During the past few decades Christianity versus communism has been the burden of countless publications and discourses throughout America. These for the most part have extolled the virtues of the Christian faith and of the American way of life, while on the other hand, they denounced the errors and terrors of communism. And of errors and terrors there have been plenty. Today, for all the “socialist” trends in American life, few causes so strongly unite the American people as the anti-Communist crusade.

Despite this strong opposition, however, the march of communism continues apace. Its progress since the Russian revolution 40 years ago is astounding. To the partisans of the movement this bears eloquent testimony to its validity. Its enemies recognize the fact that evil forces often seem more suited to the conditions of history (for a time) than the good. In any event, it cannot yet be supposed that the high water mark has been reached and that we shall see presently the eclipse of world communism.

Meanwhile, developments within the “free world” have not been reassuring. Despite an outer religious prosperity, there is clear evidence of the fresh growth, since World War II, of the secular stream in our own own culture. It is true that “the time of trouble”—the rise of totalitarian powers, the world-wide economic collapse during the inter-war period, two world wars and the Korean conflict—purged the West of much of its false optimism. Religion once more became respectable, and sin and tragedy returned as theological categories necessary to the understanding of history. But it was our military technology that rescued us from both our economic doldrums and our foreign enemies. God may have been introduced to the federal mint and the flag salute, but it is in our control of the atom that we trust.

Indulgent Living

The lesson has not been lost on “the masses.” No sooner had the war ended than we turned with abandon to cash in on the benefits of wartime technological progress for indulgent peace-time living. Seldom has the old proverb come so near to vindication: War is the father of all things. Where there was still a world of want to be conquered, we squandered our resources in sensate living, and sought security in tranquilizers and missiles. Admittedly, the apocalyptic fears of the atomic age have often seemed the dominant obsession of our time, and yet as we have eased past crisis after crisis, and the prospect of immediate war has receded, the old utopian dream of a world society ordered by man once more returns to encourage our couch of ease. If war is indeed averted, we stand on the threshold of the most powerful onrush of a secular world culture in history.

An astounding harbinger of the new age is this year’s Universal Exhibition and International Fair in Brussels, Belgium. With deep insight into the undercurrent of the world mood today, the planners of this technological extravaganza set out to depict man “building a world for man.” “The time has come,” they announced some months ago, when “man must build and shape this his World to his own measure.” Not content at coining their own slogans, they employed biblical phraseology. “In the beginning,” they said, “man started on a long journey.” And as they reached the climax of their rhapsody, they proclaimed, “Joy to the world.” The Brussels exhibition of 1958 is thus heralded as the “crowning of a great effort (but) above all, a new beginning.…” (Circular published by La Société de l’Exposition Universelle, 10, rue du Chene, Bruxelles).

This dream of man building the world to his own measure comes to us with a haunting familiarity, for it reminds us that the communism we abhor and the secularism of the West are blood brothers. Both are children of the Enlightenment and of scientism. Both are based on belief in evolution, progress and human perfectibility. Despite the contradiction in metaphysical symbols—there a dialectical materialism, here a theistic God—both are terrifyingly alike in their belief that men can create paradise, and in reliance upon science, technology and military might, achieve their own utopia.

The present juncture in world history therefore demands that we take a second look at the problem of communism, a look sufficiently detached to examine the foundation upon which we have built our anti-Communist defenses. This, few people have bothered to do. It has seemed far easier and rewarding to join the great chant of denunciation. As a result, many people have mistaken minor skirmishes for major battles, and perhaps very few can even distinguish the real battle line. This growth of a world-wide secularism, if clearly recognized, will drive us to the conclusion that the crucial issue of our time is not, as commonly supposed, the struggle between Christianity (as the Western way of life) and communism, but rather the confrontation of the Church of Christ by the greatest secular forces of history, before which she stands as an embattled minority. Communism as an ideology and as an historical force may be at present the most malignant form of a post-Christian secularism, but its kinship to other forms of the same secularism is not to be denied. The issue which should give us most concern, therefore, is not the internecine conflict of the two forms of secularism (and who can call our nuclear policy anything but secular?), but between the powers of this age and the Lord of glory. However serious the clash between Washington and Moscow, the front of the real conflict of history lies not on the Elbe, but between the kingdoms of light and of darkness which know no geographical boundaries.

Communism A Dangerous Heresy

This analysis does not rest on a whitewashing of communism. By this time the case has been established beyond all doubt that there can be no concord between the basic faith of Christianity and that of communism. The one is avowedly theistic and the other is avowedly atheistic. Furthermore, in the practical realm, communism has persistently employed methods which fundamentally contradict Christian morality.

Finally, the very goal of communism, namely, as a perfect society within history, to be achieved by the most imperfect means, without God, is a supreme expression of the sinful pride of man. Nor does this analysis deny that on the plane of real politics many problems facing our statesmen appear well nigh insurmountable. Taking the world as it is today, with its festering sores on the one hand, and the open and clandestine efforts of international communism to exploit these on behalf of the revolution on the other, statesmen indeed find themselves “between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

What we propose, rather, is that these facts seemed so conveniently and obviously true that it was far easier—and more profitable—to get on the bandwagon to reiterate them, than it was to face the sober reality that this simply negative analysis does not fully define the Communist problem. Accordingly, as the Communist fever has ravaged more ardently, the American remedy has exhibited ever more fully its inadequacy. It will therefore be necessary to turn to a consideration of the things we, as American Christians, so far have missed in our attitude toward communism. Though such an effort seems not a little presumptuous, it must nonetheless be risked.

The Things We Have Missed

It must be noted first of all that to place Christianity and communism in juxtaposition, as we are wont to do, is inaccurate and misleading. It implies that we are confronted with alternatives at a point where alternatives do not exist. For if communism presents us with a proposed system which incorporates all reality, including the institutions of society, in a unified field, Christianity does not. That is, we do not have before us as an alternative to the Communist proposal, a Christian pattern for world political order. True, the will of God comprehends the whole of our life, but the will of God reckons with the realities of sin and freedom, and therefore the Gospel of redemption does not offer to us a universal historical order, woven in a single cloth, which we can throw into the teeth of the Communists.

This opposing of Christianity and communism quickly leads to a second error which, from a Christian point of view, must be decried as outright heresy. It is the tendency to identify Christianity with one system of states as over against the other. If this was a feature of the pre-Christian chosen people of Israel, it is a vision that has been completely transcended in Christ. We now know that redemptive truth is never confined to one historical complex as over against another. Rather, God weighs the affairs of history in terms of those “in every nation that fear him.” Though the qualitative differences of political powers are not to be ignored, the issues of history turn, not on the relative merit of the one against the other, but on the relationship of all of them to the kingdom of God. Here all are found wanting, and there is no biblical warrant for us to wed the cause of Christ completely to one political power in a Christ-denying war against another.

A third thing which we have missed is the false view of human nature upon which the classical economic theory rests. The belief that the competition of egos in the economic struggle will of itself achieve a harmonious equilibrium runs counter to the biblical view of fallen man as well as to the testimony of history. Furthermore, classical capitalism tends to transfer the economic process from the moral realm to the realm of nature, and thereby to weaken the moral sensibility of its agents. These facts must be admitted without our falling into the opposite and doubly grievous error of Marxism which attributes to man not only goodness, in the planned society, but also (to the few at the top) the omniscience necessary to its achievement. Their admission, too, does not entail a denial of free enterprise as a superior economic system. It is rather that our blindness to these flaws in our system has led to overconfidence in its rightness and efficiency. We are thus ill-prepared to recognize the validity of certain Marxist criticisms, or to come to terms with the achievements of other economic systems. But most serious of all, we therefore bring an inadequate understanding to those people who are faced with the necessity of devising a modus vivendi with a political or economic system which may indeed deny the values they hold dear. It is sobering to realize that we Western Christians in some measure take for granted positions of economic privilege among the nations of the world, which positions are often dependent upon our superior military force, when at the same time we find it difficult to sympathize with Christians in the Communist orbit who similarly make concessions, though at different points.

Real Nature Of Revolution

In the fourth place, this false juxtaposition of Christianity and communism has blinded us in part to the real nature of the revolution on the Eurasian and African continents, and has led to an “overideologizing” of the world struggle. While in the West the scientific and industrial revolutions were achieved leisurely and organically with abundant resources, over a period of several centuries while other societies stood still—and at a cost far greater than we recognize now in our romantic view of our own history—half the world’s population still lives in want. Granted that many of the poor peoples understand their situation imperfectly and, moreover, tend to fix the blame for their plight primarily on the nations who have more. Nevertheless, having come to realize that want is no longer necessary, they are driven frantically to escape it. The pathos of this we have not understood.

While we should certainly labor, hope and pray that revolution may come to the peoples in distress without violence, we dare not be sentimental about the true dynamics of this revolution. For the stirring in the Orient means that the real “disturber” of the peace there is not Communist agitation, but the naked struggle of men for a tolerable earthly existence. And beneath the immediacy of this struggle, man being a unitary being, lies their spiritual hunger.

In the fifth place, this misreading of the struggle in terms primarily of political and military power balances has brought on a vulgarization of our own faith. In a manner reminiscent of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, we have been coarsened and calloused spiritually by totalitarian struggles fought under slogans of deepest piety. Beneath the euphemisms of military technique we accept mass homicide, and today continue to pour our best resources into the “improvement” of that technique.

A final error antedates the Communist revolution by many centuries. It is the loss of an articulate awareness in Christendom that, while the law of God is indeed binding upon all men, Christian ethics in the full sense can be expected of Christians only. Since the fourth century of our era, it has all too seldom been clear that the unique and primary ethical significance of the Christian faith is not its mollifying influence on pagans who remain pagans still, however desirable this may be, but rather the creating of the new people of God who press forward redemptively in his kingdom, whether or not such action coincides with a particular political destiny. The recovery of the experience of personal conversion in evangelical Christianity has been a partial corrective, but there is too little evidence of a recovery of the ethical implications of this insight. Thus for all the emphasis on personal conversion, when we reach the point of political ethos we tend to glide into vague clichés of national piety which derive, not from the Gospel, but from a strange synthesis of Old Testament national Judaism and the Enlightenment.

It will be a great day when evangelical Christians come to see that the doctrine of the sovereignty of God among the nations cannot be played off against the redemptive thrust of the gospel of Jesus Christ to exempt Christians from obedience to Christ when they are caught in a struggle for national survival. Only when our lesser loyalties are subsumed under the rule of Christ can the full prophetic impact of the will of God for mankind impinge upon the world of nations.

As a result of these deep misunderstandings, historical Christianity has been brought to its knees before Communist might. True, it behooves us to be humble at this point, for we can never presume to comprehend all the counsels of God. Furthermore, we do not pretend by this analysis that Christians en toto have forsaken the faith, or that the Church of Christ has suffered lasting defeat. We are discussing here phases of Christian understanding and practice which do fall within the scope of Christian responsibility, where continuous seeking and sharing among Christians are imperative, and where every insight is subject to the correction or the improvement that another may bring.

It is in this sense that the present writer believes that we have sacrificed the Christian ministry of reconciliation, which in truth transcends our present divided world, to the promotion of the aims of Western civilization. At a time when communism has sought to cast Christianity in the role of the protagonist of corrupt regimes, American Christians play into their hands by attacks which either implicitly or openly identify Christianity with the cause of the West. Just as for decades we were virtually incommunicado with the Russian people, we are now unable to communicate with the Chinese. While there may be many reasons for such a state of affairs, the false assessment of the Communist problem by Western Christians is unquestionably one.

Christian renewal does not in fact come by the prefabrication of new structures, outside the situation, which then, like Solomon’s temple, can be assembled on the desired spot. Christian renewal comes rather when we turn to God in concrete repentance, and he then revives his work “in the midst of the years.”

The direction of that repentance lies, it would seem, in a recovery of a primary loyalty to Christ and his community, to which other loyalties—and national fears—must once more be made secondary. It lies in the discovery that the real battle line today stretches, not simply between Christianity and communism, but between the Christianity and the secular idolatry which East and West share alike, and which is mushrooming to unprecedented proportions wherever men succeed in liberating themselves from the whims of nature. That such recovery will demand a heavy price of American Christians is not to be denied. If in the West we have been granted a temporary respite in the struggle between the Lord of history and the rulers of this age, so far as the attitude of the State toward the Church is concerned, let us receive it with gratitude. But let us never make it an end in itself. It has come, perhaps because some men have been faithful, but more basically, for reasons hidden in the counsel of God. To contradict the Gospel in our effort to defend this temporal value is a spiritual hazard of the first magnitude.

