Christianity in the World Today

The most potent organizational foe of Roman Catholic infractions in the United States today is the group known as Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Its leaders and backers include some of the most influential men in American Protestantism.

POAU first won widespread recognition in 1947 with its “Manifesto” which warned that the Roman Catholic hierarchy was trying to divide state-supported public schools into sectarian school systems sustained out of public revenue. Its warning was prompted by devotion to a constitutional principle which provides that religious and governmental functions stay clear of each other.

Two years later Paul Blanshard, the special counsel for the POAU, followed up the warning. His book raised a cry which is still ringing in bookstore cash registers. American Freedom and Catholic Power in its original edition sold 240,000 copies and was the most vigorous revelation of Roman Catholic plans and principles ever to come before the American public. The book still is selling at the rate of about 300 copies a month.

A Ten-Year Review

This month the POAU reviewed the accomplishments and the frustrations of the past ten years. Tacked on to its “balance sheet” were three questions which organization leaders said should be addressed to every Catholic candidate for the United States presidency or vice presidency.

Is the POAU against the Catholics as a whole?

Blanshard himself took another look at the situation in American Freedom and Catholic Power, 1958 edition, scheduled for publication March 12. He carefully restated the POAU policy of not being against Catholicism per se, but only as the church hierarchy would tend to violate the Constitution.

The book states, “It should be noted that I have not included in my suggestions for a resistance movement any anti-Catholic political party or any general boycott of Catholic candidates for public office … However, we cannot avoid the further conclusion that a Catholic candidate’s attitude toward certain policies of his church is clearly relevant to his fitness to hold public office.”

Blanshard also came up with three questions which he felt should be asked of a Catholic presidential candidate. Two were the same as those prescribed by the POAU: (1) Do you approve or disapprove of your church’s directive (Canon 1374) to American Catholic parents to boycott our public schools unless they receive special permission from their bishops? (2) What is your personal conviction concerning your bishops’ denouncement of the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the religion clause of the First Amendment, the payment of government funds to parents for major parochial school costs, and the payment of tax money for such fringe benefits as bus transportation?

Blanshard’s third question would ask: Do you personally approve or disapprove of your church’s policy of denying both Catholics and non-Catholics the right to receive birth control information?

Blanshard said he would also be willing to put before Catholic presidential aspirants the POAU’s third query: If you became president what would be your policy concerning the appointment of an American ambassador or a personal representative to the Vatican?

POAU Also Considered It

Dr. C. Stanley Lowell, associate director of the POAU, said the organization leaders had considered Blanshard’s birth information question, but that some objections were raised.

(CHRISTIANITY TODAY suggested editorially, June 24, 1957 [Vol. I, No. 19], that when seeking the nation’s highest office a Catholic candidate be asked whether he shares the official view of the hierarchy that the state is the temporal arm of the Vatican. Lowell agreed that such a question would be “a rather good one.” Blanshard’s comment was, “I would not phrase it that way.”)

But why bring it up now? Political conventions are two and a half years away. Said the POAU, “… We believe that it would be unfortunate to postpone the discussion of these issues until personal factors have become paramount in a presidential campaign.”

What Is A Grant?

A group of taxpayers pointed to a 13-acre slum area in New York’s Lincoln Square section as the latest battleground in the separation of church and state issue. The taxpayers went unsuccessfully to the New York State Supreme Court to try and block what they viewed as a city fund grant to Fordham University, a Roman Catholic school.

City plans include condemnation proceedings against the blighted blocks and an auction sale as part of a $205,000,000 redevelopment project. Fordham wants part of the land for a collegiate center. The rest would be left for housing and commercial building.

State Supreme Court Justice Owen McGivern heard arguments from the taxpayers on the contention that the city is paying more than $16 a foot for the property for resale to Fordham at $7 a foot. A suit filed by the group sought to prevent the resale to the university on the grounds that such action would in reality be “a direct subsidy to a sectarian institution.” The group contended that this would amount to violation of federal and state constitutional guarantees of separation of church and state.

Fordham’s attorneys called the suit an attack on the university’s right to contract legally with the city as guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. They also argued that a court decision preventing them from buying the land would have violated the school’s rights to full exercise of religious freedom as provided by the First Amendment.

McGivern dismissed the taxpayers’ suit with a ruling that sale of the land to Fordham would not involve any “gift or subsidy.” He implied that although the university would get the land for less than the city pays for it, additional costs would be involved. Fordham would be left with the task of relocating tenants and tearing down buildings before it could make use of the land. McGivern said any other educational institution was welcome to bid on the property.

Harris L. Present, attorney for the taxpayers’ group, was not through. He took the case to the appellate division and planned to appeal “to the United States Supreme Court if necessary.”

Convention Planned

The 14th World Convention of Christian Education will be held in Tokyo August 6–13. Related events will extend throughout the summer.

The Camel’S Nose

The presidents of 28 Jesuit colleges and universities have asked to have private schools included in any federal aid to education designed to increase United States scientific talent.

They announced after a two-day meeting in Washington the establishment of a national Jesuit Commission on Research and plans for $102,000,000 in new college buildings.

The president of the Jesuit Educational Association, the Rev. Edward B. Rooney of New York, said that if the objectives of increasing the teaching of science and mathematics can be attained only through federal aid, “then that aid should be made available on an across-the-board basis, for all students and for all institutions.”

“Where because of state constitutional provisions such across-the-board distribution is precluded, provision should be made for direct grants by the federal government to individuals and institutions affected,” Father Rooney said.

The Jesuit school heads claimed that the federal school lunch program provided a precedent for giving assistance directly to students without ragard to the private control of the school attended.

Imc-Wcc Merger Voted

The International Missionary Council Assembly voted to merge with the World Council of Churches.

Approval of a plan of integration came at a meeting of 200 delegates from 35 constituent councils of the IMC at Achimoto in the new country of Ghana.

Ratification by the constituent councils still is needed before the merger can be consummated.

The assembly recommended that the next WCC Assembly, scheduled for Ceylon in 1960, be postponed until 1961 to allow IMC constituent councils more time to study the merger plan.

The Assembly nominated James K. Mathews, executive secretary for India and Pakistan of the Methodist Board of Missions, to succeed Dr. Charles W. Ranson as general secretary of the IMC.

Bishop J. E. Leslie Newbigin, head of the Madhurai-Ramned diocese of the Church of South India, was named to succeed Dr. John A. Mackay, president of Princeton Theological Seminary, as chairman of the IMC. Mackay was made honorary chairman.

The Assembly admitted three additional councils to IMC membership.

People: Words And Events

Church Sponsors Jazz Movies—The St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Glendale, Mo., is sponsoring free showings of jazz movies in the City Hall. Comment will be given by the Rev. Alvin Kershaw, Episcopal rector of Peterboro, N. H., who won $32,000 on a television program with his knowledge of jazz.

New Journal Published—A new quarterly journal known as Foundations, the Baptist Journal of History and Theology, began publication this month as “an open forum for the expression of the theological conviction of Baptists.” Editor is the Rev. George Younger, Minister of Mariners’ Temple, New York. The journal’s initial issue contains an article entitled “Twenty Years A Baptist,” by Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Skyscraper Church Planned—Trinity Methodist Church of Louisville, Ky., authorized its trustees to plan a $2,000,000 skyscraper building to house both a new church and 200 one-bedroom and efficiency apartments.

Free Organs Offered—Retired Cleveland businessman Claude Foster offered to buy a Hammond organ for any “poor country church” in Ohio that needs one and that does not have the funds to buy it.

Editor Dies—Louis Minsky, managing editor of Religious News Service, died at his Kew Gardens, N. Y., home at the age of 48.

Love Aflame—In Arlington, Va., Perry W. Johnson and Florence Edna Gutridge showed up for their New Year’s Eve wedding an hour late and found the church dark. Still determined, they happened upon the Rev. U. N. Troutman in a fire house. The couple walked down an “aisle” formed by two parked fire trucks and were pronounced man and wife in the waning moments of 1957.

Attendance Increases—One million more adults attended church and synagogue services regularly during 1957 than the year before, the American

Institute of Public Opinion reported. Dr. George Gallup, Institute Director, said an audit showed average weekly attendance in the United States at about 48,500,000.

Crime Rate Up—There were more crimes committed in the United States in 1957 than in any previous year, said J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover said preliminary figures from police departments showed an increase of 7½ per cent over 1956, when 2,563,000 major crimes were committed.

Translations Planned—Through Gates of Splendor, account of the martyrdom of five American missionaries, is being translated into the languages of Finland, Holland, Germany, Japan, Norway and Sweden.

Lutherans Triumph—The Lutheran Laymen’s League float won first prize in the religious category of the Tournament of Roses parade at Pasadena, California.

Digest—Canadian Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker will address the fifth Baptist Youth World Conference in Toronto next summer.… President Eisenhower sent greetings to the Church of the Nazarene on the opening of its golden anniversary year.… The Manhattan Baptist Church was organized as the first New York City church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.… Some 120 United States Methodist ministers and laymen will participate in a 10-day evangelistic crusade in Cuba, January 28-February 6.… Youth for Christ International announced plans for a five-year expansion program with a half-million-dollar-a-year budget to “combat juvenile delinquency by reaching teenagers with Christian teaching.…” Protestant churches in the New York City area opened a 13-week church attendance campaign to be climaxed on Easter Sunday as a follow-up to the Billy Graham crusade.… Wake Forest College trustees rejected a motion to permit campus dancing in violation of a North Carolina Baptist Convention ruling.

Students Confer

Not all college students go home for the holidays. At least nine thousand spent their Christmas vacations at religious conventions.

At Urbana, Illinois—Evangelist Billy Graham warned 3,200 delegates at the fifth International Student Missionary Convention that this may be the last generation for world evangelism.

“I have a feeling that as God called the disciples and the early church to evangelize in the first generation of church history, so you and I may be the ones God has called to evangelize the world in its last generation,” Graham said.

He told the gathering sponsored by Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship that the delegates represented a potential missionary force to shake the world. He urged them to make “a full, irrevocable commitment to Christ.” More than 1,500 did.

The theme of the convention on the University of Illinois campus was “One Lord—One Church—One World.” In addition to Graham there were five other major speakers: Dr. Harold J. Ockenga of Boston, Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse of Philadelphia, Dr. Masumi Toyotome of Tokyo, Japan and Dr. Kenneth Strachand and Rev. Israel Garcia of San Jose, Costa Rica.

Ockenga declared that missions were “the world’s first line of defense against atheistic Communism and against irresponsible freedom.”

But he stressed that “Christians must view the world through other glasses than the East-West struggle. We must recognize the value of all men regardless of color, creed and nationality in their condition of human need.

“The overpopulation, undernourishment, disease, lack of sanitation, illiteracy, ignorance, superstition, prejudice, hatred and corruption have bound mankind in darkness and fear. Compassion and concern are the twin motives which stir us.”

At Lawrence, Kansas—Some 3,400 students attending the sixth quadrennial Methodist Student Conference heard themselves called the “uncommitted generation.” They promptly admitted the designation, then dropped the blame back in the laps of accusing clergymen.

Delegates representing some 1,000 colleges and universities adopted a statement at the close of the conference which declared that the youths belong to an “uncommitted generation” because “the church has not called us to her Lord or her mission clearly enough to excite our response.”

The youths denied “the implication we are uncommitted either through choice or indifference.” “To the contrary,” the statement said, “most of us are deeply concerned over our lack of commitment and many of us are actually searching for that cause to which we can offer unreserved allegiance.”

Their statement was read by Dr. Robert Hamill of Madison, Wisconsin, director of the Wesley Foundation at the University of Wisconsin.

The statement said that the church which chides them for their uncommitment “proves to be a major stumbling block toward commitment.” The students said that although the church offers herself as the only institution worthy of their allegiance “it is herself a primary deterrent.”

“We may be silent and withdrawn, but we are not easily misled,” the statement continued. “The church as she stands now is not, we believe, worth our lives. But the mission of the church obedient to her Lord is. The institution does not impel our commitment, but the Lord of the institution does.”

All that the church has called on youths to do, the students said, “is to perpetuate the peripheral role in which she is presently engaged, while the urgent issues of the world remain unchanged. Some wonder if all she offers is just contentment, the antithesis of a commitment.”

The students said they were faced with a “curious dilemma” of wanting to commit themselves while the church offers no “clear reason” for them to do so.

