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CHRISHTIANITY TODAY presents a spirited exchange on two significant questions. Beginning on the opposite page, scholars of divergent views ask whether theological interdependency is necessary and/or legitimate. On page 9, a stimulating analysis of issues involved in creation and evolution draws critical comments from four evangelical spokesmen.

Our news section includes a special report on religion in politics, as well as interpretative stories from the Presbyterian U. S. General Assembly and the NAE convention. See also the account of Billy Graham’s evangelistic efforts in Alabama.

Howard Carson Blake

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The most significant action of the 105th General Assembly of the 938,000-member Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (Southern), meeting at Montreat, North Carolina, in late April, was the decision to move resolutely ahead with plans for organic union with the Reformed Church in America. If the General Synod of the Reformed Church, due to meet in early June, also gives its assent, a joint committee of twenty-four (twelve from each denomination) will begin to formulate a plan of union. The General Assembly asked the committee to return with the plan by 1968.

Approval of the step toward merger with the Reformed Church, virtually all of whose 229,000 members reside in the North, came just after the standing committee on inter-church relations presented its recommendations in connection with proposals on relations with the 3,280,000-member United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. The Synod of Virginia had sent an overture urging the assembly to name a committee of twelve to meet with a corresponding UPUSA committee to “explore the conditions that are before our churches today with a view to our reunion.” Two presbyteries of that synod had submitted similar proposals. The ensuing debate was vigorous and prolonged. Practically all the commissioners who participated on both sides were men known as having previously favored all moves toward reunion of all denominations in the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition. Here the lines were clearly drawn between those favoring wider talks on church union and those determined to preserve the Reformed faith, and the latter gained an overwhelming victory.

The standing committee’s recommendation was “that Overtures 53, 54 and 56 should be answered in the negative; that our church continue to explore possible union with the Reformed Church of America; and that all possible means of cooperation and unity with the United Presbyterian Church, U. S. A., continue.” The assembly adopted the recommendation by a vote of nearly three to one. A few moments later the commissioners voted to adopt the joint committee’s recommendation for the RCA union. Then an invitation to participate in the six-denomination Consultation on Church Unity, an outgrowth of the so-called Blake-Pike proposal, was refused. Instead of providing participants, the General Assembly will continue to send only “observer-consultants.”

A record number of eleven overtures requesting steps toward withdrawal of membership or support from the National Council of Churches came before the assembly. These were rejected by a majority of about 2½ to one. At the same time, however, the assembly voted decisively in favor of an overture urging various reforms in NCC practices and procedures.

A report of the committee on Christian relations led to the longest and most heated debate. S. J. (“Jap”) Patterson, the San Antonio layman who was elected moderator, presided with disarming humility and directness, and the debate was characterized by courtesy. But no one could fail to feel and to understand at least to some extent the agony of spirit in many commissioners from the deep South. They had lived through a decade and more during which the whole social structure in which they and their fathers had lived for generations was being shaken. To some, the effort to spell out a Christian viewpoint on the civil rights movement seemed like “self-flagellation.” Some have been trying loyally, and with great difficulty, to interpret and carry out the decisions of the church in previous General Assemblies. To them the report entitled “The Civil Rights Movement in the Light of Christian Teaching” seemed likely to increase rather than lighten their burden.

The assembly patiently waded through this paper chapter by chapter, first that on “‘Respect’ or Love?,” then chapters that showed sympathetic understanding of “The Methods Used,” “Demonstrations,” and “Sit-Ins.” Phrases were altered here and there in the interest of accuracy; yet each section was adopted decisively, until the chapter favoring “Boycotts and the Use of Worldly Power” was reached. This one was rejected. Chapters on “Civil Disobedience” and “The Peace of the Church” were then adopted. At the end, a Negro commissioner from Kansas City, deeply moved, said he had seen something “that I never thought could happen here in the South.” The cumulative effect of the voting was to place the assembly on record as endorsing peaceful demonstrations, sit-ins, and certain types of civil disobedience.1Subsequently, more than sixty commissioners recorded a signed dissent on those parts of the report having to do with demonstrations, sit-ins, and civil disobedience.

The only close vote of the entire meeting came in a paper condemning capital punishment. Commissioners voted it down by a narrow margin.

On the final day, a report from the Permanent Judicial Commission led to a long and difficult discussion. Last year’s assembly had voted to “instruct” three synods to dissolve the three remaining all-Negro presbyteries and also to “instruct” the presbyteries in whose geographical areas the Negro churches were located to take these churches into their membership. As a result of this action, four overtures were sent to this year’s assembly pointing out the original jurisdiction of the presbyteries in such matters and the unconstitutionality of “instructing” presbyteries on matters in which no judicial process had been initiated. The commission said that “the 1964 General Assembly did not follow strictly the procedures provided in the Book of Church Order” and that “to request such action through the synod is more properly consistent” with the book.

The action finally taken this year “requested” the presbyteries to take similar action but “instructed” them to report on it by next year. A vigorous but unsuccessful attempt was made to couch the whole action as an “instruction,” thus disregarding the advice of the commission. In the debate it became clear that many commissioners were concerned mainly with enforcing the will of the assembly without realizing the far-reaching implications for Presbyterian polity of permitting such actions to originate at the top rather than in the court where original juridiction resides.

Many of the assembly debates reflected a problem that is troubling top churchmen in this and other denominations: the clergy-laity split. Very frequently the support for a proposal comes largely from ministers and the predominant opposition arises from the laymen, or vice versa.

Other assembly developments:

—One commissioner proposed that the assembly seek to withdraw an invitation extended to Dr. Martin Luther King to address a Christian social action conference to be held in Montreat. The conference is being sponsored by the Division of Christian Relations of the Presbyterian U. S. Board of Christian Education. Some support was found, but even some who would not have favored the invitation itself felt that withdrawal would have led to even more serious consequences. The proposal was voted down.

—A somewhat equivocal report on glossolalia was adopted. One commissioner translated it as saying, “Yes, and then again, no; but possibly perhaps.”

Evangelicals Involved

“The Evangelical Imperative: A World in Crisis—the Church Is Involved” was the theme of the twenty-third annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals attended in Minneapolis by nearly 800 delegates April 27–29. The theme, based on Romans 1:14, “I am debtor,” bore a logical relation to that of the 1964 convention, “Evangelicals Unashamed,” with its reference to Romans 1:16. The convention showed that NAE not only is moving out of its shell but also has attained a strong sense of direction.

The usual simultaneous meetings of commissions and affiliates, the morning public and business sessions, and the evening mass meetings were in the familiar mold, as was the warm devotional spirit that characterizes an NAE convention. With impressive sincerity, speaker after speaker dealt with the imperative of involvement in the needs of the world. Clearly audible in the public sessions and also in group luncheons and smaller commission meetings was a wholesome note of self-criticism. Manifestly NAE has attained the maturity of honest introspection. At the meeting of the Evangelism and Spiritual Life Commission, President David L. McKenna of Spring Arbor (Michigan) College asked the pointed question, “If you were the arch-enemy of God, … would you attack evangelical Christianity?” Evangelicalism must, he insisted, speak with an uncompromising voice that challenges secular society and must show a new sense of responsibility for social problems. At a morning public meeting, Dr. John Haggai, well-known evangelist, told the delegates, “It takes greater dedication to be in the world than to recede from the human race and to criticize from the outside.… We must combine with all colors, occupations, and nationalities to display our liberation.”

One of the most outspoken addresses was given by Dr. Richard C. Halverson, pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Washington, D. C., at the closing mass meeting. In an astringent analysis based on Christ’s words, “Ye are the salt of the earth,” “Ye are the light of the world,” and “The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but to minister,” he said: “With the Church of Jesus Christ, nothing is secular; all is sacred.… The work of the Church lies outside the church establishment and requires every member to do it. The work of the Church is downtown and in the social structure.… We have tended to pull men out of the world … instead of sending them out to the world equipped to witness and serve for the glory of Christ.”

A unique feature of the convention and a further evidence of NAE’s developing maturity was the premiere of the motion picture, It Can Happen. This forty-minute film, made under the sponsorship of the Scripture Press Foundation, World Vision, Inc., and Mr. P. J. Zondervan, is based on comments from people in various walks of life who were asked their opinion of the evangelical church. The film probes the self-centered superficiality and narrowness of many evangelicals, few of whom will view it without pangs of spiritual disquiet.

What about the trend of NAE toward the Church’s involvement in the world? Is this association, with its membership of two million and its broader constituency of ten million, known for nearly a quarter of a century for its biblical and social conservatism, now moving toward the social gospel? To come to any such conclusion would be to misunderstand this 1965 convention. While NAE leadership is determined to move the association out into the world, in doing so it is equally determined to bring the one transforming Gospel to the world and through this Gospel to serve the world.

The meaning and extent of the kind of church-world involvement NAE stands for is reflected in the resolutions of the 1965 convention. These began with a strong reaffirmation of the basic witness of NAE in which its biblical, doctrinal statement (signed publicly by the officers at an evening session) was reiterated. Other resolutions dealt with matters ranging from obscenity, civil rights, labor unions, and immigration laws to leisure time and public education. While the trend of the resolutions was conservative, NAE again took sides on sensitive matters relating to federal policies and social problems.

Dr. Jared F. Gerig, president of Fort Wayne (Indiana) Bible College, was elected NAE president for a second year. The Layman of the Year Award was given to Dr. Stephen W. Paine, president of Houghton College and a former president of NAE.

FRANK E. GAEBELEIN

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Frank Ferrell

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Some forty-five clergymen from a dozen states assembled in Washington early this month in an organized effort to communicate their views about what the U. S. government should be doing in Viet Nam. Although they stopped short of specific proposals, they voiced “uneasiness” about the growing crisis.

A larger group of clergymen scheduled a march to the Pentagon and a “silent vigil” there the following week.

Both groups disclaimed a pacifist consensus, but a call to the “vigil” committee headquarters elicited the “educated guess”—and transparent understatement—that the “vigil” participants were against the $700 million appropriation overwhelmingly passed by the Senate and the House of Representatives for United States involvement in Viet Nam. In general, the “vigil” participants were reported to favor more active efforts toward a negotiated settlement of the crisis.

The earlier group of forty-five, who called their gathering a “visitation,” were less specific—especially after an hour’s talk with Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. The Vice-President spelled out the administration’s position in what a group spokesman called “persuasive” terms, apparently changing the views of some of the clergymen.

Before the meeting with Humphrey, the consensus was reportedly against continued bombing of North Viet Nam.

Although the “visitation” was billed as an inter-faith project, with Protestant and Jewish clergymen participating, the rendezvous point was the Washington office of the National Council of Churches. Much of the spadework, moreover, was done by Dr. Vernon L. Ferwerda, NCC assistant general secretary in charge of the office.

Ferwerda minimized the pacifist orientation of the “visitation” participants. He labeled “simplistic” a recent petition of 2,700 clergymen virtually urging instant peace in Viet Nam.

The group visits by clergymen to Washington this month raise anew the question of the involvement of the institutional church in complex political and international affairs. Encouraged by the decisive role they are credited with playing in the civil rights bill lobby, many churchmen now are ready to step up their activities in Washington. The church lobby seems to be expanding substantially, and some congressmen and other government officials are reluctantly obliged to take it more seriously.

There are now more than a dozen church-related agencies with offices in Washington that are lobbying or information liaison centers. Although no two of them have the same goals, the agencies frequently reflect a solid front on specific issues. Thus Washington now finds itself with a religious coalition that represents collectively an ecclesiastical lobby of growing pressure and influence. Those who view this development with concern are often critical of its chief characteristic: a leftist tilt.

Traditionally the most formidable religious agency in the nation’s capital is the Roman Catholic Church. The closest thing to an American headquarters of the church is the National Catholic Welfare Conference, which is actually the American bishops’ administrative arm. The NCWC is housed in an attractive but modest ten-story building along Massachusetts Avenue.

Not far away are the offices of Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an expanding operation that disclosed plans last month for the erection of a new headquarters building at the corner of Rhode Island Avenue and Seventeenth Street.

Another expanding agency is the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs. On August 1 the committee will begin a new program of study and research, and it is presently contemplating moving its offices nearer to the Capitol.

Considerable religious representation in Washington is already located in the Capitol Hill area, particularly around the Methodist Building. The NCC maintains its offices here, as do the United Presbyterian Church and the United Church of Christ.

