Theology

Bible Book of the Month: I Thessalonians

William Hendriksen

Unless a thorough study of I Thessalonians has been made, one does not know Paul, “the apostle of the Gentiles.” Some students focus their attention on Paul, the theologian; others on Paul, the man; still others on Paul, the missionary. These three lines of interest converge beautifully in I Thessalonians.

To begin with the theological interest. Nowhere do we find so much source material for the doctrine of the last things (eschatology) as in the letters to the Thessalonians. In I Thessalonians every chapter ends with a reference to the second coming (1:10; 2:19, 20; 3:11–13; 4:13–18; 5:23, 24). As for Paul, the man, it has been well remarked that here he stands out “in all the charm of his rich and varied personality” (George Milligan, St. Paul’s Epistles to the Thessalonians, London, 1908, p. xliii). The following passages may be regarded as windows that afford a look into Paul’s great heart: 2:1–12; 3:1–10; 5:12–24. And as for Paul, the missionary, studies devoted to this subject often refer not only to Acts 17:1–19, which contains a brief report of the work at Thessalonica, but also to 1 Thessalonians 1:8–10, which indicates the content and the amazing success of Paul’s missionary message.

The epistle contributes more than a triple primary source for the study of Paul. It manifests God’s glorious special revelation that comes to every believer with absolute divine authority; it indicates how one may enjoy real comfort in life, benefit his brothers and sisters in the Lord, and live to God’s glory.

Authorship of this epistle presents no great problem, as it is among those letters which even today are generally conceded to Paul. To be sure, some disagree with this well-nigh unanimous opinion, but they do so on wholly subjective grounds which, if pursued to their logical conclusions, would rob Paul of all his epistles. According to some of these objectors, the letter cannot have been written by the great apostle because it is too un-Pauline, and according to others it cannot have been written by him because it is too Pauline! In the hands of such men Paul simply does not have “a ghost of a chance.” But all the real evidence points directly to Paul. The epistle presents itself as his letter (1:1; 2:18), has the typical Pauline structure, is Pauline both in vocabulary and phraseology, reflects Paul’s character, and was ascribed by the early fathers to Paul. Even the early heretics are in agreement with this dictum.

There are those who believe that II Thessalonians was written before I Thessalonians (for example, Lyle O. Bristol, “Paul’s Thessalonian Correspondence,” Expository Times, Vol. 55, 1944, p. 223). But that 2 Thessalonians 2:1–12 clearly points back to 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 can be seen by comparing the two (cf. especially 2 Thess. 2:1 with 1 Thess. 4:17; and note also the reference in 2 Thess. 2:15 to an earlier epistle).

A more difficult question is whether here in I Thessalonians the apostle gives an answer to a letter from Thessalonica that Timothy presumably had brought with him. Interest in this question has been revived by the article of Chalmer E. Faw, “On the Writing of First Thessalonians” (Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 71, December, 1952, pp. 217–225). Personally I believe that the evidence favoring the answer-to-a-letter idea is insufficient (see my Exposition of I and II Thessalonians, pp. 12 and 13, for detailed argumentation).

Historical Background

On his second missionary journey Paul, accompanied by Silas and probably Timothy, reached Thessalonica or Salonica, as it is called today. Situated in northeastern Greece, on what is now called the Gulf of Salonica, Salonica has become next to the largest city of Greece, with a population of about a quarter of a million. In course of time Thessalonica became the capital of the entire province of Macedonia. Because it had sided with him in the great struggle for supreme power, the emperor Augustus made it a free city. Hence, even in Paul’s day a great measure of home rule was enjoyed in the selection of magistrates, who were called “politarchs” (Acts 17:6).

Although the culture of the city was basically Hellenic, its population was cosmopolitan. In addition to Greeks and Romans, the city was “hometown” for many a Jew. It is not surprising, then, that Paul found not only pagan idol worshippers—Mt. Olympus, “the home of the gods,” was nearby—but also Jews and proselytes.

The missionaries seem not to have stayed long in this city, though the “three weeks” mentioned in Acts 17:2 probably indicates the period during which the apostle taught in the synagogue. For various reasons, the opinion of most commentators that the total duration of the Thessalonian ministry was longer than three weeks must be considered correct. Though the ministry was short, the amount of work the missionaries performed was amazing. Paul taught that the Messianic prophecies had attained their fulfilment in Jesus; that it was He who suffered, died, was raised from the dead, and will come again, all according to the Scriptures; that by his work he delivered from the wrath to come all those who trust in him; that idol worship is evil and foolish; and that those who accept Christ, having been called into his glorious kingdom, should live a life of sanctification so as to please God who saved them (Acts 17:3; 1 Thess. 1:9, 10; 2:12; 4:1–3). On one point—Christ’s return and the events that will precede it—Paul gave detailed instruction.

The great missionary’s heart was in his message. Deeply persuaded of the supreme importance of that message, he dealt with each person as a father deals with his children, teaching, exhorting and encouraging (1 Thess. 1:1–5; 2:4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11). There were many conversions, so that Paul later on mentions the joyful and enthusiastic manner in which the word had been taken to heart, and the fact that this congregation had become an example to all believers in Macedonia and Achaia (1 Thess. 1:6, 7). It is not surprising that Paul’s “success” made the unconverted Jews jealous and angry. In fact, their opposition resulted in the departure of the missionaries, who made their way to Berea. Here Silas and Timothy stayed for a while, Paul himself heading for Athens. It was there that Timothy found Paul, who, being deeply concerned about the young church, sent him back to Thessalonica.

When Timothy returned from his mission, Paul was carrying on his gospel activity in Corinth. So encouraging was Timothy’s report that Paul’s heart was filled with joy and thanksgiving. “Now I really live,” said Paul, as Timothy brought him the wonderful news of the undiminished faith and love of the infant church (cf. 1 Thess. 3:8). Yet there was also some bad news. Base opponents were casting slurs at Paul’s character and motives (1 Thess. 2:3–10) and were trying by this means to destroy his influence and the comfort his message had brought. And comfort was badly needed, comfort blended with further instruction. This was true especially with respect to one important matter. Some members of the church had “fallen asleep.” Were they going to share in the glory of Christ’s return? Moreover, if this coming again was imminent, why work any longer? Why toil for the things that were soon to perish?

Objectives And Content

Hence, Paul now writes I Thessalonians, having in mind the following objectives:

To meet head-on the whispering campaign with reference to his motives

To express his joy and gratitude for the good news Timothy had brought

To shed further light on the question touching those who had fallen asleep and on the related question of the manner of Christ’s return

To give exactly such directions as were needed by those who had so recently been brought into the kingdom of light.

In harmony with this four-point purpose Paul writes to the Thessalonians as follows:

Reminding them, in connection with his thanksgiving for them, how the gospel had come to Thessalonica, as a genuine work of God and not as a product of human deception (chapters 1 and 2)

Informing them how he rejoices over Timothy’s report of their continued spiritual progress even in the midst of persecution (chapter 3)

Instructing them how Christ will come again, namely, with impartiality toward all believers, so that survivors will have no advantage over those who have fallen asleep, and with suddenness, so that people will be taken by surprise (4:13–5:11); and accordingly

Exhorting them how they should conduct themselves, living sanctified lives with respect to all classes at all times (4:1–12 and 5:12–28).

Special Points

How gloriously the heart of God in Christ is revealed here: “Are you worrying about the dear ones who have fallen asleep [what a wonderful phrase!] in Jesus?” Paul seems to say. Well, God loves them. Hence, when he causes his beloved Son to return upon clouds of glory, these “dead in Christ will rise first,” and “then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words” (1 Thess. 4:16, 17).

Just what further light does the epistle shed on the subject of the Rapture? Is it possible, after all, that Christ’s coming “with the saints” and his coming “for the saints” are two phases of the same Second Coming? And speaking about the eagerly awaited return of our Lord, how should one interpret that mysterious passage in which the apostle expresses the wish that with a view to that day “spirit, soul and body” may be preserved entire (1 Thess. 5:23)? Was Paul a trichotomist? In my Commentary I have devoted several pages to the problem of 1 Thessalonians 5:23 (pp. 141, 146–150).

Literature

I shall try to be very selective in mentioning works on Thessalonians. The older “sets” of New Testament commentaries are too well known, I trust, to need mentioning. Of the more recent works that strive to do justice to the Greek text two have long been considered outstanding: James E. Frame, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians (New York, 1912) one of the best in The International Critical Commentary series, and George Milligan, St. Paul’s Epistles to the Thessalonians (London, 1908). Worthwhile information may also be gathered from the work I consider one of the best in The Interpreter’s Bible, namely, John W. Bailey and James W. Clarke, The First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians (New York, 1952, Vol. XI).

Other more or less important twentieth century titles are: Martin Dibelius Die Briefe des Apostels Paulus (in Handbuch zum Neuen Testament, Tubingen, 1913); George G. Findlay, ed., The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Thessalonians (in Cambridge Greek Testament) (Cambridge, 1904); James Moffatt, The First and Second Epistles of Paul to the Thessalonians (in Expositors’ Greek Testament) (London, 1910) William Neil, The Epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians (in Moffatt New Testament Commentary) (New York, 1950) and G. Wohlenberg, Der erste und zweite Thessalonicherbriefe (in Kommentar zum Neuen Testament) (Leipzig, 1909).

Eutychus and His Kin: May 27, 1957

IN AND OUT THE WINDOWS

Every preacher knows that illustrations in sermons are windows to let in the light. Some sermons are like railroad coaches, with windows regularly spaced throughout their length; others are ranch style, featuring one picture window. Homiletical architecture, taking its cue from contemporary building, is using more and more glass. Indeed, to change the figure, as every illustrator must, many sermons have so many windows and so little structure that they resemble not so much a greenhouse as a fish net, classically defined as a large number of holes tied together with string.

A window does not only function to admit light. Recall the experience of my namesake at Troas! (Let me here deny categorically that Eutychus fell asleep on the window sill because Paul’s sermon lacked illustrations.) Many a bemused hearer has been lost from a sermon via illustrationis, that is, out the window. Consider the folly of the young preacher who on a June morning is the victim of his repressed desires and pictures an approach shot to the ninth green to illustrate his second point. The greater his finesse with his homiletical iron, the more squarely he will loft fifteen per cent of his hearers over to the wrong fairway for the rest of the service.

Illustrative windows have also been known to admit dust, bugs and noise. Red herrings have been dragged through some; others are service ports from which thousands of canned anecdotes slide down an endless belt.

One preacher’s corrective is to compare illustrating to harness racing. That illustrative critter must be lean and fresh, it must move fast on the inside track, and most of all, it must be harnessed. Unless it carries the point down the homestretch, keep that horseflesh off the track.

Still better, board up those windows and distill a limpid prose like that of this letter, which is free of all illustrative additives.

EUTYCHUS

CHURCH AND SCHOOL

Modern Americans are inclined to see Jesus altogether as a teacher. As if to correct the imbalance, they have with careful determination stripped his church of most of its teaching authority. It is not uncommon to hear preachers who call themselves evangelical declare from the pulpit and elsewhere that the traditional Gospel is not relevant to modern life, and ‘public’ schools are our salvation.

The supposed reason for abandoning the Church as the great teaching institution is that we believe in separation of Church and State. The slogan has served well a long night of debauched ravishing, both of Christian schools and Christian knowledge. Thank God there is a streak of dawn light splitting the darkness. Church schools are appearing all across the land: they may herald the dawn of real revival in our time.

It is strange indeed that to separate Church and State, American Christians have separated church and school. There is neither precedent nor logic for this. Certainly there is no doctrine. From the time of the great commission the Church has taken to herself full authority to teach all knowledge in the Name of Jesus: the brilliance of her scholars and thinkers has overshadowed even the giants of every non-Christian civilization. The mighty Aristotle has been ‘brought up to date’, and Plato cut down to size.

One searches in vain in the past to find any serious view that learning is a function of civil government, not of ecclesiastical. Even pagan writers of ancient Rome recognized that men’s religious beliefs are not subject to the power of police. Religion and learning are almost synonymous. Poets and philosophers were the religious leaders of paganism: and, for the Jews, the beginning of wisdom was the fear of the Lord. The scholars of China pored over the religious teaching of Confucious. In frontier America the little red school-house was more often than not the neighborhood church. Even Marxist religion is equated with the ‘intellectuals’.

Recent developments in New York state have only clarified the oneness of religion and learning. Reports of investigations and hearings on the subject make it clear that the root of all controversy over what is to be taught in the schools is religious. It seems to be impossible to teach any recognizable morals in New York, because all morals must reflect a religious conviction of some kind. It seems to be overlooked at the moment that it also reflects a religious viewpoint called godlessness to teach no religion.

In the face of this dead-end, the Council of Churches in at least one major city has expressed itself through committee as being unalterably opposed to teaching any sectarian religion in public schools. One is entitled to ask what religion is not sectarian?

