Ideas

Low Tide in the West

Low Tide In The West

Christianity Today’s fifty contributing editors have relayed their impressions of the spiritual situation in the West. This editorial survey gathers their convictions into focus.

Any absolute appraisal of the panoramic present runs the risk of revision tomorrow. When one plumb-lines the world of spirit and morality, intangibles multiply. Nonetheless, an inventory of the ethical and spiritual reserves is timely and proper at year-end, if only to shield men from needless despair or groundless optimism.

*

Some observers fear that the refashioning religious revival must be rejected as substantially spurious, and even decidedly detrimental. Professor John H. Gerstner, of Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary, warns that the spiritual surge swirls about a show of shallowness in pulpit and pew. Full-orbed Bible doctrine is a refugee, while Liberalism, Neo-orthodoxy and truncated Fundamentalism are regnant. The doctrine of justification by faith alone, regarded by Luther as “the article by which the church stands or falls,” is widely disregarded. The result, he contends, is miserably disappointing: the church now influences society in inverse proportion to her numbers; immorality widens within the church with little effort at discipline; the will to suffer “for righteousness’ sake” is withering.

Professor Gordon H. Clark of Butler University finds no evidence of a revival. He points to “the flippancy and venom directed against biblical Christianity by the writers of college textbooks and the almost complete absence of specifically Christian teaching in the universities.” As always, he remarks, small groups and individuals “fight manfully against our present evil world,” but there seems to be “no trend away from socialism in politics, ecumenicalism in the church and antagonism to the word of God everywhere.”

General William K. Harrison, United Nations truce delegate in the Korean war, shares much the same mood: “The major part of the visible religious revival is superficial rather than deep, spurious rather than sincere.” Much of the widespread religiosity, the General thinks, is motivated by the search for security “in the world”; while it results from a realization of man’s inadequacy in our dangerous and lawless world, it remains a manifestation of the unregenerate self, involving no true repentence. C. Darby Fulton, executive secretary of the Board of World Missions, Presbyterian Church in the United States, voices misgivings over “the quality and depth” of spiritual concern. Aspects of it seem serenely superficial. Many nominal Christians understand little even of the cardinal doctrines of the church concerning God, sin and salvation; much preaching and believing fails to rise above the level of humanism; “a kind of baptized sociology” is often mistaken for Christianity; and “the zeal of the church to influence every aspect of life, commendable in itself, has sometimes risen no higher than a sort of partisanship in the political, economic, social and public issues of the day.”

From England and Scotland, likewise, storm warnings are sounded over the religious climate of the day. Dr. W. E. Sangster, president of the Methodist Union in Great Britain in 1950, states tersely: “There is no clear religious revival among us yet.” Professor Norman C. Hunt, of University of Edinburgh, reports in much the same vein from Scotland: “Undoubtedly the Graham crusades continue to bear fruit, and the churches have permanently benefited, but there is no indication of widespread spiritual renewal and turning back to God. I see few signs of real revival.”

*

A negative preparation for revival is widely acknowledged. The Rev. Richard C. Halverson, of International Christian Leadership, sees the prodigal modern man, frustrated by the turn of world affairs, driven Godward by the sheer failure of alternatives. The futility of his pursuit of earthbound security (economic, social and political) has yielded a vague nostalgia for God. Dr. Harold John Ockenga, pastor of Boston’s Park Street Church, finds the disillusionment over secularism and materialism attended by an interest in religious reading and preaching, in prayer, in religion itself, and indeed in God and a theological solution to the problems of the day. Professor Roger Nicole of Gordon Divinity School discovers a sound basis for spiritual benefit in this frustration over man’s own attainments, since man’s despair of his own ability is one of the Holy Spirit’s preparatory works on the way to true conversion. But he warns that people in this mood often turn “to any kind of panacea that seems to proffer a solution,” and finds reason to doubt that they are genuinely reborn who under these circumstances alone profess interest in the Christian faith.

Although not too hopeful about the present state of affairs, Professor W. Stanford Reid of McGill University, in Canada, thinks man’s anxiety after two world wars and his depression into quasi-humility offer impressive parallels with the historical situation during the century preceding the Reformation. “That man is becoming more and more skeptical of the powers of his own reason, and more and more doubtful about his ability to attain to ultimate Truth through science, as is manifested by the writings of Planck, Dingle, Jeans and Eddington, is a significant indication of the present trend. Along with that, the fact that the intellectual or quasi-intellectual such as the university student is no longer committed to unrelieved scoffing at Christianity also shows that certain changes are taking place.” Professor Reid now teaches in a university where he started his undergraduate work, and reports that “the difference in attitude amongst students from the early 30’s compared with now is rather startling.”

*

Conspicuously lacking, however, are signs of a corporate sense of divine dependence in national life either side of the Atlantic. The major orders of life, domestic, economic and political, are not firmly fastened to spiritual priorities. The American scene reflects a steadier emphasis on the indispensability of faith in God for the democratic way of life, but this seldom gains a specifically Christian exposition. In Britain, international tensions touching the Middle East have propelled the debate over state policy into prominent discussion of the standpoints of morality and political expediency. Public debate over Franco-British intervention in Egypt revolved around this issue, an indication that the corporate sense of right and wrong was not wholly submerged; churchmen of all denominations voiced protests, and many political Conservatives admitted to guilty consciences. Yet, Professor Hunt observes no sign that the critical international situation is shaping a sense of need of divine intervention. There has been no call to national prayer, and no leading statesman has called the nation to repentance and to dependence upon God.

The grades of society, as ordered levels, have scarcely been ruffled by the modern stirring of spirit. Speaking of Britain, Dr. Sangster remarks that “there is no obvious awakening among the masses of artisan workers whose whole leisure seems absorbed by football pools, television and other secular hobbies. Nor at this moment do the leaders of the churches see a clear way into this area of life.” The American scene, likewise, despite vigorous pulpit emphasis on the necessity of an active participation of laymen in Christian witness, reflects only a random return to a conviction of Christian vocation in the crafts and professions. Dr. Earl L. Douglass, editor of the Douglass Sunday School Lessons, stresses that multitudes remain unlifted by any spiritual upsurge. The interest in religion exists side by side with a rising crime wave, increased juvenile delinquency, increased liquor and alcohol consumption and gay living among the middle-aged. The current religious fad, he thinks, “may lead to a real religious revival later,” but it is as yet unattained. Mr. Halverson, noting that even the religious resurgence itself has a secular side, reflected in the earthy books, songs, motion pictures and even church attendance it produces, gives much the same verdict: “This is the opportunity for revival; it is not revival.” Dr. Paul S. Rees, of First Covenant Church, Minneapolis, observes that “church statistics in the United States may have little connection with the vigor of an informed and infectious Christian faith, but they do testify to the heightened prestige of the churches and the wistfulness, not to say nervousness, of modern Americans.”

While concurring that the revival of interest in religions “surely can be the first step in a revival of religion itself,” Dr. Samuel M. Shoemaker proposes that “rather than merely assessing from the side lines what is taking place, it seems to me we had all better go to work to turn the interest into true conversion.” What gives many of CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S contributing ediors cause for alarm is that many professing Christians, among them a phalanx of pastors, are themselves enmeshed in the temptations of the times. Some churches, eager to enlarge their numbers, are ignoring the basic requirements for membership.****“This shallowness of pastors who are looking for numerically large churches, financially huge income and statistically large records, militates against revival,” writes Dr. Oskenga. In Washington, D. C., a minister called to a church of 3650 members, told his congregation that he was unable to find a mailing address for 1000 of them and noted that his denomination is looking for addresses for 2½million names on its rolls.

*

Professor Faris D. Whitesell of Northern Baptist Seminary asserts that “we are too much in the grip of material prosperity, too busy with gadgets and inconsequential chores, and too self-centered to give ourselves to that praying and personal witnessing which wins our neighbors. The spiritual-moral renewal has not yet gone deep; it is stirring the surface.” Dr. Geoffrey W. Bromiley of Edinburgh comments: “Much evangelistic work of the definite evangelical type is superficial in its results and Christians themselves are apathetic in all the things that ought to claim their attention and far too conformed to this world in outlook and standards.” Dr. Rees writes: “The shallowness of the spiritual stream within the churches themselves should concern us. Church membership means too little. Confusion as to the nature of the Gospel is too prevalent. It means a non-contagious witness by the people of the churches to the people of the world. Too great by far is the tendency to associate Christian life with the amenities of culture: economic success, social standing and ‘peace of mind’.”

Dr. Frank E. Gaebelein, headmaster of Stony Brook School, remarks that, “Alongside the hopeful signs of spiritual renewal, we must set the continuing materialism and moral softness of much of American life. So long as secularism pervades great areas of our education, so long as the shoddy ‘entertainment world’ dominates our recreation and so long as our way of life knows little of self denial, we must ask whether the current revival is deep as well as widespread.” The similar sentiment of Dr. Philip E. Hughes, voiced from London, is relevant far beyond his homeland: “The nationwide apathy, godlessness and materialism (not in a philosophical sense) present an alarming picture and the churches are doing little more than scratch the surface of the problem. Christians are themselves infected with the materialistic outlook, with the concern for comfort and security in this world, with complacency and lack of compassion for the multitudes that are as sheep without a shepherd.”

*

While no widespread revival is conceded, a firm conviction prevails that the evangelical enterprise is gaining ground. The undoubted conversions which have accrued to the evangelistic thrust in the last decade seem to attest this. “Within this religious ferment,” in General Harrison’s words, “God has saved and is saving many thousands of persons from sin through personal faith in Jesus Christ.” Dr. Bromiley evaluates the Scottish situation in much the same mood of caution: “We have perhaps seen a first move of the tide, but it would be premature to be over-optimistic about either moral or spiritual renewal. Billy Graham made an impression which has left religion a talking point in wide circles—but my own assessment at the moment is not too hopeful. We have just begun to move in the right direction, perhaps, but we have a long way to go and have not gone far.” Wistfully, he adds, “things are better perhaps in the States.” “States-side,” Dr. Cary N. Weisiger III, of Mount Lebanon U.P. Church, Pittsburgh, evaluates events “at the grass-roots level as the beginning of a revival of the Christian religion. Many people are open to the teachings and claims of Christianity.” As Dr. Gaebelein puts it, “The Gospel is today receiving a wider and more ready hearing than ever before. Under the stress of world tragedy, there is an openness to Christian truth coupled with a response to vital doctrine that was not evident in the earlier years of the century.” Yet Dr. Gaebelein is hesitant in his appraisal: “Whether these facts constitute genuine revival is debatable.” On the Canadian scene, Professor Stanford Reid reports: “I would not like to suggest that there is a great religious revival just around the corner, for religious revivals do not come until there has been a much greater growth in humility and knowledge, but nevertheless, I do feel that it is in this direction we are headed. Only the Spirit of God, however, can make it effective.”

*

Gratitude for the gains of the decade is, however, not absent. Always there is the flurry of recognition that the Graham campaigns have vindicated the legitimacy of mass evangelism in an age of unbelief, even though they may not yet represent a decisive breakthrough. Darby Fulton thinks that “much in the present spiritual awakening affords solid ground for encouragement.” He voices “apprehension that our Christian social concern today may be moving under the momentum of a spiritual motivation provided by a generation that had a deeper and more virile faith than ours, and that we are living on an ‘unearned spiritual increment’ that may exhaust itself in time unless it is replenished by a revival of faith in the cardinal doctrines of Christianity.” Yet the reality of spiritual-moral renewal in our day can be supported, he feels, by “the rapid increase in the number of churches, the substantial rise in church membership, better attendance at services of worship, more candidates for the ministry and Christian service, popular interest in religious themes and more active participation of the laity in the activities of the church.”

Professor F. F. Bruce of Sheffield University thinks the student situation in Britain, and to some the classroom also, reflects promise. “Since World War II there have been signs of a deeper seriousness and sense of responsibility, especially (but not exclusively) among young men who have served for some time in the armed forces. When evangelistic missions to students are arranged, there is a widespread willingness to listen to what the missioner has to say and a scarcely articulate hope that what he has to say may be the word they are waiting for. I regard as one of the most promising signs in this country the increasing number of fully committed Christian teachers who are recognizing their vocation to be the teaching of the Bible in our national schools.” Dr. Sangster also touches this trend: “The nearest thing we have in Britain to a religious awakening is at the universities. At all our universities the religious societies are doing well. This does not belong to one kind of churchmanship or one interpretation of the faith. The Christian religion as such is being examined afresh … and winning its way. The time has passed when intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals looked upon Christianity as beneath contempt. It is fairly freely conceded in those circles today that a man can be intellectually respectable and a Christian.

*

Not only are there gains, even if modest, but there are hopeful omens. Dr. Weisiger finds one in “the gathering together in many churches of small groups of Christians for real fellowship based upon the Word of God and prayer.” Dr. Gaebelein cautions, however, against expectations within history which impose a secular rather than biblical prospect upon the mass movements of unregenerate men. “Any estimate of today’s spiritual climate must be measured by what Scripture teaches regarding God’s purpose in this age,” he writes. “If we believe, as the Bible plainly declares, that the divine plan is not world conversion but world evangelization, then we may see in the present religious situation revival to the extent that, in ever-increasing numbers, the sovereign God is calling out of the world a great multitude to be His own.”

Alongside hopeful anticipations, moreover, must be ranged the responsibilities of Christians in relation to the world needs of our day. General Harrison, nearing retirement in his military career, writes: “What a wonderful privilege have ministers of Christ to proclaim His Gospel, and what frightening responsibilities! May God give them grace to expound His truth in all its fullness and saving power.” And Professor Whitesell voices this uneasy plea: “We need more and better biblical preaching and biblical living. Our age needs more emphasis on repentance as a total life-reversal and dedication as total life commitment to Christ. I hope it does not take total war to bring us to the New Testament level of Christian experience.” The retreat from repentance, the neglected imperative of our age, is noted also in Dr. Douglass’ reply: “I am not deeply impressed with the present-day ‘revival’ of religion. It is good as far as it goes, in fact inspiring. But it lacks one thing—repentance. The present ‘interest’ in religion will evaporate unless there is a widespread soul-searching and earth-shaking repentance on the part of Christian believers.”

