Page 6062 – Christianity Today (2024)

The Protestant Reformation is usually held to date from October 31, 1517, the Eve of All Saints, when Martin Luther, a professor at Wittenberg University in Saxony, Germany, posted on the door of the Castle Church what he called “95 Theses for Disputation … Concerning Penance and Indulgences, in the desire and with the purpose of elucidating the truth.” “If a particular day may be selected as the birthday of the Reformation” said the late Anglican Bishop Herbert H. Henson, “it is perhaps impossible to select any other for the purpose” (Christian Liberty, pp. 104, 105). Why should this strictly academic proceeding—for such it was—of Martin Luther have developed into such a mighty religious upheaval as the Reformation?

The answer lies partly in the explosiveness of the subject with which the theses dealt, partly in the way Luther’s challenge was handled by the church authorities, and partly in the general situation of the church in Luther’s Germany, and indeed throughout Western Europe.

Luther’s theses had to do with indulgences. An indulgence may be described as a draft on the bank of heaven to pay for human sin. The underlying theory was that Jesus and his saints had accumulated a “treasury of merits.” This treasury was at the disposal of the pope, who could draw on it for the benefit of those sinners who were in arrears. Just how much could thus be effected was debatable. The moderate and traditional opinion held that an indulgence could remit only that punishment for sin which the Church had imposed. In 1476, however, Pope Sixtus IV (1471–84) had declared that an indulgence could shorten, and even end, the stay of a departed soul in purgatory. There was also an extreme view that an indulgence could not only remit penalties but could even forgive sin as well. And something like this claim was made for that particular indulgence—it was called a “plenary” one—which provoked Luther’s protest in 1517.

Indulgence seekers had to pay for these benefits, of course, and in earthly coinage at that. In view of what indulgences professed to offer, it is not surprising that they were highly lucrative: indeed, Roland H. Bainton has aptly described them as “the bingo of the sixteenth century.”

The Indulgence of 1517 was first issued by Pope Julius II (1503–13) to finance the rebuilding of St. Peter’s in Rome; and this was continued by the next pope, Leo X (1513–22). A German cleric, Albert of Brandenburg, already bishop of Halberstadt and Magdeburg, in 1514 was elected archbishop of Mainz and primate of Germany. This highly questionable arrangement—which even the Roman Catholic historian of the popes, Ludwig Pastor, considered “a disgraceful affair for all concerned”—had to be confirmed by the pope. This the pontiff agreed to do for a payment of some twenty-four thousand ducats. Albert borrowed the money from the well-known German banking house of Fugger; and to enable him to repay his creditors, the pope allowed him to proclaim the indulgence in the areas of his ecclesiastical jurisdiction and in the territories of his half-brother, the Elector Joachim of Brandenburg, as well.

Half of the proceeds were to go to the pope for his building project in Rome and the other half to Albert and his bankers. The indulgence-hawker for these areas in Germany was a Dominican friar named John Tetzel, who in pushing his sales asserted that “as soon as the money rattles in the box, the soul leaps out of purgatory.”

Tetzel was not allowed to hawk his wares in Saxony, where Luther lived. But he set up his mart just over the border, and a number of Saxons journeyed there to purchase indulgences. This situation provoked Luther to make his protest. His theses denied the ecclesiastical doctrine of the treasury of merits on which the efficacy of indulgences depended; but they asserted that if the pope really had the power to empty purgatory of sinners, he should do so promptly and for nothing! Luther also contended that indulgences were spiritually harmful, since they taught sinners to fear the punishment of their sin and not the sin itself as an offense against God.

Luther’s theses were presented in Latin, the language of academic discourse; but they were quickly translated into German and widely circulated, causing a serious falling off in indulgence sales. Luther had at first no thought of separating himself from the Roman church. But various interviews that he had in 1518 and 1519 with representatives of the pope convinced him that the abuses against which he was protesting were not a mere excrescence of the surface of the body ecclesiastic but a cancer that was eating at its very vitals. He concluded that the papal church had departed from the New Testament doctrine of justification by grace through faith, which he believed to be the basic tenet of the Christian Gospel. And since the Church would not correct its teaching and practice on this matter, no reconciliation between it and Luther was possible. When in 1520 he was formally excommunicated by the pope, he publicly burned the papal bull of excommunication. He had passed the point of no return in his controversy with Rome.

By 1520 Luther had become the focus of widespread discontent and had acquired a following large enough to produce what has become known as “the German drama.” Patriotic Germans resented being governed by an Italian pope and sending so much hard-earned German money to Rome. They wanted a German national church governed by German bishops and independent of the papacy. Scholarly humanists applauded Luther because he appealed to the Scriptures and to Christian antiquity and not to the medieval schoolman. And many devout Christians in Germany and throughout Europe resented the all too prevalent vices of the clergy—such as cupidity and sometimes sexual irregularity—and the corruptions of the church system that they administered. Throughout his duel with the Roman church, Luther was strongly backed up by his ruler, Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, whose protection was invaluable to him both before and after his excommunication in 1520. The opposition of these various groups to the papal church had been growing in Germany for some time prior to 1517; and Luther provided it the leadership necessary to bring about the Protestant Reformation.

In the light of this account, the following statement by the late Anglican church historian Norman Sykes is an accurate explanation for why Luther’s academic protest of 1517 led to the Reformation. Said Dr. Sykes: “That [explanation] which best fits the facts is a recognition of the widespread revulsion from the Church and its system, alike in its theological and its financial expression. The old order in Germany, as in the political sphere in France in 1789, though outwardly imposing and strong, was rotten inwardly, and collapsed before the first sharp impact of revolt. Beneath the controversy about indulgences was concealed on the, religious and theological side a growing persuasion of the reality of justification by faith alone, of the impotence of the human will to work out its own salvation with fear and trembling, of the inefficiency of the system of good works and of the Treasury of Merits proclaimed and administered by the Church, and therefore ultimately a doubt of the necessity of either Church or Sacraments to salvation” (The Crisis of the Reformation, pp. 34, 35). Or as the Roman historian Leon Christiani put it, Luther “set a light to the gunpowder.”

One highlight of the World Congress on Evangelism came when the Berlin scholar Johannes Schneider weighed modern theology in the scale of apostolic beliefs and found it an empty wind. In this issue the brilliant German commentator (now writing an exposition of John’s Gospel) introduces a two-part essay assessing contemporary theology in the light of scriptural teaching.

This issue is weighted also by the annual index. When librarians and readers convince Readers’ Guide that CHRISTIANITY TODAY should be included in that index, more space in our end-of-volume will be available for essay content.

October 13 will be our anniversary issue and mark the beginning of the magazine’s twelfth year. Likewise it will signal my twelfth year as editor. Life has been full—a decade as a newspaperman and student, a decade of theology teaching in the Midwest, another in the West, and now more than a decade as editor of a religious periodical in Washington. All in all, life on earth does not hold many decades of service, but the great Editor-in-Chief, who is himself the Word, knows all its imponderables.

A number of Canadians will contribute to the Current Religious Thought series in the year ahead. Dr. William Fitch, distinguished minister of Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto, will be the first, in the up-coming issue.

A LOOK AT THE LIST of subjects to be discussed at the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Uppsala, Sweden, next July may cause the thoughtful believer to wonder about the future of confessional Christianity. The assembly will concern itself with “a shrinking world,” with “a secular age,” with matters of social and economic development, with international affairs—in short, with “a new style of living.”

These subjects are to be scrutinized in the light of the role and mission of the Church. What is surprisingly absent in the agenda is any clear proposal for the consideration of matters historically regarded as “theological”—the being and nature of God, the incarnation of our Lord and his saving mission in the days of his flesh, the doctrine of grace, and so on. Are these doctrinal questions no longer meaningful? Is the body that professes to speak for Christendom now seeking to evade them?

Much will no doubt depend upon the selection of the spokesmen who are to “speak to the Church.” If the doctrinal presentations are made by those who feel impelled to proclaim, for example, that God must die for the sake of man’s promotion, or that the “salvation” of Christian theology demands a comprehensive “dehellenizatiort of dogma, specifically that of the Christian doctrine of God,” then the results may be expected to be dismal.

The real point in question is the starting point in theology. If the prevailing mood proves to be that man cannot (some would say will not) find God “on the way down” (i.e., through His selfdisclosure) and can only hope to discover Him “on the way up,” then the fears of many will probably be realized.

Some persons now feel that historical theology is made up of “copybook answers” and thus is radically irrelevant in an age of nominalistic and empirical science. To these, the prospect of a new beginning—with man and his problems—is tempting. The thesis seems to be that if we are to recover a meaning for theology, we must begin with man’s world, man’s problems, man’s hopes. It is, then, a vital question whether Uppsala will seek to elaborate a global form of culture-religion that derives its “theology” from secular and humanistic sources and interprets its “hope” in merely temporal and one-layered terms.

Major elements in our society are presenting the Church with the challenge of a religion without God and a Christianity without Christ. Will the Church respond to this challenge in secular terms—in terms of a New Worldliness—or confront its age with the vigorous assertion of the Lordship of Christ, with its own challenge of an Incarnate God and a risen Saviour?

Of those who would make a totally “new” beginning in theology, one is tempted to ask: Is it a foregone conclusion that as the human predicament is spelled out, valid theological assertions will emerge? To put the question in another form: Can we suppose that this decade is so pregnant with essential meaning that men can, through cultural analysis, propose answers to human problems so basic that in their very formulation God will necessarily disclose himself and his grace?

Must we accede to the assertion (made, for example, by Leslie Dewart in The Future of Belief) that Modern Man has developed in such a fashion that a completely new theological formulation is mandatory? Or, to state the question in Harvey Cox’s terms, has man in his “urban state” become so completely dependent upon forces and resources within himself that the categories of historic Christian thought, acceptable during the “tribal” and “town” stages, are no longer applicable to him?

If the past is anything of an indicator, the new theology will be some type of universalism in which it is assumed that all men are in reality children of God, and need only to be told so. And there will probably be no mention of any divine negative action toward human sin, such as is implied by the doctrine of the final judgment.

How far may the reformulation of historic Christian faith be expected to go? One is not cheered by the assertion in All Things New (the preparatory booklet for the Uppsala assembly) that “the forgiveness of sins was not merely a spiritual event, but had its consequences in people’s physical lives.” On the surface, this seems a plausible assertion. But can the theological basis for the forgiveness of sins be determined from its empirical consequences? Moreover, precisely what events bear witness to the breaking-in of the “New” that has allegedly occurred?

Few will deny that “the world is being drawn into one consciously common history, united by fear of universal catastrophe”; but can we deduce from this that in the unity of “shared secular hopes” God is being realized in the consciousness of man? Secular hopes and secular despair certainly do exist and merit recognition and respect. But is their articulation a reliable means to the articulation also of a new theological vision?

The WCC agenda seems to imply that the quest for a new literacy in theology must begin with the analysis of secular issues, and that when this analysis has proceeded far enough, God will “break in” and disclose himself. All this, we are led to hope, will issue from the elaboration of the predicament of secular man, despite his flight from a theology resting upon revelation.

Does much or all of this newly oriented “quest for theology” rest upon the hidden assumption that historic Christian theism reflects a relatively naive and infantile state of man’s mental evolution? Is Christian theology the product of underdeveloped cultures (Hebrew and Hellenistic) and thus irrelevant today? It would be helpful to have, prior to Uppsala, some forthright answers to these and allied questions.

This is being written in Munich, where in the sessions of the Goethe-Institut men of linguistic and philological orientation are also concerned with matters that relate to man’s ultimate destiny. One finds among them a certain preplexity about the almost frenetic attempts of theologians to trumpet Nietzsche’s robust proclamation of God’s demise. Few of them feel that God’s disappearance would guarantee a new epiphany of theology, or that “God” must emerge from the exercise of the current secular consciousness.

The Church may be in genuine peril of being remade in the image of the world, and the “one-world kingdom of man” may sidetrack men from historic Christianity’s insistence upon a crucial and personal commitment to Jesus Christ. Certainly, if the WCC assembly expects that an adequate theology must emerge as man focuses his attention upon his problems, many will be tempted to adopt a Socratic skepticism about the outcome.

