Eutychus and His Kin: September 2, 1957

SPECTATORS

Americans are all screened these days—by the TV set. The screen separates a few hyper-tense performers on a ball diamond or in the studio from spectators relaxing in the bars, living-rooms and dens of the forty-eight states. Never have so many lost so much to so few.

Fortunately some have escaped the contour chair of spectator sports. Even the country club has members who will occasionally desert the TV lounge for an afternoon on the links. As the coach has often reminded us, the school football program still demands self-discipline for the glory of Alma Mater and several thousand paid spectators. Progressive education has not affected squad scrimmages!

Off the athletic field, discipline is rare. This fall school teachers face again the relaxed teens in loafers with the loose look and desperately resume the struggle in a strategic position much deteriorated from the long summer truce.

A preacher can sympathize. The stifled yawns of relaxed worshipers are symptoms of spectator Christianity, slumped smugly in the sanctuary. The most evangelical parson might be tempted to prescribe for his flock the rigor of the canonical hours that summon monks to prayer.

Discipline should begin with the preacher. If he prays more in public than in private and makes fewer calls than any doctor, insurance salesman or Fuller Brush man, he needs self-examination. A popular style of preaching is the stream-of-consciousness method, a flexible, freeform discourse in which the preacher passionately or pompously says whatever comes into his head. The cure is the discipline of the study. Scientific exegesis of the Scriptures and a return to the bracing richness of the creeds can bring new meaning to preaching.

Lazy Christianity that avoids hard thinking and hard work will never reach America’s spectators with the gospel.

EUTYCHUS

NIEBUHR AND GRAHAM

A subtle movement is on to discredit Billy Graham and his message before the world and the Christian church. Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr has become the spokesman for Protestant enemies of the Graham crusades: In Life magazine (July 1, 1957) Dr. Niebuhr accuses Graham of “simplifying the issues of life” in his crusade sermons. From his theological citadel of New York’s Union Theological Seminary he denounces Dr. Graham’s evangelism declaring that (1) he “exemplifies a typically frontier American evangelism”; that he (2) has “neglected to explore the social dimensions of the Gospel,” and that (3) “this new evangelism is much blander than the old.”

Dr. Niebuhr attacks “frontier American evangelism” because of its condemnation of the “old self” and its emphasis on the need of “decision for Christ.” But this is precisely the method which brought the Christian church into existence, preserved her and made her spread out to the ends of the earth. The apostolic message and method was the same Graham is carrying to the world today.

It was not the liturgical priesthood nor the theological Pharisees or Saducees which promoted Christianity, but those “frontier” men of Galilee who were personally regenerated and therefore able to carry the message of new life across national, racial, cultural and social frontiers of their day. This same frontier evangelism saved Christianity in the Middle Ages from the liturgy and formalism of dead Romanism. It saved Protestant Europe in the eighteenth century, through Wesley, Whitefield and others, from national, social and religious corruption. It is not present-day liturgical Rome nor Niebuhr’s modernized theology which can save America from corruption and destruction, but new life in Christ Jesus brought to us through the channel of what the Bible says. There is no other way to change men’s lives, morally, socially and culturally, than grafting of Christ’s new life into the “old self” life.

Can Dr. Niebuhr prove his assertion that “Such evangelism, with its continual emphasis on the individual saving his own soul, neglects to explore the social dimensions of the Gospel”? Individual regeneration is the only effective way to reform society. Only in the heart of individuals who are open to the Gospel seed can a better ethical and moral standard be planted.

Communism is progressing on the very same principle, that reform is built on small cells of individuals having accepted unconditionally the tenets of communistic ideology. While Niebuhr is working with abstract formulas for reform of New York’s teeming millions, hundreds of them are individually “converted” each week to Communism through surrender of “self” in “decision for” Karl Marx.

We wonder if Dr. Niebuhr has ever taken the time to hear a whole sermon by Dr. Graham. If he had, how could he say “This new evangelism promises a new life, not through painful religious experience but werely by signing a decision card.” After having heard Graham a dozen times in soul-searching messages demanding complete change of moral and ethical life toward men, in repentence toward God, my impression is that not since Savonarola have men heard an evangelist who has thundered so much against spiritual as well as social sins.

Can we wonder at Dr. Niebuhr’s assertion that “relatively few New Yorkers attend the Garden meetings” when we consider that nearly two thirds of New York’s population are of the Jewish race or Roman Catholics? Dr. Niebuhr, who wants to be spokesman for its 8 per cent Protestant population, warns both Jews and Gentiles against Graham. Roman Catholic leaders are glad to mingle their voices with his. The greater part of New York’s religious life is encased in formalism, a shell which Dr. Niebuhr’s theology has not been able to crack.

God is in the process of breaking open this shell of estrangement from him. Through united prayers of Christians around the world God is tearing down the temple walls which New Yorkers have erected for their mammon and bacchus worship. A few days ago I went to call on a new convert whose name and address had been mailed to me from the Garden Crusade office. I found him in one of Brooklyn’s swank apartments. This prominent Latin American businessman said to me, “My wife is a strong Catholic, but I have frequently attended Billy Graham’s meetings. I have given my heart to Christ.”

If Dr. Niebuhr would dedicate more of his time to the “narrow” channel of “frontier evangelism” and less time to filling the “chasm between Christian pietism and modern scientific culture,” he would find with Graham that the approach to life’s problems is not “too simple and narrow,” for both the man in the street as well as the erudite scholar may find solution to all life’s problems in the presence of Christ the Saviour and through what the Bible says. Director of Evangelism OLAV EIKLAND Latin Evangelical Free Church Brooklyn, N. Y.

ROMAN CATHOLIC GAINS

“Roman Catholics are increasing by leaps and bounds in America” seems to be a belief of many Protestants.

It simply is not true, and it is surprising that so few Protestants are familiar with the statistics which are to be found, incidentally, at periodic intervals in “Information Service” of the National Council of Churches.

Here are a few figures: In 1906, Roman Catholics were 37% of all church members in the USA. In 1956 they were 34%. In 1906, Catholics were 16.5% of the whole American population; in 1956 they were 20%, an increase of 3.5%. During that time much of the immigration was Roman Catholic. During the same fifty years, non-Catholics increased from 24.3% in 1906 to 40% in 1956, for a gain of over 15%. In other words, from 1906 to 1956, Protestants and Jews increased at a ratio of 4 times as rapidly as Roman Catholics.

Two other items are significant: 1. of the 531 members of Congress, 94 or 17.5% are Roman Catholics. 2. of the 48 governors, 5 or 9.6% are Roman Catholic.

Interpretations of these statistics may vary but at least there are the figures.

WILLARD JOHNSON

Barrington, Ill.

• The present population of the United States is 171,000,000. The Roman Catholic population of the United States is between 32,000,000 and 33,000,000 at the present time. The United States has 223 archbishops and bishops.

In 1906, according to the Catholic Directory on file at Catholic University Library, the Catholic population of the United States was 12,651,000. At that time the total population of the United States was close to 80,000,000. (It was 75,900,000 in the 1900 census.) At that time there were 104 bishops and archbishops.

In 1857 the Catholic population of the United States was 2,064,000. At that time there were 29 bishops and archbishops. The U.S. population, as a whole, was about 25,000,000 (23,190,000 in census of 1850).

In the last 50 years the Catholic population has increased about 275% while the whole U.S. population was increasing about 212%. Therefore, a contention that the non-Catholic population of the United States is increasing more rapidly than the Catholic is not borne out by the facts. However, Roman Catholic statistics include everyone ever baptized in a Roman Catholic church and there are a certain percentage who have lapsed from the church.

The Catholic membership in Congress is now 96 out of 531, the highest it has ever been, except for a brief time this session when it was 97 (prior to Sen. McCarthy’s death)—ED.

REVIVALISM’S RESIDUE

I hesitate to ask you to print a rejoinder to R. J. Rushdoony’s review of my book, Revivalism and Social Reform, (June 24 issue) lest I appear ungrateful for the many kind things he did say. But the more critical portion of his essay identifies me, personally, with the doctrines of the men whom the book describes. I fear the result will be that many of your readers, whose fellowship I cherish, may think that I am now outside the pale of evangelical fellowship. So please accept this brief apology and confession of faith.

I certainly do not rejoice in the triumph of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism. I regard the seizure by radical liberals of the proprietorship of the parable of the Good Samaritan as one if the great ironies—and falsehoods—of our time. Similarly, the doctrine of America’s “manifest destiny” is odious to me. For most of my short life I have held to the a-millennial “variant of the beliefs which [William] Miller’s demise discredited,” without regard to who “spawned” it. Far from being blindly prejudiced against Calvinism, I have taken heart at every movement in recent scholarship or piety which has opened up an avenue to the reconciliation of Wesleyan and “Calvinist” evangelicals. Our division is the least defensible of any which affiict modern Christendom.

But the facts are that in the mid-nineteenth century revivalist churchmen did identify the Kingdom of God with the American dream. They were largely postmillennialists. They did blaze the trail which Social Christianity later followed. They nourished the ecumenical spirit. Christian perfection made remarkable headway among them. And they nearly all believed that old school Calvinism was a superannuated theology, closely identified with the reaction against political and social democracy. All this was as true of Presbyterian, Congregationalist and Baptist revivalists as of their Lutheran, Low Church Episcopal and Methodist brethren.

I thought these things important and tried to tell the story which lay back of them with accuracy and enthusiasm. That the writings of old school Calvinists, so long quoted by secular historians as typical of “Christian” opinion, were in fact a minor current quite outside the mainstream of American religious life in the period, seemed important to point out. This applies to Warfield’s later studies of perfectionism, too, though the reviewer could not but have noticed that the stricture which he deplores was also applied in the same sentence to the work of a recent Wesleyan scholar and referred only to their inadequate treatment of “the social dynamics of the movement” (p. 238).

Mr. Rushdoony’s statement that the chapters on the rise of Christian perfection contain a genealogy which omits reference to the black sheep of the family will, I think, seem strange to those who read the book. Please note the uncomplimentary facts recorded concerning Asa Mahan (p. 111), T. C. Upham (p. 144), the Free Methodists (pp. 129–132), W. E. Boardman (p. 234) and Bishops Janes and Hamline, architects of the Methodist bishops’ policy of silence on slavery (pp. 211–212). All these were clearly in the “second blessing” camp. I doubt if the reviewer seriously believes that “sexual communism” is an inevitable concomitant of Arminian or Wesleyan revivalism. But just to make sure all the evidence was in, I referred to John Humphrey Noyes (who was neither an Arminian nor a Wesleyan) and the Oneida community five times (see index).

One final note. The “something”, as the reviewer put it, to which I referred as being potentially “as dry as Johnathan Edwards’ bones and just as sterile of saving compassion” was (p. 92) Arminian Orthodoxy. But I hasten to acknowledge that such a reference even to that dear Calvinist’s bones was unfortunate, especially if it leads any to suspect that I have not read Perry Miller on Edwards!

TIMOTHY L. SMITH

First Church of the Nazarene

Boulder, Colo.

THE RISING TIDE

At 80, after 57 years in public Christian work, I can truthfully say your magazine met a long felt need in our library.… Being now retired, a good, sound paper is a good companion.…

JOHN O. FERRIS

Crystal Bay Presbyterian Church

Wayzata, Minn.

Ideas

Christ and the Atom Bomb

The Editors

To preserve the universe from capitulating to pagan views of origin and existence, each generation must delineate and declare the relationship between Christ and the atom. Development of the atomic bomb, and of its even more monstrous successors, imposes on our own generation particularly an unprecedented urgency to meet this task. In fact, for us the challenge may already involve retrieving as well as withholding the atom from Satan and his destructive purposes.

During the past decade, atomic energy’s military significance received man’s concentration far more than its peacetime potential. But relegated to even less consideration than the link between the atom and peace has been the link between the atom and God. The long overexposure (and double exposure) to evolution and naturalism has obliterated, at least skewed, the present generation’s recognition of the Christian doctrine of origins and being. Unfamiliarity with Christian thought patterns is prevalent. The comfortable assumption of Christianity as a permanent, all-inclusive Western tradition has inured modern man to a purposeful personal investigation of religion. Within his remnant of theological categories, the average man, therefore, can only associate the atom bomb with the Devil, rather than the atom with God.

