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Dear Quiz Kids:

The recent radio trivia games (Who was Lamont Cranston?) made me think that you religiophiles might, as a respite from life’s trials, enjoy a quiz on the minutiae of American religion. Your grasp of the grand sweep of great events and major doctrines of the faith may be profound, but the real depth of your religious erudition will be seen in your ability to retrieve the tidbits of info called for by the following questions:

1. Who was Billy Sunday’s song leader during his heyday, and what instrument did he play?

2. George Baker married a blonde and commuted between his several heavens. By what name was this religious figure better known?

3. Name the third dispensation.

4. Who preached the highly publicized 1922 sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”

5. You have often sung, “Here I raise mine Ebenezer.” Just what is it you are here raising?

6. What priest from the Shrine of the Little Flower was a frequent critic of FDR on his national radio broadcast?

7. What flamboyant evangelist was thought drowned in the Pacific Ocean in 1926 only to turn up five weeks later in Mexico alleging kidnaping?

8. What publisher is said to have telegraphed his editors: “Puff Graham”?

9. On what basis were ministers formerly categorized as strong, young, or crude?

10. What religious broadcaster invites listeners to establish a “point of contact” with him? How? Why?

If you answer all ten correctly (answers on page 40), you are entitled to a splinter from a chair demolished by Billy Sunday during a sermon in his 1915 Omaha campaign; for nine right, a swatch of skin from a rattlesnake handled by a miracle-worker in the hills of Tennessee to demonstrate his powers; for eight correct, a drop of duck blood like that poured by Father Philip Berrigan on draft files last year. If you score five or less, send in your old Christian Endeavor pin as a proper show of contrition.

EUTYCHUS III

Trivially and convivially,

OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE

I consider “A Minister’s Wife Speaks Out About Sex” by Opal Lincoln Gee (Jan. 5) to be the finest concise statement of the Christian view of marriage I have seen.

J. ROY CLIFFORD

The Tabernacle Baptist Church

Richmond, Va.

LITURGY—MORE OR LESS

Although I have been eagerly awaiting a scholarly evangelical appraisal of the liturgical movement, I was somewhat disappointed with Professor Donald G. Bloesch’s critique, “What’s Wrong with the Liturgical Movement?” (Jan. 5).…

A thoroughgoing critique should be based not on superficial aspects of “high church” worship but on some of the movement’s deeper theological considerations.… Evangelical theologians need to respond to the liturgical movement’s seemingly contradictory secularization of worship on one hand and their formalization of it on the other.…

Dr. Bloesch is not correct when he states that the movement aims to focus attention on the choir rather than the congregation. Many liturgists favor having the choir sing from the rear of the church or even intermingled with the congregation to make singing truly an act of praise and worship by the entire congregation and not just “a mighty good show.” I am grateful, however, for Dr. Bloesch’s other comments concerning singing and the selection of hymns.…

Concerning the Lord’s Supper, evangelical Christians are always justified in re-echoing Luther’s classic labeling of the sacrifice of the Mass as “that dunghill of Popery,” but merely because we reject the idea of a repeated sacrifice or a localized presence; we err greatly when we fail to see that the Lord’s Supper can make a vital contribution to an evangelical worship service.…

What is needed today is a truly evangelical eucharistic theology. We should respond to the liturgical movement not on the basis of externals, but with a positive presentation of what we believe about the Lord’s Supper. Our investigation and critique of their movement should be carried on with a spirit of openness and humility. Perhaps there is something in their dual emphasis on the Word and the sacrament that would enrich evangelical worship.

DEIRDRE B. DAY

Dallas, Tex.

You might want to review the front-page story in the New York Times (Dec. 25) on the Africanization of Christianity. This trend toward cultism has many implications for future missionary efforts—there and in other underdeveloped parts of the world.

There needs to be more serious consideration of how much accepted as normative Christianity (such as the altar call) represents an accommodation with the world or contemporary life styles. Furthermore, these African cults—and some that have appeared in South America—seem to develop out of liturgical excesses in normative Christian groups. Which brings me back to my contention that the need may be for less liturgy rather than more.

BELDEN MENKUS

Bergenfield, N. J.

SPEAKING OF UNITY

I was interested to note the editorial, “The Overlooked Majority Tries Harder” (Jan. 5) … I feel very deeply that we must speak out these days in favor of closer understanding and ties among evangelicals with a view to closer action.

WILLIAM W. CONLEY

Chairman, Department of Missions

St. Paul Bible College

St. Paul, Minn.

Is group action really the answer to the world’s need? Even if that group is wholly united and wholly biblical, how impressed will the world be? Men in Jesus’ day were impressed, not by the fact that crowds followed Christ, but by the works that he wrought.

STEVE GROSECLOSE

Holdrege Assembly of God

Holdrege, Neb.

ANSWERING A LETTER

I was shocked at … the letter of Mr. Alan J. Krauss concerning the cover of November 24 (Eutychus and his kin, Jan. 5).…

I believe the Negro has been grossly subjugated, exploited, and humiliated in America, and I have done and am doing all I can to help him gain equal rights and the respect to which every American is entitled. I am on the board of directors and am the director of publicity for a non-profit organization whose primary aim is to provide scholarships in college education for Negroes. During 1967 I preached in perhaps ten Negro churches, and my message often was, in essence: “I want the will of God done; I want your brotherhood; I want your interests served.”

But I also urge these brethren of mine to refrain from violence, to continue to make Christ their pattern, to educate themselves and their youth, and to take peaceful advantage of the many and sweeping opportunities now available to them.

This is in sharp contrast, of course, to the politics of the “new left” or the “new breed.” These advocates favor violence … estrangement, fragmentation, chaos. Their advocacy will bring disaster, both to the Negro’s hopes and to America. What I advocate will have considerable prospect of bringing fruition to the dream of equality, progress, and a unified nation.

VERNON W. SMITH

Director of Publicity

Foundation for Christian Education

Nashville, Tenn.

I quite agree with [Mr. Krauss] in regard to the word “despicable”.… Why must you generally take such a negative attitude to such an important aspect of the Gospel? Christians have enough trouble without adding to it by such improper caricatures.

WILLIAM HAUB

First Methodist Church

Washington, Mo.

When a conciliar action is taken and its proceedings “leaked” to the press, there seems frequently to be a waiting period in which public reaction is assessed. If this reaction proves to be negative, then the responsible officials of NCC make the (to us) evasive statement that a given conference is speaking to rather than for the churches. If it be true that at the Detroit conference the way was left open to the conclusion that the sniper in the tower might be the agent for righteous action, then it seems to me that the NCC left itself open to all of the rebuke which is implied in the cover cartoon. Somewhere there needs to be a courageous confrontation from a neutral source with the vaguely directed pronouncements of the supposed avant-garde of the council.

HAROLD B. KUHN

Professor of the Philosophy of Religion

Asbury Theological Seminary

Wilmore, Ky.

KEEPING THE PEACE PEACEFULLY

I enjoyed Dr. Laurin’s article, “Significance of the Patriarchal Narratives” (Dec. 22). A lot of jokes have been made about Sarah’s age when she was inducted into the harem of the king of Gerar.… I am told that until a very recent date native African chiefs used to take wives from all the leading families of their neighbors, irrespective of age or ugliness. The poor ladies were really hostages for the good behavior of their tribes. It was a lot cheaper way of insuring peace than a standing army. True, it did not always work as a deterrent, but neither did a standing army. (One hates to suggest that President Johnson and DeGaulle might try keeping a harem, but it would probably work as well as the U.N.) Abraham was a rich man with many servants and some reputation as a warrior. The king of Gerar, finding there was no daughter, decided to seize a sister. That she was ninety years old did not matter; she was to be a pledge that Abraham would be a good boy. What would have happened if Isaac had been born a Philistine prince? Happily God took care of the situation, for Abraham’s sake—and ours. Fillmore, Calif.

O.T. BRYANT

ONE OF A KIND

I appreciate CHRISTIANITY TODAY more than any other magazine that comes to my study. I think this magazine is in a class by itself.

JAMES L. CLEMENTS

Memorial Methodist Church

Lynchburg, Va.

Christianity TodayFebruary 2, 1968

ALTHAUS, PAUL, The Theology of Martin Luther (Fortress, 464 pp., $8). Althaus’s definitive work on Luther’s theology, distributed in English in 1967, treats the Reformer’s thought on twenty-eight topics.

BACKGROUND

1. The Land of the Bible (Westminster) by Y. Aharoni, discusses the sources presently available for a historical geography—sections on the annals of Thothmes III and the Samaritan ostraca are especially fine—and then traces the data from Canaanite to Persian times. Aharoni takes biblical evidence seriously; e.g., his single Sennacherib campaign, with Hezekiah’s accession dated 726. For particular areas, Heinz Skrobucha offers a beautifully illustrated folio on Sinai (Oxford), and Charles F. Pfeiffer presents a handy paperback, *Jerusalem through the Ages (Baker, “Studies in Biblical Archaeology,” 6). Pfeiffer has also surveyed *The Divided Kingdom (fifth in his Baker “Old Testament History” series), though Jonah and Daniel are strangely missing from his discussions of Northern Israelite and exilic prophets.