END

Paul Peachey is currently on leave from Eastern Mennonite College in Harrisonburg, Virginia, to study the “peace movement” in Japan, and its implications for the Christian witness. He teaches Church History and Sociology, in which fields he holds the Ph.D. degree from University of Zurich.

In the choice between two terrible evils, Western civilization may voluntarily submit to the Soviet tyranny—a tyranny of political wickedness and monstrous power run by purges and by secret police.

The frightening force backing our world into this predicament is, of course, the implications in the lethal might of “the nuclear threat.” People the globe over are afraid, and there is cause to be. The mind staggers as problems keep spinning out of the runaway potentialities of our atomic age. The survival of humanity is at stake. Those who know most are most fearful. Token samples of the awful possibilities numb the powers of thought. The harbingers of the future are ominous. “ ‘The ashes of death’ already poison many waters and beaches of the world.”

It is a time for greatness, but civilized leaders, baffled and clumsy, stand in human littleness on a precipice, gambling with catastrophe. They are not sure which way to go, nor are they sure what they should do.

It looks as if man is not equal to the demands of history. We are developing a structural complexity we may lack the powers to sustain. One of the last signs of a crumbling epoch is a general decline in moral appreciation and in moral values. As the atom bomb sounds alarms all over life, Nobel prize winners declare that “… we are no longer great enough for ‘problems of the spirit.’ ” Nothing is left but “a massive and universal physical fear.” We can only “temporarily arrest society’s lethal self-laceration.” Influences that should be spiritual are “a mixture of will-worship, egocentricity, nihilism, jargon, verbal mystification, ontological claptrap and pornography”—pagan wails in a pagan world. What a stage for people fumbling with nuclear explosives!

The issue right now terrifies every element of decency, but—and this is the monstrous thing—it is the chance of all time for evil exploitations.

Sinister influences always exploit the fears of a frightened world. The wicked forces of the hour are, of course, making the most of our terrifying crisis. With diabolical effectiveness, clever manipulations touch and temper the interests of our age. Sensitive and nervous minds, duped with fear or caught with propaganda, are persuaded to chance some deal with evil. Moral expediency is a terrible disease which rots the soul and pauperizes finer moral sensitivities. Morality shrivels when good people think that bargains with degradation can insure decency or keep alive nobility and values.

The atomic problem today faces mankind with grim tasks. It calls for grim greatness. Unstable temperaments that progressively shake apart in the storms of history are to be feared, not trusted. Men who have been terribly wrong in the past and who have been doctrinaire in their wrongness are suspect. Yet such people always bubble into headlines in crisis hours.

Pre-Pearl-Harbor pacifism, tremendous and single-tracked in its sincerity, might have turned the world over to a philosophy of barbarism and a gospel of tyranny. In the last months of 1939, some 400 American intellectuals signed their names to endorse an uncritical crusade that “stressed the role of the Soviet Union as ‘a bulwark against War and aggression.’ ” The Soviet-German pact ironically followed almost immediately. In dangerous times, sentimental prophets are monstrous risks.

There is a point beyond which authentic moral responsibility cannot go without losing everything. It is unrealistic and self-deceiving to assume one’s commitments can be divorced from their responsible consequences. If belief in what is taken to be an ideal aids and abets international gangsters, responsibility cannot be escaped.

Illusions For Reality

Ponder today’s crusade to stop Western society from all further development of nuclear weapons. In some queer way, it is thought that this alone affords humanity its only chance of survival. The implications and responsibilities are enormous.

We may again be seeing how fearful people in tough times substitute illusions for reality. The movement offers no substantiating facts, no scientific principles, no realistic credentials and no proofs. Because nothing is predictable or real about it, the easiest thing in the world is to claim anything and everything for it. One must meditate long upon the thing if he is to comprehend the immense implications.

If the West stops all further nuclear development, the Soviet Union automatically achieves a nuclear monopoly over the world. That by any standard is a monstrous and awful risk! When before did moral man ever think he could find hope by directly or indirectly implementing barbarism with the might of matchless power? When before did intelligent people admit a willingness to chance the future of the race on the inhumanity of an acknowledged despotism?

The strange and dreadful recommendation of this movement which calls itself “A Sane Nuclear Policy” makes realistic newspapers ask about man’s sanity. Isn’t there something twisted when men of eminent position sponsor a crusade which will give brutal communism unquestionable control of the planet? A token of the amazing distortion lies in the conflict between the emotionally excited important people and the park bench realism of the common man. What idealism will, for any reason, voluntarily accept chances with Soviet domination? In the words of the New York Daily News, “We do not charge these persons with consciously trying to do a job for the Kremlin.” But we shudder at topflight emotionalism aligned, to all practical purposes, on the side of Moscow’s immorality. Time magazine quotes the view “of Bertrand Russell, and Philip Toynbee—son of the famed historian—that nuclear disarmament will probably bring Communist domination but that domination is preferable to the prospect of nuclear war” (February 21, 1958). Another version from a different, but top source, comes yet more vividly to the point: “… to be dominated seems to me to be a lesser evil than to get oneself extinguished” (May, 1958).

The Flight From Martyrdom

The drift is to an all-time low for moral expediency. This belief, bluntly stated, says that the only summum bonum of existence is to make sure of staying physically alive. If this mind-pattern of expediency appeals to leadership, may not that have something to do with the tendencies that have decimated so much of the moral life of our era? When before did men of conviction stand in abject fear and confess they would do anything to stay alive? With that standard decency disappears, liberty dies and animal interests are accepted morality. What about the nobility and values of moral convictions? What about the deep cry of the heart for righteousness and for truth and for justice? Were the martyrs of the past inexpedient fools? They could have stayed alive. Are we at long last to give up the moral law, that moral law which has held over nobler ages the unbounded sway of something greater than the selfish desire of men, to save their skins? What values can a humanity possess if it will not die to protect its convictions? Authentic civilization still lives in the principle, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Isn’t there something seriously wrong when men of good will actually believe that serfdom is today a lesser evil than martyrdom for a cause?

The choice now is one of the most serious in history. There has never been anything like it before. The dilemma is: an expedient trust in cynical faithlessness or paying, price down, the cost of austere integrity. The blood of freemen runs cold at the thought of liberty-loving people in high position expressing a deliberate willingness to accept “a Communist dominated world.” For posterity nothing could be more cruel.

World Government by the Soviet Union! The power-drunk infamy of Moscow Lord of the world! World government by degradation because the principles of civilized existence are giving themselves up—because men no longer prefer death and extinction to injustice or to inhumanity and slavery! The twisted moral situation is amazing, namely:

“Uncompromising loyalty to moral principles may mean extinction of the race.” That is a monstrous thought!

“Submission to evil domination may be humanity’s only chance of survival.” That is an even yet more monstrous thought!

Is there any morality in a willingness to turn the world over to the butchers of Hungary because the alternative may mean crucifixion? Can authentic morality gamble on the ruthless degradation of a Communist dominated world? Such promethean defiance of moral principles misses the bottom law of elementary virtue, for absolute power corrupts absolutely and absolute corruption can only decimate the world. Making self-preservation the sole concern of existence is the sure-fire way for a civilization to get itself extinguished. “The paramount aim of the Roman Empire was to keep itself alive.” The self-centered rule disintegrated into chaos and annihilation. In a moral world, a philosophy essentially interested in saving our hides can do nothing but ruin us. Moral laws govern the rise or fall of men and nations, lifting or destroying them with silent and inexorable fatality (Burke). The nemesis of violated axioms is destruction.

What about the willingness to accept, for any reason, an all-powerful Moscow master or—what is more amazing still—the willingness to accept, for any reason, a totally helpless democratic world? A strange recipe indeed for the survival of mankind! What can come out of betraying civilization?

We are witnessing, perhaps, another copybook lesson from history. Recall the silly days in the 1930’s when leaderships of great nations were so afraid of war that they shouted “peace for our time” and submitted to anything. Out of those came the second World War. Hitler tore up the earth because people believed there was nobility and safety in pious platitudes. Vociferous public characters emotionalized themselves into believing that they alone were “realistic, hardheaded and practical.” The motive was the overpowering fear of war. The motive now is the overpowering fear of nuclear explosives. Again logic is underlining, for those who will see it, the evil of ignoring principles. The romanticism that was to stop war in the 1930’s brought war. The sentimentalism of today which thinks it can insure humanity’s survival by debasing the morality of existence can do nothing but disintegrate the race.

The essence of civilization is the will to oppose evil and to stop, at all costs, the enemies of liberty and of decency and of spiritual values. Anything else degrades the moral status of the world. Only a paragon of moral stupidity can dream of taking chances with sinfulness to achieve that which is good. When willful depravity is at work in the world we must not bargain with it for advantages. It is wrong to speak of gambling with expediencies as “a great act of faith.” It is moral betrayal. How far can we go in “striving to concede to international desperadoes a moral capacity?”

If the West stops in the nuclear race, the Soviet Union automatically is in nuclear command of the globe. In that situation, the United States would be turned into a Russian satellite with dizzy speed. Remember what happened to the countries that put their trust in helplessness or thought they could do business with communism.

The last “scribbled message of Imre Nagy”—now a martyr—cracks like the rifle-fire of Lexington around the globe saying: “I want the world to know there can be no compromise!” The soldiers at Corregidor were trapped like rats but they died like men. When you appeal to history, that great teacher of mankind, you find an invocation “not to caution, but to courage” (Clemenceau). If we are coming to the end of the way and if the final curtains are set to fall on the disappearance of all consciousness, it is, I think, nobler to “go out” like moral men than to make the last act of existence the story of voluntary slaves who were willing to do anything to stay alive.

A World Government run by the Soviet Union is a terrifying thought! What is more amazing is the fact that there are freemen ready to accept it.

END

Commander H. H. Lippincott, United States Navy, Retired, served as Chaplain with the United States Fleet in the First World War. He holds the A.B., A.M., and S.T.B. degrees from Dickinson College and Boston University, and has served pastorates in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. He now resides at 26 Colonial Road, Morristown, New Jersey.

At the time of the American Revolution there were about 18,000 Roman Catholics in all the colonies. Today, according to the hierarchy’s figures, they number 34 million. In less than 200 years the Roman church has grown from the smallest denomination in the country to the largest. Such a sensational increase in the dimensions of the Roman Catholic community suggests that this faith may, in the foreseeable future, become predominant in the United States and attain political and cultural control.

The process is signally aided by a curious theology which makes intelligent family limitation a sin for Roman Catholics. If the hierarchy should gain the ascendancy here, it would mean that a country once overwhelmingly Protestant in numbers and thoroughly Protestant in its genius had turned in another direction. Such a development would have consequences of the utmost importance to every Protestant, to every non-Catholic, and, for that matter, to the Roman Catholics themselves.

Will the United States ever become a Roman Catholic nation? Twelve years ago Harold E. Fey, now editor of The Christian Century, completed a series of articles for that journal under the title, “Can Catholicism Win America?” He concluded the series by answering “Yes.” Every trend which Dr. Fey noted has become more pronounced during the years since. Father James M. Gillis, then editor of The Catholic World, predicted in 1929 that America will be predominantly a Catholic country “before the present younger generation dies.” Two men, observing from opposite sides of the fence, foresaw the same result. It is practical wisdom to ask the nature of the denouement toward which we may be heading. It is in the area of freedom that this question concerns us, and within that area the particular locale of religious freedom concerns us most. What would Roman Catholic predominance mean at this point? We can find the answer in (1) What the Roman church itself teaches; (2) What the Roman church teaches the children in its schools; (3) The practice of the Roman church in lands where it has already gained predominance.

Catholics And Religious Freedom

No Catholic program in regard to religious freedom can be understood without some grasp of the theology which informs it. The fact is that the systematic curbing of other faiths, particularly Christian faiths, is indigenous to its entire position. The Roman church and any government to which it is legally joined are driven to such action by the church’s own inherent logic. The insistence on the identity of the true Church of Jesus Christ with the visible Roman church—an outrageous heresy from a Protestant point of view—is largely responsible. If this particular coterie of ecclesiastics has the truth and the whole truth, then all others, while they might have some of the truth, are also bound to have some error. But error cannot have the same rights as truth. Therefore, it is an act of moral responsibility on the part of those who have the truth to set some limits or inflict some disabilities on the spread of error.

This is the real basis of Roman Catholic suppression of Protestants as it has continued through the centuries to the present day. We see this clearly in the teaching of Father Francis J. Connell, generally regarded as the leading Catholic theologian in the United States. In his book Freedom of Worship, the Catholic Position, a work currently distributed by the Paulist Press, he makes clear that Roman Catholic curbs on Protestant freedom are always inherently present. The degree to which they are carried out, however, differs greatly from country to country. Father Connell says that, generally speaking, the decisive factor in the application of disabilities to Protestants would be the country’s attainment of a Catholic majority. Whether he means a straight 51 per cent of the church population, or a working majority politically, he does not make clear. He does insist, however, that in a country that is “distinctly Catholic … the civil rulers can consider themselves justified in restricting or preventing denominational activities hostile to the [Roman] Catholic religion.”

