A few days ago the Honorable Robert Newbigin arrived in Port-au-Prince as the new U. S. ambassador to Haiti. A Protestant, he succeeds Gerald Drew, a Roman Catholic. The 55-year-old Newbigin, formerly U. S. ambassador to Honduras, is known to face a tough assignment. Haiti, the Caribbean republic that shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, is caught in the cross-streams of political floods in Latin America.

The religious scene in Haiti is characterized by a large evangelical advance in recent years, the expiration of a 100-year-old concordat with the Vatican, the coming respectability of voodoo, an influx of Communist literature in recent months, and a severe economic crisis.

Catholicism was introduced on Hispaniola to the Arawakan Indians following discovery by Columbus in 1492. In 1555 African slave-trade began at the instigation of a Catholic priest concerned about the high death rate among Indian slaves. Catholic teaching was forced upon the Negro slaves, who formed an amalgamation of Catholicism and a form of African paganism now known as voo-dooism. Today the official language of Haiti is French and the national language Creole.

Haiti won national independence from France and liberty from slavery in 1804. Not long after the republic was established the president, Petion, sent to Great Britain a request for Protestant missionaries. Two Methodists responded in 1816, worked for two years and made some converts, but were forced to leave when an unfriendly president was installed in 1818. The work was continued by the Haitian believers.

The first resident missionaries established in Haiti were British Methodists, in 1836. Some converts were won, but development was very slow. James T. Holly, a Negro Protestant Episcopal clergyman, came to Haiti in 1861. This field today is one of the Episcopal Church’s largest missionary dioceses with congregations in both rural and urban centers for some 13,000 communicants and a strong national clergy.

Baptist missions were introduced about 1895 by Eli Marc, a Frenchman who had studied in a Baptist seminary in the United States. He never left Haiti and worked nearly 50 years in the northeast sector. Upon his death his work went to the American Baptist Home Mission Society. One of his sons, Reuben Marc, is the pastor of the largest Baptist church in Haiti, which is located in Port-au-Prince and which claims some 2,500 members.

Pentecostals came to Haiti about 1930 and now have a large work numbering more than 20,000 believers.

The West Indies Mission, which entered in 1936, has developed an indigenous church on the southern peninsula with a Christian community of 63,000. Associated with the West Indies Mission are some 200 organized churches with 250 mission churches and some 150 national pastors and preachers. The West Indies Mission at Cayes has a Bible institute, printing plant, dispensary, and radio station.

The Church of God (Tennessee) sent their first missionaries in 1937.

In 1940 the Unevangelized Fields Mission established a work in the northwest. Today there are some 200 UFM congregations and Sunday Schools. They are engaged in training a national ministry at their Bible institute in Port-au-Prince. Orphanages, a hospital, high school, book store and Gospel press gives UFM a well-rounded missionary program.

The East and West Indies Bible Mission, which began in 1940, has been succeeded by the Oriental Missionary Society. One branch of its ministry is a radio station at Cape Haitian, which broadcasts not only in the languages of Haiti, but by short wave has an international ministry.

Today the predominant religion in Haiti is Roman Catholicism, with a clergy largely French and Canadian. The Roman church is faced not only with the dynamic and indigenous evangelical witness, but also with a growing feeling against a foreign clergy. Last year two French priests were expelled from the country by the government, accused of plotting against the government; the archbishop was placed under house arrest by the president of the republic.

After 100 years the concordat between Haiti and the Vatican expired last spring and the government of President François Duvalier has made no effort to renew it. Officially, the whole issue has been treated with silence. Meanwhile, Protestant groups petitioned for a denunciation. Some Catholics also are opposed to a renewal, asserting that by the concordat forces of colonialism have subsisted and Haiti continues under the domination of a colonial clergy. Some are known to resent that the government was required to support a seminary in France from which they have received such small dividends.

The Catholic church is deeply concerned by the advance of evangelicals in education. Methodists, American Baptists, Protestant Episcopals, and the Unevangelized Fields Mission have established high schools. Almost all missions have established Bible and theological schools for training national pastors and evangelists. The West Indies Mission is establishing Christian day schools in the southern peninsula together with a scholarship and normal school program for the preparation of accredited teachers. Evangelical radio stations of the West Indies Mission at Cayes and the Oriental Missionary Society at Cape Haitian are making a profound impression on the total population of Haiti. They are not only an effective means of evangelism but are creating a good climate for evangelism in every segment of Haitian society. The West Indies Mission plans to expand its radio ministry to cover the entire country with a network of four 1,000-watt stations. Their first station at Cayes has been on the air for two years. This month they are establishing a booster station at Jérémie and hope to have another booster on the air in Portau-Prince, the capital, by 1961. The Unevangelized Fields Mission has daily broadcasts on a commercial station at Port-au-Prince. After the West Indies Mission established their radio station, Catholics announced their intention to build a station but no particulars have been disclosed. A television station has been established and has offered evangelicals free time but no evangelical group is known to have taken advantage of the opportunity.

Haiti’s basic economic problem is unemployment. Well-educated young people cannot find jobs. As a result, they are social misfits. Spiritually, they seek a center around which to integrate their lives. Communism seeks to fill the vacuum with a great influx of literature in recent months. Some young people have turned to the nihilism of existential philosophy. It is also among these that the Jehovah’s Witnesses and other cults are making their greatest inroads. Jehovah’s Witnesses have more than 40 foreign missionaries in Haiti, many of whom are American negroes.

President Duvalier has seemingly gone all out to combat the multiple problems of poverty, unemployment, poor communications and illiteracy. He has been handicapped by an empty treasury. In a major speech this past summer he intimated that the ideology of Haiti was that of the West, but if the West did not give the proper kind of aid Haiti would have to look elsewhere. Haiti is not unaffected by the political influences of their closest neighbors, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. While anti-American feeling is definitely growing, the attitude of the people as a whole is wait-and-see. While missions in Haiti avoid involving themselves directly in politics, the political climate particularly as it touches on its attitudes the United States, the home of most of the missionaries, has a real bearing on evangelical missions.

Back in the Garden

Evangelist Billy Graham paid a return visit to Madison Square Garden last month. Despite the specialized nature of the week-end effort in seeking to reach only the Spanish-speaking population, Graham’s crowds matched those of his four-month campaign in the Garden in 1957. An aggregate of 43,500 attended the three services, with some 1,000 of these stepping forward to profess faith in Christ.

More than 10,000 Disciples of Christ trekked to Louisville, Kentucky, for the 1960 assembly of the International Convention of Christian Churches, October 21–26. It was the largest assembly in many years and one of the most significant in Disciples’ history. Actions taken may hate wide repercussions in the life of the nation’s largest religious body with distinctively American origins.

The convention theme, “His Mission—Our Decision,” was relevant to its “Decade of Decision” program, adopted by the 1959 convention. At the opening session in Kentucky’s mammoth Exposition Center, Convention President Loren E. Lair stated that the program’s purpose was to implement the mission of Christ in the world. Among specific advances which Lair proposed in the ten-year period were the establishment of 1,500 new churches and the raising of $400,000,000 for the work of the brotherhood at home and overseas.

The varied program of the convention also included major addresses by A. Dale Fiers, president of the United Christian Missionary Society; Albert Edward Day, noted Methodist divine: Marion Royce of Ontario’s Department of Labor; James H. Robinson, director of the Morningside Community Center in New York City; and Henry G. Harmon, president of Drake University. Missionaries and nationals from Disciple mission fields in Africa, Asia, Japan, Southeast Asia and North America were among the speakers.

The 40th anniversary of the United Christian Missionary Society was observed in several addresses, a pageant, and a luncheon at which 5.000 were served. The society, one of the largest mission corporations in American Protestantism, began in a merger of several boards in Cincinnati in 1919 in the midst of one of the most devastating doctrinal controversies in the history of the Disciples. It has weathered many storms and stands today with a net worth of over $10,000,000, 227 foreign missionaries, a membership of 245,000 in its women’s organizations, and a vast service organization employing hundreds of staff and field workers.

Spiritual highlight of the assembly was the traditional convention observance of the Lord’s Supper on Sunday afternoon when an estimated 13,400 partook of the sacred emblems of Christ’s death and suffering. An effective biblical liturgy centered the thought of the convention on Christ as in no other session.

Christian aesthetics were given unusual prominence at Louisville. Impressive dramas, such as “This Burning Hour” by Kermit Hunter of Hollins College and “The Circle Beyond Fear” by Darius Leander Swann of Christian Theological Seminary, were well received. A panoramic view of the “Decade of Decision” in Scripture, music, message and commitment and a music festival presented by mass choirs of four major Disciple colleges filled most of the closing day. The proceedings represented a strange contrast with the deeply evangelistic stance of Disciples’ national gatherings for more than 100 years.

Business sessions were largely concerned with resolutions, which: urged effective means of cleansing mass communications without invoking a deadening censorship; commended the code of decency in motion picture production; condemned “apostles of discord” and the controversial Air Force manual; pledged renewed loyalty to the National and World Councils of Churches; and endorsed proposed integration of the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches.

Overshadowing all other resolutions were those dealing with interracial issues. Highly controversial and causing deep rifts in certain sectors of brotherhood life, these pronouncements put teeth into the church’s traditional stand on racial discrimination. They call for integrated church life at all levels. The National (Negro) Christian Missionary Convention has been temporarily incorporated into the UCMS orbit and will later be completely integrated with the International Convention. The National City Christian Church, on the edge of a large Negro area in Washington, will eventually face serious problems as a result of one action. Early in the convention. Kring Allen, integrationist agitator, precipitated an embarrassing situation for conferees. Because Congolese delegates had been refused service in certain Louisville hotels and restaurants, Allen proposed a special resolution which charged that some leaders of the church had, in the interests of “expediency,” “compromised” the convention in agreements with Louisville hostelries. Convention authorities were called upon to strictly observe a resolution passed seven years ago providing that the convention meet only in cities which would accommodate delegates without racial discrimination.

Most revolutionary action taken by the convention was in the adoption of a report “concerning brotherhood restructure.” It commits the convention to a “decade” program which may change the whole polity and program of its constituency. The report proposes that an intensive study be undertaken in the nature and mission of the church. It calls for an overall master plan for “responsible action” affecting local churches, city unions, district and state conventions, boards and agencies, colleges and seminaries, benovolent homes, the International Convention and relationships with ecumenical bodies. It proposes that the newly organized denomination be put in a legal position to negotiate with other religious bodies looking toward eventual union. Traditional congregational autonomy and self-government could be sacrificed for “independence and responsibility” within a centralized ecclesiastical framework.

