In the struggle of truth with error and righteousness with evil, evangelicals are finding it too easy to forget the richest of the blessings that God in his goodness has showered upon them: the joy of the Lord.
What is it that gives the believer a light heart and a merry disposition? First and best of all, he knows that everything is going to come out right. Gloomy though the immediate outlook may appear, the Christian has the serene inner assurance that history’s ultimate issues are safe in God’s hands. His Kingdom will prevail, and all will be well. “Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world.” The victory note of the Resurrection trumpet brings an unfailing shout of triumph from the camp. We are on the winning side, and who would not be glad?
But other drops of “oil of joy” fall into the heart of the Christian every day, and we ought to be reminding ourselves of them. There is the rejoicing over every soul that comes to Jesus Christ. Undoubtedly a good many on the fringe of the Church hear the news of a conversion with misgivings. Is it real? they quickly ask. Will it last? Is it genuine and complete? Does it involve a proper transformation of values? The green-eyed monster seeks to elbow his way into the picture with more questions to complicate the scene: who did the converting? Would not someone like myself have done a better job—in theory at least? Would not I have emphasized certain social relevancies that would have made it a more “solid” conversion?
But the evangelical knows that a New Testament criterion always recognizes such considerations as human and subordinate to the glorious fact of divine regeneration. Thus Paul rejoiced as much over a conversion in which he played no part whatever as over one in which the Lord used him; and the true Christian today can discover that every heart that turns to God gladdens him.
There are many tensions in modern existence, and there are many for whom the Christian life is an unsolved riddle. They will walk out of a lukewarm church on Sunday, having heard a hesitant herald, and still convinced that the only certainty is uncertainty; that truth is a sliding principle; that the Bible is so compounded with error that it can only be quoted with extreme care and is at best an undependable guide.
The evangelical is blessed, however, with a holy trust that releases him from this tension. It is not, to be sure, an arrogant confidence that scorns the timid; rather it is a simple reliance upon the Creator and Saviour of men that stills the winds and waves of his inner being. “I am the way, the truth, and the life!” That, as David Livingstone said, is ‘the Word of a Gentleman,’ and can be depended upon. With such assurance, who would not inwardly rejoice?
Further, the evangelical Christian finds God everywhere. To eyes of spiritual discernment, the supernatural is almost everywhere invading the natural so that every blade of grass, every floating leaf, every prospect of nature, every kindly gesture and friendly word serves to freshen his appreciation of “the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” And just when skies seem to turn their blackest and the stain of sin seems to be upon everything, God reminds us of His presence with the gift of song. By making melody in our hearts to the Lord, we recapture the joy that Satan would strip from us.
With all the needed emphasis upon obedience and responsibility in the Christian life, we are apt to forget that God’s best witnesses are light-hearted Christians, and that the oil of joy is the only lubricant God has provided to keep the church’s machinery from clanking. Pentecost Sunday is a great time to rediscover it. Rees Howells, a godly Welsh intercessor of our own time, once remarked daringly, “The Holy Spirit is full of jokes.” Reinhold Niebuhr, although doing somewhat less than justice to the criterion of coherence has discerned a relationship between humor and faith, since both are bridges—on different levels—over the seeming irreconcilables of life. The man who thinks laughter is out of place in church has missed much of the parable of the Prodigal Son. We are speaking of laughter in the Lord, laughter that brings joy without bitterness, as when the lonely soul finds a friend, the cripple finds his Gate Beautiful, the anxious one finds his fears have vanished, or the guilty one that his conscience has been washed clean.
“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.” An evangelist tells the story of the lady who asked him whether he believed women should use cosmetics. He glanced at her and remarked, “Well, madam, you could use a little.” Whatever we may think of his answer, many of us who name the name of Christ go about with expressions that silently ask, “Is it possible that you believe a Christian ought to wear a smile?” And the whole New Testament answers back, “Brother, you could use a little.”
THE REAL LESSON OF THE CHESSMAN CASE
Caryl Chessman is dead. With his death the world has seen fit to establish a minor symbol of the twentieth century.