Christianity is certainly sectarian in the eyes of civil government: if, then, it cannot be taught in government controlled schools, what religion do Christians accept from government schools?

The Christian doctrine about civil government has been expressed straightforwardly since the preaching of Peter and Paul. Rulers exist to punish wickedness and reward virtue. That covers all civil government authority in both domestic and international affairs. There is no hint that the government also teaches the young. If it does, and if Christians have no schools of their own, then Christians are compelled to accept a strange doctrine that the government not only punishes and rewards, it teaches. When we see state schools in other lands, we cringe at the shadow of tyranny and compulsion.

So-called ‘public’ schools (a misnomer for tax-supported or state-controlled schools) are usually espoused with a passionate conviction that they are a bond of unity. This raises a fundamental religious conviction. Whatever gives unity to a people is that people’s god. Could it be that the real center of real American religion is the image of Caesar, or the power of taxation and punishment with the sword? Are we not really united in Christ?

Certainly it makes sense for those who worship civil government to give to government the religious authority to teach: for to such, government is a god. But one must search in vain for any other rationale. Those who, having other gods, make of Jesus only a great teacher are not espousing the Jesus who really lived, or who has ever been really worshipped by any Christian Church. But both Latin and Greek churches have been alert to the pagan’s ‘debauchery of learning’, or ‘lust for knowledge’ which accompanied his worship of Caesar. The comparisons are too easy to allow any rest to the conscience of any American Christian. Learning, as a tool and an arm of faith, has reached heights in Christian scholars never attained outside the fold: but when made an end in itself, it has been a corrupting debauchery, a vicious lust.

This realization suggests some startling possibilities for modern churches. At a time when local school costs have caused public outcry, as in Denver, and when the Federal government is straining to centralize all tax-supported schools through its already overloaded budget, these possibilities cry out for attention.

Cost wise there is an overwhelming argument for opening the doors of thousands of church ‘educational buildings’ for week-day schools. Most of them are dark and empty except for one hour on Sunday. They are available at no extra cost to the same community which otherwise will have to construct equal but separate facilities.

The administration for congregational schools already exists where a congregation is functioning. All that needs to be added is a teaching staff.

The educational philosophy is at hand with the glory of the ages stamped upon it—the high calling of Christian scholarship.

By relieving civil government of a chore it cannot perform, by returning to a Jesus of Incarnation, Atonement and Beatific Vision, modern American churches can speedily and easily take up once more their great evangelistic mission of being a teaching church. At the same time, they can leave civil government free to its natural and historic function of punishing wickedness and rewarding virtue. Perhaps peace is nearer and easier than we thought, if government can do its work because the Church is doing hers.

For those who are alarmed at Roman Catholic schools, one need only reply their is no fear of Roman schools among non-Romans who have their own. Certainly we need not turn to political action to curb the religious activities of our Roman Christian brethren.

T. ROBERT INGRAM

St. Thomas Episcopal

Bellaire, Tex.

PROPITIATION

The article “Propitiation” (Apr. 15 issue) is timely and commendable. I hesitate to raise any question concerning it because Dr. Nicole is no doubt already aware of what comes to my mind. But, if he is, I wonder why he fails to note it. He lists three appearances of the word propitiation in the English N. T. What he does not note is that while hilasmos is the equivalent Greek for the two appearances in I John, the word that St. Paul writes in Rom. 3:25 is hilasterion. Hilasterion is the LXX word in Exodus 25:17, which KJ translates as mercy-seat. Does not this translation and its concept better fit St. Paul’s thought than propitiation? Is not Christ the new way to the Father, apart from the Law, through the New Covenant? Would our author not wish to add another item (6) to his “relevant observations”?

EARL M. HONAMAN

Diocese of Harrisburg

Suffragan Bishop, Williamsport, Pa.

Bishop Honaman’s observation is welcome. His interpretation of the meaning of hilasterion in Romans 3:25 has the support of many exegetes (Origen, Luther, Calvin, Grotius, Tholuck, Olshausen, Lange, Philippi, A. Ritschl, Liddon, Gifford, and very recently Nygren, T. W. Manson, etc.). There are also many, however, who have favored another view (Hodge, Shedd, Godet, B. Weiss, Zahn, Sanday and Headlam, V. Taylor, C. H. Dodd, Lietzmann, O. Michael, F. Buechsel, J. Knox, etc.). This is obviously a keenly debated question, and it was our desire … to avoid as much as possible controversial issues, if merely incidental to our main contention.

In any case, whether the rendering mercy-seat be or be not favored in this instance, the fact that hilasterion, a cognate of hilasmos, is used implies an element of propitiation in this passage. If hilasterion is the mercy-seat, the root meaning of the word connotes that this is the propitiatory place, the place at which the propitiation of God with respect to his people is sealed and signified. If another translation be preferred, it should be one in which the idea of propitiation, etymologically and semantically implicit in hilasterion, comes explicitly to the fore.

ROGER NICOLE

Beverly Farms, Mass.

THE CHURCH AND VITAMINS

REGISTER STRONGEST POSSIBLE PROTEST AGAINST THE DISGUSTING HUCKSTER TYPE ADVERTISEMENT APPEARING ON THE BACK PAGE … MORE ESPECIALLY WHEN YOUR MAGAZINE IS SAID TO BE DIRECTED TO A RESPONSIBLE LEVEL OF CHURCH AND BUSINESS LIFE.

S. D. MACKEY

MONTREAL, QUEBEC

Allow me to protest briefly the unsavory nature of the advertisement on the back page of your issue (April 29). I look upon this kind of advertisement … as on a plane with liquor advertisement.…

GEORGE G. HARPER, JR.

Grand Rapids, Mich.

I was very much astonished as well as shocked to find this ad in your journal.… The product is a simple vitamin preparation which can be purchased in any drug store at a fraction of the price. Even if prescribed by a doctor it would not cost as much as this.…

E. OSTBRGAARD, M.D.

Evansville, Minn.

I am writing … of my personal dislike of your lack of taste.… Referring to the blazing headline: “… increased income plan endorsed by leading Churchman”.… What ‘leading Churchman’? What Pastor who is faithful to his calling has time to degrade himself and his ministry by becoming a pill peddler?…

CHARLES L. KOESTER

Holy Trinity Ev. Lutheran Church

West Allis, Wis.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S advertising policy is still fluid, except for the basic requirement that advertisements be culturally constructive. Beyond this, CHRISTIANITY TODAY does not restrict advertising to items it approves, whether church publications or products in general. The vitamin advertisement in question was cleared by a reputable Christian physician in advance of publication. Publishing costs are high, and advertising is necessary to meet them. When the quota is met through advertising more natural to a religious magazine, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will adopt a more restrictive policy. Meanwhile, it can only hope that the balances of the magazine will assure that readers burdened for the Great Commission will not lose that concern even if and when they are attracted to the ministry of vitamins.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY sincerely regrets, however, the appearance of a hotel advertisement (May 13 issue) containing reference to a cocktail lounge, and straightforwardly apologizes to its readers. The advertisement in question arrived late, and was relayed directly to the printers (unfortunately) without proof-reading by our advertising department.

—ED.

CATHOLICISM AND LABOR

I would appreciate your correcting an error in my article “The Catholic Plan for American Labor” (April 29).… The reference at the very end was to Italian, not Indian history.…

KERMIT EBY

University of Chicago

Chicago, Ill.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S proof-reading department dozed at a strategic point in Dr. Eby’s article. His point was, of course that recent Italian history supplies a commentary on the operation of the corporate state toward which he thinks Catholic social action leads.—ED.

Cover Story

Operation Phenomenal

Lionel A. Hunt

The name of Count Nicolaus Ludwig Von Zinzendorf has come down in church history as the instrument which the Holy Spirit used to spark one of the greatest revivals the world has ever seen. Through his efforts prayer meetings started that continued for a hundred years. There were many evidences of a signal working of the Holy Spirit, and this Moravian revival originating in Germany began to affect distant parts of the world. Strange to say, however, although these basic facts are generally known, few theologians know what actually sparked this revival. Nor is it generally realized in circles of Christian leadership that the discovery of Zinzendorf’s secret might lead to similar spiritual repercussions today.

A Class Of Nine Girls

It was August 17, 1727. Count Zinzendorf was giving spiritual instruction. Was this to a church of a thousand wealthy and influential adherents? Far from it! The Count’s occupation would be disdained by many of today’s clergy. His instruction was to a class of nine girls between the ages of ten and thirteen. He had told his wife that although the girls gave outward attention, he could not perceive any traces of spiritual life among them. It is recorded that on July 16 he poured out his heart in effective prayer, and was in great anguish of soul for these girls. Then for ten days, August 17 to 27, this influential Count’s prayers were answered in a great outpouring of the Spirit of God upon these girls. As the hours passed, more girls, then the boys, then the adults of the refugee community of Herrnhut came under the Spirit’s influence. An eyewitness said, “I cannot ascribe the cause of the great awakening of the children of Herrnhut to anything but the wonderful outpourings of the Spirit of God.…”

Where God Begins

An exhaustive study of this great spiritual movement was made by Dr. Clay Trumbull, who in his Yale Lectures states that Zinzendorf and his co-workers took up an emphatic ministry among the children. They preached directly to them, gathering large numbers into the church fold. At the same time they arranged for the personal training of the converts individually by placing them in small classes under special teachers. John Wesley met Zinzendorf and went away persuaded that children can play a great part in any spiritual movement. Thus Wesley laid great stress on the work among the children and on the class instruction of converts. He said, “Unless we take care of the rising generation the present revival of religion will be res unius actatis—it will only last the age of a man.” And Dr. Trumbull stresses that in this statement Wesley touched the truth of truths concerning God’s method of giving permanent power to the work of his church. Lecky, in his careful review of the methods and influence of the Wesleyan movement, says, “The Methodists appear to have preached especially to children”; and he cites the words of Wesley when describing “among other cases, a remarkable revival among children at Stockton-upon-tees in 1784. Is this not a new thing upon earth? God begins his work in children.… Thus the flame spreads to those of riper years.”

Similar Pattern Of Events

Today in America and elsewhere there appears to be a condition much the same as the spiritual condition prior to the above mentioned revivals. There is also much evidence that the Holy Spirit is working in an unusual way among children. The need of today is for influential Zinzendorfs and fiery Wesleys to pour out their hearts for the children. The enemy of souls seems to be subtly busy doing all he can to keep our attention, our praying, our budgeting, our planning, on adult evangelistic crusades, because as Billy Sunday said, it is a miracle of God if a man over forty comes to him. We no longer remember that Moody and Spurgeon started their tremendous ministries among children, that Dr. Torrey said, “It is a well proven fact that no other kind of meetings bring such definite results in the way of conversions as meetings held for the specific purpose of bringing children to Christ. No revival is what it ought to be if a great deal of attention is not given to the children, and much prayerful effort put forward for their conversion. Whatever other meetings are held or omitted in times of special revival interest, meetings for children should not be omitted under any circumstance.”

God’S Heart For The Child

The above quotations are but from men, and some may question their authority. How wonderful, then, to find that they agree with Scripture. God’s heart is very tender toward the child. It is not his will that one of these little ones should perish. Christ commands us to suffer them to come to him. He promises reward to those who minister to the child. He also informs us that they have angels that appear before his face! Christ himself warns us not to “think down upon” (Young) one of these little ones, and his denunciation of anyone who would cause a child to stumble is indeed serious. It brings to mind the minister who gave an altar call and found his own six-year-old among the penitents. “Run along home,” he whispered, “this is no place for you.” But upon the father’s homecoming he found he had offended his little one as he heard his plaintive, “I wanted to come to Jesus but Daddy wouldn’t let me.” As father and son knelt together, a child’s angel appeared before the Father in heaven with the news that caused rejoicing among the angels, and a minister of the gospel found forgiveness for the tremendous transgression of “forbidding” a child.

Neglect Of The Young

Scripturally, historically, statistically, there is ample evidence that spiritual attention should be given to children in an aggressive and positive way. Too many churches are leaving the care of the children to the church school; hence we find but 20 per cent of the scholars converted and 80 per cent or more leaving in their teens. The church school has its important place; yet these spiritual statistics but emphasize Finney’s statement that the church does not advance by its routine program but by special spiritual efforts and “there will never be a revival till somebody makes particular efforts for this end.…” Such special efforts were not uncommon years ago, efforts in which hundreds or thousands of children were brought into evangelistic meetings specially adapted to the child. Space forbids mention of many such recorded campaigns, but an outstanding example is that of Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle.

The children’s evangelist was the Rev. E. Payson Hammond, and his book Early Conversions gives much insight into God’s workings among children. Of this campaign Deacon Olney said, “This building will seat six thousand adults, but there are today crowded into it no less than eight thousand.… I believe at least three thousand outside who came here to get admittance cannot do so.” A man of much experience said he believed that during those weeks’ meetings from two to three thousand were convicted of sin and brought to Christ.

