Page 6110 – Christianity Today (2024)

Do modern pulpit politicians and money-raisers really resemble Amos or Jeremiah, John the Baptist or the apostle Paul?

The Church of today urgently needs to be more prophetic. As Robert B. McNeill declares in his book, Prophet, Speak Now, the contemporary Church is “an institution bent on saving itself—complacent, seeking to keep everything quiet and comfortable and denying the prophetic mission.”

The Church denies its prophetic mission in many ways, but particularly in its obsession with material things and visible success. Someone has aptly remarked that much of contemporary preaching is geared to the mortgage on the building. The “coming of the Kingdom” seems to be considered a matter of successful church building programs, membership increases, and larger budgets. Most church people are so caught up in this success spiral that they dare not face up to the fact that authentic Christianity too often runs in inverse ratio to successful churchianity. Today the prophet seems to be an encumbrance to the Church. We find the same incrustations of organized religion that Jesus encountered in his time, and there is no room for the prophet in his own country or in any other.

Lacking the prophetic voice, many a church has become dormant, or, to use the term popular today, “irrelevant.” Its influence in the affairs of men is negligible. It is out of touch with reality; it is shrinking back, narrowing its sympathy. No wonder that someone has suggested this epitaph: “The living faith of the dead has become the dead faith of the living.”

But in saying that the Church is denying the prophetic mission, we are pointing an accusing finger at ourselves—its ministers. If the Church is not prophetic, the reason is that those who stand in its pulpits are not prophets. The state of the Church today is the result of the leadership it has or has not had. Only a prophetic ministry can call the Church back to her true mission.

Too often we find in the pulpit the skilled politician rather than the prophet of the Lord. The ideal minister is thought to be the one adept in administration and effective in money-raising, the one who construes the scriptural word about being all things to all men apart from the offense of the Cross. How little this pulpit politician resembles Amos or Jeremiah, John the Baptist or the Apostle Paul, or any other man of God whom we would call a prophet.

A young man being interviewed as a possible candidate for the ministry registered his disinterest by saying, “But the ministry is a job for tea-drinkers and hand-shakers. I want something that will challenge a man.” The ministry is no longer a challenge because the Church today is not challenging men, as did the prophets, with the great questions of sin (not in general but specifically), of righteousness, and of judgment.

This loss of the prophetic note from the pulpit was deplored in an article that appeared in one of our national publications: “Today in our churches we find in the pulpit men whose sole talent is knowing how to put a wet finger into the wind to see how the zephyrs of public attitude are blowing so that they can appeal to as many people as possible” (David Susskind, “The Millennium of the Mental Midgets,” Saturday Evening Post, March 24, 1962). Needless to say, this wet-finger-in-the-wind preaching is worlds apart from the “Thus saith the Lord” of the true prophet. Too often considerations of his own security hinder the preacher from proclaiming the Word of the Lord. Thus he is leading his people back to the flesh pots of Egypt rather than forward to the Promised Land. He has become the priest of the comfort cult, which has as its slogan, “Give me security or give me death.” What a contrast to the battle cry of the prophet of another generation: “Move forward, and the Lord will go before you!” It is much easier to seek the security of some Egypt rather than hazard life on the frontier.

Instead of fulfilling a prophetic ministry, the minister is winning reputation as the upholder of the status quo. He is not about to risk his privileged position by declaring some unpopular truth. His slogan is “Let’s play it cool,” let’s not get too excited about anything, even doing the will of God. A church led by such a placater has little resemblance to the first-century Church that went out and “turned the world upside down” in less than a generation. But as ministers today, we want “to play it safe”; our own security does not allow us to risk life on the frontier, or witness to the will of God in some “Crete.” It is much easier to protect the status quo than to challenge it. If Christ had accepted things as they were, he would not have had to bear the cross; but neither would there be any salvation. What his accusers said of him is true of us if we are faithful ministers, “He saved others; himself he cannot save.” But we are trying to save ourselves, and if we follow Christ, it is always at a safe distance. We are quite content in being the “bland leading the bland.”

Too often today’s minister is an ecclesiastical version of Whyte’s “organization man.” He is thoroughly culturized and in tune with the popular winds of doctrine or denial of doctrine. He is the echo of the crowd rather than “the voice crying in the wilderness.” He is a puppet of the denomination—a “yes-man” to the denominational bosses—concentrating less on the coming of the Kingdom than on the coming of a more lucrative parish at the next annual conference. Little wonder that the Church has become, as Robert Raines has said in New Life in the Church, “the mouthpiece of the people instead of the voice of God. The Church, which is meant to be at tension with the customs and traditions of every culture, changes her protective coloring like a chameleon to suit the environment she is in.”

If we are to lead the Church in the fulfillment of a ministry that is prophetic, we must realize that Christianity is a creative risk rather than a security system. A ministry that seeks the safety of the rear echelons rather than risking the firing line is less than the ministry of Jesus Christ. The prophet is one who is willing to hazard everything in order that the kingdoms of this world may become “the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.” In the kind of world we live in today, the preacher should be proclaiming a word from the Lord that might even get him fired. The true prophet does not preach to live but lives to preach. As Ralph Waldo Emerson has put it in his poem “Sacrifice,”

Though love repine, and reason chafe,

There came a voice without reply—

’Tis man’s perdition to be safe,

When for the truth he ought to die.

Not “Safety First” but “God First” is the watchword of the prophet.

In a world full of promises Christianity should be preeminent because it outpromises every ideology, religion, and philosophy. Certainly the promises of communism are pale, shabby, and ungenerous in comparison.… Among the promises of the Christian faith, the following are certain to get a hearing: life, liberty, happiness, community, and forgiveness.…

The Christian concept of the sacredness of life has had a growing impact on the world.… The Christian concept of liberty has also become externalized over the ages. The Christian church was born in a world in which human slavery was an accepted thing and in which immediate emancipation was impossible. But the Christian church abolished it first as a spiritual fact within the confines of its own community. The apostle Paul asserted that the church knows only freemen in Christ and demonstrated in the case of Onesimus how Christian brotherhood makes legal emancipation flow from inner liberation.… Christian ferment eventually led to the legal abolition of slavery throughout the civilized world. It also led to the emancipation of women from many restrictions and disabilities once imposed by law and custom to the present full recognition of their civil and political rights as persons.… Protestantism promoted education everywhere and founded all the oldest institutions of learning in the United States. Civil liberty and the bill of rights and constitutional procedures which sustain it all grew out of the Reformation. Freedom of worship was the source from which political, economic, social, and intellectual freedoms sprang and spread. Freedom under God historically preceded freedom under law.…

The historical record does show that Christianity has fulfilled its promises where the Christian faith was tried, and has failed where that faith was not tried or was too diluted with extraneous elements. What modern man needs, therefore, is a Christian faith that is deeper and purer in a “post-Christian” world and much more widely shared in a religiously pluralistic world.…

Most of our contemporaries … are obsessed with the minority status of Christianity in a religiously pluralistic world and with the magnitude of the forces of evil all around us. They point to the very nominal nature of much Christian affiliation and the shallowness of much church life, to the pervasive secularization of the West, to the renewed vitality of the non-Christian faiths in the East, to the aggressive dedication and ominous spread of the communist faith. The result is that they dismiss the claims of the Christian faith as futile and look for some form of escapism. The most fashionable form of escapism nowadays is existentialism.…

Where two or more rival faiths are defended with equal dedication, it is the truth and not the intensity of the faith which will provide the margin of victory. There is and always will be strength in being right.

—RENE DE VISME WILLIAMSON, Independence and Involvement: A Christian Reorientation in Political Science (Louisiana State University Press, 1964), pp. 32 ff., 254 f.

Balmy summer breezes have blown into our editorial offices two gifted scholars as month-long staff associates. Dr. Leon Morris, principal of Ridley College, Melbourne, Australia, was with us before attending the Seminar on the Authority of Scripture in New England. Dr. George L. Bird, chairman of the Graduate Division of Syracuse University School of Journalism, is helping to project a special issue on Communication and the Christian Gospel. In this effort we also have the aid of Dr. David E. Mason, associate director of Laubach Literacy, Incorporated. The issue will appear early this fall.

June is the month of weddings, and in the chapel of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, we are told, the wedding party received a pleasant surprise. The groom was the minister of music at the Baptist Tabernacle in Atlanta, and each of the twenty participants received a subscription to CHRISTIANITY TODAY and the bonus New Testament in Four Versions. The suggestion came, we understand, from the groom’s mother, Mrs. W. C. Wiest of Falls Church, Virginia. We ourselves couldn’t have proposed a more useful gift.

On a clear day a man with a little imagination can quite easily see a lot of problems. In the first place, we have the war in Viet Nam. No one seems to know whether we should go all the way in or get all the way out. The whole situation gets particularly tight when a member of one’s own family is involved, and more and more people are learning this. It is a rather shaking experience to watch some of our splendid eighteen-year-old boys heading for who knows what.

In the second place, there is the population explosion. By the year 2000, the population we are told, will have doubled again. I have heard it said (what magazine do you read?) that in 100 years there will be standing room only. There are solutions to this that are problems in themselves, such as the Pill, which raises questions about the new morality (another problem), and—worse—nuclear war or a plague. And there is always the possibility, however distant, of famine, even if we can discover how to use our resources (including those still hidden away in the depths of the sea) for new kinds of food we haven’t even thought about yet. Then there is a thing called the cycle of life: we have the problem not only of how to get food into people but also of how to get the waste products back into the soil again. Meanwhile we foul up our streams and blaspheme our natural beauties.

If, as William Temple and Douglas MacArthur both said, “All our problems are theological ones,” then we have the unhappy situation of theology running wild in all directions. Where do we turn for light? Who are the experts? What magazine do you read? Meanwhile the sources of news and information are affected by special pleading, the love of money, freedom from moral restraint, and all of Bacon’s idols.

It is refreshing, when we turn to another problem, to find a first-class mind at work and able to produce a book breaking new ground with intelligence, enthusiasm, and bits and pieces of good humor. Robert Lee, a professor at San Francisco Theological Seminary, has written a first-rate book on the problem of leisure, which grows, I imagine, out of another problem, automation. I recommend Religion and Leisure in America (Abingdon, 1966) as helpful and enjoyable, a rare combination. Professor Lee knows what he is talking about.

Just last week I caught myself giving some advice to a student about summer employment. I thought it would be good for him to learn how to do a good day’s work under the pressure of a demanding job. This sort of thing ought to prepare him for life. The only trouble is that I am not sure this is the sort of life he ought to be preparing for. Americans have always had a kind of gospel of hard work. We have been suspicious of people who have had a lot of leisure, afraid of the softening of the character of a man who doesn’t work for a living. But how can we prepare a young person for a day we cannot clearly foresee?

I have it on good authority that automation has reached the place already where, if it were rationally used, we would immediately have 14,000,000 unemployed. We have been crying out against any kind of socialism that takes care of a man from the cradle to the grave. Yet thinking men are suggesting that we may well move into the day when people can go from the cradle to the grave—on public support, I presume—without ever having been gainfully employed in useful work. Perhaps my advice to the young person should have been that he spend his summer in leisure learning how to use it.

Historically the gospel of hard work has not always prevailed. I think I can say that in ancient Greece the assumption was that the great thinkers like Plato and Aristotle could justly lead a life of leisure because (1) they rested on a slave base where the work was done, and (2) they used their leisure for creative thinking. We feel that there is no apology required for Praxiteles, Aristophanes, or Pericles. The Golden Age of Greece was golden because the leisure class was highly creative in the arts, philosophy, and government. It was assumed that this was the sort of thing that a gentleman did with his time.

The leisure class in the courts of France, however, was something else again, and illustrated a way in which leisure can be degrading. But we can pass another judgment on the nobility of Great Britain. There was a good bit of riding to hounds, gaming, and gambling; but there also arose a high sense of noblesse oblige. A man of leisure was expected to find opportunity to serve in public life. The best schools of England have been called “public schools,” not because the public attended or supported them, but because it was there that men were expected to train for public service.

Professor Lee approaches the basic question of leisure time from two directions. One, all the available evidence seems to point to the fact that the machine will become our slave base, thus replacing the slaves of ancient cultures and giving leisure to the masses instead of to some small aristocracy. Two, the masses of men thus released (and they will not be able to evade the issue by “moonlighting”) will then have to discover the uses of leisure. These uses may be creative ones in the arts, in public service, or even in the appreciation of such things. Or they may degenerate into the “bread and circus” pursuits of declining Rome.