2. Pfeiffer’s cooperative work with Howard F. Vos, *The Wycliffe Historical Geography of Bible Lands (Moody), surveys Palestine and its surrounding areas from Persia to Italy, with 459 excellent illustrations (almost one per page). Each chapter has a sketch of geography and history, followed by archaeological notes on specific places. Also on Old Testament lands and life are a revised edition of Nelson Glueck’s classic The River Jordan (McGraw-Hill) and W. S. LaSor’s paperback study course on *Daily Life in Bible Times (Standard).

3. The Society for Old Testament Study (British) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a splendid volume, Archaeology and Old Testament Study (Oxford), edited by D. Winton Thomas. Monographs on twenty-five Near Eastern sites plus three Palestinian areas were written by European, American, and Israeli experts, often the directors of the very excavations described. Short histories are followed by summaries of significance for Scripture; e.g., the chapter on Egyptian Thebes concentrates on the Middle Kingdom execration texts, so important for Canaanite history. Among the more technical studies, W. F. Albright’s The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and their Decipherment (Harvard Theological Studies, 22) appeared late in 1966; and among the more popular, Allan MacRae’s *Biblical Archaeology (National Foundation for Christian Education) is an advance publication from the second volume of the Encyclopedia of Christianity.

4. Most breath-taking among the pictorials—well worth its $10 tag—is Everyday Life in Bible Times (National Geographic) edited by J. B. Pritchard. Six top scholars (e.g., Kramer, on Ur) dramatize ancient cultures through the eyes of major biblical characters, such as Abraham, Moses (in Egypt), and Paul. Interspersed are travelogues by National Geographic staff writers. William S. Deal upholds scriptural inerrancy and gives concise book surveys in *Baker’s Pictorial Introduction to the Bible. Cecil Northcott’s People of the Bible (Westminster) provides young people with fine colored sketches, along with paraphrases of biblical passages to whose truth the writer seems only partly committed.

5. Among historical studies, D. S. Russell’s The Jews from Alexander to Herod (Oxford) not only is a useful survey by an expert on Old Testament apocalyptic writings and the Qumranic literature but also marks the reappearance of a famous series, the New Clarendon Bible. Appearing too late for 1966 reviews was Giorgio Buccellati’s technical The Amorites of the Ur III Period (Instituto Orientale di Napoli); and in 1967 came Ignatius Hunt’s The World of the Patriarchs (Prentice-Hall’s “Backgrounds to the Bible” series), which is long on archaeology, culture, and Roman Catholic form criticism, but short on biblical historicity.

CONTENT

6. The Old Testament in Syriac According to the Pesh*tta Version; Sample Ed., Song of Solomon, Tobit, and IV Ezra (Brill, late 1966) may not end up in very many pastors’ libraries, but it is a fine start on this necessary six-year scholarly project. Also on the ancient biblical text are The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll (Cornell University) by J. A. Sanders, a students’ edition of his 1965 Oxford volume, plus a new Psalm fragment; and Ronald J. Williams’s photo-offset Hebrew Syntax, An Outline (University of Toronto), which makes use of Ugaritic and Old Testament syntactical examples but is hampered by terminological innovations, such as “bound-form” (construct) or “fientive” (non-stative).

7. Already on many, many pastoral bookshelves, however, is Kenneth Taylor’s latest biblical rendering, his stimulating *Living Psalms and Proverbs, with the Major Prophets Paraphrased (Tyndale House). Lamentations is included. Psalm 2:12, “Kiss His [note the capital] feet,” may superficially resemble the RSV’s emendation but is really only legitimate interpretation; compare Psalm 110:1, “Jehovah said to my Lord the Messiah.…” Contrast the skepticism in J. H. Scammon’s handling of Psalm 110:5–7 in his Living with the Psalms (Judson)—devotional helps, à la Gunkel, for reading ten selections from the Psalter. Prophets of Salvation (Herder and Herder), by Eugene H. Maly, popularizes certain prophets, e.g., deutero-Isaiah, as related to their historical environments.

8. Also slated for wide use is *The New Scofield Refence Bible (Oxford), edited by E. Schuyler English. The KJV text is modernized; certain introductions have been much improved (e.g., those on Job and Joel), and the Ussher chronology has been up-dated. The format, even to page numbering, stays as close as possible to the old Scofield; and the dispensationalism may be tighter than ever; note, for example: “Peter did not state that Joel’s prophecy [2:28] was fulfilled on the day of Pentecost.” Other biblical handbooks for 1967 include Rolf E. Aaseng’s brief book summaries, *The Sacred Sixty-Six (Augsburg); Lloyd Perry and Robert D. Culver’s enlarged hermeneutical manual, *How to Search the Scriptures (Baker); L. A. T. Van Dooren’s enthusiastic book-by-book sketches for neophytes, Introducing the Old Testament (Zondervan); and John H. Otwell’s I Will Be Your God (Abingdon), which proceeds by literary types, as “Deuteronomic history,” but with unreconstructed liberalism that should horrify even its intended lay readers—for example, “God and the people drew up an agreement called a covenant.” C. Westermann’s Handbook to the Old Testament (Augsburg), despite its handy charts of J and P in Genesis, presents clearer Christian values.

9. Top rating, popular class, goes again to the *Beacon Hill Bible Commentary (Nazarene) for Volume III, Job to Song of Solomon. The discussion of Proverbs, however, seems more ambiguous on biblical authorship than Beacon’s previous volumes; and that on Job is far better in its notes than in its questionable approaches to dates and authenticity. Of similar Wesleyan-Armenian persuasion is *Adam Clark’s Commentary (Baker), the original six volumes of 1832 now effectively abridged into one, over three inches thick, by Ralph Earle. This volume is a far better buy at $ 11.95 than the translation of E. Dhorme’s 1926 Book of Job (Nelson of London) at almost three times this price. At the other extreme, but noteworthy for their helpful analytical charts, are Irving L. Jensen’s modest *Studies in Exodus, *Studies in Leviticus, and *Studies in Numbers and Deuteronomy (Moody).

10 and 11. The following two, both paperbacks, deal with the prophecies that form the two shortest books in the Old Testament. John D. Watts’s *Obadiah: A Critical and Exegetical Commentary (Eerdmans) includes a history of Edom and an analysis of Obadiah’s form and theology. Richard Wolff’s *The Book of Haggai (Baker, “Shield Bible Study Outlines”) is no mere outline, as its sixty pages of commentary on thirty-eight verses may suggest; his treatment of the “desire of nations” and of “Zerubbabel” in 2:23 is especially commendable. Other volumes on the prophets during 1967 were Don W. Hillis’s helpful topical studies on *The Book of Jonah (Baker, “Shield Bible Study Outlines”); David A. Hubbard’s paperback on Hosea, *With Bands of Love (Eerdmans; and Geoffrey R. King’s conversational lectures on *Daniel (Eerdmans) and its true historicity.

CRITICISM

12 and 13. The best analyses of the full Old Testament were R. K. Harrison’s *The Old Testament and Apocrypha: An Introduction (Eerdmans) and Walther Zimmerli’s The Law and the Prophets: a Study of the Meaning of the Old Testament (Harper & Row, Torch-books); the former is a generally conservative and well-documented survey. The latter, an American reproduction, first published in England in 1965, of what is primarily German criticism, surrenders the Old Testament’s literary and historical authenticity, yet seeks to maintain a theological relevance that points toward Christ. Similar to Zimmerli are Daniel Lys, The Meaning of the OldTestament (Abingdon) which asks how a non-propositional Old Testament revelation can show “progress,” and John Bright, The Authority of the Old Testament (Abingdon), which seeks “structure of belief” in the ruins left by skepticism.

14 and 15. Among more specialized studies there are two excellent works. K. A. Kitchen’s *Ancient Orient and Old Testament (Inter-Varsity, late 1966) is a must for every serious Old Testament student, as Part I zeros in on the fallacies of negative criticism, especially over the Pentateuch, and Part II furnishes telling illustrations. Closely related in source and spirit is England’s evangelical annual, the Tyndale Bulletin (Volume 18). Four of this year’s six essays are on the Old Testament, and another is on the New Testament’s use of it. Longest is J. W. Wenham’s defense of “Large Numbers in the Old Testament,” though his appeal to ’eleph for clan rather than thousand in the wilderness census is unconvincing; note also J. P. U. Lilley’s apologetic for the literary unity of Judges. Another collection, less appealing, was Martin Noth’s eleven essays ranging from 1938 to 1958, The Laws of the Pentateuch and Other Studies (Fortress); the first, on Pentateuchal form criticism, takes up nearly half the space. Candidly admitting his dependence upon Noth was the Catholic writer James Plasteras, The God of Exodus (Bruce), who then analyzed the exodus narratives as a recital of faith: creed rather than history.