“We ask the church to recommit herself more fully to her true Lord and mission that we may have more reason to heed her call.”

Among conference speakers were Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review; Methodist Bishop Fred P. Corson of Philadelphia and Dr. Harold A. Bosley, Evanston, Illinois, Methodist minister.

A highlight of the meeting was the world premiere of an oratorio, “The Invisible Fire,” commemorating the 250th anniversary of the birth of famed hymn writer Charles Wesley.

At Lexington, Kentucky—Some 2,500 delegates to a Southern Presbyterian youth meeting were told to hold on to spiritual perspectives in spite of the growing “scientific mood.”

The occasion was the sixth quadrennial Youth Convention sponsored by the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern).

Church-State Issues Summarized

The issue of separation of church and state promised to create continued tensions. Here is a summary of developments around the turn of the year:

WASHINGTON—Catholic presidential candidates should be asked to reveal their position on the clash in principles between the Roman church and democratic government, urged Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State. (Story on page 28.)

NEW YORK—A state Supreme Court judge refused to block the proposed sale of public land at a discount to Fordham University, a move which a group of taxpayers view as a government grant to a sectarian institution. (Story on page 28).

WASHINGTON—Jesuit college heads asked that private schools be included in any future program of federal aid to education designed to increase this nation’s scientific talent. They said precedent has already been set for such action by the federal school lunch program. (Story on page 29.)

WASHINGTON—The Census Bureau decided to drop the idea of asking a question on religious affiliation in the 1960 Census. Bureau Director Robert W. Burgess said it was decided to forego the proposal primarily because “a considerable number of persons would be reluctant to answer such a question …” Burgess said the feeling was that the value of statistics based on the religion question would not be great enough “to justify overriding such an attitude.”

STOCKHOLM—The Swedish Minister of Justice undertook a new study of church-state relations in anticipation of a Parliament bill which would allow women to apply for office in the Lutheran National Church. Involved is the larger question of whether the church synod has the right to veto bills regarding church matters. The synod rejected a similar bill last fall.

The church has been challenged today by the “scientific mood,” said Dr. M. M. Heltzel, pastor of the Ginter Park church in Richmond, Virginia. But he added that science cannot, and was never intended to, meet all of our many needs.

“In a world of atomic energy and man-made satellites we see that science, if unrestricted, could be our destruction,” he warned. “Now we see that some power outside man, from beyond the forces of nature, must be brought upon the scene to prevent disaster.”

Heltzel’s contentions won support from the pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, Dr. Lawrence I. Stell, who said that the church’s primary need is to aid students in resolving “the seeming conflict between Christian faith and scientific method.”

“There are some who rejoice in attempting to develop a wide chasm between these two and demand that the student choose between them,” said Stell. “This can be based only on a misreading of the nature of the two.”

Other speakers included Dr. Julian Price Love, professor of biblical theology at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, and Dr. Chandran Devanesen, head of the history department, Madras Christian College, Tambaran, India.

President Worships

President Eisenhower was among high government officials who attended an early morning National Presbyterian Church service which marked the opening of a new session of Congress.

He was joined by members of Congress, the cabinet and service officials.

The service of intercession and Holy Communion was conducted under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church of the USA, the United Presbyterian Church, the National Council of Churches and the Council of Churches of the National Capital Area.

The Communion sacraments were served by elders of the National Presbyterian Church, among whom are Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Secretary of the Army Wilbur Brucker.

Lawmakers Pray

The United States Senate reconvened as Chaplain Frederick Brown Harris, D.D. prayed that the nation’s leaders may “rise to greatness of vision and action to meet the most crucial challenge since the Liberty Bell first rang out its glad tidings.…”

Brown prayed in behalf of the senators that the Lord would “give thy servants, the few out of the many, who for the nation speak and think and act here, to see clearly that our salvation will not be found by wailing about the things we might have done, but by the mighty things we here highly resolve to do today for the tomorrow.” His prayer continued:

“Purge our outlook of all defeatism and despair; and above all, of the perilous fallacy that the final victory of thy truth which makes men free depends on the massing of material might alone. Deliver us from the evil of seeking deals which crucify ideals.”

Seminary Land Acquired

A 100-year-old family estate was purchased to become the site of the new Midwestern Baptist Seminary at Kansas City, Missouri.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s sixth seminary will be located on 99 acres which cost the trustees $252,000. The site is the largest of the six.

Former owner of the property is Mrs. Sheffa Vivion Foster, who said she would will an additional five acres to the seminary.

“Religion” Jails Youth

Because he said his religious scruples forbade him to use electricity or other modern conveniences, a young conscientious objector was sentenced to a year and a day in jail.

Abraham Y. Bontrager, 24-year-old member of the Old Order Amish community at Hazleton, Iowa, was sent to a federal penitentiary after he refused to accept alternative work assigned to him by his draft board in lieu of military service.

Bontrager refused three alternatives offered by Federal Judge William J. Campbell: work in hospitals either in Des Moines or Fort Wayne, Indiana, or work on a farm at a Mennonite home for the aged in Kansas.

Bishop Emanuel Schrock of the Amish community, who appeared in court with the youth, said employment in a public place or use of any modern convenience, such as electricity, was forbidden by the sect’s religious beliefs.

Judge Campbell said he had to decide “whether the defendant is exercising his religious beliefs within reason.”

Gospel Radio For Nome

The Evangelical Mission Covenant Church said it would assume responsibility for securing a broadcast license and installing equipment for a Gospel broadcasting station at Nome, Alaska.

The announcement came after a meeting in Chicago between church officials and representatives of Denali Broadcasters, Inc., which also has wanted to erect such a station for Western Alaska.

Denali and other evangelical organizations will be given opportunities to assist in the missionary radio effort in Alaska.

The Evangelical Mission Covenant Church has been studying the possibility of building a radio station in conjunction with its mission operations in Northwestern Alaska for several years.

Industrialist Ordained

Robert B. Watts, vice president and general counsel of the Convair Division of the General Dynamics Corporation, was ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church in Los Angeles.

A Change Of Mind

The Detroit Common Council voted to ban Sunday real estate operations then, a week later, reversed itself.

Votes on the proposed ordinance, which was to undergo further study, climaxed seven weeks of debate involving church groups, home builders and estate men.

Councilman James H. Lincoln originally introduced the bill “so salesmen won’t have to work seven days a week.” A Michigan law in effect since 1846 forbids “any manner of labor, business or work” on Sunday, but the law in recent years has not been enforced.

A previous ban on Sunday real estate sales was ruled out by the state Supreme Court in the 1930’s.

The Common Council first passed Lincoln’s bill by a vote of 4 to 3.

But Councilman Charles N. Young-blood, who favored the ban, asked for reconsideration because, he said, it was controversial and it was passed on the eve of the swearing in of two new members.

The second time around the Council reversed the ban by a vote of 5 to 3.

Middle East

Oil And The Gospel

The nationalization of the oil industry in Iran brought unprecedented gains in the proclamation of the Gospel.

The old Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had exercised control over the region in which it operated to such an extent that Christian workers were discouraged.

Avoiding religious controversy was the company’s chief interest. Any stirrings might have halted the flow of oil.

Chaplains paid by the company were the only recognized Christian clergy. These chaplains, representing the Catholic and Anglican Churches and the Church of Scotland, were imported to minister solely to the foreign employees. Iranian Christians were for the most part leaderless and allowed to use chapels occasionally. Oil workers found themselves in a materialistic environment, among them Armenian and Assyrian Christians and others who had received Christian training in mission schools.

Efforts in the name of Christ were few. The Christian and Missionary Alliance had a missionary couple in Khorramshahr and Ahwaz for five years and a Lebanese couple lived in the area for a few years as free-lance missionaries. Large missions of Iran were unable to station any missionaries or evangelists in that region.

Then came the establishment of the consortium, the nationalization of the oil industry. Formal chaplaincies were abolished and restraints of long standing also went.

Iranian evangelicals and new technicians from the United States began insisting on some form of Protestant church organization. The Bishop of Iran, the Rev. W. J. Thompson of the Church Missionary Society, took the lead by inviting the Presbyterian Mission in Iran to join in a survey of the possibilities for a joint chaplaincy in the Province of Khuzistan.

That was two years ago. Since then, evangelical missionary couples with a knowledge of the Persian language have come into take up the challenge. They have brought Christians together and have created interest among non-Christians in a manner unparalleled in Khuzistan.

Although the couples serve as members of their own denominational missions on loan to the Chaplaincy Committee, their salaries are met entirely from local sources.

F.T.W.

New Church

Presbyterians decided to establish a church in Hawaii against the advice of the Honolulu Council of Churches and findings of Dr. J. Quinter Miller, Assistant General Secretary of the National Council of Churches.

The Rev. Carroll Schuster, Clerk of the Los Angeles Presbytery, said persons are being sought to organize the Hawaiian church.

Honolulu church leaders said this was in violation of a “gentlemen’s agreement” dating back to the 1840s between the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians. The agreement reportedly provided that Presbyterians would operate elsewhere in the Pacific area, and that Hawaiian Presbyterians join other Protestant denominations.

The Honolulu Council of Churches is on record as having written the Presbyterian National Board of Missions and the Presbytery of Los Angeles to the effect that there were already enough denominations located in the Hawaiian Islands.

Miller made a survey on the islands several months ago at the request of the board. “While I found a wide variety of opinion thereon,” he said, “the conclusion to which current thought and opinion points is that it would be unwise for Presbyterian work to be established there.”

His survey said such a move would “inescapably weaken, by division, the work of the Hawaiian Evangelical Association of Congregational Christian Churches.” The Congregationalists have been in Hawaii since 1820 and list today more than 100 individual churches with nearly 13,000 members.

Thomas C. Major, president of the Honolulu Council of Churches, promised at any rate to “welcome them (the Presbyterians) with open arms and invite them to join the council.”

P.E.T.

Europe

Pastors Attacked

Communist leaders appeared to be changing their tactics in a campaign to undermine the strength of East German churches.

The latest maneuver in the Soviet cold-war offensive saw direct attacks against individual clergymen instead of open assault upon entire religious movements. More pastors were being arrested and others denounced publicly.

Leaders of the Evangelical Church in Germany quickly sensed the change and issued direct orders to its 5,500 pastors in the East Zone to stay with their congregations—even at the risk of their personal safety.

The orders came as ministers by the dozens sought to move out of Communist East Germany. Some 20 pastors under suspicion for alleged anti-State propaganda already had fled to the West and another 150 were reported to have asked for reassignment outside the Red satellite nation.

The Evangelical Church in an effort to stem the tide, took disciplinary action against two of its pastors who fled the East Zone and reportedly refused to return, even at the urging of church leaders.

South America

Growing Tension

Growing tension between the Roman Catholic Church and Venezuelan Dictator Perez Jimnez was highlighted in an article published recently in La Republica, Costa Rican daily, in which it was revealed that Archbishop Rafael Arias Blanco had sent the dictator a note demanding legal elections as scheduled December 15.

“The peace and happiness of the Venezuelan people,” the archbishop said, “demand the return of the exiled, the liberation of all political prisoners, and full amnesty.”

President Perez’ reply was to confiscate the edition of the Catholic daily La Religion, in which the note was subsequently published, and to secure from his congress a bill authorizing the substitution of a simple plebescite for regular elections.

Venezuelans may vote in December for or against continuation of the present regime.

The current attitude of the Venezuelan clergy is reminiscent of the fact that it was the opposition of the Catholic church in Colombia which finally tipped the scales against former dictator Rojas Pinilla.

W.D.R.

Japan

Conference Expands

The Central Committee of the Japan Protestant Centennial Conference decided to expand its scope by including Japanese pastors and Christian workers as well as missionaries.

Six Japanese church leaders agreed to form an executive committee.

To date 21 missions including 643 missionaries have accepted invitations to participate in the centennial celebration.

Founding Marked

Japanese government officials were among participants in a service which commemorated the 80th anniversary of the founding of Meiji Gakuin High School and University.

The Meiji Gakuin school traces its formal history to the founding in 1877 of a theological school under the sponsorship of Reformed and Presbyterian missionaries from Scotland and the United States.

Tokyo officials and representatives of the federal Ministry of Education helped to observe the anniversary.

J.A.M.

