Page 5961 – Christianity Today (2024)

The United States of America is not the Kingdom of God. Nor is any other nation or state. Only great confusion can result if we insist on applying biblical teachings concerning the Kingdom of God to kingdoms of this world. Yet this is precisely what many sincere Christians have been doing in the discussion of the Viet Nam tragedy.

The problem arises from the fact that a Christian is a member of the Kingdom of God and at the same time of his own worldly kingdom. A Christian who is a United States citizen, for example, has obligations—biblical obligations, it should be emphasized—both to the Kingdom of God and to the United States of America.

The Kingdom of God is ruled by God. Its primary objective is to spread the knowledge of the redeeming love of God that is revealed in his Word and above all in his incarnate Son, Jesus Christ. Its method of achieving that objective is love—sacrificial love like that of its Master.

A member of the Kingdom is obligated to know and to do the will of God. In sum, this is expressed in “the first and greatest commandment,” which is, as Jesus Christ pointed out, “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and mind, and strength, and … your neighbor as yourself” (see Matthew 22:36–40). The detailed specifications of loving God and neighbor are set forth in the Bible, which is the Word of God. The Christian is under obligation to study that Word “for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). It is particularly the Christian’s duty to study the life of Jesus Christ, who is our God-given example of life that is wholly committed to the will of God, so that we “may walk as that One walked” (1 John 2:6). God discloses his will for his people through his Word.

The kingdoms of this world are ruled by men. It is a scriptural teaching that these earthly rulers rule by the will of God, but this does not mean that they are knowingly obedient to the will of God. Rather, they are designated as a “terror to evildoers,” a restraining force upon the satanic powers of disorder and lawlessness in this present age (cf. Rom. 13:1–7; 1 Pet. 2:13, 14; 2 Thess. 2:1–10). The primary objective of a worldly kingdom is its “national interest,” which is defined by its rulers. The method of achieving that objective is force (which does not necessarily, nor even primarily, mean war), scripturally described as “the sword.”

A member of a worldly kingdom is obligated to obey its ruler. In a state established on law and justice, obedience to the ruler is better defined as obedience to the laws of the state. Individual human rights, as well as the corporate rights of the society, are set forth in that law. In a state ruled by a dictator or by a small council whose will is supreme, obedience is defined by the will of the ruler. Individual rights are usually suppressed. Only the rights of the state (as determined by the ruler) are important. In either case, it is a citizen’s duty to discover what the law or will of the ruler is, and to obey.

The Christian member of an earthly kingdom, however, finds that the will of God (as he understands it) is sometimes—perhaps often—in conflict with the will of the state. It is at this point that the greatest problems arise. We cannot avoid this conflict, for this present age is satanic. “If they have persecuted me they will also persecute you.” “In the world you shall have tribulation.”

Sometimes the conflict arises because of misinterpretation of the Word of God. The law of God says, “Thou shalt not kill.” A Christian policeman is armed with a revolver and told to use force in apprehending a dangerous felon, if necessary to “shoot to kill.” He at once feels he is being ordered to disobey the will of God. Further study of the biblical word, however, shows that the law really says, “Thou shalt not murder.” Moreover, the very law of God that forbids murder expressly commands that under certain circ*mstances man is to be killed (compare Exodus 20:13 with Exodus 21:12–17). Laws of all nations make a clear distinction between “killing” and “murder.” However, if the Christian has not come to this understanding of the law of God, he can either refuse to be a policeman or as a policeman refuse to obey the order and then take the consequences. He has no biblical authority to tell the state it must renounce the use of force in order to preserve law, or to demand that the law of the state be changed to disarm policeman. This would be to take the “sword” from the “magistrate”—and the bearing of the sword by the magistrate is recognized and approved by the Word of God.

The use of force in international relations is an extension of the use of force in state matters. At the state and local level, the power of the sword is exerted to defend the laws of the state. At the international level, the power of the sword is exerted to achieve some goal in the national interest. A citizen may be ordered into the armed forces, armed, and later given a command to “Fire!” The same conflict arises as in the case of the policeman. The same set of reasons apply. But there is possibly one additional area of conflict. This comes through the introduction of the concept of “unjust law.”

At this point, the Christian has another obligation, namely, to defend the existence of law and justice in the worldly kingdom. He may, for conscience’ sake, refuse to take the sword. He may exert his effort to have unjust laws changed and unjust national objectives withdrawn. He may use every legitimate effort to convince the ruler (in the United States, the governing powers) that the laws are unjust or the war is unjust. But he has absolutely no scriptural authority to incite to anarchy.

Anarchy is satanic. God does not will anarchy in this present world; he wills order. Satan is the one who seeks anarchy, in order to oppose the will of God. Anarchy is the method used by a minority to impose its will on the majority. Anarchy was the method used in the Russian revolution, with the result that less than 15 per cent of the people took over the rule. Anarchy was used to take over China. Sometimes fancy names are used to describe anarchy, as when a “Young Guard” seeks to wipe out the “customs” (= laws) of the past. Whatever the original motives—and some of them may well have been unobjectionable or even desirable—the riots in Watts, Chicago, and elsewhere degenerated into anarchy. One leader of the Viet Nam Moratorium said on television that if this method doesn’t get action from the President, “we will use other methods.” This is anarchistic. By no stretch of the imagination, much less of sound biblical exegesis, can any form of anarchy be equated with the will of God.

The Christian way is to enter into orderly discussion, to seek to influence the legally chosen representatives in a representative form of government, to show the way of Christ by word and by example, to suffer for righteousness’ sake, and to pray for the coming of the Prince of Peace, at whose coming the kingdoms of this world shall become the Kingdom of our God and of his Christ.

Two current questions provoke immediate visceral reactions—sex education in the schools and gun-control laws. The response may be wild—transcending logic and even the facts—or it may be reasoned, but always it is marked by intense conviction.

In the matter of sex education in the public schools, it appears evident that the real issue is not whether there will be such programs but rather what kind of instruction will be offered, to whom it shall be given, and at what age. The data from polls indicate that the majority of the American people favor sex instruction in the schools. Some want it because they believe it will reduce the problems of venereal disease and premarital pregnancy and improve social conditions. Others are convinced that it is essential for marriage stability, will shield young people from the influence of harmful information from unreliable sources, and will diminish prurient interest. Undoubtedly many parents who opt for sex education in the schools do so because they feel it will relieve them of a responsibility they hesitate to shoulder, an embarrassing duty they shrink from facing. By delegating this responsibility to the schools they are delivered from a sense of guilt and can disclaim blame for any untoward consequences.

Some people are opposed to sex education in the schools regardless of what it consists of and who does it. For them the question is not one of curriculum or teachers or value judgments about extramarital sex. Even if the materials used were wholly acceptable, they would still hold that sex education has no place in the schools.

Many people are indignant, however, not because sex is being taught, but because of the abuses that have sometimes accompanied this teaching. They fear it is getting out of hand morally, socially, and religiously. More than a score of state legislatures are now considering the subject, and undoubtedly some of them will act either to ban or to sharply curtail such programs.

Old wives’ tales have been circulated around the country about offensive acts stemming from the teaching of sex. When these have been discounted, enough reliable data remains to justify the angry complaints of aroused parents. Unfortunate incidents should be anticipated in any program dealing with sex. The nature of the subject will always prove attractive to people who have abnormal drives or psychological hangups about sex. hom*osexuals, voyeurs, exhibitionists, and other deviates will be tempted to join the teaching ranks in an attempt to gain either an outlet for their sexual drives or a platform from which to propagandize for public acceptance of their irregularities.

One minister who became actively concerned about the sex-education program of his school system wrote us of his experiences. One of his complaints was that though evangelicals are criticized for lack of involvement in social matters, when he got involved and took exception to what was being offered, he was criticized for doing it. What was expected of him, he says, was acquiescence, the uncritical acceptance and endorsem*nt of a program to which he objected. He complained that he and his group got little or no help from school administrators, and that educational materials they wished to scrutinize were withheld from them. Eventually, of the twelve high-school teachers considered a problem in his community because of their erotic approach to sex (one of them encouraged students to kiss her, fondle her, and express themselves in any way they saw fit), nine were dismissed, and the sex-education program in the schools was halted.

Conversely, a teacher from a Bible school in Oregon wrote saying: “In our area, the city of Portland, the sex-education program is an excellent one, worthy of support by evangelicals.”

Squarely in the middle of the current controversy stands the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States. All sorts of charges have been broadcast about this organization, and its opponents have subjected its leadership to exhaustive investigation. As a result, considerable misinformation has been spread abroad. Dr. Mary S. Calderone, the executive director of SIECUS, has been attacked vigorously, and her husband’s activities have been used against her in campaigns that have sometimes reached the point of vilification. All this has of course produced a defensive reaction by supporters of SIECUS.

If one were to decide for or against sex-instruction programs solely on the basis of SIECUS, a strong case could be made for scrapping them. No one can deny that the idea behind SIECUS—that children need instruction in this area because parents and churches have not fulfilled their duties adequately—is sound. Moreover, by no means is all the instructional material endorsed by SIECUS unsatisfactory. The most telling argument against SIECUS is this: the organization has become so embroiled in controversy that much of the value it might once have had has been nullified. Its usefulness may have been irretrievably lost.

In the first place, SIECUS has been inextricably identified with people whose viewpoints and life style have deeply offended many Christians. Chief among these is Isadore Rubin, one of the founding fathers and the first treasurer of SIECUS. Rubin was dismissed from his position in the New York City school system. He was identified as a member of the Communist party before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and took the Fifth Amendment before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, refusing to answer questions about his alleged Communist affiliations. He is now the editor of Sexology magazine, of which more will be said later. Rubin has maintained close ties with people deeply involved in SIECUS and its operations and has never been repudiated by SIECUS. Consequently a number of organizations have pounced upon him and his career and used it tellingly against SIECUS. In the minds of many people, the activities of this one man serve to make SIECUS and its programs totally unacceptable.

Another person whose views have helped to tarnish the image of SIECUS—even though it seems he is not officially connected with the organization—is Dr. Albert Ellis. He has been lauded by Isadore Rubin as one of America’s leading sexologists, and there is no doubt that this is true. But what is also true is that as a leading sexologist he has raised the hackles of Bible-oriented believers by his humanistic and non-biblical views. At the University of Bridgeport he espoused “heavy petting to climax” for unmarrieds, and “as much sex activity as possible before you’re married—as intense as possible.” He encouraged married couples to have “intercourse in the same room at the same time.” He approved “communal” sex and said, “A great many people would enjoy mate-swapping occasionally. Have a ball.” Rightly or not, his name and his views have been so firmly linked with SIECUS that dissociation may be impossible.

A third association that has hurt SIECUS is its close tie-in with Sexology magazine. The editor of that magazine is Isadore Rubin, and four members of its board of consultants are also directors of SIECUS. Sexology has been labeled as p*rnographic by many of its critics. It hardly fills that bill when compared with the usual run-of-the-mill p*rnography. Its articles concentrate on sexual themes that are dealt with in a professional, didactic, and factual way. It answers questions many people would rather not ask a physician, a clergyman, or a counselor. From the biblical perspective its leading weakness is its a-moral stance. It generally neither approves nor disapproves of sexual aberrations. But on occasion some of its essayists have endorsed extramarital sex as beneficial. Because of all this, Sexology is a millstone around SIECUS’s neck, guaranteed to hinder its efforts as an educational agency for schools. No amount of propaganda will change this so long as Rubin and Sexology consultants are linked with SIECUS.

Perceptive observers have been disturbed also by the apparent mass exodus of members of the SIECUS board of directors. In 1965 thirty-four names were listed. Today twenty-four of those thirty-four no longer appear on the organization’s letterhead. Their places have been filled by others and the number of directors enlarged to forty-eight. Among those whose names are no longer listed are Mary I. Bunting, the president of Radcliffe College; William Graham Cole, the president of Lake Forest College; and professors from Harvard Medical School, New York University, the University of Southern California, Hunter College, and Columbia University. This rapid turnover in board membership in an organization little more than five years old lends credence to the suggestion that something is amiss.

Because of these and other aspects of SIECUS, the organization has been under heavy attack. And since in many minds sex education and SIECUS are inseparably linked, the fortunes of sex education tend to rise or fall on the basis of support for, or opposition to, SIECUS. This is unfortunate. As this essay is being written, the State of Virginia is faced with strong objections to its sex-education program, and the main charges are that SIECUS is behind the program and that Communist influence is being exerted.

It must not be forgotten that SIECUS, which seems to be the catalyst that makes people either fervid opponents or passionate supporters of sex education, is a Johnny-come-lately on the sex-education scene. Many schools offered satisfactory courses long before 1964, when SIECUS began. And if SIECUS were to disband tomorrow, sex-education programs would continue.

What are the minimum standards for sex-education courses that will satisfy the Christian who takes his life and world view from the biblical revelation?

First and foremost, sex need not and should not be taught in isolation. Instruction should deal with the whole area of love, courtship, marriage, family, and society; sex should be treated as only a part of that total package.

