Building Christian Homes

Christian homes do not just happen. They are built, and only built, by Christians, men and women who sense something of the beauty, the wonder and the responsibilities involved.

After the Creation the home was the first institution established in the divine economy. Since that time it has been the central unit of the social order.

In very large measure the character of the home determines the character of the nation. In the home young lives are bent, moulded and trained, and they are our citizens of tomorrow.

In Japan one sees dwarf trees, many of them representing birds, animals and even works of inanimate art. Nevertheless, they are living trees, dwarfed by a secret process, and their formations are determined by careful bending and pruning during the growing years. In like manner, whether for good or evil, the home is the place where the lives of children encounter those influences which in such large measure determine what kind of people they grow up to be.

When Hitler’s forces threatened the shores of England, Winston Churchill, that sturdy old warrior and incarnation of the Britain that was, announced to his people: “I have nothing to offer you but blood, and sweat, and tears.”

Building a Christian home can prove a battle, for Satan hates and fights against the efforts of those who would establish such an institution. Only consecrated parents know the blood and sweat and tears involved, for it means hard work, courage, steadfastness, sleepless hours, wrestling in prayer.

But they do not work alone.

A Christian home means first of all that Christ is the Lord of the home and that he has pre-eminence in the lives of those who live there.

Immediately after entering Westminster Abbey one notes the tomb of David Livingstone, located in the place of conspicuous honor by a nation that recognized his greatness and the contribution he had made in opening a continent for Christ.

What kind of a home did Livingstone come from? A biographer writes: “The home in which David Livingstone grew up was bright and happy, and presented a remarkable example of the domestic virtues. It was ruled by an industry that never lost an hour of the six days, and that welcomed and honored the day of rest; a thrift that made the most of everything, though it never got beyond the necessities of life; a self-restraint that admitted no stimulants within the door, and that faced bravely and steadily all the burdens of life; a love of books that showed the presence of a cultivated taste, with the fear of God that dignified the life which it moulded and controlled.”

Since that time great changes have taken place. No one would care to return to the rigorous living of even a century ago, but we should never forget that the marvelous gadgets which are a part of house-building today cannot of themselves turn that house into a home. The spiritual and moral values that make men and nations great are to be found within those individuals who turn to God for his divine blessing and help. Such values are an integral part of the Christian home.

In the Old Testament we read of the patriarchs that they “pitched their tents, digged a well and built an altar.” But today how many there are who pitch their tents and dig their wells but make no provision for the spirit! The altar is never built.

There are millions of houses scattered across America, many of them fabulous in their appointments for gracious living, but many of them are houses only, not homes.

A house is built with materials—brick, stone, wood, plaster, etc. It is made with things and furnished with things. A Christian home is built with faith in God—with love, unselfishness, consideration, patience, prayer, work and praise. It may be very humble; it may be a mansion.

Training children is one of the greatest privileges and responsibilities of parents, and Christians must never forget that no child has been trained properly until Christ is pre-eminent in his or her heart.

Christian training of children is a responsibility that cannot be faced too soon. Some time ago a woman asked a psychologist: “When should I start training my child?” “How old is he?” she was asked. “Five,” she replied. The psychologist said: “Madam, hurry home, you have already lost five years.”

But are we this wise? There are many who think young children are too young for instruction about the things of God. However, those who have tried it know that little ones avidly listen to Bible stories and absorb their implications, and at a very early age God and his Son become wonderfully real to them.

In a Christian home probably the greatest single influence on children is a realization that their parents want them to know Christ more than anything else in this world, and set such an example in their own lives. If Christ is given a secondary place in the life of parents, and in their ambitions for their children, the latter know it and no amount of talk can erase from their minds the fact that Christ is not first.

A Christian home should be the happiest place in the world. There one should find the right perspective toward life. Interesting books, carefully selected for adventure, instruction and cultural value, should be in the bookcase. Games, with the parents joining with their children in the fun, should form part of home life. Youthful friends should be made welcome, and profitable amusements can well be found away from the TV or outside influences.

The family altar, with daily prayer and Bible reading, is one place where children learn the difference between temporal and spiritual values and where the source of man’s ultimate responsibility is centered. Paul, writing to Timothy, said: “And that from a child thou hast known the holy Scriptures which are able to make thee wise unto salvation.” Happy are those children whose parents have done as much for them.

A Christian home is held together by the cement of love. As Edgar Guest so truly wrote: “It takes a heap o’ lovin’ to make a home.” This means love of God, of each other, of other people.

Some time ago a man observed a snake taking baby birds from a nest while the mother bird frantically tried to drive it away. The nest was across a stream where the observer could not render assistance and he could only say: “Oh mother, you built your nest too low.”

Only Christian homes are built high enough to protect all concerned. Only those homes where God is given his rightful place can so qualify for his promised protection.

A Christian home is built on the solid rock of Jesus Christ. It is instructed in the Word of God. It is sustained by the power of prayer and by a close walk with the Lord.

L. NELSON BELL

Just one hundred years ago, God awakened America coast to coast with the most phenomenal spiritual revival of her history. Everything about that movement seemed unusual: the time and place of its beginning, the pattern of development, the leadership, the methods, and the results.

For one thing, its origin was striking. Who would have imagined that a sweeping revival might get its start and shape from a little noonday prayer meeting? And the place was unusual: in the downtown bustle of New York’s business world, on Fulton Street. There was its founder, Jeremiah Calvin Lanphier, an unknown business man who had come untrained to his new task as lay-missionary for the old North Dutch Reformed Church, and who later went unheralded for the meeting which he had begun. Most unusual was the fact that this simple prayer meeting was to become the pattern for later meetings for the great revival to follow.

Historical Development

Much like today, the main characteristic of the times was amazing material prosperity combined with great expansion and turbulent political scenes involving ever new disturbances and agitations. This was “the golden age of our history” (Bacon). Entire cities and even states were springing up. Between 1845 and 1860 seven new states and four organized territories were admitted to the Union. Frontiers were pushing westward. Gold had been discovered in California. Railroads, telegraph and steamship lines were multiplying. Harvests were plenteous, and trade was prospering. Much new land was being acquired through the conquest of the Mexican War, and people were money-conscious, even money-mad. The boom was on.

But, with the increase of all this gain, there was a decrease of godliness, and zeal for religion was becoming lukewarm. Political strife was growing, and the oncoming Civil War was casting a shadow over the land. Suddenly, on October 14, 1857, the nation suffered a tremendous financial crash. Fortunes vanished into thin air, bankruptcy, failures, and frauds were on every hand, and men’s hearts failed them for fear. God had lowered his boom.

The Eve Of The Crash

Only six people—five businessmen and one clergyman—gathered for that first noon prayer meeting, on September 23, several weeks before the crash. The decision to hold the meeting daily also preceded the crash. Only God foreknew that the bank bust would give sudden impetus to prayer, and that the praying in turn would give birth to a great revival. In a few days every room of the three-story consistory building of the church was filled for prayer. Entrances choked up with crowds. The church sanctuary had to be opened, and every wall resounded daily with prayers, songs, testimonies, and exhortations. Hundreds were turned away, and because of this a committee of young men from the YMCA gained permission to open near-by John Street Methodist Church, where both lecture room and sanctuary filled almost immediately.

The meeting became a movement. Prayer meetings sprang up in many places: stores, shops, halls, warehouses, theaters, hotels, rooming houses, police stations, fire houses, YMCAs, churches, and ships at sea. Most of these were held for one hour at noon, and followed after the Fulton Street pattern.

Preaching services began for furthering the revival. But it was the prayer meeting which continued as the characteristic feature of the movement. Burton’s Theater, for example, became the scene of great crowds who gathered nightly to give eager attention to the preaching of God’s Word by ministers like Theodore Cuyler and Henry Ward Beecher. Their sermon themes, on repentance, faith, and practical religious duties, became also topics of social conversation, and ministers of all denominations took new hope in their congregations.

What was true of New York became true, in time, of every city, large and small, throughout the land. In a few months Philadelphia reported that more than 3,000 people were daily gathering at the well-known Jayne’s Music Hall, the largest number, it was said, ever to assemble daily for prayer in this country. Prayer meetings sprang up everywhere: in Baltimore, Wilmington, Washington, D. C., Richmond, Charleston, Memphis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St. Louis, Chicago (where Dwight L. Moody was beginning his work), and other cities. Henry Ward Beecher, then ministering in the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, personally conducted many of the daily prayer meetings. Little wonder that he gave a large portion of one of his Yale lectures to this very subject.