The Epistle to the Colossians is one of three or four letters which were written by Paul around the same time and sent to various Christians in the Roman province of Asia by the hand of his friends Tychicus and Onesimus. The others were the Epistles to the Ephesians and to Philemon, together (it may be) with the enigmatic “epistle from Laodicea” mentioned in Colossians 4:16. At the time when he wrote these letters Paul was a prisoner. While arguments have been advanced for the view that they were written from Caesarea or Ephesus, it is more probable that they were written from Rome during the two years which (according to Acts 28:30) Paul spent in custody there.

Some years previously, from his headquarters in Ephesus, Paul and his colleagues had evangelized the province of Asia (Acts 19:10). The valley of the River Lycus, in which Colossae lay, was one of the districts evangelized at that time—not, it appears, by Paul in person, but by his trusty lieutenant Epaphras. Now Epaphras had paid Paul a visit in Rome and told him of the state of the churches in the Lycus valley. Much of his news was encouraging, but there was one very disquieting feature: at Colossae there was a strong inclination on the part of the Christians to accept an attractive line of teaching which (although they did not suspect it) was calculated to subvert the pure gospel which they had believed and bring them into spiritual bondage.

The Colossian Heresy

It was mainly to refute this teaching that Paul wrote the Epistle to the Colossians. We have no formal exposition of the false teaching—commontly called “the Colossian heresy”—but we can to some extent reconstruct it from Paul’s allusions to it.

Basically the heresy was Jewish; this seems clear from the place which it gave to legal ordinances, circumcision, food regulations, the sabbath, new moon and other prescriptions of the Jewish calendar. But on the Jewish foundation there had been erected a philosophical superstructure which was non-Jewish in origin—an early and simple form of what later came to be known as Gnosticism. In this part of Asia Minor the barriers between the Jewish communities and their pagan neighbors were not very effective. Social intermingling led to religious fusion, and the Colossian heresy may be described as a Jewish-Hellenistic syncretism which had made room for some Christian elements in its system so as to attract the young churches of the area.

In this system the angelic beings through whom the Jewish law had been given (cf. Acts 7:53; Gal. 3:19; Heb. 2:2) were identified with the lords of the planetary spheres, “principalities and powers,” who had a share in the fulness of the divine nature and controlled the lines of communication between God and man. Since they were in a position to cut off men from access to God, tribute must be paid to them in the form of law-keeping. To break the law incurred their displeasure, and they had to be placated by severe self-denial and penance. Christ himself, it was probably held, could not have passed from heaven to earth or back to heaven without their permission. Indeed, the fact of his suffering and death was a token of his inferiority to them. And similarly his servants, such as Paul, whose ministry was attended by so much tribulation, had clearly not attained that degree of control over the cosmic powers which would have made it possible to avoid all this tribulation.

Its False Appeal

This kind of teaching undoubtedly appealed to a certain religious temperament, the more so as it was presented as a form of advanced teaching for a spiritual elite. Christians were urged to go in for this higher wisdom, to explore the hidden mysteries by a series of successive initiations until they achieved perfection. Baptism was only a preliminary initiaton; those who would pursue the path of truth farther must put off all material elements by means of a rigorous asceticism until they were transported from this material world of darkness into the spiritual realm of light, and thus had experienced full redemption.

But however attractive many might find this cult, Paul condemns it as specious make-believe. Far from constituting a more advanced grade of knowledge than that presented in the apostolic preaching, it was totally inconsistent with that preaching and threatened to overthrow the foundations of Christianity. A system which exalted the planetary powers must enthrone fate in place of the will of God, and a system which brought men into bondage to these powers must deny the grace of God.

Paul’S Corrective Teaching

To this “tradition of men,” Paul opposes the true tradition of Christ. The planetary powers have no part at all in the divine fulness; that fulness is completely embodied in Christ. It is in Christ, too, that all wisdom and knowledge are concentrated, and in him all wisdom and knowledge are accessible to believers—not only to a spiritual elite, but to all. The planetary powers are in no sense mediators between God and man; that role is filled by him who unites Godhead and manhood in his one person. He is not inferior to them; his sovereignty over them is established by twofold right. First, it was by him and for him that these powers were created, together with everything else that exists; secondly, it was he who vanquished them when they assaulted him on the cross, and liberated from their now impotent grasp those who formerly had been held in bondage by them. Why should those who were united with Christ think it necessary to appease powers which owed their very being to him? And why should those who by faith had died and risen with Christ, thus receiving a share in his victory, render any further service to those powers whom he had so completely conquered? Far from being an advanced stage of wisdom, this angel-cult bore all the marks of immaturity; it called on those who had come of age in Christ to go back to the apron-strings of infancy.

Christ’S Supremacy Over All

In his reply to the Colossian heresy Paul unfolds the cosmic significance of Christ more fully than in his earlier epistles. It is not entirely absent from the earlier epistles, as may be seen from 1 Corinthians 1:24; 2:6–10; 8:6 and Romans 8:19–22. Here, however, it is expounded at length.

Justification by faith, fundamental as it is to Paul’s gospel, does not exhaust his gospel. In the age of the Reformation it was inevitable, and indeed most desirable, that special attention should be concentrated on the means by which the individual soul is accepted as righteous in God’s sight. But in some quarters Paulinism has come to be identified so exclusively with the insights of Galatians and Romans, that the cosmic and corporate aspects of the gospel unfolded in Colossians and Ephesians have been felt to be un-Pauline. There is room in true Paulinism for both, and contemporary evangelicalism must similarly make room for both if it is not to be lopsided and defective.

In particular, the truth of Christ’s supremacy over all the powers in the universe is one which modern man sorely needs to learn. He is oppressed by a sense of impotence in the grasp of merciless forces which he can neither overcome nor escape. These forces may be Frankenstein monsters of man’s own creation, or they may be horrors outside his conscious control; either way he is intimidated by the vastness of those fateful currents which may sweep him to destruction against his will. And to modern man in his frustration and despair the gospel of Christ as it is presented in this epistle is the only message that can bring hope. Christ crucified and risen is Lord of all; all the forces in the universe are subject to him, well-disposed and ill-disposed alike. To be united to Christ by faith is to be liberated from the thralldom of hostile powers, to enjoy perfect freedom, to gain the mastery over the dominion of evil because Christ’s victory is ours.

The arguments which have been used against the authenticity of Colossians cannot stand up to serious examination. Some of them, as has been said, depend on an unwarranted restriction of “Paulinism.” The type of heresy which the epistle attacks is not the developed Gnosticism which we meet in the second century, but an incipient Gnosticism such as was prone to emerge in the first century and even earlier in areas where Judaism of the Dispersion was influenced by dominant trends of Hellenistic and Oriental thought. If Paul uses terms here in a rather different sense from what they mean in his earlier epistles, we need not be surprised; the sense which he gives to a number of technical terms in Colossians may well be due to the sense in which they were employed by the heretical teachers. Some parts of Col. 1:9–23 have been singled out as specially un-Pauline in character; but in part of this section (verses 12–17) we probably have echoes of a primitive Christian confession of faith. The mediating theory that Paul wrote a shorter letter to Colossae which some later hand expanded by the incorporation of sections from Ephesians is condemned by its own complexity.

Analysis

The Epistle falls into five main sections:

1. Salutation (Col. 1:1–2).

2. The Person and Work of Christ (Col. 1:3–2:7).

3. False Teaching and its Antidote (Col. 2:8–3:4).

4. The Christian Life (Col. 3:5–4:6).

5. Personal Notes and Final Greeting (Col. 4:7–18).

As in most of Paul’s epistles, the doctrinal part is followed by a practical part, the two being linked together logically by the conjunction “therefore” (Col. 3:5). Because that is the doctrine, he says in effect, this is how you should live (cf. Rom. 12:1; Eph. 4:1). Or, as our Lord put it: “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them” (John 13:17).

The practical injunctions of Col. 3:5–4:6 are arranged according to what appears to have been a well-established catechetical method in primitive Christianity; they may be subdivided under the headings: “Put off” (3:5–11), “Put on” (3:12–17), “Be subject” (3:18–4:1), “Watch and pray (4:2–6).

Literature

Of all the commentaries on the Greek text of Colossians, the best is J. B. Lightfoot’s (1875), recently reprinted by Zondervan. Less brilliant than Lightfoot’s, but a piece of sound scholarship, is T. K. Abbott’s work in the International Critical Commentary series, where it shares a volume with the same writer’s commentary on Ephesians (1897). The most recent commentary of this kind is an excellent work by Professor C. F. D. Moule in the new Cambridge Greek Testament series (1957). On the English text there is a useful commentary in the Cambridge Bible series by H. C. G. Moule (1893). The same writer’s Colossian Studies (1898) is more devotional in character. A. T. Robertson produced an interesting study of the epistle in Paul and the Intellectuals (Stone Lectures, 1926). E. F. Scott expounded Colossians together with Ephesians and Philemon in a volume of the Moffatt New Testament Commentary (1930). The exposition of Colossians in the New International Commentary on the New Testament by the present writer will soon be published in the same volume as E. K. Simpson’s exposition of Ephesians.

F. F. BRUCE

No Common Field

Fundamentalism and the Church, by Gabriel Hebert, Westminster, 1957. $3.00.

This book has been receiving considerable publicity and it is difficult to understand why. It is not a great book in any sense of the word. It is interestingly written, but badly constructed. It contributes nothing new to some old problems and rarely meets directly and concisely the problems which it raises within its own thesis. The book is probably receiving its acclaim for one of three reasons: first, the subject of the book, including the word “Fundamentalism,” is an advertisement in this day when the book itself proves that the issues between Fundamentalism and Modernism are far from dead; second, the liberals are delighted to have someone take up the cudgels against the fundamentalists; third, the fundamentalists having been rubbed raw at various points, receive this book with considerable sensitivity.

Such comment immediately raises the question of what the author means and what any of us mean when we use the term “Fundamentalism.” There are “fundies,” “fighting fundies,” “conservatives,” “evangelicals,” “the orthodox,” and those who wish to remain “true to the main features of the Reformed tradition.” Hebert is very clear in pointing out how the word “Fundamentalism” arose, and he is clear in listing the “fundamentals” which lead to the term “Fundamentalism.” From that point on, however, he never really meets Fundamentalism on the basis of his own definition. Therefore, each man in reading this book, if he feels himself to be in the conservative tradition, is moved to raise the question whether Hebert is talking about him at all. This sort of thing is particularly striking as Hebert discusses the whole question of the inspiration of Scripture. When he talks about bibliolatry I am forced to conclude that I know no one who practices such. When he talks about “mechanical dictation,” I know of no one who holds such a view. Yet this sort of thing goes on and on, a constant criticism of those who hold to verbal inspiration: that they practice bibliolatry or that they believe in some view of mechanical dictation. I think Hebert is quite right in bringing up the whole question of inspiration as central to the discussion of Fundamentalism and the Church, but his book makes no contribution to the discussion.

Throughout the book the author gets off into unnecessary and unfortunate excurses. On pages 26 and 27 he is working on a problem between the I.V.F. and the S.C.M.; the controversy reflects largely the Australian context and is probably not applicable most places in this country. In any case, it is a discussion of the old problem of the individual versus the social gospel, and is really the sort of thing one would expect to find in a tract. Beginning on page 103 he gives almost 14 pages to a digest of a book by Bo Giertz. These 14 pages are one-tenth of the printed matter of Hebert’s book. The material from Bo Giertz is interesting and valuable, but entirely too long for illustration, and what Hebert is illustrating is not clear.

It is hard to discover the public whom Hebert is addressing. So much of the book seems to be naive in terms of the real issues at stake and the arguments on both sides that are available are well known to all the disputants. Is he saying that all our arguments would disappear and we would have real unity if we would cease making issues out of what we believe to be fundamentals? That is impossible. Take a statement like this on page 14: “all controversy between Christians needs to start from the unity which God has made.…” Is it not more exact to say that all controversy between Christians needs to start from a deep concern for God’s truth or God’s glory? We all agree that God’s truth will be one truth, but I think we all need to agree also that until we have that truth there must be controversy. We cannot get rid of the problem of the serious difficulties among men by pretending that the difficulties are not there or by pretending that they do not matter. Hebert makes this plain enough when he begins to talk about the Church, particularly from the Anglican viewpoint in the latter part of his book.