Father Connell then explains what he means by this. He says he does not mean that civil rulers should punish or persecute Protestants who will not become Catholics. “But they are justified in repressing written or spoken attacks on Catholicism, the use of the press or the mails to weaken the allegiance of Catholics toward their Church, and similar anti-Catholic efforts.” When one realizes that every sermon from a Protestant pulpit is, in a theological sense, “anti-Catholic activity,” the possibilities of this program begin to appear.

It is only fair to Father Connell to cite his own supplement to his program as outlined above:

Even in a predominantly Catholic country, circumstances may render it more advisable for the government to grant non-Catholics the same measure of freedom of worship as is enjoyed by Catholics. Such a course is justifiable when it is foreseen that a policy of complete toleration will procure greater good than will repressive measures against anti-Catholic activities.

This concession to Protestants is generous. It should be pointed out, though, that it rests upon no conviction or principle—only upon the observation that in a given situation the suppression of Protestants might create more fuss than it would be worth!

Roman Catholic thinking on religious freedom is clearly indicated in a rather spontaneous remark of José M. de Arielza, Spanish ambassador to the United States. When speaking before a Charles Carroll forum, he was questioned about the closing of the Protestant Union Theological Seminary in Madrid. He replied:

There exists in Spain today the natural desire to avoid that it become a Protestant missionary camp. If the Catholic Church believes it professes the true religion, why should it be subjected to adverse propaganda to rob it of its faith?

What Mr. Arielza is saying is simply: Why should the Roman church run the risk of competition when it has the power to eliminate it?

Attitude Toward Other Faiths

A succinct statement of the Roman Catholic attitude toward other faiths is found in an oft-quoted article in the Jesuit journal, Civilta Cattolica, published in Rome. This journal is a quality publication which enjoys high prestige and authority among church scholars, and is also known to be close to the Pope. The statement in the issue of April 1948 reads:

The Roman Catholic Church, convinced through its divine prerogatives, of being the only true church, must demand the right of freedom for herself alone, because such a right can only be possessed by truth, never by error. As for other religions, the Church will certainly never draw the sword, but she will require that by legitimate means they shall not be allowed to propagate false doctrine. Consequently, in a state where the majority of the people are Catholic, the Church will require that legal existence be denied to error, and that if religious minorities actually exist, they shall have only a de facto existence without opportunity to spread their beliefs.… In some countries, Catholics will be obliged to ask full religious freedom for all, resigned at being forced to cohabitate where they alone should rightfully be allowed to live. But in doing this the Church does not renounce her thesis which remains the most imperative of her laws, but merely adapts herself to de facto conditions which must be taken into account in practical affairs.… The Church cannot blush for her own want of tolerance as she asserts it in principle and applies it in practice.

The tenor of this teaching is clear. Religious freedom is not a value for the Roman Catholic hierarchy, except in one context only. It is a value to them only when they are in danger of losing it for themselves. The reason the Pope never includes clerically oppressed Protestants in his appointed days of prayer for the oppressed is that in his view such oppression is necessary and proper. Since those being denied their freedom in this instance are not Catholic, there is, in fact, no denial.

There is one source of information on this subject which is so close at hand it is commonly overlooked. Yet it has a significance all its own. In the long run the teaching of Roman Catholic theologians or even the encyclicals of popes may not count for so much as what is taught the children. We know that 4 million Roman Catholic children are now being trained at the elementary and high school level in a carefully insulated denominational enclave. What goes on within its walls? What is the hierarchy teaching these millions of future Americans on the subject of religious freedom?

An article of limited dimensions can do no more than spot check representative parochial school textbooks. The quotations offered here are typical of many that prove highly disturbing to Protestant peace of mind. In Christian Principles and National Problems, by Ostheimer and Delaney, published by William H. Sadlier, under imprimatur of Cardinal Spellman, we read:

The doctrine of the Church … is that the State must profess and promote not any religion, but the one true form of worship founded by Christ and continuing today in the Catholic Church alone. Such a public profession … will of necessity bring the State into some relation with Catholicism, the only complete expression of God’s revealed truth. As an ideal, then, Church and State should be united in their efforts” (p. 98). “The non-Catholic and the non-baptized should be permitted to carry on their own form of worship as long as there would be no danger of scandal or perversion to the faithful. In a country where the majority are Catholics, the practice of Protestantism or paganism by an inconspicuous minority would be neither a source of scandal nor perversion to the adherents of the true Faith” (p. 99).

This chapter then follows with a condemnation of the principle of Church-State separation, agreeing with Pope Leo XIII that the status of the church in the American scheme of things is not the most desirable in the eyes of the church and is not to be accepted as ideal.

What is disturbing to Protestants is not the arrogance of this, but its implied threat to their freedom of worship. The teaching is vague only in regard to the point at which sanctions would be applied to Protestants. The attainment of a majority would not warrant the commencement of repressive measures, provided the Protestant minority were small and “inconspicuous.” How large the majority would actually have to be, and how conspicuous the Protestants would have to become, is not stated. Nevertheless, to suggest that 4 million children be taught the idea that, at any point whatever, their church should start oppressing other churches is in itself monstrous. Have Protestants any reason to doubt that what is taught the children of one generation will be done by their leaders in the next, provided the opportunity offers?

We see a similar point of view in Living Our Faith by Flynn, Loretto and Simeon, published by W. H. Sadlier, imprimatur of Cardinal Spellman. (Both of these books are widely used in Roman Catholic schools.) We read:

The question of union or separation of Church and State has perplexed men since the Protestant Revolt. The ideal situation exists when there is perfect union and accord between Church and State, with each supreme in its own field.… In a Catholic country, when a dispute arises [between Church and State] and settlement is unattainable, the rights of the Church should prevail, since it possesses the higher authority.”

The text points out that citizens of the United States are apt to think that separation of Church and State is a good thing. The church holds, however, that “(separation) is still a compromise and … the lesser of two evils.” The church would do better, the pupils are told, “if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of public authority” (p. 247). This obviously means establishment.

Living Our Faith further points out to the children the fact that “non-Catholic methods of worshiping God must be branded counterfeit” and the plain inference is that the state should assist in the branding (p. 112).

At the college level, consider the popular text by Ryan and Boland, Catholic Principles of Politics, published by Macmillan, imprimatur of Cardinal Spellman.

Suppose … that the Constitutional obstacles to prosecution of non-Catholics have been legitimately removed and they themselves have become numerically insignificant: What then would be the proper course of action for a Catholic State? Apparently, the latter State could logically tolerate only such religious activities as were confined to the members of the dissenting group. It could not permit them to carry on general propaganda nor accord their organization certain privileges that had formerly been extended to all religious corporations, for example, exemption from taxation.

This is the kind of mental climate in which millions of Roman Catholic children and young people are being reared. Why should we doubt that it may have its desired effect tomorrow?

Still another useful source of information as to Roman Catholic intentions lies in the hierarchy’s actual performance in lands where this denomination predominates. The governments of many nations have concordats or special agreements with the Vatican. All of these agreements give certain privileges to the Roman Catholic church and visit certain disabilities on other churches. They vary considerably, yet all have these two major facets. The concordat with Spain is regarded by the Vatican as the ideal agreement with a political power. We may regard its provisions as typical of those which the church would like in all nations.

This instrument, signed August 1953, specifically grants the Roman Catholic church a religious monopoly in Spain. The government agrees to provide its support from tax funds—stipends for priests at all levels, grants for seminaries, church universities and church construction, and “for the general practice of the [Roman Catholic] religion.” Clergy are immune from civil suit or criminal prosecution before a civil judge unless permission is given by the ruling prelate. The state undertakes to subsidize all missionary activities of the Roman church, to care for its monasteries and to support its social and welfare institutions.

Marriage comes under the dictates of canon law. The Roman version of Christianity is made compulsory teaching in all schools, whether operated by the church or the state. All teachers of religion are appointed and controlled by the church. Education is placed under control of the hierarchy. Schools of other denominations are prohibited. Priests are given a monopoly on all religious broadcasting. They are also given a monopoly on the chaplaincy of the armed forces, of the police force, of all penal institutions, hospitals and orphanages.

The public practice of any other faith than Roman Catholicism will occasion the arrest and punishment of the guilty party.

These provisions would seem to represent the goal of Roman Catholic policy. It is a goal achieved in whole or in part in all lands having a Vatican concordat.

The Argument From Difference

The American hierarchy, who understand how shocking their church’s teaching and practice would be to freedom-loving Americans, have endeavored to cushion the shock with an ingenious argument. They offer the plea of “difference.” The plea has two points of emphasis-first: these other countries are “different” from the United States and therefore we should expect to find ideas on religious freedom different, also. This is the argument in one of the famed Knights of Columbus ads designed in an effort to get new members for their church. The ad reads: “The status of the Catholic Church in such a land [Colombia] would obviously be different than in the United States where there are many faiths all entitled to the same rights.”

What the Knights seem to mean is that when Catholics are in considerable majority, this creates a “different” situation and it then becomes proper for them to oppress others. It is highly doubtful, however, whether Protestants find brutality, jail and death any easier to take because they are few in number. Nor are they any happier about the closing of their schools and the destruction of their churches because they are a minority. (All of these things have happened to them in Colombia, the land of the concordat.) From a Protestant point of view, the doctrine that a Roman Catholic majority makes a country “different” where religious freedom is concerned is false and dangerous. Such freedom is even more important to a minority than to a majority.

The second approach to the plea of “difference” is that the United States is different. Because of this “difference” it is argued that the consistent pattern of clerical oppression in other lands could never obtain here. This is the approach taken by the Jesuit, Father Gustave Weigel, and his collaborators in his book, The Catholic Church, U.S.A. Protestants were much interested in a debate on this matter within the Roman church some years ago. The Spanish hierarchy on May 28, 1948, had issued a statement taking Franco to task for not being rough enough on the Protestants. They hotly denounced Protestant proselytism as illegal activity and urged the government to enforce the laws forbidding public Protestant services.

The American Indiana Catholic and Record took exception to these statements and questioned their propriety. It suggested that the Spanish hierarchy was behind the times. The Spanish hierarchy replied with vigor, citing the very pronouncements of Civilta Cattolica quoted in this article. They also cited the encyclicals of Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII denouncing the idea that the state should grant complete religious freedom. The controversy mounted to the point where a Vatican pronouncement was necessary. The Vatican settled it by stating that an address on the subject by Cardinal Ottaviani was “unexceptionable”—that is, correct. Cardinal Ottaviani, as Secretary of the Supreme Congregation of the Holy Office, was the Pope’s closest confidant. In his address he had simply reasserted the Civilta Cattolica position that the church would advocate freedom in certain circumstances only to use it as a means of ultimately overthrowing freedom.

Father John Courtney Murray, one of this country’s most effective Catholic spokesmen, has stated publicly that he did not accept the Cardinal’s statement as the final word. He has, however, had no more to say on the subject. This rejection by Father Murray is a courageous act, but it only points up the futility of his position. Neither he nor his colleagues have any voice on such matters. One voice settles them. It cannot be forgotten that the position of the Roman church on any such question is just as monolithic as the pope wants it to be. There is, and can be, no “American position” among the hierarchy on religious freedom, or on any other matter where the popes have spoken. We may rejoice at some occasional “American sounding” statement of a member of the hierarchy on the subject of religious freedom. Unfortunately he can speak for no one—not even himself.

What Can We Expect?

We are now prepared to give reasonable answer to the question: what can we expect if and when the Roman Catholic hierarchy gains ascendancy in the United States? Those who are inclined to belittle this summation as “speculation” may well ponder the fact that in a number of instances we see the program well on its way.

The first step—and one on which notable progress has been made—would be the elimination of all restrictions as contained in present law on the use of tax funds for the support of parochial schools. This would likely be done not so much by change or repeal of laws as by ignoring or circumventing them in practice. An insistence by the Jesuit college presidents that Catholic institutions share Federal aid on an “across the board” basis, and the proposals by Cardinal McIntyre for full tax support to Catholic elementary and high schools via a “pupil certificate” plan, are examples of the approach.

At the same time there would be stepped-up grants for Roman Catholic welfare activities—hospitals, orphanages, homes, relief work, etc.—together with complete domination of all united fund and community chest projects. Functions which we have traditionally thought of as public in character would be turned over to church operation, though financing would still come from tax funds. (Bishop Sheen has recently suggested that the foreign aid program in its social and medical aspects would be turned over to the church.)