When Mr. Hammond returned to London seventeen years after this children’s evangelistic effort, Mr. Spurgeon told him of the permanent result of those meetings. He thanked God for the great numbers that came into the church through the meetings, and told of many preaching the gospel then who had been converted in those meetings. Today it seems that one of our difficulties is that we have lost our belief in the conversion of children, and the church is suffering. Mr. Spurgeon once said that he was in the habit of receiving thirty to forty children into his church every year. He had “found it necessary to excommunicate one or two adults in that time, but had never yet found it necessary to dismiss one received in the early years of childhood.” In America, Payson Hammond had results similar to those in Britain. In one case from a united effort in Rochester 1,001 children joined the churches. Among these were some as young as nine years. Later Dr. Campbell wrote: “Six years ago Mr. Hammond held a similar series of meetings in this city and it is sometimes asked ‘What has become of the converts?’.… At the Central Church a careful investigation has been made.… As the fruit of the revival season of 1863 one hundred and sixty-three persons were received into Central Church.… Of these one hundred and fifty-three are either in good standing today or have taken a regular dismission to other churches, or have died in hope.… Of the 163 new recruits only ten missing at the end of six years.”

Evangelism Versus Entertainment

To get results like the above today we must alter our thinking. We must abandon the thought that child efforts must be addressed by a professional entertainer able to send the child into hysterics. It is time we realized that the child needs the same sane presentation of the passion of Christ that reaches the adult. We have got to look upon the child effort in exactly the same light as the adult effort, except that advertising and program are geared to the child. The adult campaign necessitates the seven P’s, and these must characterize the child effort. Unless Planning, Prayer, Preparation, Publicity, Program, Personal work and Pastoral work are conducted with the same enthusiasm and effort as for the adult campaign, we cannot expect God to fully bless.

But when these conditions are met the results are phenomenal today in America. The harvest field is thirty million unchurched children. It is a virgin mission field on our doorstep. These children are susceptible to gospel influence, but are passing into adulthood and into the sophisticated age at the astonishing rate of fifty thousand a week. The call of God is that Christian leaders face the challenge—and act.

Alongside his work as an electrical engineer, Lionel A. Hunt has carried on children’s evangelistic rallies for more than 20 years. Born in London, he completed studies as a professional engineer in British Columbia in 1932, and now resides in Toronto. He is author of Fruitful Child Evangelism.

Ideas

Published In Grand Rapids

“Published In Grand Rapids”

There was a time not so long ago when the phrase, “Made in Grand Rapids,” referred unmistakably to furniture, and in this connection the trademark slogan was known the world over. Things have changed, however, and in the last 30 years metal products and automobile components have come to overshadow furniture as the Michigan city’s chief output, and the world’s home furnishings market has become concentrated in Chicago.

The city’s name nonetheless remains famous, but nowadays when one mentions “Grand Rapids,” especially in religious circles, the reference is more apt to bring to mind the publishing of religious books, a field that has assumed considerable importance in the last quarter century. This remarkable advance of Grand Rapids to the forefront of religious book publishing was dramatically illustrated recently when one of the most widely known of the city’s book publishing firms celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. Significantly, the same week’s issue of Publisher’s Weekly listed no less than 40 new titles issued by the firm that month, and it was cited that more than 1600 titles had been issued by that organization in the last quarter century. This would be considered a good record of productivity even for a large New York publisher. And speaking of New York, little do the big city’s editors and publishers realize the major role they played in building up Grand Rapids as a publishing center.

The growth of the Grand Rapids complex of book publishers has been noted by many religious journals all over the world, as evidenced by the increasing frequency of the name Grand Rapids in their book reviews and credit lines. Today in addition to Eerdmans, Zondervan and Baker, there are several smaller firms: Kregel, Society for Reformed Publications, Gospel Folio Press and more recently, Grand Rapids International. It is interesting to observe that the first four named all got their start in the second-hand theological book business (although today only two still have used-book departments). Their familiarity with rare and out-of-print religious titles gave them a shrewd sense of the demand for many works of a generation or two ago—titles conveniently neglected or completely forgotten by the New York publishing offices. The Grand Rapids publishers simply picked up the fumbled ball and ran with it, and they are still running hard. For the largest and most important (and certainly the most profitable) share of the Grand Rapids publishers’ output consists of reprints of old religious and theological works that had been allowed to go out of print many years ago. Most of these are conservative, evangelical works that appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, roughly the period 1875 to 1925, but the major part of these titles had been issued just before the turn of the century. Today these reprints—“second-hand” publishing, if you will—constitute the backbone of a flourishing Midwest publishing industry that supplies millions of volumes each year to bookstores and schools all over the world. And lest it be said that the conservative Protestant market was a marginal one, and thus understandably passed up as hardly worthwhile, it must be noted that many of these warmed-up titles sell several thousand copies each year in the Grand Rapids reprint editions—very likely more than they sold when originally issued, in many cases. So successful has been this postwar religious reprint phenomenon that it has spread to other publishing centers like Chicago and even back to New York itself.

Several elements combined to make it possible for the Grand Rapids publishers to make a bumper crop out of the gleanings left in the fields by the established New York houses. Some of these causes were religious and academic, others technical. First and foremost was the tremendous upsurge in religious interest and study after World War II, which sparked the mushroom growth of hundreds of colleges, Bible schools and seminaries, many of them newly founded and conservative, evangelical in character. The lack of suitable textbooks for these institutions was aggravated by the now-apparent vacuum of evangelical scholarship in the last thirty or forty years, and the preoccupation of the New York publishers with liberal religious thought in that period. Faced with an urgent need for books as working tools, the schools cried for reprints of recognized works of a generation or two ago—books by such solid scholars as James Orr, Philip Schaff, J. P. Lange, Patrick Fairbairn, J. B. Lightfoot, Charles Hodge and others.

The publishers in Grand Rapids responded. They were able to do so with a sure feeling, for they were being deluged with requests for these out-of-print works. And they were able to do so with alacrity, because the new process of photo-offset printing had now been applied to books on a production basis, so that they had only to select a good, well-printed copy of an old edition and hand it to the printer. No longer was it necessary to have the plates or stereos available in order to print a new edition—a copy of the book was all that now was necessary; modern methods of photo-lith reproduction would do the rest. This was the other major factor in making Grand Rapids a reprint publishing center—although almost all of the actual printing of this type of work was being done in another Michigan center, Ann Arbor, as the direct result of government war work and research.

In addition to being able to reproduce these titles by the simple new photographic processes, the republication of most of these works was also, in most cases, without any need for payment of royalties. Almost all of the material was in the public domain, and the original publishers very rarely tried to enforce any reproduction rights. This tremendous advantage, coupled with the big saving of not having to set any type, has made this reprint publishing business particularly lucrative for the Grand Rapids houses and it has, in fact, constituted the backbone of their business.

It is amazing that none of the established New York houses sensed in time the reviving or continued demand for the better religious and theological titles of a generation or two ago. Some, indeed, were engrossed with the products of the new liberal theology. Others simply let their religious lists die out. But, back around the turn of the century, prominent New York imprints appeared on the title pages of volume after volume of sermons by Phillips Brooks, Louis Banks, Alexander Maclaren, H. B. Liddon, De Witt Talmage and others. Books by J. Gresham Machen, Benjamin B. Warfield, Philip Schaff, J. P. Lange, James Orr, B. F. Westcott, J. B. Lightfoot and others were issued in New York, even some time after that. Firms like Funk & Wagnalls, Dutton, Dodd Mead, Lippincott, Doran, Harper, Scribner, Longmans and Macmillan devoted a considerable share of their activities to the issuing of religious books of a conservative stamp. Today a great many of these same titles appear over Grand Rapids imprints. These include such large and important multi-volume sets as the Nicene and Ante-Nicene Father, Lange’s Commentaries, The Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Schaff’s History of the Christian Church, The Biblical Illustrator, Talmage’s Sermons and many others. The rights to some of these were purchased for a song; others, out of copyright, were simply adopted as out-of-print orphans and reprinted without any formal arrangements.

An examination of the catalogs of the Grand Rapids publishing houses shows a predominance of old titles in new editions, some of them billed as “Restorations,” others as “Reprint Classics,” and so forth. In some respects the reprint activity in Grand Rapids is not of recent origin. It started more than 30 years ago when the plates for several of the old George A. Doran properties were sold to Richard R. Smith, who resold most of them to William B. Eerdmans. These included such properties as The Expositor’s Bible, Maclaren’s Expositions and others still printed from the old plates. But the big boost came after World War II, when the advance of inexpensive offset printing and the entrance of new firms into the field multiplied the reproduction of old titles. No doubt some titles have been reissued that might just as well have been left out of print, but by and large the supplying of these reprints has been received and welcomed as a service by thousands of clergymen and hundreds of schools.

Several times in the last ten years it has seemed to appear, especially to book reviewers, that the reprint bonanza was about over, but each time there followed a new wave of warmed-up titles, many of them amazingly successful. True, and to their credit, most of the Grand Rapids publishers have also been issuing new titles in large numbers, even if in varying quality. But the outstanding characteristics of the religious publishing industry in Grand Rapids still are a conservative evangelical outlook, and the predominance of reprints. Certainly New York’s neglect of the conservative market, and its preoccupation with expressions of liberal thought, left the Grand Rapids publishers a golden opportunity to capture what is now a rapidly increasing market for books of a distinctively evangelical Christian viewpoint.

Mighty Potential Of New York Campaign

Speaking of Billy Graham’s mission in Madison Square Garden, one of CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S contributing editors, Professor Faris D. Whitesell, recently remarked that it carries the potential of being the greatest revival in all history. New York City is the first or second city in the world (depending upon the way suburban populations are computed), and is the center of the investment world and publishing business. With television and newspaper media open to the Gospel, and delegations coming by plane and train, the campaign makes Christianity an easy subject of conversation, will draw influential persons to the hearing of the Gospel, will encourage the clergy across the land to preach evangelistic sermons and to press the need for decision and will lift discouraged Christians to new confidence that God still works mightily in response to the prayers of his people.

The cause of evangelism in our day does not rest upon one person, as Billy Graham has so often pointed out. The Great Commission imposes the duty of Christian witnessing upon every believer. Let the Lord’s redeemed say so.

The Coming Great Church

J. Marcellus Kik

A significant book that has escaped conservative critical appraisal is The Early Church and the Coming Great Church (Abingdon, 1955) by John Knox, professor of sacred literature at Union Theological Seminary, New York. The author searches for a historical basis upon which to build and model the coming great church. The book takes on added significance in light of the September (1957) conference of the World Council of Churches on “The Nature of the Unity We Seek.”

The main thesis is that the united church of tomorrow cannot be modeled after the first-century church but must find its prototype in the Catholic movement of the second century. While Knox fully recognizes the importance of the life and faith of the church, his great concern is with its form and structure. He maintains that the church must be united in form as well as in spirit, and that all must participate in this comprehensive and fundamental structure (pp. 135, 136). The basic organizational structure finds expression in the historic episcopate, which the author insists must be fully accepted if Christendom is to be united (p. 142).

Diversity And Division

Professor Knox despairs of finding the model for the coming great church in the primitive church of the first century because of its alleged diversity and division. He marvels that it has ever been pictured as a model of unity. He claims that “there was wide diversity in both cult and faith, and signs of tension and of actual division, both within and among congregations” (p. 13). Yet he seems to contradict the existence of wide diversity of faith with this statement, “Thus, the common faith of early Christianity involved a considerable measure of agreement not only as to the significance of the event and the meaning of the community but also as to the nature and role of the person: Jesus was Lord and Christ” (pp. 68, 69). Consistency of thought does not characterize the book, when one section speaks of wide diversity of faith and another of considerable measure of agreement in the common faith of the early church.

Apparently the author is convinced that the first century lacked visible and outward unity, but he acknowledges the existence of inward unity. “The acceptance of the New Testament as our only authority—and as an adequate authority—has the effect of making us, to be sure, inescapably aware of our inward unity, but at the same time it confirms our more outward differences and divisions” (p. 134). Throughout the book complaints appear that in the early church there was no “comprehensive organization,” no “organic union,” no “inclusive and centrally administered organization,” no “one visible institutional church united under hierarchy or council.” To Knox no real union can exist without a comprehensive organization under control of a hierarchy or council.

Shared Life

Two chapters develop the theme that the early church was conscious of its own identity within a movement. The author writes, “This deeper identity of the churches, and therefore this deeper unity of the church, had a double character and ground. It had an empirical basis in a shared life and a more ideational basis in a shared faith” (p. 43). Great stress is placed upon the “event,” which is the coming of the Spirit. This seems of more importance than the advent of the person of Christ. The significant event was that “a new Spirit had come; a new love had been given; a new communal life had been brought into existence.… To share in this Spirit, this love, this life, was to belong to the church” (p. 62). More important than the advent of Christ there looms the event of new life entering into the community.

