Cover Story

Biblical Authority in Evangelism

Billy Graham

I had many doubts about the Bible. Now I see Scripture as a flame that melts away unbelief.

Billy Graham Evangelistic Association

It is a sultry day with a hot breeze spinning little dust whirls down the winding road by the Sea of Galilee.

There is an air of expectancy everywhere. We hear voices, raised to an excited pitch as friend calls a greeting to friend. Down every trail leading to Galilee little clusters of people make their way. Word has spread abroad that Jesus is returning to Galilee.

Thronging multitudes

Suddenly He and His little band of followers come over the brow of a little hill on the Capernaum road. Following close behind swarms a vast multitude of people from Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and beyond Jordan.

Quickly the word passes from mouth to mouth, “Jesus is coming.” Crowds from Bethsaida and Capernaum soon appear and join the others. Together they follow the little band of thirteen men, simply dressed in flowing robes. As they reach the summit of the hill, where gentle winds afford relief from the heat, Jesus stops and motions for all to sit down and rest.

The authoritative teacher

The air is tense. It is a moment to be captured and held for eternity. The crowd hushes as Jesus mounts a large rock and sits down. Quiet falls upon the multitude, their faces turned expectantly toward Jesus. Then He moves His lips and begins to speak. What He was saying there, on that Mount of Beatitudes in faraway Palestine, was to illuminate the pages of history. The most profound, the most sublime words ever uttered were spoken there that day. In simple words, Jesus revealed to His dumfounded hearers the inner depth of God’s commandments and a new way of life!

No one who once heard Jesus could ever again be the same. What was the secret of this Master Teacher? How did He hold those crowds spellbound? “And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one having authority”(Matt. 7:28, 29). Is not this authoritative note part of the secret of the earthly ministry of Christ?

The prophets and revelation

The great prophets of the past had also spoken with authority. The impact of their preaching cannot be traced simply to an authoritative technique. Nor was their authoritative note based on confidence merely in the rightness of their own intentions and speculations. Their secret is traceable to nothing less than the confidence that they were the mediators of Divine revelation. Throughout the Old Testament we find Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and the other prophets continually using such expressions as “The word of the Lord came unto me” or “Thus saith the Lord.” The flaming prophets of old gained their authority from this: they were not simply speaking their own words, they were mouthpieces for God.

The authority of Jesus is more than a prophetic authority. The Christian Church rightly acknowledges that in Him alone the incarnate God entered history; the very words He spoke are the words of the one and only God-man. Yet the remarkable fact is that in His teachings Jesus continually referred to passages in the Old Testament as fully authoritative. His Messianic self-consciousness, His very authority as the Son of God, are combined with the highest regard for the Old Testament as the authoritative record of the will of God.

Even a casual study of Church history will reveal that the great giants of pulpit and pen, from Augustine to Wesley, relied heavily on Scripture for their authority. In this, they followed a sacred precedent hallowed by Christ and the apostles.

A word of confession

In 1949 I had been having a great many doubts concerning the Bible. I thought I saw apparent contradictions in Scripture. Some things I could not reconcile with my restricted concept of God. When I stood up to preach, the authoritative note so characteristic of all great preachers of the past was lacking. Like hundreds of other young seminary students, I was waging the intellectual battle of my life. The outcome could certainly affect my future ministry.

In August of that year I had been invited to Forest Home, Presbyterian conference center high in the mountains outside Los Angeles. I remember walking down a trail, tramping into the woods, and almost wrestling with God. I dueled with my doubts, and my soul seemed to be caught in the crossfire. Finally, in desperation, I surrendered my will to the living God revealed in Scripture. I knelt before the open Bible and said: “Lord, many things in this Book I do not understand. But Thou hast said, ‘The just shall live by faith.’ All I have received from Thee, I have taken by faith. Here and now, by faith, I accept the Bible as Thy word. I take it all. I take it without reservations. Where there are things I cannot understand, I will reserve judgment until I receive more light. If this pleases Thee, give me authority as I proclaim Thy word, and through that authority convict me of sin and turn sinners to the saviour.”

Preaching from the Bible

Within six weeks we started our Los Angeles crusade, which is now history. During that crusade I discovered the secret that changed my ministry. I stopped trying to prove that the Bible was true. I had settled. in my own mind that it was, and this faith was conveyed to the audience. Over and over again I found myself saying “The Bible says.” I felt as though I were merely a voice through which the Holy Spirit was speaking.

Authority created faith. Faith generated response, and hundreds of people were impelled to come to Christ. A crusade scheduled for three weeks lengthened into eight weeks, with hundreds of thousands of people in attendance. The people were not coming to hear great oratory, nor were they interested merely in my ideas. I found they were desperately hungry to hear what God had to say through His Holy Word. I felt as though I had a rapier in my hand and, through the power of the Bible, was slashing deeply into men’s consciences, leading them to surrender to God. Does not the Bible say of itself, “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Heb. 4:12)?

Fire in the pulpit

I found that the Bible became a flame in my hands. That flame melted away unbelief in the hearts of the people and moved them to decide for Christ. The Word became a hammer breaking up stony hearts and shaping them into the likeness of God. Did not God say, “I will make my words in thy mouth fire” (Jer. 5:14) and “Is not my word like as a fire? … and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?” (Jer. 23:29)?

I found that I could take a simple outline and put a number of pertinent Scripture quotations under each point, and God would use this mightily to cause men to make full commitment to Christ. I found that I did not have to rely upon cleverness, oratory, psychological manipulation of crowds, or apt illustrations or striking quotations from famous men. I began to rely more and more upon Scripture itself and God blessed.

Hunger for God’s Word

I am convinced, through my travels and experiences, that people all over the world are hungry to hear the Word of God. As the people came to a desert place to hear John the Baptist proclaim, “Thus saith the Lord,” so modern man in his confusions, frustrations, and bewilderments will come to hear the minister who preaches with authority.

I remember how in London many secular and religious journalists remarked on this very point as being perhaps the greatest secret of the meetings there in 1954. One of the thousands who came to commit their lives to Christ in that crusade was a brilliant young Communist. She was a student at the Royal Academy of Drama and Arts, and was already a successful young actress. She had joined the Young Communist League because the members were zealous and seemed to have the answers to the problems of life. Out of curiosity she and some of her fellow students came to our meetings at the Harringay Arena “to see the show.” She later testified how startled she was to hear not a lecture on sociology, politics, psychology, or philosophy, but the simple word of God quoted. This fascinated her and her companions. They came back several nights until the Word of God did its work of breaking open their hearts. They surrendered their lives to Christ.

The bugaboo of bibliolatry

I am not advocating bibliolatry. I am not suggesting that we should worship the Bible, any more than a soldier worships his sword or a surgeon worships his scalpel. I am, however, fervently urging a return to Bible-centered preaching, a Gospel presentation that says without apology and without ambiguity, “Thus saith the Lord.”

The world longs for authority, finality, and conclusiveness. It is weary of theological floundering and uncertainty. Belief exhilarates the human spirit; doubt depresses. Nothing is gained psychologically or spiritually by casting aspersions on the Bible. A generation that occupied itself with criticism of the Scriptures all too soon found itself questioning Divine revelation.

It is my conviction that if the preaching of the Gospel is to be authoritative, if it is to produce conviction of sin, if it is to challenge men and women to walk in newness of life, if it is to be attended by the Spirit’s power, then the Bible with its discerning, piercing, burning message must become the basis of our preaching.

From my experience in preaching across America, I am convinced that the average American is vulnerable to the Christian message if it is seasoned with authority and proclaimed as verily from God through His Word. Do we not have authority in other realms of life? Mathematics has its inviolable rules, formulas, and equations; if these are ignored, no provable answers can be found.

Music has its rules of harmony, progression, and time. The greatest music of the ages has been composed in accordance with these rules. To break the rules is to produce discord and “audio-bedlam.” The composer uses imagination and creative genius, to be sure, but his work must be done within the framework of the accepted forms of time, melody, and harmony. He must go by the book. To ignore the laws of music would be to make no music.

Every intelligent action takes place in a climate of authority.

Basis in divine authority

I use the phrase “The Bible says” because the Word of God is the authoritative basis of our faith. I do not continually distinguish between the authority of God and the authority of the Bible because I am confident that He has made His will known authoritatively in the Scriptures.

The world is not a little weary of our doubts and our conflicting opinions and views. But I have discovered that there is much common ground in the Bible—broad acres of it—upon which most churches can agree. Could anything be more basic than the acknowledgment of sin, the Atonement, man’s need of repentance and forgiveness, the prospect of immortality, and the dangers of spiritual neglect?

There need be no adulteration of truth nor compromise on the great Biblical doctrines. I think it was Goethe who said, after hearing a young minister, “When I go to hear a preacher preach, I may not agree with what he says, but I want him to believe it.” Even a vascillating unbeliever has not respect for the man who lacks the courage to preach what he believes.

Messengers and the message

Very little originality is permitted a Western Union messenger boy. His sole obligation is to carry the message he receives from the office to the person to whom it is addressed. He may not like to carry that message—it may contain bad news or distressing news for some person to whom he delivers it. But he dare not stop on the way, open the envelope and change the wording of the telegram. His duty is to take the message.

We Christian ministers have the Word of God. Our Commander said, “Go, take this message to a dying world!” Some messengers today neglect it, some tear up the message and substitute one of their own. Some delete part of it. Some tell the people that the Lord does not mean what He says. Others say that He really did not give the message, but that it was written by ordinary men who were all too prone to make mistakes.

Let us remember that we are sowing God’s seed. Some indeed may fall on beaten paths and some among thorns, but it is our business to keep on sowing. We are not to stop sowing because some of the soil looks unpromising.

We have our orders

We are holding a light, and we are to let it shine. Though it may seem but a twinkling candle in a world of blackness, it is our business to let it shine. We are blowing a trumpet. In the din and noise of battle the sound of our little trumpet may seem to be lost, but we must keep sounding the alarm to those in danger.