A further step might well be that of direct state stipends to priests. There is precedent for this in Italy, Spain and colonial Portugal. Such a step would, of course, have to await a formal designation of the Roman church as America’s official church. The teaching of Roman Catholic dogma in all public schools, and in all church schools as well, would be required by law, the teaching to be done by priests, nuns or lay persons approved by the church. There is precedent for this in many concordat countries, particularly in Latin America.

Authorities duly constituted by the hierarchy would exercise censorship over the press, books, magazines, motion pictures, radio and television programs. Precedent is forming in the large measure of de facto censorship which the Roman church already exercises in this country through its Legion of Decency and National Organization for Decent Literature. We see the full precedent in Spain where the concordat formally gives the church this authority. No criticism of any policy or action of the Roman church could then be offered in print or on the air.

Restrictions On Protestants

The worship of Protestants would probably not be banned. They would worship on a carefully restricted basis, however, with no large public services or evangelistic services permitted. The building of churches by Protestants would be limited, and they might have considerable difficulty in securing permits to replace outmoded facilities. New church buildings could not indicate by any style or marking the purpose of the structure. Protestant church signs would be prohibited. Protestant children, after observing certain formalities, could be excused from the teaching of Roman dogma in public schools, but they would not be permitted to have religious instruction of their own denomination. Nor could Protestants operate dominational schools of their own except in instances where they would agree to have Catholic doctrine taught by teachers approved by that church. While Catholic dominated lands differ in some of these items, specific precedent exists for all.

There would be no Protestant orphanages, or homes, perhaps even no Protestant hospitals. Protestant theological seminaries might be closed. Only Roman Catholic marriages would be recognized in civil law; those of other denominations would be ignored legally as they are now ecclesiastically. Protestant funerals would be prohibited as public displays of false religion. Protestant services would be closely confined to their own church buildings. There is long and prolific precedent for all these forms of oppression.

Conversions to Protestantism would be barred, and reports of “proselytism” might result in closure of the offending church. (Father Eugene K. Culhane, managing editor of America, after visiting Colombia, said there would be no religious trouble there at all if Protestants would only obey the law and stop making converts.) Protestants could not publish a paper or insert ads in the press. They might be discriminated against in the civil service and in general employment. Only Roman Catholic priests would minister to the spiritual needs of the armed services and to members of the legislature and to all public institutions. Again, there is ample precedent for every item.

Roman Catholicism would be named the country’s official religion. The duty of government to defend and uphold it would be duly recognized. There would be, in time, a concordat with the Vatican providing, initially, for an exchange of ambassadors and other gestures of official recognition of the Roman church. The concordat would be renegotiated from time to time with continually greater concessions on the part of the United States as the country became “more Christian” and as it was found possible to model the American concordat more closely to the model of “Christian Spain.”

The long tolerant tradition of the United States would likely modify the threat of anti-Protestant violence. There would probably be little or none of this so long as Protestants worshiped quietly in their own homes and churches, off the beaten path. But the full weight of official policy and promotion would be thrown against them; vast sums of money, much of it contributed by themselves, would be devoted to their reduction and eventual destruction. There is precedent for this in every land where the Roman church is strongly joined with the state.

Protestants would be treated with snide amusement and official contempt. They would be reduced to second-class citizens and treated as damned souls. Their young would be cajoled and bribed to leave their traditional faith. They would be steadily, systematically whittled away. They would be left at length a devout but inconsequential minority, just as Protestants are in Spain today.

After 51 per cent——that!

END

C. Stanley Lowell, formerly active in Methodist temperance work, since 1956 has served Protestants and Other Americans United, an organization corrective of sectarian encroachments on the American policy of separation of Church and State.

“If it will hurt the Catholics, I’m for it!” The minister who expressed this frank but enthusiastic lack of moral discrimination reflects the thinking of an impressive segment of California’s Protestant clergy. I have heard a reasonable facsimile of this viewpoint in the last 18 months from more Protestants than I care to remember.

The remark concerned a November 4 ballot issue in California which has split the Protestant community. Both sides are campaigning vehemently to increase their Protestant support, for this will be decisive. The position of the Roman Catholic church is united and unequivocal, but it represents only 20 per cent of the population.

The controversial measure, an initiative constitutional amendment, is officially known as “Proposition No. 16.” Thus it gained its place on the ballot through petitions circulated more than a year ago among the voters of the state. It seeks to place in the California State Constitution a provision to deny property tax exemption to all nonprofit, nonpublic schools from kindergarten through grade 12, except those for the handicapped. Once in the Constitution this denial of exemption will be out of the reach of the Legislature and can be altered or reversed only at another general election.

This is not a new issue. After the State Legislature by a vote of 108 to 3 granted tax exemption in 1951 to nonprofit private schools below collegiate grade, a Protestant group disapproving this measure sponsored a referendum. At the polls in 1952 the electorate upheld the action of their lawmakers although the contest was close. Advocates of taxing schools then took the matter to the courts where they were again defeated. The California and the United States Supreme courts in effect affirmed constitutionality of the exemption.

As a study in Protestant strategy, Proposition No. 16 has serious significance beyond the confines of the Golden State. In the face of mounting tensions in its relations with Roman Catholicism, the need of American Protestantism for a sound and effective strategy is obvious. The fundamental importance of this ballot measure lies in what light it can shed on Protestant tactics vis-a-vis Rome. Thus it provides a laboratory situation which may yield data of real value to guide Protestantism in what undoubtedly will be a long period of stress.

As is inevitable in any controversial matter, there are infinite nuances of opinion and many fine gradations of thought. It is not possible in a brief report to do them all justice. At best we can indicate only the main battle lines, primarily as they have been defined by the major opposing Protestant groups in the struggle. In being true to the main over-all outlines of conviction, we may not present accurately any particular Protestant minister’s viewpoint, whether he is for or against Proposition No. 16.

Rome The Decisive Issue

The decisive issue in Proposition No. 16 is the Roman Catholic church. If there were not 643 Roman Catholic elementary and high schools in California to be taxed, the measure certainly would not be on the ballot. Those who have once again placed this before the voters renounce subtlety and are quite frank and open about this. The official ballot argument they prepared quotes liberally from a textbook used in some Roman Catholic schools, including certain words from Pope Pius XI. They do not permit their campaign literature and public speeches to leave any doubt about their target. In one pamphlet they put it quite bluntly: “However, regrettable as it is from the standpoint of what some unthinking voters may misconstrue as intolerance, the question of tax exemption for nonpublic schools cannot be divorced from the rigid and unyielding objectives of the Roman Catholic Church.”

While proponents of Proposition No. 16 have taken the name “Californians for Public Schools,” their main purpose admittedly is not to increase revenue for public schools. Their state campaign director has said: “Actually the amount of money we are talking about is not too great.” The $1,175,000 that would result from the repeal of private school exemptions (1.43 per cent of the total exemptions granted in the state) wouldn’t mean very much to California’s burgeoning public school system which requires the establishment of 37 new schools each week.

Nor can the advocates of taxing private education point to any “clear and present danger” to the state’s public school system. As of March 31, 1958, there were 117,841 public school children on half-day sessions. In the past five years public school enrollment in Los Angeles County alone increased by 453,859, while private schools added 60,780 children. In 1952 nonpublic schools educated 8.3 per cent of all elementary and high school pupils. Five years later their share had increased to only 8.9 per cent. In California there have been no unfortunate actions detrimental to public education involving Roman Catholics. While there is the fashionable grumbling about rising taxes, educational extravagance and ineffectiveness, both the financial undergirding and the general moral support for California’s public schools are quite healthy and adequate. It is impossible out here to get the impression that they may be forced out of business. While they are beset by problems of growth, they are doing well and everyone knows it.

Fear of Rome supplies the teeth in the arguments advanced by “Californians for Public Schools” to justify taxing nonprofit schools. The true focus of their concern is Rome, not public education. If anxiety over Roman Catholicism is removed, so is the bite of their logic. Lacking a clear and autonomous position of their own, they represent reaction.

Their basic position can be fairly stated by stringing together some sentences from their own literature: “Shall California subsidize private and parochial schools with tax property exemption?… Should you pay public funds through tax exemption to support parochial schools that indoctrinate ideas alien to America?… Rome has the biggest stake in tax exemption.… Tax exemption is the opening wedge to full tax support later on.”

This thinking reflects the viewpoint of the Protestant minister who said to me: “If it will hurt the Catholics, I’m for it!” It also involves the reverse: “If it will benefit the Catholics, I’m against it!” This reactionary position, pure and simple, threatens to inflict greater harm on Protestantism than it ever will on Roman Catholicism. When you leave Rome out of the case for placing mandatory property taxes on nonprofit schools it collapses completely.

Protestants who uphold tax-free schools and oppose Propostion No. 16 have sought to establish their basic position independent of Rome. “Protestants United Against Taxing Schools” has adopted three basic convictions to guide its campaign: 1. Strong support of the public schools by every citizen whether or not he has children in them; 2. Opposition to the use of public monies to support nonpublic schools, including textbooks, bus transportation and teachers’ salaries; 3. Tax-equality for religious-sponsored and nonsectarian schools below grade 12 with similar educational institutions above this level.

They maintain that tax-free education is a Protestant tradition in America older than the republic itself, now universally honored in all 48 states. Not even their opponents can deny this. That the exemption is constitutional and does not violate proper separation of Church and State has already been decided in the courts.

Opponents of Proposition No. 16 are pointing out the tremendous danger that confronts Protestantism in the philosophy that a tax exemption is a subsidy. If this view is accepted, then all churches, educational units, fellowship halls, colleges, seminaries, hospitals, homes for the aged, orphanages and camps are being subsidized by the state. Recognizing the weight of this logic some leaders of “California for Public Schools,” like Dr. Abbott Book and Walter Hancock, have publicly advocated taxation of all property of every description owned by any church. Many Protestants in the state go along with them on this, since “it will hurt the Catholics.”

“Protestants United Against Taxing Schools” is stressing the perilous fallacy of defining principles of social justice by statistics. That 89 per cent of the nonpublic school enrollment is Roman Catholic has no relevance one way or other to the basic question of taxing education. We might as well tax churches, since a greater proportion of Roman Catholics than Protestants is reputed to be in their respective pews on Sunday. Indeed, by a quantitative determination of right and wrong, Protestantism itself never could have come into being, for it represented only a small segment of Christendom at the start. Obviously all that matters is that the tax exemption be available to all nonprofit schools, Catholic or Protestant, on equal terms and this unquestionably prevails in California.

The thorny point in the campaign centers in Rome’s future intentions regarding education and taxation and its conflicting position on separation of Church and State. On this the Protestant leaders of the tax-free school forces take a very “existential” position. Affirming their faith in the strength of Protestantism, they believe that the fairest way to handle problems of this type is individually and concretely in the courts. The Constitution of California is quite intransigent in prohibiting the appropriation of public money for the support of any religious sect or church or for any sectarian or denominational school (Art. 4, Sec. 30 and Art. 9, Sec. 8). The present law is both adequate and proper. Protestants should be vigilant about its enforcement. They should not, however, deny justice to Roman Catholics now simply because there may be further demands in the future.

This much is clear from the California situation: The strategy of “If it hurts the Catholics, I’m for it” only divides Protestantism and weakens its effectiveness. Triumphant tactics spring not from fear but from confidence. Therefore the starting point for sound Protestant strategy is not what Rome is doing nor yet what it might do. The proper starting point is a deep appreciation of historic Protestant convictions and an abiding passion for social justice regardless of what Rome does or does not do now or in the future.

If the Protestant position on any given issue is determined by the position the Roman Catholics take, then Rome determines Protestant strategy by negativity. This has happened to some Protestant groups in California as it has to some across the nation. Yet to assume that Rome is always wrong is to come as definitely under papal control as to assume that it is always right.

These days of mounting tensions call for an autonomous and authentic Protestant strategy that issues from the deep places of its own soul. The development and the pursuit of such a strategy demand both courage and objectivity. Thus we will serve our God far better by thinking more about justice and less about Rome.

END

The Rev. Kenneth W. Cary has been Rector of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, Pacific Palisades, California. Currently he is serving as State Chairman of “Protestants United Against Taxing Schools,” an organization formed to defeat a ballot measure that would deny property tax exemption in California to nonprofit schools. He is a graduate of Occidental College, Los Angeles, and Union Theological Seminary, New York.

