Bible Book of the Month: The Prophecy of Isaiah

This wondrous prophecy sets forth Jesus Christ and his saving work with a clarity that is equaled by few books of the Old Testament. Hence Isaiah has rightly become known as the “evangelical” prophet. His words are filled with a richness of truth that is the constant delight of the believing soul. At the same time, his prophecy is difficult to study and to use in the pulpit.

Who Wrote Isaiah?

One reason why the prophecy appears to be difficult to study is the widespread idea that Isaiah was not the author of the entire book that bears his name. If one disbelieves in the Isaianic authorship of the prophecy he is likely to encounter serious difficulty in understanding large portions of the book. A word is in order therefore with respect to the question of the book’s authorship. According to the heading and the first verse, Isaiah the son of Amoz, a prophet of the eighth century, B. C., was the writer. This position is also born out by the authority of the New Testament, which attributes portions taken from different parts of the book to this same Isaiah. The manner in which the New Testament uses the prophecy is most interesting. It speaks not so much of a book of Isaiah, although it does indeed do that, as of the man Isaiah himself. For example, we read statements such as “Isaiah became bold and said” and “Well did the Holy Ghost speak through Isaiah the prophet.”

One instance of quotation is of unusual interest. In the twelfth chapter of John’s Gospel we are given the sad information that despite the miracles which our Lord performed, the Jews did not believe on him. John then explains that they could not believe on him, because Isaiah had prophesied, “Lord, who hath believed our report?” This quotation is from the second portion of the prophecy. In order to support this quotation, John goes on to say, “therefore they could not believe, because that Esaias said again, He hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them” (John 12:39, 40). These words are from the first part of Isaiah (chapter six). To clinch the matter, John goes on to say, “These things said Esaias, when he saw his glory, and spake of him” (12:41). In this verse John gives the “life-situation” which called forth these two utterances on the part of Isaiah.

From the New Testament it is clear that we are to regard Isaiah the son of Amoz as the writer of the entire book which bears his name. The issue is one of supernaturalism versus unbelief. Those who believe the infallible witness of the New Testament will of course believe that Isaiah was the author of the prophecy that bears his name.

Some Modern Views

Throughout the long history of the Church, the view that was espoused in the New Testament prevailed. Twenty-seven years after Jean Astruc wrote his book on Genesis (i. e., in 1780) a question was raised in a footnote of the German translation of Lowth’s commentary, as to whether chapter fifty of Isaiah might not be the work of Ezekiel or of someone who lived during the exile. Nine years later, the first full scale attempt to deny the Isaianic authorship of the last twenty-seven chapters of the book made its appearance (1789). There had previously been hints to this effect among certain Jewish scholars, but nothing as thorough as Doerderlein’s work of 1789 had appeared. Doerderlein denied to Isaiah chapters 40–66. From that time on it became more and more fixed among certain scholars of the negative critical school that Isaiah had not written these chapters. It was soon pointed out however, that if he had not written these particular sections of his book, neither could he have written chapter 13 which claims to be a ‘burden’ about Babylon.

During the nineteenth century the view gained ground that chapters 40–66 were the work of an unknown writer who lived during the exile. He was called the “Great Unknown” or “Second” or “Deutero Isaiah”, and he was regarded by those who had abandoned the witness of the Bible to itself as the greatest of all of Israel’s prophets. This view was supported by great learning and was heralded as one of the assured results of criticism.

Then something happened. In the year 1892 Bernhard Duhm issued his commentary in which he attributed to “Second Isaiah” only chapters 40–55, and denied to him the four passages in these chapters which deal with the servant of the Lord and which Christians generally apply to Jesus Christ. Furthermore, he insisted that this “Second Isaiah” had not lived in Babylon but in Palestine, and probably in Lebanon. The remainder of the book, chapters 56–66, he attributed to a writer who lived in Jerusalem about 100 years after the supposed “Second Isaiah”. Thus, we have a first, deutero and trito Isaiah. From the time of Duhm onwards criticism which rejects the infallibility of Scripture has maintained the existence of three major divisions of the prophecy, attributing comparatively little to Isaiah himself and the remainder to other authors. It should be clear that if one adopts such a view of the composition of the book he will have difficulty in understanding much of it. For this reason, many modern commentaries are unsatisfactory as far as a serious coming to grips with the message of the prophecy is concerned.

One who wishes to make an earnest study of the message of the prophecy must accept the New Testament witness and consequently maintain the unity of the work. The arguments which are adduced in favor of the unity of the book are strong and cannot be neglected.

The Message Of Isaiah

To understand the message of the book one need but study carefully the grand first chapter. Here in germ form are to be found the principal emphases which the prophet later develops. It is almost impossible to date the time of composition of this first chapter for it seems to have reference, not so much to particular events and situations as to general principles and conditions. Here the prophet condemns the iniquities of the nation and also announces the blessings of a coming deliverance. Beginning with the second chapter Isaiah calls our attention to a prophecy of the blessings which will come in the “latter days”, a phrase which he uses to designate the age of the Messiah, the age which began to run its course with the first advent of the Lord Jesus Christ in the flesh. This leads him to turn to the present sinful condition of the nation and to contrast it with the day of the Lord which will come.

Interspersed with these earlier prophecies are messages which have a distinctly Messianic character. After the great vision in the temple the prophet finds himself compelled to preach to the rebellious Ahaz and to announce a sign of the Lord’s deliverance, namely the wondrous fact that a virgin (the word almah in vii. 14 is best translated ‘virgin’) will bring forth a son and call his name Immanuel. In the ninth chapter Isaiah again reverts to this son and proclaims his wondrous name, “Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” The little core of Messianic prophecies found in chapters seven through twelve form as it were a foundation upon which the prophet can now build.

It will be clear from the passages themselves that these prophecies were uttered during the reigns of kings who lived in the eighth century, B. C. Beginning with the thirteenth chapter, however, Isaiah takes us away beyond his own day to look forward to the time when Babylon will be a mighty power. It is in the Spirit of God that he can thus look forward. He then returns again to the Assyrian period, i. e., the eighth century, and speaks much about the injustices of his own day. He does not stay in this century however, but casts his glance far beyond his own day to give what approaches an apocalyptic picture of world powers and a wondrous vision of peace (chapter 35).

Chapters 36–39 form an historical bridge by means of which Isaiah takes us from the Assyrian period to that of the Babylonians. These are fascinating chapters, but they close on a note of unrest and sorrow. Read carefully chapter 39, and note how tragic is the condition into which Hezekiah and the people of God have come. This is not the end, however, for chapter 39 prepares the way for chapter 40. The mighty “Comfort ye” of chapter 40 cannot rightly be understood apart from the background of gloom with which chapter 39 closes. If ever two chapters belonged together, these are the two.

At the same time when we read chapter forty and those that follow we do notice quite a difference from the earlier portion of the book. How is this difference to be explained? Must it be explained upon the hypothesis that a new author is at work here? That is the position of the negative critical school, but it is a position which is contradicted by the New Testament. May we not account for these chapters in the following manner? Isaiah, after the conclusion of his vigorous ministry under Hezekiah, more or less retired from the scene of active prophesying and devoted himself to reflection upon the future course of the people of God. He saw them by revelation of the Spirit of God under the bondage of Babylon. From this bondage they were to be set free by means of Cyrus of Persia, whom the Lord would raise up to be his anointed.

There was however a greater bondage than that of Babylon. It was the bondage and servitude of sin. From this servitude there could be but one deliverance, and that was to be accomplished, not by Cyrus nor by any other mere human agent, but only by the righteous servant of the Lord. The last chapters of the prophecy, therefore, have to do with the vicissitudes which will come upon the people of God. They are somewhat desultory in character, but throughout them all there runs the wondrous fact that there will be a salvation, a deliverance which is spiritual in nature and which will be wrought, not by man, but by God.

The Servant Of The Lord

Who then is this servant of the Lord? There are many answers to this question. Under the influence of modern Scandinavian studies, we are being told that the figure of the servant is a complex one, the roots of which go back into ancient mythology and to the ideas of kingship and “corporate personality” which were held in ancient Israel. The discussion of the problem is one which constantly engages the pens of scholars. Despite all the views which have been advanced, however, we believe that the servant is none other than the Saviour, Jesus the Christ.

We believe, that Jesus not merely found a correspondence between the figure of the servant and certain events in his own life and death, but rather that Isaiah actually predicted the death and sufferings of Jesus. Here the issue of supernaturalism meets us head-on. Isaiah himself may have written far more deeply than he realized, but the Spirit of God, the final author of Scripture, revealed to Isaiah in the strange words about the servant the death of the one who should deliver mankind from the guilt and bondage of sin. Isaiah prophesied of Jesus Christ.

Helps In The Study Of The Book

How can one best approach a study of this remarkable prophecy? The material which is written on the prophecy is so vast that it is impossible to keep up with it all, nor is it all worth reading. There are, however, certain books which are so important that no clergyman who wishes to preach from this prophecy should be without them. We shall merely attempt to list some of the most valuable works. In the first place, an excellent introduction to the study of the prophecy will be found in the little book of Oswald T. Allis, The Unity of Isaiah. The chapter on the nature of biblical prophecy should be studied by all who wish a sane discussion of this question. The biblical view of prophecy is cogently contrasted with the negative critical view. The question of the authorship of the work is capably handled, and particular attention is devoted to the importance of the Cyrus prophecy. We can think of no better approach to the prophecy than the study of this little book. A useful little work on Isaiah which may also be mentioned is by George L. Robinson, The Book of Isaiah.

There are many commentaries, but probably the best is that of Joseph Addison Alexander, which has recently been reprinted. This work is first of all true to the Scriptures, and it is also thoroughly scholarly. It breathes the air of genuine piety. The introduction is excellent and so are the comments. The man who uses it will have to consult his Hebrew, but it will enable him to obtain a greater grasp of that language. As a companion the reader will find the commentary of Franz Delitzsch of great help. When Delitzsch is at his best he cannot be surpassed. There are some remarkable insights in this work.

There are of course many other works, but the one who wishes to make a serious study of the prophecy cannot do better than to use those which we have mentioned. The study of Isaiah will not be easy. It will require much application and thought, but it will certainly be rewarding. It will bring one ever closer to the redeemer of whom it speaks, the child whose name is Wonderful, who was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities.

- More from Edward J. Young

Did the Church Fail Them?

Thomas I. Lee

“Now about that time Herod the king stretched forth his hand to vex certain of the Church” (Acts 12:1).… “Peter therefore was kept in prison: but prayer was made without ceasing of the Church unto God for him” (Acts 12:5).… “And when Peter was come to himself, he said, Now I know of a surety, that the Lord has sent his angel, and delivered me out of the hand of Herod” (Acts 12:11).… “But he, beckoning unto them with the hand to hold their peace, declared unto them how the Lord had brought him out of prison” (Acts 12:17).

The above verses form a beautiful framework for one of the most inspiring stories of the early Christian Church. These Scriptures describe the persecution of the faithful in the Church during the early half of the First Century, yet by way of triumph over the subtle enemies of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Church’s only weapon to bring victory nineteen hundred years ago was the simple procedure of persistent prayer.

Among The Chief Tasks

How effective is the Christian Church today in its battle with godless and satanic forces? Whereas in the time of Peter a few tens of Christians worshipped and prayed in the home of a widowed mother in Jerusalem, Christ’s followers today encircle the globe. Instead of worship in the homes, or in secluded caves or fields, beautiful edifices dot our lands with spires and crosses to remind us of spiritual values in the midst of materialistic blessings. But is the Church today meeting one of its chief tasks: “praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints” (Eph. 6:18)?

Were we conscientiously to answer that question, we must make a sad admission that we have fallen far short of our duties. Thinking of the persecuted Church in China in the light of the above question, we will have to admit almost total failure. Had our American and European congregations been cognizant of the battle that faced the faithful persecuted Christians of China and prayed constantly for them, there might have been a different record for the Church of China. The Chinese Christian Church was young. Much of it was permeated with Modernism. It was unprepared for the spiritual battles which had faced the Church of the first century. When the “evil day” struck, it was unable to stand. The “sending missions” of other lands failed them in the mission of prayer.

The experiences of three Christian leaders in China and their positions today stand as an accusation against us for our failure in intercessory prayer.

Story Of Pastor Wu

Pastor Wu, a native Chinese Christian, is a sincere and able servant of the Lord. Respected among the congregations, he was made President of his Lutheran Synod. On invitation of a Lutheran Synod, he visited in the United States. When the Communist Party took over China in 1949 and established their government, new and unexpected problems arose for the Church. Though avowedly anti-God, the new government feigned concern and respect for the Church. Many Chinese church leaders and even missionaries were deceived. Through subtle and clever manipulations many became ensnared in the net so skillfully laid by the Communists. In April, 1951, the Communist Government brought together 158 Protestant leaders from all parts of China for a six day conference in Peking at Government expense. Pastor Wu as head of his Synod was forced to participate. On his return to his county parish he refused to carry on services in the manner prescribed by the Communist Party. He was unwilling to make the Church an enslaved servant of the State. For his stand he was discriminated against. Like many others, he learned that he could not live freely, and support himself and his family, unless he was willing to accept the “mark of the beast.”