We are kindling a fire in this cold world full of hatred and selfishness. Our little blaze may seem to have no effect, but we must keep our fire burning. We are striking with a hammer. The blows may seem only to jar our hands as we strike, but we are to keep on hammering.

We are using a sword. The first or second thrust of our sword may be parried, and all our efforts to strike deep into the enemy Hank may seem hopeless. But we are to keep on wielding our sword.

We have bread for a hungry world. The people may seem to be feeding busily on other things, ignoring the Bread of Life, but we must keep on offering it to the souls of men.

We have water for parched souls. We must keep standing and crying out, “Ho, everyone. that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.”

Plea for Bible preaching

Give a new centrality to the Bible in your own preaching.

Jesus promised that much seed will find good soil and spring up and bear fruit.

The fire in your heart and on your lips can kindle a sacred flame in some cold hearts and win them to Christ. The hammer will break some hard hearts and make them yield to God in contrition. The sword will pierce the armor of sin and cut away self-satisfaction and pride, and open man’s heart to the Spirit of God. Some hungry men and women will take the Bread of Life and some thirsting souls will find the Water of Life.

Preach the Scriptures with authority! You will witness a climactic change in your ministry!

Billy Graham, D.D., is an internationally distinguished evangelist and author of Peace with God, The Secret of Happiness, and other books.

Cover Story

Changing Climate of European Theology

G. C. Berkouwer

We have been placed by God in an extremely exciting time—an era charged with tension.

ArTono/Shutterstock

In the past thirty or forty years drastic changes have taken place in European theology. These theological changes are visible against a complex background; and to take account of their background is to be reminded again that theological development is interwoven with history. The theological climate of a given time is always profoundly influenced by historical events. In times of prosperity and calm, theology takes on an optimistic color; in other times catastrophe throws a shadow over theology. Theology, in the sense of believing reflection on the truth of the Christian faith, does not stand unmoved within the events of a given area. It is constantly taken up, in thesis and antithesis, in struggle and confrontation, into the situation of the times.

Temper of the times

In the nature of the case, there is always a real danger that a theologian may fit his theology to the mentality of a given era and thus capitulate to it. This has often occurred, as appears from the modernistic theology of the nineteenth century, which, under pressure of the natural science popular at the time, sacrificed decisive points of the ancient confession of the Church to the current Zeitgeist. When this happens, a time in history is no longer viewed in the light of the Word of God, but rather the Word of God is interpreted out of the presuppositions of a given epoch. Thus, the Gospel is assimilated to the mind of the time. And finally, it is no longer the Gospel, but the temper of the times that speaks with authority.

Post-evolutionary hypnosis

It is clear that theology in Europe today has arisen out of the crises of many catastrophic events that are still vividly alive in our memory. These events are concentrated around the two world wars and all that is intimately associated with them. I do not refer only to the problems that arose directly from them, such as the problem of the state, the question of the demonizing of life, and the problem of Israel, all of which have stirred up lively discussions in Europe during the past ten years. I refer primarily to the crisis in the optimistic, evolutionistic thought of the nineteenth century.

In the previous century we were hypnotized by the idea of the progress of humanity as it was spurred on by the development of the sciences. Fascinated by the optimistic notion of the imminent evolution of the Kingdom of God, we were blinded to actual threats to our existence that were even then arising. People gave up belief in the reality of demonic powers (as in the reality of angels), and they spoke seldom about the corruption of the human heart and the corresponding judgment of a holy God. What was formerly called corruption was then seen as the “not yet” of human development. The coming of the living Lord into history, paled in the light of the development of culture within history.

Secularizing of theology

The theology of the nineteenth century mirrored in many respects the optimism and evolutionism of the era. Books of dogmatics appeared in which eschatology was given only a passing notice and the message of the coming of Christ was scarcely heard. Correspondingly, the ancient dogmas of the church went through a profound crisis. Sharp critique was directed against the doctrines of the two natures of Christ, the confession of the Trinity, and redemption through the blood of Christ. In all of this we encounter what was actually a radical secularizing of theology; the scandal of the Gospel was disappearing. This development proceeded into the beginning of the twentieth century; even then, hearts were still full of faith in the promise of the future. The expectation was translated by voices who said that the new century would be the age of the soul or the century of the child. The developments of the century then past appeared to guarantee this future.

The waves of pessimism

These expectations were unfulfilled. Our century is the opposite of an age of peace. One sometimes wonders whether this hard and uncompassionate century has any room at all for the innocent child and whether in spite of the rise of the science of psychology—it is not precisely the soul of man that is lost. One wonders whether the proverb about the sickness of heart caused by deferred hope (Prov. 13:12) has not become a reality in our time.

A wave of pessimism rolled over Europe after the First World War. Spengler’s The Decline of the West reflected the bitter disappointment of Europe after the intense expectations of the nineteenth century. This disappointment is reflected in the literature as well as in the theology and philosophy of the postwar era. It was sensed increasingly that human development was not so obvious as had been imagined and that immense threats haunted the horizon of human existence in spite of and within its cultural and technical enrichment.

Recovery of the vertical

These threats, with the insecurities and fears they caused, were mirrored in theology. The break with the optimistic past was executed toward the end of the First World War. We think of the rise of dialectic theology with its onslaught against the optimism of the past and against the tendency to identify religio-socialistic ideals with the Kingdom of God. This movement called men to a respect for the majestic judgment of God, for His wrath (of which nineteenth-century theology knew scarcely anything), for the inescapable crises in the entire human situation—in culture, and in morality and religion as ways for man to get to God. Salvation for man was recognized as possible only through Divine forgiveness, only through the justification of the ungodly. The horizontal line of evolution gave way to the vertical line of God’s grace and judgment. This mode of thinking called attention so insistently once again to the eschata, the end, that we can justly speak of the eschatological theology of the twentieth century. In this the emphasis was laid on the unfathomable majesty, the unapproachable holiness of God, on His hiddenness, His grace and judgment. (In 1917 Rudolph Otto had written his celebrated The Idea of the Holy, which by 1925 had had its thirteenth printing.) The corollary of this was also set down, the nothingness of the creature in his lostness and rebellion against God. Eschatology—not now in the sense of a distant future event—became real and existential, a present actuality in the dynamic and in the tension of the coming of God into history.

Shift of perspective

This effected a profound shift in the thinking of theologians about the relationship between God and man. The distance between God and man came sharply into focus (“God is in heaven, and thou upon earth,” Eccles. 5:2), and the accent fell on the fact that only in recognizing this distance could the light of grace and the experience of comfort be captured. Man had been placed in the center of things by nineteenth-century theology; dialectic theology attacked this vehemently and set God in the center. Appeal was made for a theocentric theology. Schleiermacher, with his optimism, his Christology and his eschatology, was a favorite target of men such as Barth and Brunner. For Schleiermacher’s Christology did not recognize God in Christ and his eschatology had no place for a real coming of God into history.

This initial attack on nineteenth-century theology has proceeded in a line of development that, it seems to me, has been unbroken. The same questions put then are still acute. They are concentrated about the central questions of the Church’s confession and, in connection with it, about the nature of the last things. We see clearly that the struggle which began with eschatological questions still is centered there. More than ever, problems concerning the significance of the Kingdom of God are the order of the day. The extreme alternatives are still the view that would have the Kingdom as our task and the eschatological view that sees it exclusively as a future act of God. For us, the consciousness that the New Testament knows nothing of such a dilemma and, on the contrary, warns us against one-sidedness, becomes ever clearer as we observe the theological struggles or Europe.

A stubborn resistance

This remarkable development in theology does not mean that the influence of the theology of the last century is completely broken and that it has permanently disappeared from the stage. The resistance to the Church’s confession was too stubborn to be drowned so quickly. It should not surprise us that we still encounter attacks on the apostolic confession, with its virgin birth, resurrection, and ascension statements, nor that the fierce critique of the Christological confession of Chalcedon is carried through into the twentieth century.

In this connection it is important to note the strong influence of the German New Testament scholar, Rudolph Bultmann. Bultmann was part of the dialectic circle at first, but later came into sharp conflict with Barth in regard to the foundations of theology. The most striking element of Bultmann’s theology is that, with his program of “demythologizing” of the New Testament, he continues the critical line of the liberal nineteenth-century theology. This is manifest in his teaching that the New Testament has come to us clothed in the mythical view of the world common to the time of the New Testament, a view which has become impossible for modern man to accept. The Incarnation, the virgin birth, the resurrection and the return of Christ on the clouds of heaven are all inextricable parts of this mythical world picture. Modern man cannot accept the naive New Testament world picture, and therefore, cannot accept these mythical forms in which the New Testament presents the Gospel. It was Bultmann’s conviction that theology must make it clear to modern man that Christianity did not stand or fall with its Biblical, mythical setting and that theology must not put an unnecessary stumbling block before modern man by maintaining the antiquated mythical setting of the Gospel.

Dispute over basic concerns

In all this, we are not dealing with a struggle that was played off as a competition within the quiet libraries of theologians. It hit the Church in its vitals of faith. The Church could not observe this development from a balcony; she was brought into it with her entire confession and with her preaching. We see more and more that the struggle around orthodoxy, which took such fierce form in the nineteenth century, is not a thing that belongs only to the past. In the overwhelming flood of theological literature of the postwar era of the forties and fifties, we can see the struggle increasing in intensity. In Europe (we limit ourselves to this continent, although the same tensions are observable in other areas of the world) the struggle still centers around the same basic questions raised by the modernism that has influenced theology for a century now. In this struggle, as observed in Bultmann’s theology, the foundations of the whole Christian faith, and therewith the absoluteness of Christianity, are affected; and the Church of Jesus Christ is directly involved.

As we are impressed with this fact, we realize that our strategy cannot be that of a retreat to an intellectual no man’s land where we can withhold ourselves from genuine scholarly involvement. It is this approach which, if pursued, could do such a journal as CHRISTIANITY TODAY great harm. We would then be giving the impression that we are afraid of scholarship and, moreover, that we have reason to fear it. This is the position of fear. We must take the position of honest scholarship which is bound by the Word of God and which does not retreat with the Word but rather enters the struggle with faith, unafraid.