Words are the minted coinage of thought. Whether spoken or written, they are the medium of exchange of ideas. They range in power from the cheap little words of common chatter to the trumpet tones that can electrify a nation or change a culture. Words can sing with joy in victory, or shout defiance in defeat. They can mumble and cower in abject surrender, whimper or cry aloud in fear. They may rise like sweet incense in prayer, or burn with the acrid smoke of profane cursing. They may grow in stature, or they may shrivel away. They may become archaic and obsolete, and so cease to communicate thought to a living generation. Or they may simply lose their vitality and become empty casks, hollow shells, mocking the ideals for which they stand.

Disillusionment In Our Time

In one of his early novels, A Farewell to Arms, set during the first World War, Ernest Hemingway gave expression to the postwar disillusionment of his generation, a disillusionment that has been very largely duplicated in our time. He puts into the mouth of the main character, young Lieutenant Henry, something of his own bitterness and cynicism when he says:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice … We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by bill-posters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory, and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.… Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage … were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers.…

It is not a new attitude, nor is it confined to a post-war generation, though it is more likely to afflict men living in such a period. Cynicism, the loss of faith in ideals and in the words they express, is a virulent disease that can attack any man when he becomes disillusioned. It is a loss of faith in the things one once believed. For there was never a cynic who had not been once an idealist.

Victims Of Despair

Hamlet, Shakespeare’s greatest character creation, was probably the embodiment of something of his own desperate anguish of spirit during the dark period of his great tragedies. His was a truly noble mind. He was a man of penetrating reason and kindling affections. When the play opens, a series of brutal shocks to his sensitive spirit have broken Hamlet’s faith in man, and especially in woman. The kingly father whom he deeply loved and admired has died suddenly under suspicious circumstances. His mother, whom he also loved, has hastily (within two months), married his uncle, a man he loathes; and this man has further, by clever machinations, usurped his rightful place on the throne. Then he learns from a ghostly visitation that his mother has been an adulteress, and, what he had already suspected, that his uncle has been the murderer of his father. He is surrounded by those whom he believes to be spies in the service of the usurper. And even the girl he loves, prompted by her father, has apparently turned against him in his most terrible hour of need for love and understanding.

And so his mind is defiled by the things that are rotten in the state of Denmark. The world has become to him an unweeded garden possessed by things rank and gross in nature. The brave o’erhanging firmament, the majestical roof fretted with golden fire has become nothing but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. Man, once noble in reason and infinite in faculties, now seems to him merely the quintessence of dust. And woman has become synonymous with frailty and folly. Worse, the ideals of mother and wife have become defiled and corrupted in his imagination. The very words have lost their sacredness. At best they have become hollow, empty, meaningless. At worst they are full of gall and bitterness and poison.

Several years ago a sensitive teen-age girl finally found unbearable the bawdy and lewd atmosphere of her home where her mother and older sisters entertained men promiscuously on riotous Saturday nights. Escaping from the polluted environment, she secured sanctuary in a neighboring home where she worked part time for board and room while she continued her studies at the local high school. She suffered humiliation and loneliness, estranged from her classmates by the ill-repute of her background, and from her family by her purity and independent spirit.

One Mother’s Day, moved by compassionate love, she went back to the old home, bearing a gift for her mother and longing for reconciliation and understanding. But as she stood outside the door with the gift in her hands, she was greeted by a stream of profane abuse and hatred. Who did she think she was? Was she too good for the likes of her family? She could go back to her new home and stay there. Her mother wanted nothing more to do with her. The little gift of sacrificial love was refused, and the door was slammed in her face.

She went back to her new home that day, slowly and in desolation of spirit. But it was some time before they found her there. And when they found her, she was hanging in the barn, a suicide. Can one imagine what the sacred name of “mother” had come to mean to that girl?

There is a vast difference, of course, between that simple girl’s disillusionment with life and the profound heart-sickness of the noble prince of Denmark as Shakespeare portrayed him, brooding in terrible dejection above the sea of troubles that had overwhelmed and destroyed his faith while he painfully considered making his quietus with a bare bodkin. But the same great darkness engulfed them both when the ideals by which they had lived became empty, hollow words.

Certainly not all who suffer the loss of ideals plunge so deeply into the night of despair. Some cynics laugh rather in affected bravado, or in supercilious mockery. They protect themselves by satire and irony. But in either case, the great words for these people have become sounding brass, hollow vessels, broken and empty cisterns, cracked facades, or great courts lying empty in the sun.

What All Cynics Forget

However, what all cynics forget is that every abstract word is hollow until we pour life into it. Honor, glory, sacrifice, loyalty, love, joy and peace, courage and endurance, faith and faithfulness, chastity and sobriety, democracy and brotherhood, justice and mercy—what are these? Words! Abstract words. Hollow words—until we fill them with deeds, with life, and thence with meaning.

Cynicism as an easy attitude for disillusionment is a common experience. Indeed it is always a part of the process of maturing into manhood and womanhood. Truly no thoughtful person has ever escaped a period of storm and stress when the sure foundations of the earth seemed to tremble and the sky threatened to fall. If life itself does not cause us to question the age-old words, the ancient ideals, then certainly an honest reading of the world’s great literature must cause us to do so. No education can be truly liberal, and truly liberating, that does not confront the youthful mind with the awful alternatives to an easily accepted, lightly held and naively comfortable faith.

The first adventures of the mind with the city of dreadful night, the first voyaging upon strange seas of thought alone, the first descent into the black depths of evil in man, the first face-to-face colloquy with the mystery of death, may well shake the most secure soul. But faith can exist only in an atmosphere of doubt. And the word cannot be filled full until the soul has wrestled with the dark angel.

Browning suggests the experience powerfully and poetically for us in his narrative of Childe Roland, the youthful knight in his first grim mission into the land of the Dark Tower. It is a dreadful land, as Browning describes it, with one stiff, blind horse, every bone astare, and the grass scant as hair in leprosy, and a palsied oak with a clift in it like a distorted mouth. A great black bird sails past. There are rats and toads and dead men’s bones. It is the Waste Land of T. S. Eliot. It is a nightmare landscape by Salvador Dali. It is the world without God and without hope.

And suddenly there in the midst of the reek and decay, with a dying sunset kindling through a clift in the hills, he sees the round squat Tower, “blind as the fool’s heart,” the castle of Giant Despair. And he puts the slug-horn to his lips and blows his resounding challenge toward the castle, confronting in faith the worst that life can throw at him.

Thomas Carlyle recounted his experience more directly in the poetic prose of that strange book, Sartor Resartus. Brought up in a devoutly religious Scottish home, he had found his first adventures away from the lee shore overwhelming. He struggled in a vast sea of materialism. “Doubt,” he says, “darkened into unbelief.” Shade after shade went grimly over his soul. There was no Pillar of Cloud by day and no Pillar of Fire by night. “To me,” he continued, “the universe was all void of life, of purpose, of volition, even of hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.”

Carlyle came out of that period of “the Everlasting No,” as he calls it, the basic and fundamental denial of spiritual reality, but he lay for a time in “the Centre of Indifference,” when he tried, like Wordsworth, to yield up moral questions in despair. He came eventually into “the Everlasting Yea,” when the affirmation of faith in God and concern for man welled up within him, and the great words sang again with meaning, as they did for Beethoven when he composed the last movement of the massive Ninth Symphony.

Cynics And The Great Words

The great words can never be filled by men of little faith, nor by those who have never confronted the horror of the world, who have closed their eyes or looked the other way. Dostoevsky, in some respects the greatest novelist in world literature, said that his hosanna rose out of the fiery furnace of suffering. No one can read The Brothers Karamazov and not sense that here was a man who had plumbed the dark depths of human evil and human suffering, but who saw at the same time the sunlit heights of man’s noblest aspirations. Saint and sinner are both real to him. By contrast, one can read Faulkner and Hemingway, our contemporary “greats,” and some of the lesser naturalists of our time, and not gain from them any true sense of the grandeur, dignity and beauty of human life at its best. The great words for them are hollow, for they have emptied them of life.

The Christian view of man sees sin and degradation as tragic realities. But it sees also grace and forgiveness and redemption and renewal as forever possible and equally real. Yet the great words of the Christian faith are hollow and meaningless until we have experienced them. Until we have recognized our sin and grieved for it, until we have sought forgiveness and showed it, until we have been cleansed and renewed by divine grace, we cannot truly sing, nor can we even comprehend, the song of the redeemed.

Back in 1901, Amy Carmichael, a little Irish woman who went by faith as a missionary to India, despite the warning of doctors that her health would not permit her survival there, found herself one day drawn into personal contact with a horror she had not known, the dedication of children to the evil service of prostitution in the Hindu temples. A little girl of nine had escaped from one of the temples and was brought to her. “The child,” she writes, “told us

things that darkened the sunlight. It was impossible to forget these things. Wherever we went after that day, we were constrained to gather facts about what appeared to be a great secret traffic in the souls and bodies of young children, and we searched for some way to save them, and could find no way.”

Eventually she did find a way to help deliver and redeem some of them from their sordid fate. But first she had to go through redemptive agony in her own soul. She learned to pray the words of F. H. Meyers, “Yea, Lord, I know it, teach me yet anew with what a fierce and patient purity I must confront the horror of the world.”

“There came a day,” she writes, “when the burden grew too heavy for me; and then it was as though the tamarind trees about the house were not tamarind, but olive, and under one of those trees our Lord Jesus knelt, and He knelt alone. And I knew that this was His burden, not mine. It was He who was asking me to share it with Him, not I who was asking Him to share it with me.”

And so by faith she created the Dohnavur Fellowship, a place in South India where rescued children could be brought up in the rich, full, clean life offered in Christ. And E. Stanley Jones said of Dohnavur that it was the nearest thing to the kingdom of God that he had yet seen.

The great words of the Christian faith—grace, forgiveness, redemption, faith, hope and love—are all hollow words until we pour our Christian experience into them, until we see that God has poured his own divine life into them.

John, the beloved disciple, knew this when he referred to the incarnate Son of God as the Word made flesh. “We beheld his glory,” he wrote, “the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” He was the Word of God to man, fulfilled and filled full. And Paul understood this also when he wrote of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

One of the most memorable and terrible reminders of the Nazi perversion is a painting of Hitler in the early days of his movement. The artist has portrayed Hitler addressing a group of people in a beer cellar in Munich. There are only a few folk gathered about him as he speaks, but the intensity and passionate longing in their faces suggests the fierce and fanatical devotion that was soon to sweep the nation and threaten the peace of the world. The picture was titled by the artist, “In the Beginning Was the Word.”

Most Powerful Instrument

That seems to us a blasphemous caricature of the words of John’s Gospel, but it illustrates paradoxically the same profound truth. The word, spoken or written, can be the most powerful instrument in the world for good or for evil.

Because some men fail the great words (and we all do at times), because some betray them, deny them, deride them, it is easy to become cynical about ideals. In some colleges and universities, cynicism is the attitude not only of a majority of the students, but of some of the faculty as well. It is supposed to be smart to be cynical about virtue and honor and integrity, about faithfulness and sacrifice and love. But the person who truly observes life will discover these great ideals here and there alive in some man or woman, boy or girl. And so long as an ideal is incarnate in a single life, the word describing it will stay alive and it may begin to recover its meaning and walk about among us.

Yes, the great abstract words are hollow, and yet, filled full of life, they could shake the world. But there seems to be no hope for a general recovery of the great words in the life of our Western society until the Word of God to man is heard afresh, until the incarnate Word, the speaking and spoken Word that so perfectly reveals God, is seen in his transcendent glory as the ultimate answer to our human need. Until that Word is seen, until that Word is heard, all our best words, all our great words, will remain unfilled and unfulfilled.

The Christian faith should deliver us from cynicism. It should deliver us also from a blind and comfortable optimism. It enables us to see the beauty and wonder of the world, and it confronts us too with the evil and the horror of the world; but it challenges us to transcend our world and transform it with the “fierce and patient purity” of the redemptive love that was in Christ.

END

J. Wesley Ingles is Professor of English at Eastern Baptist College in Philadelphia. He is author of five novels, best known of which is The Silver Trumpet. Born in Dunoon, Scotland, he holds the A.B. from Wheaton College, Th.B. from Princeton Theological Seminary, M.A. from Princeton Univ. and D.D. from Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

A Swedish pastor by the name of Olov Hartmann has written a book called Holy Masquerade and with it has set off considerable excitement in Sweden. There are those who bitterly criticize the book, but there are as many who report the reading of it as a liberating experience. The book has a lot to say about the kind of Christianity practiced by some in the environment of the Swedish State Church. But it clearly has a message that reaches beyond the borders of Sweden.