*

The call to concerted commitment and conduct is spirited. “Thank God,” writes Dr. Shoemaker, “for the great voices that can speak to great crowds. But we need to supplement these with tens of thousands of ministers and laymen who have become contagious through their own deepened conversion, and have learned how to reach individuals and speak to congregations and groups about what Jesus Christ does to change human lives. They need to learn also (and it is a new art for many of them) how to draw together small companies for a time to study and consider the Christian faith, under competent leadership that does not talk too much, but draws the company into the conversation; then helps these people get into sustained groups which they lead themselves, and in which they grow and find inspiration for their daily work and their Christian witness.” Positive preparation for revival includes, in Dr. Ockenga’s words, “deeper consecration on the part of Christian people, united praying, believing and witnessing in the church, and a willingness to face spiritual shortcomings.… Unless greater heart-searching, introspection, inventory and dedication are manifested among church members, beginning with us pastors, we will not have revival and will miss our opportunity.” “I do not think,” writes Philip Hughes, “that the solution lies in more planning or organization, but rather in more prayer and devotion to Christ on the part of the Lord’s people. We need desperately to recapture the spirit of the Acts of the Apostles before we see and experience the same dynamic power as they knew. Then we shall prove once again the relevance of the simple elemental Gospel of Jesus Christ to the needs of our world today. But we must learn what it means to take up the Cross daily and follow Christ.”

*

Mr. Halverson, International Christian Leadership, inquires soberingly whether the crest of opportunity may not already have subsided. The favorable conjuncture, he thinks, “is clearly on the wane, and if it is not exploited soon, the result will be that our ‘last state will be worse than the first.’ The faithful preaching and teaching of the Bible are the tragic missing ingredients in our twentieth century awakening. The one thing that will bring a ‘decisive turn’ if it is not too late already is a revival of biblical preaching, teaching, reading, studying and memorizing.” Dr. Weisiger develops the same theme: “The depth of spiritual penetration,” he says, “will depend entirely upon the extent to which the Bible is presented and appropriated as the authoritative word of God. Unless people begin to read the Bible, to study it, to memorize it, and to apply it to their problems, the revival will prove to be a passing mood, wistful but unfruitful.”

A summary statement may perhaps be sketched in the words of Professor Ned B. Stonehouse of Westminster Theological Seminary. He finds the resurgent religiosity not too different from that of Athens in the lap of paganism and needing still to be confronted by the Christian Gospel. In Dr. Stonehouse’s words, “The many evidences of an interest in religious things, as shown by the popularity of religious books, the utilization of religious themes in popular music, and especially the impact made by many preachers, are without doubt of great moment. To a large extent, however, all of this adds up in my judgment to the conclusion that this is a day of great opportunity rather than of extraordinary spiritual conquest. Paul found the Athenians very religious and seized upon this fact as a most significant ingredient of the man’s basic makeup to preach the Word. My best thought, therefore, is that, rather than dwelling upon the superficiality of the present response, we should find in the present phenomena encouraging points of contact for the proclamation of the Christian message.”

Christianity Today’s contributing editors, therefore, face the year ahead with an awareness that, while the name of Jesus Christ more often glides constructively into general conversation, it is still far removed from pre-eminence. No doubt a wave of evangelism is abroad in the world, and even a ripple of revival, but the spiritual current is still shallow; indeed, it is low tide in the West.

***

A Dividing Gospel In A Deciding World

Only as the Gospel divides is its preaching effective. To many persons, this fact comes as a shock, but it cannot be otherwise. Christ came that there might be a Gospel to preach and he is still a stumbling stone to some and a rock of offense to others. The offense of the Cross is still with us.

How foolish to attempt to make Christianity popular with the world. It is the antithesis of the unregenerate world order. The more effectively Christ is preached, the more vigorous will be the opposition. Satan has not surrendered and the bitter warfare, the outcome of which was determined at the Cross, has yet to see its final denouement.

The Gospel divides between truth and error. Jesus is truth. The source of power in the Church is the truth which she proclaims. The Scriptures are truth and the Holy Spirit bears witness to that truth. It is inevitable that confrontation with truth divides between those who accept and reject it.

The Gospel message, God’s revealed truth, is still His power unto salvation to all who believe. The Apostle Paul affirms that its message is supernatural in origin and supernatural in its effect on those who hear and accept it.

Because it is supernatural in its origin it demands of those who hear it an act of faith, a submission of the will to one who is above all.

Decision to accept or reject is a point at which division occurs.

Ours is an age of tremendous achievement. Under these conditions, it is exceedingly difficult to admit that only those who have Christ in their hearts have light and that all others are groping in darkness. We worship at the shrine of the finite intellect, forgetting that it is a reverential fear of and trust in Almighty God which is the beginning of wisdom.

Walking in the darkness of an unregenerate worldly wisdom, men find themselves buffeted by the currents and cross-currents of pride, greed, lust, hate and other evidences of sin in the human heart, and stumble over these barriers to progress.

Once the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ shines upon the situation, not only the cause but also the cure of world disorder becomes apparent to those who emerge from spiritual blindness into God’s divine light.

Not for nought are we told that men love darkness more than light. It is a humiliating experience to see ourselves in the light of God’s holiness and from that experience many turn away.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ, received, believed and acted upon, clarifies man’s thinking on sin, on righteousness and on judgment to come. It is this message which makes clear the demarcation between that which is evil and that which is good. Purity becomes the enemy of impurity; love of hatred; generosity of greed; unselfishness of selfishness; compassion of indifference; humility of pride.

This conflict of the Gospel has been in evidence down through the ages. Our Lord said: “I came not to send peace, but a sword.” There is the inner conflict between right and wrong; there is ever-present struggle in the social order as a whole.

This devisive effect of the Gospel is no reason for pessimism. A Christian is not in a hopeless minority for God is with him.

Abraham Lincoln, when told by a friend: “I am sure that God is on our side,” replied: “My concern is that I may be on God’s side.”

Every individual is on one side or the other. Throughout the world the Gospel must be a dividing force. It is a message of love, of redemption, of hope and of action. It is also a message of judgment to come. A decision must be made—for or against.

Mencken from the Grave

In an afterlife, H. L. Mencken is an intriguing idea. He always hoped there would be none, but he did say—when he realized he would not get everything done—that it would be nice to have one life for observation and another for comment. He felt, though, that a place where there would be no sinning people—even preachers—would be boring indeed; there would be nothing to laugh at!

Wherever he is now, Mencken is passe as far as this world is concerned. And with him lie many of his radical ideas. Along with speak-easies and the village atheist, he represents an era gone.

And most Christians are glad. United States 1956 with its fashionable churchgoing and its staid approval of evangelists makes quicker soil for growing Christians than the humus that Mencken stirred around Bryan. But though the soil seems to produce rapid growth, this may be the rocky ground of which Jesus spoke as producing plants that could not bear adversity.

Churchgoing America 1956 prefers the millions who quietly snooze in church pews to the one who threw brickbats at the stained glasss. And one can hardly blame them. But even from the grave Mencken’s missiles may stir Christians today—and perhaps even toughen them.

How irritated he would be if some of his brickbats became solid building blocks!

No one would accuse Mencken—the cynic, the cocky, the iconoclast, the sceptic, the impious, the arrogant, the irreverent, the blasphemer—of consciously backing Christianity or helping Christians. It would be unkind! And yet in what he said was so much basic truth that he often defended what are Christian ideas despite himself. Though he stood a long way from the church, some of the bricks he threw at religious superficiality, at hyprocrisy, at pious dishonesty are the same bricks that Jesus used, the same ones His followers must handle if they would build the church by His standards.

Mencken said much that needs to be said today—both to Christians and to those who go along on the 1956 Religion Bandwagon just for the ride.

Mencken And The Supernatural

For one thing, Mencken insisted that Christianity was basically supernaturalistic. With telling thrusts he made his point again and again that it was based on supernaturalistic revelation, not philosophy or science.

And this is a point old-fashioned Modernists all too often ignored. Mencken never forgot (many professing Christians do) that Christianity teaches that “without faith it is impossible to please God.”

Of course, supernaturalism was to Mencken superstition. God and ghosts, hell preaching and snake oil for rheumatism—they were all the same; and there was as much evidence for witches as for immortality. “Faith may be defined briefly,” he said, “as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.” Since he felt he did not accept anything on faith, every Christian was, ipso facto, a fool, since being a Christian demanded acceptance of the supernatural by faith.

Obviously Mencken was not proselytizing for Christianity when he thus insisted on the supernaturalism of Christianity. But he drew the line clean in a way many with more claims to Christian truth than he could well emulate.

Mencken saw Christ’s supernatural Resurrection as central to Christian doctrine and demanded to know if it really happened. If it did, he admitted, there might be something to Christianity. If not—and of course he chose that side—it was “sheer nonsense.”

He said he preferred science to theology, but he honestly admitted that science too left “dark spots.”

The whole matter of Mencken at the Scopes trial was concerned with the same idea. To Mencken, Evolution removed the necessity of supernaturalistic creation and was therefore the only reasonable answer to the conundrum of man’s presence on this planet. Since he felt it was obvious that the Bible taught supernaturalistic creation, Evolution proved Christianity again a fool’s philosophy. In the same way he believed Copernicus’ discovery not only proved that the earth revolved around the sun but also that the “Old Testament was rubbish” instead of revelation. There is little indication that he would have been intrigued by the problems of metaphor, myth, and symbol that contemporary Christian thinkers struggle with. If the angel blew from the “four corners of the earth,” then the earth was square; and, since it had been proved not to be, then the Bible was false and irrelevant. Within his naturalistic presuppositions there could have been no honest alternative in any event.

Men are civilized, Mencken said, in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The larger a man’s stock of faith and “adamantine assurances,” the more stupid he was in Mencken’s eyes. Perhaps there would be fewer wrangles and splits in Protestant churches if Christians reserved their faith and “adamantine assurances” for the essential and supernaturalistic elements of their faith and allowed some of Mencken’s doubt to creep into their vociferously held opinions on other matters.

Mencken sometimes seems to be battling windmills or adolescents converted last Saturday night—youths who know the seven steps to becoming and remaining Christian and are sure that these cover everything necessary. Mencken seems to think that all Christians, like enthusiastic youths, believe they can reason out or know the answer to every question. He’s there to assure them that they can’t. But not all Christians are as stupid as he makes them out; some not only hold to the Christian truth which the human mind can understand but also unabashedly believe the Christian revelation of those things which have not “entered into the heart of man.”

Words From The Silence

Mencken’s pronouncements and example in regard to the use of words is another way he can speak to Christians even from the grave. He has been called the greatest prose stylist America has produced. He loved to shock and overstate. He insisted on being read. And he worked at finding a vital idiom that would arouse interest. He wanted American language for Americans. He liked the specific, concrete, even vulgar word because it got the meaning across sharply.

This is the impulse that provides a new rendering of the Bible every few years. This is the contention of teachers of English and of religious journalism or creative writing in Christian colleges when they red-pencil out the religious cliche and the jargon that is meaningless to the uninitiated and worn out to the rest.

Mencken tried a body blow to religious shibboleths by using cliches for satiric purposes—e.g., signing his letters “I pray for you constantly.”

Christian writers almost without exception can learn in Mencken’s school. Vital truth deserves vital garb.

Ideas That Smash Idols

Obviously it was not his language alone that made Mencken readable and also read. He had ideas and he scattered them freely although he said that the average man prefers cliches and resents new thoughts. Mencken knew how to ask questions. Few Christians—even the propagandists—excel in either of these areas. What campus pastor can hold a group of sophomores spellbound for twenty minutes of listening the way Mencken could through a long essay? And then give them enough for a week’s bull sessions in addition? If one can, let him then try a group of Saturday night stein wavers like those Mencken delighted every week!

Admittedly it is easier to be exciting when one’s ideas are iconoclastic like Mencken’s. But there are some things in Christianity that might smash a few idols too if they were preached interestingly. And what Christian would be ready to admit that Christianity is potentially less exciting than Menckenism?

You name it and Mencken had an idea on it—language, politics, food, literature, liquor, religion, music, minorities, liberty, democracy, Puritanism, sex, the theater, etiquette, prohibition, and a hundred others.

And if he didn’t have an idea—or more especially if he did have—he could ask a good question, particularly about Christianity and its application. He asked the tough questions professing Christians often don’t dare ask: Is Christianity a matter of deeds or beliefs? How far can human reason go? Can a man be a hypocrite and a Christian at the same time? Why do mission bums listen to the preaching? Who is qualified to censor the press? How do we know that God hasn’t turned the world over to a lesser deity to operate? What was the origin of the double standard? What is the psychological basis of commercial morality? Why do churchmen believe it unlucky to meet a black cat and lucky to find a pin? What happens at death? Why are artists so often scoundrels? Is the soul merely the product of wishful thinking? How does a man decide to be a martyr for a religious belief?

What could not a Menckenesque Christian—preacher or teacher or parlor conversationalist—do for the Christian cause?

One Day At A Time

Though he may not have realized it—and would surely have been irritated to have it pointed out—Mencken agreed with Jesus that men ought to live one day at a time. He declared that he woke every morning to an interesting life in which there were still men who were “worse asses” than he! His version of the day-by-day walk—to get through life with the least possible pain and the most possible entertainment—is different from Christ’s “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” in its selfishness but not in its emphasis on living one day at a time.

With this idea, it is foregone that Mencken would be hard on the pie-in-the-sky boys who live not for today but only for the rewards of the future. He declared that a mountebank who thought only of “tomorrow’s cakes” would be less dangerous with power than a “prophet and martyr” living for rewards in heaven.