The present is a clue to the future, and one gets the impression that not all men—indeed, not the masses of men—are prepared to use their leisure for something beyond the increase of entertainment. The continuation of this leisure and the population explosion will raise the problem of how all the masses of men can spend their leisure simply “enjoying” life. Will there be enough highways and stadiums and lakes and motor boats for everyone? Will the expansion of leisure be a degenerating experience or a creative one?

Now is the time to think about these things, and Lee is one of the first thinkers in the field. He examines the question of leisure in width, in depth, in length, and in time. And when he comes to time, he opens up the theological resources for leisure. Personally, I give three cheers for his treatment of the Puritans and four cheers for his treatment of the Sabbath tradition.

Perhaps the Sabbath tradition is the key to the whole business. If you don’t know what to do with a Sunday afternoon, or if you run a school or summer camp and don’t know what to do with the kids, then you see clearly, very clearly, what all this leisure is going to mean. To some people, eternal life is what the Bible calls the Sabbath rest. If we don’t know how to use leisure, all that Sabbath could be hell instead of heaven.

Three days of special observances climaxed the American Bible Society’s commemoration of its 150th anniversary last month. Heading the list of guest participants were the Archbishop of York, Dr. F. Donald Coggan, and evangelist Billy Graham.

Graham addressed the 150th annual meeting of the society held May 12 in Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. The day before, a special service was conducted at the New York City Hall with Mayor John V. Lindsay. The day following, an anniversary dinner was held at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Also part of the commemoration is a year-long promotional campaign by the society in behalf of the Bible. There has been wide use of the mass media, plus special displays across the country and numerous localized observances. Friends of the society helped to persuade Congress and President Johnson to designate 1966 as “the Year of the Bible.”

Attention to the Scriptures took a fresh turn, meanwhile, as Richard Cardinal Cushing, Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, gave his imprimatur to a special edition of the Oxford Annotated Bible. The OAB uses the Protestant-oriented Revised Standard Version of the Scriptures. Cushing’s approval covers “common usage,” such as in home Bible reading and study groups. It does not extend to liturgical use.

Graham’s address in New York hailed the American Bible Society as “one of the best evangelistic agencies in the history of the Christian church” and encouraged accelerated effort to stimulate a spiritual awakening through increased Scripture distribution programs.

Calling for a return to the absolutes of the Bible and the Sermon on the Mount, Graham declared: “Once you start reading the Bible and believe it, its absolutes become principles by which men lead their lives.”

Other portions of the program included selections by 300-voice Westminster Choir and the singing of a special “anniversary hymn” entitled “Give Men My Word!” written by the Rev. Frank von Christierson, United Presbyterian clergyman of Citrus Heights, California. It was one of 14 selected by the Hymn Society of America in a contest sponsored as part of the 150th anniversary year.

Following the meeting at Philharmonic Hall, a colorful procession of robed churchmen moved down Broadway to the society’s new Bible House building.

The society is the world’s largest nonprofit organization devoted exclusively to translating, publishing, and distributing the Scriptures. Its Scriptures appear without note or comment.

At the City Hall service, Mayor Lindsay, on behalf of New York’s 1,250,000 Spanish-speaking residents, accepted a copy of the society’s new Spanish Version Popular New Testament.

To meet the needs of non-English speaking people in the United States, the society distributed Scriptures in 220 languages and dialects during 1965. World distribution last year was in 417 languages and dialects in 150 countries and Scripture portions appeared for the first time in 18 additional languages.

At least one complete book of the Bible has now been published in 1,250 languages and dialects of the nearly 2,500 spoken in the world. The whole Bible has been published in 237 languages, the entire New Testament in 297 and at least a single Scripture book in an additional 716.

Distribution of Scriptures in 1965 by the society reached a record high, with 54,042,014 Bibles, Testaments, and portions put into circulation in the United States and around the world.

The total—nearly 5.5 million more than the 1964 distribution figure—passed the 50 million mark for the first time and was seen as a substantial step toward the current-year anniversary goal of distributing 75 million copies of Scripture.

In addition to attempting to increase sharply its distribution, society leaders have set as goals the hope to inspire 10 million persons to become regular Bible readers during the year and to place Bibles in all public and public school libraries.

Miscellany

Theodore A. Gill, currently on health leave from the presidency of San Francisco Theological Seminary (see January 7 issue, page 48), will become executive secretary of the World Council of Churches’ Joint Study Commission on Education. He will prepare a major report for presentation in 1968.

Donald Hustad, doctorate-holding organist for evangelist Billy Graham, returns to the academic life next year as a church music professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Kenneth G. Hanna, a local clergyman, was chosen president of Winnipeg (Manitoba) Bible College.

Maxie G. Smith, formerly a pastor in Glen Ellyn. Illinois, will be academic dean of Midwest Christian College, Oklahoma City.

The Religious Newswriters Association elected David Runge of the Milwaukee Journal as president for the next two years. The annual Supple award for excellence in the field went to Dan Thrapp of the Los Angeles Times.

Congregationalists in England and Wales renamed their national “Union” a “Church,” a move interpreted as a paving of the way for merger with other churches.

The Church of the Nazarene has chosen a 100-acre site in Pike’s Peak Park, Colorado, for a multi-million-dollar Bible college scheduled to open in September, 1967.

Washington Star Religion Editor Caspar Nannes, one of the few newsmen in the nation to hold an earned doctorate, was chosen by his alma mater, Rutgers University, to receive an honorary doctor of letters degree as well. Nannes was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Rutgers and received his Ph. D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Enrollment in Presbyterian-related schools in the Congo jumped 63 per cent during the past year.

Deaths

CORNELIUS JAARSMA, 69, former dean of the education department at Calvin College; in Grand Rapids, Michigan of a heart attack.

ANTON PEARSON, 56, professor of Old Testament at Bethel Theological Seminary; in St. Paul, Minnesota, after several weeks of hospitalization.

The main opposition to Billy Graham when he came to London in 1954 was from English conservatism. This time, it comes from English radicalism. A full month before the current London crusade began, the radicals’ magazine, New Christian, had fired off a couple of hot salvos.

“No Instant Mission,” complained the paper’s front-page editorial on April 22. It went on to speak of the need for pastoral care of the “casualties” of the campaign. The editorial took up several well-worn themes: that Graham’s gospel lacks social concern and involvement, that this approach sets back the cause of “evangelism” by decades, and that its results are ephemeral. It added the modern radicals’ lament, that this “fundamentalist” preaching may undo all the excellent work of the new rationalists in finding and formulating a gospel for man “come of age.”

This response to Graham was predictable, of course. The radicals have captured all the publicity since Honest to God appeared four years ago. At times their domination of the more popular TV religious discussion programs has been so strong that it has almost appeared that no other view existed. Graham, with the exposure on the radio and TV and in the press that he inevitably draws, is the first challenge at this popular level to their mastery of the situation.

But the New Christian’s editorial—and in the same issue a far cruder, near-libelous review of John Pollock’s biography of Graham (the reviewer seriously suggested that Graham is mentally unbalanced or unwell)—drew weighty rejoinders in the correspondence columns of the next issue (May 6). Among letters objecting to both the tone and the content of the two articles were one from the principal of Spurgeon’s College, the redoubtable Dr. Beasley-Mur-ray, and another signed by the entire pastoral team of the influential Anglican Lee Abbey Community. Not one letter supported the paper’s strictures on Graham.

This incident illustrates the way in which the Greater London Crusade, now under way in the Earls Court Arena, has clarified the complex British Christian scene. Support for Graham is certainly greater and broader than in 1954–55, or even 1961 at Manchester. However, opposition from within the churches is also greater and sharper than before.

This is not surprising. Since the minor revival of religion and (to some extent) churchgoing in Britain in the mid-fifties, the churches have steadily lost ground. The free churches dwindle in membership at a regular rate. Over a thousand Methodist churches, for instance, have been closed in the last six years. Easter communicants in the Church of England—the only reliable assessment of active churchmanship in a body claiming the nominal allegiance of two-thirds of the population—have dropped by nearly 300,000 since 1962, to a figure of just over two million—a mere 4.6 per cent of the population.

The fact that various opinion polls (including a recent one by Gallup for the new ecumenical monthly Sunday) attribute regular churchgoing to as much as 25 per cent of the population proves only that British people are more ready to claim church attendance than to attend church. Even Roman Catholics, whose overall figures rise steadily each year, seem to be having more difficulty in getting the “faithful” to Mass, and the number of converts to Rome has dropped by about 15 per cent in the last two or three years.

In the face of this sort of failure, two reactions are to be expected. Some will say, “Return to the old message, the proven Gospel, the faith once given to the saints. Innovation and compromise have failed.” And others will say, “Jettison the old, out-worn message, which clearly is irrelevant to the present situation. Start afresh, with all our modern knowledge and new insights, and find a new kind of Christianity altogether, as different from the old as it was from Judaism.” So the split widens, as the orthodox (including Roman and Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals) call for a return to strong proclamation and the radicals call for a new, non-supernatural, non-theistic religion for a new world.

It is not surprising that support for Graham is broader. Many strong Anglo-Catholics are actively supporting the crusade and defending the evangelist’s message against the radicals.

It is also hardly surprising that opposition is sharper. After all, one is embarrassed, to say the least, when an approach to evangelism that one has dismissed as utterly irrelevant is making headlines, drawing crowds, winning a hearing, and gaining a response. Nobody likes to see corpses reviving, and it is in those terms that many of the new radicals would describe the London crusade.

Opposition has also come, sparse but shrill, from fundamentalist groups and the more extreme Calvinists. Well primed by the anti-Graham movements in the United States, these attacks have concentrated on the evangelist’s alleged compromise with Roman Catholics and modernists and his failure to preach “the whole counsel of God” (in context, a full Calvinistic doctrine of human depravity and divine election). However, unlike the fundamentalist attacks in the States, this opposition has been, for the most part, courteously and charitably (though trenchantly) expressed, with what seems to be a genuine desire not to cause incurable wounds in the Body of Christ. The more vituperative literature emanating from the U. S. has been largely repudiated and ignored.

The backcloth of all this religious controversy is, of course, the state of the nation. At times this seems to have been overlooked, as theologians have grappled in wordy and often woolly dispute about how the materialistic modern Briton can be won back to the Church. Theories abound, but few have been put to the practical test.

One that was so tested, however, was the “Woolwich experiment,” an exercise in pastoral and evangelistic ministry along the lines of the “new theology” in the parish of Woolwich in Southeast London. It ended in well-publicized failure, when the Rector of Woolwich, Nick Stacey, wrote a long article in a popular Sunday paper confessing that, for all the money and manpower sunk into this experiment over a period of years, in terms of people drawn from unbelief into the worshiping life of the church it had achieved virtually nothing at all. (Such honesty is to be admired; would that some evangelicals were equally frank about evangelistic failure.) The evidence is very damaging to the whole concept of evangelism represented by the radical school of thought.

It also indicates the hardness of the soil upon which Graham is broadcasting the seed just now. Cynicism and hedonism abound. “We are more popular than God nowadays,” one of the Beatles told a reporter, and in a sense he was speaking the truth. The majority of people—perhaps 90 per cent—never go to church. So far as one can judge, not many ever give spiritual concepts even a passing thought. Organized unbelief, under the aegis of the British Humanist Association, is stronger and more influential than ever.

And yet there are signs of hope. In a carefully researched article for Crusade, George Hoffman found genuine evidence of interest in evangelical Christianity in the colleges and universities of Britain. The annual report of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship—a body not given to rash judgments—stated: “It appears that after a period in which the number of professing conversions has not been so large, there is now a turning of the tide.”

In the nation as a whole, too, one senses a growing impatience with the downward trends of the last decade. The recent Moors murder trial, with its horrifying evidence of the effect of p*rnographic and sad*stic literature, shocked many people and led one major newspaper to point out the general failure of society in the moral realm and call for a ban on these books. A minister in the Harold Wilson Administration, Methodist George Thomas, has spoken out boldly against the degenerating influence of the betting boom currently sweeping Britain (about 2.8 billion dollars was spent on gambling in the United Kingdom last year—$56 per person!). “Unless a halt is called now,” Thomas declared, “we will be on the way to decadence.” Subsequently, government action to curb betting has been promised.

“A turning of the tide”: this is what British Christians look for. Whether the Graham crusade is the first wave or the sign of full flood waits to be seen.

Centennial Crusades

A week-long crusade in the capital city of Ottawa is expected to highlight evangelist Billy Graham’s ministry in Canada next year. Graham also plans a meeting in predominantly Roman Catholic Montreal, plus a visit to the Expo 67 world’s fair.

Graham’s major crusades during the Canadian centennial year will be in Ottawa (June 18–25) and Winnipeg (May 28-June 4). One or two day visits have been scheduled for Montreal, Toronto, Regina, Calgary, and Edmonton.

