The Consultation on Church Union got its tenth participant last month, the all-Negro Christian Methodist Episcopal Church with its 466,718 members. In May, CME representatives will meet those from other denominations to discuss the pending giant Protestant merger.

Whatever happens at that session in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the major U.S. ecumenical question of 1967 is whether the Episcopal Church as a whole will love COCU in September as its delegates did in May.

The Episcopal ecumenical commission recently announced its plans for the September General Convention in Seattle. It proposes that the church authorize its delegates to negotiate a specific merger plan. The delegates from COCU’s two biggest members, the Episcopal and Methodist Churches, lack this authority, although several other denominations have approved such escalation. The ecumenical commission also wants the U.S. church to “commend” COCU to the worldwide Lambeth Conference next year. The General Convention won’t meet again until 1970, and the next Lambeth Conference is in 1978, so both proposals are important in the COCU timetable.

Virginia’s Bishop Robert F. Gibson, Jr.—ecumenical commission chairman and former chairman of COCU itself—said COCU executives who met last month thought the merger timetable “has clearly slowed up over what we thought possible” at the last COCU meeting in Dallas, where “Principles of Church Union” were approved.

Gibson is confident the Episcopal Church will vote to continue with COCU, but is less certain it will approve entry into specific negotiation. His panel’s proposal could be amended to freeze talks at the present ambiguous level.

Although many Episcopalians think COCU is inevitable, its most conspicuous opponent, Canon Albert J. duBois, is “much more hopeful” COCU can be stalled than he was when he began a two-month series of two-night stands across the country. DuBois, 60, is the veteran executive director of the American Church Union, an organization of 11,000 Anglo-Catholic or “high” churchmen.

He finds many Episcopalians who had no previous interest in ACU and disagree with its liturgical slant are backing its drive against COCU. He also reports a significant increase in financial aid from bishops.

Also on tour against COCU is ACU President Chandler W. Sterling, the bishop of Montana, whose mailing address in Helena—Last Chance Gulch—may be prophetic.

The ACU case is presented in the current issue of its monthly American Church News. Essentially, the argument is that COCU is a move toward Protestantism at the expense of closer relations with Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. (Bishop Gibson’s commission asserts it is trying to move in both directions.) The ACU’s objection to COCU agreements on the ministry, bishops, and apostolic succession seems to be that the COCU church will not be the Episcopal Church. From the non-Episcopalian’s point of view, the Episcopal negotiators have won more concessions within COCU than any other denominational team.

The Episcopal delegation includes such high churchmen as Peter Day, the denomination’s ecumenical officer, and Bishop Stephen F. Bayne, Jr., who directs liaison with the world Anglican Communion. Another delegate is Chicago’s Bishop Gerald Francis Burrill, one of nineteen bishops who belong to the ACU. Last month, he opened the year’s discussion of COCU in the Episcopalian by saying the denomination must decide “either to obey our Lord’s command to be one and to enter willingly into the difficult, often painful, negotiations with all other Christian bodies” or to “be satisfied to be a sect, isolated from the rest of Christendom.”

Asked to comment on the ACU criticisms, Burrill said they are “not valid, on the whole,” but he agrees with its concern about the “position and impact” of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, traditional doctrinal standards of the Episcopal Church now questioned by Bishop James A. Pike and some other liberals.

The American Church Union points out that the COCU “Principles” consider the creeds as corporate, historic “symbols,” but “it is not stated, however, that anyone has any obligation to believe” them. The Apostles’ Creed, it fears, may become “an interesting historical relic,” rarely used. The status of Nicene is even more vague.

The ACU, which also dislikes the National Council of Churches, fears that the COCU church will be another NCC, run by the same people but carrying more authority, since it will be the Church rather than a voluntary council. “The sorry record of the National Council of Churches gives us a very dependable indication of what the leadership in the new COCU Church will do.… We will be bound by its heretical publications and the many distressing resolutions it chooses to set forth.” And ACU envisions an administratively muscle-bound, undemocratic church full of bureaucratic parasites.

The ACU questions whether the united church would be “truly evangelical.” “In the absence of a definite standard of beliefs for teaching, it is not likely that the new COCU Church would have much Evangelistic force in its effort to reach out for conversions.”

Although a denominational official said the ACU is an “extreme” minority, duBois claims to be more in tune with the grass roots than the COCU delegates. Many active laymen are conservative (most of ACU’s membership is lay), and he points out that a majority of Episcopal clergy are converts from other denominations, and thus many are unenthusiastic about losing Episcopal distinctives. He is convinced that if the denomination votes to join COCU, some members will form a continuing Episcopal church.

To duBois, “the ecumenical movement is forcing us to a decision on our very nature.” The Episcopalians have traditionally straddled the Protestant-Catholic fence. DuBois says many Episcopalians want to do nothing to cut off channels to Rome, and “are willing to accept the pope as a visible head of the church—a chairman of the board—but not as a monarch.”

Bishop Gibson thinks the ACU is “over-interpreting” what the COCU “Principles” are: “They are asking for more definition than anybody else has.” He calls the ACU statement “a misinterpretation of what Dallas did do and what it tried to do.”

Most of the Episcopalians who will vote on COCU this fall will be chosen in diocesan conventions this spring. The COCU resolution must pass with a simple majority in both the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies (priests and laymen). The bishops’ approval is considered automatic, so the real action will occur in the other house, where each diocese has one vote. If the lay and clergy delegates within a diocese disagree, their votes cancel each other out. Any eventual merger proposal would need to pass two General Conventions in a row, with a two-thirds majority in each house.

Evangelistic One-Upmanship

About forty evangelism specialists of the American Baptist Convention braved Chicago snowdrifts last month to plan strategy for the next two years, but the biggest evangelistic controversy in the ABC got little attention.

Just before the meeting of state evangelism executives with national evangelism director Jitsuo Morikawa and his staff, the ABC General Council had repeated and re-explained its previous decision to boycott a hemispherewide, pan-Baptist Crusade of the Americas in 1969. The ABC plans instead to boost its own “Faith and Work” curriculum and handle evangelism on its own terms with ABC-aligned churches in Latin America.

The vote showed the gap between the ABC and the much larger and more conservative Southern Baptist Convention, prime mover of the 1969 crusade. But the ABC stereotype of the SBC must have taken a jolt when Wayne Dehoney, former SBC president and chief planner of the forthcoming crusade, proposed that Roman Catholics join with Baptists in the campaign. “We are hopeful, and happy that a spirit of evangelism and outreach based on the proclamation of the Gospel and New Testament faith is breaking loose in the Catholic Church.” He said Methodists and Southern Presbyterians also are interested.

Several of the state and local ABC units represented at the Chicago meeting plan to cooperate with the crusade on their own, which is fully permissible under Baptist autonomy.

The Chicago conferees mainly discussed internal efforts from headquarters such as “Action-Reflection” visitation and more efficient follow-up when ABC members move to a new community. A leading ABC figure said the lack of a pro-crusade drive in Chicago probably means the issue will be raised at the national convention in May.

Southern Baptists are still smarting from comments by Morikawa at the November meeting where the ABC first shunned the crusade. He belittled the old-style evangelism of Southerners and Pentecostalists and criticized the preeminent crusade role of the SBC, which he said has not faced up to its racial responsibilities. ABC President Carl Tiller, in his February report, said many members are losing confidence in the General Council and the “convention superstructure.” He said that many also believe the ABC evangelism program “does not meet the needs,” and that “restlessness” exists on interchurch strategy. Tiller, whose congregation belongs to both ABC and SBC, hopes for better relations across the Mason-Dixon line. To help things, Tiller has agreed to serve, as an individual, on the laymen’s committee for the 1969 crusade. His term as ABC president runs out this spring.

Confession Of 1967

The controversial Confession of 1967 appeared headed toward adoption last month. Religious News Service reported February 16 that out of ninety-one presbyteries known to have voted on the document, seventy-six had approved it. Favorable action by two-thirds or 126 of the 188 presbyteries is required for passage.

After Hash, A Barbecue

Should Christians send their children to Sunday school? Resigned Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike provided both the question and an answer when the National Council of Churches staged its annual Division of Christian Education meeting in Dallas last month. Generally it added up to a “no.” He said the “no” for the benefit of some 1,000 professional Christian education workers. Then he qualified it a bit: children should not be sent to “most” church schools, he explained. He would recommend only the kind that does not teach anything that has to be “unlearned” later, and that means that the supernatural would not be taught, and nothing about heaven and hell, and certainly nothing about a once-for-all conversion. Just the natural—“if true”—not the supernatural, said the bishop. Let the children stay home and read the funny papers (unless they are the blood-and-thunder sadistic kind), he counseled.

Pike addressed only one of sixteen sections meeting simultaneously, with other groups scattered across downtown Dallas.

Another Episcopalian almost stole the headlines from the former bishop of California. He was Malcolm Boyd, principal speaker at the meeting of adult workers, which specialized this year in approaches to young adults. Boyd chose the occasion to announce existence of the “underground church,” made up of those who are impatient with the existing practices of organized churches.

Defining members of the underground church, Boyd said, “These people are refusing to worship God merely along denominational lines. They ignore official structures and hierarchy. They regard Protestant-Catholic reunion as having already taken place. Their fellowship includes priests, pastors, laymen, nuns and even many Jews.” He said they celebrate the Lord’s Supper together at mealtimes, as the early Christians did.

He explained that the builders of this nameless revolution have decided simply not to worry about ecclesiastical and doctrinal differences, which bore them and seem futile. They are for Pope John and against Cardinal Spellman. The martyred Dietrich Bonhoeffer—along with a few secular figures such as Albert Camus—is a saint in their canon. But by and large they try to avoid too much celebrity worship.

The priest and sometime night-club performer said some of the underground church members go to church and some do not. He found an immediate reaction in the audience of adult workers, and somebody decided to call him phony, even though he had earlier said that all members of the underground church reject everything that is phony.

The adult workers, in seeking better understanding of young adults, spent some time one evening visiting bars, “gay” hangouts, and other habitats of unchurched young men and women.

Youth workers heard from another controversial minister, Howard Moody of Judson Memorial Church in New York City. He spoke of the need to move from “the apathy of the fifties to the action of the sixties.” He suggested that leadership of young people has moved from the academy and temple to the streets, and urged the development of “mobile ministries.” He asked youth workers to help the church find a new morality and get over its pietism.

Workers in week-day religious education had among their speakers Rabbi Arthur Gilbert, who stressed a need for objective teaching of religion in schools but rejected any devotional use of religion in schools and Bible study as such. He thought the teaching of religion in history would be more acceptable to the entire community than teaching the history of religion.

The sixteen sections all met independently, and the only time that all 1,800 registrants were together was at a concluding barbecue and fellowship luncheon.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

Second Thoughts On Structure

Last fall the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren General Conferences voted to unite into what is to be known as the United Methodist Church. Now some top executives of the two denominations want to change the terms of the pending merger.

“We believe that there is a need for redesigning the structure of the new United Methodist Church,” said a resolution adopted at a joint meeting of the Methodist Council of Secretaries and the EUB Council of Executives.

The Joint Commission on Union was asked to “set up a committee on redesigning the structure of the church, to develop succinct statements on mission (purpose) and to draft a plan of restructure.”