In this he turns the light of truth on the professing Christian who is merely in it for what he can get—who tithes because he believes he will become richer, who serves the church for fifty years so that he may wear a crown for eternity—the irreligious of the class of Peter when he asked, “What then shall we have?” The tragedy of Mencken was of course that he missed entirely the biggest thing in the life lived one day at a time.

The Art Of Puncturing Frauds

For all his exaggeration and posing—he apparently often took the side least likely to succeed simply for kicks—Mencken was refreshingly honest on important issues. He curried favor with no one and punctured frauds wherever he found them. He did not aim for popularity; he aimed for truth and scorned those who, he felt, did not.

He believed that religion hurt clear, honest thinking. He felt that religious people cared nothing for the truth so long as they retained “a hopeful and pleasant frame of mind.” That he was shockingly close to right can be easily demonstrated by the perusal of a dozen stories in so-called “Christian literature”—papers and books produced by religious presses. With sickening monotony they present a world where life is pleasant for the good, where sinners are few and soon fail, die, or get converted, where the Christian—especially the preacher—can do no wrong. Mencken, along with old and new orthodoxy alike, saw men as sinners. “Man is inherently vile,” he said, “but he is never so vile as when he is trying to disguise and deny his vileness.”

Mencken hated hypocrisy and untruth. And he made no bones about it.

Though he had no time for the homo boobus, Mencken loved individual liberty. And he fought hard for it. Whether the ban was Prohibition or a statute preventing the election of Socialists, the prosecution of young people who talked against war, the prevention of the teaching of Evolution, or Boston’s Watch and Ward Society’s Index, he battled. He was willing to suffer personal loss when he felt that the personal liberties of others were at stake.

In our day when religion is popular we too often forget that it was individuals whom Christ came to free—not majorities that He came to enslave. We forget too that it behooves us to defend the freedom of minorities in every age because we are bound to be a minority ourselves, since “few there be who find” the Way.

What Mencken overlooked, of course, is that even the minority sometimes champions a freedom that is only a form of slavery after all, and that Christ alone frees man from moral bondage.

Gibes Of A Tamed Cynic

Mencken is dead. And so are many of his opinions. But his scorn of hypocrisy and dishonesty, his insistence on human liberty, his daring to ask questions, his clear and pungent language, his insistence on straight thinking—these still live. And they lived—perhaps less colorfully—in his day too because they are basically Christian.

From his grave even Mencken can help Christians—and even with his brickbats. He can help insofar as he speaks truth. But the Christian must go beyond Mencken’s negations to the positive message which was Christ’s as well—that the supernatural exists and that in it there are answers.

If we do, Mencken may really (though unwittingly) help undo the work of a life spent, we can’t help believing, on the wrong side.

But as we read him how we wish we had some Christain Menckens!

Virginia Lowell Grabill (wife of Dr. Paul E.), Ph.D. in English from University of Illinois, is Professor of English and Chairman of the Department at Bethel College, St. Paul. Formerly she taught at University of Illinois, and then at Western Illinois State. She is former editor of His magazine, and author of numerous articles.

To A Scientist Friend

Your stories of the shrunken sea’s abandonOf palm trees high within a mountain range,And of the tiger (saber-toothed) whose skeletonSunken in tarry pit, defied time’s change,Were open door to where past ages are:Mountain and lake repeat primordial criesOf life and death that echo in my ear.Today this mystery before me lies:These wild bird feathers fallen by the way—Grey clip of wing, quill torn, swirl auburn flame;“Life values I cannot describe,” you say.O ageless woe, and beauty without name,He lives Who heard the ascending creature fall,And ancient shore and lair, forsaken, call.

RACHEL CROWN

Cover Story

Barth’s Doctrine of the Bible

It is a most happy coincidence that the celebration of Karl Barth’s seventieth birthday should have seen the completion of the translation of the second part of Volume I of his Dogmatics. The English-speaking world has had to wait almost twenty years for this continuation of the series, although it is hoped that the other volumes on the doctrines of God, Creation, Reconciliation and Redemption can now follow in fairly regular sequence. But the importance of the initial volume has not diminished, for it is here in his Prolegomena that Barth lays the foundation with his doctrine of the Word of God. In particular, the second part volume treats in some detail of Holy Scripture, and contains a full and balanced statement of Barth’s maturer doctrine of the Bible. It is with this specific topic that we are to deal in the present discussion.

Setting of Barth’s Exposition

First, we must note the general setting of Barth’s doctrine of Scripture within his general treatment of the divine Word. It follows the long chapter on the revelation of God as a work of the Trinity, and precedes a concluding chapter on the proclamation of the Church. In other words, as the Word written, Scripture is preceded by the Word revealed and followed by the Word preached. The chapter on Scripture (I, 2, pp. 457–695 E.T.) is itself divided into three main sections, each of which has two sub-sections. The doctrine of inspiration is handled in the first section, “The Word of God for the Church,” under the more detailed headings “Scripture as a Witness to divine Revelation” and “Scripture as the Word of God.” The other sections are devoted to questions of authority and freedom, and although they have their own importance, we may discount them for our present purpose.

It is a pity that considerations of space do not allow a more rigorous analysis of this first section (pp. 457–537). All that we can do for the moment is to indicate some of the main points that are made, listing the valuable emphases and marking the points which call for criticism or query. A consideration to bear in mind is that the whole of this volume was written almost twenty years ago, and it may well be suspected that in some respects Barth himself might place the emphasis differently if he were to rewrite the work today. At any rate, there is a marked shift in his doctrine of reconciliation (IV, 1) in answer to the wholesale subjectivisation of Bultmann.

Beyond the Liberal View

We may begin with some confident endorsements. For example, the practice of the Church is often better than its theory in the acceptance of Scripture’s authority. And it is as well to start from the fact of biblical supremacy as Barth himself does. The doctrine of the Canon is also thoroughly in the tradition of the Reformation—even to the point of admitting that the Church’s decision might conceivably be overthrown by the self-authentication of newly-found documents. Barth thinks of this only in terms of possibility, his main point being that the Church’s judgment is fallible as such and can only follow the self-witness of Scripture. A further point is the definition of Scripture primarily in terms of witness. This is contested in some quarters as depreciatory of the true nature of Scripture. But it is difficult to see how the concept can legitimately be resisted, for we must obviously safeguard the primacy of God, and especially of the Logos, in and over Scripture, and Jesus Himself refers to the Old Testament Scriptures in these terms: “They are they which testify of me” (John 5:39). It is worth noting that Barth categorically asserts the uniqueness of Scripture in this capacity. The indefinite article “a” is added in the English title to the first sub-section to give it a more natural ring, but it is not actually in the German, and Barth goes out of his way to scotch the widely circulated caricature that the Holy Spirit “might” use other books and make them the Word of God to various individuals. In Barth’s theology there is no space for this kind of “might.” The truth is that the Holy Spirit does not do so. Only the Bible is a primary witness and therefore the Word of God. Christian preaching and literature may also be secondary witness and therefore the Word of God too, but, as Barth points out later, they are this only in strict subordination to Scripture. The holy books of other religions or philosophies are ruled out in toto.

Role of Biblical Presuppositions

Another important and welcome contention is that a truly historical study of the Bible demands an acceptance of the Biblical presuppositions and teaching. It is not enough to try to use “historicist” methods, for the Bible is an interpretation and demands a wider decision. To try to sift out the “historical” elements from the theological is ipso facto to reject the latter and therefore to become unhistorical in the wider and deeper sense. The matter cuts very deep, for in this as in all our dealings with God we must allow our study to be determined by its object, i.e., Jesus Christ Himself, and therefore as far as possible accept only the biblical presuppositions. Barth realizes that this is not easy. That is why he is mild enough in his strictures on the Aristotelianism or Cartesianism of many of the seventeenth century divines. But he is surely right in principle. If the Bible is so important, it must be the Bible in terms of itself, not the Bible in terms of a current or traditional philosophy, however imposing. No wonder that Barth reminds us that genuine reading of the Bible is possible only in obedient humility, and therefore with prayer.

Compromise of Reliability

When he comes to the historical reliability of the Bible, Barth is not quite so happy. He allows himself to make rather sweeping and categorical judgments which he mostly ignores in his own practice and which seem largely designed to clear him from a possible charge of Fundamentalism. He does not actually discuss these matters in detail, but takes it that the historical deficiencies belong to the human side of the divine word in Scripture. How far the christological analogy allows us to adopt this attitude is a query to which we may return. For the moment, however, we may object that Barth seems to commit the very error of judging Scripture which he had formerly rejected, and that he uses the presuppositions of historicism to do it. If his criticisms of an unhistorical historicism are justified, as they may well be, it is surely puzzling that Barth adopts this attitude. On the other hand, if we are to make historicist judgments, we must treat each case on its merits, and miracles especially will constitute a permanent stumbling block. All in all, the remarks on errors, and so forth, seem very like lip-service to current notions, but the matter evidently needs to be thought through with rather greater rigor.

Inspiredness Versus Inspiration

We may now turn to inspiration proper, and here the main contention of Barth is that attention has been too conclusively directed to the given fact of inspiration, i.e., what he calls the inspiredness of the Bible. In a valuable historical survey he shows how very quietly this aspect came to the forefront, and naturally resulted in rigid and sometimes docetic views of inspiration. As he sees it, it was a hardening in this direction, and the consequent attempt to prove rationally the integrity of Scripture, which led to the reaction of Liberalism. A better way indicated by the Reformers was not followed by their successors. This better way, while it involved the traditional doctrine, consisted primarily in a new emphasis on the dynamic operation of the Holy Spirit. And it is this way which Barth himself attempts to follow. The all-important thing in inspiration, as Barth sees it, is the present action of the Spirit giving life and actuality to the apostolic and prophetic word as it is heard and read. In other words, inspiration is not an attribute or state. It is an event. This event has happened in the past, so that we can look back to it; and it will happen again in the future, so that we can also look forward to it. Inspiration itself, however, is the present act between this recollection and expectation. It is the divine act which cannot be seized or stated because as soon as it takes place it becomes again the past which we recollect, and the future which we expect. This is the heart of Barth’s doctrine of inspiration, and it is by this assertion that it must ultimately stand or fall.

We must not misunderstand it. Barth does not envisage it as a thoroughgoing subjectivisation. It is not just as the act in me that inspiration is important. It is as the act of God in me. Nor is this an unrelated and capricious act. It is referred strictly to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ and its attestation in Old and New Testament Scripture. These are given facts which stand outside the momentary act. It is also to be remembered that the recollection and expectation are of definite events of inspiration, not only in our own lives, but also in those of others. Even in his dynamic and subjective preference, Barth plainly does not intend that the doctrine should be subjectivized and therefore undermined.

At the same time, the teaching is not immune from serious criticism. In the first place there is the biblical objection. Barth attempts to sustain his thesis by an exegesis of the two main texts, in I Timothy and II Peter, and passages in I and II Corinthians. But his attempts to read into the passages on inspiration a movement from recollection to expectation—with the assertion of inspiration between—are not a very convincing exposition; and although there is a valuable truth in his understanding of 2 Corinthians 3, it seems to be given a disproportionate emphasis in relation to the whole. Again, the historical argument is not by any means conclusive. No doubt a rationalized orthodoxy did contribute to the rationalistic revolt. But so, too, did the false subjectivism of the various “Inner Light” movements. And while the Reformers emphasized the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit, they did not abandon a strict doctrine of inspired authorship. To be sure, they knew better than to try to prove, and therefore to master, the truth and authority of the Bible. Its ultimate validity lay in its true Author and Expositor. But all the same, the fact that it had this Author and Expositor meant that it was itself an inspired test, and this is presupposed in all Reformation discussion. At any rate, the evidence may be read in different ways and cannot therefore be pressed in support of any particular interpretation.

Does the Christological Analogy Hold?

But the understanding gives rise to the very basic questions which we have to address to Barth’s teaching. Before we pursue this, we will return briefly to the earliest question of the christological analogy. As Barth puts it, the human phrasing of the Bible corresponds to the human nature of Christ as the divine Word in the Bible does to the divine. But he will not allow that there is a corresponding unity of “person.” The unity of words in the Bible is a unity of special divine act. This is a distinction of great importance, and it is worth noting that it was a distinction drawn by the Reformers (e.g., implicitly by Zwingli and quite explicitly by Cranmer) in the parallel doctrine of the sacraments. Indeed, we may say that in certain respects it is a necessary and inevitable distinction. But can we really press it quite so far as Barth does, or in the same direction? Is it a genuine basis for ascribing historical error to the Bible, or virtually rejecting its objective inspiration?

Priority of Inspiration

At this point, the question merges into the second, whether the term inspiration is correctly used of the internal work of the Spirit in relation to the hearers and readers. Barth is undoubtedly right that this is necessarily complementary to the work of the Holy Spirit in the authors. An inspired Bible is of little value unless it comes alive for the reader—just as Christ Himself must be perceived and known as Christ if His gracious work is to avail for us. Yet the fact remains that as Christ was and is the Son of God and Savior irrespective of our human response, so too the Bible was inspired by the Holy Spirit and is therefore God’s Word even if hearing we do not hear. And in the Bible it is surely the case that inspiration is used primarily of the act of the Holy Spirit in and through the authors, not the readers. By extension it may also be used in reference to the readers. But although it is a work done through the text, it is really a work done in the readers rather than the text. It is a work of enlightenment or illumination rather than inspiration. We may be grateful to Barth that he has directed our attention again to this aspect. We may join in prayer that the Spirit will breathe upon the Word and thus “inspire” it to us and for us. But we have still to recognise, have we not, that there is a prior work to which this present work is correlative, that the Spirit breathes upon a word which He has already inbreathed through the prophetic and apostolic authors. Otherwise it may be doubted whether all the safeguards that Barth genuinely proposes will preserve us from a final, radical subjectivism.