This year, associate evangelist Leighton Ford will hold campaigns in Regina and Calgary. He recently completed a series of meetings in Kitchener-Waterloo. Next year Ford will conduct two-week crusades in the cities of Edmonton and Saskatoon.

Rejecting the recommendation of its own special nominating committee, the 178th United Presbyterian General Assembly elected Wichita lawyer William Phelps Thompson to succeed Eugene Carson Blake as stated clerk.

The 47-year-old Thompson, who has just completed a year as assembly moderator, is an experienced ecumenist who proposes to treat the wounds suffered by the denomination during its recent doctrinal tempest (see story, page 44). As one of the few laymen ever named to head a major ecclesiastical bureaucracy, he hopes to see resolved an “incipient polarization between clergy and laymen.”

Thompson was elected to a five-year term to the post made famous by Blake, who is leaving July 1 to head the World Council of Churches. The assembly refused pleas to limit the powers or term of office of the stated clerk. Blake’s take a large manner had prompted many to accuse him of reading too much into that part of the stated clerk’s job description that gives him responsibility for “all other matters for which provision is not expressly made.”

Thompson, whose salary will be $25,500 per year, was elected by a 502–302 vote over Dr. John W. Meister, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Meister had been nominated by a twenty-three-member, geographically representative committee elected by the assembly. A pre-assembly committee had reportedly brought in the names of Thompson and Dr. Arthur R. McKay, president of McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago.

“I covet your help and your prayers as the servant of this assembly,” Thompson said in a brief acceptance speech. Later at a news conference be promised to be a social activist in the tradition of his predecessor. Lethargy, he declared, is the biggest problem facing the churches today.

Thompson’s successor as moderator was Dr. Ganse Little, pastor of Pasadena (California) Presbyterian Church, where Blake served before becoming stated clerk. Little defeated Dr. John Calvin Reid of Pittsburgh by a vote of 431 to 241 on the second ballot. The new moderator is 61 years old and serves as vice president of San Francisco Theological Seminary.

Thompson was born in Beloit, Kansas, attended public schools in Kansas and Oklahoma, then studied at Bethel College and McPherson College, both in Kansas. He got his law degree from the University of Chicago.

While in military service, Thompson served as an assistant prosecutor in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.

He is a life-long Presbyterian, currently a member of First Presbyterian Church in Wichita. He has been active in the leadership of the local council of churches for more than a decade. In 1956 he was given an ecumenical award by the state council of churches.

Thompson’s wife is the former Mary Alice Wood, who was a Methodist until they were married. The couple has three children.

Vacated Office

Archbishop Philip N. W. Strong of Brisbane was named acting primate of the Church of England in Australia following the resignation of Archbishop High Rowlands Gough of Sydney.

The noted Dr. Gough stepped down because of illness. Doctors had warned him not to undertake any duties for at least six months because of low blood pressure and general exhaustion.

A new Archbishop of Sydney will be elected at a special diocean synod within a few weeks. But a new primate will not be chosen until the quadrennial General Synod in September.

The election is expected to follow a procedure quite different from past methods. Formerly the primate was elected by the House of Bishops, a body of all Australian Anglican bishops. Only the archbishops of Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, and Brisbane were eligible for the office. But new election procedures were framed when a new constitution of the Australian Anglican church was drawn up.

At that time the Anglican church in Australia became autonomous from the mother church in England. The procedures for naming a primate are subject to revision and ratification by the synod.

Gough submitted his resignation from London, where he has been undergoing medical care since March.

A German Bishop’S Optimism

Bishop Kurt Scharf of the Berlin-Brandenburg Church, titular head of German Protestantism, takes a “more optimistic” view than his predecessor Bishop Otto Dibelius, he says, of spiritual and moral conditions in East and West Germany.

Open debate of religious questions by young people and their ready enlistment in church social-service efforts are prime reasons for his optimism.

Scharf considers estimates that only 3 to 4 per cent of church members attend services “too low”; the figure could be put at 20 to 25 per cent of the population, he says, if one also includes more than 12 million radio listeners.

While in East Germany attendance varies greatly between industrial and rural areas, in the large cities where communicants are fewer, he reports, they are more intensively and actively committed than before. Although in Leipzig 95 per cent of the youth observe Jugendweihe, the secular socialist counterpart to confirmation, in Brandenburg and farming areas almost all the youth seek traditional confirmation.

Scharf concedes that Germany is hardly in the throes of spiritual revival. “The God-is-dead theology is alive also in Germany,” he comments, noting that the tradition there reaches back 150 years to Feuerbach. But no prominent theologian champions the view, although some lecturers and prominent laymen in the Kirchentag movement espouse it. “But no churchmen in East Germany hold such radical views,” he comments, “any more than one finds atheists in Viet Nam.”

The new morality has also stirred debate in Germany, says the bishop. But open conflict over ethical and spiritual concepts, he thinks, provokes a hot-or-cold decision that transcends lukewarm religious attitudes. During the Nazi era, the Germans showed hidden spiritual reserves to combat forcible suppression of Christianity. Today, says Scharf, although a public-opinion poll would show that many church members do not acknowledge Christ’s resurrection in the true sense, still a reservoir of spiritual faith lies beneath their personal experience. Yet German Christians need constantly to be confronted with the Gospel, he says.

Scharf also takes a more optimistic view of East-West relations. West Germans have more access to relatives in East Germany on limited-period visas at the high church holidays. But West Berlin churchmen still cannot visit East Berlin churchmen, because party functionaries view West Berlin as an abortive facade for NATO. “Inside the churches there are differences,” says Scharf, “but no tensions.” Individual congregations in East Germany want close ties with those in West Germany, and West German churches sense a spiritual responsibility for brethren in East German churches.

What of theological and ethical differences? Scharf speaks of other matters than property rights, totalitarian power, and the welfare state. “There is more God-is-dead discussion in West Germany than in East Germany. Moral temptation is not so prominent in East Germany as in West Germany, where an affluent society creates a more difficult situation. East Germany has no sex and crime films, no illustrated press featuring risqué displays.”

When reminded that other content is censored from the East German press, the bishop acknowledged that the press advances what the government considers right and proper. “But freedom in West Germany carries more temptations,” he reiterated. The Council of the EKID (Evangelical Church in West Germany) has taken a stand for limitations imposed by decency on the liberty of the press; although it does not urge legislation, it encourages Christians to support what is right and proper and to abstain from what is improper. Asked whether the Church in East Germany has adopted a parallel protest against specific restrictions upon liberty of the press, Bishop Scharf replied that in 1964 the Bishops’ Conference adopted Ten Articles Concerning Freedom and the Service of the Church.

Should the Church involve itself corporately in political affairs? Bishop Scharf answers ambiguously: normally, no—the details and execution of political policy should be left to the politicians; but in all matters of principle “the Church should interfere in politics.” He even makes pressure groups’ quarrel with the position of the Church “a test of the validity of the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel” and defends the Church’s advocacy of redistribution of wealth as commendable.

What of Billy Graham’s approaching crusade in West Berlin, his third in Germany? Scharf considers it of “great importance” that neither it nor the World Congress on Evangelism make “anti-ecumenical” or “provocative political-economic pronouncements.”

Graham’s first crusade, Scharf says, helped restore the broken relationship of many refugees to their churches, and many skeptics were brought in touch with Christianity for the first time. The second crusade was attended mainly by those already in the people’s church and in the free churches, but these were strengthened by seeing so many other believers gathered together. The important thing. Scharf thinks, is whether effective follow-up use is made of the names of converts. Graham’s earlier ministry, he concedes, enlisted some from among both the intellectuals and the avant-garde, who attended mainly out of curiosity over a mass religious activity.

CARL F. H. HENRY

Where Are The Recruits?

From his office just off Times Square, the Rev. Louis L. King commands a sometimes restless company of 860 dedicated missionaries in twenty-four countries. Keeping them in line can produce a headache a day for the 50-year-old chief of the foreign operation that dominates the Christian and Missionary Alliance. The problem that promises to cost him the most aspirin, however, is how to get more missionary candidates.

In rainy Vancouver. British Columbia, last month. King put the recruit shortage squarely in the laps of 1,197 delegates attending the 69th General Council of the CMA. “All of us have been sincerely exercised by the loss of missionary personnel during 1965,” he said. Eleven missionaries were lost because of “doctrinal deviations” and “spiritual failure” alone. Only thirty-one new missionaries, far short of the annual average of fifty-five, were appointed.

The candidate shortage is even more vexing in large Protestant denominations, and New Jersey-born King offers no special credentials to be able to meet it. His earlier years were ordinary—three years in Bible school, eight as a pastor, and seven as a missionary to India. But he is now serving his fourth three-year term as CMA foreign secretary, and he is gradually gaining recognition as a missionary statesman. King’s prestige grew considerably from his masterminding the Congress on the Church’s Worldwide Mission, held at Wheaton, Illinois, in April.

Though normally quiet, King can rise to eloquence before a crowd. His hardest going is perhaps with his own CMA missionary subjects, some of whom tried to unseat him last year. One complaint is that he has been somewhat “high-handed,” another that he goes “too strictly by the book” in administering policy.

The candidate problem was not discussed as a separate topic at the six-day Vancouver council. Instead, it appeared in the wake of other issues, particularly the need for stepped-up recruitment and for a solid philosophy of higher education. Some even saw the candidate problem as related to CMA reluctance to get into the broader evangelical swim. Delegates answered that by voting to apply for membership in the National Association of Evangelicals. To meet the recruitment demand they authorized a full-time personnel officer.

The education question was more troublesome. It concerned the extent to which the four CMA Bible and missionary colleges should teach liberal arts subjects. No consensus was reached. More committee work was authorized, and council delegates will have another go at it next year.

Some have felt that the CMA needed to overcome a doctrinal fuzziness in order to consolidate its appeal. So last year’s council adopted a 553-word statement of faith. The action was implemented this year with a move to require educators and missionaries to subscribe to the statement. Pastors and laymen, get by with a much shorter, less explicit statement.

CMA President Nathan Bailey cited as “the greatest need throughout the homeland” a “recovery of the consuming passion that characterized apostolic Christianity in its evangelistic outreach.” Bailey’s annual report contained a ringing challenge: “Eighty per cent of all the people who will have lived from the birth of Christ to the end of this century will live in our generation. Can we not match that eighty with at least eighty new missionaries within the year? And more—can we not collectively produce the eighty new churches to support them?”

At 10:30 on the morning of May 24 a hearty and historic “Aye” was voiced across Boston’s spacious War Memorial Auditorium. Its effect was to approve a new theological foundation for much of American Presbyterianism.

The vote, nearly seven hours ahead of the printed schedule for the 178th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., moved to set aside the primacy of the Westminster Confession in favor of a creedal package. Enactment now needs only the expected endorsem*nt of two-thirds of the 3,310,000-member denomination’s 188 presbyteries and formal constitutional incorporation at next year’s assembly.

In the assembly showdown, only a few of the 837 commissioners cried “No” (several of these later recorded signed dissents). The lopsided affirmative vote seemed to indicate that theological liberals and conservatives had found a patch of common ground on which to end more than a year of sizzling doctrinal controversy among the 9.000 United Presbyterian churches.

Contention focused upon the theologically disputed “Confession of 1967,” which together with the Westminster Confession and Shorter Catechism and six other historic creeds is to provide the church its doctrinal guidelines. The formula represents a sophisticated attempt to arrest the modern mind. What has bothered conservatives is that it also seemed to represent a drift away from biblical moorings.

A pointed exchange between two young ministers brought out the issue. They were speaking to an attempt to delete a phrase of the new confession that says Scriptures “are received and obeyed as the word of God written.”

“If this wording is used,” said campus pastor C. William Hassler of the University of Montana, “those students who are intelligently and vitally interested in what it means to be a Christian person will not be confronted with a confessional statement raising live issues but rather those issues which have been dead on campus for years.” In Hassler’s mind, the big question is whether God speaks “when and how and where he chooses” or “when and subject to man’s philosophical interpretation of the nature of the written language of Scripture.”

The rejoinder came from Louis H. Evans, Jr., a pastor in La Jolla, California, who after acknowledging the critical nature of the issue declared: “The word, Jesus Christ, is that which is speaking to us, in the living, dynamic, en Christo relationship. But this term is also used in the Scriptures for that which has been spoken.… I think we should explain this to our collegians, that God has entered into history. He has spoken to us. We have a witness to what he has said, and that witness still instructs and guides us.”

Next Controversy?

A proposal to restructure the United Presbyterian Church promises to stir increasing debate. The plan suggested by a special committee of the General Assembly has already created so much controversy that some aspects have been eliminated. The committee, told by the Boston assembly to continue its study for at least another year, did gain endorsem*nt for other elements.

