Page 6018 – Christianity Today (2024)

The modern Christian is confronted by an ancient problem—how to live as a Christian in a non-Christian world. Through the centuries, people calling themselves Christians have devised a number of strategies for doing this. One of these is isolation, retreat from the world’s compelling and insidious allure. This has been the policy of monasticism, in which the religious live separated from the world. Various non-monastic groups throughout history have adopted a strategy of psychological isolation in an effort to maintain their identity within a hostile, contaminating world. Purity is sought through isolation.

A second strategy is accommodation. Out of a concern for relevance grows the idea that the world’s values and attitudes may not be so pagan after all, and that one can accommodate one’s faith to them. Some contemporary theologians have tried to secularize the faith in order to make it “relevant” to modern man. On another level, church members who know and care little about theology have attempted to cope with the challenge of modern life by accommodating their standards of behavior to those of the world. And so the norms of Christianity are gradually modified until in effect they are given up, and the Christian and non-Christian become indistinguishable. Relevance is sought by accommodation.

Another way of dealing with the world is belligerence. On the thesis that the best defense is a good offense, the world and its people are regarded by some with hostility and suspicion, and are considered fair targets for attack. The Christian who is not constantly outspoken in his criticism of the world and of non-Christian people not only may be regarded as in danger of being assimilated by it but also as a lukewarm compromiser. Reputation is maintained through belligerence.

The logical extension of this approach is the fourth strategy: Christianity’s conquest of the world. By whatever means possible—from the exercise of personal persuasion through political pressure and even military power when this is available—the Church is to extend itself over the earth and impose its will upon the nations. The social order is to be reconstructed, the ills and inequities of life eliminated, and a new order built through the imposition of Christian values and the enforcement of the Church’s decrees. The world is to be Christianized by conquest.

Quite different is the strategy of compartmentalization. The Christian copes with the conflict between the world in which he lives and the world into which his faith has admitted him by separating them. He lives in one on Sunday and in the other throughout the week and sees to it that never the twain shall meet. Inner peace is obtained through compartmentalization.

Although each of these approaches has a certain plausibility, none is a genuinely Christian way of dealing with the world. None follows the example and the teaching of Christ, whose strategy may be called “involvement.”

Jesus was involved with people in need; he met them where they lived. He ate and talked and mingled with them in their homes and shops and on the streets and in the countryside. Jesus neither physically nor psychologically isolated himself from the world. Yet he maintained his purity.

Today’s Christian neither can nor should live in isolation. His task is to relate to the unbelievers of this day as Jesus related to the pagans of his day. People need to know the Christian as a human being—who he is, how he feels, what he thinks about. Christians are too often seen by others as queer specimens of cultic isolation, rather than as fellow human beings with common thoughts and feelings.

The Christian, like Christ, must be careful to maintain his purity. This is no easy task in a permissive society where anything goes and one is constantly bombarded by multi-media sensual stimulation. It is far easier to withdraw behind a Pharisaical robe of piety, thank God that one is not like other men, and isolate oneself spiritually and psychologically from the rest of mankind. But this defeats the Christian’s mission in the world. He is to be Christlike in attitude and behavior, which means maintaining personal integrity while at the same time engaging in relationships with all kinds of people, so that in time of need the Christian can put the non-Christian in touch with the Christ who still goes about doing good.

In the second place, involvement as Jesus practiced it means being concerned enough to interact with the world on issues of current interest in an intelligent and responsive way, without accommodating one’s views to the point of compromise on basic issues. In all the conversations Jesus had, he dealt with issues with which people were concerned, matters that were a part of their experience. But always, rather than lowering his own standards or compromising his convictions, he sought to raise the sights of those he talked with, to cause them to face the issues of life in the light of eternal values.

One problem the modern Christian faces is that of differentiating between conviction and prejudice—between those matters that are essential parts of Christian faith and life and those aspects of thought and conduct that are culturally conditioned. Too often the Christian spins his wheels making major issues out of matters that are really inconsequential to anyone but himself and his narrowly inbred circle.

Jesus refused to become involved in peripheral issues. He would not arbitrate a quarrel over an earthly inheritance, but he told people how to inherit eternal life. He did not waste his time setting up straw men, or dealing with questions nobody was asking. He related the interests of everyday life to the basic problems of living and dying that are the ultimate concerns of people today as they were then. These are what the Gospel is all about. The Christian need not compromise to be relevant.

Jesus’ attitude was one of compassion and understanding, rather than of suspicion and belligerence. True, he spoke bluntly and acted vigorously. And he was not deceived by the conformity of Judas, the craftiness of Herod, or the latent virulence of the mob. But when he looked at people, he saw them “as sheep not having a shepherd.” And when he talked with individuals, including a rich and self-sufficient leader of the power structure who refused Jesus’ claims on his life, he loved them.

This attitude of acceptance does not mean that Jesus approved of wrongdoing or condoned sin. He had the marvelous faculty of loving sinners while hating the sin that bound them, and the still more marvelous ability to communicate these feelings. How else could he have won the promiscuous woman at the well, the notorious Mary Magdalene, or Zacchaeus, the dishonest tax-collector?

When the Christian today faces his non-Christian acquaintance, what attitude does he communicate? Too often, it seems to be one of mistrust or suspicion. People want and need to be accepted as people—for themselves, for what they are with all their faults and failures. Only when we accept them this way will they be able to realize that Christ also will accept them just as they are, and transform them into what they are capable of being and what in their hearts they want to be. How many hungry hearts, how many inquiring minds, how many anxious spirits have looked for acceptance by a Christian acquaintance, only to be greeted by a barrier of misunderstanding and unspoken condemnation? Involvement means looking at the non-Christian world with compassion and love, not hostility and belligerence.

And then, involvement surely means something other than conquest. The idea of victory over enemies has always appealed to the natural man. The disciples of Jesus’ day shared the widespread Jewish expectation that Messiah would lead an insurrection against the Romans and re-establish the Jewish state. But Jesus did not operate this way. He came not as a conqueror but as a Redeemer. He sought not to impose his will on men but to transform them from within so they would choose his way. His modus operandi went contrary to the current of his times (and ours). He chose the path of peaceful witness rather than violent revolution. To attempt to reconstruct him in the image of a revolutionary intent upon remaking society, by force if necessary, is to read history through the spectacles of contemporary bias.

The harvest, and the burning of the tares—the revolution that will usher in the golden age about which men have always dreamed—will be accomplished by the angels of God when God’s time comes to bring this era to a close. Until then, the wheat and the tares grow together, and the wheat has no mandate to choke out the tares. The mandate, to change the metaphor, is to infiltrate the enemy forces with the transforming dynamic of the Gospel, so that some who now follow the prince of this world will defect to the Prince of Peace.

Finally, involvement cannot be effective so long as the Christian compartmentalizes his life and thought. Jesus has provided us with an example of a thoroughly integrated rather than fragmented personality. He did not behave one way in the synagogue and another on the street. He did not follow one set of rules on the Sabbath and a different one the rest of the week. He was surely the most consistent person who ever lived.

It may be that compartmentalization is one of the major defects of contemporary Christendom. Christian people seem to have a way of segmenting themselves, so that what they hear and say in church has little relation to the rest of their lives. His faith teaches the Christian to be honest; but he neglects to report some extra income when making out Form 1040. His faith tells him to practice sexual morality, in attitude as well as in act. But in front of his television set he laughs at the double entendres and leers at the girls.

His faith commands him to love God with all his being and to love his neighbor as himself. But too often he treats that neighbor, particularly if he happens to be of a different race, as if he were a “lesser breed without the law,” or a “thing” to be exploited for his own benefit. He conveniently forgets that Jesus’ own illustration of the neighbor went across racial lines as he spoke of the Samaritan who came to the aid of a Jew.

In short, Christianity too often has become a Sunday sabbatical, an escape from reality, rather than an integral, all pervasive part of daily life. No wonder the modern pagan sees the institutional church as irrelevant and many of its adherents as hypocrites.

The best way the Christian has of coping with the non-Christian world in which he lives is to be involved as Jesus was involved: not isolated, but in contact; not compromising, but concerned; not belligerent, but compassionate; not conquering, but transforming; not compartmentalized, but integrated. This is no easy task. It requires qualities of character, and understanding above the ordinary, and may well bring antagonism and persecution from an anti-Christian, revolutionary age.

But the divine call cannot be gainsaid. Endowed with the mind and heart which God has given, fortified by continuous communication with God through his Word, prayer, and the Holy Spirit, strengthened by the companionship of others of like precious faith, and invigorated by the joyful expectancy of his return, the Christian can engage in this kind of effective Christian living, even in today’s aggressively non-Christian world. In this way he will fulfill the desire Christ expressed in his prayer for his followers:

“I do not pray that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; thy word is truth. As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.”

There is an intimate relation between body and soul, between the spiritual and the physical, and the Church must concern itself with helping the whole man for whom Christ died. Here it had better not follow the suggestions of secular man, nor even of those within the Church who find their answers outside Holy Scripture. To fulfill its God-given mission the Church will have to remember the basic premises set down by the Saviour of the Church.

1. The Word is the means. Although Harvey Cox asserts that it will no longer do to say with the Lutheran and Reformed confessions that the marks of the Church are the teaching of the pure Word and the administration of the sacraments (The Secular City, 1965, p. 145), this is precisely what creates and maintains the Church. Article VII of the Augsburg Confession says:

The church comes into being and is maintained in no other way than through the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments. Because the Gospel in Word and sacrament effectively creates and preserves faith, the church will be found wherever the Gospel is preached and the holy sacraments are administered according to the Gospel.

God, who sacrificed his Son for man’s salvation and decreed that man is saved by faith in his Son, graciously decided to lead man to Christ by means of his Word. The Apostle Paul put it this way: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:19).

This does not minimize the importance of the Christian life. Paul wrote the Christians of Corinth: “Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men” (2 Cor. 3:2). Yet our Christian life in itself never converts anyone. Arthur M. Vincent in The Christian Witness calls it “pre-witness.” The World Congress on Evangelism (1966) rightly spoke of Christian love as a fruit of the Gospel but insisted that without the verbalized Gospel there can be no evangelism. Paul speaks of the Word as dynamite (Rom. 1:16), and the Prophet Isaiah assures us that God’s Word will accomplish his purposes (Isa. 55:11).

2. The Gospel is the focus. There is general agreement in the churches on the importance of the Gospel. Differences arise, however, over the definition of the Gospel.

To some, proclaiming the Gospel is telling people what they should do, how they ought to live. Others feel that every social activity by Christians automatically becomes the Gospel. Still others equate a discussion of moral and ethical questions (international affairs, campus morals, crime) with the proclamation of the Gospel.

According to Scripture, the Gospel is the “Good News” of all God has done for man in Christ.

As soon as Adam and Eve had sinned, God in his grace promised them a Saviour through the woman’s seed (Gen. 3:15). Salvation through this seed was promised to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their descendants (Gen. 12:3; 22:18; 28:14; cf. Gal. 3:16). Isaiah and other prophets elaborated on what this Messiah would mean to God’s people (Isa. 53 f.). In the fullness of time God sent this promised Seed of the woman, put under the law to redeem those under the law (Gal. 4:4, 5).

Redemption includes deliverance from the devil (Heb. 2:14, 15), and the curse of the law (Gal. 3:13), and death (2 Tim. 1:10). It means living under forgiveness as God’s children (Gal. 3:26) and enjoying God’s care, guidance, and protection (Rom. 8:28; 1 Pet. 5:7). It includes heirship (Gal. 4:7), an inheritance reserved in heaven (1 Pet. 1:4), and a final transfer from this world of sin to the glories of heaven, which will be enjoyed forever.

The apostles assure us that redemption is for all men (1 John 2:2), all classes and races (Rom. 10:12), and that all these blessings of Christ’s redemption may be appropriated by faith (Rom. 3:28; John 3:16; Eph. 2:8).

3. The spiritual must have priority. Mrs. Madelyn Murray, well-known for her role in leading the courts to declare against formal prayer in the public schools, remarked: “An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church.” The Christian believes that both hospitals and churches should be built, but that churches are more important. The spiritual must have priority. But where the spiritual is given true priority, there the material needs of man will be met also.

The conviction that everything in this world is transitory (2 Pet. 3:10) and that heaven is eternal (Rev. 21) underlay the apostles’ great concern for the spiritual. At the same time, their love for the whole man also came to expression in a concern for the poor, the suffering, and outcasts.

4. The clergy have a particular task. Involving the laity in witness evangelism and other church functions is not an option for the Church. The clergy can never begin to do the job alone, nor is this the will of God (1 Pet. 2:9). Christ showed the way by enlisting the seventy, training them, sending them out, and having them report back (Luke 10).