Finally, in the summer of 1956, the Communist-sponsored and controlled section of Pastor Wu’s parish sent a seminary graduate by the name of Chang to Hankow for ordination into the ministry by officials of the New Church. They gave Mr. Chang a suit of clothes, travel expenses, and money. Pastor Wu, who as President of the Synod should have been the ordinator, was reduced to a clerk’s job in a Government-operated Co-operative to gain a living for himself and family. Last summer, Mr. Chang’s Sunday morning services consisted of reading to the assembled congregation the Communist dailies and magazines and commenting on them.

Does neglect of intercession in the Lutheran Church have any responsibility for what has happened to Pastor Wu and other church leaders on their Mission Field in Central China during the last eight years?

Pastor Wang Ming Tao

Another of China’s faithful church leaders is Pastor Wang Ming Tao. Denominationally, Mr. Wang is a Baptist. During his 30 year ministry he has probably preached to more people in China than any other living Chinese. He defended the Word against Modernists, the Christian-Shinto Japanese Church, Communists, and then against the Communist-sponsored and controlled Church. On the other hand, President Dr. Y. T. Wu of the Chinese Christian Three-Self Patriotic Church has stated in one of his books that the Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Resurrection and Second Advent of the Lord are but myths of no value to the Church.

Since the inauguration of the Accusations Movement in the Peking Church Conference in April, 1951, Pastor Wang Ming Tao has been singled out frequently for accusation. Under the sponsorship of The Chinese Christian Three-Self Patriotic Movement, National Accusation Meetings were organized throughout China in the spring of 1955. Records of the procedures of those meetings are found in the official church papers.

The July 1955 issue of The New Church was given almost wholly to an attack on Wang Ming Tao. The editor, the Rev. Ch’en Chien-Hsun, now an ordained pastor of the Government sponsored church, was once a student in the U.S.A., and for many years the editor of The Lutheran Weekly in China. Chief accusations against Wang Ming Tao were that he had refused to support the Government-sponsored Church—The Chinese Christian Three-Self Patriotic Movement. He rejected the assumption that “all men are brothers” under “the Fatherhood of God” regardless of spiritual viewpoints. Most frequently used against him was his literal acceptance of 2 Corinthians 6:14, “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers …”

In December, 1951, Mr. Wang ran an editorial in his publication, The Spiritual Food Quarterly, from which we quote the closing sentence: “Under these conditions the one who faithfully preaches the Word of God cannot but expect to meet opposition from some leaders in the Church and from ‘Christians’ who are spiritually dead, in the form of malicious slander and cursing. I know that this will come to pass. I am prepared to meet it. I covet the faithfulness and courage of Martin Luther.” Then follows the prayer Luther uttered at Worms in April, 1521, before he entered the presence of Emperor Charles the Fifth, who was requiring Luther to recant.

Wang Ming Tao continued for nearly five years to minister fearlessly and to witness in Peking. Unforseen by Mr. Wang was the fact that Sunday night, August 7, 1955, was to be his last free service. That night he closed the service with Communion, and passed out his forty page Chinese booklet entitled: We, Because of Our Faith Alone. It was his defense, his position on the Word, over against the compromising Communist-sponsored Church.

About one o’clock the following morning, police came to the church premises with warrants for the arrest of Pastor and Mrs. Wang Ming Tao and 18 Christian students who had attended the service. These warrants were legal in every respect, and they were the efforts of the Communist-sponsored Church, to which a number of Lutherans had contributed.

Pastor and Mrs. Wang were subsequently brought to trial and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. Mr. Wang was 55 years old at the time. The couple were incarcerated in separate cells. Early in 1956 there was a report that Mrs. Wang had been released from prison and had died. That is not true. She was released and is still alive. Later in 1956 reports began coming out of China that through the “graciousness” of the Communist Government, Wang Ming Tao had been released after serving less than a year of his sentence.

The report from reliable sources inside China verifies the fact that Wang Ming Tao has been released from prison, that he is “a changed man,” and that he appears to be under an ominous dark cloud, worrying that he has done something which he should not have done. With Mr. Wang in his prison cell there had been two other “prisoners.” They were agents placed there by the Communist Party, a common procedure in Chinese prisons. These agents worked on Mr. Wang day and night, arguing that he was wrong in opposing the Chinese Christian Three-Self Patriotic Movement. He finally succumbed, signed the prepared confession, and was released from prison.

What a contrast with Peter’s experience in prison! But did the Christian Church in America support Wang Ming Tao during his years of persecutions? How much prayer was there in our Churches for this “prisoner of the Lord” during his brain-washing in that Communist cell?

The Case Of Paul Mackensen

Finally, look at an American missionary imprisoned in China. Paul Mackensen is the son of a pastor of the American Lutheran Church serving in Baltimore. Now in his early thirties, Paul Mackensen graduated from St. Olaf College in 1945, and then spent three years in a theological seminary. He was interested in China, but since his own Church had no mission there, he was loaned to the United Lutheran Church. He went in 1948 in the Tsingtao Area on the east coast of China. He had one year of language study, with a minimum of contacts with the Chinese people, before the Communist occupation of that Port city in 1949.

Sometime the night of March 7, 1952, police came to Mackensen’s home and took him away. The night following his arrest, a giant spectacle of aerial warfare was staged over the Tsingtao Area by Communist military forces. They claimed that their anti-aircraft guns were fighting off American Air Force planes dropping insects impregnated with plague-carrying germs. During the three hour demonstration, the city was in total darkness.

Later, German Lutheran missionaries testified that they never heard the sound of planes. Yet the Communist Daily came out saying, “Two U.S. Planes Drop Germ-Infested Insects On Tsingtao Area.” Students were mobilized, each wearing a mask and carrying a bottle in one hand and chop-sticks in the other. They were going to hunt insects which the American planes were said to have dropped. The military forces were engaged in the same search. Doctors and nurses were organized and paraded the streets in white uniforms, holding high their syringes. People were urged to have inoculations against epidemics and plague. In the month following the Government carried on a constant propaganda campaign against the United States, then engaged in the war in Korea. All groups, particularly religious and educational, were required to participate. The Organized Christian Church became a vehicle for such Communist propaganda.

No one knew exactly where Paul Mackensen was, though it was supposed that he was in a Tsingtao Prison. Fifteen months after his arrest, Catholic missionaries came out of the prison, bringing the word that Mr. Mackensen was there. He was charged with “threatening the security of Communist China” through his complicity in germ warfare. It was intimated that if Mackensen would confess this, he would be released. In 1956 Mr. Mackensen was transferred to a prison in Shanghai. There the New Testament taken from him upon entry into the Tsingtao prison was restored. Together with some Catholic missionaries he was taken on a 2000 mile tour in China, evidently to condition him for favorable reporting on the New China.

In January, 1957, Mr. Mackensen was interviewed by an American newsman—William Worthy—of the Afro-American in Baltimore. Mr. Mackensen told Mr. Worthy that he expected to remain in China and work after he had completed his five year prison term. In Worthy’s opinion Mackensen appeared to be brainwashed. On March 7, 1957, following the completion of his five year sentence Paul Mackensen was released from the prison, and that day telephoned Hongkong that he was remaining to work in Shanghai.

Exactly what this may mean we do not know. One could surmise that a missionary would like to remain in China and work among the people he has learned to love. But, despite numerous reports to the contrary, it appears that the organized church in China—Catholic and Protestant—is under the direct control of the Communist Government. I am convinced the Communist Party would never permit any American to move about in China freely unless they were very sure of that American’s political attitude. It is likely that he has been won over to the position of the Communist-controlled Church.

Breakdown Of Prayer

How could such a thing come to pass? I feel definitely that it reflects a failure of the Church in its mission of intercession. True, Pastor Mackensen’s family and many of his closer friends constantly remembered him in prayer. But few of the American Church people were aware of Mr. Mackensen. Some who did know, did not want to be reminded of his unpleasant situation. It was much more pleasant and convenient to continue in complacency.

We wish to share excerpts of a letter written in January, 1954, by one of the Catholic missionaries who came out of this Tsingtao prison, in reply to inquiries about Paul Mackensen. That information was shared with some Lutheran Groups in 1954. Yet, today, few people know the story of Paul Mackensen and the terrible things he suffered, or of the hundreds of native church leaders who are now suffering because they refuse to “Bow the knee to Baal”:

“I knew Mr. Mackensen well … I was in the same prison … but did not see him or have any contact with him; as a matter of fact I did not know he was arrested until after I was released … A German Priest … told me that he had been in the same cell with Mackensen for some time, and that Mr. Mackensen was having a very hard time of it … In prison many prisoners had to wear handcuffs for a long time and some had a chain clamped from one ankle to the other. This priest told me that Mackensen had both. This can happen for very minor things, or some times for reasons unknown to the victim.

I would like not only to suggest to you but to tell you to pray very much for Mr. Mackensen and also ask others to do so as you cannot imagine what he might be going through, not only physically, but he has to study propaganda continually and propaganda is very tricky, and conditions he has to study under are very severe. Let us pray together then for Mr. Mackensen and for all those in China who are suffering for the cause of Christ.”

Hundreds Of Others

Hundreds of other pastors, evangelists, Bible-women, teachers, doctors and nurses have already made the supreme sacrifice for their faith, or are languishing in prison. Two and one half years ago the Communist-sponsored church claimed that it had the approval and support of 417,000 Protestant Christians—40% of the Church. Time is no doubt gradually weakening the resistance of others as they become isolated and discouraged and finally decide that compromise is their only way out. The Communist-sponsored church in China was represented in England last summer and later in Budapest for the executive committee of The World Council of Churches by a bogus Bishop. And there is to be an exchange of visiting church delegations. We are told that delegates will come from behind the Bamboo Curtain of China to the Lutheran World Federation Assembly meeting in Minneapolis in August. Will there be delegates from the Persecuted Church in China?

One can wonder at the compromise Wang Ming Tao is said to have made. It is not strange—for like a scattered flock the imprisoned one is separated from friends. One becomes lonely and alone when the bonds of prayer are broken.

We are cautioned to be charitable in our judgments of those who have compromised and cast their lot with the Communist-sponsored church. We want to be charitable. But we also want to protect ourselves from the spiritual apathy which produces compromise.

Major William A. Mayer, psychiatrist of the U.S. Army, has stated that “one third of all American soldiers captured in Korea yielded to brain-washing” and that without torture. The primary reasons were that most of those men lacked a strong religious faith. Through propaganda they eventually were convinced that their country—the United States—was not a good land after all. This is a serious charge, but it is true that we are being educated and conditioned for a passive non-resistance. In the schools, colleges, universities, and even seminaries the youth are taught and asked to believe that co-existence with Communism is the solution to the problems of our age.

It appears that there are few principles of faith that the church holds dear. We are in an age of compromise. Does the church believe that it can co-exist with communism? It might as well believe that it can live and worship together with the followers of Buddha or Mohammed.

Where is the spirit of the early church today with the zeal and faith found in Peter, and John, and Stephen, and again in Paul and others?

Preacher In The Red

DEVIL’S FOOD CAKE FOR DESSERT?

Early in my career as a student-minister I preached in a small town in the mountains of Kentucky. In time I came to know and accept what seemed to be an unwritten law in that community: the lady in whose home the minister was entertained must not attend church that Sunday but instead should stay at home in order to have the noon meal ready to serve as soon as the minister arrived from the morning service.

However, on the first Sunday of my ministry there I did not understand this situation and was loathe to accept it. My hostess, Mrs. Jones, told me that morning that she would not go to church but that I was to come promptly to her home for dinner upon the conclusion of the service. In my youthful zeal I tried to persuade her to attend the worship service and to prepare and serve the meal later, but she was adamant in the face of all my arguments. Finally, in my mind, I reasoned that it is Satan who keeps people away from church, and that if my being a guest in a home kept the lady of the house away from church then I was like him. But what I actually said was, “But Sister Jones, I’ll feel like the devil if you stay away from church this morning!”

As soon as I realized what this sounded like I hastened to explain my reasoning, but even so I didn’t alter Mrs. Jones’ adherence to that custom.—the Rev. Harold F. Hanlin, Oklahoma City, Okla.

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

A missionary to China whose service was twice interrupted by Communists, Thomas I. Lee is a graduate of St. Olaf College and Lutheran Theological Seminary, St. Paul. In 1924 he was ordained by the Evangelical Lutheran Church and began missionary effort in China. The Communist uprising in 1927 necessitated his return to America. But in 1929 he renewed missionary work in China, and except for two furloughs remained until he fled to Hongkong in 1949 as superintendent of the Lutheran United Mission there until 1953. In 1954, in a difficult decision, he declined reassignment to the Hongkong work, in order to stir Americans from slumber touching the Christian situation in China.

- More from Thomas I. Lee

Cover Story

The Catholic Plan for American Labor

Kermit Eby

At the recent Steelworkers convention, David McDonald, president of the United Steelworkers, uttered even more than the usual number of words the leader of a great union is called on to speak on such occasions. But perhaps the most significant of his declarations has gone unnoticed.

He told the delegates that unions, operating in the field of mutual trusteeship, have made a great contribution toward bringing something unique “in our America and Canada.… We have established what is properly called a people’s capitalism, a people’s capitalism which is a far cry from the old reactionary capitalism which dominated the lives of the American people for so many years.”

