Page 6061 – Christianity Today (2024)

An analysis of new trends in Eucharistic theology within the Church of Rome

A few years ago the suggestion that Roman Catholic and Protestant clergy might one day have intercommunion would have been thought preposterous by both sides. Today it is not. During the last few years, some developments in the Roman Catholic Church, particularly studies on the Lord’s Supper and on relations with Protestants, have brought about changes in theory and practice that lead one to ask: What next?

As recently as four years ago Roman Catholics were forbidden by canon law to worship with non-Catholics: “By no means is it permitted for the faithful to assist actively in any way whatsoever or to participate in non-Catholic worship” (Codex Juris Canonici, 1258). But the Second Vatican Council gave guarded encouragement to certain forms of common worship:

In certain circ*mstances, such as in prayer services “for unity” and during ecumenical gatherings, it is allowable, indeed desirable, that Catholics should join with their separated brethren. Such prayers in common are certainly a very effective means of petitioning for the grace of unity, and they are a genuine expression of the ties which even now bind Catholics to their separated brethren. “For where two or three are gathered together for My sake, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt. 18:20). As for common worship, however, it may not be regarded as a means to be used indiscriminately for the restoration of unity among Christians. Such worship depends chiefly on two principles: it should signify the unity of the Church; it should provide a sharing of the means of grace. The fact that it should signify unity generally rules out common worship. Yet the gaining of a needed grace sometimes commends it. [“Decree on Ecumenism,” The Documents of Vatican II, 8].

Four days before the close of the council, the Pope set an example of interfaith worship when he took part in a prayer service with Protestants and Greek Orthodox at one of Rome’s great churches. Joint worship of Roman Catholics and other Christians is no longer news.

But what about intercommunion? To sing, pray, and hear the Word together is one thing; to share the Eucharist is another.

Is it? Some theologians wonder. With the “new look” in the theology of the Mass and the conviction of some theologians on both sides of the ecclesiastical fence that the other’s doctrine might not be so bad after all, the possibility of intercommunion no longer seems remote.

On the Roman Catholic side, there has been in recent years a spate of writings on the Eucharist that sound more like Reformation theology than what most of us have associated with Rome. The old terms are still used, but often the meaning is changed; and there are new terms, too. Paul VI’s encyclical Mysterium Fidei (September 3, 1965), meant particularly as a warning to Dutch theologians, seems not to have slowed them down but rather to have been received as part of the ongoing discussion. The term transubstantiation is used, but transfinalization and transignification—i.e., the idea that the bread and wine have a new finality, a new significance or meaning—continue to be used also. More important, Christ’s presence in the Supper is understood in personal, spiritual categories. The bread remains bread. “The physical reality does not change, otherwise there would no longer be any eucharistic sign,” says Edward Schillebeeckx, one of Rome’s top theologians (“Transubstantiation,” Worship, Vol. 40, p. 337). Kilian McDonnell, a Benedictine whose magnum opus on John Calvin, the Church, and the Eucharist has just been published by Princeton University Press, writes similarly: “Only on condition that the materiality of bread remains can there be a eucharistic reality” (p. 315).

They, and other Roman Catholic theologians, not only interpret the Eucharist in terms more acceptable to Protestant understanding but show positive appreciation for the Protestant celebration of the Holy Supper as well. In doing so they agree with Vatican II, which, though it lamented that separated Christian brethren “have not preserved the genuine and total reality of the eucharistic mystery,” nevertheless conceded that “when they commemorate the Lord’s death and resurrection in the Holy Supper, they profess that it signifies life in communion with Christ and they await His coming in glory” (“Decree on Ecumenism,” 22).

Since the Dutch theologians have been in the center of the Eucharistic debate with Roman Catholicism, it is instructive to hear what they say. Passing over the Jesuit Piet Schoonenberg, whose untranslated Dutch Eucharistic writings caused a considerable stir, we mention the Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx and the Jesuit Frans Jozef van Beeck. Schillebeeckx’s Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God laments the focusing of attention after the Council of Trent (1545–63) on the substance of the elements and on the recipient of the sacrament and his dispositions, while the encounter of the Christian with God in Christ received inadequate attention. Schillebeeckx is a personalist, and he interprets the Gospel and the Eucharist accordingly. Wasting no time, he begins his book by saying:

One cannot help remarking that the theology of the manuals does not always make a careful distinction between that unique manner of existence which is peculiar to man, and the mode of being, mere objective “being there,” which is proper to the things of nature. The absence of this distinction, particularly in the treating of grace or of the sacraments, occasionally obscures the simple fact of encounter with God. The intimateness of God’s personal approach to man is often lost in a too severely objective examination of that which forms the living core and centre of religion, the personal communion with the God who gives himself to men [from Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God by Eduard Schillebeeckx, O.P., © Sheed and Ward Ltd., 1963, published by Sheed & Ward, Inc., New York; this and the following quotations used by permission].