In Boston the revival took possession of every pulpit except one (that of Theodore Parker). Evangelist Charles G. Finney was at this time holding revival meetings in the historic Park Street Church. He tells of a Christian businessman who had traveled all the way from Omaha to Boston. In an open meeting this gentleman reported that he had found “a continuous prayer meeting for 2000 miles.”

Everywhere people wanted to pray. They would rather pray than hear preaching. A kind of spontaneous feeling about it prevailed: “We have had enough preaching for awhile—let us pray.” All classes, ages, and characters of men assembled. Those present day by day were young men and women, lawyers, physicians, merchants, car-men, hod-carriers, policemen, firemen, butchers, bakers, porters, skeptics, gamblers, drunkards, hoboes, rich and poor, high and low, easy and uneasy—they all prayed. Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Friends, Reformed, Congregationalists and other groups gathered to contact the greatest unused power in the world. Prayer was offered by all and for all, and it was answered in marvelous ways. Glory dwelt in our land, and righteousness exalted the nation!

Audience participation made these meetings different. Songs, thanksgivings, exhortations, and many short prayers punctuated the hour. Some interesting rules governing the Fulton Street meeting were put up on the walls: “Prayers and exhortations not to exceed five minutes, in order to give all an opportunity.… Not more than two consecutive prayers or exhortations.… No controverted points discussed.” But God had done a new thing. This sort of meeting was an innovation which set the standard and outlived all others, and still continues today, close to the spot where it began a century ago, on Fulton Street.

We shall consider some of the results—direct and indirect—that came from this prayer movement.

The immediate result was that the prayer meetings turned into a glorious revival that filled the churches. Conversions to Christ multiplied by hundreds and thousands. In less than two years 500,000 to 1,000,000 became Christians, and most of these were added to the churches. At the peak of the revival (in the spring of 1858) people were converted at the rate of 50,000 a week for a period of eight weeks. That was when our population was not much over 30,000,000. Several New England towns reported that not a single adult person could be found who was not converted. Many who received Christ as Saviour were remarkable characters, such as the famous pugilist Orville (“Awful”) Gardner. Men of violence, gamblers, and infidels melted as before a mighty volcano.

Revival became the talk of town after town. It captured the press and even the headlines, crowding out stories of crime and slavery agitation. The New York Evening Post carried accounts of it daily. The New York Daily Tribune published “Revival Extras.” It was common for New York businessmen to close their stores at noon and put up a sign, “Will reopen at the close of the prayer meeting.” Many merchants who came to New York on business went back home converted, and would usually start their own prayer meetings at once, thus spreading the revival where they were in those areas. Such was the case in Philadelphia. There a young man under 21 started the prayer meeting after having visited one in New York. Later, in May of 1858, the churches of that city purchased a large tent in which for a period of four months were reaped a harvest of souls. Older Christians who had lived through previous revivals (the early 1800s, the 1820s, and the 1840s) said they had never witnessed such a visitation from God. They began to speak of this as “the great revival.” Some called it “the American Pentecost,” and others “the revival of revivals.” Theodore Cuyler said it was “probably the most extraordinary and widespread revival ever known on this Continent.” Talbot Chambers said “it may emphatically be called the event of the century.” Bacon, a church historian, says “this Revival was the introduction to a new era of the nation’s spiritual life.” W. C. Conant says it was “the unprecedented awakening … which now casts all other wonders of the age into shade.” Roger Babson writes, “Our nation was truly reborn in 1858.”

Some Rediscoveries

This movement of God marked three great rediscoveries for the Church.

First, it rediscovered the tremendous power of the prayer meeting. With the reviving of prayer came the revival. The prayer meeting was not the product of the revival, but the revival was the product of the prayer meeting. It became an integral part of the revival, and not merely something that preceded it or was added to it. The fact that hundreds of thousands were converted in prayer meetings brought a new kind of church life into being. It meant that these converts at once became prayer-meeting Christians, and that the significance of prayer meetings dominated the churches of the entire United States for at least a generation.

Prayer was not everything, but everything was by prayer. In our day Billy Graham has explored this grand secret. One could call it the organizing principle of prayer which is the basis for all his evangelism. The greatest need of our churches today is a return to New Testament prayer meeting Christianity. We have forgotten that when Christ built the church, he built the prayer meeting.

As the other side of the same coin came the rediscovery of genuine Christian unity. This hidden treasure was also found in prayer. It came as a surprise, for it was not the original object of the noon meeting to unify Christians of different denominations. It was found that the Church was one, and no effort was made to found one Church. The Fulton Street and Jayne’s Hall prayer meetings set a new seal of grand ecumenicity on evangelistic work from that day forward.

And the entire revival points a lesson for us in our quest for ecumenism today. It would tell us that true Christian unity is experienced only when men pray together. It is a love-unity and a faith-unity. Christ interceded for this oneness in prayer (John 17), and it was in a prayer meeting in Jerusalem that unity was first experienced. “These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication” (Acts 1:14).

Scarcely in history had there been a revival so spiritually solid and sane. It was difficult to find fanaticism anywhere in the movement of those years. Doubtless, the secret was in the togetherness of prayer. If Methodists would meet to pray only with Methodists, their liberties might have more easily corrupted into licenses. But if they would pray with Presbyterians, and Baptists with Reformed, and Quakers with Congregationalists, etc., the law of Christian love would be fulfilled.

This revival also rediscovered the layman as the great local church evangelist. It was largely a lay-movement, and became a training school for a force of lay-evangelists, among whom D. L. Moody became the most eminent.

It was demonstrated that revival could come without great preaching, but it could not come without prayer. No oustanding leaders or great name evangelists were featured in this movement. Even pastors did little more than enter more fully and faithfully into the regular ministry of their congregations.

Indirect Results

The indirect results of the revival, for communities and nations, are not so easy to trace fully. But they were as distinct and far-reaching as leaven working on the whole lump of society. The effects touched the social circles of community life, education, government, new institutions, various reforms, cultural standards, and new organizations whose enterprises belted the globe.

As in previous revivals, this one also found outstanding ministers and evangelists giving to establish new colleges to train young converts for the Christian ministry as well as all fields of service. We know that out of revivals have come many of our strongest colleges, such as Oberlin, Amherst, Rochester, Wittenberg, Connecticut Wesleyan, Ohio Wesleyan, Lane, Yale, Andover, to mention but a few. It was believed that Christian education would transform society, and what it could not directly transform, it would indirectly reform.

But did the revival avert the financial panic? Prayer was answered and the recession was stayed. Did the revival abolish slavery, or the Civil War? The answer no may surprise some people. The revival did not remove the war, neither did the war remove the revival. Both North and South experienced further revival during the war, and both set forth regiments with prayer. Never did the churches rise to such heights in sacrificial giving as during those turbulent times. In 1861 the revival broke out with unusual power among the troops around Richmond, Virginia, beginning with the wounded in hospitals and carrying out into the camps. Prayer meetings were organized, and great numbers were converted. This work was also encouraged by army leaders like Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. (“Stonewall”) Jackson. The revival brought healing to the wounds of war, and became a mighty factor in welding the nation into new unity and courage for reconstruction.

The revival also made clear the social aspects of the Gospel. Many of the revival measures, considered new and progressive in that day, went hand in hand with every humanitarian concern: good government, good education and culture, the abolition of slavery, and every kind of help for the poor, the afflicted, and the less privileged of society. Hospitals of many kinds were as strongly supported as Bible societies. Perhaps we should say, the revival made the second commandment stand out as strongly as the first: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

The Power Of Prayer

Once again in history God had demonstrated the amazing capacity of prayer in pathfinding all his purposes. The prayer meeting gave us the great revival, and with it, a new Christian unity. The revival, in turn, gave us many social by-products. These, all taken together, put new leaven into our liberties and salt into the whole of our society.

After these hundred years, when living is so fluffy, praying so feeble, and much preaching so flabby, nothing is more renewing than to contemplate the wonders that God can work in all the earth through his simplest organic structure—the prayer meeting.

Armin R. Gesswein has stirred ministers of many denominations to prayer and to a new burden for the spiritual revival of believers. Trained as a Lutheran minister at Concordia Theological Seminary, St. Louis, he took an active part in Norway’s spiritual awakening in 1937 and 1938. He is director of the Ministers’ Revival Prayer Fellowship which reaches into many American cities, and Chairman of the Spiritual Life Commission, National Association of Evangelicals.

When the Incarnate Son of God lived on earth he did really pray. That is a fairly obvious thing to say, but it does require to be said because the chances are that we do not take sufficiently seriously the fact that Christ did pray when he was on earth.

