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Catholic Theology Today

Theological Investigations, Volume IV: More Recent Writings, by Karl Rahner, S. J., translated by Kevin Smyth (Helicon, 1967, 421 pp., $8.50), is reviewed by Donald Bloesch, professor of theology, Dubuque Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa.

This volume introduces the reader to some controversial themes in contemporary theology as viewed by one of the avant-garde theologians of the Roman Catholic Church. Karl Rahner is regarded in many circles as the greatest philosophical theologian produced by the Catholic Church in this century.

Rahner, unlike some of the older scholastic theologians, views revelation as event as well as truth, with the emphasis on event. He acknowledges that God reveals himself through words and concepts, but he maintains that the revelatory meaning of these words is not disclosed until the Spirit of God acts upon the minds of the hearers. Like Karl Barth, he locates revelation in the conjunction of the historical word of Scripture and the present action of the living Christ. At the same time he speaks much more of “revealed dogma” than of a divine message or Gospel. When he affirms that this dogma can be “handed on” by the Church from one generation to the next, he seems to return to a static theory of revelation. Evangelical theology maintains that the Church is the servant of dogma, that it can witness to the truth of revelation but that such truth can never be its possession.

Rahner shows himself basically sympathetic with Küng’s treatment of justification, and yet he also has some criticisms. In line with traditional Catholic theology, he holds that justification in its subjective mode and sanctification are the same. He views the justifying and saving act in terms of man’s inner renewal and purification rather than as a forensic declaration of pardon that must be received by faith alone. In contrast to Küng, Rahner avers that we are justified by love as well as by faith, though he differentiates love from the good works that follow it. He reminds us of the truth that the goal of justification is man’s sanctification. But as evangelicals we must continue to affirm that the believer is fully justified even though he is only partially sanctified, and that sanctification is the consequence and evidence of the divine act of justification.

Rahner follows the thought of much contemporary existentialist philosophy in maintaining that God cannot be objectified, that he transcends the subject-object cleavage. For Rahner, the knowledge of God is shrouded in mystery; the “substance” of God is completely beyond the rational powers of man. “The supreme knowledge which man has of God is to know that he does not know God.” Rahner’s affinities with the tradition of Christian mysticism are especially evident here. The evangelical theologian must ask, however: Does not God objectify himself so that we can have real, objective knowledge of him? We also maintain that in Jesus Christ God reveals himself fully, even his very essence, which is reconciling love. The Christian by faith does not know simply the effects of God upon the world; he knows the very being of God. Rahner’s theology verges towards monism (though it does not actually become monism), particularly when he asserts that the grace of God and Christ are in everything. Here he is close to Tillich, who sees God as the ground of all being.

Reading For Perspective

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

A Varied Harvest, by Frank E. Gaebelein (Eerdmans; cloth, $4.95; paper, $2.45). Out of his life as headmaster, editor, and writer, Gaebelein offers choice essays on Christianity, education, public affairs, and mountain climbing.

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.

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.

Like most other Catholic theologians both past and present, Rahner believes that the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist should be central in Christian devotion. It is well to note that he views the sacramental sign as being not the material elements but rather the participation of the people in the Eucharistic meal. He points to the basic area of difference from evangelical theology when he contends that transubstantiation means the miraculous transformation of the elements. Yet he insists that what is changed is not the “being” of the bread but rather its “substance,” its signification.

The note in Rahner’s theology that is particularly disturbing to evangelicals is his doctrine of universal prevenient grace, which practically amounts to a universal salvation. According to Rahner, the saving grace of God is operative everywhere in the world, and the main difference between Christians and non-Christians is that Christians are cognizant of this grace. “Even when he does not ‘know’ it and does not believe it … man always lives consciously in the presence of the triune God of eternal life.” The universal saving work of God is concretized in the historical Christ, but it is not limited to this event. Rahner contends that it is not just that the world can be saved if it wills; the world is already saved through the reconciling grace of God revealed and fulfilled in Jesus Christ. He speaks of an anonymous Christianity, a way of life characterized by self-giving love even though conscious faith in Jesus Christ is absent. In his view, whenever man accept their own humanity they have accepted the Son of Man.

Rahner believes that the natural man has the potentiality for obedience, a capacity to respond to and recognize God’s grace. The grace of God fulfills man’s natural possibilities and thereby builds upon rather than negates man’s nature. The evangelical will ask whether grace does not in fact bring to man a new nature. Did not Paul say that the man in Christ is “a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17)? Does not grace entail man’s crucifixion and resurrection rather than his self-fulfillment or self-realization? Rahner also maintains that we can by the light of our reason arrive at a true but not complete understanding of the nature of man, although the answer to man’s quest lies in revelation.

What is lacking in Rahner’s theology is that biblical dualism which envisages man as being in opposition to God and enslaved to the demonic powers of darkness. The fall of man is not given serious enough attention in this theology, for the fall certainly means that man’s reason is darkened and that his will is irrevocably bound to forces beyond his control. Rahner recalls us to the truth that the world has been reclaimed by Christ, but he does not do justice to the biblical witness that the world is presently in the grip of the demonic adversary of God (1 John 5:19).

On the other hand, evangelicals will rejoice that here is a modern theologian who accepts the deity of Christ, salvation by divine grace, the full inspiration of Scripture, and revelation as both the saving action of God and divine truth. We can learn from Rahner that Christianity also has a mystical dimension, that faith involves not only personal confidence but also mystical participation in Christ. This book is recommended for all evangelical Christians who seek a deeper understanding and appreciation of contemporary Roman Catholic theology.

Updating Old Theories

Creation Versus Chaos, by Bernhard W. Anderson (Association, 1967, 192 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by R. K. Harrison, professor of Old Testament, Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, Canada.

At first glance I thought this book would be a careful examination of the Genesis creation narratives in the light of modern scientific discoveries. Further examination showed, however, that it actually pursues the twin themes of creation and chaos through the Old Testament, in the process formulating a theology of historical conflict.

Anderson admits that his inspiration came from Hermann Gunkel’s Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit(“Creation and Chaos in Beginningtime and End-time”), written in 1895, whose observations he attempts to update. Into this rather artificial mold he has poured a good deal of old-fashioned biblical liberalism. JEDP, second and third Isaiah, and an annual New Year enthronement festival in Israel are all accepted without criticism. Although he is vaguely aware that “myth” is an unsuitable term for the early Genesis material, he manages to use a disarming definition from another liberal scholar in favor of retaining the word. He has a low view of the inspiration of Scripture and gives the impression that the Israelites experienced God in history more than in revelation.

In his zeal the author overstates his case by apparently regarding almost all occurrences of the word “sea” in the Old Testament as direct or overt references to the primordial water-chaos of Babylonian mythology. Like some other liberals, he is not above amending the Hebrew text when he thinks it will strengthen his case. He clearly has no understanding of the way in which the early Genesis material (“myth,” in his terms) is amenable to a scientific interpretation. And he is apparently unaware that the relation between the Babylonian creation stories and their Genesis counterparts is once again an entirely open question. In his view that Israel used the Babylonian chaos myth rather than divine revelation to probe the meaning of history, he shows himself insufficiently aware that the very few Old Testament allusions to pagan mythology are themselves thoroughly demythologized.

Even more serious, perhaps, is Anderson’s misunderstanding of the first word of the Hebrew Genesis, which he says points to an absolute temporal beginning. Again, had he recognized that “good and evil” often are used merely as antonyms, he would have had less difficulty in asserting the sovereignty of God. But he fails to notice that evil is less a part of a dualistic entity than a parasitic one.

Anderson’s arguments are not always clear, and I found that the most penetrating insights of the book were the contributions of Will Herberg, to whom the work was dedicated.

Turnpike In The Sky

The Symbolism of Evil, by Paul Ricoeur (Harper & Row, 1967, 357 pp., $8.50), is reviewed by Cornelius Van Til, professor of apologetics, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

This is the second in the author’s series of three volumes entitled “Finitude and Guilt.” In the first and second volumes we have a keen, modern, phenomenological analysis of what Scripture speaks of as sin and pollution. In the third Ricoeur proposes to set this analysis in relation to general philosophical reflection.

We are then to have an empirically founded and critically responsible totality view of what was traditionally spoken of as creation, fall, and redemption.

Ricoeur is deeply conscious of the difficulty he faces. He knows that “it is always in the midst of contingency that rational sequences must be detected.” Therefore “the hiatus between pure reflection on ‘fallibility’ and the confession of ‘sins’ is patent. Pure reflection makes no appeal to any myth or symbol; in this sense it is a direct exercise of rationality. But comprehension of evil is a sealed book for it; the reflection is pure, but it leaves everyday reality outside insofar as every-man’s everyday reality is ‘enslavement to the passions.’”

Here then is Ricoeur’s problem. Philosophy is pure reflection. It “must comprehend everything, even religion.” On the other hand, symbols deal with pure facts. The symbol “does not conceal any hidden teaching that only needs to be unmasked for the images in which it is clothed to become useless.”

We cannot understand a thing unless we understand everything to which it is contingent. Obviously we cannot understand everything. Can we then understand anything? Yet we must insist that “the symbol gives rise to thought.” This sentence, says Ricoeur, “enchants me.” Well it may. It can, on his view, never do more. He can only assert that symbol “gives occasion to thought”; his methodology, as he virtually admits, excludes such a possibility. His principle of reflection is like a turnpike in the sky. His symbols are like grains of sand in an infinitely extended desert.

The enterprise of “a creative interpenetration of meaning,” Ricoeur claims, “would be a hopeless one if symbols were radically alien to philosophical discourse.” But he himself has asserted that an absolute alienation exists between fact and reflection on fact.

All he can do is repeat to himself, “I wager that I shall have a better understanding of man and of the bond between the being of man and the being of all beings if I follow the indication of symbolic thought.”

Thus Ricoeur says he is “betting on the significance of the symbolic world.” Seeking for “rational sequences … in the midst of contingency,” he sees traditional Christian believers as those who “would seek nothing, not being motivated by concern about any question.” Nobody knows, but you are wrong and I am right. Thus indirectly does Ricoeur exhibit the truth that if man does not accept the Christian answer, he can find no coherence whatsoever in the facts of his experience.

A Fresh Point Of View

Basic Modern Philosophy of Religion, by Frederick Ferré (Scribner’s, 1967, 465 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by Herman J. Ridder, president, Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan.

Frederick Ferré, chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Dickinson College and the son of Nels F. S. Ferré, has written a lively, challenging book that, though understandable to the beginner in the field, will nonetheless engage the interest of the veteran also.

“Basic” in the title means “available,” says Ferré—the book can be understood by the thoughtful reader without technical prerequisites. It is “modern” in that he goes no further back than Descartes. And it is a “philosophy of religion” in that it is an attempt at “helping to rejoin the island of philosophy of religion to the general philosophic continent from which, I fear, it has sometimes been cut off by the rip tides of party spirit or by the gentle marshes of suffocating naïveté.” Therefore, his primary aim is to provide a fresh point of view on issues of central importance to a critical and comprehensive understanding of religion, which Ferré defines as “one’s way of valuing comprehensively and intensively.”

The author’s method is very satisfying. He skillfully combines illustrative material with various instructional approaches (in one chapter a theologian and a skeptic, assisted by a friend who “starts the apples of philosophical discord rolling,” demonstrate through dialogue what Ferré calls “scientific stalemate”). The result is an interesting and useful educational tool that Ferré tested in two classrooms before committing it to type.

