Ward S. Miller
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Reflections on the occasion of the 300th birthday anniversary of an expert in exaggeration
Gulliver’s Travels is today probably the most widely read literary work of the eighteenth century. Usurping the prominence that Pilgrim’s Progress shared with Paradise Lost in the nineteenth century, it has become a staple ingredient of college literature courses.
Its currency is not difficult to explain. The book is mainly satire, and our age is sophisticated and disillusioned enough to like satire better than simple biblical allegory or epic elegance. Although Gulliver’s Travels is but one of several satirical or disillusioned works that contend for a place in college courses, nothing else quite matches it in charm and challenge. Once merely a children’s story, it has now become a required intellectual experience for college students. For the most part, this timely book—whose author was born November 30, 1667—is a subtle, richly diversified, ostensibly comic study of human depravity and its various alternatives.
The last and most imaginative section of this four-part work is more often admired than understood. It is about the Houyhnhnms, who are a society of horses, and a depraved race of men called Yahoos. In the first part of the work, the traveler Gulliver, in Lilliput, becomes mildly disillusioned by human vices. In Part II the king of Brobdingnag calls Gulliver’s fellow human beings “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” Part III castigates the human race for an assortment of academic, scientific, and political absurdities. Then in Part IV Swift portrays the Houyhnhnms and the loathe-some, much belabored Yahoos, and here he seems to exceed all bounds of truth and decency.
For literary study, however, there was no way to sidestep Part IV. This last part is the climax, and in it the accumulated meaning of the previous episodes comes to a jarring and well-sustained finale. In the candid twentieth century the Yahoos are still revolting, but they seem too real to be dismissed as malicious libels on the human race.
Swift’s protean talents were all too adequate for the overwhelming effects he sought. Gulliver in Part IV, now captain of his ship, is the quasi-capitalistic victim of a mutinous crew who put him ashore on an unknown island in order to seize the ship and become pirates. Once ashore, he encounters the Yahoos. After his first disgusting misadventure with them, he eagerly welcomes the kindly Houyhnhnms as paragons of sweetness and light; he is overjoyed by their benevolent mildness, their grave reasonableness, and their plain “horse” sense about death, sex, and other highly affective realities. The Houyhnhnms are superior to human beings, he decides.
For generations most readers have shared his admiration of the Houyhnhnms, and quite an embarrassing proportion of literary scholars have incautiously joined in the extravagant applause. Today, however, a number of the most competent Swift specialists, after thoroughly investigating their author’s unusual life and complex psyche as well as Gulliver’s Travels, have converged in a relatively new interpretation, growing out of what A. E. Dyson calls “Swift’s ironic trap.”
Gulliver, like millions of readers who identify with him, is surprisingly uncritical; several scholars have suspected that his name derives from “gullible.” He swoons and sinks to the depths of despair when the Houyhnhnms reject him as a Yahoo, unfit for their society. Morosely he returns to England, but he finds reconcilement with his fellow Yahoos (as he styles them) impossible. Unable to endure his wife and children because of their odor, he comforts himself by sitting in the stable, conversing with the two horses he bought as solace.
The average reader sadly shares Gulliver’s despair. Thus he falls into the ironic trap, not realizing that Swift was fonder of literary pranks than any other English writer. What Gulliver and the naïve reader fail to see is that the Houyhnhnms, whatever their charms, are actually subhuman. They get along with each other well, as human beings ought to do, and they have superhuman sense; but they have no crafts, no books, no culture, no arts except poetry. Their political system works well enough for horses, but they are appallingly uncreative, and their society could hardly make a human being envious.
The Houyhnhnms have little to offer human beings because they lack imagination. This is the gift that raises man above the animal level and enables him to know good and evil. Human beings alone can conceive of “the thing which is not” and then create it, for good or for bad. The Houyhnhnms who have no knowledge of evil and not even a word for it, are in fact subhuman.
Gulliver never suspects this, however. He is well educated, well traveled, well balanced, and in a sense quite intelligent. Unfortunately, like the Houyhnhnms he lacks imagination, and thus he is unable to picture a fully realized human utopia. Instead of collapsing in despair when the Houyhnhnms dismiss him, he should thank God that he is a man and not a horse.
How can Gulliver be so gullible? And how can most readers identify with him so readily? They follow him home and share with him the solace of his two horses. It does not occur to them that the stable must smell considerably worse than his wife and children, or that there is something wrong with a man who has so little affection for his family.
Another important recognition most readers never achieve is that Gulliver is not really a Yahoo with clothes on, as the Houyhnhnms conclude after examining him with ludicrous scientific solemnity. Here Swift is making a point that is especially relevant today. The truth is that Gulliver is a gentleman who at no time behaves like a Yahoo, though, as several Swiftian scholars have pointed out, he does turn out to be a pride-powered stoic or deist. In Lilliput he remains loftily superior to the petty jealousies and animosities of the Lilliputians, disdaining to punish their treachery. He distinguishes himself in Brobdingnag by his judicious moderation and objectivity, thus making himself an impressive contrast to the conniving Englishmen as he described them to the King. He does nothing discreditable in Laputa or among the Houyhnhnms. Surely he deserves to be accepted by the Houyhnhnms for what he is.
The Houyhnhnms, however, never show their lack of perceptivity more clearly than by rejecting Gulliver, simply on the basis of physical appearance. Yet, because they cannot make subtle distinctions between appearance and behavior, the comedy accumulates, and their failure suggests the very tragic way in which modern Houyhnhnms fail or refuse to see that man is more than an animal with clothes on.
Excerpts From Jonathan Swift’S Observations
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Positiveness is a good Quality for Preachers and Orators, because he that would obtrude his Thoughts and Reasons upon a Multitude, will convince others the more, as he appears convinced himself.
All Fits of Pleasure are balanced by an equal Degree of Pain or Languor; ’tis like spending this Year, part of the next Year’s Revenue.
The latter Part of a wise Man’s Life is taken up in curing the Follies, Prejudices, and false Opinions he had contracted in the former.
No Preacher is listened to but Time, which gives us the same Train and Turn of Thought that elder People have tried in vain to put into our Heads before.
When a true Genius appears in the World, you may know him by his Sign, that the Dunces are all in confederacy against him.
One of the ironic facts about the ironic trap is that Swift made his intentions reasonably clear. In a letter to Alexander Pope dated September 29, 1725, he stated that his purpose in writing Gulliver’s Travels was “to vex the world rather than divert it.” And in a letter two months later he said, “I have got materials toward a treatise, proving the falsity of that definition animale rationale [the rational animal] and to show that it could be only rationis capax [capable of reason].” The treatise is Gulliver’s Travels, and the letters indicate that for Swift true man is a via media between the Yahoo and the Houyhnhnm.
It is not surprising that Swift admired the Houyhnhnms in an ambivalent way. He realized how naïve persons like Shaftesbury were in believing that men could live by reason alone or by a natural religion that assumed the innate goodness of men. But he also knew, as he said in his letter to Pope, that the Houyhnhnm kind of life was unattainable. He found too much of the Yahoo in man, even in himself. He could not forget, for example, that one young lady half his age and more than half Yahoo whom he had befriended in London became so aggressive in her passion for him that she followed him to Ireland, hounded him for years, and finally blamed him for the misery that later led to her unhappy death. Swift knew the Yahoo side of humanity as well as its Houyhnhnm-like distortions.
The startling thing about Part IV today is its “prophetic” dimension. This is not to say that Swift felt any desire or competence to predict the future, but only that the world does not change as much as most apostles of progress would like to believe. Swift’s Houyhnhnms may be a caricature of the eighteenth-century deists. Yet they persist today and proliferate in numerous varieties of vaguely theistic humanism, a humanism that would have men live, like the Houyhnhnms, by reason alone in self-generated good will founded on enlightened selfishness. Such thinking is inevitably confused. It accepts human limitations in a realistic and often unimaginative way while it theoretically and idealistically denies them. And it reduces God, by whose grace man can transcend these limitations, to an impersonal abstraction or at best an absentee landlord.
At the same time the Yahoo element in man also continues to be conspicuous. It flourishes in gruesome crimes almost without precedent. Science, in one of its most familiar stances, acknowledges man as merely a beast and labels his most shocking deviations as illness that psychiatry can cure and environmental manipulation will in time be able to prevent. Yahoo behavior is the shameless and often blatant material of much of the most publicized twentieth-century fiction. Yahooism has also invaded art to a degree that is disturbing if not degrading; and the Yahoo spirit is more conspicuous in social behavior than it was in Swift’s day, more overt and less restrained. It takes prettified Playboy forms that lure many a hypnotized pilgrim into its polite perversions of lust and regression.
The result is ever the same for cultivated Gullivers. Horrified by the Yahoo aspect of man, they eagerly embrace the Houyhnhnm antithesis in all its meretricious simplicity, only to learn (perhaps too late) that the concept of man as animale rationale is a mirage. In fact, unless Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven” at length subdues a man, he is bound to sink in mortal despair, just as Gulliver did. This despair is the inevitable and eternal result of meeting the Yahoos and Houyhnhnms without Christian insight. Its victims go to their graves unsalvaged, never imagining what the Creator can make of man’s Yahoo impulses and Houyhnhnm dreams.
Swift did not explain this via media. It must have seemed obvious to him, and perhaps it was obvious in a day when all schoolboys learned the catechism and the basic theology of the Christian faith. Anyway, a writer of Swift’s genius respects his readers too much to be unduly explicit.
Was Swift a misanthrope? He is often summarily convicted by his own words, when he says, for example, in the same letter that clarifies his view of man as merely capax rationis: “I hate and detest that animal called man.…” It is easy to overlook the other half of his statement here: “… although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth”—a sentiment to which Gulliver could hardly have subscribed.
It is not generally known that the Irish people came to revere Swift as their beloved dean (he was for a few years dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin), partly because his self-advertised saeva indignatio is the kind of righteous indignation a preacher should display at times and because he wielded it for many years on their behalf in writings such as “A Modest Proposal.” Few of his critics were aware that during the latter part of his life he was giving a third of his income to charitable causes. Indeed, they use this last part of his life to discredit him. The insanity into which he lapsed has been represented as a case of poetic justice or well-merited retribution. Actually it was not violent insanity but rather the senility into which many elderly persons drift.
Swift lived too long. He was a man of scintillating wit and unusual physical vigor who found emotional outlet chiefly in his friends and in his writing. When these failed him (after 1730, when he was sixty-three), loneliness became the painful accompaniment of longevity, and he found an outlet only in letters and in bitter, cynical, or misanthropic outbursts.
“Life is a comedy to him who thinks, a tragedy to him who feels.” This familiar aphorism of the eighteenth century helps one understand Gulliver’s Travels. Swift saw clearly the absurdity of man’s animalistic behavior in the light of his proud pretensions. He saw no less clearly the more subtle absurdity of man’s frantic, futile, misguided efforts to make himself a rational being. This contrast heightens the comic “vision” that dominates his best literary work.
At the same time, as a dedicated clergyman he sincerely loved individual men and felt the tragedy of their condition and his own disappointments deeply. Thus, his gullible Gulliver becomes a tragic figure for those who feel as well as a comic figure for those who think. In this strange paradox is a key to the enduring power of Swift’s most influential work.
Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”
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David P. Scaer
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Modern theologians offer a deceptive choice
Theology today often offers a choice between Christ and the Bible, as if this were a legitimate option. The alternatives are stated in such a way that if a person chooses the Bible, he has denied Christ and is guilty of bibliolatry; indeed, he may even forfeit his right to be called Christian! The charge of bibliolatry suggests that conservative Christians have brought back the “Black Mass” in Protestant form and made a black leather book an object of devotion.
This offer of a choice between Christ and the Bible is not only misleading—it is downright deceptive. It is certainly not suggested by the Scriptures themselves. Shortly after Christ’s resurrection, he chided his disciples for not knowing what the Old Testament had to say about his crucifixion and resurrection. It was by means of the Bible and not without it that he discussed these saving events (Luke 24:25–27). If our Lord had been as set against the Bible as some theologians imagine, he could merely have revealed himself as the resurrected Christ without taking on the bothersome task of expounding at length the Old Testament.
No real choice can ever be made between Christ and the Bible, simply because the Bible centers in Christ and he submits himself totally to it. Christ is the chief content of the Bible and also the only key to its interpretation. Thus Luther could say, “No one can understand the Law without Christ, because no one knows what it demands and how it can be fulfilled.” On the other hand, Luther so exalted the Scriptures that he could also say, “Moses is the source of all wisdom and understanding, from which everything flows, as the prophets knew and said; even the New Testament flows out it and is based on it.”
In the Church, therefore, Jesus Christ and the Bible constitute one authority, neither part of which is greater or less than the other. The Reformers pointed to this twofold authority when they said that both sola fide (faith in Christ alone) and sola scriptura (all teachings based on the Bible alone) were at the heart of Christianity. To uphold one is to uphold the other also, and to deny the authority of one is to deny the authority of both. In the Church it is always Christ and the Bible, never Christ alone or the Bible alone.