The method of implementation involves so-called “listening conferences” in all sections of the nation, speakers in conventions and institutes, lectures in colleges and seminaries, articles in the religious press, books and brochures, consultations and various propaganda gadgets. A Commission on Restructure composed of from 120 to 130 representative leaders and meeting annually will make final decisions subject to convention approval. From this body a Central Committee of from 15 to 18 members will be selected which together with a paid staff will do most of the planning and handle detailed action.

Report No. 31 involving “Cooperative Policy and Practice” provides a committee for dealing with current developments in this revolutionary program. It is to provide “cooperative strategy” and new “brotherhood solidarity.” It proposes to “strengthen cooperative life” regardless of “independent claims.” The committee will give guidance and counsel to local congregations facing internal problems arising out of expected opposition to the new program. Close cooperation is to be maintained with the Year Book Committee (which lists approved ministers and churches), the Home and State Missions Planning Council, the State Societies and related agencies.

Some observers predict that these decisions at Louisville will have wide repercussions in this intensely congregational body and could well result in the loss of hundreds of churches and ministers from presently tenuous relationships with the convention.

Dr. Perry E. Gresham, president of Bethany (West Virginia) College, was elected convention president for the ensuing year. Bethany was the first Disciples’ college.

Rival Assemblies

A last-ditch reconciliation attempt by the Reunited Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Korea failed to prevent a final schism as rival assemblies met in Seoul this fall.

The 45th General Assembly, meeting in Seoul’s Yung Nak Presbyterian Church, made a last attempt to woo back die-hard dissidents who had rejected a partial reunion effected last February. Postponing its first order of business, the assembly dispatched a reconciliation team to the opening session of the assembly organized by the dissidents and pleaded for reunion before election of opposing slates of officers would make division irrevocable.

The splinter (Seung Dong) Assembly, however, meeting behind locked gates, refused even to admit the peacemakers to a committee hearing.

The Seung Dong assembly, in turbulent session, postponed for a year consideration of the explosive issue of membership in the International Council of Christian Churches. It turned instead to open negotiations for union with the Koryu Presbyterian Church, a smaller Presbyterian body in Korea related to the Orthodox and Bible Presbyterian Churches of America.

Publishing Plan

Delegates to the 77th annual conference of the Bible Fellowship Church, formerly known as Mennonite Brethren in Christ, approved plans for a denominational paper to serve its 4,000 members. The conference, held last month in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, appointed the Rev. David Thomann editor.

Rampant Immorality

Australia’s top-ranking Anglican leader says the spread of immorality is “a cancer eating at the nation’s heart.” He blames the condition largely on the distribution of indecent literature and urges concerted efforts to arouse public and governmental concern.

In his presidential address to the 32nd Synod of the Sydney Diocese last month, Dr. Hugh R. Gough, Archbishop of Sydney and Primate of Australia, declared that immorality is rampant not only among married and unmarried grown-ups but among young people and even children.

Charging also that many young people in the country are amoral, he said “immorality is bad enough, but to be amoral is infinitely worse.”

Gough said that probably no new laws of censorship are necessary, but only a “full and literal implementation of the existing laws,” and a “refusal to give way to the pressure of a few loud voices which are clamoring for a relaxation of those laws.”

Mormon Headquarters

Plans for a 38-story denominational office building to be built in Salt Lake City by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) were announced by President David O. McKay at the church’s 130th semi-annual conference last month.

The project, described by church architects as the “greatest in the Intermountain Region,” also includes construction of a 17-story addition to the Hotel Utah, also owned by the church.

A four-level underground “self-parking” area will accommodate 2,000 automobiles, and a new church gymnasium will be provided. Working plans for the project are now under way, it was reported.

The office building—to be one of the tallest of such structures between Chicago and the West Coast—will house administrative offices of the church, the missionary department, and branch departments of the 1,600,000-member denomination.

Thorpe B. Isaacson, first counselor in the church’s presiding bishopric, told the conference that the church plans to double its 8,000-member missionary force now serving in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific.

‘Gas-House Gang’

A space problem in your Sunday School?

If there is a service station nearby, you might want to follow the example of the young married couples’ class of Atlanta’s Peachtree Baptist Church (Sunday School enrollment: 1,157).

Every Sunday morning the class gathers at a gas station across the street from the church, with the women meeting in the office and the men in the auto wash rack.

The station was offered by its owner, Jack Mauldin, a member of the church, when he learned that the class had to give up its facilities to another adult Sunday school group.

Appropriately enough, the men’s group meeting in the service station calls itself the “Gas-house Gang.”

Exit Federation

The University of Chicago’s Federation of Theological Schools was officially dissolved as of September 30. Following dissolution, the schools which had been linked announced establishment of separate agreements, as follows:

—Disciples Divinity House will enroll all its students in The Divinity Schol of The University of Chicago and they will receive University of Chicago degrees.

—Under an arrangement between Meadville Theological School and The University of Chicago, university courses will comprise at least 50 per cent of the academic requirements for a degree from Meadville Theological School.

—Under a contract between The Chicago Theological Seminary and The University of Chicago, students of The Chicago Theological Seminary will take at least one-fourth of their course work from The Divinity School of The University of Chicago, but The Chicago Theological Seminary will have its own faculty and degree program.

—The Divinity School of The University of Chicago with its 29-member faculty will conduct The University of Chicago’s graduate theological degree programs.

Debt-free Dedication

The Methodist Theological School in Ohio, the 12th U. S. seminary supported by The Methodist Church, officially opened its doors at dedication services last month.

The five buildings on the 69-acre campus in Delaware, Ohio, cost $2,700,000, all of which has already been paid, thanks to a successful campaign headed by Dr. John W. Dickhaut, former Methodist district superintendent who was inaugurated as the school’s president a few hours before its dedication.

Classes at the new seminary began in September with an enrollment of 72 students from 13 states.

Alaskan Education

In the shadow of famed Mt. McKinley on the outskirts of Anchorage lies the campus of Alaska Methodist University which opened this fall with an enrollment of 150 students. About $3,500,000 has already been expended since planning got under way 10 years ago.

Two large buildings have already been erected on the 505-acre hilltop campus. More are to come.

The faculty includes 14 full-time and 11 part-time members. Dr. Fred P. McGinnis is president.

A 10,000-word Holy Communion “guide,” which provides for discussing fellowship at the Lord’s Table with other denominations, was adopted by delegates to last month’s 22nd biennial convention of the United Lutheran Church in America.

The statement, three years in the making, takes the place of a 20-year-old, 250-word statement which the delegates rescinded. It was prepared by a special commission composed of 10 theology professors, 4 pastors, and a synodical president.

“The time is ripe,” the statement says, “for Lutherans to initiate theological discussion with other Christian bodies regarding inter-communion … [In the meantime] no blanket judgment should be expressed about the celebration of the sacrament in interdenominational assemblies.”

Generally, the new statement discourages extremes of both “high church” and “low church” communion practices.

Dr. John W. Behnken, president of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, restricted his comment on the ULCA statement to a reaffirmation of the conviction that there must be doctrinal unity before there can be intercommunion.

As expected, ULCA delegates unanimously endorsed a proposed merger with three small Lutheran groups: the Augustana Lutheran Church, the American Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church.

The ULCA itself represents a union dating to 1918 of the General Synod, the General Council, and the United Synod of the South. It now has some 2,500,000 members in 4,600 congregations.

The new body, to be known as the Lutheran Church in America, will have some 3,140,000 members and will probably rank anywhere from fourth to sixth in size among U. S. denominations. The ULCA, now the seventh largest American denomination, is the biggest in Lutheranism.

If the merger is ratified by local congregations as anticipated, the constituting convention will be held in June of 1962.

The ULCA convention, held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was marked by a prolonged debate on a disarmament statement sponsored by the Board of Social Missions.

As first presented to delegates, the statement prompted a critical address by the Rev. William B. Downey, who is now pastor of Fox Point Lutheran Church near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Downey was chaplain to the crew of the “Enola Gay,” the aircraft used to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

He centered his opposition to the original draft on a section which called upon the governments of the United States and Canada to engage “in such forms of peaceful cooperation and competitive co-existence with the Communist world as will not further the totalitarian concept of control.”

“What does the statement say with regard to the defeat of Communist ideology?” Downey asked. “What word is there concerning the rollback of the forces of Sovietism? What does it say about the liberation of our own brethren of the household of faith who are now enslaved? Can we cooperate with Communist treachery?”

Downey’s remarks were greeted with enthusiastic applause, but after lengthy debate his amendment to the part of the statement he found objectionable was defeated by the delegates. He had sought a stronger anti-Communist stand.

The statement then was referred to an informal committee composed of members of the Board of Social Missions, Downey, and Dr. O. Frederick Nolde, a ULCA clergyman who is director of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, a joint agency of the World Council of Churches and the International Missionary Council.

The revised statement, adopted by a large majority, urged the nuclear powers “to persist in the efforts to arrive at effective multilateral agreements on the cessation of all kinds of nuclear weapons testing with provision for adequate inspection and control.”

“A moratorium on testing should be continued,” the statement added, “until every opportunity to secure such effective agreement has been utilized.”

Eliminating mention of “competitive co-existence,” it asked the United States and Canada to engage “with other governments in peaceful competition where important differences exist and in peaceful cooperation where fundamental principle is not compromised.”

Another statement endorsed by the Board of Social Missions, opposing capital punishment, was defeated 248 to 238 in the last hour of the eight-day convention.

Elected ULCA secretary was Dr. George F. Harkins, who succeeds Dr. F. Eppling Reinartz. Harkins since 1949 has been assistant to Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, ULCA president.

Stand On Sacrament Defined

Dr. F. Eppling Reinartz, retiring secretary of the United Lutheran Church in America, hailed a new statement on Holy Communion adopted by its 22nd biennial convention as “one of the principal documents to be produced by the ULCA in its 42-year history.”

Here are highlights of statement:

Presence of Christ—“There is no direct physical discernment of the presence of Christ in the sacrament any more than of the presence of God in the man Jesus. The mystery is the miracle of God’s gracious approach to man. Rationalizations are ruled out. A mystery can only be acknowledged, not explained.” Thanksgiving—“We do not offer Christ’s body and blood in thanksgiving but we offer thanksgiving for the body and blood that are given and shed for us, imparting forgiveness, life and salvation.”

Frequency—“The frequency of the sacrament, the designation of a proper ministrant, and the character of vestments are not unimportant or dismissable.… The Lutheran Church has its own organic way to deal with such practical issues.”

Fellowship of Believers—“The legally organized congregation may well provide the context within which the sacrament is normally celebrated, but as an institution it has no sacramental monopoly. The holy communion may be celebrated elsewhere as well, wherever an assembly of believers is gathered.”