Determined to abide by their assigned task, the apostles insisted, “We will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the Word” (Acts 6:4). The next sentence adds, “And the saying pleased the whole multitude.” The chapter indicates that it also pleased the Lord.

Would it perhaps please God and the people if the clergy of today would carry out this divinely assigned task, trusting God to work through his people for man’s spiritual and physical needs?

The question Jesus asked the Jews about John the Baptist’s authority can well be asked about another matter, speaking in tongues: Is it from heaven or from men? Is it a manifestation of divine power through the Holy Spirit, or is it merely the result of human emotion and religious ecstasy?

According to those who defend speaking in tongues as a legitimate charismatic gift bestowed by the Holy Spirit, it is also a distinctive sign given to God’s Church as a fulfillment of divine promises (Joel 2:28, 29). To them it is a renewal of the Pentecostal experience, described in Acts 2, and is in agreement with the practice of the church in Corinth as recorded by Paul in First Corinthians 14. The attempt to arrive at an answer to this delicate and increasingly controversial question requires, first, a comparison of these two texts on which believers base their claims.

The Key Passages

Glossolalia is a Greek compound noun: glossa, tongue, and lalia, talk or speech, hence speaking in or with tongues. We read that on the day of Pentecost, the disciples “began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:4). That these heterais glossais (other tongues) were foreign but known languages is evident; they did not have to be translated in order to be understood by the multitude. Three times the record says that the people heard the preaching by the disciples “in their own languages,” for which the words dialectos and glossais are interchangeably used. Clearly the “tongues” at Pentecost were intelligible speech in a variety of languages, and there was no need of either translation or interpretation.

As we turn to First Corinthians 14, the predominant word is glossa, talk. However, this usage is clearly distinct from the usage in Acts 2, referring to an entirely different type of speech. The King James Version consistently inserts before “tongues” the word “unknown,” but this is not found in the Greek text (1 Cor 14:4, 13, 14, 19, 27). That the most fitting translation of glossa here is that of the New English Bible—“language of ecstasy” (v. 2) or ecstatic “utterance”—will be shown later.

The reason for this distinction is rather simple. Paul goes to great lengths to hold before the church of Corinth the fact that their “tongues” are not intelligible speech, only ecstatic babbling. Consequently, the difference between the two kinds of speaking in tongues is twofold: the foreign tongues of Acts 2 were intelligible speech and could be understood directly by the congregation. The ecstatic utterance could not be understood by the people, and thus required an interpreter. “Interpretation of tongues” was a separate spiritual gift. The speaking in foreign tongues in Acts 2 represents one gift only, but the “tongues” in First Corinthians 14 required two distinct gifts: speaking in tongues or ecstatic utterance, and the “interpretation of tongues” (1 Cor 12:10). It is also noteworthy that Peter quotes Joel 2:28 ff. as being fulfilled at Pentecost (Acts 2:17), but Paul does not use that text in support of tongues-speaking at Corinth.

Understanding The Terms

One reason for the present confusion about tongues is an inaccuracy in expression found in most of the older versions of Scripture, and even in some modern ones. The word “interpreter” is often used instead of the correct word, “translator.” A translator is one who translates from one language into another, while an interpreter is one who explains or expounds either law or religion, not necessarily in connection with a foreign language. Although both the Hebrew and Aramaic as well as the Greek language in the Bible make a clear distinction between these terms, many Bible translators have failed to preserve that distinction.

A good example in the Old Testament is the meeting in Egypt of Joseph and his brethren. As they reasoned among themselves in their mother tongue, Hebrew, “they did not know that Joseph understood them, for there was an interpreter between them” (Gen 42:23, KJV, RSV). This ambiguous rendering is incorrect, for that official was obviously not an interpreter but a translator whose job it was to translate from Hebrew into Egyptian and vice versa. Thus the text correctly translated should read: “for there was a translator between them.” This agrees with the Hebrew liṣ, which means to translate, not to interpret.

How specific the Hebrew—and for that matter the Aramaic—terminology of the Old Testament is can be shown from a number of other passages. While in prison Joseph was asked to make known the meaning of his fellow prisoners’ dreams. Here the text uses, not liṣ, to translate, but pāthar, to interpret, to expound, to explain the meaning of (Gen. 40:8, 16, 22; 41:8, 12, 13). The Septuagint uses the corresponding Greek term, sunkrisis, to interpret. The same distinction is made in the Aramaic section of the Book of Daniel, where the Aramaic pešar is used thirty-one times, for the prophet did not translate from one language into another but interpreted dreams and the handwriting on the wall (Dan 2:4–7:28).

In the New Testament the distinction between translate and interpret is continued through the use of different Greek verbs. However, in the older English versions these distinctions are not always so obvious as they should be. In Matthew 1:23; Mark 1:41; 15:22, 34; John 1:41, and Acts 4:36, there appear several Hebrew and/or Aramaic names and their equivalents in English. However, the King James Version consistently mistranslates: “which is interpreted.” A personal name could eventually have its meaning “interpreted,” but since these are actual translations from one language into another the texts should read: “which is translated.”

The principal verbs for translate and interpret to be distinguished in New Testament usage are methremēneuō and hermēneuō. The Greek noun hermēneuō appears in our English hermeneutics, the science of interpretation. And the verb meaning to interpret is what is used in First Corinthians 12:10; 14:13, 26, and 28, a clear sign that the speaking in tongues at Corinth was not the natural talent or the charismatic gift of speaking foreign languages, for which no translation was required. The tongues-speaking in Corinth was ecstatic utterance or babbling. To be understood by others it had to be interpreted, but not translated.

This fundamental distinction between translation and interpretation as observed in both Testaments should be a strong enough argument to dismiss “tongues” in the sense of First Corinthians 14 as intelligible speech or as “foreign languages.”

Paul’S Appraisal Of Tongues

The Apostle Paul found himself in a delicate position. He could not discriminate against one of the charismatic gifts in which he himself shared abundantly (1 Cor. 14:18); neither could he approve of the way it was used in the church at Corinth nor the importance placed upon it. Therefore he proceeded carefully, tactfully, and diplomatically in a balanced appraisal of the gift. He did this in a masterful way by comparing “tongues” with “prophecy,” which resulted in a downgrading of speaking in tongues.

To say that Paul limited himself to arguments about the kind, of speech in the church at Corinth is a serious mistake. That question became almost secondary. For Paul the issues are much larger: What benefits, if any, does the Church derive from this gift? Do tongues advance spiritual fellowship? Do they result in a deeper understanding of Christ, truth, and doctrine? What about active moral and intellectual participation in worship by the person who is exercising the gift? What communication between the Church and the world is created through tongues? Are tongues as they were used at Corinth a sign of Christian maturity, or do they indicate spiritual immaturity? Only as we study the problem of tongues in this larger spiritual context will we be able to understand Paul’s position and conclusions.

Unfortunately, instead of engaging in a step-by-step discussion we have to be satisfied with a skeleton list of points of comparison and contrast, primarily with the other and greater gift, prophecy.

1. Whom do the two gifts benefit, and how?

The man who speaks with tongues speaks the language of ecstasy (1 Cor. 14:2, 4, NEB); he does not speak to men; nobody understands him; he speaks in the Spirit, consoles himself.

The man who prophesies preaches the word of God; he speaks to men; he builds up others; he encourages and consoles others (1 Cor. 14:35, NEB).

Paul’s conclusion is: Speaking with tongues benefits only the individual, and is of no use to the congregation.

2. What spiritual benefits do the gifts offer?

While prophesying brings some revelation of truth, some knowledge in spiritual things, some message from God, or some teaching about the Christian life (14:6, Phillips), tongues do not supply any of these spiritual needs of the congregation, nor of the world.

3. Are the manifestations comprehensible?

If spoken sound has no precise meaning, it is spoken “into the air” (14:6–9). Since tongues cannot be understood without interpretation, the Apostle indicates that this gift is inferior to that of prophecy.

4. Do “tongues” advance spiritual fellowship?

Paul states: “But if the sounds of the speaker’s voice mean nothing to me, I am a foreigner to him, and he is a foreigner to me” (14:11, Phillips). The simple conclusion that tongues do not produce communication with others even in the church is of serious consequence for the believers.

5. Do tongues promote conscious religious life?

With this point begin Paul’s most damaging arguments against the Corinthian use of tongues. Even praying in tongues becomes a subconscious act, to the exclusion of conscious moral participation of man’s mental faculties. “If I use such language in my prayer, the spirit in me prays, but my intellect lies fallow” (14:14, NEB). It means that man makes his emotions the basis of his belief and religious experience. This relationship is inferior to the conscious relationship of the Spirit-filled mind with God, truth, and man.

6. Are tongues of benefit to the world?

Having shown that praying in tongues was not even understandable to the believers, Paul now shows that likewise it does no good to those outside the Church. The “outsider” can’t even add his amen to it. At this juncture Paul draws a conclusion that, though figurative, indicates the value he placed on praying in tongues in public: rather five intelligible words than 10,000 in the language of ecstasy. It proves the Apostle’s conviction that purely emotional worship has little value when compared with conscious, well-balanced, fruitful worship.

7. Do tongues signify Christian maturity?

Are ecstatic utterance really a sign of a deep religious experience, of mature spiritual life and a morally responsible church? Paul’s answer is no. “Do not be childish, my friends! Be as innocent of evil as babes, but at least be grown-up in your thinking” (14:20, NEB). A truly stern rebuke for a church that considered itself privileged on account of this gift: “We are counted as being childish and immature!”

We arrive, then, at these conclusions:

1. The phenomenon in Acts 2 is different from that in First Corinthians 14; the first was intelligible speech in actual foreign languages, the second ecstatic utterance or babbling.

2. The distinction is obvious through Hebrew and Greek terminology. The languages at Pentecost could be understood without translation; ecstatic utterance made no sense unless interpreted, which required a second gift.

3. Paul’s presentation in First Corinthians 14 hardly leaves anything in favor of tongues. Speaking in tongues in public is lowered to the level of almost complete uselessness, for it does not promote spiritual fellowship, is a sign of spiritual immaturity rather than of completeness in Christ, and substitutes subconscious emotional religion for conscious moral experience.

Laudable as any sincere effort may be to promote true Christian belief in a decadent world, speaking with tongues seems to be highly overrated as a means of making known salvation as a transforming experience, involving the whole man, including his mind. Paul’s concern for the apostolic Church has also a definite message for the Christian Church as a whole in our days. Any doctrine, any teaching of the Church, though right in itself, can be wrongly elevated to a position it does not deserve. Points of secondary importance can become so prominent in the opinion of certain groups that they are presented as if they were the most essential parts of the Gospel, and the divine credentials of those particular groups. There must be a balanced message, and its center is man’s salvation through Jesus Christ. Over-accentuation of any doctrine is a distortion of the Gospel. This is what Paul tried to counteract when he discussed speaking in tongues.

Slow Advent and Christmas: TIME

In silver candy seeds

worked into shortbread

a manger and

pentangle star,

precedent

for grit-sweet dread

in my known danger now, in war.

The all-enabling Infant “lulled”

in romance stanzas

is set amidst stagehands’

hay and incense;

yet (my heart sings)

there is a breath of

animal realness and

richesse.

Stitched in wool

on kindergarten paper and

in electrical dangles, glow

the emblems (to the doomed

young, the strange,

visitors, and shoppers).

All try and fail.

And my whole

being swells to cry out; I too

must desecrate

the holy hush to trumpet

joy. A newborn

new Being-in

my keeping? so

far, His

coming. so

tiny to all

my anticipating sense of

majesty. yet

through the long patience, slowly the

marvel, the

indomitable coming:

a steel-bright-faced

ready-for-gallows One

on. on. into glory. and His

place of my being to be

His as will every

place.

—MARGARET AVISON

After the fanciful reconstructions of the life of Jesus by Strauss, Renan, and other nineteenth-century writers, Martin Kähler proposed a new theory of history and faith. This theory has been adopted in the main by Barth, Bultmann, and many contemporaries, and therefore demands attention.

The motivation of this new theory of history was the preservation of the Christian faith despite the inescapable conclusion that the Bible was untrustworthy. Kähler first showed that reconstructing a Life of Jesus is impossible because the Synoptics recount neither his boyhood nor more than a fraction of his ministry. Conceded. But Kähler went further and also denied that the gospel accounts or any part of them could furnish, as one writer has put it, even “a minimum of historically certified facts … to support Christian faith, to give it authority, and to provide faith with its invulnerable basis and content” (Carl E. Braaten, The Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ).