Jesus And The Event

The place that Jesus will possess in the coming great church is of utmost importance. For John Knox the historical person Jesus will occupy a subordinate place. The community and the event are of more importance. Actually, they give significance to the person of Jesus. Knox states that the person “was subordinate to the other two in the sense that the terms in which he was first defined were terms provided by the event and the community respectively and constituted hardly more than a reassertion of the empirical values that the event and the community had proved to have” (pp. 68, 69).

Jesus continues to be a symbol. The name of the person symbolizes the significance of the event and the church finds it impossible to minimize that significance (p. 80). Knox goes along with the World Council of Churches on the requirement of belief in “Jesus Christ as God and Saviour” not because it is a characteristic biblical statement nor because it is theologically adequate but because the name is a mere symbol of the significance of the event. The event and the church give significance to Jesus and not Jesus to the event and the church.

Apparently what Knox calls the event signifies more to him than the historical person Jesus. He writes that the event was the real ground of belief that Jesus was the Christ; the event was regarded as eschatological not because Jesus was believed to be the Christ, but rather Jesus was called Christ because he had been the decisive center of what was empirically realized to be the eschatological event (p. 70). To say Jesus was “Christ” was to say something about the event (69). The Christological question need not be construed as a question about the person; it can just as appropriately be thought of as a question about the event or community (pp. 65, 66). More startling is his statement that, “He is believed to overcome the world, ‘condemned sin in the flesh’ because the new community in principle overcame sin and broke the power of sin. He is believed to have ‘tasted death for every man’ because the community finds itself walking in newness of life. He is the ‘Savior’ because the event proved to be in fact the saving event and the community the saving community” (p 73). The creative power of the community receives the emphasis while Christ is reduced to a mere symbol.

What is this wonderful and significant event that overshadows the person of Jesus? Knox writes that “the event was, in its final issue, the coming of the Spirit” (p. 55). “The living reality of this Spirit was the real ground of the resurrection faith. To know the Spirit was to know Christ, and in the most vital parts of the New Testament the terms can be used almost interchangeably” (p. 61). Obviously he does not have the third person of the Holy Trinity in view. The Spirit seems rather to connote a new love and a new life as he writes, “to share in this Spirit, this love, this life, was to belong to the Church.” Where does this leave the person of Christ and what is his significance for the future?

Catholic Prototype

As Professor Knox would have it, the Catholic movement of the late second century is the great prototype of the modern crusade for unity (p. 17). This movement assertedly achieved a greater measure of sound unity than the early church. Knox states that the early Catholic movement had the same goal in view and was actuated by strikingly similar inner motivations and outward pressures (p. 84). There is no claim that perfect outward unity was achieved; nevertheless, it is stated, “it brought the church a larger measure of outward unity than it had before or than it had since” (p. 129). The unity of the first century was that of life and faith; the unity of the second century laid emphasis on form and common structure (p. 133).

Knox often draws back with one hand what he gives with the other. On page 17 he states that we must “invest the early Catholic movement with an interest and importance—yes, with an authority—which it deserves and which we must acknowledge, if we are ever going really to achieve the unity it sought.” Then cautiously he admonishes the present-day “Catholic” to acknowledge the soundness of the historic Protestant emphasis upon a distinction as regards normative values between the first century and any later century (p. 146). Something essential is lost, he feels, if the authority of the second century is raised to that of the first. He seems to compromise by implying that the second century should be recognized as authority for common forms of polity and worship and the first century as to life and faith (p. 149). He concludes that “the coming great church will be apostolic as well as Catholic, and Catholic as well as apostolic” (p. 155).

He insists that those who accept the sole normativeness of the New Testament are actually affirming the normativeness of certain decisions of the Catholic church. By accepting the canon and the ancient creeds we acknowledge the authority of the early Catholic Church. Here Knox follows the well known reasoning of the Roman Catholic Church that the church invested the Scriptures with authority. The historic Protestant position has maintained that the authority of the Scriptures does not depend in any degree upon the judgment of the church nor does her sanction give them validity. The Bureau of Standards may verify that a certain metal is gold, but such verification does not make the metal gold. The Scriptures are intrinsically authoritative and the church has recognized this on internal and external evidence. Again we accept the ancient creeds not on the authority of the second-century church, but because they conform to the Scriptures. Herein Knox reveals that he is far removed from the historic Protestant position.

Acceptance Of Episcopacy

The answer to unity of the church Knox finds in what he terms the historic episcopacy. He writes frankly, “I simply cannot conceive of the union of Christendom except on the ground of a polity which … involves the full acceptance of the historic episcopate” (p. 142); “I see no hope of a united church without the universal acceptance of episcopacy” (p. 143). He feels that on this matter we cannot agree to disagree. We may disagree on matters of faith and worship but not on form and polity!

However, the acceptance of the episcopate must not involve acceptance of either the fact of apostolic succession or any understanding of its meaning. The Catholic must not insist that the only sound reason for its acceptance is the belief that it was the primitive church order or that Jesus or the apostles instituted it (pp. 145, 146). The reviewer believes this to be divisive, for some in the “coming great church” would trace the order of the ministry and the episcopate to the authority of Christ and the Apostles while others would trace this to the authority of the second-century Catholic movement or to expediency. Within this “united” church a “Catholic” and a “Protestant” party would exist.

Evangelical Misgivings

The accusation has often been leveled at the evangelical that he has no concern for greater unity, that he is basically disruptive and incapable of seeking unity, and that he has no ground for opposition to elements of present-day ecumenicity. Let fairness prevail, however. If John Knox’s conception of Christ prevails, the evangelical is asked to give up his Lord and God for what he feels to be a superficial outward unity. Christ is not a symbol to which an “event” and a community have given significance. Christ is the event. He has created and given significance to the Christian community. The headship of Christ will not be easily relinquished.

On the basis of the views expressed by John Knox, the evangelical becomes apprehensive lest tradition share the authority of the Scriptures. Traditions of men cannot be allowed to supplement the Scriptures as a rule of faith and practice. The Catholic movement of the second century must be judged by Scripture. If the practice of the second-century church becomes normative, what about the church of the third, fourth, fifth and ensuing centuries? Giving weight to human tradition leads toward Rome.

The nature of the church looms large in the thought of the evangelical, and he has serious misgivings about the emphasis on the “institutional” character of the church. E. A. Litton (Anglican) wrote long ago, “Every theory of the Church, whether it profess to be Romanist or not, which teaches that its true being lies in its visible characteristics, adopts instinctively the Romish notes and rejects the Protestant” (The Church of Christ, p. 174). Edward Schweizer, writing in Theology Today, (January, 1957), says, “The Church is also most certainly not an ‘institution’ in the Roman Catholic sense, to which Christ has delegated certain of his tasks to a hierarchy of office holders who dispense his grace.”

Many evangelicals within historic denominations have not given up the Protestant position on the nature of the church. They do not feel that deeper unity will be achieved by an “inclusive and centrally administered organization.” They cling to the conception of the church taught by Christ and the Apostles.

We concur with Knox when he concludes that the coming great church “will not be the consequence of our shrewd planning, of our cautious concessions and careful compromises. It will be God’s building.…” (p. 153). Indeed, the evangelical rejoices in Christ’s statement, “I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18); and he knows that this church is built upon the apostles and prophets, Christ himself being the chief cornerstone.

We Quote

CECIL B. DE MULE

Distinguished Motion Picture Producer

… The decision we make at our desks in Hollywood may intimately affect the lives of human beings … throughout the world.… We are responsible as artists and as molders of men’s thoughts. We have a duty to our art and a duty to the audience for whom we make our pictures. We must keep those two responsibilities clearly in view all the time. If we do that we may be able to keep our industry free of the forces which threaten to corrupt it from within and the forces which threaten to cramp and stifle it from without. Our greatest danger from within the industry is the worship of the golden calf—the temptation to care nothing about what we put on the screen as long as it makes money.… Perhaps we think it is easier to draw a crowd by pandering to their lowest tastes than by inspiring their highest ideals.… But it is treason to the human spirit, and treason to the art we serve. And we are simply stupid if we have not learned that, in motion pictures, dirt is not necessarily pay dirt.… Who else in the world can go, as our pictures go, into every corner of the world—almost into every home and heart of the world? Who else—except the missionaries of God—has had our opportunity …?—In an address to 900 leaders in the motion picture industry at the Screen Producer’s Guild Milestone Dinner.

Cover Story

Incense and Salt

Christine Fleming Heffner

Western Society—particularly that of the United States—prides itself on its scientific agnosticism. But the “scientific” attitude of the ordinary layman is in no way like the attitude that has accounted for the advances made by the physical sciences in the past few decades. His agnosticism is not the questioning of the seeker, but the prejudicial disbelief of the skeptic. As a scientific agnostic, he is only playing a part, and one he understands no better than the football hero acting Socrates. The skeptic who prides himself on his scientific knowledge usually has no conception of the scientific method, but credits himself with knowledge of science simply because he uses its fruits in his daily living. He usually conceives of agnosticism as something like the viewpoint of a sophomore from Missouri. And, finally, he is quite capable of straining at religious gnats while swallowing technicological camels.

Beyond Dogmatism

There was a time when scientific men were likely to claim for their science the answers to all questions, or to discount any questions for which their science gave them no answers. But that was in the adolescence of science. Now that the physical sciences have reached the maturity that sees itself in proportion, more and more top-ranking scientists are convinced and outspokenly religious men. They seek in their own field only the knowledge that is inherent in that field, and know that there are realms to which their science gives no entry. As the social sciences reach the same kind of maturity, their top-ranking men will be found, no doubt, claiming for their own fields of interest only such things to which they actually do pertain.

To the usual layman, the scientific attitude is one of disbelief, but the true scientist is actually a man who believes any possibility until it is carefully ruled out. The skeptic pre-judges. The scientist suspends judgment. Far from being a doubter, he is a believer, albeit a cautious one. He may be a questioner, but his question is “what is the truth?” and he looks for the truth into whatever unlikely corners he may be led. Scientific discoveries are made by the painstaking examination of the most far-fetched hypotheses. To the scientist, anything can be true, and thus must be tried. Any other attitude would preclude all discovery, except by sheer accident. The real scientist attempts, above all else, to be an unbiased man, at least in so far as his science is concerned. He must not even allow himself to be biased in favor of his own working hypotheses. It is a point of honor with him never to claim knowledge that he does not have, whether that knowledge be negative or positive.

This is science in its mature state, and this is the stature and attitude of the scientist, by his own ideal,—a far cry from the layman exercising what he considers to be “scientific skepticism” and from the megalomania of the partially informed.

Beyond Skepticism

But true agnosticism also has nothing to do with prejudicial skepticism. A man is not an agnostic simply because he rejects certain religious dogmas which he finds unappealing or distasteful. Agnosticism is never so easy, so simple, nor so self-serving as that. The true doubter is one who, hearing news reports, or the expert opinions which rain down on us as the ashes of Vesuvius rained upon Pompeii, says, “Is this fact? or opinion? or prejudice? or propaganda?” In short, the agnostic greets every pronouncement, from no matter how official or awesomely professional a source, with three questions: Is this the truth? Is it all the truth? Is it more than the truth? An agnostic is not so much a man who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus as one who doesn’t believe in oracles.

Beyond Agnosticism

Agnosticism has been put in cold storage for generations by being confined to religion (where it is pointless) and thus kept isolated from politics, economics, education, social welfare, international relations, and community gossip—all places where it might render invaluable service to the state and the individual. We have, as a culture, developed a supreme and unquestioning faith in man and an impudent doubt of God. Do not the gentiles the same? But the present need is to combine a real love of our fellow men (a very different thing, and still in short supply) with a healthy skepticism about their perfection, moral or intellectual.

Agnosticism in religion is pointless because religion, like love, cannot be other than a matter of faith, anyhow. Here some sort of commitment has to be made, and without proof, even though it is best aided by the intelligence. Love that waits for proof is unlove, and the rejection of all creeds is a creed-of-rejection.

But the very man who struts his doubt of the tenets of the ecclesiastics will give blind assent to the tenets of the illuminati. The man who jests at the Law handed down from Sinai or the Grace handed down from Calvary will clasp to his bosom the wisdom handed down from a bureaucracy, or a philosophy, or a public lobby.

The man unmoved by the language of religious devotion will genuflect at the jargon of a technology. The man who looks down his nose at a religious explanation of his origin will meekly bow his neck to the yoke of any one professional explanation of his nature. Parents who refuse to indoctrinate their children religiously will rear them according to their own indoctrination in some infallibly-pronounced theory of child-training. The contradictions of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures are cited against their validity, but year after year philosophic and social and psychologic pronouncements contradict one another in bewildering succession, yet men’s faith in them remains unshaken.

Beyond Credulity

Is ours an agnostic society? And is the scientific approach the pathway of our culture? Hell, no! And hell is precisely the right word, for the pathway we really march runs through a hell of bewildering credulity for many and conflicting gods, an inferno of frustrating strain in trying to live by a thousand creeds. When intellectual enlightenment casts away religion, except as social convention, superstition in a new guise replaces it with the weight of many strata of religions called by new names.