Critics have been quite justified in expressing disapproval of graphic materials that depict chickens, dogs, and human beings engaged in the sex act. Unless sensitive teachers offer further explanations, this type of presentation implies that intercourse is merely an animal act. It is indeed a physical activity that satisfies a normal appetite; but it is much more than this, and a child is cheated when the sexual relationship is not presented in a context of love, personal concern, the giving of self, and the concept of moral choice.

Moreover, children should be taught the facts of life only when they are old enough and mature enough to accept them without psychological harm or undue embarrassment. Even teen-agers do not need to be given detailed information about all aspects of the sexual relationship. Some things can wait for the post-high-school years and the approach of marriage. Sex is a very personal and intimate matter, and those who feel the urge to tell all in the supposed interest of candor and honesty should remember that the law of love may transcend candor and honesty at this point. Not all inhibitions are bad.

The part of family-life instruction that deals with the sex act should be taught to young people in separate classes. Some if not many students are totally unprepared for open discussion in mixed groups; to be placed in such a situation would cause them great embarrassment and perhaps real harm.

Sex cannot be presented in a moral vacuum. A school that allows its students to be taught that extramarital sex is a matter of personal choice or that no moral standards are binding is bound to create havoc for them. Moral principles are the cement that holds a culture together; history affords numerous examples of nations that collapsed and disintegrated when moral principles were set aside.

To speak of a moral framework for sex education is to raise the issue of church-state separation. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was framed not to do away with religion but to prevent any one religious group from becoming officially related to the government of a pluralistic society. We still have “In God We Trust” on our coins; we still have chaplains in the Senate and House; we still take oaths on the Bible in court, and the president of the United States still uses a Bible in his inauguration.

A school in which students are taught to believe in a system of relativistic ethics, especially in the area of sexual behavior, is taking advantage of Christian conscience at this point. All teaching is undergirded by some life and world view, whether it is held consciously or unconsciously, and complete neutrality and objectivity is impossible. Only the rarest teacher is able to present all sides fairly and to keep his students from being influenced by his own bias. And even this teacher may be forced to take a stand when students probe to find out what he himself believes.

Since sex is inextricably linked with morality and religion, sex-education classes should not be mandatory for all children. Parents have an inalienable right to decide whether their children should be exposed to this teaching, particularly since the programs will always vary widely from community to community. Some communities will offer courses of study offensive to Christian conscience; others will offer highly satisfactory ones.

Observers have pointed to Sweden as an example of a nation where universal sex education has become traditional in the schools. And opponents of sex education have been quick to reply that in Sweden the statistics for premarital intercourse, rape, sodomy, illegitimate births, and venereal disease have shot up at an alarming rate. It would be incorrect, however, to lay the sole blame for this at the door of sex education. By and large Sweden is now one of the world’s large mission fields. Few of its people attend church, and the moral principles of Christianity have little or no place in Swedish life. The value of sex education can hardly be tested fairly in a moral vacuum.

Given the present situation, what can Christians do about sex education?

First, Christians should get involved in their local schools. They can do this through the PTA. They can review the books and other materials used in sex-education courses. They can try to persuade school administrators, elected school-board members, and even teachers, to maintain standards that do not violate biblical teaching. Parents have a high stake in their children’s education and should have a determinative voice in what they are taught. If colleges and universities allow their students to be involved in the decision-making processes, how much more should parents be represented in these processes on the grade-and high-school levels. Teachers and administrators are more qualified than parents in some areas, but not in moral matters.

Secondly, parents owe it to their children to instruct them in the home, by example as well as by precept. If they themselves lack information, they should get it. Concerned parents can establish their own teaching classes, bringing in well-informed instructors who can help them learn what they need to present to their children.

Thirdly, Christian parents should see that their churches provide sex-education classes as part of the Christian education program. Churches can help parents also by offering instruction for them as well as for their children. Evangelical Sunday-school publishing houses have an opportunity and a responsibility to make materials for sex education available. Concordia Publishing House has done much in this area, and others will do well to follow that example.

Ultimately the kind of education that children receive can be determined by the parents. If their children are given what they disapprove of, they have no one to blame but themselves. Human nature, marred by sin, stands in need of correction, and sex education will never be any better than the people who control it. Therefore eternal vigilance by parents is the price of adequacy, purity, and biblical soundness in sex education—a highly important need ideally fulfilled by a properly functioning program involving the home, the church, and the school.

On March 16, 1970, the complete text of the New English Bible is due to be published, nine years after the appearance of the New Testament part of the work, and nearly twenty-four years after the adoption by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland of an overture from the Presbytery of Stirling and Dunblane calling for production of an entirely new English translation of the Bible. The Church of Scotland approached the Church of England and the principal free churches of Great Britain and Ireland, and a joint committee of the cooperating churches was set up in 1947. With these churches were also associated the Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, the British and Foreign Bible Society, and the National Bible Society of Scotland. Three panels of translators were appointed, to take responsibility for Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha; a fourth panel was created for consultation on literary and stylistic questions.

Several changes in the membership of the committee and the panels have been occasioned over the years by death, emigration, and other causes. But Professor C. H. Dodd has seen the enterprise through as general director from start to finish. In addition, he has served as convener of the New Testament panel. The Old Testament panel has met under the convenership of Professor Sir Godfrey Driver, joint director, and the Apocrypha panel under the convenership of Professor W. D. MacHardy, deputy director.

The New Testament translation was discussed by me in the March 13, 1961, issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. It was impossible at that time to foresee how successful the translation would be in terms of sales: within twelve months some four million copies had been bought—and not only bought, but read. In the first few weeks after publication especially it was a common sight to see people whom one would not normally class as Bible readers reading the new version in public vehicles and such places, and in many instances understanding what they read for the first time. The New English Bible has deliberately broken with the tradition of “Bible English” maintained for over four centuries, from William Tyndale to the Revised Standard Version. The Revised Standard Version could justly be called a revision of Tyndale—at several removes, naturally!—but the New English Bible is not a revision at all; it is a new version based directly on the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts in the light of the most comprehensive and up-to-date information available on both language and text.

Because of this departure from traditional Bible English, some people have felt that the new version is not quite so “holy” as the older ones, while a distinguished English poet and author remarked that he would not feel that an oath sworn on the New English Bible was so binding as one sworn on the King James Version. But the translators’ main purpose was that people should understand the text of Scripture, and this purpose has been abundantly achieved. Time and again people reading in the New English Bible a passage with which they had long been familiar in an older version found themselves suddenly thinking: “Oh, so that’s what it means!” They had known the words before, but not the sense. And it could be that some of the criticism evoked by the new version was due to the fact that when certain readers realized what the sense actually was, they didn’t like it. One is reminded of Mark Twain’s observation that it wasn’t the bits in the Bible he didn’t understand that troubled him, but the bits he did understand.

Here and there the text of the New Testament, when it appears in March as part of the complete Bible, will be found to have undergone some slight revision, mainly stylistic. These revisions will no doubt go some way to meet criticisms of the 1961 edition.

The first installment of the Old Testament (Ruth) was submitted to the joint committee of the sponsoring churches in 1952, and the last (Ecclesiastes) in 1965. The present chairman of the joint committee is Dr. F. D. Coggan, Archbishop of York, who will contribute the preface to the New English Bible of 1970 as his predecessor, the late Dr. A. T. P. Williams, Bishop of Winchester, did to the New Testament of 1961.

It may be found, when the Old Testament part of the work is read, that Sir Godfrey Driver’s influence has been even more pervasive here than Professor Dodd’s was in the New Testament. This is really inevitable, since the original draft translations of the Old Testament books were submitted in the first instance (we understand) to Sir Godfrey, who examined them in the light of his exceptional mastery of Semitic philology and suggested improvements that the respective translators might adopt or not as they thought fit; after this the drafts were submitted to the appropriate panel. One major source of strength of the Old Testament part of the work is that it was able to draw unstintingly on Sir Godfrey’s scholarship.

Those acquainted with this scholar’s contributions to Hebrew lexicography over the years know how freely he has had recourse to other Semitic languages—whether surviving ones like Arabic or dead ones like Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Aramaic—to elucidate the meaning of Hebrew words and roots. This frequently has had the effect of reading an Old Testament passage in quite a different sense from that traditionally given to it, and readers of the New English Bible must be prepared for a good deal of this kind of thing. In several places the new interpretation will commend itself as self-evidently right, and this must be the final justification of any such reinterpretation, as it is of conjectural emendation. But there will no doubt be other places where the new interpretation is less than convincing. We may hope that before long a companion volume to the New English Bible will be provided, explaining why the Hebrew has been rendered so differently here and there from what we have been accustomed to—explaining it, moreover, not in the technical language of scholarship but in terms that can be understood by the intelligent Bible reader whose special studies have not lain in this field.

Another point should be made: especially where the Old Testament is concerned, the interpretation of Hebrew by reference to cognate languages is such an important and delicate exercise that it requires definite rules of procedure. This matter has been dealt with in James Barr’s most recent work, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1968). Professor Barr conducted his research for this book in independence of the New English Bible project, but in fact he discusses critically a number of the reinterpretations that appear in the Old Testament part of the project (this will not surprise anyone who observes that “Driver, G. R.” has a much longer entry in Professor Barr’s index than any other scholar). It may be thought a pity that the translators did not have the benefit of considering what he has to say before they completed their task; at any rate, readers and reviewers who raise their eyebrows at some of the translations will do well to consult Barr’s treatment of them.

Again, the reader may discover that the ancient versions (the Septuagint and others) have been used freely for the reconstruction of the Hebrew text—to a greater degree than in the Revised Standard Version, not to speak of the older versions. Here too is an area of scholarly activity that would profit by being subject to agreed procedural rules. The Greek (Septuagint), Syriac (Pesh*tta), and Latin (Vulgate) translations of the Hebrew Bible represent a Hebrew text some centuries earlier than our oldest Masoretic manuscripts, whether that text (as with the Pesh*tta and Vulgate) be the ancestor of the Masoretic text or (as with the Septuagint) a part of a separate type. The ordinary canons of textual criticism would therefore lead us to expect that here and there these versions may preserve a correct reading that has been corrupted in the course of subsequent transmission (as, for example, all three of them have preserved Cain’s words to Abel in Genesis 4:8); but the emendation of the Hebrew by reference to the versions varies so much from one editor to another that some means of severely reducing the element of personal preference would be welcome.

As is well known, the canonical texts discovered since 1947 at Qumran and elsewhere in the Dead Sea region have enabled scholars to write a new chapter in the textual history of the Old Testament. Although Sir Godfrey Driver has developed a line of his own on the origin of the Qumran scrolls, he is in substantial agreement with most of his colleagues in dating the biblical fragments found among them between 150 B.C. and A.D. 50, a millennium earlier than our most important Masoretic manuscripts. But the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible go back a further millennium, and the circ*mstances of their transmission during that earlier period are but scantily documented. This may give some scholars additional encouragement to practice the art of conjectural emendation; but in view of our imperfect knowledge, the wiser course at this stage would be to try to establish the text attested by our earliest surviving witnesses, and wait for further light on the earlier period.

The New English Bible, however, does not run to excess in this matter, though it indulges in conjectural emendation much more than did the Revised Standard Version—which in this respect was remarkably conservative. It is no longer fashionable among serious scholars to postulate large-scale corruption of the Hebrew text. Today they are much more cautious and conservative—partly because the great increase in knowledge of Semitic languages during the past generation or two makes it plain that much that was once thought corrupt or meaningless is perfectly sound and intelligible Hebrew.

Three years after the publication of the New Testament in 1961, there appeared a volume, under the editorship of Professor R. V. G. Tasker, entitled The Greek New Testament, Being the Text Translated in the New English Bible 1961. It will not be necessary to publish a parallel edition of the Hebrew Bible for the Old Testament part of the work, for this has been based on the third edition of Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica.

The ineffable name of the God of Israel is usually translated “the LORD” (occasionally “GOD”), as in the KJV and the RSV, but in the few places where a personal name is required the traditional form “Jehovah” is used. It is rather surprising that the translators did not venture to break with tradition and use “Yahweh,” as the Jerusalem Bible and (in some degree) the Berkeley Bible have done. It might be pleaded that the form “Yahweh,” for all its familiarity to scholars, has not yet been naturalized in English: but if the New English Bible had popularized it, the process of naturalization would have been well launched.

In the Hebrew text of the Song of Songs, the sex of the speaker is commonly indicated by pronominal suffixes and other inflections that have no English counterparts, so that what is obvious in Hebrew is ambiguous in English. The New English Bible has compensated for this deficiency in English by indicating clearly who the various speakers are. This is one of the ways in which the translators “have had in mind not only the importance of making sense, … but also the needs of ordinary readers with no special knowledge of the ancient East; and they trust that such readers may find illumination in the present version.”

Among interesting features in the new translation of the Apocrypha, the dragon in the story formerly called “Bel and the Dragon” has now been demythologized; the new title is “Daniel, Bel and the Snake.” One of the most helpful things in this part of the work is that the entire Greek Esther has been translated as a continuous narrative, with the “Additions to Esther” appearing in their proper contexts, instead of being printed as disconnected fragments. Those parts of the Greek Esther that were translated from the Hebrew Bible (and therefore have not usually been printed in the Apocrypha) are distinguished by being placed within square brackets.