Kähler’s defense of this radical exclusion of history from faith is that historical verification of any account of Jesus automatically substitutes positivistic historicism for dogmatics.

Although Kähler, Barth, Bultmann, and all other members of this school of theology place great emphasis on the notion of “scientific” history, we cannot here go into the immense subject of historiography. Let it be noted, however, that their argument is fallacious because it assumes that positivistic historicism is the only acceptable form of historiography. No note is taken of those professional historiographers, such as Croce and Collingwood, who defend the autonomy of history against its positivistic reduction to natural science. This is not to say that R. G. Collingwood has satisfactorily solved the problem of New Testament faith; but so long as there are several theories of historical methodology, it is fallacious to argue that historical verification must be positivistic historicism.

Under the compulsion to avoid positivism these theologians have constructed a type of faith that not only does not need historical support but is actually damaged by historical support. Note how Hans Conzelmann is disturbed when the results of archaeology lead the common people to conclude that “the Bible is right after all.” He does not want people to have this kind of corroboration. The motive alleged in this theological line is that faith cannot, simply cannot, depend on the fluctuating and problematic results of historical research. As Braaten again says, “neither the basis nor the content of faith can be secured” in this manner.

These theologians claim that the doctrine of justification by faith requires this rejection of history. We are justified by faith alone completely apart from the works of exacting historical investigation. Not only historical investigation: the same argument implies that faith cannot depend on the scholarly works of dogmatics, which we must prevent history from replacing. Otherwise the learned historian or theologian would be in a better spiritual position than a simple Christian. Reliance on any such works would make the authority of the Gospel contingent upon the authority of scholarship. Faith, says Kähler, has no extrinsic authority—neither a verbally inspired Bible, the Church and its creeds, subjective experience, nor scientific history.

This point of view, so widespread today, can be shown, I believe, to be based on a confusion, a confusion that is basically a misunderstanding of faith. Under the spell of Kierkegaard and later existentialism, the dialectical theologians reduce faith to the purely subjective operations of the mind and neglect the objective content. What our contemporaries talk about is essentially different from the sola fide of Luther, Calvin, and, may I add, Turretin. The Reformers knew what they believed. The modern faith has neither “what” nor knowledge.

These new theologians’ appeal to justification by faith alone is thus seen to be irrelevant. Justification is a judicial pronouncement by God. Of course, scholarly activity is neither the cause, the basis, the content, nor the authority for this judicial sentence. But this divine action has nothing to do with the matter at hand. To talk about justification is to wander from the subject. The subject is not justification but the nature of faith. “Justification by X” demands an explanation of the “X.” Does “X” depend on history? If it does, this “X” is still the means of justification.

Now, despite the assertions of mysticism and existentialism, faith cannot be an empty belief in a vacuous nothing. So-called encounter is simply not faith. It is not Islamic faith, it is not Christian faith, it is not any kind of faith. It is simply an uninterpreted experience, like a pain or other uncognitive emotion. Mere encounter is not a belief at all.

Undoubtedly Christianity requires a subjective, psychological act of believing; but the faith is what is believed. Unless a person believes something, he does not believe. He has no faith. The fundamental difficulty with much modern preaching is that it allows faith no object or content.

Bultmann asserts, “Faith does not at all arise from the acceptance, of historical facts.” Taken at face value this would mean that the passive and active obedience of Jesus Christ is of no importance. It is not necessary to know even that Jesus died. Jesus’ death itself is a historical fact, or at least an alleged fact.

Yet even Bultmann seems to allow that the historical fact of Jesus’ death plays some role in Christianity. But if so, the principle of excluding history is breached, in this one particular. And in many others with it. For if Jesus died, he must have lived. Can one learn that a man lived without some kind of historical evidence? Furthermore, since Pilate and the Pharisees died, too, the death of Jesus, if it is to be of any importance, must in some way have been different from theirs. Where can one discover this difference? One can learn something of this difference from what Jesus himself said about his death. An orthodox Christian may indeed rely on what Paul said; but since Bultmann reduces New Testament theology to the ungrounded imaginations of the early Christians, he, far more than the orthodox, must discover the actual words of the Jesus of history—unless he is willing to put his faith in Pilate or a Pharisee. Historical research is therefore indispensable to the Christian faith.

Does this mean that the learned historian is in a better position than the simple Christian? Well, it certainly does, if we add the phrase, “other things being equal.” Naturally, learned historians may not be Christians at all. But other things being equal, the more one knows about Christ, the better off he is. Christ’s final command was to teach all things whatsoever I have commanded you. He did not put ignorance and knowledge on a par. He never commended little faith in comparison with extensive faith.

When the dialectical theologians decry historical material as furnishing a basis for faith, or as giving faith its authority, or as providing faith with a support, they confuse the issue; at least they confuse the issue if these phrases denote something different from the content of faith. Faith, as said above, must have content; and Christian faith has as part of its content the words and deeds of Jesus. These words and deeds, including his death, are learned and believed only through historical reports, that is, the Gospels. Christianity, unlike Buddhism, is a religion to which actual historical events are essential. Dispose of the history and one disposes of Christianity with it. Kähler therefore has invented a pseudo-problem and solves it by eliminating faith.

watching snow

just like this the manna fell

not in loaves but broken broken

honey-sweet into a wildness

slowly slowly from some flour-cloud

for the faithful early early

kneeling for that first communion

LOIS HOADLEY DICK

There is something impertinent about writing for fellow ministers on “the importance of keeping spiritually renewed and refreshed in mind as well as in spirit.” The need is undeniable. But who feels qualified to exhort busy men to still more effort?

Let us then take refuge immediately behind a row of books—four well-known and rewarding volumes that most men of fifty will have within reach.

E. F. Scott’s The Fourth Gospel was a seed-book, and still after sixty years it is stimulating, provoking, delightful to read, sending one back to John if only to refute Scott!

James Moffatt’s Introduction to the New Testament was monumental, summarizing a hundred books, and citing (surely) a thousand, setting all New Testament study on higher ground. It is a weird collection of the radical, the fantastic, the illuminating, all possible and impossible theories, and brilliant suggestions, and it provided the groundwork for the New Testament’s first great breakthrough into modern speech. It is superseded now, except as a history of New Testament studies, but no one will ever measure what modern Bible-lovers owe to James Moffatt.

R. W. Dale’s Atonement was a teething ring for many evangelicals, a fairly stiff introduction to theological ways, enlightening as a scriptural survey and philosophical enough to persuade more than one earnest young man that the “old, old Gospel” was intellectually respectable. Though dated now, in its day it was a magnificent protest against subjective theories of the Cross.

J. S. Stewart’s A Man in Christ was a brook by the traveler’s way: rich, refreshing, modern, scholarly, heart-warming. Taken up for study, it served for devotion, most of all perhaps by keeping Paul close to the life he really lived, in all its depth, struggle, and achievement, instead of making him a theological academic.

These four great books, to which (whether we have read them or not) we are all indebted, through our teachers or through other books, have one thing in common: each was written in the pastorate.

They were all manse-produced—thought out on the parish streets, jotted down on doorsteps, researched in the manse study or the living room with the children calling outside the window and the doorbell ringing. E. F. Scott down at quiet Prestwick beside the western sea; R. W. Dale in the midst of an English metropolis teeming with problems and politics; Moffatt along the silvery Tay outside developing Dundee; James Stewart in haughty, demanding Edinburgh.

These four books made three important points: (1) It is possible to study in the pastorate. (2) One strong stimulus to study is writing. It is a craft to wrestle with, but a ministry too, and one without parish boundaries. A word with a local editor about topical matters seen by alert Christian eyes; a magazine article tailored to the intended readership; a paper thoroughly prepared for the local fraternal organization—these may provide the spur to read and think in ways the sermon never demands. (3) One remarkable feature of these four books is the way they relate theology to the living Church, to living, breathing Christians. Stewart declared it an advantage to be writing of Paul amid the pressures of a busy city pastorate. Scott mediated to Britain the radical conclusions of Continental theology, but transmuted into positive, illuminating thought, because he knew the pressing needs of a worshiping church. Dale saw that the doctrine of the Cross must be tested on the consciences of ordinary Christians, and insisted that to be apostolic it must be preachable. Moffatt determined to give his people the Word of God in their own tongue—Scottish accent and all! We would be spared a lot of theological nonsense if every textbook were tested in a living congregation. It is in the pulpit, and the minister’s study, not in the college lecture room, that Christian doctrine comes alive.

Four manse-produced books of such scholarship and power may perhaps pitch the key a little too high for ordinary mortal ministers like ourselves. Let us instead ask what inhibits diligent study in the ministry, and answer: pride, fear, or contempt.

Some might add, lack of time. But what we call lack of time for study is merely a different scale of priorities; if we think study important enough, we leave out something else.

Pride inhibits study whenever, by some astonishing inversion of real education, men come out of seminary thinking they know everything. On the one hand, they have reached assured conclusions on all important questions; they know the right reference books, where to find authoritative, “sound” answers—and that is enough. On the other hand, a few years in an average church convince them they are already so far ahead of their people intellectually that they need stretch no further. Such an attitude of mind is the best possible proof, not of too much education, but of the incompleteness of education. Years spent in school may teach a man the questions to ask, the techniques for finding answers, a few examples of how it is done, and a mental discipline; then it takes the rest of life to fill the gaps, and to digest the results into an order one can communicate. All the while thought and faith move forward. Only the half-educated imagine themselves too well taught to need more.

Fear inhibits study: fear of being disturbed, fear of new ideas, new questions, and especially new denials. We call it fear of wasting time on this shallow modern stuff, but it is not really that at all. We read enough modern stuff if we already agree with it—looking for new and “with-it” ways of saying what we have long been accustomed to think. But to wrestle with something we do not like, to grapple with questions and approaches and theories and the intolerable new jargon we temperamentally react against—this needs intellectual courage. To think out once again what you thought you had got clear once and for all demands an honesty of mind that gets increasingly rare within the Church. Yet not to be sure enough of your convictions to give a fair hearing to the opposite point of view is weakness indeed; and to evade that point of view because it disturbs, upsets, or frightens is just cowardice. And it reveals a lack of faith in truth’s wonderful capacity to defend itself.

Contempt inhibits study when we think meanly of our hearers. Sometines one wonders what sort of people the television networks think viewers are. Often one wonders what sort of people some politicians think we are. And sometimes, sitting in the pew, one wonders what sort of people the preacher thinks we are. Does he seriously imagine that we did not know, and could not see for ourselves, what he has labored for twenty minutes to make plainer to himself? Does he think the school teacher behind me, the engineer in the back pew, the minister’s widow across the aisle, even the bright sixth-grader up in the balcony, cannot see the weakness of that argument, the enormousness of those assumptions, the unfairness of that special pleading, the other, very different point of view that ought to have been mentioned?

Often one has to admit that earnestness is not enough!

Carlyle speaks of theologies, rubrics, surplices, and “this enormous and repeated thrashing of the straw.” Does not sermon preparation sometimes descend to mere imposition of a new pattern on the same limited assortment of ideas? The arrangement, the headings, the text are new, but the content is a reshuffling of familiar themes, so that after ten minutes the congregation has caught up and passed, and can see just where the preacher will end! It is no answer to say that this is what our people want—the simple and familiar. That may be true. Sometimes it is also why they stop coming.

Surely we have now gone far enough in meeting the supposed demand for simplicity and brevity, and are reaping the result in stunted minds and shallow spiritual experience. If the pulpit fare is thin gruel, however attractively served, it is just not worth the trouble (and the expense, these days) to attend service. The old principles still hold: Every sermon must have a clearly defined purpose; plus information, or illumination, or both; and some part, at least six inches over the hearers’ heads, to make them grow. That means digging new veins all the time, reading ahead of our best people.

Three practical steps will aid perseverance:

1. Form a small, intensive seminar group within the church, prepared for discussion, instruction, argument, investigation, on any serious subject—and then keep up with them!

2. Choose one Scripture book; assemble a dozen or so major tools; and spend a whole winter’s private study wrestling with its problems, translating, comparing, absorbing its meaning. (One of my most rewarding experiences was a winter so spent on First John. An almost unknown book slowly came alive as an “Open letter to evangelicals” if ever there was one—relevant, searching, forceful, exceptionally modern. The same thing has happened with Acts, with Romans and Galatians, and with Ephesians.) Later, perhaps a man might preach through the chosen book, or work through it with his study-circle: but not at the time, because that diverts attention and imposes a time schedule. At first, absorb, wrestle, surrender, and let overflow what will.