Wine or Grape Juice?—“… not inconclusive is the length and unity of the tradition which specifies wine as the element commonly used.… This is not to say that grape juice may not be used either in the instance of an offence to conscience created by the use of wine or because of reasons of health.”

Communion Cup—“In the past the church has generally used the chalice for the administration of the sacrament. However, the banning of the use of a common cup by civil law in some states and general training in hygienic measures in our society have caused considerable concern about the continued use of the chalice for the administration of the sacrament. It is appropriate that the vessels used in the sacrament do not create an obstacle to the devotion of the people.”

Posture at Altar—“Contemporary parishes are encouraged to ask if kneeling at the altar for the reception of the sacrament might not be desirable for our time and circumstances.… However, this is not to be interpreted to suggest that standing is an inappropriate posture for the reception of the sacrament where local conditions make it more desirable.”

Vestments—“In the absence of local conditions to the contrary, the use of cassock, surplice and stole (by the pastor) for services of holy communion is acknowledged as generally appropriate today.”

Protestant Panorama

● The Protestant missionary force in the Congo was gradually regaining pre-independence strength as of the end of October. Even women missionaries were finding their way back, despite continued instability in the political situation.… A newly-organized agency of the Congo Protestant Council, the Congo Protestant Relief Agency is seeking additional medical help.

● Central College in Pella, Iowa, associated with the Reformed Church in America, has one of the youngest presidents on the U. S. educational scene. Arend D. Lubbers, 29, inaugurated last month, is the son of Dr. Irwin J. Lubbers, who served as Central president from 1935 to 1945.

● An advertising campaign in behalf of Churches of Christ reached into the October 31 issue of Life. The $11,000 quarter-page advertisement in Life represents the most ambitious undertaking of the Gospel Press, a non-profit foundation which raises money for promoting Churches of Christ in the secular press.

● A new organ arrived last month for the Anglican church located on the tiny island of Tristan da Cunha off the South African coast. It was a gift of Queen Elizabeth, sent to replace one accidentally dropped in the ocean during unloading operations.

● American Baptists in Burma plan to turn over all mission property to local ownership. The transfer involves more than 160 plots of land, many with churches, schools, residences, and hospitals. Burma was the American Baptists’ first mission field.

● Methodism’s newest mission hospital is located in Kapit, Sarawak (Borneo). The $175,000 plant dedicated this fall serves a population of 41,000 scattered over a territory the size of the state of Maryland. Facilities include a fleet of mobile clinics.

● The Far East Broadcasting Company plans to beam Gospel programs overseas from a new short-wave station, KGEI, with studios and a 50,000-watt transmitter in Belmont, California.

● A new missionary boat began serving isolated Philippine islands this fall with a five-member crew which includes a Protestant evangelist. The “St. Luke” also carries a doctor, a nurse, and a handyman. Skipper is Dr. Ray Bennett, who for the past 10 years has been consultant on respiratory diseases at Los Angeles General Hospital.

● The entire townsite of Hlolden, Washington, was presented as an outright gift to the Seattle Lutheran Bible Institute last month by the Howe-Sound Mining Company. Buildings on the townsite, valued at $1,750,000, are said to have been well maintained since the company ended 20 years of copper and gold mining there.

● Seven countries were represented at the 23rd annual meeting of Christian Business Men’s Committee International in Seattle last month. The CBMCI norv has nearly 500 local chapters with a world-wide membership of 15,000.

● Dr. Siegried Asche, custodian of Wartburg Castle, fled to West Germany last month after complaining to Communist authorities that his life and work had been marked by “the atmosphere of a jail.” Wartburg Castle, located in the Red zone of Germany, is famous as the retreat where Martin Luther found refuge after the Diet of Worms.

● The Granville (North Carolina) Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. overwhelmingly rejected last month an anti-integrationist proposal which would have restricted use of a new summer camp to presbytery members only.

● Chaplain (Colonel) Charles I. Carpenter, first Chief of Air Force Chaplains, will retire from military service November 30. Top Air Force officials have paid tribute to Carpenter, a Methodist, by presenting him with testimonials from government, military, and church leaders.

● Trustees of Chicago’s Northern Baptist Theological Seminary are negotiating the purchase of a 50-acre suburban site for a new campus.

The Passion Play

Before chilly autumn breezes in the Bavarian Alps coaxed an end to the 1960 edition of their decennial Passion play, Oberammergau villagers were able to enact a total of 93 performances. This year’s series, the 37th since the villagers conceived the idea of a Passion play back in 1634, was witnessed by 518,000 paying patrons and stirred many controversies.

For an appraisal of the play and the issues it raised,CHRISTIANITY TODAYcalled upon Contributing Editor Harold B. Kuhn, professor at Asbury Theological Seminary and a student of the German scene. Dr. Kuhn, who with his wife saw the 1950 play as well as the latest performance, is currently at the University of Mainz on sabbatical leave.

Those critical of the play usually base objections upon one of the following: That the play was not well done; that the village of Oberammergau commercialized the endeavor; that the effect was anti-Semitic.

As for the first objection, one must observe that the performance is basically a work of village folk art, done in pursuit of a vow made during a time of pestilence which marked the Thirty Years’ War. The play must be judged upon criteria which are applicable to such art. Such a judgment is difficult for the sophisticated, who tend to make Broadway, or Sunset and Vine, the standard. Oberammergau has no Cecil B. DeMille, and no facilities for the production of the fabulous, even if its people should desire to present an art-spectacle. The play was artistically staged and beautifully performed, the staging and costumes being the hand-work of the villagers. But the nature of the Passion play itself is such that to revise it in the manner demanded by those who would make it “authentic” and cause it to conform to contemporary “ideas of reality” would be to remove it from the sphere in which it was designed to move.

Some are inclined to view the Daisenberger text of 1860 as the bête noir, as if there came some self-conscious change over the original play during the nineteenth century. This writer has examined a copy of the text as it was about 1670, and so far as he has been able to compare, he finds that the changes made by Father Daisenberger were made, not in the direction of an alteration to suit nineteenth-century ideas and prejudices, but with a view to making the text intelligible in modern High German.

With respect to alleged commercialism of the Passion play, it needs to be borne in mind that some misunderstandings and inequities are inevitable when a village of a few thousand inhabitants attempts to present a play for more than a half million persons. The “block booking” of room, meals, and play tickets doubtless seemed harsh to some who had local connections in Bavaria. But when one seeks to be sympathetic with the problems of the village, and when he remembers the lack of control in 1950, he may conclude that the matter of tickets and accommodations was handled admirably, measured against the problems. As for the motives of the inhabitants of Oberammergau, no outsider would presume to speak the last word. However, when one realizes that the total economy of the community was disrupted for nine months, and when one views the vast quantity of physical and expendable properties involved, he will be slow to charge the Oberammergauers with being mercenary.

Regarding the alleged anti-Semitism of the play, it needs to be said that the text is taken, for the most part, directly from the four Gospels. Granted that selection and emphasis may be tendentious, it can be shown from the play as a whole that no one narrative has been utilized to the exclusion of the others. It must be faced, at the same time, that no presentation of the Passion of our Lord can be faithful to the Scripture and at the same time serve the contemporary purpose of improving relations between Christians and Jews, so long as there is any realistic facing of the fact that our Lord was crucified at the insistence of the Jewish authorities of his times. If this be anti-Semitism, then no authentic Passion play can be free of the charge.

In summary, it may fairly be said that the Oberammergau Passion play has accomplished a large task. It was able to hold the attention of people of diverse faiths—and perhaps some of no faith at all—for a performance lasting some seven hours, in a theatre definitely not constructed for comfort.

There was no resort to the usual dramatic vehicles by which crowds are held spellbound. Not one of the twenty tableaux presenting Old Testament and Apocryphal support of the scenes contained a torrid love scene; there was no alcoholism and no scene of seduction; Mary Magdalene did not even take another try at “happiness.” If the impression made upon the writer and his wife be at all typical, audience after audience left the Passion play theatre gripped by the conviction that they had seen a faithful presentation of the mighty event in which the Prince of Glory died for the sins of the world. This conviction cannot fail to persist as an abiding result, of genuine value to the Christian cause.

It seemed to this writer that the part of Christus was played with great fidelity. This is especially noteworthy in view of the demands of the role upon the performer. Not all supporting roles were played with equal effectiveness. The next strongest character-portrayals were, in order, Judas, Caiphas and Pilate. A 48-voice chorus enhanced and enriched an impressive dramatic performance.

People: Words And Events

Deaths:Rabbi Jacob Moshe Toledano, 80, Israeli Minister of Religious Affairs; in Jerusalem … Dr. Robert Marsden, 55, executive secretary of Westminster Theological Seminary; in Middletown, Pennsylvania … Dr. William M. Fouts, 73, retired professor and registrar at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Appointments: As professor of Pastoral Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, Dr. Seward Hiltner … as executive editor of Christian Herald, Dr. Kenneth L. Wilson … as editor of The Methodist Hymnal, the Rev. Carlton R. Young.

Quote: “I welcome this opportunity to acknowledge my nation’s indebtedness to the spiritual and intellectual resources of Scotland. A symbol of this indebtedness, the Rev. John Witherspoon, stands in bronze outside the door of our church in Washington. Born in Edinburgh and nurtured in the land of his fathers, Witherspoon became a heroic leader of Americans in their struggle for independence. As such he represents a great host of Scots who helped to build my country and whose descendants give living strength to the bonds which unite our peoples.”—President Eisenhower, in a message to the 400th anniversary General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, delivered by his minister, Dr. Edward L. R. Elson of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D. C.

A ‘Common’ Bible

A team of Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish scholars are working together on a new translation of the Scriptures, which they hope will win acceptance as a “common Bible” for theological and ecumenical discussions and for public school reading.

The Rev. Walter M. Abbott, editor of the national Jesuit weekly America and a leading proponent of the “common Bible” idea, says the new translation will be published in 30 paperback volumes by Doubleday in its Anchor Book series.

“The first of the volumes,” says Abbott, “is scheduled to appear in January, 1962, and it is expected that the last will appear in 1966.”

Heading the translation team is Dr. William F. Albright, renowned Methodist scholar and professor emeritus of Semitics at Johns Hopkins University. His associates include the Rev. Mitchell J. Dahood, a Jesuit priest from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome; Dr. Moshe Greenberg and Dr. E. A. Speiser, both of the University of Pennsylvania; and Professor Bo Reicke of the University of Basel, Switzerland.

Purely Religious?