Man doesn’t presently suffer so much from lack of belief as he does from belief in the wrong things, from reliance on gods that constantly betray him. The sickness of our society may well be chiefly nausea that result from swallowing too many things whole, in too rapid succession, without even the preservative and flavor of a healthy grain of salt!

The sore need now is not only for a new birth of religious credence to stabilize and keep sane a rising religious sentiment, but for the unlocking of agnosticism from its ecclesiastical prison, for its release into secular affairs. God, however he has been understood throughout the ages, has always been a jealous God, which only means that he has been a logical God. Any renewed belief in God has to include the thing he has in all religions demanded: disbelief in all rival godlets.

We should bring down the poor scientists and technologists from the Olympus to which we have forcefully elevated them, that they may simply work their own works in their laboratories, human and fallible and helpful as they really are. We should bring the social scientists down from Sinai, where the best of them never desired to be, and put them to work among men, in full recognition of the inevitable incompleteness of their knowledge, and of their own inevitable partaking in the weaknesses among which they work. For if the world ever has found or ever shall find a truly saving knowledge, it will come from beyond human intelligence, and it will be spiritual in nature. If the world has ever had, or ever does have, a saviour, he may be a man, but he must also be God.

Anything less than that demands the exercise of a healthy agnosticism. Any voice less than God’s demands the test of the three questions: Is it the truth? Is it all of the truth? Is it more than the truth? The world suffers enough, unavoidably, from human sinfulness. This much at least we can do to rid it of the primacy of the doctrinaire, the megalomaniac, and the demagogue.

END

Out of

Eternal

Dawn

came

the

Lamb,

To stride across the lightless wastes of temporality; Deeper were his footprints and bloody when he walked into

the

Valley

of the

Shadow

to die;

but yet

to live

again

and

rise

into

the

Dawn

leaving in his wake a lighted trail to his eternal home

GARY YOUREE

Mrs. Edward A. Heffner grew up on the campus of one of America’s foremost medical schools and married a medical student in his sophomore year. Now a priest of the Episcopal Church, ordained in 1948, her physician-husband practices his ministry full-time and his medical specialty (ophthalmology) part-time in Ellsworth, Kansas. Mrs. Heffner is author of The Way of Light, Intercession, With All Our Hearts, a devotional speaker and the mother of four children as well.

Cover Story

Christian Responsibility in Education

Carl F. H. Henry

We should be roused from slumber by the spectre of a society where every school may become an instrument of state policy, every classroom a center for inculcating a totalitarian creed, every lecture an occasion for delineating truth and goodness as personal prejudices instead of durable distinctions. The world still outside the communist orbit has cause to ponder the perils of education gone wholly secular and godless, and to consider afresh the influences which stand guard against irresponsibility in education.

Because of the indispensability of an enlightened public opinion in a democracy, the United States has special reason for vigilance in the sphere of education. Our republic has sought to insure an informed citizenry through the provision of public education for our youth. Today some observers insist that we had a better democracy before our national reliance on public education, and moreover, that we have had less freedom since. Be that as it may, the time has come to take a new look at American education, and to raise anew the question of Christian responsibility; indeed, to fail to do so would be a mark of our neglect.

Loss Of Christian Ideals

Is there a way to bring together the concern for truth in private and public education without intruding a schismatic bias contrary to the American spirit but also without despising the Christian motifs whose dynamic once rescued the West from its pagan past and the loss of which is now sinking us into a pagan future?

In his treatment of The Development of Modern Education, Professor Frederick Eby sketches the rising “revolt against authority” that has “invalidated the imperatives of beauty, morality, and religion.” In a chapter on “Educational Progress in the 20th Century,” he reminds us: “Life has levelled off; art, intelligence, and spirit no longer aspire to the sublime.… The very suggestion of the universal, conceptual, perfect, or the infinite induces a shudder of revulsion down the spine of the sophisticated” (ibid., p. 679). Professor Eby writes not alone of the revolt against the past and against external authority; he writes as well of the increase of crime, of the exaltation of immorality, of the widespread cynicism of our times. And I cannot abstain from quoting: “Never have sex perversions; unscrupulous disregard of the evil effect of liquor, narcotics and tobacco upon children; divorce; rape; murder; political chicanery; debauchery; gambling; corrupt athletics; and contempt for law and order been so rampant and unblushing as they are today. The revolting sexual perversion extending from multiple divorce to criminal assault upon women and even little girls, frequently ending with the brutal murder of the victim; the increase in sexual relations of high school students; the heartless killings by youth of high IQ out of sheer moral idiocy; all such behavior testifies to the deterioration of public and private morality and sanity.… One conclusion is certain: the strong claims of a century ago that a system of public schools would do away with crime now look absurd.… Not only has public education failed to eliminate crime but it is in some measure responsible for the increase of these various evils.… Down to the end of the last century, educational leaders were college graduates who had studied ethics and the Evidences of Christianity, and the teachers were the products of an education which respected law and reverenced moral principles and religious sanction. All this was changed at about the end of the century.…” (ibid., p. 679 ff). So writes the Professor of History and Philosophy of Education at the University of Texas. And who need meditate long on the facts he relates without an awareness that it is timely indeed to raise the subject of Christian responsibility in education with new urgency?

A Christian Incentive

The rise of popular education in the West had a measure of Christian motivation. The urge to impart to every person a core of spiritually integrating information was lacking in the speculative philosophies of the Graeco-Roman world into which Christianity came. The ancient world not only lacked interest in universal education as such, but it lacked an evangelistic concern for the masses which might have stimulated and reinforced this. The ideal of mass education enlarged through the Middle Ages, through the Reformation, and through the Renaissance with its fresh concern for the course of this world.

Christian interest in general education and in the democratic process, however, looked beyond a secular exposition of man and society; it incorporated from the very first a concern for life on this planet fit also for the world to come. In the early American colonies, all education was Christian. When public schools emerged after the Revolution, the famed McGuffey readers preserved this sense of citizenship in two worlds. The Christian churches, moreover, likewise established higher education in America. Harvard was the first of a large number of colleges founded by the churches, with the special aim of an educated ministry. Two out of three of the colleges existing in the United States this very day were established by the churches.

The Tragic Decline

By the time of the first World War, the character of many of these colleges was only formally Christian. Until they were stabbed awake by the intellectual shock of the Second World War, they were not much interested in re-examining the Christian heritage. Harvard, bearing the Christian motto Christo et Ecclesiae, had gone Unitarian, and its Professor of Theology (J. A. C. F. Auer) was a humanist. Columbia, founded as King’s College in colonial times by Anglicans who chose its motto from the Psalms—“In Thy light shall we see light”—became through John Dewey’s influence at Teachers’ College the fountain of pragmatic naturalism in American primary and secondary education. Chicago, established with Rockefeller funds as a Christian university with a Baptist divinity school, declined into an essentially humanistic and functional center for the so-called “Chicago School of Theology.”

At the turn of the century, many universities still concealed their defection from Christianity by harboring idealistic philosophies of one sort or another. This idealistic speculation spurned the miraculous supernaturalism of the Bible, while at the same time over against naturalism it championed the reality of the supernatural world, the dignity of man, and the givenness of truth and morality. But idealism lost touch with the self-revealing God; it neglected the Law and the Prophets; it did not bow before the Incarnation, Atonement and Resurrection of Christ. It substituted for the word of Scripture the word of Hegel and Lotze and Royce and Bowne and Hocking and Flewelling. And, cut off from Christ and his redeeming work in the lives of men, it was important to halt the tidal waves of naturalism. John Dewey set the intellectual spirit of the new century by saying: “Faith in the divine authority in which western civilization confided, inherited ideas of the soul and its destiny, of fixed revelations … have been made impossible for the cultivated mind of the western world.” Although naturalism has not won the enthusiasm of the majority of the people in any nation, the enterprise of education in America, except for a few interdenominational colleges and a remnant of the church-related institutions, came to cast its weight against the theology and ethics of revealed religion.

Christianity Goes Underground

This became true in the public schools, through the infiltration of Dewey’s educational philosophy; it became true in private colleges and universities, through their disregard of Christian philosophy; it was true in public-supported universities, which had difficulty in defining the place of religion in the curriculum because of the American emphasis on separation of church and state. In all these centers of academic influence, biblical Christianity became subterranean. In the centers of intellectual life, the Christian tradition was regarded, however politely, with disdain and despite.

Nowhere in this pattern of things did there arise another President Timothy Dwight who, a century and a half ago, mindful of the apostasy of the campus, entered the chapel at Yale with a sense of missionary urgency and planted the seed of faith anew in the hearts of the students.

The Definition Of Deity

Today some educators are struggling against the secular surge that inundates all the spheres of learning. Yet even men of influence fail to sense that the rising tide of religiosity is no clear victory for the cause of pure religion, and that it may signify instead a resurgence of shallow superstitions in the realm of the spirit. There is pious talk of moral and spiritual values even by some educators who reject God and the supernatural; indeed, who do not even believe that any values are fixed and final. Men seem concerned to define a policy, while cautiously avoiding any definition of God.

A year ago, during extended high-level correspondence, educators began evolving a public school policy to emphasize that belief in God is inherent in American ideals and institutions. This, however, is a vague, cryptic and disappointing way of stating the facts. For the term God has now gained so many diverse definitions from American professors that the bare word is little more than a fetish.

Recently wide publicity was given the president of a university in the District of Columbia when he declared that no atheist would be approved on his teaching faculty. Asked what, specifically, was meant by an approved belief in God, the president replied: “I made no definition of ‘final cause’ or ‘God’ in my words.” Thus latitude over the real identity of God gains academic respectability, while a bare belief in the existence of an undefined god presumably provides an acceptable frame for religion and virtue on the campus. In actuality, however, this nebulosity brings us to the threshold of cynicism. For an undefined god is merely a word, and no god at all. It is no mere touch of irony, but a turn of logic, that in their defection from the Logos modern men speak no longer of the Word, but simply of a word (and that an unintelligible word) when they worship. In a post-Christian society, this altar to an unknown god supplies the transition, if I may say so, to the worship of antichrist.

Values And The Living God

A genuine concern for religious values in the classroom dare not make the definition of deity a matter of indifference. Whatever comfort theological vagueness may supply to professional circles, the doubt of our demoralized decade is not likely to be dispelled by the introduction into the curriculum of an emphasis on belief in a god who may or may not be supernatural, who may or may not be personal and who may or may not be living.

Since the bare notion of “faith in god” does not specifically share the emphasis of the Declaration of Independence that a supernatural Creator endows and preserves all men with unalienable rights, I pleaded that in the teaching of moral and spiritual values in the public schools the supreme being at least be designated as the Living God. The reply was that any such qualification would be partisan and sectarian; that the doctrine of separation of church and state excludes any definition of God. I would not have thought that separation of church and state requires a platform of spiritual and ethical values indifferent to the question whether God is living or not. In fact, I rather think the founding fathers would have warned us that the loss of the Creator would sooner or later involve us—by the most rigorous logic—in the loss also of unalienable rights, and of enduring moral and spiritual values.

The Regeneration Of Education

Sometimes I quite despair of our existing institutions—and in this touch of pessimism I am not alone—and wonder whether they retain any longer the spiritual courage and vision to reverse the present order of things. I do not say God has utterly cast them off, but I am unsure whether there remains any deep desire for the regeneration of education. I am not here to upbraid. And I am quite aware that even the Middle Ages produced no university fully permeated with the Christian ideal. I ask for no uncritical return to the past. But I rather fear the West has been too long adrift from its sacred moorings to cherish the prospect of a university in which an Augustine might hold the chair of philosophy; in which Calvin would teach philosophy of religion, and Zwingli comparative religions; with a Gladstone in law, a Handel in music, a Milton in literature, and a Kepler in astronomy. The virtual absence of Christians from our public faculties today almost inevitably raises the question whether contemporary education perhaps discriminates especially against them.

The Bible would not, indeed, be the only textbook in a program of education genuinely concerned with moral and spiritual values, but the students would feel the shock and sting of its sacred presuppositions. Is it not almost incredible, and yet at the same time quite natural from the standpoint of secular counterattack, that this Book from which our profoundest Western ideas and ideals are derived, and to which the dynamic for general education is itself somewhat indebted, should be increasingly banned from our public schools and bypassed by our colleges and universities? Does not history have a strange way of exacting retribution? The Bible is a bulwark of freedom; it sketches man’s rights and duties, and it states facts about both true and false religion. Is it not a remarkable commentary on our century that, when they were exposed to reactionary pressures that opposed teaching the facts of Communism in the public schools, teachers who had suppressed teaching the facts of Christianity were driven to invoke the privilege of teaching the facts of naturalistic irreligion as an evidence of academic liberty?

