Page 6006 – Christianity Today (2024)

Truths in the Bible that we read about for years may suddenly burst upon us like a blinding ray of light. I experienced this when I realized that from beginning to end of the Holy Scriptures we are told again and again that the God with whom we have to do is the Creator of all things. This fact that God is the Creator appears some five hundred times.

The Bible opens with these majestic words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). And at the end of the Revelation we read: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.… And he who sat upon the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true’” (Rev. 21:1, 5).

Man’s first encounter was with the God of creation. His final time-bound encounter will be with the same God, who will make all things new.

Between these two extremes of human history God reminds us again and again that he is the God of creation, and is sovereign in all things. The witness to God in creation is continuous; for every generation it is new each morning and fresh each evening.

God has endowed man with the ability to reason, to evaluate evidence, and to come to logical conclusions. All around there is the evidence of God’s wisdom and power—in creation as a whole, and in the intricacies of its components in particular. David’s Spirit-directed observation speaks to our sophisticated age: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Ps. 19:1–4).

To even the dullest mind there should come the realization that these things did not just happen. No combination of fortuitous circ*mstances could possibly account for the universe, or its component parts. That man has tried to explain away the absolute necessity for a Creator is a sign not of mature reasoning but of willful rejection of facts in favor of theories.

The Apostle Paul speaks with finality about the incontrovertible evidences of Creation: “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.… They changed the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator …” (Rom. 1:19–22, 25).

The Prophet Isaiah pleads with a rebellious and sinful Israel, “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary, his understanding is unsearchable” (Isa. 40:28). Creation implies sovereignty. We read: “Let them praise the name of the LORD! For he commanded and they [sun, moon, and stars, heavens and waters] were created” (Ps. 148:5).

Speaking through the Prophet Jeremiah, God says, “It is I who by my great power and my outstretched arm have made the earth, with the men and animals that are on the earth, and I give it to whomever it seems right to me” (Jer. 27:5). God rightfully claims sovereignty, as the Source of all things, and his creation stands as a continuing and inescapable witness to himself.

The idolatry in which Israel had become involved brought out this challenge: “Thus shall you say to them: ‘The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.’ It is he who made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens” (Jer. 10:11, 12).

Affirming his sovereignty as Creator, God repeatedly claims loving obedience from man, his highest creation. But he does more than that. The Creator of all things has come into his creation as Saviour and Lord. That it was to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, that the work of creation was committed is one of the most thrilling parts of divine revelation.

We find the Apostle John saying: “All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.… He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not” (John 1:3, 10). Paul takes up the same theme: “Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor. 8:6). Again Paul says: “For in him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:16, 17). The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews likewise confirms the stupendous fact that God the Creator and God the Redeemer are one: “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world” (Heb. 1:1, 2).

When we are confronted with the witness of creation, our God-given reason demands that we recognize that there must be a Creator, and in the fullness of time he was revealed in the person of God’s Son. We experience through our senses the infinite wisdom and power of God the Creator, while in the person of Christ we see his love and redeeming grace.

But in the midst of the perfection of God’s creation we also see at work a malignant power, Satan, and his design for evil—so terrible, not only in execution but also in effect, that the Creator’s entry into the world became imperative, as an act not only of divine love but also of holy judgment.

God’s work of creation is not finished. What we now see will pass away to be replaced by a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness will prevail. In the interim between the first and second creation God is creating new men through faith in his Son, so that through this spiritual rebirth they may become a part of his eternal Kingdom.

This is not a fanciful concept. It is a part of the divine revelation given in the Scriptures. Not only should we be aware of God’s original creation, but we should believe in Jesus Christ through whose atoning work we may partake of the second creation.

In loving condescension the Creator stands at the door of our heart and knocks. Finally he will ring down the curtain of human history, and that time may be nearer than we think.

L. NELSON BELL

Is decision enough?

Those who complain that “the converts don’t last” have inadvertently helped convince evangelicals of the importance of evangelistic follow-up. It is now more clear than ever that just as infants need special care, so newborn Christians require help to become established in the faith. It is neither charitable nor biblical to bring a person to the place of commitment, then abandon him to satanic temptations.

This recognition of the need for effective follow-up suggests that we also take a fresh look at the other side of the conversion experience. How can we help to prepare persons to take that all-important step of faith? Is it possible for evangelicals to map national and global strategy that will pave the way for evangelistic tactics? Can we help to create a cultural and intellectual climate more conducive to evangelism?

Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer urges evangelicals to weigh seriously the need for “pre-evangelism.” He contends that “no one can become a Christian unless he understands what Christianity is saying.” In his perceptive new book The God Who Is There, Schaeffer offers exegetical evidence from Luke and John to show that biblical faith must be built upon knowledge.

This is not to say that regeneration rests upon “head knowledge” or doctrinal understanding. But Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians clearly indicates that evangelism is more than isolated personal confrontations. See chapter three: “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.… I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon.” If we are to learn from this passage we must conclude that there is a spiritual preface to God’s redeeming work in the life of an individual. Things take place that ready a person for decision. Evangelicals within communions that have traditionally used catechisms and conducted confirmation classes appreciate this principle much more than evangelicals in independent ranks.

Pre-evangelism takes on special priority when one considers today’s acute philosophical, theological, and ecclesastical confusion. Could it be that resistance to the Christian message rests not simply on an unwillingness to accept it but on an ignorance of what to accept?

Evangelicals need to concede that they often have very little idea of what today’s unbeliever is thinking and where the great gaps in his Christian knowledge lie. We know hardly anything about his spiritual hang-ups. We don’t know how he really regards Christ or the Bible or the Church. Thanks to Satan’s subtle diversionary tactics, we may be unaware of the common intellectual or emotional ground upon which We can approach him.

If a better climate for evangelism can be developed, it may help to overcome individual reluctance to witness. Much of our hesitation in initiating man-to-man evangelistic confrontations stems from the hostility of the cultural climate. Adverse circ*mstances do not excuse silence, and there are times and places in history when the Christian is unable to improve the conditions for witness. The point is that in North America in our day we do have opportunity to facilitate presentation of the Gospel.

One factor in developing a good climate for evangelism will be the creation of a greater sensitivity toward sin. Modern man must be made aware of his alienation from God. He must be shown the depth of his depravity, the extent to which he has fallen short of the expectations of Almighty God. Dr. H. Daniel Friberg, a Lutheran scholar, has said, “When sin is known for what it is, the issue of salvation or damnation becomes a burning reality, and the Gospel will get a hearing.” You cannot persuade a man to be saved if he does not know he is lost.

This is not to suggest a return to a steady diet of hellfire-and-brimstone preaching. There is little precedent in Scripture for such an approach, and there is little evidence that it would have much of an effect upon modern man. People today respond much more readily to love than to warnings of judgment.

Indeed, another element in a climate conducive to evangelism is a good Christian example. Until the unbeliever sees something different about Christians, something he himself would like to have, he will have little interest in making a commitment to Christ. Too often Christians appear to be just as victimized by circ*mstances and just as depressed about their lot as unbelievers are. This attitude hardly attracts people to Christ.

Better conduct will also entail more caring. It is far easier to program evangelism than to take an interest in people for their own sake. Yet people still want to be loved, and they will be won primarily through personal confrontation with those who care. Impersonal evangelism is second best.

A better Christian example is demanded in the vocational dimension also. Evangelicals are gratified by the visibility Christian men are winning in the halls of Congress these days. However, this kind of Christian presence should be seen in every profession and discipline, every area of work and study. It is up to the individual Christian to find out how his Christian faith can have the most influence on people working in his particular field. This is not an easy task.

A better climate for evangelism demands a deeper respect for Scripture. The conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch appears to come out of the sheer blue. However, Philip built on a respect for Scripture that had been instilled in the eunuch sometime in the past. Evangelicals today need to work harder at the task of establishing a reasonable apologetic for the Word of God. The Bible is its own strength, we are told, but among many people there is a skepticism over Scripture that must be overcome before the truths of Scripture can be pressed home.

A corollary to this is that truth must be recognized as absolute, not relative. Men must respect truth as such. In the case of Nicodemus, Christ’s challenge came to him after a measure of respect had somehow been instilled. He came to Christ realizing that he was a teacher of Scripture who had been sent from God, Unless there is a respect for truth in general and Scripture in particular, the Gospel has little authoritative appeal.

Few witnessing evangelicals are as aware as they should be that reason is on their side. The prevailing philosophies of our day have thrown rationality overboard. The time is ripe for evangelicals to take the intellectual offensive, and to carry evangelism and theology forward together. Unfortunately, even the simple practicality of this approach is often overlooked.

Leighton Ford, in The Christian Persuader, says:

The evangelical revival of the eighteenth century provides a classical example of theology’s relation to evangelism. In the early part of that century the orthodox scholars had met and mastered the assault of the deists. Their victory was largely in the realm of intellectual debate, but it did not lack practical significance. The truth of the Christian faith had been established at the scholarly level before Wesley and Whitefield came along. A highway along which the evangelical revival could move had been built.

Similar freeways must be constructed in our day.

What can be done on an individual scale toward developing a climate for evangelism is not enough. Evangelicals must resolve to work together in this effort as they never have before.

The mass media offer sweeping possibilities for cooperative pre-evangelism. But instead of perpetuating a hopelessly fragmented use of radio and television in which each sponsor tries to achieve a balance between outreach and self-support, why not work for coordinated network efforts on prime time? These could be climaxed with person-to-person contacts initiated by cooperating churches and agencies. The same thing could be done through purchase of full-page advertisem*nts in major newspapers. What congregations cannot afford to do singly they can do together.

The book and magazine field is likewise a giant waiting to be used effectively for pre-evangelism. Evangelicals are largely talking to themselves in what they produce for publication today. Evangelical book and magazine publishers are putting out precious little in the way of apologetics aimed at non-Christians, and are making almost no attempt to market what they do print in a way that reaches the unbeliever.

We cannot program revival and we do not know the nature of the next great revival—how it will come and what will characterize it. Unfortunately many Christians long for revival out of a guilt feeling. They pray that God will step in and sweep sinners off their feet miraculously while they themselves remain at ease. Revival of this kind takes some of the labor out of evangelism, and many of us would like it to happen this way. But although prayer is indispensable, it may not be enough. God sometimes chooses to use secondary means—man’s head and heart and hands—to bring about spiritual awakening.

Student Revolt Hits The Seminaries

No prophetic insight was needed to predict that the current student unrest would filter down to the theological seminaries. We had hoped, however, that its advent would be governed by Christian principles and that its approach to the correction of grievances, real or imagined, would set an example for the university world. Sad to say, the earliest samples of seminary unrest do not point hopefully in that direction.

Students at Colgate Rochester Divinity School took over the main building and chained and nailed it fast. The administration dismissed classes pending the outcome of the seizure, which, fortunately, involved only a handful of students. Whether their grievances were legitimate, which is questionable, is beside the point. The fundamental issue is how candidates for the ministry should conduct themselves when they have grievances.

Seizure of buildings is a violent, coercive measure that contravenes both the letter and the spirit of the Gospel. It is contrary to the law of love—love which is described as being patient and kind, not arrogant or rude, not insisting on its own way, not irritable or resentful. The minister of the Gospel has been given the role of servant. Paul said: “For though we live in the world we are not carrying on a worldly war, for the weapons of our warfare are not worldly but have divine power to destroy strongholds” (2 Cor. 10:3, 4).

Christ, when he was reviled, did not revile again. He willingly suffered wrong at the hands of men. He told his disciples to turn the other cheek and proclaimed the truth that force does not solve problems nor does the end justify the means. It is better to suffer loss than to win a point by unspiritual conduct.

Seminary students have a unique opportunity for special witness in this disordered age. There is no better way for them to show the relevance of the Church and the Christian faith than by bearing witness in a manner that abjures the kind of conduct exhibited by the student radicals and honors and glorifies Christ by the fullest adherence to the law of love.

Chirp, Chirp

There’s a certain newness in spring. Velvety butterflies, wobbly colts, and newborn rats herald it. Birds that survived winter’s barrenness chirp in happy harmony with the noise of traffic. Sleeping bulbs now poke through bits of softened ground hedged with cement and glass and burst into rich-hued tulips and delicately tinted daffodils. Lilacs’ fragrance is lost in carbon monoxide. Fragile violets nestle near rusty hub caps. Trees bud pale green then bloom pale pink above bent cans glaring in the warm sun. Sparkling mountain streams flow into fetid pools ringed with furry puss* willows.

Spring is a new reminder that God’s creation is good. We’re not so sure about man’s.

The Impending Demise Of The U.C.M.

A familiar line from one of Charlotte Bronte’s novels seems on first thought to apply disturbingly well to the current fate of the University Christian Movement: “Give them rope enough, certain that in the end they will hang themselves.”

One might conclude that this is what has happened to the radical, free-wheeling organization whose roots lie in the evangelistic Student Volunteer Movement immortalized by the late John R. Mott. The UCM General Committee has ordered that the UCM as a national movement be dissolved by the end of June.

Some boast that this development represents ultimate liberation. Others see the organization as a victim of its own thing, choked by too much rein. Either way, the committee’s action reflects the uncertainty of so much of today’s Church about Christian essence and purpose. And it leaves the ecumenical movement without an arm in the academic world at a time of extraordinary campus upheaval.

The UCM was a 1966 outgrowth of the former National Student Christian Federation. It has been an independently run affiliate of the National Council of Churches, ostensibly embracing Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox groups. The federation was the product of a merger of the United Student Christian Council and the Mott movement, which had as its goal “the evangelization of the world in this generation.” The UCM’s organizing principle was “to bring about social change through the reformulation of the university.”

For all its alleged relevance and responsiveness to the mood of the American campus, the UCM has never really captured the attention of many students. Its 200 local groupings are scarcely identifiable as purposefully Christian entities. There has been little consensus on the nature of lasting values. In its two and a half years of existence, the UCM proclaimed justice as its aim but hardly went beyond being an anti-Viet Nam war protest. UCM leaders have sensed failure and have taken seriously what one spokesman called “deep differences of opinion.” The UCM president has publicly conceded that the issue that prompted the decision to disband centered on the “nature of the Church in a pre-revolutionary society.”

