Page 5893 – Christianity Today (2025)

Biblical criticism in some form or other is accepted practically everywhere these days. While every Christian readily admits the importance of knowing as accurately as possible the geographical and historical background and authorship of each book of the Bible, many have gone much further. The so-called higher or internal critical methods have frequently tried to prove that a biblical book is not an integral unity but is made up of the writings of a number of different authors. Other arguments have claimed that some of the biblical writings err in their statements of fact as well as in their claim to a certain authorship.

Some Christians have responded to this situation by accepting the results of critical studies of the Scriptures while at the same time clinging to their trust in biblical authority. Despite all the assumed historical evidence to the contrary, they insist they can still accept the Bible as God’s authoritative revelation to man because the Spirit of God witnesses with their spirits that the Bible is the Word of God.

The difficulty with this position is that, as one young student put it to me after hearing an address on this theme, it is pure subjectivism. With this as our only ground of belief, she insisted, the Koran, the Vedas, and any other religious books may have the same authority if we have the feeling that they are divine revelation. It is virtually impossible to prove that one’s acceptance of the Bible, despite claimed historical inaccuracies and errors, is the result of the testimony of the Holy Spirit, and not merely of wishful thinking.

Other Christians respond to destructive biblical criticism by attacking it and trying to demolish its conclusions. Then, bolstering their claims with internal and external evidence, they attempt to show the historical accuracy of the Bible’s statements and the scientific validity of its concepts, in the hope of proving its divine inspiration and authority.

Although in some circles this second tactic has been commonly used for a century or so, it also has great weaknesses as a rationalistic point of view. The fact is, Christians cannot prove certain biblical statements or ideas according to modern historical and scientific standards because essential links are often missing from the chain of evidence. By claiming to prove their whole position logically and scientifically, these Christians set up human scientific reasoning as the ultimate standard of truth; then if their claims do not meet the demands of this way of thinking, their proof collapses from within.

What the Christian must do is face the question of history itself, for while the Bible is not a textbook of history, it is a collection of historically generated sources, such as chronicles, poems, prophecies, and letters. Like the historian, the biblical scholar has to take into account the critical problems of the external aspects of the biblical writings and also of the supposedly assured results of internal criticism. He has to look at the evidence as carefully and as objectively as possible so that he can properly evaluate the critical assertions.

At the same time he must also accept the idea that, no matter how hard he works, gaps will appear in his evidence. After all, he, like the historian, has as his facts only the remains of past events left on the shifting sands of time. Yet despite this problem of gaps in the available information, the historian carries on his studies confident that he can attain at least a partial knowledge of what happened in the past. The scholar dealing with Scriptures is in the same position: he can attain a certain knowledge of the biblical background, but he can never gain complete knowledge of every event. There will always be gaps in his understanding of the Bible and in his arguments for its historical accuracy.

Furthermore, the problem goes far deeper. A person’s approach to the Bible ultimately stems from his basic view of the nature of reality. If he begins by denying that God exists or has revealed himself, he can only approach the Bible with the attitude that it is a collection of ancient myths and fables that have no authority except as expressions of what men believed many centuries ago. If, on the other hand, he believes that God does exist and that he has revealed himself to man in and through Jesus Christ, his Son, his attitude toward the Bible will be very different. One’s acceptance or rejection of the Bible is ultimately determined, therefore, not by his historico-grammatical exegesis of the biblical text, nor by a critical analysis of its background, but by his religious faith—even if that faith is atheism.

This message becomes clear when we turn to the history of biblical criticism over the past two centuries. Out of the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Hegel flowed streams of thought that ran beneath much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century biblical study. Kant’s denial of man’s ability to know anything but the phenomenal, i.e., the space-time world—and his insistence that in that area man’s judgment was final stimulated much of the early attack on the truthfulness and dependability of the biblical record. Although Hegel, building on Kant’s thesis, did not deny the possibility of a knowledge of the transcendent, he made such knowledge fundamentally subjective, while at the same time presenting a scheme to make history operate in a dialectic manner that eventually reconciled all opposites.

These two systems of thought underlie nearly all subsequent non-Christian Western thought, including the modern philosophy of existentialism, which is usually frankly atheistic. The trend of thought in the Western world for two centuries has been toward denying the possibility of divine revelation, even when admitting the existence of a god, on the grounds that such a being could not be truly personal. Arnold Toynbee, who accurately reflects contemporary thinking, has expressed this point of view in many books and speeches. To deal with the Bible from this standpoint is to deny from the beginning its claim to be divine revelation.

This rejection of the Bible as the Word of God has produced such phenomena as the documentary hypothesis, an attempt to reconstruct from the Old Testament various writings for which there is no tangible evidence but which were supposedly compiled by ancient editors into the present text. This destroys the whole fabric of the Old Testament as it stands. It is then reorganized on the basis of a Hegelian dialectical interpretation of history. No historian does this with any other historical source, ancient or modern. In New Testament scholarship the same philosophical presuppositions have produced the demythologizing technique of Rudolf Bultmann, Ernst Fuchs, and others who have carried the process out to its logical conclusion. The result is the wrecking of the Bible, not only as divine revelation, but as a historical source of even the same degree of integrity as Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War or Livy’s Annals of Rome. It is a not unexpected result, given the negative presuppositions produced by modern philosophy.

The Christian’s answer to this is, first of all, that no one can truly believe the Bible is the Word of God unless he is enlightened by the Holy Spirit to see that it is so. Without “the testimony of the Holy Spirit,” all the argument in the world, no matter how logical and correct, will not bring anyone to believe that the Bible is inspired. The Apostle Paul points this out specifically in First Corinthians 2, and Christ implied as much on numerous occasions while he was on earth. The Old Testament was in fact a closed book to the Jews until the Spirit of God made them see its true meaning and authority (John 5:36 ff.; 6:36 ff.). As Christ pointed out to Nicodemus in John 3, before anyone can truly speak of spiritual things, he must be “born again,” by the Spirit. His spiritual eyes must be opened to see that the Bible is truly the Word of God (Ps. 119:18).

Yet this does not relieve the Christian of the responsibility of making a careful study of the biblical text and its background and authorship. After all, to the Christian the Bible is both a divine and a human book. While prophets and apostles spoke as they were carried along by the Spirit, the Spirit of God never destroyed their humanity; they were still human beings writing in human situations. Furthermore, their own statements indicate that some of the books are collections of prophecies pronounced at different times, while others are the result of extensive historical research or of personal experiences. Consequently the use of extra-biblical evidence for understanding and validating biblical statements is quite proper: histories, archaeological remains, and the like throw much light on the biblical text. Through them the student comes to a deeper knowledge and understanding of what the Bible has to say.

As he works, though, the Bible historian must apply the same high standards of scholarship and methodology that he would follow in other areas. In studying Thucydides, for instance, the historian never attempts to take the liberties with the text that many “higher critical” or “demythologizing” students of the Bible assume is their prerogative. If we approach the Old and New Testaments with the proper and “humble” historical methodology, we discover that it is a much more reliable historical document than many today are prepared to admit.

The answer to the problem posed to the Christian faith by biblical criticism, then, is neither to retreat into a completely subjective defensive position nor to advance to the attack with the idea of proving the Bible’s historical, scientific accuracy and divine inspiration by some form of philosophical argument or historical evidence. No man will accept the Christian position as long as his presuppositions, his religious beliefs, incline him away from it; “a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” Only when he is converted through the action of the Holy Spirit will he adopt a different approach and be willing to investigate the Bible as he finds it, without attempting to foist on it his own religious or irreligious opinions. When that happens, he will discover that from both the historical and the spiritual points of view it effectively proves itself to be the Word of God.

W. Stanford Reid is professor of history at Wellington College, University of Guelph, Ontario. He received the Th.M. degree from Westminster Theological Seminary and the Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Many seminaries today require no knowledge of biblical languages for their degree, and there are increasing pressures to make this trend the norm in theological education. Broadly speaking, at least two causes appear to underlie this development, one educational and one theological.

American higher education tends to be “higher” in name than in fact. In a climate in which “everyone has a right to a college degree,” it is understandable that the more demanding disciplines, of which language skill is one, would be the first to be fudged or sacrificed.

Perhaps a greater contributor to the low priority of languages—particularly ancient languages—is the pragmatic temper of American education, what Richard Hofstadter calls its anti-intellectualism. This manifests itself in a demand for immediate relevance and in an indifference toward academic disciplines that do not have a direct application to the student’s current situation. Philosophically, this pragmatic bent is complemented by a belief that truth resides in the current event or process and by a pedagogical model of “learning through involvement,” or, in an older, related idiom, “progressive education.” This methodology contrasts sharply with a historical (or scientific) method in which an idea or period is carefully studied within its own context, prior to and distinct from its relation to current events or applications.

The desire for instant relevance creates a demand for instant synthesis. In the seminary, then, one no longer is to “learn theology” of a past age; rather, one is to “do theology” in the present. Whatever historical ingredients are needed are to be brought prepackaged to the task. It is like making a lemon meringue pie with a purchased pie shell, ready-mix filling, and aerosol topping—one is “doing cooking” without having to bother with “learning to cook.”

In this context biblical language skills are superfluous. For the historical understanding of Scripture, which language study is primarily designed to facilitate, has itself been severely discounted.

Two Weaknesses

In theological education this method brings the whole curriculum immediately into focus on the minister’s professional task. This might seem entirely desirable; after all, the divinity degree should reflect professional training and not academic achievement. But there are two weaknesses in this kind of reasoning. The first may be brought out by a look at two other professional degrees, law and medicine. In law school—at least this was so when I was there—understanding a case is assumed to require a prior knowledge of, for example, economics, history, and political science. It is necessary to study cases in their historical context lest they be wrongly applied to a contemporary situation. Similarly, in medicine the study of chemistry and biology is an important prerequisite. It is not enough for the future doctor to practice prescription writing and bedside manners.

For future ministers also, academic disciplines are an essential foundation for professional training. Perhaps it would be good to develop this foundation more at the undergraduate level, as it is done in law and medicine. But any professional theological program that does not build upon a competence in academic theology will inevitably be superficial. Lacking the skill to examine a biblical teaching in its own context, for example, the student is not well equipped to apply that teaching to a current situation.