Neglect Of Higher Learning

The church, no less than the university, in our century has tended to restrict the relevance of Christian confession to religion. This limitation explains Protestantism’s failure to establish a university in the large and thorough sense, which penetrates all the schools of advanced instruction from the Christo-centric point of view, thereby fitting men for the professions—medicine, law, teaching, science, as well as the ministry—with a full-orbed sense of divine vocation. We have great universities, some with an appended postgraduate school of religion, or with an appended divinity school, but we do not have a Christian university permeated by the vision of God. We have a remnant of Christian colleges, many of them weak and struggling, and a few for whom the title “university” is a misnomer. If we really face the larger problem of Christian responsibility in education we shall soon see that the effectiveness of the faith nurtured in our homes and churches, and by those Christian influences that now survive in education, is fragmented and, moreover, is constantly threatened and depressed from above. What fractional concepts and convictions survive the teaching of the lower schools remain unelevated, unsupplemented and unsupported at the higher level, and tend instead to become blurred. Advanced and professional instruction, therefore, instead of nourishing faith, impoverishes it, and the higher strategic grades of vocation are placed largely in the hands of an intelligentsia in revolt against the Christian heritage.

Christian believers in earlier centuries anticipated this danger with greater wisdom than evangelical forces today. They founded their universities first—Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale; the colleges and public schools were their offspring. The universities supplied the faculties which in turn influenced every village and hamlet of the nation. The plain fact is that if Christianity does not shape the university world, the university world will always frustrate the climaxing influences of Christian social ethics; if education at the top is hostile or indifferent to the Christian outlook, the expansion of Christian doctrine and life through all the gradations of society is hindered. This will be increasingly true in the coming generation when collegiate and university enrollment will be greatly multiplied.

Evasion Of The Facts

Modern education is evasive about the facts of the history of religion. It not only shies away from spiritual decision, but it evades the teaching of the facts of religion and morality. Faith has everything to lose, doubt has everything to gain, by the suppression of those facts. Faith has everything to gain, doubt has everything to lose, by the impartation of those facts. I do not say that the public schoolroom should be used to enlist students in this or that church or denomination or religion; the wall of separation between church and state is too precious a heritage of democracy to see it thus endangered. But the students will come from our classrooms with one creed or another, or they have not been challenged much. And an American classroom that yields irreligious students, and ignores the facts of the Hebrew-Christian religion and its heritage, is neither the friend of democracy nor the foe of totalitarianism.

Our Christian Duty

What do we say then of Christian duty—of the responsibility of devoutly committed believers—in education? We must bear our witness in this as in all spheres of life and culture, even if the penetrations are but partial. We must remember that the vision for private colleges and universities has been predominantly spiritual and Christian. We must remember, too, that public education in this land does not belong to the secularists. And while the Living God doubtless chooses a remnant, he is not on that account the private property of some one church or denomination; he has a word for the public, and for public education as well. We do not deny the secularists their right to found and support secular schools, but we do challenge their right to capture the public schools of the nation for their partisan ends. The Harvard Report confessed that public education today has no unity, no goal. We must sound the alternative of a unified and purposive education in the school districts in which we pay taxes, for it is to the people, and not to the educators alone, that our public schools are answerable. We must not surrender our public schools needlessly to the spirit of the age. If we establish parochial schools, it will be as Protestants, not because public education free of ecclesiastical control is to be condemned, but because education with no concept of enduring truth and of fixed goals perverts our children; it cannot even vindicate the permanent validity of democracy. And we must train our youth for the professions, particularly for the teaching profession, whose sense of mission seems now on the wane. We do not covet for them an artificial confession of Jesus Christ that narrows the human intellect and the range of knowledge, for true faith is expansive and integrative of the whole of life. For life in this time of tyranny and trouble they require an education that not only plumbs the doubts, but emerges to a faith and resultant philosophy of life that focuses and sharpens the perspective of man and society on the eternal polestar of history—the Living God.

END

Preacher In The Red

WHAT—NO HANDS?

I have but recently taken charge of this new pastorate. Since arriving I have been subject to many requests for “hand-outs” and have been inclined to help all and sundry. I have, however, been warned by my Church Board to use discretion in this indiscriminate giving, much of which is mistaken charity.

As yet, I do not know the members of my Board too well. The other day I was walking along the street when I saw a laborer coming towards me with his hand held out. For the first time I thought I would follow the advice of my Church officials. Consequently, I ignored the proffered hand, and went on my way but not without certain qualms of misgiving.

Imagine my consternation the following Sunday morning, when one of the Church officials met in the Church vestibule, and asked me why I snubbed him on the street. “Did you think I was a hobo?” he asked.

That was the first time, and I expect it will be the last time that I shall ignore the proffered hand of a stranger without proper investigation. Am now awaiting repercussions.—The REV. ERNEST BARRATTE, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

For each report by a minister of the Gospel of an embarrassing moment in his life, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will pay $5 Cupon 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.

An address by the Editor of Christianity Today in an International Christian Leadership panel with Dr. R. W. White, president of Baylor University, Texas, and Gen. W. S. Paul, president of Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania, presided over by Senator Ralph E. Flanders of Vermont, in the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, D.C., Feb. 7, 1957.

Cover Story

John Dewey and the American Spirit

Cecil De Boer

Christianity Today May 27, 1957

With the death of Professor John Dewey in June, 1952, there passed from the contemporary American scene a man whose writings probably reflected the real America since the turn of the century more revealingly than those of any other contemporary philosopher. Our faith in democracy as the ultimate guarantee of the perfectibility of society and the individual, our optimism concerning the wholly secular public school, the decline of Protestantism as a pervading Christian influence, our practical atheism, and our materialism—it is all duly recorded in Professor Dewey’s special brand of pragmatism known as instrumentalism.

As a philosopher he threw overboard all metaphysics, and he repudiated all absolutes—except, of course, the two which he introduced more or less sub rosa, namely, evolution as a cosmic and social principle, and scientific method as the only means of arriving at truth. And the only truth worth having, according to Professor Dewey, is not truth in any absolute or final sense but rather truth in the sense of “truth made,” truth provisional, truth for the time being. He refused to recognize the genuineness of any problem not in the end referable to experiment and practice, and he defined knowledge as the “intelligent control of a material situation.” Ideas are mere tools, and human intelligence is simply an “organ for the control of nature through action.” The only problems ever really solved are practical ones, whereas metaphysical and religious ones are simply outgrown. There are no eternal verities and no final answers, and any school of philosophy proposing final answers ipso facto degrades itself to a school of apologetics and propaganda.

Premium On The Provisional

Genuine progressive thinking is provisional thinking, i. e., it confines itself to the here and now, always aware of the necessity of perpetual adjustment to changing conditions. Man has no demonstrable destiny or end but only “ends that are literally endless.” Embedded as we are in the evolutionary process it does not make sense to talk about the universe as a whole, for our universe is and will forever remain a “universe in the making.” Moral and other values, therefore, have nothing of the abiding and the eternal about them.…

The import of all this for education is that it, together with everything else, will have to keep moving and changing. Accordingly, Dewey’s application of the absolutes of evolution and scientific method to education came to be known as “progressive education.” Because society learns only in the course of trying to solve its problems, the school should function as a kind of miniature society, in which progress in learning comes as a result of problem solving. The child, like the scientist and, let us hope, like the philosopher, gets his problems from the world of action and should therefore “return his account there for auditing and liquidation,” especially since the practical pursuits of modern man are of a kind as to allow “intellectualization.” Anyway, experimental science has effectually undermined the prestige of the purely intellectual studies.

Change, evolution, and progress are incompatible with the idea of unchanging goals or aims. The proper aims of progressive education are, therefore, those which satisfy the following criteria: They should be the outgrowth of existing conditions so that they will be founded on the activities and needs of the pupil; they should enlist the pupil’s cooperation; they should be flexible; and they should be specific and immediate rather than general and ultimate. Whereas traditionally the aim of education was conceived as the realization of man’s ideal nature and true end (which for Christian education meant the realization of his destiny as a redeemed creature made in the image of God), “progressive education” knows of no ideal nature or true end. For man as a member of a universe in the making there can be only an endless series of immediate and provisional ends, ends which are themselves means to still further ends. We know that somehow we are moving, but we can never know where we are going and just how we shall get there. And so if education may be said to have anything like a general aim at all it can only be that of social efficiency—for the time being, of course. Consequently, we cannot assert that one study is more valuable than another since value is something relative, depending upon specific situation. All we can say is that culture must be socially efficient to deserve the name of culture, that it is simply a halo of vocation, that usefulness is in utility rather than in enjoyment, and that a thing has value because it is useful.

Some Critical Reflections

A few observations. To say that one subject is as valuable as any other is to say that education has no determinable goal, i. e., that it is impossible to know just what the purpose of education really is. And this brings us to the subject of Professor Dewey’s criteria of the proper aims of education. These criteria would seem to apply to bad aims as well as to good ones—even where by bad aims we meant nothing more than aims which seem to interfere with “social efficiency.” These criteria would evidently be satisfied, for example, by a successful school for the training of thieves (on whatever financial or political level), gangsters, shysters, confidence men, and so on. The aims of such a school would presumably be founded on petty thievery as a persistent activity and need of the young; they would evidently enlist the cooperation of the pupils; and they would be specific and immediate rather than general and ultimate. In fact, such a school would aptly illustrate Professor Dewey’s definition of subject matter, viz, “what one needs to know in order to do what one is interested in doing.”

It is right here that we see the fallacy of limiting the essentials of education to the essentials of scientific method, for education and life vastly transcend scientific thinking. Professor Dewey, although recognizing the legitimacy of remote ends and interests, shows a definite preference for the immediate ones. As a result the factors of duty and conscience never really enter into the picture of progressive education, proposing as it does only those aims which place no obligation on human nature. Yet there is no good reason, whether in logic or psychology, why remote and therefore more or less external aims, aims imposed as it were from without, cannot in fact represent truly human ideals, ideals which may become internal as the result of a change of attitude. In fact psychology and psychiatry are today reasserting an old truth to the effect that a stable personality depends to a considerable extent upon such things as obedience, the recognition of authority, and self-denial. An important criterion of educational aims, a criterion ignored by Dewey, is that it should embody an ideal whose fulfillment is willed. It is simply a matter of fact that conscious mental effort has proved an important factor in past progress; and to the objection that imagined good does not sufficiently influence conduct, the answer is that by the testimony of history it is certain that imagined evil does. Dewey’s conception of interest may fit the needs of backward children; it does not fit the realities in the world of adults.

In discussing the role of the public schools in America Professor Dewey appears to be somewhat at odds with himself. He admits that as a matter of history American society made the American public school; nevertheless he recommends that the public school be used as an instrument to reform American society. Here the truth seems to be that the schools, like the philosophers, like John Dewey himself, rarely do more than reflect social conditions and the social temper, and that they do not as a rule change them. The American public will probably continue to employ the schools for the purpose of propagating the type of society in which the adults believe. After all, the adults live where the economic, political, and other problems are; hence, if there is to be any reforming at all, adult society will have to begin by reforming itself. That the schools usually reflect the society which supports them can readily be learned by looking at Russia, where a transformed adult society quickly transformed the schools.

Professor Dewey’s notion of learning by doing has, of course, its uses, and no one has ever denied this. But it also has its limitation. There is an old saying that only fools must learn by experience—the implication being, of course, that the wide awake pupil will be able to learn both from books and from the sad experience of others. Children need not experience crime in order to be effectively warned against it. Naturally, the burnt child dreads the fire, but that hardly warrants the burning. The learning process may start on the basis of physical activities, but that does not support the conclusion that it should be kept there. All depends upon the grade of intelligence; that is to say, the lower the grade of intelligence the more numerous the physical activities apparently necessary. Children doubtless begin some of their learning as the animals do; on the other hand, animals cannot learn as children learn, since otherwise we should be able to teach them mathematics, aesthetics, and morals. One of the most interesting features of Dewey’s theory of progressive education is the paradox that a person completely the product of this theory consistendy applied would be quite incapable of reading and understanding Dewey. If philosophy—at least in one of its important phases—may be defined as “the ultimate sense of the ridiculous,” Professor Dewey’s philosophy of education seems seriously lacking in at least one important respect.

Priority Problems

In refusing to recognize the genuineness of all problems not referable to the method of hypothesis and verification on the physical level Professor Dewey, of course, brushes aside all “purely intellectual problems.” The truth is, however, that such problems do in fact determine men’s conduct to an extent far greater than is commonly supposed. Take for example such a “purely intellectual” problem as that of survival after death. The question of survival is natural to man in spite of the fact that any hypothesis about it is necessarily speculative and inconclusive. Furthermore, it is regulative of human conduct since, obviously, people act as if it were true, or false, or a matter of indifference. To justify any one of these alternatives would call for a certain amount of thinking, thinking which in the nature of the case must always be incomplete. In other words, it is simply a fact of existence to be explained—not ignored—that man is inevitably philosophical, that he thinks about problems he can never completely solve, and that he acts upon beliefs he can never hope directly and completely to verify. One may argue, of course, that modern man ought not to trouble his mind with these things, but the fact remains that he not only does, but that he can’t very well do anything else and remain normal. And that is something to be explained, not simply condemned.