In the study of the sacraments, the consequence of this tendency towards a purely impersonal, almost mechanical approach was that they were considered chiefly in terms of physical categories. The inclination was to look upon the sacraments as but one more application, although in a special manner, of the general laws of cause and effect. Inevitably, the result of this view was that we appeared to be merely passive recipients of sacramental grace, which seemed to be “put into us” automatically. We do not, however, want to divert ourselves with the defects of the theological works of the last two centuries, but positively and constructively to take up the study of the Church’s sacraments, with the concept of human, personal encounter as the basis of our consideration.

Religion is above all a saving dialogue between man and the living God.

The most interesting part of the book is his struggle with the problem of Protestant sacraments’ seeming to be charismatic, life-giving ordinances, and yet being invalid. Reformed communion is not a true sacrament; yet it has a “positive and Christian significance.” The author feels he must examine this “delicate question closely” in the light of Thomistic principles. Thomas did not deal with this question, since he knew nothing of the Reformation, but he shows that whoever is validly baptized “possesses an inner orientation to the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist.” Schillebeeckx goes on:

Are Protestants willing, for the sake of ecumenicity and fraternity, to commune after the manner of the Mass?

Furthermore, valid baptism is implicitly a “Eucharist of desire.” Therefore in virtue of their baptism Christians of the Reformation have an inner orientation to the Catholic Eucharist. For the baptism is truly a Catholic sacrament which in consequence incorporates them not into the separated community but into the Catholic Church [p. 192],

Thomas claims that no single grace comes to us except through a desire, at least implicit, for the Eucharist. With this desire, the essential effect of the sacrament is received. Yet it is not necessary that we receive this effect through the real sacramental reception of the Eucharist. A “Eucharist of desire” is enough, and this is necessary for salvation. Evangelical Christians have this, and so in their communion services they really participate in the res sacramenti, or in the effect of the sacrament, though not to the full. The fathers ate manna in the desert and communicated in a spiritual manner, but this eating of the fathers was more than mere spiritual communion. Likewise Protestant communion is more than that. “It is the spiritual reception of the sacrament itself” (p. 193). As Thomas says, “This is not only to eat Christ spiritually but also to partake spiritually of the [true Catholic] sacrament” (ibid.). Schillebeeckx says such a statement has many and far-reaching consequences, for it is impossible to deny that the Protestant rite is truly a figure of the Eucharist, more so than the manna or the Jewish Passover.

It is not merely a foreshadowing, it is a direct commemoration of the Last Supper, even if not in the full ecclesial sense of the word. Some of the fundamental aspects of the Catholic Eucharist are lacking in the Protestant Communion Service, but others are retained in it. And this is sufficient to enable us to apply with even greater right the ancient patristic and scholastic view of non-Catholic sacraments as vestigia Ecclesiae, traces of the true Church of Christ, to the Protestant sacraments [p. 194].

Schillebeeckx takes his position with reservation, aware that the teaching authority of the church may decide otherwise, but he argues that the Protestant Communion is a “quasi-sacramental manifestation of an explicit eucharistic desire which, moreover, implicitly looks forward to the true fruits of the Catholic Eucharist.” Thus in our Supper there is an “intrinsic tendency towards integration into the Catholic Eucharist” (p. 194).

Van Beeck, writing similarly in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies (Winter, 1966), tells of the common current Roman Catholic theological conviction that the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the Presbyterian church two blocks away is not “nothing.” But if it is not nothing, what is it? Rejecting the categories of valid and invalid as inadequate, he tells of a student who asked Karl Rahner whether a priest would be validly ordained even if in the chain of episcopal consecrations leading up to his ordination there had been an invalid consecration. Rahner’s response was, “One should not think of these things in the manner of an apothecary.” What about the priest, reasons Van Beeck, who learns that he was invalidly ordained after a lifetime of fruitful ministry? Or what about the happy parents who, on the eve of their fiftieth wedding anniversary, discover they were invalidly married? Van Beeck’s response is this: The Roman Catholic Church has a “healthy awareness of the relativity of the notions of validity and invalidity in matters sacramental. Validity is no more (and no less) than the juridical claim to ecclesiastical recognition; it is the finishing touch every normal sacramental celebration needs as its marginal rounding-off” (p. 63). Juridical thinking of the sacraments gets rough treatment from this author, who would have them looked at existentially.