3. A man should have his own special line—a particular doctrine, biblical theme, period of history, area of Christian concern—on which he reads everything he can lay his hands on. He will become in his immediate circle the expert on that subject. He may become a bore, but for himself, and for what he contributes, it will be worth it.

Behind all we have urged lies theological truth. We of the reformed tradition believe in justification by faith. We believe, that is, in the communication of Christian life—not just socially, in the living fellowship of the church; nor just sacramentally, in the performance of holy rituals; nor just miraculously and mystically within the soul; but in all these ways, conditioned first by faith in a message, a truth, a testimony—a Gospel preached and understood, accepted and believed. Whether we like it or not, this gives a certain intellectual cast to evangelicalism. It demands that we be as clear and comprehensible, as lucid and logical, as eloquent and effective, as well informed and well prepared, as we can possibly be to mediate the saving truth to the minds of men in words and ideas they can respect and understand. For by belief in the things preached they are to be saved.

Several gospel passages have to do with barrenness—that fatal blight upon ministers and churches alike. Some of them suggest that the cure for barrenness may be to abide more closely in Christ the Vine, to pray more earnestly, to obey more carefully, to confess the sin that robs our work of power. But one parable insists that the cure for the barren tree is—simply and bluntly—to “dung it about.” The cause of barrenness may sometimes be not carelessness, or prayerlessness, or some unspecified and undiscoverable sin, or even laziness, but just plain emptiness, spiritual starvation in the preacher. Sermons can for a long time be constructed like mass-produced chairs, out of pieces shaped by other men—and how grateful we all are for such help. But great preaching is the controlled and directed overflow of a full, rich mind, kindled by truth and impelled to share what it has found. When the mind is empty, the tap drips pathetically.

We are, after all, scribes of the kingdom, who bring forth from our treasure things new and old. We owe it to our call to continue training to the end; we owe it to our people to offer the best that they can take; we owe it to ourselves not to stand still intellectually while the years pass; we owe it to our Lord, who is the living Truth, made unto us wisdom, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

To accept what is manifestly inevitable and to strive to modify its inherent iniquities is one thing. To pronounce as inevitable something that is only problematically so is quite another. He who does the latter contributes to its occurrence and participates in its evils. The thoughtful person who seeks to understand current pronouncements of religious bodies on the subject of public disorder can scarcely fail to be perplexed. Are the architects of tomorrow’s Church attempting to formulate an actual Theology of Violence?

We read in the proceedings of the Zagorsk Consultation: “Some Christians find themselves in situations where they must, in all responsibility, participate fully in the revolution with its inevitable violence?” (We wonder, incidentally, whether Patriarch Alexis and Metropolitan Nikodim would thus counsel Christians in Czechoslovakia during the past August.) Or, one notes a quotation attributed to the General Secretary of the WCC: “There are times when a Christian ought to break the law, any law.”

Scarcely more reassuring is an excerpt from the report of the Commission on Theology of the Lutheran World Federation held in Geneva earlier this year: “The use of violence to carry out a revolution with the goal of bringing about a more just legal structure presents an exceptional situation. There are cases in which Christians can conceivably approve of the use of violence and in fact participate in violence.” Such quotations could easily be multiplied.

One wonders what lies behind this tacit approval of violence upon the part of ecclesiastical leaders. There are several possible explanations. The first to suggest itself is that, in the event of revolution (read violence), the Church may avoid the fate of churches in the U.S.S.R. if she “dissociates herself from the oppressor” and acquiesces in what occurs. This would be a skin-saving procedure—if it should work.

Another possible explanation is that the Church views the coming of violence on a broad, perhaps world, scale as inevitable, and hopes by nodding approval now to be able later to modify that approval. One is reminded of the Church’s futile attempts to set boundaries to violence through the Peace of God instituted slowly within the chaos prevailing in the Carolingian empire at the time of the accession of the Capetian dynasty (ca. 987). No more successful was the institution of the Truce of God, beginning with the Council of Toulouges (Elne) in 1027, which sought to impose temporal limits upon violence.

Whatever parallels might be found between medieval times and our own, it is instructive that when the civil powers could no longer maintain order, the Church felt justified in drafting a type of Theology of Violence. The situation was, of course, one in which the Church tried to assume responsibility for the socio-economic order. One wonders whether today’s “involved” Church is prepared to assume such a Constantinian role.

A third possible interpretation is, that in giving at least a limited assent to the legitimacy of violence, the Church hopes to have a hand in shaping the forms which will come out of violent revolutionary movement. While this might be making a virtue out of necessity, one wonders whether her leaders realize in any profound degree the doctrine of the “Phases of Revolution” to which the revolutionary militants are committed.

Churchmen may well be warned against any romantic views of violence, against any easy assumptions that the revolutionary elite intend to share with any religious organization or movement the “honor” of building the post-violence world. Their evident eliteism is not altruistic, and their literature makes it clear that those who direct the overthrow of the old order fully intend to rebuild the new on their own terms.

Much is being made of the ambiguity said to be implicit in violence and in violent action. We are assured that social and economic systems which lead to inequities and to poverty are “violent” in an implicit and covert sense. This appears to be a juggling of words. In a proper sense of the terms, such systems are unjust; violent they are not.

One wonders at the words of Jürgen Moltmann, spoken at Tarku, Finland: “The problem of the use of violence and non-violence is an illusory problem. There is only the question of justified and unjustified use of violence and the question of whether the means are proportionate to the ends.” True, there are systemic or built-in structures of injustice; but it is unhelpful to regard them as being, in more than a very loose sense, structures of violence.

Those who are deeply concerned with the war in Viet Nam may be tempted at this point to say, “A plague on both your houses,” and to insist that as long as the United States is engaged in a violent war there, there is little point in attempting to condemn or curb violence at home. It goes without saying that the question of whether there is a proper distinction between what is done by the soldier in combat, and the proper conduct of the citizen at home or in the street, is too complex to discuss here. What is noteworthy is that while the left is profoundly moved to oppose the expenditure of lives in war for the purpose of containing Red expansionism, no one from this point in the political spectrum has been especially concerned with the loss of two and one-quarter million Allied lives (excluding Russian losses) to contain the expansion and dominance of Nazism.

Church leaders who propose a permissive rationale for violence may well remember that militants are selective in their decision of what forms of violence are licit and which are “inhuman.” It is standard for them to mention with horror the six million who were killed by Hitler’s government. Seldom do the same persons manifest a parallel regret at the fate of the “other six million,” the Kulaks who were starved, shot, or clubbed to death, or deported to die of cold and malnutrition in Siberia. Nor is more than the most cursory mention made by leftists of the uncalculated millions more who died unnatural deaths during the Lenin-Stalin era.

It must be said in fairness that the overt position at Uppsala was that violence should be “a last resort.” At the same time, the opinion gained status that violence may be a legitimate tool if change does not come quickly.

In the last analysis, the resort to violence represents impatience with the orderly processes of democratic government. It may be wondered whether the Church, in addition to lending her influence to the reduction of pressures for violence at home and abroad, should not let her influence fall upon personal and corporate discipline within our citizenry. In place of producing mass opinions, she might well consider the alternative of a ministry which produces regenerate individuals in whom Christ the Lord has engendered a disposition which removes the occasions and dispositions to violence.

The words of Benedict XV, spoken at the end of World War I, may be meaningful today: “Nothing abiding can be erected upon the ruins of charity.”

HAROLD B. KUHN

This note is being written in advance of my departure for Singapore to attend the Asia-South Pacific Congress on Evangelism. A thousand delegates from all over Asia will attend, and it is hoped that a vigorous new evangelistic thrust will develop from the congress. Sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, it follows the pattern set by the Berlin congress in 1966. Christians everywhere should pray that God will bless this endeavor and that the Holy Spirit will work powerfully in every heart.

I will return to the States after the election and before Thanksgiving. Voteless because of a change of residence (a feature of our democratic system that needs to be changed), I can only pray that God’s will be done and that the man of his choice be sent to the White House. Whoever is elected needs the prayers of all Christians and a new sense of loyalty to our nation from those who supported him and those who did not. At Thanksgiving time we should rejoice that we still have the right to vote and freedom of speech and assembly.

The new name that appeared recently on our masthead signifies not a new copy editor but a newly married copy editor. We wish Carol Friedley Griffith and her husband God’s best in their marriage pilgrimage.

We welcome to our staff Connely McCray, our new Circulation Manager. Mr. McCray formerly served with the Southern Baptist Convention.

Richard M. Nixon, elected thirty-seventh President of the United States by a whisker, got public support from only two major Protestant leaders. But they were big ones.

After a long personal friendship, and several appearances with Nixon during the campaign, evangelist Billy Graham said in Dallas five days before the election that he had voted for Nixon by absentee ballot. Formal endorsem*nt came from the Rev. Joseph H. Jackson, of the huge National Baptist Convention, Inc., whose opinion was shared by few other Negro leaders (see editorial, p. 25).

Hubert H. Humphrey got a series of endorsem*nts from social-action Protestants, white and black. George C. Wallace won little prestigious support, and drew active opposition from a few church spokesmen who did not endorse either of his opponents.

And some activists sat this one out, disgruntled over the Viet Nam war. This 1968 phenomenon showed how far the war had eclipsed the racial-justice crusade of the earlier sixties. For these clergymen couldn’t rouse enough enthusiasm to back Humphrey or Nixon—or both—against Wallace, who had repudiated the whole church consensus on race.

In the Dallas interview, Graham said “I almost feel sorry for the next president, because he will be heading into the eye of a hurricane. What we really need is a great religious awakening.”

The evangelist, probably the nation’s best-known and most-respected clergyman, said he would make no speeches for Nixon. “I am trying to avoid political involvement. Perhaps I have already said too much, but I am deeply concerned about my country. It is hard to keep quiet at a time like this. I feel like this is going to be the most important election in American history.”

Historians may yet debate what role the evangelist—who had a key role in Nixon’s decision to run—played in the thin victory. On Election Day Graham, in New York City where he planned to visit Nixon, made no comment on his influence.

Graham said he had come out for Eisenhower in 1952. In 1964 “everybody knew by implication that I was for Lyndon Johnson,” he said, recalling that the two went to church together the Sunday before the election. In the two weeks before that election, Graham got 1.2 million telegrams urging him to endorse either Johnson or Barry Goldwater. His 1968 statement drew about 200 complaint letters, compared to about 60,000 letters his office receives daily.

Graham, who voted for Democrats in North Carolina races, said he felt a “personal tug” over the presidential race since “I admire Hubert Humphrey.” He said the Wallace factor “did not enter in at all,” and he had “no comment” on the Alabamian.

The evangelist was amused that some of his liberal critics had now praised him for being “relevant” in supporting a candidate. Though Graham has been critical of much social action by church officialdom, which he believes displaces the Gospel, he believes the nation is in “such serious condition” that “Christians should stand up and be counted on social and political questions.”

Nixon won formal endorsem*nt from Graham’s father-in-law Dr. L. Nelson Bell, well-known Southern Presbyterian layman and executive editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Jackson, president of the 5.5 million Negroes in the NBC, the world’s largest black church body, was joined in his endorsem*nt by a political-action committee authorized at the denomination’s September meeting. The NBC group decided the Democratic Party was “too divided” to unify the nation, and it favored the Republicans’ emphasis on “law and order.”

Since surveys showed 90 per cent of U. S. Negroes were for Humphrey, reaction to the endorsem*nt was not surprising. Concerned Clergy, a group within the NBC, predicted few members of the denomination would vote for Nixon and charged that the Republican “panders to racist theories and has no program which is relevant to the black community.” Signers of the statement, which praised Humphrey’s civil-rights record, included Baptist layman Charles Evers, the Mississippi civil-rights leader.

Humphrey won support from two other denominational presidents who issued endorsem*nts: Culbert Rutenber of the American Baptist Convention, and Dana McLean Greeley of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, endorsed Humphrey while on a get-out-the-vote tour, just eight days before the election. Other prominent Negroes for Humphrey included Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr.; Union Seminary sociologist C. Eric Lincoln; and the Rev. M. L. Wilson, board chairman of the National Committee of Black Churchmen (for report on NCBC convention, see page 40).

The major clergy support for Humphrey came in two publicized petitions, one from Boston and another from New York. The 45-name Boston list was headed by theology deans Krister Stendahl of Harvard and Walter Muelder of Boston University.

The New York list, accompanied by a reluctant pro-Humphrey rationale, was led by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and Union Seminary President John Bennett. It included editors Alan Geyer of the Christian Century and Wayne Cowan of Christianity and Crisis, and such veteran petition-signers as Harold Bosley, Arnold Come, L. Harold DeWolf, Roger Shinn, and Ralph Sockman.