Communism drives relentlessly toward world revolution. The political absolutism of “might makes right” perils millions with barbarian mass destruction. Atomic fall-out and radiation mean yet unplumbed hazards. Must not the Christian conscience speak to the world’s conscience about the atom and its uses? Not to do so is a shirking of responsibility. Indeed this silence of a Christian community grants to alien philosophies permission to interpret the atom and its serviceability in wholly secular and arbitrary terms.

But silence is not the only charge to be leveled at the Christian community. What is spoken in the name of the Church, often by its cursory nature, and sometimes by its narrow and even misguided phrasing, is hurtful to Christianity and helpful to paganism.

Monstrous as it is, the atomic bomb is but a part of a much vaster, more important concern, that of the atom itself. To confine the problem to the atomic bomb is unfortunate both for the proclaiming Church and for the listening world. Largely inundated by naturalistic ways of thought, twentieth-century culture needs from the Christian churches a more comprehensive approach to the atom than merely pronouncements on the bomb.

Basic to Christianity’s philosophy of life as it relates to war is the Christian doctrine of origin and existence. While a generation may perpetuate its survival by restraining the atom bomb, that survival may be within a pagan concept of life that brings its own and worse final doom. At every moment the Christian movement must primarily engage in a total battle for the souls of men and not simply in lesser endeavors that spare life unchanged for the pagan world. The contemporary Church needs to proclaim the comprehensive message of the God of the atom when it issues its subordinate proclamations on the atom bomb.

In this connection, some of the recent programing of the Voice of America has reflected a deeper sensitivity to spiritual realities than have the massive church organizations. The U.S. Information Agency’s approval of Moody Institute of Science films such as The God of the Atom for international educational purposes is commendable, since such material lifts the question of the use of the atom beyond the elemental issue of the peaceful or destructive employments of nuclear energy to the higher principle of the spiritual purposes of the universe. If the primary basis of the Communist philosophy is evolutionary naturalism, as indeed it is, then no decisive blow has been dealt to the Communist program for the use of the atom while this basic philosophy is unassailed. The neglect of the Christian doctrine of creation within the churches is due largely to the infiltration of evolutionary naturalism into the religious as well as the secular centers of Western thought and life. This deficiency is a current factor that nullifies the churches’ own efforts to champion the peaceful over the destructive use of nuclear energy. To borrow a warning from the recently published symposium on Contemporary Evangelical Thought (Channel Press, 1957), the unchallenged revolt against the God of creation provides modern man with leverage for his revolt against the God of redemption.

If the subject of Christ and the atom is urgently vital, the subject of Christ and the atom bomb is an appropriate and crucial problem as well. If the Church is properly concerned with why Christ made and preserves the atom, it is also properly concerned with why man splits it.

Christianity is not a religion of war; it is on the side of peace among men. Today when so much of the initiative for world peace is carried by secular agencies, when the warring chapters in the history of Christianity are exploited by anti-Church movements, it is especially necessary for Christianity to entrench in man’s conscience the fact that the tidings of the incarnation are those of “peace on earth” and that Christ’s beatitudes include a special designation of his disciples as peacemakers. Above all the symbols of warfare and strife in the world today, the Church of Christ should tower as a symbol of peace.

Alien conceptions of peace, so often today defined as mere cessation of outward hostility, can easily mislead Christian leaders, however. A striking feature of the New Testament is that despite its emphasis upon the peace of God in human life, the early Church was not drawn into political dispute with the Roman empire, the mighty military power of that day. The Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans of the mighty dunamis of God, and of Christians being “more than conquerors,” but whatever may have been the perils of mankind and of the scattered Christian communities, the early Christians felt no constraint to chart a military program for the Roman Empire. The early Christian concern for peace on earth was linked exclusively with the necessity for spiritual and moral regeneration of individuals, not primarily with programs of action whereby unregenerate men might assure mankind’s survival. The followers of Jesus Christ never understood their task to be the promotion of survival programs for unregenerate men who sought physical security while persisting in rejection of the Redeemer; rather, they ministered to the sick and to the dying by way of spontaneous commentary on their living faith, and they preached Christ the Saviour and Lord before whom even the Roman emperor must be counted a doomed sinner needing salvation (cf. Rom. 3:20, 23). Although it insisted upon the universal validity of the biblical revelation, the early Church did not foster resolutions to reform unregenerate humanity.

Leaders in the World Council of Churches have frequently pleaded for suspension of all current tests of nuclear weapons. Such a demand was voiced to the American government at the WCC New Haven meetings in August. An adopted report of its Commission of the Churches on International Affairs urged that “governments conducting tests should forego them at least for a trial period, either together or individually, in the hope that the others will do the same, a new confidence be born, and foundations be laid for reliable agreements.”

Entrance of churchmen into the political order in the name of the Church frequently has the effect of ascribing to multitudes of parishioners opinions which they as individuals do not in fact entertain, and for the propagandizing of which they have no mandate. Organized Christianity thus may become enmeshed in questions that go beyond the scope of the Church’s legitimate function. In demanding that the United States unilaterally suspend all current tests the WCC’s recent action on nuclear weapons actually supported present Soviet Russian policy. This shocking situation coming from the most representative gathering of Christendom apart from the Papal See supplies a tremendous asset to the Russians in their present jockeying for world sympathy and international support. Although motivated by quite other considerations, the WCC action nonetheless climaxes a Communist drive begun in the Stockholm Peace Conference, namely, by mobilizing and utilizing pacifist sentiment in the non-Communist world to deter the development of new atomic devices in the West thus to alter the balance of power between the Communist and non-Communist worlds. One of the program’s most zealous proponents has been Professor J. L. Hromadka from Communist-dominated Czechoslovakia.

While some dissent was evident at the New Haven conference, the recommendations of the executive committee were never effectively challenged. Professor Florovsky, Russian Orthodox Church official, publicly abstained from support of the atomic tests statement because he considered it a political issue. Dr. P. O. Bersell, Augustana Lutheran leader from Minneapolis, publicly declined to support the re-election of Dr. Hromadka to the executive committee but finally yielded with the explanation: “If the executives are satisfied, knowing the nature of this election, I am satisfied.” Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher of the Church of England was criticized when he suggested that the World Council should not take sides in international disputes, but confine its pronouncements to “fundamental spiritual principles.” Mayor Charles P. Taft of Cincinnati, a leader in the Protestant Episcopal Church, cautioned against pronouncements without the aid of experts, indicating that this is a common failing in church groups. But executives of the central committee received overwhelming endorsement in virtually everything they proposed. The result of the New Haven sessions may well be that, in the months and years to come, the political program of the WCC will receive more scrutiny than ever before. The great tragedy of the twentieth century would be if, in the effort to conserve the creative power of the atom for Jesus Christ, the atom bomb should unwittingly have been given in to the destructive service of Karl Marx.

The Christian churches have adequate reason to warn the nations of the world of their moral accountability to the Living God, to condemn the evil of aggressive warfare, to protest the one-sided enlistment of scientific genius to what Pius XII has called a “race toward death,” and to show concern for the well-being of the race in view of the perils of radiation. The Christian community has good reason also to disown a fatalistic view of the inevitability of war, and to emphasize the crucial role of spiritual decision upon the flow of history.

But what mandate do the Christian churches have for instructing any nation that it ought in the name of political righteousness to desist from testing its military defenses? If God wills the state as a political order to promote justice and to restrain injustice in a sinful society, is not a state precondemned to suicide if it is deprived of the right to test its weapons of defense in a century in which one world power, operating on the thesis of state absolutism, makes no pretense of its goal of world revolution?

The usual reply, that a halt must be called in the bomb race because of the vast destructive capacity of nuclear energy, is not decisive. No clear case has been made out for a qualitative difference between nuclear bombs and other weapons of warfare; the difference, however great, remains quantitative. Eliminate the bombs, and terrible though more conventional weapons of war remain. Does the Church bless these? Does it condemn their use under all circumstances also? Is experiment with tactical atomic bombs (limited to battlefields and used against cities only along the front lines of land fighting) approved as moral? Can this qualitative line really be drawn in warfare?

Is not an organization that intrudes into such questions in the name of the Church confused about the weapons of the Church’s warfare? Are we not driven to ask whether behind the WCC action there still lurks the optimistic hope of the now discredited social Gospel of Protestant liberalism, that by the reorganization of unregenerate mankind on ostensibly Christian prinicples a warless world will be inaugurated?

No Christian—indeed, no human being—can fully escape agony of soul over the death-dealing prospect of modern warfare. The Christian churches are rightly driven to assure themselves that they are making their fullest contribution to world peace. But what scriptural license has a resolution to end the testing of the bombs, even for a trial period, as a strategic Christian contribution to world peace? As a venture of political idealism it may perhaps be justified, even perhaps as a military maneuver, but that is a decision which statesmen charged with the destinies of the political order need to make. When Christian churches speak, are they not obliged to stress that man’s only guarantee of survival is his devotion to the commandments by which God judges the race; to stress the connection between the social evils of the world and the master passions of individual life (cf. James 4:1, “From whence come wars … Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?”); and to stress the contribution to peace made by the regenerating power of the Gospel? Doubtless it is superficial to hold that, in a sinful order, the preaching of the Gospel is the only contribution that Christianity can make to promote world peace. But, if anything, it is superficiality compounded to seek a Christian solution while neglecting the Gospel, and venturing simply to reorganize an unregenerate world order on the basis of romantic idealism.

Progress in disarmament hinges upon a sense of mutual trust among nations. Even unchurched leaders today ask what basis exists for trusting a Communist leadership that acknowledges no objective moral principles, let alone the reality of the Living God and the validity of his commandments. Is not the Gospel the best weapon the Church knows for restoring these dulled spiritual and moral sensitivities?

The Christian community is profoundly right in its warning to the world that nuclear war will provide no solution to world problems, but will bankrupt modern history. But if Christian forces hope to show the way to peace, they had best not concentrate their efforts on dubious vulnerable techniques for avoiding war. Worldly organizations may busy themselves with delaying actions for postponing doom, but the Church’s primary role is to call a new race of men into fellowship with Christ as Lord. The cessation of nuclear bomb tests is no more the world’s real hope for peace in this decade than the organization of the United Nations was in the last. That great hope is Jesus Christ. And it is time professing followers of Christ clarify this hope in a world of peril. The modern man’s one great prospect of peaceful existence in these dark decades lies in the recognition of the lordship of Christ, in the reaffirmation of the Judeo-Christian view of life, and in the dedication of the atom and the atom bomb to the service of righteousness and love.

A Prepared Messenger And His Message

Dr. Robert Munger, pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, California, recently said in a workshop for ministers in New York: “A prepared messenger is more important than a prepared message.”

By this Dr. Munger did not mean to minimize the importance of thorough preparation of a sermon from a topical, scriptural and homiletical standpoint. But he did mean that God uses cleansed and filled vessels for his own glory and that a minister who has prepared himself by a complete yielding to Christ in every area of his own personal life and approaches his message from his knees is the one whom God can honor and use.

In these days when so many administrative duties accrue to the minister, when he finds himself under constant pressure to meet pastoral responsibilities, grave danger exists of too little time being left for the most vital part of his life, the spiritual, without which even the most eloquent sermon can become so many empty words.

While it remains the responsibility of the minister to guard and nurture this most important part of his own life, the congregation has a duty to see that he is spared many seemingly important but nonetheless secondary duties. To make this possible the minister will have to say “No” to many requests and to make his position tenable the congregation will have to accept such refusals graciously.

What person would employ a lawyer on a vitally important matter and then expect him to spend his time in social and other activities that mitigate against proper preparation of his case?

Who would ask a surgeon to operate for a serious physical ailment and then expect the surgeon to fritter away his time on secondary matters?

And yet, too many members of the average congregation ask their minister to provide time and services they have no right to expect. Or how often a minister may himself take time and energy for things that deaden or lessen spiritual awareness and power.

