Last year CHRISTIANITY TODAY announced that more than $1,000 would be awarded for sermons preached sometime in 1962—“that (1) expose the fallacies of universalism and (2) faithfully expound the biblical revelation of man’s final destiny and the ground and conditions of his redemption.”

In response to this announcement we received 250 sermons from a majority of the fifty states and also from Canada, Mexico, Peru, Wales, Scotland, India, Japan, and the Philippines. The sermons were by preachers from many denominations. The following served as judges: Dr. Andrew W. Blackwood, professor of homiletics, emeritus, at Princeton Theological Seminary; Dr. Harold B. Kuhn, professor of the philosophy of religion, Asbury Theological Seminary; Dr. Robert J. Lamont, pastor, First Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh; Dr. Harold John Ockenga, pastor, Park Street Church, Boston. They were aided by a panel of experts, working with the executive editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Now that the long task of reading and evaluating 250 sermons has been completed, we announce the results of the competition. (The winning sermon follows this page.)

First Place ($500 award)—The Rev. R. Eugene Crow, D.D., director of evangelism and public relations of the Southern California (American) Baptist Convention, for a sermon entitled “Eternity: Our Responsibility.”

Second Place ($250 award)—The Rev. Bruce J. Nichols, M.Th., Union Biblical Seminary, Yeotmal, Maharashtra, India, for a sermon entitled “The Great Encounter.”

Third Place ($125 award)—The Rev. John M. L. Young, D.D., missionary in Japan of World Presbyterian Missions and president of the Japan Christian Theological Seminary, Tokyo, for a sermon entitled “The Curse of Christ.”

Fourth Place ($75 award)—The Rev. Faris D. Whitesell, D.D., professor of preaching, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Chicago, for a sermon entitled “Reconciliation Requires Response.”

Fifth Place ($75 award)—The Rev. Fred D. Howard, Ph.D., professor of religion and philosophy, Wayland Baptist College, Plainview, Texas, for a sermon entitled “The Moral Necessity of Hell.”

Honorable Mention—The Rev. Calvin Niewenhuis, pastor, First Christian Reformed Church, Waupun, Wisconsin, for a sermon entitled “Christ’s Life for His Sheep.”

The fact that within a period of about six months 250 congregations throughout the nation and in a number of foreign countries heard—perhaps in some cases for the first time—a biblical discussion of the errors of universalism together with a presentation of redemption shows the significance of this venture.

Universalism may be briefly defined as the doctrine of the ultimate, eternal well-being of every person. As a Christian heresy, it goes back to the early years of the Church. St. Augustine strongly attacked it, and the doctrine is rejected by the general tradition of the Church—Roman, Eastern, and Protestant. Nevertheless it has persisted and influences many Protestant pulpits today. It has two chief forms—restoration to God at death and restoration to God after future punishment. Its modern expression implies that all men are already saved, although they know it not, or that the victory of Christ includes the final reconciliation of all to God.

Universalism in America goes back to the late eighteenth century. In 1961 the Universalist Church merged with the Unitarian Church. This merger shows that the universalist heresy can lead even to humanistic rather than theistic religion, as with some churches in the Unitarian-Universalist Association today.

More dangerous to the spiritual welfare of Protestantism than the openly universalistic churches is the hidden universalism found in practically every major denomination. Often unrecognized in evangelical Protestant churches, it is present by implication in failure faithfully to proclaim the judgment as well as love of God. For many a Protestant what the New Testament teaches about hell is vague and unreal, because he never hears the doctrine except perhaps in the Apostles’ Creed.

Yet those who preach universalism openly, covertly, or by default must reckon with the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ. He who came to show us in his perfect humanity what God is, taught not only love but also judgment. The starkest words about hell were spoken by our Lord himself. The eternal lostness of the unsaved is hard to preach. But Christ, the Lord of love, taught it, and the Bible declares it.

God’s ministers are called to preach not what is congenial but what God has revealed in his Scriptures. For to preach so as to lead men to feel that somehow, somewhere, all will be well with their souls when they have never trusted Christ, is to lull them into a false security and to stultify evangelism and missions. Not that the biblical message about human destiny is only negative. On the contrary, it is gloriously positive, calling men to receive life more abundantly in Christ, inviting them to share in “the things that God hath prepared for them that love him.” Therefore, preaching of the awful possibility of hell must always be accompanied by the proclamation of redemption through Christ. The eternal destiny of the human soul is not a subject for speculation; it is truth revealed in the Word of God. As such, it must be preached in love for the lost and in hope of their acceptance of the Gospel of salvation.

As a theological force in America, Protestant liberalism is now open to increasing fragmentation. Liberal frontiers are in a fluid state; nobody seems able to chart lines of fixed differentiation authoritatively. A crumbling of positions, along with some realignment of loyalties, is setting in. The term “liberalism” is not self-definitive; its only common feature is a methodology; but the conclusions it draws from that methodology, which involves tentativeness, are constantly being revised. The one sure fact is that liberalism has less a character of its own than a settled temper of antipathy toward central aspects of biblical supernaturalism.

Plurality and variety have in fact marked liberalism since its beginnings. Under the banner of Schleiermacher there emerged in America, as H. Shelton Smith has noted, the traditions of (1) enlightenment (rational liberalism), both deistic and pantheistic, but Unitarian in either case; (2) transcendentalism (romantic liberalism), championed by New Englanders like Theodore Parker and Emerson, whose revolt against Locke was informed by Kant, Schelling, and Hegel in the direction of epistemological intuitionism; (3) Christocentric liberalism, which held a more radical view of sin and appealed to a Christological “norm,” as with Horace Bushnell, W. N. Clarke, W. Adams Brown, and Walter Rauschenbush; (4) empirical liberalism, which erected experience as the only norm and derived “truth” from process, as with James, Dewey, and Wieman.

The early 1930s proved a moment of judgment upon liberalism. Pressed from the right by the logic of evangelical stalwarts like J. G. Machen (in view of what liberalism wished to preserve) and from the left by the logic of naturalistic humanism (in view of what liberalism disowned), and pressed from behind by the pressures of post-war history, so-called post-modern liberalism sought to correct its positions. On the premise shared by Barth and by Machen, that “modernism is heresy,” both European neoorthodoxy and American evangelicalism called liberalism to higher ground, the former to an authoritative scriptural revelation and the latter to vertical divine confrontation. In these circumstances, liberalism was increasingly on the defensive, became less creative than its champions boasted, and espoused a guarded apologetic.

The emerging “realistic theology” halted short not only of evangelical positions but of Barthian commitment. The new note of realism in American liberalism was struck firmly within remaining liberal postulates. Reinhold Niebuhr, Robert L. Calhoun, Paul Tillich, H. Richard Niebuhr, Walter Marshall Horton, John C. Bennett, H Shelton Smith, and L. Harold DeWolf emerged as chastened liberals who refused to move to Barthian positions. At the time when Continental theology was most thoroughly influenced by neoorthodoxy and the impact of Barth and Brunner was at its height in Europe, a poll by CHRISTIANITY TODAYdisclosed that more American ministers still chose to be designated as liberal (14 per cent) rather than as neoorthodox (12 per cent). It was younger scholars studying abroad, much more than American theologians, who accounted for neoorthodox gains in America.

Barth’s supernaturalism (the Virgin Birth included) and his insistence on the absolute uniqueness of special revelation, and hence the rejection of general revelation, and a one-sided fideism (his denial of the necessity for any kind of philosophical apologetics for Christianity), were among the stumbling blocks. Instead of displacing liberalism in America, crisis-theology was welcomed simply as a form of liberal self-criticism. Every influential crisis-theologian on the American side not only began as a liberal, but also remains a liberal in methodology—not simply in the acceptance of organic evolution and biblical criticism, but in the rejection of special supernatural revelation and redemption. It is not surprising, therefore, to hear it said that Horton’s prognosis in the 1930s (“liberalism has collapsed”) was premature, and to learn that Niebuhr now considers many of his earlier broadsides against liberalism too sweeping.

After a generation of fermentive reflection and dialogue, the most prominent leaders in American liberal ranks are leaving the scene through either death or retirement—the two Niebuhrs, Tillich, Van Dusen, Shelton Smith, and others. The younger liberals acknowledge that no “new flag” is flying. It is a time for second thoughts, they say. Some, lacking a recognizable theology, are prone to substitute a conscience on political or sociological issues—particularly the race question. Their main excursion into dogmatic concerns, one is tempted to say, is simply a wild distortion or misrepresentation of evangelical views (the doctrine of original sin is made to mean that every man is “a bag of pus,” the doctrine of substitutionary atonement that God “becomes loving only when he sees blood sprinkled around,” and such calumnies).

It is clear that most liberals remain wholly out of touch with the massive works of evangelical orthodoxy—dismissed as irrelevant simply because the problems they addressed were of no immediate concern to liberals. While they grant the resurgence of “erudite evangelicalism,” some liberal denominational leaders maneuver to crowd the book tables at ministerial conferences with anything and everything but solid evangelical publications, as if to concede that liberalism today can survive only in a climate that is specially protected.

Among the regrouping liberal forces is a movement which H. Shelton Smith, one of the editors of American Christianity, designates as Christocentric realistic liberalism. Smith identifies himself with this wing, which he calls liberalism’s “reigning” type. Its emphases are on divine transcendence as well as immanence, divine revelation (general as well as Christian), God’s sovereign judgment in history, the sinfulness of man, the social gospel, and an ecumenical doctrine of the Church. Its methodology remains liberal, and it readily utilizes the accepted categories and beliefs of the ruling cultural milieu as a means of communicating Christian faith. It renounces any external criterion of truth (despite its claim to take revelation seriously), since this would lead to authoritarianism. It conceives of revelation in the form not of concepts and words but of subjective awareness. Its main claim to advance lies in its Christological affirmation: to be genuinely Christian, a theology must recognize the incarnation as the hinge of history. Jesus Christ is therefore not just another man; unitarianism is rejected, and Trinitarianism affirmed.

But when one examines this Christological ingredient at closer range, its real meaning is usually seen as much less than its apparent meaning. The Trinitarianism turns out to be not ontological but economic or Sabellian. The Chalcedonian formulation is rejected as based on a substance philosophy, and the Nicene formula approved. But this “Christocentric” view has other peculiar aspects. It does not embrace the Virgin Birth or the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Nor does it consider his teaching normative. At various points, it is said—Satan, angels, hell, eternal punishment, and so on—Jesus was simply the child of his culture. And while Jesus’ “vicarious existence” is emphasized, his death is viewed as simply the culminating event of a series of acts that rendered his death inescapable. (In the words of one spokesman for the Christological realists: “If Jesus had been strangled with a silk stocking, it would have meant just as much.”) Moreover, there is no doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to sinners, but simply an emphasis on divine forgiveness and moral stimulus.

Insofar as Christological realism sees that, to survive as a Christian movement, liberalism must move from an empirical to a Christological norm and thus to incarnational and Trinitarian ground, its instinct is sound. But thus far this readjustment has been hesitant and half-hearted. In Europe liberal Protestants have already passed through this zone—on the way up, or on the way down. Karl Barth convinced Continental thinkers that to take Christianity seriously, one must take divine initiative and special revelation and incarnation seriously and realize that “modernism is heresy.” There are weighty objections to many aspects of Barth’s theology, but not at this point. The tendency of Christological realists to console themselves with Cornelius Van Til’s judgment that Barth’s methodology is after all liberal, despite his conclusions, is scant comfort, for it is liberalism’s conclusions that seem constantly to call for revision.