16. Among other form-critical studies, however, The Ten Commandments in Recent Research (Allenson, “Studies in Biblical Theology,” Series II, 2), by J. J. Stamm and M. E. Andrews, rates selection among the top twenty books of 1967, not so much for its first half, on introduction, with its speculations over the Decalogue’s “pre-Deuteronomic nucleus,” but for its second half, on exegesis—e.g., its favoring, “No other gods in defiance of Me.” More exclusively devoted to those elusive source elements said to underly Israel’s evolving literary traditions were Brevard S. Child’s Isaiah and the Assyrian Crisis (number 3 in the Allenson series mentioned above), ultimately uncertain about Sennacherib’s doings; J. Kenneth Kuntz’s The Self-Revelation of God (Westminster), which expresses the opinion that temple smoke and rams’ horns may have been taken by cultic prophets to indicate the presence and voice of God; and C. Westermann’s Basic Forms of Prophetic Speech (Westminster), in which he postulates an original “messenger’s speech” form, before it was subjected to the baleful effects of transmission.

TEACHINGS

17. Th. C. Vriezen has come up with a fine companion volume to his Old Testament theology (1960) in The Religion of Ancient Israel (Westminster). Structured chronologically (rather than topically as before), it places Israel in its ancient pagan environment, concentrates on its religious life in about 1000 B.C. under David, and then traces subsequent developments. Less objective are Bernhard W. Anderson’s Creation Versus Chaos (Association), which attempts to move from Babylonian myths about the sea, via nineteenth-century Wellhausenism, to a meaning for history; and B. D. Napier’s unusual Come Sweet Death (United Church), which develops certain quoted myths of Genesis by means of poems in the modern mood, including profanity and such crudities as, “Who Wants to Waltz with Yahweh?”

18. Of great significance is the completion in English after thirty-four years, of W. Eichrodt’s Theology of the Old Testament II (Westminster). Here Eichrodt’s covenant-based theology moves on into God’s relationships to the world and to man. Although neo-orthodox in persuasion (e.g., the fall is an “event” but not history) and permeated by Religionsgeschichte (e.g., demons are either an inheritance from the heathen past or late speculation), his detailed analyses remain indispensable to research. Other theological treatments in 1967 are T. B. Maston’s Biblical Ethics (World), a book-by-book survey; and Kornelius Heiko Miskotte’s, When the Gods Are Silent (Harper & Row), on the significance of the Old Testament for today’s secular man.

19. Specifically on the doctrine of God is C. J. Labuschagne’s The Incomparability of Yahweh in the Old Testament (Brill, late 1966; “Pretoria Oriental Series,” V), comparing the Old Testament on God’s infinitude with similar expressions from Mesopotamia, Ugarit, and Egypt. He concludes that the Old Testament is unique and that monotheism is Mosaic in origin. Nelson Glueck’s 1927 dissertation, Hesed in the Bible (Hebrew Union College), is now reissued, with thirty-two pages on recent trends by G. A. Larue—and hesed still means loyalty to the covenant.

20. Finally, Dom Wulston Mork exhibits a fresh style in analyzing flesh, soul, and spirit for his The Biblical Meaning of Man (Bruce). He begins by quoting G. Vos and Berkouwer and ends with applications against secularism and self-denial of the body (this from a Roman Catholic). In between, however, he hesitates to affirm the personality of man’s spirit, though two pages earlier he recognized its coextensiveness with man’s soul. With similarly practical orientation is George A. Riggan, Messianic Theology and Christian Faith (Westminster); but when a systematic theologian derives his exegetical cues from Von Rad (e.g., that Yahwism was a war cult and that Hebrew divine kingship was borrowed from the Canaanites), it’s little wonder that he concludes, “We are Christ to one another.”

Several significant exegetical studies that were promised for 1967 had not yet appeared when this review was written: E. J. Young’s *Isaiah, Volume II (“New International Commentary on the Old Testament”), D. Kidner’s *Genesis (“Tyndale Commentary”), and the *Wesleyan Bible Commentary, Volumes I–III (the Old Testament portion), edited by C. Carter. By now they may be available. So may new Old Testament volumes in the Anchor Bible and the revised New Century Bible, not “*” but still promising.

The Serendipities Of J. B. Phillips

Just over two hundred years ago, in 1754 to be precise, Horace Walpole coined the word “serendipity,” which has now come to be accepted into our language. The word, which is derived from the ancient name for Ceylon, is defined as “the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident”.… I must mention some of the “happy and unexpected discoveries” which I made in the translation of the Epistles.

Serendipity: Ephesians 2:4

The first one I will mention, which of course may all the time have been no secret to anybody else, was the expression “rich in mercy.” This struck me as a positive jewel. Just as we might say that a Texas tycoon is “rich in oil,” so Paul writes it as a matter of fact that God is “rich in mercy.” The pagan world was full of fear, and the Christian Gospel set out to replace that fear of the gods or the fates, or even life itself, with love for and trust in God. “Rich in mercy” was good news to the ancient world and it is good news today.

Serendipity: I Peter 5:7

I think the idea of God’s personal care for the individual came upon me with a similar unexpected strength when I came to translate I Peter 5:7, which reads in the Authorized Version, “Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.” In one sense it is quite plain that God wants us to bear responsibility; it is a false religion which teaches that God wants us to be permanently immature. But there is a sense in which the conscientious and the imaginative can be overburdened. This familiar text reminded me that such overanxiety can be “off-loaded” onto God, for each one of us is his personal concern.… The word used for “casting” is an almost violent word, conveying the way in which a man at the end of his tether might throw aside an intolerable burden. And the Christian is recommended to throw this humanly insupportable weight upon the only One who can bear it and at the same time to realize that God cares for him intimately as a person. “He careth for you” is hardly strong enough, and I don’t know that I did much better in rendering the words, “You are his personal concern”.… It may seem strange to us, and it may seem an idea quite beyond our little minds to comprehend, but each one of us matters to God.

Serendipity: 1 John 3:2

“Beloved,” wrote John, “now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is”.… What would normally be sheer effrontery, or even blasphemy, is here written with cool confidence and authority. No one to my knowledge has ever written like these New Testament writers. Yet I was constantly aware that I was dealing not with exhortations or homilies but with letters written to people living in the midst of this world’s business, people who were tempted and tried as we are, blinkered and frustrated and limited just as we are, yet with the same unquenchable flame of hope in their hearts as Christians have today.… It is the authority which stabs the spirit broad awake. Paul and John wrote because they knew. The Christian revelation was not to them a tentative hypothesis, but the truth about God and men, experienced, demonstrated, always alive and powerful in the lives of men. The whole Christian pattern had to be lived against pagan darkness and frequently overt hostility. It required super-human qualities to survive. Of course there were casualties—Demas was not the first nor the last deserter—but the amazing thing to me is that the Christian Gospel took root and flourished in many different, and indeed unlikely, places.

Serendipity: 1 John 3:20

I have kept the best until last. Like many others, I find myself something of a perfectionist, and if we don’t watch ourselves this obsession for the perfect can make us arrogantly critical of other people and, in certain moods, desperately critical of ourselves.… Now John, in his wisdom, points out in inspired words, “If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things,” This is a gentle but salutary rebuke to our assumption that we know better than God! God, on any showing, is infinitely greater in wisdom and love than we are and, unlike us, knows all the factors involved in human behavior. We are guilty of certain things, and these we must confess with all honesty, and make reparation where possible. But there may be many factors in our lives for which we are not really to blame at all. We did not choose our heredity; we did not choose the bad, indifferent, or excellent way in which we were brought up. This is naturally not to say that every wrong thing we do, or every fear or rage to which we are subject today, is due entirely to heredity, environment, and upbringing. But it certainly does mean that we are in no position to judge ourselves; we simply must leave that to God, who is our Father and “is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.”

- More fromJ. Barton Payne

Geoffrey W. Bromiley

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Archives

In this survey of recent books in church history, dogmatics, and related fields, twenty works of particular interest or importance are listed first. These are not, of course, the best evangelical books, nor are they necessarily the books that will have the most lasting influence. Not all of them will be equally important for all readers. They were selected according to several criteria, and with an attempt to span the various interrelated areas, though with a special focus this year on the Lutheran Reformation.

1. Luther, Works: Volume 5, Lectures on Genesis (Concordia), and Volume 54, Table Talk (Fortress). Among books published during the year of the 450th Anniversary of the Reformation, it is fitting that these two volumes of the Luther translation should have pride of place. They present us with two different aspects of Luther, the exegete and the conversationalist; in the two roles he is equally engaging and powerful.

2. Luther, Selected Writings, four volumes (Fortress). For those who cannot hope to purchase the full set of Luther in English, here is a useful gathering of some of the more important writings. One does not have to follow Luther blindly to realize that the seeds of future reformation and renewal still lie in his writings.