Some of his criticisms of the fundamentalists need to be taken to heart, particularly his well-founded criticism that the fundamentalists are slow to recognize the social and sociological implications of their own salvation. He points up also at least the implication that someone soon needs to make clear what fundamentalists believe about the inspiration of Scripture. That this sort of thing has been done by men like Warfield does not mean that this position is being publicized today. If the fundamentalists are so strenuous in their support of verbal inspiration or verbal inerrancy, then someone modern, scholarly and conservative needs to write the book which can be a kind of “Q.E.D.” on the whole problem. Hebert has brought to our attention also that many of the Fundamentalist movements, particularly among college students—Inter-Varsity, Young Life, etc.—have given no serious thought to ecclesiology. Most of them are movements in independency.

One concludes from this book that in this controversy two different teams are playing on two different fields with slightly different sets of rules. Once in a while one team lobs a ball to the other field and hits someone in the head. This brings immediate reaction, but nothing is settled. Perhaps in the new ground swell of the conservative tradition in our day it will be possible for both teams some day soon now to play on the same field with the same rules, and settle some old scores.

ADDISON H. LEITCH

Life Of Augustine

Son of Tears by Henry W. Coray, Putnam, New York, 1957. $3.95.

This is a novel based on the storm-swept life of St. Augustine, who in himself forms a fascinating chapter in the history of the Christian church.

Mr. Coray states his purpose: “I began to read the works of St. Augustine.… Then I gradually developed the conviction that I had to bring him again to life. I found that the outline of his early years lies half buried in his Confessions. Son of Tears seeks to interpret one of the great minds as well as one of the most complex characters in history.”

This statement contains the seeds of many of the novel’s difficulties: Mr. Coray has attempted too much. Explanations of Manichean, Donatistic, and Pelagian heresies, along with other historical data and interpretation of Augustine’s writings all constitute too much burden for the novel. Furthermore, the fact that the author tries to cover his subject’s entire lifetime almost compels him to tell us rather than show us Augustine’s feelings. Of the death of Augustine’s son we are told, “A raging fever sapped Adeodatus’ strength. He lapsed into a coma. On the thirty-fourth day of the illness, while his father and a few of the monks looked on, brokenhearted, he breathed away his life. Augustine groped his way to his chamber to pray, the hot tears coursing down his cheeks.”

We can accept these perfunctory statements as facts, but we cannot very well empathize with the emotions. This spells failure to the project of bringing Augustine fully to life again.

Along this same line, Mr. Coray falls into a habit, all too prevalent in Christian novels, of explaining too much. One is reminded of Charles Lamb’s letter to William Wordsworth: “An intelligent reader finds a sort of insult in being told: I will teach you how to think upon this subject.… Very different from Robinson Crusoe, The Vicar of Wakefield, Roderick Random, and other beautiful bare narratives. There is implied an unwritten compact between author and reader: I will tell you a story, and I suppose you will understand it.”

Quotations from the Confessions at climactic points throughout the novel tend to destroy any artistic illusion which had been built up, and lowers the suspense by reminding us that all will be well in the end. Quotations would, of course, be very much in order in an interpretative literary biography, but they seem injurious to the novel. (Perhaps, after all, Mr. Coray simply chose the wrong medium.)

But the novel is honest on the subject of Augustine’s youthful sin, and thus avoids the very common and lamentable practice of whitewashing Christian biography to an impossible extent. There is immense intrinsic interest shown in the turbulent life of Augustine, with his passionate love for truth, for the lovely Melanie, and finally for the church. Such a life could hardly fail to command attention. It does not fail to do so in Son of Tears.

VIRGINIA RAMEY MOLLENKOTT

Lesson Commentaries

Douglass Sunday School Lessons, by Earl L. Douglass, Macmillan, 1957. 482 pp., $2.95. Tarbell’s Teachers’ Guide, by Frank S. Mead, Revell, 1957. 383 pp., $2.75.

Rozell’s Complete Lessons, by Ray Rozell, Rozell & Co., Owensboro, Ky., 1957. 342 pp., $2.95.

These commentaries are based on the International Sunday School Lessons, the International Bible Lessons for Christian Teaching, and on the Home Daily Bible Readings, copyrighted by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ and the International Council of Religious Education.

Three well-known teachers’ guides on the International Sunday School Lessons are considered in this review. Recent estimates by Sunday school authorities indicate that 60 per cent of the Sunday Schools throughout the United States are still using the International Lessons for some classes in the local Sunday Schools. No wonder, then, that writers on the International Bible Lessons continue to work assiduously every year on the preparation of teachers’ guides.

All three volumes offer a vast amount of information concerning the three topics for the year. Twenty-six weeks are given to “New Testament Teachings about the Church.” The third quarter is given to “Principles of Social Justice.” The last quarter is devoted to lessons on “The Life of Christ.”

First impressions count. This is where the format and type used in printing make a difference. Rozell has the edge on pleasing format. The layout in his volume is simple and easy to follow. Each lesson has a box entitled, “For the Teacher Only,” Rozell makes it easy, then, for the teacher to think quickly about the needs of the pupil, the aims of the lesson and a suggested approach to the lesson.

Douglass and Mead, however, have both included daily Bible readings and audio-visual resources which Rozell has omitted.

The teacher who is looking for a simple outline of the content will probably enjoy Rozell’s volume. For the teacher who wants to enrich and support the lessons with visual aids and illustrative material, he will find extensive resources in Douglass’ volume. In addition to lessons that throw light on the Biblical text, Douglass offers resources of visual aid materials for the temperance emphasis throughout the year’s work. Mead includes a list of addresses of producers whose material is used in the listing of audio-visual materials.

Douglass and Mead have used the King James Authorized Version, while Rozell has chosen to develop the lesson based on the Revised Standard Version text.

All three authors aim at taking the biblical text and making it relevant to contemporary life. Mead gives special help in adapting the lesson for intermediates and seniors in the local Sunday School. Douglass has the most helpful development of the lesson following a lesson plan. However, he does not go into a strict exposition of the text itself, but draws from the portion of Scripture and brings a great deal of material to bear on the contemporary needs as they are relevant to the universal principles of Scripture. Rozell does not provide any topics or questions for discussion. Douglass orients his questions and topics for discussion around the biblical text; whereas Mead seemingly is more concerned with contemporary problems and social issues in the use of suggested questions and topics of discussion for the teacher.

Douglass is more provocative as he develops his ideas. He attempts to inject the problem situation and then uses the biblical resources to solve the problem. Mead, on the other hand, tends to use many quotations from a variety of sources, and in that way throw some light upon the lesson outline. Rozell has more of a running comment on the ideas that are found in the biblical text; there are numerous helpful statements but not much illustrative material.

All three authors offer more than the average Sunday School teacher will use in the Sunday School hour. The best procedure, of course, would be to have all three volumes on one’s desk and gather the best for the teaching of the lesson.

If the reviewer could choose only one, he would prefer Douglass’ development of the lessons.

MILFORD SHOLUND

Peloubet’s Select Notes, by Wilbur M. Smith, Editor, Wilde, 1957. 455 pp., $2.95.

Since a day in October of 1924 when a synodical executive suggested that he supplement his meager library with some copies of Peloubet’s Notes, the present reviewer has consistently used and appreciated the successive volumes of this series. Under the able editorship of Dr. Smith, this commentary on the International Bible Lessons has become an indispensable tool for evangelical pastors and teachers. Having an acquaintance with and an access to expository literature second to none, the editor has again furnished the church with a veritable storehouse of biblical truth, of which only a fraction may be utilized during any class period. Christian workers who begin to use these Notes will continue using them over the years and thereby build up a valuable library of Christian literature to aid them, not only in their future teaching, but in preparing devotional talks and Gospel messages. This will yield a great dividend of spiritual blessing, both to the teachers and those to whom they minister. The book is printed in clear type and expertly indexed.

ERIC EDWIN PAULSON

That religious thought which may be described as distinctly Reformed is not marking time is shown by the marked revival of interest in Reformed literature, both classical and modern, and also by the formation in recent years of the International Association for Reformed Faith and Action. The story of this latter venture is well worth recounting. In 1952 a small group of young and youngish men from half-a-dozen different countries met at the Free University of Amsterdam in order to discuss the situation of the Reformed faith in our world today and to lay plans for the strengthening of the Reformed cause in this generation. One tangible outcome of their deliberations was the decision to hold an international Reformed congress in the summer of the following year, and this congress was duly organized and convened at Montpellier in the South of France in July, 1953. Lectures and discussions centered around the theme: “The Secularization of the Modern World—the Reformed Answer.” Those attending this congress represented nationalities from every quarter of the world—Europe, Near and Far East, Africa, America—and the proceedings were conducted in three languages: English, French and German. At this same congress the organizing group presented a draft scheme for the formation of an international organization, and this scheme was accepted in principle by the members present and a provisional executive committee appointed for the further elaboration of the project.

Two years later a second international congress was held at Detmold in Central Germany. At this gathering, even more widely representative than the former, it was formally resolved to found an international organization, and a constitution which the committee had prepared was discussed and approved. It was agreed that the organization should be named The International Association for Reformed Faith and Action—the emphasis being placed not merely on belief but also on progressive activity. This is made plain in the statement of the Doctrinal Basis and Purpose of the Association as incorporated in the Constitution, as follows:

Doctrinal Basis:

The Association proclaims the sovereignty of God, revealed in the Lordship of Jesus Christ, over the world and thus over every department of human activity.

In accordance with the historic Reformed confessions of faith the Association submits unconditionally to the authority of Holy Scripture as the Word of God, thereby recognizing it as the sole standard of reformation in this and every age of the Church.

The Association accepts, as being consonant with Holy Scripture, the ecumenical symbols of the ancient Church, namely the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed.

Thus the Association asserts that it is in true succession in faith and doctrine from the Apostles, through the ancient Church, and down through the Reformers to the present day.

It is the confident hope of the Association that God will grant to the Church of this age the gifts of the Holy Spirit in order that, in obedience to Holy Scripture, it may respond to the needs of this age, as our fathers in the faith responded to the needs of their age.

Purpose:

The purpose of the Association is to promote God-centered living through faith in Jesus Christ.

To this end the Association regards as its special task

a) the strengthening and advancement of the Reformed cause throughout the world;

b) the encouragement of fellowship between Reformed Christians in every land;

c) the facilitation of the interchange of Reformed thought and experience.

National or regional branches have already come into existence in such varied and widely spread countries as the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, North America, South Africa, Australia, Japan and Korea, and plans are afoot for the formation of more branches of this kind through which the work of the International Association can the more easily be set forward. That the aims of the Association are increasingly being put into practice appears also from the fact that an ambitious literature program is now being carried out, included in which is the provision of financial and other aid for the composition, translation or republication of Reformed writings, especially in languages in which there is as yet a deficiency of such literature, e.g., Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Korean. The Association’s sights are also trained on countries behind the Iron Curtain and on South America. Money has been lent to the Societe Calviniste de France so that the grand scheme for a completely new edition of Calvin’s Institutes and commentaries in modern French may be brought to fruition.

As the result of a visit by the undersigned to Portugal in the Spring of 1956 a national branch was formed in that country; and a year later Professor Jean Cadier of Montpellier gave a series of lectures in Lisbon at the invitation of the Portuguese branch. At the present moment Professor Gerson Meyer of the Carcavelos Seminary (Portugal) is in Brazil, his native land, endeavoring to promote the work of the International Association there, and a similar object is being pursued by the Rev. Hisashi Ariga in Japan and Professor Raden Soedarmo in Indonesia. The formation of a Belgian branch has been encouraged by visits and lectures by Professor Cadier, Dr. Andre Schlemmer, and Pastor Pierre Marcel of France and Dr. Jan Dengerink (the International Secretary) of the Netherlands.

And so the work goes on and increases—not, of course, without its very real problems and difficulties, but to the great delight and thankfulness of those few who met together in Amsterdam six years ago, having no resources other than their faith and their vision. The time-honoured motto Soli Deo Gloria expresses both their praise for the past and their ambition for the future.

The next international congress is to be held, God willing, in the historic city of Strasbourg, France, from the 22nd to the 30th of July this year. The theme of the congress will be: “How to Confess our Reformed Faith.” A distinguished international team of speakers will deal with subjects such as “The Reformed Faith and the Modern Concept of Man,” “Witness by Word and Deed,” “Witness in and through the Church,” “Witness in and through the Family,” and “Christian Witness in the World of Industry”; and each day time will be allotted for open discussion of these subjects and for Bible study in groups. By these means it is hoped to make a relevant and genuinely scriptural contribution to the religious thought of our day.