Tracing the history of philosophy in the modern era, Ferré notes that in the seventeenth century the issues of religious belief were defined theistically and theoretically. Descartes and Paley illustrate the optimistic belief that purely speculative means could be used to establish religiously significant truths. This is “the rising action” in the drama. David Hume brings in the element of conflict with his radical questioning of the assumption that religious believing is a speculative enterprise. Under the influence of Immanuel Kant, the question marks become “full stops,” and practical reason is suggested as a means more suitable to the nature of religious belief. After this climax comes the “falling action” of the nineteenth century, when the discussion centers on whether or not there is such a thing as practical reason. Here Kierkegaard and Nietzsche agree in completely rejecting an academic, detached discussion of religious matters that deal with life-and-death issues.

Ferré reminds us that we of the twentieth century are the inheritors of this philosophical history. For that reason he seeks to define religion in terms of its “practical” role while at the same time avoiding the mistake of completely sealing off practical matters from questions of truth. He hopes that the linguistic key provided by the philosophy of language in which forms of speech are reunited with forms of life can be of considerable help in reworking the traditional conflicts in the religious drama so that there can be some hope of progress.

In the meantime, we shall have to live in a time “between models.” Traditional imagery employed by the Scriptures and theology can serve at best to provide partial meanings as “broken myths.” Does this mean that the person who chooses to live so must live a life “parched and shallow, without the heights of worship, the depths of prayer, the breadth of fellowship”? Ferré doesn’t think so. But the alternatives he gives are, in my opinion, hardly adequate. “Standing in a picket line” may be a noble act, but it is not nearly as much an “exalting act of worship as kneeling in a cathedral.” The author suggests “Thy will be done” as the model petitionary prayer. In this era between the models, the prayer becomes, “May the values that I acknowledge as really sacred, beyond the petty and inconstant willfulness of my momentary desires, find genuine fulfillment”!

But don’t let that deter you from reading a very worthwhile book. After all, long ago (in chapter 1) he warned us that a philosophy of religion is not to be understood as an apologetic for the faith. If you’ve been spending a lot of time on issues that don’t really matter or with parishioners or others who lack the interest or ability to wrestle with basic problems confronting the faith today, I suggest you take on Ferré!

As Cardinal Bea Sees It

The Way to Unity after the Council, by Augustin Cardinal Bea (Herder and Herder, 1967, 256 pp., $4.95) is reviewed by Ernest Gordon, dean, University Chapel, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.

A question I have often heard concerned Christians ask is: “Did the Second Vatican Council succeed in loosening the strong controls imposed on the Roman church by the Council of Trent and the First Vatican Council?” The question is important, for the attitudes existing between Roman Catholics and Protestants have been determined, in large part, by these councils.

This book helps to answer the question. In an irenic manner Augustin Cardinal Bea explains the significance of the deliberations and conclusions of Vatican II. The main concern behind John XXIII’s convening of the council was clearly ecumenical. This concern was expressed plainly in the Decree on Ecumenism: “The restoration of unity among all Christians is one of the principal concerns of the Second Vatican Council.” Cardinal Bea, president of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, is obviously in a good position to speak for his communion to those outside it. As he sees it, the two directing principles of the ecumenical approach are: love of truth and charity of judgment. Along with these principles goes the recognition that authentically ecumenical action must begin in the church’s own renewal.

The concern of Vatican II extended to the non-Christian world. The doctrine of creation formed the mode of approach. Although all men participate in the Fall, they are still left with their innate dignity as God’s creatures. The sons of the church have, therefore, the duty of recognizing and promoting the spiritual values they encounter in other religions. This is a far cry from the philosophy of the Inquisition, which was created as a branch of the Counter-Reformation.

The council’s declaration on the attitude of the church toward non-Christian religions was hailed as “a milestone in the relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people.” Here again it represented a more open and charitable view. The declaration pointed out that the people of the New Covenant have a spiritual bond with the descendants of Abraham: “All who believe in Christ—Abraham’s sons according to faith—are included in the same patriarch’s call.” Having established mutual bonds, the declaration recommended that profitable areas of understanding be worked out and that biblical and theological studies be the guide in a brotherly dialogue. The burden of guilt for our Lord’s death was recognized as one too heavy for the Jews to bear; they “should not be presented as repudiated or cursed by God.”

The hope of Christian unity that inspired John XXIII was reinforced by the council’s evaluation of the common ties that bind all Christians:

1. Baptism: “All who have been justified by faith in baptism are members of Christ’s Body, and have a right to be called Christian.”

2. The centrality of Christ: “We rejoice to see that our separated brethren look to Christ as the source and center of Church unity.”

3. The inspiration of Scripture: “Sacred scripture provides for the work of dialogue as an instrument of the highest value in the mighty hand of God.”

4. The fellowship of the sacraments, although we separated brethren lack the sacrament of orders.

5. The moral teaching of the Gospel.

6. Solidarity in sin.

The cooperation we may look forward to, however, is mostly in the field of social action—all of us are one “in acknowledging the dignity of the human person in the social implications of the Gospel, in working for peace, and alleviating the calamities of our time, such as hunger and disasters, illiteracy, poverty, the inequitable distribution of wealth, etc.” Cardinal Bea points out that although religious problems are not specifically mentioned here, nevertheless cooperation in the social field is “a way of furthering the Creator’s will.”

Most readers will agree that Vatican II opened the way for further study, action, and dialogue, but that “the complex realities of the Church herself” remain. How much of a synthesis may be achieved between the Roman communion and those outside, according to the principles of truth and love, has yet to be worked out. If “truth” includes the sacrament of orders and the apostolic college, how far may the separated brethren go in recognizing it without weakening their faith in Him who is the way, and the truth, and the life?

If the council restored mutual love, as the Pope has said it did, then surely the “separated brethren” may gratefully accept and respond to this fact. In any case, none who owe allegiance to Jesus Christ as Lord can remain indifferent to the world’s hatred of God and its need of the one Saviour.

Myths, Late Dates, And Assumptions

Theology of the Old Testament, Volume II, by Walter Eichrodt (Westminster, 1967, 573 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by R. Laird Harris, dean and professor of Old Testament, Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

Eichrodt’s Theologie des Alten Testaments was originally published in the thirties. This second volume from the fifth German edition (1964) is an important addition to Old Testament study. Eichrodt’s massive and original work is perhaps the most basic of the several Old Testament theologies that have lately come to us from Europe.

His different approach is refreshing. On the basis of recent discovery he criticizes the older Wellhausen view: “Once again, therefore, the beautifully constructed developmental theory comes to pieces in one’s hands.” He includes much exegetical material that is also often the product of a novel point of view.

Eichrodt arranges his material topically. But he passes up the usual topics of systematic theology in favor of topics derived, he feels, directly from the material: God and the People (Vol. I), God and the World, God and Man (Vol. II). One may doubt, however, whether the treatment is purely objective. At least, Eichrodt reaches the familiar neo-orthodox conclusions in all his study. God is the hidden One, the totally other. Meaning in life is attained by a God-Man encounter. The suffering of righteous people offers as much atonement as is necessary. Creation and the Fall and eschatology also are myths—spiritually real, but not historically true.

Although he rejects Wellhausen’s development of Israel’s religion, his whole work is built on acceptance of the late date of the documents. He traces many lines of doctrine from their origin in the monarchy (the prophets and the J document) to the exilic period (Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel), the post-exilic period (P document and most of the Psalms), then late Judaism (other Psalms, trito Isaiah, Daniel, and non-canonical literature). Even much current critical study would question some of his very late datings—as, for instance, that of the Psalms.

This highly technical work has its value, but its conclusions are largely determined by its initial assumptions.

Luther Vs. Heresy

We Condemn: How Luther and Sixteenth Century Lutheranism Condemned False Doctrine, by Hans-Werner Gensichen, translated by Herbert J. A. Bouman (Concordia, 1967, 213 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by C. Gregg Singer, chairman, Department of History, Catawba College, Salisbury, North Carolina.

This is a scholarly treatment of a technical but very important aspect of the Lutheran Reformation. The problem of the Damnamus, the Condemnation, was a serious one for Luther and his successors in Germany as they worked for the reformation of the German church, and the history of this controversy offers the key to understanding the doctrinal controversies that at times threatened to engulf Lutheranism after 1550.

Dr. Gensichen declares that his purpose is to foster understanding among the churches through investigation of a highly controversial historical question. But he also says that in this strictly historical study he has no intention of prejudging the dogmatic questions. On the whole, he manages to maintain a high degree of impartiality until the final pages of the work. Then his neo-orthodox leanings begin to be evident in his rather subtle attempt to associate Luther with a Barthian view of revelation, and in his suggestion that the Barmen Declaration of 1934 points to the possible answer to the vexing question of the proper use of the Condemnation. Yet high scholarship marks every page of this work.

The author begins with the assumption that the rejection of false doctrines is one of the major points at which the Reformation maintained some continuity with the pre-Reformation Church. But he also seeks to locate the Lutheran use of the Condemnation in the practices of the primitive Church rather than in the legal formalism of the Church of the Middle Ages. He insists that the fight against false doctrines in the Middle Ages was closely associated with the increasing objectifying of doctrine and institutionalizing of the Church. Thus the use of the Condemnation departed from the New Testament ideal of maintaining the purity of the life of the Church; it came to be a punitive measure in the hands of the clerical hierarchy. Although in general I agree with this thesis, I think that this section is perhaps the least satisfactory part of the book. I also question the assumption that the use of the Condemnation came to its own under Gregory IX. But these are minor criticisms.

The basic chapter is the one that deals with Luther’s own position. Here the author asserts that Luther sought to return to the practice of the early Church in his view of the Condemnation and sought to use it to protect the doctrine of the Cross and justification by faith alone. Gensichen seems to think that Luther’s own position here was the best and that the rise of a legalistic view of the excommunication in Lutheran thought after 1530 is regrettable because it became a source of discord. I cannot accept this view, in that the author seems to minimize the doctrinal controversies that arose and to overlook the loyalty of the Flacians to what they felt was the truly orthodox Lutheran position.

The great value of this work is that it reminds us that the churches of the Reformation did have a great zeal for a biblical orthodoxy and were willing to take a stand for the truth, even if it meant administering ecclesiastical discipline to those who departed from it. That is the real message of this book for our day.

A Man Used By God

Another Hand on Mine, by William J. Petersen (McGraw-Hill, 1967, 228 pp., $5.50), is reviewed by Delbert A. Kuehl, executive assistant director, The Evangelical Alliance Mission, Wheaton, Illinois.

“If you help me to get my medical education and help me to become a doctor, I will give you everything.… Yes, Lord, everything.” This was the critical hour that set the compass for the life of the young Carl Becker, a life to be marked by amazing accomplishments as a missionary doctor. Petersen so vividly portrays the life of Dr. Becker—his burdens and doubts, his deep love, his humble spirit, his practical faith, his able leadership—that one feels he is living the experiences of this amazing missionary along with him.

In the midst of a prosperous and expanding medical practice in Pennsylvania, the inner call of God persisted until, despite their doubts and hesitations, the Beckers turned toward the Congo to begin pioneer medical work in the great Ituri forest. There were no facilities, no medical assistants, and, strange as it may seem, scarcely any patients. Gripped by superstition, the Africans still turned to the witch doctor. With a living allowance of $60 per month and meager funds with which to start the simplest medical work, faith to Dr. Becker was not an option but a necessity. From this small beginning rose a medical work that was to touch tens of thousands of sufferers and attract worldwide attention.

The sad plight of the great number of lepers pressed hard upon Dr. Becker. He was not satisfied with the medicines available, and he began experimenting with other ways to attack this dreaded disease. The leprosy work grew to be the largest in Africa and second largest in the world. Its success drew prominent doctors from all over the world to Oicha hospital in the Ituri forest.