Christ showed us how to pray by praying. It was when he was “praying in a certain place” that one of the Twelve said, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). The request leaped to the lips when one day the disciples, with hushed and awed hearts, actually watched the Son of God at prayer. Looking at Christ praying they suddenly realized what prayer was. If that was prayer they had not yet started to pray.

Christ’s Prayers Intensely Real

It requires to be emphasized again and again that our Lord’s prayers were real prayers; as real and intense as any ever uttered. It may be true that the majority of references to Christ’s prayer life concern intercessory prayer; but he did pray for himself, both in Gethsemane (Matt. 26:39) and in the high-priestly prayer in the fourth Gospel (John 17). And therefore we may well be justified in assuming that during those many sleepless nights, far away from the haunts of men, when he communed with the Father in prayer, the Son would recuperate his strength for the task of redeeming a fallen world, and would make his task, and his needs on his human side, the subject of prayer. We should remember that the Son of God found that the best preparation for a long hard day of demanding work was entering into fellowship with the Father in prayer, there beholding the Father’s glory with no veil between except the thin veil of his true humanity.

There are some 17 references to Christ’s active prayer life, and these may be grouped under four heads: His prayers at the great events of his life, those in the course of his ministry, those at his miracles, and his prayers for others.

Prayer Was His Life

There is a sense in which it is not accurate to speak of our Lord participating in prayer at different times and on different occasions. The fact of the matter is that when we study his life of prayer we find that prayer was not simply a part of his life; it was his life. Prayer was a habitual attitude of his mind and heart. Prayer was the atmosphere in which he lived, it was the air he breathed. So true is that that the Hebrew original of Psalm 109:4, “But I am prayer,” or, “But I am a prayer,” was literally true of our Lord. Surely, this is remarkable when one recalls how much our Lord crammed into the three brief years of his ministry.

Although it would be more accurate to say that prayer was our Lord’s life, yet he did, at particular times and on particular occasions, turn aside to engage in prayer.

Our Lord paused to pray in the midst of an almost incredibly busy life, and when subjected to a constantly high pressure of work and ministry. Preaching, teaching, casting out demons, healing individuals or large crowds of people, and always surrounded by excited, jostling, seething multitudes whose pathetic eagerness to see and to hear must ever have moved our Lord to pity—all this demanding service, all this eager self-giving, was carried on in the atmosphere of prayer.

No matter how busy he was, so steeped in prayer was his spirit that he could immediately, and without prolonged preparation of heart, turn aside for long seasons of prayer. Indeed, our Lord insisted on these extended times of prayer. For example, we read in Luke 6:12, “He went out into the mount to pray, and he continued all night in prayer to God.” Again, Mark 1:35 informs us that “in the morning, a great while before day (the morning of a day of incredible toil), he rose up, and went out, and departed into a desert place, and there prayed.” Or turning to Luke’s gospel again, “Great multitudes came together to hear, and to be healed of their infirmities, but he withdrew himself in the desert and prayed” (Luke 5:15f).

The significance of this important factor in the life of our Lord is the more easily understood when we try to discover the real meaning of Christ’s ability to calm, in an instant, the tumultuous seas and the storm-tossed hearts of the Twelve in the midst of the tempest on the lake. We have not exhausted the significance of that moment when we attribute his miraculous power over nature to his deity. Part of its significance lies in the fact that he emerged from high converse with the Father on the mountaintop to march straight into the heart of that raging sea (Matt. 14:25). A lesson indeed for all Christian workers! If we would speak the Word with power, or exercise the healing, soothing touch, there must be in the background, unseen, our own conscious communion with God. How soon our puny resources are exhausted unless constantly replenished from the reservoirs of God. How mechanical is our work, how ineffectual is our witness, how powerless is our word, unless carried on in the atmosphere of prayer. The harder Jesus’ days the longer were his prayer times, the busier he was the greater his insistence on the practice of the presence of the Father. He recognized no substitute for the daily practice of the shut door, the bent knee, the secret communion.

In Sorrow And In Joy

Our Lord turned aside to pray when, as truly man, he was subjected, as we are, to upsurges of deep emotion, especially of profound sorrow and of great joy. Alas, these emotions make us men and women of conflicting moods which inevitably affect our life of prayer; but not so our Lord. We have hints in the gospel records that the deep emotions that upsurged from his heart were inevitably turned into prayers. For example, we have a hint of this in Mark 8:11f, where, when the Pharisees asked a sign, “He sighed deeply in his spirit.” Again, when a deaf man was brought to him, “He looked up to heaven and groaned” (Mark 7:33f). Whereas similar emotions in us produce moods and mental conflicts that make us neglect prayer, the Lord took these very emotions and blended them into a glance and a prayer heavenward.

We cannot, as is so commonly done, restrict the significance of that profound word to Gethsemane and Olivet. It must be taken as a window into the total life of Jesus Christ. Through that window we can dimly see the agony of soul in the Son of Man when confronted by suffering humanity, and also in the long, still night of retirement, in the desert or on the lonely mountainside, where his anguished soul sent up unutterable sighs to the Father. We, the victims of mood, neglect prayer; when human emotions invaded the spirit of Christ they only drove him the more insistently to prayer. Yes, even in the awful agony of soul and fluctuation of spirit in Gethsemane and on the Cross, his spirit was in undisturbed communion with the Father, still anchored in that one haven of security—prayer. That is a lesson we need constantly to learn. The varying winds of moods and gusts of emotions that blow upon our spirits should not be allowed to disturb our communion with God. They should be made rather to contribute to our fellowship with God by turning them into “strong crying and tears, with prayers and supplication,” as did the Son of God in the days of his flesh.

The Lord turned aside to pray in the midst of spiritual conflict and death. Certain Greeks came seeking an audience of Christ, saying to Philip, “Sir, we would see Jesus.” On hearing of this the Lord began to say, more to himself, perhaps, than to the Twelve, that the hour of glory had arrived. The moment had come when the corn of wheat must fall into the ground and die, and thus bring forth fruit. He says, “Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say? Father save me from this hour? But for this cause came I unto this hour!” And then this hour of spiritual conflict, which had driven him to prayer, issued in triumph: “Father, glorify thy Name!” And then the voice, “I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.”

Another incident is that of Gethsemane (Luke 22:39–46). In trying to understand this event in our Lord’s life it is necessary to realize that this was not an isolated or sudden acceptance of the Father’s will. “I delight to do thy will” (Ps. 40:8) had been the ruling principle of Christ’s whole life. But this should not blind us to the fact that because Jesus Christ was truly man, as well as truly God, it was “natural” that he should desire, if it were possible, not to experience the anguish that this part of the Father’s will might involve.

But having said that, it has to be pointed out that this “natural” desire in the human side of Christ not to have to face this part of the Father’s will was not due to opposition to that will. His prayer that the cup should pass from him never for a moment conflicted with his habitual and perfect submission to the Father’s will, whatever that will might involve.

Such an incident in our Lord’s life is of profound significance for the study of his doctrine and practice of prayer because here in Gethsemane he shows, not by word but by act, what real prayer is. Real prayer is absolute self-surrender to, and absolute correspondence with, the mind, the will, the character, of God. And we require to remind ourselves that this was not a cold, unfeeling acceptance of the Father’s will. “He began to be exceeding sorrowful.” He began to tremble and faint, and therefore he took refuge in prayer. Indeed, so powerful was the pressure on his soul that an angel from heaven came to strengthen him; and to strengthen him for a still fiercer conflict, that of the Cross. “And being in an agony, he prayed the more earnestly: and his sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44).

Another extremely significant incident is that of the Cross. As our Lord’s life ebbed away, and the horror of contact and conflict with sin and death filled his soul with anguish, again he found refuge in prayer. “My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?” Then that dread cry of dereliction in the darkness was succeeded by another agonized prayer. Ere death sealed his lips Jesus Christ’s last words were a prayer, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” To the last, despite the horror of the past hours and of the present moment, our Lord is still in communion with the Father.

So when the sorrow and anguish of some dark spiritual conflict comes upon us, let us remember the Lord who prayed, “O Father, since this cup cannot pass away except I drink it, thy will be done.” And when at the last death draws near to us, and strength is ebbing away, and Jordan’s cold river rolls at our feet, let us remember that Jesus Christ the Son of God died praying.

Rejoicing And Thanksgiving

Prayer, for the Lord, was thanksgiving. When the Seventy returned exulting in the subjection of the demons to the Name of their Lord, Christ rejoiced in spirit saying, “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth” (Luke 10:21). Again, just as he was preparing to utter the word of power at the grave of Lazarus, Christ lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, “Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And when he had spoken thus he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth!” (John 11:41f).