Focusing the whole seminary curriculum on the minister’s professional task has a second weakness: it misinterprets the role of the Bible in the tack of ministry. When inordinate emphasis is given to the minister’s current situation, the Bible tends to be seen, not as an authority by which his ministry is governed, but as a resource that, along with others; aids him in his task. At this point the methodological problem becomes a theological problem, and to this we now turn.

The Ministry of the Word

In the Reformed tradition a central task of the minister has been to teach the Scriptures. This arose from the conviction that both the traditions and the novelties of the Church needed to be continually reformed according to the Word of God. In a recent lecture Professor W. C. van Unnik put it this way: As long as the Church recognizes its divinely given mission to present the message of the Bible ever anew to each generation in its own terms, then the Church’s pastors and teachers can never neglect the serious, sustained encounter with the Scriptures required for fulfilling that mission. Mainstream American Protestantism needs to hear Professor van Unnik’s exhortation. For in its seminaries and its church life during this century, the drift from the centrality of the Scriptures has been, apart from the biblical theology movement following World War II, a fairly consistent trend.

What has this to do with biblical languages? First, it is an observable fact in a number of seminaries that when the language requirement is removed, serious study of Scripture becomes a marginal element in the seminary’s curriculum. Of course, the seminary may only reflect what is already true in the life of the Church. A minister recently confided that he had never made use of his language skills. Having heard him preach, I have no doubt that he was telling the truth. The implications of the statement are rather broad. For without some use of the biblical languages one cannot make a reasoned use of modern literature about the Bible or consult a serious commentary, cannot do a word study or discuss a biblical concept, and cannot distinguish among the many translations and paraphrases being published today.

Even if many pastors and those in specialized ministries no longer use the biblical languages, does this justify abandoning the language requirement for the theological student? Hardly. This narrow view of “relevance” not only restricts the seminarian’s study of biblical literature and historical theology to textbooks of a high-school level but also fails to consider the importance of language in giving perspective to one’s understanding of Scripture. No minister who has—however long ago—learned Hebrew or Greek can ever be quite as susceptible as before to a simplistic misuse of the Bible. Whether or not he ever becomes a gifted interpreter of the biblical message to his people, he has at least an important tool to use to that end if he will.

According to the New Testament, to understand what God is doing in the world one must search the prophets; and, likewise, to understand what one reads one must be alert to what is happening in the world. Neither the ancient Word nor the “signs of the times” can be neglected if God’s current acts and messages are to be discerned and communicated. Exclusive attention to past or present must be avoided just as the distinction between them must not be fuzzed over.

But to my mind our problem today is not a Church immersed in the Scriptures and indifferent to current events, it is rather a Church largely ignorant of the Scriptures, allowing events to determine its message. At a time when academic standards are in decline and the cultural pressures are to define relevance in activist terms, can a seminary say to students, “We demand more because we think it important to the Church and to your ministry”? I think we can. And if we explain why, the student who seriously desires to be a minister of the Word of God will buy it.

E. Earle Ellis is professor of biblical studies at New Brunswick (New Jersey) Theological Seminary Reformed Church in America. He received the Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. The substance of this essay was first published in the “Reformed Review” (Spring, 1971).

In recent months, both the secular and the religious press have called attention to the economic plight of small, private colleges and universities. Evangelicals cannot ignore the serious question raised in an editorial in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, “Shall the Christian Colleges Die?” (May 21, 1971). We must face the realistic possibility that many Christian schools will be closing their doors; one estimate is that more than forty schools will shut down this year. Evangelical educators are aware that some hard decisions must be made if their schools are to survive.

Yet there are signs that the finest and strongest of our evangelical colleges will weather the storm and will continue to provide the high caliber of education for which they have become widely recognized. Crises are nothing new for the Christian colleges: their histories are replete with them. The Christian college has proved itself amazingly resilient.

In the previously mentioned issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Frank E. Gaebelein sounded a challenge to evangelical educators, and a most timely one: “Christian education must explore new paths, though this may mean breaking with traditional ways of doing things.” Breaking with the traditional ways is no easy task, but evangelicals have been quite willing in the past to make necessary educational adjustments. To mention a few: they introduced the Sunday school, the Bible school, and in more recent times—yet long before reinforcement theory became popular in educational psychology—the motivational techniques of Sunday-school contests and prizes.

Is there an educational alternative to the private college for evangelicals to consider in the light of current economic stresses and strains? I propose that “Evangelical Living and Learning Centers” for undergraduate students be built on private property near large state universities. What I have in mind is not unlike the old colleges at Oxford University, or the new, small state colleges located within large state universities, such as those at Michigan State and at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

But although there are similarities, there are also important differences. A Center would have no official connection with the state university. The student in an “Evangelical Living and Learning Center” would use all the instructional and other facilities of the state campus. The Center building, or cluster of buildings, would be architecturally attractive and well equipped to provide meals and residence-hall living in a Christ-honoring atmosphere. In addition, these buildings could accommodate both large- and small-group instruction and would be equipped with the latest in audio-visual learning aids. The permanent staff would be academically qualified evangelical educators.

Along with their studies at the state university, students would be required to take courses and seminars in the Center during their four years; the subjects would be Bible, theology, apologetics, and philosophy. Students would be encouraged to develop their own “mini-courses” to meet particular needs and interests. In addition to the regular staff, outstanding evangelical professors from both this country and abroad would be invited to teach at the Center for a semester or two. There are indications that state universities are increasingly willing to give credit for off-campus courses if they are taught by qualified people in the field.

The teaching staff would also spend time talking informally with students, discussing the conflicts that will arise between the secular instruction at the university and a Christian world-and-life view. Much time would be spent in an intellectually honest investigation of the Christian faith and its relation to secular disciplines. The university class in anthropology, sociology, or psychology, for example, would become a testing ground for the Christian view of the nature of man. In the physical sciences the philososphy of science would be investigated from a Christian perspective. Thus the Christian student in a Living and Learning Center would use his knowledge daily on the campus.

Many evangelical students and faculty members at state universities belong to campus organizations dedicated to reaching students for Christ and ministering to those who commit their lives to him. For a number of years Inter-Varsity Fellowship and Campus Crusade for Christ have been the vanguard of evangelical penetration of the secular campus. The Center would not compete with these organizations but would seek to work with them in a concerted outreach. Those of us who are associated with large universities know that there is plenty of room for all who want to reach students for Christ. The problem is not that we have too many organizations but that we have too few.

Nor would the Center replace the good, effective, Christian liberal-arts college. The possibilities for cooperation are inviting: for instance, some students might transfer from one to the other, thus gaining the experience of studying in two different kinds of learning situations; and professors from Christian colleges might teach at a Center for a semester or two.

A large part of the cost of education is in salaries, student services, and building construction and maintenance. The cost of living in the Center would be only slightly more than what the student attending the state university would normally pay. The rest of the money needed to ensure a quality program could come from interested people who were convinced that the Living and Learning Center was a worthy educational innovation.

Some may point out that the students at the Center would be largely from the state in which the Center is located. There is indeed an attractiveness in attending a college where students come from all sections of the country. But in recent years state legislatures have substantially raised out-of-state tuition for undergraduate students. Some states have limited reciprocal arrangements with neighboring states, and perhaps state legislatures could be encouraged to do more. This would give the Center a wider geographic distribution.

My experience has been that Christian students on the secular campus do not witness forthrightly for Christ in class even when given the opportunity to do so. Perhaps the reason is that, like all other students, they are afraid of low grades and social disapproval. Most professors do not value evangelical Christianity. Furthermore, most students are not equipped to handle arguments presented by a professor or opposition from other students. One of the objectives of the Center would be to develop in the Christian student both the courage and the skills necessary to make his witness for Christ effective in the classroom and on campus.

The possibility of “Evangelical Living and Learning Centers” with hundreds of witnessing Christians involved in the mainstream of university life is exciting indeed. This kind of witness could not easily be ignored by even the largest state university.

Frank C. Nelsen is assistant professor of the history and philosophy of education at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He received the B.A. from Wheaton College and the M.A. and Ph.D. from Michigan State.

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? In this rhetorical manner Tertullian raised the question of the relation of philosophy to revelation. The answer, of course, is Much, every way. Athens and Jerusalem were both places of human habitation and thus centers of commerce, education, political activity, religious inquiry, crime and other forms of evil. The human enterprise in its astonishing variety is recognizably occupied with distinctively human concerns, wherever it spreads. Men struggle with the physical environment, with problems arising out of their instinctual natures, with issues created by their societal interrelatedness, with questions of meaning and value.

To be human is to be a part of this matrix of earth, time, family, and generation. This is the “given” that is each person’s unearned heritage as homo sapiens. Each of us is brother to every son of Adam. Each plays a role in the continuing story of mankind.

As human beings we are inevitably items in the catalogue of nature. The earth is our mother, the beasts our rivals for her attention and benevolence. But according to Scripture our relation to earth is far more significant than that of merely tenants and dependents. To man was given custody of land and sea, flora and fauna; he was to preserve and protect all living things upon the face of the earth. Stewardship of this scope forced upon man the serious study of the world which supports him and for which he is responsible.

In the pursuit of this kind of knowledge there emerged the sciences needed for the development of human societies. Tools were invented, cities built, and art created. Human life took on secular character. The urgency of mundane matters could not be ignored except in despair of life. Food, shelter, the security of property, the safety of the community, were considerations of immediate importance to every person in the social complex. In the midst of grappling with these persistent problems, man turned his attention to the big questions of existence.

This history of man as a secular being is the essential curriculum for every man who seeks to understand his life in the world. No facet of the human career, so far as it is known from the beginning, is unimportant or irrelevant data for any thoughtful person. Everything that has been learned about the earth, about the forms of life on earth, about man’s being and relationships, about the events that have marked the flow of time, is the object of our eager investigation as cognitive creatures.

Because we are intelligent beings we are driven to examine the world, to pry into its secrets and to explore the record of our own past. Intelligence requires this cerebral effort. The spirit of learning is integral to the highest and noblest impulses of human nature. As Aristotle maintained in his Metaphysics, “all men by nature desire to know.”

