Bible Text of the Month: John 14:6

Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh

unto the Father but by me (John 14:6)

Jesus here says: I am the means of coming to the Father (the way) in that I am the truth and the life.—F. L. Godet.

The three terms lay down the proposition that no other than Christ is the Mediator of eternal salvation with God in the Messianic kingdom, under three several characteristic aspects which are coordinated yet in such a way that the advance is made from the general to the particular.—H. A. W. Meyer.

Note as belonging to all three of these that remarkable: I am. We show a way, Christ is it. We speak truth, Christ is it. Parents impart life, which they have received, Christ is life. He separates himself from all men by that representation that he is not merely the communicator or the teacher or the guide, but that he himself is, in his own personal being, way, truth, life.—Alexander Maclaren.

The way without error, the truth without darkness, the life without end. The way in exile, the truth in counsel, the life in reward. All the words call us to Christ. Post me, per me, ad me, after me, by me, to me. After me, because I am truth; by me, because I am the way; to me, because I am life.—Thomas Adams.

The Way

I am the way. This is spiritually spoken of that union of the believer with Christ, which opens a way of approach to God, so that as Christ himself returns to the Father, the believer may follow in his footsteps and attain to the same place of glory and bliss.… Christ opens for all his followers a way to heaven, by the atoning efficacy of his blood. He is therefore figuratively declared to be the way, because he is thus the author of salvation to them that believe in him.—John J. Owen.

God did at the beginning assign us a path to walk in with him, even the path of innocency and exact holiness, in a covenant of works. This path, by sin, is so filled with thorns and briers, so stopped up by curses and wrath, that no flesh living can take one step in that path; a new way for us to walk in must be found out, if ever we think to hold communion with God. It is hid in Christ. All the world cannot, but by and in him, discover a path that a man may walk one step with God.—John Owen.

In the religious language of the Jews, it meant the path which a soul should follow in order to reach the true goal of its destiny; in order to be conformed to the will of God. Thus the Psalmist speaks of the way of the righteous, the right way, the way of God’s statutes, the way of truth, the way wherein I should walk, the perfect way; and the Book of Proverbs of the way of life; and Isaiah of the way of the just, the way of holiness, the way of peace; and Jeremiah of the good way, the one way, the way to Zion, the way which God would show; and Amos of the way of the meek; and Malachi of the way that the forerunner should prepare; and Zacharias of the way of peace into which the Day-star from on high would guide our feet.—H. P. Liddon.

The Truth

He does not say, “I teach the truth.” All teachers would at least wish to say that. He does not say, “I am the greatest teacher of truth that the world has seen.” That would have been true; but it would have fallen short, almost infinitely short, of the reality. He does say, “I am the Truth.” … His message is bound up indissolubly with his person; nay, he is his own message to the world. His language is intolerable or meaningless unless there exists such a person as he proclaims himself to be, and unless he is that person. In short, Christ is Christianity.—H. P. Liddon.

God himself is the first and only essential Truth, in whose being and nature the springs of all truth do lie. The counsels of God are the next spring and cause of all truth that is so declarative. Of them all the person of Christ is the sacred repository and treasury—in him are they to be learned. All their efficacy and use depend on their relation unto him. He is the centre and circumference of all the lines of truth—that is, which is divine, spiritual, and supernatural. And the beauty of it is presented to us only in his face or person.… So we are said to learn the truth as it is in Jesus (Eph. 4:21). And the knowledge of all evangelical sacred truth is, in the Scripture, most frequently expressed by the knowledge of him (John 8:19; 17:3; 2 Cor. 2:14; 4:5, 6; Eph. 1:16; Phil. 3:8, 19; 1 John 1:1, 2; 2:4, 13; 5:20; 2 Pet. 2:20).—John Owen.

But now where is this truth? I will tell you an apologue. Four friends parting inquired where they should find one another again; the water, the fire, the wind and the truth. Fire said, You shall be sure to find me in a flint stone. Water said, you shall be sure to find me in the root of a bulrush. Wind said, you shall be sure to find me amongst the leaves. But poor truth could appoint no certain place of meeting. What say you to Westminster Hall? Indeed, there is room enough, but small room for truth. What say you to the exchange? There be fair walks, but they may exchange away truth. Is she then in the courts? We behold there always the seat of truth, but not always truth in him that supplies that place. You would smile to find her in children and fools; yet they say, children and fools tell truth. But if it be childhood or folly to tell truth, I am sure we have but a few children, a few fools. Where then shall we find truth? I hope in the church, in the pulpits: oh God forbid else! yet often truth keeps only in the pulpit, and does not go down-stairs with the man, but stays there till his coming up again.… There is no certain place to find truth, but in the word of God; there let us seek her, there we shall find her. Now the God of truth give us the truth of God, in the knowledge of Jesus Christ.—Thomas Adams.

The Life

The life which believers derive from God is through Christ. He is that eternal word, by which all things were made on their first creation, and do still subsist. And he is made the basis of the second creation, in a wonderful way, becoming himself a creature; and so, the root of the new progeny is from heaven, the sons of God.… Man is knit to God in the person of Christ so close, that there is no possibility of dividing them anymore.—Bishop Leighton.

Though a man be physically a living man, i.e. his natural soul hath union with his body, yet his soul having no union with Christ, he is theologically a dead man (Luke 15:24; Col. 2:13). Alas, it deserves not the name of life, to have a soul serving only to season and preserve the body a little while from corruption; to carry it up and down the world, and only enable it to eat, and drink, and talk, and laugh and then die. Then do we begin to live, when we begin to have union with Christ, the fountain of life, by his Spirit communicated to us.—John Flavel.

Let us not deceive ourselves. Christ came not to free us from damnation only, but as an head, to infuse spiritual life into us, and to live in us by his Spirit. He came not only to purchase a life of glory for us, but likewise to live in us by his Spirit; and if he overcome for us, he will overcome in us; if he hath a life for us, he will have a life in us. The life Jesus must be manifested in us.—Richard Sibbes.

Only Mediator

Christ spans the distance between God and the sinner. Man would fain manufacture a ladder of his own, and by means of his resolutions and reformations, his prayers and his tears, climb up to God. But that is impossible.—A. W. Pink.

There is no choice. You must accept of him, or remain unreconciled and be cast into hell. Israel found but one path through the Red Sea; the church shall never find more than one way to the heavenly Canaan. Christ is the elect and beloved of the Father, the appointed medium of man’s approach, the designated channel of God’s communication.—Christmas Evans.

He is the medium through which intercourse is carried on between heaven and earth. Through him the love of God descends upon us, and through him our prayers, and thanksgiving, and all our holy services, ascend to God. He obtains for us all spiritual blessings. They are granted in consideration of his merit, and in answer to his request; and they are not dispensed immediately by the Father, but pass to us through the hands of his Son. The fountain of Divine love has found a channel, in which it flows to refresh and gladden the souls of the guilty and unworthy.—John Dick.

Korean Missions: Triumph and Shadow

L. Nelson Bell

No Christian can visit Korea and not be moved with a sense of deep gratitude to God for what he has done in that land. In no other field where Christian missions have had a reasonably adequate opportunity to work has there emerged a church of the strength and influence on the life of the nation as a whole comparable with that to be found in Korea.

Comparisons can be unwelcome for they are not always justified. But on any given Sabbath it has been estimated that more people worship in Seoul’s largest Presbyterian church than in all churches of that denomination in all of Japan. And this church is but one of over four hundred in that city, over half of which are Presbyterian. This may give a relatively true picture of the comparative impact which Christianity has made on these two nations.

Presbyterianism is strong in Korea because of the combined work of American, Australian and other missions of that denomination over the years. The Methodists, Baptists and others also have much to show for their work.

Reasons For Growth

Many factors have entered into the success of the Christian enterprise in Korea. They are a religious people, devout in worship and ready and anxious to hear. National frustration during the years of Japanese occupation may have driven some into the church for solace. In addition, exceedingly wise mission policies were adopted by the early missionaries. What is known as the “Nevius Plan” led to the establishing of a self-reliant national church, looking to the missions primarily for spiritual cooperation rather than for financial assistance.

Furthermore, the Korean Church has been a Bible-instructed church. For many years, during the cold winter months, centers of organized study were held in central locations. Here church officers and lay readers, men and women, would join in two or more months of intensive study. The courses were set up on a long-range basis so that Christians received comprehensive instruction over a period of several years. This led to probably the highest rate of spiritual literacy to be found.

The Korean Church has been a praying church. Even today almost all places of worship are open long before dawn and thousands of Christians resort to them to pray. That these buildings are unheated and the weather sub-freezing does not deter these earnest people.

Suffering too has taken its toll and borne its precious fruit. Because of their faith, thousands of pastors and other Christians have undergone imprisonment, torture and death. The Shrine issue, imposed by the Japanese, found hundreds of Korean pastors ready to endure prison and torture rather than violate their consciences. To them submission to the demands that they attend Shrine ceremonies involved an act of idolatrous worship and they were willing to suffer for conscience and principle’s sake.

Later even greater and more universal atrocities were perpetrated by the Communists who rightly considered the church and Christians their greatest source of opposition. At least five hundred pastors were martyred by the red invaders and tens of thousands of other Christians died because of their allegiance to Christ.

The Korean Church has been a generous church, Christians often giving far more than their tithe. Many bring an offering of rice each week, having taken a part of this major source of their diet and set it aside for the work of the Church.

Such faith and virile Christianity have resulted in churches scattered over the length and breadth of Korea. Prior to the taking over of the North by the Communists, the Church was particularly strong in that area. Reliable information today indicates that rigorous suppression has driven the church underground. Of great significance is the fact that there is a Christian church on an average of every three miles along the southern border of the DMZ (demilitarized zone) which stretches across Korea.

The present Korean government recognizes the significance and importance of the Christian movement through the appointment of Christian chaplains for the armed services. Prisons also have chaplains. Only under the Nationalist government on Taiwan (Formosa) does a similar situation exist in the Far East.

A Time Of Burden

But it would be wrong to imply that World War II, liberation from the Japanese, the arbitrary division of the country, the invasion of the South by the Communists with the attending loss of life and destruction of property and now the uneasy truce and the blight of economic instability, have not all combined to affect the church adversely. These things are taking their toll.

Prior to the communist invasion the population of Korea was more or less equally divided geographically. Today twenty-two million people live in the South, only six in the North. This influx of people from the North has brought its blessings and its serious problems. Many Christians have come South, men and women strong in the faith and willing to bear their witness. Literally hundreds of new churches have been started by and for these displaced persons and most of them are self-supporting.

But such wholesale transplanting of the population has been attended by serious economic problems. The North has been developed industrially and in that area there are rich reserves of iron, good coal and other minerals. The South has been largely the granary of the country. New industries are now being gradually developed but last year the entire exports were said to be only twenty million dollars. The refusal of the present government to accept normal economic relations with Japan is a handicap to both countries, particularly Korea. It is also encouraging wholesale smuggling from Japan.

The disruption of wars and their aftermaths are also to be noted in the life of the Church. Less emphasis is now laid on organized Bible study than formerly. Standards in some theological seminaries have been lowered until a graduate of a “night seminary,” of which there are many, is now accepted in the senior class and subsequently graduated.

Relief money and goods have been poured into Korea in recent years. Desperately needed at the beginning, the continued flow of help from the outside is in danger of having an adverse effect in the important realm of self-support and self-reliance. Also, seeing hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the country by the American government, some of which is obviously squandered and misused, seems to be creating a desire for more money from abroad, even in the work of the church.

It is of more than passing significance that an American administrator recently asked an experienced missionary to explain to him the “Nevius Plan,” with the candid admission, “We have made a mess of much of our relief program in this country.”

Experienced mission personnel in Korea seems united in the opinion that certain mission boards are now complicating the situation for the Korean Church by proposing a policy directly antithetical to the policy that was so largely responsible for the strong Church which exists in Korea today. The observation has been made by one missionary that the recipients of relief funds should never be the ones who administer those funds. Also, that any move to subsidize a church, be it in America or in Korea, is a “step backward, nor forward.”

Preacher In The Red

FOR PAGANS ONLY

The problem of making an early contact with newcomers to the city has always been a problem for me as a minister.

In my pastorate of the First Christian Church, Lynchburg, Va., I thought I was on the way to finding a solution when I obtained the names of all newcomers to the city each week from a merchant association.

I wrote each new resident a brief note of welcome. I urged them to join in the religious life of the city and I invited them to attend a morning or evening service of worship at my church.

Everything was going well until one day I received a letter of reply from one of the newcomers.

The letter read:

“Your letter expressing interest and welcome to us on our arrival here is very kind. I am sure that you did not note that I will be occupying the pulpit here in Fairview Heights Methodist Church each Sunday for both services, but nevertheless it is good to be welcomed. Trusting I may have the privilege of meeting you soon, and with best wishes, I am Sincerely, (signed) F. Lester Hylton.” COLBERT S. CARTWRIGHT Pastor, Pulaski Heights Christian Church, Little Rock, Ark.

Faith And The Future

What of the future? Korea is a land of uncertainties. Divided by the agreement of outside powers; an armed camp by necessity; living perilously on an economy based on outside aid; controlled by a government strong in determination to resist Communism, (and even economic ties with Japan), but weak and often corrupt at local levels; little wonder that optimism is a lagging commodity in that land. There is an overwhelming sense of uncertainty, of living from day to day, of an unwholesome dependence on American money and might. There is also a rightful yearning for a re-united country, a country now divided and for which American leadership is rightly blamed.

The bright spot on the horizon, and it is a bright spot, is the devotion, loyalty and faith of the Church. Those who have invested their lives or their money in Christian work in that land have much to show for their investment. The same God who has strengthened and blessed that Church is still present and active today.

Apparently secure in the peace and plenty of American Church life we should pray earnestly for our brothers in Christ in Korea, a land of triumph and a land of shadow.

END

My Father

He knows! My heavenly Father surely knows

The mortal limitations that oppress

This earth-born frame: the dire distress

Of surging griefs: the diabolic foes

That hold the soul in grim encounter: every need

He knows, and all my wants His mercies still exceed.

He cares! I know my heavenly Father cares,

And bids me cast on Him the pressing load

Of dark, foreboding thought. ’Tis mine the road

Of filial trust to tread, since He who bears

In hands omnipotent the sparrow and the ages

Makes me His care, and for my weel His might engages.

He can! My Father’s boundless grace can meet

The high demands of full salvation: sure

His succour in temptation, to endure

His help sufficient, swift His rescuing feet.

His promises arc matched with equal powers: the score

Of all my prayers this motto bears, “He can do more!”

