Since Celsus of the second century, a recurring criticism of Christianity has been that it is too narrowminded to listen to the voices around it. Without doubt a prima-facie case can be established. Tertullian of North Africa raised the question, “What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?” The medieval Church was as brusque in its reaction to the new thought forms arising from the rediscovery of the writings of Aristotle. In the nineteenth century some Christians violently opposed the use of chloroform in childbirth.

But the truth is that the Church has not been unwilling to listen to voices around it; she has only been slow to do so. That is why critics have been able to make the bigoted characterization stick, for the Church has been one of the great conservative forces in Western life. Novelists of the 1920s such as Sinclair Lewis, and the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean Paul Sartre attacked the Church. But the Church listened even to their views. She only appeared not to, because she failed to respond quickly.

The Church has sometimes fooled both herself and her detractors by insisting that her ear is attuned only to the voice of her Lord. On the contrary, she has sometimes resembled those referred to in Second Timothy “who will listen to anybody and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth.” She has even been like a King Jehoiakim, putting a penknife to the document to which she claims to listen, while in fact listening to voices from elsewhere.

By the time a new intellectual movement reaches its peak it begins to infiltrate the Church—or the Church, in an attempt to oppose the new philosophy, accepts its premises. The difficulty is that about the time the Church accommodates to the current fad new intellectual currents arise, rendering the adjusted views obsolete. But the Church for at least another generation feels obligated to defend the fad along with the faith, and is therefore more bigoted than she ought to be.

In our time, effort is being expended in the Church to eradicate narrowmindedness, and this has something to commend it. But there is cause for concern, because that effort has been directed not only against thought molds of obsolete philosophical systems, but against the biblical faith itself. The result has been that in becoming openminded the Church has become innocuous so far as her real message is concerned. There is a great need in our time that the Church discover her own voice, so that she will know how to react to other voices.

This charge against Christianity is a serious one. What evidence is there to support it?

First, we might point to Augustine, whose reading of Neo-Platonic philosophy paved the way for his conversion. Even after becoming a Christian, he found Neo-Platonism compatible. In Against the Academics, he wrote: “I feel sure at the moment that I shall find truth with the Platonists, nor will it be at variance with our sacred mysteries.” Augustine, therefore, listened not only to his Lord but also to the voice of Plato.

Scholars today are not so certain that Neo-Platonism and the Scriptures say the same thing. In fact, it is popular in some circles to make a radical distinction between Greek and Hebrew ways of thinking. But the fourth-century Church heard the certain voices that were incorporated into the life and thought of Christendom.

In the thirteenth century, the voice heard by the Church was that of Aristotle, but not until the tenacity of Augustinian thought molds had relaxed. In the twelfth century, the works of Aristotle were rediscovered, and Thomas Aquinas, now the official theologian of a major segment of Christendom, prepared his monumental synthesis, but not without opposition. The medieval Church opposed but then accepted Aristotelianism, and its influence continues in the theology of Christendom even to this day.

As Protestants we tend to think, “It is true, Christianity did listen to other voices, but all that was remedied by the Reformation.” But many remnants remain. Plato’s proofs for the immortality of the soul may still be heard; but as contemporary biblical scholars tell us, the early Christians affirmed not the immortality of the soul but the resurrection of man in bodily form. Also Aquinas’ five arguments for the existence of God, three of which he borrowed explicitly from Aristotle, have had a continuing place in Protestant apologetics. But most theologians in our day agree that these arguments are not Christian after all, because they prove a god who is an object, an “It,” rather than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who must be addressed as “Thou.”

Of greater significance to the contemporary scene is the battle which the Church has fought with modern science. At first the Church clung to such views as the earth being the center of the universe and matter consisting of four elements. But a later generation of churchmen decided that these views were not necessary to the faith. By this time, however, science had moved even further. The sun was now the center not of the universe but only of the solar system, and the number of elements kept multiplying. Many Christian thinkers have now rightly concluded that it is not the business of the Church to make pronouncements in science.

Even now, however, the Church is characterized as seeing red when the word science is mentioned, but the truth is that she has listened avidly to the voice of science. Henry Wieman, professor emeritus of the University of Chicago Divinity School, even went so far as to employ the scientific method in constructing a Christian (?) theology.

These examples of the influence of the ongoing intellectual life of man upon Christianity are selective rather than exhaustive; yet they are sufficient to show that, contrary to the usual opinion and often to her own chagrin, the Church, however slowly, has tended to listen to most of the voices around her. As Basil Willey of Cambridge University has written:

Nothing more clearly illustrates the impingements of secular thought upon Christianity than the history of the successive changes in the mode of arguing the case for the Christian religion. Each change has the aspect of a phase in a rear-guard action; driven from one position after another, religion seeks to entrench itself in surer and surer ground. If religion has been thus largely on the defensive it is because religion long occupied territory not properly its own; as Arnold put it: “Religion has attached its emotion to certain supposed facts, and now the facts are failing it” (Christianity Past and Present, p. 11).

Willey goes on to say that now, due to our increased knowledge of history and the fact that the faith has been laid bare to its very foundation, we are in a better position than ever before to determine what is uniquely Christian. But by and large, the Church goes on her way listening more to the voice of her age than the voice of her Lord.

Christians in our time are shockingly unaware of the nature of the biblical faith. The concern of college students from Christian homes is not so much, What is the nature of the faith?, as, Should one believe? Some time ago as a student waited in my office for a conference he read a book. My curiosity was aroused, and when his turn came I asked what he was reading. It turned out to be a book on the philosophical bases of faith. He said that discussions in the dormitory at night revolved about religion and that he was attempting to find the answers to some of the problems raised. Most students are more sophisticated in questioning than in their knowledge of what the faith is all about. A person should be at least as concerned about the content of his faith as he is about whether he should believe. But most students seem much more concerned about the latter. Unfortunately, it is more popular to read books about belief that often take their cues from voices other than Christian, than it is to read the biblical documents or books about the biblical faith.

One does not need to be an astute observer to conclude that the Church is having too little impact on the intellectual climate of our time. Part of the reason may be that the Church is no longer clear about what her message ought to be. Furthermore, she has taken so seriously her obligation to listen to anyone that she no longer feels that anyone should listen to her.

Last spring we invited my advisees into our home for the evening. Among those present was a pre-ministerial student who told of plans to transfer to a Bible college, and the subject turned to religion. Represented in the group were some from various groups in Christianity and Judaism. What was significant and is germane to this article is that, except for the pre-ministerial student, each soon conceded any uniqueness or finality of the Christian or Jewish faiths. These students seemed as committed to listening to anyone as to the biblical faith. Our generation includes very many who will listen to anybody and who thus can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth.

The Church is in this predicament precisely because she does not know the voice of her Lord. Even Paul Tillich can write;

Certainly, every real Christian is gripped by the power of the biblical words and even of the classical creedal statements of the Church. They mediate something to him that is more important than logical understanding. And nobody can be a theologian who is not gripped in this way by the Christian message (Religion in Life, Winter 1955–56).

But, as G. Ernest Wright observed, Tillich leaves off where he must begin. Wright’s task is to determine the nature of the biblical faith as reflected in biblical literature. It is also the task of the Church if she is to be the Church of the Lord, for if she spends most of her time listening to other voices, then she is something else.

When the Church has discovered who she is by listening to her Master, then she will find that it is her obligation to speak as well as listen when confronted by the voices of our time. And it is the word and work of her Lord that sit in judgment on all other words and works.

It is not for the Church to listen to anyone but her Lord. It is in this way that she arrives at a knowledge of the truth. He declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The lesson the Church needs to learn from her own history is that she must more sharply distinguish His voice from the other voices.

Thomas M. Olbricht, assistant professor of speech at The Pennsylvania State University, received the M.A. and the Ph.D. degrees from the University of Iowa and the S.T.B. degree from Harvard Divinity School.

SPACE AND TIME

Ever since I heard about a friend of mine who wrote a whole book either on the Pennsylvania Railroad riding, or in the Pennsylvania Station sitting, I have been hurt deep down with a renewed awareness of my inadequacies. My wife points out that whereas this other man improves each shining moment, I am apt to read a paperback or take in a movie. There is something here that points up the difference between genius and the unwashed multitudes.

One of my best ways of wasting time is watching how other people waste time. You can put it down as one of life’s finalities that any man who finds time to read a bulletin board, for example, just doesn’t know what to do with his time. He stands with his hands behind him and swings back and forth on the balls of his feet. Watch the man who sits in a meeting and reads the material in the front and back of the hymnal. I have been known even to look up the name of the publisher of a hymnbook. Another loafing opportunity is to take the docket of a meeting and read it all the way through. When that man down the row reads it with great intensity, you can be sure that he is bored beyond comprehension. How much time have you spent on your date book recently, especially those lovely tables of troy weights or that list of birthstones for all twelve months! There is a special thesis to be written on the reading of memorial windows and memorial plaques.

Marney has a great sermon entitled “In the Meantime,” and the simple word is that if we do not live in the “meantime, we do not live at all,” because life is made up of “meantimes.” I suppose the only thing worse than killing time is conquering space. Time is such a marvelous gift. Space is such a lovely thing. I hate to see my time run out, and I think it is a terrible ambition to want to conquer space. There may be a better thing in having the immensity of space conquer me. But that is another story.

EUTYCHUS II

TO BANISH THE PULPIT CLICHÉ

Since I am a preacher turned writer I found profitable pleasure in your September 27 issue.… Since Mr. Albus (“Why Don’t More Ministers Write?”) can remember a few impression-forming sermons from a lifetime of listening, one should rejoice that so few sermons get into print. Probably the percentage of printworthy sermons is quite small.