Dr. Becker had great compassion for the Africans’ physical suffering but was stirred even more by their spiritual need. With deep devotion and keen insight—with another hand on his—he led large numbers to Christ.

In a day when the “Missionary, go home” theme is often presented, it is refreshing indeed to read how in the midst of the pressures and tragedies of the Congo the Africans pleaded with the Beckers and their fellow workers not to leave them. Those closely involved in worldwide missions realize that this is the general picture and “Missionary, go home” the exception.

William Petersen has done a remarkable job in unfolding to us the accomplishments of the amazing Carl Becker and the Africa Inland Mission, a man and a mission greatly used by God.

Book Briefs

Christianity in the Non-Western World, edited by Charles W. Forman (Prentice-Hall, 1967, 146 pp., $4.95). Readings about Christianity’s confrontation with various non-Westem cultures that remind us that the Christian message is not a Western phenomenon but God’s truth for the whole world.

Prophets of Salvation, by Eugene H. Maly (Herder and Herder, 1967, 191 pp., $4.50). A Catholic biblical scholar describes the major Old Testament prophets and their involvement in the events of their day. He includes a helpful discussion of the Hebrew concept of dabar, the word.

Strasbourg and the Reform, by Miriam Usher Chrisman (Yale, 1967, 351 pp., $8.75). Students of church history will welcome this interesting analysis of the Reformation’s effect on a single city, Strasbourg, 1520–1548.

They Stood Boldly, by William P. Barker (Revell, 1967, 188 pp., $3.95). The thrilling story of the early Church recorded in the Book of Acts is told with fresh insights and dramatic verve by a Presbyterian minister.

From Primitives to Zen, compiled and edited by Mircea Eliade (Harper & Row, 1967, 645 pp., $8). An anthology of documents from major religious traditions (other than Judaism and Christianity) that sheds light on their beliefs, conceptions, rituals, and institutions; compiled by the University of Chicago Divinity School’s expert on history of religions.

Please Pray for the Cabbages, by Helen W. Kooiman (Revell, 1967, 123 pp., $2.95). Pint-sized parables for grown-ups from the mouths of babes, delightfully told by a Christian homemaker.

Spiritual Leadership, by J. Oswald Sanders (Moody, 1967, 160 pp., $2.95). A lively, practical discussion of characteristics and practices vital to Christian leadership. Even if you do not consider yourself leadership material, read it.

The Modern Tongues Movement, by Robert G. Gromacki (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1967, 165 pp., $4.50). A well-written survey of tongues-speaking, past and present, and an analysis of references to it in Mark, Acts, and First Corinthians. Gromacki argues that the modern movement’s use of unknown tongues without any language basis is contrary to the scriptural standard and cannot be of God. Quoting Paul in First Corinthians 13:8, “Tongues shall cease,” he concludes, “They have.” A book bound to promote controversy in many circles.

Living in Kingdom Come, by Vance Havner (Revell, 1967, 128 pp., $2.95). More than a Scripture-saturated devotional book by a traveling evangelist, this is a message to Christians to shake their apathy and live as subjects of a heavenly kingdom.

The Making of the Christian West, by Georges Duby (World, 1967, 214 pp., $21.50). An exquisite volume that tells the story of sacred art, A.D. 980–1140. The influence of the feudal system and monastic Christianity is seen in the 111 high-quality pictures included with the readable text.

114 Ways to the Mission Field, by Mel Larson (Free Church Publications, 1967, 256 pp., $3.95). Heart-warming and encouraging stories of the conversations, the call, and the commitment that led 114 people into missionary service.

The Wit and Wisdom of Billy Graham, edited and compiled by Bill Adler (Random House, 1967, 165 pp., $3.95). The stirring message and vibrant personality of Graham shine through in this collection of excerpts from his sermons.

The Epistles of St. John, by B. F. Westcott (Eerdmans, 1966, 245 pp., $6.50). A classic commentary first published in 1883 is now reprinted, with the addition of a survey by F. F. Bruce of Johannine studies since then. This commentary is not for those who have no Greek. Even the Latin quotations in the author’s notes are left to the imagination of the modern reader!

Paperbacks

A Religion Against Itself, by Robert W. Jenson (John Knox, 1967, 127 pp., $1.95). The author’s earlier critique of Karl Barth raised hopes for this book that are unfulfilled. What he offers here are scattered thoughts on an assortment of topics that cluster around “religionless Christianity” but lead nowhere.

Take My Life, by Michael Griffiths (Inter-Varsity, 1967, 189 pp., $1.25). A plea for dynamic Christian living characterized not by the modern virtues of toleration and moderation but by an all-out response to God. A practical and uplifting book.

The Significance of South India, by Michael Hollis (John Knox, 1966, 82 pp., $1.95). The South India scheme for church unity is a phrase to conjure with today, especially since it is advocated as a pilot venture for the British Anglicans and Methodists to embrace. The author’s enthusiasm for the scheme raises hope that this may be the solution in other areas where church union is under negotiation.

The Early Christian Church, by J. G. Davies (Doubleday, 1967, 414 pp., $1.75). A handy sourcebook of scholarly data on the first five centuries of Christianity. Well organized, clearly written. First published in hardcover in 1965.

The Ministry of the Church in the World, by John A. Bailey (Oxford, 1967, 125 pp., $1.55). A low-key introduction to what the Bible’s message is all about; even “ministry” is explained. The author’s earlier missionary work explains the elementary nature of this book, which raises almost as many questions as it answers.

Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church, by W. H. C. Frend (Doubleday, 1967, 577 pp., $1.95). This significant historical work considers the Judaistic tradition of martyrdom inherited by Christians and discusses the controversies and sufferings involving Christians from New Testament times to the fourth century.

Counseling and Theology, by William E. Hulme (Fortress, 1967, 250 pp., $1.95). Hulme considers the needs of counselees, the theological foundations of counseling, and the Christian basis for personal acceptance, growth, and assurance. Includes chapters on the use of Scripture and the Lord’s Supper in counseling. New paperback edition.

Ideas

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New report recommends liberalized policies on drinking

Proposals advanced in the recently released Alcohol Problems: A Report to the Nation are enough to drive churchgoers to drink. In fact, if the recommendations of the Cooperative Commission on the Study of Alcohol are followed, drinking in America will almost surely increase. The hope of the seventeen-man commission of scholars, scientists, and lay experts is that its comprehensive plan for prevention and treatment of alcoholism will lead to modifications of attitudes toward the use of alcohol. But if the report seeks to reduce problem drinking, just as surely does it encourage more casual drinking.

The major objective of the $1 million, six-year study federally financed by the National Institute of Mental Health is to work for control of alcohol consumption through individual judgment rather than legal restrictions. The report’s most astounding recommendations call for immediate lowering of the legal drinking age to eighteen years, promotion of drinking within the family setting, liberalization of liquor advertising policies, and even encouragement of imbibing by teen-agers at social and church gatherings under adult supervision. Asserting that fewer problem drinkers are found in Jewish and Chinese ethnic subcultures, where alcohol is regularly consumed but drunkenness is strongly disapproved, the commission reasons that the integration of drinking with other activities, such as eating meals, will help young people develop a responsible attitude toward it. The report contends that drinking patterns can be changed and drinking abuses lessened if the emotionalism associated with alcoholic beverages is reduced, distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable drinking are clarified, drinking “for its own sake” is discouraged, and young people are helped to adapt themselves “realistically to a predominantly ‘drinking’ society.”

Along with its preventive measures, the document recommends new approaches to the care and treatment of alcoholics. “Public drunkenness should be approached as a medical-social rather than as a legal-criminal problem,” claims the commission; present policies are “inhuman as well as ineffective.”

The report, pre-released at a luncheon sponsored by its publisher, Oxford University Press, and by the National Council of Churches and the North Conway Institute of Boston, elicited strong reactions. Dr. Jon L. Regier, NCC asssociate general secretary for Christian life and mission, called the document “more of a watershed than the Surgeon General’s report on smoking” and said solutions to the problems of alcohol and alcoholism in America will “tend to be wet rather than dry ones.” Despite Regier’s statement and the NCC’s co-sponsorship of the pre-release luncheon, NCC general secretary Dr. R. H. Edwin Espy later disclaimed official NCC endorsement of it. In a blistering statement the previous day, Dr. Samuel A. Jeanes, legislative chairman of the New Jersey Council of Churches, had urged the U. S. senators from his state to investigate the report, charging, “The liquor business has never had a better boost for its business than has come through this report paid for by the taxpayers of America.” In a curious twist of logic, Dr. Thomas E. Price of the Methodist General Board of Christian Social Concerns said that the commission’s approach “in no way conflicts with the abstinence position of the Methodist Church.” Seventh-day Adventist temperance director Miller Brockett objected to all parts of the report except the recommendation that problem drinking ought to be handled by “prevention, not cure.”

Despite the good intentions of the commission, adoption of their sweeping recommendations would make a tragic situation in America even worse. The increase in liquor consumption resulting from legalizing alcohol for eighteen-year-olds, scrapping our all-too-few restrictions on liquor advertisements, and promoting more widespread drinking at home, church, and social gatherings would not lead to enlightened attitudes and greater control of drinking. Instead its result would predictably be more drunkenness, shattered lives, and a greater highway death toll. If drinking has been moderate in certain cultural settings, the reason has been, not easy access to alcohol, but commitment to religious or ethnic values that exert profound influence on behavior. It is irresponsible folly for the commission to relax deterrents to alcoholism on the assumption that its recommended cooperative efforts in society will be able to supply the necessary deep-seated human regulative controls. Every day we see new evidence of the erosion of protective moral values in home and society. To encourage policies that will lead to greater drinking in America, where social disruption is increasing, is to hasten the disintegration of human lives.

Legal restrictions and educational and rehabilitative programs are necessary in our communities to help restrain men from succumbing repeatedly to the sin of drunkenness. But the solution to the alcohol problem lies only in an internal change in individual lives. Men driven to drink can find a lasting release from their problem only as they are driven by the Word and the Spirit to Almighty God. It is sad to find some churchmen more concerned with the relaxation of liquor laws than with the proclamation of God’s commandments.

The Church must realize anew its responsibility to confront the problem of excessive drinking. Christians must work for feasible legal safeguards against the misuse of alcohol. They must not lend support to programs such as that of the Cooperative Commission that would weaken legal controls on drinking without developing adequate spiritual controls. But more important they must fully recognize that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only sure cure for alcoholism and every other sin. To those who find solace only from spirits in a bottle, Christians must humbly, sensitively, and compassionately offer the message of Christ. Christ himself will provide for them the true solace they seek: the joy of the Holy Spirit in the innermost being.

A MISLEADING STATEMENT ON MARIJUANA

In their crusade to legalize the use of marijuana, the hippies may have found a new friend. Dr. James L. Goddard, director of the U. S. Food and Drug Administration, recently stated that he considers smoking marijuana no more serious physically and mentally than drinking a cocktail. He denied that smoking marijuana leads to addiction to stronger drugs and advocated removal of legal penalties for its possession (though not for its sale and distribution). “Society should be able to accept both alcohol and marijuana,” said Goddard. He called for more research on chronic use of the hallucination-inducing drug.

Dr. Goddard’s views fly in the face of the World Health Organization’s expert Committee on Drug Dependence, which categorized marijuana along with heroin as “particularly liable to abuse and to produce ill effects.” Marijuana is now prohibited on a worldwide scale as a result of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, a treaty signed by fifty-eight nations in the 1960s.