We have been placed by God in an extremely exciting time, an era charged with tension. The struggle is being played off on almost every theological field, in the Biblical as well as the dogmatic arena. If we insist on carrying on the battle, it is not because we are bound by conservatism. On the contrary, when we see the Biblical studies of our own day, we are impressed with the fact that there are treasures in the Gospel we have not yet touched. We carry on the battle because we realize that the Word of God has riches we have not yet grasped. We need think only of the great theological word book of the New Testament now being published in Germany (Theologisches Wortenbuch zum Neuen Testament, G. Kittel, ed.), which is having an enormous influence on European theological study, to see evidence that the Word of God is powerful through all heterodoxy. If I see it correctly, there is a special calling for true Christian theology implicit in today’s theological climate. We can be faithful to this calling only as we are seized by the Gospel of Christ and are willing to give ourselves wholly to an understanding of and obedience to the Scriptures.

Love and dogmatic debate

Naturally, there is danger of sterility and intellectualism, as there always has been in orthodoxy. But there is also another possibility. I think of John, the apostle of love. He lived in a time when a hard battle had to be fought for the reality of Christ come in the flesh. As he pursued the battle, he was the apostle of love; but in and from love he waged a hard and moving fight, not hesitating in his situation to point up the temptation and threat of the Antichrist. Evidently the strength of love did not disqualify the beloved apostle for pitched battle. I see in this the program for “orthodoxy,” or, if you will, for CHRISTIANITY TODAY, in the changed and still changing theological climate of our time. Orthodoxy has often been accused of being loveless and conservative for conservatism’s sake, possessed with an antiquated mentality without consciousness or feeling for the changed times. Whatever justice this charge may at times have had, it will be our continued calling to come to a unity of life, without unbearable tension between faith and science, and without conflict between love and orthodoxy.

The earnestness of life

In the midst of the continuing battle over the confession of Jesus Christ, the Trinity, redemption through the blood of Christ (and, in the background, the authority of the Scriptures), we shall have to understand that, in all the changed and changing times, there is one question which shall never be relegated to the sidelines. It is the question that, when Christ first asked it, stirred up a crisis: “Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am? … But whom say ye that I am?” We may not allow ourselves to forget that after Peter confessed His Lord, the Lord gave a benediction. In our theological reflection too, we must remember this benediction. In theology, we do not deal with an intellectual joust, but with the very earnestness of life itself. It is in this earnestness that we must make our theological decision as to the offense of the cross, an offense that remains the same in every changed situation.

Natural understanding, regardless of the time, seeks other ways than the way of the Cross. Hence, in all changes of climate, there is also a prevailing continuity. The calling of the Church and of theology is to enter the struggle in order to serve with the Gospel, the Gospel that is not according to man. If we in common responsibility use the phrase CHRISTIANITY TODAY it must not be as an empty motto; but as a program and a perspective, a task that, without fear, we willingly take on. We shall not think too highly of our own strength or of our own thinking. We shall be comforted and led by the Word of God that is applicable here: “Cast thy bread upon the waters; for thou shalt find it after many days.”

G. C. Berkouwer, Ph.D., is Professor of Systematic Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam and author of Studies in Dogmatics, The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth, etc.

Theology

The Gospel of Matthew

J. Marcellus Kik

An eye-witness received special grace and guidance from the Holy Spirit to give a faithful account of information received from other sources.

The Gospel of Matthew is a treasure house stored with a wealth of sermon material. Yet for many preachers the door to this treasury has been locked by Higher Critical scholars. But such was not the intent of those scholars. Their purpose was to clarify the teachings of the various books of the Bible, and Higher Criticism is indeed invaluable as an aid in the sphere of Biblical introduction, where it has a legitimate and important function. But as a result of the use of what sometimes proves to be only a critic’s imagination, the tendency has been to confuse rather than to clarify the text for the preacher.

What is in the mind of the present-day preacher as he takes a text from Matthew’s Gospel? One steeped in the lore of Higher Criticism immediately faces a number of questions. Is the text a translation from a document originally written in Aramaic? Does it come from Mark or from the hypothetical document Q? Or is its source some other unknown document? Or does it come from oral tradition? Does it show church or Hellenistic influence? Is it the work of the first or the second century? Is it the work of the original author, a redactor, or an editor? Is it legend, tradition, or history?

Caught in the maze of such questions; the preacher does not go to his pulpit and declare of the text, “Thus saith the Lord.” Indeed, to avoid insincerity he may turn away from the Bible as the source of sermon material and tum instead to current events, modem literature, social problems, or church programs.

But today something is happening in the realm of scholarship. Now one may dare to question long-venerated hypotheses without being accused of obscurantism. A prominent New Testament scholar, Dr. Vincent Taylor, in writing about a number of hypotheses under question says, “The celebrated Q Hypothesis is a case in point. In recent years it has been assailed by several scholars, including Abbot B. C. Butler, of Downside, in his Originality of St. Matthew (1951), and Dr. Austin Farrer, of Oxford, in A Study in St. Mark (1951). Its substance has been replaced by several Roman Catholic scholars of first rank, who prefer to think that the original sayings-source was an Aramaic Matthew used in the later Gospels” (The Expository Times, September, 1955). Other scholars, such as Professor J. H. Ropes, have questioned the very existence of the Q document.

As every scholar knows, the hypothetical Q document has entered into the warp and woof of almost every New Testament Introduction. The abandonment of this hypothesis will have the effect of making them obsolete. In the light of the recent assault on the Q hypothesis one may echo what Professor A. M. Hunter wrote concerning the “Proto-Luke Hypothesis,” “So twenty-five years after its propounding, this hypothesis remains hypothetical.”

A working hypothesis

A working hypothesis for the study of the Gospel of Matthew is this: The Gospel of Matthew was written by an eye-witness who received special grace and guidance from the Holy Spirit to give a faithful account of the things heard and seen and of information received from other sources.

The history of Higher Criticism reveals one discarded hypothesis after another. This is due to speculation in the absence of objective evidence. Generally, certain hypotheses have been adopted because they have been accepted by distinguished scholars. But, generation after generation, the subjective reasoning of scholars has been proved erroneous. Although desiring to give credit for constructive work, one cannot help questioning whether the influence of Higher Criticism on the study of the Bible is out of proportion to the lasting contributions it has made to the science of exegesis.

Uniqueness of Matthew

It is no accident that the Gospel of Matthew stands at the beginning of the New Testament, for Matthew forms the connecting link between the Old Testament and the New. More than any other Gospel, it concerns itself with Old Testament prophecy. There are over sixty references to the old dispensation. Frequently one finds such expressions as “that it might be fulfilled” and “thus it is written by the prophet.” This is in contrast to the absence of such expressions in Mark and Luke.

The Jewish constituency was foremost in the mind of the author of the Gospel of Matthew. This is seen incidentally in that he presupposes the reader will know the geography of Palestine and its customs, manners, and ceremonies. For instance, in the matter of washing the hands before eating bread, Matthew takes for granted that the readers are acquainted with that custom (Matt. 15: 1,2); but Mark feels that he should explain to his readers that this was the tradition among the Jews (Mark 7:3). Even more from the general content of the Gospel, we can sense that Matthew had Jewish readers in view. He wanted the Jews to see that Jesus was the long-promised Messiah who had come to establish the kingdom of heaven upon earth. But, alas, as Matthew so vividly portrays, the Jews would not recognize Jesus as the Saviour of Israel.

The conflict between the true conception of the Messiah and His kingdom and the false conception held by contemporary Judaism might be termed the plot of the Gospel. With increasing crescendo the Jewish leaders are warned and also denounced for their false views. This emphasis begins in the third chapter with John the Baptist warning the Pharisees and Sadducees that the axe was laid at the root of the tree and denouncing them as a generation of vipers. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus warns against the false righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. He distinguishes between the true meaning of the Old Testament teachings and the false accretions of the elders. In the eighth chapter Christ prophesies that “the children of the Kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness.” This is followed by such expressions as “O generation of vipers” (12:34), “ye hypocrites” (15:7), “blind leaders of the blind” (15: 14). A dramatic climax is reached with the denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees in chapter 23.

The increasing enmity of the religious leaders may be gathered from these statements: “This man blasphemeth” (9:3); “Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?” (9: 11); “He casteth out devils through the prince of devils” (9:34); “Behold a man gluttonous, and a wine bibber” (11:19); “By what authority doest thou these things?” (21:23); “He is guilty of death” (26:66). This enmity is climaxed by the terrible cry, “Let Him be crucified.”

Though the apostle wrote with the Jews in mind, the note of universality is not missing. Matthew alone presents the story of the Magi, the first representatives of the Gentiles. He records the wonderful faith of the Roman centurion and the prophecy in connection with it: “Many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.” No doubt with sad heart he records another prophecy of Jesus: “The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.” The great ecumenical reach of the Gospel is seen in the recording of the Great Commission: “Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations” (ASV).

The following is a broad outline of the Gospel: (1) Introduction, chapters 1, 2; (2) Christ’s entrance into his public ministry, chapters 3-4: 12; (3) Galilean ministry, chapters 5: 12-18: 35; (4) Judea and Jerusalem, chapters 19, 20; (5) Passion Week, chapters 21-27; (6) Resurrection and Ascension, chapter 28.

Tools for exposition

For the study of each book of the Bible a minister should have at least three or four good commentaries. Because of its clear exegesis and homiletical aids the commentary by Dr. John A. Broadus, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, although first published in 1886, is still superior. A good example of the lexico-grammatical method of exegesis is H. A. W. Meyer, Handbook to the Gospel of Matthew (1875). One must be on guard against some of his conclusions; nevertheless his commentary is valuable. He is prone to assign needlessly a role to legend, e.g., the story of the Magi. Another standard work is Alfred Plummer’s An Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (1909). Plummer does not give a verse-by-verse exposition. Rather, he treats each incident of discourse as a unit which is helpful.