This plight of liberalism results, no doubt, from its methodological predicament. It has lost what Barth has sought to recover, a “Thus saith the Lord.” The weaknesses even of Barth’s exposition are well stated in the recent book, Karl Barth’s Theological Method, by Gordon H. Clark. And right here, in the recovery of the divine authoritative note in modern theology and a new recognition of the role of Scripture as the rule of faith and practice, lies the key to the fortunes of the religious movements of our age.

It was in 1910, when I was transferred from Crossen on the Oder to Danzig, that I really found out what preaching meant.

I had gone to Danzig very reluctantly. The Reformed congregation to which I was assigned numbered barely 2,000 souls, scattered throughout the city and its suburbs. Of “reform” there was not a trace. People were prosperous and worldly, that was all. And the small congregation was lost in the huge church of SS. Peter and Paul. A magnificent musician, Professor Fuchs, sat at the powerful organ. But he was not interested in the service. During the sermon he read his Schopenhauer.

From the first day I realized that everything depended on the sermon. The members of the Reformed congregation were not to be counted upon—with a few exceptions, of course. Those who came to church did not come to take part in the religious life of the congregation. As for the non-Reformed, they would not so much as set foot in a Reformed church. They did not want to have their children confirmed there, and they definitely did not want to attend the Communion service. Those who came, came exclusively for the sermon. There were no workers among them, or members of the lower middle class, who went to their own parish churches. The only people who came were the well-educated, for whom membership in a congregation meant nothing, but who were looking for a preacher who had something to offer them. It was sheer coincidence if one of them happened to belong to the Reformed congregation.

I made few personal contacts. I had no idea who was at service. Some wrote to me after my sermons, and such letters occasionally led to contacts. But basically I was thrown back upon myself. I tried to put my time to good use. I began to learn to preach.

I always found preaching hard. Even as a student at Wittenberg I envied those of my fellow students who were glad when their turn came to preach in the Schlosskirche, over Luther’s tomb. I was never glad. I felt too inadequate to be able to hand on to the congregation, with authority, the word of the holy God—for that is what preaching really is. This sense I have retained right up to my old age.

It was easiest, of course, to preach to the kind of educated congregation that was slowly building up in Danzig, or the kind I later had in Berlin, at Heilsbronnen. Sermons before such congregations certainly required the most careful preparation, but nevertheless one was addressing communicants from the same world as the preacher. They lived with the same issues, even if they did not arrive at the same conclusions. They listened to the words of Holy Writ with the same assumptions. They understood quickly what the preacher meant, even if he did not always express himself with complete clarity.

Preparing a sermon was always hard for me. But once I began to speak from my pulpit at Heilsbronnen—with people standing all the way out to the vestibule, sitting on the altar steps, often on the steps leading up to the pulpit too, with the altar beautifully adorned, with many faces familiar to me from my Bible classes or from house visits—then it was easy to say what I had to say at the command of my God.

Nevertheless I would often go home from service depressed. For I could not preach as the strict Lutherans preached. Once, the president of the Westphalian church, who was a Lutheran of that stamp, was sitting in the sacristy during a festival service at which he was to preach the second sermon. He saw his young colleague who had preached the first sermon wiping the sweat from his brow as he descended from the pulpit. “You are sweating, my brother?” he asked in a tone of reproach. “Only falsehood brings out the sweat!” That was the Lutheran principle: God’s word is efficacious of itself; the preacher should not try to make it more efficacious by his own efforts.

I could not preach like that. I had to preach with body, mind, and soul, as the Apostle Paul says, in intimate contact with the congregation. I had to demand something of the congregation. I had to be able to see in their faces whether what I said in the name of my Lord Jesus Christ was reaching them or not. And from the way the congregation said the Amen I had to be able to sense whether the sermon had gone home. With the Amen I was released from the inner tension in which I had lived during the preceding twenty-four hours.

Today it is not uncommon to hear it said that the liturgy is more important than the sermon, and that a feeling for the liturgy should be reawakened in the Evangelical Church.

I do not deny that these liturgical endeavors have their significance. How often have I longed for purely liturgical services myself! For instance, at sessions of the synod, after four to six days of incessant talk from early morning to late evening, I often found it intolerable to listen to yet another sermon at the close of the proceedings. Could we not for once have an hour of reflection at a liturgical service without human speech?

But it is not my own wishes that I have to consult, least of all at services which I am conducting. I have to think of the congregation. I am the last to overestimate the imporance of sermons in the inner development of the church and in the practical application of the Gospel to the life of our people. It should not be imagined that anything decisive can be given to people in a fleeting half-hour on a Sunday, especially when attendance is irregular. Something effective can occasionally happen, but each time it is the result of a special grace of God.

As for “famous pulpit orators,” these are the worst, and their importance has been vastly exaggerated. In the 1880s, Berlin had more brilliant preachers than it ever had before, or since. There was nothing unusual, in those days, in seeing dozens or, rather, hundreds of people waiting before a closed church door an hour and a half before the beginning of the service in order to secure their places. And it was precisely at this period that parish life decayed and Berlin became a worldly city. The Rhineland, on the other hand, always had remarkably few pulpit orators. But parish life flourished, both inwardly and outwardly. The same is true of the Moravians. Famous preachers, whether they will it or not, gather an audience rather than a genuine congregation. They attract people who care more about the manner than about the matter of a sermon; people who in running after a famous preacher evade their duty to their own parish.

Power Of The Average Sermon

The important thing in the Evangelical Church is the sound, average sermon. But the average sermon requires diligence and concentrated spiritual power. That is the only kind of sermon which will carry conviction.

I was thankful that for years I could minister to quite unpretentious congregations. I was never tempted to try to preach like a Rittelmeyer, for instance, who always showered upon his congregation a veritable cornucopia of modern literary allusions and brilliant reflections, and made it quite clear that he was fully conversant with the problems of modern art and science. The rest of us, to be sure, might almost envy him the number of cultivated persons he drew to his pulpit. Yet the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a very straightforward affair, and it is this that everyone needs for his salvation, old and young alike and in every walk of life, however exalted and however lowly. I was happy if I chanced to notice a fourteen-year-old nudging his little brother at some point in my sermon as though to say: “Do you hear? That’s meant for you!”

When I was still a boy, a curious law suit took place in Berlin. A young officer had gone to church in Charlottenburg with a detachment of soldiers. They found themselves at a service conducted by Pastor Kraatz, a very liberal minister. The preacher’s critical comments on the Gospel shocked the officer, who came of a very strict religious family. Finally he could stand it no longer. He signed to his men and they all left the church together—and their departure, as is customary with soldiers, was not made altogether without noise.

The liberal church council initiated proceedings for disturbance of a public religious service. The pastor was called upon to testify. The judge asked him to state what he considered to be the purpose of a sermon. The pastor replied that the purpose was for the preacher to “discuss religious questions” with the congregation. To those of us young people who had not rallied to the standard of liberalism such a definition was shocking.

The advent of the National Socialists in 1933 marked the beginning of the Kirchenkampf (church struggle), and with it a turning point in the history of the sermon.

The pastors who had accepted National Socialism were, at Hitler’s behest, calling themselves “German-Christians.” Many of these German-Christians—and important ones among them—let themselves be carried away by their political enthusiasm, quite heedless of the scriptural text. For instance, on Good Friday, there would be a description of the arrest of Jesus. “Then all the disciples forsook him, and fled.” To which the preacher would add: “Such a thing could never have happened to Adolf Hitler!” and he would go on about German loyalty, about the fighting courage which National Socialism had restored, and so forth. Or again—this was a particular favorite with the German-Christians as a text for sermons in 1933—“But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory!” The words “through our Lord Jesus Christ” were suppressed. And the fact that the whole verse deals with victory over sin did not trouble them. The victory, as they saw it, was Adolf Hitler’s victory of January 30, 1933, and the victory of the National Socialist movement.

Nor did they shrink from altering the text when it suited them. For instance, the opening words of St. John’s Gospel would now be cited as reading: “In the beginning was the people, and the people was with God, and the people was God!”

Getting To The Essentials

Now people began to open their eyes. Up till then they had felt unsure.

Now it was clear to everyone. When Karl Barth called upon the theologians to “get down to essentials,” his call found a resounding echo among both pastors and congregations. What people wanted to know was not what Pastor X thought about political, religious, or other problems, but what God’s eternal word had to say to them in their need and temptations. Quotations from modern poets stuck in pastors’ throats. Congregations no longer wanted to be told that they might believe this or that because Goethe or Wilhelm Raabe had said something of the sort—something more beautiful and impressive, even, than the New Testament. No, people now wanted to hear what the Church of Jesus Christ proclaimed to them as the word of God.

Overnight the collections of Rittelmeyer’s sermons, which previously had gone through edition after edition, were discarded and forgotten. It was the substance that mattered once more; and that, generally speaking, is how it has remained to the present day.

One result of this new frame of mind was the renewed popularity of what theologians call the homily. This is a sermon in which the text is analyzed sentence by sentence, rather than as a whole, and in which not much time is devoted to its practical lessons.

I have never used that form of preaching. To my mind a homily has a purpose only when the members of the congregation have the text open before them and can follow the exposition verse by verse. This occurs in some British congregations, but not here, unfortunately. And only rarely is the text so well known—the parables of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, for instance—that the congregation can follow the preacher point by point. In other cases the precision and acuity of the homily are lost on them. The homily is suitable for the Bible class, not for the parish service.

I have the impression, too, that with this type of sermon the pastor tends to stick too closely to the text itself and fails to make the connection with the practical life of the congregation. Even if he tries to relate the text to present-day reality he will often not get beyond generalities.

I have always regarded the sermon as a vehicle for pastoral care. It should reach the members of the congregation in their daily duties and needs. That is why it has to be practical. For the parish pastor, the substance of his sermon is constantly supplied by his daily work of pastoral counseling. The pastor who has no parish has to search further for a subject. But no sermon should be without pastoral impact on daily life. During the sermon the listener should form resolutions. “He who does not have a God to thread his needle, does not have a God to give him salvation either,” wrote Elise Averdieck in her old age. That is the spirit in which a sermon should be preached.

I remember an incident which took place at Lauenburg in 1913. We were having our big annual mission celebration. Dr. Axenfeld, the director of the Berlin Mission Society, was staying with us. In the morning I had to preach the regular Sunday sermon. It was certainly not a good sermon, for I had not had enough time or peace to prepare it. After the service Axenfeld put his hand in mine and said, “I was so happy; you demand something of the congregation.”

My principle regarding a sermon has always been quite simple and straightforward. When the wife comes home and her husband asks her (or the other way round, as the case may be): “What did he say?” she should be able to reply quite definitely: “He said this.” Perhaps the text was so simple that she can repeat it. That is good. Perhaps the preacher gave an illustration or told a story which she can relate in her turn. That is also good. And it is also helpful if the pastor organizes his sermon under clear headings and recapitulates those headings toward the end.

The pastor should prepare his sermon in writing. If he cannot do so because he is too busy, then he must make it an iron rule to write out at least every second or third sermon. Otherwise he will inevitably slip into monotonous chatter.