Although marijuana does not become “a monkey on the back” of a user as does heroin, it often has an adverse effect on certain persons. Even Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld, medical adviser to the “turned on” community and an advocate of marijuana legalization, admits in his “HIPocrates” underground newspaper column: “Emotionally unstable individuals may freak out after using the drug even in small quantities.” No conclusive studies have been made of long-range effects of marijuana. But the threat it poses to many persons on a short-term basis plus the possibility of lasting damage from habitual use should lead individuals to steer clear of “grass-blowing” and governmental bodies to continue strict enforcement of laws prohibiting its sale and possession.

Although Dr. Goddard’s concern for a healthy America is well known, his views on marijuana unfortunately, and perhaps unintentionally, tend to embolden present and potential users of the drug. We urge public-health officers to consider carefully all available evidence and forthrightly warn the American people of whatever dangers are inherent in marijuana-smoking, so that needless damage to human minds and bodies will not be unwittingly encouraged.

DISSENT BY VIOLENCE

The massive anti-war siege of the Pentagon was not even over before David Dellinger, chairman of the National Mobilization Committee, called for protests that would be “more militant, more persistent, and more insistent.” Persistent perhaps. But militant? What less justifiable sequel could there be to the two-day demonstration?

The Washington protest called for peace, but violence was its outstanding feature. Calling for “direct action” and “disorderly conduct” even before the protests began, many intentionally made this the most violent non-violent peace protest yet against the war in Viet Nam. At least forty-seven persons were injured in clashes between the crowd and soldiers. Nearly 650 were arrested, including Dellinger, Yale chaplain John Boyles, and novelist Norman Mailer. As thousands streamed across the Potomac to the Pentagon Mall, the tranquil spirit that had prevailed at meetings earlier that day yielded to one of ugly provocation. President Johnson was vilified. Troops were goaded. Some militants spit on soldiers. Many more threw stones, sticks, and garbage. At one point demonstrators observed a moment of silence for slain Communist guerrilla Che Guevara.

Not all those present would condone the violence, of course; many were probably distressed by it. But let them learn from what happened. Let the more responsible dissenters learn that mass demonstrations tend to take on the character of the more militant minority. And let no one obscure the fact that the Washington protest marked an ominous step in the revolt against non-violent persuasion and legislative processes, and accelerated the already noticeable decline of American society toward the anarchy of mob rule.

There is no excuse for lawlessness. Shortly after his arrest Mailer argued that the war in Viet Nam “will destroy the foundation of this republic.” If it is destroyed, the cause will more likely be mob action. If it is preserved, as all good men desire, it will be preserved by the grace of God through the exercise of spiritual leadership, moderation, law, justice, and responsible dissent.

STATE FUNDING OF PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS?

Separation of church and state is at stake this week as residents of the State of New York go to the polls to vote on a new constitution. The document being presented to the electorate would repeal a provision of the present New York constitution that bars state financial aid to church-related schools. The vote is crucial because of this state’s traditional influence upon the rest of the United States in legal matters. If New York opens the door for the use of public funds in parochial schools, it could set a trend toward further expunging of the moneyline separating church and state.

Ever since famine drove Joseph’s brothers to Egypt in the second millennium B.C., and probably also before that time, crop failures and consequent starvation have been a chronic problem of mankind. Drought, wars, and plant disease have swept through history, leaving a trail of misery and death behind. And little could be done to stop their rampage. Famine came to Rome in 436 B.C., causing thousands to throw themselves into the Tiber. Famine struck England in 1005. All of Europe suffered in 879, 1016, and 1162. Even in the nineteenth century, with its great advances in technology and commerce, hunger stalked many countries—Russia, China, India, Ireland, and others—and many perished. Famine, like war and pestilence, has always been a bellicose neighbor to large sectors of the human race.

It still is today. Tonight in India thousands will die of malnutrition and accompanying diseases, and hundreds more will perish in the nations of Latin America and other emerging countries. Millions will awake hungry and go to bed unfed. “Two-thirds of the world’s people live in countries with national average diets that are nutritionally inadequate,” reports the latest government study on the World Food Situation, conducted under the leadership of United States Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman. And the situation does not seem to be improving. In fact, the most startling development in recent years is the serious prediction by population and agriculture experts of widespread famine by the end of the century—possibly by 1985.

Many popular predictions of intensified famine are highly sensational and are designed to sell newspapers or specific economic programs rather than to give an accurate account of the hunger problem. When Esquire publishes an article maintaining that “The Human Race Has, Maybe, Thirty-five Years Left,” that is the worst sort of sensationalism. And one suspects that the concern to involve the Church in various political programs, particularly in an advisory capacity, has led various ecun enical bodies to exaggerate the world hunger problem.

But even with allowances, there is ample cause to consider suffering through hunger a great moral issue for governments, churches, private foundations, and individuals who live in favored lands. It is hard to overlook the report that food will inevitably become a problem for a race whose numbers are increasing geometrically—now doubling in less than forty years—while production of grain and other foodstuffs seems to increase arithmetically by small and regular proportions. Hunger is now widespread and often acute. And by all reasonable estimates it seems to be increasing.

Secretary Freeman’s report is generally optimistic. It speaks of adequate food supplies for the world well into the 1980’s. But even this is disturbing. What about 1990? What, for that matter, about those who will be starying in 1968? What can be done? What can Christians do? Is the problem too removed from us to be our responsibility? Or is it our concern? Do biblical principles apply to a need this great? One may certainly point out that the poor will always be with us, that men will never succeed in wiping out world hunger, and even that the Bible sometimes views famine as the judgment of God upon masses of people. But these truths do not excuse inertia or a basic lack of Christian compassion.

The one thing Christians may not say in answer to these questions is that biblical principles do not apply to the problem of world hunger, for they certainly do. In the first place, the Bible teaches that material possessions are ultimately not our own; they belong to God. This view is inherent in the opening chapters of Genesis, where man is placed in the garden, not as an owner, but as the custodian of God’s creation. It is also basic to the biblical conception of tithing. For the tithe is not merely that which belongs to God, though in a sense it is that. Rather, it is a tangible acknowledgment that all we have comes from God and belongs to him. “Freely ye have received, freely give,” Jesus commanded. Vatican II was right to conclude that “a man should regard his lawful possessions not merely as his own but also as common property in the sense that they should accrue to the benefit of not only himself but of others” (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Chapter 3).

Secondly, the Bible teaches that our attitude toward the needy should be motivated by genuine compassion and that this compassion should transcend such factors as race (the Pauline collection for the Jews at Jerusalem), nationality (the Good Samaritan), and social status (Philemon). Christians should give because of their love for those who are suffering, and not any less because they are suffering 10,000 miles away. For us to be concerned with multitudes in India whom we have never seen is no different than for the Christians of Asia Minor to help starving Jews in Palestine in Paul’s day. If this fact were taken seriously, it would eliminate several unworthy and ultimately ineffective motives often put forward in popular debate—“We must overcome food shortages in order to avoid universal unrest and war” and “The United States must do the job because it is the most wealthy nation.” Actually, all Christians everywhere must do the job, together with unbelievers who share their concerns. And they must do it simply out of a God-derived compassion.

Finally, the Bible teaches that a successful transformation of society can come only from within, through the transformed lives of individual men and women. The Bible does not advocate a political blueprint for the renewal of society; it proclaims a Gospel for the spiritual transformation of persons, which leads to increasing moral sensitivity and the birth of true compassion. And the biblical method works. When the Christian ethic is actively appropriated by individuals, it can make significant contributions in the underdeveloped nations even where believers are a small minority. A large-scale turning to Christianity, like that which seems to be occurring in Indonesia, can eliminate fatalism and the much-publicized socio-religious barriers to complete nutrition and agricultural development.

Even secular study in its own way supports the need for individual-by-individual action. The Freeman report notes a basic shift by the United States government as a result of its own experience: outright grants of food are minimized in favor of efforts to increase food production in the developing nations through technical aid and the training of local leadership. The shift is not based merely on the fact that the United States’ food surplus is diminishing while its population increases. (Population of this country will probably increase by 50 per cent in the next thirty-three years.) It is based on the recognition that large food grants tend to depress food prices in the recipient countries and thus deprive individuals of a major incentive for increasing their own food production. A similar shift is also taking place across the wide spectrum of American philanthropy—private funds, foundations, and so on.

Any solution to the hunger problem calls for a body of adequately financed men able to communicate both a knowledge of agriculture and an enthusiasm for social progress to their potential counterparts in emerging lands. But social progress cannot occur in a moral and spiritual vacuum. Here lies the great challenge for the Christian churches.

Measured against the current population of Latin America and Asia, the United States today is now giving about one-sixtieth as much money to poor nations as it offered to Europe under the Marshall Plan. The foreign-aid percentage of the national budget is decreasing; today it is less than 1 per cent. The amount is about one-tenth of what American citizens spend on alcoholic beverages. Still the Western nations together contribute between $5.6 billion and $7 billion annually in outright grants or easy loans. In contrast, American Protestants spend only $7 million a year on food programs and another $7 million in agricultural development, and they dispense few workers for these programs. These figures must be weighed against the estimated $3.3 billion income of the forty-four largest Protestant denominations last year ($1.25 billion was applied to church construction) and the fact that the average church consistently spends four-fifths of its income on its own support.

It must be pointed out, of course, that the basic task of the institutional church is spiritual and moral, and also that multitudes of churchgoers give generously as individuals to local and national benevolent projects—the efforts of some individual believers have been astounding. Moreover, few will deny that the churches have been socially active in many problem areas, including hunger. Yet much more could be done.

1. Churches could increasingly recover the Reformation emphasis upon vocational stewardship and call upon qualified Christians to use their training in other lands. Of America’s agricultural specialists, many of whom must be Christians, fewer than 1 per cent are directly involved in foreign projects. Let the churches appeal to these men and to successful farmers and support them for short terms abroad through missionary agencies.

2. Denominations could also use a percentage of their income—perhaps money that would normally be spent for bigger and better facilities—to operate training programs in crisis areas. The Rockefeller Foundation reports that progress in agriculture has caused a 60 per cent increase in the world production of corn in the past decade and has enabled India to plan to double her wheat production in the next eight years. Gains of 50 to 200 per cent in rice production through improved varieties of seed are being reported in Pakistan, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Let the churches apply such gains to other underprivileged lands, thereby serving physical needs while they minister the Gospel. Such programs could enable missionary churches to become self-supporting.

3. American churches might also strive to heighten sensitivity to human need among all believers, particularly on the local church scene. For the churches merely to shift the responsibility to government would be blatantly immoral.

4. Most significantly, the Church should double its evangelistic efforts, realizing that the Gospel can do its liberating work only in and through those whose lives are transformed and guided by the indwelling presence of the risen Jesus Christ. By God’s grace, new birth properly leads to new energy, new initiative, and new abilities, as well as to new sensitivities toward those who are in need.

In its approach to hunger as in other areas, the Church has far too often looked outside itself rather than to its own responsibility under God and its own potential. Most church conventions pass resolutions written by a few and heeded by still fewer. Too often these hastily prepared statements are little more than a salve to Christian conscience. They pass the buck to government and are content to recite facts that responsible sources have long known. All this must cease if the Church is to respond effectively to the growing problem of world hunger. If this problem is as bad as churchmen say, then the Church must quickly put its tithe, time, and talents where its mouth is.

The Depth Of Famine

Politically minded ecumenists are appealing to the Barmen Confession (in which German Christians repudiated Nazi pretensions to state sovereignty) to justify expanding pressures by the National and World Councils of Churches upon government for politico-economic goals. In recent years these ecumenical pressures have embraced such objectives as getting Red China into the United Nations and getting America out of Viet Nam. Now a new ecumenical motif is gaining emphasis: world famine.