Other commentaries of value are those of Calvin, Simeon, and Lenski. Calvin has rightly been called the prince of exegetes, and all later commentaries benefit from his work. In 1820 a work by Charles Simeon appeared under the title Expository Outlines on the Whole Bible. This work has recently been reprinted. The preacher who desires practical helps and outlines will find this book of great aid. Another recommended work is by a Lutheran scholar, R. C. Lenski, Interpretation of St. Matthew’s Gospel (1931).

The Church has been enriched with the labours of learned men in the field of exposition. Neglect of the fruits of their work can only impoverish the pulpit. A diligent use of the commentaries suggested above will enable the preacher to be like the householder described in Matthew 13: 52, “who bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.”

J. Marcellus Kik is associate editor of Christianity Today.

Ideas

Why ‘Christianity Today’?

A Christianity Today Editorial

The vision that has animated this magazine from the beginning.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY has its origin in a deepfelt desire to express historical Christianity to the present generation. Neglected, slighted, misrepresented—evangelical Christianity needs a clear voice, to speak with conviction and love, and to state its true position and its relevance to the world crisis. A generation has grown up unaware of the basic truths of the Christian faith taught in the Scriptures and expressed in the creeds of the historic evangelical churches.

Theological Liberalism has failed to meet the moral and spiritual needs of the people. Neither the man on the street nor the intellectual is today much attracted by its preaching and theology. All too frequently, it finds itself adrift in speculation that neither solves the problem of the individual nor of the society of which he is a part.

For the preacher, an unending source of wisdom and power lies in a return to truly biblical preaching. For the layman, this same Book will prove to be light on the pathway of life, the record of the One Who alone meets our needs for now and for eternity.

Christianity Today is confident that the answer to the theological confusion existing in the world is found in Christ and the Scriptures. There is evidence that more and more people are rediscovering the Word of God as their source of authority and power. Many of these searchers for the truth are unaware of the existence of an increasing group of evangelical scholars throughout the world. Through the pages of Christianity Today these men will expound and defend the basic truths of the Christian faith in terms of reverent scholarship and of practical application to the needs of the present generation.

Those who direct the editorial policy of Christianity Today unreservedly accept the complete reliability and authority of the written Word of God. It is their conviction that the Scriptures teach the doctrine of plenary inspiration. This doctrine has been misrepresented and misunderstood. To state the biblical concept of inspiration will be one of the aims of this magazine.

The content of historic Christianity will be presented and defended. Among the distinctive doctrines to be stressed are those of God, Christ, man, salvation, and the last things. The best modern scholarship recognizes the bearing of doctrine on moral and spiritual life. This emphasis will find encouragement in the pages of Christianity Today.

True ecumenicity will be fostered by setting forth the New Testament teaching of the unity of believers in Jesus Christ. External organic unity is not likely to succeed unless the unity engendered by the Holy Spirit prevails. A unity that endures must have as its spiritual basis a like faith, an authentic hope, and the renewing power of Christian love.

National stability and survival depend upon enduring spiritual and moral qualities. Revival as the answer to national problems may seem to be an oversimplified solution to a distressingly complex situation. Nevertheless statesmen as well as theologians realize that the basic solution to the world crisis is theological. Christianity Today will stress the impact of evangelism on life and will encourage it.

Christianity Today will apply the biblical revelation to the contemporary social crisis, by presenting the implications of the total Gospel message for every area of life. This, Fundamentalism has often failed to do. Christian laymen. are becoming increasingly aware that the answer to the many problems of political, industrial, and social life is a theological one. They are looking to the Christian Church for guidance, and they are looking for a demonstration of the fact that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a transforming and vital force. We have the conviction that consecrated and gifted evangelical scholarship can provide concrete proof and strategic answers.

Christianity Today takes cognizance of the dissolving effect of modern scientific theory upon religion. To counteract this tendency, it will set forth the unity of the Divine revelation in nature and Scripture.

Three years in a theological seminary is not sufficient to prepare a student fully for the ministry. Christianity Today will seek to supplement seminary training with sermonic helps, pastoral advice, and book reviews, by leading ministers and scholars.

The interpretation of the news becomes more and more important in the present world situation. Correspondents conversant with local conditions have been enlisted in the United States and abroad. Through their reports Christianity Today will seek to provide its readers with a comprehensive and relevant view of religious movements and life throughout the world.

While affirming the great emphases of the historic creeds, this magazine will seek to avoid controversial denominational differences. It does not intend to concern itself with personalities or with purely internal problems and conflicts of the various denominations. If significant enough, these will be objectively reported.

Into an era of unparalleled problems and opportunities for the Church comes Christianity Today with the firm conviction that the historic evangelical faith is vital for the life of the Church and of the nations. We believe that the Gospel is still the power of God unto salvation for all who believe; that the basic needs of the social order must meet their solution first in the redemption of the individual; that the church and the individual Christian do have a vital responsibility to be both salt and light in a decaying and darkening world.

Believing that a great host of true Christians, whose faith has been impaired, are today earnestly seeking for a faith to live by and a message to proclaim, Christianity Today dedicates itself to the presentation of the reasonableness and effectiveness of the Christian evangel. This we undertake with sincere Christian love for those who may differ with us, and with whom we may be compelled to differ, and with the assurance in our hearts that God's Holy Spirit alone can activate any vital witness for Him.

Cover Story

The Primary Task of the Church

Addison H. Leitch

Why bringing men and women into a saving relationship to God through Jesus Christ beats any other emphasis.

Glen Scott / Flickr

The Church can be understood best at two points in its history: at the time reflected in the book of Acts and the Epistles, and at the time of the Reformation.

It is more difficult for us to project ourselves into the experience of the early Church because of our inability to duplicate certain advantages they had, namely, the immediate experience and authority of those who had known our Lord in the flesh and the unique outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We are closer to the experience of Luther and the other Reformers because their Christian experience was partially the result of the mediation of the Bible, the history and customs of the medieval church community, and the drag of all the accretions of the human upon the divine institution. An examination of Luther’s experience as a member of the church is helpful, therefore, as a starting place for our own understanding.

The Bible invoked against Rome

In the providence of God, Luther, a devoted and disciplined monk of the Augustinian Order, was called upon to lecture from the Bible. Also in the providence of God, he was led to lecture from three sources, all of which forced him to decision over against Rome. He lectured on the Psalms, Galatians, and Romans; and both in the study and in the classroom the logic of his material led him eventually to see that he was justified by faith alone, that Christ was the only Mediator between him and his God, and that neither he nor his salvation needed the trappings and ceremonies of the Romanist hierarchy. Luther’s experience was highly individualistic. He found himself in a saving relationship to God through Jesus Christ, and this experience of salvation with its accompanying assurance was not the result of nor had it been nurtured by any external organization”. It was over against such an organization that Luther had now to say, “Here I stand.”

The Church basically spiritual

But an individual standing alone is not a church, and Luther knew it. Who or what then was the Church? How could it be created? Where was it to be found? If a man could break away from the Church because what was then called the Church was not the Church, just where is the body of which Christ is the Head? Pioneering his way through such problems, Luther came to see at last that there must be others who were “in Christ” as he was. Therefore, those in Christ were in one another. Communion with God through Christ meant communion with one another. What later Bucer was first to term “the invisible Church” was the only church of which Luther could call himself a member. This “invisible Church” was henceforce inescapable in Luther’s understanding. In spite of the fact that Luther was forced by later circumstances to say something authoritative about the “visible church,” and in spite of the fact that Calvin also found it necessary to expand his description of the visible church to over one hundred pages in the Institutio, the Reformers could never define the Church in such a way as to eliminate this basic necessity in the believer’s experience of oneness with the living God through Christ. There was no church anywhere without a core of those who had experienced Christ, who were one with Him and therefore one in Him.

Primary task to win the lost

In the Reformed tradition, therefore, it is the primary task of the Church to bring men and women into this saving relationship with Jesus Christ. No part of our program, no emphasis on liturgy or philanthropy, and no delight in our rapid numerical growth have any meaning apart from this primary emphasis. The interesting and amazing complexity of our church life today has no meaning unless and until this is done. The primary task of the church is to make Christians out of people. And a man is a Christian when he has accepted Christ as his Saviour, when he is in a saving relationship to God through Christ; anything else and anything less is vain and futile “religious” exercise. Professor Paul Vieth of Yale, in his approach to Christian education, says that the task of Christian education “is to confront with and control by” the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is true. First, a man is confronted by Christ and His Gospel, he is forced to decision by this encounter, he becomes by this commitment a new man in Christ; he becomes thereby a living unit in the body, a building block in the construction, a part of the Body of Christ.

Ministry of Word and Spirit

Luther further discovered for us that this new relationship with God and with one another was mediated through the Scriptures which in turn were applied to us by the ministry of the Holy Spirit. For the Scriptures to be taught, therefore, the “invisible Church” had to become visible. It had to take form. It had to meet at a certain place and at a certain time; there had to be organization so that things would be done decently and in order. Certain notae of the church appeared— the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments—and then the “right” preaching of the Word and the “right” administration of the sacraments. Men were to be brought to Christ by the audible word and by the visible word. The emphasis on preaching in the Reformed tradition is firmly set in the necessity of the Word and the Spirit as the only means of bringing men to Christ. The Reformers believed in the power of the Word, in the ministry of the Spirit. The task of the preacher is to set the Word before the people. Fundamentally we are to let the Word speak, expound it, interpret it, bear witness regarding its power in our lives and the lives of others. What we have lost sight of most, I suppose, in our day, is that this Word itself has power. Sow the seed, get it out; in the providence of God that Word shall not return void.

The visible church, therefore, becomes a means, and only a means, of getting the Word out. It soon happened in Luther’s day, as in our own, that there were at least three kinds of people in any given congregation: those still unconverted by the Word, those ready only for milk, those ready for meat. The church had to be organized, and needs to be organized now, of course, to answer all these needs. Many evangelists, rightly concerned for conversion, fail to see that after certain people have been roundly and soundly converted, it is time to move on to something else. There must be the clear confrontation with the Gospel calling for life decision and commitment, but there must also be building up in the faith. We are to convert sinners and also edify saints. It is Vieth again saying “confront with” and then “control by” the Gospel.

