TA THUNG

I have just returned from the beach. It is such a relief to get away from the city crowds on the street and get among the city crowds at the shore. I love to watch the ocean. Since I couldn’t see it for people, I decided to watch people. Ocean watchers, prone on the sand, can observe the bubble and wash of spent waves, the boisterous dance of the junior combers, and beyond, in endless line, the proud plunging plumes of the great breakers. People watchers, from a similar posture, can observe padding feet, mincing legs, peeling haunches, paunches, sagging silhouettes, and the endless line of beach umbrellas—until a rush of running feet ends all vision in a blinding sandstorm.

The charm of the beach is equaled only by the subway in achieving the modern ideal of “togetherness.” Even the Iron Curtain is no screen against togetherness. The Chinese Communists call it Ta Thung, “the Great Togetherness,” a phrase from the classics describing a legendary golden age. Ta Thung can also mean “great similarity,” a remarkably apt term for the drab, mechanized uniformity of totalitarian togetherness. Seaside togetherness is not mechanized or drab, but just as uniform, in spite of the best efforts of swimsuit stylists.

Too often togetherness is confused with the Christian ideal. The idea of heaven which masses lounging saints on a golden strand can be forbidding to a man fresh from the seashore. Dante saw unending proximity as one of the torments of hell.

What makes comradeship a delight, and a great host inspiring? Not that they are together, but what they share together. Christian fellowship is koinonia, a sharing in the blessings of God. Christians are together with one another because they are together with Christ.

Without this relation to the Giver and Meaning of life, togetherness is only crowded emptiness. Men surrender their personal freedom to the packed prisons of mass society and the modern state in vain flight from loneliness—and God. We find one another when we are found of Him, and join the singing saints in the Ta Thung in Christ.

EUTYCHUS

FIRST DAY OF THE WEEK

For those who think the Christian observance of the first day an aberration, let me refer (beyond the New Testament intimations) to Justin Martyr’s First Apology (A.D. 136–150): “Now we all hold our common meeting on the day of the Sun, because it is the first day, on which God changed the darkness and matter in his making the world, and Jesus Christ, our Savior, on the same day rose from the dead.…” Ignatius makes the distinction between the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day very emphatic in his Epistle to the Magnesians (Ch. 9, 10).…

Philadelphia, Pa.

A common assertion of the SDAs is that the Roman Church displaced Sabbath observance with Sunday … There was no Roman Church in the begininng of Christianity. The Apostolic Constitutions, accepted as historical, tells about worship on the Lord’s Day.…

United Lutheran

Eau Claire, Wisc.

Eaton R. Burrows … wants to know if anyone has gone back to the year one and traced all the weeks down to the present date to be sure we have the right days (“Eutychus and his kin,” May 26 issue). Yes, such a book has been written by Dr. Dimbelby, a noted scientist and astronomer. The book … All Past Time … proves that the first year of time began on Sunday … and … that the weekly cycle has never been broken, or altered.

Arlington, Calif.

God … knew what day he was talking about when he commanded its [Sabbath] observance at Sinai.… Jesus knew what he was doing when he worshiped on the Sabbath.…

Hamilton SDA Church

Hamilton, Ont.

It is absolutely erroneous for us to assume that the ancient Jewish (Commandment) Sabbath always fell on the day that corresponds to our Saturday, or that the weekly cycle of days has come down in unbroken sequence from Eden. In ancient times the first day of the Jewish New Year was automatically under Sanhedrin law the first Sabbath, thus the day changed from year to year, or rather the cycle of days changed according to lunar reckoning. The Sabbath did not fall every seventh day as our Saturday and Sunday do now. At this time, every day began and ended at sunrise and sunset. The Jews in dispersion found it impossible to hold to the ancient Hebrew calendar with its realignment of days according to lunar astrology differing each year, and about 360 A.D., in the fourth century after the inauguration of our Lord’s Day, … the Jewish rulers throughout the world, at Alexandria, Egypt, established the Saturday Sabbath in accord with the universal calendar cycle. Hence the Christian Lord’s Day is of older observance than the Saturday Sabbath.

Wolff Memorial Presbyterian Church

Newark, N. J.

SDAs go all out to keep only a part of the Fourth Commandment and overlook the rest. Sabbath labor of servants is … definitely prohibited. The hewers of wood and drawers of water, whose labor is clearly under the ban, have in the 20th century moved into the pumping stations and public utility plant control rooms. I challenge any SDA to show how he can flush a toilet or observe a traffic light at any time between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday without violating his favorite commandment. It is impossible to keep the Fourth Commandment since the Jews lost their sovereignty and their land.

Winnetka, Ill.

Every breach of the law incurred the penalty of stoning within hours or days. Such condemnation must be as unavoidable for disobedience for those under law now.

Gerrards Cross, Bucks, U. K.

It does seem passing strange that it should be considered tantamount to pronouncing Ellen White “immaculate” for an author to merely refer to her as having been granted the high privilege of acting as the Lord’s stenographer or general reporter of much of his special warning and instruction to his people in the perplexing situations of these perilous closing days of earth’s history! No such immaculance has ever been generally assumed for Isaiah, Jeremiah or John.

Beacon Light Mission

Minneapolis, Minn.

It is interesting to note in Revelation 19:8, RSV, in speaking of the bride, John says, “It was granted her to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure, for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.” Could it be the Adventists have a right to have at least “one stitch … of [their] own making” … in their celestial robes?

San Gabriel, Calif.

Before me is one of their [SDA] decision cards.… “My decision. Jesus, I come to thee. Recognizing that the seventh day of the week, the Sabbath, is the day of the Lord, I promise with the help of God, to observe it as His holy day and obey all the rest of the holy commandments.”

In Uberlandia [Brazil] this group managed to seduce one family from the Presbyterian church and half a dozen from the Methodist. We “gladly” say goodbye to those who find the fellowship in another evangelical church more to their liking. I am no strong sectarian. However, it is distressing to see a group infiltrate and slander and use all manner of deceit to win adherents, and do it in the name of Christ.

PAUL J. COBLENTZ

W. Brazil Mission, Presby. Church, U.S.

Paracatu, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Thanks for articles on church unity (May 26 issue). These should stop controversy on SDA. “External union is the product and expression of internal (spiritual) unity.” Both my Christian love and my business have caused me to try hard for fellowship with SDAs, but it is very difficult (impossible in a true spirit of fellowship).

Marquette, Mich.

Having once been an Adventist myself, and under the delusion of such doctrines as their “sanctuary doctrine,” and their investigative judgment theory, and having finally realized that those teachings are out of harmony with the Word of God, I left them voluntarily … and sought fellowship with other Sabbatarian Groups.… All of us connected with … The Gathering Call … magazine … were formerly Adventists. We felt the call to try to help our former brethren see through some of their delusions.

Asst. Ed. and Mgr.

The Gathering Call

Riverside, Calif.

ETERNALLY SEEKING

Dr. Wilbur Smith’s … review of Bishop Oxnam’s … A Testament of Faith (June 9 issue) reveals a most interesting analogy. Bishop Oxnam extends his thinking beyond Biblical precision. Dr. Smith conforms to the most rigid … interpretation. The point … involves freedom of thought in a theological field of infinite interpretation.… Bishop Oxnam may not be right in his own conclusions on major theological issues—but his spirit is absolutely right because it is broad enough to be stimulating and eternally seeking.

Shelton, Conn.

It is nothing unusual for a Methodist bishop to hold several high positions at once.… In his one-year position as president of the Council of Bishops, Bishop Oxnam is not the voice of Methodism. He can speak for the bishops only when they authorize him to do so. He can speak for Methodism only when he follows the Discipline, concerning which the Judicial Council is the court of final appeals, and not the Council of Bishops. Anything else that he may say or write is private opinion. Wherein the Bishop’s theology does not follow the Discipline, which follows the Scripture, it is regrettable. However, as Dr. Smith’s own Presbyterian Church officially teaches the questionable doctrines of limited atonement, perseverance of the saints, and unconditional election—all as unscriptural and repellent to many orthodox Christians as the worst errors imputed to Oxnam—the reviewer is singularly unsuited to throw stones.

First Methodist Church

Belen, N. M.

Such statements as, “Someday the Bishop will know, before the judgment seat of Christ, what Christ thinks of ‘theological discussions,’ ” leave very little to the imagination.… Thank God that he alone makes judgments as to who is right and who is wrong, for I feel that if either Wilbur Smith or Bromley Oxnam were to establish the criteria for salvation many areas of Christendom would be doomed to eternal damnation.

Aldersgate Methodist Church

Wilmington, Del.

May I remind Wilbur M. Smith that Billy Graham has also said any number of times that he is not a theologian. Considering Graham was president of a Bible school why should Smith be so alarmed at our intrepid Bishop Oxnam’s admission that he is no theologian. Without having read Oxnam’s “A Testament of Faith,” I would suppose it is at least as theologically sound as “Peace with God,” which I have read.

First Methodist Church

Sebring, Ohio

I deeply appreciate the fine … reviews that you have published … of books by Fosdick and Oxnam.

Evart, Mich.

In the … fine … review Dr. Smith mentions that Dr. Oxnam is “the president of the Board of Trustees of Westminster Theological Seminary.” … This is a Methodist seminary, now located at Westminster, Maryland. This institution is moving to Washington, D. C., this fall and is changing its name to Wesley Theological Seminary. Bishop Oxnam has never had the remotest connection of any sort with Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. His theological positions are, of course, abhorrent to us.

Exec. Sec.

Westminster Theol. Sem.

Philadelphia, Pa.

SOUTHERN BAPTISTS

From the bottom of my heart I want to thank you for the splendid report of the Southern Baptist Convention (June 9 issue).… We Southern Baptists make lots of mistakes but we do sincerely love the Lord and want to win people to him. Your report seems to me to catch the spirit of our convention better than any other I have seen.

Editor

Baptist Messenger

Oklahoma City, Okla.

Thank you for your helpful interpretation and … your genuine concern in the field of religious news. In a day when material things can be blown to bits in seconds and the dimensions of time and space have lost much of their significance, there is a hunger on the part of people for spiritual values which sustain in times of crisis. We feel that you perform a real service in taking note of these values and their significance in modern society.

Exec. Sec.

Executive Committee

Southern Baptist Convention

Nashville, Tenn.

Thank you for your splendid story.… I thought this a most constructive and enlightening piece.

Executive Com.

Southern Baptist Convention

Nashville, Tenn.

COMMUNITY ETHICS

In reference to the … comment on gambling in … “Current Religious Thought” (May 26 issue) … it is high time Christians, both laymen and ministers, raise their voices against the deplorable conditions found in many of our communities. In our area gambling is wide open along with its accompanying vices. The county officials were approached by a local ministerial group concerning the matter and were told that because of the widespread corruption in both local and county authorities, nothing could be done. Some of our communities are so full of this vice, seemingly protected rather than halted by law officers, that a good Christian parent dreads the day that his children will become of age. No good Christian desires to bring his children up in a community where every good ethic taught in the home is denied and made light of by the deplorable ethics of his community.

Salem Evangelical Congregational

Church, Mahanoy City, Pa.

CULTURE IN THE BASEMENT

What a beautiful, touching, and unusual activity is beautifully described … by Robert K. Churchill (June 9 issue).

Didcot, Berks, U. K.

INSOLUBLE DILEMMA

I was very much interested to see your note concerning the discussion now going on at Harvard (May 12 issue). It seems to me that the function of a university is to teach and not attempt to fulfill the role of a church. If the university does its job well, whether its administrators are Christians or otherwise, they will include courses, competently taught, in the Christian religion. But when the university plays church, it asks for trouble. Exhibit “A”: the ultimately insoluble dilemma of the Jewish couple’s request. The only answer is an uneasy and transparent compromise on both sides. You can no more mix church and university than church and state. The university has no just claim to return to anything but President Eliot’s “minimum,” pathetic as it may be to the theologian.

Lutheran Student-Work Committee

Philadelphia, Pa.

PREACHING TO THE TIMES

William H. Beckmann (May 26 issue) … should read again the prophecy of Isaiah, or Jeremiah, or Amos. In ancient days the presbyteries in the church in Scotland inquired of its ministerial members whether they had “preached to the times.” Why not the same inquiry today.

Lisbon, N. Y.

CHURCH OR CHAPEL

Your paper seems to include … every denomination … as a “Church” … There is nothing to stop people … breaking away from the original Church and calling themselves the “new church” … but that will never make them a “Church”—possibly a “chapel” which is the correct name for present-day sects.

Church of England

Stow Bedon, Norfolk

CHRISTIANITY TODAY … seems to be written, chiefly, by nonconformist ministers outside the Church who have no authority to teach, and obviously do not know the faith, since they elect to remain outside the Church.

Dean Prior Vicarage

Buckfastleigh, Devon

I have left my parish in Suffolk, and the Church of England, and have become a Roman Catholic.… I feel I must write to express my appreciation of this periodical and my admiration of the very important principles it stands for—for instance, the authority of Holy Scripture and the original teaching of the Church on the Person of Christ. Besides this, I remain a firm supporter of Dr. Billy Graham because of his magnificent presentation of these fundamental truths of our religion.

Ipswich, England

May I say that I consider CHRISTIANITY TODAY the finest piece of Christian literature being published at the present time. One may not perhaps agree 100% with everything written, that would not be possible; but in no other publication of its kind, known to me, is there to be found such a wealth of sound doctrine, learned exposition and interesting and valuable information.

The Vicarage

Frome, Somerset

I warmly appreciate the substantial and dynamic quality of its many articles, with their clear and positive presentation of the original faith and practice. This is in strong contrast with most British theological journals, which for the work-a-day minister are too often merely technical and vague. In an age of theological dilution it is vastly encouraging to find that there are still so many first-class minds, with the necessary scholastic equipment, who maintain and articulate the original simplicities of the Word of God, and their relevance to these modern times. I pray that wherever it is sent it will challenge the superficiality of prevailing liberalism, and have a tonic effect upon the thinking of those who stand by a genuine scriptural Christianity.

Methodist Supt. Minister

Castle town, Isle of Man, U. K.

READER TO READER

How anyone can take the stand of H. D. Sanders (Apr. 28 issue) and live with himself is beyond comprehension.… Idol worship never produces sane reasoning. We are persuaded that the great American idol today is the naked human female form!