This relation between Christ and the Bible was expressed more technically in the statement that Christ was the material principle of the Church and the Bible the formal principle. Here the term “principle” meant source. Jesus Christ, as the content or matter of the Scripture, was said to be the source of all truth in the Church, and the Bible, as the framework in which Christ alone could be found, was said to be the source also. Luther spoke of this dual authority in the Church when he said that anything that taught Christ was for him the word of God. For him, however, all the books of the Bible taught Christ.
Even though Christ, the material principle, and the Bible, the formal principle, constitute only one authority for the Christian Church, they must nevertheless be distinguished from each other. Those of neo-orthodox belief tend to exalt Christ at the expense of the Bible. Conversely, Rudolf Bultmann places a higher value on the Bible as preaching to the existential situation than he does on Jesus Christ. For Bultmann, Jesus is not the Jesus of Nazareth who died for sin but the “Christ” of belief who is found in preaching. The material principle. Christ’s atoning work as history, is inconsequential.
Unfortunately, Bultmann’s preoccupation with the “Christ of preaching” also leaves him with a Bible subject to his own existential interpretation. There is no objective person called Jesus Christ and hence no norm for his interpretation. Thus, despite his avowed devotion to Christ in the preached word of Scripture, Bultmann has neither a historical Christ nor an objectively reliable Bible.
Bultmann has failed to distinguish between Christ, the material principle, and the Scriptures as God’s Word, the formal principle. Just as in reading a newspaper account we distinguish between what we are reading and what has happened, so in reading the Scriptures we distinguish between the report itself, the formal principle, and the actual event, the material principle. For Bultmann, “Christ” is not an event of past history reported in the Bible; the report of the Bible is itself the “Christ event” for the reader. There is for him no difference between the “word” and “Christ.” Thus he has so confused Christ, the material principle, with the word about Christ, the formal principle, that he finds no real distinction between them.
Jesus Christ, the incarnate word of God, and the Bible, the written word of God, must be distinguished from each other, but together they constitute one single authority in the church, not two. Like love and marriage and the horse and carriage, they go together. Whoever worships a “Christ” not cradled in the Bible and swaddled in its words worships a false god and is guilty of “Christolatry.” If the charge of bibliolatry applies to anyone, it must certainly applies to Bultmann, whose Christ exists only in the Bible. His Christ neither lived, died, nor rose from the dead, nor is reigning with the Father, waiting to judge the world in righteousness. For him, “Christ” lives only in words as they confront man in the existential situation. The accusation of bibliolatry applies to Bultmann and not to those who through the Bible find Christ.
The answer to the question “Christ or the Bible?” is given when we substitute “in” for “or.” The answer is “Christ in the Bible.” This is the message of the Scriptures themselves, the Protestant Reformers, and the Church in all ages.
Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”
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Don Neiswender
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In the early days of the Christian Church, the supranational, one-world ideal founded by Alexander the Great and perpetuated in the Roman Empire was very much alive. Although Greece as a nation was eclipsed after it fell to the invincible phalanxes of the Roman army, the philosophy of Greece was revered even throughout the waning years of the empire and beyond. Thus, the libraries, museums, and general Hellenistic atmosphere of Alexandria made their impression on Clement and Origen just as surely as they did on Philo. And it was evident that as surely as the early Church Fathers were trained in the thought of their own day, so also would their ministries in the Church bear the impress of the thought and literature of Greece.
Not all the Fathers acquiesced in this Greek influence, of course. Tertullian, who is known for the rhetorical question “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?,” labeled all efforts to reconcile pagan wisdom with Christianity a failure. Tatian, a great student of Justin Martyr (who was perhaps more dedicated to reconciling the Gospel with the wisdom of Greece than any other Father), betrays a hatred of all that belongs to Greek civilization, art, science, and language. And Valentine, too, distrusted the rationalism of Hellenistic thought and, in ecstatic vision, felt he had seen its fall.
It is notable, however, that each of these men was a heretic. The more orthodox Fathers used the wisdom of Greece for Christian ends. Hugo Rahner, taking the Odyssey as a prime conveyor of the Greek spirit and outlook, has shown at great length how the teachers of the Church availed themselves of this myth, adapting it to Christian interpretation (Die Griechische Mythen in Christlicher Deutung, Zürich, 1957). Since the words of Homer were well known, both within the Church and outside it, Christian writers found them to be convenient pegs upon which to hang Christian truth. And the method was largely successful, even though much of what was written seems forced to us today.
A famous example of the Christian use of pagan myths is found in the letter of Clement of Rome to Corinth. Chapter 25 of this letter uses as the crowning evidence for the doctrine of the resurrection the ancient myth of the Phoenix, the bird that was thought to be reborn at five-hundred-year intervals from its own ashes. Clement, however, speaks of this bird not as myth but as historical reality, and we may assume that in this belief, as in other things also, he was a true child of his age. Another example of affinity between the Fathers and Greek philosophy is the attempt by Justin and others to make “pre-Christian Christians” of Socrates and other outstanding pagan figures.
Clearly, then, the Hellenistic thought-world had some effect upon the early Church Fathers. But what was that effect? Hans F. von Campenhausen insists that the early Church had no true theology and never would have had without the influence of Greek philosophy. But can this be said of the teaching of the early Church or only of the system in which and the method by which distinctively Christian doctrine was organized? Was it doctrine that was borrowed or only structure?
The answer is found in the fact that the early Church subordinated what it borrowed to the authority of Holy Scripture. Adolph Harnack is no doubt correct in saying that when the Church broke with the Jews and turned to the Gentiles it was forced to adopt Gentile modes of expression and thought. Saul of Tarsus was indeed a Hellenist; but Paul was a Christian Hellenist who gave the remainder of his life to spreading the teachings of Scripture, and the content of his message came by revelation (Gal. 1:12).
It is undeniably true that the early Church used the great Greek epics. But the Fathers’ extensive use of Homer was possible because they interpreted him in the light of the Logos of John, not in the light of the logos of the Greek philosophers. John may have found the actual term logos in Greek philosophy, but the word was not merely adopted; it was adapted, given new and Christian content. Likewise, when Tertullian considered the then current use of the word quiescere to describe the state of the dead, he felt he should generally prefix a re-,thereby adding a sense of Christian eschatology, namely, that the end is a return.
It is often claimed that the Church borrowed not merely terminology and teaching devices but also the very beliefs of its contemporaries. But this is not easily demonstrated. The Fourth Eclogue of Vergil, written in the strife-ridden aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar, prophesies the birth of a child who would restore order, and important scholars have attempted to trace the birth narratives in the Gospels to this source. But to do this is to be more Hellenistic than the early Greek Christians were, for the early Church did not connect the Eclogue with the birth of Christ until the fourth century. Even then it was the Emperor Constantine who claimed it was a “prophecy of Christ.” This example actually shows that the Gospel reigned over the classics.
But did the opposite ever occur? Did myth and philosophy ever alter the content of the Gospel? This certainly happened in the apocryphal writings of the early church era and in the pseudo-Christian writings of the Gnostics. In fact, it was the appearance of such Gnostic writings as the “Gospels” of Thomas and Philip that necessitated official recognition of the canon. The early Fathers were never wholly able to subordinate their pre-Christian training to the word of Holy Scripture, either. And their writings, too, are rightly outside the canon. Even with respect to the very heart of the Gospel, the doctrine of grace, it is painfully evident how far even the earliest Church Fathers could drift from the New Testament (see T. F. Torrance, The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers, Grand Rapids, 1959).
Yet, for the most part, it was the early Fathers of the Church who successfully opposed heresy and the many attempts by Gnosticism to submerge the Gospel, and who also sought to gain a hearing for the faith by showing that it was compatible with much of what had been said by the great classical teachers. Perhaps it may be said that they exactly reversed the procedure of the Gnostics, who sought to blend Oriental myth with Greek philosophy, leaving only a small place for revelation.
Origen was well aware that Greek philosophy, if accepted as an all-inclusive system of truth, would contradict the Christian faith. But he was also aware that Christian dogma, though it has no base in philosophy, must be proclaimed in a way that is relevant to the existing philosophical climate if it is to get a hearing. Thus the Church wished to accommodate Greek thought while yet affirming the uniqueness of Christianity as the only way of salvation. It had abundant examples of what would happen if the word of Holy Scripture was not allowed to dominate in this relation.
Thus, against the mythology common to the day, the Church contrasted the opinion that the gods were historical heroes or kings who came to have deity ascribed to them with the biblical doctrines of monotheism, the Trinity, and Christ’s unique sonship and humiliation. And even though one today might be somewhat dismayed to find Clement of Rome relying on the Phoenix myth to bolster the doctrine of the resurrection or conceding supernatural powers to the oracles, a glance at the footnotes in a modern translation of his letter will amply demonstrate that Scripture was his prime authority.
It is striking that although almost all second-century Christian literature was written by Gentile believers, Hellenism can in no way be considered a dominant factor in it. The letters, addressed to Christians, as they generally are, seem totally independent of Hellenism and show an intense concern for the New Testament message. The apologetical writings that deal with Hellenism do so in order to show the superiority of Christian revelation.
The Church, then, was unwilling to receive truth from outside. And by the middle of the second century it had acknowledged the canon as the divinely given corpus of propositional revelation. It considered the Holy Scriptures sufficient, the only valid norm of thought and practice.
Tertullian was no doubt joined by many others in his opinion that Athens had nothing to offer the Christian, but Clement of Alexandria felt it best to try to preserve the Hellenistic breadth of thought and learning within the Church. He argued that the call of the sirens in Homer’s Odyssey was the call of classical mythology and thought. This Greek wisdom, if blindly followed, would lead to destruction. Yet the crew of the ship, whose ears Odysseus stopped with wax to spare them from temptation, were cowards. Odysseus was the hero, for he endured the trial, sailed by, and made his way to his home. Clement argued that to hear the wisdom of Greece is necessary for the full Christian experience but that to remain only with Greek wisdom is death. When the Greek word for siren was taken into the Septuagint (e.g., Job 30:29; Isa. 13:21, 22; Jer. 50:39) and when these sirens were exposited in Homeric fashion (in Jerome’s commentary on Isaiah, for example), the Homeric epic continued to convey Christian teaching for centuries.
The early Church considered itself totally bound by the authority of Holy Scripture and thought the worth of Greek wisdom relative and the worth of Greek religion non-existent. The Fathers drew upon their classical knowledge as a point of contact with their non-Christian contemporaries. Origen realized that he needed to study philosophy to see into the minds of the unchurched; like Clement of Alexandria, he studied it not primarily so he could teach it but in order to gain a hearing for Christian truth.
The classical culture that surrounded the early Church was not simply ignored. It was brought into subjection to Christ and the Scriptures he inspired. But then it was used as a point of contact for evangelizing Gentiles.
The implications for today are plain. Some forms of modern existentialism easily match Gnosticism in meaninglessness. Neo-platonic optimism about the power of reason finds its parallel in a scientism that thinks it has crowded the God of the Scriptures out of his universe. The spirit of Celsus—the platonist philosopher who was the author of the first notable attack on Christianity—is still with us, and it calls for many an Origen to reply. The times demand men who are truly men of the modern age but who bow before the words of God in Scripture.
Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”
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James Montgomery Boice
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First of Two Parts
As an adjustment to the destructive biblical criticism of the last century and this one, much of Protestant theology has attempted to shift the Christian faith from an objective to a subjective footing. Christians have been told that the facts of biblical history do not matter for the life of faith, that our subjective understanding of Jesus is more important than historical knowledge of the events of his life and ministry. Many argue that theology and anthropology, not history, should be the concern of Christian thinkers.
This argument has an element of truth, for there is more to Christianity than historical facts; as a personal relationship with the living God, it has an indispensably large subjective element. But we cannot divorce the subjectivity of Christianity from its objective basis without destroying the nature and power of the Gospel. Christianity is a historical faith, and the events to which it refers are of its essence. Where the Church forgets that Jesus Christ actually lived and died in Palestine, that he demonstrated the truth of his claims to be the Son of God and Saviour of the world by his resurrection from the dead, there the force of the Gospel is lost and Christianity is inevitably swept away by the ebb tide of history.
On the other hand, where these events are recognized as true, there Christianity stands. For it rests upon the supernatural activity of the eternal and omnipotent God. The facts are essential for Christianity. Hence, the historical reliability of the Bible and particularly of the New Testament documents is immensely important for the advance of Christian faith.
The reliability of the New Testament is also important for the progress of theology, for theologies that do not regard the New Testament documents as trustworthy and authoritative inevitably decline into varying degrees of subjectivity. If the New Testament documents are not to be trusted, who is to say what happened in Palestine nineteen centuries ago and what did not? And if these events are unknowable or irrelevant for Christian faith, what is to keep that faith from merely conforming to or reflecting the cultural and intellectual thought-patterns of the theologian? Valid reasoning must have a valid point of reference. Hence, even the theological enterprise depends upon the reliability of the basic documents.
A purely historical approach to Christianity has its natural limitations. It cannot prove the theological significance of an event, for instance. Nor can it always deal adequately with what we know as miracles. It cannot establish the claim that the Bible is God’s revelation to men, or that it is entirely authoritative or infallible. Nevertheless, a defense of the reliability of the New Testament documents can emerge as a defense of the historical basis of the Christian faith and thus as a proclamation of those mighty acts of God which God himself sets before mankind.