The big question that the book asks is the old one about whether a man practices what he preaches. The material of the book is taken from the parsonage of a preacher who happens to be married to an unbeliever. The unbelieving wife keeps a diary. The diary is the substance of the work. The mistress of this manse turns out to be a shrewd student of her husband’s words and his deeds. In her diary she unmasks her husband as a preacher whose words are empty of accompanying life, whose sermons are full of compromise and are really mere form without content.

She is a careful listener to every sermon. Then she surveys her husband’s life from the perspective of his pretty homilies. She claims to be making an earnest search for identity in his preaching and his life. She fails to find it. So she sets out to show that the Christianity she hears preached is worthless. She wants to know what her husband means when he talks about the “presence of Jesus Christ” in one’s life. And she wants to know what her husband really does believe when he tells her that one must not construe the dogma of the church too literally. Meanwhile she watches her husband being caught up in the details of organizational work and in the subtleties of making a career for himself. She suspects that her husband is not following the demands of his calling, but the dictates of the quest for popularity. His sermons always come off neatly. But they always leave echoes of unreality.

Finally, her observations turn to fury. “To me the whole thing is poison. My whole being revolts against it. But it must be more than revolt. I declare war against this masquerade.” Her diary, thus, becomes an angered charge. The book, which uses the diary as a literary device, is being called a scandal in Sweden.

Author-pastor Hartmann adds two chapters following the diary. The first of these is the report of a judge on a fire which destroyed the church pastored by the fictional preacher, a fire in which the authoress of the diary is fatally burned as she tries to salvage a statue of Christ from the building. The other chapter is the preacher’s own reaction to his wife’s diary, which he discovers after her death. It is his self-justification, a mealy-mouthed attempt to diagnose his wife’s troubles as “confusion of the spirit,” an ailment about which he says he has read a good deal of literature. The preacher’s feeble effort to justify himself only serves to underscore the validity of his wife’s accusation.

The book, written by a man who is himself a Swedish pastor, has understandably aroused much emotional reaction. The intent of the work is clear enough. It warns against nominal Christianity and unveils its demonic character. It is true that the diary mocks at many of the church’s cherished doctrines. This alone is setting off much of the adverse reaction to the book. But it is just as true that the diary succeeds in demonstrating how Christianity itself can become something close to blasphemy. Many readers find the volume a necessary warning against unreality and hypocrisy, against the terrible dualism that can exist between word and deed, doctrine and life.

The author does not mean to stand behind all that the chronicle contains. The preacher’s wife is anyone who as an unbeliever is trying to understand Christianity and to find out whether it is really meant to be taken seriously. The book is really not profane. It raises a profound question, that of the reality of the Christian life. This is a question which always confronts the church. It is the question which faces every believer: does my life become an occasion for the blasphemy of God’s name because of the contradiction between what I say and how I live? Not he who says Lord, Lord, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven.

The sharp pointedness of the treatise hurts most because it is written as the observation of a person who lives with a nominal Christian. Such close-hand study is often more accurate than the kind written from a distance. The book, in spite of the objections one may level against details, is a gripping witness to a desperate groping for reality and integrity, for genuine Christian living. That it is concerned with a preacher only gives the theme a sharper accent. It is precisely those who face the world with the name of the Lord on their lips who are most closely scrutinized as to whether their lives establish what they teach. There is nothing worse than the career of an evangelist played off against a background of inconsistent living.

The Word of God has much to say about the dangers of the impressive word. Nowhere does the Gospel warn more urgently than it does against Pharisaism. Pharisees were people who had much religion, who were steeped in the law. We read that they thought they were serving God. But the essential thing, love, was lacking. Their lack of love was demonstrated in the kind of lives they lived. Christ’s “Woe unto you” that rang out against the Pharisees still forms a call of the Lord to integrity of life. The call sounds to us, lest we cause men to reject the Gospel because of what they see in our lives. The preacher is not called to proclaim anything about his own holy life. But as he preaches the Gospel the holiness of his life must be transparent in his preaching. In the Church of Jesus Christ something of what Zechariah wrote must become actual. “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” (Zechariah 8:23).

The danger of word-deed is felt as keenly by Paul as by anyone in the Bible. He writes, “Thou therefore which teachest another, teachest thou not thyself?” (Romans 2:21). Serving the Gospel of Christ in the world is really a noble and holy office. But the Lord calls the whole man into his service, not merely the mouth. His witnesses must be free of the dualism that forms occasion for blasphemy. This is doubtless the intent of the Swedish pastor’s book. It is a summons to sober reflection wherever preachers stand up to testify that the darkness is passing away and that the true light is already shining. “… because the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth” (1 John 2:8).

Inadequate Solution

Resurrection and Historical Reason, by Richard R. Niebuhr (Scribner’s, New York, 1957, 184 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by R. Allan Killen, author of The Ontological Theology of Paul Tillich.

In its opening chapters this book promises to be one of the most daring attempts to give the resurrection of Jesus Christ a true place in history, but before it closes it proves to be the greatest of disappointments.

Niebuhr begins by pleading for the re-establishment of the Resurrection as a true historical fact. He quite ably shows how there has been a tendency on the part of many theologians, including Karl Barth, to place the Resurrection in some category that transcends real history. Barth puts it, for example, in supra-history. This manner of dealing with the Resurrection Niebuhr traces to the influence of Immanuel Kant. Kant maintained that we cannot know metaphysical or revelational truth by means of theoretical reason—that is by means of the realm of everyday knowledge. He found a place for it however in his “practical reason.” Niebuhr sees the theologians of the nineteenth century and the neo-orthodox of today as actually, in one manner or another, falling back upon Kant’s concept of practical reason in their explanations of the Resurrection. Niebuhr’s solution is that there needs to be added to Kant’s three roads to knowledge—namely theoretical reason, pure reason (which incidentally Niebuhr considers of no real value), and practical reason—a fourth, namely historical reason.

Up to this point the book contains much of real value insofar as it presents an interesting and worthwhile analysis of Ritschl, Schweitzer, Barth, and others. It is as Niebuhr starts to describe his “historical reason” that the total inadequacy of his solution begins to become apparent.

He commences by establishing the fact that besides scientific knowledge there exists historical truth. The marks of historical truth are individuality, transcendence and memory. To what kind of knowledge will “historical reason” lead us on the basis of such a definition of historical truth? Niebuhr’s explanation of the Resurrection is the answer.

In the resurrection of Jesus Christ we do not have, Niebuhr maintains, any proof of a bodily resurrection. The references to the “empty tomb” are “a relatively late tradition” (p. 172), and the so-called corporeal emphasis comes only in the third and fourth Gospels. The references, in the Resurrection appearances, to Jesus eating and drinking and to the marks of his crucifixion are not to be connected with the idea of a bodily resurrection, but are merely elements of identification and recognition. As Jesus appeared to the disciples they remembered that he had eaten and drunken with them. Now identity and recognition, Niebuhr argues, are the marks of a true historical event. He writes: “If the preceding argument is sound—that the narratives are encounters centered in recognition and identification—then we can affirm that the Resurrection appearances shared in the same kind of independence as all historical events. The past—shared by Jesus and his disciples and held in the memory of the latter—and the present in which the disciples believed themselves to be alone were abruptly fused through the appearance of Jesus before them. His presence induced recognition in the place of pure memory (p. 174).

If Niebuhr is saying that the disciples actually saw the Lord in some mystical sense remembering how they had eaten and drunken with him, and that even though there was no such historical experience as their eating and drinking with him again after he arose from the grave, nevertheless they said they had done so, then any historian today would simply say that the Gospel writers lied. Niebuhr explains it as something else!

This proposed fourth kind of Kantian reason, “historical reason,” ends in a confusion of thought and memory with event. Events can occur without our confusing them with memory, and memory is not an indispensible element in true historical event. True historical narrative does not confuse event and memory as it would seem according to Niebuhr the Gospel writers have done. It is hard to see that he has advanced in any real sense beyond Schweitzer’s psychological explanation of the Resurrection or even that he has developed anything essentially different. This is not a return to the orthodox biblical view.

R. ALLAN KILLEN

Crime And Punishment

The Urge to Punish, by Henry Weihofen (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1956, 220 pp., $4) is reviewed by John K. Mickelsen, Minister of Canoga Presbyterian Church of Seneca Falls, New York.

The author of this work, professor of law at the University of New Mexico, discusses the problem of the effect of mental disorder on a criminal’s responsibility for his unlawful acts. Evangelicals must study this complex problem if they are to understand and react to one of the current trends in the treatment of criminals. Certainty, every Christian who acts as a juror and hears an insanity plea on behalf of the defendant must have an informed opinion on which to base his verdict.

The generally used test for criminal irresponsibility, the M’Naghten rule, asks if the accused knew what he was doing or if he knew that he was doing wrong. Prof. Weihofen considers that rule to be in error because it concentrates on the ability to know to the exclusion of volition and emotion and the role of the unconscious in human mental activity. However, the M’Naghten rule seems to be in accord with the Bible’s emphasis on knowledge as the basis of responsibility (Luke 12:47 f.; Rom. 1:19 f.).

Prof. Weihofen states that the M’Naghten rule is becoming obsolete in our courts, and will be replaced by either the product rule or the appropriate section of the Model Penal Code drafted by the American Law Institute. The product rule says, “An accused is not criminally responsible if his unlawful act was the product of mental disease or mental defect” (p. 7). The 1955 tentative draft of the Model Code affirms, “A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law” (p. 62).

The concluding chapter, which gives the book its title, presents the case for the abolition of the death penalty. This is not unrelated to the subject of the book because “the insanity defense is almost never raised except in murder cases” (p. 146). Eight objections to capital punishment are given (pp. 152–166). Though some of the objections are worthy of note, the argument here is weak, for all eight objections are appeals to effects and consequences rather than to principles; in effect, this is an appeal to expediency. There is no recognition of the primary purpose of punishment, the vindication of God’s righteousness and justice (Rom. 13:1–4). Nor is there any awareness that, because murder is the destruction of God’s image in man, the one who murders deliberately must be executed (Gen. 9:6; Num. 35:6–32).

The other five chapters may be criticized on the ground that they also ignore the teachings of the Bible. This shows up in three ways. The psychology on which this work is based denies the existence of the soul (note 8, pp. 176 f.). Wrongdoing is defined by human law rather than by divine law; this the author accepts without protest (pp. 64 f.). And the presence of design and purpose in the universe is denied (p. 55), which is but another way of denying the providence of God.

Before evangelicals come to a common solution for the problem of mental irresponsibility they must come to agree on two things. They must agree on the effect of the freedom of the will on human responsibility; and here Jonathan Edwards’ The Freedom of the Will cannot be ignored. Secondly, evangelicals must arrive at substantial unanimity concerning the effect of mental disorder on the freedom of the will. If evangelicalism is to make an impact on this area of social responsibility our theologians and scientists must give both facets of this problem their attention. And if we are to make that impact in time to influence the present trend, our treatment of these facets must begin immediately.

JOHN K. MICKELSEN

Christian Soldier

Way to Glory: the Life of Havelock of Lucknow, by J. C. Pollock (Murray, London, 1957, 270 pp., 25s), is reviewed by Philip E. Hughes, lecturer of Mortlake Parish, London, England.

The name of Havelock of Lucknow is a name that means little to the present generation—so quickly is the fame of the heroes and great men of the past obscured. It is over 100 years since General Sir Henry Havelock died at Lucknow, November 24, 1857, and was mourned and acclaimed on all sides as a Christian soldier of dauntless courage and outstanding genius. The Daily Telegraph recorded that “For two days, in every circle from the palace to the cottage there was a national lamentation.” Luneral eulogies were uttered in churches and chapels throughout the land, including Westminster Abbey. Across the Atlantic, flags were flown at half-mast in New York and Boston, “a tribute of respect which,” according to the New York Times, “even the Duke of Wellington did not command and which we believe was never before paid to a foreigner.” The Duke of Cambridge, indeed, considered Havelock to be “equal and in some respects superior to Wellington.” However that may be, Havelock, by consistent integrity of character and perseverance during years of disappointment, and by the crowning blaze of his brilliant leadership at the height of the Indian Mutiny, achieved the ambition which he had expressed in the words, “to be surpassed by none in zeal and determination in the path of my duty because I was resolved to put down the vile calumny that a Christian could not be a meritorious soldier.”

But if the consummating event of his life was the victory at Lucknow, the crucial and most important event, and the key to his character, was his own conquest by the gospel of Jesus Christ on board ship when sailing out to India as a newly commissioned officer, aged 28. From then on he remained a faithful and fearless soldier of the King of kings. Eager to win others for Christ, he was not ashamed to organize informal services for the purpose of bringing the Gospel to such as would attend, despite the strong disapproval of his fellow officers. Appalled also at the dreadful hold which strong drink had over the soldiery and at the vicious excesses which were the consequence of drunkenness, he inaugurated a regimental temperance association and opened a coffee room, the prototype of the canteen clubs which are now taken for granted in service life.

