The Humorous And The Tragic

The Blood of the Lamb, by Peter De Vries (Little, Brown & Company, 1962, 246 pp., $4), is reviewed by George Harper, Associate Professor of English, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The trickle of high-level religious novels has become a runnel in the last few years, and it should surprise no one to find even Peter De Vries, the author of The Mackerel Plaza (surely the finest spoof on fading religious modernism in recent literature), adding to the flow with his latest novel, The Blood of the Lamb. De Vries was reared in a strict religious group, the Christian Reformed community of Chicago’s South Side, and the culture he absorbed through the skin, with the habit of strong responses to great human affairs that distinguishes groups which take their religion seriously (all salvation and grace, or none; if none, none with a vengeance), is dyed deeply in him, will not wear away, can be hidden for a time under a suitable cosmetic, but is ineradicable, and hence, perhaps, his choice of theme in this novel.

Choice of theme, but not of plot. The plot is chaotic, episodic, and thin, but the theme, when it finally settles down to work, is the death of a young girl of eight. Worked in and out among the various medical and social and lyric observations on the death of the child (the only daughter of the widowed hero, Don Wanderhope) are De Vries’ pronouncements on faith, doubt, grace, divine love (and hate), cosmic justice, the bad hands dealt one by fate, God, the genes, and so on. To be fair, it should be added that many of these old chestnuts occupy De Vries’ hero in the years when he is growing up in Chicago among the Dutch garbage-collectors of the area, and arise later from his hero’s recollections of his life with his psychotic father and long-suffering mother and other members, lay and clerical, of the Dutch Reformed community. In fact, for the hero, his daughter’s illness and death merely stir up the dormant bitternesses, and it is only fair also to add that these bitternesses are surely more noble in their display at the end of the book than they were at the beginning, with exceptions: there is a disgraceful episode in which the hero, whose daughter has just died, hurls a soggy cake at a Christus in a Roman church, hits the statue full in the face, and has a fantasy in which the statue’s hands slowly rise to wipe the cake out of its eyes. The effect is hardly commensurate with the cause, and De Vries’ hero is left looking like a mildly repentant Robert Ingersoll with crumby hands.

Ideally a review of De Vries’ book should be written in two separate columns, one trailing the other. The book is really two books—a fairly good farce of the kind that De Vries has spent a lifetime bringing to a very high level of development, and a “serious” book with a great theme, well handled for the most part but shading off into uncontrolled melodrama of a particularly sneaky kind, what might be called ironic melodrama. The difficulty is, that the humor and the seriousness and the melodrama are seldom integrated. The fun is often mordant, destructive of what could have been handled more profitably in another way—overlong and overly detailed family prayers before meals, hypocritical wrestlings with unreal religious doubts, and the like, but it seldom illuminates or relieves the serious themes. And the serious parts, though they are often too melodramatic to have their proper effect, show a very deep and credible feeling, of the kind that must have accompanied the actual experience that surely lies behind the book—one can sense the genuine and heartblasting truth of the death of the little girl. Another thing: the sex bits are out of place in this novel, and are not very well done at that. At one point the hero seduces his future wife in her father’s model home, but the whole episode seems to be merely a setup for the exquisite malapropism hissed by the girl’s mother when she discovers the couple in the model bed: “Prude!” Another sex episode is macabre; it involves the hero with a girl dying of tuberculosis, and owes too much, probably, to a fashionable (in the thirties) reading of Rimbaud or perhaps Huysmans. Sex at the edge of the grave is no longer funny. But perhaps De Vries did not mean it to be.

The title of the novel would seem to indicate that its author is about to take a stance relative to religion. What De Vries’ stance is, however, is very difficult to determine. Now this might not be anything to complain of, except that one feels that his apparent neutrality is not the result of deliberate policy but rather of inadvertency. His hero seems to be intended as a bold and heroic agnostic in the grand manner of the 1890s, for at least part of the book, but the day for that is obviously past—it’s hard, hard, to be a bold and heroic agnostic in the grand manner, and has been ever since galluses and The Police Gazette went down. But then again De Vries seems to be reclaiming, through his hero, some of the material of his youth: his hero is made secretly to like old men praying, and to relish old Honest Doubters. The language in these parts of the book that deal with religion strains to express the essence of genuine religious experience, often of rather weak strength though it may be. But the essence is barely discernible, as if a working lifetime of using words for their decayed senses to bring up laughs, of making language gape and drool and snicker, had cut off the author’s access to the language of genuine emotion. De Vries seems to find it difficult to work back to a position from which his verbal shots can really go straight to the mark of meaning. The language of this novel is imprecise, in that it fails to contain the emotions behind it; is often pedantic in an unexpected way (“Dark-complected [complexioned?] Mr. Italia was indeed, with handle-bar mustaches of a size that might have made him topple forward out of his chair were it not for the posture seemingly aimed at correcting the leverage in his favor”), a hangover, perhaps, of New Yorker preciosity; and is at times awkwardly ambiguous (“What enabled me to bear Stein’s apothegms through the highly bibulous luncheon was the knowledge, serenely hoarded, that I would have my sweet home in a day or two” [Home Sweet Home?]).

The Blood of the Lamb fails. Shorn of the horseplay, it could have been a good serious book, a poignant relation of the death of a fair child, enlightening in a proper way; it might have been, shorn of the seriousness, yet another good farce, another risible patricide in a long line of the same kind; it might even have managed to make the best of both worlds, in the fashion of the unhappily neglected Father and Son of Edmund Gosse, poignant too in its recollection of early religious culture and what can be salvaged from it, in its evocation of old pieties now behold with a skeptical eye, and of old certainties now riddled by the grapeshot of modern thought, etc. As it is, the hook is merely amusing and heartbreaking by turns; its deeper tragedy is not only the death of a child, but also the moribundity of a talent and of the heart behind it.

GEORGE HARPER

Gospel In New Guinea

Cannibal Valley, by Russell T. Hitt (Harper & Row, 1962, 256 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by James M. Boice, Editorial Assistant, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

In September, 1959, seven French explorers began a seven-month, 1,000-mile passage across Dutch New Guinea, popularizing their arduous adventure in a film released this year as The Sky Above—The Mud Below. When it was over, five of the seven had dropped out, three of the native bearers were dead and 30 men were sick with dysentery and malaria. Mr. Hitt’s chronicle of the missionary effort in the Grand Baliem Valley of New Guinea illustrates that once again the adventures of the secular world have been preceded by the brave, sacrificial and visionary missionaries of the Christian Gospel.

These missionaries are not idealized in Hitt’s account. Neither are the outstanding successes of the Christian witness overemphasized. Instead, the reader will discover a vivid, personal portrayal of Christian proclamation, beginning with the vision of Robert A. Jaffray in the 1930s and continuing through 25 years of hardship, discouragement, sacrifice and martyrdom to the eventual establishment of an indigenous Christian Church among men who had once been illiterate cannibals and killers.

As one follows the narration one wishes that there were fewer events to cover and fewer individuals to mention. One also regrets that the personalities of the missionaries, their hopes and discouragements, are not more intimately portrayed. But the Christian reader who will overlook these limitations will find the attempts of native Christians to understand the Christian message and to order their lives in accordance with biblical principles profoundly moving. These incidents are the high points of the narration.

This work is not without shortcomings. But the account, sometimes little more than a chronicle of the missionary enterprise in New Guinea, often sweeps the reader up into its greater vision of the transforming power of the Gospel.

JAMES M. BOICE

Trend Index

Current Issues in New Testament Interpretation, edited by William Klassen and Graydon F. Snyder (Harper, 1962, 302 pp., $5), is reviewed by Merrill C. Tenney, Dean of the Graduate School, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

Reading for Perspective

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

* Man: The Image of God, by G. C. Bcrkouwer (Eerdmans, $6). A leading Christian theologian puts the light of Scripture to man, the image of God who has now become a danger to himself and his neighbor.

* Reformation Studies, edited by Franklin H. Littell (John Knox, $5.50). Essays on both left-wing and classical personalities and movements of the Reformation.

* The Doctrine of Man in Classical Lutheran Theology, edited by Herman A. Preus and Edmund Smith (Augsburg, $3). Disinterment of M. Chemnitz’ and J. Gerhard’s thought on the image of God, free will, and sin. Much of it translated into English for the first time.

The wide influence of Dr. Piper, who is now completing forty years of teaching—twenty-five years at Princeton Seminary—is reflected by the fifteen contemporary scholars who have contributed these essays in his honor. Both American and Continental scholarship are represented by such well known names as Paul Minear, Amos Wilder, Markus Barth, Floyd V. Filson, Rudolph Bultmann, C. K. Barrett, and Johannes Munck. The subject matter covers a wide variety of material: ontology, hermeneutics, the Synoptic problem, the Johannine writings, the Pauline epistles, the nature and development of the early church, and the formation of the canon. Each essay represents some phase of the most recent production in biblical scholarship.

A trend common to all of these essays is the readiness to reexamine the New Testament in the light of its historical and psychological setting and to concede a greater importance to its intrinsic testimony than did the criticism of a generation ago. Irrespective of individual presuppositions, the authors seem to take the biblical text more seriously than did their predecessors. Barth’s essay on “The Old Testament in Hebrews,” Filson’s “The Gospel of Life,” and Barrett’s discussion of “The Theological Vocabulary of the Fourth Gospel and of the Gospel of Truth” contain much useful analysis of textual content.

This work reveals a prevailing unrest in biblical scholarship that has been increasing in the last three decades. Although these writers could not strictly he called conservatives in interpretation, they seem to assume a less cavalier attitude toward the New Testament than prevailed in the older liberalism. They admit that at least some of its history is reliable and that some of its teaching deserves serious consideration. Although not all of their theses will be acceptable to evangelical scholars, and although they do not hold either a high view of inspiration nor a consistent evangelical theology, their thoroughness deserves emulation. Some of their suggestions, like Minear’s argument that the cosmology of the Apocalypse demands a new dimension of thinking, Robinson’s method of analyzing Jesus’ epigrams, and Barrett’s demonstration that the theological vocabularies of John’s Gospel and of the Gnostic “Gospel of Truth” are quite unrelated, can be useful to the student of exegesis and of theology.

In general one may say that these essays are comparatively free from the trivia that occupy many Festschriften, and are a valuable index to the trend of current scholarship. They emphasize interpretation more than speculation. On the other hand, they illustrate by contrast the vast field that is open to evangelical scholars and theologians who will endeavor by patient investigation and by constructive reasoning to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of the Word of God, and to stress its spiritual authority rather than its “problems.”

MERRILL C. TENNEY

Tillich’S Christ

Paul Tillich and the Christian Message, by George H. Tavard (Scribner’s, 1962, 176 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by James Daane, Editorial Associate, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Paul Tavard confronts the theology of Paul Tillich with the question, “What think ye of Christ?” After comprehensive, expert analysis Tavard concludes: the man is Christian, the theology is not.

The first half of this judgment does not mean that Tavard adopts Tillich’s contention that the Protestant principle of justification by faith justifies unbelievers and atheists as well as believing sinners. It rests rather on the faith of the man Tillich as it shines through his sermons.

Tillich takes the religious-ethical Protestant principle that the saint in history is yet a sinner and expands it into the philosophical principle that within history there can be no ontological absolutes, no absolute truth, no infallible Bible or Church, no genuine historical Incarnation.

Since the ground of man’s being is said to be in God the Unconditioned, man’s existence (quite in harmony with this expanded Protestant principle) is never equal to his essence. This disparity of existence and essence is Original Sin. Concern about the disparity (when more than merely psychological) is an ultimate concern since it concerns the very ground of man’s existence. Such ultimate concern is faith. This faith is found in all religions and in all serious art, philosophy, and literature.

On the basis of this same principle the Jesus of history is not the Christ. Jesus as the one in whom the ground of man’s being, God’s Godmanhood, is revealed under the conditions of existence, as the one in whom man’s essence and existence are seen reconciled and free from anxiety, is called the Christ, the New Being, the symbol of the ontological victory over all that threatens man’s being. Jesus appears to be the Christ especially on the Cross where without anxiety he sacrifices himself as Jesus.

In Tavard’s judgment such a Christology is not Christian; it fails to do what Chalcedon did: recognize a point in time and history in which the divine and human are united.

Tavard admits writing as late as 1953 that Tillich’s interpretation of the New Being in Jesus as the Christ was essentially correct. He now confesses that the publication of Tillich’s Systematic Theology II (1957) makes this reading of Tillich impossible. Tillich’s Christology is heterodox, incompatible with Chalcedon.

Tavard then goes on to suggest that Tillich’s Christology could be brought in line with Chalcedon by the idea of “God-manhood” which Tavard sees suggested in the biblical ideas of Christ as the “man from heaven,” the “second Adam.” Tavard suggests that these can be interpreted to mean that Jesus Christ is “the second Person, the Man-God,” “the perfect Image of the Father, of whom he is eternally born.” As such Jesus would be “the pre-existent Man” in whom our manhood participates and is grounded. But says Tavard, “A full elaboration would require a separate volume.”

Tavard provides a sympathetic but competent critique of Tillich’s Christology as symbol, as history (perhaps the finest chapter), as dogma, and as ethics.

This book is one of the finest critiques of Tillich’s thought. Although Tavard is a Roman Catholic, his Catholicism does not limit the value of his critique for a Protestant since the norm by which he evaluates Tillich is the Christology of 4th century Chalcedon and that of Luther and Calvin.

JAMES DAANE

Choose You Must!

On Asia’s Rim, by Andrew T. Roy (Friendship, 1962, 166 pp., $2.95; paperback $1.75), is reviewed by Lewis H. Lancaster, for 41 years a missionary of the Presbyterian Church, U.S., in China.

The Christian mission on the rim of East Asia is the theme of World Mission study for 1962–63. On Asia’s Rim is the basic book for adult study of this theme. The author is a missionary of 30 years experience in China and Hong Kong.

Caught in the maelstrom of world politics are 38 million people crowded on the Korean peninsula and the islands of Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. In this brief book we are told of the history and culture of these “islands between,” their economic and political conditions and problems, their religions and spiritual needs, and something of the life and work of the Church.

The last chapter is entitled, “You and the Rim of Asia.” “We in the West are deeply involved in East Asia as helping hands and as sources of irritation.” “The issues are drawn, the choices are before us.… We can give our lives in trying to save the peoples of the world in the name of Jesus Christ, or we can try to save our own lives and lose them ingloriously.”

The reading of this book should not only give a new understanding of and an urgent concern for these people, but also stir a more serious determination to meet the responsibilities that we face as followers of Christ.

LEWIS H. LANCASTER

Divine Command?

Death Row Chaplain, by Byron Eshelman with Frank Riley (Prentice-Hall, 1962, 244 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by John A. MacDonald, Minister, First Baptist Church, Mill Valley, California.

Byron Eshelman has been head Protestant Chaplain at San Quentin Prison and Supervising Chaplain for the California State Department of Corrections for more than 11 years. His book, Death Row Chaplain, has been written out of considerable depth of personal experience and for this reason ought to be read by anyone concerned with the issue of capital punishment.

Eshelman states his concern for “a lack of theological perspective and religious depth” in the field of penology and corrections. He also writes with obvious disapproval of capital punishment. But he states that his purpose is more “to analyze what the symptom of capital punishment means in our culture” than to help abolish the death penalty. In the mind of this reviewer the analysis is entirely unsatisfactory. For evangelicals who oppose capital punishment, his argument offers no comfort. He assumes that all administration of the death penalty has always been wrong. He does not in any responsible way consider the theological implications of this assumption. Apparently he classifies the divine commandment of Genesis 9:5, 6 as merely a presumptuous human rationalization of its barbaric custom. Imposition of the death penalty, he claims, has always been a symptom of immaturity in a given culture. Thus Freudian psychology is accorded recognition as authoritative in place of the divinely attested biblical revelation. This is the “theology” of the book.

Unshackled from authoritative revelation, Eshelman is able to scold the self-righteous ones of society who “play God.” He further states his long-held conviction that it is “pharisaism and self-righteousness for Christians to maintain that their religion is superior to all others.”