Are the New Testament documents reliable? For over a century faith has answered its Yes in opposition to the adverse verdict of influential scholars. Today, however, thanks in large measure to advances in biblical and archeological studies, a significant shift is taking place in certain areas of biblical studies and scholars such as William Albright, Oscar Cullmann, F. F. Bruce, and Joachim Jeremias are arguing that the New Testament is in fact “what it was formerly believed to be: the teaching of Christ and his immediate followers between cir. 25 and cir. 80 A.D.” (William Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity, p. 23). They are noting that much of the historical content of the New Testament is increasingly vindicated by archaeological research.
New postures in biblical scholarship are nowhere more apparent than in approaches to the Gospel of John. A generation ago all but the most conservative scholars gave John an exceptionally late dating, and few would credit the book with historical accuracy. For many writers, the Gospel of John was to be placed in a literary category of its own as something very much like theological fiction. Today, rejection of apostolic authorship is increasingly coming under attack as an inadequate explanation of the Gospel and its origins, and a renewed claim is being raised for the historical reliability of its narrative.
The so-called shift in scholarship has been pointed up by a number of authors, among them Cullmann, who speaks of “a new approach” to the interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Expository Times, 71, pp. 8–12, 39–43), and J. A. T. Robinson, who writes of the “new look” in Johannine studies (Twelve New Testament Studies, pp. 94–106). Comparing contemporary approaches to John’s Gospel, with the critical orthodoxy of the first half of the twentieth century, these scholars detect a tendency today to perceive a genuinely historical and even apostolic tradition in the Fourth Gospel and even to go so far as to recognize the evangelist (although perhaps not the author of the Gospel as it now stands) as a contemporary of Jesus Christ and an eyewitness of the events described. At least five factors have contributed to this new approach:
1. Increased knowledge of the New Testament period has led to general acknowledgment of the existence of a non-conformist Judaism in Palestine before the Christian era, a Judaism embracing genuine Hellenistic tendencies not far removed from the supposedly Greek elements that have always been noted in the Fourth Gospel. This increased knowledge is due in large measure to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 and their publication in subsequent years. In particular, there is a growing readiness to recognize that the life and the literature of the Qumran community may represent the historical milieu out of which John the Baptist emerged with his message of repentance and baptism and also the historical background of the author of the Gospel.
An excellent illustration is to be found in the so-called Gnosticism of the Fourth Gospel, upon which much Johannine scholarship is built. This has often been considered a product of Hellenistic Christianity. Today it is increasingly recognized that the closest parallels to these Johannine themes are found, not in the thought of Asia Minor, but in what Bo Reicke, a Scandinavian scholar, calls the “pre-Gnostic” thought-forms of the Qumran community (New Testament Studies, 1, pp. 137–41). A. M. Hunter writes, listing K. G. Kuhn, Albright, Millar Burrows, W. H. Brownlee, Jeremias, and Reicke for support:
The dualism which pervades the Johannine writings is of precisely the same kind as we discover in the Dead Sea Scrolls; not physical or substantial (as in the Greek Gnostics) but monotheistic, ethical, and eschatological [Expository Times, 71, p. 166].
It is also to be noted that other themes apparently Hellenistic (the Logos, life, and light) are essentially the products of Jewish modes of thought.
This argument for the reliability of the Fourth Gospel asserts, not that the fourth evangelist himself emerged from the environment of Qumran—few would argue this—but that the Dead Sea Scrolls provide tangible evidence for the existence in Palestine, even in the southern and most Jewish sectors of the country, of a body of ideas perfectly adequate to account for the distinctive beliefs and thought-forms evident in the Gospel. Robinson, assessing the historical background, says:
I detect a growing readiness to recognize that this is not to be sought at the end of the first century or the beginning of the second, in Ephesus or Alexandria, among the Gnostics or the Greeks. Rather, there is no compelling need to let our gaze wander very far, either in space or in time, beyond a fairly limited area of southern Palestine in the fairly limited interval between the crucifixion and the fall of Jerusalem [Twelve New Testament Studies, pp. 98, 99].
He adds that the Dead Sea Scrolls “may really represent an actual background, and not merely a possible environment, for the distinctive categories of the gospel.”
2. The reliability of the Johannine topography, vindicated by recent archaeological discovery, also points in its own way to the author’s familiarity with southern Palestine and to the historical trustworthiness of the narrative. The evangelist mentions several places known to the Synoptic writers that might therefore be known generally through tradition: Cana of Galilee (2:1; 21:2), the Praetorium (18:28, 33; 19:9), and Bethany (11:18). But he also speaks accurately of Ephraim (11:54), Sychar, which is probably to be identified with Shechem at Tell Balatah (4:5), Solomon’s Porch (10:23), the brook Kidron, which Jesus crossed to reach Gethsemane (18:1), and Bethany beyond Jordan, which he distinguishes from the other Bethany only fifteen furlongs from Jerusalem (1:28). In recent years the reliability of the writer’s knowledge of Jerusalem has received additional verification by the discovery of an old reservoir with five porticoes near the sheep gate, undoubtedly correspond-to the Pool of Bethesda (5:2), and by identification of the Pavement of judgment, Gabbatha (19:13), as an area in the northwest corner of the temple enclosure bordering on the tower of Antonia.
The most striking of the archaeological discoveries is the probable identification of Aenon near Salim, where there were “many waters” (3:23), with Ainun (“little fountain”), lying near the headwaters of the Wadi Farah. The author’s accurate reference to such an obscure site indicates a remarkable familiarity with the area of the Jordan, and the general knowledge of Jerusalem and its environments he displays argues strongly that his information about Palestine was firsthand.
3. Of equal importance with the increased knowledge of conditions in Palestine during the Christian era is a greater sensitivity to the uniqueness in content of the Fourth Gospel, resulting from an intensified comparison of the text with the Synoptic narratives.
At one time the very uniqueness of the final Gospel would have been taken as an argument for its historical unreliability and as a sign of the distance in time between its composition and the events it describes. Today this is no longer so. With the shift in interest in New Testament studies generally from specific problems of authorship to the gospel traditions that the individual compositions represent, there has come a new awareness of the potential reliability of any independent testimony and a willingness to accept the unique Johannine traditions as being at least as old as the traditions represented by the Synoptics. Many scholars today regard the case for a literary dependence of John on the Synoptics as unproven and improbable. Some even consider the possibility of a dependence of the Synoptics upon John. The weightiest work in English to advance the case for literary independence is the exhaustive examination of Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel by C. H. Dodd. Although Dodd prefers to leave the question of authorship in abeyance, his whole work is designed to show that “behind the Fourth Gospel lies an ancient tradition independent of the other gospels, and meriting serious consideration as a contribution to our knowledge of the historical facts concerning Jesus Christ” (p. 423).
In this area of Johannine studies, few dismiss the theological nature or even the original character of John’s work; but many now regard his teaching to be at least as old as the Pauline theology and, in terms of the tradition, as historically reliable as the Synoptic Gospels on those points where the narrative is to be taken as a history.
4. The new recognition of the possibility of John’s authorship of the Fourth Gospel or of a genuine eyewitness experience as a basis of the traditions it incorporates has been given added stimulus by the attempts to find within the Gospel traces of Aramaic idiom or of original Aramaic documents that are supposed to underlie it. This area of research has been controversial. But though the case of Charles Burney and C. C. Torrey for an Aramaic original of the Fourth Gospel (in Torrey’s case of all four Gospels) has hardly met with general acceptance, it seems quite probable, nonetheless, that a strong Semitic idiom does underlie part of the Fourth Gospel, if not the whole. This may be indicative of a Hebrew- or Aramaic-speaking author who composed his narrative in Greek. Dodd observes that “the evidence for an underlying Semitic idiom is irresistible” and that “this in itself brings the gospel back into a Jewish environment, of which we must take account” (The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, p. 75).
In itself this factor may not prove the existence of an Aramaic-speaking author, but it does make it difficult to associate the Gospel solely with Hellenistic thought-currents or to locate its historical background exclusively in Asia Minor and see it as a representation of Greekspeaking Christianity. Taken together with the other items mentioned, this factor substantially increases the probability that the witness who stands behind the Gospel and to whom must be attributed a share of the actual composition, if not the authorship of the whole, was a Jew of Palestine and thus a possible eyewitness of the events of Christ’s ministry.
5. The final factor that has weighed heavily in an assessment of the Johannine authorship of the Gospel is the belated discovery by critical scholars that the so-called theological (Clement calls it a “spiritual”) interest of the Gospel does not militate against an equally serious attention to the facts.
Not many would doubt today that John is concerned with what has been called for lack of a better term “the Christ of faith.” He affirms indeed that “the flesh is of no avail” (6:63) and asserts repeatedly, as in the account of the post-resurrection appearance to Thomas, that belief must take precedence over sight. But for John the Christ of faith includes the Jesus of history, and belief, though it represents a step beyond the evidence, nevertheless is based upon it. In fact, as Robinson believes, the notion that the Christ of faith can be had apart from the Jesus of history is “exactly the error which, to judge from the prologue and the epistles, he was most concerned to combat” (Twelve New Testament Studies, p. 100). A recognition of these facts has led some scholars to speak of a twofold concern in John’s approach to history, a concern, as Cullmann expresses it, for “faith in the Jesus of history as the ‘Christ’” (Early Christian Worship, p. 38). Or as Edwyn C. Hoskyns writes, “The visible, historical Jesus is the place in history where it is demanded that men should believe” (The Fourth Gospel, p. 85). If these two interests are really interwoven, then it is hard to see how the spiritual interests could be maintained without an equally serious attention to the history and how the historical interest could be genuine without an equal concern for verified historical material. It is contributory to this line of thought that John places an exceptional importance on the facts and in particular upon verification of the facts by those who witnessed them.
It would be unwarranted, of course, to suggest that the question of the authorship of the Fourth Gospel is now receiving an answer radically different from that given by scholars a decade or two ago. Because of the opening up of these new interests, the question of authorship has actually assumed a less important place and has received much less direct discussion. At the same time, however, it is warranted to speak of a shift in Johannine studies according to which scholars more readily admit the possibility of apostolic authorship and speak even more surely of a primitive and reliable tradition underlying the historical material of the Gospel.
[To be continued]
Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”
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We have received welcome notice that CHRISTIANITY TODAY has been elected for indexing in the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, and that indexing of our 1968 issues will begin in the February 25 issue of the Guide. This recognition of broad general interest in the content of CHRISTIANITY TODAY should encourage the availability of the magazine on public library shelves throughout the nation. There are about 17,000 library subscribers to Readers’ Guide, one of the valuable reference works published by The H. W. Wilson Company of New York.
There is more good news. While most magazines, both secular and religious, are showing a marked drop in advertising, total advertising linage in CHRISTIANITY TODAY for 1967 will register a solid 15 per cent gain. Advertising manager Dave Rehmeyer reports that the current issue includes a record total of 732 inches of advertising copy. That is a very pleasant trend. But since not a single religious journal of significant size or influence on the American scene now pays its own way (all are subsidized either by interested individuals or by churches), the prospect of a self-supporting magazine remains as remote for us, in the foreseeable future, as for other religious publications.
Addison H. Leitch
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For better or for worse, I am a Presbyterian, and I suppose I was predestined to be one. It is easy to believe, as a Presbyterian, that what happens to us is of very great importance, and that it may be of great importance to all Protestants—indeed, all Christians. Whether this is so or not, I still think that the debates over the new confession of the Presbyterian Church are important to all Christendom, if only because they pointed up trends, and may well affect decisions in all denominations.
I am further convinced, as I have been for many years, that there are two crucial areas of theological debate, Protestant or Catholic. One is the nature and authority of Scripture, and the other is the place of the Church qua Church in social action. The Presbyterian Confession of 1967 is highly relevant to both these debates.
These things being so, a new book by Jack Bartlett Rogers is very important, because in it this brilliant young theologian of Westminster College (New Wilmington, Pennsylvania) has given us a serious, scholarly, and at the same time intensely interesting study of one of these crucial questions, namely, the doctrine of Scripture. The title of the book is Scripture in the Westminster Confession: A Problem of Historical Interpretation for American Presbyterianism (Eerdmans, 1967).
In my own reading, two books have helped me more than anything else to understand the moving of the Presbyterian Church. The first one is by Lefferts Loetscher: The Broadening Church: A Study of Theological Issues in the Presbyterian Church Since 1869 (1954). The second is this new book by Professor Rogers. Reading these two books will, in my opinion, give anyone an excellent framework for understanding Protestant theology in our time.
Rogers’s book is really a remarkable piece of work. To call a Th.D. dissertation “interesting” strikes most of us as a contradiction in terms, but somehow Rogers has brought this off, and with none of the devices an author is often tempted to try. The interest is not supported by humor or illustration, and he never demeans language in order to get effect. Yet the reader is carried along through page after page of the most careful and erudite writing. Even the footnotes are interesting! In one of them he refers to Baillie’s comment on the Westminster Confession: “It’s generally taken here for a very gracious and brave peece of worke.” I am grateful to Rogers for a “very gracious and brave peece of worke.”