In other action, the Boston assembly commended the Billy Graham crusade in London, authorized the Cuba presbytery to set up its own national church, and issued numerous pronouncements on social issues.

At about that point parliamentary monitors called for a reconciling word from Princeton Seminary’s Edward A. Dowey, the lanky professor who chaired the committee that drafted the original confession. The phrase “word of God written” was added by a special General Assembly review committee. The amendment in question would have restored the intent of Dowey’s committee.

Dowey strode hesitatingly to the podium, pressed a pen to his lips in a moment of contemplation, then said quietly, “I favor this amendment. I think the assembly should vote it down.” This puzzling statement stemmed from obvious agreement among members of both committees to oppose all attempts to amend the confession substantively, personal convictions notwithstanding. Such amending would have upset the delicate liberal-conservative balance achieved in the document through the revisions of the review committee. The assembly voted down the amendment decisively, and the phrase “are received and obeyed as the word of God written” was retained.

The move to “update the church” by changing its confessional standards had a quiet beginning. The General Assembly of 1958 brought together the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. and the United Presbyterian Church of North America, and a committee composed initially of nine members was appointed to prepare a historical introduction to the seventeenth-century Shorter Catechism, to revise its scriptural references, and to draft a brief contemporary statement of faith for the newly merged denomination. With the approval of the 1959 assembly, the committee shed its responsibility in connection with the catechism and concentrated on a new confession.

The proposal finally brought forth by the committee in 1965 included not only a new confession but also a plan to revamp the doctrinal basis of the church’s constitution. Instead of relying solely upon the Westminster Confession and Catechisms “as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scripture,” the church was called on to create a “Book of Confessions” incorporating the Westminster Confession and Shorter Catechism, the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, the Scots Confession, the Second Helvetic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Theological Declaration of Barmen.

Moreover, the committee introduced a thorough revision of the questions put to candidates for ordination. No longer would they be asked. “Do you believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice?” The proposed substitute was, “Do you accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the normative witness to Jesus Christ in the Church catholic, and by his Spirit God’s word to you?”

It was at the point of apparent deviation from biblical authority that the plan drew the most fire. The reviewers appointed by the 1965 assembly and popularly referred to as “The Committee of Fifteen” reported, however, a wide range of protests. Some felt the new confession came close to syncretism, universalism, and pacifism. Some demanded a stronger affirmation of the deity of Christ.

In a year of work, the Committee of Fifteen agreed on significant changes here and there in the new confession. Equally important changes were made in the proposed subscription questions. But the basic idea of shifting confessional standards remains intact.

More than two dozen amendments were introduced at the Boston assembly. Only a few were accepted, and these were minor revisions. Aside from the question of scriptural authority, commissioners spent the most time debating the propriety of saying in the new confession that reduction of strife and the broadening of international understanding require “the risk of national security.” A Pentagon employee who was a commissioner finally succeeded in getting a favorable vote on the substitute phrase “and even at the risk to national security.”

Following the vote of endorsem*nt on the whole package, the assembly discharged Dowey’s committee. His parting word: “May I suggest that this does not discharge the church. We are only beginning.”

The New Creed

In acting upon the Confession of 1967, the United Presbyterian General Assembly in Boston adopted all the revisions suggested by the official reviewers, the so-called Committee of Fifteen headed by W. Sherman Skinner. A few additional changes were made by the assembly itself, but these were minor.

Skinner’s committee had the responsibility of hearing objections from the whole church and determining if and how they should change the confession. Under the strain of duplicating so many proposals and petitions (about 1,100 in all), the chairman reported, a photocopier at the Witherspoon Building “blew up.”

Many of the criticisms were based upon what the confession fails to say. Drafters countered these by declaring that the document was not intended to be definitive and comprehensive. “Our generation stands in peculiar need of reconciliation in Christ,” the preface reads. “Accordingly this Confession of 1967 is built upon that theme.”

The committee’s changes made Christ’s deity “more explicit” in the new confession, according to Skinner. Jesus was made the saviour “for all men” rather than “of all men,” and the necessity for man’s response to God’s love was indicated more clearly. A section on the Holy Spirit also was expanded. The only new section added was a paragraph of about 200 words on sexual relationships.

Southern Baptists In Michigan

The 10,700,000-member Southern Baptist Convention covers Dixie like the dew, but this year’s annual meeting was in pioneer country—Detroit—one reason for the lower-than-usual count of 10,500 “messengers.”

Arthur Rutledge, executive of the SBC Home Mission Board, said, “For years we sat in the Bible belt, content with feeling no responsibility for the lost in the West and North.” Now eight per cent of SBC members live outside the South and border states, and the North is becoming the promised land.

Former convention president Herschel Hobbs said, “Somewhere along the line we lost our forward thrust,” and Sunday Schools “are little more than holding their own.” In contrast, SBC in Michigan is nearly half as big as the American Baptist Convention (which has a 100-year jump), the ratio of baptisms to membership is twice as favorable as in SBC as a whole, and the per capita giving of $73 is nearly as good as that of Episcopalians nationally.

Southern Baptists may find the North rubs off. Detroit SBC members not only seek Negro converts, but even cooperate with other Protestants and Roman Catholics in inner-city projects. SBC’s first vice president for next year is Fred Hubbs, executive secretary for Michigan. The new convention president is Dr. H. Franklin Paschall, 44, of First Baptist Church, Nashville, whose congregation has had Nigerian student members but no local Negroes. Paschall hopes churches can “go beyond what the U. S. government has done to encourage the right attitude toward people. We have the laws that provide for integration. Now we must instill love.” He said an increase beyond the 4,000 Negroes now in SBC must be normal and voluntary … in love and mutual understanding.”

In the style of old, the Rev. C. A. Roberts of Tallahassee spoke on “practicing the new birth we preach by mentioning sex and swearing, but not race.” But Jimmy Allen of the Christian Life Commission in Texas charged that “the sphinx-like silence of generations of Baptist preaching on the subject of racial prejudice has produced a generation of church members who do not really understand that racial discrimination and prejudice tears out the heart of the Gospel.”

By coincidence, Paschall was on the program to preach hours after his election over eleven opponents to SBC’s top post. Paschall is soft-spoken outside the pulpit, but his address was an amplifier-crackling performance. “The modern sinner may resent our preaching to him, but he won’t deny us the right to love him,” he said. Paschall thinks a “federated church is not the answer to our problems, nor would it be good for Baptists to unite organizationally.”

Visiting American Baptist President Carl Tiller (see story following) stretched his hand of friendship as far as possible, and the next move seemed up to the Southerners. Tiller proposed stages of cooperation: 1966, Joint Bible study; 1967, joint city-wide rallies; 1968, “a substantial number of pulpit exchanges;” and in 1969, the hemisphere-wide Crusade of the Americas. ABC has yet to give the crusade project final approval.

The 1969 effort got a rousing sendoff at the climax of the SBC meeting. Outgoing president Wayne Dehoney believes the crusade will be the biggest evangelistic thrust in the history of Christianity.

In some respects, Detroit was a stalemate. Foy Valentine, executive of the Christian Life Commission, said “a new era of Southern Baptist acceptance of Christian social responsibility seems to have dawned during the past year.” Even so, his commission got its fingers burned on a race resolution in 1964, offered no recommendations for 1966, but it plans some next year.

The convention also had laryngitis on two big internal issues: a new name for the denomination to reflect its national character, and federal aid to SBC colleges (two resolutions, passed without discussion, reaffirmed past stands for separation of church and state without getting into specifics).

The interest of Rutledge and other individuals in friendly talks with Roman Catholics, reported in the Detroit Free Press, may become a pivotal issue in coming days.

American Baptists In Midstream

The annual American Baptist Convention last month dodged a clear-cut vote on joining the Consultation on Church Union, even though ecumenical strategy is the denomination’s most pressing problem.

One can read the returns from Kansas City several ways, but the denomination obviously is not ready for COCU.

Despite attendance by 3,500 delegates and several thousand visitors, interesting issues, and some good music, the proceedings seemed pallid. Convention mythology has it that locale affects voting under the ABC’s permissive delegate scheme. COCU advocates are already gearing for next year’s Pittsburgh meeting and, in particular, the 1968 Boston session.

In Kansas City, observed one veteran ABC employe, “the liberals had the microphone but the conservatives had the votes.”

Before the convention opened, the General Council, the ABC’s central policy-maker, spent a night rehashing its February vote against COCU (see February 18 issue, page 42). The reconsideration, sought by the COCU camp, backfired. The vote against COCU was more lopsided than ever—29 to 5—perhaps reflecting some discontent with plowing old ground. The council and the resolutions committee decided not to take COCU to the main floor, but the door was open for amendments.

The General Council approved outgoing President Robert Torbet’s plan for a permanent commission on Christian unity to talk with “other Christian bodies” and explore organic union or federation where approved by the full convention.

The closest thing to a COCU showdown came when a resolution to back this commission plan was introduced. An amendment by Missouri’s ex-Congressman O. K. Armstrong squeaked through (1,010 to 920); “for the further guidance of the commission” it lists distinctive Baptist beliefs,¹The amendment in full: “For the further guidance of the Commission on Christian Unity, we reaffirm our loyalty to the great distinctives that have formed the cherished heritage of Baptists from the beginning of our fellowship, among them specifically our belief in the New Testament as a sufficient guide for faith and practice, the competency of the individual in matters of religion, believer’s baptism by immersion for entry into the church, the symbolic understanding of the ordinances, the freedom of each local church to order its own life without control by an episcopacy, the advisory and cooperative natures of our associations and denominational organizations, and separation of church and state. We urge our Commission on Christian Unity to continue and if possible to increase every appropriate effort for greater unity with other Baptist bodies in the United States; and for greater unity with other free churches, in a federation or other cooperative organization that would involve no sacrifice of the New Testament principles which have been, and will ever be, the source and reason for our Baptist witness in the world.” Those beliefs are the main problem with COCU, and Armstrong’s speech, replete with historical name-dropping, made it clear where he stood. The Armstrong amendment also emphasized bids toward other Baptist and free church groups.

COCU advocates got a consolation prize later in the day when the depleted convention refused (by 478 to 221) to “commend” the General Council decision on COCU. Thus the ABC withholds support of its own council while, in another resolution, it notes the COCU talks “with commendation.” That resolution asks continued COCU observation “so that our constituency may be well-informed for any possible future change in our relationship.”

ABC’s new President Carl W. Tiller debated and voted against COCU in February. A layman. Tiller is chief of budget methods for the United States Bureau of the Budget. Because of his vocation he hopes “some things may happen at headquarters.” Other platform planks are fresh emphasis on evangelism, more community relevance for local congregations, and more faithful giving of money.

Although Tiller was uneasy about some wording in the Armstrong amendment, he said it doesn’t “foreclose” talks with non-Baptists but merely advises the new commission to “keep our Baptist insights well in mind.” Tiller Would like the ABC to look toward both other Baptists and other non-Baptist Christians.

The conservative wing that seeks Baptist unity has little to sponsor. The current Southern Baptist Convention President Wayne Dehoney is friendly, but in a joint appearance with Tiller he said he saw no future beyond such existing ties as the Baptist World Alliance and the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs. Both agreed that congregations dually aligned with the ABC and the SBC (like ones where Tiller and Armstrong belong) are valuable tests of unity.

The ABC is also gaining dually aligned churches from Negro denominations, particularly the Progressive National Baptist Convention. The Rev. Charles Sargent, Jr., a civil rights leader in Stamford, Connecticut, said many Negroes see in the ABC “the potential for a racially inclusive church body.”

The 1.5 million American Baptists continue to lag in most indicators of church vitality. COCU backer John Skoglund of Rochester envisions a struggling ABC caught between two giants, the COCU church of 24 million and the SBC of 11 million.

“Given the size of such competitors, with their accompanying power, influence, prestige and ability to get an effective job done,” he predicts, “there will be an accelerating movement of American Baptist members, ministers, and congregations to affiliate with either of these two strong churches. This will surely mean that the present ABC will continue its present decline in church membership and number of churches.”

Attention centered on ecumenical maneuvers, but there was the usual spate of political resolution-making at Kansas City. Two anti-labor amendments and one against “civil disobedience of any form” were killed, along with a liberal move to cast doubts on the U. S. government’s approaches to getting peace in Viet Nam. The ABC ducked endorsem*nt of the NCC and WCC resolutions critical of America’s Viet Nam policies. Liberals also lost by 459 to 434 a dramatic bid to back diplomatic recognition of Red China and seek an end to U.S. opposition to seating her in the United Nations.

