A missionary said one time that the Devil never laughs so heartily as when he can get Christians fighting on the wrong front, for then he has the main field to himself. You could hardly find a better description of what has been happening to Christianity in its struggle with Communism. We have been fighting too many secondary battles and we have too often lost sight of the main conflict. I believe that Communism is not primarily economics or politics, but religion. I believe that a false religion can be overthrown only by true religion. I believe that in this contemporary struggle—the most serious we have faced in a thousand years—we shall win or lose according to the strength or weakness of our Christian faith.

If the struggle is merely political, then we may expect the State Department to save us. If it is economic, we may trust the National Association of Manufacturers to lead us. If it is military, then the Pentagon will give the orders. But if it is essentially a spiritual and moral conflict, then the Christian church must be held responsible for the outcome.

In Russia, I observed so many signs of a rival religion that it was frightening. The State becomes God, and the secular rites take the place of the holy sacraments. A materialistic, earthly paradise is substituted for the kingdom of God, and individualism is original sin. There is zeal, loyalty bordering on the fanatical, and a sense of purpose and unity. I can still hear a young guide saying earnestly to me, “If my English were better and I had more time, I could convince you that the future is ours.” And that future is to be a materialistic paradise.

I am not too worried about Communism as a political system, although it has won some notable victories. But I believe democracy can outlast it and that men who have known freedom will not long endure tyranny. Communism as an economic system has certain undeniable strengths, but in the long run, the victory will go to free enterprise, and even Communism itself—its theory to the contrary—makes concessions in that direction. The scientific and military advances made by the Soviets are astounding, but I have faith in our brains and ability to more than hold our own in this rivalry.

My chief concern is the enthusiasm, the unity, the willingness to sacrifice, the sense of purpose, the puritanism, and the faith in the future which mark Communism. In such a fight there can be no quick, decisive victory, and the struggle must be waged in the daily life of men. This is the first century again, and the Christian church faces strong, entrenched, vigorous foes. This is A.D. 312 with Christians seeking desperately for another Constantine and a vision of the flaming cross in the sky as the promise of victory. It is A.D. 732 with a longing for another Charles Martel and another victory at Tours. But we must not wait for salvation from warriors, and the churches must gird themselves to take the offensive. For we shall not win with a continuation of our defensive tactics. It is time to hurl Christianity’s challenge straight at Communism and invade its strongholds. While it will sound naїve to many, I believe our defense must be worship and our offense must be evangelism.

Raising A Banner

We begin with God, for he is our refuge and our hope. Unless we understand this and act upon our understanding, we have no adequate protection against Communism’s advance, and we have no basis for destroying it. The real battle cry is sounded every Sunday morning when a congregation of Christians stand together and proclaim, “We believe in God the Father Almighty.…” This is no perfunctory, unimportant act, but the raising of the banner and the blowing of the trumpet.

For against tyranny with its attempt to control our souls, “a mighty fortress is our God.” How wonderful is the testimony of the Psalms and how inspiring is the example of Israel! God is a hiding place, and no matter how fierce the pagan attacks, we find our safety in him.

God is not only a fortress but he is an invader. He comes into human life through the Law, the Prophets, and the Word. But he comes primarily in Jesus Christ our Lord, and he enters every phase of human life and experience. He moves through men into the center of the evil condition. The history of Christianity has been a story of invasion—of going into all the world. We are not a people called upon to merely defend what we value and build the big barns for our increase. We are to enter a new kingdom and claim the whole world—yes, and outer space—for the King.

It is now time for the Christian church to get off dead center and move the civilization which it has created into an affirmative mood. We have sulked in our tents long enough while fearfully whining about our problems. No nation, including Soviet Russia, is to be out of bounds so far as our offensive is concerned. We have seen what life becomes without God, and we have watched a world sink into despair in its pride and hatred. Communism is a judgment against us. Now, on an aggressive spiritual basis, we must sound again the cry of the Crusades: “God wills it.” When Isaiah said “the crooked ways shall be made straight,” he did not imply this was to be done by a government committee. This is the Church’s task, and only Christianity can challenge atheistic Communism at its most vulnerable point.

In the year 1944, the Yugoslav leader Milovan Djilas visited Moscow and consulted with Stalin. He notes in a recent book (Conversation with Stalin, Harcourt, Brace and World) that the doctrinaire Communists had been shocked to discover that in the crisis the people turned to the Church. It was the great statements of faith that reached their hearts with freshness and vigor. The government propaganda slogans seemed tired and stale in comparison. The words that set men on their feet and start them marching are always words about God.

Our ally is the human spirit, and strangely enough, it has been the Communists themselves who have shown us this truth. Their successes have not been attained by outproducing us or by contributing more to the underdeveloped nations. They have put more emphasis on hope, and they have shown a keen perception of the truth that man does not live by bread alone, even when he is hungry, although this denies their theory.

We have done a poor job in telling the world the kind of society we have built in America. It is easy to paint a dark picture of our failures, which, so far as it goes, may be true. But what free men have accomplished in establishing individual dignity and social responsibility in this country is one of the greatest stories ever told. It is not merely coincidental that this fruit has ripened on the Reformation tree. If the masses of men seek participation and recognition, then our attack must be on a system that sees them merely as servants of the State. Our promise is not only that men may sit under their own vine and fig tree, but that they may live in a society which recognizes that every man has the right to equal justice and equal status before the law.

What are the uncommitted people seeking? Primarily, I believe, they seek recognition as free nations and free persons. They want a better economic life for themselves and their families, but they are breathing the heady air of liberty. So they make mistakes and often seem amazingly unaware of obligations. But the revolutions have been inspired by the Gospel, and Christian teaching has certainly been subversive from the viewpoint of police states like Angola and Mozambique. But as far as propaganda power is concerned, the Christian Gospel makes the Communist promises about as alluring as ten cents’ worth of cold potatoes. The great answer for those who are hoping to be somebody is in the One who came to give us life. As John says, “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” (1:12, RSV).

In the face of an almost universal drive for independence and freedom, Christianity challenges the sentimental basis on which this drive too often rests. The people under colonial domination have often assumed that the removal of the outside powers will give them freedom. It has not worked that way, and we watch small nations trade an imported tyranny for a domestic one. The Communist doctrine is that freedom comes when one class is substituted for another, as if virtue were an economic affair. A visit behind the Iron Curtain reveals a sullen, sad, proletarian atmosphere that is as different from the free societies of the West as darkness from light. All men are sinners, as the Bible makes clear, and all men are the victims of a lust for power. Only the democratic doctrine that no man is good enough to be trusted with unchecked power over another will ever establish a free society. And this stems out of the Church’s doctrine that each man is of final importance but all men sin.

It has never seemed more obvious to me than just now that the conflict is spiritual and religious. No single concentration of physical power will protect us. We have to make clear to ourselves and to the enemy that our faith in God revealed through Jesus Christ has brought us through crises as great as this one. The Christian faith changes men, creates new societies, and lifts them to new moral heights. It is that power which sustains us in the perilous fight. For no matter what the immediate future may be, we know that the ultimate triumph is in God and in Jesus Christ, whom he has sent. This faith is the assurance that even Communism’s successes are but steps toward its ultimate failure, while even our own setbacks are but incidents along the road to final victory.

END

“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” So wrote Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx in their celebrated Communist Manifesto published in 1848. If that document were published today it would have to be amended to read: “A spectre is haunting the world—the spectre of Communism.” More than one billion souls have now come under the rule of Communist governments—one-third of the world’s population.

One of the notable characteristics of Marxist tyranny in every country where it has become securely established is its unflagging hostility to religion in every form, and especially to the Christian faith. This is not surprising since, working for human freedom, religion has ever been one of the strongest factors in history. Men and women who believe in God and his government of the world are not good material for any form of slavery. That is why all dictators who wish to make individual citizens subject to the dictatorship of the state, realize that first they must destroy or silence the Christian churches and ministers within their bounds.

The Marxist Cornerstone

This is how Lenin expressed himself on Marx’s dictum, “Religion is the opium of the people”:

“This dictum of Marx is the corner-stone of the entire Marxist world outlook concerning the problem of religion. All contemporary religions, churches and all types of religious organizations, Marxism forever looks upon as organs of bourgeois reaction serving to defend the exploitation and stultifying of the working class.” Lenin, Stalin, Malenkov, and now Khrushchev have steadfastly fashioned their attitude to religion by this statement. There has never been a softening of this rigid dictum except as the hand of Soviet leadership has been forced to relax its pressure.

Always there have been those observers of the Russian scene who assure us that Soviet opposition to religion was prompted by the unquestioned corruption of the Orthodox Church and especially by the fact that the church permitted itself to become a tool of tzarist tyranny. If only these leading Marxists could come to know some of the enlightened manifestations of our Western brand of Christianity, their attitude would undergo a decided change, say these observers.

A Mistaken Diagnosis

This, however, is a mistaken diagnosis. Some years ago Professor Julius F. Hecker, a native Russian and a teacher in a Soviet university, wrote these revealing words on the subject of religion:

There is a tendency among some writers on Communism to ignore the religious issue or to regard it a misunderstanding, interpreting Communist opposition to organized religion as an opposition to the abuses of religion but not to religion in its pure state. This is a great error. Communists, particularly Lenin, have always emphasized that reformed, modernized, socialized and every other improved religion is worse than the old Orthodox reactionary religion.…

Religion in every shape and form, and especially Christianity, is regarded by Communism as its archenemy.

Only once did Stalin ever relax his unrelenting opposition to Christianity, and then only when circumstances forced him to do so. When Hitler invaded Russia on June 22, 1941, he already had trained Orthodox priests standing ready to take over and operate the churches throughout the newly acquired territory. In addition, he broadcast in the Russian language that religion would soon be completely free throughout the Soviet Union. What a caricature of the truth Adolf Hitler, Liberator of Religion! At this moment 1,300 German pastors were behind bars in his own Reich. When Stalin learned that his people were going over to the enemy, he became frightened almost out of his wits and began to give a larger measure of freedom to the Russian churches. He sent his emissaries into the Russian mines, internment camps, and the frozen reaches of Siberia to ferret out almost-forgotten Orthodox priests and bring them back to newly opened churches. It might have fared ill with Stalin and his government had not the Metropolitan Nikolai come forward and urged the Russian people to rally to the motherland’s defense and rout the Nazi invaders.

Ever since these events the Soviet government has been more lenient with the Orthodox Church and its leadership, while at the same time steadily working to circumvent everything for which the church of Christ stands.

Stalin’s cynical attitude toward religion was revealed in 1942 when his government printed in English a beautifully bound book purporting to show the important place religion held in Russian life. This author was one of those who received a copy of the book. It was bound in sky-blue cloth, edged with gold, with many pages of artistically printed photographs. What gave the show away was a line of small print on the back page, bearing this information: “Put out by the Anti-religious Press of the U.S.S.R.” Several thousand of these had been posted before the censor discovered this unintentional blunder.

Turning The Tide

What can we Christians do to turn in our favor the tide that has been running with such strength toward Communism?

1. We should seek to recapture the spirit of first-century Christianity with its passionate proclamation of Christ’s inevitable triumph. Present-day Christians, by and large, have lost this note of conviction. Our leadership speaks with uncertain trumpets, and the masses of Christians are not preparing themselves for battle. We lack the spirit of confident militancy and are characterized by confusion, disunity, dubiety, and defeatism. It is the Communists who tell the world that the forces of history are on their side—that the wave of the future is sweeping them on to victory. It is the Communists who manifest confidence and tireless enthusiasm. They mean business. We do not. We plod wearily on—or merely mark time. It is the Communists who are sending out the greatest number of missionaries into all quarters of the globe, trained technicians who move into every vacuum that our apathy creates. We appear to lack both the will and the strategy of victory.

Where is that holy zeal that enabled the early Christians to vanquish the ancient gods of paganism and within three hundred years to lift the cross of the despised Galilean higher than Rome’s proud eagles?

Professor T. R. Glover, in an oft-quoted passage, puts the matter succinctly: the Christians “out lived,” “out died,” and “out thought” the pagans. They beat them all hollow in living, says Glover. Would to God that the same could be said today.

Christianity has not failed, but we have failed. Faith in their crucified but risen Lord freed all the true Christians of the fear of death and inspired them to stand defiantly before governors, magistrates, and kings. This spiritual dynamic saved the world once. By the grace of God it can save the world again.

2. We ought to choose carefully the battleground on which we will meet our adversary. Up to the present, Marxist strategists have induced us to meet them on their ground. Millions of Americans followed with absorbed attention the discussions that took place a few years ago between Mr. Khrushchev and representatives of our government and of American business. The Russian leader told us industrial production had made such unprecedented advances in so short a period in the Soviet Union that backward and uncommitted peoples, marvelling at this materialistic triumph, would cast in their lot with the Communists. In the foreseeable future, said the Russian leader, Marxism will win the whole world to its banner without recourse to war.

And what did our representatives say in reply? They talked of America’s materialistic might, her industrial strength, her monumental production, her high standard of living with comforts and luxuries undreamed of by any other people in history. An American government official remarked to Mr. Khrushchev that the strongest nation is the one “whose people are the best fed, the best clothed, and the best housed.” The Soviet leader could go back and report to his people that America is more materialistic than the Soviet Union.

Did that spokesman for the American people truly state our case? Was it the abundance of material things in this land that for more than a hundred years caused oppressed peoples all around the world to look to this nation as the champion of human freedom and the defender of the rights of man? Was it material resources and wealth upon which our forefathers laid the foundations of this great republic—or was it rather great moral and spiritual principles, from which we have drawn our strength through successive generations?