The commission met the next week and voted to set up fourteen committees, one of which was assigned the job of studying the restructure request.

The Methodist-EUB executives want the restructure action taken in 1968. That’s when the merger question will be up for ratification. A plan of organization and administration for the United Methodist Church has been drawn up but will not be voted upon until then.

Schism Out Of Ecumenism?

Six emissaries of the Evangelical United Brethren hierarchy plan to hold peace talks next month with fellow churchmen in the Pacific Northwest who want no part of a merger with Methodists.

Last fall’s EUB General Conference, which voted to unite the denomination with The Methodist Church, also recognized formidable resistance from congregations in Washington, Oregon, and Montana, and authorized the General Council of Administration to appoint a special negotiating team. The group is expected to visit the area in mid-April and try to persuade as many churches as possible to recognize the expected merger. If schism cannot be avoided, the negotiating team is understood to be planning concessions to avoid court fights over church property rights.

The resistance is primarily among theologically conservative churches that do not want to be dissolved into the more liberal Methodist machine. Some authorities estimate that as much as 85 per cent of the EUB constituency in the Pacific Northwest may refuse the merger. The eighty-two EUB churches in Washington and Oregon have a total membership of about 11,600. There are twenty-two churches in Montana.

At least six churches have already taken a congregational vote against participation in the merger. Virtually all the large churches oppose union.

A leading EUB minister has declared that anti-merger members “are not a belligerent people. We are a strong holiness movement abiding by the discipline of our church, rather than departing from it.”

There is already considerable talk of forming a new regional fellowship of the non-merger churches. A number of previously independent churches are also reported to be interested in such a move. Together they will be in a good position to court association with an existing national body. Four national holiness denominations have already made approaches to EUB churches in the Pacific Northwest.

Presbyterian Rules Retained

When the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U. S., meets this June in Bristol, Tennessee, it will follow the same procedural rules it used in 1966.

To Southern Presbyterians, that’s news.

Last October the denomination’s Permanent Committee on Assembly Operation caused a furor by announcing it would make sweeping changes in the rules. The agency, which makes the arrangements for the annual assembly, has now reconsidered and withdrawn the changes.

The committee claimed authority to amend the procedures from a motion passed at the end of the 1966 assembly. It was approved after several commissioners complained of the haste with which some business (notably the decision to become a full participant in the Consultation on Church Union) was handled. But differences of opinion later arose as to whether the minutes had recorded the motion accurately.

After objections to the proposed rules began to come in, the committee reviewed the whole matter. Tapes of the concluding minutes of the 1966 assembly were heard, and makers of two procedural motions were interviewed. When it was all over, committeemen said there was a reasonable doubt about how much authority had been given them and about the intent of the motions.

The proposed rules, which resembled some used at United Presbyterian assemblies, would have assigned only half of the commissioners to standing committees. (All Presbyterian U. S. commissioners have been serving on committees.) Another unpopular change provided that the retiring moderator, the stated clerk, and the chairman of the assembly operation committee (instead of the moderator alone) would appoint the chairmen of standing committees. Another was aimed at cutting down on lobbying.

Instead of going into effect at the 1967 assembly, the rules (with several important revisions) will now be submitted as recommendations for adoption and implementation at the 1968 assembly.

If the committee’s decision on the rules settled one hassle, another of its decisions might start a new one. It voted to hold the 1969 General Assembly in Mobile, Alabama. Officials of the United Presbyterian Church had been expecting the Southern church to join it and the Cumberland Presbyterians in San Antonio for simultaneous assemblies that year. Presbyterian U. S. proponents of closer relations with the other two denominations might seek to reverse the committee’s action and push for a family reunion.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

History And The Christian Faith

Vindications: Essays on the Historical Basis of Christianity, edited by Anthony Hanson (Morehouse-Barlow, 1966, 192 pp., $5); The Historical Shape of Faith, by Ralph G. Wilburn (Westminster, 1966, 240 pp., $6); and Christ the Meaning of History, by Hendrikus Berkhof, translated by L. Buurman (John Knox, 1966, 224 pp., $5.50), are reviewed by John Frederick Jansen, professor of New Testament interpretation, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Austin, Texas.

Different as these books are in scope and approach, they express a common concern that the Christian faith must take history more seriously than some tendencies in modern theology have done.

Vindications is a symposium of six essays by five British authors. Three of the essays deal with the historical skepticism that characterizes form criticism of the Gospels. R. P. C. Hanson objects to the tendency to deny any genuine historical or biographical interest in the Gospels and seeks to show that “if nothing is certainly original, then we cannot be sure that anything is certainly secondary.” He points out that the time between Jesus and the writing of the Gospels is remarkably short for such a radical transformation of the message of Jesus as some posit. Anthony Hanson carries this critique further by examining Nineham’s commentary on Mark to show that his approach could discredit the reliability of any historical document. One may ask whether the comparison with other ancient literature does enough justice to the specifically confessional character of the Gospel. A. R. C. Leaney shows the most appreciation of form criticism as he deals with the quest of the historical Jesus in recent discussion. All three recognize the legitimacy and importance of the form-critical method but object that often conclusions are based less on form analysis than on prior presuppositions.

Ralph Wilburn’s The Historical Shape of Faith relates Christian concern for history to the development of the idea of history. He begins with the eschatological view of history as seen in the New Testament and in Augustine. The New Testament discussion is not very satisfying; it is much too brief and settles for rather sweeping generalizations. But Wilburn rightly shows how the eschatological view was challenged and undermined in the Enlightenment, and how rationalism’s “light of universal reason” failed to take history seriously. He gives a readable summary of the direction that the understanding of history has taken, paying particular attention to Croce, Toynbee, and Collingwood. The remaining chapters examine the implications for theology, especially for Christology and for the quest of the historical Jesus.

This is an interesting book. One wonders, however, why the jacket claims that it is “the first book to analyze just what history is, to define the impact of this modern idea of history on the Christian faith, and to consider ways in which theology must respond.…” The same publisher gave us Alan Richardson’s History, Sacred and Profane in 1964, a book that receives no mention in the present volume and yet is, in my opinion, a more substantial work.

The last book is Hendrikus Berkhof’s Christ the Meaning of History (written in 1958). An apocalyptic era, he suggests, calls the Church urgently to a theology of history. But church dogmatics has too much left a theology of history to the sects. Berkhof proposes to appropriate the message of biblical theology, including biblical apocalyptic, for an answer to the threatening alternatives of wrong meaning and no meaning in history. Since Israel first saw history genuinely as goal-directed, he examines the significant Old Testament traditions from the Exodus faith through Daniel, criticizing the manner in which prophecy and apocalyptic are often set over against each other. The New Testament portrays Jesus Christ as both the End and the Beginning of history. That is why “consistent” and “realized” eschatology are complementary expressions of this End and Beginning, both in the life of Jesus and in the life of the Church. The new beginning is seen in the missionary endeavor of the early Church. Berkhof examines modern secularization and says: “Secularization is the child of the gospel, but a child who sooner or later rises against his mother. And yet, the mother would not be what she ought to be if she did not desire the child.”

The most important chapters portray the Crucified and the Risen Christ in history. Here Berkhof deals with New Testament apocalyptic, including such thorny questions as the future of Israel and the millennial hope. Finally, he deals with the Consummation, both as break and as connection with past and present history. Eternity is not “timelessness”—or else there is only break and no consummation of history. Yet Berkhof does not follow Cullmann’s tendency to minimize the break between time and eternity. In his conclusion, avoiding historical skepticism and predictive confidence, he points to the practical necessity of making relative decisions in the present. An epilogue, written in 1965, indicates that Berkhof remains opposed to the basic conceptions of the Bultmann school.

These three volumes show that Christian theology need not settle for an uncritical biblicism or a historical skepticism that is indifferent to historical foundations of the faith. Of the three, I found Berkhof’s the most rewarding.

Reading for Perspective

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:

• Reformed Dogmatics, by Herman Hoeksema (Reformed Free Publishing, $14.95). A systematic treatment of biblical and Reformed theology, thirty years in preparation, that develops the traditional topics of theology, anthropology, Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and eschatology.

• Ancient Orient and Old Testament, by K. A. Kitchen (Inter-Varsity, $3.95). A British scholar applies ancient Near East data to problems of Old Testament chronology, history, and literary criticism and calls for a critical reassessment of widely held liberal theories and methods.

• Ring of Truth: A Translator’s Testimony, by J. B. Phillips (Macmillan, $2.95). The renowned biblical translator relates discoveries of the deep truths of God that have gripped his life during his long years of study.

Death-Of-Reader Theology

The Future of Belief: Theism in a World Come of Age, by Leslie Dewart (Herder and Herder, 1966, 223 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by David A. Redding, writer in residence, Tarkio College, Tarkio, Missouri.

The argument over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is nothing to our intricate theological needlework. The diversionary literature defining the death of God and refining the new morality grows more and more complicated and voluminous. Our debate has become so rarefied that it would have bewildered Dionysius the Areopagite. Surely it will amuse the next generation, with the brutally practical reaction it is sure to have.

The Future of Belief is a book about the author’s God. Mr. Dewart’s desire to release God from the prison of the past only means that He is to be incarcerated in a more effective one. The author adds his form of atheism to that of the Marxist and that of the death-of-God theologian. But in this book the reader dies before God does.

At times Dewart with his erudition sounds a little like Emily Post describing the proper way to extract a prune pit. Take this, for example:

But is it possible to transcend the conceptual dichotomy of God’s essence and existence?… If we depart from Greek metaphysics at their Parmenidean root, knowledge is no longer an immaterial “intrussusception” of reality, and the investigation of being is no longer guided by the equivalence of intelligibility and being.

These “come of age” theologians complain that all Christian expression that preceded them is adolescent and irrelevant. In a very knowing and humorless way, Dewart rushes into this thin air to deal with “the problems of integrating Christian belief with the everyday experience of contemporary man.” I had high hopes for this author, having just put down the most exciting book I’ve read in years by another Roman Catholic. But Dewart continues the rage of carrying religion off into a corner where only the very special coterie can look at it. The book is brilliant inside its own logic but far remote from contemporary man’s “everyday experience.”

Dewart does fluff up some issues on which theology has been sitting for ages. And he can be incisive: “Belief must bear upon the reality of God, not upon words or concepts.” “The Marxist counterpart is the rejection of the God who is truly that of the Christian faith, but who in fact is unfaithfully believed in by us.” The author offers a shakeup more illegible than mistaken, undisciplined rather than deadly. But, not content with knocking out windows, he goes on to knock out walls and leaves us no house at all. As he discusses such matters as the distinction between the essence and the existence of God, the atheistic and anti-theistic positions, and the possibility that God may or may not be a being, one suspects that he is not in the realm of The Future of Belief but in fantasy.

Books of this kind do not belong to prophecy, nor are they organic additions to Christian theology. The death-of-God mood is a revolt that rejects most ungratefully the past wisdom and genius of all those who have transmitted Christianity to us. This new conceit suffers under the illusion that we are smarter than the apostles and that Augustine and Luther are only adequate corollary reading for good secondary schools. Now, borne on the wings of modern enlightenment, we shall bravely free our lofty insights from the drag of yesterday. Such an attitude is that of a defensive teenager tooting his own horn, howling with reproof, rife with objection toward the masterpieces of the past. Having emerged so recently from two wars and trembling now within the shadow of another, how can we pontificate with such authority?