Lutheran groups, including the public relations offices of the National Lutheran Council and the Missouri Synod, share space in the Lutheran Church Center on Sixteenth Street.

But the only religious agency that does not shy away from being called a lobby is the Friends Committee on National Legislation. This Quaker pacifist group has been traditionally identified with E. Raymond Wilson, who is still active in retirement. Wilson is regarded as the dean of religious lobbyists.

Although there has been much public concern over the impact of the religious and theological right wing, none of the religious groups identified with this viewpoint has Washington offices. The closest thing to a conservative voice is the National Association of Evangelicals’ public affairs offices. NAE lobbying is minimal and often is provoked by ecumenical church pressures for prejudicial positions.

The Moral Crisis

The so-called new morality now advocated by some modern churchmen is as yet far from being universally accepted by their fellows. A recent Time article (March 5) was cited by the Presbytery of Omaha last month in a petition to the forthcoming General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. In reporting a meeting of proponents of the new morality, Time had described their ethic as one “based on love rather than law, in which the ultimate criterion for right and wrong is not divine command but the individual’s subjective perception of what is good for himself and his neighbor in each given situation.”

In response to such views, the Omaha presbytery pointed to teaching in the Westminster Confession and catechisms that moral law is permanently binding upon the consciences of all Christians. They cited moral principles enunciated by Christ (Matt. 22:37–40; 5:8, 17–20, 28) and the Apostle Paul (Col. 3:5; Gal. 5:19; Eph. 5:1–5; Rom. 12:1, 2), and continued:

“Whereas: Any abuse of sexual intimacy outside the responsible bonds of Holy Matrimony destroys pure love, damaging marriage and causing guilty alienation from God, and

“Whereas: The public press has recently carried widespread news of churchmen advocating a moral relativism …, thereby excusing fornication by engaged couples as no sin, causing public scandal, encouraging license, and weakening the fabric of our free society;

“Therefore the Presbytery of Omaha …, asking the grace of God for our own weaknesses, reaffirms its adherence to our Church’s historic moral standards, affirming any sexual intercourse outside the bonds of Holy Matrimony to be a sin before our Holy God, damaging to fellowship with Him, and to personal character and spirituality, and requiring sincere prayer of contrition, repentance and forgiveness through Christ’s grace before full restoration to communion with God may be assured, and the Table of the Lord’s Supper approached with a good conscience.

“We respectfully petition our General Assembly to reaffirm its adherence to our Church’s historic moral standards in the interest of the purity of the Church.”

This month’s General Assembly in Columbus, Ohio, is to consider a new confession of faith, which declares that in “each time and place there are problems and crises which call the church to act.” Singled out as particularly urgent modern crises are race, war, and poverty. Inasmuch as the new confession does speak to modern problems, some Presbyterians are disappointed that it does not speak to the moral crisis as represented in the sex revolution and the increase of crime. Attempts to redress the omission may be made in Columbus.

In the same week as the Omaha action, the Methodist Council of Bishops, meeting in Houston, spoke out vigorously on the crisis in morals:

“It has become incredibly easy for responsible people to rationalize away accepted standards of morality as unessential and irrelevant. Wanton acts of crime, drunkenness and sexual exploitation and abuse are flippantly tolerated and comfortably minimized as necessarily characteristic of a culture in transition. Basic rights like freedom of action and speech have been made into license for … filth. The people of Christ, through the Church, must speak meaningfully to the moral lostness of this age.”

FRANK FARRELL

God’S Word And Man’s Impressions

In the first-floor exhibit hall of its Bible House at Park Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan, the American Bible Society is using an eye-popping display of op art to show off modern Scripture formats.

The rationale, says a society official, is this: “Just as the artists of today are seeking new dimensions and a new outlook in their field, so the American Bible Society is constantly seeking bold, creative, colorful, and imaginative new formats and translations to lead more and more people, many hitherto unfamiliar or bored with the Scriptures, to search the Bible for God’s Word for this new age.” The society will mark its 150th anniversary next year.

At the center of the display is “Oeuil de Boeuf #2” by Claude Tousignant. A description says it “might convey the feeling expressing the words of the Prologue of John’s Gospel, ‘In the beginning … the Word.’ The concentric circles emanating from a red center appear to give the sensation of creation from a focal point in time.”

Another picture features a cross and circle which are said to “convey the impression of a mature faith reached through suffering. Out of the darkness of the abyss comes a positive center which brings coherence from threatened chaos.”

A small red center in another is compared to the Sermon on the Mount: “It pulses its way toward vacuums and frontiers and by its power permeates the whole.”

In “Blue Law” by Paul Margin, “strictures and disabilities are overcome when a new pattern of lighted harmony breaks through.”

Society officials are believed to be considering the use of op art in cover illustrations for Bibles and Scripture portions. The society is rapidly expanding its distribution program in an effort to keep up with the exploding population and literacy rate.

To help to meet the challenge, churches are being encouraged to step up their investments in Scripture distribution. United States denominations have been increasing their financial contributions to the society, but not in proportion to the demand for Bibles. In fact, the denominational share of the society’s support has been decreasing steadily, from nearly 30 per cent in the 1940s to about 21 per cent in 1964. Denominational mergers have also resulted in financial cutbacks. Gifts from individuals have made up the difference.

The biggest share of the society’s financial burden is borne by the Assemblies of God, who contribute seventy-six cents per capita. Methodist and Southern Baptist contributions amount to about two cents per capita.

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Harold Lindsell

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How the Church Grows

Church Growth and Christian Mission, by Donald Anderson McGavran, editor, Robert Calvin Guy, Melvin L. Hodges, and Eugene A. Nida (Harper and Row, 1965, 252 pp., $5), is reviewed by Harold Lindsell, associate editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This impressive work treats the problem of church growth from four vantage points: theology, sociology, methodology, and administration. The contributors are representative: one is a Southern Baptist missions professor, another an Assemblies of God missions executive, another the director of the Institute of Church Growth in Oregon, and the last a foremost linguist with the American Bible Society.

Section 1 on theology and church growth surveys the foundations on which missionary work is built. Hodges stresses the need for a “New Testament climate.” This means New Testament Spirit-filled men who are eager to plant churches and who are undergirded by prayer. A spiritual enterprise demands spiritual people. Guy writes about an adequate theology in which Christ the Lord is exalted, sin is recognized as rebellion against God, salvation is preached through the Gospel, and missionary methods are oriented properly to the message. Nida discusses numerical increases versus maturation of converts and warns of the ideological conflicts faced by missions interested in church growth. He is less enthusiastic about church growth than McGavran. He sees the need to weigh carefully such opposing forces as nationalism, indigenous non-Christian religions, secularism, and the population explosion. He warns against the dangers of the ecumenical movement when it becomes “a functional substitute for growth.”

In the section on sociology and growth, McGavran points out that growth occurs among people and in societal structures. Homogeneous groups make up the mosaic of society. Sociology cannot be ignored in the preaching of the Gospel, and man must be understood and approached in terms of his environment. The study of applied anthropology is essential. While these subjects ought not to become ends in themselves, they are essential as means by which the Gospel is made relevant to men in their own cultures. Nida forcefully shows why groups of people leave their indigenous religions and adopt new ones. He also traces the changes that occur in groups that turn to Christianity and notes how their economic and social life alters. Often they then become new and fixed classes, resistant to change and out of contact with the kind of people they once were. He deals with the external and internal factors that influence church growth and with the mistakes that missionaries often make when they try to structure new churches after Western likenesses.

In the discussion on methodology and church growth, Hodges argues that the good seed sowed in the ground in Christ’s parable is men; that there must be a harvest; that the harvest will produce its own kind. Indigenous churches should be planted, churches that become granaries from which more seed is sowed. In order for churches to grow they must be self-supporting, truly indigenous, self-governing, self-amplifying, and self-teaching. Programs must be tailored to fit needs, and the men who are the seed must regard sacrifice and death as essential to productivity. Guy brilliantly discusses the problem of underbrush, the dispensable, non-fruit-bearing weeds that hinder the discipling of men, which is the missionary’s prime business. Among the weeds are sentimentality that continues useless forms and shopworn, antiquated ideas that won’t be surrendered. Get back to basics, to essentials, is the plea.

McGavran traces the kinds of growth: biological, transfer, and conversion growth. Biological growth derives from the children of believers, transfer growth from the movement of Christians from one church to another, and conversion growth from the bringing in of unbelievers through regeneration. This chapter should be read by every minister and layman in every American church. He demonstrates that statistics are often misleading: unless they are “read rightly” they may all too easily be misunderstood. Nida discusses the dynamics of church growth from the divine and human sides, including such topics as who communicates the Gospel, how he communicates it, the verbal and non-verbal factors in communication, the four roles in communication, and patterns of support and leadership.

The fourth section of the volume has to do with missionary administration. Guy describes the functions of the administrator, the rules that should govern his thinking, and the need for making and carrying out difficult decisions that will upset the apple cart. His discussion of conserving the fruit of evangelism is exciting and compelling. His point that the back door of the church is equally as important as the front door applies to all church work. New converts must be nurtured, instructed, and given work to do; the momentum of their new zeal must be preserved. Hodges has an excellent summary of the role of the administrator, particularly in terms of leadership. He tells of the specific problems an administrator faces and the choices he must make.

McGavran closes the volume with a splendid overview of the book. He is aware that the work of men like Roland Allen who have pioneered in church growth has been left untouched by most missionary agencies, in practice if not in theory. He knows that his own efforts to study church growth, to advocate important changes, and to alter present trends are meeting resistance as well as acceptance in many quarters. But he sees evident gains and is sufficiently optimistic that this new emphasis has borne, and will continue to bear, fruit.

This book should be made required reading for every missionary, every missionary administrator, and every pastor. Most laymen would also profit by reading it. It is accurate, well written, scholarly, and thought-provoking.

HAROLD LINDSELL

Not Loud And Clear

The Meaning of Christian Values Today, by William L. Bradley (Westminster, 1964, 176 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by D. W. Jellema, professor of history, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The problem of communicating the mean-of the Word to today’s “post-Christian” world is a major one, and evangelicals have done little about examining it. To call for “orthodox” or “Spirit-filled” preaching in the tradition of the eighteenth century is to evade the problem. The author of this short (and over-priced) book presumably tries to grapple with the problem, but he never gets very far. This is perhaps because the book is not an incisive and clear-thinking consideration of the problem of communication but rather a collection of loosely organized thoughts arranged vaguely around the theme of communication.

The bulk of the book deals only indirectly with the problem and is devoted to short summaries of Graeco-Roman ethical thinkers and to the ethics of the Old and New Testaments—in brief, to a superficial overview of Western ethical traditions. In conclusion, it is said that contemporary man is difficult to reach because the churches often preach a gospel stressing escapism (avoidance of social problems, concentration on the world to come) and old-fashioned capitalism (thrift, saving, hard work). Perhaps, suggests the author, we should concentrate on reaching the elite groups of our society (e.g., businessmen) and work to communicate with them.

The book’s main value may be for discussion groups looking for an introduction to the problem of communication and for a quick survey of Western ethical tradition. Occasional paragraphs show insight. The book is readable and the style, though it often makes one think of lectures for college freshmen hastily done over into book form, is adequate.

The informed reader’s reaction is likely to include some irritation mixed with bafflement. Hasty generalizations abound (among them: it is suggested that both Greek and Hebrew ethics have a sense of guilt because of patriarchal societal structure; that the individual comes to full self-consciousness at the beginning of the Christian era; that Eastern Orthodoxy holds that God is not present in the world; that for Augustine, the good man is one who lives in moderation and humility; that private property as a value has little meaning in today’s society; that medieval civilization was “created by the church”). There are also frequent statements that are simply not clear. What is “the middle-class way of life” of which New Testament ethics is a reflection? In what sense did Augustine “actually belong to the two cities” of which he wrote (they do not refer to the Church and the world of affairs, as the author seems to assume)? What can be meant by the statement that Luther did not favor obedience to authority in the Church? What does it mean to say that “large numbers of sophisticated Christians are content to remain agnostic”? How can nationalism be seen as a social reform which shows how the rich often try to help the poor? Such statements, if not necessarily betraying confusion in thought, do seem to show that the manuscript should have been checked more thoroughly.