Why didn’t our representatives ask Mr. Khrushchev, in the hearing of all the world, when the Soviet government would be prepared to give to the Russian people and Soviet satellite nations the right to choose their own leaders and their own form of government? Why did they not ask him when he and his politbureau intended to fulfill Marx’s prophecy of the “withering away” of governmental tyranny—monopoly and political absolutism? The thing that Marx most feared was that the monopoly of the party would become the monopoly of a small oligarchy and the dictatorship of the oligarchy end in a tyrant who would become a kind of irresponsible and (in the case of Stalin) bloodthirsty monster, from whose decrees there could be no slightest hope of appeal.

We must remind the Russian people, and indeed all nations, that the Soviet system with its athestic absolutism denies man’s individuality before God. We must affirm and reaffirm those spiritual principles upon which Christian democracy rests: belief in the dignity and worth of every human being; in the priceless value of human freedom; in the brotherhood of man based upon the Fatherhood of God; in those inalienable rights of the individual that have come to us, not from the hand of a dictator but as the gift of the Creator when he fashioned man in his own image and likeness.

The great postulates of freedom must be proclaimed, not once or twice or even a score of times but hundreds of times, until they become deeply implanted in the conscience of mankind.

3. We must insure that in our own lives and in our national life we do not contradict the very precepts we proclaim. One of our truly urgent tasks is to close the gap between our profession of equal opportunity and justice for all classes and races within our own borders, and our too-frequent practical denials of these high ideals. The Communists are forcing us to become a better people.

A special responsibility rests upon Protestant Christianity, which in the past has so often provided the leadership for spiritual and social advance, to manifest once again its concern for the sacredness of personality and human rights. Our churches, in which millions of people assemble each week, may well become the spearhead of a new spiritual reformation that will combat and root out moral flabbiness manifested in a national obsession with sex, a low estimate of marital vows and fidelity, preoccupation with material success, failure to recognize the dignity of labor, and an inordinate love of pleasure and mass entertainment.

We have lost faith in ourselves and in those lofty national purposes that have ever been our inspiration and hope in the past because we have been losing faith in God and his providential ordering of the world. The leadership of mankind will not be secured simply by the possession of megaton bombs—though we must not relax our vigilance—but by the nation that is dedicated to moral and spiritual ends which are bigger and more important than itself and its material possessions. In the face of a resolute, dedicated, disciplined, God-fearing people, mountains of difficulty will become a plain across which they shall speed to their divinely appointed goal.

END

MISSION TO THE WORLD

There is a paramount need for distribution of Bibles and Christian literature not only to meet the needs and the yearnings of the uncommitted world but as well to meet the pagan propaganda in the vast amount of Communist literature which is everywhere being distributed. Without the truth being available, Communism in this way mobilizes the thinking and hearts of its victims.

Above all, what is needed today is a renewed and vital Christian faith. The Christian believes in individual worth and dignity and the sacredness of the human personality.

Mankind today faces a struggle between the forces of religion and irreligion, between the forces of good and the forces of evil in the terms of ultimate human destiny.

The strongest power we possess is the practice of the Christian religion with its cardinal tenets of love, dignity, humility, and faith.

The Communist challenge covers religious, social, political, economic, and military fronts, and lays a tremendous burden on those who believe in spiritual values.

Can it then be said that the day of the individual or group missionary effort is past?

Mass Christianity of the Christian nations does not “rub off” on others who need it. It depends on personal relationships between God and man—and between man and man. To meet man’s hunger and need it demands the constant reinforcement of the zeal of dedicated individuals. It is in this, more than in any other aspect, that Christianity differs from other religions. It is personal religion, a religion that must be enshrined in the soul as well as the mind—and that, for all practical purposes, means that it must be renewed again and again in each individual.

The missionary zeal of individual Christians is the hope there is for the bringing about of a better world in time to stem the tide of that other world force which is the very opposite of everything that is Christian—the ominous and ever-threatening tide of materialism, whose political arm is International Communism.

It is sometimes said that a world struggle is being waged for men’s minds, but it is more than that. It is a struggle for men’s souls. Therein lies the assurance of ultimate victory. Here and there Communism may for a time win the minds of men, but it can never win their souls. What the Man of Galilee came to tell the world two thousand years ago is the need of today.…

The world needs the acceptance of the fundamental principles which Christ gave to mankind to meet the problems of mankind. In this age, one of the watersheds of history, Christian men and women need courage re-inforced on faith, for all history shows that however evil may have triumphed over short periods of time, good has ultimately triumphed.

We need a renewed realization that “except the Lord build the house they labour in vain that build it.”

Believing this, I have constantly advocated the need for provision being made for a room for prayer and meditation in the Parliament Buildings, similar to that established by the United States Congress. The Prayer Room in Washington is only a small room 17 feet by 18 feet. Its overall concept is: “This nation under God.” The concept rests for its greatness on the open, massive Bible. It signifies the need for divine guidance and blessing. A similar room will shortly be available in Ottawa.—Prime Minister JOHN G. DIEFENBAKER of Canada in remarks to the assembly of the Baptist Federation of Canada.

“Nothing puzzles me more than time and space,” wrote Charles Lamb to a friend; “and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.” As usual, the gentle, stammering little man with the tragedy-scarred face speaks for most of us. And yet (again as usual) he hints at neither the heights nor depths of man’s agelong confrontation of these two imponderable realities, for man has always been space-haunted and time-haunted. Nor has modern thought reduced the mystery. Instead, it has deepened it, for it asserts, among other things, that there is a sort of incredible interchangeability between the two concepts, and between them and motion. The lay mind is increasingly inclined to agree with certain modern physicists who declare that the ultimate nature of reality is, quite explicitly, unthinkable.

These words, therefore, are not written in any hope of shedding broadly philosophical light on the mystery of time. Their purpose, rather, is to point to one or two beams of light shed on the subject by Scripture.

Time The Shadow

Because it is impossible to define time (although it seems easy when one first sets out to do so), most of our inner awareness of it is expressed in the form of similes and metaphors. Time is said to creep with petty pace or to rush like a winged chariot; to flow silently like a dark river or to blow upon our faces like an interstellar wind; to drift down like snowflakes or to blow over man’s habitations like sands of the desert. Or it may be personified: “Old Time the clock-setter, that bald sexton, Time,” writes Shakespeare; time the reaper; time the devourer; time the dart-thrower; time the shadow at our elbow.

Some simply deny its existence. To the nominalist, “time” is no more than the word we have invented to denote a feeling we have, a feeling of purely subjective significance.

To the scientist, time is a phenomenon susceptible to measurement and instrumentation. His search, therefore, is for a scale, a universal constant. Until recently, the speed of light in space has served this need, but now experiments with “laser” light (Light Amplified by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) suggest that light is traveling faster than it used to. This has led to a query in a recent magazine: “Is it the speed of light that is actually changing, or time itself?” (Time, April 20, 1962). The mind finds itself incapable of pondering the second alternative.

The practical-minded man sees time as a simple matter of minutes, hours, days, and so on. But he may be quickly forced to admit that these are merely statistical derivations from the fact that our earth happens to revolve about the axis and about the sun at a certain (and changing) rate.

On the other hand, it is the Newtonian conviction that time is absolute, that each moment possesses in itself a temporal reality, not dependent upon the relationship of any given moment to all others nor upon that moment’s relationship to co-existent events.

A recent book on the subject—and there are surprisingly few in the history of philosophy and science—The Natural Philosophy of Time, by G. J. Whitrow (London, 1962), denies both the Newtonian and the subjective views. To Dr. Whitrow, there is a “unique basic rhythm of the universe,” but it is not absolute in the sense of being without beginning or end. “The concept of the first moment of time is not a self-contradictory concept,” he writes, “for it may be defined as the first event that happened.…” But, objects a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement of June 22, 1962, this asserts that “there was a time after which there was a time before which there was no time.” Dr. Whitrow would probably acknowledge this, for to him time is event; in a static universe there is no time. After the last event has occurred, after the last atom has disintegrated and energy is lost from totality, time will cease again. If, however, the slightest particle in the universe moves, time begins, marks the event, and stops again when the particle finds its rest.

But whatever may be the contradictions and confusions inherent in intellectual attempts to define time, man’s emotional and artistic responses to his temporal environment have been almost uniformly poignant. Each individual’s experience of time transcends abstract theories about it, and that experience is uniform. It teaches that time is linear, and that its inevitable sequence is this: nothingness-beginning-middle-end-nothingness. It is the nothingness at each end which haunts and frightens. “Our little life is rounded with a sleep”; man is a tragic figure (as all great literature depicts him) because he is a transitory one. Every moment lived leaves one a little closer to the end. The grains of sand can be seen as they fall into the bottom half of life’s hour glass, but the top half is covered and no one can tell how many golden grains remain. Hence the hedonist’s frantic effort to jam into every moment as many pleasurable sensations as possible; hence the mystic’s efforts to transcend the condition of mortality and link his soul, in ecstasy, with eternity; hence the despair of the suicide who finds it intolerable simply to wait, in suffering, for the final running out of life.

The naturalistic philosopher, incidentally, has a difficult time explaining man’s time-caused sadness. Whence his ineradicable longing for a condition which, to the naturalist, he has never known and which, by the nature of things, he can never achieve? What “natural” forces have implanted this hopeless dream and this inconsolable sadness?

The mystery is deepened by man’s incapacity, in his own wisdom, even to imagine what he does want. Not simply an indefinitely extended lifetime, surely. The Wandering Jew was cursed, not blessed, by everliving. The Sibyl of Cumae had eternal life, but when (as Petronius tells it) the boys jeered at her in her cage and asked, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she replied, “I want to die.” Nor does he want absorption into the Wholeness of things, as taught by certain oriental religions, for that involves total loss of being, a prospect which daunted even the fierce hearts of Milton’s fallen angels. Nor does he seriously want the fleshly paradise of the Moslem, where all sensual delights are eternally magnified and the pains eradicated. Solomon had a chance to come pretty close to this ideal, and it bored him to distraction even before he had lived out his human lifetime.

In all of human history, true light breaks from only one source, the pages of Scripture. There we learn that man will never be satisfied with less than, first, a re-made, regenerated life, righteous and reconciled to God; and, second, a radically different, time-less environment, whose dimensions are the limitless ones of God, the God whose self-definition is the simply majestic assertion, I AM.

Time To Turn In

Surely earthly time must be one of the mysteries into which the angels long to look. It is not “eternity” which is strange to them, but the confining bourne of time, where men live. Time, they may be imagined to reason, is a strange, bewildering phenomenon, derived from the appalling fact of rebellion, sin, and their consequence, death.

And so Scripture shows it to be. The tragic picture of man in history, his hand ever at his lips bidding adieu, his heart ever oppressed by the fear of ending, his mind tormented by bewilderment—this is not the picture God originally painted in Eden. Before the fall, Adam and Eve existed in a living, dynamic condition of sequence and change, meaningful in that events were relevant to each other, but were not part of a chain ending in nothingness. Only with rebellion from the God of eternity did man’s dimensions shrink to his own scale and his philosophy become bounded by his own dimmed reason. Bereft of relevance to that which is Absolute Being, man was forced to think in terms of dualism, to attribute reality only to the tension existing between opposites. Thus light is real only because there is darkness; good is real only because there is evil; life is real only because there is death; and time (being) is real only because there is non-time (non-being). This is the two-sides-of-the-coin fallacy which, at least for the existentialist, logically demonstrates that the essential quality of human existence is tension, anxiety, between being and nothingness.

Scripture refutes such dualism. By sin came death, scriptural death, separation from God, which in Scripture is always distinguished from physical dissolution and which is never described as non-being or nothingness.

But from the first tragedy-darkened pages of Genesis the light bursts forth; for just as God in his omniscience and love transformed the terrible fact of death itself into the means by which the Son, sent in the fullness of time, made atonement for sin, so did he insert (as it were) into the fabric of eternity this incredible thing called time. By this amazing device, by creating time and by inserting it between the pronouncement of doom upon sin and the carrying out of the sentence, God gave Adam, and all men, “room” to repent in. The very burden of time, therefore, under which all men suffer, was made the channel of God’s grace, for he transcends time, foresaw its every instant, its beginning and its ending, and determined the moment within time when his Son should invest it with eternity by giving his life a ransom for many, an event in time, effective out of time. One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day, not because he subjectively feels time differently from us, but because he is outside it, using it for his eternal purposes and to his glory.

In timelessness, in eternity, every act is eternally valid. Only in a temporal environment can we “put things behind us,” change direction, turn—as the Bible so often exhorts men to do. There is no scriptural hint that Satan can repent. His rebellion occurred in the fixed condition of eternity, and is eternally binding, for “God spared not the angels that sinned but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into claims of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment” (2 Pet. 2:4).

But God’s love showed itself to man by removing him from eternity and by putting him into time. Quickly Adam was barred from the tree of life, “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” (Gen. 3:22). (The tree is to appear no more until it grows in the Holy City, “in the midst of the street of it,” bearing twelve manner of fruits, its leaves “for the healing of the nations,” Revelation 22:3.) The mysterious mode of being into which Adam was placed may be said to have two effectual terminations: first, of course, the ending of each individual life in death; and second, the foreordained termination of the entirety of human history, after which all things will be made new (Rev. 21:5). No man can foretell either termination, nor whether, in his case, the latter will forestall the former. He only knows that now he is.

Scripture leaves no doubt about the use which man is to make of his incalculable gift of time, nor about the terrible urgency of using it rightly. “… Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is” (Eph. 5:14–17). “For he saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succored thee; behold, now is the accepted time; behold now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2).