After evaluating sermon manuscripts along with several other types of free-lance writing I’m convinced of one preacher deficiency—most men don’t have the ability to communicate the Gospel to either their local or their printed-page congregations.…

Putting a sermon into an idea-communicating article would do more to improve the preaching of some men than ten years of theological jargon studies. Ridding a manuscript of the fluent pulpit clichés takes talent. But the end result—a fresh approach to an old truth—is most rewarding.

May I also suggest that ministerial self-importance hinders many others from writing. The busy-preacher image can’t be maintained when a man admits he has hours to labor over a manuscript for publication. Rejection slips that say your stuff isn’t so great also challenge this ego factor.

WILLIAM J. KRUTZA

Staff Writer

Harvest Publications

Baptist General Conference

Chicago, Ill.

MARCH AND COUNTERMARCH

The condescending, flippant article “Churchmen on the March” (News, Sept. 13 issue) was certainly no credit to your usually fine publication. Your readers deserved a more thoughtful analysis of this significant demonstration, and you missed an excellent opportunity for meaningful comment on a major moral issue in American life.

If, as you imply, some of the religious overtones betrayed muddled theology, this only reflects the absence of evangelical leadership in the civil rights movement. This absence is truly puzzling, for justice in human affairs is a well-attested biblical theme.

SANFORD V. SMITH

Washington, D. C.

This is certainly the most amateurish reporting that CHRISTIANITY TODAY has ever sponsored. I cannot conceive of treating a significant event as that in such a childish fashion.

JERRY BEAVAN

Vice President

DeMoss Associates

Valley Forge, Pa.

A masterpiece of neutrality.…

SHIRLEY S. ACKLEY

Warwick, R. I.

“Churchmen on the March” leaves the impression that my activity in opposition to the march, August 28, in Washington, was a personal affair and that I was disappointed “that he had been refused an interview with President Kennedy.”

The opposition headquarters which was established in the Hotel Washington on March 26 was an activity of the American Council of Christian Churches. This council believes that the whole approach now being made to civil rights is wrong and that you cannot legislate love nor can the golden rule be made a statute of the federal government, and your own report of “some civil wrongs” and “the earmarks of a garrison state to enable a freedom rally to be held” is most appropriate.

In regard to the White House, the President declined to receive a delegation of some 200 churchmen affiliated with the American Council of Christian Churches. Previously he had sent invitations to 243 churchmen in the country to meet him in the White House on June 17, and most of those invited came, and he sought to enlist them in behalf of his political proposals on civil rights. We felt that a contrary opinion needed to be presented to the President and sought to exercise our right as petitioned.

We object strenuously to the President’s use of religious organizations to promote his political programs. He sent the Hon. Averell Harriman, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, as his personal representative, to Rochester, to the meeting of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, where Harriman used the platform of the WCC to denounce the cut made by the House in the foreign aid bill; and now the National Council’s General Board has announced that the President will be the honored speaker at the Triennial Convention of the NCC in Philadelphia, the first week in December. All religious groups should be treated alike by the White House, and the President, whether he be Kennedy or John Doe, should not use the platforms of religious bodies in this country to serve his political ends.

CARL MCINTIRE

President

International Council of Christian Churches

Collingswood, N. J.

Let me ask you this, sir: what would be your reaction, ignoring the years of slavery, to the assertion “from our tenth-story window view it appeared that the marchers were moving much too fast to accomplish their sociological objectives” (Editorial, Sept. 13 issue), when you view the pace for the last one hundred years? At what pace would you have us go? Is it possible for an oppressing majority to assess, with any objectivity, how fast a suppressed minority should move?

The editorial seems worried about an apparent demand for preferential treatment. This is what the Negro has been receiving for the last 350 years. Have not evangelicals been guilty of offering others who have come to these shores preferential treatment? I saw the evangelicals of Lynchburg, Virginia, making herculean efforts to assist Hungarian refugees get jobs and housing when they would not lift one finger to help Negroes born in America and who had gone to foreign battlefields in America’s cause.

As a Negro who was in the march, I view our pace as much too slow and the evangelical’s response tragically inadequate.

W. J. HODGE

President

Kentucky State Conference of NAACP Branches

Louisville, Ky.

We were appalled at the article … and the writers’ serious acceptance of some of the leaders of the Negro march. A. Philip Randolph has, according to this article, equated himself with Jesus Christ; NAACP leader Roy Wilkins equates the march with a religious crusade; Eugene Carson Blake equates Negro “suffering” with the suffering of Christ! It is impossible to articulate adequately the blasphemy of such utterances. If this article was merely meant to expose rather than condone, the irony escapes us, because of what was left unsaid.

M. MCCORMACK

Louisville, Ky.

The National Council of Churches’ call for support of the march on Washington was of considerable interest.

It is particularly noteworthy to us because it denotes (1) a doctrinal position purporting to be that of the churches it represents, (2) a political voice and authority that belie its original express purpose of “meeting for discussion and fellowship,” (3) a spiritual dearth resulting in distortion of priorities and ethical means.

It is particularly disturbing to note that by espousing this cause in obedience to the “call,” we give assent to the NCC’s usurping of these realms, yet if we do not, now, we will be accused of bigotry, prejudice, and divisiveness.

Personally, I strongly believe in the Christian, ethical principle of integration, and have enjoyed much good fellowship and compatibility at intellectual, emotional levels, etc., with Negro brethren. But I fear this belief, and the action I may feel I should take as one freed by the grace of God, are far from the present militant cries and demands.

Likewise I believe the true Church must be vocal and active to show here Christ’s love, and strengthen the hands of our missionaries abroad.

TIM STAFFORD

Birmingham, Ala.

GLOSSOLALIA

Mr. Farrell states (“Outburst of Tongues: The New Penetration,” Sept. 13 issue) that exponents of classical Protestantism point out that Paul stated a preference for intelligible words and that there is no record of a specific instance when he used the gift. The fact is that Paul stated a preference for intelligible words when teaching in the church. It seems to me a mechanic prefers a wrench but if he is doing carpentry he would prefer a hammer and saw. To my knowledge there is no record of a specific time when Paul took communion, though obviously we know he did.…

There is a growing minority among Full Gospel people who do not believe that tongues is the “only” or “necessary” evidence of the initial receiving of the Holy Spirit. We do accept that it is an evidence.

J. E. STILES, JR.

Neighborhood Church

Pacoima, Calif.

This is the most complete summary and evaluation I have seen to date.

One subject Mr. Farrell did not touch upon and that I have not seen discussed is the relation of the tongues movement to the inspiration of the Scriptures. My limited and local observation has been a light view of the authority of the Scriptures and the meaning of “inspiration” as applied to Scripture on the part of glossolalics—both the older Pentecostals and the newer converts from more formalistic churches.

Does not the logic of “tongues” indicate that this is revelation from God by and through the Holy Spirit? If so, how does it differ in kind and in authority from the sacred canon? My experience has pointed to a foggy distinction on the part of those who practice speaking in tongues. Does this not account for the readiness with which Pentecostals have entered into and been accepted within the ecumenical movement? In fact, is not one of the psychological appeals of the ecumenical movement the substitution of a “super-church” authority for [that] God’s holy inspired revelation?

WILLIAM L. WOOD

State Line Baptist

Milton-Freewater, Ore.

Felt compelled to say a hearty “Amen.” … As an evangelist I have found much confusion over the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, especially his work after conversion. Huntington, W. Va.

ARNOLD WILLIS

“Outburst” reads like the elder brother’s reaction to the return of the prodigal son. His wordy assault is more like an outburst than an analysis. His references to the Scripture are not fair to the truth contained in Scriptures cited.

JAMES C. KOFAHL

Assembly of God

Prichard, Ala.

Voodo, which elevates the satanic, is particularly attracted to glossolalic experience. In the Middle Ages a group psychotic form known as the “dancing madness” reports glossolalic experience. We cannot ignore anthropology and psychology in understanding the new movement which is sweeping middle-class Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. In the framework of every culture it appears that symbols of the unconscious as well as the conscious are universal.…

Our time is spiritually defunct and sees tremendous need for group identity, and thus a group psychopathology can offer security on a level slightly less than chronic mental illness. We saw this happen in the warped ideology of Nazism which was as satanic and foul as voodoo, happening to supposedly civilized Christians. There is no premium or sanctity to being white, Anglo-Saxon, or Christian for group psychopathology. In the need for present conformity the new cultural schizophrenia has occurred in the pentecostal experience, and in some ways has little actual connection with the [U. S.] Pentecostalist Churches.…

We are not witnessing a valid biblical experience of God encountering man in history as he did on the shores of Pa-hahiroth in Exodus but a group psychopathology. All this reminds me of C. S. Lewis’ reminder that the main task of Satan is to make you think he is not there.

Perhaps the symbol of cloven hoof and horns is medieval, and he is disguised as some middle-class respectable gentleman who gets up on an Anglican pulpit and breaks into open hallucinatory clatter which is finally found to be nonsense syllables.

(THE REV.) HENRI M. YAKER

Consulting Psychologist

Highland Park, N. J.

Thank you for so balanced a coverage of the subject.

RAYMOND H. LIBBY

Seventh-day Adventist Church

Modesto, Calif.

Perhaps a preponderance of those during the past fifty or sixty years who have received the baptism of the Holy Ghost have been of the less educated, but perhaps, too, they have been the ones who were “simple enough”—in faith and acceptance of God’s Word to believe he would do just what he promised: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my spirit upon all flesh …” (Acts 2:17), and finally, “For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off …” (Acts 2:39).

CARL G. CONNER

Springfield, Mo.

Comment can be little more than supplementary, but a little seems appropriate.

