Bible Book of the Month: The Epistle of James

The range of thought in this epistle of James, some have said, is so limited that we are kept on rather a pedestrian level. Even if that were a strictly accurate estimate of the Epistle, let us remember that our flight to the heights from which far-reaching vistas of truth open out before us is a preparation for returning to the ordinary walk of life on its more prosaic levels. The supreme test of the quality of our religion is how we react to the long monotonous trudge on hard and stony roads, and not in the moments of ecstatic communion or in moments of specially strenuous activity (Isa. 40:31). We ought to be grateful to find in the Canon of Holy Scripture a book as severely practical as this Epistle, a book that contains words as sharp and uncompromising as these: “Be ye doers of the Word, and not hearers only, deluding your own selves” (1:22); “you believe that God is one, and you are quite right; evil spirits also believe, and shudder” (2:19, Weymouth).

The great Christian scholar, Origen of Alexandria (circa ca. A.D. 230), is the first Church writer who explicitly quotes this Epistle as Scripture, ascribing it to James, the Lord’s brother. In the Shepherd of Hermas, written about the middle of the second century, we hear fairly clear echoes of the teaching of the Epistle. In an earlier writing, the Epistle of Clement of Rome, written about the year 96, the echoes are much fainter; indeed, the evidence supplied by this writing is of doubtful validity. But, if the external evidence for the Epistle should appear to be rather vague and inconclusive, there seems to be no doubt about the evidence supplied by the Epistle itself. It enables us to reach some conclusions with regard to the authorship that seem to be irrefutable.

Authorship Of James

The writer was a Jew. He speaks of Abraham as “our father” (2:21), he applies to a Christian place of worship the word “synagogue” (2:2), he uses the Jewish word “Gehenna” in 3:6 and a specifically Jewish name for God in 5:4. He was a Jew of Palestine, knowing well its early and latter rains (5:7; cf. Deut. 11:14) and its hot burning wind that withers he grass (1:11). The name of this Jew was James, and the only one of that name mentioned in the New Testament whose claims call for any scrutiny here is James, the Lord’s brother. The disciple of Jesus, James the son of Alphaeus, seems to have been an obscure and undistinguished person; and James, the son of Zebedee, died early as a martyr, in the year 44 (Acts 12).

There are three interesting lines of argument in connection with the internal evidence that students might profitably explore. In my commentary on James in the New International Commentary (published in 1954) I have explored them with a fair degree of fullness. Here I simply mention them.

1. In the vocabulary of the Epistle there are some coincidences of language with the vocabulary of the speech of James at the Jerusalem Council of the year 50 and the letter issued by that Council (Acts 15). There are also two coincidences of language between the vocabulary of the Epistle and some of the words of James recorded in Acts 21:24 and 26. 2. The Epistle is the work of just that type of mind which is typical of James in the New Testament and in Church tradition. 3. The Epistle contains more reminiscences of the teaching of Jesus, and especially of the Sermon on the Mount, than all the other apostolic writings put together. The writer is not quoting from our Gospels; he must have stood very close to Jesus, to be able to reproduce so much of His teaching in a way that is strikingly independent.

If these three features of the Epistle are studied carefully and judicially, they will be seen to provide strong evidence that points in the direction of James, the Lord’s brother, as the author. The evidence is cumulative in both force and volume. This James is the only James in the early Church who was so well known that the simple designation, “James, a servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ” was sufficient to identify him at once to his readers. The Epistle has nothing whatever to say about the controversy that led to the holding of the Jerusalem Council of the year 50, the controversy about the place of Gentiles in the Church. Some have argued that this shows that it was written long after that Council, when that controversy had fallen into the category of “old unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago.” A far more reasonable theory, and one to which the majority of scholars adhere, is that it was written before the Council. Various hints here and there in the Epistle also point to an early date. Even so radical a scholar as Dr. A. T. Cadoux, in his little book on The Thought of St. James (published in 1944) advocates the early date, mentioning such arguments in support of it as the simplicity of the greeting, the use of “synagogue” for a Christian place of worship and the reference to “elders” only as officials of the Church (5:14).

Alleged Weaknesses

Some have looked with suspicion on the Epistle because of what they have described as its lack of theological teaching. We can, however, find a good deal of what has been called “compressed theology,” in such phrases as “Of His own will He brought us forth” (1:18), “the implanted Word” (1:21), “heirs of the Kingdom” (2:5) and the like. A remarkable feature of the Epistle that deserves careful study is the witness that it bears unobtrusively, at more than one point, to the Deity of Christ. In its very first words James stands as a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is one with God. Jesus is the Judge who stands before the door (5:9), and His Name is the resource of the Christian in sickness and sin (5:13–15). As Bengel, Warfield, J. B. Mayor and even so advanced a scholar as James Moffatt have held, in the first verse of the second chapter Jesus is referred to as “our Lord Jesus Christ, the Glory.” As Moffatt says, the Christian religion is there described as belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, Who is the divine Glory, which is a striking term for Christ as the full manifestation of the divine presence and majesty. Severely practical the Epistle may be, but, as I have said in my commentary, the practical exhortations “have their roots in deeper things, in the vital truths of Christian theology, though these roots, as is natural, are, to a large extent, hidden from the eye.”

Others have criticized this Epistle because of what they regard as its lack of evangelical fervor. Luther had doubts about it because he thought that it contradicted the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith. This is a very serious misunderstanding. The plain truth is that Paul and James deal with entirely different subjects. Paul in his teaching on justification is combating Jewish legalism; James is making his protest in the interests of morality, against Antinomianism. We may put it like this: they are not antagonists facing each other with crossed swords; they stand back to back, confronting different foes of the Gospel.

Dr. John Duncan of the New College, Edinburgh, once said that Antinomianism is the only heresy. That may be going too far, but it most certainly is a foul and pestilential heresy. There are some ardent evanglicals who need to have their souls strengthened and braced up by the searching, ethical teaching of an Epistle like this.

Addressed To Dispersion

James, revealed in the Book of Acts as a person of commanding power and influence in the Jerusalem Church, writes here to some Christian Jews of the Dispersion (1:1). They had experienced the miracle of regeneration (1:18). James speaks of the worthy Name which had been invoked upon them in baptism (2:7). He exhorts them to wait in patience for the coming of the Lord (5:7), looking for the crown promised to those who love Him (1:12). The Book of Acts describes a migration of Christian Jews from Jerusalem, which followed the death of Stephen (Acts 11:19). Thus, there could quite easily have been Christian Jews of the Dispersion to whom, at an early date, this letter was written.

Analysis

It has been said that James seems “to have poured out what was uppermost in his thoughts, or closest to his heart, without waiting to connect his matter, or to throw bridges across from subject to subject.” This tentative analysis may be suggested: (1) greeting (1:1), (2) trials from without (1:1–12), (3) trials from within (1:13–18), (4) hearing and doing (1:19–27), (5) respect of persons (2:1–13), (6) relation of faith and works (2:14), (7) sins of the tongue (3:1–12), (8) the false and the true wisdom (3:13–18), (9) mischief caused by strife and evil speaking (4:1–12), (10) the uncertainty and brevity of human life, leading us to humble dependence on the will of God (4:13–17), (11) the terrible doom that the rich oppressors of the Church are to meet (5:1–6), (12) final exhortation to the Church to stand firm and to be forebearing in view of the coming of the Lord (5:7–12), (13) various activities of the Church—prayer, praise, visitation of the sick, confession of sins, and the restoration of backsliders (5:13–20).

Tools For Exposition

It will be difficult to find a better Commentary than the one by that prince of biblical exegetes, Dr. Alfred Plummer, which was issued as one of the Expositor’s Bible series. For close study of the Greek text, a study so minute as sometimes to be in danger of becoming wearisome, those who know Greek will be well advised to have beside them, if at all possible, J. B. Mayor’s Commentary (Macmillan). J. B. Hort’s notes extend only as far as 4:7; they exhibit so often the keen exegetical insight of that great Anglican scholar that we profoundly regret that he was unable to complete his work. Help can be obtained from Ropes’ Commentary (I.C.C.), Moffatt (Moffatt Commentary), Arthur Carr’s little textbook (Cambridge Greek Testament), and, of course, from John Calvin.

Is Modernity Worth Sparing?

The question so little raised, but so pressingly urgent, is whether Western culture is any longer worth sparing? After all, if salvation (the term is theological) is ethical, by what right do men expect a halo permanently to hallow their pagan ways? Today not sin, but rather Christianity is subterranean. The basic Christian dogmas are marginal to the prevailing outlook on life. The ideas by which men shape their social life have become warped and individualized. Art and literature are no longer simply Christian-pagan, but pagan-Christian; the humanistic motif has triumphed and reaches even into the churches. When has paganism dared, as in our decade, to incorporate even Jesus as one of its fleshly themes? When has the music and song of the churches, historically centered in the Psalms, erected so wide a bridge to the world, so that the world itself replies in kind, although carnally, blending the spiritual motif and rock-and-roll with scant sense of incongruity and attracting to religion many who do not take it seriously? Our streets are crammed with pagans, and not even the revival of religion—and an indubitable awakening there is among many sincere Christians—can hide from view this conformity of religion to paganism. Indeed, more worldly-wise adults in the Americas are said to consult newspaper horoscopes than consult the Bible for light on the day’s decision.

Each passing decade now finds the inhabited world in a state of instability and shock worse than the preceding period. Every sweep of the horizon discloses widening crevices. The soulless nations remain as bleak signposts after the landslide of Western civilization into abysmal pagan depths. In civilized Europe in 1945 and 1946, in the aftermath of World War II, more people succumbed to cold and starvation than for many preceding generations or centuries; millions of refugees from bombed cities or hostile governments begged for asylum; fully a third of the people in France and Italy voted for Communist party candidates; the homeless survivors of oppressed continental Jewry fled to Palestine for refuge, while a million Arabs were dispossessed in that dissension-wracked land. The ascendancy of the white race seems nearer its eclipse.

Indeed, the future of human history itself lies in doubt. Henry Steele Commager, in The American Mind (1950), points to the unparalleled “breakdown of personal integrity … looting and destructiveness, … sexual promiscuity” discovered in the second American war, and remarks that the two world wars failed to induce in the American “either a sense of sin or that awareness of evil almost instinctive with most old world peoples … but accentuated his own assurance of power and success. His culture was still predominantly material, his thinking quantitative …” (pp. 432, 410). The old landmarks of Christian culture are vanishing, and some “prophets” are left with no more basis for optimism about the future than a confidence that man is a “tough animal.” National fatigue is spreading, and despair increasingly clouds the face of the man in the street.

The world is less one world than ever, except in its sins. It has less homogeneity; beyond a common veneration of science, a common dread of the atomic bomb, the great unanimities slip away. The Kremlin, depending on the Marx-Lenin philosophy, regards a clash with the Western powers as inevitable. Europe, the home of modern Western civilization, is caught in the tug of war between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. The United Nations itself is frustrated by a lack of unity; any great power bent on war can exercise its veto power, and even small powers have already spurned U.N. verdicts.

The real question before us is not whether Europe and America will be cut to the Soviet pattern, or Russia to the Anglo-Saxon; rather, it is whether the whole world in our day will go down in nihilism. We are face to face not merely with one of the great divides of history, but with the divide of divides in the sphere of human decision.