To all such exhortations, the world’s wisdom recommends instead a little more slumber, a little more sleep, a little more folding of the hands in sleep, on the grounds that “there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?” (Eccles. 3:22) All Satan need do is to cast man into a state of impotent Prufrockian lassitude, or to divert him with baubles; for simply not to seize, in time, the proffered salvation is to enter eternal doom. There is no hint in Scripture that anything remotely resembling the astounding time-bound drama of human history will ever again be injected into timeless existence. Hence the tireless urgency of the prophets; hence the parables, metaphors, allegories, and direct injunctions throughout Scripture to act speedily; hence the burden of drama of such verses as this: “In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink” (John 7:37).

Time In God’S Hands

Every life on this planet, therefore, occupies, with regard to time, one or the other of two radically different conditions. Those souls who have, in effect, said to God, “We will hear thee again of this matter,” and who are yet dead in trespasses and sin, simply await the running out of time in order to enter an eternity of separation from God. Those who have accepted the offer of divine pardon through faith and repentance have already died spiritually, crucified with Christ, and have received the new life in Christ, a life panoplied with the glory and eternity of the Son himself. For them, time’s teeth are drawn, and death is swallowed up in victory. What remains of human life to them is lived “as workers together with him,” in the knowledge that their labor is not in vain but is effective to their present well-being and future reward. So far is mere physical death from being fearful that Paul found himself “in a strait betwixt” a desire to continue his labors in love here, and “a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better” (Phil. 1:23).

We shall never truly comprehend the nature of time while yet we remain confined within it. But from Scripture we can see something of its origin, its use, and its relevance to eternity. We can remember that “time, that takes survey of all the world, must have a stop,” and escape becoming those “wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever” (2 Pet. 2:17). And we can marvel at God’s sovereignty and grace in using for his purposes this mystifying phenomenon, this strange thing “of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed.”

END

Objection

If Jesus had only argued,

We could have answered Him.

If Jesus had only said,

“Don’t you think …?” instead

Of “You must believe …,”

We could have answered Him.

But since He came

With all the authority of eternity

Behind His every word,

And since He was, Himself, the Word,

We have no way to argue,

No way to connive, debate;

No right to speak.

If Jesus had sought an argument

We might have given one.

But he seeks our souls.

FRED MOECKEL

Choir Of Angels

Pastor Peterson has demythologized Christmas. For at least three generations our Christmas program has followed the traditional scenario. No script has been needed for years. Even the props are standard; the manger, the shepherds’ crooks, the crowns of the wise men, and ‘the angels’ wings are always stored in the attic.

The actors vary a bit, but the casting is uniform. Mary and Joseph are recruited from the Senior department, the shepherds are Junior boys, and the angels are Beginner and Primary girls. We still have a choir loft behind the pulpit, and the most theatrical part of the program is the apparition of the angels.

First a blue light shows the sleepy forms of the shepherds on the platform; then a white spot bursts out on the herald angel rising to her feet in one corner of the loft. At the conclusion of her announcement the whole angelic choir stands to sing as a floodlight is switched on.

A few improvements have been made in the last few years. The herald angel part is now taken by Miss Fixture since it was found that the sudden illumination often left a Junior angel more terrified than the shepherds. The wise men have gone back to stocking feet after an unsuccessful experiment with “zoris” for sandals.

That was before Pastor Peterson began preaching about Christmas. Last year he shook up our wise men tradition. Most of us knew that the wise men came much later than the shepherds, and that the Christ-child was most certainly neither in a stable nor a manger by then. But the Pastor made the details of the biblical narrative so vivid that people began to notice the contrast with our pageant.

This year he treated the shepherds and the angels on the Sunday before our program. The pastor demythologizes in reverse. He doesn’t treat the biblical accounts as myth, but shows the mythology in our understanding of the Bible. Where, for example, do we get our notion of feminine, fluttering, infant angels? The heavenly host is the army of the mighty sons of God attending the Lord of Sabaoth. When the Pastor described these Mighty Ones shouting glory to God in the fields of Bethlehem, it seemed that these angelic invaders must burst the gates of hell and demolish the walls of darkness. They did not hover in heaven, they stood on earth. They did not bring greetings to men of good will; they proclaimed the peace of God’s rule to the men of God’s pleasure.

Yet they came as evangelists, not avengers, to declare the peace of the Prince. The Lord of the angels is found of the shepherds in swaddling clothes.

This demythologizing is disturbing. How can you put that in a program?

EUTYCHUS

Ecumenics And Merger

With mild alarm, I read … “A Layman Views Church Merger,” by Justus N. Baird, Jr. (Nov. 9 issue). In his pattern of logic, Mr. Baird seems to commit one of the oldest fallacies in the world. This is the premise that because a given movement may possibly fall victim to certain misuses, the entire movement must therefore be evil.

It is perfectly true, I admit, that the enthusiasm of some persons for modern ecumenical efforts is stimulated by the rather shallow motive of a yen for organizational bigness. No human motive ever is simon-pure. But above this—and I am confident that it does lie above—is the imperative of Christ himself that “they all may be one.” …

A. HUGH DICKINSON

St. Philip’s Church (Episcopal)

Laurel, Del.

His illustration of the birds seemed to be the keynote for the whole article. My conclusion: His whole article is for the birds.…

RICHARD N. MILLER

Mt. Morris, Ill.

I am in accord with Mr. Baird in that I am skeptical of mergers on the national, denominational level.

The article suggested four courses of action for the individual layman who is faced with merger and is opposed to it. I would like to add a fifth course of action which applies to merger on the denominational level.…

I suggest that the individual layman who is faced with a denominational merger should consider leaving that denomination and seeking a church which is autonomous and not controlled by its denomination. A local church of this type would be only slightly affected by a merger of its denomination with another. Although I do not belong to such a church, it has been my experience to find that the self-governing church, as a rule, has more vitality and its denomination places much more emphasis on the needs of the local church.…

The question of which type of church polity is best is not the point of this discussion. The point is simply that the layman who is disturbed by a denominational merger and questions the present “big business” organization of segments of modern Protestantism may be much more at home in a self-governing church.

JAMES H. TREDINNICK

Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

The fruit of life together is clarity of vision—a broad view of the Church in the world actively engaged in the life and death struggle to win and hold men for Christ. I say that Mr. Baird’s spiritual myopia is based upon a dollars and cents, anti-officialdom bias which is not only unreal, but unrealistic. That there are problems of communication between the national bodies and the local congregations cannot be denied. But Mr. Baird’s suggested annihilation of the national bodies that propose to merge is certainly not the answer to any of the problems which mergers raise.

KARL H. BREVIK

Bethlehem Lutheran Church

Kalispell, Mont.

Justus N. Baird, Jr. makes the following statement: “If the multiplicity of denominations confuses the African aborigine, we owe him no apology.” I beg to differ. In my opinion, an apology of the first magnitude is owed.… I have spent … three years of my life preaching Christ to “African aborigines” in Nigeria’s Eastern Region. Sincere pagans … have asked, “Sir, which Christ do you want us to follow?” I always answered them by quoting John 17:20, 21, and similar passages which teach that there is but one true Christ who prays for his followers to be one. I apologized to these Nigerians as sincerely for the sin of denominational division … as I apologize on behalf of white, professed followers of Christ who participated in the West African slave trade years ago.…

Back to the birds just a minute. Their biggest trouble was choosing a “leader” and a “flight plan.” Mr. Baird may have something there. If we really choose Christ for our leader and the New Testament for our flight plan, we could be one.…

REES BRYANT

College Church of Christ

Searcy, Ark.

It seems to me this article reflects a policy of harrassment of the ecumenical movement rather than any attempt to offer constructive criticism.…

NORMAN D. STANTON

Director of Christian Education

North Avenue Presbyterian Church

New Rochelle, N. Y.

I agree with much that [he] writes.… Certainly if splitting churches has often proved a costly method of upholding our “convictions,” then our working together, in whatever form, cannot be without some “price.”

However, I would like to add a fifth alternative, … that is supporting local councils of churches. These councils are not pushing for church merger, but they are endeavoring to be a channel through which churches, especially laymen (as opposed to ministerial associations), can work together. Local councils are not usually ambitious so far as having heavy overhead, or in endeavoring to become a sort of super organization. However, they are anxious that the Protestant churches make some united impact and witness in the community, while at the same time holding to their own peculiar beliefs and autonomy.

LEONARD R. HALL

Executive Secretary

Peoria Area Council of Churches

Peoria, Ill.

Teilhard De Chardin

May I beg to add a few words to your Review of Current Religious Thought (October 26 issue) on Teilhard de Chardin?

Teilhard de Chardin had to withdraw from his chair at l’Institut Catholique de Paris, because of his opinions on evolution. In spite of the plea of the Rector of the Institut at the time to retain him, his superiors were adamant. Ever thereafter he lived under a cloud.

All his life Teilhard de Chardin was in fact a pilgrim in exile. His career in China, Indonesia, America and South Africa, was spent abroad. If he was allowed to make occasional trips to France, he was never permitted to live permanently in his country. Under the same policy, when he was over seventy years old, in 1951, he made his last trip to New York where he died in 1955. It is true that he gave some lectures at La Sorbonne in Paris. However, even after making a personal trip to that city, he was denied by the authorities of his Order in Rome to accept a chair at Le College de France, the highest institution of learning in France.

Teilhard was forbidden to publish his works during his lifetime. Copies of them were made by friends and circulated in small circles. A short time before his death, on the friendly advice of a brother priest, he willed all his manuscripts outside his Order. Otherwise all his writings would have never seen the light. They would still be buried or scattered at large in scientific reviews.

In spite of the controversial issues raised around him, Teilhard de Chardin will remain a “Sign in our Times.”

P. M. LETARTE

Highland Park, Ill.

Ole Miss: Two Echoes

You do have some faint glimmering of the fact that the basic issue (Editorial, Oct. 26 issue) is not merely race: Hundreds fought at Oxford who have not the slightest concern with integration or segregation as such. This fact is brought out clearly in some of the articles by the newsman who died there; is that the reason the marshals murdered him?

Your wording is interesting on page 25: “Use of Federal troops and consequent mob violence.” It is quite true that one was consequent upon the other. There would have been no mob violence, as you term it, if it had not been deliberately provoked by the Federal marshals. The students, thrown out of their dormitory by marshals moving Meredith in, were arrested as rioters; coeds driven out of a dormitory where no disturbance had occurred by tear gas thrown in by marshals, were beaten with clubs and handcuffed to trees. Several Mississippi law officers trying to control the crowd were fired upon and wounded by the Federal Gestapo.…

S. S. JONES

Louisville, Miss.

Contrary to your notion, the mob violence was the cause, not the consequence, of the use of Federal troops at Oxford—as anyone who has read the daily papers during the period can testify.…

Why don’t we come right out and say that, so long as the states’ behavior indicates that they are insisting on their (states’) rights in order to deny their citizens theirs (citizens’), then the only adequate moral response to the states is raucous and mocking prophetic laughter!!

WAYNE REINHARDT

Nashville, Tenn.

Work Of Norlie

“When a man thinks he knows a lot, he has a lot to learn.” “You could not take it.” Who does not see sermons leaping from such texts? These are 1 Corinthians 8:3 and 3:2 … from Norlie’s translation.

Olaf M. Norlie of St. Olaf’s College, Northfield, Minnesota, worked quietly on it for years.… It is the clearest and most American version I have seen.…

It does not have the English literary texture of Phillips’ masterpiece, but it has certainly passed the other translations this side of the water. You are missing something if you do not have this devoted and reverent translation on your desk. I might make bold to consider myself a minor authority on the New Testament, since I have read it through each week for 30 years in a score of languages and a dozen translations.

CHARLES G. HAMILTON

Booneville, Miss.

Can’T Help Believing

One cannot help believing that the mode and doctrines of baptism on the part of most denominations is a primary cause of present world conditions. The origin of both present-day modernism and Communism can be traced back to churches that have failed to follow the Bible in doctrine and mode of baptism.…

H. F. SCHADE

Kitchener, Ont.

To Locate The Tension

In his article “Protestant-Catholic Tensions” (Oct. 12 issue), C. Stanley Lowell presents “the parochial school aid question” as one of the areas of tension.… May I suggest that this is not so much a tension between Protestants and Catholics as it is … between those who believe religion and morality to be an integral part of the educative process and those who do not.

I, a Christian Reformed Calvinist, am happy to join the Catholics in their position that religion is a vital part of education and that all children are entitled to an education from the publicly gathered tax monies, regardless of which school they may attend.… I cannot join my Protestant brothers who, apparently, believe that religion and morality can be separated from education and that the government may only support the education of children who attend these areligious and amoral schools. [I conclude] that the government favors an areligious education over against a religiously-oriented education. And, this, it seems to me, violates the Constitution, which protects the right to practice one’s religion.

It is because I believe as I do that I have joined Citizens for Educational Freedom. Although it is true that 90 per cent of CEF’s membership is Catholic (which is quite reasonable in view of the fact that 90 per cent of the non-public school enrollment is in Catholic schools), I feel quite at home with my Catholic friends, for we seek the same goal of equity in the education of our children.

JOHN VANDEN BERG

Chairman of the Board

Michigan Citizens for Educational Freedom

Grand Rapids, Mich.

Death And Taxes

When first I read my Bible I did not realize:

(1) That when it said “the moon (shall be turned) into blood” that this would be a threatening possibility within human means during my lifetime, nor that my taxes would help to make it so. I confess, I used to think the passage was symbolic.

(2) That when it said “every eye shall see him” that man himself would create the Telstar network to facilitate this visual miracle on a globular world, nor that my monthly telephone bill would help to make it so.

(3) That when it said “there shall be no night there,” that my country would send up a pilot flash in the sky to give six minutes of nightlessness to the Pacific area. With a little more experiment and control, and some more taxes, this could take on a global continuity in nightlessness.

STANLEY H. BEAN

Albany, N. Y.

Search For An Ethic

According to the New York Times, Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, urges the formation of a board of professional moralists to advise businessmen and politicians who wish to distinguish right from wrong.