The art of preaching begins with the translation of the written word into living speech. The written and the spoken word are two fundamentally different things. The written word moves in relative clauses and paragraphs. The spoken word requires short sentences, clear associations. It uses emphasis to express many things which in the written word have to be explicitly formulated. Very few people have the gift of delivering a written text so that it comes alive. Sermons that are read are nearly always boring.

In our day, people will not tolerate the old-fashioned oratory in which every word was so polished that the text had perforce to be committed to memory verbatim. We have become too sober and realistic for that kind of thing. Today the only possible way to preach is to master both the over-all theme and the details of the written sermon, to memorize certain important phrases but to develop the sermon itself from the pulpit. It is an art that comes naturally to very few. Most preachers have to acquire it laboriously over the years. The preacher who prides himself on jotting down brief notes and then speaking freely will soon show his superficiality. A sermon is not an address before a meeting. It is bound by its scriptural text. It undertakes to proclaim eternal truth in the name of God. The man who treats it lightly is not fit to be a preacher.

The Glad Message Of Grace

This truth, be it added, is the glad message of the grace of God which in Jesus Christ has become final reality. It is a message which includes moral imperatives. But sermons on morals, unrelated to the Gospel, should never be preached from a Christian pulpit. And if this glad message also contains words about God’s judgments which man must ultimately face, it is still a message of joy, and that fact must emerge from every sermon. I rarely preached a penitential sermon. I could never get over what St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “lest that … when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.” But the penitential sermon in which the preacher declares himself at one with those to whom he is speaking is actually no longer a penitential sermon, for it must of necessity end in a glorifying of God’s grace.

Let those who feel themselves called upon to be prophets preach penitential sermons! We simple servants of God should preach in such a way that those who listen to us may always feel: “We are the Saviour’s joyful people!”

Of my own sermons, I shall here mention three.

The first of these was the sermon of March 21, 1933, which the National Socialists and later the Communists held so strongly against me. To the end of my life in the ministry I abided by what I said at that time.

The second sermon relates to July 1, 1937, when Niemöller was arrested. The day was a Thursday. On Sunday I had to conduct the service in his place.

People streamed into the church. Two overcrowded services took place in succession. My text was from Second Timothy, where St. Paul speaks of the sufferings he has undergone. The text was not deliberately chosen but taken, I believe, from the Bible reading for the day. (The sermon is no longer in my possession.) In the sermon I adhered strictly to the text. Each word was carefully weighed. The congregation followed the sermon with palpable emotion. Niemöller’s name was not mentioned till the final prayer.

The church was swarming with agents of the Gestapo who were immediately conspicuous by their irreligious and sometimes boorish behavior. A couple of courageous women stopped some of these “Stapisten,” as we called them, after the service, and asked them what they had to say about the sermon. They could say nothing at all. They admitted that not a word could have been construed as hostile to the State—although of course everyone in the church sensed what was behind the words.

At first nothing happened. Ten days later I was arrested—for the third time. The sermon had been taken down by faithful members of the congregation and reproduced. They had meant well. They had not yet learned that under a totalitarian regime one should commit nothing to paper, at any rate not under the author’s name or without his permission. Inevitably the notes of my sermon fell into the hands of the Gestapo. Grounds for prosecution had been provided after all.

A couple of days later I was brought before the magistrate who was to determine whether the police custody should be followed by a bench warrant or not. To that extent judicial forms were still observed.

The judge had the sermon before him and now began to go through it sentence by sentence. “You refer to the Apostle Paul all the time,” he said, “but in fact you always mean Niemöller!” There was a grain of truth in what he said. This is the way the congregation had understood the sermon, and I had known that they would so understand it.

Nevertheless I could in good conscience give the judge a little lecture to the effect that a sermon belongs to the service and must be interpreted within the framework of the service. If a National Socialist trial judge subsequently goes through every word with a blue pencil, an interpretation will emerge which does justice neither to the preacher nor to the congregation.

This seemed to make some impression on the judge. After a half-hour’s talk, he suddenly informed me that he would not issue a bench warrant and that I was free. In a short while I was outside in the street and could telephone my wife to tell her of my release.

Later I learned that the news of this unexpected release aroused something of a storm within the Party. But this time they did not dare rearrest me, as they had already done once before.

The third sermon was delivered on May 20, 1945.

On April 25 the Russians had marched into Berlin. For two weeks we had had to live in cellars, constantly threatened by hostile visits by day and by night.

In the meantime we began to rebuild our ecclesiastical organization. On May 7 the Consistory was reconstituted in Dilschneider’s parsonage at Zehlendorf. We met every day. And one of our first decisions was to hold a big service in the church of St. Matthew in Steglitz on Whitsunday, May 20, at which the new church leadership would appear before the congregation. I was skeptical. Transportation facilities had not yet been restored. It was impossible to publish announcements. Who would come?

But as we made our way on foot from Lichterfelde to Steglitz, we saw our congregation flocking in the same direction—groups of people from Nikolassee, from Schlachtensee, from Zehlendorf, from the heart of Berlin. They were undaunted by the long trek, an hour, two hours through the ruins of Berlin. They could not all fit inside the church. But the building, after all, had no windows, and the doors would not close. So I preached my sermon to the packed congregation and beyond it, to the many whom I could not see.

I had never experienced such an atmosphere before or since. The people’s faces still bore the marks of the shock of the recent past. At the same time they were buoyed up by a new hope, a new resolve. Everything was destroyed. But the Church of Jesus Christ remained. With it and in it they were prepared to make a new beginning.

The text was taken from the second part of the Pentecost story: “This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses.” We recalled the Whitsunday, twelve years before, when Pastor von Bodelschwing, newly elected Reich Bishop, had preached in the Zion Church in Berlin, and all the sufferings the church had undergone in those twelve years. And then I called upon the community of the faithful to help the new church leadership: “Help us to trust in the Holy Ghost. Help us to pray that the Holy Ghost may come upon us, too! Help us to do the deeds of the Holy Ghost!”

Dr. Otto Dibelius, Evangelical Bishop of Berlin, has spanned in his ministry two world wars and the division of his homeland. This article is reprinted from the forthcoming book, In the Service of the Lord: The Autobiography of Bishop Dibelius (Copyright © 1963 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.), by permission of the publishers, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.

American churches suffered under a load of frustrations during 1963. Some thought they saw the flicker of a breakthrough, but the signs of frustration were more obvious. The Protestant establishment barely held its own in a year when availability of resources was at a peak. Then came the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of the chief suspect. Ministers and laymen alike felt a sense of defeat.

For clergymen, a chief source of frustration was what to do with the latest variety in a historic strain of hearers-only Christians. The 1963 crop of professing believers whose lives reflect so little of New Testament teaching drew many a pastor into the lonely garden of perplexity.

One candid young minister came out of an experiment aimed at more meaningful Christianity with these words: “It’s been a flop. So far I’ve managed to reduce the congregation from 400 to about 50.”

He had tried modern music, jazz, dialogues, discussions, and plays. Next on the list was a plan to convert the church into an apartment house with the lobby as a chapel.

The heresy of universalism, implicit or overt, may be held responsible for lay indifference in some quarters. But what about lethargy in evangelical ranks?

The growth rate of most evangelical enterprises has leveled off markedly in recent years, and in 1963 many such efforts were pushing to maintain the status quo. Yet spiritual and physical need in the world is acute. Modern science offers the helping hand of amazing new developments in communications, air travel, medicine, and machinery, but lack of money and manpower keeps the most sophisticated of these means beyond the church’s grasp. Frustration thus seems inevitable.

“It’s like trying to climb Niagara Falls to meet these needs,” one evangelical leader said publicly.

Frustrations are especially apparent over the race question. Every major denomination has officially condemned racial prejudice, but action by the rank-and-file has hardly begun. The March on Washington with its wide religious support turned out to be a significant demonstration, but so far its effect on the churches seems to have been negligible. Most observers feel that if the organized American church were able to put its own 118,000,000-member house in order, the civil-rights issue would be resolved. The latest attempt at “enforcement” of top-echelon dicta is the offer of denominational funds to integrationist clergymen who get into trouble with the laity. It is at best a stop-gap maneuver, however, inasmuch as large lay defections could wreck denominational budgets.

The Christian Century published a letter from a minister who put his finger on the broader issue. “On the one hand,” the minister wrote, “we have the supposedly learned clergymen who are capable of saying what the Bible means but too fearful to tell laymen bluntly what they should be doing about it. On the other we have laymen of high intelligence, occupying strategic positions in the world, who do things all the time but generally refuse to study in depth so that they can learn God’s will for their lives.”

Likewise men of low estate have acted in ways which can point only to spiritual decline in “Christian America.” By what perverted philosophy does a man undertake to kill the leader of the free world? By what right does another seek amends through a second murder? What kind of examples have American Christians set that such attitudes can coexist alongside the teachings of Jesus Christ?

Today’s cultural patterns accentuate the problem of lay indifference. The man of the 1960s is subjected to so vast an assortment of daily messages that it is a wonder he takes anything seriously. The Sunday sermon becomes an ever smaller part of the total communications complex made up of television, radio, records, books, periodicals, signs, pamphlets, letters, and packaging. Americans are retreating to the isolation of high-rise apartments or secluded country homes, where they are sealed off from some of the clamor—and from the influence of the church.

Personal participation in the local church program is further discouraged by such developments as the weekend travel habit, now made so much more inviting by the rapidly expanding super-highway system. In short, the church is conspicuous by its absence in the emerging cultural patterns of the sixties.

But the laity is experiencing frustration, too. And some of the brethren in the pews are blaming their own disillusionment, curiously enough, on the clergy.

The chief clergy-produced irritant of 1963 was the wide ecclesiastical support for the Supreme Court’s decision against public school devotions. Take, for example, the statement by United States Senator Norris Cotton of New Hampshire: “The thing that disturbs me is that ministers and clergymen of many denominations are sanctioning this decision, insisting it is a sound one. This I cannot understand.”

Laymen are bewildered because they think it is the job of clergymen to foster rather than to discourage any form of prayer and Bible reading. They fail to see how the principle of separation of church and state can be stretched so far as to preclude public school devotions, particularly since the practice is well over a hundred years old in many localities.

Disparity of views between clergymen and laymen over the Supreme Court decision is underscored by the result of a Gallup poll published this past summer. It indicated that 70 per cent of the American public disapproves of the court’s decision. Only 24 per cent of those responding to the poll said they approved of the decision. Six per cent gave no opinion.

An Unfilled Void

Be that as it may, neither the clergy nor the laity has made a significant attempt to fill the void that some say was created by the court ruling. A nation-wide sample survey conducted by CHRISTIANITY TODAY failed to turn up any new movements to counter the school ban with new devotional forms. (There has been a grass-roots Bible study movement afoot for several years, but it saw no appreciable spurt.) Even the most vociferous critics of the court decision seemed not inclined to bow the knee any oftener themselves. Student prayer services in a Montpelier, Vermont, church were discontinued because of poor attendance.

Most ironic in this connection is the fact that the United States government has for the last ten years set aside a National Day of Prayer which is largely ignored by church people. Each fall, in accordance with an act of Congress passed in 1952, the President issues a proclamation naming a certain day to be observed as a day of intercession. Selection is usually made so late, however, that religious forces have little time to prepare. Most people never even hear of it.