HAROLD B. KUHN

Negro churchmen say they are convinced U. S. cities need “not more studies of the causes of the ‘civil disorders,’ not more ‘anti-riot’ controls, not more welfare handouts, and certainly not more piecemeal appropriations for limited aid to the cities.”

The real problem, says a statement adopted by the National Committee of Negro Churchmen, is a lack of capital: “Even as Negroes in 1863 saw themselves deprived of necessary land, so Negroes today see capital flow through their communities without capital gain for their communities.”

The NCNC, which in effect is the ecclesiastical arm of the responsible element in the black-power movement, held a meeting in Washington last month that coincided with the one-day conference of the star-studded Urban Coalition.

The Negro churchmen voiced support of the coalition’s bid to “reorder our national priorities” and to establish “earn and learn” centers.

They also endorsed in general the coalition’s call upon Congress “to move ahead on the many proposals already before it which seek to remedy the root causes of our urban crisis.” But that endorsem*nt had a hollow ring, because black-power churchmen seem to be growing increasingly dubious of the effects of government handouts.

“Neither emergency job programs nor any present legislative proposals can be more than palliatives providing short-term relief unless one critical need is placed at the center of the stage,” they declared.

That one need is identified as capital. “The despair and disillusionment among black people in America will not be intercepted—peace will not be achieved—unless the historic wrong which has denied us a stake in this nation’s capital economy is righted.”

To this end, the Negro churchmen called for creation of a “national Economic Development Bank.” Such a bank would use funds from government and private sources to lend money at reduced interest rates for Negro homes, schools, and business. It would be run “by persons who have sensitivity and commitment to meeting the special needs and requirements.”

This veering off from reliance upon government aid is a notable contrast to the course suggested by most liberal churchmen, whose comments have been a can-you-top-this scramble. NCC President Arthur S. Flemming urged Congress to provide full funding of the Office of Economic Opportunity “at no less than 2.1 billion dollars.”

The Rt. Rev. John E. Hines, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, who was billed as spokesman for the religious community at the Urban Coalition meeting, echoed ecumenical appeals. He declared that “we of the churches have demonstrated that we do not have the answers, at least not in the form of discernible specifics.” He went on, nevertheless, to quote a resolution of the National Council of Churches’ 1966 assembly that asked political leaders to give highest priority to equal-opportunity programs. He also quoted from a report of the World Council of Churches’ 1966 Geneva conference that poses the question whether “violence that sheds blood in planned revolutions may not be a lesser evil than the violence which, though bloodless, condemns whole populations to perennial despair.” Hines’s own view was that “no anti-poverty program will work unless and until poverty itself is re-defined, and ministered to, in human rather than material terms alone.”

The Urban Coalition brought together nearly 1,000 prominent political, business, labor, religious, and educational leaders. The mayors of a number of the biggest American cities were on hand. The coalition met in the plush Shoreham Hotel in Washington, prompting civil-rights leader Marion Barry to take the rostrum even though he hadn’t been invited. “When you hold these meetings,” he said, “please don’t have them out here at the Shoreham. Hold them down where the people are, get down there and try to get to the nitty-gritty. When that time comes we’ll begin to scratch the surface of the urban problem.”

From the ecclesiastical bureaucracy has come an eighteen-point program on what local churches and ministers can do before, during, and after racial riots. The plan was drawn up by the United Presbyterian Commission on Religion and Race and has won endorsem*nt from the counterpart commission in the Southern Presbyterian denomination and from Foy Valentine, executive secretary of the Southern Baptists’ Christian Life Commission.

The plan includes such suggestions as planning meetings with local authorities and with ghetto leaders and getting out “interpretative materials” for white congregations to exert political pressures. Procedures are also described for what can be done during and after crises.

Triumph, a monthly put out by well-informed Roman Catholic conservatives, devotes a portion of its first-anniversary issue to analyzing the political and religious factors in the rioting of the past summer. Triumph editors say the riots prove the American Negro has rejected both the political and social premises of secular liberalism.

They say that “Islam seems to have something to offer the Negro, something that Southern Puritanism because of past associations cannot offer, and that secularized, liberalized Protestantism rejects out of hand: time, and some plausible instructions in what to do with it. Time to rebuild the family; and Islam teaches him the discipline and gives him the ethical rationale for the job. Time to stand on his own feet; and Islam teaches courage, perseverance. Time to show the white man a distinctive culture; and Islam offers a proud heritage.”

The Roman Catholic Church, Triumph declares, “has been hiding from the Negro.”

Protest From Arkansas

First it was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Now the Viet Nam war has an even less expected opponent: the official Arkansas Baptist Newsmagazine. Last month, Erwin McDonald became the first Southern Baptist editor to advocate that the United States pull out.

His editorial said South Viet Nam is “dominated by military junta” and that Premier Ky’s regime had no intention of permitting a fair election this month. The vote was to be monitored by a group of U. S. citizens named by President Johnson, including a last-minute addition, the Rev. Edward L. R. Elson of National Presbyterian Church.

The Arkansas paper said “there may have been a time when the big question for us was how to get out and save face.… The question now is how can we save our soul if we stay in?”

Miscellany

Appeals for a papal encyclical against racism came from the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice and Urban League chief Whitney M. Young, Jr. After talking with the Pope in Rome, Young had “great hopes” he would comply; but officials unofficially told Religious News Service not to expect an encyclical in the foreseeable future.

Southern Baptists asked for 100 volunteers to go to Fairbanks, Alaska, before freezing weather sets in to help repair nine Baptist churches hit by hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage in last month’s floods. The floods began the day before the state convention was to meet. United Presbyterians also issued an emergency appeal.

In the first half of this year, church construction dropped 4 per cent from the 1966 level, the Commerce Department reports, with the dip intensifying in June. Private-college building, however, took a major upswing.

Internal Revenue Service warns that “contributions” normally paid for admission to charitable fund-raising activities are not tax deductible.

Evangelical Press Association, which recently won tax exemption, is talking with Associated Church Press about a joint convention in Washington, D. C., in 1971. EPA will also meet there in 1970 and ACP in 1968.

The Columbus, Ohio-based Bible Meditation League decided its work will be better described by a new name, Bible Literature International. It distributes tracts, Scripture, and correspondence courses in 175 languages to 100 nations.

Spokesmen for the National Council of Churches, U. S. Catholic Conference, and Synagogue Council testified in support of the proposed 1967 federal fair-housing law.

The legislative arm of the LCA-ALC college-student group passed a unanimous resolution urging Lutheran denominations to “seek organic reunion with the Roman Catholic Church.”

The general committee of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students met in Wuppertal, Germany, last month and surveyed its work in thirty-seven nations, including eleven added since the last committee meeting in 1963.

After years of tumult, the last Christian missionaries were to be evacuated from Aden by September 9, when the British colony becomes independent. Church of Scotland, Danish, and Red Sea Mission leaders issued a statement asking prayer for the now-isolated “infant Church of South Arabia.”

A survey of 4,710 people in Kazan, Soviet Union, showed 21 per cent believed in some religion. Only 3 per cent of the believers were under 30 years of age, and 81 per cent were women. But one-third were members of the working class.

Protestant Panorama

Methodists will decide next year whether to order conference votes on joining the proposed united church of North India in 1969. Methodist conferences—and other denominations—rejected a 1962 union plan, and rejoined negotiations in 1965.

The International Council of Christian Churches says it will help build 200 new churches for those who pulled out of the Church of South India, charging liberalism.

Although the Southern Baptist Convention withdrew official support of the project, thirty SBC pastors willing to accept limits on political commentary will aid an evangelistic drive by South African Baptists this month. The 45,000 Baptists there, who worship along racial lines, include more blacks than whites. Overseas Baptists rarely visit.

More than 100 Mennonites left Canada’s far-north Peace River area for Bolivia to seek “greater fulfillment of customs and traditions,” and more are expected to leave. The group, which had hoped to get a government-supported school of its own, disliked modern pressures in public schools.

At the foot of a statue of Christ during the Pentecostal World Conference in Rio, leaders of two Wesleyan denominations in Chile with 680,000 members and the 63,000-member Pentecostal Holiness Church of the United States signed a pact of doctrinal agreement and mutual membership.

Personalia

The Rev. David G. Colwell, chairman of the Consultation on Church Union, will be in Seattle this month while the Episcopal Church votes on COCU. He has taken the pulpit of Plymouth United Church of Christ there, moving from First Congregational, Washington, D. C.

Harvard Divinity student Sam W. Brown, 24, after leading the first ballot, lost last month’s vote for president of the National Student Association. The winner was activist Oberlin graduate Edward Schwartz.

Washington columnist Jack Anderson claims Richard Cardinal Cushing chuckles at recalling how he and Joseph Kennedy “made strategic contributions to Protestant ministers in West Virginia to help win friends and influence voters for Jack Kennedy in the crucial 1960 West Virginia primary.” Amounts supposedly ranged from $200 to $ 1,000, depending on the size of congregations.

Army Captain Colin Kelly III, 27, son of America’s first hero in World War II, enters Philadelphia Divinity School this month to study for the Episcopal Ministry with an eye on the military chaplaincy.

The Rev. Kenneth M. Lindsay, executive director of the Greater Detroit Council of Lutheran Churches, was elected public-relations director of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. Unlike New York-based predecessor Norman Temrne, now with the American Bible Society, Lindsay will locate in St. Louis.

Miss Lillian Tookman, former publicity chief for Decca Records and later a staffer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was appointed public-relations director for the Armenian Church of North America.

World Vision named the Rev. Spencer De Jong (Reformed Church in America) as acting director of its thirty-seven orphanages in Indonesia. He will also direct the relief program suspended during the attempted Communist coup in late 1965.

James W. Reapsome, editor of the defunct Sunday School Times, this month becomes chaplain and religion professor at Malone College (Quaker) in Canton, Ohio.

At New York’s Constitutional Convention, former Bronx probation officer John Carro told how he couldn’t get an orphanage to accept fatherless Lee Harvey Oswald when he was 12 years old because he was a Lutheran. The convention then passed a provision ending nearmandatory matching of religion in adoption, guardianship, and custody cases.

Deaths

A. RAYMOND GRANT, 69, bishop of Portland, Oregon, and president of the Methodist social-concerns board; in Portland, of cancer.

GEORGE L. MORELOCK, 87, former chief of Methodist laymen’s activities; in Miami.

GEORGE HANDY WAILES, 100, who taught Bible for half a century at Reformed Episcopal Seminary, Philadelphia; in Salisbury, Maryland.

Under the skilled leadership of Primate H. H. Clark, son of a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman and onetime insurance salesman, the biennial synod of the Anglican Church of Canada met in late August in the capital of Ottawa for the second time in the church’s history.

The urgent problems of Canadian unity were clearly on the minds of both the Primate and Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson on opening day. Said Clark, “We must catch a vision of what Canada can be—a land with two founding peoples, French and English.” In like vein, Pearson urged “full recognition by all Canadians that the culture, language, and tradition of the French-speaking minority are essential—a distinctive and equal element of our national life.”

In obvious reference to French President DeGaulle’s recent sally into the Canadian political scene, he added that “all Canadians repudiate interference in our affairs by those who mistakenly believe that we are not Canadian Frenchmen, Canadian Americans, Canadian Englishmen, or Canadian something else.” Clark was even more pointed in his reference to the deep rupture DeGaulle created with his famous cry of “Vive Quebec Libre” in Montreal: “The visit of General De-Gaulle to Canada showed us that a problem we thought solved, or at least hidden under the carpet, is still with us.”

The 300 Anglican delegates from twenty-eight dioceses met at Roman Catholic St. Paul University. The synod’s upper house of bishops has veto power over the lower, composed of clerical and lay delegates elected by dioceses, but winds of change are blowing. Even the primate urged abolition of the upper house. Gordon Baker, retiring editor of the denomination’s Canadian Churchman, added his support by remarking, “Up to heaven or down to earth, any change in the upper house will be an improvement.”

Broadening of the grounds for legalized abortion is to be urged on the Canadian Parliament by the church, and remarriage of divorced persons in Anglican churches will now be possible under a canon ratified overwhelmingly. Till now, most divorced Anglicans have remarried in the United Church of Canada and then returned to the Anglican fold, where normally they have been granted the sacrament once more. The professed aim of this canon is the strengthening of marriage, but it is not difficult to see the strong public pressure behind it. Criticism of the new measure, though limited, was incisive. Noteworthy was the fact that the two Eskimo delegates spoke vehemently against ratification. It was clearly with much heart-searching that the synod made this historic departure from Lambeth.