United Presbyterian

Franklinville, N. Y.

There are some like A. A. Cone … who … see what is facing us.… I am acquainted with a man who is a converted Roman Catholic who can mention time after time when the Catholic church and her puppet priests and people have made attempts on his life but have not as yet succeeded.… When seven-year-old boys are threatened with excommunication because they take a Gospel of John from a Protestant minister, what is that but slavery.…

Writers use the term … “Adventism” as though it refers only to SDA. I am of the Advent Christian … denomination which is a completely evangelical group.…

Advent Christian

Crouseville, Me.

With reference to Mr. H. Hawkin’s remarks (Apr. 28 issue) … to present Jesus on the cross would mean that he did not “resurrexit.” I might understand the symbol of the Cross but not the crucifix.

South Boston, Mass.

Mr. L. H. Saunders … in a letter (Apr. 28 issue) … objects to the term “born-again Christian” … However, the term “Christian” in many circles, has come to be a synonym for “Gentile”.… Though the terminology is redundant, nonetheless it is often needed and may … afford an opportunity to witness to … saving grace.…

Tucson, Ariz.

A clear apprehension of the biblical revelation of man bears more significantly on the character of evangelism than is often recognized. Many extravagances, weaknesses, and failures in present-day evangelism come from a deficient understanding of biblical anthropology—the doctrine of man. To be successful the physician must know the nature of the human body. An evangelist has to know the nature of the human soul. And he who would serve the Church in the task of evangelism must evaluate that soul in the light of revealed truth. However much the books of nature and history can reveal of man, Scripture stands as the infallible source of true knowledge. To neglect such a basic text is indolence of the worst order.

What a minister believes about man determines the nature of his preparation, the content of his message, and method of appeal. Component parts of public worship are often selected with a view to the character of man, particularly in evangelistic services. The depth and passion of the preacher’s prayers reveal his comprehension of man’s natural condition. Important consequences—good or evil—depend in great measure on the evangelist’s comprehension of the true nature of the human soul.

Biblical Anthropology

The doctrine of man, revealed in Scripture, vividly sets forth the tremendous and difficult task of evangelism. We observed that a physician ceases to work when life leaves the body of his patient. But the evangelist begins with something that is dead; for according to Scripture, man is dead in trespasses and sin (Eph. 2:1), he is of the flesh (John 3:6), shapen in iniquity (Ps. 51:5), his heart is deceitful above all things and is desperately wicked (Jer. 17:9), in his condition he is unable to receive the things of the Spirit (1 Cor. 2:14), without the restraining influence of the Spirit every imagination of the thoughts of his heart is continually evil (Gen. 6:5), he seeketh not after God (Rom. 3:11), and doeth no good (Ps. 14:3). What can be a more discouraging estimate of man than this?

Spiritual deadness, according to biblical revelation, finds its historical and causal origin in the voluntary apostasy of Adam. We read in Romans 5:12–21 that all men experience death, not in themselves, nor in their parents, but in Adam. All men without exception died in Adam: “wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Rom. 5:12). But strangely absent from so much modern evangelism is just such reference to the specific and historical cause of spiritual death and its corollary, the objective righteousness of the second Adam as requisite to salvation. Martin Luther’s conversion occurred when he perceived that the gospel of Christ revealed the righteousness of God. And it is just as important for the sinner to know that Christ’s obedience is imputed to his own account through faith, as it is to know that at one time Christ died for his sin on the cross (Rom. 1:17; 5:19; Phil. 3:9). Often forgotten is that precious title of Christ in Jeremiah 23:6, “the Lord our righteousness.” Yet there lies the depth, strength and durableness of Reformation evangelism. It is true that some would shrug all this off as unnecessary theological detail; but is that not shrugging off a vital scriptural teaching, without which a sinner remains ignorant of his relationship to the Adam of death and the Adam of life?

This desperate situation of fallen man also implies the tremendous power that was required to rescue him. The same mighty and miraculous power that was necessary to raise Christ from physical death must needs be exerted as well on behalf of the spiritually dead (Eph. 1:19, 20). This truth is echoed in Colossians 2:12, 13: “Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead. And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him.” Regeneration, spoken of here, is likened to a passing from death to life, a resurrection from the dead.

Spiritual death signifies a state of alienation from God and a loss of the moral image of God. It is an estrangement wherein men walk not according to the law of God, but “according to the course of this world” (Eph. 2:2). The ungodly spirit of the world governs their conduct; loving, serving, and worshiping God do not actuate their lives. They are children of darkness who walk “in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart” (Eph. 4:17, 18). It should be observed that alienation from God issues in more than inactive deadness—it leads to active opposition, as we note in Jesus’ crucifixion and the stoning of Stephen. And this is what the evangelist must accept, this biblical evaluation of man’s ignorance, blindness, deadness to the Spirit and hatefulness if he is to undertake at all the mission of evangelism in the Church.

Implications For Evangelism

But how can the spiritually dead be quickened and made alive? Certainly not through eloquent speaking or the wisdom of this world. The state of the unsaved sinner is such that the evangelist must distrust any power of popular persuasion, thunder, or terror of the law. However much he has the art to depict the beauty of holiness or the blessedness of a virtuous life, this can produce no motion within the spiritually dead. He may instill dread by his descriptions of the lake of fire and brimstone or implant longings in the hearts of his people for the glories of paradise, delineate in dramatic fashion the sufferings of Christ or describe the manifold love of God, but none of these skills in themselves can impart to a sinner life. Such a one is wholly insensitive to the spiritual truth and beauty of God.

The biblical doctrine of man, therefore, makes necessary an evangelist’s complete dependence upon almighty God in the effecting of man’s salvation. Only God has the power to give sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf. Only he can create light in the darkened and distorted understanding of the unregenerate. And until the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity, infuses divine life into a man’s soul, no man can put forth a hand of faith to lay hold upon Christ. No man can come forth out of the tomb of death, except by the voice of the Son of God: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live.” This is the source of power and life.

While the power to awaken the dead is the Lord’s he has ordained means and does use instruments for the carrying out of his purpose. One of these, of course, is the preaching of the Cross and Christ crucified: “For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe” (1 Cor. 1:21). This does not mean foolish preaching. It means preaching what the world considers foolishness through which God is pleased to save those that believe. One common fault with evangelists today is that their messages contain a minimum of Gospel and a maximum of the extraneous—the witty, frivolous, and the inane (a form of man’s “wisdom”). And what is worse, they evidently mistake their foolish talk for the preaching of the Cross. Paul, knowing that God had ordained the Gospel to establish the faith, depreciated the excellency of speech and enticing words of man’s wisdom lest the preaching of the Cross be of no effect. And the Lord blessed his faithful preaching with the power of the Spirit.

A striking and encouraging illustration of how effective the preaching of the Word to the dead can be is seen in Ezekiel’s vision (Ezek. 37:1–14). The prophet is shown a valley of dry bones and is urged to preach over them. He preaches as he is directed and indicates the marvelous results in these words: “So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.” The significant fact here is that the preaching of the Word alone was insufficient to restore life, and the prophet was directed to prophesy to the wind. Undoubtedly the wind symbolized the Holy Spirit and Ezekiel, in effect, was to pray, for the outpouring of him who alone could give breath to the house of Israel. It was thus the Word and the Spirit made a living army out of a valley of dry bones. God’s means for quickening the spiritual dead in the twentieth century are no different from those at the time of Ezekiel, and the same blessed results may always be expected.

The figure of death which is used here in no way implies that natural man is destitute of intellectual power. Spiritual deadness consists in the perversion of the pure intellectual capacity created in man by God. And in regeneration God merely takes what he has made and gives it a new and holy direction. The true evangelist knows, therefore, that he is addressing the unconverted as rational beings, and must confront them with the truth of the Gospel, beginning with the terrors of the law, the fact of eternal punishment, the way of salvation and then the gracious but urgent invitation to it. To a corrupt and depraved generation the Lord said through Isaiah, “Come now, and let us reason together … though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow: though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” (Isa. 1:18). Paul reasoned of righteousness, temperance and judgment to come before Felix and Drusilla. Thus Isaiah and Paul addressed themselves to the intellect and conscience of the unregenerate. Both would recognize that the actual change within a man is engendered by the Holy Spirit. Paul declared, “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.”

Biblical Precedence

It is true that much criticism has been directed against the means by which people are often drawn to the evangelistic meetings. Many deplore fanfare and Madison Avenue tactics as secular and undignified. However, these means are many times employed for the purpose of attracting average people to the preaching of the Gospel and it does have biblical precedent. In the second chapter of Acts, we note one rather spectacular way of gathering a multitude. It consisted of the rushing of the wind, cloven tongues like as of fire, and the speaking of other tongues. And when this was advertised abroad, a multitude came together (Acts 2:6) and Peter preached a sermon that was instrumental in saving some three thousand souls.

Another spectacular means which God used to bring one soul under the preaching of the Word was an earthquake (Acts 16). By what may be termed common grace a man can be attracted to hear the gospel, but only by special supernatural grace can he be made to respond to it. He may be brought to the pool by various means, but he can only be healed as God stirs the waters (John 5:4). One need not be greatly concerned how a sinner is brought under the preaching of the Gospel, as long as the method does not become a substitute for true preaching in the power of the Word and demonstration of the Spirit.

Knowledge Of Scripture

How carefully then must an evangelist’s message be prepared. Superficial knowledge of the Scripture can only produce superficial preaching and in turn superficial response. This means, therefore, that he ought to give to the Word his most careful attention, that he be, in short, a theologian, knowing well the essential teachings revealed in Holy Scripture. His calling to the preaching of the Gospel in simplicity and clarity does not give him margin to be simple (ignorant) of knowledge. God’s Word has the effect of making the simple wise (Ps. 19:7; 119:130). “Simple,” of course, means “not blended, mixed or compounded with something else.” When an evangelist adulterates the Gospel with irrelevant humor, anecdotes and personal experiences, he comes far from proclaiming the simple Gospel wherein he boasts, and it is that which God has specifically ordained as the means to awakening the dead.

It is the Spirit of God that gives power to resurrect a dead soul, however. And here is where prayer for that power becomes one of the most important factors in evangelism. Billy Graham constantly attributes the conversion of souls in his ministry to the prayers of God’s people. Regeneration of a man’s soul depends wholly upon God’s grace and power. Would that more evangelists understood this. They seek by human means to bring about “decisions,” they feel that they have failed unless they can present a good count; some will even stoop as low as to trick people into coming forward at meetings. But of what avail is it that the church be thus filled with the dead? Is that way more profitable and more glorious than appealing to God for true regenerating power?

Evangelism, if exercised according to the nature of man as revealed in Scripture, will have none of the extravagances, idiosyncrasies, or weaknesses that have justified so much criticism toward it, and it will certainly induce men to greater dependence upon the Lord of life. Only God can quicken the soul that is dead in trespasses and sins.

Past All Understanding

Tired? Let go!

Hear the “Come unto Me,”

Of His heavenly voice,

If rested you’d be.

Lonely? Look up!

Let the world grow dim;

There is steadying strength

When you journey with Him.

Hungry? Draw near!

For a feast is spread

Of living water

And heavenly bread.

Doubting? Fear not!

For the promise holds true,

That the child of God’s care

Shall his faith renew.

So, rested and steadied

And nourished and stilled,

Claim each promise of God,

And each need shall be filled.

—Sue C. Boynton

The evangelical status of Seventh-day Adventism has been questioned in recent issues of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Contributors and correspondents participating in the debate voice appreciation of many features of Seventh-day Adventism—zeal of its lay workers, faithful “observance” of the Saturday-Sabbath despite economic disadvantage and cultural pressures, evidence that detailed doctrinal confession and patterns of behavior do not retard church growth or community impact, and tithing of income for support of the ministry before church offerings are given for missions and other purposes. Adventist acceptance of many basic evangelical tenets, moreover, is not in dispute. Even the formal Adventist insistence on the perpetual and universal validity of the moral law as divine standard of conduct is widely regarded as an emphasis unfortunately neglected by many evangelicals. What is in question, however, is the advocacy of certain doctrines peculiar to Seventh-day Adventism. CHRISTIANITY TODAY has correlated these criticisms in the form of specific questions and has addressed them to Dr. Frank H. Yost, formerly Professor of Church History, and of Systematic Theology, at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary in Takoma Park, Washington, D. C., and Editor of Liberty: A Magazine of Religious Freedom. His reply is printed below.—ED.

1. Is the General Conference the only authoritative voice of Seventh-day Adventists?

Yes, in the ecclesiastical sense. Every Seventh-day Adventist is a free man, answerable to God, walking under the blessing of the Holy Spirit, who illuminates the Scriptures, the norm of his spiritual and moral experience. But the General Conference in session is the highest administrative body, and is alone qualified to speak for the entire body of Seventh-day Adventist believers.

2. Has the General Conference endorsed or approved the views recently enunciated in the publication Seventh-day Adventists Answer Questions on Doctrine (Review and Herald Pub. Assn., Washington, D. C., 1957)?

Not in the administrative or creedal sense. The book is not a creed. Seventh-day Adventists purpose to have no creed. In our opinion, creeds tend to limit the spiritual freedom of individuals, or to produce creedal loyalty rather than loyalty to the Scriptures. Both of these, Seventh-day Adventists intend to avoid. But the book has been widely read, both in manuscript form and since publication, by the ministry and the laity, with general acceptance. “The officers of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists felt that the material appearing in this volume would not only be helpful to the members of their own church but that it would also furnish reliable information on Adventist beliefs and teachings to the many inquiries, that, in recent years, have arisen regarding Adventist doctrines. They have therefore requested that this book be published for general use with the fervent prayer and hope that it may be useful in making clearer the way of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Questions on Doctrine, p. 10).

3. (a) Is it acknowledged that Saturday observance lacks precedent in the long sweep of church history until its 19th century introduction by Captain Joseph Bates of New Bedford, Mass.?

No. We have at hand documentary source evidence (in the technical historical sense) that the seventh-day Sabbath has been observed by Christian bodies at many geographic points in Europe and the East, and at many times in past Christian history. We recognize and emphasize that these bodies were the “sects” of Christian history, not the creedal groups. However, history does not establish or validate scriptural doctrine or scriptural observances. It can only illustrate them.

