ALL OUT FOR EASTER

Pastor Peterson’s Christmas peeve has carried over to Easter. He predicts that the Easter Bunny will soon be riding in Santa’s sleigh. There is scarcely time now for the clearance sales in between. The pastor is depressed by Easter fashions in pew and pulpit—the liberal spending of the first and the liberal theology of the second. We are indebted to him for the following selections from his forthcoming anthology All Out for Easter.

Flowers in the Pulpit

The eloquent Doctor,

To the pulpit born,

Wanders in the garden

On Easter morn

And, wreathing the garlands,

With poetic powers

He distils sweet odors

Of verbal flowers:

“Perfume everlasting

Wafts from springtime bloom …”

Preaching in the garden

He missed the tomb!

Absorbed in the glory

Lilies may afford,

He beheld no angels

Or living Lord!

Easter Observance

To observe Easter season

Will cost her much—

For that mad little hat as

A lighter touch,

For the strange new dress which, as

Fashion decrees,

Must be quite free of shape, like

A French chemise.

Yet she bears like a saint the

Financial strain;

She’ll adorn Easter’s pew if

It doesn’t rain!

These poems have been edited slightly. The first originally included the words, “… lost in the flowers he mythed the angels.” I am glad to say Peterson himself was dubious about the pun.

SAVING THE REPUBLIC

Your editorial, “Can We Salvage the Republic?” (Mar. 3 issue) … is eloquent, prophetic in the best tradition, and makes a number of points which are desperately in need of the kind of statement you have given them.

The Foundation for Economic

Education, Inc.

Irvington-On-Hudson, N. Y.

Is such a decline honestly such a terrible thing? Can I not have enough faith that God will lead the world finally to freedom without America being the power nation in the world? Perhaps there is a leading role for rich Africa to play in world affairs. Maybe the Middle East which once cradled civilization will again lead to world power. Perhaps even the people of Russia who know firsthand the tyranny of oppression and hate can and will one day break those bonds and show us all how precious is the sweet taste of freedom and lead the world.

Chesterfield, Ind.

Your blind criticism of the National Council is out of place in these perilous times when Christians must join forces to fight the common enemy.…

Franklin, Ind.

I am far from being in agreement with all the actions or pronouncements of the National Council; nevertheless I am convinced that the repetition of the unfounded and discredited charges of collectivism and socialism against the National Council, can only proceed from attitudes which are either bigoted or misinformed.

St. Luke’s Lutheran Church

Huntington Park, Calif.

• Perhaps an analytic survey of policy statements on social action by NCC (and its predecessor the Federal Council of Churches) is in order. CHRISTIANITY TODAY made no blanket “charges of collectivism and socialism against the National Council.” But it does not concede that those who have found leftist tendencies in some of its pronouncements have acted merely from bigotry or ignorance.—ED.

Congratulations on your editorial “Can We Salvage the Republic.” Excellent.… And, for the record I wish to call your attention to an error in fact. Frank Chodorov never was a socialist, on the soapbox or off. He was a soapboxer, but the torch he carried was the single tax, or rather the philosophy of Henry George, which is quite a different thing.

Berkeley Heights, N. J.

Undoubtedly, you have brought fire down on your head from the ramparts of the National Council of Churches, Rome, Labor and Government. But you do not stand alone in your convictions and analysis.

North Oxford Baptist Church

Oxford, Miss.

Your analysis of the situation America finds herself in today indicates an understanding that I wish more of our people possessed. I share your apprehension as to the future of America, unless present trends can be reversed.… It is refreshing to know we have a religious magazine that dares to sound a warning, even though it may fall on an unresponsive people as did that of prophetic voices of past generations.

Ozark, Ark.

It is the truest and clearest survey of the present situation and its cause I have ever read. As a Christian duty and American responsibility, it must be reprinted in tract form, so that it may be distributed by the thousands throughout our tortured and confused country.

Central Baptist Church

Dayton, O.

I can see in my mind’s eye the swing of the pendulum all across the broad area of religious thinking in America. And to be able to see in print an article such as this is gratifying.

Bethel Baptist Church

Olanta, S. C.

The statement about the government assuming many of the former functions of the Church … aroused my attention. The Church has been especially negligent in the field of charity. She freely accepts the gifts of her members but will do little in time of trouble even for her own. This is her greatest shame!

Churches could at least give an annuity based on a family’s previous contributions. Many would never ask for it; yet the troubled would take it because it would not be charity but a rightful return on their investment.

Cincinnati, O.

Your very splendid and to the point editorial … turned me very definitely as to sending in my subscription.… I have thought along that line many times, and still have a grave doubt in my mind that this nation can ever repent and return to the sound ideas of the founding fathers.

Paso Robles, Calif.

I believe that we cannot salvage the Republic because we are already too far gone. The Reformation doctrine of liberty of all of life under God, never took deep root in the new world.… Neutrality is one of Satan’s greatest inventions. Not Christianity but rather atheism predominates in the schools. In politics, no room for the God of the Bible. Unless we get together in earnest prayer and repent, we are doomed as a Republic.

Highland, Ind.

TOMORROW’S EVANGELISM

In J. Marcellus Kik’s outburst against Charles Templeton’s Evangelism for Tomorrow (Feb. 17 issue), one detects a vigorous attempt to defend the traditional evangelism of our day.…

But it would seem that Templeton has rightly revolted against our “one-shot” brand of evangelism which moves heaven and earth to evoke a “decision” and pats itself on the back for a job well done.

Even allowing for the book’s faults, I consider Kik’s article a bit too severe.

Bethany Baptist Church

Philadelphia, Pa.

Your … review … is indeed timely. As one who recalls affectionately Dr. Templeton’s early days in the evangelistic field, it hurts me to confess after two readings that (this) is one of the saddest books I have ever read.…

Dr. Templeton has succeeded in unfolding the danger of the pulpit in these crisis days, the weakening danger of skillful preaching that falls short of redemptive revelation.

Evangelist

Presbyterian Church U.S.A.

Geneva, Ill.

PRESIDENT OF THE WORLD

Let me throw a swift salute … for the grand good sense in the piece on World Government and Christianity (Feb. 3 issue). A world government—in spite of the great Einstein’s demand for it, to escape the perils of nationalism-gone-militarist with his baby atom-bombs—is suicide of the prophetic voice of the rare far-seer. I ask myself, when a ‘democratic’ world government is outlined (as by a U. of Chicago commission) whom would I vote for, for world-president? Exactly nobody.

Madison, N. H.

AROUSING PREACHERS

The article by Cannon and Everett (Feb. 17 issue) … interests me very much. Certainly there is deep need for an aroused public opinion on the subject. It seems to me that preachers need arousing more than anyone else. It is extremely doubtful that the vast majority of the brethren are acquainted with the type and volume of obscenity that has been flooding the country for a long time.

Monte Vista, Colo.

Pious churchmen may deplore trashy magazines, but how many churches, much less pastors, are … conducting detailed and realistic classes or programs on what … the … Biblical ideal of family is.…

Bellerose, N. Y.

Thanks for your significant Christian literature issue. The many excellent articles and the editorial, “Upturn in Evangelical Publishing,” have a combined effect of powerfully helping readers realize the importance of the written word of God. And the article, “Sex and Smut on the Newsstands,” is valuable for showing the tragic results that occur when writers do not stand under the prophetic judgement of God and are not guided by Christ.

Religious News Editor

The Nashville Tennessean

Nashville, Tenn.

Sincere appreciation for the two fine and enlightening articles titled “Why our Preaching Fails” and “Sex and Smut on the Newsstands”.…

These were among the best ever appearing in the pages of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

First Church of God

Princeton, West Virginia

We … thank you for printing it and thank the men engaged in this repulsive task, which is so necessary for the welfare of our young people and our country.

Dayton, O.

A world of praise should be given to Ralph A. Cannon and Glenn D. Everett for their two-year study of vile literature on our newsstands.

Baltimore, Md.

(The) article … inspired me to attempt to launch a one-woman campaign here against these magazines.

… Encouraging is the fact that simultaneously with my interest, there seems to be a general awakening here to this evil.…

If there was ever a problem crying for action by ministers and church people, this is it.

Louisville, Ky.

I couldn’t help but think that were there more genuine preaching of the evangelistic type and less of the philosophy of men, a great deal of this stuff would not have the appeal to people in general as it does now.

Missouri Conference of Seventh-day

Adventists, Kansas City, Mo.

MANY-SIDED TRUTH

In … “Why Our Preaching Fails” by F. R. Webber (Feb. 17 issue), his … statement that all preaching should be “Christ-centered” is beyond dispute. But he makes the mistake so frequently repeated by extreme conservatives, in falsely charging that Christ-centered preaching is vanishing.…

… Christ-centered preaching … is preaching not only a theology about Christ and salvation; it is a presentation from the Scriptures of Christ’s full message, exemplified, to be sure, in a plan of salvation, but also by his life, teachings and personality, with direct application to modern problems of life.…

I have visited more than a thousand churches, speaking, counselling.… In nearly all of them—conservative, moderate and those sometimes referred to as liberal—I find, with varying success, a Christ-centered program, more effective in my opinion than a one-sided program of evangelism in the narrow sense. Truth is many-sided.

Lincoln, Neb.

It is interesting that Webber spends one full third of a column quoting a man who 70 years ago was saying what he is saying is true today.…

Fourth Avenue Christian Church

Columbus, Ohio

Would God that every seminary student and any other erstwhile preacher would take its message to heart.

First English Lutheran Church

Missoula, Montana

PLEA FOR SIMPLICITY

L. Nelson Bell’s … “Simplicity in Preaching—a Plea” (Feb. 17 issue) emphasizes a need which I have longed to express, and it does it far better than I probably could.…

There was a time when I preached that I searched for ideas and then tried to find Scripture to bolster up those ideas; now I go to the Word itself and simply invite my people to see what God has to say.…

Mexico Baptist Church

Mexico, Me.

PRESERVING THE DOLLAR

Thanks for your excellent editorial on inflation (Jan. 6 issue). It should do much to make clear that inflation is an increase in the supply of money and credit, and that government is directly responsible for it. Unwise action by both capital and labor certainly develops inflationary pressures. But unless government responded by increasing the supply of money those who seek wages or prices higher than the market will support, would soon bring unemployment and loss of sales upon themselves. That would quickly put an end to the spiral. Unfortunately, government responds to the pressure by increasing the supply of money and credit, as the purchasing power of the dollar falls lower and lower.

Unless our government changes its course, the dollar will eventually be destroyed as have most of the other fiscal units of the world.

Marble Collegiate Church

New York, N. Y.

I wish to congratulate you.… It is a clear presentation of one of the great dangers confronting our nation. So long as we have a currency whose value is subject to the whims of a handful of people who may be motivated at times by political expediency, the economic foundations of our nation are in constant peril.