Again, before Christ fed the five thousand “He took the loaves, and gave thanks” (John 6:11). And so also when he fed the four thousand “He gave thanks” (Matt. 15:36). The most solemn prayer of thanksgiving took place, however, when Christ sat down with the Twelve to keep the last paschal feast. It must have been with profound emotion that the Son of God “took the cup and gave thanks” (Matt. 26:27). And yet again, in the evening of the Lord’s resurrection in Emmaus “He took bread and blessed it (or gave thanks) and brake and gave” (Luke 24:30).

The main point to notice in these references to our Lord’s prayers of thanksgiving is that whether he was walking in the light or in the shadow, gratitude was an integral part of his life of prayer. It was not only in life’s shining hours that thanksgiving leaped to his lips. Indeed, it would seem that it was especially in the darkest times that praise poured forth from his heart.

Prayer, for our Lord, was also the taking of solemn counsel with the Father. The choice of the Twelve was, to our Lord, a decision fraught with such grave consequences that it was only after spending the preceding night in prayer that he made the choice (Luke 6:12f).

It was through eleven of those men then selected, and later ordained and commissioned on the evening of the day of the Lord’s resurrection, that the world was to hear the gospel, and receive the faith once for all delivered to the saints. They had to be men who would be prepared to preach only what their eyes had seen, and their ears had heard. Men who would rely, not on their choice of Christ as Saviour, but on the Saviour’s choice of them as his disciples.

Christ’s Intercession

Prayer, for our Lord, was also intercession. In this connection there is one phrase in particular which should be noticed, and which will help us to understand how prayer was for Christ intercession. The phrase is, “for their sakes,” or, “for your sakes.” For example, in John 11, where our Lord announces the death of Lazarus, he remarks that he was glad for the disciples’ sake that he had not been in Bethany to heal Lazarus, that they might believe. That is to say, the Lord raised Lazarus, not only because of his love for Lazarus, and Martha, and Mary, but also in order to bring the Twelve to see that he was the Resurrection and the Life.

Now, for whom did our Lord intercede? For example, he prayed for Peter (Luke 22:31). “Simon, Simon, behold, satan hath desired to have you that he might sift you as wheat; but I have prayed for you, that thy faith fail not.” That Peter did not fall as Judas fell was doubtless due, in part, to a radical difference between the two men; but finally, Peter was kept from falling away by special grace granted to him in answer to the Lord’s prayers for him. That Christ’s prayers were answered is clear from the sequel of Peter’s denial. The proof is seen in the melting grief, the bitter weeping, the frank confession. What a blessed commentary is Peter’s experience on the Pauline phrase, “by grace are ye saved.” And how precious is the thought that the Lord who prayed so effectively for Peter now prays for us as our High Priest in glory.

Finally, Christ interceded for those who crucified him. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). What amazing grace! How hard it is for us to forgive. How seemingly impossible it is to forget injury. How fatally easy it is for bitterness to linger on, deep-rooted in the heart; and how ready it is ever to break out again, and this even after the lapse of years. But here our Lord, in the midst of extreme injury, intercedes on behalf of cruel, violent men.

However, prayer was, for our Lord, primarily and supremely communion. This is especially clear from Luke’s account of Christ’s Transfiguration: “And it came to pass (that) he took Peter, John and James, and went up to a mount to pray. And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering. And behold Moses and Elias appeared in glory but (the disciples) were heavy with sleep, and when they were awake they saw his glory” (Luke 9:28–32).

The Transfigured Life

The significant point for us in these moving words is that Christ was transfigured while he was praying. Prayer was the cause; the Transfiguration was the effect. Surely the lesson here is that the transfigured life is the result of the prayer life. Compare also Moses’ experience when he emerged from communion with God. His face reflected the glory of God with whom he had been communing as a man communes with his friend.

It is on the holy ground of Christ’s prayer life that we learn that only through prayer that is face-to-face communion with God can we receive the grace indispensable for the transfigured life. The grace for that transfigured life is indispensable because it includes identification with Christ in his sufferings.

I lay in dust, life’s glory, dead;

And from the ground there blossoms, red,

Life that shall endless be.

The Mount of Transfiguration shows that divine glory is unveiled, and the divine voice is heard, only after the preparation of prayer that is communion. Here it stands revealed that for Jesus Christ prayer was communion. Prayer that is communion is the prayer that goes to God, not for what he gives, but for what he is. And in the prayer that goes to God for himself alone, God comes forth to meet and to greet the seeking heart, “a blessed invasion of God’s Presence” takes place, and lo, an earth-born son is transfigured with heaven-born glory.

There is a path open to us along which lies the possibility of translating the truth and the reality of Christ’s prayer life into our own lives. That path is the path of prayer; a path which Jesus Christ has marked out for us by his living example, as well as by his teaching. By his own present intercession for us, and by his indwelling our hearts by the Holy Spirit, he has provided a spiritual dynamic to enable us to walk that path of prayer which we have seen him walk. The pathway of prayer becomes the pathway of power. He stands upon that very pathway now. Let us, then, respond with glad obedience to our Lord as he beckons to each of us saying, “Follow Me.”

James G. S. S. Thomson is associate professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia. He was formerly at New College, Edinburgh, where he taught for six years in the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Languages. Previous to that he was missionary to Arabic-speaking Muslims in Algeria. He holds the B.A. degree from Oxford, and M.A., B.D. and Ph.D. from Edinburgh University, from which he also received the Aitken Traveling Fellowship. At Oxford he was a Casbred Prizeman. This article is an abridgment of a chapter of a book on prayer soon to be published.

“Behold the Lamb of God who is to take away the sins of the world” (John 1:29).

Some weeks ago, not far from the entrance door of the United Nations in New York, I found a tiny chapel for meditation, an unpretentious place in which, as you enter, all you notice are the curtains on the walls, a table with a vase of flowers on it, and the quietness and stillness of a chapel. This chapel is all that has been able to be introduced into the United Nations because of the Moslem bloc, solidly opposed to anything Christian, and the Russian section, officially atheistic and opposed to any emphasis upon the world of the spirit.

But I am not thinking of the matter particularly from a political standpoint. I found myself asking, as I stood in that silent place, “Is this chapel and what it contains enough for a man to find God? Is this a sufficient highway into the presence of our God?” And I found myself facing the questions, “Where does Jesus Christ come into the picture? There is no symbol of him here. There is no cross nor Bible. Do we really need him whom Scripture calls the Son of God? Or is religion of itself sufficient? Is silence and these emblems of nature enough to help us toward God?”

Around the world today, and especially in America, there is new interest in religion. But is it enough that people are turning religious, that they have vague ideas about a Supreme Being and occasionally perhaps feel like praying? Is there any need of Jesus Christ in the picture? This is the question I pose.

The Christian God

First of all, I suggest that Jesus Christ is absolutely essential to the picture because only through him can we come to the Christian God. But what a man believes about God is all-important. It is not sufficient anymore to answer, “I believe in God.” There are too many different conceptions of him for this statement to be meaningful. The simple statement is not enough.

This was posed to me very vividly two or three years ago when I was taken from Australia to the Middle East for what happened to be the first convocation between Moslems and Christians. There for six days we sat round tables, thirty-five representing each faith, and we tried to find the points of likeness and the points of difference between these two great world religions. It was not long before it became very apparent that the point where we differed was regarding our conception of God. I remember early in the piece a debate developed as to whether in the Republic of Lebanon, where roughly half of the people are nominally Christian and half are Moslem, it would be possible to find a prayer for the schools so that each school day could open with Moslems and Christians saying the same prayer. I remember saying naively, “Would it be possible for a Moslem child to repeat the Lord’s Prayer?” And at once an old sheik from Saudi Arabia jumped to his feet and said, “Impossible! We could not repeat ‘Our Father which art in heaven,’ for God is not our father. God has no sons. He’s God!”

Later on another scholar of Islam said, “You can talk about the slaves of God if you like, but not the sons of God.” Later we discussed the difference of our ethical standards. There was heard a justification of polygamy; there was a defense put up for slavery that still operates in Saudi Arabia. But when you penetrated to the heart of it, where it all began was in our different pictures of God.

In America, we have become used to a society that is penetrated by the Christian understanding of God. And although many reject Christ, we hardly know what it is to live apart from his revelation of the Father. What would we know of God, for instance, if we stood only under a towering mountain, or in a woodland, or by a lakeside? What would we learn of him if we tried to interpret him only in history, or listened only to our own whirring minds and the voice of conscience within us? Without the special revelation of Jesus Christ we would have no clear understanding of the one true God whom we may come to know and love.