World task of the Church

In obedience to the Great Commission the Church must also move out from its own center of operations to ever wider areas of operation. No group, however small or however pure they may think themselves to be, can be released from the pressing requirements of world mission. This again means organization and planning- some teachers, some evangelists.

If we analyze our situation, we can see what this means in the growth and complexity of the church.

It is vain to believe that all this organization has meaning apart from the primary task of evangelization; but it is naive to believe that the work of evangelization can be carried out without care in organization. Whatever the drag of organization and the temptation to lose the primary task of the Church in the wheels and gears of a great denominational enterprise, we do not understand the necessities of our task unless we see the unfortunate necessity of visible organization. The cry for the simple Gospel, or the cry for the simple program of the Great Teacher and His handful of followers, is easily understood as a yearning of the heart, but it is a misunderstanding of what our task will constantly require of us. The early Church was still very young when it had to have a Council at Jerusalem. Paul never mentions his expense account, but he had one. And there must have been some kind of certified accountancy for the collection for the saints in Jerusalem.

Simple Gospel, complex organization

The primary task of the church is to bring men and women into a saving relationship to God through Jesus Christ. Now see what happens. A man in communion with Christ finds himself in a communion; those in Christ are in one another. Out of this communion, because men are physical as well as spiritual, there arises a community, a visible group of people gathered around one center of commitment and loyalty. It is a part of the requirements of this visible group that they evangelize others and in time bring them into this same fellowship. The community grows, it breaks up into congregations, there are synods and assemblies, there are programs of mission and philanthropy; there are building programs, financial drives, magazines and editorial policies, theological seminaries and boards of trustees.

It is deadly for a church to grow from the outside in; but when it grows spiritually and dynamically from the inside out, all these externals are necessities, not unfortunate excrescences on the living organism. The simple Gospel makes a complex organization; it is a part of the task of the Church to keep all these physical expressions under the power of the Spirit.

The Gospel and social activity

When the communion becomes a community, necessities laid on the Church become almost endless. At the time of my theological training there was much talk about the personal gospel as against the social gospel. Now we know what we should have immediately recognized then, that there is only one Gospel, but that it includes both sides.

There is no salvation by way of the social gospel, but only in the individual’s call to Christ. But there is no such thing as an asocial Christian. His commitment to Christ immediately and by necessity has social implications. The salvation of the man is the salvation of the whole man, and the whole man is a man engaged in business or trade; he is an employer or an employee; he is an economic man, a political man.

What can be said of individuals must also be said of congregations of individuals. Commitment to Christ means that a man is changed in all his relationships; a church made up of committed members has something to say also to the total life of men. Only men saved by grace can work to save society, but men saved by grace cannot escape the necessity of working redemptively upon society.

It is surprising how easily we can see the place of the church community in terms of social reform in some directions but not in others. The Church stands usually against liquor and the liquor “interests,” that is, the business of liquor. The church community is always against organized vice, against narcotics. In the past the Church as such took a stand against slavery and felt called upon to speak out against child labor even when such speaking hurt profits. We accept these victories over injustice in former days as assumptions of the position of the Church in our own day; it is harder to see in our contemporary scene just what it is that the Church is called upon to do.

Sins of contemporary society

Nevertheless we have tasks in relation to the sins of contemporary society. We must not confuse our difficulty in knowing just what to do with the necessity to do something, to take a position, to bear our witness. Evangelicals commonly draw back from such responsibilities because the primary task for them is the preaching of the Gospel of salvation. Very well. Now what are these saved people to do in the society in which they live? If the church community can support their efforts by speaking out on organized vice, why cannot the organized church community speak out for the moral obligations of capital on the one hand and labor on the other? Although it is not within the province of the Church to determine what may constitute “just wages,” it should expect them to be paid. The Church may be unqualified to determine what comprises “feather bedding,” but it should expect labor as well as capital to deal honestly and justly.

It helps to think of it this way: If through the instrumentality of my preaching on a Sunday morning a man is led to conversion, what shall I tell him that his new Christianity involves when he calls upon me in my study on Monday morning? I can’t tell him everything, I am sure. But I can challenge him with the position of the Church on his marital relationships, his use of liquor, what he does with his leisure time. I cannot advise him on political parties, but I can discuss good citizenship. I can talk to him about his “calling” in his daily task, but can I tell him anything about whether he is right or wrong to continue to pay dues in his labor union? These are touchy questions because they are contemporary ones. But questions of right and wrong are of the stuff of life in any day, and the Church bears its witness today. There is no such thing as a social gospel; conversely, there is no such thing as an asocial Christian. A man is to be confronted with and then controlled by the Gospel in every relationship. The Church should be ready to help the members of the Christian community in all such relationships. Calvin’s church in Geneva, for example, set up controls in the markets and established a weaving industry for the unemployed.

Christian impact on culture

Saved men should also have an impact on culture. Great periods in the history of the church have meant great art and architecture, great music, new laws, educational institutions, in short, a new way of life. Whether we will or not, a dominant religion will create a way of life; the question is, which religion? Will it be Secularism? or Materialism? or the dialectic of Communism? The Christianity of the Puritans poured into American life what Van Wyck Brooks was led to call The Flowering of New England. The iron core of Calvinism is still felt by way of the children of Convenanters, Beggars, and Hugenots, and the end is not yet. How we dress, our manner of speech, the pictures we like, the television programs we allow, the places we spend our leisure and how we spend it there; all these are expressions of the reality of what is supposed to happen first and happen truly: a man’s commitment to Christ. He is a “new creature,” and “Behold, all things are become new.” A different culture has always been the necessary corollary of essential Christianity. We should expect Christianity to make a difference in all life around us; the leaven leavens the whole loaf. We see this taking place on the foreign mission field; can we understand our total mission here at home?

The primary task of the Church, therefore, is to bring men into a saving relationship to God through Christ. This is done by Word and Spirit. Men thus saved must be given the nourishment to grow in Christ; this is Christian education. Such men in communion form the communities which make constant redemptive impact on the world around them. Thus the things of heaven are brought to bear upon the things of earth and the day is hastened when “every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess” Christ’s Lordship.

Addison H. Leitch, Ph.D., Litt.D., is president of Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary.

Ideas

Evangelism and the Sacred Book

A Christianity Today Editorial

Contributor

Karl Barth and Billy Graham are both rescuing the Bible from Liberalism. But their views on Scripture differ dramatically.

The names of Karl Barth and of Billy Graham ought not, perhaps, to be mentioned in the same sentence, unless one is prepared to stay for the afternoon.

Their gifts and callings are diverse—the one a skilled theologian, the other a skilled evangelist. Their influence is equally dissimilar, that of the one mainly academic, and of the other mainly popular. Barth is today doubtless at the very apex of his career, while Graham’s star very probably is still rising.

Nonetheless, both names are indelibly inscribed upon the role of distinguished Christian leaders in the twentieth century. In some respects, moreover, their ministries reflect superficial points of contact. Barth has had an impact upon theological thought throughout much of the Western world through the translation of his writings; Graham has had an evangelistic access to the Orient as well as to the Continent through the translation of his preaching. Even to contrast their ministries in terms of the technical versus the simple is to exaggerate their basic differences. Barth’s influence has extended beyond the classroom to the pew, and Graham’s call to decision among university students has been as effective as among the less sophisticated. Barth has delivered a series of Gifford Lectures; Graham has fulfilled a week’s preaching mission at Cambridge. And what theologian today does not covet a broad ministry to the market place? Is not the New Testament ideal (we do not imply the flawlessness of Barth’s theology nor of Graham’s evangelism) the theologian-evangelist, whom the apostle Paul supremely exemplifies?

However varied their talents and influences, both Barth and Graham have come to symbolize a religious springtime after the long, cold winter of Liberalism. They stand as giants of our generation protesting against the liberal reduction of the Bible to the category of sacred literature generally. The Hebrew-Christian Scriptures differ uniquely from all other religious writings in their witness to special revelation; they cannot, therefore, be classified under general divine revelation. In stressing this fact, the “theology of the Word of God” and the evangelism of “the Bible says” are in formal agreement, and share in the rebellion against the classic liberal distrust of the special revelation claim that is everywhere implicit in the Bible.

Yet whoever sees no essential difference between the views of the Bible represented by Barth and the theology of crisis, on the one hand, and by Graham and the theology of the evangelicals, on the other, stands in need of theological lenses.

The difference is understated when the one position is lampooned as returning to the “precritical” and “prescientific” view which disregards “the new knowledge of the Bible.” To explain the difference by saying that the evangelical view waves aside those indubitable gains which objective scientific criticism can bring is an oversimplification. There will be convenient occasions to speak of such gains without concealing the sad predicament of twentieth-century biblical scholarship.

Mr. Graham has not, indeed, centered his preaching, nor his writing, in the perspectives of modern higher criticism. Wisely enough, he has left the discussion of critical problems to those whose lives have been dedicated to criticism. And, be it plainly admitted, the critics today face herculean problems, which call for more than expert skill. They bear the burdensome task of letting their profession down easily from a growing series of discredited verdicts—among them the impossibility of Mosaic writings, the nonhistoricity of the Hittites, the priority of the prophets over the Law, the non-supernatural Jesus, the Greek rather than Hebrew background of the New Testament, the second-century dating of John’s Gospel, and so forth. They now find scholarship as imposing as that of Dr. William F. Albright in support of the thesis that the composition of no New Testament book need be dated later than A.D. 80, that is, after the lifetime of contemporaries of Jesus of Nazareth. The reconciliation of competitive critical theories is no easy task, and it is no wonder a mere evangelist would prefer to bequeath its exacting requirements to the specialists. For what so often has been proclaimed, with evangelistic fervor, as an assured result of critical science, has turned out all too often to be a transient dogma of a biased critic.