3. Augsburg Historical Atlas of the Middle Ages and the Reformation (Augsburg). Maps of Europe changed almost as dramatically in the Middle Ages as world maps do today. Here is an invaluable tool for students and others who wish to relate the great movements of church history to their geographical and political settings.

4. C. Bergendoff, The Church of the Lutheran Reformation (Concordia). This concise and readable account of the Lutheran church should correct the idea that the Reformation is simply a movement from Luther via Calvin to Puritanism and the free churches. In view of the numerical strength of both American and worldwide Lutheranism, and its actual and potential influence in the Church today, this book should not be dismissed as irrelevant.

5. B. A. Garrish (ed.), Reformers in Profile (Fortress). To keep the picture in balance, this little collection is a very useful introduction to the many men who contributed to the Reformation. For those who are looking for a readable and authoritative account of the Reformers in handy form, this is as good a work as may be found today.

6. New Catholic Encyclopedia, fifteen volumes (McGraw-Hill). Indissolubly linked with the Reformation is the medieval and modern Roman Catholic Church with its own dogma, practice, and outlook. Here is an up-to-date reference book on Roman Catholicism that readers are not likely to buy—even if they can afford it—but that they will often be glad to consult. It need hardly be said that cool discernment is required in the use of this type of work.

7. K. Rahner, Theological Investigations, IV (Helicon). Karl Rahner is perhaps the outstanding “reforming” theologian of the Roman Catholic Church today. For an understanding of the theological basis of the new movement, its concerns, qualities, weaknesses, and dangers, one can hardly do better than follow him through these volumes. This latest in the series, like the others, is not for the “average” reader (whoever that is). Nevertheless, it calls for serious theological investigation, in view of Rahner’s influence on Roman Catholicism and hence on the Christian world at large.

8. G. C. Berkouwer, The Sacraments (Eerdmans). The evangelical world also has a theologian of stature in Professor Berkouwer of Amsterdam, who has earned respect from Karl Barth on the one side and Roman Catholic writers on the other. This book is the latest addition to his series of dogmatic studies, which might well prove to be the finest orthodox work of the century. As the title shows, he stands in the Reformed tradition; but this should not hinder those not in this tradition from profiting from the series as a whole, or indeed from this volume on the sacraments.

9. K. Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, IV, 4 (Fragment) (Evangelischer Verlag). For various reasons Barth had discontinued his Dogmatics, but better health has enabled him to prepare and publish the section from IV, 4 dealing with baptism. This will form an interesting counterpart to Berkouwer, for Barth here makes a final statement on baptism in which he regards his well-known earlier essay as too Reformed. In this work one almost seems to hear Menno Simons himself speaking in the phraseology and with the accents of Karl Barth. More conservative Baptists will have to decide whether to welcome an ally or to fear guilt by association. The English translation (T. and T. Clark) should be ready shortly.

10. H. Hoeksema, Reformed Dogmatics (Reformed Free Publishing). We should not leave the narrower sphere of dogmatics without a reference to this very substantial attempt at a comprehensive theological statement. At a time when flighty faddism threatens to destroy true theology, it is good to have some more solid works. Persevering and judicious reading of this work will probably contribute more to genuine theological education than skimming through the latest pseudo-doctrinal “thrillers.”

11. O. Cullmann, Salvation in History (SCM and Harper & Row). Although this is a biblical study, its scope and implications give it a more general significance. In it Cullmann has provided a definitive statement of his view of the interrelation of salvation and history. Whether or not the thesis commends itself, the work takes us to the heart of modern discussion and indeed of the Christian message itself. The positive insights to be derived from Cullmann outweigh the possible overemphases of the presentation or the minor liberties taken in handling the text.

12. W. Pannenberg, Theology as History (Harper & Row). Mention of Cullmann is a reminder of the influential trend away from the more specialized concept of salvation history. An able proponent of this movement is Pannenberg, whose German treatise on the theme has now been published in English. This book too has implications that make it more than a biblical study. It poses afresh the question of biblical historicity and the relation of Bible history to world history. Like Cullmann’s, this is a demanding but rewarding book.

13. J. B. Phillips, Ring of Truth (Macmillan). More of the stuff of which best-sellers are made is this new book by the noted biblical paraphraser J. B. Phillips. In it Phillips gathers from his intensive acquaintance with Scripture a series of considerations that argue forcefully for its authenticity. There is nothing defensive or petty about this comparatively short work. Phillips has learned authenticity from the Bible itself; he uses ringing tones to proclaim its ring of truth. Readers of all kinds will gain refreshment and insight from the work, and will want to pass it on to others.

14. J. B. Rogers, Scripture in the Westminster Confession (Eerdmans). The question of Scripture is approached from a different angle in this interesting and important survey. Arising out of the confessional wrestlings of the Presbyterians, it considers whether the venerable text of Westminster is accurately represented in the theology of Hodge and Warfield. Is a more neo-orthodox reading of Westminster nearer the mark? Is the Confession of 1967 a true continuation of this tradition? Two basic problems arise: First, the historical problem of a correct understanding; secondly, the dogmatic problem whether Westminster, correctly understood, is right or wrong. Rogers is an able if not entirely impartial. guide to a discussion that is of more than antiquarian interest.

15. C. F. H. Henry and W. S. Mooneyham (eds.), One Race, One Gospel, One Task (World Wide). The Berlin Congress on Evangelism might well turn out to be one of the more significant events of the decade, not only for evangelicalism but for the larger Christian and non-Christian world. It is good, therefore, to have a permanent record of addresses given under the congress theme to present to a wider audience, and thereby to continue and extend the influence of the congress. Although the essays are naturally of unequal value, or of value for different purposes, they contain much that merits the attention of the Christian public.

16. Max Warren, Social History and Christian Mission (SCM). Of many missionary studies, this one seems to deserve special notice because of the way it tackles the interrelation of secular and missionary history, with all that this means for worldwide mission today. Warren’s predominantly British point of view, though an obstacle in some ways, is a gain in others. The perspective is a little different, and Britain was deeply involved in the secular life of many of the areas during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The social background of missionaries themselves is considered also, as is the contribution of missions to the emergence of the new nations. Underlying the discussion is the perennial problem of the Church—how to be in the world and yet not of it, how to be transformed (and transforming) rather than conformed or merely nonconformed.

17. P. Ramsey, Who Speaks for the Church? (Abingdon). The relation of Church to world is also in a sense the theme of this work, though Ramsey speaks specifically about the ecumenical movement and its varied pronouncements. Critically, but not unconstructively, he argues that ecumenical leaders take too much on themselves when they issue pious judgments on matters in which their knowledge is limited, their responsibility (of execution) minimal, and their authority dubious. Those who have had similar misgivings—and they must be legion—will welcome this thoughtful but trenchant statement, though it should not be read merely for the critical material or as a prop for the oversimple equation of another set of political and social judgments with the Gospel.

18. R. G. Turnbull (ed.), Baker’s Dictionary of Practical Theology (Baker). In the field of pastoral theology, the publication of a new Baker’s dictionary is a notable event. This ably prepared work covers the main areas of pastoral life. It provides compendious and authoritative guidance for ministers, seminarians, and church members who want to learn more about what their ministers do and how they can help them. For varied reasons, many parishes might consider buying their pastor a copy.

19. D. H. C. Read, The Pattern of Christ (Scribners). Good sermons do not always make the best books. Dr. Read, however, has a fine touch with the pen as well as the tongue, and this new book contains much that is both well said and worth saying. Particularly striking is the way in which the sermons’ orientation to the center of the Gospel gives them an obvious relevance to contemporary life and needs—there is no need to “make” the Gospel relevant.

20. C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (Eerdmans). This posthumous collection of papers (some incomplete) will not disappoint those who have been so much helped by Lewis before. The freshness, artistry, and cogency are all present; topics range from literature and ethics to church music and petitionary prayer. This volume is worth getting for two essays alone, that on “The Poison of Subjectivism” and that on “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism.” The latter was printed as an article in CHRISTIANITY TODAY (June 9, 1967), and many readers might like to have it, or to pass it on to others, in this more permanent form.

What of other works? In the Lutheran world there is the biography by H. Lilje, Luther and the Reformation (Fortress), and the study of confessional anathema in We Condemn by H. W. Gensichen (Concordia). M. U. Chrisman’s Strasbourg and the Reform (Yale) should also be noted. From a different angle, J. W. Montgomery has two brief volumes of essays entitled Crisis in Lutheran Theology (Baker).

Many useful works have come out in church history, J. Foster’s Men of Vision (SCM) is small but good. O. K. and M. M. Armstrong write on The Indomitable Baptists (Doubleday). C. M. Hopkins discusses The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism (Yale). B. Shelley gives an account of Evangelicalism in America (Eerdmans). P. A. Lapide has a not unsympathetic analysis of Three Popes and the Jews (Hawthorne). R. B. Spain presents the Southern Baptists At Ease in Zion (1865–1900) (Vanderbilt University). Mention might also be made of H. P. van Dusen’s biography of Dag Hammarskjöld (Harper & Row) and K. S. Latourette’s autobiography, Beyond the Ranges (Eerdmans).