It has not been possible at this stage to give actual quotations from the New English Bible. But perhaps enough has been said to show that when it is published it will arouse great interest, excitement, and probably controversy as well. This will be all to the good, provided the controversy is conducted in a reasonable and temperate spirit, and does not descend to vulgar vituperation or aspersions on the faith and integrity of the translators. They have deserved well of the English-speaking public by the patient devotion with which they have undertaken and carried through their gigantic task, and they would be the first to agree that their aim can only be promoted by well-informed and well-expressed criticism.

Among the external resources available to the church, the printed page stands first. The invention of printing from movable type was one of the right-angle turns in history. Marshall McLuhan aptly gives his book about how we have been molded by “the print technology” this title—The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographical Man. That is what we all are—men and women who in one way or another have been conditioned through the printed page.

The origin of movable type is a complicated story. Here is an invention wholly independently at different times and with different results in Occident and Orient. Asia was first. Block printing in China goes back to the eighth century A.D. and printing from movable type to the eleventh century; yet results were not the same in China as in the West, because with its thousands of ideographs Chinese is not an alphabetical language. Therein lies one of the reasons for the difference between China and the West. Typography in Europe also began with block-printing, which was used as far back as the fourteenth century. But it is Johann Gutenberg in Germany who is generally credited with the invention toward the middle of the fifteenth century of printing from alphabetical type.

So there came into history a vast expansion of the “dimension of repeatability,” as McLuhan puts it. This quick, manifold repeatability of the written word has opened the door to modern civilization. And though we stand today on the verge of a new era through mass electronic communication, the printed page will endure. It will endure because it is the unique extension of one of our most important capabilities as human beings—the use of words to convey thought and feeling—and because it makes the verbal products of the human mind available for continuing study and reflection rather than flashing them electronically on our consciousness.

Behind the first printed book in the Western world, commonly taken to be the Gutenberg Bible of 1455–56 (though we have a few smaller pieces of printing from about ten years before that), there stood the written word. And behind the written word stands the alphabet: and behind the alphabet stands our unique faculty of speech; and behind our speech stands our capacity for thinking; and behind our capacity for thinking stands our creation in the image of God; and behind all these stands the Word. For “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.… All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.”

As Herbert M. Butcher says, “Communication is the primary fact, for God communicates Himself.… It was through this that everything came into being.” Supremely and historically, the divine self-communication took the form of a human being, the Man Christ Jesus, the Word who invaded history in the stupendous miracle of the Incarnation. There, in the self-communication of the living God through the actual events of the birth, teaching, deeds, and, paramountly, the death and resurrection of his Son, lies the divine model of communication.

“But what,” someone asks, “has this to do with the printed page?” Well, it was not by chance that the unknown genius who invented the alphabet came, not from the people of Egypt, or India, or China, but from the Semites of Syro-Palestine. Moreover, God chose a Semitic people, the Hebrews, for revealing himself step by step through the centuries. To them he began to commit scriptural revelation as far back as the time of Moses and continued to do so through the prophets and other inspired writers until the fourth century B.C., thus preparing in written words as well as mighty acts the way for the incarnate Word. Then when Christ had come, God continued until the close of the first century to use the written, alphabetical word—now for the inspired record of his revelation through his Son.

The Bible is still the most influential and most widely read piece of communication the world has ever known. Why? Because in it God speaks to man. Like paper impressed with a watermark, every page of Scripture in some way points to the incarnate Word. As James Stewart says, “It was a favorite dictum of the preachers of a bygone day that just as from every village in Britain there was a road which, linking on to other roads, brings you to London at last, so from every text in the Bible, even the remotest and unlikely, there was a road to Christ.” When we follow that road we find the cross. Malcolm Muggeridge speaks truly when he declares, “One thing at least can be said with certainty about the Crucifixion of Christ; it was manifestly the most famous death in history. No other death has aroused one hundredth part of the interest, or been remembered with one hundredth part of the concern.” And, he might have added, the reason for this is that only through Christ’s death and the inevitable sequel for his resurrection can men enter into the glorious liberty of the sons of God.

The influence of Scripture has reached into literature, law, government, art, music, modern science (the basic concepts of which can be traced to the Reformation)—in fact, the whole of our culture. Public education found its first motivation in the century following Gutenberg’s invention of printing. The Reformers insisted on the establishment of schools so that the people could know how to read God’s Word for themselves. The biblical impetus to literacy, which is the key to the vast realm of human knowledge, has continued ever since in a chain reaction now at its height as throughout the world language after language is reduced to writing so that people can learn to read the Scriptures in their own tongue. Today, at least one book of the Bible has been translated into 1,337 languages or dialects. And it is expected that by the year 2000 there will be translations in all the as-yet-unwritten tribal languages of the world. The implications, just on the literacy and educational levels, stagger the imagination.

Let no one say, This may be all very well, but in what some call a post-Christian age the influence of the Bible is petering out (as the writer of a poorly researched article in the Wall Street Journal maintains.) This is simply not true. In a single year (1967), more than 104 million copies of Scripture were circulated—a ration, according to the American Bible Society, of one copy for every thirty-three persons living today. Consider that a single New Testament translation, the Today’s English Version, first published in 1966, attained a circulation of ten million copies its first year and a half—one for every twenty people in the country. Add to that the millions of sales of the Revised Standard Version, the New English Bible (New Testament) and other recent translations, such as those of Kenneth Taylor, and all contemporary best-sellers are left very far behind. The Bible remains the most influential and most enduring of all books. In this secular age not only does its circulation stand at its highest level in history but also for the first time Roman Catholics are joining Protestants in the effort to make it accessible to all.

What about the Christian use of the printed page for purposes other than the circulation of the Scriptures? When in 1517 Luther nailed his ninety-five Theses to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, it was a printed, not handwritten, Latin page he posted there. He meant those Theses, which were a profoundly biblical document, to be a challenge to scholarly debate. But they were soon translated into German and surreptitiously circulated all over the land. So the Reformation may be said to have begun through the printed page. What a literature it gave rise to! There were the writings of scholars like Melanchthon and Erasmus; there was Calvin’s Institutes, the towering classic of Reformed theology; there were the works of Luther himself. There were also those of his Catholic opponents like Eck, and there were many pamphlets or what we today call tracts. This stirring period of church history was a time of intense literary activity.

Christians have kept on using the printed page. As they have done so, world literature has been immeasurably enriched. Examples from among many that could be cited come readily to mind, ranging from Pascal, Milton, and Bunyan to modern and contemporary writers like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Browning, Unamuno, Mauriac, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, James Weldon Johnson, and Flannery O’Connor.

There is, however, a special way in which Christians have long been using the printed page to persuade others of the truth of their faith. This is the kind of writing known as the tract. Such literature comes under the head of propaganda. Although the word gained a disreputable connotation during the First World War, there is nothing essentially ignoble about propaganda. It is simply the use of words to persuade others of a point of view. Gorham Munson refers to it as a garden hose. As through a hose there may pass pure water from a crystal spring, or contaminated water from a river like the Potomac, or fluid from a cesspool, so propaganda may present the clear truth, or a muddy mixture of lies and truth, or a poisonous stream of prejudice.

The Chinese proverb, “One picture is worth more than ten thousand words,” sounds good. But unless the picture is a masterpiece of a Rembrandt or a Renoir, it is not true. Even in this electronic age, words, far more than pictures, are the most potent of all means of affecting human beings. The perennial battle for the minds of men is still being fought by words—some of them violent and crude, others strong and healing.

Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is a tract of the most exalted kind. As Munson says, “The sixth book of the New Testament is probably the greatest letter in all literature and reveals the height to which propaganda in the noble sense can attain.” Paul’s example has been followed by many Christian leaders through the ages. Even before Gutenberg’s invention of printing, the tracts of John Wycliffe together with his translation of the Bible into the vernacular looked forward to the Reformation and established English prose. The Reformation itself became what one historian calls “a pamphlet warfare.”

It was John Fox in the English Reformation who declared, “God has opened the press to preach and by this printing as by the gift of tongues the doctrine of the Gospel sounds to all nations and countries under heaven.…” John Wesley, the leader of the great revival in eighteenth-century England, left 233 written works, many of them pamphlets or tracts. Here is an excerpt from Wesley’s diary for December 18, 1745: “We have within a short time given away thousands of little tracts among the common people.… And this day ‘An Earnest Exhortation to Serious Repentance’ was given at every church-door in or near London to every person who came out, and one left at the house of every householder who was absent from church.” Wesley’s use of tracts probably led to the formation in England of the Religious Tract Society in 1799. Similar societies were established in other European countries, and in 1825, the American Tract Society began its work. In his History of Christianity, Kenneth Scott Latourette says, “In 1832 the American Tract Society adopted a plan to place some of its literature in every religiously destitute family in the United States. In 1847 most of its 267 colporteurs were in the Mississippi Valley, in much of which frontier conditions still prevailed.”

That word frontier points to a challenge for our Christian use of the printed page today. Geographically, America has only one remaining frontier, sparsely populated Alaska. Sociologically and spiritually, however, frontiers lie all around us, with explosive ones in every city and in every state. For this is a day of frontiers between young and old, between rebels and the establishment, between white and black. But while education, politics, and the mass media-cannot by themselves transcend these barriers between people, the Bible can cross every frontier and the Christ whom it proclaims can reconcile men to one another and to himself through his redeeming love. It is his truth that makes men free from the barriers that shut them off from accepting one another as members of the common brotherhood for whom Christ died. And that truth can be dynamically presented in writing.

Using the printed page to persuade men to receive the message set forth in the Scriptures entails an awesome responsibility. It is that of telling the truth. Here we must look again at the divine model of communication through the incarnate Word and the written Word. Complete and perfect trustworthiness characterizes this communication. Because propaganda, even with the highest aims, can easily be made a medium for distortion, every writer who makes use of it, whether in a tract, religious essay, or apologetic work, must hold unswervingly to the criterion of truth.

Truth is the most spacious word we can use apart from the Name of Deity himself. Commitment to it must be the hallmark not just of tract, sermon, or essay but of every kind of Christian writing from editorial to newspiece, from novel to poem. Because the Christian message is everlastingly true, in Christian writing the medium must indeed be the message. For the Christian writer, editor, or publisher, this means a conscience for truth in the use of facts. It means checking every reference, every statistic, every implication. It also means cultivating a style that has the authentic ring of reality. With John Bunyan, who said in that most honest of autobiographies, Grace Abounding, “God did not play in convincing of me, the devil did not play in tempting of me.… wherefore, I may not play in my relating of them but be plain and simple and lay down the thing as it was,” the Christian writer cannot be content with anything less than striving as best he knows how to “lay down the thing as it was.” In the language of today this means to “tell it like it is.” For to express the truth is the unchanging goal of Christian writing.

The long story of the way in which the forces of the Christian faith, though operating slowly, finally made a difference in how men lived, should give us, if we are willing to observe it, a practical hint about the problems that we face at the end of the twentieth century. Many, it is true, talk glibly of the sacredness of persons, and this includes several who have no conscious adherence to the faith of Christ, but it is quite possible that without a religious anchorage the doctrine of inherent human sacredness cannot be maintained. The forces of impersonalism, we must remember, are very strong. The deepest roots of what we call democracy are not to be found in ancient Greece, where democracy experienced one of its greatest failures. It was, after all, the Athenian democracy that pronounced the death sentence upon Socrates, “concerning whom I may truly say,” said Plato, “that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best.” (Phaedo, 118A). The deepest roots of democracy are found in the Bible, particularly in the revolutionary story of Naboth’s Vineyard, in which both king and commoner stand on exactly the same level because both derive from the Divine paternity.

Whether the dignity of the individual, which lies at the heart of the entire struggle for equal rights and social justice, can be maintained permanently on any other basis we cannot know, but we shall, if we wish to be realistic, pay careful attention to the one basis that is known to be an effective place to stand, and from which many loads may be lifted. When we realize, with Whitehead and other historians of ideas, the way in which a free society traces its roots back to a religious belief and commitment, we shall not lightly neglect this revelation of how emancipation comes. Contemporary thinkers can profit from a new study of a striking essay, “The Free Society and Individual Rights,” written by Theodore O. Wedel in The Christian Demand for Social Justice, edited by Bishop William Scarlett (A Signet Special, 1949). Canon Wedel was at great pains, in this essay, to show that the doctrine of the worth of every man is fundamentally derivative, rather than “a truth standing on its own.” The needy neighbor may, in fact, be an unlovely person and might, in a purely secular society, reasonably be liquidated to the profit of the state. The most notorious of Roman dictators operated unashamedly on this basis, but Christianity, with all its mistakes, became an opposing force.