What, then, are the Protestant sacraments? Some Roman Catholic theologians, says Van Beeck, affirm that Protestant sacraments do not celebrate salvation really but only spiritually. Van Beeck rejects this distinction because it assumes that spiritual, as used here, is tantamount to unreal. He shows that this distinction can be traced to scholastic theology, which used physice ambivalently as “real” or “material.” So the spiritual, then, is relegated to the realm of the unreal, or imagination, or metaphor. This led to a material conception of the sacrament at the expense of its value as a sign. Once the choice was put this way, the Reformers opted for “spiritual.” Van Beeck says that if the Protestant sacraments celebrate salvation spiritually, they must be real sacraments (p. 66).

He then draws the consequences of the fact that Vatican II, at its third session, called Protestant communions “churches” and envisioned the whole church as the people of God on its pilgrim way into the future. Since Vatican II, Van Beeck argues, the unity of the church is no longer seen as a “juridically outlined, fixed unity of order; it has also, and pre-eminently, come to be viewed as Christ’s eschatological gift to his perfect community” (p. 70). Protestants, too, are part of this:

The ecumenical mentality provides not just a new political situation among the Churches, but a theological one: it means a conversion to an eschatological view of the Church, putting an end to the exclusive, paradoxical, antithetical situation in which the Churches antagonize each other. The Churches are in good faith, for the differences among the Churches no longer bear the stigma of formal invalidity and heresy [p. 72, n. 87].

Coming to grips with the problem of the “validity” of Protestant sacraments, Van Beeck argues that valid celebration necessitates (1) a church base from which it is administered, (2) proper intentions, and (3) a competent minister. All agree that the first two are met in Protestantism; but what about number three? A history of sacramental practice, writes Van Beeck, shows that the validity of a sacrament has never been one-sidedly linked up with a validly ordained minister. There was always the possibility of the minister extraordinarily. He can administer baptism, confirmation, and even marriage (p. 80), according to canon law. But all the sacraments have been so administered at times, says Van Beeck. The reason for this and for its recognition by the church as valid has been the need, or situation, in the church, and not law (p. 88). The real theological base is the universal priesthood of all believers, which under normal circ*mstances operates through the recognized ministers but which in emergencies has operated through those deputized by the faithful. Protestants have done this when they have lived in a protracted extraordinary situation. Consequently, he concludes, Protestant sacraments and ministers may be recognized as such by Roman Catholic theology and church order. Dogma and order are essentially provisional. They may never be allowed to tie salvation down to themselves in a univocal way (p. 95). The church is in status viae, and dogma and order are meant only to help her on the way.

Van Beeck criticizes the traditional distinction between joint prayer and the reading of the Word on the one hand and the joint celebration of sacraments on the other:

Prayer and Bible services are all too often permitted “because nothing happens in them,” as if prayer and the Word were not sacramental. On the other hand there is a tendency to view joint celebrations of sacraments as acts of the most perfect communio, which, therefore, would have to be postponed till the day on which official mutual recognition would be achieved. But is not this to forget that the communio in via will never be perfect and that it is also in the nature of a sacrament to be a pledge of salvation? It seems not wholly sound to consider the sacraments so eschatological as to practically deny that they are part of the status viae of the Church [p. 108].

The Protestant response to much of this is: Well and good, but what about the sacrifice of the Mass? Van Beeck suggests that the Roman Catholic “Eucharist as sacrificium Christi” and the Protestant Supper “as sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving carry essentially the same meaning, although viewed from very different doctrinal angles” (p. 109). He does not stand alone; some other Roman Catholic, and Protestant, theologians share his view.

Still there remain a number of unresolved problems. Just what is the nature of the Eucharist? In what manner do Christians feed on Christ? With Rome’s conviction about the infallibility and irreversibility of dogma, allowing for the qualifications made—historical conditionedness of all dogmatic statements, the necessary one-sidedness of all polemical statements, the imperfection of all dogma, and so on—are Protestants finally willing, for the sake of ecumenicity and fraternity, to overlook what their fathers believed to be “a cursed idolatry” (Heidelberg Catechism, Q.80) and commune after the manner of the Mass? Are Roman Catholics likely to forget the anathemas they have heard poured out against Protestant perversion of the “Blessed Sacrament,” and will their leaders allow their people to eat bread and drink grape juice in a typical Protestant setting?