He will! Performance crowns the triple grace

Of knowledge, care and power divine. What work

Begun will be performed until the murk

Of time dispels. Complete before His face

I then shall stand from pain and tribulation brought,

While powers supernal loud acclaim, “What hath God wrought!”

J. C. MACAULAY

- More from L. Nelson Bell

Cover Story

Are We Obscurantists?

Bernard Ramm

A frequent criticism of evangelicalism is that it is obscurantist. An obscurantist is one who binders knowledge, or actively resists its progress. In religion it refers to those who oppose the progress of critical biblical scholarship and the findings of modern science. Because evangelicals do not accept much of the current theories in Old and New Testament criticism they are branded as obscurantists. The charge is that obscurantism is essential to evangelicalism and as long as evangelicals persist in it they are anachronisms in the modern theological world.

To the contrary I shall defend the thesis that obscurantism, far from being essential to the evangelical position, is positively not a part of its essence. Further, it is impossible for an evangelical who truly understands his position to be an obscurantist. That obscurantism does associate itself with conservative religion cannot be denied; but the reasons for this are psychological and sociological. It is not the product of the essence of evangelicalism.

Role Of Scientific Scholarship

The Roman Catholic Church professes to be graced with an infallibility that enables her to determine the canon of scripture; to issue decrees on matters of biblical introduction; and, if necessary, to give an authoritative interpretation of a passage of Scripture. The Reformers substituted a different program. They accepted the divine authority of Scripture and the inner witness of the Divine Spirit. But they cut off their divine certainties at this point. They did not profess to possess a special means of knowing the text, canon or interpretation of Scripture. Such items were not considered matters of revelation. The only hedge put around such matters was that no position could be held that was a virtual denial of the revelatory content of Scripture nor of its divine inspiration. The authenticity and genuineness of Scripture could not be challenged without serious damage to its inspiration and its revealed content.

If the Reformers rejected the Roman Catholic position in these matters, there was only one other avenue open to them: these matters are settled by principles of scientific scholarship working with due reverence for the word of God and trusting that these matters were under the providential guidance of the Holy Spirit.

It was the essence of the Reformers’ position to commit themselves to a program of devout, critical biblical scholarship. Biblical obscurantism is therefore not part of the essence of the evangelical Protestant tradition. Just the opposite happens to be the case.

Text Of Scripture

The evangelical has no means of settling the text of the Scripture outside the usual methods of scholarship. There is no official copy of either the Hebrew or Greek Testaments. There are only copies of them. There is only one conceivable method of settling the text of Scripture and that is by the employment of the general science of textual criticism modified to fit the peculiarities presented by the biblical texts. When Calvin treated the text of Scripture, he employed the methodology he learned as a humanist and attempted scientifically to determine the true readings (cf. B. B. Warfield, Calvin and Augustine, p. 58). Warfield himself affirmed in another place that “processes that are valid for the ascertainment of a secular are equally valid for the ascertainment of a sacred text” (Critical Reviews, p. 81).

Evangelicals may believe that God has remarkably preserved the text of the Old and New Testaments, but to determine the precise text of Scripture is a problem for scientific criticism. This is the essence of the evangelical position, and there is, therefore, no place for obscurantism here.

Calvin accepted the canon of the Church but it was no blind acceptance. His acceptance was (in Warfield’s phrase) “critically mediated” (Calvin and Augustine, p. 54). Again Calvin put his former humanist learning to service. He investigated the history and the internal characteristics of the books of the canon.

Faith that God would lead the Church to establish a canon does not settle the limits of the canon. The internal witness of the Holy Spirit bears witness to the divinity of Scripture, but the internal witness of the Spirit does not determine the canon. The canon is determined by historical research and criticism, and there is no place here for obscurantism. The very opposite was the essence of the Reformers’ position.

The scholarly ability of Luther and Calvin may be readily gathered from the relevant chapters of E. H. Harbison’s The Christian Scholar in the Age of the Reformation. Much of the powerful striking force of Luther and Calvin must be credited to their scholarly backgrounds. Luther’s translation of the Bible earned for him the right to be called a scholar, and no one acquainted with the Commentaries and Institutes of Calvin could dare think otherwise of the Swiss Reformer. Warfield also sketches for us the remarkable education and scholarly traits of Calvin (Calvin and Augustine, Chapter I).

Interpretation Of Scripture

The Reformers’ rejected Rome’s claim to be the infallible and authoritative interpreter of Scripture. Their counterblow was to develop a critical and scientific hermeneutics, whose greatest achievement is in Calvin’s Commentaries. While not depreciating nor underestimating the necessity of prayer and faith in understanding sacred Scripture, the Reformers proceeded to develop a scientific hermeneutics to replace the authoritarian hermeneutics of Roman Catholicism.

A battle raged over the use of the Hebrew and Greek Testaments by the Reformers and the Latin Vulgate by the Catholics. A scientific understanding of exegesis drove Luther and Calvin back to the original languages of Scripture. Thanks to the Reformers, Hebrew and Greek were restored to their proper places in exegesis. The story of the contest over the original languages versus the Latin Vulgate is briefly recited in Preus’s The Inspiration of Scripture (p. 134 ff.). Here again the evangelical position is pledged to a scientific scholarship operating within the circle of Christian faith. No obscurantist methodology is available to the evangelical to enable him to interpret Scripture.

The scientific attitude of Luther and Calvin toward matters of biblical criticism is a matter of record. By no means was their approach characterized by obscurantism. Perhaps the most serious differences between evangelicals and much of contemporary biblical scholarship are at the level of literary criticism. But the essence of the Reformers’ position and of the evangelicals is that matters of literary criticism must also be settled by the canons of the highest scholarship. The evangelical insists that revelation and inspiration are as much objective data as the other materials of literary criticism, and it is this insistence which creates the divergences between them and contemporary schools of thought. However this may be judged, the point is still obvious that the essence of the evangelical position is not obscurantist.

Role Of Scientific Scholarship

First, evangelicals admit that much biblical learning has been contributed by non-evangelical scholars (e.g., Bible dictionaries, Bible encyclopedias, commentaries, lexicons). The outstanding Reformed scholar of France wrote: “We are not foolish enough to condemn modern criticism as a whole. The works of the best representatives have contributed and still contribute to a better understanding and a greater love of the sacred text. It would be absurd as well as unjust to accuse all modern critics of a spirit of systematic hostility to divine realities” (A. Lecerf, An Introduction to Reformed Dogmatics, p. 304). The great Reformed scholar of another century in Holland was of the firm conviction that the scholarly works of men outside the boundary of orthodoxy could be employed with profit by the Christian scholar (A. Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology, p. 581).

Second, evangelicals admit that there is no short cut for the hard work of biblical criticism. They may venture an opinion that much of modern critical work is hay, wood and stubble but that does not settle the data for them. Evangelicals must make their peace with the Pentateuchal problem, the Synoptic problem, or the Johannine problem. “The believer cannot at any time afford to be obscurantist; and orthodox scholarship must set right criticism over against wrong criticism” is the outspoken opinion of a Reformed theologian (John Murray, The Infallible Word, p. 10).

Evangelicals may be flayed for not facing up to modern criticism or for not making a significant contribution to it. They may be accused of harboring too large a population of obscurantists. But the thesis here propounded is undamaged: The pattern of the Reformers states that when divine certainties end, the only safe guide is the finest of scientific scholarship excercised in humility before God. Obscurantism has no place in an evangelicalism which properly understands itself; in fact, the essence of evangelicalism demands the wholehearted denial of it.

Bernard Ramm is Professor of Religion and Director of Graduate Studies in Religion in Baylor University, and was formerly Professor of Philosophy at Bethel College and Seminary, St. Paul. He holds the A.B. degree from University of Washington, B.D. from Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Ph.D. from University of Southern California.

- More from John Calvin

Cover Story

Theological Climate in America

G. Brillenburg Wurth

To a European the study of contemporary American theology is highly important. America is one of the two political, cultural and spiritual poles (Russia being the other), around which oscillate the main currents of the life and thought of Western Europe.

For a long time America was of no concern to the spiritual vision of a European. Indeed, Europe looked down upon an America it considered immature and culturally undeveloped. The “Yankee” did not appear to be a cultured inhabitant of Western Europe. Fie seemed solely concerned with the dollar. He appeared to have little understanding of spiritual life. Since the last World War, however, the European’s attitude has changed. Personal contact with Americans has led to a better understanding and appreciation. In any case, the economic and political life of Western Europe must take America into account. The luxury of ignoring the existence of this great power in the West is no longer permissible. Nor, for that matter, can we Europeans ignore Russia and the Far East.

Present-day American theology is still predominantly liberal or modernistic in character. In the past, this was not the case. Once America was the land of the Pilgrim Fathers. The public life bore a Christian stamp in all social expressions. American theological faculties, for example, at Harvard, were fortresses of orthodox Christianity and orthodox theology.

Retreat From Orthodoxy

The spiritual powers now in control of American life cannot be called Christian. In philosophy, the Pragmatism of which William James is the spiritual father has exercised a great influence for many years. Its modernized form is found in the Behaviorism of John Dewey.

Pragmatism is closely connected, in some respects, with the historical origin of the American people. The colonist, who daily encountered the hard facts of reality and therefore did not have much time and interest for abstract philosophical speculation, was inclined to ask, “What is the benefit of it?”

The specific type of Pragmatism encountered in James and Dewey is one of the characteristic off-shoots of the Enlightenment, which at the end of the eight-teenth century propelled life along radically new paths. The Enlightenment exchanged historical Christianity for a humanistic rationalism, strongly optimistic in character and nearly unconditional in its faith in the unlimited possibilities of human nature. The roots of this philosophy have gone deep in America. The eighteenth century American stood on the threshold of its natural development. Under the influence of the Enlightenment it suddenly became conscious of its enormous potentialities. In this respect no figure was more important for his own time and for later periods than Benjamin Franklin, in whom the young America was so-to-speak incarnated. With him was launched the triumph of modern science, especially the application of science to technique. The unbelievable accomplishments of technology have shaped America into a land where the majority, not just a fortunate few, can achieve a standard of living higher than any previously conceived. This trend in development was favorably disposed to the rise of Pragmatism.

Truth Reduced To Utility

Pragmatism implies the radical denial of each concept of truth. Truth is no longer a magnitude of an entity in its own right. Just as modern American life was oriented toward utility, so truth became reduced to usefulness. Truth is what is useful, what in one way or another serves the vital needs of the individual in society. And since different individuals have different needs, Pragmatism for the first time in the history of philosophical thought consciously proposed a pluralistic concept of truth. Truth is not unitary; truth is just as much a plurality as life is pluriform. What is true for one person does not necessarily have to be true for another.

The Behaviorism of John Dewey, a mild form of this early Pragmatism, is known by the term Instrumentalism. For Dewey, the human spirit is in its essence nothing but an instrument, a utensil, a tool, suited for the attainment of a specific aim. It is clearly evident how thoroughly undermining this concept is for the Christian faith. Nothing is more devastating to our spiritual life than such a devaluation of the concept of truth. It results in a spiritual decline of human life in its entirety, especially in the field of religion.

Religion is not denied its right to exist. Dewey believes, however, that religion comes into its own only when it breaks all connection with the supernatural. What is left, however, is a religion that no longer deserves the name of religion. It is a religion without God. Some may continue to speak of something divine, but faith in a personal God as the creator of the world and of man is abandoned. Man was not created by God. God is a creation of man. Man is able to manufacture everything that he desires. Man makes or fabricates all he desires and needs, also his God.

It is deplorable that Dewey’s viewpoint still gives the general tone to present-day scientific America and controls much of the entire philosophy of education.

Gospel Becomes Social Energy

What has been the attitude of the Christian Church during the last century with respect to Pragmatism and Humanism? Has it been asleep? Did it simply allow the life of its time to slip by unnoticed? Certainly not. The large ecclesiastical bodies in the United States (e.g., Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist) have so far been a model of powerful activity in this twentieth century. For example, their enormous accomplishments in the field of philanthropy and missions are well known. Financially and organizationally, America has for a long time played a dominant role in the missionary enterprise.

To a large extent, however, the prevailing American spirit has left its mark upon the official life and theology of the larger denominations. In particular, this is evidence in the social gospel movement, which since the beginning of this century has been the motif of American theology. The attempt to confront with the Gospel of Christ the problems of modern American life, especially the important problem of an industrialized society, is in itself worthy of respect. What is seriously to be regretted, however, and what has resulted in great spiritual damage, is that this movement has been accompanied by a complete lack of resistance to the dominating spirit of the time. The latter has been given a completely free hand to dictate the path to be followed. What is characteristic of the social gospel is not so much the application of the gospel to social questions but rather the overwhelming emphasis placed on social problems by this gospel. The entire gospel is seen as a social and ethical totality; everything that does not fit into this framework is discarded.

This accomodation of the gospel to social and ethical problems was readily accomplished through the inner affinity of the social gospel and the dominant American liberal theology.

Triumph Of Enlightenment

The spirit of the Enlightenment with its rationalism, moralism, optimism, and tolerance had conquered the entire New World. In harmony with the spirit of tolerance, the separation of church and state was not guarded against an exaggerated and libertarian concept of religious freedom. The acceptable view was that everyone can believe and teach whatever he wishes. The day was not distant when faith was strongly reduced in its content. Of the original Christian confession, very little was to remain in force. In the broadest circles, the ideal became a religion as free as possible of any dogmatism and predominantly moral in character. Even unitarian tendencies became respected as essentially Christian. Inevitably, the grace of God was little understood. Much more important than God’s mercy in Christ, it was held, is the dignity of man. One can thus truly speak of the trend as the humanization of religion. “The biggest goal of God’s laws and religion,” said one of the spiritual leaders of the time, “is human happiness.” He did not bother to add “… the happiness of unregenerate man.”

Impact Of Evolutionary Science

The theology of the social gospel clearly contains trends of the piety of the Enlightenment, especially its individualism, rationality, and unconquerable faith in human progress. These tendencies acquired a special emphasis with respect to the Darwinian theory of evolution, so cherished by the modern ideal of science.

One task of science was thought to be that it should, as much as possible, purify religion of all so-called nonessential elements (especially the miraculous!) so that it would be a suitable foundation for modern society.

In the form of modern biblical criticism science was expected to lead to the creation of a more “correct” picture of Jesus, which would replace the ecclesiastical Christological dogma by a completely human Jesus.

The idea of development was now applied to the New Testament message of the Kingdom of God, viewed as a human accomplishment, to be developed by human effort, within the boundries of our human era.

Religion Narrowed To Ethics

A new type of Christian piety arose. The religious, in its entirety, was nearly subordinated to the ethical. Honest moral conduct was considered to be the best form of religiosity.