For the ordinary reader interested in a survey, the book will be of value. Though it gives evidence of occasional carelessness, it also shows genuine concern with the problem. And there would seem to be all too much point to the author’s charge that the churches have avoided problems of social justice and that this is one reason why the best of the young are losing interest in it.

D. W. JELLEMA

It’S Hard To Swallow

Catholics and Birth Control: Contemporary Views on Doctrine, by Dorothy Dunbar Bromley (Devin-Adair, 1965, 207 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by C. Everett Koop, surgeon-in-chief, Children’s Hospital, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Although many Roman Catholics, laymen and theologians alike, have new attitudes toward the morality of birth control, the need for population control, and the dilemma faced by married couples who wish to space children as part of their concept of responsible parenthood, no theologian is at liberty to free Roman Catholics from the obligation to accept papal teaching.

Miss Bromley takes no stand on birth control but rather reports on the conflicts within the Roman Catholic Church between papal authority (that of Pius XII) and the newer attitudes expressed by Roman Catholic theologians and moralists who seek a reinterpretation of marriage, sexual love, and birth control within the framework of Catholic theology. Her presentation is by means of innumerable quotations from public statements and published papers, and there is essentially no reference to the subtle pressures felt by the non-Catholic community as the lower echelons of the church have sought to impose on Catholic and non-Catholic alike the church’s teaching on birth control. The technique, though at times fatiguing to the reader, is generally well handled.

Readers will perhaps be surprised to learn that in a church thought to be monolithic in doctrine and teaching there is so much concern among theologians, philosophers, and moralists over the necessity for a more liberal interpretation of the goal and the meaning of marriage. A touchingly written chapter entitled “The Married Speak” explores the problems raised by the need for obedience to the church on the one hand and the desire for some freedom in non-procreative sexual relationship on the other. The long discussion on the morality of “the pill” provides an insight into the devious paths the Roman Catholic follows as he attempts to justify contraception under the papal teaching that condemns it.

This book purports to have been written in the hope of fostering mutual understanding. It does this. But the evangelical will find it more profitable for its look behind the scenes at possible courses of action open to the Roman Catholic Church in its effort to solve a perplexing spiritual, social, and moral issue without reversing papal teaching.

C. EVERETT KOOP

Critical Scholarship

The Anchor Bible, Volume 37: The Epistles of James, Peter, and Jude, introduction, translation, and notes by Bo Reicke (Doubleday, 1964, 221 pp., $5), is reviewed by Leon Morris, principal, Ridley College, Melbourne, Australia.

This new commentary series, The Anchor Bible, has an unusually wide range of contributors. It is a sign of our ecumenical climate that for such a project a team can be assembled that includes top-ranking Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish scholars. The general editors are William F. Albright and David N. Freedman. From the list of contributors it is plain that the highest standards of scholarship have been enlisted, a fact amply demonstrated in this volume.

Professor Bo Reicke (of the University of Basel, an ordained member of the Church of Sweden) begins with a general introduction to his group of Epistles. In outlining the historical setting, he emphasizes movements of a “zelotic” type, which were found fairly widely in the first century and are too often overlooked by those seeking to understand the New Testament. Reicke leaves us in no doubt that this background is very important for these Epistles. In another valuable section he deals with the form and content of these writings. He sees these Epistles not as substitutes for conversation, as private letters are, but as ways of speaking to congregations; that is, they are like sermons. He finds their background to be the New Testament tradition rather than Judaism or the like, and he thinks that these Epistles, along with Hebrews and First Clement, form a specific branch of early Christian literature, distinct from the Pauline corpus. He sees all four Epistles as inculcating essentially the same attitude as that of Paul toward the state, an attitude brought out in his statement that “the exhortations to a peaceful and patient Christian life in loyalty to state and society are to be understood in an eschatological perspective” (p. xxxviii). This is further brought out in his comments on the individual Epistles.

These comments are very valuable, though the evangelical reader must be warned that the author is far from conservative. He sees James, for example, as having been written around A.D. 90 by someone who was possibly a disciple of James the Lord’s brother and who wrote in the name of that James. A similar dating and a similar kind of authorship are assigned to Second Peter and Jude. Reicke sees First Peter as written by Silvanus at the instigation of the Apostle Peter not long before Peter’s death, i.e., about A.D. 64.

The scriptural text is translated into English, and the commentary is based on that translation. For purposes of comment the text is split up into short paragraphs. Then at the end of each Epistle there are “textual notes” which comment on the Greek text. These are usually quite short, and I found myself wishing that a scholar of Reicke’s caliber had let himself go a little more in this section. This was probably impossible, however, since the series is expressly designed for “the general reader with no special formal training in biblical studies.”

This volume is a very welcome addition to our commentaries. It is clearly written, its scholarship is impeccable, and many of its discussions are penetrating. Conservative evangelicals will find much that they cannot accept. But they could scarcely do better if they are looking for a non-technical commentary written from the standpoint of the modern critical scholar.

LEON MORRIS

How Time Was Counted

Handbook of Biblical Chronology, by Jack Finegan (Princeton, 1964, 338 pp., $8.50), is reviewed by John M. Bald, associate professor of Christian ethics, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Dr. Finegan, professor of New Testament history and archaeology and director of the Palestine Institute of Archaeology at Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, California, has gathered together in this volume a vast amount of complex material concerning the measurement of time, the literature devoted to the recording of time, and the science of time as found in the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures and in the biblical record contemporary with them. He has organized this material into a readily accessible form in which relevant data are presented, complexities and problems noted, and conclusions adopted.

The first of the two major parts of the book is concerned with the various systems of chronology used in the ancient world, primarily those of the Egyptian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman civilizations. The manner of reckoning the basic units of time—the day with its subdivisions, the week, the month, and the year—is noted and is followed by a description of the development of several of the calendars that were used in early times. The methods by which the years were counted—the association of time with the reigns of kings and public officials and with certain eras having various distinctions in the ancient cultures—are also fully described. Finegan concludes his discussion with an outlined critical treatment of the chronologies developed by early Christians, particularly those of Africanus and Eusebius.

The second part of the handbook is concerned with a number of problems of chronology found in the Bible itself. Not all such problems are treated. Pre-Abrahamic chronology, for example, is not dealt with specifically, although the dates given for the creation of Adam and the Flood appear in tables that illustrate the chronologies of Africanus and Eusebius, as well as the Hebrew manner of reckoning time back to the founding of the world. Dr. Finegan does not comment upon this aspect of chronology. The problems of chronology in the Old Testament that are presented are those concerned with Abraham, the Exodus, the kings of Judah and Israel, the fall of Samaria and of Jerusalem, and the period following the exile. The problems of New Testament dating center in the events in the lives of Jesus, Peter, and Paul.

Throughout the work the biblical data are compared with extra-biblical data as these have become known in archaeological research. Many helpful suggestions are made in the attempt to work toward solutions of chronological problems met in the Bible on the basis of the possible use of different principles of time-reckoning that the biblical records may reflect. Thus, the author notes that the passion chronologies in the Synoptic Gospels may reasonably be harmonized with the record as found in the Fourth Gospel (pp. 290, 291, R452).

Finegan writes positively without falling into the temptation to make dogmatic claims to certainty where the evidence is not wholly clear. The book is exactly what its title claims—a handbook, not a thesis. Its concise style, arrangement by topics and numbered paragraphs, many chronological tables, listing of primary and secondary sources within the text in conjunction with section headings, and full indices and table of contents make it a very valuable and reliable reference tool.

JOHN M. BALD

One Thing Lacking

The Rector of Justin, by Louis Auchincloss (Houghton Mifflin, 1964, 341 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Frank E. Gaebelein, co-editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Months on the best-seller list and very favorable reviews have brought this novel, dealing with an important part of American education, wide attention. It is not generally recognized among evangelicals interested in Christian education that the independent boys’ schools of the nation, particularly those in the New England tradition, have exercised a significant influence upon America, and indeed upon the world. The kind of schools that molded the formative years of men like Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman, Thomas Lamont, Henry L. Stimson, and many other leaders are, despite their comparative insignificance numerically, no mean educational force.

Mr. Auchincloss, himself a product of this kind of education, has attempted a full-length fictional portrait of Dr. Frank Prescott, the distinguished rector (headmaster) of an Episcopal school for boys that he calls Justin Martyr. He has chosen as his medium the intellectual novel. Comparison with Henry James, whose work is so greatly admired by many contemporary critics, is inevitable. There is little question of Mr. Auchincloss’s literary competence. He knows how to delineate character. He knows how to keep narrative moving. And his picture of Prescott, as seen through the eyes of those who knew him well, has a virtuoso quality like the painting of Sargent. Yet Auchincloss is no Henry James. For one thing, as the reviewer in the Washington Post observed, the occasional excursions into coarseness are quite alien to the James tradition. For another thing, with all his concern for motivation, Auchincloss lacks James’s indefatigable probing of the inner man and his meticulous analysis of moral conduct.

Out of a lifetime spent in an independent school for boys, this reviewer finds The Rector of Justin disappointing. Strong and even overwhelming though the character of Frank Prescott is, the picture of him, despite its remarkable verisimilitude, is disillusioning. Whatever else Frank Prescott was, he was far from a great headmaster. Nor was he, as portrayed by Auchincloss, authentically Christian. Indeed, it is in the passages dealing with Prescott’s spiritual pilgrimage that the book is particularly weak. The author has evidently read a little theology, but little of the redemptive heart of Christianity shines through the character of Prescott. There is rather the fatal flaw of compromise at the heart of the man, so that in the end the school is seen as based not upon principle but upon subserviency to wealth and social position.

Although the book has been widely heralded as revealing “the inner workings of a boys’ school,” it contains surprisingly little about the school itself. Prescott is the giant who walks through these pages. But he is no Olympian like Endicott Peabody, to whom he has been unfortunately and irresponsibly compared by some reviewers. Nor is he, for that matter, of the stature of other great American headmasters. This is not surprising, for no man who is lacking in integrity could achieve greatness as a headmaster.

Louis Auchincloss has written a readable and in some respects a fascinating intellectual novel. Yet he does less than justice to a kind of education that has produced both great headmasters and great schools. Evangelical educators will find the book compelling reading, even though spiritually it never rises above the level of churchianity. Let them be assured that neither Justin Martyr nor its rector is typical of the New England school at its best.

FRANK E. GAEBELEIN

Book Briefs

1400 Ideas for Speakers and Toastmasters: How to Speak with Confidence, by Herbert V. Prochnow (W. A. Wilde, 1964, 162 pp., $2.95). A surprising amount of wit and wisdom.

Objections to Christian Belief, by D. M. Mackinnon, H. A. Williams, A. R. Vidler, and J. S. Bezzant (Lippincott, 1964, 111 pp., $2.50).

The Soul’s Anchorage, by Robert Hampton Mercer (Christopher, 1964, 209 pp., $2.75). Sermons with a touch of freshness and, though praised by bishops, with much theology of doubtful pedigree.

Prayers for a New World, compiled and edited by John Wallace Suter (Scribners, 1964, 244 pp., $4.95). A collection of short Christian prayers from many sources. The title is rather misleading.

Preaching and Pastoral Care, by Arthur L. Teikmanis (Prentice-Hall, 1964, 144 pp., $2.95). A small book.

Congo Drumbeat, by Alexander J. Reid (World Outlook Press, 1964, 158 pp., $2). A history of the first half-century in the establishment of the Methodist Church among the Atetela of Central Congo.

Interludes in a Woman’s Day, by Winola Wells Wirt (Moody, 1964, 160 pp., $2.95). The author puts a religious glow on the little things of a woman’s life.

Called unto Liberty: A Life of Jonathan Mayhew 1720–1766, by Charles W. Akers (Harvard University, 1964, 285 pp., $6.50). A biography of a Boston minister who fired up rebellion against the British and no less against Puritan theology; his Arminian theology helped prepare the way to Unitarianism.

Parerbacks

The Formation of Christian Dogma: A Historical Study of Its Problem, by Martin Werner (Beacon, 1965, 352 pp., $2.45). Accepting Albert Schweitzer’s thesis that Jesus was in error about an eschatological Second Coming, Werner contends that a disappointed Church developed its dogma to accommodate this failure.

