Page 6153 – Christianity Today (2024)

Getting CHRISTIANITY TODAY to press on time with a content worthy of its almost quarter of a million press run is a precision effort. A skilled corps of evangelical writers, from Co-Editor Frank E. Gaebelein on down the ranks, fill editorial positions.

Readers will note the absence from the masthead of the name of Frank Farrell, who for seven years has ably covered conventions and edited the letters section. Almost every year his talents have been wanted elsewhere, and Washington weather (some foreign embassies call it a hardship area) entered into his decision to become adult editor for Gospel Light Publications in California. With him Dr. Farrell takes the best wishes and affection of the remaining staff. He will serve as our Los Angeles correspondent.

New on the masthead is the name of Richard N. Ostling. He will share coverage of outside events and backstop for News Editor David E. Kucharsky, whose UPI experience and sense of news values have given the church world a first-rate news section from which twenty or more radio programs borrow items fortnightly. Mr. Ostling holds the B.A. degree from the University of Michigan with high honors in journalism, and the M.S. from Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. He has gained valuable experience on the state desk of the News-Journal papers in Wilmington, Delaware.

It needs no proof that all the New Testament writers who refer to the subject regard the forgiveness of sins and the salvation of men as connected in quite a peculiar way with the death of Christ; and it is not less evident that they do this because they ascribe to Christ’s death a sacrificial and expiatory value. They do this further, as everyone must feel, not in a mere poetic and figurative way, but with the most intense conviction that they have really been redeemed and reconciled to God by the death of Christ upon the cross.

More important is the question whether Christ’s doctrine on this subject is the same as that of his apostles. We have a theology of propitiation in the Epistles—but have we anything in Christ’s own words?

Before there could be any preaching of an atonement, there must be an atonement to preach. I grant, however, that if the apostolic Gospel really represents the truth about Christ’s work, the facts of his early manifestation ought to bear this out. Taking the testimony of the Gospels as a whole, I think it is exceedingly strong. It is remarkable that in the Gospel of John, the most spiritual of the four, we have both the earliest and the clearest statements of the fact that Christ’s death stood in direct relation to the salvation of the world. I refer to such passages as the Baptist’s utterance, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29, Marg. in RV, “beareth the sin”); Christ’s words to Nicodemus, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:15), etc.; and the sayings in chapter 6 about giving his flesh for the life of the world (verses 51–56). In the Synoptic Gospels, we have many utterances declaring the necessity of his death, and such a saying throwing light upon its character as, “For verily the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45, RV). But the clearest expression of all prior to his death is his solemn utterance at the institution of the supper, when, taking the sacramental bread and wine, he said, “This is my body; this is my blood of the Covenant, which is shed for many, unto remission of sins” (Matt. 26:26, 28, RV). To this must be added the instruction which the disciples are recorded to have received after the Resurrection. At a meeting with the eleven, he said, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer, and rise again from the dead on the third day; and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name unto all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem” (Luke 24:44–47).

The apostolic Church, therefore, was not left without guidance in its construction of the doctrine of redemption, any more than in its construction of the doctrine of Christ’s person. It had various groups of facts to lead it to a conclusion.

1. It had the objective facts themselves of Christ’s death, resurrection, and subsequent exaltation to heaven. Holding fast as it did to the Messiahship and divine Sonship of Jesus, it could not but find the death of Christ a dark and perplexing problem, till it grasped the solution in the thought of a divine necessity for that death for the accomplishment of the messianic salvation. With this had to be taken the fact of Christ’s own command, that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name to all nations.

2. There were the sayings of Christ, above referred to, which threw light upon the meaning and necessity of his sufferings and death. These, in the new illumination of the Spirit, would be earnestly pondered, and are sufficient to explain all the forms in which Christ’s death came to be regarded by them.

3. There was an earlier revelation with which the new economy stood in the closest relations, and to which Christ himself had directed his disciples for instruction regarding himself. In many ways also this old covenant aided them to a fuller comprehension of the meaning of the sufferings and death of Christ.

a. There were the prophecies of the Old Testament—foremost among them that wonderful prophecy of the Servant of Jehovah in Isaiah 53, to whose undeserved sufferings, lovingly and submissively borne, an expiatory virtue is expressly ascribed.

b. There was the work of the law in men’s hearts, begetting in them the sense of sin, and, in virtue of its propaedeutic character, creating the deep feeling of the need of redemption. It is with this consciousness of the want of righteousness wrought by the law, and the consequent feeling of the need of redemption, that Paul’s doctrine specially connects itself.

c. There was the sacrificial system of the Old Testament. This was the remaining key in the hands of the early Church to unlock the significance of Christ’s death. If the law created the sense of sin, it was the sacrificial system which created the idea of atonement. This, in turn, is the thought to which the Epistle to the Hebrews specially attaches itself. When, therefore, exception is taken to the apostles casting their ideas into the molds of Jewish sacrificial conceptions, we have rather to ask whether the economy of sacrifice was not divinely prepared for this very end, that it might foreshadow the one and true Sacrifice by which the sin of the world is taken away.—JAMES ORR (The Christian View of God and the World).

Is creation a “relationship” or an “event”?… Reflections on science and faith.

CONSCIENCE CONSERVATIVE

After a lifetime of enthusiastic effort, I still have some serious flaws in my infield technique. At third base I move very badly to the left because I cross my right foot over instead of starting out with the left. At shortstop I have a tendency to back up on my heels instead of charging forward on my toes (it’s safer that way). I have a bad pivot at second base on double plays, and at first I am always catching low balls with the palm of my hand instead of in the pocket.

It must be this sort of thing that keeps me from being an expert on shaving. Kubek trots in from shortstop, and first thing you know he is shaving. Callison takes one off the wall with his bare hand, and the first thing you know he is shaving. It must be because I play ball so badly that I never quite get the hang of putting that shaving soap on and taking so much off with the first stroke of the razor. The other thing that puzzles me about ball players is that they always have two days’ growth of beard every day. The manly type, no doubt.

Would you believe that I am still using a shaving mug with a brush? This isn’t because I don’t like to squirt the cream out of the end of a can, although sometimes this can be confusing, and it isn’t because I am not in favor of the new over the old. It just so happens that the shaving brush and mug have all kinds of advantages over the shaver. Even after all my conditioning by television hucksters, I still think it’s nice to rattle the shaving brush around the mug (a nice homey sound, like that of our college cook scraping toast before breakfast), while other men are running out in front with the latest gadget.

Well, that’s the way I am, even in theology. I get the impression that we throw away some awfully good things because we are overly impressed by the new ones.

THE WORDS OF CREATION

As reported in the August 27 issue (News), the Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship at a recent meeting reached a consensus that “creation” is to be thought of as “a relationship rather than a past event.” This overlooks the data of the biblical terminology. The noun “creation” is formed from the verb “create,” which in turn is a translation of the Hebrew verb bara. To affirm that this means a relationship rather than an event is both linguistically and theologically incorrect—linguistically because it misses the meaning of bara, and theologically because it confounds creation and providence.

The verb bara occurs only fifty-five times in the Hebrew Old Testament. It designates an act of God which originates that which is truly new—new as to form, new as to matter, or new as to both form and matter. The ordinary word for “make” in the Old Testament is asah, which occurs over 2,600 times, and describes God’s providential working which operates through second causes or forces of nature and produces changes without originating anything truly new. Bara, accordingly, is used for God’s creative acts in distinction from his providential working.

The Bible in Genesis 1 and 2 marks off creation from providence by a clear line (2:3). In later times, it is true, the creative power of God was sometimes exerted in miracles. The verb asah occurs ten times in Genesis 1 and 2, where it is used either to describe a providential dealing of God with that which had already been created, or in connection with bara, which qualifies the meaning and renders it specific in the sense of origination of the truly new.

To say that creation is a relationship, not an event, is to assume that the origin of nature can be understood in terms of the functioning of nature—really, it is to beg the question of origins. The origin of the universe, of life, and of mankind must be conceived in terms of event, not merely in terms of relationship. Otherwise the relationship is left without a beginning, and must have been eternal. And this drives us straight to philosophical pantheism.

“Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Heb. 11:3). Can this verse really be speaking of a relationship instead of an event? Does this verse not effectively affirm that the functioning of nature can never explain the origin of nature? Are we really ready to degrade God’s work of creation to a form of his work of providence?

Geneva College

Beaver Falls, Pa.

The very issue of your magazine (Aug. 27) which contains numerous articles lamenting the failure of Christianity to speak to and be accepted by our contemporary world contains numerous examples of why this is so. I refer, for instance, to the almost incredible remarks of Dr. Robert Cameron on how Christ gives the up-to-date answers to our problems. “He is the answer to the population explosion—‘Man does not live by bread alone,’ and ‘Behold, I come quickly.’”

Is this what Christianity says to the starving billions?—“Remember, my hungry fellow, your spirit is the important thing, and anyway Christ will return soon to put you out of your misery.” Or on sex, “… in Christ there is neither … male nor female.…” That’s very fine, but we still have males and females most other places, and I doubt if we are ready to ignore the difference.