Well, Mr. Warren surely needs some elementary moral advice. Any man who favors homosexuality on the same day he opposes prayer, or on any other day, is desperately in need of being told that sodomy is a sin against the laws of God.

The great trouble with Mr. Warren’s suggestion is that a body of governmental professionals to regulate the rest of us would probably be closer to the Chief Justice’s perverted moral opinions than to the divinely revealed laws of the Bible.

GORDON H. CLARK

Butler University

Indianapolis, Ind.

Danger: Gunmen At Large

It I could go back and do it again, I’d study at least one more subject in seminary. Then I’d do all I could to see that others studied it as well. The subject is “firearms.” There is a remarkable similarity between preaching and the study of guns. Not that it should be this way, mind you, but it is nevertheless.

Let’s get down to cases. My first exposure to the types of preaching available to the pan-Protestant Christian came in the seminary. A buddy who had been assigned a preaching post in a nearby village for the coming Sunday was asked how his sermon preparation was coming along. His suave answer was as smooth as a diplomat’s coat tail. “Oh, I’m not doing a lot of work before time; I’m just going out and shoot from the hip.” The old pro himself! A bona fide hip shooter—the man who’s so confident he doesn’t even need to take aim.

Then, there’s his blood first cousin, the fast draw artist. I wonder how often this fellows shoots himself in the foot, then hops around complaining he was sabotaged. If you couple his stock-in-trade with a machine gun, then “Look out, everybody!” Already blasting forth before the choir can sit down, never letting up in the staccato delivery, he finally throws up his hands and quits, saying something about the peace of God which passes understanding. He’s never at a loss for words.

More prevalent is the type whose preparation is unquestionable. You know he has been thinking. Else how could he put together so many nice-Nelly words that really say nothing? He simply goes off in all directions at once. His condemnation of sins or admonitions to be good are so broad as to defy comprehension. He volleys forth point upon point, but since he never hits the same target twice, it’s obvious that he’s only a scattermatic trying to comprehend the length and depth and height—all in one sermon!!

This preacher too has a cousin—he’s the rifleman. Firmly positioned with only the target in mind, he is perfectly capable of putting bullet after deadening bullet through the middle. Make no mistake; this is no slouch at work. His perfect shots are masterful. The only difficulty is that the congregation may be only spectators at his shooting gallery. Who is moved by watching an expert take target practice?

Last Sunday I was incapacitated and had a fresh experience (via TV) with a type I had not seen in a long time. Here was an example of the heavy bombardier. His artillery was polished and pointing. He had the trigger of this big brass cannon filed to a fly’s weight. There would be a five- or six-word lull in the pulpit battle and then without warning—BOOM! The effect was more terrifying than “the rockets’ red glare or the bombs bursting in air.” Fact is, I never did see where the banner really was! And the lesson I learned was not to get sick and miss church on Sunday!

At least he did not disappoint you, like a friend of his—the flash-in-the-pan. Here is the preacher who “gets off a good one” in the introduction, but from there on (he must have looked a week to find that story) it turns out to be a steady downhill drag, with the emphasis on the “drag” for the last thirty minutes. There oughta be a law against having your hopes raised up like that, only to have them expire on the spot.

Two other types deserve honorable mention. The gun collector handles all sorts of firearms, but he only toys with them. One Sunday he needs only the cane-bottom chair to make like Billy Sunday; the next Sunday you would think he is lecturing on the plant life of the Falkland Islands. His buddy is the nuclear fizzizist. He begins with some wild and incoherent idea, only to spend the rest of his time cleaning up the debris created by his explosive and heretical-sounding thesis. At last, he appears from the woods, pointing to a pea-sized crater and a mountain of unrelated rubble. Somehow or other the contraption refused to go off.

But there is another kind of preacher who honestly does occupy the great majority of our pulpits—probably the one you and I hear when we can—and is not a firearms man at all. Maybe the seminaries don’t need to teach a course in this. Our favorite man in the pulpit is most likely a very uncomplicated man doing an uncomplicated thing, like the postman who simply leaves a letter in your mailbox. It is a letter of good news from God about what he has done in Christ. And your reaction is like Kirkegaard’s, “Why it’s about me that this is written! This has my home address on it.”

RAYMOND A. PETREA

Faith Lutheran

Warner Robins, Ga.

The motivation behind one’s decision to accept Christ as Saviour always bears scrutiny. It seems that in the first century the people in Corinth who made such a decision viewed it as a means of escape. With a sigh of relief they began divorce proceedings against the non-Christian husband or wife. Withdrawal from society protected them from further exposure to cruelty, drunkenness, immorality, perversion, and debauchery. The slave felt that he should no longer be subject to his master.

But Paul said, “Wait! Stand where you are! Stay in the condition in which you were when you accepted Christ” (1 Cor. 7:20 ff.). In other words, be Christian where you are. If you are a slave, as the Phillips translation indicates, never mind. If you’re a Jew, stay a Jew, if you’re a Gentile, stay a Gentile. Don’t let your outward condition or status worry you.

The Main Thing In Life

Here is a great lesson. The main thing in life is not the outside condition, but rather the inner spiritual reality. In other words, it’s not the material things that count most; it’s the spiritual. A Christian is a new man under the same old conditions. Salvation is the old life made new. “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Cor. 5:17). After conversion you live on the same street. You hold the same job. You go to the same school. You have the same wife or the same husband. But you are a new person in Jesus Christ.

The Apostle is not indifferent to the status of people and to their daily problems. He advises that if they get a chance to be free, they should by all means do so. But if you are a slave, recognize that there is a divine Master in your life; if you are free, know that you are a bondslave to Jesus Christ. It was possible for the slave to become free. On his own time, when he wasn’t busy serving his master, he could earn extra money. The results of this moonlighting were deposited, not in the local bank, but rather in the temple. After almost a whole lifetime of saving a few pennies here and a few pennies there, the slave would meet his master in the temple on an appointed day. The priest would bring the cash savings (twenty pieces of silver in those days) and present the money to the master. The slave would then be free, as far as men were concerned; but he now was literally owned by his god. Not until the day he died would he forget that he owed his freedom to his god.

Paul is saying: “Don’t you know that you have been bought with a price? you’re not your own? Therefore, glorify the one who has purchased you.” The Christian, purchased by Christ, is the property of Christ and should be subject to the Master. The Christian should not “kick over the traces” but should remain under God in his daily responsibility.

Sometimes people say to me, “I once had a call to be a missionary,” or “I once felt that I should be a preacher.” Don’t you know that you are a missionary? That you are a preacher? Every person purchased by Jesus Christ must now serve him. It’s not a question of taking ordination vows. Your ordination, your commission, comes from Jesus Christ. God expects us to be Christian right where we are. This takes courage. It takes very little courage to withdraw, but much to stay put and let your light shine where you are.

The Courage To Serve

Think, for example, what it means to be a Christian in East Germany today! At the time of the clanging shut of the gates in the Wall of Shame dividing East and West Berlin, many Christians from East Germany were on vacation. Should they return? Some stayed, but many of them went back to the place where they felt they could serve Jesus Christ more fully—behind the wall! Some of the parents sent their children to school in West Berlin, but they themselves stayed under Communism. There they felt they should be Christian. Thank God for a man such as Otto Dibelius who, as the Bishop of the Evangelical and Reformed Church of the Brandenburg Diocese in East Germany, not only stood up to Hitler, but today takes his stand with the Christians on the east side of the Wall of Shame. He is being Christian where he is.

Think of Dag Hammerskjold, the late secretary general of the United Nations. That man of massive mind, massive charity, and massive patience, gave his life as he stood at the crossroads of rising and falling nations. This man was a Christian, an able, courageous, dedicated, and noble soul of vast mind and lofty spirit. He had a Christian mother and father. His butler, who ministered to his needs as he lived in Manhattan, gives this testimony: “Mr. Hammerskjold was a saved man, a Christian.” In his luggage after the fatal plane crash there was found the devotional book, The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis. Thank God for a man who would be Christian where he was, in the midst of the United Nations.

Some of you have heard of Mrs. Eleanor Searle Whitney, one of the most beautiful women of our nation. Wealthy, charming, intelligent, she is part of Long Island society, with her home on the north shore. In 1957 she went to Madison Square Garden to hear Billy Graham. She went forward, dedicated herself to Jesus Christ, and for five years, in many other countries, but especially here in America, she has been used of God in witnessing to the social set. It takes courage to be Christian among the Four Hundred.

Donn Moomaw, one of the ten greatest football players, the All-American center and linebacker from UCLA, said, “I want to be an All-American for Christ.” When he became a Christian, he stayed on the gridiron. He fought a noble battle as a football player, giving his testimony not from the sidelines, but from the line. This takes courage.

Bob Richards—what a switch he made! Bob was pastor of a large church in Long Beach, California, but felt he could be a more effective witness by getting back into the sports world. Every time you see him, the World Olympic pole vault champion, clean-living and speaking for Wheaties, he is also speaking a word for Christ. That takes courage.

There is also Wally Moon of the Dodgers. And Bobby Richardson of the Yankees of World Series fame, who signed a contract when he was seventeen years of age. Homesick and lonely, away from home, arriving at his first camp at four o’clock in the morning, he found waiting for him a letter from his high school baseball coach, who wrote, “Undoubtedly, you wish you were home. Stay where you are and stay as a Christian. Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added unto you.” Then there is Ty Cobb, that all-time great who played 3,033 games and for 12 years led the American League in batting average. For four years, he batted over 400. On his death bed, July 17, 1961, he accepted Jesus Christ as his Saviour. He said, “You tell the boys I’m sorry it was the last part of the ninth that I came to know Christ. I wish it had taken place in the first half of the first.” Now is the time to be Christian! And to be Christian where you are.

Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, rather than leaving the entertainment world, stay in it and are Christians where they are. Jerome Hines of the Metropolitan Opera and Mahalia Jackson are Christians where they are. Be Christian where you are. “Wherever God has put you,” Paul said, “stay in that state.

We thank God for Governor Mark Hatfield. This man came to a point of decision when three careers opened up before him: education, the ministry, and politics. He has said to a massive convention in assembly, “Laymen should bear the responsibility of giving witness to their faith by their lives, deeds, and words, seeking not to Christianize institutions, but to bring the individual within the institution into the family of God.” This takes courage.

What About You?

John Glenn, the astronaut, is giving simple witness to his faith in Jesus Christ. But what about you? Certainly, you say, it is good to hear about these famous people. But what about your being Christian where you are? Vance Packard, in his provocative book entitled The Status Seekers, says most people want to be well accepted by the right crowd. Christians, for example, want to be thought of highly by church people. But isn’t that a low standard? Is social acceptance to be our greatest concern? Isn’t it far more important to be in good standing with God? To be “okay” with our Heavenly Father, right with our Creator?

Paul is saying to the Corinthians, in the midst of the quagmire of iniquity which shriveled and seared the soul of sensitive people, “Now that you are right with God and know the difference between right and wrong, be Christian where you are. Don’t get out. Stay.” Anybody can run. Anybody can withdraw from a denomination marked by modernism. Anybody can resign from the club where worldliness is the order of the day. This will preserve your spotless reputation with your fellow church member, but it takes courage to be Christian in that club. The Bible urges you to say, “To me to live is Christ.” To really live—in the locker room, on the nineteenth hole, in the smoke-filled room, at the office, when the cocktails are clinking and the dirty stories are rolling, when a crooked transaction looms—be Christian! As a young person on a date, be Christian where you are! In that examination, in your profession, as a leader in your community, be Christian!

Christians must not be content with vague generalities of religiosity worn as a cloak. We must not be content with the fringe benefits of a secularized Christianity. We must not surrender to the pride of our particular closed order. We must not be satisfied with the abrasion of our modernity. Jesus became so involved with the common things of life that the religious leaders charged, “He eats with publicans, associates with wine-bibbers!” He wasn’t an Essene. He didn’t live in caves of the mountains. He was in the market place where people desperately needed him. He was identified with the common ventures of men. He was moved with love to such a degree of identification with people and was so surrendered daily to his Heavenly Father’s will on earth that he rebelled against oppression. He accepted man’s guilt and died for man’s salvation. He came to bear the burden and the brunt of the hate and the rejection that were the common lot of man. Jesus brought God’s grace at the point of man’s despair. Jesus is there when man comes to the end of himself, when man needs him the most. We must love as Christ loved, in the framework of man’s extremity. We must love Him because he first loved us. We who are justified with God must associate with and help the unjustified. We who have received spiritual life must share this life even to the point of losing physical life.

We must be Christians in our homes, therefore, even with a husband or wife who is a non-Christian. This is the place to be Christian. As a wife you may be concerned about the spiritual welfare of a non-Christian husband. You have talked and talked and it doesn’t seem to do any good—right? Try being Christian in your living. Student, be Christian at school; man, in your work. Be Christian in your lodge life, in your race relations, in your politics, in your business, in your recreation, in your sports. Love your enemies. Go the second mile. Turn the other cheek. Be truthful, honest, helpful, loyal, kind, trustworthy. Reach out to the underprivileged, the minorities, the poor, the lonely, the unloved, and the forgotten, and share Jesus Christ and his love.

For The Whole Of Life

It is easy to be Christian in church for an hour each week, but we must be Christians in all of life. Booker T. Washington, the Negro born a slave on a Virginia plantation of unknown parentage (though he often said he thought his father was a white man), never knew what it was to sleep in a bed until emancipation took place. He slept on the dirt floor of a 14′ × 16′ log cabin which had no windows, only holes in the wall. He lived like an animal, scavenging for food and seldom having enough. He was ignorant and friendless. This young man was led to Christ by his slave mother. As a slave, he loved Jesus Christ. As a slave, he sought knowledge. As a slave, he became a friend to every Negro and an advisor to presidents. This is the man who lifted his race and founded Tuskegee Institute, which now has 1,500 students and an endowment of over $2,000,000. He did not say, “If I had a different place to live, if I were not a slave, if I had enough to eat, if I had better education—then I could be an effective Christian.” He was Christian under adverse circumstances.