Within a few years, we are told, the expanding population will exhaust all available food resources; the prospect of global famine is therefore very real. What can be done? Those aware of the ecumenical mind-set will find fully predictable the proposed “solution”: mammoth U. S. expenditures abroad. Christian conscience, so the argument runs, practically requires that President Johnson and the U. S. Congress extend unprecedented foreign aid to underprivileged nations. In short, famine threatens mass genocide, and only U.S. intervention can prevent world hunger.

Is this emotional plea of the political ecumenists trustworthy? And if world famine is indeed a probability, is the proposed “solution” necessarily the most efficient, most effective, and most durable?

Ever since Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), demographers have warned of impending imbalance between human population and food supply; today’s pronouncements are hardly something new.

We might properly ask, therefore, whether modern technology cannot cope with the need for increased food productivity. In enlightened areas of the world, improved agricultural techniques already enable one farmer to produce what a few generations ago required the labor of a hundred workers. Technical and methodological promises for the future are even more staggering. Should the Church, then, by encouraging outright food subsidies, go into the business of what amounts to perpetuating non-enlightenment? If, instead, just for one example, the truth of revealed religion were to revise the Hindu idea of the sacredness of cattle, a major factor in India’s food crisis would be corrected. Working together, Christian evangelism and scientific technology can and do help to close the famine gap. The “solution” of political ecumenism promises merely to postpone the problem, adding the illusion, moreover, that an ecclesiastical agency has socio-political omni-competence.

The fact is that much arable land remains to be put to productive use. Russia, for example, could produce more wheat, but Communist control stands in the way. It is no secret that the United States could produce more food; the fact is that the government currently pays farmers $1.6 billion annually not to grow it. Another case in point is Burma, once a major source of rice for India and China; now fallen under socialism, it exports only a tenth of the food it used to export. Why do political ecumenists neglect such facts and problems? And why, if they venture to speak of a “Nazi-Christian” mentality, do they not mention the staggering distributions of American dollars and surpluses that have already proved the United States unequaled in world benevolence? Between July 1, 1945, and December 31, 1965, alone, total U. S. foreign aid (apart from military supplies and services) amounted to $66 billion.

Moreover, why should the American response to world hunger be left so onesidedly to the government? Private agencies like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations have contributed significantly to improving world agriculture, not least in India. The appeal to voluntarism and the private sector should be kept in the forefront.

Toward world famine, as toward many other issues, political ecumenists continue to show the wrong prejudices. One need not long study NCC-WCC political-economic pronouncements to sense two tendencies; theological raïveté, and an oversimplification in which a problem that has profound technical implications is seen as only a mora issue. The “solution” political ecumenists propose would, in effect, rely on government relief to perpetuate the problem while impoverishing the United States, on which the NCC-WCC leadership makes its main economic demands.

A Washington economist and prominent Episcopal layman, Dr. Elgin Groseclose, has protested that “at times the State Department, fearful lest foreign aid be pared by the Congress, has rounded up claques of clergymen, priests, and rabbis to testify that we must vote these sums of money as a religious duty and as a national charity.” A conspicuous instance of such tactics was the formation in 1961 of the Citizens Committee for International Development—‘at the request of the White House to mobilize public support for the foreign aid program.” Statements by this group were then supported by 257 Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergymen and laymen, the implication being, as Dr. Groseclose puts it, that “religious leaders of all faiths in America are overwhelmingly behind the President’s new foreign aid program.…” On the list, predictably, were such familiar names as Blake, Cushing, Dahlberg, Niebuhr, Oxnam, Pike, and Sherrill.

In January, 1967, the United Church of Christ set up a Washington office, with six other Protestant denominations (American Baptist, Christian, Church of the Brethren, Episcopal, Methodist, and United Presbyterian) on an advisory board, to lobby for an $18–20 billion increase in American foreign aid in the next five years as an “alternative to war.” Neither the dubious success of the foreign-aid program nor the evidence of its adverse effects seems to deter these churchmen from promoting the program under the guise of Christian charity.

Many influential religious leaders increasingly concur with the Marxist notions that society is best changed from without and that individuals are transformed by environmental conditioning. These unbiblical views enjoy a wide hearing. Fortunately even some secular observers are asking whether the ultimate interest of the free world is really advanced by the conditioning of the loyalties of whole societies through economic means, and whether politically mature nations can be developed through ongoing material subsidy. Events at home and abroad show that dollar subsidies often create expectations of increasing aid, and that when these hopes can no longer be fulfilled, the spirit of dependence changes to one of animosity.

In the final analysis, political ecumenism seems to ignore the great resources offered by redemptive religion to relieve the spiritual impoverishment of men and to change human nature. Political ecumenism is, in fact, itself guilty of a kind of human genocide—one that evangelical Christianity finds intolerable. For evangelical Christianity, the problem of human nature and character continues to be the irreducible core of every social concern, including famine. It is double tragedy to perpetuate the problem of physical hunger while ignoring the global famine of the Word of God. For this famine no stone of political ecumenism will suffice.

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“You do realize, of course, that most people today consider sermons obsolete.” We were in the cafeteria outside the main hall where an Anglican synod was in assembly. My newly met acquaintance drew meditative puffs on his pipe and oracle-like continued to expound the eclipse of preaching. “People today won’t stand for it. They want action and less talk. The preachers have had it.”

“But if that is so,” I countered, “shouldn’t the Church be honest enough to admit it has parted company with the New Testament?”

He didn’t think so. “Social action is the thing for today. Political action is this century’s best medium of Christian communication. The pulpit’s days are gone.”

This may well be a dominant view. The preaching of the Gospel is no longer regarded as our chief weapon against the establishment of the world. Harvey Cox says that most people consider preachers cultural antiques and have the same fondness for them that they have for deuxième empire furniture, especially when they dress up and strut about in their vivid ecclesiastical regalia.

The 179th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church was told by its avant-garde Standing Committee on Church and Society through committee chairman Robert McAfee Brown that the “Confession of 1967” had thrust a type of divine pressure on the Church that would and could only be expressed by vigorous and world-wide politico-social action. According to this view, the ministry of the Word of God through Spirit-filled preachers will no longer be regarded as the sine qua non of the Church’s evangel. Protest marches, increased aid to underdeveloped nations, pressure through groups organized for social renewal—these will become the main thrust of evangelism. We must concern ourselves with devising worldwide institutions to civilize the vast forces of change—and to challenge and overcome the three great disproportions of power, wealth, and ideology.

In a world being driven onward at apocalyptic speed by technology and science, it is easy to assume that political and economic policies should become the electives of the Christian Church. But we must mark clearly the point where we part company with the Christian mind. “The weapons of our warfare are not carnal,” says St. Paul, “but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds.” Preaching is such a weapon. “It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” When our Lord began his ministry, he came “preaching the gospel of the kingdom.”

In the noble words of the Book of Common Prayer, the Christian minister “receives authority to read the Gospel in the Church of God and to preach the same.” This is the right order: he reads and preaches. That is, he opens the Bible and expounds what he reads. To expound is to unfold, unravel, reveal, interpret, make clear. In himself, he has no authority; the Word before him is his authority, and as he reads and expounds and preaches the Word, the Holy Spirit anoints and empowers the declaration so that Christ himself is offered and made evident to the hearer by faith.

It is interesting to note the Apostle Peter’s method of preaching on the Day of Pentecost. He has no soothing, flattering speech, no outbursts of educated eloquence. He quotes Scripture and reasons from it. Yet, as he preaches, something happens in that mighty throng. The murmur gradually subsides; the mob becomes a congregation; the voice of the fisherman sweeps from one end of the crowd to the other, uninterrupted. He is preaching. And in his exposition of the Scripture there is heard the summons of God to every heart.

We must restore preaching to its rightful place. We must go back to the Bible and reverently search for the God-given message for our people. The New Testament pattern, so clearly set forth for every preacher to see, must become again our standard and our goal. Jesus Christ in all his glory must be central as he ever was in the witness of the apostles. “Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth.…” Wherever the preachers of the early Church started, they made straight for the Christ. “We preach not ourselves,” declares Paul, “but Jesus Christ.”

Jesus himself used this pattern even after his resurrection: “Beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” God has but one Word for this world, and that Word is Jesus Christ. Our exposition of the biblical records will be wide of the mark if we fail to see our Saviour there. “Search the scriptures,” he said, “for … they … testify of me.” We present Christ to men truly and fully only when we present him in the context of all Scripture.

Expository preaching will also follow the apostolic example in tracing the divine program in human history. In his sermon on the Day of Pentecost, Peter pointedly stresses the sovereignty of God and shows from the writings of the prophets how closely entwined are the histories of redemption and sin. He interprets what is happening by recalling the words of the prophet Joel centuries before.

As he preaches, Peter sweeps across all history and sees God at work in it. He notes that God has been planning man’s redemption from the beginning of time. He sees the Cross at the heart of history and the resurrection as the mightiest act of God. He looks onward to the climax of history to what he calls the “restitution of all things” and emphasizes that this has been declared by “all the holy prophets since the world began.” His theme is that God is at work in history; that God has permitted sin and evil to enter and infect history; yet has provided both answer and antidote in Jesus Christ. His Word is therefore relevant to every situation, and the proclamation of his Word is the supreme need of every generation.

In the New Testament pattern of expository preaching, God’s way of salvation is made very plain. Through the words of this humble fisherman, a sword begins to pierce the hearts of the hearers. Presently the multitude finds itself asking almost with one voice the most crucial question of all: “What shall we do?” To this question, the apostle gives immediate answer: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.” Nothing could be more direct than that.

The expository preacher need not presume to explain all that God has said in Jesus Christ, but he must make it plain. We must not becloud our hearers’ minds with muddy verbiage or thinking. Our message must be crystal clear to ourselves, and out of a burning heart we must declare the wonder of the saving truth of Christ our Lord. Like Paul in Corinth, we must make it our “secret determination to concentrate entirely on Jesus Christ himself and the fact of his death upon the cross” (the Phillips translation of Second Corinthians 2:2).

—The Rev. WILLIAM FITCH, Knox Presbyterian Church, Toronto, Ontario.

L. Nelson Bell

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Millions inside and outside the Church are spiritually ignorant, emotionally insecure, frustrated, and unhappy. But their lives can be completely transformed. Spiritual understanding can replace ignorance. A sense of security can come, bringing emotional stability. Peace can take the place of frustration. And an inner joy can settle in that the world cannot take away.

How can a person experience such a change? By reading the Bible, taking it at its word, and receiving the Christ it reveals.

I have written on this subject before and will probably do so again, because I am convinced that people—Christians above all others—are missing a blessing beyond anything they have ever known by failing to make the Bible a daily companion.

Oh, I know all about the tired old charge that we “worship” the Bible. It is hardly worthy of reply. The surgeon does not worship his knife and diagnostic equipment—but he trusts and uses them. The artist does not worship his brushes and oils, but he relies on them to produce the effects he desires.

Studying the Bible with a simple faith in its integrity and authority brings a reward achieved in no other way—the assurance that God is speaking to one’s heart and life.

Why not give the Bible a chance to speak? All other books, even the best of them, are men’s books and the expression of men’s wisdom. The Bible is God’s book, the expression of God’s wisdom. In it one can find the answers to the questions and uncertainties of life. Its message provides assurance that will banish fear from the heart and mind.

