Europe News: April 01, 1957

State Church Exit

The traditional State Church is on its way out in Europe, according to the president of the Baptist Union of Sweden.

Dr. Gunnar Westin, former dean of the theological faculty at Uppsala University, made the statement recently on a visit to Washington, D. C.

“A strong doctrine of Church and State separation is developing throughout Europe,” he said.

Dr. Westin, a member of the Baptist World Alliance executive committee, came to the United States last fall for a four-month lecture engagement at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. He also has lectured at other theological schools and will conclude the visit with lectures at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, the first week in April.

The Baptist leader said the State Church system which developed in Europe immediately following the Reformation was based on the theory that “government is responsible for the souls of its people.” It also grew out of the doctrine that church unity is essential to political unity, he said.

The Lutheran Church is the State Church of Sweden and other Scandinavian countries.

Study In Contrast

The United States has delivered $700,000,000 worth of equipment to the new German army, including 1,100 tanks and 1,000 military planes.

The Pocket Testament League is sending 50,000 copies of the Gospel of John.

‘Pact With Devil’

Communist newspapers in Germany’s East Zone accused Berlin’s Bishop Otto Dibelius of “entering into a pact with the devil” when he recently co-signed with the West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer as agreement providing for establishment of chaplaincy services for the new West German Army.

The pact will go into effect after approval by the synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany and the Bundestag, lower house of the West German Parliament.

Bishop Dibelius is chairman of the EKD Council. Roman Catholic chaplaincy for the new army has already been established under a Vatican-West German concordat.

The Soviet Zone press denounced the arrangement as an “un-Christian misuse of the Church” and “provocation of peace-loving forces within and outside the church.” It said that Christianity must not be “misused as a moral cement for a NATO army” and warned East German members of the EKD Synod that they could not “in good conscience” approve the treaty.

Ruling In Italy

Italy’s new Constitutional Court has ruled that public religious gatherings may be held without previous notice to the police.

The decision marked a victory for evangelical groups who had long sought to have the police regulation set aside.

In its ruling the court declared unconstitutional an article of the 1931 Public Security Law specifying that the police must be notified three days in advance of any religious assembly outside a recognized house of worship.

Some Italian and Protestant missionaries have run into trouble in recent years over interpretations of the law.

Africa News: April 01, 1957

Doors Open Wider

Christian denominational mission leaders, once fearful of the path the new state of Ghana will take, now feel that self-government may mean wider open doors—with the stigma of “foreign imperialism” removed.

Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah said his country will continue to welcome missionaries. “We owe a lot to missionaries,” he stated.

The Prime Minister said his people were becoming Western in their outlook and had no intention of joining the Afro-Asian bloc of leftist countries.

In the flush of their first taste of political freedom, the jubilant people of Africa’s newest nation did not forget to thank God and the missionaries who brought the message. At the official Independence Week mass church service in the capital city, Accra, the Rev. Christian G. Baeta, chairman of the Christian Council of Ghana, told thousands of worshippers:

“Ghana’s independence enables her to do battle for God. We would dedicate ourselves and our new nation, all that we are and have, to the service of Almighty God, the giver of all. The Lord hath done great things for us, whereof we are glad.”

Dr. Baeta, who is senior lecturer in theology at the School of Divinity, University of Ghana, paid tribute to the work of missionaries:

“Particularly would we remember with humble thanksgiving that noble army of missionaries of the Gospel who, in selfless devotion, penetrated the deepest recesses of our land and of the lives of its people, bringing in the light of God, the light by which we now live.”

In an interview with the African Challenge (140,000 circulation), Dr. Baeta stressed the need for Christian instruction in the young nation:

“The ordinary religious instruction given is very primitive. We teach people basic Bible stories, but little instruction is given on how to carry Christianity into practical life. Nobody else will give moral instruction so vital to a young nation. It remains for Christians to do this through literature.”

—W.H.F.

Threat By Church

The Capetown Presbyterian Church of South Africa intimated recently that it will resort to civil disobedience if proposed legislation is enacted giving the government control over church services attended by both Europeans and Africans.

In a statement read from pulpits in all churches of the denomination at Capetown, the presbytery declared that to bow to government control of multi-racial worship services would be to “disregard our Lord’s own words—‘my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.’ ”

The statement added:

“In the event, therefore, of the bill becoming law, it would be our solemn duty, while not unmindful of our obligations towards and respect of civil power, to take our stand on the words of Calvin: ‘We are subject to men who rule over us but subject only in the Lord. If they command anything against him, let us not pay least regard to it nor be moved by all the dignity they possess as magistrates—dignity to which no injury is done when it is subordinated to the special and truly supreme power of God.”

The proposed new law is incorporated in a section of the Native Laws Amendment Bill. It will require permission from the Minister of Native Affairs, Dr. H. F. Verwoerd, for multi-racial services in churches or other institutions established since 1938. The bill also has been opposed by the Anglican, Roman Catholic, Methodist and Baptist churches and other religious groups.

Middle East News: April 01, 1957

Massive Radio Effort

Plans for the construction in the Near East of a 100,000-watt radio transmitter to beam programs to the Arabic-speaking world have been approved by the Near East Committee of the National Council of Churches.

To be built at a cost of $250,000, the station will be supported by cooperative Protestant foreign mission boards. With the exception of the Vatican radio, which equals the new station’s planned power, this reportedly will be the largest and most powerful venture in radio by any religious group.

The radio will be as powerful as the 100,000-watt Voice of America transmitters in the area. Like these, it will be short-wave, which carries much farther than medium and long-wave signals. Most home radios in Africa and the East—405,000 were licensed last year in Egypt alone—are equipped to receive short wave.

Exact location of the transmitter has not been determined.

Radio jamming by Russia, recently intensified in the area, will be a problem, but church engineers are optimistic after studying transmitting conditions in the Middle East.

The station’s programs will be educational and cultural as well as religious.

Dr. W. Burton Martin, executive secretary of the NCC’s RAVEMCCO (Radio, Audio-Visual Education, Mass Communications Committee), said programming will call for an eight-hour day, seven-day-a-week schedule. Included will be a family breakfast program, and programs for industrial workers, farmers and homemakers.

Bible study and daily devotions will be features in the schedule, but music, drama and light entertainment will have significant roles.

“Its influence will be invaluable in bringing the Christian message to new millions, while operating in the public interest,” said Dr. Martin.

Some American observers said they were not enthusiastic about the church putting on public service programs. Others expressed hope that evangelical voices, long familiar to world audiences as bearers of the Gospel, will not he bypassed.

Far East News: April 01, 1957

Philippine Outlook

Religious issues may play a big role in the November election of a president in the Philippine Republic, a country officially dedicated to the Order of the Sacred Heart a few months before the airplane crash in which President Ramon Magsaysay was killed.

Presidential aspirant Claro M. Recto is opposed by Catholics and backed by Protestant leaders.

The former Vice President, Carlos P. Garcia, who assumed duties of the high office shortly after the crash, is a graduate of Silliman University, a Presbyterian institution in Manila. He is a Catholic, however, as was his predecessor.

Secretary of Education Hernandez, strongly Catholic, also perished in the crash, which took 24 lives. Undersecretary of Education Martin Aguilar Jr., a logical choice for the vacant position, is a Protestant, and church observers are intensely interested in seeing who will get the key post.

President Magsaysay was a popular figure among both Catholics and Protestants. Nearly a half-million persons swarmed around Malacanan Palace when the body of the 49-year-old chief executive was brought from the Cebu Island mountainside.

“His fight against communism as one of democracy’s staunchest champions …,” said Philippine Ambassador to the United States, Carlos P. Romulo.

‘The Only Weapon’

Thirty missionaries, representing 24 different mission groups, agreed on the following statement of faith before issuing invitations to all missionaries in Japan for the 1959 Protestant Centennial Conference:

“We believe in the Bible as the fully inspired, infallible Word of God, the only rule of faith and practice.”

Words Of Warning

Christians in China who are permitted to communicate with the West are members of “show case” churches maintained by communists for propaganda purposes, Ambassador Hollington K. Tong of Nationalist China said recently.

The ambassador, speaking at a dinner commemorating the 155th anniversary of First Baptist Church in Washington, D. C., said most Christian groups in China continue to feel severe persecution.

Despite such reports, however, according to Japan Harvest, a 13-man Protestant Japanese delegation is making plans to visit Red China in April and May. The Rev. J. Asano, Japan Biblical Seminary professor and pastor of The Mitake Kyodan Church, will be the delegation leader.

The delegation will be in Red China for communism’s biggest holiday, the May Day Celebration.

Worth Quoting

“This is the day of the larger church, handsome buildings, plush furniture and costly appointments. I’m not against these things. I love them. I break the Tenth Commandment every time I go into one of those spacious ministers’ studies in our new churches. Then I have to remember how easy it is to insulate yourself from your neighbor, especially if he is on the poorer side of town. If we forget him and his work, we are judging ourselves and our ministry by the price tag.”—Rev. Homer R. Lane, Toronto, Canada.

“It is not a struggle merely of economic theories or forms of government or military power. The issue is the true nature of man. Either man is the creature whom the Psalmist describe as ‘a little lower than the angels’ crowned with glory and honor, holding ‘dominion over the works’ of his Creator; or man is a soulless animated machine to be enslaved, used and consumed by the state for its own glorification.…”—President Eisenhower.

Digest …

Zondervan Publishing House takes over book publishing business of Sword of the Lord Foundation April 1.… Over 50% of Milwaukee TV viewers watch premiere of “Martin Luther.”

$140,000 fund raised to restore historic Calvin Auditorium in Geneva, Switzerland.… Two leading Christian schools in Seoul, Korea—Chosun University and Severence Union Medical College—merge as Yonsei University. First president, Dr. L. George Paik.

Books

Book Briefs: April 1, 1957

Liberal Leader

The Living of These Days, by Harry Emerson Fosdick. Harper and Brothers, New York. $4.00.

Harry Emerson Fosdick’s friends have prevailed on him to write his autobiography, and he has done so under the title, The Living of These Days. It is part of a prayer, taken from his hymn, God of Grace and God of Glory: “Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, For the living of these days.” The title is apt, for not only was Fosdick strongly influenced by the events of the last seven or eight decades, he also exerted a considerable influence on that period of human history. To this reviewer, who is not a great many years younger than Fosdick, the reading of this biography seemed like a review of the history of his generation.

No one who has heard or read Fosdick needs to be told that his style is superb. This does not indicate one that is flowery and certainly not one that is wordy. Fosdick’s style excels in precision, simplicity, directness, forcefulness and ruggedness. His humor is as wholesome as it is natural. One of the most pleasing features of this volume is the author’s humility. To cite but one of numerous instances, concerning his teaching of homiletics at Union Seminary, he says, “I hope that I helped the students, but I am unable to express how much they helped me” (p. 119). Another laudable characteristic of the book is its candor.