The National Education Program

Searcy, Ark.

“MATERIALISTIC TRUTH”

Mr. Shen, in his comments on the Rev. Mr. Hebert’s book (Mar. 3 issue) … upbraids your reviewer … for “dodging the main issue,” … “Does the doctrine of verbal inspiration … not involve a ‘materialistic’ view of truth, or an intellectualistic conception of revelation? Can either of them be justified on biblical grounds?”

At least Mr. Shen has not subjected us to the entire gamut of cliches on this point, a good summary of which must include at least “Aristotelianism,” “Greek (vs. Hebrew) view,” “scholasticism,” and “rationalism” in addition to “intellectualism,” “materialistic view” and “Fundamentalism.”

Ever since Brunner and others have popularized the “Truth as Encounter” view, it has been the fashion to assert that truth is not factual correctness (the quality of statements of being in accord with reality), but rather some indefinable ectoplasmic “something,” which is now God himself, now Christ, now some relation between God and man, but never anything as definite as Scripture or doctrinal statements. Moreover these claims are habitually advanced in tones implying that they are so obviously self-evident as to be beyond question or necessity of proof. (Cf. the dutiful approval and unoriginal rehearsal of the neo-modernistic cliches in the Christian Century’s Nov. 27 review, by Dr. Marty, of Hebert’s book.) In fact, such proof is rarely even attempted. To question this modern dogma is to blaspheme the very mother of all of neo-modernism’s … sacred cows.…

These claims about truth have so permeated the theological atmosphere, that even many a conservative is embarrassed by the term “propositional truth” … and when the arrogant, proofless cliches begin to fly, these poor conservatives run in dismay.…

For which position is the stigma of “intellectualism” intended? Obviously for the traditional doctrine of the Church that Scripture does not merely contain, but by virtue of divine inspiration, itself is the infallible Word of God.… It follows since Scripture consists of words and propositions, that there is such a thing as propositional truth and revelation in theology.… The denial of “propositional truth” is a convenient device by which the whole obligation to be orthodox is with one stroke eliminated, and everyone is left free to “witness to” his own “encounters” as he sees fit. This is nihilism.…

Is the traditional doctrine “unbiblical?” Nonsense. Our Blessed Lord Himself asserts: “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). Note that (1) the reference is to a specific proposition, even one of relatively minor importance; (2) this proposition “cannot be broken” because it belongs to a specific series of propositions, explicitly recognized as “written,” and collectively known as “Scripture.” Or take the refutation of the Sadducees (Mt. 22:23ff.). Here our Lord (1) identifies error with definite propositions, not encounters, (2) opposes to these other propositions, and (3) establishes the truth in the matter not even with a direct proposition from Scripture, but with a mere, and shockingly Aristotelian, deduction from Scriptural propositions. St. Paul also identifies authoritative revelation with a collection of propositions, (2 Tim. 3:15 ff.)

Shocking! Christ and his holy Apostles represent the materialistic concept of truth! The fact of the matter, of course, is that this “concept” is not particularly or peculiarly materialistic, but is simply the common meaning of the term, as also Webster testifies. We can congratulate the atheistic materialists of our day at least upon a laudable amount of clear thinking, candid definition, and logical rigor, virtues which modern theologians should be advised to emulate.…

Redeemer Lutheran Church

North Tonawanda, N. Y.

NATURALISTIC ARROGANCE

The account of the recent meeting organized by the faculty of Chicago University School of Theology surprised me. The demand for a naturalistic Christianity seems to me not only intellectually arrogant, but also shockingly absurb.

Science has not, and never can exclude the supernatural.…

The natural sciences are indeed a great and important discipline of truth. If, however, their uniformed prejudice against the supernatural should succeed in discrediting a transcendent faith, their unfounding of freedom, and so of morality, may result in the violent end of modern civilization. I do not believe this will happen; but neither do I believe that men whose minds have been shut up to one discipline of truth are going to command the thinking of the second half of the 20th century. The risen Christ is the Lord of history, and He will find a way to undergird the Gospel which He instituted at such infinite cost.…

Brown Mills, N. J.

IN RE JONATHAN EDWARDS

Not long ago we visited with a Seminary classmate who has served for about two decades as Professor of Systematic Theology in one of the leading seminaries of our country, is the author of several widely read books on theology and is recognized as one of the most able theologians of our country and time. We spoke to him concerning the disproportionate emphasis being placed upon the mercy and love of God so prevalent today in pulpit and religious press, expressing the opinion that this is a chief explanation of the tragic let-down in morals marking our time, lawlessness and fact that there are comparatively few people now who fear God. The Professor replied that he shared my opinion and if time permitted he had it in his mind to write a volume on this subject.

Those who take a different view will be surprised if they will consult their concordance to see how many times the Scriptures mention the justice and wrath of God and enjoin the fear of God.…

It is a tremendous responsibility any teacher or minister takes who misrepresents the true character of God—perhaps sometimes through quest for popularity! Surely he would not fail to warn his friends of an approaching train or storm. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.”

Erie Conference, Methodist Church

Townville, Pa.

THE TURNING POINT

I was particularly pleased with the Dec. 9 issue, containing Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ Christmas sermon and Earl L. Douglass’ … “Our Lord’s Virgin Birth.” I was Moderator of Philadelphia North Presbytery when Earl Douglass asked to be received by letter from a New York State Presbytery and become Pastor of Summit Church. At once there was a protest, and I urged Presbytery not to act hastily; and after he read a statement of his Christian faith, he was received and the call approved and placed in his hand. That, I take it, was the turning point in his ministry, and he and Mrs. Douglass became big factors in the Presbytery, and later on he took over Wm. T. Ellis Sunday School lesson job, etc.

Gettysburg, Pa.

LATE LAUNCHING

To me CHRISTIANITY TODAY is must reading. It is extremely stimulating, very evangelical, evangelistic—and just what I want, and need. It should have been launched years ago—many of them—when I was much younger—with more years ahead to use and profit by it.

Elmora Presbyterian Church

Elizabeth, N. J.

BREAKING THROUGH the gloom of death and hovering over the seeming finality of the grave there abides the certainty of the resurrection morning; a morning centuries ago when two men in dazzling robes stood in an empty tomb and exclaimed, “Why seek ye the living among the dead: He is not here, but is risen: …” and, the certainty of a yet future morning when, “The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: … and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”

The true significance of the Cross is inexorably linked with the empty tomb, for without the Resurrection our Lord’s death would have been the symbol of a lost cause.

And without the Resurrection there would have been no Gospel to preach.

As God’s redemptive work for sinful man unfolds, the Resurrection emerges as an absolute necessity. Prior to any resurrection there must have been death, and we know that death came into this world because of sin. If Christ’s work of redemption was to be effective then he must triumph over all the results of sin. The Resurrection therefore becomes living proof of his power as Saviour.

The ground itself was a partaker of the curse of sin: “Thorns and thistles shall it cause to bud.” The crown of thorns worn at Calvary was not merely a symbol of the derision of his tormentors. Rather we believe it to be a divinely ordained symbol of bearing in his body the penalty of sin in man and in nature.

Writing of the ultimate triumph of the Gospel, Isaiah tells of a day when: “Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and it shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”

In the light of the unfolded Gospel, revealing God’s redemption planned in the councils of eternity in and through his Son, the Resurrection becomes an absolutely necessary part of the whole.

That our Lord arose physically and visibly from the dead is one of the best attested facts of history. Remove the Resurrection story from the records—in the Gospels, in the history of the early Church, in the Pauline and other letters and in the book of Revelation, and the crowning proof of Christ as Saviour, and of immortality, vanishes from sight.

The evidence is so overwhelming, and the effect so transforming, that a study of the record brings certainty of the Resurrection that at first was ignored, then disbelieved and finally accepted as the crowning proof of the Christian faith.

The scriptural record is one of internal evidence beyond the realm of collusion. The disciples never understood our Lord’s frequent references to his death and resurrection. After he had risen they still doubted. Only as they were confronted with “many infallible proofs” was their unbelief and hopelessness transformed into a burning assurance. Only then did they know that the One they had seen die on the cross was alive.

This same Jesus was alive. They saw him. They heard him speak. They touched him. They ate with him. They knew.

They were aware of the amazing fact that while in some way he was changed he had the same body, for they saw the scars in his hands and feet and at least one of them was invited to end his persistent doubts by thrusting his hand into the wounded side.

In the succeeding days they frequently enjoyed the fellowship of the risen Lord. His miraculous powers were still in evidence and his command to them to go out, after they had received the power of the Holy Spirit, and make disciples of all nations was an impelling commission which turned timid and ignorant men into flaming evangels of whom it was said that they turned the world upside down. That they were faithful to the command of their risen Lord—faithful even unto death—is but further evidence of the effect of knowing they were proclaiming a risen and living Saviour and Lord.

The Jews had made provision to seal and guard the tomb against the Lord’s disciples; little had they realized that they could not guard it against Christ himself. But, the stone was rolled away, not to let Christ out, but to let the wondering disciples in. Dr. Robert Speer used to say that the crowning evidence to these disciples was the collapsed grave clothes and the napkin lying separately.

All the synoptic writers tell of the Resurrection. Each supplements the other, and all bear the stamp of honesty and accuracy.

The Sabbath was deeply rooted in the law and in the practices of the Jewish religion. Only a cataclysmic event could have changed the old Jewish Sabbath, the seventh day of the week, to the Christian Sabbath, the first day of the week.

The angelic manifestations at his resurrection are significant. When Christ was born, angels had announced the event. On the Mount of Transfiguration we again find two men, Moses and Elias, talking with him about his death which he was to accomplish in Jerusalem. At his ascension it was again two angels who spoke to the disciples as they gazed heavenward and affirmed the fact of his future personal and visible return.

A final impelling truth: as mentioned before, his disciples had been confused and dull of understanding when he frequently referred to his coming death and resurrection. They frankly admitted that they did not at first believe the Resurrection story. Collusion, therefore, for the removal of the body would have been impossible. It was only when they saw, and touched, and heard and lived with the risen Lord, that they at last believed.

Because the Resurrection was the crowning and visible evidence of the power of God to these disciples, unlearned and ignorant and fearful men were completely transformed. Weak in faith and turning again to their fishing nets in disillusionment, these disciples were suddenly transformed by the blinding light of a new faith, a knowledge that the Lord they thought to be decaying in a tomb was alive, that he had triumphed over death and the grave, and the realization of this fact completely transformed their lives. They went out to preach the Gospel of redemption and a new life in their risen Lord: “Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it.”

These same disciples who had fled before the torch-lit mob headed by Judas (one of whom had cursed and sworn that he knew not the Christ) stood unafraid and unabashed before the murderers of Jesus and said: “Be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you whole.” And, when they were ordered not to preach in his name they prayed not for protection but for courage: “And now Lord, behold their threatenings: and grant to thy servants, that with all boldness they may speak thy word …”

Nothing less than the visible, bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, became a doctrine to be preached; nothing less than the infallible proofs which they themselves had seen and experienced could account for the transformation of these men.