The Christian ministry is a desperately serious matter for it has to do with matters of eternal import. The preacher of the Gospel stands as a link between the living and the dead, between men who are in darkness and despair and a Way which brings light and joy. “Be ye clean, that bear the vessels of the Lord” is an admonition found in Isaiah. This envisions a minister of the Lord cleansed for his task. “Be filled with the Spirit” Paul exhorts us, an indication of the source of spiritual power.

Prepare your message? By all means, but never forget that for the message there must also be a prepared messenger.

END

- More from The Editors

Theology

God Is Not Deformed

L. Nelson Bell

Can man hope to have an adequate concept of God? Certainly we can never hope to understand comprehensively all of his perfections and attributes for we are finite. Nevertheless God has not left himself without a witness. It is both our privilege and duty to learn that which he has been pleased to reveal about himself.

We know only that which God has been pleased to reveal, and for sinful man this is overwhelmingly adequate.

To contemplate the attributes of God staggers the imagination, yet he has revealed himself for the very purpose that we might, although limited by the flesh, know him and glorify his name and distinguish between that which is true and false.

God has made it possible for us to know him through his general revelation in nature. Romans 1:20 says, “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” He reveals himself also in history and conscience.

He has revealed himself in his Son of whom we read in Colossians 2:8, 9: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the elements of the world, and not after Christ. For in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.”

God reveals himself in his written Word. The apostle Paul writing to Timothy says, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto good works.”

In these various ways God’s marvelous attributes are revealed, being exercised by him in his works of creation, providence and redemption.

Why then the necessity of affirming, in a spirit of deepest reverence, that God is not deformed? Because in each generation, and particularly in our own, God is often presented in only one aspect of his personality or by only one attribute to the exclusion or depreciation of others. This narrow presentation causes God to be seen as though he were deformed; his glorious person is disclosed out of focus.

There are those who are so overwhelmed by the love of God and all of its implications that they overlook other attributes which are equally true and impelling. The depth and height and breadth of the love of God can never be exhausted, for he is the epitome of love and all that it implies.

He is also the God of holiness and justice. The Bible which tells us that God is love also affirms that he is a consuming fire. Therefore, to stress the love of God to the exclusion of his perfections in holiness and justice is to give a distorted picture.

The Cross of Jesus Christ reveals the love of God. But it reveals far more. The depths of sin, the magnitude of its offense against a holy God and the price necessary to free man from its guilt and penalty, all are revealed by the Cross. We see combined in one sublime act the love, truth, holiness, righteousness, mercy, faithfulness, justice, and knowledge of God, and having said this, all of its implications have not been exhausted. Let us never forget that in this glorious act of redemption and propitiation we see combined many aspects of the God with whom we have to do.

God is the God of infinite and absolute perfection. Being infinite he is free from all possible limitation. Being absolute he is an eternal self-existent person who is the voluntary cause of all that is, has been or ever will exist. He is “the same yesterday, today and forever” and he is “without variableness or shadow of turning.”

One may hear the seemingly wise statement: “God is too good to damn anyone,” and from this premise the deduction that therefore all men will some day be saved regardless of what they do about Christ, God’s provision for their need. Paul, in Romans, writes: “Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise you too will be cut off.” The crux of the matter is that sin must be judged and God in his infinite love and justice has done something about it, sending his Son through whom man may be freed from the guilt and penalty of sin and restored to fellowship with Him now and forever.

If we would know God and the attributes whereby he is known we have but to turn to Holy Scripture. In both Old and New Testaments we find the same God. Some would distinguish between the “God of the Old Testament” and the “God of the New,” but they are the same. To discard the one for the other is to be guilty of a selective prejudice that leads to grave error.

For instance, in Isaiah we read: “Therefore as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust: because they have cast away the law of the Lord of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.” But the same God, speaking in the same book also says: “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

We find the Lord Jesus Christ uttering this scathing denunciation: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!… Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?” This same Christ also says: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

The apostle Paul denounces sin and the unrepentant sinner but offers pardon and peace to all who will turn to Christ in full repentance. The writer of the Epistle to Hebrews affirms God’s revelation through the prophets and the Son and presents a picture of escape and eternal salvation to those who believe.

Peter tells of the patience and longsuffering of a holy God unwilling that any souls be lost, but also of the day of impending judgment from which none who have rejected Christ shall escape.

No, God is not deformed. He is revealed to us in the perfections of his glorious attributes. It is his will that we should see him and believe in him for who he is and what he is.

We who are capable of love, feeling, knowing, righteous indignation, kindness, mercy and a sense of right and justice, should realize that in him all of these things are found in absolute perfection. He who knows no limitations of time, space or circumstance deals with mankind in perfect love and also perfect justice. He who is of purer eyes than to behold evil, and who cannot look on iniquity, has nonetheless made perfect provision for sin and the sinner. In all of this the perfection and absoluteness of his attributes are revealed to man.

No, God is not deformed. He is perfection, a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, truth and love.

- More from L. Nelson Bell

Cover Story

Labor Needs a Conscience

George Stob

Labor has become a burly figure on the American scene. No one can fail to be impressed by this striding giant. But the impression left by the behavior of unions and their leaders at this point is that the labor movement in America has grown big and strong without “growing up.”

There are two things one notices particularly in connection with labor’s bigness. One is the huge appetite of the big, strong body. The other is the vast power with which the body stands its own ground or pushes others around at will.

Throughout its struggling years the labor movement endeavored to obtain for the workingman a larger share of the world’s goods. The endeavor, often very costly, has succeeded in improving greatly the workingman’s material circumstances. Shorter hours, better working conditions, more leisure, larger pay and other benefits have brought the laboring man into possession of a large share of the good things of life. These gains, however, have not resulted in a larger measure of contentment, nor in a happy and satisfying sense of significant achievement. They have merely whetted the appetite for more. Labor’s success at getting has sharpened a technique and shaped a spirit concerned almost always and predominantly with getting and getting more.

The overwhelming concern for getting has not been accompanied, meanwhile, by adequate concern for being and doing. The worker has been taught to think not in terms of the glory of work, the meaning of service to society, or dignity of the worker as creative and productive individual. Instead, the worker has been taught to think in terms of what he can wrest from the man who needs his skill.

This, when it is an almost exclusive way of looking at one’s job and predominant in the spirit of one’s approach to it, can do very little else than promote the spirit of thoroughgoing cupidity. The quality or measure of one’s work and sense of responsibility to one’s employer or to the society in which he lives are matters of little consequence. It is the getting that counts, and because of the preoccupation with getting, work itself loses meaning, dignity and interest.

This kind of thing lies at the bottom of the moral corruption that has become manifest in so much of labor union activities today. Dave Beck has been exercising labor’s fierce passion for getting, the more successfully because of his more favored position. Most of us are too angered at what we have learned to pity him, but it is a fact that Dave Beck is a sort of victim of the kind of cupidity the whole labor movement has been cultivating. He is in a sense the reflection of the mores of our times and our materialistic culture, and none of us can escape a measure of responsibility with him and for him.

This is part of labor’s great temptation. The very thing for which it was forced to fight, a share in the goods it produces, can, if this becomes an all-consuming objective, make of this giant a monstrosity—a big body with all appetite and no soul.

Labor’S Use Of Power

Labor has grown not only big, but strong. It had to be strong in order to maintain itself and to counterbalance the great pressures from management to which workingmen were subject. Labor has spent itself in courageous effort and has survived some tremendous battles. This struggle had in it something of the law of the jungle which permits survival of only the fittest. The labor movement has come out fit and strong and stands today as one of the major social and political forces in American society.

The possession of such vast power places the labor movement in a position of grave peril or of great opportunity. Power is peril if abused and misdirected. It is opportunity if put to the service of the community in a responsible way. Power is peril if there is no soul to govern, no conscience to set limits to it and give direction. Power has become peril to the whole movement of American labor because, grown strong, it has exercised its tremendous power selfishly and irresponsibly.

The power that labor holds over American industry and all of American life is sometimes awesome. In an industry-wide strike in crucial materials and services, labor unions may hold the health and life of masses of people in their hands. They have a strategic hold on the whole of our economy. The greater the power, the more urgent the need for a responsible conscience in the use of it. It is a pity that labor unions have often shown a total unconcern for the health of society and have been quite ready to destroy not only monetary but human values in order to achieve their ends. The right to strike has often been exercised with sheer arbitrariness and without reference to equally urgent rights existing within the life of the community.

Power thus used for achievement of the ends of a specific group is nothing other than fomenting of class struggle. Labor’s earlier complaints against class-conscious capitalists are hollow-sounding now, because labor shows itself ready, with ruthlessness that matches earlier power interests, to disregard the common good for the sake of its own class-interest.

The Need Of A Conscience

All of this increases the suspicion that while the labor movement in America has grown big and strong it has not grown up. What American labor needs is something other than a huge and devouring appetite, more than the hulking strength of a new giant. American labor needs a conscience that will place limits upon its concern for getting, and set its wants in the context of larger and abiding social values—a conscience that will make possible a responsible use and direction of the great power it wields.

Without attempting to offer a blueprint for labor’s refromation, it would appear that at least three things are basic to the moral character of so significant a social entitiy as the labor movement.

First of all, there is needed a sense of dignity of the worker and a sense of calling that is involved in the work he performs. A labor union professes to be concerned with a definition of the genius of the workingman as member of our common society. It is part of the fearful perversion of the whole labor movement that the genius of the American worker has been interpreted in sheer materialistic terms. The worker has been represented as an individual who works in order to get certain material gains, and he has been assured that for all his efforts he has a right to get as much as he can out of his labor.

Emptiness Of Perpetual Discontent

This is a horrible basis from which to start and a most unprofitable principle for understanding the meaning and value of work. One who is taught that work has meaning only for what he gets is being schooled in the spirit of perpetual discontent, and is left with a feeling of emptiness with reference to something that stands close to the center of his living. The first thing needed for the laborer’s conscience is sound conviction that man is essentially worker, that the fulfilment of life’s function and purpose is to be found in work, and that work itself is the crucial area for the most significant kind of achievement and service.

When he is taught that it is good to trim the measure and quality of his work in order to secure a set of by-ends in leisure, shorter hours and higher pay for the whole laboring fraternity, he is being taught to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage. An honest job ought not to be sacrificed for the sake of the dollar, nor pride of workmanship for weeks of leisure, nor responsible duty to his employer for loyalty to the gang.

Second, a requirement for any responsible labor movement is high sense of social responsibility. This needs no explication but it needs constant emphasis. Lip service to the interests of society is no substitute for real service rendered at cost of willing sacrifice. It is easy enough to return to the law of the jungle, because it is in the character of human nature to live for self with complete disregard of the interests of others. When men of such mind join together the tendency to selfishness is accentuated. And selfishness can achieve both demonic character and demonic proportions in group organization. A labor movement that becomes the agency for group interests and that rides roughshod over interests and needs of other members of society in the attempt to achieve its own ends, is corruptive of the meaning of labor itself and a curse to the society it is called upon to serve.

Third, involved in a responsible labor movement must be recognition of accountability to a law higher than the individual, higher than the group of which one is a member, and higher than the society in which one is placed. This means recognition of accountability to God, the Sovereign Lord of all, and to his law of love for his world and all his creatures. This is ultimately the basis for all morality in individual and social life and the only effective sanction for securing decency, justice and respectability in human relations. The American labor movement will come to responsible character, and be in position to serve its own members and all of society, if there is remembrance of the God whom all men must fear and to whose law and judgment all men are subject.

It is precisely on the score of these basic requirements that American labor unions have been in serious default. On this account they have corrupted American workingmen while endeavoring to secure for them materialistic bonanzas, and they have increased and intensified the problems of our society.

The Christian’S Responsibility

All of this raises the question concerning the Christian’s responsibility as a member of the laboring class. Corruptions have come into existing labor unions because the members have only too readily surrendered their sovereignty to the “labor leaders,” abdicating their rights and duties of active participation in union affairs. This is a confession that must be made not only of the mass of workers, but of the Christians in our labor unions. If Jesus made his followers the salt of the earth, where is the salting power? It seems profoundly weak in American labor unions. Perhaps there are two reasons for this weakness. One is the prodigious failure of the Christian churches in conditioning their members for vigorous exercise of a living Christian witness in common areas of daily life and work. The second is the related factor of a quietism that puts a profound apathy upon the social conscience of even Christian men, and which looks upon social evils as something from which to withdraw rather than to confront.