Do not the angels sing for Mr. Dewart? We shall wait for him to put his articulate pen to work on what Christ meant when he said, “Except ye … become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

Dissecting 007

James Bond’s World of Values, by Lycurgus M. Starkey, Jr. (Abingdon, 1966, 96 pp., $1.45); and The Devil with James Bond, by Ann S. Boyd (John Knox, 1966, 123 pp., $1.75), are reviewed by Clyde S. Kilby, professor of English, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

Dr. Starkey and Mrs. Boyd hold diametrical opinions on the work of Ian Fleming. Starkey believes that Fleming, through his hero, James Bond, glorifies sex, sadism, violence, snobbery, “gambling, guzzling, sports-car gunning, and gourmandising,” and a narrow nationalism. Mrs. Boyd proposes that Bond is in reality “a modern knight of faith whose adventures involve a gallery of modern demons who have been attacking contemporary mankind just as diabolically as Medusa and all the other legendary demons and dragons attacked mankind in ages past.” She thinks that Bond is indeed another St. George going about to slay the demons in contemporary society.

I do not find myself in much sympathy with either book. Starkey’s is not at all a study of Fleming and therefore has a completely unjustified title. Rather, it is a series of sermons against the evils he finds approved by Fleming’s hero. The sermons, which Dr. Starkey delivered over NBC television, are earnest, informative, and excellent in expression. They take Fleming, however, simply as a point of departure.

On the other hand, Mrs. Boyd makes a thorough examination, from her own point of view, of Fleming’s books. Her clever hypothesis is so intriguingly presented and so undogmatic that I think it might be palatable even to one as opposed as Dr. Starkey. She concedes that her view is “a little preposterous,” but she carries through on it so well that it becomes interesting for its own sake.

This is not to say that Mrs. Boyd is simply toying with her reader. She insists that the reading of all the Fleming novels in their chronological order will show the reasonableness of her argument. The spirit that has been missing in Western civilization, says she, is that of the image of St. George the dragon-slayer, an image that for generations captured the imagination of youth and benefited them. James Bond has such an image, says Mrs. Boyd, as partially proved by the fact that his novels have sold 45 million copies and sent 100 million people to see the movie versions. (Although both books were printed in 1966, Dr. Starkey reports only 18 million copies sold. It seems too bad that errors of this sort are allowed to pass both writer and editor.)

The thing that impresses me most about Mrs. Boyd’s book is not that she proves her point but the astonishingly wide backdrop against which she tries to prove it. She makes use of a large array of distinguished authority, particularly Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer. Although she sometimes marshals her material with strength, one often senses little more than ingenuity at work. I think she might have done better to forget Bond and use her insight and skill to try to show the need today of another St. George. There is indeed such a need.

I felt that I should not write this review without first reading one of Fleming’s stories. At random I picked up Dr. No. I discovered no St. George but only a salad of mystery entertainment, with a tart dressing of sex. On the whole, it seemed to be a very contrived performance. But then, Mrs. Boyd insists one must read not just one book but all. I did inquire of a James Bond fan (a Christian) and was told that the truth is probably halfway between Dr. Starkey and Mrs. Boyd. That is, Fleming, like many other popular writers today, dishes out lots of violence, drinking, and sex. At the same time his overcoming hero can become for some readers, a model—like Batman—of bravery and endurance.

Catalyst For Christian Writers

The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation, by U. Milo Kaufmann (Yale University, 1966, 263 pp., $6.50), is reviewed by John S. Ramsey, graduate student, University of Maryland, College Park.

The Protestant spirit, here and in England, has never been especially charitable toward imaginative literature; but in seventeenth-century England, the Puritan wing of the Reformation permitted the creative writer as little room for the practice of his art as the Tudor monarchs allowed the Puritan for the exercise of his religion. Yet within this heritage so inimical to the creative imagination, Puritanism discovered its most original genius and its most enduring work of art: John Bunyan and The Pilgrim’s Progress.

U. Milo Kaufmann’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation is a scholarly and penetrating analysis, marred only occasionally by its once having been a doctoral dissertation. It supplies a readable account of the theological forces within Puritanism antagonistic to imaginative literature, and it offers a convincing explanation for the artistic excellence of The Pilgrim’s Progress in spite of those forces. Indeed, Kaufmann suggests how the very restrictions of Puritanism upon the activity of the imagination defined a territory that Bunyan could imaginatively explore.

Significant in Kaufmann’s book is the fact that both in the Puritan reverence for the Bible as the sole authority for faith and conduct and in the corollary emphasis on the use of the Scriptures only for the discovery of doctrine, the creative writer’s imaginative devices were denied validity: His use of symbol, image and metaphor was not appreciated by his readers, since these literary devices communicated ambiguous suggestion rather than clear, unspotted doctrine. The Puritan spirit thus inhibited the poetic sensibility. And this inhibition reveals in part why modern Puritanism—call it orthodoxy or evangelical conservatism—has produced so few great writers, and perhaps no writers of the stature of those who have fashioned from their antipathy to the Puritan spirit a creative stimulus.

But Bunyan, Kaufmann shows, found his imaginative freedom for The Pilgrim’s Progress within the narrow boundaries of Puritan meditation, a discipline that urged the believer to reflect upon the Word (an exercise of making and preaching a Puritan sermon to oneself) and to meditate both upon heaven (a locus for infinite imaginative opportunity) and upon his experience (a process using memory and imagination in which the truth of the Scriptures was attested). Within these limits Bunyan’s imagination operated freely, as shown, for example, in his description of Christian’s sojourn at House Beautiful.

Moreover, Kaufmann’s demonstration of the importance of meditative traditions in Bunyan’s art places The Pilgrim’s Progress within the larger artistic context described by Louis Martz in his seminal works on this subject—The Poetry of Meditation and more recently The Paradise Within. Martz argues that much of the seventeenth-century religious poetry (which, incidentally, has been a major influence on a good deal of modern literature) was not ecstatic lyricism; rather, it was a poetry shaped by the rigorous formulas of medieval and Tridentine spiritual exercise.

The tradition of meditation, then, which seems to be a factor of artistic excellence in seventeenth-century English literature, is, according to Kaufmann, not exclusively the province of Donne and Milton, Herbert and Crashaw. Bunyan is there, too; his style, structure, and content prove it. Furthermore, Kaufmann’s study—and Martz’s studies, too—reveals that in the genre of meditative art, the best writers refused to oppose their antecedents; rather, they found in them a discipline for their art. The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation is perhaps the catalyst needed by the aspiring writer suffering within the restrictions of contemporary, orthodox Protestantism.

Book Briefs

The Mercersburg Theology, edited by James Hastings Nichols (Oxford, 1966, 384 pp., $7.50). Selections from the writings of John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff, nineteenth-century German Reformed Church leaders whose ecumenical theology stressed sacramentalism.

Pioneers in Mission, edited by R. Pierce Beaver (Eerdmans, 1966, 291 pp., $6.95). A Christian missions scholar amasses an abundance of ordination sermons, charges, and instructions that shed light on early American missions to the heathen.

Christ’s Parables Today, by George K. Bowers (Beacon Hill, 1966, 139 pp., $1.95). Unravels some of the enigmas of Jesus’ parables about the King, his kingdom, his subjects.

Peloubet’s Select Notes 1967, by Wilbur M. Smith (W. A. Wilde, 1966, 436 pp., $3.25).

The following article by J. W. Hyde appeared in the February, 1967, issue of the “Presbyterian Survey” under the title, “NIP*: Good or Bad?” (*New Improved Presbyterian). It explains one reason why there is so much unrest within all major Protestant denominations.

By and large, laymen know the world in which they live and look to the Church to preach and teach the Gospel by which alone people’s hearts can be changed. When they see the Church becoming a social-action group, they are rightly alarmed.

After listening to the pronouncements emanating from the courts of the church, one gets the impression that the Presbyterian Church U.S. has been preaching Christianity on a trial basis, and any day now she may change her name to the “New Improved Presbyterian Church.” We seem to have switched our emphasis from God so loved the world to Jesus went about doing good. I read these pronouncements with dismay and increasing alarm, and quite frankly, I would rather fight than switch.

Let’s take a look at a prototype—this New, Improved Presbyterian. His ecumenical viewpoint borders on what someone has rightly described as an ecumaniac—a man who believes everyone else’s religion is better than his own.

Briefly, his joy knew no bounds when we officially joined COCU. Nothing short of full organic union with all of Protestantism will satisfy him, and after this, a world church.

I firmly believe the strength of the Protestant Church to be in its multiplicity, not in its oneness. The unity of a free society resides in its diversity, and diversity is more compatible with Christian unity than is uniformity.

The ecumenical movement has translated unity and oneness to mean unison and union. But there is absolutely no relationship. Real unity does not require compromise, sameness, uniformity, nor union. It does require a unity of “mood, disposition and objective,” as well as an understanding of the freedom that is in Christ.

Unity does not require the submerging of differences and motivating forces. On the contrary, it is a united desire to present Christ to the world in the best way we know. Christians have a oneness with each other, not necessarily because we think alike, but because we pledge allegiance to a common Saviour. We should shout this—not from a common pulpit—but in a million different ways, and from a thousand pulpits. We should let the world know that this Christ in whom we believe does not demand uniformity and union among Christians, but rather a united concern to make the Christian faith a living reality in the world—an eagerness to get on with it.

Merger for the sake of putting up a united Christian front to the rest of the world is hypocrisy.

Regarding the mission of the Church, the New Improved Presbyterian’s viewpoint seems to be that while the Church is not necessarily wedded to the world, there should nevertheless be some sort of common-law arrangement to serve the purpose of accommodation. A sort of hide-and-seek arrangement, whereby every time the world progresses another notch on the scale of sophistication, the Church adopts a new stance in order to be recognized. She jumps out of her hiding place and says, “Look at me.” This she calls “relevancy.” I call it absurdity. She calls it compatibility—I call it compromise.

It is not the job of the Church to preach reformation through social action. It is the task of the Church to preach redemption through Christ. A man does not become a Christian through the knowledge that he is doing something morally right. It might help his conscience, but it will do absolutely nothing for his soul.

The Church has a high calling: to confront men with Jesus Christ. No other organization on the face of the earth is charged with this responsibility. She will, therefore, influence the world in direct proportion to her ability to bring about this confrontation. This is her great task—to proclaim the Gospel of Christ. She can eliminate every evil in the world, but if eliminating evil is her primary task, her job would then be through. If every person in the world today had adequate food, adequate housing, adequate income; if all men were “equal”; if every possible social evil and injustice were done away with and the world were truly a Utopia—men would still need one thing: Christ!

One cannot be concerned over the soul of his fellow man without being concerned over his welfare. Good work indeed is closely related to the teachings of Christ, as well as every other religion, and unconcern at this point makes a mockery of Christianity. It places the Church in the position of preaching Christ in isolation. The servant theme in the New Testament, however, does not suggest that men serve men, but that they serve Christ among men. The Christian’s concern for his brother and the Church’s mission are two different things.