The city of Nashville’s bid to place a tax assessment of some $5,000,000 against Baptist properties was stopped short last month by the Tennessee Board of Equalization.

City attorneys may appeal the ruling, which removed from Nashville’s tax rolls $5,101,400 in assessments on denominational publishing and educational properties.

The assessments, most of which were placed on the tax rolls for the first time this year, would have yielded about $150,000 in tax revenue annually.

The bulk of the assessment—$4,796,200—was on properties owned by the Baptist Sunday School Board, publishing agency of the Southern Baptist Convention. A portion of the remainder was levied against the Sunday School Publishing Board of the National Baptist Convention in the U. S. A., Inc.

Church Giving

A record $2,407,464,641 in contributions was reported for 1959 by 49 Protestant and Eastern Orthodox denominations in the United States, according to statistics compiled by the National Council of Churches.

Average gain in contributions was reported to be 4.6 per cent above 1958 for 35 of the 49 bodies which gave comparable figures for both years.

The totals appear in an annual report issued by Dr. Thomas K. Thompson, director of the NCC’s Department of Stewardship and Benevolence.

Per capita giving for the 35 groups amounted to $69.13, of which $2.26 was earmarked for foreign missions, the latter figure representing a four-cent increase over the previous year.

Six Canadian church bodies disclosed contributions totalling $105,304,001. Among four of these reporting comparable figures for both years, total gifts averaged $54.20 per member in 1959, an increase of $1.27 over 1958. Their foreign missions contributions rose 7.6 per cent to $1.69 per member.

Agitation in Laos

Communist agitation in Laos prompted evacuation last month of a Protestant mission station at Xieng Khouang.

In Vientiane, shell fire damaged a large Roman Catholic cathedral. Sam Neua, where eight Catholic missionaries were stationed, was reported overrun by Communist troops.

The evacuated Protestant station was operated by the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which reported that all other missions activity in Laos were proceeding normally. The Alliance has 12 missionaries in Laos, and two more were due to arrive this month.

Swiss Brethren and the China Inland Mission also are represented in Laos, each with some 20 missionaries.

WCC as Mediator

Still unresolved are the strained relations between Dutch Reformed and Anglican churches in South Africa which resulted from basic differences on the apartheid issue and on the policies of Prime Minister Hendrik F. Verwoerd.

The dispute dates back to attacks by Dr. Joost de Blank, Anglican bishop of Cape Town, against the Dutch Reformed church in South Africa for its support of apartheid. There has been talk in the meantime of expelling the Dutch Reformed from the World Council of Churches.

The WCC intervened by sending a representative to arrange a round table of its South African member churches, including the Anglicans and Dutch Reformed. Negotiations progressed until the government issued an expulsion order against Anglican Bishop Richard Ambrose Reeves of Johannesburg. No official reason was given, but deportation evidently followed statements by Reeves which were interpreted as “meddling in politics.” Reeves opposes apartheid.

De Blank then balked at continuing negotiations, asserting that Reeves was a central figure in the discussions. The WCC representative was scheduled to make a new attempt at renewing talks, and de Blank’s attitude seemed to be softening last month.

The round table was originally scheduled to take place in December in Johannesburg. It may still transpire as initially planned.

B. J. M.

Christ Depicted In Modern Dress

A Sunday school booklet which includes illustrations of Christ wearing Bermuda shorts is being distributed to local congregations of the United Church of Christ.

The booklet, designed for three-year-olds as part of a new religious education curriculum, won endorsement last month from the General Council of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, which is merging with the Congregational Christian General Council to form the United Church of Christ.

Stories in the booklet are retold in nursery rhymes, and biblical figures are depicted in clothing and appearance familiar to children.

Some of the illustrations show Christ and his disciples dressed in knee-length Bermuda shorts and tuniclike shirts. Others portray them in slacks and sports coats, with slight beards and short hair.

“I can more easily imagine [Jesus] wielding his carpenter tools dressed like this than in the long robe with long sleeves in which he is usually pictured,” said Dr. James E. Wagner, United Church co-president.

Dr. Robert Koenig, director of the curriculum, cited archeological authority to support his assertion that working men of Jesus’ time customarily dressed in garb approximating short trousers and shirt. The long robe in which Jesus is traditionally pictured, he said, was used as a combination overcoat-blanket by travellers.

In approving the booklet, the General Council called on “pastors, church school teachers and parents to participate in a fair, thoughtful trial use of this new curriculum.”

John Knox. Patrick Hamilton. George Wishart. Andrew Melville. James Guthrie. Richard Cameron. Ebenezer Erskine. Thomas Gillespie. Thomas Chalmers. To call these names is to quicken the heart of a Scottish churchman as he recalls the often turbulent course of Protestant history in Scotland. Last month a special General Assembly of the Church of Scotland was held in Edinburgh to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Scottish Reformation.

In August, 1560, the Scottish parliament had ratified Protestantism’s victory over Rome by abolishing the papal jurisdiction and the mass in Scotland and approving the Calvinistic Scots Confession which Knox had helped write. Now in October, 1960, Queen Elizabeth with Prince Philip drove in state from the Palace of Holyroodhouse—scene of Knox’s famed dialogues with another queen, Mary Stuart—to St. Giles’ Cathedral, site of some of Knox’s fieriest preaching, to join nobility, churchmen, and some 2000 others in a colorful service of thanksgiving for the Reformation.

Queen Elizabeth later became the first sovereign to address General Assembly since union of the crowns of Scotland and England in 1603, the monarch customarily being represented by a “Lord High Commissioner.” Last sovereign to attend in person was James VI of Scotland in 1602, who became also James I of England the following year.

Although head of the Church of England, the Queen is a Presbyterian while in Scotland. But she is not head of the Church of Scotland, which proclaims the sole headship of Christ.

The Queen had some pertinent things to say to the Assembly, calling the Scottish Reformation a “distant turning point in the nation’s life”:

“In spite of the bitter quarrels of the past and the divided religious loyalties which still remain with us, I belive that what happened at the Reformation can be stated in terms on which all Christians may agree. Holy Writ was liberated to the people and as a result the Word of God was revealed again as a force to be reckoned with in the affairs of both public and private life.

“The gospel which has long been revered as a record handed down from primitive Christianity was once more seen to be also a living light by which men ought to direct their lives and remold their institutions. This lesson from the Reformation is one that all Christians may surely apply to the modern world.”

The Queen’s enthusiasm for the Reformation, which drew sharp attack from the Romanist press, excels that of certain of her churchmen. Some Church of Scotland ministers wonder whether it is possible in 1960 to have equal interest in celebrating the Reformation and in promoting the ecumenical movement. Some fear the former will heighten old divisions while others see the latter jeopardizing their doctrinal heritage. Energetic synthesists attempt to find indications that the Reformers would have favored the course of modern ecumenism.

Speaking in Edinburgh’s St. Mary’s Cathedral (Scottish Episcopal), the Archbishop of York, the Most Rev. Arthur M. Ramsey, noted losses as well as gains of the Reformation. “There was the loss of the historic succession of the ministry.… No longer was there observed the Christian year with Good Friday, Easter, the commemoration of the saints.…”

The Very Rev. George F. MacLeod, former General Assembly Moderator and colorful leader of the Iona Community, deplored as idolatry any attempt to “re-create” that earlier Reformation (“they would recover the old Confessions; reinstitute a catechism”). Inasmuch as the Renaissance gave “birth to the ecclesiastical Reformation,” asserts Dr. MacLeod, writing for The Glasgow Herald, we must not “try to recover” the Reformers’ insights, but rather “look at our modern environment and see what it says to us.”

Part of what it says to Dr. MacLeod, his fellow churchmen would find quite unsettling. To be in “the true line of the Reformers,” he calls for a renewed doctrine of man’s worth in a machine age, a recovery of a sense of mankind’s unity, and an energetic search for church unity. Then pacifist MacLeod seems to issue a tentative call for rebellion against a nuclear-armed government. He uses Knox’s words: “ ‘To which party must Godly persons attach themselves in the case of a religious nobility resisting an idolatrous Sovereign?’ We all know what his [Knox’s] final answer was.… Unless ‘the sovereignty of the monstrous regiment of the damned bomb’ is annulled soon, may it be that the real celebration of the Reformers will be seen in the witness of those who, for the freedom of men, and, indeed, for the continuance of civilization, unilaterally rise up against the possibility of its use? High treason? Yes indeed. And was not Knox a traitor?”

Dr. MacLeod has long had a considerable following, particularly among students, this being coupled with a long record of being voted down in General Assembly after making vivid and moving speeches for unpopular causes.

His Renaissance-flavored article is silent on such great Reformation themes sounded by Knox as justification by faith and not works, an Augustinian view of sin, the sole mediatorship of Christ, and the unique authority of the Scriptures.

The oft caricatured John Knox, besides having a strong sense of humor, possessed a conviction that the Scottish kirk was in doctrine and in fact part of the true Catholic Church, from which the Church of Rome was deviate. Listen to him as he answers a Jesuit: “… Our kirk is no new found kirk (as the writer blasphemously rayleth) but it is a part of that holy kirk universall which is grounded upon the doctrine of the Prophets and Apostles, having the same antiquitie that the kirk of the Apostles has as concerning doctrine, prayers, administratioun of sacraments and all other things requisite to a particulare kirk.… And, therefore, albeit we have refused Rome and the tyrannie thereof, we think not that we have refused the societie of Christis kirk; but that we are joynit with it, and dayly are fed of our mother’s breastes, because we imbrase no other doctrine than that which first flowed furth of Jerusalem, whose citizenes be grace we awen ourselves to be.…”

The great power of Knox’s speaking led the first Queen Elizabeth’s very critical ambassador to write from Edinburgh that this “one man” was “able in one hour to put more life in us than five hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears.” Onetime galley slave of the French and later faithful student of Calvin in Geneva, Knox was to lead the Scots people, says Philip Schaff, “from medieval semi-barbarism into the light of modern civilization” as he gained his place in history beside Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin.

Though he brought Scotland closer to England in helping to break up the “auld alliance” with France, his countrymen have through the centuries believed that to Knox more than any other man Scotland is indebted for its political and religious individuality. Mary Queen of Scots had hoped to use Scotland as an instrument in the international Roman Catholic reaction, to the injury of the national welfare. In contrast, since the union of Scottish and English crowns (1603) and parliaments (1707), the Church of Scotland has acquired popularity as one of the few surviving witnesses of an independent Scottish nationality. Scottish Presbyterianism has stood for freedom from ecclesiastical tyranny and corruption, and also for the rights of the middle and lower classes against the crown and the aristocracy.