At the Steelworker’s convention in 1954, David McDonald said to the assembled delegates, “When I say to you, the status quo shall not remain, I would like you to think about what has been going on in the Steelworker’s union. We have been bringing something new into the field of trade unionism. Most of the intellectual writers today conceive the trade union movement [as] split down the middle into two distinct groups. One of these groups has the Marxian approach. The other group has a strictly bread and butter base. We of the Steelworkers are not of either of these groups. We think that type of thinking applied to either of those groups is antediluvian.”

Fascism and Stalinism, Mr. McDonald declares, were both spawned by Marx and lead to despotism. The bread and butter approach simply says: get all you can, regardless of the repercussions. (Mr. McDonald expressed no protest when, by constitutional amendment, his salary was raised to $50,000. Walter Reuther, on the other hand, refused an increase beyond $18,500 because “he was not in the movement to get rich, and there were other compensations than money.”)

Too Neat A Dichotomy

We might note that Mr. McDonald produces his neat dichotomy by ascribing it to the intellectuals, ostensibly students of the labor movement. Being familiar with these “intellectual” efforts, I must admit not being able to recall such a neatly packaged article. In fact, as I read the intellectuals, they are much more inclined to attempt to understand the movement of labor in its entirety as the product of the particular organizational and corporative and environmental struggles which produced them. But let’s just admit that other intellectuals are stupid and oversimplify, for if not we would have to say that Mr. McDonald puts into their mouths what he wishes to say!

Continuing in the words of Mr. McDonald: “We are engaged in the operation of an economy which is a sort of mutual trusteeship. What do I mean by that? The days of the Andrew Carnegies and people like him are gone. The great corporations of our country are no longer owned by small family groups. Hundreds of thousands of stockholders own the great corporations, particularly in the steel industry. The United States Steel Corporation has almost as many stockholders as employees. Those stockholders, through the operations of some sort of voting system, employ managers. Those managers are simply employees of those corporations. Then there is another group of employees known as the working force. Both of these groups have this mutual trusteeship which operates this steel company or all of these steel companies. This is their mutual trusteeship, and in operation of this mutual trusteeship they are obliged to give full consideration to everybody involved.”

The “Third Alternative”

What is Mr. McDonald’s “third alternative,” his “something new”? I think that it is contained in the eulogy (on Philip Murray) given by Monsignor George Higgins, associate director of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, at the 1954 convention. “This,” he declares, “is not the place to analyze in detail the social philosophy of Philip Murray. Suffice it to say that it was the enlightened philosophy of a Christian statesman who understood as well as any other man in modern history the meaning and importance of industrial democracy. ‘The C.I.O.’, he said on one occasion, ‘does not believe the common good can be promoted by government alone. Neither do we believe,’ he continued, ‘that it can be solved by management alone or by labor alone. We do not believe in government dictatorship or in management dictatorship. Nor, I hasten to add, do we believe in a labor dictatorship. We believe in good-faith cooperation among all parties concerned. That is why we are requesting and shall continue to request—in spite of reactionaries—be they communists or so-called free enterprisers—that organized labor be accepted by American industry as a full-fledged partner with an equal voice in deciding upon policies which will most effectively promote the general economic welfare.

“ ‘We shall continue,’ he concluded, ‘to promote the C.I.O. Industrial Council Plan which was first suggested at our 1940 convention but which has received all too little public attention in the interim. The communists say it is a fascist program. We say that it is democracy at its best and the only alternative to either socialism or fascism.’ ”

Roman Catholic Program

Father Higgins was correct when he said that “Philip Murray was a deeply religious man who made a conscious effort to apply the social teachings of religion to the complicated economic, industrial and racial problems of America.” What was not said is that both Murray’s and McDonald’s emphasis was and is Catholic social doctrine, and the Industry Council Plan is the Catholic plan for economic reorganization.

The Industry Council Plan, as such, was first formally proposed in Quadragesimo Anno (1931). Complete cure, runs the statement in this papal encyclical, “of the sins of the body politic will not be possible until well-ordered members of the social order—industries and professions—are constituted in which men may have their place, not according to the position each had in the labor market but according to the respective social functions which each performs.”

The Plan as such received little attention in this country until recently. It was first brought to the CIO by John Brophy, one of its founders. In 1941, it was proposed to the CIO convention as a means for speeding up production for national defense. The proposal was further elaborated and endorsed by the National Catholic Welfare Conference in November, 1948, and during the same year the CIO again endorsed the plan. The resolution passed by the CIO is entitled “Industrial Planning with Industrial Councils.”

Point 3 for the “resolved” outlines the plan. “Nationwide democratic industrial planning must be accompanied from the outset and permanently thereafter by Industry Councils through which such planning and administrative works can be kept close to the people. There should be a National Production Board on which there would be representatives of organized labor, farmers, consumers, industrial management and government. In each of the industries coming under the plan there should be an Industry Council composed of representatives of organized labor, industrial management and the government, and where possible, of ultimate consumers. The planning and administrative process should involve an interchange of ideas and decisions between the Industry Councils and the National Production Board in order that a general national plan may be evolved by democratic methods and adjusted and perfected constantly over a period of years.”

John Brophy, as usual, spoke for the resolution and declared that, next to organizing the unorganized, this was Philip Murray’s greatest contribution to American workers. Brophy concluded, “I feel most strongly that if our political work is to be given the vitality it will need during the next decade, we must declare ourselves politically for a program of Industrial Planning.”

Spelling Out The Details

Thus, the program evolves: a plan, plus political implication, and, history willing, the result will be a “just” society. Father John F. Cronin, S.J., author of a definitive volume called Catholic Social Action, states the concept of a just society: “An organic society, fitted to meet the common interests of diverse groups and not merely an accidental cohesion of essentially opposed elements.… it aims toward a basic change in the framework and institutions of society, rather than toward specific and isolated reforms.… (it) imposes the obligation of group action to reform the institutions of society so that the common good will be best served.” When more specific blueprints of the ICP are asked for, speakers are often inclined to reflect the attitude of Father Raymond McGowan, who cautions that the plan is many-sided, and as yet indefinite in the matter of details. Results, says Father McGowan, “would depend entirely on who carried them out.”

Archbishop Karl J. Alter, D.D., hierarchical chairman of the National Catholic Welfare Conference’s Department of Social Action, has attempted to wrestle with some of the difficulties standing in the way of specific outline of the plan. In an article in The Sign, he says, “The chief difficulty is the disagreement among the proponents of the new order concerning the function of Industry Councils.… A second difficulty arises in respect to union activities.… A third difficulty is in the area in which Industry Councils shall operate.” Cautioning against a purely abstract acceptance of the plan, the Archbishop goes on to say: “It is, in fact, necessary to come down out of the realm of the abstract and grapple with some concrete problems as the following: Shall government initiate the Industry Council or shall it come about by voluntary action? If so, by whom? Shall there be collective bargaining as now between labor unions and management? Shall strikes be allowed or forbidden, with recourse only to labor courts? What rights shall owners retain as distinct from those of the Industry Council? Shall labor unions be sanctioned?… We know that there is far more to the Industry Council system than this, but we shall make more rapid progress if we remove the obsecurity surrounding some of these questions.”

Some Concrete Steps

Vague as the Plan still seems to be, concrete steps toward the organization of it have been taken. The National Industry Council Association, Inc., has been set up “to encourage and participate in the establishment of the councils of employers, employees and the public, suggested in the Papal social encyclicals as the Christian way of regulating industrial strife.” Acting as the educational guide of the National Industry Council Association is Father William J. Kelly, O.M.I., of Buffalo, former member of the New York State Labor Relations Board and a renowned arbitrator.

In Europe, as early as 1949, rapid progress toward legislative enactment of the Plan had been made. In 1949 the Belgian parliament passed a law promoting the establishment of an industry council system. Similar action was taken in Holland. From Germany, Bishop Aloijsius J. Muench, Regent of the Apostolic Nunciature in Germany, wrote in April, 1950, “In Germany a revolutionary change is in the making. It is proposed that labor become a sharer with capital in the management of the enterprise in which both are employed. Instead of giving to capital, that is to stockholders, the exclusive right to choose the management, labor also would obtain that right.… Labor would not only have a consultative voice but would be accorded also the right of decision. In other words, there would be a right of joint decision by the representatives of capital and of labor.… The enactment of a law recognizing the right of joint decision would make perhaps the most revolutionary change in labor relations in the twentieth century.…”

End Result Of The Plan

Catholic Action in the United States is set up in order that “men of good will” can share in “effecting the change.” This is being done not only nationally, through such groups as the National Catholic Welfare Conference and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference but also locally throughout the dioceses. Social action is a duty imposed upon every bishop and hierarchical authority in every diocese. In his book Catholic Social Action Father Cronin writes: “Normally this means that the bishop has selected one or more priests to specialize in social action work, in line with certain principles which he has laid down.” The second step is the setting up of a diocesan social action committee. This committee acts as a “front” for the clerical authorities and enables the Church to escape blame for any action that turns out to be unpopular.

Father Cronin writes on this point: “When a committee is set up in permanent form, it is important that its authority be clearly defined.… It should be accorded strong support by diocesan authorities.… At the same time it should be sufficiently detached from the diocesan curia to permit it some freedom of action. The support is necessary to win cooperation from the clergy. The limited independence frees the authorities from the necessity of making countless decisions in a specialized field. Furthermore, it permits official reversal of actions imprudently taken, even if such actions had been the subject of prior consultation with the authorities” (Italics added).

Priests chosen to work as social action directors receive special training in economics in Catholic labor schools or in the social science and industrial relations departments of Catholic universities and colleges. According to Father Cronin, the program uses “all known adult education and leadership techniques,” because, as he says, the training of leaders is “among the greatest and most urgent tasks of the American Church.” But “the training of Catholics is but a first step,” says Father Cronin. The ultimate aim is “the acceptance of a Christian social code by all groups in our society.” The Christian social code intended is, of course, the dogma of Roman Catholicism.

Although there has been official sanction given to Catholic workers joining secular labor unions (be it from expediency rather than conviction), Pius XII has reiterated a requirement made by Pius X that “side by side these unions there should be associations zealously engaged in imbuing and forming their members in the teaching of religion and morality so that they in turn may be able to permeate the unions with that good spirit which should direct them in all their activity. As a result, the religious associations will bear good fruit even beyond the circle of membership.”

The Articles of Federation of ACTU (Association of Catholic Trade Unions) state explicitly that the Association is formed for the purpose of “carrying out this [the Pope’s] mandate … to: (1) bring all Catholic working people into the unions of their occupation and choice; (2) to bring all the Catholic members into ACTU; (3) to assist the labor unions, wherever feasible, by lawful support of just demands; and (4) to spread among the people the social teachings of the Church and the idea that it is a religious duty to aid the reform of society.”

“To bear good fruit even beyond the circle of membership” and “to spread among the people the social teachings of the Church”—these are not the words of amateurs. And the difference between amateurs and professionals in the political world (as perhaps elsewhere) is that professionals not only know what they want but also know by what methods and means it is possible to get what they want.

David McDonald’s plan, the “third way,” would sanctify the obvious. Ultimately the cartelization of American industry would be complete. Then the cartels would become as powerful as the government. Power, filtering from cartel to government and back, would again give us the corporate state. If my readers do not understand how the corporate state operates, they need only study recent Indian history.

David McDonald may not understand the end results of his plan, and he may not understand the relationship between monopoly, inflation and the corporate state, but it certainly behooves every American to do so!

A frequent contributor to national publications, Kermit Eby is a student of American labor trends. Professor in the Division of Social Sciences in the University of Chicago, he served from 1945 to 1948 as Director of Education and Research for the C. I. O.

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Cover Story

The Man from Outer Space

James M. Guthrie

And I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice (John 10:16).

I had never taken much interest in speculation concerning space ships, space men, flying saucers and such. And yet the moment that the man appeared at my study door I knew that he was not of the earth. It was not that he differed greatly from earth men in physical characteristics. There was nothing grotesque or frightening about his appearance. He was a superb physical specimen. It was the radiance about his face which convinced me that here was a visitor from another planet. He possessed that quality which the medieval artists sought to portray when they painted halos on the saints.

His first words confirmed my deduction. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, “I am from outer space. My car is in the field west of the church.” His “car” proved to be a flying saucer surprisingly similar to the type portrayed in current fiction.

“I am a free-lance journalist,” he went on, “working on a feature. I want to visit some of the places on earth where people have not heard of Christ. Perhaps you will be so kind as to be my guide?”

“Do YOU know about Christ?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” he replied. “There is but one God of the universe. He revealed himself to our planet just as he did to Earth by sending his only begotten Son as our Savior. Everything about his incarnation was just the same as it was at Bethlehem. The remainder of the story is the same also; the Savior died for our sins and arose again. The only difference is that our people have accepted what Christ has done. The first disciples were faithful in their witness, and others since then have been just as faithful. It was not long until all of the kingdoms of our planet became the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, and he is today enthroned in every heart. Oh, yes; we know about Christ!”

He paused, and I reflected that this brief statement made many things plain. This was the secret of the radiance of his personality. All of his fellows would have that same glow. This too was the explanation of their advanced state of intellectual development, their superiority in the field of science as evidenced in their conquest of the space barrier. With everyone serving Christ their energies would not have been devastated in war or ravaged by poverty and disease.

My guest was speaking again. “Our people have difficulty in conceiving of life where Christ is not known. If you will accompany me as my guide to a few such places I will be obliged.”