As you might have guessed, the New Improved Presbyterian is unequivocally in favor of the National Council of Churches. In his sight they can do no wrong. Perhaps he is right, but they could surely use a good public relations man right now. I think the NCC does some good, but it also does some harm; and there is serious doubt in the minds of many as to which it does the most of.

The NCC shatters the unity of the Church by its very controversy, and the irony of it all is that the impression of unity expressed by Christians counseling together in this manner is overshadowed by disunity of Christians quarreling.

I don’t mind counseling with other denominations at all, nor do I mind being challenged and disturbed by groups who do not think as I; but I object very strenuously when the group initiates programs which I do not approve, makes pronouncements (from war in Viet Nam to unemployment insurance) on political and social issues, and spends my church’s money on causes to which I do not subscribe, yet conveys to the rest of the world not only that I agree, but that this is Christian unity.

I have come to the conclusion that the NCC is a politically oriented, religious organization run by professional clergymen who think that the Church should be involved in the mainstream of American and world politics. This view of the mission of the Church is incompatible with evangelical Christianity, which proclaims the “Good News” of the Gospel, not the pronouncements of the U.N.; which builds its message around a person, not an organization; which witnesses to the power of the Holy Spirit, not the Democratic Party; which teaches salvation by faith, not by united community action.

Certainly the Church should speak, but she should speak against the backdrop of the love of Christ for the world and his reason for coming, not in the name of social reform. Certainly the Cross should be taken to the market place, not necessarily by the Church, but by individual Christians working in the world. As George MacLeod has written, “Christ was not crucified in a sanctuary between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves.” He is present in the world to redeem the world, and the Church had better get this message across, or the sanctuary will become obsolete.

Copyright 1967, Presbyterian Survey.

Reprinted with permission.

Dear Seers-Through-A-Glass-Darkly:

Crystal-ball-gazing is on the increase! Seers of the future like the phenomenal Jeanne Dixon, the unpredictable Criswell, the astrological Carroll Righter, and numerous roadside gypsies are flourishing. But for my money none of these can hold a bell, book, or candle to the Rev. Richard P. Buchman when it comes to foretelling the future. Check some of his “Fearless Forecasts” for 1967, published in The Messenger of Brooklyn’s Cadman Memorial Church (Congregational):

1. Early in the year “a justly unknown theologian from the Marksman School of Theology (‘We Aim to Please’) will discover that God is a red-and-white petunia. The New York Times, titillated, will interview Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Vincent Peale, and an ecstatic PR man from Burpee’s, who will agree that God does sometimes show himself to men in funny ways. Before the end of the month twenty-nine Ph.D.’s will react in print to the discovery, thereby stoking up the theological discussion groups for another year.”

2. “On Race Relations Sunday, 33,148 ministers will say: ‘Eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week,’ believing as they say it that no one has ever said it before, and further that by saying it they will be effecting major changes in the attitudes of their listeners.”

3. “At the Annual Pow-wow of the Consultation on Church Union, a spokesman will declare at noon on Monday that ‘the obstacles we face are insuperable.’ At two o’clock he will report breathlessly that the Holy Spirit has overcome all the obstacles. At three, he will predict that Church Union is twenty years away—ten at the very least. At four, he will announce that everything is ready for referral to the churches. At five, in lieu of referral, the Holy Spirit will cast one vote in favor of the plan.”

I’m not one to dabble in the occult, but I suspect that come 1968, we all will be convinced of Buchman’s oracular powers.

Remembering that the future lies ahead, EUTYCHUS III

Final Word On The Final Third

Since I read CHRISTIANITY TODAY primarily for balance—against the opposite theological extreme of humanism—I do not expect to agree with everything that you publish. However, I wish to compliment you upon the excellent symposium of January 20 about the “final third” of our century. Particularly did I find significance in what Mark Hatfield said about war and peace, Bishop Kennedy about intra-Protestant ecumenism, and Kenneth Scott Latourette about world revolution and Communism.

The most un-helpful contribution, in my opinion, was by a man identified as a professor of philosophy. In view of what he said, one must wonder about his qualifications to teach “love of knowledge.” ARTHUR O. ACKENBOM Grace-Frontenac Methodist Churches Pittsburg, Kan.

Crime protected by the Supreme Court and the lower courts with their criminal sympathies is an understatement by writer Gordon H. Clark, philosophy professor at Butler University.

KERAL CARSEN

President

Association for Social Psychology

Ottawa, Ont.

I have just finished reading the paragraphs on “situational ethics” by Thomas B. McDormand.…

The true situationist continues to take law quite seriously, but he also remains sensitive to the contingencies of any given situation. He is not afraid to supplant the ethic of law with the ethic of love when the situation so demands.

That Jesus was a situationist should be obvious from his attitude toward the woman taken in adultery, his healing of a man’s hand on the Sabbath, and his willingness to touch a leper. It is not, therefore, surprising to read that he was criticized by the legalistic religious leaders of his day, who found his actions threatening. Although we do not have these criticisms preserved for us in detail, I rather suspect that the reasoning behind them was similar, in many respects, to some of that presented by Mr. McDormand.

BYRON BURCH

San Anselmo, Calif.

Voicing A Very Strong Hatred

I believe the Berlin Congress broadened and deepened the involvement of the participants with Christians outside the immediate fellowships, and I am enthusiastic about Berlin’s potential for enlarging the ecumenical dialogue.… I consider adherence to the infallibility of Scripture demonic. My Miami Beach speech was simply a spelling out of this conviction in the context of the Berlin Congress and of Billy Graham’s presence at Miami Beach.

Anyone who thinks my paper does not reflect an authentic ecumenical view has a romantic notion of “ecumenical.” The word is not a synonym for “conciliatory.” “Ecumenical” rather means that Christians in one place and in many places take each other seriously enough to enter into dialogue with the intention of together worshipping God and witnessing, in deed and word, to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Ecumenists often suppress differences so as to establish fellowship and mutual action. In certain circumstances, this may be responsible behavior—for the Holy Spirit often finds ways to outwit intellectual differences when Christians are together in fellowship and service. But hatred for the doctrine of the perfect book is very strong in a very large segment of ecumenical leadership, and I can hardly be considered irresponsible and ecumenically inauthentic in voicing this hatred.

WILLIS E. ELLIOTT

United Church Board for Homeland Ministries

New York, N. Y.

Humorless Humor

Usually I enjoy your “What If …” cartoon, but somehow the one in the February 3 issue gave me a jolt. The Garden of Gethsemane to me is a place of holy mystery.… Somehow I can’t picture my Lord laughing at this cartoon. Can you? or your kin?

PHYLLIS C. REISIG

Redondo Beach, Calif.

I strongly object to the cartoon.… It is absolutely tasteless!! You have published excellent cartoons, but this one—No!

SIGMUND H. KRIEGER

Oberursel, Germany

I enjoyed reading Eutychus and his Kin until lately when a different author took it over.… In any other magazine Eutychus III would be an instant hit, I’m sure, but I don’t think he has any place in your magazine, which otherwise seems to be written by devout men of God.… Humor and cynicism are two different things.

MIRIAM BURTSCHE

De Bary, Fla.

The Catholic Mind would like to reprint your delightful “Eutychus” feature, “Dear Verbal Militiamen: …” (Dec. 23).

EILEEN TOBIN

Editorial Asst.

Catholic Mind

New York, N.Y.

I always look for your cartoon in each issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY with alacrity. Keep up the good work.

ROBERT H. COUNTESS

Lookout Mountain, Tenn.

One of the features of your valuable magazine which I always enjoy is the series of cartoons entitled “What If.…” So often they seem to hit the nail on the head.

JOHN ELDER

Waverly, Ohio

The Idea Seizers

In “Two Times at Once” (News, Jan. 6) you ask the question, “Why haven’t big denominations … seized the newspaper idea?”

One has! The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod publishes the Reporter.

WALTER E. ROSENBERG

Stewardship Counselor

The Atlantic District

The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod

New York, N. Y.

Inactive Meddling

I read your February 3 editorial, “NCC Opposes Loans to South Africa,” with considerable interest. It appears to me that you believe that the National Council is meddling only if it speaks against the policy of the Chase Manhattan and First National City Banks. What you fail to realize is that silence in the face of the activities of these banks is also “meddling.” I believe that you have forgotten that the villains in the Parable of the Good Samaritan were not only the robbers who attacked the man, but the priest and the Levite who walked by on the other side of the road and did nothing.

ROBERT S. BEAMAN

Westminster Presbyterian Church

Englishtown, N. J.

In practical terms I would suggest that every denomination in the NCC and WCC begin immediately to submit in three-year cycles a referendum to the local churches as to whether or not they wish to have the denomination remain in affiliation with the NCC and WCC.

JAMES MILLER

Montclair Community Church

Denver, Colo.

Is It Contagious?

Your editorial criticizing Representative Adam Clayton Powell missed the crucial problem. Far more important than the irresponsibility of one man is the question of why the people of his district continue to send him to Congress even though the facts of his misbehavior are well known. His re-election by an overwhelming majority is an indictment either of the representative form of government itself, or of the moral corruption of the people of his district, or of both. Whichever it is, democracy will be in deep trouble if the sickness of the Harlem community should ever spread throughout our society.

HENRY WILLIAMS

Bloomington, Ind.

The Shape Of Art

What Mr. Leitch is discussing in “For the Sake of Art” (Current Religious Thought, Feb. 3) is neither drama nor the desire to present realism, but simply an excuse to engage in and promote wickedness under the disguise of being something respectable and artistic.… His comments were excellent.

JAMES W. BOYD

Red Bank Church of Christ

Chattanooga, Tenn.

Mr. Leitch says, “In any case, great literature is not only a reflection of life but also a creator of life.” I understand this to mean that the literature influences the thoughts and behavior of the reader or viewer.…

If you can find any Christian sociologists (or non-Christians) who would agree, we could re-convince the Christian community that laws against pornographic literature and topless dresses make a difference.… In a recent three months around the country I found that my very fine, consecrated, evangelical friends … are not convinced that the above idea is true.

WILLIAM F. CAMPBELL, M.D.

Roanoke, Va.

Mr. Leitch identifies Jews under the rubric of nation and race. Do you really believe that Jews are a race?… Let it suffice to suggest that any “racialist” compare an American Jew with a Yemenite Jew, an Ethiopian Jew, a Chinese Jew, etc., and then report on their common racial characteristics.

ALFRED RUSSEL

Editor

Education in Judaism

The American Council for Judaism

New York, N. Y.

Assigning Labels

The liberal theologians are the Sadducees, the seminary professors are the doctors of the law, and the so-called evangelicals are the Pharisees (ultra-orthodox in doctrine but in works they deny Him; in fact, many would fight to prove they are right). In fact, is not this the purpose of all these who have judged themselves worthy to speak with authority in matters pertaining to God?

I thank God that there are many little people carrying out the commission of the Lord Jesus in going and making disciples and living humble lives, probably set at naught by the great organized forces of Christianity, yet are faithful to the Saviour, to the Bible, to his Church.