The most marked and significant revival of Sabbath observance in the post-Reformation period was by the Baptists, and it was by Baptists, as well as by individual Bible students, that Adventists of the early 19th century were admonished to follow the Bible in keeping the seventh-day Sabbath. Seventh-day Adventists acknowledge freely their debt to these Sabbath-keeping Baptists in respect to this observance, as well as the practice of immersion baptism.

3. (b) Is it acknowledged that the early Church specially marked the first day of the week, and that the New Testament epistles specifically refer to the seventh day only by way of prohibiting observance of the Jewish Sabbath?

Again, No. The New Testament emphasizes repeatedly the spiritually practical, nonlegalistic observance of the Sabbath, from the example and admonition of Jesus Christ, who asserted his lordship over the Sabbath (Mark 2:28), and rebuked pharisaical Sabbath observance (Matt. 12:1–13), through Paul’s own repeated examples (Acts 13:14–44; 16:12–15; 17:1–4; 18:1–11) to the “Lord’s day” of John’s experience in Rev. 1:10. What our Lord had to say about the keeping of the seventh day was patently not to negate the day, but to rebuke pharisaical interpretation of it, which led to abuses in its observance. “The texts of the New Testament specifically mentioning the first day of the week cannot rightly be construed as enjoining the observance of Sunday, or as transferring the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first day” (Questions on Doctrine, pp. 151f.).

As a matter of fact, reliable church historians, falling into the category of historical sources, record that both the seventh-day Sabbath, and the Sunday Sabbath, after its weekly observance was introduced at Rome in the second century, were used by Christians generally for worship, side by side, decade after decade, till as late as the 5th century (Sozomen, Church History, bk. 7, chap. 19, and Socrates, Church History, bk. 5, chap. 22; in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, Vol. II, pp. 390, 132). This historical fact shows clearly, of course, that the rejection of Sabbath [Saturday] observance was not apostolic (cf. Questions on Doctrine, pp. 149–202).

4. Waving aside Seventh-day Adventist adherence to the Arminian view that believers may lose their salvation, the question remains whether the believer possesses salvation—on Adventist principles—on the sole ground of the atonement without any admixture of works. If Saturday-Sabbath observance is the special sign of spiritual obedience by the true saints of God (so that something man does specially qualifies him for heaven), is not the Saturday-Sabbath given a special priority in relation to salvation, and justification specially conditioned on its observance? If men now or in a later age must keep the Saturday-Sabbath to avoid forfeiture of salvation, then is not salvation a matter of both faith and works, since the righteousness of Christ no longer is the sole ground of the sinner’s hope but requires as its correlate an element of salvation by works?

God has a standard for all men to live by, and that is his own holiness and righteousness, as seen in the life of our blessed Lord and expressed in the Ten Commandment law (Rom. 7:12). Failure to meet the terms of his standard is sin (1 John 3:4; Rom. 7:7–14). We are saved from sin by the grace of God alone, through the vicarious sacrificial atonement of Jesus Christ our only Saviour and sinbearer. However, to continue in known sin, or to repeat sin, is to deny or to frustrate the saving grace of God (Rom. 6:1, 2, 11–18). The character of God, the example of the sinless Jesus Christ on earth, the standard of the Ten Commandments, and the will of God as expressed in the life and teaching of our Lord, comprise one holy pattern for the positive godly life, and define conversely the nature of sin. The keeping of the commandments, in any spiritually significant sense, can only be through the power of God. Indeed, only he who has been saved by grace, and empowered by the Holy Spirit, can keep the law of God (Rom. 8:1–9; 1 John 2:3–6; 3:22–24; 5:1–4). An excellent recent presentation of the relation of the Christian to the Ten Commandments is Harold Lindsell and Charles J. Woodbridge’s A Handbook of Christian Truth (published by Revell, Westwood, New Jersey, 1953, chap. 13). All Seventh-day Adventists can subscribe to this statement.

The grace and power of God have created the former sinner into a new-born man, “created in Christ Jesus unto good works” (Eph. 2:8–10). The result is a godly life, manifesting obedience, not to be saved, but because salvation has been received. Mrs. E. G. White wrote in the year 1900: “Only the covering which Christ Himself has provided, can make us meet to appear in God’s presence. This covering, the robe of His own righteousness, Christ will put upon every repenting, believing soul. ‘I counsel thee,’ He says, ‘to buy of Me … white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear’ (Rev. 3:18). This robe, woven in the loom of heaven, has in it not one thread of human devising” ([italics added]—Christ’s Object Lessons, Southern Pub. Assoc., Nashville, Tenn., pp. 311f.).

Should the Christian, saved by grace, be honest? The answer is yes. The character of God, the experience of grace, and the eighth commandment all require this. Should the Christian, saved by grace, be truthful? The answer is yes. The character of God, the experience of grace, and the ninth commandment all require this. Then, should that same Christian, saved by grace, keep the Sabbath? Again, the answer is yes, for the character of God, the experience of enabling grace, as well as the fourth commandment, naturally lead him to do this. Seventh-day Adventists believe that if as sons of God they did not observe the fourth commandment along with the other nine, they would be making a false distinction between the commandments, which is a discrimination condemned in the Bible (Jas. 2:8–14).

It is noticeable that all Protestant communions agree as to the applicable function of the eighth commandment in portraying the honest Christian. There might be a more or less sophistical argument as to whether in a given case a man who has appropriated another man’s property without his consent has stolen; but there is no dispute over the fact that stealing is immoral. So it is with the other commandments.

Except the fourth. Here the lines of cleavage are sharply drawn. Either all ten commandments merit a thorough-going application, or only nine of them. We firmly believe that here is a test which will become more and more serious and significant as we approach the time of the parousia of our Lord. In this connection, we are sincerely and deeply concerned in behalf of those who are accepting salvation by grace, but who are not manifesting the full richness of that experience by allowing Christ to work out in their lives, in the power of God’s grace, the revealed terms of God’s will (cf. Questions on Doctrine, pp. 101–145).

5. In view of the Seventh-day Adventist defense of Mrs. Ellen G. White’s teaching as authoritative and of her life as immaculate, does the movement affirm that Mrs. White was sinless? that she was infallible in propounding doctrines not drawn from Scripture? Is she to be believed when she states of her writings: “It is God and not an erring mortal who has spoken?” Are her writings to be considered normative? Questions on Doctrine refers to her words as “inspired counsels from the Lord.” Do her writings share in the inspiration of the biblical writings? Since it is often asserted that “the spirit of prophecy” reappeared in Mrs. White, is it contended that she shared an apostolic gift nowhere else manifested since that era but in Mrs. White? What is its independent authoritative significance for the whole Church? What authority is assigned the extra-biblical elements in her writings?

Seventh-day Adventists believe that Mrs. White was a godly woman like any other godly woman, no better, and no worse. They have never put forth by word, or even by suggestion, that she was “immaculate,” and deny that she was. We believe that the Spirit of God addressed himself to her, and that she put down as accurately as was humanly possible the instruction she received. Use of her writings over the years has led us to recognize her spiritual accuracy.

As to God speaking through her, the quotation here given is exactly what would be expected wherever the gift of prophecy is manifested (cf. A. G. Daniells, Abiding Gift of Prophecy, Pacific Press Pub. Assoc., Mountain View, Calif., 1936). As shown in numerous statements of hers, Mrs. White did not believe herself verbally inspired, nor infallible. Seventh-day Adventists do not attach these qualities to her work (cf. F. M. Wilcox, The Testimony of Jesus, Review and Herald Pub. Assoc., Washington, D. C., printing of 1944, pp. 74–89).

We believe that Mrs. White was in the stream of those who were entrusted with the prophetic gift, but hold firmly to the canonical Scriptures, from Genesis to Revelation, as our only rule of faith and practice. By this standard, too, we reject all religious rites and observance of “days,” such as Sunday, Easter, Lent, Christmas, and saints’ days which cannot be clearly supported in Scripture, and which are, we believe, condemned as frustrating to grace by Paul in Galatians 4:9–11.

If Mrs. White did not give additional details and instruction for the spiritual guidance of Advent believers, what she wrote would have been a needless if not impertinent repetition of biblical revelation. Her writings do include details shown to her in vision, and practical applications of scriptural principles for current living. But these are always consonant, we believe, with biblical revelation, and they are, at her repeated insistence, always to be tested by Scripture (cf. Questions on Doctrine, pp. 89–98).

6. How can the emphasis that the Bible is the sole rule of faith be reconciled with the lack of a definite biblical basis for the novel Adventist interpretations of the 70 weeks and 2300 years and the cleansing of the sanctuary (that Christ in 1844 entered the heavenly sanctuary and is now carrying on the investigative judgment), which arose after the collapse of 19th century prophecies of the Lord’s return?

“No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation” (2 Pet. 1:20). The understanding Seventh-day Adventists have of the eighth and ninth chapters of Daniel has been held by numerous Bible commentators, some of them noted scholars and churchmen for many centuries. The interpretation is certainly no novelty devised by early Adventists (Questions on Doctrine, pp. 309–316). Actually, the prophecy of the 70 weeks in the ninth chapter of Daniel, clearly understood in parallel with other prophecies and in view of history (Seventh-day Adventists adhere to the historical method of prophetic interpretation as opposed to the “futuristic method, Questions on Doctrine, pp. 296 f.), gives unshakable testimony to the messiahship of Jesus Christ and to the efficacy of his atoning work; and it shows such recent innovations as the teaching of the “rapture” to be unacceptable.

As to our application of the 2300-year prophecy to Christ’s intercessory work in heaven, the meaning of this could scarcely have become clear until the progress of events, including the 1844 “disappointment,” had cleared away the debris of preconceived notions. Remember the disciples’ complete failure to understand Christ’s foretellings of his death and resurrection until after the event. Our Lord laid down this principle of prophetic application: “I have told you before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye might believe” (John 14:29) (cf. Questions on Doctrine, pp. 246–249; for a full treatment of this question cf. pp. 205–337).

7. Can the legalistic legislation of details of Christian conduct (not only the prohibition of alcohol and tobacco, but of indulgence in tea, coffee, ham, shrimp, lobster, claims, oysters, and snails!) be reconciled with any specific scriptural requirement binding on the New Testament Church?

The application of God’s standards to Christian living is not legalism. It is the normal life of the child of grace “created unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:8–10). Probably a majority of the readers of this journal believe that the habitual use of alcoholic beverages and tobacco is harmful, bodily and spiritually. Seventh-day Adventists agree very strongly with this view, and make the use of either a test of church membership. The sixth commandment calls for the preservation of life. Alcoholic beverages and tobacco are destructive of life. It is not legalism for a man saved by grace to experience the power of God in bringing his life into harmony with the sixth commandment, or the second, or the fourth, or the eighth, or any other of God’s commandments.

The Lord pointed out to Noah, forefather of Jew and Gentile alike, a distinction concerning the creatures of his creative hand, that some were “clean” and some “unclean” (Gen. 6:18–21; 7:1–3, 7–10). This distinction was still there when God instructed the Hebrews in godly living (Lev. 11). Obviously, God had not changed his mind between Noah’s and Moses’ time. We find no biblical evidence that he has changed it since. We eat accordingly. However, since Seventh-day Adventists believe that dietary matters are the concern of the individual conscience, they are not matters of church discipline (cf. Questions on Doctrine, pp. 622–624).

8. Do Seventh-day Adventists regard evangelical believers not in their own ranks as legitimate objects of missionary and evangelistic endeavor?

Yes, they do, as a matter of sharing truth with fellow-believers in Christ. To believe something concerning God or one’s duty to God, and not to share it with others, for the quickening of conscience, for spiritual illumination, and ultimately that such persons may stand acceptably before God in the Judgment, would be a sin of neglect and worthy of reprehension (Ezek. 3:20, 21). We sometimes wonder therefore at Christians today who, unlike their spiritual forebears of a century ago, seem slow to preach the virtue and spiritual importance of such doctrines as immersion baptism at the age of accountability as evidence of the operation of God’s grace in the experience of a convert (Rom. 6:3–6) (cf. Questions on Doctrine, pp. 21–32, 179–202).

Paul Tillich’s doctrine of revelation must be treated in relation to his doctrine of God. Tillich’s God is not a supernatural God who existed before nature was, and who exists as its lawgiver; rather, the term “God” designates what concerns man ultimately (Systematic Theology, Vol. I, p. 211; except where otherwise indicated, page references refer to this volume).

Judged from the standpoint of traditional theism, Tillich is an atheist. “God is being itself, not a being” (p. 237). All statements with respect to God, other than that he is being-itself, are symbolic (p. 239). And the truth of a symbol is independent of our own experience, whether physical, psychological, or historical (p. 240).

The Art Of Symbol

Being-itself (God) can be spoken of symbolically as living (p. 241). But to say God is a “ ‘personal God’ does not mean that God is a person. It means that God is the ground of everything personal.… Ordinary theism has made God a heavenly, completely perfect person who resides above the world and mankind. The protest of atheism against such a highest person is correct” (p. 245). Indeed, it is not even possible to ask whether God exists. For being itself is above existence (p. 237).

According to Tillich, man speaks of his ultimate concern in terms of his own being (p. 243). To speak of God as loving, omnipotent, omniscient, and as the Creator, as the Bible does, is to speak symbolically (pp. 272 f.). Creation and the Fall, described in the Word of God, do not refer to events, but rather are descriptions of the relation between God and the world (pp. 252 f.).

All such Christian symbols answer existential questions. God’s “word” is not limited to or identical with the Bible (p. 4). The concepts of theology are rooted in a direct experience of something ultimate in value. Experience is an inexhaustible source out of which new truths are continually taken. Thus, the theologian ought to be open to experience which might go beyond Christian experience. “He is not bound to a circle the center of which is the event of Jesus as the Christ” (p. 45). Every person and thing participates in being-itself, and is therefore a possible revelatory medium.

Dimension Of Mystery

Revelation discloses the ground of being, the true being behind things (p. 94). It is the manifestation of something hidden, a dimension of mystery which remains a mystery even in its disclosure (p. 110).