In following the author through numerous interesting, and in some instances famous, records of criminals, the reviewer was frequently puzzled as to why the parole system was not scrutinized as a possible contributor to the ultimate crimes for which many have been executed.

The familiar problems of injustice, social responsibility, insanity, etc., are handled quite skillfully and no doubt with telling effectiveness upon any sensitive reader. No Christian can be insensitive to the tragic affairs of human life. But the problem must be assessed in terms of the nature of sin and its growing evil effects in human life and society as a whole. Would a “mature” and “responsible” society actually accomplish the “redemptive” effects Eshelman hopes for through his enlightened penology? Or should serious Christian theology humbly assume that the ancient Scriptures reveal God’s infinite wisdom, sufficient to take account of acknowledged problems of human injustice, social responsibility, and insanity, while no sinful society can ever trust itself as truly mature and thus able to reject revelation and law it doesn’t like?

JOHN A. MACDONALD

Something Different

Living Today for God, by Roger Schutz, translated by Stephen McNierney and Louis Evrard (Helicon, 1962, 128 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by Franklin T. Van Halsema, postgraduate student of philosophy, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The name Taizé has come during the last 20 years to stand for several things, but perhaps for none so unmistakably as for a unique approach to the problem of Christian unity. The Prior of the Reformed monastic community of that name, situated near the more famous Cluny, France, sketches in this book the view of the world and of Christian life in it which has determined that approach.

An excellence of this book is that it exposes the problem of Christian unity as a radically spiritual, rather than theological or church-political, problem. But is it not an “escapist” spirituality which seeks expression in a monastic form of life? Father Schutz does not think so, and gently points out, with more persuasion than can be reproduced here, that a retreat into the “ghetto” of denominational security is “more ‘cloistered’ than any convent.” His book On the Christian life is not a plea for more monastic vocations, and even less for more correct Christian “behavior,” but for stronger commitments to the mission of authentic Christian living. Taizé stands for fulfilling that mission by replacing denominational allegiance with the allegiances of the three old Benedictine vows.

There are some Reformation Christians who are finding in Taizé and in movements such as the liturgical revival more hopeful signs of real ecumenical progress than can be found in the councils and counter-councils pledged to ecumenisms of various kinds. Even the Roman Catholics have taken notice. It is not often that a book by a Protestant author is published first by a Roman Catholic house, introduced by a Cardinal’s letter, and prefaced by one of the Church’s noted scholars.

FRANKLIN T. VAN HALSEMA

Valuable For Some

Ministries of Mercy, by Fern Babcock Grant (Friendship, 1962, 167 pp., $2.95; paperback, $1.95), is reviewed by W. E. Borne, Pastor, Foster Park Baptist Church, Chicago, Illinois.

This book will be of greatest value to those almost entirely ignorant of the scope of the social ministries performed by the churches of America. It is uncritical in its assessment of programs and reads as if the folders sent out for special offerings were used as source material. The author does, however, express concern that social service institutions of the churches sometimes fail to meet the standards for membership in the Child Welfare League of America.

As a survey the book is incomplete. In listing the hospitals sponsored by churches, the author makes no mention of the many hospitals and health services supported by Southern Baptists.

I wish that I could be kinder to this book for there is need for a briskly written book on the many “ministries of mercy” performed or supported by the churches of America. To be of maximum usefulness, however, such a book should critically examine the programs and approaches which may have outlived their usefulness. Since churches cannot do everything, they must seek ways and means to best use the monies and energies that are available. In this search, this book will not greatly help.

W. E. BORNE

Book Briefs

Roman Catholicism, by Loraine Boettner (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1962, 466 pp., $5.95). A thoroughgoing, conservative, often emotional and never exciting contrast of Catholicism with Protestantism. More apt to propagandize than to convince.

What College Students Think, by Rose K. Golden, Morris Rosenberg, Robin M. Williams, Jr., and Edward A. Suchman (Van Nostrand, 1962, 240 pp., $5.95). What college students think about college, fraternities, sex, dating, religious and political matters, and the interesting conclusions they seem to support.

The United Church of Christ, by Douglas Horton (Thomas Nelson, 1962, 320 pp., $4). Author tells the story of the origins, organization, and role of the UCC by reference to its Constitution, and along the way expresses personal comment on many matters.

Financing Medical Care, edited by Helmut Schoeck (Caxton Printers, Caldwell, Idaho, 1962, 314 pp., $5.50). The story of governmental medical care programs in various European countries.

Pascal’s Pensées, translated by Martin Turnell (Harper, 1962, 447 pp., $6). Pascal’s classic apology for religion with material newly ordered and an introduction by the translator.

You Can Witness with Confidence, by Rosalind Rinker (Zondervan, 1962, 105 pp., $1.95). An unusually sane treatment of how to witness to Jesus Christ.

John Colet and the Platonic Tradition, by Leland Miles (Open Court, 1962, 239 pp., $4.50; paper $1.75). Exploration of the Platonic tradition in Colet, Oxford Reformer.

Don’t Park Here, by Paul Erb (Herald Press, Scottsdale, Pa., 1962, 182 pp., $3). A collection of essays on the Christian life, originally published as editorials in the Christian Herald. Brief and topical.

God Is Where You Are, by Alan Walker (Eerdmans, 1962, 128 pp., $2). This addition to the Preaching for Today series by a distinguished Australian preacher is generally fresh and stimulating. The ghost of Rauschenbush lingers on in several places.

The Handbook of Biblical Personalities, by George M. Alexander (Seabury Press, Greenwich, Conn., 1962, 291 pp., $5.75). An alphabetical listing of biblical characters with biography and references. Undecisive on historical and critical problems.

Whom God Hath Joined Together, by Wesley H. Hager (The Upper Room, Nashville, Tenn., 1962, 96 pp., $.75). Devotional guide for the newly married; readings and prayers for the first forty days.

The Disciplined Life, by Richard Shelley Taylor (Beacon Hill, 1962, 102 pp., $1.75). Author pleads the need and value of discipline before a soft, flabby, pampered, self-indulgent generation. Simple, pointed; recommended.

Your Child’s Religion, by the Rev. Randolph Crump Miller (Doubleday, 1962, 164 pp., $2.95). Author raises and answers 88 questions; some answers are excellent, but some of the questions are better than the answers.

A History of Mission House-Lakeland, by Eugene C. Jaberg, Roland G. Kley, Rein-hard Ulrich, Arthur M. Krueger, Theophilus F. H. Hilgeman (Christian Education Press, 1962, 277 pp., $4.95). A centennial volume celebrating the history of Mission House, seminary of the former German Reformed (then Evangelical and Reformed, now United Church of Christ) Church.

The Story of the Good News, by Arthur H. Voerman (Exposition, 1962, 280 pp., $4.50). Author follows the highly dubious procedure of presenting a translation which is paraphrase in which the interpretations of the author appear to fall from the lips of Jesus. Reader will not be sure whether he hears the words of his Lord or those of Voerman.

From Out of the West, edited by P. J. Baird (Lantern Press, 1962, 156 pp., $3.95). Sixteen sermons from 16 Presbyterian ministers of the West breathing something of its expansive mountains and deserts, its storied coast. With pictures of their churches.

A Guide to Daily Prayer, by William Barclay (Harper & Row, 1962, 160 pp., $3). Prayers which reiterate help me, give me, forgive me, keep me (and those I love, or who love me), but lack the dimension of worship and thanksgiving.

The Priesthood of All Believers, by Cyril Eastwood (Augsburg, 1962, 268 pp., $4.50). The place and role of the laymen in the Church as seen in Luther, Calvin, Anglicanism, Puritanism and Methodism.

Paperbacks

The Dynamics of World History, by Christopher Dawson, edited by John J. Mulloy (New American Library, 1962, 480 pp. $.95). Renowned erudite historian probes the relationship of religion and history and urges Christianity as history’s greatest dynamic. Reprint.

Pacemakers of Christian Thought, by James William McClendon (Broadman, 1962, 68 pp., $1). Brief, incisive essays on nine important modern theologians. Theological appetizers calculated to whet the appetite for the reading of Barth, Tillich, Carnell, Bultmann, etc. Done with sympathy and criticism.

Faith That Makes Sense, by J. Edwin Orr (Judson, 1962, 109 pp., $1.45). By use of analogy and popular language author attempts to make Christian faith convincing. First published in 1960.

Homo Viator, by Gabriel Marcel, translated by Emma Craufurd (Harper, 1962, 270 pp., $1.45). A religious existentialist’s reflections on man in pilgrimage. First published in 1951.

A Lawyer Examines the Bible (New Revised Edition), by Irwin H. Linton (W. A. Wilde Company, 1962, 318 pp., $1.85). A lawyer considers the evidence for the truth of Christianity and gives personal testimony to its truthfulness. First printed in 1943.

Reprints

If Thou Shalt Confess, by J. K. Van Baalen (Eerdmans, 1962, 65 pp., $1.50). For those who just have confessed or are about to confess faith in Christ. Very fine, very brief. Revised.

Faith and Its Problems, by Paul G. Schrotenboer (Pro Rege Publishing Co., Rexdale, Ontario, 1962, 114 pp., $1.95). Simple, orthodox answers to big questions in simple, uneven English.

A fortnightly report of developments in religion

It was like a summer romance which seemingly flourished during the vacation season only to break off abruptly. Gone, but not forgotten.

The parties to the short-lived affair were the U. S. foreign aid program and religious enterprise abroad, a pair of institutions traditionally kept apart by the American principle of separation of church and state.

The love letter which sparked the romance was a 2,000-word statement officially labeled “Policy Determination No. 10” issued by the Agency for International Development, successor organization to the International Cooperation Administration. AID is the government instrument of technical assistance to underdeveloped countries and it dispenses about three or four billion U. S. dollars abroad each year.

AID’s policy determination, drawn up as a guide for agency personnel, spelled out the means whereby the U. S. foreign aid program could enter into partnership with missionary endeavors. It declared that funds could be channeled to religious organizations abroad for missionary schools and other projects which are compatible with overall objectives of the country concerned and which meet the approval of its government.

Appropriate safeguards were to be required, however, to assure that religious agencies involved “will not proselytize or discriminate or otherwise take advantage of the relationships with A.I.D.”

The implications of the policy aroused the reaction of numerous church-state observers nonetheless.

A spokesman for the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs had predicted that it would “cause grave concern to Protestants who feel strongly about church-state separation.”

Dr. Glenn L. Archer, executive director of Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and States, had charged that the policy amounted to “a flagrant violation of our long-standing church-state tradition.” “The charge being constantly leveled against our missionaries and against church groups abroad is that they are tools of United States imperialism,” Archer observed. “We know that such charges are false, but substance is given to them if these groups now commence to receive support from the U. S. Government.”

He added that “already these aid programs for churches abroad have inspired the complaint that we are discriminating agains our own churches here because we do not give them the same aid.”

Perhaps the most pointed reaction came from Editor E. S. James of the Baptist Standard of Texas. Within an hour after he had learned of AID’s policy statement, James fired off telegrams to President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, and several Congressmen. James said he praised the President for keeping his campaign promises on church-state separation, then asserted that the announced AID policy was as clearly a constitutional violation of the Constitution as would be federal aid to parochial schools.

Kennedy replied with a friendly letter dated August 22 which disclosed that AID had withdrawn its statement.

Subsequently, AID Administrator Fowler Hamilton issued a notice to subordinates:

“Policy Determination No. 10 has given rise to misconceptions concerning the policy of the Agency regarding ‘religious organizations and the U. S. aid program.’ Therefore, it is hereby withdrawn and has no further force and effect. Henceforth, the Agency will continue to pursue the same policies that it and predecessor agencies have pursued in this regard during the past period of more than ten years. In view of the confusion that has arisen, I wish to make perfectly clear that the Agency in administrating the funds for which it is responsible will do so in full accord with the traditional constitutional principles that are applicable to this area.”

POAU applauded the withdrawal with a comment by Associate Director C. Stanley Lowell.

Aid’S Controversial Policy Determination

“Appendix A” was probably the most significant portion of the “policy determination” issued and then withdrawn by the Agency for International Development. The policy was designed to set forth guidelines as to how U. S. foreign aid funds could be tied in with missionary work. This portion spelled out the policy as it was to apply to religious educational activity. Here is the complete text of “Appendix A”:

A. I. D. basic policy regarding assistance to or through “religious organizations,” and its specific reference to technical assistance, govern all relevant education programs. Supplementary guidance concerning contracts with “religious organizations” and assistance to religious or religiously affiliated schools is provided best by examining the application of A. I. D. policy to instances which, in terms of past experience, are typical of the problems which arise. The following paragraphs are illustrations.

1. Requests have been received for direct assistance to U. S. religious organizations for their work abroad, e.g., a grant to a missionary group to build a missionary school in Africa.

If the Mission finds the request compatible with the country program, and if the request is submitted by, or with the support of, the host country’s government, favorable consideration is possible.

2. The question has been raised whether it is permissive under A. I. D. policy to enter into a contract with a U. S. or foreign religious organization to assist in carrying out an A. I. D. project, or a project which will help to accomplish A. I. D. aims; e.g., (a) a contract with the American Friends Service Committee for assistance in developing school gardens in Jordan; (b) a contract with the Koinonia Foundation for conducting a literacy program in Yemen.

A. I. D. would first make sure (a) that such a contractor is the best available one, (b) that the contractor is clearly agreeable to the host government and people, and (c) that there are built-in guarantees that the contractor will refrain from any activities which might give the project a religious content. With these three items satisfied, a favorable response would be within established A. I. D. policy.

3. Requests have been received from institutions or organizations which are not classified as religious organizations but the request is for religious purposes, e.g., to build a chapel.

The determining factor is the requirement of conformity of a request with A. I. D.’s objectives and technical assistance aims. Policy regarding religious organizations would not be pertinent.

4. Projects have been submitted which involve assistance to schools maintained by a religious organization, but recognized as part of the national school system; e.g., Catholic normal schools in Peru which are “fiscalized” institutions receiving some support and supervision by the Ministry of Education and recognized by law as adjuncts of the national system.

Provided that the status of the school in the national educational system of the host country has been verified, the situation discussed in illustration I becomes applicable.

5. Requests for assistance have reference to schools or school systems where religious instruction is a required or customary part of the curriculum, e.g., many national school systems in Latin America (Catholic) or in the Near East (Moslem).

The decisive factor is whether the schools meet the criteria indicated in 1 and 4 above. The presence or absence of religious instruction in the curriculum of a national school system is in itself not a determining element.

6. A rather frequent type of request received by the Agency and concerning assistance to a religiously affiliated school in a foreign country is the submission presented directly by a representative of that school.

In such instances the school official or organization representatives should be advised to submit the request as a host government proposal, or at least with host government endorsement, through A. I. D. Mission channels. The status of the school and its relationship to the national education system would be evaluated by the field mission and if the situation thus revealed were analogous to cases 1 and 4 above, the same considerations would apply.

“This is a wise move on the part of AID,” said Lowell. “To assist religious organizations abroad in ways that would be unconstitutional at home would create an intolerable dichotomy in government policy. We cannot have one set of rules for home games and another set for away games.”

The POAU official still had some misgivings, however: “What disturbs us is the lack of any assurance that the policy of AID will be changed to conform to the First Amendment. It is a good thing to change a wrong statement, but it is better to change a wrong practice.”

The Baptist Joint Committee declared:

“We are informed by responsible spokesmen in AID that the policies contained in the recent policy determination are those which have been in use by the U. S. government foreign aid program for more than 10 years. Accordingly, in our estimation, the issuance and withdrawal … opens for church-state analysis the whole policy field as developed in recent administrations.”

The AID policy had reportedly been approved by the agency’s executives on July 16, but there was no public announcement. Subsequently, copies were made available to some religious organizations engaged in overseas work.

The first public notice of the policy statement apparently was disseminated by the National Catholic Welfare Conference news service to diocesan papers. An NCWC newsman said his office first learned of the policy statement when it was distributed at a Chicago meeting of relief agency representatives.