One of the most amazing things about the Bible is its relevance. It is more up to date than tomorrow’s newspaper, for it accurately tells of the future. It is wholly relevant in the moral realm, also, because since the beginning of time man’s basic problems have been the same. His sins have always been the same. The Bible is God’s word to man, and God never changes. He always stands ready to meet every need.

American business is based on proving the worth of one’s product. Advertising, samples, testimonials all have their place. I am simply asking that you give the Bible a chance to prove that it can bring a new dimension into your life.

Of primary importance is the Christ revealed in both the Old and the New Testament. In the Bible we learn of his person and his work—that he is the Son of God, and that, for the believer, he is Saviour and Lord.

The earnest seeker will find within the pages of this book a philosophy for living and also for dying. The Bible is a book by a Friend that tells us about a Friend. God speaks through all its pages. In the Old Testament we find history and the whys and wherefores of matters that have perplexed the wisest. We also find poetry, inspired by the Holy Spirit, that puts into words the deepest feelings and longings of the human heart. And we find prophecy, which tells of the coming of the Christ as suffering servant and his return as triumphant King and Judge.

Many have lost all sense of awe and reverence for Scripture because they have come to view it as a “human document” that can be understood only by those who can analyze its origins and history. Some are like the curious child who picks apart a rose to find out where the beauty and fragrance come from and in so doing destroys the rose.

I have known too many people whose joy and confidence in the Bible has been undermined by those who dissect it with a critical and unbelieving heart or who accept scholarly “findings” that, in their eyes, discredit its integrity and authority.

For many of us this book is the Holy Bible; but, sad to say, for many others it is only exceptionally good literature, subject to the frailties of the human mind and limited by the ignorance of the writers.

There seems to be a strange fascination in the minds of some, a determination to “interpret” the Bible on the sole basis of human scholarship. This scholarship starts with the presupposition that one is dealing with a human document, not a supernatural one. As a result its “interpretations” frankly deny the clear statements of Scripture. This is not “interpretation” but utter presumption.

Much is said against the practice of “literalism” in interpreting the Bible, but more needs to be said about denials of the unequivocal statements of Scripture in the name of “scholarship” and “recently discovered manuscripts.” The fact remains that not one manuscript has ever been discovered that in any way invalidates the basic doctrines of Christianity. We must be wary of a pseudo-scholarship that seems willing, even glad, to deny the honest interpretation of the Word of God.

Let those who are confused because of the limitations and interpretations of men turn to the Bible. Let it speak for itself! It will speak to your heart, appeal to your mind, command your will.

I am convinced of the reality and astuteness of Satan. And I am equally convinced that in no area is he more active today than in turning men away from the Bible. The question in the Garden, “Yes, hath God said?,” is still heard in many places. The “If you are …” statements of Satan in the wilderness continue to plague men. We need to utter the words of affirmation: “I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24, RSV). “Let God be true though every man be false …” (Rom. 3:4); “All scripture is inspired by God …” (2 Tim. 3:16); “No prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Pet. 1:21).

Give the Bible a chance. Let it speak to you, knowing that it is God who speaks in words the hungry and believing heart can understand. Let no man stand between you and God’s Word. Give the Bible a chance to speak for itself, and the Holy Spirit who moved the hearts of men to speak for God will interpret its meaning to you and bring a faith, comfort, and hope that nothing and no one can dispel.

Use several translations or versions if you prefer. A few years ago a prominent American had become interested in studying the Bible, but about that time a furor arose over the Revised Standard Version, and in disgust he gave up his study. No translation is perfect (the King James Version certainly is not); yet in any translation and any language there breathes forth the fact that this is not a human document but God’s Word. If God has spoken, how important it is that we find out what he has to say!

Let us not rest on what men say; let God speak for himself. Give the Bible a chance in your heart, and God will do the rest.

    • More fromL. Nelson Bell

Page 6067 – Christianity Today (9)

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Dear Heresy Hunters:

Another mention of this headline-grabber may nauseate certain readers, but I can’t resist one more verbal peek at Bishop Pike. Any cleric who wears a button at his church convention stating, “I Believe in Life After Birth,” and fends off some of Carl McIntire’s practitioners of religious picketry by extending a handful of purloined posies deserves the publicity he seeks.

The censured bishop emerged from the latest Episcopal convention fragrant as a rose. Fearing the stir of a heresy hearing, the paper-tiger House of Bishops not only appeased Pike by changing the procedure in censure cases but also made it nearly impossible to hold a heresy trial. Fortunately for him, however, they did not entirely eliminate the “anachronistic” charge of heresy. Had they done so, Pike’s new book, If This Be Heresy, would have been passé. Now its sale is assured.

The controversy prompted publication of two Pikean analyses prior to the convention. William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne in The Bishop Pike Affair contend that opposition to the bishop is an ultra-right-wing plot. They scream that growing conservative power in church councils “makes a rightist, racist, anti-ecumenical, traditionalist coup d’église a realistic, and imminent, possibility.” Maybe the leftists’ “galloping paranoia” has subsided since Pike tamed the tigers.

New York Bishop Horace W. B. Donegan poses the Great Question of Our Day in his booklet, Bishop Pike: Ham, Heretic, or Hero? He concludes that Pike is a fascinating combination of the three and has rendered a service in calling us to rethink the Faith. My view is that Pike’s theological bill of fare is something like a hero sandwich of ham on wry stuffed with pickled heresy. The heroic element lies in the underpup’s boldness in declaring his convictions and facing down his peers. The ham on wry is in quips like his tale about the disadvantage of preaching trinitarian doctrine in polygamous societies: It’s a matter of offering three gods and one wife against three wives and one god. The pickled heresy is that Pike’s errant ideas about the Trinity, Christ, and the Resurrection are all adaptations of old heresies argued more impressively and as futilely centuries ago.

Now Pike’s spiritualistic séances are arousing more controversy. Did medium Arthur Ford really put him in contact with his deceased son? I can prophesy one thing for Episcopal bishops: their House will continue to be haunted by Pike for many years to come.

Clairvoyantly,

EUTYCHUS III

WATCHING THE TREND

After reading the editorial “The Urgency of Personal Conversion” (Oct. 13), I am constrained to give my personal endorsement. I fully concur in every word of it.

I have watched this tendency [away from emphasis on personal conversion] gradually grow in practice in the churches of which I have been a member since my own conversion in 1888. While it has not been so pronounced in my own denomination as in some others, I can but feel that some of our own pastors have been somewhat affected.…

I am a layman myself and hesitate to be critical, but I think this to be a grave departure from New Testament doctrine.

D. P. CARTER

Brownfield, Tex.

ACCREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE

“Two for Philadelphia” (News, Oct. 13) states that the Philadelphia area has three conservative seminaries that are non-accredited. Westminster Seminary is mentioned as one of these. You are right about our conservative position but wrong about our lack of accreditation. Westminster Theological Seminary is accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools and has been since 1954. We have never sought accreditation by the American Association of Theological Schools, for reasons related to our conservative theological position.

EDMUND P. CLOWNEY

President

Westminster Theological Seminary

Philadelphia, Pa.

ANSWERING HIS QUESTION

Milton D. Hunnex, in his article, “Have the Secularists Ambushed God?” (Oct. 13), answers his own question very emphatically. Dr. Hunnex is surely a great Christian philosopher. Men like him … will make for stemming of the tide of atheism.

EPHRAIM D. CONWAY

Jacksonville, Fla.

PIQUED FOR PIKE

We are particularly “turned off” by your very biased attitude toward the person of James Pike. We feel it is not your duty to judge men or to ridicule their integrity. Needless to say, we found such a “Christian magazine” a little short of Christian brotherhood and love.

We would appreciate it if such shallow reflections as the ones concerning James Pike published in your October 13 issue (“The Pike Side Show”) would stop laughing at and start caring for [him], as the unconditional Father-of-us-all would have it. Then we would be as full of praise for your magazine as I’m sure James Pike himself would be.

MR. AND MRS. JACK BRADFORD

Fort Worth, Tex.

I will be the first to voice the opinion that, to me, Bishop Pike has done irreparable damage to his church, and that furthermore he is the world’s number-one heretic today. Yet, in spite of this fact, I do not feel it in good taste to hold him up to ridicule in magazine cartoons (Eutychus and His Kin, Oct. 13). He is still a human being, entitled to his individual dignity. Even though he seems hell-bent upon destroying his own dignity, dare we, as professing Christians, go so far as to dangle his failings and foibles before the reading public?

K. G. HENDRIX

Sunman Evangelical Parish

Sunman, Ind.

WORD FOR THE DAY

Thank you for L. Nelson Bell’s article, “That Day” (Oct. 13).… There is very little preaching left in which men and women are presented with the challenge to put their trust in him who by his death and resurrection in history saves them from the wrath to come.

May Christ have mercy on his people and on a sin-cursed world.

CORNELIUS VAN TIL

Professor of Apologetics

Westminster Theological Seminary

Philadelphia, Pa.

SAILING, SAILING

We especially appreciated your latest [Eutychus] production as it related to a proposed Bible conference cruise (Oct. 13). Good for you, Ancient Mariner! Keep those lower lights burning.

JAMES A. NELSON

Trinity Baptist Church

Santa Barbara, Calif.

Eutychus’s comments on the Christian Herald revival cruise were surprising, to say the least. Is he suffering from an advanced case of sour grapes or just deadline strain? As a totally impartial observer (by virtue of ignorance of the subject), I was more puzzled than entertained.

DIANE BRADLEY

Pasadena, Calif.

FIRST WORDS OF DIALOGUE

There was one note which I found missing from the extraordinary, and I am sure undeserved, coverage you gave to my book Who Speaks for the Church? (“A Challenge to Ecumenical Politicians” and “An Ecumenical Bombshell,” Sept. 15). This was my endorsement of a suggestion made at the Geneva Conference by the Quaker economist Kenneth Boulding, that we in the United States need to open a serious dialogue between the liberal church opinion represented in the NCC and those who call themselves conservative evangelicals. The ritual of Billy Graham’s appearance at the Miami Beach meeting of the NCC is not what Boulding meant.

If I may draw this to the attention of your readers, I said:

… In the United States conservative and liberal religious opinion is the same thing as conservative and liberal secular opinion—with a sharper edge. In short, the polarization of public debate on most issues is simply aided and abetted by the polarization of the religious forces. There is little “other-ing” yet reconciling dialogue. Our particular points are too important for that. Few would really want a major effort to be put forward to see whether there are not better ways to be or try to be the church speaking. That might threaten some cherished particular policy we most urgently want to be sure is spoken to the church and to the world. So we say that these others have “dropped out of the dialogue.”

With this goal and task before us, I imagine you can understand my belief that neo-Protestant ecumenism may be as capable of reform as evangelicals are likely to discharge the proper role you describe for them, namely, enunciating theological and moral principles that bear upon public life and saying to the world a proper and relevant word about social justice.

What each of us stands most in need of is colleagues. Since I was only proposing a program for bringing into being a truly ecumenical Christian social ethics, it is no wonder you found my sketch of the possible results somewhat obscure and disappointing. The lively word will continue to escape us, so long as one party speaks of asserted concepts of social justice and not in the same breath of scriptural truth and another party speaks of that truth but not in the same breath of norms of justice.

True, I do not believe that a proper Christian ethics will be “confined” simply to the truth of Scripture. But I do not want to “go beyond” this—certainly not beyond “Scripture and sound reason.” We do need to search out together every entailment of this truth for the world of today, and to prolong this into our lives.

PAUL RAMSEY

Professor of Christian Ethics

Princeton University

Princeton, N. J.