Nonsense in Jesus’ name is still nonsense.

First Presybterian

Pitman, N. J.

The issue dated August 27 was one of the best ones that has ever come off the press.

The article, “Science and Faith,” and related items have thrilled me very much and increased my faith not only in God but also in mankind and in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, to whom we owe our very existence in the spiritual world and our material possessions.…

[The articles] are something that has not been in print and are written in such a way that the average layman can understand them.…

Dothan, Ala.

A. F. POWLEDGE, SR.

LOS ANGELES

We have a significant new symbol for understanding our differences within Christendom … in the recent Los Angeles riot. Commenting on the riots, the Rev. Dr. Billy Graham said we could be rather sure their meaning was in their being Communist-inspired and directed: such were his broadcasted remarks. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., drew a different meaning from the riots: namely, that they point to our society’s failure to draw the Negro minority into the mainstream of our cultural and economic life.

We have another symbol, then, to help us decide what will motivate us as Christians in 1965: fear of the spread of Communism, or a united determination to eliminate the diseases of prejudice and discrimination that infect our society.

Trinity Church

Boston, Mass.

CREED HOMEWORK

Addision Leitch in the August 27 issue is certainly right. Even had we been doing our homework on creeds and their place in the Reformed tradition (which we have not) we scarcely have time to give proper consideration to the Confession of 1967, though I believe we must venture such.…

We just have not been doing our homework in the parishes. But the answer is not to say that Westminster is good enough in all respects for us to confess a living faith. That has yet to be shown. And to do so means to interpret it for today in such a way that all that we have learned of biblical theology and the Church and mission can be said using the same formulas.

Until someone does this who is against any contemporary statement, I can only attribute to them laziness or cowardice.

Saint Andrew Presbyterian Church

Iowa City, Iowa

SIN OF MISSION OMISSION?

In the August 27 issue (“Mission or Omission?”) you presented a very glib, off-the-cuff summary of the current study of many churches in this country.

May I suggest that you do not dismiss this study as “slogans” and “clichés” without a little deeper research. I refer you to the Study/Action Manual by Edward Adkins, specifically the introduction and explanation of the differing emphases from those which have produced little real growth among Christians in the past twenty years, and to a statement on page 14: “A church member can better understand the church’s mission in the world when he recognizes his own share in it.” There has been no diminution in the study of missions but a shift in emphasis to the relevant; if Christianity makes no difference to a man “where he lives,” it will make no witness to anyone, even from the man in the pulpit.

Denton, Tex.

OBEDIENCE IN GERMANY

With great interest and joyous agreement I read the article “Faith with Obedience” by L. Nelson Bell (July 30 issue). It seems to me that Christianity in Germany is lacking personal initiative and dedication, because obedience has not been stressed in the pulpit for decades in fear of minimizing God’s grace. The endeavor to emphasize the importance of obedience in a Christian’s relationship to Christ is not seldom branded as “perfectionism” in this country.

The Apostle Paul considered it his main mission “to bring about the obedience of faith among all … for his name’s sake” (Romans 1:5; 16:26). Christianity today needs the combination of faith and obedience, if it is to fulfill its God-given mission.

Gemeinde Christi

(Church of Christ)

Munich-Laim, Germany

THE GAMUT

Your magazine is still the best in its field. You fill it with material that runs the gamut from deep theology to everyday thinking—and all with a clear, evangelical approach.

First Southern Baptist Church

Ontario, Calif.

Unity without uniformity: this is one of the keynotes of the Principles of Union, now published, by which it is proposed that any scheme for uniting the Anglican Church of Canada and the United Church of Canada should be governed. It is undoubtedly an important keynote. The present document sets forth “basic principles and not final expressions of doctrine or details of organization and liturgy.” Its terms represent the “full and unanimous agreement” of the two committees concerned.

The principles propounded fall into two categories: first, those relating to faith and order; and, secondly, those relating to organizational union. The former of these is divided into sections on the faith, the church, the sacraments, and the ministry. If a certain embarrassment is evident in what is said of the Bible, so that an impression of ambiguity is conveyed, what is in fact said might well have been worse. Thus the Holy Scriptures are accepted as “the faithful witness of God’s self-revelation and his mighty acts.” Further: “Through the Bible, as the record of the prophetic witness to the word of God and the apostolic witness to Jesus Christ, the Word of God Incarnate, the church hears that living Word and receives it [what is the antecedent of this pronoun?] as the supreme rule of faith through which its life, teaching, and worship are to be tested and renewed.”

From the ancient Church the Apostles’ Creed is gratefully received, together with “the ecumenical statements of faith” (presumably the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds; the failure to be specific is unsatisfactory in a document of this nature). Moving on to more modern formularies, “the witness borne to the Catholic faith by those articles of doctrine and forms of common worship which have been authorized in our separate churches and used by God as means of grace” is gratefully acknowledged. The proviso is added that such formulation must be “always in essential agreement with the Word of God received in Holy Scripture and witnessed by the creeds of the Ancient Church, of which agreement the church shall be sole judge.”

There is a danger here of introducing a double standard: Scripture plus the ancient Church; whereas classical Anglicanism knows only one standard, that of the Holy Scriptures (cf. the Thirty-nine Articles throughout), and approves the creeds of the ancient Church precisely because “they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture” (Article 8). Furthermore, setting up the Church as the sole judge introduces yet another standard, that of the modern Church. And in this connection what exactly is meant by “the church”: the bishops? the clerics? the majority vote? History, ancient and modern, supplies abundant evidence of the basic unreliability of any such standard, however interpreted. In any case, the lack of precision here is a serious defect.

In the section on the Church, emphasis is placed on the visibility of the Christian fellowship. It is an impoverishment of perspective to overlook the invisibility of the Church—by which is meant that there are tares among the wheat and that both grow together until the harvest, when God, who alone can infallibly separate between the genuine and the spurious, will make the ultimate distinction. Thus the otherwise admirable definition of the Church as “the Body of Christ, in which the members are united with Him and with one another in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, in which the Gospel is preached and the Sacraments are administered,” could be improved by greater explicitness, for the first part would fit the Church in its invisible aspect and the second part the Church in its visible aspect. The unsatisfactory nature of the statement that “those are members of the Church who have been baptized with water in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” is obvious. It could be simply remedied, however, by adding the adjective “visible” before the noun “Church.” Entirely commendable is the explanation of the apos-tolicity of the Church as its “continuing in the apostles’ doctrine and mission.”

The section on the sacraments is confused and lacking in coherence. It is certainly true that the sacraments “are primarily concerned, not with what men do, but with what God does and has already done.” If, as stated, repentence and faith are the requirements for baptism, and grace is prior to the sacraments (as implied in the quotation given in the previous sentence), in what way is it possible to describe baptism as a sacrament “whereby we are made children of grace,” etc., except in an external and ceremonial sense, which, however, is hardly consistent with the terms used of its effect. It would seem, rather, to make baptism prior to grace. The significance of the sacraments as means of grace needs more careful definition.

Again, what are we to understand by the assertion that in the Holy Communion we “set forth and represent” Christ’s sacrifice to the Father? Does it mean that this sacrament is a reminder to God, as though he might be forgetful and needs to be confronted with the dramatic spectacle of the Eucharist? Or does it mean that at the Eucharist Christ’s sacrifice is reoffered (represented)? And does not talk of our offering ourselves to God “in union with the self-offering of Christ” suggest a quite illegitimate association of those whom Christ came to save with his unique, once-for-all sacrifice of himself on the Cross? Is this language designed to leave the door open for sacerdotalism and eucharistic sacrifice? Its effect is to reverse the proper movement of the Eucharist, which is from God to man. Our self-offering, as the New Testament makes plain, is in response to, not in union with, the self-offering of Christ.

There is agreement that, when union is achieved, the threefold ministry of bishops, presbyters, and deacons shall be adopted “in some constitutional form,” which is fair enough; but agreement seems to be altogether lacking when it comes to deciding what it is that constitutes a valid ministry. There will, accordingly, be need to define precisely what is implied or intended by the act of unification of ministries which is envisaged. The lesson can at least be learned from the negotiations between the Church of England and the Scottish and Methodist churches that any suggestion of the validation of previously inadequate ministries or of the conferring of priesthood through the imposition of a bishop’s hands will hinder, not promote, the realization of union.

In this respect the Church of South India has given a lead that others should follow. While adopting the pattern of the threefold ministry, the ministers of the uniting churches were accepted as they were, without any camouflage of reconciliation or validation or reordination. It is a shameful thing that to this day Anglicanism has refused to enter into a relationship of full communion with the Church of South India.

With only one out of 400 delegates expressing public dissent, the twenty-second General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada approved in principle a merger with the United Church of Canada.

The action was taken at a joint session of both houses of the synod at Vancouver, British Columbia, and represents the culmination of twenty-two years of on-again, off-again negotiations. The action was in the form of resolutions approving a report from unity committees of both denominations. Anglicans in Canada now claim 1.3 million members and the United Church, itself the result of a 1925 merger of Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, counts about 2.6 million members.