For Times Like Ours

Paul said to the slave of Rome, “Be Christian where you are.” He is saying to the twentieth-century slave to materialism, “Be Christian where you are.” To the Space Age man probing outer space and neglecting inner space, the Apostle says, “Be Christian where you are.” To Christians caught in a world of fear because of a bearded bandit on a tiny island, the word of the living Lord urges, “Be Christians where you are.” To little people shaken by N bomb testings set off by big people, the God of history counsels, “Be my royal subjects where you are.” To the children of God vicariously identified with suffering, divided humanity, the Heavenly Father says, “Be sons of mine where you are, and enter the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”—A sermon by Dr. J. LESTER HARNISH, Minister, First Baptist Church, Portland, Oregon.

When the Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy, “Never lose your sense of urgency” (Phillips), there must have been a reason, an importunity, which should carry over to the preaching of the Gospel today.

Why have so many lost their sense of urgency? Why do we seem unmoved when the number of Christians continues to dwindle in proportion to the total world population? What lies back of the widespread indifference to be found within the Church itself?

Are we listening again to the siren song of Satan, “Ye shall not surely die”? Are we engaged in wishful thinking, believing that after all the preaching of the Gospel is not so important, that there are other ways to eternal life?

Can it be that our Lord’s words to the Pharisees were in error?—“I go my way, and ye shall seek me, and shall die in your sins: whither I go, ye cannot come.”

There are many classes of people in the world. There are those who have never heard of God’s redemptive love in Christ, who will be judged in the light of the knowledge they have and the use they have made of that knowledge.

Then these are those who are indifferent to the claims of Christ. Surrounded by evidences of the Christian faith, they ignore them because other interests seem more worthy and more compelling.

And there are those who deliberately reject the truth, choosing the way of disobedience, sinning against the light.

In these circumstances the duty of the Christian is clear. We cannot ourselves convert sinners, but we are to witness to Christ, that he may forgive those who come to him with repentant hearts.

This witnessing demands urgency for a number of reasons—the nature of the message, the need of the world, and the shortness of the time. That the night will come when no man can work is a fact affirmed by our Lord himself. That duty is now is also attested by the Bible.

Somewhere along the line we have permitted the alternatives of the Bible to become blurred. No longer are there absolutes in right and wrong. For many these things have become relative. No longer do we realize the implications of eternal life and eternal separation from God. Heaven and Hell to entirely too many are mere figures of speech. Satan is no longer an evil personality ever active as the enemy of souls. Rather he is an evil influence which is a part of the world order.

Lostness is described as merely a matter of ignorance, not of a soul’s condition out of Christ. Our Lord’s words, “but he that believeth not is condemned already,” are rejected because “God is too good to damn anyone.”

Basic to the lost clarity of alternatives is an unwillingness to face up to the implications of the Cross. It seems too incredible that the Son of God should have come into the world, because of the alternative—that aside from his death for the sins of the world there is no hope; yet the Scriptures clearly teach this.

Furthermore, all through the New Testament there is found one condition to salvation—faith.

Luke tells us that after the Apostle Paul’s preaching in Antioch in Pisidia, “as many as were ordained to eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48b). Can there be any question but that there were those present who did not believe and who were therefore not saved?

Blurring of the distinction between man’s condition as a believer and his condition as an unbeliever is working havoc in Christian circles today. Why be urgent about something which does not require urgency?

“Whosoever” is a marvelous word—through it mercy, grace, and salvation are opened up to anyone who will believe. But “whosoever” involves the truth that man may reject the love of God in Christ, and it is obvious that many do just that.

It is impossible to escape from the clearly stated alternatives in the Bible—they are there to inform and warn us.

Furthermore, to note the danger in God’s alternatives is to be true to his revelation. No Christian can ignore these distinctions if he reads and believes the clear statements of the Scriptures. Coupled with the free salvation offered through faith in Jesus Christ there is the plainly stated alternative of eternal lostness for those who reject God’s way to eternal life.

“Ye shall not surely die” is a lie of Satan, the enemy of souls. It is one of his propaganda weapons against the redemptive work of Christ. It is a siren song which lures the unwary to the rocks of destruction.

But there are other barriers to the preaching of the Gospel, a Gospel which stresses the love of God against the background of his holiness and justice. Indifference is manifested in a lack of concern for those outside of Christ. As we rest secure in our own faith in him, there can arise a form of selfishness which does violence to the very faith we profess. When the fullness of what Christ has done for us sweeps over our souls, the first reaction should be one of sharing the good news with others. Once this sense of responsibility is silenced we find ourselves in the dangerous position of unfaithful stewards—failing to warn those less fortunate than ourselves.

But for many in the Church it is not a matter of indifference but of unbelief. We reject the clear statement of the Bible in favor of the cleverly projected hypothesis of those who piously say, “They shall not surely die.”

When confronted with this “gospel” which is as old as Eden itself, we need to stand firm in that which God has revealed. The alternatives of eternal life and eternal separation from God are made so plain that only the willful can reject them.

Daniel, speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, says: “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12:2). Who are we to deny this?

Our Lord, speaking of the last judgment, says: “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into life eternal” (Matt. 25:46). Who are we to question our Lord?

The Apostle John, writing in the Spirit, speaks of those who reject the Christ in favor of his evil antagonist: “And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day or night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name” (Rev. 14:11). Who are we to reject this picture of man’s eternal separation from God?

A subject such as this should bring us to our knees—we who have been so blessed. If men out of Christ are eternally lost, what are we doing about it? To denounce those who believe and teach otherwise has no reality of meaning unless we do and give all that we can to turn the tide.

Ours is a grave responsibility and a great privilege.

The agony of soul presently experienced within the Dutch Reformed Church (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk) of South Africa about racism is generally unknown or underestimated. As an American from the South, I have throughout my adult life been concerned with this problem, and have closely observed the South African scene, being personally acquainted with all the theologians mentioned in this article. I can affirm that, comparatively, their spiritual agony has produced more biblical and theological probing than has emerged from our southland over the same period and crisis. And in spite of the present apartheid policy of their Nationalist government, they have advanced considererably in their thinking on Christian race relations.

It is not so much what is said—although the general direction of their statements is good—but that they are saying it at all, and the redemptive manner in which they are saying it, that is significant. Even slight examination will disclose how far they have come since Professor J. du Plessis wrote in his History of Christian Missions in South Africa at the beginning of the century, “No responsible missionary today would venture to preach or to practice the doctrine of social equality between the White and the Colored races” or since the (1951) Twenty-second Synod of the DRC of South Africa which declared “that it will not be unchristian for Christians of different races to mix at international congresses, but in social life where national customs and habits are at stake, everyone should maintain his national identity by withdrawing to his own separate circle.”

Within the past year, the majority church of South Africa, which has embarrassed world Christianity with such official policies as the foregoing, has produced some nation-shaking departures from these positions. In June Dr. W. D. Jonker, the official adviser on church law to the Synod of Transvaal, issued a document advising the white missionary “even in South Africa to become a member of the church he serves, subject to the discipline and supervision of their synod (African).”

The Assault on Apartheid

Within the decade there has been a radical reversal pertaining to the justification of apartheid based on the Bible; this started with a commendable openness to listening to the Word of God afresh, as stated by the advance commission reporting to the Federal Council of all the branches of the Reformed Church in South Africa (1956), and developed into the present virtually unanimous repudiation of finding support for apartheid in the Bible. The commission advised: “To an increasing degree the Christian Church is becoming aware of the danger of acquiescing in race relationships which may perhaps not be in accord with the Word of God. Consequently the DRC too is listening afresh to what the Word of God has to say to us on the above-mentioned matter, in the light of the present situation.” Dr. Ben Marais summarizes the change of climate in the epochal symposium of the new mood, Delayed Action (1961): “Only ten years ago a responsible ecclesiastical body in South Africa could put it in writing that separate Churches for Whites and non-Whites were not only permissible but, according to God’s Word, imperative. I know of no responsible theologian in South Africa who would today subscribe to such a doctrine.”

Moreover, since the aggravating adamancy of the DRC in the ecumenical councils, including the 1954 Evanston Assembly, there has been a growing willingness within the church to be open to the brotherly advice of world Christians on this matter. Official committees of 25 members from the Cape and Transvaal Synods concurred in the now-famous Cottesloe Consultation of December, 1960, called by the World Council of Churches and including all denominations of South Africa. And even though the die-hards in the hierarchy have subsequently succeeded in repudiating Cottesloe, even to withdrawing from the World Council, those findings are generally admitted to be the true opinions of many and testify that ecclesiastical power cannot forever hold back the tide of the converted conscience. Included in the final Cottesloe Statement was this affirmation (No. 6): “No one who believes in Jesus Christ may be excluded from any church on the grounds of color or race. The spiritual unity among all men who are in Christ must find visible expression in acts of common worship and witness, and in fellowship and consultation on matters of common concern.”

But far more important for the understanding of the soul-agony of the DRC are the growing ranks of the prophetic minority who have risked the wrath and repudiation of their fellow churchmen to plant the seed which would eventually split the rock wall of apartheid. From the two theological seminaries, at the professorial level, came the first trumpet sounds. At Pretoria Dr. Ben Marais published his historical survey, The Color Problem and the West (1954). However it is generally conceded that Professor B. B. Keet, who was then dean of Stellenbosch Theological School, in Whither South Africa? (1956), was the first theological voice of public protest. Since then others on his faculty have joined him: Professor Jack Muller, Professor P. A. Verhoef, and now, most recently, Professor J. C. G. Kotze (Principle and Practice in Race Relations [1962]). Two of the aforementioned, Marais and Keet, were joined by three others—namely, Professor G. C. Oosthuizen of Ft. Hare University, Professor J. Alex van Wyk of Turfloop Theological School (for Africans), and Dr. G. J. Swart, pastor in Johannesburg—in publishing, with six other persons from the other branches of the Reformed Church in South Africa, an arresting tract for the times, Delayed Action (1961). The courage required for their open stand is indicated in the Preface: “The writers do not expect immediate and complete agreement. They have written in the full knowledge that pioneers also in the realm of Christianity, very often and for a long time stand alone. All the same they realize beforehand with deep gratitude that their work will be welcomed because it has put into words a sense of urgency which has been felt by many for a long time.”

In addition these eight leaders have been joined by others, especially younger men in missions and parishes. For instance, in July of this year a highly successful suburban pastor in Johannesburg relinquished his comfortable living to launch a new and independent “Christian Monthly for South Africa” called Pro Veritate, and he (Dr. C. F. B. Naudé) and his supporters are thinking of staging continuous spiritual consultations on the subject throughout South Africa.

Let no one think these churchmen find it easy to take their stand with Christ. All of these mentioned and many others have had their hardships. Of the 11 writers of Delayed Action, one professor has been tried and found guilty of “theological heresy,” a pastor was obliged to resign, and another was forced to explain his article before the church session. In other words, the soul-agony within the South African DRC has been written publicly in blood—in church trials, in enforced resignations, in demotions, in censored press—and all have been under the fire of culture pressure. Yet, as the Preface of Delayed Action makes clear, they were spiritually prepared for this beforehand: “For church people reflection means asking with faith and listening in prayer to the will of God made known through His word. This takes time. The formulating of an answer to His Word requires courage. For church people courage in certain circumstances means to conquer and renounce the self. This too takes time.” But they eventually brought forth, spreading a beacon light in the darkness of their nation’s race tensions. They may not have said all the things we would want them to say, and there are some questionable tenets in what they have written. Sometimes they appear to have been overly cautious amidst the rapid social change of our world, but invariably they have been open and constructive, never rigid and avengeful.

Two Births

Pain and travail

Overtake a woman,

Crimson drops

Usher a new life

Into the shallow mercy

Of Time.

A child is born.

He grows

In wisdom and knowledge

And one day,

He beholds himself

In the mirror

Of Holy writ,

And sees

A whited sepulchre.

He gazes on a cross,

Where, again,

There is travail and pain,

God of agony,

Who is not willing

To send us a cross

He cannot bear

Himself,

A thorn-crowned God,

Suffering

The innocent,

For the guilty.

Crimson drops

Usher a new life.

A man

Enters the womb

The second time,

By the Spirit.

He is born again

Into the unchangeable

Mercy

Of eternity

In Christ.

ROMAYNE ALLEN

Criticism of Race Codes

A short review of the latest and perhaps the best book written by these courageous voices will summarize the advanced thinking of all. Professor Kotze’s Principle and Practice in Race Relations According to Scripture was published in English this year but first appeared in 1961 in Afrikaans as Ras, Volk en Nasie [Race, Folk and Nation] in terme van die Skrif. Generally speaking, it can be said that he underscores the criticisms of prevailing South African race codes made by all the persons mentioned: (1) that the Bible nowhere supports racism; (2) that thoroughgoing apartheid is both impractical and sinful; (3) that the church does not uncritically support government policy; (4) that racism is the greatest hindrance to missionary outreach in Africa; (5) that the extra division of a racist church further defies the ecumenical unity of the Church; and (6) that racism as presently defended in South Africa greatly embarrasses any defense of so-called “white western Christian civilization” on the continent.