The statement had declared that “where such projects make a vital contribution to economic development, A. I. D. may therefore furnish assistance through a qualified organization, even if such organization has religious affiliations. Our standards and criteria here do not turn on the question of the nature of the organization, but rather on the question of where our assistance can be most effective to economic development and at the same time not to religious activity.”

The statement implicitly recalled the strong public reaction which followed a decision to grant U. S. aid to schools in Colombia, where Roman Catholic influence is felt throughout the educational system. One portion cautioned that “domestic and foreign traditions, views and sensitivities require special consideration and, in some instances, additional guidance.”

An agency official had been quoted as saying that “the important thing is helping people, not arguing over who gets credit for it.”

Protestant Panorama

• A plan is being worked out to coordinate Lutheran pastoral ministries in health, welfare, and correctional institutions. Participating churches of the National Lutheran Council have ratified an agreement with the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod to establish a “consulting committee” for implementing the plan. Normally, pastors and chaplains will schedule Communion services for members of their own churches.

• Church World Service, relief agency of the National Council of Churches, announced an administrative reorganization effective September 1. New positions are being created and responsibilities reassigned. The CWS overseas staff is being strengthened. Executive Director Hugh D. Farley cited a transition from temporary relief to long-term rehabilitation as reason for the change.

• Fire caused an estimated $315,000 damage to the First Methodist Church of El Centro, California. The Rev. Jesse J. Roberson, pastor, said there was “indisputable evidence of arson.”

• Delegates to the 63rd convention of Gideons International were told that the organization has distributed more than 50,000,000 Bibles since its inception. More than 3,000,000 were passed out last year.

• A Church of Reconciliation built by German volunteers as a symbol of repentance for Nazi crimes was inaugurated on a hilltop near Taizé in Burgundy, headquarters of a Protestant monastic community.

• A controversy over local church autonomy resulted in the ouster of the Rev. Wayne Smith, moderator of the newly-formed North Carolina Association of Free Will Baptists, from his post as pastor of the First Free Will Baptist Church in Smithfield, North Carolina. The association was formed by members of the North Carolina Free Will Baptist Convention who opposed withdrawal from the National Association of Free Will Baptists in a factional dispute.

• Delegates to the 61st General Session of the Missionary Church Association endorsed a proposed merger with the Christian and Missionary Alliance. To become effective, the merger plan must still be ratified by a two-thirds vote of the members in 121 association congregations.

• Eternity magazine and The Sunday School Times called off plans to operate under a joint governing board. Both will continue to publish as separate ventures.

• Gospel musician Thurlow Spurr begins a nation-wide tour of his 30-member instrumental and vocal troupe on September 29 with a concert in Chicago. The Spurr group plans concerts in 100 U. S. cities within the next year.

• A new seminary is being opened in Jacksonville, Florida, this month. A number of Southern Baptist ministers are behind the project, but no official denominational ties have been established.

• The Upper Room, world’s most widely used daily devotional guide apart from the Bible itself, now has a circulation of 3,250,000 with an estimated readership of 10,000,000. It is published bi-monthly in 34 languages and 40 editions and is distributed in 100 countries.

• Some 3,000 Anglicans paraded through the streets of Georgetown, British Guiana, last month, marking the consecration of the Rt. Rev. Bernard Markham as Bishop of Nassau and the Bahamas.

• A $1,000,000 interdenominational Christian high school and junior college will be built in Menifee County, Kentucky. Spearheading the project is newspaper publisher Jerry F. Ringo, a Presbyterian layman.

• A number of Lutheran Free Church pastors and congregations say they will not join the proposed merger with the American Lutheran Church. The Rev. Richard Snipstead of Green-bush, Minnesota, says a conference of dissident congregations is tentatively set for October. Churches from other synods also are expected to become a part of the new association.

Jews Versus Jesuits

It was not only hypocritical. It was also unjust. And the Jews were not the only ones to know it. Noting “disturbing hints of heightened anti-Semitic feeling” in an editorial “To Our Jewish Friends,” the September 1 issue of the weekly Jesuit journal, America, warned of “intense efforts … being made in some Jewish quarters to close ranks and to exploit all the resources of group awareness, purposefulness and expertise that are to be found in the Jewish community.” The object of such an effort, the Jesuits believed, was an “all-out campaign to secularize the public schools and public life from top to bottom.”

The Jesuit editorial came in the wake of the June 25 decision of the Supreme Court which banned the use of the New York Board of Regents prayer in the state’s public schools. A number of Jewish organizations have been active in voicing their support of the court’s decision. “What will have been accomplished,” the editorial demanded, “if our Jewish friends win all the legal immunities they seek, but thereby paint themselves into a corner of social and cultural alienation?”

To Jewish leaders the “friendly warning” was little short of a direct threat of anti-Semitism. Replied the rabbis, in a statement issued jointly by the Central Conference of American Rabbis and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, “America is encouraging the very evil it claims to be trying to avert.”

“What would be the Catholic reaction,” the reply queried shrewdly, “if a Jewish publication were to publish an editorial entitled ‘To Our Roman Catholic Friends’ warning Catholics to cease their campaign for public aid to parochial schools … lest a wave of anti-Catholic bigotry descend on the nation?”

At week’s end another Roman Catholic publication took issue with the Jesuit editorial. In a move which may give weight to suspicions of friction between laity and clergy within the Roman church, the lay magazine Commonweal observed, “If there is any real danger of anti-Semitism among Catholics then it is Catholics who ought to be warned.” The approach was termed “very odd.”

Lamenting Indifference

Protestant laymen are more than twice as zealous as Catholics in seeking to win converts, according to a priest who is director of the Bureau of Convert Research at the University of Notre Dame.

Writing in the August 25 issue of America, national Jesuit weekly, the Rev. John A. O’Brien charged that “the overwhelming majority of Catholics have never so much as lifted a finger to share their faith.”

Quoting from a survey compiled by the bureau, O’Brien said Catholics “need to learn effective techniques of sharing their faith, as only 17 per cent of those who tried were successful, as compared with 43 per cent successful Protestants.”

According to the statistics he cites, 59 per cent of all Protestants sought to interest others in membership in their churches, while the Catholic figure came to 28 per cent.

O’Brien says the data came from “the most extensive survey of this subject ever made.” He said the survey was conducted by the Catholic Digest and that a cross section representing 75.9 million people in the United States who attend some church were confronted with two separate questions:

1. “Have you ever tried to get anyone to join?”

2. “Did you ever succeed in getting anyone to join?”

A chart accompanying the article in America showed that 67 per cent of all Baptists try to win converts. The record for other groups was as follows: other small Protestant denominations, 61 per cent; Presbyterian, 59; Methodist, 56; Episcopal, 53; Lutheran, 49; and Congregational, 38.

A second chart involved percentages of members of various faiths who succeeded in winning converts. It showed that Presbyterians were successful 52 per cent of the time. Other group figures were: Baptist, 50 per cent; Episcopal, 45; other small Protestant denominations, 44; Methodist, 39; Lutheran, 28; and Congregational, 19.

O’Brien said religious bodies “particularly active” in recruiting people for instruction include Jehovah’s Witnesses the Churches of Christ, the Seventh-day Adventists, and the Mormons.

“As a consequence,” he said, “they are gaining the largest numbers of adherents in proportion to their membership.”

He stated that Roman Catholics tend to think that “sharing the faith” is a business confined to priests. “The average Catholic feels that he is fulfilling his duty when he attends Sunday Mass and drops a fairly generous offering in the collection box. If, in addition, he acts as an usher or occasionally attends a Holy Name Society meeting, he considers himself a real apostle, with the crown of sainthood weighing heavily on his hallowed head.”

Southbound Evangelist

Evangelist Billy Graham leaves this week for South America where he and his team plan meetings in at least six major cities. The tour is his second in South America this year.

Graham will begin the crusade in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Tuesday, September 25. Meetings will be held each night at Pacaembú Stadium with the closing scheduled for Sunday, September 30.

Subsequent crusades will be held in Asunción, Paraguay, Córdoba, Argentina, Rosario, Argentina, Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. The tour will close in Buenos Aires With a meeting on Sunday, October 28.

Last month Graham travelled to the Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, Alabama, for a Sunday afternoon rally which drew a crowd estimated at 35,000.

Two days later, William F. Graham, the evangelist’s father, died in Charlotte, North Carolina, at the age of 74. The elder Graham had suffered a stroke several weeks earlier.

Arousing Suspicion

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect about the debut of the New English Bible New Testament was that the translation was judged on its own merits. The qualifications of the translators were seldom brought into question. Hopes for an equally objective reception for the NEB Old Testament suffered a severe blow last month when a 70-year-old Oxford professor took it upon himself to emphasize how drastic the new version would be.

Dr. Godfrey R. Driver, professor of Semitic philology and chairman of the panel of Old Testament translators, made the mistake of meeting the press without clearing his remarks with NEB publishers. He compounded the error by giving the virtual impression that his translators would improve upon God’s revelation to man. A London newspaper quoted him as saying that present translations include passages in the Old Testament which amount to “nonsense.” The quotation was picked up by wire services and appeared in headlines around the world.

Serious students of the Bible were satisfied that Driver meant no harm to Old Testament content, but the net effect of his indiscreet remarks was to arouse suspicion among uninitiated readers.

Driver also ventured a prediction that the Old Testament might be completed within two years. The publishers say there is no chance of it appearing before 1966.

The Road To Apostasy?

The leading complainant in the controversial Hick case charges that the United Presbyterian Church, for the first time in history, “has taken a deliberate step down the road that leads to apostasy by permitting, in effect, the word of man to be superior to the Word of God.”

The accusation is contained in a comprehensive 4,500-word statement released last month by the Rev. J. Clyde Henry, minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Lambertville, New Jersey. Henry said the General Assembly had taken an unconstitutional action last spring when it overruled a decision by the Synod of New Jersey which barred a Princeton Theological Seminary professor from membership in the Presbytery of New Brunswick because of his refusal to affirm belief in the Virgin Birth.

“The Church has declared officially that it is hospitable to heresy,” Henry declared, “and that error may stand on an equality with truth.”

Henry was chairman of the committee which initially examined Dr. John Hardwood Hick, who joined the Princeton faculty in 1960 and subsequently sought a membership transfer from a presbytery in England.

The presbytery accepted Hick, but the Judicial Commission of the Synod of New Jersey reversed the presbytery’s decision by sustaining complaints from a group of eight ministers and ten ruling elders led by Henry. The Judicial Commission of the General Assembly then annulled the synod’s decision. Said Henry:

“The Church now appears before the world as one which will censure a minister who makes an error in judgment, but will welcome with open arms a minister who is unable or unwilling to affirm his belief in a doctrine which has been an integral part of the faith of the Holy Catholic Church, and of all its branches, from the beginning.”

Henry protested the General Assembly action which alleged that there were irregularities in synod’s proceedings.

“To reverse a court’s decision on the basis of irregular procedures is to jeopardize the right of the original complainant to a fair hearing and a just decision.”

The Curriculum Problem

The unified curriculum prescribed for military Sunday Schools came under fire last month from the National Association of Evangelicals.

Dr. Robert A. Cook, NAE president, lodged a protest in a stiffly-worded letter to the chairman of the Armed Forces Chaplains Board, Air Force Major General Terence P. Finnegan.

Cook complimented the chaplains’ efforts in seeking an acceptable curriculum for Protestant servicemen and their dependents and conceded that a unified Sunday School curriculum “has many points in its favor.”

He declared, however, that “the end does not justify the means when the basic principles of religious freedom in our American heritage are violated.”

“It has come to our attention,” he added, “that the manner in which the Unified Protestant Sunday School Curriculum for Armed Forces is being made available to the military Sunday Schools does violate the constitutional freedom which our Armed Forces are committed to defend.”

“We must, therefore, respectfully but vigorously protest the fact that the respective Chiefs of Chaplains have recommended that the Unified Protestant Sunday School Curriculum be used in preference to any other.”

Under the unified curriculum system, a military-civilian committee reviews the materials of denominational publishing houses and selects those deemed most appropriate to the military. (See also CHRISTIANITY TODAY, April 13, 1962.)

The Armed Forces Chaplains Board, meanwhile, began a study aimed at possible revamping of the curriculum program. The Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention was awarded a contract to determine the feasibility of producing a new type of curriculum. Users of the unified Sunday School material are said to have expressed a desire for a “more static curriculum.”

Guidelines for the “new approach” were set forth by the Protestant Religious Education Advisory Group of the Armed Forces Chaplains Board. The advisory group includes editorial-representatives of denominational publishing boards. Here is a complete text of the group’s document, entitled “Guidelines for Considering Curriculum Materials to be Used in the Unified Protestant Sunday School Curriculum”:

Theological Principles

1. The curriculum materials should themselves provide specifically Christian content and plans for learning experiences in which the uniquely Christian interpretation is plainly stated or identified. The minimum content presented and experiences proposed by the materials should themselves provide a positive Christian declaration. The experience of the individual pupil and of the class will, of course, be enhanced by whatever depth of Christian experience and clarity of Christian expression the teacher can bring; but the central witness to Christ in the lesson must not be left to the ingenuity of the teacher alone.

2. The curriculum materials should themselves provide for bringing the pupil into direct contact with the Bible and not depend upon the teacher alone to fill it in nor to provide it from his own background or knowledge. It is always important that the learner be led to see himself as over against God—not merely as over against a group of believers who do things a certain way. This aspect of curriculum materials is all the more significant in the Armed Forces since the quality of the Christian community within which the chapel program takes place is so varied and so changing.

3. The curriculum materials should foster belief and confidence in God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—according to the Scriptures, and in the church as the communion of believers in Christ.

4. The curriculum materials should emphasize the following major themes:

a. God the Father, and the history of Israel.

b. Jesus Christ

c. The church and the Christian witness.

Educational Principles

1. The spiritual needs of people in military centers are the same as those of persons everywhere. But at military installations there are persons who are on the move every few months or who might be ordered to move any day; persons in an environment far removed from their usual friendships, from the security of home and what might be called a normal life. The curriculum materials should emphasize inner conviction and security, the meaning of Christian faith in relation to situations and cultures in which the learners find themselves.

2. The curriculum materials should themselves provide direct guidance for classroom procedures. The skilled teacher can easily omit, modify, or remake lesson plans, but the unskilled teacher cannot supply what he does not know.

3. The teacher’s guide materials should provide presentations of background reasons, both theological and educational, for what is proposed.

4. The curriculum materials should provide for as many contacts with the home and family as possible.

5. The curriculum materials should contain a minimum of specifically denominational references or emphases.

6. The curriculum materials should present a positive approach to other religions rather than attacking them.

An Official Rebuke

The World Council of Churches needs to face up more boldly to moral issues involved in the East-West conflict, according to Lutheran Bishop Otto Dibelius of Berlin.

Dibelius, a former president of the WCC, chided the council last month in an interview with Religious News Service.

“Many German churchmen are disturbed,” he said, “over the silence concerning Soviet policies which has emanated from the WCC since the decision was reached last November to receive the Russian Orthodox Church into the world body.”

Some observers saw the rebuke by the 81-year-old Dibelius as an indication that the WCC is experiencing internal strife over its posture toward the Communist bloc. It is the most severe indictment thus far from a churchman within the WCC orbit, and is all the more significant in that it comes from one who has played such a key role in council affairs.

Dibelius, who retired last year as chairman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKID), said that events since the WCC assembly in New Delhi tend to show that by receiving the Russian church into its membership the council may be committing itself to compromising its Christian witness in world affairs.

A “nefarious but successful” technique of dictators is to silence critics in the free world by threats to hostages, and the Russian churchmen are hostages, he declared.

“If a Christian stand is taken in this ecumenical body on issues of evident international justice,” he said, “the Russian churchmen will be called on the carpet when they return home and asked why they did not counter this anti-communism. So to avoid embarrassing and endangering their Russian delegates, the World Council seems to be heading in the direction of silencing its Christian witness where conscience should take a stand.”

Dibelius cited the report on world affairs presented at the recent meeting in Paris of the WCC’s policy-making Central Committee.

He said Dr. O. Frederick Nolde, chairman of the WCC’s Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, reviewed numerous world problems unrelated to the Communist world conspiracy and “then, at the end, as a kind of appendix, he did mention the Soviet threat to Berlin, expressing the hope that negotiation might ease the situation.”