Through 30 or more years of air wave communication, I have never heard any commentator speak of the Church as a world power. In an earth shaken by the fear of atomic destruction, commentators today refer only to two sources of restraint upon potential war-minded aggressors: massive military might, and the United Nations. However necessary fearful military equipment may be, it is at best but a negative restraint upon the passions of potential dictators. It cannot transform a warmonger into a lover of peace. The United Nations is a useful public forum for the focus of world opinion. But again it is fundamentally an organization of external pressure. Its range of influence is on the circumference of life. It seeks to shift the balance of nations by outer compulsion. It lacks power to deal with inner motives. Only the Church dares to claim it can change a man’s heart, and wash away lust, greed, hate and fear. Yet, in the affairs of nations, the Church is ignored.

New Power For A New Day

Now, one cannot ignore a hurricane. A sidewalk cannot ignore the root beneath it which by persistent growth eventually splits the concrete pavement in two. Peter, the fisherman disciple of Jesus Christ, was not ignored. The mind and heart of St. Paul could not be ignored. Peter and Paul had access to the source of life like that growing in a twig on a hillside that cracks in twain a granite rock. Equipped with holy boldness, their private prayers and public speech were spiritual hurricanes of faith and love that crumbled the strongest resistance. Slowly but surely, they and the early disciples took over an ancient empire. What life-giving power has the Church lost that it cannot duplicate that experience today? Were the Church to have this same spiritual power in our atomic age, it could not be ignored!

Thirty odd years in pastoral work makes this problem mine. If the Church has failed, it has been my failure. In retrospect, I would like to examine the Church from the standpoint of personal observation and experience. In the two churches where I have served a major part of my ministry, I received into church membership perhaps 1200 individuals. I now realize that they fall into three groups.

The first group are those who lack a living experience of Jesus Christ. I received them into church membership, but as far as knowing who Jesus Christ was and what he had done for them, they were still in spiritual darkness. If that was true, how dared I welcome them into full church membership?

I am speaking now from hindsight, the backward look, as I try honestly to assess my action and their condition. So far as I can now determine I was blinded to the full reality of what I was doing. In the natural life these men, women and young people were normally kindly, goodhearted folks in their daily fellowship. They were helpful to one another in time of physical distress or financial need. When they were asked if they believed in Jesus Christ, their reply was correct. They said, “Yes, I believe in Jesus Christ.” They were not dishonest people who deliberately affirmed what they did not believe. If anyone then had challenged the veracity of their affirmation about Jesus Christ, they would have been deeply hurt. They did believe in Jesus Christ. But I see now that it was a mental belief, an intellectual statement about Jesus, rather than a living experience of passionate love for Jesus Christ as their Saviour and Lord.

Facing The Fact Of Failure

If I try to excuse myself at this date by saying what I have said in the past, “They gave the right answers,” I know now that I would be hiding behind an evasion. When I face my Lord in heaven about my personal responsibility for the destiny of their souls, he will rightly and justly say to me, “In those dealings with souls for whom I died, I never knew you.”

Why, then, do I say this, when my part in their living relation to Jesus Christ is beyond repair? First of all, I say it because I believe it is true. Furthermore, if in spiritual blindness and irresponsibility, I failed those who were entrusted to my spiritual care, it may be that other ministers have had or are facing similar experiences. If this is one reason why the Church lacks power for its Master when the fate of a world hangs in the balance—to face the truth of failure with penitence and renewed faith may help open the channels of God’s grace to a new and greater flow of his power in this hour of world need.

I see plainly now that I welcomed into church membership people who from the world’s standpoint were goodhearted, generous folk, but who had not yet been born into the spiritual plane of life where Jesus Christ dwells continually. To receive them under those circumstances was deception on my part, however blindly I acted. I did them grievous spiritual harm.

Life From Outside

In my own boyhood, at the age of fifteen, I had a living experience of Jesus Christ as my Saviour and Lord that revolutionized my life and became the foundation for every good thing that came to me thereafter. The Holy Spirit entered into my spirit, led me into a life of daily prayer and opened to me a love of Scripture that every blinding experience since has never been able to destroy. Yet, in those days of youth, I didn’t understand what was happening to me. Nor did anyone ever make it fully clear to me. A clear understanding of the development of my spiritual life could have made me far more useful to my Lord.

Now no one disputes the facts of physical birth. No one denies the self-evident fact that a germ of life from one human body must invade another body and two forms of life merge into one to produce physical conception. Unfortunately it has not been made as clear in the teaching of the church that entrance into the spiritual plane of life requires the same process—an invasion of the human spirit by divine life outside the human spirit—the living Spirit of Jesus Christ entering the human spirit in a union that brings regeneration, and birth from above, a second birth, even as physical conception makes possible generation, or our first birth as human beings.

All nature confirms this process. Every seed has been born once by the self-evident fact of its physical presence. When planted in the earth and the life outside the seed breaks through the decayed, dying, protective shell, to merge into union with the life inside the shell, the seed has had a second birth, a new birth, a “born again” experience. The seed has now entered that marvelous plane of harvest abundance where one seed becomes multiplied a thousandfold.

Truly for the seed, this is life from “above,” a plane of existence the seed could never have known if it had not been buried in the earth in the death experience for the outer shell or “self” life of the seed.

The first step for spiritual power in the Church is a membership made up of people who have actually been born into the spiritual plane where Jesus Christ, the Risen Lord, abides. How can a person know anything about the physical world until he is born into it? How can anyone know anything about the spiritual world until they are born into it?

The Dawn Of Daylight

The second group among the church members I received were those with a lack of the life-giving expression of Jesus Christ. They were born into the spiritual plane of fellowship with Jesus Christ. But birth into either the physical or spiritual realm, was only at the infant stage. It was only the dawn of spiritual daylight. Spiritually, this salvation experience is only the cradle or Bethlehem stage.

Physical infancy is a lovely thing if it is only a passing stage on the road to physical maturity. However, passing years that leave a human being as physically helpless as a babe is very sad. It is an even sadder experience to see promising spiritual infants who never mature into the developed capacity for a life-giving expression of Jesus Christ. It is a double tragedy for a pastor to look back through the years of his own spiritual blindness and realize his failure to nourish these individuals with an eternal destiny until they have grown beyond the need of constantly being rocked in the cradle of spiritual infancy by maturer spiritual hands. It is my personal failure, which I wish again frankly to confess, that I have shared in a Church that lacks power in an atomic age. My failure to help guide those children of God into the New Testament experience of spiritual maturity can be another area where my Lord can say to me, “In this area of soul need, I never knew you.”

The second step for spiritual power in the Church today is strong, wise nourishment for those who have been genuinely regenerated through penitence and faith, and who now through that second birth live in the spiritual plane where Jesus Christ always dwells.

The Expansive Life

The third group in the members I received into the Church were those leading a life of expansion for Jesus Christ. They were the ones who by God’s grace were soundly born into the Kingdom of God and grew beyond spiritual infancy to a measurable life of Christian maturity. They became spiritual disciples of Jesus Christ. They reached the point of Christian usefulness to their Lord. The Lord saved them. But he made me responsible for a ministry of the Word that eventually made disciples of them. His command was, “Go, make disciples.…”

An editor once wrote me that he was more interested in people having the experience of “salvation in Christ” than he was in seeing people have “success in Christ.” My own share in keeping people in the cradle stage through failure in nourishing them to spiritual maturity, makes it necessary for me to bear a part of the responsibility for the lack of power in the Church today. Altogether too many “saved” people in our churches never make it to the disciple stage of useful spiritual maturity. As one who can see his failure in pastoral responsibility, I know I cannot dodge my Lord’s solemn judgment.

There were many activities in my churches that no one would label harmful, save for the fact that although they were generally accepted parts of church machinery, they had nothing whatever to do with my Lord’s command, “Go, make disciples.” Even in those moments of my higher vision as a Christian, it was far too easy for me as Henry Ward Beecher used to say, “To pray cream and live skim milk.”

Resurrection Power

The “unborn” lives in my churches exercised no spiritual power. The “undernourished” ones who were only in the cradle stage, were only then at the beginning point where they could be led by careful guidance into the stage of usefulness to their Lord—discipleship. Only the undaunted lives of spiritual maturity in the Church exercised New Testament resurrection power.

These were the ones who clearly understood who Jesus Christ is and what he has done for them on the Cross. They were the disciples who, on the basis of the redemption of Jesus Christ, clearly recognized and joyously acknowledged his absolute sovereignty over their lives, and who witnessed to his absolute Deity. They knew they no longer belonged to themselves. They had been bought with a price. They had given up all right to themselves. With St. Paul, they affirmed, “I (the self man) die daily,” abiding in death to self at the Cross with Jesus Christ in order that they might abide in his risen life, the power of his Resurrection.

I know now why the Church lacks power today. I know where I have failed my Lord. I know that he is the Lord of the harvest and that my obedience is to him alone who wills to bring in his Kingdom his way, not mine. I know that I love and serve a Saviour and Lord who has all power in heaven and earth, whose promises are unfailing, whose love is infinite and who still commands and empowers me by his Holy Spirit to, “Go, make disciples.” My trust and obedience determines the flow of RESURRECTION POWER in and through his Church.

Carlos Greenleaf Fuller holds the A.B. degree from Colgate University, B.D. from Union Theological Seminary (New York City), and M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University. He served Featherbed Lane Presbyterian Church, of New York City for 16 years, and then First Presbyterian Church of East Rochester, N.Y. for 13 years. A prolific writer, he has written some 60 articles for religious publications.

The outstanding fact about twentieth-century unbelief is that it is organized and massive.

Before the beginning of the century there were, of course, skeptics who voiced their unbelief as individuals in and through their philosophical or critical works, poems, essays, and novels. Up to 1870 religious works and sermons were among the “best-sellers,” but by 1900 they had dropped nearly to the bottom of the lists. During that thirty years, novels with a religious or moral purpose had displaced them.

By 1898 rationalistic writings had gained sufficient hold to make possible the founding of the “Rationalistic Press Association” in London, from which, year by year, cheap reprints of scientific, “positivist” and skeptical works poured forth, attacking the Bible and theology and the Church from the standpoint of scientific materialism, evolutionary agnosticism, and evolutionary ethics and sociology.

Unleashing Of Unbelief

Unbelief was not yet “organized” unbelief. It was, however, being so organized, particularly in Germany, in support of the ambition of a grandiose Germanic world state. Bernhardt’s Germany and the Next War, for example, had as its fundamental premise that “war is a biological necessity,” which the writer had arrived at on naturalistic, evolutionary grounds. “Nature was deemed to be red in tooth and claw.” The “struggle for existence” and “the survival of the fittest” were natural phenomena, and “fittest” meant “most forceful.” Thus, Bismarck’s “Blood and Iron” theory was justified on naturalistic grounds, and the doctrine “Might is Right” was widely preached and practiced.

The war of 1914–18 undoubtedly stemmed directly from this root, and the world at large should have learned a lesson, but it failed to do so despite the 12 million precious lives that holocaust extinguished. Even before the Armistice was signed Lenin, with, be it observed, the help of Germany, was busy organizing the foreboding Russian Revolution of 1917. The basis of that Revolution was “unbelief,” and it just as patently was of the same naturalism that lay behind the German bid for world power. It was, of course, Marxist through and through—a materialistic interpretation of history, with progress to be achieved by class war. Its objective was a Communist world state, professedly egalitarian, but in fact a robotian enslavement of the common man by the brutally strong and animal-istically cunning. Tsarist tyranny was replaced by the tyranny of even worse ruthless brute force. If Nature was “red in tooth and claw,” the new Russian despots showed that man could easily beat her record in murderous blood baths, cruelty and viciousness.

This same basic creed took another turn in Italy in 1922 (Mussolini) and in Germany in 1933 (Hitler), which in 1939 plunged the whole world into World War II. Again murder and destruction stalked abroad and ended in the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But while Fascism and Nazism hated Communism, they nevertheless invoked its aid against the democracies. Stalin, tongue in cheek, gave aid, which ended in a stricken Poland and an enslaved Eastern Europe. When these later turned on Stalin, the Russian Bear was, strangely enough, upheld by the democracies.

