, although not in the same sense as in the optimistic 19th century. But there is another possibility: the possibility of pessimism. Optimistic eschatology expects a future from the human nature and now there is the danger that pessimism threatens every expectation and leaves the world without the responsibility which is included in the trustful message of the second coming of Christ.

More and more it becomes evident, that there is only one resistance: faith, hope, charity, these three.

Books

Book Briefs: May 27, 1957

Vital Truth

Redemption—Accomplished and Applied by John Murray. Eerdman’s, Grand Rapids, 1955. $3.00.

Central in Christian faith and experience is the doctrine of the atonement. Professor Murray of Westminster Theological Seminary has provided us with a fresh and vigorous study of this vital truth. The title of the book indicates the contents. Murray first deals with the accomplishment of redemption in terms of its necessity, its nature, its perfection and its extent. The death of Christ is seen as necessary to accomplish man’s salvation but not to win God’s love. Indeed, it is God’s very love which is the cause or source of the atonement. But unless the death of Christ was a necessity, it is hard to see how the cross is a supreme exhibition of love. The nature of the atonement is found in sacrifice, propitiation, reconciliation and redemption. Atonement was made, in Murray’s view, only for the elect. He argues vigorously that unlimited atonement leads to universalism.

Redemption, once secured by Christ, must be applied to men. In the second half of the book, Murray expounds the biblical teaching on Effectual Calling, Regeneration, Faith and Repentance, Justification, Adoption, Sanctification, Perseverance, Union with Christ and Glorification. An introductory chapter to this section discusses the order of application of the various aspects of applied redemption; and Murray argues that regeneration must precede faith and produce it. “Faith is a whole-souled act of loving trust and self-commitment. Of that we are incapable until renewed by the Holy Spirit” (p. 103). “Without regeneration it is morally and spiritually impossible for a person to believe in Christ, but when a person is regenerated it is morally and spiritually impossible for that person not to believe” (p. 133).

Any book is of value not so much for the positions it sustains as for the vigor with which the material is presented. A book which does not challenge and stimulate is of little value, whatever its view point. Professor Murray has given us an excellent book which no thoughtful reader will lay down unmoved. The positions taken are exegetically grounded and frequently interact with important optional interpretations. The book is attractively bound and includes a helpful text and subject index.

GEORGE ELDON LADD

Deity And Humanity

God Became Man by Alan M. Stibbs. Tyndale Press, London. 1s. 6d.

The person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ are rightly described by Mr. Stibbs as “the distinctive truth of Christianity.” It is this—if there were nothing else—that justifies the careful and thoughtful considerations which the author offers in this little monograph. Because so much recent thinking about the person of our Lord has been determined, not by Scripture but by scientific theory and philosophic speculation, Mr. Stibbs devotes a separate chapter to each of these alternative ways of approach. In a chapter on “Christian Truth and the Scientific Method” he deals with the insufficiency of “kenotic” theories and shows that the reasonable man is compelled to accept by faith the truths that are inherent in the Biblical view of the Person of Christ.

In a similar chapter on “Some Philosophical Speculations” the author discusses Anglo-Catholic views such as those represented by E. L. Mascall and L. S. Thornton who “have interpreted the incarnation in terms of human elevation and fulfilment.” Mr. Stibbs points out that these views are based upon unscriptural assumptions as to the purpose of the incarnation, for the Bible indicates that “what man needs is moral redemption, not metaphysical completion.” The author exposes “the evolutionary and optimistic humanistic ideas which underlie some of these suggestions.”

Against the above speculative notions Mr. Stibbs sets out the biblical data in a lucid manner. He draws attention to the evidence both for the full deity of Jesus and for his true humanity and emphasizes the fact that Jesus was born not for the purpose of realizing the metaphysical completion of man but to die for man’s redemption.

The fellowship of Christ’s sufferings which a Christian may know is nevertheless not “redemptive” in itself but is part of the cost of testimony which he in some small degree shares with his Lord.

ERNEST F. KEVAN

Evangelical Movement

Cooperation without Compromise, by James DeForest Murch, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids. $3.50.

Any movement which claims the interest and devoted service of great numbers of evangelicals is worthy of careful study. In its fifteen years of existence, the National Association of Evangelicals has established itself as such a movement, and the history of its growth and development is bound to be of deep interest to all who are concerned about the religious currents of our day.

Dr. Murch, well qualified by his gifts and by his close association with the N.A.E., has written its story, and an interesting one it is. He begins by presenting the theological and ecclesiastical context in which the new movement was born. Briefly, but clearly, he portrays the rise of theological liberalism, the inroads of apostasy in the great denominations, the failure of the old Evangelical Alliance to claim the support of American conservatives and the shortcomings which rendered the Federal Council incapable of representing the evangelical movement.