“The dogma of individual rights,” wrote Wedel, “is not a truth standing on its own. It is a derivative dogma and depends upon divine, not secular sanctions. It does not derive from a doctrine of the inherent goodness of human nature, or a sacredness of personality which man has earned. It derives, rather, from the doctrine of the sinfulness of human nature and the universal judgment and grace of a righteous God” (p. 15). Here is a profound and exciting idea. If every man, in spite of his personal ineptitude, is God’s handiwork, and if every man, including the leader or the king, is under judgment, we have a powerful motive for the creation of a social order in which there is maximum chance for equality of opportunity as well as equal justice. No one is outside the law, just as no one is outside the Divine Concern.

Such an understanding of the nature of the human situation provides a far stronger motive for overcoming racial injustice than does any merely economic or political or legal conception. If it could be followed with any sincerity, it would provide an antidote to all racism, whether of the white or the black variety. General acceptance of such convictions would not make laws unnecessary, but it would lead to the enactment of laws and, furthermore, help to provide some of the spirit that keeps men from circumventing laws by their own clever devices. A world in which men of different races can look upon men of contrasting color as Children of God is one in which equal freedom can come without bitterness.

We cannot say too often that Christianity is the most revolutionary of faiths, far more revolutionary, indeed, than any known form of communism, whether Marxist or Maoist. Contemporary schools of communism claim to be revolutionary, but they are not thoroughly so. They may decide to distribute property and thereby aid the dispossessed, but there is nothing, in any of their systems, about compassion for the person from whom the property is to be taken. He is a hated imperialist, and that is enough to say about him. But the Christian, if he understands his Lord, goes further. He is, of course, eager to help the poor, but he is not willing to settle for hatred or contempt for the original owner, since the owner, too, like the landless, is an unconditional object of Divine Concern. We need to work in all known ways to see that the Negro in America is given a chance to earn a decent living, to enjoy equal schooling, and to inhabit equal housing, but underneath all these forms of equality is that of equal respect. This is what every man desires, and the most powerful motivation for giving it is that provided by the Gospel of Christ. We do well to insist upon voting rights, but if we end there, the battle has only begun. We are never far on the way until the white man sees the Negro, not only as an equal politically, but spiritually as a brother.

Any honest observer is bound to admit that some of the worst examples of oppression have occurred in areas in which the Gospel has been preached and believed. But while this is true, it is only part of the truth. The other, and the more important part, is that the most encouraging changes in the southern part of the United States, in regard to race relations, are coming from primarily religious motives. Anyone who spends much time in southern states can hardly fail to notice the role of Christians in the effort to solve the problem that is so deep-seated and that has been with us so long. (For a careful estimate of this, written by one born in the South, see Kyle Haselden’s book entitled Morality and the Mass Media (Broadman, 1968), page 68). Wherever the Bible is honored there is real hope, because the Bible clearly teaches that all mankind is of one family.

Another valuable teaching, which needs to be remembered when we are working to bring about a better social order, is that we shall never have perfection in the relations between human beings. Much of the frustrated anger of our time results from utterly naïve expectations that are inevitably unfulfilled. The Christian faith, when understood, helps to avoid the bitterness of disillusionment by making it clear in advance that there will be no Utopia. The impossibility of Utopia follows logically from the chronic character of human sin, which infects the planners in the same way that it infects those for whom the new social order is planned. The experience of ideal communities in America is pathetically uniform, and the sad truth is that each fails.

We shall avoid much bitterness and idle recrimination if we realize in advance that there is a wide difference between the degree of perfection possible in an individual and in a society. There was, for example, much more that was admirable about the character of William Penn than there was about the “Holy Experiment” that he sought to execute in the new world. Though his experiment had some good features, it was, in considerable measure, a failure, as is bound to be true with anything that has people in it.

The personal life, particularly in its solitude, can often attain a high degree of excellence. It is more nearly possible, in short, to learn to pray well than it is to serve well, because, though some prayer involves others, all service involves others, and that is where the trouble begins. A man has made a few steps on the road to wisdom if he knows the difference between the two complementary realms. The door to life represented by “we” opens more widely than the door represented by “I,” but it is harder to keep it open.

There are two forms of foolishness to be avoided assiduously in this connection. It is equally foolish either to entertain Utopian hopes or to abandon the struggle because of lack of perfect accomplishment. Perfectionism … causes people to give up when they learn that the ideal commonwealth cannot be established on the banks of the Wabash or anywhere else. Perfectionism is always harmful when the abstract best becomes the enemy of the concrete good. The intelligent procedure is to understand that the ideal will not be achieved and then to try, with all our might, to make the situation relatively better than what it was before. We shall not experience a perfect social order, either now or a thousand years from now, but some improvement is possible, and this is what keeps thoughtful men going.

The person who sincerely desires to serve his fellow men soon finds that the service side of his life, far from standing alone, requires not only a deep inner life of devotion, but also the third leg of our stool, the life of critical intelligence. Without careful thought, the individual may easily find himself upholding positions that once made sense, but do so no more because the battle front changes. A good many people are still fighting old battles on the supposition that the major danger is still what it formerly was. It is part of our needed realism now—a realism in which committed Christians should take the lead—to point out that we are in a new day in which the major danger, which once came from the right, now comes from the left.

Without vigilant examination of what we are doing, it is easy to evince more interest in causes or in dogmas than in persons. It is not uncommon, for instance, for white crusaders, deeply committed to civil rights, to have no close friends or even acquaintances among the Negroes, but social action cannot meet the test of authenticity unless it is profoundly personal. Careful intellectual attention may likewise save us from the mistake of supposing that others who do not share our particular solutions of social problems are less concerned with social action than we are.

Almost everyone has heard some public speaker deplore the obvious gap between what we do technologically and what we do socially. If we would only put as much disciplined intelligence and money into psychology or sociology as we now put it into physics and chemistry, it is implied, we should do as well with the social order as we have done with landing men on the moon. This popular judgment reveals a pathetic fallacy. We are dealing with problems of a radically different character when we deal with persons rather than with things. It is possible to achieve striking success in producing a rocket, since we are dealing with essentially passive materials that do not exercise freedom of decision and do not sin. But people, by contrast, cannot be manipulated as physical objects can be, and we are glad that this is true. The study of psychology is worth pursuing, but it is naïve to suppose that such study will bring to human society the kind of success possible in a scientific laboratory. Scientists, it should be carefully noted, find it far easier to manipulate their environment than to manage themselves.

The much-publicized gap between scientific success and success with human life is not surprising to anyone who understands something of the Christian faith. We must use all the intelligence that we can muster in the organization of human behavior, for emotion will not suffice, but even when we do so, there will be disappointments at every level. We must build colleges, but colleges will be centers of dissension; we must support labor unions, but unions will be involved in power struggles; we must have a movement for civil rights, but the movement will be exploited by demagogues; we must administer welfare, but there will be corruption in its administration. Only the realist can operate without debilitating discouragement.

We need to give careful attention today to the relationship between social service and evangelism. The danger is that service may take the place of evangelism or that evangelism may be redefined so that it is social service and nothing more. However desirable it may be to help workers to organize or even, in extreme instances, to strike, this does not and cannot take the place of evangelism in the sense of confrontation with Jesus Christ. The more deeply involved a person comes to be in the Christian Cause, the more he will reject simplistic approaches, and the reduction of evangelism to social action is such an approach. The early injunction of Christ was to become “fishers of men” (Mark 1:17), and this is quite as significant as the injunction to feed the hungry. To feed a man is important; but man does not live by bread alone, so it is equally important to make him sense the love of Christ. If we do only the one and not the other, we may, in the end, undermine the motivation even for the feeding itself. It is a serious mistake to seek to change the environment without also changing the man.

The people who think that evangelism is dead or is fully incorporated in acts of justice and mercy would do well to think again. How is the fire of social sensitivity to be sustained and replenished? The Christian is a man who, regardless of the century in which he lives, knows the answer; he knows that the way to become ignited is to approach the Source.

The end of a year always stimulates in me the sort of mood that might not have been tolerated for a moment by Adelaide Ann Procter. That indomitable lady, whose restless fingers originally hit upon the “Lost Chord” (rediscovered a century later by J. Durante), struck also a brisk note worthy of a school principal after summer vacation:

The Past and the Future are nothing,

In the face of the stern To-day.

There’s something theologically awry with that—perhaps because it seems to preclude the blessed memories and lively hopes that are to me inseparable from the present season.

What follows here may be dubiously current, religious, or thoughtful, but may be welcomed as affording some relief from my customary high-handed discussion of this or that.

Of all my recollections of 1969, the drollest was of an item by William Pratt in Conference, a missionary magazine:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

I don’t wonder what you are;

I surmised your spot in space

When you left your missile base.

Any wondering I do

Centers on the price of you,

And I shudder when I think

What you’re costing me per twink.

My most bizarre memory of the year I owe to the question-and-answer column of a religious weekly not normally given to humor. “Is it sinful,” a correspondent asked, “to use extra-sensory perception to correspond with an atheist … while the mailmen are on strike?” You think the question a humdinger? Read the answer (I’ve mislaid the precise wording, but I can vouch for the sentiments): “You do not mention the purpose of your correspondence. If it is the conversion of the atheist, by all means go ahead, but the indiscriminate use of ESP for general secular purposes is not recommended.”

My most nerve-shattering moment came at a conference center on being wakened to the ear-splitting tidings over a loudspeaker that “We Shall Know Each Other Better When the Mists Have Rolled Away.”

The most asinine piece of red tape in a country where it flourishes came in the news that a fellow Scot in exile, a distinguished surgeon, was solemnly censured for discrimination by the Race Relations Board because he advertised in an English newspaper for a Scottish cook.

The most sermon-provoking word came from a notice I saw while walking within the legal precincts of Lincoln’s Inn, London: “Persons with burdens are not allowed to pass through.”

My most memorable moment poses a conflict, but innate modesty must take second place to the reputation of this journal. During the Church of Scotland General Assembly in Edinburgh, the Queen invited the twenty-four-strong regular press corps to a reception at the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Having been presented to the royal couple, I was asked by Prince Philip: “Who are you with?” Before I could reply the Queen said: “CHRISTIANITY TODAY.” It could, of course, have been a deft piece of regal oneupmanship after consulting the list in advance, but I would like to think …

For the worst ecclesiastical policy of the year I nominate a high-level Baptist pronouncement on ministerial manpower: “The superintendents are always conscious of the need not to place a man where his message is unacceptable or where he feels ill at ease theologically.” I would like to hear C. H. Spurgeon on that.

My most moving experience of 1969 came during a brief stop in American Samoa. A coachload of Roman Catholic ladies with their aged choirmaster had come to see their bishop off. For half an hour the airport lounge rang with a fascinating recital of Samoan secular and sacred songs. The choirmaster then politely requested everyone to be quiet. They were. He invited them, regardless of creed or color, to join them in saying goodbye to “the first real Samoan boy” who had ever made bishop. As we walked out to board our plane, it was touching to see each of the singers take farewell of the bishop, who can visit that part of his diocese only every third year. For the first time they broke out into English, singing over and over again, “Oh, we never will forget you.” The bishop, who was traveling alone, was still brushing away tears as he took his seat in the economy section of the plane. I couldn’t help contrasting the incident with the hurried and arid manifestation of Protestantism at the previous day’s church service in a local hotel, when worship was curtailed to thirty minutes so that the room could be used for a fashion show.

My most gripping—and most jolting—book of the year was the Zondervan publication Black and Free by Tom Skinner. Brash it undoubtedly is in parts, but even that is a byproduct of the singlemindedness found in too few of us. Listen to this: “I don’t have to go out and struggle for human dignity,” says the young evangelist. “Christ has given me true dignity.… As a member of the family of God, I am in the best family stock there is.… My message to society is very simple. If you want status, maybe you ought to rub shoulders with me because I’ve got it as a son of God.”

Some people tend to go all morbid at New Year. One could understand it of someone like Caesar Augustus, who, when fortune had been lavishing her richest gifts on him, prayed that some very great sorrow might speedily come, lest the gods be jealous. But even Charles Kingsley, a writer for whom I have the greatest admiration, could say at the start of a new year: “I am never better than at present; with many blessings, and, awful confession for mortal man, no sorrows. I sometimes think there must be terrible arrears of sorrow to be paid off by me, that I may be as other men are. God help me in that day!” (He sounds a little like a friend of mine who, far from regarding it as a bonus, greets a sunny day in December with the dark mutter: “You’ll see; we’ll suffer for this yet.”)

And yet and yet … There is something right-rooted about Kingsley’s reaction to God’s overwhelming benefits. While I know that the proper tack should be “Glory to Thee for all the joys I have not tasted yet!,” I find that this stocktaking season invariably cuts me down to size with the realization that nothing will ever alter my status as an unprofitable servant. It irks me that I am called not just to action, but to dependence; not to give God instructions, but to report for duty.

As a spiritual corrective I find much value in occasionally reading books originating in another religious tradition. Here the most helpful of all to me has been Friedrich von Hügel. This baron of the Holy Roman Empire, master of seven languages and one of the greatest Christian thinkers of modern times, is buried in a little Somerset churchyard beneath a tombstone that displays the simple but profound thought: “Whom have I in heaven but Thee?” Seven salutary words for the self-sufficient seventies!