The Church may rejoice that an emphasis on the New Testament evangel is finding its way once again into pulpits from which it was long absent. In this proclamation of the evangel there is often a considerable similarity between those who hold the high view of the Bible and those who shy away from it. Whoever preaches the Gospel must lean heavily on the warnings of Jesus about sin and its connection with the wrath of God and the judgment to come, no less than upon His assurances of the gracious forgiveness and the welcome awaiting sinners who come to the Father “in Christ’s name.” The omission of either of these elements is destructive of the Gospel. But the Gospel is far more definite than this; the simplest New Testament statement of it includes the substitutionary death of Christ for sinners and His bodily resurrection (1 Cor. 15:1-4). It is at this point of the sharper definition of the Gospel that the difference between evangelical and sub-evangelical preaching comes more clearly into view.

The danger in a pragmatic age is that the success of evangelism may institute an era of respect for evangelism in which the evangel itself is foggy and mist-thin. Much of this resurgent emphasis today is hesitantly biblical in mood. It is especially uncomfortable in the presence of the well-worn Graham formula: “The Bible says.” In fact, in some places, the twentieth-century phenomenon of an evangelist without an evangel has appeared in the aftermath of a Graham campaign.

A half-hearted confidence in the reliability and authority of Scripture faces the opportunities of evangelism with self-defeating uncertainties. Shall the evangelist preach the wrath of God? The apostles did. The propitiatory atonement? The apostles did. The final doom of the wicked? The apostles did. The formula “the Bible says” covers all the articles of faith. If we are to hear only what a given evangelist or theologian tolerates, however impassioned his intonation of whatever Scripture escapes his censorship, the fact that the Bible appropriates certain of his theses is no more significant than its repudiation of certain others. The public exhortation on Sunday to heed what “the Bible says” in a given passage does not mean much in the mouth of a professor who on Wednesday is confiding to divinity students that they had best disregard what it says in the next verse. The same verdict holds for the evangelist who strikes one note in the invitation and another in the ministerial meeting.

This leads us on to an important difference between the modern “theology of the Word of God” and the evangelism of the Bible. The Graham article in this issue employs the phrase “biblical authority.” It does not rush to draw a line between what God says and what the Bible says. It does not locate what God says in the misty flats above the Bible, above its written propositions and words. It picks up, with life-and-death urgency, the confident identification of special divine revelation with a specific message, and in this characteristic it stands in the company of prophets and apostles and of the Lord Jesus. The hearers of the Sermon on the Mount were reminded that they would be judged by specific principles and words: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man…” (Matt. 7: 24). It is in the course of precisely this identification that lightning strikes from heaven in Graham meetings.

Doubtless some will think that Mr. Graham sketches the picture in too broad strokes. Others will rally to his side, proclaiming the high view of the Bible to be not alone a key factor in evangelism but a watershed of theological conviction. However his readers may divide, nobody has a profounder right than Mr. Graham to a hearing on the subject of the authority of the Bible in evangelistic preaching. He has earned that right theoretically, by his devout study of the Word, and pragmatically, by his passionate proclamation of it to an age of theological unbelief, in which he has unsheathed the Book once again as a two-edged sword. His ministry supplies the theological enterprise with a graphic reminder that the mysteries of higher criticism are unnecessary for grasping the essence of the biblical message—as devout Christians in apostolic and in Reformation times did—and also that the simple believer often stands closer to the heart of the Gospel than the sophisticated critic. This is not because Christianity is against scholarship, but because scholarship often places itself in needless opposition to Christianity. Those who have invested much of a lifetime propounding now-discredited theories supply eloquent witness that the essence of the Gospel did not first become available through some new and modern gnosis, but can be confidently located in what was plainly accessible to the earliest century of faith.

By a true intuition, shaped by confidence in the plenary inspiration of the Bible, the evangelical movement and Mr. Graham cling fast to the Gospel, and to what most of the new theology still misses, namely, that Jesus of Nazareth is the high point of special divine revelation, and that the Christian revelation disallows the relegation of Scripture to a twilight zone in which its authoritative note disappears.

Ideas

Vision of Sovereignty a Remedy for Tensions

A Christianity Today Editorial

We are prone to forget that God sees all time and eternity at once.

PHOTOCREO Michal Bednarek / Shutterstock

The uncertainties and conflicts of national and international tensions are in themselves no excuse for the pessimist or the cynic in Christian circles. Nor are they a legitimate excuse for man to lay impatient hands on the ark of the universe to steady it. We are prone to forget that God sees all time and eternity at once.

We need a new vision of the sovereign God, of a sovereignty which is universal, unlimited and immutable. Neither chance, the follies of man, nor the malice of Satan can determine the sequence of events and their issues. God has not abdicated; He is on His throne and He still causes the wrath of man to praise Him. He is aware of world disorder and He has provided its cure. To the Church He has committed the Gospel and it is still the power of salvation to all who believe. To understand the content of that Gospel and to make that content known is the impelling duty of the individual Christian and of the Church.

Ideas

The Evangelical Witness in a Modern Medium

A Christianity Today Editorial

Behind this initial issue stands a year of prayer, of decision, of planning. (Plus: CT’s first masthead)

With the first public announcement that a biweekly journal of evangelical conviction was in prospect, Christianity Today attracted the spontaneous interest of thousands of ministers and lay leaders. That initial response gained swift momentum as assurances multiplied that a wide welcome would await such an evangelical medium.

Behind this initial issue stands a year of prayer, of decision, of planning. The fortnightly correlation of the Christian lifeline and the editorial deadline now takes the form of necessity as well as of opportunity and responsibility.

In design and typography, Christianity Today combines the classic heritage of the past with the best of the modern. The cover achieves this effect with its combination of the classic Dutch and Weiss initials. The feature articles, contemporary in interest, are set and captioned in modern type faces. For article headings, Deepdene will predominate, with the body of the article set in Fairfield, an easily legible book face not uncommon in religious magazines. In its choice of type faces Christianity Today had the counsel of Paul Smith, a leading West Coast type designer.

Christianity Today is printed on 40-pound eggshell paper. The first issue alone required 37,000 pounds-enough to reach, page by page, almost across the state of Texas, or from Cairo to Jerusalem to Damascus to Beirut.

Christianity Today enjoys excellent printing arrangements. Type is set in Washington, D.C., by the McArdle Printing Company. “Mats” cast from the type are rushed to Dayton, Ohio, where the McCall Corporation, publisher of national magazines, completes the actual printing and mailing.

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Staff

Carl F. H. Henry, Editor L. Nelson Bell, Executive Editor J. Marcellus Kik, Associate Editor Larry Ward, Managing Editor George Burnham, News Editor

Contributing Editors

Oswald T. Allis (Wayne, Pa.) G. C. Berkouwer (Free University of Amsterdam) Andrew W. Blackwood (Temple Univ. School of Theology) Robert F. Boyd (Assembly's Training School, Pres. U.S.) Geoffrey W . Bromiley (St. Thomas Episcopal, Edinburgh) F. F. Bruce (University of Sheffield) Gordon H. Clark (Butler University) F. P. Copland Simmons (St. Andrew's Presbyterian, London) Earl L. Douglass (Princeton, N. J.) Edward L. R. Elson (National Presbyterian, Washington) William Fitch (Knox Presbyterian, Toronto) C. Darby Fulton (Bd. of World Missions, Pres. U.S.) Frank E. Gaebelein (Stony Brook School) John H. Gerstner (Pittsburgh-Xenia Theol. Sem.) Billy Graham (Montreat, N. C .) Richard C. Halverson (Intl. Christian Leadership) William K. Harrison (U .S. Caribbean Command) C. Adrian Heaton (Eastern Baptist Theol. Sem.) Philip E. Hughes (London, England) W. Boyd Hunt (Southwestern Baptist Theol. Sem.) Norman C. Hunt (University of Edinburgh) Clyde S. Kilby (Wheaton College) W. Harry Jellema (Calvin College) Harold Kuhn (Asbury Theol. Sem.) Robert J. Lamont (First Presbyterian, Pittsburgh) Roland Q. Leavell (New Orleans Baptist Theol. Sem.) Pierre Marcel (St. Germain En Laye, France) Clarence E. Macartney (Beaver Falls, Pa.) Duke Mccall (Southern Baptist Theol. Sem.) Samuel Moffett (Seoul, Korea) Arthur J. Moore (Bishop, The Methodist Church) J. Theodore Mueller (Concordia Theol. Sem.) Roger Nicole (Gordon Divinity School) Harold John Ockenga (Park Street Church, Boston) Stanley W. Olson (Baylor Univ. College of Medicine) J. C. Pollock (Templecombe, Somerset, England) Bernard Ramm (Baylor University) Paul S. Rees (First Covenant, Minneapolis) W. Stanford Reid (McGill University) William Childs Robinson (Columbia Theol. Sem.) Samuel M. Shoemaker (Calvary Episcopal, Pittsburgh) W. E. Sangster (Methodist Home Mission Dept., London) Wilbur M. Smith (Fuller Theol. Sem.) Ned B. Stonehouse (Westminster Theol. Sem.) John R. W. Stott (All Souls Langham Pl., London) James G. S. S. Thomson (Edinburgh, Scotland) Cary N. Weisiger III (Mt. Lebanon U.P., Pittsburgh) Faris D. Whitesell (Northern Baptist Theol. Sem.) Maurice A. P. Wood (St. Mary's Islington, London) Kyle M. Yates (Baylor University) Fred Young (Central Baptist Theol. Sem.)