His lucid and forthright statements reinforce what his colleagues have said in this united DRC front against racism. As a theological-school professor formerly in the chair of missions, he can be expected to speak urgently on the relationship of missions and race. “Next to mission work, her [the Church’s] most difficult task is the building up of Christian race relations.… The task of the church in human relations! We shall succeed in our mission work according as we progress in this respect” (p. 20). Racism at home has a boomerang effect on missions abroad. “We are, alas, today witnessing the painful situation that racial tensions tend to close many hearts and doors to the missionary message” (p. 123). And unfortunately “you find whites who display great zeal for missions while at the same time they are extremely inhuman and unchristian in their race relations” (p. 77). Finally he states the case bluntly: “In South Africa it is precisely our race-relations and colour situation with its whole background which hampers the practice of our Christian principle of unity” (p. 101).

He writes from a thoroughly biblical and theological stance, and apparently would not have taken the public platform had he thought that his fellow DRC churchmen were stating the case fairly without rationalizing the Bible and theology. With this sense of urgency he enters the controversy, and writes on the flyleaf of his book: “We in South Africa are more intensely concerned with this problem than any other country in the world.” Once entering the fray he makes the strongest positive suggestions to date. These focus around the dialogue in his country over the terms “apartheid,” “differentiation,” and “indigenous” churches. Regarding the first, he thinks there can be no apartheid in the Lord’s house: “But colour and racial type must not play a discriminating or excluding role here. This in no way accords with Christian thought and brotherhood. Nobody must ever be excluded from the exercise of corporate worship with other believers solely because of his colour” (p. 94).

Most significant is the fact that since the publication of his book six African ministers from Nyasaland participated in Holy Communion with the white congregation of the Central (Student) Church, Stellenbosch, of which the Rev. Kosie Gericke is pastor. In spite of the open criticism, the Synod of the Cape DRC, which was then in session, passed an epochal resolution—a resolution said by observers to be “far more significant than its resolutions passed on to Cottesloe.” What follows is a translation: “This meeting has noted with approval the efforts of several congregations of our church to establish closer contact between ministers, church councils, congregations and church organizations of our mother church and mission churches. The Synod would therefore encourage all congregations of our church to seek, with due care and Christian love, ways by which we as Christians and members of the same confession could learn to know one another better, could learn to work together better, and could learn to pray together more often in the interests of the Kingdom of God. The Synod regards this task as urgent in view of the increasingly difficult times which, according to the Scriptures, await the Christian Church in the World.”

In regard to the second term, he refutes the defenders of “differentiation” (who interpret race as a fact of God’s creation in order to justify separation) by substituting the more proper concept, “homogeneous.” “In the sight of God all men as contrasted with the rest of creation are homogeneous; they are human beings, they are His creation in His image and likeness” (p. 65). In two ways, theologically speaking, they “still remain similar to the rest in spite of the highest achievements in human life. They are all fallen sinners, dependent on the grace of God alone” (p. 76). While this doctrinal awareness may not seem to have many social and political results, for Dr. Kotze it has tremendous bearing on practical life. “The realization that we are all equal in sin before God ought to save us from this offensive superiority” (p. 77). Developed further, it means, contrary to the usual rationale of apartheid, that the concepts “race,” “folk,” and “nation” are not interchangeable (p. 48) or rooted in the Bible; and that Christian brotherhood transcends any attempts to legalize such spurious divisions of “homogeneous” mankind.

The Christian Fellowship

Furthermore, this central theological concept means that “indigeneity” must not hamper koinonia. “When, however, the church in the name of diversity organises the indigenous church ‘apart,’ on the ground of ethnic differences with their peculiar culture, in such a way that spontaneous Christian contact and fellowship are made impossible or are hampered, the principle of Scripture for the church of Christ is neglected.… Then it is no longer an indigenous church, but a church ‘apart,’ with the purpose of bringing about separation” (p. 93). The historic decision of the Synod of 1857 which allowed for “indigenous churches” “because,” in its original wording, “of the weakness of some,” is not to be interpreted as supporting permanent apartheid. “There was never any question of the exclusion of non-white believers,” he points out (p. 83). Moreover, “homogeneity” as opposed to “differentiation” allows for no depreciation of the cultures of other ethnic groups. All men need each other for mankind’s corporate maturity. There can be no talk of second-rate cultures. “In spite of the cardinal differences, we have to do here with homogeneous beings who must be accepted and treated as human beings no matter how much they may differ mutually. The White people must also bear in mind that the Bantu’s culture—call it primitive if you like—is not necessarily of a poor quality and unacceptable because it does not accord with the Western pattern and standards” (p. 51). On the contrary, he affirms that “we would have made much more headway in the sphere of race relations if we had clearly realized, and adhered to it, that backwardness is not necessarily identical with colour or race” (p. 73).

Moreover, if racial groupings are to have any meaning in human relations, they must never be rigid but must be understood as dynamic. “With the right Scriptural philosophy of life relevant to racial affairs, we shall gradually develop realistically according to norm. On the one hand, we shall regard and treat all people, irrespective of ethnic differences, as fellowmen; on the other hand, we shall realize that cultural differences in equality are not static or connected with colour” (p. 75). Within this norm, he allows for a minimal self-preservation of each culture group, but only if maintained on the superior principle of eternal righteousness (p. 148).

Finally, besides taking his nation to task for its pretentious talk of “guardianship”—not unlike colonialism’s pretentions about “the white man’s burden,” the Central African Federation’s policy of “partnership,” and the United States South’s “separate but equal”—he reinterprets the concept of guardianship positively. “Whoever takes maturity for the non-white to be less than for the white, solely on the ground of race or colour, does not exercise a Christian guardianship” (p. 128). For him guardianship implies three principles: (1) “in the process of education towards maturity, the ward must be guided and treated in such a way that he becomes innerly free and mature” (p. 127); (2) the ward must be encouraged by keeping alive within him the promise of the concrete termination of the guardianship; (3) there must be a present acknowledgment on the part of the guardian as well as the ward that the termination date based on the “human state of maturity ought eventually to include for the non-white exactly what it includes for the white” (ibid.).

In the light of the evidence presented, who can affirm that the Spirit of God is not moving redemptively on the troubled waters of South Africa?

G. MCLEOD BRYAN

Professor of Christian Ethics

Wake Forest College

Winston-Salem, N. C.

Christian history may single out 1962 as the year in which the alarm was sounded.

It was the year in which concern over lack of virility in the Church broke into the secular press.

In a lead article in the September Reader’s Digest Dr. Norman Vincent Peale charged that “Protestantism is losing ground” in spiritual effectiveness.

Peale cited a Gallup poll which showed church attendance on the wane and which reported that the number of people who feel that religious influence is declining had more than doubled in the past five years.

In November, the Saturday Evening Post carried a provocative article by an anonymous writer who said he quit the ministry because of frustrations encountered in dealing with the laity of the church he pastored. A sub-heading asserted that there is an acute shortage of clergymen.

Look magazine, at about the same time, also reported that the shortage of clergymen is critical and that recruits are scarce.

Nine leading Protestant officials¹Dr. Theodore F. Adams, Dr. Edwin H. Dahlderg, Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, Dr. Ben Mohr Herbster, Dr. James A. Jones, the Rt. Rev. Arthur Lichtenberger, Bishop John Wesley Lord, Dr. Theophilus M. Taylor, and Dr. Henry P. Van Dusen. subsequently issued a joint statement disputing the seriousness of the problem of ministerial retention. They declared that there is “no evidence whatever of unprecedented resignations from the Protestant ministry.”

A few days later the Massachusetts Council of Churches got into the controversy with a startling report based on a poll conducted among 1,620 clergymen in the state. The poll indicated, said a council news release, that “nearly one out of every two Protestant ministers in the state may be retiring soon from the pastoral ministry.”

Public Relations Director James L. Hofford hastily cautioned against any “misinterpretation” of the findings: “We sincerely request that the keyline for any of this copy used not state that nearly one out of two ministers in Massachusetts will soon quit the ministry itself. Our information only indicates that nearly one out of every two will soon leave the pastoral ministry … i. e., positions as local church pastors … and in all probability, the majority of those resigning will be taking positions in some other phase of the ministry or actually retiring.”

Doubtless many more similar polls will be taken in coming weeks and months as church leaders face up to major anxieties. Interest of the mass media reflects a growing secular sense that something is amiss, even though reporters and writers may be statistically wrong. A broad look at the religious scene in America indeed indicates that institutionally the Church may be losing ground. Back of generalized apprehensions is a long list of deficiencies which are taking their toll.

Among the most subtle obstacles to the advance of the Gospel is Christendom’s increasing preoccupation with ecumenicity and church-state problems. This preoccupation becomes so intense at times as to be a decoy. Even legitimate concerns become illegitimate when they wrest priority from proclamation of the Word. Inclusivists channel all available forces into promotion of political pronouncements. The far-right with its intense hatred of Communism and Communists does battle not simply for the sake of battle, but to combat left-wing aggression.

NEWS / A fortnightly report of developments in religion

THE VOICES OF CONCERN

A troubled clergy aired assorted concerns at a quickening pace during the last few weeks.

The most dramatic expression of anxiety came from Finland, where the distinguished theologian Osmo Tiililä broke with the national Lutheran church in protest against modern trends which he says are leading the church away from its central purpose.

The 58-year-old Tiililä, professor of systematic theology at the University of Helsinki, resigned from the ordained ministry of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church more than a year ago. This fall he gave up all church committee posts.

His decision, he said, had been brought to a head by the treatment given by the church press to an evangelistic rally in Helsinki last month. Tiililä, speaker at the rally, criticized new methods of church work aimed at reaching and understanding modern man without primarily seeking his conversion from sin. He said he wanted to stress that “the greatest danger to the church is the neglect of the message of eternal life.”

In the United States, the noted Quaker scholar Dr. Elton Trueblood observed that “the scoffing outside world does not object to our cozy Sunday meetings, because they are quite sure these won’t make any difference in politics or business or society. They’ll let us alone as long as we stay in our little organizations, and bother nobody.”

Trueblood, in an address to the Men’s Convention of the Reformed Church in America, declared:

“Jesus Christ did not come to this world just to build an organization, just to hold meetings and raise budgets. He came to build a hard core of committed men in a labor force.”

Dr. Elwyn Allen Smith, professor of church history at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, said church people, not Supreme Court decisions, are dulling the impact of religion.

“If there is secularism in this country,” Smith declared at a seminar in Niagara Falls, New York, “it is because of what is happening inside our churches.”

Evangelicals in particular were served a mild rebuke by the departing pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, Dr. Alan Redpath.

Redpath, who is returning to the pastoral ministry in his native Great Britain after ten years in the United States, said that “failure to preach the entire message, which includes not only forgiveness of sins but deliverance from the power of the sin principle, has produced a generation of independent evangelical Christians who simply have not progressed with God.”

Redpath’s remarks, which appeared in the Sunday School Times, charged that “the separatist movement has become involved in a Phariseeism in its fellowship which I believe is grieving to the Holy Spirit.”

The vivid irony of current church problems is that religious leaders are aware of them all too well. Often they speak in generalized self-criticism. But when adverse particulars are cited, particularly in cases touching upon narrow loyalties, churchmen abruptly shift to the defensive and repudiate analyses which set their own groups in a bad light.

Evangelicals can still lay claim to the largest area of interdenominational theological agreement (see statement by British evangelicals on the nature of the Church, page 34) and the broadest representation of any world view found in non-Catholic Christendom. Yet evangelicals overlook their spiritual unity in bickerings and disputings which often are mere misunderstandings. Friction saps their combined strength.

Notwithstanding the theological unity which does exist, the evangelical community is being confronted increasingly with the problem of what to do with school faculty personnel who no longer insist upon the inerrancy of the Scriptures but a more liberal view.

In trying to reach the uncommitted world, Christians can trace their ineffectiveness largely to forefeiture of cultural impact, including the mass media void. Observers are hard pressed to pinpoint any creative Christian literary work, movie, painting, or telecast which has had general popular appeal. C. S. Lewis is an outstanding exception, but his latest works have not counted as much. Christians by and large are talking to themselves. Even Barth, Brunner, and Tillich register their views more on those within the Christian community than on the outsiders.

The Madison Avenue publishing house of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, however, spoke of a “resurgence of theological power in biblical Christianity” in America in its decision to publish in book form the Basic Christian Doctrines from CHRISTIANITY TODAY as one of its two year-end religious volumes (the other: a compilation of Barth’s American lectures).

To cite another principle needing attention, the field of Christian social concerns is punctuated by tremendous gaps. Even liberals, who take pride in their brotherhood programs, have all but neglected the role of moral responsibility in traffic safety. Christians seem wholly unconcerned that as many as 100 Americans die on the highways daily; yet careless, inconsiderate Christians must share the blame.

The link between smoking and cancer is another major concern overlooked by the churches. President Benjamin Browne of the American Baptist Convention this month called on Christians to rally to the support of Leroy Collins, an Episcopal layman who was in danger of losing his job as president of the National Association of Broadcasters because he dared to urge restrictions in tobacco advertising. Browne said that “it is rather humiliating to have a layman speak out on the safeguarding of the health of young people at a point where the church has remained silent.”

Perhaps as a revolt against the ineffectiveness of the Church and its preoccupation with secondary issues, there seems to be a rising anticlericalism. Among the laity, in turn, is found an ever-widening range of committal. Thousands of regular churchgoers remain spiritual illiterates. Others are outpacing the clergy in education and even in spiritual insight. Most are somewhere in between, including some who are so intensely groping for spiritual truth that the charismata are taking on dramatic new appeal.

Modern life with its bent toward materialism and comfortable luxury is giving rise to new problems for the local church. The outsider becomes more difficult to reach as he takes to the high-rise apartments, sealed from church visitation efforts. Lay responsibility in local congregations is evaded by weekend wanderers—the growing tribe of motorized nomads who abandon their homes from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening “to go visiting” or “just for a drive.”

In weighing all the adverse trends, the discouraged Christian invariably asks: Why?