One doesn’t meet the labor problem by withdrawal. He merely bypasses it. And when it is the Christian who does this, no ground for complaint against the evils of the labor unions is left to him. He is, rather, coresponsible for them. There is tremendous opportunity for good and righteous men, including Christians of every kind, to perform real service for decency and respectability in labor unions. But the task is tremendous, too. Nor is there promise of easy achievement. The progress of goodness against evil in this evil world is never conveniently traceable. Men must live for goodness by faith. And the Christian’s role here, as in so many aspects of contemporary life, will be the struggle to keep his soul and to carry on the fight as the situation allows and demands against what is more than flesh and blood.

Separate Organization?

There is another possible way for exercise of the Christian’s social responsibility. That is the way of separate Christian organization. This kind of effort is, indeed, embodied in a small way in an already existing movement—that of the Christian Labor Association, with headquarters in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The Christian Labor Association had its origin some 25 years ago among a group of consecrated members of the Christian Reformed Church. These Christian laymen recognized the need of organization for achievement of social justice but considered existing labor unions unsatisfactory agencies for attainment of these ends. The movement is based upon Christian principles enunciated in the Scriptures and committed to the belief that the recognition of Christ the King and his Sovereign Word is necessary for resolution of problems of our sinful society. The movement has grown with painful slowness. It is concentrated largely in Western Michigan, and locals have been established also in other places where members of the Christian Reformed Church are concentrated—Chicago, Minnesota, California, among others.

Though it has won some notable victories over existing unions in courts of the land, the general effect of the CLA on existing major unions has been that of a nuisance value in certain areas. For the rest, the significance of this small labor movement is that it stands as a protest against the moral and spiritual failures of existing labor unions, and is an attempt to give witness by embodiment to the Christian social ideal.

The Christian Labor Association is bound to arouse the admiration of all who have taken notice of this movement led by men of strong commitment and great integrity. The movement has its limitations, however. It has been too closely associated with a specific church group and has sought undue support from ecclesiastical legislation concerning conditions of church membership. It has tended to the character of a religious society, committed to certain carefully defined theological tenets. And it has been governed in too large degree by the psychology of shelter from and against our present evil world.

The possibilities in the Christian Labor Association are significant, however. It could become a very large hope for Christians in America if its character were not only that of protest and witness against the secularization and corruption of existing unions, but that of a competitive labor movement seeking to embody for a large mass of American workers the concerns and ideals of a responsible laboring group within our society.

The germ of a competitive labor movement exists in this Christian Labor Association. It addresses itself to the basic labor situation, is concerned with social justice based on fundamental Christian principles, and is recognized by the National Labor Relations Board as a bona fide bargaining agency. Could this association, with a broader base, a wider appeal, less concern for confessional commitments and a less separatistic definition of the social task, be the hope for America to purge labor of some of its besetting perversions?

Renwick Harper Martin has served as Instructor in Political Science and then as President of Geneva College and now is Editor emeritus of The Christian Statesman. He has been Moderator of the Reformed Presbyterian Church and is author of Our Public Schools: Christian or Secular?

Preacher In The Red

“The movements of the Home Mission director are not without humorous touches. I was scheduled to appear in a small Alberta Church located about twelve miles from the nearest town on the main line.

Arrangements had been made whereby a car would meet me at the bus when I reached this town. However, upon getting off the bus I discovered that no one seemed to be the least interested in my arrival.

As the situation remained unchanged for at least fifteen minutes, I decided to take the initiative. Seeing a small panel delivery across the street and deducing that the young man behind the wheel was probably too shy to seek me out, I approached with the query, “Say, are you looking for a preacher?”

Upon coming a little closer I noticed that the interior of the cab had taken on quite a brilliant hue and I realized then that the transformation was accounted for by the presence of a young lady by his side.

Apparently my approach had been interpreted as the blustering attempt of a travelling ecclesiastic to drum up a little curb service business.

I made an apologetic and hasty retreat, to discover, gratefully, that my driver had arrived. The REV. GERALD M. WARD, First Baptist Church, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

- More from George Stob

Theology

Form in Religion

Clyde S. Kilby

Selden Rodman’s The Eye of Man, which Time magazine calls one of the most provocative books in its field in recent years, is pivotal because of its pronouncements on art in our day, but it has, I think, some interesting implications for Christianity as well. On the art side this book boldly raises the question whether the artist is obliged to weigh human values and communicate spiritual truth. Conversely, it asks whether the artist’s refusal to acknowledge such responsibilities denies to him on the one hand the driving force which has motivated the great arts of the past and on the other hand the audience without which the artist is doomed to exclusive communication with himself alone. Many people will rejoice to know that Rodman, whose critical acumen and insight are well known, gives no uncertain answer to these questions. The artist, says he, is a man among men and cannot abdicate his position as a responsible member of the human race. He has not the right to retire into a world of esoteric inner experience and thus separate himself from his fellow men. Rodman examines the history of Western painting and attempts to show that in times of cynicism or retreat from positive values in life, art has tended to move away from subject and toward form, but, says he, only in our day has this movement away from content suffered a total eclipse.

Rodman’s book is devoted to a minute description of the relation of subject and form. Form he defines as “the appropriate shape an artist discovers in the process of saying what he has to say.” To make form an end in itself is to fall back upon the old and sterile doctrine of art for art’s sake. If form in art simply calls attention to itself, it thereby falls into a trap as clearly obvious as is the trap of didacticism. He goes so far as to declare that form is mere decoration unless it is integrally connected with subject. These doctrines enunciated by Rodman are entirely at odds with both the theory and the practice of many prominent artists of our time—beliefs which reach their extreme expression in Mallarme’s statement, “A beautiful line without meaning is more beautiful than a less beautiful one with meaning,” and Flaubert’s notion of writing a book without any subject at all. Rodman feels that it is only when artists have lost every social and spiritual conviction that the frivolous notion prevails that art’s function is “to define forms and arrange them in space.” There are signs, thinks this critic, of a return to content, to responsibility, and to communication.

It is important, however, to point out that Rodman feels many artists have been forced into the nonobjective world because of the public’s insensitivity to genuine works of art. He is fully opposed to an aesthetic norm which loves sterile copying of natural objects, such as manifested at its worst in so-called calendar art, and opposed also to easy Hollywoodish symbolism that plays up to this same unworthy aesthetic norm and produces people devoid of all true humanity. He describes the Hollywood “star” as having “a face untroubled by thought which smiles blandly at the citizen in a thousand disguises from birth to death.” Thus there are two distinct sides to Rodman’s position: At one extreme he opposes the nonobjectivity and noncommunication of much modern art; at the other he is equally opposed to the unthinking cliches of popular art and the level of public taste in general. His entire book is rather well summed up in his remark that “content without supreme conviction never achieves convincing form.”

It may be profitable to discuss some ideas not explicitly put forth in Rodman’s excellent book but applicable to Christianity by implication.

The Form And The Spirit

One is that form does not mean simply the method of doing something. It is much more deep-seated than that and more nearly related to being than doing. Rodman believes that in a genuine work of art, form and content are indistinguishable from one another and that form by itself is nothing but decoration. The implication for Christianity is that form is the shape discovered and manifested in the living of a Spirit-filled life. It is not simply the outward actions of a life but the essential shape of a life at its roots whence all its motives take their beginning and their genuine nature. Form is never obvious and sterile but always dynamic and potent. Form is the eternal shape of truth making its impact upon the Christian. It is the thrusting power which molds his reborn “content” into convincing reality. Of course form will finally manifest itself in outward actions, but if it is genuine it will first of all be effectually and uniquely inner. Love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith. meekness, temperance—all these have infinite possibilities of manifestation in the Christian. An easy and outward definition of such Christian virtues may eventuate in a static, limited, and sometimes even unbiblical, notion of them. There are no “ten easy steps” to any of these virtues, and their manifestation in the Christian will be most telling when their “appropriate shape” has been hammered out in the unique depth of individual experience with God.

The literal translation of Ephesians 2:10 is “… we are his poems.” A poem, like any other work of art, is, above everything else, unique. There is only one of its kind in existence. God is a God of variety, whether it be in the making of snowflakes, the leaves of trees, or men. An identical twin recently said to me, “My sister and I don’t think we are alike at all.” God is a God of variety also in the re-creation of men into Christians. Phillips translated 1 Peter 4:10 as “the magnificently varied grace of God.” Form is the dynamic by which that varied grace is shaped into the unique “poem” which God wants to make out of each of his children.

Divine Poetry In Our Flesh

It is most unusual when a minister alludes to the self in us other than to denounce it. I think we might be nearer the truth if we distinguished two kinds of self. There is the self whose manifestation is selfish—the self which is everywhere condemned in the Bible. But there is also the self which God uniquely created and which he uniquely re-creates in the Christian. Nowhere in Scripture are we taught to be a zero for its own sake but only to withdraw from the selfish self so that God can mold the inner man after his own fashion; “… he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” George Macdonald says that God’s wrath will consume what men call themselves so that the selves God made shall appear. It seems to me that this distinction is almost totally neglected in pulpits. The implication of much preaching on the theme of denial of self is that God is seeking to produce not poems but robots. The totally yielded Christian is a man much more “himself” than is the natural man, and his new freedom is as unique and varied as heaven itself. He is genuinely God’s handiwork, God’s craftsmanship, God’s poem. D. E. Harding has well said that of necessity God’s love “individuates its objects.” Form is the eternal shape of the truth which God is manifesting in his twice-unique creatures.

Cliches Move No Mountains

Since the Reformation orthodox Christianity has very properly laid great emphasis on the fundamental doctrines of the faith. It has made the repetition of the Apostolic Creed a part of its worship and has written innumerable platforms and declarations with the intent that the faith once delivered should not be allowed to deteriorate. Orthodoxy will continue to be vitally concerned to promulgate the purity of the faith. At the same time it must avoid implying that language itself is sufficient to corral Deity. The genuine danger that men may think there are many ways to Christ must not lead to another extreme in which the recitation of a cliche becomes the only language which is thought to be good theological specie. We have concluded too often that accepting Christ and “accepting Christ” are identical, where the latter phrase means going to the front during an evangelistic campaign, getting on one’s knees, saying certain words, standing up and shaking hands, and afterward giving one’s testimony. Too often we are not willing to leave the work of the Holy Spirit to the Holy Spirit himself. God’s purpose to form the new man in Christ is fully as vital as what Rodman would call the subject matter, i.e., the doctrines of Christianity. Without denying the Bible as our rule of faith and practice and as the perspective for every part of life, we may say also that the Bible was never intended as a yardstick by which the orthodox should pharisaically measure their fellows and then attempt to whip them into line. God will not form a new man any different from the standard indicated in Scripture, but he may form that man different from our own redaction of Scripture into case-hardened language.

The calling of a Christian is to lead “naturally” a supernatural life. His conduct is expected to proceed from the deepest Spirit-stirred motives. He is expected to be, paradoxically, himself in the completest fashion and at the same time nothing at all. If the right sort of result is to prevail, God must be allowed to shape his materials after a unique pattern. The Christian will be involved in never-ending growth based on experience with the master artist. Instead of this we often place the accent on outward manifestation alone. The loudness or even jazziness of our singing is assumed to be the measure of its spiritual vitality. We listen to sermons and seldom come to any deep movement of soul. Bodily presence is substituted for communication and communion with God. In such ways superficial outward form replaces that genuine sort of form which Rodman claims for art. Every such act tends to seal over or sear the point of our spiritual sensitivity until, as C. S. Lewis has so aptly declared, “The more often [man] feels without acting, the less he will ever be able to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel”; or, as Rodman says, the religious images become “cold, intellectually self-contained, erudite and completely out of contact” with reality. The orthodox thus may be no better off in actuality than those who, again to cite Rodman, see religion so completely as history that it becomes remote and static and picturesque, “something to be endured passively Sundays as … a Tournament of Roses on New Year’s Day.” It is possible for a Christian to denounce every implication of the word form while at the same time manifesting a formalism of his own that leads to almost complete spiritual sterility. He becomes a practicing “materialist” who can never understand that God is more than the sum of his attributes.