The point I am suggesting is that the need to learn inheres in the being of man as man. And that the effort to satisfy that need by energetic and disciplined study of all available data is man’s most exalted work. The man who preaches is first of all a man, living under the conditions of existence that support and limit all men, sharing in the human fraternity. He experiences hunger, fear, solitude, and the flight of time in common with his fellow men. The quality of this temporal existence and the dynamics of its emotions and moods are inevitably concerns of keen interest to every reflective mind. Only the mentally incompetent are exempt from the necessity of examining life and the world in time.

It is well known to students of the Old Testament that ancient Hebrew thought celebrated earthly life. The full-bodied joys of robust human experience were to be neither renounced nor regretted. Earth was fair, life was good. From this perspective the Wisdom literature surveys the whole of human life and seeks to assign appropriate value to its varied aspects. This comprehensive perspective commends Hebrew thought to the attention of scholars committed to the service of mankind. Mankind must be the subject of our resolute study.

This mandate to inquire into the character of human existence in all its dimensions is implicit in the function of the Church as herald of the Word. Not only is it essential to know the message to be proclaimed; it is also vital to know the nature of the creature to whom the proclamation is directed. Jesus knew what was in man, the Gospels tell us. His insight into the human heart gave sharp impact and continuing liveliness to his words. It is of more than passing interest to note that most of our Lord’s teaching developed out of confrontation with specific issues and problems through which he saw the reflection of man’s perennial inquietude and malaise. Knowing men, he was competent to prescribe for mankind.

Alexander Pope, often ridiculed by preachers for his counsel “the proper study of mankind is man,” was nevertheless right. This need not and ought not to be the only course in the curriculum of life, but it is an indispensable one. Men have insistent, critical needs. It is monstrous to preach even such incredibly good news as the Gospel in ways that do not appear to speak with power and grace to man’s needs. To this extent, at least, we can appreciate the force of Tillich’s method of correlation: the deep questions of existence are answered in the affirmations of revelation. It is helpful to know what the questions are before we rush to supply the answers!

In our lifetime the wrong kind of stress has been placed, in evangelical circles, on the simplicity of the Gospel. This emphasis has been construed as a beatitude on the simple-minded. Does not Isaiah speak of a highway so well marked that even “fools shall not err therein” (35:8)? What need is there for learning if salvation is available on terms so elementary that even a child can easily understand them? Does not even the Apostle Paul warn against the wisdom of this world and contrast it with the far stronger “foolishness of God” (1 Cor. 1:19–25)?

There is undeniably an important truth in this thicket of wrong-headed questions. Intellectual pride has spawned a dreadful progeny of impotent and disastrous programs aimed at improving man’s estate. The presumption that human genius needs no assistance from divine providence in managing the affairs of earth has lifted the lid on a Pandora’s box of evils that engulf mankind and continue to proliferate. Man by wisdom discovers neither himself, nor God, nor redemption.

But this sobering acknowledgment does not constitute the sanctification of ignorance. Man is the creature whom God addresses. That address is apprehended by the mind and spirit. Revelation is possible only because there is an intelligent and sensitive being to receive it. Furthermore, the character of that revelation, in all its ramifications, requires the full use of man’s mental powers to mature insight and understanding. New light is continually breaking forth from God’s Word, but it is no mystery that it shines only in studious and thoughtful minds.

Therefore let us celebrate the intellect as a splendid endowment of the Creator enabling us to order our lives by the light of knowledge and truth. John Calvin scolded those who were so depressed by the depravity of human nature that they supposed man incapable of discerning the truth apart from regeneration. Calvin observed that the desire to know truth is characteristic of all men: “human understanding then possesses some power of perception since it is by nature captivated by love of truth” (Institutes, Bk. II, Ch. II, 13). He praised secular learning—Calvin once aspired to be a humanist scholar after the pattern of Erasmus—and ascribed all truth discovered in every field of investigation to one divine source. He writes,

Whenever we come upon these matters in secular writers, let that admirable light of truth shining in them teach us that the mind of man, though fallen and perverted from its wholeness, is nevertheless clothed and ornamented with God’s excellent gifts. If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God [ibid., Bk. II, Ch. II, 15].

Reason and understanding are a part of man’s natural equipment, thanks to a benevolent Providence. For this great benefaction we should be profoundly grateful. Calvin speaks wryly to this point when he says, “The Creator of nature himself abundantly arouses this gratitude in us when he creates imbeciles (ibid., Bk. II, Ch. II, 14). In Rupert Brooke’s memorable phrase, there is a “glory of the lighted mind.”

The Travelers Meet

Emmaus lies a short day’s walk away

for those who make the journey over space.

But half a lifetime past before my face

with war and unbelief in full display

make journeying through time a wider bay

than Chesapeake to separate the pace

of marching duty from joy’s dancing grace

dustless through Friday night and Saturday.

After the Crucifixion what is planned?

If I seek not the living with the dead,

where shall I seek him? If he does not stand

or show his hands, his side, his thorn-cut head,

shall I find him?

Stay, friend. Be welcomed, and

discovered in the breaking of the bread.

TERENCE Y. MULLINS

Philosopher Etienne Gilson sees a divine immanence in this human capacity to learn. He contends that “every effort of reason to know the truth attests God’s presence in us and may hence be rightly considered as on an equality with prayer.… If God is present in us through our intelligence, the purest form of worship we can offer him is the worship of truth” (Essays on Maimonides, p. 30). The exercise of the intellect in a life-long pursuit of knowledge and wisdom is the vocation of the genuinely pious person. God the Ultimate Truth is honored in our finite endeavors to find answers to the stubborn questions of existence.

If we turn our attention away from metaphysical reflections and look at the contemporary Church in its social context, we are impressed again with the need for Christians to rediscover their intellectual calling. This urgency presses upon us from two directions.

From one standpoint the Church is confronted by a popular pragmatism that is apathetic toward the question of truth. Relativism has won the day with a considerable segment of society, replacing the search for truth with techniques of adjustment to the convolutions of the modern world. To ask about reality is to play a meaningless game with words. What is real is now, Viet Nam, taxes, and take-home wages. How can I live in the world as presently shaped without coming apart at the seams?

The how questions always replace the what and why questions in a technology-oriented society. Success, profit, and comfort are key words in its vocabulary.

Ominous signs abound that this kind of secular mentality has invaded the Church, encountering only feeble resistance. Doctrinal and theological issues are peripheral matters for most church members—and clergy. What is important in the local church and denominational headquarters is the success of the institution—numerical growth, fiscal prosperity, plant expansion. That all this can occur in the absence of didache and with only an occasional nod at kerygma is a clear symptom of malignancy. The Church cannot live for long on such worldly resources.

People may act in accord with values and ideals inherited for a time, even when they have lost faith in them, or understanding of them, as viable life-patterns. But sooner or later they will cease to practice these virtues unless they recover intellectual conviction of their worth. When commitment is detached from sound thinking, it is doomed to an early demise. Surface tides of pietistic enthusiasm may wash over tangential church-related groups from time to time, but tides always ebb as well as flow. The Kingdom of God is effectively served by men who know the truth, men who have the mind of Christ.

The second threat to the Church implicit in the social situation is the new secular consciousness of late twentieth-century man. His recently won mastery over the atom and his triumphs over earth’s gravitational forces have generated enormous self-confidence. Man has come of age in the world. He can manage his own affairs without recourse to a divine power waiting behind the scenes to rescue him when things get out of control. The controls of the forces of nature are now in human hands.

Secular as the descriptive adjective of the modern spirit refers not only to the ascendancy of the physical sciences but also to a distinctively this-worldly attitude that permeates our culture and time. There is no transcendent realm determining the course and destiny of this contingent earth. All we can know is circumferenced by space and time and is discoverable only at the price of strenuous efforts of mind and will. Whatever meanings come to light in the process are meanings that inhere in our temporal and historical existence only. Any ultimate order of reality and truth beyond our finite environment is outside the reach of our limited powers and can only be the subject of inconclusive speculation.

This is the profile of the world in which the Church lives today. To this kind of auditor, informed by presuppositions about the world significantly different from those cherished by his predecessors, the Christian message of redemption is preached. This demanding and challenging situation underscores the notices Peter Berger thinks should be posted far and wide: “Wanted: A Christian Intelligentsia!” (Theology Today, July, 1962, p. 190). To be out-educated and out-thought by the advocates of a secular faith is no cause for rejoicing by those who claim to represent the Incarnate Truth.

Professor Jaroslav Pelikan reminds us that the Christian tradition once included the attitude that “being an intellectual meant being a Christian.” He distinguishes three principal features of the intellectual tradition of the Christian Church: “a passion for being, a reverence for language, and an enthusiasm for history” (“The Christian as an Intellectual,” The Christian Scholar, Spring, 1962). “Being” includes the whole created universe. Implicit in Christian consciousness is an appreciation for nature, a profound respect for all the orders of creation. Reverence for life is generic to the Christian mind. From this reverence is born the scientific spirit that ceaselessly probes the mysteries of being in all its manifold expressions.

Language as the vehicle of thought and the conservator of truth has always been regarded as a priceless treasure by the molders of Christian tradition. Those who believe that faith is evoked by hearing know that there is nothing “mere” about words.

History is the comprehensive story of the life of the human race from its traceable beginnings to the present, critically interpreted by informed investigators. Every man has an incalculably great stake in history, for he owes the very shape of his existence to the accumulated knowledge of the past. Christian concern for historical data has special significance since God chose to make himself and his will known through a long succession of temporal events.

I have argued that the enterprise of learning is both a human and a Christian imperative. Since we are men, i.e., rational beings, we are impelled to inquire into the nature of our existence, the lessons of our past, and the enigmas of the present time. Since we are Christian men, we are under mandate to acquire such competence and skill in handling the Word of Truth as to merit the approval of its ultimate Author. Only the learned man can be a whole man, a cultivated man, a mature man, and thus in the finest sense, a Christian man.