In Quest of a Kingdom, by Leslie D. Weatherhead (Abingdon, 1965, 272 pp., $1.25). A general discussion followed by a study of the kingdom parables. First published in 1944.

Spiritual Values in Shakespeare, by Ernest Marshall Howse (Abingdon, 1965, 160 pp., $1.25).

The Biblical Image of the Family, by Webb Garrison (Tidings, 1965, 64 pp., $.60). A pointed treatment that throws considerable light on the biblical understanding of the family, marriage, divorce, children, and the like.

Glossolalia in the New Testament, by William G. MacDonald (Gospel Publishing House, 1964, 20 pp., $.50).

The Revelation of Jesus Christ: An Interpretation, by Donald W. Richardson (John Knox, 1965, 144 pp., $1.45). Brief, informative, and very readable.

After Death, What?, by William B. Ward (John Knox, 1965, 96 pp., $1). A very fine discussion of death, the funeral, and what comes after.

Be Perfect!, by Andrew Murray (Bethany Fellowship, 1965, 171 pp., $1.50). Short essays on the biblical demand for perfection. First printed in 1893.

Instead of Violence, edited by Arthur and Lila Weinberg (Beacon, 1965, 486 pp., $2.75). Writings by the great advocates of peace and non-violence throughout history.

Reprints

The Bible Basis of Missions, by Robert Hall Glover (Moody, 1964, 208 pp., $2.50). Just what the title says. First printed in 1946.

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James Orr

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It is one of the fashions of recent criticism, though its beginnings go farther back, to set Paul against Jesus, and represent the Apostle as, even more than the Master, the real author of historical Christianity.

In support of this charge, the contrasts between the simpler teaching of the Gospels (John being left out) and the elaborated theology of Paul, starting from, and laying all but exclusive stress on, the death and resurrection of Jesus, are dwelt upon and strongly exaggerated. Paul, it is held, knew little of, at least cared little for, the earthly life and teaching of Jesus; his interest was absorbed in the Heavenly Being who had appeared to him on the road to Damascus, and in the supposed meaning of his death and resurrection for the salvation of the world. In interpreting these facts Paul drew on notions borrowed from his Rabbinical training and Pharisaic experience, and gave the events a quite new significance. A theology of the Person of Christ (preexistence, incarnation), and of a work of redemption, through endurance of death as curse of the law, took the place of the older, simpler conceptions.

It will be very evident that, if the foregoing description is correct, Paul was an even greater religious force than Jesus, for Paul at least taught a universal Gospel of grace and love for men, while Jesus did not. Yet surely it is not difficult to see that, while necessarily there must be a contrast between Master and Apostle—between Gospel and Epistle—the features of the contrast are violently exaggerated. Gospel and Epistle are not thus rudely to be torn asunder. The Gospels, with their matchless pictures of the historical Jesus, came from the bosom of the apostolic community—from circles charged with those very Pauline ideas which are said to be opposed to their representations. The Epistles, didactic and hortatory in character, dealing largely with practical questions which had arisen in the churches, are what we might expect them to be, remembering that letters are not biographies, and that, in the interval, Christ had died, had risen again, had been exalted to glory; that the Spirit had been given, and a Christian Church created. The Christians in these communities, familiar with the story of Christ’s life and instructed in the meaning of his death and resurrection by the Apostles, would have been the most astonished people in the world to learn that there was any antagonism between the two things. How many letters of Christians one to another, it might be asked, even at the present hour—how many homilies, sermons, pastorals to churches—furnish details of Christ’s doings and sayings, and do not rather assume a knowledge of these?

Alike from his personal acquaintance with the heads of the Jerusalem church—he stayed with Peter for fifteen days (Gal. 1:18)—from companions like John, Mark, and Luke (the later evangelists), and from the catechetical instruction imparted to converts in every church he visited (cf. Luke 1:1–4), Paul had the amplest opportunities of knowing all that was to be known about the history of Jesus. If the Epistles do not give incidents and sayings, they at least, like Paul himself, are saturated with Christ’s spirit in a manner which implies that the facts of Christ’s history were known, and that their spirit had been imbibed.

If it is in his death that Christ has supremely reconciled us to God, must not that fact now take the leading place in all that is declared regarding him? The life is not ignored—far from it. All that was in Christ’s life is gathered up in concentrated form in the Cross; without the life, the Cross could not have been. But the Cross is the decisive turning-point for human salvation. Man’s first need is to be set right with God; this is done at the Cross. Then comes the obligation to holiness and service, and here the image of Christ’s earthly life reasserts its rights as exhibiting the model to which we are to be conformed.

As was to be expected, therefore, it is not in Paul only, but in all the leading apostolic writings—in the Epistles of Peter, of John, to the Hebrews, the Book of Revelation—that this insistence on the redeeming death, and on the resurrection, of Christ is to be observed. The early discourses in Acts concentrate on these facts, and on the remission of sins in the name of the crucified and now exalted Jesus (Acts 2:22–38; 3:13–26; 4:8–12).

But there are other reasons which make the contrasts that appear between the Gospels and Epistles more clearly intelligible. The fallacy which underlies most of the reasoning on this subject lies in ignoring the necessary contrast in the positions of the Apostle and his Lord. So long as Jesus is looked on simply as one great teacher, and Paul as another, on the same or like planes of influence, the contrasts naturally present a puzzle.

But this is not the true relation. Paul was sinner; Jesus was Saviour. Paul was disciple; Jesus was Lord. Paul was weak, struggling man; Jesus was Son of God. Paul spoke as the ambassador of another; Jesus spoke with an authority of his own. Jesus achieved redemption; Paul by faith appropriated it. These things involved the widest contrasts in attitude and speech. It is an obliteration of all the actualities of the situation to put Paul and Jesus in the same line.—JAMES ORR

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Despite “this terrible twentieth century,” many people remain confident that the twenty-first century belongs not to Communist tyrants but to the free world.

Yet nobody with a sense of history sees any real hope of that outcome apart from radical spiritual renewal. A former United States Army chief of chaplains, Ivan L. Bennett, points out that our country was “founded and developed within the framework of faith and hope in God. Today no nation possesses such resources of power, such reserves of plenty, such technical skills, and such reservoirs of compassion. Yet our day of destiny has come. Either we shall walk with God, or we shall sink into the dismal darkness that envelops nations forgetful of God.”

Any generation preoccupied with creature comforts and isolated from spiritual concerns is in the process of committing spiritual suicide. People who try to live without God cannot long live with one another, or with themselves. It takes moral earnestness and spiritual power to keep a civilization alive. To pay one’s debts, to mind one’s own business, to support the fight against cancer, and to keep the dog off the neighbor’s lawn—important as this suburban code may be—is no sure preservative of a way of life. Dr. Joseph R. Sizoo has somewhere detailed the tragic cost of our popular credo, “Get what you can; get it honestly, but get it.” It produces a society, he comments, in which people can eat caviar while a neighbor starves, or play solitaire on Persian rugs while slum children stumble in the streets because of malnutrition. Dr. Sizoo says of such a citizenry, “They can pick flowers on Golgotha while the Son of God dies and leave him hanging in the rain.”

As descriptive of the contemporary American mood, Congressman Walter H. Judd singles out the discomfiting term “confusion.” This confusion he locates primarily in the sphere of values. Is there or is there not a moral order in the universe? Americans answer ambiguously. The masses of our people, Judd contends, fail to see that the great conflict of our times is over the nature of God and the nature of man. They do not sense the heavy weight of moral duty placed on us by the question of values. “We haven’t understood the nature of this conflict, nor the character of the adversary,” he states, “because we have grown fuzzy about ourselves.”

Secularism and materialism stifle the life-breath of our own society. Its moral decline is terrifying, its spiritual illiteracy alarming. Fifty million Americans no longer attend church or synagogue, and the younger generation places an incredibly cheap price tag on human life. Dr. Edward L. R. Elson, minister of the National Presbyterian Church of Washington, D.C., observes that millions of persons are inadequately fed and most people travel on foot in the modern world, yet the two chief concerns of many Americans are “How can I reduce?” and “Where can I park my automobile?”

No spiritual merit accrues from simply denouncing an enemy who blasphemes the divine source of human life, debases the dignity of man, and desecrates our noblest beliefs, while we ourselves neglect the fountains of spiritual vitality.

Traditionally, the American spirit found its deepest delights not in material things but in spiritual privilege. The Pilgrims left home and kindred, comfort and security, to cross an uncharted sea and to build a new society in the rugged wilderness for one supreme reason: to worship God in good conscience. The Pilgrim Fathers signed the Mayflower Compact which began, “In the Name of God.…” In 1776 the Founding Fathers were influenced by the Christian view of man in their charter of liberty, defining government as an instrument for the preservation of man’s divinely given rights. Washington praying at Valley Forge, Lincoln pleading at Gettysburg, Marines fighting their way on Iwo Jima, soldiers establishing the Normandy beachhead, and American airmen repelling North Vietnamese aggressors today testify eloquently that life’s most precious values do not consist in enslavement to material things.

Modern Americans no longer need to span unknown seas nor to pioneer in an untried continent. But they do need to meditate anew on their nation’s heritage and destiny.

The more we spin through outer space while stockpiling missiles at home, the more apparent it should be that love is no optional twentieth-century commodity, that righteousness is an eternal imperative, that faith is not outmoded, and that God’s rule in human affairs is more requisite than ever. Those citizens who no longer honor the Lord’s Day, who neglect the house of God, who utter no prayers and bow to no Scripture, had better reckon among their privileges their inheritance of the blessings of a way of life shaped by a society that honors the spiritual disciplines of life.

A nation not built on good men and good will must falter and fail. The will of the majority is no adequate substitute for the will of God.

E. Stanley Jones has said: “There is one unshakeable kingdom, only one. The kingdom of self is shakeable; the kingdom of health is shakeable; the kingdom of property is shakeable; the kingdom of nationalism is shakeable; every kingdom in this world is shakeable at least by death. But there is one unshakeable kingdom …” (in And Our Defense Is Sure: Sermons and Addresses from the Pentagon Protestant Pulpit, ed. by Harmon D. Moore, et al., Abingdon, 1964, pp. 19, 20).

More awesome than the cold and hot war with Communist aggressors in which the nations are engaged today is the ultimate conflict for the soul and spirit of man. A member of the British Parliament, Sir Cyril Black, has put the decisive issue well: “It is a war of ideas, a war of ideologies, a war that can only be won in the hearts and minds of men and women. It concerns such fundamental questions as what we believe about man, his destiny, his way of life. Is man a creation of God and immortal … a human personality created by God …, or is he merely a pawn in the game of great tyrants and cruel dictators …?” (ibid., p. 22). A land in which the spirits of free men no longer compete for the highest ideals has one sure destiny: to march off the map. The only unshakeable terrain is Christ’s.

For about $150—thirty pieces of silver—Judas betrayed Jesus of Nazareth. The lust for money still compounds that tragedy. “Shall we confess,” asks Chaplain Frederick Brown Harris of the United States Senate, “that the ruling passion of half our citizenry is to build more barns and bigger barns (or more and bigger corporations), that the raging passion of the other half is to get more and more wages for less and less work—and that wealth and security have become the goals of our personal living and of our national existence?”

Recent American history is not all shadows; there are signs of strength. A people who once routinely drove Quakers from colonial New England later elected Herbert Hoover to serve in the White House. The clearer American ideals become, the more citizens proudly repeat the words “with liberty and justice for all” only as that Pledge to the Flag raises no embarrassment before the test of race, birth, color, sex, and religion. Injustice is seen more clearly as part and parcel of an ideology that renounces human dignity, that rules out God—in a word, injustice belongs to a society of the kind that the founding Americans disowned and despised, and that we reject in Communist tyranny.

But the vision of social justice is not self-sustaining. Its noblest ideals, its deepest insights, were nurtured by revealed religion. And in the long run redemptive religion alone has moral and spiritual resources to sustain and fulfill this vision.

In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Carl Jung relates that among his patients over thirty-five he found not one “whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.” It is a tragic fact that multitudes of Americans today grope for spiritual reality. Even graduates of many church-related colleges complain that they were denied what they had a right to expect—a reasoned outlook on life centering in the realities of revealed religion. And members even of some evangelical churches complain that they are not really nourished in the deep central truths of the Christian religion.