These are only some of the questions that will be asked increasingly with the growth of the spirit of ecumenicity. They will have to be faced in honesty as well as love if there is to be real progress.

Reflections on church, state, and culture in America

Some decades ago American Protestantism quietly retired from its post as acting chairman of our cultural heritage and assumed a nominal emeritus position. The circ*mstances of this remarkable event, as well as its exact time, remain obscured in mystery. Some have attributed it to ill health, others to mental disease. Yet by all appearances, the Church at the time of its retirement was at the height of its powers. According to its own reports and the best available statistics, it had just completed a “Great Century” and was well prepared to face the era that lay ahead. Yet when confronted with the challenges of rapidly changing social, moral, intellectual, and scientific standards, American Protestantism courteously stepped down with hardly a protest or an apology.

Today Protestants in America live with the consequences of our emeritus status. The churches we support, and even those we rebuke, are notoriously ineffective. They are, by and large, neither loved nor hated; they are merely patronized and ignored. Confronted with little but the evidence of our weakness, we may well ask, Why?

Although all must concede that a large part of the answer is found in the nearly irresistible secularizing forces in modern culture, few will exempt the Church itself from responsibility. Who or what, then, in the twentieth-century Church should be blamed?

A generation ago the answer seemed simple enough. Theological liberals and fundamentalists characteristically blamed each other. Today, however, we seem to have entered an era of reappraisal. Many of the heirs to each of these traditions now concede some weaknesses within their heritage. The vogue of terms like “neo-orthodoxy,” “neo-liberalism,” “neo-fundamentalism,” and “neo-evangelicalism” presumably indicates a desire to be dissociated from the programs of a generation ago.

Yet we err if we place the blame for the weaknesses of the Church in twentieth-century America primarily on the excesses of liberalism and fundamentalism. These after all developed only after the battle against modern secularism had been all but lost. The ineffectiveness of the Church today is not the result of those emergency measures devised in the midst of crisis. Its cause should instead be sought in the era of Protestant success. Only when we frankly confess to the weaknesses characteristic of American Protestantism even in its most prosperous years are we prepared to devise a renewal program that will be more than an attempt to revive the traditions of a lost cause.

Our self-analysis could focus on any one of several aspects of our heritage. This essay will attempt, not to analyze the complex relationships that have shaped American Protestantism, but only to sketch outlines thematically related to one of the contributing factors—the response to legal disestablishment.

The Protestant Ideal

The Protestants who settled America were not champions of religious freedom. Indeed, except among a few radicals—Roger Williams and William Penn, for example—the dominant attitude of the seventeenth-century settlers was honest bigotry. Nathaniel Ward, the first (and perhaps the last) wit among New England’s Puritan clergymen, epitomized orthodox sentiments when in 1645 he wrote, “He that is willing to tolerate any unsound Opinion, that his owne may also be tolerated, … will for a need hang God’s Bible at the Devill’s girdle.” Anglican Virginia was hardly more “enlightened.” There the standing law of 1612 threatened the death penalty for speaking impiously against the doctrine of the Trinity or the known articles of the Christian faith. Such opinions and laws hardly seemed harsh to transplanted Europeans whose tradition of legal establishment was thirteen centuries old and who lived in an age when nations were commonly torn apart in the quest for religious uniformity. Their deepest religious convictions demanded that church and state be allied in ensuring that their society be unequivocally Christian.

Yet the state-church ideal could not long be maintained in America. The land was too large and the population too scattered for effective controls. More importantly, diversity of beliefs among immigrant groups forced recognition of tolerance as the only feasible path. Reluctantly, then, by the early eighteenth century American Protestants had had to give up their hopes for a state-enforced religious uniformity. In most of the colonies, however, they maintained a modified form of establishment, giving tax support and official sanction to the preferred religion, though granting grudging toleration to dissenters.