Fred P. Thompson, Jr., is president of Emmanuel School of Religion, a graduate seminary of the conservative Christian Churches, in Milligan College, Tennessee. He received the M.A. degree from George Pepperdine College and the B.D. degree from Christian Theological Seminary.

Christian education is the focal point of interest in this issue. The lead editorial deals with identity, ideology, and finances in Christian colleges. One financial alternative—“evangelical living and learning centers”—is proposed by Frank Nelsen. Fred Thompson digs down to a basic point: man’s need to learn. Two articles will be of special interest to seminary students: W. Stanford Reid writes on how to respond to destructive biblical criticism, and E. Earle Ellis asks, “What good are Hebrew and Greek?”

We are happy to report that our news editor, Edward E. Plowman, won a special award from Religious Heritage of America for “his perceptive coverage and analysis of the Jesus Movement in America in articles in the magazine; and for his book The Jesus Movement in America.”

Keeping abreast of the citations and awards accorded our board member Billy Graham is not easy. Among the latest are the 1972 Franciscan International Award for “true ecumenism” and the West Point Sylvanus Thayer Award for outstanding devotion to the ideals of duty, honor, and country.

What was probably the last published article by J. Edgar Hoover, “A Morality For Violence,” appeared in our April 28 issue. Just a few days before his death we received a letter of appreciation from him. Our contributing editor Dr. Edward L. R. Elson, minister of National Presbyterian Church and Senate chaplain, conducted the funeral services.

All Christians, but more especially evangelicals, say that the Bible has the central place. It establishes Christian doctrine, and it provides guidelines for Christian conduct. We feel that is what the reformation was all about. It is a dogma with us that the Bible is THE book.

Why then can J. D. Smart write a book entitled The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church? The very appearance of his book shows quite plainly the possibility of arguing that the Bible’s influence on Christians is less than it used to be, perhaps even nonexistent. This is enough to cause evangelical hackles to rise. We maintain that the Bible is our one authority. We insist that it is not through tradition, not through sanctified human reason, not through another book, but only through the Bible that we are able to discern the authoritative word of God.

Our words are the right ones. But what I want to ask is whether in fact we really let the Bible speak to us.

Sometimes we are so familiar with the words of the Bible that we simply let them flow over us without ever really taking them in. We rejoice in the sound of familiar passages with their well-remembered beauty. In our certainty that we know what they are saying, we do not stop to ask what they mean.

In some Anglican circles it has become fashionable to object to the singing of the Magnificat, the Song of Mary (Luke 1:46–55), at evening worship. A long-haired youth explained to me that he saw no reason why the church should go on singing the song of a pregnant woman. Putting aside the not unimportant fact that there seems no reason why a pregnant woman should not compose a song worth singing, we can see that my friend has obviously not thought about the words in question. He was all for revolution, and what could be more revolutionary than this song? “He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.” He had simply silenced the Bible. He was so sure he knew what it was saying that he no longer listened.

Some of us are like that with our disputes with our fellows. We are so sure of our position on the millennium or on predestination or free will or some other question that the Bible has become little more than a quarry from which we dig out stones to hurl at the foe. It is not simply that we pay insufficient attention to the arguments that might be legitimately used on the other side. Our pet controversy so engrosses us that we do not regard as important those passages of the Bible that do not bear on it. We have silenced the Bible in all areas but that of our interest.

It is not often that evangelicals take shelter behind the walls erected by biblical criticism. But it happens to some of them and it happens to many of our contemporaries. This is a very effective way of silencing the Bible, for whenever we come to any disturbing passage we can be sure that some critic will regard it as authentic. Many people these days go comfortably on their way confident that modern scholarship has shown that the Bible as a whole is unreliable. Once we get that idea firmly into our heads, the Bible might just as well have never been written. We then accept it for those teachings that we accept on other grounds and reject it for all the rest.

I would not like this to be taken as a suggestion that we can safely ignore modern scholarship. There is no virtue in obscurantism. Much modern scholarship has shed a blaze of light on the Bible that enables us to understand it much better. It is all too easy to read this old book as though it were nothing more than another twentieth-century product. The background of the Bible writers is not our background, and what they say must be understood in the way they meant it and not in any other way. Anything the scholar can tell us that will help us in this task is to be welcomed. Unless we see the New Testament writers as first-century men and the children of their own times, we will miss what they are saying.

It is not criticism that we must reject. It is that type of criticism that J. V. Langmead Casserley castigates as “so insipid and unstimulating.” He goes on, “We are confronted with the paradox of a way of studying the word of God out of which no word of God ever seems to come.” This type of scholarship forms yet another way of silencing the Bible. Its impressive array of facts, its show of learning, its dogmatism about the “obscurantism” of all those who refuse to go along with its findings, cannot disguise the fact that it keeps men from hearing the word of God.

Or we may silence the Bible by a love for liturgy. It is not difficult for a liturgist to have a deep and abiding love for the Bible and to be a humble and devout student of Holy Writ. But it is not difficult either for him to develop such a passionate concern for what we can learn from Hippolytus and Sarapion that his attention is concentrated on such ancient worthies and not on the Bible. He may also fancy himself as a practical man and give himself over to the proper running of the services in the modern way for the modern day. He will hear the Bible read, but it will not register only as to its effect on the particular service.

Our practical man may have another way of rendering himself immune to the Bible. He finds these days that there is so much to the running of a successful church that he can concentrate on that. He spends his time grappling with the problems of church management and church finance. He is convinced he is doing a good work, and when the disturbing word from the Bible hits him, as it may now and then, he shrugs it off as belonging in someone else’s department.

Or he may be a church musician. This is quite a convenient escape, for the musician is caught up in holy words and a holy purpose. He is singing to God’s glory. Now not all parts of the Bible can be sung easily, and many of the finest pieces of church music are not biblical pieces. So he can bury himself in his music and flee from the word of God. And the beauty of it is that this particular escape caters to all tastes, from the Bach chorale to the rock mass.

The ways of muting the voice of the Bible these days are legion. But when all is said and done, the Church has never been powerful and never known revival except when it has listened for the word of God and obeyed it.

It may be that the powerlessness of much of the contemporary church is due to the diligent contemporary use of a variety of ways of silencing the Bible. There is not much hope for us until we are ready to cast off our shams and listen to God’s Word for us, however disturbing it may prove to be.

LEON MORRIS

United Methodists adjusted their theological base last month, legislating a major change in their Book of Discipline that charts a course “between doctrinal dogmatism … and doctrinal indifferentism.”

“We do not possess infallible rules to follow, or reflex habits that suffice, or precedents for simple imitation,” says a newly conceived theological statement. The 4,800-word statement was designed to be included in the Discipline along with John Wesley’s Articles of Religion of 1784, his General Rules, and the Confession of Faith of the old Evangelical United Brethren Church.

Delegates to the United Methodist General Conference,¹United Methodism’s supreme legislative assembly, which, though normally quadrennial, has met every two years since 1964 because of heavy press of business. meeting in Atlanta, approved the package with virtually no debate by a signed but secret ballot of 925 to 17.

Also part of the package is a section entitled “Historical Background” which notes that “by the end of the nineteenth century, and thereafter increasingly in the twentieth, Methodist theology had become decidedly eclectic, with less and less specific attention paid to its specific Wesleyan sources as such. Despite continued and quite variegated theological development, there has been no significant project in formal doctrinal reformulation in Methodism since 1808.”

The package was put together by a thirty-six-member commission headed by the theological elder statesman of United Methodism, Professor Albert C. Outler of Perkins School of Theology, Dallas. He described it as an effort to clear up some of the theological “bedlam” in the church, but said the new theological statement should not be regarded as a creed.

The “Historical Background” argues that Wesley and the early Methodists had a collegial formula for doctrinal guidance that was unique in Christendom. “It committed the Methodist people to the biblical revelation as primary without proposing a literal summary of that revelation in any single propositional form. It anchored Methodist theology to a stable core, but allowed it freedom of movement in the further unfoldings of history.” Thus, though doctrinal statements are said to be “landmarks in our complex heritage,” they “never have been and ought not to be legal tests for membership.”

Nevertheless, the explanation continues, there is an identifiable “marrow” of Christian truth that “must be conserved.… This living core … stands revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience and confirmed by reason.”

The commission’s task was especially difficult in that, as every Methodist knows, Wesley and his early followers insisted that there be no changes in the doctrinal standards they laid down. Yet, as every Methodist also knows, and as the new theological statement observes, “the theological spectrum in The United Methodist Church ranges over all the current mainstream options and a variety of special-interest theologies as well.” The statement goes on to say that “this is no new thing. Our founders supported what Wesley called ‘catholic spirit.’”

Facing this perplexity, the commission chose a line of thought that is at best close reasoning and at worst sheer paradox: “Our newer historical consciousness allows us to retain the various landmarks of our several heritages, interpreting them in historical perspective. Similarly, our awareness of the transcendent mystery of divine truth allows us in good conscience to acknowledge the positive virtues of doctrinal pluralism even within the same community of believers, not merely because such an attitude is realistic.”

The commission’s statement declares that “there is a core of doctrine which informs in greater or less degree our widely divergent interpretations,” but that “core” is not identified.

The statement merely says that “from our response in faith to the wondrous mystery of God’s love in Jesus Christ as recorded in Scripture, all valid Christian doctrine is born. This is the touchstone by which all Christian teaching may be tested.”

The two-week General Conference worked its way through a maze of issues, including consideration of a new social creed and an organizational restructure. Some 20,000 petitions from individuals, churches, and groups had to be dealt with. Approximately 15,000 of these were stimulated by Good News, the increasingly potent evangelical force in United Methodism.

But the theological package was the historic highlight of the sessions. Entitled “Our Theological Task” and subtitled “The Gospel in a New Age,” the new doctrinal statement was four years in the making. It touches upon a number of traditional Christian doctrines, including the Trinity, salvation, “life in the Spirit,” and Scripture.

“An active stress on conversion and the new birth” is listed under “Distinctive Emphases of United Methodists.” “Whatever our language or labels for it, we hold that a decisive change in the human heart can and does occur under the promptings of grace and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Such a change may be sudden, dramatic, gradual, cumulative.”