Other resolutions supported national open-housing legislation, federal rent subsidies for the poor, laws requiring minimum safety standards in automobiles, and the right to refuse to serve in the Army because of moral objections to a particular war.

ABC resolutions are usually handled in haste and are often written by staffers of the Division of Christian Social Concern. This year, the ABC will use an experimental system featuring a steering committee of six, periodic meetings on resolutions, and a cut-off date two months before the convention. The changes represent a compromise with those who seek stronger grass-roots participation in resolution-making and official pronouncements on current events.

In a major convention speech, Lutheran and World Council of Churches leader Franklin Clark Fry offered some thinly veiled COCU criticisms. He considers it “heresy” to “attach religion too closely to national culture.… It may be one of the evil days in the church if we unite so that the only distinctness is not interpretation of the faith, but a national cast placed on Christianity.”

The WCC, he said, offers unity without “bleeding out all the vivid colors each brings into the tapestry of Christianity.” Through the world organization, Fry said, he has learned to appreciate Eastern Orthodoxy, with its “art of the adoration of God.” By contrast, he said, many American Protestants “have the unfortunate habit of sauntering and slouching into the presence of the Almighty with an easy comradeship and informality we wouldn’t think of using with the President of the United States.”

Kyle Haselden, editor of the Christian Century, an ABC clergyman, and a voting delegate at Kansas City, made a clean break with the new morality in a speech. Haselden rejected legalism because it “tends to negative human conduct … mechanizes the good life … binds the future … and precludes the working of the Holy Spirit.” Situational ethics, he said, is a “modern rebellion” against such legalism.

But he said Christians should repudiate the new moral relativism for these reasons: its origins is not in Christian thought but in writings of men like Rousseau; it is too easily distorted into license, especially “sexual libertinism,” which makes it popular with “broad segments” of high school and college students; and it “clashes sharply with the realities of the human situation.”

An unstructured love, he said, “trusts everything to the dominant impulse of the moment and that impulse may be wholly foreign to the Christian love that has its focus on the sacredness of persons and the holiness of community.”

Pondering Religion’S Role

The old, easy assumptions about religion in public education are out-of-date in the light of recent Supreme Court decisions. And academic presentation of the religious side of life seems increasingly constricted in an age of onrushing technology.

With such problems in mind, eighty-five scholars assembled at Harvard University May 19 and 20 in an off-the-record Conference on the Role of Religion in Public Education, sponsored by Harvard and the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

They pondered the relation of the new technological civilization to previous social structures, the ways in which religion is vital to this civilization, and how religion can properly affect the society through public education. The papers presented, all of which were revised as a result of the discussions, will be published by Houghton Mifflin next spring in what is likely to be the most comprehensive volume yet on the question.

The idea emerged that tensions between education and religion perhaps take a unique form in our culture because it is shaped by an increasingly comprehensive and ambitious technology. An age whose patterns are laid down by technological advance is without precedent. Symbols and images (perhaps, the categories) by which life was ordered as recently as fifty years ago no longer exist. The problem arises whether the technological culture can provide a framework in which man can live coherently.

The role of religious faith in such an age was said to require definition. Man needs a center around which to order his life, no matter what forces press upon him; but such a center is difficult to achieve in the analytical mood of the time. Conference participants sought to show how religious instruction can provide guidance in this area.

But religious instruction must be consonant with the demands of our pluralistic society. Representatives of the three major faiths faced the questions whether a “neutral” projection of religion can avoid drifting into insignificance, and whether objective, non-sectarian teaching can retain two essential elements of a religious outlook: knowledge and mystery.

In the third major area of discussion, how religion can affect the society through public education, it was assumed that the Supreme Court ruling against devotional Bible reading and prayer in the schools will be determinative for the decades ahead. This raised the question: What part must religious education play in preparing students for citizenship in a democracy?

The educators whose papers formed a structure for the conference seemed most concerned with “human” issues—how religious instruction in public education can relate to interests and needs of the individual pupil.

The theologians present were divided. Some were most deeply exercised on the constitutional issue, especially as it concerns the safeguarding of minority rights. Others wondered whether it is possible today to produce a methodology and curriculum that retain the mystery inherent in religion, particularly in a society and educational system that seek to eliminate the element of mystery from human life. This problem is crucial, if teaching is to do justice to the element of the supernatural.

Pastoral Theology Abroad

The Art of Pastoral Conversation, by Heije Faber and Ebel van der Schoot (Abingdon, 1965, 215, $3.75), is reviewed by Melvin D. Hugen, pastor, Eastern Avenue Christian Reformed Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

This book is a first in intercontinental travel in the field of pastoral theology. For far too long the theological traffic across the Atlantic has been one way instead of round trip. And this space mission is a resounding success.

Two Reformed ministers in Holland, both university professors of pastoral theology, have written a book that does not dismiss the American contributions of Carl Rogers, Seward Hiltner, and others as regrettable activism. Drs. Faber and Van der Schoot accept the American lead in this area of theology and then make a typically European contribution. They illuminate the theological significance of the pastoral conversation.

Both their debt to America and their contribution are illustrated in these comments by Faber.

I am also perfectly certain that the pastor must begin from this position of acceptance, and that he must accept the consequences. I should indeed go so far as to suggest that Roger’s acceptance of the client … has its roots in the Christian acceptance in God’s name of every man. However, this acceptance is not the only aspect even though it is an essential, indispensable, and often sufficient aspect of the pastor’s job. The pastor must also know … [that] he has a prophetic assignment [p. 29].

Again, “My proposition is this, that in this contact the message and the messenger are not to be divided, and that the effect of the message depends not only on the chance telling of it, but also on the fact that it is this messenger who brings it” [pp. 38, 39].

Significantly, the authors see that a pastor must not only listen (and listen he must, first and well); he must also be. He must be what he expects the other to become. But the pastor also speaks. As he listens and is, he communicates.

The question, “What can the pastor learn from Rogers and others in this field?” is answered in the context of a particular concept of the pastoral task: “He has, in the first place, the task to lead people to faith and to keep it alive, to help them see themselves in God’s light” (p. 133). Again, “revolution and faith are fundamental categories for a pastoral conversation” (p. 135).

This highly readable book is one of the best introductions available to the newer methods of pastoral counseling. It should be particularly appealing to evangelicals, since it gives a thorough theological analysis of this form of the ministry of the Gospel.

The first part is an attempt to reproduce in book form the clinical training of Rogerian type. The attempt almost succeeds, and that is no small contribution. Faber and van der Schoot add their theological concept of the specific nature of the pastoral conversation:

1. The pastoral conversation takes place, because the church—and through the church, Christ—commissioned the pastor. This awareness of not speaking on your own authority but in service of the Lord appears to me to be the fundamental presupposition. 2. The pastoral conversation finds its fulfillment there where the Strange Word is heard, where the Third Party enters the conversation, where people know themselves to be standing in God’s presence [p. 175].

Many evangelicals fear the client-centered approach to pastoral counseling. Any approach other than an authoritative one raises the specter of relativity. The authors develop a penetrating distinction between necessary authority in counseling and the authoritative approach.

This book should become a standard introductory text for pastoral counseling courses in Protestant seminaries.

MELVIN D. HUGEN

One Baptism Or Two?

Baptism Today and Tomorrow, by G. R. Beasley-Murray (St. Martin’s Press, 1966, 176 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by James Daane, assistant editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This is one of the most fascinating books that I, an endorser of infant baptism, have read against infant baptism. The author, principal of Spurgeon’s College, London, and a participant in the discussions that produced the World Council of Churches’ One Lord, One Baptism, recognizes that there is renewed interest in this subject within the ecumenical movement because baptism involves the question both of the sacraments and of the nature of the Church. He agrees with the statement of Cambridge theologian A. Vidler: “All the chief Christian doctrines are involved in the theology of baptism.”

As a Baptist, Beasley-Murray, rejects baptism as a sacrament, of course. But he is highly critical of Baptists who reduce baptism to a mere symbol and points out that it is foolish indeed to live and die for nothing but a symbol. He also scores Baptists for spending vast energies on debating the proper subjects of baptism without ever seriously attempting to develop a theology of baptism.

The author himself rejects infant baptism on the ground that the meaning of baptism in the New Testament is much more than infant baptism can bear. And after pointing out that various churches which practice infant baptism have defined infant baptism in smaller terms than that of New Testament baptism, he says bluntly that these churches have in fact not one but two baptisms.

Beasley-Murray sees certain values in infant baptism: it eloquently demonstrates the priority of grace and its initiation of all matters of redemption; and it demonstrates that children of believers are set apart from the world and exist within the “outer court” of the Church. Indeed, he asserts that some rite to demonstrate these truths is needed and suggests that the Church form a rite that would meet this need without beclouding the truth of New Testament baptism. It seems to me that this is a telling admission.

Pedobaptists have always urged that without infant baptism the children of believers in the fuller New Testament dispensation of grace would be more impoverished than the Jewish children of the Old Testament. Beasley-Murray does not go into this—indeed, he quite ignores the whole Old Testament background of infant baptism. But the admission, after infant baptism is rejected, that the children of the Church need some kind of rite that the Lord has not provided is one whose significance ought to be pondered. Either the Bible, and the Lord, fail the children of the Church at this point, and the Church itself by biblical definition is deficient, or Beasley-Murray has given us an incomplete version of New Testament baptism. To admit that the Church has a need which the Bible does not meet is particularly significant in the light of Beasley-Mur-ray’s belief that “all the chief Christian doctrines are involved in the theology of baptism.”

Ultimately Beasley-Murray’s Baptist church is left with a need that it must itself fulfill, for he holds that “faith is not merely an accompaniment of baptism but an inherent element of it.” And he approvingly quotes W. G. Kümmers comment that faith is “an ingredient of the event of baptism, as it is of justification.” But this is a violation of the Reformation’s “by grace alone,” in regard to both baptism and justification. The objectivity of the sacrament for ordinance) of baptism and the distinctive priority of grace are surrendered in both baptism and justification when man’s act of faith becomes an inherent element or ingredient in baptism and in justification. Beasley-Murray asserts the priority of grace, but he cannot have it both ways.

Even so, the argument of the book is intelligent and interesting, and its spirit irenic. The book may serve to prod pedobaptists into thinking through the full meaning of New Testament baptism, for infant baptism and reveal the folly of reducing infant baptism to something less than full baptism.

This little book carries a price that suggests either that the publishers expect it to have a small sale or something less charitable. But the author is right; given the ecumenical movement and the increased interest in biblical study, the problem of baptism is going to be with the churches a long time.

JAMES DAANE

The Central Point

The Theology of the Resurrection, by Walter Künneth, translated by James W. Leitch (Concordia, 1965, 302 pp., $5), is reviewed by Robert D. Preus, professor of systematic theology, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

Professor Künneth has done a great service to all committed Christian theologians with this study of the theology of the Resurrection. First published in German in 1951 and now translated most adequately by James Leitch, the volume presents the most rigidly systematic and complete study of the Resurrection to appear in our generation, and this by a conservative scholar.

The book is divided into three parts: (1) the reality of the Resurrection, (2) the dogmatic significance of the Resurrection, and (3) the Resurrection and eschatology. Interspersed in the discussion are some of the most valid and telling polemics this reader has ever run across. For instance, the critique of Bultmann and his attempt to demythologize the Resurrection is devastating; Künneth shows that it is upon the resurrection and its reality (its anti-mythical character), that the entire demythologizing enterprise founders. Tillich, too, is criticized for making the Resurrection a mythical sign of something transcendent and unconditional; to Künneth this levels down the particular to the universal and reduces all special revelation (as in the Resurrection) to a general revelation. Again, Brunner comes under severe criticism for finding a difference between Paul’s theology of the Resurrection and the gospel accounts. That Paul does not mention the empty tomb does not imply that he was influenced by Greek thought. On historical and exegetical rather than on theological (philosophical) grounds, Künneth contends against Brunner that there is a connection between the Resurrection and the empty tomb.

Of the three sections, the first is by far the most difficult for the reader to understand, and for at least this reason the most unsatisfactory. Künneth wishes to maintain the reality of the Resurrection against all possible heterodoxy. It is grounded in history, he says. But it is not historical. The weight and character of it “simply does not depend at all upon his historicality.” It is a reality “beyond history” and “outside history.” The Resurrection is not “an objectively ascertainable object of knowledge.”

Such language, which may be used to guard against certain outmoded orthodox apologetics or the encroachments of scientific historicism today, is surely neither clear nor adequate. Now we must understand that Künneth is talking about the Resurrection as such and not the appearances of our Lord when he speaks this way. But the Scriptures do not make much distinction between the Resurrection and the appearances. And certainly the appearances lead each witness back to the Resurrection itself. If the Resurrection was a unicum that transcends historical analysis, as Künneth says, so also was each appearance; and so, for that matter, was the death of Christ, for it was an atoning death. Surely we would wish to call the Resurrection (although no one was present to observe it) historical simply because it took place on earth at a certain time and place (something which I am sure Künneth would profess).