• CHRISTIANITY TODAY editorialized that Dr. Ramsey’s dismissal of evangelical social ethics as simply a secular counterview to secular liberal ethics was too sweeping and unjustified. But his beginning of a response to the possibilities of fruitful dialogue is welcome. The American religious scene would have been vastly different had not the Federal Council and National Council, despite large evangelical constituencies, committed themselves officially to non-evangelical positions, as has the WCC, both in conferences and in pronouncements. The ecumenical pattern in recent years has been one of increasing private dialogue with evangelical leaders (particularly with unaffiliated evangelicals) and of increasing public suppression of evangelical positions. This has given evangelical Christians a feeling that ecumenical dialogue tends to exhaust their time and is futile. But ecumenical structures apart, Dr. Ramsey’s plea for discussion is worthy, and his appeal to Scripture and sound reason is formally the place to begin.—ED.

Dr. Ramsey’s polemic was long overdue. It is, in a sense, unfortunate that the very basic theology which causes many of us to disagree with almost all of the pronouncements of ecumenical politicians also causes us to abhor the very act of making pronouncements on socio-political issues. Therefore, we cannot, in good conscience, retaliate.…

I, for one, have long resented the fact that when an ecumenical VIP or council speaks “as from Sinai,” the world around me, not knowing any better, considers that voice to speak for all—including me. To speak so, within the Protestant context, displays irresponsible churchmanship and colossal conceit. I’m glad someone is putting this word out.

STACY L. ROBERTS, JR.

Chaplain, U. S. Navy

Gulf of Tonkin, Viet Nam

CALL THE GREAT PHYSICIAN

The editorial “We Are Sick” (Sept. 29) is an eloquent and forceful analysis which deserves wide attention.

I hope that this statement will summon many of our citizens, and in particular our political leaders, to a reappraisal of our current social crisis. I hope also that evangelicals will respond to the challenge by making an even more effective penetration of the inner city in order that the saving and healing power of the Great Physician may be made available to those who so desperately need his touch upon their lives.

HUDSON T. ARMERDING

President

Wheaton College

Wheaton, Ill.

It’s easy to get sick over what killed the patient, especially when it might have been prevented.…

I’m sick of the loud, wounded, indignant voice of the Church about wrongs that could have been prevented by a bold, decisive Church taking the leadership to nip the problem in the first place.… Don’t you think “judgment begins at the house of God”? How about a line or two … about the Church’s responsibility in all this? And then maybe some solid points on what the Church ought to do now? The horse is out of the barn—got any suggestions about corralling him?

JIM JOHNSON

Wheaton, Ill.

A great big “thank you” and a hearty “thank God” for your editorial. It makes me sick, too, to realize that there are apparently so few of our American people who are “sick” of the prevailing conditions in our nation and in our churches.

S. G. POSEY

Executive Secretary Emeritus

Southern Baptist General Convention of California

San Diego, Calif.

‘EWE’-NITING THE FLOCK

I found “Canada’s Fragmented Evangelicals” (Current Religious Thought, Oct. 13), another most interesting ‘interpretive report” from Dr. Fitch on the Canadian scene.… It seems to us that Canada’s evangelicals are fragmented in many instances in a most positive way: like the bread in the hands of the Master. The Lord in fact has his witness permeating our fragmented national society. Probably not more than 3–4 per cent of our population are living disciplined Christian lives, but that witness, co-ordinated by God’s “idea man,” the Holy Spirit, is making a most impressive mark in our society.

The witness of that 3–4 per cent may not have much lobbying power, but maybe that’s not in the Spirit’s scheme of things. After all, our commission is “as sheep among wolves.” The very idea of seeking to “ram” our views down the unwilling jaws of the wolf-pack makes some of us feel a bit more “sheepish” than usual.

KENNETH CAMPBELL

President

Campbell-Reese Evangelistic Assn., Inc.

Milton, Ont.

Dr. Fitch’s observations are tragically inaccurate. He begins by saying, “You travel far in Canada before you find any evangelicals making a good effort to cooperate with their fellows. The bitterness of evangelical unity above the forty-ninth parallel is tragic and inglorious.” This is simply not the case!…

1. Within the past month a great National Sunday School Convention was held in Toronto. More than 3,000 delegates were registered from practically every Protestant denomination.…

2. A ministerial fellowship encompassing almost all of the evangelical pastors of Greater Winnepeg has been functioning for close to twenty years. These men have a wonderful record of cooperation in evangelical crusades, Sunday school conventions, and other such ventures, with much blessing and success. This is being duplicated in Regina, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, and many other Canadian cities.

3. One of the most glorious triumphs of the Gospel in our history has recently been written in the success of the “Sermons from Science Pavilion” at Expo ’67. Close to three-quarters of a million dollars was raised for this effort; hundreds have professed faith in Christ. The editor of the liberal United Church Observer exhorted his readers to have nothing to do with this “divisive” exhibition either by contribution or attendance. In a wonderful display of united faith and effort, the evangelicals of our country rose to the occasion and today give God the glory.

4. Our land has been greatly blessed by the Bible-college movement; there are fifty-four across the dominion. The heads of these schools have organized into the “Christian Educators Conference” and in a very fine Christian spirit meet regularly to discuss matters of common concern. The same spirit of unity prevails amongst the leaders of the faith missions. Consequently, the number of young people being thrust out into missionary service per capita can scarcely be equaled by any other country in the world.

Our churches and leaders who are remaining true to the Word of God are not without fault. However, the generalizations of your correspondent … should be documented or retracted.

The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada holds great promise as an agency to speak unitedly for the evangelicals of our land. The movement is in the infancy stages. Many of us had hoped that its development would be more rapid. Premature criticism however is of no constructive value.

God has been good to this land. The united efforts of evangelicals have been far-reaching and will continue into the future. Your correspondent states, “One of the greatest barriers to an organizational form of cooperation is the reluctance of evangelicals to become involved in anything other than the preaching of the Word and the saving of souls.” This is meant no doubt as a criticism; I think it should rather be accepted as a commendation. Our liberal churches have become involved in Viet Nam, birth control, the United Nations, and have forgotten to a great extent the great commission to “preach the Gospel to every creature.” On the other hand, the above statement is only part of the truth. Evangelicals are building Christian schools and colleges, they are prominent in the political life of our country. They are involved and becoming increasingly so in many areas of the social life of our nation.

It would indeed be refreshing in the future if in the interests of fair play and objectivity you would print some comments from the many outstanding evangelical leaders across our nation.

ELMER S. MCVETY

Editor

The Evangelical Christian

Willowdale, Ont.

GOOD NEWS ON THE STANDS

“Memo to Missionaries” (Sept. 15) made two significant points. The first was in the first paragraph, where you dealt with the lamentable lack of evangelical material on the nation’s news stands. There are probably two thoughts which come immediately to mind: first, that the quality just isn’t there to merit sale on the stands; and second, that the Billy Graham paperbacks become truly outstanding by comparison. The challenge, of course, is to produce more volumes with the appeal and quality of the Graham books—or even to produce a quality periodical.…

The second point is one very near and dear to my heart. I have tried to persuade pastors of the very thing you were talking about to the missionaries. I wasn’t very successful, and perhaps you won’t be either. But don’t give up!

JERRY BEAVAN

Palos Verdes, Calif.

It should be appalling to the clergy—certainly it is to me, a lay journalist—that there is not one single evangelical magazine on the newsstands and, furthermore, that there is no liaison between foreign missionaries and foreign correspondents. In a free country such as ours, the clergy and the laymen can blame only themselves.

Such a gap between truly religious people and the secular press seems incredible in an age that is supposedly one of advanced techniques in communication.

I … would like to suggest that religious people “go ye forth” into their own “jungles” to see if they cannot interest the media in broader news coverage. After all, editors are supposed to be fairly, objectively, tolerantly interested in covering news activities in all walks of life, and it would seem to me that a little good news along the way would balance some of the bad.

Why doesn’t CHRISTIANITY TODAY spearhead a project to make up “press kits” for foreign missionaries?… If missionaries know what kind of stories interest editors, they are better able to furnish these stories and act as their own foreign correspondents. They should actually be a veritable storehouse of good stories—after all, the story of Stanley and Livingstone was a great missionary story before it was anything else—and it was made into a movie.

MIDGE SHERWOOD

San Marino, Calif.

FRONT-LINE NOTES

I am translating the Scriptures for a small tribe of Indians in the Amazon Basin. I want you to know that your magazine is my favorite reading material.…

What do I do when I wonder if it is worthwhile to learn such a different language from Indo-European languages in order to give God’s word to two thousand Indians who run around in rags and survive on manioc and game, who don’t know the days of the week, much less that men are going to the moon soon, who think that Karusakaybü created the world and that he and his son have accomplished just as wonderful feats as anything we tell them about God and Jesus Christ? I read CHRISTIANITY TODAY … and am reminded that God is bringing people in similar circumstances to his Son in a thousand spots around the globe.

MARJORIE CROFTS

Manus, Amazonas, Brazil

For many, many years now I have had to observe the West from the perspective of the East: my missionary work demands this. I fear that whilst the East is imbibing Western customs the West is imbibing Eastern concepts. Our decline of the West is because it is being philosophically devoured by the East. Much in modern theology is more Oriental than biblical in its outlook.…

If the Gospel is to advance, theology must rethink itself; it must apply the famous Ockham razor to the peripherals and get back to the heart of theology: God was in and is in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. If you can, please give us more meat.

C. VICTOR BARNARD

Immanuel House

Uttar Pradesh, India

BARNUM AND BABEL

Here it is folks, the greatest show on earth since Babel! The church come of age! The church is putting on the greatest side-show since Barnum to cover up the well-known fact that professional “religion” did not work in biblical times, is not “working” now and never will “work” for the church magicians.… Laymen are told that God does not “exist” because existence is the property of mortals.… The next step was obvious: the church could run the whole show if it could get rid of God! But with the proclamation of God’s demise, God’s grave has proved to be the church’s Pandora’s box. Since the disputed funeral the “religious” world has been going to hell! The mediums chirp and the wizards mutter but God is not consulted. Maybe God’s job was bigger than the church bargained for! Maybe in the process of self-election the church accepted too many commissions! Without God the church doesn’t have much of an act going for it. Be still, O churches, and let God put the show on the road!

JOHN TRAVERSO

Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd

Indianapolis, Ind.

BABY FOOD FOR LAYMEN

We enjoy reading CHRISTIANITY TODAY. It is useful in our work. However, it is often necessary to strain it like baby food for the layman’s digestive tract.

LLOYD T. HAYES

Wire Editor

Daily Express

Newport, Vt.

John Warwick Montgomery

Page 6067 – Christianity Today (11)

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Protestant theology in the 1960s is characterized above all by the God-is-dead phenomenon. Although this movement, as represented particularly by Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, has inherent instabilities that will doubtless shorten its ideological life, one must not underestimate its importance. The death-of-God phenomenon reflects the increasing secularization of our time, which will certainly go on whether or not the theothanatologists retain their popularity.

Even more significantly, the God-is-dead movement demonstrates the consequences of the weak view of Holy Scripture that has prevailed in Protestant theology since the advent of rationalistic biblical criticism. By noting the connections between God-is-dead thinking and destructive criticism of Holy Writ, we can see quite plainly how evangelical Christianity’s belief in a totally authoritative Word has maximum relevance in a time of general theological collapse.

