When Churchgoers Crash Bunpers

The coming of warm days brings the happy sight of Americans on the move—or it would be a happy sight, if not quite so many of us were trying to move at the same time. Turnpikes and freeways are now crowded with millions of cars crawling over the glorious landscape. Who are the people riding in these automobiles? Where are they going? What are they thinking? We rarely know. Only when a bumper crashes into ours, or a fender is creased, do we step out and engage in the formal ritual of exchanging cards, thereby becoming acquainted with our traveling fellow-Americans. For the rest of the journey we live in isolation, the windows rolled up. Even though we are on the same highway, we live in different worlds.

It is astonishing how complete and self-sufficient our little “worlds” are, and we have but little inclination to change groupings. There is, by way of illustration, the intellectual-philosophical world, which moves in its distant and wide-ranging orbit. There are the tight orbits of the “scientific world”, the “world” of psychoanalysis, the “sporting world” and the “underworld.”

The danger is that the particular “world” in which one lives becomes the consuming interest of life. The Church has always, since New Testament times, been tempted to become a “world” of its own, and the temptation is such today that no “world” can become quite as isolated in its orbit as the denominational “world.” Ministers and church executives can and do go for days without speaking to anyone except to Baptists, or to Presbyterians, or to Episcopalians as the case may be. Despite all the books about “the role of the Church in the world,” many churchmen never see the world or even the other side of the Church.

Thus it is possible for an intelligent Christian to be unaware that on the highway of Christianity there are millions of American church members traveling alongside him, but headed perhaps in a different direction; whose personal disciples, intellectual life, attitudes, opinions and even dreams revolve around foci that are quite unrelated to his own orbit. Only because of this compartmentalizing of American life can we explain such a statement as appeared in a recent issue of Christianity and Crisis:

To hear again the claim that the church’s chief function is the cultivation of individual piety and the ignoring of social responsibility seems like listening to an echo in an empty room … it has come as something of a shock to realize the intensity of feeling that still exists in this area.

Such a scribe cannot conceive that anyone today would think that the Church’s business first and last is with God Almighty, the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of the universe. He decides, therefore, to seek out a hidden primary motive, and what does he come up with? Money, no less. “The effort to normalize some kind of pietistic theology is better seen as the rationalization of a reactionary political and social ideology.”

The sword of determinism cuts both ways, of course. If evangelical theology and social ethics are a mere reflex of free enterprise economics, anti-supernaturalism is a mere reflex of Communist political theory, and the neo-orthodox search for “middle axioms” is a mere reflex of socialist economic theory. But we believe the reverse is more likely to be true: that one’s beliefs about God mold one’s attitudes toward the issues of life.

It so happens that life’s answers are never quite so simple as people who are orbiting in their own little worlds like to think they are. Men are, as the Psalmist says, fearfully and wonderfully made; and if a theologian is bumped from the rear and gets out of his car to discover that the Christian Church is greater than he thought, and more Biblical than he thought, and has not swung behind the latest theological fashion as rapidly as he thought, it is all to the good.

How easy it is for some churchmen to clamber back into orbit by writing off the great truths of the Christian faith as “some kind of pietistic theology,” and to resume forthwith the anthropo-sociological debate! Surely God called us into his service for greater purposes. To the Body of Christ he has committed the Spirit, the gifts, the sacraments, the means of Grace, the privilege of prayer, the message of the evangel, the joy of salvation, the communion of saints, the Christian hope, eternal life, and the mysterious riches of his love. Is it “pietistic theology” to believe and declare that Christ loves the whole Church, just as God loved the whole world and gave His Son for it; or that this world is greater than any “private worlds”?

The priest and the Levite stayed “in orbit” on the turnpike. The Good Samaritan then “parked his car” and left his world and offered his brother a hand. Paul acted from the same motive when he left the world of Asia for the world of Europe. There is a sense, indeed, in which only the Christian is truly a world citizen, since for the love of Christ he makes every man’s world his own.

ALCOHOLIC RESPECTABILITY IN ‘CHRISTIAN’ AMERICA

Whiskey seems totally irrelevant to “responsible fatherhood,” but the House of Seagram, one of America’s leading distillers, does not think so. In fact, it spent a small fortune this year in Father’s Day advertising in 143 newspapers with a circulation of 24 million advising dads to drink moderately and set a good example for their sons.

This hypocritical “hard sell” in reverse is typical of a trend in modern liquor salesmanship. Calvert promotes drinking by intimating that “men of distinction” are whiskey users. The pious visage of a William Penn-ish Quaker “sanctifies” every bottle of another brand. Christian Brothers is not only the trade-name of a popular wine but the winery is a church-sponsored business. Christmas is celebrated in many of our larger cities by elaborate crèches underlined with the name of the sponsoring brewery. Good Friday and Easter are yet to be exploited, but give the liquor industry time! Thanks to Madison Avenue and mass media intoxicating beverages are no longer linked with drunkenness, the underworld and crime; alcohol is becoming not only respectable but an essential to the abundant life. Has “Christian” America so far degenerated that she has no conscience on these blasphemies against good taste and God?