When C. Virgil Gheorghiu penned The Twenty-fifth Hour, a best-selling French novel, he applied that title deliberately to “The hour when mankind is beyond salvation—when it is too late even for the coming of the Messiah. It is not the last hour, it is one hour past the last hour. It is Western Civilization at this very moment. It is NOW.” Although Arnold Toynbee might write (A Study of History, p. 554), “We may and must pray that a reprieve which God has granted to our society once will not be refused if we ask for it again in a humble spirit and in a contrite heart” (a stupendous if, indeed). Gheorghiu speaks of Western civilization as already being superseded. Only while we can be sure that a man and a culture have not drifted past redemption’s point does any semblance of hope remain. In any event, we are far down the road to final destruction and doom. Our culture is afflicted with moral paralysis, and may never learn to walk again. At least, hope is fast running out that it can recover from its crippling deformities.

Only skilled pilots can maneuver the ship of Western culture any longer through the twilight of midcentury chaos toward even the hope of a sunny dawn. No other post-Christian generation has stood as desperately as ours in need of expert navigational advice. Sprawling mudflats and sloughs extend treacherously on every side, and the sea of life is encumbered with obstacles that faith alone can move.

Indeed, a deeper problem vexes us today: how long before a people set adrift lose their capacity for taking compass bearings? What are the limits of heaven’s tolerance? When does collective shame reach a depth from which there is no route back? When is the cup of iniquity in a given culture full to overflowing? When is “civilization” divinely outlawed, and faced with a death penalty? Dare we any longer look for the spiritual reconstruction of a culture that stinks already? Has it, like Lazarus, perchance already been dead four days, and the Lord refuses now to come near its grave?

The Christian concern to “rescue” the Christian-pagan culture of the West is remarkably strange. Whatever bears the impress “pagan” is marked for judgment, as the early Christians well knew. The apostolic community was aware that “this present evil world” is near death, that the forces of Satan almost everywhere intrude into its life, that in this world of wars and rumors of wars there is no unending peace. They made no goal of rescuing a pagan culture; nor would they have ventured to perpetuate a pagan-Christian, or a Christian-pagan, culture. What God sends to its death in judgment neither prophet nor apostle can resurrect. And the pagan spirit is doomed, no less in A.D. 1956 than in A.D. 1. Indeed, only a Christian-pagan conception of the Church’s task can be committed absolutely to the goal of cultural rescue—for this implies a primarily social conception of the Gospel and a highly optimistic view of society and history as well.

To some, it may seem a needless concession to pessimism to speak of modern culture as headed for doom and as outside the pale of redemption. But to those familiar with the New Testament this perspective cannot but appear realistic. The lively sense of historical end-time produced in the early Christians a quite different expectation from that among most modern Christians, many theologians included, who think the possible extermination of a pagan-Christian civilization on this fair planet an intolerable and insufferable presumption. That is why, to this Christian-pagan way of thinking, committed at all odds to the survival of a Christian-pagan culture, the blessing of the Church is conferred upon Christian-pagan strategy: the United Nations becomes the only real hope for peace, the integration of the races takes priority over the regeneration of the race, and so forth. The church of the hyphen, of the Christian-pagan disposition, made room even in its divinity schools for professors hostile to all supernaturalism, who promoted the organization of the Church while yet they were enemies of the evangel, propagating instead (as the essence of Christianity) the mirage of the social gospel. The twentieth-century church yielded to Communism, with its radical atheism, a role of challenge against the Christian-pagan patterns of our day more dynamic than the Christian-pagan forces themselves retained. Communism ranged against a pagan-Christian culture, in the interest of paganism, displays more zeal than those segments of the Christian camp whose main interest is the perpetuation of a Christian-pagan order. Both have lost the vision of Augustine’s The City of God; one is still enamored of Plato’s Republic, while the other is committed to the Manifesto of Marx and Engels.

For the early Christians, the only hope for the whole world lay in the appearance within it of what Professor F. Van Der Meer refers to as “a new category of men … ‘christanoi’ or ‘christians’ ” (in Atlas of Western Civilization, p. 36). The advancing Christian witness added a new dimension to human personality, one that the Bible depicts in the idiom of regeneration, justification and sanctification. Redemption through Christ altered man’s sensibilities in every sphere of life. The early Christians were not committed, therefore, to the perpetuation of Graeco-Roman culture. They preserved what was compatible with their faith, but they were not primarily concerned with the fate of a civilization which, however religious, was not built on foundations of genuine spirituality. They knew that only supernatural regeneration produces men and women of indomitable faith, unshakable peace, superb morals and neighbor-love. They knew because they had participated in the life of the old culture before their walk with Christ. They did not regard it as a Christian responsibility to aid a dying culture in exploring non-Christian or pagan-Christian avenues of survival. They had a Gospel to preach, and they preached it as to dying men and doomed nations.

The great frontiers before us all now are either nihilism or repentance and faith, for the present soul fatigue must lead, if not to spiritual renewal, then to disillusion and destruction. Once a world was dying in its sins, and Christianity seized the initiative. The safe era of the pax romana served as a framework for the propagation of the Gospel within the empire, and later the Christian witness systematically moved beyond the frontiers of the empire into barbarian lands. When the old culture succumbed, Christianity survived. The fate of the culture was not the fate of Christianity.

Only evangelical Christianity voices the biblical verdict: the modern mind is unsound, and requires renewal; the modern man stands in need of supernatural rebirth. Speculative philosophers still prattle about “maturing” the modern mind, or “shaping” the modern mind, but evangelical theology alone uses the relevant vocabulary: the utter necessity of regenerating the whole man.

The continuation of our very existence depends on the solution to basic problems, which Christianity alone has power to solve. The peoples of the world stand in desperate need of moral and spiritual enlistment, charging daily life with a sense of ultimate responsibility. We need to overcome the feelings of a generation which is not only incredibly ignorant of Christ, but which lives as if the Gospel were untrue. Many hear the Gospel today as something unbelievably novel, much like the throng in the Athenian market place.

The Christian needs to tell forth the fundamental facts of incarnational religion with a vividness to match the hour. He must enter, unintimidated by their modern eclipse, into a mood which grasps the elements of biblical revelation as new discoveries.

He need not fear because he speaks for a minority view. The power of Christianity has never depended on numerical superiority. The fisherman Peter by himself could resist the Hebrew religious leaders; the tent-maker Paul could carry the message of Christ through the far-flung Roman empire; the scholar Augustine in his day could convincingly interpret the debacle of history from the Christian standpoint; Luther could spark the Reformation and Calvin help sustain it; Wesley could turn the tide of secularism in England a century ago, and in our time Billy Graham can carry light to the Gentiles of three continents. So God through his anointed servants in succeeding generations becomes the light of a city, of a country, of a continent.

When the old Roman Empire crumbled, Christianity was scarcely known to the east of Jerusalem. In the Middle Ages, Europe alone (including Britain) was a virile center of Christian faith, transplanted later to America and other colonies. It is highly questionable whether there any longer exists a genuinely Christian nation on the face of the earth. But true followers of Christ are salted over the face of the globe. In Israel there are not many, fewer still in Egypt and Syria, but there are some; interdicted by totalitarian persecution in Red China, by autocratic religion in Colombia; eking out an apprehensive existence in Soviet Russia and satellite lands like Hungary; singing hymns in the jungles of the Cameroons and of the Congo—they remain the light of the world. In much of Southeast Asia the enterprise of “foreign missions,” as Western churches refer to it, seems to be drawing to an end. But the Church itself is in little peril of extinction even there. For dedicated nationals remain united with their living Lord. Indeed, recent events have quickened the cause of evangelism, for national workers now courageously proclaim the apostolic message in centers where the missionary movement itself has lost a biblical witness and vitality.

In his column “Spires of the Spirit” in the Washington Star, the chaplain of the United States Senate, Dr. Frederick Brown Harris, notes that even in the United States only a vigilant minority carries forward the fight for freedom. He recalls the sixteenth-century letter of Henry IV of France to his friend Crillon, who had failed to appear for a crucial battle. With biting scorn, the King wrote: “Go hang yourself, brave Crillon. We fought at Aques and you were not there.” Although applied to the tense modern battle for liberty, the anecdote can also be given a sharper turn. What more shameful verdict may history and eternity pronounce upon today’s Christian minister and the layman than this: “It was an end-time—for your generation and its culture—but you were not there”?

In 1956 no man, least of all a professing Christian, can afford to be neutral. These are days of unmasking, when neutrality discloses only those who desert the faith. Christian compassion leaves no man to his own destiny, for the lack of spiritual decision leads to hell, first on earth and then for eternity. It is not for us to answer the question “after 1956, what?” for God holds the future in His hands, but there is a question for whose answer we may be sure, “what must I do to be saved?” The Philippian jailor asked it centuries ago. The apostolic reply, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, and your household” (Acts 16:31), which wrought emancipation for one imprisoned soul, still has power to free all who are captive to the spirit of paganism. The Gospel in its very unveiling of the living God imparts at once a new hue to man and society, and to nature. It has power still to bind the awakening conscience to Christ and the inspired Scripture. If any word of Christ’s holds out hope to the West it must be found in His last instruction to the first century followers: “Go ye … and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you: and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matt. 28:19 f).

A generation and a century, a civilization and a culture, which advance under alien commands are trooping always on the quagmire of doom. In passionate obedience to the Great Commission the Church fulfills her mission, while, by their response to the Christian confrontation, men and nations seal their destiny. In a time of peril the Church can do no better than to obey those majestic marching orders, rushing to the aid of dying men carrying their misplaced hopes with them.

Fear Of Man Ejected By Fear Of God

In his first inaugural address Franklin D. Roosevelt made the statement that has become a popular and common quotation. He said in part, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” From pulpit and platform this quotation has been hurled to dispel the dark, overhanging clouds of fear—but without effect. Darkling clouds still lower over our civilization.

The fear of Roosevelt’s concern cannot be compared to the new dread that possesses the hearts of people. The fear of 1933 was defined by Roosevelt as “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” The present terror is not nameless, nor unreasoning nor unjustified.

Atomic and hydrogenic doom is the name of this fear. Scientists reason that the new destructive weapons are capable of destroying civilization, if not the earth itself. Dread of their use is indeed justified, for previous wars have revealed the demonic character of man.

Actually the new fear has displaced an older fear. Fear of man is superseding fear of God. Millions have shaken off the dread of God only to become enslaved by another anxiety—fear of the future, the fear of man for man. This modern apprehension terrifies as much as did concern of the hereafter implanted by the thought of fire and brimstone. Terror of unrighteous and of sinful man in possession of nuclear weapons has supplanted terror of the righteous and holy God.

In casting off the fear of God man has in reality repudiated that which alone will dispel the fear of man. Isaiah pointedly asked, “who art thou, that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die, and of the son of man which shall be made as grass; and forget-test the Lord thy maker, that hath stretched forth the heavens, and laid the foundations of the earth?” (Isa. 51:12, 13). If man had not forgotten God, he would not now be living in fear of man.

Dread of man finds its source in distrust of divine power. The creature is thought to possess greater power than the Creator. Reflection on the infinite might of God evidenced in creation and providence generates confidence and peace. God has greater power to preserve than enemies have to destroy.