In historical theology, G. E. Spiegler has The Eternal Covenant (Harper & Row)—who would guess that this is on Schleiermacher? No less mystifying is G. W. Glick’s The Reality of Christianity (Harper & Row), i.e., its Wesen according to Harnack. P. Tillich’s Perspectives on 19th and 20th Century Protestant Theology (SCM) offers a good perspective on Tillich.

In theology there is much sound work alongside the flimsy or bizarre stuff. A Reader in Contemporary Theology by J. Bowden and J. Richmond (SCM) is informative. Note should also be taken of D. E. Jenkins’s The Glory of Man and J. Moltmann’s The Theology of Hope (both SCM). The Roman Catholic series Concilium has now reached Volume 23, edited by K. Rahner, and Volume 24, edited by H. Küng (Paulist Press); the themes here are atheism and the sacraments. J. A. T. Robinson still pursues his Explorations into God (SCM), though it might be better to consult the map first.

Ethics is still a dominant theme. J. Macquarrie has an interesting Dictionary of Christian Ethics (SCM). J. A. Pike espouses the new view in You and the New Morality—74 Cases (Harper & Row), but P. Ramsey is more balanced in Deeds and Rules in Christian Ethics (Scribners). There is good historical material in E. L. Long’s Survey of Christian Ethics (Oxford).

The miscellaneous works are varied and fascinating. Both Tillich and Barth have sermons, The Eternal Now (SCM) and Call for God (SCM); there is a moral somewhere in the differences in title, presentation, and congregation. A Roman Catholic cry of protest comes from J. Kavanaugh, A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church (Trident). C. S. Lewis writes with his usual force and elegance in Letters to an American Lady (Eerdmans). D. E. Trueblood issues a stirring call in The Incendiary Fellowship (Harper & Row). Essays on diaconate make up the volume Service in Christ, edited by J. L. McCord and T. H. L. Parker (Eerdmans). Finally, there is a magnificent collection of extracts from great Christian writings in Valiant for Truth, edited by H. W. Coray (Lippincott). Here is a timely reminder that we have a goodly heritage to enjoy, preserve, and extend.

- More fromGeoffrey W. Bromiley

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January was specially gratifying in several ways. A $53.03 checkbook balance survived my annual income-tax payment (next year’s surtax will doubtless alter that). And fellow religion editors commented sympathetically and generously on my personal plans for theological research.

Since I made passing mention of death-of-God theologians as among those needing evangelical confrontation, not a few volunteers have worked my telephone overtime with offers of help in showing God alive.

An Arlington, Virginia, cab driver called to say that he is “the Truth,” that he was raised from the dead April 3, 1931, and that he has been conscious of his divinity since 1964. I thought I had escaped that climate when I moved from California, but almost anything can now happen in the Washington area too.

Another to volunteer help in my “search for God” was a stranger who said he had gathered scientific proofs to end all doubt. And a college professor asked that I send him periodic bulletins, as and if such are issued, on the current state of the supernatural world.

With help of this kind, the year ahead should be remarkably interesting, if not fruitful.

Clearer than ever is the fact that evangelical Christians are overdue participants in the modern dialogue. And what is necessarily said at scholarly levels must also be preserved at journalistic frontiers, where many ordinary readers need and seek theological help.

Addison H. Leitch

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In days like these, who can read the signs of the times? Our many and varied experts seem to lead us only to confusion. As. for me, I find that “keeping up on things” is always just a little beyond me.

After such a humble introduction, however, let me think along with you about a few things in this new year of 1968. I see in the papers that the Russians are now becoming capitalistic. I am also led to understand that this apparent slippage in loyalty to sound communistic doctrine is what is driving the wedge between Russia and China.

At the same time, I see—and this has been going on for many, many years—that there is the general belief (or rather fear) that so-called Western civilization, exemplified primarily by the American way of life, is wrapped up in a creeping socialism that is slipping toward communism. It would seem, therefore, that one way or another, the United States and Russia are on the way to some kind of a reasonable rapport. But the idea of getting along with Russia is such a frightful thought to many people that they run away from any such possibility.

To understand these tendencies, it seems to me, we need a correction in the kind of thinking we have been accustomed to. This may easily lead us into philosophy—perish the thought.

The first thing wrong with our thinking is that we have continually criticized Russia for being atheistic. Why this is a purely Russian problem, I have never been able to see. The Roman Catholic Church has taken the lead in a continuous condemnation of Russia because of its atheism, and many Protestants have been more sympathetic to Romanism because they like the way Rome stands up to Russia while so many Protestant leaders seem a bit vague at this point.

The real problem for the Roman Catholics, however, is not atheism. What else does a church do for a living besides combat atheism wherever atheism is found? The church in Rome has been in the business of combating atheism all over the world for centuries. What we fail to notice is that the problem of Rome and Russia is, more than godlessness, the fact that in communistic society the church cannot control its own property, cannot control its own money, and therefore has no foundation in a power struggle. In other countries, such as our own, the financial strength of the Roman church and the power that flows out from this strength are staggering.

At the same time, those of us who like to talk about Western civilization had better think again about atheism in Western society. What is the Church doing about the atheism of France, or modern Britain, or Christian America? About 50 per cent of the population of our own land is related in no way to the Church; would you like to guess what part of that 50 per cent has any Christian commitment? The domination of state-controlled education is producing a secular society by geometric progression. Statistically, there are more Christians in America than in any other country in the world; yet we cannot walk our streets at night in safety. To put it succinctly, do we really believe that God is more interested in atheistic democracy than in atheistic communism?

Now take the word “communism.” There may be something essentially weak in a communistic society. Perhaps its own built-in flaws are what have led to failure time and time again when groups small and large have tried communal living. We have to keep reminding ourselves that the early Church looked very much like a communal society, and that other early experiments failed over and over again. Many times in history, people for religious reasons and Christian reasons—not atheistic reasons—have thought that society ought to be some kind of a community.

In the communal society, property and even family belong to the group. Communism does not have to be atheistic, and it is not in essence anti-God. Many serious thinkers have thought that some form of communal living approaches the Christian ideal.

What I am arguing is that the problem with Russia is neither atheism nor communism in essence, and that their moving toward capitalism may simply be illustrative of the historically sound position that any communistic form of society will not sustain itself.

The problem is deeper. This brings us to the philosophical basis of the Russian experiment: dialectical materialism. The term looks forbidding, but it isn’t really difficult. “Materialism” is clear enough, so long as we remember that we are speaking of it as a total world view. It is not simply a liking for material things; it is the belief that at the foundation of all reality there is nothing more or less than matter. This eventually leads to a psychology or a sociology or even a system of values in which the only realities are material; they can never be spiritual. Goals are material, methods are materialistic. In the last analysis, even man can be looked on as things; the most subtle operations of a man are seen to rest on cells and combinations of cells, and other possible realities such as the soul are dismissed as nonsense. “The mind secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.”

The word “dialectical” is a little harder. In simplest terms, it means this: There are certain forces loose in history that by their nature oppose one another. One force becomes a thesis, the opposing force is the antithesis, and the moves of history have by necessity been moves toward many syntheses. As the Russians view it, the force of capitalism is a thesis, the proletariat is the antithesis, and the synthesis is to be the classless society. Since these forces of history are deterministic and irresistible, men as persons are expendable. One’s freedom of choice consists in aligning himself on the side of the new day that will bring in the classless society—and perhaps even giving his life for it.

The doctrine of thesis and antithesis must be thought of, again, as materialistic. This is where atheism comes in. There is no God; therefore man cannot be a creature of God. As a result he is either the end product of a series of biological accidents or a thing swept along by the tides of history.

Well, if the Russians and the Chinese like this sort of thing, let them have it. We Christians and especially we Americans will believe in God and will protect men as persons and will pass judgment on behavior according to the will of God. The only question is, Do we?

As one reads the signs of the times, the real and frightening aspect of rapport between East and West is not a question of ahteism or communism; it is the fact that Americans generally are settling for materialistic aims and methods and are coming to believe that men are things and not souls.

Would you not agree with me that most of the goals of our beloved nation are materialistic? And can you not say with me that the dominant philosophy of our universities (logical positivism) and the dominant psychology of our universities (behaviorism) are variations of scientism, which is another way of describing materialism? The apathy and despair that mark our civilization are simply the throwing up of our hands in the face of the determinism of forces and the sweep of history. Russia may well be winning in ways we haven’t even suspected.

- More fromAddison H. Leitch

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A bill signed into law by President Johnson January 2 requires all ordained ministers to participate in the Social Security program as self-employed persons.

Previously, clergymen were exempt but could participate by filing waivers. Now they are obligated to pay into the program and will thus be eligible to receive monthly Social Security benefits when they retire.

The only exceptions will be members of religious orders who have taken vows of poverty and clergymen who conscientiously object to participation in government insurance programs. Both will have to apply for special waivers.