Correspondents

Tom Allan (Scotland) Charles F. Ball (Chicago) George Bartholdy (Denmark) Jerry Beavan (Evangelism at Large) Trygve Bjerkrheim (Norway) Louis T. Bowers (Liberia) Wilhelm Brauer (Germany) Allen Cabaniss (Jackson, Miss.) Frank Colquhoun (England) L. David Cowie (Seattle) Calvin Chao (Singapore) Ellsworth Culver (Philippine Islands) A. Thakur Das (Pakistan) R. L. Decker (Kansas City) Boris Decorvet (Switzerland) Peter De Visser (Grand Rapids) James I. Dickson (Formosa) Cyril Dorsett (British West Indies) W. Harold Fuller (West Africa) J. Wayne Fulton (Miami) Roy E. Grace (Philadelphia) G. A. Hadjiantoniou (Greece) J. Lester Harnish (Los Angeles) Stuart Harrison (Peru) T.W. Hazelwood (Toronto) Langdon Henderlite (Brazil) Benjamin Heras (Spain) Robert Holmes (Ceylon) John G. Jetty (New York City) D. Koilpitchai (India) Elmer F. Kraemer (St. Louis) T. Leonard Lewis (Boston) Paul Lilienberg (Sweden) Marcus L. Loane (Australia) Robert S. Lutz (Denver) Ben J. Marais (South Africa) W. W. Marichal (Belgium) James A. McAlpine (Japan) Don McClure (The Sudan) W. A. McGill (Egypt) Tom McMahan (Columbia, S. C.) Roger B. McShane (Detroit) Herbert Mekeel (Schenectady) R. Strang Miller (New Zealand) William McE. Miller (Iran) Samuel H. Moffett (Korea) Benjamin Moraes(Brazil) John Morrison (Belgian Congo) William Mueller (Louisville) Robert Boyd Munger (San Francisco) Sidney W. Murray (Ireland) Donn C. Odell (Israel) J. Edwin Orr (Evangelism at Large) James Pritchard (India) W Stackford Reid (Montreal) W. Dayton Roberts (Costa Rica) J. Hervey Ross (Mexico) Benjamin Santana (Puerto Rico) James P. Schaeffer (Milwaukee) C. Ralston Smith (Oklahoma City) Gerald B. Smith (Minneapolis-St. Paul) Paul G. Stephan (Des Moines) Cullen Story (Lebanon) P. N. Tablante-Garrido (Venezuela) Clyde W. Taylor (Washington, D .C.) Paul E. Toms (Hawaii) Renato Tulli (Italy) Abe C. Van Der Puy (Ecuador) Vance Webster (Eugene, Ore.) Cary N. Weisiger III (Pittsburgh) Faris D. Whitesell (Chicago) G. Brillenburg Vurth (The Netherlands) Irvin S. Yeaworth (Cincinnati)

The Fragility of Freedom in the West

Carl F. H. Henry

Individual liberty is not a sufficient yardstick of to measure Freedom versus Slavery.

Jojoo64 / Shutterstock

The role of freedom is waning. The high hope of a free world, so widespread two generations ago, is today in obvious decline. Wherever human liberty survives it dwells under somber shadows. The West distinguishes itself from the Soviet bloc especially as the champion of human freedoms. In contrast with the totalitarian enslavement of man, and the disregard for human dignity and rights in the Soviet sphere, the virtue most publicized by democratic nations is that they are “freedom-loving.” The twentieth-century conflict between the totalitarian and the nontotalitarian worlds is a conflict over man’s position and his rights and duties.

Search for a rationale

Yet the West itself betrays a growing search for a rationale of freedom. That the Western conception of freedom needs to be revitalized is increasingly recognized and confessed. Multitudes of citizens in the favored Free World today lack a dynamic devotion to the cause of freedom and a missionary zeal to proclaim its message to men near and far. The spontaneous passion to enlist recruits under the flag of freedom is missing. The political crusade upholding individual worth and dignity is carried forward mainly by specialized organizations and technical leaders. What the West lacks is a passionate popular enthusiasm for liberty.

Beyond doubt the Western view of human dignity and human rights presupposes a worthier outlook on life than does the communist devaluation of man. The Free World detaches itself, and rightly so, from the materialistic attempt to limit human life to finite considerations. Cooperation and loyalty require more than an appeal to underprivilege and misunderstanding; they demand a recognition of basic values. The West grasps the great fact that the strength of life and culture, and the permanence of nations, rest ultimately upon moral and spiritual foundations.

Yet the contrast between the Free World and the Soviet bloc cannot, in this respect, be reduced to an absolute antithesis. And the reason it cannot is complex. Even within the Soviet sphere, however counterbalanced they may be, there remain large groups of Christian believers who have not flexed the knee to Karl Marx. The West may take heart that such advocates of human dignity and responsibility, however thwarted in effectiveness, exist even on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Moreover, the tenets of the West and of the East cannot be reduced to two wholly hostile positions—a fact that should give the West no cause for gratitude. They cannot be so reduced because of the ambiguity over freedom in the West—an ambiguity that extends to the conception of the nature, the sanctions, and the sources of freedom. The West itself has not worked out a philosophy of human freedom that provides a satisfactory antithesis to the totalitarian world’s philosophy of the enslavement of the individual spirit.

Freedom in fuzzy outline

The West’s lack of a positive philosophy of freedom is increasingly acknowledged to be a major Free World weakness. The communist philosophy is categoric and precise; the West’s concept of liberty is indefinite and fuzzy. With the destiny of the world hanging in the balances, an ambiguous program holds little prospect of converting the impressionable masses permanently to its side.

Weaknesses in the West’s position are easily detected, however statesmen may defend them. The United Nations, with which the West has cast its lot, includes not only the U.S.S.R. and its veto but also lesser powers with scant sympathy for democracy or who, like France, seem to prefer a death-bed struggle to the disavowal of imperial colonialism. Apart from these considerations, the apparent foreign policy of the West reflects strategic concessions to material-expedient factors. An equally distressing weakness arises from the present tendency of some Free World leaders to champion only political freedom, cutting the plea for democracy and political liberty adrift from such fundamental issues as religious liberty and economic liberty.

Yet these important issues must inevitably be brought into any comprehensive discussion of human freedom. The distressing fact is that the West’s conception of freedom today is not one, but many. The Free World defends “the dignity of man,” but its agreement is mainly negative, against the communist view; it is not at all unanimous on the meaning of human dignity. The same charge may be leveled against the lack of a single definition of such everyday terms as democracy, free enterprise, capitalism, and so forth. In fact, organized propaganda continually bombards the man of the West in the interests of competing definitions of these controlling ideas.

Conflict of ideas

This lack of agreement in the West is due in part to an unresolved conflict in its culture, and reflects the lingering influence of the biblical and Renaissance traditions upon its past and present life. As a result of this conflict, friends and foes of theistic supernaturalism, carrying on an important war of ideas between themselves, claim an equal right and authority to fix the Free World’s definition of its governing terms. Thus, for example, UNESCO is headed by an aggressive humanist, whereas the President of the United States emphasizes an inseparable connection between the democratic outlook and the fact of man’s creation in the image of God. At the Geneva summit, the agnostics and atheists were not all on the Soviet side of the conference table.

Lack of dynamic

But this absence of synthesis and precision in the ideology of the West is not the only reason that the principle of freedom is incompetently shaped by the Free World. Alongside the problem of leadership in the West stands the problem of the masses. The case for human freedom and responsibility is often cast in a philosophical form quite beyond the grasp of the man on Main Street. The communist appeal to the masses has the virtue of simplicity, going with dramatic directness to some of the basic interests of life. The picture of the dedicated cadres of Communism, vigilant vanguard of the totalitarian thrust, supplies a disturbing contrast to the West’s fervorless and undedicated recognition of the priority of human freedom over slavery. Free men and nations do not long remain free unless they understand what freedom is and promote it with an enthusiasm that exceeds the vigor of untruth.

How, then, can the West “firm up” the case of freedom? Is there a simple yet valid appeal, calling for a personal dedication and a militant defense of liberties? How can the ideology of freedom gain dynamic? Can the West forge a positive and an evangelistic formula of freedom to replace a merely defensive statement?

The present tendency in the West is to position a nation on the yardstick of Freedom versus Slavery merely by the degree of individual liberty available to its citizens. Whatever worthwhile elements this preserves, it is a vulnerable measure of freedom.

The significance of the individual is, doubtless, an important criterion in gauging the submission to or resistance of totalitarianism. Whenever individuals accept personal responsibility and promote human rights they strengthen the bulwark against statism. The right of individual conscience to an opinion and to a decision about the reigning “class conscience” is essential. A state that minimizes this personal responsibility is increasingly vulnerable to totalitarian influences, which subject its citizens to society and society to the state.

In the free society, the military and police force protects individual rights, whereas in a totalitarian world, they enforce the will of the state. Indeed, the police state is dedicated to the abolition of personal freedom. In the free society, individual right of conscience in religious worship is upheld; in a totalitarian climate, the individual is hedged about either by a patriotic religion or by state irreligion. In the free society every citizen has the right of free and secret ballot; in a totalitarian nation, elections are predetermined, with a forced vote for but a single candidate or party, and reprisal if the citizen withholds his ballot. In a free society, the individual holds the right conscientiously to criticize the state alongside his obligation to support it; in a totalitarian atmosphere, the state is the lord of conscience, and individual disagreement means elimination. In the free society, social and economic distinctions do not imply differences in personal worth, nor do they exclude fraternal relations between the dictator, the high party functionaries, the party members, the general hierarchy, the proletarian masses, the slave masses, and the enemies of the state.

From these contrasts it is clear enough that every freedom-loving nation in defending the dignity of the human person must champion also the sanctity of individual conscience, in contrast with communistic suppressive tendencies.

Negative indication only

But does not the importance attached to the individual, expressed in this bare way, fail to supply a safe index to the actual presence of human freedoms? May it not rather simply give a negative indication of the absence of formal slavery? Is freedom ever simply the possibility of acting in a certain way in relation to the state? Is the individual’s ability to resist state aggression really a conspicuous and conclusive victory for the forces of freedom? Can freedom really be weighed accurately upon scales whose weights bear no other identifications than these: Will of the Individual, Will of the State? Is the revolution for freedom, in totalitarian lands, decisively implemented by the mere defense of certain horizontal freedoms for the individual?

The West tends to reply—quite in the spirit of the Renaissance, rather than in the spirit of the Reformation— that human freedom implies human responsibility, and. the freedom of the one man therefore implies similar freedom for every man. Individual freedom is guarded from becoming individual license, or individual tyranny, by the obligation of the one who invokes these freedoms for himself to de fend these same freedoms for all.

What of the durables?