The principles now go to the General Council of the United Church for consideration. Approval is expected at its next meeting, scheduled for September of 1966 in Waterloo, Ontario. The actual merger of the two denominations may take five or ten years or longer.

Anglican synod approval came after only a brief flurry of discussion. The lone dissent came from a lay delegate, Derek R. C. Bedson of Winnipeg, former private secretary to Conservative Party leader John Diefenbaker and now secretary to Manitoba Premier Duff Roblin. Bedson said he regretted that laymen across the country had not had more time to study the report. He charged that the union proposal had been handled with too much haste, inasmuch as the committee report was made public only last spring.

“This haste has left the impression, among many Anglicans in Canada, that some things are being done in haste and secrecy,” he said.

On the problem of apostolic succession, the merger statement asserts:

“We agree that orderly transmission of authority in ordination is a normal part of the means by which the church is kept from generation to generation. Some of us believe an unbroken succession of episcopal ordination from the apostles is a necessary guarantee of a valid ministry. Others of us, holding that there is no distinction in Scripture between the offices of bishop and presbyter, believe that the continuance of a succession of presbyterial ordination is sufficient.… But we are all agreed that in a united church there must be a ministry accepted and acknowledged by all.”

Another far-reaching decision made by the synod was approval of a new canon which for the first time allows exceptions to the church’s refusal to remarry divorced persons. One observer called it “a triumph of theology over law.” Legal advisers argued that the synod had no right to vote on the canon because it contained matters of church doctrine that could be decided only by bishops.

A series of constitutional changes enacted by the delegates broadened electoral procedures so that the whole synod will now elect the primate instead of the House of Bishops and an electoral college. The membership of the lower house was reduced from 314 to 222.

The executive officer of the Anglican communion, Bishop R. S. Dean, warned delegates that its two-year-old world mission manifesto is in danger of reaching “an impossible impasse.” He called for more study of the meaning of the mutuality implicit in the program, officially entitled “Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ,” which was undertaken by the nineteen autonomous church bodies in the Anglican communion at Toronto in 1963. Archbishop Howard H. Clark, Anglican primate of Canada, drew laughter when he related that the Church of England, finding the document’s title cumbersome, decided to replace it with “No Small Change.” But “nobody seemed to know it was also the name of a commercial diaper service in Birmingham.”

In Des Moines, the general superintendent of the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination issued an appeal for ministerial recruits in the face of declining Bible college enrollment. The Rev. Thomas F. Zimmerman told the thirty-first biennial business convention of the Assemblies of God that the number of students enrolled in Assemblies of God ministerial training colleges had dropped from 2,400 in 1956 to 2,200 last year. Zimmerman said that the General Presbytery had voted an outlay of $25,000 for a student revolving loan fund to encourage the financially needy.

A resolution bidding the 550,000 members of the Assemblies of God “to discourage unfair and discriminatory practices” was adopted by delegates. “The teachings of Christ are violated by discriminatory practices against racial minorities,” it stated. “The transformation of mankind through faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ breaks down prejudice and causes justice to prevail.” The resolution affirmed “our belief in the teachings of Christ, including His emphasis upon the inherent worth and intrinsic value of every man, regardless of race, class, creed or color.”

At Alfred, New York, at the 153rd annual session of the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference, a unanimous vote ratified a constitution for the new Seventh Day Baptist World Federation. The federation will come into official existence when four national conferences ratify it.

Protestant Panorama

A plan was unveiled last month to coordinate the missionary work of twelve national Baptist bodies around the world. It will establish a Baptist Council on Cooperation in World Mission and will become operative when seven of the national bodies approve its constitution.

The United Church of Christ began an experimental newspaper advertising program in the Washington, D. C., area this month. Local churches will split the cost with the coordinating denominational agency.

Miscellany

The Episcopal House of Bishops refused this month to consider heresy charges against its most flamboyant member, Bishop James A. Pike of California. The house approved a committee report on Pike which observed that “individual speculations are just that.” Pike’s tactful reply declared, “If my witness has made your task more complicated, I am truly sorry.”

Ground was broken last month for a new Protestant church in the Laotian capital of Vientiane. It will replace a thirty-year-old chapel which has been outgrown. Construction costs will be borne largely by the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

Ecumenical services marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the world-renowned Protestant monastic community at Taizé, France. Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic observers were on hand. Among messages of good will received was one from Pope Paul VI.

Eighteen young people made initial professions of faith in Christ at summer camps sponsored by Yugoslav Baptists on the northern Adriatic coast. Tents were set up in a wooded area, and services were held morning and evening, with afternoons free for recreation.

Orthodox Jewish zealots stepped up their campaign of harassment against Christians in Israel last month. In Ashdod, a city of 30,000, zealots broke into the home of a local Christian leader and forced him to reveal the whereabouts of two young women converts who had fled to Jerusalem after being beaten by their parents. Earlier in August, mobs staged similar attacks in Haifa.

At least four Christian civilians were killed and two Protestant churches were destroyed in the crossfire of the Vietnamese war last month. The heaviest loss came in a battle between U. S. Marines and the Viet Cong about ten miles south of a new airstrip at Chu Lai.

Pocket Testament League is reportedly seeking permission to take at least 10,000 Russian-language New Testaments behind the Iron Curtain. One source said “there has been some indication on the part of officials that this may be possible.” A PTL spokesman, however, refused to give any details.

The Ecumenical Commission of the Standing Conference of Orthodox Bishops of the Americas and the Roman Catholic Bishops’ Commission for Ecumenical Affairs held exploratory talks this month in Worcester, Massachusetts. It was the first such discussions between the two church bodies on a national scale in the United States.

New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary fared better than much of the city when Hurricane. Betsy struck. The chapel steeple and roofs were damaged and power cut off. Classes were suspended temporarily.

Personalia

Bishop Odd Hagen of Stockholm was elected to a five-year term as president of the World Methodist Council. The term will begin August 25, 1966.

Dr. Earl D. Radmacher was elected president of Western Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary.

R. Orin Cornett, former executive secretary of the Southern Baptist Education Commission, was named vice-president of Gal-laudet College.

Arthur LeRoy Schultz, an ordained clergyman of the Evangelical United Brethren Church, assumed the presidency of Otter-bein College this month.

Elmer Engstrom, noted Protestant layman and a member of the board of directors of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, was named chief executive officer of the Radio Corporation of America, succeeding General David Sarnoff.

Robert MacKenzie, 26, former chairman of the music department at Shelton College, is the new general manager and assistant conductor of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra.

The Rev. Alton L. Wheeler was elected general secretary of the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference. The Rev. Marion C. Van Horn was elected president.

Vatican Radio reported last month that Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras of Istanbul had named two delegate-observers to the fourth session of the Second Vatican Council. They were identified as Metropolitan Emilianos, the patriarchate’s representative to the World Council of Churches, and Archimandrite Miximos, rector of the Greek Orthodox church in Rome.

A faith healer as college creator? Incon-gruous as it seems, Oral Roberts has planted a $12.2 million campus on Oklahoma’s soil, from which he grew forty-seven years ago. The last fifty years have produced no major Christian university in America, but E. T. Dunlap, head of the Oklahoma state college regents, predicts this venture “will ultimately be one of the leading universities of the Southwest.”

Oral Roberts University is starting with a big bang. As one professor wrote, “It’s too late to start with a few simple facilities and tools and over tortuous years gradually to acquire the basic necessities.…” So on opening day, September 7, the campus inventory included: 420 acres south of Tulsa, some chewed up in anticipation of new buildings; six buildings, three complete, three not; 30,000 books; thirty-eight staff members who hold fourteen earned doctorates; 325 freshmen; and twenty-seven graduate students in Oklahoma’s second theological school (the first is at Phillips University in Enid).

Faculty salaries are comfortable, ranging from $7,500 to $14,000. The well-dressed students, two-thirds of them men, are select and averaged 1,100 out of a maximum 1,600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Kind words have come down from the regional accrediting agency. Several schools, including the University of Minnesota, have decided to accept transfer credits. The U. S. Office of Education has approved $5 million worth of aid.

It’s all incredible to millions who see the shirt-sleeved Roberts enacting his dramatized, televised, big-tent brand of healing evangelism. Dapper and quiet-spoken on his campus, Roberts is still an evangelist most of the time. He interrupted a San Fernando Valley crusade just one day to fly back to campus during opening week.

In effect, he has turned education over to the educators: Dr. John D. Messick, the executive vice-president, former president of East Carolina College, and Dr. Raymond O. Corvin, graduate school dean, who dreamed of such a university with Roberts thirty years ago.

Their university is pioneering all over the place. The pace is set by 1975ish buildings in which architect Frank Wallace, 41, combines starkly contrasting colors and unexpected shapes to produce a kind of permanent World’s Fair.

By next term, the school will boast America’s first electronic “Learning Resources Center.” For $750,000, ORU is buying 150 individual push-button information consoles, similar equipment for every classroom, and necessary production facilities. The goal is a complex blend of sight and sound materials, custom-made to enrich classes and meet study needs of individuals.