New clergymen will begin participation as soon as they enter the active ministry. Missionaries who are ordained ministers are also covered by the new law and must begin payment for the year 1968, Missionary News Service reported.

Ministers who in the past have chosen coverage and signed exemption waivers (form 2031) must continue coverage. They may not sign out as conscientious objectors.

Coverage under the new law begins with the calendar year 1968, for which income-tax returns will be due on April 15, 1969. However, ministers who are filing an estimated income tax for 1968 should include with it the estimated Social Security tax.

The rate for 1968 will be 6.4 per cent of taxable incomes up to $7,800. This means that a pastor may have to pay as much as $500 in Social Security taxes in 1968 in addition to regular federal and local income taxes. Clergymen earning less than $7,800 will of course pay proportionately less.

Retirement benefits from Social Security vary according to a person’s age and the number of years he has been paying into the program. At present the largest monthly check for a surviving family amounts to $368. In February this will go up to $434.40. The top of the range for individuals will be increased from $142 to $160.50. Minimum monthly payments will go from $44 to $55.

Every major country now has a social security program. The idea dates back to the 1880s, when Germany became the first nation to adopt workmen’s compensation and old-age pension laws. The first U. S. Social Security Act was passed in 1935.

CHURCH PANORAMA

Membership in the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ) has dropped 19,257 from the 1966 total. The new figure is 1,875,400. However, contributions for the year were a record $109.6 million.

A restructuring of ties of churches in forty nations to American Methodism will be discussed at the spring convention when the Methodists merge with the Evangelical United Brethren. Overseas Methodists dislike the fact that 90 per cent of the representation and agenda items at quadrennial conferences relate to U. S. matters.

As of January 1, the United Church of Canada absorbed 10,000 members of the Evangelical United Brethren, a result of the merger of the U. S. Brethren with The Methodist Church.

Seventh-day Adventists, more willing to submit to Spain’s new religious laws than most Protestants, held their first large public worship series in Zaragoza, where the Adventists have built their first church in Spain. Attendance was 850 for each of six nights.

The Evangelical Free Church has made Scripture Press lessons the denomination’s official departmental study course.

San Francisco Roman Catholic Archbishop Joseph McGucken turned down Episcopal Bishop C. Kilmer Myers’s offer to share the Episcopal cathedral. The Catholics plan to build an $8 million cathedral. Former Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike also offered use of the building when the old Catholic cathedral burned down in 1962.

The Episcopal Church and American Jewish Congress are joining a suit asking the U. S. Supreme Court to rule that legal discrimination against children born out of wedlock is unconstitutional. The case involves five illegitimate Louisiana children seeking damages in their mother’s death on the basis of alleged medical negligence.

PERSONALIA

W. Stanley Mooneyham, international vice-president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, underwent surgery for removal of the infected sac around his heart January 3 and was reported in serious, though not critical, condition at a Houston hospital. He had a heart attack a year ago. Meanwhile, plans are proceeding for the Asian Congress on Evangelism, which Mooneyham is coordinating, to be held November 4–11 in Singapore.

Former Billy Graham staffer Jerry Beavan resigned as vice-president for public relations and personnel of Rexall Drug to open a Los Angeles public-relations consulting agency, aimed at evangelicals.

Francis Cardinal Spellman left his entire $30,000 estate to his successor for use in the New York archdiocese. He had given the church most of his book royalties and other past income.

Paul Ramsey, a Methodist who teaches ethics at Princeton, Was appointed to a two-semester professorship of genetic ethics at Georgetown University’s medical school, under a Kennedy Foundation grant.

The U. S. Catholic Conference refounded its public-information office and named Robert Donihi, 52, as director. Donihi, a noted international lawyer, has been press consultant to the national Catholic charities.

The Rev. Robbins Strong, head of interpretation and personnel for United Church of Christ foreign missions, will now direct the Joint Action for Mission program of the World Council of Churches’ evangelism division.

The Rev. John Hoad, a 40-year-old Methodist in the conservative Reformed tradition, has been named president of the United Theological College of the West Indies in Jamaica. He previously was a student chaplain and district superintendent.

New executive director of the Gustave Weigel Society, which seeks ecumenical understanding between Catholics and Protestants, is Robert Balkam, a Congregationalist who joined the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, D. C., and then became a Catholic.

Roman Catholic priest William Leahy of Philadelphia has been suspended because he celebrated a Mass on behalf of the marriage of his brother John, a former priest who was excommunicated after he married a widow. The California priest who allowed the Mass to be offered has been relieved of his parish and assigned to a monastery.

MISCELLANY

Six inmates of the Nashville prison had to hide a bound guard and delay their plans for a jailbreak while Salvation Army workers went from cell to cell handing out Christmas gifts. The break then continued; three of the six were quickly recaptured.

The council of Montgomery County, Maryland, switched from prayers to silent meditation at the opening of its meetings because it took the county clerk one to three hours a week to find a clergyman willing to pray.

Navajo Indians near Shiprock, New Mexico, trapped in the Southwest’s brutal blizzard, got a quick collection of $1,000 worth of staple foods from local Protestant and Catholic churches. An appeal for help on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s radio and TV stations in eastern Virginia raised money for fourteen tons of food and clothing.

The Canadian Council of Churches said it has sent $50,000 in aid to North Vietnamese civilian war victims in the past eighteen months. A similar amount has gone to South Viet Nam.

The Spanish government extended for five months the deadline for protesting non-Catholics to register under the new religion law in hopes that mutually acceptable procedures can be worked out.

The Vatican City daily, commenting on heart transplants, said such surgery should not be undertaken “capriciously.” To be morally legitimate, it said, such experiments should involve “an urgency to operate because of the certainty of death; some possibility of success; and the explicit or tacit consent of the patient.” The paper criticized operations with the aim of “increasing one’s own power of seduction” or helping a criminal escape apprehension.

Deaths

JOOST DE BLANK, 59, crusading foe of apartheid in South Africa, where he served from 1957 to 1963 as Anglican Archbishop of Capetown; in London, after a stroke.

FRANK ALEXANDER JUHAN, 80, former Episcopal bishop of Florida and chancellor of the University of the South; in Sewanee, Tennessee.

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Only a few days before President Johnson paid a surprise visit to Pope Paul VI, the weekly Washington Examiner reported that the chief executive “is showing a growing affinity for Catholicism.”

The report suggested that the President’s interest in the Roman Catholic faith goes beyond the mere intention of reflecting an ecumenical image before the pluralistic American society. This seemed to be supported somewhat when on the day before Christmas he turned up for a 7 A.M. mass at St. Dominic’s Roman Catholic Church in southwest Washington. That was just three hours after he had returned from his exhaustive 27,000-mile trip around the world.

The Examiner said that Johnson also has made private visits to St. Dominic’s and that “he draws great strength from ‘the little monks’” there.

The President visits an assortment of Protestant churches and is a member of the Disciples of Christ (Christian Churches). “Recent reports have President Johnson drawing closer and closer to the Catholic Church, however,” the Examiner said. “Some speculate this is a result of the intense moral and political pressures of the Viet Nam war.”

The newspaper declared that “the actual conversion of the President to Catholicism is seen by reporters as possible, but not probable. In any event, such an unprecedented step would certainly not come during 1968, reporters agree.”

Johnson conferred with the Pope for seventy-five minutes on Saturday night, December 23, during a stopover in Rome. Viet Nam was reportedly a key topic of discussion. The President was on his way home from a visit to Viet Nam and Australia, where he attended memorial services for Prime Minister Harold Holt. During the Vatican visit, Johnson gave Pope Paul a bronze bust of himself as a gift from his daughter Luci, who was converted to Catholicism in 1965. The Pope gave the President paintings and medallions for members of his family.

The meeting was the fifth between a reigning pontiff and an American president in office, and the second between Johnson and Pope Paul since they were elected to their present posts. Only generalized summaries of the talks have been made public.

Prior to the meeting, the Pope had asked that the United States suspend its bombings in North Viet Nam and that forces opposing the United States “give a sign of a serious will for peace.” After the meeting there were reports that the Vatican would send a peace mission to Hanoi.

Newsweek subsequently reported that the meeting between Johnson and the pontiff was something less than cordial. “The Pontiff was visibly disturbed that the twenty-four-hour Christmas truce could not be lengthened and the bombing stopped permanently,” the magazine said in its issue dated January 8. This month, Vatican Radio denied reports of “dissension” at the meeting. In deference to another papal plea, the Allies in Viet Nam extended their New Year’s truce for twelve hours.

The day before New Year’s, the President attended mass at a small frame Roman Catholic Church near his Texas ranch. There he brought greetings from Pope Paul to the local parish priest, the Rev. Wunibald Schneider, who is an old friend of Johnson.

WANTED: MATURE WOMEN

“I can’t understand it,” says retired Navy Captain Kenneth L. Butler, whose years at sea accustomed him to getting things done effectively. “This is the only spiritual ministry I’ve ever been connected with that hasn’t prospered.”