This is the background against which separation of church and state in the American Constitution should be seen. When the framers of the First Amendment declared that the new federal government “shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion,” they were recognizing an accomplished fact—that America’s religious diversity made federal control impractical. Protestants acquiesced, but not always out of conviction. Separation of church from state support was something that happened to them, not something they had planned. As Perry Miller has said, “they stumbled into it, they were compelled into it, they accepted it at last because they saw its strategic value” (quoted in Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment [Harper, 1963]; Mead’s book and Winthrop S. Hudson’s American Protestantism [Chicago, 1961] provide documentation and elaboration for many of the arguments of this essay).

Although they accepted official separation of church and state because they had to, few American Protestants gave up the essential aspect of their traditional ideal—that theirs would be a Christian nation. Yet it was now an era of spiritual crisis. The Revolution appeared to have unleashed the forces of Enlightenment skepticism and to have fostered widespread infidelity. With the weapon of state sanction gone, the churches were forced to turn to new strategy. They would Christianize America yet—if not by state coercion, then by evangelical persuasion. (Perry Miller elaborates upon this thesis in “From the Covenant to the Revival,” in Smith and Jamison (eds.), The Shaping of American Religion [Princeton, 1961].) The spearhead of their strategy was the simple gospel preaching and intensive evangelism of the revival. These techniques, having proved effective during the Great Awakenings of the colonial era, seemed ideal weapons with which to face the post-Revolutionary crises of infidelity and disestablishment.

Indeed they were. The American Protestant churches never showed greater sustained vitality than in the first half of the nineteenth century. With all hope of winning America to official state Protestantism now gone, they turned with renewed vigor to their mission of winning men to Christ. As Lyman Beecher, the indomitable general of many of the campaigns of this “Second Great Awakening,” observed when looking back on Connecticut’s disestablishment of 1818, it turned out to be “the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut. It cut the churches loose from dependence on state support. It threw them wholly on their own resources and on God.”

Yet the strategy of the “Second Great Awakening” involved far more than the widespread evangelistic and missionary programs. It was a comprehensive interdenominational campaign to Christianize American society, not only spiritually, but intellectually and morally as well. In the intellectual sphere the churches stood in a strong position, virtually controlling America’s higher education. At mid-century nearly every college in the country still had an evangelical Protestant (usually a clergyman) as its president. As the nation had moved west, Protestant missionary zeal had inspired the founding of numerous new colleges in the frontier communities. Moreover, the Protestant theologians of this era had few intellectual peers, and a vigorous religious press was a formidable part of the nation’s communication system.

Moral reform of the society was to complete the strategy. Militant evangelicals founded scores of “voluntary societies” to aid the denominations in combatting a host of national sins, most notably slavery, intemperance, and Sabbath desecration. When possible, they enlisted governmental support for these campaigns. Having inherited an ideal from the era of national establishment, evangelicals were convinced that the churches should act as moral guardians for the entire society. Not only should Christian ethical standards be maintained among the regenerate; they should be enforced among the unregenerate as well. National social reform, dealing largely with the externals of behavior, thus appeared as an integral part of the evangelical message.

Despite remarkable revivals and respectable intellectual achievements, the most spectacular success of nineteenth-century American Protestants came in this area of national social reform—in the Northern triumph over slavery. Whatever its political causes, the Civil War was to the Protestant churches a Christian crusade. Northern denominations readily adopted resolutions explicitly identifying the cause of the Union with the cause of Christ. The war was God’s judgment on covenant-breakers and sinners, they affirmed. Victory would hasten the millennial return of Christ. His truth was marching on. It was marching, it seemed, under Mead, Sherman, and U. S. Grant. The ideals of church, state, and Northern society were virtually identified.

Identification of Protestantism with Americanism in the Civil War symbolizes both the remarkable success and the great weaknesses of the American churches in the nineteenth century. Their strength was evident in their influence on the culture. By the second half of the century, their effectiveness in shaping the ideals (if not the realities) of the society was perhaps greater than any that official state support could have provided. They set the moral standards for a nation that was notoriously moralistic. At the end of the century, for instance, it hardly seemed incongruous for the President to propose that America should take the Philippines in order to “uplift and Christianize” the Filipinos. “In 1900,” observes Winthrop S. Hudson, “few would have disputed the contention that the United States was a Protestant nation.”