The Rev. G. W. Bromiley was senior scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he took a first-class honours degree in Modern Languages, followed by a Ph.D. and D.Litt. at Edinburgh. He was lecturer and vice-principal at Tyndale Hall, Bristol, from 1946 to 1951, and is now rector of St. Thomas’ English Episcopal Church, Edinburgh. His most recent work, Thomas Cranmer Theologian, was published by Oxford University Press.

Preacher In The Red

A QUESTION OF ENDURANCE

Early in my ministry I was called to conduct the funeral for the wife of one of the church members. She was not a member and never attended, having been ill for a long time. I had not been on the field long and was not well acquainted with the families in the church.

The funeral was held in January and shortly after, the husband of the deceased left for Florida.

I did not see him again, until one extremely hot afternoon in August. Meeting him on the street, I tried to be cordial and concerned, though I could not remember just what the situation was in his life. I had a faint recollection of his wife’s illness, but had forgotten her death. So, after a moment’s greeting, I asked, “How is your wife standing the heat?”—Dr. F. H. JOHNSON, Pastor, Central Baptist Church, Dayton, Ohio.

For each report by a minister of the Gospel of an embarrassing moment in his life, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will pay $5 (upon publication). To be acceptable, anecdotes must narrate factually a personal experience, and must be previously unpublished. Contributions should not exceed 250 words, should be typed double-spaced, and bear the writer’s name and address. Upon acceptance, such contributions become the property of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Address letters to: Preacher in the Red, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Suite 1014 Washington Building, Washington, D.C.

Cover Story

Refusing Responsibility

“Then I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf” (Ex. 32:24).

Not often does the preacher find it proper or helpful to quote a poet like Ogden Nash. Nevertheless, I find myself listening in memory to a couplet of his which, like so much that he writes, is accompanied by a mischievous twinkle of the eye:

Why did the Lord give us agilityIf not to escape responsibility

That is one man’s biting satire on a gravely widespread tendency of our time—the tendency to run away from life’s demands instead of meeting them with willing shoulders.

The same thing has been said in chaste but challenging prose by Elton Trueblood in The Life We Prize. After reminding us that the heavy strain under which modern life must be lived is essentially the same for all of us but that the reactions to this strain differ sharply in different persons, he says: “It appears that the most common reaction is that of some form of escape, and especially the effort to escape responsibility.”

Although there is no comfort in it, there is perhaps instruction in the fact that this shabby way of treating life and the Lord of life is not altogether new. To this our text can testify—it goes back three thousand years.

Description Of Failure

Consider, then, the description of Aaron’s failure as we have it in biblical history.

Only three months earlier the people of Israel had left Egypt. God had drawn a curtain over the four dismal centuries they had spent there. Now they were encamped over against Mount Sinai on their way to the Promised Land. Already Moses had made one ascent into the solemn heights of the mountain, returning with the Ten Commandments.

Again he is lost in the unapproachable splendor of Sinai, this time to receive a revelation from God as to the order of worship that the people are to follow. Before his six weeks’ absence had run its course, the people grew restless. Where was he? Why so long withdrawn from them? Was he dead or alive?

In this restlessness they conceived the idea of holding a festival. Since Aaron was second in command, would he make them an image around which they might have a religious dance? We may be sure that he was not for it. The pity is that he wasn’t firmly against it.

Under his supervision golden earrings were collected and melted down. From this molten gold a calf was fashioned. Aaron then built an altar in front of the calf and offered sacrifices.

Whether this was primarily a violation of the first commandment or of the second is a matter I make no attempt to settle. Each view has its advocates. If the sacrifice to the calf meant that the people were giving up Jehovah, then certainly it was flying in the face of the law they had just accepted: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

If, as some believe, it was an effort to hold on to Jehovah and to mingle with spiritual worship the visible image of deity, then it was a transgression against the law that says, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” We may not be able to read all of their thought. What we know is where their conduct led them. Their dancing became reveling. Their reveling became their shame. Their shame exposed them to the leering gaze of their pagan enemies.

In the midst of this disgusting spectacle Moses appeared. He “saw that the people had broken loose [for Aaron had let them break loose, to their shame among their enemies” (Ex. 32:25)]. The stern challenge that Moses flung at Aaron is set down in verse 21: “What did this people unto thee, that thou brought so great a sin upon them?”

To which the red-faced Aaron offered the feeble, flustered reply: “Let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief” (Ex. 32:22).

Then comes a further build-up of self-defense, after which Aaron says, in the words of our text: “I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.”

Aaron was a good man, whose name was to become famous as the founder of the priestly line in Israel, but in that hour Aaron was a weakling. It was cowardly of him to refuse responsibility for his part in Israel’s sin.

Cowardly or not, he did it; and, cowardly or not, you and I in one way or another are sorely tempted to soften down or sneak around this tall, titanic fact of responsible living. Under God we are accountable not only for the evil we may do or condone but for the good we might achieve or encourage. Let cabbages be vegetables, let animals be bundles of instincts, but let men know, creatures of God as they are, that the Lord of life will one day reckon with them for the way they have handled themselves and others. Let them know, too, that over the Day of Judgment is written: “No Excuses Accepted.”

Directions Of Responsibility

In view of this, it would be helpful to look around at the directions in which the lines of responsibility run.

To start with, there is our responsibility for ourselves. However we got here, whatever we find here, one thing is certain: we have ourselves on our hands. That’s something that won’t be changed by motoring to Miami or flying to Rio or taking a drawing room to Southern California. “For every man shall bear his own burden” (Gal. 6:15). Just that bluntly did St. Paul express it long ago, meaning centrally, I take it, the burden of responsibility. Professor Hocking expresses the same idea when he says: “Other creatures nature could largely finish: the human creature must finish himself.” “Therefore,” to quote St. Paul again, “thou are inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest” (Rom. 2:1).

Or, take the family, the first and closest social organism in which our relationships spell responsibility. Between husband and wife, mutually, there’s a love to be given, a care to be exercised, a loyalty to be guarded. Between parents and children there’s a table to be spread, a wardrobe to be furnished, a set of physical, emotional and spiritual habits to be fashioned, a system of responsible sharing to be worked out. It was a thoughtful father who said that he purposely delayed, by a year or two, the installation of an automatic heating plant because he wanted his teen-age son to gain experience by getting up at an early hour and firing the coal-burning furnace. Today’s irresponsible homes are the spawning grounds for tomorrow’s juvenile deliquents and day-after-tomorrow’s shiftless citizens or chronic criminals.

Still another line of responsibility runs into the schoolroom. It is easy enough for us to say that the school is responsible for the child. What we need to see more clearly is that part of that responsibility consists of making the child feel responsible for the school—responsible, in a measure, for its cleanliness, its physical care and upkeep and, in larger part, for the classroom atmosphere, for the grades he will receive and for the progress he will make.

Again, there is responsibility as it relates to one’s work. Usually, to start with, it takes the form of what one owes to his employer. Later the tables may be turned and the duty is that of an employer toward his employees. In either case, of course, there must be recognition that these responsibilities are mutual. When employers frequently fall back on injunctions and employees frequently fall back on strikes, it takes no expert economist to tell that somewhere the sense of responsibility has broken down. Nor will the trouble be cured merely by laws and penalties. There must be a new spirit, a different disposition.

Or, once more, there is community responsibility. Whose concern is it that we shall have decent housing, proper sanitation, good schools, respectable government, a healthy moral climate? There is only one intelligent answer: it is everyone’s concern. It is when this simple, basic fact is forgotten, when, in short, responsibility is shirked, that government rots, gangsters have a field day, vice flourishes and community standards deteriorate.

Let me name only one more direction in this survey of our responsibilities. It is the church. I’m not quite satisfied with this way of expressing my thought. Actually, what we owe the church is not just one of many responsibilities. What we owe the church and her Divine Head, Jesus Christ, should be the center of all our concern.

This gripped me powerfully the other morning as I was reading the fourth chapter of Ephesians. Christ’s gifts and appointments to the church, says Paul, were for “the equipment of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain unto the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (vv. 12–15, RSV).

Not one of us has reached this goal. Until we have, we had better put the church first on our list of loyalties and responsibilities.

Go back to that phrase “responsible living.” It is inescapable. Ourselves, our families, our schools, our jobs, our communities, the church of Jesus Christ our Lord—these circle us with claims we dare not deny. They lay upon us obligations we shun only at our peril.

Yet, shun them we do. Aaron did, long, long ago. Some of you have done it within the week. How?

Devices For Evasion

Let’s think next of the devices that we commonly use as we follow feeble Aaron down the road of refusing responsibility.

For one thing, it is frequently a trick of ours, as it was Aaron’s, to blame natural forces for our failures. Mark Aaron’s words: “I cast it (the gold) into the fire and there came out this calf.” Don’t blame me, the accused man seems to say; blame the fire. When the heat had done its work, this idol happened to be the result.

Moses’ comrade never looked so little as in the moment when that piece of sophistry escaped his lips. What of the pattern he had cut out for the idol? What about the graving tool he had used? No mention of these! Instead, the complaint is that by the play of natural forces, by the prankish effect of the fire, this image was produced over which Israel had corrupted itself.

You know the modern equivalent of such weakling talk, don’t you? You get it in crude form in the popular song of some months ago—“Doing What Comes Naturally.” You get it in somewhat more refined form in many current novels. You get it in a still more sophisticated version in some—by no means all—half-baked courses in psychology. In gist it says: Nature made me this way; I have these urges and drives; it’s really not my fault if I run counter to old-fashioned morals, which after all were foisted on the people by frustrated priests and old maids.

So a man who has been untrue to his wife, while admitting mildly that he has caused a tangle, says to a minister, self-defendingly, “I did exactly what other men in my position would have done.” The urge was there; I simply satisfied it.

Actually such nonsense is not modern. It is as old as Esau selling his birthright for a mess of pottage. It makes man an animal reacting to stimuli instead of a person responding to challenge. It takes no notice of what Jesus Christ said: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24).

What is more, it takes no notice of the sanest and soundest findings of psychiatry. Listen to Dr. Starke Hathaway in his Physiological Psychology: “After going through the experimental and clinical literature, the thoughtful reader will conclude that the effects of personality upon glands are more impressive and easier to illustrate than the effects of the glands upon personality.”

No, when we are confronted with personal responsibility, we can’t slither down the rabbit hole of nature and so escape blame.

But there’s another device, also tried by Aaron, which commonly serves as a means of shirking responsibility. It is putting the blame or the load on

other people. Look at verse 22: “Thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief.” In verse 23: “They said unto me.” In verse 24: “They gave it me.”

Some scholars say that in verse 1, where the Authorized Version reads “The people gathered themselves together unto Aaron,” it would not be incorrect to render it, “The people gathered themselves together against Aaron.” To use contemporary slang, “they ganged up on him,” jostled him, challenged him, threatened him.

Everybody likes to be talked up; most people like to be talked about; but nobody likes to be talked against. So we buckle at the knees and bow down to the great god called the crowd. “They … they … they!” They decide what clothes I shall wear, what books I shall read, what music I shall play or hear, what TV programs I shall view. They determine whether I shall drink or go sober, whether I shall smoke or go free, whether I shall support Hollywood or the Kingdom of God, whether I shall rate success in terms of money made or in terms of manhood dedicated, whether I shall behold the fair face of Jesus Christ and cry “Away with him” or whisper worshipfully, “My Lord, and my God!”

A member of this church, invited to a gathering in honor of a distinguished university professor, found herself surrounded by members of the intelligentsia who engaged in round after round of cocktail drinking and became the giddier for doing so. When her courteous insistence brought her ginger ale in place of alcohol, she was gently chided as one who was still held in the grip of a “cultural taboo.” With that light phrase they would dismiss a deliberate conviction held fast in conscience. It is that kind of smiling paganism that you and I must meet as Christians.

We must meet it, let me add, not with sour visage, not with a martyr’s halo self-fixed, not with a whipped and whining resignation to duty but with a passionate and unashamed devotion to Jesus Christ and all the high things for which He stands.

It is year’s end. Some of us have stood up to our responsibilities creditably well, all thanks to the grace of God on which we have leaned. Others have sagged miserably, like Aaron. We haven’t been as true to ourselves as we might have been, nor to our families, nor to our work nor to our church.

Let’s confess it. Let’s come out of hiding. Let’s stop making excuses. Let’s throw back our shoulders to bear the full weight of whatever responsibilities God presses down upon them. And then, taking gratefully His forgiveness for every one of yesterday’s failures, let’s head straight into the new year, trusting, dauntless, unafraid.

Paul S. Rees is an alumnus of University of Southern California, which conferred the honorary doctor of divinity degree upon him in recognition of his gifts. Since 1938 he has been Pastor of First Covenant Church of Minneapolis, which has about 1500 members. He has 18 years of continuous broadcasting experience and is author of seven books.

Cover Story

Israel in Her Promised Land

The question whether or not Palestine has a place in God’s redemptive program for Israel, and in relation to the other nations of the earth, in our age and particularly at the end of the age is interwoven with other questions. Indeed, one’s attitude toward Palestine as a future Land of Promise will be determined, primarily, by his attitude toward two eschatological themes: will there be a millennial reign of Christ on this earth, and is there a special place for Israel as a nation at the end of this age? If there is to be no millennial reign of Christ and, consequently, no place from which his rule will be directed, there is little need to discuss the prophecies regarding the future of Palestine, for it certainly will have no role apart from the Messiah. Furthermore, if there is no future for Israel as a nation, apart from the participation of converted Jews in the promised privileges of the Christian Church, Palestine will have no more meaning than any other national territory, except for its holy places.

We cannot determine if Palestine is still the Land of Promise, and gloriously so at the end of the age, except from the inspired records of the Hebrew Scriptures. I shall divorce the subject as far as possible from any discussion of the millennium and messianic reign of Christ and confine this article to the teaching of the Old Testament.