The ministry to which Butler refers seeks to supply voluntary civilian assistants for military chaplains. Right now it is a foundering enterprise, and Butler, its executive-board chairman, is deeply concerned.

“We get all the money we need,’ he says, “and many chaplains are friendly to the idea. We could place dozens of workers almost immediately, but we just can’t find them.”

The 14-year-old ministry goes by the stuffy name of Protestant Religious Education Services, Inc. But it has a simple, clear-cut purpose: a spiritual outreach to the more than 5,000,000 dependents of American servicemen, many of whom live on military bases in considerable isolation from religious influences found in the typical civilian community. When the total number of U. S. servicemen and their wives and children is compared to the number of chaplains available, the ratio is about 2,700 to one. The needs of dependents are intensified when the husbands go off to Viet Nam or to some other place where families can’t accompany them.

Butler is looking for mature women trained in Christian education to conduct Bible classes, visitation, children’s churches, teacher training, teen clubs, and release-time classes. The commitment is full time, and the women raise their own support, as they would in any faith mission. Their goal is ultimately to turn over direction of the activities to Christian base residents.

The idea, a remarkable bit of evanglical initiative, began with Mrs. Georgia V. Rushton, who developed such a ministry in California at Castle Air Force Base and Fort Ord. The idea spread, and eventually it developed into an organization affiliated with the National Association of Evangelicals. At one time there were reportedly as many as fifteen staff workers. Now the number is down to two.

W.C.C. MAN IN HAVANA

From Havana, Ecumenical Press Service reported that the Cuban Council of Churches would hold a national institute for leadership training on social issues in January. The institute was being sponsored by the council’s Department on Church and Society, EPS said. No other details were given.

The press service also told of a December meeting of the department in Havana, where “it was decided to emphasize work on the local and denominational level during the coming year.” Speakers included Mauricio Lopez, associate secretary of the WCC Department on Church and Society in Geneva, who was said to have “outlined efforts being made to follow up on the 1966 World Conference on Church and Society and the challenge posed by revolutionaries and technocrats in various parts of the world.”

SEMINARY MILESTONES

Colgate Rochester Divinity School, which has the richest history of all American Baptist seminaries, will take on new ecumenical dimensions this year. Beginning this fall, the seminary will share its Rochester, New York, campus with Bexley Hall, a small Episcopal seminary in Ohio that, like Colgate Rochester, dates back about a century and a half. Trustees of the two schools voted last month to affiliate by bringing Bexley Hall’s students, faculty, and books to Colgate Rochester. Colgate Rochester has about 150 students, Bexley Hall about 50.

The move is said to be the first legal step toward establishment of a proposed Rochester Center for Theological Studies, which may also include St. Bernard’s Roman Catholic Seminary in Rochester and several other divinity Schools outside the area. All the seminaries are to retain their identities and denominational affiliations while sharing facilities.

Colgate Rochester’s proud past, recalled in 1967 during the school’s 150th anniversary, is chiefly remembered in connection with two people: Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) and Augustus Hopkins Strong (1836–1921). Rauschenbusch, primary mover behind the social gospel, held the chair of history. Strong was theology professor and president of what was then Rochester Theological Seminary.

Rauschenbusch did not share the emphasis on radical divine immanence, and the neglect of personal salvation, characteristic of later social gospel advocates, but his social Christianity nonetheless pointed clearly in the direction of socialism. Strong, on the other hand, viewed nature as a part of God, yet gave more stress to the traditional view of personal salvation and social change.

Although Rauschenbusch is better known, Strong’s work has been in a sense more enduring. Among American Baptists no theological treatise has been more influential than Strong’s Systematic Theology. He won lasting respect despite the continuing swirl of criticism he aroused during his lifetime by espousing ethical monism. Strong alienated many theological conservatives by appropriating premises of the personalistic idealists. To the end of his life, however, he maintained that they could be reconciled with an authoritative Scripture.

The new Rochester plan may be the strongest among a group of seminary federations now taking shape in a number of large American communities, notably Washington, D. C., Boston, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California. The trend is toward mutual recognition and sharing of libraries and specialists. It also reflects a de-emphasis on theological and ecclesiastical distinctives.

A LIFT FROM THE GOSPEL

Church leaders in South Africa seem mildly surprised at the positive effects of an evangelistic effort among the predominantly non-Christian Chatsworth Indians.

“It is most encouraging to see how churches of highly different traditions can work together,” said the guest preacher of the campaign, the Rev. Ross Main, rector of Christ Church, Addington.

The campaign, sponsored by the Natal Christian Council, was initiated by Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches and supported by the Roman Catholic Church. Each night a large tent was packed to capacity. Preparation and follow-up methods were borrowed from the Billy Graham crusades.

THE PLOT THICKENS

Los Angeles police arrested a devout churchman last month on the basis of an information filed by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison naming him as a conspirator in a plot to assassinate President Kennedy.

Edgar Eugene Bradley, West Coast representative of radio preacher Carl McIntire, surrendered to the sheriff’s office upon learning of the charges and was released on his own recognizance. Bradley says the accusation is absurd and plans to fight extradition to Louisiana. A hearing has been set for January 29.

McIntire released a statement declaring that “the whole development is preposterous.” He called for “a full investigation of Mr. Garrison’s conduct and particularly his sources of information by the responsible state officials.”

“We appeal to the American people to recognize that this type of abuse which we are now suffering is typical of what is being done all across the land to discredit the anti-Communists,” McIntire said.

IMPATIENCE ON RACE

Negro college students at the Inter-Varsity Missionary Convention (story on page 35)—inspired in part by missionaries’ comments on the harm American church bias does to foreign missions—called a spur-of-the-moment meeting that was attended by 250 persons. Some voiced interest in a special movement to prod evangelicals on the race question.

Then the Negro leaders met again and, after praying and discussing into the wee hours of the morning, scrapped ideas for a new organization. Instead, they vowed to work within existing evangelical groups, speaking and buttonholing leaders to bring the Church to grips with its internal segregation and social irrelevance.

At stake is not only foreign missions, they feel, but also any chance for a turn to evangelical preaching in Negro churches. Paul Gibson, a Harvard senior in biology, will coordinate the informal efforts of the Negro evangelical students and keep them posted through a newsletter. A follow-up meeting during spring vacation is hoped for.

Elward Ellis, a sophom*ore at Shaw University in North Carolina, said Negro evangelicals have been “so content to have white evangelicals pat us on the back” that missionary zeal has been lost. Negro churches must be reached, he said, because the ravages of slavery, bad education, and separation from white evangelicals have cut theological content and soundness in Negro preaching to the bone.

The Negroes appreciate gains made by the civil-rights movement but, in the words of Chicago high-school senior Ronald Potter, “the basic problem is the human heart. Why spend forty years on the symptom when you can deal with the cause?” The students generally see some value in a non-violent form of “black power.” Isom Herron, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, said “black power is a necessity for people who have not experienced the freedom and deep meaning for their lives that is found in Christ.”

Gibson thinks the current movement will result in either “blood in the streets or bread on the table.” Speakers from Newark, New Jersey, and Philadelphia said slum frustrations are so potent that black Christians who take a stand against violence may be martyred.

In another development, forty African students met and wrote a joint resolution read on the convention floor. It expressed concern for evangelizing other “black students” and deplored the fact that Inter-Varsity has not been able to hire Negroes for any leadership positions.

Seven Die In Boat Mishap

An American missionary couple lost their four children in the sinking of a motor launch off the coast of Hiroshima last month. Three other persons also drowned.

The Rev. and Mrs. Donald Bowman were on their way to Atada Island to hold a Bible class when their twenty-two-foot boat sprang a leak. All on board had life preservers, and all set out to paddle ashore. But only the Bowman couple and a 22-year-old American Marine, Herbert Christiansen, survived.

The victims included an American Navy lieutenant, Robert A. Hatcher, 26, of Dallas, who like Christiansen had gone along for the ride, and two Japanese.

The Bowmans are natives of Home-dale, Idaho.

SENATOR SAM’S CRUSADE

For several years, U. S. Senator Sam J. Ervin, Jr., has led a crusade to enable courts to rule on the constitutionality of public financial support for church-related institutions. He has been trying to get enabling legislation through Congress, but always it has been stalled in the House Judiciary Committee. The latest hope, in the form of a judicial-review rider on the Elementary and Secondary Education Amendments Act of 1967, was killed by a Senate-House conference committee in closing days of the first session of the Ninetieth Congress.

“The death of the judicial-review rider was the result of a number of factors, including a reported direct personal intervention by President Lyndon B. Johnson,” Baptist Press said.

Other factors were said to be opposition by the Roman Catholic hierarchy because they feared a cutoff of certain aid that goes to pupils in parochial schools; opposition by the Justice Department on grounds that authorization for judicial review of federal spending by individual taxpayers is unconstitutional; fear that such constitutional lawsuits would disrupt much of the current education program of the federal government and that old feuds between religious groups would break out anew; and opposition by an unidentified AFL-CIO lobbyist who joined others in trying to reduce the threat to the education program.