The democracies thought they had won the war. Doubtless they had, but Russia annexed territory all around, seized power and is now the most extensive force—if not the mightiest—in the world. Based on what? Complete unbelief. No God, no spirit in man, no moral or spiritual values, no freedom, no compassion, no semblance of shame, no sense of sin or evil. Russian Communism, thrusting its tentacles into every part of the globe—to Egypt and the Arab world, to China and the Asian world—is unbelief, massive, organized, Satanic.

Complete Secularization

This is the unbelief of the twentieth century, different from the unbelief of any previous age. An American writer has said that “for perhaps the first time in history we are confronted with complete secularization of the opinions, emotions and practices of mankind.” He was writing a judgment of the democracies in particular. He would have used a stronger word than “secular” to describe the Russian communistic menace. He might have said the complete “animalization” of the opinions, emotions and the practices of people, for at bottom it is dehumanization. He might have said that this “unbelief” is the organized embodiment of hell itself: anti-God, anti-Christ and man, anti-moral values—Lucifer let loose.

For Christians there can be no “peaceful co-existence” with such a creed. God and the Devil cannot possibly be at peace. Nor can there be any compromise. It is war—war to the death. But Russian Communism is “organized” as a powerful state—a state that means business and has no scruples as to how it achieves its end.

Amiel’s prophecy of 1856 is coming true in 1956. “What terrible masters,” he wrote, “would the Russians be if ever the might of their rule should spread over the southern countries! A polar despotism of tyranny such as the world has not yet known, silent as darkness, keen as ice, unfeeling as bronze, a slavery without compensation, or relief; this is what they would bring.” The truth of that warning is evident today as the Russian Bear’s paw reaches out far beyond the southern countries—to Egypt and the Arab world. That paw has already grabbed China and much of the Asian world, and its claws are even in the Americas and beyond the Southern Cross.

We know, of course, that the almighty Russian communistic world state opposing itself to Almighty God cannot win. In the end it will destroy itself. “God is not mocked.” But meanwhile it can devastate and destroy and enslave. It can bring in George Orwell’s “1984”; it can repeat on a much larger scale Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Vast masses of mankind are fearfully aware of this—the Western democracies especially.

Towers Of Babel

But what do we find among these powers? A clear understanding diagnosis of the situation? Indeed no. Rather, we find them building, out of their own proud self-sufficiency and for their own self-glory, materialistic, God-defiant Towers of Babel. They erected a “Tower” called the League of Nations after the First World War. It ended in “Babel.” After the Second World War they erected the United Nations. Is that becoming “Babel” as well?

Why did the League of Nations fail? It failed because it did not abjure “unbelief.” If the United Nations fails it will be from the same cause: lack of faith in God. How can men be united in spirit and truth if there is not worship of God in spirit and in truth—if men do not believe in God?

Is it not the same with the other “isms”—Socialism, Humanism? What hope have these against Communism if men are building them upon the same major premise—whose name is Naturalism? Communism is, after all, devilishly logical—if there is no God and no spirit in man. Are not all our “isms” contradictions in terms if Nature is all—if materialism is the real—if secularism is our master? Is it possible to deduce “Liberty—Equality—Fraternity,” from a godless nature, or a godless world of men? Nay, it is impossible.

But this means abjuring our own “unbelief.” It means shedding our anthropocentrism, our self-sufficiency and self-glory. It means recognizing our utter dependence. It means rehabilitating the Bible’s major premises: “In the beginning God created,” and “God made man in his own image,” “God breathed into man the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” It means reading the Garden of Eden story with spiritual insight and understanding; not with mockery as an ancient tale, but as revelation. Therein is unfolded the wrongheadedness and pride of man; he imagined he knew better than God. And that imagination, so man’s history shows, has ever been the forerunner of calamity; it is shouting this today louder than ever in man’s history. Man does not and cannot know better than God. It is only fantastic, conceited, self-centered unbelief that makes him follow that ignis fatuus which is today the match that (unless there is a very radical change in the spirit of society) will explode the H-bomb.

Changing The Social Spirit

Radical change in the spirit of society! But how is this to be brought about? Is politics equal to the task? If so, which brand? Have not we in this century pretty well tried them all, and fruitlessly, from Fascism to Communism, and all the brands in between these extremes, which literally stand back to back and scream different slogans concocted in the factory of Naturalism? Can economics do it? Even the economics of the welfare state? Can scientific materialism and its offspring, materialistic Socialism, change the spirit of society when it does not even behave in the spirit of man? Can technical education perform this miracle of change? Look again at Russia, which probably has more technicians than even the United States; are they changing the spirit of Russian society? Recent events in Hungary give an appalling answer.

One is neither blind to the importance of these activities, nor does one wish to disparage their service to mankind in their proper sphere. But it is obvious nonsense to think that they can, by their collectivism and environmentalism and this-worldism, change the spirit of society. Jeremiah long ago asserted in the name of God, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it?” A greater than Jeremiah pronounced a similar judgment: “From within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: all these things come from within, and defile the man” (Mark 7:21ff.). The world today is thus pinpointed. The Lord Jesus said to Nicodemus: “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again” (John 3:5ff.).

The Wisdom Of Christ

We err sadly if we value the wisdom of either science, or politics, or economics, or even education, more than the wisdom of Christ. For in the light of his wisdom they all turn out to be plain foolishness. And yet it is to just such foolishness that modern unbelief is leading us. Neither social nor ecclesiastic externalism can change the spirit of society, for neither of these can change the heart of man. It is only as the heart of individual man is changed by the Eternal Spirit himself that the spirit of the twentieth-century world can be changed. Only as each man “believeth” can he be “saved.” It is “believers” the world needs—obedient, dependent believers, personal believers—in the Lord Jesus Christ as the Word of God, the Light of the world, the Saviour, the Regenerator of men, the Way to God, the Truth of God, the Life of God. Neither dictatorship nor democracy can save the world from disaster. Only Christ can do that through ordinary men and women like you and me who humbly cry, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

All of which is, admittedly, old-fashioned. Yes, as old-fashioned as the New Testament and “the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). The Gospel which Paul declared in pagan Rome was “the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth” (Rom. 1:16). Why not do as St. Augustine did, “open and read” for yourself, and let the Word himself speak to you? You want peace. Why not listen to the “Prince of Peace”? Can anyone be a surer guide than “the Son of God”?

J. H. Ward has held pastoral posts in the Church of England for 47 years. He holds the B.A. and M.A. degrees from Cambridge University, and served from 1914 to 1919 as Director of Religious and Educational Work for the Y.M.C.A. in England. Now in his 79th year, his present parish in Ongar, Essex, is 30 square miles in area. He is a frequent contributor to church periodicals on current spiritual concerns.

The Busy Man

My life has been too much on little spires,my heart intent on second-rate desires;my soul has struck its spark too much to lightthe chaff and tinder-stuff of petty fires;while God’s great beacon, patient in the night,has waited for the torch to make it bright.

TERENCE Y. MULLINS

Two hundred years ago at Princeton, the ministry of Jonathan Edwards ended (March 22, 1758) in untimely death. He was and is considered to be one of the outstanding minds of American history. He stands out as a philosopher, theologian, man of letters, and revivalist. His reputation has been maligned for many years because of false judgment against a certain sermon and a particular emphasis in preaching. The time has come to revalue Jonathan Edwards and his ministry in the light of the eighteenth century, the Great Awakening, and our present age. During his lifetime (1703–1758) he lived and labored under the eye of the divine Taskmaster. The several lives of Edwards give the details of his life of dedication and devotion.

New knowledge about Edwards indicates that he was primarily a pastoral preacher who did the work of an evangelist. Puritan in life and ideal, he followed well defined models of Puritan homiletics and hermeneutics. Study filled most of the day, and a well-disciplined mind was lighted by the Holy Spirit for his ministry.

Election And Decision

The manuscripts at Yale and Andover throw new light upon his inner convictions and the emphases he made in preaching. These suggest that in Edwards there is a paradox. How was it that he, a Calvinist convinced of the sovereignty of God, could at the same time act as a persuasive Arminianist in storming the will of man and urging man to press in to the Kingdom of God? This is most enlightening, especially as we are witnessing in our day a revival of preaching closely akin to this. Modern evangelism raises afresh the question concerning the stress in preaching which brings people to repentance and faith.

Is there any difference between revival preaching and evangelistic preaching? Are we too ready to assume that what is evangelistic is also revivalist? Do not the Scriptures make a distinction here? Men advertise that revival services will be held at a Church, but attendance on the preaching would indicate that here is no revival but simply evangelistic preaching. Evangelistic preaching has its place and is the reaching out of the church through the evangelist or the pastor to win the lost for Christ. But revival is the renewal of spiritual life, the revitalizing of lives grown careless and cold in spirit. Evangelism is primarily to those without the church, but revival is for those within the church. True, when church people and Christians are revived in spirit there is an outflow of love and compassion through evangelism to those without.

Sinners And God’s Anger

All this can be seen in the life of Edwards. His pastoral ministry was for a congregation primarily, but he also ministered to communities and people without. The Great Awakening found him in the midst of revival. He was used of God in reaching multitudes, yet he never ceased to be the pastor who reached his congregation. When revival came to his own church in Northampton, it did not come with “hell-fire” preaching as many imagine. The facts are these:

One Sunday he preached on “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” What happened? Nothing! That morning the good people listened with respect and agreement. After the service they stood outside the church and talked about the weather, births and deaths, crops and other domestic interests, including no doubt the finer points of that long sermon. But no one is on record as having been convicted and converted. Three months later, at Enfield, Edwards was asked to preach to the gathering of the district church people, and he took from the sermon barrel (or was it his saddlebag?) the manuscript of this sermon. A study of the manuscript at Yale shows how he worked over it and altered selected words and phrases. The revised manuscript then was used as the basis of the sermon which that day found the people “in great expectancy” (B. Trumbull, History of Connecticut, II, p. 112). The Holy Spirit brought conviction of sin, and people were moved to cry out and seek repentance and salvation. Revival broke out that day and spread across a wide area. It was the same sermon in essence which Edwards had used in his regular pastoral ministry, a token that the Spirit blows where he wills.

The question is asked—when did Edwards witness revival among his own congregation? The evidence is that he was not preaching imprecatory sermons, but delivering a series of expository sermons based on 1 Corinthians 13. The stress on love moved his own people, and again we see how the Spirit blows where he wills.

In the light of these experiences, let us not make the mistake today of demanding that God will send revival to his people or reach the lost through evangelism by any one method or by any one kind of preaching. In the book of The Acts we trace the regularity of the irregular. God is sovereign, as Edwards believed, and he acts in ways not stereotyped or fixed in ruts.

Edwards was neither a hireling nor a middleman in his conception of the ministry. He was a voice for God. While God was pleased to reach men in diverse ways, Edwards said it pleased God most of all “to call his saints in all his proper person, but in practice, preferring to employ his ambassadors and conforming his grace to the process of cause and effect.” It was the accepted belief of the Puritan that “whatsoever any faithful minister shall speak out of the Word, that is also the voice of Christ.”

Aiming For A Verdict

Edwards knew that he was an instrument of God. He based his preaching on a view of life in which God was all-sovereign. He revitalized conventional religion with this truth. He believed in redemption for the individual and the sermon as the agency of conversion. Others stressed ritual and sacrament in a day of declension and barrenness. He restored the sermon to its primacy in worship, and application in a sermon was usually more than mere exposition! He emphasized one idea, and then looked for salvation of the hearer.

Man’s sinfulness or depravity was stressed to show man’s inability to save himself. God’s sovereignty was central to show how man is shut up to God’s grace alone. It was Edwards’ testimony that he found “no discourses more remarkably blessed than those in which the doctrine of God’s absolute sovereignty with regard to the salvation of sinners was insisted on.” Stressing God’s grace in “Narrative of Surprising Conversions” and the sermon on “A Divine and Supernatural Light” he witnessed that “those that are under conviction will enquire earnestly what they shall do to be saved, and diligently use the appointed means of grace.”

In aim, Edwards appealed to the emotions by self-interest. He believed that unless a man was moved by some affection, he was by nature inactive. His defense of the Great Awakening supposed that the element of fear loomed largely in his imprecatory sermons, but the appeal to self-blessedness was always found in sermons dealing with heaven and the joys of salvation.

Then again he aimed to awaken the conscience for a verdict. The evangelist in Edwards appealed for a response. “I have not only endeavored to awaken you, that you might be moved with fear, but I have used my utmost endeavor to win you.”