The author traces, with careful documentation, the rise and growth of the N.A.E. and its early expansion into new fields of service on behalf of the evangelical cause. He presents the work of the organization in such realms as radio and television, missions, Sunday School work, social action and international cooperation. He closes the book with a moving appeal for fresh advances in the realm of cooperative activity among evangelicals, sounding a high spiritual note for the days ahead.

It is neither unkind nor unfair to say that Dr. Murch’s work sometimes lacks the objective quality which characterizes the best historical writing. It may well be that we are still too close to the beginnings of this important movement to form a fully objective evaluation of it. Besides, the author’s own enthusiasm for the work to which he is devoting his life and service probably makes impossible a full-orbed view of it. His writing sometimes seem more like a promotional release than a history. This tendency is manifested in his use of superlatives, in his passing over lightly some of the serious differences of opinions which have existed at times within the organization and in the omission of any adequate mention of the defection from it of some individuals and groups. Dr. Murch has every right to his enthusiasm for this work and is to be commended for it, but the reader may well feel on occasion that this factor has colored the presentation of his story, and that the full story of the evangelical movement in our times remains to be written.

HORACE L. FENTON

Wealth Of Material

The Story of Stewardship, by George A. Salstrand, Baker, Grand Rapids, 1956. $3.50.

Mr. Salstrand states in his introduction: The purpose of this treatise is to trace the record of stewardship from colonial times to our present day, seeking to determine in so far as possible the origin, growth and development of the stewardship movement.

To achieve his goal he received the cooperation of many denominations and several stewardship organizations in our country. This is a book containing a wealth of material gathered from numerous sources including many charts and statistics. To add to its value he includes a large bibliography of both original sources and secondary works. He shows how stewardship has been an American contribution to theological thinking since the separation of church and state made it necessary for individuals to support the church. As the church has awakened to its missionary responsibility, the financial needs have grown so that stewardship and missions have gone hand in hand.

It is amazing to observe what some churches and denominations have accomplished that have stressed tithing and courageously preached and taught the matter of biblical stewardship. One gets the feeling that the success of stewardship lies not primarily in clever schemes and techniques but in emphasizing the biblical truth that what a man possesses is the Lord’s.

Dr. Salstrand, who was instructor in Evangelism and New Testament at Tennessee Temple Schools in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is also the author of The Tithe, the Minimum Standard of Christian Giving and How to Preach from the Gospel of John. The Story of Stewardship contains 153 pages and is a powerful message to open the eyes of many of us as to what can and should be done to be faithful stewards and thus hear at our Lord’s return, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

GORDON L. VAN OOSTENBURG

Fresh Meaning

The Book of Revelation by J. B. Phillips. Macmillan, New York. $2.00.

For those already familiar with J. B. Phillips’ translations of the New Testament (and who, among those sufficiently interested in books to be reading this review, is not?), the task of the reviewer of a volume such as this is more to announce than to describe. Sufficient unto the task is the bare assertion that with this volume Phillips completes the New Testament.

In this translation of the Apocalypse, there has been less room than elsewhere in the New Testament for Phillips’ magnificent prose to convey fresh meaning. The account is too factual to lend itself well to the sort of interpretative writing for which the author is justly famous. On the other hand, by the use of tenses and idioms, it has been possible for him to convey meaning where before there was obscurity. Occasionally this is very refreshing. Occasionally it makes one pause.

For instance, in chapter 4, Phillips uses a continuous present tense to convey a dramatic impression of never-ending worship which is quite effective. But he translates the familiar “He that hath an ear …” by “Let the listener hear …” which, to this reviewer, weakens the suggested selectivity implied by the phrase. A similar weakness of idiom occurs elsewhere as, for instance, in the next-to-last verse in the book where “He which testifieth these things …” becomes “He who is witness to all this.…”

G. AIKEN TAYLOR

Light On The Scrolls

Second Thoughts on the Dead Sea Scrolls by F. F. Bruce. Paternoster Press, London, 1956. 10s. 6d.

The Teacher of Righteousness in the Qumran Text by F. F. Bruce. Tyndale Press, London, 1957 2s.

Discriminating readers will distinguish between the reliable and the sensational books on the Scrolls. All books on the subject at present must contain considerable speculation, but in several cases hypothesis has been presented virtually as fact.

Professor Bruce’s book and his monograph are reliable treatments, and the reader is clearly shown the boundary between fact and conclusion. The book tells the story of the discovery of the Scrolls, their dating and the type of community from which they emanated. A chapter setting forth their bearing on the O.T. text is followed by a discussion of how the Qumran commentators treated the Messianic hope. Prof. Bruce points out that whereas Qumran looked for what we might call both a sacred and a secular Messiah, the N.T. finds all the O.T. prophecies fulfilled in the one person of Jesus Christ.