Only fear of God will cast out fear of man. This is not a terrifying or servile fear of God but a reverential fear. It finds its source in the realization of God’s power and righteousness. Wisdom and true religion are the fruits of reverential fear. It leads to Christ and commitment to His care and providence.

The present generation needs to learn that the only road to real security and confidence is found in the fear of God. Only Almighty God has the power and the love to protect man from man. Commitment to Him makes fear of man unreasonable, for God’s power is unbounded and man’s power limited. It makes terror unjustified, for the Psalmist has declared that those who abide under the wings of God’s protective care shall not be afraid for the terror by night. Only as a nation dwells under the fear of the living God does fear of man become “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.”

Only to a God-fearing nation can it be declared in truth, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

A Preacher’s Great Temptation And The Spiritual Antidote

Every minister called upon to stand in the pulpit week after week should read 1 Corinthians 1:17 to 2:5 at frequent intervals.

Paul the great preacher, the divinely instructed theologian, places his finger squarely on the ever recurring temptation to proclaim God’s truth with “enticing words of man’s wisdom.”

To the unregenerate world the preacher is engaged in a foolish business and it cannot be otherwise. Man in his natural state wants a convincing sign or a well reasoned philosophy. To yield to such pressures is an insidious and deadly temptation.

It is not easy to preach a message which is a stumblingblock to some and meaningless jargon to others. Nevertheless that is the preacher’s mission.

But how can it be effective? Does not reason demand that we convince our hearers by the very force of logic and erudition? Take care! Paul found the preaching that has lasting effect is centered in Christ and Him crucified; foolishness to the world but the power of God to those who will believe.

An intellectual concept of the gospel message is vital, but there is also the absolute necessity of a personal relationship with the One Who made that Gospel possible. This experience of the burning heart enables one to rise above the ever-present temptation to please the “itching ears” in any given congregation. It is this recognition of the supernatural origin and effect of the Gospel which alone can compel the minister to preach the message on God’s terms and in God’s way.

- More from Alexander Ross

Eutychus and His Kin: January 7, 1957

SOBER UP

Martyrdoms have been commemorated in stained glass through the ages. Only to our time, however, has come the happy thought of memorializing a hangover in glass. There on the neighbor’s serving table is a choice selection of beautiful “Swedish modern” decanters, the relics and mementos of the New Year’s binge that finished off the Christmas spirits. Through the generous self-interest of progressive distilleries a man may now hit the bottle and keep it as a trophy.

Perhaps a liquor manufacturer in search of art treasures for his advertising might be referred to the triptych on the Fall of man by Albrecht Altdorfer in the National Gallery. The left panel would be appropriate for an antique label: it pictures Bacchus, dissolute and obese, presiding over a loathsome mass of besotted revelers.

I sense the reaction of some of my “kin” among your correspondents: “You evangelicals find it so convenient to attack the sins of the flesh! Everybody is against dmnkenness and scarlet sin. What about pride … the self-righteous hypocrisy of a sanctimonious wife that drives a man to drink … the social sins that create economic misery from which alcohol seems to promise escape? Don’t you realize that the alcoholic is a sick man?”

Touche! But to plead that drunkenness is not the only sin or even the worst sin or that it involves physical consequences beyond the initial sin does not disguise the fact that it is sin. This plea suggests a mistake like that of the crusaders against “Demon Rum.” Passing social legislation is no more effective than smashing whiskey bottles in dislodging the demon from the sinner’s heart.

Only Christ can do that. Christian soberness is more than temperance in food and drink. Aroused from the drunken befuddlement of wordly stupor, the Christian sees the real issues. He knows what time it is—that the night is far spent and the dawn near. The sober Christian is not a lean ascetic, but a full man—drunk with the new wine of Pentecost!

EUTYCHUS

MARIOLOGY-MARIOLATRY

There is a common misuse of the world “Mariology.” The term itself is neutral and refers simply to the theology concerning the place of Mary in the Christian scheme of things. Mariolatry (literally: worship of Mary) is the better term to use in describing certain extreme Roman Catholic theological developments which seem to threaten the unique place of Christ as our Redeemer. How unfortunate it is that these developments seem to exalt the humble Mother of God at the expense of her Son. For Mary always points us, not to herself, but to Christ: “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it” (St. John 2:5).

JAMES H. DAVIS

Ascension Episcopal Church

Hintong, West Va.

JORDAN’S STORMY BANKS

Having lived in Israel for three years I write … (1) The Arab conquest of Palestine was in 634 A.D., and this rule lasted till about 900.… The Jews had ruled the land for more than a thousand of the 3000 years of its recorded history, and had always maintained their claim. (2) Extensive Arab immigration came only after Jewish colonization brought new prosperity to land wrecked under Arab and conqueror misuse.… (3) The Jewish contribution to the allied cause in World War II was magnificent in man-power, applied science and money. The Arabs never lifted a finger to free themselves from the Turks.… The Arabs were given over 100 times as much land freed from the Turks.… On the basis of past history, what hope is there that any Christian hand or voice would … protect this nation, a pilot project for the world in working out the teachings not only of the Old Testament prophets but of him whom the Jews call their greatest Prophet.…

ELIZABETH G. CHAPMAN

May I, through your columns, ask Christian people three questions:

Are Arab refugees any less important or deserving in the sight of God than Jewish refugees? Or Hungarian refugees?

On what grounds can you justify the West’s support of Israel? (Surely not on religious grounds for if Egypt is a Moslem nation, modern Israel is out and out materialist with no claims to Christian partisanship whatsoever.)

If we believe in democracy and the sovereign right of a nation to determine its own affairs, how can we maintain this belief and, at the same time, deny these rights to ANY nation whose internal policy does not happen to please us?

The point is that through our support of Israel, the ancient foe of Araby, we seem to have driven the Arab nations into the arms of the Communists, and this seems to me to be not only a great pity but a very grave mistake.

M. B. JOSE

St. Paul’s United Church

Prescott, Ontario, Canada

CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE

Will Gordon H. Clark answer this question in print: If the virgin birth is as essential as the Incarnation in Christian belief, why does not Paul mention it in Galatians 4:4, 5 nor John the Evangelist in John 1:1–18 …? Please notice that these two writers both strongly affirm the fact of Incarnation, emphasizing God’s initiating Incarnation into human nature. It is Mary’s humanness as revealed in the Gospels and Acts and not the method (virgin birth) of conception that is important to Paul and John the Evangelist.

Mr. Clark evades this question by saying that Paul’s silence about the triumphal entry or John’s about Peter’s confession means that their silence about the virgin birth means nothing; however, in the above two passages either or both would have included the virgin birth if it was as important as the Incarnation. But it wasn’t. Their common interest is in God’s action through human nature in the particular woman, Mary.

Mr. Clark cannot say that I find the virgin birth too much as a miracle, for he knows as well as I that the Incarnation and the Resurrection are both such drastic miracles that all others are minor by comparison. I am raising only one question, and this on the basis of the two above passages, how can the virgin birth be equated with the Incarnation as equally important in any way? The Incarnation is essential fact or we become Unitarian in view, but let us only affirm and declare with Paul and John that Christ was born of the woman Mary.

Mr. Clark in his dealing with the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke neglects the important discoveries of 100 years of scholarship. These two narratives are not part of the foundation of our Gospels, which foundation is the kerugma and the Passion narratives. Attached to this essential structure, which of course, presupposes the Incarnation as a postulate, are the various pericopes, most of them very important, but some as the birth narratives showing a less important interest and emphasis.…

JOHN YEAMAN

Edison St. Methodist Church

Fredericksburg, Tex.

Paul in Gal. 4:4–5 does not state and cannot state all that is essential to the Gospel. Nor can John, who in chapter one of his Gospel has selected the preexistence of Jesus as his topic and not his human birth. We cannot legitimately expect everybody to say everything.

Further, the question of the letter seems to depend on lack of attention to what I wrote. A belief in the Virgin Birth is not essential to one’s salvation. The thief on the cross knew nothing about it. At the same time I maintain that the fact of the Virgin Birth is essential to God’s plan; and further, a belief in the Virgin Birth is essential to a worthy ministry. The kerugma, or that which must be preached, is not some small part of the New Testament: it is the whole of the Bible; as Paul indicates in Acts 20:27.

I am not ignorant of the “important discoveries of 100 years of scholarship.” The destructive critics “discovered” that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch because writing had not been invented in his time. They “discovered” that the Hittite nation had never existed. Wellhausen “discovered” that the culture reflected in Genesis was the culture of the Babylonian captivity. Orthodox Christians have always known that this scholarship was mistaken.

GORDON H. CLARK

Indianapolis, Ind.

FOR MEN ONLY

I did not notice a single woman’s name connected with your publication.… It is probably an act of chivalry on your part to keep the menfolk in the vanguard army.… I can’t find any record in the New Testment of a woman deserting, or being displeased with Christ. Even the Magdalenes tagged after Him without seeming to unruffle His composure, so you see it should be a measure of your divinity if you can allow the company of “sissies” in your very dignified columns without losing composure.

E. N.

Norwood, Mass

The roster of masculine names in CHRISTIANITY TODAY follows from the fact that contributing editors and correspondents were largely chosen from among the clergy. But the magazine spearheads no anti-feminine movement. The current issue contains one of a number of articles to appear by lady penmen.

—ED.

ON THE EDGE OF GLORY

The solution of the problem … (“Preaching on the Edge of Desperation,” Dec. 10, 1956) lies in a thorough study and application of the Pastoral Epistles of St. Paul and of Acts 6:1–4. If we ministers could and would, as we should, follow the guidelines there laid down—and how many congregations specify as much in their calls?—… we’d have a chance to grow professionally.

E. P. SCHULZE

Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer

Peekskill, N.Y.

NO INTEGRATION

I feel the need of commenting … It is said that “Organic Church Union could be represented in its most intense form by the National Council.…” If the verb “could” is supposed to mean “is”, I can only express amazement: the NCCC has never even had a Department of Faith and Order in its structure! And as to the NCCC’s being “integrated” within the framework of the World Council of Churches, I feel that too strong a verb has been chosen. There is good cooperation, but hardly integration.

J. ROBERT NELSON

Commission on Faith and Order

World Council of Churches

Geneva, Switzerland

Both editorials “The Perils of Independency” and “The Perils of Ecumenicity” are excellent! Anyone who objects … reflects the confirmed bigotries of his “camp.” Continue on this high level. God condescends to work on such a plateau.

RICHARD T. SMITH

Princeton Baptist Church

Princeton, Me.

Your twin articles … pertinent and timely … were written kindly and penetratingly.

JOHN EUMURIAN

Angelo Community Church

Sparta, Wis.

World Crisis Prompts Inauguration Decision

Christianity in the World Today

When President Eisenhower takes his second term oath of office at a private ceremony in the White House at noon on January 20, he will become the first President of the United States ever to be sworn in on a Sunday.

The decision against waiting until Monday, prompted by the tense international situation, will prevent the nation from being without a President for 24 hours. (Religious leaders, generally, are in complete accord with the decision.)

President Eisenhower will repeat the oath at noon on Monday, January 21, in a public ceremony on the steps of the Capitol. The Monday ceremony will be broadcast and televised throughout the world.