Great value was ascribed to the idea of the brotherhood of man on the basis of the universal Fatherhood of God. This brotherhood discloses itself in the cooperation envisioned by the social gospel, in the equality of man, and in a recognition of the absolute value of human personality.

In time the ideal of the democratization of the industrial social order arose; that is, the workers must receive the right to organize.

In international relations the Christian ideal of life was also to be applied according to the Golden Rule, “Do unto others that which you would have them do unto you” (Matt. 7:12). War was viewed as a serious violation of the divine world order.

Although these concepts undoubtedly have some real values, Christianity is hereby conceived in a predominantly collective fashion. Very little value is placed on personal salvation. The entire Christian faith is restated in terms of collective solidarity. God’s plan primarily consists in saving and reforming human society.

Inseparably connected with this movement was the removal from Christianity of all “transcendent” elements. Walter Rauschenbusch, a representative figure of the social gospel, sought to humanize all religion, including the conception of God. He frankly said that today God must be dethroned in order to meet the needs of men. What is necessary is “a God with whom men may cooperate, not to whom they must submit.” God is openly proclaimed to be a partner of man. And Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of America’s most popular preachers, ascribed only one function to religion, namely, the service of man and humanity. Religion according to him was a question of psychology. It was not concerned with the knowledge of God but with a knowledge of man and his human end.

It is no wonder that in this spiritual atmosphere no room remained for the biblical evangelical proclamation: the preaching of Christ as God’s Redeemer, reconciliation through his sacrifice, and justification by faith in his Atonement and Resurrection. The historicity of Christ no longer had any integrating significance. The only thing important, declared A. W. Palmer, one-time President of Chicago Theological Seminary, is “that Christ shall be reduplicated in a myriad of Saviours.”

Fidelity To The Bible

American Fundamentalism has also contributed to the theological climate of America. In sharp contrast to the predominantly moralistic social gospel in which the atoning death of Christ has almost no place, in Fundamentalism one often finds a hearty inner piety, especially a joy in the blood of the atonement and in the grace of the Holy Spirit. Characterized by an unconditional respect for the witness of the Scriptures, Fundamentalism views modern biblical criticism as a serious threat to true Christianity. Unconditionally it retains the plenary inspiration of the Bible and requires that, above all else, one must bow in faith to what is revealed in Scripture.

Special emphasis is laid, however, upon what are considered to be fundamental biblical truths: the virgin birth of Christ; his metaphysical Sonship; his crucifixion as the only basis of salvation; his resurrection; original sin, and the consequent depravity of man; and eternal life and eternal death, as the twofold starting points of human life. Fundamentalists deem it impossible to have any bond or fellowship with one who denies any of these fundamental truths.

Lack Of Cultural World-View

Often, however, the impression is given that faith in these truths is only a blind subjection to an external authority without the integration of these truths into the totality of life. And, in many cases, no attempt is made to reach a solution to questions of the relevance of Christianity to modern science and culture. Such questions are in fact often met by a hostile attitude. Usually there is no awareness of the call and obligation of a Christian to culture or the intellectual content of civilization. Christianity is thus in danger of degenerating into a morbid and sickly enthusiasm.

Niebuhr On Liberalism

After this short and incomplete characterization of the twentieth century American spiritual and theological situation, it may be well to discuss briefly a representative of contemporary American theology, Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr’s theology is usually described by the term “Christian Realism.” This designation distinguished it from the older theology of the social gospel, which was characterized by a definite idealistic tendency and a naive trust in the goodness of human nature.

The social gospel limited itself to social programs and high-sounding social slogans, but it scarcely disturbed the actual life of society. Niebuhr gradually discovered the cause of this failure of liberal theology to lie in its anthropology, its theory concerning man, which lacks all understanding of the demonic depth of human existence. In its thoughtless optimism, Liberalism imagined that a proclamation of law of love could of itself conquer the natural egoism of the human heart. Its perfectionism, its new faith in human perfectability, did not take into account the deeply rooted power of sin in human nature.

In addition to his campaign against Liberalism, Niebuhr conducted a second front against orthodoxy. The basic fault of Liberalism was to be sought in its sentimentality; the lack of power of orthodoxy was due to its pessimism. Orthodoxy’s vision was too exclusively directed to the sinfulness of our world. Therefore, orthodoxy maintained the status quo as much as possible. It feared that if changes were made in the existing order, the result could only be complete chaos.

Niebuhr is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the theological world of today; in more than one respect he is worth listening to. We consider it of great importance that Niebuhr was one of the first to recognize the pernicious totalitarian structure of such ideologies as National Socialism and Communism. Niebuhr was one of the first to understand that sin is more than a wrong subjective attitude of the human heart; it can also become incarnate in certain social relationships, which then constitute the greatest threat to temporal human life.

Flaws In Niebuhr’S Thought

At the same time, we believe that there are serious objections to Niebuhr’s theology and ethics.

His views are dangerous because Niebuhr is one of the most noteworthy and most gifted representatives of a new type of theology, often qualified in America as “neo-orthodoxy.” Many hope that neo-orthodoxy will provide the basis of a future ecumenical theology. As a matter of fact, neo-orthodoxy contains something which makes it appropriate for this purpose. It is preeminently a theology of synthesis. The chasm between orthodoxy and Liberalism appears to be bridged in a genial manner. Basic evangelical sounds are heard and what offends modern man’s world view and religious autonomy is discarded.

In this respect Niebuhr’s theology displays a striking agreement with another fashionable theologian of our time, Rudolph Bultmann, who by his de-mythologizing seeks to escape the offense of biblical revelation. Bultmann does not realize that in the meantime he has exchanged revelation for a modern religious Existentialism. The latter is ready to speak to modern man in his despair, but it shares with the true gospel of Jesus Christ only a verbal similarity.

Our century is apparently repeating the same mistakes made by the theologians in the nineteenth century. Everything points to the fact that a new theology is more adapted to the needs of twentieth century man; it contains dialectical tension, is less strange to reality, and has a better understanding of the tragic depths of human life. But like nineteenth century theology, it accomodates the gospel in its deepest kernel to the dominant spirit of the time, and has received its stamp from the dominating philosophy of the day.

Because of the important influence of America upon the economic and political life of the world, Europeans watch with interest the theological climate of this great nation. It is hoped that the humanization of religion under Liberal influence will be halted, and greater emphasis given the transcendental elements of Christianity.

Dr. G. Brillenburg Wurth has taught for a number of years at Kampen Theological Seminary in the Netherlands. He is author of many books, and writes frequently on such themes as pastoral counselling, the Christian life, Christian morals, and Christian ethics.

- More from G. Brillenburg Wurth

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Faith and Reason

Gordon H. Clark

Part 1

[Part II is here]

According to many Protestant writers, Roman Catholicism is seriously mistaken in making faith a mere intellectual assent to certain dogmas. Faith, true faith in Christ, these writers say, is a personal trust rather than a cold intellectual belief. On the other side, the Catholic Encyclopedia (in loc. cit., p. 752, 1913 ed.) states “Non-Catholic writers have repudiated all idea of faith as intellectual assent.” The truth of the matter, however, seems to be more complicated than these brief characterizations suggest.

These complications include the uncritical assumption that personality should be divided into intellect, will and emotion rather than into id, ego and superego. Granted, the Freudian division may have an evil odor, but its very recognition of an evil nature in man could be closer to the biblical view than the other division allows. For the older division is not self-evidently scriptural. At any rate, those who use it often assume that intellect, will and emotion may be equated with specific biblical terms, when a study of the Bible shows that this is not so.

The Head And The Heart

The key term of biblical psychology, particularly in the Old Testament where the fundamental principles are laid down, is the term heart. When contemporary Christians, often in evangelistic preaching, contrast the head and the heart, they are in effect equating the heart with the emotions. Such an antithesis between head and heart is nowhere found in Scripture. In the Psalms and the Prophets the heart designates the focus of personal life. It is the organ of conscience, of self-knowledge, indeed of all knowledge. One may very well say that the Hebrew heart is the equivalent of the English word self.

To understand Old Testament usage, consider the following few examples.

Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually … (Gen. 6:5).

Then Abraham … said in his heart, Shall a child be born … (Gen. 17:17).

In the integrity of thy heart thou hast done this … (Gen. 20:6).

My heart exulteth in Jehovah … (1 Sam. 2:1).

Commune with your own heart (Psalm 4:4).

God, who saveth the upright in heart (Psalm 7:10).

They speak falsehood … and with a double heart do they speak (Psalm 12:2).

The fool hath said in his heart … (Psa. 14:1).

He … speaketh truth in his heart (Psalm 15:2).

Lest they … understand with their heart (Isa. 6:10).

Neither doth his heart think so (Isa. 10:7).

He hath shut … their hearts that they cannot understand. And none calleth to mind [heart], neither is there knowledge nor understanding (Isa. 44:18, 19).

As there are somewhat over 750 occurrences of the word heart in the Old Testament, these form a meager sample. But they are enough to show that many verses would make complete nonsense if the term were translated emotion. For example, if this identification were made, it would be necessary to say, “He speaketh truth in his emotions”; and, “Lest they understand with their emotions.” Obviously this substitution results in nonsense. It is not to be denied that the biblical term heart can and does occasionally refer to the emotions, as in 1 Samuel 2:1, though even here there must be some intellectual understanding. But although sometimes referring to the emotions, the term heart more often signifies the intellect. It is the heart that speaks, meditates, thinks and understands. At the same time, since the self acts emotionally, volitionally and intellectually, the three activities are each represented in the several occurrences of the term.

But the preponderance of the intellectual references shows the preponderance of the intellect in the personality. It is extremely difficult to appreciate the motives, at least in the case of those who are attached to the Bible, which lead to a disparagement of the intellect. Why is it that thinking, meditating, understanding are to be condemned? Why is knowing and thinking of God a poor way, an impossible way or an impious way of coming to him? What is wrong with intellectual activity?

The common modern contrast between head and heart is thus evidently unscriptural. There is a scriptural contrast. It is the contrast between the heart and the lips, for Matthew is quoting Isaiah when he says, “This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” When the scriptural contrast is refused, the possibility cannot be ruled out that other scriptural theses are discarded at the same time.

Two results of this unscriptural belittling of intellectual activity will be discussed.

The Element Of Trust

In describing the nature of faith, fundamentalists, evangelicals and even modernists in a certain way stress the element of trust. A preacher may draw a parallel between trusting in Christ and trusting in a chair. Belief that the chair is solid and comfortable, mere intellectual assent to such a proposition, will not rest your weary bones. You must, the preacher insists, actually sit in the chair. Similarly, so goes the argument, you can believe all that the Bible says about Christ and it will do you no good. Such illustrations as these are constantly used, in spite of the fact that the Bible says, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”

Confusing The Issue

There is here at least a confusion of mind, a confusion between something unscriptural and something else that is entirely scriptural. The weak point of the illustration is that it contrasts an intellectual act of believing with a physical act of sitting in a chair. This distinction is a matter of common experience; but how is it supposed to apply? In the spiritual realm there is no physical action but mental action only; hence the act of sitting down, if it means anything at all, must refer to something completely internal and yet different from belief. Belief in the chair has been made to stand for belief in Christ, and according to the illustration belief in Christ is of no value. Something else is needed. But what is this something else that corresponds to the act of sitting down in the chair? This is the question that is so seldom answered. Now, there is such an internal factor, though it is extremely doubtful that those who use the illustration have this factor in mind. But since there is another facet of mental activity, the truth that has been confused with the error needs to be given its due. However, when the true element is identified, the illustration collapses.

In addition to “mere belief” or “intellectual assent” faith in Christ surely involves an “act of will.” Whether faith requires emotion or not and if so, which emotion it requires are at best secondary considerations. Emotions notoriously depend on bodily conditions; a good meal or a bad meal can alter them; atmospheric pressure and anemia likewise. Emotions by definition are fluctuating; whereas throughout our constantly changing emotional states, our beliefs and the volitions founded on them remain comparatively fixed. And, to return, faith surely involves the will.

Here, however, the original difficulty returns in full force. Is there such a thing as “mere belief,” or “mere intellectual assent?” Indeed, is there such a distinguishable phenomenon as a “mere” act of will? Intellectual assent is itself an act of will; and conversely, no volitional action could possibly take place without belief. If you will to eat ice cream, you must believe at least that there is some ice cream to be eaten. Intellect and will are not two separate “faculties”; rather they so interpenetrate in a single mental state that it is difficult and perhaps impossible not only to separate them in time but even in definition.

Faith And Belief

There is perhaps another flaw in the illustration, a flaw which also combines an element of truth with a confusion of thought. It would seem that those who say belief in Christ is of no value have an incorrect notion of belief and intellectual assent. They probably mean—though it is rash to guess what they might mean—that salvation is not obtained by knowing the propositions in the Bible and understanding their meaning. Obviously this is true. Many intelligent men know very well what the Bible says; they understand it far better than many Christians; but they are not saved and they are not Christians. The reason is that though they understand, they do not believe.

Clear thinking, however, will reveal that faith, Christian faith, is not to be distinguished from belief. Consider Hebrews 11:1. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The A.R.V. says that “faith is assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen.” Assurance and conviction are belief, strong belief, voluntary belief and as intellectual as you please. The heroes of faith, whom the chapter goes on to describe, all believed some definite intellectual content. Hebrews 11:3 says, “Through faith we understand” something about the creation of the world. Surely this is an intellectual content. And in explaining why “without faith it is impossible to please God,” verse 6 says, “for he that cometh to God must believe that he is.” As a reply to those who disparage the intellect within the limits of this first example, let this suffice.

[TO BE CONCLUDED IN NEXT ISSUE]

- More from Gordon H. Clark

Cover Story

Peter’s Confession

R. V. G. Tasker

MATTHEW 16:13–17

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them “But who do you say that I am?” Simon replied “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him “Blessed art thou Simon Bar-Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed this to you but my Father who is in heaven.”

When a great personality appears on the stage of history, the opinions about him held by his contemporaries are often diverse. It is certainly true that the views held about Jesus of Nazareth by the men and women of his generation differed widely. All of them, rabbis and rulers, priests and peasants, were agreed that here was an astonishing person; but only a very few could say with truth as well as conviction who and what manner of man he really was. Some, to be sure, imagined that they had found the clue to the understanding of him; but for the most part their attempted explanations were at best inadequate and at worst little more than the products of ignorance and prejudice.