Apart from man’s reception of revelation as one’s ultimate concern there is no revelation. In revelation the mind goes beyond itself in ecstasy. Ecstasy includes an element of inspiration. But inspiration does not mediate otherwise unknown facts; it opens a “new dimension of understanding” in relation to our ultimate concern and the mystery of being (p. 114).

Revelation discloses mystery in miracle; it points to the mystery of being, expressing its relation to us (p. 117).

Revelation is the manifestation of the depth of reason and the ground of being. It points to the mystery of existence and to our ultimate concern. It is independent of what science and history say about the condition in which it appears … (p. 118).

Revelation does not convey “revealed words” (p. 123). The “Word of God” is a symbolic expression. Revelatory power is absent in propositions which give theoretical information about the past (p. 127).

The Role Of Jesus

Although the theologian is not bound to a circle, the center of which is Jesus as the Christ, Tillich appears to be inconsistent when he affirms that the permanent point of reference of all subsequent revelation is Jesus as the Christ. But the inconsistency is in appearance only. Tillich’s notion of final revelation is not dependent upon the Jesus revealed in the New Testament text. “Final revelation” has a speculative meaning for Tillich. For the original revelation has to be transformed and reinterpreted from time to time (p. 126). Jesus as the Christ, the New Being, is the final revelation.

The words of Jesus and the apostles point to this New Being; they make it visible through stories, legends, symbols, paradoxical descriptions, and theological interpretations. But none of these expressions of the experience of the final revelation is final and absolute in itself. They are all conditioned, relative, open to change and additions (p. 151).

The picture of Jesus as the Christ portrays a man who is the medium of final revelation. It discloses a person in complete possession of himself, because he is completely united with the ground of his being, and able to become transparent to the mystery he reveals. A revelation cannot be final unless it is able to negate itself without losing itself. Jesus is the “Son of God” because he met this criterion.

The symbol of the cross of Christ is superior to other religious symbols because Jesus sacrifices himself not to become “an idol,” another God besides God, a God into whom the disciples wanted to make him (The Christian Scholar, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3, p. 197). Jesus accepted the title “Christ” on the condition that he would die; “that means to deny the idolatrous tendency even with respect to himself.” Jesus is not the Christ in the literal sense of existing eternally with the Father, as the pre-existent “Son of God.” In the second chapter of Philippians, verse 6, Paul speaks of Jesus Christ as being equal with God. And in Colossians 1:16, participation in the work of creation is ascribed to Christ: “For by him are all things created.… And he is before all things and by him all things consist” … (vss. 16, 17). For Tillich, such language can have symbolic, but not literal meaning. “Jesus became the Christ by conquering the demonic forces which tried to make him demonic by tempting him to claim the ultimacy for his finite nature” (p. 132).

The clash between Tillich’s philosophy and the historic Christian faith is especially clear in Christology. By refusing allegedly to be the Christ in the biblical sense, Jesus becomes the Christ in Tillich’s sense. We are liberated from the authority of everything “finite” in Jesus—his traditions, world view, and personal piety. Jesus is the New Creature only insofar as his historical existence is negated. He is “New Being” to the degree that he is not the old, i.e., not finite, not historical. He is the Christ because he refused to be the Christ of Chalcedon; i.e., by refusing to be equal with God, he became the Christ.

To view Jesus himself as final, as orthodoxy does, is asserted to be demonic and idolatrous.

Jesus is the religious and theological object as the Christ and only as the Christ. And he is the Christ as the one who sacrifices what is merely “Jesus” in him. The decisive trait in his picture is the continuous self-surrender of Jesus who is Jesus to Jesus who is the Christ (p. 134).

The symbol “Son of God” means that Jesus brought people to “that in him which is greater than he and they” (p. 136). The acceptance of the cross implies that as a finite being, Jesus refused to impose himself on other finite beings. As Jesus of Nazareth he sacrificed himself to Jesus the Christ, and thus became the final revelation. The final revelation is universally valid in that Jesus stood in uninterrupted unity with the ground of his being and continuously sacrificed himself as Jesus to himself as Christ.

Triumph Of Relativity

Tillich accuses orthodoxy of failing to make past truth relevant to the present situation (p. 3). The “eternal truth” at the foundation of the Christian message lacks any permanent meaning. It must be reinterpreted for every new generation. Tillich presupposes without evidence that all expressions of truth are historically relative and changing.

The Christian faith affirms that God has revealed himself to man in a way that is clear and final. Jesus Christ is the final revelation in the biblical sense because God was in him reconciling the world unto himself. Christ’s sacrificial death and atonement is not subject to changing situation, but it is the unique event in history, in terms of which the entire changing course of human events has significance and meaning.

This affirmation does not mean that orthodoxy elevates something finite and transitory to something infinite and of eternal validity. It recognizes that we now see through a glass darkly. Our knowledge of God is not exhaustive and complete. We know in part. We know what has been revealed to us by God. And such knowledge is sufficient for our salvation. Tillich begs the question to assume that the propositions of historical Christianity lack validity.

Tillich assumes that it is possible to identify “God” with being-itself. But the term “being” is an abstraction derived from experience. And as such it cannot go beyond experience.

If knowledge of God is known from an analysis of “being” then the term “God” is as abstract and nebulous as “being.” To define God by adding “in itself” to the word “being” is to engage in verbal manipulations, without any more significance than defining the term “Pig-tig” to be a cross between a male pig and a female tiger.

Tillich’s employment of language is speculative; it does not arrive at the discovery of any nonverbal state of affairs. A chair, a table, the square root of five, the moon, and Charlie’s great aunt do not share a common quality, in that they participate in “being.” The only thing they have in common is that they can be thought about and spoken of. “Being,” as Tillich uses the term, is a meaningless hypostatization of individual subjectivity. The God of Scripture is a personal being, aware of man, a loving Father, not a philosophical construction.

The question of God cannot be answered by an analysis of “being.” The living God is not the result of an abstract ontological analysis. But the Christian faith depends upon the acceptance of biblical revelation as its norm.

If the term “Christian theology” is appropriate as a description of Tillich’s theology, then a new term is needed to describe a theology based upon the biblical writings as an authoritative source.

Tillich’s God is not a supernatural God, it is a meaningless abstraction. And it is not clear how even being-itself can be a nonsymbolic description of God, when the notion of “being” is simply an abstraction. For why does Tillich speak of being-itself and not of becoming-itself?

To identify revelation with the Bible is for Tillich one of the most serious errors of theology (p. 157). In our opinion, Tillich is in error when he holds that revelation is never separable from the act of receiving. For the Word of God is the objective norm of our faith. It was objectively given by God to man.

Tillich does not wish to hold that revelation is simply a psychological state. But the “ground of being” is discovered in psychological experience. And from an analysis of psychological experience it is not possible to get beyond one’s own experience. The “ground of being” is nothing but a projection of experience. It cannot exist in the usual sense of “exist,” but only in the sense that it concerns us ultimately.

For Tillich a person is a possible bearer of revelation because he can participate in being-itself. But the term “participate” is vague, for it does not refer to any concrete state of affairs. No change occurs in our experience, if we deny that a person participates in being-itself.

It is important to remember that Tillich’s notion of a symbol presupposes the notion of “participation,” but “participation” is itself a poetic metaphor. Tillich assumes that different levels of reality presupppose a different approach. We can grant that language has different levels and uses. But this admission does not imply that there are dimensions of reality corresponding to the levels of language. To speak of a depth dimension of reality, opened by religious symbols, and to speak of the ultimate power of being, is merely a speculative verbalization, which in principle is incapable of being described in terms of sense experience.

The Christian faith is destroyed in Tillich’s system by making the attributes of God projections of our own experience. Language is admittedly inadequate to express the nature of God in any exhaustive sense, but this does not imply that God is completely unknown. Tillich’s position is a form of religious skepticism. God as he really is, is a mystery, even in revelation. In fact, the notion that God is a personal, living, conscious being, aware of man, is symbolic and is absurd for Tillich, if understood in a literal sense. God is forever hidden. But if this is the case, why speak of God at all? Why speak of God symbolically as a person? Why not speak of him in mathematical terms, such as X2?

Tillich’s attempt to remove revealed knowledge from the possible criticism of science and history would remove revelation from the field of intelligible discourse. However, God has revealed himself to man in human events, within history. The Bible is the record of God’s dealings with man. It tells man what he is to believe concerning God, and what duties God requires of man. The supposed conflict between science and religion is not resolved by banishing religion to a mystical realm.

It is not meaningful to speak of God unless something is known of God. The term “God” when used in the biblical writings refers to a God who has revealed himself to man in nature and in the course of human events. And the objective side of this revelation, history-as-event, occurred, according to the account, independently of the reception it received. God, if he is to be known at all, can only be known if such revelation has occurred. That such revelation has occurred can in the final analysis never be demonstrated. The existence of a revealed God is a matter of faith and commitment. It cannot be proven scientifically, for scientific proof is limited to an analysis of human experience, beyond which it cannot go.

The Christian faith accepts the biblical writings as the Word of God by an act of faith. Such an act of faith is, however, not irrational. For the Bible refers to objective states of affairs, not simply to subjective emotional states. It does not abolish logical thought but suggests that man, in all his functions, including his ability to think logically, is a creature of the living God. And as a created being, man is limited in his reasoning to an examination of a created universe, so that God can in principle be known only insofar as he has disclosed himself to man.

Either the Bible presents God’s redemptive dealings with men, or the Christian faith lacks meaning and is pious nonsense.

Speculative Criterion

Tillich’s criterion of a final revelation, that it be able to negate itself without losing itself, is purely speculative. For what criterion can be offered for the acceptance of Tillich’s criterion?

Tillich’s construction of Jesus as the Christ is presented on speculative grounds, not on the basis of exegesis of the New Testament. The latter is interpreted by Tillich in terms of a criterion which is imposed on the New Testament. Tillich’s claim that Jesus accepted the title “Christ,” on the condition that he would die and thus deny the idolatrous tendency with respect to himself, overlooks the Gospel account of the events surrounding the death of Christ. There is absolutely nothing in the text to suggest that at his trial Jesus negated his historical existence. And it was just his claim to be equal with God that brought about his execution.

One may deny the validity and truth of the claim Jesus made, but the New Testament clearly indicates he made it. To interpret the New Testament in terms of modern existentialism is an unscholarly distortion of an historical document. To make Jesus the perfect existentialist, a person in complete possession of himself, and transparent to the mystery of being, is to interpret the past in the light of the present. To apply existentialist categories to the past, in such a way that historical texts are distorted, is to forget that the categories of existentialism are of recent origin. Such a procedure, if not “demonic,” is at least uncritical.

Tillich’s view of Jesus as the Christ is the very opposite of that presented by the New Testament, and it is achieved by rejecting, by means of an a priori criterion, the authority of everything finite in Jesus. What such elements include is known only to Tillich! The New Testament makes no such distinction.

David H. Freeman is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Rhode Island. He is editor of Essays on Modern Thinkers to be published in the Fall by the Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company.

The modern era began with an intellectual rebirth among the peoples of the West who, for many centuries had been immersed in ignorance and superstition, instigated and reinforced by a tyrannical Christian hierarchy. We still feel the repercussions of that revival of learning. As never before, common man is exposed to the progress of knowledge and shares in the conquest of truth. Higher education for his children is no longer an idle dream. Enrollment in colleges and universities continues to spiral upward with more youth entering the ivy halls and crowded campuses each year. But not only is formal education acting as the medium of raising this general intellectual level today; the newspaper, the magazine, lower-priced literature, radio, television and the theater are alike reaching the public with an effectiveness heretofore unparalleled.

Now, in the light of these developments, Protestant orthodoxy stands faced with an intellectual challenge. And this fact is presenting two urgent questions: What is orthodoxy doing to meet this intellectual challenge? How ought orthodoxy to meet it?

More than a decade ago, many evangelical leaders became aware of the need for a renewal of conservative scholarship and higher intellectual standards within their ranks. This began a trend in contemporary orthodoxy which has steadily gained momentum. Today conservative spokesmen are in the front ranks of biblical and theological scholarship, and are creating reliable and authoritative literature being published not only by evangelical publishers, but well-known firms of long standing. Evangelicals who have won distinction in the fields of dogmatics, apologetics, ethics, biblical studies, philosophy, history and archeology are increasing. Colleges and especially theological seminaries in the orthodox tradition—Westminster, Calvin, Fuller, and Concordia (to mention a few), are fully recognized in academic circles as scholarly institutions with superior standards. The evangelical pulpit is also meeting the intellectual challenge and giving its message new impact.

It must be admitted that earlier in the twentieth century the prevailing winds of orthodoxy were not of this temper; nor has this intellectual rebirth yet enlisted universal enthusiastic support. Some time ago I attended a meeting of the friends and supporters of a metropolitan Bible institute, at which the president of the institution outlined an ambitious program for the school’s future development, one phase of which was academically oriented. Immediately after his remarks, a clergyman, representing a well-known evangelical tradition, expressed alarm at the academic proposals and passionately protested the growing tendency within orthodoxy to attain higher intellectual status. He did this simply on the basis of general principles, and among that assembly of clergy and laity, many supported him.

The incident reflects the mood and spirit of much that passed for orthodoxy several decades prior to the revival of which we now speak. Orthodoxy in general was beating a retreat from the intellectual scene. There were significant exceptions of course; not every college, seminary, and pulpit within the tradition had plunged into the dismal abyss of anti-intellectualism. Nevertheless, anti-intellectualism was the prevailing climate, and it was evidenced by a noticeable dearth of scholarly publications in most areas of theological and biblical disciplines. It was also evidenced in a decline in provocative and penetrating preaching, and a widespread uncritical acceptance of grossly inferior, deplorable music. Apart from appeals to a handful of eminent scholars like J. G. Machen, conservatives habitually took theological refuge in the masters of the past. Even to the present hour there are those who, rather than sharpen their wits to the combat of ideas themselves, prefer to resurrect their grandfathers, great grandfathers, and great, great grandfathers, and speed them to the front lines to challenge Barth, Brunner, Niebuhr, Tillich, and contemporary biblical critics. Happily such reactionary persons are no longer the foremost representatives of orthodoxy, and it is to be hoped that their kind will not long survive.