The apostles of Christ who faced the first-century world nowhere claimed omniscience; about some things they knew much less than we do. Least of all were they armed with a political ideology for revamping the Roman Empire.

But one thing they knew beyond all doubt. They knew that God’s promised Redeemer had come; they knew that he was crucified for sinners, and that he lives triumphant over death as Lord of all. They owned him as Saviour and put themselves beneath his Lordship. And they were true to their mission: to invite lost sinners to redemptive forgiveness and grace, and to proclaim the whole counsel of God. Theirs was a mission of love and righteousness in a world that had lost its way.

It is time to recapture the high and holy faith that exalts a people—faith in the Creator-Redeemer who forgives men’s sins and who lifts them to newness of life. It is time Bibles were opened again. It is time to return to family worship and private devotions. It is time for church attendance. It is time to face the implications of “our most holy faith” for all of life. It is time for “the things of God” to find ready place upon our lips and in our hearts.

A Dunce For God

Five hundred fifty years ago this July, John Huss was burned at the stake as “an obstinate heretic.” He had been granted a “safe conduct” to Constance by Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor. The safe conduct led him safely to the stake when the emperor obeyed the Roman Catholic Church that, while not burning him, turned him over to the secular authority saying, “Go, take him and do to him as a heretic.”

Prior to his death Huss was taken to the cathedral and seated upon a high stool, where there was placed on his head a dunce’s cap with pictures of the Devil and words committing his soul to Satan. He was publicly degraded from the priestly office, and thirty charges were read against him.

Huss followed the tradition of Wyclif. Both of them, as Philip Schaff wrote, “made the Scriptures the final source of appeal, and exalted the authority of conscience above Pope, Council and Canon Law as an interpreter of truth.” Both were true Protestants before the Reformation. Both died for the faith they embraced. When the Roman church offered Huss his freedom if he would recant, he replied: “I shall die with joy today in the faith of the Gospel I have preached.” As the flames swallowed his body, he was heard to sing twice: “Christ, thou Son of the living God, have mercy upon me.”

For five and a half centuries men have waited for the Roman church to right the wrong committed against John Huss. After the awful Salem witch trials in New England, the Massachusetts court made a full confession of its errors. In Geneva, Switzerland, in 1903, French Protestants erected a monument signifying their repentance for the burning of Servetus and for the part Calvin had in that tragic incident. But no pope or council has ever recanted for what the church did to Huss.

In any ecumenical dialogue, it would be well to place the name of John Huss high on the agenda for discussion. His views are no less important today than when he was burned at the stake. Is the Scripture the only final authority? Is conscience above pope, councils, canon law, and Protestant general assemblies, conventions, and consistories? Huss is dead, but the issues for which he died live on. His memory is imperishable; his faith and fervor are an everlasting testament to truth and to Christ.

A Time To Speak

Student demonstrations in foreign countries have long been signs of political unrest, noisy indications that political crises are in the making. This has been particularly true in revolutionary countries where governments rise and fall in quick succession. Even though students are often too young to vote, uneasy heads of state keep an alert eye on political fermentations and protests occurring on college and university campuses.

In the more stable climate of American social and political life, the college student has often been a rebel without a cause. But search for a cause he did, and he usually found one, on the campus itself. He would then, with a deep sense of achievement, deliver a protest telling the university’s president how the university should be run. Recently, however, college students have become increasingly concerned with off-campus social and political issues. This is a healthy sign and bespeaks better things than panty-raids and telephone-booth stuffing. Yet recent student political protests suggest that students are teaching the government before they have learned their lessons in civics and political history.

Not long ago ten to fifteen thousand students left campus and books behind to tell President Johnson what to do about Viet Nam. One wonders how undergraduates get so smart so soon. The French, not unlearned after centuries of practicing international diplomacy, struggled with Viet Nam for eight years and ended up without the right answer. The Johnson administration is funneling its best brains into the search for a solution. What special fount of wisdom did these thousands of college students tap that made them so confident of having the right answer that they traveled to Washington to enlighten the President and his advisers?

It has again been proved that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Although these students were shouting from the hip and not from the head, President Johnson was enough affected by their demonstration to take steps to enlighten his young advisers. He is returning the call by sending to college campuses persons who have been instructed to convey a full picture of all the issues involved in Viet Nam. This is a good thing. For the best protest comes from the person who knows what he is talking about.

Democracies depend on informed people who are capable of cool and sane judgment and immune to reckless mob spirit. Abraham Lincoln, whose campus was only a hearth, was sufficiently enlightened to remark that “there is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” As a government of, and by, and for the people, a democracy depends on the sober restraint of its people and on their recognition that not everybody knows everything.

There are signs today that this restraint is crumbling. Everybody seems to be getting into the oracle act. Clergymen tell the government what to do about military, economic, and technological matters, although there are few things they know less about. Students follow suit; before they have finished their courses in history they are informing the government how it ought to chart its course through the complex sea of international affairs. There is a time to speak, and a time to study—and the last should come first.

The Church should learn from current student demonstrations that students are anxious to get caught up in crusades; that they want and need the satisfaction of doing something for a cause that is bigger than they are. Students are people. No less than others, they find life useless and meaningless if it presents them with nothing worth suffering for.

The magnificent service rendered recently by students in fighting back the flood waters of the Mississippi at many points of danger suggests that most of them do not conform to the student image that some press reports and the beatnik slice of the student body have created. We salute the students on the banks of the Mississippi River who literally turned the tide. And we summon society and especially the Christian Church to challenge students to identify with good causes in which they will find good reasons for living. Most students are not cynical about causes. But many are cynical in an affluent society about the worth of living only for more material goods.

An Example Of Excellence

During the past eight years, students in the English department at Wheaton (Illinois) College have achieved outstanding success in the Atlantic Monthly contest for creative writing. In competition with writers from colleges and universities throughout the nation, Wheaton writers have since 1958 been close to the top and for three of these years had the best record in the United States.

This year a historic “first” was scored by Jeanne Murray, a Wheaton College junior, who took top honors in both the poetry and short story divisions. Some of her fellow students were also given awards, with the result that 20 per cent of the recognized manuscripts in the 1965 Atlantic Monthly competition were written by Wheaton-trained writers.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY has consistently advocated excellence in evangelical education. Therefore we salute the award-winning students and the Wheaton English faculty. They are setting a standard that reflects credit upon evangelical Christian education. The achievement of excellence in writing or in any other part of education rests upon the kind of teaching that builds in students respect for truth and willingness to persist until clarity of thought and statement are attained. Without these, there can be no authentic scholarship and no honest creative expression.

Labor Laws And The Right Of Conscience

The majority of American Christians are not against labor unions. However, there are thousands of Christian people in the United States in such groups as Mennonites, Amish, Seventh-day Adventists, Christian Reformed, Protestant Reformed, and Plymouth Brethren who have conscientious objections to holding membership in labor unions. Their reasons are not always the same. Some object to affiliation in an organization that is religiously neutral. Some object to the use of force in strikes. They think it unchristian to achieve their rights by coercive measures. Still others feel that, since they are members of Christ, they may not become members of a labor, professional, trade, or any other kind of organization to which non-Christians also belong.

These moral arguments are neither dodges nor cheap attempts to reap the advantages of organized labor without accepting responsibility or paying membership dues. Many are willing to pay their share of labor bargaining costs; others would donate the equivalent of membership fees and dues to a charitable organization. Within the Christian Reformed churches, a Christian labor union has been organized, known as the Christian Labor Association. Such attitudes and actions bespeak the moral earnestness that attends the question of membership in labor unions.

But if these people differ in their reasons for refusing to hold membership in our national labor unions, all the reasons do fall into the basic category of the right and duty of a man not to act contrary to his conscience. The American government has long been very sensitive to the right of its citizens to live in terms of their consciences. It has not forced the conscientious objector to take up arms, nor has it forced the Jehovah’s Witness to salute the flag. This respect for the individual’s moral convictions is one of the profound ways in which American democracy differs from totalitarianism; totalitarian governments demand the ultimate loyalty of their citizens, whereas American democratic government recognizes that a man’s ultimate loyalty is to God, not the state.

In the nineteen states that have a right-to-work law, the person with moral objections to union affiliation is protected. In others he is not. Among the score of bills relating to the Taft-Hartley Act introduced in Congress, H.R. 4350 is prominent. This bill, while containing certain political safeguards, would, like H.R. 77, modify the Taft-Hartley Act to make state right-to-work laws illegal and thus compel any man to join a union in a union shop as a condition of obtaining or keeping a job. If such legislation is enacted, those in all fifty states who have conscientious objections to joining labor unions will be caught in the dilemma of violating their consciences or losing their jobs.

H.R. 4350 also requests Congress to designate the proposed change as the “Employee Civil Rights Act of 1965.” The attempt to confuse and mislead the public is glaringly obvious. To link the proposed change in the Taft-Hartley Act with the Negro civil rights issue and thus to convey the impression that the right of a union to force membership upon a conscientious objector is similar to the Negro’s right to vote is at best misleading, at worst dishonest. It is also anything but precise legal language. The employee’s “civil right” in this proposal is, for the Christian with moral objections, quite simply: John the union or lose your job. Such a choice savors of a Russian election, not an authentic American option.

Suppose the Church were to confront union members with the choice, “Join a church or lose your job.” How many of them would consider their compelled choice an exercise in civil rights?

Every American has a large stake in this issue. Not only the conscientious objector but also every lover of freedom should be concerned about this bold attempt to undermine the long American tradition that recognizes a man’s right to live by his conscience without sacrificing his right to work for a living.

Christian Missions And Turkey

One of the best friends America has had throughout the cold war period is Turkey. En route to the Holy Land, Americans on pilgrimage have often returned a report that nowhere were they greeted in such friendly fashion as in Turkey.

In response to Turkish friendship, Christian Americans would like to give the greatest thing in their power to give—the good news of Jesus Christ. But Turkish restrictions have made heavy going for the Christian missionary task. Dramatizing this fact was the scream of a front-page headline in the Turkish Ankara daily Ulus of April 28: “Network engaged in missionary work caught.” The report went on to name four men, Swiss, American, British, and Turkish, who had been engaged in Christian propaganda among university students in Ankara. Acting on a tipoff, security officers raided an apartment rented by the three foreigners, and found them around a table with five Turkish students, busy translating the New Testament. In the apartment were found about 8,000 envelopes and “propaganda brochures,” copies of which the police alleged had been mailed to many people during the feast of sacrifice (i.e. the Muslim lamb-killing feast in April). It was stated that investigation showed that “the network is run from headquarters located in Istanbul … controlled by an American navy man, Captain Luke, and the search has been intensified at that end.” The newspaper report claimed that the accused men were associates of Dale Rhoton (an American now working with Operation Mobilization in Beirut, Lebanon), who had previously been “expelled from Turkey for the same offense.” The case is now in the hands of the public prosecutor.

The report is misleading and yet faithfully reflects the confusion and illogicality of Turkish officialdom toward Christianity. The Ulus story is so presented that translation work is implied to be criminal; yet such work is done by the British and Foreign Bible Society, which functions legally in Turkey. The somewhat sinister reference to a senior American naval officer’s involvement does not tally with the facts: the person concerned turns out to be a civilian carpenter working for the United States Navy. Dale Rhoton, whose activities had come to the attention of the police, had not, however, been tried, sentenced, or expelled.

In 1962, three university professors who were appointed by the prosecuting attorney’s office to examine Operation Mobilization literature unanimously agreed that the literature contained nothing “contrary to our principles of Laicisim” (i.e. separation of state and religion). It regarded as irrelevant the suggestion that these principles were infringed because an allusion to the Second Coming of Christ had “the aim of altering the world system.”

Before Christ’s Second Advent does indeed alter the world system, our hope and prayer for our good friend Turkey is that she may hear his Gospel. In the past politico-religious circumstances altered this land where lie Tarsus, Antioch, Ephesus, Smyrna, and Contantinople. Now Mecca is preeminently in view rather than the New Jerusalem. But even as Turks are permitted to bring Islam to American shores, we covet for Turkey the free entry of the Christian Gospel.