The citation of First Corinthians 14:14–19 from the AV without indicating italics is deceptive. Nowhere does the Greek speak of “an unknown tongue”; the word “unknown” is an interpretative addition by the translators. It may or may not be a valid interpretation. Thayer (in his Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament) is very sure that Paul uses glossa here with reference to the physical organ, and that the activity consists of making speech-like noises rather than using a language, known or unknown. Yet Paul’s words in First Corinthians 13:1, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels,” seem to imply that language as a system of communication is involved, and not merely ecstatic babbling. The possibility of interpretation reinforces the idea that something definable as “language” (a secondary meaning of glossa) is indeed intended.

Not all of the references in Acts to being “filled with” or “full of” the Spirit can be taken to describe a special “outpouring” of the Spirit. Certainly Acts 13:52 is one of Luke’s typical summary sentences.… The outpouring of the Holy Spirit is never once described with reference to an individual, but always in connection with the Church of Christ: first the Jews, then the Samaritans, then the Gentiles, and finally the strange group in Ephesus, with one foot in each dispensation. In each of these cases, the gift of speaking in tongues was clearly given to every person; even the number is mentioned in some cases. The “baptism” of |he Holy Spirit belongs to the Church as a body, the body of Christ, with absolutely no individual selectivity, and with the ability to speak in new languages as an initial evidence of the supernatural character of this universal Church. This was communication; in Corinth it must potentially have been, if interpretation was possible. At worst, it was a highly specialized type of ecstatic glossolalia.

Farrell refers to a minister who claims to have witnessed to foreigners in their own languages. Polish is mentioned; fine, I hope he did. Also mentioned is Coptic Egyptian. The latter must have been in a spiritualist seance, because there have been no native speakers of Coptic Egyptian for a good many years. I fear this is typical of the mistaken, though perhaps sincere, claims of modern glossolalics.

I am the more concerned about the statement that “a group of government linguistic experts sought to analyze for CHRISTIANITY TODAY a tape of his glossolalia but found it unrecognizable, though one said it sounded like a language structurally.” The fact that there are some 3,000 languages in the world, many of them unknown (to most of us, that is), is not entirely relevant. We do know something about representative languages of every known language family in the world. I am by no means unique among descriptive linguists in having had direct, personal contact with well over a hundred languages representing a majority of the world’s language families, and in having studied descriptions of languages of virtually every reported type. If a glossolalic were speaking in any of the thousand languages of Africa, there is about a 90 per cent chance that I would know it in a minute. Now, I have also had the opportunity of making a sympathetic study of an alleged instance of speaking in tongues. And I must report without reservation that my sample does not sound like a language structurally. There can be no more than two contrasting vowel sounds, and a most peculiarly restricted set of consonant sounds; these combine into a very few syllable clusters which recur many times in various orders. The consonants and vowels do not all sound like English (the glossolalic’s native language), but the intonation patterns are so completely American English that the total effect is a bit ludicrous. My sample includes an “interpretation.” At the most generous estimate, the glossolalic utterance includes ten or eleven “sentences” or stretches of possibly meaningful speech. But the “interpretation” involves no less than fourteen distinct and independent ideas. There simply can be no match between the “tongue” and the “interpretation.” I am told that Dr. E. A. Nida of the American Bible Society has reported similar impressions of glossolalic recordings. Our evidence is still admittedly limited, but from the viewpoint of a Christian linguist the modern phenomenon of glossolalia would appear to be a linguistic fraud and monstrosity, given even the most generous interpretation of First Corinthians 12–14.

I have spoken as a linguist; let me also speak as a theologian (an ordained minister of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church). In the sample of glossolalia I have, the speaker speaks in the name of God. His “interpretation” begins: “My people, why do you doubt? Why do you fear? In my Word I have said to you, you can do nothing without me.” But God has already spoken in his inspired Word, the Holy Scriptures. Any presumption to add to this Word, even to reinforce it with a new Spirit-breathed message, is falsehood and blasphemy. I do not accuse this alleged speaker in tongues of being deliberately fraudulent; I rather believe (and the recording includes other evidence of this) that he is an emotional and possibly unstable mystic. I am persuaded, however, that he is the victim of a deception that will ultimately be a spiritual detriment rather than an advantage, to himself and others. When he speaks for God, his “tongue” is condemned on the surface.

I dislike being a “debunker.” Frankly, I have my own private spiritual experiences which I cannot entirely explain, and which I (perhaps wrongly) consider precious. But when Christians publicize, propagate, and endeavor to perpetuate an apparent manifestation of psychological instability and an obvious blasphemy as a special “gift of the Holy Spirit,” I cannot refuse to apply my knowledge and training to the problem. So far, I can only conclude, with all the sympathetic Scripture-centered scholarship I know how to apply, that modern glossolalia is a sad deception. Even if I am wrong, we had all best heed Paul’s admonition not to play it up, but to control it most carefully.

WILLIAM E. WELMERS

Prof. of African Languages

University of California at Los Angeles

Los Angeles, Calif.

Deals quite fairly and adequately with a subject which is currently of great interest to biblical Christians throughout this country, and perhaps the world.

There are several of us (graduate students in various fields) in this area who have been meeting for fellowship during the past six months. Your article on tongues answers and clarifies some of the questions which have been raised and discussed.

CHARLES E. HUNT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, Mass.

THANKS FOR THE THANKLESS

Your “Books in Review” section is superb. Your reviewers are selected, from what I can judge, for being familiar and concerned with the fields with which the books deal. Furthermore, they represent the finest of influential, evangelical scholarship. This is a service to the whole Christian community, for one can often learn more of a scholar’s views when he is assessing another’s work than when he is speaking in his own right. This is particularly true when key books are discussed.

But besides being good scholars and writers, your reviewers take positions for and against books—an increasing rarity in the reviewing business. Judging the intrinsic value of a book is difficult sometimes, but necessary to an adequate review. Other aspects of reviewing—such as the length of the article and the proximity of the review to the date of publication—together with those mentioned above, make CHRISTIANITY TODAY required reading for the lay Christian or the theological scholar.

Thank you for engaging writers for the thankless task of book reviewing.

DONALD G. DAVIS, JR.

School of Librarianship

University of California

Berkeley, Calif.

TO HEIGHTEN THE TIDE

The burning issue of “The Fourth R” (Aug. 30 issue) should not be permitted to flicker out and turn to ashes through lack of oxygen! In a similar vein, at the Los Angeles Coliseum on the closing night of the recent campaign, Billy Graham evoked a thunderous ovation from 140,000 people with an almost offhand remark that maybe such a crowd might make a march on Washington protesting the outlawing of religion in the public schools.

Can’t something practicable be devised to preserve and express this tide of sentiment?

For example, there are at least a couple of protest bills languishing in the Congressional hopper. Evidence of powerful public concern may be all that is needed to spur the committee to get one of these bills (say Senator Williams’ bill) to the top of the pile. This would be a good place to start.

How about doing something? How about testing the sinews of American Protestantism?… Invite readers to reply personally or through signed petitions circulated in their churches.

HARRY JAEGER

Youth Editor

Gospel Light Publications

Glendale, Calif.

Dr. Billy Graham has called for a march on Washington to demand our legislators pass an amendment to the Constitution and thus give American youth God’s Holy Word in our nation’s schools. It has occurred to me that if your great magazine would publicize and aid this challenge of Dr. Graham, that Christian Americans would march on Washington not 200,000 strong, but 2,000, 000 strong.

S. MCMASTER KERR

First Presbyterian Church

Harlan, Ky.

GO NORTH, YOUNG MAN

Re “The Ministry of All God’s People” (Editorial, Sept. 27 issue): If there are almost 1,000 seminary-trained graduates reportedly “biding their time” in the Dallas-Fort Worth area “waiting for pulpits,” why don’t some of them come to New England where there are numerous pulpits waiting for seminary-trained graduates?

DOUGLAS A. ELLIOTT

Trinity Baptist

Lynnfield, Mass.

THE YOKED AND THE UNYOKED

Dr. Samuel Shoemaker’s article “A Personal Word to the Clergy” (Aug. 2 issue) is a most stimulating personal witness to all who are yoked by the Holy Spirit. This well puts “Why I Left the Ministry” to sleep in its rightful place

FRANCIS E. NELSON

St. Mark Lutheran

Circle Pines, Minn.

AUTHORITY AND TRADITION

For the first time in centuries, a Roman Catholic pope (Pope John) recently confronted the tradition of the church openly with some of its own problems. In the ecumenical council and in the deliberations of the Curia, these challenges were publicly spoken of in the form of dialogue.

Prior to the council, the essence of authority in tradition was that the communicant of the church transferred his religious opinions to an institution, which was in a better position to determine what was truth or error than he was. Justification for such authority was found in the liability to error in the individual mind. An organized church, responsible for the determining of truth, was to be preferred to a single person concerned with any inquiry into it. Tradition was something which has “stood the test of time”—that which has emerged and endured out of the deliberations of the past.

Now the question which Pope John raised in the last council was that if the individual was capable of error, does it have to follow that tradition was incapable of error in every point? Accordingly, the raison d’être for the calling of the council was to determine if any error was perpetuated by tradition—for if such were true, then it would be far more costly than the mistakes of any one individual, past or present. If tradition can preserve truth then it can also preserve error, that is, any tradition not spoken ex cathedra.

It was always postulated in the Catholic Church that tradition is good if it can survive. This was one of the premises of the scholastic mind. But church history has shown, and Scripture is full of it, that the evil as well as the good can survive.

There is no better proof of the fallibility of tradition than in the recounting of historical judgment.

The story of mankind is replete with illustrations. The independence of a man like Socrates against the claims of the state was recounted by certain scholars on the floor of the recent Curia. Again, in the story of the Vatican, it was called to remembrance that the judgments of Galileo against the church were not in error. “Recanto! Recanto!” the pope told him to say. He recanted, but he uttered under his breath, “But the earth does go around the sun anyway.”