Dr. John Gerstner has written a brief critical article on the book in Pittsburgh Perspective, the journal of Pittsburgh Seminary. Expressing enthusiasm for Dr. Rogers’s total work, he gives critical attention to his analysis of relationships in the interpretation of Scripture in Calvin, the Westminster Confession, Hodge and Warfield, and the Confession of 1967 (by way of Hendry and Dowey).
My problem in discussing the book here is not so much one of space; it is more a question of my own critical judgment. My education included three years of church history, a doctoral dissertation centered on Calvin, and a considerable amount of reading in church history since then, and so I don’t think I quite represent that mystery man, “the average intelligent layman.” But I am not, on the other hand, a career historian. Right here is the strength of this book. It is instructive and delightful for a man in my condition. It opens doors to new personalities, clarifies movements above and below ground, and creates new vistas for reading and thinking. I think it ought to be read by churchmen everywhere.
Certain thoughts suggest themselves. Is Rogers at the end of Barth, reading a Barthian viewpoint of the Word into the thinking of the Westminster divines? Many writers are tempted in the same direction when working on Calvin and Luther. Does a man conditioned by Karl Barth unconsciously use this conditioning to work through the ambiguities that show up in Calvin, Luther, and Westminster?
Vocabulary and definition—words like “inerrancy,” “plenary,” and “verbal”—give the most serious scholars great difficulty. In conservative circles, and—especially in the seminaries of such persuasion—the whole question of “verbal inerrancy” is very much to the fore in serious discussion. Much of the discussion has very little publicity, but the decisions are serious, nevertheless. Roggers’s book makes a scholarly contribution in this whole area and will lead to its own discussions because of what he sees and what he supports. And he holds that the new confession, in bypassing Hodge and Warfield and the so-called Princeton theology, rediscovers the proper tone of Westminster and points fairly to Calvin himself. The reader himself will have to discover how well Rogers’s thesis maintains itself.
One cannot help being pleased with how Professor Rogers really wades in. He evades no issues, writes intelligently on each subject as it forces its way into his attention, and marshalls great support for what he has to say. In my opinion this book will be a necessary point of reference for future debates on the theologies of Protestantism. Perhaps it might even give rise to some more interesting doctoral dissertations!
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Russell Chandler
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Communication with the dead appears to be a live option for a growing number of influential clergymen who believe they have made contact with deceased relatives “on the other side.” One is the Rev. Dr. Edward W. Bauman, pastor of Washington, D. C.’s Foundry Methodist Church, seminary lecturer, and instructor of a Bible telecourse seen coast to coast (his new series started this month).
Like California’s Resigned Bishop James A. Pike—who asserts he has communicated with his dead son at least six times—Bauman originally thought spiritualism was “bunk.” But after he and a physician friend spent an evening with the world’s foremost medium, Arthur Ford, Bauman was a believer.
The tall, vigorous minister confided that he went to see the Philadelphia medium and onetime Disciples of Christ minister in a “very skeptical frame of mind” to “poke holes in the whole business.” During the “sitting,” “very convincing” personal messages came through from Ford’s spirit control, just as reputedly happened in the now-famous Pike séance televised in Canada last month and rebroadcast in the U.S.
Although Bauman didn’t detail what he heard, he says the information could not have been researched beforehand. And—as was true of Pike—the psychic excursions which Bauman has pursued have profoundly influenced his theology. He and another District minister, the Rev. Ernest Martin of the neighboring Church of the Holy City (Swedenborgian), are active in a quickly expanding and respected organization called the Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship, founded by Ford. Bauman is a national executive council member.
Members—who include scientists and psychologists as well as clergymen—explore “psychic phenomena and mystical experience within the framework of the church.” They pay $10 a year dues.
A parallel organization, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, is headed by Hugh Lynn Cayce, son of the late clairvoyant Edgar Cayce. The ARE is making inroads on church-related people who seek new dimensions in extra-sensory perception and psychic experience. A spate of Cayce-inspired paperbacks relating to ESP, reincarnation, and diet and health fads abound on bookstore shelves.
One of the surprising things about all the psychic interest is the serious hearing it seems to be getting. “Pike’s séance would have created a storm of ridicule a few years ago,” says Bauman. Today, forty-two universities have special departments investigating psychic phenomena and parapsychology. At the University of Virginia, former psychiatry Chairman Ian Stevenson, a leader in the field, is collecting data about persons who have memories of past lives.
Reincarnation and karma (belief in “one eternal self” with a carry-over of perfection and retribution into successive incarnations) are central to both the SFF and the ARE. Ford, who settles for “optional reincarnation”—“you don’t have to unless you want to”—told a large and well-dressed audience in posh, Baltimore suburban Towson Presbyterian Church that Christ was incarnated in Jesus because “he had something to say.” Therefore, Jesus and Christ are not exactly the same person, he explained.
Ford also projected his spiritized theology: Sin is simply an “honest mistake” in which instinct bests spiritual values, and hell is only the spirit world, according to the Bible.
The 72-year-old master medium (he has had forty years’ professional experience) said Pike hasn’t jettisoned any basic beliefs. He called Pike’s book If This Be Heresy “as important as Luther’s theses on the door.” Cayce also referred admiringly to Pike, telling a curious audience in Washington, D. C., it had been revealed to him in a dream last June that “a high church official would soon be suggesting ideas on survival.” “Could this be Bishop Pike?” he asked ponderously.
Bauman arranged for Ford to speak in Foundry Church a week before Halloween and hopes to get him and Pike to speak together next spring.
Bauman affirms his brush with the psychic world has brought previously “speculative” doctrines to life, like “the communion of the saints,” but he has some reservations.
He’s not convinced that reincarnation is a fact—though he is “open to the possibility”—and warns against too much dependence on mediums. “It’s not something you play around with,” he said in an interview. “The demonic is always very close.”
Why should the Church be interested? Ford, Cayce (a Presbyterian elder), and Bauman refer to First Corinthians 12. Prophecy, tongues-speaking, and healing are all a genuine part of the movement, Ford maintains. None of the three has spoken in tongues, but neither do they rule this out as a “genuine” possibility.
What they fear most is that spiritualism may float out of the mainstream of religious experience and be relegated to cults and “isms.” Devotees are urged to stay in their own churches and “keep all this in perspective.”
Yet the movement has all the trappings of a religious cult. Cayce advises: (1) Form small groups, (2) meditate individually and together, and (3) spend a week at Virginia Beach (headquarters of ARE). The psychic-content books are virtually “sacred writings” to ardent followers, and one man paid tribute to Edgar Cayce as “a saint.” Mediums give charismatic, prophetic leadership. “Jesus might have been another man like Edgar Cayce, only more so,” remarked one awed woman at an ARE meeting.
The spiritualist thing has stirred up a cauldron of protest from churchmen who are less than entranced. Some say the communication bit is a fake: “The medium is the message.” And they cite King Saul, who once invoked the Witch of Endor to call forth the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel—and wished he hadn’t. Bauman says such warnings are needed but do not close the door to investigation of the “other side.” In any case, those on the far-out frontier of the psychic seem to prefer a minimum of orthodox theology, a maximum of credulity, and a medium-sized faith.
PERSONALIA
Jesus Garcia Valcarcel, founder of Spain’s Catholic charity agency, ran for one of Madrid’s seats in the national legislature on a platform of church-state separation.
The Rev. George Hafner, a New Jersey priest, stopped serving informal Masses in private homes, and his bishop agreed not to excommunicate him and his followers (see October 13 issue, page 43). Later, at Monmouth College, Hafner said “the entire Christian Church has become corrupt.”
Fred Buschmeyer, 67, newly retired secretary of the United Church of Christ, takes a Sydney, Australia, Congregational pulpit next month.
‘Negligent’ Healer
Clergymen and a jury in Toronto got exercised over an exorcism and faithhealing cult. The upshot is that Anglican Canon G. Moore Smith has been fired.
A coroner’s inquest found Smith and his wife negligent in not calling a doctor for Katherine Globe, 18, who died of a brain abcess and meningitis in the Anglican rectory during a prayer service in which cultists were attempting to exorcise evil spirits from her. No criminal charges against Smith were expected, but Smith’s superior, Bishop George Snell, ordered a halt to the group’s meetings while the bizarre “healings” were investigated.
Meanwhile, a chartered airplane left Windsor, Ontario, with 116 gravely ill passengers bound for the Philippines and treatment by faith healer Antonio Agapaoa. One Roman Catholic priest helped raise the $658 fare for his nephew, who suffers from muscular dystrophy.
William L. Nobles, graduate dean of the University of Mississippi, next year will become president of Mississippi College, a Baptist school that refuses to sign compliance with the civil-rights act of 1964.
Pope Paul is expected to visit Colombia and Brazil, the largest predominantly Catholic nation in the world, next year—his health permitting.
Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower was to mark his seventy-seventh birthday by laying the cornerstone of the National Presbyterian Church and Center in Washington, D. C., on October 14.
The Rev. Secundino Bermudez, president of the West Indies Mission’s Association of Cuban Churches, was incarcerated last July, according to mission officials in Miami, Florida. Castro’s police gave no reason for the mysterious seizure.
PROTESTANT PANORAMA
Last month’s Episcopal Church convention voted to permit non-Episcopalians to take Communion on occasions of “spiritual need” if they have been baptized in the name of the Trinity and profess personal Christian commitment. The statement denied this is “open communion.” In another change, non-Episcopal ministers can now participate in burial and marriage services and speak from Episcopal pulpits.
Repudiating a radical program of its Board of Evangelism and Social Service, the General Council of the United Church of Canada said it is not interested in encouraging U. S. youths to dodge the draft.
The United Church Observer, official publication of the United Church of Canada, says Israel stands “condemned before the world” for its expansionist policies and “harsh, inhumane treatment of Arab refugees.”
The American Baptist Convention, with 80,000 tenants, claims to be the biggest private non-profit housing manager in the United States. Meanwhile, church councils in southern California and Michigan voted to start huge housing projects for low-income families.
The Methodist mission board, protesting apartheid, plans to withdraw its $10 million investment portfolio if the First National City Bank of New York renews a credit deal with South Africa. Meanwhile, two Methodist nursing homes in Maryland were cut off from Medicaid payments because of alleged segregation.
The National Council of Churches asked the U. S. Supreme Court to review an appeal challenging the constitutionality of federal aid to private schools.
The 1,834-church Baptist Bible Fellowship International came out against ecumenism and “all civil disobedience.” Miami pastor Al Janney was named president.
The reassembled synod of the Christian Reformed Church narrowly bypassed a harsh rebuke and instead aimed a mild reprimand at Calvin Seminary Professor Harold Dekker, who wrote nearly five years ago that the church view on “limited atonement … impairs the principle of the universal love of God.”
The 12,300-member Conservative Congregational Christian Conference chose the Rev. Raymond Ortlund of Pasadena as president and agreed to an exchange of literature with the Evangelical Free Church.
The 20,500-member Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches voted further study of an invitation to merge with the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, and of altar and pulpit fellowship with The American Lutheran Church.
Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary purchased a twelve-acre campus from a private girls’ school southeast of Denver, and plans to move next summer.
Six professors and forty students were expelled from Brazil’s Campinas Theological Seminary. One of the victims, the Rev. Robert Evans, blames a struggle for leadership in the nation’s Presbyterian Church.
Former agriculture secretary Ezra Taft Benson, a Mormon Apostle, told a church convention that “today’s civil-rights movement is a Communist program” and defended the church’s ban on full membership rights for Negroes as God’s will.
MISCELLANY
A year later, the bizarre murder of the Rev. Dr. Robert W. Spike of the University of Chicago Divinity School is still unsolved. This month Columbus, Ohio, prosecutors dropped first-degree murder charges against William Minor after a judge ruled out a confession as evidence, saying constitutional rights were violated.
The posh Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D. C., in which the Vatican holds a major stock interest, is said to need an addition to turn a profit. But Newsweek reports the Kennedy family plans to fight the move because it would detract from the nearby John F. Kennedy arts center, now being built.
U. S. Roman Catholics on October 22 were to begin mandatory, “temporary” use of a mostly-English Mass. English has been required in the “people’s” section for three years, but the canon (central prayer) has just been authorized in English.
Dominican Republic Roman Catholic bishops have issued a pastoral letter urging wealthy landowners to make their property available to alleviate “the dire poverty” of peasants.
The passports of five Quakers who sailed to North Viet Nam with medical supplies last April have been revoked by the State Department. The five were crew on the ketch “Phoenix,” which currently is making another run into Haiphong. Mrs. Diane Bevel, the wife of an assistant to Martin Luther King, Jr., also lost her passport for making what the State Department called an “unauthorized” visit to Hanoi.
Fifteen top clergymen of various Christian communions in Syria notified the government they will not reopen their schools if they are under full control of the government education ministry.
Singapore’s Trade Union Center has been chosen as the site for the Asian Congress on Evangelism in November of 1968, first of a series of regional conferences projected to follow last year’s World Congress on Evangelism. A second world congress in 1971 is also under discussion.
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Among the several major evangelical enterprises to spring up in the last generation, none has pioneered more daringly than Wycliffe Bible Translators, Inc. And none except the far-reaching ministry of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has been more remarkably successful. Wycliffe now counts 1,700 career personnel assigned to overseas posts in a dramatic effort to get the Gospel to obscure peoples in languages they understand best. Total Wycliffe “membership” stands at nearly 2,000, making it the world’s largest Protestant missionary organization.