The Christian religion is a supernatural religion and it has a supernatural effect on those who believe.

In God’s plan of redemption the supernatural is seen on every hand. Our Lord, the eternal Son of God, is a supernatural person. That he emptied himself and came into this world was itself a supernatural act accomplished in a supernatural way, his virgin birth. His life showed his supernatural powers and his death accomplished a supernatural redemption. His resurrection, while a supernatural event, was but the natural consequence of both his person and his power.

The Resurrection story and its effect on the hearts and minds of believers is the crowning evidence of God’s saving grace. Prove it? Talk with him today and he will make his living presence a reality in your life.

That which God did through his disciples nineteen centuries ago he wants to do through you and me today. Paul saw this same risen Lord and was transformed by him. “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”

Brothers … That is living!

L. NELSON BELL

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. (1 Peter 1:3).

All our blessings are bestowed upon us by the Father, without our desert, of sovereign mercy. This is the true evangelical doctrine, which we must preach. O how little do we find of this preaching, even in the best books. There is here nothing to be praised, but the great compassion of God.

Hath begotten us again. The meaning is, that as God is the Author of our life in a natural sense, so he is the Author of our second life by regeneration. The Saviour said, that “except a man be born again,” or begotten again, “he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Peter here affirms that that change had occurred in regard to himself and those whom he was addressing.

Father Of Our Lord

As formerly, in calling himself the God of Abraham he wished himself to be distinguished by this mark from all fictitious gods, so after he manifested himself in his Son, he wishes to be no otherwise known than in him. Therefore, they who form to their apprehension the naked majesty of God without Christ, have an idol in the room of God.

WILHELM STEIGER

The believers whom Peter wrote to were stranger Jews, cast out and dispersed from their own land and inheritances. To comfort them against this their dispersion, he puts them in mind of another and greater inheritance, which also by a birth higher and diviner than that of theirs from Abraham, who gave them right to the other inheritance in Canaan. The carnal Jews boasted of his birth from Abraham, as that whereby also they boasted God to be their Father. And when they had occasion to bless God for any eminent mercy, their form of blessing was “Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel” (Ps. 72:18). Instead of entitling God by the name of “God of Israel,” Peter teacheth them to enstyle and bless him now as the “God and Father of Jesus Christ,” and to view him upon that account as become a God and Father unto them.

THOMAS GOODWIN

How is it, then, that this holy and righteous God blesses sinful men with all heavenly and spiritual blessings? How is it that he makes them his children, gives them a heavenly inheritance, and cheers them with a living hope? It is as “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” that he does all this. In the riches of his sovereign mercy he determined to save an innumerable multitude of sinful men, and in the depth of his wisdom he formed a plan for realizing the determination of his mercy, not merely in consistency with, but in glorious illustration of, his holiness and justice. The leading feature in that plan is, the appointment of his only-begotten Son to be the representative of those who were to be saved, to be dealt with as they deserved to be dealt with, that they might be dealt with as he deserved to be dealt with.

JOHN BROWN

By The Resurrection

As Christ died as the head and representative of his people, his resurrection secures and illustrates theirs. As he lives, they shall live also. If he remained under the power of death, there is no source of spiritual life to men; for he is the vine, we are the branches; if the vine be dead the branches must be dead also.

CHARLES HODGE

The resurrection of our Lord not only brings his work to the first stage of its completion; it is God’s own attestation of his acceptance of all that our Lord had done, and that in two respects,—(1), as to the manner in which it had been accomplished; (2), as to the fact that by it sin had been forever blotted out, and the foundation of the new life laid.

WILLIAM MILLIGAN

By the resurrection of Christ, God having declared himself pacified, hath opened all the treasures of his grace to Christ for the framing a new generation in the world to serve him; without which merit of the suffering, and discharge thereupon, there could not have been a mite of grace given out of God’s treasury for the renewal of the image of God in any one person. The spiritual resurrection of any one soul is as much the effect of this resurrection of Christ, as the resurrection of bodies shall be at the last day. That power which doth raise any soul from a death in sin, would never have wrought in any heart without this antecedent to it, it would have wanted the foundation of satisfaction, for God only sanctifies as a God of peace. And therefore the power which was exerted for the raising of Christ from the grave was put forth as a power to work in the hearts of all his seed.

STEPHEN CHARNOCK

There is an intimate connection between the saints’ resurrection and that of Jesus Christ. The simple reunion of their souls and bodies, is not to be considered as the effect of his mediation, because the same thing will take place with respect to the wicked. To the wicked the resurrection is not a privilege, but a curse; it is not the effect of the goodness, but of the avenging justice of God. What the saints owe to his mediation is a happy resurrection, the change of a tremendous evil into an unspeakable blessing. As he died not for himself, but for them, he has taken away the sting of death, or made it cease to be a penal evil to them; and rising in the character of their surety, he secured that they also shall rise, to enjoy the immortal life which is the recompense of his merit.

JOHN DICK

Living Hope

If it were not for hope, the heart would break; as they do whose lives and hopes end together. True hope lives when the man dies.

JOHN TRAPP

Dead hopes—sickly, dying hopes—are common enough among men. But here, at last, is such a hope as becomes the children of the living God. This hope has life in itself, and it imparts life and has life also, eternal life, for its object. Even in the dust of the sepulchre blooms this heavenly flower, and over it, as over the living Christ, death hath no more dominion.

JOHN LILLIE

We are said to be begotten again “to a lively hope,” where hope is taken objectively, as the following words show: “to an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for us.” And when, elsewhere, it had been said, “Every one that doeth righteousness is born of him” there is immediately subjoined a description of the future blessedness; whereto it is presently added, “And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure,” implying the hope of that blessed state to be connate, implanted as a vital principle of the new and divine nature.

JOHN HOWE

“And there were also two other, malefactors, led with him to be put to death” (Luke 23:32).

There were three crosses on Calvary. Of the central cross, Christian believers join with the Apostle Paul in exclaiming, “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Of the cross on which there was nailed the thief, who became penitent, Christians everywhere sing in Cowper’s lines:

The dying thief rejoiced to see

That fountain in his day;

And there may I, though vile as he,

Wash all my sins away.

Of the other cross and the man who was crucified thereon silence largely prevails.

Three men shared death upon a hill,

But only one man died;

The other two

A thief and God Himself

Made rendezvous.

Three crosses still

Are borne up Calvary’s hill,

Where sin still lifts them high;

Upon the one, sag broken men

Who, cursing, die;

Another holds the praying thief,

Or those, who, penitent as he,

Still find the Christ

Beside them on the tree.

—MIRIAM LEFEVRE CROUSE

The cross of the impenitent malefactor is not without its distinctive though solemn and awful symbolism.

Sin Is Punished

The fact that one of the malefactors, a hardened criminal and bandit, went to his execution affords the assurance that sin is often punished drastically in this life. We hear much about the prosperity of the wicked, a problem that vexed the Hebrew Psalmist and has never ceased to puzzle the thoughtful. We observe the evil men grow gray in their iniquity and seem to flourish like the green bay tree, with no apparent penalty shadowing their nefarious careers. President M. Woolsey Stryker of Hamilton College once said: “Sodom does not always burn; not every Korah fats the jaws of the earth” (p. 33, The Well by the Gate, M. W. Stryker, Presbyterian Pulpit Series). Here is a cross and an executed man demonstrating for all ages that crime does not pay, and that evil more often brings destruction upon the evildoer than it fails so to do. Here is a gallows proclaiming to mankind that the Bible is correct in its stem pronouncements: “The way of the transgressor is hard”; “The wicked shall not live out half their days”; “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap”; “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”; “He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption”; “Be sure your sins will find you out”; “Sin, when it is finished, brings forth death.”

“We receive the due reward of our deeds,” was the comment of the thief who repented, to his companion on the opposite side of Christ. A man’s sins become the Frankenstein monster that accomplishes his undoing. Retribution for wickedness is more often realized in this world than not.

Rejected Opportunities

The impenitent thief went out into the darkness of eternity with many inducements to repentance towards God, to which he made no slightest response, waiting to arrest his downward course.

In his penetrating study of the unrepentant malefactor, Frederick W. Robertson of Brighton, says: “Round the cross of the dying thief were accumulated such means as never before met together to bring a man to God.”

What were some of those circumstances which seemed peculiarly designed to lead a soul to God in contrition and faith?

There was the power of pain “often exerted in the soul to soften it.”

Out of my stony griefs

Bethel I’ll raise;

So by my woes to be

Nearer, my God, to Thee.

When he had tasted virtually all of his appointed cup of suffering and with a dread malignancy penetrating the inner recesses of his cranium, one of the accomplished scholars and leaders of the Presbyterian church, who died a score of years ago, told his friends that he would never exchange his last months of agony for any healthier days, so enriching had the last days proved in deepened insights in the things of the Spirit and the nature and will of God.

Alas, to the impenitent thief, suffering was not a savor of life unto life but of death unto death.

He was equally unmoved when he listened to the truth as it was preached by a very recent convert, his comrade in the anguish of crucifixion. Although the “intensity and earnestness of fresh love” characterized the pleas, this man was not stirred.

He had the unequalled privilege of hearing the truth preached from the lips of a dying man. The penitent thief exemplified the phrase of Baxter, the Puritan divine, who said that he always preached as never sure to preach again, a dying man to dying men.

He had the Lord Jesus himself beside him in the hour of his death. He listened to what Alfred North Whitehead calls in his Adventures of Ideas, “the tender words as life ebbed.” He hears what John Mason Neale, as he asked the great doctors of the early Church in one of his hymns how to gain the lore by which they established the truth, has them reply:

Dying gift of dying Master,

Which once uttered all was o’er;

Pillars seven of sevenfold wisdom.

Zion’s safeguard evermore.

This man, after a lifetime of crime, might have witnessed the majestic serenity and compassion that were Christ’s in his dying.

With all of these encouragements to contrition and faith, this man was dead and dumb and blind to God, his own immortal soul’s welfare, and his terrible need of redemption from sin. No man ever leaves the world, dying in his sins, to use Christ’s own phrase, except as he has had repeated opportunities to forsake his wicked way, abandon his unrighteous thought, and turn to the God who will have mercy and abundantly pardon.

Irreverence And Derision

The impenitent thief had no sense of the sacred. “Dost thou not fear God?” was the question put to him by the thief who repented. Reverence was unknown to him.