Anti-intellectualism grew out of two erroneous conceptions. On the one hand many conservatives, if not deliberately, then unwittingly, failed to perceive that truth, though absolute, is not static but dynamic. God’s revelation of eternal truth in his Word is addressed to man’s reason and has been cast in concrete, conceptual, verbal form. There is abundant witness in the Scriptures to the fact of revealed doctrines. We know that doctrines are not merely the vehicles of truth; they are themselves truth. Nevertheless, how are we to conclude that our conquest and understanding of this truth are complete? Hodge, Kuyper, Warfield, and Machen did not scale the last heights and thus leave to posterity the vain luxury of idleness. The Spirit of God is still at work to enlighten the mind; he merely bids us keep step with him.

On the other hand, conservatives were inclined to misinterpret the role of the intellect and its relation to the Christian gospel and life. They all too often overemphasized the emotional and volitional implications of the Gospel and repudiated, if not in principle then in practice, the doctrine of “the primacy of the intellect.” As Gordon Clark pointed out so well in his article “Faith and Reason” (CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Vol. I, issues 10 and 11), the biblical term “heart” has been given an almost exclusively emotional interpretation, inconsistent with scriptural usage. To underrate the intellect is neither good psychology nor good theology.

While orthodoxy weltered in this mire of anti-intellectualism, modernism preened its feathers, boasted its superior knowledge, and assumed an air of sophistication. Then with the force of an avalanche, charges of obscurantism and irrelevance descended upon orthodoxy and drove it into the intellectual revival we are having now. Sober-minded conservatives, therefore, became bent on vindicating and restoring the rightful respectability of their theological position and emancipating it from a terrible and vicious bias. To this point, they have succeeded, and their efforts merit the highest commendation.

Warning Of Peril

But this reaction is also fraught with peril. Orthodoxy will go too far in the opposite direction if intellectual respectability becomes an end in itself. In fact, orthodoxy could wind up in a cloister.

There is a lesson to be learned here from neo-orthodoxy which, in the opinion of many, is proving itself an arid intellectualism. The writer recollects his own strenuous tussle in seminary with the complicated lines of reasoning from leading exponents of the new theology. He has also listened to frequent complaints from students and pastors that their study of neo-orthodox literature leaves them with not the slightest idea of the authors’ meaning. Some even question whether the authors understand themselves. For this reason, if for no other, the new theology has failed to reach even the informed layman. Many a neo-orthodox preacher addresses himself to a congregation of “wholly other” convictions, and does so without creating a rift simply because the congregation cannot understand him. The curse or the blessing—depending on one’s viewpoint—of neo-orthodoxy has become its extreme intellectualism which cuts off understanding from the common man.

In their mad scramble to regain intellectual status, therefore, some orthodox scholars are beginning to travel this same dangerous road. As one reads the latest evangelical books in theology and related fields, he senses a calculated abstruseness on the part of some authors. One also meets the initial formulation of what may in time become an extensive esoteric vocabulary, or just plain suicide.

It is true that evangelicals are caught in the web of a difficult problem that is not of their making. Modern theological thought, as noted above, is exceedingly complex and employs a highly specialized, often ambiguous vocabulary and method of expression. Obviously, anyone who proposes to combat and wrestle effectively with modern theology has to meet it on its own terms. But this is no excuse for a deliberate counter obscurity of expression which at bottom is petty imitation.

There can be no doubt that orthodoxy ought to vindicate its title to intellectual esteem. To veer away from the intellectual challenge of today is to betray Jesus Christ. The New Testament evangelists supply indisputable evidence that in the days of his flesh Jesus appealed to intellectuals. In John, chapter 3, Nicodemus is designated “the teacher of Israel,” which suggests that he was a man of superior learning and ability. The scribes repeatedly joined the ranks of Jesus’ listeners, not only to accumulate legal evidence against him, but also because they found intellectual stimulus and inspiration in his teaching.

St. Paul was an intellectual giant. His epistles are ample proof of genuine competence. Had he been a man of lesser stature, he would not have attracted his Athenian audience on Mar’s Hill. The Church Fathers followed in the train of the Master and his chief apostle. And what shall we say of the Protestant Reformers and the orthodox spokesmen of the still more recent past? Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Edwards, Orr, Denney, Hodge, Kuyper, Warfield—these and scores of others were scholars of the first order.

But there is something else we cannot overlook. Beginning with our Lord and continuing down through the centuries—with the exception of the Dark Ages (and widespread ignorance was one reason for the darkness)—scholars of orthodoxy diligently sought rapport with the common man. They were not pedants. Their scholarship was not of the flamboyant kind. Their aim was to persuade men of the truth of their doctrine by use of rational arguments which could be understood, and thus their intellectual efforts were entirely subservient to the furtherance of the Gospel. This tradition, this and no other, is precisely the need of the hour.

The time has come for conservatives to re-examine both motives and objectives in regard to this renewal of intellectual concern. Without our knowing it, intellectualism per se could become the goal and driving spirit. If this happened, if all we wanted was to wave the banner of intellectuality, then we would be guilty of both treason and idolatry. As a preventative to this, we ought to remind ourselves that claiming the truth wherever we can find it, enlarging our own understanding of it, and communicating it to the man in the pew and the man on the street in intelligible terms is irrevocably our responsibility. And it is a large one.

This means, of course, that we have a corollary responsibility of raising the intellectual level of the evangelical laity which, in many instances, is still pitifully low. At the same time we engage in the thought tensions confronting us, pseudo Christian and non-Christian, we ought earnestly to seek simply to be understood by those in the many walks of life. This cannot be done without humility; humility is a prerequisite for Christian discipleship. “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.” It was in those words that Jesus demanded humility of the arrogant disciples. He is still demanding it of his disciples today. If to preserve our dignity we ever capitulate to a barren pseudo intellectualism, our quest for greater relevance will issue in no relevance at all, and our quest for respectability will become utter contemptibility.

Alike To Thee

Lead us, O Father, through our shadowed years,

When life perplexed and perilous appears;

Direct our steps in paths we cannot see,

For light and darkness are alike to Thee.

Teach us the truths we are so slow to gain—

The good of grief, the high reward of pain;

Help us meet bravely earth’s adversity,

For light and darkness are alike to Thee.

When on our lives the final Shade shall fall,

May no doubts daunt us and no fears appall:

Life, death, for us are veiled with mystery,

But light and darkness are alike to Thee.

EFFIE SMITH ELY

Richard Allen Bodey is Minister of Third Presbyterian Church, North Tonawanda, New York. He holds the A.B. degree from Lafayette College and the B.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary. Books are his special interest; in his library of 2200 works are many volumes bearing the autographs of giants from past day such as Liddon, Stalker, and Alexander.

To you who know the Lord Jesus Christ, who have been awakened to the awfulness of sin and have felt the cleansing power of his blood, to you who have now found life, I bring this message: “For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?” (1 Pet. 4:17).

We note that the verse begins, “The time is come.” Many devout Christians feel that we are living in the last days. The conviction that “the time has come” seems particularly compelling just now. This feeling—that we may well be in the last times and the Lord will tarry no longer—strikes a responsive note in hearts.

Some are saying that the time has come for a great revival. Hyman Appelman has said that once in a hundred years the time seems ripe for a great awakening. This time of jubilee has come, he feels. And many others are seeing the beginnings of a great movement of commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. The time has come for a revival that will save us from atheism and materialism, and the terrible evils of our time.

Whether, of course, we are living in the closing days, or whether we are sharing in a movement that will shake our country and the world with revival, we do not assuredly know. But we do know that judgment has begun.

Empty Modernity

A symptom of this judgment is the current widespread interest in religion. People sing about thanking God “together on our knees,” not because they have suddenly repented and accepted Christ for what he is, but because the secular life they have known has been found wanting. Our culture has been judged. The judgment of God is upon our novels, our movies, our family life, our morals in general. Even our refinements, the richness of so-called “American culture,” have left a great emptiness in the hearts of men and women. In great America, rich America, educated America, people have found that the total meaning of their lives adds up to nothing. Editor of Fortune magazine, Russell Davenport, sensing the temper of our times, wrote:

O my country

It is nothing that we fear; the thought of nothing;

The sound of nothing in our hearts like the hideous scream

Of fire engines in the streets at midnight;

The belief in nothing.

From Culture To Christ

I was a product of the culture of our age. It seems as though it had done its worst upon me. In my shallowness and ignorance, I had drunk the heady draught of selfish conceit and grandiose dreams of success. Selfish success and nothing else dominated my life. I sailed through school with outspread sails for success.

Then the hour of judgment came. Did you ever compare the experience of great insight and awakening to a ride on the subway? You are hurtling through the dark, uncertain, unknown; suddenly you come into a station full of light. It was exactly that way with me. On a Friday afternoon at the 72nd Street express stop on the west side subway in New York City—suddenly, out of the darkness of the pit in which I had been trying to live—the train burst into the station’s blinding light.

As I stood there on the platform with the train pulling away, I saw in an instant the past and future in a true light. He beset me behind and before and placed his hand upon me! I felt the hand of God on my shoulder. I was overcome. What was success? What was this false sort of thinking that had been driving me? Where did it lead? Quick as a flash of light, as the vanishing train left its sparks flying from the third rail, I saw the emptiness and the nothingness of it—the horror of selfish conceit and of my striving for success.

Like thousands of others in our time, I turned away from the cultural ends in which I had been steeped. And there was no one to whom I could turn except Jesus Christ. I knew very little of him. But who else had deep answers? I cannot say I “waited patiently,” but I waited for the Lord, and he “inclined unto me and heard my cry; he brought me up out of the horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.” I had felt blinded and confused, but that Friday night I took the first unforgettable step toward the most wonderful life one can live—a life with Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.

The Concealed Gospel

Judgment has begun. Our culture is under judgment as our country and other lands feel the blighting effects of nihilistic philosophies. But this verse from I Peter reminds us that “judgment must begin at the house of God.” First our culture, and second our church is under judgment.

I think of the church in which I grew up in a little village in Vermont to which I still have strong ties of love. There, boys like myself found no faith and hope. For it was a church, like so many others, that concealed the saving Gospel from its people.

Where were the people of God when liberalism began to gather power until it blew like a gale over New England? Those who had been “born again” were pushed aside and trampled down by the heavy boots of liberal doctrine. The Bible and its teachings were a subject for ridicule in countless colleges and universities, even in institutions which had been established through the sacrifices of God’s servants for the sole purpose of training preachers and teachers in the Word of God. The school I attended had as its seal an open Bible and underneath the words Terras Irradient. Many members of the faculty made sport of this seal. Not one professor was available to supply needy churches on a Sunday. No one believed that much in the Gospel.

Only Christ Can Save

Thousands of educated and respectable people are now living in spiritual paralysis because of infection by this liberal teaching years ago. More and more people comprehend that modern medicine cannot save us from ultimate death. The man on the street, and even more the man in the academic robe, knows that psychiatry cannot save a man from his sins. But men need to learn that only Jesus Christ, who gave his life a ransom for many, can save them.

The winds of liberalism are blown out and now the storm of neo-orthodoxy beats upon us. Few liberals have repented for those sterile days or asked forgiveness for having led men astray. Many liberals have slipped into various forms of neo-orthodoxy. I cannot be unsympathetic to this movement. While I was a student at Union Theological Seminary, it was neo-orthodoxy that gave me, a confused liberal, the Bible. I remember the day I first saw Karl Barth’s The Word of God and the Word of Man. We were so sick of humanistic notions, we longed for the Word of God.

I sat at the feet of Reinhold Niebuhr, for whom I have great respect and affection; and he delineated the sin and bankruptcy of man from history and social patterns. That we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God seemed a wicked understatement as we beheld the colossal sinfulness of modern society. As time went on, more and more thinkers began to grant that Niebuhr was reading history aright. Mussolini and Hitler had come and gone; men thought about the gas chambers, the mass murders; and they began to ask again “What is man?” This was the beginning of a turn toward orthodoxy.

But just as liberalism had misread history, neo-orthodoxy was reasoning entirely from history and the social scene. The neo-orthodox thinker was making the mistake of forgetting that the Word of God speaks to us, and that a doctrine is to be believed because it is according to Scripture.

Finding The Bible Anew

I believe that the grave danger of neo-orthodoxy is that it sounds to the common man like the old-time religion. As he draws nearer to it, he finds himself quite confused by its dialectic, its involved reasoning. The power of evangelism and the joy of salvation seem to be missing. For several years I have served on a committee which passes on students coming up for ordination. I will say that most of them have returned to orthodoxy. They know what the Gospel is—they know that man is a sinner and needs redemption through Jesus Christ. God has burst into sinful history and sent his Son to earth that through him man might be reconciled to God. Yet these ministerial candidates have been shaky about the Bible. Just what its place is they are uncertain. They have been led to the Gospel not through studying Scripture, but by the assertions of professors who have been led to Bible doctrines by the study of history. But the point I make here is that we cannot build an adequate faith on an interpretation of history, true as it may seem at the moment.

As for myself, I at long last came back to the Bible. God who loved the world would not leave himself without a witness. God being God communicated his will to man. And that communication is the Holy Bible, the absolute Word of God to us.

God’S Sweeping Judgment

Liberalism has obviously come under judgment. Every university man knows this today. Neo-orthodoxy in all its many forms stands under the judgment of God also. It depends too much on history and the interpretation of the social scene. It misleads the seeker, and does not build him up in the fullness of the stature of Christ. I want to pay honor to fundamentalism. The courage and saintliness of so many of its followers point to something we cannot pass over lightly. Yet fundamentalism too is under the judgment of God. There is a lack of repentance there. The fundamentalist often feels proudly that he is the custodian of the Scriptures, and that no man can gainsay his comments.

The danger of fundamentalism is that it does not see history aright. The fundamentalist is in danger of believing in the American dream of “upward and onward forever” for this great United States. He has had a tendency to stamp uncritically his approval upon modern capitalism, for instance. While I am a firm believer in capitalism, and believe that some form of it is implicit in the Scriptures, it must also come under the judgment of God. A popular blanket approval of any phase of American life has its dangers. I read a sermon once in which a Christian preacher sought to show that the Bible approved segregation. Fundamentalism, much as it deserves our praise for its courage in preserving the Gospel, must also be repentant and humble. It must not say with pride, “Thank God, I am not as these others are, liberals and neo-orthodox.”