Why is it that our age, which has specialized in cruelty, inhumanity, bestiality and total war; which has watched (thanks to cinema and TV) more blood-letting and violence than any other; which has refined the tortures of Nero to delicate germ-laden perfection; whose indifference and callousness to innocent human suffering has made ours one of the worst centuries in the history of mankind, should now shrink at the sight of a notorious convicted kidnaper, robber, pervert and abuser of helpless women being given his just deserts?
All but forgotten are the grisly genocides of Buchenwald, Belsen and Dachau; the entombed miners of West Virginia have moved off the front pages, together with the pitiful victims of the Moroccan earthquake; a culture saturated with sex takes for its martyr-hero a sex bandit, decides that his sins, being sexual, are minimal; and brands his death—postponed so many times not to be cruel to him, but to be just to him—as legalized murder. Meanwhile in a western mental hospital a 29-year-old young woman sits and stares, her mind permanently deranged by four brutal hours of ugly acts inflicted upon her as a church lass of 17 by this man (there is no doubt as to his identity) who then wrote best-selling books about the cruelty of equal justice under law.
In the small village that our world has suddenly become, the expected sympathy protests have arisen. New life has been given to anti-American sentiment in Brazil, Italy, Scandinavia, Uruguay, Finland, Britain, France, Portugal, and many other parts of the globe. What happened at San Quentin prison used to be California’s business; now it is everyone’s. The mistakes of California justice—including the long delay in carrying out the court sentence—are now seen as American mistakes. It should never be forgotten, however, that the first mistake was Chessman’s, and that his admitted sins have now brought reproach upon the American people.
The 4 to 3 decision of the California Supreme Court against Chessman, and the split vote in the state Legislature symbolize the division in the public mind over the question of capital punishment. A romantic view of the nature of man, drawn from the age of “Enlightenment,” has deluded millions into thinking that it is kindlier and wiser to spare the life of a killer or a kidnaper than to apply the Biblical precept of retributive justice. But man is not kinder or wiser than God. The rioting stonethrower in front of the Stockholm embassy or the Sacramento state house is not more merciful than Moses, he is just more sentimental. He thinks men can be dissuaded from crimes of horror by the prospect of a few comfortable years in prison. It does not matter what the wardens, the psychiatrists or even the prisoners themselves say to the contrary; death always has and always will be a deterrent to crime, because the sinful nature of man does not change. Chessman, it is said, matured while on death row. That is just the point: death row has a maturing effect on us all.
Finally, it is significant that Caryl Chessman died alone, an agnostic to the end; there was no chaplain, no funeral. Said his counsel afterward, “His greatest flaw, his greatest lack of character, was his unrelenting unwillingness to believe in something greater and bigger than himself.” So he becomes modern man facing his doom, a tragic symbol of what many are calling the post-Christian age of unbelief.
There are many lessons to be learned from the Chessman case, theological and ethical, but surely this is one of the most important: that these United States can no longer afford the luxury of protracted criminal justice.
LIGHTNING FLASHES AND THE TENNESSEE LAW
A curious debate is being waged between the editors of The Christian Century and the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University. It happens that the Chancellor, Dr. B. Harvie Branscomb, is one of America’s foremost liberal New Testament scholars whose writings are standard texts in many theological seminaries.
Under the umbrella of the Church, the gentlemen in question would be in cordial agreement—so cordial as to preclude a lack of amity.
In matters of public morality, however, the “point of contact” between the radically critical interpretation of the New Testament and the application of that interpretation has proved to be a “point of divergence.” The editors of the Century give their blessing to the “sit-in” demonstrations as a nonviolent tactic for securing social justice; the Chancellor protests that such tactics violate law and encourage violation of other laws, such as the Supreme Court ruling of 1954. Both seek the welfare of the Negro, but in different ways.
A unique problem in ethics is thus posed, and we shall be interested to see how it is resolved. Will an appeal be made to “principle-transcending, nonlegislative” existential ethics (what Joseph Sittler calls “occasional lightning flashes and gull-like swoops”) to be applied to particular situations, or to historic biblical concepts of justice and rectitude? Will Karl Barth be invoked, or will claims be buttressed by the Sermon on the Mount? And if the Bible—on what basis of authority?
MINISTERIAL SINS AND THE SINS OF ADAM
Attempts to catalogue and analyze the sins of the Christian minister have been many, both in fiction and nonfiction.