Harry Emerson Fosdick received his formal education at Colgate University and Union Theological Seminary of New York. He has been pastor of the First Baptist Church of Montclair, New Jersey, and the First Presbyterian and Riverside churches of New York City. He has served Union Seminary as part-time professor of homiletics and practical theology. He has preached and lectured in several lands and has written some twenty-six books.

The aforesaid salient facts derive most of their significance from his theological pilgrimage. He informs his readers that he began as a fundamentalist. However, as a young man he found fundamentalism incompatible with intellectual honesty. His problem was how to retain Christianity without committing intellectual suicide. Theological liberalism, or modernism, proved to be the answer. He accepted many of the conclusions of the so-called higher biblical criticism and rejected the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of Holy Scripture. He felt that the doctrines of historic Christianity were but the temporary, and hence changeable, framework for abiding truth. That formula he applied to certain explicit teachings of the Bible as well as to teachings deduced by the church from the Bible. He denied such supernatural events as the virgin birth of Jesus and his bodily resurrection. He deprecated the orthodox formulations of such dogmas as the Trinity, the deity of Christ and the satisfaction of divine penal justice by Christ’s death on the cross. He came to base his theology, not on the Bible as the infallibly inspired Word of God, but, after the manner of Schleiermacher and Ritschl, on religious experience. He taught his students to base their preaching on the Bible as the record of the religious experience of certain saints of antiquity rather than the authoritative Word of God. Withal he fell under the spell of the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch. The fundamentalist-modernist controversy in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. of the nineteen-twenties centered about his teaching. When a general assembly asked him to subscribe to the system of doctrine contained in the confessions of that denomination and to its principles of church government, he declined in the interest of honesty to do so. He wanted the membership of his churches to be inclusive, not only in the sense of embracing all races and strata of society, but also in the sense of “a liberal fellowship ready for an adventure into unrestricted interdenominationalism” (p. 183). To be sure, after the Second World War he saw, with others, that modernism was in need of several adjustments. For instance, it had been too optimistic about human nature and hence about the future of the human race, it had stressed the divine immanence out of due proportion to the divine transcendence and it had accommodated itself too much to the prevailing culture instead of challenging that culture. But Fosdick did not cease to be a modernist. Even the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, particularly in its early expressions, was not nearly liberal enough for him. Now that Brunner has mellowed in his attitude toward liberalism, Fosdick is hoping for a synthesis of liberalism and neo-orthodoxy.

What struck the reviewer perhaps more than anything else in his perusal of this autobiography was the author’s slighting of orthodox scholarship. He denounces fundamentalism scathingly for its “obscurantism,” and in so doing he takes to task especially William Jennings Bryan. Now Bryan, sincere Christian layman that he no doubt was, did not rate as a theologian. That there are fundamentalists who cling tenaciously to foolish notions is beyond dispute. For instance, the notions that the human authors of the Bible were mere robots, that each and every statement in the Bible must be interpreted literally and that man was created in the physical image of God do indeed fall under the head of obscurantism. But pray, what orthodox theologian of any note holds to such nonsense? This reviewer cannot suppress the question whether Fosdick has ever made a serious study of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, of such protestant confessions, to name but two, as those of Augsburg and Westminster and of the works of contemporaries as B. B. Warfield and Herman Bavinck. And why does he completely ignore the man who proved to be not only the most militant but also the most scholarly defender of orthodoxy in that Presbyterian conflict in which Fosdick himself was so deeply involved—J. G. Machen? Here seems to be a most serious lacuna in Fosdick’s education. Or is it possible that he would brush aside as unscientific the noblest literary products of orthodoxy? But that would be so preposterous as to be well-nigh unbelievable, for their authors excelled in erudition and it may be said without in the least belittling Fosdick that in point of theological scholarship he does not deserve to stoop down and unloose the latchet of the shoes of any one of them. To refer again to Machen, even the most extreme liberals being his judges, he was a scholar to be reckoned with. In A Preface to Morals Walter Lippmann stated that Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism was more convincing than the reasoning of his modernist opponents, and H. L. Mencken in his characteristic way eulogized Machen shortly after his death in 1937 by saying that he was to Bryan what the Matterhorn is to a wart.

This reviewer intends no insinuation that this biography is wholly devoid of good ideas. We must all assent to the improvements Fosdick advocates on the older liberalism. But even here Fosdick does not give historic orthodoxy the credit due it for those ideas. A few examples follow. Says Fosdick: “Static orthodoxies are a menace to the Christian cause” (p. 230). But orthodoxy has always said that. One of its tenets is the progressive guidance of the church by the Holy Spirit into the truth. Therefore it ever seeks to bring forth new things as well as old out of the treasure of the Word of God. Such a conservative church as the Christian Reformed has in recent decades drawn up a tentative formulation of the doctrine of common grace, and the Presbyterian Church in 1788 amended its Westminster Confession of Faith to eliminate Erastianism. Baptist Roger Williams, no doubt, deserves some credit for that change. Fosdick insists that the preacher must deal with social problems. While it is true, on the one hand, that orthodoxy rejects the modernist brand of social gospel and, on the other, that dispensationalists would preach an exclusively individualistic gospel, many conservatives have long insisted that the social implications of the Gospel must be stressed in the pulpit. Professor Louis Berkhof of Calvin Seminary did that in a lecture on The Church and Social Problems, delivered in 1913. The undersigned did likewise in an article, The Christian Pulpit and Social Problems, published in the Westminster Theological Journal. Fosdick declares: “Faith and reason are not antithetical opposites” (p. 258). But what orthodox theologian of any stature ever thought they were? Paraphrasing a saying of George A. Buttrick to the effect that “there is only one thing worse than a devil and that is an educated devil,” Fosdick comments: “That emphasis is a newcomer in America” (p. 271). But this reviewer had it impressed on his soul by the advocates of Christian day schools when he was yet a mere boy. Fosdick has come to the conclusion: “Neo-orthodoxy is right in stressing the necessity and primacy of God’s self-revelation, if we are to know him” (p. 256). But why credit neo-orthodoxy with a truth which has been obvious to orthodoxy for ages? Fosdick agrees thoroughly with Brunner “that man’s wickedness is a dreadful, desperate fact, and that man, left to his own unaided devices in a materialistic universe empty of the saving grace of God, is doomed” (p. 252). But that is the very essence of historic orthodoxy—provided, of course, the term “grace of God” be taken in the Augustinian sense, not the Pelagian. In short, in later years Fosdick has moved in the direction of orthodoxy, yet he keeps insisting that he is a modernist. No doubt, basically he still is.

As good a way as any of stating the point at issue between Fosdick’s modernism and historic orthodoxy is this: the latter acknowledges God’s infallible Word as the test of truth; the latter makes experience the norm. Of course, it does not follow that Fosdick casts the Bible overboard; according to him it is itself the record, albeit a fallible one, of the religious experience of great saints of old. But in seeking solutions for such problems as that of God and immortality Fosdick does not rely on any authoritative statements of Scripture but turns to human experience. For that reason he cannot but flounder about, much as a vessel without rudder or compass. Small wonder that his attitude toward war has changed so radically. Nor is it altogether strange that in spite of his high regard for Jesus of Nazareth he rejects his teaching of hell. If truths are divorced from their formulations, they become vague indeed. Besides, many truths simply cannot be experienced. At best theology of experience will lead to probabilities, never to certainties. Fosdick himself so much as grants that and even more when he writes: “Concerning every human experience theories of explanation and interpretation are essential, but however confidently they may be held, their probable insufficiency must be assumed and their displacement by more adequate ways of thinking positively hoped for” (p. 230).

Is modernism Christianity? Fosdick is sure that it is Christianity at its best and he defines it thus: “For me the essence of Christianity is incarnate in the personality of the Master, and it means basic faith in God, in the divinity revealed in Christ, in personality’s sacredness and possibilities, and in the fundamental principles of life’s conduct which Jesus of Nazareth exhibited” (p. 269). But that definition is quite inadequate. For one thing, it makes the incarnate Son of God a Christian, which he certainly was not. A Christian is a sinner saved by grace; a sinner who, conscious of his need of salvation and realizing that he cannot save himself, abandons himself to the Christ crucified; and a sinner who loves the Lord who bought him with his blood and lovingly serves that Lord. Such is the Christian, and Christianity is first of all God’s solution for the problem of sin—its guilt and penalty as well as its power and pollution.

In his early work, The Theology of Crisis, Brunner vigorously denounced modernism as “a religion which has nothing in common with Christianity except a few words” (p. 261). But Brunner was not then and is not now an exponent of the historic Christian faith. In 1924, the very year in which Fosdick delivered at Yale the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching under the title The Modern Use of the Bible, Machen wrote his Christianity and Liberalism. The point of that book was that Modernism is not Christianity. Five years later Lippmann observed that Machen had not been refuted. That still holds true today. This reviewer thinks his argument irrefutable.

Christianity is based squarely on the Bible as the Word of the living God. Modernism is based on religious experience. Christianity is history, doctrine and life—all three; and they stand and fall together. In that history such supernatural events as Jesus’ virgin birth and bodily resurrection loom large. Modernism denies them. But the apostle Paul said, “If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain and your faith is also vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). At the heart of Christian doctrine lies the Pauline teaching that, being justified by Christ’s blood, believers will be saved from wrath through him (Romans 5:9). Modernism preaches another gospel. In his sermon Shall the Fundamentalists Win? Fosdick spoke with disgust of those who believe “that the blood of our Lord, shed in a substitutionary death, placates an alien Deity and makes possible welcome for the returning sinner” (quoted in Christianity and Liberalism, p. 120). The Christian ethic is rooted in Christian doctrine, notably in the doctrine of the atonement. Paul has enjoined Christians to glorify God in their body and their spirit because they are “bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20). That price was the precious blood of Christ. The ethic of modernism disdains blood-theology. Inspired Paul being the judge, modernism is not Christianity.

R. B. KUIPER

Full Commitment

Christian: Commit Yourself: By Paul S. Rees. Revell, $2.00.

Paul Rees is pastor of the First Covenant Church of Minneapolis. The influence of his Christian ministry, however, has extended far beyond the confines of his own parish; it has been felt throughout the entire nation. His books on stewardship, evangelism and the Holy Spirit have blessed many lives.

The 10 messages in this volume are all directed toward securing from the listeners a full commitment to Christ and his cause. Decisions at depth constitute the major thrust of each soul-probing sermon. Thus, the paramount aim of this preacher is to recapture the dedication, devotion and discipline that gave such irrepressible fervor and undaunted daring to the early Christian movement. Following the announcement of each subject, Dr. Rees stipulates the kind of commitment he seeks from the particular message. For example, in the sermon on “The Supreme Surrender” he begins by summarizing the commitment he desires: “I will seek to know and do the will of God in every area of my life.” After announcing the subject “The Badge of Royalty” the commitment sought is “I will accept responsibilities for service in my church.”