Verdict Of Contemporaries

Those who disliked him most, the scribes and the Pharisees, forced as they were by the evidence to recognize his supernatural power, concluded that he was a dangerous sorcerer in league with the prince of devils, regardless of the lack of logic such a verdict involved; for how could Satan cast out Satan? On the other hand, the ordinary folk among whom his early life had been spent, baffled by the mystery of his person and behavior, dismissed him as abnormal and eccentric. “He is beside himself,” they said. Moreover those of a more jealous nature could not forget that he belonged to their own level of society. “This is the carpenter’s son,” they complained, “whose father and mother we know”; and the implication was that he was obsessed by an exaggerated idea of his own importance. Whatever the views men came to hold about him, one thing was certain; here was a man who made others conscious of the impact of his personality and compelled them to attempt some answer to the question “Who do you say that I am?”

Jesus was no doubt aware of much that was being said about him; but one day when he was alone with his disciples in the district of Caesarea Philippi, when they were free from the danger of interference from the partisans of Herod the tetrarch of Galilee, at a time in his ministry when he was anxious (if they were at all ready to receive it) to tell them about the necessity for his own submission in the near future to a criminal’s death, he felt constrained to question them about what men were saying of him. What in fact was the gossip they had heard about him in the synagogues, the bazaars and the country towns of Galilee? And in reply they gave him three specimen answers, typical no doubt of the more thoughtful and less superficial views that were current. “Some are saying,” they answered, “that you are John the Baptist risen from the dead; others that you are a second Elijah; and others that you are another Jeremiah.” All three suggestions had two things at least in common. They all identified Jesus with a figure of the past instead of acknowledging him as unique, someone whose like had never been seen in this world. And they contained dangerous and misleading half-truths; for, though Jesus possessed some of the characteristics of each of these three great men, he transcended them all.

Greater Than The Baptist

But, we naturally ask, why should some of his contemporaries ever have imagined that Jesus was the martyred John the Baptist returned to life? We cannot be sure of the answer. We only know that John made a very deep impression upon his fellow countrymen when he first appeared in the desert of Judea. People flocked to hear him, and all sorts of people responded when he called upon them to repent and return to the Lord their God, in view of the impending judgment. Soldiers, tax collectors and many others came to him for practical advice as to how they ought to conduct their lives in this critical time of waiting. John, moreover, in true prophetic tradition, had boldly rebuked vice even when he found it in royal circles and rebuked it with such effect that Herod, who had somewhat reluctantly given the order for his execution, never forgot the impression that this martyred prophet had made upon him. When subsequently news reached him of what Jesus was doing, he was ready enough to believe the rumor that Jesus was John, the troubler of his conscience and the disturber of his dreams, restored to life. “This is John the Baptist,” he said to his servants, “he has been raised from the dead; this is why these powers are at work in him.”

There was, it is true, some likeness between John and Jesus. Both were children of the divine wisdom. Both had vital parts to play in the working out of God’s plan for man’s salvation. But the difference was far greater. Many, who knew both men better than Herod did, had been quick to observe this difference both in their behavior and in the way they exercised their ministry. John, they noticed, lived an ascetic life typical of the holy man of the east; Jesus came, as they put it, “eating and drinking.” John moreover ministered away from the haunts of sinners, Jesus was known as “the friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Jesus to be sure repeated, with equal emphasis, John’s call to repentance, but he also did what John could never do. John could prepare men to receive the reign of God in their hearts, but he could not enable them to receive it. He stood on the threshold of the kingdom of God: Jesus was the door alone through whom men could enter the kingdom. The truth was that sinful men and women had need of a Saviour, himself human and divine, who could make atonement for their sin, as no ordinary man however pious could ever make it and restore them to fellowship with the all-holy God—and that Saviour John could never be. Some said “John the Baptist”—but they were wrong.

Greater Than Elijah

But others were saying, “Jesus is another Elijah.” It is perhaps less difficult to understand how this identification should ever have arisen; for Elijah had come to occupy a unique position in Jewish thought. As the earliest of the great prophets of Israel, his name had become representative of the entire prophetic revelation, just as Moses represented the entire revelation embodied in the sacred law. The blows that Elijah had struck for true religion at a most critical period in Israel’s history were both mighty and decisive. He had been indeed “the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof” glorified in his mighty deeds; and according to biblical tradition he was translated to heaven without experiencing death. So wonderful did the achievements of Elijah seem to subsequent generations that he was regarded as more than human; so much so that James (as we read in the Epistle in the New Testament which bears his name) when he wished to hold up Elijah as a supreme example of what a man of prayer can effect, had to remind his readers that Elijah was in fact no demigod or superman, whose example they could not be expected to follow but a man of like nature with themselves.

There are real parallels between Elijah and Jesus. Both were men of prayer; both performed supernatural works of healing; and both waged triumphant war against false religion. But the victories of Elijah were won by physical force, while the victory of Jesus was won not by shedding the blood of others but by allowing his own blood to be shed. One day his impetuous disciples requested him to command fire to come down from heaven, as Elijah did, and consume the inhabitants of a Samaritan village that had refused him entrance. But the answer of the Master came swift and sure: “Ye know not of what spirit you are. The Son of Man came not to destroy men’s lives but to save them.”

Elijah, moreover, wavered in his vocation, but Jesus set himself consistently and steadfastly to accomplish the work he had come into the world to do. Single-handed, Elijah defied 850 prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel; but a little later we find him cowering in a cave at Mount Horeb, crushed by a sense of futility and failure, a victim of an almost suicidal self-pity, wincing at the thought of his own spiritual isolation and requesting, even though his work was unfinished, that he might die. Jesus, on the other hand, learned not self-pity but obedience through the things he suffered. He was faithful to him who had appointed him, faithful even unto death. He endured to the end, despising the shame. Some said “Elijah”—but they too were wrong.

Greater Than Jeremiah

But others were saying, “Jesus is another Jeremiah.” This estimate was perhaps nearer the truth than the other two. For of all the historical characters of the Old Testament Jeremiah approximates most closely to Jesus himself as an outstanding example of patient endurance of undeserved suffering. He was known to subsequent generations of Jews as “the prophet”; and they looked back to him for inspiration and courage in their own trials and persecutions. This hypersensitive, warm-hearted patriot, commissioned by God to proclaim a succession of divine messages to his countrymen that were unpopular because they were of necessity pessimistic, who was so sympathetic with others in their sufferings, was himself beaten, put in the stocks, imprisoned in a dungeon and thrown into a cistern by the very men he gladly would have saved, had that been possible, from the doom that awaited them. Surely this weeping prophet, whose eyes ran down with tears day and night for the sins of his people, was indeed akin to the divine Man of Sorrows, who, on a spring morning over five hundred years later, wept over the faithless city of the children of his people, the city outside whose walls within a week he himself was destined to be crucified.

But for all the nobility of his character, Jeremiah remained a prophet and no more. He foretold the new covenant, by which men with their sins forgiven would be given a direct knowledge of God, but neither he nor any prophet like him could ever bring it into being. For all his sympathy and patience he was not good enough, as Jesus was good enough, to pay the price of sin, by allowing his own blood to be shed in the only perfect sacrifice by which the way was opened for sinners to draw nigh boldly unto the throne of grace.

Some said “Jeremiah”—but they too were wrong.

Verdict Of Disciples

What then did Jesus’ own disciples think about him? The answer they would give was of vital importance. For if their estimate of their master had not risen to a higher level than the answers of their contemporaries, he could never have gone on to teach them the most vital truth that they had to learn. Men may do many things for other men. They may die for other men as so many in our own lifetime have done. But no man may deliver his brother from the penalty of human sin or make atonement to God for him: that was precisely what Jesus had come to do. And it was the fact that he was divine as well as human that alone could give infinite value to all that he was to suffer as man on behalf of men. Simon Peter’s answer to the great question, however, did not disappoint him who had asked it. However slow and even unwilling Peter was to prove in accepting the further truth that Jesus was now to unfold to them about the necessity for his death, his confession at least showed that he understood one thing very clearly. The age of prophecy was over because the hour of fulfillment had come. Peter knew there was no need for another John the Baptist, another Elijah or another Jeremiah, because he to whom all these prophets had been pointing was standing there before him. He knew that Jesus was not just another in the long line of prophets to whom the living God had spoken in many and various ways in the past but the Son of the living God who knew, as only such a Son could know, the mind and purposes of his father. And because his Master was the Son of the living God Peter knew that he need not—nay he could not—look elsewhere for salvation. “Lord to whom shall we go?” he said to him on another occasion when some were turning away from him; “Thou hast the words of eternal life.”

Christ The Son

This great confession of Simon Peter (as the last part of our text reminds us) was no wild leap in the dark: he did not make it on the spur of the moment as if “stung by the splendor of a sudden thought.” Nor was he voicing at second-hand an opinion learned from some other human being. Flesh and blood, as Jesus told him, had not revealed it unto him. On the contrary, ever since that day when he first stood before Jesus and felt compelled to say, “Depart from me for I am a sinful man, O Lord,” and yet in spite of that reluctance had found himself irresistibly led to respond to Jesus’ call and leave his nets and follow him—during all the time that he had witnessed his master’s mighty works and listened to the words of eternal life that fell daily from his lips, the living God, the God who acts and intervenes in the affairs of men, had been leading him to see that Jesus was indeed his Son—his Christ or anointed one, anointed to bring the Gospel of salvation to sinners. In consequence, there was only one answer that Peter could make. It was: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

And Jesus pronounced him blessed, just because his heavenly Father and no one else had made this confession possible. “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.”

And the way by which Peter was led to make this confession is always the way by which men are led to acknowledge Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God. No man is even led to this faith solely as the result of human reasoning or solely through the example of others or solely through hearing the Gospel preached. All or any of these things may play, and do play, a vital part in the process by which men are brought to Christ. But unless the Spirit of the living God is at work in the human heart, the deductions of reason, however convincing, will not lead to a life of active discipleship; the example of others, however inspiring, will have but a temporary influence; and the message of the Gospel, however faithfully proclaimed, will fall on soil where it takes no permanent root. Only the Holy Spirit can take of the things of Jesus and so reveal them to us that we are led to make with Peter the great confession: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

So may I put to you the question that Jesus put to Simon Peter: “Who do you say that I am?” It may be that you have tried to answer it in the past, but that your answer has not risen much higher than the answer given by so many of Jesus’ contemporaries. It may be that to you, as to them, Jesus may have been just one more, even though perhaps the greatest, of the prophets. But it may also be that the Holy Spirit of God is leading you to a fuller confession of faith. And it is certain that if you listen to his voice, you will be able to say what only a Christian can say: “The life I now live I live in faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me” and you will be counted among those blessed ones, who, though they have not seen Jesus as Peter was privileged to see him, yet have believed.

For twenty years the Rev. R. V. G. Tasker, M.A., B.D., has served King’s College, University of London, as Professor of New Testament Exegesis. The sermon printed here was preached in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.

- More from R. V. G. Tasker

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Liberalism as a Mirror of a Secular Invasion

Andrew K. Rule

When Adolph Harnack based his interpretation of Christian history upon the principle that the Gospel, in any time and place, must have a “contemporary integument,” his principle was sound though his application of it was faulty. Without taking on the thought forms and the language forms and some other forms, from the contemporary culture, the Gospel could not be apprehended by the preacher or by his hearers. The difficulty and danger are that these forms were created for, and normally express, a culture that did not have Christianity as a formative influence within it and, as it stands at the time, may be quite antithetical to Christianity. For example, in the first century the Gospel had to be expressed in popular Greek—a language which somewhat perpetuated the pagan culture of classical Greece and which at that time embodied the pagan culture of the Mediterranean basin. But it had to be made to express Christian meanings. The results show that the New Testament writers achieved amazing success. Not so, however, the Alexandrian theologians. And Nygren’s study, Agape and Eros, shows clearly that the problem persisted. Taking on the contemporary integument means, in practice, that either the Gospel will be accommodated to the contemporary culture and lose its distinctive significance or the culture will be baptized into the spirit of the Gospel or there will be a mutual accommodation. Whenever a Christian seeks to proclaim his faith, he and his hearers are faced with this problem and exposed to these hazards; for both he and his hearers must put the same Christian meaning into the borrowed forms or no real communication will result.

The thesis of this paper is that nineteenth-century liberalism was, on the whole, an earnest attempt to express the Gospel in terms of one strand in the European and American culture of that era; that the culture of that strand was a naturalistic humanism; and that in spite of the sincerity and the ability of the creators of that form of liberalism, the authentic Gospel was finally submerged by the naturalism.

It is sometimes stated quite sweepingly that the culture of the nineteenth century was secularistic, and that it was this culture which invaded Christian theology. In view of the character of the missionary movement for which this century should always be famous; in view of the revival of the Roman Catholic Church and of its increasingly conservative spirit; in view of the continuing evangelical revival within Protestantism; and in view of the highly cultured and scholarly resistance to liberalism among the Protestants; in view further of the faith of rank and file Christians, confused but not captured by liberal propaganda—in view of such facts as these it is not true to say that nineteenth-century culture was secularistic. But nineteenth-century liberalism was an attempt to appeal to the culture of certain highly vocal people, the “intelligentsia”; and their culture was secularistic. We are not condemning that attempt. What Christian dare say that none of them may be included among the elect, and that we need make no serious attempt to win them for him? However, they must be won for him. Their culture must not be dressed, essentially unchanged in vague, Christian-sounding terms and the result be offered to the world as “progressive Christianity.” The latter, unfortunately, is what happened. Read, in this connection, Nathaniel Micklem’s article, in an early issue Christendom (Vol. I, No. 5, Autumn, 1936) on “The Aversion of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion.”

Decline Of True Liberalism

We have been using the qualifying term “nineteenth century” as a not very precise way of indicating that it is not liberalism as such that we have in mind. Since “His service is perfect freedom,” we would contend that authentic Christianity is true liberalism, and we are heartily in favor of it. Indeed, our objection to “nineteenth-century liberalism” is that it is not really liberalism all but abject and soul-endangering slavery to an alien philosophy.

But it is one thing to say that it was not really liberalism; it is a very different thing to say precisely what it was. For example, one of the spokesmen for the movement, (D. S. Robinson, in his The God of the Liberal Christian) begins by assuring us, as many another did, that liberalism or progressive Christianity is not a body of doctrine but a method and a spirit; but then he proceeds to give a fairly definite statement, doctrine after doctrine, of central-trend liberalism in its distinction from the liberalism of the social theologians. That would seem to suggest that liberalism was more than a method and a spirit; it was also a coherent body of doctrine. But, if so, what can be made of the following facts? Schweitzer, at least in his The Quest of the Historical Jesus, apparently reserved the term “liberal” for the doctrines of Harnack. Others would characterize Schweitzer’s own views as liberal. In their conceptions of the historical Jesus, at least, these gentlemen flatly contradict one another. And that is fairly typical.