J. D. DOUGLAS

Since hitting a low point of 21,025 in 1964, enrollment in seminaries holding membership in the American Association of Theological Schools (AATS) has been slowly gaining. It appears to have reached a plateau over the past two academic years.

Institutions reporting in both 1968 and 1969—not including nineteen new AATS schools—had an increase of one-half of one half of one per cent: 28,033 in 1968 and 28,177 in 1969. All 171 U. S. and Canadian schools represented pushed the AATS total enrollment to a new high of 29,690.

Interestingly—but perhaps not significantly—seventeen non-AATS seminaries surveyed by CHRISTIANITY TODAY show an upturn of 9.8 per cent in enrollment from 1968 to 1969. The schools—all with at least fifty students currently enrolled—had a total of 2,178 students a year ago last fall, and 2,391, or 213 more, in the fall of 1969.

Figures supplied to CHRISTIANITY TODAY (see chart below) include candidates for the master of divinity degree (which is rapidly replacing the B.D.), or its equivalent, as well as students in post-graduate, continuing-education, and (in several cases) non-degree programs.

NON-AATS SEMINARIES WITH MORE THAN 50 STUDENTS

The largest non-AATS seminary (and one of the ten largest seminaries in the nation) is Dallas, with a record enrollment of 445 last fall, up seventeen from the previous year’s 428.

Information was requested from non-AATS seminaries thought to have at least fifty students. One of the seventeen queried, Bob Jones Graduate School of Religion, refused to release any information. It was learned, however, that the graduate school of religion there has 130 students in various programs, most of which are one year in duration. A master of divinity degree is offered at Bob Jones and normally requires three years to complete.

In releasing its statistics last month, the AATS noted that certain comparisons “can be misleading.” Students in “post-ordination” continuing-education programs were not included in 1969 enrollment totals, for example.

Despite some closures and mergers, the trend has been toward increasing enrollment in AATS schools, according to AATS executive director Jesse Ziegler. He predicts there will be 200 member institutions within a year or so.

All but one of the new AATS affiliates are Roman Catholic; the traditionally Protestant association began receiving Catholic and Orthodox applicants in 1966. There are now some forty Catholic member-schools. (The AATS is the only organization in North America that accredits graduate theological institutions.)

Ziegler noted that “one of the most notable features of the report is the sharp decline in the number of non-college graduates in professional programs.” This category declined from 1,338 to 781 between 1968 and 1969. Ziegler explained this by saying that churches increasingly are demanding fully qualified clergy. This in turn has resulted in major upgrading of seminary entrance requirements.

AATS Canadian schools reported 848 students in 1969, compared to 876 the year before, a drop of 3.2 per cent.

Of all AATS-related students, 67 per cent were working on ministerial degrees, 5.5 per cent were interns, and 5.6 per cent were registered in Christian education.

AATS statistics usually are broken down by denomination; this was not done for 1969. Instead, according to Ziegler, there will be a “sample comparison” for thirty “representative” schools to show enrollment, finances, faculty and library data, and minoritystudent ratios, to be published early this year.

Much of this “theological fact book” will be compiled from computer research siftings. (The AATS has received a $450,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to further its accreditation and research.)

Statistics from 90 per cent of the U. S. Roman Catholic diocesan seminaries (they do not belong to the AATS) have been compiled. They indicate a 1.4 per cent drop in enrollments from 1968 to 1969. The greatest slippage is at the high-school level, or minor seminaries, where there are 2,313 freshman students this semester, compared to 2,458 the year before.

There are 1,729 men preparing for the priesthood at the college freshman level, while there were 1,790 in 1968. First-year graduate (theology) students, however, total 1,067 now, compared to 967 in 1968.

A spokesman for Catholic diocesan vocations said the data from the nearly 500 seminaries was “complex and difficult to analyze.… What’s happening is that some who formerly were called seminarians aren’t [in that category] anymore.”

From other information on seminaries:

• A survey of five denominations by a research bureau at Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, showed that many of the ablest younger ministers are leaving the pastoral ministry to take staff positions, teach, engage in social work, and enter business.

• A total of 1,626 degree candidates were enrolled in the six seminaries of the Boston Theological Institute last fall. Catholics (421) lead the enrollment, with 250 United Church of Christ students second. There were fifty-two black students in the six seminaries.

• The combined enrollment at the six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention showed almost no change over a year ago. Enrollment for 1969 was 4,578, compared to 4,575 in 1968.

• Seventy-six per cent of the 498 students in the eight Disciples of Christ-related seminaries last fall were preparing for the pastoral ministry. Another ninety-four Disciples students are studying in non-Disciples schools.

Hromadka Dies

Dr. Josef Hromádka, 80, the Communist world’s leading Protestant theologian, died of a heart attack in Prague last month. He recently quit the presidency of the Communist-dominated Christian Peace Conference in a dispute over the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, which Hromádka condemned. He taught theology in a Prague seminary and was a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary during World War II.

Roberts’S Ratings: Rising

Actress Anita Bryant gave a clear witness to Christ as the only answer on the fourth prime-time hour TV special produced by evangelist Oral Roberts (both she and the Pentecostal-healer-turned-Methodist are from Tulsa and of Cherokee ancestry).

Christ is the answer to youth who “cop out” by blaming their parents for things that go wrong, added the actress. The show, appearing on more than 160 stations across the nation just before Christmas, typifies Roberts’s “new look” in evangelism (see March 28, 1969, issue page 40).

New lookers apparently will keep the quarterly specials going this year. Two are already scheduled, one at Easter and a second in June. Roberts’s mail is at an all-time high, and the programs “are almost self-supporting,” according to a Roberts aide. Mail to his Tulsa-based university admissions office has doubled, too, indicating that the animated singing and slithering of the World Action Singers and the melodic, rich voice of son Richard Roberts have caught on with the younger set. (Another half-hour, Sunday TV show for the church crowd—and one suspects, a much older audience—is also successful, Roberts’s spokesmen say,)

The Christmas special show also had the luster of the Ralph Carmichael Orchestra behind it, and an assist from Mark Hatfield, Roberts’s longtime friend, who read “The Incomparable Christ.” Roberts closed a short sermon with his usual injunction. “Let’s touch each other and pray,” he said, taking Anita’s hand.

Although there was no appeal for funds, Roberts offered a Christmas recording to all. And, perhaps as an index of his rising respectability (and visibility), he told viewers to write simply to “Oral Roberts, Tulsa, Oklahoma.” “That’s all the address you need.”

Silent Night

National Council of Churches president Cynthia Wedel announced early last month that “surely not one of us can object to prayer,” referring to prayers for penance and peace to herald local Viet Nam Moratorium activities on Christmas Eve. But special services were scant, according to reports—or lack of them.

In the nation’s capital, for example, where November’s moratorium march attracted nearly half a million protesters, only fifty people heard Paul Moore, Jr., the newly elected Episcopal bishop coadjutor of New York.

Apparently, most people who stirred the night before Christmas did so for traditional candlelight and carol services.

Lutheran Ecumenism Boost

Lutheran churches considering union with non-Lutheran denominations will get help and encouragement from the Lutheran World Federation. The LFW’s executive committee, meeting in Denmark last month, said that aid—rather than efforts to prevent union conversations—is “consistent with respect for both the fellowship and autonomy of member Churches.”

The LWF will be restructured from seven to three main commissions: studies, church cooperation, and world service. About two-thirds of the world’s 75 million Lutherans are represented by the LWF.

From Tents To Stadiums To Straw …

Evangelist Billy Graham made his first public appearance at a rock music festival between Christmas and New Year’s and was so pleased with the response that he plans to attend more.

Graham told a youthful audience of about 2,500 sprawled on a straw-covered field at the Miami-Hollywood (Florida) festival to get high on God instead of drugs. Some accepted the challenge. About 100 youths later congregated in a striped tent to receive literature about Christ.

Freezing temperatures kept attendance (estimated to be 10,000) far below the promoters’ expectations. Arrests for drug use were few, but even as Graham spoke, some youths passed out stickers calling for the legalization of marijuana.

Wearing a bright gold jacket, dark trousers, and a yellow shirt, a beaming Graham told the youth: “Tune in to God today and let him give you faith.” In a press conference afterwards, Graham said he had been prepared to be shouted down at the festival (promoters had invited him to come). Instead, he noted, he felt a “tremendous response.… I’ll be happy to come to any rock festival where I’m asked.”

The evangelist, who of late has been tailoring his ministry to reach far-out youth in particular (he sometimes puts on a false mustache and beard and stalks rock gatherings to get the feel of what young people are thinking) had an immediate taker: California promoter Bill Starns invited him to speak at a nine-day rock spectacular tentatively slated for Easter in San Luis Obispo.

Hanging Is Dead In Britain

Permanent punishment—the death penalty—for murder has been permanently abolished in Great Britain. The public galleries of the House of Lords were filled for the historic vote last month. The measure already had been approved almost two to one by the House of Commons.

Eighteen Anglican bishops in black and white robes sat with Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey and voted against hanging for murder, a penalty Parliament temporarily suspended for five years in 1965.

All western European countries except France have now abolished the death penalty. There is a trend toward its abolition in the United States and the Soviet Union as well.

Eleven of the fifty states¹Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, North Dakota, Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. have outlawed capital punishment, and in New Mexico, New York, and Vermont, it is permitted only for special cases such as the murder of a prison official. There have been no executions in the United States since 1967, and more than 500 prisoners are awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on capital punishment.

From 1930 through 1964, 3,857 persons were executed in the United States for state and federal crimes. The crimes of which they were convicted were: murder, 3,324; rape, 455; armed robbery, 24; kidnapping, 20; burglary, 11; spying, 8; and aggressive assault, 6. Of those executed, 178 were teen-agers. According to the Library of Congress Legislative Reference Service, there have been seventy-four known wrongful convictions for criminal homicide since 1883; eight of these were executed.

Although the death penalty was prohibited in the Soviet Union in 1947, it was revived three years later for traitors, spies and “wrecker diversionists.”

South Bend Echoes

Echoes from the second special General Convention at South Bend, Indiana, last September were still reverberating through the Episcopal Church at year end. In New York, two Episcopal laymen filed a suit in the State Supreme Court seeking to bar the denomination from transferring $200,000 to the Black Economic Development Conference through the National Committee of Black Churchmen.

The laymen charged that the grant, approved at the South Bend meeting (see September 26 issue, page 42) is illegal because the BEDC “supports violence.” The plaintiffs did not mention in their suit that $43,000 has already been transferred to the militant organization born last April at the time James Forman issued the Black Manifesto. (That money launched a Detroit-based publishing house this month—see January 2 issue, page 43.)

David Arms, a marketing economist, and Walter Gates, a business executive, claim that the Episcopal grant is an “illegal subterfuge” and that the BEDC does not meet the “non-violent” criteria required of Episcopal-funded organizations.

Their suit asks the court to declare the convention’s actions “null and void,” and to restrain the church from further solicitation for the grant. It names the NAACP or “some other established Negro self-help group” on record as advocating non-violence as rightful recipient of the money already raised.

Arms and Gates also contend that the grant was illegal because the convention was improperly convened and the grant voted “under duress and threats.”

In another controversy, Muhammad Kenyatta, Philadelphia director and national vice-president of the BEDC, occupied the Wellsprings Ecumenical Center in Philadelphia to protest the center’s refusal to act as a “conduit” for funds to the BEDC.

After Kenyatta (who was the leader of the South Bend confrontation) and other BEDC leaders reportedly forced their way into the building with a tire iron, and several remained overnight, the Wellsprings board of directors backed down and agreed to accept $2,000 from a United Church of Christ agency for the BEDC. But author-pastor Robert Raines of Germantown’s First Methodist Church, chairman of Wellsprings, said that he expected the center and the BEDC would continue in “dual use of the facilities” though Wellsprings did not necessarily totally endorse the BEDC.

Brazil Church Surges Ahead

Brazil’s Protestant churches are increasing more than twice as fast as its population. According to figures recently released by the Missionary Information Bureau, the country has an annual population growth rate of 3 per cent, while Protestant church membership is gaining at the rate of 6.7 per cent each year.

After Indonesia, Brazil is said to have the fastest-growing church in the world: it now has 3,244,000 Protestants, more than double the number of Protestant church members in all other Latin American countries combined.

Two-thirds of Brazil’s Protestants are Pentecostals from the fast-growing Assemblies of God, the Christian Congregation, the Brazil for Christ movement, and independent Pentecostal groups. Evangelistic emphasis is seen as the reason for the phenomenal rise of the Pentecostal churches.

Fifty-eight per cent of the church membership is concentrated in the south of Brazil, which has only 10 per cent of the area and 37 per cent of Brazil’s 90 million inhabitants.

The report also shows that Brazil now has 12,884 pastors, 23,776 deacons, and 15,890 presbyters. There are nearly 30,000 meeting places for Christians; half of these are organized churches, and the rest are preaching points. Including wives, there are 3,000 non-indigenous missionaries in Brazil.

Half of Brazil’s people now live in the cities, and about 52 per cent of the population is under twenty years of age. The trend in literacy is up. In 1920, about one-third of those fifteen years and older could read and write; today two-thirds can.