If religious historians were to compile a list of the more perplexing events of 1963, nominations would surely include the failure of the Lutheran World Assembly in Helsinki to arrive at a definition of justification by faith.

“Considered from one point of view,” said a knowledgeable observer, “the charge of failure, while it is a gross oversimplification, is not entirely without foundation.” He then added that “one wonders … if the charge of failure does not arise as a result of a basic confusion concerning the purpose of the assembly and its responsibility in regard to the interpretation of justification.”

There also seemed to be a lack of understanding among the laity of the purpose of the Faith and Order Conference held at Montreal. Delegates did, however, engage in wholesome theological confrontation. On the other hand, some observers expected more. Ambiguous agreements left them disappointed.

More realistic was the hard-hitting manifesto put together by Anglican bishops and released at the congress of their communion in Toronto. The statement called for a “rebirth” of Anglicanism in terms of its worldwide relations. But again a gap between clergy and laity became apparent when the document was discussed at the Church Assembly in London last month. One layman, saying it heaped “inanity upon inanity,” proposed an amendment which was carried by his own house and the clergy only to be vetoed by the bishops.

The Church And The Future

How will the discontent of the laity affect the future? Some dare to suggest that the organized church is expendable, that it need no longer be considered as God’s chief station among men, that he could choose to work through an alternate cultural institution, and that men and women in secular employment might well be more effective apostles than religious professionals. The church, to put it bluntly, would be transcended.

A few observers might say such a transition is already taking place. For a long time governments have been more active in the expansion of educational and humanitarian enterprises, which traditionally were the churches’ forte. To cite one example, little has been done to step up the effectiveness of church-related rescue mission work in the inner cities; meanwhile, vast amounts of public money are being poured out to combat the ills of urban slums through secular means. The churches have the challenge of major new problem areas such as mental health and traffic safety, but little interest has thus far been apparent.

The trend suggests a fading sense of compassion, a preference on the part of the American religious establishment for more impersonal approaches. During 1963, the world saw two instances of refugees fleeing religious persecution: the thirty-two Siberians who vainly pleaded for help at the American embassy in Moscow and the twenty-nine Cubans who landed on the British island of Anguilla Key only to see more than half of their group seized by marauding Castro seamen and returned to Cuba. Not a single major religious denomination or organization raised a voice of protest over the inhuman treatment of these two groups.

But while other significant liabilities could be entered on the ledger of religious forces for 1963, there are important assets to be credited in the United States and Canada. The charismatic revival, controversial in its present state of development, may be a sign of spiritual renewal. Moreover, other manifestations of God’s Spirit in evangelism, Christian education, prophetic preaching, and a stronger sense of social and moral concern, could also reflect greater vitality.

The big topic of conversation at the moment is the new ecumenical climate. Evangelicals will surely err if they chose to ignore the movement, for it has already given the Gospel opportunities which were unthinkable a decade ago. Beyond that, it is clear that the people of the world now live too close together to be able to afford serious disputes. If the Gospel is going to be preached at all, it will have to be preached in an attitude of mutual respect. A line must be drawn, however, and the question of a more amicable posture toward atheistic Communism has serious implications.

A listing of the more important assets would also include the advancing linguistics-literature program, the interest in the Bible which has been given a boost by modern-language translations, and the vital faith exhibited by military personnel and their dependents in the face of often adverse circumstances.

By far the most heartening single development was the evangelistic crusade with Billy Graham conducted by the Christians of Southern California. Here was a case of believers clasping hands across denominational lines and submerging petty differences in the interests of proclaiming the saving Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. The evangelicals of California, so often thought more carnal by their Eastern brethren, pooled their efforts in sacrificial spirit and were used of God to give Los Angeles one of the most powerful evangelistic crusades any city has ever known.

These are restless years. The man of the sixties has an almost rocket-like energy, but the uncharted expanses of a revolutionary decade leave him uneasy. The booster of more obvious post-war opportunity is spent, and the path ahead demands creativity. A myriad of forces seek to influence his course. And through his dizzy flight he knows that the push of a button can terminate it.

The energy of the restless sixties can be harnessed to serve a Christian advance. The problem is how to tell modern man more effectively that only a response to the Gospel of Christ enables him to attain the orbit of godly living. Time, our most precious commodity, is uncertain. The necessity of a coordinated strategy for evangelical advance is urgent.

Ministers who are obliged to preach Old Year or New Year sermons are usually hard put to know what to say. To preach about the year as something forever gone and past is a rather melancholy business. For there is something sad about year’s end; melancholy does linger through the last days of a dying year. For some this haunting feeling has the sharp edge of despair, as the sudden increase in suicides so tragically indicates. After all, a year is not just a year, but a year of a man’s life, and the end of the one echoes the end of the other. Old Year sermons consequently tend to be funereal.

A sober realism similarly prevents the maker of New Year sermons from speaking with unbounded enthusiasm about the glowing possibilities often superficially associated with the dawn of a new year. Memories of past years hinder hope that the new year will be all shining and bright.

Why is it difficult even for the Christian minister to make good sermons about the ending of one year and the beginning of a new one? Chiefly, because neither Old Year’s Day nor New Year’s Day is a Christian holiday. Neither day commemorates a great act of God or a significant event in the life of Christ. Our calendar is a Roman calendar, and the origin of its division of time stems from paganism at worst, or from the movement of the stars at best. Consequently, he who feels obliged to preach Jesus Christ “in season and out of season” has peculiar difficulties in his sermonic efforts because he can find nothing distinctively Christian to say about the thirty-first of December or the first of January. Under the circumstances he does the best he can. He either philosophizes about time and its passage, or preaches a sermon equally appropriate to any day of the year, based on a biblical text that knows nothing about Old or New Year days.

Yet there is a distinctively Christian understanding of time that is old and past, and of time that is new and coming. Strangely, few Christians have a clear understanding of it, though even non-Christians constantly pay it silent tribute. And it has to do with Christmas, the most celebrated of Christian holidays. It is the birth and life of Christ that divide the times, ending the old and beginning the new. Christ’s birth has divided our time and history; his death and resurrection have determined what is Old and what is New. He rendered all things before him Old, all things that come after, New. The division he made is absolutely decisive; what he did can happen only once, and, once it has happened, cannot be undone.

The peculiar way the Western world numbers the years is a mute but powerful testimony to this significance of Christ’s birth. The familiar B.C. and A.D. express a deep theological insight. Numerically the years before Christ can be counted either forward or backward. Yet the West counts them backward, thereby expressing the theological understanding that what happened before Christ is not only past but also finished and complete. And the countback begins with Christ, from the center, for he made them old and past. But the years after Christ are counted forward, for as the New they are always new; pulsating with eternity, they open out upon an authentic, never-ending future. This theological understanding of Christ’s birth as a division of time so decisive as to be the only point of departure for any meaningful count of the years, is the significance of B.C. and A.D. It is something to which every newspaper, check, business transaction, every piece of correspondence daily bears silent witness.

Christmas and New Year’s are but a week apart. But how often within a week men forget the meaning of Christmas and celebrate their own division of the times, haunted as it is with melancholy and unable as it is to sustain a new departure toward better things.

As 1963 dies, let Christians not sorrow as those having no hope; as they enter 1964, may they enter it carrying the memory of the meaning of Christ’s entrance into our time and knowing that he who divides time gives those trusting in him the power to redeem time. For each year and each day falls under the division of B.C. and A.D.

At this season of the year, there is but one Christian affirmation: Our times are in Thy hand.

The ancient land of Portugal is yielding in a slow but gratifying way to evangelical Protestant penetration. Much Spanish and Portuguese Catholicism remains hostile and intolerant of evangelical Christianity, some of the most “conservative” churchmen participating in Vatican Council II coming from this European peninsula. Yet believers are daring nonetheless to pray daily that Portugal may be stirred by divine blessing upon the courageous witness of united evangelical forces.

The Portuguese are in fact adrift from their traditional Romanist moorings. Some Dutch Catholics are said to consider Portugal a mission field. In a land the size of Indiana, with almost ten million inhabitants, some 70 to 90 per cent of the people are not attending Catholic churches, the figure varying with the provinces. Of Catholic candidates for the priesthood, proportionately fewer arrive at the goal from seminaries in Portugal than in any other country in Europe. Some 40 per cent of the population remains illiterate. In some sections there is but one priest to every 12,000 inhabitants. In this land of the legends of Fatima, religious life is crassly superstitious, and for many Portuguese Catholics the doctrine of Mary’s assumption into heaven has become more significant than the ascension of Jesus. When the Baptist Convention of Portugal during an evangelistic effort in Porto paid for billboards proclaiming Christ the hope of the world, Catholic zealots superimposed the words “Christ and the Virgin.”

Despite the deterioration of their own religious position, some Catholic leaders repeatedly exert subtle political pressures to repress Protestant evangelistic efforts. A Keswick convention of sorts was held annually at Carrascal until Catholic pressures forced the Y.W.C.A. to discontinue building a rest home there in 1948. Jesuits in Portugal as well as in other lands label evangelical workers as Communists or as political agitators and through the hierarchy’s publications discredit them as pernicious and dangerous. Evangelical pastors are denied the vocational identification card granted to priests and to bricklayers and barbers because their category is nationally “unrecognized.” Alongside this religious prejudice against Protestants, new restrictions have recently been placed on the importation of evangelical books—even Bibles. In some cases postal and customs authorities have turned back as much as 75 per cent of such literature, and some Sunday schools now lack quarterlies for lesson studies despite repeated appeals to Portuguese authorities. Government funds are used to build Roman churches, and church-state relations are interpreted specially to benefit Catholicism. A papal concordat exempts Catholic priests from paying income taxes.

Although Portugal’s long history has many anti-papal facets, and neither the prime minister nor the people want to be “stepped on” by the Catholic hierarchy, the present situation is ambiguous. The hierarchy’s anti-evangelical temper flashed hot in the aftermath of a sudden and in some ways amazing evangelical breakthrough in Portugal earlier this year. A cooperative evangelical thrust in Lisbon, with the Lebanese evangelist Samuel Doctorian as speaker, resulted in nightly crowds of 3,000 persons, a cumulative attendance of some 70,000, and at least 1,400 decisions—including priests, atheists, and persons from all walks of life. After the meetings had run twenty nights they were halted by police. A protest to the civil governor of Lisbon was unavailing. Orders to intervene (reported reliably to have come from the Cardinal of Lisbon) were provoked by anxieties lest all Lisbon become unsettled by evangelical preaching.

Then evangelical workers in the southern province of Algarve near the Straits of Gibraltar (where evidence is still found of the Moorish invasion and five centuries of occupation) united for a small but successful evangelistic effort. But most spectacular was a thirteen-day crusade to the north that for the first time united virtually all evangelical workers in Porto, the nation’s second city. There were some 400 decisions. After the first week a Methodist minister invited workers to a tea which, they discovered, was arranged by twenty-two young people converted during the opening nights.

Evangelical leaders contend they can hardly be charged with proselyting since the masses have neither heard the Gospel nor maintained their church ties, and the people themselves are showing signs of new interest in Christian realities. Among Protestant leaders a few express fear that mass evangelism will provoke Romanist countermeasures. But these same spokesmen seem also to oppose foreign missionary effort and mass evangelism under any circumstances.