As a military leader he was absolutely intrepid, and a remarkable strategist. Wherever, the firing was fiercest and the dangers greatest he was to be found on horseback setting an example of unsurpassed valor to his men. Though apparently altogether careless of his own personal safety and survival, and though his mount was shot from under him on half-a-dozen occasions, he came through all his engagements unscathed, so that his men came to regard his person as invulnerable and his leadership invincible. Even when the end came, it was acute dysentery and not the iron or steel of the enemy that carried him off.

Mr. Pollock has performed his biographical task most competently, realistically and sympathetically. He has made excellent use of his material.

PHILIP EDGCUMBE HUGHES

Among the extant epistles of Paul there is none more genial in its attitude and more revealing of the author than the epistle to the Philippians. Like an excerpt from an intimate diary, this short letter, occupying about three pages in the average copy of the Bible, speaks of the fulness of Paul’s Christian experience and contains some of his ripest teaching. Although it is not primarily theological in character, it deals with an aspect of the Incarnation that has kept theologians arguing about it for years. Probably Paul would be quite dismayed if he knew how much controversy his seemingly incidental reference to the selfemptying of Christ had aroused.

History And Authorship

From the earliest times that the epistles of Paul were quoted, Philippians has been known to the Church. There are allusions to it in the writings of Ignatius and Polycarp, early in the second century, and the later writers of that century, Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, all mention it. The authorship of Philippians has never been seriously questioned, for it bears the unmistakable imprint of Pauline thought and experience.

Date And Origin

The exact date of Philippians is uncertain, but it was probably written toward the close of Paul’s imprisonment in Rome. Some commentators like G. S. Duncan have argued for an Ephesian imprisonment about the time of the third journey, around 55 or 56. If Paul were imprisoned in Ephesus during or at the end of his three-year ministry there, neither his own writings nor the tradition of the Fathers has preserved any certain evidence of it. Internal evidence indicates that he wrote it when the issue of his case was still unsettled (Phil. 1:22, 23; 2:7). He was certainly confined to prison (1:7), and had probably just had his first hearing, so that his case had come to the attention of the palace officials (1:13). His enemies had taken advantage of his detention to promote their own cause, preaching Christ insincerely (1:16), while his friends had boldly come to his defense. Paul himself did not know what to expect. Death was quite possible, and he was ready for it (1:23), but he felt reasonably sure that he might be acquitted, and that he would be able to return to Philippi (1:25 f.).

The letter was written as a note of thanks to the church for having sent him support both in his past ministry in Macedonia (4:15,16), and during the imprisonment (4:14). Epaphroditus had brought their message (4:18), and had been taken ill at Rome (2:25–27). Paul had sent him back with this note after the delay of his illness, with the recommendation that they receive him well. He expected to send Timothy a little later, as soon as the outcome of his imprisonment should be decided (2:19–23).

Background

The church at Philippi was the first founded by Paul in his Macedonian campaign on the second journey, about the year 51. Upon receiving the call to Macedonia (Acts 16:9, 10) he and his party, including Luke, sailed westward from Troas to Asia Minor, and landed at Neapolis, the present port of Kavalla. From there they proceeded to Philippi, the largest city in that immediate region, and a colony of Roma. As a colony, it was under Roman law, and was regarded as an extension of Rome itself. It was largely populated by retired Roman legionaries, and the inhabitants prided themselves on their Roman citizenship. There were very few Jews in the city, not enough to build a synagogue.

Paul began his ministry in a prayer-meeting of Jews and Jewish proselytes held by the river bank. There he met Lydia, a wealthy shopkeeper, who became interested in his message. She entertained Paul and his party in her home, and became one of his first converts. Paul’s cure of a demon-possessed slave girl aroused the enmity of the owners, who could no longer use her profitably for fortune telling. They aroused public antagonism against Paul and Silas on the charge that they were Jews, whose message was subversive of Roman loyalties. They were seized, beaten, and thrown into prison without legal action, but were freed by the intervention of God through an earthquake at midnight. The jailor was converted. The next morning the magistrates of the city, upon learning that they were Romans, came down to the jail to release them. This public apology removed the stigma of the arrest, and the party was allowed to leave the city in peace (Acts 16:13–40).

According to the account of Acts, Luke seems to have remained behind as the pastor of the church and as a general evangelist in Macedonia and Achaia, for at this point in his narrative the pronoun shifts from the first person (“we”) to the third (“they”). He rejoined Paul when he returned to Philippi (Acts 20:6) about three years later. In the meantime his ministry at Philippi may have had a powerful influence on the church in promoting its loyalty to Paul, when, as Paul says in this very epistle, he was beset by enemies within the church who were seeking to undo his work.

Structure And Content

Because of his imprisonment which had curtailed his evangelistic and pastoral activities, Paul was deeply concerned with the progress of the gospel in the Roman world. There were other preachers, of course; but he felt responsible for maintaining the integrity of the churches which he had founded and for carrying the message to the farthest bounds possible. Spain was in his mind when he wrote Romans (Rom. 15:28) just before his arrest at Jerusalem. Now, three or four years later, he is still seeking “to reach forth unto those things which are before” (Phil. 3:13).

The theme of “the gospel” runs through Philippians like a current in the ocean. His relation with the church is “the fellowship in the gospel” (1:15). His preaching is “the confirmation of the gospel” (1:7). His career is “the progress of the gospel” (1:12). His conflicts are “the defense of the gospel” (1:17). Ethical conduct is determined by the standards of the gospel (1:27), and the body of truth that Christians hold is “the faith of the gospel” (1:27). The labors in which Paul and his associates are engaged are “the service of the gospel” (2:22), and he speaks of the women of Philippi “who laboured with me in the gospel” (4:3) … In fact, so closely was his entire career bound up with this subject that he called the beginning of his campaign in Macedonia and Achaia “the beginning of the gospel” (4:15). Paul used the term in several senses. It denoted his message about Christ, the content of Christian faith, the sphere of Christian service, and the purpose of his whole career.

Philippians may be divided into several fairly well-marked sections, though its composition is much less formal than many other of Paul’s epistles. Nevertheless, there is a discernible outline in this epistle.

I. Salutation to the Philippians 1:1, 2

II. Paul’s Relationship to the Church 1:3–11

III. Paul’s Plan for the Church 1:12–2:30

A. Personal Prospects 1:12–26

B. Personal Requests 1:27–2:30

1. A Plea for Unity 1:27–30

2. A Plea for Humility 2:1–11

3. A Plea for Witnessing 2:12–18

C. Arrangements for Messengers 2:19–30

IV. Paul’s Warning Against Legalism 3:1–21

A. Personal Experience 3:1–16

B. Personal Plea for Loyalty 3:17–21

V. The Final Word 4:1–23

A. Concluding Injunctions 4:1–9

B. Thanksgiving for Favors 4:10–20

C. Salutation 4:21–23

Philippians is not so thoroughly logical an epistle as Romans or Galatians because it is written for a different purpose. It is non-controversial, and is much more like a conversation than like a debate or a lecture. Paul opens it by chatting informally about his imprisonment. He is grateful for the work that God has begun among the Philippians, and is confident that He will continue to carry it to completion. Paul wants them to know that his imprisonment has not blocked the progress of the gospel. On the contrary, it is becoming known in official circles, and many have begun to proclaim Christ publicly, whether out of sympathy for him, or whether as rival preachers. He is quite encouraged by the prospects, and wants the Philippians to know that his chief concern is the honor of Christ.

There is no outstanding heresy or abuse in the Philippian church that calls for correction, but Paul wants his readers to maintain their courage, and not to be frightened from their calling in the gospel by the fact of his imprisonment. Since Philippi was a colony of Rome, any action of Roman courts would be immediately effective there. Perhaps some of the people were wondering whether the church would be declared illegal if Paul were condemned. He urged them to conduct themselves as good citizens (1:27—Greek: politeuesthe) of the gospel.

The passage in chapter 2 is worth more than passing comment. Paul used the picture of the humiliation of Christ as a pattern for the Philippians. The modern church has made it a crux interpretum of doctrine. We should note that Paul was not arguing the case for the Incarnation; he was assuming it. He was not seeking to explain it metaphysically; he was using it as an illustration. The very fact that he does so indicates his acceptance of the pre-existence of Christ and his high view of Jesus’ person. Christ, existing in that form which expressed the reality of his Godhead, voluntarily laid it aside for a different form which expressed the status of a bondslave, and in the outward appearance of a man he endured the death of the cross for us. Paul does not mean that Jesus was only a phantom, but he wishes to convey the idea that in the garb of human flesh Deity was resident. The Incarnation did not strip Jesus of his rights, but he laid aside certain of his powers in order that he might live the life of man. By so doing Deity was not degraded, though he suffered humiliation; rather, humanity was exalted as he became the Lord of heaven and earth. The point of the illustration is that if Deity could voluntarily accept humiliation to make the gospel possible, we should have the same attitude for the sake of making the gospel known. “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14), and we, in turn, “hold forth the word of life” (Phil. 2:16).

A second important message in Philippians is the first part of the third chapter, where Paul describes Christian experience in autobiographical terms. He tells how he, a thorough Jew, steeped in the law and filled with zeal for it, found in Christ a gain greater than the loss of his prestige and influence in Judaism, and a motivation far stronger than that of the law. Christ became his righteousness, and in the power of His resurrection and in the fellowship of His sufferings he found a new and more abundant life.

The Philippian church seems to have been threatened by a legalistic type of Christianity somewhat akin to that which had disrupted the Galatian church about a decade before. There are not lacking hints that Paul’s antagonists had not been completely silenced in the Galatian controversy, but that they had pursued him throughout his missionary career. In the second epistle to Corinth he complains about those who have attacked both his preaching and his person (2 Cor. 11:3–6, 13, 22, 23; 10:10). They had reappeared at Rome (Phil. 1:15, 16). The Philippian church had not been led astray completely as had the Galatians, but he was aware of the danger which might overtake them, and he was seeking to avert it.

In order to make clear the nature of the gospel he cited his own experience. He had been brought up in strictest conformity to legal righteousness. He could trace his ancestry back to Israel, the “prince with God” who had been changed by God’s power. He came from Benjamin, the smallest but one of the most vigorous of the twelve tribes, and he was named for Saul, the Benjamite king of Israel. Although he had lived in a Greek city, he was a strict Hebrew, maintaining the language and customs of his people. He had been circumcised on the eighth day as an infant, so that he was no proselyte. He had adhered rigidly to the observance of the law. His zeal had been manifested in his persecution of the church, and his career before the public eye was blameless.

Surely so respectable a citizen and so upright a religionist would be quite well satisfied with his attainments. He found that there was something lacking which could be satisfied only in Christ. Christ became his righteousness, so that he stood before God clothed with a holiness not his own (3:9). Christ became his life, so that in power and in suffering he drew upon Christ’s resources (3:10). Christ became his goal; for as the runner speeds his way toward the tape and the judge’s stand where the prize will be awarded, Paul pursued his quest of following Christ (3:13, 14).

His closing exhortations enforce this same principle. He urges the Philippians to follow him, and to avoid those “who are enemies of the cross of Christ: whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things” (3:18, 19). In his conclusion in this section of teaching he incorporates another illusion to the local social background. The passage beginning, “For our conversation is in heaven …” should be translated, “For our citizenship is in heaven …” (3:20). Just as the Philippians were politically citizens of Rome, though living in Philippi, so we are a colony of heaven. Our citizenship is there, even though we may be living in the world as “registered aliens.” Our conduct should be measured by the standards of our native land and not by the customs of the place of sojourn.

The last chapter of Philippians contains chiefly exhortations to unity, to trustfulness, and to prayer. Its great promise, “My God shall supply all your need …” (4:19) is linked with Paul’s personal thanks for all the gifts that the church has sent him. As they have supplied him, so God will supply them. As Paul closes this epistle, he succeeds in communicating his triumphant spirit to his friends, for he assured them that through his ministry there are saints even “in Caesar’s household” (4:22). In spite of his imprisonments he has carried the gospel forward, and has been able to bear an effective testimony to the imperial court in Rome.