Something can be said in favor of the committee’s action. It is an honest, realistic, and courageous step, and welcome exception to the almost universal ecclesiastical tendency to preserve organizations no matter how outmoded and ineffective. The committee is to be commended for not yielding to the temptation to continue a $200,000-a-year organization simply for its own sake.

On the other hand, orthodox Christians can lament the inglorious end to a movement which has had such a rich heritage and which in its early years did so much to advance the Christian Gospel. Indeed, we might well ask how things ever got to the place where two dozen churchmen could put out of business a movement that untold thousands of Christians have supported with their prayers, their money, and their labors. Fewer than half of the General Committee members were present when the crucial vote was taken.

To ask an even more distressing question: How did the movement ever stray so far from its original purposes? “UCM’s theology emerges from anthropological, sociological, and historical assumptions,” its house organ declared recently. Although these assumptions are not spelled out, a study of UCM programs reveals a naturalistic, humanistic, and anarchistic outlook far removed from biblical precepts or spiritual goals. This point of view sees the university not as a place of mental cultivation but as “a means to effect social, cultural, economic, and political change.” The aim is said to be a just society, but change per se seems to win priority. The UCM officially called upon “one thousand or more universities and colleges to suspend for one full year the business-as-usual curriculum for joint community-university reeducation.”

The outrageous irony is that this is the approach of a movement allegedly ecumenical. Even a superficial examination shows the approach to be decidedly narrow and unecumenical. It represents a highly speculative philosophical and theological bias espoused by at most a handful in the Church or on the campus. On what grounds such exclusiveness wins support from the major American denominations is a puzzle.

The leaders of the UCM will undoubtedly seek soon to create a successor organization. It is unfortunate but likely that they will continue to seek consensus outside biblical revelation.

The quotation from the Bronte novel really does not fit this situation, because here the “rope” was initially given not to kill but to help. The lesson is there, nevertheless. Liberation for its own sake can be self-defeating, and a free hand unrestrained by biblical norms, rather than serving the best interests of a Christian organization, becomes the instrument of its suicide.

Beauty And The Bible

Television is sometimes useful, sometimes clever, sometimes artful, but rarely biblical. And when it has dared to tread on holy ground, its footprints have not always been beautiful. An exception that was broadcast last December will be repeated next week.

“The Secret of Michelangelo: Every Man’s Dream” not only offers great art; it also portrays biblical themes. One of the greatest depictions of man’s spiritual history was painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo. For four and a half centuries, visitors to the chapel have craned to view the panels sixty-eight feet above their heads. On Easter Sunday the paintings will be as close as the television screen (ABC network), where closeup cameras will show details of the heroic work that the pilgrim to Rome cannot see. The script, beautiful in its imaginative prose and poetry, tells the Old Testament stories that the Renaissance painter interpreted: creation, fall, flood, and others.

Criticism is easy to come by, and television has had its share (often deservedly). But productions that tastefully wed beauty and the Bible merit attention—and commendation.

Women And Israel

In ancient times the history of the Israelites was greatly influenced by women—Miriam, Jael, Deborah, Bathsheba, Jezebel, Athaliah. Now, at a turning point in history, the new Israel has turned to another woman for leadership, Mrs. Golda Meir, a Ukrainian-born one-time Milwaukee schoolteacher. Surely the whole world wishes her well as she struggles for the survival of her people and as she pursues what may be an illusive objective—the peace of Jerusalem.

Is The Sky The Limit?

This has been spoken of as “the era of permissiveness,” and we wonder if this attitude is not something like the concept of space now held by some—that it reaches on to infinity.

The news headline “Vassar OKs Male Visits Any Hour, Day or Night” has amazed some and distressed others. Does this decision merely regularize an already existing situation? Does it reflect the philosophy of life of those who made the decision? Or is it a weak-kneed concession granted by those who want peace at any price?

Without some guidelines based on religious convictions or common sense or personal experience, young people (and old) are left to drift in a sea of ethical relativity and moral decay. Young and old alike need standards of conduct to follow, and colleges have usually been considered sources of the teaching of moral values. Vassar’s departure from accepted standards will doubtless prove to be bad for the school, unfair to the parents of students, and, most of all, bad for the students themselves.

Decision Time On Viet Nam

Former President Johnson, whose decision not to run for re-election was based largely on the Viet Nam war, took the step his critics advocated when he stopped bombing North Viet Nam and sat down at the bargaining table to end the war. He was assured that when he halted the bombing there would be a corresponding response from the Viet Cong and that serious peace negotiations could then get under way.

At the present writing it is clear that serious peace negotiations haven’t begun yet, and that the Viet Cong response to the cessation of bombing has been to bomb Saigon and kill innocent citizens. Not unexpectedly, those who clamored loudest about U. S. bombing of North Viet Nam targets are silent about Viet Cong bombing of civilians in Saigon. Those who argued that the only way America could test the sincerity of the Viet Cong was to stop the bombing have not yet suggested that perhaps they were mistaken.

President Nixon has inherited a war his predecessor turned into a holding operation and a search for a very elusive peace. His choices, as we see it, are limited to (1) complete withdrawal from Viet Nam and acknowledgment of failure, (2) all-out military assault designed to ruin the Viet Cong or else force them to serious peace endeavors, and (3) military holding efforts that will allow the enemy to attack when and how he chooses while Nixon endeavors to secure a negotiated peace that the Viet Cong seem to have no interest in attaining. No choice is free from danger and none will be acceptable to every American. Nixon’s third alternative, now in force, is a tenuous one at best and puts him at the mercy of the Viet Cong. He will be forced to alter that stance unless dramatic changes occur in Paris and in Saigon.

Big as America is and powerful as its nuclear armaments are, the Viet Nam imbroglio seems beyond its ability to terminate. Maybe the time has come for Christians to cry as Jehoshaphat did when he was faced by a coalition of powers: “We are powerless.… We do not know what to do, but our eyes are upon thee” (2 Chron. 20:12). Maybe, just maybe, God can do what armaments, peace tables, and talk have not been able to do.

Campus Turmoil: Tracing A Cause

Dr. Nathan Pusey of Harvard ran little risk of dispute when he declared in his latest president’s report that the academic year “will surely prove to have been one of the most difficult in the history of higher education in America.” Harvard had so far been spared the major unrest experienced on other campuses, but Pusey noted realistically that “the end is not yet.” Although he did not speak from first-hand experience, his description of the problems was only too accurate:

Unpleasant, demanding, and accusatory attitudes were in evidence on many campuses. The sobriety of the scholar and the would-be scholar, celebrated in all previous ages, seemed simply to vanish. In some places the spirit of reasonableness, and the desire to achieve understanding with common courtesy, traditional hallmarks of academic life, were actually sneered at and contemned. In many places discontent flared and strong passions tended to drive out good feelings and careful thought. Manners suffered. It was indeed an extraordinary year.

Pusey has given a good description. The question that remains is: Why should it be so?

Where the Christian faith is operative, such turmoil ought not to be. Indeed, it cannot be. The fact that we have it indicates quite clearly that faith has lost its hold, that we have yielded those principles upon which Western civilization was founded and has prospered.

Christian faith is never overthrown suddenly. Its demise is always gradual, and sometimes undetected. Very often a residue of acceptable standards will be perpetuated for a time, so that many who are not Christians will temporarily continue to be controlled by Christian ethical presuppositions. But inevitably the time comes when even these are discarded, and disorder ensues.

The university is geared to pass on knowledge. But it cannot effectively pass on Christian faith. Each generation must come to believe for itself, and adopt anew those principles that have made for social order and tranquillity. Only when we return to the faith that has made these principles operative—or at least to an acceptance of its derivative implications—can we logically hope for a return to campus sanity.

The Strange Case Of Segregation

For some years powerful forces have worked for desegregation in American life. The battle was won at the legal and constitutional level. Gradually, despite pockets of opposition, Americans are adjusting to an integrated society. Now the objective sought by blacks who were discriminated against and fought for by both blacks and whites is being reversed. More and more blacks are calling for the restoration of a segregated society.

Nowhere is the pressure greater than that in educational institutions where black students insist on separate facilities and demand a segregation hardly different from what blacks fought against for a hundred years. Some of the schools that were among the first to banish segregation have capitulated to black insistence on re-segregation with the result that the government is now forced to withdraw financial aid from such institutions on the ground that voluntary segregation by blacks is just as illegal as involuntary segregation forced on them by whites. It is a strange twist indeed that what blacks have fought to secure is now being rejected, as some insist on returning to a social condition long regarded as inhuman and unconstitutional. Does it not play into the hands of demagogues, and does it not tend to negate all the effort and bloodshed that went into the blacks’ battles for equal rights?

Verily, human perversity in men of all skin pigmentations is an enigma hard to understand and a disease not easily conquered.

Antidote For Anxiety

Anxiety is a thief that robs many Christians of the fullness of life Christ intends they should experience. Most Christians spend a great deal of time and energy worrying—about all kinds of things. In his Sermon on the Mount Jesus talked about anxiety and how to deal with it (Matt. 6:19–34).

First, he pointed out the need to put things into perspective. All the “things” that we worry about and work for are only temporary (v. 19). In time all our material possessions will decay or disappear. Only the treasures laid up in heaven are lasting (v. 20).

Most of our anxieties grow out of our excessive concern with material comfort and security. We cannot be preoccupied with these things and still be loyal to God (vv. 21–24). Jesus made it clear that loyalty to God excludes any competing loyality; either our lives are centered in God and his will or we are servants of mammon.

When we give priority to the wrong kind of treasure, anxiety is an inevitable result. Jim Elliot expressed the proper Christian perspective when he said: “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

Secondly, Jesus encouraged his bearers to look at the reasons not to worry (vv. 25–33). Remember that God is the creator of life; certainly he can provide food. He created the body; surely he can provide clothing. Besides, worry is useless; it won’t accomplish anything. Look how wonderfully God cares for the birds of the air and see how magnificently he endows the flowers with beauty. He will care for his people in an even greater way.

When we allow our lives to become little more than an anxious pursuit of food and clothing, we are behaving as those who have not God. The godless have reason to worry, because they do not know a heavenly father who cares and provides. In essence, worry is a kind of atheism, because it is a lack of trust in God. The Christian has an infinitely big God whose love for him defies description. There are no grounds for worry.

Finally, Jesus offers a positive cure for worry: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (v. 33). A man seeks the kingdom of God and his righteousness by submitting himself to the authority of the king, Jesus Christ, and by making the will of God the controlling factor of his life. Anxiety springs from the desire to have things as we wish rather than as God wills. To place ourselves completely in the hands of the living Christ and to desire only his will eliminates all cause for anxiety. He will do his will through us, and his will is “good and acceptable and perfect.”

The Christian-Education Rut

The difference between a grave and a rut is that a rut still provides an option. Although Christian education in the local church may be in a rut, it is neither dead nor hopeless. The tragedy is to be in a rut and not know it or to recognize the rut and make no effort to escape it.

Many ruts in the traditional programs of Christian education develop through neglect of the principles of learning that the word “education” implies. An effective curriculum measures up to the standards of continuity, sequence, and integration.

Continuity means that a common thread of meaning can be detected in learning experiences at all levels. The Word of God, for example, is an excellent learning text because it has the continuity of the redemptive theme running like a thread through every book.

Sequence is the principle of learning that implies step-by-step progress. Motivation for growth requires a current task that a student can master as well as another step just beyond his reach. The student who said that his freshman course in Bible was taught like a Sunday-school class was complaining about the lack of sequence in his Christian education.

Integration is an equally important educational principle that speaks of the wholeness of knowledge as seen in the connections between learning and life. A specialist in the segments of knowledge is a sad figure in a world where the dominoes stand or fall together. Integration is protection against ruts in Christian education because it permits no segregation of knowledge from experience, hearing from doing, or believing from witnessing.

Ruts in the Christian-education programs of local churches are best reflected in the opinions of young people who are trying to escape these programs. If pressed for a reason, most will say that Sunday school is meaningless, boring, and unrelated to the real world. Perhaps we are teaching without a clearcut purpose, expecting loyalty without challenge, and assuming that students can put together the pieces of the puzzle called “The Christian Life” without help.

To get out of the rut, we need to exercise the options open to us. Establishing continuity in Christian education is no more difficult than defining the end product of our programs. “What are we trying to do?” is a question that ought to be asked at the annual planning session of every board of Christian education. “Is our purpose to produce new Christians, new members, or new witnesses? Can we find this thread of purpose running through every program in the church?” One church that asked this question discovered it had an unusual opportunity to serve the families of a bedroom community adjoining a great metropolis. The Christian-education program was shifted to an emphasis upon the Christian family, and the new common motive transformed the church. The rut of meaninglessness can be escaped if the product of Christian education in the local church is defined and kept always in view.

All education is plagued with the problem of progress. That is why there will always be some kind of grades, diplomas, and degrees as recognition of educational accomplishment. The local church cannot offer the rewards of dollars, jobs, social status, or academic recognition in its Christian-education program. It must rely mainly upon the intangible and long-range rewards of the effective Christian life for its success. Yet there can be developmental tasks and rewards for progress.

Robert Havighurst, in The Educational Mission of the Church, has applied his thinking about developmental tasks to the local church program. Beginning with the early task of the formation of the moral conscience, he climbs through the learning steps of sociability, moral autonomy, identity, intimacy, parenthood, productivity, citizenship, social responsibility, and retirement. In an evangelical Christian context the developmental steps might be conceived as Christian commitment. Christian living, and Christian witness. Progress along these steps should bring some recognizable reward, such as public reception into Christian fellowship, church membership, and responsibility for work in the church. With some attention to the principle of sequence the local church might successfully dispute the charge that after age twelve Christian education is a matter of spinning your wheels in a rut.

The deepest rut in the traditional programs of Christian education seems to be the failure to relate the Word to life. Marshall McLuhan has said that a child stops learning when he enters the public schools at the age of five. He means that the preschool child is engaged in a total learning experience that captures all his senses, particularly through the images of the television tube. School, however, forces him into the narrow and isolated track of sight and tongue called, “Run, Dick, run.” McLuhan’s point, though overstated, suggests questions to be asked about education in the local church. Children of the television generation, youth of the now generation, and adults of the anxious generation are expected to participate in programs that are both internally segmented and disconnected from the impact of the secular world. To use a McLuhanism, the secular world is an “anti-environment,” and it must be considered as a counter-force to Christian education.