Scores of reasons could be offered, but one of the most glaring is that for years Protestant churches have not taken their educational programs seriously enough. The vast majority of Christian parents are satisfied that one hour out of every 168 in the week is given over to spiritual instruction in the Sunday school. And to a large extent they are apathetic to the fact that even that one hour may be made up of shoddy instruction. Christian day schools are popping up everywhere, but most are limited to children under ten, and some have only segregationist inspiration.

Local church facilities in the United States and Canada have a combined tax-free value of 100 billion dollars or more. The plight of the churches is easily understood when one realizes that most of these facilities lay idle for 6½ days of the week. Dr. James DeForest Murch has aptly underscored the alternative in the title of his 1962 book, Teach or Perish.

Religious Review

Here is a brief resume of significant religious developments during 1961:

EVANGELISM: Billy Graham conducted major crusades in Latin America; Chicago; Fresno, California; and El Paso, Texas.

THEOLOGY: Southern Baptist Convention was rocked by a controversy over biblical interpretation. At issue was The Message of Genesis, a book written by Professor Ralph H. Elliott of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and published by the Southern Baptist book house.… Theologian Karl Barth made his first visit to America for lecture series at University of Chicago and Princeton Theological Seminary.

MISSIONS: Anti-Christian uprisings killed 20 Roman Catholic priests in the Congo and more than 80 Baptist believers in New Guinea.

ECUMENICITY: The Roman Catholic Church opened its renewal-oriented Second Vatican Council with a two-month session.… The new Lutheran Church in America was formally inaugurated in a merger of four Lutheran denominations.

EDUCATION: Gross-roots enthusiasim was building up for the shared time concept of child education whereby students’ time is divided between public and Christian day schools.

MORALITY: Astronaut John Glenn won admiration from millions as a devout Presbyterian layman.

CHURCH-STATE: A U. S. Supreme Court ruling which forbid use of governmentally-composed prayers gave rise to the biggest religious news story of the year in America.… Disputes over federal aid to parochial schools continued.… Protests were voiced when the U. S. government’s Agency for International Development disclosed it was entering into contracts with religious organizations abroad.

SOCIAL ACTION: Desegregation of Roman Catholic schools in New Orleans prompted a major controversy climaxed in the excommunication of three persons from the church.

On the world-wide scene, oppression of religious minorities continued in many countries.… The total Christian community—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox—approached the one billion figure as world population moved past the three billion mark.… In the United States. Southern Baptists were displacing Methodists as the largest denomination. Both groups number approximately 10,000,000.

Evangelism Under Fire

The barrel of his sub-machine gun was still warm when Guatemalan President Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes drove into the capital city’s Olympic Stadium. Some 30,000 of his countrymen stood and cheered while the determined, 67-year-old chief executive climbed out of his black Cadillac in the unmistakable image of an all-time hero for the Protestant minority in Latin America. Rifle fire which still crackled in the distance lent a seemingly incongruous backdrop to the biggest Protestant event in the country’s history. But Ydígoras, confident he had crushed a military revolt which had almost taken his life a few hours before, took a seat in the stands and witnessed the entire service.

Such was the dramatic climax to a year-long “evangelism-in-depth” movement in Guatemala spearheaded by Latin America Mission. The movement, an evangelistic saturation program which embraced virtually every Protestant church group and missions board, was almost obliged to forego its grand thrust because of the revolt on Sunday, November 25.

Ydígoras is a nominal Roman Catholic, but he has been outspoken in promoting the cause of religious freedom. His sympathy toward the evangelism-in-depth movement became openly evident when he turned up for the opening service of a four-week evangelistic series. Dr. Kenneth Strachan, international coordinator of the evangelism-in-depth project, understood it to be the first time in history that a Latin American president had spoken at a Protestant evangelistic meeting. Last month, Protestant church leaders set up a banquet at which Ydígoras was honored guest.

It was uncertain whether the goodwill gestures toward Protestants had anything to do with the outbreak of the rebellion on the closing day of the campaign.

The revolt was staged by elements of the Guatemalan air force at Guatemala City. Several American-built aircraft of World War II vintage strafed the president’s home and army barracks. Two civilians were reported killed, and some 30 persons were injured. One of the planes was shot down. Ydígoras was said to have personally led the ground forces in subduing the air-force units.

By noon the government reported that it had the situation under control, and it was not a minute too soon as far as Protestants were concerned. They immediately started to assemble in a downtown area for a parade to the stadium. Some 12,000 persons marched for three miles carrying banners and singing hymns. A chilly drizzle did not discourage them.

Ydígoras arrived at the stadium still carrying a sub-machine gun. He was dressed in a black hat and black coat over a sport shirt and turtle neck sweater. Some 30 bodyguards accompanied him.

The speaker for the rally was evangelist Fernando Vangioni of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Approximately 100 persons stepped forward at the close of the service to commit their lives to Christ.

Among those who witnessed the service was a delegation of 30 pastors and laymen from the United States, including Editor James W. Reapsome of The Sunday School Times.

“It was a tremendous boost,” said Reapsome, “to the morale of Latin American Protestants. It will have the effect of increasing recognition for the evangelical movement in Latin America.”

A Baptist Protest

Dr. Stanley I. Stuber, an American Baptist who has been a guest observer at the Second Vatican Council, criticized the Baptist World Alliance this month for not sending official delegate-observers to the meeting in Rome.

Stuber, former public relations director for the American Baptist Convention who now serves as executive director of the Missouri Council of Churches, charged the BWA executive committee with a “closing the door action” which is “embarrassing to national Baptist denominations” and places “many Baptists in an entirely false light.”

Roman Recess

The Second Vatican Council began a nine-month recess this month.

The 2,600-odd conciliar fathers headed home for Christmas following adjournment of the proceedings in Rome. They will reassemble again next September 8.

It had been announced previously that the second session would last from May 12 to June 29, but “the Holy Father, in response to the wishes of many Council Fathers, especially those living a great distance from Rome, and taking into account reasons of a pastoral character,” cancelled the spring dates.

There was no immediate announcement as to how long the second session would run. The first lasted for two months.

In an open letter to the executive committee he called for a reconsideration of representation at the Vatican.

Stuber was invited to attend the Roman Catholic Council as a “Guest of the Secretariat [for Promoting Christian Unity].” Such guests of the secretariat have all the privileges of official delegate-observers, but have been given a different designation because they were not chosen by their churches.

Another Baptist leader who attended the council as a guest was Dr. Joseph H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Inc., and a vice president of the Baptist World Alliance.

Note To Khrushchev

Forty-six Christian and Jewish religious leaders, educators, and editors assailed anti-Semitism in Russia this month and called on Premier Khrushchev to end the government’s “extraordinary disabilities” against Jews in the country. (For a comprehensive report on Jewish-Christian tensions, see page 36.)

The plea was made in a message to the Soviet Premier delivered to the Russian Embassy in New York. It also appeared as an advertisement in four metropolitan New York dailies as a cooperative undertaking of the signers and the American Jewish Committee.

The message sharply criticized “blanket restraints” against all religions in the Soviet Union, but noted that Judaism had been placed outside even the “narrow framework of permissible religious practice” in Russia.

Those making the appeal did so as individuals and not as representatives of organizations. They included: Dr. John C. Bennett, dean of Union Theological Seminary; Dr. Fredrik A. Schiotz, president of the American Lutheran Church; Catholic Archbishop Karl J. Alter of Cincinnati; Rabbi Julius Mark, president of the Synagogue Council of America; Archbishop Iakovos, head of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America; and Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike of California.

The message pointed out the sharp contrast between Russia’s constitution, in which equality of citizens is guaranteed, and the Soviet government’s “persistent enmity to religion.” It stressed that devout members of any religion “suffer harassment” in the country.

While most other faiths are permitted “bare necessities” needed for religious practice, the message declared, nearly 3,000,000 Jews in Russia “are denied minimal rights conceded to adherents of other creeds.”

“Hard pressed as they are by blanket restraints,” it continued, “none of the other major religions of the Soviet people, neither the Orthodox, Armenian, Catholic or Protestant Churches, neither Buddhism nor Islam, have been subjected to the extraordinary disabilities inflicted on Judaism and its followers.”

It asked the Soviet government to conform its behavior “to its own professed principles,” and to the standards of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the constitutions of other countries which affirm that “freedom of conscience and expression is vested unconditionally in every human being.”

Among others signing the appeal were Dr. Nelson Glueck, president of Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion; Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY; Dr. Harold E. Fey, editor of the Christian Century; Dr. George L. Ford, executive director of the National Association of Evangelicals; Father Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., president of Notre Dame University; Methodist Bishop Edgar A. Love of Baltimore; Catholic Archbishop Patrick A. O’Boyle of Washington, D.C.; and Dr. Daniel A. Poling, editor of Christian Herald.

The Vatican In Washington

A high-rise apartment project planned for the nation’s capital by an Italian real estate investment corporation is the target of a nation-wide letter-writing campaign, according to Federal government officials, because of allegations that it has received zoning favoritism due to “influence from the Vatican.”

The apartment and office building project, known as the Watergate Towne, will overlook the Lincoln Memorial and the proposed National Cultural Center which is to be built nearby.

It is being financed by the Societe Generale d’lmmobilaire of Rome, a corporation in which, opponents of the project claim, the Holy See reportedly has a large investment.

The letter-writing campaign, which brought more than 2,000 communications in less than a month to the Senate District of Columbia Committee headed by Democratic Senator Alan Bible of Nevada and about 1,500 letters to the White House, has been urged by Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Dr. C. Stanley Lowell, associate executive secretary of POAU, said, “The request of sponsors of the project for realization of the 90-foot limit on height in this area to 130 feet would have gotten nowhere, if it had not been for the Vatican money involved.”

There is a limitation on the height of buildings erected within the District of Columbia so that they do not overshadow the United States Capitol and other national monuments. In most areas near Federal buildings, the limit is 90 feet, which allows for 8 or 9 stories; while no building anywhere in the city may be higher than the Capitol dome, 130 feet, which permits 12 or 13 floors.

The higher a building goes, the cheaper is the over-all construction cost per square foot, and the more profitable it becomes, a District of Columbia official explained, and the limitations on height are constantly under pressure from builders.

A letter which has been sent to many Protestant organizations and other groups concerned with separation of Church and State from POAU contains a sketch of the apartment project and contends that “laws protecting the beauty of the nation’s capital are being bypassed so that owners of Watergate Towne can have taller buildings and a better return on their investment.”

The letter expressed concern that “a Vatican-created corporation mounted such pressure that the Government has yielded.”

In asking that letters be sent to President Kennedy, as well as the congressional committees for the District of Columbia, POAU claimed it has learned from reliable sources that the President has “doubts about allowing the building code to be waived” on behalf of this project and expressed belief that letters from the public would “strengthen his hand” in intervening in the controversy.

Biblical Breakthrough

Evangelist Billy Graham reports that a “significant breakthrough” is taking place all over the world in opportunities for winning men to Christ through evangelism.

As an example, he cites an invitation extended to the Rev. Howard Jones, Negro evangelist on the Graham team, to hold non-segregated meetings in the Union of South Africa.

“To my knowledge,” said Graham, “this is the first time in history such an invitation has been extended.”

Graham issued the report followed several days of meetings with his team and directors of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association at Airlie House in the famous Virginia hunt country 40 miles from Washington.

“We are going away from this ‘mountain-top’ to tell the whole world that Jesus Christ is the answer to the human dilemma of 1963, and that he is the Saviour of all men regardless of place, color, or origin,” the evangelist said.

Earlier he disclosed plans to spend a third of his time on college campuses.

It was also announced that BGEA would erect an exhibit building at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair.

Nature Of The Church

A list of signatories that reads like a “who’s who” in current British evangelical circles has been appended to a statement on the nature of the Church.

After taking a long look at ecumenical trends, Britain’s Evangelical Alliance assigned priority to the nature of the Church and asked a small theological study group to prepare a statement on doctrines that cannot be compromised. Evangelicals from a number of divergent communions contributed their signatures.

The statement was issued in the backdrop of the current British controversy over intercommunion. The Evangelical Alliance plans a gigantic ecumenical communion service in Royal Albert Hall on January 10.

Here is the complete text of the statement:

“The Church of God consists of His elect of every land and every age, who have been united to Christ by His grace through faith, and are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. This union with Christ, signified by baptism though not created by it, finds visible expression when believers meet together for worship and the ministry of the Word, and at the Lord’s Table.

“This spiritual unity is further expressed when Christians of varying traditions participate together in the Lord’s Supper, unhindered by differences on secondary matters. The existence of this God-given unity does not, however, absolve Christians from endeavouring to understand the differing viewpoints held on these secondary matters, such as forms of worship, systems of government, and orders of ministry.

“Nevertheless, there are certain essential doctrines on which no compromise is possible, such as the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit; the deity of Christ; the sole sufficiency of His atoning work for the salvation of men; the supreme authority of Holy Scripture in all matters of faith and practice; the justification of the sinner by the grace of God through faith alone, and the priesthood of the whole Church whereby every believer has direct access to God the Father through the one Mediator, Jesus Christ. To the extent to which churches (whether in membership of the World Council of Churches or not) fail to express these truths, to that extent they fall short of being churches in the New Testament sense, though individuals within them may be true believers.”

A Dubious Doxology

Intolerance is not a feature of the Church of England. In its chief diocese of Canterbury, for example, one will find an archbishop who expects to see atheists in heaven, and a dean who is something of a hero in the annals of Russian and Chinese Communism. Now into the limelight has come the Rev. Alec Vidler, whose carefully cultivated beard, black shirt, and white tie still startle his starchier colleagues.