In his Science and Philosophy, Dr. William E. Hocking challenges the moral right of the psychoanalyst to probe the depths of what should be an inviolate province reserved for a man and his God alone. Hocking’s position is well taken but one does not have to penetrate very deeply into the inner life of the impenitent robber to realize that this man had no regard for the eternal and invisible realities. He was enmeshed in temporalities. Witness his mad shriek to Jesus: “Save thyself and us!” He was concerned solely with an extension of life in this world. For a lifetime he had entertained no respect for the personalities and the bodies of his fellow men. He was determined only to exploit them. His irreverence reached the stage of vile derision and raillery. Cursing, blaspheming, sneering, raving, full of acrid mockery, he departs from the world.

Every generation has its ribald purveyors of bitter scorn at the Christian religion, ranging from those in the train of Celsus and Porphyry, who with sarcasm yet literary finesse attack the faith, to others, who in cheap and vulgar form, borrowed from long passe champions of unbelief, pour their contempt on all that is high and holy.

A wave of irreverence has swept over the modern world. You witness it in the theater, in current fiction, and on the street. You find it in widespread lawlessness and juvenile delinquency. It is to be noted in a marked degree in the desecration of the Lord’s Day and in the unabashed profanation in public of the hallowed names of the Trinity.

There are persons who have occupied positions of influence in the Christian church, yet who have treated the Bible as though it were a mere document of human literature, rather than the Word of God and a revelation of a supernatural character, which the unaided reason of man could not ascertain.

We find the same lack of reverence in persons who view with contempt those of other races and nations and differing religious views. The modern world and even the church itself stands in need of a revival of reverence.

Folly Of Postponement

This man hanging on his cross, with no word of sorrow for his sin and no importuning of mercy from his Saviour, is a warning concerning the perils of late repentance. The penitent thief has long been regarded as the supreme example of deathbed repentance. Here is the proof that not every man in what Dr. Francis Landey Patton once called the toxic twilight of life’s day, turns to his God for absolution and acceptance.

Here was one who had never troubled himself about the spiritual phase of his existence. What did he care for the soul, whether his own or that of his neighbor, whom he viewed as a prospect for one of his acts of brigandage? He may have seen Jesus and heard him preach. Always he believed, it may have been, that he was an impressive imposter or a poetic dreamer. Surely, he thought within himself, Jesus had nothing to offer him in his situation. The opinions of the years became fixed. Robertson, writing while in his thirties, contended in one of his sermons that opinions are rarely altered after one attains the age of forty. That is, of course, a moot question. It is certain that a dulling rigidity marks the intellects of men as the years increase. Hostility to new ideas intensifies. Then at length weakness ensues, leaving no strength for vigorous and serious thought on life’s deepest issues.

We Die As We Live

Some persons are never granted what might be termed a dying hour. Without premonition, and in the twinkling of an eye, they lapse into a comatose state or pass suddenly through the gate of death itself. It was of this melancholy fate of meeting the unseen, unfit and unrepentant, that the Anglican litany speaks in the petition, “From sudden death, good Lord, deliver us.”

Most persons die as they have lived. It is the manner in which you have lived and thought in active years that will probably govern the fashion in which you will confront death. We must ask ourselves if we are living as we would wish to be when the summons comes for us to confront God and eternity.

The twilight shadows enfold Calvary and a Saviour who has finished his propitiatory sacrifice, and a man who, following a life of violence, found the homeward way, the Redeemer’s love and peace at the last. The shadows also encompass a man whose envenomed and godless tongue was active until the end and who faced death without hope and without God. He had been so impervious to the motions of conscience and the voice of God directed to his soul that for him conscience became insensitive. “Dost not thou fear God?” There is no sensible response from this man.

The Old Testament portrays the disintegrating personality of King Saul who again and again spurned the counsel of the prophet Samuel, who was God’s special messenger to his soul. At length, Samuel withdrew from Saul. “Samuel called no more to see Saul until the day of his death.” That is parabolic of the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the soul. When one constantly resists the motions of the divine Spirit, a point of no return is reached.

There is that sometimes baffling passage which tells that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Pharaoh so persistently declined to give heed to God’s voice as mediated by his oracle, Moses, and through the signs and wonders by which God sought to speak to him, that at last the Spirit of God withdrew. There was, henceforth, no susceptibility on the Egyptian ruler’s part to the suggestions of the divine.

“Today, if ye would hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” “Now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation.”

On which side of the cross of Jesus do you take your stand? Are you on the side of the man who repented, or are you on the side of the man who did not repent?

No one of us need find himself in the plight of this unhappy man. God waits for our confession of sin and faith. Will you go down to the end of your days as this man? Or will you look to the cross of Jesus and say with H. G. Stafford, as the penitent thief might well have said:

My sin—oh, the bliss of this glorious thought—

My sin—not in part, but the whole,

Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more,

Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

H. G. STAFFORD

Galbraith Hall Todd is the late Dr. Clarence E. Macartney’s successor in the pulpit of Arch Street Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia. Since 1948 he has been Lecturer in Homiletics at Reformed Episcopal Seminary in Philadelphia. This sermon is reprinted by permission from The Gamblers at Golgotha, a volume of Dr. Hall’s expositions just published by Baker.

Even if pulpits have been taken from the center of many sanctuaries within recent years, preaching is still holy business. Luther was not incorrect in calling it sacramental. Theologians Barth and Farmer, among others, have rightly urged a high view of this holy task.

Not because in preaching we have a chance to moralize a bit. Not because in it we can serve our peanut philosophies, half-baked or well. It is not these things that make preaching holy business. But it is a task cut off from other kinds of work because in it we confront sinful men with Jesus Christ. Daniel Jenkins goes so far as to say, “No sermon is ultimately possible which does not start from what God has done for his people in Christ” (Tradition, Freedom, and the Spirit, Westminster, 1951). We confront them, for one thing, with that deed done for us at Bethlehem.

A highly-favored virgin is selected for unending honor. Isaiah had said it would be so, and it is. She conceives by the Holy Ghost and gives birth to Jesus the Christ.

Nels Ferre thinks the account strange and offers a possible substitute story of his own—one in which there is no mystery, no miracle, not even a moral element. Brunner also quite denies the account in order to make room, as he says, for believing in the Incarnation by faith.

Yet in this way, through birth by a virgin, God entered into our humanity. By this means he got a footing on the hard earth by which to lift us out of sin. A heartbeat away—no more than that. That is how near the God of the Incarnation is to men. No other religion makes such a claim as this—that God was born into our world, a man among men; that he is even now touched by the agony of our infirmities.

At Pentecost, Peter established this “enmanment” before going on to tell of the death and Resurrection. And so did Stephen soon afterwards; and Paul, on numerous occasions.

One might not want to call this “the central affirmation of Christianity” as H. H. Farmer does. For one might not wish so to disjoin it from the death and Resurrection. For the same reason, one might not want to say with John S. Whale that Christianity is “a religion that finds its living heart in an Incarnation” (Christian Doctrine, Macmillan, 1942, p. 21). But it is certainly a central element of the kerygma. And it is appealing to men who feel distanced from God by reason of their sins and who have the jitters in this hydrogen era. Perhaps twentieth-century men are not so different from first-century men as Bultmann thinks. The common people hear Graham gladly; and that evangelist’s message is not a “demythologized” version of the apostolic preaching, but that kind of preaching in its first-century simplicity and power. But there is more.

The Death Of Christ

There they are, three of them. Not one, but three. Three men leave Pilate’s palace bearing crosses, trekking their last road. They are en route to a skull-like knoll outside a Jerusalem gate. Numbered with two transgressors, our Master submits himself to public shame along the holy streets.

It has been a strange trial. Our Lord’s accusers and his judges have been the same persons. An officer, during the proceedings, has been allowed to strike Jesus. Messengers, scurrying from home to home in the darkness, have got the Sanhedrinists into a night session, contrary to their rules, and that body has made its decision against Jesus when a sleeping populace could not become aroused.

Jesus was to die, but the holy Sanhedrin could not make such sentence. So they pressured Pilate to do it for them. Pilate had finally produced Jesus, robed, thorn-crowned and beaten bloody, before the murderous mob and let them go on with their sin. Those who had thirsted for his death had triumphed. And Jesus made his way to Golgotha and died for us.

O what wonder—what sweet wonder! Love without limit; mercy without measure; suffering without stint. Pile them all on there—words like propitiation, sin offering, sacrifice, ransom, free gift. And then put on some more—like obedience, surrender, sorrow, affliction. Still you cannot describe it; you are only hinting at its strength with the weakness of words.

Always some have wagged their heads, unable to see it. A man reveals God—how can it be? One dies for all—instead of all! Redemption is provided! The law of karma they could see, but not lawless forgiveness. Works they could figure out, but not grace. A bloody religion, that’s all, with a murder at its middle. To the Jews a stumbling block and to the wise ones foolishness. O the offense, the scandal of it all!

But wait! Its secret does get out. Young and old do believe. Even if it opposes what a rationalist would figure out, it is true after all. The blind do see and the lame walk. Sinners are transfigured. And God puts a glory in their souls, a song in their hearts, a word of witness on their tongues, and a map—a world map—in their hands. They fan out in every direction, to every part. For they cannot but speak of something so utterly real to them.

Such as this is a scoop, sure enough. It is big news and must be told—front page, headline, byline and all. Our listeners hear from Moscow and London and Washington through men appointed for that work. Come Sunday they need to hear—they must hear—from Calvary. But there is more. Much more.

Hope had grown corpse-cold for the apostles. Bewildered, disillusioned, morbid in memories—it was the end. What was left for them? Fishing, perhaps; certainly chagrin. Had not their Lord been crucified on a Roman cross and buried?

Entombed and sealed in, with a heavy stone rolled against the door and an armed guard sitting about, Jesus had had a seeming checkmate. Yet he vacated that tomb and became the perennial contemporary.

The Resurrection Theme

To a man the New Testament writers believed he had risen. Of that event James Stewart writes, “This was indeed the very core of the apostolic kerygma.… It was the theme of every Christian sermon; it was the master motive of every act of Christian evangelism; and not one line of the New Testament was written … apart from the conviction that he of whom these things were written had conquered death and was alive forever” (A Faith to Proclaim, pp. 104, 105).

Had he not appeared to the Marys and Salome? to those two disheartened ones along the country road there; to the eleven; to above five hundred; and later to Saul, man-eating tiger from Tarsus? Certainly he had. And many blessed ones on through history’s jaunts have believed, not having “seen” in that same way. The Sadducees have had no continuing citadel!

It means something to them, too. He indwells them. And they take assurance with what they find in Hosea: “O death, I will be thy plagues.…” (13:14). Because he lives, they will live also—abundantly here, and aboundingly there.

The Resurrection packed the Incarnation and the death chock-full with continuing meaning. It is integral to the whole redemptional scheme. So with that footing in history and with the smashing by men bent on sin, this enlivening has to be told. “Go … tell …” was the commission to those first women witnesses. Surely that is the word also to the Christ announcers in our time.