A beginning step out of the rut is to integrate the learning experiences of the church. In most churches, the programs of Christian education, worship, fellowship, and work are unrelated. There are no connecting lines between the study of the Word, the proclamation of the Word, and the application of the Word. One of the most important lessons learned in the attempt to educate disadvantaged youth has been the need for a broad approach to the total environment. Otherwise the learning of the schoolhouse is vetoed by the forceful lessons of the home and the street.

Christian education must learn the same lesson. Inside the church, all the resources should be unified for a total impact upon the learner. These will lend strength to counter the veto groups and values of the “anti-environment.” Otherwise, our feeble attempts to be relevant are washed away in the mainstream of counter-currents both outside and inside the church.

Continuity, a thread of purpose; sequence, steps in progress: and integration, a web of relationships—these are interlocking principles of education. The way out of the Christian-education rut can be discovered through careful consideration of the questions, “What is our common purpose? How do we recognize accomplishment? And are we organized for a broad attack upon the gritty issues of an opposing world?”—

Facing The Unknowable Music

Only once have I been in Alaska. My stay lasted no longer than forty-five minutes, yet it made an indelible impression on me. The beginnings were inauspicious. Our plane had stopped to refuel at Anchorage, and after exhausting the diversions offered by the airport lounge I picked up a local newspaper to help while away the remaining forty minutes.

Immediately my eye was caught by the editorial. “We do things differently up here on the frontier,” it modestly admitted, “but this is ridiculous.…” What was ridiculously different, it emerged, was that a prisoner had escaped from the Fairbanks calaboose fifty-two days earlier, but his absence had just been noticed. The editor went on to wax justly indignant, but it was his conclusion that I liked most: he speculated on what other dark disclosures might be made if the citizenry but knew what was going on.

C. S. Lewis somewhere points up the diabolical dangers that confront a man cooped up alone with a free-ranging imagination. In this case I got to thinking of the Alaskan editor’s words, and decided he was probably righter than he knew. That is, of course, if we think in terms of the Unknowability of the Constant Factor—a concept with which classical readers of this journal will naturally be familiar.

The latter involves an old and honored bit of reasoning, the original purpose of which was to prove the existence of God. Found in an ancient myth about the music of the spheres, this held that the heavenly bodies combined from all eternity to produce the most ravishing of music. But since to human awareness the music has had neither beginning nor ending nor intermission, it has never been heard by human ears. Only as its opposite can enter in and be contrasted with it can there be any perception of it. Thus when all other sounds are stilled, we in our ignorance call what remains silence.

Whatever we think of the myth, the principle behind it is nonetheless sound inasmuch as it points up the eternal unknowability of anything that, existing before us, is constant, continuous, and universal. The person who asks “What’s going on around here?” might on this basis be on to a pretty meaningful question after all.

Anyway, keep thinking on it, for it has the makings of a thoughtful sermon wherein some incisive allusions to the mindfulness of the eighth Psalm could be coupled with exposing the limitations of the eighth Apollo.

If you should find the going sticky, slip along to the Anchorage airport lounge and derive the benefits of its stimulating atmosphere. Oh, and while you’re there, you might inquire whether they ever caught up with the escaping one. I never heard the sequel to that, but I can’t help wishing him well.

Gun Shots

I read with interest your editorial regarding “Gun Control and Crime Prevention” (Feb. 28). I applaud your action in taking a stand on this problem. But the question I am concerned with is whether a permit and registration law would be a solution to the problem.…

During the last two years I have lived in a territory of the United States (Guam) where registration of all firearms has been mandatory and enforced by the police department for several years. Yet during this two-year period there were several murders of innocent civilians, one policeman and one sailor. Investigation revealed that the guilty parties were from the criminal fringe of the island population. These murders were committed with firearms, notwithstanding legal controls, and these weapons were stolen or unregistered.

St. Paul, Minn.

I am deeply disturbed by your editorial on gun control. It seems to me that you are now advocating stronger government control over our lives, as if we do not have enough now. Perfect control is not the answer to perfect freedom! More government control is not the solution, or else Hitler and Stalin had a utopia and we failed to recognize it. More government control can only lead to a dictatorship.

(The Rev.) ROBERT L. LARSEN

Keene, Tex.

With many of my neighbors I share the fear that gun-control legislation is one of the greatest dangers to our freedom. Any criminal with only a slight mechanical ability will be able to make a crude but efficient gun for robbery or murder. More swift and severe penalties for such crimes will surely do much more to curb crime than to simply prohibit one form (out of many) of lethal weapons.

Broadway and Madison

Church of Christ

Springfield, Mo.

The statement which to me is so offensive is that “Christian citizens have a high stake in the prevention of homicides, so many of which are caused by hand guns.”

Is this not the liberal, modern approach? The object used is evil. If we can remove the object, man will be good. Did not Christ teach that all evil proceeds from the heart of man?

The man who hates enough to kill has always done so with hand, rock, stick, rope, or whatever tool is at hand. Only the nation that fears and does not trust its citizenry denies them the right to bear arms.

Let us turn to the real cause of violence—man—by seeking to bring him to know Christ.

Kingsport, Tenn.

I think the thing that bothered me the most was the insinuation that if you are a Christian you will support the present trends in gun legislation. There are many sincere and intelligent Christians who do not support the present gun legislation and who can only be alienated by this kind of journalism.

I hope the editors of this valuable periodical will resist the temptation to make papal pronouncements in the fringe areas.

Leoti, Kan.

Believe it or not, there are a goodly number of evangelical “born again” Christians who are not fanatics, as you imply, but are level-headed thinkers who oppose further gun control by either private registration of guns or melting them down into pruning hooks.

You presume too much by pleading that Christians should write their congressmen to counteract the powerful lobbyists who oppose further and picayune legislation against private ownership of firearms. You write as you feel—I’ll continue to support them, so help me God.

The Roman Catholics suffer from this dictatorial journalism but we evangelicals don’t buy it.

Youngstown, Ohio

I have been reading CHRISTIANITY TODAY for several years. I have been a Christian for fifteen years.… Now for the first time I have come to find that I am a “fanatic”.… Really, now, I don’t enjoy being called a fanatic any more than you do, and I don’t think that I am any more a fanatic than you are.… In the interests of honesty, fairness, and Christian charity I request your apology in print.

Pontiac, Mich.

Many Christians fall for the line that “passing a law” will solve all crime problems. If we are not more careful, we shall legislate into criminality a lot more people who merely wish to be free and to be able to defend themselves, their family, and their property against criminals.

Moreover, if those Christians who write these type editorials would spend their time, effort, and other resources in their field of competency—trying personally to “lead” people to Christ, witnessing, and proclaiming the Gospel—the effects on our society would be much more in evidence now, and certainly infinitely more enduring.

Glen Burnie, Md.

In your editorial on gun control you imply that restrictive legislation would keep guns out of the hands of criminals. You use the same argument that the Prohibitionists used to get the Eighteenth Amendment, but if you know any history, you know that the prohibition law was respected only by decent, law-abiding citizens. The gangsters, criminals, and bootleggers went right on making, drinking, and selling whiskey. In fact, they made so much money from the sale of it that they almost gained the powers of government—money talks.

Surely we are not going to be naïve enough to think that gun-control laws will keep guns from criminals. Only law-abiding citizens, who need no restriction, would be affected by such legislation.

St. Mark United Methodist Church

Northport, Ala.

The most significant thing about your editorial was an omission. You cited no Scripture to support your contention that the Christian—and even the law abiding non-Christian—should have his rights to own arms infringed upon by the federal government as a so-called deterrent to crime.

No doubt the “argument that gun-control laws won’t stop criminals from getting and using weapons” is “tiresome” to you because it makes a lot more sense than your statements that “restrictive legislation … would keep guns … away from criminal elements” and that strong gun-control legislation will “measurably” affect the crime rate, which is unsupported by facts or even sound reasoning.

Secretary-Treasurer Southern States Industrial Council

Nashville, Tenn.

Fcc’S War

Allow me to peek from behind my Southern fundamentalist label far enough to observe that you are taking a dangerously short-sighted view in commending to one and all the FCC’s war on the dreaded brown-leaf weed (“Waging War on the Weed,” Feb. 28).

Aside from the constitutional question of free-speech infringement, you are falling for the very old line of allowing a good “end” to justify some very questionable “means.” I hold no brief for the tobacco companies, but to allow five men—and those appointed rather than elected, as the FCC is—to decide what is “good” for the people is a very dangerous precedent indeed.

Their next decision could say the public is best served if all religious radio time is provided “free” by the broadcaster to the “major” denominations; or that second-class mailing privileges should be suspended from religious periodicals such as CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Erroneously, many people believe hard-liquor ads are banned by FCC fiat—not so. It is a self-imposed regulation of the broadcasters and to my mind a far more effective approach to the problem, not to mention much less dangerous. Let the public get after the weed-sellers, otherwise you’re wasting your effort anyway.

As for the FCC’s promise not “to proceed against any other product commercials”—doesn’t anyone remember government’s ironbound assurance that the income tax would never, never go above a rate of 2 per cent? Try that on your friendly IRS man come April 15.

Press Secretary to

Washington, D.C.

Campus And Church

Lawing’s cartoon about the church and protesting youth (Feb. 28) was unfortunate. It suggests that the vocal youth have nothing to say to the Church, and that the Church has nothing to say to them. For how can we speak to them without speaking with them? And when did self-righteousness and complacency become acceptable?

Dearborn, Mich.

I was disappointed in your editorial “Ending Campus Chaos” (Feb. 28). The actions you simplistically advocate seemingly fail to recognize that the status quo on the campus may not represent the best atmosphere for academic pursuits and that illegal demonstrations, however disruptive they may be, sometimes accomplish the purposes of bringing the problems to the attention of many people and prodding administrations into constructive action.

On a deeper level, simply expelling dissatisfied students who demonstrate, especially minority groups, is not likely to offer any lasting solutions to the problems of our society which often evoke these frustrated responses. Arbitrary punitive action may not create an atmosphere conducive to bringing the powerful implications of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to bear on these problems. I am not sure that Jesus’ healing of the man with the withered hand on the Sabbath was any less offensive to the Pharisees than the action of militant students in taking over college buildings is to most evangelical Christians today.

Durham, N.C.

A personal thank-you for your sane and penetrating editorial on “The Student Revolution” (Feb. 14). This warning is extremely timely.

Secretary of the Board of Education

Bethel College and Seminary

St. Paul, Minn.

I was greatly disturbed and disappointed by your editorial “The Student Revolution.” The whole thing was “irresponsible journalism” at best.

The question that came to my mind immediately as I saw the title, which I am afraid perhaps never crossed your mind, was, “How many hours, if any, did you spend at the secular campuses before such an editorial? How many, if any, at the campuses where unrest was taking place?” There seem to be quite a few assumptions which I think should be left to the “prophets” and not the editors, such as the “probable” cause of death of the president of Swarthmore. How about the figures such as “a small minority”—where did you get that? You also generalized and concluded that they “have no intrinsic interest in [securing an education]”.…

I fear that the secular campus, just as other aspects of our complex society, is doomed not because of the “revolutionaries” but because Christians choose to pass judgment instead of facing the facts and expect God to use us to do our share in his total plan of redemption.

Maywood, Ill.

I wish to take exception to your analysis that this “student war is fought by a small minority of irrational revolutionists.” Irrational elements may be present in this unrest. But the cause of this turmoil lies deeper in a nihilistic despair that pervades many a college campus.…

The problem on campus lies in the blurred relationship of the student to the governing administration, not in academic deficiencies per se. The school exists for the student. His demand for change and participation in university government reflects a desire to help mold and shape his own education. This is nothing new. In the early history of the university the students hired the teachers to lecture about subjects chosen by the students.

Rather than casually and despairingly dismissing the student unrest as a “threat to our educational system,” let us at least give these students an ear. Perhaps they are not always wrong! For the Church to minister to these students it must get down to their world and guide the student in his “growing moral consciousness.” Things are going to be different on campus and in the world at large. The power of Christ’s love and justice must be related in manifold ways to change and renew the university. The Church’s opportunity is there. Do we dare to get concerned with the issues and dilemmas of the student? Or will we stand on the sidelines with disdain and miss our opportunity to speak relevantly in the love of God through Christ?

Christian Reformed Church

Iowa City, Iowa

Sympathy For Czechs

I must take issue with your editorial of February 14 in which you brand the “strange silence of some of Czechoslovakia’s leading Protestant churchmen” as shameful. Your editorial is inappropriate and unhelpful for two reasons. First, it is misinformed about the situation. Leading Protestant churchmen in Czechoslovakia did vigorously protest the invasion. They did this both in their own country and abroad.…

The second problem with your editorial is its unchristian lack of willingness to sympathize with the tragic problem of the churches in Communist-dominated countries. It would be much more appropriate for a journal of your influence to protest totalitarian tendencies which we see all about us in this country.

Associate Professor

of Church History

Bethany Theological Seminary

Oak Brook, Ill.

Mind And Heart

May I thank you for the strikingly relevant article by Elton Trueblood on “Rational Christianity” (Feb. 14). As a campus pastor, I am painfully aware that we are in a battle for men’s minds as well as their hearts, and that evangelical efforts to emphasize “faith alone,” without a complementary intellectual foundation for Christian belief, produces an extremely vulnerable situation, in which students, by slow erosion or quick demolition, may be swept away permanently from their moorings in evangelical Christianity.

University Reformed Church

East Lansing, Mich.

Elton Trueblood’s essay was commendable. It does seem, however, that in his argument to link faith and reason inextricably he concedes a point that tends to dull a more aggressive apologetic.…

A forceful apologetic would stress that the same finitude of human knowledge that allows for the confirmation of God’s existence also disallows the rational retreat from belief to unbelief and atheism, since a negative judgment can only find its logical sanctuary in the context of universal knowledge. Thus the case for God’s existence, beyond the pursuit of evidence, always remains a viable and rational option while the defense of atheism is irrational and absurd.