STERLING P. KERR

First Baptist

Wilmington, Ill.

Readers Say

Your fine magazine is a great thing for a layman like myself.…

However, could you couch the articles in plain, ordinary language so a fellow like myself does not have to read an article with a dictionary in the other hand …?

WALLACE G. HIGGINS

Philadelphia, Pa.

It has been a real pleasure for me to read the discussions on theology. While it takes some time to digest them, the meat is of real spiritual value to a preacher who is seventy-two years young.…

W. L. SWARTZ

Flint Springs Cumberland Presbyterian

Cleveland, Tenn.

I find that CHRISTIANITY TODAY is one of the most stimulating journals of its type available, even though as a Catholic we differ widely in many areas, especially the doctrine of the nature of the Church.

I am glad to see evangelical Christianity speaking to the issues.…

HARRY W. SHIPPS

Vicar

The Church of the Holy Apostles (Episcopal)

Neither Christians nor Jews can find a basis for anti-Semitism in the Gospels

Many people assume that the New Testament, if not actually anti-Semitic, at least provides a basis or starting point for anti-Semitism. Gentile Christians in particular, reading it from their own standpoint and with the legacy of pagan anti-Semitism, quickly reached this conclusion. A tradition was thus established that persists to the present day. There are still Christians who think their prejudice is biblical, and still Jews who fear the New Testament as anti-Semitic. In fact, however, the New Testament, far from providing a basis for anti-Semitism, offers an illustration of it and bears testimony against it. Several points need to be brought out.

I

The Gospels were written within the context of Judaism. We must recognize this if we are to understand and appreciate them fully. The subject, our Lord himself, is a Jew. The disciples are Jews. The opponents are Jews. The main themes of divergence are Jewish. The betrayer is a Jew. The sources are Jewish. The authors, apart from Luke, are also Jews.

This is not to say that there is no distinction between Judaism and Christianity, or to minimize the universal range of the Gospel. The point is simply that Gentile Christians have no factual or biblical right to impose a Gentile understanding on the persons, events, and teachings recorded. An anti-Semitic reading of the New Testament can arise only if existing Gentile anti-Semitism is foisted upon texts that by their very nature can be anti-Semitic only in a self-contradictory, self-destructive way.

Ii

In many important respects, the Passion theology of the Gospels is a continuation and development of the passion theology of the Old Testament (and Apocrypha). Vital new features are added, notably the Incarnation and the vicarious death and resurrection of the divine Son, which lie at the very heart of the Gospel. Yet from the days of the Exile, in particular, the idea that the innocent suffer, not in spite of but because of their righteousness, had been common in Israel. The faithful servant of God is beset by enemies. He has to be a witness, as the prophets were. The witness he bears may entail persecution, imprisonment, poverty, or even death. The Maccabean martyrs provide an example. In a true sense, if not the full Christian sense, the suffering is for others. It is also for God, for God’s law and God’s truth.

Jesus, and later the disciples and all Christians, both Jew and Gentile, take their place with the prophets, with the exiled, with the oppressed and the slaughtered of Israel’s past. As Hebrews so nobly puts it, the heroes of Israel’s past are the great cloud of witnesses around the suffering saints of the present, and the author and finisher of this faith is Jesus himself, who for the joy that was set before him endured the Cross and despised the shame. (Compare the concept of the “martyr” in the Old Testament, Judaism, and the New Testament.)

Iii

Mention of the shame leads us to the third and perhaps the most incisive consideration. This is that Jesus, like the suffering righteous before him, was made an object of scorn and derision, especially by and to the Gentiles.

In early days, Israel had often been made a byword in judgment. God himself put his people to shame because of their transgressions. But faithful servants of God such as the prophets had already, for a very different reason, become objects of special derision even within Israel itself. With the Exile, the dispersion, and the resettlement in the land under alien suzerainty, the Jews became exposed to ridicule and contempt that was increasingly directed, not against their defeats, but against their distinctive faith and practice. This aspect of shame is seen already in the Servant Songs of Isaiah, in Job, and in many Psalms. It comes out again especially in Maccabees. Here the temple is desecrated, the city is shamefully treated, the patriots are subjected to humiliation.

This whole movement reaches a culmination in the Passion narratives of the Gospels. Jesus himself foretells that he will be scornfully treated (Matt. 20:19). In the course of the trial and crucifixion, he is an object of ridicule in the palace of Herod (Luke 23:11), at the hands of the Roman soldiers (Matt. 26:67), and finally on the cross itself (Mark 15:31). (Compare the concept of “shame” in the biblical world.) That his own countrymen also ridiculed him is no new feature. The most severe shaming, however, is carried out by the Gentiles, who vent their anti-Semitic spleen in the mock robe, the crown of thorns, the spitting, the smiting, and possibly also the title on the Cross, “King of the Jews.” Jesus himself, as part of his vicarious self-offering, is a victim, not a protagonist, of anti-Semitism. The positive “inasmuch” of Matthew’s Gospel might well have a negative counterpart whenever we are confronted by a target of anti-Semitic as well as anti-Christian violence.

Iv

Objection might be made that in the case of our Lord there is the special factor that the ecclesiastical authorities of his own race handed him over to the Gentiles. Are they not unsympathetically portrayed in the Gospels and in, for example, Stephen’s speech in Acts? This is, however, a common enough feature in the passion piety and theology of the Old Testament. The prophets had been persecuted and even put to death by religious and political leaders, often for the sake of Gentile alliances. The Maccabean heroes were hampered and betrayed by the fifth column of ecclesiastics ready to come to terms with the Gentiles.

If the New Testament portrayal is unsympathetic, it should be remembered (1) that depiction of similar figures is just as unsympathetic in the Old Testament, (2) that the lack of sympathy is due to outrage at betrayal of the faith, not to hatred of it, and (3) that the New Testament criticism itself is from within, not from without. The sin of the leaders is, not that they are Jews, but that they are fundamentally “false” Jews who are guilty of betrayal, of handing over, into the hands of the Gentiles. The New Testament protest is not against Jews as contrasted with Gentiles, for the Gentiles actually carried out the sentence. It is against Jews who are Jews outwardly and not (in Paul’s phrase) inwardly. It is against the spiritual descendants of those who were ready to sacrifice Elijah to Jezebel, or Jeremiah to the Egyptians, or the Maccabean patriots to the Syrians. Against these “handers over,” of course, the New Testament sets the many who waited for redemption in Israel (like the 7,000 of Elijah’s day), or the numbers (including priests, Acts 6:7) who became the nucleus of the Jerusalem Church.

V

We must note an important distinction. The Jew, like all of us, has a right to criticize his own people in a way that applies to others only if they are prepared to speak and act from within the same context. In other words, a Gentile, even if a Christian, is untrue to his own Scriptures, to the New Testament, if he confuses its critical pro-Semitism with prejudiced anti-Semitism, and thinks it gives him a right, as Gentile, to criticize the Jew, as Jew.

The Gentile Christian can certainly adopt the standpoint of the Old and New Testaments toward unperceiving and unbelieving Israel, though even here he should also remember that Gentiles past and present have their own quota of the unperceiving and the unbelieving, and that in fact it is only by grace, and through God’s work in Israel, that he is no longer an alien but a member of the one household of God. Incidentally, he should also remember two further facts: first, if charges of deicide are hurled, the whole of mankind is represented at the Cross; and second, that the ingrafted branch, as Paul reminds us, can be broken off again even more easily than the natural branch.

Vi

The New Testament, like the Old Testament, sees God’s hand even in the shaming of the righteous. God brought deliverance by the selling of Joseph to Egypt and his shame and imprisonment there. God was behind the suffering and ignominy of Job. God used the prophets in their afflictions. Similarly, God brought shame and grief to the dearly beloved Son, not in judgment, but in reconciling love and salvation. Even instruments of evil are unwitting instruments in God’s hands. The Passion theology of the Bible sees that God himself can be the enemy of his own people, even in its choicest representatives, and finally in the one true Israelite, who gave himself the one for the many.

But this divine “anti-Semitism,” which links Old Testament heroes and Christian martyrs at the intersecting point of the Cross, has nothing whatever to do with Gentile anti-Semitism. It is the outworking of pro-Semitism, of election. It is the overruling of evil in the service of good. Its work is positive, not negative. Its impulse is love, not hate. God is himself its ultimate target, in the person of the Son. It teaches, not the condoning of evil, but its forgiveness, and the triumphing over it by good. At its heart is willing vicariousness, the readiness to be the target of hatred, to be exposed equally to God’s holy purpose, which may involve contempt and persecution, in order that others might be enlightened and redeemed. Jesus himself, bearing our sin, had to be the victim both of the Father’s judgment and of the hatred of the rebellious race, in order that there might be deliverance in his name for both Jew and Gentile, the one Israel of God.

This is surely no basis for anti-Semitic action. On the contrary, it is a summons to Christians to see their calling as successors of the Old Testament righteous, those against whom the spleen of a hostile world is directed, and who may even have to undergo the experience of apparently having God himself against them. For it is thus that, in fellowship with their Lord, not by persecuting others but through their own shame and tribulation, they enter the Kingdom of God.

First of Two Parts

The doctrine of the Atonement, so indispensably central to the New Testament, has once again become an important subject of theological study.

I. Recent Studies Of The Atonement In The Giants Of Yesterday

Several current writers have been bringing the solid testimonies of yesterday’s theologians into fresh view. For example, Samuel J. Mikolaski, of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote his Oxford doctoral dissertation on objective theories of the Atonement advanced by R. W. Dale, James Denney, and P. T. Forsyth. The dean of our Columbia Seminary faculty gives an elective in Forsyth. John Randolph Taylor’s attractive book God Loves Like That deals with James Denney. The noted German preacher Helmut Thielicke has rediscovered Charles Spurgeon—just when some people were discounting any preacher who followed him. Paul van Buren wrote an excellent doctoral thesis on Calvin’s doctrine of the Atonement, entitled Christ in Our Place. One can only regret that under the aegis of natural science and the empirical method, he finds himself unable to accept as a fact the Easter event, which is the prime witness to the living God.

One of the most unexpected returns to the past is found in the commendation by Princeton’s George S. Hendry of the Augsburg Confession, a document that sets forth the doctrine of the Atonement with which Hendry differs so radically in his The Gospel of Incarnation and The Westminster Confession for Today. Here is the fine statement of the Gospel proclaimed by the heroic Lutheran princes at Augsburg:

Also they teach that men cannot be justified (obtain forgiveness and righteousness) before God by their own powers, merits, or works; but are freely justified (of grace) for Christ’s sake through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor, and their sins forgiven for Christ’s sake, who by His death has satisfied for our sins. This faith does God impute for righteousness before Him, Rom. 3 and 4.

God, not for our merit’s sake, but for Christ’s sake, does justify those who believe that they for Christ’s sake are received into favor.

Christ is the one Mediator, Propitiation, High-Priest, Intercessor. His passion is an oblation and satisfaction.

No wonder John Calvin signed this magnificent manifesto! Yet the Westminster Standards make faith slightly more personal: saving faith is our receiving and resting upon Christ alone for salvation as he is offered to us in the Gospel.