Dr. Rees quotes General Omar Bradley as saying, “The most completely committed person I have met is a convinced Communist.” Recognizing the challenging truth in a statement of this kind, Dr. Rees has dedicated himself to the holy task of activating and mobilizing Christian people to a more drastic and ardent commitment to Christ and his cause in this world.

The Christian minister will find here new illustrations and perhaps new insights expressed in new ways. The new Christian who reads this book will be able to learn more about the nature of the deeper Christian life and the clarification of many of his own embryonic thoughts.

JOHN R. RICHARDSON

Render To Caesar

The State in the New Testament, by Oscar Cullman. Scribners, New York. $2.50.

That the New Testament has something to say about the State will come as a surprise to many people. Secularists have assumed that politics have nothing to do with piety; sectarians have imagined that piety may be divorced from politics. But the New Testament has much to teach us on this subject. We are indebted to Cullman for his careful exposition of the Christian view of the State.

In the various chapters of this book the author discusses, “Jesus and the Resistance Movement of the Zealots,” “Jesus’ Condemnation by the Roman State,” “Paul and the State,” “The State in the Johannine Apocalypse.” There is also an excursus dealing with “the powers that be” mentioned in Romans 13, viewing the State as the effective agent of invisible (angelic) powers.

According to Cullman, the attitude of the New Testament to the State is one of “neither denial nor affirmation.”

The State is to be accepted rather than denied since it has been ordered of God for our own good. The State is intended of God to be his servant in the administration of justice, and that is why Jesus refused to go along with the Zealots who renounced the State unreservedly and sought to overthrow it.

Nevertheless, the State is not final. There are some things that are not Caesar’s. The totalitarian claims of the State must be resisted. For this reason Jesus refused to agree with the Sadducees whose religious indifference gave the Romans unlimited submission.

Some have regarded the question of the political world order within the framework of the sovereign Lordship of Christ (cf. “The Declaration of Faith Concerning Church and Nation” approved by the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1955).

Cullman’s emphasis is on the eschatological. In the New Testament witness concerning the State he finds a unity rooted in the tension between present and future. Ordered of God for the present, the State must be recognized by the Christian citizen. Yet in the end, it will pass away. The State is not a final institution with divine authority; therefore the disciple of the Lord will ever be ready to warn and resist when the State transgresses its limits. Only the Christ of the cross, the coming King, is Lord of all.

We have seen the State threaten the Church by political tyranny (Communism), and ecclesiastical forces seek to dominate the State by pretensions to power (Romanism). It has also been disturbing to note the indifference of many professing Christians to political problems and the attitude of the worldling that Christianity is irrelevant to the situations of our time. Most welcome, therefore, is this volume by Cullman. While one may not always agree with the author, no one can fail to profit from his serious and stimulating exposition of the New Testament on the subject of the State.

MARIO D. GANGI

Able Commentary

I and II Thessalouians, by William Hendriksen. Baker, Grand Rapids, 1955. $4.50.

This able commentary, one of a series called New Testament Commentary (upon which the author is at present engaged), covers in a semi-popular fashion Paul’s two letters to the church at Thessalonica.

Dr. Hendriksen is fully abreast with modern scholarship in the realm of New Testament literature and exegesis. However, there is no parade of learning in these pages. The difficult problems of interpretation are usually relegated to footnotes (which do not average one a page). A selected bibliography lists the major works on these epistles, and a more extended bibliography adequately covers the larger literature on this subject.

The book is definitely evangelical and conservative in viewpoint, The Pauline authorship is defended with adequate scholarship. All the arguments against Paul’s authorship are fairly stated and persuasively answered. No one can accuse our author of obscurantism.

One of the most valuable features of this commentary is found in the extended prior to Christ’s parousia. Although there is no precise treatment of the various eschatological views as such, the author’s interpretation naturally leads to a millennial conclusion. This is what we would expect from the author of More Than Conquerors.

In general the reviewer agrees with the theological and eschatological views presented in this excellent commentary. The flaws are few and hard to find. We found a Greek preposition misspelled and incorrectly accented (p. 21). On the same page another Greek preposition is incorrectly accented. A participle appears without accent (p. 48). The Greek word parousia is accented incorrectly (p. 76). A smooth breathing is omitted (p. 135). A present participle is called an aorist participle (p. 142). A Greek infinitive is incorrectly accented (p. 168). The English word “personal” is misspelled (p. 137). “Of repent” should be “to repent” (p. 185). “So that” is always spelled as one word except in two places (pp. 68, 103).

Conservative scholarship cannot be entirely satisfied with the republication of learned and evangelical works that were produced by orthodox scholars of the nineteenth century or earlier. It is good to see an increasing number of conservative books on biblical and theological subjects appearing in our day. We feel confident that Dr. Hendriksen’s contribution to this swelling list of evangelical literature will do much to restore confidence in the orthodox position concerning the New Testament literature. A more useful commentary on Paul’s letters to the church at Thessalonica could hardly be found.

WICK BROOMALL

Reliable Introduction

Second Thoughts on the Dead Sea Scrolls, by F. F. Bruce. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1956. $2.50.

This is just the book to give to the layman who wishes a trustworthy introduction to the now famous Dead Sea Scrolls. The interest which these scrolls has aroused in the public mind is nothing short of remarkable. It is probably no exaggeration to say that they are the most significant archeological discovery of the last thirty years. Inasmuch as this is so, many of the books (and the number of such books is rapidly growing) which discuss the scrolls may tend to overemphasize their importance for the study of the beginnings of Christianity. It cannot be denied that much that has been written on the subject borders on the nonsensical.

If there is any one word which can characterize the present work it is the word “sane.” Professor Bruce gives a remarkably clear and valuable survey of the whole field, and in all his discussion seeks to abide by the facts. He goes as far as the facts allow and no farther. He makes it clear that he is acquainted with the various interpretations of disputed points which have been advanced, but he himself is not interested in pressing them. He is fair in his discussions, and seeks to withhold judgment when judgment must be withheld. For this reason primarily that his work is dependable.

The book is written in a pleasing style, and is well adapted to the layman who is not acquainted with the various technical questions which a proper study of the scrolls involves. One who reads through this work carefully will have a good understanding of the principal points in debate in connection with the scrolls, and he will be prepared for further study. To produce such a book is no easy task, and it is this reviewer’s opinion that the author has done his job in a first-rate fashion.

The principal point at which we are constrained to disagree with the author is in his evaluation of the importance of the Isaiah manuscript with respect to the question of the origin of the prophecy. Professor Bruce thinks that this newly discovered manuscript proves nothing that was not already known. For our part we believe that the manuscript is of unique significance. It makes clear that the book of Isaiah existed in its present form as early as the second century before Christ. Thus it stands as a monumental NO to the views of Bernhard Duhm, the influential German scholar who held that the prophecy did not receive its present form until the first century B.C. This is not a minor point, but one of tremendous importance. For, if there is a first and a second Isaiah, as the overwhelming majority of modern biblical critics affirm, then the witness of the New Testament to the authorship of the prophecy is clearly in error. The Dead Sea manuscript supports the New Testament, and it also renders more difficult attempts to explain the origin of the book of Isaiah on any view other than that of the Bible itself, namely, that Isaiah was himself the author of the entire prophecy.

If the reader wishes a clearly written, accurate, informative introduction to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, this is the book to obtain.

EDWARD J. YOUNG.

Theology

Review of Current Religious Thought: April 01, 1957

Philip Edgcumbe Hughes

The question of the relationship between the Church and the State remains a perennial problem for the Christian. Four hundred years ago at the time of the Reformation the principle in England was that of one State, one Church, so that every Englishman was regarded as a member both of the State and of the Church. One thing that history has taught us is that everybody cannot be forced into the same ecclesiastical mould and that between fellow-Christians there must be room for conscientious differences of judgment and practice where forms of worship are concerned. Failure to recognize this on the part of the authorities in England led to the hazardous sailing of the Pilgrim Fathers for the New World in the search of that freedom. Subsequently, as toleration gained ground, the Free Churches came into being—free, that is, or independent of official connection with the State-while the Church of England continues to this day to maintain its historic bonds with this Protestant realm of England.

The Rev. Edward Rogers, a Methodist minister, writing in the January issue of The London Quarterly and Holborn Review on the subject of “Christians and the Modern State,” speaks of industrialization, urbanization, centralization and secularization as the four distinctive features of the modern State, and asserts that the Christian, “simply because he is a Christian, confronts the State in two inseparably related ways,” as one who, “whatever the social or political order, … must seek to live by faith and love. The political order,” he says, “may be corrupt or cruel, the economic order unjust and the moral code of society debased. Nevertheless, he will be generous and just, truthful and honest, kind and forbearing.”

We are reminded that political liberty is “a rare and precious thing, hardly won and easily lost” and that it “demands and depends upon men and women of integrity and charity, ready to acknowledge that they are their brother’s keepers.” It is, in fact, the believing Christian who is “the preserver of sound values in a society that would otherwise decay.” Mr. Rogers points to loneliness and a slackening of the social ties that strengthen life as resulting from living in the modern State. These deficiencies, it is true, are made good by church life, which offers “fellowship and shared responsibilities.” Saying this, however, he makes the following very salutary comment on what has come to be known as the social gospel: “What went wrong with the ‘social gospel’ in the generation immediately past was that it put ‘social’ first, and a diluted gospel second. Men and women of noble intention strove to implement the Sermon on the Mount while pushing into the background the Cross and the Resurrection—and found that their fine phrases and benevolent exhortations splashed ineffectively on the rocks of sin.”

Who will not agree with his conclusion that the doctrine of the sovereignty of God is “a doctrine desperately needed to check the blasphemous and destructive doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of the State”; for the State “is the servant of God, not the master of men?”

The dualistic doctrine that the care of the State extends only to the body and the care of the Church only to the soul is described as “entirely unchristian” in an article on “Church and State” in the January–March number of The Church Quarterly Review by C. H. Glasson, who, appropriately enough, is a lay member of the Church of England and also a civil servant. He affirms that the Church “will continue to assert that it is different in kind from other voluntary organizations,” and that it “will not even consent to reserve its gospel for its members, as Freemasons do the oddities they indulge in.”

Regarding the function of the Church of England as the “established” church of the realm, Mr. Glasson is of the opinion that its disestablishment would weaken both itself and also the Free Churches. He imagines that there are few Christians who would be glad to see the sovereign profess no religion or the proceedings of Parliament open without a prayer—with the exception of the Roman Church, which, he pointedly observes, is “the one nonconformist body which might have cause for satisfaction.”

In a consideration of the politics of the Church of Rome. He draws our attention to the fact that in the Roman Missal there are prayers whose design is the undoing of the work of the Reformation; that in it the English are spoken of as having been “the dowry of the blessed virgin Mary and subjects of Peter,” and that among the Bidding Prayers for Good Friday there is the distinctly political note, under the heading “For the Emperor,” explaining that this prayer is “omitted, the Holy Roman Empire being vacant.”