20th Amendment

Under the 20th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1933, the term of the President ends at noon on January 20. If a President has failed to qualify, the Vice President-elect shall serve as President until he does. Thus, President Eisenhower will have to step down as President at noon on Sunday unless he takes the oath for a second term. Presidential advisers warned against a 24-hour hiatus of executive power.

Vice President Richard M. Nixon also will take his second term oath at the private White House ceremony and will repeat it at the public ceremony on Monday.

January 20 will be the fourth time in U. S. history that an inauguration day has fallen on Sunday. On Saturday night, March 3, 1877, President-elect Rutherford B. Hayes took the oath privately at the White House. He repeated the oath publicly the following Monday. In 1849, Zachary Taylor refused to take the oath on Sunday and was not sworn in until Monday noon. In 1821, President James Monroe deferred taking his second term oath until Monday.

Plans for Church

President Eisenhower plans to attend the 9:30 a.m. service at National Presbyterian Church on Sunday, January 20. If he attended the 11 a.m. service, he would be in church at the time his term expires.

Four clergymen, including the head of the Greek Orthodox Church in North America, will participate in the public inauguration. It will be the first time that a representative of Eastern Orthodoxy has taken part.

Dr. Edward L. R. Elson, pastor of National Presbyterian Church, where President Eisenhower is a member, will give the invocation. (Dr. Elson is a contributing editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.)

Archbishop Michael, of the Greek Orthodox Archdioceses of North and South America, will deliver the first prayer, immediately before the Vice President takes his oath of office.

Dr. Louis Finkelstein, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York, will offer the second prayer immediately preceding the administration of the oath of office to President Eisenhower.

Edward Cardinal Mooney, Archbishop of Detroit, will give the benediction.

Traditionally, three clergymen participate in inaugurations—one each from the Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish faiths.

Private Communion

On Thursday, January 3, a private Communion Service was held in National Presbyterian Church at 8 a.m. for President Eisenhower, his Cabinet and members of Congress. Dr. Elson conducted the service.

Flood Of Indecency

The so-called small protests of concerned people throughout the nation have converged on official Washington and touched off the following major developments in the “flood of obscenity” flowing through U. S. mails:

★ Staff members of the House Post Office Committee are drafting a bill that will make habitual violators liable to as much as 20 years in prison.

★ Rep. John Dowdy (D-Texas), chairman of House Subcommittee on postal operations, has announced plans to close a legal loophole through which “peddlers of lust” flaunt the law.

★ Mr. Dowdy also plans to introduce a bill providing that publishers of indecent books and magazines may be tried at any place such mail is received as well as where it is deposited. (Kansas and New York differ greatly on views of pornography.)

★ The United States Supreme Court has taken under advisement an appeal by a convicted publisher of obscene books which, if granted, can upset state and Federal statutes and necessitate complete revisions of such laws.

Concerning habitual violators, Mr. Dowdy had this to say:

“We see the same fellows over and over again. They publish first under this name and then under another. As soon as postal authorities catch on to them in one place, they move somewhere else. They get fined, but it doesn’t stop them because they are after big, quick profits. If they do go to jail for six months, they only use the time to think up new ideas.”

The only answer, he said is “a good stiff jail sentence.”

In the matter of the legal loophole he plans to close, the Texas congressman said the Dowdy-Rees Bill gives the Postmaster General authority to impound mail of publishers violating postal regulations, but allows violators to flaunt the law because of a Senate amendment.

Designed to protect legitimate publishers, the amendment provides that the Dowdy-Rees act “shall not apply to mail addressed to publishers or distributors of publications which have entry as second class matter under the Act of March3, 1879, or to publishers or distributors of copyrighted books and other publications to whom a certificate of registration of copyright has been issued under the copyright laws.”

Publishers of racy “men’s magazines,” he said, are rushing to Washington to register the contents of their magazines for copyright and are going through the form of applying for a second class mail permit.

The Post Office Department is rejecting the applications for second class mail privileges, but publishers are entitled to a 30-day period in which to appeal. Not until that period is over can the department start legal action to impound the publisher’s mail. The copyright office of the Library of Congress does not have authority to deny a registration of copyright merely because it questions the contents of a publication.

Regarding the site for the trying of cases, Mr. Dowdy said most of the objectionable magazines and books are being mailed from two cities, New York and Los Angeles.A staff spokesman for the House Subcommittee said:

“Pornography may be viewed as one thing in Hollywood or on Broadway, and as quite another in Emporia, Kansas, or Athens, Texas. After all, it is in the latter places that the damage is done in terms of corruption of morals and juvenile delinquency. Judges and juries who see at first hand the results of such immoral reading matter may take a more serious view of the offense.”

In the Supreme Court appeal, Samuel Roth, a New York publisher convicted by a Federal jury and sentenced to five years in jail with fine of $5,000, has asked that the conviction be set aside on grounds of no evidence to prove his publications actually injured anyone.

The appeal has reached the Supreme Court at the same time that the justices appear to be moving toward a sweeping ruling that will decide the constitutionality of state statutes aimed at preventing the sale of indecent literature.

The justices have delayed until mid-January their decision in the case of Butler vs. Michigan, in which a Detroit bookseller has challenged a Michigan law aimed at preventing sale of books that may be harmful to the morals of minors. This case was argued before the high bench on October 16, 1956. Other cases heard by the court during October have been decided.

(Usually when a case is by-passed in this manner, it means either that the justices are divided and dissenting opinions are being written by some members of the court, or that the court considers its opinion so important and fundamental that extra time is being spent on preparation of the written opinion.)

Jerusalem + Judea + Samaria News: January 07, 1957

Route Of Moses

Extensive surveys, tending to support the theory of some that Moses took a northern route through the Sinai Peninsula on his way to the Promised Land, have been completed by two teams of Israeli scientists.

One team, consisting of archaeologists, historians, philologists and geographers of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, explored the famous Greek Orthodox monastery of St. Catherine at the foot of Mt. Sinai.

The other team, made up of archaeologists of the Israeli Department of Antiquities, investigated ruins in the Oasis of Kadesh Barnea, near the Israeli-Egyptian border north of Sinai.

At St. Catherine’s the scientists scrutinized and photographed manuscripts dating from the sixth century. Examination of the monastery buildings disclosed remains of a basilical church built by the Emperior Justinian in the fourth century, with only a chapel of the Burning Bush—a Crusader addition—still substantially intact.

The monastery was found standing on a Justinianic foundation on which were superimposed structures of the Crusader, Napoleonic and late 19th century periods.

Geographers surveyed a granite area between the monastery and the south Sinai coast. Archaeologists examined the ruins of a large fortified settlement at Wadi Feiran in ancient Paran. Paran, which reached its prime in the Byzantine period, was inhabited from the middle of the Iron Age to the early Arab period.

The scholars, headed by Dr. Benjamin Mazar, president of Hebrew University, reported they had found no remains of a middle Bronze Age, claimed to have been contemporary with the Jewish exodus from Egypt.

The second team found large quantities of pottery at Kadesh Barnea dating from the Patriarchal period, as well as remnants of a 10th century B. C. Judean fortress which had apparently been destroyed by the Babylonians. A wall three miles long protected the whole Kadesh area against nomadic tribes.

Unusual Infant

Noah, builder of the ark, was such an unusual infant that his father believed he had been supernaturally conceived and spoke to his wife “with vigor” about it.

This new light on the family life of Lemach, father of Noah, and his wife is contained in what is known as the seventh Dead Sea Scroll, the last to be unrolled, Dr. Yigael Yadin, one of Israel’s leading archaeologists, disclosed.

Dr. Yadin, former chief of staff of the Israeli army, is now on the staff of Hebrew University. He and a colleague, Dr. Nahman Abigad, have translated five columns of the scroll.

The account, said Dr. Yadin, is written in Aramaic “in a very pleasant hand” on the hairy side of what is believed to be goatskin. He said it was so brittle that only an inch or two could be unrolled at a time.

In the scroll, Lamech, speaking in the first person, tells of his growing fear that the boy he thought was his son was really the child of “the Watchers, the Holy Ones or the fallen angels.”

He explains that his fear was induced by the unique qualities of the child. Lamech describes the infant as having a body “white as snow and red as the blooming of the rose,” with long locks of hair “white as wool” and eyes that lighted up the house “like the sun” when he opened them.

The scroll then tells how Lamech confronted his wife and how she, finally “growing wrath,” swore by the “Most High Lord of Greatness and King of the World” that Lamech, not some supernatural being, was the father of Noah.

One More Seat

Another seat in the Chamber of Deputies has been granted to Iraq’s Christian minority, making a total of eight in the 138-member lower House.

The newly-created seat from Baghdad brings the number of Christian deputies from the Iraqui capital to three.

Projects In Israel

The government in Israel has allocated $140,000 for the improvement of biblical, historical and other tourist sites.

Landing facilities will be improved at Tabgha on the Sea of Galilee, the site of the Multiplication of Loaves and at Capernaum, site of the ancient synagogue where Jesus is said to have prayed and preached.

A new tree-lined road to Mount Zion is nearing completion.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY is a subscriber to Religious News Service, Evangelical Press Service and Washington Religious Report Newsletter

Africa + Asia + Australia News: January 07, 1957

Missionaries Slain

Half-civilized natives of Dutch New Guinea became enraged when their pigs began to die in large numbers.

Blame for the plague (thought to be pig-cholera) was laid on the intrusion of missionaries in tribal territory.

A native uprising was planned for November 3, but failed to materialize, according to information received by the American Mission of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Then, about two weeks later, the natives, armed with axes and knives, surrounded the mission, located near the border of Dutch and Australian New Guinea.

Twelve unarmed native missionary teachers were killed and the bodies dismembered, the Sydney Mirror reported. An airplane belonging to a European missionary was ripped apart.

Had the November 3 attack been on schedule, 12 American missionaries, plus the 12 natives, would have been caught at a mission service.

The uprising was brought under control when the Dutch flew Marines, with Sten guns and mortars, to the scene. Americans and Europeans were kept under police protection in a government building for several nights.

‘Godless Monopoly’

A new universal primary education plan initiated by the East Nigerian government has been denounced by Catholics as a “godless monopoly of education.”

Under the plan, all new schools opened in the region are to be government-controlled and managed by local officials, who will be free to invite religious bodies to supply temporary faculty members.

Britain and the Continent News: January 07, 1957

Responsibilities

Dr. Regin Prenter, professor of theology at the University of Aarhus, has warned members of the Danish Parliament that too great a dependence upon government will stifle self-reliance of the people and make them incapable of democratic self-government.

Speaking at the annual worship service in Copenhagen, marking the opening of Parliament, he declared that “the greatest danger of the modern welfare state lies in its failure to acknowledge its limitations.

“The danger is that the State not only cares materially for those who are not able to take care of themselves, but that it will care both materially and spiritually for all of us … to such a degree that the personal responsibility of the individual is weakened by it.”

Taking as his text, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” Dr. Prenter praised “the far-reaching social legislation” of recent years which has “put an end to much human need and misery.”

“But,” he added, “a democracy can live only as long as there is a feeling of responsibility in the people. On the day when the politicians alone have any responsibility and all of us let ourselves be blindly led by them … democracy will be finished.”