Yet success had its price. In their zeal for national reform, the Protestant denominations had assumed the role of an unofficial American establishment. The cost had been an obscuring of their central message—that men must be redeemed in Christ. Retaining the ideal that the Church should supervise the behavior of the entire society, they increasingly blurred the lines between their message to the regenerate and their message to the unregenerate. Denominational involvements in political affairs, for instance, were indicative of the ambiguity implicit in the churches’ aspirations to act as national moral guardians. By advocating specific legislative measures, the churches inevitably confused their redemptive message with the platforms of American political parties. What’s more, they automatically alienated all those in the population who disagreed with them politically. The Northern denominations’ unqualified endorsem*nts of Republican programs during the Civil War and their general identification with Republicanism throughout the rest of the century were the clearest examples of this confusion. But the legacy of political involvements continued to affect American Protestantism in later eras. The social gospel’s identifications with Progressivism, Prohibitionism, and New Deal Democracy, for example, reflected much the same establishmentarian ideal.

Participation in political programs was, however, symptomatic of a far deeper malady within the successful Protestant establishment of the late nineteenth century. The churches were identifying themselves with the culture. As with all alliances between church and society, the influences worked both ways. While the denominations were successfully acting as moral guardians of the American cultural heritage, they were adopting, no doubt inadvertently, many of the values of American society—particularly the popular moralism of the middle classes. Rather than continuing to challenge the culture with the radical implications of the biblical message, they allowed many of their standards and objectives to appear virtually indistinguishable from those of the “best people” of the secular society. As Sidney E. Mead has observed, “During the second half of the nineteenth century there occurred an ideological amalgamation of this Protestantism with ‘Americanism,’ and … we are still living with some of the results.”

Success had also bred complacency. The methods of the successful programs designed to revive the new nation early in the nineteenth century were continued almost intact, even though industrialization and urbanization were radically changing American life. Successful revivals were still held, but increasingly large segments of the population were left unaffected. Intellectually, “common sense” philosophy designed to meet the challenges of the Enlightenment continued to be the chief bulwark of orthodox apologetics. Only in the moral sphere did the Church appear strong; but its challenge was muffled by its respectability.

The weaknesses of the successful churches became apparent early in the twentieth century as American culture was shaken by the modern cultural, scientific, and intellectual revolutions. The shocks of Darwinism, widespread confidence in the scientific method, higher criticism of Scripture, dynamic philosophies, technological advance, and social reorganization all struck almost simultaneously. Within a generation, from 1900 to 1930, the Protestant cultural establishment collapsed.

The development of theological liberalism and fundamentalism in the face of this impending crisis was symptomatic of the weaknesses inherent in Protestantism’s reliance on the cultural establishment. When the values of the culture changed, the Church was caught in the midst of a seemingly irresolvable dilemma. It could sacrifice either its Biblical message or its cultural relevance. The result was a tendency for American Protestantism to polarize around the two extreme alternatives. Theological liberalism attempted to maintain the churches’ traditional cultural and intellectual relevance, but at the expense of the Gospel. Fundamentalism preserved the Gospel, but often at the expense of relevance.

Despite the basic incompatibility of fundamentalism and liberalism, it is in their similarities that we can best see the characteristic aspects of the American Protestant heritage. The most conspicuous similarity is in their moralism. Of the two, liberalism was by far the more moralistic, defining its gospel almost solely in ethical terms. Yet, as we are all aware, fundamentalism also has been notorious for its moral proscriptions. Often it has also been accused of lacking social concern. But even in this it was not wholly unlike its liberal social-gospel opponents. Few liberals have shown greater zeal for cultural reform than have fundamentalists such as William Jennings Bryan and Carl McIntire. The only difference is that fundamentalism’s social gospel has been defined largely in terms of the nineteenth century, while theological liberalism has moved steadily with the winds of popular twentieth-century political doctrine.

A second common characteristic of liberalism and fundamentalism that also seems typically American was their anti-theological tendencies. Again, liberalism was by far the more anti-theological, often explicitly repudiating all theological constructions. But fundamentalism too had its anti-intellectualist wing that tended to deprecate theological training. In neither movement was this characteristic universal, but in both it was prominent.

Despite a tradition of formidable theologies, American Protestants have always had a tendency to accentuate the practical, activist, and non-intellectual. If we are to believe foreign observers, these same traits have been characteristic of the culture at large; it is hardly surprising, then, that they have affected the churches. Protestantism’s most popular successes in shaping American life have been its practical campaigns for moral suasion. Accordingly, the tendency has been for theological concern, and eventually evangelism itself, to be submerged in fervor for national social reform. Doubtless this is not the sole cause of the weaknesses of the American church, but it does reveal some telling symptoms.