Christ and the Bible

In an unpublished paper delivered at a program on radical theology sponsored by the University of Michigan’s Office of Religious Affairs (October 28, 1966), William Hamilton unwittingly provided a laboratory example of how the demise of one’s bibliology results in the demise of one’s God. In answering the question, “Can you really maintain a loyalty to Jesus without a loyalty to God?,” he said:

Professor Altizer solves the problem more readily than I by his apocalyptic definition of Jesus, more Blakean than biblical, as the one who is born out of God’s death. I am not yet ready to give up sola scriptura (!), and thus my answer must be more complex and tentative.… Early in the nineteenth century, we had to face, under the early impact of historical criticism, both that Jesus was firmly committed to demon-possession as the meaning of mental and physical illness, and that we were not so committed and needn’t be. But obedience to Jesus was not destroyed. Later, at the time of Darwinian controversy we had to face another instance of Jesus’ full participation in the thought forms of his day—the three-story, primitive cosmology. But we do not go to the Bible for science, we were rightly told, and obedience to Jesus was not hurt. At the close of the century we had to face an even more disturbing fact—the fact brought before us by Weiss and Schweitzer that Jesus was completely committed to the apocalyptic views of the Judaism of his day.… If Jesus’ demonology and cosmology and-eschatology were taken as first-century views, appropriate then, not so now, needing reinterpretation and understanding but not literal assent, what is inherently different about Jesus’ theology?

The significance of this argument for the current theological situation cannot be overestimated, for it explicitly maps the progressive demise of Christology through the consistent application of rationalistic biblical criticism. For over a century, orthodox Christians have vainly reminded their liberal confreres of the Reformers’ conviction that the “material principle” (the Gospel of Christ) cannot possibly survive apart from the “formal principle” (divinely inspired Scripture). “Fiddlesticks!” has been the reply: “Of course we can distinguish the true theological core of Scripture and the central message of Jesus from the biblical thought-forms of the ancient Near East.” But in point of fact, as Hamilton well shows, stripping the cultural thought-forms from the “true” teaching of Scripture is like peeling an onion: when finished, you have no teaching at all, only tears (unless you happen to be a constitutional optimist like Hamilton, who finds mankind a satisfactory God-substitute).

Either Jesus’ total teachings (including his full trust in Scripture as divine revelation) are taken as God’s word or, as Luther well put it, “everyone makes a hole in it wherever it pleases him to poke his snout, and follows his own opinions, interpreting and twisting Scripture any way he pleases.” The Bible has become, to use Spurgeon’s phrase, a “nose of wax,” so that even a death-of-God theologian claims to follow sola scriptura. This is the inevitable outcome of rationalistic biblical criticism that refuses to distinguish between straightforward grammatical-historical explication of the biblical message and pre-suppositional judgment upon it. Has the time perhaps come for the Church to recognize that aprioristic biblical criticism has brought theology to the bier of Deity?

The way back is the doctrine of total biblical authority as taught by Christ himself, at once the Lord of Scripture and its central figure. Kenneth Kantzer gives us weighty testimony in this regard from the critics themselves:

H. J. Cadbury, Harvard professor and one of the more extreme New Testament critics of the last generation, once declared that he was far more sure as a mere historical fact that Jesus held to the common Jewish view of an infallible Bible than that Jesus believed in his own messiahship. Adolf Harnack, greatest church historian of modern times, insists that Christ was one with his apostles, the Jews, and the entire early church in complete commitment to the infallible authority of the Bible. John Knox, author of what is perhaps the most highly regarded recent life of Christ, states that there can be no question that this view of the Bible was taught by our Lord himself. The liberal critic, F. C. Grant, concludes that in the New Testament, “it is everywhere taken for granted that Scripture is trustworthy, infallible, and inerrant.” Rudolf Bultmann, a radical anti-supernaturalist, but acknowledged by many to be the greatest New Testament scholar of modern times, asserts that Jesus accepted completely the common view of his day regarding the full inspiration and authority of Scripture.

If Christ did in fact “show himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs” (Acts 1:3), thereby validating his claims to Deity as he had predicted he would (Matt. 12:38–42; John 2:18–22), how can the Christian possibly rationalize a view of Scripture inconsistent with that of the Lord Christ? It will not do to argue in terms of modern “kenotic theory” that Jesus was limited or limited himself to the thought-forms of his day, for (as Hamilton has well demonstrated) such hypothetical limitations have no boundaries and are logically capable of reducing everything Jesus said to meaninglessness; moreover, as Eugene R. Fairweather concludes, after examining the whole kenotic question in detail: “It can hardly be claimed that Kenoticism is explicitly contained in the New Testament picture of Christ; rather, it depends on a complicated deduction, involving highly debatable presuppositions.… The Kenotic theory does not in fact vindicate the religious meaning of the Christian Gospel. On the contrary, in the severe words of Pius XII, it ‘turns the integral mystery of the Incarnation and of redemption into bloodless and empty spectres’” (see Fairweather’s appendix to F. W. Beare’s Philippians).

Nor does one accomplish anything by trying to maintain that Jesus stamped with approval only the “substance” or “message” of the Bible, not its “form” or “medium” (the former being absolute while the latter is culturally conditioned and therefore lacking in normative character). As contemporary communications specialist Marshall McLuhan has shown in his epochal works (The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media), “the medium is the message”: it is impossible to separate a message from its medium, since the medium makes an integral contribution to the very nature of the message. Orthodox Christianity has always recognized this in respect to Scripture: no “detail” of the Bible is unimportant; the literary form must itself be inspired in order for it not to detract from the message conveyed; every word of Scripture—every “jot and tittle” of the text—has an impact, however slight, on the totality of the Bible, and this impact must, if Christ spoke truly, be for good.

Relevance in a Disenchanted Era

The stir produced by the death-of-God movement is a genuine reflection of the loss of God by vast numbers of people in the twentieth century. In Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, the leading characters are typical of modern man, waiting in darkness and addressing himself to the unknown god who never appears. At one point Vladimir says:

We wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let’s get to work! (He advances towards the heap, stops in his stride.) In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.

Elsewhere in the play, Estragon remarks:

Yes, now I remember, yesterday evening we spent blathering about nothing in particular. That’s been going on now half a century.

Chancel Music

Whether whistle, bell, or chime

from marble campanile,

I do not know,

but I shall recognize its signal.

In a lightning-splintered moment

sounds of earth gone … gone

I shall leap! sing! soar!

trading fleshly inhibition

for eternity’s vast space.

Through the stained-glass eyes of love

draw me softly, chancel Dove.

WILMA W. BURTON

How has such a cultural malaise come about in our time? Someone has sagely noted that in the eighteenth century the Bible died, in the nineteenth century God died, and in the twentieth century mankind has died. This sequence is not accidental. The rationalistic criticism of Scripture during the eighteenth-century deistic “Enlightenment” removed the most solid foundation for belief in God; and after Nietzsche and other nineteenth-century thinkers had proclaimed God’s demise, it was no longer possible to substantiate man’s individual worth. No longer a creature of God, man could only regard himself as a clever, evolving animal, and the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century are the inevitable result of stronger animals’ subjugating the weaker to their own ends. Without an eternal value system, available only in a veracious revelation from God, man is at the mercy of his fellows. Might makes right; to use Lord Acton’s well-known aphorism: “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Orwell’s 1984 takes on nightmarish reality.

Among the “secular theologians,” however, an optimistic note is presently being sounded. We are informed that the “secular city” offers revelatory possibilities for acquiring a “new name” for God (see Harvey Cox’s The Secular City and also The Secular City Debate, edited by Daniel Callahan); and one writer (Gibson Winter) goes so far as to speak of “the New Creation as Metropolis.” An axiom of the day, expressed by Cox and Altizer, is that “God is where the action is”: in the dynamic social movements of our day, in the struggles for racial justice and human freedom. We are told that the “fully hidden Jesus” is now to be experienced in such movements, and that “a whole new era in theology” is opening up through stress on the Spirit—“the God of the present” (so wrote President James McCord of Princeton Seminary in Time, August 5, 1966).

But what is the actual situation? The urbanization of life is, as the greatest living phenomenologist of religion, Mircea Eliade, points out, desacralizing life by separating it from the cyclical, God-given patterns of nature. In the city we create our own environment and are therefore easily led not to God but to ourselves. We become convinced that we are the masters of our fate and the captains of our soul, and we quickly reach the point where we try to justify any “action” that we create. Much of the social action of our day is indeed God-honoring, for all races are “one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28) and “there is no respect of persons with God” (Rom. 2:11); but apart from a revelatory, absolute ethic (as we saw earlier), supra-cultural standards of justice cannot be established. This means that without an authoritative Scripture the “secular theologian” can as easily find himself embroiled in the demonic, racistic, fascist activism of a Third Reich as in the contemporary freedom marches in behalf of minorities. Only a firm Word of God, coming from outside the flux of contemporary action, can serve as a map to an honorable and just future. And as the Reformers properly observed, talk about “Christ” or the “Spirit” apart from an objective Word is a waste of breath; for without a stable criterion, each man can build a demonic Christ—an Antichrist—in his own image, and deceive many. The spirits, most definitely including the spirits of the age, must be tested (1 John 4:1); and the only touchstone remains the inscripturated Word.

Sham

Reluctantly, perversely braced,

I raised my cross with great distaste;

Beneath it let my spirits sag,

And petulantly felt it drag.

But I exhibited that cross,

Talked much of it, and thought my loss

Was rather gain for Christendom;

Sidling eyes askance at some

Who seemed unseemly light. How blind

And foolish, I, to be resigned

To humbug, when reality

Is borne by Christ, and not by me.

HELEN S. CLARKSON

The instability of current “action” philosophies and theologies is becoming evident as our contemporaries, à la Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary, simultaneously seek answers in Eastern mysticism and reality-avoiding psychedelic drugs (see my article, “The Gospel According to LSD,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, July 8, 1966). Unconsciously, modern man recognizes that, whether in the metropolis or in the wilderness, whether in action or in silence, his heart—to recall Augustine’s great truth—is restless till it rests in God. But to rest there, it must know who God is and what he has done for sinful man, and that can be learned only in the pages of Holy Writ.

Like the little lost creatures in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, we long, each one of us, for “the piper at the Gates of Dawn.” How desperately we need to hear the clear piping of eternity as century twenty-one approaches! Well did a great theologian over a hundred years ago (William Henry Green, The Pentateuch, 1863) point disenchanted modern man to that clear voice of God recorded in the most relevant Book of all:

Who can tell us whether this awful and mysterious silence, in which the Infinite One has wrapped himself, portends mercy or wrath? Who can say to the troubled conscience, whether He, whose laws in nature are inflexible and remorseless, will pardon sin? Who can answer the anxious inquiry whether the dying live on or whether they cease to be? Is there a future state? And if so, what is the nature of that untried condition of being? If there be immortal happiness, how can I attain it? If there be an everlasting woe, how can it be escaped? Let the reader close his Bible and ask himself seriously what he knows upon these momentous questions apart from its teachings. What solid foundation has he to rest upon in regard to matters, which so absolutely transcend all earthly experience, and are so entirely out of the reach of our unassisted faculties? A man of facile faith may perhaps delude himself into the belief of what he wishes to believe. He may thus take upon trust God’s unlimited mercy, his ready forgiveness of transgressors, and eternal happiness after death. But this is all a dream. He knows nothing, he can know nothing about it, except by direct revelation from heaven.

The question, therefore, is one of life or death. We will not, we can not give up our faith in the Bible. To do so is to surrender ourselves to blank despair. It is to blot out the sun from the heavens and extinguish at once the very source of light and life and holiness. “All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth and the flower thereof falleth away; but the Word of the Lord endureth forever.”

He who has ears to hear the piping, let him hear!

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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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

Page 6067 – Christianity Today (17)

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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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Page 6067 – Christianity Today (2024)

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