Evangelical breakthroughs almost invariably occur under strong leaders. Bob Pierce has been the Billy Graham of the evangelically rooted World Vision movement and through plaintive pleas and skillful promotion raises millions of dollars annually for orphan care and general relief work in the Far East. Dapper Bill Bright has led Campus Crusade for Christ, with its simple but intensive evangelistic zeal, into hundreds of colleges in the United States and abroad. In the case of Wycliffe,1Named after John Wycliffe (c. 1319–1384), the “Morning Star of the reformation,” who broke a 1,000-year tradition when he translated the Scriptures into English. the genius has been that of soft-spoken W. Cameron Townsend, now 71, whose diplomacy has won him entrée to scores of traditionally anti-Protestant government residences in Latin America.
Fifty years ago this month, Townsend, product of a California farm family, arrived in Guatemala as a $25-a-month salesman for the Bible House of Los Angeles. The real challenge came with his discovery that the Scriptures were of no use to the Indians because they could not read Spanish. Prodded by their complaint that “God doesn’t know our language,” Townsend set out to translate the New Testament into the then-unwritten Cakchiquel dialect. Although it took twelve years, Townsend not only achieved that goal but also inspired similar projects across Latin America and subsequently in other parts of the world.
Out of these projects grew Wycliffe, which was incorporated in 1942 and today operates on a budget of about $5,000,000. Personnel and bases are now located in twenty-one countries stretching from St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Straits, where Dave and Mitzi Shinen are marooned for most of the winter, to New Guinea, where Alan Pence runs a compound of 120 buildings.
A key adjunct to the translation work is a vast transportation system and communications network—some forty aircraft and 254 radio stations.
Main Wycliffe headquarters, now in overcrowded offices in Santa Ana, California, will soon move to Dallas, where a modern new complex is planned. The Dallas facilities will have an administrative building, an educational unit that includes a museum, an auditorium, a library and research facilities, and retirement housing for missionaries.
Townsend’s dynamic thrust for Christianity through translation and literacy grows out of effective recruitment of talented linguists who bring with them guarantees of financial support. Part of the secret, however, has been abandonment of some traditional evangelical missionary principles—there has even been some hesitation as to whether Wycliffe personnel should call themselves missionaries. As a result, Wycliffe has been a controversial subject, and Townsend has been at odds with some of his evangelical peers.
The backbone of Wycliffe strategy has been legal contracts with the governments of countries in which the organization operates. These contracts are somewhat parallel, though counter, to the Vatican concordats prevailing for the most part in Latin America. Wycliffe gets official access to, and government help for, areas previously dominated by Roman Catholicism or pagan religions. In return, the organization vows to aid the peoples of these areas, who are sometimes minority groups with only second-class legal standing. The help takes the form of reducing their languages to writing and providing local transportation and communication. Townsend’s critics contend these treaties are brazen violations of the American concept of church-state separation.
What bugs many evangelical missionaries is that Wycliffe personnel, in living up to their contracts, readily serve as chauffeurs for Roman Catholic priests and nuns in jungle and remote areas where Wycliffe planes are the only means of getting around. Because of this, Wycliffe is accused of aiding the propagation of superstitions that the missionaries are trying to counter.
Another charge often hurled at Wycliffe workers is that of implicit duplicity. In hostile field environments, they are known as representatives not of Wycliffe Bible Translators but of the secularly oriented, scientific and educational Summer Institute of Linguistics. Actually the two organizations are twins, with the same board of trustees and headquarters. The secular image is undergirded by the fact that only 5 per cent of Wycliffe members are ordained. Back home, money is raised among evangelicals not through the secular image of the Summer Institute but through emphasis upon the Wycliffe name and the organization’s Bible-translation work.
The Institute, however, is no mere gimmick. Linguistic schools have been conducted each summer for some thirty years and have been the initiating stage for workers going out under the Wycliffe banner. (Another step is several months of basic training in a rugged survival camp in a remote part of Mexico.)
Another complicating factor is that the transportation and communications arm of the Townsend enterprise is a separate corporation known as Jungle Aviation and Radio Service. It has headquarters in Waxhaw, North Carolina, and a different board, but its elections are controlled by the parent group.
Because its multi-faceted venture is a distinct departure from the established evangelical pattern, Wycliffe has had an uphill fight for a good image. During the fifties, it withdrew from the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, a coordinating agency for conservative Protestant missionary boards, because its practice of transporting priests was coming under so much fire that Wycliffe officials feared they might eventually be forced out of IFMA.
Methods aside, Wycliffe is getting a big job done, and some objective observers contend this is actually part of the controversy. Typically, Wycliffe workers who move into a field where other missionary groups have relied on conventional approaches will in ten years have chalked up four times as many converts. That doesn’t make for the best relations.
Undaunted, Wycliffe is pressing ahead. Its appeal to eager, intelligent young people is enhanced considerably by a specific goal: to decipher all the world’s “un-Bibled” languages by the end of the century. A popular estimate is that there are 2,000 to go. Not even the Wycliffe doctrinal requirement that its members affirm inerrancy of Scripture seems to deter the flow of recruits. The prospect of working in Communist countries is their next big challenge.
‘MR. BROWN’ COMES DOWN
If Jesus Christ came to earth today, would men worship him or still hound him to death? The ninety-minute film Mr. Brown Comes Down the Hill provides tragic but convincing answers.
The film, released in America last month, was produced in Britain two years ago by the controversial Moral Re-Armament movement. It is based on a play by the late Peter Howard, the high-salaried political columnist who joined MRA and became its worldwide leader.
Key Bridge: Forty Churchmen Signal Opening Of Major New Evangelical Drive
In the quiet seclusion of a basement motel room, influential evangelical churchmen met the last three days of September to explore joint endeavor. They came out determined to champion a mighty drive for biblically oriented impact upon the nation.
“This was not merely a fruitful exchange,” said Editor Carl F. H. Henry, who took turns presiding with evangelist Billy Graham. “It was a great first step toward mobilizing 40,000,000 American evangelicals.” Henry and Graham had convened the meeting, held at the Marriott Key Bridge Motor Hotel, Arlington, Virginia, after a widely favorable response to CHRISTIANITY TODAY articles and editorials urging evangelical unity.
Evangelism Plus. The forty Key Bridge participants set up a ten-member committee to study the feasibility of a formal evangelistic crusade of unparalleled dimensions, perhaps in 1973. And a number of suggestions were offered—also for study—to further transdenominational evangelical cooperation beyond evangelism (see editorial, page 25).
The discussion took place in a comfortably furnished room under the gaze of a portrait of Francis Scott Key, best known for his authorship of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” The motel takes a Key motif because it is located near Key Bridge, which spans the Potomac between Arlington and Washington, D. C. The motif was very appropriate for this meeting of evangelistically minded churchmen, for Key played a major part in the founding of 25,000 Sunday schools in the early part of the nineteenth century.
No New Structures. Theological and ecclesiastical differences were not discussed at the Key Bridge Meeting. Participants made no move to compromise present denominational loyalties, and there were no proposals for a new organization.
Southern Baptist participants at the Key Bridge Meeting reported growing sentiment within their denomination for more cooperation with other groups in evangelistic efforts. The Southern Baptist Executive Committee recently gave favorable attention to a formal proposal for a “mutual pooling of our collective resources for worldwide evangelism” and assigned the plan to the Home Mission Board for implementation.
The idea for an evangelism drive in 1973 grew out of “Dialogue: Cape Kennedy,” held August 31-September 1 at Cocoa Beach, Florida, and attended by a number of Southern Baptist clergymen. The plan has been spearheaded by a pair of Southern Baptist pastors, Jess Moody of West Palm Beach, Florida, and Alastair Walker of Griffin, Georgia, with the encouragement of C. E. Autrey, director of evangelism.
The participants at the Key Bridge Meeting were:
BAPTIST—Southern: C. E. Autrey, evangelism director, Home Mission Board; H. Leo Eddleman, president, New Orleans seminary; John Havlik, associate evangelism director, Home Mission Board; Duke McCall, president, Southern Baptist seminary; Jess Moody, pastor, West Palm Beach, Fla.; Robert Naylor, president, Southwestern seminary; Alastair Walker, pastor, Griffin, Ga.; T. W. Wilson, associate evangelist, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. American: Paul Almquist, board chairman, Eastern Baptist seminary; L. Doward McBain, president, American Baptist Convention. Other: Dennis Clark, international secretary, World Evangelical Fellowship; Rufus Jones, president, National Association of Evangelicals; W. Stanley Mooneyham, international vice president, BGEA; George Wilson, vice president and treasurer, BGEA.
PRESBYTERIAN—Presbyterian U.S.: Donald Patterson, pastor, Pensacola, Fla.; Walter Shepard, area secretary, Board of World Missions; G. Aiken Taylor, editor, “Presbyterian Journal.” United: Stewart Rankin, pastor, Silver Spring, Md. Orthodox: Edmund Clowney, president, Westminster seminary.
REFORMED—Reformed Church: Henry Bast, pastor, Grand Rapids, Michigan; Louis Benes, editor, “Church Herald.” Christian Reformed: Anthony Hoekema, Calvin seminary.
METHODIST—Ira Gallaway, district superintendent, Fort Worth, Texas; Charles Keysor, editor, “Good News”; Frank Stanger, president, Asbury seminary; Philip Worth, pastor, Collingswood, N.J.
EPISCOPAL—Peter Doyle pastor, Leesburg, Va.; Peter Moore, director, Council for Religion in Independent Schools.
LUTHERAN—American: Conrad Thompson, evangelism director, American Lutheran Church. Missouri Synod: Robert Preus, Concordia seminary, St. Louis.
CHURCHES OF CHRIST—Reuel Lemmons, editor, “Firm Foundation”; Frank Pack, graduate dean, Pepperdine College; Edward Rockey, pastor, White Plains, N.Y.
CHRISTIAN CHURCHES—Fred Thompson, Jr., pastor, Chicago; Dean Walker, president, Milligan College.
OTHER—Church of the Nazarene: Westlake Purkiser, editor, “Herald of Holiness.” Evangelical Free Church: Arnold Olson, EFC president and first vice president, NAE. Independent: Hudson Armerding, president, Wheaton College.
Mr. Brown, a Christ in modern dress played by Eric Flynn, comes to the world and mixes with the publicans, sinners, and pharisees of this age—drunkards, prostitutes, and modernist bishops. A few find new hope in his message, but the majority hate him for what he is—his purity, his love, his ability to disturb their complacency and idleness.
The situations are so lifelike and the dialogue so relevant to life and devoid of clichés that it is easy to understand why viewers of the film throughout the world have said in effect, This is a Christ we can believe in.
Mr. Brown provokes men to love or hate; they cannot remain ignorant of his presence or his claims. A prostitute decides, “He didn’t threaten anything except my living. And I loved him for it.” A Negro learns to love his persecutors—“If love does [this], heaven help our enemies.”
For Mr. Brown, “the most uncharitable thing on earth is to pretend sin is not sin, and that it needs no cure, and that there’s no cure for it. That’s cruel and loveless.” This is his principal complaint against the modern clergy. “I don’t believe in your sort of God,” he tells four pompous bishops, “with his watered-down ways and doubtful disputations, and theology designed to prove you needn’t take him so seriously after all.” An all-too-familiar pattern emerges. “We shall have to do something about that Mr. Brown,” says one of the bishops. And so they plot to kill him.
This film is a powerful modern presentation of the life of Christ, magnificently scripted and acted. Many viewers of “Mr. Brown,” both in the stage production at London’s Westminster Theater and in the film, have found it at least a first step toward a personal faith and trust in Jesus Christ. And this alone makes it a worthwhile production.
DAVID COOMES
CHURCH ANTI-POVERTY PROBLEMS
While proponents of a $2,258,000,000 (anti-poverty bill attempted to steer the measure past the reefs of congressional resistance, the poverty war was having controversy of its own at three locations out in the field.
United States Senator James Eastland of Mississippi declared an audit of the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) has revealed $654,000 of “unaccountable” invalid expenditures. When rumblings of financial irregularities first sounded last year, the United Presbyterian national mission board—deeply involved in the preschool training organization—agreed to cover any shortages then and in the future.
If Eastland’s information is correct (the U. S. Office of Economic Opportunity says the audit is not complete), the Presbyterians will be left holding a half-million-dollar bag. Church officials, apparently unruffled, said they had not heard from OEO or its auditors.
In Syracuse, the Rev. Ernest Boston, full-time director of the citywide antipoverty agency, Crusade for Opportunity, wasn’t exactly whistling Dixie either. OEO accused the agency of “flagrant abuses” of the administration’s rules and promptly cut off $1.1 million of community-action program funding. The New York Times said OEO’s audit revealed financial deficiencies and “serious problems of conflict of interest.” Boston presently is organizing a new congregation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
A “model” anti-poverty project in Pacoima, California, set up to rehabilitate gang youth, struck a snag when James Sherman, 25, project director-elect, was charged with holding up a liquor store.
Although OEO had announced a quarter-million-dollar grant for the project a month before, funds are being held up while Sherman, who has a record of fourteen arrests, goes to court. Sherman would be paid $9,000 a year for leading the project, sponsored by the Pacoima Congregational Church.