By making the Resurrection “nonobjective” and by making the accounts of the Resurrection not purely eyewitness accounts but confessions, Künneth wishes to place the Resurrection theology above transitory world pictures and the Resurrection itself above scientific analysis or criticism. This is also his explanation for “possible contradictions” in the Resurrection accounts. One wonders, however, whether the author has not thereby paid too high a price to both scientism and the form critics. Certainly science is not competent to judge the Resurrection as something historical. And calling the traditions of the Resurrection “confessions” that involve a “believing knowledge” of the Resurrection, right as it is, will hardly satisfy the problem of “possible contradictions.” We will want to know that these “confessions” involving “believing knowledge” are true to what really happened and are not contradictory. Professor Künneth is most insistent upon the reality of the Resurrection, and one gets the impression that this involves also belief in the empty tomb. For this reason we wonder about the propriety of such vague, apologetic terminology.

In the second section, Künneth shows the centrality of the Resurrection for all Christian theology. Christology is best approached from the point of the Resurrection rather than from the classic Logos-incarnation motif or the Spirit Christology of E. Hirsch. Beginning in this way we naturally progress to the themes of Sonship and Lordship so fundamental in any Christology. Künneth breaks with the old classic Lutheran and Protestant Christology in saying that both Sonship in the sense of divine authority and Lordship were “given” through the Resurrection. To Künneth, the Resurrection (as the exaltation of Jesus) does not manifest what was formerly hidden but effects something new in Jesus. And to Künneth Lordship is divinity. This would indicate that the ground for a confession of Christ’s deity is first laid by God’s action in the Resurrection, and that God cannot be found apart from Christ. This does not deny the Incarnation, in which the Logos became flesh; but the Incarnation is incomplete without the Resurrection and is “conditioned” by it. Künneth contends also that the Resurrection shows that Paul’s theology, though it goes beyond that of Jesus, is legitimate.

Creation, too, must be interpreted in the light of the Resurrection. Thus we are saved from falling into any philosophy of nature, either a pantheistic glorifying of nature or a Manichaean depreciation of it. Time, too, must be determined by the Resurrection, which marks the consummation of time. The Resurrection is also the basis for the presence of Christ and for the bestowal of the Spirit. It is even “the basis” (presumably in the sense of a principium cognoscendi) of the Trinity (again an advance from catholic theology). Even the Church is “realized” in the Resurrection, and the sacraments derive their meaning from it. In fact, all ethical effectiveness in the Church gains its power from the Risen One. Finally, ontology, in the sense of man’s “Dasein,” must be a resurrection ontology (against Heidegger). Particularly the meaning of death (against naturalism or a naïve ethico-religious conception) is made clear only by the Resurrection; for death is God’s “no” to the world of the Fall and sin. If nothing else, Künneth in this long section shows how fundamental the Resurrection is to all Christian theology, and does not do so by depreciating the life and death of Christ.

In the final section, which is perhaps the best, the author attempts to ground all eschatology in the Resurrection. Against Althaus, he insists that Christian eschatology looks for a bodily resurrection on the basis of Christ’s resurrection. And this must be maintained in defiance of all historical criticism. In fact, the Resurrection is the central point in history (although it is not “a historical fact as such”) that sheds light on all history and saves us from every speculative philosophy of history. Again against Althaus, who teaches the essential unity and simultaneousness of death and judgment, of homecoming to Christ and resurrection, Künneth insists that biblical eschatology is determined by a principle of succession and progression. This means that he holds to an intermediate state of bliss as well as to judgment and resurrection, and at this point his work is particularly convincing.

In our day when the resurrection of our Lord is misunderstood, made peripheral and irrelevant, and called myth and legend—and this by theologians—it is gratifying to find a competent theologian not only defending the Resurrection against these many forms of unbelief but proclaiming it as central to our theology.

ROBERT D. PREUS

For The Shallow Life

Personal Religious Disciplines, by John E. Gardner (Eerdmans, 1966, 134 pp., $3), is reviewed by Gary R. Collins, assistant professor of psychology, Bethel College, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Modern man lives a fragmented life—without meaning, direction, purpose, or clearly defined values. For many people, life is little more than a “tangled web or a frustrating pattern of multiple loose ends.” This is the message of contemporary philosophers and the observation of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists. Even many Christians find that life is shallow and their religion irrelevant.

A number of writers have diagnosed this modern condition: Dr. Gardner is one of the few who have offered solutions. “The dream of being a whole person cannot be realized without great effort,” he writes. “Christ must be put at the center of all thought, feeling, and action, and kept there …” by the practice of devotional discipline. This book is a penetrating consideration of the three disciplines Jesus describes in Matthew 6: giving, prayer, and committed, disciplined living.

Dr. Gardner (who teaches at Memphis Theological Seminary and is not to be confused with John W. Gardner) has written a persuasive, thought-provoking book. His style and message discourage rapid reading but invite careful and frequent reflection. This is a book that deserves to be read and by any one seeking a richer relationship with God.

GARY R. COLLINS

Orthodoxy Confirmed

The Temptation and the Passion: The Markan Soteriology, by Ernest Best (Cambridge University Press, 1965, 222 pp., 32s. 6d.), is reviewed by I. Howard Marshall, lecturer in biblical criticism, University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

The appearance of this book as the second monograph in the series recently begun by the Society for New Testament Studies indicates the character of the audience for which it is meant. In 1957, J. M. Robinson put forward the thesis that in Mark the ministry of Jesus is presented as a conflict with Satan, who acts through his agents, both human and demonic, until his defeat at the Cross. Dr. Best, an Irish scholar who has already made his mark in the world of scholarship with his study of Pauline theology, One Body in Christ (1955), attempts to rebut this thesis.

In Part One of the book, Best shows, by linking together the stories of the temptation and the Beelzebub controversy, that Jesus as “the stronger man” overcame Satan at the beginning of his ministry (Mark 3:27). Thereafter, Jesus was able to plunder Satan’s kingdom at will, the demons recognizing in him their Master. The other temptations that came to Jesus after the initial experience were not due to Satan but to other sources (Mark 8:33 means that Peter took on the role of Satan, not that he was possessed by him), and Best demonstrates from a study of the Bible and other relevant literature that Satan is only one of many sources of temptation.

In Part Two the author puts forward an alternative, positive interpretation of the ministry and death of Jesus. He examines in turn, sometimes rather tediously, the evidence for Mark’s theology in his editing of his material (especially in the “seams” that join up the individual pericopae), in his choice and ordering of the material, in the witness borne to Jesus and the titles assigned to him, and finally in the evangelist’s view of the Christian community. This study, which is conducted in the light of the latest scholarship, leads to a conclusion that readers of this review might have thought to be self-evident: Mark sees Jesus as the Teacher who brings men to an understanding of his Cross and calls them to repentance and as the One who in his death bears the judgment of God upon human sin and thus makes himself a vicarious sacrifice for men. Traditional though this conclusion may be, it is good to see it confirmed by careful, critical scholarship.

There are a number of points on which one could well take issue with Best, but mention of one must suffice. The author is concerned in this book to expound the theology of Mark rather than the mind and teaching of Jesus. Living as he does in the post-form-critical era in which the evangelists are regarded as theologians in their own right, he believes that a delineation of the theology of Mark is an essential preliminary to any attempt to work back to the historical Jesus. We may be glad that Dr. Best is plainly not disposed to agree with scholars who are telling us today that the historical Jesus is irrelevant to our faith. But it is a pity that in this book, where the opportunity to do so was often present, he has not made any attempt to indicate the relation between the historical Jesus and Mark’s portrait of him; indeed, he goes to great pains to tell us repeatedly that in this book he is not concerned with the question of historical reliability. One may surely ask what the value of Mark’s theology is if it is not in harmony with the teaching of Jesus himself, and it is a pity that Best has not shown whether what he calls “Mark’s inspired comment” is true to the facts. Attention to this point would have enhanced the value of what is a challenging piece of scholarship with which future interpreters of Mark will have to reckon.

I. HOWARD MARSHALL

Book Briefs

The Next Christian Epoch, by Arthur A. Vogel (Harper and Row, 1966, 111 pp., $3.50). Vogel responds to the secular, linguistic, God-is-dead theology and insists it is “catchy” but superficial.

The Ways of Friendship, by Ignace Lepp, translated by Bernard Murchland (Macmillan, 1966, 127 pp., $3.95). A very competent discussion of the various possibilities of friendship.

What the Cults Believe, by Irvine Robertson (Moody, 1966, 128 pp., $2.95). Brief, popular treatments.

With the Whole Heart, by Bud Collyer (Revell, 1966, 96 pp., $2.75). A good confession if you close one eye to its theology.

The Minister’s Wife as a Counselor, by Wallace Denton (Westminster, 1965, 172 pp., $3.95). For the pastor’s wife who feels she must.

John XXIII and the City of Man, by Peter Riga (Newman, 1966, 239 pp., $5.50). A commentary on John XXIII’s Mater et magistra.

Christian Economics: Studies in the Christian Message to the Market Place, by John R. Richardson (St. Thomas Press, 1966, 169 pp., $4.95). Practical comments that grew out of camp work with young people.

Hymns and Songs of the Spirit (Judson and Bethany Presses, 1966, 223 pp., $1.90). A collection of excellent hymns.

The Concept of Irony, by Sören Kierkegaard, translated by Lee M. Capel (Harper and Row, 1965, 442 pp., $7.50). One of Kierkegaard’s earliest major works and the last to be translated into English. Only for the most serious Kierkegaard students.

A History of the Jews in Babylonia, Part I: The Parthian Period, by Jacob Neusner (E. J. Brill, 1965, 236 pp., 36 Guilders). A scholarly work for scholars only.

The Generosity of Americans: Its Source, Its Achievements, by Arnaud C. Marts (Prentice-Hall, 1966, 240 pp., $5.95). Why do Americans give $11 billion a year in private generosity for the public good? An informative, historic survey of the major role Americans have played in philanthropy.

Luke and the Gnostics: An Examination of the Lucan Purpose, by Charles H. Talbert (Abingdon, 1966, 127 pp., $2.75). The author’s thesis is that Luke and Acts were written to counter Gnosticism. A scholarly work.

Joy to My Heart, by Gene Gleason (McGraw-Hill, 1966, 217 pp., $4.95). The true story of nurse Annie Skau, medical missionary to China and Hong Kong.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Portrait of an American Humanist, by Edward Wagenknecht (Oxford, 1966, 252 pp., $6). For the person who wants to know the smallest detail about Longfellow, who was not long.

More Beautiful than Flowers, by Joan M. Lexau, drawings by Don Bolognese (Lippincott, 1966, 28 pp., $2.95). A poem-prayer set to lovely drawings; its purpose is to show the small child what God is like.

Paperbacks

Faith, Fact and Fantasy, by C. F. D. Moule, et al. (Westminster, 1966, 125 pp., $1.45). Provocative essays that should provoke critical evaluations. One is by John Wren-Lewis, to whom John A. T. Robinson often appeals.

A New Approach to Sex, by William Fay Luder (Farnsworth Books, 1966, 103 pp., $.85). Some good sense on sex offered in the name of Christianity by an author whose theology is essentially non-Christian.

Priest and Worker: The Autobiography of Henri Perrin, translated by Bernard Wall (Regnery, 1966. 247 pp., $1.95). The interesting story of the French priest-workers, particularly of one of its first and most famous.

Layman Extraordinary: John R. Mott, 1865–1955, by Robert C. Mackie (Association, 1965. 128 pp., $1.25). The story of the man who perhaps more than any other contributed to the birth of the World Council of Churches.

Understandings of Man, by Peter Le-Fevre (Westminster, 1966, 187 pp., $2.45). The understanding of man in the thought of such men as Freud, Reinhold Niebuhr, Marx, Buber, J. Huxley. For critical readers.

Assignment: Overseas, compiled by John Rosengrant, edited by Stanley J. Rowland, Jr. (Crowell, 1966, 129 pp., $1.95). How to be a welcome resident and a worthy Christian abroad.

The First Southern Baptists, by Robert A. Baker (Broadman, 1966, 80 pp., $1.25). New, thorough research gives interesting insight into Baptist beginnings at Charleston, South Carolina.

Is the New Testament Anti-Semitic?, by Gregory Baum, O. S. A. (Paulist, 1965, 350 pp., $1.25). A son of Jewish parents, now a Catholic theologian, whose vocabulary is reflected in the Vatican Council’s statement on the Jews, stresses that God continues to make himself known in the synagogue.