Mr. Glasson warns—that the Roman Church is far from having abandoned its political objectives. “In this country [England],” he says, “it plays the role of a minority, biding its time. If it were as strong in England as our Church now is, the State would be forced to define more or less regularly its relationship to it. The State would, ultimately, have not merely to define relationships with its own subjects in their church but with a foreign power.” And that, he adds, is “from the national point of view, the most significant difference between the Roman Church and our own.” Past history shows that English Roman Catholics have been relieved of their duty of loyalty under papal direction. But we are rightly admonished that these are political issues which by no means belong only to the dead past. Evidence of this is provided by citing the well known Roman Catholic writer and apologist Jacques Maritain, who “can still defend the old thesis of the Elizabethan Jesuits that excommunication of a Prince by Rome relieves the subject of all duty of obedience, and that a Pope is indeed a temporal sovereign because if he were not he could not avoid being a subject.”

The political aims and ambitions of the Roman Catholic Church are no less total and arrogant than are those of Communism. The Church-State connection in England is designed to ensure, amongst other things, a Protestant succession to the throne and security from a relapse into a state of subjection to the absolute tyranny of a foreign potentate claiming unrestricted authority over the souls and bodies of men. These ends are thoroughly desirable, but it must always be remembered that the only effective safeguard against the domination of darkness, whether civil or ecclesiastical or both, is the promotion of that vital evangelical religion whereby men’s hearts and minds are enlightened and liberated by obedience to the Word of God which liveth and abideth for ever.

This review of live spiritual and moral issues debated in the secular and religious press of the day is prepared successively for CHRISTIANITY TODAY by four evangelical scholars: Professor William Mueller of the United States, Professor G. C. Berkouwer of the Netherlands, Professor John H. Gerstner of the United States and Rev. Phillip Hughes of England.

Cover Story

Christianity and the Sense of Tragedy

W. Stanford Reid

The feeling that life is fundamentally tragic seems to be common to the human race. The tendency toward death, frustration and what Carlyle has called “the inane” seems for most men to be the dominant theme of earthly existence. True, in times of expansion, of economic and social improvement, men have usually become optimistic, declaring this to be the best possible world and that every day in every way we are getting better and better. But let there be ever so slight a “recession” and the immediate change of tone in the chorus of optimism becomes very noticeable. The sense of tragedy very soon reasserts its rule over the human heart and mind.

That this is so is seen early in the history of civilization and culture. To the Greeks, for instance, the highest type of dramatic art, that which most truly portrayed life, was tragedy. Aristotle held that such representation performed a catharsis in those who witnessed it, enabling them to project themselves into the situation depicted in the drama. By so doing, they would be able to evaluate and overcome the catastrophic in their own lives. Here, as in much Eastern thinking, the black tragedy of man’s existence is taken for granted.

The Forms Of Tragedy

To the Greek dramatist, whether Sophocles, Euripedes or another, tragedy had one of three principal forms. The hero might find himself in conflict with society and its conventions, the result being virtual outlawry and death. Such an end, however, was not so tragic as that of the man who dared to fight with the gods. If he attempted this, his end was foreordained, for the gods would crush him with the weight of their roaring thunderbolts. In an even worse plight was the man in conflict with himself. There lay the deepest depth of tragedy, for such a one was not only the victim but also his own prosecutor and judge.

Thus, in Greek thought, anyone worthy of the name of man was obliged to enter into one form of conflict or other. As an individual he had to face the demands of society, religion or even his own human nature. One answer he could offer to these demands was submission, but by giving this answer he really ceased to be an individual and a man. This was slavery. On the other hand, he could go his own independent way, a way leading inevitably to a conflict ending only in defeat. But having fought a good fight, he would go down with his flag flying. Here was the gloriously tragic moment of life.

Such an approach to life assumes, of course, a whole philosophy or world-and-life view. It holds that life is fundamentally void, for man is destined to defeat and consequently to hopelessness. The hero is one who does not really overcome but who faces life defiantly and, by maintaining his own individual integrity, transmutes defeat into true victory. This is the tragedy which underlies all of life, for it reveals the ultimate vanity of all human endeavor.

It is upon this tradition that the great Western dramatists have built. This theme lies at the heart of Milton’s Samson Agonistes, which the author prefaced with a discussion of Aristotle and his views of the tragic. Corneille and Racine both followed the same pattern. Only Shakespeare at first appears to be different, but he too in King Lear, Macbeth or Othello, while perhaps more psychologically profound, follows the same well-worn path. Whether it be man’s fatuous love, his pride or his lust, they all lead to a destruction which he can only resist, daring the gods to strike him down with their searing darts of lightning.

Bleakness In Modern Life

Nor has our thinking changed much in our own day and age. We, who would seem to have good reason for optimism, particularly if we live in the Western Hemisphere, might well be excused for a certain buoyancy of outlook. Yet, on every hand, tragic bleakness seems to dominate. Robert Louis Stevenson commented more than once on this fact, and the parade of great novelists and writers only bears him out too well. Dreiser, Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Proust, Dylan Thomas and many others continually point up the fact that life is essentially calamitous. Going even further, historian-philosophers, such as Spengler and Toynbee, declare that civilizations, like the individual, can end only in tragic death.

One may, of course, object that this attitude is a product of extreme intellectualism. It is the fate of the university professor, rather than of the man in the street. Yet is this true? Is it not true that it is part and parcel, not merely of Western, but of human thought? How often have we heard it prophesied in the past few years that there will be a third world war, and that this war will bring about the end of all things! Man seems to accept it as axiomatic that he will eventually bring himself to destruction, perhaps because of his very efforts to survive. In a hostile universe he can look forward to nothing but ultimate disaster. Despite all that he does, the universe will ultimately run down, bringing man’s hard-won achievements in art, science, religion and war to nothing. There is the ultimate tragedy.

And what practical effect does this have upon men? They see no value to life. They make money, they amass power, they build up a reputation. But where does it all lead? There is nothing beyond, for death ends all, and frustration is the common lot of man. Out of this situation come inner tensions, which in turn lead to social conflicts. The individual in his drive, in his search for something beyond his own puny efforts, to make life mean something finds himself opposed by others with the same tensions and acquisitive desires. The result is war in the economic, political or international sphere, and this in turn destroys man and his glory, civilization, and their cultures, nations and their achievements. Man agrees that

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

Await alike the inevitable hour,

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Mirror Of Man’s Need

The Christian church in human society and the individual Christian as a member of society both have seriously to face this common interpretation of life. A mere glib “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world” sort of attitude does not solve the problem, nor overcome the difficulty. Does Christianity, therefore, have any real answer to, any effective argument against, the usual “philosophy of tragedy?” Or, does it simply admit that life is vanity of vanities about which man can do absolutely nothing?

In considering this matter, the Christian must of course realize that this belief in ultimate tragedy is a revelation of man’s need. As man becomes more self-conscious, so he becomes more “tragedy-conscious.” His sense of uncertainty and insecurity grows stronger as he more clearly sees his own smallness against the background of the universe. At times he has felt that he could govern all things by his reason, but before long, further knowledge has made him realize that he was dealing with something far beyond his power to control. Thus it has indeed been true that “he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (Eccles. 1:18).

To the Christian this is not unexpected. After all, when man frankly and bluntly refuses to acknowledge God as sovereign, he cannot expect anything else. A limited god, or no god at all, leaves the universe as the plaything of chance and the sport of conflicting currents of forces. In the circumstances, all that man can do is fight back at his environment, in the hope that some day in the future he may see victory—or oblivion. Man’s sin is thus at the root of his tragic sense.

Its Roots Are Deep

One may well ask then if Christianity sees no tragedy in life. Is Christianity a religion of facile optimism that goes its way without considering or caring for the emptiness which obviously lies so close to the surface of all human endeavor and activity? No, Christianity realizes that there is indeed a tragic side to life, but it believes that its roots lie deeper than most men realize.

The Christian bases his understanding of tragedy upon his belief in the doctrine fundamental to all Christian thought—God’s sovereignty. Because God is sovereign, he is the Creator, Sustainer and Ruler of all that is (John 1:3–5; 1 Cor. 8:6; Col. 1:16, 17). Indeed, he is more: the Redeemer of his people, sovereignly saving them by his grace (John 1:12 f.; 3:3, 6, 7, 16; Rom. 8:28 ff.; Eph. 1, 2). God is absolute in all things.

Yet although God’s sovereign goodness is so bountifully manifest in creation and providence, man continues in rebellion. Although God continually displays his kindness to man in providing what he needs in this life, man shows neither gratitude nor thanksgiving. He prefers to declare that all these things are attained by his own hard work, or even by chance. Completely egocentric, he ignores God, refusing the submission that he should offer (Rom. 1:19–20).

Nevertheless, the sovereign God continues by his providence to sustain and govern the rebel, not only providing him with those things which he needs, but even restraining the ravages of sin in his mind and body. Although man laughs in his face, God still keeps him in this life, for the rebel is utterly dependent, though he acknowledge it not, upon him.

As if this evidence of God’s goodness were not enough, he has entered into history speaking to men through the mouths of prophets and apostles, and calling upon them to return to him. Most important of all he entered into man’s world as man, in the person of Jesus Christ. And in the Incarnation, which led to his death on Calvary’s cross, he substituted himself for man, that he alone might bear the penalty of man’s continual and obstinate rebellion. Here was the supreme manifestation of divine sovereign grace.

The Rebellious Creature

Yet in spite of God’s infinite grace, in spite of all his calls to return, man pays little or no attention. Faced with the offer of the Gospel, he turns his back upon it, and we hear the tragic cry of the Savior: “How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not” (Matt. 23:37). Here is one aspect of the Christian sense of tragedy: the tragedy of the rebellious creature.

But there is another side to it, for Christ adds the words: “Behold your house is left unto you desolate.” The tragedy of life consists not only in man’s turning away from the call of the sovereign God but also in the fact that God in his just and righteous wrath may, and does, turn away from his rebellious creatures. This is tragedy indeed—the tragedy of Hell, far greater, deeper and more enduring than anything man can imagine: eternal death.

The Initiative Of Grace

Yet no Christian would ever admit that tragedy is the final word. For the Christian, tragedy is never the end, since God’s grace is as ultimate as his justice. Even though the Christian once rebelled and fought against God, in his infinite mercy and loving kindness God has laid hold upon him. He has sweetly wooed him back to himself, and hope has blotted out the feeling of vanity and emptiness.

The Christian, however, must continually emphasize that this has not happened because of his own willingness or desire to turn to God, but because God in Christ and through the Holy Spirit has taken the initiative.

Born again from above, “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13), God’s people turn to him in faith and obedience, knowing that they have been saved from black tragedy, by the sovereign grace of God alone.

Swallowed Up In Hope

The Christian cannot and does not seek to escape from the sense of tragedy in the world. But his view of tragedy is not the result of a sense of insecurity forced upon him by a world of chance. He sees tragedy in man’s continual rejection of the sovereign God of grace; but at the same time he also sees tragedy swallowed up in hope. Christ has died; yea, he has risen again and he offers salvation freely to all. Tragedy is not ultimate, for Christ lives and reigns as the Redeemer and Intercessor for all who come unto him by faith.