Still The Establishment?

American Protestantism today appears to be recovering from the religious debacle of the era between the world wars. The successors to the liberal tradition now speak increasingly of a gospel that will challenge the culture, repudiating the old social gospel’s confusion of the kingdom and the world. Yet the challenge remains obscured as these same voices call for renewed involvement in political power structures for the purpose of making the nation a better place to live. The American Protestant quest for social relevance (certainly a fine objective, if not the primary one) continues to dominate America’s most respected ecclesiastical councils. The idea still persists that Protestantism is the American establishment and therefore is not essentially in conflict with the best interests of the secular society. The vision of a Protestant America filled with community churches, open to the whole community regardless of creed, remains the prevailing ideal. Indeed there has been something like a theological revival, but certainly not yet a revival of theological relevance. Relevance is still defined in social and moralistic terms. And it is difficult to preach to a culture that it needs to be revolutionized by the Gospel when your practice indicates it can just as well be reformed.

But the conservative successors to the fundamentalist tradition are no less in danger of seeing their recovery revert to a form of Americanism. We too have inherited the ideals of the respectable cultural establishment of the era of Protestant success. We too have our tendencies toward moralism, identification with current political philosophies, and anti-intellectualism. Doubtless there is much in our typically American heritage that is worth preserving, and indeed we must preserve some if we are to communicate to America. But as we do, we must distinguish sharply between that which is characteristically American and that radical challenge which is characteristic of the Word of God.

The problem we as Protestants face today is the same one the Church has faced in every new era. It is the problem of communicating to our culture while not identifying with its values. Two ingredients are especially necessary for such communication today. The first is intellectual relevance. There is no easier or more understandable excuse for today’s American to avoid listening to the challenge of Christ than the prevailing opinion that a biblically grounded Christianity is an intellectual absurdity. To regain an audience we must overcompensate for this with a strenuous promotion of all aspects of evangelical scholarship.

The second and most essential ingredient is genuine Christian love. Love is the foundation of effective communication. It demands an active display of sacrificial concern for all men in all aspects of their existence—socially, morally, and intellectually, as well as religiously. Although American denominations cannot afford to perpetuate the establishmentarian’s confusion of redemptive and political objectives, individual Christians in a democratic society must employ all their political and civil rights, as well as their personal resources, to manifest their self-giving love for all members of their society. To communicate in Christian love, whether intellectually, morally, or religiously, we must be all things to all men. Again, our record is bad and we must overcompensate. By and large conservative American Protestants have been one thing to all men. We have tried to preach the same sermons in the same language to all classes of society the same in 1967 as in 1867. The pious moralisms that appeared so relevant to middle-class America in the Gilded Age are far too often heard to echo in the Great Society. Love would demand as much concern to show the application of the gospel message—both by proclamation and by action—to the changing needs of our audiences as to preserve its integrity. The Gospel is relevant to every aspect of American experience. But until we learn how to communicate it without compromise, we have not witnessed to the love of Christ. We are as sounding brass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HAROLD B. KUHN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protest From Arkansas

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

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

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protestant Panorama

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

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

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

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

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

Personalia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deaths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WILLIAM FITCH

Making Non-Pacifism Official

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JAMES DAANE

Everybody And Brother

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Integrating The Power Structure

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

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

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

The Curia’S New Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art Ebb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J. D. DOUGLAS

W.C.C.: Dull In The Sunlight

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

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

Selective Critique

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J. D. DOUGLAS

Nigeria: Will Missions Survive?

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

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

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

Philippine Catholic Zealots

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

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

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

EUSTAQUIO RAMIENTOS, JR.

An Extraordinary Man Of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bringing Barth Into Focus

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

Reading for Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sociological View Of A Church

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Briefs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contemporary Theology

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

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

Systematic Theology: Reformed

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

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

The Basis Of Authority: Revelation

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

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

Old Testament: Survey

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

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

New Testament: Survey

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

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

Biblical Criticism: Old Testament

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

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

Biblical Criticism: New Testament

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

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

Bible Commentary

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

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

Bible Dictionary

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

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

Christian Doctrine

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

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

Apologetics

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

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

Life Of Christ

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

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

The Church In Mission

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

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

The Gospel And Modern Man

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

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

Christian Social Responsibility

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

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

Church History

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

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

Evangelism: Comprehensive View

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

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

Evangelism: Personal Witnessing

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

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

Cults

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

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

Christian Living

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

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