In a few moments we were in his car, as he called it, and were hurtling through space. As we went my companion told me something of his way of life, and I realized that compared with ours his should be spelled with a capital “L.” He was enjoying what Jesus had envisioned when he said, “I am come that you might have life, and that you might have it more abundantly.” I saw that the glorious prophecies of Isaiah had been literally fulfilled upon his planet: “The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together”; “They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord”; “The whole earth shall be full of his glory.”

We touched down first in Japan. A missionary friend took us to a remote mountain community of 10,000 persons not one of whom is a professing Christian. A huge Shinto shrine dominates the town. The shrine is served by more than 200 priests who preside at the mechanical rituals which have little or no religious significance. While the people here were outwardly cheerful there was an air of depressing hopelessness which made us sad. I thought that the community was a good example of a place where Christ was unknown, but my friend from outer space did not agree. “It is true that these people do not know Christ, never having heard his name; but,” he said, “even this remote community in a heathen land is not untouched by Christian civilization. The hospital, although pitifully inadequate, would not be here had Christ not come to earth. The schools reflect an inspiration which Shintoism failed to produce in 2000 years. These are byproducts of western civilization, which is itself a byproduct of Christianity.”

So I guided him to the fastness of inner Mongolia to an area so remote that I could have believed myself on another planet. I explained to my friend that it was reported that not even the Communists had yet penetrated to this region. He looked at me strangely and made a remark which haunts me still. “Even the Communists, did you say? Am I to infer that the Communists excel the Christians in missionary zeal and enterprise?” Well, we would not find any westernizing influence here. The people were so primitive that I was fearful what our reception might be. To my relief we were received with grave courtesy and kindness. I was astounded to discover that a few of the people could converse with us. A long time ago a white man had come to them and lived among them. He had given them a book, and had taught a few of them his language that they might read the book. This they were still doing. They brought the book to us, an ancient copy of the Holy Bible! There was no temple, or shrine or church in that place; only a Bible. Distorted as their understanding of the book was it was a light in the darkness, and they were walking in it. All of the darkness of that vast continent had not put out that tiny light.

My friend from outer space was deeply impressed by what we had discovered, but still we had not found a place untouched by Christian influence.

I took him next to India. He felt that I was wasting his time in taking him there. “You have had missionaries at work in India for well over 100 years,” he said. “They labored unhampered under the benevolent encouragement of the British government. Surely you have made an impression upon the people of this land.” When I reported that after more than a century of missionary labors less than one percent of the people of India are nominally Christian he was incredulous.

We flew low over the great plains of that huge subcontinent and observed thousands of villages many of which I knew had never heard of Christ. I told my friend how India is a land of contrasts and of inconsistencies; that abject poverty and immense wealth exist side by side. The religion of India is largely Hindu. The Hindus believe that life is sacred. They believe that life is so sacred that nothing is to be killed. A holy man will permit a louse or a flea to drive him half crazy rather than take its life. They do not destroy vermin or harmful bacteria or tubercular cattle or rabid animals. Life is too sacred to destroy so they stand by in apparent indifference as millions of human beings die of famine or of plague.

My friend was deeply shocked. “And you have not given them Christ?” he said, accusingly.

“Oh, but we have tried!” I protested.

“Have you indeed?” he asked coldly. “Have you given yourselves to Christ in complete commitment and abandonment of self that the lost might be won to him, or have you only given a little of your gold?”

In the heart of Africa we saw other people who had never heard of Christ. The darkness in which these tribes dwell is appalling. These animists live in abject fear of evil spirits and are under the domination of cruel witch doctors who exploit their superstition. As we observed their bondage to fear we recalled how Jesus had said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Yet here we were nineteen centuries later among people none of whom as yet had been given the truth of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

Suddenly the man from outer space was seized with fury. He fairly seethed, and I was taken with surprise that such a man as he was capable of such wrath. He had discovered that the penetration of commercial interests was greater than the penetration of the Gospel. We found Standard Oil and Coca-Cola where there was no chapel and no good news of salvation.

“I can’t believe it!” he cried. “My people will never believe that Christians with the means to make Christ known, and the opportunity, would be less enterprising and less determined than are commercial interests in marketing their product. Is it nothing to you Christians in America that these live and die in darkness?”

At last we were headed back over the Atlantic. It had been a harrowing experience for me because of my friend’s accusing observations. They were painfully true.

He asked to see our greatest city. We found it frantic with preparations for Christmas. We mingled with the surging crowds of Christmas shoppers; shoving, elbowing people with faces hard or haggard. We heard muttered curses. My friend again became agitated as he had in central Africa. I guided him to the sanctuary of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church where we were sheltered from the press.

“What has this to do with Christmas?” he demanded. “How did this madness ever become a part of your commemoration of the birth of the Savior?”

I was at a loss for an answer. I did not tell him that there in New York City, U.S.A., we were in the midst of the greatest concentration of lost souls to be found anywhere this side of Hell.

We were silent as we sped home, and he bid me an almost silent good-by. I am certain that he was glad to get away.

I am haunted by the sadness of his eyes—almost pity it was, as he looked at me and then looked at the church behind me, its cross topped spire beautiful against the evening sky.

I wondered what sort of a story he would write.

And then I found myself back at my desk, the words of my Sunday’s sermon text before me: “All authority has been given unto me in heaven and on earth. Go ye therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always even unto the end of the world.”

James M. Guthrie, D.D., is pastor of Westminster United Presbyterian Church, Marion, Indiana.

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Do We Want a Giant Church?

Gilbert M. Savery

As a Protestant layman I have come to the firm belief A that ecumenicity of spirit and purpose is more to be desired than organic union of our American churches. I assume that Protestant pastors and laymen are equally concerned about organizational changes that occur as church mergers take place.

If our ecumenical movement does not lead us in this direction of spiritual ecumenicity, I think Protestantism will lose much of its richest heritage. The over-all aim of Protestants, it seems to me, is to unite on the very highest levels, ideologically, and to be able to present a unified voice on major social, economic and political issues facing our nation.

The Big And The Dictatorial

The trick is to accomplish this worthy goal without pushing the layman aside—to have all the advantages of the “one voice” idea without damaging the individual’s relationship to his God and to his church. The problem revolves, in part, around the task of becoming big without becoming dictatorial; of becoming part of a greater whole and still retaining effective, independent self-expression.

We were discussing this at home one evening. In our town the daily newspapers carry rather complete reports of the annual church meetings: elections of officers, fixing of budgets, reports of progress and outlines of goals ahead. My father, for more than 40 years a clergyman, noted that the bishop of the Catholic diocese had announced his appointments to the diocesan boards. This encompassed many parishes and symbolized in one act the authoritarian character of a “one voice” church. How different from the democratic actions of the various Protestant groups who had elected their officers and outlined their own plans in free discussion.

There probably is no great ground swell toward organic union. There may not be a popular demand at the grass roots for further mergers of our American denominations. But we all know that the forces of ecumenicity (of which we ourselves may proudly be a part) are at work. It is timely, therefore, to ask questions about the nature of the unity that may be contemplated. The man in the pew and the man in the pulpit have a stake in the decisions that are to be made.

The Dictates From On High

Who will run united Protestantism? Will it be democratically governed? What role will laymen play? How important and how effective will be the voices of individual churches? How rigid will be the dictates from on high? In short, will control be vested in the hands of only a few men?

Let me illustrate the importance of these questions in regard to a specific problem raised by organic merger of two denominations. About ten years ago my denomination (United Brethren in Christ) united with another (Evangelical) in a merger supported with equal enthusiasm, I would say, by clergy and laymen alike. It was a logical development. There were no great creedal differences, and historically the two churches had traveled parallel paths.

I know, as everyone close to such mergers knows, that compromises must often be made in the interests of unity. In this instance one of the things which underwent re-examination was the united denomination’s policies and programs for higher education. Two seminaries now operate instead of three. One college has been closed in an attempt at economy and efficiency. Although many factors were involved in the decision to close the one school (through merger with another), the important fact is that its board of trustees repeatedly voted to replace a building destroyed by fire and to continue operation of the school on an expanded basis while, at the same time, the general church board controlling the funds for the colleges insisted that it be closed. This insistence was made effective by the board’s cutting off denominational grants essential to the school’s survival.

It can be argued, and with some cogency, that this was merely a matter of judgment. With this I do not disagree. But the important point here is that the centralized body exercised the final judgment over the repeated protests of the local governing body.

Laymen are concerned about such things. It is obvious that because of their daily work, laymen cannot generally spend as much time with commissions, boards or committees on a national level or even on a state level, as they can with their local churches. The same is true of the average small parish pastor. It is my contention, then, that organic union and centralization of authority do indeed represent a genuine threat to Protestantism.

Drifting Toward Control

To me, it appears there is likely to be a drift toward high-level ecclesiastical control of church business and policy.

That this potential shift to increased concentration of power is present concerns those within and outside the church because of the very considerable effect that church thought and action have on the nation’s economic and political life—to say nothing of their effect on the development of the spiritual man.

Dr. Elton Trueblood sees this as an age of growing importance for the layman. But it is my observation that the lay movement and the ecclesiastically engineered church mergers are not nicely meshed so that the church will move “like a mighty army.”

Layman’s Point Of View

Looking at the problem from the layman’s point of view, it seems to me that it is basic in Protestantism that we retain every particle of democracy we can as we move toward a union of faith and action.

It should be emphasized, as I see it, that almost all Christendom is working toward the union of Christ’s Church in accordance with varying interpretations of the universally accepted belief that Christ is its Head. Therefore, discussion turns not upon the desirability of unity but, rather, on how it should be accomplished and of what it should consist.

Our councils of churches, at various levels, are finding common fields of action. This is greatly to be desired. It is perhaps a natural consequence that one after another our great Protestant bodies are exploring the idea of organic union and often achieving it. However, in church government, as in civil government, it is axiomatic that the larger the governing unit, the smaller the voice of the individual.

The net effect of larger denominations is to remove laymen still farther from the points where decisions are made, leaving the higher eschelon clergy in more powerful control of church policy, creed and government. This I oppose.

Would it be heretical to suggest that in a large measure the Church as Christ wanted it may already be established in the hearts and minds of Christian believers and that organic union is not an essential to its fulfillment?

It has been said (perhaps too often) that democracy and Christianity have much in common. They both stress initiative, provide freedom of expression, emphasize equality of opportunity and are based on the inherent value of the individual. I am not eager to say that the Christian faith can operate only in the political and economic framework of democracy. But I do say that the layman can best practice his religion in an atmosphere of freedom and that this is one of the great reasons America has achieved a place of world leadership, imperfect though this may be.

Thus I believe that the layman plays an important role in God’s plan. Possibly Christ would be distressed were he to see the multiplicity of methods, creeds and rituals used in worshipping him. But he might overlook the mere mechanics of man’s approach to him if he saw the pathway clear for each man to find his way to worship God. There are almost 250 Protestant denominations in the United States today. And yet, even with the vehicle of representative government provided by many of them, the layman has little voice in state, national or world church administration.

Without Organic Union?

If the end we seek in promoting ecumenicity is spiritual unity, can it not be achieved without organic union? Or, if there are forces promoting religious regimentation, can they achieve it more effectively by any means other than organic union?

Should the ecumenical movement result only in the building of church giants or one giant Protestant church, we might some day face the threat of a Protestant hierarchy having in it the seeds of regimentation and unyielding authoritarianism.

A Fellowship Of The Spirit

The ecumenical movement, in my opinion, will serve both God and man best if it develops as a fellowship of the spirit. A centralization of religious organization and thought is as dangerous to Protestantism as similar trends are to democracy in the realm of civil government.

It is not to be supposed that leaders of contemplated or effected church mergers are guilty of willful designs against a democratic Protestantism. I prefer to believe that all church mergers are motivated by the highest of Christian ethical standards, and perhaps they are, but there is the omnipresent danger of spiritual democracy being sacrificed on the altar of organizational bigness.

The long-range dangers are real enough, however, to be of genuine concern to clerics and laymen alike who are charged equally with the burden of carrying out the Christian mission. Anything less than this cooperative spirit is unworthy of the Protestant tradition and unworthy, too, of Christ who had to enlist imperfect men of his age to do his work.

An active Christian layman, Gilbert M. Savery has been news editor of the Lincoln Evening Journal in Nebraska for 13 years, and formerly edited its church page. He works at close range with the Nebraska Council of Churches, and is an active member of his home church in Lincoln, Southminster Evangelical United Brethren Church.

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The Headship of Christ

William Childs Robinson

The Headship of Christ is a biblical truth that has come to a fuller recognition in the Reformation and in the Reformed Church. All Christians profess Christ as the heavenly head of the Church. But clericalism in Roman Catholicism and its counterpart in other denominations, places the word of the church on a level with the word of her Lord. True Protestantism subordinates the decisions of the church to the voice of the Lord. For the evangelical, the church is the servant of the Lord, not his confidential adviser. The Headship of Christ carries the implication that the risen Redeemer, whose gracious presence brings forgiveness and spiritual life, is the sole King and the only Lawgiver in Zion.

Historical Setting

The high watermark of the Reformation was Luther’s act of hurling into the flames the canon law of the Roman Church, December 10, 1520. The lawyers stood aghast, for that law had ruled Europe for a millennium. Luther likewise realized the gravity of his act. He told his students that to continue to follow him would mean martyrdom for them as it would for him. But he also reminded them that since they now knew the Gospel, to forsake it meant Hell. Thus the authority of the Roman Curia was cast down; the word of the Saviour was to be the only rule in the Church of the Gospel.