How does the Christian view affect one’s attitude toward life? For one thing, the Christian realizes that God has called him in this life to serve him. The Apostle Paul never tired of stressing this point when dealing with the individual members of the early Church, because it gave to even the humblest Christian a sense of vocation. God had summoned the Christian to service; therefore the Christian, even though a slave, was God’s freedman.

And out of this sense of calling comes a further result. The Christian’s work, feeble, sinful and ineffectual though it might be, if it is done honestly, faithfully and conscientiously, will redound to the glory of the sovereign God. Thus, even the humblest ditch digger can glorify God in his work. Moreover, this is not just for a day, or a year, but for all eternity, for “their works do follow them.” This destroys frustration, emptiness, tragedy. We are working for the eternal glory of the King of Kings.

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord” (1 Cor. 15:58).

END

Components

Dust … and clay …

and the voice of God.

Here is the Creator’s handiwork;

Here is dust … and clay.

The highest of all organisms,

yet of the earth.

The most complex of God’s creations:

Insignificant.

What good can come of dust …

and clay?

Dust of itself is nothing;

Clay—little more.

What then remains?

The voice of God.

DONALD CLAIR REAM

W. Stanford Reid teaches in Canada in the city of his birth, at McGill University, Montreal, where he is Associate Professor of History and Warden of Men’s Residences. He holds the Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania and is author of The Church of Scotland in Lower Canada, Economic History of Great Britain and Problems in Western Intellectual History since 1500.

Cover Story

Segregation and the Kingdom of God

E. Earle Ellis

Race relations is probably the most important problem agitating the Christian conscience today. Secular integrationists are calling upon the Church to speak to the problem—assuming that if it “spoke,” it would call for the solution that the integrationists demand. As a matter of fact the Church has spoken and is speaking, but it does not speak with one voice. The cleavage is particularly apparent if one avoids that un-Protestant confusion of the voice of the clergy with the “voice of the Church.” Since the Supreme Court decision of 1954, the issue has been focused in terms of “segregation” versus “integration.” Within this framework Christian integrationists champion their position as “the Christian way” and dismiss the views of segregationists as naive or prejudiced.

Most of the integrationist press treats the question as if all segregationist thinking stemmed from emotional, ignorant or ulterior motives. Religious periodicals, with some exceptions, tend to identify integration with Christianity and segregation with the forces of iniquity. This attitude is not just an oversimplification; it is a basic distortion of the issues. It identifies the principle of segregation with certain evils in segregation-in-practice. It illogically leapfrogs from the proposition, “Integration is concordant with Christian race relations,” to the contention, “Integration is necessary for Christian race relations.” Finally, it ignores the injustices present in integration-in-practice in the North, and the evil implicit in a consistent integrationist philosophy.

Note: In a 2018 editorial, CT highlighted this article as a leading example that “during this crucial era of American history, CT did not lead as much as reflect the moral ambiguity and confusion of that era’s white evangelical churches. Though today we champion racial justice as a vital component of Christian discipleship, we must acknowledge and repent of this part of our history.”

A Southern Point Of View

Few Southerners—certainly few Christians—will defend in toto segregation-in-practice in the South. Too often the color line has been viewed as horizontal rather than vertical; unchristian white men—like unchristian men everywhere—have used their racial status to bully or to prey upon the weaker group; and the slogan “separate but equal” has preserved the separate and forgotten the equal. The greatest sin of Christian segregationists has not been their individual relationship with Negroes but their indifference to chronic injustices within the dual social system. In the forties, Virginius Dabney and a number of other Southerners organized to correct some of these injustices within the segregation formula. Dabney cites the reason for their failure (American Magazine, August, 1956): “There was no cooperation from influential segments of Southern society. The result of such indifference was the removal of the Negro capital from Atlanta to New York and the shifting of Negro leadership from Southern moderates to Northern radicals.”

This is not the whole story however. Raymond Moley has correctly identified the two salient facts in the segregated South over the past half-century—the great progress of the Negro and the great improvement in racial attitudes. Within the segregation pattern the South has opened the door to the professions for the Negro, in some ways surpassing integrationist areas. In each of several Southern states, for example, there are as many Negro school teachers (receiving “equal pay” and in some areas a higher average pay) as in thirty-one Northern and Western states combined (cf. Dabney); segregated Meharry and Howard universities have provided more Negro doctors than all of the integrated institutions of the North. For several decades preceding the Supreme Court decision, inequities had declined and the business and professional strata of Negro society had increasingly developed. “In the South they have segregation,” replied a Mississippi Negro to his surprised Northern college professor, “but Southerners are kinder to Negroes than Northerners are.” Segregation does not necessitate bad race relations, nor does integration guarantee good ones. On the contrary, the very opposite often appears to be true.

It is sometimes asserted that segregation almost always is associated with domination of and discrimination against the weaker group. It would be more accurate, however, to say that whenever diverse groups have been associated under a political unit, whether on an integrated or a segregated basis, the tendency has been to discriminate against the weaker. This is true of some “integrated” minority groups in Europe today—a problem that finds a “segregation” solution in the political realm through racial, rather than merely geographical, representation in parliament. On the other hand, eastern Canada is an example of segregation equitably administered. The French and the English have separate schools and churches, move in their own social circles and maintain distinct cultural divisions in an attitude of mutual respect.

It is not unnatural that the Christian in the North should look askance upon segregation. He can see no good reason for it (the “melting pot” philosophy worked for the Poles and the Germans, why not for the Southerner and the Negro?); he weighs it in terms of individual discriminations, e.g., the inferior Negro school (a complaint passe in many areas) or the poorer Negro residential area; and he hears of it only in caricature. Emotional and sentimental factors are particularly strong where the problem can be solved by a slogan. It is no secret that the integration sentiment of most white Christians increases in direct proportion to their distance from the Negro as a group factor in society.

The integrationist, viewing the problem as one of “personal” exclusion, overlooks or denies the relevancy of treating it as a group relationship. Christians in the South have a different reality to face: There is de facto a biracial society with vast numbers of each group; cultural, sociological and psychological differences between the races are considerable. (Only a naive appraisal can reduce the problem to one of “skin color.”) Freedom of association, in the eyes of the South, is a liberty applicable to group as well as individual relationships. The white South desires—and holds it to be a right—to preserve its European racial and cultural heritage; this cannot be done if integration is enforced in social institutions, e.g., the schools. Intermarriage, whether in the 2nd generation or the 10th, is a question which, in Alistair Cooke’s phrase, “only the intellectual, the superficial and the foreigner far from the dilemma can afford to pooh-pooh” (Manchester Guardian Weekly, May 24, 1956). The soothsayer may confidently predict that this will not happen, or publicize as the “scientific” view (as though scientists were agreed on the matter) that racial differences are merely physical and environmental. The essential point is that the people who must live in the situation are convinced, for reasons sufficient for them, that integration will be destructive of their society, ultimately an evil rather than a good. (Compare H. R. Sass, “Mixed Schools and Mixed Blood,” The Atlantic, Nov., 1956.) And they are confident that, where the white and black races live together in considerable numbers, the concept of a dual society applying a principle of segregation in varying degrees according to the exigencies of particular situations will, when directed by a Christian conscience, provide the more equitable and harmonious relationship.

The master-servant relationship is passing in the South, and some modus vivendi is desperately needed to replace it. Segregation has the potential to develop into a partnership of mutual respect; this partnership can never arise from a judicial force bill which is intolerable to one of the groups. Southerners often wonder whether integrationists are as interested in good race relations as in forcing a particular kind of race relations. The unfortunate fact is that ardent Christian integrationists, however conscientious, are one cause of the worsening race relations in the South today. Their moral superiority complex, their caricature of the segregationist as an unchristian bigot and their pious confession of the sins of people in other sections of the country have not been wholly edifying.

Segregation in America is, and should be, a fence not a wall, a division with many openings. In former years in the South the writer occasionally visited colored churches and enjoyed their fellowship in an atmosphere of Christian love; they on occasion visited his. At that time segregation was the norm, recognized and approved by both groups; yet it was no bar to friendship or fellow ship in many areas. Then came the integrationist, a self-righteous harbinger of a “new world a-comin,” pounding his pulpit drum and condemning all opposition to Gehenna. The outlines of his new world have come: and what is the cause of the growing resentment, fear, animosity and discord? Why, the segregationist, of course!

Across The Ohio

Whatever appeal integration has for Southern Negroes, it has been produced by the current identification of everything bad with segregation and everything good with integration. Even to the more sophisticated outside the South the word still casts a spell, but some of its luster no doubt has faded. They came north to the promised land, but they crossed the river to find it wasn’t Jordan at all but only the Ohio. In the North Negroes are integrated—at the bottom. There are exceptions, of course, but by and large integration-inpractice is full of discriminations: A Negro student sometimes cannot fulfill his requirements because no integrated school will accept him for student teaching. In Negro sections business and professional services are largely in the hands of whites. There is no “separate but equal” formula to equalize facilities between “white” New Trier and Chicago’s “black” south-side schools.

If the 90-year integration experiment in the North had produced a just and amicable relationship, it might be more attractive to the South. Actually, integration has most signally failed in just those areas which most nearly approximate—in population ratio—the Southern scene. The integrationist “blockbuster” approach is exemplified by Trumbull Park (Chicago) where Negroes were assigned to a white housing project. The result has been riot, race hatred and a 24-hour police guard for more than a year. In nearby Gary, Indiana, Andrew Means, a Negro contractor, using a segregationist approach, has built six Negro suburban-type communities. Race relations are good. Nevertheless, integrationists encounter a mental block at the suggestion that segregation has merit as a pattem-for-living in a multiracial society.

The Southerner can understand the sentimentalist, but the inconsistency of most integrationists is harder to comprehend. In the integrationist North, papers often censor local racial unrest (to prevent riot), then editorialize about immoral segregation in the South. When teaching Sunday School in Chicago’s “black” south side, the writer failed to encounter any homes of Christian integrationists. They live in “white” suburbs, send their children to “white” schools, and then travel through Negro areas to their editorial offices, professions and businesses where they expatiate against segregation. Sometimes they favor admitting a Negro to their suburb if he is the “right kind” of Negro. A Christian friend of the writer, quite integration-conscious, mentioned having had Negro dinner guests. “Of course,” he added, “they were clean and educated—no one like Isaac (our janitor).” Is this the fulfillment of New Testament ethics?

The point is not that the integrationist would defend integration-in-practice in the North. But in condemning the segregationist’s failure to achieve a “separate and equal” society, the integrationist fails to realize the implication of his own failure to achieve a “mixed and equal” society. This failure hardly recommends integration as “the solution” to racial discrimination and animosity—a goal that both groups seek. If Southern Christian leaders can do no better than to follow the integrationist approach of their brothers to the North, the future is less than bright.