Ii. The Call For An Objective Atonement By Theologians Of The Word

Emil Brunner’s The Mediator (English edition: Lutterworth, 1934) is a striking call for an objective Atonement. Against the subjectivizing of reconciliation in Ritschl’s “ethical docetism,” Brunner warns,

So long as we continue to reject the Scriptural idea of Divine holiness, of Divine wrath, and of Divine righteousness in punishment, the process of decay within the Christian Church will continue [p. 48].

That God possesses and exercises penal justice is a central idea of the Bible [p. 466, n. 1].

When man rebelled against his Maker, it was not only that he fled the presence of God. The Almighty drove him out of Eden and placed the cherubim with a flaming sword as a veto against his return. He could come back into God’s fellowship only when the Lord himself opened the way by the Cross of the Mediator.

The Cross is the sign of the Christian faith, of the Christian Church, of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.… He who understands the Cross aright … understands the Bible, he understands Jesus Christ.… Therefore this text—“He bore our sins”—must be understood … as the foundation upon which stands the whole of the New Testament or the Gospel … [a quote from Luther; p. 435].

Luther’s theology was a theologia crucis (theology of the Cross):

The whole struggle … for the sola fide [faith alone], the soli deo gloria [the glory of God alone], was simply the struggle for the right interpretation of the Cross [ibid.].

Karl Barth says that the Father gave effect to Christ’s death and passion as a satisfaction for us, as our redemption from death to life. In him God the Judge gave himself to be judged in the sinner’s place, so that the Cross is the strict outworking of the judicial aspect of the Atonement with its emphasis on representative atonement (see, for example, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 157).

From old Scotia comes a current Edinburgh testimony in T. F. Torrance’s Theology in Reconstruction (Eerdmans, 1966):

Jesus Christ who took our nature upon Him has given to God an account for us, making atonement in our place, and in our name has yielded Himself in sacrifice and worship and praise and thanksgiving to the Father.

Once and for all, He has wrought out atonement for us in his sacrifice on the Cross.

Justification by Christ is grounded upon His mighty Act in which He took our place, substituting Himself for us in the obedient response He rendered God.… In Himself He has opened a way to the Father, so that we may approach God solely through Him and on the ground of what He had done and is.

Nothing in our hands we bring, simply to His Cross we cling.

Iii. The Emphasis On Isaiah 53 By The Biblicists

Joachim Jeremias, the noted Continental biblicist, has offered valuable contributions to the understanding of the Cross in various writings, particularly The Servant of the Lord, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, and The Central Message of the New Testament. In the first of these he shows how the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah underlies every part of the New Testament and thus every part of the testimony of the primitive Church. First Peter applies to Jesus’ suffering the substitutionary language of Isaiah 53:5—“by whose stripes ye were healed” (1 Pet. 2:24100).

In The Central Message of the New Testament, Jeremias shows that our Saviour viewed the fulfillment of Isaiah 53 as his God-appointed task, and that he interpreted his death to his disciples as a vicarious dying for the countless multitude of those who lay under the judgment of God. In place of the expiatory vow of the murderer, “May my death expiate all my sins,” Jesus prayed, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Before his conversion Paul had required believers to say, “Let Christ be accursed”; but the Risen Redeemer made his Apostle to the Gentiles add two words—“for me.” When Christ hung on the tree, he was made a curse for us, even for me. The sinless One took the place of sinners. “He takes the very place of the ungodly, of the enemies of God, of the world opposed to God,” says Jeremias. “The atoning power of Jesus’ death is inexhaustible and boundless.” It reaches from his descent into the blackest depths of Hades (First Peter) to his ascension to offer his blood in the holy of holies (Hebrews).

The importance of Isaiah 53 as the basis for the teaching of Jesus and of the New Testament Church is recognized currently by other scholars also, such as Oscar Cullmann and F. F. Bruce.

In The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, Jeremias shows that when Jesus spoke of his blood shed for our forgiveness, he was referring to his sacrificial death. Likewise, according to Hebraic thinking, the close parallelism between “justified by his blood” and “reconciled by his death” in Romans 5 shows that “his blood” means Christ’s death for sinners. The blind spot in Robert H. Culpepper’s otherwise thoughtful book on Interpreting the Atonement is his misinterpretation of blood.

Otto Michel in Römerbrief shows the biblical stress upon the wrath and judgment of God with the gospel answer in the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ as the reconciliation provided by God—without, however, any rational theory (such as Anselm’s).

Iv. Scholarly Classical Calvinists

Turning to British Christianity, we find that Leon Morris has written two volumes on the Cross worthy to stand with James Denney’s The Death of Christ and The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation. The thorough scholarship of Morris’s work is not lower than that found in Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross vindicates the offering of Christ as a propitiation, his blood as his sacrificial death that turned aside the wrath of God, and the redemption he wrought as a deliverance by the price of his death. Morris won his doctoral degree on his ability to defend these theses in a university where the catchword was: “Thou shalt love the lord thy Dodd, and thy Niebuhr as thyself.”

Having dealt with the great central concepts of the Gospel in his doctoral thesis, Morris has added The Cross in the New Testament, showing that in the Cross God himself intervened to change the whole relation between his Holy Being and guilty sinners. For Peter, Christ bore our sins in his own body on the tree. He suffered for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God. In Hebrews, Jesus Christ is the great high priest who offers himself once for all, and the faultless victim whose precious blood removes all sins. No matter how sin is understood, Christ is the answer.

In America, Roger Nicole has valiantly supported Morris in the maintenance of propitiation as the true translation of the New Testament terms and Christ’s blood as referring to his true sacrifice for sins. And John Gerstner of Pittsburgh Seminary has added his popular Primer of Reconciliation.

G. C. Berkouwer of Amsterdam includes in his theological studies a volume on The Work of Christ. In my opinion, Berkouwer is the Charles Hodge of the twentieth century, the ablest systematic theologian of classical Calvinism. I advise my students to read Berkouwer for classical Calvinism in today’s world and Barth for neo-Calvinism. Incidentally, these two leaders think highly of each other. For example, Barth acknowledges that he has learned from Berkouwer on justification, and Berkouwer has an understanding appreciation of what he calls The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth.

In The Work of Christ, Berkouwer faces the currents and crosscurrents of theological thought with an able and scholarly grasp of the Reformed faith. He accepts mystery and paradox and avoids pressing his logic where revelation is silent.

V. Particular Themes

The classical or “victorious” view. Gustaf Aulén in Christus Victor has recovered what he calls the triumphant or victorious aspect of the Atonement. Starting with the mighty God, Aulén sees the vertical coming from above in an uninterrupted line, conquering all his and our enemies. Here Christ is the divine hero, overcoming sin, death, Satan, the law, the curse, and the wrath of God. Luther has some of this in his “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and in his commentary on Galatians. But no full reading of Luther can fail to see that the Reformer also stressed the work of Christ as a satisfaction of divine justice, a propitiation of God’s wrath. In the Scottish Journal of Theology (VII, 3, p. 6), Torrance shows that a true appreciation of the person of Christ needs both this dramatic or “classical” view of the work of Christ and the satisfaction or “Latin” doctrine to do justice to both the divine and the human nature of Christ. An exclusive focus on the former leads to theopaschitism (the view that God suffered in Christ’s passion), at times with overtones of the Monophysite heresy (that the divine and human constitute a single nature in Christ).

Barth emphasizes that the Judge has graciously come in Christ to give himself to be judged in the sinner’s place. Jesus Christ who on the Cross took on himself the wrath of God is “no one else but God’s own Son, and hence the eternal God himself in his oneness with the human nature which he in free grace had taken upon himself” (Church Dogmatics II/1, 446). But the effort to make a higher divine synthesis following only the line from above to below leaves us with the idea of a wrath conflict in God himself. And it is not evident that this is more biblical than the satisfaction of divine justice, the vindication of God’s righteousness set forth in Romans 3:25, 26; 4:25; 5:18, 19; Second Corinthians 5:21; First Peter 2:24; 3:18; First John 2:1, 2.

Christ our representative. According to Vincent Taylor in The Cross of Christ, the death of our Lord was vicarous, done on behalf of man, a representative accomplishment in our name, and sacrificial as a self-offering on our behalf. The person and the work of Christ must be kept together. For as we identify the work with the man, the gibbet becomes a face, the Cross becomes a person. Taylor holds that there is “a substitutionary aspect in the offering of Jesus” and that Paul comes within “a hair’s breadth of substitution” without ever reaching it.

In reply I would point to the use of anti in Mark 10:45 and in First Timothy 2:5, 6; to the use of huper in Second Corinthians 5:15, 21 and Galatians 3:13; and to Isaiah 53. The New Testament uses huper (in behalf of) and anti (instead of) to supplement each other. We teach not an impersonal substitution—K. Schilder prefers the word “substitute” to “substitution”—but one in which Christ gives himself in our stead to benefit us. As he gives his life in our favor, it is precisely the case that he takes our place. From his study of the papyri, A. T. Robertson showed that huper frequently has the meaning of “in another’s stead,” as he finds in Galatians 3:13.

Christ identified with us. The doctrine of Christ’s identification with us, earlier stressed by Macleod Campbell and F. O. Maurice, has been revived by such English writers as C. F. D. Moule (The Sacrifice of Christ) and G. W. H. Lampe (Reconciliation in Christ), by the French scholar Theo Preiss (Life in Christ), and by Kenneth Foreman in the United States. This stress brings out the blessed truth that we are saved in Christ as well as by Christ, that he is the Head and we are the members of his body. Yet this representation did not lead either Paul or Bernard of Clairvaux to deny redemption by his blood or to reject propitiation. It need not lead us to deny his gracious substitution of himself for us when he gave his life a ransom in the stead of many. Preiss finds in Matthew 25:31 f. that Christ mystically identifies himself in sympathy and solidarity with each one who is wretched in a substitution resembling that set forth in Mark 10:45 and Second Corinthians 5:14, 21. Thus he combines an element of juridical substitution and the Son of Man’s mystical identification with his brothers, especially those who are most needy.

On the other hand, G. W. H. Lampe, though he admits that Mark 10:45 and Second Timothy 2:5, 6 are to be united and mean the same thing, entirely ignores the significance of anti, which occurs as a preposition in the former verse and as part of the noun in the latter. For him Christ is our representative, not our substitute. That Christ is our righteousness or that his righteousness is imputed to sinners—either statement is acceptable to Lampe. This means that in union with Christ, man has the covenant status of being in the right with God. “Man is justified in Christ never in his own natural state.”

Gospel and myth in Bultmann. For Rudolph Bultmann, the death of Christ was an event that actually occurred in our human history. More than that, it was an act of God in which he revealed his love to move our love, he entrusted himself to us that we might entrust ourselves to him, he gave himself without reserve for us that we might give ourselves to him. And this existential decision is evoked from us by his grace, not by works, lest any man should boast.