Who is the Teacher of Righteousness who is so greatly venerated by the community? Prof. Bruce holds that at present the evidence is insufficient to identify him with any known character of history, but he inclines tentatively to the view that the Wicked Priest, who persecuted him, is Alexander Jannaeus.

In estimating the relationship of the Qumran community to primitive Christianity, it is unlikely that the Teacher was himself regarded as the Messiah, nor was there any saving efficacy in his death.

Certain ideas are obviously common to any religion that is grounded on the O.T., and these must not be treated as though Christ and his disciples drew their teaching from Qumran. Yet the Scrolls have shown some interesting points of contact between the vocabularies of Qumran and St. John’s Gospel, indicating that some features that were formerly traced to Greek sources are likely to have been already current coin in Palestine in the time of Christ.

J. STAFFORD WRIGHT

Calvin Revival

American Calvinism, a Survey edited by Jacob T. Hoogstra. Baker, Grand Rapids. $2.50.

About twenty years ago Georgia Harkness wrote, “Calvin’s theology is in eclipse. Nobody now accepts his strange ideas.” After reading this survey of contemporary American Calvinism, one is not likely to accept Georgia Harkness’ judgment for 1957. The spirit of the times has changed. There is a great new interest in Calvin among students in the Southern Presbyterian Church. The same is true in the Reformed Church of America and in some seminaries of the Presbyterian Church. New translations of The Institutes have appeared in Hungarian, German and French; new printings have appeared in English also.

These and other facts are included in this unusual volume which embodies the talks given at the Calvinistic Conference held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on June 20, 21, 1956. The Conference was sponsored by the American Branch of the International Association of Reformed Faith and Action. Speakers included John H. Gerstner (Pittsburgh-Xenia), Paul Woolley (Westminster), Donald F. Tweedie (Gordon), J. Moody McDill (Pastor, Southern Presbyterian), Jerome DeJong (Pastor, Reformed Church of America), Jacob T. Hoogstra (Pastor, Christian Reformed Church), Cornelius Jaarsma (Calvin) and M. Eugene Oosterhaven (Western, Holland, Michigan).

The two papers by Gerstner and Woolley are well worth the price of the entire book. Prof. Gerstner sketches the history of Calvinism in the United States, especially in New England, before 1900. This is his field. Not only does he know the dominant characters but he knows their theology. He has the knack of painting with broad strokes the sweeping movements and then filling the canvas with details. Prof. Woolley takes up the picture with Darbyism and traces the social and doctrinal difficulties of the Northern Presbyterians to the present day expanding interest of the Reformed churches in Christian education and evangelism.

There follow ecclesiastical surveys of the various regions of our country. These are well done and form a basis for the growing optimism of Calvinists. It is regrettable that a survey of the North-Eastern region was not given. Many would like to know what theological direction Harvard is taking in 1957.

The inclusion of the discussion which followed each paper gives the reader the feeling he is listening in on a Calvinistic “bull-session”!

The collaborators on this book represent a broad front of Calvinism, as evidenced by their attempts to define it. Their talks cover American Calvinism in a comprehensive sweep.

FRANK LAWRENCE

Thematic Interpretation

Philippians, The Gospel at Work by Merril C. Tenney. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids. 1956.

Immediately upon seeing a new book on Philippians, two questions come to my mind. (1) How has the author treated the Kenosis passage, and (2) how are the key words translated and applied? Satisfaction for both questions is to be found in The Gospel at Work. This is an “in between” book. It is not a comprehensive commentary of the Epistle to the Philippians, but neither is it a “thin” book in the sense of lack of scholarship or purpose. It is small, but it is filled with good things.

While completely “fair” with the text, a contemporary note is maintained throughout by the illustrations and applications utilized. Historical unity is maintained by frequent reference to Paul’s experiences in Philippi and also to his knowledge of the needs of that church.

The author has chosen thematic interpretation as his literary method; a natural method derived from the fact that the chapters of his book were originally lectures given in the spring of 1955 at Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana. The theme is built around the nine appearances of the word “gospel” in the Philippians.

Five divisions; i. e. “Beginning”, “Fellowship”, “Pattern”, “Experience” and “Effects” are then developed. In interpretation, the author seems to be motivated by a desire to help rather than to dogmatize, and where necessary he will use variants of a text to make the meaning clear, including personal translation.

Each section of Philippians receives approximately equal treatment, including an analysis of Paul’s autobiography in chapter three. The “humiliation and exaltation” passage is treated briefly but adequately. The reader can be satisfied with what is there. In many instances, suboutlining by the paragraph and italics method makes the points more readily available.

As I read, I kept waiting for something to be said about the peculiar political status of the city of Philippi in the Roman system. This appeared in the last chapter; I could wish that there had been more.

ROBERT WINSTON ROSS

Africa News: May 27, 1957

Ambassador for Christ

Dr. Joseph Simonson, who recently completed a four-year term of service as U. S. Ambassador to Ethiopia, was given an unusual tribute before his departure by Protestant evangelical missions in the country.