The view of Scripture is essentially Barthian. The Bible is called “the deposit of a unique testimony to God’s self-disclosures.” but a distinction between Scripture and the Word of God is clearly implied.

If the statement is taken seriously by the nation’s 10.6 million Methodists, they will have their work cut out for them. It says: “In charting a course between doctrinal dogmatism on the one hand and doctrinal indifferentism on the other, The United Methodist Church expects all its members to accept the challenge of responsible theological reflection.”

The statement notes that “of current importance is the surfacing of new theological emphases focusing on the great struggles for human liberation and fulfillment. Notable among them are black theology, female liberation theology, political and ethnic theologies, third-world theology, and theologies of human rights.… The United Methodist Church encourages such developments so long as they are congruent with the gospel and its contemporary application. However, no special-interest theology can be allowed to set itself in invidious judgment over against any or all of the others, or claim exemption from being critically assessed in the general theological forum.”

Environmentalists will be disappointed that no attempt was made to tie in biblical injunctions regarding stewardship with the doctrine of Creation.

Black Evangelicals: Keeping It Together

More than 100 registrants attended the annual business sessions of the National Negro Evangelical Association (NNEA) in Jackson, Mississippi, last month, with hundreds of local church members listening in at evening sessions. They discussed busing and President Nixon but passed no resolutions.

Emphasis was given to implementation of the Gospel in society and to the necessity of keeping body and soul together in evangelism.

Chicago pastor-professor William Bentley, re-elected president, said he attended a recent black political caucus in Gary, Indiana, and saw “the vacuum that exists when there is no Gospel.”

As for cooperation with white evangelicals, delegates decided they had run the gamut of rhetoric with inadequate response and must now do “what has to be done” alone.

Thousands attended a Saturday-night youth rally addressed by evangelist Tom Skinner, named NNEA board chairman, and hundreds professed faith in Christ. NNEA leaders say they see an upsurge of spiritual interest among young blacks that they must do something about.

Social-Action Shakeup

The United Church of Christ recently announced it was firing its entire social-concerns division staff of sixteen and would reorganize the department along more modest lines to service local church needs.

At the annual ministers’ meeting of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, NACCC executive secretary John H. Alexander said the UCC action was a recognition of growing grass-roots discontent with controversial social-political statements and activities initiated by the UCC’s social-concerns people.

The action may be traceable in part to renewed interest in congregational autonomy at the local level, which in turn was triggered by study of the proposed Consultation on Church Union (COCU) plan to merge ten denominations—including the UCC.

The fifteen-year-old NACCC, says Alexander, has survived long enough to show that it can provide fellowship for churches valuing local autonomy.

HAROLD O. J. BROWN

Nigeria: Evangelism Now

Response to the Gospel in a former war zone in Nigeria is “phenomenal,” according to a recent Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) dispatch.

At Enugu, rebel capital during the recent civil war, a church affiliated with the SIM-related Evangelical Churches of West Africa (ECWA) is holding three Sunday-morning services to accommodate crowds of nearly 1,000.

“Entire communities are turning to Christ,” report missionaries. With some ECWA pastors now serving five or more churches, the ECWA—to meet urgent demands for leadership—has reopened a Bible school at Aba that had closed during the war. Seventy are enrolled. Meanwhile, graduates of crash courses in evangelism for laymen are instructing new converts in outlying districts. At the first women’s conference of the ECWA, held a few months ago at Aba, more than 100 women spent afternoons in neighborhood evangelism, reportedly leading many to Christ.

And at a week-long school of evangelism in Keffi, sponsored by New Life For All, students—mostly pastors—led 599 to Christ.

Libya Releases Evangelists

Under pressure from the U. S. State Department and the king of Belgium, the Libyan government finally ordered the release from prison last month of four young men affiliated with Operation Mobilization, an international evangelistic organization. The four were arrested last August while handing out tracts in Tripoli, sentenced to four years in jail, and fined $300 each. They were convicted of importing literature without a license, giving false reasons for entry into the country, and endangering public peace.

James Geisler and Clinton Smith of the United States, Henri Daniels of Belgium, and George Salameh of Lebanon said that they had a good lawyer and were treated well in prison but that a letter-writing campaign by Americans imperiled their chances of release. All four are back at work evangelizing in other countries. Smith’s wife bore their first child while he was in jail, and Salameh had to postpone his wedding set for last September.

Worst Mission Crash

Fire in the starboard engine of a Piper Aztec followed by an explosion that tore away the right wing resulted in the first air tragedy for the Wycliffe Translators—affiliated Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS). Seven persons, including five missionaries, died in the New Guinea crash, the worst missionary aviation disaster in history.

Those dead: veteran JAARS missionary pilot Doug Hunt; Darlene Bee, a Wycliffe translator for the Usarufa tribe; Oren and Francine Claassen, translators for the Rawa tribe; short-term missionary Kathleen McNeil of New Zealand; and two New Guinea tribespeople.

Dr. Bee’s irreplaceable manuscripts containing important data on the difficult New Guinea highland languages were recovered. Usarufa tribespeople asked that she be buried in their village; men of the village served as pallbearers.

Visiting Episcopal clergyman W. Graham Pulkingham of Houston conducted a memorial service at the Wycliffe base.

Religion In Transit

The Internal Revenue Service says it may reject deductibility of contributions to a number of private Christian high schools and academies in the South for alleged segregationist admission policies.

That ad for priesthood students in Playboy a while back is paying off. Of 600 inquiries so far, twenty-eight young men may be studying for the priesthood by next month, says a spokesman for the manpower-short Order of the Most Holy Trinity in Maryland.

Faculty members clashed with officials of the (Catholic) University of Dayton who rejected a $65,000 federal grant to study male fertility because it required masturbation for collecting sperm samples.

Five Protestant leaders in the Massachusetts Council of Churches spoke out sharply against Catholic archbishop Humberto S. Medeiros’s stand against birth control, calling it “repugnant.”

President Nixon will not address the Southern Baptist Convention next month after all because, say spokesmen, he may still be touring the Middle East after his visit to Russia. A number of church members had criticized the proposed convention appearance.

A ten-day crusade in Mobile, Alabama, led by Texas evangelist James Robison recorded 2,395 professions of faith among the 70,000 in attendance.

Thirty-five new churches were received into the Baptist Missionary Association of America at its annual meeting in Houston. Messengers spoke out for separatism and against tongues in a doctrinal statement they adopted. The denomination has 1,500 churches with 200,000 members in twenty-nine states.

More than 12,000 persons jammed into a Kansas City (Missouri) Youth For Christ rally to hear celebrities and to view the burning of a $600,000 mortgage on YFC’s auditorium in the suburbs. Kansas City YFC, with its 140 high-school YFC clubs, is reputedly the largest YFC branch in the country, and is now producing television shows.

The spread of venereal disease has become so serious, says the New York State Council of Churches, that it will now support legislation allowing the sale of prophylactics to persons under age 16.

Many National Council of Churches officers and denominational leaders have scored American escalation of the war in Indochina. But the grass roots may support President Nixon. Delegates to the annual convention of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Texas rejected 373 to 118 a resolution that criticized American bombing and urged withdrawal of U. S. forces.

A shakeup of sorts may be under way at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. It has been brought into closer alignment with the college division—and with Evangelical Free Church policy. Graduate programs may be cut back. At least one professor has resigned over the rearrangement.

The Supreme Court unanimously upheld a lower court ruling in Missouri that the state constitution could prohibit the use of public funds for church-related schools, and that denial of state funds does not violate the religious rights of the parents of children.

Berkeley’s controversial Free Church, funded since its founding in 1967 by Presbyterian and Episcopal churches, closed its doors amid staff firings and verbal blasts at director Richard York by the street people he worked with.

Personalia

Reformed Church in America executive secretary Arlie R. Brouwer has declined to serve as president of his denomination’s two seminaries.

After near unanimous opposition from the ten seminaries of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Jesuit Albert R. Jonsen declined a board invitation to become GTU’s acting president. Jonsen resigned in 1969 as president of the University of San Francisco amid a no-confidence vote by the USF board and complaints about his handling of finances.

Evangelist Billy Graham was awarded the 1972 Franciscan International Award for “true ecumenism.”

Hair music director Rick Shorter tells how he found Jesus in a special 250,000-copy evangelistic edition of Insight, a Seventh-day Adventist youth paper to be handed out at Explo 72 and elsewhere. Shorter now runs an SDA drop-in center in Greenwich Village.

Frank P. Sanders, an elder of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington, D. C., has been nominated by President Nixon to be undersecretary of the Navy. He is active in many evangelical causes.

Former Anglican dean of Johannesburg Gonville ffrench-Beytagh flew to London after a South African appeals court quashed his five-year prison sentence on charges of subversion.

World Scene

Burgeoning Indonesian churches (Protestants have doubled to six million in the last five years) are sending missionaries throughout the land. One team working with the Karo Bataks reports that the local church increased by 40,000 in one year.

More than 100 missionaries from eight American denominations serving in India issued a statement that sharply criticizes the United States for supporting the “anti-democratic forces” of West Pakistan instead of India and Bangladesh in the recent conflict.

John Newton’s 1779-vintage hymn “Amazing Grace” set to an old Scotch tune topped the song popularity charts in Europe last month.

Reuters news service reports that both Protestant and Catholic church services have resumed in Peking after a long break during the Cultural Revolution. Easter services at two churches were attended by about thirty persons each.

More than 15,000 youths from eighty countries visited the Taizé religious community in France during the Easter weekend for prayer and small-group sharing.

After the biggest national church convention in Zambia’s history, delegates from twenty-five denominations—nearly half of them evangelical—called on churches to help develop the nation.

Unless President Nixon takes action by the middle of May to free American prisoners of war in Indochina, Illinois fundamentalist minister Paul Lindstrom says his elite commando unit of 105 American volunteers and thirteen foreign mercenaries will storm Communist POW camps and release the prisoners themselves. Lindstrom issued his vow in Saigon last month.

Deaths

ESTHER BACON, 56, Lutheran Church in America missionary nurse who delivered more than 20,000 babies during her thirty years in Liberia; in Zorzor, Liberia, of lass fever, a newly discovered virus found in West Africa.