Luther, in his way, took up the tradition of Wycliffe and the Hussites, even as in turn his glorious testimony was carried more completely into the government and worship of the Church by Zwingli, Calvin, Knox and the Scottish Kirk. Our Reformed heritage holds that the Holy Scriptures, as the mouth of the Lord, contain all that is necessary for Christian faith, life and worship.

The Evangelicals in Scotland sought a warrant from the Divine Writ for everything introduced into the government and worship of the Kirk. The Episcopalians and the Erastians acknowledged the mystical Headship of Christ over the individual believer, but the Presbyterians and the Evangelicals insisted, in addition to this mystical Headship, upon the juridical Headship, or Kingship, of Christ over his corporate people. For them the Bible was the ultimate constitution and the only lawbook for the Church.

The Biblical Basis

In his earthly ministry, our Lord affirmed his authority to forgive sins, to cast out demons, to set forth doctrine, to give eternal life, to execute judgment, to lay down his own life and to take it again. After his Resurrection, Jesus declared that all authority had been given unto him in heaven and on earth. At Pentecost, Peter pointed to him exalted to God’s right hand, as Lord and Christ, occupying there the throne of which David’s throne in old Jerusalem was the type. As a result of the work of Christ, Satan fell as lightning from heaven. In place of the adversary, there is now at God’s right hand the mediator, the prince and Savior who gives repentance and the remission of sins. “Now is come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ; for the accuser of his brethren is cast out” (Rev. 12:10). As a result of his life and death of obedience, Christ was given by the Father the name which is above every name, his own name of Lord. God has placed all things under his feet and given him in this plenitude of lordship to fill his body, the Church, with all things needful for her blessing and her ministries.

The Church is pervaded by his presence, animated by his spirit, filled with his life, energies and grace, governed by his authority and used as his instrument for bringing men into his all-embracing act of salvation. He is the sole head of the Church, which receives from him what he himself possesses and is endowed by him with all that she requires for the realization of her vocation.

Application To Life

Features of the application have already been indicated in this treatment. Fundamental in the thinking of our Scottish forebears was their conception of the proper attitude of a loyal heart to our gracious Savior and king. A loyal spirit cannot brook the thought that our King of Grace is niggardly in the provisions he has made for his people. Accordingly, the way of plenty and of progress in the church is the narrow way of the sole headship and kingship of the Lord Jesus Christ.

For one thing, the sole headship and kingship of Christ is placed over against any allegiance owed by the Church to any state. In 1638, the Kirk of Scotland unfurled a blue banner with the legend “For Christ’s Crown and Covenant.” Marshaled under this banner, the Kirk repelled the efforts of King Charles to force upon her officers a worship not warranted in the Word. In 1752, the Rev. Thomas Gillespie refused to share in the installation of Andrew Richardson at Inverkeithing because he was appointed by the patron against the will of the parishioners. In 1833, Dr. Thomas Chalmers led the Free Kirk out of a state control that enforced patronage. In the United States in 1861, the commissioners of the Southern Presbyteries organized what is now the Presbyterian Church in the United States as a protest against the effort to tie the allegiance of all Presbyterians to President Lincoln and the Federal government. In addition to the Southern organization, protest was filed against the 1861 loyalty resolutions by a minority in the Old School Assembly led by Dr. Charles Hodge. Moreover, the 1953 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America recognized that its majority action in 1861 was in error.

Calvin sets forth two governments, Church and State, each ordained by God, neither subject to the other. The Christian is subject to the one as a believer, to the other as a citizen. Under the sole Kingship of Christ, the Church is subject neither to the Roman Pope, nor to the British King, nor to the American President, nor to a German Fuhrer nor to any communist dictator.

A Specific Commission

Second, the Church recognizes the Headship of Christ in seeking to do only those things which he has commissioned her to do. As she receives Christ’s righteousness by his saving presence, so also the Holy Spirit makes her his instrument to preach his word, mortify the flesh and manifest his love to men. The Church is not in the world to find problems to solve or issues on which to pass resolutions. She has her gospel given her by God, the proclamation of Christ as prophet, as priest and as king, the testimony to the grace of his coming in humiliation and the glory of his coming in power. She is commissioned to offer the Gospel of free salvation through his atonement, to expound the word to his body, to be the pillar and ground of the truth, to carry the evangel to all nations. It is not her business to carry out every good thing that needs doing in the governmental, international, economic, social or political structure of the world.

Sufficiency Of Scripture

Third, the Headship of Christ proclaims the Holy Scriptures as the unique and sufficient rule of faith, of practice and of worship. The Church is not merely to give pious advice, neither is she a lawmaking body. She is a court to declare, rather than a legislature to make, laws. She is to declare, administer and enforce the law of Christ given in the word. Without a scriptural warrant she can make no requirement binding the consciences of men. Those who seek to legislate on their own authority are reminded that it is a man-sized job to get people to live according to the Bible—without adding to it. We can err in interpreting and applying Scripture; we multiply error when we first make our own laws and then use the Church of God to enforce them. Accordingly, nothing ought to be regarded as a matter of offense or as a cause for discipline in the Church except that which can be shown to be contrary to the word of God.

The King’s Orders

Fourth, the Headship of Christ is recognized in the effort to conform worship and government to those things the king has provided in his word. The injunction against worshipping graven images is united with and to some extent hidden under the First Commandment in the Roman Catholic and Lutheran numbering but is given full force as the Second Commandment in the Reformed faith. With this emphasis, the Reformed Church has sought to introduce into God’s worship only those things provided in his word. Pictures have pedagogical value, but God has not ordained them to be used as aids in his worship. We would tread the courts of the Most High only in the ways of his ordering. The Good Book is also the book of common worship, the book of etiquette instructing us in how we ought to conduct ourselves in the court of the King of Kings.

Similarly, the question of what officers the Church ought to have, and whether they are to men or women, is first of all a question of the ordering of the King. The Church is not in the first place a democracy, but a theocracy (1 Cor. 12:28), a Christocracy (Eph. 4:11), a pneumatocracy (Acts 20:28). Thus the election of officers in a congregation is not democracy’s right to choose whom she would as her spokesmen; but God’s trusting the priesthood of believers to elect those men who have the marks he has laid down for their respective offices.

Finally, the Headship of Christ means that the officers of his ordaining receive their positions, empowering gifts, authority and equipment from the Lord Jesus, and to him they are primarily responsible. The ministers and elders in the Church are the representatives of the people, but they are also the delegates of Christ.

They are not lords over God’s heritage, but servants of him who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many. The chosen rulers are those whom he has called, equipped with his Holy Spirit, and given to the Church to minister to her. They can minister effectively only as the Holy Spirit mediates to them and through them the living Christ with his saving work. And he does this not by making Christ or his Church subservient to the plans of men, but by calling us into his program and using us for the promotion of his kingdom of grace.

William Childs Robinson has been Professor of Historical Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Ga., since 1926. He is the author of numerous works, including Christ the Hope of Glory, Who Say Ye That I Am and Christ the Bread of Life. He holds a Th.D. degree from Harvard University and has studied abroad at the University of Basel.

- More from William Childs Robinson

Cover Story

The Pathos of Religious Liberalism

Ned B. Stonehouse

It was Adolph Harnack, brilliant exponent of liberal theology and penetrating observer of the historic scene about the turn of the century, who declared that “there is something touching in the anxiety which everyone shows to rediscover himself, together with his own point of view and his own circle of interest, in this Jesus Christ, or at least to get a share in him.” This phenomenon has been no less evident in the half century since Harnack thus expressed himself in his memorable lectures on the essence of Christianity. Few indeed have been those who have read the Gospels with serious attention and have not been sympathetically drawn to the portrait of Jesus Christ there drawn. There is genuine pathos, however, in the observation that many a modern inquirer in his quest of Jesus, finding the Jesus of the Gospels unacceptable, more or less unconsciously refashions the portrait to conform Jesus to his own presuppositions or predilections.

Although Harnack himself spoke so self-assuredly regarding his understanding of Jesus, it was not long before criticism had exposed the subjuctivity of his reconstruction and had effectively shown that he had been guilty of presenting a radical modernization of Jesus. In seeking to maintain the thesis that “the gospel of Jesus proclaimed that it had to do with the Father only, and not with the Son,” and in interpreting Jesus’ messianic claims and his eschatological teaching as merely formal or peripheral and ultimately as expendable, Harnack came to be recognized as arbitrarily eliminating that which was uncongenial to his modern spirit. Nevertheless, in terms of his own perspective, he was captivated by the history and personality of Jesus. For he thought of Jesus not only as a teacher but as one who was connected with the gospel as “its personal realization and its strength.” Christianity to him was not a question of a doctrine—not even the teaching of Jesus—being handed down, but rather of a life “again and again kindled afresh,” as one came under the impact of Jesus’ personality.

It may also be recalled that Wilhelm Herrmann, Harnack’s peer as a spokesman for liberal Christianity, was perhaps even more emphatic in interpreting religion in Christ-centered terms. If one supposed that the liberal theology conceived of Jesus merely as a moral teacher and example, and that accordingly the religion of the liberal was devoid of fervor and power, he would be bound to undergo a revolutionary change of judgment if he came really to know Herrmann. Thus, at any rate, J. Gresham Machen, as he sat under Herrmann in 1905, was completely overwhelmed at the evidence of his religious earnestness as expressed in terms of “absolute confidence” in and “absolute joyful subjection” to Jesus. Such occupation with the figure of Jesus Christ and such confidence and devotion, however, did not serve to establish Herrmann’s theology on a sure foundation. His view also was soon recognized as essentially a modernization of Jesus. But there is a heightening of pathos as one contemplates the sincerity of his mistaken response to the testimony of the Gospels regarding Jesus.

Invoking The Spirit Of Jesus

Among those who struck powerful blows that shattered the portrait of the liberal Jesus was Albert Schweitzer. The very elements which Harnack had found most uncongenial, namely, the messianic and eschatological teaching, and which had, as Schweitzer says, “ingenuously and covertly” been rejected, Schweitzer declared to be the central and dominating features of Jesus’ life and thought. Although Schweitzer’s interpretation suffers from one-sidedness and other basic defects, he must be credited with an epochal contribution toward the understanding of the witness of the gospel. As the result of the impact of his views it would seem that no serious student of the Gospels can ever contend again for an essentially non-eschatological understanding of Jesus. But an even greater pathos can be found in Schweitzer’s evaluation of Jesus than in the older Liberalism. For no longer is it one of a more or less artless kind. It is now a self-conscious pathos in the presence of tragedy of gigantic proportions. This is so because the Jesus whom Schweitzer searches out, though he is described as an “imperious ruler” and as possessing the “volcanic force of an incalculable personality,” was a mere man who was completely disillusioned on the cross. Moreover, subsequent history is regarded as having demonstrated that Jesus was completely in error with regard to his most basic thoughts regarding his life and destiny. Although Schweitzer wrote a doctoral dissertation to defend the sanity of Jesus, his own interpretation of Jesus’ self-consciousness appears to place too great a burden upon him for any healthy person to endure. The end of the story, as Schweitzer depicts it, is therefore utterly pathetic.

But the extent of the pathos in Schweitzer’s construction is even now not fully measured. For it is touching to observe how Schweitzer, having radically rejected the eschatology of Jesus and the Jesus of eschatology, nevertheless is not able to let him go. And in spite of his judgments upon the liberal theology he himself ends up by being a liberal! Now, however, this occurs without the benefit of the liberals’ appeal to “the historical Jesus.” And Schweitzer is not less arbitrary than the liberal when he likewise insists that it is possible to set aside the eschatological as husk and to retain as kernel something that has little or nothing to do with Jesus’ own dominant ideas. And so Schweitzer, in spite of his recognition that the liberal Jesus is an historical illusion, and in the face of his own judgment that the Jesus of history as he understands him is altogether unworthy of trust, makes the claim that “the spirit of Jesus” is on the side of liberalism. Like David F. Strauss before him he discounts the significance of the historical by regarding it as constituting only the outward form in which with considerable variation essential religious truth comes to expression. And so declaring “that it is not Jesus as historically known, but Jesus as spiritually arisen within men,” he sets out to develop his ethical mysticism.

Can one conceive of greater pathos than that which confronts us here? According to Schweitzer’s view, the more fully that we come to a genuine knowledge of Jesus as he lived on earth, the more impossible it becomes to accept his central self-appraisal. Nevertheless, in spite of his being persona non grata as he appeared in history, we are told that we need not be discouraged. Indeed, we may be basically indifferent to the results of our study of what the Gospels have to say concerning him, and yet we are to suppose that we may come to genuine knowledge and experience of “his spirit.”

The Pendulum Of Criticism

Speaking rather broadly of certain dominant trends of gospel criticism, we may observe that this basic characteristic is evident again and again. There has indeed been some genuine progress in interpretation, not only as it concerns eschatology, but also as it relates to the broader impact which the Gospels as a whole make upon us. Schweitzer’s extreme views have been corrected and modified by subsequent criticism as far as most New Testament scholars are concerned. His one-sided futurism in particular has been largely abandoned in favor of a more comprehensive estimate of the manifestation of the kingdom of God and of the scope of the ministry of the Son of Man. There has developed, moreover, a greater awareness that the Gospels are concerned with the single theme of God’s decisive action in Christ for man’s salvation, that this action finds climactic expression in the cross and the resurrection, and that, accordingly, the message of the Gospels resists dissection of kernel and husk after the manner of the liberals. Thus, also the unity of the New Testament, particularly in its central concern with salvation history, is substantially discerned and acknowledged.