The vote-for-nobody position, debated in the pages of Cowan’s journal, was represented by Harvey Cox, Tom Faw Driver, and Howard Schomer.

Several voices came out explicitly against Wallace: the Christian Century, the Methodist college magazine motive, and the Jesuit weekly America. The evangelical weekly Christian Times did its bit among pietistic readers by running a page-one photo of Wallace smoking a big, black cigar.

Newly elected Methodist Bishop James Armstrong of North and South Dakota issued a four-page statement asserting that the Christian, no matter how disappointed at the candidates, must refuse to “drop out.” Armstrong saw the Wallace candidacy giving the election special significance. When the nation is divided, he said, “this is hardly the time to encourage a presidential candidate who has promised he would never be ‘out-nigg*red’ again.”

Despite the bombing halt, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam went ahead with some protest meetings the Sunday before the election, with no apparent impact.

There was some flap late in the campaign when Nixon booster Max Fisher sent a letter to rabbis across the country reporting on Nixon’s friendly meeting with Jewish leaders and asking the rabbis to discuss the material in their sermons. Presidents Levi Olan of the Central Conference of American Rabbis and Maurice Eisendrath of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations called it a “crude attempt to manipulate the synagogue and the rabbinate for partisan political advantage.”

In general, there seemed to be no slackening in the trend toward clergy endorsem*nts. In 1952, 1956, and 1960, the Republicans won a substantial number of important clergy endorsem*nts. But in 1964 clergy statements were almost unanimously in favor of the Democrat, Lyndon Johnson. The Democratic edge was retained in 1968 among nationally prominent spokesmen, though the polls showed that at the grass roots level Protestants definitely favored Nixon.

On the perennial issue of aid to parochial schools, there was little difference between the major party nominees. Humphrey sent a message to the U. S. Catholic Conference supporting federal aid to pupils in non-public schools. Nixon announced he would set up a “National Task Force for Religious Affiliated Schools.” He said religious schools often perform “indispensable community services and would seem to merit public support.” He favored federal aid for state-administered payments to private-school pupils.

Incomplete returns showed at least thirty Virginia localities approved, and eight defeated, restaurant sale of liquor by the drink. A similar proposal in Utah, dominated by non-drinking Mormons, lost by nearly two to one.

BOMB HALT REACTIONS

Church leaders sent up expectable sighs of relief as the United States announced it would stop all bombing of North Viet Nam.

General Secretary Eugene Carson Blake of the World Council of Churches noted that the WCC had called for this move since 1966 and said “killing and maiming of the people of North Viet Nam” would be ended. Blake said expansion of the Paris peace talks to include the National Liberation Front and South Viet Nam—later a clouded situation—promised “rapid achievement of a ceasefire throughout the divided nation preliminary to the negotiation of a just and honorable peace.”

WCC international-affairs director O. Frederick Nolde wired President Johnson expressing “gratitude to Almighty God” for the halt. He sent a similar wire to the North Vietnamese government.

Similarly, international-affairs director Robert Bilheimer of the National Council of Churches and department chairman Ernest Gross told the President they pledged “continuing support of your efforts to contribute to a lasting peace in Southeast Asia,” and recalled NCC pressures for a bombing halt.

Vatican Radio said shortly after the announcement that the halt “has aroused hopes on all sides.… It seems that the principal obstacle to concrete negotiations has now been removed.” The broadcast recalled Pope Paul’s tireless efforts for peace. Later, press spokesman Monsignor Fausto Vallainc said the Vatican received the news with “extreme satisfaction.”

The Vatican reaction was gracious, considering that on the eve of the bombing halt, Viet Cong terrorists fired rockets in Saigon that killed nineteen persons and injured sixty-four while they were attending All Saints’ Day Mass in a Catholic church. Among the injured was Father Nguyen Minh Tri, who was reading the Gospel.

North Viet Nam Case Study

While the bombing halt was being planned last month, United Press International sent a reminder of one reason why religious forces in South Viet Nam fear Communist expansion. Reports pieced together from North Viet Nam indicate the Red regime is “slowly eradicating Roman Catholicism and Buddhism from the fabric of North Vietnamese society,” UPI says in an October 27 dispatch from Saigon.

North Vietnamese regimental commander Phan Van Xang, who defected to the South in June, said, “They don’t forbid old people to go to church, but they send small children to beat drums in the streets outside as the service is taking place.” Rather than using harsh methods, he said, the government seeks to destroy religion slowly through education.

Roman Catholics, once a strong force planted by French missionaries, now constitute an estimated 571,000 of the North’s 19 million people. The Vatican has had virtually no contact with the 300 North Vietnamese priests for years. The government confiscated all church land and buildings when the French withdrew in 1954, and it is impossible to tell how many churches now remain open.

UPI says “older Catholic priests apparently are allowed to work relatively unhindered, especially around diplomatic circles, but are closely watched to see that they don’t overstep the party line.” The number of priests is reported dwindling, and seminaries are gradually closing down.

Shortly after the Communist takeover, one account runs, Catholic children were taken to church at midday and shown pictures of Jesus and Ho Chi Minh. They were told to pray to Jesus for food, but after an hour, nothing had happened. When they shifted to praying to Ho, the Pavlovians brought in candy and cake.

As for Buddhists, they have been badly organized in the North, and apparently the faith is fading away. In 1964, when fewer than 100,000 believers were reported, the government decided there were too many temples and began closing them. Some are used for housing and grain storage.

Colombia: An Illegal March

Religious liberty in Colombia, an issue obscured during Pope Paul’s recent visit (September 13 issue, page 49), continues as a matter of concern.

City officials in Medellin, the nation’s second largest city, recently denied permission for evangelicals to hold a parade, traditional culmination of campaigns sponsored by Latin America Mission’s Evangelism-in-Depth. Basis of the denial was that under the concordat with the Vatican, non-Catholic meetings must be in private.

Evangelical leaders, who had been allowed use of the city Coliseum for the meetings, decided to exercise a bit of civil disobedience and went ahead with the parade, which was held without incident.

Medellin is one of the most devoutly Catholic cities in the world. A recent survey showed more than 50 per cent of adults attend Mass at least once a week.

National officials have also been putting a notice on passports of entering Protestant missionaries stating that they are not allowed to work in “mission territory” in which, by pact with the Vatican, Protestant schools and evangelism are forbidden. Ostensibly set up to protect the Indians, these mission tracts cover more than two-thirds of the country, and include good-sized cities and large areas with no Indians.

A spokesman for Bogota’s Apostolic Administrator Anibal Munoz Duque reacted to debate in the national congress over reform of the concordat by claiming that any change must come by direct conversations between the president and the Vatican and that therefore the congress has no say except in ratification of a new treaty.

However, the spokesman said a commission of canon-law specialists will be set up to study possible reforms. He admitted parts of the 1887 concordat may be archaic.

STEPHEN SYWULKA

Turkish Eyes On Jerusalem

The Koran does not credit so much as a single miracle to Muhammad, though the pious say “his whole life is a miracle.” But one tradition gives him extraordinary status: the miraj (ladder). This is the belief that he was elevated into heaven from a point in Jerusalem and returned to earth with the ordinance of praying five times daily.

This highly speculative event at the site marked by the Dome of the Rock is celebrated by an emotional October prayer session by Muslims. In Istanbul, key city of Turkey, this year’s summons to worship said the topic of prayer is revival of the Muslim world and the deliverance of Jerusalem, now fully under Israeli control.

Turkey has never had any dispute with Israel. But its sentimentally susceptible Muslim populace—to whom Islam and Arabism offer a stronger savor than mere Turkish nationalism—is thoroughly unhappy with Israel’s control of all Jerusalem since its victory in the 1967 war.

The paradox is that this right-wing Muslim element is also fanatically anti-communist. But it seems to care little that an Arab victory against Israel (if and when) would have to be executed with Soviet weaponry and that the Soviets could well turn against Jerusalem. Soviet war vessels cruise almost daily through the Straits of Bosporus on their way to friendly Arab ports. The Soviet buildup in the Mediterranean is giving the shivers to many discerning observers in the Middle East.

An editorial in the liberal Istanbul daily Cumhuriyet last month described a recent meeting of Muslim leaders in Cairo that openly declared jihad (holy war) against Israel. The paper, noting that Turkey’s religious-affairs director Lutfi Dogan was in Cairo during the meeting, asked whether he attended it on behalf of the Turkish government and whether he had authority to condone such a statement.

An informed Turkish observer said, “The rightist-religionist element of Turkey seems to be paving a disastrous course for this country.”

Two weeks later, a new committee of Islamic organizations held its first meeting in Amman, Jordan, and called for an Islamic “summit” to work toward “rescuing Jerusalem.”

Armenians: Held By The Bible

Armenian Christians last month celebrated the 1,535th anniversary of translation of the Bible into Armenian, and the Tarkmantchatz, the “Armenian Renaissance,” which started with formulation of an alphabet in A.D. 406 and culminated in the still-significant A.D. 436 Bible translation.

Armenologist Kevork Kherlopian of Haigazian College, Beirut, Lebanon, says the Armenian Renaissance is significant because it came centuries before that of Europe. It was marked by “a back-to-Greek-culture movement, involving translations of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, and a parallel movement—the idea of education for the masses,” he said. But Bible translation “came first.”

The Armenian Bible is important for scholars since it was one of the first translations and is thus close to the original manuscripts. Although no examples of the fourth-century Bible remain, ninth-century copies of the earlier translation exist.

During the Renaissance, it is said, a school was opened in every village. Whether they were effective in teaching the masses to read is hard to determine, Kherlopian said; but “the people began to believe that whoever keeps a manuscript or orders a manuscript to be written goes to heaven, thus helping promote a love of learning.”

Armenia was a highland region between the Caspian and Black Seas to the north and the Mediterranean to the South. Kherlopian says Armenian culture is so interwoven with religion that it has kept the people from assimilation during repeated invasions from all sides across the centuries. During World War I, the Turks slaughtered 1.5 million Armenians in a massive resettlement plan that led to abandonment in the desert for those few who survived long death marches.

Historians attribute the Armenians’ staying power largely to the fact that translation of the Bible unified their culture and gave them a God in whom to hope.

Today’s Armenian Christians are divided into three groups with general cooperation salted by frequent feelings of opposition: the Armenian Catholic Church (Roman); the Armenian Gregorian or Apostolic Church (Orthodox), the largest group, which was founded at the end of the third century; and the small Armenian Evangelical (or Protestant) Church. The latter group founded Haigazian in 1955 as the only Armenian college outside the Soviet Union.

Soviet Armenia’s population is 2.3 million, with 1.5 million Armenians living elsewhere in the Soviet Union. About 1.4 million Armenians live in other nations, including 400,000 in America.

Fiercely proud, the Armenians have clung to their cultural past, celebrated in Tarkmantchatz and represented by Mount Ararat, the supposed site of which is in the heart of what was originally Armenia. Kherlopian says, “Every Armenian wears Mount Ararat in his heart.”

LILLIAN HARRIS DEAN

Miscellany

The Vatican has agreed to pay a special tax to Italy on its investments there, though still holding the tax unfair and illegal. Informed estimates place annual taxes on the secret securities list at $1.6 million.

The Indo-Burma Pioneer Mission changed its name to the Partnership Mission, and President Rochunga Pudaite says that as many foreign missionaries are asked to leave India, unprecedented opportunities are open to Christian nationals.

A joint Anglican-United Church-Roman Catholic pastoral letter read from thousands of pulpits urged church members to sign petitions against proposals to tax churches in Ontario, Canada.

Far East Broadcasting Company—which has received more letters from mainland China in the last nine months than in the previous thirteen years—has been accused by Hong Kong Communists of anti-Communist propaganda “under the cloak of religion.” FEBC says its programs are not anti-Communist as such but pro-Christian.

The Asian Evangelists Commission recorded 2,000 decisions for Christ during a thirteen-day crusade in Surabaja, Indonesia.

District Court Judge Roy Harper chastised St. Louis Episcopal priest Walter Witte for testifying in favor of the right of black militants to carry guns in public.

The Milwaukee Council of Churches said “we cannot in good conscience condone” the fourteen war protesters who destroyed draft-board records.

Agnes Scott College, a women’s school in Georgia affiliated with the Southern Presbyterian Church, dropped a twenty-year ban on non-Christian teachers.

DEATHS

KENNETH UNDERWOOD, 49, social ethicist at Wesleyan University, previously at Yale; director of the Danforth Foundation study of campus ministries; in New Haven, Connecticut.