Its constitution as contained in the Church of Scotland Act, 1921 (a preparatory act toward the 1929 church union of the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church) sets forth an unmistakable antithesis to Erastianism, “a free Church in a free State”: “Recognition by civil authority of the separate and independent government and jurisdiction of this Church in matters spiritual, in whatever manner such recognition be expressed, does not in any way affect the character of this government and jurisdiction as derived from the Divine Head of the Church alone, or give to the civil authority any right of interference with the proceedings or judgments of the Church within the sphere of its spiritual government and jurisdiction.” While establishment in Scotland has no great practical importance, its emotional value as a perpetual recognition of national Christianity is considered to be large.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Schaff referred to “the Presbyterian Church of Scotland” as the “most flourishing of the Reformed Churches in Europe,” unsurpassed in “general intelligence” and evangelistic and missionary zeal. Indeed, the church bears a distinguished record in the field of biblical exposition through great preaching and enduring commentaries. Yet, more recent assessments have usually been considerably less optimistic than Schaff’s. The church does not pretend it has been “setting the heather afire.” Theological dilutions have dulled the old keen sense of mission. Divinity professors on the same faculty offer widely varying views on basic matters of doctrine. Church attendance is proving a worrisome problem. With some 1,300,000 adult communicants, two of every three members do not attend services with any regularity, a record inferior to that of the smaller Protestant churches and Roman Catholics.

Calvinism is no longer strong, though in Barthian form it has gained new friends through theology professor Thomas F. Torrance of New College, University of Edinburgh. The writer, when a student at New College, recalls a Scots student assuring him of “new life to come” in the church due to the coming of dialectical thought in place of a theology which mediated between Continental neo-orthodoxy and American liberalism. But neo-Kantianism still survives, and Bultmannism is on the horizon.

Friends of Scotland will desire the best for her kirk. The Glasgow Herald was warily hopeful when it recalled the Reformers’ aim to be the making of every citizen into a “profitable member of the commonwealth.… To their success … qualified indeed as it was, Scotland owes the godliness and integrity which once were the marks of her people.… No better celebration of the fourth centenary of the Reformation could be imagined than the return of Scotland, Church and nation, to the ideal of the godly commonwealth.”

THE STILL SMALL VOICE

Many of us are so conditioned to look for, admire, and react to the spectacular that we forget God does not act or react in terms of modern Madison Avenue superlatives.

We are also prone to evaluate things, movements, and people in terms of bigness or noise, and thereby overlook the work and moving of the Holy Spirit.

Elijah had exercised a valiant ministry for God, but there came a day when, fearful and discouraged, he fled from the threatening boast of Jezebel.

Elijah was dispirited, complaining, and on the defensive, but God graciously gave to his faltering prophet a new vision of Himself.

Standing alone on the mountain, Elijah experienced a windstorm of herculean proportions; then an earthquake followed by a fire. But God was not in these exaggerated manifestations of nature.

Then it was that Elijah heard a still small voice; and although it was one of stillness and quietness, it was the voice of God himself.

We are experiencing today the storms of world tension and uncertainty, the earthquakes of national and international upheaval, and the fires of testing adversities. God may be using these developments as a warning to men everywhere, for he uses as his agents of judgment many strange phenomena. But that to which we should have our ears attuned is the still small voice which speaks to the opened mind and surrendered heart.

Although we know better, we are prone to put our trust in the might and power of this world. Even in the affairs of the Church we so easily sin against God by trusting in the arm of flesh rather than in the Spirit of the living God.

To be still in God’s presence in order to know him is a lesson hard to learn, for it runs counter to the inner urge to be doing something when we should be listening.

To stop and observe quietly people and events with Spirit-directed eyes is not easy, for we look on outward appearances with their many-sided impressions while all the time God is looking on hearts, and is blessing and using those who are surrendered to him.

As we read about, view, and hear the conflicting voices from the United Nations, and from all over the world, we can easily lose perspective and forget that man proposes many things, but only God determines the outcome.

The prophet Isaiah, with a vision of the coming Messiah, wrote: “He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.” Here is a picture of the coming One who some day would triumph over sin and death.

It is he with the still small voice who will eventually “bring forth judgment unto truth. He shall not fail nor be broken till he shall have set judgment in the earth.”

Looking at the power of long-range missiles, the devastating potential of atomic detonations, and the satanic clever devices for destruction, it is easy to forget that God will “bare his holy arm in the eyes of the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see his salvation.” He still speaks with a still small voice to those whose ears are attuned to hear.

Today there may be heard speaking from the Cross the still small voice proclaiming God’s cleansing and redeeming love to all who will hear. The crowning shameful act of men with sin-deadened hearts is eternally the most glorious news of the ages; and it is the foolishness of the message of that event which is still God’s power unto salvation for any who will believe.

The God of Israel has not changed. The God for whom Isaiah spoke is the same God who speaks to us. We look to the power of man-made schemes to solve the world’s problems, but the answer lies elsewhere—“In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.”

But the prophet continues: “and ye would not.”

The individual and the nation need the rest that is found in utter faith in the triune God. There is little rest today because individuals and nations are seeking it apart from him.

James, speaking to his generation, speaks also to us: “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God?”

Small wonder that the Church has so little power today, for she has conformed her message and her way of living so closely to that of the world, which is at war with God, that his still small voice is not discernible above the noise.

It is hard for the Christian to learn that he triumphs in weakness, not in strength; that he often shines most effectively in what the world calls “obscurity”; and that ultimate victory is a matter of the Spirit, not of the flesh.

The great battles of the world are not detailed in newspapers nor recorded in books of history. Rather, they are the conflicts of the human soul which are known only to the individual and his God, and are won or lost as the still small voice that says “This is the way, walk ye in it” is heard or rejected.

One of the hardest lessons for some of us Christians to learn is the admonition Paul gave to his spiritual son, Timothy: “And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient.” Only as we hear the still small voice can we learn that the spirit of force must give way to the inexorable power of the Holy Spirit.

To be “blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world; holding forth the word of life,” requires a supernatural work in our hearts as we listen to his still small voice.

Standing in the shadows today, not noted by the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune, or any secular agency, is the One who would speak to men everywhere. He speaks through the voice of his creation. He speaks through his overruling providence, his written Word, his Son the living Word, through his Church, through the Gospel.

In all of these the Holy Spirit whispers, “Turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die?”

May the Christian hear this voice and obey. May the Church pray for the listening ear and the obedient heart, for there is always the temptation to confuse the activities of an earth-bound religion with the transforming work of the living Christ.

Not every one who says, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. God’s eternal presence is reserved for those with the listening ear, who hear his still small voice, and with willing hearts and minds obey.

L. NELSON BELL

PROGRESS IN PROCESS

Now I saw in my dream a great globe in the heavens, and within it were many chambers and courts, and I saw Christian knocking at a door on which there was written, Navigation. Keep Out. Suddenly the door opened.

Professor Neinstein: You again! Oh, come in.

Christian: Forgive my importunity, but I am seeking the city of the King, and I must know if that be your destination. They say you alone chart the course.

They entered the room together, and sat near a wall in which strange lights glowed, and from which there came sounds as of the purring and growling of beasts.

Professor: Destination! What a nostalgic term! In the early days of space flight interplanetary ships had destinations, but even then men had learned to stress process rather than goals. Since technology has made cosmic ships completely self-sustaining, a destination is quite needless.

Christian: Can you mean that we are bound nowhere, like a wandering star in darkness forever?

Professor: What earthy language you use! You really must become an informant for one of our research groups. But surely you find this a happy ship. Our last complete renovation eliminated all shadow and improved the tranquilizer distribution in the air conditioning.

Christian: I know not what power grips these smiling folk who never laugh or weep, but they have not read this Book.

Professor: Your antique book can be stored by our electronic pluvaric file if it is not already recorded. You must excuse me. I must give our guidance system directional instruction.

Christian: Direction, sir? But said you not that we have no destination?

Professor: Surely you don’t confuse the two? At present we are establishing direction in relation to a solar orbit. Here, take this memo to the Delta group office. I believe you’ll adjust well to their structure. They have been the leading group in our recent directional elections. Your persistent concern could find a desirable outlet in their group dynamics. They have been discussing the inauguration of a chaplain role, and you project a superb father image.

Now I saw Christian hasten away, singing as he went:

The wanderers in goalless flight,

Descend the pit of soulless night;

The wonder of their fall is this:

With instruments they find abyss,

And by atomic automation

Achieve the orbit of damnation.

EUTYCHUS

PLUNGE INTO THE VOID

Many, many thanks for the excellent Sept. 26 issue! What a joy it is—to men struggling to put their Christian faith to paper—to see a national magazine plunging into the void—and making such wonderful arguments for the rise of a truly Christian literature in our land.…

We really need magazines and publishing houses who will at least consider the Christian novel, the Christian play, the Christian poem—and if it is literarily and intellectually trustworthy—publish it. Many thanks for your efforts in behalf of all the unknown “triers” in the Church.

… I could go on endlessly with the efforts I have made in the last eight years. Many of my manuscripts have received favorable comments from editors, but always, the fact that they were based on a Christian world view, caused them to be called “limited in appeal.”

JOHN C. COOPER

Faith Evangelical Lutheran Church

Tampa, Fla.

Ten thousand orchids to Mr. Ingles for his excursion into the question which embarrasses the teachers of literature in every Christian college, annoys their students, and dogs the thinking of any sensitive evangelical.

May I add a little fuel to his fire which will, I hope, bring some latent Christian artist to a productive simmer. After a good deal of rumination on the whole wretched question concerning the breakdown between Christianity and aesthetics (e.g., why is evangelical taste so vulgar? why is the poetry, fiction, and art of this sector of Christendom so incorrigibly platitudinous?) I wonder if, for one thing, the evangelical has had rather too confined a view of the compass of art. Art has, as Mr. Ingles has said, the whole world as its province. The artist is not writing a tract when he sets about writing a novel. He is not illustrating a church bulletin when he takes up his brush. He is not writing a DVBS closing-exercises pageant when he tackles a drama. Perhaps we have had too immediate and easy a view of what we were about in our so-called art. One doesn’t write a novel to get people saved. One is commenting on life—all of life. And there is a great deal of horror, chaos, and bitterness in life. All is not sweetness and light.