JOHN DIXON, 84, retired Anglican archbishop of Montreal; in Montreal.

ERLING EIDEM, 91, archbishop emeritus of the (Lutheran) Church of Sweden and one of the first presidents of the World Council of Churches; in Vanorsborg, Sweden.

J. ARTHUR RANK, 83, Methodist layman and British film czar who used biblical themes in many of his motion pictures; in Winchester, England.

NEWS

Thirty years ago 187 persons assembled at the old Coronado Hotel in St. Louis for the founding meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals, with prominent pastor Harold J. Ockenga as prime mover and keynote speaker. Last month the NAE and Ockenga, now a college and seminary president as well as pastor, were back in St. Louis, this time at a plusher hotel and with a bigger crowd. The NAE and Ockenga had both come up in the world.

Today the NAE has thirty-four member denominations¹They are: Assemblies of God, Baptist General Conference, Brethren Church (Ashland, Ohio), Brethren in Christ, Christian Church of North America, Christian and Missionary Alliance, Christian Union, Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), Church of the United Brethren in Christ, Churches of Christ in Christian Union, Conservative Congregational Christian Conference, Elim Fellowship, Evangelical Church of North America, Evangelical Congregational Church, Evangelical Free Church, Evangelical Friends Alliance, Evangelical Mennonite Brethren Church, Evangelical Mennonite Church, Evangelical Methodist Church (Wichita, Kansas), Free Methodist Church, International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, International Pentecostal Assemblies, Mennonite Brethren Church, Midwest Congregational Christian Fellowship, Missionary Church, National Association of Free Will Baptists, Open Bible Standard Churches, Pentecostal Church of Christ, Pentecostal Church of God, Pentecostal Evangelical Church, Pentecostal Holiness Church, Primitive Methodist Church, Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, and The Wesleyan Church. with three million members, twelve full-time staffers, a $350,000 annual budget, publications (Action magazine, with 12,000 circulation, and Profile, a news sheet with 200,000 circulation), and commissions that are said to raise the NAE’s service constituency to ten million persons in 38,000 churches.

In closing out the annual meeting, Ockenga reviewed the NAE’s thirty years of growth. He said there would have been revival in the beginning had it not been for the cleavage between the NAE and the then one-year-old American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC) headed by Carl McIntire.

The NAE’s first priority now, he declared, should be “a broader movement that will include all evangelical groups.” He named the giant Southern Baptist Convention and called for a merger with the ACCC “now that McIntire has been discredited.” (Several ACCC leaders were present at the NAE meetings as observers but left early and did not hear Ockenga’s suggestion, almost certain to be rejected by the ACCC. As one old veteran of the separatist wars put it, “Times haven’t changed that much.”)

Citing widespread grass-roots disenchantment inside the major councils of churches, Ockenga warned that the NAE must broaden its appeal lest another movement arise to supersede the NAE in bringing together evangelical churches.

The NAE is apparently already too broad for some churches. Its second largest group, the Free Will Baptists, will vote this summer on a policy committee’s recommendation that it bolt the NAE. NAE executive director Billy Melvin, himself a Free Will Baptist, says that the denomination has only nominally supported the NAE in the past but that he will be on hand to fight the motion.

The uneasiness of others surfaced during consideration of a resolution that urged NAE churches to participate in the Key 73 evangelistic campaign next year, perhaps the broadest cooperative church effort in American history.

Harold Burdick, a conference superintendent of the Evangelical Church of North America (a Key 73 participant), read into the record a news story reporting that the Catholic bishops had voted to participate in Key 73. (Actually, there was no such vote; see following story.) He warned of confusion and identification with unscriptural concepts of evangelism, Christ, and the Gospel, then moved to refer the paper back to committee for study, an undebatable motion that carried 47–46. (Of the 1,000 registrants, 350 were voting delegates, but many were absent from the floor and others abstained.)

Action In North Viet Nam

The Alliance Witness says it has learned that the Christian and Missionary Alliance in North Viet Nam was able to hold a conference in March. “It is reported that many have believed in the Lord and are very zealous,” the official organ of the international Alliance added. “The Christians are giving sacrificially to repair church buildings which have ‘greatly deteriorated.’ The church asked for special prayer.”

Free Will Baptist moderator J. D. O’Donnell complained that “liberals and heretics” were yoked with evangelicals in Key 73. Others said the NAE had no business telling its members to participate in anything; they wanted the statement buried, not reconsidered. “This is the worst difference we’ve had in the NAE in its thirty years,” boomed NAE general director Clyde Taylor. “I’m for dropping the issue altogether.” The motion to refer was then recalled in favor of a motion to table indefinitely, which carried by voice vote.

NAE officials, noting that many NAE churches were already committed to Key 73 anyway, reassured members that nothing had been done to imperil local participation in Key 73. But despite such assurances and a mild NAE endorsement last year, the incident may be a storm warning of things to come in some evangelical groups for whom Catholic participation could be the last straw.

Afterward, Melvin said the Key 73 resolution had been presented late in the convention to the resolutions committee by a respected person. It should not have been sent to the floor, he said, because the NAE’s structure prohibits it from committing its member denominations to such a venture. (Years ago the Christian Reformed Church succeeded in hog-tying the NAE on evangelistic activities, then left the fold.) Melvin and Taylor both insisted that many of the votes were not really against Key 73 but against the NAE’s forcing it on those opposed to it.

Other resolutions were passed with virtually no discussion, including one on aging that affirmed the “right” to die with dignity “without the use of extraordinary means to prolong life.” It suggested that churches hire ministers to the aging as well as to youth. In other matters the delegates supported the concept of tax credits for gifts to institutions of higher learning (excluding tuition), and cautioned against giving to shady-dealing mission organizations.

A group of seminarians and collegians voiced displeasure at the absence of resolutions dealing with important social and political issues of the day. Not one woman or youth was nominated to the dozens of board and commission slots, a reflection of the way it is inside the member denominations and organizations, says Melvin.

Bishop Myron F. Boyd of the Free Methodist Church was elected president. Presbyterian Journal editor G. Aiken Taylor and Christian and Missionary Alliance president Nathan Bailey were elected vice-presidents.

Nearly 2,000 on the opening night heard youth evangelist David Wilkerson confess that he now sides with the Jesus-people movement after earlier hostility. He proceeded to drub the Church for what he saw as its coldness and inactivity.

A battery of workshops, seminars, and commission meetings kept delegates hopping in and out of elevators. The National Religious Broadcasters hosted Jesuit broadcaster Dennis Daly on “The Return to Scripture Within the Roman Catholic Church.” The Evangelical Foreign Missions Association listened to leading missions spokesmen discuss emerging foreign mission societies in Third World churches.

Insiders say the NAE must tend to some overdue housekeeping before it goes looking for new residents. A strategy meeting will this month take “a long, hard look at our commissions,” says Melvin. “Some are outdated and just not working. The affiliates need to be drawn in closer, and more grass-roots activity is needed.” Restructure of the pressure-ridden National Sunday School Association is already under way following the resignation of executive Joseph Hemphill and the sale of its headquarters building.

Meanwhile, more financial support is needed if the NAE—still $65,000 in debt—is to move into the stage Ockenga envisions, says an official who cites low salaries and understaffed offices. It’s one thing to talk about togetherness, he says, but it’s something else to fund it.

Catholic Bishops: Key 73 Sounds Okay

Some distinct evangelical notes came through loud and clear at the spring meeting of the nation’s Catholic bishops in Atlanta, which marked the first time the bishops’ deliberations were open to the press and other accredited observers.

The 240 bishops attending the conclave heard a report from their ecumenical relations committee that endorsed Key 73, the pan-denominational project to evangelize America in 1973. The committee’s head, Bishop Charles Helmsing of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri, warmly recommended Catholic participation in the evangelistic campaign. He noted that the St. Louis province had voted to participate.

John Cardinal Carberry of St. Louis, one of the most conservative bishops of all, was even more enthusiastic. In urging Catholic participation, especially through revival of parish preaching missions, he said Key 73 offered the church a chance “to stir up deep spirituality among our people.”

Auxiliary Bishop Gerald V. McDevitt of Philadelphia voiced his endorsement of Key 73 too but cautioned that clerics should be concerned about sacraments as well as about spreading the Gospel.

Although no action was taken on the report, the absence of dissent can be construed as tacit approval of Key 73—at least for now—at the highest official level of the church. Already, several dioceses in addition to the St. Louis district have voted to join the outreach.

There was a little more restraint in a report on the Catholic Pentecostal movement (see July 16, 1971, issue, page 31). The report said most bishops who responded to a special survey were satisfied with the growth and conduct of charismatic renewal groups in their dioceses, but it warned of “negative factors” listed by some bishops. Bishop John R. Quinn of Oklahoma City-Tulsa, chairman of the bishops’ Committee on Pastoral Research and Practices, outlined the latter as: “emotionalism, anti-intellectualism, danger of religious indifferentism, and development of gnostic sects.”

Yet, reported Quinn, many bishops expressed “a very positive outlook” about the movement, mostly because of its emphasis on prayer, holiness, ongoing conversion, and sympathy for the sacramental life of the church.

Most of the bishops, he said, supported the recommendations of their doctrinal committee that they “not encourage this [movement] too enthusiastically or discourage it in any way” but rather “let it develop and keep a watchful eye on its progress.”

Quinn announced that Grand Rapids auxiliary bishop Joseph C. McKinney had agreed to serve as national adviser of the movement. (McKinney, in an earlier interview, told CHRISTIANITY TODAY he himself had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit.) Quinn also mentioned that Rockford, Illinois, bishop Arthur J. O’Neill has started a non-territorial parish in his diocese for Catholic Pentecostals (see March 31 issue, page 34).

Besides dealing with reports and actions of a housekeeping nature, the bishops implied consent to continued conversations with Southern Baptists, American Baptists, Anglicans, and Lutherans (“separated brethren”), apparently ignoring the suggestion of Triumph’s editor that prayers for unity be instead characterized as prayers on heresy and schism.