RAYMOND BUCK HAYES, 73, of rattlesnake bite during a Holiness Church of God service in Stoney Fork, Kentucky.

JOSEPH LEWIS, 79, president of the Freethinkers of America and atheistic author; in his New York City office.

The Rhode Island Supreme Court unanimously ruled constitutional the state law requiring towns to lend science, math, and language texts to private schools.

Personalia

Victor Orsinger, attorney and prominent Catholic layman in Washington, D. C., was convicted of stealing $1.5 million from the Sisters of the Divine Savior while acting as their financial adviser. He faces a sentence of nine to ninety years or a fine of $9,000.

Mrs. Madelyn Murray O’Hair, crusading atheist, walked out on two meetings at the University of Michigan after complaining that students who expressed views from the floor were “religious fanatics.”

The Southern Baptist home-mission board named Sidney Smith, Jr., 24, to head a new project in Watts, Los Angeles.

United Church of Christ minister Clyde Miller, Jr., a Negro, replaces white Catholic layman Thomas Gibbons, Jr., as national chief of Project Equality.

Robert L. Friedly, onetime New Orleans States-ltem reporter and oil-company personnel specialist, was promoted to director of the Christian Church (Disciples) Office of Interpretation.

The Rev. Donald F. Hetzler, 45, will succeed his boss, the Rev. A. Henry Hetland, as head of the National Lutheran Campus Ministry (LCA-ALC). Hetland recently resigned without explanation.

The Rev. Gary Anderson, 29, a Presbyterian and an Army lieutenant, won the gold medal in free-rifle shooting at the recent Olympic games, with a record score of 1,157.

Cardinal Bea, head of the Vatican’s Christian-unity secretariat, said that despite religious liberty and dialogue, “we should feel impelled to do everything in our power that non-Christians may achieve the fullness of truth, grace, and power in Christ.”

Cardinal Wyszynski, 67, of Poland, banned from travel abroad by the Communist regime for three years, left November 4 for a visit to the Vatican.

Presiding Bishop Zoltan Kaldy of Hungary’s Evangelical Church told a Lutheran meeting: “We are on the side of socialism, and we regard its defense as our task.”

Burma’s former Premier U Nu, 61, released after fifty-five months in prison, has become a preaching Buddhist monk.

John Victor Samuel is the first Pakistani national elected a Methodist bishop.

Church Panorama

The association of seventy-four Southern Baptist churches around Charlotte, North Carolina, continued an immersion only membership rule that bars two congregations. The Houston association also barred a church that does not practice rebaptism.

The Baptist association in Knoxville, Tennessee, rejected a Negro congregation because it is affiliated with the National Baptist Convention, Inc., and hence the National Council of Churches, then reversed the decision a day later. A recent Southern Baptist study showed 3,800 of the group’s 34,000 churches would be willing to receive Negro members, and 500 actually have.

Presbyterian Life says that counting an average 15 per cent housing allowance, the typical new United Presbyterian minister makes $7,102 a year, compared to $10,548 for master’s degree holders in non-technical fields and $11,256 in technical occupations.

The Lutheran Church in America is listing 3,088 projects to receive $6.5 million in urban-crisis funds to be raised in the next fifteen months. A United Presbyterian agency announced $1.1 million in ghetto investments.

The 65,000-member General Association of General Baptists voted to revise its statement of faith and to set up permanent church offices in Poplar Bluff, Missouri.

Some 1,300 persons attended a rally in support of fifty-one priests who have petitioned the Vatican to fire San Antonio Archbishop Robert Lucey.

The American Council of Christian Churches, meeting in Pennsylvania, attacked the state’s new elective public-school course on “Religions of the West” for “creating an attitude critical of the historic Christian faith.”

A paper discussed last month at the U. S. Episcopal bishops’ meeting but not released advocated that Episcopal seminarians who do not serve in the military be required to serve at least two years with such groups as the Peace Corps, VISTA, or the American Friends Service Committee. Two seminary deans spoke on opposite sides.

Canada’s Anglican bishops voted to permit laymen and women to administer bread and wine at communion. And U. S. Presiding Episcopal Bishop John Hines is even speculating that women someday might be bishops.

Temporary separatism or permanent schism—which road will blacks in mainly-white denominations take?

That critical question stood disturbingly on the horizon at the second annual meeting of the National Committee of Black [changed significantly from Negro] Churchmen, which closed November 1 in St. Louis. White response to black demands for a fair say in church matters will largely dictate the choice, the churchmen said.

“Black churchmen are putting white churches on notice that old paternalistic relationships will not continue. Black people can’t stay in mainly white denominations if those groups can’t begin to deal with racism and distribution of power. Yes, it is still an open question, but if whites don’t answer positively, it could look pretty bad,” said Hayward Henry, president of the Black Unitarian Caucus. His comment hit the crux of issues thrashed over by some 300 committee members in denominational caucuses, workshops, and general sessions, most of which were closed to the press.

The committee had fewer than 100 members at its organizing meeting a year ago as clergymen began to tune into the black-power movement in the aftermath of the 1967 riots. The group still has only 375 members. Though some come from the big all-Negro denominations, most represent the two million Negroes in the white churches.

But black churchmen swing weight far beyond their size, through caucuses formed in every important white-dominated church. Last year blacks in the United Church of Christ got Chicago Negro Joseph H. Evans elected national secretary. This year black Unitarian-Universalists demanded and won $250,000 to spend as they please in ghetto programs. Thus less than 01 per cent of the denomination’s membership got 12 per cent of the budget prescribed for urban projects. Blacks in the American Baptist Convention won creation of a new Negro post, “Associate General Secretary Without Portfolio,” with promises to hire more Negroes in administrative posts and give more say to blacks in ABC ghetto programs.

In St. Louis, committee members evinced heady determination to make further gains in their churches. But a certain defiant cynicism about white responsiveness fringed their comments.

The Black Methodists for Renewal, for example, “must free this great big monster that smothers and strangles us” to give black people participation in their own destinies. If this is not done, “you can forget it, write it all off,” says the Rev. Cecil Williams, of San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church.

Williams said black Methodists had heard of white opposition to the $20 million Fund for Reconciliation pledged by the United Methodist convention. He speculated that “a lot of local churches won’t give money.… If this happens perhaps it will be the best thing. We’ll finally see for the first time where white people stand.”

The delicacy of black caucus-denomination relationships showed in statements the two highest officials of the United Presbyterian Church made to the Black Presbyterians United. Stated Clerk William P. Thompson encouraged the caucus to “go apart from us for a while to seek a greater identity and selfhood; that need is real and you should honor it.” He and Moderator John Coventry Smith said they saw the caucus not as a threat but as an interest group. The caucus—composed of some of the 300 black ministers in the 3.3-million-member denomination—should stay within the church structure because “we need you,” the officials said.

Smith and Thompson came at the invitation of the caucus to receive a list of grievances dealing mainly with what was called the church’s emphasis on “abetting the American middle class at the expense of its ministry to the poor.…”

The Association of Black Lutheran Churchmen issued a statement charging that “racism has created a caste system” that “manifests itself in the oppression of black Lutherans by white Lutherans.” Caucus members, representing all three major Lutheran bodies, voiced intent to be “militant catalysts” for eradication of racism “in this complacent, apathetic church.…” The Rev. Cyril Lucas of Sacramento, California, said the Lutheran church has traditionally been lax in attempting to win black people for Christ for fear that white churchmen would leave.

Many black churchmen said they wanted to continue to work for change within their present church groups. But questions about their potential for effectiveness continued to nag.

Said Charles S. Spivey, Jr., executive director of the National Council of Churches’ social-justice department: “It is hard for a white man to accept defeat to a black man. And white bureaucratic structures can’t even recognize black structures as valid. American Baptists can work with Russian Baptists but not with black Baptists. Methodists can merge with the EUB but not with the three black Methodist churches.”

Ron Karenga, nationally known militant who espouses pagan African religion, hit hardest at blacks in white churches, saying they show “a dependency mentality. You are afraid you can’t make it on your own.” He said the “white church tries to co-opt the black power movements within itself. It finds your community organization, keeps control and co-opts your leaders.… Every black group the white church supports is a front group.… The National Council of Churches is all ready to deal with you. It even has black men in there to deal with you.”

Karenga later denied that he meant black men should leave white denominations. But this ticklish question will continue to plague black churchmen, particularly black executives in white bodies, as they work out the relation of black power to Christian faith.

Much talk at the meeting centered on the idea that churchmen should identify fully with “blackness” and give political as well as spiritual leadership to black people in their quest for “community control.” In fact, a most startling aspect of the convention was the sight of black churchmen, mainly from the middle-class mold, who seemed for the first time to rejoice over their own “blackness.”

A racial confrontation on the eve of adjournment further united the turned-on churchmen. About 100 held a lobby sit-in at the Gateway Hotel, then split for a nearby church without paying their bills, to protest an employee’s calling some members “boys.” After they received a formal apology and a promise to inspect Gateway hiring practices, the churchmen paid their bills.

The confrontation scrubbed some workshops, but one group plans a week-long session next summer on black theology. Race director Gayraud Wilmore of the United Presbyterians said there are questions whether churches rooted in the sixteenth century have anything to say to blacks. The black identity search will include study of the third-century African church, the Coptic church, and other African religions, he said.

A minority of blacks, said Wilmore, favor “a reinterpretation of classical Christianity.” A majority are “searching for a new interpretation which may or may not be Christian, but are not willing to consider themselves heretics.” He added: “Black theology is in a very formative stage right now.”

‘Thinking Black’ In Newark

Philadelphia’s Conwell School of Theology suspended classes the week of October 20 for an experiment in “on-the-job training.” President Stuart Barton Babbage led his faculty and students to the streets of Newark, New Jersey, to learn about the problems of the ghetto community.

Hosting the Conwell group in Newark were two evangelical organizations, the Rev. Bill Iverson’s Cross-Counter ministry and the Greater Newark Tom Skinner Crusade. Iverson’s luncheonette ministry is an established work of witness and counsel to teen-agers in the tense city. Skinner is a black evangelist who has held meetings on the street, in churches, and in Newark’s Symphony Hall, where, in June, almost 90 per cent of those who responded to the Gospel were from the riot-scarred Central Ward.

Babbage stated that the week was “an extraordinary educational experience.” His students learned that the white man can work effectively in the black community if he can “think black.” Iverson led the Conwell group into the ghetto where they met armed Black Muslims, armed white extremists, and a white Protestant businessman proud of his church’s foreignmission program who saw no poverty problems “if a person would only work” (“or,” quipped Babbage, “inherit a factory like he did”).

“Evangelicals tend to contract out our involvement with the world,” says Babbage. He and the Conwell faculty are out to produce a new breed of evangelical, one who can meet people where they are with the Gospel of Christ.

The Conwell men spent their mornings in seminars with Iverson and Skinner on problems of communicating the Gospel to the black, inner-city community. Skinner, a visiting lecturer at Conwell, says the emphasis of that community has “shifted away from riots toward political and economic development.”

He and his associate, the Rev. William Pannell, think that the black community is hungry for the reality of evangelical Christianity but that it “often incorrectly identifies Christianity with the white power structure.”

“It is bad news for the black man if Jesus Christ is a white Republican preacher,” says Pannell. But “if you present Jesus like he was … beard, sandals, non-Western, an angry young man yet packed full of love … you will reach the black American.”

Skinner believes a new affirmation of Christianity can and must emerge from the black community. “The black man cannot think of himself as beautiful until he realizes that Jesus Christ thinks of him as beautiful,” he says. “What’s to prevent the black man from doing to the white man what has been done to him?” “Here,” Skinner states, “is where Christianity can say ‘this will not happen.’ … What white Christianity has not been able to do for the black man and for himself, a new Christianity will be able to accomplish for both.”

To this end, Pannell says, “we preach the same essential Christianity.… We preach the cross, but we dare not ignore the basic social needs and aspirations of black man.”

JOHN EVENSON

Evangelism Congress Statement

After a Halloween day meeeting, leaders of the U. S. Congress on Evangelism approved and released a nine-point Statement of Purpose for the congress and announced a list of nationally prominent members of the sponsoring committee.

The congress, with wide interdenominational support, is one of several regional follow-ups to the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism. It will be held in Minneapolis next September 8–14.

SEQUEL TO THE ONASSIS MARRIAGE

Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston made a big splash with the announcement that he wants to retire at the end of this year because of attacks he has suffered for his defense of Jacqueline Kennedy’s decision to marry Aristotle Onassis.

Many chided the Roman Catholic archbishop, saying officials must be prepared to face criticism without buckling.

