Page 5945 – Christianity Today (2024)

An eighth assignment for apologetics is the development of empathy for differing viewpoints. The apologist begins, not by seeking to destroy all viewpoints other than his own, but by attempting to understand the other. He will aim at thinking from the perspective of the others, so that he can truly understand what the others are saying, and why. Only then can effective Christian witness be brought to bear. Dogmatism and opinionation are not attractive qualities in a Christian. Although the believer must be convinced of the truthfulness of what he holds, he must be capable of recognizing that there is a difference between having absolute truth and understanding it absolutely.

Apologetics will also have to give itself to the careful delineation of the objective and subjective elements in faith and in theology. The general movement of our age has been toward increasing subjectivity, in many fields: art, music, philosophy, theology. In taking this route, some have continued beyond subjectivity into subjectivism, with consequent skepticism and even despair. In theology, Bultmann took the neo-orthodox emphasis upon subjectivity a step further, making the biblical message primarily a message about existence and man’s self-understanding, rather than relating to truths about the objective God. Some of Bultmann’s followers carried the principle to its logical extreme, virtually maintaining that the objective referent is superfluous, and that the subjective experience is the message of Christian theology. In the work of Wolfhart Pannenberg, there is a reaction against this trend. Here, a strongly objective position on faith is advocated. Theology may be leading the way back to a more objective form of thought.

Christianity is not to be a purely objective, coldly impersonal matter. It cannot be assimilated to the methodology of natural science, nor should it. As usually understood, it has required involvement, commitment, passion. Yet it also is something more than belief in “the great whatever.” Jesus seemed to teach that belief was good not in itself but only as it rested upon the true object (Matt. 16:13–20; John 14:5–7). One can err in the direction either of excessive subjectivity or of excessive objectivity. It seems to me that at present excessive subjectivity is a greater potential danger. Christian apologetics will be concerned to locate, define, and describe accurately the objective basis of Christian faith and the believer’s subjective involvement with it.

One particular area illustrates this issue: the problem of ethical norms. Christian apologetics must work hard at the problem of how ethical judgments are made and justified. In so doing, it must take account of the complexity of the situations in which ethical decisions are made and to which they are applied. Yet, it must not take lightly the question of the identity, nature, and status of ethical norms, if ethics is to be more than mere expression of one’s own preferential tastes. This problem is graphically seen in the case of Joseph Fletcher, who places his situational method midway between antinomianism and legalism. Yet, as Paul Ramsey has shown, Fletcher has difficulty keeping his method from sliding into one or the other of these extremes, largely because of a lack of specification of the meaning of “love,” as well as any really clearly defined conceptual framework, such as the understanding of man’s nature and destiny. Apologetics should deal with the status of ethical judgments.

Finally, apologetics accepts the task of helping to place theology in the context of other, non-theological disciplines. If it is to speak relevantly to the world in which it finds itself, Christian theology must interact with the so-called secular world. Thus, for example, in developing and expounding a doctrine of man, the theologian will draw its content from the biblical revelation, and will seek for insight in what the best theological minds are saying on the subject. But he will not disregard the questions the behavioral sciences are asking about man; he will address himself to them. It may well be that the most significant questions that the theologian must answer today are not those being asked by the exegete. Most of these have already been quite adequately answered. Further, the non-Christian is often quite indifferent to them. But the behavioral scientist is posing questions to which he does not necessarily have the answers himself. Apologetics attempts to relate theology to general culture.

This means that there will be a concerted effort to determine just what the biblical view on a given matter is, and similarly, what non-theological disciplines are saying. At times there will be insight into the biblical doctrines from these other areas. If the Bible teaches that God created man in his own image, psychology, sociology, and anthropology may help us to understand just what it was that God created. This is a procedure not unlike the use of archaeology and secular history to shed light upon a given event reported in the Bible. Sometimes an antithesis may be found, which should not be surprising in view of First Corinthians 1, and the apologist should call attention to this. Neither uncritical acceptance nor blind rejection of culture should be the pattern for the Christian.

We seem to have moved beyond the idea that the Christian life is to be lived in a monastery. We are quite generally agreed that the Christian is to be in the world, actively relating his faith to it. Yet we may perpetuate a monastic tendency in our theology. The result is usually a theological jargon that is little comprehended by the secular thinker.

What I am speaking for is a dialogue that is broader than theologian with theologian and extends to conversations with secular disciplines as well. There are a number of practical means by which those could be promoted. One could be a use of the sabbatical leave program, for study not simply in the scholar’s own theological field in a seminary or university divinity school but rather in a cognate discipline in a secular university. This would be particularly desirable in the case of a scholar who has taken none of his previous education in a truly secular environment. For example, a systematic theologian might spend his time studying philosophy; a New Testament scholar, classics; an Old Testament man, ancient history; a homiletics teacher, communications; a pastoral-counseling professor, clinical psychology; a church-administration teacher, business administration. Another valuable tactic would be for a theological scholar to join a professional society in a “secular” field for which he might be qualified.

It is not simply the intellectual who is exposed to the influence of secular thought. Through literature, music, the various art forms, even the modestly educated layman is encountering modern forms of thought. It is no secret that the most effective teacher in a Sunday school is not always the theologically trained minister. Often the doctor, the engineer, or the public schoolteacher does a more effective job of communicating Christian truth, because he lives in the same world as fellow laymen and speaks their language. The apologist will attempt to do away with “ghetto theology” and relate his work to the world of today.

But if these are the tasks that apologetics is to fulfill, what of the general nature of the apologetic that will attempt this? We will concern ourselves with the “shape” of apologetics, a general contour or outline rather than a detailed depiction.

There is a rather broad consensus that the traditional proofs for the existence of God are not effective today. Whether one considers them valid or not, they do not seem to make much impact upon modern man. These proofs rest upon certain assumptions that were once very widely held and thus considered to be “first truths,” innate truths, or indubitable facts. An example of this is Thomas’s premise that there cannot be an infinite regress, which is widely disputed today. Attempts to begin with certain features of the space-time universe and conclude to God seem to be falling into disuse.

The new apologetics in general does not attempt to prove demonstratively the truth of Christianity, as did classical natural theology. It recognizes that all proof is a function of two factors: evidence offered, and someone who accepts the validity of that evidence. Rather than claiming to start with something accepted by all men, it acknowledges that it begins with faith. It rests upon presuppositions not antecedently proven. In this, it takes its stand within classical Augustinianism. Yet it hastens to observe that the issue between Christian and non-Christian is not between faith and proof. Every position ultimately rests upon unproven assumptions. Although these cannot be antecedently proven, there will be basis for choosing one standpoint over another, and apologetics will concern itself with showing this.

This new apologetic will not claim to derive a theism from the data of natural theology. Rather, it rests its content upon the special revelation claimed by Christianity. The contention is that once the hypothesis has been derived from the revelation, its tangency to the whole of man’s experience can be seen. Natural theology is like a person trying to discover the solution to a mathematical problem from the problem itself. The new apologetic is more like a man who has been given a claimed solution to the problem and whose task then is to determine whether it is the correct solution. The Christian message is the key to understanding the puzzle of life. The case is not for theism in general; it is more effective when it seeks to assay the adequacy of the distinctive Christian biblical theism.

Much has been made in recent years of Wisdom’s famous parable. It goes like this:

Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, “Some gardener must tend this plot.” The other disagrees. “There is no gardener.” So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. “But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.” So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Well’s The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. “But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.” At last the Sceptic despairs. “But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?” [quoted by Anthony Flew in “Theology and Falsification,” New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. by Anthony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, Macmillan, 1964, p. 96].

Note, however, that the evidences that support the hypothesis of a gardener are derived from a scrutiny of the problem itself. If a claimed communication from the gardener were found, indicating certain specific features of his nature and describing certain features detailed of the garden-tending, not ordinarily observed but accessible under a certain type of study, then the parallel to Christianity would be more appropriate. Apologetics today finds the most effective evidences for Christianity to be those specifically pertaining to the distinctive nature of Christianity.

This means that the new apologetic will focus upon Jesus Christ, and what his life and teaching mean to the person who puts his trust in him. Christianity is not so much a philosophy of reality and of life as it is a person. To be sure, the person who becomes related by faith to Christ in taking him as personal Saviour has thereby committed himself to much else as well. Nonetheless, this is secondary and derived. In our age, which is apparently so starved for reality in personal relationships and is more person-oriented than idea-oriented, an emphasis on Jesus as a real person, a person with whom one can interact, is probably the most germane to the felt needs of men, and is, of course, biblical.

Further, then, the apologetic will attempt to focus upon man’s existential predicament. Rather than starting with an abstract principle and deducing from it certain conclusions, the strategy today will involve beginning with the problems of anxiety, confusion, and impersonality that modern man feels. It will try to show how the Christian message relates to these concerns. The present age is at least suspicious of, and perhaps even hostile to, authority. It will be necessary to make man aware first that his situation necessitates acceptance of some authority and then that he achieves this best by turning his life over to Jesus Christ as Lord and teacher.

One of the areas where apologetics will make its primary thrust is ethics. The old arguments that seek to move from observable characteristics of the physical universe to God are not very effective today. In part this ineffectiveness is due to logical difficulties that have often attached to many forms of the argument. Beyond that, however, is the fact that a large number of persons today are relatively uninterested in the physical universe; they are more interested in ethical issues and activity.

In particular, this is seen on college campuses, where there is strong interest in politics, in issues of war and peace, civil rights, materialism, and related concerns. It is instructive to note that on many rather relativistic campuses, quite absolute pronouncements are being made, such as: The Viet Nam war is immoral! Racial discrimination is wrong! This opens to the apologist what appears to me to be a potentially very fruitful opportunity for dialogue, not necessarily about the conclusions or positions taken but rather about the very basis of ethical judgments. There should be an opportunity for demonstrating the significance of the Christian revelation, both in the ethic it presents and in the support and justification it gives to ethics.

The new apologetic will ask about the basis or rationale for man’s estimation of himself. In what context does modern man’s self-concept make sense? Christian apologetics has often argued that a humanism that does not go beyond itself is incomplete and inconsistent, that man has real significance only if there is something beyond him from which he derives value. Today, this seems to be an even more strategic type of approach, as man concentrates increasingly upon the problem of man.

Finally, apologetics will want to stress the dimension of history. If it is true, as I contended earlier, that Christian apologetics will be most effective when it concerns itself with what is unique in Christianity, then history will occupy a prominent place. Christianity is a historical religion, in a sense in which most other world religions are not. It depends upon certain events claimed to have occurred. The renewed concern with history, exemplified by the “Pannenburg circle,” should prove an effective vehicle for Christian apologetics.

Christian apologetics has in all ages a task to do, and some of the most highly regarded theological critics of our day recognize the particular urgency of apologetics today. Theology, however, can be likened to a long train. When the cars at the front have already rounded a curve and are headed in a different direction, later cars will still for a time be traveling the old course. Thus, despite the facing of Barthianism and its emphasis upon a purely kerygmatic type of biblical theology, there will be theologians who continue to regard this as exclusively sufficient. Yet others are proclaiming the need to supplement this with apologetic. As the train of theology moves onward, from yesterday, through today, into tomorrow, I want to be in that front car.

To reach threescore and ten is something like arriving on top of a mountain. Attaining even a modest summit—the highest point in a range doesn’t always give the best view—reveals to the discerning eye features of the landscape hidden from those who see it only from level ground. Likewise, looking back from a sunset height in life helps sort out relationships and meanings in the landscape of experience. It is with such feelings that, at the request of the Editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, I venture upon these reflections.

“My life,” said Sir Thomas Browne, the author of Religio Medici, “has been a miracle of thirty years; which to relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable.” There is a sense in which every mature Christian can echo this thought. For he knows, as G. K. Chesterton put it, that “the incredible thing about miracles is that they happen,” and that for him the miracle of the new birth has happened. He knows too that the same Lord who led the Israelites by a pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night has in the providences of everyday life been directing his pilgrimage.

The first thing the perspective of the years shows me is an overwhelming sense of the goodness and grace of God. If, unlike Francis Thompson’s “hound of heaven,” the Lord did not pursue me for a long time but found me early, it was because I had parents whose faith in Christ was so real that there was no hindrance to trusting the Saviour in young boyhood.

It was through my mother that I did this. The date is uncertain, but etched in memory is the picture of the evening when with boyish concern I asked my mother how to be born again and she explained lovingly the way of life from John 3. The next morning I walked to school with the thought singing in my heart, “I’m saved.” The sky was bluer, the leaves greener, the sun brighter that day. To be sure, through the years this initial experience has been immeasurably deepened. Yet I look back on it as the beginning of sixty years of Christian life. When our Lord told Nicodemus about regeneration, he likened the Spirit’s action to “the wind [that] bloweth where it listeth.” In some conversions, the wind of the Spirit blows with stormy power; for me, his touch, though like a gentle breeze, was no less irresistible than if it had struck with gale force later on.