The Gospel’s Strange Power

We must not teach the Christian, directly or indirectly, that he is to fear and denounce his own personality. Rather he is to yield it to God for the creation of a product—an artistic product if you will—after God’s own ends, in which none of the man’s God-given uniqueness is lost. Such a man is one who is at once completely himself and completely God’s, a man in whom Christian experience is daily being shaped into a product worthy of a high and holy Omnipotence. We need to feel the terrible reality of Christianity. Too often we manage to tame it. In our intensity of desire to preserve it uncontaminated, we turn it into a groove, or perhaps we should say a rut. Christianity is really a dangerous enterprise.

William Still is a native of Aberdeen, Scotland, who turned from a career as musician and teacher of music to the ministry. Formerly assistant minister to Dr. W. Fitch at Springburnhill Church in Glasgow, he has served since 1945 as minister of Gilconston South Church, Aberdeen.

- More from Clyde S. Kilby

Cover Story

Oneness with Christ

John Henry Strong

He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit (1 Cor. 6:17).

How close does Jesus Christ come to the lives of those who have trusted in him? Is he spectator solely, or is he an active participant in the lives which believers live? If a participant, does he help only at points and at moments, with intervals and absences between, or is his influence continuous? And if continuous, how close does he come? Is there some inner life connection? Are our lives somehow so related to his that, could we scan the inner foundations where the two join, we should find ourselves in some manner actual sharers of what he is?

Men may hesitate before such questions, but there is no hesitation in the New Testament Scriptures. Whatever the mystery involved, there is no fact which the New Testament sets before us more variously or plainly than our vital union with Christ. The Spirit of the Lord is represented as so interpenetrating and energizing the spirit of the believer that the two are—oh, the marvel of it!—“one spirit” (1 Cor. 6:17). This is not metaphor, but fact. Not a figurative “oneness,” a harmony of spirit, an identity of aim, but a literal oneness of life. Union with Christ is represented not as loving Christ, following his precepts, sympathizing with his aims. In this sense I might be one with Martin Luther or George Washington. The believer is one with Christ in a sense far deeper than that in which he is one with patriots, fellow Christians, or friends. He has become a participant in Christ’s life. The believer lives in Christ as truly as he lives in the atmosphere about him. Christ lives in the believer as truly as the air fills his lungs with the breath of life. For the believer has become “one spirit” with his Lord.

The Reality Of Oneness

How much we lose by taking substance to be shadow, by allegorizing the great truths of the Bible, by treating as mere orientalisms statements that otherwise

would startle us with their grandeur and open miraculous vistas of Christian living to the hopeless and despondent. The traveler in the desert sometimes sees upon the horizon waving palms and sparkling pools of water that lure him on and on, only to fade into thin air. But how much more tragic if he mistakes reality for mirage, and when he might press forward and be saved, sinks fainthearted upon the sand!

Oneness with Christ is a truth that baffles all description and confounds all philosophy. Intimations, foreshadowings of it there are, to be sure, in the world around us. The tree standing in front of my house depends on God. His power lives in it, sustains it, and he clothes it in a leafy robe. Yet God is not the tree. In cutting it down I should do no violence to God. And God lives in man’s natural life. He gives me strength to think, to strive, to lead my daily life, while all the time not destroying my independence. My sins are mine, not God’s. Yet how poor are all analogies beside the unique relationship which comes to pass when Christ enters into the human soul and makes it, not a Leyden jar, a mere receptacle for his energy, but a temple resplendent with his presence, a tabernacle for his personal indwelling!

This is the astonishing truth that our Lord set forth under the figure of the vine and the branches. A vine with leaves and branches, with arms stretched forth laden with fruit, may seem a thing far removed from the life and relationships of responsible and free men and women; yet our Lord never would have employed the figure had it not imaged forth the half-concealed reality behind it. A vine is a unity. Its branches are only individualized stock. Stock and offshoots together form one organism. One life pervades the whole; and the supreme “concern” of the branch is, as it were, to live in the uninterrupted power of the union on which fruitfulness depends. “Abide in me,” Jesus told his disciples, “and I in you.”

More impressive still is the vastly significant fact that Jesus likened his oneness with his disciples to his own oneness with the Father. “I in them,” he prayed, “and thou in me” (John 17:23). That sets the thoughts soaring. Was our Lord’s union with his Father not a life union? Nothing less, then, is his union with his followers. This is a mystery. It was to his disciples; these babes in understanding did not at once grasp even the fact of it. But a day of revelation was coming, Jesus promised, when they should know that he was in his Father, and they in him, and he in them (John 14:20).

“Christ In You”

The Apostle Paul stands out as the most potent human examplar of vital relation. He is the man God chose to put Christianity into the form in which it has won its greatest victories for nineteen centuries. How did Paul live his life and do his work? This same life union with the Master is the answer. Union with Christ is the secret of the life of Paul. It is the cornerstone of his theology, and the key to unlock all the mysteries of his epistles.

“In Christ,” “in Christ,” “in Christ!” How the phrase recurs on Paul’s familiar pages. “I hope in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you.” “I trust in the Lord to come to you.” “I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all.” Is there anything this man thinks, feels, believes, prays, hopes, plans or remembers, except through the will and power of the One within him?

A discouraged evangelist, so Bishop Moule once told us, was making his way through a field in solitude, his forces spent, his obstacles and burdens mountainous and hopeless. Suddenly, as though Spirit-prompted, these words stole into his mind: “When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall we also be manifested with him in glory.” Then He came into view, of whose fulness we have all received, and who quickens whom he will. The burdens were rolled upon His shoulders, and a revived servant of God once more turned courageous steps into the path of surrender and faith.

Christ The Believer’S Life

How plain it is that our union with Christ is not “fidelity in the free imitation of the Master,” as some would have it, to whom every soul is severely separate and discontinuous and a teaching like that of the vine and the branches nothing more than a figure for the moral harmony that should exist between the disciple and his Lord. Trees do not root themselves in the air. Souls are not self-subsistent. Christ is our life. Those are bereft indeed whose little systems will not allow for a vast underground relationship lifting the strain from life, discovering our true glory, and making our chief task the joyous experience of abiding and believing.

How plain it is, too, that to receive the “life of Christ” is to receive the Christ who lives it. Life has no existence by itself, as though it could be stripped from a person as a coupon is stripped from a ticket or a skin from an onion. Life is a property, a function, of someone. If it is imparted at all, it is imparted only in and with the person who possesses and lives it. Why then should we build these abstract barriers between ourselves and Jesus our Master? First we build them, and then we deify them. But if his life is in us, it is because he himself is within us, living that life as his divine and blessed function. It is because, whether our intellects penetrate to it or not, he and we are one in a union divine and indissoluble.

Results Of Oneness With Christ

Now if union with Christ is as wonderful as this, what of its results? Must they not also be wonderful? It is simply a question of the wealth and potency of the wonderful divine being we know as our Lord and Master. Paul hints at one result when he says, “If any man be in Christ he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come.” How could it be otherwise? What is the new birth but the beginning of the new life which now is come, revealed to the eyes of faith by the Spirit of the Lord dwelling within us?

Another result of union with Christ is hinted at when we read, “There is now therefore no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus,” and we find that the law of the new relationship in Christ makes us free from the old law of sinning and dying. Nothing could be more triumphant than the assurances which meet us on every hand of an immediate, complete, and continuous deliverance, wrought by Christ within us, from the seductiveness and strength of long-entrenched sinful habits.

A lovely fruit of this union is disclosed in the unity of the spiritual life which springs up between all believers. Severally members of Christ, they become together the Church, the Body. Possessing Christ as individuals, they have this supreme experience in common. Only Christians understand one another and are truly at home with one another. The Epistle to the Ephesians sets forth the glory of the Church of which Christ is the head, and which, drawing from his inexhaustible life, enters joyfully into the length and breadth and depth and height of the purposes of God.

A crowning result of this oneness with Christ remains in the eternal life with which Christ even now blesses his followers. How shall I live forever unless I am joined to him who is “the Life”? Cut off from the source of life, the “well of living water,” I shall surely die; but if I have trusted Christ, if I have cast in my lot with him, if I have become one spirit with him, then who shall separate me from his love? “For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.”

“Abide in me, and I in you.” There lies the emphasis. What we yield to Christ is as nothing beside what he bestows upon us; and even our power to yield must be drawn from his storehouse of grace and power. Yet even this becomes possible because he abides in us.

To abide then, what is it? It is to give and to take. Both are absolute. Both are continuous, calling for daily and hourly renewal. We are entirely Christ’s—that is the first step; we have deeded ourselves over, body and soul, with every faculty and power, to be his exclusively. And then he is entirely ours, with the wealth of his nature, with the riches of his wisdom and strength and love. We live for Christ, and Christ lives for us. We make the self-renunciation involved in the first. We claim the riches involved in the second. And we do both, because “Christ lives in us, the hope of glory.”

END

Professor Norman C. Hunt occupies the Chair of Organization of Industry and Commerce in the University of Edinburgh. He is a Sir Edward Stern scholar and a first-class honors graduate in Commerce at the University of London and holds the Ph.D. from Edinburgh. He is a member of the British Institute of Management and a director of the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce. An elder of Charlotte Chapel, the largest Baptist church in Scotland, he is also president of the Edinburgh Evangelistic Union and president-elect of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship of Great Britain.

- More from John Henry Strong

Cover Story

Fourth R in American Education

Renwick Harper Martin

Never in history has any nation invested as much in education and depended as much on it as the United States. At the beginning of 1957, 41 million Americans—one in every four—were in school. The cost of their schooling amounted to $15,544,000,000, or almost $400 per pupil. Our investment in school property was over 16 billion dollars in 1953 and today would probably reach 20 billion. Truly, education is Big Business with us.

Public And Private Education

In our early history education was almost entirely a private enterprise, provided by parents, churches and other private agencies. Now it is very largely a public enterprise, provided by institutions under state control.

In our public (state-controlled) schools in 1955–1956, 33 million pupils were enrolled at a cost of 10.5 billion dollars; in private schools, 5 million were enrolled at an expenditure of 1.5 billion dollars. Thus, there were 86–1/3 per cent in public and 13–2/3 per cent in private schools.

In higher education the enrollment was 3 million and the cost 3.4 billion dollars—divided into 2 billion dollars (56.3 per cent) in public and 1.4 billion dollars (43.7 per cent) in private schools.

Notwithstanding this vast expenditure of effort and money on education, we are confronted with an appalling crisis in morals, youth delinquency and crime. With reference to the latter J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI informs us that last year a total of 2,563,150 major crimes were committed in the United States, a 13.3 per cent increase over the preceding year; that since 1950 the increase in crime has been 43 per cent, while that of population has been 11 per cent. This is a worse criminal record than that of any other civilized nation. Hoover also says that crime is increasingly becoming a youth problem, that young people still in their teens are “committing crimes that are almost unspeakable,” and that in 1956 persons age 17 and younger accounted for 24.7 per cent of the arrests for robbery, 53.9 per cent of the arrests for burglary, and 66.4 per cent of all auto arrests. The underlying cause is the lack of the moral and spiritual training of American youth. Mr. Hoover says: “People for the most part commit crime because they do not have the moral stamina and traits of character to withstand temptation.… The criminal is the product of spiritual starvation. Someone failed miserably to bring him to know God, love him and serve him.”

Education And Character

The secular public schools cannot escape a large measure of responsibility for this frightening crime situation. It has taken over the major portion of time that can be given to formal education of American youth during the character-forming period of their lives—six hours a day, five days a week, for a period of 10 to 12 years—leaving the church only one day for youth education and only about one hour on that day. The public schools, backed by our compulsory school laws, enroll 83 per cent of our youth population, but the churches, relying on voluntary attendance, enroll no more than 50 per cent. Thus the average young person receives 30 hours of secular state education weekly compared to 1 hour of church religious education.