HOW TO EXPLOIT A WHITE HOUSE CONFERENCE

Three months after the 1960 White House Conference on Children and Youth, the official findings have been announced. Seven thousand conferees last Spring came up with 1,600 recommendations but no final report. The present document seems to reflect the views of its drafters more than the consensus of the delegates themselves.

There are many good things in the report. It manifests a sincere desire to give United States youth better opportunities to realize their full potential for a creative life in freedom and dignity. It takes a sound position of separation of Church and State. It recognizes religion as a far more vital factor in the nation’s social situation than did the 1950 Conference report. It proposes some new valid scientific techniques for dealing with youth problems.

Nevertheless there are startling evidences of apparent Conference exploitation to promote questionable social and political doctrines and procedures. The framers of the report clearly intend to reconstruct the White House Conference into a monolithic Federal bureaucracy involving a children’s bureau, a national youth council, a cultural center, and varied secretariats under the U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. It would centralize authority and exert control over all state and community agencies involving schools, churches, religious organizations, health, welfare, recreation, mental health, medical aid, and other services to American children and youth.

The report frankly calls for a vast increase in Federal spending not only to finance this bureaucratic complex from Washington down to Prune Center, but for the encouragement of the social and behaviorial sciences, more government scholarships and fellowships, vocational guidance, school and community counsellors, subsidies for public education, increased teachers’ salaries, aid to migrant workers, and other concerns too numerous to mention. If half the suggestions of the report are followed a new horde of professional personnel in the fields of health, social welfare, and education would swarm over the land—all at Federal expense.

Strange socio-political doctrines are sanctioned, such as “inter-group” community religious education, a weakened draft law, rewriting the nation’s marriage law, public marital bureaus, easing laws of illegitimacy, mass diagnostic evaluation of children and youth, fluoridation of the nation’s water supplies, compulsory “fair employment” practices, compulsory racial integration, public sex education, elimination of loyalty oaths, Federal support of public education, state planning for family and home life, minimum legal children’s and family allowances, watered-down immigration laws, a “one-world” youth exchange to translate the “essence of democracy” to all nations.

Should this proposed bureaucracy be realized the Conference report would take an added significance. It might well constitute a platform and a policy which could be effectively implemented within a few short years. Here is a document which warrants more than casual reading as a record of something that happened yesterday. It is a portrait of tomorrow.

SOME AMERICANS ABROAD HAVE BEAUTIFUL FEET

Something healthy is taking place in world missions. Here and there a Christian doctor, dentist, contractor, or agricultural expert is putting his business in the United States in the hands of others for a year, and is going abroad to serve the people of Africa or Asia through his church’s missionary out-reach. He takes his family along and learns at first hand what it is like to be an ambassador for Christ in strange surroundings. He also smooths out many kinks in the mission’s operation.

Today thousands and even millions of American churchgoers travel outside the United States. Some attach themselves to permanent Christian communities overseas; others encounter representatives of various religions and become more confused than ever. Denominational leaders meanwhile struggle to indoctrinate their traveling laymen with some notion of cultural empathy and the “motive for mission.”

We feel that this new “grass roots to grass roots” missionary thrust is the best teacher of all. It has something of New Testament flavor about it, and we hope the idea will catch fire. The world could stand some attractive Americans following in the steps of him of whom it was said that even his feet were beautiful.

NCC PROJECTS FIVE-YEAR PLAN, SEEKS FUNDS FOR PEACE PROGRAM

The National Council of Churches, whose sense of competence in international affairs ought to have been shaken by recent events, is now launching a five-year plan to expand the activities and staff of its Department of International Affairs. A five-year program of education and action in “Christian Responsibility for World Survival and Peace” has been approved by the executive board of the Division of Christian Life and Work, of which the Department is a part. Substantial funds will be sought from individuals, corporations, and foundations to implement the project. The Department wants to expand its work with liaison specialists with the United Nations, United States government agencies in international affairs, ecumenical and denominational programs in international affairs. It also seeks program associates with special concern for disarmament, international aid, and world economic development; world area specialists for Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North and South America.

The Department promises to provide “competent leadership for Christian church people who are concerned about the world situation, and who seek the largest attainable measure of justice, freedom, and peace in the world.” But the competence of American ecumenists to speak on issues of world order and peace in the present international crisis has been a matter of open doubt since the World Order Study Conference urged United Nations admission and United States recognition of Red China. The unbecoming equivocation of the General Board on this issue has only served to communicate to grass roots an impression of ecclesiastical sophistry; and the high-powered propaganda campaign launched by ecumenical leaders to convince the masses that “ecumenism can do no wrong” has only confused the situation. The American people prefer truth to a whitewash.

In 1954 the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs called for the nations to “refrain from the threat or use of hydrogen, atomic and all other weapons of mass destruction as well as any other means of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Dr. Charles Malik commented bluntly on this involvement in strategic problems of the H-bomb that the churches “should say nothing on any subject about which they know nothing.” Former President Harry S. Truman has since said, “We know now that when some people were advocating in 1956 that the American government stop its tests of the hydrogen bomb, the Russians were already in possession of a multimegaton stockpile of intermediate ballistic missiles with thermonuclear warheads.…”

Nobody is trying to muffle the Church or the spokesmen who bask in the dream that their pronouncements are pan-Protestant. But the Church, if she be Christ’s Body, has a mandate to conform her words to his authoritative Word. If she professes to speak for him, she must fix her sights on the revealed principles of the Bible rather than on the provisional programs of study conferences.