The home in Mount Vernon, New York, in which I grew up, was Christian, not because our parents were constantly talking to my two brothers and me about religion, but because of the good sense with which they lived their faith. My father was born in Germany; both my mother’s parents were also born there. Doubtless this European background had much to do with the cultural depth of our home.

Some early recollections come to mind. In one, I am sitting on the front step of our house looking at an open book, not yet able to read it but wanting with all my heart to do so; in another, I am picking out on the piano a little German song and am then cutting a notch in the wood above the keys to show where the tune started! Music lessons began soon after that. Music was part of our life—not, to be sure, through radio and records, but “live” as my father and oldest brother played four-hand arrangements of Haydn and Beethoven symphonies and my brother played Chopin and other masters. Books also were part of our life. My father was a scholar and writer, and in our house books were not just displayed but read. Thus two of my lifelong pursuits—reading and writing books, and playing the piano—go back to these early days.

In another way our home was formative. By my father, whose knowledge of nature was exceptional, I was introduced to the beauties of the countryside as he took me on walks; later, I came to know something of the fascination of the mountains, as we tramped together in the Catskills. Out of these experiences grew the avocation of mountaineering, which has led me to the Far West and to Canada, Switzerland, France, Mexico, and Iceland.

One more thing, and that of prime importance, I owe my home. My parents lived in and by the Bible. To its teaching my father devoted himself until his death in his eighty-fifth year. It was my mother’s constant companion during her long life. Memory holds no recollection of their ever telling me to read the Bible. Yet I began its daily use very early. And now, after living with it since boyhood, I know that the Bible has done more to form my life and thought than the whole of my schooling. In every way—doctrinally, intellectually, devotionally, ethically, aesthetically—this incomparable book has molded me. It has kept me near to Christ. It has given me a perspective for seeing in the light of God’s truth the different currents in life and thought flowing through our times.

Crucial though my heritage was, it was neither intellectually nor spiritually parochial. Some have recently written of their emergence (through a kind of “up-from-evangelicalism” experience) from the cocoon of a pietistic, biblicistic upbringing; my experience was different. Our home, with all its genuine devotion, was not defensively pietistic. True, I do not dot every i or cross each t just as my father, giant in the faith that he was, did. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” In the spacious liberty of Christ and of the Scriptures, which, contrary to the opinion of some, lead not to provincialism but to responsible freedom (“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free”)—in this liberty my thought and life have developed.

In my formal education, the same pattern of providential direction is discernible. First-rate preparation for college at Mount Vernon High School; a major in English under scholarly teachers at the University College of New York University; an A.M. in English and comparative literature at Harvard with work under such scholars as John Livingston Lowes and Irving Babbitt and with membership in Dean L. B. R. Brigg’s unique course in creative writing—this training helped make me a generalist rather than a specialist. It led to the habit of wide reading. By imbuing me with the determination to write plainly and well, he helped me learn how to think. For one must think clearly to write clearly.

A good liberal-arts education is always relevant. The recovery of a Christian humanism (using the term in its Renaissance rather than current religious sense) seems to me essential in this day of the ascendancy of the specialist, for the specialist tends to lose sight of the wood for the trees and needs to be corrected by the generalist. The principle applies, by the way, to some specialists in biblical criticism, who, as C. S. Lewis has said, though they insist that certain New Testament documents are myth or romance, wouldn’t recognize myth and romance if they saw them.

Toward the close of my graduate study an invitation came to organize a new school for boys on the conference grounds of the Stony Brook Assembly on Long Island. The invitation was unusual in that it was given to a young man who did not have a day of teaching experience. It was also very specific. The new school was to be wholly committed to Christian education. On this basis, there was developed the Christian educational philosophy that has been expressed for forty-eight years at the Stony Brook School. Beginning in 1922 with about thirty boys, the school now has 240 students, a faculty and staff of 40, and buildings and grounds valued at $4 million. Today it stands even more firmly for Christian education than when it began—all this in God’s providence through the work of many devoted teachers, understanding trustees, and generous friends.

For forty-one years this school was my life. Next to my conversion and my marriage, the decision to serve at Stony Brook was most determinative. There my intellectual and spiritual interests matured. Out of teaching Bible to generations of schoolboys came knowledge of the Word. Talks in chapel and also off campus provided practical training in public speaking. Because demands of a growing school continued during summers, there was no time for further graduate work. Although I looked with a certain wistful respect at friends with earned doctorates, I recognized that for me my scholarly work could only come through independent study. So amidst the busy life of a boys’ school nine books were written, seven on Bible study and two on the philosophy of Christian education. So also preparation for ordination was made through private study just as some years before I had taught myself the elements of New Testament Greek.

A constant and essential support and help during the Stony Brook years was my wife, Dorothy Medd Gaebelein. She merged herself unselfishly with the school to which I was committed and made its ideals and purposes her own. We have served together in unity of faith and life, and my work would have been impossible without her.

One of my interests was in religious journalism—writing articles, and serving as associate editor and later publisher of Our Hope (the Bible-study monthly founded by my father in 1894). There were other connections too—as an associate editor of Revelation, a consulting editor of Eternity, and a contributing editor to CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Again retrospect shows a providential pattern. For with this background it was logical on retirement from Stony Brook in 1963 to accept an invitation to become co-editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, where I served for three years.

What are some of the more important things I have learned? In what ways has my outlook changed, my convictions matured? Anyone who attempts even a modest retrospective essay faces questions like these. On looking back there come to mind several directions in which my thought has changed.

I am an evangelical whose convictions are rooted and grounded in Christ, the incarnate Word, and in the Bible, the infallible written Word of God. To speak of being “rooted and grounded” in Christ and the Bible is a metaphor of growth. Just as a tree, nourished by moisture-laden soil, grows and puts forth foliage and fruit, so a person whose theological and spiritual residence is rooted in Christ and the Bible lives in a context of growth—and that of the most expansive kind.

Intellectually, growth comes through learning. It has been my practice to be open to other points of view. I have long read theologically liberal as well as conservative writers and have faced radical positions regarding the Bible. Today my position is that of a moderate Calvinism based on a high view of Scripture. For the historic creeds and confessions, such as the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds and the Westminster Confession, I have deep respect, although even the greatest of these, being on another level from the inspired Word of God, lack the ultimate authority it alone has.

Where my thought has changed most definitely has been in the social implications of biblical truth. Until middle age, I reflected uncritically the social attitudes of the evangelicalism in which I grew up. In zeal for the Gospel, opposition to anti-supernaturalist theology, recovery of vital prophetic truth (especially that of Christ’s return), and concern for foreign missions, the evangelical leaders of the earlier decades of the century stood for historic Christianity. Their stalwart witness made it impossible for the Church to forget the true, supernatural evangelicalism of the Bible. I am lastingly indebted to such leaders and their influence. Yet in reacting against the modernism of many advocates of the social gospel and in complying with the mores, particularly in racial matters, prevalent in North as well as South, they missed much of the biblical emphasis on compassionate responsibility for victims of injustice and exploitation. To be sure, they belonged to a generation that, except for concern about such things as alcohol and ministering to down-and-outers in rescue missions, had not awakened to the social implications of biblical ethics here at home—a lack of awareness that was shared by most Americans of the time. In retrospect I am distressed that it took me so long to realize that social concern is a vital biblical imperative.

Several things led to a changed outlook. In the 1940s I began an intensive study of some of the minor prophets, and this confronted me with the burning ethical message of these men of God. After that, I read and was moved by two books: Carl F. H. Henry’s, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism and, later on, Kyle Haselden’s The Racial Problem in Christian Perspective. Moreover, a personal project to memorize the Sermon on the Mount brought new understanding of our Lord’s ethical teaching.

In 1955 I realized that Stony Brook, though open to Oriental, Latin American, and American Indian students, could not maintain integrity as a Christian school without any black students in its enrollment. That year, tardily indeed, we admitted our first Negro. In 1969–70 the school had 23 black students in its student body of 240. Here let me say that we still need to be greatly concerned about the paucity of black students in evangelical schools and colleges.

To equate uncritically, as many evangelicals continue to do, a conservative theology with political and social conservatism, is for me not possible. I know only one Gospel—that of the atoning death, the burial, and the justifying resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 15:1–4). But I also know that our Lord’s Great Commission (Matt. 28:19, 20) is twofold: evangelistic (“Go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”) and ethical (“teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you”). The Lord, who had compassion on the poor and oppressed, who condemned injustice as well as other sins, who loves all men with a holy impartiality, said: “As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you” (John 20:21). Therefore, while fully committed to the priority of the Gospel, I cannot accept the oversimplification that says, “Just preach the Gospel and everything will be all right.”

Another revision in my thinking relates to the doctrine of the Church. My upbringing stressed the great truth that all the redeemed constitute the body and bride of Christ and thus are the true Church, whose actual membership is known only to God. It placed much less emphasis on the visible manifestation of the Church here and now. Along with this, there was a tendency toward independency and separatism. Today, while holding fast the precious New Testament doctrine that all the redeemed are indeed Christ’s true Church, I value the Church visible much more highly than I did several decades ago. Experience has shown me the dangers of independency and separatism.

My views respecting Christian fellowship have mellowed. I am not an ecumenist. To me there are critical dangers in organic union of ecclesiastical bodies that hold fundamentally divergent theologies. But I am deeply committed to fellowship on a practical working basis with all who know and love our Lord Jesus Christ. God has richly blessed me with friends. With some of them I am in full doctrinal agreement. Their fellowship has been and is a benediction. Other friends, including some who are much involved in ecumenical activities and with whom I have certain doctrinal differences, are also a benediction to me. They know and love our Lord Jesus Christ and manifest his Spirit.

The New Testament makes the peril of apostasy very clear. Undoubtedly departure from the faith marks our times. Yet the Lord knows all who are his, and their number is very far from small. So it seems to me essential for Christians of all nations, races, and churches who acknowledge Christ as God and Saviour and who accept the Bible as God’s inspired Word, to recognize one another and to work together whenever possible for the salvation of men and for the alleviation of suffering and meeting of human needs. Our Lord’s high-priestly prayer for the unity of believers compels us to take seriously the outward expression of that unity so that the world may believe that the Father sent him (John 17:21).

Still another development of my thought concerns Christian education. Although from its beginning the Stony Brook School had placed the Bible and the Christian faith at the center of its program, it was not until the late 1940s that I began to work out the far-reaching implications of this position. Study of the Harvard Report, General Education in a Free Society, awakened me to the need for an evangelical and biblical articulation of the Christian philosophy of education. The result was Christian Education in a Democracy (1951), written under the auspices of the National Association of Evangelicals and with the help of a committee of Christian scholars and teachers. Also, in the early years of my association with the Council for Religion in Independent Schools, I was influenced by the clarity with which some in the Episcopal schools stated the necessity of a Christian world-view. Another influence was that of leaders in the Christian day-school movement with their insistence upon a comprehensive Christian philosophy of education. So I came to the exciting recognition that all truth, whether we call it sacred or secular, is God’s truth. The result was discussion of the Christian philosophy of education in The Pattern of God’s Truth (1954).

Work on this book led me to apply the principle of the unity of truth in God to the field of aesthetics, a line of thought especially congenial because of my activity in music and writing and my more recent interest in the appreciation of painting. My thought about the relation of the arts to Christianity has been enriched by seeing the relevance of the theological doctrine of common grace to aesthetics. The Christian life is truly a full one, and I am convinced that evangelicals should, to the glory of the God who gives artistic as well as other talents to men, move out of the cultural provincialism that has characterized so many of us.

Sooner or later, every educator of long experience is asked how young people have changed since his earlier years of teaching. To this question, I have a twofold reply: in fundamental human qualities young people have changed not at all; in certain ways in which they act many of them have changed markedly.

At bottom, the young are still impatient; they still seek reality; they still want a cause that will challenge them; they still respond to integrity and honest conviction; they still see through pretense. As always, they abhor being different from their peers and submit rather uncritically to the prevailing attitudes and customs of their group. Like their predecessors, they combine impatience at restraint with an inner (and frequently unrecognized) need for authority they can respect. Without someone who cares enough for them to take time to listen to them and then, acting according to his integrity, to make decisions they may or may not like, children and adolescents are deprived of something essential for their emotional stability. These are some constants that apply to them in the seventies just as they applied to youth in the twenties, thirties, and middle decades of our century.

The outward characteristics of youth today are another matter. Some future historian of our society will, I think, identify as a watershed in twentieth-century life the rise of the mass media—notably films, radio, television, and the multi-million-circulation periodicals. These have tended to proliferate attitudes and practices with a rapidity formerly unimagined. In an increasingly hedonistic and depersonalized society that puts profits above human welfare, the young are among the chief casualties. They are being brought up on more hours of television than of books and are habituated to quick answers and superficial gratifications. They see the emptiness of materialistic affluent living. They lack in many instances a structure of authority (at home or in school) based on love and respect. No wonder many of them express themselves so overtly.