The time has come that judgment must begin at the house of God. With love toward all men, we must unflinchingly maintain that the way of salvation is a strait and narrow way. Christ is the door and Christ is the way. Life is with Jesus Christ and there is only death without him.

The Issue Is Salvation

The issue at stake, as we think of our times, is salvation. It is not simply Communism or Capitalism; it is not simply Roman Catholicism or Protestantism. The Church passes from death to life because it is the body of Christ. Every church must be the church of the Saviour. And the mission of every true church is to spread the Gospel and help its people grow in it. I repeat that the issue is salvation—salvation through Jesus Christ. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin, now and forever.

The time has come and it is a time of crisis. Neo-orthodoxy is right in speaking of it as a crisis. I am told the Chinese translate crisis into two words meaning dangerous opportunity. The time of dangerous opportunity has come to the Church. Judgment has begun and the Church of Christ must be repentant as it views the liberalism of the past, the neo-orthodoxy of today and the equally grave dangers that have existed in fundamentalism. The issue before us is very clear. It is salvation—salvation through Jesus Christ made known to us through God’s Holy Word.

Maurice O. Mahler is Pastor of First Church (Congregational) in Sterling, Massachusetts. He was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Amherst College in 1929, and received the B.M. cum laude from Union Theological Seminary, New York, in 1932. The church he now serves, said to be the largest rural congregation in New England, has 855 members in a community of 2500 population. Dating from 1742, First Church is a united Church (Baptist, Congregational and Unitarian).

(Part II will appear in the next issue)

If we were to ask today’s average Christian (whether he be Protestant or Catholic, intellectual or not) what he conceived to be the New Testament teaching concerning the fate of man after death, with few exceptions we would get the answer: “the immortality of the soul.” Nevertheless, this idea in just this form is one of the greatest misunderstandings of Christianity. There is no point in attempting to hide this fact, or to veil it by means of a reinterpretation of the Christian faith. Rather it should be discussed quite candidly whether the concept of death and resurrection as anchored in the Christ-event (to be developed in the following pages), precisely in its incompatibility with the Greek belief in immortality, precisely in its orientation in Heilsgeschichte which is so offensive to modern thought, is not such an integral element of the early Christian proclamation that it can neither be surrendered nor reinterpreted without robbing the New Testament of its substance.

But is it really true that the early Christian resurrection faith is irreconcilable with the Greek concept of the immortality of the soul? Does not the New Testament, and above all the Gospel of John, teach that we already have eternal life? Is it really true that death in the New Testament is always conceived of as “the last enemy” in a way that is diametrically opposed to Greek thought, which sees in death a friend? Does not Paul write, “O death, where is thy sting?” We shall see at the end that there is at least an analogy, but first we must stress the fundamental differences between the two points of view.

The widespread misunderstanding that the New Testament teaches the immortality of the soul was actually encouraged by the rock-like post-Easter conviction of the first disciples that the bodily resurrection of Christ had robbed death of all its horror and that, from the moment of Easter on, the Holy Spirit has awakened the souls of believers into the life of the Resurrection. The very fact that the words “post-Easter” need to be underscored illustrates the whole abyss which nevertheless separates the early Christian view from that of the Greeks. All of early Christian thought is oriented in Heilsgeschichte, and everything that is said about death and eternal life stands or falls with a belief in a real occurrence, in real events which took place in time. This is the radical distinction from Greek thought.

If one recognized that death and eternal life in the New Testament are always bound up with the Christ-event, then it becomes clear that for the first Christians the soul is not intrinsically immortal, but rather became so only through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and through faith in him becomes so; then it becomes clear that death is not intrinsically the Friend, but rather that its “sting,” its power, is taken away only through the victory of Jesus over it in his death; then it becomes clear that the accomplished fact of resurrection is not the condition of perfection, but rather this condition remains in the future until the body is in fact resurrected, which will not occur until “the last day.”

It is a mistake to read into the fourth Gospel an early diversion toward the Greek teaching of immortality, because also in it eternal life is bound up with the Christ-event. Within the bounds of the Christ-event, of course, the various New Testament books place the accent in different places, but common to all is the view of Heilsgeschichte.

I

Nothing shows more clearly than the contrast between the death of Socrates and that of Jesus (a contrast which was often cited, though for other purposes, by early opponents of Christianity) that the biblical view of death from the first is focused in salvation-history and so departs completely from the Greek conception.

In Plato’s impressive description of the death of Socrates in the Phaedo occurs perhaps the highest and most sublime doctrine ever presented on the immortality of the soul. What gives his argument its unexcelled value is his scientific reserve, his disclaimer of any proof having mathematical validity. We know the arguments he offers for the immortality of the soul. Our body is only an outer garment which, as long as we live, prevents our soul from moving freely and from living comfortably to its proper eternal essence. It imposes upon the soul a law which is not appropriate to it. The soul is confined within the body; it belongs to the eternal world. As long as we live, our soul finds itself in a prison, that is, in a body essentially alien to it. Death, in fact, is the great liberator. It loosens the chains, since it leads the soul out of the prison of the body and back to its eternal home. Since body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed. Although the proofs for the immortality of the soul do not have for Socrates himself the same value as the proofs of a mathematical theorem, they nevertheless attain within their own sphere the highest possible degree of validity, and make immortality so probable that it amounts to a “fair chance” for man. And the great Socrates, tracing the arguments for immortality in his address to his disciples on the day of his death, did not merely teach this doctrine: at that moment he lived his doctrine. He showed how we serve the freedom of the soul, even in this present life, in our occupation with the eternal truths of philosophy. For through philosophy we penetrate into that eternal world of ideas to which the soul belongs, and we free the soul from the prison of the body. Death is then only that which completes this liberation. Plato shows us how Socrates goes to his death in complete peace and composure. The death of Socrates is a beautiful death. Nothing is seen here of death’s terror. Socrates cannot fear death, since indeed it sets us free from the body. Whoever fears death proves that he loves the world of the body, that he is thoroughly entangled in the world of sense. Death is the soul’s great friend. So he teaches; and so, in wonderful harmony with his teaching, he dies—this man who embodied the Greek world in its noblest form.

And now let us hear how Jesus dies. In Gethsemane he knows that death stands before him, just as Socrates expected death on his last day. The Synoptic evangelists furnish us, by and large, with a unanimous report. Jesus begins “to tremble and to lose heart,” writes Mark (14:34). “My soul is troubled even to death,” he says to his disciples. Jesus is so thoroughly human that he shares the natural fear of death. Jesus is afraid, though not afraid, as a coward would be, of the men who will kill him, or still less of the pain and grief which precede death. He is afraid in the face of death itself. Death for him is nothing divine: it is something dreadful. Jesus does not want to be alone in this moment. He knows, of course, that the Father stands by to help him. He looks to him in this decisive moment as he has done throughout his life. He turns to him with all his human fear of this great enemy, death. He is afraid of death. It is useless to try to explain away Jesus’ fear as reported by the evangelists. The opponents of Christianity who already in the first centuries made the contrast between Socrates’ and Jesus’ death saw more clearly here than the exponents of Christianity. He was really afraid. Here is nothing of the composure of Socrates, who met death peacefully as a friend. To be sure, he already knows of the task which has been given him, to suffer death, and he has already spoken the words, “I have a baptism with which I must be baptised, and how anxious (or afraid) I am until it is accomplished” (Luke 12:50). Now, when God’s enemy stands before him, he cries to God, whose omnipotence he knows: “All things are possible with thee; let this cup pass from me” (Mark 14:36). And when he concludes, “Yet not as I will, but as thou wilt,” this does not mean that at the last he, like Socrates, regards death as the friend, the liberator. No, he means only this: but if this greatest of all terrors, death, must befall me according to thy will, then I submit to this horror. Jesus knows that, because death is the enemy of God, to die inherently means to be utterly forsaken.…

Can there be a greater contrast than that between Socrates and Jesus? Like Jesus, Socrates has his disciples about him on the day of his death; but in sublime repose he discourses with them on immortality. Jesus, a few hours before his death, trembles and quakes and begs his disciples not to leave him alone. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who, more than any other New Testament author, emphasizes the full deity (1:10) but also the full humanity of Jesus, goes still further than the reports of the three Synoptists in his description of Jesus’ fear of death. In chapter 5, verse 7, he writes that Jesus “with loud cries and tears offered up prayers and supplications to him who was able to save him.” Thus, according to the Epistle to the Hebrews, Jesus wept and cried in the face of death. There is Socrates, calmly and composedly speaking of the immortality of the soul; here Jesus, weeping and crying.

And then the death-scene itself. With sublime calm Socrates drinks the hemlock; but Jesus (thus says the evangelist, Mark 15:34—we dare not gloss it away) cries: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And with another inarticulate cry he dies (Mark 15:37). This is not “death as a friend.” This is death in all its frightful horror. This is really “the last enemy” of God. This is the name Paul gives it in 1 Corinthians 15:26, where the whole contrast between Greek thought and Christianity is disclosed. Using different words, the author of the Johannine Apocalypse also regards death as the last enemy, when he describes how at the end death will be cast into the lake of fire (20:14). Because it is God’s enemy it separates us from God, who is life and the creator of all life. Jesus, who is so closely tied to God, tied as no other man has ever been, for precisely this reason must experience death much more terribly than any other man. To be in the hands of the great enemy of God means to be forsaken by God. In a way quite different from others, Jesus must suffer this abandonment, this separation from God, the only condition really to be feared. Therefore he cries to God, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” He is now actually in the hands of God’s great enemy.

We must be grateful to the evangelists for having glossed nothing over at this point. Later, as early as the beginning of the second century, and probably even earlier, there will come people who will take offense at this—people of Greek provenance. In Christian antiquity we call them Gnostics.

I have juxtaposed the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus. For nothing shows better the radical difference between the Greek doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the Christian doctrine of the resurrection. Because Jesus underwent death in all its horror, not only in his body but also in his soul (My God, why hast thou forsaken me?), and as he is regarded by the first Christians as the mediator of salvation, he must be the very one who in his death conquers death itself. He cannot obtain this victory by simply living on as an immortal soul, thus fundamentally not dying. He can only conquer death by actually dying, by betaking himself to the sphere of death, the destroyer of life, to the sphere of “nothingness,” of abandonment by God. When one wishes to conquer anyone else, one must repair to the other’s province. Whoever wants to conquer death must die; he must really cease to live. Not simply live on as an immortal soul, but die in body and soul, lose life itself, the most precious good which God has given us. For this reason the evangelists, who none the less intended to present Jesus as the Son of God, have not tried to soften the terribleness of his so thoroughly human death.

Furthermore, if life is to issue out of so genuine a death, a new divine act of creation is necessary. And this act of creation calls back to life not just a part of the man, but the whole man—all that God had created and death had annihilated. For Socrates and Plato no new act of creation is necessary. For the body is indeed bad and should not live on. And that part which is to live on, the soul, does not die at all.

If we want to understand the Christian faith in the resurrection, we must completely disregard the Greek thought that the material, the bodily, the corporeal is bad and must be destroyed, so that the death of the body would not be in any sense a destruction of the true life. For Christian (and Jewish) thinking the death of the body is also destruction of God-created life. No distinction is made: even the life of our body is true life; death is the destruction of all created by God. Therefore it is death and not the body which must be conquered by the resurrection.

Only he who apprehends with the first Christians the horror of death, who takes death seriously as death, can comprehend the Easter exultation of the primitive Christian community and understand that the whole thinking of the New Testament is governed by belief in the resurrection. Belief in the immortality of the soul is not belief in a revolutionary event. Immortality, in fact, is only a negative assertion: the soul does not die, but simply lives on. Resurrection is a positive assertion: the whole man, who has really died, is recalled to life by a new act of creation by God. Something has happened—a miracle of creation! For something has also happened previously, something fearful: life formed by God has been destroyed.…

Whoever paints a pretty death can paint no resurrection. Whoever has not grasped the horror of death cannot join Paul in the hymn of victory: “Death is swallowed up—in victory! Oh death, where is thy victory? Where, death, is thy sting?” (1 Cor. 15:54 f.)

II

Yet the contrast between the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul and the Christian belief in the resurrection is still deeper. The belief in the resurrection presupposes the Jewish connection between death and sin. Death is not something natural, willed by God, as in the thinking of the Greek philosophers; it is rather something unnatural, abnormal, opposed to God. The Genesis narrative teaches us that it came into the world only by the sin of man. Death is a curse, and the whole creation has become involved in the curse. The sin of man has necessitated the event which the Bible reports and which we call the redemptive process. Death can be conquered only to the extent that sin is removed. For “death is the wages of sin.” It is not only the Genesis narrative which speaks thus. Paul says the same thing (Rom. 6:23), and this is the view of death held by the whole of primitive Christianity. Just as sin is something opposed to God, so is its consequence, death. To be sure, God can make use of death (1 Cor. 15:35 ff.; John 12:24), as he can make use of Satan for the tempting of man.

Nevertheless, death as such is the enemy of God. For God is life and the creator of life. It is not the will of God that there are withering and decay, dying and sickness, the by-products of death working in our life. All these things, according to Christian and Jewish thinking, come from human sin. Therefore, every healing which Jesus accomplishes is not only a driving back of death, but also an invasion of the province of sin; and therefore on every occasion Jesus says: “Your sins are forgiven.” Not as though there were a corresponding sin for every individual sickness; but rather, like the presence of death, the fact that sickness exists at all is a consequence of the sinful condition of the whole of humanity. Every healing is a partial resurrection, a partial victory of life over death. That is the Christian point of view. According to the Greek interpretation, on the contrary, bodily sickness is a corollary of the fact that the body is bad in itself and is ordained to destruction. For the Christians, on the other hand, an anticipation of the resurrection can already become visible for the time being, even in the earthly body.