The Paradox Of Preaching

We may summarize the paradox of Edwards’ preaching by stating his own aim: “the unconverted are guilty and deserve the punishment awaiting them; this punishment is given by an infinite God in his justice; and the only hope of escape is by the gift of salvation which cannot be won by man’s effort, but if anyone is violent he may press into the kingdom.”

In our day of man’s failure and fear of world doom, we may learn from Edwards. There is place for “hell-fire” sermons and the preaching of judgment in the right spirit but not in a cold manner. Conversion is a reality for the sinner and “whosoever may come.” John Wesley in the same day as Edwards had no stress on philosophy or a doctrine of the will comparable to Edwards’, but he also preached evangelistically, and multitudes were found in the valley of decision.

God honored and used both Edwards and Wesley. Calvinist and Arminian, philosopher and scholar, revivalist and evangelist, each had his place in God’s plan. Edwards’ paradox, from which we learn, lay in the predetermined sovereign will of God which knows man’s end, but allows his servant to preach as a means of urging people to press into the Kingdom of God.

Both evangelist and revivalist must unite to affirm that there is no final opposition between divine sovereignty and human free will. God is sovereign and man is free. God the Father works out his redemptive purpose and his Kingdom is sure.

Ralph G. Turnbull is pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Seattle, Washington. A native of Scotland, he holds the M.A. degree from University of Edinburgh, B.D. from United College, Manitoba University, Th.M. from Princeton Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Whitworth College. His Jonathan Edwards the Preacher is to be published in March.

Preacher In The Red

A FRIEND IN NEED

I was completing my first funeral service in my first congregation on the plains of Kansas. The words of committal for a dear, aged mother had been spoken and a prayer following concluded the grave-side service. Unexpectedly, one of the sons of the family approached me and asked me to thank those who had been of help to the family during their bereavement. This is what the nervous and frustrated young preacher announced, “In name of the mourning family I want to thank all the neighbors and friends who have made this funeral possible.”—The Rev. FRANK DEJONG, Home Missionary, Christian Reformed Church, Bellflower, Calif.

Not long ago I heard the titular head of a large missionary organization say that medical aid was the “bait” by which his group hoped to catch men and give them the Gospel. Some of his hearers protested, but one of them, a doctor, immediately came to the speaker’s defense: “Of course it is right to use bait. Jesus used plenty of it, both in his words and in his miracles.” But did he?

There is no doubt that the Christian Church has often used bait. Everyone knows the sorrowful story of the rice Christians of China, the free meals and lodging offered in a score of missions on skidrow, the lurid advertisements which have featured the dramatic conversions of former gangsters, wiretappers, communists, and convicts. The other day I saw the words “air-conditioned” sending forth a particularly fervent appeal in red letters from the bulletin board of a church in the deep South. We are all familiar with the appeal of spectacular buildings, magnificent music, special programs, and daring sermon subjects.

Spiritual Resources

Leonard M. Outerbridge in his Lost Churches of China says: “Seldom has the church dared to trust its cause solely to its innate character and its own spiritual resources and message.” And Walter Lippmann has reminded us in his Preface to Morals that if men had the “certainty which once made God and his plan as real as the lamppost,” and were sure “that they were going to meet God when they go to church … there would be no complaint whatever about church attendance. The most worldly would be in the front pews, and preachers would not have to resort to desperate expedients to attract an audience.”

Whatever may have been the policy of his followers in using bait, did Jesus use it? Can one honestly point to anything he ever did or said which shows that he looked upon the practice with favor, or used it himself?

Immediately there come to mind his words: “As ye go, preach, saying, the Kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give. Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves, for the workman is worthy of his meat” (Matt. 10:7–10). The simplest interpretation of these instructions is that Jesus’ followers were not to use bait. Healing the sick, cleansing the lepers, raising the dead, and casting out devils were to be the fruitage of their work. These were to be the consequences which followed the preaching of the Gospel. In no case were they to be dangled before the sick and needy as bait for the purpose of gathering an audience to hear the Word!

As far as I can discover, there is no instance recorded in Holy Writ where any of the earliest Christians did otherwise. Not once do we read of any of the Apostles first rallying a crowd around a “wonder” like a magician or a medicine-man at a carnival, and then preaching the Gospel.

In not using bait, the earliest Christians were not only following the instructions of our Lord, but his own example. What were miracles to men were not miracles to him. They were merely his work. “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work” (John 5:17).

Bait Disguises The Gospel

The feeding of the five thousand was not bait. It came as a total surprise to Jesus’ audience, even to his closest followers. When some of them would have had it as bait, he rebuked their misrepresentation of it: “Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled” (John 6:26). The “bait” had already degenerated into its grosser, lustful components, as mere bait always does, for it is chiefly of the flesh. “Labor not for the meat which perisheth, but for the meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you” (John 6:27).

Bait is for those who would catch men as game, and must needs disguise the hooks bent for their capture. The Gospel is not for man’s enslavement, but for his liberation. When purely preached it will spread everywhere of its own essence, which is the power of God. If the acceptance of the Gospel depends upon the bait that is used, our cause is lost, and men will be taken by another Gospel. For in the art of manufacturing baits, baits having great allure, even with miracles and wonders, we are no match for the enemy.

If we find that we have to use bait in order for the Gospel which we preach to be heard and effective, maybe Walter Lippmann is right. Maybe our preaching still has the form of the old Gospel, but has lost its power. If so, help lies not in the use of bait, but in a recovery of the power of God.

The Rev. David W. Baker is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., and holds the Th.B. degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. He also holds the M.D. degree from University of Pennsylvania Medical School, and is currently practicing Christian counseling in the Philadelphia Presbytery, where he does interim preaching, and lectures in Psychology at the Temple University School of Theology.

Four hundred years ago this year there took place in England one of those events which may genuinely be described as crucial for the whole development of the Western world, not only in the sphere of religion but also in that of ethical, political and social movement. In itself, the event was quite ordinary and simple, and not altogether unexpected. It consisted in the death of an aging, lonely, disappointed and embittered lady. But this lady happened to be the Queen of England, the wife of Philip of Spain, and the leader of the Counter-Reformation in her kingdom. Her name was Mary Tudor.

She had been through unfortunate experiences prior to her accession. Her mother was the ill-fated Katherine of Aragon, who had first been married to the elder son of Henry VII, and then became the first of the many brides of Henry VIII. Mary was her only child to survive infancy, and the failure to produce a male heir was one of the reasons for the unsavory affair which touched off the Reformation in England. Mary herself grew up under the shadow of her mother’s ill-treatment and a prey to the fickle moods of her father. For a time, when the king’s marriage with Katherine was pronounced null and void, she was even declared illegitimate and excluded from succession to the throne. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that she later identified the Reformation with a great wrong, and regarded those who espoused it as mistaken at the very best, if not irreligious and hypocritical.

Mary was not unkindly treated during the reign of Edward VI, and was given her rightful position as next in succession should Edward die without any children of his own. Her religious convictions were respected, although Reformers like Ridley made futile efforts to bring her to an appreciation of evangelical truth. But the experiences through which she had passed, and the influence of her advisers, made her quite impervious to their appeals and unswerving in her conviction that England must be brought back to the papal fold. The precarious health of Edward made the position of the Reformers a very uneasy one during the years of their apparent success, and the selfish and unscrupulous policy of the real ruler in Edward’s minority, the Duke of Northumberland, did little to commend the cause of reform to the mass of the people.

When Edward died in 1553, the new reign commenced with high hopes. Even Protestants had not supported the attempt of Northumberland to secure the throne for Jane Grey, whom he had conveniently married to his own son. And encouraged by Mary’s vague promises of respect for religious convictions, most of them rallied to the legitimate heir, and were only too glad to throw off the yoke of the exacting Northumberland. Mary had in fact a great chance. She could hardly be expected to approve or actively foster the cause of Reformation. But at least she could grant a period of conciliation or concession when matters could be thoroughly and honestly sifted and some form of settlement quietly reached.

No Concession To Protestants

However, in practice, this was hardly to be expected, and the leading Reformers were well aware that they must seek safety in exile or face the possibility of imprisonment and even death. Mary’s character and policy were already fixed for her. The bringing back of Reginald Pole as Archbishop, the election of a new Parliament carefully picked from sympathizers and finally the Spanish marriage committed her to a way of reaction which very quickly became a way of intolerant suppression. One by one the various measures of reform were repealed, Mary’s only failure being in the matter of monastic properties which even the most “Catholic” of beneficiaries refused to restore. The instigators of the Reformation, from bishops on the one hand to humble artisans and even expectant mothers on the other, were committed to prison, and in many cases to flames. Nor was the policy of religious reaction and intolerance matched by progress in the economic or foreign fields. At home, conditions were perhaps even more wretched than they had been under Edward, while abroad England as junior partner with Spain had seldom stood so low in the estimation of other nations.

Perhaps the main question in the minds of Protestants and others during the brief reign of Mary was whether she would have an heir and thus ensure a “Catholic” succession in place of Elizabeth. On many occasions there were rumors that an heir was expected, and once the bells were even rung for his or her supposed birth. The likely source of these rumors was that Mary was suffering from an internal growth from which she finally died, but we can imagine the state of suspense for the country when so many issues were poised in the balance, and no one could tell how the decision would fall.

God Can Work The Improbable

No study is ultimately more futile than that of the possibilities of history. For after all, one of the great interests of history under the guiding providence of God is that even the most probable things do not happen. Yet it is tempting to consider what might not have happened if Mary had really had a healthy successor. Even politically the consequences could have been momentous. England might have been enslaved for many years to Spanish policy, and never have become the seafaring, mercantile and colonizing power which it did under Elizabeth. In these circumstances, there might well have been no development of the dominions or even the United States in their modern form; no emergence of the democratic institutions which these nations have in common; no vigorous development of commerce and industry; no flourishing of independent education; no literature and culture so obviously informed by Protestant convictions and principles. Religiously, of course, the results might have been even more awful to contemplate. Protestantism might well have been finally excluded from England, and in this case the Scottish Reformation would probably have been impossible, the Netherlands might well have succumbed to Catholicism, there would have been no Pilgrim Fathers to spread evangelical truth to the new world, and all the enterprises in which Britain and America especially have been so gloriously identified, whether in the form of religious awakening, missionary expansion or social reform, might never have eventuated. Indeed, it is not impossible that Spain might have maintained its influence far longer than was the case, and ultimately have been the real colonizer of North as well as South America and other parts of the globe. So much of the future depended upon the life or death of Mary Tudor.

The lessons of history are more instructive than its probabilities. And from the situation at the close of the reign of Mary, four simple lessons are to be learned which may stand us in good stead in similar circumstances. The first is obviously the value of a steadfast witness even when the cause seems hopeless. The martyrs who died at the stake did not die in vain. Indeed, they perhaps commended the Gospel in a way in which it had never been commended to the common people by previous reforms. At the very least, it aroused a hatred for the bigotry (however sincere) which could carry through such remorseless persecution, and a respect for simple folk and learned churchmen who cared enough about scriptural truth to be prepared to die for it.

The Lesson Of Restoration

But not all the Reformers were called to die. Some of them sought refuge in exile, not merely for their own safety, but to be ready for a possible restoration. Some Roman Catholic writers have been prepared to see in the exile almost a deliberate and well-considered plan for the possible future. Whether this was consciously the case or not, the fact remains that from the exile there came back to England on Mary’s death an able body of mostly younger leaders able to take up where their fathers had been broken off. We must not despise those who flee when they are persecuted. Some are called to suffer; some to preach elsewhere and at the right moment to return. Even in the most desperate case, prudent measures can rightly be taken for the turn which God may see fit to bring. Preparation for the future may also be an act of faith and obedience.

One of the less fortunate aspects of the exile was that it saw the beginning, or rather the intensification, of discord and division among the English Protestants, with all that this was to mean in the form of later Puritan and Independent controversies. At this point there is a third lesson of warning. Times of weakness and apparent defeat are often times when there is a particular temptation to disagreement. But the call of God in such times is surely to close the ranks, to face the common enemy, to concentrate on the essentials and to work together a step at a time for the basic cause. How much happier might not the ultimate settlement have been, and how much stronger the evangelical cause in England, if the exiles and their successors had overcome at once the kind of division which became such a scandal at Frankfort!