While there is little open persecution of Protestants, there is underground opposition, and evangelicals are disallowed full freedom of public evangelistic meetings. For about two years new congregations have been unable to gain “legal personality” as corporate entities with property rights except as missions of older efforts previously recognized.

What marked the evangelical breakthrough in Portugal was a vivid sense of sin and shame which overpowered those attending the special meetings and constrained many to cry out for divine salvation. At one banquet even the waiters were convicted and filled with a longing for deliverance, and several were converted.

Although the Portuguese are outside the churches, they respect God and are open to the Gospel. But the hunger of the people is now awakening more rapidly to material than to spiritual desires in a land of much hardship and poverty. The fact that many evangelicals are themselves “have-nots” gives them special appeal in speaking of blessings beyond the material.

Pentecostals have the largest church in Lisbon (seating 1,500) and are active in personal work and diligent in stewardship, But vigorous churches are also maintained by the Brethren, Independents, Baptists, Lusitanians (Episcopal), Methodists, and Presbyterians. The number of evangelical believers is now thought to exceed 30,000. Baptists have the most seminary-trained ministers. In one Presbyterian church in Lisbon twenty-two persons recently responded to a Communion Sunday call for converts, and prayer-meeting attendance has multiplied several times.

The growing interest of Protestant pastors and evangelists in a united “evangelism in depth” effort on a nationwide basis is one of the significant developments, since the divisions among Protestants are an obstacle which Catholics exploit. Interdenominational activities have helped prepare the way across the years, under sponsorship such as the Evangelical Alliance, the Comissao Inter-Edesiastica Portuguesa, Christian Endeavor, the Portugal Sunday Schools Union, and in some areas the Y.M.C.A. also. There are now 600 Protestant churches and missions and 300 pastors and evangelists in Portugal. A large number of missions are led by laymen, many because of a shortage of ministers or lack of financial ability, although the Brethren prefer a lay ministry. Among Portugal’s 70,000 gypsies a growing company of converts now includes numerous voting people determined to prepare to preach the Gospel to their own people. Another hopeful factor is the emergence of an organization of Christian businessmen meeting periodically in Lisbon and aggressively interested in an evangelistic thrust.

A Campaign Against Christianity

Placed in the hands of church authorities in London last month was a detailed document describing what it tails the “dreadful persecution” of Russian Orthodox believers in Byelorussia and the Western Ukraine.

Brought by a British tourist who visited the Soviet Union, it was signed by a group of “parishioners and pilgrims of the Orthodox churches throughout Russia” and addressed to the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul and to the Patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem, “and others.”

Church sources said they regarded the document as exceptionally important not only in describing the atheistic policies of the Soviet regime—as reflected in two important areas of Russia—but in indicating the courage and tenacity of great masses of Orthodox believers in resisting all attempts to wean them from religion.

One source said that “while many visitors to the U.S.S.R. have reported on evidences of the strong religious devotion still found there, this document offers a tragic but inspiring insight into precisely what this means in terms of personal courage and fortitude.”

Although undated, the document appeared to have been written subsequent to August 6, the most recent date mentioned in the text.

The document confirms reports last December that monks at the Pochayev Monastery in the Tarnopol region of the Western Ukraine have been subjected to severe persecution at the hands of Soviet secret policy.

In Byelorussia, it charged, churches and monasteries have been ordered closed and torn down, ruthless campaigns of persecution have been carried out against parents who seek to give their children a religious education, clergymen have been forbidden to conduct religious services, and monks have been hounded and vilified.

The document also charged that “in order to exterminate the Orthodox faith and to speed up the closing of the churches, the government is secretly training its godless Communists as priests. They appoint them as heads of churches and cathedrals and make them bishops and priests.”

Worse still, it said, some priests through weakness, have become servants of “the Anti-Christs who may well convert the Orthodox Church into a heretical church.”

According to the document, the current anti-religious campaign began in 1959 when children of school and pre-school age were forbidden to serve as acolytes to bishops anywhere in Russia. This was done, it said, on orders of Vladimir Kuroyedov, president of the State Council in charge of Russian Orthodox affairs.

Between 1960 and 1962, it said, three churches were closed—two of them were later demolished—in Minsk, Kozyrevskaia, and Semitskava. In 1961 authorities in Byelorussia forbade the reception of Holy Communion and church attendance by children under eighteen.

“The mockery has gone so far.” the document said, “the strict representative stands next to the church of the Minsk archdiocese, spying on the children. If he finds any children in the church, he speaks to the churchwarden and this servant of Anti-Christ collars them and knocks their heads against the wall.”

The report said one of the children was the son of a pious widow, whose house was later visited by state investigators who stripped the walls of all ikons, and took away all her religious books. The agents also threatened to send her son and her other children to a boarding school where they would be protected from the “contamination” of religion.

Citing similar cases, the document said many parents in Minsk had pleaded with the civil authorities “not to drive their children out of church.” Some, it said, even went to Moscow to plead before Premier Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders, “but their appeals were ignored.”

On May 30 last, the document recalled, many pilgrims from all over Russia came to venerate a famous ikon of the Blessed Virgin in the village of Zhirovitsy in the Grodno district, but local authorities barred clergymen from conducting services.

Minsk and Grodno authorities also sent agents to intimidate young men planning to enter a monastery in Zhirovitsy, the report said, and as a result none of them enrolled.

Pentecostal Aid

How Pentecostal churches may help other denominations receiving gifts of tongues was one of the keynotes of the sixteenth annual convention of the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America, held last month in Montreal. The Rev. Thomas Zimmerman. general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, said the Pentecostal movement has the responsibility of guiding those experiencing this phenomenon to prevent the tendencies to excess which often characterized the Pentecostal movement in its own early days.

The $500,000 Virgin Of Kazan

The Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of America, at its quadrennial Sobor (general convention) in New York City, agreed to purchase a 500-year-old ikon of the Virgin Mary from a private collector for $500,000.

Measuring 10 by 13 inches and encrusted with some 1,000 diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and pearls, the ikon, known as the “Virgin of Kazan,” is named for the Russian city where it was painted in about 1400.

Plans call for the ikon to be displayed in the New York World’s Fair pavilion of the Russian church, which does not recognize the Moscow Patriarchate. The painting was shown at the Holy Virgin Protection Cathedral in New York during the convention, and before that was on a tour of the United States and Canada.

Credited with many miracles, the ikon is believed to have been in a Moscow Orthodox cathedral until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. It was sold by the Communists and is now owned by Miss Anna Mitchell-Hedges of Farley Castle, Berkshire, England, who agreed to sell it to the Russian church in America.

Depicted in the ikon with the Virgin Mary is the Child Jesus resting in her arms. The gems around the painted wooden panel are encrusted in a silver gilt rizza which covers all the ikon except the faces of Mary and Jesus. It is believed that this rizza was added to the picture in about 1600.

“When the king, having ended the time of fasting, kept his Easter, the queen and her followers were still fasting, and celebrating Palm Sunday.” This intriguing domestic vignette, in which the principal characters were the Anglo-Saxon king Oswy and his queen Eanfleda, described by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History, was enacted thirteen hundred years ago, in the middle of the seventh century. It serves to remind us of the fact that the question of the proper date of Easter has been a center of much controversy in the history of the Church.

The question has been brought to the fore once again by the announcement that the Vatican Council, now in session in Rome, has by an overwhelming majority (2,058 to 9) agreed to fixing the date of Easter in the event that civil authorities adopt a calendar reform. As things are now, the date of Easter changes from year to year, falling on the first Sunday after the full moon which occurs on or next after March 21. This involves variations of date between the limits of March 22 and April 25, so that Easter is at present very much a moving feast. (The Eastern churches follow a different system for computing the date of Easter.)

In the early Church, controversy was aroused when some Christians, especially those of Asia Minor, maintained that Easter, the Christian Passover (see 1 Cor. 5:7), should coincide with the date of the Jewish Passover, which fell invariably on the fourteenth day of the lunar month Nisan. The rest of the Christian world insisted that Easter should always fall on a Sunday. Thus in the middle of the second century Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the bishop of Rome, Anicetus, to conform to the usage favored in Asia Minor. Later in that same century Anicetus’s successor Victor actually excommunicated Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, for holding to the Jewish date—an action which called forth a rebuke from Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons. By this time it had become normal to celebrate Easter on the Sunday following Nisan 14; but even so the issue was complicated by a further controversy over the method of determining the date of the paschal moon.

The First General Council, held at Nicea in A.D. 325, sought to resolve this conflict by making the regulation that Easter should be observed throughout the Church on the Sunday following the full moon next after the vernal equinox. But the continuing use of different paschal cycles, in particular in Rome and Alexandria, meant that confusion was still not eliminated. Between the Roman and the Alexandrian Easter there was a difference of a week, as there was also between the Roman date and the date observed by the Celtic churches of the British Isles—hence the intriguing situation in which one and the same day was Easter Day for King Oswy and Palm Sunday for Queen Eanfleda. This divergence continued until the Roman system was formally approved by the Synod of Whitby in A.D. 664—a decision which at first applied only to the territory of Northumbria, but which five years later was extended to the whole country.

Of course, the calculation of the date of Easter by reference to lunar cycles means that it is not a fixed festival, but shifts constantly within the limits that have been mentioned. This is not a particularly convenient arrangement, and the advantages of a fixed date are widely acknowledged. The fact is that there seems to be no good reason, apart from predilection for old-established custom, why there should not be universal agreement over a proposal for a fixed date.

The proposal is not a new one. For instance, to glance at more recent years, in 1928 the British Parliament approved what is known as the Easter Act, in accordance with which Easter would fall on the Sunday following the second Saturday in April. But this act will not come into force unless and until the general agreement of the churches has first been obtained. In 1949 the proposal that a perpetual world calendar should be approved was discussed by the United Nations, but was subsequently put into cold storage. It will be as well for the Christian Church if it is left there permanently, in view of the fact that a universal calendar is unlikely to find anyplace for the great festivals and seasons of the Christian year.

The British proposal is a sensible one, though it would mean that Easter was only virtually fixed: the actual date would still vary, but the variation would be within the limits of a few days instead of, as at present, five weeks, and complicated calculations would no longer be necessary.

A scheme has in fact been suggested which would have the effect of making Easter an absolutely fixed date; namely, Sunday, April 8. This would be achieved by dividing the year into four quarters of thirteen weeks each. But there is a loose end to this scheme, for there would be a blank day to be added in somewhere each year to make up the 365 days (two days would have to be added in a leap year); this awkwardness is unlikely to commend itself.

Less commendable still would be an absolutely fixed date, which would mean the incidence of Easter on a different day of the week each succeeding year. It can hardly be a matter of doubt that Christian churches throughout the world very rightly insist that Easter Day should fall invariably on a Sunday. Each Sunday is in itself for the Christian a little Easter, reminding him of the first day of the week on which his Lord rose triumphantly from the dead. In the words of Isaac Watts’s Sunday hymn:

Today Christ rose and left the dead,

And Satan’s empire fell;

Today the saints His triumphs spread,

And all his wonders tell.

While preaching doctrine from the Gospel of John, make ready to deal with Bible ethics, based on doctrine. The Bible contains almost as much ethics as doctrine. After Easter, believers new and old need doctrine and ethics. The latter more difficult! Commentaries: G. C. Findlay (Exp. Grk. Test.); H. L. Goudge (Eng.). The lists here suggest too many sermons before midsummer. Save time for the later parts.