And The Kingdom Of God

Both integrationists and segregationists are extremely eager to quote God as on their side. However, the Scriptures most frequently used, the “curse of Ham” argument in Genesis and the “one blood” argument in Acts, are irrelevant. The New Testament does indeed picture all Christians as being united. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, free nor slave, rich nor poor, educated nor ignorant, clean nor dirty, black nor white (cf. Gal. 3:28; Col. 3:11). But in New Testament Christianity this is a unity in diversity, a unity which transcends differences and works within them, but never a unity which ignores or denies differences or necessarily seeks to erase them. The servant is no less a servant, the master no less a master; the rich no less rich, and the poor no less poor. The New Testament ethic is not “we are the same, there is no difference; we are equal, therefore I love you” but rather “we are not the same, we are not equal in many ways; but I love you and desire your good.” The Gospel was not primarily to change the pattern of society, but to bring to bear new motives and new attitudes within the pattern. It is true that Christianity effected changes in the pattern, but its approach was totally different from the integrationist’s philosophy today.

Integration as a moral imperative has its roots in a secular view of the Kingdom of God in which the Kingdom is identified with the church and ultimately with the society of this world, and is to be brought in by social reforms. For the New Testament, however, whatever its manifestation within the Christian community is, the Kingdom of God is never to be identified with or find its consummation in a this-world society. (Compare T. W. Manson, The Teaching of Jesus, p. 134; E. Stauffer, New Testament Theology, p. 196.) Even within the church the differences between individuals and/or groups are not done away. Paul and Barnabas came to the conclusion that in certain circumstances their best unity lay in separation (Acts 15:36–46). Jewish and Gentile Christians differed in many practices, e.g., the observance of the Sabbath and other Old Testament laws (Rom. 14:5, 6; Acts 18:18; 21:23 ff), differences that ultimately resulted in “ecclesiastical” separation. Not only does the Apostle not view these differences as sinful, but he rather insists on the right of the groups to continue in them (Gal. 2:5; Rom. 14). In other words, the unity of Christians does not necessarily mean a physical “togetherness” or organizational conformity; the Kingdom in the church does not negate the church’s relation to the social customs of the world and of the churches: The same Paul who said that there was neither male nor female in Christ also instructed women to be silent in church (cf. 1 Cor. 11:4; 14:34).

The creed of consistent integrationist Christians could be summed up in the phrase, “the right to belong”; and their heresy, “the refusal to belong.” In their minds “togetherness” is a good, exclusiveness an evil. God—whatever else he is—is certainly “democratic”; segregation is “undemocratic” and therefore immoral.

Only when one applies the philosophy of integration consistently—thankfully most integrationists are not consistent—can he see its full implications. In Christ there is no rich nor poor; therefore, says the economic integrationist, we must integrate society through Christian socialism to eliminate evil class distinctions. It is wrong, cries the political integrationist, to discriminate against a man because of “an accident of birth”—birth in a foreign country; world government and world citizenship are the answers to this wrong. The ecclesiastical integrationist intones: denominations are evil per se, they divide us; we must fulfill Christ’s prayer “that they may be one” by uniting in the “coming great church.” Segregation is discrimination, concludes the racial integrationist, and “de-segregation” is its cure.

The argument for racial integration and the use of governmental force to implement it is a part of a pattern that is very evident in other areas of life. (And how often the voices in the argument vaguely remind one of voices heard at other times, on other issues.) It is a bad argument. Christian communism does not yield a good economic relationship; the “one church” organization does not give true Christian unity; cultural leveling does not produce a common bond of friendship; integration does not alleviate racial animosity and injustice. Further, it is an argument that is ethically anemic: in the name of equality it destroys the liberty of individuals and groups to live and develop in associations of their own preference; in the name of unity it points with undeviating insistence toward authoritarianism and conformity, eschewing the inherent sin root in human society with its inevitable consequence: power corrupts and total power corrupts totally.

If the Kingdom of God as a monolithic homogeneous structure is the goal of Christian ethics—if national, economic, cultural, racial, ecclesiastical distinctions are to be abolished as “immoral,” then the integrationist argument is sound. But if the Kingdom of God is seen as intersecting—and yet above—a this-world framework, compatible with—and yet superseding—the many and varied distinctions in this present age; then segregation is, in principle, an equally valid answer. And in practice it is much more compatible with liberty. Christian integrationists are patently sincere in the path they are forging, but the road signs along that path sometimes remind one more of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than of the New Testament’s Kingdom of God.

A native of Florida, E. Earle Ellis holds the B.S. degree from the University of Virginia, the M.A. and B.D. degrees from Wheaton College Graduate School and the Ph.D. from University of Edinburgh. His dissertation, “Paul’s Use of the Old Testament,” has just been published. He is Assistant Professor of Bible and Religion at Aurora College, Illinois.

Cover Story

The Spirit in the Old Testament

J. G. S. S. Thomson

In the Old Testament the Spirit operates in two spheres: in the realm of nature and in the life of man. In nature, the Spirit is depicted as an agent who creates (Gen. 1:2; Job 26:13; Isa. 32:15) and who sustains what has been created (Ps. 104:30; Job 34:14). This serves to remind us not only that God created the world, but that the principle that animates nature is not a blind, unreasoning force. The Spirit is not mere physical energy but is life-breathing, vitalizing what God the Father created through the Word (cf. John 1:1–3; Heb. 11:3).

The Old Testament presents this same Spirit as present in the life of man and active at four different levels of man’s personality.

“The Lord God … breathed into his [man’s] nostrils the breath of life,” and in virtue of this “man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7). “The Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life” (Job 33:4). The purely physical human organism is vitalized by the breath of God.

Elsewhere in the Old Testament the spirit of man appears as the animating principle, but this does not conflict with the Genesis account of man’s creation. For the vitalizing power that is the Spirit of God belonged to man, and could, therefore, properly be called the spirit of man (Job 27:3; Ps. 104:29 f.). Both views teach that the life that animates the physical organism results from God’s communication of his spirit.

Now it is this Spirit in man—or, if you will, it is man’s spirit—that distinguishes him from the beast and imparts a unique pre-eminence to man. This is the Old Testament explanation of a self-evident fact.

This Spirit in man is the special gift of God, and constitutes also the source of righteousness, wisdom and morality in man, placing him in a relation with God that is unshared by the animal world.

If it be argued that the terms in Genesis 2:7 are used also in Genesis 6:22, in reference to the animal world in general, it may be pointed out that Genesis 1:27 introduces a factor which distinguishes man absolutely from the rest of animate creation. In addition to his being animated by the Spirit of God, man is created “in the image of God.” These two phenomena—his being created in the image of God, and his being vitalized by the Spirit of God—are not, however, two distinct factors in the nature of man. This spiritual quality of man’s physical organism proclaims his original creation in the divine image.

It may also be argued that some of man’s higher faculties manifest themselves in animals. But even there we find an unbridgeable gulf between man and animals. In man these faculties are conjoined with self-conscious reason; in animals this conjunction is absent. And the conjunction in man is not the result of an evolutionary process but of the inbreathing of God of his Spirit into man. It is this that makes man a spiritual, self-conscious being, capable of communing with God and reflecting something of the character of God. It is the root of man’s rationality and morality. It is man’s inmost self, the essence of his manhood. And this image of God in man did not disappear with the fall. It is handed on to posterity (Gen. 5:1, 3; 9:6) and is the possession of all men in varying degrees.

But this concept of man’s physical organism vitalized by the Spirit of God portrays but the beginning of the Spirit’s activity in the human personality. The Old Testament depicts the Spirit also as the source of man’s mental life, creative faculties, ineradicable moral sense and capacity for knowing and communing with God. Let us consider these elements in turn.

The Spirit And Man’s Mental Life

When God breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life, he not only vitalized the human organism but he made man a living soul. This implies not merely animation but intelligence. “There is a spirit in man; and the breath of the Almighty giveth them understanding” (Job 32:8). The Spirit is indissolubly linked, in the Old Testament, with the intellectual element in man (cf. Exod. 28:3; 31:3; 35:31; Deut. 34:9). This conjunction is even clearer in the Septuagint, which speaks of “a divine spirit of wisdom, and understanding and knowledge” (Exod. 31:3; 35:3) and of “the spirit of wisdom and perception” (Exod. 28:3). When this “divine spirit of wisdom” became operative in man, intellectual powers, unique among created beings, were manifested.

The Old Testament gives us several examples of such manifestation. Joseph’s discernment and wisdom and his ability to interpret dreams are said to be due to his being “a man in whom the Spirit of God is” (Gen. 41:38 f.). Moses was given the Spirit to help him bear “the burden of his people” (Num. 11:17), i.e., to enable him to dispense judgment at the tribunal (Exod. 18:22 f.), a task requiring the use of the critical faculties to an unusual degree. The seventy elders were also given the Spirit to enable them to assist Moses in guiding and governing the people (Num. 11:16 f.). Bezaleel, the chief artificer in constructing the Tabernacle, was also filled with the Spirit of God, in virtue of which he had the ability to devise complicated designs, execute work in various metals and carve in stone and wood (Exod. 31:2 ff.). Bezaleel’s chief assistant and all the workmen under their direction also shared in this artistic skill, which had its source in the Spirit of God (Exod. 35:30–36:2).

Clearly then, the Old Testament teaches that the Spirit of God, who originated the personal life of man, is also the source of man’s intellectual life; and that where the Spirit is allowed to act in a special degree, outstanding powers manifest themselves. This means that our reason is not completely other than the divine reason. Reason in man is that which feels, wills and apprehends goodness; and God, not being pure reason, also wills, and feels and cares. But it is the Spirit of God which in the divine nature feels (Mic. 2:7), thinks (Isa. 40:13 f.) and acts ethically (Ps. 143:10); and it is this same Spirit in man who feels and thinks, and apprehends goodness.

The Spirit And Man’s Moral Life

In two passages in the Old Testament the Spirit is called the Holy Spirit, Psalm 51:11 and Isaiah 63:10 f. Now, if to this additional fact concerning the nature of the Spirit we conjoin the fact of the divine Spirit’s presence in man, then moral life in man becomes not merely a possibility but a human necessity.

In Proverbs 20:27, “the spirit of man” (which means the Spirit of God in man) is described as “the lamp of the Lord,” whose function is to “search the innermost parts” of man. This is probably a reference to conscience, the inner mentor that tests a man’s motives and feelings, thoughts and actions by God’s law, approving some, condemning others, as they agree or disagree with that criterion. In other words, this divine Spirit who is the principle of life in man and the source of his intellectual gifts is also present as “a moral witness against sin.”

If the rendering of Genesis 6:3 in the Authorized Version—“My Spirit shall not always strive with man”—can be maintained, then here also the divine Spirit appears as a moral witness in man against his sin. Indeed, even if the Hebrew be rendered “rule,” or “judge,” in man, its ethical significance would still be apparent.