What, then, was liberalism? Was it a body of doctrine to which “all competent scholars agree”? Or was it a method and a spirit without any necessary agreement as to doctrine? Or was there some minimum of doctrine essential to it? If so, what? In answer, perhaps one could do no better than follow the late Dean Willard Sperry. In his little book, Yes, But—the Bankruptcy of Apologetics, addressing his fellow liberals, he maintained that authentic liberalism, wherever you find it, sacred or secular, has a brief creed, the first article of which is “I believe in man.” By calling it the first article, he means that it is the controlling article. Any other article in the creed is either derived from it or held only in harmony with it. But that certainly means that liberalism is always humanistic, and that the humanism, even if it goes on to include a belief in God, is first and basically naturalistic. There you have our thesis in a nutshell.

Humanism At The Crossroads

A thoughtful Christian surely will not object to a certain kind of humanism, in the right place. The fact is that the Reformation did for man exactly what the humanists wanted done. For it discovered or rediscovered the value and dignity of the individual; and it presented man in nobler colors, based more firmly, than humanism ever was able to do. But it did so indirectly, not directly. It did not vaunt man’s inherent qualities and his superiority to the natural creation, though it did not ignore or minimize them either. The humanists did, and that way lies soul-destroying pride. The Reformation saw the glory of man in the gracious purpose of God—a much greater glory, which nevertheless cultivates the virtues of gratitude and humility. Thus, what Dr. Sperry tells us that liberalism essentially does is precisely what authentic Christianity refuses to do. Indeed, that is, for it, the essence of sin.

According to authentic Christianity, God made man, because he is love, to live and grow in filial dependence upon God; and he equipped man with those qualities in which the liberals found man’s greatness to consist in order that man might be capable of such a relation to God. Man’s whole life was to be “begun, continued and ended” in God. Sin is man’s prideful effort to realize his potentialities in his own way, in dependence upon himself alone. If God is permitted to enter the picture at all, it will be only upon man’s terms, to do what man thinks his right but not within his power. In short, “I believe in man” is the first article of the operative creed of the sinner. But, according to Dr. Sperry, “I believe in man” was the first article of the liberal creed. To such an extent had the spirit of a sinful, secular culture invaded the thinking of men who regarded themselves as Christian.

Theological Road To Pride

But, let it be clearly noted that we are here characterizing a theological expression. We are not bringing any charge of immorality and sin against the persons who adopted and advocated this theological expression. As far as any human being is capable of judging in such matters, we would gladly insist that these men were no more immoral or sinful than the rest of us. We earlier recorded our judgment that they were sincere and highly capable. How then, it may be asked, did such men come sincerely to adopt a theological expression that constitutes sin and that logically generates pride? In answer, we would draw attention to two things—the peculiar character of nineteenth-century life and thought and the way in which naturalism crept up on the theologians gradually and unsuspected.

The life and thought of the nineteenth century were like the life of a tropical jungle, teeming but chaotic. Before men had a chance to orient their thinking and conduct to one new idea or invention, a dozen others came leaping upon them. The constant and increasing overstimulation might have caused resignation or frustration, and it probably did in many cases; but in many others awakened an unbridled enthusiasm for the new and sensational. One thing it did not foster. It did not encourage men to take time to make a calm and balanced evaluation of their attainment and direction. We have seen how liberals could flatly contradict one another. In that burgeoning century, individuals could flatly contradict themselves, and apparently be blissfully unaware of the fact. It would be ungenerous and presumptuous to deny the genuine Christian status of all of these liberals, yet their thinking certainly was seriously out of harmony with Christian truth.

A Creeping Naturalism

And naturalism crept up on them gradually, without their suspecting its true character. When Justin Wroe Nixon, in 1925, drew the attention of his brethren to the real character of the principles upon which they had been building, they reacted with horror and dismay; and the contemporary era came upon American theological thought. For they then saw that their principles led to pure naturalism. Why had they not seen that previously? It had overtaken the movement gradually. How it proceeded in every area may be seen by studying as an example the way in which it penetrated Christology; and Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historcial Jesus will picture that for us with sufficient accuracy and vividness. It began, as he shows us, as an ill-defined discomfort with regard to particular supernatural actions attributed in the Gospels to our Lord and as an effort to suggest a natural explanation. The rationalists tried that in one way; Strauss tried it in another. By the time of Schleiermacher, this naturalism had become a highly skillful dialectic, which might almost have been expressly designed to conceal from the reader just what that great thinker did believe about the miracles. In Harnack, Jesus was forced within the limits of human genius, and “miracles do not occur.” Most of the liberals went approximately as far as that; but they did not go along with the spate of volumes that presently presumed to diagnose the mental ill health of the man named Jesus. What had happened was that, in that century of rich confusion, the desire of Christian scholars to get away from the woodenness of eighteenth-century theology and to make Christianity appeal to contemporary thinkers opened the way for an alien “camel” to get its nose into the Christian tent. That camel, the naturalistic humanism of contemporary university life, pushed itself further and further in, always most graciously and plausibly, until finally the owner of the tent was outside in the storm without ever discovering, until it was too late, what was happening to him. When that discovery was finally made, in the second decade of the present century, a new theological era was upon us. Liberalism was, indeed, a mirror of the secular invasion of a Christian country.

A native of Australia, Professor Rule has an international education: M.A., University of New Zealand; B.D., Princeton Theological Seminary; Ph.D., University of Edinburgh. Since 1927 he has served as Professor of Church History and Apologetics at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary.

- More from Andrew K. Rule

Theology

Review of Current Religious Thought: February 04, 1957

Philip Edgcumbe Hughes

The Bible is indeed an amazing book. In the academic world alone many thousands of scholars continue year after year to find it an inexhaustible mine in which they dig and delve and probe and experiment; and as the years go by the vast amount of scholarship devoted to the critical and analytical study of the sacred text shows no sign of diminishing. The great pitfall which intellectual activity of this kind does not always succeed in avoiding is that of a perspective which has room only for technicalities, thus tending to permit preoccupation with the letter to smother the spirit of the text and to forget that the primary purpose of Holy Scripture is to make man “wise unto salvation which is through faith in Christ Jesus.” But that the sacred text should be searched and pondered is a vital task of the Church in every generation.

The Expository Times (January, 1957) contains a stimulating article by Professor T. F. Torrance of Edinburgh on “One Aspect of the Biblical Conception of Faith.” We have by now become familiar with the contention that in the New Testament the word “faith” (pistis) should in important instances be understood as “faithfulness”, particularly divine faithfulness. For example, Romans 1:17—“The righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith”—may, as Dr. Torrance points out, be taken to mean that God’s righteousness is revealed from God’s faithfulness to man’s faith. “God”, he expounds, draws man within the sphere of his own faithfulness and righteousness and gives man to share in it, so that his faith is embraced by God’s faithfulness.” Or again, Romans 3:3 may be rendered: “Shall their faithlessness make of none effect the faithfulness of God?” Other significant texts mentioned are Romans 3:22 and Galatians 2:16, 20, and 3:22. Dr. Torrance explains “the faith of Jesus Christ” as “essentially a polarized expression denoting the faithfulness of Christ as its main ingredient but also involving or at least suggesting the answering faithfulness of man, and so his belief in Christ,” and he adds that “even within itself the faithfulness of Christ involves both the faithfulness of God and the faithfulness of the man Jesus.”

No one is likely to dispute the conclusion that “the whole of our salvation depends upon the faithfulness of God who does not grow weary of being faithful.” But when Professor Torrance asserts that “in Jesus Christ we are in fact unable to disentangle our faith from the faithfulness of God” we can but feel that his predisposition to dialectical thinking has confused rather than clarified what is a crucial issue. And even more so is this the case when he propounds the doctrine that “Jesus Christ is not only the Word of God become flesh, He is also Believer, but Believer for us, vicariously Believer” (my italics). So novel a deduction may be the offspring of dialectical ingenuity, but hardly of scriptural revelation.

In the exegesis of the biblical text, however, the twofold significance of pistis should not be overlooked.

Professor C. F. D. Moule of Cambridge writes in New Testament Studies (October, 1956) on “The Nature and Purpose of I Peter.” The hypothesis that I Peter is not properly a letter, but a primitive liturgy, and, more particularly, a baptismal liturgy, has been put forward by certain scholars in recent years. (Perdelwitz, 1911; Bornemann, 1919; Preisker, 1951); and more recently still Professor F. L. Cross of Oxford has advanved the view—in his book I Peter, A Paschal Liturgy (1954)—that I Peter is not only a baptismal liturgy, but (in Professor Moule’s words) “substantially the celebrant’s part of the Baptismal Eucharist of the Paschal Vigil.” While agreeing that I Peter is concerned with baptism, Professor Moule observes that this is also true of many other parts of the New Testament, and that in itself this ‘proves no more than that the early church writers continually had the ‘pattern’ of baptism in mind.” He is unconvinced that there is here an actual liturgy—“the words used actually at a celebration of baptism or a baptism-and-eucharist.” He finds it difficult to conceive how such a liturgy “could have been hastily dressed up as a letter and sent off (without a word of explanantion) to Christians who had not witnessed its original setting.” His detailed criticism of the hypothesis in question is sensible and compelling.

Professor Moule, however, advances a theory of his own. He believes that I Peter is “genuinely epistolary and was

written specifically for the communities indicated in the greeting.” But it is his opinion that, since (on his interpretation) “some of these communities were actually suffering persecution, while for others it was no more than a possibility, the writer sent two forms of epistle, one for those not yet under actual duress (1:1–4:11 and 5:12–14), and the other … for those who were in the refining fire (1:1–2:10, 4:12–5:14),” and suggests that “the messengers were bidden read the appropriate part to each community, according to the situation.” By an analysis of the contents he shows that each part contains an opening address (2:11 and 4:12) and a closing ascription (4:11 and 5:11), a macarism (ie. “Blessed are ye …”, (3:15 and 4:14), an appeal to Scripture (3:10–12 and 5:5), a reference to the imminence of judgment (4:7 and 4:17), an exhortation to commit one’s cause to the Lord. 1:1–2:10 and 5:12–14 are taken as common to both letters. This theory is certainly interesting and thought-provoking. The lack of any breath of ancient tradition in its support is, however, an obstacle not easily surmounted, and it is well known, not least in the New Testament, that the epistolary form may not infrequently exhibit digressions, recapitulations, repeated emphases, and spontaneous outpourings in the form of ascriptions, invocations, and so on.

Writing in The Christian Graduate (December, 1956), on “Some Aspects of the Reformed Doctrine of Holy Scripture,” the Rev. H. M. Carson emphasizes that “linked closely to the objective fact of the sufficiency of Holy Scriptures there is the allied doctrine of the inner witness of the Holy Spirit.” This means that “our acceptance of the sufficiency of Scripture is not merely a mental assent, but is a spiritual response to the inner testimony of the Spirit, who brought the Scriptures into being, and who still interprets them to the people of God.” The Christian who adheres firmly to the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture can, he asserts, “be assured that he stands in a noble succession”—a succession which reaches back to the early church and to Christ Himself. It is, moreover, a doctrine that has been prominent “at all periods of spiritual awakening in the life of the church.” We, too, for our part, are convinced that, if there is to be a true spiritual awakening in our own day, it will not be apart from the recognition of the sufficiency of Holy Scripture as the Word of God.

- More from Philip Edgcumbe Hughes

Books

Book Briefs: February 4, 1957

Voice Of Barth

The Existentialist and God, by Arthur C. Cochrane. Westminster, Philadelphia. $3.00.

Mr. Cochrane, a Canadian, did his undergraduate work at the University of Toronto and took his theological training at Knox College, Toronto. He received his Ph. D. from Edinburgh in 1937 and did further graduate work in Germany. Since 1948 he has occupied the Chair of Systematic Theology in the Seminary of the University of Dubuque, Iowa. The work here reviewed contains the Robert Foundation Lectures delivered at Presbyterian College, Montreal, during the fall semester of 1954. The lectures consist of an analysis of the concept of being in the thought of Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, Tillich, Gilson and Barth, from the standpoint of Christian doctrine of the being of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

The author’s thesis sets forth that existentialism is a serious quest for being. It is fundamentally ontology (though more than that) with the color of theology. This ontology rests on the awareness that our existence is founded upon something which transcends it. It understands man’s being as movement, as action in relation to another than itself, rather than as being grounded in itself.

As for Kierkegaard, the fundamental principle of his thought is the absolute qualitative distinction between time and eternity, God and man. Man is a particular existing being, but God is eternal. According to Cochrane, Kierkegaard did not intend by this formulation to outline a new philosophy of existence, but rather to drive home to his contemporaries what it means to exist before God. For Kierkegaard the only legitimate question in connection with pure being is that of the relationship which I, the subjective, existing thinker, sustain to this being. Ontology is incidental, at best implicit, in Kierkegaard, and this was his intention. Those who have followed him, however, have all too often seen in Kierkegaard’s refusal to develop an ontology, and invitation to them to do just that. The elaborate systems of Jaspers, Heidegger and Sartre are really, according to the author, utterly foreign to Kierkegaard’s spirit, and to call him the father of contemporary existentialism leads to a gross misunderstanding (pp. 29–30).

Turning then to the exposition of Jaspers’ thought (pp. 48–57), the author shows quite convincingly, in the reviewer’s opinion, that though Jaspers is a sort of theist who talks about “faith” in “God,” his thought is essentially humanistic. The concept is the awareness of the transcendent in the ultimate situations of life. Cochrane tells us that churchmen (I suppose he means respectable Christians) should realize that Jaspers combines with this theoretical opposition to Christianity something of an evangelistic fervor against Christ’s claims to exclusiveness.

As for Heidegger (pp. 58–65), he agrees with Jaspers that being cannot be comprehended as anything that is or as an object of thought. Heidegger, therefore, begins with human existence (Dasein) in its ontological structure. Dasein is not at hand, however, as objects are. Dasein is a being-in-the-world, but not simply spatially, as a table is in a house, but being in a situation which has the possibility of non-being. Hence non-being (death) is integral to Dasein; it constitutes its possibility. “For if Dasein is to become something, it must not be. We encounter this nothing in the mood of dread (Angst). Its object is indefinable.”

Satre (pp. 65–76) is the boldest of all the existentialists. He draws the pessimistic consequence of Heidegger’s ontology with fortitude. He perceives the relationship of human existence to that which transcends it, but for him it is unequivocally the nothing. Sartre is an honest atheist. Man simply turns up on the scene and then defines himself. He becomes what he wills himself to be in the upward thrust of his existence. Cochrane observes (p. 70) that there is little danger that the church will ever confuse the nothing which Heidegger and Sartre have substituted for God, with the true God, though the possibility exists that it may be confused with what the Bible calls evil.