To understand the roots of youthful rebellion, adults need to look at themselves. The present moral slippage began with the decline of faith and with the lack of self-restraint among many adults too preoccupied with their own pursuits to keep open their relationship with God and their communication with their children. An age shadowed by the twin threats of nuclear catastrophe and ecological ruin, along with the insistent problems of race and war, is not a happy one—a fact reflected in the highly judgmental attitude of so many young people. Irrationalism, nihilism, drug addiction are ugly symptoms. And not the least of the causes of these symptoms is spiritual emptiness. For like all other human beings, young people need new life in Christ.

Young people have a wonderful resiliency that must not be underestimated. In a time of troubles when civilization is making an even more radical turn than in the industrial revolution, they have not lost the capacity to respond and grow. By no means are all, or anything like a majority of them, doing so in destructive ways. This is a day, I believe, when Christian educators have one of their finest opportunities. To meet it effectively requires not only a genuine openness to necessary changes in schools and colleges—it requires above all a self-giving concern for youth that reflects authentically the love of Christ.

Prophets of doom are saying that the small private college will die out. It is faced with skyrocketing costs, with the competition of large universities for research funds, foundation grants, and qualified faculty, with the public institutions’ subsidy of a student’s education. The doomsayers can point out that of 594 American colleges founded before the Civil War, only 182 still survived in 1927. Perhaps it is good that some did not last and that others yet may not, for a college does not deserve to survive unless it embodies a worthwhile idea of what a college should be. Yet prophets of hope declare that the small college’s day is yet to come—provided it can define its distinctives and carry them out with excellence. The Christian liberal-arts college is in just this situation. Whether it survives or even deserves to depends on the identity it defines for itself.

The idea of a Christian liberal-arts college has no fixed form, eternal in some Platonic heaven. It varies from place to place and changes from time to time. It has found different forms in the face of different needs. In colonial days, the idea was of a classical education to discipline the mind and provide the tools of scholarship deemed essential for the clergy and other leaders of society. During the westward movement, the classical ideal stood in contrast to the more vocational and pragmatic goals of the Land Grant colleges.

Adolescence is the age of independence, and in time the idea of a Christian college found a life for itself that seems independent of classical education. It evolved amid theological controversy into what has been called a “defender of the faith” institution. But though defending the faith was certainly an apostolic responsibility, it is hard to extend this conception to the educational task. Yet this defensive mentality is still common among pastors and parents; many suppose that the Christian college exists to protect young people against sin and heresy in other institutions. The idea therefore is not so much to educate as to indoctrinate, to provide a safe environment plus all the answers to all the problems posed by all the critics of orthodoxy and virtue.

This is an idea, I say—more a caricature than a reality. The trouble with it is that there often are no ready-made answers, new problems arise constantly, and the critics are perplexingly creative. The student who is simply conditioned to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli is at a loss when he confronts novel situations—as he will in a changing society undergoing a knowledge explosion. He needs a disciplined understanding of his heritage plus creativity, logical rigor, and self-critical honesty, far more than he needs prepackaged sets of questions and answers. The trouble with cloistering young people to keep them from sin and heresy, as evangelicals—of all people—should realize, is that these things come not from the environment but out of the heart. And while every parent feels protective towards his youngsters, over-protectiveness can stifle faith and hope and love, and trigger opposite excesses of thought and conduct.

Is the idea of a Christian college, then, simply to offer a good education plus biblical studies, in an atmosphere of piety? These are desirable ingredients, but are they the essence of the idea? After all, through religious adjuncts near a secular campus, students could be offered opportunities for biblical studies and support of personal piety while they were getting a good education, without all the money and manpower and facilities and work involved in maintaining a Christian college. Nor is the idea of a Christian college to prepare people for church-related vocations, desirable as this may be as a byproduct and central as it may be elsewhere in the educational work of the Church. The Christian college, like any other small institution, must decide whether its primary calling lies in the liberal arts or in vocational training.

Then why a Christian college? I suggest that its purpose, its idea, is the creative and active integration of faith and learning, and of faith and culture. This is its unique potential in higher education today and in American life. I say “integration,” for this precludes disjunctions between piety and scholarship, faith and reason, religion and science, Christianity and the arts, theology and philosophy, or whatever the differing points of reference may be. The Christian college will not settle for a militant polemic against secular learning and culture, as if there were a great gulf fixed between the secular and the sacred. All truth is God’s truth, no matter where it is found, and we can thank him for it all.

Integration also transcends awkward conjunctions of faith and learning in some unholy alliance rather than a fruitful union. It will not settle for taking critical pot shots at variant interpretations of material without working out a more satisfactory explanation. Nor will it settle for tacked-on moralizing and applications, for stale, superficial approaches that fail to penetrate the real intellectual issues. It will require a thorough analysis of methods and materials and concepts and theoretical structures, a lively and rigorous interpenetration of liberal learning with the content and the commitment of Christian faith. The Christian college has a constructive task, far more than a defensive one.

The Creation Mandate

A positive mandate of this sort hardly needs justification if we confess that God the Father Almighty is Maker of heaven and earth. To confess God as Creator is to affirm that he is Lord over all life and thought. It is to admit that every part of the created order is sacred, and that the Creator calls us to exhibit his wisdom and power both by exploring the creation and developing its resources and by bringing our own created abilities to fulfillment. For while all nature declares the glory of God, we men uniquely image the Creator in our created creativity. Implicit in the doctrine of creation, then, is its cultural mandate and the call to a creative integration of faith with learning and culture. It is a call, not just to couple piety with intellect, nor just to preserve biblical studies in our schools, but more basically to explore the wisdom of God in every area of thought and life, and to replenish the earth with the creativity of human art and science.

This creation mandate has not been rescinded by either sin or grace. On the contrary, it is reaffirmed. God’s grace comes to men in creation to help us fulfill the creation responsibilities in which we have failed (Heb. 2:6–10). The incarnation of Jesus Christ reaffirms the potential value of what we see and hear and handle in this world, for he came in the flesh, into a family and a community and a nation and a culture, into history. Christianity is not an otherworldly religion on the periphery of life—the doctrine of creation and the incarnation of Jesus Christ see to that.

Education With A Perspective

The idea of a Christian college that creatively integrates faith and learning, then, is an extension of the doctrine of creation. But we need to examine the idea more closely. Christian scholarship is not primarily distinguished by its techniques, nor by some privileged access to esoteric facts hidden from the uninitiated. At the levels of technique and fact, Christian and non-Christian scholars work together in fruitful and irenic cooperation. Rather, Christian scholarship is distinguished by its interpretation of material and by the value-judgments it makes. There is no distinctively Christian history of modern times—but a Christian view of God and man is likely, as Butterfield and others have pointed out, to affect our interpretation of the past and even, in measure, our selection and use of historical materials. There is no Christian physics—but belief in divine creation is likely, as Whitehead and others have said of early modern science, to shape our attitude toward scientific inquiry, and especially toward the kind of interpretation that goes into making a supposedly scientific world-view.

In other words, Christian scholarship is perspectival. The Christian revelation provides a vantage point—not just a set of presuppositions stated in propositional form from which to deduce a closed system, but a whole outlook on life replete with values and attitudes as well as beliefs. And it is from this perspective that we proceed. It motivates us, gives sanctity to our work, and provides an interpretative framework. We confess our faith in our work. This means repudiating the idea of ideological neutrality and detached objectivity; the teacher and scholar and student are whole persons, and their faith and their values inevitably influence their work.

The perspectival nature of thought is by no means unique to the Christian. All human thought and life is perspectival: consciously or unconsciously, what we are speaks loudly in what we say; what we believe and value shows itself in how we think. The more closely our thinking touches on matters of world-viewish concern, the more overtly our guiding perspective shows through.

The Christian college, then, should clarify its guiding image, so that the Christian perspective its students encounter is one that they understand, one also that they can make their very own. For while neutrality is impossible, the alternative is not blind prejudice—it is a self-conscious and self-critical commitment, an honesty that need not be ashamed. Christian thought is legitimately perspectival when the scholar is authentically Christian.

Second, it is pluralistic. A variety of perspectival traditions is at work in Western thought, and each of these is itself diversified. Naturalism, for instance, is a tradition that has taken many different forms, each one true to a common basic perspective. So too with theism, and within theism with Christian thought. To many things there is no one Christian approach, and Christian thinkers differ among themselves while affirming the truth of their common perspective. Some of our differences arise from our theological diversity, but not all. For Christian theology, effective as it is in providing an overall direction for our thinking, does not of itself resolve every theoretical and practical question that may arise. Our differences are due as well to differences in training and experience, in personal emphasis and interest, in the breadth and depth of our scientific and humanistic knowledge. In these matters, Christian learning, like Christian living, requires Christian liberty—hence the importance of academic freedom. There is no all-embracing “party line” dictated by biblical revelation. Ours is not a closed, complete “system to end all systems” but a richly variegated heritage of thought from the perspective of a biblical faith. It requires an honesty that is irenic, not contentious, an honesty that humbly admits our humanity. We see through a glass darkly. We know in part. The finiteness, the fallibility, the fragmentariness of human understanding require that we grant others the liberty we desire for ourselves; that we be willing to learn from others and remain open to correction, to new angles, to invigorating insights. The pluralistic character of Christian thought is a blessing, for it safeguards us against premature dogmatism and monolithic structures. It will keep us humble and keep us human; it will keep us working creatively and self-critically in all our endeavors.

This leads to a third characteristic; if Christian education is both perspectival and pluralistic, it must also be exploratory, an open-ended adventure in learning and living. As long as we fall short of omniscience it will be this way, as it is for those in non-Christian traditions. They have to explore the implications of the viewpoints they take, and so do we. We have barely begun to chart the worlds of science and of ideas, to relate faith and learning and life, and so to explore the insight afforded by the meaning-giving Logos of God. This is an exciting prospect for the believer, whether student or professional scholar, and it demands of us both creativity and discipline. After all, education should be exacting and exciting.

We have spoken of Christian scholarship in ethical terms, like faith and love and honesty and liberty. Some writers have suggested that it involves hope, and I think they are right: the virtue of hope should mark the Christian in this world. We believe that life is not absurd but that it makes sense, that the world of nature and history are intelligible from the perspective of faith. We may therefore add a fourth characteristic of Christian thought—it is redemptive. The Christian perspective enables us to see things whole, to recapture the meaning and worth of human existence, to reinvest secular life with its God-given sanctity. We bring this hope to our work in a secular world, to the interpretation of our learning, and to the application of learning to life. We live and think with a redeeming hope. The truth is not yet complete; it is not yet all in. To use Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, truth-for-man is an “eschatological ideal” toward which we strive, an ideal we glimpse in broad outline and in part but have not yet fully attained. Yet we work at it in the confident hope of truth’s full disclosure and of the ultimate redemption of human thought. This hope begets imaginative endeavor and hard work. We confess our hope in our work, and thereby bear witness in a secularized world that is fast losing hope as it already lost faith.

A Mandate For Today

This idea of a Christian college is strategic at the present juncture in history. We hear a great deal about the secularization of society, the compartmentalization and seeming irrelevance of religion, the loss of ultimate concerns in the routines of daily life, the fact that the Hebrew-Christian world-view, which once gave meaning and value to Western life and thought, has disintegrated. God is said to be dead, the Church is caught in a suburban captivity, and modern man, eviscerated in this way, is left groping for meaning and grasping at whatever straw blows by.

Involved in this crisis is the secularization of learning. The medieval university was governed by a unifying religious world-view—theology was at the center of the curriculum, just as the church spire was at the center of the city. But all this has changed. Education today is largely rootless, or at best governed by a heterogeneity of goals. The university has become a multiversity, and its orderly operation is threatened, in part, because it lacks a unifying world-view that can unite the heritage of the past with the realities of the present, and that can infuse meaning into learning and hope into life in a bent world.

Hence the idea of a Christian college where learning is honest about its perspective, dialogical in its pluralism, exciting and exploratory, yet still able to see things whole. It is the idea of a faith that inspires learning, gives sanctity and value to culture and scholarship, and casts light on the perennial concerns of men and society. The truth still has its meaning-giving power, and knowing the truth will still make men free.

Stock phrases in the current ecclesiastical jargon make it clear that the institution thinks pragmatically of its task for the seventies. “Ministry is people.” “Church is where the action is.” “Live love!” “To be Christian is to be human.” The directives coming to the minister, now conceived as an “enabler,” seem to imply that his primary function is to build up a head of steam powerful enough to drive the people forward in good works. The area of good works is determined by the pressing need of the moment. A few months ago it was the desperate situation in Biafra. During Lent it was overseas development and relief. Right now it is drug addiction. On the horizon is environmental pollution.

The reasoning behind this frenzied activism seems logical enough. When Jesus was living in this world, he went about doing good—healing the sick, feeding the hungry, giving sight to the blind. The Christian Church is supposed to be his body and to continue his saving work in the world. If Jesus were living in the world today, surely his concern would still be with people in need of human deliverance—the victims of such hardships as war, poverty, and racial injustice. Therefore, if the Church is to be true to its function as the body of Christ, must it not be the Church that “serves a hurting world”? Hence the contempt today for stained glass and broadloom. Anything that shuts the worshiper out from the clear vision of a torn and bleeding world, or deadens the noise of human strife, has no place in Christian work and witness. Worship itself—the action by which God is praised—must forsake the passivity of inward renewal to identify with Christ in constructive (or destructive!) social action.