After a high-caliber debate that a capital reporter said equaled anything in Parliament on the subject, the synod urged the United States to stop bombing North Viet Nam and both North and South to move to the negotiating table.

Membership in the church declined by 67,000 last year, continuing the trend begun in 1963. Parish rolls indicate 1,292, 762 persons registered, but of these scarcely 500,000 partook of Easter communion this year. In quest of solutions, the synod veered strongly toward radical policies. Public relations and communications by radio and television will henceforth be handled jointly by teams from the Anglican, Roman Catholic, and United Churches, under the direction of broadcaster Roy Bonisteel. Big-business streamlining of headquarters under an efficiency plan from Price-Waterhouse will update the secretariat of Church House.

Evangelism—apparently the Cinderella of the synod’s operations, since many left when its report was introduced—lifted the remaining delegates to a new dimension of debate. With humor and deep concern, the report called for the training of seminary students on how to lead a soul to Christ. The Metropolitan of Ontario cited this debate as a great highlight of the synod, and the report was received with applause that seemed unending.

Clearly there is still an evangelical voice among Canadian Anglicans. Equally clearly, in the sacred cause of Anglican unity, this group is silent on ecumenical issues. Be it the mystique or the genius of Anglicanism, its successful unification of extreme Anglo-Catholics and ultra-evangelicals continues to be one of the mysteries of our ecumenical age.

At the synod, ecumenical relations was an interweaving theme in every issue, and in the eyes of most Anglican leaders the trends are clearly God-ordained. As a report put it, “With a distraught and divided world badly needing a demonstration of charity and good-will, and a clearer understanding of the common destiny of all mankind as brothers in one family and sons of one Father, the Church cannot evade the supreme task of restoring its visible unity.”

No less than four committees are operating in this field: Christian unity, the Church universal, ecumenical affairs, and Roman Catholic relations. The assurance with which the guidance of the Holy Spirit was claimed hallmarked every report on ecumenical themes. One could scarcely help reflecting on words both cynical and penetrating: “Le bon Dieu, c’est moi.”

Union with the United Church of Canada moved a step nearer as the synod, in response to UCC requests, approved a fifth joint commission on “The Church and the World.” Principles of Union has already been passed, and other commissions are at work on constitutional, legal, doctrinal, and liturgical matters. UCC Moderator Wilfred Lockhart received a conqueror’s welcome. Both he and Clark later admitted they see no great grass-roots movement in support of the union. And leading layman Derek Bedson served notice that one Anglican group does not regard Principles as “a sufficient statement of the faith of our church.”

Union in our time seems sure, but how soon, no one will predict. And whether the ultimate union will carry all Anglicans with it is open to doubt also. Clark pleaded for temperate and wise teaching of all the people at the parish and diocesan levels and spoke of Christ as “the great Divider as well as the great Uniter.” Not so Moderator Lockhart. Calling himself a frustrated ecumenical, he said he can scarcely wait for the final consummation. And under him the decision will be at the council level, not congregation-by-congregation as in 1925, when the United Church was formed.

It is certain that the union of the two Canadian churches will presage the shape of things to come elsewhere. In the opaque world of ecumenical politics so vividly described by Ian Henderson in Power Without Glory, Canada obviously has a role to play that far transcends her geography or her population.

For the Christian not so confident that the Holy Spirit is guiding him into these ecumenical expressways, the words of Jesus seem particularly apt in Ottawa and elsewhere: “What I say unto you I say unto all: watch.”

WILLIAM FITCH

Making Non-Pacifism Official

In the year the world fell apart, various Pentecostal churches came together to form what in fifty-three years has become the largest Pentecostal church. Although its leadership has long denied the church’s commitment to pacifism, the biennial General Council of the Assemblies of God put ground under the denial by repudiating its constitution’s Article 22 on military service.

This article appeals to such biblical passages as “resist not evil” and “love your enemies” and declares, “These and other scriptures have always been accepted and interpreted by our churches as prohibiting Christians from shedding blood, or taking human life; therefore, we, as a body of Christians” are “constrained to declare we cannot conscientiously participate in war … since this is contrary to our view of the clear teachings of the inspired Word of God.”

Meeting in the arena of Long Beach, California, the council’s 2,880 voting delegates decided to adopt a new Article 22, which declares, “As a movement we affirm our loyalty to the government of the United States in war or peace. We shall continue to insist, as we have historically, on the right of each member to choose for himself whether to declare his position as a combatant, a non-combatant, or a conscientious objector.”

True pacifism among Pentecostals has never been strong. The Assemblies are aggressive in grooming chaplains and help prepare military chapel lessons.

Because “some difficulty and embarrassment have been reported by various District Councils,” the council also rewrote Section 1 of Article 23. The new formulation retains the church’s rejection of “the unconditional eternal security position which holds ‘once saved, always saved,’” but indicates its basis for this rejection by asserting that in biblical teaching, “the security of the believer depends on a living relationship with Christ” and on the “Bible’s call to a life of holiness.”

The new formulation also retained disapproval of Seventh-day Adventist teaching but omitted the earlier article’s citation of Titus 3:10, which exhorts avoidance of the “heretic” or “factious man.” Many delegates movingly proclaimed their rejection of “once saved, always saved” but expressed embarrassment by the quote from Titus, which clearly suggests that others with whom the Assemblies work and are affiliated are heretics. The Assemblies belong to the National Association of Evangelicals, the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America, and the Pentecostal World Conference.

The newly proposed and adopted article cites Romans 16:17, which exhorts turning away from those who cause division by teaching “contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned.” (Verse 18 goes on to declare that such people do not serve Christ “but their own belly.”) But by amendment, the Titus reference was also reinserted. The heading of the article was changed from “Heresies Disapproved” to “Doctrine Disapproved.”

By an overwhelming vote, the council then adopted a motion of the Rev. Wesley P. Steelberg of Long Beach to appoint a committee to study Article 23 in its entirety “for further possible amplification and change.”

Thomas F. Zimmerman, the church’s general superintendent, announced plans for a Five-Year Program of Advance for the fast-growing denomination, whose U. S. membership is well over half a million, whose foreign membership is well over a million and a half, whose publishing house prints more than eleven tons of literature daily, and whose denominational budget for the past two years was $29 million.

JAMES DAANE

Everybody And Brother

If magazine formats were open to lawsuits for plagiarism, Newsweek would have a good case against Acts, a new bimonthly reporting news of the interdenominational charismatic movement. Though it might feel complimented by having a look-alike, Newsweek might also blanch at typographical errors, including one in a headline on the cover.

Smoother and infinitely broader in ideological scope is a Canadian entry in the religious magazine field, Ferment ’67, which is the ultimate in journalistic ecumenism. Contributors and staff include liberals, conservatives, and fundamentalists with such widely varying affiliations as Pentecostalist, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Unitarian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim.

Editor John Burbidge, a liberal pastor in the United Church of Canada, says the magazine “is to act as a catalyst; out of the interplay and clash of opinion within its pages will emerge the choice open to reasonable men …”

The Rev. Leslie Tarr, a staunch evangelical writer who is business administrator of Toronto’s Central Baptist Seminary, is an associate editor, along with Roman Catholic Paul Harris. Along with the liberals and humanists on the advisory board stand the Rev. J. Harry Faught, president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, and the Rev. Paul Smith of the well-known Peoples Church in Toronto. Smith sees Ferment as “a good opportunity to expose the liberals, and other religions, to the evangelical position” and doesn’t view his participation as an ecumenical venture.

The lead item in the first issue is a debate on conversion. Burbage contends that evangelism is “unchristian” and “just another means of manipulation.” But Mennonite psychology professor Frank C. Peters of Waterloo Lutheran University says, “Evangelism that does not make Christ and his salvation central, that does not invite conversion and definite decision, has fallen short of its purpose. Evangelism without commitment is no evangelism at all but only a kind of religious activity.”

Ferment’s publisher and initiator is A. C. Forrest, editor of the United Church Observer. Free copies of the first edition went to 25,000 Canadians, mostly clergymen, and staffers are confident that there will be a Ferment ’68.

Acts is put out by a group of Los Angeles Pentecostalists, most notably David DuPlessis. The ad-less forty-eight-page first edition covers charismatic events around the world and includes a major survey of Brazil, site of this summer’s Pentecostal World Conference. No fewer than twenty-three columns go to doings at a single Baptist church in Mobile, Alabama. A report on charismata at Wheaton (Illinois) College is explicit, but specifics are missing in a roundup from denominational seminaries. The final article is a description of “baptism in the Holy Spirit” by Harold Horton that avoids mention of charismatic distinctives and contends that the experience is meant for “every child of God.”

Integrating The Power Structure

Negro Methodists and Disciples took steps last month to phase out their racially segregated power structures. But both denominations still are a long way from a completely integrated hierarchy.

The Central (Negro) Jurisdiction of The Methodist Church, created in a 1939 merger as “a rank concession to prejudice,” as one Negro Methodist leader puts it, will pass out of existence next April when Methodists merge with the Evangelical United Brethren Church. The Negro Methodists held their last jurisdictional conference in Nashville and elected as their last bishop the Rev. L. Scott Allen, editor of the Central Christian Advocate. Future Negro bishops must be elected by regional jurisdictions, at least two of which will continue segregated annual conferences into the indefinite future.

Negro Disciples have thus far been concentrated in the National Christian Missionary Convention, which held its fifty-first annual assembly in Indianapolis and adopted in principle a plan for merger within the racially inclusive but predominantly white International Convention of Christian Churches. The plan provides, however, for a continuing Negro organization that, according to a Disciples spokesman, would meet “primarily for fellowship.”

The Curia’S New Day

Come New Year’s Day things will be different at the Curia, the 400-year-old organization of Vatican agencies berated by church liberals for its traditional views.

In the long run, the most important change initiated in Pope Paul’s VI’s 11,000-word reorganization decree last month is a five-year limit on Curia terms. Staff members can be returned for additional terms by the pope. Till now, Curia work had been considered a lifelong vocation. As in the U. S. Cabinet, agency heads will resign when a new pope is elected so he can choose his own “cabinet” members if he wishes.

The decree strengthens the Secretary of State as the pope’s closest administrator. The office became virtually the only channel to Pope Pius XII in his later years. Its functions have been ill-defined, and it has tended to assume authority. The Vatican reorganization may actually restrict its power. Speculation is increasing that the current secretary, 84-year-old Cardinal Cicognani, will soon step down.

A new Economic Affairs Office headed by three cardinals will undertake central administration of the sprawling Vatican holdings, estimated at a minimum of $5.6 billion in securities alone. Worldwide administration will also be tightened up through an informationgathering Central Statistics Office. Nothing was said about what statistics would be revealed to church members.

This second major reorganization in the Curia’s history (the other was in 1908) was proposed by Vatican II and promised by Paul four years ago. Vatican rumors had said it would be announced on Pentecost, but the final date was the feast of Mary’s Assumption. Insiders blamed the delay on rivalries that had to be ironed out between leading Vatican personalities.

To ease the pain, Paul’s decree said that the Curia is absolutely essential and that its basic structure and its closeness to the pontiff must be retained. After the document was released, the Pope said the reorganization confirms the Curia’s “necessity and excellence.” But this will be scant comfort to what the St. Louis Review describes as “dozens of clerics between forty and sixty” who are “too young to retire and too old to adapt. Many are fearful about the future, depressed about the present, bitter about the recent past. Pope Paul has somehow to move them away from the levers of power, yet at the same time keep them useful and sustain their morale.”

Previously, Paul reoriented the “Holy Office,” now the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, toward a less authoritarian handling of discipline and scholarship. He has appointed several non-Italians and younger clerics to Curia positions, including little-noticed, middle-echelon posts. Just before the reorganization was announced, he ordered that diocesan bishops be made full members of the “Congregations” (the major Vatican agencies) while retaining their dioceses, by attendance at annual meetings at the Vatican.