Actually, Dibelius added, “the threat to Berlin is a major issue before the world today. Whether or not World War III breaks out may depend on a just solution to the Berlin harassment. Great issues of historical morality are at stake here. To pass over these issues because of expediency drives the blood to our faces.”

The bishop said that “often in history small minorities have imposed their will on the majority” and “the WCC may become another example.” Declaring that the World Council will have to face the issue in the immediate future, he added:

“Powerful influences in the Central Committee are increasingly concerned. Not only the true Christian effectiveness of the council’s witness but the cause of peace in our time hangs on the courageous facing of social immorality whether in the West or the East.”

Another factor which may still irk German churchmen is that they are represented on the WCC presidium by Dr. Martin Niemöller, whose pacifist views make him a highly controversial figure in West Germany. Niemöller was chosen at New Delhi over Bishop Hanns Lilje, who next to Dibelius is probably Germany’s best known and most respected churchman, but who takes a much stronger line against the Communists than does Niemöller.

Without Fear Or Favor

Even those who know the International Council of Christian Churches as an enterprising body would have been impressed at the first evening meeting of last month’s Fifth Plenary Congress in Amsterdam. The large choir did not confine itself to sacred songs, the magnificent organ of the Concertgebouw was heard to full advantage, a lady soloist rendered a piece by Mozart which is sometimes played in Roman Catholic churches before celebration of the Mass, and a full orchestra flung itself into a lively version of “D’ye ken John Peel?” A stranger might have thought such motley fare a somewhat unorthodox prelude to the president’s address which followed, on “Jesus Christ, the same.…”

“We are in the very hall,” began Dr. Carl McIntire, “in which the World Council of Churches, representing the ecumenical movement, was formally constituted, August 22 to September 4, 1948. Just previous to this our Gideon’s band met in the historic English Reformed Church in this city, August 11 to 19, 1948, and here the Doctrinal Statement was formulated, the Constitution adopted, and the International Council of Christian Churches unfurled its banner ‘For the Word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ …’.”

The ICCC now claims churches from 83 denominations, and has affiliated bodies and regional councils on five continents. Added Dr. McIntire, ICCC president: “The history of these 14 years is a chronicle of struggle, of vigorously fought battles on all the continents, and of a militant testimony to Jesus Christ.”

Describing an attack made on him at New Delhi by a leading WCC official, Dr. McIntire commented: “We were not fully aware of the increasing effectiveness of the ICCC’s testimony to Jesus Christ.… These ‘love’ arguments vanish when these men face the ICCC.” Up to the present time the ecumenical leaders had not issued a single invitation to an ICCC-affiliated body. “They do not want us,” said Dr. McIntire without evident sorrow, “they for some reason cannot seem even to stand us.” He went on to condemn the Blake-Pike proposal, the “advancing courtship with the Roman Church,” and religious syncretism. On the widely reported views of Dr. A. M. Ramsey he said: “A church leadership which honors an Archbishop of Canterbury who thinks that atheists will get into Heaven is in no position to give counsel to a world that is in confusion as to how it may deliver itself from the conspiracy of godless Communism.”

The secretary of the British Consultative Committee, Mr. George H. Fromow, reported that no British church bodies and no large groups of evangelicals were in the ICCC. In England most of the churches are in the WCC, and those which were not (here he named four evangelical denominations) “seem not to see the issues confronting us clearly enough to join us.” Lamenting that evangelicals would not “take a distinctive stand against the World Council of Churches, or call for separation from it,” Mr. Fromow listed four British objections to ICCC: it was an American institution, had a negative approach, was too political, and was “vicious” in its heresy hunting.

Referring to a recent WCC decision to “woo the evangelicals,” Mr. Bernard N. Bancroft, administrative secretary of ICCC’s Associated Missions, expressed the earnest hope that many of the missions and denominations would now understand the purposes and intentions of the WCC, and would cease to cooperate with the latter’s many agencies.

In a thoughtful and closely-reasoned address on “The Christ of the Scriptures and the Ecumenical Theology,” Professor S. U. Zuidema of Amsterdam’s Free University pointed out the dangers in the ecumenical recommendation of the dialogue as the most suitable means of preaching the Gospel. “The testimony of New Delhi,” he said, “even speaks of new ways for the missionary preaching of the twentieth century. We only get the right view of this matter when we take in account that this emphasis on the dialogue is closely bound up with a teaching about communication and solidarity,” and this in turn with the modern doctrine of identification. (This view says that we must be prepared to identify ourselves with those to whom we preach the gospel of salvation, just as Christ identified himself with men by becoming man and entering into their needs.) Such a doctrine, suggested Dr. Zuidema, which is represented by the testimony of New Delhi, “puts an end to missionary zeal (and) is also in principle the end of missionary fruitfulness, as it neglects the heart of the Gospel, that is, a rich Christ for a poor sinner.”

The Rt. Rev. D. A. Thompson, formerly bishop in the Free Church of England, pointed the need in the twentieth century for a second Reformation, and mentioned what he regarded as encouraging features since the last Plenary Congress. He said that an element of Korean Presbyterianism “which had been swept into the World Council of Churches through the influence of unworthy missionaries, was enlightened of God to see the error and disobedience, and so the sin, of being in such a fellowship, and came out and joined the ICCC. Likewise some 25,000 faithful Indian brethren, including two bishops and a number of ministers and evangelists, left the Mar Thoma Church which was in the World Council of Churches, and at great sacrifice have formed themselves into the St. Thomas Evangelical Church of South India.”

In typically forthright terms the congress made its mind known about the entrance into the WCC of a further group of churches from Soviet Russia. It passed a resolution, saying: “It is only logical to assume that according to the Communist timetable, the time has come when the program of world communism can be best advanced by injecting specially trained churchmen supposedly representing the masses in police states, into a religious United Nations with headquarters in Geneva.”

The congress: received greetings from the Mayor of Amsterdam and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek … denied that the Pope’s “subtle invitation” to his “separated brethren” has any application to true and faithful Protestants … condemned Dr. Leslie Weatherhead for his yen to take a blue pencil to certain parts of the Bible … expressed indignation at Russian blasphemies in exploiting outer space and “tells them that outer space belongs to the Almighty God and not to Mr. K.” … deplored the Ghanaian government’s deportation of two Anglican bishops, adding that “a Jeremiah must be free to speak for righteousness” … arranged its Sixth Plenary Congress for Geneva, August 12 to 21, 1965 … elected Dr. McIntire as president for a further three-year term.

J.D.D.

Convention Circuit

Medicine Lake, Minnesota—The Seventh Day Baptist General Conference voted at its 150th annual session to discontinue support of its School of Theology at Alfred (New York) University.

The conference voted to establish a new center of ministerial training at Plainfield, New Jersey. Ministerial students will take most of their work at other Protestant seminaries in the Plainfield area under supervision of the center’s director, yet to be named.

Rising costs of maintaining an accredited program at the Alfred School of Theology was given as reason for terminating the support, effective July 1, 1963. The school, founded by the denomination in 1857, has trained most of its clergy.

The Rev. Albert Rogers, school dean, said the conference action would undoubtedly close the school. Final action lies with Alfred University trustees.

Mankato, Minnesota—A renewed plea to dissolve the strife-ridden Evangelical Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America came before the annual convention of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod.

A report from the synod’s doctrine committee said the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, largest member of the conference, “did not resolve the issues disturbing the conference” at its recent convention in Cleveland.

“What was disheartening,” the committee said in its report of the Cleveland convention, “was that many who spoke for what one would call the more liberal side were seminary professors and synodical leaders who offset the good testimony given.”

The 13,639-member ELS, smallest of the four bodies making up the Synodical Conference, suspended relations with Missouri Synod several years ago, charging it with unscriptural practices.

Northfield, Minnesota—By a one-vote margin, the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America chose to cling to its historic stand of “dissent from all immoral civil institutions.” An effort to relax the position, which required a two-thirds majority, failed at a meeting of the denomination’s general synod.

A spokesman said that one aspect of the denomination’s “highly complicated theological thesis” involving political dissent demands that the Christian must be “very careful” in taking any kind of oath.

Cape Girardeau, Missouri—Congress was asked to “restudy all U. S. Constitutional amendments, especially the First and Fifth,” in a resolution adopted by The Church of God at its 58th annual General Assembly.

The resolution said the First Amendment had resulted in “controversies” regarding freedom of religion and church-state separation and its interpretation has “sharply limited” religious liberty.

Concerning the Fifth Amendment, which protects witnesses from testifying against themselves, the resolution asserted that it has served to “darken judgment.”

A New Era

A new era began last month for the World’s Christian Endeavor Union. Thousands of delegates attending the concluding service of the World’s Christian Endeavor Convention in Sydney, Australia, stood to their feet in Rushcutter’s Bay Stadium as Dr. Daniel A. Poling passed on the symbol of his leadership to his successor, Bishop Clyde W. Meadows. Poling placed the presidential medallion about the shoulders of the man who becomes the third president of the worldwide youth movement. Poling retired after 35 years as president and was named honorary president for life.

The Sydney convention also saw a reorganization of the World’s Union “to provide for more participation by national unions.”

Meadows, who now also serves as president of the International Society of Christian Endeavor embracing the United States, Canada, and Mexico, is a bishop of the United Brethren in Christ. He said that Christian Endeavor is experiencing an upsurge in interest in the states of Washington, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. He said the program is “a vital display of ecumenicity at a level that makes an impact on people in the various churches.”

Among resolutions adopted was one which challenged Endeavorers “to make the ecumenism which is as natural as breathing to Christian Endeavor, effective in all their contacts with the Christian community.” Another resolution declared that undue emphasis given to material possessions and the crippling expenditure upon the manufacture and use of weapons of mass destruction make for suspicion and strife and that Endeavorers pledge themselves to use all available spiritual resources to encourage leaders of all nations to “seek peace and ensue it” (1 Peter 3:11).

Another statement released during the convention emphasized that there “can be no affinity between atheistic communism and Christianity,” and that atheism wherever incorporated into government is an affront to human personality.

People: Words And Events

Deaths: Methodist Bishop J. W. E. Bowen, 72; in Atlanta … Moravian Bishop Samuel H. Gapp, 89; in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania … George Pepperdine, 76, founder of Pepperdine College; in Los Angeles … Anglican Archbishop Reginald Charles Halse, 81; in Brisbane, Australia … Dr. William H. Wrighton, 78, former president of Western Baptist Theological Seminary; in Victoria, British Columbia … Dr. Clarence Bouma, 70, emeritus professor of ethics and apologetics at Calvin Seminary; at Grand Rapids, Michigan … the Rev. Martin Erikson, 61, editor of The Standard of the Baptist General Conference; in St. Paul, Minnesota … the Rev. Joel Fridelt, former owner and editor of the Swedish religious weekly Missions-Wännen; in Worcester, Massachusetts … Dr. Samuel Ferdinand Nelson, director of the Penzotti Institute in Mexico City; in Isabela, Puerto Rico … Dr. Paul D. Devanandan, 61, director of the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society in Bangalore; at Dehra Dun, North India.

Elections: As president of the World Council of Christian Education, Sir Francis Ibiam … as president of the General Conference Mennonite Church, the Rev. Walter Gering … as president of the National Association of Church Business Administrators, W. Dean Willis … as president-designate of the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference, the Rev. C. Rex Burdick … as president of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod, the Rev. Theodore A. Asberg … as moderator of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, the Rev. Harry R. Butman … as president of the Supreme Council of the Presbyterian Church of Brazil, the Rev. Amantino Adorno Vassao.

Appointments: As president of Crozer Theological Seminary, Dr. Ronald V. Wells … as president of Iliff School of Theology, Dr. Lowell Swan … as dean of arts and sciences at Gordon College, Dr. F. Brooks Sanders … as president of Singspiration, Inc., John W. Peterson … as executive vice-president of the American Sunday-School Union, Walter W. Scott … as director of the Chaplain Service of the Veterans Administration, Rabbi Morris A. Sandhaus.

Resignation: As director of the Bureau of Information of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, Msgr. John E. Kelly.

Faith and trust are not synonymous, although in some aspects they may be.

We trust in God because we believe he is faithful. We have confidence in him because we believe he is able to do that which he has promised.

We have confidence in him because of who he is and what he has revealed about himself in word and action.

We depend on him because we believe he is wholly dependable.

One fine distinction that may exist between faith and trust is that which is found between action based on faith and the object of faith itself.

The writer to the Hebrews describes faith as follows: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (RSV); “Now faith means putting our full confidence in the things we hope for, it means being certain of things we cannot see” (Phillips); “But faith forms a solid ground for what is hoped for, a conviction of unseen realities” (Berkeley); “Now faith is the title-deed to things hoped for; the putting to proof of things not seen” (Weymouth); “Now faith means we are confident of what we hope for, convinced of what we do not see” (Moffatt).

From these and other translations we get a clear view of the meaning of faith. Therefore, in a very real sense trust is putting faith into practice. The antithesis of faith based on the revelation of God is its rejection in favor of human reason.

We have before us a letter inveighing against both the integrity and authority of the Bible. In it the writer says: “Our judgment on these things we must make for ourselves, and there is no finality, no authority, to which we have recourse other than an honest appraisal of our own experience, and knowledge of our time.”

Here there is stated the difference between faith and reason. Faith steps out and believes things it can neither see nor prove by human standards. Human reason, right and good when exercised under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, stands however on quicksands when it rejects those things which it cannot prove by the measurements of worldly values and concepts.

The Bible tells us that without faith it is impossible to please God. It tells us that the just shall live by faith.

Faith is necessary because God cannot be judged by human values, nor can he be brought within the confines of our puny imaginations. The heavens declare the glory of God but the immensity of space, along with many other elements of his creation, must be accepted by faith because they go beyond human comprehension.

Proceeding then from such faith there comes a tranquillity of life which none but the Christian can know. As the Psalmist says: “Blessed is the man that maketh the Lord his trust” (Ps. 40:4a). This blessedness, or happiness, proceeds from confidence in the one trusted. When there is no such object of confidence, or an inadequate faith in him, such blessedness is impossible.

We have heard the story of the wayfarer carrying a heavy burden. When taken up into a cart by a kindly farmer he continued to carry the load on his back. On being questioned he said, “You have been so kind to pick me up, I cannot impose on you by laying down my burden in the cart.” Humorous? Just about as humorous as our failure to avail ourselves of the blessings of perfect trust. Too few of us heed Peter’s admonition: “Cast all your anxieties on him, for he cares about you” (1 Pet. 5:7, RSV).

The completeness of God’s provision for his children is an unending marvel; our failure to take advantage of this provision is life’s greatest source of frustration and futility.

The Psalmist exclaims: “O how abundant is thy goodness, which thou hast laid up for those who fear thee, and wrought for those who take refuge in thee, in the sight of the sons of men!” (Ps. 31:19, RSV).

What greater evidence of the reality of God can confront nonbelievers than Christians stepping out on the greatness and the promises of God in simple trust and faith?

Life’s problems are legion and God has never promised that the Christian shall be free from them. Rather, he promises grace and wisdom to meet them for our good and for his glory. “Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after false gods!” (Ps. 40:4, RSV).

An illustration of the blindness and perversity of human nature is our willingness to trust in things which are transient in their nature.

Unquestionably money gives a sense of security, and Christians are often tempted to measure the degree of God’s blessings in terms of wealth. Once such a temptation is overcome and trust is based on the One to whom all riches belong, a new sense of security is ours.

Other things beckon us to trust: position, power, intellectual abilities and attainments. All of these have their rightful place, but once the center of gravity of our faith shifts from the everlasting God to anything in this world we will find ourselves confronted with the solemn fact that we have sold our birthright of the Eternal for the pottage of the temporal: “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides for ever” (1 John 2:16, 17, RSV).

King Hezekiah set us Christians an example, for of him it is said: “He trusted in the Lord God of Israel; so that there was none like him among all the kings of Judah after him, nor among those who were before him. For he held fast to the Lord; he did not depart from following him, but kept the commandments, which the Lord commanded Moses” (2 Kings 18:5, 6, RSV).