The Dominican Crisis

American troops are in the Dominican Republic to protect the lives and property of Americans and others. When what seemed a simple internal revolution shaped up as a Communist-planned effort to take over a country of strategic importance to Latin America and the Panama Canal, President Johnson expanded American participation and sought the support of the Organization of American States in a mutual effort to preserve the integrity and freedom of this nation. As usual, there have been catcalls and plaudits. Russian and Cuban leaders, with predictable anguish, opposed this “imperialistic” assault against “a peoples’ movement.” The matter has been brought before the United Nations, where Adlai Stevenson has undertaken an explanation of the United States’ intervention in the affairs of another nation. The OAS has agreed to assume responsibility for the military operations.

Few people are aware of the background of the struggle. The Dominican Republic is slightly smaller than West Virginia and has a population of 3⅓ million. For years it was ruled by dictators, the latest of whom was Trujillo. He was replaced by Juan Bosch, who was elected president on December 20, 1962, in the first free election in thirty-eight years. Bosch’s regime was overthrown on September 25, 1963, and replaced by a triumvirate that promised another election on September 1, 1965.

This republic is one hour away by jet from Miami, Florida, and twenty minutes from Cuba. The Communists have infiltrated it, and the recent uprising is in accord with their plans to control this nation. For some time Castro’s agents have been interfering in the affairs of the Dominican Republic. Their violent reaction to America’s involvement accepts as honorable their own subversion and intervention.

One of the unalterable facts of life in the international arena is expressed in the phrase, “spheres of influence.” Since the days when the Monroe Doctrine was first elaborated, the United States has regarded the domination of any Latin American nation by foreign powers to be inimical to America’s national interest. President Johnson understands very well that the Dominican Republic falls within America’s sphere of influence. What happens there is of the greatest significance to the United States and to the free world.

Those of us who argue against situational ethics when absolutes are involved do recognize that in this instance the Word of God offers no absolutes to support one course of action over against another, as though one were right and the other wrong. Undoubtedly Mr. Johnson did not wish to send in our soldiers and was hesitant to do so. But he obviously thought that this action was far preferable to sitting still and doing nothing. The lesser of two evils was to take prompt and decisive military action. At this writing a formal ceasefire agreement, under the auspices of the OAS, has been signed by both sides in the civil war. The United States government has named a number of “Communist and Castroist” leaders who played an important role in the uprising, infiltrated the rebel leadership, organized the mobs, and carried out paramilitary action.

There are those who will argue that Mr. Johnson made a wrong decision. But Americans predictably will stand solidly behind the decision, and history will vindicate its rightness. Interestingly enough, even the veteran commentator Walter Lippmann, no consistent champion of administration policies, concluded that the President followed the only reasonable course of action.

It is too early to say how the situation will end. But we know there can be no “return to normalcy” in the Dominican Republic, because that would be a return to dictatorship similar to what the people endured under Trujillo. We can only hope that a new leadership will arise to carry this people to a way of life that will exclude dictatorship as well as Communism and bring a stable government under which the people can enjoy liberty and justice.

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L. Nelson Bell

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One of the most popular of recent mystery novels is a tale of espionage and counterespionage in Europe, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. This story of suspense, intrigue, violence, and sordidness can well represent what is taking place in the world today.

But there is another story that might be written, a story of men and women who have come in from the dark to the light, who have lived in spiritual darkness only to have the light of the love of God in Christ break in on and transform their lives. This thrilling tale concerns once-blind people who have come to sec themselves and the redemption to be had in Christ.

For many this transition is so gradual that only in retrospect do they realize the difference; yet the fact remains that a true conversion experience entails coming from darkness to light, from spiritual blindness to sight.

The Apostle Paul, in his defense before King Agrippa, told of his encounter with the risen Christ and of the commission he had received: “I send you to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (Acts 26:17b, 18, RSV).

Blindness is frequently used in the Bible to symbolize the spiritual condition of those who do not believe. In his letter to the Ephesians Paul says, “They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart” (4:18). The psalmist uses the same analogy: “The Lord sets the prisoners free; the Lord opens the eyes of the blind” (Ps. 146:7b, 8a). Isaiah records God’s words: “I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness” (Isa. 42:6, 7). And the Prophet Zephaniah foretells a day similar to our own: “I will bring distress on men, so that they shall walk like the blind, because they have sinned against the Lord …” (1:17).

More than twenty times our Lord referred to blindness, either physical or spiritual. He denounced the Pharisees as “blind guides,” “blind leaders of the blind.” In the Revelation, the risen Christ, speaking through his servant John, describes the Laodicean church. so like the Church today, as “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked” (3:17).

Spiritual blindness is the natural state of the once-born man; spiritual sight is given to the twice-born. This is the major challenge to the Church. That she spends so much time offering white canes and seeing-eye dogs to the blind when she might offer restored sight through faith in the Christ of Calvary is strange and tragic. Even within the Church, the blinded state of the unconverted is ignored or misunderstood.

It is spiritual blindness that causes men to reject the Gospel and to look on the preaching of the Cross as foolishness. The very nature of the problem renders futile any cure devised by man. The gravity of unregenerate man’s state is such that only a miracle can bring about a change. As our Lord opened the eyes of the physically blind, so he and he alone can open the eyes of those afflicted by blindness of the soul.

In the Gospel there is that miraculous, supernatural power which brings a man from darkness into the light, from blindness into spiritual sight. This involves a complete renewing of the person so that he becomes a “new creature in Christ.”

The reality of spiritual blindness and the transforming power of Jesus Christ are an inescapable part of revealed truth. How tragic if any in the Church should fail to admit the fact of blindness and the efficacy of the cure! And equally tragic if any who call themselves Christians should cause the blind to stumble or should lead them in a way at the end of which there is only more darkness.

Years ago in China the writer often operated on people with cataracts. It is a spectacular and rewarding experience to perform this comparatively simple operation on a blind patient and a few minutes later watch him as he sees the faces above him and counts the fingers held before him. The joy of the patient is often unbounded, and the satisfaction of the surgeon is great.

How much more rewarding to lead one who is spiritually blind into the marvelous light reflected in the face of the One who came to give light, life, and complete newness to men!

Can it be that many of our activities are attempts to fit blind people with glasses when their only hope is to be found in the divinely provided healing of the Son of God?

Can it be that we often make a grave error in diagnosis, failing to recognize spiritual blindness as man’s natural state?

Can it be that after this diagnostic error we compound the problem by holding out a false hope of a sight that can be obtained in no other way than through the blood-bought victory of Calvary?

We must never forget that the healing of spiritual blindness requires the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. Human agencies? Yes. But the power rests in the Spirit of the living God; the work of restoration is his. Our greatest failure is the failure to admit the reality of spiritual blindness. Front this comes man’s rejection of the remedy.

The Apostle Paul told the Ephesians that they were once in darkness but through faith in Christ had come into the light. Therefore, he said, “walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true).… Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them” (Eph. 5:8–11).

This transformation from darkness to light, from blindness to spiritual sight, becomes evident to all: “For you are all sons of light and sons of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness” (1 Thes. 5:5).

After this change we can test our own lives by seeing what we enjoy—evil things or good things, the works of darkness or those of light. “The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day” (Prov. 4:18). Self-testing will show us whether we are growing in our appreciation and reflection of light or are continuing in darkness.

This transformation is a work of God’s free grace, of his redeeming power. Speaking in the synagogue in Nazareth our Lord said: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:18, 19).

What a tragedy when we reject the light because we love darkness more!

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Eutychus II

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GOD AND MAMMON

If you are looking for a good point of reference for the solutions of about 70 per cent of your ethical problems, you might call to mind, “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” Most people think they are discussing the issue when they are really trying to discover some rationalization by which they can make the best of two worlds. They can see very clearly what they ought to do, and they see with equal clarity what it will cost. It’s the cost in the decision that is the real trouble.

This covers all sorts of things, such as how you will spend the Sabbath Day, where you will engage in sharp practices in business, how long it will take you to get even with somebody else, and what to do with your money.

The all-American “success motif” gets into all kinds of things. There was a wife who almost refused to go along with her husband to a foreign mission field because she couldn’t stand to part with her electric toaster. There was a girl who wanted to be a missionary but whose good Christian mother talked her out of it by saying, “Why don’t you work for a few years and get a little money ahead, and then you will have something to fall back on.” And another mother advised her daughter, “Get your three-year teaching certificate; and then, if anything goes wrong, you will have something to fall back on.” In the last analysis, what we “fall back on” is our real god, no matter what else we say.

Someone has suggested that our easiest forgetting is forgetting that we inhabit a planet. Right now we are hurtling through space in at least seven different directions (according to Einstein), and it is interesting to suggest that while we are riding on such a bolt in the blue our security rests on a three-year teaching certificate.

One time I followed a yellow bus full of nuns. In large print on the side of the bus it said, “Sisters of Divine Providence,” and in small print on the back it said, “Emergency Exit.” Take another look at your “emergency exit,” and see whether you are serving God or Mammon.

SEX AND A SINGULAR CHURCH

I read in your news section (Apr. 23 issue) of a church called Judson (New York) and a pastor called Moody (Howard—I hope no relation to D. L.) that claim to be American Baptist and [of] the heathen ritual (nude dancing) performed in their building. I would hope this was a mistake in reporting, but likely it is not.

We as American Baptist pastors realize that because of our democratic procedures anyone or anything from soup to nuts can parade under our name. I’m sure I speak for the vast majority of American Baptist pastors who try to be honorable servants of our Lord in apologizing to the Christian world for the behavior of one who uses our name.

Adoniram Judson, for whom Judson Church was very likely named, suffered much humiliation in a Burmese prison, but I’m sure it would be nothing compared to the humiliation he would suffer if he could know of the behavior of his namesake church in New York. I feel the least such a church could do would be to drop the name of such an honorable man. May I suggest a new name—The Church of “St.” Ashtoreth. First Baptist Church

Williston, N. D.

How far do we go in our obsession with relevancy? New York is probably no more sex-obsessed than was ancient Corinth; yet a bachelor Christian minister by the name of Paul did not instruct or give license to the church to duplicate the sex practices of Corinth. In fact, he sought to lead them in just the opposite direction.

If being relevant means adopting non-Christian standards of conduct, then I would rather be “irrelevant.” If the biblical ethic in sex conduct is unacceptable to our age, then it is nothing unusual, for it has always been so.

Incidentally, Judson Memorial Church is also a member of the United Church of Christ.

First Baptist Church

Dover, Del.

THE VICTORIA INSTITUTE

Dr. J. D. Douglas has drawn the attention of your readers to the foundation and activities of this institute in your journal (Current Religious Thought, Apr. 9 issue). Perhaps … your readers may be perplexed as to where details of the institute’s prizes (of which only one was mentioned) and membership may be obtained. All enquiries should be addressed to the Secretary, 12, Burcote Road, London, S.W.18., England.

The Victoria Institute

London, England

Editor

FLOOD TIDE

I want to commend you on your editorial. “Facing the Tide of Obscenity” (Apr. 9 issue). There can be no question … that our society is simply being overwhelmed by a flood of pornography in paperback books, magazines, and motion pictures. The long-range impact of this upon our civilization is going to be serious unless measures are taken to bring it under control.

I am sure that most Protestants concerned with this field would share your fear of boards of censorship, for censorship is a double-edged sword that a free society cannot tolerate. However, the Supreme Court—if the courts would but follow a strict interpretation of its dictum—has laid down an intelligent and reasonable standard for judging obscenity that is denied the protection of the free press.… We must go deeper than repression, of course, and educate people to the need for maintaining our historic Judaeo-Christian standards of sex behavior.…

Your editorial convinces me that you see this problem in proper perspective. We need very urgently to get this message before the American public.

Washington, D. C.

I was impressed with your demand for “a creative literature that dips into the restless revolt of our times,” but I am afraid that most of the modern work which fits that description has been frowned upon by the Church as “immoral.” If the modern world believes anything is “outdated,” it is not the “morality” of former days but the moralist’s ill-conceived attitude toward that morality.…

Amherst, Mass.

Thank you for your editorial. “A Time for Moral Indignation” (Mar. 12 issue). We thought this was great.

We suggest a practical program to follow up on this editorial. We have found it effective for five people to meet together weekly, each writing a letter to a magazine or newspaper. They should read the letter to the group, so that the best possible letter goes for publication. They should undertake only a six-week campaign so that their work does not look endless. We feel this type of approach is necessary, since the Supreme Court has enunciated that all obscenity questions rest on the expression of community standards. A silent community means there are no standards in that community.…

Secretary

Operation Yorkville

New York, N. Y.