When, however, this distinguished scholar describes the biblical and theological terms in which this gracious transaction was wrought as myths, I greatly fear that he slips into the Abelardian tradition that locates the glory of our redemption not in what Christ did and bore for us on Calvary but in our existential decision. And I fear also that the “demythologizing” of the Resurrection leaves our hope, not in the death and resurrection of Christ, but rather in his death and our faith. While Bultmann undertakes to “demythologize” reconciliation, redemption, propitiation, satisfaction, and resurrection, and Tillich to deliteralize them, Morris, Berkouwer, and others in the classical Reformed tradition receive more literally the terms God has given as the means of apprehending the mystery and the meaning of his mercy and Christ’s merit in our salvation.

Can evangelical Christians overcome the sins of silence and reticence?

Soon the organized church will be able to keep tabs on the whole world population. By using computers it can collect a master file of religious case histories. Data on the spiritual encounters of persons from Anchorage to Ankara might then clatter across one centralized console.

These prospects are exciting, for they also pull the Church within reach of presenting every man on earth the choice of accepting or rejecting Jesus Christ.

But before it can effectively use electronic technology in fulfilling the biblical missionary mandate, the Church must confront the impasse of personal reticence. This barrier is widely recognized but seldom discussed. To put it another way: Christians lack individual evangelistic motivation. Despite a recent trend toward more personalized evangelism (see April 29, 1966, issue), many still shy from persuasive words and overt deeds that declare their faith. In short, the Church suffers from an acute shortage of willing witnesses.

Reticence thrives among those whose theology is sound. The preacher thunders the Gospel before thousands but suddenly contracts laryngitis at a cab-driver’s profanity. The layman regularly presents his tithe but recoils from risking material success for an unpopular principle. The affluent Christian homemaker cringes at the thought of venturing into an underprivileged neighborhood to do a loving service. The evangelical student is hip to everything but the spiritual need of his roommate.

“The great need today is to get individuals inviting individuals to Christ,” says Harry Denman, Methodism’s elder statesman of evangelism. “We have a lot of people who are talking about evangelism and saying that what we need is evangelism, but they themselves do not extend the invitation to accept Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.”

Unless the Church finds a way around this impasse, it will make poor use of the vast aid to evangelism offered by new research and development, including automated data-processing. Without personal application, modern technology can do little more than perpetuate orthodox Christianity’s long tradition of seeking painless ways to evangelize, and the Church will sink further into a remnant role.

Christian reticence is all the more tragic in our day of unparalleled evangelistic opportunity. The World Congress on Evangelism lifted the ecclesiastical mood to an advantageous new plane. Suddenly evangelism was “in,” and almost everyone talking about it assigned it at least respectability, if not credibility. Even though some now exploit the term, and interpret it in other ways than its historic sense, the very fact of its resurrection begs for new evangelical action.

Last fall’s historic congress in Berlin produced not only an immediate new image for evangelism but also consequences that promise to remain. The respected Presbyterian churchman John Coventry Smith predicted that “the Berlin congress will mean a world-wide quickening of evangelical concern.” He noted in an official report that sixty-seven meetings based on denominations or geographical areas were held privately to discuss local implementation.

Smith’s observation offers a clear rejoinder to any who might have thought the congress little more than a ten-day emotional jag. Some specifics have already appeared that refute any description of the Berlin assembly as merely a sophisticated indoor camp meeting. Delegates swung into action spontaneously even before the benediction was pronounced. One, for example, reports that while in Berlin he “got the ball rolling” to provide an Eastern European country with its first Christian film unit. Another, in a vision of grandeur, drew up a fifty-seven-point mobilization program for evangelization of the world, including a flow chart for coordinating evangelism-in-depth strategy on a global scale. Delegates from Muslim Pakistan projected for 1967 a school of evangelism with three three-week terms, each followed by door-to-door Scripture presentations and evening meetings for non-Christians. Individually, there were new visions, new resolves, and revolutionized ministries (“the spiritual event of my life with the greatest impact,” said one delegate).

These developments are obviously but a drop in the bottomless bucket of the world’s spiritual need. Congress planners hope for wide local implementation. The congress has brought the evangelical world to an embarrassing realization of the crucial impasse in personal responsibility. But unless twice-born Christians take it from here, the congress will fail to attain its real objectives.

Evangelicals must face the fact that their present behavior and speech make no substantial impact upon unbelieving worldlings. Many churchgoers—even preachers, missionaries, and evangelists—bother little at all about the spiritual state of those with whom they rub shoulders. Superficial conversations about politics, sports, cars, fashion, other people, sometimes even religion in general, are the rule. How many manifest a winsome love (agape) and raise the question of man’s need for a new birth? Many prominent evangelicals would have to admit that it has been years since they have on their own initiative sought out a single person with the intention of seeing him find a saving faith in Christ.

From the perspective of church history, an inhibited Christianity is a comparatively new problem. The Church has hurdled many obstacles (see below), but none quite like this one. Fear of tyrants and lions has been replaced by the fear of rebukes or of loss of face.

Another reason for Christian reticence is that religion has become so highly subjectivized in today’s pluralistic society that the believer feels he would be trampling on his neighbors’ toes if he suggested that in their own convictions—or the lack of them—they might be in error. Ecumenical momentum reinforces the inclination to speak only of religion-in-general, devoid of distinctives, lest one appear to be proselyting. The concept of tolerance has been stretched to become a cloak for spiritual inaction and disobedience to the Great Commission.

Historically, Christians tended to cluster together in urban centers or to be isolated in rural areas. Either way, there was little opportunity for direct contact between believers and unbelievers. Now, as national churches fade, people of varying faiths and no faith mesh in the work-a-day world.

Why do Christians ignore the challenge of this culturally integrated society? The answer lies partly in the scientific mood of our time. Even among Christians, there is the inclination to take seriously only what seems to be established by empirical data. All other realities, if not regarded as implicitly suspect, are thought somewhat irrelevant.

Social conditions also contribute to the evangelistic impasse. The affluent are deafened by pride, the poverty-stricken by shame. Rapport is a prerequisite for witness to either group. Christians need to achieve a balance of what Leighton Ford calls the three strands of New Testament evangelism: loving (koinonia), service (diakonia), and proclamation (kerygma). As one World Congress prayer partner haltingly put it, “I am a Latin American who not believes in capitalism or Communism as the real solution for the problems of our mankind but I believe in the Christianism of Jesus Christ, which open his mouth and finger point out to heaven … but with heart and the whole right hand helps without reservations the biblical solution for injustice and hunger.”

Reticence is seen not just in what we fail to say but also in what we fail to do, and here the age-old gap between word and deed may be catching up with the Church. A backlash is now developing. The younger generation particularly is tempted to paste a “phony” label on many institutions dear to Protestant hearts. There’s security in institutions, and Christians leave to professionals what they themselves are too timid to undertake. But the longer this goes on—the more mission is overtaken by structure, with its problems of status quo and “this-is-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it”—the more the hypocritical element sticks out to anyone taking a fresh look.

The High Cost of Church Growth

Source: Statistics of Church Finances, National Council of Churches, 1965 and 1966 Reports

Perhaps the crucial factor in the impasse is the lack of leadership. The ecclesiastical elite fail both in teaching how to witness and in demonstrating by personal example. There is almost no instruction for the layman apart from an occasional inspirational sermon, no correlation of modern vocation with the biblical mandate, no sense of continuing urgency.

It may be time to declare a moratorium on all so-called revival meetings and Bible conferences and to concern ourselves more intensely with evangelistic training. People in the pew are being devotionalized to death while the really big priorities are neglected. Many evangelicals live spiritually undernourished lives, partly because of their steady diet of soupy sermons hurriedly cooked up on Saturday night. Weak preaching makes weak laymen, who then try to turn the church into a soul-saving station, the one and only means of evangelization, instead of using it as a learning center for external evangelism. Altar calls assuage the guilt of failing to act under the discipline of Scripture and get the preacher off the hook for not addressing spiritual problems that might offend someone.

Where should we begin? The problem is clearly one of motivation, and computers cannot help at this point. But as soon as Christians become convicted over failure to witness, they begin devising programs. Soon their energies are being expended in the programs rather than in evangelism.

Broadly speaking, the Church already has the best possible structure for reaching the unbelieving world. As any politician knows, work at the precinct level is what counts most, and what institution has more precinct potential than the Church? True, the Church is, among other things, a million little paper mills. But it permeates society! It can be found at every cultural level and in even the most isolated nook and cranny.

One World Congress delegate proposed that every local church in every land begin a program of mass evangelization by teams—starting, at least, by devoting just one evening a month. But here goes program again.

There are many other problems facing effective evangelism, such as the need for theological definition and for unity, or at least a cooperative approach. But until the impasse of personal reticence is overcome, evangelism will be largely stymied. Evangelical churches ought to confess their plight openly and to consider carefully the reported boast of a Communist Chinese:

“Everyone in my country knows of Marx and Stalin. We did in ten years what you Christians failed to do in one hundred.”

The World Congress on Evangelism has provided a new stimulus. Where do we go from here?

Reflections on the approaching 450th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation

In the sixteenth century forgiveness of sins did cost money. In the nineteenth one gets it for nothing, for one helps oneself to it. That age stood on a higher level than ours, for it was nearer to God.” This was one of the ninety-five theses with which Claus Harms, one of the leaders of the Awakening in Germany, accompanied his 1817 reprint of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. The theologians, who celebrated the tercentenary of the Reformation in the conviction that Luther had begun that great Enlightenment in which mankind was freeing itself from the ecclesiastical tyranny and religious superstitions of the dark Middle Ages, were deeply shocked.

But was Harms not right in stating the deep contrast between the Reformation and the modern world? Even Goethe asked, “How can one live without daily giving an absolution to oneself and to others?” That is what had to him become the daily forgiveness of sins of which he had learned as a boy from Luther’s catechism.

When we celebrate the 450th anniversary of the Reformation, we can state what amazing further progress we have made on the proud road of modern Enlightenment. We do not care for Goethe’s self-absolution. We no longer need forgiveness of sins. For we have made the deeply reassuring discovery that there is no such thing as “sin.” If we feel that not all is well with our inner man, we see the psychiatrist. There are wonderful tranquilizers to calm what a less educated age used to call a bad conscience. Drugs have become our means of grace (if the reader will kindly forgive this relapse into the mythological language of the past Christian era). For grace is not needed where there is no sin.

Crime, it is true, is rampant in our big cities as never before. Organized crime, using the latest scientific and technological achievements, threatens to take over whole cities in our Western world, now that the authorities have shown their inability to get rid of it. But how can one expect them to cope with the situation as long as they carry on the outmoded thought-patterns of an unscientific era? The crimes that fill our newspapers and are highly cherished for their “news value” are not “sin”; they are an expression of mental and social disorders. Our prisons, crowded with the victims of such disorders, should be transformed into mental hospitals and schools for social adjustment. For where there is no sin, no guilt, there punishment has lost its meaning. Capital punishment, freely practiced by the organized underworld of our big cities because these people are maladjusted and uncivilized, is denied to the modern civilized society as an atavistic relapse into primitive instincts.

Furthermore, sexual morality, which at all times has been the surest indicator of the moral standards of a civilization, has in America as well as in Western Europe sunk far below the level of Russia and Red China to that of the Greek (see Rom. 1:24 ff.) and Roman (read the late Latin Fathers) civilizations in their stages of complete disintegration. This is not the subjective impression of a few malcontent churchmen, reactionary politicians, and romantic laudatores temporis acti (those who praise past times); it is the substantiated verdict of well-informed sociologists, historians, jurists, economists, and medical scholars, men with a world-wide outlook and experience in all countries of the Western world.