Introductory: “The Welfare of the Local Church” (12:27, RSV). I. Present Perils. II. Moral Problems. III. Christian Ideals. Like the Apostle, answer local questions, and lead up to vital doctrines. Unless local conditions call for the first topic, pass it by. In such a course, begin and end strongly.

“The Folly of Church Cliques” (1:10). “The Supremacy of the Cross” (2:2). In Columbia, South Carolina, during World War I, the government closed the red-light district. Later the city fathers planned to let it open. After an evening sermon, “The Folly of Segregating Sin” (Rom. 14:13, Augustine’s text), I received an anonymous card: “1 Cor. 2:2 is better than segregation. Preach the Gospel!” Paul did so by looking at city sin in the light from the Cross. Only a pulpit coward would ignore such a local issue. Incidentally, the red-light district did not reopen.

“The Christian a Farmer for God” (3:6, in a rural church). “The Believer a Builder for God” (3:10b). When the Apostle employs the singular, as here, do likewise. Who can “improve” a Bible text about one person? “The Holiness of the Believer’s Body” (6:10). Church-coiners often think that goodness has to do only with a soul, an idea foreign to the Gospel. “The Declaration of Christian Dependence” (8:12. RSV). In dealing with a matter neither right nor wrong, a believer should refrain for the sake of a weak brother. This principle has to do with current games, such as pool, in itself harmless. In Louisville the church people keep away from Churchill Downs and its horse races.

“The Christian a Spiritual Athlete” (9:25). In writing to a sports-minded city Paul used athletic terms. “The Way to Deal with Temptation” (10:13). “The Christian in Ordinary Affairs” (10:31). “The Sermon in the Lord’s Supper” (11:26). In the New Testament the word here rendered “show” usually (fifteen cases out of seventeen) means to preach. The Supper the most wondrous sermon since the Ascension of Christ! In a church where university students filled a long balcony, we had on Communion Day no sermon or meditation. But more students then applied for membership than on any other day. A sermon!

“The Church the Body of Christ” (12:27, NEB). A lofty ideal for the local kirk! “The Greatness of Christian Love” (13:13). Sometime deal with the chapter: I. Great by Contrast with Things Good. II. Greater Still in Itself. III. Greatest of All in Permanence. Love lasts: from infancy to manhood, youth to old age, time to eternity. Find this love supremely in Christ and his Cross.

“The Wonders of the Heavenly Harvest” (15:20). In the Mediterranean world harvest comes early, and brings joy. If feasible, deal with the two parts in separate sermons: I. The Resurrection of Christ Marks the Beginning of the Heavenly Harvest. II. The Resurrection of Believers Will Mark the Completion. As for the resurrection and judgment of unbelievers, that calls for another sermon.

“The Resurrection of the Believer’s Body” (15:44). The hardest part of the Apostles’ Creed for many an adult to say. The message calls for no proof, argument, or attack, but for clear, kind, radiant teaching of what the Bible reveals, and what difference the truth makes now, as well as hereafter. “The Resurrection in Everyday Living” (15:5–8). “The Christian as God’s Trustee” (16:2), as a consequence of believing in the Resurrection. The term “steward” has lost its pristine luster, but a trustee of church or college is somebody. What an honor to serve as one of God’s trustees, according to his Book!

Why does Christian ethics not now bulk so large in evangelical pulpits as in the New Testament and in other golden ages of preaching? Partly for three reasons: (1) Such pulpit work is difficult, too much so for a beginner. (2) Appeals to conscience may not prove popular; they hurt. (3) Some orthodox persons think it unwise to preach anything but Good News. Such an idea would have astounded Paul and his Lord. On the other hand, many “moral sermons” are not based on doctrine, and are not blessed of God.

If you wish to meet the needs of laymen, learn to do the most difficult sort of preaching from the Bible. (Abridged from an article in Southwestern Journal of Theology, October, 1960. Used by permission.)

I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2).

What is this Cross of Christ? The master thought of eternal God, the symbol of devotion, the measure of duty, the impulse to righteous living. There is no sin to which we must surrender, no habit that cannot be shattered, no victory that cannot be won through Christ and his Cross.

I. Witnesses to the Supremacy. A. The supreme emphasis of Paul, the master preacher in the Christian Church, and of thoughtful, devout men and women across the centuries. The greatest preachers of the Church have found this passage of Scripture stored with teaching. Devout men and women have rekindled their ardor at the flame of this declaration. Uncounted millions have recited it in their last prayers.

B. The Compelling Power of Great Convictions. “I determined”—the language of the man who has thought his way through to great convictions, and is now ready to suffer the consequence of loyalty to those convictions. “Determined.” however, is not the chief word in the text. The key word is “I know.” C. The Voice of Christian Experience. It is much easier to know things said about Christ than to know his Cross, than to know him about whom they are said, and to bring total life under the mastery of the Christ of the Cross.

II. The Consequences of This Experience. Three major results follow. A. To know Christ and him crucified is to know God. Jesus came into the world to show us God, to bridge the gap that separated us from God, to bring man the sinner back into the family of God. Men knew that God was great; they did not know that he was good. Jesus came to say that God is Father, a new name for the One who sent him on his earthly mission. On the Cross Jesus unveiled the face of God the Father.

B. The Cross Gives a New Philosophy of Life. If you come under its spell you say that it is better to be the servant of a hundred people than to have a hundred servants. You find life by giving it away for the glory of God and the good of others, not by hoarding it for yourself. This Cross is the revelation of redemption to us all through the revelation of God.

C. The Cross Holds the Secret of Triumphant Living. Once you know the Cross you have learned how to live, how to put first things first. When we have found the Cross, life is a new experience. We know God. We have the correct philosophy of life. We have the secret of creativity and effective living. But if we miss the Cross, ours is the deepening darkness of men gone blind. As for me, I am determined to know Christ, and him crucified.—From The Mighty Saviour, by permission of Abingdon Press.

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?… So glorify God in your body (1 Cor. 6:19, 20).

Every member of the church in Corinth needed to know the Christian teaching about the body. So does every person in this congregation and this community. We live in a time when everyone tends to think much about the body. Would that all of this thinking were according to Christ!

I. The Christian Doctrine about the Body. In a city where men loved architecture, especially in temples, Paul wrote about the body as a temple of God. A. The most wonderful thing God ever has made. The body not so amazing as the soul, but both made of God for each other. Nothing visible seems to be so dear to the heart of God.

B. The Ravages of Sin. Especially in a city like Corinth, a body may become a stench in the nostrils of men, worse than a sty for hogs. How much drunkenness and adultery offend the holy God! Also, overeating and other forms of bodily excess. How many of a man’s sins have to do with his body? Does he repent, confess, quit?

C. The Re-creation. When Christ redeems a man, that includes his body, with pardon, cleansing, and peace. Then the Holy Spirit continues to transform this place where he dwells. All the while he wishes you to serve as the God-appointed custodian of this temple that he has made. What a privilege, an honor, and a responsibility!

II. The Christian Use of Your Body. Deal with it as you wish the custodian to care for the home church edifice. A. Dedicate your body to God. Have you ever done so, as a definite act of worship? How often do you renew such giving of the body to the One from whom it came? As really as the minister, the right sort of custodian looks on his calling as holy unto the Lord.

B. Use the body in ways pleasing to God. During the Revolutionary War British troops used the Old South Meeting House as a stable for horses. Later men restored it for the worship of God and the service of men. By His grace let your body be useful every day. As a start, have a bodily check-up tomorrow.

C. Look forward to the Resurrection. In some mysterious way that body will share in the resurrection and the life everlasting. Meanwhile regard it as precious to the Redeemer, who in his own body died to redeem you, both sold and body, and by his Spirit waits to guide in using this body for the glory of the One from whom it came.

After a few words of prayer, we are all going to sing the noblest of our evangelistic hymns, “Just as I Am.” In the spirit of that hymn, and of our text, now dedicate your body to Christ, and seek his blessing that you may use it here in such a manner that it will become worthy to share in the Resurrection.

Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept (1 Cor. 15:20).

The introduction obviously would have to do with the harvest as the culmination of life on the farm, and the happiest season of the year. With a different topic the approach could be through the idea of “first-fruits.” An introduction ought always to depend on the thought-forms of the hearers now. Here the brief approach leads up to the Resurrection of Christ, a mystery of light, about which we as yet know only in part.

I. The Resurrection of His Body. When young I thought I believed only in the resurrection of His soul. Then I discovered his soul did not die (Luke 23:43b). If I did not believe in the resurrection of his body, I did not believe in his Resurrection, but only in his Immortality, a truth different. Now I believe in the Resurrection of his entire Person, as the Bible clearly shows.

II. In a Sense the Same Body. The same in the sense of continuity. The Bible stress does not fall on the empty tomb, save as it shows the continuity between the body on the Cross and that of the Risen Lord. By the resurrection of that dear body our God shows how much he cares for the body of every person whom he has created.

III. And Yet Not the Same. In the earthly life of our Lord, the body did not remain the same. It grew and developed perfectly, according to the Father’s will. And neither did the body of the Risen Lord seem to his dearest friends the same as the one they had laid in the tomb. Here again we enter into mystery, which we cannot hope to fathom until we again see Him face to face, and begin to know as we are known. Meantime we ought gladly to accept the facts that God has revealed (Deut. 29:29), and leave with him these that he yet waits to reveal.

IV. The Fact of His Continued Life. In all the biblical accounts of His post-resurrection appearances the stress falls on his living then, as it ought today to fall on his living now. About the Resurrection, as often on other Bible truth, too much of our preaching and thinking has been in past tenses. According to James Denney, “The Church lives, not only by what Christ was, but by what He is; not only by what He did, but supremely by what He does.… Faith always has its object here and now, and without faith there is no Christianity” (Studies in Theology, pp. 20, 154).

In the New Testament records of our Lord’s mission on earth the center of gravity lies beyond the grave. In the fact of his Resurrection and his living Presence the early believers found their joy, their power, and their radiance. If as believers today we have lost the radiance, the power, and the joy of the early Church, we can find all of this where those early believers found it, in the living Presence of the Risen Lord. Let us seek this blessing now in prayer.

Spirit of the laving God, shine upon the open page and bring the truth to light in the face of Jesus Christ, the Risen Lord.

Every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming (1 Cor. 15:23).

The introduction has to do with the Resurrection in terms of harvest joy. All of this should be interesting to those who attended church a week ago, and clear to anyone who did not. Every sermon ought to be a complete unit, with no overlapping.

Today we consider the difficult words in the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” What then should you believe? Only what the New Testament teaches, and ideally all that it teaches. Here we shall deal only with the truth as that truth is related to believers, one by one.

I. A Heavenly Mystery. The truth here comes by revelation of God, and largely through the Resurrection of Christ. This truth we accept, not because we can understand it all, but because we believe in it and in His Holy Book. After all, how much do we mortals really comprehend about life, either here or hereafter? But all of this God knows.

II. More than Immortality. We likewise believe what the Bible reveals, but does not strongly stress, that Christ came to bring life and immortality to light. The noblest of the Greeks believed what George Eliot later sang about “the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again in lives made better by their presence.” But Paul led believers in Corinth to accept what we today rejoice to hold true: that “the souls of believers do at their death immediately pass into glory, and their bodies, being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves until the Resurrection,” “the one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves.”