To a significant extent, however, exegetical gain has spelled historical and religious loss. For it is especially the more radical critics who, having recognized that the Gospels proclaim a message of supernatural salvation through Jesus Christ, but disallowing that this could have been Jesus’ own conception of his ministry, regard the Gospels as essentially dogmatic constructions rather than historical memoirs. And so the Christian community, whether in Palestine or in the Hellenistic world beyond, has been held mainly responsible for the origin of the Christian message. By this approach, Jesus Christ becomes a vague and misty figure in the background, about whom we have little or no certain knowledge.

Among recent New Testament scholars Rudolf Bultmann is perhaps the most representative of these latter tendencies. As the result of his application of the method of form criticism, only a few remnants of the Gospel tradition are regarded as applicable to the Jesus of history. Bultmann has even said that he would have no quarrel with anyone who might wish to place “Jesus” in quotation marks as a designation for the historical phenomenon back of the Christian church. In the most recent phase of his thought, which is concerned with the Christian proclamation, he is indeed substantially faithful in expounding that proclamation in terms of the supernatural action of a pre-existent divine being who appeared on earth as a man. But he is compelled, in virtue of his estimate of technological progress and man’s understanding of his own nature (as “a self-subsistent unity immune from the interference of supernatural powers”), to regard this proclamation together with the view of the world that it presupposes as hopelessly obsolete.

In certain basic respects Bultmann’s position, however, is like that of Schweitzer. For Bultmann, too, the life of Jesus was a merely human life which ended in the tragedy of crucifixion although he had envisioned the dawning of a new world through supernatural intervention in history. Bultmann is more skeptical regarding the testimony of the Gospels to Jesus than was Schweitzer, for he does not even allow that Jesus thought of himself as the Messiah. But this difference is after all only one of degree so far as the significance of the life of Jesus upon earth is concerned. As noted above, Schweitzer, in spite of his tragic estimate of the Jesus of history, with startling boldness proceeds to reinterpret his life and spirit in liberal terms. And Bultmann, in spite of even more radical judgments upon the life of Jesus, also becomes involved in the effort to separate the kernel from the husk in his judgments concerning Jesus and the Gospel. For example, in dealing with the message of Jesus, he acknowledges that Jesus thought of the kingdom of God in supernatural terms and awaited its manifestation in world-shaking events such as the coming of the Son of Man, the resurrection of the dead, judgment and the end of the world. Nevertheless, Bultmann has the temerity to insist that these features of “contemporary mythology” do not express Jesus’ “real meaning”! “The real significance of the kingdom of God for the message of Jesus,” Bultmann declares, “lies in any case not in the dramatic events associated with its coming … it does not interest Jesus at all as a condition, but rather as the transcendent event, which signifies for man the great either—or, which compels man to decision.” It may be observed, therefore, that as to both method and results, in basic respects Bultmann’s position does not differ essentially from that of the liberal.

In similar fashion, as Bultmann is concerned particularly with the apostolic proclamation, he places an unbearable strain on our credulity when he outrightly insists that the Gospel is mythical and yet makes the claim that by a process of de-mythologizing one may discover “the real meaning of the New Testament.” As far as history is concerned, the cross is merely the tragic end of a great man, and the resurrection itself is not an event of past history. Nevertheless, the cross and the resurrection are viewed as forming “a single, indivisible cosmic event” which we may experience as an event in the word of preaching as we acknowledge that by the grace of God we understand our existence in terms of being crucified and risen with Christ.

Considering how profoundly skeptical Bultmann is concerning the possibility of knowledge of the historical Jesus and his scornful repudiation of the Christian kerygma as that comes to us in the New Testament, we might expect that he would let Jesus go and frankly espouse a Christless religion or philosophy. Yet he does not do that. And it remains significant that, in spite of the centrifugal forces which drive him away from Jesus Christ, there remains an impact of Christian tradition which somewhat restrains this outward course.

There are, to be sure, many other scholars whose approach to Jesus and the gospel is far less skeptical and negative than that of Bultmann. Among such scholars a higher estimate of the trustworthiness of the gospel tradition prevails; and hence the Christian community is assigned a less creative or transforming influence. Nevertheless, among modern students of the New Testament generally we find the characteristic liberal failure to see the New Testament message as a unity or to accept it in its entirety. Perhaps the clearest illustration of this tendency is found in the fate of eschatology. For one of the most striking features of present-day thought about the New Testament is that, speaking generally, the clearer the apprehension of the inclusion of distinctively eschatological features in that message, the greater the insistence upon discounting or minimizing them. The latter may be done by “interpreting” them in terms of timelessness, as not only Bultmann but also Lohmeyer, Barth, and others have done. Or a similar result may be achieved by the approach of C. H. Dodd who, by interpretation and criticism, develops the formula of “realized eschatology.”

The defining of the gospel in Christocentric terms or in terms of salvation history is a highly salutary emphasis compared with that of the older Liberalism. Nevertheless, when the entire testimony of Scripture is not acknowledged as authoritative when Christ is not received in all the fullness of the testimony that the Scriptures contain. When his eschatological message is affirmed and denied at the same time, there may indeed be a poignant wrestling with the historical and personal problem of Jesus Christ and his meaning for us. But the element of pathos remains as long as men do not come to the place where with all their hearts they receive and embrace Jesus Christ as the Scriptures present him to us.

For the evangelical, the recognition of this factor should provide no basis whatever for conceit or complacency. First of all, he will be constrained to search his own mind and heart to see whether he has come fully to the place where he no longer sits in judgment upon Christ but rather is characterized by wholehearted commitment and submission to him. And then he will be deeply moved, as he contemplates with tears the pathos conspicuous in much of present-day religious faith, to rededicate himself to the ministry of reconciliation, a ministry which points men first of all to the manner in which in Christ God was reconciling the world unto himself and then beseeches them in Christ’s name to be reconciled unto God.

We Quote:

JOHN KNOX

Professor, Union Theological Seminary

The preacher’s message must be derived, not from current events or current literature or current trends of one sort or another, not from the pholosophers, the statesmen, or the poets, not even, in the last resort, from the preacher’s own experience or reflection, but from the Scriptures. There is, of course, nothing really new about this. That it needs to be said again, and with fresh emphasis, means only that preaching has departed in this respect from its own tradition.—In The Integrity of Preaching, p. 9.

Ned B. Stonehouse is Professor of New Testament and Dean of the Faculty, Westminster Theological Seminary. He is Editor of the New International Commentary on the New Testament and author of Paul Before the Areopagus.

- More from Ned B. Stonehouse

Theology

Review of Current Religious Thought: April 15, 1957

William A. Mueller

How deeply do we Westerners understand the souls of men in other cultures? Do most missionaries really come to grips with the hopes, aspirations and fears of people in Asia and Africa? T. A. Beethan probes into this question in an article “The Church in Africa Faces 1957” (International Review of Missions, Jan. 1957). The Gold Coast has just achieved independent statehood. The state of Ghana has been born. Our author points out that during the last 25 years the Church has carried the major burden of developing educational programs but often has given people a sense of false security. Many Africans, he avers, have not yet accepted the Christian view of marriage. Rightly he holds that the answer to and affirmation of monogamy must come from within the African Church itself. Likewise it is highly imperative that the theologians and church historians of Africa emerge from the theological schools of Africa. In too many cases the Christian churches in West Africa are far more European than indigenously African.

Hans A. De Boer of Germany has written a fascinating book under the title Noted en Route (J. G. Oncken Verlag, Kassel). It is a travel book by a young business man and full of intriguing vistas. He tells of walking unarmed into the camp of the Mau Mau rebels in Kenya. His white Christian friends threw up their hands in horror at his very suggestion to visit these people.

But De Boer’s faith was vindicated. The Mau Mau rebels received him, at first somewhat suspiciously, then with increasing confidence. A two hour conversation ensued. De Boer frankly told them that their path of violence and murder was dead wrong. “Why don’t you negotiate?” was his query. “Indeed we would if all white men would come to us like you have, without arms, in order to speak with us and not to dictate. Then blood would not have to flow. But nobody wants to negotiate with us!”

One cannot read this account without sensing the vast tragedy of the white man’s situation in countries like Africa.

De Boer also met Nehru in India. They talked about Christian missions. Nehru expressed his appreciation of many missionaries and their endeavor. The German traveler, however, sensed that Nehru was not impressed by all of them. “Do you want me to give you an appraisal in the order of rank?” asked Nehru. Reluctantly and with a smile he mentioned the following representatives of Christian missions: Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Evangelical-Lutheran, Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists. De Boer was considerably perturbed about this graded scale of appreciation. All the major denominations had been mentioned. Then he asked: “And which Churches do you esteem most highly?” Nehru instantly answered: “The Mennonites, the Quakers and the Church of the Brethren!”

And why this high esteem of these smaller Christian bodies? “First, because they are free from racial bias. They live modestly and as much like the natives as possible. Nor do they build sumptuous mission stations outside our Indian dwellings, nor do they ride in luxurious cars or meddle in politics. They have but one desire: to preach Christ and walk according to his teachings.”

When American Ambassador Bowles used a bicycle instead of a Cadillac while stationed in New Delhi he made a terrific impression upon the people of India. This writer vividly remembers a statement by the late Dr. Theron Rankin of the Foreign Mission Board of Southern Baptists when he said: “While a missionary in China I thought of myself for a long time more as an American than as an ambassador of Jesus Christ!” It is good to realize how others see us.

“Crossroads in Mass Evangelism” (The Christian Century, Mar. 20, 1957) by Malcolm Boyd contains much food for serious thought. The writer is concerned about our modern means of communication such as radio, TV and other mass-media of publicity. “And obviously such techniques are to be claimed for Christ; he is their Lord as he is ours. But does ‘claiming’ certain techniques for Christ necessarily mean employing them for him? Perhaps we must be as concerned with motivation as we are with new (or old) techniques.” Let us beware by all means of exploiting men for Jesus Christ! Well has our author written:

God never exploits man; he has created us with free will. Jesus, far from exploiting the situation in which he found himself, refused all the temptations of worldly power—refused a crown, refused to press an “advantage,” subdued the crowd’s passions and went off by himself, died alone, defeated, on the cross. This is not only the antithesis but the refutation of exploitation. Indeed, love is always the antithesis and refutation of exploitation.

Hendrik Kramer, the missionary statesman, recently warned students at the Southern Baptist Seminary against the allurements of our all too clever ways of advertising. Boyd warns that publicity, bigness and modern techniques themselves may create a non-Christian climate. Are we “using modern tools and techniques to escape from reality?”

Die Gemeinde, the weekly journal of the Evangelical Free Churches (Baptists) of Germany, under a February 24, 1957 dateline, reports a warning from the Central Bureau of the Evangelischen Hilfswerk with regard to the emigration of older people to the Americas:

At first the joy of parents and grandparents who follow their children abroad may be rather great, but soon the even greater disillusionment sets in: the old folk can no longer accommodate themselves to a new and strange way of living; often the climate does not agree with them; they are in many instances unable to learn the language of the country, and after a few years they cannot even converse with their grandchildren. In that moment these aged people long to return to their native land and often cannot.

This writer has had many dealings with immigrants and refugees in recent years. He can only underscore this word of warning from abroad. One old lady, a kin of ours, felt utterly forlorn in our midst, even though she had escaped the terror of the Russian zone of Germany in 1947. Her deepest sorrow was that she could not hear God’s Word in her mother tongue on Sunday. She would attend our church but simply was unable to derive any benefit from the English sermon of the preacher. Meanwhile she has returned to Germany and is happily located in an Old Folks Home in the Rhineland.

The same journal announces that in the future candidates for the ministry from Spain may receive their training in the Rhineland, since the Evangelical Seminary in Madrid has been closed since January, 1956, at the behest of the Franco regime. Love always finds a way. The bond of Christian fellowship is always stronger than the threats of dictators.

- More from William A. Mueller

Books

Book Briefs: April 15, 1957

Toynbee’s Approach

An Historian’s Approach to Religion, by Arnold Toynbee. Oxford. 1956. $5.00.

Arnold Toynbee’s fame as a historical prophet has already spread far beyond the limits of the academic world. Although perhaps relatively few people have read all ten volumes of his Study of History, a great many have enough acquaintance with some of his ideas through works of popularization and criticism, to appreciate something of his wide knowledge and brilliant generalizations concerning man’s history.

For this reason, the present work under review should be of no little interest to many, particularly Christians, for in his Gifford Lectures of 1952 and 1953 Professor Toynbee has attempted to apply to the history of religion the same techniques he has already used on history in general. He is here endeavouring as he, himself says, to give “The glimpse of the Universe that his fellow-historians and he are able to catch from the point of view at which they arrive through following the historian’s professional path.” (p. 3). And, one might add, this glimpse is both interesting and stimulating, even if one is obliged to disagree.