Pope John’s council revealed that when authorities are in conflict, it is impossible to happily resolve the dialogue by the method of authority itself.

Here perhaps is the most pleasing prospect of the coming council. Pope Paul himself in the last council took a position that authority and faith may be distinguishable.

WILLIS BERGEN

Hermon Presbyterian

Cabin John, Md.

CONTRASTING ATTITUDES

The concluding paragraphs of your report on the Billy Graham crusade in Los Angeles (News, Sept. 27 issue) mention that “Graham is still implicitly snubbed by some denominational and ecumenical leaders” and cite evidences of this.

The one interdenominational group which has consistently and prayerfully supported Mr. Graham from the beginning of his crusades is the National Association of Evangelicals. On the eve of his New York City crusade in 1957, when he was being sniped at from both sides of the theological fence, NAE passed a resolution which declared our “profoundest regard for our beloved brother” and assurance “of our united prayerful support as he prepares to pour forth his very life in the proclamation of the glorious Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”

It seems to me that this support on the part of NAE, contrasted with the attitudes of the ecumenists and neo-fundamentalists, is worth noting.

W. STANLEY MOONEYHAM

Director of Information

National Association of Evangelicals

Wheaton, Ill.

ANOTHER STRATEGY

Re “Strategy” (Eutychus, Aug. 30 issue): There is already a wealth of radio programs in Canada and the States, and if only a tenth of what the churches and other organizations spend on this were allocated for radio work abroad the national churches and missionary societies would be able to expand their present programs on an unprecedented scale.… May I suggest that our Christian radio programs at home need an “agonizing reappraisal” as to their value, and that it would be a mark of real Christian grace for a number to get off the air and get their sponsors to donate for radio and TV work on the mission fields of the world.…

LEONARD A. STREET

Toronto, Ont.

IT BEGAN IN ST. LOUIS

“Give Me Back My Child!” (Aug. 30 issue) is precisely the rallying cry of Citizens for Educational Freedom. As far back as August of 1959, when CEF was founded, there was the realization that the financial structure of education made compulsory by various state laws was saying to the parents of the nation, “You must send your child to this school, where he will be taught this, that, and everything else, but will not be allowed to receive training in morality based on belief in God.”

Five “citizens” in Saint Louis, meeting in like reaction to a single letter-to-the-editor, said as one, “Enough of this nonsense. We are the state, you will do what we say!” And like-minded citizens across the nation have been picking up the cry on a non-partisan, non-sectarian basis ever since.…

As a Roman Catholic, I would be unfair to my personal convictions if I did not take exception to the Stuart journey to “Spain (and) some of the South American nations.” But as an American citizen, I would have been most happy to have had Rev. John M. Stuart to nearby Bernardsville, New Jersey, last Sunday to be present at a dedication program. There, he would have seen for himself a fifteen-room Christian education building constructed before the church which would eventually serve the Presbyterian congregation in the Bernardsville area.…

Implement CEF philosophy by making the total tax fund set aside to foster education made compulsory by state law available to the parents of the nation for education of their children in the school of their choice and those educational facilities will receive full, five-day-week use “teaching right concepts to the children” who would attend them.

J. B. MCCAFFREY

Morris Plains, N. J.

LUXURY OF THE MOAN

The recent Supreme Court decision respecting church-state relationships in the public schools has brought forth considerable debate, some of which has been found in your pages, especially your August 30 issue. None of these articles mentioned the possibility of civil disobedience, however, even though they seemed seriously disturbed over the meaning of these decisions. All assumed that the decisions of the state determine the nature of church-state relationships.

Yet certain pronouncements I’ve read in the papers suggest that civil disobedience is in fact occurring.…

Are there possibly student prayer groups which insist on meeting on state property, for example, or parent groups? Are there evangelical teachers who insist on their rights as priests in the faith of the “priesthood of all believers”—rights to openly spread the Gospel wherever they may be? If so, are these things only happening where they have political support, or the support of tradition? Do they happen only in the South and in the East?

If, in fact, no meaningful civil disobedience is occurring, can this be because the “faithful” do not actually want to suffer anything for their “faith”? Could it be that the movements which determine the structure of our society are secular because the secularists have the courage to raise a meaningful issue in the society they live in? Could it be that the meaning of the present situation to the evangelical world is that their readiness to despise the state has led to their willingness to surrender the power of decision to it in order to have the pleasant luxury of moaning about it afterwards?

ROBERT S. JACKSON

Kent, Ohio

THE RENAISSANCE POPES

Mr. Karl Fr. Hering said that a Lutheran pastor—at his ordination—confesses that the Book of Concord is in agreement with the one scriptural faith (Eutychus, Aug. 30 issue). That is quite right. But merely the dogmatical propositions of the Book of Concord and the Smalcald Articles which are a part of it have binding character. The historical statements are not to be believed unanimously.

Now the quoted statement concerning the pope as the Antichrist is a historical one. Directed against the Renaissance popes, I am quite willing to subscribe to it. But I am not under ecclesiastical discipline bound to do so.

The Book of Concord quotes dicta of other popes as references to their authority. It would never have quoted an Antichrist. Now if the popes before the Renaissance era have not been Antichrists, it is quite possible that popes after that era are something other than Antichrists, even true believers of the justifying grace and destined to enter into eternal life. To classify Benedict XV or John XXIII as Antichrists, destined to enter hell, is a bent of mind from which may God prevent us.

CORNELIUS FRH. V. HEYL

Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church

Bad Toelz, Germany

BIBLICAL INFALLIBILITY

As I read Professor Seerveld’s article “Perspective for Christian Colleges” (Sept. 13 issue), I found myself feeling happily that here is a man who realizes the contemporary needs and imperatives of Christian education. But as the article went on, it began to dawn that underlying the professor’s condemnation of the “compartmentalization of reality,” of “the spirit of accommodation,” of the “spirit of scientific Modern Freedom,” and of “lingualized analytic philosophy,” and behind his commendation of the “reforming spirit,” of “something earth-shaking and important to say ourselves,” and of “a Septuagint approach,” underneath all this lies the assumption that characterizes most of the articles that appear in CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This assumption appears in various and sundry guises, but it always amounts to the same thing—biblical infallibility. From the tenor of Professor Seerveld’s article, one might feel that he was trying to escape this assumption. But then we read, “… all the theories and products we develop must conform to biblical specifications, no matter the measure of the day” (italics mine). I sympathize with and pray for this man’s vision of the need for the uniqueness, vitality, and transformation of Christian education. But this assumption of biblical infallibility—if he does hold it—will vitiate his whole position in the eyes of those who he is trying very hard to convince the most, namely, highly intelligent, morally sensitive, and technically competent Christian educators.

DUANE WILLARD

Madison, Wis.

A TIMELY TRUMPET

Warmest congratulations on the September 13 issue and in particular its editorial, “The Power of the Truth” … This word is most timely and meaningful. It is a trumpet blast for all who are in Christian higher education.

V. R. EDMAN

President

Wheaton College

Wheaton, Ill.

As s a form of literature, the letter holds a central place in communicating the Christian faith. One-third of the New Testament is made up of letters or epistles. Thus the modern Christian owes much to the practice of letter writing. It is therefore difficult to imagine the Christian minister misusing or distorting the values of letter writing. Yet this is frequently done with that special kind of letter called the letter of recommendation.

Perhaps the following sardonic quatrain is relevant:

A clergy letter penned with tongue in cheek

Is like a cup of tea that’s pale and weak—

For tea it is, as you can plainly see,

But sipping it reveals from taste it’s free!

Undoubtedly many clergymen write what appear to be letters of recommendation but are really little more than aggregations of pale words, devoid of real meaning.

At a recent meeting of college and university admission officers, one official remarked, “We require two letters of recommendation, not including the one from a clergyman.” When asked to explain, he pointedly said, “Experience has shown us that the letter from the minister is useless, little more than a string of platitudes and worn-out clichés.”

The pastor may claim that he has far too many other demands on his time to be particularly concerned about writing good letters of recommendation. But that is hardly a satisfactory answer. For after all, some conscientious ministers do write letters which are exceedingly helpful, individualistic enough to show close knowledge of the candidates and realistic enough to show that the writers have not adopted the all too prevalent attitude, “If I can’t say something good about a person, I won’t say anything.”

The traits of a good letter of recommendation are not hard to identify:

A letter of recommendation should be honest. The recipient of the letter does not expect the clergyman to offer expert judgments on another person’s emotional, intellectual, and physical conditions. Other sources yield this kind of information. But the letter can give important facts about character as honestly perceived by the writer.

Without doubt ministers are generally honest in their letters of recommendation; the trouble is that they are not honest enough. The generalized list of virtues, no matter how idealistic the writer or reader might be, does not come close enough to reality to be taken seriously. “No one can be that perfect!” is the only realistic response to the pyramids of complimentary words stacked high in too many letters of recommendation.

Honesty merely means that the writer tells what he believes the recipient of the letter should know. Probably the best way to handle this crucial judgment is to ask ourselves what we would wish to know about this person if we were on the other end of the corresponence. Most of us would appreciate honesty, even if it were not always flattering to the candidate.

A letter of recommendation should be concrete and specific. It is about a particular person, not generalized mankind. The form letter has no place in this area of writing; every sentence ought to be about the person in question.

Truths about honesty and other virtues need to be individualized. This can often be done by relating a concrete illustration of honesty, or loyalty, or whatever the virtue might be, as practiced by the candidate. A specific illustration, briefly stated, is worth a hundred generalizations.

A letter of recommendation should be brief. There may be circumstances which warrant giving three pages of information, but generally such a length is not only unnecessary—it is frightfully ineffective. There appears to be a direct relationship between knowledge and verbosity: the less we know, the more we write.