A Lutheran professor has suggested that of all the pastor’s temptations, the greatest are “to shine, to whine, and to recline.” Dr. Andrew W. Blackwood’s latest volume, The Growing Minister: His Opportunities and Obstacles, deals with ministerial shortcomings as he would anyone’s. For there is a sense in which the minister’s sins are simply variations on a theme by Adam. The old parson in Masefield’s Saul Kane remarked,
“We’re neither saints nor Philip Sidneys
But mortal men with mortal kidneys.”
Yet Dr. Blackwood feels that a minister’s vocational duties make him particularly susceptible to the desire to “shine.” “In the ministry at first,” he writes, “everything conspires to make a young man proud.” The new crop of seminary graduates has not proved immune to the charge of cockiness; nor has the liturgical revival helped the situation. But the Church and the world are weary of strutting bantams, who have not yet learned the meaning of the word “minister” (Mark 10:45). And where will they learn it, if not at the cross of Christ? The Growing Minister accurately points the direction to spiritual maturity.
MYTHS AND JOKES AT ‘BIBLE STORYLAND’
“What’s that over on the far shore? A very large green snake seems to be having an animated conversation with a very pretty if somewhat informally dressed young lady. She seems to be having her lunch. Just now she’s about to bite into a big, luscious red apple. Oh, oh! It looks like (sic) we’re all in for trouble now, and for a long time to come. Oh well, somebody had to make a monkey out of us (sic), or was it the other way around?”
Such are the jazzed-up, carnival expressions used by two promoters and a movie comedian in their 28-page brochure describing a proposed $15,000,000 amusement park near Ontario, southern California, to be known as “Bible Storyland.” The plan, which has exercised the indignation of thousands of California clergymen, includes not only such ticket-booth concessions as “Noah’s Ark,” “Solomon’s Temple” (with Jesus poised on the edge of the roof), the David and Goliath slingshot gallery, the Tour of Egypt (by Camel, with a ride in Cleopatra’s barge tossed in), the “Ride to Heaven,” “Dante’s Inferno” and the “Shrine of Faith”; but also a “magic town” where one can have his fortune told, mind read, psyche analyzed, palm scrutinized and head bumps charted, according to the brochure.
The combination of sex, circus, and sanctimony has proved to be profitable in southern California history, and this latest historical anachronism will perhaps become the richest mine yet, though one questions the brochure’s statement that its gimmicks are “bound to inspire and affect deeply all who see them.” It so happens that the Old and New Testaments are the revealed Word of God, and if that Living Word is exposed to the crudeness and irreverence of an amusement park, a new stumbling block to faith is established.
Will a virgin give birth to a child in “Bible Storyland?” Will citizens of Ontario be raised from the dead? Neither will anyone be born into the kingdom of God for the price of admission. The spiritual emphasis of the venture, as Episcopal Bishop Eric Bloy suggests, sounds little short of blasphemous.
MARRIAGE MAINTENANCE IN A HOSTILE AGE
Perpetuating an unhappy marriage “for the sake of the children” is today usually looked upon as an old-fashioned idea destructive to the personalities of marriage partners and children alike. This conviction, joined with weakening theological strictures on divorce within the church and the modern elevation of emotional elements in marriage, strips away much of the surprise from the current astonishing divorce rate.
A study by sociologist E. E. Le Masters of Beloit (Wisconsin) College indicates that chronic marital conflict is not necessarily damaging to the children. Possible explanations: unsuspected emotional toughness of children, less awareness of the conflict than generally supposed, and the numerous contacts outside the family afforded by modern society.
Further reinforcement of such findings may fortunately persuade some sincere couples to maintain their marriages. But more than this is needed to halt the divorce rate appreciably, for the noblest arguments lack power to prevail against the hedonism of our culture. For modern man wants everything and he wants it now. Such covetousness-in-a-hurry explains the origin of many unhappy marriages—a suitable partner comes just “too late” to bide the time.
Most folks are trying to pinpoint the cause for their lack of happiness. They generally look in the wrong places, and the marriage partner is a handy scapegoat. The “next marriage” is seen as certain to provide the missing happiness, rather than as simply compounding frustration. The answer to this fairyland complex is not the scapegoat. It is the Lamb of God. It is the Cross. When a couple are met beneath its shadow the biblical injunctions against divorce assume true relevance and meaning.