But overall, the most significant story of the conference was probably the further emergence of evangelical trends in the Catholic Church as the moment of truth for Key 73 approaches. As if to underscore what is happening, Quinn called attention to a National Congress on the Word of God—aimed at underscoring evangelical truth, revitalizing preaching, and ministering to the current crisis in faith—to be held in Washington, D. C., in September.

Turned-On Mennonites Probe Evangelism

Last month’s Probe 72 All-Mennonite Consultation on Evangelism in Minneapolis was by all standards one of the most significant events in the 450 years of Mennonite history. From throughout the United States and Canada more than 2,000 participants representing a number of Mennonite groups gathered for four days to discuss how to reach the world for Christ. A third of them were high schoolers and college students, many of them newly turned on to Jesus, and they were largely responsible for a joyous revival atmosphere that swept over the conference shortly after it opened.

“Mennonite Hour” broadcaster David Augsburger pointed up perhaps the major significance: “We have been together in the past on relief and service; now we are together on evangelism.” (Although most Mennonite bodies²The largest: the Mennonite Church (Old Mennonites), Scottsdale, Pennsylvania, and Goshen, Indiana, 100,000 members; the General Conference Mennonite Church, Newton, Kansas, 60,000; and the Mennonite Brethren Church, Fresno, California, 35,000. Others include the Mennonite Brethren in Christ and the Evangelical Mennonite Mission Conference, whose 3,900 members have fielded 100 foreign missionaries. share a common heritage and are linked in the Mennonite Central Committee, there has been little common spiritual activity at the grass-roots level.)

One of the announced purposes of the consultation was to tool up for participation in the Key 73 outreach campaign next year. Workshops and seminars covered just about every conceivable way to apply the evangelistic touch, from music and drama to home Bible study groups, preaching, disaster relief work, and peace demonstrations.

Some groups hit the streets to practice what they had learned. Teams visited door to door and shared their faith on downtown street corners, returning with reports of conversions. Others visited a Christian commune across the street from the University of Minnesota to find out how to reach students and counter-culture youths.

A group of twenty-five delivered a petition signed by 1,400 to the Honeywell plant, asking the company to reconsider renewal of military contracts. Their statement closed with a testimony and an invitation to company officials to follow Jesus.

The peace issue kept coming up in sessions as news poured in of escalation of the Indochina war. (The Mennonites have been pacifists ever since their founding in 1525 in a Zurich church whose members—later known as Anabaptists—renounced civil authority.) But delegates resisted liberal pressure to turn the conference into an anti-war rally, with young people leading the way in keeping evangelism central. Testimonies and platform references to evangelical doctrine, especially the Second Coming, set off enthusiastic applause and shouts of “Praise the Lord!” among the young.

Dean George Brunk of Eastern Mennonite College in Harrisonburg, Virginia (100 of EMC’s 850 students attended Probe 72; many slept on church floors), called for “warmth and winsomeness” in the traditionally quiet, conservative Mennonite churches. “Hitherto we have not been known for our success in this realm of evangelism,” he observed. “We had our heyday in evangelism in the Reformation, and then we became the quiet people of the land. But we’re waking up, we are excited about Jesus in this consultation!”

Brunk told of hearing of a crowd that had applauded Jesus and was himself interrupted as the audience stood and gave a similar sustained ovation. As it subsided, Brunk, a balding man in his fifties, shouted, “Give me a J!” Young and old Mennonites joined in spelling out in loud cheers the name of Jesus—perhaps the most unusual moment in Mennonite history.

In telling of early Anabaptists’ enthusiasm for evangelism, EMC president Myron Augsburger said that when Anabaptist leader Michael Sattler was killed, a plan was found on his body to reach literally all of Europe for Christ. Picking up the cue, Palmer Becker—home-missions director of the General Conference Mennonite Church—in the closing session asked participants similarly to write down a plan to reach their world with the Gospel.

Commented church worker Marie Wiens: “If Probe makes each one of us feel responsible for our next-door neighbor, somehow winning the world for Christ will naturally follow.”

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Live Coverage

Because of the small auditorium in Charlotte, evangelist Billy Graham arranged to have his recent crusade there telecast each night over ten stations in both North and South Carolina, the first time he has ever employed live TV coverage.

Concordia’S Dispute Is Extended

Faculty members at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, say they do not affirm the doctrinal guidelines issued in March by Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod president J. A. O. Preus. The thirteen-page faculty statement charges that the guidelines are “invalid both as an assessment and a solution of presumed problems at the seminary.”

The statement was said to have been approved by a “virtually unanimous” vote of the seminary’s forty-eight professors. One professor known to have demurred is Dr. Robert Preus, a brother of the Missouri Synod president and a staunch evangelical. Robert Preus, who holds doctorates from Edinburgh and Strassburg, declared publicly that he rejects the historical critical method. Seminary president John Tietjen contends it is impossible “to teach at the seminary level of instruction and take the texts of Scripture with utter seriousness without using the so-called historical critical method.”

Evangelical Setback In Zaire

Thirty-three evangelical churches and missions in the Republic of Zaire (formerly Congo) entered a crisis period in early April when the government rejected their proposed council of churches. The Council of Protestant Churches in Zaire (CPCZ) had requested legal recognition in accordance with a new law requiring all but three major churches to reapply for permission to operate. The three exempted were the Roman Catholic Church, the Kimbanguist Church (an independent African movement now part of the World Council of Churches), and the Church of Christ in Zaire (CCZ).

The government ruled that the CCZ would be the only recognized church in which Protestants could work. All denominations and missions that had formerly been approved by the civil authorities were now to continue their activities within the united church. The official statement promised the imminent publication of a list of all authorized Protestant groups, or “communities,” as proposed in the CCZ.

The government’s decision put most of the thirty-three members of the rejected council back where they once were. The evangelical groups of CPCZ had withdrawn from the united church because of its ecumenical trends. They attributed these trends to the leadership of Dr. I (Jean) Bokambanza Bokeleale, who is president of CCZ and serves on both the Executive Committee and the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches. The CCZ itself is not a member of the WCC. (See March 17 issue, page 42, and April 14 issue, page 4.)

These problems of doctrine and administration were incomprehensible to the Zairian lawmakers, who are almost all Roman Catholics. So when they drafted a law to stabilize religious activities in the nation, they simply put all the Protestants together in one church. In the words of one national magazine, “all the Protestant communities were put into one sack and condemned to get along with each other.”

The council of churches was not the only group rejected by the government. The Ministry of Justice reported at least 1,300 religious groups operating in Zaire at the end of 1971; some cities with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants had 150 or more churches and sects. Forty-five of the 1,300 groups presented formal requests to the government for recognition. These included such familiar names as the Orthodox Church, Muslims, and Seventh-day Adventists as well as CPCZ with its thirty-three member groups.

The Ministry of Justice subjected the forty-five requests for legal status to the stringent conditions prepared by the National Assembly. Only four requests were passed on for President Mobutu Sese Seko’s signature. On April 5 the radio announced that in addition to the three churches previously approved, three more religious groups had been recognized by the government: the Islamic Community of Zaire, the Israeli Community of Kinshasa, and the Orthodox Church. Within three months the government had cut down from 1,300 to six the number of religious organizations permitted.

Even if permitted to continue within the CCZ, some evangelical groups may choose to disband rather than be part of a united church they consider ecumenical. To go or stay became a dilemma of conscience for the Unevangelized Fields Mission (UFM), working in northern Zaire. Mission leaders at first decided to pull out of Zaire unless CPCZ were recognized. After the council was rejected, UFM missionaries and national church leaders met in Kisangani. They decided that although the UFM could not support the CCZ in any way, missionaries were free to continue working with their local churches if they desired.

ROBERT L. NIKLAUS

Ecumenical Midwifery

Officials of the World Council of Churches claim a share of the credit for the peace agreement reached by the government of Sudan and the South Sudan Liberation Movement. The pact offers the prospect of peace in the Sudan after sixteen years of civil war during which an estimated half a million Sudanese died. WCC spokesmen say its representatives along with local ecumenical leaders were instrumental in bringing together the warring factions. As one member of the government put it, “their role has been to act as midwives” between the Arab Muslim leaders in Khartoum and the part-pagan, part-Christian tribal chieftains in the south.

Bangladesh: ‘Come Before June’

The monsoon season will begin next month in Bangladesh, and many of the still homeless refugees—estimated to number ten million—will die as a result.

Dr. Larry Ward, president of Food for the Hungry, announced that without a dramatic airlift program Bangladesh won’t survive the summer months. Citing a recently published United Nations study, Ward estimated that the majority—some sources put it as high as 75 per cent—of trucks, riverboats, and bridges were destroyed during the war. Also involved in relief efforts is Russell O’Quinn, who heads the Foundation for Airborne Relief and led the successful Biafra airlift. He planned to go to Bangladesh soon with a big C-97 cargo plane carrying smaller amphibious planes and helicopters. Most sources say helicopters are needed most. Food is said to be rotting on docks.

Foodstuffs and building supplies rank highest in priority to be air-lifted, says Bernard A. Confer, executive of Lutheran World Relief. And along with supplies, the refugees need help in rebuilding. Many major relief organizations are providing just that (see March 3 issue, page 38).

Students, too, are getting involved. In late March twenty-one young people, including sixteen Wheaton College students, left for Bangladesh to spearhead a village relief effort sponsored by Medical Assistance Programs of Wheaton, Illinois. They are headquartered at Memorial Christian Hospital in Chittagong. Other Wheaton students, as well as faculty and staff, donated nearly $4,000, channeling it through the World Relief Commission of the National Association of Evangelicals.

The recent history of the Bangladesh people is characterized by disaster. In 1970 the worst natural disaster of the century, a cyclone and tidal wave, drowned 500,000 Pakistanis and left millions homeless. Three million were killed in the 1971 civil war, and the 1972 India-Pakistan conflict has raised the figure.

If the tragedy is to cease, immediate help is needed, points out Ward: “This is a race against time”—the one thing no one can give Bangladesh.

Second in a Series

We have noted the high mortality rate of contemporary theological theories, and the tactics many recent theologians have used to commend their novel views as authentically Christian. We now look at some other characteristics of neo-Protestant religious views.