Crystal Lake, Ill

Books And The Clergyman

It strikes me, in response to your question in Marvin Wilson’s article (Feb. 14), that study is perhaps the most significant way the rabbi, pastor, and teacher can maintain his self-respect. No study—no growth … for the clergyman or for his congregant. So-o … you must study, and that means you simply make the time for it. I block out several hours each week and take no calls during “my time” with the books. If your congregation knows you study, and if you share the results with them, either through sermons, forums, or writings, then they will insist that you do it consistently. Nothing pleases me more than the congregant who says, “I want to pick your brain about Judaism,” because that means I’ve got to be sharp and that challenges me to more study.…

Next to our religious school, our library is top priority.… We urge our congregants to donate books to our library, or to make a contribution to our library fund in honor or in memory of a friend or relative. In this way, we are building a fine library in a short time, which will benefit everyone. We also subscribe to many periodicals, both Jewish and Christian, so that we may be aware of developments on all fronts.

Someone once said, “Wisdom is the principal thing. Therefore get wisdom.” There’s only one way to do it—study.

Temple Sinai

Atlanta, Ga.

More Power

Allow me to offer my congratulations … on what must be one of the best magazines of its kind in the world today. Naturally I would like to see a bit more space for Australian news.…

As an ex-journalist myself, I say more power to your arm in your fight for the faith.

Reformed Church

Moe, Australia

For a publication with the all-embracing name of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, you people sure do not seem to be aware of what is really going on in Christianity today.… I suppose church history would show that the orthodox group always has been the last to hear what God is doing.

Dolores, Colo.

I find myself reading the entire issue as quickly as possible. It inspires, challenges, probes, convicts, and yes, it preaches too. I thank God for your work.

Houston, Tex.

A brief outline of the biblical view of God may help to clarify the main departures of process-theology.

■ The God of the Bible is first and foremost known as the sovereign One, the Monarch of all. Unlike the gods of pagan polytheism, who struggled to survive in a battle against fate, the biblical God from the very first towers as Creator and Lord of all things by his own word and will. The objects of pagan worship—sun, moon, and stars, beasts and creeping things—in the Bible are mere creations of the God of the universe. He it was, the sovereign Lord of All, who assigned man to have dominion over the earth and its creatures in moral obedience to his spiritual purposes. Contemporary moralists tend to deny any necessary connection between divine command and human morality and destiny; no less than Alfred North Whitehead conceded, however, that Christian belief in the rational, inexhaustible Logos as the source of a creative and dependable order was an indispensable element in the rise of modern science. The one God, sole sovereign of the universe, is at the heart of biblical religion.

■ The God of the Bible is known as the sovereign Lord through the fact of his self-revelation: as personal mind and will, he makes himself known in thought, word, and deed. In this emphasis on personality in God, the Bible contrasts both with Greek philosophy and with Greek popular religion. The classic philosophers spiritualized the polytheistic god-figures. Using such general concepts as the Divine, cosmic reason, and abstract Being, they postulated the ultimately real in terms of impersonal principle. The religious poets not only espoused polytheism but also ascribed to their multiplied gods all features and actions of human existence. The Bible, to be sure, depicts God as personal, speaks of his relation to human beings in concrete personal terms, and uses metaphors of human relationships, including the intimate terminology of love. But, as Daniel Day Williams notes, a striking difference distinguishes the biblical from polytheistic religion: “Never are the erotic and the emotional satisfactions of human life asserted to be the key to the relationship of God and man. The Bible … never makes the ecstatic or emotional fulfillment of familial or sexual experience the key to the experience of God” (The Spirit and the Forms of Love, 1968, p. 20). From the very outset the Bible uses generic terms for deity in conjunction with proper names for God; Yahweh, as the distinctive Old Testament name for God, highlights the fact that the sovereign One has introduced himself by name and made his purposes known. By making man the unique bearer of the divine image for intelligible spiritual relationships, God manifests his personal being. In intelligible, purposive communication to his chosen prophets, in the covenant with Israel with its mighty promises, in his saving acts in behalf of his people, he reinforces his redemptive relationship to Israel, depicting it in terms of highest intimacy: “You only have I known of all the nations of the earth” (Amos 3:2); “For your Maker is your husband, the LORD of hosts is his name” (Isa. 54:5). In and through incarnation he reveals finally the inner secret of his personal life; the Son assumes human nature to mirror his perfect fellowship with the Father, and to accomplish atonement for alienated mankind. The Spirit who is given, moreover, indwells and renews the community of faith in the divine image. What is already hinted at in the creation narratives, and now and again throughout the Old Testament revelation, is thus articulated in the New Testament revelation, namely, that there exists even in the personal life of the sovereign One a divine social relationship.

■ The God of the Bible is not only the one sovereign personal God: he is also the Living God, an assertion frequently made in the biblical revelation. As Paul Tillich pointed out, “few things about God are more emphasized in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, than the truth that God is a living God” (Systematic Theology, 1951, I, 268). By this truth of the Living God, the biblical writers do not mean simply that God is alive, in contrast to God-is-dead attitudes (“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God”—Ps. 14:1). Nor do they merely contrast him in this regard with the ultimately non-existent pagan divinities (Jer. 2:11; Isa. 6:3; 41:4; 42:8; 43:10 ff.; 45:3–6; 48:11), let alone suggest only that he is at least as much alive as animate creatures. No; for the biblical writers, God as God “has life in himself” and exists eternally; he is the “I AM” (Exod. 3:14). All being and structures therefore have their ground of being and existence in him who is subject to no determination but self-determination. He is the ground of the being of the universe, and the source of man’s creation-life, redemption-life, and resurrectionife.

■ The God of the Bible is not only the one sovereign personal, living God: he is also supernatural Creator and transcendent judge, the metaphysical ground of the Good and the True, the foundation of rationality and morality and order, the ultimate source of all the forms and structures of existence, and of the coherence of experience and life. He is, moreover, the immanent preserver of men and things who works out his comprehensive purposes in history and nature, to be consummated in a new heaven and earth. He is independent of the universe, however; man and the world are in no sense necessary to his being or perfection, for he is not subject to variation, to increase or diminution of being or perfection. The supernatural Creator is transcendent ontologically, ethically, and epistemologically. The Good is what God wills, the Truth is what God thinks and says. The Greek gods were strangers to such independence of the cosmos, since they presupposed no doctrine of creation and were circ*mscribed in their activities by a cosmos that included them as well as all other beings. The pagan gods were not other-wordly, and hence could sustain no comprehensive relationship to the world.

■ The God of the Bible is the God of election-love, known as such in his self-revelation as the sovereign eternal Spirit, the God of holy love, who works out his redemptive purpose in a created and fallen world. As Norman Snaith put it: “Either we must accept this idea of choice on the part of God with its necessary accompaniment of exclusiveness, or we have to hold a doctrine of the love of God other than that which is biblical” (The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament, 1944, p. 139). God is the God of holy love. Himself fulfilling all the claims of righteousness, he provides free redemption for sinners unable to rescue themselves from the entrapments of sin. By the incarnation, atonement, and resurrection of the Logos, he lifts the lost to everlasting life. In brief, God reveals his love especially in his saving action and prophetic word in behalf of Israel, and in the gift of his promised Son to provide redemption and reconciliation for repentant sinners.

Over against this background, how does process-theology alter the biblical doctrine of God?

□ Process-metaphysicians compromise the sovereignty of God. God, says Whitehead, is “Co-creator of the universe” (a phrase attributed by Lucien Price in Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, 1956, p. 297). God’s creation is said to be a continuing evolutionary process, a co-existence of order and freedom in which man takes part in determining the future. The divine-human relationship is viewed solely in terms of divine persuasion. Williams notes “large coercive aspects in the divine governance of the world” (in Process and Divinity, E. Freeman, ed., 1964, p. 177), and Charles Hartshorne remarks that God’s influence may approach compulsion during our unconscious experiences of him (The Divine Relativity, 1948, p. 141). Divine love is defined in such a way, however, as to require the rejection of any concept of a sovereign Monarch who predetermines the course of events. To be sure, Peter Hamilton remarks that “process philosophy requires the existence of the living God, who supplies to every entity its ‘initial conceptual aim’” (The Living God and the Modern World, 1967, p. 250). The reference is, of course, to Whitehead’s statement that “each temporal entity … derives from God its basic conceptual aim, relevant to its actual world, yet with indeterminations awaiting its own decisions” (Process and Reality, 1929, p. 317); this idea, Hamilton asserts, “closely corresponds to the Christian doctrine of the ‘prevenience’ of God” (op. cit., pp. 159f.). W. A. Christian holds that “the concept of God in Whitehead’s philosophy is categorically contingent, systematically necessary, and existentially contingent” (in Process and Divinity, p. 195). In any event, can one possibly reconcile God’s prevenience, as biblically stated, with Whitehead’s notion that “God and the world interact upon and affect each other; the initial aim which God offers to successive entities is continually adjusted to allow for environmental changes, so as to aim for maximum intensity of experience according to the circ*mstance of the moment” (Dialogues, p. 160)? One may be tempted to read the biblical view of God’s purpose in creation and redemption into Whitehead’s assertion: “Apart from the intervention of God, there could be nothing new in the world, and no order in the world. The course of creation would be a dead level of ineffectiveness with all balance and intensity progressively excluded by the cross currents of incompatibility.” But if one follows the thought to its conclusion one soon discovers the central thrust: “The novel hybrid feelings derived from God … are the foundations of progress” (ibid., p. 349). Accordingly, Hamilton is only too happy to discard the physical resurrection of Christ; an empty tomb followed by corporeal appearances would have constituted divine compulsion overwhelming “the disciples’ free will,” whereas in Hamilton’s view “neither human free will nor the normal processes of nature are subjected to, or interrupted by, divine compulsion” (op. cit., p. 226). Williams’s systematic exposition of process-theology contains no section on eschatology; he merely asserts that God “never refuses to love” (The Spirit and the Forms of Love, p. 127) and suggests that the doctrine of universal salvation be probed (p. 97).

□ Although process-theology depicts God as personal, it tends to reduce the Divine to a principial aspect of the whole of things. Paul Tillich had explicitly rejected divine personality; he used the term “personal” only symbolically of God, conceived impersonally as Being-itself (op. cit., I, 270 f.). But Whitehead viewed God as “an actual entity” or perhaps as a succession of entities with personal order, and Hartshorne went a step further by defining God as “living person.” This emphasis Hamilton develops to the point of justifying prayer to “the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands” (op. cit., pp. 240 ff.). No one was more aware than Hartshorne, however, that process-metaphysics shifts the case for divine personality to philosophical considerations of its own. “It may be said,” he wrote of Whitehead’s theory, “that this is one of the first philosophies which has any intellectual right to speak of divine personality.… We doubt if anyone can really, or other than verbally, mean by a ‘person’ more than what Whitehead means by a ‘personally ordered’ sequence of experiences within certain defining characteristics or personality traits” (in Philosophers Speak of God, Hartshorne and Reese, eds., 1953, p. 274). And Williams says that “process metaphysics proposes analogies in which the Creator-Redeemer God of the Bible is really conceived as creative being” (op. cit., p. 125, n. 14); he is quite aware that Whitehead’s imprecision about how God acts on the world jeopardizes the being of God as “a fully actual, effective subject.” This weakness Williams first proposed to overcome by stressing “the disclosure of the divine initiative in religious experience” (in The Relevance of Whitehead, I. Leclerc, ed., 1961, p. 370). But not even Williams’s later emphasis on love as the structure of reality guarantees the personality of God, whatever may be his intentions. This fact becomes fully evident in our subsequent discussion of the process-theory’s transformation of the concept of divine love. Here we note only that the loss of intelligible divine self-communication reduces the reality of God in fact to an unsure inference from experience, whereas the more God is postulated in personal categories, the more decisive becomes the question of his cognitive disclosure. Although process-theologians retain the vocabulary of revelation, they abandon its biblical sense. In the Bible, revelation is a mental concept, and involves God’s disclosure of truths about himself and his purposes; the God of the Bible does not wait for speculative philosophers to postulate his nature on the basis of analogies from human experience. The personal God of revealed religion speaks and acts for himself, and declares his purposes intelligibly.

□ Process-theologians take seriously the reality of a divine life and insist that the living God has an existence that must be differentiated from mere cosmic process. They disagree with Tillich’s assertion that “we must speak of God as living in symbolic terms” (op. cit., I, 268). Tillich earlier had held that God has actual being as the ground of all being, as Being-itself; God is the structure of all being, and these structural elements “make him a living God, a God who can be man’s concrete concern” (I, 264). In later statements Tillich considered merely symbolical even the assertion that God is the structure or ground of being (II, 10). The statement that God is what concerns man ultimately and unconditionally (I, 17) thus became detached from any objective cognitive reality whatever; those who insisted that atheism might equally well be one’s ultimate concern saw in Tillich’s view a transition to death-of-God speculation. But process-metaphysicians insist upon creative being as the objective reality of Tillich’s “ultimate concern”; emphasis on God as the ground and structure of all being they coordinate with a theory of God’s function in the world as an active being who enters into relationships, and who may thus be distinguished conceptually from the universe of which he is the depth, ground, or structure. Yet such coordination in fact hardly requires much advance over the view of Henry Nelson Wieman, who saw no need to carry Whiteheadean metaphysics beyond the emphasis that “deity” is the impersonal value-producing frontier of evolutionary process (The Source of Human Good, 1946); here the term God, when identified with creative good, seems merely complimentary. More than one critic of Whitehead’s theory has suggested that God is quite a dispensable appendage to his metaphysics and reflects more of cultural heritage than of integral logical necessity. The newer process-theologians seek to give their theory of God biblical overtones. Nonetheless creation becomes evolution, redemption becomes relationship, and resurrection becomes renewal; the supernatural is abandoned, miracles vanish, and the Living God of the Bible is submerged in immanental motifs.

□ Process-metaphysics, while affirming the transcendence of God, repudiates his supernaturalness and absolute transcendence. It rejects the pantheistic identification of God with the whole of reality, but insists that God is an aspect of all reality. Whitehead held that not God alone, but every actual entity, transcends the rest of actuality; “the transcendence of God is not peculiar to him” (op. tit., p. 130). Hartshorne formulates the process-doctrine of divine transcendence by saying: “God literally contains the universe.” Yet, he would add, God is both the cosmos and something independent of it (The Divine Relativity, p. 90). Because Hartshorne’s literal inclusion of creatures within God jeopardizes their independence, W. A. Christian argues that God neither is the cosmos nor includes the cosmos. While, he says, the cosmos does not determine God’s activity, it always conditions it (An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1959, p. 407). In either case, the world is necessary to God, and God’s absolute transcendence is therefore compromised both through his necessity for the world and through a reciprocity of influence.