PRAYER SOLICITOR?
Foes of the federal ban on public school prayers may find an ally in Erwin N. Griswold, 63, newly appointed as Solicitor General, the top U. S. advocate before the U. S. Supreme Court. Griswold, dean of Harvard Law School since 1946, a Protestant and a Republican, was named by President Johnson last month to fill a post vacated by Thurgood Marshall, who became the first Negro on the Supreme Court.
Griswold was an outspoken critic of the Supreme Court’s June, 1962, decision that ruled the twenty-two-word New York Regents’ prayer unconstitutional. He said then in America: “To say that … all trace of religion be kept out of any public activity is sheer invention.… Must we deny our whole heritage, our culture, the things of the spirit …?”
COURT SHUNS TWO CASES
The U. S. Supreme Court this month refused to review two important religious cases. One appeal opposed a lower-court ruling in favor of the Pennsylvania law that requires public school busing for non-profit private schools. The high court found no “substantial federal question” despite pleas that the law violates church-state separation. The effect is to leave the matter entirely to the states.
The court also refused to review contempt-of-court convictions of Martin Luther King, Jr., and seven other Negro clergymen over Good Friday and Easter demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Last June the court had affirmed the convictions as a violation of an Alabama court order. The pastors face five-day jail terms and $50 fines.
In other church-state news, atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair filed suit in U. S. District Court appealing the Federal Communications Commission’s denial of her bid to force equal time on radio and TV to answer religious programs. And New Hampshire’s Supreme Court ruled non-public schools can’t share in state sweepstake profits.
‘GOOD NEWS’ FOR ATLANTA
A wide spectrum of Atlanta church groups are cooperating to blitz the city and sell one million copies of the modern New Testament translation “Good News for Modern Man” at twenty-five cents each by Thanksgiving. The main push was set for National Bible Week, with the added incentive that at the end of the week, October 22, unsold books had to be moved from a rented building.
The “Good News” translation produced by the American Bible Society a year ago had already passed the seven million mark in sales before the Atlanta order. The work, which uses basic everyday language, was done by Robert Bratcher, a Southern Baptist on the ABS staff. In addition, the ABS produced a special eight-page version of John 14 and 15 with local city scenes for the Atlanta drive.
GRAHAM IN ‘DRIEST DESERT’
“Japan is the driest desert Billy Graham has ever entered,” remarked one observer shortly before the ten-day Tokyo crusade was to begin last week. Someone pointed out that Tokyo has fewer Christians than Moscow—only 15,000 in the Japanese capital out of some 11 million residents.
The sponsors are optimistic. Said Dr. David Tsutada, chairman of the crusade executive committee: “We believe that this crusade is going to be the beginning of a long-lasting spiritual revival that Graham will spread not only throughout Japan but throughout southeast Asia.”
Three and one-half million homes were visited with personal invitations to the crusade, held in the 15,000-seat Nippon Budoan in downtown Tokyo, with the closing service in the 50,000-capacity Korakuen Stadium. This is Graham’s first major crusade effort in Japan, and his first preaching engagement there since February, 1965.
Jan J. Van Capelleveen
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The Synod of Bishops, which is holding its first meeting in Rome throughout October, was proposed at Vatican II five years ago by Cardinals Suenens, Frings, Lercaro, and Montini as a means by which the bishops would play a part in governing the church with the pope. When Montini became Pope Paul VI and set up the synod, its function shifted; it is now a governing body to advise him.
The Pope now seems much more pessimistic than his bishops. “Great dangers confront the church,” he warned the 196 prelates on opening day. Then came the doctrinal document drafted by Cardinal Ottaviani and his Congregation of Faith (formerly the notorious Holy Office), which listed all the heresies and errors the church is facing.
The synod, in effect, rejected the document as far too negative in tone, and elected eight of its members to meet with four papal appointees and within ten days work out a redraft. After the synod’s first week, reporters from the Netherlands—the nation that is the chief target of conservatives—decided that the Pope has discovered he has been grossly misinformed by his nuncios and his mostly Italian, mostly conservative Curia. As the doctrinal debate closed, the Pope scheduled audiences for national groups of the synod bishops to sound out their opinions, perhaps on birth control.
Unlike Vatican II, the synod met in severe seclusion, without observers or guests. Incredible restrictions on the press were ordered on opening day, including a ban on interviews with synod members. Most Italian papers were so piqued they boycotted the synod in their columns for days. Only the Vatican press officer (who speaks no English) was allowed to attend. He prepared extremely short, general, and nameless press releases.
But Rome would not have been Rome if a religious black market had not sprung up within twenty-four hours. For stiff prices, journalists were able to buy mimeographed copies of the bishops’ speeches on the floor.
The bishops began by discussing reformation of outdated canon law, and apparently they were as little interested in the topic as the reporters. One bishop said the study document was extremely vague, presenting some principles for a new ecclesiastical lawbook that may take a decade to prepare. Canada’s Cardinal Leger said all traces of “Roman law” should be discarded in favor of a pastoral tone to emphasize that Christian living is not merely “observance of certain external laws.” Many supported him. As in doctrine, a special committee will sift comments from the floor and probably come up with another document for synod vote.
The real discussion began October 5 when the synod received the report, “Dangers Which Threaten Faith, and Atheism.” In his opening speech, Paul had warned against the naturalistic thinking of theologians who are more influenced by secular ideas than by the teaching authority of the church, and who “forget the right rules of the faith in order to select those truths which agree with their personal preferences.”
Observers felt the Pope was trying to push the discussion in a certain direction, but it soon became evident that the bishops weren’t to be pushed that easily.
The Ottaviani document listed dangers of modern thought and asked the bishops what should be done for a counterattack. The great majority of bishops had little interest in such a strategy, feeling the dangers were overemphasized and wrongly interpreted.
Brotherhood
A power struggle in the Lutheran Brotherhood—fraternal insurance and loan society with 600,000 policyholders and assets of $405 million—ended this month. Vice Chairman Arthur Lee was named board chairman, replacing the ousted Carl Granrud, 71, an executive for twenty-seven years. A war of words and court action followed last month’s convention when anti-Granrud forces won board seats from L. Edwin Wang, chief pension officer of the Lutheran Church in America, President J. A. Preus of Concordia Seminary, and two others.
Cardinal Alfrink of the Netherlands, once called a progressive, did his best to help the drafters save face by emphasizing that the document should be considered, not as a synod report, but only as a working paper that doesn’t require a formal yes-and-no vote. He then proceeded to warn that the crisis of faith in the West will only increase. Authentic faith, he said, must be adapted to reach the hearts of modern men in diverse social settings; traditional preaching no longer suffices; the message of salvation must be translated into the terms of our time; and the church should be thankful for theologians who devote their lives to this task.
Leger, more blunt, said that the document didn’t distinguish between real errors and unhappy formulations and that he would vote against it. Soon the suggestion was made that an international committee of theologians be set up in Rome to study the key problems of today. The plan, still rather vague, is clearly an attempt to take responsibility away from Ottaviani’s office. An international theological academy in Rome was also proposed.
All the synod documents were supersecret, but National Catholic Reporter provided a lengthy report on the contents of the doctrinal statement that shows many well-balanced assertions. The statement says that “the resurrection of Christ is a true, real, historical and personal fact.” On the Virgin Birth, it says the church has always confessed “both the full and perfect humanity which Jesus receives from Mary, truly virgin and truly mother, and the divine sonship of the [Only Begotten] who has no other father on earth than the God of Heaven and earth by whom he is born ‘before all ages.’”
The section on biblical revelation warns against two dangers: a theology that does not give Scripture enough prominence, and a naturalistic explanation of the Bible. The document says original sin is not merely “the sum total of actual sins” nor a “symbol of the ambiguity of man’s condition.”
The agenda for the rest of the synod is mixed marriages—a key ecumenical irritant—followed by seminaries and then liturgical changes. A continuing topic, particularly after adjournment, is what the synod really is, what its authority will be, and what the pope will do with its ideas. Whatever else happens, Cardinal Suenens revealed that the Pope “rejected the whole idea” of having future popes elected by the Synod of Bishops instead of the College of Cardinals.
C.O.C.U. SLOWED AT SEATTLE?
Both sides are claiming victory in last month’s Episcopal convention maneuvering over the Consultation on Church Union. The chief COCU delegate, Bishop Robert Gibson, Jr., and Ecumenical Officer Peter Day say they got what they wanted: authority to prepare a specific merger document at upcoming COCU meetings.
But COCU critic Carroll Simcox, who edits the independent Living Church, interprets the convention as being “determined not to go ahead and negotiate a plan of union.” He says lack of authority for proceeding to COCU’s critical next stage is “clear, and a matter of record.” Simcox refers to a phrase inserted from the floor that directs Gibson’s delegation to the ten-denomination merger talks “not to negotiate entry of this church into such a plan of union.”
Another COCU foe, however, Executive Director Albert duBois of the American Church Union, admits that the Episcopal delegates are permitted to work on a plan of union but says the Seattle statement means the Episcopal Church “is not committed to one iota of it.” He says the ACU got what it wanted in Seattle: clarification that the COCU delegation is just talking and not acting for the church; elimination of blanket praise for COCU’s Principles of Church Union; and renewed stress on talks with the Lutherans, Orthodox, and Roman Catholics, all of whom are outside COCU. Nothing was said about the church committee on relations with “Pentecostal and Conservative Evangelical Churches,” which has been dormant for years.
In the legislative hearing on COCU, Gibson went along with all the ACU-type modifications, and he is as pleased with the results as duBois. “I think both sides came out thinking they won,” said the congenial Virginia bishop. He is certain his delegation is authorized to join in drafting the merger document.
Part of the confusion lies in the fact that the Seattle resolution bans “negotiation,” which in everyday language is exactly what COCU wanted the Episcopalians to do—to move beyond the talking stage. But “negotiation” has been dropped from the COCU lexicon because in certain church circles it implies committing denominational authority to the actions of the nine-man COCU delegations.
Ecumenical Fish Story
Enter culinary ecumenism. When Roman Catholic and Lutheran theologians held their fifth dialogue in St. Louis, the Catholics served meat (medallion of beef tenderloin) for Friday lunch. That night the Lutheran hosts served seafood (unshelled African lobster tail). The hotel bulletin board announced meetings of the “Lutheran Catholic Church.”
The theologians discussed the eucharist, and a press release said “substantial accord” was reached “in such points as the eucharist and the church’s sacrifice of praise and self-offering; the sacrificial presence of Jesus Christ in the Lord’s Supper; the once-for-all character and full sufficiency of the sacrifice of the cross.”
Day said that when the convention acted, national COCU Chairman David Colwell remarked to him that the Episcopal resolution was the same as the authorization from his United Church of Christ. Day said the decision for Episcopalians is “still whether to unité, not when or how.”
A possible result of Seattle is new emphasis on Episcopal distinctives. At the convention, the Archbishop of Canterbury said the Principles section on bishops should be rewritten “to make it clear that the episcopacy isn’t just people representing the Church, but is the continuation of an order in the Church of God.” And Day says “we’d better be pretty clear that we’re trinitarians” because ultimately COCU will have to face the question of unity among all the world’s Christians, 90 per cent of whom confess the Nicene Creed. At present, Principles does not require a creedal stance, in deference to the anti-creed Disciples of Christ. Day said that Episcopalians “strongly uphold the creeds” but that Disciples should be reassured from the church’s handling of Bishop Pike that creeds are not “clubs to beat you over the head.”
COCU may decide to send its “plan of union” back to the denominations on a piecemeal basis, Gibson said, to seek approval of various aspects of union on the installment plan. He still considers merger possible by the end of the 1970s if COCU decides on a federation of ten autonomous denominations with shared membership and ministry and eventual organic union. He thinks approval of COCU’s other basic choice, an amalgamation right from the start, would take considerably longer.
The Episcopalians and the Methodists—who will vote next spring on authorizing preparation of a merger document—form half the constituency of the proposed united church, and they are the only nationally distributed groups involved in the talks. The other eight denominations reportedly are concerned about this predominance, which would make a federated merger more likely than all-out amalgamation.
At the climax of his Seattle speech on COCU, Gibson said, “If you don’t mean us to go ahead—for God’s sake, for Christ’s sake—let’s vote this down.” The 1967 decision was a watershed. At the future convention when the Episcopal Church votes on merger, COCU proponents will point out that if the denomination didn’t mean business it should not have told its representatives to help write a plan of union, since the final document will be tailored to the wishes of the participating denominations.
450TH (AHEM) ANNIVERSARY …
For 450 years there was little dispute among Protestants that 1517 was the greatest year for Christianity since the first century. But the relatively sudden change that has come over Christendom during the 1960s has seriously threatened to alter the historical perspective.
“Now no one seems to know what to do,” says Decision. “The 450th anniversary of Martin Luther’s nailing of his ninety-five theses to the Wittenberg church has come at a puzzling time. Protestant-Catholic relations are thawing, and no one seems to want to talk any more about the disputes of the past. The general feeling is that enough blood has been spilled over religion. A modern-day ‘Reformation’ service is quite apt to turn into an ecumenical festival in which the events of the sixteenth century are not even mentioned.”