Palestine a Divine Gift

In the Old Testament—and many Bible students seem unaware of this—God’s giving of Palestine to Israel is more frequently referred to than any other act of God toward Israel, even than the deliverance from Egypt or the promise of a Messiah. In 141 passages of the Old Testament (57 in Deuteronomy alone) God is said to give the land of Canaan, the Land of Promise, to His people Israel—a truth declared from the call of Abraham (Gen. 12:7) to the exilic prophecy of Ezekiel 11:17. Of these references to Palestine as a gift of God to Israel, quite a number are portions of prayers to God, or of God’s answers to prayer (Exod. 6:4, 8; 32:13; Neh. 9:15, 35, 36). Some state that Palestine is to be a gift of God to Israel forever, a truth enunciated as early as Abraham’s day and reiterated down through the prophets. Turn to some of these passages:

For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever (Gen. 13:15; also 17:8; italics added).

And thou shalt keep his statues, and his commandments, which I command thee this day, that it may go well with thee, and with thy children after thee, and that thou mayest prolong thy days in the land which Jehovah thy God giveth thee, for ever (Deut. 4:40; italics added).

Israel’s Restoration Predicted

Even when Israel’s future rebelliousness is spoken of, Scripture clearly predicts that after a period of judgment Israel shall be permanently restored:

And Jehovah will scatter you among the peoples, and ye shall be left few in number among the nations, whither Jehovah shall lead you away. And there ye shall serve gods, the work of men’s hands, wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell. But from thence ye shall seek Jehovah thy God, and thou shalt find him, when thou searchest after him with all thy heart and with all thy soul. When thou art in tribulation, and all these things are come upon thee, in the latter days thou shalt return to Jehovah thy God, and hearken unto his voice: for Jehovah thy God is a merciful God; he will not fail thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them (Deut. 4:27–31).

Centuries later, Amos even more specifically emphasized this hope:

And I will bring back the captivity of my people Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be plucked up out of their land which I have given them, saith Jehovah thy God (Amos 9:14, 15).

A Permanent Possession

That such a restoration should be permanent and not followed by another dispersion is clear from passages in the prophets, particularly Jeremiah:

Behold, I will gather them out of all the countries, whither I have driven them in mine anger, and in my wrath, and in great indignation; and I will bring them again unto this place, and I will cause them to dwell safely. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God: and I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me for ever, for the good of them, and of their children after them; and I will make an everlasting convenant with them, that I will not turn away from following them, to do them good; and I will put my fear in their hearts, that they may not depart from me. Yea, I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will plant them in this land assuredly with my whole heart, and with my whole soul (Jer. 32:37–41; cf. 24:6).

A century after the Mosaic period Jeremiah exhorted apostate Jerusalem:

At that time they shall call Jerusalem the throne of Jehovah; and all the nations shall be gathered unto it, to the name of Jehovah, to Jerusalem: neither shall they walk any more after the stubborness of their evil heart. In those days the house of Judah shall walk with the house of Israel, and they shall come together out of the land of the north to the land that I gave for an inheritance unto your fathers (3:17,18; cf. 25:5).

Ezekiel echoes the theme in the following context:

Thus saith the Lord Jehovah: I will gather you from the peoples, and assemble you out of the countries where ye have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel. And they shall come thither, and they shall take away all the detestable things thereof and all the abominations thereof from thence. And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them a heart of flesh; that they may walk in my statutes, and keep mine ordinances, and do them: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God (11:17–20).

Although the word give is not used, Isaiah also stresses that Palestine is to be an abiding possession of Israel:

The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but Jehovah will be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. Thy sun shall no more go down, neither shall thy moon withdraw itself; for Jehovah will be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended. Thy people also shall be all righteous; they shall inherit the land for ever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified (60:19–21).

Joel likewise promises, “But Judah shall abide for ever, and Jerusalem from generation to generation” (3:20).

The Promise Is Uncanceled

This promise to Israel of Palestine as a permanent possession, often repeated in the Old Testament, is at no time canceled. Not only has the idea of Israel’s permanent occupation remained unfulfilled, but other aspects of these promises are as yet unrealized. When has Israel ever enjoyed the permanent, uninterrupted peace and prosperity here promised? Rather, her history has been among the saddest in the annals of ancient peoples. Except for Solomon’s glorious reign, her records reveal not one century without Israel’s defeat by one of her enemies. Even during Solomon’s day, taxes were so burdensome that upon his death this problem was presented to the new king by these distressed people. Because this complaint was not properly resolved Israel and Judah were separated and have remained so ever since. At no period has all Israel served the Lord in faithfulness and sincerity. That day is yet to come or scores of prophecies will never be fulfilled.

If we take the unauthorized liberty of canceling these prophecies, why may we not with equal liberty cancel any other prophecy with which a particular theory would lead us to disagree? The promises regarding Canaan were made to one nation, Israel, and to no other; if this land is ever to enjoy the prophesied blessings, it will be only as believing Israel again inhabits that sacred territory.

The Import Of The Names

The very names given this land are predictions, especially Zechariah’s term, “the holy land” (2:12). It is called by Isaiah “Immanuel’s land” (8:8), land of Immanuel’s birth, where He died and, as an earlier writer once said, “the scene of His labors and sorrows, of His shame and triumphs and the land where He will again plant His kingdom and reign with accumulated glory” (J. T. Bannerman, A survey of the Holy Land, Its Geography, History and Destiny, London, 1844, p. 12). Repeatedly the Lord refers to Palestine as “my land” (2 Chron. 7:20; Isa. 14:25; Jer. 2:7; 16:18; Ezek. 36:5; 38:16; Joel 1:6; 3:2); once it is called “the Lord’s land” (Hosea 9:3). It is sometimes said that the New Testament practically ignores the significance of Palestine. This is contradicted by many passages. Only in the New Testament does the frequently used title for Palestine, “the land of promise,” occur (Heb. 11:9).

In the four thousand years since the call of Abraham. Palestine has never fulfilled the implications of these divinely bestowed titles. In the books of Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and even Ezra and Nehemiah, is there any period in which this land displayed, from Dan to Beersheba, the holiness of God? When was God recognized by all Israelites living in that land as a holy and true God? In what reign did this land have abiding peace, its people walking in uncompromising righteousness? If the implications and promise of these names are fulfilled, it must be in a future day of “Holiness unto the Lord” (Zech. 14:20), when the laws of the Lord will be written on the fleshy tables of the hearts of God’s chosen people (Jer. 31:31–34).

The Sacred City

The divinely given names of Palestine’s capital likewise embrace promises and prophecies as yet unfulfilled. Isaiah, for example, multiplies sacred titles for this city: “the city of Jehovah” (60:14), “the city of righteousness” (1:26), “the daughter of Zion” (1:8; 4:4; 62:11, etc.), “the faithful city” (1:21,26), “Hepzibah” (62:4), “the holy city” (48:2; 52:1; 64:10), “the holy mountain of Jehovah” (27:13; 66:20), “my city” (45:13), “my holy mountain” (11:9; 56:7; 57:13), and “Zion of the Holy One of Israel” (60:14). Never has Jerusalem known as many as forty successive years in which these names accurately express the prevailing conditions. Some day the nations of the world will go up to that city to learn the law. If Jerusalem is to be so central in the redemptive program of God at the end of this age, surely the land in which it is located will have equal significance.

For centuries the scattered and persecuted people of Israel have looked toward Palestine with hope and expectation and with a prayer that God would restore them to the land promised to the patriarchs for a perpetual possession.

No other people in history but the Hebrews have carried in their hearts, century after century, a love for the land of their fathers which they themselves have never seen; And they have derived this hope of return not from Midrashic and fantastic interpretations, from Targums written long after the close of the canon of the Old Testament or from some obscure Talmudic tradition, but directly from the Word of God. Even before a powerful league of nations or royal commissions, the Jewish people plead not a mere hope or imaginary right but these prophetic Scriptures. In 1937, David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, was testifying before the British Royal Commission. Lord Peel, chairman of the Commission, had remarked, “The mandate is your Bible.” To this Mr. Ben-Gurion replied: “The Bible is our mandate. The mandate of the League is only a recognition of this right and did not establish new things.”

The proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, began with these stirring words: “The land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and national identity was formed. Here they achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance. Here they wrote and gave the Bible to the world. Exiled from Palestine, the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of their dispersion, never ceasing to pray and hope for their return and the restoration of their national freedom.”

Finally, the last eight years testify that Palestine needed the Jews for prosperity and plenty. Anyone who saw the pitiful barrenness and poverty of that land even thirty years ago, and has seen the land more recently, recognizes that the Arab was a curse to the land, showing no advancement in agricultural methods for two thousand years. Today not only are nearly two million Jews feeding that land, but there is such a surplus of some products that Israel must now find an outlet for the sale of excess food. There has been a greater advance in prosperity and culture in Israel in the last decade than was evidenced in the eighteen hundred years preceding it.

The Glory To Come

The names of Palestine, the prophecies regarding Palestine, the disappointing history of the Jews in Palestine in ancient times and events in the newly created state of Israel bear a united, indisputable testimony to the fact that the greatest glory this land has ever seen will yet be unfolded. Jerusalem shall truly become a city of peace, and the people of God will dwell in unwalled villages, each man sitting in quietness and confidence under his own tree. This will be God’s victory for that portion of the earth which He has called His own land. No anti-Semitism, no wars, no unbelief, no pogroms, not Antichrist himself will be able to prevent the fulfillment of these divinely given promises.

The Rev. Wilbur M. Smith, D.D., is author of more than a dozen books, and is editor of Peloubet’s Select Notes on the International Sunday School Lessons. Since 1947 he has been Professor of English Bible at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is a frequent contributor to religious magazines and a writer on prophetic themes.

See also the article that ran next to this one: “Israel’s Transgression in Palestine.”

Cover Story

Israel’s Transgression in Palestine

The explosive situation in the Near East is a startling reminder that ever since World War I, the world has been confronted with an anomalous and even unprecedented state of affairs. It is the claim of a people to return and repossess a land that has not been theirs for nearly two thousand years. What other people in the world would venture to demand that the clock of history be put back two millenniums for their benefit? Yet within a decade the land of Palestine, which has been for centuries under non-Jewish control, with a population estimated in 1914 at less than 700,000, of which the majority were Arabs, has been partitioned in such a way that the state of Israel now has a population of 1,716,000, of whom nearly 90 per cent are Jews. Yet nearly a million Arabs are refugees outside of Israel and dependent upon a dole from the United Nations for their very existence.

A Religious Question

This is an amazing situation. To what is it due? It is due partly to Zionist agitation in England and America, partly to the widespread sympathy for the Jews because of the inhuman treatment they received in Europe during World War II. Consequently, the claim of the Zionists that Palestine belongs to them as the descendants of Abraham was accepted by many who would have emphatically rejected a similar claim by any other people to possess a land in which they had been for centuries an almost negligible minority. In fact, to evaluate the situation properly, we must view it not as a political question but as a religious one and ask ourselves, Do the promises of the Old Testament to which the Zionists appeal support their claim to the possession of the land; and does the New Testament which the Zionists reject confirm them in it? A number of considerations are involved in the answering of these important questions.

The promise to which the Zionists appeal is clearly-stated in Genesis 18:18, “Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates”; and it is referred to repeatedly elsewhere. Does this settle the question? Does it give the Israeli a clear title to Palestine under the Abrahamic Covenant? We believe it does not and for the following reasons.

Conditioned On Obedience

This promise was conditioned on obedience to the will of God. Note the words, “because thou hast obeyed my voice” (Gen. 22:18) and also Genesis 26:5, where the renewal of the covenant with Isaac is explained by the words, “because that Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.” This basic principle, that possession of the land and prosperity in it was conditioned on obedience, is stressed again and again. It is made especially clear in the solemn warnings in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28; and it is definitely declared that to be “scattered among the nations” will be the punishment of disobedience (cf. Deut. 4:27).

These prophecies plainly foretold the course of Israel’s history. When the people forsook the Lord in the days of the Judges, the Lord “sold” them into the hands of their neighbors, the Moabites, Ammonites, Midianites, and Philistines. Later He brought against them mighty enemies from distant lands to punish them. The situation in the days of Isaiah is graphically described in the “Great Arraignment” (chap. 1). Again, the Lord declared through his prophet that Assyria was “the rod” of his anger (Isa. 10:5). He used this rod to destroy the Northern Kingdom; and only a representative handful ever returned to the land. Many speak of the tribes of the Northern Kingdom today as “the lost tribes.” More than a century later Jeremiah (5:1) described the apostasy of Judah in words that remind us of Diogenes and his quest for an honest man; and Jeremiah declared to the Jewish “patriots” who were resisting Nebuchadnezzar that the king of Babylon was the Lord’s “servant” (25:9), that Jerusalem would certainly be taken by him, and that the Jews would go into captivity for seventy years. At the end of that time the Lord raised up Cyrus, whom He called “my shepherd” (Isa. 44:28); and Cyrus permitted the Jews to return to rebuild the temple. But it was only a believing remnant that returned; and they were subject to foreign rulers during most of the time that they were permitted to remain in the land of their fathers. Certainly the Old Testament teaches both prophetically and historically that possession of the land was conditioned on obedience to Him who had given it to Abraham his “friend” (Isa. 41:8).

Repentance A Prerequisite

Repentance was the condition of restoration to the land. This principle is stated with special clarity in Deuteronomy 30:1–10. The words “and shalt return unto the Lord thy God and obey his voice” precede and condition the promise “then the Lord will turn thy captivity.” This condition may properly be said to underlie all the promises of restoration that appear later in the prophecies of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others. And the course of history confirms it. It was when the people cried unto the Lord in the days of the Judges that He delivered them from their oppressors. Only a small remnant of the Ten Tribes (note Luke 2:36) returned with the believing Jews after the Babylonian captivity. A return in continued unbelief in Old Testament times would have been an act of defiance of their God who had driven them from the land because of their unbelief and disobedience to Him.