The reasoning is logical. Yet a question remains: Are the underlying assumptions concerning the “saving work” of Jesus perhaps an oversimplification—one great enough to be considered a tragic distortion? The Church is indeed supposed to be the body of Christ in which he continues his saving work in the world, and responsibility, both individual and corporate, indisputably attaches to Christian discipleship. But where is the real action of Christ in the world to be found? And what, precisely, is his saving work? The question that the disciples asked Jesus “on the other side of the sea” must repeatedly be put: “What must we be doing to be doing the work of God?” (John 6:28).

The answer to this question is not, I believe, to be found in the feverish social action now being forced on the body of Christ. It is found, rather, in the thrust of the Gospel as expressed in Jesus’ reply to the disciples’ question: “This is the work that God requires: believe in the one whom he has sent.”

Before looking more closely at this answer, let us glance at the distressing world situation that confronts the Church in the seventies. Over-population, ecological imbalance, racial tension, armaments buildup, the widening gulf between affluence and poverty, pollution, drug addiction—these problems are so great that any one of them appears capable of destroying society. If they are not solved speedily, no world will be left to which the body of Christ can witness. Hence the urgency of social action.

And yet, the very magnitude of these problems is forcing solutions that can be found only beyond the periphery of Christian concern. As the complexities of a technological society and the interrelatedness of its concerns become more evident, the catalytic effectiveness of programs of Christian social action becomes less evident. The greater the social problem, the less likely it is that the church will have anything very helpful to say or to do about it. Consider three examples:

1. Concern for the economic distress of “underdeveloped” peoples has now moved beyond the sphere of overseas mission boards of churches to take top priority on the agenda of secular international bodies as UNESCO and the World Bank. Involvement by the churches in areas where the experts have taken over is proving to be something of an irritant. (Witness the about-face that the World Council of Churches had to make on the Biafra situation: after urging the Christian constituency to do the “right” thing and feed Nigeria’s “enemy,” it was forced at the eleventh hour to withhold aid from Biafra so that “realistic” political action might be taken!)

2. A short generation ago the problems of addiction—drug, tobacco, and alcohol—were felt to be trivial enough to be relegated to the passion of the WCTU or the denomination’s board of evangelism and social service; now they are found on the front doorstep of health departments at every governmental level. It is somewhat amusing to discover that though university students a dozen years ago were contemptuous of the Church for worrying about liquor and tobacco, today’s students are snide for another reason: the problem of addiction is so serious that only society’s superior scientific wisdom can solve it.

3. Then there is pollution. The annual conference of the United Church of Canada here in Saskatchewan has decided to make itself relevant in the year 1970 by studying pollution. But it will hardly achieve relevance by doing this. It will merely tag behind a host of other interest groups that have latched on to the latest “in” thing in order to be heard. Its findings on this subject may be profound, but the world is not going to look to the churchmen for help. Both for analysis and for solution of the problem of environmental pollution, the world will look to its technical specialists—as it should.

Even the motivation for good works is unlikely to require Christian support in a world that is increasingly maturing in its sense of responsibility for its secular well-being. Bonhoeffer’s insight here is certainly valid. The Christian has no monopoly on good works. Caesar’s realm takes in a lot of territory—most of the territory, indeed, that bestirs Christian activists today. The Christian should not feel resentful if his moral judgment is no longer needed to press good works that secular man, motivated by self-preservation and a “live-and-let-live” philosophy, can successfully undertake himself. Indeed, secular man can plausibly argue that he has more right to clean up the world than the Christian. This is all the world he has.

Does all this imply that the message of the Christian Church no longer has social significance? Does this mean that the Christian Gospel confronts modern man with indifference and his tragic plight with resignation? Far from it! In a world “come of age,” the Church has to define more carefully than ever the nature of Jesus’ saving work for the world. It has to differentiate more clearly than ever what man can do and be without Jesus Christ and what he can do and be only in and through Jesus Christ. As Joseph Sittler has said:

[The Church] only serves that which is not itself by being most absolutely itself. Otherwise it has no reason for being. When, therefore, we ask for a permeating presence of the Church in the world, this is absolutely right, but that presence will only be a presence effective in order to its calling when the particularity of that presence, which is nothing less than God in his world, remains that which permeates, and constitutes the substance of, that presence [“Revolution, Place and Symbol,” Journal of the First International Congress on Religion, Architecture and the Visual Arts, New York, 1967, p. 65].

This brings us back to Jesus’ answer to the disciples’ question: This is the work that God requires: believe in the one whom he has sent. The context in John 6 of this surprising reply is a discussion of food, the contrast being pointedly drawn between the kind of food men need to keep body and mind together and the kind of food that nourishes a believer “unto eternal life.” In John’s Gospel, the “work” of God, which Jesus’ earthly works attest—bread for the hungry, sight to the blind, life to the dead—is represented as the gift of a new humanity that is realized in and through Jesus. Jesus in his living perfectly fulfilled the will of God and in his dying triumphed over sin and death. As a result of this achievement—an achievement unique and unrepeatable on the human scale—a new order of righteousness has been established to which the natural man is called to relate himself. The paradox is that what man cannot do and be on his own, he is called to do and be in Christ. “If any man be in Christ Jesus he is a new creature. Old things are passed away. Behold, all things have become new.” Christian faith is the acceptance of this achievement of Jesus.

Obviously, implications for man and the world follow fast and sure from this act of faith. The Christian community has the responsibility of actualizing here on earth the union with God that Jesus has achieved. But it will do this, not by identification with “one-dimensional man” in his need, but by union with Christ in his risen power. The current obsession that the Church has first to “identify with men in their needs” before it can help them finds no support in the New Testament. Man by his sinful nature is already fully identified with his fellows and shares his fellows’ plight. What sinful man needs is not closer identification with sinners but identification with the One who has overcome sin and death—that is, identification with the risen living Christ in a faith union made possible by the work of the Holy Spirit.

Traditionally the Holy Spirit has achieved this when men have been open to God’s Word and have given themselves to prayer and sacramental renewal. From this work of faith, as the Epistle of James makes clear, practical works follow—“by these actions the integrity of his [Abraham’s] faith was fully proved” (Jas. 2:23). But the order is clear: faith in Christ, and then the works that prove it. The one thing that the Church dare not do is to reverse this order. It dare not move from man’s own works to faith. It dare not take a sweeping look over the human scene, assess what is wrong with man, and then turn to the Christian faith in the hope of redeeming the situation. Since Jesus Christ has already redeemed the human situation, all that the Church can do is point to him in whose name and power men are bidden to rise up and walk.

The very last thing that the Church needs to fear is that a faithful and simple proclamation of the mighty acts of God in Christ will be irrelevant to a hurting world. It was to meet the human need that God acted in Jesus Christ. The real questions, the ultimate questions confronting men and women in the seventies, are the very questions on which the drama of the Incarnation focuses. These ultimate questions go far beyond the social concern of our time to confront man at the basic level of his being. Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? These night questions will remain after urgent and remedial first aid has been given to social problems. Night questions confront all men everywhere and under all circ*mstances of life—whether they live in the black ghetto or in the white suburbs, in polluted air or clean. The pragmatic problems can be solved by sensible men everywhere, but the night questions find their answer only in the Christian Gospel. There is nothing outside the Christian Gospel to witness to the fact that man came from God and must return to the Father, and, while here, do the Father’s will.

It is both tragic and ironic that at the very time a vocal and influential segment of church leadership is trying to make the Christian Gospel relevant by secularizing it, the generation to which the appeal ostensibly is made is crying out, not so much for the solution of life’s social problems, as for an understanding of life itself. Lady Susan Glynn has remarked that “the quality of human nature is leading, as always, to two movements in opposite directions. Religious leaders are tending to speak more about corporate action and less about personal faith, but at the same time many individuals, particularly young people, feel starved of the things of the spirit.” Whether this generation’s spiritual hunger can be satisfied by the announcement of the Christian Gospel remains to be seen. There is a stage at which starved people spurn food, and it may be that the spiritual need of this day and age is not going to be met. It may be that even the most inspired “updating” of the Gospel will fail to win a response from those for whom Christ died. But this is beside the point, and it is not the real concern of the Church. The only real concern of the Church is that it be faithful to the Gospel it has been given, which is not its own but its Lord’s.

The Value Imperative

Colleges are not all as bad as the one glimpsed in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Yet there is certainly a great need for educational reforms. Although education has made great promises in methods, it is confused about goals and ends. Knowledge is like a sharp knife. It can be used to save a life in a delicate operation or to stab a man in the heart. It is just a means. At this critical moment in the world’s history, education has practically gone dead in regard to goals.

We have a disintegrating educational system in a disintegrating cultural order. A young person can graduate from even our finest universities with honors and still be broken down in health, vocationally a misfit, personally disagreeable, unfitted for home life, morally a menace to society, politically a grafter, and emotionally so unhappy as to be on the verge of suicide. There is something drastically wrong with such a system.

The great underlying issue of our time is whether we believe in a God-centered or a man-centered universe. All truth is God’s truth and should lead to God. Most education is fitted into a framework of naturalism and fails to discriminate between the facts and a naturalistic interpretation of facts. The same facts need to be fitted into a framework of theism. Instead of narrowing the fields of knowledge, religion should add immeasurable depth and height and significance. The heavens declare the glory of God. When the glory of God departs, the glory of man made in his image departs also.

The United Church of Christ gave $600,000 to a college that chose one of the main exponents of the “God is dead” theory as its only professor of religion. Some denominational leaders have advocated the separation of colleges from the Church. It is not surprising that many church-related colleges produce a lot of pagans.

The National Education Association has stated that more people have spent more hours in more schools since 1900 than in all human history before. To this we should add that more people have been killed since 1900 than in all previous human history.

Knowledge is a means. We greatly need Christian goals. What is the value of knowing physics if we use it to destroy mankind in a nuclear war? What is the value of knowing biology if we use it for biological warfare, or chemistry if we use it to produce poison gas? What is the value of knowing mathematics if we use it to cheat our fellow men, of knowing three, five, or twenty languages if we lie in every one of them? The more nuclear science we have in our heads, the more imperative it is that we have the love of God in our hearts.

The Book of Joel says, “Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” Youth should accept the wisdom of age, and age should accept the vision of youth. “Without vision, the people perish.” Instead of the spectacle of youth and age scolding each other, we need to see the ripe experience and wise judgment of age clasp hands with the vision and idealism and adventurous spirit of youth.

We should help our young people to develop the love of truth and the love of man. We desperately need Christian higher education. The prayer of a student should be: “Unite my mind, O God, to know you and your universe and my purpose in it.”—Dr. WILLIAM R. BARNHART, minister emeritus, Circular Congregational Church, Charleston, South Carolina.

As we prepare this issue, the news reports tell us that near revolution has come to northern Ireland; the Arab-Israeli undeclared war is getting hotter; the stock market is in the doldrums; peace seems no nearer anywhere; and the hot season has once again brought rumblings of unrest in the cities during sultry summer nights. In the midst of all this God is still at work. Men are being converted as the Gospel goes forth in power, and Christian compassion is working to relieve the miseries of men everywhere.

A few days ago I heard Billy Graham preach at Shea Stadium in New York City (see News, page 30). His message was simple: as Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego had to choose between the worship of Nebuchadnezzar’s image and the worship of the true God, so men today must choose between false gods and the true God. When Graham asked his hearers to choose Jesus Christ, a large number—black and white, young and old—came forward to make that commitment. It was thrilling to observe the power of the Holy Spirit at work in the hearts of men.

Strangely enough, we often get discouraged even when we see God at work. Elijah got the blues after his great victory over the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel. What we need to remember always is that reassuring promise, “Fear thou not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed for I am thy God.”

Several weeks ago the publisher of my latest book informed me that a well-known fundamentalist periodical had refused to advertise the volume. The reason? I quote directly from the letter my publisher received: “We do not feel we can carry this particular ad, since Dr. Montgomery openly opposes any talk against the movies and dance.”

The charge was not strictly accurate (in point of fact, I oppose immoral and inartistic movies, as well as lewd and cloddish dancing; what disturbed the periodical was simply that I refuse to throw all secular theatrical activities into outer darkness). But the anti-theatrical philosophy of American fundamentalism is sufficiently at odds with my own viewpoint that the letter in question motivated a long-standing intention to survey the current French stage and screen for readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. For years I have had a secret desire to imitate Janet (“Genêt”) Flanner’s “Letter from Paris” in the New Yorker; who would have thought that a certain Tennessee periodical would have turned potentiality into actuality?