If the fourth R has anything to do with building moral character and preventing delinquency and crime, no wonder we face this perilous situation. Back in the early days of our nation’s history, all education was basically religious, public as well as private. Our founding fathers set forth its religious character in these words from the Ordinance of 1787 for the government of the Northwest Territory: “Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged.” This has been called the “Magna Charta of American Education.”

The Retreat From Religion

This was the type of education our forefathers established: The fourth R—religion and morality its foundation; and the three R’s—knowledge built on this foundation. This continued until about 1870 when a great change took place in public education. The order was reversed. The three R’s became the major and the fourth R the minor role. We have sown to the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind.

To meet our nation’s perils and save our beloved country it is imperative that we again give religion its basic place in education. Our basic task is to build strong public sentiment for the right and duty of the state in its own schools to give adequate and effective moral training to American youth.

How shall we go about it?

The Bible In The Schools

We must build public sentiment for giving the Bible a place of importance in our public schools. There are many reasons for this: Its matchless English, its biographies, its history, its great moral and spiritual truths—to sum them all up, its contribution to our nation. We submit a few testimonies to its contribution to our nation and government: Justice Brewer of the United States Supreme Court said, “The American nation from its first settlement at Jamestown to this hour is based upon and permeated by the Bible”; President Andrew Jackson, “The Bible is the Rock on which this Republic rests”; President Thomas Jefferson, “The Bible is the Source of Liberty”; President William McKinley, “The more profoundly we study this wonderful Book and the more closely we observe its precepts the better citizens we will become and the higher will be the destiny of our nation”; President Woodrow Wilson, “There are great problems before the American people. I would be afraid to go forward if I did not believe that there lay at the foundation of all our schooling and all our thought, the incomparable and unimpeachable Word of God.”

To deprive American youth of the opportunity of coming to know this Book in their education is an injustice both to them and to the nation.

We must make the moral and spiritual development of youth the major objective in education. “Good education,” says Frederick M. Raubinger, Commissioner of Education of New Jersey, “has always been concerned with more than knowledge. Its ultimate objective is the development of persons of honor, integrity, vision and high purpose—in short, persons of character.” To achieve this objective will require much greater emphasis and more effective methods of developing it, namely, emphasis upon religious motivation that, because of secular influence, is rare in public education.

Perils Of Irreligious Education

We must show the peril of education from which the fourth R is excluded. Education multiplies power. Inventive science has put into man’s hands power not even dreamed of a century ago. That power can be used for good or evil. Long ago Alfred the Great said, “Power is never a good except he be good that has it.” In the hands of evil men such power over forces of nature can destroy our civilization. Someone has said: “It is not the ignorant, the primitive people who terrorize the world today, but the most educationally advanced peoples who have made learning a road to power without bringing that power under ethical control.”

We must correct the prevalent wrong idea that our laws and court decisions are nearly all against religion in public education. The opposite is true. They are indeed against sectarian religious instruction. The attempt to introduce sectarian views has been a leading cause of opposition to religion in public education.

Religious Liberty

We must correct the mistaken idea that the American principle of religious liberty and of separation of church and state excludes religion from public education. No one’s religious liberty is infringed on if he is not required to participate in religious exercises of the schools. For him to insist religious instruction be denied those who want it, when he is free not to take part, is not religious liberty but religious bigotry. Properly interpreted, separation of church and state is separation of control. That is, each of the two organizations is independent in its own sphere of action. Not separation of function—that is excluding religious instruction from state schools and restricting it to church schools and the home.

The carrying forward of such a program as this is imperative. Professor Ernest Johnson of Teachers College, Columbia University, has said, “The divorcement of education and religion is the most basic defect in American life.” This defect must be remedied. Let every Christian patriot help.

Alan Redpath is minister of Chicago’s Moody Memorial Church, which maintains a vigorous prayer life under his ministry and leadership. Born in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, he studied at Durham University and began a career in London as an associate chartered accountant. From 1940–53 he served the Duke Street Baptist Church, Richmond, Surrey, and then was called to Moody Church. He has spoken frequently at English Keswick, and the Mid-America Keswick Convention is one of his interests. His books include Answer for Today, Victorious Christian Living and Victorious Praying.

I Rest in His Love

I rest in His love, as a ship in a storm

Takes rest on a restless sea:

Knowing the currents that bear it up

Are steady and strong and free.

I rest in His love, as a tree in the wind

Takes rest through the bitter blast:

Feeling the pull of the deep, deep roots

That anchor it sure and fast.

I rest in His love, as a babe on the breast

Takes rest from the world’s alarms:

Hearing the beat of the parent-heart,

Locked close in the parent-arms.

I rest in His love. He will bear me up

And anchored my soul shall be:

As a storm-swept ship, as a sleeping child,

I rest—as a wind-tossed tree.

HELEN FRAZEE-BOWER

- More from Renwick Harper Martin

Cover Story

The Holy Spirit in Preaching

William Still

Preaching is more than lecturing. It is more than exhortation. It brings Christ home to the hearts of men and confronts them with his living grace and power. It is not only that Christ is discussed—it is too easy to discuss people in their absence—but that he is proclaimed; even that he proclaims himself by taking over the personality of the preacher and speaking through him.

John the Baptist was such a “voice.” Pilate also, in his way, was nearer to proclamation than many preachers. He stood before the mob with Jesus at his side and proclaimed “Behold the Man!” There were two factors in his proclamation: (1) he proclaimed Jesus in his presence; (2) he proclaimed him, not to the winds, but to the people present. In his hour of crisis, Pilate was both “Christ-conscious” and “people-conscious.” Both are necessary for effectual preaching. Soliloquy will not do, however spiritual and “Christ-conscious” the speaker may be, for it is not directed toward men and their needs. Nor will “discussion” do, however aware the preacher may be of the human situation. Christian preaching must bring God down to men—to particular men.

How often on the radio we hear a sort of religious recital, as if a man said, “I am speaking: you may listen or not, but I will speak. It is fine to have an audience, but I can speak without one, for I get great pleasure from my own speaking.” How vain! Preaching must have direction—from and to. It should make men sit up and face Christ, as corporate prayer should make them kneel down and worship him. For the true preacher is saying, “Christ is here and is speaking to you. You had better hear him now, for you will have to later!”

It is all very well to compare preaching to Pilate’s presentation of Christ to the people, but they are not the same. No, but in true preaching Christ is just as present as he was then. It is often lamented that the Holy Spirit is the least understood Person of the Trinity, but surely we see why this is so; for the Holy Spirit comes not to speak of himself, but to glorify Christ. Where preachers are intent on glorifying Christ (and only crucified men can do so!), the Spirit is there with all his aid. All true showing forth of Christ is by the Holy Spirit. We are, therefore, to consider how the Holy Spirit manifests Christ in preaching.

Christ And Scripture

Christ is proclaimed in his Word and by his Word. The first qualification of the preacher, therefore, is that he acknowledge the Bible to be the Word of God, and that he understands that it was Christ by his Spirit who caused to be written “in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” There is no use saying that the Bible “contains” the Word of God if in our modern understanding of the word we mean to infer that it does so inter alia. “All Scripture is God-breathed and is profitable …”; its truth is therefore not partial and intermittent, but complete and permanent.

A prevailing wind of doctrine fails to see this because it confuses revelation and inspiration with illumination. Revelation is what God has made known to us once and for all by the inspiration of his chosen writers; illumination is the work of the Spirit in bringing the truth of the “closed Book” to light. The art treasures of London’s National Gallery remain intrinsically the same during the hours of darkness when they cannot be seen. We remain as essentially alive during the hours of unconsciousness in sleep as when we are awake. It is because we are alive that we can awake. It is surely a plain error of fact to say that the Bible “becomes alive” in the divine-human encounter, when what we mean is that it awakes and shines forth its light and truth into the dark mind of man. The revelation of Christ in the Holy Scriptures is a work of God established long before we were born, and owes nothing to us, nor can it be subtracted from or added to by us. It is the “word of the Lord which liveth and abideth for ever.”

The Spirit’s Illumination

But revelation and inspiration without illumination are useless; for man is by nature dark and cannot see the truth in the Word of God until he is enlightened. Why is it that one man preaching can bring spiritual light to bear on the sacred page and make the Book live, while another makes it seem the dullest book on earth? Because the Holy Spirit who was active in revelation and inspiration is present and active or is not present and active in illumination. The difference between a good and a poor preacher is not one of natural gift. That “gift” is necessary, we agree, but not necessarily natural gift. Some preachers can make people listen to them, but the test of a true preacher is whether he can make men listen to Christ, and that not with a little temporary interest but with lasting effect. What we hear by natural gift, of language, logic, passion, and powers of persuasion, may stir profoundly, but all this may be done equally well on the secular rostrum or in the theater. A true preacher may have a natural gift and aptitude for peaching. God is not foolish or perverse in his choices, but since God loves to do a hard thing, he may well choose men of no natural gift to do his work and add to them the spiritual gift of utterance. Who shall distinguish between natural and spiritual gift in preachers who have been used of God? The endowment of power and anointing of the Spirit sounds so “natural”! In this matter the need of the naturally eloquent is just as great as the need of the naturally tongue-tied.

Unfortunately, these things are too little understood by listeners to sermons, who are often quite unable to distinguish between the soulish-and the spiritual, not to say between the spiritist and the spiritual, in preaching; whereas the writer to the Hebrews tells us that the Word of God in action “pierces to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit.” Many who for the first time come under the sound of Holy Ghost preaching are mortally offended because while they may consider themselves expert sermon-tasters, having much experience of eloquent preaching, they have never been exposed to the white light of the Spirit. The atmosphere of the theater and the concert hall is so native to modern man that when it is produced in church he is pleased to believe that it is right and that the Holy Spirit is there. But while the Holy Spirit in former revivals produced overpowering experiences and created deep emotional sensations in many, that is not his essential work, but to convince of sin, righteousness, and judgment to come, and to be a savor of life unto life and death unto death.

The Spirit’s Power

How can a man ensure the presence and action of the Holy Spirit in his preaching? The Word must become flesh again; the preacher must become the vehicle of the Holy Spirit, his mind inspired and his heart inflamed by the truth he preaches. This will depend not primarily on what he preaches or how he prepares, but on what he is in himself. As his physical presence cannot be hid, no more can his spiritual condition be hid from the discerning. This is terrifying. In a vestry in Aberdeen these words used to confront the preacher ere he mounted the pulpit stairs: “No man can glorify Christ and himself at the same time.” If the Holy Spirit is to speak through the preacher and the preaching he must have clear passage—not through a void, but through a mind and personality laid open in all its delicate and intricate parts to the operation of the Spirit, to the end that his total powers may be willingly and intelligently bent to the present purpose of God.

What are the requisites of such dedication? A man must know Christ personally as his Saviour and Lord. He must also be sure of his call to the ministry, as sure as he is of his conversion; for God will never anoint a man for service to which he has not called him. We are sometimes dismayed when a man steps down from the ministry to follow a lesser calling, but is it not a good thing when he realizes that he had intruded into holy things without divine authority? When a man knows that he knows Christ and is called by him to minister his Word, he must believe the truth and accept the authority of that Word, for himself, and for those to whom he is sent. It is here that what he is and what he believes, however privately, is exposed to the discerning. Men may have private and secret reservations concerning the Word of God, and these not only as to Genesis and science, literalism and infallibility, but with cardinal doctrines, such as holiness or hell. These may never be aired in public, and so the preacher may gain a reputation for evangelical orthodoxy, but there is no converting or edifying power in his preaching. No one is very different for it, nothing much happens. Why not? Because while a man may hide from men, and from himself, what he doubts or disbelieves, he cannot hide it from God, and God will not give his Holy Spirit to those who doubt and disbelieve.

The Spirit’s Sword

There can be no doubt that the underlying secret of fruitfulness in preaching is in one’s attitude to the Word of God. The Word of God is the sword of the Spirit, but when men sheath it in the scabbard of their own limited conceptions and beliefs, it is powerless to do its two-edged work of saving and judging. To listen to and sense the multifarious quibbles, qualifications and guarded cautions with which a preacher hedges his utterances is to understand why the Spirit of God is not let loose among the people. The man does not believe. He strangles the Word he is supposed to be declaring even in preaching it; for it is faith, not un-faith, that brings God down to men. Yet preachers seem so proud of their unfaith. Is it because we think we have the Almighty in a corner bowing to our superior intelligence? Surely it must be because we think we can add something vital or subtract something superfluous, that we hedge with so many reservations and provisos. Think of an eminent scholar and eloquent preacher using nine weaker words apparently to avoid saying that Jesus bore our sins.