I wonder, further, if the one thing which artists of all sorts and conditions must share is lacking in evangelicals. I refer to the agonizing search for meaning and form. It is not, I think, purely fortuitous that when the artistic temperament is mentioned, one immediately conjures images of turbulence, passion, revolt, and tempest. The man who is not plagued by the ache to discover form, who is satisfied with the banalities of the status quo, is not likely to create anything of significance. Perhaps the fact that we have been taught that we have the answer to all the problems and unknown quantities of life (which is, in a sense, true) has muffled the voice of unrest in us which would call forth the creative process. We are inclined to silence any disturbing question about the suffering of innocents, or the ascendency of injustice, or man’s inhumanity to man, with a reference to God’s wisdom and inscrutable goodness, or an airy, “Oh, we’ll find out when we get to glory.” Perhaps so. And admittedly there is the place where doubt turns to unbelief. But let us also remember that faith is large enough to encompass doubt. It does not preclude doubt. A faith which has no questions is something less than faith. It does not take faith to see that two apples placed beside two other apples on the table makes four apples. It does take faith to be able to say, in the face of Budapest or Dienbienphu or Auschwitz, “I know that God is the loving Father.” It seems to me that the kind of faith necessary in the soul of a Christian artist must be this kind, which holds firmly to its trust in God as revealed in Jesus, but allows itself to take its place alongside suffering humanity and to ask unsettling questions. It cannot be a faith (or sub-faith) which looks with horror on the honest questions which ravage every sensitive mind, and feels that the very entertaining of such questions is immoral and blasphemous.

One other thing: there are not many noble savages, Chattertons, or tinkers of Bedford about who will produce great works of art from a position of ignorance or rusticity. Most of the great works of literature have come from a broad background of the humanities. And our (evangelical) emphasis on the study of the humanities has not been altogether overwhelming. We may produce great preachers, great scholars, and great missionaries in our Bible schools and Christian colleges. We will not produce any novelists, poets, or dramatists. I submit that there is something not quite honest in the approach to literature in these institutions. We have confounded Christianity with Victorianism. The Old Testament, with its earthy, robust, and lusty method of story telling, would never pass muster in our evangelical English Departments. The names of D. H. Lawrence, Proust, Gide, Zola, and Mailer are dirty words. One may take vigorous issue with the view of life which some of these gentlemen evidence (I, for one, do), but they are the writers who have influenced the literary scene, and if we set about to study literature, let us do it with a vengeance. If we cannot, let us be candid and admit that we are conducting a course more suited to some 19th century finishing school for young misses.

THOMAS T. HOWARD

The Sunday School Times

Philadelphia, Pa.

Bravo, Dr. Ingles!… You took the words right from my pen! An ardent reader, including best-sellers in the field of fiction, I am bored by the average “Cinderella Fairy Tale” in our Christian novels.

Have threatened to write a novel portraying 20th century Christianity but never dared. Who would publish it?

You have given me an incentive!

TINA MASELLI

Woodlynne, N. J.

Mr. Ingles has voiced the plight of many evangelicals who must needs read secular writing alone. We have no real choice.

… Where does a Christian go with his finished work? Neither secular nor so-called Christian presses will touch his works.… The easy way out is to stick to the secular field. But I found I could not write and disregard Jesus Christ, for it was empty and lifeless without Him.… It’s easy to write for slicks, but it does not satisfy the writer, the reader, or God.

JUNE STEPHENSON

Chicago, Ill.

Some of us young Christian writers would even dare to rub the sanctified keys of our typewriters together against the highly fissionable problems of Atomic Age Christianity if conservative, evangelical publishers would ignite us with a brighter spark than the standard yellow rejection slip.

PATRICIA E. CULVER

Buffalo, N. Y.

CRUCIAL CALL

While praying for the United Nations at Asbury Theological Seminary, during a prayer convocation under the leadership of Dr. Frank Laubach … we feel led to request you … to call this entire nation to pray … that God’s will may be done. This is the supreme crisis of history. People are desperate.… Other things can wait; this cannot. Now is the time. We need … a mighty prayer movement.

OFFICERS OF ADMINISTRATION

Asbury Theological Seminary

Wilmore, Ky.

MISSOURI AND ROME

If Reader Kofahl finds it amazing that the Lutherans of Fort Wayne see no violation of the separation of Church and State involved in the public transportation of parochial school children (Sept. 12 issue), one can imagine the surprise of several of us Missouri Synod Lutheran pastors when we found that Synod has repeatedly adopted convention resolutions favoring such transportation.…

The feeling among us is that the resolutions are the opinion of a majority of convention delegates but not the consensus of the vast rank and file of Missourians. At one time an entire district of the Missouri Synod fought against state aid to parochial schools. This was a Texas proposal to supply free text books to all school children.

In many a locality Lutheran school children ride the public school bus. However, it is distinctly understood that this is purely a courtesy; that the driver may not go out of his way to pick up or deliver a child of the parochial school; that parochial school pupils may ride the public school bus only as there is surplus seating; and that the practice may be discontinued at any moment and without any explanation from the public school officials. It is my understanding that Lutherans generally have this understanding: by virtue of payment of taxes we are entitled to the common facilities offered in the public school system, but that if we desire something different or something beyond these common facilities, that is a special privilege for which we are willing and obliged to pay special. In other words, if something is offered to us, we may accept it, but we do not demand it as a right. In this we differ antipodally from the Romanists.

KARL F. BREEHNE

Our Redeemer Lutheran Church

Greenville, Ill.

I was talking to a Lutheran minister the other day who said that his Reformation Day radio sermon would be edited two weeks in advance. Have we already lost freedom of radio and press?… In Walter Montaño’s book Behind the Purple Curtain he says that the Catholic Church has Catholic editors and coeditors on all important U. S. newspapers. I now believe that he is right.

MRS. IRIS LARSEN

Hales Corner, Wisc.

Had you thought of discussing the secularistic materialism, with its subtle insinuation of humanistic agnosticism, of Kennedy’s presentation of “American brotherhood” as his political religion to the Houston, Texas, ministerial group?

It ought to be said, by someone with the facilities to do so, that positively no good Roman Catholic could possibly set aside the Roman hierarchy’s definition of what, to them, constitutes issues of “faith and morals,” as did Senator Kennedy in that address—for the sake of political expediency. If he will do that in the realm of his religion, for the sake of getting elected, what will he do in the realm of constitutional principles after being elected?

ELBERT D. RIDDICK

Portland, Ore.

DARWIN DEBATED

Professor Leith’s review of Darwin, Evolution and Creation (Aug. 29 issue) characterizes the book as being “not quite fair.” We believe that he has not understood the thrust of our book. The authors feel that the non-scientific public is too often exposed to the idea that the theory of evolution deserves the status of a scientific law. They deserve to know that the theory of the evolution of man from a one-celled creature has not been proved and indeed faces tremendous obstacles.

The reviewer asserts that theories are never proven. This is an incorrect statement. The progression from theory to scientific law is well established, particularly in the physical sciences. Furthermore evolutionary theory, since it deals with the past, cannot he put to the acid test of experiment in the same way we examine other theories.

Professor Leith asserts that evolutionary theories have secured the adherence of the majority of the scientific community for a century. This statement neglects to mention the numerous and radical revisions in evolutionary theory. More important, it neglects to mention that evolutionists refuse to consider the supernatural (i.e. the miraculous) when dealing with the question of origins. This rules out creation, leaving only one alternative—evolution.

The chapter on the age of the earth points out that the methods used are based upon certain unprovable assumptions, that they often give discordant results, and that they may suffer the fate of earlier methods, now discarded as unreliable. These propositions have been presented in seminar to other chemists who regarded them as worthy of consideration. The literature itself has carried these same criticisms. Again the purpose is to inform those whom Leith terms the “uninitiated” that the age of the earth and the universe have not been definitively determined.

We make no apology for taking God’s Word concerning creation seriously and for applying accepted rules of hermeneutics to it. Certainly many who depart from this practice also abandon the very fundamentals of the Christian faith. Nor do we regret exposing the fact that the evolutionary theory has an attendant philosophy which contradicts the Christian doctrine of man and which has led many to deny the very existence of God.

The reader will judge for himself. Certainly we agree that there has been much variation within the limit of the created “kind.” Moreover, the term “kind” is much broader than “species.” But we do not believe that science has shown anything beyond this.

Interested parties will do well to read the Darwin Centennial volume Evolution After Darwin, Volume I, University of Chicago Press, 1960, the chapter on “Morphology, Paleontology, and Evolution.” Dr. E. C. Olson, geologist, is the author. We think the statement on page 523 applies to the present discussion: “There are, of course, degrees of difference in the evaluation of successes, from healthy skepticism to confidence that the final word has been said, and there are still some among the biologists who feel that much of the fabric and theory accepted by the majority today is actually false and who say so.”

PAUL A. ZIMMERMAN

Concordia Teachers College

Seward, Nebr.

Perhaps Leith knows more about the matter than Dr. Louis Agassiz, who called evolution “a scientific mistake, untrue in its facts, unscientific in its methods, mischievous in its tendencies.” Or it may be that he is wiser than Dr. Robert A. Millikan, who said, “The pathetic thing is that we have scientists who are trying to prove evolution, which no scientists can ever prove.”

E. P. SCHULZE

The Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer Peekskill, N. Y.

DOOYEWEERD DEFENDED

I am disturbed by the inadequate and frivolous review of In the Twilight of Western Thought by Herman Dooyeweerd. It would be unreasonable for me to protest, since I have not seen this volume, but from the review this book appears to be an abbreviation of the author’s A New Critique of Theoretical Thought (almost 2000 pages, plus an extensive index) with which work I am endeavoring to acquaint myself. This is not an easy task, as Paul Tillich is a model of clarity compared to Dooyeweerd.

To quote briefly from Dooyeweerd is most unfair, as it only displays his very personal technical language and turgidity of expression, without giving any indication of the close reasoning which is the vital element in his writing. Contrary to the reviewer’s final quip, Dooyeweerd knows of no other revelation than that accepted by all Christians, creation, the written Scriptures, and the Word made flesh. Is it heretical to believe that any and all parts of the revelation are made available and administered to the believer by the Holy Spirit as the administrator of the Church? The reviewer seems to think so.…

May I point out one other bit of criticism where it seems to me the reviewer was not too careful. He objects to the author saying “God’s creative deeds surpass the temporal order.…” I cite 1 Cor. 2:7: “… which God ordained before the world unto our glory.” Certainly ordaining is creative and it antedates and surpasses the temporal order.

Why is it that so many fundamentalists (or conservatives) are so quick to knock down and jump on any writer who doesn’t express himself in the accepted set of clichés? It looks to me as if that is a good three-quarters of objections to Barth, Tillich, and Niebuhr.