First, some words about the cinema. (In my next “Current Religious Thought” column, the stage will be the focus of attention.) For those unacquainted with French cinematography, it is perhaps well to stress at the very outset the radical difference between French films and Anglo-American products. The difference is not (despite opinions in Murfreesboro) sex. Actually, film-makers in Hollywood—and even more so in London—are today producing erotica that cultured Frenchmen regard as trash; interestingly, the French answer to Playboy magazine (Lui) is much milder than Hefner’s product, and the dives in London’s Soho and Charing Cross districts would make an inhabitant of Montmartre blush for shame.

French movies differ from Anglo-American films as the modern French novel differs from its English counterpart: the Frenchman is concerned to plumb the depths of individual personality and to record the development of character that occurs in the crucible of human relationships; the Englishman and American love external action (“play the game”), clean-cut distinctions between the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” and the positive resolution of the plot (everything should “come out all right”).

A comparison of the greatest of English-language fictional detectives with his twentienth-century French counterpart makes this point with telling effect. Conan Doyle’s Holmes is cold, almost machine-like, and ruthlessly effective in bringing his cases to a logical and successful conclusion; Simenon’s Maigret, in contrast, never has a “plan,” often does not “catch” the criminal in the traditional sense, but discovers the truth through intimate observation and involvement in the lives of all concerned.

I shall not spend time on French films available in the States with English dubbing or subtitles (e.g., Z—a superlative critique of present Greek political abominations); my comments are restricted to films not yet exported. L’Aveu can be considered to be a sequel to Z; the success of Z in castigating the Greek generals led naturally to a condemnation of Marxist imperialism in Eastern Europe—especially as concerns the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. The hero, again portrayed by Yves Montand, is subjected to a Kafka-like trial leading to an “admission of guilt.” This utterly unjust purge of an honest, patriotic statesman (Dubcek, to be sure) reminds one of the concluding chapters of Orwell’s 1984.

Current history is the point of departure for a number of excellent French film productions. Les Choses de la vie, for example, is perhaps the most telling blow ever struck on the screen against the demonic loss of life through traffic fatalities. Sensitive actor Michel Piccoli portrays the victim of a meaningless auto accident that in a split second destroys human relations and values built up over a lifetime.

France is still haunted by Indochina and North Africa, as the United States will inevitably be haunted by Viet Nam. Le Boucher, set in a harmless, sleepy French provincial village, shows how the past can devour the present: a butcher and a school mistress fall in love, but the taste of blood the butcher acquired years before in Indochina has made him incapable of experiencing the ordinary joys of life, and ultimately his pathological past destroys him.

Le Pistonné, the second unit of Claude Berri’s film autobiography, narrates the experiences of the hero during his draftee service in Morocco in 1955. Pistonné is slang for a person who “knows the right people” and can “pull strings” with the higher-ups. Actually, the young hero’s attempts to do this are farcical failures owing to the incredible stupidity and naïveté both of French civil servants (the buffoon-like fonctionnaires) and of military officialdom. The “pacification” program in Morocco accomplishes little more than the terrorization and uprooting of the native populace and the demoralizing of the soldiery. The final scene in the film shows our hero at his discharge, being met by his brother whom he has longed to see—and whom he finds grotesquely hopping on one leg, having been permanently maimed in similar military operations.

The question to which French film-makers return again and again is: Who is man? Like novelist Camus and playright Sartre, they are obsessed with the need to probe man’s nature. François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage follows the (actual) scientific diary of Professor Itar, who at the time of the French Revolution attempted to civilize a boy who had lived for years in the forest without human contact. The professor concludes that the boy has a “native moral sense”; but does he? Is it the very tenderness of the relation between the professor and his charge that elicits moral response in the boy? Are the professor’s interpretations the result of factual observation, or are they but “necessary conclusions” from his deistic presuppositions? The viewer is forced to confront these questions for himself.

My favorite among the recent films devoted to analyzing the human animal is Borsalino, with the inimitable acting combination of Belmondo and Delon. A “borsalino” is that peculiarly shaped fedora that was the mark of Chicago and Marseilles gangsters during the 1920s and early 1930s. The film tells the story of the friendship between two Marseilles underworld characters who combine operations and go to the top. Finally, one chooses to leave. Why? Because, he shrewdly observes, now that the opposition has been laid low, the two will go after each other, and he wants rather to preserve their friendship. On leaving, he is gunned down by an unknown third party—while reiterating his philosophy: “Nothing happens by chance.” Exactly. Power corrupts. He who lives by the sword dies by it. Selfishness extends to all unredeemed human relationships.

JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY

I know what you are doing; I know that you have the reputation of being alive, even though you are dead! So wake up, and strengthen what you still have, before it dies completely.

—Revelation 3:1–2, TEV

John’s divine message to the church at Sardis was appropriated by Ralph Abernathy last month as a relevant word for the American religious establishment. Abernathy told the General Board of the National Council of Churches that failure to press more vigorously for social justice is a fatal symptom.

The board members gave Abernathy a warm welcome to their two-day meeting in Washington and expressed their gratitude for his prodding address. Actually, however, they didn’t need to be reminded of the moribund condition of American conciliarism, for the main item on the agenda was an attempt to rescue the perishing.

A fifteen-member task force had been named in January to come up with alternatives to the present NCC. The group, “after two intensive two-day meetings,” came up with a thirty-five page report giving four options. The Reverend Arie R. Brouwer, an executive of the Reformed Church in America who serves as chairman of the task force, said the report “was generated almost entirely in the meetings of the group. Through it all we kept scrawling ideas and observations on pieces of newsprint which were then taped around the walls.… The material thus generated was put into the hands of Dr. David Hunter.… From it he compiled the report.”

Hunter is deputy general secretary of the NCC and is considered by some to be heir apparent to the American conciliar throne.

Perhaps more important than the options suggested (the final plan will doubtless be an adaptation with features from two or more of the proposals) were these recommendations from the task force: that the General Board establish “a probable trend” at its September meeting in Phoenix, and that a “National Ecumenical Consultation” be called during November or early December of this year “to be attended by accredited representatives of member churches and their boards and agencies, non-member churches eligible for membership and all interested church-related agencies and recognized special-interest groups.”

The recommendations were endorsed by the board along with a proposal that the board commit itself to a particular plan for a new conciliar structure by next January.

The options developed by the task force were simply labeled A, B, C, and D. Option A seeks the widest possible membership potential at the expense of continuing programs, with “para-ecclesiastical bodies” eligible along with churches. Option B is also a decentralized approach, but only churches would be eligible for membership, and programs would be operated more along present lines. Option C is the most radical, inasmuch as it ties the ecumenical concept entirely to social action. Option D is described as the most flexible plan, with the General Board given more power and member communions expected to increase their undesignated giving substantially.

The only action or reaction the board took on the options was an informal straw vote that showed that denominational staffers tended to favor Option A, pastors went for Option B, while laymen seemed to prefer Option D.

The board meeting was held on the weekend of Father’s Day, which also was the longest day of the year. That fact provided a coincidental contrast to the day on which the task force first met, because on that day, Brouwer noted, the sun went into eclipse.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Board Actions

The new shape of American conciliarism could conceivably preclude pronouncements on social issues. But until that is decided, the National Council of Churches is continuing to crank them out. The NCC’s General Board, at its June meeting in Washington, urged the U. S. government not to sell military planes to Israel and criticized labor unions that bar minorities.

The board, noting that some California grape-growers have signed union contracts, lifted its boycott on table grapes but recommended that church agencies and “men of good will” buy only those table grapes that come in boxes with union labels.

A first reading was given to a new policy statement entitled “Responsible Family Planning.” The document asserts that “voluntary sterilization and abortion have been made safe through new medical techniques. Every decision for an abortion is a heavy responsibility, because potentially human life is present. It is always better to prevent unwanted conceptions. However, when unwanted conception occurs and the woman strongly feels she cannot or will not accept responsibility for a child and is unwilling to bear a child to be placed for adoption, she must be free to decide in consultation with her physician.”

The Board approved a number of personnel separations necessitated by declining revenues and dissolved the NCC Division of Christian Unity for the same reason.

Lamenting The Tie That Binds

The “frightful irrelevance” of the Church of England was mourned by one of its own bishops in a television interview seen by millions last month. The Right Reverend Trevor Huddleston, bishop of Stepney in London’s East End, advocated severing the link with the state that gives his church “a bogus security and a position in society and opportunities which it has not earned.” Disestablishment would not create a spiritual revival, he said, but it was a necessary first step.

“Basically,” went on the 57-year-old Anglo-Catholic, “the Church of England has never thought it necessary to give. It is a very unsacrificial church to live in.” All the paraphernalia of the institutionalized church and “the clutter of legality” sap much of its energy, he said.

Huddleston, a former bishop in Tanzania, had earlier been declared persona non grata in South Africa for his vocal opposition to apartheid, expressed also in his best-seller Naught for Your Comfort.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Religion In Transit

Two noted evangelical leaders, Harold J. Ockenga and W. A. Criswell, have issued a call for a Conference on Biblical Prophecy to meet in Jerusalem June 15–18, 1971. Carl F. H. Henry is chairman of the program committee.

New York voters, in a primary election last month, defeated both the senate sponsor of the state’s liberal new abortion law and the assemblyman who cast the deciding vote for the bill.

Richmond College, Canada’s first independent Christian liberal-arts college, graduated its first class. One of the ten students awarded bachelor of arts degrees was Antonio Pulla of Ottawa, who scored in the upper 2 per cent among 30,000 Canadian college seniors who took comprehensive examinations.

Washington City Presbytery is closing its experimental Market Place Ministries in suburban Virginia. The experiment was a highly-touted effort aimed at showing the church’s relevance for apartment dwellers. It included a theater and child care programs. The closing was reported as having left the presbytery with debts of $845,000.

Decision, the monthly periodical published by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, has passed the 4,000,000 mark in circulation in the United States and Canada. The total, largest of any religious publication in the world, does not include additional circulation for British, Australian, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese editions.

Evangelical Christians in Turkey are enduring continued persecution for their faith. A German, a Turkish, and three Finnish Christians recently were held and beaten by the police for distributing Christian literature near Izmir. The foreigners had come to Turkey as tourists, confident that Turkish law would guarantee freedom of religion.

The U. S. Supreme Court announced it had agreed to rule on the constitutionality of federal construction grants to church-related colleges.

Coburn Hall Chapel of Virginia Union University, Richmond, was badly damaged by fire. Although the cause of the fire was not immediately determined, officials expressed confidence that it was not the result of student unrest.

Ninety-three arrests were made at the Pentagon last month as the Episcopal Peace Fellowship attempted to hold a series of five daily masses there. Among those taken into custody was the Rev. Malcolm Boyd. The fellowship may seek a court test.

The National Labor Relations Board reversed a longstanding policy last month and asserted jurisdiction over labor relations in private colleges.

The four-year-old Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, was notified last month that it has been accepted into associate membership of the American Association of Theological Schools. The move is the first step toward accreditation.

Deaths

ROBERT W. ROOT, 55, noted professor of religious journalism at Syracuse University and more recently at Eisenhower College, and onetime public relations director of the World Council of Churches; in Seneca Falls, New York, of a heart attack.

A. A. ALLEN, 59, controversial head of a noted faith-healing ministry; in San Francisco, as a result of “acute alcoholism and fatty infiltration of the liver,” according to a coroner’s report.

Personalia

Dr. Allix B. James, president of Virginia Union University, was elected president of the American Association of Theological Schools. He becomes the first black ever to be elevated to the post.

Dr. S. T. Jacobson of Saskatoon was elected president of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada. He was chosen on the fourth ballot to succeed the retiring Dr. Karl Holfeld.

Dr. Orley R. Herron, Jr., was named president of Greenville (Illinois) College, operated by Free Methodists. He is a 1955 graduate of Wheaton College and has been serving as assistant to the president of Indiana State University.

The Reverend David J. Draewell will become president of North American Baptist Seminary on September 1. He will replace Dr. Frank Veninga, who has resigned to become executive vice president of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

A 43-year-old Jesuit priest, the Reverend John McLaughlin, won the Republican nomination for the U. S. Senate from Rhode Island. The Democratic candidate will be incumbent Senator John Pastore, also a Catholic.

Check one:

□ The Lutheran Church in America is moving toward greater unity with other Lutheran bodies in the United States.

□ The LCA is rapidly pulling away from its more conservative sister Lutheran churches in this country.

□ The LCA is moving toward greater unity with Roman Catholics and certain liberal, non-Lutheran Protestant denominations.

Answer: Probably all three are correct, judging from action taken at the LCA’s fifth biennial convention in Minneapolis June 25–July 2.

The 695 delegates representing the 3.2 million members of the nation’s largest and most liberal Lutheran church: shattered a tradition in American Lutheranism by overwhelmingly voting to allow the ordination of women; appeared by mid-convention to be moving toward the adoption of a liberal position statement on sex, marriage, and the family that would be the first such document officially approved by a major denomination acknowledging that under exceptional circ*mstances sexual relations outside legal marriage may not be sinful; became the first of the three major Lutheran bodies in the United States to approve a far-reaching report on confirmation that departs from tradition by allowing communion for children before the rite of confirmation; and heard a report endorsed by a team of ten Lutheran and ten Catholic theologians expected to signal a breakthrough in ecumenical relations because it could lead to intercommunion between the two faiths for the first time since the Reformation.