THE MARCH

I appreciate each issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY as we receive it. In the issue of April 9 is an article on the news pages entitled “The March to Montgomery.” May we have permission to reprint it in the pages of the Church Advocate?

Editor

The Church Advocate

Harrisburg, Pa.

You have been very unfair toward us and write as though you felt we were all a very evil people.…

Atlanta, Ga.

There has always been love and respect among the different races in our state. The colored do have the right to vote. They also have some of the finest schools and colleges here. They have every opportunity a white child has.…

Huntsville, Ala.

Assuming you are a Christian, do you not know anything about the Bible, the separation of people, races …?

Girard, La

Most of the letters (April 23 issue) are self-righteous concerning the racial problems and troubles in the South.

We ministers and church members in the South have failed to follow the commandments of our Lord: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.… Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself …” (Mark 12:30, 31).

God help us to repent and to be followers of Christ!

Hackleburg, Ala.

I strenuously object to the analogy set forth in the first three paragraphs of the news article “Selma: Parable of the Old South” (Mar. 12 issue). The first sentence tells me that Mr. Taft is naïve and uninformed, or is a Southerner himself and is writing in defense of the system of segregation.…

I do not mean to speak harshly or in generalities, but if I would generalize on the same level of Mr. Taft, I would rather compare Selma’s attitude (and the rest of those who uphold the system of segregation) to “A Boy’s Smothering Love for His Dog.” I say this for two specific reasons: (1) As long as a boy can play with his dog, as a dog, on the level of a dog, all is well. As long as the dog does not assert himself to rise to the level of the boy all is well. The dog may live a life “smothered in love,” happy, without a care. As long as he stays in the place of a dog, he will never have any trouble. (2) Let the dog try to ascend to the place of the boy, however, and the dog is in trouble. The boy may try to reason a little while. He may try to control the dog with love first; then a little force. He may try to make allowances for some things. But in the end the attitude is hardly one that “sets about to reestablish, with God’s help, the bonds of love on a more mature and satisfying basis that recognizes her child as a person in his own right.” Rather, that dog is sub-human. If he thinks he has a right to the same place in society that the little boy has … that dog must die.

Cedar Avenue Church of God

Sharon, Pa.

REVERENDS, RIGHT, VERY, ETC.

If you’re mad at that man of Divinity

Who is taking pot-shots at the Trinity

Likewise, if the Bishop of W.

Continues to worry and trouble you,

Here’s some thought-provoking news:

Free will enables you to choose!

You don’t have to get with it,

You can simply dismyth it!

There’s no rule that says you have to go along,

Rt. Reverends or not, they could be Wg.!

San Antonio, Tex.

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Cover Story

The Editor

Page 6154 – Christianity Today (17)

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Perhaps no study is more important that that of the role of Christian institutions in the present secular climate of American life. Of the national population, 85 million persons are presently twenty-four years of age or under; by 1980 more than 35 per cent of the population will be between sixteen and twenty-five. Sunday school enrollment is not keeping pace with population growth, and youth evangelism faces growing odds if church colleges do not counterbalance the secular trend of public education and, in fact, sacrifice one biblical truth after another to modern alternatives. The Danforth Foundation, which has made many notable contributions to American education, has undertaken a systematic appraisal of the 817 religiously oriented colleges and universities throughout the United States, with spring, 1966, as the target date for a public report. Statisticians agree that public education will in the future even more overwhelmingly overshadow church colleges and universities in size, facilities, and total financial support than it does now. If, despite this service to a declining percentage of college students, church colleges are to fulfill a highly important leavening role, far-reaching changes are demanded.

So much new knowledge has emerged, along with a growing thirst for its assimilation within a reasoned outlook on life, that Christian colleges face a remarkable opportunity to confront the academic world in a fresh spirit of intellectual adventure. But without constructiveness of purpose, clarity of objective, and authentic spiritual vision, they are doomed first to irrelevance and then to extinction.

Values In A Vacuum

What distinctive role has the Christian college? To emphasize the humanistic values in Western culture? The better secular campuses now do this in their humanities courses. To add a religion department to a secular curriculum? Already eighteen state universities have established full-time religion departments; learning about religion is no distinctive of church-related education but an integral element in a complete liberal arts education. To stress “Hebrew-Christian values” or “the basic truths of life”? An academic institution that seeks to perpetuate these values in a metaphysical vacuum has learned little from the drift of Western thought and life, and its cherished “vital truths” usually become so broad that little depth remains. Sometimes church-related colleges differ little from others except in preserving corporate worship or a moral code that erases biblical patterns less swiftly than that of secular campuses.

Since the questioning of religious beliefs is a widespread characteristic of American secular education, what special obligation have the church-related campuses? They are accused by some of neglecting the development of a philosophy of life and assuming unjustifiably that a reasoned outlook emerges automatically from a college education. At a time when many forces are inimical to historic Christianity, a steady stream of graduates sensitive to modern ideas and equipped for intellectual leadership could exert significant influence both in the churches and in secular society. The Christian campus might thus supply the guiding principles of the future as a by-product of its illumination of the liberal arts by the Christian faith.

No mere addition of “a religious tone” to the liberal arts will dispel the present spiritual vacuum, to which paradoxically many of the churches are contributing. The theological and ethical uncertainty in the seminaries and in the churches is surely one of the chief causes of uncertainty in the church-related colleges. The major universities have, in fact, sloughed off their church-relatedness except when crusading for funds or recalling their origins. Some secular educators cherish the strange notion that the academic excellence of colleges is proportionate to their lack of church-relatedness. And not a few surviving church colleges tend to look upon their church affiliation as a liability. They perpetuate no fixed Christian beliefs, consider chapel attendance optional, pay no serious attention to religion, and emphasize their non-sectarian character.

Despite the ecumenical tendency to speak of “church colleges,” this term now covers a spectrum of institutions of such divergent commitments that it serves only a statistical purpose. For obvious reasons, Roman Catholic educators would rather speak of their institutions as Catholic colleges, while evangelical educators speak of Christian colleges. One Presbyterian college president, asked what religious beliefs he requires of faculty, replied: “Only that they be church members; we assume that this establishes their evangelical commitment.” The term “church-relatedness” implies nothing definitive in the way of theological commitment; what it assures is little more than favored tax treatment for ordained members of the teaching staff.

The weakest link in the effort to revive the importance of the church colleges is their unsure sense of the role of truth in Christianity. This uncertainty is doubly distressing at the present moment, when public education is groping to understand the role of religion in the curriculum and when the main vacuum in many church colleges is their lack of an integrating world-life view.

The Wind-Swept Campus

At a time when the winds of modernity have swept over many religious campuses, administrators speak of the need for faculty diversity—for “ventilation”—as a guarantee of intellectual ferment, despite the fact that the fundamental problem in church-related institutions is their neglect of Christian perspective. When the Christian faith has been all but blown away by modernity, sensitive educators ought to think about closing some doors rather than opening more windows. The times being what they are, the need is not for more “ventilation”—the thing that already accounts for the secularizing of many church colleges—but for greater consistency in the relevant exposition of Christian truth and the relating of all subjects to the Judaeo-Christian revelation.

The plea for vitality in learning is, of course, well taken. It has been rightly said that students ought to “field the question” before teachers suggest the answers. No Christian faculty is worthy of its academic responsibilities if it can sustain intellectual excitement on campus only through the presence of unbelieving colleagues. This device may be dramatic, but it tends to neglect the best resources for academic vitality—such things as the full use of library holdings, the conflict in the minds of students, the spirit of the classroom, panel discussions including outside participants, and visiting lecturers.

The Christian campus does not need a devil on its faculty; a devil’s advocate will do. The devil will be active enough on his own account. Even an ideologically united faculty usually includes a considerable amount of diversity, simply because sanctification is not glorification. Those who make room for a Unitarian on a seminary or college faculty may have a church-related institution, but its Christian integrity is compromised. The advocates of “ventilation” offer no objective gauge of when such contrary winds become objectionable. But faculty members who contend that unbelievers ought to be able to teach in a Christian college classroom should apply to a secular institution, since the main distinction between a church college of diverse religious outlooks and a secular college is usually the latter’s academic superiority.

Behind the advocacy of “ventilation” is not so much a desire for intellectual excitement, which can be achieved in other ways, as a surrender of the traditional view of the Christian college as a propagatory institution or medium of indoctrination. The campus cannot be the church, requiring an affirmation of the historic faith from its students. Its role cannot be defined as pastoral and protective. Nor is the classroom the place to press for conversion. Its main traffic is in ideas; intellectual content is its commodity. But liberal arts education presumably is interested in the whole truth. Just as physicians are bound by the Hippocratic Oath to preserve life, so teachers ought to consider themselves academically responsible to purvey truth in its entirety. And a company of scholars who agree about a corpus of spiritual truth that they are willing to expose to the same searching scrutiny they give other ideologies has every academic right, and in fact an obligation, to pass this truth on.

Non-evangelicals who disbelieve biblical truths will hesitate to inculcate these truths, but it should be clear that it is the truths and not the indoctrination that they oppose. Whoever thinks that only evangelical or fundamentalist campuses practice indoctrination is due for some higher education. Every campus, and, in fact, almost every teacher, does this; the difference between liberal and conservative teachers and colleges in this regard is not whether but what. If conservative colleges are characterized as defenders of the faith, the plain fact is that the liberal college not only has lost the historic faith and is confused about what to substitute but also serves an intellectual smorgasbord, with ardent promotion of one specialty or another by the various classroom chefs.

A Difference Of Degree

The notion that academic freedom is inconsistent with the presentation of a body of truth to which a college faculty subscribes is unconvincing. The difference in this matter among the religiously oriented campuses is one of degree, not of kind. Few if any church-related colleges will tolerate an atheist as a professor, and probably none would tolerate a known Communist. All religious institutions have specific faculty requirements. If academic freedom is thwarted by an intellectual requirement, then all church-related campuses are in the same predicament. What is really objectionable about evangelical institutions from the liberal standpoint is the requirement of faculty adherence to articles of the historic faith that the non-evangelical has surrendered, and that are a barrier to faculty eligibility unless religious symbols are rationalized to mean what they once did not mean. Every educational institution gathers a company of scholars subscribing to its purposes, and no institution grants its faculty members freedom to destroy those purposes. If an institution allows academic license to erode its objectives in the classroom, the dissident faculty will in time preside over the death of these objectives.

Let no one consider this a brief for run-of-the-mill fundamentalist education. It is the academic shortcomings of these institutions that lend artificial credence to liberal contentions. Their ingrown faculties, their worship of Ph.D.’s more than good teachers, their contentment with graduates who have not really won the faith for themselves but “parrot” it, their elevation of the campus code to an authority paralleling that of divine articles of faith, their inclusion in required faculty statements details on which even evangelicals disagree widely, their failure to produce a comprehensive literature articulating the Christian faith in the context of contemporary thought, their smug withdrawal from the secular academic scene—all these elements and more call for a new day in conservative education.

But non-evangelicals are in no position to gloat over this list of shortcomings, since some of their own campuses reflect certain of these tendencies also. And the so-called “liberal” campus that boasts about its academic freedom often has bolted the doors against firsthand reflection of evangelical convictions, and, even more often, presents them second-hand in the spirit of effigy-burning. As a matter of fact, some “liberal” liberal arts colleges wholly bypass evangelical faculty prospects. Nor are theological seminaries an exception; at one period or another campuses of the stature of the University of Chicago Divinity School have displayed this same exclusive temper. As many graduates complain of the academic illiberality of liberal institutions as protest the closed-mindedness of conservative campuses. One would be hard put to it to draw up a list of evangelical professors teaching philosophy in non-evangelical church colleges. The libraries of non-evangelical institutions are often woefully lacking in evangelical reading resources, and course requirements and reserve reading shelves frequently bypass conservative literature entirely.

The liberal complaint that conservative institutions necessarily transgress academic freedom by their doctrinal requirements really springs from a quite different motivation—in a word, from skepticism about basic evangelical tenets. Often, in fact, this skepticism runs much deeper; there is doubt of the reality of any divinely revealed truths whatever, or of the existence of a fixed body of truth of any kind. This attitude implies not so much a concern for freedom, of which Christ is the font, as an uncertainty that Christ is the font of truth and that the Christian campus can know absolute truth about the spiritual world.