Dooyeweerd is attempting to construct a philosophy based on Christ as revealed in the Scriptures. As part of this work he feels it is necessary to destroy the foundational errors of the worldly philosophers, using their own language and techniques to point out their shortcomings.… We all actually hold some sort of philosophy, usually irrational and incomplete, and very little Christian. Dooyeweerd is trying to remedy this unnecessary weakness. Let us do him and ourselves the justice of giving a fair hearing to his study.

DON MARTY

Sacramento, Calif.

Dooyeweerd is being given an awful brush-off. It’s grossly unfair. He’s probably the greatest Christian thinker alive. I can’t find words to deplore the cheap sarcasm with which Clark dismisses him. About four years ago Dr. Buswell had a similar obscure, bad-tempered review of Dooyeweerd in the Christian Record and I think that’s the poorest thing Dr. Buswell ever wrote.… Seldom has godly reverence been combined with philosophical acumen as in the case of Dooyeweerd.… In your circle there should by all means be a sphere of fruitful dialogue about Dooyeweerd, but now there just “ain’t.”

SAMUEL WOLFE

Santa Barbara, Calif.

THE THIRD FORCE

I have been greatly intrigued by Thomas F. Zimmerman’s article on the “Third Force” (Aug. 1 issue). Certainly the marks of this force sound like a description of New Testament Christianity.

He leaves me with one or two great questions in my mind. For example, after giving Dr. Sweet’s definition of a church as “an organized body which accepts ‘(1) creed or confession of faith, (2) infant baptism and automatic membership, and (3) an elaborate church polity,’ ” he goes on to state that “many Baptist groups have moved or are moving into the church category.” Being currently a Baptist, I have yet to meet or hear of one who accepts point (2) above, let alone a group of them.

ELLSWORTH C. BEATTY

Kansas City, Mo.

Do not these groups have much in common with the early Methodists, Quakers, Huguenots and Moravians?

LIDA CHAPPELL

Takoma Park, Md.

Thank you and your fine publication for your courtesy toward our beloved Pentecostal faith. Your inclusion of Mr. Zimmerman’s article … substantiated a definite place in the Christian publication for Pentecostalism—a faith always admirable but scorned because of peculiar truths. Talk about “space frontiers”—you, in effect, have acomplished an equal feat!

G. J. SIMMONS

Ottumwa, Iowa

[The] argument that the “third force” must be right and modernism wrong because of its great evangelistic fervor could be used with equal logic to prove that communism is right and Christianity and democracy wrong.… Mr. Zimmerman overlooks the possibility that the New Testament position may be the one that is inadequate and one-sided.

THEODORE B. DUFUR

Los Angeles, Calif.

The issue of August 1, containing the “census figures” on the peoples and religions of the world, was a “high point” in the history of a rather dull and one-sided magazine.

PAUL E. WALTHOUR

Phoenix, Ariz.

That there has been a direct relationship between religion and the arts is evident from primitive times. Men have used statuary, chants, paintings, and places of worship to objectify and house his spiritual experiences. Not always so obvious, however, is the danger of making aesthetics a substitute for true devotion, of becoming so enamored with our inner responses to experiences of beauty that we turn our products of artistic creation into objects of adoration. Thus we glorify man rather than worship God. The threat of aestheticism persists wherever churches become so concerned with safeguarding ceremonial traditions that they fail to respond creatively to the challenge of the Gospel for a more constructive spiritual and social ministry. When art faithfully communicates elements of confession and exaltation, it may then serve a unique role in nourishing spiritual life.

MAN’S NEED FOR ORDER

A characteristic of man’s mind is his need for order. His artistic impulse arises from a hunger to find and re-create meaningful relationships and harmony in life. The artist labors to bring music out of sound, line and symmetry out of unrelated forms, and to proclaim reasonable order in the face of much that seems accidental or even chaotic in life. Fritz Kreisler and Albert Einstein agreed that music and mathematics have much in common; science and art both seek to objectify the inward urge for order and meaning. Plato, finding reason for relating art and science to religion, held that beauty and truth are realities in themselves to which man may become committeed in a religious attitude. For Nietzsche, religion was no more than an aesthetic response to beauty and truth; in religion, as in art or science, he contended, the wellspring of inspiration and insight is inside ourselves and not in some supernatural “cloudland.”

Practicing artists have not infrequently been among the first to assert the close relationship between their faith in God and their creative endeavor. Johann Sebastian Bach, in giving musical expression to his experience of the wonder and majesty of God’s Word, made his personal faith so contagious that even the irreligious temporarily laid aside their doubts while hearing his works. For Bach, as for Handel and other artists, the very raison d’être of art was to reveal God’s will for order and harmony in man’s disordered world. “In the architecture of my music,” Bach wrote, “I want to demonstrate to the world the architecture of a new and beautiful social commonwealth … it is the enlightened self-discipline of the various parts—each voluntarily imposing on itself the limits of its individual freedom for the well-being of the community. That is my message.”

DANGERS IN THE ART PURSUIT

Several elements of danger are to be noted as the artist agonizes over his work to make the “felt” become a tangible reality. The first perhaps is that of forcing techniques of art to serve ends they were never intended to serve. In the truest sense artists do not “create,” they can only represent, symbolize, or translate what is given. At best they can take materials such as pigment, stone, words, or musical symbols, and rearrange them in such a way as to give communicable impressions of their ideas. The ever-present danger is in substituting the artistic product for the ideal to which it relates. Beethoven, for example, tried to make his musical setting for Goethe’s Ode to Joy take the place of personal communion with his fellow men. The singing of hymns about brotherhood or the enjoyment of international art exhibits, seems to represent for many people the limit of their desire for genuine fellowship beyond their parochial horizons.

A MEDIATING MESSIAH?

Those who look to the arts as a kind of mediating messiah for fractured human relations are doomed to disappointment; that people can sing together or enjoy the same kind of poetry or sculpture does not erase the causes of tension between them. Heated competition among members of a ballet troup, supposedly dedicated to a harmonious performance, would dispel such illusions. One would hardly expect to quell a race riot by singing the national anthem! But should such a miracle occur, it would be because the combatants were already dedicated to the democratic ideal behind the song, and not because of the chord structures or harmonies.

HEDONIST TEMPTATION

A second problem relates to the fact that much of art is “escapist” in nature. It idealizes the real and fosters a merely spectator attitude toward life for the sake of protecting one’s own tranquility. The hedonist temptation is always present in art, and it draws men apart from the real issues of our pilgrimage. Since the “Golden Age” of Greece, attitudes of detachment and “apathy” (from the Epicurean apathia) have been upheld among aesthetes for whom contemplation of things beautiful becomes a necessary buffer against “the shocks that flesh is heir to.”

In the development of formal religion, the aesthetic problem is particularly evident in the demand for spiritual and mystical effects in ceremonial worship. The pastor who has struggled through the preparatory years of church building, and has held services in store buildings or school auditoriums, is familiar with the words, “We’ll join after your church is built; we just can’t get into the mood of worship in this place.” The requirement of organ music, stained glass windows, and the traditions of a recognizable sanctuary can rob us of the scriptural concept of worship and service. In mystical contemplation of abstract ideals, our practical response to God’s moral call-to-action is too easily evaded. It is easy to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” while sitting in air-conditioned comfort, aided by a resplendent choir. It is something else to oppose with Christian vigor the racial or commercial injustices practiced in the neighborhood.

THREAT OF IDOLATRY

Art and religion together may plunge us into a morass of “symbols, echoes, and myths” in the effort to tranquilize our discordant souls. Aestheticism then becomes a new idolatry, harder to combat than the old idolatry because it is less concrete. Since art is essentially of the imagination, it imposes a devastating threat to the integrity of faith.

The European Reformers were not alone in warning against the abuses of art by the Church (wherein standards of taste were literally dictated), and against the intrusion of pagan art in Christian guise in churches where prelates were culturally illiterate. Botticelli, who became a Christian under Savonarola’s influence, destroyed all of his own paintings done prior to his conversion so that he might dedicate his subsequent work to the specific glory of God. And no less a genius than Michelangelo, who probably did more than any other graphic artist to aid the church in communicating the Gospel, wrote in a rare poetic effort:

Now know I well how that fond fantasy

Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall

Of earthly art, is vain;

Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest

My soul that turns to His great love on high,

Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread.

Art’s gift to the life of the spirit is twofold. By its protest against and idealization of “the rude world,’ it can provide a needed element of confession. It can reveal the elements of beauty which the Creator intended for us to find in the same effort by which it communicates our dissatisfaction with things as they are and portrays them somewhat ideally as they ought to be.

Secondly, having reflected the truth about the world, it should as Browning said go nature one better by leading us consciously to exalt the Lord. Religious art is not merely that which portrays religious themes or illustrates biblical events. Rather it is that which, by word or music or whatever medium is employed, portrays man’s very real struggle with sin in its contemporary guises, and man’s yearning for release; which interprets God’s stern demand for justice while also reflecting “the beauty of holiness.” Such art both confesses mankind’s dilemma and glorifies the Almighty God.

Wonder-full

“I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”Psalm 139.

Who, since, has said it better

Than the faithful, pre-scientific

Writer of verse, the sensitive soul

Who paused to reflect, who saw

Himself a miracle, a wonder

To behold in a universe

Miracle-and-wonder-full.

Little could he know of the

Stranger-than-fiction molecule,

The atom, or the atom’s nucleus.

Knowing what not how

Seemed stupendous enough

To a man intent upon the source.

He called God, God; man, man;

And let the chips fall where

And in the way they always fell.

DONALD REAM

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

Despite the ever-swelling list of literary works which testify to the endeavor on the part of evangelicals to relate philosophy, sociology, psychology, and other fields to twentieth century Christian living, the relation of biblical teaching to human artistic endeavor continues to be a neglected area of thought. The pages of the Old and New Testaments abound with evidence that an aesthetic attitude of a special kind is characteristic of God’s people. It involves not only the arts per se, but a quality of living which, in Christian thought, distinguishes a human being created in the image of God from an animal.

Today evangelical Christianity is faced with the urgent task of providing the world with a real alternative to materialistic living—whether Western or Marxist. The present century needs a comprehensive demonstration of the biblical truth that man is not intended by his Creator to “live by bread alone.” In such a context the Christian artist finds his mission and his opportunity to serve contemporary society. His task is to develop an aesthetic based on biblical truth and Christian experience, which will utilize his powers in contending for Christ through the broad approaches of the visual arts, music, the theater, architecture, and other phases of artistic expression.

Modern iconoclasm among Christians, needful as it has been against the abuses of certain movements, has often been so reactionary that the creation and interpretation of true, dedicated Christian art have been utterly stifled. Instead of encouraging Christian men and women who have talent and ability in artistic pursuits, evangelicals have consistently made one of three common errors in their relationships with young artists: 1. they have directed them to schools of aesthetic experience which have no appreciation for the Christian beginning-point in philosophic expression or cultural attitude; 2. they have advised them to restrict their efforts to “religious” art; or 3. they have discouraged them entirely by implying that artistic impulses are from the evil one.