The college desires an intellectual openness, in contrast to some schools that share its dedication to evangelical Christianity. Free inquiry is encouraged, and no statement of faith is required of students. “This is a university, not a Bible school,” Roberts says. Three Bible courses will be part of a liberal arts curriculum otherwise identical with that of secular schools. The college will “steer away from cold-blooded legalism,” Corvin adds.

The “don’ts” are cheating, profanity, drinking, and smoking, but the last two bans are justified as health measures. This health aspect is a special emphasis under Roberts’ reigning philosophy of creating “the whole man.” Based on the example of the only “completely whole man,” Jesus, it calls for development and fusion of mind, spirit, and body. Exercise will be required of everybody, including teachers.

How about healing? Corvin says, “All healing is divine, whether through the laws of nature, good health habits, medical science, or miracles.” All will be part of student health, he says, applied on a personal basis. There will be no mass healing meetings.

At the opening-day communion service, the murmur of tongues-speaking identified the university as one with marked Pente-costalist flavor. As such, it dramatizes new intellectual aspirations among some Pente-costalists. The stress is on charismatic gifts, not denominational ties. The faculty (70 per cent from non-Pentecostal churches) must either have experienced “Pentecostal Baptism in the Holy Spirit” and speaking in foreign tongues or be “generally compatible” with this approach.

The boldness of ORU is matched by a contagious optimism. Messick, in his quiet style, claims that “our education this year will be as good as a freshman will find anywhere.” Roberts told students on opening day: “I think you can emerge as the world’s most wanted college graduates.” He said they can offer employers “a healthy body that you know how to take care of, a trained and disciplined mind that never settles for less than excellence, governed by an invincible spirit of integrity, inspired by a personal relationship with a living God, and driven by an irresistible desire to be a whole man to make a troubled world whole again!”

Denver Crusade

When Billy Graham arrived in Denver to launch his Colorado crusade, he addressed 550 ministers and told them to “preach with simplicity, preach with authority, and preach with urgency.”

Then for ten days the evangelist practiced his own preaching—and more than 10,000 Coloradoans responded to his call to receive Christ.

In many ways it was a remarkable crusade. The ten meetings—held in Bears Stadium—drew a total attendance of 277,300, nearly twice as many as the baseball team that normally occupies the stadium drew during the entire season.

Three of the crusade meetings were taped for showing on nationwide television the following week. This second television crusade this year—the first was in June from Honolulu, Hawaii—was to be seen on nearly 300 stations across the country. It was one of the largest independent networks ever put together for any event other than a presidential news conference or a national emergency.

W. STANLEY MOONEYHAM

He Never Felt Better

“Ah! I saw Old Nick grinning on the ivied rock as I dragged such a one along the dell.” The speaker was Marshall Howe, who in 1665 had made himself responsible for the disposal of the bodies of kinless plague victims in the little village of Eyam, 160 miles north of London. In the churchyard can still be seen a stone with the inscription, “He stood between the living and the dead, and the plague was stayed.” This memorial is not to the emergency gravedigger but to Thomas Stanley, nonconformist minister and former incumbent, who worked faithfully with his successor at the rectory, 28-year-old William Mompesson, during the outbreak. By the end of the epidemic, which lasted more than a year, the 350 inhabitants were reduced to 91.

The dread disease arrived in the summer from London, in tailor’s samples and old clothing sent to Edward Cooper, trader. The package was opened by George Vicars, who found the contents damp and put them in front of the fire to dry. He quickly became ill and was dead within days. The scourge soon took hold of the community. There being no resident doctor, it was left to the rector, his wife Catherine, and Stanley to take the lead in the crisis. They persuaded the inhabitants to remain in the village to prevent the spread of infection.

The death rate rose so high that corpses were interred without ceremony, usually by the surviving relations. When the churchyard was full, graves were dug in fields and gardens.

In a dell (probably the one referred to by Howe) the faithful gathered to worship, sitting at a respectful distance from one another. William Mompesson preached from an improvised pulpit on ivy-covered rocks forming a natural arch. Although Catherine succumbed, her husband and Stanley survived. Mompesson was able to write later, “During this dreadful visitation I have not had the least symptom of disease, nor had I ever better health.”

At an open-air service last month, the Archbishop of York, Dr. Donald Coggan, addressed a commemorative congregation of 3,000, including Eyamites in seventeenth-century costume. Recalling the events of 1665, His Grace spoke of modern plagues, mentioning unofficial strikes, indecision, and shoddy thinking. “At the heart of men,” he said, “there is an inner selfishness which acts as a rot in society and in our relations to one another.”

VICTOR PRICE

For America’s Christian colleges, status quo is not 1965’s slogan. The babies of the “boom” are laying siege at admissions offices. Uncle Sam is preparing yet more millions in college aid. Long-cherished academic patterns are facing harsh searchlights.

The 1965 Christian college landscape includes the ultra-modern lines of Oral Roberts University (see story on page 47), but Upland College in California is dead, and New Jersey’s Shelton College may be dying.

There are hybrids: Azusa Pacific College, merging Los Angeles Pacific and Azusa College; the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, from two Lutheran seminaries of different denominations.

Independent Bible colleges still dot the continent, from the tropical campus of Miami Bible College to the near-wilderness outpost of Sexsmith, Alberta, where the Peace River Bible Institute survives cold and isolation. But the trend is toward a broadening curriculum (the Assemblies of God decided August 30 to call their Central Bible Institute in Springfield, Missouri, a “college,” in line with an expanding liberal arts program), and Bible labels seem to be out of vogue (latest defector: the Disciples’ College of the Bible in Lexington, Kentucky, which opens this fall as Lexington Theological Seminary).

Even the grand old lady, Chicago’s tuitionless Moody Bible Institute, has joined the self-examination corps. For two years the staff has mulled its destination, polling both alumni and students for ideas. This month, what is described officially as “an innovation” will be proposed to the board. If approved, it will be carried out next year.

Most unusual program change this fall is Northwestern College’s “quinary calendar.” The Minneapolis school now parcels its year into five eight-week terms. Students will take two or three courses at a time and graduate after three years. Electives are being weeded out in an “economy and efficiency” drive.

Wheaton College in Illinois plans similar but less extreme consolidation. It is limiting students to four courses (except in music and graduate work) and counteracting the “natural proliferation” of specialized elective courses, reports Dr. Hudson T. Armerding, installed as president earlier this year.

Wheaton’s sagging summer school turnout spurred a special study to be completed by January. Calendar and other revisions could result. In 1963, the college had 1,059 students (cumulative) for two short summer terms. The 1965 figure was 753. Expanding summer offerings at other Chicago area campuses make “competition three times as keen,” Armerding said.

Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, also expects to install a three- or four-course plan, under a quarterly calendar, probably by fall of 1966. Also on tap are team teaching (several teachers lecturing in one course), honors and individual study, and emphasis on study abroad. Unlike Northwestern, Westmont hopes to reduce the general education requirements and allow more electives.

Westmont is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary with completion of a $.2 million dormitory. Soon it will break ground for a library-classroom building and chapel addition as part of a $4,375,000 ten-year plan. The school president, Dr. Roger J. Voskuyl, speaks for a new look at federal aid:

“We would like to be entirely independent, but support from private sources too often has been inadequate.” He is not unhappy at the results. “Never once has the federal government tried to tell us what kind of building to put up or program to run,” he stated at a recent meeting of the seventy-six-member Council for the Advancement of Small Colleges, which he once served as president.

Current federal aid to colleges will look like loose change if the Senate approves the higher education bill that passed the House August 26. The bill would provide $580 million for college construction during the next fiscal year, as well as $64 million in scholarships to needy students, backing of loans for middle-income students, $129 mil lion in payments to low-income students for jobs on campus, $50 million for community service projects by colleges, $70 million for library science aid, and $30 million to bolster “underdeveloped” colleges, mostly Negro ones in the South.

Typical of colleges tempted by federal money is Taylor University, which faces major building needs at its Upland, Indiana, campus, because it froze construction for five years awaiting a move to Fort Wayne that never materialized. A $7 million program is on the boards for the next five years or so. A new residence hall was begun in April and opened this month. In a year there will be three more new buildings, including a science center that got a $410,000 U. S. grant and a $517,000 loan. It will be the campus’ first structure not built by private funds.

Dr. Milo A. Rediger, who will be installed November 10 as Taylor’s new president, said, “We can’t act as if there is no federal aid. If we do, we may have to get out of education.…” The college still holds generally to its traditional Christian principle that “people ought to pay for their own education,” he said.

Cascade College in Portland, Oregon, less than one-third as big as Taylor, landed a $1.5 million dormitory loan last month.

Among those rejecting aid is the country’s biggest fundamentalist school. Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. It is just opening a $1 million dining hall that will serve the entire student body of 3,500. Wheaton’s biggest men’s residence hall, tagged at $2 million, will be built this year with private money.

Among schools wholly dependent on private support, Columbia (South Carolina) Bible College has an unusual “faith” plan in which faculty pay (“allowances”) is not guaranteed. The monthly gap between $12,500 tuition income and $20,000 payroll must be filled by gifts.