That reminds us that the body is in no sense bad in itself, but is, like the soul, a gift of our Creator. Therefore, according to Paul, we have duties with regard to our body. God is the creator of all things. The Greek doctrine of immortality and the Christian hope in the resurrection differ so radically because Greek thought has such an entirely different interpretation of creation. The Jewish and Christian interpretation of creation excludes the whole Greek dualism between body and soul. For indeed the visible, the corporeal, is just as truly God’s creation as the invisible. God is the maker of the body. The body is not the soul’s prison, but rather a temple, as Paul says (1 Cor. 6:19): the temple of the Holy Spirit! The basic distinction lies here. Body and soul are not opposites. God finds the corporeal “good” after he has created it. The Genesis story makes this emphasis explicit. Conversely, moreover, sin also embraces the whole man, not only the body but the soul as well; and its consequence, death, extends over all the rest of creation. Death is accordingly something dreadful, because the whole visible creation, including our body, is something wonderful, even if it is corrupted by sin and death. Behind the pessimistic interpretation of death stands the optimistic view of creation. Wherever, as in Platonism, death is affirmed, there the visible world is not recognized directly as God’s creation.

Now it must be granted that in Greek thought there is also a very positive appreciation of the body. But in Plato the good and beautiful in the corporeal are not good and beautiful in virtue of corporeality but rather, so to speak, in spite of corporeality: the soul, the eternal and the only substantial reality of being, shines faintly through the material. The corporeal is not the real, the eternal, the divine. It is merely that through which the real appears—and then only in debased form. The corporeal is meant to lead us to contemplate the pure archetype, freed from all corporeality, the invisible Idea.

To be sure, the Jewish and Christian points of view also see something else besides present corporeality. For the whole creation is corrupted by sin and death. The creation which we see is not as God willed it, as he created it; nor is the body which we wear. Death rules over all; and it is not necessary for annihilation to accomplish its work of destruction before this fact becomes apparent—it is already obvious in the whole outward form of all things. Everything, even the most beautiful, is marked by death. Thus it might seem as if the distinction between Greek and Christian interpretation is not so great after all. And yet it remains radical. Behind the corporeal phantasm Plato senses the incorporeal, transcendent, pure Idea. Behind the corrupted creation, under sentence of death, the Christian sees the future creation of the resurrection, just as God willed it. The contrast, for the Christian, is not between the body and the soul, not between outward form and Idea, but rather between the creation delivered over to death by sin and the new creation; between the corruptible, fleshly body and the incorruptible resurrection body.

Interpretation Of Man

This leads us to a further point: the Christian interpretation of man. The anthropology of the New Testament is not Greek, but connected with Jewish conceptions. For the concepts of body, soul, flesh, and spirit (to name only these) the New Testament does indeed use the same words as the Greek philosopher. But they mean something quite different, and we understand the whole New Testament amiss when we construe these concepts only from the viewpoint of Greek thought.…

The New Testament also knows the difference between body and soul, or more precisely, between the inner and the outer man. This distinction, also present in the New Testament, does not, however, imply opposition, as if the one were by nature good, the other by nature bad. Both belong together, both are created by God. The inner man without the outer has no proper, full existence. It requires a body. It can, to be sure, somehow lead a shadowy existence without the body, like the dead in Sheol according to the Old Testament, but this is not a genuine life. The contrast with the Greek soul is clear: it is precisely without the body that the Greek soul first attains to full development of its life. According to the Christian outlook, it is the inner man whose very nature demands the body.

And what now is the role played by the flesh (sarx) and spirit (pneuma)? Here it is especially important not to be misled by the secular use of the Greek words, although these are to be found in different places even in the New Testament and although the individual New Testament writers’ use of terminology is never completely uniform. With these reservations, we may say that according to the use which is characteristic, say, for Pauline theology flesh and spirit of the New Testament are two transcendentpowers which can enter into man from without; but neither is given with human existence as such. On the whole it is true that the Pauline anthropology, contrary to the Greek, is also grounded in Heilsgeschichte. “Flesh” is the power of sin or the power of death. It seizes the outer and the inner man together. Spirit is its great antagonist: the power of creation. It also seizes the outer and inner man together. Flesh and spirit are active powers, and as such they work within us. The flesh, the power of death, entered man with the sin of Adam; indeed it entered the whole man, inner and outer; yet in such a way that it is substantially linked with the body in a much closer indissoluble manner. The inner man finds itself less closely connected with the flesh; although through guilt this power of death has more and more taken possession even of the inner man. The spirit, on the other hand, is the great power of life, the element of the resurrection; God’s power of creation is given to us through the Holy Spirit. In the Old Testament it works only singularly in the prophets. In the End-time in which we live—that is, since Christ has broken the power of death in his own death and has arisen—this power of life is at work in all members of the community (v. Acts 2:17: “in the last days”). Like the flesh, it too already takes possession of the whole man, inner and outer. But here the situation is quite the reverse of that with flesh. While, in this age, the flesh has established itself to a substantial degree in the body, and rules the inner man, it is not in the same inescapable way; the quickening power of the Holy Spirit is already taking possession of the inner man in such a decisive manner that the inner man is “renewed from day to day,” as Paul says (2 Cor. 4:16). The whole Johannine Gospel emphasizes this point. There we are already in the state of resurrection; of eternal life—not immortality of soul; the new era is already inaugurated. The body, too, is already in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Everywhere the Holy Spirit is at work we have what amounts to a momentary retreat of the power of death, a certain foretaste of the End. This is true even in the body, hence the healings of the sick. But here it is a question only of a retreat, not of a final transformation of the body of death into a resurrection body. Even those Jesus raised up in his lifetime will die again, for they did not receive a resurrection body. But the transformation of the fleshly body into a spiritual body does not take place until the End. Only then will the Holy Spirit’s power of resurrection take such complete possession of the body that it transforms it in the way it is already transforming the inner man. It is important to see how different the New Testament anthropology is from that of the Greeks. Body and soul are both originally good insofar as they are created by God; they are both bad insofar as the deadly power of the flesh has hold of them. Both can and must be set free by the quickening power of the Holy Spirit.

Here, therefore, deliverance consists not in a release of soul from body but in a release of both from flesh. We are not released from the body; rather the body itself is set free. This is made especially clear in the Pauline epistles. But it is the interpretation of the whole New Testament. In this connection one does not find the differences which are present among the various books on other points. Even the much-quoted saying of Jesus in Matthew 10:28 in no way presupposes the Greek conception. “Fear not them that kill the body, but cannot kill the soul.” It might seem to presuppose the view that the soul has no need of the body, but the context of the passage shows that this is not the case. Jesus does not continue: “Be afraid of him who kills the soul”; rather: “fear him who can slay both soul and body in Gehenna.” That is, fear God, who is able to give you over completely to death; to wit, when he does not resurrect you to life. We shall see, it is true, that the soul is the starting point of the resurrection, since, as we have said, it can already be possessed by the Holy Spirit in a way quite different from the body. The Holy Spirit already lives in our inner man. “By the Holy Spirit who dwells in you (already),” says Paul in Romans 8:11, “God will also quicken your mortal bodies.” Therefore, those who kill only the body are not to be feared. It can be raised from the dead. Moreover, it must be raised. The soul cannot always remain without a body. And on the other side we hear in Jesus’ saying in Matthew 10:28 that the soul can be killed. The soul is not immortal. There must be resurrection for both; for since the Fall the whole man is “sown corruptible.” For the inner man, thanks to the transformation by the quickening power of the Holy Spirit, the resurrection can take place already in this present life: through the “renewal from day to day.” The flesh, however, still maintains its seat in our body. The transformation of the body does not take place until the End, when the whole creation will be made new by the Holy Spirit, when there will be no death and no corruption.

The resurrection of the body, whose substance will no longer be that of the flesh but that of the Holy Spirit, is only a part of the whole new creation. “We wait for a new heaven and a new earth,” says 2 Peter 3:13. The Christian hope relates not only to my individual fate but to the entire creation. Through sin the whole creation has become involved in death. This we hear not only in Genesis, but also in Romans 8:19 ff., where Paul writes that the whole creation even in the present waits longingly for deliverance. This deliverance will come when the power of the Holy Spirit will transform all matter, when God in a new act of creation will not destroy matter, but set it free from the flesh, from corruptibility. Not eternal Ideas, but the concrete objects will then rise anew, in the new, incorruptible life-substance of the Holy Spirit; and among these objects belongs our body as well.

Because resurrection of the body is a new act of creation which embraces everything, it is not an event which begins with each individual death, but only at the End. It is not transition from this world to another world, as is the case of the immortal soul freed from the body; rather it is the transition from the present age to the future. It is tied to the whole process of redemption.

Because there is sin there must be a process of redemption enacted in time. Where sin is regarded as the source of death’s lordship over God’s creation, there this sin and death must be vanquished together, and there the Holy Spirit, the only power able to conquer death, must win all creatures back to life in a continuous process.

Therefore the Christian belief in the resurrection, as distinct from the Greek belief in immortality, is tied to a divine total process implying deliverance. Sin and death must be conquered. We cannot do this. Another has done it for us; and he was able to do it only in that he betook himself to the province of death—that is, he himself died and expiated sin, so that death as the wages of sin is overcome. Christian faith proclaims that Jesus has done this and that he arose with body and soul after he was fully and really dead. Here God has consummated the miracle of the new creation expected at the End. Once again he has created life as in the beginning. At this one point, in Jesus Christ, this has already happened! Resurrection, not only in the sense of the Holy Spirit’s taking possession of the inner man, but also resurrection of the body. This is a new creation of matter, an incorruptible matter. Nowhere else in the world is there a new matter, a spiritual matter. Nowhere else is there a spiritual body—only here in Christ.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Oscar Cullmann is Dean of the Theological Faculty of the University of Basel and Professor of the Sorbonne in Paris. He holds the degrees D.Theol., D.D. (Edin.) and D.D. (Manchester). This two-part article comprises most of Dr. Cullmann’s Ingersoll Lecture for 1954–55 at Harvard University. The complete text (including footnotes), copyrighted 1958 by Dr. Cullmann, has just been published under the title Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? by The Macmillan Company, with whose permission, as well as Dr. Cullmann’s, this excerpt is used. The British publisher of the same material is the Epworth Press of London.

During the next twelve months or so the centenary of “Darwinism” will be attracting a considerable amount of attention and there are already indications that the celebration of this centenary will not disclose a situation of complete harmony within the ranks of the scientists. It is a subject in which the theological world can hardly fail to be deeply interested.

Last May 21st the London Times published a mildly satirical letter from Dr. H. Graham Cannon, F.R.S., Professor of Zoology in the University of Manchester. He referred to the recent appearance in the magazine Endeavour of “a laudatory article in praise of Charles Darwin” in which Sir Gavin de Beer, F.R.S., who is Director of the British Museum (Natural History), stated that “new species have been artificially produced in the laboratory,” and requested that the author give “chapter and verse for this remarkable achievement,” adding that at the same time “it would be useful if he would tell us exactly what he means by the word ‘species,’ ” since “it is one of those little points which Darwin omitted to define.” As Sir Gavin had also written that the French zoologist Lamarck had brought the subject of evolution into disrepute by the “fanciful nature” of his views, Professor Cannon invited him to “give us any examples of ‘what Lamarck really said’ of this nature which cannot easily be beaten by Charles Darwin in his more exhilarating flights of fancy.”

Sir Gavin de Beer’s reply, printed the following day, claimed that certain new botanical species have been produced under experimental conditions, but failed to comply with Professor Cannon’s request for a definition of the term “species.” It concluded with the following categorical assertion: “Disparaging remarks about Darwin are best refuted not by any words of mine but by the past 40 years’ research in laboratory and field, which has proved beyond the possibility of error that natural selection of random variations has been the chief factor in evolution.” In this statement two things are worthy of remark: (1) that the theory of evolution is treated unconditionally as a fact which admits of no doubt; and (2) that the evolutionary process and the ordered system of nature it has (ex hypothesi) produced are built upon a foundation of chance, not design or purpose.

In so speculative a field, however, claims like the above that affirm “proof beyond the possibility of error” are more easily uttered than justified. They certainly do not represent the unanimous judgment of scientists on the question of evolution. Perhaps the most remarkable recent expression of discontent with Darwinism from within the scientific camp is to be found in the introduction to the latest edition of no less a volume than Darwin’s The Origin of Species in the Everyman’s Library (published by J. M. Dent and Sons, London, and E. P. Dutton and Co., New York, 1956). This introduction is written by Dr. W. R. Thompson, F.R.S., who is Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control, Ottawa. “I am not satisfied,” he says, “that Darwin proved his point or that his influence in scientific and public thinking has been beneficial.” He explains that he could not content himself “with mere variations on the hymn to Darwin and Darwinism that introduces so many textbooks on biology and evolution,” and that he is well aware that his views “will be regarded by many biologists as heretical and reactionary.”

Dr. Thompson complains that in the argumentation used by evolutionists “personal convictions, simple possibilities, are presented as if they were proofs, or at least valid arguments in favour of the theory.” Darwin, he reminds us, “did not show in the Origin that species had originated by natural selection; he merely showed, on the basis of certain facts and assumptions, how this might have happened, and as he had convinced himself he was able to convince others.” But, he points out, “the long-continued investigations on heredity and variation have undermined the Darwinian position. We now know that the variations determined by environmental changes—the individual differences regarded by Darwin as the material on which natural selection acts—are not hereditary.”

As for mutations, the main straw at which contemporary evolutionists clutch, they are not adaptive; indeed, “in general, they are useless, detrimental, or lethal.” Dr. Thompson quotes Emile Guyénot’s criticism of the explanation of evolution as the result of chance mutations in the genetic structure, as follows: “It is impossible to produce the world of life where the dominant note is functional organization, correlated variation and progression, from a series of random events.” Arguments founded upon the supposition that certain structures or organs are rudimentary or vestigial, and upon the so-called “biogenetic law” according to which the development of the embryo is said to recapitulate an animal’s evolutionary ancestry, receive short shrift in this essay.

The taxonomic system, whereby organisms are classified, presents, as Dr. Thompson points out, “an orderly arrangement of clear-cut entities which are clear-cut because they are separated by gaps.” These gaps are not explicable on the evolutionary theory. This is the case also with fossils, for investigation has revealed “a remarkable absence of the many intermediate forms required by the theory.” Dr. Thompson charges that “the modern Darwinian paleontologists are obliged, just like their predecessors and like Darwin, to water down the facts with subsidiary hypotheses which, however plausible, are in the nature of things unverifiable.” Even more serious is his verdict that “the success of Darwinism was accompanied by a decline in scientific integrity.” The doctrine of evolution by natural selection has, further, been associated with the decline of belief in the supernatural and the decline of Christianity, and the biblical account of creation has been abandoned for a view which, despite the evidence in nature of finality and design “and, therefore, of an intelligent providence,” ascribes all to chance.