Nothing Less Than Gospel

A now tottering liberalism taught that man is inherently good, a god writ small—that there is nothing wrong with him that “a little bicarbonate of soda wouldn’t take care of” (Bulkley, Christian Century, Nov. 21, 1956). Walter Rauschenbusch took that sort of view in his earlier works, but made a distinct change by 1917 in his lectures at Yale, A Theology for the Social Gospel.

Others too, such as Karl Barth, have made an about-face, so that now most will agree with Edwin Lewis that there is a radical disharmony at man’s center. It is true that the new doctrines of man’s sinfulness are in modern dress. For example, many join with Reinhold Niebuhr in denying that the Fall was historical. Yet it all means that modern man is facing up to his sinfulness—to the built-in kind and the kind you obtain later. To us who preach it means that we can never simply moralize any more, for that might further entrench sinners in their smugness. It will take no less than the preaching of the Gospel of Christ, “which is the power of God unto salvation to every one who believes.”

J. Kenneth Grider is Associate Professor of Theology at Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City. He has held pastorates in Missouri, New Jersey and New York, has taught at Pasadena College and at Hurlet Nazarene College, Glasgow, and studied at Trinity College, where he received his Ph.D.

Uncle Will had died. He lived across the street. On Sunday afternoon the whole family went over to see him while we had our good clothes on. He looked natural, everybody said. But when I finally got next to the casket and stood on tiptoe to look in through the polished glass, I thought he looked a little stiff. You see, I was a child, and death is not natural to a child. It is artificial, unreal. But grownups think differently than children and have always tried to make death look natural.

Life After Death

The ancient Egyptian Pharaohs planned it carefully: furniture, reading material, dishes, food, even servants. Treat the dead man naturally. There is a life after death, and it is much more enjoyable to spend it in leisure with a full house, if you can afford it.

The classic Greek thinker did not make much over dying. It happens to everybody sooner or later; your time comes and you go. Accept it stoically, like Socrates who, though his friends cried, took the hemlock with poise and drank it down slowly, unruffled. He knew that he had an immortal soul that would shortly fly away from the prison of carnal flesh to the Elysian fields and philosophic serenity.

The Romans preferred a little ceremony to the matter, a little pomp and circumstance by the burial. They burned the dead man and disinfected his house for sanitary reasons; but they put flowers on his tomb every year. The important thing about dying was to die well. Die like a man, a noble Roman worthy of his country.

The African heathen viewed the dead with mixed feelings. They were afraid the dead man’s spirit would come back to haunt the living, and at the same time they wistfully desired to make use of his supernatural powers. So they made a fetish of his remains in order to give his spirit peace, and they made wailing a tabu and hoped for the best.

All these different outlooks at death and the dying presuppose the same thing, simply that death is a natural transition from life before death to another life after death. It is a look at death that the Roman Catholic church has tried to Christianize. When you die, oh man, there is a long, long trail up purgatory mountain ahead of you. Hope now that the living left behind will light a candle and say a prayer for you to lighten your weary trek through the wastes of time.

Life Instead Of Death

The biblical look at death makes a radical break with this line of thought. The New Testament does not believe in a life after death: it teaches life instead of death. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will not die but have life, everlasting life! The early Christians simply took it at face value. They believed on the Lord Jesus Christ and were certain that they would not die. To partake of Christ’s body in the Eucharist strengthened their belief. But soon they were surprised. Christians died too; at least it looked exactly like death. One congregation was perturbed and wrote Paul about it. Paul wrote back, saying no, Christians do not die; they are only sleeping. Some of the early Christians could not swallow that line, and left. Others held on desperately: Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will not die but live! They believed, and listened to Paul who was trying to wean them away from the habit of thought of a general kind of life after death. To Paul the issue was: life or death.

Jesus saw it that way too. There was death in the world and he had to replace it with life. Death was the greatest enemy of man, the payment for sin, the boundary of a man’s timed existence. Every man is living on borrowed time; death has the power to cut it off, and when your time is up, you are politely and irrevocably finished. Jesus knew that if a man died he became nothing, that the whole man died and that the whole man was finished, eternally.

But Jesus lived through it. Christ came back out of nothing. Only a man who was God could do it. By doing it he paid for sin once and for all, and took away Death’s license to do business. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will not die but live!

The respectable thing to do nowadays when somebody dies is to call the undertaker, and the minister. The minister and undertaker work hand in hand. What follows is just so much secular sentimentality. Something becomes secular when you lose sight of the Christian meaning at the center and start paying attention to details out on the periphery. Once away from the center you lose focus, and details out on the periphery loom up large and very important. Sentimentality is false feeling and selfish love. When somebody dies nowadays a lot of nonsense is carried on in the name of respectability, often simply secular sentimentality.

First, the remains are professionally arranged and made presentable for a showing. Then the pagan rituals are softened down and civilized into a memorial service, maybe at the funeral parlor. Notices begin in Latin, that dead language—In Memoriam—to give it style, the sound of tradition and decorum. Finally, the survivors bear up under the shock and strain, and wear black. The women cry more or less; close relatives come to pay their last respects; and distant friends say it with flowers. It is a sad, artificial affair.

It is a sad artificial affair because it is sub-Christian and even non-Christian! A Christian knows that a dead man is no longer a man, a dead body is no longer a body: it is a corpse. What is left over is not the temple of the Holy Spirit but a corpse, and the care undertaken to show it off is misplaced tenderness and wasted money, a blatant mockery to the man who was. Jesus would say curtly: let the dead bury the dead.

A Christian knows further that a memorial service, if it is a memorial service, is pointless. How can a service held to the memory of a man fail to degenerate into eulogy or empty appropriatenesses? Eulogy gives superficial edification, and so much of memorial memory is the looking back of Lot’s wife, a gentle kind of idolatry. When all are gathered together at the grave to do honor to the dead man, an angel of the Lord should appear: why do you stand here looking down? He is not here; he is risen!

Finally, a Christian knows it is human to weep when a loved one leaves; it is human to be sincerely sad when a loved one goes away. But, those sorrowing must take seriously the comfort of the Resurrection. Too much of grief is often deep down an understandable but selfish love; you miss the security father gave, you miss the pleasure and help the wife gave, you miss the love and laughter the child gave, you feel sorry for yourself and distractedly do as if you are sorry for the resurrected one. Tears are actually out of place when a man dies—unless he is an unsaved one. Then you may cry! Cry your heart out, cry in chorus, cry until the heavens can hear you! For the terrible tragedy is only just begun with the bizarre funeral procession, and the cries of the loved ones left behind is a poor consolation to the lonely dead man crying himself, weeping and gnashing his teeth for all eternity.

Once upon a time Jesus went to a funeral. He was late, but the people were still crying. Martha ran out to meet him, “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.” Jesus said, Your brother shall rise again. Martha knew her catechism well, “Yes, Lord, I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day, but.…” No, Martha, said Jesus: I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes on me stays alive even if he “dies”; every living person who believes on me shall never die! Do you believe this? Martha edged away to go get Mary who understood the Lord’s talk better: “Yes, Lord,” she said evasively, “I believe you are the Christ, the Son of God.” With that she turned impulsively, left Jesus standing there, and ran to get her sister, Mary, a little frightenedly. Jesus stood still and watched her run.

Mary was in the house with her friends and mourners crying together. Martha slipped in and whispered, “The Teacher is here and wants to talk to you.” Mary got up quickly and went out. The Jews who were trying to console her followed dutifully, supposing that she was going to go to the grave to weep there. When Mary saw Jesus she fell down at his feet and reproached him sorrowfully, “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw Mary, whom he loved, sobbing at his feet, and the crowd of mourning Jews around her weeping and wailing, Jesus became indignant and said, Where did you put him? “Come, Lord, we will show you,” and the wailing procession wound its way slowly out to the graveyard, a black huddled group of sobbing women.

Jesus was provoked, vexed by this display. At the same time an unutterable sadness fell over him; it was such a pitiful picture, so human, so earthbound, so stupidly closed to genuine comfort. Here was the Resurrection before their eyes and they could not see it; he had said it clearly: I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes on me does not die but has everlasting life. They had ears to hear and couldn’t hear; all they could do was cry. How could you get through to such people, how could you get through and change such unbelief, people so trapped in their traditional customs? Even Mary whom he loved was in the first row weeping. It was too much for Jesus. He wept.

That impressed the Jews. They got paid for crying; they wept on demand and knew how difficult it was to work yourself up into tears. Their practiced eye had never seen anything like Jesus’ crying before. How he must have loved Lazarus, they said, Look at him cry! Their professional admiration only added insult to the irritation. They mistook divine frustration to preach Life for a technically perfected tribute to death. Jesus was thoroughly exasperated. Roll away the stone! he said. “But, Lord,” protested Martha, “it stinks in there.” Roll away the stone! commanded Jesus impatiently: Didn’t I tell you, Martha, that if you believed you would see the glory of God! They rolled away the stone and Jesus prayed: Sorry, Father, that I was angry and impatient and said ahead of time that your glory would be shown off here; not for my glory but for your glory I said it, to try to teach these people here that you have sent me as Lord of the Resurrection. Then Jesus said aloud: “Lazarus, come out.” And Lazarus came out, and the crowd was astounded and even afraid. Don’t stand there, said Jesus; unbind him.

It is 20 centuries ago that Jesus spelled out the meaning of the Resurrection letter by letter, but the Holy Spirit still has trouble breathing it into our everyday look at death and manner of dying. The trouble is we generally think merely chronologically the way the unbelievers do, one thing after another. The Bible talks chronologically too, but it does not speak only that way. It speaks eschatologically, too, one thing instead of another. When Jesus Christ said “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes on me shall not die but have everlasting life,” he did not mean later. He meant now, yes or no. Theologians may debate about a soul-sleep and an in-between period and split hairs about a natural-spiritual-and-eternal death, but the Word of God is more than theology. The Word of God has a simple message and speaks directly to the heart of a man on the street: if you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ you will not die but live!

I believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of the Resurrection, and know I cannot die. When I shall go to sleep I will not want those who are still awake to cry, to mourn my sleeping—because I am alive, not dead! One thing is certain: the Christian who takes the Resurrection seriously dare not view death in the usual burdensome way, because by default he then falls in line with the prevailing secular sentimentality. Those first women of long ago who took precious linen, costly ointment, and tenderly laid the corpse of Jesus in the grave may be excused. The idea of the Resurrection was new, so strange, so incomprehensible: life instead of death! But after twenty centuries of the Holy Spirit’s working in the Church of the resurrected Christ, who can find an excuse? The Christian does not die and should not carry on as if he were dead or were ceremoniously burying another dead Christian. The sentimental world may find unfeeling the behavior dominated by the Resurrection; but David was living close to the Lord when he paid his respects to his infant son, that is, prayed to God for his infant son while he was alive, and when the son fell asleep David stopped praying, washed his face and went back to work. What the sentimental world finds unfeeling is the Word of the resurrecting Lord: I am the resurrection and the life; let the dead bury the dead.