Abraham and Jonas, both by J.-M. Warbler and Harold Winstone and illustrated by Jacques le Scanff, and The Prophet and the Soldier, by J.-M. Warbler and Harold Winstone, illustrated by Alain le Foll (Macmillan; 1966; 25, 27, and 25 pp.; $.59 each). Well-written, evangelical in content, and delightfully illustrated. For small children.

Where preaching should he biblical, relevant, existential, confessional, and sacramental

Sermons come out of a man’s life. Good preaching depends more on what a man is in himself than on academic preparation, accumulated reading, or the experience of the years. What a man is at the center of his being will very largely determine what he becomes in the pulpit. The channel of music is an instrument or a voice. The channel for God’s Word is the cleansed, unfettered personality of the preacher at home with both the visible and the invisible, a man saturated with the mind and spirit and love of Jesus Christ.

In a lecture John Knox declared that Christian preaching should be biblical, relevant, personal, existential, confessional, and sacramental. I should like to feel at the end of my days that my preaching has been characterized by these qualities.

Everyone must have his own method. I began my year of work during the long summer spent at a home by the waters of the Bras d’Or Lakes on Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, Canada. From the earliest days of my ministry I have kept a large, black, loose-leaf notebook, and this book goes with me to my summer home, supplemented by several large boxes of books and some commentaries.

The notebook might be called my homiletical garden. In it the idea and the inspiration for a sermon begins, grows, and in time finds expression. At the top of a page I write a single text or a series of texts, or a theme that has arisen out of my devotional disciplines or has come to me from “beyond” into my consciousness as I have gone about my work. Each idea or text gets an entire page; then with the passing of time the page begins to fill up with an outline, illustrations, and some paragraphs and sentences, and lengthens into several pages. It may be several years before the seed idea becomes a skeleton and the skeleton takes on form and substance and at last becomes a manuscript. But the book always has in it many pages with a wide variety of sermon stimulants at various stages of development.

God gives the preacher his authentic message. It comes from the biblical word, from the living word, and breaks in upon his consciousness by the power of the Holy Spirit under every conceivable situation. I have been prompted to jot down sermon suggestions while studying the Scriptures, while praying, hiking over a mountain, walking by the seashore, or swimming, on a train or a plane, in the middle of the night. I have dictated an entire sermon to my wife as we have driven on some long motor trip. When the channel is kept open, the message of the Spirit will come through.

Gradually, as the summer weeks pass, my preaching plans for the coming season evolve, until in about the second or third week of August the plans are sufficiently well formed that I can list all my sermon subjects and texts from the first Sunday of September through the following January. This list I send back to the church office in Washington for the minister of music and other members of the staff to use as they plan their part of worship for the coming season. During the first week of January 1 provide the staff with my topics and texts through Easter. Then about midway in the Lenten season I provide the topics and texts for each Sunday until mid-June, when the vacation period begins. But before September arrives I shall have the main emphasis of the coming season’s work clearly in mind and much of it on paper.

The preaching cycle for the year falls into rather natural categories. September is a time of renewal of the regular church schedule, and my preaching reflects this fact. I find, for example, that in 1961 I preached a series of sermons in September under the title, “Christ and Your Daily Life.” The subtitles were (1) “Christ and Your Home,” (2) “Christ and Your Work,” (3) “Christ and Your Education.”

The first Sunday of October is always World-Wide Communion Sunday, and the Communion festival in our church is always a high and significant occasion. The Communion service begins with the preparatory service on the preceding Thursday night, at which time the sermon is preached and the sacrament of adult baptism is administered. On Sunday the order for Holy Communion is rich and full of meaning. Since the sermon was preached on Thursday night, the invitation to the sacrament becomes a brief Communion meditation.

October is the month of the festival of faith for Protestants. I generally preach a series of sermons, certainly not fewer than two, on the salient features of Protestantism, treating the subject in its historical and contemporary setting. Thus I note in 1961 a series of three sermons on “The Unfinished Reformation,” and in 1962 a sermon on “The Reformed Church and the Vatican Council,” another on “A Protestant Reformer and the American Revolution—An Appreciation of John Witherspoon,” and still another on “Freedom and Order.” October closes with All Saints’ Day, when there is an opportunity for a service of remembrance for the faithful departed.

Several Sundays in November must be given to Christian stewardship and the Church in mission, for this is the period when church members are making their stewardship commitment for the next church year. November includes Veterans Day and Thanksgiving Day, with an opportunity for appropriate emphasis.

Soon after the Harvest festival emphasis, Advent begins, and I preach an Advent series each year. There are many extra services in December—stated Communion on the first Sunday, a Christmas Eve celebration of Holy Communion, and two or three vesper services containing the great treasure of Christmas hymns and carols. In January there are topical sermons dealing with the events at the turn of the year.

Then after a few weeks Lent is upon us. During this season I always preach a series of Sunday sermons, supplemented by Wednesday noon and Thursday evening services at which guest speakers preach. Such a series leads helpfully to Holy Week, Maundy Thursday, and the Good Friday commemoration. Such a series one year was “Words Spoken at the Cross” (1) “By the Gamblers,” (2) “By the Crowd,” (3) “By the Priests,” (4) “By the Malefactors,” (5) “By the Commander,” (6) “By Christ.” Another year I preached a series of Lenten Sunday sermons on the seventeenth chapter of John under the title, “The Time of Grief and Glory.” During the last Lenten season, the series was entitled “A Credo For Christians,” and I dealt with the following subjects: “A Look at the Apostles’ Creed,” “A Look at the Nicene Creed.” “The Westminster Confession—and the Proposed Revision,” “Honest to God—and the New Theologians,” “The Ecumenical Thrust,” and (Palm Sunday) “Christ and Our Times.”

On the Sundays in Eastertide several years ago, I preached a series of sermons on the “Words of the Risen Christ.” This series of nine sermons later became a book, And Still He Speaks.

Looking back, I find that I have preached three or four series each year—in the fall, in Advent, in Lent, and between Easter and Pentecost. There have been series on the parables, on the beatitudes, on great personalities in the Bible, on the Apostles’ Creed, on the Character of Jesus, the Work of Jesus, the Prayers of Jesus, and so on. There have also been topical sermons, especially on political freedom as it is derived from and sustained by the Christian faith. Special sermons appear at the time of a national election, the opening of Congress, or the convening of some international tribunal. By its very nature the National Presbyterian Church plans and conducts many special services.

Planning one’s preaching is one thing; preparation is quite another. I make a careful and detailed outline and assemble the material that is to be quoted. I then dictate the sermon either to a secretary or to a machine, and the manuscript is given to me for use or for revision. I preach from notes but do not read from a manuscript. I do not memorize words or sentences as such, though I reproduce in spoken word almost precisely what has been written. I spend part of Saturday evening and early Sunday morning with the manuscript in my hands, pacing the floor, mulling it over, soaking it up, and praying that God will use these efforts to his glory.

The value of a complete manuscript is that one has a permanent record, yet is free for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to use, change, or even discard the sermon. The manuscript can provide the substance of what one subsequently might publish, and sometimes manuscripts end up in unexpected places. The preacher in the pulpit of the National Presbyterian Church is always exposed, and I have found a manuscript in the church office makes possible accurate quotations by the press.

When I preached my first sermons after my ordination, I wondered whether I would have enough in me to last six months. Now I fear there may not be enough Sundays left for the texts or themes growing in my homiletical garden—that big black book.—

The Rev. EDWARD L. R. ELSON,

The National Presbyterian Church,

Washington, D. C.

The Incarnation occurred at that level where the world and humanity in toto stand under the judgment of the Cross

One of the claims of Christianity is its significance for the totality of human life. There is no area of human life that is not under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

But if the claims of Christianity are universal and total, one of its secrets is that its truth is disclosed, not on the celestial ground of Venus or Mars, but on this earth; not in the glories of ancient Greece, but in the lowly place called Palestine. More specifically, the truth of Christianity is revealed in humanity. Although the Man Jesus Christ knew no personal sin, yet he unreservedly identified himself with humanity, not at its best but at its sinful fallen worst. This secret is difficult for the “righteous” to understand, and even the saint must constantly be reminded of it. The truth is that Jesus Christ came to save not the righteous but sinners, not the good people but the bad; he came to save the indecent as well as the decent, the worthless and the rejected of the ghetto and the inner city as well as the respectable of suburbia.

A Pharisee once entertained Jesus at dinner in his home. But when Jesus conversed with a woman of the streets who broke in, the Pharisee concluded that Jesus could not be the prophet sent by God; if he were, reasoned the Pharisee, he would not speak with her. This Pharisee did not understand where the Incarnation took place. His “respectable decency” blinded him to the fact that the Incarnation occurred not on the self-righteous level of the street where he lived but on the lower street where this prostitute lived. This Pharisee, and all those others who objected because Jesus ate with publicans and sinners, mistakenly thought that the Incarnation ratified the higher levels of humanity and scorned the lowest levels of degradation and rejection. The Pharisee, therefore, understood less about Jesus than did the women of the streets.

Even evangelicals today find this difficult to understand, this secret of the Incarnation in all its depths. As the material in this special issue devoted to the Gospel and the inner city shows, even evangelicals learn to their surprise, and only at the cost of some of their notions about Christianity, that the Incarnation can be rightly understood only in relation to the lowest levels of human sin and fallen degraded humanity. It was not on the level where men are popular or even mildly accepted, but on the level where men are rejected, that he who was “rejected of man” was born, lived, and died. It was at the level where men are nobody that the Christ himself was “set at nought.” It was at the point where men no longer believe they are men that the cry arose, “I am a worm and no man.”

The place of the Cross is the place where no one helps and no one cares, where men are despised and in their thirst receive vinegar for water. At the Cross rather than in church, at Buchenwald and Auschwitz rather than in the United Nations with its moral resolutions, in the cold, heartless, broken-down, abandoned inner city rather than in pleasant, average, small town America, the true nature of our fallen humanity is revealed. It is at the Cross, where all things are lost, even life itself, not in Shaker Heights, Chevy Chase, or Beverly Hills, that the Christ is disclosed; and it is from the Cross that the saints have come. Regardless of where they now live, and where they spend the 11 A.M. hour on Sunday, it was here that men met God; it was here that the sinners became saints as they discovered they were loved of God and accepted in Jesus Christ.

Therefore Harlem and Watts, Appalachia, and the slums and poverty pockets of our large cities are no less conducive to the understanding of the Cross than is Pleasant Valley, South Dakota, or Sun Valley, Idaho. It is a profound misunderstanding to imagine that the poor and oppressed must first be socially and economically uplifted before the Cross can become meaningful to them. Indeed, the uplift that comes with social improvement and affluence may obscure the meaning of the Cross from the non-Christian, as it also does in large degree from the saintly, prosperous church member.

The evangelicals consulted by CHRISTIANITY TODAY in the preparation of this issue are unanimous about the absolute necessity of being identified with, and accepted by, the people of the inner city. Not only must such people be loved, but their acceptance of the evangelical must be won. Youth Development Incorporated works with the teen-agers of East Harlem. Its executive director, Jim Vaus, says that in order to gain “a hearing for the Gospel of Jesus Christ” among these young people, one must first “win their friendship and confidence.” This is not done by conjuring up a certain attitude toward the inner city; it can be achieved only, Vaus says, “by being there.” YDI concentrates on training the inner-city teen-ager to witness to Christ and work with fellow teen-agers.

Youth for Christ International is enlarging its work with the big-city teen-ager, especially the Negro. Its president, Sam Wolgemuth, also recognizes the need of identification and acceptance if one is to reach the Negro inner-city dweller with the Gospel. He says we must “demonstrate a total concern for the Negro people, not only to ‘get their souls saved.’” “Evangelicals have been so busy defending the deity of Christ,” says Wolgemuth, “that we too often forget the humanness of Christ and his example of involvement in human affairs during his ministry.” And he adds, recognizing the difficulty of identification and acceptance, that “evangelicals are generally economically secure and can’t identify with Negroes who don’t have anything.… No matter what we represent theologically, we [YFCI] represent the white power structure.”

Workers in both these organizations, as well as the three men who write on the inner city in this issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, want above all else to bring the people of the inner city to Jesus Christ and the saving power of his Gospel. Yet YFCI and YDI urge that one must so love these people that one is trusted by them, so be identified with them that they accept their accepter, if one is to gain even a hearing for the Gospel. Such identification with and acceptance by the person (body and soul) whom one would reach with the Gospel points to a context in which the whole question of the priority of man’s spiritual over his physical needs, of the Bread of Heaven over the bread that sustains a life that perishes, is largely theoretical. As one cannot love God without loving his fellow men, so one cannot love the inner-city person and identify with him without being concerned simultaneously with his poverty and his slum-ridden existence and with the eternal needs of his soul. Where aloofness is overcome and the feeling of superiority annihilated, the evangelical meets the inner-city inhabitant person to person; and it is the total person that is loved and ministered to in the name of Christ.