Vigorous writing is concise. George Orwell once took a biblical passage and attempted to rewrite it with the verbosity and pedanticism too often characteristic of our writing. Here is his translation of Ecclesiastes 9:11:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must inevitably be taken into accounting.

The biblical passage reads:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

The “sighted sub; sank same” radio message from the aircraft pilot of World War II fame may be an overemphasis, but it nevertheless demonstrates that a great deal can be said concisely and with vigor.

A letter of recommendation should be invitational in tone. There are times when a letter cannot possibly tell the whole story, not even an important part of it. This is a good reason to invite the reader to ask further questions.

Too often letters of recommendation show anger and curtness between their lines. They say: “Look, this is time consuming! Here’s a letter! Now forget it, will you?” But such an attitude does not express our deepest responsibilities as pastors. There are many reasons for the letter of recommendation, but the most important one from the writer’s point of view is that it can be of assistance to other persons, especially the person about whom we write.

In analyzing our letters of recommendation, we can well reread Paul’s letter to Philemon. True, this cannot serve as a pattern; no one letter can. But it does offer much in the way of illustration. For it is honest: “I mean Onesimus, once so little use to you, but more useful indeed, both to you and to me.” It is concrete and specific: it deals primarily with the life of one person, the slave Onesimus. It is brief: the shortest book in the New Testament; and note the concise but completely descriptive sentence: “And if he has done you any wrong or is in your debt, put that down to my account.” It is invitational in tone: Paul will be seeing Philemon in the future—“Have a room ready for me, for I hope that, in answer to your prayers, God will grant me to you.”

Honesty, specificity, brevity, and an invitational tone are simple characteristics, but they will greatly improve most clergymen’s letters of recommendation.

Orlo Strunk, Jr., is dean of West Virginia Wesleyan College, from which he received his A.B. He also holds the S.T.B. and Ph.D. degrees from Boston University.

Have you ever heard one Christian reminding another Christian to preach only what he has experienced? Or one preacher advising another preacher, “Don’t preach above your experience!”

It will be a sorry day for Christianity and our world when a Christian layman or clergyman tries to preach no higher than the level of his own experience. True, one must have had a personal encounter with God in Christ, and know that whereas once his back was to God, now he is facing Him. He must know that though once he was outside in the cold without Him, now he is inside the warm shelter of His love. Once in, we are told to go on to perfection, to an ever deeper experience in the grace of God, and communicate to others our experience.

As laity and clergy, we are called to proclaim not only our own experience but the message of God in its entirety. Shame on us for not having a higher experience; but more shame will come to us and to those who hear us if we preach only our experience, and not the highest to which we must heartily and everlastingly aspire! “Preach only what you’ve experienced!” To do that we shall have to omit much of the highest and best in the Bible. For who but the most presumptuous person could claim to have attained the complete surrender God demands in Galatians 2:20—“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me”? Or who has ever found all God desires for him as expressed in Jesus’ words: “If anyone wants to follow in my footsteps, he must give up all right to himself, carry his cross every day and keep close behind me. For the man who wants to save his life will lose it, but the man who loses his life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:23, 24, Phillips)?

“Preach only what you’ve experienced!” Then the Sermon on the Mount would never have been proclaimed after Christ, for who among us has ever experienced all God is calling us to in this message? In all the centuries past, if Christians had proclaimed only what they had personally experienced, much of the Bible would never have been proclaimed to the local communities. For within the local group, there is always some experience missing which needs to be supplied by other members of the Church elsewhere. If Christians were to herald only what they had personally experienced, then probably no one but Paul would have preached on some of the greatest themes in Christian experience. If the prophets and apostles had proclaimed only what they had experienced, we would have only half the Bible, with no prophetic word, and with whole passages and chapters and possibly even whole books of eschatology missing.

To Timothy, who was young and somewhat inexperienced, Paul wrote, “Preach the Word.” Paul himself proclaimed “the whole counsel of God,” not only his experience. What a deadening, provincial, perfunctory Gospel would be proclaimed if a man preached only what he experienced, if he kept silent about what prophets and apostles and other Christians experienced and recorded, if he said nothing about what God revealed and man may experience in the future.

As Christians, we must aspire, “go on to perfection,” reach for the highest God has for us in Christ Jesus. To do this, we must hear and preach not only what is ours in experience, but the whole message of God—the whole of his Word.

To preach only what one has experienced is to assume that all who listen are on the same level with us or have not yet reached our level. Some who listen, however, may have reached a higher level of experience than ours. To proclaim only what one has experienced would be to ignore these worthy persons or continually to preach below their experience, and never give them anything to which they could aspire. Both the herald and those who listen must reach for higher things. This can be done only through proclaiming a higher experience than that which both preacher and hearer have attained. Paul wrote to Timothy, “Preach the Word.… Prove, correct, encourage,” because he knew that the proclamation of the Word leads to more godly living on the part of those who hear it.

Richard G. Dunwoody, pastor of the Grace Evangelical United Brethren Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is a graduate of Lebanon Valley College (B.A.) and of the Temple University School of Theology (S.T.B.).

Moby-Dick is the great American novel—an epic of the voyage of life, the story of man’s folly. It is also the story of man’s rebirth from the ways of death to the way of life, and if read as such, Moby-Dick is a very great Christian novel.

Surely no other work of prose fiction contains such a profusion of Christian imagery so concretely identified. The acts and rites of the Church, the dual responsibilities of man-to-God and man-to-man: Herman Melville has given them all, yet wholly and artistically in the language and lore of whaling and the sea.

Early in the novel the vagabond-narrator Ishmael attends a worship service in New Bedford. Ishmael is a Presbyterian by claim, but he is not a practicing believer. He finds the sociality of the pagan Polynesian Queequeg preferable in its simplicity to the profound doctrine of Calvin and Knox. But he goes to church nonetheless on this December morning because he is afraid: he is about to embark on his first whale-hunt.

Melville devotes three chapters to description of the chapel and the service. The preacher is Father Mapple, an old seaman himself, and Chapter IX records his sermon on Jonah. It is the greatest sermon in imaginative literature (see excerpts on page 11).

No other passage in Moby-Dick has stirred quite so many differing patterns in the reflecting pool of criticism as has “The Sermon.” There are critics who think they see in the sermon some degree of contrast between what the preacher says and what Melville would have his readers believe. This camp is headed by Professor Lawrance Thompson, who, in his book Melville’s Quarrel with God, speaks of Father Mapple’s sermon as “the deceptive equivocation and the sneer at Christian doctrine.” There are also critics who regard the sermon merely as an extraordinary example of Yankee oratory. So Lewis Mumford exclaims, “What a preacher, and what a sermon!”

Then there are those critics to whom Chapter IX becomes a key with which to unlock the doors of mystery, or a compass by which to steer through the stormy pages that follow. Howard Vincent writes that “Melville undoubtedly intended that Father Mapple’s sermon should be the vehicle for the central theme of Moby-Dick.” W. H. Auden agrees, declaring that “Father Mapple’s Sermon … is not, as has sometimes been said, a magnificent irrelevance, but an essential clue to the meaning of the whole book.” And Professor Randall Stewart concurs with these opinions when he says:

One remembers, upon reaching the end of the book, Father Mapple’s sermon (in Chapter IX), and looking back, one sees its importance more clearly than before. For Father Mapple’s sermon about Jonah gives us a yardstick by which to measure the sin of Ahab.

Clearly the reader of Moby-Dick must choose one of these alternatives or else construct a meaningless fourth—that Melville was merely padding his novel with a sample of New England rhetoric. Obviously this essay claims for “The Sermon” a lasting significance throughout Moby-Dick; indeed, a lasting significance in literature.

What makes it a great sermon? In the first place, the preacher directs his remarks to his audience in a deliberate attempt to establish a relationship between the story and his listeners’ experiences. “What a pregnant lesson to us in this prophet!” he cries. To increase the effectiveness of his delivery and to impress more deeply the importance of the lesson upon his audience, Father Mapple employs a contemporaneity of speech that removes the narrative from its ancient setting to show its current application. The crew of Jonah’s ship are “Joe,” “Jack,” and “Harry.” The interview between the Captain and Jonah is conducted in the American idiom of the time. “ ‘Point out my state-room, Sir,’ says Jonah now. ‘I’m travel-weary; I need sleep.’ ”

A Double-Stranded Lesson

Secondly, Father Mapple declares the message of the Jonah story to be “a two-stranded lesson,” that is, a double-significance bound tightly and intertwined: “a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God.” Here we come upon the parallels between the biblical account and the drama of Moby-Dick. Jonah’s example serves to enlighten all men, including Ishmael and Queequeg, members of the congregation that Sunday morning. To each one Father Mapple addresses the lesson:

“Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah.”

But that second strand of the lesson relates specifically to the interwoven thread of experience that ties together Jonah, Father Mapple, and Captain Ahab. Consider first the direct resemblances between the Hebrew prophet and the Yankee skipper.

Both are unhappy men with their slouched hats and guilty eyes. Father Mapple calls Jonah “a miserable man … most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God.” Ishmael records that “with slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks,” looking like a moody, stricken man “with a crucifixion in his face.”

When Jonah seeks to crown his escape from God by adding the privacy of a locked door to his perquisites, “the Captain laughs lowly to himself.” There is in that laugh the evil suggestion of imminent disaster, and its similarity to “the low laugh from the hold” of the “Pequod” that presages the role of Fedallah in Ahab’s tragedy is frightening.