But several less publicized facts about Cushing, who has been called the most Protestant of cardinals, suggest that he is not hung up on being a bishop and may have lost interest in the job some time ago.

The 73-year-old prelate has said repeatedly at public gatherings in the past five years that he wants to leave the Boston archdiocese to become a Latin American missionary with the Society of St. James the Apostle, which he founded.

Cushing is known to have submitted his resignation to the Vatican at least twice. Until his latest announcement, he had planned to retire in June, 1970.

Cushing’s comments expressed a frank anti-institutional mood, or at least greater concern for Mrs. Kennedy’s feelings than for church rules. He said suggestions that her marriage to a divorced man made her a “public sinner” were “a lot of nonsense.… Why can’t she marry whomever she wants to marry, and why should I be condemned and why should she be condemned?” he asked. Cushing later said he didn’t mean the marriage was legal in church eyes and he told her so, but he supported her in the decision since she was “already committed.”

In the first Vatican reaction, an official weekly said Mrs. Onassis, under canon law, is “a public sinner” who has, in effect, renounced her faith and is cut off from the sacraments.

Cushing said he acted out of love for Mrs. Kennedy despite questions over the merits of her decision. “I am not a scholar … a theologian. I am simply a humble man trying to practice charity.… My life has been that of caritas … love for all people.”

The text of the Statement of Purpose:

“1. To witness to the central fact that the gospel of Jesus Christ has power to save people in this age, and that faith in Jesus Christ is the way of salvation for all.

“2. To find anew the Biblical basis and strategy for evangelism through the urgent proclamation and teaching of the gospel to each generation by a worshipping, witnessing, and serving church in which all believers once again declare boldly their faith in the risen Lord.

“3. To teach believers how to do evangelism in the power of the Holy Spirit.

“4. To experience a spiritual awakening within the church by the power of the Holy Spirit.

“5. To challenge the powers of darkness, spurring the churches to stimulate believers everywhere to mount a vigorous attack upon the forces producing misery, inequity, emptiness, discrimination, and other evils in our society, and to lift, wherever possible, the spiritual and temporal burdens of man.

“6. To encourage the church to develop and use modern and effective means for reaching people with the gospel in all its relevance.

“7. To demonstrate practical Christian unity through witness to the world that Jesus Christ is Savior and Lord.

“8. To confess together past failures; to assess together opportunities for evangelism presented by a burgeoning world; and to strengthen one another in the common task of reaching out to that world for Christ.

“9. To reaffirm that Jesus, the Lord of the church, is the Lord of history at whose return ‘every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father’.”

The congress is sponsored by a National Committee consisting of the Co-chairmen Billy Graham and Oswald Hoffman, a Minneapolis area Executive Committee, and thirty-four newly announced members.

Southern Presbyterian Schism?

Suddenly some Southern Presbyterian conservatives are talking about a split in the denomination. And if the current merger with the Reformed Church in America goes through, individual congregations will have a year in which to pull out of the denomination.

In Louisville this month, Kenneth Keyes, 72, president of the conservative lay group Concerned Presbyterians, said a split “is bound to happen within the next few years.” He predicted “there is going to be a continuing Southern Presbyterian Church. It may be known as the Evangelical Presbyterian Church,” and might include 500 to 1,000 of the church’s present 4,000 congregations.

Florida clergyman Daniel Iverson, 79, advocated a split in a recent North Carolina speech, but Dr. L. Nelson Bell, CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s executive editor and a leader in Keyes’s group, said this “would result in chaos.”

Which Methodism Will Win?

The specter of global Methodism haunted a recent symposium on ecumension marking the tenth anniversary of the Methodist Theological School at Delaware, Ohio. It was a challenge and comfort to those who see positive values in denominationalism, and a curse for many who would like to dispense with denominations and get on with merger.

Some 500 pastors and laymen heard the issues discussed by three dozen theologians and church leaders.

Host Bishop F. Gerald Ensley offered little encouragement for Consultation on Church Union activists as he blasted away at the concept of national churches. He argued instead for a Methodist World Church with an international general conference, deriving its unity from a common basis of faith, ministry, membership, and general episcopacy—such as is now being proposed by the United Methodists’ standing Committee On Structure of Methodism OverSeas (COSMOS).

“For the foreseeable future, the real strength of Christianity will continue to be in its confessions,” Ensley said. A world confessional church is “a stage on the way” to a future united church, he said, but prevents identifying ecumenism with national churches. He called “nationalism clad in ecclesiastical vesture … an affront to the universalism of the Gospel.”

Reaction came thick and fast. Perhaps the strongest was from Principal Rupert Davies of Wesley College, England: “I’ve never heard such dangerous doctrine propounded in such a powerful and lucid way!” He said it means continuation of present Methodist “colonialism” with powerful, rich churches controlling the overseas programs. Many theologians agreed with him.

Ensley also argued that the Church must emphasize morality and holiness of life rather than union efforts. “Church union is not an absolute, either in the New Testament or in the history of the Church.” He surmised that John Wesley would have had little interest in ecumenism unless he had thought it could cure such maladies as declining membership and clergy figures, paltry stewardship, and cold worship.

Ensley’s comments were significant, since he is a veteran delegate to COCU sessions, including the tense 1964 meeting where a Methodist report containing many of the themes of the 1968 Ensley clouded the atmosphere. The United Methodist Church constitutes 40 per cent of the constituency of the proposed COCU denomination of 25 million, for which a definite Plan of Union is due by 1970.

Dean Walter Muelder of the Boston University seminary, also a COCU delegate, said Plan-writers “will find that ecumenicity is not high on the priorities of the people of God, not because they have higher priorities of mission, but simply because they could not care less” about renewal.

Yale’s Paul Minear, a United Church of Christ minister, expressed another growing mood: many are tired of union talks, plans, and compromises, and favor secular ecumenism through involvement with social problems. “Where are the sacraments rightly celebrated? On the battle lines, among the sit-ins, in ghetto homes …”

L. DAVID HARRIS

Canadian Anglican Split?

With union plans accelerating between the Anglican and United Churches of Canada, a group of Anglicans is beginning to think in terms of a continuing, separate church.

Their spokesman is the Council for the Faith, an organization of clergy and laymen “who are concerned lest the current negotiations for union should mean that the witness of Anglicanism to Evangelical Truth and Apostolic Order be lost or impaired in this country.”

As the wording implies, the council is not all “high church.” One of the leaders is Professor Donald Masters, an evangelical or “low church” Anglican. His co-chairman is the Rev. Carmino de Catanzaro, former professor at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Illinois and now vicar of St. Barnabas Church, Peterborough, Ontario.

In a newly published statement the council lists four purposes: to promote the Anglican witness in both its Catholic and Evangelical aspects; to labor for unity of all Christians in accordance with Scripture and the witness of the early Church; to combat union plans that tend to subvert the wholeness of the Gospel; and to work for a forceful expression of the gospel witness and for church reforms to ensure it.

The council says it is bound by the solemn declaration the General Synod passed in 1893, which appears in the Prayer Book. A key part of his declaration deals with the ancient creeds.

The council insists on continuing use of the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds, while many United Church clergymen couldn’t care less. A new United Church creed was recently presented to the denomination’s highest ruling body, then sent back for revision (see August 30 issue, page 43). It was even too liberal for some of the most liberal minds in the United Church, but a spokesman said he doesn’t expect to see it changed very much. The creed is already in use in some United churches.

The council is being pressured by some Anglicans to begin setting up a separate denomination immediately, but it wants to make sure of its moves and is proceeding carefully.

AUBREY WICE

Rift In Mclntire’S Movement

Carl Mclntire, founder of the fundamentalist American and International Councils of Christian Churches, is accusing colleagues of trying to undercut him.

Things came to a head last month at the ACCC meeting in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, where—among other things—the council voted to set up permanent headquarters at nearby Valley Forge. Mclntire opposed this and other moves, and the discussions consumed most of the three-day meeting.

The apparent issue is the ACCC’s desire to break out of the one-man mold, and some embarrassment over Mclntire’s hard-line methods in his radio and publishing work. ACCC General Secretary John Millheim, one of the anti-McIntire leaders, denies any matters of doctrine are involved.

Millheim, 34, says Mclntire remains “a respected member” of the movement. But in his five years as general secretary “I have never called him up to ask, ‘What should I do today?’ You’re not supposed to do this.” He hopes the ACCC can attract “articulate young men who are hostile to the methods of Dr. Mclntire.”

This echoes behind-the-scenes complaints at the International Council’s August meeting. Its missions arm wrote the council executive committee expressing alarm at Mclntire’s “increasing involvement in political issues,” protest parades, and criticism of the government. “When he speaks in the area of politics, race, and civil rights, this causes irreparable damage to our missionary efforts,” said the letter, signed by outgoing missions executive J. Philip Clark, the new ACCC president.

Mclntire considers Clark, Millheim, and ACCC radio-TV director Donald Waite as leaders of the effort “to undermine me and to have me removed from leadership positions.” Waite, who formerly worked on Mclntire’s radio broadcasts, quit to join the ACCC this year, and Mclntire charges him with distributing anti-McIntire literature. Mclntire is also upset that the ACCC did not provide money for the international meeting or for his drive against the Federal Communications Commission.

Issues And Answers

Religious Issues in American History, edited by Edwin Scott Gaustad (Harper & Row, 1968, 294 pp., $3.50) is reviewed by Robert G. Torbet, executive director, Division of Cooperative Christianity, American Baptist Convention, Valley Forge, Pa.

This volume in the Harper “Forum Books” series is intended to provide a new generation of students with source materials that confront them with the religious roots of American culture and with the relation between beliefs and various areas of life. Dr. Martin E. Marty, of the University of Chicago Divinity School, is general editor of the series, and Edwin Scott Gaustad of the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside, edited this volume. Gaustad’s selection of source materials and his introductory essays to each show the care and judgment of a competent historian and literary analyst. He also brings the insights of a Christian.

In eighteen sets of paired selections, the story of religious conflict in American life is highlighted with sensitivity and historical insight. Gaustad probes into and illustrates the issues that lie behind the clashes and confrontations in America’s religious history. From the traditional review of denominational triumphs and rivalries the reader is led to examine the nature of American religion—its pluralism, its acculturation, its struggle to survive.

Many of the issues have not been fully resolved and continue to demand attention: Was William Penn right in seeking diversity within unity? Or was Thomas Barton correct in warning that religious toleration only breeds “a swarm of sectaries” that threaten an orderly society? In a time of renewal of the church, as the Great Awakening certainly was, Gilbert Tennent’s stress upon a truly converted ministry clashed with John Hanco*ck’s warning not to minimize an educationally qualified ministry. Episcopacy or liberty was an issue that seemed to be purely religious but actually had disturbing implications, since bishops often wielded political powers on behalf of a group that threatened the freedom of other groups in society. The proposal to subsidize the Christian religion so that all denominations could share alike was opposed by James Madison on the grounds that the only way to safeguard freedom of conscience is by separation of church and state. The contrary viewpoints of Thomas Paine, advocate of the supremacy of human reason, and Timothy Dwight, defender of the Word of God against all attacks from the rationalists, remind the reader that history repeats itself. The debate over how to promote revivals by Charles G. Finney and John W. Nevin, the Lutheran theologian who feared the substitution of “feelings” for true “faith,” is echoed today in many circles. The issue of nature or supernature is illustrated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horace Bushnell.

The most disturbing issue of all in American history is seen in William Ellery Channing’s attack upon human slavery and James Henley Thornwell’s defense of slavery as a system of labor supply that might be justified by the Christian conscience. Reading these documents forcibly reminds one that the old rationalizations are not all dead.

Other issues include the conflict between science and religion, the question whether souls or systems in society are to be redeemed, and the anti-Catholic fear of Protestants expressed by Josiah Strong and countered by James Cardinal Gibbons’s defense of the rights of Roman Catholic citizens. The book concludes with a number of contemporary topics that reflect the challenge of secularism to Christianity. Among these are the waning of missionary zeal in the churches, the debate over the place of religion in education, and the question whether man has really come of age and can live without religion or belief in God.

For those for whom the discussion of religion must today be oblique rather than direct, this book will provide a helpful approach. The introductory essays are stimulating enough to suggest even to the skeptical reader the values of religion. For those who are convinced Christians, Gaustad’s approach will prove to be a provocative way of looking at complex issues that the churches often tend to over-simplify in our rapidly changing society.