Besides closer coordination of the bishops throughout the world and the Curia, regular “cabinet” meetings and processes for resolving disputes will promote collaboration among the various Curia agencies.

These points were made at a press conference by Monsignor Giovanni M. Pinna, judge on a Vatican court, who turned out to be secretary of the top-secret commission of cardinals on Curia reform. Pinna said merit—not seniority—will now be the key to promotions.

The Pope himself will no longer head three of the Curia departments but will place them under cardinals. Instead of twelve, there are now nine Congregations for:

DOCTRINE OF FAITH—Safeguards the doctrine and morals of Catholicism; examines new opinions and writings.

DISCIPLINE OF THE SACRAMENTS—Handles matters connected with the seven sacraments that do not come under other agencies; its work has ecumenical implications in handling sacramental discipline, for instance in mixed marriages.

RITES—Handles all aspects of worship not relating to doctrine or juridical discipline; besides the liturgical section, a second section handles beatification, canonization, relics, and recognition of miracles.

ORIENTAL CHURCHES—Administers Eastern churches in communion with the Vatican; consults with other offices concerning other Eastern Christians and Muslims.

BISHOPS—Organizes geographical divisions, names bishops and other administrators, surveys work and personal affairs of bishops and national and regional episcopal conferences.

CLERGY—Administers all clergy and property not under the orders, including assignment, discipline, duties, education, pay and fringe benefits.

RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR INSTITUTES—Does the same for all the orders.

CATHOLIC EDUCATION—Holds responsibility for seminaries and universities as well as parochial and diocesan schools.

EVANGELIZATION OF THE NATIONS (OR PROPAGATION OF THE FAITH)—Handles all missionary work.

Three Secretariats are formally absorbed into the Curia: For Promoting Christian Unity (ecumenical relations with non-Catholic Christians, and with Jews); For Non-Christians (study and dialogue with adherents of other major faiths, including a special office on Islam); For Non-Believers (study and dialogue with atheists).

Two new agencies established in January are put in the Curia on a trial basis: the Council for the Laity and the Study Commission on Justice and Peace.

The three tribunals are the Apostolic Signatura (decisions on canon law and administrative disputes); the Sacred Roman Rota (all matters on annulments except doctrine); and the Apostolic Penitentiary (indulgences, absolutions, dispensations, commutations, graces, and condonations).

Besides a series of offices for administering the Vatican, there are the two new offices: Economic Affairs and Central Statistics.

The decree reminds the prelates that “no serious and extraordinary business may be conducted before the appropriate heads have notified the Supreme Pontiff. Furthermore, all decisions require the Pope’s approval.…”

Art Ebb

Mankind faces one of its worst periods in the history of art and architecture, contends architect-woodworker George Nakashima. “It is a sad statement of our civilization when art styles are obsolete in five years and the buildings themselves in twenty years,” he told last month’s Catholic Art Association meeting.

Nakashima is a noted designer of furniture and has built churches in Japan and India. A recent work was the Christ of the Desert chapel in Abiquiu, New Mexico.

Nakashima says church architecture is no better than the rest, though “it should be.” “There is a basic immorality, I think, in spending $100,000 for a church bell tower which is built on status symbolism,” he said. “Simplicity and poverty in church architecture is a question of the spirit. It is basically a humble and aspiring spirit resolved into a method and a high technology.”

That the World Council of Churches Central Committee meeting went on as scheduled in Heraklion, Crete, last month despite the coup in Greece was a triumph for the new regime and a setback for left-wing elements within the WCC itself. A considerable amount of lobbying and ecumenical backstairs discussion had followed the April 21 military takeover, but so keen was the junta to welcome this assembly that it agreed readily to two conditions: no restriction on visas for those from Communist countries, and no censorship on reports emanating from the meeting.

Then came a bonanza for the government when influential Orthodox sources brilliantly contrived to turn the Heraklion meeting even more to advantage. They approached the young King Constantine, obtained his consent, and, so far as can be ascertained, presented the Central Committee with un fait accompli: Constantine, they said, had graciously agreed to appear at the opening. New luster was thus added to the colonels’ day. After the WCC appearance he left for his visit to the U.S. and Canada.

On the first appearance of a Greek monarch in Crete for many years, Constantine got a terrific welcome from the people—though, ironically, some were applauding the king under the impression that they were thereby heckling the government in the only way left to them. Nevertheless, it was game, set, and match in favor of the junta, which combines sporadic shrewdness with incredible naiveté.

Toward its own religious constituency the government displays more of the iron hand. It may have abandoned its initial absurdities about compulsory churchgoing, but there is still a weighty element in the cabinet that tends toward strict Orthodoxy. One of the slogans of the new regime is professed adherence to “Greco-Christian civilization.” Although this somewhat wispy concept is never spelled out, there is reason to think it refers to Orthodox-Byzantine tradition.

The corollary of this is a strong line against nonconformists, who are identified on this view with an alien religion. An Orthodox newspaper in Salonika recently came out strongly against heretics (i.e., Protestants) and their proselytizing ways. You’re right, approved the official government press, and we’re studying the measures to be taken on this very problem. It might be salutary if they realized that evangelicals abroad are also keeping an eye on developments.

The junta has not so far interfered with freedom of worship, but it has stipulated that evangelical publications should not go out with the perfectly acceptable Greek word for “evangelical” but should instead have the foreign word “Protestant”—with all its suspect associations for the Orthodox.

A Christian newspaper in Britain whose Greek correspondent outlined some of these restrictions was last month stridently denounced by the Greek government in Athens newspapers as having “slandered” the Orthodox Church. The WCC was immediately at pains to dissociate itself from the London publication, whose editor has visited Greece and satisfied himself of the accuracy of this material.

There are further disquieting features here. An exception to the suspicion of foreign religion is the Greek bishops’ attitude toward dialogue with Rome. This constitutes a change from the known views of the former primate, Archbishop Chrysostomos, who went on record as saying there would be rapprochement with Rome “over my dead body.” Those of the fifty-two Greek bishops who still oppose such dialogue are keeping quiet about it, for they would be going against the policy of the new government and its appointed primate, Ieronymos, who is a key figure in the present situation.

It seems clear that Ieronymos does not express the views of the rank-and-file Greek clergy, among whom the incidence of semi-literacy is high. Some, indeed, have been brought up to regard Roman Catholics in much the same way as Communists regard Trotskyites.

Ieronymos is in a strong position. The junta badly needs the support of the general public, and this can best be influenced from the pulpit, even in a land whose capital sees only some 2 per cent in its churches on an average Sunday. The new primate has the confidence of both king and government. His position was recognized in mid-August by the Patriarchate of Moscow, after some hesitation. As a member of the WCC Central Committee, he is even in a position to muzzle the council over Greek affairs (see box, next page).

The king, for his part, is in a difficult situation. Should he abdicate, the junta’s hold on the country is strong enough to do without him—and he might never recover the throne of a country traditionally capricious in its attitude toward monarchy. Paradoxically, the new government has sent his popularity rocketing, especially in the rural areas, possibly because he is identified as a stable feature in all the bewildering chances and changes of modern Greek life.

A reliable source in Athens regards him as the prisoner of the junta and compares his position to that of King Victor Emmanuel in Mussolini’s Italy. Whatever the truth of this, the 27-year-old monarch might feel that a waiting role is the only one possible to him at this time, with discreet pressure exerted whenever feasible toward the gradual re-establishment of a more democratic form of government.

When this will be is anyone’s guess. Asked how long political prisoners would be detained if they refused to sign a declaration renouncing Communism, Brigadier Patakos, minister of the interior, replied, “Three, five, or 100 years.… Their release depends on themselves.”

A British observer who recently returned from Greece holds that democracy will not be restored by the junta till the Greeks are transformed into paragons of virtue. This seems just another example of the favorite phenomenon of avrio (tomorrow), the day that never comes. Meanwhile, the present regime is in danger of slipping into authoritarian permanency with a lamentable habit of regarding all forms of protest as evidence of “Communism.”

The visitor who knows Greece will find at present little surface evidence of the iron grip on this land traditionally regarded as the cradle of democracy. But he who digs deeper will soon discover a new spirit of fearful apprehension and wariness toward strangers usually associated with Greece’s northern neighbors.

Disturbing stories are heard about middle-of-the-night arrests, of education that is as much political as scholastic, of a man summoned before a court-martial for giving hospitality to his daughter and her husband without registering them with the local police, of a national press reduced to government servitude or the passive protest of non-appearance. The Athens Union of Journalists has lost the right to decide who shall represent it abroad, and has said that seventeen of its members were detained on an island prison.

Even ecclesiastical occasions are reported exclusively by government officials. The Heraklion WCC meeting was described with such wild inaccuracy that General Secretary Blake lodged a protest. In response an official from the board of censorship came speedily from Athens to ensure that a potentially valuable ally be suitably placated.

There is more than a little of the farcical in the situation. A 25-year-old Athenian was arrested in a cinema and sent for trial by court-martial because he made “insulting comments about the traffic policy” during a film that showed a clumsy traffic policeman. Small wonder that they tell of a dog that swam from the Greek island of Corfu to Brindisi on the Italian mainland. “Why on earth did you do that?” asked an Italian dog. “Oh,” said the other, “I wanted the chance to bark just once.”

Yet there is hope in the government’s sensitivity to world opinion. Because a Swiss government official dropped a word on how to win international friends, an evangelical church in Salonika got the okay on building plans tied up by red tape for four years. The dropping of the five-year sentence on former Foreign Minister Averoff was due to the adverse effect it would have outside Greece. With the junta so sensitive to international protest, and the WCC so sensitive to violations of human rights, it will be interesting to see how the latter body continues to wield its ecumenical leverage.

J. D. DOUGLAS

W.C.C.: Dull In The Sunlight

Perhaps the sun on Crete had an enervating effect. Last month’s World Council of Churches Central Committee meeting in Heraklion was stupendously dull. It might have been worse but for a zany opening service, some unguarded remarks by the general secretary, and further evidence of the familiar policy of let’s-not-be-beastly-to-the-Orthodox (see adjoining box).

The opening service in St. Minas’ Cathedral was bedlam. It was not clear whether the noise was a normal accompaniment to public worship or whether the presence of King Constantine had whipped up enthusiasm. Contributing to the deafening tumult were fitful microphones and the startling interventions of some cheerleader offstage with a loudspeaker. Foreign visitors, crammed together in a sweltering mass of misery during the liturgy, could grasp only that something meaningful was happening just out of earshot. The liturgy over, Constantine sauntered over to chat with a nearby archbishop and thus kept Central Committee Chairman Franklin Clark Fry, who was poised to give a seven-minute Bible reading, waiting.

Selective Critique

In his international-affairs report to the World Council of Churches meeting (story above), Frederick Nolde’s plain speaking about other troubled areas was followed by the statement that the WCC was “not unaware of the political difficulties” in Greece recently. He said WCC officers had “received several representations of dissent and criticism.”

Then came this cloudy sentence: “In a manner appropriate within the ecumenical fellowship, these concerns have been made known and reassurance given in the course of lengthy conversations in which various members of the Central Committee have participated.”

That was all. Nolde then tapered off with an expression of thanks that the Heraklion meetings had been “conducted in complete freedom.” It was reliably reported, however, that certain West European members had earlier pressed privately for specific criticism of Greece’s military regime but that this was stymied when Archbishop Ieronymos threatened to take his church out of the WCC. As it was, even the diluted statement above suffered a sad sea change in the hands of Greek censors and emerged as a mere thank-you for hospitality.

The report had a single unhelpful sentence about another Orthodox stronghold: “Restrictions of various kinds in the Soviet Union continue to be reported to us.”

No such inhibited brevity or ecclesiastical diplomacy characterized references to Viet Nam. There was the usual complaint by the same minority, with their usual objection to a reasonable statement, and their usual failure to convince their colleagues. The final statement called for the United States to stop bombing, North Viet Nam to start negotiating, and South Viet Nam to move toward discussion with the Viet Cong.

It seemed ironic to recall that Blake had said earlier that if the WCC “acts timidly and by compromise rather than courageously and by principle,” many Christians would look elsewhere “for the dynamism and the faithfulness that the ecumenical movement requires.”