□ Process-theology subverts the love of God into a principle of universal causality which it dignifies with personal categories. This is evident, first and foremost, from its dismissal of the biblical motif of preferential election-love. In the Old Testament the election-love of God focuses exclusively upon Israel, and in the New Testament upon called-out believers who constitute the Church. On the basis of the divine creation of mankind viewed as an act of love, Williams gratuitously extends God’s election-love for Israel to all nations, and universalizes God’s election-love in the New Testament by first concentrating it in Jesus Christ as the Elect Man and then extending it through him to all mankind. Williams concedes that “perhaps there is nothing in scripture which explicitly identifies God’s act of creation as an act of love” (op. cit., p. 27). The Old Testament passages which he thinks suggest “that God’s care for all nations is the same character as that for Israel” (ibid.)—particularly Amos 9:7; Ruth; Isaiah 19:19–25; 42:1–6; 49:6—surely cannot be read in terms of divine covenant with a chosen people. The underlying motivation for rejecting God’s preferential-love is clearly speculative: Williams contends that it is sinful to withhold love from some (p. 142) and not to bestow the same love on all (pp. 121 f.). The latter premise would turn human matrimony into a shambles, and both premises would discredit preferential divine love as immoral. Williams nowhere discusses the implications of his premise for the Father’s unique love for the Son. That the Son is uniquely the object of the Father’s love is a truth fundamental to New Testament Christology (cf. John 5:20). Are we to demand the divine extension of this love to all persons as the precondition of divine moral integrity? And if so, what becomes of divine grace? A second way in which process-theology tends to dilute the love of God, even when it expounds God as Divine Love, is by eroding the miraculous in the interest of evolutionary process and scientific uniformity. Despite the process emphasis on God as a social being, the matter of personal immortality is left in doubt through the eclipse of Christ’s bodily resurrection. Whitehead declared his theory “entirely neutral on the question of immortality” (Religion in the Making, 1926, p. 111); Hartshorne is disposed to reject the concept of personal immortality (Philosophers Speak of God, Hartshorne and Reese, eds., p. 285). Contemporary process-theologians, on the other hand, are somewhat more conditioned by biblical expectations. Williams treats Christ’s resurrection as incidental to the incarnation, rather than as an external physical miracle; he emphasizes “a new situation in human existence” (op. cit., p. 168), reconciliation involving our “hope for eternal communion with God” (p. 169; cf. p. 188). W. Norman Pittenger seems to consider man permanently valuable to God and perhaps indispensable; one is tempted to ask how God managed so well before man was created. Says Pittenger: “Precisely because God is love and precisely because the achievement of greater good, especially through the activity of such personalized occasions as man may be said to be, is in itself a good, may not the achieved good include the agency by which it was achieved?” (Process Thought and Christian Faith, 1968, p. 81). But he adds that “there never has been … any strict logical demonstration of what the Christian is talking about … when he declares his faith in ‘resurrection,’” a term Pittenger translates into “some sort of persistence of the creaturely agent” (pp. 81 f.). Hamilton settles for Whitehead’s view that what survives death is not our personality but God’s as inclusive of our concrete experiences (op. cit., p. 141).

In discussing God’s relation to man, the process-theologians so strip away the distinctive biblical manifestations of divine personality—intelligible revelation, election-love, promise and fulfillment, and miracle—and so completely assimilate it to experiential routines that one can only ask: Is this idea of a personal God in process-metaphysics merely an emotional overtone or a bit of religious coloring added to cosmic theory? If, as Hamilton states, “the existence of a transcendent God is not intellectually essential” (ibid., p. 166), the existence of a non-transcendent God would seem even more dispensable on process-presuppositions. Indeed, Whitehead himself acknowledged that he had never fully worked out his doctrine of God, and Dorothy Emmet, in the preface to the second edition of her work on Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism (Macmillan, 1966), expressed uncertainty as to whether the reality of God is integral to Whitehead’s view of the world.

Let us assume, however, that process-theology does indeed seriously postulate divine personality on its own premises. We would still ask whether its view of God as a person is logically coherent. As I see it, process-theorists involve their God in a split personality. For all the criticism non-evangelical theologians level at Chalcedonian Christology, charging that the concept of two natures in one person destroys the integrity of the self, this problem is not only duplicated but escalated to the point of logical contradiction in the process-theory exposition of God. In brief, process-theology sacrifices God’s simplicity and unity as well as his supernaturalness.

What process-metaphysics emphasizes is that God in his nature is temporal and socially related; independent of the actual world in his abstract identity without being wholly external to it, he nonetheless includes the actual world in his concrete existence; at the same time the world is completely contingent and radically dependent upon him as its sole necessary ground.

When process-theologians depict the nature of God as at once eternal and unchanging and yet temporal and changing, as perfect and yet growing, their dialectical ambivalence becomes quite apparent. As Schubert Ogden puts it:

If God is the immanently temporal and changing One, to whose time and change there can be neither beginning nor end, then he must be just as surely the One who is also eternal and unchanging … the immutable ground of change as such both his own and all others.… That God is not utterly immaterial … but, on the contrary, is the eminently incarnate One establishes a qualitative difference between his being and everything else … His only environment is wholly internal, which means that he can never be localized in any particular space and time but is omnipresent. Hence just because God is the eminently relative One, there is also a sense in which he is strictly absolute … the absolute ground of any and all real relationships, whether his own, or those of his creatures [The Reality of God, London: SCM Press, 1967, pp. 59 f.].

To top it all off, Ogden assures us that a God who is growing is “infinitely more perfect” than a God who wholly actualizes all possibilities of being and value (p. 60, n. 97).

We might say, with tongue in cheek, that this theory is so intricate and complex that God would and could have disclosed himself only to twentieth-century metaphysicians to make his existence intelligible. What’s worse, however, is the theory’s questionable logical coherence. While Ogden insists that “it is clear at least in principle” that process-theology surpasses traditional Christian theism in “theoretical coherence” (ibid., p. 65), he offers no convincing demonstration. He condemns classical Christian theism for its so-called contradictory emphasis on the absolute and relative attributes of God. But then he proceeds to justify the dipolar nature of God in process-theology as expressing an authentically Protestant theology of “difference and identity” grounded in divine love (pp. 68 f.).

Far more is needed than verbal assurance to validate the statement that process-theory can “show how maximum temporality entails strict eternity; maximum capacity for change, unsurpassable immutability; and maximum passivity to the actions of others, the greatest possible activity in all their numberless processes of self-creation” (ibid., p. 65). One is tempted to call this a colossal fiction or to suspect that God has acquired a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ambivalence from his exposure to process-metaphysicians. At best, after the high promise of a coherent view, the process-theologians seem to offer us only a theology of squiggle. The dilemma of process-thought comes from trying both to maximize and to minimize the differences between the Superself and the human self, from trying to preserve and yet to prune such metaphysical attributes of God as eternity, immutability, and immateriality. Process-theology therefore not only loses the coherence of evangelical theism, but also substitutes for the biblical perfections of the self-revealed God merely abstract philosophical projections of the nature of deity.

Whatever else may be said about process-theology as a contemporary conceptuality of a theory of God, its deity is certainly not the God of the Bible, nor is the “new theism” demonstrably as coherent as evangelical Christianity. If the new conceptuality becomes an influential modern option, it will be only because contemporary man has taken to trading even his gods for periodically new models, or because those who know the true, abiding God have gone into hiding. If, at its crossroads of confusion, ecumenical theology now turns hopefully to process-metaphysics, it will finish the twentieth century no less disillusioned than when it tracked the trails of modernism, neo-orthodoxy, and existentialism.

Government subsidy to church schools is unconstitutional. Most state constitutions forbid it, as does the First Amendment to the federal Constitution, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.…” The prohibiton is clear and it is absolute. “No law” means no law. The Constitution does not say that, of course, if it is a matter of “helping children,” church benefit laws may be passed. It does not say that the ban need not apply to certain features of the church, such as its educational programs. It does not say that there can be an exception if the purpose is to help the poor. It says plainly: “no law.” It means that Congress is not to get into the area of religion, that it is to undertake nothing that pertains to religion. As the Supreme Court has expressed the meaning of the no-establishment clause in the 1947 case of Everson v. Board of Education:

The “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.… No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.

The Founding Fathers were well aware of the church-state problem and were determined that this ugly chapter of old-world history would not be reopened in the new. This was their purpose in drafting the First Amendment.

Now it is true that there are those who, for their own purposes, want to see this and other parts of the Constitution “interpreted away” by court decisions that would subvert their plain meaning. Can we really have respect for “law and order” when such thinking prevails? Let those who want government to finance (which is to establish) religion openly and honorably seek repeal of the First Amendment.

The current effort to charge the costs of sectarian education to the taxpayer is the first systematic attempt in over a century to impose the old-world pattern upon the new. It is a move that, if successful, would open in the United States a spate of sectarian rivalry and strife that our church-state arrangement has so far enabled us to avoid. It would plunge us immediately into our own American version of the Thirty Years’ War, deftly pitting group against group in a struggle for the tax dollar.

A microcosmic example of the religious bloc technique was seen recently in Youngstown, Ohio, where Catholics organized to defeat public-school levies because they weren’t getting their “share.” They were successful in shutting down the entire public system until funds became available to reopen. In Cincinnati, a Catholic-action spokesman declared that unless the administration makes an “iron-clad agreement [for tax benefits to nonpublic schools] we’re not going to be supporting the [school] levy.” The subsidy to sectarian schools would invite, not less of this sort of thing, but far more, as each religious group would commit its bloc of votes to getting its “share” of the melon.

What we have here, initially, is a “Catholic drive” to get a subsidy from government for its indoctrination program. The effort to round up Protestants and Jews to get out front is rather pathetic. But when government money becomes available it is a vacuum into which the church invariably rushes. Once the gold begins to flow into sectarian institutions, many religious groups will plunge into the competition for tax dollars, cleaving our culture neatly asunder. A pattern of voting by predatory sectarian blocs is politically debilitating. Where will this leave the country?

While not all the 241 religious denominations in this country would go for sectarian schools, as many as twenty assuredly would. This means twenty overlapping, competitive school systems—plus no one knows how many other private operations—each battling for its “share” of the public funds and competing for students.

Whatever this might be, it would certainly not be efficient. This is not a good way to manage education. Politically and economically, this is the age of merger. The small, competitive operation is passé. Small companies merge to form vast combines because, from every standpoint, they are more economical and more efficient in operation. To plead solemnly that this entire trend should be reversed in regard to education and that we should revert to multiple, competitive schools is unrealistic.

Then there is the matter of money. There are just so many tax dollars for the support of education. Most of this money comes from the local tax base, which is eroding faster than it is expanding. Certainly no greatly expanded funds for schools are in sight. The public schools, which educate over half the Catholics and much higher percentages of other sectarian groups—indeed, the vast majority of American children of all faiths and none—need every single dollar they can get.

The comments of Woodrow W. Zinser, superintendent of the Youngstown, Ohio, public schools, are enlightening. He said:

We kept going last year by depriving 2,000 youngsters of kindergarten, by depriving all students of extracurricular activities, by not having up-to-date textbooks.… Textbooks here are older than in any other system I’ve been in. The average book here is ten years out of date.… One science text … is so old that it predicts “Someday we will put a man in space!”

The Youngstown schools are typical of many of America’s public schools today. They are being short-changed. They deserve much more than they are getting. Now, to snatch from them a part of their present, inadequate support and divert it to church schools does not seem to make much sense. At a time of crisis like this, the basic needs should certainly be met first. There is no money for frills.

The proposed diversion of the public dollars to sectarian schools is so patently unfair to the general population as to be almost inhuman. It is a device for channeling more funds to the privileged suburbs and depriving the inner city. Many church schools are closing these days. Where are these closings taking place? Almost invariably in the inner city, where such operations do not pay. One of the popular proposals for aiding church schools is a per capita grant for each student. One can hardly conceive of a proposal more unfair or more socially undesirable than this. The funds would, of course, flow to the suburbs, where the all-white church schools congregate, while the inner city would be deprived of the little it has. For years the church schools have dumped their poor and their problem cases into the public schools as they sought to assemble a privileged and protected clientele. Of course they have a right to do this—but not at public expense.

But are not Catholics, and other sectarians who operate private schools, double-taxed? Are they not compelled to pay twice—once for the public schools they do not use and again for the sectarian schools they do use? No: they are single-taxed like everyone else. Many individuals and groups pay taxes for services they do not use. Bachelors pay for schools, though they have no children. Upright citizens pay for jails they never enter. The concept of “What’s in it for me?” obliterates the concept of the public good and makes organized society impossible. Indeed, the general public should not be double-taxed—once for the public schools and again for private, sectarian schools.

The issue is, as much as anything else, that of how best to manage education. Proponents of the sectarianschool subsidy argue for a catch-as-catch-can method. Let the clergy and other volunteers, with whatever ideology they may have to impart, erect and staff schools as they will, these proponents say. And let them do this with public funds, the only requirement being that they can assemble a group of children and at least passably run the operation.

Proponents of the common schools argue that institutions are one of the great definitive bases of our democratic culture. Not a heterogeneous, catch-as-catch-can conglomerate, but common schools—one great system serving all children without religious discrimination, bringing together all groups of the populace for learning and play. Here is one great system, yet with each part of it indigenous to its own community, taking root, rise, and direction from the people there.

Can there be any doubt which is the better way to operate the schools?

Moreover, the cry for subsidy to church schools is a cry for subsidy to the church. Be careful not to miss that fact! The two are one and the same. It so happens that 90 per cent of the church schools are Roman Catholic. Because they form such a large, solid block, they serve as an excellent example. Of the Catholic schools these observations can be made: There are not two entities, a parish church and a parish school. There is one entity only—a parish; one treasury only—a parish treasury; one management only—that of the local priest, who is appointed and directed by his bishop and the Pope. The teaching burden is carried by professional religionists under vows of poverty and total commitment to teach the Roman Catholic religion in every course that is offered.