III. The Sleep of the Body. As a rule the New Testament refers to the end of a believer’s earthly life as a sleep, and beyond that sleep, the awakening in the Father’s home. Here we must think of heaven in terms of earth, and not push any such figure too far. In so far as we can tell, the soul does not ever sleep, but is changed, in the twinkling of an eye, into “such full-grown energies as suit the purposes of heaven,” and for a while awaits the reunion with the body, which God will glorify. “Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?” (Acts 26:8).

IV. The Resurrection Body. As for the “spiritual body” after the resurrection of believers, we shall have to leave the understanding to our God. After all, what does it often mean for a child of God to have faith in him? Surely to trust him and his goodness when one cannot begin to comprehend what he will do for the body of one redeemed at the Cross, and afterward transformed into perfect completeness for the life everlasting in the unseen City of God. What a source of comfort, peace, and joy to you as a believer in Christ, as you “nightly pitch (your) moving tent a day’s march nearer home.

Does some one whisper fervently: “I wish I could be sure of all that”? My friend, you can! You will, if you come close to Christ in the Book, and live close to him in prayer. Little by little, it may well be, but surely he will lead you to testify with “the holy Church throughout all the world: I believe in the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”

The Debate Continues

Essays on Old Testament Hermeneutics, edited by Claus Westermann (John Knox, 1963, 363 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by Charles F. Pfeiffer, professor of Old Testament Literature, Gordon Divinity School, Wenham, Massachusetts.

The interpretation of the Old Testament and the relation between Old and New Testaments have been the subjects of lively debate since World War II. Claus Westermann has assembled fifteen essays, originally published in German, to provide a basis for discussion of these important themes. The contributors include the best-known names in German Old Testament scholarship: Gerhard von Rad, Martin Noth, Friedrich Baumgartel, Walther Zimmerli, Westermann himself, and a number of others.

Although the scholars differ among themselves at numerous points, they agree in insisting that the text of Scripture must be studied in the light of contemporary knowledge of history and philology. Westermann seeks to deal with two problems: (1) the relation between the story of the acts of God as testified to by the people of God and the history of Israel as seen by historical research; and (2) the relation of the Old Testament to the New Testament, particularly the search for a valid concept for establishing the unity between the two Testaments.

Zimmerli, writing the chapter “Promise and Fulfillment.” sees faith in Christ as an answer. While rejecting the idea that an apologetic proof for Christ can be derived from the Old Testament, he suggests that the believer may recognize in the Old Testament a book of genuine allusions to Jesus Christ. Rudolf Bultmann in his article “Prophecy and Fulfillment” is more negative in his conclusions. He affirms that the New Testament writers used the same exegetical principles as did Philo. Even to Bultmann, however, there is a valid way of seeing Christ through the Old Testament. The “miscarriage” of Old Testament history itself provides a ray of hope. The history of failure so prominent in the writings of the Old Testament is to the eye of faith, says Bultmann, a promise.

Von Rad, writing on “Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament,” disowns the practice of focusing attention on historical or biographical details, but insists that typological interpretation rightly understood is valid. He says, “… typological interpretation has to do only with the witness to the divine event, not with such correspondence in historical, cultural, or archaeological details as the Old Testament and the New may have in common.” It is the kerygma, rather than narrative details, that finds expression in Old Testament typology.

The variety of ideas gathered together for our instruction by Westermann underscores the gulf between scientific biblical study and popular understanding. Baumgartel in his article “The Hermeneutical Problem of the Old Testament” notes the tension existing between biblical science and the Church, and makes it clear that the fault is not all on one side. Research has as its aim the discovery of truth. Westermann’s collection of essays will provide no pat answers, but it will provide food for thought in the hands of mature scholars of both Old and New Testaments.

CHARLES F. PFEIFFER

With Vigor And Clarity

Four Prophets, by J. B. Phillips (Geoffrey Bles, 1963, 161 pp., 15s.), is reviewed by J. A. Motyer, vice-principal, Clifton Theological College, Bristol, England.

No book can escape without some adverse criticism. However, since it is the object of this review to accord warm praise to this translation of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah 1–35, and Micah, it may be well to dispose of the complaints first. It is a pity that the introduction, which displays such sensitivity toward the requirements of the Hebrew language, should give the impression of textual disorder in these prophetical books, and should suggest that it is but a moment’s work for “scholars” to diagnose and cure the complaint. In the same way, we can only regret that translations have been offered of amended texts without any annotation of the fact in footnotes, and that the verse order of the Massoretic text has been sometimes upset without, be it said, either a word of justification or a compensating advantage in clarity. The translator allocated the task of historical introduction to the Rev. E. H. Robertson, but the resulting prose-poem, dwelling on the contemporary movements in pagan thought as much as on the state of the people of God, and urging that “over the whole world the Spirit of God stirred the spirit of man,” not only seriously damages the uniqueness of these inspired prophets, but leaves the general reader without a sharp awareness of the situation they faced.

In the translation itself, it is a major tragedy that no attempt was made to represent the Divine Name (even the traditional device of capital letters is absent), with consequent loss of accuracy and of theological and devotional flavor. And, of course (though subjectivity is necessarily rampant here), there are times where one is forced to say that “the old is better”: for example, “Make yourselves ready to meet your God” is inferior to “Prepare to meet thy God” (Amos 4:12); the passover reference is missed in, “I will not relent again” (Amos 7:8); “Husks will be your food” (Isa. 1:20) both manhandles the text and loses robustness. One matter, however, where the old has been retained to the detriment of clarity is the divine appellation, “of hosts.” Could not Phillips have turned his skillful hand to paraphrase this?

Turning away, in the second place, from adverse criticism, there is no doubt that we have here a notable addition to Bible translations. The prophetical books offer to the general reader a sort of literary Sahara, and to the translator the biggest challenge in the Bible. In so ably meeting the latter, Phillips has gone far to overcome the former. He has broken up the text with his own system of shoulder-headings, and usually has illuminated the meaning of the passage by setting its direction in this way. We would expect a vigorous translation, and we find it: “… compose melodies as though you were David himself” (Amos 6:5); “… seen, seized, and swallowed all in a moment” (Isa. 28:4); “No, we must have horses to ride, Very well, you shall ride—in full retreat! We must have swift horses, you say; Your pursuers will be swifter still!” (Isa. 30:16).

Phillips is too experienced a translator to try to reproduce the Hebrew puns of Micah 1, but, because he is not afraid of the accusation of paraphrasing, he carefully makes each clear: “In Aphrah, the house of dust, grovel in the dust” (1:10), and so on. In individual matters readers will be interested to know that in Isaiah 7:14 is found “maiden”; that “Adam” is retained in Hosea 6:7. However, the messianic reference is virtually excluded in Isaiah 4:1 and 32:1. To vigor and clarity, Phillips often adds moments of rare feeling and beauty. Isaiah 33:17–24 is outstanding, but is only one of many places where the reader is moved to read again and again, and always with profit.

The translation is, on the whole, accurate, although, of course, there are points at which a different view of the meaning could be urged. For example, Hosea 13:14 is translated as a question, and the passage is not held to express a hope after death. This sort of difference of opinion is inevitable, but the over-all excellence of this work remains.

J. A. MOTYER

Belief And Unbelief

Atheism in Our Time, by Ignace Lepp, translated by Bernard Murchland (Macmillan, 1963, 195 pp., $5), is reviewed by Carl F. H. Henry, editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This remarkable and readable analysis of the psychology of unbelief comes from the pen of French priest-psychotherapist Ignace Lepp, onetime Marxist atheist, whose career as journalist and professor pays sound dividends in the organization and exposition of his theme. Dr. Lepp warns that atheism today is “well on the way to becoming the common norm of society” (p. 6), and surveys types of atheism represented by Marx, Rostand, Sartre, and Nietzsche.

Modern atheism differs from atheism in earlier times by its extension and absoluteness. Most atheists recognize Christianity as their chief ideological enemy, although the ground of unbelief is existential rather than rational. They are occupied more with counterattack than with elaborating an alternate positive view of reality.

Although he lived in Western Europe during his first twenty-five years, Lepp met not a single believing Christian. He did meet numbers who had forsaken their churches. He joined the Communist party at fifteen without a prior religious commitment, and fell in line with its anti-religious crusade. Harnack and Feuerbach and Nietzsche were quoted to undermine faith in Christ’s deity. In university studies he was taught Aquinas’s five-fold proof of God’s existence, but “they prove nothing to one who does not have the faith” (p. 16).

He had no fear of death, no hope of personal immortality, no troubling “metaphysical unrest.” For Communism had become his all-engaging “religion,” and supplied for him that “transcendent” or “absolute” which every life must serve (p. 24). “This unshakeable faith in the future of communism was in fact the positive component of my psychological synthesis as an atheist” (p. 27). “Existentially, the subjective transcendence communism provided for me performed exactly the same psychological function as divine transcendence.… Precisely this awareness of living for something very great … makes the conversion of a sincere Communist to religious faith almost impossible. There is no room in him for supernatural grace” (pp. 28 f.). “Acceptance of divine revelation presupposes in the subject a natural awareness of insufficiency or dissatisfaction” (p. 30).

It was disillusionment over the Communist party (the treason of Stalinists) that led to Lepp’s defection and preceded his conversion, which occurred after a period of “metaphysical anxiety.” “It did not seem logical that being endowed with a capacity for thinking and loving could be thrown into an absurd universe, where there was nothing to think, nothing to love, nothing to hope for. It was with these psychological dispositions that I encountered the Christian message” (p. 34).

The author reflects his Catholic perspectives in the ready categorizing of other religious groups as “sects” (p. 14), his minimizing of medieval superstitions (p. 17), and his implication that Protestant churches are less hostile to Communism than Catholic churches (pp. 17 f). He still derives man and monkey from a common ancestor (p. 25), but does not now exclude “creation” (p. 26).

The missionary challenge of Lepp’s book is inescapable. “Believers, in the old countries of Christianity,” he writes, “have no idea how firmly shut off they are from the mental world of unbelievers” (p. 23). Nowhere had he been confronted with the works of Christian beliefs. Worse yet, it is “the unbelief of believers” much more than that of the genuine atheists which is “the real cause of the desacralization of the modern world, of its descent into the most sordid of pragmatic ‘materialisms’ ” (p. 190) because their attitude toward the concrete problems of life is “exactly the same as that of … atheistic or agnostic colleagues.”

CARL F. H. HENRY

The Nature Of Church Unity

The Dynamics of Christian Unity: A Symposium on the Ecumenical Movement, compiled and edited by W. Stanley Mooneyham (Zondervan, 1963, 116 pp., $2.50), is reviewed by James Daane, editorial associate, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This book contains the messages about Christian unity delivered at conferences sponsored by the National Association of Evangelicals. While it glows with the spiritual warmth of men committed to Christ, theologically it is a strange book.