D. T. Niles, Ceylonese leader in Australia, was once asked the question, “You live in Hindu Ceylon; how do you present the necessity of Jesus in a society where everybody believes in God or gods?” This was his answer: “Oh, I just repeat to them the words of Jesus, ‘No man cometh to the Father but by Me.’ ” And he went on to say, “One may come to some imaginary kind of god through Hindu idols and such, but no man can know the living God apart from Christ. And I would again pose the question of the chapel with the silence, the curtained walls, and the table with roses. Could this of itself reveal who God is?

The Fact Of The Church

Secondly, I suggest that Jesus Christ is essential to the picture because he has given to us the community of Christians called the Church. The Church as a fact is part of the fact of Christ, part of the essential contribution Jesus Christ makes to man. It is significant that in the early chapters of the Book of Acts, Christians, before they were called by that proud title, were known as the “People of the Way,” a new community of people, who practiced the virtues of magnanimity, forgiveness and love in a world that reserved its plaudits for materialism. And so, as people watched this new community of people move through the world, they said, “Ha, People of the Way.” And it was precisely because these “People of the Way” took their historic journey through the earth that that ancient world of Greece and Rome was arrested. Presently, its decadence was halted; new life sprang out of these cells of “People of the Way.” And precisely because there was a new community of people that emerged, a new culture, the Christian culture, came into being.

Over in Australia, or in any country where your country is represented, we have a little bit of American territory. Right at the heart of Canberra, our national capital, there is the American Embassy. And there is a certain little piece of land which is really America; and if, as an American citizen, you step on that piece of soil, the laws of the Queen of England and the Commonwealth of Australia do not operate. You are under the President of the United States. There it is. A little bit of America! By normal diplomatic usage, that is America! And we, if we are obedient to Jesus Christ, are set down in a colony of heaven, down where the laws of heaven operate, and where the ways of the people of God are to be seen.

We need a “People of the Way” today to challenge the world again. And we need a “People of the Way” to remind the world again that Jesus is indeed “the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me” (John 14:6). Otherwise, how is this world ever going to be deflected from some of its poverty-stricken living and its evil activities unless there are a “People of the Way”? How do you think, for example, the purity of Jesus is going to stand in our sex-saturated society unless there are people who express in their lives the purity of Jesus? How do you think this floodtide of liquor that is moving out all over our communities is going to be stopped? How is it going to be stopped in its fallacious propaganda and from gripping human society in its tyranny unless there emerge people who say, “As for me, I can’t touch it, I will not succumb to its appeals. I follow another way.” So also this can be carried into the questions of race and war. How shall this world be challenged unless there be emerging people who think differently from contemporary sub-Christian America, or contemporary sub-Christian Australia? How shall there be an elevation of our society unless there are people who begin to be truly “People of the Way”?

The Conscience Of Jesus

Thirdly, I suggest that Jesus Christ is essential because the conscience of Christ is the need of us all. I wonder has it ever struck you what a miracle is the conscience of Jesus? He lived two thousand years ago in primitive, out-of-the-way Palestine. And yet no one can say Jesus was ever a brake on human progress. No matter what issue arises, you will not find him away back in the past dragging humanity backward! Mohammed and Buddha do at certain points. Jesus is not away back there; he is far ahead. His conscience stands far beyond the point we have yet reached. The conscience of Jesus is one of the miracles of history.

We have reached a day when the conscience of man has rapidly to expand. Middleton Murray in one of his books says, “The time has come when man’s mind must jump forward.” And that word “jump” is well-chosen. A gulf has developed. We must gather our strength; we have to jump forward to catch up. Here we are in the atomic age. The peril of today is that we are taking into the atomic age stale old ideas that belong to the pre-atomic age. And man is lost unless he can find something that will cause him to jump forward in conscience and conviction.

The Need Of A Saviour

Lastly, I suggest that Jesus Christ is essential to man’s faith because every one of us needs a Saviour. It is not long since we were treating sin rather lightly, as though it were a growing pain of the human family. Throw a man a bit more education, let him become more civilized and he will grow out of sin and will leave it behind. But we are not talking this way so much anymore. We have seen too much of evil, and are now prone to talk of it as being a cancer—deadly.

What is the answer to the fundamental problem of evil? Deep down in the basement of our life there is a twin issue. Most of us are grappling with both the problem of ignorance and the problem of evil. They are both there. We have imagined that education grapples with both ignorance and evil. But education grapples only with ignorance; it does not necessarily touch evil. That is why a very clever man can be a clever devil. That is why George Buttrick says, “The only thing worse than a devil is an educated devil.” Education may just sharpen the wicked wit of man. It is time we saw clearly the limitations of education. Education does not solve the problem of evil! Only God in the Lord Jesus Christ and his cross and resurrection overcomes evil. The need of man is to have education come to grips with ignorance, and religion, that is, the Saviourhead of Jesus, come to grips with evil. Every one of us needs Jesus Christ as Saviour.

A little while ago I was over in Los Angeles. I had one Friday there. It was one of the most thrilling days I ever had. I went to see Roy Rogers’ ranch. I did not see him there, but I saw Dale Evans, his wife, and talked with her. I had heard something of her story before; here was the confirmation of it. I saw those little adopted children running around the house. She feels as a Christian that she must do something to answer world need, and has therefore adopted a little Korean child, a little American orphan, a Scottish orphan, and a little American Indian. As I talked with this woman, now a mature Christian, I realized that five or seven years ago she was just another actress in Hollywood. But something had happened to this woman. Christ had come into her life, and into her home.

I was speaking a little later with a man who told me, “You know, I’m in training for the Christian ministry. How long have you been a preacher?” I told him. “Oh,” he said, “I’m older than you are, and I’m only just beginning.” Later I heard his story. He had been a criminal in Kansas City, right down in the depths, one of the wicked men of the city. Then one night, distraught, he stepped into a church, and there a minister found him and began to talk to him. Something happened. Jesus Christ, the Saviour, came into his life. He felt, though he was getting older, that he ought to do something for Christ. Then one day he read the story of Peter, and how he was over 40 years of age when Jesus finally picked him. “I suddenly took heart,” he said. “I was over 40.” And therefore, he is today in theological school, getting ready to give what is left of his life to the service of Jesus Christ.

I thought of the wonder of it. Dale Evans on the top of the entertainment industry of America; another from the depths of an underworld of a great city—each finding the same Christ, the same Saviour, the same answer to the need of their lives.

Why is Jesus necessary? He is necessary because a Saviour is necessary. Have you received him? We need not a chapel with silence, curtained walls and roses on a table, but a lonely hill with a cross at its rim, an empty tomb in a garden, and a risen Christ, Lord and Saviour. This is the need of our hearts.

This is an abridgement of a sermon preached in Riverside Church, New York City, by the Rev. Alan Walker, who served from 1954–55 in Australia as director of The Methodist Church’s “Mission to the Nation,” and in 1956–57 under the Board of Evangelism of American Methodism. A native Australian, son of the onetime president of the Methodist Church of New South Wales, he has received an honorary D.D. degree from the Bethany Biblical Seminary, Chicago.

The peril of the artist is his constant temptation to an idolatrous worship of the beautiful creature rather than the beatific Creator. This results in service of the holiness of beauty rather than the beauty of holiness. Nevertheless, art and religion are inextricably bound, and the Christian faith finds its pure expression in artistic forms just as truly as it does in intellectual works of theology or practical works of mercy.

Spirit With Spirit

Of all the art forms, painting is the most peculiarly Christian. Although the ancients and the orientals engaged in painting, it is a historical fact that Christian culture has excelled in this medium. The reason for this excellence lies in the spirituality of Christian reconciliation. While pagan art, where it has made an attempt at reconciliation at all, has sought a resolution of matter and spirit, Christianity with a surer and more reverent realism has found the need to reconcile Spirit with spirit. In Semitic and Hindu art there is no real attempt at reconciliation. The resolution of life is expressed in terms of release (Moksha for the Hindu and an apocalyptic longing for the courts of the Lord for the Semite). Thus there is no reconciliation with either matter or the course of this world—and consequently there is a glaring aesthetic indigence. In ancient Greek and Chinese art there is a serious attempt to reconcile matter and spirit in the form of moderation (sophrosune and tao), a balance between the Dionysiac and the Apollonian, between Yang and Yin. But Christian art does not reconcile matter with spirit by means of a humanized rationalization; rather reconciliation is found only through death and resurrection, death to both matter and spirit and resurrection in newness of life with the Holy Spirit.