Sectarians pleading for public subsidy often try to put a different face on the thing. They try to present their school as a 90 per cent public institution with only a pinch of religion added. But this is simply not true—and, indeed, ought not to be true! Actually, the parish school exists for exactly the same purpose as the parish church, of which it is an integral part. Pope Pius XI in his 1929 encyclical, The Christian Education of Youth, said that the purpose of the school is to “permeate” the entire curriculum, including physical education, with Christian—i.e., Roman Catholic—doctrine. The Roman Catholic people are even officially bound by their Canon Law 1374 to send their children to a Catholic school unless the bishop excuses them for good reason, such as the unavailability of a Catholic school.

True, this canon has been enforced only sporadically in the United States. But it has never been repealed, and it will not be repealed. It depicts the Catholic intention in education—every Catholic child in a Catholic school in order to insure his correct indoctrination.

To tax all the people for such a school is to tax them for the support of a church in its most significant ministry. This is the dreaded tax for religion. This is establishment of religion, by whatever name we may choose to call it.

On July 25, 1968, Pope Paul VI reasserted the ban of his church on the use of effective contraceptives for birth control. In his encyclical Humanae Vitae he also sought to persuade public officials to uphold this ban in public programs. When Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle of Washington, D. C., undertook to implement the encyclical in his diocese, he summoned 1,500 parochial-school teachers and directed them to teach this doctrine to students in their classes. If these denominational schools were to receive public subsidy, it is obvious that the taxpayers would be paying for this kind of teaching. Yet most church groups and non-church groups alike repudiate the ban on contraceptives as cruel and dangerous.

Those who coddle themselves with the thought that the church has changed or will change some of its obscurant views should ponder the statement of Pope Paul VI on December 4, 1968: “When it comes to its own teaching, the church is intransigent and dogmatic—at any cost.”

Some say that church schools save the public money. If so, the saving is hard to see. In every known instance where the policy of subsidizing such schools was begun, taxes have steadily risen as more and more tax funds were poured into their duplicating, competitive service. If there is any saving, the taxpayers are certainly not aware of it. In the long run it is much cheaper to operate one system serving the entire public than a number of systems with consequent overlapping.

Much has been said about the failure of the school. But what about the failure of the church that this demand for tax funds so eloquently depicts? In seeking the religious tax, the church acknowledges that it cannot evoke adequate voluntary response and must resort to the coercive power of the state. Having failed to win the voluntary allegiance of youth, the church seeks to accomplish its goal by use of compulsory-attendance laws and the coercive tax.

In this uninhibited lunge for tax support the churches are overreaching themselves. They are a wealthy and powerful enterprise. Tax exemption not only on their places of worship and their institutions, but also on both their active and passive business income, has enabled the churches of the United States to amass resources estimated to exceed $160 billion. Churches are already receiving more than $6.5 billion annually in government (mostly federal) subsidies. Now they are proposing a program that would probably double this figure and, indeed, approximate the total of the sums now being received by the churches in voluntary gifts.

What does this mean? It means a shift from voluntary religion toward a state church. The financing of a thing ultimately determines its nature. A church financed by the state will become a state church. It will become a part of officialdom, a long step removed from the people. This tends to reduce religion to formal observances without any real hold on the popular affection.

Last year the church enterprise in the United States declined in all vital categories except one. Attendance? It was off. Membership? It declined. Sunday schools and youth work? Way down. Seminary enrollments? Also down. You name it; the record was poor. But the churches had more money than ever before.

The plain truth is that the churches are already too rich. Success in their current subsidy drive would put us well into a condition of “religious inflation”—i.e., an overdevelopment of church institutionalism. It would soon create such a vast and powerful dimension that corrective action would be necessary.

What happened to Germany in the sixteenth century, to England in the seventeenth, to France in the eighteenth, and to Mexico and Russia in the nineteenth may well happen to us in the twentieth or twenty-first. State subsidy to the church is the sure way to bring it about. These countries had to have their corrective action and, if matters proceed as at present, we shall have to have ours. To put it bluntly: this could come to expropriation of the church.

The churches today are on the wrong track in many vital respects. But no more so than when they seek tax subsidies for their support. The great danger is that their current subsidy drive will succeed, thus helping them bring doom upon themselves.

Gordon Oosterman*

There is much in the American heritage that antidisestablishmentarians and I share. The concerns to “establish justice” and “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” are echoed in the phrase “with liberty and justice for all.” Christians have a way of identifying these ideals with the ringing call of the prophets of the Old Testament as well as with New Testament exhortations. This is all to the good. Keeping a biblical perspective on such concepts should keep us all from a ranting parochialism or a raving anti-Catholic or anti-Baptist polemicism.

Virtually all of us will agree on abstractions such as liberty and justice; it is when concrete, specific meanings are put into these terms that interest rises and emotions sometimes register a fever.

The matter of tax dollars and the non-public school sector is a case in point. I leave constitutional lawyers and others so disposed to question and quibble over the technicalities of whether pupils or parents or institutions should be the recipients. Also for them is the question of the grade levels—kindergarten through college—on which aid should be given. It would seem natural, though, that concern be greatest for those levels subject to state compulsory-attendance laws. In most states this takes in ages six to sixteen, the elementary and secondary years of schooling.

The substance of the matter is whether our society wishes to have a monolithic system of education, akin to the established church of bygone centuries, or a pluralistic system, as we now have with our churches and press. Happily, our churches are not handicapped by the existence of a state church. Another fine feature of our present system is that Christian and non-Christian families experience the same tax practices in regard to their homes. But when it comes to schools, well, that is different. Everyone gets taxed, but only those whose children attend the public—that is, the state—schools may benefit from their own educational taxes. Like the Dissenters, Baptists, and Covenanters of a former time, taxpayers have the choice of identifying with the favored established institution or making the best of their lot. Churches and schools are not identical institutions, you may well say; but need evangelical Christians be reminded of the close association between preaching and teaching? And as promoters of values or non-values in our own day, which have the greater influence, the churches or the educational institutions?

What I am suggesting is that the obviously inequitable system of the present be modified, within the bounds of state and federal constitutions, to do away with an established school system. I am not for abolishing the public school system; on the contrary, I wish to make it even better than it now is. And I have the same concern for every non-public school system.

It is not hard to anticipate the objections to such a proposal. Generally they will follow along these lines:

1. It would be unconstitutional. This is decided in only one domain: the courts. A badly written piece of legislation could and should be declared unconstitutional. A well-written law embodying the same intent could well be constitutional. If the courts are not competent to decide, surely the self-appointed proclaimers of what is or is not constitutional are even less qualified. The same Constitution that has prohibited a state church or press has never made provision for an established school system of the kind that ours has come to be. And even if it had done so, there are legitimate procedures for amending any constitution. Perhaps the current reconsideration of the archaic electoral-college system will lead to a constitutional amendment. Those who would ascribe to the original Constitution a special-revelational quality are guilty of twentieth-century idolatry.

2. Non-public schools are divisive. One wonders how seriously people make such a charge—one that is leveled also against the evangelical churches. The question, I would say, is one of loyalty: loyalty to a state-controlled secular educational system or to the principle that pluralism in education is a better guardian of freedom than is a state monopoly in education. For the Christian who believes that the Word of God demands that education for his children be God-centered, a further dilemma is posed: Is he to obey God or man? And if he obeys God, why should he be deprived of the benefits of his educational tax dollar?

3. It would benefit Roman Catholics. True. And a more just society would also benefit evangelical Christians, and I hope every other American (and Canadian) citizen also. I am for civil rights, not because my family is Negro, but because justice, decency, and Christian love demand it. I trust we all agree that a Christian church or a Christian school that supports racial discrimination is a contradiction in terms. And if a social system can be made more just, may the day come quickly, regardless of its beneficiaries—Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Negroes, Spanish-Americans, anyone. The Word of God leaves us with no alternative.

4. It would ruin the public school. This same argument was used to maintain the established church; it is essentially an argument for establishment and against freedom. For if freedom has any meaning at all, it means the opportunity to choose from among alternatives, including the alternative of an education consistent with one’s religious convictions. As Dr. Harold W. Dodds, former president of Princeton University, has written: “When it is no longer possible for a man to find a school for his boy except within a universal state system, it will be too late to worry about freedom.” Two further observations: First, if there would be a mass exodus from the public schools as a result of free parental choice in education, that would mean that public education is, at best, second choice for these parents. Second, if the public school system would collapse from the competition of other school systems, it must be in pretty bad shape. I, for one, do not believe it is.

5. It violates the principle of absolute separation of church and state. May I extend an open invitation to anyone, to any organization to define “absolute separation of church and state” and be willing to defend it? Sloganeering is an effective way to attract attention, as the advertising industry well knows. But Christian responsibility prohibits the hit-and-run technique; what is said must be defended on the basis of something other than repetition. Even the coiner of the phrase “wall of separation” was perceptive enough to refrain from defining this figure of speech. Neither expression, incidentally, appears in the Constitution itself; at best they belong in commentaries on the document.

6. The non-public schools really aren’t schools but are churches. Apparently none of the fifty state departments of education, nor the federal government, nor any branch of Canadian government, has been able to come to this conclusion. Those who attend non-public schools are not charged with truancy. A hospital does not cease to be a hospital because it is sponsored by the Presbyterian Church, the United Mine Workers, the Little Sisters of Jesus, or a local community. Name-calling serves only to confuse the issue. Referring to non-public schools as “sectarian” is a case in point. People of good taste refrain from speaking of Sectianity Today’s coverage of the meeting of the World Council of Sects at Uppsala. Non-established religiously oriented institutions are not ipso facto “sectarian.” As the courts have acknowledged a school remains a school, regardless of sponsorship.

7. Disestablishment of the public school would make for a conglomeration of small schools. Like evangelical churches maybe, “small and inefficient units.” Would someone tell me the ideal size for a family, a church, a school, an industry, or any other organization of human beings? If the quality of education is implied here, let the proof of quality education be in the pudding, not the cookbook. Standardized tests could be given to all pupils—and let the real students, regardless of school identification, step forward.

8. Non-public schools are really not thoroughly American. Why not ask the chaplains or commanders of American troops to substantiate this? Or perhaps the local mayor or police chief. Can they identify non-public school graduates as less loyal citizens? And while gathering the data, will someone please ascertain what “thoroughly American” or “thoroughly Canadian” means? When common definitions are agreed upon, discussion either ceases or takes on meaning.

9. Education is the responsibility of the state. Really? Educating my children is my religious and civic duty. The state has an obligation to provide education when parents are unwilling or unable to do so themselves. On the same basis the state establishes orphanages, but is it the duty of the state to raise children? Only by default of the parents is the state forced to do so.

10. It forces me to support a religion I don’t believe in. This is precisely the point in favor of a disestablished church as well as a disestablished educational system. The secularistic humanism I am now forced to support is not my faith; neither do I wish it to be the faith of my children. Let those who wish to have their children reared in such an educational climate be free to do so. But let the same option be given to the Jew, the Roman Catholic, the evangelical Christian, the atheist, and others in schools whose value systems are espoused by the parents of children attending these schools. The same unrestricted choices should exist for those who claim no religious or anti-religious bias but simply want what they consider “good education” for their offspring. The school as an extension of the home should be freely chosen by the parents. Authority for training children can be delegated, but responsibility never!

Those who would oversimplify the issue by saying that the problem is one of money are partially correct. The power to tax is the power to destroy, and with educational costs in all schools rising (necessitating higher taxes for the support of public schools), many a non-public school on both sides of the Canadian-American border is being forced to close shop. According to a 1967 Michigan School Finance Study, “eventually, through sheer financial pressure, most non-public schools could be forced to close.” Whether non-public schools were annihilated through legislative decision (swift death) or through economic strangulation (slow death) would not be important, for the end result would be the same. A presumably neutral government is destroying a religiously oriented segment of society, namely, religiously oriented education, for only the rich can compete against the overwhelming financial resources and power of the state. Those who favor a monolithic system in church, press, or education may rejoice at news of the demise of specific non-public schools, but I find it disconcerting. Analogies from church history leave me with a sense of uneasiness. The reversion to a single, monolithic school system on the part of nations that also have a monolithic political party system causes me apprehension. I am too skeptical or realistic to believe that within the coming decade the public schools of our land are going to be staffed, administered, and governed by Christians. Even less do I believe the myth of “local control” of public schools by Christians. Court prohibitions of prayers and the dropping of baccalaureate services do not reassure me. Nor was I exuberant at the news that in Boonton, New Jersey, Christmas carols were prohibited from the high-school Christmas concert. (Substitutions were “Babes in Toyland” moving on to “Moon River.”)

What of the future? Whose future? Admittedly neither the public nor the non-public schools are sacred cows. Closing down one group or the other scarcely seems responsible in a society such as ours, any more than closing parts of our cities would solve our housing and urban-development problems. But justice and liberty are more than contemporary social institutions. Truthfulness has a bearing, and one cannot help wondering about the remarks of a clergyman in a public meeting that “they” are “trying to get a firm hold on the public treasury” and that we should have “faith and hope in the public school … the cornerstone of our society.” If you can find biblical or other evidence for the validity of such a statement, please send me a letter or telegram.

I suspect my discussion has been long enough. What I have tried to say is that I do not believe that the full implications of justice for every American and Canadian citizen have yet been developed. The fewer real choices and options available, the smaller this thing called freedom becomes and the more questionable “liberty and justice for all.” To do nothing to disestablish existing situations in society that perpetuate unwarranted limitations upon religious, educational, and ethnic minorities is to help establish a society with the announced target date of 1984.

Before me is a copy of the Jerusalem Daily News. The edition is labeled “Extra,” and the date is Sunday, April 9, A.D. 30. The startling big-type headline reads, “NAZARENE’S TOMB FOUND EMPTY.” One of the column captions catches the eye with “‘Death Now Vanquished!,’ Cry Converts.” Another draws attention with “‘Body Stolen’—Pilate.”

The paper, it scarcely needs pointing out, is not from the archives of Israel. It can claim no kinship with the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is a fabrication of recent date. It is intended, not to fool anyone, but to convey, in the manner of contemporary journalism, something of the excitement—the quality of “breathlessness,” as one writer has put it—with which the story of the risen Jesus races through the New Testament.