Tools For Study

Old, but still one of the best commentaries on Philippians is J. B. Lightfoot’s St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians. The volume in the International Critical Commentary by Vincent will provide ample discussion of the problems of introduction and of the Greek text. For a rare combination of scholarship and spiritual insight, try H. G. C. Moule’s Philippian Studies. The new one-volume commentary by Davidson, Stibbs, and Kevan has a clear, brief treatment of the epistle, with an unusually good introduction. A. T. Robertson’s book, Paul’s Joy in Christ, has some helpful homiletical suggestions. The development of the theme of the gospel may be found in Tenney’s Philippians: The Gospel at Work.

MERRILL C. TENNEY

Dean of the Graduate School

Wheaton College (Illinois)

Recent developments in astronautics are affecting many areas of human thought and action. The Christian may well ask how it affects his faith.

Consider the attention now focused on a shot to the moon. Is there a moral, even a spiritual side, from which this concentration of interest may be viewed? What may be said to be the religious and ethical implications of a successful shot to the moon (or even an unsuccessful attempt)? What does it indicate about man as created? As fallen? Where may it lead us? Away from God? Nearer to God?

For a religious assessment of lunar exploration, Christianity Today put these questions to Protestantism’s foremost theologians and philosophers. Most of the 25 distinguished leaders quoted herewith are evangelicals, but not all.

KARL BARTH, professor, University of Basel: “What about the prospect of a shot to the moon? See Psalms 139:7–10. (‘Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there: If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me’ [AV]). For the rest: take it easy!”

ANDREW W. BLACKWOOD, professor emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary: “The shot to the moon calls attention to Psalm 8, which sings about man’s insignificance compared with the moon, and his majesty as ‘little less than God’ [RSV]. Once I preached about the hydrogen bomb. Now I think a minister should preach from the Bible, as an expert, and not preach science, as an amateur.”

F. F. BRUCE, professor, The University, Sheffield: “ ‘The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein’ (Ps. 111:2, AV). The more that men discover about the universe of God, the more cause they have for admiring his wisdom and power. National prestige and the like, however, are unworthy motives for exploring creation, as compared with doing it to the glory of the Creator.”

EMIL BRUNNER, professor, University of Zurich: “A shot to the moon has significance only as the latest achievement of science. The improportionate interest in it shows mankind confusing means and ends and overrating the importance of technological achievement. While science manifests men’s God-given dominance over nature, the course of its development shows its incapability of integrating it into the oneness of human life according to its divine destiny.”

GORDON H. CLARK, professor, Butler University: “The attempt to shoot the moon has no more religious significance than any other great scientific advance. To suppose so is on a level with interpreting the Apocalypse by the morning newspaper. God’s first command to Adam contained the injunction to subdue nature. Shooting the moon, therefore, is a divinely appointed task. Unfortunately, however, the ungodly are generally reputed to have obeyed this commandment more successfully than devout Christians have.”

OSCAR CULLMANN, professor at the Sorbonne: “The scientific attempt, as such, a legitimate means of exploration, will neither remove us from nor will it draw us nearer to God. But it will remind the Christian of the cosmic reach of his faith: the work of Christ, mediator of all creation, concerns the entire universe. That faith will inspire the solution of the ethical problems.”

FRANK E. GAEBELEIN, headmaster, The Stony Brook School: “Exploration of space should lead man closer to the only true God, who created not only this planet but also the whole universe. But it cannot do this unless man remains humble before the living God. If man, who brought ruin to the earth through the rebellion of sin, makes such achievements as lunar exploration and space travel an occasion for self-exaltation, he will inevitably be subject to God’s greater judgment upon his pride. The redeeming work of Christ has infinite and universal implications. Because it reveals the very heart of God, it stands above the material universe. God’s love for man through Christ, who upholds all things by the word of his power, is eternal and therefore beyond revision through any kind of scientific advance.”

JOHN H. GERSTNER, professor, Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary: “I cannot become excited theologically about a landing on the moon, but I am quite interested in it as a possible relief for the earth’s population, weather observatory, missile base, and so forth. It seems to me that its exploration draws us neither closer nor further from God and has no implication for the state of man’s depravity, except that it illustrates once again that fallen men can be very able scientists. I see nothing more sinister in the discovery of the moon than in the discovery of America.”

CARL F. H. HENRY, professor (on leave), Fuller Theological Seminary, and editor of this magazine: “Fallen man vaunts his genius and power to disguise his moral nakedness and spiritual bankruptcy. He shoots to the moon much in the spirit of proud Lucifer exalting himself against God. In fact, in the Bible, Satan is prince of the power of the air. To bend the universe to God’s purpose is man’s divinely-given task. As sinner he exploits the universe instead; he reaches for infinity to vaunt his own glory.”

W. BOYD HUNT, professor, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary: “Man is not to fear science (Matt. 10:28). Rather, science under God, is man’s (Gen. 1:26–28), to use or to abuse. Something would be wrong with Christians if professing atheists were to permanently out-think and out-invent them. If man can get to the moon, reverent faith says that time is wasting. And it also says, let the glory be God’s, who made man, and who made him hungry to know truth, and who made truth so vast and all-challenging.”

DIRK JELLEMA, professor, Case Institute of Technology: “The success or failure of current moon shots has no religious implication. Man’s coming conquest of space (and note that God made him to ‘have dominion’—Ps. 8:6 [AV]) will have no effect on his basic problems, his religious problems, which are unaffected by his space-time location. Man may someday rule the galaxy; if so, he will still need a Saviour.”

W. HARRY JELLEMA, professor, Calvin College: “Always the problem for the Christian moralist has been to lead men in the path of wisdom; and wisdom for man is to know and to use himself and his world so as to grow in knowledge and love of God in Christ. For Christian ethics and theology, therefore, I see no more of a problem in current researches in outer space than was occasioned by invention and use of the telescope. No more of a problem; essentially no new problem; very much the same problem as always.”

CLYDE S. KILBY, professor, Wheaton College: “Christians can rest in the perfect assurance that planetary or even interstellar exploration will make no essential difference in the rationale of their position. Since the Creator is of necessity larger than his creation, and since he sovereignly occupies all space and all time, Christians should joyfully encourage every honest investigation of the universe. They should be of all people the least provincial.”

HAROLD B. KUHN, professor, Asbury Theological Seminary: “The results of space explorations may be largely in one of two directions. They may lead men again to ponder the words of the Psalmist, ‘When I consider … the moon and the stars, which thou has ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?’ (Ps. 8:3–4, AV). In other words, today’s explorations could point the way to a new recognition of both the majesty and the condescension of God. Or, such achievements could serve to bolster man’s pride in his own wisdom and ability, and to revive Swinburne’s superficial, ‘Glory to man in the highest!’ ”

C. S. LEWIS, professor, Cambridge University: “I … fear the practical, not the theoretical, problems which will arise if ever we meet rational creatures which are not human. Against them we shall, if we can, commit all the crimes we have already committed against creatures certainly human but differing from us in features and pigmentation; and the starry heavens will become an object to which good men can look up only with feelings of intolerable guilt, agonized pity and burning shame.”

J. THEODORE MUELLER, professor, Concordia Seminary: “So far as our modern helpful and terrifying inventions are concerned, the Christian believer views them all as made by God’s gracious permission and according to his direction, ‘replenish the earth, and subdue it’ (Gen. 1:28, AV), in order ultimately to serve his glory, the spread of his gospel to bring in the elect, and the proclamation of his second coming as our Lord foretold this (Matt. 24). To the unrighteous, who glory in their pride, they are tokens of divine wrath, but to the believers in Christ they are both a comfort and an admonition to trust in the divine Word and to submit themselves absolutely to their loving father in heaven, who makes all things work together for good to those who in Christ Jesus love and serve him.”

REINHOLD NIEBUHR, professor, Union Theological Seminary: “I am baffled by the concern about the theological significance of a shot to the moon, particularly when we are living in the nuclear age and the conscience of the whole world is troubled about another aspect of modern technical achievements, namely, the destructive possibility of nuclear weapons.”

(Readers will recall the editorial “Christ and the Atom Bomb” [Sept. 2, 1957 issue]. The current issue [page six] carries a relevant article by Dr. William G. Pollard of Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies.—ED.)

HAROLD JOHN OCKENGA, president of the board of directors, Fuller Theological Seminary: “Nothing in Scripture precludes the possibility of interplanetary space travel. Let us evangelicals not be provincial. But should fallen man succeed in projecting himself to the moon or to any other planet, he will inject his sin, his hate, his violence, into the new sphere. This only intensifies the Gospel task and Christian responsibility. Space travel may well be a fulfillment of Acts 2:19 and Luke 21:25, which prophesy recognizable signs in the sun, moon and stars before the second coming of the Lord. For the first time in history, these may be fulfilled.”

BERNARD RAMM, professor, Baylor University: “Man is man wherever he is. The meaning of his life is know only through revelation; and the conditions of life with reference to God remain unchanged wherever man is. Extensions through time do not change man’s God-created nature, nor do extensions in space change any of the conditions under which he lives before God. The Spirit of God can just as aptly regenerate somebody on the moon as he can in the submarine. Man’s dominion concerns the totality of created reality so I do not feel that he must of necessity be earth-bound. Therefore, any trip to the moon changes nothing in the Christian scheme of things for that scheme of things pertains to man wherever and whenever he is.”

W. STANFORD REID, professor, McGill University: “I do not feel that a landing on the moon constitutes, as some seem to think, a violation of the divine order. On the other hand, there is no doubt that if man does succeed, he will take with him his sinful heart so that he will attempt to use any success in this venture for his own selfish purposes, unless restrained by the grace of God.”

WILLIAM CHILDS ROBINSON, professor, Columbia Theological Seminary: “ ‘Seventy-seven Seconds—Multi-million Dollar Failure.’ That is the record of the first U. S. effort to fire a rocket to the moon. This multi-million dollar experiment is, of course, paid for by increasing the debt limit and cheapening the dollar. That is, everyone in the country paid for the expensive failure. At about the same time two submarines cross from the Pacific to the Atlantic under the polar ice-cap. God gave the earth to man, but He did not give man dominion over the moon. Why not use the marvelous skills of science for this world and leave the sun and the moon and the stars to the fingers of the Almighty?”

NED B. STONEHOUSE, professor, Westminster Theological Seminary: “Is man, in trying a shot to the moon, forgetting his destined sphere and perhaps arrogantly and irreverently stepping out of bounds? No, at least not necessarily so. For man, though a creature of the earth, has by reason of being a creature of God a far wider horizon. Such an increase of knowledge as travel into outer space may afford, like other advances of human learning, leads to conceit when men suppose that by searching they can find out God or that they have no need of him. Such self-exaltation is, however, not inherent in man’s increase of knowledge of and power over the forces of nature. On the contrary, one may advance in humility and readiness to serve God as one stands more and more amazed at what the heavens are telling us of the glory and power of God and the scope of his rule and saving purposes.”

PAUL TILLICH, professor, Harvard University: “There is no direct religious significance in the penetration of man into outer space—including the moon and planets. The divine ground of everything is equally near to and equally removed from the grain of sand as from the farthest galaxies. And the divine self-manifestation in human history is valid for all phases of man’s history, past and future. But there are indirect religious effects of these developments comparable to those which occurred with the victory of Copemican astronomy. They can immensely increase man’s awareness of himself as free, namely free from bondage to any encountered situation, including bondage to the power-field of the earth. But they also can greatly increase man’s temptation to confuse his power to progress endlessly into world space with the inner infinity of his spiritual nature and, hence, to lose the vertical line by surrendering to the horizontal one. Finally, the opening of outer space can overcome our terrestial provincialism and produce a new vision of the greatness of the creation of which earth and mankind, their space and their time, are only a part.”

FARIS D. WHITESELL, professor, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary: “The attempted moon shot reveals modern man’s prowess, pride and fear—his prowess in scientific achievement because bearing the image and likeness of the Creator—his pride in racing to be first in this venture—his fear that his enemies may get to the moon first and use the accomplishment in some way to destroy those they hate.”

WARREN C. YOUNG, professor, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary: “Man’s ingenuity in mastering his environment is evident by his determination to penetrate outer space. While the effort in itself has no new moral nor spiritual significance, it demonstrates all too well man’s selfish determination to achieve personal supremacy and to proclaim his self-sufficiency. No new theological issue is involved since man has always been a creature in revolt against his Creator.”

Acknowledgments

The statement by Professor Lewis originally appeared in Christian Herald and is reprinted by permission.

All other comments were written especially for Christianity Today.

Sources of pictures are as follows: Professor Barth, Religious News Service Photo; Professor Brunner, Religious News Service Photo; Professor Lewis, Religious News Service Photo; Professor Niebuhr, Religious News Service Photo; Dr. Ockenga, Fabian Bachrach; Professor Reid, Garcia Studio; Professor Tillich, Religious News Service Photo.