When grownups today pay special attention to dying and keep trying to make death look natural, they are busy at a morbid kind of make-believe. To know that death really is make-believe, and to behave accordingly: this is the gracious wisdom of a child, a child in the Kingdom of the Resurrected Lord.

Calvin Seerveld holds the B.A. degree from Calvin College, the M.A. from University of Michigan, and is presently pursuing philosophy studies at Free University, Amsterdam.

The Canadian philosopher Ztir, in his Wisdom’s Folly, discerningly classifies prejudice as a “disease of the mind,” and appends this further observation: “Prejudice is the life-blood, the spark, the very heart and core that keeps alive an inflammatory spirit and enriches a malignant intellectualism.” Any one who concerns himself with the true aspects and characteristics of prejudice must endorse this classic description. Prejudice may become so firmly rooted, so crystallized in the life as to ludicrously warp man’s mental concepts, thus rendering him incapable of harmoniously functioning in the community. An insular prejudice may produce a psychoneurotic individualism, and a general prejudice may produce an eccentric behavior pattern in society. A false ideal, an abstract idea, an oblique dogmatism may be the basis for individual or community prejudice.

Emotional And Irrational

Prejudice may develop along two major lines, emotional and irrational. The former frequently has its roots anchored and grounded in economic poverty and social injustices, while the latter is the result of deliberate and indiscriminate irrationalism. Many people are hedged about by some form of emotional or irrational prejudice, or both. In a sense, they cease to be individuals, and become but moving echoes and spectral reflections of surrounding circumstances or dominating powers.

God in his creative wisdom made man an ambivalent creature. That is, man is so constructed mentally as to be capable of both hatred and love. Every mortal is able to love. Every mortal is also able to hate. Aggressive prejudice eventually solidifies into morbid hate. The will, that majestic faculty governing man’s behavior, is the pivot upon which rotates the choice of prejudice or love. If the will has been sanctified by God and circumscribed by divine love, then degradation into prejudice and hate becomes impossible. If the human will is influenced and controlled by the caprice and the carnal nature of man, then inordinate prejudice and violent hate follow in natural sequence as the logical fruits of the sensual vine.

Deserving Of Censure

Among the eccentric behavior patterns that make up the catalogue of erratic human dispositions, none is so deserving of censure as is prejudice. Prejudice is an effective block to mental and spiritual development. Certainly no emotional indulgence is so effective to the self-destructiveness of the inner soul. Prejudice may properly be classed as a disease of the mind, producing a vintage of inner and outer frustrations and distortions. The fruits of prejudice are too numerous and well-known to warrant detailed enumeration here. Sufficient to acknowledge that the river of intolerance and hate, like a searing flow of lava, criss-crossing its way across the plains of human existence and tragically spilling its swirling contents into society, has its source and power in prejudice. Greed, war, discrimination, anti-Semitism, frustrations, and neurotic dispositions—in short, the whole of human sin has its roots and foliage infested by the pernicious rot of prejudice.

Webster defines prejudice as “preconceived judgment,” “judgment without adequate grounds,” “an opinion adverse to anything without just grounds.” Prejudice may even be defined “adverse disposition.”

Against Better Judgment

Millions of people are caught in the irritating cynicism of this neurotic indulgence. Like a malignant cancer, prejudice distorts the mental life and colors it with opaque thought patterns. Prejudice in full growth may so put the mind into a lethargic state that facts and even eternal truths become but glaring irrelevancies. The ears hear, but the mind is unable to discern. The full impact is lost because the mind is walled in by prejudice blocks. Frequently prejudice so overpowers the mental faculty of man that he moves within the framework of an illusionary world, blind to the world’s realities and an obstruction to its progress. Man’s sense of direction is thus impaired, causing him to move and act emotionally and irrationally. Indeed, prejudice so stirs the inner passions and baser motives of man as to lead him to acts of violence and indiscretion, against his better judgment.

Prejudice knows no boundary lines. It runs the gamut of religion, science, philosophy; in fact, it is present in all areas of intellectual contact. Russians and Americans, British and Japanese, African and Chinese alike fall into this eccentric neuromental pattern. Prejudice is present in every strata of society, even in the gilt-edged halls of intellectual aristocracy. Business and industry, trade and commerce, university and grade school alike deal with it. These themselves often become centers of prejudice propagation. No sphere of unregenerate society is free from the weight and imposition of prejudice.

The Religious Zone

Possibly in no field is the exhibition of prejudice more clearly discernible and its effects more disastrous than in the field of religion. Paradoxically, ours is an age of conspicuous enlightenment on the one hand, but on the other, astonishing religious prejudice. Men and women stalk our land, spiritually impoverished, religiously illiterate, like living specters, in mental bondage to some religious prejudice. A multiplicity of reasons, ranging from the wholly insignificant to the sublime and the absurd, are advanced as justifications for clinging to prejudices. Many have built about them an iron wall of prejudice, a curtain of separation, fully as effective as the Russian curtain and more disastrous in its eternal effects. All this for no other reason than that it suits a warped ego and embellishes what eventually becomes a cultivated dullness.

The Christian world is saturated with men and women whose religious prejudices cannot permit them the God-given freedom of opening the Holy Book, thus making connection with the vitalizing power of Jesus Christ and his law of divine love. Pharisaically and sanctimoniously, many avoid contact with spiritual and mental freedom lest it crack the wall of separation. These, like Peter of old, in effect look upon a large segment of humanity as “Gentile” and “unclean.”

Loss Of Spiritual Vitality

Religious prejudice may be traced through the history of the Church. The early Christian Church lost a vast treasure house of spiritual vitalization because of its early anti-Judaistic prejudice, whereas Judaism today stands spiritually naked and stripped of rich gems of Christian spirit and Christian truth because of her prejudicial rejection of Christianity. Religious prejudice has robbed both Judaism and Christianity of rich mutual God-given truths. Attempts at making up these deficiencies have produced for Judaism and Christianity a crust of traditions, ceremonies, and religious apologetics, all carrying the earmarks of carnal man.

Kings and pontiffs have been laid to rest, spiritually and intellectually impoverished because of the high wall of prejudicial separation. Scholars have been laid to rest, blunted and stifled in their intellectual pursuits because prejudice separated them from great wells of spiritual and intellectual depths. Men and women through long centuries have been leveled to the dust, seeking ways and means to circumvent organized prejudice. The annals of mankind are replete with the records of multitudes who have groped along the avenues of life, as it were, living a blind life within the brain, inwardly strangled in spirit, because of religious prejudice. Only eternity will reveal the horror of human dullness, self-inflicted, with which the human race has contended because of prejudice. Certain it is that the master deceiver, Satan, has no more effective weapon against enlightenment and spiritual progress than the thick walls of prejudice. Religious prejudice, like a huge iron gate, must be unlocked from within.

Race Prejudice Is Ugly

Another area of human contact that provides a rich source of morbid pleasure is the area of race prejudice. Race prejudice is as old as the human race. There never has been a time in which mankind was not guilty of some form of race discrimination and color prejudice. Thus the ancient Egyptians looked upon their contemporary nations as inferior and worthy only of cruel subjugation. The haughty Greeks, puffed up with their intellectual greatness, goaded by their scholastic genius, looked upon all contemporary peoples through the eye of prejudice, and saw their surrounding nations only as rude and barbarous. The Romans looked upon all other nations with contempt and disdain, worthy only of annihilation. It was a day of supernationalism, a time of Roman ego. It was a time of prejudiced racism. So severe were the implications of race and society prejudice that millions of their fellow Roman citizens never rose above the level of animalism, sold and bartered in the public auctions.

A Continuing Evil

Race prejudice has not lost its appeal through the centuries. Champions of race prejudice, super-racism, Aryanism, Nietzscheism, survival of the fittest, abound to this day. The nations of the world fought a bloody war to eliminate two major twentieth-century champions of super-racism. The one sought to build up a Gothic-German empire. In his prejudiced drive for a super race, Hitler determined to stock his “new earth” with only the “select.” And Mussolini, a beguiled and prejudiced Caesar, was, at the hour of his death, permitted to see the world “right side up” from his “upside down” view. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini rose above race prejudice.

Race prejudice has produced violent wars, insurrections, civil and religious crusades, tragedies and horrors almost beyond human grasp and human description. Thus the Roman emperors with fiendish glee watched the slaughter of men, women, and children in gladiatorial contests in the old Roman Coliseum. The stench of the dead and dying frequently made the huge stadium unfit for use for weeks. In contemporary history we have seen the same unbalanced mentality at work building up a super race by annihilating millions in the ghettos and gas chambers of Europe. Race prejudice is fundamentally a question of distorted nationalism, embellished with specious arguments. Can a genuine Christian be a hater of any race?

Prejudice And Human Dignity

Prejudice is degeneracy. Even one hundred years ago the world could not afford the eccentric pleasure of religious and race prejudice, much less today. Through trade, commerce, international thinking and living, the human race has moved into such close confines that religious and race prejudice is suicide and global catastrophy. Arab and Jew, Russian and German, Japanese and American, white and colored should seek the adoption of every conciliatory spirit to make not merely co-existence possible, but co-living a reality. Fifty years ago leaders in a big world could afford to act like little men, but today’s hour of international close proximity calls for big men in a small world.

Prejudice, like a many-membered octopus, is today strangling and laying waste. Prejudice is silently alive, lurking in full strength. In the totality of its effect upon the human race, prejudice is more devastating than either the A-bomb or the H-bomb. Communism, political and religious totalitarianism, inordinate nationalism, all have their roots and source in prejudice. Prejudice, like carbon monoxide, stifles from within.

Dying With One’S Biases

Millions have died within the cloistered walls and cells of prejudice. These have drawn the curtain of narrowness about them and suffocated. Great attempts have been made through the centuries, by force, legislation, dogmatics, to eradicate prejudice and hatred from the human neurotic dispositions … yet none of these avenues of human guidance have been as successful in the unshackling of men’s minds as has been the simple action of Christ’s love upon the soul and mind. The mind, the citadel of human rationalism, can be gloriously enriched with the crowning joys of Christian culture, love, peace, kindness and brotherhood, so that prejudice will find no soil for root or propagation.

The dignity of man must be preserved, but it can be preserved only by the recognition of the true value of the human soul. A look at Jesus Christ, our Lord in all his beauty and simplicity, his character adorned with the characteristics of love and graciousness, the absence of emotional and irrational prejudices—can by contrast reflect man’s shortcomings and sinfulness.

O. J. Ritz is a Canadian who distinguished himself in business. In 1933 he was converted to the Seventh-day Adventist faith, and attended the Seventh-day Adventist Seminary in Washington, D. C., receiving the M.A. degree. He has held pastorates in Toronto, Montreal, and New Haven, Connecticut.