GET RID OF THE MESSAGE BY DISQUALIFYING THE MESSENGER

The attempt to get rid of the Christian message by getting rid of the messenger continues. Many caustic critics are busily at work trying to convince the public that every day in every way, the minister is getting worse and worse. “Sinners, watch out!” shrieks the downtown marquee, “Elmer Gantry is coming!” And Bert Lancaster, who built his reputation in roles specializing in sadism, lust, mayhem and murder, now becomes the paragon of the pulpit. A remarkable bit of Hollywood casting, indeed. The next minister part will probably be played by an orangutan.

How magnificent it would be if, just once, before God rolls up his heavens and the alarm in the clock of the universe goes off, Protestant Christians would echo the apocalyptic thunder with a resounding protest: “Let the Christian minister alone. He has earned a rest.”

WHAT DO CHURCHES REALLY THINK ABOUT CAPITAL PUNISHMENT?

The value of denominational statements on public issues is cast in doubt by a booklet issued by the Connecticut Friends Committee on Social Order, titled “What Do the Churches Say on Capital Punishment?” The booklet is, in fact, a fascinating document, for it compiles official statements of dozens of Protestant church bodies, every one of which opposes capital punishment in explicit terms. Many of them claim biblical warrant for their views.

If such remarkable unanimity of mind were characteristic of the Church as a whole, capital punishment would be eliminated overnight. But such is evidently not the case. We can only conclude that the church leadership is not fairly reflecting either the views of American Christians, or the Bible on which they profess to base their views.

IS THE CHURCH CONFUSING THE BODY AND THE HEAD?

The decisive ecclesiological issue of the latter part of the twentieth century seems to be taking shape. A movement is underway exalting the Body of Christ at the expense of the Headship of our Lord. Oriental Christians grasped the significance of the issue before the West did, as we know from the reactionary “Jesus Only” movement which flourished in China during the years before communism, and the popular “No Church” movement in Japan. In the West the conflict is developing more slowly, but it is surely coming.

Some of the impetus behind this drive to establish the Body over the Head comes from the form criticism which has tried to show that Jesus can be seen only through the eyes of the early Church; that the objective facts of his life are not knowable by us; and that the faith of the early Church contrived a supernatural setting for his life as a kind of hero worship. It was only natural that, with the New Testament “de-mythologized” and the figure of Christ blending and fading into the background until it was no longer discernible, scholars should begin to exalt the Church. There was nothing else left.

Father Gregory Baum of Toronto, as reported earlier this year by Time magazine, noted that the new Protestant tendency is to minimize the importance of “whether Jesus really said this or did that.” “What counts,” according to the new view, “is that through the biblical witness the early Church proclaimed its faith.” Thus it does not matter whether Jesus healed a blind man; what is significant is that Jesus “now heals the blind eyes of men through faith,” that is, through a faith mediated by the Church.

The tragedy is that while churchmen have been emphasizing the significance of the Church, magnifying its strength and virtues and “strengthening” its theological base at our Lord’s expense, more and more there has welled up within the hearts of contemporary churchgoers and non-churchgoers a yearning to know more about Jesus. People read the Gospels and find a bond that knits them to the Man from Nazareth. They couldn’t care less about our scholastic debates; they assume the record is true or it would not have endured for centuries. They are eager to appropriate the power that they sense as they read the chapters of the New Testament.

What does it mean to come to Jesus today? How does one walk with Him along the Emmaus road when it has been transformed into a six-lane freeway with satellites whizzing overhead and international TV installed in every car? People want to know. They feel it is still possible to have Jesus for a Savior and a friend, but they are confused. When they arrive in church they are caught up in a flood of promotion that sweeps them down the ecclesiastical water gap, and instead of answering their question, the church introduces ten new ones. Do our Christian leaders really understand that Jesus is the key to mission, to stewardship, to Christian education, to worship—to everything? He is Lord of the Church, and without him our cathedrals and meeting houses are about as useful to man as the pyramids of Egypt.

Somehow the idea has been circulated that the Church herself is the instrument of reconciliation; that the Church herself redeems us from our sins; that the Church today is God’s favorite, if not his sole instrument on the earth. And who make up the Church? On the earth, we do. If we glorify the Church we are therefore in danger of exalting ourselves. Yet John said that God the Father could raise up sons of Abraham out of the very stones of the desert.

The Church exists for one reason only: to glorify God through Jesus Christ her Lord. She exists to proclaim the message that John uttered: “Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.” An expensive set of binoculars is not worth much if you cannot see anything through them. Not to get men on the church roll, but to get them to Jesus; not to integrate them into the social stream, but to get them to Jesus; not to bring them into an awareness of their acceptance into reality, but to get them to Jesus! This is our task.

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