The excitement survives, though less in both range and rapture than the numbers of today’s self-confessed Christians entitle us to expect. After World War II, during Martin Niemoeller’s first visit to America, a jaundiced newspaper reporter edged his assessment of Niemoeller with mild disgust: “Think of it, here is a man who spent three years in solitary confinement. When he comes out, all he can talk about is Jesus Christ.” Remove the huffiness of the speaker and the words stand as an exciting truth. The first disciples suffered through three anguished days when all the joy and hope they had known in Jesus were drained away. Then they came out of their prison. They came out of theirs because he came out of his. “Then … came Jesus and stood in the midst,” as we have it in John 20:19. Or, as John Masefield fashions it on the lips of a Roman soldier, in answer to the question of Pilate’s panic-stricken wife about the “escaped” Jesus, “Where is he now?”: “Let loose in the world, lady, where neither Roman nor Jew can stop his truth!”

So Easter was on its way—many-splendored and many-sided.

There is the Easter that rises historically. It would be truer to say that it towers. It soars. In saying this are we forgetting that some of this century’s distinguished theologians have shown a kind of ingenious reluctance to give our Lord’s alleged resurrection any status at all in the category of the “historical”? With a zeal worthy of a better cause they argue for the nonhistorical—that is to say, the “demythologized”—character of the rising from the dead, the empty tomb, and the post-resurrection “appearances.” The Bultmann position is well known: what is historical is not the resurrection as event but the resurrection as faith. It is unimportant whether Christ did in fact rise; what is all-important is that the disciples believed that he did.

Therefore, says Bultmann, it is the task of theological interpretation to sort out myth from history. This is held to be important because sitting there in the congregation or working yonder in the laboratory is the sophisticated man of today, dedicated to scientific objectivity to about the same degree that Ivory Soap claims to be pure. This “now” man simply cannot swallow it when you tell him that the Nazarene was buried on a Friday and on Sunday next was alive and in convincing communication with his friends. “It is impossible to make use of electric light and the radio, and, in case of illness, to claim the help of modern medical and clinical methods, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament’s world of spirits and miracles.” That is Professor Bultmann stating his case. In making this huge concession to what some contemporaries love to call “man come of age,” he shows, on the edge of his main point, that he has no fear of dogmatism. After all, “impossible” is a word that is neither tender nor tentative.

A position at once more reasonable and more responsive to the whole biblical-Christian outlook is that taken by Bishop Lesslie Newbigin in his highly contemporary book called Honest Religion for Secular Man:

It is really rather absurd to suggest, as Bultmann does, that a man who uses electric light cannot believe things like this. It is no more and no less difficult to believe in the resurrection after the invention of electric light than before. Nor is this belief made more or less credible by the abandonment of the belief that the universe has three storeys and the world is flat. All this talk is irrelevant to the issue. It has never at any time been possible to fit the resurrection of Jesus into any world view except a world view of which it is the basis. This does not answer all the questions, but it eliminates a certain amount of nonsense.

Our incredulity may batter our brains. Our skepticism may feed our pride. No matter. The historical and theological singularity of that first Easter remains. “Nothing can resist it,” as Bishop Charles Gore has contended in a weighty sentence, “except that sort of treatment of the narratives which can render insecure almost any historical evidence.”

There it is: the first Easter! Tall and tremendous. Witnessing incomparably that “Jesus is Lord”—Lord of death, and life, and righteousness, and forgiveness, and cleansing, with evidence held fast in his scarred hands that, though not coercive of faith, is handsomely conducive.

GOOD FRIDAY

The swift sun nibbles the frost

As the long morning shadows dwindle in fear.

This is a day for joy and triumph.

This is not a day for chatter

Though it rings over the garden

Where the blue jays scavenge the garbage

That was scattered for the Spring-hungry mouth

Of Rototiller and spade.

How incongruous is the raucous, cerulean flutter Of their carnage.

This is not a day for death,

With the fat-breasted robin Rounding the mud of her forming nest With a motherly bosom,

Her industry sacrificing unceasingly For the coming of birth.

This is a day that is wrong;

A morning that is out of joint;

It is a time, untimely,

And the white dove pinioned On a cruciform of plum already knobby with bloom

Is like cruel laughter.

This is not a day for our hands to be bloody And our eyes dilated with hate.

Let us tremble. Let us listen.

Let us wonder … and wait.

CHARLES A. WAUGAMAN

If the first of our four Easters rises historically, the second returns annually. The link between the two is obvious. If the first was inauguration, the second is celebration.

The Bible is concerned with mnemonics. If you doubt it, take any good concordance and look up the word “remember.” Annual feasts bulked big in Israel’s life of worship. Why a Passover every year? “Thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee” (Deut. 15:15).

Why an Easter every year? It would be a tawdry answer to say it is because the early Christians inherited the springtime festival of the pagans. Exactly ten years ago I celebrated Good Friday and Easter in New Zealand. And there it is autumn rather than spring. Does this mute the music or muffle the trumpets of resurrection assurance and joy among the Christians? Not at all. Indeed the editor of Auckland’s influential newspaper, the Star, wrote:

Since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, dated by some at Friday, April 7, A.D. 30, Easter has throughout Christendom had a significance that obliterates all others. It commemorates the central fact of the Christian religion and throughout the succeeding centuries has been the chief festival of the Christian year. Thus has a pagan celebration been transformed and hallowed. And thus have men and women refreshed and rededicated themselves in the ancient faith that brought new hope to the world—and eternally renews that hope.

Of the throngs that fill our churches on Easter Sunday we may take either of two views. We may say, This is empty conventionality—all these people showing up in their springtime finery, many faces we shall not see again in the sanctuary until the Christmas carols are sung. Or we may say, This is engaging opportunity—these people, with all their shallowness and churchly sentimentalism, will be exposed, so help us God, to the deathless music, and the praiseful prayers, and the convinced and convicting preaching, that gather richness and relevance from the Christ who “died for our sins and rose again for our justification.”

It may be that some ministers are suffering from a misplaced worry. Instead of wringing their hands because so many of these “religion in general” people will not be back for many a moon, the minister might well ask himself how much conviction, how much robust “good news” faith, he is prepared to share with them. There is little prospect of conversion when a groping William in the pew is met by a doubting Thomas in the pulpit.

The Easter that returns annually should glow with remembrance and gleam with hope.

Our third Easter is the one that recurs weekly. In that rather highly regarded Christian document of the second century known as the Epistle of Barnabas we read: “Therefore also we keep the eighth day with joyfulness, the day also on which Jesus rose from the dead, was manifested and ascended into heaven.” That Easter comes once a year is true, but it is not the whole truth. For the Christian community it comes once a week.

Some episodes in Christian experience bear repeated telling. This is true, I judge, of what happened one day in the study where England’s renowned preacher, R. W. Dale of Birmingham, was preparing an Easter sermon. Suddenly a truth that he had held for years—“the third day he arose again from the dead”—caught fire within him. He no longer held it; it held him. With a sort of ineluctable clairvoyance he saw it, felt it, was mastered by it—this aliveness of the risen Jesus. Later he set down these words in his diary:

“Christ is alive,” I said to myself: “alive!” And then I paused: “alive!” And then I paused again: “alive!” Can that really be true? Living as really as I myself am? I got up and walked about, repeating: “Christ is living! Christ is living!” At first it seemed strange and hardly true, but at last it came upon me as a burst of sudden glory; yes, Christ is alive. It was to me a new discovery. I thought that all along I had believed it; but not until that moment did I feel sure about it. I then said, “My people shall know it. I shall preach it again and again until they believe it as I do now.”

After this experience, Dr. Dale insisted that each Sunday the congregation should sing at least one hymn that struck the resurrection note.

Easter may be seen in yet another guise. We may think of it as the Easter that remains continuously. Viewed historically, even the essential Easter can be remote. Viewed annually, the festive Easter can be merely a commemoration. Viewed weekly, the repetitive Easter can be an all but hidden bow to antiquity. Somehow a link must be fashioned, a circuit must be closed, between A.D. 30 and now, between last Easter and now, between last Sunday and now, that will give to Christ’s conquest of death the dynamic immediacy and continuity we find it had for the New Testament Christians.

Failure here gives rise to the complaint that Paul Scherer once voiced in a sermon: “We Christians seem to have developed a kind of memorial complex.… I grow a bit weary of anniversaries. Religion is like marriage in this; it can fall away until it becomes little more than a celebration of anniversaries. It never seems to occur to some couples that they could do more than just remember that they were happy once.”

Yet there have always been cadres of Christians who have lived in the now of a dynamic union between the living Lord and themselves. Here in truth applies that startling thought James Denney once expressed: “The early Christians did not remember Jesus.” Without its context it is a puzzler. What the revered theologian meant was that the disciples we meet in the Acts and the Epistles lived chiefly in the consciousness of Christ’s presence with them, not on the fading stimulus of recollections of the past.

There is a hint of this in one of the resurrection narratives. When Luke tells the story of our Lord’s appearance to the two shattered devotees who were trudging along the Emmaus Road, he says, “Jesus himself drew near and went with them” (24:15). Easter is more than a parade to; it is a pilgrimage from. From the shrine on Sunday to the shop on Monday. From the church where the hymns are sung to the chamber where the legislation is made. From the pews where the prayers are said to the playground where good sportsmanship is shown.

This perpetual history is more than hinted at by the risen Master himself: “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matt. 28:20). Knowing full well that the early Christians took this seriously and, on the whole, radiantly, Luke the historian begins the Book of Acts by saying, “The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach” (1:1). Paraphrase it: “All that I told you in the book of Luke is but the beginning of Christ’s mighty doings and directings!”

And something hugely more than a hint of Easter’s perennial vitality was dropped by St. Paul when he prayed for the Christians at Ephesus that they might know “how very great is his power at work in us who believe. This power in us is the same as the mighty strength which he used when he raised Christ from death, and seated him at his right side in the heavenly world.… God put all things under Christ’s feet, and gave him to the church as supreme Lord over all things” (Eph. 1:19, 20, 22, Good News for Modern Man).

But now the secret! Now that link, that closing of the circuit between past and present, between Easter formal and Easter functional. What is it? Twice, in the immediate setting of our quotation from Ephesians, Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit. The God whose saving acts, made known objectively in our incarnate Lord—birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension—are made known subjectively, immediately, situationally if you please, by and through His holy Spirit.

Regrettably, there is a pseudo-sophistication, found even in our churches, that regards all conversation and witness about the Holy Spirit as hopeless mystification. We should not be intimidated. Such sophisticates are plagued not by too much intellection but by too little. They should try tracing what happens when an idea passes from one brain to another. The nonphysical and the physical are related by processes that are incredibly mysterious.

Little more mysterious—in principle, perhaps not at all—is the process by which the Spirit of God, whose norm of action is what we see in Jesus Christ and whose resources infinitely transcend our own, illuminates the minds, focuses the emotions, and energizes the wills of those who are open to his action. This is Easter now. It is the Easter between Easters. Indeed it is the Easter between Sundays—where life must be lived by dying, where self must be crucified into conquest, where Christian presence becomes really authentic in high demand and lowly drudgery. It is where G. Campbell Morgan’s magnificent apostrophe to his own soul leaps into reality:

Oh, my life, thou shouldest keep perpetual Lent within the sacred chamber of thy being, and everlasting Easter on thy face!

Last january four dozen suffragan and assistant bishops wrote to the London Times warmly commending the current Anglican-Methodist unity scheme. Possibly the reason why it took so many of them to do it was that, like the old lady whom the Boy Scouts helped across the street, the Church of England doesn’t want to go (see “Being Ambiguous on Purpose,” Current Religious Thought, July 19, 1968).

At least a substantial part doesn’t. A vote taken this year in rural deaneries of the influential London diocese has shown that 53 per cent voted against the proposed Service of Reconciliation, and 51.6 per cent against the scheme as a whole. In many other dioceses there is a majority in favor, but overall the result has fallen short of the 75 per cent majority their church has fixed as a prerequisite of the scheme’s implementation. Both churches will take the vital vote on July 8.

Let no one imagine, however, that the establishment has admitted to backing the wrong horse. Too many episcopal shirts have been put on it. As well as the lesser luminaries mentioned above, all but one or two of the forty-three diocesan bishops favor the scheme. The loftiest Methodist brass concurs; like Winston Churchill on an occasion almost as momentous, they are not interested in defeat or retreat. As usual, my friend Dr. Jim Packer of Oxford, following Bernard Manning, has le mot juste, warning against an unthoughtful ecumenical rush. He tells of the Way-side Pulpit outside a church that displayed the stirring words: “Anywhere, provided it be forward—David Livingstone.” Underneath someone had added: “And so say all of us—The Gadarene Swine.”

Most of the objections to the present scheme are centered around the Service of Reconciliation, particularly the vexed point of whether this constitutes ordination for Methodist ministers. Objections to the original wording were considered, and a revised version published two years ago. It did little to resolve the controversy, which chiefly concerns the following section:

Then shall the Bishop lay his hands on the head of each of the Methodist ministers in silence. After he has laid hands upon all of them the Bishop shall say, “We receive you into the fellowship of the Ministry in the Church of England. Take authority for the office and work of a Priest, to preach the Word of God and to minister the holy sacraments among us as need shall arise and you shall be licensed to do. We welcome you as fellow Presbyters with us in Christ’s Church.”

Therein is the sore point. That Dr. Ramsey appreciates this was seen in his January convocation address. Here was one occasion when the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury could not have been accused of sitting on the fence. His clear partisanship on a religious occasion is a rare spectacle, and I am glad I was present to hear him. He wanted this merger to go through. In saying so he mercifully did not reiterate that if-we-can’t-unite-with-the-Methodists-who-can-we-unite-with line, out of which he has got good mileage in the past.

In its place, however, was another massive question-begger, another primatal “if.” Said Dr. Ramsey: “It won’t be surprising if other churches in the Anglican Communion do not take us very seriously if, having exhorted them to seek unity on these lines, we are unwilling or unable to do it ourselves.” This unhappily worded statement suggests a wrong motive for action, implies that the Church of England is already in some sense morally committed to the scheme, leaves no room for a courageous change of heart, and advocates uniformity more than unity.

But this point came later in his address, almost as an incidental. Very properly the archbishop spent much time discussing the Service of Reconciliation. “Of course it resembles an ordination,” he said, in reply to a common objection. Instead, however, of going on to say where it is not an ordination, he veered off to put the whole matter on his own terms. Three questions, he suggested, are important: “What is God asked in this service to do?” (which seems to me to be the very point in dispute). “Is God able to do what he is asked in this service to do?” (Who could possibly say no to the question in that form?) “What will be the result for the recipients if God does what he is asked to do?” (All right, but what will be the result if he doesn’t?)