Later in St. Mark’s church hall, where the meetings were held, Fry told king and committee that the king’s appearance was “the memorable event of this meeting” and described him as a “devoted follower of Jesus Christ.” The king replied to the greetings in a voice of impeccable English, but it was not just an icon-boosting section that suggested the hand was undoubtedly that of Archbishop Ieronymos, 62, the former royal chaplain who was inserted in office as Primate of All Greece this year by the military junta.

Eugene Carson Blake was taken to task somewhat after his first report as general secretary for giving much space to, and some loose discussion of, the word “transcendence,” and for tending to say what should need no saying. “God is strictly nonsense in the popular mind today,” said Blake. “… It is this widespread modern agreement that there is no transcendent God which threatens most deeply the ecumenical movement.… I believe it to be highly important that we do not give reason to anyone to suppose that we as a World Council of Churches are calling into question the being of the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.… If we are unable just now to articulate our faith in the transcendent God to the satisfaction of our own theologians … let us nevertheless continue in faith to worship together.…”

The address, which reportedly had caused advance misgivings among the executives, was criticized by the meticulous Professor Berkhof from Holland, who took exception to Blake’s distinction between the WCC and its scholars. One committee member privately suggested that, trying to emulate his predecessor, who had walked dryshod over the Red Sea, Blake had finished up an Egyptian with wet feet.

On the keynote theme of evangelism, the Rev. Philip Potter read some splendid quotations from past ecumenical utterances in arguing that evangelism was not, as many thought, “a neglected vocation in the life and activities” of the WCC. It was, moreover, “not the task of specialists or of a few but of the whole Christian community.” Potter’s paper, more an academic dissertation than an urgent call to action, had one feature that fell strangely on some ears. He explained that the WCC “cannot organize evangelistic campaigns or sponsor what has been called ‘ecumenical evangelism’ unless specifically asked to do so.”

Rising out of Potter’s address were some unexpected remarks from Professor J. L. Hromadka of Prague. “The real problem in socialist countries,” said the erstwhile Princeton theologian, “is not whether the churches will survive [but] whether we Christians believe what we confess [and] witness to this belief in such an urgent, dynamic way that even those who deny our right to exist would be urged to listen to us.” He pleaded also for dialogue with evangelical non-member churches.

The past five or six years had seen a new situation in his own country, continued the Czech. Marxists were now acknowledging that a changed society does not produce a changed man. He urged discussion between the 100-percenters on each side. “Half-Marxists and half-Christians don’t do much,” he explained. At the meeting, plans were announced for a five-day Christian-Marxist confrontation in West Europe next spring, one of several projects in which the WCC is cooperating with the Roman Catholic Church.

Strong opposition came from one quarter when the committee discussed the Middle East situation. What seemed a balanced policy statement roused Soviet members to a flurry of anti-Israel amendments. A filibuster might have developed, had not Fry earlier persuaded the committee to agree to vote on the subject by the normal adjournment time. The Soviet endeavors, which had the support of a solitary Hungarian, came to naught. The statement held, among other things, that national boundaries should rest on international agreements freely reached between those concerned; that the political independence and territorial integrity of all nations in the area should be secured by international guarantees; and that nothing significant could be done unless the problem of Arab refugees, old and new, was resolved.

In a policy statement on the racial issue, the committee urged Christians and churches everywhere “to oppose, openly and actively, the perpetuation of the myth of racial superiority found in “social conditions and human behavior as well as in laws and social structures.”

Accepted into WCC membership were eleven churches, ranging from the 400,000-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania to the Methodist Church in Sierra Leone, which has not quite 18,000. Total acquisition: 1.1 million.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Nigeria: Will Missions Survive?

Civil war has raged in Nigeria, and already thousands have died; yet British, American, and other missionaries continue to work both in Nigeria and in the newly formed rebel state, Biafra. Some missionaries have witnessed dreadful massacres, mostly against the Ibo tribe. Although it is nearly impossible to get reliable information, so far no action appears to have been taken against the missionaries. The seventeen Southern Baptists working in Biafra have been evacuated.

Nigerians’ future policy toward missions may depend largely on British government policy and politics in general. If Britain recognizes Biafra, federal Nigerians might retaliate against Britons. If Britain continues to send arms to federal troops, Biafra may well turn against Britons on its soil.

The Church Missionary Society has twenty missionaries in Biafra and as of late August was unable to obtain news about them, since Biafra was completely cut off from the outside world. There was no alarm at the society’s London headquarters, however, since missionaries are well instructed on what to do in such emergencies.

Philippine Catholic Zealots

Two years ago Ferdinand Marcos won the presidency of the Philippines by a margin of 600,000 votes, roughly the size of the voting bloc of the Iglesia Ni Cristo (“Church of Christ”—a nationalistic cult with Protestant roots), which supported him. In the upcoming campaign for mayor of Manila, Marcos and his Nationalists may have to choose between men from intensely feuding religious groups: Congressman Felicisimo Ocampo, backed by the Iglesia, and ex-Congressman Ramon Bagatsing, supported by the new Cursillistas.

The Cursillistas are a group of militant Catholics generally considered a political counterforce to the Iglesia. Newspaper columnists say the Roman Catholic Church must have gotten tired of seeing Filipino leaders troop like vassals from the heathen provinces to Iglesia headquarters to pay tribute to the sect’s leader on his birthday. Although Marcos and most other leaders are Catholic, the Iglesia votes in a bloc for the hierarchy’s choices, while Catholics seldom vote as a body.

Previous attempts to form a Catholic political movement have failed. But the Cursillistas are at a new high in popularity. Their zeal and fanaticism are formidable, as everyone who has been exposed to them knows well. They represent a new dimension of Philippine Catholicism: they are aggressive, articulate, militant, and sure of themselves, and they brook no word of doubt or dissent from anyone.

EUSTAQUIO RAMIENTOS, JR.

An Extraordinary Man Of God

I Stand by the Door: The Life of Sam Shoemaker, by Helen Smith Shoemaker (Harper & Row, 1967, 222 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Peter C. Moore, director, Council for Religion in Independent Schools, New York, New York.

This is a risky book to read, because it was a risk to know this man. A man thrice defeated for high office in the Episcopal Church, a man with an almost hypnotic effect on idealistic young men, a man variously described as a mystical pietist or an unscholarly enthusiast, Sam Shoemaker was unquestionably one of the most controversial clergymen this century has produced.

His wife, Helen, best known as the founder and executive director of the Anglican Fellowship of Prayer, has revealed for us the many threads interwoven in this colorful life. Sam’s Maryland boyhood, his school and university career, his student Christian work in China and back at Princeton, his twenty-eight years as rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in New York, his deep involvement in the Oxford Group (now known as Moral Re-Armament), his nine years as Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh—all this is presented with vigor, humor, and great warmth, often in words from his own notes and diary.

The effect is to force the reader to come to terms with a style of Christian living and witness with which most people, even most Christians, are unfamiliar. One sees in Sam Shoemaker a number of extraordinary combinations: a free-wheeling response to the Holy Spirit, which made him so appealing to those dissatisfied with the institutional church, coupled with a deep appreciation of the historic structures through which God continues to work; an intense concern that individuals come to a personal commitment to Christ, together with a profound conviction of the Church’s role in the total life of the world; an infectious, never sentimental commitment to Christ, combined with an ease of manner in the company of happy pagans.

I recall a time when Sam Shoemaker, pointing to black and white tile squares on a kitchen floor, said: “People are like that. Most of us are not shades of gray. We’re black and white together, side by side within ourselves.”

The reader who is looking for black squares will not find them in this book. He may wonder if Sam Shoemaker was an easy man to work with. He may ask how in the midst of so much success he managed to remain humble. He may question whether his robust personality ever got in the way of his spiritual effectiveness. Perhaps a biography cannot and ought not to attempt to answer questions like these.

But what no question can obscure is the fact that here was a rare, gifted human being who yielded himself to the task of winning men and women to Christ. Always a loyal and faithful parish priest, Sam nevertheless had an eye out wherever he was—on a university campus, at a conference, at a party—for the potential convert. Thousands were brought face to face with themselves and face to face with their Lord and Saviour through a talk with him in private. Hundreds more are in the Christian ministry today because of his tireless zeal in confronting young men with the challenge of this vocation.

The book vindicates Sam Shoemaker from charges of being against institutions and against social concern. Mrs. Shoemaker claims that much criticism of him stemmed from resistance to the spiritual challenge which his profound and obvious commitment communicated.

I Stand by the Door is filled with sketches of people whom Sam Shoemaker loved and in whose lives he was used by God. He had the remarkable gift of making friends and acquaintances, high and low alike, feel as if they were of vital importance to him, and thus of vital importance to God. He was able to speak boldly about God to others, because he allowed God to speak boldly about others to him.

Three movements that Sam Shoemaker helped to found—Faith at Work, The Pittsburgh Experiment, and Alcoholics Anonymous—are described in a separate section of the book. Each testifies in a different way to his belief in the power of small groups as vehicles for individual and social renewal.

I repeat, this is a risky book to read. You will not be lulled to sleep by its often lyric passages. You will not be entertained with stories of bishops and ecclesiastical politics. You will not be tickled with fashionable heresies nor comforted with reassuring orthodoxies. You will sometimes laugh, sometimes cry. You will burn with anger and indignation, you will be ashamed, you will pray, you will rejoice. Most significantly you will—if you permit it—be deeply moved and deeply challenged by a spiritual movement that even now is confronting men and women with the claims of the Christian life and pointing them to the power available for living it.

Bringing Barth Into Focus

Karl Barth and the Christian Message, by Colin Brown (Inter-Varsity, 1967, 163 pp. $1.95, paper), is reviewed by Fred H. Klooster, professor of systematic theology, Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Reading for Perspective

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

• Baker’s Dictionary of Practical Theology, edited by Ralph G. Turnbull (Baker, $8.95). Every minister should have this scholarly source book on preaching, hermeneutics, evangelism, counseling, and other aspects of practical theology.

• Deeds and Rules in Christian Ethics, by Paul Ramsey (Scribners, $5.95). A Princeton theologian offers trenchant criticism of the “new morality” and insists on some form of “rule-agapism” for a viable Christian social ethic.

• Crisis in Lutheran Theology, by John Warwick Montgomery (Baker, $1.50). An analysis of new emphases within Lutheran theology seen in the light of historic doctrinal foundations. All Lutherans should read this.

Anyone who attempts to summarize the whole of Karl Barth’s voluminous Church Dogmatics has set himself an almost impossible task. But Colin Brown has done an outstanding job in this small book, which is probably the best introduction to Barth’s theology for the beginning student. Even long-time students of Barth will find the focus on main themes rewarding, the interpretation of debated issues challenging, and the suggested central theme inviting.

Colin Brown, tutor at Tyndale Hall in Bristol, England, evaluates Barth from a solidly evangelical, Reformed standpoint. Recognizing that there is much to learn from Barth, he is concerned “neither to whitewash nor to condemn wholesale.” He attempts a sympathetic understanding of Barth’s thought and an evaluation of Barth’s approach to the Christian message.

The author gives us a biographical chapter, a concluding chapter of summary and evaluation, and a brief note on books about Barth, in addition to the main part of the book the three middle chapters. Two of these middle chapters set forth Barth’s view of the Word of God and the knowledge of God and of the bankruptcy of natural theology—the themes of Church Dogmatics I/1 and I/2. The most significant chapter, however, deals with Barth’s Christ-centered view of God, creation, and reconciliation and thus summarizes the themes of the extensive ten parts of Church Dogmatics II, III, and IV. Obviously the nuances and complexities of Barth’s thought cannot be included in such a compact treatment, and there is no substitute for a first hand study of his work. But Brown sketches the main themes quite well.

Brown contends that the underlying unity in Barth’s thinking, the Ariadne thread, is his Christ-idea or covenant concept:

[Barth] saw a union of God and man implied in the union of divine and human nature in the person of Jesus Christ. To this union he gave the biblical name of the covenant. And in the light of the covenant Barth reshaped the entire Christian message.

Barth’s entire theology is a series of variations on this theme. But this covenant concept or Christ-idea rests upon dubious exegesis and actually conflicts with the Christian message of Scripture. Barth’s Christ-idea is a Procrustean bed upon which “some important aspects of New Testament teaching had to be stretched to make them fit, while others had to be lopped off.” In the last analysis “Barth is guilty of Brunner’s charge (a charge which Brunner is himself open to) that he has erected a ‘natural theology on the basis of a statement that has a biblical core.’”