God intends our trust to be active as well as passive. He expects us to “rest in the Lord,” and he also expects us to be “up and about our Father’s business.”

Faith and trust in God are the anchors to which we cling, the bases from which we act, the certainties on which we carry out our daily tasks.

The apostle Paul passed through almost every vicissitude of life, but his faith sustained him. Writing to the Corinthian Christians he says: “But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead” (2 Cor. 1:9).

We live in times when unbelievers are deeply disturbed about world trends and events. This is a time for Christians to demonstrate that their faith is immovable—to show to others that our trust is in the eternal, sovereign and loving God.

This is a testimony the world needs to see.

We are not far removed from the time when in theological circles eschatological themes were considered unimportant and irrelevant. An apocalyptic world and a new emphasis on biblical theology have combined to change radically this situation. Theologians have again been brought to consider soberly the great eschatological themes of the New Testament and to ponder carefully their meaning and significance for our age. Two of the most important of these eschatological themes are the resurrection of the dead and the final judgment.

The Resurrection of the Dead. Although belief in the resurrection of the dead has been generally unacceptable to both ancient and modern man, A. M. Ramsey is right when he says that for Christianity to have succumbed to the opponents of this truth would have been disastrous for the Church. “It would have blunted the cutting edge of the Gospel and removed a doctrine which sums up the genius of Christianity in its belief about man and the world” (The Resurrection of Christ, p. 100). Indeed, Reinhold Niebuhr states that “there is no part of the Apostolic Creed which … expresses the whole genius of the Christian faith more neatly than … ‘I believe in the resurrection of the body’ ” (Beyond Tragedy, p. 290).

The Old Testament is strangely silent about the future life. It has been suggested that this silence may have been a reaction against the Canaanite cults of the dead. Whatever the reason, the Old Testament usually describes the afterlife in terms of a shadowy existence in Sheol, the abode of the dead. When it does speak of resurrection, most often it is the resurrection of the nation, as distinguished from the individual, which is in mind. The well-known “valley of dry bones” passage in Ezekiel 37 and probably the resurrection passage in the Isaiah apocalypse (26:19) fit into this category. The only clear statement of a resurrection for individuals is Daniel 12:2: “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”

Significant developments in the doctrine of the resurrection of the body took place during the inter-testament period, particularly during the time of the Maccabees. The intense suffering and persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes provided a stimulus for the further refinement of this doctrine. This is most evident in such apocryphal books as the Wisdom of Solomon and II Maccabees, and the pseudepigraphical Psalms of Solomon and I Enoch.

It is not until we reach the New Testament that the full flower of belief in the resurrection of the dead appears. References to it appear in every stratum of the New Testament, from the words of Jesus as found in the Synoptics to the visions of the seer in the Apocalypse.

The basis of all New Testament belief in the resurrection of the dead is the fact of Christ’s resurrection. 1 Corinthians 15 is the classic passage. Paul’s answer to those who denied a future resurrection was Christ’s resurrection. “Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised” (1 Cor. 15:12, 13). But Christ has been raised and has become “the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (v. 20).

Dr. Cullmann has underscored the difference between the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul and the biblical concept of the resurrection of the dead (Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?). The Bible does not embrace the Greek dualism of body and soul. The human body, in biblical thought, resulted from the creative activity of God, and as such is good. Thus man is not conceived of as a soul housed in an evil body from which he constantly seeks release. He is a body-soul, and the redemptive process includes his material as well as his immaterial self—a process climaxed by the resurrection of the body.

Very little is said by Jesus about the nature of the resurrection body. His most significant statement arises in answer to the question of the Sadducees as to whose wife the woman would be in the resurrection, who had married seven brothers in succession. Jesus replied that because of an inadequate knowledge of the Scriptures and the power of God they were wrongly limiting the conditions of the future life to those of the present. “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:30). Resurrection life is of a new and different order of existence.

The Apostle Paul says essentially the same thing in 1 Corinthians 15:35–50 in answer to the questions: “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” These were pertinent questions at Corinth since the Greeks denied the resurrection of the body on the ground that corruptibility and bodily existence could not be disassociated. How could the future life have anything to do with a corruptible body? Paul concedes that the earthly body of man is corruptible (“Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” v. 50).

But there is more than one kind of body. Although the resurrection body has a certain continuity with the earthly body (Paul likens this continuity to that between the seed which is planted and the ear of grain which springs from it), yet there is a vast difference between the present body and the resurrection body. This difference is emphasized in a series of contrasts in verses 42–44: “… What is sown [our earthly bodies] is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.…” Corruptibility, dishonor, weakness, and a psychical (AV “natural”) nature are all ascribed to our earthly body. In contrast, incorruptibility, glory, power, and spirituality (pneumatikos) are ascribed to the resurrection body.

This last mentioned characteristic has led to much misunderstanding. How can a body be “spiritual”? G. E. Ladd’s answer is to the point: “The ‘spiritual body’ of 1 Corinthians 15:44 is not a body made of spirit, anymore than the ‘natural’ (literally, psychical) body is a body made of psyche.… However, it is a literal, real body, even though it is adapted to the new order of existence which shall be inaugurated at the resurrection for those who experience it” (Crucial Questions Concerning the Kingdom of God, p. 139). “Spiritual” in this context is probably best taken to mean “dominated by the Holy Spirit,” or perhaps as Leon Morris suggests, “adapted to the needs of the spirit” [i. e., the human spirit]. “The spiritual body … is the organ which is intimately related to the spirit of man, just as his present body is intimately related to his earthly life” (The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, p. 228). Whatever “spiritual” means here, Paul is convinced that the future life will be so glorious that our present earthly bodies will have to be radically changed in order for us fully to enjoy what God has prepared for us (cf. Phil. 3:20, 21).

Although all evangelicals believe that the resurrection of the dead will be closely associated with the return of Christ (cf. Phil. 3:20, 21), there are numerous differences in details. Some hold to one general resurrection of all men at Christ’s return. Others, on the basis of Revelation 20 in particular (cf. also John 5:29; Phil. 3:11; 1 Cor. 15:23), see two resurrections, one (of just men) at Christ’s return but before the millennium, the other (of the unjust) at the end of that period. Dispensationalists split the first resurrection into two phases consistent with their theory of a pretribulation “rapture” and a post-tribulation “revelation.” Differences in details there are, but these do not prevent evangelicals from unitedly affirming, “We believe in the resurrection of the body.”

The Final Judgment. Closely associated with the resurrection of the dead is the final judgment. Our Lord declared: “… the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment” (John 5:28, 29).

The New Testament idea of the final judgment arises out of the Old Testament concept of the Day of the Lord. That Day is the final crisis (the English word “crisis” is simply the transliterated Greek word for judgment) of history when God will judge all men, with blessing for the faithful and destruction for the wicked.

Judgment is an essential part of biblical religion. In both the Old and New Testaments it inevitably arises out of the nature of God as righteous. A righteous God must judge sin and reward obedience.

The judge is none other than God himself and his agent in judgment is Jesus Christ, the Son. Thus God “has appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he has ordained” (Acts 17:31), and the Father has given to the Son “authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man” (John 5:27).

The judgment effected by God through Christ is universal. All men must stand before God’s judgment bar (Rom. 2:6–10). This includes Christians (2 Cor. 5:10; Rom. 14:10) as well as non-Christians (Rev. 20:15). Whereas it is true that he who believes in Jesus will not experience condemnation (John 5:24), for “there is no condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1), these statements are not to be taken to mean that for the Christian there is no future judgment at all. Paul specifically states that “we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ” (Rom. 14:10), and “all” in this context means “all Christians.” The Christian, however, can face the judgment with confidence (1 John 4:17). Christ’s redemptive work has already acquitted him. It was Thomas à Kempis who said: “The sign of the cross shall be in heaven when the Lord cometh to judgment.”

Judgment of Christians will be based on works (2 Cor. 5:10). The work of some Christians will prove to be superficial (“wood, hay, stubble”). “The Day will disclose it,” and it will be destroyed, but the believer himself will be saved, but “only as through fire” (1 Cor. 3:12–15). Alan Richardson is right when he says that this “works judgment” for Christians “is no mere relic of Paul’s Pharisaic ideology; it is no unconscious clinging to a doctrine of works. It is an assertion of the seriousness of the moral struggle of the Christian life …” (An Introduction to the Theology of the New Testament, p. 342). In this judgment Christ’s verdict of blame or praise is itself the punishment or reward (Matt. 25:21, 23; Luke 19:17; cf. 22:61, 62).

The final judgment is the climax to a process of judgment which was actually inaugurated by the entrance of Jesus Christ into human history. “For judgment,” said Jesus, “I am come into the world” (John 9:39). This present aspect of the final judgment is particularly stressed in John’s Gospel. He that does not believe in the Son “is condemned already because he has not believed on the name of the Son of God” (3:18). The final judgment has already begun, and its basis is belief in Jesus. The same teaching is found in the Synoptics: “For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man also be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38; cf. Matt. 10:32, 33; Luke 12:8, 9).

There are some passages (cf. the “Great Assize” passage of Matt. 25:31–46; Rom. 2:6–10) that emphasize works as the basis for the judgment of the unbeliever (as well as the believer). Stauffer understands these passages to refer to those who “have rejected the work of Christ and relied upon their own achievements, and on their achievements they will be judged.… But such a judgment will lead inevitably to condemnation, for even the noblest needs and characteristics are tainted with the poison of self-sufficiency …” (New Testament Theology, pp. 221, 222).

No uncertainty exists about the outcome of the final judgment. Both in the teachings of Jesus and in the writings of the apostles the ultimate fate of those who persist in their rebellion against God is eternal condemnation (Matt. 25:31, 46; 2 Thess. 1:7–10; Rev. 20:14, 15).

Differences, similar to those that exist concerning the resurrection of the dead, are found among evangelicals relative to the precise time and number of judgments. But unanimity exists on the great fact of the final judgment—a judgment that involves the end of history and the ultimate separation of souls.

The biblical doctrines of the resurrection of the dead and the final judgment have powerful practical implications for the Christian. Although he anticipates with joy the consummation of his redemption at the resurrection, and the revelation of the lordship of Christ at the final judgment, aspects of the latter have sobering elements. He must stand before Christ to be judged on the quality of his Christian life—a potent incentive for holy living! All men must face the same Lord to be judged on the basis of the gospel of God’s grace—an urgent plea for an increased effort in the proclamation of the truth concerning Jesus Christ, in whom there is no condemnation. How true it is that eschatology and ethics can never be disassociated; but neither can eschatology and evangelistic concern!

Bibliography: P. Althaus, Die letzten Dinge; O. Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?; T. A. Kantonen, The Christian Hope; H. A. A. Kennedy, St. Paul’s Conception of the Last Things; W. Milligan, The Resurrection of the Dead; S. D. F. Salmond, The Christian Doctrine of Immortality; R. Summers, The Life Beyond; G. Vos, The Pauline Eschatology; G. Kittel, Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament—relevant articles.

Professor of Biblical Literature

Bethel College

St. Paul, Minnesota

Cooperative ministry—Much has been made of the fact that the Anglo-Saxon word from which our words hale, whole, and healthy are derived is the same word from which comes the word holy. Similarly salvation and salve are said to be linked, and Scripture speaks of “balm in Gilead.”

The problem of the interrelationship between sin and sickness certainly continues to loom as a practical problem in the experience of every sufferer and the aim and rationale of the person ministering to him is certainly no less important than his manner and method. For example, when the person with pneumonia asks the perennial question “Why did this happen to me?” or more particularly “Does this have to happen to me?” implying whether or not this sickness can and should be removed now and avoided in the future, the minister and the doctor are naturally liable to think, speak and act in widely variable if not diametrically opposite fashions, deriving from their different callings and conceptualizations.

Even the language is different—and here I am not referring to the temperamental surgeon’s proverbial tendency to use an abundance of dubious expletives whether exceedingly rare or disgustingly common. But the jargonic (if there is such a word) variations need no further emphasis at this time except to say it is amazing how two people can speak the same language so differently. This is especially true in my field of psychiatry where a number of common terms with differing definitions pose a real threat to communication. For example the term “conversion” and the more loosely used “guilt complex.” At least one motivation for our differing jargons is the principle of “condensation,” which is putting into a few compound words a number of different concepts which may thus be expressed simultaneously, saving time and space of explanations. An example from your theological field would be infra-and supralapsarianism, and examples from our field would be paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea, polymorphonuclear neutrophilic leucocyte, or unilateral multilocular pseudo-mucinous cystadenocarcinoma. Professional men have no corner on this. My brother, an ordinary business man, belongs to an organization that has us “beaten all hollow”: S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A., Inc. (Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, Inc.).

Despite and sometimes even because of our differing goals and methods I want to stand up and be counted as favoring a holistic view of man and his ills and a collaborative method of ministration best carried out by conferences with ministerial groups followed up by individual conferences such as the practice of lunches with pastors. The holistic view holds that all aspects of man’s nature, including physical, psychological and spiritual, react together as a unit in health and in sickness. Thus though factors contributing to disturbance or disorder may arise primarily in one aspect of man’s nature and the symptoms become manifest in another aspect, ultimately all aspects are affected and adequate treatment requires ministration to all causative factors.—D. F. BUSBY, M.D., Niles, Illinois, to Christian Reformed ministers in Grand Rapids.

Less Spigot

For every top-level preacher who speaks Ecclesian in the pulpit there are three score and ten parishioners whose speech problem is at the other end of the scale. Great swelling words are not their difficulty. They can’t manage any words at all. They are the manly mumblers.

Manly mumbling is a male malady. There are two varieties. The first is the muscular mumble, in which words are extruded under pressure between teeth clamped together by clenched masseter muscles. The tense belligerence which this conveys is accentuated by rippling these muscles occasionally, as though one were chewing on horsehide, or had his dentures fast in a caramel. The second mumble achieves a similar effect through opposite means. It is the drool mumble. The jaw is relaxed, and the lips have barely enough tension to contain saliva. Extreme ennui is indicated; this mumbler could care less, and does.

Both varieties are conscientiously developed in the middle or late teens to prove the mumbler’s masculinity in conformity to the tribal mores. Both add striking new confusions to our language.

I was fascinated to hear a student song leader ask a group, “The zany won half a fable-lit sung?” Someone did, and they sang what sounded like, “Freeze a jelly goof hello.” I met the young man later. When I was introduced he mumbled “Police tomato,” and moved away.

That sort of thing could lead to misunderstanding. Before tackling semantics and psychology in the communication of the Gospel we need to begin with peppermints and consonants. In the great assembly of Israel described in Nehemiah, Ezra the scribe and his colleagues “read in the book, in the law of God distinctly; and they gave the sense, so that they understood the reading.” Clear thinking and speaking should go together.

Tongues were a problem in the early church. Paul warned the Corinthians that a stranger who heard their ecstatic utterances would think them mad. He insisted that those who used the gift in public must have an interpreter.

Perhaps your young people’s group needs an interpreter, too, for the mumblers. I suggest you test the candidate of your choice on this closing sentence:

A slang us in gushes sour linkage less spigot.

EUTYCHUS

In Free Europe

We are missionary appointees to France … now speaking in deputation services in California. We read your issue of July 20 on “Christianity in Free Europe” with great interest, as perhaps it is the finest combined writing on this subject in print today.

CHARLES M. WRIGHT

Greater Europe Mission

Long Beach, Calif.

With reference to the Rev. G. A. Had-jiantoniu’s article, “Greece and Eastern Orthodoxy,” … may I point out the most significant part that American Mission to Greeks has been having in recent years, bringing the Gospel to the entire nation.

It has pioneered in a unique method of evangelism, that of publishing as paid advertisement full-length Gospel messages every week in nearly all secular newspapers and magazines of Greece. This has aroused the official opposition of the Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church, who proposed that the government officially forbid me to write these messages. When this was turned down, they offered the newspapers a sum equal to what we are paying, if they would only keep our messages out. And when this also failed, they issued an encyclical in 640,000 copies, forbidding the people to read our Gospel messages. Needless to say that this had the exact opposite result.