Hidden away in his cramped bunk beneath the waterline of the ship, Jonah watches the lamp remain steady in spite of the heaving of the ship. “ ‘Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!’ he groans, ‘straight upward, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!’ ” Thus Father Mapple characterizes the remorseful prophet. So too are all the chambers of Ahab’s soul, “tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles.” Not so the warning, burning masts of his ship. Like Jonah’s steady lamp, they stand straight; the corpusants at their tips blaze upward in a blinding apocalypse of doom. “God’s burning finger has been laid on the ship,” Ishmael discovers. “His ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin’ has been woven into the shrouds and cordage.” But even as the great masts burn like candles, and in spite of the Christian mate Starbuck’s condemnation—“God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! tis an ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued!”—Ahab rededicates himself and his entire crew to their iniquitous quest.

“All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear!” And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the flame.

Jonah’s conscience appalls him, Ahab’s is quenched. There a difference between the two lies.

Father Mapple tells the audience that, in his greatest moment of need, Jonah cried “ ‘out of the belly of hell’—when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones.” Jonah’s prayer stands starkly in contrast to Ahab’s curse at a similar time of need: “From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee, … thou damned whale!”

One Restored, One Doomed

The greatest distinction between Jonah and Captain Ahab is apparent in Jonah’s restoration and Ahab’s doom. For Ahab there is the shattering realization that he has failed. “Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief,” he despairs. The reader gropes to find Ahab’s meaning: perhaps he suggests that his most noble moment, since the avenging act upon Moby Dick has never been consummated, was the instant of Ahab’s dismembering. If so, Ahab is conscious in his final speech of having had his closest communication with Supremacy in the initial confrontation. All his subsequent suffering and self-denial have not elevated him above the psychical apex he once reached at the Season-on-the-Line.

But because Jonah’s conscience was not seared, and because he “prayed unto the Lord his God, ‘salvation is of the Lord,’ ” Father Mapple’s peroration can sound its exultant peals. As if prefiguring the depths of Ahab’s “topmost grief,” the preacher reminds his seafaring congregation that God’s delight is higher than man’s woe, even as the pinnacle of the ship is higher above the water than the keel is below. The regenerated prophet is portrayed as possessing “delight … a far, far upward, and inward delight,” and with this delight an unmitigating sense of purpose that reveals something of the New England independence-from-men and dependence-upon-God that typifies such widely diverse philosophies as those of Edwards and Emerson. “Against the proud gods and commodores of this earth,” Jonah “ever stands forth his own inexorable self.” Therefore “delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.”

Excerpts From ‘The Sermon’

Father Mapple … slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: “Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah—‘And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.’

“Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sea-line sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish’s belly! How billowlike and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; seaweed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God.…

“Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the living God. How being an annointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along ‘into the midst of the seas,’ where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were wrapped about his head,’ and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet—‘out of the belly of hell’—when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;’ when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean—Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!

“This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!”

He drooped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm—“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”

He said no more, but slowly waved a benediction, covered his face with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place. [Moby-Dick, L. Mansfield and H. Vincent, eds., Hendricks House, 1952. By permission.]

The contrast between Jonah and Ahab at this point is strikingly clear. How many citations could be amassed from the text of Moby-Dick to show Ahab’s unflinching refusal to give his allegiance to anyone but himself! Yet even he realizes the contradiction of fact.

“Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before the ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.… Stand round me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump, leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. Tis Ahab.”

Another set of comparisons exists, that between Ahab and Father Mapple. Here the contrast need not be quite so hypothetical, for both are flesh-and-blood contemporaries, men who have sailed the same seas, perhaps in the same ships. But one has retired from the sea; the other ought to have retired. One has committed his will to God’s use, while the other has sanctified that will unto himself.

There can be no doubt that Melville wished his readers to see in the personality of Father Mapple a character such as Ahab might have been, had he left the sea after his crippling to follow “his humanities.” In fact, it could well be argued that Melville is implying in the parenthetical paragraphs describing the preacher in action that Father Mapple was once himself a Jonah/Ahab. His demeanor is that of a man relating a confession from the inner core of his soul. He is no mere story-teller, embellishing a fish-tale. Throughout the chapter he is depicted as increasingly engrossed in his message.

His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell. He … seemed communing with God and himself.

But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these words.

He drooped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm.

We may rightly suppose that Father Mapple, like Jonah, “when the word of the Lord came a second time,” had responded to do the Lord’s bidding, as a man who realizes his own position as a sinner before God and senses both God’s hands pressing upon him. Ahab had never acknowledged his obligation because Ahab, though smitten by fire and disabled by the Whale, had never learned the greatest lesson to come out of Father Mapple’s sermon.

“As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God—never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed—which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.”

Melville, through the lips of Father Mapple, has caught in that last sentence the essence of the struggle that faces every man—the conflict between flesh and spirit that Jesus Christ taught when he said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” Moreover, it is the conflict that Christ himself experienced in Gethsemane. And it is in the spirit of consecration expressed through the Saviour’s prayer, “Not my will, but thine, be done,” that Father Mapple is last seen.

He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place.

The sermon is ended but its significance lasts, and its effect is powerful, whether in or out of the book.

Blue Monday

Now as I sat down at my morning meal in the house where I do dwell, I did look down upon a table spread with the good fruit of the earth. But I was weary and ill at ease and could not eat. There was food for my body, but my soul was desolate. The girl friend, who knows me perchance all too well, did then say: “Thou needest not tell me what ailest thee; it is thine old ailment. Thou hast again said all that thou knowest on the Sabbath Day and there is nothing left for thee to say on the coming Sabbath. Thou hast thy Monday morning blues.” Then I did reply, “Thou speakest wisely. My head is as a barrel, and I have come to the bottom of my barrel. I must flee to the hills and hide my hoary head in shame, even if perhaps the whole world doth perish with me.” But the girl friend hath a way with her. Whenever I dance around in holy glee as if I were God’s personal secretary, she soon bringeth me back to earth. She steppeth on my toes to remind me that I too have feet of clay. But whenever I am in the depths of despair, she lifteth me up on a rock that is higher than I. “The whole world will not perish if thou ceaseth thy preaching,” she said. “One higher than thou is in charge of things. Thou thinkest that thou art a little god. Thou speaketh too much of what is in thine own mind and not enough of what is in the mind of God. There is enough light in his Word to sustain thee for thy threescore and ten years. Forget thyself, open thy mind, hear His voice, and new truth will come pouring in as in the sound of a rushing wind.” Then I did sit down and eat a good hearty breakfast of ham and eggs, and I did say to the girl friend, “Thou art a good egg, and I have been acting like a ham. Thou speakest so wisely, forsooth; can it be because thou hast been listening to such good sermons during thy lifetime?” The girl friend thereupon did heave a deep and heavy sigh.—The Rev. DOWIE G. DEBOER, Brimfield, Massachusetts.

D. Bruce Lockerbie teaches literature and composition at The Stony Brook School. He received the A.B. and the M.A. degrees from New York University, and is chairman of the English Department at Stony Brook.

The problem of revelation remains vital for our time. Indeed, whether God has let himself be known and, if so, how, is a decisive question of human life. A simple negative answer is given by all forms of atheism, for which the question itself is meaningless. There are, however, also those who are not atheists for whom the basic question is whether God has in fact revealed himself. For the person who has outgrown his childhood faith of more naïve times and has experienced profound changes in himself and the world, the question is existentially important. The simple faith of childhood cannot stand up under the critical attitudes he has assumed towards life and its increasingly complex problems. Questions arise concerning the reality of the formerly assumed love and righteousness of God in the face of the things which God “allows” to be suffered in the world. This does not mean that he has given up faith in God. It does mean that the God of his faith is surrounded by more and more question marks. Meanwhile, uncertainty and unrest swell up within the heart. The voices that taunted Old Testament poets echo more strongly around this perplexed modern, asking: Where is your God?

The challenge of the voices is the challenge of the silent God. It would seem to be a contradiction even to speak of a silent God. To speak of God at all, even of a silent God, assumes that in some way he has not kept silent. The silence of a God can be eloquent.

This may seem to be empty logic. Yet, men will often say something of God from out of a tradition of dogmatics, and then conclude that this God is a silent God. There are many voices which resound through life, but His voice is still. He is the silent, the hidden God. In the silence of heaven, the deep desperation of the voices of history becomes more acute, the tired searchings of man are endless and wearying unto death. If there were suddenly a manifestation of His divine presence, such as occurred in former times; if he should stand before us unavoidably and his voice should sound as the unmistakable Vox Dei; then would men believe. Then would men follow his leading with new courage. But it does not happen.

There is no voice from above, no revelation breaking through the doubts, not even an angel of light coming with a message from heaven. There is no breakthrough in the everlasting round of things, there are no miracles as in the once-upon-a-time. There is only a perpetual sweeping up of men into the maelstrom of ordinary and brute events. There is a world in distress with men in distress and anger and a constant state of shock; but there is no heavenly voice. Is there an answer—can we take courage from the very silence of God?

Protestantism is sometimes taunted by Roman Catholicism that, in decisive moments, it knows only the silent God. A prominent Roman Catholic once wrote: “The Protestant can believe that Christ has redeemed him, but he has no visible sign to hold to in hours of doubt and dread; he stands alone before a silent God.” The Roman Catholic, in contrast, has a God who speaks infallibly today. The Catholic has an audible voice of absolution in the priest.

We may set aside the fact that this audible voice, too, must be believed to be the voice of God. The point is that the problem of the silent God cannot be resolved in this way. I think of the situation of fear and despair in the Philippian jail, when the jailer was on the verge of suicide because he saw no way out. In that situation, Paul set before him the way out, the radical way out of his despair. It was the way of the Gospel of the speaking God.

Men do not want to deceive themselves in the dark despair and deep dread of the world. They want to hear a real voice, a voice which can remove all doubt and offer an unshakable foundation. The darkness of the world is not broken by a divine theophany or an angel of light. Doubt is not removed this way. In the Old Testament such things sometimes happened. But not always. Critics asked: Where is your God? And God did not break through. He allowed his chosen people to waste in exile, not merely for weeks but for long, long years.