Last year, this worked ten months. In the other two, 85 per cent allowances were paid. Some belt-tightening resulted, with the staff reduced by six and certain “peripheral” programs cut, such as required social service for freshmen. Another casualty was practice teaching of Bible courses in Carolina schools, but Dean Janies M. Hatch said court decisions have eliminated this as a career possibility anyway.

CBC also raised its tuition, formerly one of the lowest in the country, and President G. Allen Fleece says the school is now in the best financial position ever. It has built a new $2.5 million campus on a hill overlooking South Carolina’s capital city but carries an indebtedness of only $400,000.

The largest Bible school in Canada, the 700-student Prairie Bible Institute, is planning a new academic building to add to a plant that already includes a 4,300-seat auditorium which would hold the population of its locale, Three Hills, Alberta, three times over.

The flight from center city is an ongoing pattern in Christian education. An example this fall is Bethel Theological Seminary, which has moved out of St. Paul, Minnesota; a companion undergraduate college will be relocated by 1971. Seattle Pacific College (Free Methodist), which is marking its seventy-fifth anniversary, operates a 100-acre field campus fifty miles from the main campus.

Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has already invested $10 million in its Knollcrest campus outside Grand Rapids and got another $5.5 million from the Christian Reformed Church this summer. Half the classes are now held downtown, half at Knollcrest, with the complete move expected by 1972. With 1,000 freshmen arriving this month, Calvin is one of America’s biggest church-related colleges.

In nearby Holland, Michigan, the largest school related to the Reformed Church in America—Hope College—marks its centennial this year and expects 1,650 students.

Also on the anniversary list are two American Baptist schools: Keuka College of Keuka Park, New York (seventy-fifth), and Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (fortieth).

While some celebrate, others mourn. Some 125 students and twenty-two fulltime faculty members were left looking for a new campus home July 30 when Upland College dissolved. The college, located in Upland, California, merged with up-and-coming Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania (regionally accredited two years ago, and with a 30 per cent jump in students this year).

Messiah offered to accept all Uplanders, but only a few have made the cross-country switch. Others have gone to Pacific College in Fresno or LaVerne College near Claremont.

Upland, no fly-by-night, was forty years old and held regional accreditation. But financial support sagged. It severed ties with the Church of the Brethren (Messiah’s sponsor) three years ago in a bid to broaden its constituency, but things only got worse.

On the surface, the myriad problems of Shelton College involve accreditation and disputes with its home town of Cape May, New Jersey, and the state. But there was an internal squabble even before the State Board of Education in June withdrew Shelton’s authority to grant the B.A. degree.

Last spring, all three top executives and three-fourths of the faculty quit in a disagreement with the college’s board and its controversial president, Dr. Carl McIntire. The trouble started over relations between collegians and the staff of the Christian Admiral, McIntire’s beachfront hotel which is providing temporary dormitory space for Shelton. Dr. Arthur E. Steele, then president, said his disagreement with the board produced an unexpected “choosing up of sides” and brought “latent anti-McIntire feeling” to the surface. After the resignations, the state board voted not to renew accreditation, a decision later overruled by the Superior Court pending further hearings.

McIntire is now Shelton’s president, with his son, Carl Thomas, handling administrative tasks. The younger McIntire offered no guess on how many students will show up this fall but predicted victory in court. About the faculty turnover he said, “We made some adjustments on our own for academic reasons—there were not enough Ph.D.’s on the staff and we were required to adjust.…”

Whatever happens in Cape May, Steele plans to open a new four-year Christian college next fall in St. Petersburg, with a staff including his dean at Shelton, Dr. Nathan A. Willits, and twelve of the ex-Shelton teachers. Another faculty fragment hopes to start a new college in the North.

Willits, who quit with Steele, expressed melancholy. “I didn’t want to leave. I left tenure, retirement benefits.… I had expected to spend the rest of my life there.…”

Religion And Academic Priorities

At big-name campuses across North America, religion as an academic discipline may be on the rebound. For long decades the study of man’s ultimate concerns has been in virtual exile from most centers of higher education. A chair in religion has been almost as rare as a genuine antique of colonial times, when private Christian initiative was the dynamic that created Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a host of other prestigious universities.

But the worst seems to be over. Indiana University, one of the nation’s largest, announced last month a major expansion of its comparative religion program with “a top-flight scholar” as director. Indiana follows in the train of a number of state universities that have slowly been building up a religious studies curriculum since World War II.

By contrast, many of the Christian colleges are de-emphasizing their theological orientation in favor of broader liberal arts pursuits.

Behind the establishment of higher education in America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was an evangelistic zeal and a desire to ensure a learned clergy. Harvard began from 400 pounds and 320 books bequeathed by the Rev. John Harvard, and was conducted as a “theological institution” from 1636 until 1692. Yale was founded in 1701 partly on the suspicion of Harvard’s laxity in matters of religion. William and Mary was opened in order that Anglicans might have a seminary, that youth might be “piously educated in good letters and manners, and that the Christian faith may be propagated amongst the Western Indians, to the glory of Almighty God.”

The Great Awakening was a further stimulant to higher education. Princeton University was born out of it in 1746, for the special purpose of educating clergymen. Brown, fonnded in 1764, had a similar aim. So did Dartmouth, originally a missionary school for Indians. Columbia started with a grant of land from a church, and to this day its seal bears the scriptural “milk” citation of 1 Peter 2.

The latter part of the eighteenth century and to a lesser extent the nineteenth century saw Protestant initiative continue to produce institutions of higher education, especially in the northeastern United States. “It is no accident,” says the noted historian Samuel Eliot Morison, “that almost every education leader and reformer in American history … has been a New Englander of Puritan stock.”

Morison also notes Christian impact upon education in the South. There, he says, religious bodies were responsible for most of the colleges and universities that sprang up during the Revolutionary War and shortly thereafter. Northwest of the Ohio River, higher education was stimulated by the historic Ordinance of 1787, which encouraged establishment of schools in the same sentence that noted that “religion, morality, and knowledge” are necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind (under the ordinance was founded the University of Michigan, which began with a Presbyterian minister as president and a Roman Catholic priest as vice-president). In Canada, noted universities such as McMaster, Dalhousie, and Toronto got their start under religious auspices.

The land-grant college movement stole the initiative from Christian educators in the nineteenth century. About the time of the Civil War and immediately thereafter, however, a number of distinguished women’s schools, including Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley, were founded on Christian purposes. The last of the great universities with Protestant beginnings were Chicago (1890) and Southern Methodist University (1911).

For religious studies at the big state universities, the road back from the academic periphery is a long one. Most curriculum efforts are interdepartmental, with courses parceled out to denominational representatives. But there are schools of religion at Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, and Wyoming. Although Iowa is the only state university offering a Ph.D. in religion, a number of others seem to be moving in this direction, particularly in terms of cooperative programs with nearby seminaries.

Last year, the University of California at Santa Barbara opened a department of religious studies. Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are understood to be studying similar moves.

Dr. Robert Michaelsen, former director of the Iowa Religion School and now chairman of the Santa Barbara department of religion, predicts an increasing interest in religious studies by state universities: “Students today seem more inclined toward the study of religious subjects in such an environment. There is perhaps less push than in distinctly Christian or denominational colleges.”

Indiana’s announcement of an expansion in the comparative religion program cited not only increased student interest but “recent Supreme Court decisions [which] have clarified the terms under which academic instruction about religion may properly be given in public institutions.”

For evangelicals, the interest in religious studies shown by the state universities is a phenomenon worth pondering. The trend will most likely be toward uncritical acceptance of higher critical presuppositions, thus deferring biblical perspectives to speculative approaches. But an even deeper issue concerns the nature of the truth-claim associated with the Christian religion, at a time when many philosophy departments dispute the possibility of cognitive knowledge of transcendent realities. On American campuses, where philosophical idealism held sway in the forepart of the century, there has been a marked trend to philosophical naturalism, and to skepticism over religious realities. It is also noteworthy that philosophy and religion departments in the universities tend to be intolerant of evangelical associates.

If the university religion faculties make room for competent evangelical scholars, the development of such religion departments will afford new opportunities. Evangelical scholars manifest a vital personal experience of Christian faith at a moment when the Protestant alternatives of liberal, dialectical, and existential theology are clearly on the defensive.

Entirely True, Entirely Open

A new Christian college preparatory school for girls opens September 27 on Long Island, New York. The Stony Brook Girls’ School will be across town from the well-known boys’ academy. While it proposes to echo the philosophy of the older school, it is separate in organization.

The headmistress is Miss M. Judy Brown, 27, who has studied at Duke, Harvard, the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Miss Brown says her school will be “entirely true to biblical religion, and entirely open to scholarship in general.” She contends that “most Christian high schools don’t believe that God also redeems the mind.”