(Part II will appear in the next issue)

In recent months the question, “Are Seventh-day Adventists evangelical?” has been troubling many Christians. This question has been accentuated by many articles on both sides.

The recent publication of an important volume by the Seventh-day Adventist leaders gives the discussion added significance (Seventh-day Adventists Answer Questions on Doctrine, a commentary on questions addressed to the movement).

Among The Cults

For many years SDA has been labeled a cult. Conservative Christians, particularly, have said hard things about the group and its doctrines. But this situation is changing. Some voices now lifted in defense of SDA are from theologically conservative ranks. Walter Martin, in several recent magazine articles (expected soon to be expanded into book form) comes to the defense of SDA, declassifying it from the list of false religions, and approving it, for the most part, as evangelical. One of the leading SDA writers, LeRoy E. Froom, asserts in Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge that the Adventists “do not regard themselves as just another sect, but as continuators of the arrested Reformation, and in the spiritual line of the apostolic faith and the Protestant dissentients.”

While an exhaustive examination of SDA teachings must now take cognizance of contemporary literature as well as that of the past, certain preliminary observations should be made in approaching the question whether SDA is entitled to evangelical approval or acceptance.

The SDA book, Questions on Doctrine, does not disclose the names of its authors. They remain anonymous. It is admitted that the authors cannot and do not speak with authority, since “official” statements come only from the General Conference in quadrennial session. At present the movement’s only official statement appears in the Church Manual and is entitled “Fundamental Beliefs of Seventh-day Adventists.”

A second fact must be stated. Opponents of SDA have not only written harshly about the group in the past, but they have accused SDA of deliberate falsehood and intentional deception. This writer assumes that the men who have prepared the new SDA materials are sincere and honest in the provision of answers to questions about their beliefs.

Rejection Of Modernism

During correspondence with some leaders in this movement, the writer was asked a significant question. It is this: “Why are we Adventists, who believe the Bible to be the very Word of God, and [here he appends all of the basic doctrines of the faith]—why, I ask, should we be classified by many as a ‘non-Christian cult,’ while prominent modernists who openly deny every evangelical truth that we, with all sound Christians, hold dear, are treated as Christians, and often classified as ‘orthodox’ in common parlance? I confess I cannot fathom or follow such reasoning.”

The answer to this question is twofold. First, it is unfair to classify SDA with Christian Science or Jehovah’s Witnesses. There is a great gulf which separates the former from the latter. Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witnesses deny most of the basic tenets of the Christian faith. They deny the true deity of Christ, his atoning work on Calvary, the virgin birth, and so forth. Their errors are gross and obvious. The term “cult” properly belongs to these and other groups like them. Secondly, we observe that the question now at stake is not whether modernists can be called Christians (that is worthy of discussion in itself) but whether SDA can be labeled evangelical or orthodox. And the last question can be determined only by a careful examination of the announced doctrines of the group.

The Doctrinal Conflict

SDA admits that it espouses certain teachings that evangelicals normally reject. For example, SDA teaches conditional immortality, annihilation of the wicked dead, soul sleep and foot washing. In the opinion of this writer, the term “evangelical” is not to be bestowed on the basis of acceptance or rejection of such concepts. A man can be a genuine believer who believes in soul sleep, providing at the same time he accepts the truths essential to salvation.

However, there are some SDA teachings with which evangelicals must disagree strongly. Thus, Mrs. Ellen G. White, the movement’s key founding figure, chief prophetess and authentic teacher, states that Satan originated the doctrine of eternal torment. Now, it is one thing to reject the doctrine of eternal torment and to conclude that those who embrace it do so in error. It is quite another matter to claim that Satan is author of the doctrine, which leaves evangelicals who find a biblical basis for belief in eternal torment with the impression that Mrs. White is blaspheming the voice of the Holy Spirit in Scripture.

The problem of semantics complicates any evaluation. As the index to her writings confirms, Mrs. White leads one to believe that at Christ’s coming the sins of God’s people are to be placed on Satan. Does this mean, as critics assert, that Satan becomes man’s sin-bearer? If it was not the intention of Mrs. White to make Satan man’s sin-bearer, her framing of language is all the more unfortunate.

Role Of Ellen G. White

Moreover, decision as to SDA’s evangelical status is further complicated by the movement’s attitude toward the writings of Mrs. White. This attitude differs from that of scholars who highly regard the writings of Augustine, Calvin, Luther, and so forth. To the best of my knowledge no one has ever written a book aiming to show that Calvin or Luther was always correct doctrinally and in personal life and ethics. Yet a prominent Adventist, Francis Nichol, wrote the volume, Ellen G. White and Her Critics, to demonstrate the immaculate nature of Mrs. White’s teaching and life, defending her not only against all charges of plagiarism, lying, and breaking her word, but against doctrinal vagaries. I know of no SDA literature that hints that Mrs. White was ever wrong. This has led, and can only lead, to the notion that there is an intrinsic affinity between her writings and those of the Bible. This attitude toward the writings of Mrs. White corresponds in some measure to the regard with which other movements hold the writings of Mary Baker Eddy and Joseph Smith. Even in Questions on Doctrine one reads that her words are accepted as “inspired counsels from the Lord,” and while they are not equated with Scripture per se, one sees in the framing of the words the suggestion that Mrs. White was inerrant. Evangelicals normally reserve inerrancy for the Word of God alone, and extend this neither to Calvin nor Mrs. White! Contemporary evangelicals who interrogated SDA could profitably have phrased their inquiries about Mrs. White’s writings to get an answer to this question: “Did Mrs. White err at any point theologically or in ethical and personal life, or was she inerrant in all of her teachings, pronouncements and ethics?” SDA says that the test of Mrs. White’s writings is the Word of God itself, but then they conclude that her writings harmonize with the Scriptures and thus they appear to possess a native inerrancy. No one will say this about Calvin, Luther, or any other Protestant leaders.

SDA claims its teachings are based upon the Bible. But an examination of its “Fundamental Beliefs” published in the volume Questions on Doctrine reveals some interesting exceptions. “Fundamental Beliefs” contain 22 propositions, beginning with a statement on the Scriptures and the Trinity, then moving through the gamut of theology. In each instance the biblical passages are listed at the end of each statement showing the grounds on which their convictions are founded. Without biblical backing, however, are statements 13, 14 and 15. These deal with one of the touchiest segments of SDA teaching—the 70 weeks and 2300 years and the cleansing of the sanctuary. The date 1844, which involves the 2300 years, and the cleansing of the sanctuary are pivotal to SDA faith. Destroy these and certain conclusions are self-evident. There would then be no adequate basis for the existence of SDA. But there are no definite statements in the Bible which support the views of SDA at this point. Their conclusions are derived from the teachings of Mrs. White, in turn, are the result of her interpretation of the Bible. Even this consideration, complex as it is, does not determine whether SDA is evangelical.

One acid test marks off Reformation theology from both sacramental theology and all other viewpoints. This has to do with soteriology. Framed another way it answers the question “How is a man saved?” Sacramental theology differs from Reformed theology in the sense that baptism becomes essential to salvation. This is true in Romanism. Unbaptized babies do not go to heaven, according to Romanism; they go to infant limbo. Romanism also teaches that salvation is the result of faith plus works. Reformed theology says salvation is by faith alone. One of the charges consistently leveled at SDA is that it teaches salvation by grace plus works. It is the charge of legalism. This charge relates both to the Sabbath question, deliberately unmentioned up to this point, and to the keeping of the other commandments. If SDA is involved in the Galatian error against which Paul wrote, then it is not evangelical. If, on the other hand, the charge of legalism is more academic and formal than real, then perhaps SDA will fall within the minimal orbit of evangelicalism. Is this charge of legalism one of language and semantics, or does it touch the structure of reality and mark off SDA from evangelicalism? To this question we shall address ourselves in the second installment of this article.

Since Seventh-day Adventism was formally organized in 1863, the movement has attracted a world membership approaching the million mark. Their Sabbath schools have a membership of more than a million. The question of the movement’s status as a cult or a legitimate evangelical manifestation is now in wide debate. Some related issues are covered in this article by Harold Lindsell, Dean of the Faculty at Fuller Theological Seminary, a church historian who has long appraised the cults.

In Weymouth’s translation of Acts 25:19 we find “They quarreled with him about … one Jesus who had died, but—so Paul persistently maintained—is now alive.” Christians even before Paul’s day “persistently maintained” that Jesus is alive. The Christian church would not have begun had it not been for this assurance. Kenneth S. Latourette, a first rank historian, says, “It was the conviction of the resurrection of Jesus which lifted his followers out of the despair into which his death had cast them and which led to the perpetuation of the movement begun by him. But for their profound belief that the crucified had risen from the dead and that they had seen him and talked with him, the death of Jesus and even Jesus himself would probably have been all but forgotten (History of Expansion of Christianity, Harper, New York, 1937, Vol. I, p. 59).

Person And Event

The New Testament scholar C. H. Dodd writes, “The resurrection remains an event within history, though we may not be able to state precisely what happened.… The assumption that the whole course of Christian history is a massive pyramid balanced upon the apex of some trivial occurrence is surely a less probable one than that the whole event, the occurrence plus the meaning inherent in it, did actually occupy a place in history at least comparable with that which the New Testament assigns to it” (History and the Gospels, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1938, pp. 108 f.).

But to consider, what sort of person is this testimony to the Resurrection about? In the first century there were those who believed that Nero would return to life and resume his demonic activities. In the Middle Ages it was thought that Frederick Barbarossa would awaken in a cave to lead his people in time of stress. Yet, of all of the sons of men in history, was there anyone whose life remotely approached that of Jesus of Nazareth’s as being worthy of a resurrection? The New Testament scholar John Knox says, “It was not the fact that a man had risen from the dead but that a particular man had done so which launched the Christian movement.… The character of Jesus was its deeper cause” (The Man Christ Jesus, pp. 13 f.).

Biblical Teaching

When we are investigating ancient historical documents, we ask, “Are they trustworthy, accurate, and in sufficient number?” There are over four thousand manuscripts or major parts of manuscripts of the New Testament! We have two complete New Testaments from the middle of the fourth century. There is a fragment of the Gospel of John that New Testament scholars date as early as 117 A.D. This is within 25 years of the time that Gospel was written, if we assume a date for it late in the first century.

Paul of Tarsus gives us the earliest written testimony to the Resurrection. He was a persecutor of the Christians who, of course, became an ardent follower of Christ. Perhaps the most brilliant intellect of the first century, he was a theologically trained Jewish monotheist who became utterly convinced that Jesus was God’s Messiah raised from the dead by the Eternal and alive forevermore. The physical suffering Paul later bore for this testimony is extraordinary. He tells us that five times he received 39 lashes, three times was he beaten with rods, once stoned, and three times shipwrecked. The fact of the Resurrection is the heart of a letter written by Paul to the Corinthian Church not more than 25 years after the event. This letter is admitted by all scholars, even the most radical, to be an authentic letter of the Apostle.