Is pragmatism something new? William James once called it a “new name for an old way of thinking.” Certainly the only thing new about Professor Dewey’s brand of it is the success with which he gave ancient doctrines an American orientation. Its denial of finality to truth, its assertion of man as the measure of all things, its evolution, its naturalism, its denial of the legitimacy of metaphysics, its definition of knowledge as a tool for discovery, its humanism, and its skepticism are as old as, respectively, Heraclitus, Protagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Lucretius, the mediaeval nominalist, Hume, Comte, and Herbert Spencer. Nevertheless, John Dewey’s influence upon primary and secondary education in America is not easily over-estimated. In Columbia University he left behind a minor galaxy of pragmatists in the school of philosophy, who in turn have fathered thousands of “pale spiritual offspring in the jungles of Teachers College” alone. And Teachers College, despite the fact that it has occasionally been ridiculed for standing politically and socially for little more than colorlessness, mediocrity, and just plain behaviorism, has exerted a tremendous influence upon the school teachers of the American Middle West, underpaid men and women who for years have willingly spent their summers in New York City for the privilege of drinking at this new fountain of progress.

A Final Judgment

What must be our final judgment on John Dewey as the philosopher of the American public school? It would seem to be an elementary truth that before we can hope to invent a system, whether of politics or education, which will not in the end turn out to be thoroughly bad, we should be able to take for granted the existence of something like common decency. Now, moral earnestness without religious conviction is a bare possibility—at least with the select few who happen to be the beneficiaries of a moral momentum bequeathed by generations of devout forebears. But as a rule the passing of a religion marks the decline of the moral consciousness which it created and sustained. Professor Dewey seems to have taken for granted that the common decency he himself adhered to by reason of the aftershine of a Puritan ancestry could be regarded as a ubiquitous feature of human nature as the result of evolution. If so, his philosophy of education appears to rest upon a somewhat precarious faith, a thing not quite in keeping with his strenuous disavowal of metaphysics and his reverence for scientific method. And if, in view of the present religious and moral poverty in the homes, the schools, and increasingly large sections of the churches, American education will presently have only the principles of instrumentalism to fall back on, one wonders just how long we can last as a self-governing and civilized society. John Dewey is dead, but the dominant secular temper of contemporary America which he expressed is very much alive. John Dewey’s spirit “goes marching on”—who knows to what hard destiny?

END

Earthen Vessels

“For He knoweth our frame;

He remembereth that we are dust.”

The God who spoke to darkness

And bid it turn to light;

Set sun and moon in heaven

And made the day and night—

Is the Father who created

Man from the dust of earth;

Who breathed into him spirit—

Gave him eternal worth.

The God of our Lord Jesus,

Who sent Him as the Light

To fill the earthen vessel

And thus show forth His might—

Is the Potter who remodels

The creatures of His Hand

Until the Glow of heaven

Shines through, at His command.

This God of matchless Power

In earth and sea and sky;

Yet stoops to bear the burden

Of one so frail as I—

In His divine compassion

Takes my infirmity;

His Hand, I know, will perfect

Those things concerning me.

FRANCES M. BARBEE

Cecil De Boer, late Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, died suddenly on November 28, 1955. His latest writings recently have been published under the title Responsible Protestantism: Essays on the Christian’s Role in a Secular Society by Eerdmans. The essay above is an abridgment of a chapter from this volume, reprinted by permission.

Cover Story

From Wesley to Graham

J. C. Pollock

A criticism in Britain at the time of the Billy Graham Crusades suggested that such efforts were outside the stream of national religious development and therefore suspect. This view takes no account of history. For over two hundred years, since large populations first arose, mass evangelism has played a leading part in the growth of Christianity in the British Isles.

A Venerable Tradition

The memory of John Wesley and George Whitefield is now held in high honor. Their names, Wesley’s especially, have that aura of respectability which is given to the prophets of the past and which was accorded to neither during his lifetime by national religious leaders.

Both men—Whitefield following somewhat gingerly at first in Wesley’s footsteps—addressed vast crowds in the only large auditoriums available, the open air. For preaching in unconsecrated buildings or in the open and for making mass appeals for decision they were berated by their contemporaries. A new class, however, a proletariat, had been created in Britain by the Industrial Revolution, and organized religion had passed it by. The two evangelists, working for the greater part independently and at times in doctrinal conflict, brought to this new class the knowledge of the holiness and love of God. They went fearlessly among rough and almost savage miners and sought out the factory and mill workers while also, like the Lollards before them, preaching at the market crosses of great country towns. The “classes” they founded and the congregations they built up brought a new awareness of Christ to many of every level, Whitefield especially reaching the aristocracy.

But it was the proletariat who most felt the power of Wesley and Whitefield. Without the two evangelists and their followers those exploited myriads, unleavened by the Gospel of Christ, might have exploded in a revolution more terrible than that of France. And this was recognized, once the passing of time permitted the building of the sepulchres of persecuted prophets.

Generations Of Silence

After Wesley’s death in 1791 no evangelist of like caliber arose for two generations. The stream of the Evangelical Revival flowed on, Wesley’s branch mainly through the church which bore his name, Whitefield’s more directly affecting the Church of England. Evangelicalism grew, but its great names were now those of pastors and teachers, such as Charles Simeon of Cambridge, or social reformers, such as Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury. As the nineteenth century passed into its fifties the movement became stilted, its impetus dying, choked with the respectability born of its own victory, and its energies increasingly absorbed by controversy rather than evangelism.

In 1857 occurred the revival in New York. In 1859 this revival reached Northern Ireland from where, in the early sixties it spread through the length and breadth of England and Scotland, more quietly than in the first evangelical revival, but as surely. No name to be placed beside that of Wesley is associated with these years, but during them arose great missions operating today at home or abroad. A new spirit of devotion, of faith in God’s power, and of willingness to proclaim the Christian gospel with conviction was sensed in churches, chapels, and meeting houses, preparing the way for the great advance to follow.

Moody’S Visit To Britain

In 1873, at the age of thirty-eight, Dwight Lyman Moody reached England. He had made a short visit before but had been unknown beyond a small circle. From 1873 to 1875, Moody undertook a campaign throughout the British Isles, and in a short time this genial, burly New Englander with a large black beard became, with the singer Ira D. Sankey, an important force in British religious life. He addressed, night after night, crowded meetings in London, Edinburgh and the provinces; he touched the lives of princesses and flower girls, cabinet ministers and cabbies and gave the churches a new vision of the need and the possibilities of evangelism. His second long visit, from 1882 to 1884, ensured that whatever the caustic comments of the ill-disposed, D. L. Moody would be reckoned among the formative figures in the development of modern Britain.

At first sight it seems strange that such a man should have so influenced mid-Victorian England, when the upper classes were stiff with convention and an excessive regard for birth and rank and the masses inclined to despise Americans as heartily as they despised Colonials. Unlike Wesley, Moody had little academic background. He made up for it by voracious reading and a native shrewdness which made him the type of the self-made man on whom depended the new wealth, if not the political leadership, of the age. He had no obvious breeding (and his accent was at first a source of mirth) but he offset this handicap by an innate courtesy developed no doubt as much from his New England background as from the influence of God’s grace on his character. And this, with his patience and expansive good humor, helped him to win the respect and affection of men and women of all levels without pandering to their artificialities. And his profound learning in those two great books—the Bible and human nature—enabled him to penetrate to the root of the troubles of those who sought his help.

The strength of British religion in the last quarter of the nineteenth century owed much to Moody. He did not initiate revival, as Wesley and Whitefield, but he caught the rising tide and swept it on until it reached the furthest recesses of the land. Every Protestant mission and ministry, even the Tractarians, drew strength from his work, epitomized by a remark of the Vice-Principal of a Cambridge theological college two years after Moody’s mission in the University. “I think there is not one man here whose life was not influenced more or less by Moody’s mission.”

In the social sphere he was not a pioneer, for the social consciousness was already alert before he came. But his campaigns increased the impetus provided by Lord Shaftesbury and others, and renewed the hope of the Gospel to the underprivileged who might have been led into materialistic exasperation by the agnosticism of Darwin and Huxley. That the British working-class movement developed more in the spirit of Methodism than of Marx is not a little due to Moody.

The Arrival Of Torrey

Nineteen years after Moody’s second campaign, another American evangelist landed in England. For two years it seemed as if the great days were back. R. A. Torrey, the failed suicide who had been converted to Christ, the brilliant Bible student who had run after Higher Criticism and found it wanting, the abrupt and rather forbidding white-bearded, white-haired prophet of forty-eight, reached London with Charles Alexander in 1903 after a triumphant evangelistic tour in Australia and New Zealand.

In the providence of God Great Britain has often learned more from American evangelists than from the native-born. Perhaps it is the freshness of their approach and the pleasing unfamiliarity of their accent which enables them to deal more faithfully with us than we would accept from one of ourselves.

R. A. Torrey was no exception. He filled the great halls of London and the chief cities of the land. He reached men and women of all classes. His severity seemed more apposite to the careless Edwardian age than Moody’s geniality, his inside knowledge of the strident liberalism of the contemporary theological leaders and his reasoned faith in “the Bible, the whole Bible, as the word of God; an altogether reliable revelation from God himself” was more effective for his generation than would have been Moody’s more rough-hewn presentation of biblical truth.

When Torrey left Great Britain in 1905, the sponsors said, “We know that tens of thousands have opened their hearts to Christ … and there have been blessings that cannot be counted, a spiritual force and influence and awakening which is immeasurable.” Yet no lasting national revival occurred. The churches turned again to their theological and ritualistic controversies, popular agnostic science gained further ground (despite the faith of many leading scientists), literary men continued to proclaim a Christian ethic divorced from Christian dogma and nine years later the outbreak of the First World War shattered the brittle fabric of national church-going.

The Barren Decades

In the barren years between the wars, the twenties and thirties, with the tide flowing strongly against any vigorous or authoritative Christianity, evangelism was at a discount. Such attempts as there were at mass evangelism on more than a strictly local level were associated with unfortunate characters, some from across the Atlantic, whose odd methods or travesties of doctrine left a legacy of suspicion to shadow the work of those who trod sounder paths in recent days; or else were devoted to the propagation of teaching attuned more to the spirit of the age than of the Scriptures, such as Frank Buchman’s Oxford Group.

In the late forties, in the fresher atmosphere generated by the sufferings and achievements of the Second World War, the usefulness and potentialities of great meetings began to be demonstrated again. The name of Mr. Tom Rees should be honored for his faith in reopening tracks which had become overgrown with the weeds of the interwar years.

The Graham Impetus

When Dr. Billy Graham came to London early in 1954, he arrived at a time, as the Archbishop of Canterbury commented in his sympathetic appraisal at the close of the Crusade, when “a fairly widespread beginning of a return to the Christian religion had already set in.… Many things had combined to make people desire to find an escape from moral indifference, disillusionment and despair. Many were ready to be recalled to their faith in Christ or to discover afresh his claim upon them.” Thus, like Moody and unlike Wesley, Dr. Graham did not, under God, initiate a recovery of faith but was used to lift forward the incoming surge. For, as the Archbishop also wrote in June, 1954, the London Crusade “beyond doubt brought new strength and hope in Christ to multitudes, and won many to him.… It has given an impetus to evangelism for which all churches may be thankful to God.”

It is too soon to appraise Dr. Graham’s position in the story of British Christianity. But his London and his Glasgow Crusades can never be forgotten. And if the signs of the times are sure and if, as is to be hoped, he returns to conduct a Crusade in the Industrial North of England, it would certainly seem that he will be regarded by the later twentieth century as significantly as Moody the century before.

Evangelism And The Nation

These five evangelists—Wesley, Whitefield, Moody, Torrey, Graham—with varying backgrounds and characters and, apart from their different historical environments, varying methods, have characteristics in common, which might be called the marks of the great evangelist. Each has the awareness of a definite, dated conversion, though not necessarily preceded by intense spiritual conflict. Each has an unhesitating dependence on the Bible as the Word of God, to be used as the Sword of the Spirit; no liberal has ever been a great evangelist. All the five possess great energy and resilience, an ability to continue for prolonged periods without proper leisure and to seize their relaxation in odd moments—Wesley did most of his reading on horseback as he traveled to his next engagement.

They exhibit strict discipline of body and mind and know that their ability to preach effectively depends on their willingness to absorb Bible knowledge and to read widely. They have faith, continually renewed. They have a passionate, unforced love for the souls for whom Christ died and, above all, a deep and abiding sense of the presence beside them of their Lord and Saviour.

Pastors, teachers and administrators each have their part to play. But without the evangelist God’s will for a nation cannot be fulfilled. And without these men, from Wesley to Graham, England would not be what it is.