Sharp criticism of the sermon was voiced by the Danish press. Editors took issue on the grounds that it was a “political sermon” rather than the “ordinary devotional service” customarily delivered on the opening of Parliament.

In response to the criticisms, Dr. Prenter said “a colorless church service is of no devotional value.” (He is chairman of the Commission on Theology of the Lutheran World Federation.)

Changes In Hungary

The presidium of the General Synod of the Hungarian Lutheran Church has acted in Budapest to widen a reorganization of the Church begun in the wake of the anti-Soviet uprising during October.

It confirmed the reinstatement of Dr. Jajos Ordass, head of the southern district and acting leader of the Church. The presidium announced that elections will take place this month to fill all other church posts, including bishoprics. Results of the elections are scheduled to be announced January 19.

The General Synod also reinstated all pastors who had been removed or suspended by the former Communist regimes for political reasons.

Bishop Ordass replaces Bishop Laszlo Dezsery, former head of the district which includes Budapest. Bishop Dezsery was named to the post, with the approval of the Communist authorities, in 1950, only a week after Bishop Ordass was released from prison, where he served 20 months of a two-year sentence for alleged “foreign currency manipulation.” Bishop Dezsery resigned recently and may soon quit the ministry.

The General Synod also named Bishop Zoltan Turoczy to replace, temporarily, Bishop Lajos Veto, another Communist appointee who resigned, as head of the Trans-Danubian district.

Digest …

Greater Manchester (England) Evangelistic Campaign, with the Rev. Joseph Blinco as speaker, scheduled March 23 to April 13, at Albert Hall. Mr. Blinco now serving as associate evangelist of Billy Graham team.

News about North and South America: January 07, 1957

Sparks In Canada

Nearly 500,000 persons attended 125 rallies in the first two months of a national evangelistic mission conducted by the United Church of Canada.

“It is impossible to estimate the number of persons influenced by these missions,” said Dr. W. G. Berry, crusade director, “but reports show that large numbers came forward to make personal decisions for Christ.”

The missions were held in cities across the country. Leading speakers were Dr. Alan Walker of Australia, the Rev. Joseph Blinco of England and the Rev. Leonard Griffiths of Ottawa.

Dr. Berry said the missions are “only a small part of a much larger plan of the United Church to conduct the greatest evangelistic campaign in its history.”

The crusade, he said, will “challenge every area of Canadian life and culture with the Gospel. We propose to offer the Gospel not only to individuals but also to society as a whole and attack sin not only in personal life but also in social life.”

The missions will continue through 1957. Over 300 rallies are planned during the Lenten season. Speakers from overseas will include Dr. Charles Duthie, the Rev. Tom Allan of Scotland, Dr. Donald Soper and the Rev. William Gowland of England.

Giving Goal Soars

The present goal for total Southern Baptist Convention giving in the year 1964 is $728,000,000—including $189,000,000 in missionary and benevolent work.

In 1955 the total was $335,000,000, with $35,000,000 used for missionaries and benevolences.

The following goals have been set by the SBC executive committee:

1957–$364,000,000; 1958–$416,000,000; 1959–$468,000,000; 1960–$520,000,000; 1961–$572,000,000; 1962–$624,000,000; 1963–$676,000, 000.

Along another front, a survey has disclosed some interesting facts about the average Southern Baptist minister in Tennessee. In his survey, Professor Herbert J. Miles of Carson-Newman College, found:

They agree (90 per cent or more) that Southern Baptists should not join the National Council of Churches, should not ordain women to preach, should not take part in the Lord’s Supper outside a Baptist church and should not accept by letter a non-Baptist even though he has been immersed.

They disagree on such issues as capital punishment, integration of races and performing weddings where one party has been divorced.

The average minister is 41 years old, has been preaching 14 years and has held five pastorates.

Lutheran Merger

Representatives of four American Lutheran churches have agreed to proceed at once toward a goal of organic church union.

Delegates, at a meeting in Chicago, voted to form a constitution for a united Church that will include articles of doctrine as well as “practical matters of organization.”

Involved in the merger plan are the United Lutheran Church in America (2,270,000 members), Augustana Lutheran Church (536,000 members), Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (Suomi Synod) (35,000 members), and the American Evangelical Lutheran Church (20,000 members).

“We have among us sufficient ground of agreement in the common confession of our faith, as witnessed by the Lutheran Confessions, to justify further procedure,” delegates announced.

Sales On Sunday

The growing trend of Sunday selling throughout the United States received a slight setback when the New Jersey Supreme Court outlawed the Sunday sale of automobiles in the state by a 6–0 vote.

It was a victory for religious forces in the state. They have been conducting a campaign against the rising tide of business-as-usual on Sunday.

The state legislature last year enacted a law prohibiting the Sunday sale of automobiles. Its validity was attacked by two New Jersey used car dealers.

In June, Superior Court Judge Howard Ewart declared the law unconstitutional. He said it had· not been enacted to promote the general health, safety and welfare, but had as its main purpose the controlling of competition in the sale of new and used cars.

The high court’s opinion, prepared by Chief Justice Arthur T. Vanderbilt, rejected this contention. It maintained that the dealers were not being discriminated against because the ruling applied to all motor vehicle dealers and all were “protected in their businesses.”

Floundering Students

Recent surveys prove that theological students are not being adequately trained to grapple with modern church problems, Dr. Colin Williams of Australia said at the 70th annual meeting of the Theological Faculties Union of Chicago.

Dr. Williams, new professor of historical theology at Garrett Biblical Institute, Evanston, Illinois, asserted:

“Too many unapplied content courses and too many ungospelized practical courses leave the student frustrated and floundering when he takes a church. There is a big time lag—20 years or more—between seminary graduation and the time a man gets into a church big enough to count, and by that time he has forgotten his theology.”

Dr. Williams expressed fears that American Protestantism “identifies Christianity with Eisenhower prosperity and fails to bring modern culture under the judgment of the Gospel.”

He added:

“Contemporary religion in the United States lacks an awareness of Christ’s Lordship and sovereignty, which involves a break with the world.”

The speaker urged teams of seminary professors to go out for workshop conversations with laymen of the churches in order to bring the needs of the churches and the teaching of the seminaries into better focus.

F.D.W.

Educators Retire

The second president of a Southern Baptist College to announce his retirement, in recent weeks, is Dr. D. M. Nelson of Mississippi College.

Exact date of the retirement was not announced.

Dr. Harwell G. Davis has reported he will retire as president of Howard College in 1958.

Dr. Nelson has been associated with Mississippi College for 50 years. A graduate there in 1907, he later served as professor of physics before succeeding Dr. J. W. Provine as president in 1932.

The college increased from 360 students to over 2,000 during his span as president.

In announcing his plans, Dr. Nelson said:

“We have thought that with the completion of the library and fine arts building and with three other buildings begun and on the way toward realization, we should transfer the responsibility of the presidency to younger and more capable shoulders.”

The board of trustees appointed a nominations committee to seek a successor.

No Giving Up

Pilot John Keenan, who replaced the martyred Nate Saint, has been flying, in recent weeks, over Auca villages discovered after the death of the five missionaries.

He reports that the famous “George,” the Auca man who visited the martyrs’ camp with his two companions, always appears friendly and that he has in his possession the model airplane last seen floating in the water near the bodies.

It has been noted that Auca houses are adorned with the tin strips used to cover the graves of the missionaries.

College To Close

Shurtleff College, Alton, Illinois, 129-year-old American Baptist College, will suspend operations on June 30, according to a vote by the board of trustees.

One of the mid-west’s oldest educational institutions, the college was founded by a famous Baptist home missionary, John Mason Peck, in 1847.

The college has been unable to finance the additional personnel and equipment necessary for accreditation by the North Central Association of Colleges. Its facilities probably will be taken over by Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois, as a branch school.

Books

Book Briefs: January 7, 1957

Milford Sholund

Lessons For 1957

The Douglass Sunday School Lessons, by Earl L. Douglass. The Macmillan Company, New York. $2.95.

The International Sunday School Lessons and the International Bible Lessons for Christian Teaching are used in Sunday schools throughout the world. Sunday school teachers and leaders looking for stimulating commentaries on these lessons will be rewarded in this volume by Dr. Douglass. For forty years this series of lesson expositions has been a favorite in the United States.

The author has organized the fifty-two lessons in a compact volume of 490 pages. The introductory material for each lesson includes the Scripture reading, devotional reading and daily Bible readings with the printed text from the Scriptures for the lesson of the day. In addition, there are topics designed to help the teacher develop the lesson for young people and adults. The lesson plan includes a simple outline usually with four points which is very helpful for the teacher.

The biblical exposition is simple, scholarly and conservative in interpretation. Pastors and Bible teachers will find a library of choice interpretations on the heart of the Scriptures.

The lesson plan includes a section on suggested questions and topics for discussion, “Suggested Questions and Topics for Discussion.” There are usually five questions for each lesson, thus simplifying the discussion period.

The entire series of studies are made relevant to practical life situations. The author succeeds in showing how to use the biblical text for a twentieth century problem. The first quarter studies include the Gospel of Matthew.

Ten lessons in the second quarter on Studies in Genesis consider the origin of perpetual human issues. The author stresses the point that life and salvation are the great truths of God’s Word.

Personalities of the Old Testament are made to live again in lessons for the third quarter. The lesson on Amos, Crusader for Righteousness, is an excellent example of making an ancient prophet of God speak the eternal truth for American people in the twentieth century. The Sunday school teacher will find abundant help on thirteen biographies.

The New Testament themes are drawn from I Corinthians, Philippians and Philemon in the last quarter’s lessons. The author succeeds again in bringing truth to life. In the lesson entitled, “That I May Know Christ,” page 459, based on Philippians 3:12–14, Dr. Douglass says, “First we observe that Paul realistically regarded life as a struggle. The modern idea that we can lie back and let peace and confidence come down upon us like the gentle rain from heaven, finds no support in the New Testament.”

Temperance lessons are seldom included in graded lesson series. Dr. Douglass has not only included helpful information on this subject, but he has applied the implications of the problem where it belongs. He shows by reliable data what the results of drinking do in automobile accidents, home life, military service and among youth in general.

He includes a bibliography of fifteen pamphlets and periodicals which every Sunday school leader can use, especially for high school students.

Milford Sholund

The New Eve

Christ and the Church, by L. S. Thornton. Dacre Press. 18s.

In this comparatively slender volume Dr. Thornton has given us the third and final part of his treatise on The Form of the Servant, and the thesis of its pages is, in the author’s own words, “that the whole mystery of the Christ is re-enacted in the church.” The relation of Christ to the church he sums up in the two terms identify and cooperation. The doctrine of identity centers around his concept of the church as the new Eve coupled with that of Christ as the new Adam: as Eve was formed from Adam’s side while he was in a deep sleep, so the church was formed when Christ “fell asleep in death upon the cross and his newly opened side became the site of the new creation.” The doctrine of cooperation centres around his concept of the church, the New Eve, as “the human agent through whom the obedience of the new Adam becomes effectual in all.” As is common with Anglo-Catholic theology, reconciliation is sought in incarnation rather than in atonement; hence Dr. Thornton’s emphasis on the “one flesh” concept: as Adam and Eve were “one flesh,” so he finds it possible to speak of Christ and the church as sharing “a common nature in organic identity” and constituting “a single organism in which Christ is the head and the church is the body.”