In the town of Chalkis, I was sentenced to 49 days’ imprisonment, because a local newspaper published my Gospel messages, prefixing my name with the word Reverend. Local Archimandrite Christopher Kalyvas, along with the Greek Orthodox Church, took the attitude that Protestant ministers did not have the right to be called “Reverend” in Greece. This sentence was appealed and reversed by an Appellate Court in September, 1961.

Furthermore, American Mission to Greeks maintains a large printing establishment in the heart of Athens, employing twenty-six full-time printers, and publishes more new religious titles than any other religious publishing house in Greece. It maintains four evangelical bookstores throughout Greece.… In cooperation with the Million Testaments Campaigns, it has distributed many thousands of copies of the Word of God, and is now printing 100,000 at its own print shop in Athens.

American Mission to Greeks, furthermore, publishes the largest Greek evangelical magazine, the 60-page Voice of the Gospel, which now finds its place in the newsstands all over … Greece for the first time.

For the past three years, American Mission to Greeks has operated a booth at the International Fair at Thessalonica, distributing a million copies of literature and Scriptures to its visitors.

Furthermore, American Mission to Greeks is pioneering in film evangelism, producing the Moody Science Films in the Greek language, which are being shown even by Bishops of the Greek Orthodox Church.

SPIROS ZODHIATES

General Secretary

American Mission to Greeks, Inc.

New York, N. Y.

Re the issue on Europe, [the article discussing] radio omits probably the most widespread radio of all—The Lutheran Hour.…

W. H. LEHMANN

Fremont, Ohio

These eighteen pages of current information on the status of the church in Western Europe … are well worth the price alone of the year’s subscription.…

EVERETT H. VIVIAN

Anderson College

Anderson, S. C.

Some errors in the statistics (p. 14) were pointed out by the Northern Ireland Government Office in London. Under Northern Ireland the correct figures should read: Roman Catholics—498,031, Protestants—829, 502 (this comprises only Presbyterians, Church of Ireland and Methodists, and the 1961 census gives under a separate heading 97, 929 whose affiliation is either with other Protestant churches or else is unknown).

The Government Office further wishes to point out for our information that the nation listed as “Ireland” is really “Eire” or what is known as the “Irish Republic.” Further, there is a serious mistake under “Protestants” in this category. For some reason the figure is given as 975, 543. While the precise figure is not known, the generally accepted estimate is 160,000.… London, England

J. D. DOUGLAS

I fail to grasp the logic of your editorial.… You state that General Weygand saw in the collapse of France in World War II “the chastisement of God for its abandonment of the Christian faith.” In the next sentence you say that Germany, before which France fell, “stood by consenting to the greatest atrocities against humanity in world history.”

But if Germany was, as I agree, guilty of “the worst atrocities in world history,” why use it to chasten a nation which, by this admission, was less guilty?…

GEORGE GORDON

Durham, N. C.

• This sort of thing is common in biblical history. Punishment should not be viewed simply negatively—it can also serve as a discipline.—ED.

Reading your issue on Europe, one perceives a certain abstraction. The front article bears the caption “The Church in Western Europe,” to be followed by more detailed reports. Then the issue leads on to an appropriate editorial, “Free Europe: A Spiritual Decline?”, concluding with extracts of commentaries under the headline “Tempest Over School Prayer Ban.” As to the various reports on the situation of the Protestant Church in Europe, spiritually and otherwise, they represent a good summary of prevailing general conditions. The reporting as well as its deeper meaning of the two contrasting situations—Europe as against America—in one and the same issue imply the abstraction.

Everyone is aware of the fact that the Christian Church in Europe almost since its very beginning is state-supported and the state therefore has influenced the affairs of the Church to some degree all this time; pastors, or priests, are requested to give religious instruction in public schools up to this day. On the other hand, in U.S.A. where church and state are separated, a simple form of prayer before school begins has recently been ruled out by a Supreme Court decision.

The abstraction of this differing situation comes to the fore in the article “The Missionary Situation in Europe” by Robert E. Evans, when he writes: “Since 1945 more than 400 Missionaries have gone to Europe (from North America). At least a score of missionary societies have been created especially for service in Europe.” Conclusion: Where religion is being taught systematically and on a high theoretical level, the Church as a whole has failed in its given task to impute into the lives of its adherents the spiritual life that emanates from Christ—while on the other hand missionaries are being sent from America, where there is not even as much as a formal prayer to be uttered in public schools!

Not all European nations could be considered to have come, for one reason or another, under God’s judgment, but uniformly prove to be in a “spiritual decline”; the implications, both spiritually and psychologically, are no doubt varied and complex and would require comments from places and persons more competent than the writer of these lines. Such showing of the deeper reasons and causes plus their interrelations might … teach a lesson badly wanted and needed in our time.

CHARLES GRESSINGER

Niederaichbach, Bavaria, Germany

The Home Department publishes monthly and distributes … a religious news magazine in braille—The Church Herald for the Blind.

The issue contains material which we would very much like to include in our September issue.

ANNE L. WHITING

Administrative Assistant

The National Council, Protestant Episcopal Church

New York, N. Y.

Baptism: Durable Debate

Tenney on “Baptism and the Lord’s Supper” (July 6 issue) touches on vital differences between Lutherans and other Protestants.

As a Lutheran myself, on one point I must fault both. This is on the meaning of the word baptizo. The Greek word baptizo never means “dip.” In “dip” an immediate withdrawal is implied, as might be in “plunge”; but those “baptized into Jesus Christ” or “into His death” are to stay there.

The word baptizo means the effecting of an immersion, fully or compendiously, whether by sinking, pouring, overflowing, or any other mode or method.

JAMES P. MAIER

Bethel Lutheran (Missouri Synod)

Sweet Home, Ore.

Although listing Oscar Cullmann’s Baptism in the New Testament in his bibliography, Tenney has not come to grips with the basic teaching of that excellent treatise.… He states: “Faith must precede commitment; the external act of water baptism will not transform an unbeliever into a Christian.” Cullmann demonstrates beyond a question of doubt that the “faith of the candidate is thus not a condition of the possibility of the divine action; nor is it a guarantee of the future perseverance of the person baptized” (p. 50). For the heathen adult faith acted as “a sign for the Church” (p. 50) that the person is worthy to receive the sacrament of baptism. The main activity of faith must follow, not precede, the reception of Christian baptism.… Instead of dismissing the possibility of infant baptism by stating that “The mention of the Philippian jailer’s household does not necessarily imply that infants were included,” [Tenney should] … have acknowledged with Cullmann that “natural membership (in) a Christian family conferred on him by his birth … is a sign for the Church that the divine baptismal event will in his case be completed, and that he Will really be incorporated in the Church of Christ” (p. 51)

MARVIN D. HOFF

Rea Avenue Reformed Church

Hawthorne, N. J.

Tobacco And The Ministry

In your July 6 issue under “Critic’s Notebook” (Eutychus), Dr. John Henry Jowett is included under prominent preachers and teachers who use tobacco. From the time of his first visit to this country in 1906 until he resigned his Fifth Avenue pulpit at the close of the First World War, I met with Dr. Jowett on a number of social occasions. I never saw him use tobacco and I greatly doubt if he qualifies among the list of smokers.

FRANK FITT

Ann Arbor, Mich.

May I direct the writer to an article quoted by Dr. Dale Oldham over The Christian Brotherhood Hour on October 15, 1961, and reprinted in The Gospel Trumpet (now Vital Christianity) the same date.

Here is the quote: “One Saturday morning Mr. Spurgeon went for a walk, and when he came back, he said to me, ‘I saw in a show window down the street a can of tobacco, and on it a printed card reading Spurgeon’s Tobacco.’ Then he asked, ‘When the Lord calls me home, shall I be remembered by the tobacco I smoked or by the Lord I preached? I can never smoke again to the glory of God.’ Immediately the preacher picked up all his smoking paraphernalia and threw it upon the fire. He never smoked again to the day of his death.”

May the tobacco-using ministers of our day accept Spurgeon as an example and, along with him, realize their “moment of truth.”

ESTON W. HUNTER

Church of God

Fillmore, Mo.

The letter reads: “I have never heard [a fellow minister] … who was a smoker advise young people to avoid beginning”.…

I have smoked a lifetime (now 68) and I still smoke but I do advise our youth against it. I am not bragging about my smoking. Why don’t I stop? That’s another subject.

DOWIE G. DE BOER

First Congregational Church

Brimfield, Mass.

We all know that in the grace doctrine set forth by Paul, the Christian’s salvation is by grace free of legalism and “works.” By the same token, Paul sets forth the qualifications required for men seeking the offices of the ministry (1 Timothy 3). Under these qualifications, the elders and deacons must be blameless, not for their salvation, but rather for the effect their lives and examples will have on others. While I am a pharmacist by profession, I am also a licensed local preacher in the Methodist Church, and I learned the hard way that you can’t witness for Christ with a cigarette or a glass of beer in your hand if you want to be effective.… The truth of the matter is that in the eyes of the unsaved they place a sinful emphasis on these things, and while they do these things themselves they don’t believe they should be done by anyone connected with the preaching of the Word.…

It never fails, or at least it never seems to fail, that the more modern, the more liberal, the further the minister gets from the fundamental Word, the less effective his message becomes.

Yes, we have complete freedom in Christ, but with the freedom we have an increased responsibility to get the Word to others. It … isn’t a question of self-indulgence or gratification of the flesh or harmful effects on the body, but more importantly, does it interfere with the leading of souls to Christ.…

WILLIAM C. FRUEHAN

Scranton, Pa.

I feel that ministers should do some soul-searching on this matter. My Lutheran friends brush off my query with, “It’s a medical matter!” When it becomes a matter of stewardship, and common courtesy of annoyance, then it has gone beyond the stage of medicine.…

J. RUSSELL MEAD

Evangelical United Brethren Church

Winslow, Neb.

Crete, Jerusalem, Athens

The discovery that the Eteocretan inscriptions in the island of Crete (News, May 11 issue) are in a Semitic dialect, although written in ancient Greek letters, shows the ancient connection between all ancient alphabets of the Mediterranean and the Hebrew alphabet. The very sounds of the names given the letters also indicate this. All we have to do is compare the Greek and Hebrew names: A—Alpha-Aleph; B—Beta-Beth; G—Gamma-Gimel; [etc.] …

The connection between the use of the pointings and the loss of the silenced Waw and Yodh letters is also an indication that the Waw and Yodh were not originally silent, but were silenced after the points replaced them. What were they before being silenced?

A comparison with the Greek alphabet might give a clue: Yodh comes before Kaph; Iota comes before Kappa. This indicates that Yodh corresponds to Iota or I. Unfortunately, Waw has no mate in the Greek alphabet, so it gives us no clue by position. But the fact that the Yodh may be the Hebrew Iota or I, nudges us to look at Aleph and Alpha, both firsts. Can Aleph be the Hebrew Alpha or A? If so, then He is the Greek Epsilon or E. That would give us I, A, E, of the vowels. In the Greek alphabet Omicron or O comes before Pi or P; while in Hebrew the letter before Pe is Ayin (another silenced letter). Can Ayin correspond to Omicron? If so, then we have mates to Alpha, Epsilon, Iota, and Omicron. Only Upsilon is missing. And only the letter corresponding to Waw is missing. Can Waw be it? If so, we have all the vowel letters in the Hebrew alphabet!

Long before the use of pointings in writing Hebrew, the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek—the Greek Septuagint. Hebrew proper names had to be written with Greek letters. If we study how they replaced the Hebrew letters, we can get a clue about Hebrew vowels. We find that all these Hebrew letters, Aleph, He, Waw, Yodh, and Ayin, are replaced by Greek vowels.

The pointings came into use to protect the sounding of the Hebrew, and to keep it to the norm sounds of the times in which those pointings originated.…

So we can expect that, by the time the Septuagint transliterated the Hebrew proper names, different sounds had come to be used with the vowel letters. And this is just what we find. They are represented by different Greek vowel letters in different places. But, despite this shift, it is always a Greek vowel letter that represents the Hebrew Aleph, He, Yodh, Ayin, and Waw—never a Greek consonant letter. So there can be little doubt that they are the ancient Hebrew vowel letters, that were silenced by the use of the pointings, because the sounds given to them were different in different places and they had lost their utility for public readings.…

In 194 times out of 208 occurrences, the Septuagint renders Yodh as Iota, I.

Some of the ancient Hebrew consonant letters have also changed sounds during the sojourn of the Jews in Europe. Heth is Kh, but at the beginning of words seems to be like the vowel Aleph.

The use of the ancient vowel letters in their Roman counterparts will stop the deceptive misspelling that the pointings brought about, and reveal new light. Thus the alleged difference between the Hebrew words in Isaiah 14:12 (Helel) as compared to Zechariah 11:2 and Ezekiel 21:12 (17) (Yalal) is exposed as a myth, when we use the English letters corresponding to those in the older plene mss. All three occurrences will be written Eilil, the hiphil imperative, howl, wail, lament. Of course, this will upset many a poem, story, and sermon.…

J. F. HARTMAN

Springfield, Ill.

On Excommunication

The impact of Edward John Carnell’s article, “The Government of the Church” (June 22 issue) … was vague when he spoke of how the early church dealt with false teaching: “The apostles denounced the error, but they did not excommunicate the Judaizers.” This would seem to hint at a policy of tacit coexistence.

The word “excommunicate” is too weak to describe the apostolic reaction to the Judaizers. The formula went beyond “Let him be excommunicated” to “Let him be anathema”! False brethren, creeping in unawares, were an ever present peril in the minds of the apostles. And the arsenal of Christian defense included the power to deliver such to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme. Our Lord would require of his church certain procedures to be followed in the case of trespass (and would not false teaching be a trespass?). The end procedure is excommunication: “… let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican” (Matt. 18:17). Even then, the church is not empowered to declare the person unsaved. It simply says that it is no longer possible to regard this person as a Christian, or his teaching as Christian.…

EDWARDS E. ELLIOTT

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church

Garden Grove, Calif.

The reign of law—Suppose you take ten pennies and mark them from 1 to 10. Put them in your pocket and give them a good shake. Now try to draw them out in sequence from 1 to 10, putting each coin back in your pocket after each draw.

Your chance of drawing No. 1 is 1 to 10. Your chance of drawing 1 and 2 in succession would be 1 in 100. Your chance of drawing 1, 2, and 3 in succession would be one in a thousand. Your chance of drawing 1, 2, 3, and 4 in succession would be one in 10,000 and so on, until your chance of drawing from No. 1 to No. 10 in succession would reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in 10 billion.

The object in dealing with so simple a problem is to show how enormously figures multiply against chance.

So many essential conditions are necessary for life to exist on our earth that it is mathematically impossible that all of them could exist in proper relationship by chance on any one earth at one time. Therefore, there must be in nature some form of intelligent direction. If this be true, then there must be a purpose.…

Some astronomers tell us that the chance of two stars passing sufficiently near to each other to develop a pulsating and destructive tide is in the order of millions and that a collision would be so rare that it is beyond calculation. Nevertheless, one of the astronomical theories is that at some time, let us say two billion years ago, a star did pass near enough to our sun to raise terrific tides and throw out into space those objects we know as planets, which appear vast to us but are insignificant astronomically. Among those masses drawn out was that wisp of cosmos which became what we call the earth. It is a body of no importance astronomically, yet it may be demonstrated that it is the most important body so far known to us.

We must presume that the earth is composed of some of the elements which are to be found in the sun and none other. These elements are apportioned on earth in certain percentages, which, so far as the surface is concerned, have been fairly well ascertained. The bulk of the earth is now reduced to very permanent dimensions and its mass has been determined. Its speed in its orbit around the sun is extremely constant. Its rotation on its axis is determined so accurately that a variation of a second in a century would upset astronomical calculations. It is accompanied by a satellite known as the moon, whose motions are determined and whose sequence of variations repeat themselves every 18 1/3 years. Had the bulk of the earth been greater or less, or had its speed been different, it would have been farther from or nearer to the sun, and this different condition would have profoundly affected life of all kinds, including man. So profoundly indeed, that had this earth varied in either respect to any marked degree, life as we know it could not have existed. Of all the planets, the earth is, so far as we now know, the only one whose relation to the sun makes our sort of life possible.