Preaching the Cross—the symbol of poverty, rejection, and loneliness, of human death and separation from God and man, and of human bankruptcy—can be done effectively only when one recognizes, in thought and in life, the place where the Incarnation occurred, the place where the world and humanity in toto stand under the judgment of the Cross. Even evangelicals tend to wander from the Cross, and, as Don De Young poignantly suggests in his essay in this issue, the inner city is a good place to unlearn what one has learned in his wanderings and to gain fresh insight into the meaning of him who also became poor, was rejected of men, and had to accept men in love as they were before he could be loved and accepted by them.

Once the place of the Cross was “outside the walls of the city.” Today the area outside the walls is suburbia. The depressed and abandoned inner city is now the more appropriate place and symbol of the Cross.

Exemptions And Politics

It is not surprising that the Internal Revenue Service is calling upon certain religious periodicals to show cause why their tax-exempt status should not be revoked. For years and in increasing measure, some magazines have used their pages to speak for or against specific legislation or even, as during the last Presidential campaign, a particular candidate. They have thus run the risk of violating the regulations under which religious publications are granted tax exemption.

But such practices are not limited to magazines. Churches in America have always enjoyed tax-exemption, and contributions to them are deductible. However, the social-action divisions of some major denominations are evidently propagandizing and lobbying for specific types of legislation. And some social-action leaders seem to conceive of their respective churches as political pressure groups.

All this gives pause for thought. If the Church exerts political pressure, it compromises the basis for its special tax considerations. Moreover, since laymen support the Church and would suffer most should it lose exemption privileges, this is a time for them to speak their mind.

God Only Half Dead?

Professor Gabriel Vahanian recently addressed a convocation at Indiana State University. Although he was competing with two other student attractions that day, Professor Vahanian drew an audience that filled the large auditorium. Theology, it seems, is very much alive, even if God is dead.

However, one cannot be sure just how dead God is. In his book entitled The Death of God, this professor of religion at Syracuse University contrasts contemporary religiosity with biblical faith. God the transcendent Creator, he emphasizes, is not God the Cosmic Pal, God the ideal man, nor the God glibly mentioned in an empty liturgy used by hypocrites on Sunday. All this constitutes a serious accusation against spiritually dead people; but it hardly qualifies as a brilliant, new theological concept.

In a panel discussion that followed Vahanian’s lecture, disputants pressed him about the metaphysical meaning of his book’s title, and he admitted that it does not mean that God is really dead. “The death of God” is only a useful phrase, he said, by which he means (in part) that today the Church as an organization no longer controls politics as the medieval church did.

A statement in the Westminster Confession (XXXI, 5) expresses the policy of Presbyterian churches: “Synods and councils are to handle nothing but that which is ecclesiastical; and are not to intermeddle with civil affairs.” In view of this, is one to conclude that by the phrase “God is dead” Vahanian means that Presbyterianism should be abolished and the medieval church should take control? At least this would seem to be in keeping with present-day ecumenical ideas.

That some sort of God still survives may be gathered from Vahanian’s inclusion of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the amalgam of ideas he favors. But since he accepts only some, not all, modern ideas, some, not all, of the Judeo-Christian tradition, along with, perhaps, some other unspecified factors, one of the panelists justly asked him what criterion he uses to select some parts and reject others. In reply to this pointed question, Professor Vahanian spoke for at least five minutes, but he produced nothing identifiable as a criterion.

Yet this question demands a clear answer. If a philosopher wishes to combine a variety of ideas—a bit of existentialism, perhaps, with a bit of Christian tradition, but not too much—he should state clearly his basis of selection. This obligation we press on all who preach the death of God.

Are We Really So Mature?

An often recurring refrain in the writings of advocates of the new hermeneutics, religionless Christianity, and other theological novelties is that man has now come of age. Therefore he can no longer accept biblical Christianity with its core of supernaturalist doctrine. Twentieth-century man is too mature, we are told, for these antiquated notions.

This sounds plausible until one begins to ask whether it is true. Maturity is more than familiarity with machines and scientific gadgets. It is easy for twentieth-century man to slip into a kind of technological fallacy in which he confuses the ready use of familiar scientific devices with a real understanding of how and why they work. From television to jet engines, from direct long-distance dialing to computers, we use things whose principles are a mystery to most of us.

It is doubtful whether we have actually grown up as much as we think we have. On the contrary, history may well look back at our times as notable for emotional immaturity. Psychiatrists are doing a booming business, alcoholism afflicts five million drinkers, and drug usage is “in” for many on the most prestigious campuses. A leading mark of maturity is the ability to put aside self-gratification for higher ends; a nation that has had clear warning of the deadly effects of cigarettes shows little maturity in increasing its cigarette consumption to a record level. When teen-agers who should be growing toward maturity are forced into precocity by mass media and commercial interests that exploit them; when fun, luxury, and security are primary motives; when the goal is not, as a slogan of Herbert Hoover’s 1928 campaign put it, a car in the garage and a chicken in the pot but two cars in the garage and T-bone steaks on the broiler, maturity is hardly on the horizon.

Are we really more mature as persons than the ancient Greeks, the early Christians, or the men of the Renaissance? Is the average American today more mature than the colonists who fought for and forged the liberties we enjoy?

The man who, having drunk the heady wine of an advanced technological civilization, confuses his generally uncomprehending use of a thousand and one devices with genuine adulthood has much growing up yet to do. For when he faces the ultimate issues like bereavement, crippling illness, and his own death, then his inner destitution reveals his need for true maturity.

In a free society even the most radical theologians may promulgate their notions. But let them not do so on the ground that they are speaking to people who are necessarily more mature than those who have gone on before.

Reformed Confession

The shouting and the tumult died and the commissioners departed, leaving behind their approval of the proposed “Confession of 1967” (see News, p. 44). The confession will doubtless now be accepted by the required number of presbyteries and become part of the constitution of the United Presbyterian Church.

On the positive side, the Committee of Fifteen must be applauded for its revision of the new confession. In the original version the Scriptures were described as the “words of men”; in the revision they are also “the unique and authoritative witness” to the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ. It is further said in the revision that the Holy Scriptures “are received and obeyed as the Word of God written,” although this is an empirical assertion and not a creedal affirmation. In addition, the Scriptures are confessed to be “not a witness among others, but the witness without parallel.” Compared to the United Church of Christ, whose statement of faith makes no reference to the Bible as the source and authority of the faith, the United Presbyterian Church has a much stronger foundation.

Since the basis of religious authority is ultimately the controlling factor in Christianity, the less satisfactory aspect of the assembly’s action is the dilution of the confessional basis of the church. First, it has set aside the primacy of the Westminster Confession by adopting a “Book of Confessions” that includes eight different statements of faith. This could be confusing. Second, in the formula to which ministers must subscribe at ordination, the previous description of the Scriptures as the “Word of God” [in the new confession, “word” referring to Scripture is not capitalized] “the only infallible rule of faith and practice,” is removed. Instead, they are called “the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ.”

Yet the “Confession of 1967” in its revised form is a much better document than the one originally offered. Its passage was not a victory for either the right or the left; it will not be wholly acceptable to either liberals or conservatives. Perhaps it is a half-way station on the way to merger with a number of other denominations. That the church was able to navigate through turbulent waters is significant. And the assembly’s acceptance of the revisions of the Committee of Fifteen shows at least a qualified respect for the evangelical viewpoint.

The Growth Of A Cause

Evangelical Press Association, which represents ten million readers of evangelical magazines, met recently in the Disneyland Hotel during three days of forgettable weather. Besides bringing the keynote address and sharing in so many conferences that we never made it to Walt Disney’s nearby leisure land, we found it very rewarding to greet so many dedicated fellow editors. Their interest in the proposed Institute of Advanced Christian Studies, moreover, was gratifying. Among those who proffered a dollar for this project (have you given yours?) were editors Sherwood Wirt of Decision, Robert Walker of Christian Life, Wayne Christianson of Moody Monthly, Russell Hitt of Eternity, Jim Reap-some of the Sunday School Times, Louis Benes of the Church Herald, Mel Larson of the Evangelical Beacon, George E. Failing of the Wesleyan Methodist, Ted Miller of the Christian Reader, Dick Hillis of Cable, Jim Adair of Power, Stanley Peters of the United Brethren, and Paul Nyberg of Venture. Earl Kulbeck of the Pentecostal Testimony was the first Canadian to contribute. If readers follow the splendid example of these editors, the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies (see May 13 issue, page 28) can become a reality almost overnight.

The first California clergyman to give his dollar was the Rev. Norman J. Crider, assistant minister of Pasadena Evangelical Covenant Church. And a half dozen laymen and their wives gathered in Orange, California, at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Arvid Carlson of the Evangelical Free Church, added a dozen dollars. Later Paige West, of Campus Crusade in Arrowhead Springs, offered two crisp dollar bills. “I’m getting married in a few weeks,” he explained, “and I want my fiancée to be in on this too!” Mrs. West is probably manipulating the family budget by this time, but we are confident she would have endorsed this dual participation.

The Campus And The Church

It was Sunday morning in the 600 block of Daniel Street. The same old crowd was gathered in the same old place they had gathered Saturday night. Only the beverages had been changed to protect the liquor license.

The third-seeded pinball player (dressed in wheat jeans and contrasting sweatshirt), looked up from his coffee and spoke through a headache. “You’re late. I was worried you’d gone to church!”

With that, several heads swiveled for a moment and snickered briefly.

But the comeback was even better: “I don’t have to. I already know how to vote.”

This got an even bigger laugh from the group gathered for the weekly anti-worship service; perhaps because it had touched upon the reason they were there.

A growing number of theologians delight in saying that God is dead.

Many who have attended church in the last few years have suspected as much. If he were alive, why would his local authorized agents spend as much time as they do on trivial matters?

Instead of theology, the churches have been filled with applied social work; instead of discussions of whether or not the Scriptures are true, only literary criticism; instead of sermons, only Rotary Club speeches on getting out the vote.

It looks from the outside as if someone were trying to avoid the question about God’s reputed demise.

McMullin¹McMullin, central figure in a local controversy, was arrested for attempting to distribute and sell fundamentalist religious literature on campus.—Ed. may not speak the language the campus would like to think it is accustomed to hearing, but at least he meets the fundamental religious issue head-on.

How many of the local clergy could say the same after reviewing their last three or four sermons?

What can be heard on Sunday morning is a misguided attempt to be relevant. It is an attempt to reach the student audience by saying something which fits into its frame of reference. Class talk, or Saturday Review discussions of important topics.

The fallacy of this: that sort of thing is readily available in class or in the Saturday Review.

To listen to a typical campus sermon, one might almost think the clergy is attempting to befriend students rather than to convince them of the merits of a religious point of view.

In the process of appealing to the student’s interests, a paradox is created: by being topical, the minister is ignoring the topic which lured the student to church.

Topical sermons fail to challenge the religious doubts which are inevitably stirred by a college education. They concede the game to agnosticism or atheism. But if there are agnostics and atheists in the congregation, it is only because they came to have their doubts challenged; they came to hear the “old-hat” arguments which aren’t supposed to be popular with students anymore.

And on the topics which are discussed, why should the minister command our attention? Many in the audience have had better training to discuss these topics than he.

Why should a lawyer go to church to listen to some Doctor of Divinity display his legal ignorance during a sermon on the Supreme Court’s latest ruling?

Why should a political science student go to hear a superficial discussion of the merits of admitting Red China to the United Nations?

Why should a grad student in philosophy go to hear a popularized treatment of modern existential writers?

And worst of all, why should they attend when there is no question-and-answer period after the speech? Even experts lecturing on campus will at least grant that courtesy.

If the clergy is having its doubts about God’s viability, then it should honestly admit that church is merely a device for keeping people off the streets on Sunday morning.

A trip to church these days is rather like a trip to a Chevrolet agency where you are surprised to hear nothing but discussions of Fords, Plymouths and Hondas.

There must be something to be said for religion other than the superficial social comment advanced on too many Sunday mornings.

Perhaps the clergy has been too busy during the week solving the social problems of the world, or telling the generals what must be done in Viet Nam.

But if church is to be nothing more than a literary society, little wonder Sunday morning is popular for sleep or golf or pinball.—BOB AULER, “Keep to the Right … Is Church Dead?,” in the Daily Illini, student newspaper, University of Illinois.