Further, in authorizing a commission to analyze the function of the LCA’s structure, the convention provided that the study is to be coordinated with similar studies in the Lutheran bodies. (The Church Council of the American Lutheran Church, meeting the week before the LCA convention, proposed that the ALC, the LCA, and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod develop common organizational structures or administrative lines that would lend themselves easily to joint activities.)

That decision and the one permitting the ordination of women are likely to be viewed favorably by the ALC when it holds its national convention in San Antonio this fall (the ALC Church Council voted 24 to 4 in favor of the ordination of women; the convention will vote on the matter in San Antonio).

But the trends within the LCA apparent at Minneapolis during one of the hottest June weeks on record will doubtless distress many within the Missouri Synod Lutheran church—the most conservative of the three.

The vote on ordination, approved quickly after short debate and with only several baritone “nays,” drew immediate fire from Dr. Jacob A. O. Preus, president of Missouri Synod. Preus, who awaited the verdict in the hall of the auditorium, told reporters that he was surprised by the lack of opposition to the move, and that he felt it would be “detrimental” to inter-Lutheran unity.¹It wasn’t until July, 1969, at its convention in Denver, that the Missouri Synod granted woman’s suffrage in the church. Preus indicated that the Missouri Synod probably would discuss ordination of women at its 1971 convention but not vote on it.

There are already several women candidates for the ministry enrolled in LCA seminaries, and at least one could be ordained this year, according to an official. Ordination of women has been permitted in several European Lutheran churches for some time, and Presbyterians and Methodists, among other American denominations, ordain women.

The Roman Catholic-Lutheran dialogue report caused the Reverend John Reuman, a Lutheran theologian and a member of the dialogue team, to remark: “It’s been said facetiously that Lutherans and Catholics could have intercommunion before all Lutherans could.”

The LCA and the ALC have declared pulpit and altar fellowship allowing intercommunion. Last year the Missouri Synod approved pulpit and altar fellowship with the ALC, after that body had approved it, but the relationship does not exist between the Missouri Synod and the LCA.

The Lutheran-Catholic dialogue report was made by a Catholic theologian who is an authority on Martin Luther, Dr. Harry McSorley, currently a visiting professor in Toronto, and Dr. Warren A. Quanbeck, professor at the Lutheran Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.

McSorley said it is now “theologically possible and ecumenically desirable” for the Catholic Church to recognize the validity of Lutheran ordination. The dialogue report is not yet complete, he added, but he intimated that it would be ready for discussion by the nation’s Catholic bishops at their November meeting in Washington, D. C.

The traditional Catholic view has been that the Lord’s Supper is not a sacrament within the Lutheran church because Lutheran priests are not validly ordained by a bishop in the historic episcopal succession. But, said McSorley, “although ordination of ministers of the Eucharist by bishops was the almost universal practice in the Church from very early times, it is impossible to show that such a church order existed … from the earliest times.”

“Furthermore,” he continued, “there have been several well-documented cases during the Church’s history in which priests—not bishops—have ordained other priests to serve at the altar.” He added that Vatican II refused to accept a report of some 100 bishops who contended that Protestant Christians “simply do not have the true sacrament of the Eucharist because the ordinations of their ministers are defective.”

The consensus of the dialogue team is that Lutheran-Catholic intercommunion could take place in “pastoral emergencies.” Quanbeck and McSorley agreed, however, that full communion between the two bodies would not be an immediate consequence of this new recognition.

The statement on sex, marriage, and family evoked lively debate, and several amendments were introduced before final voting. The statement is akin to study papers recently introduced by the United Presbyterian Church and the United Church of Christ. Spokesmen said that while information had “passed freely” among drafters of the three papers, the LCA statement was written independently.

The LCA statement begins theologically but lets situation ethics determine the rightness or wrongness of sexual acts. The section on marriage stresses a “covenant of fidelity—a dynamic, lifelong commitment of one man and one woman in a personal and sexual union.” The statement also recognizes the need of the sanction of civil law or marriage, but notes that it is not a complete criterion for marriage: “The marital union can be legally valid yet not be a covenant of fidelity, just as it can be a covenant of fidelity and not be legal contract.” An amendment added: “The existence of a true covenant of fidelity outside marriage as a legal contract is extremely hard to identify.”

The statement: does not condemn hom*osexual expression but does recognize it as “a deviation from … God’s creation”; approves abortion; says that in divorce and remarriage the church should be concerned with the “potential” of a new marriage; affirms that there is “no theological reason for opposing a marriage between persons of different racial or ethnic backgrounds.”

Dr. Robert J. Marshall, 50, of New York, was reelected to a four-year term as president of the denomination on the first ballot. Marshall was first elected LCA president in 1968 to fill the unexpired term of the late Franklin Clark Fry, the first president of the LCA, which officially emerged as a denomination in 1962. Also reelected on the first ballot was treasurer Carl M. Anderson of Rahway, New Jersey.

In his president’s report, Marshall noted that disagreement over social issues had brought a “complete switch” within Lutheranism in a century’s time: “Some Lutherans who wish to consider themselves as conservative tend to align with revivalism rather than with the Lutheran Confessions [while] … those who want to consider themselves as liberals may align with social-action projects of other denominations.…”

RUSSELL CHANDLER

A Reformed Pact

Representatives of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the International Congregational Council released the wording of an “act of covenant” which will merge the two groups into a new structure. The formal union is to take place on August 20 in Nairobi, Kenya. The resulting organization is to be known as the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.

The text of the covenant is as follows: “We, the representatives of Reformed, Presbyterian and Congregational churches in all the corners of the earth, holding the word of God given in the Bible to be the ultimate authority in matters of faith and life, acknowledging Jesus Christ as head of the church, and rejoicing in our fellowship with the whole church, covenant together to seek in all things the mind of Christ, to make common witness to His gospel, to serve His purpose in all the world, and, in order to be better equipped for the tasks He lays upon us, to form this day the new World Alliance of Reformed Churches. Lord, keep us faithful to yourself and to our fellowmen. Amen.”

Conservative (Progressive) Baptists

Conservative Baptists heard one speaker at their annual meetings last month at San Jose, California, suggest: “Let’s be progressively conservative.” Delegates seemed agreeable enough.

They toned down a law and order amendment. While opposing violence, they asked for understanding of “those who riot” and for the relating of the Gospel to them. Delegates also opted for “biblical” rather than “unstinted” loyalty to government leaders. They also decided to censure President Nixon for his appointment of a Vatican representative. And they unanimously approved a floor resolution calling for greater involvement of “younger men” at policy making levels. After emotionally charged appeals from young delegates, they also turned down a move by some critics to vote disapproval of a convention youth musical program.

The delegates started machinery to merge their home and foreign mission units. Both groups showed progress. Last year’s income was $1.6 million for home missions (100 missionaries), $3.5 for the foreign agency (478 missionaries).

EDWARD PLOWMAN

Christian Reformed: A Classis In Contempt?

The 1970 Synod of the Christian Reformed Church indicted its Classis Chicago North for failure “to bring its policy and practice into harmony” with the denomination’s race policy. A 1968 decision declared that no persecution or disadvantage to self or institution warrants the denial to any of the church’s members of full church fellowship and full privilege of the church’s related schools because of race or color.

The 1970 ruling was a response to an appeal from the Lawndale Christian Reformed Church, which arose out of mission efforts among Chicago’s blacks. For five years the all-black congregation had tried unsuccessfully to enroll its children in Timothy Christian School in nearby Cicero. The board of Timothy had repeatedly refused admittance on the ground that racism in Cicero would bring violence on pupils and buildings. The church membership of board members—though not the board as such—is within the disciplinary jurisdiction of Classis Chicago North.

The 1970 decision that “failure to comply will cause Classis Chicago North to be considered in contempt of Synod and in open disregard of the judgment of the Church of Jesus Christ” was adopted by a 120-to-20 vote in a secret ballot. It came after four hours of discussion in which the delegates were warned that if black children enter Timothy Christian school in all-white Cicero “the people of Cicero will not hesitate to bomb it.”

The 148 delegates from the United States and Canada, meeting in Grand Rapids, Michigan, June 9–20, rejected a request that the denomination’s blanket exclusion of lodge members from church membership be altered to leave the question to the decision of each congregation. The Synod did recognize, however, that some of its longheld objections are no longer valid and appointed a study committee to formulate its anti-lodge position more adequately.

In a significant decision, approval was granted to the formation of a Calvin Graduate Studies Association, a corporation that will offer graduate degrees in various fields. Although independent, the Graduate Association will supplement denominationally owned Calvin College, which offers no advanced degrees.

Recognizing the realities of hom*osexuality, the Synod set up a committee to study the matter in an effort to help the church formulate a definitive position.

A request from a youth group of the church to address the Synod during its official sessions was rejected. The students in turn rejected the proffered permission to speak in the student commons to those delegates who cared to hear an after-dinner speech. It had been ruled that no delegate was obligated to remain to listen.

Through its fraternal delegate to the Synod, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church warned that its relationship to the CRC might break off if the CRC did not arrest its liberal tendencies. One such liberal tendency mentioned was the “propriety of even considering affiliation with the World Council of Churches.” The Synod expressed its own concern in a letter to its sister church, De Gereformeerde Kerken of the Netherlands, over that church’s easy tolerance of such views of Scripture as those taught by the Dutch theologian H. M. Kuitert. One delegate pointed out to the OPC fraternal delegate that the CRC also had its concerns and pleaded for OPC patience.

In other actions the Synod: elected the Reverend Henry De Mots of Chicago Synod president, denied candidacy to a Calvin Seminary graduate more for his Pentecostal views than for his practice of such views; chose the Reverend William P. Brink to succeed Dr. Ralph Danhof as stated clerk; and appointed Dr. Melvin Hugen of Honolulu to teach pastoral psychology at Calvin Seminary.

On the second time around, Dr. Dewey Hoitenga was appointed guest lecturer in ethics at Calvin Seminary. Hoitenga, a pacifist, is committed to the search for a Reformed peace witness.

JAMES DAANE

Paisley Does It Again

Of the forty candidates contesting the Northern Irish constituencies,” said a commentator just before Britain’s elections last month, “at least half have no business in the twentieth century, far less the House of Commons.” The electors of Antrim North made their own comment on that when Ian Paisley, Protestant Unionist, again beat the party machine and won the right to represent them in the Westminster parliament. His three colleagues (one each in Ulster, England, and Scotland) fared rather less well and averaged only 10 per cent of the poll.

When the result was announced, Paisley postponed the traditional courtesies to election officials by first giving thanks to Almighty God. At Westminster he will join the Roman Catholic Bernadette Devlin, who, to her own admitted surprise, was reelected for Mid Ulster with an increased majority. The confrontation was delayed when her appeal against a six-month jail sentence for her part in Londonderry riots was dismissed. Her imprisonment touched off a new wave of riots in Ulster.

Paisley’s triumph was only one in a night of surprises as votes were counted in the 630 seats. Opinion polls had given Conservative leader Edward Heath²Heath served as news editor of the Anglican Church Times in 1948–49. as little chance as they had given Harry Truman in 1948; sitting premier Harold Wilson, 55-year-old pipe-smoking Yorkshire economist, had romped jocularly through the campaign as though it were a formality.

Instead of a renewed mandate for Labour, however, voters gave the Conservatives a thirty-seat overall majority in the legislature. Ironically the last result, from the far-flung Western Isles of Scotland where Calvinism is still a formidable force, rejected both the incumbent who had served them for thirty-five years and his Tory opponent in favor of a Scottish Nationalist. In the lowlands a Free Kirk minister, representing the same party, achieved a mere 6 per cent of the votes.

Generally the small parties did badly. Liberals lost more than half their Commons members. Communist support, never great, continued to decline, and nowhere obtained more than ludicrous results; in what was formerly their most promising constituency (West Fife) their votes amounted to less than 3 per cent.

It was no night for independents either. Colin Jordan, leader of the Nazi-style British Movement, failed miserably in Birmingham. In a neighboring district a spinster lady with the label “Independent for Jesus and His Cross” did only fractionally better. Pop idol Screaming Lord Sutch, making his third attempt at a time when eighteen-year-olds had just been given the vote, gathered a paltry 142 votes.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Covenant Church: Smooth Sailing?

Sailing through volatile issues in a “very healthy interchange” among older and younger delegates, the Evangelical Covenant Church of America approved four resolutions on Christian social action and elected Dr. Lloyd C. Ahlem of Turlock, California, to the presidency of North Park College at its annual meeting there in Chicago.

Ahlem, head of the psychology department at Stanislaus State College, succeeds Dr. Karl A. Olsson, who resigned after 10 years as president to become director of leadership training for Faith at Work, in New York.

Representatives of the 68,000-member church issued two resolutions reaffirming their “anguish over the continuation and expansion of the war” in Indochina and encouraging “all belligerents” in it to conform to the Geneva agreements concerning prisoners of war.