Dispersion A Punishment

The destruction of Jerusalem by Titus and the resultant dispersion of the Jews was the punishment for their sin of rejecting and slaying their long-promised Messiah. Toward the end of his earthly ministry and in anticipation of his death, Jesus clearly foretold to the Jews the consequences of their failure to accept Him. In the parable of the wicked husbandmen, He told them, “The kingdom shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Matt. 21:43). He foretold the utter destruction of the temple (Matt. 24:2) and declared that Jerusalem should be “trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled” (Luke 21:24). All of these predictions have been fulfilled or are still being fulfilled. The Jews have been scattered for centuries, their land has been possessed by strangers, the site of their temple has been occupied for centuries by the Mosque of Omar.

Nationalism Rebuked

Jesus proclaimed a Gospel which was the fulfillment of the original promise to Abraham: “In thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). Speaking to Nicodemus He promised everlasting life to “whosoever” believed in Him (John 3:16). To the Samaritan woman He declared that the time was then come when men need not go to Jerusalem or to Gerizim to worship God, that wherever men worship “in spirit and in truth” their worship is acceptable (John 4:23). At Nazareth He made such effective use of the Old Testament to rebuke the narrow nationalism of the Jews that they sought to slay Him (Luke 4:23–29). After His passion and before His ascension, He combined his announcement of universal sovereignty with the command, “Go ye therefore and teach all nations” (Matt. 28:18–19).

This world-embracing Gospel, an evangel that makes no distinction between Jew or Gentile, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, was preached by the Apostles and especially by the Apostle Paul. The Christian Church was at first entirely Jewish. The great issue that came before it was not the admission of Jews but the admission of Gentiles into a church that was originally Jewish. It was the great privilege of Paul to proclaim the “mystery” of the complete equality of Jew and Gentile in the Christian Church (Eph. 3:1–13). It is quite true, and to the Church’s shame be it said, that for many centuries and even in our day she has failed to welcome the Jew into her communion. Instead she has hated him and “ghettoed” him. But despite her unfriendly attitude, many thousands of Jews have found their Messiah through the Church; and for all such the Jewish problem has been largely or wholly solved.

Land No Longer Important

Under the Christian dispensation the land, the city, and the temple have lost the importance that formerly attached to them. According to the Law of Moses it was almost a necessity for a believing Israelite to live in or near the land of Canaan. The tabernacle, and later the temple, was the center of worship for his people. He was required to go up to Jerusalem to celebrate the three annual feasts. For him Jerusalem and the temple had unique significance and importance. For the Christian, whether he be Gentile or Jew, all this is changed. A believing Jew is today as near heaven in the United States, where 5,000,000 of his fellow Israelites now live and apparently expect to continue to live, as if he were in Jerusalem. An unbelieving Jew is just as far from Heaven in Jerusalem as he would be in New York or London. For the Christian, whether Jew or Gentile, the land of Palestine has a sentimental interest. But that is all. It is only the Jew who still lives more or less in the Old Testament dispensation who regards the possession of the land as important. And part of its importance to him is due to racial pride and nationalistic aspirations. There are many open spaces in the world, many friendly nations, in which oppressed Israelites can find a refuge and a home without imperiling the peace of the world.

An Unjust Restoration

The attempt to restore the Jews to Palestine has proved to be unjust in itself and highly dangerous to the peace of the world. The Balfour Proclamation of 1917 was a war measure. Even before Allenby had captured Jerusalem, it promised the Jews a home in Palestine. Since then the British under their mandate and the United Nations under the leadership of Great Britain and of the United States (which has in the four great cities of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston nearly a third of the entire Jewish population of the world) have allowed unlimited immigration, have partitioned Palestine between Jews and Arabs, and have allowed the Jews to extend their borders beyond the boundaries established by the UN General Assembly. Furthermore, they have taken no adequate steps to right the wrongs of the dispossessed Arabs, whose tragic condition fosters resentment and hate throughout the entire Moslem world. Palestine did not belong to the British. It did not and does not belong to the United Nations. The persecution of the Jews in Europe was a grievous act of injustice. But allowing the Jews to take possession of a large part of Palestine and to force hundreds of thousands of Arabs out of it is an equally grievous wrong. Two wrongs do not make a right. Israel’s demand that her occupation of a part of Palestine be accepted as a fait accompli and her obvious intention to bring in many more Jews and to increase her holdings in the land as need requires and opportunity offers naturally incense the Arabs. How could it be otherwise?

Ought Israel To Succeed?

It is not the purpose of this article to propose a solution of the snarl that has been allowed to develop in the Near East. But mention of a historical parallel may be instructive. More than eight hundred years ago, under the blessing of popes and priests, kings and knights and multitudes of misguided men—even women and children—sought for two centuries to “rescue” the holy places in Palestine from the hands of the infidels. “They made religion subservient to war and war subservient to religion.” The attempt failed. The Children’s Crusade was one of the greatest tragedies of history. Palestine remained until forty years ago a part of the Moslem world. We ask ourselves, ought the Crusades to have succeeded? The verdict of history seems to be, No! The fleshly sword of medieval chivalry was defeated by the scimitar of the followers of the False Prophet. We ask the same question about the present struggle over Palestine. Does the Israeli cause deserve to succeed? Should Christians be willing to plunge the nations into a third world conflict just to restore unbelieving Jews to, and to maintain them in, a land from which they were driven nearly two thousand years ago? We believe the verdict of history will be, No! May God grant that this verdict not be written in rivers of blood!

The Rev. Oswald T. Allis, Ph.D., D.D., was formerly professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary and Westminster Theological Seminary. He is author of The Five Books of Moses, Prophecy and the Church, The Unity of Isaiah, and other volumes, and is a consulting editor of the Evangelical Quarterly.

See also the article that ran next to this one: “Israel in Her Promised Land.”

Cover Story

The Christian-Pagan West

The West once was pagan and then became Christian; historically, it is the pagan-Christian West. Today, in contrast, it has become the Christian-pagan West. No century was ever more misjudged than the twentieth by those who hailed it as the “Christian” century. For the once banished demonic spirits have returned again to inhabit the abode of Western culture, and some, indeed, seem to be securing permanent tenure.

Thinking men may scorn the phrase “the Christian-pagan West” as ill-tempered. The West is, after all, the Christian West; what specially distinguishes Occident from Orient is this Christian motif. Moreover, even the compound “Christian-pagan” may seem as artificial as “pagan West,” for after all, whatever is pagan is non-Christian, even as what is Christian is assumed to be Western.

Decline Of Christian Spirit

Such an evaluation of events, however, is outdated; indeed, it is actually irrelevant. It reflects the romantic overconfidence of earlier generations and of the past century. It assumes, and erroneously so, that traditional patterns of the home and work, of civilization and culture still prevail. It perpetuates the illusion of a people who took for granted that the inherited spirit of the West could not die.

Never Fully Christian

Admittedly the West has never been the totally “Christian West.” At best, it has been the “Christian West plus or minus,” the Christian West qualified by some limiting word, e.g., the “imperfectly Christian West.” Scholars now admit, indeed, that the Dark Ages were less dark than historians once pictured them; yet the Middle Ages stood nonetheless in drastic need of the Reformation. The tradition of papacy, monasticism and scholasticism developed an hierarchical, ritualistic and legalistic religion. Superstition and legend abounded; faith was often blind and unreasoning; piety and sacrifice were common substitutes for virtue; ascetic self-denial and gross sensuality flourished side by side; and the church was drawn frequently into the current of political intrigue and immorality. As Philip Schaff remarks, “the medieval light was indeed the borrowed star and moonlight of ecclesiastical tradition, rather than the clear sun-light from the inspired pages of the New Testament; but it was such light as the eyes of the nations in their ignorance could bear, and it never ceased to shine until it disappeared in the day-light of the great Reformation” (History of the Christian Church, Vol. IX, p. 12).

Yet Luther and Calvin, no less than Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, stood in hourly need of justification on the ground of Christ’s death for sinners. The same applies to the early apostles Peter, Paul and John, and in our century to evangelical giants like Dwight L. Moody and Billy Graham. The smudge of sin discolors even the best Christian history.

Heritage Of Greatness

Nevertheless it must be said that no other world culture has lived on the Christian side of life and history; it has had a Christian past, with a lease on Christian experience. The classic pagan mind, shaped by Graeco-Roman idealism, even at best was not good enough for the West. The old culture at its vulgar or common level was beneath the dignity of Christians. And the vices of infanticide, religious prostitution, slavery were abhorrent and repugnant to believers. Because they revered Christ as the guardian of purity and as the champion of sexual virtue, the Christians renounced adultery, covetousness, craftiness, dishonesty, drunkenness, theft. Doubtless the New Testament exhortations, and the picture in the Revelation of the decline of the seven churches in Asia Minor, caution us against painting the first century only in the brightest colors. Yet even in wicked Corinth the apostle Paul could write the world-stained believers: “Such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.”

Virtue In Abundance

Actually, Christians were known from the very beginning more for their positive ethical and spiritual performance than for mere abstinence. Pagan observers marveled “how they love one other.” An inexplicable joy irradiated the lives of these ordinary mortals; the peace that became theirs was unknown even to an age free of international hostilities; a boundless flood of kindness and benevolence was turned toward neighbors and strangers; godliness came to live in human flesh. These were a holy people, graced by the Holy Spirit. Acquaintance with the Risen Christ endowed them with a spiritual treasure so surpassingly superb that they laid down their lives rather than renounce Him. Even where totalitarian rulers brandished steel against them, they preferred martyrdom to the sin of silence. They were “called Christians first at Antioch” (Acts 11:26), and they were worthy of His Name. They had a divine commission to go to a perishing world; they were “under orders” to witness of the Redeemer to lost men. Their “conversation”—their walk as well as their words—was halo-bright. The incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ was the meeting place of their hopes and fears. Their marching orders were to confront the world in an armor the pagan empires had never worn. They eclipsed all the previous generations in their embodiment of love, of joy, of peace, of long-suffering, of gentleness, of goodness, of faith, of meekness, of temperance.

Inspiration Of Christianity

All that became noblest in the West was but the lengthened shadow of such faith and life. In a world abounding with religions, biblical Christianity supplied a distinctive view of God and the universe, of man and his destiny. The life of the West came to revolve around the drama of divine incarnation and atonement. The span of human existence was related in every sphere to the God-man who died in the stead of sinners and who rose for them in triumph over death. Between the divine creation of man and the final judgment of the race, the advent of the Redeemer stood as the dominating peak of history. Time “before Christ” lacked any climax; it was a movement of events in which the redemptive promise of God waited fulfillment. “The year of our Lord” became synonymous with the age of grace, in which redeemed men and women were adopted into the family of faith, with the risen Redeemer as their living Head. Since the sixth century the West has based its calendar upon the reality of the incarnation.

While Christian monotheism furnished the lofty inspiration of religion and morality, its influence did not stop there. It shaped literature and the arts. It even furthered the confidence of the West (although contemporary thought arbitrarily obscures this debt) in the unity and rationality of space-time existence, and hence stimulated the growth of science. Christianity upheld the ultimate significance of reason and conscience under God, and it proclaimed as well a providential universe on the basis of divine creation and preservation. Neither ancient polytheistic religion nor philosophical dualism had produced this lively sense of God and the supernatural world, and of man’s awesome destiny.

A Squandered Inheritance

Today this inheritance is all but squandered. No doubt those who disparage life in the Middle Ages as measured by the purity of New Testament religion can make their case, but nonetheless the world today, in contrast with earlier centuries clothed by Christian influences, stands starkly naked in moral shame.

Call it a return to paganism or barbarism or what one will, the fact remains that in the West for three centuries Christian influences upon society, the state and culture have decreased while secular influences have increased to dominating proportions. In the eighteenth century the upper classes of society broke with Christian beliefs, and the unity of Western Christendom vanished. While phantom unity rémained in the balance of power preserved by the absolute monarchies, when these fell, only the myth of the West’s ongoing progress concealed its fragmenting ideals. When progress, in turn, seemed doubtful, only the rise of dictators preserved the outward illusion of unity.

Terrifying Ambiguities

Today’s situation is awesome in its ambiguities. The largest strength of the Communist party, next to Russia and China, is in Italy, home of Vatican City and the organizational head of the largest body of professing Christians. Many who vote Communist still attend Roman Catholic mass in Italy (in contrast with the French).

The Italian Senate’s only woman member, Senator Lina Merlin, has charged that between two and three million women live by prostitution; that in Rome houses of prostitution operate under government license “all over town, and near schools and churches.” Such confusions and contradictions strike ever deeper and deeper in nominally Christian centers today; principle and piety seem ever less and less a central concern of human existence.

The Reformation warned that the Christian West had deteriorated to quasi-Christian foundations, and called for a full and swift return to biblical supports. Scholasticism had one-sidedly emphasized the intellectual element in Christianity. The community it produced repeated the Apostles’ Creed, but without putting heart and soul in the opening word. For Credo (I believe) it tended to substitute Credendum est (it is believed). A generation merely mouthing the creed led to another generation that could not in good conscience even repeat it. The highest language of faith, used first by saintly men, next by carnal men, and then by unregenerate men, at last vanished entirely from the vocabulary of the modern pagan.

Medieval Compromises

The medieval compromise, in fact, reached far beyond matters of doctrine and personal virtue. It involved also a misconception of the social order and of the church’s relation to culture.

In the provocative volume Man in This World, Hans Zehrer reaches back a thousand years to A.D. 1075 and the autocratic Pope Gregory VII’s Twenty-Seven Theses, which led in 1308 to the bull Unam Sanctum as the pivot of the Western revolt against authority. By their own claims the papal despots began to lessen the distance between God and man, and man and God. Drawing the spiritual sword, popes presumed to rule over emperors and their subjects in place of God. “In setting himself in the place of God, the Pope gave the signal for every class to do likewise. ‘Why should you be God and not I?’ is a question before which title-deeds lose their force” (Zehrer, op. cit., p. 67). Thereafter, the man who would be God becomes in swift turn the man freed from all superior authority, who loses at last not merely the image of God, but in doing so loses also the image of man, and descends to bestiality. He becomes the herd man of our era, easily led by totalitarian superiors. In the Christian-pagan West he emerges as the beast-man of evolutionary naturalism, although in actuality he is the man-beast.