Toynbee has divided his book into two distinct parts. The first of these divisions deals with “The Dawn of the Higher Religions,” attempting to outline the evolution of man’s religious consciousness from the time that he began his spiritual quest by worshipping nature. He states that man proceeded from that point to the worship of himself, first in “the idolization of parochial communities,” then in the “idolization of an oecumenical community,” and finally in the “idolization of a self-sufficient philosopher.”

Out of these efforts the higher religions eventually arose, reaching their apogee in Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity, both of which “accept Suffering as an opportunity for acting on the promptings of Love and Pity.” Moreover they believe this to be possible because it has already been done “by a Supreme Being Who has demonstrated his own devotion to the ideal, by subjecting himself to the Suffering that is the necessary price of acting on it” (p. 89). These two Beings are the Buddha and the Christ (chap. 6).

Both these religions, it is true have been diverted frequently from their spiritual missions by mundane tasks and have been perverted by the idolization of their institutions, but they still remain the only two ways of approach to Absolute Reality.

This brings us to the second part of the book. Here Toynbee deals with the breakdown of Christian tradition in western civilization. He seems to feel that the present religious situation is the result primarily of the religious conflicts engendered by the Reformation. These he holds, caused a revulsion from Christianity and men found their escape in the study of science which has in turn produced a new false religion: “The Idolization of the Invincible Technician” (chap. 17).

It is this new idolatry which is extremely dangerous, for as the world is becoming more and more bound together, Toynbee feels a world-government must eventually evolve and this will have to be dictatorial. Consequently, the one realm of freedom left for man must be the spiritual. In that situation, man (despite Nazi and Communist examples to the contrary) will be able to express himself fully only in religion. The question is, what will the mans’ ultimate religion be.

The answer to this problem, Toynbee maintains is, to use Bultmann’s phrase a little out of context, to demythologize the higher religions, by clearing away the religious underbrush from around them in order that once again man’s religious heritage may be purified and true religion shown to be the over-coming of self-centeredness through the suffering necessitated by our love for others. In this way man will once again enter fellowship with the Absolute Reality. This is Toynbee’s approach to religion.

As one reads this work, a recurring impression makes itself felt. In a good many ways, Toynbee is very much the eighteenth century “philosopher.” This becomes clear from his continual quoting of Pierre Bayle and Bishop Sprat in his ‘annexes’ to various chapters. But it is also characteristic of his way of thinking. His assumptions, his method and his conclusions are all those basically of the enlightened rationalist—of course in twentieth century dress.

In this connection, the first thing which a Christian notices is that there is no concept of supernatural revelation (p. 265). From the opening pages of the book, he assumes that any possibility of absolute reality speaking to man directly is not worth consideration. This is implied in a number of attacks upon the idea of a chosen people. Even natural revelation seems to have no place in the picture. The absolute reality, as far as one can see, is really the projection of man’s own mind contemplating himself or the world.

For this reason, although Toynbee may speak of sin and redemption, they are rather different from the Christian concepts. Sin is primarily self-centeredness, not rebellion against a God who has called man to “glorify and enjoy” Him. Redemption is to be found, as is natural on Toynbee’s definition of sin, through loving self-sacrifice, which in turn brings man by such good works to fellowship with absolute reality. Redemption by divine grace has no part nor lot in this matter.

And what is this absolute reality? It is very definitely not the Christian God. Since It (to use Toynbee’s word) has not revealed Itself man knows relatively little about It. Toynbee, however, is very insistent the historian knows that it is partly personal and partly impersonal. This would seem to posit within absolute reality an eternally unresolvable surd which can and does produce even for its personal aspect the absolutely new, or at least the unexpected. This is hardly the picture which one receives of the biblical sovereign God unto whom belongs all knowledge and wisdom.

A fundamental question which arises as one considers Toynbee’s thesis is: how does he know all this? How can he make absolute statements about an absolute reality which itself is not completely self-conscious? (pp. 18, 276). One receives the impression that not only is Toynbee’s religion not Christian, it is based upon a contradiction and so is self-destructive.

That this is necessarily so, would seem to arise from his method. He claims that what he is saying is the result of his study of history. But can one, without a prior interpretation of history which is revealed to man, use history which he declares to be apparently chaotic (pp. 9 f.) as a vehicle to go beyond itself to absolute reality? This would seem to be another contradiction in his position. The historian must indeed assume that history has a pattern, but without revelation he must also admit that it is a pattern of his own creation.

Thus, although Professor Toynbee’s book is both very interesting and stimulating, it hardly seems to be the answer which will help twentieth century man to solve his spiritual problems.

W. STANFORD REID

The Future Life

Immortality, by Loraine Boettner. Wm. B. Eerdmans. $2.50.

Dr. Loraine Boettner has earned recognition for himself as a careful and competent theologian with the publication of his earlier writings, especially “The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination”, a classic exposition of a difficult but important truth. In the present volume he again comes to grips with a perplexing, and often misunderstood, subject; death. Much contemporary thought in this area is muddled under the pressure of anxiety, sentimentality, and despair. This book, however, is a refreshing demonstration of rational argumentation growing out of fidelity to, and honest exegesis of, the Scriptures. Here is irresistible logic combined with the exercise of mature faith and spiritual insight. In addition, unlike many modern theologians, Boettner is willing to sacrifice recognition for personal genius, profundity and massive scholarship (to all of which he may lay legitimate claim) in order to be understood by his readers, whatever their theological orientation and acuteness. Even the untrained layman can read these pages without being driven to distraction.

The book is arranged in three sections: Physical Death, Immortality and The Intermediate State. Throughout the subject is treated, not in isolation and abstraction, but in relation to the whole fabric of Christian truth with which it is closely intertwined.

In the first section Boettner makes a sharp distinction between three different kinds of death: spiritual, physical and eternal. He points out that for believers physical death is in no sense penal, in which case it would be superfluous to Christ’s satisfaction on the cross. On the contrary, it is disciplinary in nature. It also serves as a constant warning to unbelievers for whom all three kinds of death are penal.

The second section includes a historical study of the universal belief in immortality and a marshalling of the arguments and evidences which establish the probability and necessity of a future life. Here Boettner indicates that the nature of the matter demands supernatural revelation, and insists that the doctrine is both assumed and taught in the Old Testament, as well as the New Testament and from the very beginning. He then examines and interprets the peculiar Christian teaching about the future life, particularly the resurrection of the body.

The concluding section on the intermediate state is a valuable study of biblical terms such as Paradise, Hades, Sheol and Hell. Here too, are carefully-documented refutations of the erroneous and perverse doctrines of purgatory (Roman Catholicism), soul sleep (Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventism) and communication with the dead (Spiritualism).

We have no doubt that this book will take its place among the important works on an all-important issue.

RICHARD ALLEN BODEY

The Neo-Calvin

The Theology of Calvin, by Wilhelm Niesel. Translated by Harold Knight. Westminster Press.

Wilhelm Niesel, whose work, here, first appeared in the original German in 1938, wrote this book as a contribution to the lively debate (still going on) devoted to finding a “key” to the understanding of the theology of Calvin. He took pen in hand (like the others) in order to settle once for all the problem for which Kampschulte, for instance, nearly a century ago thought he found the answer in a single doctrine such as that of Election; H. Bauke, more recently, in the form of his theology as opposed to a single doctrine; and H. Weber, in the structural psychology of his system, taking into account both form and doctrinal content. Niesel, decrying all efforts to understand Calvin’s theology from the point of view of its content, declares that the Reformer must be understood in terms of a single, dominant interest, namely the Incarnation. He reflects, in his thesis, the “crisis” theology of the Barthian school, of which he evidently is a member.

Niesel’s thesis is that in order to understand Calvin and resolve the obscurities and contradictions which otherwise inevitably appear, we must set aside any preoccupation with the form or the substance or even the sequence of thought which may seem evident, and look for something more “ultimate.” This “something” is provided by Karl Barth’s theology, whose idea of “theology being determined by its object” has “produced a revolution in Calvin studies as elsewhere.”

In order to develop his thesis, Niesel selects, for consideration, fundamental doctrines taken from the whole body of Calvin’s thought, such as the Knowledge of God, the Trinity, the Law of God, the Mediator, Prayer, the Church, the Sacraments, etc. His materials are selected at random from the whole body of Calvin’s writings. And there certainly are few men living who can equal his knowledge of the sources.

Calvin’s theology, explains Niesel, although centering in Christ, begins with Scripture. Scripture is the source of the divine wisdom which we must acquire and which consists in knowing Christ. But Scripture remains for us, in our unsaved condition, a dead and ineffectual thing. For Niesel’s Calvin, God’s self-revelation is in Christ, not Scripture. And the inclinations of our hearts must be changed if our study of the Bible is not to be so much lost time. This change takes place when we turn to God and is effected by the Holy Spirit. Then it is that we see in Scripture its great subject, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Throughout the entire Bible we are confronted by nothing else but the living Word of God and it is to find him that we study Scripture.

This epistemology, which underlies Niesel’s thesis, is clearly dependent upon a primary doctrine: that of the work of the Holy Spirit. Without this prior work, human intelligence remains unenlightened, the Bible meaningless and Christ unfound. Thus, though the heart of Christianity is Christ, the starting point in soteriology (and the foundation of Niesel’s theology) is the inward illumination of the Holy Spirit.

In most respects Niesel is essentially traditional in his treatment of Calvin, except for the obvious Barthian twist given the Reformer’s view of the Scriptures. But it is precisely the Reformer’s view of the Scriptures which modifies the epistemology Niesel seeks to delineate. Calvin did not believe the Bible a dead collection of words until the Holy Spirit made it the Word of God. He believed it to be the Word of God to begin with, the self-revelation of God which bore within itself the peculiar property of awakening faith as the Holy Spirit granted illumination.

There is a difference between saying that the Bible is a dead book to which a living Spirit must bear witness before it becomes meaningful; and saying that the Bible is the living Word which, when read, stirs and strangely warms the reader’s heart as the Holy Spirit applies the benefits of Christ received through the primary channel of Grace, the Word itself. In my own research, I seemed to hear the Reformer saying the latter. He certainly did not say that we must decide between doctrine and Christ, as Niesel does. He rather affirmed that sound doctrine is the way to find Christ!

The first contact of an unbeliever with the Ultimate Word is not at the point of the inward illumination of the Spirit, but in the preaching of the proximate Word. Then it is precisely because the Bible is intrinsically the dynamic Word of God that it serves as a channel through which the Holy Spirit speaks to human hearts about Christ. True, Calvin did not believe that the divine inspiration of the Scriptures could be demonstrated to all and sundry, as Niesel points out. But this was because this primary channel did not pour the saving Grace of God by the Holy Spirit into every heart: according to the Reformer’s doctrine of Election. (To some the preaching of the Word remains foolishness.) The difference is fine, but significant.

But this is an important book, without a consideration of which any serious Calvin research would be incomplete. Despite his attempt to make Calvin a Barthian, very few modern scholars know the Reformer as well as the author of this profound study. And if this had not come from his pen he would still be in the front rank of Calvin scholars by reason of the five-volume critical edition of primary sources which he co-edited with Peter Barth, the I. Calvini Opera Selecta, the last of which appeared only in 1952.

G. AIKEN TAYLOR

Though Dead, Still Lives

Commentary on the Prophecies of Isaiah, by Joseph Addison Alexander. Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 1953. $8.95.

The Psalms, Translated and Explained. Zondervan, Grand Rapids. $6.95.

Though dead, Joseph Addison Alexander still lives. A century ago, he spoke to the hearts and minds of the people of God; today, as his words have once more found their way into print, he speaks again. Some men live and die, and their memory perishes with them. In other instances, following the sunset there is a glorious afterglow but gradually the light fails and darkness reigns. It is therefore no mean tribute to the worth of a man’s work when succeeding generations find it of such worthy nature that his writings are again given wide distribution and become anew the means of our understanding that which God has spoken.

With the reprinting of Alexander’s Commentaries upon Isaiah and the Psalms, treasures which had long lain more or less buried and forgotten have once more come to light and are making it possible for us to live again in the days of the prophet-statesman of Hezekiah’s court and the sweet singer of Israel.

The author, a distinguished linguist and student of Oriental literature, an apologist of no mean ability, an historian and an exegete, for many years taught with unusual success in Princeton Theological Seminary. In the course of his studies, he amassed a body of information upon the Book of Isaiah which was characterized both by its extensiveness and by its penetrating analysis of the teaching of the Book.

The one who reads Alexander has before him three types of material, all three of which serve to aid him in understanding the text. The first of these is the author’s translation of the Hebrew, verse by verse as the discussion proceeds, a feature most helpful both to the reader who wishes to check the translation against the original language and to the one who merely wishes to have the text immediately before him so that he can appreciate fully the comments upon its various parts.

The second feature of the author’s approach is his careful analysis of the content. He endeavors to show to his reader the thought of each great segment of the book as well as that of each subdivision, each verse, each phrase, each word. He does this upon the basis of the original language, but in such fashion that the student who is not conversant with Hebrew can still follow the essential development of ideas—this in contrast to some parts of the excellent commentaries by Keil and Delitzsch.