Precisely this mood has led the church colleges to their present predicament, in which the relation between religion and truth is highly ambiguous. In fact, religion and intellect are sometimes viewed antithetically. This is all the more apparent when liberal educators, troubled about the decline of Christian conviction on church-related campuses, speak of their institutions as stronger academically than religiously. The contrast of truth and religion is one that neither Augustine nor Aquinas, Luther nor Calvin, would have tolerated. But the liberal tradition from Kant through Ritschl, Schleiermacher, and Kierkegaard refuses to acknowledge the competency of reason in the metaphysical realm. Evangelical scholars insist that this competency has been impaired by sin; but this is quite different from the emphasis that man cannot have objective knowledge of ultimate reality on any basis whatever, divine creation and redemption included.

The Underlying Denial

What underlies the liberal outlook pervading many denominational colleges today is the arbitrary denial of the ontological significance of reason—that is, of the biblical fact that the Logos is structurally constitutive of all reality. That a rational God is Creator of all things, that in Jesus Christ the Divine Logos has become incarnate, that the rational nature of man and the laws of logic belong to the imago Dei—all this has been surrendered to the waves of modernity. The instrumental philosophy of John Dewey, the anti-metaphysical theology of influential European modernist, dialectical, or existential scholars, have squandered all this—and more. What more? The historic Christian assurance that divine revelation has communicated trustworthy knowledge of God and his purposes. In a word, the whole biblical and traditional confidence in divinely revealed truths is gone.

This situational fact, much more than genuine theological renewal, explains the success of ecumenism in our time. And its implications for the church-related colleges are plain. If evangelical confidence in revealed truths is misplaced, if no genuine metaphysical knowledge is possible, if there is, in fact, no body of fixed truth, and if religion thrives in the absence of any universally valid truth-content, then it is perfectly clear why many insist that Christian colleges need “ventilation,” why the “ideal” Christian campus will not defend a “faith which was once for all delivered,” and why the insistence on creedal subscription conflicts with academic freedom. Surely no scholar wants to be chained to what he considers error.

Much of this kind of thinking motivates the emphasis that students best acquire a unified view of life from the encouragement of professorial example. This emphasis is popular among liberals who are disillusioned about the ability of a structure of courses (particularly “the religion department”) to achieve the integration of learning. Surely no one will doubt the importance of professorial example, particularly in the matter of a unified view of life. The teacher should teach by example outside the classroom what he teaches by precept in the classroom. But it should be crystal clear that, at this level, we are speaking of something considerably less than an integrated Christian world-life view, something, shall we say, answering to the Communist Weltanschauung.

The evangelical, the modernist, and the humanist have strikingly different convictions about what delivers man from inner personality discord and unifies his personality and outlook on life. And it is the evangelical today who insists on the role of reason in religious experience. The others insist, no doubt, that the purpose of education is not simply to amass a great quantity of facts but “to make the students’ eyes shine.” But all the “posies, punch, and platitudes” cannot conceal the fact that most church college campuses are evasive at the point that needs most clearly to be articulated—namely, whether the Christian religion is true. That Christianity is the highest religion, that it is unique, that it is redemptive—all this may be asserted. But no college campus that professes to be Christian can evade an academic duty to deal with the truth-claim of historic Christianity in relation to the truth of philosophy, science, and history. Is the truth of the Christian religion universally valid? If a church-related campus cannot give a reasoned affirmative answer to that question, it deserves to go out of business. In fact, it really has gone out of business so far as its religious claim is concerned.

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Car. F. H. Henry

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1. All evangelicals believe that man is a created being, but we have varied ideas on unrevealed details of how God created.

2. Consider the phrase “God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” If God is Spirit and no man has seen him, then he has no body, hence no lungs; so God did not literally breathe out a puff of air. Therefore the meaning of the phrase is “God made man alive.” Because the breathing made man “a living soul,” we need to know what biblical use is made of this phrase. In Genesis 1:24 the animals are called “living creatures,” which Hebrew scholars say is the same word used of man, “living soul.” So God, who first made living creatures, later by his breath makes man the same kind of living creature.

3. But man is not just a living creature, possessing only a physiological nature common to animals. He is also made in the image of God (which, to author Verduin, means that man reminds one of God because man creates). A Yale biologist, Edmund Sinnott, has emphasized that man’s unique feature is his creative imagination. But are not man’s consciousness of God and man’s awareness of “oughts” and “ought nots” also attributes of His image? James M. Murk of the anthropology department of Wheaton College holds that “three things are unique to man: (1) All his behavior is learned; (2) he has a complex symbolizing capacity enabling multiple abstractions (creative imagination?) and extrinsic symbolic representation; (3) he has a moral sense.”

4. The “dust” of which man was made is the “dust” to which he returns. It is composed of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and other chemical compounds that eventually after death become such elements as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, or simple combinations of them. Hence “dust” is earthy material, and man is “earthy,” as well as spiritual. We do not know in what combinations the chemicals existed in the dust when God started to make man.

5. Fossils of man are scarce and fragmentary but reveal that creatures which in most respects are similar to modern man in anatomy yet differed from him in minor details of size, skull capacity, brow ridges, and chin. Upright posture and a distinctive kind of teeth are the criteria for anatomical man. Even the Australopithecines (the South Africa man-apes) had pelvic bones that reveal bipedal locomotion of some kind. Washburn believes they could run but not walk for long distances. But all monkeys and apes are quadrupeds. No fossil specimens, considered by evolutionists to be men, are connected by a series of intermediates to four-footed beasts. The supposed ancestors of men are way back in the early Pliocene, about ten million years earlier than the earliest man-like organisms.

6. Man, as evolutionists identify him, first appears in the early Pleistocene or very late Pliocene (about 2,000,000 years ago), recent strata, not in the Cretaceous (as Verduin writes)—a difference of 70,000,000 years. The three-toed horse of the White River Badlands is considered Oligocene, and the saber-toothed tiger is Pleistocene.—DR. RUSSELL L. MIXTER, professor of zoology, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

In general this article shows some very good insights into certain historical problems in the relation of Christianity and science, into the theological concepts about creation, and into some of the pertinent problems about exegesis. Its basic thesis that the “dust” or “earth” out of which man was made could be organic dust rather than inorganic mud was proposed in the nineteenth century and is not particularly new. But the mentality that demands that all creation is instantaneous and that all notions of process in creation are concessions to evolution must be periodically challenged, lest it lead to a hardened orthodoxy that can be creative neither in its exegesis nor its relation to science.

The main strength of the paper is its attempt to preserve an open dialogue among evangelicals about creation and science and exegesis and theology, so that we do not prematurely settle on a position that might be indefensible in coming decades. For this reason the emphasis on creation as being both instantaneous and progressive, and on God’s activity as both transcendental and immanent, is to be well taken. The attempt to bring some creative imagination into the exegesis of Genesis 2 is also worthy.

Nevertheless, I find myself in fundamental disagreement with the paper. The unstated thesis seems to be that after all Genesis 1 and particularly 2 is a bit of science before science, of anthropology before scientific anthropology. In the nineteenth century Christian geologists found the geological column in Genesis 1. Thus we had geology before geology. But that thesis has been rather thoroughly exploded. Verduin’s paper seems to me to be a subtle reassertion of this now discredited thesis.

My thesis is twofold: (1) We must bring into focus all the biblical passages that refer to creation to develop a totally biblical doctrine of creation and not restrict our vision to Genesis 1 and 2. This has been ably stated by Claus Westerman in Der Schöpfungsbericht vom Anfang der Bibel. This applies to man as well as to the cosmos. And (2) we must learn to radically rethink creation as a Hebrew would think it and not as we in the twentieth century would think it. Siegfried Herrmann’s article, “Die Naturlehre des Schöpfungsberichtes(Theologische Literaturzeitung, June, 1961) is such an attempt, as is Martin Giersch’s Es Werde: Entwicklungslehre und Schöpfungsbericht. There is also Barth’s massive attempt to recover the really biblical doctrine of creation (though unfortunately corrupted with too much allegorical exegesis) in Church Dogmatics, III/1. I am sorry to limit my references to German and Swiss sources, but I think these men are out-thinking us at this point. Verduin does not interact with this kind of material; but I think a truly biblical and truly theological notion of creation is going to come from these circles, and not from the surreptitious notion in American orthodox and fundamentalist circles that Genesis 1 is only revelation or inspired if it in some way anticipates modern science.—DR. BERNARD RAMM, professor of systematic theology and Christian apologetics, California Baptist Theological Seminary, Covina, California.

When a short article discusses a broad subject, the author does not have enough space to make himself fully explicit. For this reason it is hard to understand precisely what Dr. Verduin’s position is, and therefore criticism may turn out to be misapprehension.

That God immanently controls natural processes is entirely acceptable; but that the verb “create” refers to such control and formation of plants and animals is a bit of Hebrew grammar that the author docs not quite establish.

However, if bara can refer to process and formation, so that one can properly say that man creates, why does the author deny that animals create too? Bees create honey. The fact that man also invents is not a good reason for excluding the process bees use from the concept of formation, if process is equated with creation.

A more important point is whether the Lord ever “starts from scratch.” If the power to create is God’s image in man, and if man does not start from scratch, is it clear that God creates ex nihilo? The wording of the article seems to suggest that God does not. If this be so, then God works on an eternal and independent matter, and there is no bara at all.

Again, when the author makes man continuous with the lower animal world and also continuous with the still lower inorganic world, are we to assume that he intends to teach that a continuous process produced life from the inanimate? The author should be allowed more space to make himself clear.

Toward the end of the article, the tone changes. The author notes the extremely sparse evidence in favor of the evolution of man from animals. The implications go in the direction of the ictic, the irruptive, the immediate creation ex nihilo of bara.

During the Darwin celebrations of 1959–60, I served as devil’s advocate on a panel. The zoologist had given an enthusiastic account of total, atheistic evolution from atom to man. Then I referred to the multiple gaps in the fossil remains of plants. Earlier these gaps were explained away by the arrested development of geology. When more excavations were made, it was said, the gaps would be filled. But now the geological strata are well represented all the way down, and the gaps remain. To my surprise, the gentleman who has been so enthusiastic for total evolution replied, Yes, the botanical evidence for evolution is nil.—DR. GORDON H. CLARK, professor of philosophy, Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana.

Leonard Verduin’s thesis is that the Genesis depiction of man’s creation from “the dust of the ground” (2:7) is “poetic circularity” and hence does not necessarily exclude a dependence on lower forms but rather presupposes that God specially endowed an animal with rational-moral-spiritual qualities.

1. Even if we regard the passage as poetry, the biblical account itself nowhere associates “from the dust” (cf. “unto dust shalt thou return,” Gen. 3:19) with an animal derivation. Is not the meaning more precisely suggested by Jesus’ emphasis that “ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world” (John 8:23; cf. v. 42)? (Cf. “The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven,” 1 Cor. 15:47; cf. John 3:31.)

2. The Apostle Paul not only reasserts the Genesis emphasis on graded orders of existence but also specifically contrasts the flesh of man was that of the beasts so as to suggest their essential difference: “All flesh is not the same flesh; but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts …” (1 Cor. 15:39).

3. Both the incarnation of God in Christ and the final resurrection of the dead imply the uniqueness of the human body.

4. In the divine creation of Eve as a helpmate for Adam there is no intimation of animal derivation, but the creation of Eve is related to Adam’s own nature in distinction from that of the brutes (Gen. 2:21).

5. The Genesis account specifically details the ingredients that qualify human nature in distinction from the animals: (1) the imago Dei, that is, a rational-moral-spiritual ability with which man is divinely endowed at the outset of his existence; (2) a physical constitution distinctively intermeshed with this psychic experience, in view of man’s special destiny in history (the crown of God’s creation) and in eternity. The narrative does not rule out the possibility of God’s use and transformation of a prior animal form; but it does not specifically assert this, nor can it be held actually to imply it. No such “implication” was found in the passage by exegetes until after the rise of evolutionary theory.

6. Mr. Verduin proposes no internal criterion for distinguishing aspects of the Genesis account that are to be taken poetically from those that are to be taken literally, so that the introduction of this device would seem to render uncertain the sense of the entire creation narrative.—DR. CARL F. H. HENRY, editor.

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