A certain unconventionality was again conspicuous one Sunday evening last month when Vidler, since 1956 the dean of historic King’s College, Cambridge, took part with two laymen in a BBC TV discussion which concluded that “the Church of England is in a pretty good muddle.” This in itself would not have upset the customers, less than 7 per cent of whom are regular churchgoers. But in the process Vidler launched a sweeping attack on the clergy and their “endless chatter,” and on “all this business about religion and these ghastly hymns and all these things that go on in church.” He particularly lamented what he called the “suppression of real, deep thought and intellectual alertness and integrity in the Church.”

Most significant of all in a program which purports to deal with teen-age problems was the dean’s treatment of a direct question about whether fornication was “all right.” His answer was so phrased that many listeners got the impression that he did regard fornication as “all right” under certain circumstances. “A good, objective discussion without bias, which brought out many important points,” commented Canon Roy McKay, head of BBC’s religious broadcasting.

A storm of protest arose which may have persuaded the canon to think again. Strong criticism of the BBC and of Vidler was made in the Church Assembly that week. (“Things must be bad,” dryly remarked an English Churchman editorial, “if the Church Assembly complains.”) Letters of protest poured in. Said one clergyman: “He smears the image of Christ’s Church before a world which will gladly misunderstand further all that has been said.”

Retorted Vidler: “I did not say anything about fornication being all right. In fact, I don’t think I used the word fornication at all.”

It may be a curious coincidence that the same subject came up in Soundings, a volume of essays from Cambridge edited by Vidler and published a few months ago. In one of the essays, the Rev. H. A. Williams, dean of Trinity College, discusses two current movies in which acts of fornication are interpreted as having a healing agency in two specific cases. On the first Williams comments, “What is seen is an act of charity which proclaims the glory of God”; on the second, “The appropriate response is—Glory to God in the Highest.”

The script of the offending broadcast was sent to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Perhaps even the Church of England’s tolerance has its limits.

J. D. D.

Crossfire On The Legal Frontier

Tensions between Christian and Jew stretched tautly from the United States to Israel this month. But inter-faith debate was happily set in the context of law and discussion rather than of violence and ill-will.

—In the United States, opinion differed increasingly over whether the Supreme Court’s decision against recitation of the Regents’ prayer in New York schools should be interpreted “narrowly” or “broadly.” The “narrow” view holds the court prohibited government-approved prayers; the “broad” view makes the court rule against any prayers whatever in the schools.

Proponents of the latter view were mainly spokesmen of Jewish or of atheistic persuasions, who insist that juridical consistency will require the Supreme Court to rule against Bible reading in the Pennsylvania and Maryland cases (on which a decision is due within the next six months).

Supporters of the narrow interpretation argue that the court did not disapprove prayer, but ruled against government-prescribed prayer. While insisting that prayers in the public schools are not legally unconstitutional, as long as politically unprescribed, they differ for other reasons (educational or religious) over the desirability or propriety of religious exercises in the public schools. Some insist, however, that objective discussion of religious truth must not be suppressed from the academic arena.

—Protests of the Jewish community against public school Christmas observances, which atheists also find offensive, supply another issue. Jewish spokesmen claim that such observances are harmful religiously (because they are institutional rather than voluntary), that the psychological pressures are harmful to children of alien views, and increasingly insist these observances are constitutionally wrong. One rabbi noted that when Jewish children cooperatively participate in nativity plays they are as likely to end up in the role of wise men bringing gifts to Jesus as in any other (though discreet teachers often assign them as “props” aides). In Washington, D.C., where Jewish leaders seek an end to Christmas observances in the schools, the non-sectarian Jewish Foundation for Retarded Children observes the Jewish holidays and not Christmas.

When a Christian layman at a recent meeting of National Conference of Christians and Jews remarked on the incongruity of Jewish protests against Christmas carols in the schools while Jewish merchants seeking Christmas shoppers blare the same carols from their shops, a rabbi quickly responded: “That’s not strange at all. Jewish merchants play the carols for the same reason as many Gentile merchants—not as a religious act, but as a concession to the holiday mood of the community.”

—The frequent conjunction of Jewish and atheist protests against religious observances led Editor Carl F. H. Henry of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, in remarks to the First National Institute of NCCJ, to prod the Jewish community to distinguish its concern for the protection of the rights of the atheist, from that “special” protection which enables a militant minority to dissolve the majority milieu and to reshape public institutions serviceable to minority desires. Jewish leaders replied that because of centuries-long persecution, the Jew sees his own image in every minority whose rights are in jeopardy, and his spirited defense of minority rights must not be construed as promotive of irreligion and atheism.

—Meanwhile tensions between the Christian minority in Israel and the Jewish state were placed in a new light when a Catholic monk, son of Jewish parents, began legal action to gain Israeli citizenship. Father Daniel, a 40-year-old Carmelite who came to the Haifa Carmelite monastery three years ago from Poland, has thus reraised the provocative question, “Who is a Jew?”

The Supreme Court of Israel ruled that Father Daniel was not entitled to automatic citizenship under the 1950 Law of Return. The alternative open to him was to seek citizenship through naturalization proceedings.

In answering the question of who is a Jew, the Israelis say in practice:

1. The Orthodox Jew is a first-rate Jew (legally) and a good Jew (religiously). (There is discrimination in Israel by the religious authorities against non-Orthodox Jewry.)

2. The non-Orthodox Jew, whether an atheist or Reform Jew, is a first-rate Jew (legally) but not a good Jew (religiously).

3. The Christian Hebrew is neither a first-rate Jew (legally) nor a good Jew (religiously). Hence he is clearly discriminated against on the basis of his religion more than in the case of the non-Orthodox non-Christian Jew; he is, in fact, treated as if he has ceased to be a Jew, as not entitled to the legal rights of a Jew. Therefore, the atheist Jew is viewed legally as preferable to a Christian Jew.

But in theory, the Israelis say that anybody is a Jew whose mother is a Jew. Hence Father Daniel’s suit for citizenship put this whole controversy to a legal test.

It is insisted that the tactical union of church and state in Israel is such that religious liberty is guaranteed only to Orthodox Jews, and that all others (including Reform Jews) are viewed as dissidents. Not uncommonly liberal Jews in America will say that Christians have more religious liberty in Israel than Reform Jews. But if the Reform Jew is scorned for his “bad religion” he is nonetheless honored legally as a first-rate Jew. In fact, even the Jewish atheist is legally considered a first-rate Jew, and his legal rights are protected. But the Hebrew-Christian is twice-rejected: he is disowned because he is a Christian, and on this ground is viewed further as legally not a first-rate Jew.

In Israel, the Christian gets little if any of that special protection which the Jew in America wants for atheists on the ground that religious liberty must at all odds be preserved, and that the Jew sees his own image in any person who is being denied his rights. Instead of special protection, the Christian complains that he gets special discrimination.

Other developments in Israel:

—Relief from an Israeli law requiring religious ceremonies in marriage was sought from the High Court of Justice by Yisrael Schlesinger, an Israeli Jew who was wed to a Christian Belgian woman in a civil ceremony in Cyprus. Because Jewish religious authorities refuse to marry any couple unless both are of the Jewish faith, Schlesinger cannot obtain legal sanction for his marriage.

—Opposition to a projected Christian settlement at Ness Anim in Western Galilee came from the Council of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, which denounced the plan as “proselytizing.” Leaders deny they intend to proselytize. They stress that they wish to identify with Israel and serve as an example of Christian life. Settlement sponsors include Dr. Jacob Blum, a Presbyterian minister of Jewish origin; Dr. R. Bakker of Rotterdam; Dr. J. J. Pilon, a Dutch doctor; and Dr. Hans Bernard, a Swiss physician.

—Some 3,000 Israeli Protestants and Roman Catholics sought permission from Jordan to make the traditional Christmas pilgrimage to Bethlehem. The number exceeds by 25 per cent the total of permits granted last year.

CHRIST ON THE MOUNTAIN—Sculptor Lincoln Borglum says his 175-foot statue of Christ will be the largest ever built by man. It will rest atop Spearfish Mountain, South Dakota, and may be completed in two or three years if sufficient funds become available. Idea for the mountain-top monument was conceived by the late U. S. Senator Francis Case, son of a Methodist minister.

PROTESTANT PANORAMA—Methodist observance of 1963 as “Aldersgate Year” will begin with watch night services and round-the-clock prayer vigils on New Year’s Day. Church officials urge “special emphasis on Christian experience and evangelism” and a “soul-searching study” of Romans for each Methodist congregation.

Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Schleswig-Holstein became the second member body to dissociate itself from the World Council of Churches’ statement on the Cuban crisis, charging that the statement was biased. Earlier, the American Lutheran Church disowned the statement which voiced “grave concern and regret” over the U. S. blockade of Cuba. At still another synod meeting in Hanover Bishop Hanns Lilje, a member of the WCC Central Committee, said that the majority of the churches of the West could not support the WCC statement because it was only as the result of “the firm attitude of the USA” in the Cuba conflict that war had been averted.

Latest timetable for union negotiations between New Zealand’s Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Associated Churches of Christ calls for members of the local churches to vote on the merger plan in 1965.

Church attendance gains were reported by the superintendent of Southern Baptist missionary work in Cuba, Herbert Caudill, in a statement read at a home mission board meeting in Atlanta.

Church of the Nazarene claims two construction firsts during 1962: a $100,000 church at Nazareth, first Protestant church to be built in the reconstituted state of Israel, and another in Brasilia, the first to be dedicated in the new inland capital of Brazil.

Should legal penalties be incurred by women who undergo abortions for pregnancies induced by rape? No, said a statement issued last month by the Association of Protestant Women in the Rhineland, Germany. The declaration said that “it must be left to the free personal decision of the woman concerned whether she wishes to complete a pregnancy forced upon her against her will.”

Disciples of Christ dedicated $2,000,000 addition to their St. Louis publishing house.

CHRISTIAN EDUCATION—A program to broaden Methodist work among college students and faculty members was introduced at the biennial meeting of the Association of Wesley Foundations in Nashville. The meeting marked the 50th anniversary of the first Wesley Foundation organized at the University of Illinois.

The Church Federation of Greater Chicago is studying a plan to create a mass communications center designed to train seminary students for broadcast ministries. The proposal would also establish religious radio and television stations for Chicago and a program syndication center.

Taylor University trustees will seek to affiliate the school with the North Indiana Conference of the Methodist Church.

MISCELLANY—An angry mob destroyed a Protestant chapel under construction at Colorado, in the Colombian province of Bolivar. Missionary News Service reported that the mob also descended upon the manse and forced the national pastor to flee. The chapel is related to the Inter-American Mission, the Latin American branch of the Oriental Missionary Society.

The Second Assembly of the East Asia Christian Conference has beeen scheduled for February 26-March 5, 1964.

California’s ban against the use of peyote, a drug producing hallucinations taken by some Indians during religious ceremonies, was upheld in a ruling by San Bernardino court. Three Navajos were found guilty of violating the California Narcotics Law for participating in a peyote ceremony. They were given a suspended sentence of two to ten years and placed on probation for two years. An appeal is expected.

A total of 700,000 copies of the Gospel of John have been sent to Cuba within the last two years by World Gospel Crusades. The demand for the Scriptures reportedly remains greater than the supply.

American Friends Service Committee is launching a two-year study of non-violent action and its application to international conflicts. The Rev. James E. Bristol, a Lutheran, will conduct the study. About $15,000 has been appropriated.

PERSONALIA—Dr. Martin Cole elected president of Texas Lutheran College.

Dr. Donald Willard Cole named dean of students and associate professor of counseling and psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Dr. Henry Endress resigned as stewardship director of the Lutheran Church in America to be vice president of Waterloo (Ontario) Lutheran University.

Publication of Young Life, a monthly circulated by the Christian youth organization of the same name, was temporarily suspended following resignation of editor Joan Weathers.

Reserve Officers Association will bestow its annual “Chaplain of the Year” award for 1963 on Army Chaplain (Lieutenant Colonel) Maurice S. Kleinberg, Jewish. He is cited for “outstanding leadership, efficiency, and professional skill.”

Governor-elect George Romney of Michigan is relinquishing duties as president of the Detroit Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormon). He said there was no conflict of interest but that he would find it “difficult and impractical” to continue his Detroit work from the state capital at Lansing.

Moma Markovic, a Yugoslav government official and Communist party member, named president of the federal Commission for Religious Affairs, an agency which mediates church-state problems. Markovic will replace Dobrivoje Rabosaljevic, who has held the post for more than 12 years. No reason was given for the change.

Paul A. Hopkins, former secretary of the Evangelical Foundation, Inc., of Philadelphia, elected secretary for Africa by the American Bible Society.

WORTH QUOTING—“We need a reinstatement of the possibilities of single-blessedness, a climate of opinion where dedication to the single life, whether religious or secular, can be protected and given honors.”—Dr. Gwenyth Hubble, World Council of Churches executive.

“The King James Version is still the most glorious collection of good strong English there is.”—Dr. Rudolf Flesch, readability expert, in How To Be Brief.

“Queen Wilhelmina’s death is a great loss to not only the citizens of her own country but to the world. She was truly a great leader and a noble woman.”—U. S. Senator Frank Carlson, president of the International Council for Christian Leadership (the late queen was honorary president of ICCL).

Deaths

DR. JOHANNES SANDEGREN, 78, leading Swedish missionary figure and retired Lutheran bishop of Tranquebar, India; in Uppsala, Sweden.

DR. FRANCIS CARR STIFLER, 78, retired editor for American Bible Society; in Summit, New Jersey.

DR. CLIFTON E. OLMSTEAD, 36, chairman of Department of Religion, George Washington University, and author of History of Religion in the United States; in Washington, D.C.

BERNICE LIND, 37, missionary to Brazil, fatally injured in crash of single-engine plane at Juazeiro do Norte. Also killed were four-year-old son and three-month-old daughter of the Rev. and Mrs. Harold Reiner. All served under Baptist Mid-Missions.