Painting is wonderfully suited to express this reconciliation because it is more attenuated than sculpture; more suggestive with its nuances of light, shade, and color; more supple in expressing variety and individuality; more potentially spiritual in its ability, through the use of perspective, selectivity, distortion, and accent, to quell an atomistic self-assertion and to foster the grace of sacrifice. According to the Christian Gospel this world is redeemed not by balancing it properly with an idealized spirit, but by killing it with the Word and raising it anew. Painting is peculiarly fitted to express this revelation because it can show with its suggestiveness both the depravity of the things of this world and the purity of the regenerate life in the Spirit. The Spirit is invisible and believed, yet it is precisely the visible matter and stuff of this world that is redeemed in the Word become flesh.

I submit that art is that form of service to the ruling spirit of the age in which men try to express the will of that particular spirit by means of some kind of patterned arrangement of space. Art is either spiritual or demonic depending upon whether the spirit of the age is in the service of Christ or Satan. Art is never for art’s sake. Sometimes it is done for the artist’s sake or for Satan’s, but only when it is for Christ’s sake is art true and beautiful and holy.

This view clearly cuts across Plato (art is a copy of a copy) and Aristotle (art is the representation of the universal in the particular for the purpose of catharsis) and Hegel (art is the manifest unfolding of the Spirit in history through conflict) and all the modern theories which try to reduce art to the will (Nietsche, Freud) or the feeling (Santayana) or the mind (Maritain).

One example will suffice to show what I mean. When the Western church fell under the spell of the spirit of this world, she became corrupt. Her great culture lost its salutary grace and gradually became humanized. Thus the last expression of church art, seventeenth century baroque, became a debased concern for nothing but the frilleries of nature. The Puritan reaction to this was healthy in its disciplined resistance against the intoxication of the pretty, but the priggishness of Puritanism was just as devastating to Christian art as was Plato’s prudery to classic art. In each case art fell into the service of the spirit of the age and died with the demon of its choosing.

When the humanist idolization of the natural had reached the end of its moribund journey, the reaction was violent. A new spirit, the spirit of existential integrity, convulsed a new generation of artists. Some of these were called Les Fauves because like wild beasts they tore up all the rules and traditions of the past, and after shattering the fake dead world of their fathers they set out honestly to create a new world as far as they had insight to see. In place of the naturalism of Corot, Millais, and Rubens we find now the “supernaturalism” of Picasso, Bracque, and Mondrian.

Fatigue In The World Of Art

Philosophical pluralism in our age makes analysis complex, for no simple Weltanschauung can be defined such as characterized classical, oriental or medieval art. And yet it is possible to detect a dominating spirit ruling over our age with singular authority in every area of historical activity. In all governments throughout the world today, for example, there is a general weariness in the laissez faire expression of natural law. This is coupled with an anxious concern to manipulate the state according to a new social law. Likewise there is a parallel fatigue in the world of art in its repudiation of sweet romanticism. This is coupled with the frantic attempt to express the deeper realities of the soul by means of unconventional and chaotic abstractions. This new spirit has introduced a new heresy.

The old spirit has degenerated so much that it controls now only the calendar art of the unsophisticated. In Sallman’s Head of Christ we have a pretty picture of a woman with a curling beard who has just come from the beauty parlor with a Halo shampoo, but we do not have the Lord who died and rose again!

But the new spirit is similar to the Gnostic Zeitgeist in Paul’s day when he complained of “spiritual wickedness in heavenly places.” Instead of holding up a mirror to nature, the artist today deliberately distorts nature in order that he may mirror the human soul. Just as the old naturalism idolized matter, the new abstractionism idolizes spirit, but neither serves the incarnate Lord who redeems matter and spirit, and redeems them not by adjustment and compromise with nature nor by revolt and release from nature but by the killing judgment of God’s wrath upon nature and by the regenerating mercy of his grace.

It is interesting to see that some of the modern painters express their Gnosticism in a legalistic way and some in an antinomian. Mondrian and Rothko, for instance, abstract all natural content in the interest of pure form. Paul Klee, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, on the other hand, are concerned only for matter, shattering all norms of painting in the interest of an antinomian expression. But all alike have despaired of this world, and at the expense of communicability they have run to a mystic realm of the soul, a huperouranios topos, where conversation is limited to the coterie who have the esoteric gnosis. In some cases this is a mentalistic gnosis and in others it is emotionalistic, but in every instance it is exclusive.

Others among the modern painters are not so unintelligible. Picasso’s Guernica is disgustingly unbeautiful but shockingly true because it tells those with eyes to see that this world is shattered to pieces. But while this is worth saying it leaves unsaid the profounder truth that the broken world is bound together by the bleeding wounds of Christ. And Dali’s Madonna, his two Crucifixions and his Last Supper, far from being pictures of the Incarnation, are surrealistic escapes into a mystic world of dreams. It is not accidental that the corpus on the cross had no wound prints, nor is it just for effect that the Lord of the Last Supper is so ethereal that a fishing dory floats through his midriff. With both of these artists, as with the pure abstractionists, the common denominator is Gnostic weariness with this world. Thus we have seen how with an amazing lubricity modern artists have expressed dangerously appealing half-truths which have captivated the avantgarde sophisticates of our age and put them in the service of a new ruling spirit.

Where Are The Prophets?

But where are the prophetic painters like El Greco, Grunewald, and Van Gogh who preached the Lord’s death till he come? Certainly Rouault can claim “apostolic succession,” but he is by his own admission the child of an age different from our own. Perhaps this is the requisite we seek: that the artist belong not to this age ever, but always to the coming age. In any case, painting, which is not in the service of the spirit of this age but of Christ, must convey more than the fragmentization of this world and more than the mystic dreams of another world. It must bear Christ in passionate Incarnation and triumphant Resurrection, in suffering witness in this age and confident hope in the coming age, sub crucem cum magna spe.

We Quote:

DAVID LAWRENCE

Editor, United States News and World Report

Those of us who do believe in God avow a faith in the rightness of moral teachings as derived from the Bible.… But we are dealing with men who boast of their contempt for religion—they do not believe in God.

In the Western world, theism is the basis of every constitutional right, every principle of free government.…

The world is not going to be safe for any of us as long as atheistic Communism is enthroned in Eastern Europe.… At the same time we can fervently speak what is in our hearts to the peoples behind the Iron Curtain and pray with them for deliverance. For in the millions of them who still believe in God rests the hope of mankind.—In an editorial, “They Don’t Believe in God,” United States News and World Report, Dec. 27, 1957.

Robert Paul Roth is Professor of New Testament Study at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, Columbia, South Carolina. He holds the Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Has America, like Rome of old, crossed its Rubicon? Some observers say yes. They have begun charting the republic’s decline and impending fall. Apart from any threat of sudden international war, they insist, America is tottering on the brink of tragedy. A decisive turn in national thought and life assertedly has placed the United States beyond redemption; the only hope that now remains is for emergency rescue and ailing survival.

The Sense Of Doom

Pronouncing judgment on America is no longer an exclusive franchise of a few weeping Jeremiahs. Nor is it peculiar to evangelists constantly reminding the nation of its spiritual decline, its neglect of a great Christian heritage, its whoring after false gods of money and ease. Many pulpiteers are indeed swift to show that despite America’s religiosity no sweeping repentance and faith, no decisive change of heart and life, places social forces in our great cities conspicuously in the service of the living God. Billy Graham readily admits this even of New York City. Religious analysts are finding America spiritually and morally second-rate.

While indisposed to talk much about the one true God, students of American culture likewise decry the idols of the masses. Determination of the right by mere majority opinion, and an infatuation with popular approval, have inseminated a cheap and artificial sense of values into modern life and thought. Broadway measures worth by length of run. On television or on radio, Neilsen and Hooper ratings and audience polls determine contract renewals. What is popular is right, not to mention “good” business. Thus the god of conformity snares individuals into group thinking, and loyalty only to society. Detachment of responsibility from the will of God has led to a vanishing sense of responsibility. American culture has accordingly become mediocre.

Scientists no less than religionists are doom-conscious. Pointing to Soviet superiority in the satellite sphere, they question America’s capacity to reverse the balances of strategy to overtake and outdistance the Soviet program. They decry our loss of scientific leadership. By late 1959, they warn, the United States will be less than 15 minutes from 75 Russian ICBMs capable of wiping out the Strategic Air Command’s existing bases.

A similar verdict of retrogression attaches to still another sphere, our traditions of government. In the disregard of inherited values that hinder controls and centralized power, and in the subtle restriction of individual freedoms, some students of political science see the nation drifting toward the whirlpool of a secret totalitarianism (while congratulating itself for having avoided the Soviet variety). In this matter of controls, former editor of The Washington Post Felix Morley is not alone in his conviction that “the Rubicon has already been crossed; nobody can any longer think escape from this trap an easy matter.” Adventure on the collectivistic toboggan slide both explains and evidences America’s demotion to a second-rate republic.