Thirty girls, mostly from the Northeast, are expected for ninth-and tenth-grade classes. The boys’ school mailing list was used to advertise for students, but so were Vogue and the New York Herald-Tribune, and Miss Brown expects to have non-Christian students. “Our primary purpose is not to convert, but to teach,” she said. However, programs are being planned so that faculty members can express their convictions informally in chats with students outside the classroom. There will be two compulsory chapels a week, and daily periods for prayer and Bible study.

‘Spiritual Life Center’

Methodist-related American University in Washington, D.C., has a new $425,000 interfaith chapel with a 16-foot 600-pound bronze and gold flame on the top, symbolizing eternal life.

The chapel will be known as the Abraham S. Kay Spiritual Life Center after a Washington builder who made the first contribution toward its construction.

The structure will be formally dedicated October 3, when a two-week forum on religion and society is scheduled to begin. Charles Parlin, a president of the World Council of Churches and a trustee of American University, will give the dedication address.

The death of Albert Schweitzer on September 4 brought down the curtain on one of the greatest of human dramas. Hailed as an outstanding world figure, Schweitzer was also the subject of deep controversy. He was great in diverse fields, and in each of them he had many critics.

Schweitzer was born ninety years ago, the son of a Lutheran clergyman in Kayserburg, Alsace, which was then part of Germany. He became highly educated at an early age and earned doctor’s degrees in medicine, philosophy, and theology. He also took to writing, and among his many books were two biographies of Bach, a treatise on the art of organ-building, several volumes on Africa, philosophical works, and studies of Jesus and Paul. The most famous and controversial of his published materials was The Quest for the Historical Jesus, a pacesetting analysis and critique of some sixty-seven works on the life and teachings of Jesus that had appeared by 1910 (see editorial, page 36).

Schweitzer was married in 1912 to the former Helene Bresslau, and she became a nurse as they dedicated themselves to a life of medical service in Africa. Their first years on the dark continent were ones of hardship. During World War I Schweitzer was interned by the French.

The couple returned to Africa in 1924 and set about developing the medical compound at Lambaréné where Schweitzer’s “reverence for life” reigned supreme.

Much of the criticism of Schweitzer focused upon the dirty and primitive conditions in the hospital and clinic in what is now the republic of Gabon. Le grand docteur defended the conditions on grounds that they made the patients feel at home. He contended that standards of cleanliness were observed where they really counted, as in the operating and maternity sections.

Other criticism has been heaped upon Schweitzer for his implicit racism, typified by his observation, “The African is my brother, but he is my younger brother by many centuries.”

He was regarded by some as a combination of saint and snob, a man who belonged to another era. The surge of African nationalism after World War II left him far behind. A thoughtful African leader has said of Schweitzer, “He is doing things for us and not with us.” Thus the selflessness for which Schweitzer was acclaimed was also seriously questioned, and critics debated the question: Did he really give of himself or was his motive one of condescension and self-fulfillment?

In more than fifty years the Schweitzer medical compound has been in operation, more than 1,500,000 persons have been treated. First reports said that the work would continue under the direction of Dr. Walter Munz, 32, with 46-year-old Mrs. Rhena Eckert, the Schweitzers’ only child, as administrator.

Schweitzer fell ill at a time when he was reportedly working on a book setting forth reverence for life as the basis for an ethic for the world. He lapsed into a coma periodically but revived long enough to sip beer and shake hands with friends. He died at 11 P.M. on a Saturday night in a wooden hut, with his face “showing peace,” his daughter said. Death was attributed to a stroke.

Schweitzer’s funeral was held the next day in a simple and quiet ceremony at the river-bank compound at Lambaréné. Munz, who had been working as Schweitzer’s assistant, read the brief funeral service and declared that “God has called him back.” A choir of African women uttered a chant translated, “May you rest in peace.”

The body was buried next to an urn containing the ashes of his wife, who died in 1957. A simple wooden cross which Schweitzer had made himself was erected over the grave.

Tom Allan

The Rev. Tom Allan, noted evangelical leader in the Church of Scotland, died this month at the age of 48. He had been suffering from a heart ailment.

Allan served as field organizer of the “Tell Scotland” movement and was a key supporter and friend of evangelist Billy Graham. He had made a noteworthy theological transition from liberal to evangelical ranks and was to have given one of the major addresses at the World Congress on Evangelism in 1966.

Under The Knife

Evangelist Billy Graham underwent surgery this month at a hospital associated with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The operation was described as a common type, corrective in nature and relating to the bladder and prostate gland.

Graham flew to Minnesota following his Denver crusade (see page 47) and cancelled all engagements for a month.

Fiction Or Forecast?

The scheduled visit of Pope Paul VI to New York for a major address at U. N. headquarters October 4 recalls the plot of Morris West’s best-selling novel, The Shoes of the Fisherman, wherein a pontiff becomes mediator between East and West. Curiously, the book appeared when Paul VI ascended the Vatican throne in 1963.

His life was an enduring protest against the materialistic mania of modern man

The religion of our age gives the same impression as an African river in the dry season—a great river bed, sand banks, and between, a small stream which seeks its way. One tries to imagine that a river once filled that bed; that there were no sand banks but that the river flowed majestically on its way; and that it will someday be like that again. So Albert Schweitzer once envisaged the fortunes of Christianity in the modern world, wherein ethical religion and the thought of the age no longer present a unified spiritual force.

Last week the dry river bed became even more visible, while the moving stream seemed more sluggish than ever. Stilled in death at ninety, the body of the world-famed medical missionary was buried in Lambaréné. There with his own hands, on the margin of civilization, he had built the medical compound to which he gave his life in the practice of Christian charity after achieving distinction and wealth as a musician and religious philosopher.

After Schweitzer’s half-century ministry in what is now Gabon, the works of love—especially social work—that he hopefully viewed as the means of realizing God’s Kingdom on earth seem remarkably unspectacular in this day of vaulting materialistic ambition, of vast scientific power, of mass movements, Communist intrigue, and international rivalries. Desperately as ever the modern world needs a voluntary fusion of truth and justice and power and love, but the majestic spiritual waters of Schweitzer’s vision seem widely unsought and even unwanted.

For more than half a century Schweitzer assailed the materialistic mania of modern man; indeed, his entire life was a protest against it. He rightly stressed that civilization inevitably collapses when its ethical foundations crumble. In a world of impersonal forces cementing the impression that one’s loves and hates and ideals ultimately count for nothing, that man’s life matters no more than a mosquito’s, and that this earth exists for no real purpose, Schweitzer proclaimed a reverence for life, and placed his brilliant mind and talents in the service of Africans amid physical and spiritual need.

While Schweitzer and his co-workers ministered in Lambaréné, the world outside underwent twentieth-century metamorphosis. The century that had opened with high promise of a scientific millennium was moving toward the dread possibility of scientific extinction; modern men were gripped not so much by a sense of reverence for life as by the lively prospect of getting away with lawlessness, perversion, and hatred. What happened outside the African compound, therefore, became more determinative than what happened inside. The drift of world events gave evidence that not reverence for life but a defective will dominated the human spirit, and that no ministration short of the whole Gospel of Christ could remedy that base defect. Schweitzer’s religious outlook was too thin to stave off “the suicide of civilization” that he said “is in progress” and to supply a comprehensive Christian alternative.

Schweitzer’s philosophy was pantheistic in orientation; “reverence for life” spared beetles around the mission compound from destruction and kept Schweitzer from fishing as a sport (he deplored using worms as bait) and from enjoying a menagerie (because of its captive animals). And his outlook included no deep understanding of human depravity, hence no full understanding of scriptural redemption.

He assuredly rejected Hegel’s notion that all men serve the cause of progress, and complained that Hegelian theory overlooked the passions of people. Progress does not come about automatically, Schweitzer stressed, but requires man’s transformation of reality. Yet he did not sense that beyond this it requires, first and foremost God’s transformation of man. Schweitzer rejected “dogmatic” religion because it is “more dominated by the thought of redemption than by that of the Kingdom of God.” This misunderstanding of the Kingdom was, in fact, a besetting fault.

Schweitzer’s once-influential The Quest of the Historical Jesus held that the Nazarene mistakenly expected the apocalyptic end of history during his lifetime. Schweitzer was not the first nor the last among modernists to insist that Jesus was mistaken in his point of view, while proclaiming in its place a self-assured speculative alternative. Jesus had indeed come preaching and healing, but his ministry to men now lost its character of a revelatory sign that the Divine Redeemer was manifested in the midst of a fallen race. Schweitzer associated the Divine Kingdom, not with redemptive Christianity and the new birth, but with social effort. Schweitzer’s goal became “the perfected world; the Kingdom of God.” He openly scorned Karl Barth’s emphasis on revealed religion as the Church’s one message to the world and his disinterest in “civilized Protestantism”; instead he viewed transformation of the world as the authentic Christian task. As one of the great modernists of this century, he was a symbol of a mentality that sifted the New Testament through alien presuppositions and elaborated a speculative philosophy of life. Yet he found in the great music of the Church and in the ministry of medical missions a unique and authentic Christian message.