Answering The Complaint

What should we answer when the complaint grows against the silence of God? Can we perhaps answer by saying that it is proven from nature that all things must have a cause, that there must be a First Cause that gives all things meaning? Does it, then, answer the complaint when we conclude that there must be One who has set an End or Purpose for everything? This is the scholastic answer. But it is clear that it will not set the modern heart at rest. The problem of the silent God is not answered by a First Cause. Man’s anxiety is not eased by proof of the purposefulness of all things. This is, in fact, his difficulty; he discovers precious little of this purposefulness in the world or in his own life. To deduce purpose for life from an idea of a First Cause will not satisfy, because modern man sees little purpose with his own eyes. God cannot be the crowning copestone of the magnificent vault of our thinking. Even in Roman Catholic circles it has become apparent that the significance of such neat systems of proofs for the existence of God is being questioned. In Rome, too, there are those who have no ready answer for modern man with his desperate questions and deep doubt.

In the biblical revelation, the possibility is presented that God might hide himself in certain circumstances. Israel had to reckon with the fact that God might hide his face in wrath (Isa. 54:8). The thought of divine self-withholding is terrifying: “For thou hast hid thy face from us, and hast consumed us, because of our iniquities” (Isa. 64:7). But it is evident that this wrathful hiding away is something other than the perplexing silence of God. This turning away is his holy answer to the sin of his people. When the people turned back to him, God always spoke again, came out of his holy hiding place, and turned again to them in mercy. The same thought is reflected in one of the Church’s confessions: whenever believers, fallen away, turn again in earnest repentance, the paternal face of God shines anew. The divine hiding is not a game in which he leaves us temporarily in confusion and uncertainty. It is part of the paternal earnestness of his effort to establish fellowship with us and embrace us in his love.

God’S Silence As Response To Sin

For this reason, we must not speak abstractly about the hidden and silent God. Most of the time, the phrase “silent God” is meant as a criticism. It is intended as a jibe, that we walk in the wastelands because God keeps silence. The Bible shows that God keeps silent when we choose the wastelands rather than his fold. His silence is divine in response to sin. Perhaps, in our modern situation, the complaint against the silence of God arises out of a prior estrangement from his service. It could be that we are no longer in a position to hear his voice. It could be that we do not see him because we have closed our eyes. Paul talks about the god of this world blinding the eyes of those who do not believe, lest the light of the Gospel of Christ who is the image of God should shine through to them (2 Cor. 4:4). It is possible that men speak so much about the silence of God because they do not listen to him.

In the biblical milieu things are different. The message of the risen Christ is given to the apostles: Go, proclaim it to the world. The Gospel spreads like a flame. It does not seek to prove that God exists. It is not a treatise to be commended to pure reason. It is not an appeal to the mature mind; it is for children. But the Word of God sounded as a powerful witness and cut as a two-edged sword through every culture and tradition. It went as a Word that refused to be empty, that did what God intended it to do. In the light of this, every complaint about the silence of God must be actually a refusal to listen. As long as Israel understood this, the wonder of life hung pleasant over them. They knew they had not been delivered over to dark powers and fearful destiny. They knew that God was always near unto them who drew near unto him.

Hence, there is one answer to the complaint against the silent God. It is the witness of the Church. It is not the answer deduced from a rational proof. It is a call to walk in God’s way, the way of prayer and expectation. Only in this way will the complaint be silenced, even when we are forced into a consciousness that God’s ways are higher than our ways and his thoughts other than our thoughts. This can be bitter and unfathomable, as it was for Israel when she complained: My way is hid from the Lord (Isa. 40:27). But we know the divine answer: “Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary?… He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength” (Isa. 40:28, 29).

We do not live in a world sealed off from divine mercy and left alone in the silence of God. We live in a world resounding with His summons to leave the silence of the wastelands and come to his gracious voice, to walk out of darkness into his wonderful light. And if there are many who are lost in what seems to them a valley of divine silence, we ought not to look down upon them from the highlands. We should remember the words of Zechariah: “Thus said the Lord of Hosts; In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you” (Zech. 8:23).

The greater the distress and uncertainty of the world, the more urgent becomes the challenge of the Church. As the Church responds to the challenge, it will become more and more evident that not the silence but the speech of God arouses the most complaints. But where the voice is received, there men will learn to perceive that God can indeed keep silence. Yet, it will not be a silence that arouses complaint. It will be the silence that Zephaniah witnessed to: “He will be silent in his love.”

G. C. Berkouwer is professor of dogmatics and the history of dogma at the Free University of Amsterdam. He is the author of many volumes in the field of theology, including Divine Election and The Image of God.

The ability to keep silent is not a virtue that all of us always possess. Though we may not be trained as public speakers, we have no difficulty in talking when given the right circumstances. But what we say is not always helpful to us or to others. Thus the Bible speaks again and again about loose tongues and sharp words. On the other hand, the Bible also indicates again and again the times when something should be said. Indeed, the Bible is itself a testimony that those who live in fellowship with God have something to say.

Consider some critical periods in the Old Testament. God called Abraham to come apart and be the beginning of the covenant relation established with him and his people and through them with all people. Abraham’s family was hardly settled in Palestine before forced to go to Egypt. After long years of slavery there was the Exodus and establishment in the Land of Promise. God’s chosen people became a nation. But this nation, through which all nations were to be blessed, was itself torn apart by internal strife, spiritually smothered by pagan enticements, threatened with conquest by powerful neighbors. This was the period of great prophets, men who were called to speak for God, to summon the people to repentance and warn them of impending judgment; men like Amos, who said, “The Lord God has spoken; who can but prophesy?… You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.… I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.… Take away from me the noise of your songs.… But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Or consider the New Testament. The nation of God’s people was gone, but the covenant of God’s love remained. And so in the fullness of time a star appeared and a Child was born. God became incarnate. God came into human flesh. Never did there live one like Jesus Christ. People were touched, lives were changed. Some became full disciples. But after a time Christ left the earth. Was the heavenly vision gone, the day of new hope over?

Those whose lives had been touched said, No. It was not the end, only the beginning. And they had something to say. They taught and preached Christ the crucified and resurrected Saviour, and when people asked, “What shall we do?,” the answer came back: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.” When religious leaders who were not believers ordered them not to teach or speak in the name of Jesus, these Christians responded, like Peter and John, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.”

Nor are the testimonies of the Bible given only in times of critical pressure. The Psalms are the expressions of people who lived in fellowship with God and had something to say about his majesty and wonder, his goodness and love. Or take the man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years. Christ came along one day and told him to take up his pallet and walk. The healed man’s friends argued about his carrying his pallet on the sabbath day, but he replied, “The man who healed me said to me, ‘Take up your pallet, and walk.’ ” Or turn through the Pauline Epistles. Again and again this man whose conversion began on the Damascus road had something to say—“Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

Yes, when one lives in fellowship with God he has something to say. We Christians have something to say today.

For one thing, we have something to say in times of trouble. This is true of times of national danger. If the prophet Isaiah had been living in our nation during the past months, surely his message would have been no different from that delivered to his own people in the eighth century B.C. and recorded in the book of the Bible which bears his name. The situations are different: the people of Judah faced chariots and spears, not missiles and nuclear warheads. But God’s chosen people were also faced with the ominous threat of a powerful pagan force—Assyria—that sought to conquer the world.

As the prophet Isaiah spoke to his people he urged them not to give way to the atheism of fear and panic. He called them to view the situation in the framework of the rulership of God, who was the God of all nations. Assyria could not raise an arm except within this framework. God’s people needed to see the impending judgment of God upon them and to heed the call to repentance and recommitment. Herein was their destiny to be determined. This word is always to be said in times of national danger. And it can be said only by those who live in fellowship with God.

We Christians, then, have something to say. We not only share the concerns of fellow citizens over physical safety, preservation of national boundaries, and the exercise of freedom: we have other concerns and deeper insights. We know that our play as a nation is ultimately not with Mr. Khrushchev or any other would-be rulers of the world. They are not to be taken lightly, but they and we live only in the providence of God. He is our security and our judgment.

Our Personal Experiences

This same emphasis applies to our personal experiences. The fact that we are Christians does not mean that God will always protect us from trouble or make life easy. This is what some of us want. We want our lives as Christians to be quiet and safe journeys, free from accidents and trouble. But it is not so. As long as the earth groans in travail; as long as godless forces are at work; indeed, until God’s redemptive purposes are fulfilled and Christ comes again, there will be conflicts, suffering, trouble, tragedy. But this is not all. The New Testament does not promise escape, but it is filled with promises that we can live through troubles confidently and victoriously. For these experiences are not our masters. They do not determine our fate. They are not our security. We live in and for God, and “in everything God works for good with those who love him.…” Yes, we have something to say in time of trouble; and as we say it in our living as well as with our words, life will be different.

We Christians also have something to say about moral righteousness. The breakdown of morality in our society has become so widespread that syndicated gossip columns have gone to preaching. Someone has said that the seriousness of some of our scandals is seen not only in the violation of moral laws but also in the fact that so many people seem unconcerned about the wrong that was done. One could go a step further and say a greater seriousness is seen in the fact that this breakdown involves so many of us who profess to be religious and who claim membership in the Church.

Now this is not to say we have no place in the Church if we make mistakes and commit sins. Such a position may be used by cynics and other outsiders as an excuse for staying away. It is precisely because we are sinners that we have the Church of Jesus Christ. But our identification with Christ means more than this. It means that something has happened and is happening to us. We are members of the Church not only because we are sinners but because God has come in Christ to save us from our sins.