How should we think that we are personally involved in the content of the Word of God? We are only errand boys, trusted to be faithful and to deliver what is sent. To tamper with a parcel is grave misconduct on the part of a messenger, and has serious consequences: That we are more than errand boys is a lie of the devil and of our own conceit, for the only living preachers are “dead” ones, who know that they are no more than a “voice” sent to deliver what has been given them, without personal interference.

But there are further considerations. The prophets of old were called not only or always to be “preachers” for a lifetime, but to deliver specific messages (cf. 2 Chron. 20:14). The man who knows Christ and is called to be a prophet may yet find the Holy Ghost “desert” him because he is preaching out of turn or without specific commission. He may be preaching in the wrong place, or from the wrong motive, or the wrong message. He may be powerless for no other reason than that he is not in God’s appointment. He may have left his God-given post for personal or domestic reasons, to please his wife or educate his children or to escape persecutors. Though none of these are trivial reasons, if they do not please God he certainly cannot bless disobedience and has promised that “if ye forsake him, he will forsake you.”

The Sermon Itself

What of the sermon itself? What kind of sermon does God bless? It is not a question of whether it is carefully prepared or not, or written or not, but whether it is the Word of God for the occasion and for the people gathered to hear it. In this connection, although the same sermon may be preached many times because it is a God-given burden on the heart of the preacher, it is doubtful if the same manuscript is adequate to very different occasions. A man may fashion his utterance into an expression which he cannot improve (happy man!) and into which he cannot subsequently read new, deeper or truer insights, but if so, is he not in a dangerous state of “perfection”? It is surely not unworthy of each occasion he preaches the same sermon that he revise it! A well-known preacher nonchalantly stuffed two sermons into his pocket as he set out for a village church, not sure which he would preach and apparently not very exercised about it either. It was not surprising that discerning folk who came from afar to hear him preach were bitterly disappointed at his lack of conviction. We must get the Word for the day and for the occasion. This is not too much for our hearers to ask of us.

Walking In Fellowship

But the Word may be right, and the occasion also, and yet the sermon flat. Is there no end of the considerations that govern effective preaching? They are not few, but this above all—that the preacher be walking in close fellowship with the Lord, all known sin confessed and forsaken, forgiven and cleansed. For each message he must go down again into personal death, and probably into spiritual agony, ere he come up with a living word for his hearers. God will only give his unction to those who do his work in his way.

Unction may not be experienced before the service or even before the sermon begins: it may be quarter, half or more delivered before it seems to grip. It may not seem to grip at all. We must beware subjective judgments on our own work. If we know that all is well as we essay to preach, then we are to go through with it faithfully and leave it with God. Before we begin there may be a burden, or not; there may be coldness of heart that strikes fear into us; there may be accusings of the evil one, or the congregation may be restless, or some disconcerting face may catch our eye, or it may suddenly seem that the Word is inappropriate—the devil has a thousand ways of putting God’s servants off.

But if the preacher knows that he is the man for the moment and has the word for the people, if he has sunk himself into Christ for the message, its preparation, and its delivery, and has also prepared the hearts of his hearers by previous private prayer, he may expect the living Word of God to come forth. And he must believe that it will come forth and that it is coming forth, and must thereafter go home in this steadfast assurance and leave it with God.

No man who fulfils these conditions, however hard or unrewarding or discouraging his task, can ultimately fail. He must succeed, for God is faithful. But the important things are these: He must be sure that the Holy Spirit gave the Word and that only the Holy Spirit can preach it. For the Spirit is not a Preacher, but the Preacher. If we want an audience to applaud us, let us rely on all the tricks we know; but if we want fruit from our preaching, holy and lasting, let us rely on the Holy Spirit.

Paul Harvey was still in knickers and not yet 16 when he made his first radio announcements. After World War II, in which he served as Director of News and Information for the Office of War Information in Michigan and Indiana, his rise to radio fame was meteoric. One station alone received 10,000 requests for his obituary of President Roosevelt, which started, “A great tree has fallen.…” Monday through Friday he is heard over the American Broadcasting Company at 12 noon, CST.

- More from William Still

Cover Story

Christians and the Economic Order

Norman C. Hunt

The Christian Church is under fire from many quarters. The criticisms are legion. A common charge is that Christianity is “out of date” and “irrelevant” to the practical problems of the day, to the so-called “real” issues like war, poverty, color, privilege, totalitarianism and so on. On such issues the Church, it is claimed, is either silent or inconclusive; if she speaks at all, it is with no note of authority or conviction.

Many of these criticisms are mere rationalizations, excuses for indifference towards Christ and his Church. Nonetheless, some are justified. All too often Christians, and perhaps especially evangelicals, have failed to work out the implications of their faith for the urgent, practical problems of daily life. They have been understandably wary of anything which savors of a mere “social gospel,” and anxious to make clear the biblical revelation that man needs not reformation but regeneration. In this the position of the evangelical is unassailable. As George Whitefield, when asked why he so often preached on the text “Ye must be born again,” replied, “Why, simply because ye must be born again.” Ours is a personal Gospel; apart from personal faith in Christ there is no salvation and no true Christianity. Nevertheless this personal Gospel does have social implications and if our witness is to be effective in this sophisticated twentieth century the challenge of these social implications must be faced with courage and a thoughtfulness that is both prayerful and crystal-clear.

Inevitable Involvement

The challenge is inescapable because our involvement in society is inescapable; we are in the world although we are not of it. As Christians we cannot contract out of our social responsibilities, for we are dependent upon our fellows for maintenance of life itself. Moreover, we should not even if we could, for our economic and social activities have their beginnings in the creative work of God. It is of course true that, like the rest of creation, the economic order is subject to the fall and spoiled by sin, which expresses itself so clearly in exploitation and misuse of economic resources, sharp practice, industrial unrest and bad human relations.

In this situation the Gospel is the only answer. However much men may criticize it because of our failure as Christians to realize and live out its fullness, the Gospel is relevant to the economic crisis of our time. After all, the Bible has a great deal to say about our life and responsibilities in society. Writing to the Colossians, Paul has a word for workers and employers: “Servants, obey in all things your masters … not with eyeservice as menpleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing God; and whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men”; and again, “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven.” Can anyone deny the vital relevance of such principles of action to the critical problems of labor relations, wages and motivation that bedevil the economic scene today?

Indeed, Paul’s epistles are never exclusively doctrinal; they invariably move on to practical questions of social relationships. The great burden upon the soul of James is that faith may make itself manifest in works of social as well as personal righteousness. Peter’s epistles, written to Christians some of whom were dispossessed slaves suffering under a totalitarian government, are intensely practical and vividly relevant to the social crisis of our own time. In an earlier age Isaiah, Amos and Micah were equally practical. The message of the Old Testament as of the New issues not only in personal salvation but also in social righteousness.

The supreme word for the Christian must be that of the Master himself. In reply to the lawyer’s question as to which was the great commandment, Jesus said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Here is a clear principle governing relationship of the Christian to social and economic activities of the community; he must engage in nothing which cannot be done to the glory of God; all his work must be dedicated to the fulfillment of God’s purpose in the world; and his attitude to his fellows, employer, employees, suppliers, customers and all the rest, must be governed by the love of Christ.

The Taint Of Sin

What, in practical terms, are the social implications of the Gospel? First, there is responsibility upon every Christian constantly to seek to relate his faith to the great social, economic and political problems of the day. He must avoid that dualism which, as one historian has put it, empties “religion of its social content and society of its soul.” There are two great dangers here. The liberal tends to argue and act as though the Kingdom of God can be brought in by social reform. He neglects or minimizes two great biblical truths: the sinfulness of man and the second advent of Christ. His solution is often some form of collectivism. On the other hand the evangelical too often makes the truth of the second advent an excuse for inaction in regard to social reform and gives uncritical support to free enterprise capitalism without challenging its imperfections and injustices. Since man is sinful it follows that all forms of human society must be imperfect and marred by sin; the Kingdom can only be fully established by the King, and will be at his coming. It can only do harm to the cause of Christianity to identify it completely with any existing order of society. All are the product of human history and human philosophy and contain features which cannot measure up to Christian standards.

Capitalism Versus Collectivism

That is not to say that capitalism is inconsistent with Christianity. That charge can rather be leveled against collectivism which in all its forms does violence to individual liberty and is unbiblical in its attitude to human sin and self-interest. In an imperfect world it is folly to try to operate a system which is predicated upon a false view of human nature. Collectivism is just such a system. It is based on an unbiblical concept of man. It minimizes or disregards his fallen nature and depends upon motivation which cannot work effectively in a free society made up of sinful men and women. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that attempts to make it work frequently end in loss of human liberty and, ultimately, terrors of totalitarianism.

The Christian, however, cannot simply say that capitalism is Christian and collectivism un-Christian and leave it at that. He must be prepared to admit and seek to remedy manifest imperfections of the system. The best evangelicals have done this down through the centuries. Although the Reformation released springs of individualism which were so essential to development of free enterprise capitalism, Luther denounced with the same vigor that he used against Rome the view that prevails so widely today, that the world of business can be divorced from authority of laws of God. Calvin proclaimed a message which sought not only salvation of the individual but also penetration of the whole of society with the influence of the Christian religion. The Reformed church at Geneva made a great effort to organize an economic order worthy of the Gospel it preached. Calvin’s Institutes declare that no Christian “holds his gifts to himself, or for his private use, but shares them among his fellow members, nor does he derive benefit save from those things which proceed from the common profit of the body as a whole.”

Among the Puritans, to whom our free enterprise economies owe so much, Richard Baxter insisted that the Christian was committed by his faith to certain ethical standards which were just as binding in the sphere of economic activity as in private life. He must do business in the spirit of one conducting a public service; he must not “get another’s goods or labor for less than it is worth” or indulge in “extortion, working upon men’s ignorance, error or necessity.”

Challenge To Social Evils

Many specific social evils have been challenged by stalwart evangelicals. As the late Archbishop William Temple wrote, “the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself were political projects; but they were carried through by evangelicals in the fervor of their evangelical faith.” Like Wilberforce and Buxton, the evangelicals who pioneered the abolition of slavery, Shaftesbury, Sadler and Oastler, all evangelicals, were leaders in the campaigns against the social evils of nineteenth-century capitalism. Their work gave Britain much of its legislation for protection of workers, especially women and children, against exploitation in mines and factories. These men and many others such as Barnardo, Muller and Booth, were convinced that the Gospel was not only concerned with the life of the individual but also that of society. They refused to allow their Christianity to be divorced from social problems of their day. Moreover they knew what is too often forgotten nowadays, that social reform without the Gospel of Christ is ineffective, self-frustrating and dangerous. Just as faith without works is dead, so are works without faith.

The clear duty of the Christian in society, then, is to uphold loyally and steadfastly those biblical principles by which all economic and social activity must be judged. He must never allow his faith to be isolated from his conduct as employer, employee or citizen. This is both difficult and costly, but it is essential if his Christian witness is to make sense to the man in the street. Indeed the Christian’s concern with social problems should always be conceived as extension of his witness for Christ and not as an end in itself.

Biblical View Of Vocation

One important aspect of this is the question of Christian vocation in daily work. The distinction often made between those who are in so-called “fulltime service” and those who are not is invalid. Nor is there justification for the view that a layman’s Christian service must be confined to spare-time activities, with his daily work merely providing necessary finance. Every Christian should be in fulltime service, all day and every day, but this does not necessarily mean he has to be a minister or missionary and give up his secular job. Writing to the Corinthians, some of whom were chafing at the apparent limitations of their daily work and were eager to enjoy what seemed to them a wider sphere of service in itinerant preaching, Paul said, “Let everyone abide in the same calling wherein he was called.” Clearly we must not use this as excuse to neglect the claims of the ministry or mission field; the needs there are urgent and those who are called of God must go, but it does mean that Christians must look upon their daily work as a “calling” in which they are to make their witness and which they are not to leave unless clearly called to something else. Evangelicals have a great tradition here for the concept of “calling” was at the very heart of Puritan teaching. God does not call men to withdraw themselves from the world, Puritans taught, but rather to engage in labor for his glory. Wrote Richard Steele, “God doth call every man and woman … to serve Him in some peculiar employment in this world, both for their own and the common good … and let him be never so active out of his sphere, he will be at a great loss, if he do not keep his own vineyard and mind his own business.”