Turning to Tillich (pp. 78–99), the author believes that being, non-being and being-itself are the three leading concepts in his system and the key to understanding his use of them is his method of correlation. To reduce the author’s analysis of Tillich’s position to the space of this review would overtax the reviewer’s ingenuity. We will content ourselves by observing simply that Cochrane feels that the revelation of God in Christ is nonessential to Tillich’s system. He comes to the knowledge of being-itself and of finite being just as Jaspers and Heidegger do. Churchmen should be aware of this secular strand in Tillich. His Systematic Theology is actually a systematic philosophy, not a witness to Jesus Christ, but to “being-itself,” of which Jesus Christ is only a symbol (p. 90).

The treatment of Gilson (pp. 100–112) marks a rather different stream from the main course of the book, a sort of interesting parenthesis. The thrust of this Thomistic existentialism consists in the composition of existence and essence, in which existence is the primary element (p. 105 f).

The most interesting phase of the book, to this reader (and about the only place where he has some reservation), is the analysis of Barth’s view. In the subtitle of the book, Barth’s name is the last in a list of seven representative thinkers, but in the actual structure of the book, we meet Barth everywhere—at the beginning, at the end and in the middle. As indicated at the start, the perspective which pervades the treatment of the whole is the Christian doctrine of the being of God as revealed in Christ, but in specific terms this means the doctrine of Karl Barth. It is Barth, according to Cochrane, who has given us the Christological corrective to Kierkegaard’s implicit ontology and the only saving antidote to the overt, un Christian ontology of the other representative thinkers discussed. As an exposition of Barth’s view, there is little with which anyone could disagree expressly. The reviewer, however, cannot share the author’s enthusiasm for the Barthian position, especially on the score of Barth’s Christological emphasis. No Christian would doubt that Christ is the supreme revelation of the one true God; but the Christ testified to in Scripture and the Christ who appears in the theology of Barth are somewhat more different than Cochrane would admit. More specifically, the reviewer is still not convinced that Barth has a toe to stand on in his differences with Brunner on this score. (The primary discussion occurs pp. 33–39). Not that we would counter enthusiasm for Barth by enthusiasm for Brunner, but who could ever argue, and get away with it (except Barth), that since Pilate fulfilled the plan of salvation, we see that the state is indissolubly intertwined with the Cross and therefore the Christian should honor the state? No wonder van Balthasar, the Romanist, commends Barth for expounding Scripture without being “exegetical” (p. 145, note 43). Before the writing of this review we scanned Barth’s Nein! again and still feel he is simply shouting Brunner down, as he has done with just about everyone, at one time or another. If one wants to believe everyone was a Thomist until Barth, the first Protestant, came along, that is his privilege, but it is our opinion that both Paul and Calvin believed that the knowledge of God which the sinner has is pre-supposed in the knowledge which he receives in Christ.

The book is definitely for the specialist and serves (though without intention or fault) to underline the great gulf between the theology of Barth and the common man. I fail to see, when I read Barth, or books about him, how anyone could ever transmute his theology into the idiom of preaching. Not that we expect Barth to write Sunday school quarterlies, but if theology is to serve the Gospel, there ought to be some apparent connection. Dean Homrighausen recently defended Billy Graham against theologian Niebuhr and asked, “Where are the neo-orthodox evangelists?” (Time Magazine, July 23, 1956, p. 51). Barth would probably answer, the Holy Ghost doesn’t need any!

PAUL K. JEWETT

Biblical Theologian

Our Reasonable Faith, by Herman Bavinck. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, 1956. $6.95.

This is a translation of Herman Bavinck’s Magnalia Dei, first published in 1909, now for the first time translated into English by Henry Zylstra of Calvin College, Grand Rapids. It is, as Zylstra says in his preface, “a compendium or synopsis of the four volume Dogmatics” by the same erudite and distinguished Dutch theologian. As a compendium it is less technical and is intended for more popular use (cf. p. 6). It must not be supposed, however, that this volume is a little handbook. It is a large volume in which all the leading themes of the Christian faith are unfolded with that thorough competence of which only a master theologian is capable. It is a systematic theology for the layman, and it is executed with remarkable skill. The person unversed in the technicalities of theological discussion needs to have no hesitation in undertaking the reading of this volume. It is meant for him.

If one wishes to know the distinguishing features of the unpardonable sin, he will find one of the finest expositions to be found anywhere and much misunderstanding and confusion will be corrected (pp. 253 f.). In the chapter on the covenant of grace it is gratifying to find that Bavinck uses the expression “the counsel of redemption” to designate the arrangements between the persons of the Godhead in distinction from “the covenant of grace” as the historical actualization of that counsel (pp. 260–279). Bavinck also rejects the distinction between the external and internal covenant as a distinction which “cannot stand in the light of the Scriptural teaching” (p. 279). Thorough Calvinist as Bavinck was he does not rationalistically rule out the will of God to the salvation of all, that God “wants all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” and he appeals to 1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9 in this connection (pp. 360 f.). He insists, and the present writer thinks rightly, that hell in Acts 2:27 must mean grave (p. 365). If we wish to know how Bavinck interprets such a difficult text as Ephesians 1:23, he tells us (p. 383 f.). In reference to the “water” of John 3:5, he says that “Jesus is not in the first place thinking of baptism”; water is the image of renewal and purging (p. 426). Yet, if we are a little troubled that in our evangelical tradition sufficient significance is not attached to baptism as the rite of initiation into the fellowship of the church, we may listen to Bavinck again: “Viewed in this way, baptism was in very fact a preservation, like that of the ark which spared Noah (1 Peter 3:20–21), a dying and being raised again with Christ (Rom. 6:3–4), a washing away of sins (Acts 22:16), a break with the world and an entrance into a new fellowship” (p. 524). For all of us some difficulty arises in connection with the distinction between the completed accomplishment of redemption and its application. Not a little help can be derived from the distinction which Bavinck develops between property by deed and actual possession (p. 455). These are but a few random examples of how rewarding a perusal of this volume can be.

The simplicity of presentation will not conceal from the discerning reader the maturity of thought which lies back of this exposition of the biblical system of truth. Neither will it conceal the amazing knowledge of Scripture which the author had at his command. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find another book which is so fully documented by quotation and citation of Scripture. This evinces that Bavinck was essentially a biblical theologian. And because this is so, every chapter breathes the atmosphere of that godliness which persuasion of the truth creates. In this respect Our Reasonable Faith is like its great predecessor in the Reformed tradition, The Institutes of the Christian Religion; it is written in the interests of Christian devotion, faith united with a serious fear of God. “God, and God alone, is man’s highest good” (p. 17). It is with these words the book begins.

The scientific theologian will not find it a waste of time to mark up this volume. He will find gems of theological exposition and formulation. For example, what could be better than Bavinck’s formulation of the relation of time and space to creation (pp. 169 f.)? And, when in these days the doctrine of the church is so much in the forefront

of thought and discussion, what could be more rewarding than a careful study of the chapter on “The Church of Christ” (pp. 514–543)?

The translator evidences throughout his sensitivity to the demands of literary taste and form, and this adds greatly to the readability of the translation. An occasional footnote by the translator, however, would have been in order as, for example, a correction of Bavinck’s slip reproduced in the translation at the middle of page 380. And the omission of the name of God from the translation of Hepp’s tribute to Bavinck (p. 11) leaves a startling, though erroneous, first impression of what Hepp actually said and of what Zylstra intended to say.

JOHN MURRAY

Theological Background

English Thought: 1860–1900. The Theological Aspect, By L. E. Elliott-Binns. (Longmans). 28s.

The late Canon Vernon Storr published in 1913 his book on The Development of English Theology in the Nineteenth Century: 1800–1860. He had intended to produce a companion volume dealing with the latter half of the century but was prevented from doing so by the pressure of other work. We now have a volume from Canon Elliott-Binns treating the subject over this period from a wider outlook than Canon Storr had in mind, for as the author rightly says the theological viewpoint can only be seen in true perspective when set against the background of prevailing trends of thought in other fields.

Beginning with the impact of natural science upon theology and religion, the author traces the influence of philosophy, archaeology and the critical views of German theologians on biblical studies in this period, together with the development of dogmatic theology, sacramental teaching and the position of Church and State. In such a book one would expect this ground to be covered. But where Dr. Elliott-Binns puts us particularly in his debt is in relating these theological considerations to the political, economic and social conditions of the times, to which he has added a study of the general literature and spread of liberal views associated with that period.

Though one is constantly impressed with the immense range of the author’s reading, as indicated both by quotations and footnotes, yet his learning is so easily presented that this book is a sheer delight to read. His own comments on the different situations and problems are shrewd and penetrating; for example, in dealing with dogmatic theology he states “Dogmas are working hypotheses to be tested by practical religious experiment, and every age must conduct its own tests and be prepared if necessary to make the consequent adjustments, for a too rigid doctrinal system may erect barriers to the fuller knowledge of things divine and preclude further progress. The Christian faith is not a kind of Maginot line behind which the Church takes shelter against the intrusion of new and unwelcome ideas” (p. 213).

Two major impressions are left by this book upon the· mind of at least one reader. First, the immense prestige acquired by German theologians during the period, so that for a time many British scholars accepted their findings as being almost above criticism. Though this docile spirit and submissive attitude were not universal, yet such teaching did considerable harm in undermining popular views on the inspiration of the Bible, leading to a general opinion that as its text was unreliable, so its message was obsolete. Second, the dominant position of Westcott in England at the close of the century. Though as a pure scholar he may not have been the equal of either Lightfoot or Hort, yet his influence was in his day more widespread than theirs, due to his deep concern over the social problems of the times and over the expansion of the Church in other lands. By seeming to see the past by the light of the present and its needs, by his emphasis on the teaching of the Fourth Gospel and by his knowledge of the Greek Fathers, he helped to change the direction of theological thought in this country. But if Westcott was the outstanding personality, and Lightfoot “the greatest interpreter of the New Testament”, to Hort belongs the distinction of producing what is described as “one of the most valuable and suggestive theological works produced in England during the period”, entitled The Way, the Truth, the Life. Quotations from it go far to substantiate this claim for a volume which has been largely forgotten.

In the long view, the development of psychology presented a greater danger to religion than the attacks of science, and not the least valuable section of the book is that dealing with this subject and the effect of its early pronouncements upon the uninstructed public.

Many of the problems and difficulties with which the church is faced today in England, and indeed in other countries, owe their origin to events and trends of thought which began about a century ago. A true understanding of these problems can only be gained by examining their causes, and to read this book will enable the student, and general reader alike, to obtain a wide understanding of the many factors which have contributed towards the religious climate of our own times.

G. C. B. DAVIES.

Stimulating Reprint

Luke The Physician, by William M. Ramsay. Baker Book House, Grand Rapids. $4.50.

Sir William Ramsay’s mind was that of an eager, earnest scholar who is determined to grapple with great problems. This series of studies (reprinted from the 1908 edition) deals with a variety of unrelated subjects and exhibits the wide range of the author’s interest and the carefulness of his scholarship.

Indeed, it is perhaps in this that the significance of Ramsay’s work consists: not so much in the conclusions reached, as in the methods used and the attitude which characterizes his consideration of New Testament problems. Many of the particular points he makes may seem somewhat dated, after the passage of fifty years or more. His treatment of Harnack on Luke, or Sunday on New Testament criticism, may not have the relevance it once possessed. His conclusions as to the authorship of Hebrews are interesting, and his study of the original sources of our gospel records is stimulating, but the picture which the author gives of himself is far more valuable than any of these things or the sum of them.

Here is a man who proceeds on the basis that “when a real piece of living literature is to be examined, it is a false method to treat it as a corpse, and cut it in pieces: only a mess can result” (p. 3). He lashes out against “so-called critics” who “do not read a book whose results they disapprove” (p. 8). He sees that “ideas are not like dead matter to be placed side by side: they unite and are productive, or they die; but they cannot remain inert and unvarying” (p. 125). His protest against mere cleverness in scholarship is excellent (p. 250).

The book will have a limited appeal because of the technical nature of its subject matter, and because it deals with some themes which are not of great concern today. But to those who share Ramsay’s concern for the problems of the history of religion, it offers much that is rewarding.

H. L. FENTON, JR.

CHRISTIANITY TODAYis a subscriber to Religious News Service, Evangelical Press Service and Washington Religious Report Newsletter.

A Nation under God

Christianity in the World Today

President and Mrs. Eisenhower, Vice President and Mrs. Nixon and members of their immediate families were seated in the congregation at National Presbyterian Church.

Seated nearby were Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a half a dozen other Cabinet members, the governors of more than 12 states and many members of Congress.

And this is the sermon they heard—from the pastor, Dr. Edward L. R. Elson:

“ ‘In the beginning God.’ On these first words of the Bible early America staked down its life.

“This central tenet of our life was explicit in our Declaration of Independence. It is implicit in our instruments of government. It permeates our institutions. And it is manifest in our common days. The virtues of our people and the values of our culture are derived from the premise that this is ‘a nation under God.’

“This basic truth has been mediated to our people through many religious traditions and by many denominations. All espouse in common a faith in a transcendent God in history and beyond history. In some this faith in God has been intimate and personal; in others an attitude of life derived from the social climate and the cultural atmosphere produced by religious faith, principally evangelical Christian faith.

“To be sure, America has as a principle the complete separation of the institutions of the church from the institution of government. In our plural religious structure, this separation has been a source of virility to both Church and State. But while we cling tenaciously to this principle of separation, no doctrine of American life has ever or ever will eliminate or minimize the presence, the power, or the influence of religion in our national affairs. Religion and national destiny are forever intertwined.

“To be ‘under God’ is to acknowledge that this is God’s world—that he is the sovereign Lord and Ruler of all life. He is the God of Creation. Man, created in his image, bears some of God’s characteristics. Man is a person as God is a person; and the only reason for treating human beings with dignity and respect is that they are persons created in God’s image, with immortal souls and an eternal destiny. Thus created by God in God’s own image, man is free under God’s rulership. His freedom is God-bestowed, not an attainment but an obtainment. Man is born free and the chief end of this free man as the catechism long ago said is—’to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ God himself is the Lord of Creation and he will have no other gods before him. Therefore, that nation which deifies itself, or absolutizes some reality in its life cannot be a nation ‘under’ God. Such is idolatry, for that nation usurps God’s place. Americans have always rejected this temptation. Americans believe God is above the nation.

“To be ‘under God’ is also to be under His Providence. There is a destiny for that nation whose ‘God is the Lord’—a destiny shaped and determined by the Almighty himself. Our spiritual forbears convenanted with God, not as a tribal or a racial deity but as the universal God, who while being the God of all people, becomes in a special sense the God of those who accept his purpose for human life.