Those who are acquainted with Dr. Thornton’s earlier books will recognize the theme of organic identity: the created order is viewed as a progressive organic series in which each higher level contains and elevates all the lower stages of the organic series. It is in the Incarnation that, at last, the highest level is seen to be reached; indeed, according to Dr. Thornton, it is not until the Incarnation that the plan of creation is fully disclosed. On his premises, it must be concluded that the Incarnation would have taken place even if man had not sinned: for “the first creation was,” he says, “part of a much larger plan which was from the first Christocentric,” so that the form of the first creation “is determined by the necessity that it shall find its fulfillment in the Christ.” Accordingly he maintains that “the ‘place’ of reconciliation with God is the flesh of Jesus in which Christ and the church are one.” Further, in the Incarnation, ex hypothesi, the Son of God embraced “all flesh,” so that “the transfigured flesh of Jesus was the ‘all flesh’ of creation which he had taken to himself.”

Dr. Thornton assigns to the New Testament miracles of healing a sacramental quality, so much so that this miraculous ministry, bringing wholeness to man and thereby effecting the restoration of creation to its true destiny, is propounded by him as continued in the church through the sacraments and particularly in the Eucharist, “the new passover,” in which “the bread is transformed because it is there identified with the Lamb of God as the material of his eucharistie body.” This “creative identification” of the bread with the body of Christ is effected by the repetition “in a duly authorized way” of the words “this is my body” by Christ’s “human representative.” It appears that Dr. Thornton regards the healing faculty of the church, focused in the eucharist, as leading gradually to a universal restoration of all things, until at last “all flesh” will be “one flesh” in Christ and the evolutionary journey will have reached its goal. As for the form of the servant, it finds its primary significance within the framework of the self-sacrifice of the Messiah. As the sacrifice of paschal Lamb is defined as “the substance of worship in the redeemed order,” this leads again to the central significance in Dr. Thornton’s system of the eucharist.

It is not possible in the space of a brief review to deal adequately with the important questions raised by a work so closely woven in texture as this. Throughout, in his use and manipulation of Scripture, Dr. Thorton applies the allegorical method in a manner which would have delighted the more imaginative of the early fathers and which bids fair to rival the more esoteric exegesis of certain groups of the Plymouth Brethren, though it may be doubted whether either early fathers or Plymouth Brethren would find themselves able to approve of his major conclusions.

PHILIP E. HUGHES

Semi-Popular

Titles of the Triune God, by Herbert F. Stevenson. Revell, New York, 1956. $2.50.

In the foreword to this American printing of an English work, the following statement is made: “The Bible makes no attempt at a definition of God. What it does is to give us a wealthy characterization of God.” Thus the reader is introduced to the theme of this little volume.

First, a few words relative to the mechanics of the book. The chapters, in the nature of short essays, are organized into three groups: “God,” “Our Lord Jesus Christ,” and “the Holy Spirit.” For the most part, the author has followed a chronological or progressive line of development in the first division of his book and a topical or nominal one in the latter two. Nothing in the way of an exhaustive concordance is furnished.

Second, some remarks relative to the content. There are two basic types of names treated in such a study: those formed from a single word and those formed from a combination of words. In the former class are to be found those deriving content from the word itself, e.g., “Jehovah,” and those of a descriptive nature involving something of the metaphor, e.g., “rock,” “shield,” etc. In the latter class, the general rule submitted is that the first word retains its own meaning while the subsequent word or words is an additional “unfolding of His Person, or will, or provision for His people” (p. 37). New experiences sometimes demanded new names. In some instances these names were ascribed to God by men while in other instances they were pronounced to man by God. In passing from the first division into the second, one moves into an area in which some change in meaning is evident, i.e., prophetic names of the Old Testament move into their New Testament fulfillment in the Incarnate Son and words of common use are given a deep, sacred content. The author’s treatment of the third division, the Names of the Spirit, which he calls a major theme in the New Testament, is Trinitarian and shows how in this area one moves from the vague and implicit Old Testament treatment of the Spirit of God into the concrete and explicit New Testament treatment of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity.

Third, a brief criticism of the book. For a proper perspective, one must keep in mind what must have been the author’s purpose in writing the volume. It is, first of all, to fill the gap created by the lack of any book treating “all the names and titles of the Three Persons of the Trinity,” (p. 7). Thus the scope is extensive rather than intensive. It is, next, written “not … for scholars but for students—for just plain you and me” (p. 6). Thus the nature and tenor of the book is what one may call “semi-popular.” For the pastor, this book will be extremely suggestive homiletically; for the layman it furnishes a guide for profitable devotional study; and for the scholar, in either group, it gives a good “bird’s eye view” of the subject plus a four page bibliography. The author has not purposed to enter into the arena of theological debate and therefore the expression of his own personal views without development at points is only to be expected, e.g., “the gap theory” (p. 171), his millennial view (p. 87), etc. Occasionally there is, we feel, a tendency to overdo the typology element.

HEINRICH B. EILER

Intelligible To Laymen

God In His World, by Charles S. Duthie. Abingdon Press, Nashville. $2.50.

Testifying that “the events of my own life have compelled me, from very early days, to see how necessary it is to take Christian thought and Christian evangelism with equal seriousness” (p. 7), Dr. Duthie has been concerned to present a theology that will be intelligible to laymen and that will serve them well in their efforts to win others to Christ. Out of a background that includes the pastorate, the chaplaincy, teaching, and participation in the Tell Scotland Movement of evangelism, he writes with a passion and with an ability to state old truths in fresh ways.

The author recognizes that many who previously had no interest in things spiritual are today groping for something that will satisfy their hearts, and he is concerned that the Christian faith be presented to them in an intelligible form. His interest in doctrine is to the end that men may come to know Christ as He is offered in the Word, and that they in turn may be used to bring other groping souls to him.

This is obviously a worthy aim, and it is good to be able to report that in a real measure, the author accomplishes his purpose. Recognizing the importance both of working from the Gospel out to the situation of modern man, and from the situation of man back to the Gospel, he does both effectively. His writing is full of fresh spiritual insights, and whether he is dealing with our beliefs in the persons of the Godhead, or in the opportunities which confront the Church today, his treatment is vigorous and helpful.

Each reader will have his own favorites among the chapters of the book, but there are highlights here that should have the widest appeal. The presentation of the meaning of surrender in the closing chapter of the book, for example, is a masterpiece. Dr. Duthie describes it under the headings of capitulation, acceptance, communion and confidence. Developing these thoughts, he shows that in the biblical sense, surrender is giving in to God, taking in from God, drawing near to God and trusting in God.

All of which is not to say that there are not occasional disappointments in the book. Dr. Duthie gives a central place to Christ’s redemptive work on the cross, but he cannot quite bring himself to admit that Christ was punished for our sins (p. 33). He seems to feel that the formation of the World Council of Churches marks a major step forward in Christian unity. His acknowledged indebtedness to liberal scholars is at times disturbing. But without denying or minimizing these disappointments, it must be said that Dr. Duthie has something for us, and that his message is well worth heeding.

H. L. FENTON, JR.

Faith Fades Away

Sermons from an Ecumenical Pulpit, edited by Max F. Daskam. Starr King, Boston. $5.50.

The Unitarian fellowship of German-town (it doesn’t say where, but presumably that is the Boston influence) does not have a resident minister. Instead, this congregation invites prominent preachers of every faith to occupy its pulpit for a few Sundays at a time. The plan has been in operation for twenty years and if the sermons in this book faithfully represent the result, the pulpit committee must draw its names from Who’s Who among America’s pulpiteers. Niebuhr, Tillich, Paul Scherer, James Cleland, Van Dusen, Fosdick, McCracken and Norman Thomas are among the many who contributed one sermon each to this collection.

“But how,” Max F. Daskam, the editor, reports they often are asked, “can you have (all denominations) in one pulpit? Don’t they contradict one another?” By way of reply Mr. Daskam reports that it is their experience that “denominational differences tend to fade away as our guest ministers stress the great and eternal truths of our Christian faith.” He would have spoken more accurately had he said that in these sermons whatever is explicit about the Christian faith tends to fade away.

The sermons are collected under significant headings, such as: I. What Goodness for Man; III. The Nature of Jesus; VI. The Larger Hope. When the time comes for him to speak, Niebuhr affirms the impossible possibility of human perfection; Tillich, that one can be righteous and yet feel no relief because little is forgiven him; Rabbi David W. Wise, that a true God-concept is one which does not fractionalize the Universe, accepting pleasure, for instance, but not pain, but is one which accepts all of life and substance as a part of God and His never-ending process; Harry C. Meserve, that you understand Jesus when you see Him to have been a man who found his vocation, that of a religious teacher, and went about talking, “not even about God, or any significant religious idea, but about the life that he found around him” with its necessities to maintain faith amid corruption and to get along with other human beings; Cleland, that we must get to know Jesus if we are to fit our lives to the ethical discernments and demands of our Lord and Master, for only in loving Him will we grow more like Him until our new conduct becomes second nature with us—theologically, this means re-birth; Elton Trueblood, that true freedom follows the recovery of the disciplined Christian life; Bishop Oxnam, that the ideals of a peaceful world and a unified church can be kept alive if we keep close to Jesus who incorporated those ideals; and Halford Luccock, that Easter is far more than an affirmation about the length of life, it is a symbol of the reality and the triumph of the spiritual world, the miracle of a life lived in a new relationship to God.

These are beautiful sermons. They are so beautiful, in fact, that almost everyone would enjoy reading them. But I am reminded that it is occasionally possible to string beautiful sentiments together without preaching the Scriptures. And this book suffers from the scarcity of a clear Word unto Salvation.

G. AIKEN TAYLOR

Psychological Approach

The Pastoral Epistles and the Mind of Paul, by Donald Guthrie, Tyndale, London. 1s.6d.

This pamphlet of 44 pages reproduces the Tyndale New Testament Lecture for 1955; it deals with a subject to which the lecturer, who is Tutor in New Testament in London Bible College, has devoted special study for a number of years.

In contemporary discussions of the New Testament Epistles, it is generally taken for granted that the three Pastoral Epistles—the two addressed to Timothy and one to Titus—cannot, as they stand, be ascribed to Paul. Some regard them as completely pseudonymous (one German scholar has recently suggested that they were composed by Polycarp of Smyrna, martyred in A.D. 156); others recognize genuine Pauline fragments embedded in them. Among the latter the most eminent name is that of the veteran English scholar P. N. Harrison, whose painstaking study, The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles (1921), has perhaps done more than any other work to convince scholars that Paul was not the author of these letters in their present form. Yet the case against Pauline authorship has not been permitted to make its way without contradiction; commentaries maintaining their authenticity have been produced in recent years by Jeremias in Germany, by Spicq in France, and by E. K. Simpson in England and the scholarship of these writers is unimpeachable.

Mr. Guthrie defends the genuineness of the three epistles from the psychological point of view. His approach involves linguistic and doctrinal considerations. Dr. Harrison laid particular stress on the differences in style and vocabulary between the earlier Pauline letters and the Pastorals. Mr. Guthrie does not challenge Dr. Harrison’s data, but claims that other data must be taken into account as well and that the inferences drawn from the data by Dr. Harrison are not so certain as many suppose. To make the situation clearer, he supplies at the end of his study (among other linguistic appendixes) a list of particles and other small words which constitute the connective tissue of language, comparing their use in the Pastorals with their use in the earlier epistles.