James Luckman of the Baptist Mission expressed the conviction of all:

“Mr. Ambassador, it has been a great joy to have you in our midst as fellow members of heaven’s diplomatic corps. And we as missionaries have now no excuse for failing to understand Paul’s words to the Corinthians, ‘We are ambassadors for Christ.’ You, sir, have shown us by your example the meaning of a good ambassador.”

Dr. Simonson’s response revealed his humility and the truth that he was, indeed, a “fellow member.”

He said:

“I have often thought of this passage also, and as I have told you before, Mrs. Simonson and I have come out here with a sense of vocation. Most of you serve full-time as missionary teachers, nurses, translators, pastors, etc., and there will always be great need for such dedication of the entire life in Christian service; others of us believe that we can make our service in other fields just as directly unto our Lord and Master. After all, perhaps we should not divide our lives into the religious and the secular, but rather consider the fact that either Christ has all of us or he has none of us.”

Kanpur Campaign

Over 900 persons made decisions for Christ recently during evangelistic services in the industrial city of Kanpur, under sponsorship of the Evangelical Fellowship of India.

Dr. Akbar Haqq, who observed campaigns conducted by Billy Graham in the United States, preached to increasing crowds of 800 to 2,500.

Sixty-three per cent were first-time decisions for Christ.

The EFI aided churches in arranging the services. Preparatory meetings were held in all parts of the city. Counsellors were trained under the direction of Dr. Everett L. Cattell, EFI secretary.

Small prayer and fellowship cells are being formed by pastors engaged in follow-up work.

Middle East News: May 27, 1957

‘Act Of Injustice’

“Israel is founded on an act of injustice and nothing good can ever come of it,” an official of the Lutheran World Federation asserted in Copenhagen.

Axel Christensen made the statement as he left Denmark to become senior representative in the Middle East of the LWF’s Department of World Service. He will direct the organization’s large relief program in Jordan, Syria and Egypt.

“The Arabs have been living in Israel for a thousand years, just as we have been living in Denmark,” he said. “What should we say if some foreign country suddenly turned up and declared that it was their country?”

Mr. Christensen said he sympathized with the one million Arab refugees from Palestine who, he said, will not forego their right to return and to obtain damages.

He warned against letting oneself be “blinded” by sympathy for the Jewish people, a sympathy which he said he shared because of all they have suffered.

“I am not anti-Semitic,” he added. “I admire the Jewish nation, but I am opposed to the State of Israel because it is founded on injustice. This is also the opinion of many Jews, but we do not hear much about it here at home.”

Europe News: May 27, 1957

Fervor In Norway

Norway hasn’t seen anything since the 1930’s to match the religious revivals now under way.

The harvest in the Hoyland Church, Jaeren, (western Norway) has been going on for more than six months. People from surrounding towns and far-off countrysides are attending the meetings. From 14 to 80, they are finding Christ.

Another big movement has been surging through the valley of Audnedal in the southern part of the country, led by a young lay preacher, John Olav Larsen and assisted by local ministers of the Lutheran State Church.

Larsen also preached to overflow crowds in the largest halls of Oslo.

—T. B.

‘Air Raid’ Church

A church 50 feet below ground is being planned for the rapidly growing Swedish industrial city of Vasteras.

The project is designed to meet two major needs of the city—an A-bomb shelter and a new church. Vasteras, with 70,000 inhabitants, has only one state church, its 700-year-old cathedral.

According to plans, only the belfry will project above ground. The church, which will seat 500, will be reached by stairs and elevators.

Barth Hits Tests

Dr. Karl Barth, famed Swiss Protestant theologian, has called upon people in leading public positions to “take matters into their own hands” regarding atomic and hydrogen tests.

He urged them to “appeal to mankind and not be satisfied with political appeasing assurances.”

Dr. Barth said these leaders “must use all possible means to make their governments and press understand they wish neither to exterminate nor be exterminated—neither in defense of the ‘free world’ nor in defense of socialism.

“They should cry ‘Stop,’ to pierce the eardrums of men with responsibility in the West and East; to halt preparations for war with weapons making it from the outset senseless for all taking part; halt experiments which clearly imperil us already in peacetime.

“People in the West and East must oppose the current lunacy.”

The theologian said the matter was not one of principles, ideological systems or considerations of power but “of life.”

“Mankind must help settle the matter before it is too late,” he said.

New Russian Bishop

Archimandrite Anthony Bartochevitch, formerly of Brussels, Belgium, was installed recently as Russian Orthodox Bishop of Geneva and Switzerland.

He was elected to replace his brother, Bishop Leonty, who died last summer at the age of 42.

Bishop Anthony, whose family comes from Yugoslavia, is affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia which does not recognize the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate.

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