All four of the Gospels have extended accounts of the Resurrection. Mark, the earliest Gospel, was certainly written within 40 years of the life of our Lord. John, usually considered the latest Gospel, was composed within 65 years of that time. We find the Resurrection a part and parcel of every one of the New Testament books. No other books have been studied with such minute and scholarly care, and their substantial accuracy has long since been assured. The Dead Sea Scrolls also corroborate the type of life and faith we find described in the writings of the New Testament.

The records themselves bear every evidence of genuineness. The artlessness and simplicity of the four accounts argue strongly for the reality of their content. They agree in broad outline and yet there are a number of minor difficulties in the Gospels that preclude collusion on the part of the writers. The story could not have been fabricated in order to prove a philosophical doctrine of the Resurrection, for in such a hypothetical fabrication we would not have been told that some “did not believe.” Jesus would have been made to appear to other than his disciples. Mary would have recognized Jesus at once in the garden. The two disciples on the way to Emmaus would not have been described as so slow of heart to believe.

The Resurrection story is in keeping with our knowledge of the characters involved. Mary Magdalene, who had wept as she anointed the feet of Jesus, weeps as she stands by the empty tomb. Peter and John run to the tomb to verify the story of the women. John outruns his older companion, but John the spiritual hesitates to go into the tomb. When the impetuous Peter lumbers up he barges right in. Later as the disciples were fishing on the Lake of Galilee it is the spiritually-minded John who recognizes Jesus on the shore.

One of the most remarkable details that establishes the action as in keeping with the characters is the record telling that the napkin wrapped about the head of Jesus was found in a place by itself (John 20:7). Here we find Jesus in complete character with what we know of him. He is the master of every situation from the wedding at Cana to the trial before Pilate. On that first Easter morning when the spirit reanimated his body, Jesus was not perturbed in the least. He carefully folded the cloth in a place by itself. This is what we would expect Jesus to do. Lord of the tempest, he was Lord also of the grave.

Eyewitnesses And Contemporaries

An historian always takes into account the type of man who records the events. More reliance, for instance, is placed upon statements of Tacitus than those of Josephus. But in connection with the resurrection of Jesus, we have eyewitnesses and contemporaries of the event. Eleven disciples plus some women actually saw the risen Lord under circumstances which give every evidence of genuineness. Paul claims to have seen him and refers to more than 500 others who likewise had seen him, half of whom were alive at the time Paul wrote (1 Cor. 15:6–8).

Every one of these witnesses were men who loved the truth passionately. Honest to the core, they could not have perpetrated a “pious fraud.” Jesus rightly said that a tree brings forth fruit after its kind. It would have been psychologically impossible for the disoiples to have invented the account of the Resurrection. Robertson Nicoll said long ago, “Christianity as a moral phenomenon could not have been built on rottenness.” Conclusive testimony on this question comes from the Jewish scholar, Joseph Klausner: “It is impossible to suppose that there was any conscious deception: the nineteen hundred years’ faith of millions is not founded on deception. There can be no question but that some of the ardent Galileans saw their Lord and Messiah in a vision” (Jesus of Nazareth, p. 359).

Hallucination Theory

In endeavoring to account for the disciples’ insistence upon having seen the risen Lord, some have tried to claim that they had had hallucinations. It is well to remember that the disciples themselves did not at first believe in the Resurrection. Psychology teaches that hallucinations are the product of previous brain states. Of this E. Y. Mullins wrote, “But there were no brain states produced by previous experience to furnish the contents of this extraordinary hallucination. Resurrection appearances were not a staple of Jewish history. Jerusalem was the last place in which the morbid imagination of a woman could convert a large group of cowardly men into moral heroes.” For those who maintain that it was psychological, that it happened in the minds of early Christians and of Paul as a sort of intensification of their memory of Jesus, we can comment: you could not say this of Paul, for he probably had not known Jesus in the flesh. There is a shallowness of psychologism about this view.

People who have hallucinations, dream dreams and see visions, keep on having them. Jesus appeared at least 10 times through a period of 40 days and then the appearances ceased as abruptly as they had begun. Hallucinations never come to over 500 people at one time, and men who are subject to hallucinations never become moral heroes. The effect of the resurrection of Jesus in transformed lives was continuous, and most of these early witnesses went to their deaths for proclaiming this truth.

Denial Of Death

Before there could have been any resurrection of course, there must have been a death. A clever writer once tried to prove that Jesus had not actually died, that he had fainted and that the dampness of the tomb had resuscitated him. But what does the record say? When his side was pierced with the spear, blood and water came out. Medical men tell us that this condition probably came from a ruptured heart, the blood filling the pericardium and then separating into plasma and the heavier red corpuscles. Roman soldiers were familiar with death; they knew when a man was dead, and they reported the death of Jesus to Pontius Pilate.

Long ago this “swoon theory” was completely discounted by Strauss, himself an unbeliever in the Resurrection, when he said, “It is impossible that a being who had stolen half dead out of the sepulchre, who crept about weak and ill, wanting medical treatment, without bandaging, strengthening and indulgence, and who still at last yielded to his sufferings, could have given his disciples the impression that he was a conqueror over death and the grave, the Prince of life—an impression which lay at the bottom of their future ministry. Such a resuscitation could only have weakened the impression which he had made upon them in life and in death; at the most could only have given it an elegiac voice, but could have by no possibility changed their sorrow into enthusiasm, have elevated their reverence into worship.”

Spirit Manifestation

There are those today who do not believe that life returned to the physical body of Jesus. According to their view it was the spirit of Jesus that convinced the disciples that he was alive and lives today. Now, although we must minimize in no way the spiritual nature of the Resurrection, we are aware that a spiritual or psychical resurrection is not sufficient to account for the facts given in the record. If there occurred no “physical” resurrection, what became of the body of Jesus? “Physical,” of course, is not a fully accurate term in this connection for it carries no connotation of what Paul refers to as a “spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15:44), which is certainly what Jesus possessed in his resurrection appearances. But “physical” is nevertheless used here because it best defends the reality of the resurrection body of our Lord. There can be no doubt about the fact of the empty tomb. It was a specific new tomb belonging to Joseph of Arimathea. If there had been confusion about tombs, Joseph would have had to settle the matter to his own satisfaction. Pilate, the Roman soldiers, and the Jewish enemies of Jesus knew in which tomb he had been buried.

But we ask again, what could have become of the body of Jesus had there been no resurrection? It was certainly to the interest of the Jews that they produce the body, for that would have put an end to the preaching of the Resurrection. It was to the interest of the Romans to produce the body also, because they were legally involved. And the disciples desired to have the body because, according to their custom, they wished to anoint it. If they had removed it, they would have taken the grave clothes (John 20:6, 7). Being honest as well as good men, it is certain that they could never have believed in the Resurrection had any of them had the slightest idea as to the location of the body.

Thus, according to the record of Scripture, Jesus’ body was resurrected, and was not only one that could perform certain physical functions such as eating (Luke 24:43), preparing food (John 21:9 f.) and teaching (Luke 24:27 f.), but a body marvelously changed, that could pass through closed doors at will. Karl Barth, in the forefront of leading contemporary theologians, points out that in all other stories of resurrections death has never been transcended. It has merely been postponed. But in the resurrection of Christ, a new form of life appears. The risen Christ is clearly independent of space. He appears behind closed doors. He vanishes at will. He is independent of time. And seemingly his presence can be both on the road to Emmaus and with Peter. But he is not spirit apart from body. Jesus says: “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39). The disciples touch him. He eats before them. The existence of his real body is just as certain as any other, and yet in its new form it is impossible for us to describe the nature of it (Holmes Ralston, A Conservative Looks to Barth and Brunner, Cokesbury, Nashville, 1933, p. 34). Here are the words of Barth: “We must not transmute the resurrection into a spiritual event. We must listen to it and let it tell us the story how there was an empty grave (italics ours), that new life beyond death did become visible” (Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, Philosophical Library, New York, 1949, p. 123).

When you begin to employ rationalistic explanations for the event, you run into dead-ends for each. If there was a physical resuscitation as with Lazarus, then there must be a tomb somewhere with the body of Jesus put there after a few more weeks or years of life. Oscar Cullmann calls the resurrection of Christ a new creation, “The Christian doctrine of the resurrection is the calling into new life by the power of God. The doctrine of the resurrection connects it with sin. Death comes as a result of sin. Death can be conquered only as sin is atoned.… Death as such is the enemy of God. God is life … the resurrection of the body is a new act of creation … (italics ours) it is tied to the whole act of redemption. Christ’s body was the first resurrection body” (Harvard Ingersoll Lecture, April 26, 1955).

Fact And Event

Finally, in our consideration we must remember that the Resurrection was an event as well as fact. By event we mean that all the factors in the history of God’s dealing with Israel culminated in the wondrous birth, life, teaching, miracles, death and resurrection of Jesus, and that the founding of the Church came about through faith that the totality of these experiences did establish him as the long-promised Messiah, the Saviour of the world.

Albert Outler of Yale tells us, “The Gospel’s declaration of man’s redemption still stands or falls with the Christian conviction of the reality of the Resurrection as event rather than myth.” To quote John Knox again, “The resurrection is as truly a part of the event as the event itself.… Just as memory had an objective occasion in Jesus so memory had an objective fact in the resurrection.… The resurrection undoubtedly occurred.… The resurrection is a mighty sign of the entire event—it represented a unique act of God designed for our salvation” (Harvard Lecture, April, 1947).

A crowning proof of the Resurrection is the amazing change that was wrought in the disciples themselves. One day they had been hopeless, “Let us go that we may die with him.” Another day they had been cowardly, “And they all forsook him and fled.” Even Peter, who had vehemently avowed his loyalty, had later denied Jesus with oaths and curses. But after the Resurrection these same men became fearless and bold and brave. Except for the fact and event of the Resurrection, no adequate psychological cause can account for the change in Peter that transformed him in six weeks from a craven, cursing, denying fisherman to a bold protagonist saying to the religious leaders of Jerusalem, “Ye have taken (Jesus) and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: Whom God hath raised up.…”

The continuing proof of Christ’s resurrection is, of course, in what happens to the lives of those who have believed, and believe today, that God did not allow his Holy One to see corruption but raised him from the dead through his own power and majesty. He continually raises us from the death of sin into the life of righteousness, and gives us assurance that we too shall some day rise to live forever with him. God is the same yesterday, today and forever. And the risen Christ, the Son of God, sitting at God’s right hand, evermore saves to this end.

Hillyer H. Straton is Pastor of First Baptist Church of Malden, Mass. Born in Waco, Texas, son of Dr. John Roach Straton, he attended Mercer, Columbia, and Harvard, Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and Andover-Newton Theological School. His next book will be A Guide to the Parables of Jesus.