Paul’s increasing years and the changing needs of the church account for the less dynamic approach and more formalized theology of the Pastorals. In an examination of the summaries of the doctrine called the “faithful sayings,” Mr. Guthrie points out that, with the exception of that in 1 Timothy 3:1 (where, it might be added, the Western text reads “popular” instead of “faithful”), the doctrine summarized is thoroughly Pauline.

Mr. Guthrie does not shirk the difficulties which a defender of the epistles’ authenticity has to face, but he concludes that the difficulties inherent in the pseudonymous and fragmentary theories are greater, especially on the psychological side. His arguments ought to receive the serious attention of all careful students of the New Testament.

F. F. BRUCE

Christian Verse

The Valley of Silence, by Jack Shuler. Zondervan, Grand Rapids.

This well-printed and attractively bound volume contains 94 selections. Some of them are by such well known writers as Annie Johnson Flint, Grace Noll Crowell and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and there is one each by John Greenleaf Whittier, Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens. Forty-two of the pieces are listed as by unknown authors. Sometimes a textual comparison with such a book as J. D. Morrison’s Masterpieces of Religious Verse would have improved the printed version, e.g., in “Making Harbor” where about half the first stanza is omitted in Shuler’s collection.

These selections are fairly uniform in quality. They belong, however, not to poetry proper but to verse. In the Foreword the publisher describes them as “writing for every occasion … the fitting conclusion to a sermon, the effective opening to a speech.” Verse lends itself to such ends; poetry does not. Genuine poetry operates in a different capacity than to gild the lily. It is not decorative but rather carries its own essential autonomy. It penetrates not with the pin prick of a self-evident moral but with a massiveness which is as freighted with meaning as life itself. Verse can afford to be facile, clever, ingenious. Poetry proper is original, expansive and generative. Verse may toy with an idea; poetry thrusts toward truth itself. Verse is generally satisfied with a mere twist of meaning; poetry presents the genuinely significant. Verse is descriptive; poetry presentational and symbolic. Verse is usually practical and didactic; poetry, if it is to be called functional at all, is functional at the root of man’s being. In a word, verse may deal with the surface of things, but poetry will content itself with nothing less than the center.

The selections in Mr. Shuler’s book are as good as the average of Christian verse, but too often they are marked by the inevitable characteristics—cliches, forced rhymes, padded lines and the like. The time is ripe for orthodox Christians with a gift for writing to attempt devotional verse in the great tradition of literature itself.

CLYDE S. KILBY

Simple Testimony

The Angel Spreads her Wings, by Maxine Garrison. Revell, Westwood, New Jersey.

This is a book about a book. Maxine Garrison, a friend of Dale Evans and Roy Rogers, tells the story behind the writing of Dale’s little book, Angel Unaware.

She tells the heartache and faith behind the writing of that beautiful volume and describes the way in which it was received by the public. Many quotes are given from letters received by Dale Rogers showing how her simple testimony of the mission of her frail, short-lived, Mongoloid daughter has inspired and comforted others, particularly those with similar experiences.

As interesting as it is, I regret that no mention is made in this book of the precise nature of Dale Evans’ faith. In Angel Unaware we see her insistence upon a proper relationship with Christ. Edwin Orr vouches for Dale’s genuine Christian faith in his book, The Truth Behind the Hollywood Christian Group. But if one reads Maxine Garrison’s book alone, he gathers, I am afraid, that Dale’s faith is some beautiful, mystical thing having little or no connection with orthodox Christian faith.

NORMA R. ELLIS

Composite Volume

Encyclopedia of Morals, edited by Vergilius Ferm. Philosophical Library, New York, 1956. $10.00.

Here is another composite volume edited by tha indefatigable compiler, Vergilius Ferm. The first entry on the Aboriginals of Yirkalla emphasizes the statement in the Preface that the material is not only philosophical but also anthropological.

Then when we come to Puritan Morals (12 pages, double columns), we find more description of their allegedly disagreeable conduct than exposition of theory. The articles on Aristotle, Kant, and Sidgwick are well written. The difficulties, particularly in the last two thinkers, are lightly touched on, as may be wise in an Encyclopedia; Aristotle receives more criticism, though the total effect is not so clear. Christian Moral Philosophy (49 columns) dates the Mosaic Law after the prophets and claims that the Pharisees were the legitimate heirs of Ezekiel, but in contrast with this radical view the author recognizes the eschatological theme of the Sermon on the Mount and gives a tolerably good account of Romans. Justification by faith is explained, and the infliction of a penalty on Christ is acknowledged.

As it is impossible to review every article in an encyclopedia, these must suffice as samples.

GORDON H. CLARK

- More from Milford Sholund

Theology

Review of Current Religious Thought: January 07, 1957

G. C. Berkouwer

Goethe once remarked, after Immanuel Kant wrote in 1793 about the radical evil in the heart of man, that Kant had dirtied his philosophical robe with the stain of original sin. Others were more concerned to say that the philosopher had insulted humanity. This was understandable, for the expression Kant used reminded people of the Reformation doctrine of the corruption of the human soul. And this was a confession sternly maintained in the face of Humanism, which proceeded from belief in the profound and ultimate goodness of the human heart. The bitter encounter between Kant and Goethe is often cited in books concerning humanity, but it brings to mind for our purpose a problem that transcends the dispute between these two thinkers. The question is: what can we expect of man? Can man rely on man and can he trust himself to be led by man?

There were those in Kant’s time who were willing to forgive Kant for a notion that could be explained by means of the influence on him of his family tradition. But most people judged that he went much too far. If he had to speak of humanity, there were other, better things to be mentioned. It is, however, actually remarkable that Kant’s severe judgment concerning man’s radically evil nature had a bright side. For with Kant too there appeared, at the last moment as it were, an escape from this corruption. He spoke, indeed, of a revolution that was required in the perspective of man in order to make good his rescue. But though he compared this revolution with the biblical talk of the re-birth, he found the solution in human freedom by which man could arrive on his own steam. In the light of this, it is questionable whether Kant actually gave Goethe very much reason for his protest.

In the meanwhile, this anecdote may set us to some serious thought in our own time when the question of man has again been pushed into the foreground. In the history of thought we can see a tendency again and again to hold high the value of man and to refuse to minimize his capacities. We see this in Humanism, which, in various forms, never fully recedes from history. It was inexplicable for Erasmus, for example, that Luther refused to teach the free will of man, that he insisted on talking of the bondage of the will. Erasmus had more respect for man. And it is understandable that he is still the patron saint of Humanism.

After the Second World War, the “Humanist Association” was established in the Netherlands. An appeal was made (after the catastrophe) to fill in the ranks and get going again. The appeal was to the basic humanity of the people. It is interesting that great disillusionments often awaken new trust in man. Evil is explained by circumstances. The possibility is held out of going back to the deeper forces of human personality. No matter how many disillusionments man may suffer, he remains faithful to his confidence in the resources of humanity.

In our time, however, many humanists are saying that we cannot, as previously, be unqualified optimists. There is a recognition of dark and demonic powers working in man—an admission that humanists must this time be realistic humanists. The horrible aberrations of human life are so manifest that humanists cannot themselves go on talking simply about the goodness of man. The eloquence of anti-Semitism and the concentration camps is too persistent to be avoided. Still when the chips are down, the light shines through. The great conflict which according to the New Testament was engaged and won by Jesus Christ is assumed instead by mankind; it is thought that man himself shall yet appear as the victor in this present battle.

One wonders what the background of this perennially renewed confidence in man might be. Will this confidence never fail? Shall the dogma of man’s innate goodness continue to persist in this age when the shocks that humanity suffers have been so terrific that some human acts have been universally branded as inhuman? After the Neurenburg trials, one responsible writer wrote that such criminals were not to be regarded any longer as human. This is too simple a way to dispense with the grotesque aberrations of humanity. This brings us close to Phariseeism; it is a way of holding ourselves aloof from these crimes. No, whatever darkness closes in on us in this age, we shall have to confess that it is the darkness of humanity, of the humanity of which we are part. We cannot get rid of the darkness by raising ourselves above it.

The confession concerning the evil of man has persistently been explained as a form of pessimism. Augustine was accused of Manichean influences in his confession of the evil in man. (Augustine was a Manichean for nine years.) The same pessimism was charged to the Reformers. But the Reformation confession of man’s evil has nothing to do with pessimism. The Christian Church was concerned about the burning question of man’s self-redemption, a question which hovers in the background of many streams of thought in our own time. It is relatively unimportant whether one looks for this self-redemption through the state, society, or from man in his individual striving. For in all these forms of self-redemption we have to do with the healthy who are in need of no physician. Christ spoke his most sharp and revealing word against such people.

In the confession concerning the radical evil of man we are not dealing with a more or less pessimistic or optimistic mentality. We are faced with the decisive question of redemption. For this reason, it is not surprising that the questions arising around Jesus Christ as the Redeemer of men are followed by questions concerning man himself. In our own time one of these questions is that of human freedom. The existentialism of Sartre is freighted with this very problem. The entire human existence is set on the fork of the freedom of man, who must develop his life without reference to dependence on divine power. But there is also recognizable in Sartre a profound resistance to grace. Man, refusing to capitulate to grace, must always blaze his own trail in freedom to freedom. He must also recommend freedom to the children of his time. We are wondering just now whether existentialism has seen its day or whether it is yet expanding its influence. We need not wager an answer to this, though we do note many who are saying that in existentialism life is delivered to chaos. More important for us, however, is that in every adventure in self-redemption the Gospel of Jesus Christ is and remains the great scandal. This says again that the struggle of the Gospel shall be part of our ministry until the Last Day.

- More from G. C. Berkouwer

Cover Story

The Christian-Pagan West

The Editor

The West once was pagan and then became Christian; historically, it is the pagan-Christian West. Today, in contrast, it has become the Christian-pagan West. No century was ever more misjudged than the twentieth by those who hailed it as the “Christian” century. For the once banished demonic spirits have returned again to inhabit the abode of Western culture, and some, indeed, seem to be securing permanent tenure.

Thinking men may scorn the phrase “the Christian-pagan West” as ill-tempered. The West is, after all, the Christian West; what specially distinguishes Occident from Orient is this Christian motif. Moreover, even the compound “Christian-pagan” may seem as artificial as “pagan West,” for after all, whatever is pagan is non-Christian, even as what is Christian is assumed to be Western.

Decline Of Christian Spirit

Such an evaluation of events, however, is outdated; indeed, it is actually irrelevant. It reflects the romantic overconfidence of earlier generations and of the past century. It assumes, and erroneously so, that traditional patterns of the home and work, of civilization and culture still prevail. It perpetuates the illusion of a people who took for granted that the inherited spirit of the West could not die.