Schweitzer’s death in some ways marks the end of a missionary era as well as of a distinguished missionary career. To his credit, Schweitzer associated Christian benevolence with voluntary self-sacrifice, not with political strategy. He warned that Christianity loses in spiritual power as it gains in external power. His ministry carried no hint of the notion, now becoming popular among American liberals, that government rather than the Church should become the instrument of divine compassion, if only churchmen can share the limelight with politicians while government pays the bills. Perhaps Europeans do not so easily forget how the medieval vision of the Christian state led on to the persecuting church and then beyond that to the persecuted church. Those American churchmen who eagerly embrace church-state partnership disclose either their inability to learn from history or their ignorance of it.

In Lambaréné predictions have long run rife that Schweitzer’s missionary hospital would close down after his death. The newly independent Gabon government is already operating more modern medical facilities, some with American foreign aid. Some government spokesmen had expressed an intention to burn down the Schweitzer compound after his death, because it is more primitive than a neighboring clinic. Schweitzer’s work was so romanticized in some ecclesiastical circles that his admirers seldom knew of the primitive conditions he perpetuated at the compound. Some critics claimed that Schweitzer was motivated by a desire to further the image of self-sacrifice, but he was a man of another era.

American liberals do not sense that their reliance on government rather than on voluntary benevolence may eventually edge the church out of the ministry of compassion and the state out of the ministry of justice. The Kingdom of American ecclesiastical liberalism is politico-economic, and it has even less in common with the Gospels than had Schweitzer’s vision. Just as in the last generation some liberals called the ultimate principle of life evolution while others called it god, in this generation some call political welfare programs Christianity while others call them socialism. Schweitzer somewhere wrote of modern states that devote themselves mainly to collecting money with which to prolong their own existence. It is doubly tragic when the Church suspends her mission largely on this political ability. In America the bleak river beds are showing, and the majestic stream of apostolic Christianity seems to be running dry.

Church Politicians In Partnership

The American religious establishments are deepening their commitments in cooperative political engagement. In Mississippi a Roman Catholic diocese has organized the agency that operates a $7 million government-financed project for retraining the unemployed. An agency set up by the New Mexico Council of Churches has a $1,261,000 federal grant to retrain migrant workers. The director of the Northeast regional office of the anti-poverty program is Samuel D. Proctor, who has been serving as associate general secretary of the National Council of Churches.

The laity in the American churches are not asked for opinions in such matters. They are precommitted by powerful ecclesiastical leaders operating in overlapping committees at an ecumenical level, and church members often learn of such ecclesiastical involvement through the public press, after the commitments have been made and can no longer be easily reversed. So the seeds of widespread revolt among the laity are being planted.

Kashmir—Another Powder Keg

The dispute over Kashmir between India and Pakistan has erupted on one of a dozen explosive geographic and political frontiers in the contemporary world. It follows the familiar and frightening pattern of military buildup and conflict that has characterized the past two decades of world history. And it mirrors the paradox of a world that knows all too well the ghastly consequences of war but remains a stranger to the reality and meaning of peace. Most distressing is that aspect of the conflict pitting Hinduism against Islam.

Once again the United Nations has shown itself woefully weak. Every power seems eager for peaceful solutions of all disputes except the one in which it is itself involved. Secretary General U Thant went to the subcontinent with a limited but essential objective—to obtain a ceasefire. Like every other informed person, he knows there is no facile solution to the Kashmir dispute. Had there been, India and Pakistan would not have resorted to a war that will work irreparable harm to both of these newly emergent nations.

The causes for the Kashmir conflict are many: geographic, political, economic, and, not least of all, religious. What makes the conflict ominous is the overarching lineup of powers. Ironically, the United States under SEATO commitments has guaranteed Pakistan’s territorial integrity, and now China and Indonesia have also lined up solidly behind Pakistan. India’s policy of neutrality and non-alignment, designed to play both ends against the middle in the Communist-vs.-free world struggle, leaves her without close supportive allies. Nehru’s promise of a plebiscite for Kashmir and Pakistan’s insistence upon the fulfillment of this pledge are key factors in the dispute. Yet a plebiscite can hardly be expected: it would inevitably favor Pakistan, and India cannot surrender Kashmir for reasons of nationalism, military strategy, and face-saving.

The real threat to world peace lies in the possibility of military involvement of other powers. Both Pakistan and India are already learning that it is easier to start wars than to end them. Moreover, war is always unpredictable and seldom turns out the way the participants expect; the smallest conflagration might lead to World War III. The most hopeful development at present would be a ceasefire, pending settlement of the dispute. Second best would be containment of the conflict to the two parties involved. The third alternative, too frightening to contemplate, is a third world war waged with atomic weaponry.

Christians are not naïve enough to suppose that wars will cease before the coming of the Prince of Peace. They should, however, pray for a resolution of the conflict and for the progress of the Gospel in this spiritually destitute area of the world, confident that God can bring good out of evil.

Not A Confession But An Accommodation

The deep concern felt and expressed by many members of the United Presbyterian Church over the so-called Confession of 1967 is significant. If it is to be effective, this concern must be backed fully by the laymen of that church who by and large retain confidence in the complete integrity and authority of the Word of God. These persons are unwilling to see their church base her faith on the shifting sands of human opinion rather than on the clear affirmations of Scripture.

The proposed “Confession” is not a confession but an accommodation to those who no longer accept at face value the words of the Apostle Peter, “First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Peter 1:20, 21, RSV), and who do not believe that “all scripture is inspired by God” (2 Tim. 3:16).

The weakness of the new “Confession” also lies in its vagueness of language, lack of scriptural orientation and confirmation, and hazy statements about Jesus Christ.

Calvin Research In This Century

If continuing research is indicative of vitality, Calvinism is still very much alive in the twentieth century. Not only do the thought and life of John Calvin continue to be the object of study and critical research, but quests are being conducted today for all fugitive Calvinalia. Since 1961 almost 400 titles have been recovered, titles which do not appear in Wilhelm Niesel’s Calvin-Bibliographia, which covered the period between 1901 and 1959.

Research conducted for the University of Michigan by Lester DeKoster, Calvin College librarian, disclosed that about 1800 books and articles on Calvin and Calvinism have appeared since 1900. This work is concerned with nine main themes, which include not only theology but also art and aesthetics, capitalism and social philosophy, education, science, and political philosophy and political liberty. This wide scholarly interest in so many issues that deeply concern the twentieth century bespeaks the uncommon significance of a man who at the turn of the century had already been dead for almost 350 years.

This persistent and very extensive interest in the teachings of John Calvin weighs heavily against the unreasoned, not to say glandular, assessments that have often been laid upon him. Will Durant, for example, said that Calvin darkened the human soul with “the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.” If this assessment were even half true, we would be left with the enigma why so much acknowledged scholarship has for so long been attracted to the thought of the man who has been described as God-intoxicated. Predictions are perilous and sure bets are cheating, but one could safely lay it on the line that the theologians of today who define Calvin’s God as the “ground of our being” will not engage the scholarly interest that generations have given to John Calvin.

Immorality Still Has Consequences

Ethical values inevitably affect life. This principle finds grim substantiation in the current epidemic of venereal disease that has led the American Medical Association to open a nationwide attack on the problem. An editorial in the September 6 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, after reviewing the “management” of venereal disease by penicillin, declares: “At the end of the decade [the fifties] the social disease began to reappear, to move back from its banishment to the horizons of society, to coincide with a subtle social change taking place in the late post-war period. The tiger was not dead, he had not become a docile kitten, and he was hungry. The recrudescence of syphilis in the last five years is accompanied by an annual million cases of gonorrhea. The rising incidence among young people is without parallel.”

The shocking extent of this “rising incidence” is shown by the more than 1,300 new cases (56 per cent of the total number of daily venereal infections) occurring every twenty-four hours in adolescents from fifteen to twenty years old. As an article in Today’s Health says, “Many of these adolescents come from very fine homes in suburbs where they are given ‘everything they need,’ including the cars in which many become infected.”

Immorality, whether of the kind permitted by “the new morality” or called by the old-fashioned name, “sin,” still has consequences. Learned theologians who tell young people that “love” makes sexual relations outside of marriage Christian should realize that promiscuity exacts a price. While the new morality did not initiate the moral toboggan on which many an immature youth finds himself, it cannot evade the heavy responsibility of accelerating its pace. The foggy casuistry of the moral relativists must reckon with the stark warning given in Scripture: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

If The Good News Is Really Good …

If the Good News is really good, why don’t we find it easier to tell?

Of course to the non-Christian much of the Gospel is anything but good news. The facing of personal guilt, the humiliation of accepting God’s charity, the demand for a change in one’s whole life—a man’s instinct reacts against this. Since a stigma attaches to the confession that one cannot cope with himself, the non-Christian is likely to say, “I don’t need religion” (i.e., “I don’t need help from God or anyone else”).

If we reply according to the teaching of Christianity that one is neither a whole man nor a free man without God, we may expect the non-Christian to say to himself, if not to us, that Christianity is wrong. Unless he hears what we say as something genuinely meaningful to us and something we want to share with a person who is important to us, he may dismiss our remarks as “spiritual imperialism.”