Mercury, because of astronomical laws, turns only one side to the sun, rotating on its axis only once in its complete revolution of the sun—Mercury’s year. In consequence, one side of Mercury must be a desert furnace and the other frigid. Its mass and gravity are so small that all traces of an atmosphere seem to have escaped. If any atmosphere does remain, it is tearing in unbelievable tornadoes from one side of the planet to the other. Venus is a mystery, with dense vapor for atmosphere, and its id demonstrated to be absolutely uninhabitable by any known living thing. Mars is the one exception and may bear life like ours, either in its beginnings or on the point of extinction. But life on Mars must be dependent upon other gases than oxygen, and especially hydrogen; as they seem to have escaped. There can be no water on Mars. Its temperature averages too low for vegetation as we know it. The moon could not hold an atmosphere and is now absolutely uninhabitable. During its night it is extremely cold, and during its long day it is a very hot cinder. The other planets are too far from the sun for life to be established, and because of other insuperable difficulties cannot support life in any form. It is now generally agreed that there has never been, and can never be, life in any known form on any planet except our earth. Therefore, we have in the very beginning as a home for human beings a little planet which, after a series of vicissitudes during two or more billion years, has become a suitable place for the existence of plant and animal life, of which we find the crowning achievement to be man.

The earth rotates on its axis in 24 hours or at the rate of about 1,000 miles an hour. Suppose it turned at the rate of 100 miles an hour. Why not? Our days and nights would then be ten times as long as now. The hot sun of summer would then burn up our vegetation each long day and every sprout would freeze in such a night. The sun, the source of all life, has a surface temperature of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and our earth is just far enough away so that this “eternal fire” warms up just enough and not too much. It is marvelously stable, and during millions of years has varied so little that life as we know it has survived. If the temperature on earth had changed so much as 50 degrees on the average for a single year, all vegetation would be dead and man with it, roasted or frozen. The earth travels around the sun at the rate of 18 miles each second. If the rate of revolution had been, say, six miles or forty miles each second, we would be too far from or too close to the sun for our form of life to exist.

Stars vary in size, as we all know. One is so large that if it were our sun, the orbit of the earth would be millions of miles inside its surface. Stars vary in the type of radiation. Many of their rays would he deadly to every known form of life. The intensity and volume of this radiation is anywhere from less than that of our sun to 10,000 times as great. If our sun gave off only one-half of its present radiation, we would freeze, and if it gave half as much more, we would have been reduced to dust long ago if we had ever been born as a protoplasmic spark of life. So our sun is about right for our life among millions of others which are not.

The earth is tilted at an angle of 23 degrees. This gives us our seasons. If it had not been tilted, the poles would be in eternal twilight. The water vapor from the ocean would move north and south, piling up continents of ice and leaving possibly a desert between the equator and the ice. Glacial rivers would erode and roar through canyons into the salt-covered bed of the ocean to form temporary pools of brine. The weight of the unbelievably vast mass of ice would depress the poles, causing our equator to bulge or erupt or at least show the need of a new waistline belt. The lowering of the ocean would expose vast new land areas and diminish the rainfall in all parts of the world, with fearful results.

We seldom realize that all life is confined to the space between the snow of the mountain tops and the heat of the earth’s interior. This narrow stratum as compared with the diameter of the earth is but one half the thickness of one leaf of a thousand-page book. The history of all creatures is written on this tissue-thin surface. If all the air was liquefied it would cover the earth to a depth of 35 feet or 1 part in 600,000 of the distance to the earth’s center, a close adjustment!

The moon is 240,000 miles away, and the tides twice a day are usually a gentle reminder of its presence. Tides of the ocean run as high as 60 feet in some places, and even the crust of the earth is twice a day bent outward several inches by the moon’s attraction. All seems so regular that we do not grasp to any degree the vast power that lifts the whole area of the ocean several feet and bends the crust of the earth, seemingly so solid. Mars had a moon—a little one-only 6,000 miles away from it. If our moon was, say 50,000 miles away instead of its present respectable distance, our tides would be so enormous that twice a day all the lowland of all the continents would be submerged by a rush of water so enormous that even the mountains would soon be eroded away, and probably no continent could have risen from the depths fast enough to exist today. The earth would crack with the turmoil and the tides in the air would create daily hurricanes.

If the continents were washed away, the average depth of water over the whole earth would be about a mile and a half and life could not exist except perhaps in the abysmal depth of the ocean, where it would feed upon itself till extinct. Science seems to sustain the theory that this condition did exist during the general chaos before the earth solidified. By well recognized laws, the very tides pushed the moon farther and farther away and at the same time slowed the rotation of the earth from less than a six-hour day to one of twenty-four. So the gentle moon has now become the lover’s delight and is in splendid adjustment, which promises to remain safe for a billion years or so. The same astronomers also believe that far in the future, by the same astronomical laws, the moon will return to the earth, burst when close enough and glorify our dead world with rings like those of Saturn.

Out of a chaotic mixture of the elements torn from the sun at 12,000 degrees temperature, and thrown at every conceivable velocity into limitless space, has come our solar system. To chaos has come order so exact that the place any part will occupy at any time can be predicted to the second. The balance is so perfect that it has not varied in a billion years and points to eternity. All this through the reign of law. By this same law the established order as we see it in the solar system is repeated elsewhere.—A. CRESSY MORRISON,Man Does Not Stand Alone, New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1944 (Rev. ed., 1947), Chapter 1, “Our Unique World,” pp. 13–19.

During the past 50 years a large number of historians, educators and church leaders have come to the conclusion that it is possible to accept both Darwinian evolution and orthodox Christianity. Increasingly, millions of pupils in our high schools and colleges (even elementary schools) are offered unauthenticated, fantastic statements in textbooks dealing with the history of civilization. Their instructors appear convinced that the undermining of respect for the Christian faith in the public schools is in accordance with the “blessings of liberty” mentioned in the national Constitution. But when a Christian point of view is presented, a terrible roar of protest arises. Atheists and infidels allege that the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits even the support of the famous statement in our Declaration of Independence to the effect that all men have been created free and equal. They would also abolish the maxim of the grand old men who founded our Republic: “In God we trust.”

Fusing Fact And Fiction

One problem arises when scientific theories are so interwoven with facts that the student accepts both as truth.

An example of this destructive approach, tantamount to an attack upon the orthodox Christian faith, is found in a textbook by Professor O. Harold King of Miami University entitled A History of Civilization: The Story of Our Heritage. Thousands of boys and girls from fine Christian homes have read: “Their (the scientists’) theory of the development … begins with the common ancestor of monkeys, apes and men—the first primate whose nearest equivalent today is Tarsius.” This remarkable animal “still lives.” Farther on more fiction is presented as absolute truth: “Then occurred an interlude in which man’s ancestor displayed himself a progressive. He got down out of the trees. But so did a few of the apes, like the gorilla” (p. 10).

Too often in classroom discussion, if Adam and Eve appear at all, they appear as the butt of a joke. So anti-Christian viewpoints infiltrate education, subvert the student mind, and thus rob the church of its leaders for tomorrow.

Is it not a matter of academic ignorance, moreover, when Professor King asserts that “the Old Testament shows the influence of Babylonian legends”? Or when he declares that the God of the Hebrews “had passed through a long evolution as those who worshipped him received new inspirations. When the Hebrews first came out of the desert, Yahweh was a primitive god, showing his power in storms”? Poor Abraham must have been very credulous and naїve to have argued with such a God about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah! And what explanation remains for the second verse in the Bible where we are informed that “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”? We are also told that God created man “in his own image.” That God was called Elohim, and his powers were far beyond those of a mere tribal god. And what evidence does Professor King show for his unfortunate conclusion: “While this was not monotheism as yet, nor even a close approximation, as in contemporary Egypt, the scope of Yahweh’s powers opened the way to preferential recognition of him” (p. 69)? This is a very different story from that which students had previously learned in their Sunday schools. Can they retain faith in their pastors when they are indoctrinated in such reading in universities and colleges?

A subtle example of indoctrination is found in a textbook by the Columbia professor, Theodosius Dobzhansky. In the frontispiece of the textbook, Evolution, Genetics and Man (John Wiley and Sons, 1955) appears a familiar print, bearing the caption, “Creation of Adam, a fresco by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. This is a symbolic representation of Creation by evolution” (italics mine). Is this not distortion of truth for indoctrination?

Still more ominous is the example of work by distinguished scholars at the University of St. Louis. In 1959 they published a book which was issued by the Bruce Publishing Company, hence supported to some extent by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Here some implications in attempting to fuse two viewpoints are clearly seen: others are not. The authors proclaim that the account in Genesis is not reliable. They dare not offend the great scientists who thunder forth their anathemas against the humble Christian’s belief in the fall of man or the operation of Satan among men. They imply that God did not say to Satan: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” Modern science is supposed to have proved that the very first human beings were very different from the two named in the Bible.

Now let us examine the exact phraseology used by the three historians at the University of St. Louis (Thomas P. Neill, Daniel D. McGarry, and Clarence L. Hohl). In A History of Western Civilization they reiterate: “According to modern scientists, man is not descended from the apes as we know them, but man and present-day apes derive from a common previous ancestor, now extinct” (Vol. I, p. 12). Then they offer the amazing opinion that this theory of evolution implies nothing “for our beliefs in God, creation, a human spiritual soul, immortality, and moral responsibility as formulated by theistic philosophy, revealed religion and the Bible.” No matter how the human body originated, “the dependence of man and nature upon God is unassailed.” And as for the development of religious concepts, we meet again the idea that man advanced from barbarism to civilization. We are informed that “in this process, man seemed to pass from a vague monotheism through polytheism and back again to monotheism” (p. 21). The textbook in question does not bear the official approval of any archbishop in the Roman Catholic Church; had such been granted, the archbishop would have repudiated the faith of his own communion.

So, a compromise has been attempted between two bitter enemies—Darwinian evolution and orthodox Christianity.

The Biblical View

The Bible does not teach that man descended from animals and rose from barbarism to civilization; on the contrary, it teaches that Adam and Eve were created in God’s image and endowed with immense spiritual talents. These were largely ruined, as both Martin Luther and Ignatius Loyola taught, by disobedience to the commandment of God not to eat of the fruit produced by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

As soon as our young people have been convinced through their textbooks dealing with the history of civilization that there never was such a thing as original sin, they must conclude that the human race does not need a Saviour and that the sacraments of baptism and communion are superfluous, for there is no such thing as present sin. If true, the Mass then loses its value for the Roman Catholic Church. The whole hierarchy of that communion would, in time, find itself without clientele. And Protestants would have to abolish the Sunday school.

‘It Doth Not Yet Appear’

Not yet on winter’s

Brittle branches bare

Can we perceive

What will be clothed

In vibrant green.

Not yet in single kerneled corn

Can we behold the tasseled ear,

Not in the dearest human form

See with the certainty of sight

The immortality

That we shall one day wear.

Yet we may glory in the glance

All darkly seen

Of naked branches

Dressed in spring’s new green;

Of one bare grain

Miraculously multiplied;

Of human dust in death

Whose spectral seeming end

By spirit is denied.

RUTHE T. SPINNANGER

Difficulties With Evolution

In the acceptance of evolutionary theory honest differences of findings are too seldom discussed. Paleontological evidence is the basis for evolution: yet there are limits to paleontological evidence, as some scientists state, and unresolved problems in relation to it. Why is this not more frequently mentioned?

Suppose human beings do owe their existence to animals who produced them. How did that sort of production cease? How prevent a reversal from human to animal life? Does any leading scientist today imagine that—with or without a god—the process of evolution would come to a halt? Then why do dogs reproduce dogs and why do monkeys also remain true to their own kind? No anthropologist has ever demonstrated from any findings that the origin of species as envisioned by Charles Darwin was “nothing but the truth.” It actually is still pure fiction. Why are its implications taught as truth?

In Genesis 1:25 we are told that “God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.” Each group reproduced after its kind: one group did not produce another kind. Moreover, man and animals were sharply differentiated, for in the next verse we read: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea,” and so forth. In the Hebrew original the word for God is Elohim, which at first had a double meaning. For this reason we have the plural pronoun and verb: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Here again we have the significant phrases: “after our likeness” and “after their kind.” Man was made after the likeness of God.

As long as secular historians who do not believe in the Bible ignore its teachings, it is possible to argue that they present a view contrary to that of orthodox Christians. But when professors state that their view is the same as that expressed in the Bible while they are denying the veracity of the Book of Genesis, they are causing immense confusion. Worse than that, they are misleading their own students. Instead of combining two points of view that are diametrically opposed, they assist secular scholars by making it appear as if the Bible actually supports Darwinian evolution.

Biblical teachings involved go far beyond the Genesis account. The Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:45: “And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.” He assumed that human beings (with no mention of animals) could participate in the resurrection. The natural body of man is “sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption.” In verse 39 he remarked that “there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts.” He had in mind the enormous difference between animals and human beings. He would have gasped with astonishment to hear that monkeys were closely related to human beings. (To call some of them apes would have made little difference!) No animals were assured a resurrection, no animals were made in the image of God.

Vanishing Fear Of Sin

A major unfortunate result of teaching evolutionary theory as truth has been the loss of fear for commission of sins. Men will argue that the word “sins” is now out of date. Errors are conceded, to be sure, but it is no longer fashionable to speak of sin and sinners. As human beings rise to ever greater heights of wisdom, they care less and less about the “inevitable punishment” that follows crime. They now can make their own laws and feel that somehow they can escape the results of evil actions and thoughts. Both heaven and hell fade away from the scene of scientific research. The things unseen by human eyes lose their significance. Conscience has importance only as a rudimentary survival (its presence at all being unexplained mystery) and moral law is based solely upon mores. Thus all values become relative and transitory. In short, Darwinian evolution and Christianity are enemies, not friends.

Illuminating, as a contrast, is a statement made in the Third Number of the Baltimore Catechism, published in 1933. In explanation of Question 63 the author presents the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church: “The creation of Eve, the wife of Adam, shows that the whole human race descends from one man.… Evolution is the theory that man developed from lower forms of animals. There is no scientific proof for evolution, though it claims to be scientific.” We are also informed here that if evolution were true, “it ought to be able to repeat itself.” Inferior skulls might well be “cases of degeneracy and prove nothing.”

How well Professor Martin Luther in his lectures on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, delivered in the academic year 1515–1516, understood the facts of life. He stated: “What is original sin? It is the loss of all rectitude and all efficiency in all our faculties, both of the body and the soul.” Luther referred to a famous book by Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen, entitled Spiritual Ascensions, in which he found original sin described in a manner unsurpassed outside of the Bible. Zerbolt had drawn the following conclusion: “We have been contaminated by original sin, and wounded in all the powers and faculties of the soul.… Christ through his precious death does indeed redeem us from our original sin.” All the great creeds of Christendom have supported these views. Unfortunately, the sermons preached on Sunday are disregarded by students who have been indoctrinated by their textbooks to opposing pronouncements. If they think that there is no need of a choice, they simply do not understand the present contest between Christ and Satan.

If it is a violation of the First Amendment to teach the biblical story of creation in our schools, it is also a violation of religious freedom to teach a conflicting theory of origins as truth.

As we gaze enraptured into a marine pool—seeing here a sea anemone, its iridescent blue-green tentacles rhythmically searching for food, and there the ludicrous side-winding hermit crab, his home a borrowed sea snail shell—we suddenly sense that natural selection explains too much! The brown rockweed; green, red, and coralline algae; sun, blood and purple starfish; sea urchins; sand dollars; many richly beautiful red beard sponges—surely the sea tides, daily giving this pool in the craggy rock its place in the sun for an hour or so, could not, by selection, develop such marvelous diversity as this.