Men With Half A Soul

Whatever may be said about Zehrer’s thesis, the fact is that for five centuries, since the mid-fifteenth century yielded to the post-medieval era, the man of Europe and the Americas has stood increasingly confounded and mute in the presence of the Great Questions. His distant forefathers had been heirs of the classic Graeco-Roman world view and prized the Christian inheritance even above that. The death of ancient culture they counted gain because of the birth of a higher. But the modern man, by contrast, gave half his soul to the Renaissance, and was half-hearted toward the Reformation. He now gave snap answers to Ultimate Problems, answers which blurred the Christian motif, and from which all remaining biblical hues, already pallid, would soon fade.

Those who today call merely for “a new Reformation” thereby betray the fact that they judge current history unrealistically. Latin America, perhaps, is a prospect for such a duplication within history. There, as nowhere else, the smoldering revolt against a medieval temper could erupt into a war of ideas, involving Renaissance as well as Reformation claims. But elsewhere the West has already stripped human life of much of its traditional meaning. The inherited patterns of civilization are paling swiftly. Priority Answers of the past are now repudiated, and the Priority Problems along with them. The current failure to grasp the world of ultimates commits man to categories that imply the end of a rational-moral cosmos and the consequent insignificance of reason and the good. For two generations influential philosophers in the once-Christian West have ceased to ask, “Who is God?” “What is the purpose of history, and of the universe?” “How shall we define man’s dignity?” “What are the permanent aspects of truth and morality?” but instead have been asking “Is there a God?” “Does purpose exist in history and the universe?” “Is man essentially unique?” and “Have reason and goodness any objective significance?”

The Drift Downstream

The chorus of intellectual giants answering these questions negatively has swelled. Paraded as the verdict of modern intellectual genius are the dogmas that the binding force of reality is not supernatural and that life and society are held together best if God be dissolved. Confused Western man has been floating downstream on the river of negation, for driftwood requires nothing in the way of spiritual decision. Today, tossed by doubt and uncertainty, modern man is wearying of this world and of himself. His day-to-day existence balances on the sharp edge of chilling questions.

The geographical frontiers of Christendom have shrunk perceptibly. The Russian Orthodox Church and the vast evangelical Stundist movement in the U.S.S.R. eke out their existence by the tolerance of a totalitarian government. The Ukraine, where Roman Catholic congregations date back a millennium, is enslaved behind the Iron Curtain. France, a half-century ago included in every list of nominally Christian great powers, has a bankrupt faith; of its 42 million inhabitants, 35 million no longer attend mass (a mortal sin for Catholics). Only European lands on which the Reformation made a strong theological impact are today virile in their resistance to Communism.

But the shriveling of the Christian claim upon modern thought and life is even more shocking than the shrinking of Christian territorial frontiers. Almost everywhere the West shows a return to pagan ways of thinking and living. Before Christ and before conscience it puts a score of substitute allegiances.

Eroding The Patience Of God

First, the boundless wickedness of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, the cradle of civilization, eroded the patience of God’s Spirit, and the early human enterprise was finally deluged in doom. The new beginning was grounded in revealed religion; the sacred Hebrew narratives carry forward the best of the old history from Abraham to Moses and Sinai, to David and the Hebrew temple, and through the prophets of the Old Testament. Furthermore, they light up this whole venture of faith with Messianic expectation.

Then, the decline of the proud and classic Graeco-Roman civilization ended in the tribal sack and fall of Rome. This extremity of the pagan world became the Christian believer’s opportunity; the weakness of the pagan gods revealed the strength of the Lord of glory.

The third long night of human barbarism seems to have begun. To many observers, the horizon of this third night exhibits little, if any, prospect of a sunrise. Earlier and once benign cultures perished in judgment. The first civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates valley came to naught with the destruction of a generation hardened in its revolt; the glory of the Hellenic world could not withstand its later disintegration and doom. Descending from its pinnacle of lofty achievement, the Christian West in becoming pagan is ¡leaded for inevitable doom. The light men shun today is blinding, for the post-Christian era revolts against the most sacred inheritance of the race. To assume that an anti-Christ culture will escape perdition is sheer madness.

Review of Current Religious Thought: December 10, 1956

On this occasion I intend to let the layman speak. Because a man sits in the pew “under” a minister it does not therefore follow that he is incapable of making any valuable and constructive contribution to religious thought; nor, conversely, should it be assumed that he is less likely than the parson to perpetrate theological howlers. Unfortunately, however, the temptation to intellectual arrogance on the part of the cleric is such that an occasional reminder that the lay mind has a contribution to offer which merits attention (though not necessarily agreement) may not be out of place. I propose, further, to limit this review to a consideration of only two articles appearing in the current numbers of The Scottish Journal of Theology and The Modern Churchman. In each case the author is a business man of some standing. One Mr. George Goyder, is an Evangelical; the other, Sir Henry Selfe, is a Liberal and the President of the Modern Churchmen’s Union.

¶ Mr. Goyder, writing on “The Relevance of Biblical Justice to Industry” in The Scottish Journal of Theology (Sept., 1956), cogently delineates the Christian approach to the problems which the industrial world of our day presents. He stresses the importance of law, Divine Law, as the only proper basis of both justice and freedom. This is true of the Atonement: “When we belittle the majesty, the awful splendour, of God’s Law as revealed in the Old Testament, we lose an essential in our understanding of Christ’s sacrifice for our sin.” We must be willing, he affirms, “to believe in the Law of God before we can see its relevance to our situation. Just as denial of an absolute justice has brought half the world into bondage to gross injustice, so our refusal to obey and apply God’s Law as the source of social freedom threatens us with social and political upheaval and ultimately with slavery to human laws based on the will of the powerful.” The Ten Commandments provide “a complete summary of the will of God for men in society.” One of the evils forbidden by the moral law is that of usury, which belongs to the command, “Thou shalt not steal.” But in what sense is it possible to speak of usury in contemporary business? Mr. Goyder replies that the sin of usury is committed “when a company exploits the consumer by reason of a monopoly, or when the members of a trades union restrict entry to a trade and then exploit that fact to exact the highest possible wages.”

The scope of industrial justice is not confined to the paying of fair wages. Human relationships, involving not only the workers, but also shareholders, consumers, and the community, and the dignity of human personality have to be taken into account. Accordingly, “justice in industry requires the definition of industrial purpose in social, and not purely in financial terms,” and “our practical problem is to make industrial companies into human associations of persons serving a worthy social purpose.” What of the worker, who all too often tends to be frustratingly swallowed up by the vast impersonal machine of modern industry? “As a child of God,” says Mr. Goyder, “a man needs to be able to serve God in his work. To do this he needs to know what his job means in relation to the whole of which it is a part, and to have some freedom of action to function as a whole person.… It is fundamental to the dignity of man that he should in a real sense ‘own’ his work.” Mr. Goyder’s admonitions are timely, if not overdue, for in British industry today there is desperate need for the Christian spirit, animated by love of God and love of one’s neighbour, if a sense of the dignity and the satisfaction of work well done is to be recaptured.

¶ Sir Henry Selfe’s article appears in The Modern Churchman (Sept., 1956) under the tide of “The Fundamentalist Heresy”; it is however, not merely an assault upon “Fundamentalism” (in which he seems uncritically to include Conservative Evangelicalism), but also the Theology of Crisis, Existenialism, and in general what he calls “irreason.” In his judgment “the impact of Karl Barth on the public mind of this country … has been surprisingly small,” whereas “the simple approach of an evangelical fundamentalist like that of Dr. Billy Graham has obviously had a very wide impact.” The latter, however, is a misfortune which, we are told, must cause “those who are concerned for the future of enduring religion in this country” to be “seriously perturbed.” This state of serious perturbation has apparently been engendered by Dr. Graham’s “fundamentalistic acceptance of the Bible and a form of Christian doctrine which has long been outgrown.” To dogmatize in this way is, of course, to beg the question.

It is probable that most laymen will find themselves in sympathy with Sir Henry when, with special reference to the dialectical theologians, he writes: “It is time that somebody spoke a few words on behalf of the common man.” “Religion,” he goes on to say, “must have meaning for the ordinary man, and any teaching claiming dogmatic authority must at least be intelligibly expressed to the common mind. The Theology of Crisis must be judged by its intelligibility for the thinking layman, and that is almost nil.” He appraises Professor Cornelius Van Til’s book The New Modernism as a “crushing indictment” of Barth and Brunner and a “sturdy defense of the classical Reformed Faith.”

¶ Whatever may be thought of their utterances (and for the Reformed Christian, all utterances, whether lay or clerical, will be judged at the bar of Holy Scripture), it is a healthy sign when laymen take an intelligent interest in matters theological and ecclesiastical. May we be preserved from the easy distinction of the Roman Church between the Teaching Church (ministry) and the Learning Church (laity)! Certainly the church has need of a more vitally interested and more vocally assertive laity.

Book Briefs: December 10, 1956

Reformed Apologetics

The Defense of the Faith, by Cornelius Van Til. Presbyterian and Reformed, Philadelphia. $4.95.

The importance of this volume can hardly be overestimated; indeed, we believe it to be one of the most significant works in the field of Christian apologetics to have been published for a long time. Those who are prepared to think deeply and who seriously wish to achieve an understanding of the implications of the Christian faith will not fail to find the study of this book a richly rewarding experience. Professor Van Til has not been without his critics, especially on the subject of common grace, and this work is in part a reply to the criticisms which have been levelled against the position he has defined.

In seeking to defend the faith against the assaults of unbelief it is important that the Christian should know precisely the nature of the ground on which he must take his stand. It is also important that he should have an understanding of the ground on which the unbeliever places himself. What, in fact, are the presuppositions, the principles, which govern the outlook of Christian and non-Christian respectively? For the Christian, the brief answer is that it is upon Holy Scripture as the Word of God that he takes his stand. “For the believer,” says Dr. Van Til, “Scripture is the principle of theology. As such it cannot be the conclusion of other premises, but it is the premise from which all other conclusions are drawn” (p. 360).

The unbeliever, on the other hand, will not admit the supreme authority of Scripture, but will endeavour to make himself and his human (and fallen) interpretation of things the center of reference. “In the last analysis,” Professor Van Til declares, “we shall have to choose between two theories of knowledge. According to one theory God is the final court of appeal; according to the other theory man is the final court of appeal” (p. 51).

It is affirmed that “human knowledge is analogical of divine knowledge” (p. 56); the universe has been created by God in accordance with His own all-embracing plan, and man, as one of God’s creatures, is necessarily dependent on the Creator not only for being but also for knowledge. “We could not have existence and meaning apart from the existence and meaning of God” (ibid); for “all facts of the created universe are what they are by virtue of the plan of God with respect to them” (p. 132). Thus the “Reformed apologist assumes that nothing can be known by man about himself or the universe unless God exists and Christianity is true” (p. 317).

Every man, in fact, inescapably knows God, both because this knowledge is constitutional of his being as a creature of God, and also because, wherever he turns, he is confronted with the evidence of God’s activity in the general revelation of the natural realm, as St. Paul plainly teaches when he says that the eternal power and godhead of the Creator are clearly seen from the things that have been made—the visible creation testifies to the invisible Creator. Sinful man, however, suppresses this knowledge of God and worships the creature rather than the Creator (Rom. 1:18 ff.). Hence Professor Van Til asserts that “there are no atheists … All men know God, the true God, the only God. They have not merely a capacity for knowing him but actually do know him” (p. 173).

The essence of sin is rebellion of the creature against the sovereignty of the Creator, unwillingness to know God and to acknowledge His lordship, the desire of man to be independent and self-sufficient by setting up himself in God’s place as the ultimate judge and measure of all things. It is stressed by Professor Van Til that sin is not, although it would like to be, an escape from creaturehood; it is “a breaking loose from God ethically and not metaphysically” (p. 63). The fundamental antithesis between believer and unbeliever consists in this: that the former acknowledges the divine sovereignty and seeks to interpret all things in accordance with God’s revelation, whether general (in nature) or special (in Scripture), whereas the latter refuses to acknowledge the crown rights of the Creator and seeks to make himself the arbiter of all reality and possibility.

The Christian view of man and the world, then, is diametrically opposed to the non-Christian view, with the result that the Christian defender of the faith, if he is to be consistent with his principles, cannot take his stand on the same ground as the non-Christian opponent of the faith.

The point of contact for the Gospel, says Dr. Van Til, “must be sought within the natural man. Deep down in his mind every man knows that he is the creature of God and responsible to God. Every man, at bottom, knows that he is a covenant-breaker. But every man acts and talks as though this were not so” (p. 111).

Another factor that has to be taken into consideration is that of common grace. The antagonism of the unregenerate man to God is in principle absolute; but in practice it is curbed and restrained by the goodness of God. Common grace is defined by Dr. Van Til as “the giving of good gifts to men (by God) though they have sinned against Him, that they might repent and mend their evil ways” (p. 185).

Dr. Van Til insists that “all the knowledge non-Christians have, whether as simple folk by common sense, or as scientists exploring the hidden depths of the created universe, they have because Christianity is true. It is because the world is not what non-Christians assume it is, a world of Chance, and is what the Christians say that it is, a world run by the counsel of God, that even non-Christians have knowledge” (p. 286). In view of previous misunderstandings, Professor Van Til is careful to point out that he does “not maintain that Christians operate according to new laws of thought any more than that they have new eyes or noses” (p. 296).