Tracing The Revolution

Concern for our nations, for our children and grandchildren and the unborn generations who will curse us for the destiny we have prepared for them, makes it imperative for us to re-examine the very foundations of our civilization. We must find out what has led us into the present situation. We must open our accounts and state fearlessly our moral assets and liabilities. We would do well to study the books of nineteenth-century prophetic writers like Donoso-Cortes in Spain and Vilmar in Germany, who forecast the predicament into which the great movements of that time—unchecked liberalism and nationalism, ruthless capitalism and its legitimate child, atheistic and inhuman Communism—would lead the nations of the West. Our present situation clarified by two world wars and by current global conflicts that could lead to the disappearance of human life and civilization as we have known them, is the result of a long revolutionary process.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the revolution became visible in the Renaissance, which must be understood as the great secular counter-movement against the attempt of the Middle Ages to build a Christian world. This attempt, like all similar ones in later times, ended not in the Christianization of the world but in the secularization of the Church. The world did not become Church; rather, the Church became world. The Reformation was in its deepest nature an attempt to save the Church from that destiny.

But the revolution went on. It appeared again as a mighty power in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and won its first great victory in the French Revolution of 1789, that great earthquake which was to be followed by minor quakes and by the nationalist and Communist revolutions of the twentieth century.

A revolution is not necessarily destructive; witness the American Revolution, which gave birth to a new nation. This, like the English revolution of the seventeenth century, maintained something that was lost in the French Revolution and in the history that followed it: the recognition of standards and principles that are not made by man but are given to him. On this recognition of standards, norms, and orders not made by men rests all human life. It is the basis of all lasting communities and all lasting human institutions: family, nation, authority of the law, legislation and judiciary. In whatever forms men may have interpreted or misinterpreted it in their religions, schools of wisdom, and philosophical and sociological systems, this phenomenon that the Bible calls the law written in all men’s hearts (Rom. 2:14, 15) is their common possession. They all have thought in terms of right and wrong, good and evil, vice and virtue, keeping and breaking the law, justice, guilt, sin, judgment, punishment, satisfaction.

But it was the privilege of modern mankind—or, more accurately, of the modern, Western, “Christian” world—to deny and to destroy these basic concepts of human life and thought. This is the great revolution that began in the neo-pagan Renaissance, developed in the philosophy of Enlightenment, and found its first visible manifestation when the French Revolution of 1789 started the series of modern revolutions that swept through Europe from west to east and began to spread through the entire world, threatening not only old forms of human life but all human life on earth. Not the violation of eternal laws (which has happened and will happen at all times) but the denial of the existence of such laws—this is at the heart of the great revolution that began in the quiet studies of writers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche and showed its true face in the horrors of the French, Russian, and German revolutions.

The End Of Sin-Consciousness

It is this great revolution, the abolition of eternal laws that are binding on all men and all ages, that has destroyed the consciousness of sin and the understanding of forgiveness, even in the Christian churches. History shows that the disintegration of a civilization, the decay of nations, the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of the world in which the earthly Church lives, always are reflected in the life of the Church. This is naturally so, because the members of the Church live in the world and are as weak and sinful men exposed to all temptations of the world.

This explains the strange role clergymen have played in all revolutions. The Catholic clergy in France in 1789 and the German clergy of all churches in 1933 welcomed their revolutions with equal enthusiasm. The same picture is presented today by the American clergy of all denominations who participate in those big-city demonstrations and fights that may later be called the beginning of another American revolution. Among the ideologists who pave the way for a revolution, there have always been some theologians, even in Russia. He who saw the heyday of the social gospel in America forty years ago (“The flag of the Kingdom of God is red, symbolizing the common blood of all mankind,” said Brewster in The Simple Gospel) is not astonished to see the harvest of Rauschenbusch’s theology.

Every pastor and every Christian layman with pastoral experience knows that many more people are still trembling before the judgment of God and longing for forgiveness than the theoreticians on our theological faculties are inclined to believe; however, they are a minority in our churches. It is true that, as Tholuck claimed, an indulgence salesman, should he turn up today, would bitterly complain about the decline of his trade and soon be forced out of business. This may be one of the reasons why the Tetzels of our time have had to develop better and more dignified methods of “selling the Gospel.” (We should not, in this ecumenical age, entirely deny our sympathy to John Tetzel, to whom even Luther addressed a letter of consolation shortly before his death in 1519. Tetzel regarded his job as soul-winning evangelism. Although his sense of business was certainly over-developed, he never solicited money from people without income, such as housewives. And he was one of the first to practice proportional giving.)

It is most certainly true that the average man of our day no longer understands what sin and grace, judgment and justification are. But how do we explain that this is also true of so many people who profess to be and seriously want to be Christians, and who go to church, listen to the sermon, and receive the sacraments?

Part of the answer is that the great process of secularization has transformed not only human souls but also the institutions of our social life. Serious Christians and also serious non-Christians of deep moral convictions are to be found in all walks of life. Why are they unable to change the course of things, even in a democratic society—and perhaps even less in democracies than in other forms of society?

To understand this, we take the example of a judge. Our law courts are full of excellent men, exemplary judges with all the virtues a judge ought to have. But they have to apply the existing laws, which they have not made and cannot alter. If these laws are bad, even the best judiciary cannot safeguard law and order in a nation. The institutions are stronger than the individual. This is true of all social institutions, good or bad.

It is true also of ecclesiastical institutions, from the local congregation to the biggest church body, from the office of a pastor or elder to the highest offices of church government. If a church body is in a state of disintegration and decay, the spiritual life of the individual Christians must suffer. Here lies the reason why, despite the great number of believing Christians in church and state and in all public offices and functions of our society, the decay of our Western world seems irrevocable.

One Message

The message of the Reformation sounds through a dying world. It is an eternal message, for rightly understood it is the Gospel itself. “Repent and believe in the Gospel” (Mark 1:15b, RSV). So began the preaching of our Lord. “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins …” (Acts 2:30). So began the preaching of the Apostles at Pentecost. “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ in saying ‘Repent ye, etc.’ meant the whole life of the faithful to be an act of repentance.” With this first of the Ninety-five Theses began the Reformation. Every new epoch in the history of the Church, every great revival, began with the same call to repentance and faith in the Gospel.

Indeed, we have no other message. The Church may have a lot to say on the affairs of men, applying the eternal law of God to the everyday life of men and women, parents and children, state and nation, and all human institutions. This is important and necessary, for the Church of Jesus Christ has also to proclaim and interpret the Law as God’s Word. However, this does not mean that the Church can solve the problems of mankind, draw up constitutions for state and society, proclaim a new social and economic order, and establish a theocracy. Whenever such attempts have been made, whether in the Middle Ages or by later sects or by the prophets of the social gospel in America, the Church has overstepped its rights and duties and ceased to be Church, because it has lost the Gospel.

The essential function of the Church is to preach the Gospel: “The true treasure of the Church is the sacrosanct Gospel of the glory and grace of God,” Luther’s thesis 62 says. And to avoid any misunderstanding, he defines this Gospel as the forgiveness of sins: “Without rashness we say that the keys of the Church, given by the merit of Christ, are that treasure” (thesis 60).

The Gospel, strictly speaking, is not a message that there is forgiveness, not a theory of forgiveness, but the forgiveness itself, the absolution Christ gives to the believing sinner. “Thy sins are forgiven unto thee.” When our Lord said this to a sinner, the Gospel proper was heard in Galilee. It met at once with unbelief and contradiction: “It is a blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Here in the earliest days of Jesus’ ministry, already the whole Gospel with all its implications and consequences is present. The mystery of his person, his power, his cross, and his eternal glory shine through the simple narrative of Mark 2 when Jesus demonstrates his authority “that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” As the Risen One, he passes on his mission and his authority to his disciples: “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.… Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:22b, 23).

To commemorate the Reformation means to remember the Gospel of the glory and grace of Christ, the forgiveness of sins in the name of him who alone has the power to forgive sins because he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. The Reformers did not know of any other Gospel. There is none.

The question, What is the essence of Christianity?, has often been discussed. Any answer is wrong that fails to realize that one thing distinguishes the Christian Church and the Christian faith from all other religions and “ways” of salvation in the history of mankind. Great mysticism is found in many religions; splendid ethics may be found in Buddhism or with the thinkers of ancient China; touching liturgies were found in the mystery religions that surrounded the early Church. The Christian sacraments are simple and inconspicuous compared with the holy rites of Asian religions. The Egyptian cult of Isis and Osiris with its promise of eternal life had such a power over the souls of men that the name “Isidor” has for centuries remained popular even in the Christian world. If the fight against alcohol and racial segregation is the mark of true religion, then Islam must be regarded as superior to Christianity.

What, then, attracted the people in the Roman Empire, first the slaves and the lower classes, but soon men of highest education? Why did they join, at the risk of their lives, the despised and forbidden “sect” of the Christians? Because it offered to them what no other religion, not even the synagogue, could offer: the forgiveness of their sins in the name of him who had loved each one of them so that he even died for them. This is the secret of the Gospel and its victories in the history of mankind.

Can We Understand Sin?

Today people no longer understand what sin is. Even the Christians have become very weak in their understanding of it. One can observe this in the Roman church by comparing the doctrine of sin in the decisions of Trent, which were deeply influenced by the Reformation, with the concept of sin underlying the decrees of the Second Vatican Council, which was deeply influenced by the enlightened mind of the modern world. And one may see this weakness in the Lutheran churches that in the Assembly of Helsinki agreed in recognizing justification as the center of their faith but could not agree on what justification is.

Sin is the great reality in all human life, and the greatest sin is not to believe in Jesus. Righteousness is a divine reality, not a product of human thought. There is judgment going over the world, and there will be a final judgment of all men. Of this the Holy Spirit will convince the proud, sick, dying modern world—and the modern world that lives in each of us.

Across the years I have had the privilege of serving with Christian laymen in two magnificent Easter sunrise services, one held for many years in Chicago’s Soldier Field and the other still conducted in Pasadena’s Rose Bowl. (This year’s Pasadena speaker, incidentally, will be Dr. Elmer W. Engstrom, chairman of the Executive Committee of RCA, who is one of CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S twenty trustees.)

At the height of its appeal, the Soldier Field service attracted 60,000 persons in weather so cold that an aide had to hold an electric light bulb over the organist’s hands to keep them limber.

One year Dr. Peter Rees Joshua was invited as speaker. As time passed, the spiritual burden of preaching to such a vast audience and to hundreds of thousands of radio listeners as well so weighed upon Joshua’s spirit that the day before the service he wired his regrets. From Harry Saulnier, chairman of the sponsoring committee and director of the Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago, came the incisive reply: “You’re just God’s instrument; he’ll do the rest.” Dr. Joshua appeared as scheduled for what was to be one of the most memorable of all the Soldier Field sunrise services. Not until several weeks later did the exchange of telegrams become known.

What a new dawn would break upon our churches if the clergy staggered under the burden of spiritual responsibility and if the laity refreshed them with holy expectation!