The Church is confessed to be one, and unity to be of her essence. Yet the unity is only organic, spiritual, not organizational, structural. She is one, it is maintained, in the “sole way” that Christ prayed for her unity. “The Pauline doctrine of the church refutes the common ecumenical argument that somehow [sic!] separated denominations lacerate our Lord’s body.” It is urged that “the possibility of a fragmented body because of separate organizations is an absurd idea.…” One conference lecturer urges, “We can manifest spiritual unity regardless of continued organizational diversity. We can manifest it by fellowship together, worship together, study together, prayer together, witness together, service together, and perhaps suffering together.” This statement sounds like a dream talking. Separated denominations that can do all these things together have no reason or justification for being structurally separated. They have lost, or never had, the right of separate existence. Moreover, there are many denominations that take their distinctive doctrinal positions seriously and cannot do these things together, and are therefore separated. When the World Council churches meet and celebrate Holy Communion in several different ways, they are revealing a seriousness of conviction that makes this view of theological differences look like utter indifference.

The contention that the New Testament churches were not organizationally united is, on many scores, misleading. For one thing, these churches did not exclude the members and ministers of other churches from their pulpits and from celebrations of Holy Communion. To assert that modern denominationalism is simply a reflection of interchurch relations obtaining in the New Testament period is to romanticize the facts. Is the Church really empirically one in the way that Jesus prayed for it? Did Jesus really pray for a structurally divided Church of separated parts that would rival and compete with each other on the mission field, for a divided Church whose parts would not honor one another’s sacraments and ministers? To ask the question is to answer it; yet it is a question that this symposium on the ecumenical movement does not ask. The writers simply assert that Christians of all churches can together, as a matter of fact, do everything necessary to express the unity of the Church. It is even asserted that “loyalty to the New Testament may compel us to fight against organizational unity.” And even more incredibly: “loyalty to the New Testament does not necessitate organizational union. Quite the reverse! It warrants a continued plurality of churches.” One of the basic weaknesses of the book is that it persistently thinks of Christians rather than of churches, a weakness that disqualifies it from the very start to deal with the ecumenical problem.

It just happens, by Christ’s own ordination and by apostolic injunction, that the Church in this world consists of more than individual Christians. She is also comprised of “offices,” which grant their occupants authority within the Church. These “offices” bespeak organizational and ecclesiastical structure which cannot, without violating the teaching of the New Testament, be “spiritualized” in the sense of dissolving structure and organization, for such spiritualization dissolves both the office and the authority it carries.

Since God alone is the Lord of the conscience, the right to oppose the authority of the Church must ever be allowed as an open, legitimate possibility; but it is by no means a desirable state of affairs. It is a measure to be employed only in extreme circumstances. Moreover, the act of separation (as distinguished from the separated existence) is always illegitimate. He who in the name of conscience opposes the authority of the Church may be put out, but he may not, by his own choice, get out. The act that separates is always an evil and sinful act, and whoever causes it must bear the responsibility. Whenever it occurs, something is profoundly wrong with the Church. When it is urged in this book (not consistently) that separation is a normal and biblically warranted thing, a quite legitimate thing because it occurs, in distinction from schismatic action, on the basis of the essentials rather than the details of the Gospel, then separation is unbiblically legitimatized and schism is given new definition.

This book reveals a fear that a single unified Church would mean church tyranny, a fear that is easily understood in view of the will to power found in many churchmen of any denomination. The history of the Church, past and current, does little to allay this fear. Nevertheless, our theology of the Church should be derived from the Bible, not from our fears—nor should it be overlooked that the general position of this book on separation and church authority quite accurately reflects the actual condition of the Church today, with its almost total loss of ecclesiastical authority. But if the situation is biblically warranted, then the ecumenical movement, even in its most ideal form, is illegitimate, and any ecumenical concern, rightly defined, is outside the authentic concerns of those who hold the position of this book.

What this book understands by the “spiritual” nature of the unity of the Church leaves no room within the Church for the “offices” that Paul recognized as being part of the reality designated by the term “Church.” In the New Testament view, the Church contains “offices.” These offices bespeak a unity and an organizational structuring of the Church which is other than what this book means by the Church’s “spiritual” unity. They (the offices) exclude as illegitimate what this book means by “separation.” They make every exercise in regard to church unity an exercise of conscience, that is, an exercise over against a duly instituted authority, and not a mere exercise of isolated, individual right.

To support what is designated as the “Biblical Basis of Christian Unity” the book appeals to Emil Brunner. But it is significant that the appeal overlooks, or does not know, that Brunner, in order to maintain his position that the Church is a fellowship and not an organization, renounces the teaching of the pastoral epistles about the offices of the Church as an error. Brunner honestly admits this. This book is apparently unaware that it must attribute the same error to the Bible in order to claim biblical sanction for its view of the exclusively “spiritual” unity of the Church.

With this venture into the study of the nature of the Church, NAE has at last begun to engage in theological studies of ecumenical problems. Like most beginnings, it is not auspicious. But it is a beginning and perhaps a promise of better things to come.

JAMES DAANE

Book Briefs

The International Book of Christmas Carols, by Walter Ehret and George K. Evans (Prentice-Hall, 1963, 338 pp., $10). One hundred and sixty-four carols from all parts of the world in their original languages, with accompanying English translations. With music, explanatory notes, introduction. A book of fine craftsmanship, and an excellent Christmas gift.

The Stars of Christmas, by J. Robert Watt (Abingdon, 1963, 80 pp., $2.50). A warm kindly presentation of the Christmas story. A fine Christmas gift.

When Christmas Came to Bethlehem, by Charles L. Allen and Charles L. Wallis (Revell, 1963, 64 pp., $1.50). Pleasantly written; will be read with pleasure.

Tales of Christmas from Near and Far, edited by Herbert H. Wernecke (Westminster, 1963, 232 pp., $3.95). Thirty-three Christmas stories gathered from many countries the world over, each with its local color.

The Meaning of Gifts, by Paul Tournier (John Knox, 1963, 63 pp., $2). An enlightening little Christian essay on how the giving of a gift expresses the giver, and affects the receiver.

Faiths for the Few: A Study of Minority Religions, by William J. Whalen (Bruce Publishing Company, 1963, 201 pp., $3.75). A Roman Catholic discusses twenty-two “minority religions”—including Free Masonry, Moral Re-Armament, Pentecostalism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Old Catholicism. The treatments are informative and rich with interesting detail; the theological analysis is shallow and fragmentary.

Bible Paradoxes, by R. Earl Allen (Revell, 1963, 128 pp., $2.50). Short, helpful, perceptive essays on the many paradoxical aspects of the Christian faith.

That One Good Sermon, by Alfred Nevin Sayres (United Church Press, 1963, 95 pp., $2.50). A preacher through a layman tells other preachers what goes into and makes a good sermon.

Documents of Democracy: The Declaration of Independence, The United States Constitution, The Gettysburg Address (Revell, 1963, 64 pp., $1). Handy reference book and, of course, good reading for every American.

Sticking To The Church

Methodist services attract larger attendances in Communist East Germany than in the free western division of the country, says a church official in Berlin. Dr. Ernst Scholz, a district superintendent, declares that “it is really wonderful how the people in a Communist country stick to the church and love their master, Jesus Christ.” His report was made by tape recording to the North Glendale, California, Methodist Church, which contributes to the support of churches in East and West Berlin.

Protestant Panorama

Unity commissions of the International Convention of Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ voted last month to seek authority from their respective governing bodies to formulate “a proposal looking toward a plan of union.”

A former nun was among fourteen persons baptized October 20 into the membership of the Baptist church in Warsaw, according to Ecumenical Press Service. The woman had been a member of a Roman Catholic order for twenty years.

Methodist churches which bar Negroes were censured by the denomination’s Council of Bishops in a strongly worded statement calling on all Christians to fight for the equal rights of all racial, religious, and cultural groups.

Two United Church of Canada ministers picketed the city hall in Edmonton, Alberta, last month to protest the election of Mayor William Hawrelak, who had been accused of “gross misconduct” by a judicial inquiry while in office in 1959. The ministers reported receiving threatening telephone calls because of their protest.

The North Central District Association of the Evangelical Free Church of America expelled one of its congregations where the pastor and some members speak in tongues and engage in other “Pentecostal-type practices.” The vote on the ouster of the Vine Evangelical Free Church of Minneapolis was 94 to 10. The pastor, an ordained clergyman of the Assemblies of God, said he felt the basic issue was the sovereignty of the local congregation.

Miscellany

A planeload of sixty Cubans made up “the first refugee air flight in history sponsored jointly by Protestants and Catholics.” The group was taken last month from Miami to Boston, where the Massachusetts Baptist Convention assumed placement responsibilities. All are Roman Catholics. The federal government paid transportation costs. John F. Thomas, director of the U. S. Cuban Refugee Program, called the flight “a historic step in interfaith cooperation to aid victims of Communist oppression.”

At its first congress since it was formed in 1944, the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians (Baptists) in the U. S. S. R. adopted a new constitution. Said one report: “The charter practically has no limitations to the beliefs which Baptists may hold.”

Bible societies in Africa plan to step up Scripture distribution. At their first joint meeting this fall, delegates vowed to place easy-to-read Bible portions into the hands of 150 million Africans each year. Present rate is 50 million annually.

A $50,000 grant from the James Foundation to Princeton Theological Seminary will establish an experimental program to prepare ministers for service in blighted inner-city areas. It will be a pilot project extending over a period of two years.

A new Christian Servicemen’s Center was dedicated last month at Wrightstown, New Jersey. It will serve the thousands of military personnel stationed at nearby Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force Base.

The congregation of Central Presbyterian Church in Des Moines, Iowa, voted to donate up to $4,000 to the city government to cover a portion of the property taxes from which it is exempt.

A fund drive is under way to provide a second campus for Tarkio (Missouri) College. The extension campus for the Presbyterian school would be located in St. Joseph, Missouri, and would offer junior and senior courses.

Representatives of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) and the Reformed Church in America proposed last month that their denominations combine administrative structures of the programs in which the two bodies are now cooperating to make their witness more effective.

The four-million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hannover (West Germany) voted last month to admit women to the ministry. The church thus becomes the thirteenth of the twenty-seven denominations in the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKID) to approve the ordination of women.

The previously all-white District of Columbia Baptist Convention admitted its first Negro church last month. The convention, affiliated with both the American and Southern Baptist Conventions, received into membership the 3,000-member Shiloh Baptist Church by a vote of 600–25. The church will retain its ties with the local Negro conventions and the Progressive Baptist Convention on the national level.

Personalia

The Rev. Theodore A. Aaberg resigned as president of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod because of poor health.

Dr. Jacques Maritain, renowned Roman Catholic philosopher, was named to receive France’s highest literary award, the National Grand Prize for Letters. There has been some speculation that the 81-year-old French layman is about to be named a cardinal by Pope Paul VI.

Dr. Duncan Fraser appointed moderator-designate of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

They Say

“Jerusalem was destroyed only because everybody interpreted the Torah in his own way.”—Mrs. M. Verlinsky, Haifa magistrate, in levying $167 fines against eight ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students found guilty of violent demonstrations against Christian children’s centers.

“The situation which was created by court action can be corrected by court action. Those who have made the long, difficult, complicated, expensive journey to the U. S. Supreme Court to eliminate God from our schools traveled with the aid of organizations and individuals who shared their goal. Others who share opposite goals must be willing to travel a similar arduous road if they wish to regain what they treasure.”—Mrs. Bella V. Dodd, New York lawyer who repudiated her Communist party membership, in Guideposts.