PETER CUNLIFFE

Looking Romewards

Not only from the evangelical camp is the roll of secessionist drums being heard in England at present. Fifty Anglican clergymen recently made a secret, or at least unpublicized, call on the Archbishop of Westminster, John Cardinal Heenan. Members of the 115-year-old Society of the Holy Cross, they strongly oppose new moves toward merger with Methodists (the union scheme was narrowly defeated last summer; see August 1 issue, page 38).

The society wishes to set up a “uniate” church on the lines of those found in the East which, recognizing the supremacy of the Pope, are self-governing. The idea was one likely to elicit a frosty response from Heenan, who otherwise welcomed what his secretary was at pains to call an “entirely unofficial” delegation.

Though smaller and more extreme than the Church Union, a body which itself was notably unenthused by the Methodist plan, the Holy Cross has 300 clergy, now augmented by 10,000 layfolk concerned about the threat to the “Catholic” wing of the Church of England. “We are not an effete organization,” says the society’s head, Father Alfred Simmons. If the worst happens and the diluting Methodist hordes are allowed to pour in, the society will take legal action to ensure that with them into secession will go a fair share of Anglican property and endowments.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Greek Orthodoxy: The Junta Defied

A small group of Orthodox clergymen in Greece have launched an attack on church leaders. And in doing so, the group, led by Bishop Chrysostomos, Metropolitan of Piraeus, is indirectly challenging the nation’s military government.

The metropolitan was known for liberal views even before the coup that brought in the current political leaders. He was a close friend of the late George Papandreou, the ousted prime minister who was an idol of youth. When the military staged the coup in April of 1967, Chrysostomos felt the pinch.

The junta picked the king’s special chaplain, Ieronimos Kotsonis, who then had a reputation for being progressive, to lead the conservative Church of Greece. Ieronimos was not a bishop, however, and his appointment over a number of senior bishops was a surprising move.

The new archbishop soon showed his loyalty to the new government. When young King Constantine staged a counter coup in December of 1967, he got no support from Ieronimos. Instead, the archbishop swore in General Zoitakos as regent to fill the throne vacated by the fleeing king.

Last March, Ieronimos supported a purge of the Holy Synod, the twelve-member governing body of the church. A new church charter acceptable to the military also was adopted. But an apparent conflict between the new appointees and the precepts of the new statute went unnoticed. Within a few months the flaws of the ecclesiastical action were brought to light before a number of judges were dismissed for their non-compliance with the spirit of the revolution.

The liberal metropolitan and four other bishops, all left out of the new synod, are now questioning the legality not only of the new synod and the new charter but also of the appointment of Ieronimos and the ouster of the old archbishop.

In a land like Greece, where religion cannot be fathomed as independent of politics, the bold stand of Chrysostomos and his colleagues is seen as a daring defiance of the ruling military junta. The voice of these dissenting clergy is thus being added to the more general discontent with present leaders.

The battle has led to a threat by Ieronimos that he might expel Chrysostomos, who in turn warned that he would initiate a lawsuit. Two mediating bishops were reportedly appointed to investigate.

THOMAS COSMADES

Marxist Abcs

“We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism and therefore of Marxism …,” says an article in the Communist theoretical magazine Hungch’i (Red Flag). The official article condemning all religion breaks the long silence by Red China concerning its attitude against the churches.

“Scientific Communism and religion are antagonistic. The struggle for the realization of the ideals of Communism in the whole world and the ‘building of the kingdom of Christ on earth’ are incompatible … like fire and water,” the magazine said.

The Asia News Report, published in Hong Kong, said the article followed a religious conference held on the outskirts of Moscow under Soviet leadership, and was printed to blast the gathering.

Asia News also said reports that agencies are successfully smuggling large quantities of Bibles and tracts into Red China are “incredible and naïve.” Asserting that the claim, appearing in an American church magazine, was accompanied by appeals for money to distribute the Scriptures, Asia News added that indigenous Chinese Christians “have no knowledge that any Scriptures have been received by believers in China and … discountenance these exotic claims.”

Meanwhile, Australian Radio reported that Anglican clergyman Herbert Arrowsmith of Sydney planned to distribute 20,000 copies of the New Testament inside Communist China by placing them within the personal effects of travelers going there.

Arrowsmith was quoted as saying that although Red guards burned Bibles during the so-called cultural revolution several years ago, he believed the official Communist view was now more lenient.

Religion In Transit

Membership in the United Methodist Church, second largest U. S. denomination, fell 201,096 in the past year, a drop of about 2 per cent.… The nation’s Lutheran bodies grew .02 of 1 per cent—lowest combined gain ever.… The Roman Catholic Church reported a gain of less than 1 per cent for the same period—smallest growth in twenty-five years. The Christian Church membership fell 1 per cent.

Two-thirds of 600 consultants to the National Council of Catholic Men said in a survey that Catholics should be willing to campaign for public money for parochial schools, “even if it means stirring up controversy.”

Two more Orange County (Indiana) Amish have been arrested for driving horse-drawn vehicles without required amber warning emblems.

The Alliance of Concerned Episcopalians (ACE), a group of churchmen in the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia formed to combat “overly liberal tendencies” within the denomination, placed an ad in Roanoke newspapers asking Episcopalians to withdraw financial support from the national church. In rebuttal, a pro-General Convention II group also bought a full-page ad.

“Remarkable and fundamental agreement” on the theology of Holy Communion was noted by Roman Catholic and Orthodox churchmen meeting at Brookline, Massachusetts, last month.

A top U. S. Labor Department official said religious discrimination against Jews and Catholics in executive-level positions “needs immediate attention.”

Agreeing with a similar landmark ruling in Boston last April on another case, a San Francisco federal judge has ruled that a draft resister may not be prosecuted if he opposes the Viet Nam war on religious grounds, even if he does not oppose all war. The case probably will be appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court.… Meanwhile, the Justice Department was studying for possible federal law violation a $1,000 church gift to help U. S. draft evaders and deserters in Canada.

The biggest factor in determining differing attitudes among clergymen is probably age, according to a study made for Garrett Theological Seminary. A steady increase in the percentage of conservative reactions among clerics was also noted.

The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod has lost ten pastors and five congregations because it voted fellowship with the American Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod president Jacob Preus reported.

After a student takeover shut down the school, Fisk University officials named a committee to consider demands that the United Church of Christ-related Nashville institution become all-black.

Artist Ronald White was required to paint leaves over the naked figures of Adam and Eve in his three-story mural for Toronto’s Willowdale United Church.

A ninety-minute television documentary called “A Matter of Faith,” which will attempt to incorporate the thoughts of one hundred VIPs, will be produced for Metromedia by former Newsweek correspondent John Peer Nugent.

What may be the first “ladies auxiliary” to an order of nuns was organized by the Franciscan Sisters of Wheaton, Illinois.… In a move to “democratize” the Paulist Fathers, the Reverend Thomas F. Stransky was chosen president of the 110-year-old order by direct popular ballot.

Calvinist Contact, a weekly newspaper published in Canada, has created a new department, World of Young Writers, edited by C. W. Barendrecht of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Personalia

Baptist pastor Walter B. Hoard, 44, of Milwaukee, is the first Negro to be named an associate general secretary of the American Baptist Convention.

On a Saturday night, a shotgun blast sent buckshot ripping through the living room of pastor J. Wesley Shipp of Wake Forest, North Carolina, as his daughter entertained black and white youths. Next morning, the deacons at Ridgecrest Baptist Church fired Shipp for his “views on racial matters.”

Altar The Call?

Is the altar call scriptural, or a “sacred cow”? A survey of sixty evangelical teen-agers throughout Illinois revealed that 95 per cent dislike the practice. Reasons ranged from “I went forward and nothing happened” to “I was scared.” Many said they feel public invitations repulse and scare visitors and often use too much emotion and manipulation.

Yet 95 per cent of the same young people said that if they were a pastor, they would give altar calls. And Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Christian education professor Elmer Towns notes that there are public invitations to the unconverted in the ten largest Sunday schools in the United States.

TOBY NELSON

The Right Reverend Chandler W. Sterling, former Episcopal bishop of Montana, has written a spicy sex novel about a lady-chasing lecher who also happens to be an Episcopal bishop. Sterling, 58, claims his book, The Holroyd Papers, is a new form of ministry to win attention and make money so he can turn to the spiritual books he really wants to write.

Century-old segregation of Southern cemeteries was overruled in a Birmingham federal court last month in a case that could have nationwide implications. Negro Viet Nam veteran Bill Terry, 20, was ordered buried in private, all-white Elmwood Cemetery after his 16-year-old widow brought suit and Jesuit priest Eugene Farrell drew national attention to the issue.

After a furor of faculty opposition, Mrs. Jacqueline Grennan Wexler, former president of Webster College, St. Louis, and a former Order of Loretto nun, was unanimously voted by the board of education to be ninth president of Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Maryknoll priest Dan McLellan, 53, said to be the best-known American in Peru and founder of the largest savings and loan association in South America (Mutual El Pueblo), married his longtime secretary in a Lima civil ceremony. Gregory Robertson, 52, former president of St. Mary’s College, Winona, Minnesota, withdrew from the Christian Brothers order last month to marry former nun Maura Couglan, 42. They and McLellan received dispensations from religious vows.

Jerrie Mock, first woman to solo around the world in a single-engine plane, has delivered a plane to Catholic priest Tony Gendusa, twenty years on the New Guinea mission field, for work in his 85,000-square-mile diocese. Ecumenical efforts raised money for the craft.

Betty Medsger, 27, religion editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin, became assistant religion editor of the Washington Post this month. Kenneth Dole, Post religion editor and writer for twenty-three years, retired.

Colonel Gerhardt W. Hyatt, Continental Army Command chaplain at Fort Monroe, Virginia, and a Missouri Synod Lutheran, has been named Deputy Chief of Army Chaplains. He succeeds Brigadier General Ned R. Graves (Disciples of Christ), who retired this month after thirty years.

Southern Baptist hip minister Arthur Blessitt (see December 19, 1969, issue, page 34) began a coast-to-coast hike from his Sunset Strip gospel nightclub in Hollywood to Washington, D. C., lugging a ten-foot wooden cross. With him to trigger a “spiritual awakening in the nation” is his gospel rock quartet, the Eternal Rush. A giant prayer rally will climax the trek.

World Scene

Two new, autonomous Methodist churches were formed last month: the Methodist Church of Bolivia, and the Methodist Church of Uruguay.

Forty-one countries pledged a total of $13,878,786 toward 1970 United Nations programs for Palestine refugees.

A Protestant-Catholic congress, called the Ecumenical Pentecost Meeting and the first gathering of its kind, will be held in Germany on Pentecost, 1971.

In the first phase of a thirty-year plan to evangelize all of Latin America, six regional evangelism conferences will be held in as many years.

After thirteen years of negotiations, merger plans of four regional Evangelical Lutheran churches in West Germany are slated for completion next spring. The projected 3.5 million-member body will be called the North Elbian Church.

Because Communist leaders refused to grant the Federation of Evangelical Churches’ leader Bishop Gottfried Noth of Saxony a travel visa, the East German organization canceled plans to visit the World Council of Churches in Geneva.

To meet the mounting need for Scripture literature in Latin America, the World Home Bible League of Chicago and the New York Bible Society have formed Scriptures Unlimited, with plans to place five million Bible pieces by this April.

A painting of a man in a tunic looked like a priest, so Vatican officials hung it a few yards from a portrait of Pope Paul VI in the Vatican press room. It turned out to be no priest but Mao Tse-tung (now 76) as a youth. Chagrined church officials nevertheless said the painting would stay, but barred permission to photograph it.

The new year brought with it a change in staff. Our beloved publisher Wilbur Benedict began a much earned retirement January 1. His successor is David Rehmeyer, of whom mention was made in a previous editor’s note. Mr. Rehmeyer’s place in the advertising department has been assumed by Charles R. Wright, who comes to us from a varied career in other Christian organizations and brings another note of youth and enthusiasm to our staff. Mr. Wright is a graduate of Wesley College.

Donald Tinder, who came to us as assistant editor last July, has received notice that his dissertation for the doctorate has been accepted and that Yale University will formally grant him the Ph.D. in June. He also holds the B.A. from Yale and the B.D. from Fuller Seminary. Kudos to him!

At the U. S. Congress on Evangelism in Minneapolis last September I happened to mention that my birthday fell on December 22. Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann, who chaired the meetings, commissioned the audience to note the fact and send me birthday cards. I can now report that because of his influence I found myself with far more birthday greetings than I had ever received before. To all those who were kind enough to remember my birthday I express my appreciation, and I again wish for them and all our readers a happy 1970.

Old Time Religion And One Other

Last month I stumbled on a new release from Ecumenical Press Service. Dutifully if dully I picked it up, for this Geneva publication owes its popularity neither to exciting prose nor to sensational tidings. On the contrary, it takes itself very seriously, its veracity is unquestionable, its contents unsullied by humor. Nevertheless, the issue I saw gave me the mental staggers: “WCC to Launch Dialogue with Men of Living Faiths.”