Leaders in economics report similar disturbances. Soaring costs of government, the temptation to accept inflation as a way of life, the control of credit for political purposes, national prosperity geared to the federal budget (especially to growing defense expenditures, perhaps leading ultimately to a vested interest in regard for other world powers as a military threat), the endless spiral of punitive taxation (personal income taxes estimated at $32.5 billion for 1956 alone)—to many economists these tendencies disclose America’s permanent surrender to the squeeze of socializing forces. Since it is politically unfeasible for either major party to repudiate this centralizing trend, the process may never be reversed but only modified “here” and “there.” Some warning voices like Frank Chodorov’s once mounted soapboxes as young radicals to espouse socialism. Today these same political theorists recognize the symptoms of cancerous collectivism in our national life and lament a blind economic policy. They warn us that America has already taken the decisive collectivistic turn. Not only Big Labor but Big Business also often seeks its own special privilege above the principles of freedom. Free enterprise is now so frequently pushed to secondary importance that the populace is no longer shocked nor chagrined. A controlled economy meanwhile nourishes the worship of mammon. The multitude tolerates and approves, and even demands and clamors for this household god, while the almighty state perpetuates the existence of the idol. The masses have thus enlarged socialistic concession through leaders endorsing the tawdry popular values and thereby perpetuating their personal power and office. Leaders, the masses and the “privileged groups” alike, therefore, have all sown the wind. Obscured by the resultant whirlwind is the heritage that once made America unique among the nations of the world. Both the visibility and the vision of the nation are impaired.

The Clouded Vision

The extraordinary origin of the American republic the Founding Fathers ascribed to divine providence. To them the United States represented the major political effort in human history to limit the powers of the state and to guard human freedoms under God from the encroachment of tyrants. As clearly set forth in the American Constitution, establishment of a federal government with powers restricted, divided into separate branches, balanced by states rights, dependent on the consent of the governed, envisioned the preservation of specific human rights and values.

The basic and sustaining principle of these values and freedoms—that government is limited—is directly antithetical to that by which the U.S.S.R. abolishes individual rights (viz., that all power is concentrated in the state). One constitutional provision that dramatically enforces limited government is separation of Church and State, which boldly contradicts the long European traditions of the church-state and the state church. This disjunction was both to limit political power and guard human rights, and also to protect the nation against a monopoly of political interests by one sectarian tradition. Separation of Church and State did not aim to isolate spiritual from political concerns so churches lost significance in political affairs; least of all did it aim to subordinate the spiritual to the political order. There was no desire to weaken the role of the churches in the life of the nation; rather, restricted state power was intended to support and strengthen those spiritual priorities through which a nation remains virile and noble.

In this debate between limited government and state absolutism, the position of Christian conscience is obvious. In Romans 13 Paul delineates the Judeo-Christian view: political authority derives from God and is answerable to God. Likewise, man’s obedience to the state is under God. Man bears inalienable rights by creation, the Declaration of Independence insists, and these the state is to preserve, not to destroy nor to curtail. The Bible asserts that the state must not frustrate the obedience man owes to God; it gives no quarter to the doctrine of the omnipotent state. The Old Testament prohibited even kings from seizing the private property of the people (1 Kings 21).

Skepticism over absolute values underlies the Soviet thesis that human rights are relative. Marxist evolutionary philosophy forces modern culture to choose between supernaturalism and naturalism; human dignity and human degradation; absolute truth and values and state-determined and imposed opinion and ideals. Totalitarianism compels its citizens to comply with whatever the state defines as right and good. Skepticism over changeless values creates the void into which the state rushes to propound temporary values with absolute rigor.

If all values are unfixed and ever-changing, political leaders in a democracy no less than in a totalitarian state may assert and enforce personal expediency in the name of principle. Majority opinion is not inconsistent with self-government, but self-government becomes impossible in the absence of values. If human preference alone determines policy, political theory simply vascillates with the changing tides of prevailing opinion.

The Loss Of Freedoms

In the present century Marxian Communism has whetted the world’s lust for power and state controls. During the past 25 years the cancerous philosophy of state power, civilian controls, transient values and principles, has so penetrated even America’s heritage and life that suddenly the United States appears incurably riddled with disease.

The federal government’s encroachment into many areas of American life shows up especially in affairs once considered the responsibility of the Christian churches. Education, for example, was long the concern and duty of the family and of the churches. (Few people any longer realize that much of the impetus for mass education rests ultimately on the biblical conviction that every person must be reached with a core of information vital to his temporal and eternal happiness.) But during the past century has come the rise of mass public education. Influenced in our generation by the naturalistic and relativistic philosophy of John Dewey, educational administrators have by and large nurtured socialistic tendencies, including the growing clamor for federal support of public schools. Like education, charity and welfare also were once the concern of the churches. (The effective alleviation of human suffering owes more to the biblical view of God than twentieth century humanism allows us to remember.) The state has assumed increasing direction of these responsibilities, too. On the domestic scene, social security and unemployment insurance have won their way; socialized medicine now waits in line as a hopeful government project.

More could be said to illustrate the government’s assumption of responsibilities once belonging to the churches. But equally striking is the fact that in the aforementioned areas of enlarging state power, as well as of civilian controls not directly involving Christian traditions, the churches have shown little resistance. How far the Christian conscience had lost its sense of heritage in some of these matters, e.g., education, is evident from the official statement on The Church and the Public Schools approved by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. in 1957. This report not only throws the weight of Christian approval behind the public schools as such; it also throws the weight of Presbyterian influence against private schools. This is exactly what could have been expected from a committee dominated (as it was) by public schoolmen, but it hardly represents one’s expectations from the Presbyterian conscience. Such surrender of responsibility could hardly augur resistance against additional inroads of the state.

If America has crossed the Rubicon; if the nation’s heritage is now beyond preservation; if the drift to the power-state and to a controlled society cannot be stayed, communist penetration from the outside is not alone to blame. Equal judgment falls upon the churches for indifference and ineffectiveness in the hour of America’s greatest trial. Amid the world’s subtle conflict between political and spiritual loyalties, the churches sin by their silence. Today not Nero but the churches fiddle while Rome burns. The churches have even approved leaders who support socializing and collectivistic trends in the name of the Christian community, and have permitted them without protest to speak for Christian conscience.

When The Churches Failed

What explains this deadly lassitude of the churches? In America’s tragic transition from limited government to the power-state where is the churches’ repellent force?

1. Pre-empting the right to speak for all Protestant churches in politico-economic affairs, the National Council of Churches (formerly the Federal Council) has tended in its social pronouncements to support collectivism and controls in national life. In two respects the NCC has failed to undergird the tradition of limited government and human liberties; its social declarations, bold and specific, veered to the left, while its theological affirmations were nebulous and obscure, since NCC’s inclusive policy subdued doctrinal issues for the sake of peaceful ecclesiastical co-existence. While neglecting a Christian theology of government and freedom, the massive voice of American Protestantism approved socializing tendencies in American life. The entrenched leadership even violated the conscience of its own constituency by often pledging that conscience without its consent. Sensing its repressive force and fearing its coercive and punitive power, local member churches and ministers seldom protested such organizational commitments; ministers hesitated to contradict the official statements. The Protestant churches themselves thus became vulnerable to the fetters of ecclesiastical control.

2. Although some independent agencies publicized official resolutions of protest against the National Council’s collectivistic pronouncements, they offered little guidance in positive Christian social ethics. Inside or outside the preaching ministry, they seldom faced the matter of God and government, faith and freedom, with active concern. While NCC spokesmen abetted the pressure for controls, most evangelical pulpits lacked a careful recital of man’s rights and duties under God.

3. Though becoming increasingly amoral, the state preened itself with morality and many trappings of religion. Some politicians espoused the indispensability of religion in national life even while they voted for more socialistic controls. They shaped plaudits “appropriate to the constituencies,” which not only approved special interest but basically revealed political expedience. Certainly, to doubt unduly the sincere churchly interests of many government leaders is unwarranted. One of CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S contributing editors, Dr. Edward L. R. Elson, properly insists that piety must not be suspect simply because it dwells by the Potomac. Whenever the state speaks with a sacred voice, however, it requires special scrutiny. In its beginnings even the German Nazi movement attracted many people by “spiritual qualities” that obscured its evils. In recent decades, one American president on re-election eve made political use of the Episcopal Prayer Book. Examination of public speeches discloses American politicians to be more gifted with complimentary references to Deity than with sustained expositions of the theology of politics. Labor, business and government all become more inclined to locate a religious justification for their objectives. Labor uses its Religion in Labor Movement to propagandize its legislative goals; management and labor resort to clergymen to propagandize their positions. This tendency of big government, big labor and big business to “use” religion in support of their programs is a reflex of America’s growing religiosity that calls for careful scrutiny. Rather than being flattered by it, the churches need to challenge it. Behold the terrors of Communism, tolerating only as much “freedom” for the churches as serves the tyrant’s whim!