“If we can answer these questions,” continues Dr. Ramsey (how they are answered is evidently of no moment), “we shall be saying a great deal, and perhaps saying as much as needs to be said, even though we disclaim saying within the service what the relative needs of the recipients are and what particular gifts God gives in each case to meet those needs.” The point Dr. Ramsey is tortuously trying to make here is dependent first on the validity of, and lack of ambiguity in, his questions—and then on his getting to them the answers he wants.

Thereafter he says that bishops, elsewhere referred to as “the historic episcopate,” are “necessary for a reunited Christendom.” This means that conversations with the Church of Scotland should be concerned chiefly with the terms on which the Kirk will accept bishops, so that what is lacking in Presbyterian ministers may be put right. While appearing to state that ministers of non-episcopal churches are “real ministers of God’s Word and sacraments,” Dr. Ramsey more than appears to concur in the view that all ministries are not “equally sufficient.” All must be made “equally and acceptably” presbyters in God’s Church. “I have done a good many things of doubtful morality,” admits the Archbishop of Canterbury, “but I am sure that if I am allowed to share in the Service of Reconciliation this will not be one of them.” There is an element of the bathetic in that. The primate’s past is his own affair, and is a red herring here.

Toward the end of his convocation address we find Dr. Ramsey hitting an eschatological note. This might at other times be welcomed, but I doubt if it is really helpful at this stage to make tendentious allusions to “the judgment” in the context of those who reject the merger with the Methodists.

Moreover, the primate admits that “our present understanding of the episcopate and of the Eucharist may be but a shadow of the understanding which may be ours in the future plenitude of the Church.” Precisely. If present understanding is indeed so shadowy, one might ask why earlier, in order to build up his argument, he had advocated hardline Anglicanism with regard to bishops and intercommunion.

The archbishop’s closing sentence, which immediately followed on the words quoted above, is: “It is in these ways that I think a voice is saying, ‘Speak to the children of Israel that they go forward.’” While hesitating to question any special archiepiscopal revelation, one might ask whether the same children of Israel did not discover the folly of going forward when the cloud was still.

J. D. DOUGLAS

We are approaching the Easter season with its message of triumphant resurrection and the forgiveness of sin. In a world that is torn by war, racial conflict, injustice, and hatred, no one can avoid asking whether Christianity is relevant and, if so, why it hasn’t resolved these problems. But two things must be considered. The first is that Christianity has never been embraced or tried by most of the people. The second is that no one has ever articulated a religious option that equals or betters the Christian one. It is still the world’s only hope because it is God’s only way. Wherever Christianity has been welcomed and tried, it has answered man’s spiritual quest and improved his environment.

We welcome Carl F. H. Henry back to our pages with an essay on process-theology as well as with a column entitled “Footnotes,” which he will write every other issue. As yet he has not announced what he will do when his sojourn in Cambridge, England, comes to a close at the end of the summer.

We thank our readers for their interesting letters with suggestions as well as criticisms and commendations. Keep them coming!

The second Africa Evangelical Conference gave the Association of Evangelicals of Africa and Madagascar a clear, moderate position between the rightist and leftist forces at work in the Christian Church in Africa today. The position, roughly comparable to that of “neo-evangelicals” in the United States, allows for creative scholarship and social responsibility without compromising the Gospel.

The 160 delegates, representing eight national evangelical fellowships and several missions and churches in nineteen African countries, met in the lush green hills of Limuru early last month to appraise the evangelical thrust on the continent and to discuss the opportunities and problems of communicating “The Unchanging Word to a Changing Continent.”

Africa’s first continent-wide conference of evangelicals, also held at Limuru, gave birth three years ago to the AEAM, because delegates felt the need for an active fellowship among those who hold the same Bible-based doctrines, as a means of united witness and action.

But this second conference (concurrent with the association’s General Assembly) has given the association its form and program, and may prove to have been its real founding. Confidence and hope, observed acting Secretary General Eric Maillefer, replaced the uncertainties and doubts of the first conference; and Africans came forward to make the evangelical cause in Africa their own.

Declaring their “solemn responsibility before God to ‘earnestly contend for the faith’ in Africa and Madagascar,” the conference issued strongly worded statements against the “current dangerous trends of the Ecumenical Movement as evidenced in the increased efforts of liberals and neo-universalists to capture Africa and Madagascar,” and against “the dangers inherent in the United Bible Societies’ present policy of collaboration with the Roman Catholic Church.”

While rejoicing in the use of Scriptures by Catholics on a wider scale than ever before, the conference warned that the societies’ present policy will endanger evangelical Africans’ support for the societies, and may interrupt the cordial relationships in translation and distribution.

The ecumencial movement, the conference said, has been mounting steady pressure to break down the distinction between orthodox evangelical theology and liberal theology and practice. It has also been enticing African Christian youth by offering them scholarships for training in institutions with theologically liberal tendencies.

The conference therefore urged the association to establish a scholarship fund for theological studies and asked all evangelical Bible colleges and institutions to make a concentrated effort to instruct their students concerning the dangers of ecumenism and liberalism. It also called upon Christian workers to increase their knowledge of biblical theology. It urged the Association of Bible Institutes and Colleges, an AEAM affiliate, to move rapidly toward establishment of an accreditation association.

Papers and discussions centered on how the young evangelical church in Africa can reshape itself to better serve and challenge this rapidly changing continent, and what workable guidelines it should give for young Africa’s anguished search for stability and fulfillment.

“Africa is going through her teething period,” observed the Rev. David I. Olatayo, outgoing president of AEAM. “You can scarcely predict who your head of state will be tomorrow,” he added lightheartedly.

Deep-voiced and confident, Olatayo occasionally broke into the broad, engaging smile that often belies this Nigerian’s deep spiritual agony for the current suffering in his country. He outlined the political, economic, social, and religious consequences of the rapid wind of change blowing across the continent, “showing Africa’s need for the unchanging Word of God.”

General Director Donald R. Jacobs of the Mennonite Board in Eastern Africa drew excited comments, especially from Africans, when he said the modern missionary movement in Africa has given the Gospel a Western tint. “Unless the life of Christ finds expression in local cultural terms,” he said, “the task of evangelism and nurture cannot go forward.”

In the discussion that ensued, it became plain that the traditional definition of the indigenous church—self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating—is deficient in Africa. Many churches in African hands are distrusted because they still remain essentially foreign in form and content. To indigenize the form and content of church life and teaching is a delicate task. It might lead to syncretism, in which Christ shares the throne with other gods, yet it remains the most urgent and challenging obligation for the AEAM.

“Forces Opposing the African Church” were listed by incoming AEAM President Samwel O. Odunaike. paganism, Islam, Communism, Roman Catholicism, materialism, nationalism, and schism.

Criticizing missionaries who have presented Christianity as an exclusive preserve of the white man who has come to share his inheritence with the unfortunate black man, Odunaike acidly added that his African brethren have not helped the situation very much. “At times,” he said, “we have relied overmuch on funds from our foreign missions and at the same time we get annoyed when he who pays the piper begins to dictate the tune. At other times, we have shrunk from accepting responsibility because of the price it involves.”

This combination, Odunaike said, spurs extreme nationalists to call for complete Africanization of religion. Islam and paganism have also cashed in on these circ*mstances, claiming that Christianity is a foreign religion. Odunaike called on Christians in Africa and foreign missionaries to accept this sobering truth: True Christianity is foreign to any country or race; therefore no church leadership can look toward color or country of origin. ‘Then we shall begin to talk about the church in Africa and not the African church.”

The conference urged an annual day of prayer for personal heart-searching, submission to the Holy Spirit, and total commitment to evangelism.

At business sessions the association established a literature board in Nairobi to improve training and distribution and work toward an international periodical; a seminary extension program; scholarships for theological studies; a relief fund for the distressed; a committee for evangelism; and an information service on suitable Christian-education materials available in English.

African evangelicals face a future of unlimited opportunities and monumental problems. Some mission fields are closing, but new ones are springing up among city-dwellers, university students, refugees, and others. The government radio head in the Congo-Kinshasa is reported to have told a missionary: “Our people have heard too much politics; they need to have something to calm their hearts, so we are giving you free radio time.”

“Our main purpose is not just to oppose dangerous trends,” said the incoming secretary of AEAM’s executive committee, Joash Okongo, “but to exploit the existing opportunities in order to advance the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.”

The rich diversity of African evangelicalism is at once its great strength and great weakness. Scattered all over this vast continent, the evangelical churches were founded by men from many different countries, many cultures, many mission boards, and many denominations.

But, as the AEAM’s chief founder, the Rev. Kenneth L. Downing, observed at the end of the conference, “The concept of spiritual fellowship among evangelical believers is spreading throughout the continent; denominational boundaries are forgotten when they come together in this way for ‘Fellowship in the Gospel.’”

Miscellany

Notre Dame University President Theodore Hesburgh said any campus protesters who substitute “force for rational persuasion” will be subject to suspension, expulsion, or action by civil police.… The Roman Catholic club at the State Agricultural and Technical College, Farmingdale, Long Island, was suspended for reciting a voluntary Mass in a dormitory lounge.… Girls at Queens College (Southern Presbyterian) are boycotting required chapels.

The federal war on poverty granted the National Council of Churches’ Mississippi Delta Ministry $367,777 for education, housing, and day care.

A Minnesota district judge barred Hamline University (United Methodist) from joining a lawsuit over the finances of the late Scotch Tape millionaire Archibald Bush. The school claims Bush promised it $10 million.… South Carolina’s Supreme Court ruled a United Methodist congregation can’t take its property when it secedes.… Six Protestant agencies filed U. S. Supreme Court briefs supporting the FCC’s “fairness doctrine” for broadcasters. Broadcast powers have filed on the other side, backing a fundamentalist station in Red Lion, Pennsylvania.

Indian members of the Native American Church want Idaho’s legislature to legalize their rites, which use peyote. And some Pueblo Indians seek exemption from “due process” legislation because their villages are theocracies.

A Catholic-opposed bill in Montana would permit voluntary sterilization of the mentally retarded.

The Luis Palau team recorded 814 professions of faith in two local church crusades in Mexico City.

Two dozen Catholic bishops, meeting in Rio, urged Brazil’s military to return the nation to democratic control.

A poll in Communist Yugoslavia showed 39 per cent of those over 18 believe in God.

British biologists took human eggs from ovaries removed for medical reasons and successfully fertilized one in a test tube. A Vatican spokesman called it “immoral and absolutely illicit.”

A poll among engaged Swedes showed 92 per cent of those in the state Lutheran church do not oppose premarital relations, and 80 per cent in the free churches.

Catholic sources claim Pope Paul refused an audience to South Viet Nam’s Vice-President Nguyen Cao Ky.

Italian cults led by an ex-priest and a prophetess said the world would end February 20. It didn’t. Their new deadline is March 17.

Personalia

President Charles Boddie of American Baptist Theological Seminary, Nashville, will be the first Negro professor at a Southern Baptist seminary. He will teach ethics at the New Orleans school.… Theologian Clark Pinnock announced he would leave that campus for Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, weeks after a resigning teacher charged Pinnock with sparking a conservative turn at the New Orleans seminary.

Lawrence Cardinal Shehan asked Monsignor F. Joseph Manns, pastor of Baltimore’s second-biggest Catholic parish, to quit because he hasn’t carried out Vatican II-type renewal.

The Texas Council of Churches, joined last month by Roman Catholics, has fired migrant-worker organizer the Rev.

Edgar Krueger and is pulling out of the VISTA program that Krueger boosted. The council also backed off from a lawsuit against the Texas Rangers for brutality against Krueger in a May, 1967, incident.

The leaders of U. S. Inter-Varsity, Canadian Inter-Varsity, Campus Crusade, the Navigators, Youth for Christ, and Young Life met three days in Denver, then “declared their desire to love, aid, and strengthen one another and the movements they represent.”

Anglican Bishop C. Edward Crowther, who was expelled from South Africa for opposing apartheid, is replacing Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore as director of Operation Connection.

Retiring Director Stanley Stuber of the YMCA’s Association Press was replaced last month by veteran staffer Robert W. Hill.… Managing Editor Ron E. Henderson of motive (which just lost its editor) will become a religious book editor at Macmillan.

Jennifer Albright, 19, is belly-dancing at private parties to help put husband Stephen through Bangor Theological Seminary.

Baptist minister Joseph T. Wingate, 35, was found guilty of embezzling $1,429 from a war-on-poverty child center in Virginia which he directed.

Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Hatch of Westmont, New Jersey, read in the American Baptist Crusader about a 7-year-old who needs a liver transplant to live, and made plans to donate the organ of their young son, who has a malignant brain tumor.

Josiah H. Beeman V, long active in Northern California Democratic politics, was appointed international-affairs secretary of the United Presbyterian Church. Beeman, noted for leftist views, is slated to help the church “shape its ministries and public influence to help bring peace and healing to the nations.”

James A. Christison was promoted to executive secretary of the reorganized American Baptist Home Mission Societies. Christison, a lay accountant, succeeds retiring William H. Rhoades.

Dr. Harvey Henry Guthrie, Jr., was installed as dean of the Episcopal Theological School at Cambridge, Massachusetts. The 45-year-old Guthrie has taught Old Testament at the school since 1958.

Thirty-seven-year-old Johannes Gultom is the first Indonesian to be elected a Methodist bishop.

U.S.-trained United Church of Christ minister Ndabaningi Sithole was sentenced to six years in prison on charges of conspiracy to murder Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith. Sithole, a leader in a banned black party, denied the charges.… The UCC’s U. S. social-action agency recently backed the “legitimate claims” of black liberation units in Portuguese colonies.

Two American rabbis joined 2,000 Soviet Jews in a seventy-fifth birthday tribute to Moscow’s Chief Rabbi Yehuda Leib Levin, but eight Israeli rabbis declined invitations.

DEATHS

KARL JASPERS, 86, German-born creator of a major strand of existentialist thought which sought a course of “philosophical faith” between the irrationalism of Kierkegaard’s “leap” and Heidegger’s brand of existentialism whose logical outcome many saw in Heidegger’s espousal of Nazism. Jaspers’s anti-Nazism cost him a philosophy chair at Heidelberg, which he regained after the war, then left for a post in Base!, where he died last month.