More Than An Ethical System

Here we come to an overlooked but serious cause of our moral breakdown. Instead of being a personal experience with the Christ who wrought our salvation on Calvary’s cross, the Christian way is considered by too many of the people of our land as an ethical and moral system to which they will give verbal allegiance and which they will try to follow in their daily living. But this does not work.

Christ did have a lot to say about moral righteousness. There are things which are right and things which are wrong, not because we think them so but because God is God. But you and I and our fellow men are sinful, rebellious people. We are not able to do what is right. The stronger the pressure, the more difficult it becomes. We can join a hundred organizations which recognize the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, yet this will not enable us to live as we should. Only as we have a personal experience with Christ, as he lives within us and changes us into new creations, can we live righteously.

Therefore we Christians have something to say about salvation. In the recent World Mission Consultation one of the major questions considered was universalism—the belief that all people are saved. Such a concept has a sharp effect on the dynamics of a world mission program presenting Jesus Christ as the only Saviour. It also has its effect on the testimony and witness we Christians make to our next-door neighbors.

Does it make any real difference whether people believe in and give themselves to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour? The Bible says that it does, that it makes all the difference. The Bible says you and I and all other people are spiritually lost outside of God as he is revealed in Christ. The Bible says we ourselves are unable to overcome our sin, unable to create fellowship with God. The Bible says our salvation comes not as we try to obey laws and undergo religious rituals, but when the living God comes into our lives. And the Bible says that God has come to us. He has come in Christ. He alone redeems. He is our only Saviour. Yes, we have something to say about salvation; and as we say it in our living as well as with our words, life will be different.

This means, then, that as people who are redeemed in the blood of Jesus Christ we have something to say to the unredeemed culture in which we live. We are all too aware of the tensions of our society, tensions created by critical and unresolved issues in nearly every area of our life. And we who have been chosen of God to be the Body of his crucified and resurrected Son have too long been silent with our words and with our deeds. Yea, instead of being committed instruments through whom the Holy Spirit works to redeem life, we in our silence and inactivity as the Christian community have been molded by the unredeemed culture in which we live. Look, for example, at our fellowship as believers within our own denomination. Is it marked by the New Testament characteristics of the Body of Christ or by the fellowship patterns which characterize our culture? Indeed, the watchword of the day has been: Be careful! Tensions are tight! Go slow! Stay away from controversial matters! Trouble can develop!

Thus the Christian Church today has become too much an ambulance in a sin-torn world, dragging along behind the issues, picking up the wounded, making bandages—when it should be out on the front lines, facing the issues and getting hit in the face, but leading others and conquering the enemy in the name of our victorious Lord.

Hear the words of Isaiah:

“The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.… They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. In that day the root of Jesse shall stand as an ensign to the peoples; him shall the nations seek, and his dwellings shall be glorious.”

These are no idle words. This is no fairy tale. This is a Messianic passage. This is the Word of God about his redemption of life. Let the redeemed of the Lord say so!

William A. Benfield, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Charleston, West Virginia, holds the degrees of Th.M., Th.D., and D.D. This article was the Sunday morning sermon delivered before the 1963 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S.

Many people lose their way in life because they are not grateful to God. Historically, Paul associated the most serious spiritual and moral losses with an unthankful spirit. He wrote the Christians at Rome that ungodly men were without excuse; “for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened” (Romans 1:21, RSV). The context reveals that failure in thanking contributes to failure in thinking. Awareness of God becomes blurred. Wisdom turns to folly. Worship is transferred from the Creator to the creature. Values are so distorted that the possibility of sanctity and beauty in sex and the hope of social justice and domestic happiness may be wholly canceled.

Some of our most celebrated theologians could have brightened their somber treatises with some chapters on praise, gratitude, and joy. One introduction to Thomas Aquinas which contains seven hundred pages of excerpts from the Angelic Doctor yields very little on Christian gladness. Aquinas thinks that man will find ultimate happiness in that knowledge of God which the human mind will possess after this life. Such stalwarts as Charles Hodge and A. H. Strong have no place in index headings for thanksgiving. Theology would be better written with some thankology.

As a pastor, I have often found church members startled by the simple question: “Have you ever in your life specifically thanked God for Jesus Christ?” Usually the answer has been, No.

Fundamentally, we begin to fulfill God’s purpose for us by offering up our praise:

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the lands!

Serve the Lord with gladness!

Come into his presence with singing!

Know that the Lord is God!

It is he that made us, and we are his;

We are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving,

And his courts with praise!

Give thanks to him, bless his name!

For the Lord is good;

His steadfast love endures forever,

And his faithfulness to all generations.

While many of the psalms celebrate God as Redeemer, this one (Psalm 100) sings of him almost wholly as Creator. Man was made to rejoice in his Maker. Some who may suppose that John Calvin never smiled will be astonished to learn that he attached to the first three commandments these positive cognates: adoration, trust, invocation, and thanksgiving.

While logically we may think of God in separate ways as Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer, experientially we know him in all these ways together if we are Christians. William Law, one of the outstanding men of prayer in the eighteenth century, was writing as creature and Christian when he urged: “If anyone would tell you the shortest, surest way to all happiness and perfection, he must tell you to make a rule to yourself to thank and praise God for everything that happens to you” (quoted in Prayer and Personal Religion, Coburn, Westminster Press, p. 35).

In brief compass in a pastoral letter Paul indicates that man’s chief end includes sharing gratefully in the gifts of the Creator. “Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits … who forbid marriage and enjoin abstinence from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving; for then it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer” (1 Tim. 4:1–5, RSV). A coercive asceticism may wear the garb of spirituality, but it is really an apostasy from the purpose of God for his creatures. But we must note that selfish enjoyment does not glorify God. Conscious recognition of the Giver’s goodness consecrates both gifts and enjoyment. In other words, man was put on earth to give thanks to God.

The crisp freshness of each new day, the smell of the good earth newly turned for winter wheat, a golden carpet of leaves in the woods, bulging bins of fruit and grain, and tables loaded for a feast excite our wonder and gratitude.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow;

Praise Him, all creatures here below.

Deliverance From Cynicism

If thanksgiving is a clue to life’s meaning, it must be relevant to pain, frustration, and loss. Unless it can stand up to life’s cruel blows and denials, it is as frothy and transitory as the foam on an ocean wave.

Let us consult William Law again. “For it is certain that whatever seeming calamity happens to you, if you thank and praise God for it, you turn it into a blessing. The true saint is not he who prays most, or fasts most …, who gives most alms or is most eminent for temperance, … or justice; but it is he who is always thankful to God, who wills everything that God wills, who receives everything as an instance of God’s goodness, and has a heart always ready to praise God for it” (Coburn, op. cit., p. 35).

We know life too well to suppose that the Hebrews were exempt from suffering. They were often afflicted—especially for disobedience. Yet listen to this ringing affirmation: “For the Lord God is a sun and shield; he bestows favor and honor. No good thing does the Lord withhold from those who walk uprightly” (Ps. 84:11, RSV). Try to find that in Greek philosophy! William James once said that the notion that the ancient Greeks were gaily joyous is a modern fiction and that whenever they were truly thoughtful they were sad.

Paul in chains wrote his epistle of joy, the letter to the Philippians. He saw calamity as serving to advance the Gospel. This proved the possibility of remaining thankful and unembittered under trial. He practiced what he had written earlier to the Thessalonians: “Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thess. 5:16–18a, RSV). Commenting on this, John Wesley says: “This is Christian perfection. Further than this we cannot go; and we need not stop short of it. Our Lord has purchased joy, as well as righteousness, for us.… Thanksgiving is inseparable from true prayer; it is almost essentially connected with it. He that always prays is ever giving praise, whether in ease or pain, both for prosperity and for the greatest adversity. He blesses God for all things, looks on them as coming from Him, and receives them only for His sake; not choosing nor refusing, liking nor disliking, anything, but only as it is agreeable or disagreeable to His perfect will.”

I recall a very helpful distinction made once at a union Thanksgiving service in Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Dr. John Calvin Reid was preaching on First Thessalonians 5:18. He pointed out that there is a difference between giving thanks for something and giving thanks in something. It may be impossible to be grateful for some towering tragedy; it is not impossible to be grateful in it. This is the crucial test of the thankful approach to life and the deathblow to cynicism.

The Corrective To Anxiety

Worry is a besetting weakness of most Christians, and clergymen are notoriously assailed by it. A busy pastor has problems thrown at him day and night. Some parishioners feel they are rendering high service by reporting as many problems as possible to the minister. It takes some doing to avoid being a parish trash can.

Bishop Stephen Neill in a beautiful book for ministers (Fulfill Thy Ministry, Harper and Brothers) urges clergymen to manifest the grace of ataraxia. “It is the life that is free from strain and worry and anxiety” (p. 60). He comments: “You will find, I think, that worry is almost always connected with an error about time or place, wanting to be somewhere else, or wanting to be in some time other than the present” (p. 62). He suggests three rules for effective living: “Live here and now. Recollect always that underneath are the everlasting arms, here and now. Do what you can.… In my experience God deals wonderfully gently with the honest mistakes, such as all of us are likely to make, and guards our people from being harmed by them” (p. 63). Another way to say what this gifted Anglican says is: “Practice a grateful faith moment by moment.”

This is Paul’s point in Philippians 4:6 and 7: “Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (RSV). The words “with thanksgiving” are central, suggesting that gratitude opens the windows of the spirit to the inpouring of God’s peace.

The sublime scenes of heaven in the Apocalypse resound with the praises of all creatures. We are in training now for unhampered participation in the unending chorus of joy.

Cary N. Weisiger, III, pastor of the Menlo Park (California) Presbyterian Church, holds the degrees of A.B. (Princeton University), Th.B. (Westminster Seminary), and D.D. (Muskingum College). He has served on the General Council of the United Presbyterian Church.