Yet for all the ambiguities surrounding this week’s and this year’s Reformation commemoration, plenty of celebrations have been planned. An inter-Lutheran group serving as a clearing house for the anniversary put out a single-spaced list stretching across 6½ pages, and pointed out that this list included “only a small percentage of events.” Ironically, the entry that recurs most is “Life—New Life,” a serigraph exhibit by Sister May Corita. The exhibit consists of a series of contemporary and controversial color prints made by a special process.
That a Roman Catholic nun should play a large role in remembering the Reformation comes as no surprise in view of action last spring by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. The bishops approved the action of their committee on ecumenical and interreligious affairs in accepting an invitation extended by the Lutheran Reformation Anniversary Committee to observe the anniversary with joint projects. Accordingly, theological dialogues were set up for fourteen major metropolitan areas in the United States.
In Wittenberg, where it all began, special services were slated, but the East German Communist government seemed to be keeping advance announcements to a minimum. World Council of Churches chief Eugene Carson Blake served notice that he planned to be there, as did several officers of his United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. Some felt there might yet be some visa problems.
For their part, the Communists issued commemorative stamps and a biography of Luther that concentrated on his early years.
Meanwhile, Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy promised to steal the Protestants’ thunder: it was announced that Patriarch Athenagoras of Istanbul would tour Europe in late October and early November and would call on Pope Paul VI. It will mark the first time that an Orthodox “first among equals” has visited the Vatican.
HEATON TO HEAD TWO
C. Adrian Heaton will now be president of both American Baptist seminaries in California. His board at California Baptist Theological Seminary, Covina, gave him unanimous consent this month to accept the presidency of Berkeley Baptist Divinity School.
The expected move (see July 21 issue, page 36) followed months of preliminary groundwork by denominational officials and a committee from the two seminary boards, mostly in an effort to save BBDS. The CBTS board spoke of “further unification” for the two seminaries, but one CBTS spokesman saw a “tremendous risk” in identification with more liberal, controversy-ridden, and debt-plagued BBDS. Some board members warned Heaton against any theological compromise that might jeopardize their seminary’s health. On the other hand, some BBDS teachers had warned that a conservative drift would result in their resignations.
For the BBDS board, choosing Heaton meant eating crow, since CBTS was founded in 1944 as a reaction to the more liberal stance of BBDS, which dates to 1871. Over the years some BBDS partisans have made no secret of their hostility toward CBTS.
EDWARD E. PLOWMAN
A SURGING SEMINARY
In an age of stagnant enrollments, one theological seminary has grown from thirty-one full-time students five years ago to 330 when classes started this month. The 130 new students at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois, were selected from more than 400 who paid application fees.
The growth began when the 44,000-member, theologically conservative Evangelical Free Church decided it couldn’t provide quality theological training unless it converted its Trinity seminary to large-scale, interdenominational operation. It chose Wheaton College’s Kenneth Kantzer, a Harvard Ph.D., to preside over the development as dean.
Today only one-fourth of the students and one-third of the nineteen full-time and fourteen part-time faculty are members of the EFC. Even so, Kantzer said, the EFC is willing to supply a $l,000-a-year subsidy for each student and $100,000 annually for buildings.
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Baptist Triumphs And Trials
The Indomitable Baptists, by O. K. Armstrong and Marjorie M. Armstrong (Doubleday, 1967, 392 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by L. Doward McBain, president, American Baptist Convention, and pastor, First Baptist Church, Phoenix, Arizona.
Thank God somebody has written something good about the Church! The Armstrongs have given us 392 pages of informative, fascinating material about the Baptists—from their Waldensian predecessors in the twelfth century to the vast and diversified group known as Baptists in 1967. More careful church historians than I will have to judge details. However, even the casual reader will have difficulty putting down this book. It is not all glowing history—the Armstrongs have dared to confess some of the more grievous crimes of our Baptist forebears. Nevertheless, anyone with an ounce of denominational pride (if this sin can still be allowed) will delight in reading about the contribution of one major religious group to the making of a nation.
Most of us take for granted our free institutions and often forget our history, especially that of the American struggle for religious freedom. We only vaguely remember names like John Leland and Anne Hutchinson; the Armstrongs have brought them to life. More than any other one man, John Leland gave us the Bill of Rights, guaranteeing separation of church and state. The authors also tell the story of Anne Hutchinson and her little friend Mary Dyer, who “was led to the Boston Common with hands chained and legs shackled as a criminal, charged with being a ‘vile Quakeress’ and from a rude scaffold … hanged by the neck until dead.” American Baptists who next year will converge on Boston for their annual convention should read this stirring story.
Not only do the Armstrongs dip back into American history and retell in their delightful style the stories of freedom-loving Baptists; they also chronicle the stormy years of growth and division. And they give a refreshing interpretation of Luther Rice and the early missionary enterprise as well as fascinating anecdotes—stories preachers can use to raise missionary money!
Speaking of money: Baptist clergymen fortunately have come a long way since the days of “$1.00 per meeting day—a fair wage and in keeping with the scale for a skilled worker.”
Not only was the income of Baptist preachers small in the eighteenth century; what is now the largest church in America (other than the Catholic) had mighty small beginnings itself. In 1700 in all of North America only ten small churches claimed to be Baptist. But by 1776 the total number had grown to 472. Then, according to the Armstrongs, we were off and running. During the next period, the population increased 140 per cent and Baptists increased 360 per cent.
Besides being very evangelistic, Baptists were also fanatically independent; nonetheless they “rationalized their fears of centralized church control and pooled their spiritual and material resources.” This all adds up to the greatest missionary movement in modern history. In view of this, it is hard to understand the logic Southern Baptists use in refusing to cooperate with councils of churches.
The Armstrongs are gracious about Baptist divisions and give a fine exposition of the continuing split between North and South. Men as far apart in emphases as Billy Graham and Martin Luther King are treated fairly. The book would be worth reading just for the simple story of Graham’s conversion and early years; yet this is told no more convincingly than the story of King.
The authors record Dr. King’s remarks to the student body of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1961 under the title “The Church on the Frontier of Racial Tension”: “I am absolutely convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other. They don’t know each other because they are separated from each other.” At a time when the major cities of America are on fire with race riots, these words still sound prophetic. To a group of demonstrators in Montgomery, King said: “If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people, a black people, who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’”
One could wish that the Armstrongs had described more fully the role of the contemporary prophets. I sincerely hope that these brilliant authors write another book—one that not only gives due appreciation to the revolutionary pioneers but also puts modern reformers into prophetic prospective.
The Armstrongs have done us a great service in glorifying the contribution made by Baptists in the past. Now someone needs to ask: Was the cause of the disenfranchised and the impoverished of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a cause Baptists championed—any more in need of the imperatives of the Gospel than the issues confronting the great denominations in the second half of the twentieth century?
Dry Rot In The Roots
The Roots of the Radical Theology, by John Charles Cooper (Westminster, 1967, 172 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Harold B. Kuhn, professor of philosophy of religion, Asbury Theological Seminary, Asbury, Kentucky.
To evaluate the more radical forms of Christian “theology” that mark the current scene, one must have a perspective covering centuries rather than just decades. This author seeks to gain such a perspective. He develops, among other themes, the idea that the key to any understanding of the movement(s) of human thought is the assumption of a critical attitude, to which he assigns the title “positive negativity.”
Professor Cooper sees historic Christianity as being in a relation of identity with the rationalistic temper in Western thought, so that with the “collapse” of rationalism in the modern era, historic orthodoxy ceased to be a live option with thinking persons. He is critical of all attempts to synthesize Christianity and a rationalistic world outlook. He notes that “the rise of the radical theology with its declaration that God is dead demonstrates the failure either of the synthetic theologians [Herrmann, Schweitzer, Bultmann, and Tillich] or of the church which did not fully accept their great syntheses.”
The application of these principles causes Cooper to dismiss eighteen centuries of Christian history with a wave of the hand, and to assume that historic Christian theology is permanently incapable of enlisting the loyalties of thinking persons. Within the context of this assumption, he seems to assent to the view that “there once was a God to whom worship was appropriate, but now there is no such God”—the position of the radical theologians, especially Altizer and Hamilton.
This view is, it seems, a logical (if not an inevitable) conclusion in an age that is breaking out of a stagnation of more than a century. Such an age, we are assured, demands a “free” theology—a theology that owns none of the qualities of historic Christianity. That is, it acknowledges no norms, no creeds, no fixed points of reference. The task of the “radical” theologian seems to be “the proclamation of the example of the apocalyptic Jesus of the Gospels, in whose message and example God completely revealed himself and thus willed to die in order to bring about man’s salvation in the freedom of Jesus.”
The relation between such a “theology” and the Christian Church as it empirically exists is by no means clear. Cooper pleads with the theologians to avoid any negative reaction to the “Christian atheists,” since in his view no return to the forms of historic orthodoxy is possible in such a world as ours. We are urged to recognize that for the Christian theologian there remains no alternative to “the acceptance of the secular, the radically immanent as the sole locus of the transcendent.…”
The book has strong points, among them the statement of the position of Paul Tillich, for which Cooper seems to have a special competence. He also has a broad grasp of historical movements. What may be questioned is his absolutizing of the conclusions of modern man, and his out-of-hand dismissal of historic Christian faith. It may be helpful to note that, under other sets of premises, Christian supernaturalism has been pronounced “dead” in the past, while at the same time men and women of faith have continued to draw life and strength from it.
After all, ours is not the first age to proclaim naturalism the only option for the educated person. The one-layered outlook has always had its attractiveness. But to present this as the only option seems to suggest either angelic knowledge or academic provincialism.
A Polemic Against Tongues-Speaking?
Glossolalia, by Frank Stagg, E. Glenn Hinson, and Wayne E. Oates (Abingdon, 1967, 112 pp., $1.45, paper), is reviewed by Paul McClendon, director of learning resources, Oral Roberts University, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The authors purport to have written an “objective … understanding treatment of … glossolalia in a non-partisan way.…” Generally, however, what they offer is a thinly disguised, highly partisan derogation of tongues-speaking that is seriously lacking in competent scholarship.
An attempt is made to attach a heresy label to glossolalia by quoting Bishop James A. Pike, who said it is “heresy in embryo.” Apart from the logical weakness of this attempt, there is unintended humor: Bishop Pike’s authority as a judge of heresy has been, to say the least, seriously impaired.
The historical portion by Dr. Hinson is the volume’s only redeeming virtue. The weakest section of his survey is the discussion of glossolalia in the twentieth century. Hinson ignores the worldwide scope of the movement, and one would deduce from his remarks that it all started in Los Angeles.
The biblical section by Dr. Stagg starts off with some show of objective analysis but rapidly degenerates—beginning with the section on tongues at Corinth—into a polemic in which scholarship is virtually abandoned. He buttresses his biased arguments with categorical assertions that often lack biblical support, and misuses the very atomistic proof-text methodology he decries.
His early argument in which he attempts to differentiate the tongues at Pentecost from the tongues at Corinth might be answered by A. T. Robertson, who in Word Pictures in the New Testament (III, 22), disagrees with him. Stagg even attempts to discredit the accuracy of the Acts text and avoids facing the obvious implications of First Corinthians 14:13—why should the speaker in an unknown tongue pray for an interpretation if the tongues were mere “ecstatic, unintelligible” nonsense? He gives meticulous attention to opinions of selected source critics while completely ignoring views of conservative scholars obviously acquainted with the same critical theories.
Stagg fails to admit that Paul nowhere argues against tongues but only against their disorderly abuse in a public meeting—the key is the edifying of the “church” (1 Cor. 14:4, 5, 12,19, 23, 28, 33–35). Using Stagg’s false logic, one could easily argue against communion and marriage, since they, like tongues, are sometimes abused.
The last section of the book, Dr. Oates’s treatment of the “psychology of glossolalia,” sheds little light on either psychology or glossolalia. In approach, it is surprisingly similar to many works by atheists who attempt to discredit conversion by purporting to explain the “psychology of conversion” without having experienced conversion themselves. His basic question-begging purpose is: “to correlate the studies of these psychologists with what we know about speaking in tongues as a childlike form of language.” Nowhere, however, does he support his proposition that tongues are nonsensical, baby babbling sounds.
Reading For Perspective
CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:
• The Ecumenical Mirage, by C. Stanley Lowell (Baker, $4.95). This timely and provocative analysis claims the ecumenical movement is not an authentic manifestation of the Holy Spirit but a symptom of the sickness of our time.
• Christy, by Catherine Marshall (McGraw-Hill, $6.95). Readers of A Man Called Peter will heartily welcome Mrs. Marshall’s first novel, a warm and moving story set in the Appalachian hill country, scene of her own upbringing.
• The Christian Life New Testament with the Psalms, notes by Porter Barrington (Royal Publishers, $4.95; 1.75). A functional King James Version with outlines and notes on great doctrines that will stabilize young Christians and assist all believers in their spiritual growth.
To the list of intellectuals the authors mention who find the charismatic dimension, including tongues, a meaningful part of their lives should be added Dr. Hugh O. Davis (Ph.D., Harvard), a distinguished teacher in Southern Baptist schools for twenty years. Although these men by implication share the condemnation implied by the book, the authors show no evidence of having consulted any of them.