What was this? A WCC admission of fallibility, or at least inadequacy, would have been momentous. But this went further, suggesting that the WCC’s minus could be rectified through talking with those for whom faith was positively alive. My thoughts raced as I sketched a tentative itinerary so that the seeking souls sent out two by two from Route de Ferney should not waste time in realizing what they lacked in living faith.

The exhilaration didn’t last. Never was disillusion more utter. That headline was just a shabby device to trick the guileless into reading on and discovering that a get-together of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims was planned. As sponsor, the WCC is putting up a sizable sum for the meeting, scheduled for next March in Lebanon.

EPS says that participants will be mainly “scholars … who have sufficient competence in at least one other religion beside their own.” Those unversed in the esoteric will find the terminology mind-boggling. What, for example, is the mark of having already attained “sufficient competence” in one’s own religion, much less in that of others? Who are the examiners who shall issue proficiency diplomas? What are the ground rules? And how about the scholar who can profess all four religions?

I do not yet know the names of those who will offer Christianity as their major at the dialogue. I know they will be men of broad sympathies who will go humbly “to learn” and will ensure that discussion is not snarled up by archaic ideas about the uniqueness of Christianity. Here the WCC can point proudly to its past record of not going all out for conversions.

Says a WCC staffer: “Today religious pluralism is no longer an academic point to be discussed but a fact of experience to be recognized.” Since we’re putting things on that unsatisfactory basis, let me offer another fact of experience. “To the Hindu philosopher,” said Arthur Mayhew, “all religions may be equally true; the administrator, comparing a Christian settlement with the pariah village at its gates, has good reason to know that they are not equally effective.”

EUTYCHUS IV

Hoover: Pro And Con

J. Edgar Hoover’s magnificent article, “The Interval Between” (Dec. 19), richly merits the widest reading.

GEORGE S. REAMEY

Highland Springs, Va.

Not only does Mr. Hoover fail to see the evils in our history to which lawlessness, nihilism, violence, and youthful rebellion are reacting; he is blind to the perverse sense of values and inhuman policies of the present against which these things are a protest. It is his kind of unwillingness to be awakened by protest that evokes more extreme forms of the same. If he is concerned about the loss of virtue, how can he overlook the racial discrimination that perpetuates the mental, social, political, and economic enslavement of almost an entire race of people? In bemoaning the evils of our day, he chooses to ignore our violent militarism that permits the continuation of a senseless war that is destroying a nation on the other side of our planet. He glosses over the pollution of our environment that will leave to a later generation the tragic legacy of poisoned air, land, and water. He brushes aside the charges of police brutality, thereby escaping his responsibility to grapple with the real oppressiveness of so much of our law-enforcement policy. He expresses no alarm over our degenerate sense of values that tolerates the shooting of children to protect property, or the shooting of black militants to protect white supremacy while the Mafia runs wild. The legal process tramples on the poor and caters to the rich by means of fines, bail, and pre-trial detention. Why won’t he see this as one of the major causes of the breakdown of respect for law and authority?

Mr. Hoover’s selection of the evils that he wishes to condemn and the virtues that he wishes to extol, as well as his uncritical devotion to the American dream (and the doctrine of “manifest destiny”), betray a blind patriotism which prophetic Christianity can never endorse. His selectivity allows him to praise a romanticized past that never existed and to shut his eyes to the past and present evils in our society that have brought us to a crisis that he deplores but does not understand. Reflective evangelical Christians will sense immediately that he has focused our attention on symptoms rather than causes, has thereby eliminated the need for national repentance, and has allowed us the comfort of going about business as usual (provided that we beef up our police forces and intensify the piety of our culture religion). He implies that we must be loyal to America because it is Christian, if not because we are Christians. Since when does such fervent devotion and blind loyalty to one’s fatherland become a demand of the Gospel that calls us into the international fellowship of God’s world-wide family?

VERNON GEURKINK

Madison Square Christian Reformed Church

Grand Rapids, Mich.

The article by J. Edgar Hoover is the best of its kind I have ever read.

R. E. MCDOWELL

Falling River Baptist Church

Brookneal, Va.

Books On Blacks

“Read, Baby, Read” (Dec. 19) commends the thief, dope-peddler, and pimp Malcolm X as a sensitive, highly intelligent black leader. Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver are also included in the recommended list of readings. No doubt one can learn something of the criminal mind by reading these authors; but the article would have been better had some elementary Christian morality been used in assessing the merits of these protagonists of riot, arson, and murder.

GORDON H. CLARK

Butler University

Indianapolis, Ind.

One might suggest these few additional books … Irving Howard’s The Christian Alternative to Socialism, Frank Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom, Russell Kirk’s Enemies of the Permanent Things, Leonard Read’s Let Freedom Ring, and George Schuyler’s Black and Conservative.

ROBERT M. METCALF, JR.

Memphis, Tenn.

May I also suggest Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South.

RICHARD L. TROUTMAN

Associate Professor in History

Western Kentucky University

Bowling Green, Ky.

The Malicious Side

As one who is in touch with aspects of the evangelical situation in Great Britain, I was appalled to read the maliciously one-sided report of the position of Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (“Who Is Dividing British Evangelicals?,” News, Dec. 19).

It is true that Dr. Lloyd-Jones has stirred controversy by his criticism of the World Council of Churches. But it is also true that his main emphasis in recent years has been on the need for a real unity of all evangelicals. There is no one in either Britain or America who is more positively and urgently sounding the call to evangelical unity than Dr. Lloyd-Jones. It is utterly false journalism to ignore totally this central aspect of his ministry while condemning him for allegedly promoting dissension and disruption.

DONALD A. DUNKERLEY

Associate Pastor

The First Presbyterian Church

Babylon, N. Y.

America—North And Latin

Although we appreciate the interest of your magazine in informing about the First Congress on Evangelism held in Bogotá, Colombia (News, Dec. 19), we are somewhat annoyed about the expression that the congress had a “made in America” stamp (“Evangelism in Latin America”).

Anybody who is fairly acquainted on how the congress was organized, programmed, and administered will conclude that this was really a Latin-American congress with some support from outside. The executive committee who headed all the procedures was primarily a Latin-American committee selected on a regional basis; 85 per cent of the delegates were Latins, and of speakers nineteen were Latin Americans and only three were North Americans.

It is always interesting that reporters find minor matters of mentionable interest. The fact is that the still prevalent anti-Roman Catholic attitude among Latin American evangelicals is a natural product of past experience. Converts have always been far more unsympathetic with the Roman Catholic Church than the missionaries. In fact, missionaries at times have had to try and calm the troubled waters.

Finally, the report states that no votes were taken. Votes were taken on the declaration and the long-term planning; the delegations elected their representatives of future regional congresses starting with the United States (Latin American communities) that hope to have a congress in 1970.

CARLOS LASTRA

Co-President

Primer Congreso Latin-americano De Evangelizacion

Bogotá, Colombia

Wormy Aftertaste

The evaluation of Karl Barth by Klaas Runia (Dec. 5) was very good. However, the aftertaste is not so pleasant.…

Runia appears to place Barth outside the house of the religious existentialists. I cannot agree. Barth may stand in the doorway, but he faces in. Runia has discussed the weakness of Barth’s solution to the problem of the authority of God’s Word, but Runia has not clearly stated the most serious consequence of Barth’s theology of Scripture. Mysticism is the result, and the later theologians are not so much a break as they are a development. I think that with the addition of one or two of his well-written sentences Runia could have given us a much more balanced evaluation.

I, too, think that Barth was a great man and a Christian; but his theology had a worm at its root.

H. B. HARRINGTON

The Reformed Presbyterian (Covenanter) Church

Broomall, Pa.

Incalculable Boon

I appreciate very much the articles you print from time to time which bear on the relationship of the fine arts to the Christian life. In my opinion, the outstanding example of such articles to date is Leland Ryken’s “A Christian Approach to Literature” (Dec. 5).

Professor Ryken has said so well what has needed to be said so urgently, but, to my knowledge, has been said so feebly in evangelical circles. I believe it would be an incalculable spiritual boon if every born-again Christian would read, and reread, this article.

E. ROGER TAYLOR

Music Teacher

Canadian Nazarene College

Winnipeg, Manitoba

Insofar as Leland Ryken’s “approach to literature” connects “the Puritan ethic” with an unbiblical stance, it is libelous, The implication that Puritans neither recognized nor enjoyed beauty is reminiscent of H. L. Mencken’s caricatures, which make amusing reading but are bad history and hopelessly dated. A careless characterization of Puritanism by a Christian scholar is, moreover, especially unfortunate.… Seventeenth-century Massachusetts men were not insensitive to beauty, art, or even pleasure.

WILLIAM B. BEDFORD

Charlottesville, Va.

Balancing Camp

I strongly disagree with William Gwinn’s statement in the article on Christian camps (News, Dec. 5) that we need “a movement away from meeting-centered and speaker-centered camps to a more personal interaction between counselor and camper.…”

At Word of Life camps we emphasize both the centralized and decentralized program. We bring to our camps leading Bible teachers, evangelists, and missionaries, for God manifests his Word through preaching (Titus 1:2). We also have a top-notch counseling program by which we decentralize our program to bring the counselor together with the camper.

Let’s keep this thing in balance. We have found this works well not only in our camps in the United States but also at our camps in Brazil and Germany, and we plan to use this same procedure in the 100 camps that we hope, Lord willing, to establish around the world.

JACK WYRTZEN

Director

Word of Life Fellowship, Inc.

Orange, N. J.

No aspect of the American culture fares as poorly on television as organized religion. The economics of the medium, the secular mood of writers and producers, and the lack of evangelical zeal in the vocational dimension—these combine to effect an ecclesiastical blackout on our living room screens.

To the liberal mainstream of American Christendom, this is of little concern. Many a modern prophet does not regard the Christian message as distinctive and is not quite sure what the Church is for. His causes are championed aggressively enough in the mass media by revolutionary politicians and new-morality entertainers. So who needs the Church on television?

To the concerned evangelical, however, lack of visibility on the cultural frontiers should be a vital issue. He is under a biblical mandate to spread the word. He sees the potential to confront every man, woman, and child with the claims of Jesus Christ. And he feels that as a taxpayer and loyal citizen he deserves equal time in governmentally regulated media to present ideological options to the happiness-is-things or action-is-everything philosophies that pervade so much of today’s viewing. But all he gets is an occasional Billy Graham crusade and a small assortment of Sunday-morning services.

On page three of this issue, the reader will find a pioneering article in which Ronn Spargur seeks to insert a wedge for religious interests. Mr. Spargur presents a well-thought-out proposal that takes account of all sides of the problem. What he suggests is for the good of the country and the industry as well as the Church, and we feel it merits serious consideration.

Let one thing be clear. CHRISTIANITY TODAY is not launching an anti-media campaign, as Spiro T. Agnew has been accused of doing. Mr. Spargur’s article was written before the Vice-President raised the issue. We are part of the American media, and we recognize that although little of what Mr. Agnew said can be challenged directly, he never quite got to the heart of the problems involved. The role of journalism in a free society must be analyzed on a level higher than David Brinkley’s raised eyebrows. If there is an anti-administration consensus among Washington newsmen, the reason is surely something other than the similarity of their reading matter. As the Washington Post, one of the media attacked, acknowledged, “there is a decent and respectable case to be made that ‘a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men’ represent ‘a concentration in power over American public opinion unknown in history,’ but Mr. Agnew has not made it.”

On the other hand, if Mr. Agnew’s indictment occasions a penetrating self-examination by the television industry, he will have done the nation a service. Such a rethinking is long overdue. Television programming is still patterned after that of radio in its heyday, though radio has long since shed its original format. The television industry will do itself a favor if it begins to move in fresh directions before the public begins to demand changes through some Ralph Nader.

Surely one of the first items on the reorientation agenda is the religious question. The ultimate solution may lie outside the inherent capabilities of the industry. The initiative of the religious community may well be more determinative, for the networks simply cannot be expected to hand over big blocks of precious time without compensation. Indeed, the free-time public-service policy that has been advocated by many leading churchmen and has been in partial effect on both radio and television for many years seems to be an utter failure. What it has meant in practice is that insignificant programs are aired when few people are tuned in.

But network executives need to be willing to bend some, and to offer some new counsel to the religious community. Some of them should sense their responsibility because they themselves are part of the religious community. One particularly useful framework for discussion is available in the National Religious Broadcasters, a strong organization of evangelical producers and station-owners that is holding its annual convention in Washington this month.

There are some—churchmen among them—who will claim that television is really not a suitable medium for the dissemination of Christian truth. It is primarily an avenue for home entertainment, they say, and the attempt to appropriate it for use as a religious conduit is hopeless.

One problem with that attitude is that it assumes that present TV programming is religiously neutral. But not even in entertainment is bias avoidable. Even the blandest kind usually makes some impact upon the mind, for good or evil. For all his self-sacrifice, no one can ever accuse Bob Hope of encouraging biblical morality.