What we today would describe as a guilty conscience was explained in the Old Testament in terms of the activity within man of an evil spirit from, or of, the Lord (1 Sam. 16:14; 18:10; 19:9). In 1 Samuel 16:3, this spirit is spoken of as “a spirit of God.” These verses have particular reference to King Saul, and indicate that his guilty conscience had sprung into life through a divine agent that was tormenting his spirit through its accusations. A guilty conscience, a sense of sin, is somehow connected with the activity of a supernatural spiritual agency. This is another aspect of the Old Testament conviction that a moral sense in man is produced by the Spirit of God.

The divine Spirit’s connection with man’s moral life is further established in later Old Testament writings where the word “spirit” connotes in man a fixed state of mind, a permanent attitude of heart, a man’s character. The predominating feature of a man’s disposition may be pride (Eccles. 7:8), haughtiness (Prov. 16:18), quick temper (Eccles. 7:9), humility (Prov. 16:19), patience (Eccles. 7:8) or faithfulness (Prov. 11:13), but in every case the outstanding failure of the character is described as a spirit.

The Spirit And Man’s Religious Life

The presence of the Spirit in man must, of necessity, be significant for his religious life for two reasons. It is the Spirit in man that links him to God, and creates the capacity to know, and commune with, God (Isa. 26:9). And it is the Spirit in man that makes him a moral being, and enables God to lay moral demands upon him. But man as a sinful, fallen creature cannot fulfill these moral demands. He requires a power not native to himself to enable him to respond to moral demands from which he cannot escape.

This is what Ezekiel undoubtedly recognized when he gave God’s epoch-making promise: “I will put a new Spirit within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them a heart of flesh: that they may walk in my statues, and keep mine ordinances, and do them: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God.… I have poured out my Spirit upon the house of Israel” (11:19 f.; 39:29; cf. 36:26 f.); Jeremiah’s reference to the New Covenant (31:33 f.) carries the same theme.

Here is something new in the Old Testament’s teaching on the relations between man and the Spirit in the religious life. It anticipates a revolutionary change in man’s nature involving such an invasion of spiritual power and such a renewal of character that it would amount to a rebirth in man’s experience. This conception had to wait till Pentecost for fulfillment. If Joel, Jeremiah and Ezekiel were dealing with actual spiritual experience, then at best their words could have meaning only for a few choice souls in Israel.

Even the change of heart promised to King Saul (1 Sam. 10:6, 9) was clearly not of this striking moral or spiritual nature. It was not yet the time of fulfillment of Moses’ yearning cry: “Would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put his Spirit upon them!” (Num. 11:29). Moral reformation there was, but not spiritual regeneration. The Spirit was still only the source of moral goodness, not the Agent of the birth that is from above.

But this must not lead to undue depreciation of the conception of the Spirit’s activity in the religious life of man in the Old Testament. Sufficient justice must be done to the fact that in the Old Testament the Spirit of God is the Holy Spirit. Why must the tide “Holy Spirit” (Ps. 51:11; Isa. 63:10 f.) be interpreted to mean that holiness is not to be predicated of the Spirit per se, that the Spirit is holy only because the Spirit is the Spirit of the God of holiness? Old Testament saints would be able to predicate holiness of the Spirit because in their experience, limited though it must have been, the Spirit produced holiness of life. It was the Spirit who implanted in the heart “the fear of the Lord” (Isa. 11:2), “righteousness” (Isa. 32:15–17) and a penitent and prayerful spirit (Zech. 12:10).

In the Old Testament the most spectacular evidence of the Spirit in the religious life of man is seen in the experience of the prophets. Through them the Lord communicated his word (Zech. 7:12), and to them he revealed his secrets (Amos 3:7). The Spirit was the power in which the prophet proclaimed his message (Mic. 3:8). It was natural, therefore, that the prophet should be known in Israel as “the man that hath the Spirit” (Hos. 9:7).

It is significant too that one of the chief results of the universal outpouring of the Spirit in New Testament times would be that its recipients would prophesy (Joel 2:28). Obviously, then, the Spirit was the main factor in this phenomenon of Old Testament religious experience. What differentiated the true prophet from the false was precisely that the Spirit lifted up the former into fellowship with God, enabled him to understand, and then to communicate, the divine will to his fellows.

This surely is the only adequate explanation of the genuine inspiration that characterize the prophet’s writings, and which makes them a divine revelation. How otherwise explain the habit of the prophets in attributing their message, spoken or written, to the Spirit of God (2 Sam. 23:22; Ezek. 2:2; 3:24, etc.), and of Isaiah’s and Jeremiah’s constant use of the solemn phrase “thus saith the Lord”?

In A Greek New Testament

Language of high and laurelled Attic song,

Homer’s wide wings, and Plato’s cadences;

O trophied speech! Thy mightiest honor is

That God hath made of thee his human tongue.

—NATHAN R. WOOD

Professor J. G. S. S. Thomson served with the staff at New College, Edinburgh, while completing doctoral studies at University of Edinburgh. He specialized in Old Testament and cognate studies and served for eight years in Algeria, French North Africa, as a missionary among Arabic-speaking Moslems. He returned to Scotland as assistant in the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Languages, University of Edinburgh. He is now visiting associate professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Ga.

Cover Story

Come Before Winter

Clarence Edward Macartney

“Do thy diligence to come shortly unto me.… Do thy diligence to come before winter.”—2 Tim. 4:9, 21

Napoleon Bonaparte and the Apostle Paul are the most renowned prisoners of history. One was in prison because the peace of the world demanded it; the other because he sought to give to men that peace which the world cannot give and which the world cannot take away. One had the recollection of cities and homes which he had wasted and devastated; the other had the recollection of homes and cities and nations which had been blessed by his presence and cheered by his message. One had shed rivers of blood upon which to float his ambitions. The only blood the other had shed was that which had flowed from his own wounds for Christ’s sake. One could trace his path to glory by ghastly trails of the dead which stretched from the Pyrenees to Moscow and from the Pyramids to Mount Tabor. The other could trace his path to prison, death, and immortal glory by the hearts that he had loved and the souls that he had gathered into the Kingdom of God.

Napoleon once said, “I love nobody, not even my own brothers.” It is not strange, therefore, that at the end of his life, on his rock prison in the South Atlantic, he said, “I wonder if there is anyone in the world who really loves me.” But Paul loved all men. His heart was the heart of the world, and from his lonely prison at Rome he sent out messages which glow with love unquenchable and throb with fadeless hope.

When a man enters the straits of life, he is fortunate if he has a few friends upon whom he can count to the uttermost. Paul had three such friends. The first of these three, whose name needs no mention, was that One who would be the friend of every man, the friend who laid down his life for us all. The second was that man whose face is almost the first, and almost the last, we see in life—the physician. This friend Paul handed down to immortality with that imperishable encomium, “Luke, the beloved physician,” and again, “Only Luke is with me.” The third of these friends was the Lycaonian youth Timothy, half Hebrew and half Greek, whom Paul affectionately called “My son in the faith.” When Paul had been stoned by the mob at Lystra in the highlands of Asia Minor and was dragged out of the city gates and left for dead, perhaps it was Timothy who, when the night had come down, and the passions of the mob had subsided, went out of the city gates to search amid stones and rubbish until he found the wounded, bleeding body of Paul and, putting his arm about the Apostle’s neck, wiped the blood stains from his face, poured the cordial down his lips and then took him home to the house of his godly grandmother Lois and his pious mother Eunice. If you form a friendship in a shipwreck, you never forget the friend. The hammer of adversity welds human hearts into an indissoluble amalgamation. Paul and Timothy each had in the other a friend who was born for adversity.

Paul’s last letter is to this dearest of his friends, Timothy, whom he has left in charge of the church at far-off Ephesus. He tells Timothy that he wants him to come and be with him at Rome. He is to stop at Troas on the way and pick up his books, for Paul is a scholar even to the end. Make friends with good books. They will never leave you nor forsake you. He is to bring the cloak, too, which Paul had left at the house of Carpus, in Troas. What a robe the Church would weave for Paul today if it had that opportunity! But this is the only robe that Paul possesses. It has been wet with the brine of the Mediterranean, white with the snows of Galatia, yellow with the dust of the Egnatian Way and crimson with the blood of his wounds for the sake of Christ. It is getting cold at Rome, for the summer is waning, and Paul wants his robe to keep him warm. But most of all Paul wants Timothy to bring himself. “Do thy diligence to come shortly unto me,” he writes; and then, just before the close of the letter, he says, “Do thy diligence to come before winter.”

Why “before winter”? Because when winter set in the season for navigation closed in the Mediterranean and it was dangerous for ships to venture out to sea. How dangerous it was, the story of Paul’s last shipwreck tells us. If Timothy waits until winter, he will have to wait until spring; and Paul has a premonition that he will not last out the winter, for he says, “The time of my departure is at hand.” We like to think that Timothy did not wait a single day after that letter from Paul reached him at Ephesus, but started at once to Troas, where he picked up the books and the old cloak in the house of Carpus, then sailed past Samo-thrace to Neapolis, and thence traveled by the Egnatian Way across the plains of Philippi and through Macedonia to the Adriatic, where he took ship to Brundisium, and then went up the Appian Way to Rome, where he found Paul in his prison, read to him from the Old Testament, wrote his last letters, walked with him to the place of execution near the Pyramid of Cestius, and saw him receive the crown of glory.

Before winter or never! There are some things which will never be done unless they are done “before winter.” The winter will come and the winter will pass, and the flowers of the springtime will deck the breast of the earth, and the graves of some of our opportunities, perhaps the grave of our dearest friend. There are golden gates wide open on this autumn day, but next October they will be forever shut. There are tides of opportunity running now at the flood. Next October they will be at the ebb. There are voices speaking today which a year from today will be silent. Before winter or never!

I like all seasons. I like winter with its clear, cold nights and the stars like silver-headed nails driven into the vault of heaven. I like spring with its green growth, its flowing streams, its revirescent hope. I like summer with the litany of gentle winds in the tops of the trees, its long evenings and the songs of its birds. But best of all I like autumn. I like its mist and haze, its cool morning air, its field strewn with the blue aster and the goldenrod; the radiant livery of the forests—“yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red.” But how quickly the autumn passes! It is the perfect parable of all that fades. Yesterday I saw the forests in all their splendor, and Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

But tomorrow the rain will fall, the winds will blow, and the trees will be stripped and barren. Therefore, every returning autumn brings home to me the sense of the preciousness of life’s opportunities—their beauty, but also their brevity. It fills me with the desire to say not merely something about the way that leads to life eternal but, with the help of God, something which shall move men to take the way of life now, Today. Taking our suggestion, then, from this message of Paul in the prison at Rome to Timothy in far-off Ephesus—“Come before winter”—let us listen to some of those voices which now are speaking so earnestly to us, and which a year from today may be forever silent.