The basic position of the book is an argument from ignorance rather than experience. The authors are like a Hottentot trying to describe strawberry ice cream that he has never seen nor eaten.
Conformity To Caesar
Capitulation: The Lesson of German Catholicism, by Carl Amery (Herder and Herder, 1967, 231 pp., $5.50) is reviewed by Earle E. Cairns, chairman, Department of History and Political Science, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.
The capitulation of the Roman Catholic Church to the governing urban middle-class milieu in the West German state and the consequent spiritual powerlessness of that church are the subject of this somewhat philosophical treatment by a German Roman Catholic writer. Amery traces this tendency from the days of the Fourth Crusade, through the Thirty Years’ War, the rise of Nazism in 1933, and World War II, and on to post-Nazi West Germany. He deplores the fact that the church, rather than challenging prophetically the values and actions of its environment even at risk of person and property, conformed to that environment.
One wonders why the author ignores the attempted genocide of the Jews by Hitler in World War II, especially in view of Hochhuth’s attack on the institutional Roman Catholic Church in The Deputy. This situation would seem to buttress Amery’s case. But perhaps he wanted to concentrate on the failure of the Catholic clergy and laity in West Germany.
This example of capitulation by the church to its milieu has particular relevance for American Protestantism as well as Roman Catholicism. Will the churches today conform to their economic, political, and social milieu, hostile though it is to biblical truth? His plea that the church preach and practice its prophetic function in order to become the conscience of the state, even at the risk of persecution, is needed in a day when the churches could become captives of the state.
The Remedy Is Confession
Integrity Therapy, by John W. Drakeford (Broadman, 1967, 154 pp. $3.95), is reviewed by Orville S. Walters, director, Health Services, and professor of psychiatry, University of Illinois, Urbana.
“Like John the Baptist … clad in a camel’s hair garment girded with a leather belt, so in these days a modern prophet has appeared.… Clad in academic gown, he blasted passive and permissive techniques of therapy and called for a new day.…” This excerpt is a good introduction both to the author’s prose and to his infatuation with a system of treatment that concentrates upon “therapeutic confession.” The prophet of this addition to the jostling field of psychotherapeutic sects is Professor O. H. Mowrer, “from whose hospitalization has come a new concept of psychotherapy.” This early assertion of uniqueness collides with a more moderate statement in the author’s penultimate paragraph: “Integrity therapy is certainly nothing new.”
The idea that neurotic conflict is essentially ethical or moral, being due to the repudiation of conscience, was indeed expressed by several of Freud’s associates and has been repeatedly asserted since then. The compulsive confessing and emphasis upon work advocated in “the new group therapy” are here shown to be similar to practices of the Oxford Group movement and Alcoholics Anonymous. The author also cites precedent for small groups in the early Church and in the Methodist class meeting.
Integrity therapy postulates that the troubled person is isolated from his fellows because of secret guilt, and that the remedy is confession. The therapist “gently but firmly pushes in to relate to the distressed person,” and opens his own life with some confession to prove that he was once in the same situation himself. If no exactly parallel experience comes to mind, the therapist draws upon some other example of “his own personal irresponsibility.” This gesture “frequently brings the response of openness and honesty and restitution, leading the way to health and adjustment.”
In the group, the subject is invited to accuse himself, to tell of his own defects and failures. Other members of the group then “zoom in” to help him recognize his shortcomings. They reject such “excuses” as sickness or the influence of past events. “No time is spent with the patients’ assets,” Drakeford reports. He is apparently satisfied to accept the standards of society as normative: “Aware of the expectations of the social group, the individual develops criteria for passing judgment on his own conduct.”
The author gives a glowing account of therapeutic results. The method is “simple, easy to use, and very productive.” It “frequently brings fairly quick relief from psychotic suffering.” The group technique proved to be “infinitely superior” to individual psychotherapy. “Almost any perceptive and interested person can play a part in helping troubled people.… We have the abiding conviction that it works—really works!”
A former associate says of Mowrer:
Deliberately and lucidly, he employs conventional theological language to describe thoroughly secular concepts and thus endeared to the clergy, he proceeds to assault choice parts of their theologies with gusto, wit and venom.
Drakeford quotes this sentence but omits the italics in the original. He is eager to prove that “integrity therapy follows not only the letter but also the spirit of the Bible,” but he is saddled with Mowrer’s disparagement of some basic Christian doctrines. As Freud pronounced agape “unpsychological,” so Mowrer declares forgiveness “psychologically questionable.” Moreover, Drakeford acknowledges, Mowrer “saves some of his most telling blows for Protestants and their justification by faith.” Pelagian overtones reverberate in Mowrer’s continuous emphasis upon expiration, penance, and works.
Every psychiatrist knows that the patient who concentrates upon his own faults and shortcomings may bring on increased depression. How often has recurrent depression or suicide followed group therapy that has this accusatory emphasis? At least one of Drakeford’s case histories seems to illustrate such an outcome. The author gives no statistics of any kind, though after several years of usage, long-range results should now be available.
A criticism of the system, quoted with disapproval by the author in his epilogue, is nevertheless apt, penetrating, and restrained: “Integrity therapy oversimplifies both religion and psychology.”
A Worldwide Spiritual Movement
The Church of the Lutheran Reformation: A Historical Survey of Lutheranism, by Conrad Bergendoff (Concordia, 1967, 339 pp., $9), is reviewed by Richard V. Pierard, associate professor of history, Indiana State University, Terre Haute.
Four hundred fifty years ago this year an obscure German monk named Martin Luther posted on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg a series of propositions for debate on the question of indulgences, and this action touched off a controversy that led to the fundamental transformation of the Church in the West. In this volume Conrad Bergendoff, a distinguished theologian, church historian, and retired president of Augustana Lutheran Seminary, traces the history of the Lutheran Reformation and the subsequent development of the Lutheran movement.
His thesis is quite simple. The Lutheran reformers did not seek to create a new church; rather, they wished to restore the Church to its original character. Rome had introduced innovations such as the Mass, the hierarchy, and the papacy, and the Church needed to be called back to its original mission of proclaiming the Gospel and administering the sacraments. Bergendoff portrays Lutheranism as not merely a German movement but also a worldwide church of great individuality and variety.
Although Bergendoff is not writing for the specialist in church history and his book contains very little that is new, yet the work has much to offer. He writes with clarity and eloquence and shows familiarity with the relevant literature in English, German, and the Scandinavian languages. Even though he is convinced that Lutheranism is primarily a spiritual movement, he relates its development to the general context of European political and intellectual history in a careful and balanced manner. Of particular value to the non-Lutheran reader is his portrayal of the life and worship experiences of the various Lutheran bodies. Perhaps the main strength of the book is its breadth. It is not the dreary record of endless theological controversies and the trivial activities of churchmen but rather the unfolding of a dynamic spiritual movement that encompasses the entire world.
On the other hand, many readers of different persuasion will be less than satisfied with some of Brown’s statements about the Lutheran attempt to restore the original scriptural church. His discussion of more recent Lutheran history is somewhat imprecise, particularly in regard to the nature of the Prussian Union and the role of the Church under Hitler. The book also needs more careful editing to give consistency in the use of German names. For example, Bergendoff repeatedly uses Smalcald instead of the German spelling, Schmalkalden, but then uses the German, Nürnberg, instead of Nuremberg. The Altona Statement of 1933 is incorrectly called the “Altoona” Statement. Finally, many ecumenists will be disappointed by his assertion that Lutherans have little interest in worldwide organizational unity unless there is first confessional unity.
An Edifice Built On Quicksand
Peace Is Possible: A Reader for Laymen, edited by Elizabeth Jay Hollins (Grossman Publishers, 1966, 339 pp., $2.95, paper), is reviewed by C. Gregg Singer, chairman, Department of History, Catawba College, Salisbury, North Carolina.
This carefully documented collection of essays and addresses presents the thinking of many scholars on the intricate problems of peace in the atomic age. Motivation for the essays is the tensions brought into international relations since the advent of the atomic bomb in 1945. In spite of the rather imposing list of contributors, the volume is little more than a plea for world peace through world law.
The first section lays out the predicament that confronts mankind today and indicates that a drastic change from the present system of sovereign states is an absolute necessity if civilization is to survive. Section two then presents the basic document around which the rest of the book revolves—“Introduction to World Peace through World Law,” by Grenville Clark. This has been somewhat revised and updated since its appearance in 1960. The third section deals with possible objections to the plan envisioned by Clark, and the fourth suggests transitional steps toward the goal of world peace through world law.
The fundamental idea is this: “There can be no peace without law.” But Clark overlooks the basic difficulties in this assumption. In our world of divergent legal philosophies and political ideologies, how can there be any agreement on the nature of law? Is the West to accept the Soviet concept? In a world government, which philosophy of law will become the basis for law as it is actually administered through (as the writers advocate) a court of international justice and a greatly strengthened United Nations? How can a Marxian view of law be brought into harmony with the philosophy of constitutionalism and English common law as we know it in this country? Furthermore, will not the greatly strengthened United Nations become a super-national totalitarian regime? Clark feels he has dealt with this problem sufficiently in the elaborate system of safeguards written into his proposals. And other writers believe that if there is to be a super-national United Nations it should be democratically controlled, to minimize the danger of despotism.
The book basically emphasizes that the threat to world peace raised by modern missiles transcends all other considerations. Thus most of the writers give the impression that world peace is more important that the form of government used to achieve it.
The volume as a whole rests upon the humanistic assumption that peace is possible simply because rational men can and will find a rational solution to the crisis of the atomic bomb and the missile race. The editor has made one concession to Christian conscience by including the papal encyclical Pacem in Terris, but this concession is more apparent than real since the encyclical rests the case for world peace more on nautral law than on an appeal to the Scriptures.
None of the writers pays any attention to the problem of sin, and none gives any place to a theistic world-and-life view. The book presents a closely reasoned scheme for a world government based on world law—that is, for a lofty edifice built upon the sands of human merit, on the assumption that the human mind and will is fully capable of solving the great problems that confront humanity today.
Book Briefs
Toward an Undivided Church, by Douglas Horton (Association and University of Notre Dame, 1967, 96 pp., $2.50). The retired dean of the Harvard Divinity School waters down the differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Claiming that the vocabulary of ecumenism has no such words as “surrender” or “compromise,” he envisions a world church that allows the various communions to preserve their distinctions and yet be united. Horton offers sincere optimism based on a blurred view of the theological and ecclesiastical problems involved in church union.
Religion and Regime, by Guy E. Swanson (University of Michigan, 1967, 295 pp., $7.50). A sociological investigation of forty-one societies during the Reformation era, 1490–1780, that concludes that Catholicism survived in countries with centralist or commensal regimes, Anglicanism or Lutheranism triumphed in limited centralist states, and Calvinist and Zwinglian doctrine became dominant under balanced or heterarchic regimes. Very interesting.
The Emergence of Philosophy of Religion, by James Collins (Yale, 1967, 517 pp., $12.50). Collins examines the attitudes, methodologies, and concepts of Hume, Kant, and Hegel in the area of religion. He defends the right of philosophers to study the human meanings of religion on the basis of a realistic, naturalistic approach.
Sinai, by Heinz Skrobucha (Oxford, 1966, 120 pp., $17.50). This large volume, filled with beautiful photographs and an expressive text, tells the dramatic history of Sinai from the time of Moses and on through its fourteen centuries as the site of the monastery of St. Katherine, where Tischendorf found the “Codex Sinaiticus.”
The Principles of Biblical Interpretation, by A. Skevington Wood (Zondervan, 1967, 103 pp., $3.50). A well-known British Bible expositor returns to his earlier interest in church history and traces the methodology of selected writers from Irenaeus to Calvin. His opening chapter states his own position: “The sphere from which the methodology of our interpretation of Scripture is to be drawn is that of Scripture itself”; but this overlooks the vexed contemporary issue of Vorverständnis.
The Holy Spirit: Believer’s Guide, by Herschel H. Hobbs (Broadman, 1967, 160 pp., $3.50). These popular studies in the person and ministry of the Holy Spirit by a Southern Baptist preacher contain much edifying substance. His equating the Pentecostal glossolalia with the “tongues” at Corinth places him in some difficulty, however.
The Davidson Affair, by Stuart Jackman (Eerdmans, 1966, 181 pp., $3.50). The events of Good Friday and Easter and the people involved in them come vividly to life in this twentieth-century TV documentary setting. Mr. Jackman’s narrative is convincing, sensitive, and moving without doing injustice to the biblical account.
Paperbacks
The Idea of Perfection in the Western World, by Martin Foss (University of Nebraska, 1967, 102 pp., $1.50). Foss shows the Greek idea of perfection to be static, abstract, limited, and erroneous. In contrast, he contends that the biblical understanding of perfection is not a stagnant concept but a living experience of faith in a personal God who is known in the course of dynamic service. A stimulating, scholarly little book.
The Seventh Solitude, by Ralph Harper (Johns Hopkins, 1965, 153 pp., $1.95). The solitude to which Harper refers is that of writers who realize they are metaphysically homeless and care about it. He examines the spiritual isolation of three existentialists influenced by Stendhal: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. Then he offers alternative views: St. Augustine’s passion for God and Proust’s passion for remembrance of the past. A new edition well worth reading.