Misguided Social Action

Leaders who endorse specific social measures in the name of the Church may think thereby to make “the Gospel relevant to our times.” Usually they only embarrass the Church. There are many reasons for this:

1. For every churchman who endorses a particular organization and its program (cf. the forthcoming CIO-AFL propaganda effort for the closed shop, as against “right to work” laws), there is another to oppose it. The public soon wonders if the Church does not know her own mind, or whether she is a propaganda agency for whatever social movement best exploits her endorsement. The competing and conflicting proclamations of ecclesiastical leaders not only lessen the Church’s stature in the eyes of the outside world, but also confuse the membership within the churches themselves.

2. Such pronouncements tend to be divisive. Often “social action” declarations by ecumenical and denominational leaders agitate their constituencies. Admission is long overdue that such statements were often ill-advised and represented only the personal opinion of certain individuals and pressure groups.

3. Such proclamations frequently do not express the thinking of the local churches and therefore ought not to be issued in their name by the top echelon. An element of pressure shadows the church member’s affiliation with organizations professing to speak “for so many denominations” or for “so many millions of Protestants.” A movement that not only propagandizes the views of certain leaders, but catapults those convictions into prominence by exaggerating their known support, becomes a vehicle of misrepresentation rather than of truth. Mr. Leonard Read, president of the Foundation for Economic Education, recently criticized both clergy and laity who do not protest social action pronouncements that misrepresent their convictions. Mr. Read suggests that the minister who disagrees with ecumenical social policies but feels obliged to “stay in” and “straighten things out” should apply that logic to the Communist party. The best way to “straighten things out,” he contends, is to decline support. Mr. Read further contends that membership in organizations which repeatedly violate politico-economic views of their constituencies [theological and economic views of most American churchgoers are considered far to the right of ecumenical leadership] weakens the very personality of the members. Integrity requires an individual to represent his convictions accurately to those about him. Each unprotested misrepresentation of one’s beliefs, each unprotested identification with groups that do not express one’s convictions, weakens and finally destroys an individual’s character. Mr. Read warns that personal integrity always suffers when loyalty to a group takes precedence over loyalty to the truth.

What Can Be Done?

What is the churches’ responsibility when a nation’s decline is concealed by a proud front of military power, of scientific genius, of commercial efficiency and is undetected by the self-satisfied masses in pursuit of luxury or pleasure? The Christian community is not without biblical guidance in this matter. In apostolic times many conditions in the old Roman Empire were not far different from ours. In treating social ethics in his epistle to the Romans, Paul writes the believers: “You know what hour it is.… The night is far gone.… It is full time now for you to wake from sleep …” (13:11ff., RSV).

Christianity neither deifies nor humanizes the state. Romans 13 no more means the God-state (the state is God) than Revelation 13 means the Beast-state (the state is inherently demonic). Human government is divinely willed to preserve justice and to restrain evil in a sinful society. Government may indeed deteriorate, overwhelmed by the very injustice and wickedness it ought to restrain. The Book of Revelation warns that government most readily becomes a Beast-state when it thinks itself the God-state. It then arrogates to itself the right to control every phase of human experience and to require the worship of itself.

Romans 13 speaks not only of the powers of the state, but refers as well to Christian social responsibility. Paul declares that the state is to be supported by taxes, by honor and by good works in general. More than this, he obligates Christian conscience to social fulfillment of the Commandments in a spirit of love. “Render … to all their dues.… Owe no man anything, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery … kill … steal … bear false witness … covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (13:7–9).

Limits Of The State

The first conclusion to be drawn is that the state, deriving its authority from God, cannot require of its citizens anything that violates the revealed commandments; since the power is ordained for the good of the people, passive obedience is not required when it ceases to be good. The second is that the Christian citizen by obedient fulfillment of these commandments in the spirit of love exhibits the highest patriotism.

The Scriptures here provide another equally important guideline. That is the directness with which the Apostle proceeds to the governing principles of revealed morality to fix Christian social responsibility. The Bible contains tenets that define love of God and love of neighbor in greater detail than the Ten Commandments. Biblical ethics asserts, for example, such specific rules as to pray for rulers, and to pay one’s taxes. But one thing characterizes biblical social ethics: it nowhere endorses specific contemporary movements and organizations in such a way as to throw the sanction of Christianity behind them. Rather, it states the great social concerns of revealed religion in terms of divinely disclosed ethical principles that must determine and motivate social responsibility and action. It does not even condemn slavery, though it states the principles that sounded the death knell of that evil.

Rule Of Christian Action

This norm for Christian social responsibility guards the Church from two errors so frequently committed by modern ecclesiastical spokesmen. First, it exhibits Christian duty as performance of the revealed will of God. This deters the churches from social action of merely humanitarian and humanistic nature. (One major turning point in recent American life was prominence of “the welfare of man” as the dominant social goal. Under the umbrella of this cliche, and detached from any of the priorities of revealed religion, the masses gave life a purely materialistic interpretation. Furthermore, many political leaders successfully proclaimed the solution of all problems (international relations, unemployment, education) to be simply the spending of more money.)

To frame Christian social action primarily in terms of revealed principles of social morality protects the church from a second error, that of indiscriminately approving or disapproving specific movements and organizations and even individuals in the name of authentic Christian action.

In this time of confused principles in national life the Church surrenders moral leadership by supporting isms and temporary movements, instead of conspicuously exhibiting the divinely-revealed principles of social ethics that define human liberty and human duty. Besides the primary duty of evangelizing a lost society, the Church is responsible for upholding the will of God in social life, expressed in biblically revealed principles and values. To endorse particular movements and specific activities in isolation from this primary social orientation cuts the Church adrift from her moorings. Although presuming to represent God and Church, her spokesmen become insensitive to those revealed verities, and even support movements and positions whose attachment to those principles is often obscure and sometimes nonexistent. Certainly the Church must be specific, must not confine social interests to platitudes. The revealed principles of right, however, are never platitudinous; nor is the absolute less absolute because it is neglected and scorned. Revealed principles may illuminate contemporary movements and actions by the pulpit’s use of illustration and example. Always, however, the revealed will of God must predominate and must be the gauge for everything else. Who then dare validate the Church’s permanent endorsement of a movement? (The Church is on the side of the worker rather than of the idler, but is she therefore eternally committed to AFL-CIO? The Church is on the side of the poor and oppressed, but is she therefore committed to a program of government subsidy and a welfare state?)

In the decline of the American republic the Church will count for little in a rear guard action for national survival unless she returns to the great realities of divine revelation and unless her social message centers in personal regeneration and in fidelity to revealed morality.

Betraying A Heritage

Today influential men are selling the nation’s birthright on every hand. In an official decision in 1955 even a member of the Supreme Court endorsed the denial of absolutes. The Church did little to challenge this assertion of relativity, a theory quite in keeping with the Soviet philosophy of political expedience. In fact, the Church today harbors a theory of knowledge that engenders skepticism over the very existence of revealed truth and principles of right. Neo-orthodox theology has not reversed the modernistic trend that considers revelation as inexpressible in words and propositions.

But absolutes do not cease to be absolutes, imperatives do not cease to be imperatives, because of failure to recognize them as such. Biblical theology and ethics give little credence to the modern notion that God does not articulate permanent principles. Unless the Church accepts her biblical heritage and enunciates the great ethical principles that sustain our tradition of freedom, her own liberties may vanish together with those of the nation she fails. There may not always be a U.S.A., but there will always be a Church. As the believers in Russia can eloquently testify, however, the Church sometimes is chained and imprisoned not alone for her courage to affirm the superiority of spiritual over limited political loyalties, but as penalty also for her silent and unprotesting subjection to the power-state.

We Quote:

FELIX MORLEY

Educator and Journalist

The men who wrote the Constitution of the United States had few conveniences at their disposal. But in two respects, at least, their thinking was greatly superior to that which passes as currency today. They were at home in the field of abstract ideas upon which, much more than upon the production of material wealth, the continuation of the American way of life depends. And they were thoroughly familiar with those eternal truths that alone give a sense of conviction and significance to human existence.—In The Power in the People.