J. C. Pollock, Editor of the Anglican quarterly The Churchman, is Rector of Horsington, Somerset, England. Author of several books, his most recent work, The Road to Glory, the story of Havelock of Lucknow, the distinguished Christian general, is scheduled for publication this year.

Cover Story

The Holy Spirit in Acts and the Epistles

Everett F. Harrison

Only once, for a period of ten days, have the followers of Christ ever been found in a state of waiting. The Lord himself was no longer physically present to teach his own, and the promised Spirit had not yet come. But as soon as the Spirit came that company was galvanized into purposeful activity. They were launched upon a witness which turned the world upside down.

The Greater Works

Evidently Jesus had selected his words with care when he told his chosen band in the Upper Room that it was expedient for them that he go away. If he did not go, he asserted, the Spirit would not come. His followers might well ask what could possibly be more to their advantage than the continued bodily presence of their Lord and Master? Yet now in one almost unbelievable day they had lived to experience the fulfillment of Jesus’ statement. The Spirit had come and with his coming the greater works had begun to unfold. A harvest of souls larger than Jesus had garnered through three long wearisome years of labor had been gathered in during this single day of Pentecostal blessing.

We need have no doubt about the accuracy of Luke’s report of that eventful day. Who would dare to claim for the preaching of the apostles a greater measure of success than had attended the efforts of the Lord Jesus? But this very success, even though it is attributed to the Spirit, creates a problem. Granted that Jesus had predicted this new era of power and achievement; yet its very realization seems to compromise his own uniqueness as the Mediator, the Founder of the Church, the supreme Lord. Is not the Spirit more potent than he? Do not the Spirit’s accomplishments outshine those of the Saviour?

All this is true in appearance only. Actually if the Son of God had not offered himself for the sins of men and if the Father had not raised him from the dead, there would have been no demonstration of the Spirit’s power at Pentecost. Further, the supreme authority of the Son is safeguarded in the very fact that he sent the Spirit. The economy of the Spirit is his own continuing work. The testimony of the Spirit is what the Spirit hears from the risen Christ (John 16:13,14). The Lord Jesus is the one who baptizes with the Spirit. The mighty deeds wrought through apostolic hands by the Spirit are equally attributable to the living Christ (Rom. 15:18,19). The gifts which the Spirit so freely bestows upon the Church are traced ultimately to the beneficence of the risen Lord (Eph. 4:8 ff). At no time does the Spirit act in independence of the exalted Son of God.

In view of the importance attached by Jesus to the coming of the Spirit in his teaching of the twelve and in view of the personal participation by these men in the experience of being filled and emboldened by the Spirit, it is not surprising that they attributed their decisions, their actions and the fruitfulness of their labors to the Spirit’s guidance and control. Later generations of believers could talk about the doctrine of the Spirit. These men knew rather the fact of the Spirit’s presence and power in their lives.

The Spirit’S Flame

The early Church was characterized by a limited emphasis on organization. We read of apostles and elders and deacons, to be sure, but the real guarantee of order, the real authority in discipline, the real ability in the ministering of the Word lay with the Spirit. Ananias and Sapphira learned that it could be fatal to try to deceive Him. Peter learned that he could safely move in company which his traditions and inclinations forbade as long as he was sure that the Spirit was sending him. Faced with the same prejudice against Gentiles which Peter originally had, the church at Jerusalem came to the point of acknowledging that these aliens from the commonwealth of Israel were to be admitted to Christian fellowship without any burden of law observance. It freely acknowledged that its decision was prompted by the Spirit of God (Acts 15:28). Indeed, it could scarcely have acted otherwise, seeing that the Spirit had already pointed in this direction by coming upon Gentiles as Peter preached to them (Acts 15:8). Another prominent congregation, the Gentile church at Antioch, itself the product of missionary labors, was constrained by the Spirit to thrust forth its most valued leaders to bear the message to more remote places (Acts 13:2).

This apostolic Church is the Church we forget. We remember that it was missionary, and we try to be. We recall that it preached the Word, and we admonish one another to sound forth the Gospel in no uncertain terms. But somehow the wheels drag heavily. We are burdened with our efforts. We delight in motion even when we cannot honestly call it progress. Men of like passions with ourselves made up the apostolic Church. They were guilty of disharmony at times. They made mistakes. But their crowning credential is that they lived and labored under the consciousness of the authority of the Holy Spirit. Unless the Church in our time can recapture this basic attitude, it cannot successfully minister in the present world crisis.

It is characteristic of the allusions to the Spirit in the book of Acts that they are part of the life situation of the early Church. They are not items of formal instruction about the Spirit. For these we must turn to the Epistles. The extensive data cannot easily be subsumed under a few heads, but we propose to examine the teaching in terms of the Spirit’s relation to Scripture, to Christ, and to the saints.

Spirit And Scripture

We learn that no part of Scripture can be explained, from the standpoint of its initiation, as a human production. Rather, men spoke from God as they were borne along by the Spirit (2 Pet. 1:20,21). Consequently it is impossible to hold that the Bible is a humanly produced work which God subsequently endorsed. It is his Word because of the Spirit’s activity in prompting and controlling the human writers. From a companion passage (1 Pet. 1:10–12) we learn that some things given to the Old Testament prophets were so far beyond their own understanding that they required special illumination in order to comprehend the temporal aspect of their prophecies concerning the redemptive work of the Messiah.

The Word is not only a treasure house of divine information but an arsenal for the use of the Christian soldier. The weapons of our warfare are spiritual. In particular the Word of God is the sword of the Spirit (Eph. 6:17). It cuts deeply into heart and conscience. It overcomes the evil one.

If the Spirit has truly authored the written Word, that to which our Lord appealed whether in the midst of temptation or argument or calm instruction, how unthinkable it is for the Christian to depreciate that Word by alleging that there is a guidance and authority of the Spirit which transcends the Word and sets one free from the trammels of the ancient and static oracles. When Paul draws his contrast between the letter which kills and the Spirit which gives life (2 Cor. 3:6; Rom. 7:6), he has no intention of providing justification for this modern fancy. He is simply contrasting the economy of the Spirit, the Gospel dispensation, with the legal economy, the Mosaic dispensation.

The Lord And The Spirit

As we turn to consider the relation between the Spirit and Christ, it is well to note at the outset that here too a wrongheaded criticism has misrepresented the true state of affairs. Paul’s emphasis on Christ as Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45 and possibly 2 Cor. 3:17) has been construed as contradicting the idea of a bodily resurrection (an ironical twist to a passage embedded in the great resurrection chapter) or as an indication that for Paul the earthly Jesus of history mattered little; what is crucial is one’s perception of him in his present spiritual existence. The antithesis is sometimes put in this form: Jesus the man versus Christ the Spirit. In the hands of criticism this operates to impart to the figure of Christ a mystical vagueness. But when Paul linked the Spirit to Jesus, the actual result was not the etherealizing of Jesus into the Christ but rather the sharpening of the personality and historicity of the Spirit. Paul was already committed to the indispensability of the historic Jesus for Christian faith (1 Cor. 11:1).

A typical representation is that which the apostle gives in Galatians 4:4–6. God sent his Son to redeem; then into the hearts of those who received the Son he sent the Spirit of his Son, the same Spirit who rested upon him in the days of his flesh and who has now come to glorify him. How could this Spirit, in the fulfilling of such a function, divert attention from the historic Jesus, the One who sent him to realize in his followers the lively image of his character and to recall to them his words and deeds and to guide them into his truth?

Doubtless the tide Spirit of Christ is intended not only to glance back to the earthly life of Jesus but also to emphasize that it is only by means of the Spirit that Jesus, exalted to the right hand of the Father, can come to dwell in the hearts of his people.

The Spirit And The Saints

By far the richest teaching of the Epistles on the Spirit concerns his relation to the saints. Here the gamut runs from conversion to consummation. Every phase of the believer’s life is under the gracious and compelling influence of the Paraclete. Christian life in terms of the teaching of the Epistles simply could not exist apart from his enablement. He is, in fact, the bringer of life (Rom. 8:2,6,10).

The Spirit A Gift

Because of our familiarity with the truth that every believer has the Spirit (Rom. 8:9), we are in danger of overlooking the truth that he is ours by virtue of a divine gift. Christ was given once; the Spirit is given every time a heart is opened to the incoming of Christ. God’s gifts are not repented of. The Spirit’s dwelling is permanent. Yet one would not know it to judge from our prayers and our hymnology. Ever and again we implore the Spirit to come. Such a prayer would seem to be a confession that we have not rightly cultivated his presence, that we are still in measure strangers to the communion of the Spirit.

Broadly stated, the Spirit is given to us for the development of the potential of our new life in Christ Jesus. He is ever the Servant of our blessed Lord even as Christ took the place of the Servant in relation to the Father during the days of his flesh. In sanctification the order is not, as in salvation, Christ, then the Spirit, but the reverse. We are to be strengthened by the Spirit in the inner man for the fullest measure of the realization of Christ who dwells in our hearts (Eph. 3:16,17). The goal is the new man in Christ which is being formed within us (Gal. 4:19).

The truth is in order to goodness. A part of the Spirit’s work is to lead the people of God into the truth, disclosing the deep things of God to them, that they may become “spiritual,” which Paul defines in terms of possessing the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16). From the plight of the Corinthians we learn that the very truths of the Word which are needed to build us up can be kept from us by such things as divisions and strife, which belong to the old life but are out of place in the new. From the Spirit we must “learn Christ,” discovering what is alien to him as well as what is in harmony with his will.

The Spirit And The Flesh

One can hardly consider sanctification without some attention to the recurring title, the Holy Spirit. Almost nonexistent in the Old Testament, it appears occasionally in the Gospels, profusely in the Acts (over 40 times) and moderately in the Epistles (approximately 25 times). But when we look for a connection between the use of this title and the situation in which it is employed, it is seldom apparent in the Gospels (perhaps Luke 1:35 is the only instance). In the Acts the tide is almost conventional, although 5:3 may be an exception. In the Epistles, however, the title seems to be deliberately chosen at times to reinforce the demand for inner conformity to his holy presence (1 Cor. 6:19; Eph. 4:30; 1 Thess. 4:8).

Paul is fond of putting the Spirit in sharp antithesis to the flesh. If the flesh (which includes mental attitudes as well as bodily appetites) is powerless to please God in a man’s unconverted state it is equally true that the flesh which lingers in the believer cannot please God. The only hope for overcoming the pull of the flesh lies in hearty submission to the Spirit (Rom. 8:4; Gal. 5:16).

Presence And Fullness

In the Epistles, as in the Acts, a distinction is recognized between the presence of the Spirit and his fullness. In salvation, the believer is the passive recipient of the Spirit, who comes in as the divine seal of the transaction. But in attaining the fullness of the Spirit, the will of the child of God is active. We are commanded to have such fullness (Eph. 5:18). That this is no esoteric experience is evident. The command is addressed to all—wives, husbands, children, slaves, all whose peculiar obligations are sketched in the ensuing verses. Surely the implication is that even the homely demands laid upon them cannot be fulfilled apart from the Spirit’s fullest enablement. But this fullness of the Spirit is not linked to the realization of somber duty alone. It is more immediately seen as working out in terms of joyfulness and thanksgiving, so that obligations may be addressed with a light heart (Eph. 5:19,20).

Logically the fullness of the Spirit is closely connected with the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22,23), even though, in the immediate context, Paul prefers such terms as being led of the Spirit and walking in the Spirit. He distinguishes these states from simply living in the Spirit (Gal. 5:25). Some believers in our day, as in the apostolic age, are enamored of the spectacular gifts of the Spirit such as speaking in tongues. Even if these should be sought and cultivated, it is well to remember that the apostle points to the fruit of the Spirit (which does not include the spectacular gifts) as the more excellent way. Unless the fruit of the Spirit is present, the power of the Spirit does not result in edification. Love has the preeminence in building up the saints.

This leads to the observation that the same Spirit who joins the individual believer to Christ unites the saints to one another. The term body of Christ is highly significant. Just as man is constituted of body and spirit, so the church is more than a mass of individuals viewed as a whole. It becomes a living organism because of the Spirit who indwells it.

Delicate indeed is the task of the Spirit. In the Word which he has inspired he must speak of himself. But he does so with consummate modesty. He gives himself no name. His titles are scarcely distinctive, for God is Spirit and God is holy. As the Spirit of God or the Spirit of Christ, he places himself in apparent dependency upon the other members of the Godhead. He nowhere asks for a specific act of faith toward himself. He turns us ever toward the Son of God and through him to the Father. It is his glory to glorify Christ. No man speaking by the Spirit of God called Jesus accursed: and no man can say that Jesus is Lord, but by the Holy Ghost (1 Cor. 12:3).

Everett F. Harrison was born in Alaska of missionary parents. He holds the A.B. degree from University of Washington, A.M. from Princeton University, Th.B. from Princeton Theological Seminary, Th.D. from Dallas Theological Seminary and Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania. Since 1947 he has been Professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is author of The Son of God among the Sons of Men and is presently engaged in writing a Life of Christ.

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