“Our history has meaning only in these terms. We are a people under God’s Providence.

“To be ‘under God’ is to be guided by him. That nation which seeks to understand and obey his laws; that nation which seeks to discern and do his will—only that nation becomes an effective instrument of God’s purpose on the earth. Above all, over all, guiding all, empowering all is the transcendent God. To the degree we possess his mind and spirit, which is at the center of the universe, and which we Christians believe to be revealed by Jesus Christ, we are and we shall remain a ‘nation under God.’

“This concept of freedom under God cannot survive as a mere intellectual expression. Apart from its Source, it will wither and die. But enriched by prayer, strengthened by worship, maintained by a variety of spiritual disciplines, our great nation can successfully confront all forces which would corrupt its life or destroy its freedom. A dynamic and witnessing faith is not an option for our time; it is an imperative for all ages.

“But deeper than these truths, a nation ‘under God’ is a nation under God’s judgment. God is sovereign Ruler of a moral universe. Man is not the final source of values. Nor is the nation the highest tribunal of judgment. The values by which both men and nations are judged are eternal. They rest with God. Man and his institutions are under God’s final judgment. There is a divine order above all and beyond all, in time and beyond time, where love and justice and righteousness and truth are absolute—the perfect order of God’s Kingdom, where God rules the heart and conscience of all beings. There is a higher court of Judgment above all persons, above all nations, above all cultures, even above all universes—the Court of God’s eternal perfection. A nation ‘under God’ is always under His judgment.

“Here in this Capital City this truth was legislated into our Pledge of Allegiance, is printed on our postage stamps and impressed on our coins.

“Now let us each impress it deep within our own hearts and manifest it in our lives and national conduct. Such testimony, to be sure, will sharpen the irreconcilable differences between the two great poles of power in our world today. But it will also give us the strength to live in these times and play our God-appointed role in history.

“Our dominating concern in Washington on January 20, 1957, is not what we know, not the skills we possess, not the wealth we have accumulated but rather the spirit we convey to the world. To whom are we committed? By whom are we led? These are the commanding questions.

“Freedom under God is not permanently secured, nor safely installed anywhere without personal responsibility and unceasing vigilance. Freedom is always only one generation away from extinction. Freedom must be won, understood, guarded and enriched in each age.

“Not out of fear, or insecurity, or a substitute for solid thinking; not as an escape to an easy and comfortable way do we seek to reclaim our ancient heritage. But rather we worship and pray, we trust and obey, because it is the very life-spring of our national being.

“On days such as this I like to think of our spiritual kinsman, the pioneer American who faced the frontier and the future with three implements in his hand. He carried an axe, a gun and a book. With the axe he felled the trees, built his home, his school, his church. With the gun he provided meat for his table and protection from the predatory forces about him. The Book was the center of religious devotion, the textbook of his education and the inspiration of his institutions.

“Today’s American no longer carries the axe, the gun, the Book. His axe has become America’s gigantic industrial machine, and the world sees that. His gun has become America’s powerful armament, and the world knows it well. His Book, by the power of the Person revealed therein, is pouring forth the light of a new spiritual birth, and the world must clearly see that.

“If we are to lead in this hour America must become a citadel of man’s true freedom and a vast bastion of spiritual power, whose light shines in American lives so brightly at home it will illuminate the dark places of all mankind.

“Rightly do we sing:

“Our Father’s God, to Thee Author of Liberty,

To Thee we sing Long may our land be bright,

With freedom’s holy light;

Protect us by Thy might,

Great God, our King.”

Two hours after leaving the service, the President and Vice President took their oaths of office for the new terms in a private ceremony at the White House. (This ceremony was repeated the following day before thousands of deeply-interested Americans.)

As President Eisenhower took the oath, his hand rested on a Bible that his mother gave him before he graduated from West Point in 1915.

The King James Bible was open to Psalm 33, verse 12, which reads:

“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord; and the people whom He hath chosen for His own inheritance.”

END

Beavan Resigns

Jerry Beavan, public relations director of the Billy Graham team and executive secretary of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, has resigned, effective February 1.

The announcement was made in the New York offices of the Billy Graham Crusade.

Beavan, who has been on a two-month rest leave, explained that health was a basic factor in the decision, together with the necessity of curtailing the excessive travel, which has averaged over 100,000 flying miles per year during the past six years.

Dr. Graham, in accepting the resignation with regret, announced that Beavan would serve in a behind-the-scenes advisory capacity to the Graham staff in the direction of the forthcoming New York Crusade. Beavan helped develop the New York organization in the past year.

Dr. Graham also stated, “We have reluctantly accepted the resignation of Mr. Beavan. He has been a key factor in the development of our organization. We will miss him. We remain close personal friends.”

Nae Asks Aid Halt

The National Association of Evangelicals has urged Congress to bar any further economic assistance to Colombia “until such a time as all religious violence is stopped.”

Dr. Clyde W. Taylor, Secretary of Public Affairs of the NAE, directed the request to members of the U. S. Senate and leading members of the House.

The request was accompanied by a memorandum giving several examples of the “hundreds of cases of religious pressures which are brought to bear on the Protestant minority in Colombia.”

Officials of the NAE stressed that they were not requesting the action because of any feeling of bitterness, nor in a spirit of retaliation. Rather, they said, the need for this action stems from the fact that it is entirely inconsistent with the U. S. policy in world affairs to grant economic support to a government which has ceased to protect the freedoms essential to the development of free nations.

Only the weight of Congressional concern, expressed in active measures to withhold economic assistance to a country which allows such conditions to exist, will be effective on stimulating corrective measures by the Colombia government, Taylor said.

Laymen’S Leadership

Lively discussions on the problems of the Christian conscience in business and the challenge of being a witness for Christ in every walk of life highlighted the second Laymen’s Leadership Institute at Louisville, Ky.

More than 300 leading laymen, representing business administration, finance, insurance, law, oil and sales, attended the Institute, held at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The main addresses were on such themes as “The Layman and Prayer in a Program of World Evangelization,” by Maxey Jarman;“Christ, the Only Hope,” by General William K. Harrison; “The Layman and His Faith,” by Howard E. Butt Jr.; “The Bible is My Business,” by Dr. Duke K. McCall; “God’s Priority in Man’s Affairs,” by Richard C. Halverson; “A Journalist’s Inquiry Into a Religious Dilemma,” by Stanley High; “Research, Reason and Revelation,” by Dr. George K. Schweitzer, and “Christ In This Hour of Crisis,” by Dr. Billy Graham.

A personal testimony of daily experiences with Christ was given by Alvin Dark, professional baseball player.

Halverson decried the compartmentalization of life by too many business men. He recalled the words of a banker who said, while praising his pastor, “what my pastor does in the worship hour on Sunday morning has absolutely nothing to do with what I do in my bank.” This banker, Halverson said, is a traitor to Christ and all he represents.

He continued:

“Secularism, that is, godlessness, is a worse enemy than communism. And this godlessness is widely practiced by professing churchmen.”

High warned against an “otherworldliness” that is oblivious to the Church’s involvement in the affairs of here and now.

“Christianity,” he said, “has been least significant when it has been too otherworldly and most significant when it has been most deeply involved in the woes and needs of the people.”

The journalist said that Old Testament prophets, once they had a living encounter with God, spoke with a thundering “Thus saith the Lord” to the sins and idolatries of their age.

He added:

“Let the Church be the Church, in the noble sucession of St. Francis, Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, John Wesley … let it proclaim both the grace and righteousness of God for this wicked generation.”

Dr. Graham spoke about the grace that saves, schools and serves. He called for reality in religion, for total surrender to the will of God and for total self-denial.

W. M.

Graham At Yale

Dr. Billy Graham will be guest preacher at the Annual Yale Christian Mission in New Haven, Conn., February 11–14.

His sermons, scheduled to be delivered on four successive evenings in Yale University’s Woolsey Hall, will be broadcast to local churches. Twelve associate missioners will help the evangelist with student consultations and discussions.

Members of Dr. Graham’s evangelistic team are not scheduled to take part in the series of services.

The invitation to Dr. Graham was extended by the Mission Committee, comprising Yale undergraduates appointed by the Council of the Yale Christian Community, the University Church and the Yale Christian Association.

The annual student mission at Yale dates back to the early years of the century. One of the guest ministers at Yale during the last few years was Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr.

Bills In Congress

The following bills, relating to religious affairs, have been introduced in the 85th Congress:

★ To permit income tax deductions for tuition payments to religious schools, on the same basis as charitable institutions … income tax deductions for tuition payments on children through 12th grade of private schools.… excise tax exemptions for private and parochial schools on same basis as public schools.

★ To make Good Friday a legal holiday.

★ To ban serving of alcoholic beverages on commercial airliners (passed House last year but failed in Senate).

★ To permit American missionaries serving abroad to buy supplies at commissaries and post exchanges maintained by U.S. Armed Forces.

★ To provide heavier penalties for peddlers of indecent literature.

★ To make it a Federal penalty punishable by five years imprisonment to mail obscene literature to unmarried minors.

Numerous bills, introduced by a number of congressmen, relate to civil rights.

Broadcast Probe

An effective national policy and organization at the local level to protect the rights of all paid religious broadcasts were among the top items considered in closed business meetings at the 14th annual convention of National Religious Broadcasters, Inc., in Washington, D. C., January 30–31.

The strong considerations followed reports from many evangelical pastors about being taken off the air because of the announced policy of the Broadcasting and Film Commission of the National Council of Churches in favor of “free” and “sustaining” time.

“Free” time may mark the end of “freedom” for evangelical broadcasting in America, said the official news-letter of the NRB.

Delegates to the convention were told that the National Council pressure follows this pattern:

★ “Local churches are objecting to the ‘commercialization’ of religion by the sale of time.

★ “There are too many ‘religious hucksters, religious exploiters, faith healers’ and ‘cultists’ on the air. The only way to control this situation is to put Protestant time in the hands of the Council of Churches.

★ “Paid-time broadcasters do not represent ‘the theology or worship practices of the main body of the American people.’

★ “The NCC represents within its membership all the ‘cooperative, substantial’ and ‘trustworthy’ elements in Protestantism. Local representatives should be given priority in the allocation of radio and television time.

★ “The local Council of Churches or ministerial association should be consulted and should have the right to approve all religious programs other than Roman Catholic or Jewish.

★ “Local stations should have a policy in line with that of the Federal Communications Commission, the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters and the National Council of Churches.”

The NRB estimated that hundreds of evangelical programs have been dropped at local levels since the NCC effort began last April, because of the lack of “effective strategy to meet the situation.” It was stated, however, that the radio-television industry “on the national level” has been “eminently fair and generous in its attitude toward ‘paid’ religious broadcasting.”

Moral Leadership

Christian leaders from many parts of the world have been converging on Washington, D.C., in recent days.

The reason: International Christian Leadership Conference, February 6–9, and highlighted by Prayer Breakfast for the President February 7 at the Mayflower Hotel.

Dr. Billy Graham will speak at the annual banquet. Senator Price Daniel of Texas is president of the organization.

Sigurd Anderson, general conference chairman, stated:

“America’s top role in world affairs is indisputable, as is the fact her leadership must be more than political, economic and military. The world today desperately needs the moral and spiritual leadership which our country is in a unique position to give.

“The International Christian Leadership Conference will be a testimony to the world that America takes her spiritual and moral responsibility seriously.”

Warning To Clergy

Church membership, to some, is not as demanding as membership in many civic clubs.

This opinion was expressed to an estimated 300 ministers from 31 states by Dr. G. Ernest Thomas, director of the first National Conference on Spiritual Birth and Growth sponsored by the General Board of Evangelism of the Methodist Church. The conference was held recently at Kentucky Lake State Park.

Dr. Thomas warned the ministers against permitting their churches to become merely clubs. He stressed the need for “spiritual rebirth bringing with it the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Deep In The Heart

The Baptist General Convention of Texas has launched a mammoth stewardship program aimed at increasing annual gifts to churches from $75,000,000 in 1957 to $80,000,000 in 1958.

Dr. C. C. Warren, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, is one of 27 speakers touring the state in behalf of the program.

Meanwhile, the Southern Baptist Convention’s effort to establish 30,000 new preaching stations by 1964 has been voted the top news story of 1956 in the Convention.

Baptist editors voted as second most important the record $20,000,000 given in direct support to Convention missionary and agency work.

‘Utopian Dreamers’

Dr. W. A. Criswell, pastor of the 11,800-member First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, lashed out at the “so-called social gospel” in a recent address to the 19th annual Texas Baptist Evangelistic Conference.

He said the social gospel is “destroying Christendom under the guise of social consciousness,” and declared that “its fruits, whether in New York, Japan or India, are a dead church, a dead gospel, a dead denomination, a dead seminary and a dead preacher.”

Dr. Criswell described such preachers as “utopian dreamers and arm-chair philosophers.” He said that liberal churches today, “with their abandoned Sunday evening services, their deserted prayer meetings and their cold intellectual sermons, are occupying themselves with pimples of the skin when the disease of death lies in the blood stream of the heart.”

He added:

“Men with a passion for social righteousness are to be commended. The amelioration of working conditions, the building of better community playgrounds, the organization of groups for the peace and the good of the world—these things and a thousand others like them are acceptable to God and to man. It is not for these things that we arraign the social gospelers. We would support these humanitarian movements with all our hearts and souls. But the modernists have committed evils. They have forsaken the Lord God, ‘the foundation of living waters, and they have hewed them out broken cisterns that can hold no water.’

“They made a God of judgment and wrath a soft, yielding Father, who has so made the world that we inevitably grow better and better. That one should think there is a final reckoning for evil or a hell awaiting the wicked is to insult the sentimental fatherhood of God.

“Salvation, moreover, to the social gospelers, means that what a man requires is not regeneration in the old sense of the terms, but simply an awakening to what he really is.…

“Man has one need above all others, and that is the need for redemption. If he cannot be saved from his sins, no system into which he is placed will work toward peace and perfection.

“Our hope is in the gospel of repentance and faith. We sin individually and we must repent individually. Each one of us must find pardon for himself in the atoning grace of Christ and eternal life through a personal faith in Him. The primary task of the Church today is to preach the gospel of salvation everywhere, to offer redemption from the bondage of sin and eternal life in Christ Jesus now and in the world to come. We can never have a better world until better people live in it. There is more lasting social good accomplished by bringing men to Christ than by all the highspun theories of all the armchair philosophers in the whole world.”

Restudy Of Doctrine

The American Baptist Convention’s missionary program in the Orient, caught increasingly between denominational and ecumencial pressures, has wavered ambiguously for some years.