This emphasis, that all privilege implies obligation, and that human rights imply human responsibilities, is good enough as far as it goes. The trouble is, it does not go far enough. It provides no adequate conception of the source, sanction, and scope of human freedom.

As a matter of fact, this approach cannot even show that human freedom is a permanent value. The reason is plain enough—it has not yet risen to the distinction between the temporary and the eternal. But if democracy is always superior to totalitarianism, if the dignity and freedom of man are permanent values, as against the communistic antagonism-then it becomes necessary to show that some things are eternally true and good.

Beyond naturalism

To establish the fact that truth and values endure, that they are eternal and unchanging, and not subject to revision from time to time and from place to place, it is necessary to refute the naturalistic thesis that everything is time-bound, or that distinctions of truth and morality are subjective and changing. The vindication of a supernatural order of truth and goodness is therefore prerequisite to the vindication of the enduring value of democracy and of human freedom. Unless distinctions between truth and falsehood, and between right and error, are ultimate, no convincing defense of the permanent truth and value of the democratic concept is possible.

Merely opposing the right of individual conscience to the calculated communist disregard and destruction of individual conscience does not meet head-on the hard core of the communist dogma that the interests of the state are above every personal moral code, religious inclination, family affinity, and political ideal. The point is not that individual conscience is unimportant; indeed, every worthwhile theory of morality must assign a significant role to conscience. No act can be considered moral unless performed with the approbation of conscience. The subjective sense of good intention and right conduct, the confidence that an act is performed out of moral obligation, are essential to ethical performance. An act that accomplishes “the right thing” quite by accident and lack of intention can never under those circumstances alone be a moral act. Therefore the communist doctrine, that the dead individual conscience is a virtue of the “good” party liner, must be resisted with might and main. (The communist himself tacitly admits the indestructibility of individual conscience, and is driven to reckon with its ineradicability. For he resorts to internal subversion, terrorism, revolutionary tactics, purges and military force in order to reduce individual conscience to a mere reflex “class conscience.”)

Role of conscience

But what is done conscientiously, even by the individual, is not on that account right. For the human conscience is finite and fallible; it requires education. Indeed, the Christian religion would go even further, contending that the conscience of man as fallen and sinful is distorted, needing regeneration and the guidance of revelation. The “sensitive individual conscience” can be regarded, therefore, as the diametric opposite of Communism only when one goes beyond the merely humanistic or idealistic constructions of man. The individual conscience, no less than the group conscience, may be wrong; individual conscience is not right simply because it is personal. And a wrong conscience imposed upon life is as wrong when it is individual as when it is collective. Indeed, even a group conscience need not always be wrong, and may at times be nearer the truth than a lone individual.

The theological horizon

If one aims seriously to reply to dialectical materialism, simply to insist on a balance of human rights with human responsibilities is not enough. The rights and privileges of every individual do indeed carry an inherent obligation to sustain these same freedoms for all others. But that human beings have rights and obligations is not a matter of anthropology alone, but of theology as well. The word “inherent” is misleading—a humanist or naturalist may deploy it in the service of atheism—even in the West. The only compelling basis for speaking of inherent rights is the theological fact that man is a creature bearing the image of God, so that his experience is bracketed by enduring distinctions of truth and goodness.

The fate of freedom turns on far more, therefore, than a sensitized individual conscience. It turns upon individual conscience sensitized specifically toward the living God, and toward His Word and commandments. The fate of freedom is suspended in the last analysis not on the alternative of the individual orientation or the state orientation of conscience, but on the Godward orientation of individual and state alike.

Modern crisis spiritual

The modern crisis, in which the West itself is entangled more deeply than its leaders suspect, is therefore a religious crisis. Decision for or against the living God is revealed as the upper side of the decision for or against the dignity and worth of the individual. The Hebrew-Christian religion of redemption, of the self-revealing God, vindicates a special view of human freedom-its source, its sanction, its scope. The Mosaic Law and the Gospel of Christ crackle with relevance for the modern debate over man and his worth. The Great Commission is not tangential to the crisis of the twentieth century. For Christianity is the purveyor of human freedom on the only level adequate to repel the communist revolution. It can show that lying, cheating, stealing, and murder are wrong because God by commandment forbids them-not simply because the United States forbids them (after all, in America adultery is not treated as nearly so objectionable), nor because the United Nations forbids them. They are wrong not merely because some state or superstate deplores them, but because God forbids them. Whoever therefore is bound by party discipline to perform them is obliged by the will of God to resist the will of the party.

Carl F.H. Henry is the editor of Christianity Today.

Theology

Review of Current Religious Thought: October 15, 1956

Philip E. Hughes

What British theology journals are saying.

Bencherlite / Wikimedia

The question of the reunion of the divided Church is very much in the forefront of theological thought in Great Britain at the present time. Events such as those connected with the Church of South India have forced this question from the sphere of speculative debate into that of practical politics, and “talks” are being carried on between representatives of the Church of England (Episcopalian), the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) and Methodist Church.

¶ A vexed aspect of the question is that of episcopacy and orders. In the June number of the Scottish Journal of Theology Professor J. M. Barkley of Belfast, contributing an article on “The Meaning of Ordination,” remarks that it is noteworthy that the Roman Catholic Council of Trent (1563) and the “Bishops’ Book” (1537) and “King’s Book” (1543) of the Anglican Reformation “all declare the ‘presbyterate’ to be the highest order of the ministry,” and he maintains that it is only since 1662 that a distinction has been made in the Church of England between bishops and presbyters as separate orders. He rightly declares that today, as always, the Reformed Church must “submit herself to the leading and criticism of the Word of God.”

Professor Barkley stresses significantly that ordination in the New Testament is by prayer with the laying on of hands —prayer having the priority: “Owing to the doctrine of ‘lineal’ succession the laying on of hands with prayer was emphasized rather than prayer with the laying on of hands.” He further urges that, according to the New Testament, “the Ministry of Christ is the only ‘essential ministry’ in the Church, and all other ministries are derived from and dependent upon Him,” and that it is “the call of Christ and the gift of His Spirit” that alone validate any ministry. It is evident that the author has in mind the Anglo-Catholic teaching that episcopacy is the “essential” or “apostolic” ministry on which all other ministries depend.

Canon S. L. Greenslade of Durham, in an article entitled “Ordo” in the same issue, agrees that the Church “must be faithful to biblical principles” and emphasizes that “the ministry and priesthood of Christ is continued ;md shared by the whole Church, and not limited to an ordained ministry within it.” But he asks a number of questions without offering any answer to them, particularly in connection with the office of bishop: is episcopacy necessary to the being of the Church? are bishops successors of the Apostles? do they exercise functions which are withheld from or impossible for other ministerial orders? is it open to the Church to sanction ordination by presbyters? Many will feel that Professor Barkley’s article goes some way towards answering such questions.

¶ The Editor of The Modern Churchman states (in the March issue) that it is his conviction that “the Bishops of the Church of England … should take the first step on their side in the achievement of the much to be desired reunion” by declaring that all communicants of the Free Churches “are most welcome to communicate at the Lord’s Table in the National Church.” This is undoubtedly a practical and realistic proposal which would have the support of Evangelicals in the Church of England. There will be doubts, however, about the practicability of the further suggestion that the leading denominations of the Free Churches “should re-enter the National Church as Christian Corporations retaining their property, their buildings, their ministries and their organizations and powers of self-government.”

¶ Even the satisfaction of the lust for a united world Church would not solve the problems that distress us in this existence. As St. Paul foresaw, there will always be enemies within the Church as well as from without (Acts 20:29f.). The extremes of massive organization on a comprehensive scale and of the separatism of small independent and undenominational communities both imply perfectionism, whereas perfection will only be hereafter when the Church is exalted to her glorified state. We are inclined to agree with the anonymous reviewer of Professor Norman Sykes’s recent book Old Priest and New Presbyter who wrote in The Listener of July 19: “in England again now let inter-communion be consented to all round, and the impure ambition to re-unite will be sufficiently attained” (though we would have preferred the adjective “misguided” to “impure”).

Preaching to a congregation of Methodists in Durham Cathedral on June 30, the Archbishop of York, Dr. A. M. Ramsey, said: “My own dream is that one day the Methodists will by means of bishops be linked with the Church of England while retaining their own customs and methods, as a society.” A bishop, he explained, “is a bond of unity and continuity, a symbol of a Catholic Church coming down from the past and spanning the generations.” The editorial comment of the Church of England Newspaper of July 20 is apposite: “It is precisely those churches which have bishops in the ‘apostolic succession’ which find it almost impossible to speak to one another.” When bishops cease to regard themselves as apostolical prelates and are no longer appointed as administrative geniuses, but take their place with St. Peter as “fellow-presbyters” (I Pet. 5: 1), then the Archbishop’s dream will be nearer realization.

Archdeacon W. P. Hares, in an article on “St. Peter and Papal Claims” in the June number of The Churchman, writes: “The Bishop of Rome claims jurisdiction over the whole of Christendom because he is the successor of Peter. But from the Scriptures and the writings of the Early Fathers it is quite clear that Peter never claimed jurisdiction over anyone!” The arguments he adduces against the papal claims are not new, but they are none the less valid.

¶ A responsive echo will be evoked in many a heart by the protest made in the August issue of Theology by the well-known Anglo-Catholic theologian Dr. E. L. Mascall, of Oxford, against “the extreme verbosity which has come to characterize the writings of many modern theologians.” He draws attention in particular to the volumes of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics which are still being translated into English and which he computes will reach at least a million words in length. In his opinion Barth’s work “would have lost nothing in content and would have gained much in clarity if he had written at one third of the length.” Is Dr. Mascall familiar with the Puritan divines of the seventeenth century, we wonder? They were prolific enough, but at least they were comprehensible! And what about the voluminousness of Thomas Aquinas, to whom Dr. Mascall is much addicted? Karl Barth is unlikely to outdo him! “Of making many books there is no end…”

Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, B.D., M.A., is former secretary, Church Society (Church of England) and former vice-president, Tyndale Hall.

This article appeared in the October 15, 1956 issue of Christianity Today as "Review of Current Religious Thought".

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