3. The special appeal of each neo-Protestant religious theory lies in its dramatic correlation of some urgent concern or deep longing in contemporary life with segments of the scriptural revelation that have been obscured or neglected by other recent religious alternatives. Barth stressed anew an authoritative Divine Word; Bultmann, the critical importance of personal decision; Cullmann, the centrality of salvation-history; Moltmann, the irreducible importance of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead; Pannenberg, the revelatory significance of universal world history; and so on. Each view gains a magnetic hold on younger clergymen through the reassertion of certain facets of biblical theology. And each theory compounds the errors of its predecessors in two ways. It first superimposes upon the Bible an interpretative framework alien to it, and then subordinates other definitive elements of biblical theology to this.

These theories, then, gain a following in the Christian community by correlating theosophical or philosophical novelties with broken fragments of the biblical revelation. The Bible is not appealed to as an authoritative Book, plenarily inspired and constituting a divinely given rule of Christian truth.

4. In regard to knowledge of God as an objective reality, the formative theological views of the last hundred years are metaphysically agnostic. This trend crested into the ecumenical vision of a world church that raised social involvement above metaphysical consensus and creedal tests. Protestant modernism emphasized the experiential values of following Christ’s exemplary commitment to Divine Fatherhood and human brotherhood. While Barthian theology located faith’s center in divine disclosure rather than in religious experience, it depicted revelation as paradoxical: the truth of faith, it said, defies expression in universally valid propositions. Bultmann, however, insisted that the self at the center of existential revelation is not the divine self at all; it is rather, he affirmed, the human self.

Supposedly to enhance revelation, dialectical-existential theology disowned logically consistent knowledge of God and portrayed faith as a cognitively vacuous leap. The Continental theologians therefore affirmed as Christianity’s special distinctive what in the minds of logical positivists reduced Christianity to nonsense—the notion that the reality of God turns not on intelligible rational evidence and objectively valid truth but rather on personal decision and inner response. More recently such post-Bultmannian theologians as Fuchs and Ebeling, and even such proponents of external historical revelation as Moltmann and Pannenberg, have likewise deprived Christianity of any final cognitive affirmations about the ontological being of God.

This loss of the rationality of divine revelation in recent modern theology prepared the way for the notion of God’s demise: if God cannot be truly known for what he assertedly is, the Living God is in epistemic eclipse. Contemporary theologians show almost cultic fanaticism in forfeiting ontological knowledge of God’s nature as he is in himself. Their works remind one of Clifford Irving’s supposed revelations concerning the inaccessible Howard Hughes: publishing houses are available to disclose secrets of the life and deeds of the Great Unknown; biographers tell of special access vouchsafed to them alone; readers await an up-to-the-minute revision of what the existing versions declare to be the unchanging truth. Then—at last—the necessary authorization of legitimacy is found to be missing, and the real voice and word of the Invisible Shepherd, known and recognized by his sheep, is admitted to point another Way.

5. The attempt to resuscitate process theology as the wave of the future is faltering. Process theology is one among many ripples on an agitated theological surface. It lacks firm basis in the He-brew-Christian Scriptures, and is more a philosophical than a theological explanation. Its current appeal is largely limited to students unfamiliar with related proposals from earlier in this century; the present versions are much like a return of an old movie.

Liabilities of process theology are numerous. Among its intellectual difficulties, two stand out. First, it obscures God’s causal relation to the universe; the emphasis that the universe is as necessary to God as God is to the universe compromises the biblical doctrine of creation. Second, its insistence that God is an aspect of the whole of reality precludes any absolute distinction between good and evil. Indeed, the more intimately God is correlated with man and history—particularly in a century vexed by devastating international wars and the social violence of Nazism, Facism, and Communism, as well as the pervasive moral decline of the world—the more difficult it becomes to maintain any adequate view of sin.

6. The positive significance of radical contemporary views—for example, the “theology of revolution” and “black theology”—lies in their rejection of other sub-Christian alternatives rather than in any espousal of authentic and permanently valid positions. A commitment to violent revolutionary change cannot accommodate in any event a final theology or controlling Logos; what destroys all must sooner or later be self-destructive.

Revolutionary theology mounts an extreme reaction against the misidentification of the status quo as essentially just or as acceptably Christian, a costly error that the Christian Church has too often made. Black theology is a reactionary insistence that theology can be done only by blacks, a notion no less exaggerated and extreme than the assumption that God is white. To write Christian theology in terms of any culture-orientation is hazardous. The neglected emphasis that theology needs to revive is that the Christian revelation has permanent implications for all oppressed people.

7. The unenviable consequence of neo-Protestant theology’s revolt against reason and rationality is that its positions cannot be regarded as true. It should be apparent that any movement that disowns the instrumentality of reason in establishing theological positions or in validating its objectives cannot rationally defend its own perspectives. Philosophers may speak of religion as a “special kind” of truth, and theologians may deplore the pursuit of objective truth about God as prideful presumption; but unless the man in the street is convinced that spiritual claims belong to the same order of truth as life’s other persuasive commitments, he will not take Christian claims seriously. He will turn rather to cults that claim to give such knowledge or will probe the mystical, astrological, or merely magical. The religious revolt against reason is sure to issue in a harvest of aberrant and inventive alternatives to biblical faith. [To be continued.]

CARL F. H. HENRY

Evil is restrained either through man’s fear of God or man’s fear of man. Where there is fear neither of God nor of man, chaos and anarchy prevail.

Where good behavior stems from the fear of man, as in a totalitarian or strongly authoritarian state, this “goodness” is achieved at the price of personal freedom and is a form of slavery.

God has provided for mankind the norms for right living, and to those who put their trust in him he gives the power to live accordingly. Herein lie the basis and stamina of Christian character.

Character itself is an evidence of some restraining, energizing, and directing influence on a man’s life; and Christian character is a demonstration of the presence and power of the living Christ. It is a combination of faith in the revelation God has given of himself through his Son, and obedience to that revelation in daily living.

Christian character has been described as doing what is right when no one is looking and when one knows that his actions can never be tracked to their source. But it is far more than that. Christian character involves testing of thoughts and actions by God-given guidelines and then proceeding according to his revealed will and by the power of his indwelling Spirit, regardless of difficulties.

A nation is great when its citizens possess Christian character; when that character starts to erode, the nation’s fall has begun.

The evidences of such erosion are to be seen on every hand in our country. Dishonesty is flagrantly admitted. In fact, the entire business world seems in danger of coming apart at the seams through dishonest practices. The social life of the nation is also being eroded by the so-called new morality, which is nothing more or less than the old immorality dressed up in a tuxedo.

Political life seems given over to expediency rather than to the national interest to such an extent that one wonders who can be trusted to view issues and policies from the standpoint of right or wrong.

The Church’s influence for righteousness has also suffered the erosion of compromise and worldliness; church spokesmen often substitute man-made standards and philosophies for the clear “Thus saith the Lord” of the Bible.

But nowhere is the wearing down of Christian principles and ideals more evident than in the so-called sex revolution. The general attitude of permissiveness, together with ready availability of the pill, and other contraceptives, and courses in sex education that are confined to pathological and biological aspects and leave out God’s teachings about sex—all these, as well as the hell-inspired teaching that there are no absolutes, have combined to soften and erode away many of the spiritual directives and restraints that do so much to distinguish man from the lower animals.

As the basic concepts of Christian character are downgraded in present-day America, we are seeing good spoken of as evil and evil promoted as good. We see sins of every kind not only accepted but even glorified. We see young people following evil ways because their elders have failed to show them the God-ordained norms by which man should live.

We have come to the day when Christianity, the source of Christian character, is often exchanged for a “religion” lacking in spiritual perception and power because it no longer teaches Christ’s life, death on the Cross, and resurrection as revealed in the Scriptures.

A young minister who was a graduate of one of America’s oldest and most “prestigious” theological seminaries recently returned to his alma mater for a series of lectures. To his dismay, he found that many of the students regularly drank alcoholic beverages, were profane in their conversation, and were immoral in their way of life.

While this situation may possibly be the exception rather than the rule, it gives a sobering picture of the erosion that has gotten into the Church itself as a result of its tendency to drift with the tide of contemporary life rather than to stand firm and lift up an ensign for the holiness of God and his body, the Church.

The prophets of old denounced sin out of holy conviction. Speaking under the inspiration of the Spirit, they faithfully warned of impending judgment because of sin. For this they were denounced, and many of them sealed their testimony with their life’s blood. And the judgment they had announced inexorably came.

Today the denunciation of sins against a holy God is regarded in many quarters as “quaint,” “Victorian,” “fundamentalistic,” “a perversion of the Gospel of God’s love.” Such preaching is unpopular, and, where possible, ecclesiastical pressures, restrictions, and even persecution are vented on those who persist.

This erosion in individual character and in the corporate life of the nation goes on apace, and all must suffer. While men may consider the changes trivial, God is not mocked, and sin’s wages come nearer and nearer.

Basic to the problem is man’s substitution of error for revealed truth. For the average American the Bible is a closed book. Young people in school—from kindergarten to college and university—are ignorant of God’s standards for belief and conduct. They are pagans in a “Christian” land because God and his Word have been increasingly neglected. Little wonder that we have a generation of spiritual illiterates! Little wonder that on every hand we see moral and spiritual erosion!

The supreme question is whether Christian character can be restored in America. Can the disintegrating influences that have an ever accelerating effect on our way of life be overcome and a new and effective emphasis on lost values be established?

There is one way—and only one. It is a way few choose to take, but it is the one that is divinely ordained. The route back is clearly marked in Second Chronicles 7:14:

Humility (“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves”), prayer and seeking God (“and pray and seek my face”), repentance and conversion (“and turn from their wicked ways”); when these are present, God will grant forgiveness and healing (“then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land”).

The route of humility, prayer, repentance, conversion, and healing ends at the Cross. There is much talk at present about “corporate sins,” but corporate sins are but the elongated shadows of personal sins, and revival and restoration is a very personal matter.

We need humbled minds and wills before the One who offers not only forgiveness and cleansing but the instilling in us of his own nature. Through his indwelling nature Christian character becomes a reality for us as individuals and also a positive force against the evils in our nation.