Furthermore, we challenge the idea that television is merely an entertainment medium. Its greatest asset is immediacy. Regrettably, this great boon figures little in current programming. Only a fraction of the day’s fare is live, and much of what is live could just as well be taped. Except for sports events and an occasional development of great historic significance, we seldom get to see anything as it happens when it happens. Surely there are important things happening every day that are of enough general interest to warrant coverage by one network. Must there be entertainment on every channel every night?

Only as we raise such questions will we begin to open possibilities for a more authentic and useful portrayal of religious concerns. We agree with Mr. Agnew that television “consumers” need to speak up, but we feel that the religious question is infinitely more important than the political.

From the evangelical perspective, communications is never an end in itself. Prayer and the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit are essential in any spiritual penetration of the human mind. But the Holy Spirit uses communication to bring conviction. Is not our neglect of a prime communications opportunity a sign of our unwillingness to be led by the Spirit?

The Mafia

Newark, New Jersey, hit the headlines months ago when the Negro ghetto exploded violently and fire swept through the community, the direct result of Negro frustration and rage. Now the city has hit the headlines again, but for another reason. This time the white leadership of the city has been accused of malfeasance and indicted by the federal government for an assortment of crimes ranging from extortion and income-tax violations to willful failure to enforce anti-gambling laws. Behind it all lies the omnipresent Mafia, La Cosa Nostra, an organized crime syndicate that beggars description.

Anyone who condemns radical groups like the Black Panthers cannot overlook the even more unlawful and far more obnoxious gangsters who parade around in Cadillac limousines and winter in the plush spas of Florida. These are the people who are responsible for the peddling of dope in Harlem. They are right in the middle of the gambling rackets. And wherever prostitution flourishes, these vermin are around collecting their fees, soliciting policemen by bribery, and consorting with politicians who are anxious to do their bidding. They are the big fry who work seven days a week to spread their skeins of wickedness and to exploit the weak, the sinful, and the simple.

The battle against the Mafia is never won. They continue to multiply their species despite the strongest efforts of local and federal crime-busting agents. Money is their god and murder, if need be, their means to control the vice rackets, the gambling industry, and even the lawful businesses they engage in as a cover for their nefarious activities. If any sort of righteousness is to prevail in the nation, the wings of, the Mafia must be clipped and the bird itself made extinct if at all possible.

Panthers And ‘Pigs’

It is a popular sport in the present climate to defend lawbreakers and damn the police. That the raids on the hideouts of the Black Panthers should produce such a reaction is no surprise. “Police brutality,” “planned genocide,” “a conspiracy by law-enforcement agencies”—these are among the gentler charges mouthed by Black Panther sympathizers.

Some policemen are as reprehensible as the criminals they are supposed to curb. Some of them violate the canons of the law with impunity. These malefactors should be prosecuted as vigorously as any other lawbreakers. Arrogant, prejudiced policemen should be dismissed from their jobs. Unfortunately, the misconduct of this minority has served to give policemen in general a bad image. Yet tens of thousands of them are functioning creditably, and we owe them a great debt of gratitude.

Those whose hearts bleed for the Black Panthers (see News, page 32) should take a hard look at what they profess to be and what they are actually doing. They are collecting guns and ammunition in violation of local laws. They are engaged in a conspiracy to destroy the existing order. They have repeatedly made threats that, for want of evidence to the contrary, must be taken seriously by the police. They have stated that they intend to kill the “pigs” (the police) and have encouraged others to do the same. There is every reason to believe that they have coordinated their efforts around the country so that they represent a movement, not simply a number of isolated and unrelated gangs. Why there should not be a nationally coordinated effort to meet a nationally coordinated challenge remains to be shown.

If it can be shown to the satisfaction of a jury that the recent killings of Black Panthers were premeditated murders committed by policemen in violation of law, these policemen should be convicted and penalized. But this does not legitimatize the Black Panther organization nor justify the notion that law-enforcement agencies should regard the Panthers as respectable and leave them to their illegal devices.

It is true that the Black Panthers are a small minority and do not have the approval of the majority of the Negro community. Indeed, great numbers of Negroes are terrorized by them and will be glad to see their activities curtailed. At the same time it is quite proper for the police to watch them carefully and to make certain that they stay within the bounds of the law.

Beleaguered Israel

The Arab-Israeli pot continues to boil. It reached new intensity recently after the United States issued its new Mideast peace plan and the Arabs held a summit conference. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir sharply and almost completely rejected the U. S. proposal. The meeting of Arab leaders was less than a success, also; disaffection and disagreement exists among them as to what course the Arab world should pursue. It is clear that the Arabs and the Israelis are still poles apart, and it may be that the world will have to live with this impasse for decades to come. Already references have been made to the possibility of another hundred years’ war.

No one can remain unmoved by the plight of Jerusalem, a holy city for both Arab and Jew. The United States’ proposal to unify that city, guaranteeing free traffic through all parts of it, with Jordan and Israel “sharing in civic and economic responsibilities of city government,” is an ideal solution in a dream world free from sin. But given the innate sinfulness of men, it offers little prospect of success. Jerusalem signifies the nightmare that haunts the world. Israel has possession of the city and is hardly likely to yield to any demands to give it up. But both the Arabs and the Jews feel the city is theirs. Joint rule would only accentuate the hatreds that exist; yet to give one party control over the city would be an act of injustice to the other one.

The whole imbroglio leaves most of us frustrated, hopelessly wringing our hands over a grim problem for which there are no apparent answers. At least Christians know that men do not determine history. Once again we must look to God for some way out.

Bucking The Blue Laws

Sabbath-day observance has become almost a joke in contemporary society. This fact became especially apparent when recently two major department-store chains, Sears, Roebuck and Company and the J. C. Penney Company, broke a long-standing policy by opening some of their stores on Sundays. Other companies are entertaining thoughts of following suit. Sunday blue laws have been dropped in many places, and it is likely that these laws will be severely tested in other areas where a number of merchants have been arrested for selling “unnecessary” merchandise on Sunday.

Some have seen in these recent decisions movement toward a complete takeover of Sunday by the retail merchants. And it is feared that such a trend will seriously hamper the work of the churches. This may be true to some extent, but it is probable that laxity toward Sunday closing laws is a result rather than a cause of ineffectiveness in the Church. Many churches hold special services on other days in order to free parishioners for Sunday travel and recreation. The problem must be dealt with among those who claim to be God’s people rather than among those who may claim no allegiance to God’s will.

In a 1961 Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of three Sunday closing statutes, the decision was made on the basis that Sunday laws are now intended to encourage, not religious observance, but rather the purely secular pursuits of rest, relaxation, and family togetherness. Certainly the observance of “blue laws” is not an indication of good spiritual health in our national life. Although we strongly advocate observance of the Lord’s day in obedience to Scripture, we cannot realistically expect from an ungodly society a genuine desire to follow the will of God at this point. Men must be brought to Jesus Christ as a basis for obedience to God’s will—and this must be our major concern.

A prohibition of Sunday “business as usual” may not be possible in our secular society; nevertheless, those whose convictions rule out Sunday work are protected by the law. The 1964 Civil Rights Act provides for the excusing of every employee from labor on his day of worship. In June of 1969 a United States District Court required a large company to rehire an employee who was discharged for refusing to work on his day of worship or to find a replacement. The court also required the company to reimburse him for the compensation he had lost. Christians can express their conviction about Sabbath-day observance by declining to work, and certainly Christian businessmen can demonstrate their obedience by shutting their places of business on Sunday and by refraining from requiring others to labor on their day of worship.

The Helplessly Hungry

Some people bring hunger on themselves, and even toward these the Christian must exercise compassion. But what of those in our affluent land who always go to bed hungry through no fault of their own—or worse yet, because of someone else’s avarice?

For the last several years there has been a concerted effort to get the U. S. government to do away with hunger in America. So far, it seems, this effort has been pretty much of a failure. The struggles and frustrations are documented comprehensively in a new book by reporter Nick Kotz, Let Them Eat Promises—The Politics of Hunger in America. Mr. Kotz writes, “The politics of hunger in America is a dismal story of human greed and callousness, of immorality sanctioned and aided by the government of the United States.”

So acute are the problems in achieving a political solution that it is surprising to find Mr. Kotz still trying at the end of the book. He surely recognizes the difficulty: “The nation has deluded itself repeatedly by assuming that passing laws with noble preambles or issuing well-meaning Presidential proclamations has actually solved problems. The nation discovers a problem, debates it fiercely, declares finally its decision to solve the problem, and then rushes off to a new concern with the apparent belief that wishes are automatically self-fulfilling in American government. Such, sadly, is not the case and the hunger issue is but the latest illustration of this point.”

We wonder if it ever occurred to Mr. Kotz that the answer may lie outside political institutions? Perhaps it is simply impossible to work effectively through voteconscious legislators and career-sensitive administrators. Maybe there is just enough evil in government that a program with no strings attached has no reasonable chance. Might there not be at least some hope in looking instead to some part of the private sector for a solution?

The hunger problem on the international scale is an infinitely greater problem, and the political obstacles loom comparably larger. What national leader wants to admit that his people are starving? Yet the problem has to be faced: is there then any way to transcend the political dimension?

Some experts say that if present growth continues, the mass of humanity in a few centuries will exceed the entire mass of the earth. That may be a little hard to comprehend, but it should not be hard to understand that we are running out of resources. The world is already beginning to experience a shortage of materials of great importance to a technological society, such as mercury, tin, silver, and cobalt. In food production, there is also uncertainty.

There are things, of course, that can be done. We need not be witnesses to the extinction of humanity. Triticale, a superior new species of grain, believed to be the first ever devised by man, is just one example of steps that can be taken. What is needed more than anything else is the right kind of motivation, and it becomes increasingly evident that politics cannot provide it.

This is where the Church comes in, and where the principle of love is brought to bear. Only in the Christian faith is pure incentive found. Some churchmen have had blind spots, some have been hypocrites, some have exploited religious position for ulterior ends. But the fact remains that over the historical sweep of the last two thousand years the most humane movements have grown out of Christian roots. The scriptural charge to each believer is the highest ideal, and only when we refocus upon the Christian dynamic will we find the best motivation for tackling and resolving the great problems of our time.

The Clergy Discount: Boon Or Bane?

In many communities and in some industries, the practice of clergy discounts continues. For the many ministers with low incomes (see page 26 of our December 5 issue), these discounts can be an important help in making ends at least come close together. However, a better way is for full-time ministers to be supported adequately by the people of God so that they can conduct their affairs in the world of commerce in the normal way.

Many business and professional men cannot help thinking they do God a favor when they give clergy discounts. Accordingly, the subconscious feeling is likely to be present that God will “discount” his standards when he examines their lives; they may consider themselves virtuous because of their beneficence to men of the cloth. Moreover, the pastor who accepts discounts leaves open the possibility that this will influence the content of his preaching; we do not wish to irritate those who bestow favors on us.

Rather than give discounts, Christian businessmen should increase their giving to the church so that ministerial salaries can be raised. To be sure, members of a congregation might insist on rendering their vocational services at low or no cost as one of their ways of contributing to the Lord’s work. Also, certain businesses might give discounts to various classes of customers as a means of generating trade, and in cases like this ministers might gratefully accept the discount. But in general the better way is for ministerial incomes to be adequate so that clergy discounts can be discontinued.

The Autonomous Man

Nebuchadnezzar the mighty king of Babylon was a man of consummate pride. He had it made as head of the greatest empire of his day. Responsible only to himself, with all nations lying prostrate before his feet, he could do as he pleased—or so he thought. He was a prototype of the autonomous man, the one who walks in independence and feels no need to look up to anyone else or to bow before any king or power.

God sent Nebuchadnezzar a dream, one that neither he nor his underlings could interpret. Only Daniel, God’s prophet, was able to tell him its meaning. Boldly Daniel dared to add to the interpretation a word of spiritual counsel for the king. Having said that the king would be driven from among men and live like an animal with his mind clouded, Daniel offered him a way out if he resisted pride and looked to God. “Let my counsel be acceptable to you” said Daniel. “Break off your sins by practicing righteousness, and your iniquities by showing mercy to the oppressed, that there may perhaps be a lengthening of your tranquillity.”

Nebuchadnezzar spurned Daniel’s advice and at last proclaimed, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power?” The words had barely fallen from his lips when judgment came. He lost his senses, was driven from among men, and ate grass like an animal.

The time came when Nebuchadnezzar learned the hard way the lesson he refused to learn when he was riding high. At last he discovered that pride goes before a fall and that the man who fails to give God his due place is always the loser. Then it was that he forsook pride, perhaps the source of most sin, and acknowledged what he should have known in the first place—that God stands above even the highest king and brings to dust all who exhibit pride. His reason returned to him and he exclaimed: “I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored him who lives for ever; for his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation; all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing.… None can stay his hand or say to him, ‘What doest thou?’”

We are small, and there is nothing in any of us to commend us to God. We are dependent, not autonomous. What place is there for pride? God hates it, and its wages is death. Buy therefore humility, a precious jewel that shines like the sun and adorns its possessor with beauty and God’s approval.