The validity of both conscientious objection to war and conscientious objection to a particular war were upheld in a statement expressing support for any of its members who hold such convictions. The Reverend Clifford W. Bjorklund, secretary of the church, declared that this does not mean denominational approval of selective conscientious objection.

Two resolutions encouraging environmental stewardship and caution in the use of drugs and alcohol were adopted also.

In other decisions, a Sunday was set for an appeal for funds for black Covenant members, and 300 acres of land no longer being used were voted to be returned to Indians of the Thlinket village near Yukatat, Alaska. A program of combined evangelistic and social action was initiated, making September through December, 1970, a special period dedicated to emphasizing these concerns.

Southern Presbyterians: Cooler In Memphis

During the first business session of the 110th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S., the retiring moderator, Dr. R. Matthew Lynn of Midland, Texas, was given a gavel and plaque in recognition of his service. The plaque had been broken in shipment. “This,” teased the new moderator, Dr. William A. Benfield Jr. of Charleston, West Virginia, “is symbolic of the church you passed on to me.”

“I hope you have greater success than I did in putting the church back together,” Dr. Lynn responded.

Big “Benny” Benfield—he’s six feet four—apparently did. Unlike the 1969 assembly at Mobile, Alabama, where arguments got acrimonious, this year’s six-day meeting in Second Presbyterian Church, Memphis, Tennessee, was characterized by heated words but not by bitter feelings. “There is no yielding on the part of either wing of the church, but there is improved understanding,” conservative spokesman Dr. Robert Strong of Montgomery, Alabama, reflected after adjournment. And much of the credit goes to Benfield, commissioners of all camps agreed, for his fairness as presiding officer.

The issue to which many commissioners devoted round-the-clock attention up until the moment it was settled—for now—was a proposed restructuring of the church’s fifteen synods into eight larger synods. Most of the present synods are statewide governing units. By a vote of 213 to 203, after nearly three hours of debate, the assembly put off a decision on restructure until 1971.

So crucial was the issue that many ultra-conservatives had said they would start a withdrawal from the 953,000-member denomination if synod restructure was implemented this year.

Many saw the need for larger synod units for more effective operation of the church. The objection was to alleged inequities in the proposed plan that some opponents contended would strengthen the so-called liberal camp’s control of judicatories. For instance, the proposal would have given the 24,000 Southern Presbyterians in Missouri or the 32,000 in Kentucky more votes in the General Assembly than 42,000 in Alabama or South Carolina’s 71,000.

The assembly returned the restructuring matter to a special committee for “restudy in its entirety,” for further consultation with individuals, local congregations, presbyteries, and synods, and for resubmission to next year’s General Assembly at Massanetta Springs, Virginia.

Other issues that generated considerable debate were abortion and drinking.

“Willful termination of pregnancy by medical means on the considered decision of a pregnant woman may on occasion be morally justifiable,” the assembly decided. A paper prepared by the denomination’s Council on Church and Society noted, “There is no consensus in the Christian community about when human life begins,” and emphasized that the rights of the mother, her family, and society, as well as the rights of the fetus, should be considered in each case.

Possible justifying circ*mstances, the assembly said, would include the “socio-economic condition” of the family (which apparently meant a state of poverty in which another child would be a financial burden), medical indications of physical or mental deformity, conception as a result of rape or incest, and conditions under which the physical or mental health of either mother or child would be threatened. At one point, the “socio-economic” reason nearly was knocked out by the assembly.

High overhead a skywriter etched a pair of American flags against the bright blue heavens. Down below, a crowd was filing out of Shea Stadium, where Billy Graham’s five-day crusade had just ended. The aerial artistry provided one of several interesting sidelights during the evangelist’s return engagement in New York and offered an appropriate if unscheduled prelude to “Honor America Day.”

The crusade on the home field of the baseball Mets and football Jets came off without any disruptions. The only “dissent” came in a trickle of applause when Graham spoke of Woodstock and referred to the possibility of a marijuana “smoke-in.” Graham later suggested to newsmen that the reaction merely indicated that there were indeed young people in the audience who needed to be reached with the Gospel.

The crusade apparently attracted an even greater percentage of young people than Graham’s ten-day Madison Square Garden effort last year, when up to 70 per cent of the audience was under twenty-five. He attributes the increasing appeal to young people to their “vast and desperate search.” He says that today they are “more interested in religion, probably, than any generation in history.”

A total of about 137,000 heard Graham at Shea Stadium. Of these, some 6,000responded at the close of the services to make decisions for Christ. This is about the same ratio as last year, but more of those who responded this time were young people.

More black people also turned out last month than in 1969. Graham said that checks showed about one-fourth of the total audience was black.

As usual, Graham chose simple sermon themes. On the opening night he issued a national call to repentance. “I believe that we Americans have a choice to make,” he said. “I believe we’ve reached another point in the history of this nation where we’re going to have to choose. And the decision we make is going to decide whether we remain a free democratic society. Are we going to continue to serve the strange gods in our midst, the gods of sex, pleasure, materialism, drugs, these other gods to which we’re giving our allegiance instead of the true and living God?”

Graham came to New York well aware of the acute conditions¹Advertisem*nts for the New York State Lottery currently appeal to the problem syndrome, deceptively holding out the promise: “Hit it once and your troubles are over.” that plague the city’s eight million residents. He cited figures that show that in horse-and-buggy days traffic moved across Manhattan at eleven miles an hour, compared with seven now. He urged a change of heart as the initial step to social recovery, but added that the challenge does not end there. “You may have to help remove your neighbor’s garbage,” he said seriously.

Graham told reporters in a precrusade news conference that there were so many big ethnic blocs in New York that he was amazed that the city managed to live together under any kind of political leadership. (One psychological factor in the unity that does exist is probably the diversion provided by the city’s professional athletic teams. The day the crusade opened, the world champion Mets, after a slow start this year, seized the lead in the East Division of the National League.)

The June 24–28 crusade operated on a $500,000 budget. Some $140,000 had been left over from last year. The finance committee ran into a bit of a bind when a steady, drenching rain kept most people home one evening (some 7,200 did sit out a brief service). The committee had counted on a good offering that Friday night.

Four of the services were put on videotape in color and will be shown across North America in September.

Music for the crusade was provided by the Graham team regulars (soloist Bev Shea, pianist Tedd Smith, organist John Innes, and choir director-song-leader Cliff Barrows) plus a number of guests: Ethel Waters, Norma Zimmer, Myrtle Hall, and Anita Bryant. The choir numbered between 2,000 and 3,000 voices.

Graham appeared to be in full vigor and spoke easily and well. He said he is finding it easier to get his message across these days and suggested that the eagerness of today’s youth may have a lot to do with it. A young woman reporter asked the 51-year-old evangelist if he was letting his hair grow, and Graham said it was merely a matter of his not having seen his barber for a while. Before he left New York, however, a television makeup man sheared a few locks.

The opening service at Shea Stadium was plagued by the roar of jets taking off from nearby LaGuardia Airport. Thereafter, thanks to a change in the wind, they operated in the opposite direction and were not nearly so distracting. The noise of subway trains also was something of a problem in some parts of the stadium.

The local sponsoring committee had debated whether to rent Shea Stadium or go back to Madison Square Garden. Graham said afterward he was glad the committee agreed to go outside. Although the stadium, which could hold 60,000 or more, never was full, for four of the five services it did attract nearly twice as many people as the Garden can seat.

One enterprising group spotted an opportunity in the empty seats of the huge upper deck. They folded up particular seats whose colored undersides then spelled out “God Lives.”

The closing service included a minute of silent prayer for peace. All during the service a line was emblazoned across the bottom of the big stadium scoreboard: “Pray for Peace.”

Among dignitaries who sat on the platform during the last service was Marvin Watson, former U. S. Postmaster General and White House aide to then President Johnson. Graham also introduced Bill Brown, who has been the key team man on the New York scene for the past two years, and crusade chairman Fred Russell Esty. Esty, chairman of the United States Banknote Corporation, told the crowd that “during these past few days we have seen thousands respond to the invitation to receive Jesus Christ as their personal Saviour. For them it is just the first step toward a life filled with meaning and purpose. As individuals they can never be the same. The new life they live in Christ will affect their families, their churches, and their communities.”

Some 1,000 churches in the metropolitan area participated in the crusade, and according to Graham about 400 of these “worked real hard.” Hundreds of local ministers gave active support.

Several New York reporters questioned Graham about his association with President Nixon. One wondered whether the identification tended to hinder the evangelist’s efforts to reach youth, and Graham replied he did not think so. Another asked whether Nixon’s appearance on the program at Graham’s Knoxville crusade in May gave a “political tone” to the meetings. Graham declared “it would be tragic” if a president could not make a public appearance without its being considered political.

After the New York meetings Graham left for Washington to take part in this year’s special Independence Day celebrations in the capital, and from there he was to fly to Tokyo for the Baptist World Congress. The evangelist said he planned to take several speaking engagements on university campuses this fall, and vowed to preach the same message.

“I do not have any new message to bring,” he said. “The message of the Gospel is unchanging in any generation. And an evangelist especially is narrowed as to what he can say—very limited—because he’s limited to the proclamation of the Gospel … the kerygma, which is the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ and man’s response to the love of God. It has to be said in a thousand different ways and put in different contexts, but it’s still the same message.… Many people have said that this message is irrelevant and out of date, and yet thousands of people are coming.…”

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Extra Messages

An anti-abortion group distributed mimeographed literature outside Shea Stadium before the closing Sunday-afternoon service of Billy Graham’s New York crusade. The literature charged that the evangelist had “hedged” on the abortion issue. It said “the hour of decision is here” and called on him to “make a decision for Christ.” The group, which calls itself “Christians for Life,” cited Exodus 20:13; Job 31:15, and Luke 1:43 in support of its stand against abortion.

Graham had been asked about abortion at a news conference prior to the crusade. His reply was that he was against abortion except in cases of incest or rape, or where the life of the mother is in jeopardy.

A group of young hippie types passed out literature that urged support of the grape strike, but made no reference to Graham.

Blessitt Is The Cross-Bearer

“It blows people’s minds” to see someone carrying a six-by-ten-foot, eighty-pound cross through town, says the Reverend Arthur Blessitt. The young, mod minister to hippies on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip has been walking since Christmas—at a rate of one conversion per mile—to dramatize his burden for the nation’s spiritual needs.

The seven-month march will end this month in Washington, D. C. There Blessitt and the thousands of “concerned Christians” he expects to join him will march from the Washington Monument to the Capitol and back for twenty-four hours of prayer and fasting on the monument grounds, the scene of many recent demonstrations.

There will be no program, he says—“Christians have been programmed to death”—just prayer for national revival. Soon after noon on July 19, when the prayer day will end, Blessitt will lead a brief service to challenge Christians to “share Jesus” during an intensive, forty-day evangelistic effort.

Along the way, Blessitt has been holding evangelistic rallies and urging Christians to meet him at the monument—but not with empty hands. “Everyone comes to Washington wanting something,” he says; “Christians need to come and give something.” So he is asking Christians to bring—or send—two gifts for the nation’s needy. Those who reach the capital may find a bloodmobile available for a third gift.

Blessitt began walking against the advice of three doctors who said he’d never make it (he’d had four minor strokes in three years). When a fourth gave him a fifty-fifty chance and said the worst end would be death, Blessitt decided “that ain’t so bad” and set out.²His wife, with their three children (the youngest was six months old when they started), is driving a ’55 Ford pulling an Airstream trailer; four members of his rock group, the Eternal Rush, help carry the cross.

Blessitt’s ministry to young people at rock festivals (see December 19, 1969, issue, page 34), His Place (a “gospel nightclub” on the Strip), and halfway houses prompted his concern for their parents—“You gotta reach parents to catch the kids ahead of time”—and for national leaders. The government sets up committees to study national problems, Blessitt says, but their reports never offer the “solution found in changed men, new hearts, new birth.” He hopes his cross-country walk will publicize that solution.

JANET ROHLER GREISCH

Revolution In Korea

With about 20,000 new professions of faith made in three weeks, Dr. John Haggai’s speaking tour through Korea has earned its name of the “Seventh Decade Spiritual Revolution Crusade.” The Atlanta-based evangelist’s meetings drew a total of 270,000 persons, creating crowds too large to permit walking forward at the invitation. Instead, follow-up cards were distributed, resulting in an overflow of local churches. Seoul’s Yung Nak, largest Presbyterian Church in the world, reports more than 2,000 new members from the campaign.

University and college students were the most responsive in professions of faith, with over 13,000 of the decisions coming from a campus attendance of 88,000. Haggai spent a week each in Pusan, Taegu, and Seoul, ending June 14.

A Christian Passover

Most Christian evangelistic organizations readily admit that their outreach to Jewish people is sadly lacking. Beth Sar Shalom, a Hollywood, California, branch of the American Board of Missions to the Jews, has developed a fascinating new means of reaching Jews with the Gospel and also of showing Christians their Judaic heritage.