Opportunity For Witness

This attitude to work is sorely needed in the world today. What desperate need there is for Christian politicians, doctors, teachers, business men, foremen, workers and trade unionists. One of the great problems in British labor relations at the present time is that a small number of communists are active in factories and trade unions, exerting an influence out of all proportion to their numerical strength. They are able to do so only because of apathy of the great bulk of trade union members. How different things would be if the many Christians in those same factories and trade unions were ready to take office and bring their Christian influence to bear in this workaday sphere.

Opportunities for Christian witness in journalism and authorship, in national and local government, in business and professions are so obvious and yet neglected. Many people today are outside the reach of church and the minister but are accessible to those who work alongside them in office and factory, who do the same job but in a different way and with more joyous spirit because they have found something more purposeful in life than mere money-making and material security. Many mission fields are closing to professional missionaries, but they remain open to engineers, chemists, architects—the men who do ordinary jobs with extraordinary purpose. This attitude to work as extension of Christian witness is costly; it does not permit slacking or shoddy workmanship, or coming in late because one has been to prayer meeting the night before. The Christian must be a first-rate worker because he is a Christian not in spite of it. As Macaulay put it, “The Methodist revival improved the quality of West of England cloth.”

Christian Stewardship

Finally, the Christian must work out the implications of his faith in terms of stewardship. If it is important that he should be prayerfully responsible in the way in which he earns his income, it is equally important in the way he spends it. This too is in the evangelical tradition. It was the great Puritan Richard Baxter who wrote, “Every penny which is laid out … must be done as by God’s own appointment.” In a free enterprise economy the consumer is sovereign; the way in which he utilizes his income is the prime determinant of the way in which scarce, God-given economic resources are used for production and consumption. Thus the principle of Christian stewardship involves the Christian inevitably in the working of the economic order. He cannot, he must not, live unto himself; he is personally responsible for the effects his economic activities as well as his words have upon others. Although his citizenship is in heaven, he must live and witness in the world of men. For the man in Christ, “all things are become new”; there is no deadly dualism of secular and sacred but a life that is both whole and holy.

END

Dr. Paul S. James is Pastor of The Baptist Tabernacle in Adanta, Georgia.

- More from Norman C. Hunt

Cover Story

Secret of Power: Revive the Prayer Meeting

Alan Redpath

One day a few months ago I opened my mail to find enclosed in a letter from a member of my church an old letter of Dwight L. Moody’s written to his grandfather. Dated Baltimore, October 27, 1878, Moody’s letter was encouraging Mr. Aitchison, sexton, prayer meeting leader, Bible teacher and later senior elder of the old Chicago Avenue Church, to seek through intensive and united prayer fresh blessing from the Holy Spirit both personally and in the work of the church. That letter, quoted below, reveals the great evangelist’s confidence that definite, believing prayer is the means to power.

My prayer is that you may be full of the Holy Spirit. Why should we not lay hold of Matthew 5:6? Surely there is a promise for us and why should we not make it real and enter into its fullness? Acts 1:8 comes to my soul over and over again and it is a mighty blessing to my soul and I trust it will be to you.

Now do you not think it will be a good thing to get all who are hungry for the same blessing together once a week in prayer? I would not give it out in the meetings, but get hold of them one at a time and if you do not get but a few you will find it a great help to you. I hope you will not rest until you get the full blessing. God has a mighty blessing for you and he can use you to do a great work.

I do want to see that church made a power in Chicago for good.

My heart thrilled because Mr. Moody’s burden almost 80 years ago for the church he founded and which now bears his name was also the present longing of my heart.

Our Great Danger

We live in days when our churches are in great danger of substituting busyness, activity, committee meetings, even evangelistic services, for men and women on their knees in travail before God. In so many cases Christian people do not recognize the fact that witness to Christ is inseparably connected with communion with Christ and prayer to God in his name. The result is that in many churches today the midweek prayer meeting has been discontinued altogether. In others it is just another church service where the members sing some hymns, offer a few trite prayers for the success of the church services, then the pastor makes announcements and delivers a small talk.

Prayer Is Warfare

Prayer is not mere prattle, it is warfare; real prayer engages in battle. That kind of prayer God answers: prayer grounded in the Word, founded on the promises and rooted in God’s past dealings. Prayer is not primarily a means of getting something done; it is a concern for the glory of God.

Every week we receive a number of requests for prayer. Is it, however, a reflection upon the general standard of our praying that virtually all of these requests center around physical needs? Seldom do we get a request to pray for a real spiritual issue, a revelation of the will of God, the glory of God in a life, the breaking through of the power of God in hearts. Our prayers are usually asking God to bless the work or to keep us plodding along.

Was prayerlessness on our part the reason that there was a lack of conviction of sinners in our services? I asked myself, were we seeking to do by program planning and committee procedure what could be accomplished only by sacrificial prayer? By that I mean praying which refuses to let go until God blesses. The disciples waited and the power came; we do not wait and the power does not come.

Among the problems that faced us constantly were lack of reality in our personal lives, lack of effectiveness in our witness, lack of effort in our prayers. What we needed were prayer warriors, a few humble, ordinary souls anointed with the fullness of God’s Spirit. That is the ministry through which God convicts of sin, transforms lives and promotes revival.

Even when we prayed, could it be that we were living and acting in such a manner that it was impossible for God to answer our prayers? We can be so aware of sin in the life of the unbeliever, or of breakdown and failure in the life of our brother or sister in Christ, when the Holy Spirit of God is trying to speak to our own hearts and convince us of the sin in our own souls. The secret of every discord in Christian homes and communities and churches is that we seek our own way and our own glory. Obedience and humility are the only attitudes through which God can hear and answer prayer. We cannot in sincerity bring our requests in the name of the Lord Jesus unless we are living so that it is possible for God in righteousness to hear and answer us. If sacrificial living and self-denial cease, then prayer becomes meaningless and righteous conduct impossible.

Some people come to church, even to prayer meeting, carrying the resentment of years, the bitterness of a lifetime, and when they ask God for blessing they wonder why their prayers are not answered. A condition of restored fellowship with Christ is a forgiving spirit and without that there can be no fellowship in prayer with one another. What separations develop, what resentments arise out of injuries and slights, real or imagined! What an appalling revelation of how we love ourselves and how important we think we are!

During the major part of my ministry at Moody Church thus far the emphasis in my preaching has been upon this need for holy living, because it is my deep conviction that only through holiness in the lives of Christians can the unsaved be challenged to come to Christ.

Times Of Refreshing

When individual lives were cleansed and principles of prayer practiced, we noticed increasing burden for prayer spreading throughout our church. We made innovations in our scheduled prayer meetings, the executive committee leading out by setting aside alternate meetings especially for prayer. We created separate prayer meetings for young people and adults and added other periods such as all-night prayer meetings and cottage prayer meetings in an attempt to enlist all the people in some kind of public prayer.

The first of our all-night prayer meetings on New Year’s Eve 1953–54 proved to be such a great time of refreshing and blessing we have had several more. Sometimes we take an hour or two of waiting upon God for special requests following a midweek service. At a night of prayer for foreign missions in connection with one of our missionary conferences the Lord drew very near to us and we were confident that our missionaries felt the impact. We shall never forget the hour spent in praying for revival in the church; truly heaven seemed to open on us and our hearts were melted—there were few dry eyes in that meeting.

Our next step was organizing groups in the homes of our people for prayer and testimony. The need for fellowship, Bible study and prayer among our scattered members was quite sufficient reason for setting up 27 districts for monthly or bi-monthly cottage meetings. Most of the groups started studying the Gospel of John, using a set of guide questions for analysis and personal application. We found this method stimulated helpful discussion and greater participation in study of the Word. A large percentage of time was devoted to ministry of intercession, and virtually all who attended took part in prayer, especially for a gracious visitation of the Holy Spirit upon all the life and ministry of the church. In many ways we witnessed the increasing impact of such prayer.

Charting A New Course

D. L. Moody suggested that Mr. Aitchison seek out one by one those whom he felt shared this burden with him and call them to prayer. I had half a mind to do that very thing, but then I remembered that we met for prayer for revival every Friday morning at seven. That was a difficult time for prayer meeting, of course—very inconvenient; it meant getting up and leaving home very early. For some people it was impossible, but the ten to twenty who came found a family-like spirit of oneness.

In January 1956 we put into operation a new plan for midweek prayer service—a supper fellowship at 5:30, prayer meeting at 6:30 and Bible study at 7:30. The response was most encouraging and the unhurried season of prayer paved the way for an evening of real blessing. By having a smaller group and a smaller room than the 7:30 service, we could hear each other’s prayers and those present felt more freedom in prayer.

However, the young people who came seemed to feel a hesitancy in praying before older people, and the next step was a separate meeting for those under 40. This proved the principle that “you can multiply by dividing,” because within a few months both groups were as large as the original group. “After a single month, the prayer meeting has become an almost indispensable part of our work week,” one young person wrote, “and we can only wonder why we hadn’t done it sooner!”

Praying To God’S Glory

But real prayer is more than just meeting together. The Lord said, “When you pray, do it not to be seen of men.” That applies to public prayer also. Unfortunately, it is all too easy for one or two people to ruin a prayer meeting and deprive others of blessings they might otherwise receive. A prayer meeting is no time for fancy phraseology, unnatural tone of voice, needless repetitions and long drawn-out prayers. Simplicity is a necessary ingredient of prayer and testimony in public gatherings. Above all, we should be thoughtful how we use the name of Deity; it is too sacred to be repeated without veneration or put in terms of human affection. We found that these principles of public prayer had to be emphasized at the beginning of each meeting and sometimes enforced.

When our praying is for his glory and our hearts are drawn together in love to God, in love to Jesus Christ and in love to each other, there is a triumphant note of victory in the church that drives out discord and brings liberty in work and worship. I find in my diary a few months back this entry: “The presence of the Lord has been very manifest today. It has been great encouragement to find our prayer meeting attended by many more people … How constantly we have to be taught that the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.”

“Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled,” was D. L. Moody’s conviction and the promise he claimed. Is it yours and mine?

Let us keep our chins up and our knees down—we are on the victory side!

END

The Rev. A. Dallimore, B.Th., is pastor of the Cottam Baptist Church, Cottam, Ontario, Canada. He was for some years editor of The Union Baptist and writes a monthly column for its successor, The Fellowship Baptist. He is a graduate of Central Baptist Seminary of Toronto, and for some years has been doing research on the life of Whitefield in preparation for a new biography to be called, George Whitefield and the Eighteenth Century Revival.

- More from Alan Redpath

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A Prepared Messenger And His Message

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Labor’S Use Of Power

The Need Of A Conscience

Emptiness Of Perpetual Discontent

The Christian’S Responsibility

Separate Organization?

Preacher In The Red

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The Form And The Spirit

Divine Poetry In Our Flesh

Cliches Move No Mountains

The Gospel’s Strange Power

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The Reality Of Oneness

“Christ In You”

Christ The Believer’S Life

Results Of Oneness With Christ

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Public And Private Education

Education And Character

The Retreat From Religion

The Bible In The Schools

Perils Of Irreligious Education

Religious Liberty

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Christ And Scripture

The Spirit’s Illumination

The Spirit’s Power

The Spirit’s Sword

The Sermon Itself

Walking In Fellowship

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Inevitable Involvement

The Taint Of Sin

Capitalism Versus Collectivism

Challenge To Social Evils

Biblical View Of Vocation

Opportunity For Witness

Christian Stewardship

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Our Great Danger

Prayer Is Warfare

Times Of Refreshing

Charting A New Course

Praying To God’S Glory

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