Never Fully Christian

Admittedly the West has never been the totally “Christian West.” At best, it has been the “Christian West plus or minus,” the Christian West qualified by some limiting word, e.g., the “imperfectly Christian West.” Scholars now admit, indeed, that the Dark Ages were less dark than historians once pictured them; yet the Middle Ages stood nonetheless in drastic need of the Reformation. The tradition of papacy, monasticism and scholasticism developed an hierarchical, ritualistic and legalistic religion. Superstition and legend abounded; faith was often blind and unreasoning; piety and sacrifice were common substitutes for virtue; ascetic self-denial and gross sensuality flourished side by side; and the church was drawn frequently into the current of political intrigue and immorality. As Philip Schaff remarks, “the medieval light was indeed the borrowed star and moonlight of ecclesiastical tradition, rather than the clear sun-light from the inspired pages of the New Testament; but it was such light as the eyes of the nations in their ignorance could bear, and it never ceased to shine until it disappeared in the day-light of the great Reformation” (History of the Christian Church, Vol. IX, p. 12).

Yet Luther and Calvin, no less than Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, stood in hourly need of justification on the ground of Christ’s death for sinners. The same applies to the early apostles Peter, Paul and John, and in our century to evangelical giants like Dwight L. Moody and Billy Graham. The smudge of sin discolors even the best Christian history.

Heritage Of Greatness

Nevertheless it must be said that no other world culture has lived on the Christian side of life and history; it has had a Christian past, with a lease on Christian experience. The classic pagan mind, shaped by Graeco-Roman idealism, even at best was not good enough for the West. The old culture at its vulgar or common level was beneath the dignity of Christians. And the vices of infanticide, religious prostitution, slavery were abhorrent and repugnant to believers. Because they revered Christ as the guardian of purity and as the champion of sexual virtue, the Christians renounced adultery, covetousness, craftiness, dishonesty, drunkenness, theft. Doubtless the New Testament exhortations, and the picture in the Revelation of the decline of the seven churches in Asia Minor, caution us against painting the first century only in the brightest colors. Yet even in wicked Corinth the apostle Paul could write the world-stained believers: “Such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.”

Virtue In Abundance

Actually, Christians were known from the very beginning more for their positive ethical and spiritual performance than for mere abstinence. Pagan observers marveled “how they love one other.” An inexplicable joy irradiated the lives of these ordinary mortals; the peace that became theirs was unknown even to an age free of international hostilities; a boundless flood of kindness and benevolence was turned toward neighbors and strangers; godliness came to live in human flesh. These were a holy people, graced by the Holy Spirit. Acquaintance with the Risen Christ endowed them with a spiritual treasure so surpassingly superb that they laid down their lives rather than renounce Him. Even where totalitarian rulers brandished steel against them, they preferred martyrdom to the sin of silence. They were “called Christians first at Antioch” (Acts 11:26), and they were worthy of His Name. They had a divine commission to go to a perishing world; they were “under orders” to witness of the Redeemer to lost men. Their “conversation”—their walk as well as their words—was halo-bright. The incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ was the meeting place of their hopes and fears. Their marching orders were to confront the world in an armor the pagan empires had never worn. They eclipsed all the previous generations in their embodiment of love, of joy, of peace, of long-suffering, of gentleness, of goodness, of faith, of meekness, of temperance.

Inspiration Of Christianity

All that became noblest in the West was but the lengthened shadow of such faith and life. In a world abounding with religions, biblical Christianity supplied a distinctive view of God and the universe, of man and his destiny. The life of the West came to revolve around the drama of divine incarnation and atonement. The span of human existence was related in every sphere to the God-man who died in the stead of sinners and who rose for them in triumph over death. Between the divine creation of man and the final judgment of the race, the advent of the Redeemer stood as the dominating peak of history. Time “before Christ” lacked any climax; it was a movement of events in which the redemptive promise of God waited fulfillment. “The year of our Lord” became synonymous with the age of grace, in which redeemed men and women were adopted into the family of faith, with the risen Redeemer as their living Head. Since the sixth century the West has based its calendar upon the reality of the incarnation.

While Christian monotheism furnished the lofty inspiration of religion and morality, its influence did not stop there. It shaped literature and the arts. It even furthered the confidence of the West (although contemporary thought arbitrarily obscures this debt) in the unity and rationality of space-time existence, and hence stimulated the growth of science. Christianity upheld the ultimate significance of reason and conscience under God, and it proclaimed as well a providential universe on the basis of divine creation and preservation. Neither ancient polytheistic religion nor philosophical dualism had produced this lively sense of God and the supernatural world, and of man’s awesome destiny.

A Squandered Inheritance

Today this inheritance is all but squandered. No doubt those who disparage life in the Middle Ages as measured by the purity of New Testament religion can make their case, but nonetheless the world today, in contrast with earlier centuries clothed by Christian influences, stands starkly naked in moral shame.

Call it a return to paganism or barbarism or what one will, the fact remains that in the West for three centuries Christian influences upon society, the state and culture have decreased while secular influences have increased to dominating proportions. In the eighteenth century the upper classes of society broke with Christian beliefs, and the unity of Western Christendom vanished. While phantom unity rémained in the balance of power preserved by the absolute monarchies, when these fell, only the myth of the West’s ongoing progress concealed its fragmenting ideals. When progress, in turn, seemed doubtful, only the rise of dictators preserved the outward illusion of unity.

Terrifying Ambiguities

Today’s situation is awesome in its ambiguities. The largest strength of the Communist party, next to Russia and China, is in Italy, home of Vatican City and the organizational head of the largest body of professing Christians. Many who vote Communist still attend Roman Catholic mass in Italy (in contrast with the French).

The Italian Senate’s only woman member, Senator Lina Merlin, has charged that between two and three million women live by prostitution; that in Rome houses of prostitution operate under government license “all over town, and near schools and churches.” Such confusions and contradictions strike ever deeper and deeper in nominally Christian centers today; principle and piety seem ever less and less a central concern of human existence.

The Reformation warned that the Christian West had deteriorated to quasi-Christian foundations, and called for a full and swift return to biblical supports. Scholasticism had one-sidedly emphasized the intellectual element in Christianity. The community it produced repeated the Apostles’ Creed, but without putting heart and soul in the opening word. For Credo (I believe) it tended to substitute Credendum est (it is believed). A generation merely mouthing the creed led to another generation that could not in good conscience even repeat it. The highest language of faith, used first by saintly men, next by carnal men, and then by unregenerate men, at last vanished entirely from the vocabulary of the modern pagan.

Medieval Compromises

The medieval compromise, in fact, reached far beyond matters of doctrine and personal virtue. It involved also a misconception of the social order and of the church’s relation to culture.

In the provocative volume Man in This World, Hans Zehrer reaches back a thousand years to A.D. 1075 and the autocratic Pope Gregory VII’s Twenty-Seven Theses, which led in 1308 to the bull Unam Sanctum as the pivot of the Western revolt against authority. By their own claims the papal despots began to lessen the distance between God and man, and man and God. Drawing the spiritual sword, popes presumed to rule over emperors and their subjects in place of God. “In setting himself in the place of God, the Pope gave the signal for every class to do likewise. ‘Why should you be God and not I?’ is a question before which title-deeds lose their force” (Zehrer, op. cit., p. 67). Thereafter, the man who would be God becomes in swift turn the man freed from all superior authority, who loses at last not merely the image of God, but in doing so loses also the image of man, and descends to bestiality. He becomes the herd man of our era, easily led by totalitarian superiors. In the Christian-pagan West he emerges as the beast-man of evolutionary naturalism, although in actuality he is the man-beast.

Men With Half A Soul

Whatever may be said about Zehrer’s thesis, the fact is that for five centuries, since the mid-fifteenth century yielded to the post-medieval era, the man of Europe and the Americas has stood increasingly confounded and mute in the presence of the Great Questions. His distant forefathers had been heirs of the classic Graeco-Roman world view and prized the Christian inheritance even above that. The death of ancient culture they counted gain because of the birth of a higher. But the modern man, by contrast, gave half his soul to the Renaissance, and was half-hearted toward the Reformation. He now gave snap answers to Ultimate Problems, answers which blurred the Christian motif, and from which all remaining biblical hues, already pallid, would soon fade.

Those who today call merely for “a new Reformation” thereby betray the fact that they judge current history unrealistically. Latin America, perhaps, is a prospect for such a duplication within history. There, as nowhere else, the smoldering revolt against a medieval temper could erupt into a war of ideas, involving Renaissance as well as Reformation claims. But elsewhere the West has already stripped human life of much of its traditional meaning. The inherited patterns of civilization are paling swiftly. Priority Answers of the past are now repudiated, and the Priority Problems along with them. The current failure to grasp the world of ultimates commits man to categories that imply the end of a rational-moral cosmos and the consequent insignificance of reason and the good. For two generations influential philosophers in the once-Christian West have ceased to ask, “Who is God?” “What is the purpose of history, and of the universe?” “How shall we define man’s dignity?” “What are the permanent aspects of truth and morality?” but instead have been asking “Is there a God?” “Does purpose exist in history and the universe?” “Is man essentially unique?” and “Have reason and goodness any objective significance?”

The Drift Downstream

The chorus of intellectual giants answering these questions negatively has swelled. Paraded as the verdict of modern intellectual genius are the dogmas that the binding force of reality is not supernatural and that life and society are held together best if God be dissolved. Confused Western man has been floating downstream on the river of negation, for driftwood requires nothing in the way of spiritual decision. Today, tossed by doubt and uncertainty, modern man is wearying of this world and of himself. His day-to-day existence balances on the sharp edge of chilling questions.

The geographical frontiers of Christendom have shrunk perceptibly. The Russian Orthodox Church and the vast evangelical Stundist movement in the U.S.S.R. eke out their existence by the tolerance of a totalitarian government. The Ukraine, where Roman Catholic congregations date back a millennium, is enslaved behind the Iron Curtain. France, a half-century ago included in every list of nominally Christian great powers, has a bankrupt faith; of its 42 million inhabitants, 35 million no longer attend mass (a mortal sin for Catholics). Only European lands on which the Reformation made a strong theological impact are today virile in their resistance to Communism.

But the shriveling of the Christian claim upon modern thought and life is even more shocking than the shrinking of Christian territorial frontiers. Almost everywhere the West shows a return to pagan ways of thinking and living. Before Christ and before conscience it puts a score of substitute allegiances.

Eroding The Patience Of God

First, the boundless wickedness of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, the cradle of civilization, eroded the patience of God’s Spirit, and the early human enterprise was finally deluged in doom. The new beginning was grounded in revealed religion; the sacred Hebrew narratives carry forward the best of the old history from Abraham to Moses and Sinai, to David and the Hebrew temple, and through the prophets of the Old Testament. Furthermore, they light up this whole venture of faith with Messianic expectation.

Then, the decline of the proud and classic Graeco-Roman civilization ended in the tribal sack and fall of Rome. This extremity of the pagan world became the Christian believer’s opportunity; the weakness of the pagan gods revealed the strength of the Lord of glory.

The third long night of human barbarism seems to have begun. To many observers, the horizon of this third night exhibits little, if any, prospect of a sunrise. Earlier and once benign cultures perished in judgment. The first civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates valley came to naught with the destruction of a generation hardened in its revolt; the glory of the Hellenic world could not withstand its later disintegration and doom. Descending from its pinnacle of lofty achievement, the Christian West in becoming pagan is ¡leaded for inevitable doom. The light men shun today is blinding, for the post-Christian era revolts against the most sacred inheritance of the race. To assume that an anti-Christ culture will escape perdition is sheer madness.

- More from The Editor

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