Part of the trouble we have in telling the Good News, therefore, is bound up with the offense of the Cross. Satan designs that the unbeliever shall hear the Gospel as unnecessary and unwelcome change, and such malevolent “jamming” obviously makes it hard for him to hear it as freedom and rest and happiness that, by contrast, point to his own loneliness.

But perhaps we ourselves are part of our difficulty. We say, for example, that the proclamation of the Great Commission was never more urgent than today. Ministers occasionally remind their congregations that, by the cosmic clock, the time is now five minutes to twelve. But it is hard for any of us to live in that frame of mind, especially in an environment that conspires with our natural inclination to look for islands of refuge and security either in the world or far outside it. Perhaps to the extent that we are able to accept the insecurity of living in the world and being pilgrims in it, we shall also be able to live with the truth behind the overworked five-minutes-to-twelve metaphor. To every passing moment of life the Gospel says that “the monosyllable of the clock is loss, loss,” unless we devote ourselves to recovery and renewal.

Another difficulty is our fear of risking failure. Humanly speaking, this fear is understandable. Being the bearer of God’s message to man is, after all, a solemn responsibility; and if we think of nothing but the responsibility, its weight can crush us. We know about the letter that kills and the spirit that gives life, and we may wonder which we have, or which has us. Nonetheless, we have our orders; the possibility of failure does not cancel them. And the Spirit gives grace in weakness: grace to us and, through us, to someone else who may see, not how well we live our message, but the direction of our feet.

Speaking of the widespread ignorance of the true nature of evangelism, Wilhelm Brauer, former director of the City Mission of Berlin, says that the Church needs to concentrate on the “theology of evangelism.” Ignorance and confusion on this subject are a clear danger signal as well as a difficulty. The Church pays the price of a fragmented witness for its lack of accord in this and in other areas, and apparently it is going to keep on paying. We can only hope that, by the grace of God, the ecumenical efforts to achieve unity will not leave the Church so exhausted that it has little love and strength to minister to the world. Telling the Good News to the world is the one great task we were given; and a purpose of the World Congress on Evangelism scheduled for Berlin in 1966 is to rally evangelical resources to evangelistic priorities.

As we prepare ourselves for what may be the last opportunity to carry out our responsibility, we may receive both comfort and guidance from the knowledge that our role is a humble one. It is true that in a sense we become part of the message we bear, since the message is that God is reaching out to man, and we are the instrument through which God reaches out. But the messenger does not originate his message, as Brauer says. Any churchmen who have expanded their humble role and assumed the responsibility for saving people ought to go back to the more manageable job of messenger.

“The Gospel itself creates its own kairos—the moment when the redemptive work of God grips and transforms men,” says Brauer. Our task lies in learning to proclaim the Good News in such a way that our words do not close our hearers’ minds, in making sure we are not pouring new wine into old bottles, and in being faithful messengers.

Farel The Reformer

In every age there are great leaders to whom history pays tribute long after their death. Guillaume Farel is one of these. Born in 1489, he became the John the Baptist of the Reformation in Switzerland, and the forerunner of John Calvin. He died 400 years ago this month, at the age of seventy-six.

Small and feeble, with narrow forehead, fiery eyes, and a red, ill-combed beard, Farel was an orator, a born fighter whose major work like that of Jeremiah was “to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy.” It was he who urged Calvin, twenty years his junior, to build a new church on the ruins of the one Farel had torn down, and he gladly helped in the task.

Though he was intensely human and wanting in discretion and moderation, Farel was one of the leading lights of the Reformation. His faults were balanced by rugged honesty, unceasing labors, and unshakable evangelical beliefs. Philip Schaff has said that central to Farel’s outlook were the convictions “that salvation can be found only in Christ, that the word of God is the only rule of faith, and that the Roman traditions and rites are inventions of man.…”

Farel gave place to no man either in his ministry or in his sufferings. He was insulted, spat upon, beaten and bruised, and threatened with death; at least one attempt was made to poison him. Yet he persevered. His statue, along with those of Calvin, Beza, and Knox, stands in Geneva today as a constant reminder of his contribution to the faith of our fathers.

Becoming a christian is a once-for-all experience that involves a conscious faith in and acceptance of Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Saviour front sin. Just as a child is always the child of his parents, so a person who has been born again is always a redeemed child of his Heavenly Father.

But living as a Christian is a day-to-day experience in which the believer must be renewed by the grace of God. Otherwise life becomes a drab succession of defeats and frustrations, and there is neither joy of heart nor usefulness in service for God or for others.

There is a useful analogy in the daily needs of the body and mind. In the morning one must awake and then perform certain routines of washing, shaving, bathing, fixing one’s hair, dressing, and eating. After this there is the daily routine, the expected and unexpected experiences and contacts, the work and the recreation and exercise. During the day there are periods when additional food is necessary to maintain the needed strength. Finally, sleep and rest claim one again.

Christians should realize that they need certain spiritual things in order to live with peace of heart and for the glory of God. These things, which we need every day, are all the work and gifts of God’s grace.

First of all we need to awaken to the consciousness of God’s presence. There is no surer way to begin a day of blessing than to think of God in the first waking moments, to breathe a word of thanksgiving and praise to him and ask for his blessing on the day.

Then, in a time of quiet, set aside for prayer and the study of God’s Word, we should pray for certain specific things.

First, we should ask for forgiveness. There is not a day that the most mature saint does not sin against the holy God—possibly the greatest of all sins being a smug complacency about our own lives. We tend to think we have “arrived” and are unaware of the multiplied sins of omission and commission in thought, word, and deed. For all of these we need forgiveness, and a loving Heavenly Father forgives the penitent.

We can rightly be ashamed of our repeated failures, but shame is not enough. Nor do we solve the problem by sweeping our sins under the rug of frantic religious activity. When sins are confessed and forgiven, the soul is cleansed and the spirit lifted to new heights.

Not only do we need to ask forgiveness for our sins—we also need to be cleansed from them. Sin leaves a stain on the soul and dishonors the Lord. Those about us see the effect, even if they are unaware of that secret sin which so easily besets us. But the cleansed sinner exhibits a radiance of life no one can mistake, not the false front of piosity but the aura of one who has been with Jesus and who has him dwelling within.

For the repentant and forgiven sinner—yes, for the saint living in the world—there is the ever-available and ever-effective divine detergent, the blood of Calvary. If we reject or ignore the mysterious but glorious fact that God has given the blood of his Son as the means of our cleansing and forgiveness, we have missed the very heart of redemption. John tells us: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9, RSV).

Day by day we need forgiveness and cleansing. But that is not all. We need to be filled. We need something beyond ourselves, Someone to fill us and make us the kind of person God wants us to be. God has provided this in the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. God the Father forgives (because of his Son); God the Son cleanses (by his blood); and God the Holy Spirit lives within the Christian (in the measure in which we surrender to him). All this is by the grace of God.

These all contribute to the Christian’s readiness for the day, and from them come those spiritual benefits by which he can and will live for the glory of God.

There comes strength, a strength directly related to the presence of the Holy Spirit. How often we are aware of the struggle within, the desire to do what is right and the weakness that leads us to do the opposite, bearing out our Lord’s words, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Nevertheless we have the promise, “you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.”

It is the Holy Spirit of God who enables us to be strong in weakness, to have victory in spiritual battles, to have a power beyond the power of Satan.

For the Christian who enters the day in God’s way there is also guidance. God’s willingness to guide his children is one of the clearest promises of the Bible and one of the most blessed experiences of the Christian. There is not a day in which guidance is not needed. Decisions have to be made, some routine or trivial, others with deep implications for ourselves or others. For all of these we need the leading of the One who sees all eternity at a glance and who wants us to fit our lives into his perfect plan.

God guides in many ways, usually by giving us a sense of duty and direction but sometimes in ways that are miraculous evidences of his intervention on our behalf.

A safe rule of life is to do what is at hand with a consciousness that God may lead otherwise and with a sensitivity to his will that comes through the indwelling Spirit.

As recipients of the grace of God and as those intended to live for his glory, Christians find that these daily preparations of the mind, will, and spirit will always lead to usefulness in God’s Kingdom.

It is not given to many to live lives of spectacular achievement for the glory of God. For most of us, usefulness lies in performing routine duties and doing them well. It lies in living—in our homes, in our places of business, everywhere—in such a way that honor will be given to God, not only by what we say and do but also by what we refrain from saying and doing.

We are inclined to ignore the fact that being a Christian involves living like one, and that living as a Christian involves daily renewal in spiritual values and personal behavior. God has made full provision for this renewal in the fullness of his grace. Our part is to appropriate these means of grace for our own good and for the glory of his name.

No Christian has the right to live as a spiritual beggar when he should live as one possessing all spiritual riches in Christ.

No Christian should live on the same plane as that of the unregenerate world when he should live as a citizen of heaven.

In other words, Christians should live in the world with the perspective of eternity, subject to the infirmities of the flesh but triumphant in the hope that is theirs beyond the horizon of time.

God has made every needed provision. Christians should day by day accept and make use of his grace, for his honor and glory.