There is a certain freshness to a commentary which makes no attempt to inform readers as to the reasoning of other exegetes, ancient and modern, regarding the interpretation of a point in question, but if one is to be a serious student of Scripture he cannot do other than to compare and contrast, to reckon with each suggested interpretation, to test each possibility against the biblical phrasing. The third aspect of Alexander’s treatment makes such checking possible, for he outlines the interpretations of others in great detail. Not only does he do so, but he analyzes these interpretations and sifts and weighs the evidence for each, leaving the reader no excuse for jumping hastily to unjustified conclusions. If the approach chosen makes for a more ponderous volume and is annoying to some, let it be remembered that Alexander’s Commentaries are designed more for study than for inspiration, but who shall deny that from devoted study comes often the deepest, most abiding inspiration!

Dispensationalist and non-dispensationalist alike will do well to evaluate Alexander’s treatment of prophecy. For him, the national pre-eminence of the Jews was “representative, not original; symbolical, not real; provisional, not perpetual …” (p. 52). He sees with Isaiah a carnal Israel which has not perceived this truth, but at the same time he sees a spiritual Israel, the true Church.

He sees a personal Messiah, who will come as a deliverer and bring his people into glorious liberty. He sees a Church of the future, not in its chronological outlines, but as one blaze of glory, the perspectives and details of which must wait for the fuller revelation of the New Testament.

His treatment of the Psalms is similar to that found in the volume on Isaiah except that he does not state or discuss the interpretations of others. Originally, his intention was to produce a translation only, but as he gave himself to the task he felt constrained to record exegetical comments in order that the translation might become more meaningful.

He sees the Psalms not as unrelated individual compositions but as pairs, as trilogies, as topical groups, as an organized body of liturgical material for the use of the Church.

He disavows a devotional intent in making his notes, but the commentary is markedly that of one who is consciously standing upon holy ground, and the reader whose extra-biblical knowledge of the Psalter does not include the musings of Spurgeon and others cannot fail, upon reading Alexander only, to take his shoes from off his feet, as it were, and to cry, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.”

The volumes under review are worthy of a place in the pastor’s library, and the well-read layman will consult them with profit.

BURTON L. GODDARD

Clearer Insights

The Gospel of Mark, by Ralph Earle, Th.D. Zondervan, $3.95.

This is the work of a thorough-going scholar. The bibliography reveals the author’s broad acquaintance with commentators and theologians of many periods. The Introduction provides a brief but valuable summary of textual criticism, a subject most ministers tend to neglect after leaving the seminary. Yet with such scholarly emphasis the author writes in a clear, concise style that makes the volume useful and instructive to both ministers and laymen.

Although effective use is made of the findings of numerous other authors, this book is far more than a compilation. The writer presents old truths with freshness and imagination, showing that his academic preparation has been matched by a devout search for spiritual illumination. While even a casual sampling of the content reveals Dr. Earle’s consistently high standard of scriptural exposition, the portion dealing with chapter 9:42–50 seems especially excellent. In an age when reproach has been cast upon the Word of God by faith-destroying humanism as well as by fanatical interpretations and actions of misguided literalists, the explanations found in this part of the book are greatly needed. It is significant to note that, while our Lord authorized and qualified his disciples to amplify and complement his own teaching, the subjects of hell and eternal punishment were first expressed clearly and completely by Christ before being committed to them. This commentary should prove a great boon to pastors, Sunday school teachers and all others who wish to gain clearer insights into Mark’s account of the life and teachings of Christ.

ERIC EDWIN PAULSON

Journey To Christianity

Surprised by Joy, by C. S. Lewis. Geoffrey Bles, London. 15/-.

The autobiography of a layman who has had a profound influence in British theological and religious circles in recent years is an event of considerable interest. He tells the story of the journey which led him from a school-boy’s religion into atheism, and later back to Christianity. It is in the true Lewis tradition—with that strain of independence and puckish humour which characterise his writings.

Lewis was born in Belfast in an Episcopalian (Church of Ireland) home where there was little evangelical influence. He spent most of his youth in boarding schools and in the course of his life such religious life as he had was destroyed by an insidious subjectivism. In the progress to atheism, the author could never feel quite sure that he was right and that Deity could be altogether excluded from the universe.

His confidence in scepticism was rudely shaken by meeting a friend in a classroom in Oxford whom he describes as “a Christian and a thorough-going super-naturalist.” Finally in the Trinity Term of 1929 Lewis gave in and admitted that God was God; and knelt and prayed … the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal son at least walked home on his own feet.”

The conversion of Lewis was at first to Theism rather than to Christianity, but he was moving to a more personal faith. The quality of the faith he received is clear from the books which he published during the war years and since.

Incisive is the analysis of the author concerning the twilight of religion during the years of early manhood. He makes a telling reference to a “Gabbling, a tragic Irish parson who long since lost his faith but retained his living” and who devoted himself to searching for evidence of human survival. Surely this is not an inapt description of a twentieth century Christendom, which Lewis has analysed so skilfully on various occasions.

S. W. MURRAY

Of Practical Value

Health Shall Spring Forth, by Paul E. Adolph, M.D. Moody Press. $2.50.

Dr. Adolph, student and graduate of Philadelphia Bible Institute and Wheaton College, obtained honors upon his graduation from the School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. After internship and residency he served as missionary under the China Inland Mission until 1949, with time out for study and research in surgery and four years in the U. S. Army Medical Corps. He is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and is at present instructor in first aid and minor surgery in Moody Bible Institute.

Dr. Adolph’s aim “has been to stress the importance of the emotional tension diseases, and to point out the limitless resources at the disposal of the Christian to eliminate them through maintaining a healthy outlook” (p. 124). In no sense has he attempted to present the care for all mental diseases but has limited his treatment to some outstanding causes of emotional tensions and how to treat them from the standpoint of Christian supernaturalism when the layman has insight to apply Christian therapeutic principles.

In psycho-somatic ills he sees three “common tension patterns” which are focused in the organism and explains the emotional basis for those bodily ills which may be mitigated by spiritual therapy. He calls these: (1) the stiff-neck tension pattern, often issuing in compulsive behaviour not amenable to diagnosis by counsel, resistant to any change of ways; (2) the chest tension pattern, suggesting heart malfunction through a feeling of chest constriction, and depression; and (3) the stomach tension pattern, often described as nervous indigestion, with oft-accompanying abdominal tension, vague nausea; related to a general feeling of being “fed up,” often complicated by real peptic ulcer.

He thinks that no properly instructed Christian in a condition of full surrender to his Lord’s will need be a victim of emotions. He thinks that the emotionally disturbed Christian may always find a cure for all psycho-somatic symptoms and disturbances.

Employing the nomenclature of Scripture Dr. Adolph shows how a disturbed Christian may arrive at a healthy spiritual state by a proper resolution of his psycho-somatic ills. He discusses these problems as basically spiritual and gives several chapters to these in the areas of perfectionism, fears, the unforgiving spirit, doubts, indecisiveness, lack of orderliness, failure to appreciate the spiritual heritage and lack of Christian love.

There is a sound chapter on faith healing as well as one on spiritual maturity.

This non-technical, sympathetic, understanding summary of the Christian’s psycho-somatic ills may prove of greatest value to any Christian who would rightly live for his Saviour, for here are sound techniques of spiritual therapy. Dr. Adolph notes, however, that some Christians may have come to such a state as to be genuinely psychotic and in need of psychiatric care.

Every Christian will profit by reading and circulating this volume. It will prove of value to the minister in dealing with emotionally disturbed Christians.

WALTER VAIL WATSON

Highly Competent

Christian Theology and Natural Science. The Bampton Lectures, 1956, by E. L. Mascal. Longmans, Green and Company, 1956. $4.50.

This treatise is not about specific passages of Scripture and findings of empirical sciences, but about particular theological teachings of the Scriptures and contemporary scientific theory. The author, an accomplished mathematician, is an orthodox Anglican who has accepted Thomism, as his theological and philosophical framework. The entire work is characterized by an unusual high order of competence—theological, philosophical and scientific.

Having written a treatise of my own on the subject (The Christian View of Science and Scripture), I found it an interesting experience to read this work. It was startling to find similar sectional headings, and at times exact correspondence in theses defended. I will not challenge the patience of the reader by making comparisons save to state that my position is closer to Mascal’s than American orthodox literature on the subject.

Mascal’s thesis is: “What I have tried to do is to show, by discussing a certain number of matters in which both theology and science have an interest, that it is possible to be an orthodox Christian without either ignoring or repudiating the discoveries of present day science” (p. 291).

Two basic assumptions of the book are: (i) The value of the Bible is its theological meaning, and any attempt to find empirical scientific data in Scripture is wrong (cf. p. 99) (ii). A metaphysical and theological explanation and a scientific explanation are on two different levels. The former does not derive its validity from the latter, and the former may or may not be in harmony with the status of science at any given time. Thus the doctrine of creation does not depend upon cosmological speculations, but upon theological and metaphysical principles.

His general attitude is that twentieth century science is more favorably disposed to Christian faith than nineteenth century science, but that the Christian is not to boldly proclaim that modern science has verified many Christian dogmas. In the previous century scientific laws were taken as absolutes; in the current century as statistical approximations subject to constant revision. In the previous century scientific theories were considered as literal interpretations of reality; today theories are considered as models, not true or false, but useful or not useful.

Other items of interest are: (i) he does not believe modern astrophysics proves creation but follows the position of Aquinas which is too involved to explain here; (ii) he defends the virginal conception of Christ and New Testament demonology; (iii) he believes there was a fall of angels prior to man’s fall and this accounts for pre-human evil in the universe (p. 36); (iv) he censures modernism, logical positivism and ‘narrow biblicism’; (v) he believes in the possible polygenetic origin of man for the unity of the race is not biological but spiritual or metaphysical [he mentions the Russian biologist-priest who thinks having located the gene bearing human depravity he could knock it out with radiation!]; (vi) he asserts that only ‘obstinate fundamentalists’ oppose evolution and that the method of man’s creation is completely secondary to the that of his divine origin; and (vii) the older theologians of the church would not be disturbed one bit by modern attempts to create life from organic compounds.

BERNARD RAMM

Far East News: April 15, 1957

Unity In Asia

In 1834, at Indonesia’s Lake Toba, two American missionaries—Henry Lyman and Samuel Munson—were slain for daring to venture near what the savage Batak tribes regarded as a holy lake.

In 1957, officials of the Batak Church acted as hosts to 124 delegates from 24 countries at the Eastern Asia Christian Conference, reportedly the largest ever held by Protestants in that part of the world.

The conference was ushered in with a monster open-air rally attended by 100,000 persons. President Sukarno, a Moslem, flew 900 miles from Jakarta to address the meeting. He said Christianity has a vital role to play in helping to bring peace and justice to people everywhere.

He hailed the conference, sponsored by the World Council of Churches, the International Missionary Council and the Indonesian Council of Churches, as “a living reality of the Asian churches. The churches, he said, “following the teachings of Jesus, would contribute to freedom, justice and peace among men.”

Other conference highlights:

► Interim committee, under chairmanship of Bishop E. C. Sobrepena, United Church of Christ, Philippines, named to make plans for similar gatherings in three years.

► A call for “less reliance on techniques and gadgets” in evangelism and more on demonstrations of Christian living sounded by Dr. Chandu Ray of Karachi, Pakistan.

► Unity among churches of Asia termed vital factor in successful evangelism by Dr. D. T. Niles of Ceylon.

► Delegates asked, by Professor II Seung Kay of Presbyterian Theological Seminary at Seoul, to adopt “system” of the Apostle Paul in their evangelistic work—preaching, fellowship, service.

Challenge In India

Two missionary couples soon will be sent to Thailand by the Church of South India.

The Thailand Church is said to be anxious to have fraternal workers from other Asian countries. Church leaders in India feel that Buddhists in Thailand, who emphasize the Indian origin of their religion, might listen with special interest to Christian missionaries from India.

The Church of South India was formed in 1947 through the merger of Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational and Reformed bodies.

Something Happened

Le-van Thai of Vietnam threw stones at the missionaries. He urged people to attend preaching services and start arguments.

When a missionary closed his eyes in prayer, Thai would lead people out of the meeting.

Then something happened. He took a stand for Christ.

Next month the Rev. Le-van Thai, President of the Evangelical Churches of Vietnam, will make his first visit to America as a delegate to the International General Council of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Churches, scheduled to meet in Charlotte, N. C., May 15–21.

CHRISTIANITY TODAYis a subscriber to Religious News Service, Evangelical Press Service and Washington Religious Report Newsletter.

The kingdom of God is near.

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Who Wrote Isaiah?

Some Modern Views

The Message Of Isaiah

The Servant Of The Lord

Helps In The Study Of The Book

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Among The Chief Tasks

Story Of Pastor Wu

Pastor Wang Ming Tao

The Case Of Paul Mackensen

Breakdown Of Prayer

Hundreds Of Others

Preacher In The Red

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Too Neat A Dichotomy

The “Third Alternative”

Roman Catholic Program

Spelling Out The Details

Some Concrete Steps

End Result Of The Plan

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The Big And The Dictatorial

The Dictates From On High

Drifting Toward Control

Layman’s Point Of View

Without Organic Union?

A Fellowship Of The Spirit

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Historical Setting

The Biblical Basis

Application To Life

A Specific Commission

Sufficiency Of Scripture

The King’s Orders

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Invoking The Spirit Of Jesus

The Pendulum Of Criticism

We Quote:

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Toynbee’s Approach

The Future Life

The Neo-Calvin

Though Dead, Still Lives

Clearer Insights

Journey To Christianity

Of Practical Value

Highly Competent

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Unity In Asia

Challenge In India

Something Happened

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