Lacking a cooperative program, Northern Baptists, who once held the lead in mission work among the Japanese, have now been strongly outpaced by Southern Baptists. At the same time, ecumenical aggression has tended to reduce Northern Baptist strength, whereas Southern Baptists have worked independently of national church agencies.

In an effort to halt this erosion, the ABFMS has named a committee to restudy the Baptist doctrine of the church. Composed of leaders from within the board, the committee, while predominantly conservative in theology, also includes representatives of the liberal view.

The committee’s task is a big one: to exhibit a Baptist doctrine of the church which will encourage cooperation with Southern Baptists and ecumenical forces at the same time, without loss of Northern Baptist strength.

Governor And Bible

Governor Orval Faubus, in his second term inaugural address before the Arkansas General Assembly, cited five passages from the sixth chapter of Galatians, which, he said, have been guideposts of his administration.

The passages are:

“Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”

“Let every man prove his own work.”

“Be not deceived: God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

“Let us not he weary in well doing; for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.”

“As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men.”

And One Hindu

(The following statistics on the religious affiliation of members of the 85th Congress were compiled by Robert Tate Allan’s Washington Religious Report Newsletter. The figures may vary slightly from reports of other religious news sources, because some members of Congress, at their own request, are classified as just “Unlisted” or “Protestant.”)

Senate

Methodist, 18; Baptist, 14; Lutheran, 4; Presbyterian, 13; Congregationalist 8; Disciples of Christ, 2; Evangelical and Reformed, 2; Episcopalian, 12; Quakers, 2; Unitarian, 2; Mormon, 3; Jewish, 2; Unlisted, 1; “Protestant,” 2; Roman Catholic, 11.

House Of Representatives

Methodist, 84; Baptist, 55; Presbyterian, 52; Lutheran, 15; Congregational, 19; Disciples of Christ, 14; Evangelical and Reformed, 4; Mormon, 4; Episcopal, 45; Quakers, 2; Unitarians, 3; Church of Christ, 4; Apostolic Christian, 1; Universalist, 2; Evangelical Free Church, 1; Christian Scientist, 2; Hindu, 1; Jewish, 8; Unlisted, 26; “Protestant”, 18; Roman Catholic, 75.

Edmunds Honored

A Southern Baptist educator has been elected president of the Association of American Colleges for the first time in its 42-year-old history.

He is Dr. J. Ollie Edmunds, president of Stetson University, DeLand, Fla.

Dr. Edmunds succeeds Dr. Arthur G. Coons, president of Occidental College, Los Angeles.

Digest …

► “Fishers of Men” pin President Eisenhower in hour-long visit at the White House.

► Dr. H. L. Turner, president of Christian and Missionary Alliance, on tour of mission fields in Africa. Returns late in March.… Carl L. Cleaver elected president of New York Bible Society. Associated with Reynolds & Co., member of New York Stock Exchange.

► Methodists launch drive for 1,200 new clergymen a year.… Record $23,533,296 contributed by Methodists in 1956 for missionary work.

► Six American Lutheran church bodies announce giving goal of $35,550,000 for 1957 and $120,635,000 for the three-year period ending in 1959.

► Kresge Foundation of Detroit grants $1,500,000 to help build Methodist Church’s new theological seminary.

Britain

Claims Disputed

The Roman Catholic Church is making rapid progress in Britain, reports the Catholic Directory for 1957.

According to published statistics, the Roman Catholic population in England and Wales rose by 122,300 to a total of 3,292,000 during 1956.

In commenting on these figures, the Sunday Express quotes recent words of Eric Treacy, the Roman Catholic Archdeacon of Halifax, York, who forecast that by the end of this century the Anglican Church will no longer be an established church.

These are the quoted words:

“A nation with a predominantly Roman Catholic population will by then have taken steps to have the Constitution of the country changed, so that the cathedrals and ancient parish churches are made over to the Roman Catholics; the King (or Queen) of this country is crowned by a Roman Prelate; and the Anglican Church and its clergy are deprived of the privileges that now belong to them as ministers of the establishment.”

A qualified Protestant observer had this to say:

“These opinions are without solid foundation, nor are the Roman Catholic statistics so impressive as they appear. It is well known that the numerical growth of the Roman Church in the last few years is due in large measure to the influx into Britain of refugees from Central Europe and of employees (e. g., nurses) from Ireland, nearly all of them Catholics. It is also well known (although no statistics are available) that considerable numbers of Roman Catholics are received each year into the Church of England.

“Despite the high-sounding claims of the Roman hierarchy, the Anglican Church shows no signs of decline. Its membership includes over 60 per cent of the population of England, and the number of its communicants increases year by year. The Protestant Free Churches in Britain are also gaining in strength. This is certainly true of the Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians. And the Free Churches continue to exert a powerful influence in the spiritual life of the nation. The Romans are laboring under an illusion if they think they are having everything their own way.”

F. C.

Revising Canon Laws

The Church of England is in the process of overhauling its Canon Laws—last revised in 1603.

It is generally agreed that a certain amount of revision is called for, if the Canons are to retain any sort of spiritual authority. But evangelical churchmen have become increasingly uneasy, lest in the process of revision, the distinctively Reformed character of the Church of England be endangered.

The Church Society, founded in 1950 and representing the more extreme evangelical opinion in the Church of England, has issued a broadsheet in which a direct attack is made on the proposed new Canons. It describes the revision as “an attempt, behind a smokescreen of respectability and legalism, to whittle away the faith once delivered unto us by the Apostles and to reverse the Reformation doctrine which is built upon this faith.”

Among other things, the Society protests that many of the revised Canons would give increased power to the bishops, undermine the authority of the Bible, legalize Mass vestments and the confessional and enforce Confirmation as an essential condition of admittance to Holy Communion.

A strongly-worded answer to these charges has come from the Bishop of Rochester, Dr. C. M. Chavasse, in a letter to the London Times. Describing himself as “the senior Evangelical Bishop in the Church of England,” Dr. Chavasse repudiates the Church Society’s broadsheet as “false and scandalous” and calls it a “scurrilous document” produced by “irresponsible and unknown agitators.”

Fuel has been added to the fire by speeches made at the recent Islington Clerical Conference—an annual rallying point for Anglican evangelicals. An estimated 500 attended. The president of the conference, the Rev. Maurice Wood, vicar of Islington in N. E. London, disassociated himself from the views expressed by the Church Society and forbade the sale of the broadsheet.

“Canon Law revision,” he declared, “is not a plot to drive evangelical clergy out of the Church of England. There is no need to make ourselves into a persecuted minority.”

F. C.

Sunday School Decline

The London Times has surveyed the place of children in church and concluded that the name, Sunday School, is no longer in favor.

It has discovered some attempts to change the name to “children’s church,” “junior church” and “family church.” Attendance at British Sunday Schools is steadily dropping, however, no matter what the name.

Europe

Crisis Deepens

The crisis within the Italian Communist Party (cited in November 26 issue ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY) is deepening.

The confusion that the Hungarian slaughter caused upon the rank and file of Italian Communists became manifest during the recent Eighth Congress of the Italian Communist Party held in Rome. Some outstanding leaders of the party openly accused the Stalinist bosses and asked for a more democratic leadership. Signor Togliatti and his followers, however, succeeded in silencing the opposition and in closing the Congress in absolute conformity to Moscow’s orders.

In the days that followed, the victory became less real. Signor Eugenio Reale, one of the founders of Italian communism and a former ambassador to Warsaw, resigned from the party. His example was followed by six notable personalities in the field of culture. One of these, Professor Vezio Crisafulli, who had been a candidate to the High Constitutional Court, said on behalf of the others, “To come out from the Communist Party had become for us a matter of conscience.”

An untold number declined to renew their membership cards.

The latest blow was given by Signor Nenni, leader of the Socialist Party, who offered his Stalin Prize (over $25,000), received from the hands of Stalin, to the Italian Red Cross in aiding hundreds of Hungarian refugees pouring into Italy.

R.T.

Seminary In Germany

Formation of a theological training center in West Germany for Spanish Protestant ministerial candidates was voted at the annual conference of the Gustav Adolf Work of the Evangelical Church of the Rhineland.

The decision to set up the new training facilities was made after the conference heard a report by Dr. Manuel Gutierrez-Marin, president of the Spanish Evangelical Church, on the “distressed situation” of that body.

Praise For Niemoeller

Dr. Martin Niemoeller, president of the Evangelical Church in Hessen and Nassau, was greeted on his 65th birthday by religious, cultural and political leaders all over Germany.

Bishop Otto Dibelius of Berlin, chairman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKID), hailed him as “a courageous man who tells everybody what he thinks must be told.”

Even his adversaries cannot deny that he is one of the most outstanding personalities of German Protestantism in the 20th century, asserted the bishop.

During recent years, Dr. Niemoeller has become a highly controversial figure.

His statements on political questions, particularly his opposition to the rearming of West Germany, have frequently evoked criticism from church and civic leaders and brought praise from pro-communist groups.

News Behind News

A communist newspaper in Czechoslovakia has complained about a slowing down of atheistic propaganda.

The paper, Nase Pravda, said the population is still deeply religious and hence, there must be no relaxation in anti-religious campaigns.

Africa

New Nasser Move

Egyptian President Gamel Nasser, frustrated eastward, may turn westward into the African continent in a bid to regain his prestige as the Arabs’ “strong man.”

Coastal newspapers in West Africa recently have headlined rumors of Egyptian influence among the area’s Moslem population. The papers look upon this influence, based upon religious ties and Arab nationalism, as a threat to their own nationalist ambitions.

With self-government for the Federation of Nigeria approaching, political leaders of the “Christian” south fear that the Moslem rulers of the vast and rich northern region may want to secede from the Federation in favor of the Moslem “lodestar” across the Sahara.

“The Sahara is a bridge rather than a barrier between Egypt and us,” Prime Minister Alhaji Ahmadu of Northern Nigeria said in Cairo during his pilgrimage to Mecca last June. The Prime Minister of Somalia and the Secretary-General of the French Cameroons Party also were among the leading African figures who visited Egypt last year.

Low air fares are making the Mecca more attractive to West Africans. An estimated 10,000 of them now make the “Hajj” each year. So many went from Nigeria last year that the government sent a special mission, including a physician and a team of medical workers, to look after their needs.

It is on this religious feeling of kinship that Nasser is working. The trip to Mecca whets the appetite for national liberty as pilgrims rub shoulders with nationalists from other areas of the colored world. At the same time, the sense of unity in Moslem Africa tends to undermine loyalties to the western world.

Nasser has not been silent in wooing the affections of Africa. In his Philosophy of the Revolution, he said, “If we direct our attention to the continent of Africa, I would say, without exaggeration, that we cannot, even if we wish to, in any way stand aside from the sanguinary and dreadful struggle now raging in the heart of Africa between 5,000,000 whites and 200,000,000 Africans.”

Egyptian officials announced last October that they would open a consulate in Nigeria.

Alhaji M. A. Deke, a former employe of the Islamic Congress, has told the West African press that diplomats from Egypt have been visiting Northern Nigeria in the role of businessmen. He also revealed that the Congress recently sent 20,000 Islamic books of a political nature to the Northern Region. All this, he stated, was designed to build up a Moslem empire headed by Nasser.

Leaders of Christian missions in West Africa, already concerned about the way in which Islamic “evangelism” is outstripping the growth of the Christian Church in some areas, are closely watching these signs of strengthened ties between Nasser’s Arab nationalism and the African Islamic religion.

W. H. F.

Gold Coast Nuggets

Only 10 students showed up when a youth camp, with Christian lecturers, was held on the African Gold Coast four years ago.

Converts among these 10 provided camp officers for the next year. In December, 1956, four camps were held on the Gold Coast, with 170 attending.

The idea has spread along the coast to Sierra Leone and east to Nigeria, where the country’s first boys’ camp was held last Christmas. Two of the many who made decisions for Christ were from Moslem homes.

One of the converts at the camp four years ago was Felix Konotey Ahulu. Today, he is in England studying to be a medical doctor and trying to win students for Christ.

Norway

Report On Revival

Hundreds of Norwegians have surrendered their lives to Christ, in the wake of an evangelistic campaign that began last fall.

The campaign was scheduled to end many weeks ago, but interest has mounted and the rush of people continues. Thousands jam the white parish church of Hoyland near the city of Stavanger. People come from far away and police are kept busy regulating queues.

The revival leader is the Rev. Johannes Skauge, a secretary of foreign missions. He speaks in a simple, objective and direct manner. He never appeals to the emotions. There are no solos and choir numbers. The speaker, in giving the invitation, says, simply, “Let us sing this hymn while you come along.”

A young couple walks toward the altar. Others follow. Soon, there is no more kneeling space. Others wait.

In the periodical, “Our Church,” a reporter wrote:

“Hardly anything has touched me so deeply as what I have just seen: people breaking away from the road of perdition to seek God. Christ has but rarely appeared to me in such majesty as when I was watching the multitude striding forward towards the altar to let God take the lead.”

T. B.

India

Csi Adds Big Church

The executive synod of the Church of South India voted at its meeting in Madras to accept the application of Christ (Anglican) Church at Trivandrum to become a member.

This action brought into the CSI the largest Anglican congregation in Travancore-Cochin state not already a member.

CSI, formed in 1947, now includes Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Reformed and Congregational bodies.

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The Way

The Truth

The Life

Only Mediator

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Reasons For Growth

A Time Of Burden

Preacher In The Red

Faith And The Future

My Father

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Role Of Scientific Scholarship

Text Of Scripture

Interpretation Of Scripture

Role Of Scientific Scholarship

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Retreat From Orthodoxy

Truth Reduced To Utility

Gospel Becomes Social Energy

Triumph Of Enlightenment

Impact Of Evolutionary Science

Religion Narrowed To Ethics

Fidelity To The Bible

Lack Of Cultural World-View

Niebuhr On Liberalism

Flaws In Niebuhr’S Thought

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The Head And The Heart

The Element Of Trust

Confusing The Issue

Faith And Belief

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Verdict Of Contemporaries

Greater Than The Baptist

Greater Than Elijah

Greater Than Jeremiah

Verdict Of Disciples

Christ The Son

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Decline Of True Liberalism

Humanism At The Crossroads

Theological Road To Pride

A Creeping Naturalism

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Voice Of Barth

Biblical Theologian

Theological Background

Stimulating Reprint

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Beavan Resigns

Nae Asks Aid Halt

Laymen’S Leadership

Graham At Yale

Bills In Congress

Broadcast Probe

Moral Leadership

Warning To Clergy

Deep In The Heart

‘Utopian Dreamers’

Restudy Of Doctrine

Governor And Bible

And One Hindu

Senate

House Of Representatives

Edmunds Honored

Digest …

Britain

Claims Disputed

Revising Canon Laws