Finally, there is the simple but supreme lesson of the divine overruling of history. This need not be labored. It is so obviously true at so many points that while man proposes, it is not man, whether he be emperor, pope or politician, but God himself who disposes. This has been particularly at the climaxes of history, and most of all when out of apparent disaster God brings a glorious victory like the triumph of Protestantism in England. This is the ultimate challenge to faith in the death of Mary Tudor.

Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Ph.D., D.Litt., is rector of St. Thomas’ English Episcopal Church in Edinburgh, Scotland. Educated in the University of Edinburgh, he is author of books on history and religion and contributor to numerous periodicals. He was Vice Principal of Tyndale Hall, Bristol, from 1946–54.

Revival is a return to God, and a return to God is a return to his Word. Throughout the whole span of the history of revivals this can be seen repeated in the remarkable turning of men to the Holy Scriptures. That which they had lauded as authority they discarded in favor of the Bible. Revival in every epoch has retold the story of the use of Holy Writ in restoring vitality to the Church.

Probably the greatest attestation to this in the Protestant era is found in the initial movement that made the western world Protestant. It was because the leaders of his period—Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and others—focused attention upon the Bible that revival was realized. The beginnings of the Reformation were the fruits of their efforts and the result of their pleas for a pure faith springing from the dictates of God’s Word. They recognized that the Church had previously been encumbered with volumes of literature which only obstructed the clear meaning of the Book of Books. Hence they deemed it reasonable that Scripture should take first place in the thinking and reading of the people. It was when this was emphasized that the peoples of Europe felt a strange but real power of moral uplift surging throughout the continent. This was the whole aim of the Reformers and the primary drive that motivated their zeal and teaching.

Source Of Renewed Life

What they advocated they practiced themselves. They were students of the Scriptures. The whole of Europe followed their example when the Bible was placed in the vernacular of the people. Men and women of all classes gladly became students of the Word of God with them. As the Bible was deeply, sincerely and prayerfully pondered, it quietly and unerringly did its divine work in cottage and mansion. In every country multitudes were awakened out of their sleep of spiritual death, convicted and converted to God. Converts were characterized as a saintly group, possessed by a supernatural power, for through them eternity was sensed, heaven’s atmosphere felt, and the unmistakable awe of God’s majesty realized. They lived listening to the Word of God and doing its precepts. This was indeed revival, the true portrait of vital spiritual quickening that is Christ-centered.

Motivated Wesleys, Edwards

A similar pattern was in evidence in the outpouring of God’s Spirit through the Wesleys during the eighteenth century. The whole basis of early Methodism was the Scriptures. John Wesley said in 1738 that he and his colleagues “resolved to be Bible-Christians at all events; and, wherever they went, to preach with all their might plain, old Bible Christianity” (Jackson’s Works of Wesley, Vol. VIII, p. 349). Whatever effect the revival had was the result of the soul-passion of this man. He cried, “I have thought I am a creature of a day, passing through life as an arrow through the air. I am a spirit come from God, and returning to God: Just hovering over the great gulf; till, a few moments hence I am no more seen; I drop into an unchangeable eternity! I want to know one thing—the way to heaven; how to land safe on that happy shore. God himself has condescended to teach the way; For this very end he came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book. O give me that book! At any price give me the book of God! I have it: here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be homo unius libri. Here then I am, far from the busy ways of men, I sit down alone: Only God is here. In his presence I open, I read his book; for this end, to find the way to heaven. Is there a doubt concerning the meaning of the thing I read? Does anything appear dark or intricate? I lift up my heart to the Father of Lights: ‘Lord, is it not thy word, If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God? Thou givest liberally, and upbraidest not. Thou hast said, if any be willing to do thy will, he shall know. I am willing to do, let me know thy will.’ I then search after and consider parallel passages of Scripture, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. I meditate thereon with all the attention and earnestness of which my mind is capable. If any doubt still remains, I consult those who are experienced in the things of God; and then the writings whereby, being dead, they yet speak. And what I thus learn, that I teach” (ibid., Vol. V, pp. 3–4).

Proclaiming The Word

Nothing less was the heart-concern of every man whom the Lord chose as his instrument for bringing about revival. In each instance it was the proclaiming of Holy Writ that brought about a God-consciousness and a sense of eternal verities in the midst of society. Jonathan Edwards, the mouthpiece of the Great Awakening, scrupulously applied himself to the same task of being a student of the Bible and then proclaiming what he had imbibed. One of his resolutions (which he read over once a week) states, “Resolved, to study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly, and frequently, as that I may find, and plainly perceive myself to grow in the knowledge of the same” (Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. I, p. 4). An extract from his diary confirms this desire; he says on Tuesday, August 13, 1723, some years before the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in abundance, “I find it would be very much to my advantage to be thoroughly acquainted with the Scriptures. When I am reading doctrinal books, or books of controversy, I can proceed with abundantly more confidence; can see upon what foundation I stand” (ibid., p. 11). He relied upon Holy Writ because he believed it recorded God’s thinking and spoke his message to men’s hearts. “In the Bible,” he wrote, “we not only have those warnings which are given by inspiration of the prophets, but we have God’s own words, which he spake as it were by his own mouth. In the Old Testament is his voice out of the midst of the fire and the darkness, from mount Sinai; and in the New Testament, we have God speaking to us, as dwelling among us. He came down from heaven, and instructed us in a familiar manner for a long while; and we have his instructions recorded in our Bibles” (ibid., Vol. VI, p. 333).

This was the fountain that brought new life to early American Christianity. Here is the spring of that power that revivified the dying church and cleansed it of the corruption that polluted its entire ministry. A new day dawned in the history of the United States when the infant nation again grasped and accepted the truth of God’s Word. Under the biblical preaching of Edwards the country mended its ways, received stamina and grew to become a leader in international affairs. When the church was revived the nation lived a vital life.

Also On Mission Field

What wrought revival blessing in long established Christian countries also produced the same results in heathen lands. Young mission churches in pagan surroundings experienced the impact of God’s Spirit upon their work when they emphasized scriptural teaching and Bible reading. A spiritual refreshing of unusual proportions came their way when they placed the Word of God centrally in their lives as the primary avenue through which God was permitted to speak to them his message. After many years of fruitless labor, revival came to Ongole, India, because of this very fact. John E. Clough, principal instrument in that movement, later reported, “The missionaries and native preachers are doing, we have reason to believe, a good work. Thousands of village schools are taught by Christian men and women; hundreds of colporteurs, with Bible in hand, travel from village to village, and offer the word of God, and evangelical and other tracts, for a nominal price to all who will buy; while hundreds of other zealous men, as catechists or lay-preachers, go everywhere preaching Jesus” (From Darkness to Light, p. 280).

Again the secret of success in bringing strength to a weak church, spirituality to carnal Christians, and the voice of God to deaf ears was in stressing the Bible as the Lord’s message. When constant systematic study of the Word was restored, Christians were so blessed that heaven met earth through them, heathendom was affected and thousands found salvation in the true and living God.

Modern Experience

The modern era bears testimony to the same truth. In the twentieth century there have been many notable revivals, and Holy Scripture has been shown to be the foundation of them all. One of the most extraordinary took place in Wales. Here Evan Roberts was the channel God used. He made the Bible his first concern. A contemporary biographer of his wrote in 1906, at the height of the movement, “His great book, both during the years before he became a church member and after, was the Bible. It has continued to this day to be his delight. This is proved by his extensive knowledge of the Old and New Testament by heart” (Phillips, D.M., Evan Roberts, p. 53). Whether at work or in leisure he was absorbed in the Word of God. “It will be interesting to see him at work in the smithy. Scarcely a minute passes by that he is not singing or repeating Bible verses and other good things” (ibid., p. 46). Upon leaving his place of employment he does not waste his time in gaiety, but in his home he “sits before the fire with the Bible in his hands, and reads on for hours. Losing himself completely in it, he is deaf to the chatter and clatter of the house” (ibid., p. 47). Small wonder when he became God’s man in Wales he was able to bring to that land God’s message, the sense of heaven’s presence and the touch of the Eternal. Later through his biblical preaching as a revivalist he bore in upon his hearers with telling conviction the Word of God, the “quick and powerful, and sharper than two-edged sword” (Hebrews 4:12). As “a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” the Lord used his message through his servant to speak to the people. In turn the Welsh population found God to be merciful, loving and ready to forgive.

Individual Confrontation

In every revival, individuals through personal studious and methodical contact with the Bible have seen themselves as they really are before God. Hence, each one after seeing Jehovah laments with Job, “I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” With intense meditation upon the Word, every revivalist has a similar experience with Isaiah. He “saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphims; each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory. And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke” (Isa. 6:1–4). Upon such a sight he exclaims, “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts” (Isa. 6:5).

Such a revelation motivates the viewer to revival activity by first rectifying his own life and then appealing to his fellows to do likewise. This was the commission of Jesus Christ to Simon Peter; the apostle had just seen the power of God demonstrated by the Saviour, and in astonishment he “fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5:8). However, the Lord immediately responded with spiritual quickening when he “said unto Simon, Fear not; from henceforth thou shalt catch men” (Luke 5:10). Peter was thereby declared a revivalist. Divine energy was his when he humbled himself before the sinless One. It is the sight of the sovereign Lord in all of his matchless purity and glory as revealed in the Scriptures that stirs men and brings them to themselves in contrition. Only when sin is acknowledged and forsaken does revival begin. When this is accomplished in backsliding Christian lives, revival has begun. The impact will be felt among believers who under the dynamic of the Holy Spirit turn to God.

Spirit-Directed Drive

As this is an individual matter, revival must of necessity be an independent movement fostered by God. This peak experience of spiritual blessing comes to the Christian when he meets the Lord and in that meeting he is aware only of him. Stripped of all pretence and superficiality, a Christian is in the ultimate analysis alone before his God. Out on the vast expanse of eternity that has no horizon, lacking support of environment and circumstances, he is in a condition of forsakeness apart from the consciousness that the King of Eternity is near. An unbeliever may describe such an encounter with the Lord as something phenomenal, but for one regenerated by the Spirit of God and acquainted with the Lord, it is geunine. Christians assert they know the Lord of Glory from experience. He may not be seen or grasped by human hands, but nevertheless he is as real as hands and feet and closer than breathing.

Being sensitive of such presence of God crushes one into the dust to nothingness. Knowing he is being quietly observed and read, and being certain he is under the scrutiny of God’s eye, the Christian has no other alternative but to admit his utter sinfulness and to allow the cleansing blood of Christ to make him clean and every whit whole. At that moment the Holy Spirit, who has directed this work, reoccupies the heart as sovereign and controls its every area. This is personal revival which issues in a community-wide experience. Is not this the essence of what the prophets and the apostles knew and realized in their own generation?

Broader Implication

Revival always has the broader implication, although it still possesses the traits of the personalistic contact of being subordinate only to the Lord. Whatever influence revival has, it is at the behest of God. This is noted in its corporate action in the Church. In this society of called-out ones, regenerated by the Spirit of Jehovah, the benediction of revival is shared by everyone. Each member does not realize this blessing to the same degree, but all have received some evidence of God’s grace. Each one has not the same capacity to receive spiritual power, but all know something of the outpouring of the Spirit of the Lord when he manifests himself to the Church. Under the sway of the Spirit’s brooding, the assembly unitedly rises to a new level of devotion to its Master and its members consecrate themselves severally and as one with greater purpose to propagate his truth as revealed in his Word.

Revival in its practical application brings the Christian and the Church to concert-pitch spiritually. Due to this it must be free and autonomous, for its actions are dictated by a consuming passion to obey God rather than men. No obstacle can hinder and no blockade can stop men under the direction of revival fervor. Reiteration of this is noted throughout history and can be seen in every revival. Always this has been the aspiration of the Church, even though it has been held captive at times by worldliness. It has constantly endeavored to seek God and his will through his Word, for to be in the center of his will is to be in the place of revival. This is ascertained only in God’s Word. Thus to repeat, revival is a return to God, and a return to God is a return to his Word.

Ernest V. Liddle is a native of Northern Ireland, studied at Edinburgh University and the College of the Free Church of Scotland. He holds degrees from Asbury Theological Seminary and Northern Baptist Seminary; has been a preacher for the Methodist church in Ireland and the Free Church of Scotland, held Methodist pastorates in the U.S., became a Baptist in 1956 and is now on the staff of the Watchman Examiner, New York.