THREE COMMON ERRORS

It is disturbing that the young people who have succeeded in artistic endeavors and those who have formed conclusions regarding the function of art in the total Christian experience, have done so usually with the help of scholars who entertain no decided Christian convictions. Two options are thereby open to them. The students can follow thinkers whose naturalistic tendencies lead to an inevitable relativism in aesthetic value judgments; or they can follow artists and authors who begin by making idealistic assumptions. In the first instance there is the danger that relativism will have repercussions in ethical judgments made by the same individuals. In the second case, while relativism and its dangers are avoided and there is a more stable basis for the assessment of the worth of a given piece of art, the idealistic approach robs the Christian student of an intellectual integration of his ethical and aesthetic values, and fails to relate to his actual faith in its initial assumptions.

Those who would restrict Christians to “religious” art are also guilty of a damaging error. They are like the Christians who imagine that evangelism is a program that confines itself to inviting people to church. They are reluctant to wrestle with true-life people in their own habitat. Religious art is a field of rich possibility to be sure, but it touches only the hem of the garment of the aesthetic experiences of human beings. The ostrich-like approach has characterized too many aspects of fundamentalist outlook. As a result, the great movements in the history of art have been supremely ignored because they have taken place outside the specifically “religious” category. A truly evangelical point of view, on the other hand, exempts no human experience from study and evaluation because it is considered “unreligious.” The symphonies of Beethoven, the literature of Shakespeare, and the art creations of Picasso are not all specifically religious in conception, but they cannot therefore be exempted from the realm of legitimate Christian inquiry.

By linking art with the demonic, some evangelicals have displayed a fundamentalist attitude which has been correctly criticized by liberal theology and philosophy. The ‘counselors’ who endeavor to move young people away from their innate interest in the arts because they do not foresee how such a vocation can make any contribution to the cause of God’s Kingdom, have robbed contemporary society of an influence which could have made a worthy and needful addition to the total witness of twentieth-century Christianity. Such an attitude is related to the fear of scholarship and philosophy typical of the anti-intellectualism of certain fragments of Christianity, and has abandoned the field to the anti-Christian forces in the battle for the minds and spirits of men. To dodge the problem, to default the issue, and to argue that art has nothing to do with the battle is to ignore the true nature of he human species.

The aesthetic area is one where the evangelical position is highly vulnerable. Christians may hold to a highly stable definition of values in ethical thinking, yet superficially tolerate a highly relativistic attitude toward aesthetic values. To say that this is axiological inconsistency is the kindest sort of understatement. It would seem that a careful study of value judgments in art, biblically oriented, on the part of evangelical scholars, and a fresh consideration of the problem by Christian ministers and laymen, is one of the great needs of our day.

Younger Christian students need encouragement and motivation if they are to wrestle realistically with the aesthetic problems and needs of our times and not surrender in desperation to a watered-down idealism or to naturalism in aesthetic philosophy. For the Christian student who is seeking to give glory to Christ, any art philosophy erected upon a naturalistic or idealistic rationale is an altar built of unregenerate material. The stones may be pure gold, but the sacrifice is unacceptable. Let those who are in covenant relationship with Christ raise to him a sanctified altar of dedicated, Spirit-filled artistic accomplishment. When the problem is taken seriously, a serious gap in evangelical thinking will be closed.

Captive

To escape the tenacious pleadings Of a patient God has been impossible.

He gives so much, pursues relentlessly.

He never tires,

But wearies the mind, the heart, the conscience Until at last the weariness is rest,

The emptiness is filled,

The disappointment gone.

God is Victor!

Captive in Christ.

ROBERT WINSTON ROSS

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

Director Hoover’s timely articles give emphasis to the great responsibility for everyone, particularly ministers of the Gospel, to be informed accurately as to the meaning and nature of the Communist conspiracy. Fortunately, there are today many excellent and reliable sources for such information.

The subject of communism will be confusing at first, particularly to the average Christian whose entire code of conduct, concept of morals, value of man, and belief in God are so utterly at variance with Communist mentality. It is impossible for anyone to grasp the meaning of communism by scanning fragmentary (and frequently contradictory) magazine and newspaper material, by reading a few books, or by traveling a few weeks behind the iron curtain.

Out of a wealth of available material, a “package” has been compiled which gives a well-rounded, basic picture of 1. Communism in action in the United States; 2. International communism; 3. Communist ideology, tactics, strategy and history; 4. Communism behind the “curtains”; and 5. Christianity and communism.

Included in the list are several volumes which now are out of print. However, they fill a particular illustrative function which other books do not, or they confirm and serve as check points for other parts of the whole. The reader is urged to obtain the books, either from public libraries or used book stores. By all means, he is urged to cover in his reading the four fields indicated here. One will have no real grasp of the subject if he examines communism only in the United States, for he needs to know the full significance of Soviet power today, what is going on behind the Iron Curtain, and what has happened to the victims and survivors of Communist totalitarianism. To appreciate the meaning of the Communist international network, Communist ideology, tactics, and motivations must be studied.

COMMUNIST ACTION IN THE UNITED STATES

BURNHAM, JAMES, The Web of Subversion. John Day Publishers, 248 pages, $5.

CHAMBERS, WHITAKER, Witness. Random House, 808 pages, $5.

DETOLEDANO AND LASKY, Seeds of Treason. Funk & Wagnalls, 270 pages, $3.50.

HOOVER, J. EDGAR, Masters of Deceit. Henry Holt, 374 pages, $5.

JORDAN, MAJOR R. C., Major Jordan’s Diaries. The Bookmailer, 284 pages, $2.

MORRIS, JUDGE ROBERT, No Wonder We Are Losing. The Bookmailer, 238 pages, $2.50.

WEYL, NATHANIEL, The Battle Against Disloyalty. Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 378 pages, $3.75.

Handbook For Americans. U. S. Government Printing Office, 100 pages, $.30.

Organized Communism in the U.S. U.S. Government Printing Office, 143 pages, $.45.

THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL IN ACTION

BIALOGUESKI, MICHAEL, The Case of Colonel Petrov. McGraw-Hill, 238 pages, $3.75.

BOUSCAREN, ANTHONY, Imperial Communism. Public Affairs Press, 256 pages, $3.75.

COOKRIDGE, E. H., The Net That Covers the World. Henry Holt, 314 pages, $3.95.

CRONYN, GEORGE WILLIAM, Primer on Communism. Dutton, 190 pages, $2.50,

DALLIN, DAVID, The New Soviet Empire. Yale University Press, 218 pages, $5.

DALLIN, DAVID, Soviet Espionage. Yale University Press, 558 pages, $5.75.

KIRKPATRICK, EVRON MAURICE, Target—The World. Macmillan Co., 362 pages, $5.

NOEL-BAKER, FRANCIS, The Spy Web. Vanguard Press, 242 pages, $3.75.

POSSONY, STEFAN, A Century of Conflict. Henry Regnery Co., 439 pages, $7.50.

WEDEMEYER, A. C., Wedemeyer Reports. Henry Holt, 497 pages, $6.

IDEOLOGY, TACTICS, STRATEGY, HISTORY

CALDWELL, JOHN COPE, Communism in Our World. John Day Co., 126 pages, $2.75.

FINEBERG, SOLOMON A., The Rosenberg Case, Fact and Fiction. Oceana Publications, 159 pages, $2.50.

GITLOW, BENJAMIN, The Whole of Their Lives. Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 387 pages, $3.50.

LEITES, NATHAN, The Operational Code of the Politburo. McGraw-Hill, 100 pages, $3.

MEERLOO, JOOST, A. M., The Rape of the Mind. World Publishing Co., 320 pages, $5.

MUNSON, LYLE, editor, For the Skeptic: Selected Readings on Communist Activity in the U.S.A. The Bookmailer, 194 pages, $3.

OVERSTREET, HARRY AND BONARO, What We Must Know About Communism. W. W. Norton & Co., 348 pages, $3.95.

SCHWARTZ, FREDERICK CHARLES, International Communism—The Communist Mind. U. S. Government Printing Office, $.15.

SKOUSEN, W. CLEON, The Naked Communist. Ensign Publishers, 343 pages, $6.

VON MISES, LUDWIG, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality. Princeton University Press, 114 pages, $3.75.

The Communist Conspiracy—Strategy and Tactics of World Communism (5 volumes). U. S. Government Printing Office, $5.60.

BEHIND THE CURTAINS

BERLE, JR., A. A., et al, Hungary Under Soviet Rule (3 volumes). American Friends of the Captive Nations.

DALLIN AND NICHOAEVSKY, Forced Labor in the Soviet Union. Yale University Press, 331 pages, $5.

FEHLING, HELMUT M., One Great Prison. Beacon Press, 175 pages, $2.75.

GOUZENKO, IGOR, The Fall of a Titan. W. W. Norton & Co., 629 pages, $2.50.

HUNTER, EDWARD, The Black Book on Red China. The Bookmailer, 172 pages, $2.

CHIANG, KAI-SHEK, Soviet Russia in China. Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, Inc., 392 pages, $5.

KHOKHLOV, NIKOLAI, In the Name of Conscience. David McKay Co., 365 pages, $4.50.

LIPPER, ELINOR, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps. Henry Regnery Co., 310 pages, $3.50.

LYONS, EUGENE, Our Secret Allies. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., $4.50.

NOBLE, JOHN, I Found God in Soviet Russia. St. Martins, 192 pages, $2.95.

NOBLE, JOHN, I Was A Slave in Russia. Devin-Adair Co., 182 pages, $3.75.

SCHAKOVSKOY, ZINAIDA, The Privilege Was Mine. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 318 pages, $4.

YOUNG, GORDON, The House of Secrets. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., $3.75.

Slave Labor in Russia. Free Trade Union Committee, 104 pages, $.75.

CHRISTIANITY AND COMMUNISM

DEKOSTER, LESTER, All Ye That Labor. Eerdmans, 128 pages, $1.95.

LOWRY, CHARLES WESLEY, Communism and Christ. Morehouse-Gorham Co., 176 pages, $2.50.

PRICE, FRANK WILSON, Marx Meets Christ. Westminster Press, 176 pages, $3.50.

SHEEN, FULTON J., Communism and the Conscience of the West. McClelland, 279 pages, $3.

VAN RIESSEN, H., The Society of the Future. Presbyterian and Reformed, 320 pages, $4.95.

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.