“The general tendency to eliminate, by means of unverifiable speculations, the limits of the categories Nature presents to us, is,” Dr. Thompson declares, “the inheritance of biology from The Origin of Species. To establish the continuity required by theory, historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypotheses based on hypotheses, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion.”

These are strong words. But theologians and educationists, no less than scientists, must give serious attention to strictures of men like Dr. Thompson and to re examine the whole matter candidly.

It was reported more than a year ago that in one of Dead Sea caves fragments of 13 manuscripts of Deuteronomy had been discovered as compared with 12 of Isaiah and 10 of the Psalms. This count may have been modified by subsequent discoveries; and the remarkable popularity of Deuteronomy among the Sectarians of Qumran may have been due to special reasons. Needless to say, the quotations from and references to Deuteronomy in the New Testament are “very numerous” (Angus-Green). This popularity is not surprising; rather it is to be expected. Deuteronomy is a unique book in more ways than one. It contains the farewell addresses of Israel’s great leader, Moses. It is full of reminiscences of the greatest events of Israel’s early history, the deliverance from Egyptian bondage and the giving of the Law. It looks forward to the conquest of the Promised Land with a confidence conditioned only by the ever present danger of apostasy. It contains a body of laws which are lofty in their ethical standards, stem and uncompromising; and yet they are surrounded by an atmosphere of loving concern which gives them the note of prophetic exhortation and urgency. By every test and standard, authorship, content, and circumstance, Deuteronomy is a very remarkable book.

Authorship

There are few books, if any, which bear more plainly the stamp of authorship than does Deuteronomy. This is shown by the following analysis:

Introduction—“words which Moses spake” (1:1–5)

First Discourse (1:6–4:40)

Second Discourse (5:1–26:19)

Third Discourse (29:1–30:20)

The Song of Moses (32:1–43)

The Blessing of Moses (33:1–29)

These discourses are all attributed to Moses. They make up the bulk of the book and are joined together by a narrative which tells what Moses did:

1. He appointed cities of refuge (4:41–49)

2. He gave instructions for ceremony at Ebal (27:1–28:68)

3. He appointed Joshua, wrote the Law, gave it to the priests (31:1–30)

4. Repeated the song and received final command from God (32:44–52)

The book concludes with an account of Moses’ death and a brief eulogy (34:1–12). Especially significant are the statements that “Moses wrote the words of this law in a book until they were finished” (31:24–27).

Content

Introduction (1:1–5). These are the words which Moses spake unto all Israel states the claim of the book to Mosaic authorship. The names of the cities mentioned in verse 1 and the statement that there are 11 days journey from Horeb to Kadesh-barnea, together with mention of the 40th year suggest that much of the contents of the book was delivered twice: first, in the second year before the people’s refusal to go up and possess the land when the conquest of it seemed imminent (Num. 13:1), and a second time and in its final form in Moab at the end of the 40 years.

The First Discourse (1:5–4:40). Deuteronomy may be called quite suitably, the book of the commandments of the Lord (4:2). “Command” occurs 81 times in AV and “commandment” 43 times. Israel’s attitude had been marked by “rebellion” (1:26, 43; 9:7, 24) and will be in the future (31:27). Hence the frequent rebukes and exhortations to obedience. Israel’s great sin, the refusal to possess the land, is dealt with in detail (1:26–45). The wanderings are followed by the conquest of the lands east of the Jordan in which Joshua is to see a foreview of the conquest of Palestine after Moses’ death (3:21). Deuteronomy is also the great book of remembrance, the word “remember” occurring 15 times, “(lest ye) forget” 11 times. This discourse concludes by emphasizing especially the great theophany at Sinai and the giving of the Law. They must never be forgotten. At Sinai Israel became the worshipers of the one true God (4:35, 39), a covenant people (vss. 13, 23), the special object of God’s love (vs. 37) and of his peculiar dealings (vss. 32–35). At Sinai they heard only a voice; they saw no shape, that they might shun idolatry. Another great word in this book is “love,” occurring 20 times—God’s love (4:37), demanding man’s love to God (11:1), and man’s love also to his fellow men (10:19). Here also the duty of teaching is stressed. The people must teach their children (4:9) the wonderful things Moses is teaching them (4:1, 5, 14). The most solemn warning is given against apostasy (4:23–28) because of God’s singular blessings and also because of Israel’s record of disobedience.

First Narrative (4:41–49). A brief statement that Moses set apart three cities of refuge east of Jordan. It is also stated that Moses spoke these “testimonies, statutes, and judgments” on this side of Jordan over against Beth-Peor (4:46).

The Second Discourse (5:1–26:19). This longest of the discourses falls into two main parts, chapters 5–11 and 12–26. The first part repeats the Decalogue and what follows may be regarded as an exposition of it The great affirmation, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” (6:4) is at once followed by two commands: to love the Lord supremely, and to treasure this wonderful revelation, teaching it to their children and making it a constant topic of meditation and conversation. The command to teach (cf. 11:18–21; 31:19–22) was sadly neglected by the Israelites. But the literal interpretation of the word “frontlets” (vs. 8) led to the use of phylacteries by the Pharisees of New Testament times. The extermination of the seven nations in possession of the land is commanded (7:1–6). Israel is to remember that they are a holy people and not corrupt themselves with the people of the land. The Lord is faithful (vs. 9). If they obey him, he will love them and bless them; and they will be able to overcome their mighty enemies (vss. 16–26). In chapters 8–11 they are exhorted to remember God’s wonderful dealings with them in the past as they look forward to the conquest of the land. The God who has so wonderfully blessed them is their hope for the future. But they have been rebellious (9:7, 24). Hence the constant intermingling of promise and exhortation with warnings and threats. God’s love for them is stressed, and they are exhorted to love him and to love their fellow men (5:10; 7:9–13; 10:12–19; 11:1, 13, 22).

The Code of Deuteronomy (Chaps. 12–26). The name “code” is appropriate to this group of chapters because it contains so many specific commandments and laws, despite the fact that the preceding section is markedly legal and consists of the Decalogue and its application. These statutes and judgments they “shall observe to do in the land which the Lord God of thy fathers giveth thee to possess it.” This future reference of the code is important. It is significant that it begins by commanding that everything connected with heathen worship is to be utterly eradicated (12:2–4). This is the negative side. Then follows immediately: “But unto the place which the Lord your God shall choose out of all your tribes to put his name there … thither thou shalt come and thither ye shall bring your burnt offerings …” A full discussion of this much debated passage cannot be given here. However we note the following. The law of the central sanctuary goes back to Sinai; the tabernacle was “the tent of the congregation” for all Israel (Exod. 40:12). Also, this law points forward to the time of the erection of the temple by Solomon (Deut. 12:10f.; cf. 2 Sam. 7:11f.). Thirdly, the building of altars wherever “I shall record my name” (Exod. 20:24) accounts for such altars as were erected by Joshua at Ebal and by Gideon, Manoah, Samuel, David, and Elijah. While these were extraordinary and may be called irregular, the disordered state of the worship, due to frequent apostasies and their consequences (e.g., the sin of Hophni and Phineas and its consequences) gave them a certain legitimacy; and they were tolerated by good kings like Asa (1 Kings 15:14).

For a detailed discussion of the many diverse laws which are contained in the code, the reader must be referred to the commentaries. The laws are intended to govern the entire life of the people when they shall have entered the land. The peril of apostasy and its punishment is dealt with repeatedly (12:29–13:1–18; cf. 16:21f.; 17:2–7; 18:9–14). Israel is a holy people (14:2, 21); they are not to disfigure themselves for the dead (14:1–2), nor eat unclean food (vss. 3–21). They are to keep the annual feasts (16:1–17) and observe the law of tithing (14:22–29; cf. 26:12–15) and the year, of release (15:1–18). Kingship (17:14–20) and prophetic guidance (18:15–22) are provided for. Humanity is enjoined (24:6, 10–15; 25:1–4). Especially noteworthy is the law regarding inherited guilt (24:16). The widow, the orphan and the stranger are to be humanely treated (16:11, 14; 24:17–22; 26:12f.). We have also the law of divorce (24:1–5) and of the levirate (25:5–10).

The priests, also called “priests the Levites,” which is not a distinguishing but an amplifying phrase, since all priests were Levites, are given a position of honor. They are supported by their portion of the gifts and sacrifices (18:1–5), they serve with the judges (17:9; 19:17), they are to teach (24:8), and they are here associated with Moses in the imposing of the Law (27:9; 31:9). On the other hand the Levites occupy an insecure position (12:19; 14:27). Their status is similar to that of the widow and orphan (14:29; 16:11, 14; 26:12f.), and they are commended to the liberality of the laity. Consequently we do not wonder that so few of the Levites returned from the Captivity with Zerubbabel (Ezra 2:40) and with Ezra (Ezra 8:15).

All of these laws are given to Israel that this people may fulfill the destiny which their God had set before them, a glorious destiny to be realized only through obedience (26:16–19).

Second Narrative. Instructions are here given regarding Mt. Ebal (Chaps. 27–28). The ceremony at Mt. Ebal (cf. 11:29f.; Josh. 8:30–35) which was to take place when the Lord had brought them into the land (11:29) must have been tremendously impressive. “All the words of this law” are to be written on the altar as upon a great writing tablet. Sacrifices are to be offered upon it; and the blessings and curses are to be pronounced by the Levites.

The Third Discourse (Chaps. 29–30). Moses is commanded to make a covenant with Israel “beside the covenant which he made with them at Horeb” (29:1). This covenant is a comprehensive one (vss. 14–15), and it is enforced by warnings and curses—exile the penalty of dis-obedience, restoration conditioned on repentance and obedience (30:1–10). The great alternative, obedience and life, or disobedience and death (30:15–20), is again solemnly stated.

Third Narrative (Chap. 31). Moses is to die. The people are exhorted to be strong and courageous. Moses writes the law and entrusts it to the priests (vss. 9, 24). It is to be read every seven years. Joshua is to become the leader, which is attested by the pillar of cloud (vs. 15; cf. Exod. 40:34f.; 1 Kings 8:10f.). There is warning against disobedience. Moses writes a song (vs. 22).

The Song (32:1–43). Moses celebrates God’s greatness, records his past mercies and blessings to Israel and Israel’s unfaithfulness, and after terrible threatenings he closes with a promise of mercy (vs. 43).

Fourth Narrative (32:44–52). Moses follows the reciting of the song with a final solemn warning. He is then commanded to ascend the Mount to die, but is promised a “sight of the land.”

The Blessing (Chap. 33). This blessing resembles in some respects that of Jacob (Gen. 49). Moses has been for a generation a “nursing father” to Israel (Num. 11:11f.), and this fact makes this fatherly blessing doubly appropriate.

The account of Moses’ death which follows is written as history, not as prophecy. It might have been written by Joshua. But the mention of Dan as in the far north suggests that it was written after the events recorded in Judges 18.

Relevance Of Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy is of special importance today for two reasons. We have seen that it definitely and repeatedly claims to be Mosaic. Accepted as such it gives us a very clear and impressive statement of the nature of the religion which Israel received by revelation at Sinai and covenanted to keep. This religion is a lofty, ethical, spiritual monotheism which is unique among all the religions of the world. It is so high, its demands are so great, that the danger of adopting a lower form of worship, of accepting the standards of the heathen is very great. The people are warned that the adopting of such lower standards, the turning aside to heathen idolatries is a disloyalty, an apostasy which will surely take place but will be most severely punished. They have a vastly different, a vastly higher religion than that of the heathen, and they are to be ever mindful of this unique distinction.

Despite its obvious claims to be Mosaic, “critical” scholars have been maintaining for more than a century that the book of Deuteronomy is the product of the time of Josiah, that it represents the viewpoint of a much later age than that of Moses, and that its “discovery” in the temple led not to reform but to radical innovations in the religious worship of Israel. Space will only permit us to point out that here the biblical and the critical understandings of Old Testament religion and history are in sharp and irreconcilable conflict. It has been the claim of the critics that the religion of Israel was originally very similar to, if not identical with, the religions of the neighboring peoples, that it evolved gradually through animism, polytheism, henotheism, to an ethical monotheism which was not attained to until shortly before the time of Josiah and Jeremiah. The book of Deuteronomy regarded as Mosaic is an insuperable obstacle in the path of such a reconstruction of the religious history of Israel. Small wonder that the critics have been so insistent that the book is late and that its Mosaic dress is camouflage. The best answer to this claim is the book itself.

A second reason that Deuteronomy is now of such importance is that it gives the Christian of today a correct and much needed philosophy of history. Deuteronomy emphasizes and illustrates the tremendous importance of the teaching function of the Church, the imperative duty of passing on the wonderful heritage of faith and life of which the Church is the custodian, lest the people forget and fall away and perish. Moses’ exhortations to Israel were soon forgotten. After Joshua and the elders who outlived him were gathered to their fathers, “there arose another generation after them which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel” (Judges 2:10); and so evil days came upon Israel. Today in our cities and throughout our land there is growing up a generation that does not know the Lord and does not want to obey him. We call this phenomenon in the sphere of philosophy, existentialism. In essence it is the law of the jungle—every man a law unto himself, and it is finding starting, even appalling expression in what we know as juvenile delinquency. It is the story of the book of Judges in modern conditions. Deuteronomy warns us to remember and to teach, to serve the Lord ourselves and to teach our children.

Instead of adding a bibliography, it will suffice for the purposes of this article to refer the reader to the recent book by G. T. Manley, The Book of the Law (Eerdmans, 1957). Mr. Manley has been active in the Inter-Varsity Fellowship for a number of years. He was the editor of The New Bible Handbook which I.V.F. published. His special interest in recent years has been the defense of the early date of Deuteronomy. He wrote the article on that book for The New Bible Commentary (Eerdmans, 1953). In The Book of the Law, Mr. Manley has given us a very able, scholarly, and up-to-date defense of the traditional view regarding this pivotal book in the face of the many arguments which are brought against it. The book well deserves a wide and careful reading.

OSWALD T. ALLIS

Former Professor of Old Testament

Princeton and Westminster Seminaries