Therefore, Brown maintains that the “focal point of conflict between orthodoxy and Barthianism” concerns Christ and the covenant. Over against Barth’s view of a single, all-embracing covenant of grace in Christ, Brown pleads for the Reformed contrast between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, for this involves the biblical view of creation perfection, Adam’s historical fall into sin, and Christ as judge of unbelievers and saviour of believers.

In evaluating Barth’s view of Scripture and the Trinity, Brown is somewhat less satisfying. Although he himself endorses Warfield’s high view of Scripture and makes some significant criticisms of Barth’s view, he thinks evangelicals have often been too harsh with Barth’s view of revelation. Brown’s weakness here lies in his analysis of Barth’s views. He fails to see that the Christ-idea or covenant theme is already present in Barth’s view of revelation, though admittedly less clearly expressed. Brown thinks that this retrograde development of the Christ-idea came to focus in 1942 with the publication of Volume II/2. If only Brown had seen that the Christ-idea is already present in Barth’s view of revelation, and that Scripture is simply the witness to revelation, he would have seen that the gulf between Barth and the Reformers is as great here as it is at the point of the Christian message in general.

Linked to this is his evaluation of Barth’s view of the Trinity. All too quickly Brown dismisses the view that modalism is present in Barth’s theology and asserts that Barth’s teaching on the Trinity is “a penetrating analysis of New Testament teaching.” At this point Brown is inadequate and superficial. Barth’s view of the analogy between revelation in its threefold form and the doctrine of the Trinity is rooted in the same Christ-idea that Brown so clearly sees in other parts of the Church Dogmatics and regards as the “comprehensive error” that has cast a shadow over the whole of Barth’s thinking. Here too the gulf between Barth and evangelicalism is greater than Brown admits. This difference, however, is due, not to inadequacy in Brown’s evangelicalism, insofar as it is evident from this brief work, but rather to his inadequate interpretation of Barth’s views.

Many provocative observations and interpretations are made throughout the work. Brown suggests that Barth does not regard revelation as encounter and does not play off personal over against propositional revelation. On the basis of a 1956 quotation he states that Barth now holds that “there is an objective revelation of God in nature.” These are disputed points, and Brown has done little more than affirm them. He contends that it is Barth rather than Paul Tillich who has come to grips with modern thought and culture. And he believes that Barth presents the elements of a solution to the contemporary debate over the meaning of religious language.

Brown has said that Barth’s “work might have gained twice as much had it been half the size.” Perhaps Brown’s stimulating little book might have gained twice as much if it had been twice the size.

Sociological View Of A Church

To Comfort and to Challenge: A Dilemma of the Contemporary Church, by Charles Y. Glock, Benjamin B. Ringer, and Earl R. Babbie (University of California Press, 1967, 268 pp., $5.75), is reviewed by Edwin M. Yamauchi, assistant professor of history, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

This is an evaluation by sociologists of a poll on political and social issues answered by 100 bishops, 259 priests, and 1,530 parishoners of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

Two facts immediately limit the usefulness of the survey: (1) The respondents to the poll came from one denomination. Their responses cannot be taken to hold true for the Church at large, as the authors suggest. (2) The survey was made in 1952; this study of the survey was not published sooner because of various intervening demands upon Glock, the senior author. The authors’ contention “that the portrait to be drawn reasonably characterizes the church-at-large, then and now” must surely be subject to question in the light of the many developments since 1952.

The authors developed a scale of involvement for the parishioners on the basis of frequency of church attendance, membership in church organizations, the reading of church periodicals, and so on. It is an interesting comment on the denomination of Bishop Pike that “the sponsors of the 1952 study felt questions pertaining to religious beliefs might offend respondents.”

The survey seemed to confirm the “comfort theory” of the Church’s function. At one extreme, young, upper-status men, with complete families tended to be least involved. At the other extreme of involvement were elderly, lower-status women with neither spouse nor children. “In sum, the church offers a refuge for those who are denied access to valued achievements and rewards in every day American life.” Since many of those who are deeply involved in the Church are involved because they need the Church’s comfort, they are not naturally responsive to the Church’s challenge to change the inequities of society.

The authors do not suggest that the Church abandon its function of comforting in order to challenge its parishioners. They are realistic enough to see that a one-sided emphasis on such matters as civil rights would alienate many members who need the Church’s comfort.

They offer three positive suggestions to enable the Church to challenge its members as well as it comforts them: (1) The Church should decide which deprivations (e.g. bereavement, old age) should be comforted and which (e.g. poverty) should be corrected. (2) The Church would be more effectively served by a dual structure—the parish to comfort and problem-oriented, interdenominational groups to challenge. (3) The Church should educate its parishioners in applying Christian principles to all areas of life. Two of the authors (with one dissenting) suggest that this education may be more effectively achieved by the presentation of both sides of an issue rather than a partisan position.

Book Briefs

Faith and Speculation, by Austin Farrer (New York University, 1967, 175 pp., $5). The well-known Oxford theistic philosopher gives a restatement of his arguments for the divine existence in an essay especially recommended to any swayed by the God-is-dead fantasy.

The Parables, by Don O. Via, Jr. (Fortress, 1967, 217 pp., $4). The subtitle, “Their Literary and Existential Dimension,” indicates the strength and weakness of this new study of the parables of Jesus. A promising start in a fresh literary appreciation ends up in tangled existentialism.

God and Word, by Gerhard Ebeling (Fortress, 1967, 53 pp., $1.50). The author stands at an active frontier of European theology and speaks to the American scene with a strong Brunner-like accent.

The Formation of Christendom, by Christopher Dawson (Sheed and Ward, 1967, 309 pp., $6). The doyen of Roman Catholic literary critics offers a popular treatment of Christian history, defending the thesis that Catholicism preserves the idea of the Church as a universal spiritual society.

The Church as a Prophetic Community, by E. Clinton Gardner (Westminster, 1967, 254 pp., $6). Yet another volume on the role of the Church in the secular order, but with the secularization of the sacred and the sacralization of the secular, we are left in a tizzy.

The History and Philosophy of the Metaphysical Movements in America, by J. Stillson Judah (Westminster, 1967,317 pp., $7.95). A source-book on modern para-religious vagaries such as spiritualism, theosophy, and Christian science. Contains much useful biographical data and fills an obvious gap.

The Theology of Existence, by Fritz Buri (Attic Press, 1965, 112 pp., $4). A translation of Buri’s 1954 volume that clarifies his shift of position away from the so-called Berne school and left-wing Bultmannians. His new stance is that of Heilsgeschicte, but of an existentialist, not Cullmannian, type, and begs the whole question of history.

The World of the Patriarchs, by Ignatius Hunt, O. S. B. (Prentice-Hall, 1967, 178 pp., $5.95). An up-to-date, readable, and useful summary of modern discussion on Genesis 12–50 that draws upon archaeological data and form-critical studies. A Roman Catholic scholar is here grappling with problems of historicity and theology in the Old Testament and leans toward (while not fully accepting) a heilsgeschichtlich approach within the framework of the Roman encyclical.

The Christian Church is awakening to the New Testament truth that the personal witness of all Christian laymen as well as ministers is essential if the Gospel of Christ is to penetrate the world. To have maximum impact, laymen must be wholeheartedly committed to Jesus Christ and biblically and theologically informed. A thorough knowledge of the Bible is necessary both for vigorous advancement of the Christian faith and for discernment and effective resistance of the false gods and false theology found in vital sectors of modern culture and the institutional church.

Faithful study of the Scriptures should be augmented by the study of works by Christian scholars and writers that help one handle the biblical record and comprehend the swirling moral and theological issues of our day. To induce laymen limited in biblical knowledge to undertake a reading program that will lead to theological literacy, we here recommend as a starter twenty books from various areas of religious study.

The list includes books to be devoured at one sitting and basic works to which the reader will return again and again. The books are not necessarily the greatest scholarly tomes in their fields but do present substantial and sometimes brilliant expositions within the intellectual grasp of most laymen with a bent for learning. Pastors also would do well to read and use these volumes and order them for their church libraries.

Contemporary Theology

CREATIVE MINDS IN CONTEMPORARY THEOLOGY, edited by Philip Edgcumbe Hughes (Eerdmans, 1966,488 pp., S6.95).

The bristling activity in theological studies in the twentieth century is now significantly influencing the message heard from our pulpits. This symposium of essays by prominent evangelical scholars on the thought of Barth, Berkouwer, Brunner, Bultmann, Cullmann, Denney, Dodd, Dooyeweerd, Forsyth, Gore, Niebuhr, Teilhard de Chardin, and Tillich will challenge the minds of readers and help them understand current happenings in the Church. Although complexities in theological formulations will at times make this book rough going for some laymen, they will be richly rewarded by the biographical sketch, exposition and evaluation of teachings, and bibliography found in each article. Editor Hughes writes on the creative task of theology.

Systematic Theology: Reformed

REFORMED DOGMATICS, by Herman Hoeksema (Reformed Free Publishing Association, 1966, 917 pp., $14.95).

In this recently published volume on dogmatics the late Professor Hoeksema seeks to be true to the Bible, theocentric, and faithful to the Reformed creeds and dogma of the Church. He systematically considers the major topics of theology: introduction to dogmatics, God, man, Christ, salvation, the Church, and final events. Premillennialists will take issue with his amillennial position. Except for an occasional Hebrew, Greek, or German word, the lay reader should be able to plow his way through this singlevolume work and thereby learn content and procedures in systematic theology.

The Basis Of Authority: Revelation

REVELATION AND THE BIBLE, edited by Carl F. H. Henry (Baker, 1958, 413 pp., $6).

Twenty-four evangelical scholars discuss different aspects of divine revelation, the doctrine that undergirds all Christian theology. They recognize the Bible as special revelation, inspired of God, recognized as authoritative by Christ, authenticated and interpreted by the Holy Spirit. Consideration is given to the biblical canon, principles of interpretation, archaeological confirmation of Scripture, and reversals of destructive biblical criticism. This volume is crucial for laymen in light of the curent down grading of scriptural authority.

Old Testament: Survey

UNDERSTANDING THE OLD TESTAMENT, by Bernhard W. Anderson (Prentice-Hall, 1966, 586 pp., $10.60).

Although this volume cannot be labeled “conservative,” we nonetheless recommend it for its wealth of material on the unique, sacred history of Israel. Anderson sees the Old Testament as a narrative of God’s action wherein he initiates a historical drama “that has changed human perspectives and has altered the course of human affairs.” He follows Israel’s pilgrimage as a covenant community from the Exodus to the Maccabean period, considering her faith, culture, political fortunes, literature, economic status, and religious practices.

New Testament: Survey

THE NEW TESTAMENT: ITS BACKGROUND, GROWTH, AND CONTENT, by Bruce M. Metzger (Abingdon, 1965, 288 pp., $4.75).

Designed as a first-year college text, Metzger’s survey of the New Testament examines its message against the backdrop of its historical setting and the literary development of its text. The New Testament is viewed not as just a collection of interesting documents but as the “very truth of the New Covenant” between God and man. The Princeton professor presents vital material on life in the apostolic age and offers a balanced view of current New Testament scholarship.

Biblical Criticism: Old Testament

A SURVEY OF OLD TESTAMENT INTRODUCTION, by Gleason L. Archer, Jr. (Moody, 1964, 507 pp., $6.95).

Archer brings an abundance of biblical knowledge and findings of modern scholarship to bear on problems of Old Testament general introduction (textual, canonical, and historical matters) and special introduction (authorship, date, purpose, and integrity of each of the thirty-nine books). Consistently evangelical, he argues for the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and offers a serious criticism of the documentary theory. Special attention is given to such problems as the historicity of Adam and the Fall, the date of the Exodus, the long day of Joshua, the characteristics of Hebrew poetry. The book is fairly heavy but instructive.

Biblical Criticism: New Testament

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND CRITICISM, by George Eldon Ladd (Eerdmans, 1967, 222 pp., $3.95).