Both Roman Catholicism and Arminianism come under the author’s fire for the reason that, by assigning a varying measure of autonomy to man, they compromise the authoritative revelation of Scripture and the absolute sovereignty of God in the sphere of knowledge as well as of being, thereby making a consistent and successful defence of the faith an impossibility. But Dr. Van Til’s criticism of apolgetics that is un-Re-formed, or not fully Reformed (that is, scriptural), is always marked by charity and humility. We could wish, however, that he had not used the term Evangelical as a synonym for Arminianism, and we should like to see the word Anglicanism on page 238 corrected to Anglo-Catholicism. We feel bound to inquire, also, whether it is not going beyond the limits of the scriptural revelation to declare that, because the will of God is sovereign in the world, therefore even evil and the fall must have come about within the plan and purpose of God (cv. pp. 206, 309). Not for one moment, of course, does Dr. Van Til suggest that God is the author of evil, but we believe it would be preferable to say that the evil and sin that have entered into God’s world cannot in any respect frustrate His eternal purposes, and indeed that they are overruled by God in such a manner as to work in with and set forward His purposes. The supreme example of this is the event of Calvary.

PHILIP E. HUGHES

The Actor

The Minister Behind the Scenes, by George Hedley. Macmillan, New York. $2.50.

This volume presents the sixth series of the Gray Lectures delievered at the Divinity School of Duke University in 1955.

The author, Dr. George Hedley, taught at the College of Puget Sound, the Pacific School of Religion and Hartford Seminary Foundation before going to Mills College where he is now Professor of Economics and Sociology and Chaplain of the College.

Dr. Hedley has written an interesting and helpful book. While the book is of interest primarily to pastors, it would also prove enlightening to laymen. The writer compares a minister to an actor. The similarity is primarily confined to both being upon a stage. The actor occupies the stage of the theater; the minister, the stage of the world. The actors perform for brief periods of time; the minister never leaves the stage. He is always the minister. There is no release from the “part” he plays.

The book is divided into six lectures. The first three of these are titled: (1) studying the part, (2) knowing the stage, and (3) adapting the script. The first is a call to professional reading, the second, to collateral reading; the third to the preparation of the “script.” His exhortation to pastors to return to the study of the Bible is commendable. However, we cannot approve certain methods of study he prescribes. There is wisdom in his suggestion that pastors study early Christian writings, but one questions some of the recommended commentaries and periodicals. The importance of budgeting our reading time is stressed, as also the necessity of collateral reading. The matters of sermon preparation and presentation are treated in a brief, but helpful, fashion.

Lectures four and five, “Keeping in Condition” (Recreation), and “Checking the Cash,” contain much helpful information. We do take exception to the advisability of the minister becoming a member of lodges and clubs, as suggested by the author. The advice he gives the pastor concerning financial matters is well worth pondering.

The closing lecture, six, “Staying in Character,” speaks of the essential devotional life of the minister. Dr. Hedley emphasizes the need of an appointed time, of good devotional helps, of an appropriate place for the minister’s own devotional period.

The book is well written. It is interesting and informative on many matters pertaining to the Christian ministry. The author’s understanding of the problem involved, his spiritual insight, and his Christian sense of humor contribute toward a book that is well worth reading.

E. WESLEY GREGSON, SR.

Written For God

God’s Word to His People, by Charles Duell Kean. Westminster, Philadelphia, 1956. $3.50.

Dr. Kean, Episcopal rector and Lecturer at George Washington University, is an influential minister, educator and author. His present volume discusses how the Bible came into being, its purpose, scope, essential character and the influences that molded it. The author asserts that the Bible has meaning only insofar as we view it as “the product of the Church’s (i.e., the people of God) life.” The Book and the Life are essential to each other, mutually acted and reacted on each other during the writing, and are therefore of equal authority.

The real process of compiling the Bible was conducted during a 500-year period beginning with the promulgation of the law after the building of the Second Temple, about 439 B.C. During this time a movement was initiated in Israel to establish the ideal commonwealth which Jewish leaders like Ezra and Nehemiah understood to be the nation’s mission in its covenant relationship with God, a commonwealth that would exemplify the divine purpose for the world. The Bible is actually the “life-book” of this process and reflects the changing concept of the ideal commonwealth produced by the interaction of faith and history. Three developments are noticeable: (1) the attempt at the ideal commonwealth as such, (2) the shift of the law instead of the political unit as the bearer of God’s purpose, (3) the Church as the body of Christ in whom men universally are bound to God and one another in love. Fundamental to each stage, however, is the fulfillment of the covenant relationship. In the developmental process the biblical materials underwent many changes, alterations, corrections, etc.

It is amazing what one can read out of the Scriptures after first reading into them a preconceived system, and this constitutes the primary error of this book. The interpretation of the data is thoroughly humanistic to the point that the title is a misnomer. If one accepts Kean’s approach, the Bible is neither divine revelation—the Church’s experience becomes the revelation, if it may be called that—nor is it in any positive sense inspired. The most radical hypotheses of the literary critics are consistently advanced even to the degree that significant characters become “legendary heroes.” At times one is tempted to think that perhaps the Bible was written for God’s, not man’s, edification. The Christology and Soteriology are likewise unsound. Though scholarly and interesting, this is no book for evangelical believers.

RICHARD ALLEN BODEY

Mariolatry

The Virgin Mary, the Roman Catholic Marian Doctrine, by Giovanni Miegge, translated by Waldo Smith, Westminster, Philadelphia. $3.50.

Roman Catholic teaching concerning the Virgin Mary is becoming increasingly important not only to those within but also to those outside the Roman Church. The recent definition and formal establishment of the doctrine of Mary’s assumption is one more step along the road of Roman Catholic development; it is also one more victory for the Society of Jesus, the great promoter of Marian piety. Even more important for Protestants, however, it emphasizes the difference between their views and Roman Catholicism.

For these reasons, this study of the Marian doctrine by Professor Miegge is of great value. As Professor of Church History in the Waldensian Faculty of Theology at Rome, he has not only studied the theoretical but has also seen the practical application of the doctrine. He, therefore, speaks with authority.

His method of discussion is simple and effective. Taking the various titles given to Mary, in what might be called their chronological order of appearance, he examines each in turn. After a careful historical outline of the history of the use of each, he evaluates it in the light of biblical teaching, Roman Catholic and Protestant thinking.

This work may be a disappointment to some Protestants who favor the violent method of approach to any discussion of Romanism. Professor Miegge never raises his voice. He deals with his topic methodically, carefully and soberly. In fact at times one almost feels that he is too much the detached scholar. He quotes the Roman Catholic statements in full. He endeavours as far as possible to be fair and objective in all things.

By this very cool scholarly air he is all the more devastating. For those who wish for reasoning rather than more pyrotechniques his argument is most effective. He shows conclusively that not only is the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Virgin Mary unscriptural, it is anti-scriptural and thoroughly unhistorical. Even the earlier Roman Catholic Church is in conflict with the present teaching which is set forth as divinely inspired.

The final chapter: “Mary in Dogma and Devotion” is the final blow. Professor Miegge there demonstrates with great clarity that despite all the usual emphasis on the Mass, Mary is now at the center of Romanist thought. She, althought a human creature, is the Queen of Heaven, virtually equal to the Triune Godhead. She is the supreme example of man saving himself by his good works. Christ, the Judge, the Lord of the beyond is being ushered out of the picture to be replaced by the human, sentimentalized version of the Virgin. Romanism is thus on the way to becoming, even formally, a non-Christian religion.

This book should be very useful to many who wish to understand the present developments which are taking place in the Roman Catholic Church.

The translation by Waldo Smith and the production by Westminster are both very good.

W. STANFORD REID

Mission Study

The Growth of the World Church, by Ernest A. Payne, Macmillan. 6s.6d.

This is a readable little book of 174 pages, with a useful bibliography and index. The title is perhaps a little misleading, and in some senses is rather prejudicial to the book. Dr. Payne provides a brief outline of the history of Christian Missions; this fact is better indicated by the sub-title, “The Story of the Modern Missionary Movement.” After a sketch of the work of those whom he so rightly styles “Forerunners of Advance,” the author provides the reader with an account of the outstanding features of modern missionary enterprise. It is an education to read and is just the kind of book to consider in a missionary study group.

ERNEST F. KEVAN

Eutychus and His Kin: December 10, 1956

MIRTH AT CHRISTMAS

It is “the Season” again. Rudolf lights the way for many a fast buck, to the merry jingling of the cash register. From the money-changers of the Christmas Bazaar, indulging suburbia must buy junior’s affection with bribes of magnificent extravagance.

Scrooge’s Ghost of Christmas Future projected the old miser’s end with dismal detail, but he had no inkling of his own prospects. The poor spirit has inherited Marlowe’s chain of ledgers and cash boxes, lengthened by a century and the lead type of a million full page ads.

In part Dickens himself is to blame. Under the cellophane of our commercial Christmas is the lollipop of Dickensian sentimentality. Nostalgia for our lost childhood demands that we compensate for neglecting our children by spoiling them. We must have the same carols (whether they are incarnation hymns or folk songs doesn’t matter), the same customs (enshrined in ’Twas the Night Before Christmas), and the same scenes (a “White Christmas”). Commercialism has only exploited our sentimentality.

But it is all shattered by a scream of horror. For an old-fashioned Christmas we must forget Hungary, North Korea, and China.

Yet on the first Christmas the Christ was born in blood, and it was not long before the tyrant bathed all Bethlehem in blood to murder him. Jesus was the Man of Sorrow; his agony and death are not pitiable but awesome. “Weep not for me,” he said, for he came to die and in death to triumph over sin and evil. Christianity is realistic. It has nothing to do with simpering sentiment. The joy of the herald angels abides in horror and triumphs in death. In the raging fires of our time the sentimental Christmas tree dissolves in flame. Only one tree is not consumed: that cross of Christ by which the redeemed are brought to the tree of life in the paradise of God.

EUTYCHUS

PERILS OF INDEPENDENCY

Your “Perils of Independency” must have been written by some member of the National Council of Churches.… I am acquainted with members of many denominations and it is a fact that about 95% of them are living for the devil and not for the Lord Jesus Christ.… The all inclusive conglomeration called the National Council of Churches is nothing more than a tool of the devil shaping up for the reign of the antichrist. The modern denominational church is about as effective spiritually as any civil or social club.

C. A. BARKER

Harveyton, Ky.

I read your 90% blanket condemnation of Independency and I can only say that if you want organized deception why don’t you join the Roman Catholic church? Or do you feel that Protestantism should have its own peculiar brand? It’s not an external diversity that causes weakness but superficiality and internal lack of spirituality.… People want to be “church Christians” but not “born again” Christians, and therein lies real peril.

LEWIS F. FINKEL

Captain, USAF (DC)

Trenton, N.J.

… Brilliantly thoughtful editorial.… Congratulations on combining an enlightened mind with a warm, evangelical heart.

DONALD M. STINE

Fellow in English Bible

Princeton Theological Seminary

LOVE THOSE INDEPENDENTS

I am amazed that CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and so early in its life history, should run so caustic, well, so unloving an editorial against the Independents. It seems to me that the Independents of the seventeenth century were among the most godly men who have ever lived. Nor do I even follow the Christian Century in its diatribes against the Southern Baptists. And personal acquaintance does not lead me to call J. Oliver Buswell, Jr., a child of the devil.

Your editorial proceeds on the assumption that “If any teaching is clear in the New Testament, it is the teaching of the unity of the true body of Christ.” But the existence of Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians gives the impression that if anything in unclear in the New Testament, it is the doctrine of ecclesiastical unity.

Rather than rant against Independency, could you not give us a calm exposition of the New Testament doctrine? Let us lovingly show the Baptists that they should be Presbyterians, if they wish to be true to the New Testament.

JONATHAN EDWARDS

Indianapolis, Ind.

AN OLD CHESTNUT

I was somewhat amused by the “Preacher in the Red” article in your present issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. About fifty years ago there was an English clergyman at Oxford University, Spooner by name. He often, either by intent or accident, misplaced words in a very humorous manner. His expressions were called “Spoonerisms” and there was a small book containing a collection of these “sayings.” The origin of the one mentioned in your magazine dates back to the occasion. Dr. Spooner, attending service in the nave of his Church, and seeing someone in his family pew, said “Pardon me, my dear sir, but you are occupewing my pie.” On another occasion, while addressing a congregation of farmers of country folk, and intending to say “my dear sons of toil,” he actually said “my dear tons of soil.…” Many others evade my memory at this moment, but I thought Mr. Storey might be interested in the origin of his twisted expression—which we of Oxford would term “an old chestnut.”

F. ELLIOT BAKER

Louisville, Kentucky

It requires a lot of “faith” to believe your minister in the red.

GEORGE D. OWEN

Tarrytown, N. Y.

• CHRISTIANITY TODAY has been deluged by anecdotes from ruddy preachers attesting the perils of the pulpit ministry.—ED.

We are interested in sending approximately 140 one year subscriptions to my Men’s Bible Class. Could you send a card of notice, to each one, stating from whom the subscription comes?

What would the cost be?

HUGO WURDACK

St. Louis, Mo.

• Mr. Wurdack, and others like him, are taking the initiative in lifting evangelical reading habits. Information about special group subscription rates is available from CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S Circulation Department.—ED.

END

Apple PodcastsDown ArrowDown ArrowDown Arrowarrow_left_altLeft ArrowLeft ArrowRight ArrowRight ArrowRight Arrowarrow_up_altUp ArrowUp ArrowAvailable at Amazoncaret-downCloseCloseEmailEmailExpandExpandExternalExternalFacebookfacebook-squareGiftGiftGooglegoogleGoogle KeephamburgerInstagraminstagram-squareLinkLinklinkedin-squareListenListenListenChristianity TodayCT Creative Studio Logologo_orgMegaphoneMenuMenupausePinterestPlayPlayPocketPodcastRSSRSSSaveSaveSaveSearchSearchsearchSpotifyStitcherTelegramTable of ContentsTable of Contentstwitter-squareWhatsAppXYouTubeYouTube