The Voice Which Calls For Reformation

Your character can be amended and improved, but not at just any time. There are favorable seasons. In the town of my boyhood I delighted to watch on a winter’s night the streams of molten metal writhing and twisting like lost spirits as they poured from the furnaces of the wire mill. Before the furnace doors stood men in leathern aprons, with iron tongs in their hands, ready to seize the fiery coils and direct them to the molds. But if the iron was permitted to cool below a certain temperature, it refused the mold. There are times when life’s metal is, as it were, molten, and can be worked into any design that is desired. But if it is permitted to cool, it tends toward a state of fixation, in which it is possible neither to do nor even to plan a good work. When the angel came down to trouble the pool at Jerusalem, then was the time for the sick to step in and be healed. There are moments when the pool of life is troubled by the angel of opportunity. Then a man, if he will, can go down and be made whole; but if he waits until the waters are still, it is too late.

A man who had been under the bondage of an evil habit relates how one night, sitting in his room in a hotel, he was assailed by his old enemy, his besetting sin, and was about to yield to it. He was reaching out his hand to ring the bell for a waiter, when suddenly, as if an angel stood before him, a voice seemed to say, “This is your hour. It you yield to this temptation now, it will destroy you. If you conquer it now, you are its master forever.” He obeyed the angel’s voice, refused the tempter and came off victorious over his enemy.

That man was not unique in his experience, for to many a man there comes the hour when destiny knocks at his door and the angel waits to see whether he will obey him or reject him. These are precious and critical moments in the history of the soul. In your life there may be that which you know to be wrong and sinful. In his mercy God has awakened conscience, or has flooded your heart with a sudden wave of contrition and sorrow. This is the hour of opportunity, for now chains of evil habit can be broken, which, if not broken, will bind us forever. Now golden goals can be chosen and decisions made which shall affect our destiny forever.

We like to quote those fine lines from the pen of the late Senator John J. Ingalls:

Master of human destinies am I!

Fame, love, and fortune on my footsteps wait.

Cities and fields I walk; I penetrate

Deserts and fields remote, and, passing by

Hovel and mart and palace, soon or late,

I knock unbidden once at every gate!

If sleeping, wake; if feasting, rise before

I turn away. It is the hour of fate,

And they who follow me reach every state

Mortals desire, and conquer every foe

Save death; but those who doubt or hesitate,

Condemned to failure, penury or woe,

Seek me in vain and uselessly implore—

I answer not, and I return no more.

We all recognize the truth of this in the things of this world, but in a far more solemn way it is true of the opportunities of our spiritual life. You can build a bonfire any time you please; but the fine fire of the Spirit, that is a different thing. God has his Moment!

We cannot kindle when we will

The fire that in the heart resides

The Spirit bloweth and is still;

In mystery the soul abides.

The Voice Of Friendship And Affection

Suppose that Timothy, when he received that letter from Paul asking him to come before winter, had said to himself: “Yes, I shall start for Rome; but first of all I must clear up some matters here at Ephesus, and then go down to Miletus to ordain elders there, and thence over to Colossae to celebrate the Communion there.” When he has attended to these matters, he starts for Troas, and there inquires when he can get a ship which will carry him across to Macedonia, and thence to Italy, or one that is sailing around Greece into the Mediterranean. He is told that the season for navigation is over and that no vessels will sail till springtime. “No ships for Italy till April!”

All through that anxious winter we can imagine Timothy reproaching himself that he did not go at once when he received Paul’s letter, and wondering how it fares with the Apostle. When the first vessel sails in the springtime, Timothy is a passenger on it. I can see him landing at Neapolis, or Brundisium, and hurrying up to Rome. There he seeks out Paul’s prison, only to be cursed and repulsed by the guard. Then he goes to the house of Claudia, or Pudens, or Narcissus, or Mary, or Ampliatus, and asks where he can find Paul. I can hear them say: “And are you Timothy? Don’t you know that Paul was beheaded last December? Every time the jailer put the key in the door of his cell, Paul thought you were coming. His last message was for you, ‘Give my love to Timothy, my beloved son in the faith, when he comes.’ ” How Timothy then must have wished that he had come before winter!

Before winter or never! “The poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always,” said Jesus when the disciples complained that Mary’s costly and beautiful gift of ointment might have been expended in behalf of the poor. “Me ye have not always.” That is true of all the friends we love. We cannot name them now, but next winter we shall know their names. With them, as far as our ministry is concerned, it is before winter or never.

In the Old Abbey Kirk at Haddington one can read over the grave of Jane Welsh the first of many pathetic and regretful tributes paid by Thomas Carlyle to his neglected wife: “For forty years she was a true and loving helpmate of her husband, and by act and word worthily forwarded him as none else could in all worthy he did or attempted. She died at London the 21st of April, 1866, suddenly snatched from him, and the light of his life as if gone out.” It has been said that the saddest sentence in English literature is that sentence written by Carlyle in his diary, “Oh, that I had you yet for five minutes by my side, that I might tell you all.” Hear, then, careless soul, who art dealing with loved ones as if thou wouldst have them always with thee, these solemn words of warning from Carlyle: “Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are, O think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of the moment, and all be made at last so mournfully clear and beautiful, when it is too late.”

On one of the early occasions when I preached on this text in Philadelphia, there was present at the service a student in the Jefferson Medical College (Dr. Arnot Walker, New Galilee, Pennsylvania). When the service was over he went back to his room on Arch Street, where the text kept repeating itself in his mind, “Come before winter.” “Perhaps,” he thought to himself, “I had better write a letter to my mother.” He sat down and wrote a letter such as a mother delights to receive from her son. He took the letter down the street, dropped it in a mailbox, and returned to his room. The next day in the midst of his studies a telegram was placed in his hand. Tearing it open, he read these words: “Come home at once. Your mother is dying.” He took the train that night for Pittsburgh, and then another train to the town near the farm where his home was. Arriving at the town, he was driven to the farm and, hurrying up the stairs, found his mother still living, with a smile of recognition and satisfaction on her face—the smile which, if a man has once seen, he can never forget.

Under her pillow was the letter he had written her after the Sunday night service, her viaticum and heart-ease as she went down into the River. The next time he met me in Philadelphia he said, “I am glad you preached that sermon, ‘Come Before Winter.’ ” Not a few have been glad because this sermon was preached. Let us pray that the preaching of it tonight shall move others to do that which shall make their hearts glad in the years to come.

Twice coming to the sleeping disciples whom he had asked to watch with him in the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ awakened them and said with sad surprise, “What, could ye not watch with me one hour?” When he came the third time and found them sleeping, he looked sadly down upon them and said, “Sleep on now, and take your rest.” One of those three, James, was the first of the twelve apostles to die for Christ and seal his faith with his heart’s blood. Another, John, was to suffer imprisonment for the sake of Christ on the isle that is called Patmos. And Peter was to be crucified for his sake. But never again could those three sleeping disciples ever watch with Jesus in his hour of agony. That opportunity was gone forever! You say, when you hear that a friend has gone, “Why, it cannot be possible! I saw him only yesterday on the corner of Smithfield and Sixth Avenue!” Yes, you saw him there yesterday, but you will never see him there again. You say you intended to do this thing, to speak this word of appreciation or amendment, or show this act of kindness; but now the vacant chair, the unlifted book, the empty place will speak to you with a reproach which your heart can hardly endure, “Sleep on now, and take your rest! Sleep! Sleep! Sleep forever!”

The Voice Of Christ

More eager, more wistful, more tender than any other voice is the voice of Christ which now I hear calling men to come to him, and to come before winter. I wish I had been there when Christ called his disciples, Andrew and Peter, and James and John, by the Sea of Galilee, or Matthew as he was sitting at the receipt of custom. There must have been a note not only of love and authority but of immediacy and urgency in his voice, for we read that they “left all and followed him.”

The greatest subject which can engage the mind and attention of man is eternal life. Hence the Holy Spirit, when he invites men to come to Christ, never says “Tomorrow” but always “Today.” If you can find me one place in the Bible where the Holy Spirit says, “Believe in Christ tomorrow,” or, “Repent and be saved tomorrow,” I will come down out of the pulpit and stay out of it—for I would have no Gospel to preach. But the Spirit always says, “Today,” never “Tomorrow.” “Now is the accepted time.” “Now is the day of salvation.” “Today if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” “While it is called Today.”

The reason for this urgency is twofold. First, the uncertainty of human life. A long time ago, David, in his last interview with Jonathan, said, “As thy soul liveth, there is but a step between me and death.” That is true of every one of us. But a step! What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

An old rabbi used to say to his people, “Repent the day before you die.”

“But,” they said to him, “Rabbi, we know not the day of our death.”

“Then,” he answered, “repent today.” Come before winter!

The second reason why Christ, when he calls a man, always says Today, and never Tomorrow, is that tomorrow the disposition of a man’s heart may have changed. There is a time to plant, and a time to reap. The heart, like the soil, has its favorable seasons. “Speak to my brother now! His heart is tender now!” a man once said to me concerning his brother, who was not a believer. Today a man may hear this sermon and be interested, impressed, almost persuaded, ready to take his stand for Christ and enter into eternal life. But he postpones his decision and says, “Not tonight, but tomorrow.” A week hence, a month hence, a year hence, he may come back and hear the same call to repentence and to faith. But it has absolutely no effect upon him, for his heart is as cold as marble and the preacher might as well preach to a stone or scatter seed on the marble pavement below this pulpit. Oh, if the story of this one church could be told, if the stone should cry out of the wall and the beam out of the timber should answer, what a story they could tell of those who once were almost persuaded but who now are far from the Kingdom of God. Christ said, Today! They answered, Tomorrow!

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

……..

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.

Once again, then, I repeat these words of the Apostle, “Come before winter”; and as I pronounce them, common sense, experience, conscience, Scripture, the Holy Spirit, the souls of just men made perfect, and the Lord Jesus Christ all repeat with me, “Come before winter!” Come before the haze of Indian summer has faded from the fields! Come before the November wind strips the leaves from the trees and sends them whirling over the fields! Come before the snow lies on the uplands and the meadow brook is turned to ice! Come before the heart is cold! Come before desire has failed! Come before life is over and your probation ended, and you stand before God to give an account of the use you have made of the opportunities which in his grace he has granted to you! Come before winter!

Come to thy God in time,

Youth, manhood, old age past;

Come to thy God at last.

In the weeks before Dr. Clarence Edward Macartney’s death on Feb. 20, Christianity Today inquired as to the internationally-famed preacher’s favorite sermon. Dr. Macartney, with characteristic modesty, could single out none for “greatness.” But he reminded the editors that many of his hearers have considered Come Before Winter, here printed, as their favorite. Elected moderator of the General Assembly in 1924 at the age of 45 after a nominating speech by William Jennings Bryan, Dr. Macartney led the evangelical witness in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. He was the author of over 50 books on religious and historical themes. One of Christianity Today’s contributing editors, he wrote the magazine when it was first projected: “I will be glad to serve as a contributing editor on Christianity Today. You have an impressive list of names, most of whom I know.… With the prayer that the Holy Spirit will bless this effort to advance the Kingdom of Christ.…”

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