From an evangelical perspective Ladd shows that biblical criticism is a necessary method of studying the Bible, the Word of God that has come in history through the words of men. He explains the purposes and methods of different types of criticism: textual, linguistic, literary, form (relating to the Gospels), historical, and comparative religions criticism. He recognizes that though the critical study of the Bible is not necessary for grasping the truth of redemption in Christ, it does help one better to understand the message in its historical setting.

Bible Commentary

THE NEW BIBLE COMMENTARY, edited by Francis Davidson. (Eerdmans, 1960, 1,199 pp., $7.95).

Probably the best evangelical one-volume Bible commentary available, this sturdy volume brings together the contributions of fifty scholars who seek to make the biblical text understandable to the lay reader. It offers general articles on scriptural authority and the various classes of literature of the Bible and an introduction, outline, and commentary for each book.

Bible Dictionary

THE NEW BIBLE DICTIONARY, edited by J. D. Douglas (Eerdmans, 1962, 1,375 pp., $12.95).

This spacious storehouse of biblical knowledge is well worth its price. It contains 2,300 articles on such topics as archaeological discoveries, geography of the Holy Land, Christian doctrine, institutions in Jewish life, historical personages, biblical versions, and plants and animals in the Bible. Helpful maps, photographs, and tables are included.

Christian Doctrine

BASIC CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES, edited by Carl F. H. Henry (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962, 320 pp., $6).

This comprehensive overview of the great teachings of the Bible consists of studies by top-flight evangelical scholars that first appeared in CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Editor Henry has assembled forty-three scripturally documented articles on such doctrines as the Trinity, decrees of God, predestination, atonement, justification by faith, the millennium, heaven and hell. The book will help anchor Christians adrift in their understanding of God’s revealed truth.

Apologetics

MERE CHRISTIANITY, by C. S. Lewis (Macmillan, 1964, 190 pp., $1.25).

Every layman should be acquainted with Lewis’s sparkling expositions and formidable defenses of Christian truth. Mere Christianity combines three of his most incisive and widely read books, The Case for Christianity, Beyond Personality, and Christian Behaviour. Lewis has a knack for cutting through specious arguments against supernaturalism and the Gospel and for communicating the reasonableness and joy of Christian faith. Laymen will also be fascinated by three other apologetic works by the “apostle to the skeptics”: The Screwtape Letters (Macmillan, 1962, 172 pp., $.95), The Problem of Pain (Macmillan, 1962, 160 pp., $.95), and Miracles (Macmillan, 1963, 192 pp., $.95).

Life Of Christ

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF JESUS CHRIST, by James S. Stewart (Abingdon, 192 pp., $1.50).

Stewart relates the events in the life and ministry of Jesus in accordance with the chronological framework in the Gospels. He examines Jesus’ teachings on the Gospel of the kingdom, God as father, the great confession, the royal law of love, and social questions. The passion, death, and resurrection are seen in relation to Christ’s exaltation as the living Lord of life.

The Church In Mission

THE INCENDIARY FELLOWSHIP, by Elton Trueblood (Harper & Row, 1967, 121 pp., $2.50).

The renowned Quaker professor realistically discusses the minority status of committed Christians in a world where opposition to the Gospel is growing. Citing the need for strong pastoral and lay leadership, he sets down practical conditions for church renewal. He commends the “toughness and tenderness” of “rational evangelicals” and calls the Church to carry out the purpose of Christ, who “came to cast fire upon the earth.” Trueblood’s book has the power to ignite laymen to action.

The Gospel And Modern Man

WORLD AFLAME, by Billy Graham (Doubleday, 1965, 267 pp., $3.95).

Graham confronts the deepening degradation in the moral, intellectual, and social dimensions of life today and shows how the Gospel of Christ alone offers hope for people. The evangelist offers an impressive amalgam of Scripture, illustrations, and explanations as he discusses sin and salvation, death and resurrection, personal transformation and social involvement, and Christ’s return and world judgment. This book, Graham’s best, pulsates with life just as his sermons do.

Christian Social Responsibility

INASMUCH, by David O. Moberg (Eerdmans, 1965, 216 pp., $2.45).

Moberg challenges evangelicals to be aware of the profoundly social aspect of the Christian’s spiritual life. After laying the foundation of biblical teaching on social responsibility, he considers how the Church can carry out its service to society. Although some evangelicals may object to certain of his views on church social-action practices (such as his hedged support for “church resolutions”) and be less than enthusiastic about some of his recommended readings, laymen nevertheless will be stimulated by Moberg’s bold and incisive discussion.

Church History

THE STORY OF THE CHURCH, by A. M. Renwick (Eerdmans, 1960, 222 pp., $1.25).

In 222 fact-filled pages Renwick traces the growth and development of the Church during nineteen tumultuous centuries. The early heresies, the leading church fathers, the papacy’s height (1073–1294), the Reformation, and the modern missionary movement receive terse but accurate treatment.

Evangelism: Comprehensive View

THE CHRISTIAN PERSUADER, by Leighton Ford (Harper & Row, 1966, 159 pp., $3.95).

Ford calls for mobilization of the whole Church to evangelize the whole world through the use of every rightful method. He recognizes the importance of using many means to communicate the biblical message in relation to present-day needs but stresses the key role of committed laymen in a total evangelistic strategy.

Evangelism: Personal Witnessing

How TO GIVE AWAY YOUR FAITH, by Paul E. Little (Inter-Varsity, 1966, 131 pp., $3.50).

This brief and bright volume, written particularly for college students, is a biblically based, intelligent, and practical guide to personal evangelism. Little discusses the who, what, why, how, and where of communicating the Gospel in everyday life. He deals with people’s needs, common objections to the Gospel, witnessing principles, and preparation of the witness.

Cults

THE KINGDOM OF THE CULTS, by Walter R. Martin (Zondervan, 1965, 443 pp., $5.95).

Martin analyzes and evaluates thirteen cults and provides an apologetic contrast from the viewpoint of biblical theology. He discusses the Bible’s perspective on false teachings and shows the psychological structure common to cults. Among the groups treated are Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, Mormonism, Zen Buddhism, the Black Muslims, Anglo-Israelism and Herbert W. Armstrong’s message, and Unity.

Christian Living

SETTING MEN FREE, by Bruce Larson (Zondervan, 1967, 120 pp., $2.95).

Larson’s new book is no exhaustive biblical treatise on Christian living but a warm, person-to-person conversation on how Christians may enter into the authentic style of life to which Christ calls them. Sprinkled with humor, personal examples, and practical principles, this easily read book points the way to joyful service by the believer.

Can evangelicals pick up the fragments in a constructive way?

Professor Paul Ramsey’s Who Speaks for the Church?, just detonated by Abingdon Press as somewhat of an ecumenical bombshell, has much to commend it. But this critique of ecumenical ethics also confronts the evangelical community—for which Ramsey is an uncomfortable spokesman—with the task of fixing its own perspectives in regard to social justice.

The Princeton professor calls upon the churches to “return to the fundamentals of Christian social ethics” and to rectify their message to the world. He rightly deplores the optimistic identification of the Church’s outlook with the secular city’s autonomous decisionmaking. He also insists that the Church has no divine revelation or special competence in specific policy formulation. He is equally concerned—as all of us ought to be—that Christianity not become a spiritual cult lacking a pertinent social outlook, as well it might through pious disregard of urgent secular problems.

Evangelicals, who have much to say about the primacy of evangelism and missions, ought to take this opportunity to consider what they may properly say to the world about social justice. The Christian community is called to proclaim God’s full counsel. That counsel, of course, is first and foremost the evangel, the good news that redemption is offered in Christ’s name. But the Church is also to declare the criteria by which nations will ultimately be judged, and the divine standards to which man and society must conform if civilization is to endure. Surely the present hour of social lawlessness and unrighteousness is one in which both law and Gospel need to be vigorously published. All that the scriptural revelation says about the nature and role of government—its duties and its limits—and all the divinely revealed commandments and principles of social justice belong legitimately to pulpit proclamation.

When evangelical Protestants deplore the Church’s meddling in politics, they surely do not disown its proper role in enunciating theological and moral principles that bear upon public life. And now they are called to make a bold new inquiry into questions that concern the social and political ethos. Although the Church has no mandate, authority, or competence to say yes or no to political and economic specifics—except perhaps in some emergency that may require a no to preserve the Christian faith, witness, and life—it must set the principles of revealed morality in dialogic relation to the modern alternatives. Only in this way can Christians comprehend what really governs a good political community and what really constitutes a good society. Are evangelical churches really encouraging laymen to wrestle earnestly with such issues, not on the assumption that the Church has revelational solutions for secular specifics, but rather on the assumption that devout men motivated by biblical standards can contribute significantly to public dialogue, to public policy, and to public leadership? Surely such a contribution can be made without losing Christian ethical judgments either in broad generalities that fail to relate the modern scene to the biblical norm or in specific political and military judgments.

We should say clearly at this point that the alternative to conciliar ethics proposed by Professor Ramsey is somewhat obscure and sometimes disappointing. He proposes no “siding” with evangelicals against liberals; in fact, he seems to know conservative religious views only in a form fully as objectionable as liberal religious opinion: “In the United States conservative and liberal religious opinion is the same thing as conservative and liberal secular opinion—with a sharper edge.” What Ramsey’s preferred non-liberal, non-evangelical “mix” may be he does not say.

Ramsey’s formula—“The ‘prolongation’ … of the ultimate principles of Christian ethics—revealed ethics—for as far (and only as far) as this will take us”—is formally acceptable to evangelical Christians; even he, however, seems disposed to carry ethics into the realm of an ecclesiastical binding of Christian conscience.

Ramsey calls for “a possible class of church teachings that goes between or beyond a fixed choice of either ethical generalities or prudential specifics” (Who Speaks for the Church?, p. 16, italics added). Although he opposes ecumenical policy-making in political, economic, and military specifics, he insists with W. A. Visser ‘t Hooft that the Church must give more than merely “counsels of perfection.” Insofar as Scripture goes beyond revealed principles and specific commands and supplies such rules as “pay your taxes,” “honor the king,” “forget not to assemble yourselves,” and so forth, surely no evangelical will dissent. But Ramsey wants considerably more, and the result is a shadowland of proposed ecclesiastical teaching of uncertain authority and validity. Nor is Ramsey content to leave the facing of the issues of social action to laymen, in distinction from the organized Church. The Church, apparently, is to provide a directional content that goes beyond revelation. What Ramsey pleads for in conciliar ethics is “greater reticence in reaching particular conclusions” (p. 15).

Ramsey’s “ridge” between generalities and particularities, insofar as he identifies it, remains in a twilight zone. While he opposes church “directives” for actions that involve specific policy formation, he endorses ecclesiastical “directions” of actions: economic, social, and political analyses that are decision-oriented and action-related. What is objectionable is “excessive particularity” in political judgments; approved, however, is “relative concreteness of decision-oriented directions.”

Although Ramsey concedes that “none of us knows the contours or the content of the ecumenical ethics of the future,” he seems wholly confident that ecumenical exploration could discover a middle way, a way that he apparently cannot define clearly. But is there really hope for more than a merely semantic reconciliation of the principle-particularity alternatives? As things stand, Ramsey’s approach is freighted with serious ambivalence. The Church is not to promote policy-making specifics, but neither is it to confine its message simply to the truth of Scripture. Its authority is apparently to be transferred also to proposals that range somewhere in between. Thus we face the same spectre that haunted those “middle axioms” long advocated by John Bennett—axioms that Christians were to honor as if they were divinely given when in fact they were not (and that Bennett invoked in order to rally liberal Protestants to the socialist cause).

On the one hand, Ramsey criticizes conciliar ethics because the Geneva commitments were “too particular”; on the other, he wants the Church to become more specific than the moral principles and teaching of Scripture. But how does specificity avoid particularity?

If the Church is to approve specific courses of action as authentic Christian guidance, does not this endorsem*nt—if it has any validity—also imply the non-Christian character of the alternatives?

Ramsey is not speaking, it should be noted, simply of counsel or guidance that a local congregation may properly supply to its members, but of ecclesiastical guidance that the institutional church is to provide for member churches and individuals in addressing the world in an extra-biblical way.