Elliott G. Watson, British zoologist writing for The Saturday Evening Post (“Hidden Heart of Nature,” May 27, 1961, pp. 32–33), lists four examples of life histories that orthodox evolution theories simply cannot explain. We mention only the coral reef inhabiting crab whose claws are so small as to be useless as weap-one. But the backward curving teeth of the claws grasp the slippery bodies of small anemones and detach them carefully and without injury from the rocks. Thus held close to the mouth of the pirate crab, the anemones continue to spread their tentacles and to capture small creatures, which the crab, with his free front pair of walking legs, removes as dainty tidbits. Those he dislikes he leaves for the anemones, which are finally released unharmed. Are these adaptations to be explained by chance mutations? Did a chance modification of the claws prompt some ancestral crab to detach an anemone for the mere fun of the thing and by chance hold it near its mouth? If so, we must then assume that the crab passed on to its offspring this behavior tendency, and through natural selection the crab species thus developed their close association with various anemones—the species differing, of course, (to make the problem more complex) for each specie of pirate crab. Such process, Watson says, reason simply cannot accept, and I agree with him.

Experimenting With Mutations

Let us briefly consider these mutations. It is currently believed that they are caused mostly by cosmic radiation (B. Peters, “Progress in Cosmic Ray Research Since 1947,” Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 64, Feb. 1959, p. 156), whereupon natural selection, according to Neo-Darwinian theory, leads to new species. My own work on neutron-induced variations in roses describes a technique by which from 50 radiated buds of Queen Elizabeth we can induce more mutations than could hitherto be found by a lifetime of searching among several million rose plants grown annually from non-radiated buds (“Neutron-Induced Variation of Roses,” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, Vol. 13, No. 1:2–6, 1960). Without exception, all mutations so induced were found to be defective or weaker than Queen Elizabeth. Some, such as a three-foot dwarf type, were horticulturally desirable novelties since gardeners sometimes find the seven to eight foot height of the Queen Elizabeth objectionable. Biologically, however, there is no competition with the Queen Elizabeth.

After reviewing the thousands of “naturally” occurring mutations found in that biological Cinderella, the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster), T. Dobzhansky admits that only a few have greater capability of living or viability than normal, and these only at temperatures higher than normal for the species! Yet from such questionably favorable cases he still argues for evolution (Genetics and the Origin of Species, Columbia University Press, 1951, chap. on mutations).

R. B. Goldschmidt devotes a whole book to showing how contrary to fact such a concept really is (The Material Basis of Evolution, Pageant Press, 1960). Still he seems to accept evolution as proven by geology, embryology, and taxonomy, and argues for some rather mysterious large-scale “macro-evolution” during embryonic development, new genera, and even new families suddenly arising as a result of segmental alteration of the chromosomes. Incidentally, nothing of this sort has ever been observed, even on a species level.

As K. Patau has shown, even mutations having a 1 per cent survival advantage increase in frequency from .01 to .1 per cent of the population only after 900,230 generations (“Die Mathematische Analyse der Evolutions Vorgange,” Zeitschrift für Inductive Abstamungs und Vererbungslehre, Vol. 76:220–228). Another 100,511 generations are needed to increase the frequency to 100 per cent. Certainly the time needed for natural selection to effect a change in a large population is enormous even geologically speaking. That is why Sir Charles Lyell’s concept of slow change by presently acting causes is so necessary for any concept of general evolution. We have all been taught the sequence of raindrops, rivulets, brooks, streams, and finally rivers that, carrying the sediments to continental shelves, in time wear away the mountains to almost level plains. Undoubtedly some of our landscape does result from this infinitesimally slow action. Among the well-rounded hills of England, near Downs, the home of Darwin, one can almost see such a process in operation as he watches the well-ordered flow of streams into the slow-moving Thames. But can the sedimentary rocks of the world and their abundance of fossils really be explained in this way? Let us remember that any demonstration of substantial world-wide catastrophe breaks the slow time sequence so necessary for evolution. Daily we live under threat of sudden destruction by nuclear energy bombs. Could this fact perhaps be influencing scientists to reconsider catastrophism as the possible explanation of our planet’s scarred features?

Ivan T. Sanderson writes a fascinating story of the “Riddle of the Frozen Giants” (The Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 16, 1960, p. 83). “Here is a really shocking (for our previous, Uniformitarian, way of thinking) picture,” he says. “Vast herds of enormous well-fed mammoths not specifically designed for extreme cold, placidly feeding in sunny pasture delicately plucking flowering buttercups at a temperature in which we would probably not even have needed a coat. Suddenly they were all killed without any visible sign of violence and before they could so much as swallow a last mouthful of food, and then were quick frozen so rapidly that every cell of their bodies is perfectly preserved despite their great bulk and high temperature.”

What, we may well ask, could possibly do this? Sanderson’s explanation is that at least 20 or more volcanoes erupted simultaneously due to long cracks suddenly forming from built-up tension in the outer mantle. Coincident with these eruptions occurred great lava flows. The sudden extrusion of dust and gases formed monstrous amounts of rain and snow and cut out sunlight for days, weeks, and even months in some areas. Cold fronts of great length were built up that caused continental floods of vast proportions and tidal waves. The gases shot high into outer space, cooled to—150 degrees Fahrenheit, and suddenly descending, instantly froze the mammoths. Sanderson’s postulation of the rains, tidal wave action, and continental floods makes the usual interpretation of the Genesis flood seem a tame affair by comparison.

But one might say this burial of mammoths is most unusual; surely most fossils were deposited by burial in sediments accumulated slowly as are present-day alluvial fans and offshore continental shelves. While it may come as a shock to followers of the usual geological discussions, actually the opposite is true—almost all of the fossils, by their very manner of perfect preservation, clearly show a sudden burial. M. Brangersma Sanders (“Mass Mortality in the Sea, Marine Ecology, and Paleoecology,” chap. 29, Geological Society of America Memoir 67, 1957, pp. 972, 973), William J. Miller (An Introduction to Historical Geology, 6th ed., Van Nostrand, 1952, p. 12), and Ph. H. Kuenen (Notes from Marine Biology, Wiley, pp. 215, 217) all agree that very few fossils are now formed, and these only under catastrophic conditions.

Simple And Complex Forms

Just what geologic finds then do so many scientists consider as evidence for evolution? Stripped of technical words, the answer is this: Simple marine types of plants and animals are usually found at the bottom of the sedimentary or water-deposited rock formations and lying on the granitic rocks of the earth’s outer mantle. The more complex backboned land animals and flowering plants are toward the top. Furthermore, except in areas such as the great swath of muck stretching around the Arctic Ocean, the formations have a characteristic orderly assemblage of plants and animals instead of being jumbled in some hopeless mess. The actual percentage of area showing this progressive order from the simple to the complex is surprisingly small. Indeed, formations with very complex forms of life are often found resting directly on the basic granites. Furthermore, I have in my own files a list of over 500 cases that attest to a reverse order, that is, simple forms of life resting on top of more advanced types.

It is assumed that in the sedimentary rock layers graded 1, 2, 3, and 4 in complexity, breaking (faulting) occurred followed by the uplift and thrusting of those on one side over those which remained in place; the resulting order of rock layers then became 1, 2, 3, 4, 1 (2, 3, 4). Later erosion presumably removed all traces of 2, 3, and 4!

The gloriously beautiful Glacier National Park is one such case. Ever since my first visit there in 1936, this majestic area of vari-colored limestone mountains and clear, deep lakes in the valleys of grey-black shale, has fascinated me. These mountains containing only simple kinds of fossilized algal clusters were supposedly thrust over the shales which are classified as Cretaceous because they contain more advanced fossil types such as flowering trees, ammonites, and fishes. In 1957, Ray Siers of Chief Mountain Ranch, Dr. J. Hines, and I drove about 30 miles east of Many Glacier Hotel to the base of Chief Mountain and located the contact line of the upper limestone mountain formation lying on the Cretaceous shale. Dr. Hines and Siers climbed to the top finding only limestone. What had become of 2, 3, and 4 (the Cretaceous shale)?

As I wrote Professor Henry M. Morris: “After careful observation, I am convinced George McCready Price is even more right than he thought: at the actual contact lines, very thin layers of shale showing no evidence of grinding or sliding action were always present. Furthermore, these were cemented to the upper Altyn limestone (cf. George McCready Price, The New Geology, Pacific Press, 1923).

Careful field study during many vacations since 1936 has convinced me that the assumed thrust faults are purely imaginary. The transition layers above the contact line clearly indicate deposition of the limestone formations on the underlying distorted shales. Many well-meaning pastors and teachers have pictured the Genesis flood as a rather mild local affair limited in its destruction to the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. As John C. Whitcomb says, careful study of Genesis 6–9 indicates it was world-wide and violent in action (Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb, The Genesis Flood, Presbyterian Publishing, 1961, chap. 1). A number of geologists such as Clifford L. Burdick (Streamlining Stratigraphy, The Forum, published by the Society for the Study of Natural Sciences, Glendale Academy Press, 1948, Vol. II, pp. 121–130) and Richard M. Ritland (Ph.D. of Harvard, now working with Dr. Frank Marsh at Berrien Springs, Mich.) agree with Morris that most of the sedimentary rocks and many of the great lava flows as well as the submerged mountain regions now being explored under the ocean are the result of this great catastrophe. The after-effects lasted for thousands of years, and resulted in more lava flows; in repeated burial of forests such as in the Amethyst area of Yellowstone National Park; in worldwide glaciation; in interior lakes such as Lahonton, and in vast alluvial fans almost covering mountain peaks in the great southwest desert of the United States.

Other arguments for evolution include the idea that the embryo, as it grows into an adult, retraces the various evolutionary stages. As stated by Haeckel, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” But Cyril B. Courvelle, neural surgeon of White Memorial Hospital, Los Angeles, shows that the embryos of even closely allied species use cells and tissues from various and different sources (“The Recapitulation Theory and Casual Significance of Parallelism,” Bulletin of Deluge Geology, Vol. 1, No. 2 and Vol. 2, No. 1, Collegiate Press, Arlington, California). This fact destroys any hope of tracing presumed evolutionary ancestry since the organizers cut directly across the lines of theoretical family trees. There are, for example, alternating arches and furrows on the neck of the human embryo which are claimed to resemble gill slits of a fish. But this relationship is questionable since the first of the four arches develops into the lower jaw in man, but not in the fish. The second arch forms man’s middle and outer ear which the fish does not even have. Actually, gills are never formed. While Bradley Patten accepts recapitulation in his standard textbook of embryology for medical students, he admits this, and observes, “Although the tissue closing the gill clefts reduces to a thin membrane consisting of a layer of internal (entoderm) and external (extoderm) tissue with no intervening mesoderm, this membrane rarely disappears altogether” (Human Embryology, Blakiston, 1953, p. 460).

In its development the embryo follows the principle of least action; it proceeds as directly as possible and with no waste of material to the construction of the various organs. It is interesting that Patten credits Wilhelm His with laying the foundations of modern embryology and in his discussion of the historic development of this branch of science does not even mention Haeckel. Wilhelm His clearly perceived that similarity in form did not signify ancestry, a conclusion strengthened by modern experimental embryology.

Much has been made of the so-called tail in the human embryo. The late Douglas Dewar, British ornithologist, concluded that the proto-vertebra behind the region of the leg buds fuse to become the os coccyx or tail bone. This is soon bent forward and serves for the attachment of muscles; it is therefore not an ancestral relic but a designed structure (More Difficulties of the Evolution Theory, Thynne, 1938, pp. 34, 35). The fact that the tail is thus curved enables man to sit without discomfort—a rather important consideration in recent American living!

In Support Of Creationism

Patten discusses the primitive streak as a growth center which pushes cells into the growing body, but which never becomes larger itself. The head end of the embryo is always precocious in differentiation, something one would hardly expect if the embryo recapitulated its presumed ancestors who had brains consisting only of paired nerve ganglia! Quite obviously the regulatory mechanism of the embryo is working toward a predetermined goal or template and so the head is developed first to give time for the intricate brain development. Actually, embryo development favors the special creation theory.

Oddly enough, not the faintest trace of recapitulation is found in plants. The rose is rather highly placed in the plant kingdom. Yet its embryonic development shows no trace of the presumed evolution from algae through liverworts, mosses, and ferns to flowering plants.

From the creational viewpoint, by classifying plants and animals into species, genera, and families, we attempt to understand which ones belong together by virtue of having the most genes in common. On the basis of economy of effort, a wise Creator would certainly use the same genes from a common stockpile, so to speak, whenever the same form or function was to be achieved. Thus we have the same gene pattern of flower color inheritance in such widely separated species as the carnation (family Caryophyllaceae) and the rose (family Rosaceae) (W. E. Lammerts, “Inheritance of Magenta Color in Roses,” American Rose Annual, 1960, pp. 119–125). The grouping of such genera as the apple, pear, strawberry, and peach into the rose family merely means that more genes are possessed in common by species in these genera, than are shared for example by a species in the genus Rosa and one in the genus Geranium. One cannot infer descent from a common ancestor any more logically than one can assume the evolution of a complex tinker toy from a simple one. All forms simply came from the same large set of tinker toy units.

Boundaries Of Variability

Quite obviously, to associate the ability of species and varieties to change as they spread over the surface of the earth with evolution is to push this feature of variability out of all proportion. The inability of older naturalists like Darwin to evaluate this variability potential of special and varieties properly and thus their mistaking it for evolution or change of one species into another are quite understandable. After all, they had no clear concept of genetics and even set up genetic postulates such as pangenesis, which is at complete variance with what we now know to take place. Indeed, the continued interest and belief of many modern biologists in evolution, at least in some modified form, is puzzling, since the facts of genetic variability, cytology, and mutation so unmistakably show that species and varieties have such clearly defined boundries of variability. In his Studies in Creationism (Review and Herald Publishing Company, 1950) Frank L. Marsh discusses these boundaries from the viewpoint of creationism. He argues rather convincingly that while some types of species were created monotypic, that is, capable of very little variability (a classic example is the shellfish, Lingula), others, like the rose, were created polytypic, that is, having a high variability potential.

The idea of evolution has had a dulling effect on the minds and work of many younger and less imaginative plant and animal breeders; the very concept that changes require millions of years tends to make one feel that little can be accomplished in just one lifetime. Actually plant breeding experience shows that within the limits of variability possible for a given species, change can be effected quite rapidly. From the practical point of view, however, we must always recognize that once the all-wise Creator’s predetermined limits of variation have been reached, any attempts for further progress are a waste of time.

Many younger scientists tend to accept creationism and catastrophism. In my own small circle of personal contacts are at least 25 creationists. One of the older experienced pioneers, the eminent microbiologist Rene Dubos, has little good to say of evolution; he maintains it provides no answers to questions concerning the development of life (The Dreams of Reason, Science and Utopia, Columbia University Press, 1961). Heribert Nilsson, the late Director of the Botanical Institute of Lund, Sweden, is even more emphatic in his conclusions, as judged by his recently published Synthetische Artbildung (Verlag, OWH Gleerup, 1953). In this two-volume 1130-page book he reports on his 30 years of work. Then he asks: “Has there really been an evolution? Are proofs of its occurrence tenable? After a detailed comprehensive review of facts, we have been forced to give the answer, No!”

Since we are made in God’s image, perhaps we shall learn how he created the marvelous physical universe with its interesting plants and animals. As we are blessed with more knowledge, we may even be able to “make” that metropolis of activity called a “simple” cell. Should such wisdom and privilege ever be granted to man, it goes without saying that the steps involved will be so intricate as to make the wonders of a Swiss watch seem but the work of a child. And surely such “making” of life would not imply in the least that the intricately arranged neutrons, protons, neutrinos, electrons, and other physical units could ever have assembled themselves spontaneously.

We are now beginning to unravel the code and to learn just how the gene works through desoxyribosenucleic acid (D.N.A.) and with its partner ribosenucleic acid (R.N.A.). The conversion of inert chemicals into living units of activity as related in Genesis 1:11 (“Let the earth bring forth”) may not be impossible at all. It may well be achieved by precise knowledge of the chemical nature of these complex helically arranged molecules. Our increasing comprehension of God’s method in assembling these intricate patterns would hardly lead us to substantiate the naïve implication of evolution that they construct and arrange themselves. Instead this expanding discovery and knowledge should elicit from us an ever growing sense of awe and reverence for God’s infinite wisdom.