This new ministry is built upon observance of the traditional Jewish Passover service and is held in churches throughout the Los Angeles area. The Passover commemorates the night when the angel of death took the lives of all the first-born in Egypt, sparing only those households over whose doors the blood of a lamb had been sprinkled. The observance prefigured the ordinances of the Lord’s Supper.

Plotters In The Pews

After six nights of rioting in the University of California at Santa Barbara collegiate community of Isla Vista, two hundred angry student leaders and professors rallied in the United Methodist University Church to plot strategy for continuing their protest. Nearly three hundred dissidents had already been arrested after indictments against fifteen persons and two John Does for burning the Bank of America branch February 24 brought renewed fire-setting and rock-throwing antics.

Demonstrators accused police of brutality ranging from billy-clubbing to knocking down doors to appprehend curfew-violators. University Methodist pastor, the Reverend Dan Kennedy, said, “We’re getting documentation and I can tell you we’ve got plenty of lulus.…” Police officials claimed that only necessary force was being used to enforce the law.

The church sanctuary rally resulted in an overwhelming vote to defy the 7:30 P.M. curfew with a sit-in in Perfect Park, adjacent to the Bank of America building. That evening one thousand demonstrators taunted 300 khaki-clad law-enforcement officers surrounding the park and cheered as 375 protesters were escorted, dragged, or wrestled to buses bound for jail.

Aware of the presence of television and press representatives, the students yelled, “The whole world is watching!” Many made obviously phony grimaces of pain for cameramen as they were carried off, flashing the peace sign. “Make the World Safe for the Bank of America,” cried the crowd. They sang the theme from Marat/Sade, “We want our revolution and we want it now!”

The sheriff’s men methodically made arrests until darkness necessitated use of a tear-gas fogger to disperse the remaining activists and observers on the park’s fringe. A din of obscenities, a hail of three-inch white patio rocks, and a series of trash-can and automobile fires continued until roving patrols cleared the street by 11:30 P.M. A CHRISTIANITY TODAY reporter saw no improper conduct by law-enforcement officers during this particular four-hour confrontation.

ROBERT L. CLEATH

Scripture In Public Schools

Back to the Bible may be Washington’s answer to the rising crime rate. The District of Columbia school board is considering proposals for a “character-building” program to begin this fall. Teaching the Bible as literature in English courses and instituting an elective comparative-religion course are prominent parts of the package. The plan has a “very good chance” of passing, according to Director of Curriculum Mrs. LuVerne C. Walker.

“Our ideal heroes have been wrong—somehow we have to reverse this process,” states the Reverend Andrew J. Fowler, chairman of the Committee of 100 Ministers, which originated the proposals as part of an anti-crime campaign involving police, parents, churches, schools and news media. “Unless we can do that, they may as well stop talking about more police,” says Fowler. “We produce more criminals than the guards can arrest.”

Approval is certain for such aspects as studying the lives of “heroic individuals,” memorizing wholesome poems, using more religious music, and teaching “eight positive attitudes.” “We plan to revitalize and reactivate the character-building which is actually inherent in all parts of the curriculum,” affirms Mrs. Walker.

The textbook committee is expected to add The Bible Reader (Cromwell, Collier, and Macmillan, 1969) to its approved text list to increase use of the Bible in English courses. However, the comparative-religion course will be more difficult to adopt because of administrative and financial problems.

The D. C. drive is one of a number of efforts at teaching religion being explored across the nation. Extensive field testing of other programs will begin this fall in Pennsylvania and Florida, and a revised curriculum is already under way in Nebraska.

Senate chaplain Dr. Edward L. R. Elson observed, “My mail indicates a great host of people across the land are fed up with battles going to the minorities. They want a return to the theistic presuppositions on which they feel our country was founded.”

ANNE EGGEBROTEN

Oppression In Southern Africa

Lesotho, the small black nation (formerly known as Basutoland) within white-ruled South Africa, used to be a refuge for the suffering political and religious leaders of South Africa. Not any more. The politicians have been arrested and may soon be sent back to South Africa. And churchmen in Lesotho, whose populace of nearly a million is predominantly Christian, are no longer at ease.

Straining of church-state relations began early this year when Christian leaders strongly opposed the prime minister, Chief Leabua Jonathan, for seizing power. The chief had declared invalid the results of an election that favored the opposition. He also arrested the opposition leaders, put the king under restriction, declared a state of emergency, and suspended the constitution.

In mid-February, five men representing the Christian Council of Lesotho handed the chief a protest note, but also offered their services in bringing about reconciliation between him and King Moshoeshoe II. The chief flatly rejected the reconciliation plan. He promised, however, that the state of emergency would not last long and that the constitution would soon be restored.

But by Easter things seemed to have moved from bad to worse, and Christian leaders were ready for a more drastic step. A strongly worded statement, signed by Protestant and Catholic leaders, was to be broadcast over the government radio. The government refused. The statement was recently published by Seek, the house organ of the Anglican Church of South Africa.

After declaring that they represented “the great multitude of Christian believers in Lesotho,” the leaders said: “We feel the deepest pain and grief and have a sense of shame on account of all the forms of brutality and cruelty which in recent days have scarred the good name of our … nation.”

The statement continued: “We express what we believe to be the spirit of Christ, and the conscience, in Christ’s name, to bring to an end all such forms of cruel and violent handling of our fellow human beings.

“We beg all Christian people to pray earnestly that this will be done. And this we do solely in the name of him, our Saviour and Lord, who declared that the way we treat our fellow men is seen in his eyes as the way we are treating our Lord himself.”

ODHIAMBO W. OKITE

An Essay In Fantasy

When the book first appeared, many considered it an elaborate hoax, though it had come from one of Britain’s most respected religious publishers and had been serialized in the country’s largest-selling daily. Then a group of evangelicals threatened prosecution for blasphemy, the newspaper (probably under pressure) published a reply from a prominent critic, and the whole thing blew up.

The volume was The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, the author John Allegro—who until this year lectured in inter-testamental studies at Manchester University. He is a onetime Methodist lay preacher.

His latest thesis, which runs to 350 pages, is based on the assumption that Christianity was a colossal deception to hide from all but the elect few the erotic and narcotic mushroom cult. Veneration for Amanita muscaria in the ancient Near East, declares Allegro, was combined with phallic fertility rites, a point he pursues at inordinate length.

Leading linguists, historians, botanists, and other scholars have scoffed at the book, some calling it an “essay in fantasy.” Doubleday will introduce the book in America next month.

J. D. DOUGLAS

A Chaplain Resigns

Prayers were said last month in his former Church of England diocese of Southwell for the Right Reverend Gordon Savage, who resigned last Easter for health reasons. The bishop thereafter took up a one-year appointment as chaplain in Tenerife, Canary Islands, but controversy followed newspaper reports that accompanying him to Tenerife as housekeeper was Miss Amanda Lovejoy, 31, former topless dancer in a London club.

Bishop Savage flew home for several meetings with the archbishop of Canterbury, whose “pastoral advice” he had sought, at the same time protesting that it was an innocent friendship. He subsequently resigned his chaplaincy.

In a statement issued through his lawyers, Bishop Savage said that his choice as housekeeper of Miss Lovejoy, “with whom and with whose mother I had been closely acquainted for some years, appeared then, as it does now, to be a matter which was the private concern only of myself.” Bishop Savage, 55, is a former secretary of the strongly evangelical Church Society.

Roadside Murder

Early last month two men in civilian clothes and apparently under the influence of alcohol stopped a panel truck in Lucena City, Philippines and fatally wounded the 40-year-old missionary driving it. One of the assailants shot Nolan Willems in the abdomen for blocking his attempt to approach the two Filipino pastors riding with Willems.

The alleged assailants were later identified as the local police chief and a companion who fled after firing the fatal shot.

Willems and his wife had been missionaries in the Philippines with Far Eastern Gospel Crusade since 1961. He was a graduate of Wheaton College, with a degree in sociology, a member of Calvary Presbyterian Church in Fresno, California, and the father of four children.

“I have been everywhere for help and have found none. Now I have come to the church. If you can’t help me, I don’t know what I’ll do.” This was the plea uttered by the intoxicated man as he stood in the church office, his clothes wrinkled, his hair disheveled, his face revealing deep distress. The church did help him, and arranged to reunite him with his family. But too often the churches have shown a judgmental or condemning attitude and have closed their doors in the alcoholic’s face, pretending his problem was none of their business.

The American Medical Association has defined alcoholism as a disease, and no one who encounters a person with an advanced case of alcoholism can have any doubt that the person is sick—physically, psychologically, spiritually, socially, domestically. The Church has believed, since the time of the apostles, that Jesus came to make men whole. Certainly the alcoholic is in desperate need of that wholeness.

A simple working definition of an alcoholic is: a person who is dependent upon alcohol. Or to put it another way, he is a person who has lost control of his will in the matter of drinking. A non-alcoholic can choose not to drink; but for the alcoholic, it is not at all that easy.

Today we have an estimated 6½ million alcoholics in the United States, and alcoholism is one of the nation’s major health problems. I do not see how any church can any longer ignore it. It is high time that we look upon the alcoholic not as a hopeless problem but as a human being who is ill and treatable. He is not necessarily a moral delinquent.

When a man or woman who has failed in some other way turns to the church, usually that person is received with Christian love and forgiveness. Should not this same consideration be offered to the alcoholic? He desperately needs help, not condemnation. Love and understanding can help him; scolding only drives him further into his frustration.

According to information released at the Utah School of Alcohol Studies, 70 per cent of all victims of alcoholism seek help from clergymen. In dealing personally with an alcoholic, if the pastor does not feel qualified to give counsel, he can at least assure the person of God’s love and forgiveness and then refer him to other sources of help in the community.

A church can become involved in the work of local agencies that deal with education and information on the problems of alcohol and referral of people in need. Many churches support financially the program of the American Council on Alcohol Problems, which has state affiliates.

The church can help in other ways, too. It can furnish a meeting place for Alcoholics Anonymous and similar groups. It can accept alcoholics in worship services and fellowship groups, and place known alcoholics on the congregation’s responsibility and prayer lists. The use of Scripture can prove invaluable to both the alcoholics and those who attempt to help them. The church has a particular opportunity not always available to other helping agencies in that it can take the initiative in offering help to those in need.

After the church makes known its interest and offers help through counseling and referral, many people who need help and who otherwise would be very difficult to reach with the Christian message will come to the pastor’s study. Attention must first be given to the hurts and problems that led a person to seek help. Later the counselor can probably turn easily to spiritual matters and present the message and claims of Christ. I have seen two alcoholics enter the Christian ministry after they were helped and had committed their lives to Christ.

Help can come to the alcoholic through various religious approaches. One is the sudden confrontation with Christ resulting in conversion, which, of course, brings a definite change in life and attitude. When the power of Christ is brought to bear on a willing and ready heart, there is deliverance. Many churches, and all gospel missions, are able to cite examples of this deliverance. Another approach is a combination of applied Christianity and modern healing techniques. A third approach is through the self-help groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous. Another such group now being effectively used is Alcoholics Victorious, which deals not only with sobriety but also with spiritual growth. The home address of this Christian organization is 28 South Sangamon Street, Chicago, Illinois.

Every church library should have good books on alcoholism and methods of prevention and help. Examples are: Understanding and Counseling the Alcoholic, by Howard J. Clinebell, Jr. (Abingdon), Ministering to Alcoholics, by John E. Keller (Augsburg), Marty Mann’s New Primer on Alcoholism (Holt, Rinehart and Winston), Helping the Alcoholic and His Family, by Thomas J. Shipp (Prentice-Hall), and God Is for the Alcoholic, by Jerry G. Dunn (Moody). In a long-play record entitled “God Is Not Dead” (Word Records), Gertrude Behanna tells an exciting story of her deliverance from enslavement by alcohol. The credit she gives her Lord is refreshing and inspiring.

Each year there are summer schools on alcoholism to which a church may send its pastor or interested lay persons. Outstanding are: the Utah School of Alcohol Studies, held at the University of Utah; the Rutgers Summer School of Alcohol Studies (formerly the Yale School), held at the Rutgers campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey; and an International School held at the University of North Dakota. There are others; last summer there were three in North Carolina alone. Local councils on alcoholism will be glad to furnish information on educational opportunities like these. Information is available also from the National Council on Alcoholism (2 East 103rd Street, New York, N. Y. 10029) and the American Council on Alcohol Problems (119 Constitution Avenue Northeast, Washington, D. C. 20002).

Obviously, programs of prevention are also very important. Young people must be instructed about the dangers of alcohol.

A church that is spiritually alert and ready to meet its evangelistic responsibility will offer its love, understanding, facilities, and services to persons whose unmanageable desire for alcohol has enslaved them, and who cannot attain permanent sobriety by mere resolution. We would do well to follow the example and spirit of Jesus, who said: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me; he has sent me … to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free.”—CARLTON C. BUCK, pastor, First Christian Church, Eugene, Oregon.