We find it difficult to reconcile such proposals with the passages in which Ramsey wants the Church to “penetrate to a deeper and deeper level the meaning of Christian responsibility—leaving to the conscience of individuals and groups of individuals both the task and the freedom to arrive at specific conclusions through untrammeled debate about particular social policies” (p. 15).

Ramsey asserts that the older “Faith and Order” models of ecumenical social ethics are sounder than that of Geneva, and commends Oberlin 1957 and Montreal 1964. Vatican II, Ramsey thinks, ought temporarily to serve as a procedural model for ecumenical ethics. Preparatory volumes by experts ought to be integrated into ecclesiastical deliberation, and the same discussants should meet over a period of years, with time between sessions for substantive theological-ethical reflection on drafting, followed by sessions with ample time for debate. Protestantism’s genius, he notes, has been in elevation of the laity. But today “an intractable difficulty” hinders the advance of Protestant ecumenical ethics: the lay expert is exalted “in an age when lay Christians have so largely ceased … witnessing to one another concerning the meaning of Christ for our lives.”

So far so good. But would such a return to Faith and Order, or to an approximation of Vatican II, really provide the Church with a desirable pattern of engagement in the contemporary social crisis? From an evangelical perspective, even these “sounder models” leave much to be desired. Ecumenical theology, we might observe, is in fully as much turmoil today as ecumenical evangelism and social ethics. Does neo-Protestant ecumenism stand in need only of revision? Is it any longer capable of reform—and if so, how is the ecumenical curia that has created and perpetuated the present ecumenical predicament to be dissolved?

Christianity Today On Political Ecumenism

… Ecumenical leaders would deny to churchmen and laymen even as individuals any conscientious expression of points of view contrary to left-wing ecclesiastical commitments. Their tactics ought not to obscure the growing political intervention of the institutional church through ecclesiastical approval of specific legislative items.CHRISTIANITY TODAYfirmly insists that the institutional church has neither a divine mandate, nor competence, nor jurisdiction in such matters (editorial, October 8, 1965, issue, p. 34).

While there may indeed be emergency situations in which the Church must confront the inhumanity of tyrannical forces that place themselves above law (as did the Nazis in their slaughter of six million Jews), the possibility of this kind of emergency confrontation hardly justifies the corporate church’s day-by-day political involvement, for which it lacks a biblical mandate, divine authority, and technical competence (editorial, May 13,1966, issue, p. 31).

Under the vague concept of “giving directions” while not propounding policy, much of what is objectionable in political ecumenism can be continued. Who speaks for the Church? Who will choose the issues for which the Church will formulate directions (Auschwitz, apartheid segregation, civil rights, poverty, minimum wages?).

As Ramsey sees it, admission of Red China to the United Nations is not a fit subject for church pronouncements. But when events deteriorate to the situation of Auschwitz, he says, it is much too late for the Church to begin to speak. What issues is he ready to put on the list with the Nazi crimes? And are these assuredly of such a nature that they demand an ecclesiastical Barmen whereby the Church confesses that Christ rather than alien totalitarian powers has Lordship over its life and thought?

Ramsey’s proposal that each delegate to Church and Society take along an informed counterpart who holds alternative views about policy proposals is amusing. The use of Christian funds and energies to sponsor gigantic meetings that engage in an illicit activity should be deplored. Ramsey himself was an informed participant holding alternative views at Geneva, but he did not have the privilege of voting.

No group of churchmen from around the world, meeting for two weeks in an ecumenical jamboree, can by their consensus inform the conscience of that vast host of devout Christian believers who, with Bibles open, want to know above all else what God’s will requires.

Reviving A Medieval Mentality

Sad signs of religious intolerance are rising in several lands apparently ready to revive a medieval mentality.

One is Spain, where 500 Protestant clergymen plan to hold a strategy meeting next month on how to oppose the new “religious liberty” law. Its requirements so violate positions supposedly espoused by the United Nations and Vatican II that Protestant churches refuse to apply for legal recognition. Meanwhile Spanish police have closed a Southern Baptist mission and threaten to shut down other efforts. Spain has a long-standing concordat with the Roman Catholic Church.

Another is Greece, where military putschists who claim to have saved that land from Communism have stripped away even the fragmented liberties that evangelical Christians had enjoyed. Now evangelicals are required to designate themselves as Protestants (which is equivalent, in the Greek Orthodox context, to calling themselves Swedenborgians in America); all their publications, the New Testament included, must bear the words “of Protestant origin.” Evangelical tract distribution is banned. Strong censorship has been imposed on evangelical publications; literature may not be sent through the post office. Even house prayer meetings are banned.

Another area is Eastern Europe, where children are now said to be taken from parents who teach them Christianity. Last month, a Christian woman in White Russia was reported sentenced to death for slaying her daughter—a charge that, if true, would have made the case one for the psychiatrist rather than the executioner.

In the Middle East, Israel’s annexation of old Jerusalem leaves in doubt the future of evangelical missions, in view of Israeli restriction of Christian activity to enterprises that were active at the time of statehood.

It is curious that the World Council of Churches, which holds dialogues with Marxists, flirts with Rome, and embraces the Orthodox churches, said nothing significant about religious liberty in Crete. Instead of unequivocally condemning the Spanish limitations requiring non-Catholic churches to register annually as “civic organizations” and to submit membership lists to the government, the Central Committee noted that this appears to “fall short of the positive standards” demanded by the churches. The committee did resolve to advance evangelism jointly with Roman Catholics and conservative Protestants. Freedom to proclaim Christ’s evangel would be one good emphasis with which to begin.

Putting Missionaries Out Of Business

“Missionary go home” just about epitomizes what was said at a conference sponsored by the National Council of Churches’ Division of Overseas Ministries last month at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Key speaker M. A. Thomas of the Mar Thoma Church, director of the Ecumenical Center at Bangalore, India, told missionaries from thirty-four countries and ten Protestant denominations that the work of missions is not conversion.

Mouthing the syncretistic-universalistic line of many ecumenical spokesmen, Father Thomas said that the goal of mission is the re-creation of society. Those engaged in “the struggle for civil rights, feeding the starving in Bihar, defying racist discrimination in South Africa, striving for dignity and social justice” are “partners of God in mission.”

The missionaries who felt Father Thomas had cut the nerve of missions got no help from the other chief speaker, the Rev. David M. Stanley, a Roman Catholic. He claimed that “Christ was already present in the pagans to whom he [the Apostle Paul] preached.”

Christians grounded in Scripture will reject these views. The Church needs more, not fewer, missionaries. The wishful tunes of syncretistic Pied Pipers must not deter evangelicals from their missionary duties.

Hate Begets Hate

As the brown-shirted, swastika-adorned leader of the minuscule American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell was more tolerated as a buffoon than feared as a purveyor of hate and violence. His virulent attacks on Jews and Negroes, his strident advocacy of Aryan superiority, and his disruptive demonstrations showed him to be an outrageous power seeker. At the time of his death last month, he commanded fewer than 100 active “storm troopers” in his nine-year-old party.

Rockwell’s violent death, inflicted by a sniper who police claim is a former Nazi Party member, demonstrated once again that those “who take the sword shall perish by the sword.” Army officials acted properly in refusing to permit his followers to conduct Nazi rites in Culpeper Cemetery. Such a ceremony would be an affront to the memories of the gallant men—some of whom died to defeat Nazism—whose bodies rest there.

Rockwell’s death can serve a purpose if it reminds us that hate begets hate, and leads us to devote ourselves to justice and love as the means of countering evil.

All that most people in the world see of Christ is what they see of him in the lives of Christians. If we do not honor him in our relations with others, we fail at the point that really counts.

We who identify ourselves as evangelicals are often guilty of attitudes and behavior totally inconsistent with our Christian profession. Although we strongly assert our concern for the verities of the faith, we too easily show little of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

It is sobering to realize that we can destroy our Christian witness by a careless word or thoughtless action. Our observers may say, “If that is the meaning of being a Christian, I want no part of it.”

One of the pitfalls for the theologically conservative is spiritual pride. Convinced of the facts of our faith, we may forget that it is not orthodoxy that saves but Jesus Christ. We rightly believe the biblical revelation of Christ’s person and work; but we may develop pride in our faith rather than in the saving grace of God.

Another pitfall is the ever present tendency to be Pharisaical, to thank God that we are not as other men. We pat ourselves on the back because we are not guilty of some weakness we see in others or do not have some habit we regard with distaste. Many true Christians are excluded from fellowship by other Christians who regard themselves too highly. Let us beware lest we sin against God and our brothers in this matter. We can reach others only where they are, not where we wish them to be. That was our Lord’s approach and it must be ours. To draw about us the cloak of self-righteousness smothers our witness.

Some years ago a dedicated minister worked for months trying to lead a rather notorious character in his community to the Lord. Finally he succeeded in getting the man to agree to come to a church dinner where a businessman was to give his witness to the power of Christ. When the man arrived at the church, the odor of alcohol was strong on his breath. Aware of it and embarrassed, he said to the minister, “I think I should leave.” The minister replied: “No, you stick with me and no one will know which of us smells like liquor.” His sense of humor (he had never taken a drink in his life) along with his loving attitude won that man to the Lord, and in succeeding years the man became an outstanding Christian. We all must realize, as this minister did, that in seeking to win men to Christ, we must accept them as they are.

In these days when there is so much emphasis on social reform, when social betterment seems to have crowded out the Gospel of redemption from sin in the minds of some, there is a real danger that in reaction to this imbalance we will neglect our clear responsibility to the needy. Compassion and loving concern must be a part of the life of the Christian. Without them our profession is empty. With them the love of Christ can make our witness effective.

Worsening race relations in many areas bring another call to Christians to search their own hearts. Christian race relations begin in our attitudes and continue in our outward contacts with others. We deplore violence in others; but are we ourselves always courteous and considerate, always concerned to create a climate in which the love of Christ can be manifested?

Another pitfall for the evangelical is the development of a spirit that actually rejoices in evil. Contrary to Paul’s admonition, we rejoice in iniquity and revel in the moral and spiritual failures of others. How interesting it is to savor a juicy story about some Christian who has fallen! And how often we forget that we too might be tempted and fall.

To the discredit of those involved, Christian fellowship has sometimes been broken over secondary matters, things on which godly people often differ. This does not honor the Lord nor further the work of God’s Kingdom.

Do we have a chip on our shoulder? Do we carry around a set of hypersensitive feelings? Do we go about looking for defects in others? Such attitudes make the bearer miserable, as well as those who must deal with him.

Many conservatives fail inexcusably in the matter of common courtesy and graciousness. I know some extreme liberals who put us to shame by their kindness and consideration of others. Paul’s word to Timothy speaks to all Christians: “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to every one.…” (2 Tim. 2:24, RSV). How often we forget that “a soft answer turneth away wrath,”—with disastrous results to our effective Christian witness!

Some persons who are widely reputed to be conservative Christians lead lives totally inconsistent with their professions. Some engage in immorality or other disgraceful behavior even as they proclaim their orthodoxy. Did you say, “Impossible for me”? “Let any one who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor. 10:12).

Boasting of one’s orthodoxy is a pit-fall into which some fall. Our boast is in nothing we are or do but only in the redeeming grace of a loving God. Spurious spirituality is easily recognized. A trust in orthodoxy as an end in itself is presumption at best and often pure pharisaism.

For any Christian, the lack of an adequate devotional life means spiritual starvation. I have known people who affirmed their faith in the Bible “from cover to cover” but who at the same time knew nothing about it. Their affirmation may have sounded pious, but their ignorance of the Word revealed the true state of their hearts. Likewise, without a prayer life in which prayer is as natural as breathing, the spiritual nature shrivels and dies.

Then, too, there is a form of spiritual laziness that presumes on the grace of God and stunts spiritual growth. Orthodoxy is no excuse for laziness. Christ has saved us to serve him and our fellow man. We cannot hide behind a facade of conservative beliefs while we do nothing to witness to the love of God.

The Christian who honors his Lord is not the one who, like the Pharisees, boasts of his orthodoxy but the one who day by day seizes every opportunity God gives him and tries in every way possible to glorify the One who has redeemed him.

Belief in all that the Scriptures teach about the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ is the Christian’s foundation. On that sure foundation he should build a life consistent with that faith. There are pitfalls all about, but the One who saves will also keep.

L. NELSON BELL