God As Chaos-Order

The Divine Destroyer: A Theology of Good and Evil, by Walter E. Stuermann (Westminster, 1967, 187 pp., $5), is reviewed by Ellis W. Hollon, Jr., associate professor of philosophy, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Walter Stuermann was convinced that “Nature is a Penelopean Web—at times woven in beautiful and orderly designs, but at other times unraveled in ugliness and chaos.” His own tragic death seemed to validate that interpretation: a philosophy teacher who was trained in electrical engineering, he was accidentally killed while working on his radio transmitter a short time after finishing The Divine Destroyer. Ironically, his book is full of equally tragic vignettes—the bursting of the nuclear submarine “Thresher,” the breaking of the Vaiont Dam, the Nazi obliteration of Lidice, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Thus it was at the beginning. Stuermann felt, for “Creation is the birth of degrees of Order from the womb of Chaos.”

But it is one thing to say that Nature is divided against itself; it is quite another thing to project this division onto God himself and to say that “the ground of being is similarly divided against itself.” Stuermann believed that “God is both Chaos and Order” and that “Chaos and Order are coeternal complements in deity.” To him the classical “Theology of the Crystal Cage” has wrongly confined God within the circle of the “perfectly rational, purely good, and everlastingly immutable.” Such a God is only a half-God; if the Incarnation means anything at all, it means that Order is perpetually crucified by Chaos.

“Deity is Chaos-Order, natura crescens et delens,” he writes. Thus, the problem of evil as classically formulated is solved, according to Stuermann. Traditionally, the problem was seen as an attempt to explain the presence of evil in the world in the face of a God who was infinitely powerful and perfectly good. But under the hypothesis of a “whole god advanced by way of limitation,” the problem is different. God is now simply “amoral Chaos-Order”; all events and modes of being in nature are the works of deity since all express its encompassing being and redemptive development.

The problem with Stuermann’s hypothesis is both linguistic and metaphysical. Does it mean anything to say that “God is Chaos-Order”? What is the linguistic verification for this proposition? Nature itself? Then in what way is this different from saying that “Nature is Chaos-Order”? If our observation of tragic events in Nature is our only verification, then what need is there of the God-hypothesis? Stuermann criticizes the “Theology of the Crystal Cage” for its anthropomorphism, but are not anthropomorphic presuppositions lurking behind his own assertion that “God is Chaos-Order”? For example, he says that “all persons are called to creativity by the ground of their being”; but how can the ground of being “call” anyone unless it has personal characteristics? Why take the primacy of personality seriously only for men? And if our verification for this proposition (that “God is Chaos-Order”) is anthropomorphic, then we can claim with some validity that the empirically observable human longing for completeness and perfection at least suggests the possibility that polarity may not be the ultimate criterion for interpreting either man or God.

In the realm of metaphysics, Stuermann’s panentheism faces the same problem that the personalistic advocates of a finite God must face, namely, the possibility of God’s lapse (and therefore of the universe’s lapse) into nothingness. What is to prevent a finite but growing God from dying? Our observation of all finite, growing things (including the universe itself) is that they die; then why not God? Does “God” deserve the name if there is a real possibility that he might someday die? If our guarantee that Order will ultimately triumph over Chaos—or that the two poles will eternally remain in tension—only our empirical assumption that Nature is always in tension? If so, this is little solace, for the more accurate description of Nature is that of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: “Nature is red in tooth and claw.” Better the Heavenly Father of Jesus Christ than the nebulous God of Chaos-Order!

The Basic Thrust

The Pattern of New Testament Truth, by George Eldon Ladd (Eerdmans, 1968, 119 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by Andrew J. Bandstra, associate professor of New Testament, Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Happy is the reviewer whose author succinctly states the central thesis of his book! Professor Ladd says: “Our thesis is that the unity of New Testament theology is found in the fact that the several strata share a common view of God, who visits man in history to effect the salvation of both man, the world, and history; and that diversity exists in the several interpretations of this one redemptive event. In all of the strata of the New Testament this redemptive event is both historical and eschatological in character, and stands in sharp contrast to the Greek dualistic view of man and the world.”

Ladd, professor of New Testament exegesis and theology at Fuller Seminary, emphatically and continuously maintains that the New Testament view of redemption is both historical and eschatological in character and has its roots in the Old Testament (and Jewish) view of redemption. This view of salvation history (or Heilsgeschichte) the author holds to be in sharp contrast to what he calls the Greek view of redemption, characterized by a cosmological and anthropological dualism. Therefore, for the Greeks, redemption was primarily viewed as being saved out of the world, history, and even the body, whereas in the biblical view, man, both body and soul, is saved in history and the world itself is redeemed. Ladd admits there is diversity of interpretation of this redemptive event among the human authors of the New Testament. But precisely within this diversity, the basic unity is seen in the common contention that there is the promise of redemption given in the Old Testament, the (provisional) fulfillment in the person and work of Jesus Christ in history, and the hope of the consummation of the promise at the end of history.

In the first of the four chapters—originally lectures given at North Park Seminary in Chicago—Ladd sets up this basic contrast between the Jewish and Greek views and then works out the unity and diversity of the message found in the Synoptics, in John, and in Paul. Happily this nicely published book is complete with helpful indices.

Two problem areas should be pointed out. In this day when so many scholars speak of the “early Catholicism” of Luke as compared to Matthew and Mark, would it not have been appropriate to say a few words on that subject, even if in a footnote, instead of simply assuming the unity of the Synoptic viewpoint? Second, the antithesis of the Greek and Jewish views (assuming one may properly speak of the Greek view) of redemption, though it provides a fine organizing principle for the lectures, also leads to a “playing down” of what one might call the “spatial” dimensions of salvation history. The “dualism” between God in heaven and the sinner on earth is admitted to be more basic in the Synoptics than even the dualism of present and future, but the importance of “heaven” or “the above” or “the unseen” in Paul does not receive adequate expression. The author could have shown the basic unity of the future salvation and the present “heavenly” life of the Christian more adequately by indicating that the risen and ascended Christ has already realized in himself the powers of the age to come. Explication of the unity between “future” and “heaven above” becomes even more important in presenting the message of the epistle to the Hebrews, a book the author could not deal with in this brief treatment, unfortunately.

All in all, this is a fine little book. It orients the reader toward what the author correctly sees as the basic thrust of the New Testament proclamation.

Expressing The Atonement

The Christian Understanding of Atonement, by F. W. Dillistone (Westminster, 1968, 436 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Herschel H. Hobbs, pastor of the First Baptist Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

The author’s stated thesis for this volume is “that there are numerous ranges of comparison by which the meaning of the Death of Christ may be presented to men.” He recognizes that reconciliation can be accomplished only through the Cross of Christ. His aim here is to show how this reconciliation has been expressed through worship, art, and sacrificial living, as well as through sermons and theological works.

Dillistone examines philosophy, history, social customs, myths and legends of ancient peoples, theology, art and music, and the various religions of the world, and attempts to relate these matters to the redemptive purpose of God as seen in the Bible, especially in the New Testament.

This volume is rather heavy reading. Comparisons with primitive pagan religions are sometimes forced. However, it is thorough, its style is clear, and it will prove rewarding to one who reads with discernment. There is no question in the author’s mind that the yearning for reconciliation that is inherent in the heart of man finds its fulfillment in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

Israel’S Rebirth

The Resurrection of Israel, by Anny Latour (World, 1968, 404 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Belden Menkus, editor, author, and management consultant, Bergenfield, New Jersey.

Lots of people won’t like this book. People who believe rather self-righteously that God will punish the Jews eternally. People who believe that all reports of anti-Semitism or persecution of Jews are Communist fabrications. People who care more about the course of prophecy than about the needs of people. People who believe that it is more important to protect Middle East mission institutions than to meet the demands of Christian conscience.

Lots of other people will find this book a strong emotional and spiritual experience. The author does not engage in polemics; her understated approach makes the book even more powerful.

Anny Latour is a social worker and historian. She has written a strikingly lively and authoritative history of the Zionist movement and the establishment of the State of Israel. The book shows how television has affected the historian’s craft. Using a minimum of narration, she lets the participants and commentators speak in their own words (by no means are all those quoted pro-Zionist or pro-Israel) and moves abruptly from one view to another in much the manner of the television news documentary. The result is academic professionalism of the highest order that adroitly avoids pedantry.

First, she briefly covers the period from Abraham to the middle of the nineteenth century. She amply shows that Jews never fully left the Land; colonies of the pious remained during the entire period. (I thought I knew the basic subject fairly well, but Dr. Latour has developed much that is new to me. For instance, she presents a segment of Bonaparte’s 1799 call to Jews to resettle the Land.)

The real story of the rebirth of Israel began in 1869, when land for the first agricultural school was purchased in Israel. The first major wave of immigrants came after additional land was acquired in 1882. By 1884, Arabs who had been paid inflated prices for what had been worthless land were attempting to murder the new owners and steal back what they had sold.

This is a rich and complex story. Documentation comes from such varied sources as French Catholic priests and official British records. The author includes excerpts from her 1926 diary of a school-girl walking trip through the Jewish agricultural settlements.

There is so much that evangelicals have ignored or forgotten. Christian Arabs have taken an active part in murder and theft for some fifty years. Arab merchants sold fingers cut from slain Jewish soldiers. Arab leaders supported Germany in two world wars. Arab leaders played an active role in the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. Jewish units fought bravely in both world wars, over stiff British opposition. Ex-Nazis fought in Arab forces in the 1948 War. Arabs burned seventy-seven doctors and nurses alive. So much ignored or forgotten. And we wonder why American Jews are so bitter, why Israelis are so willing to fight.

Reading this book will be a revelation for those who really care. Unfortunately the supply of Good Samaritans is terribly short.

Book Briefs

Then Sings My Soul, by George Beverly Shea (Revell, 1968, 176 pp., $3.95). A delightful glimpse into the life of the very warm and humble man whose rich voice has blessed the hearts of millions—truly the world’s beloved gospel singer.

The Progress of the Soul, by Richard E. Hughes (Morrow, 1968, 328 pp., $7.95). A thorough study of the life and writings of John Donne that relates his developing mind and art both to his own day and to the present.

Romans, by Martin H. Franzmann, I and II Samuel, by Ralph D. Gehrke, and Jeremiah, Lamentations, by Norman C. Habel (Concordia, 1968, 289, 397, and 415 pp., $4 each). These three titles introduce “The Concordia Commentary,” a series based on the Revised Standard Version text and directed at the non-specialist.

A Manual of Worship, by John E. Skoglund (Judson, 1968, 315 pp., $3.95). Contains a variety of materials suitable for use in public worship.

Broadman Comments, by Hugh R. Peterson, M. Ray McKay, and others (Broadman, 1968, 410 pp., $3.25). International Sunday School Lessons 1969.

Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Volume V, edited by Gerhard Kittel, translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Eerdmans, 1968, 1,031 pp., $22.50). An eagerly awaited addition to the English translation of this monumental work in New Testament scholarship, covering the words xenos through pachunō.

The Wesleyan Bible Commentary, Volume II: Job through Song of Solomon, by Charles W. Carter and others (Eerdmans, 1968, 659 pp., $8.95). Another in the series of commentaries on the Bible by various Wesleyan scholars.

Messengers of the King, by David C. Hill (Augsburg, 1968, 167 pp., $3.95). Biographical sketches of twenty Christian personalities covering a range of eight centuries.

Paperbacks

God, Sex and Youth, by William E. Hulme (Concordia, 1968, 184 pp., $1.75). An experienced and perceptive Christian counselor presents a frank, reverent, and mature discussion of moral decisions in the young person’s life. He points out that God’s structure for man’s life is “the way to real freedom.”

The Heritage of the Reformation, by Wilhelm Pauck (Oxford, 1968, 399 pp., $2.75). A valuable study of the bearing of Reformation thought upon the problems of modern Protestantism. Originally published in 1950 and revised in 1961.

The Christian Witness in a Secular Age, by Donald G. Bloesch (Augsburg, 1968, 160 pp., $2.95). A critical examination of the thought of several important contemporary theologians, including Tillich, Bonhoeffer, Cox, and Altizer. The closing chapter considers the mission of the Church from a biblical point of view.

How to Be Happy Though Married, by Tim LaHaye (Tyndale, 1968, 160 pp., $1.95). Helpful mixture of the practical and the spiritual.

Riots in the Streets, by Richard Wolff (Tyndale, 1968, 156 pp., $1.45). A perceptive analysis of the causes of violence and disorder in American society. Considers both spiritual and material factors and challenges Christians to develop a sense of personal responsibility.

The Preacher’s Heritage, Task, and Resources, by Ralph G. Turnbull (Baker, 1968, 178 pp., $2.95). For preachers by a preacher. A useful volume discussing the task of today’s preacher and suggesting available resources.