Baptist Press attributed to Senate sources a report that Johnson had called Ervin and one or two other senators promising early hearings in the House Judiciary Committee next session if the senators dropped the judicial-review rider from the education bill.

Subsequently, Ervin took his case to the U. S. Supreme Court indirectly by filing a friend-of-the-court brief for the Baptist General Association of Virginia and a group known as Americans for Public Schools. The brief was filed in connection with a case that the court will hear next spring. Appellants in that case seek a standing to file suit contesting government aid to church-related institutions.

TARGET: SMUT

President Johnson called for help this month on the p*rnography problem. Under authority of a bill passed by Congress this past fall, he named an eighteen-member panel “to investigate the relationship of obscene or p*rnographic materials to antisocial behavior, particularly by minors, and to determine whether there is a need for and a constitutional method to control the distribution of such materials.”

The panel consists of clergymen, judges, social-research experts, and prominent citizens. It includes the Rev. Morton A. Hill, a Jesuit who is executive secretary of the smut-battling New York organization known as Operation Yorkville; Dr. G. William Jones, assistant professor of broadcast film art at Southern Methodist University; Rabbi Irving Lehrman of Miami Beach; and the Rev. Winfrey C. Link, executive director of the Four-Fold Challenge Campaign in Nashville.

PAVILION RESURRECTION?

Keith A. Price, general manager of the Sermons from Science Pavilion at Expo 67, says Montreal authorities have asked that the program be resumed next summer. But a debt of $80,000 still remains from the original project.

“As long as there is outstanding need,” Price says, “the board cannot seriously consider repeating the program. If only the balance of our requirements were met within the next month, I feel sure that there would still be time for them to act on the suggestion.”

SEIZING A BERLIN PULPIT

Student demonstrators led by East German refugee Rudi Dutschke interrupted Christmas and New Year services in West Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church to protest the American presence in Viet Nam, touching off heated debate among Church leaders. Dutschke’s quasianarchist views drew world attention when his student protests led to the downfall of the city regime last fall.

Religious News Service reported that Dutschke was pushed from the church on Christmas Day after he had attempted to enter the pulpit to read a statement opposing U.S. policy. At the New Year’s service, demonstrators chanted: “We want freedom of speech in church,” a claim supported by Berlin’s Lutheran Bishop Kurt Scharf.

Among defenders of Dutschke—whose wife, the former Gretchen Klotz, is a philosophy graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois—were thirty young pastors of the Evangelical Church of Bremen in West Germany. They argued that the students were right about the war, and that their intrusion was justified by Christ’s disturbance of the Temple when he removed the moneychangers.

Pastor Gerhard Pohl of the Wilhelm church replied that nothing excused the demonstrations and argued that, as far as he knew, “no Bremen pastor ever protested against the border guards killing human beings who try to escape over the Communist Wall into West Berlin.”

The West German newspaper Die Welt noted that Christ had disturbed “not the order but the disorder of the Temple” and that he did so with the words, “My house shall be a house of worship.”

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“Take a trip with Jesus,” somebody had scrawled on the American Bible Society graffiti board at the vast University of Illinois Assembly Hall. And thousands of college students at the eighth triennial Inter-Varsity Missionary Convention were willing to take the trip—wherever Jesus led them.

In a day when foreign missions—even the Church itself—seems a has-been to many youths, the remarkable Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship movement assembled 9,200 persons in what convention director Eric Fife said might be “the largest missionary convention and the largest student Christian conference ever held.”

One night William Miller, Sr., veteran United Presbyterian missionary to Iran, recalled the impact made on his life when the Student Volunteer Movement met fifty-four years ago. In a poignant twist of history, the theological and evangelistic rationale of the SVM had by this last week of 1967 come to rest in Inter-Varsity as the unrecognizable heir of SVM met in Cleveland (see story following).

The IVCF convention was as ecumenical as John Mott could have wanted. Every major American and Canadian denomination was well represented, plus most of the small evangelical groups. Thirty-six denominational and sixty-four independent boards sent personnel to describe their work to interested students. About 200 U. S. Episcopalians and Canadian Anglicans attended, though their denominations did not send recruiters. The throng even included forty-three Roman Catholics; a panel discussion made it clear, however, that evangelicals have reservations about cooperation with Catholicism.

John Alexander—former assistant liberal-arts dean and department chairman at the University of Wisconsin, who decided to become general director of IVCF in the United States just before the last Urbana meeting—says that the last three years have brought “great improvement” in overcoming IVCF’s “anti-Church” image. Other trends, he said, are a new concern for evangelism of college teachers, whom “most evangelicals have written off”; more local-committee fund-raising to expand staff; and better staff training.

IVCF is at work on nearly every campus in Canada (not true in the United States), and Canadian director H. Wilber Sutherland has just hired as his business assistant Geoffrey Still, one of the nation’s biggest shopping-center operators. Sutherland said official support now comes from Presbyterians and Baptists and that United Church of Canada officials have had to admit in embarrassment that their only reason for not supporting IVCF is doctrinal.

IVCF minimizes disagreements on secondary matters but, unlike many ecumenical groups, takes a staunch conservative stand on the Bible and doctrine. With this kind of audience, one question put to an afternoon panel discussion loomed large in many students’ minds: Should I volunteer for my denominational board or for an independent board that is less permissive on doctrine? Miller took the loyalist position. “If people of biblical faith leave the Presbyterian and other churches, what will be left?” he asked. Arthur Glasser of Overseas Missionary Fellowship said it’s “not just a matter of being friendly,” since many independent boards arose frankly as a “protest against unbelief.”

Fife said that IVCF wants to cooperate with all foreign-mission boards but that it encourages biblically-minded students to ask sharp questions on how they would fit in. At the last convention, he said, two students were so dissatisfied with answers from their denomination’s representative that one joined the Peace Corps and the other joined another church.

In what Glasser called an era of “the disappearance of hope,” several speakers fairly tingled with the dangers, the possibilities, the excitement of foreign missions in the coming generation. Optimist Donald McGavran of Fuller Seminary says it’s “a day of unique openness to the Gospel.” Virtually every nation on earth has an indigenous church, speakers said, so that in this century, for the first time, the world has a universal religion in Christianity.

Other mission clichés toppled right and left. Latin America Mission’s David Howard said an influx of missionaries would be the quickest way to shut off the rapid evangelistic movement in Colombia. London rector John R. W. Stott said evangelism is not soul-winning but rather proclaiming of the Gospel—whether anybody responds or not. Fife added that the success-teaching of business has “infected much of the Church.”

Francis Steele of North Africa Mission rejected the idea of a “call” to a particular board or field. This is God’s guidance, he explained, but the only call in the Bible is unto the person of Jesus Christ. Fife said missionary choice, often made subjective, must be based on objective information.

The most incisive mission theorist was Warren Webster, a Conservative Baptist who has worked for fifteen years in Pakistan. First, he rejected the idea that world missions have been “the handmaid of imperialism,” pointing out that many imperialists fought the very existence of missions.

He attacked the notion that “missionaries should reach everybody for Jesus Christ,” which is “impossible.” Instead, the task is to “plant churches and create cells to evangelize a society from within.” Webster thinks the era of the missionary hero is over and that today’s big missions obstacles are not death, disease, and discomfort but psychological and spiritual barriers.

Webster thinks “we will never fulfill the Great Commission by running into a town, setting up a loud speaker, passing out tracts, and moving on. We must stay and ‘teach all things I have commanded.’” This thirst for a comprehensive missionary movement, for social as well as personal redemption, characterized many appeals. “Men with hungry stomachs and cold bodies are in no condition to hear the Gospel,” asserted Howard. Several missionaries were as critical of the social isolationism among evangelicals as of Gospel-less social action by liberals.

Although the program was oriented toward the central theme of evangelism, some of the panel discussion and much of the corridor chat centered on war and peace, civil disobedience, and—most particularly—race (see story, page 40). Reason: IVCF conventions also serve as the only large meeting of the coming generation of college-trained evangelical leaders.

Evan Adams, IVCF assistant missionary director, said that youth has newly emerged as “a great social bloc of history,” and that few older people are ready for this development. But IVCF is trying. Its magazine proudly promotes the unsolicited testimonial, “His makes me so mad I could spit.” Fife said that people who are conservative in theology “and progressive in every other area” are “precisely what God needs today.” Adams criticized a sermon on “Viet Nam and Prophecy” in a church where dozens of students in the audience would have to face the issue next week. C. Stacey Woods reported on the internationalism of the movement, which has spread to autonomous groups in thirty-five nations. And with institutional grace, Fife said, “There is no guarantee, no magic charm of blessing in Inter-Varsity.”

But IVCF Evangelism Director Paul Little couldn’t help remarking as he gazed out on the potent minds and muscles of the gathered crowd, “Reality can’t be faked on such a mass scale.”

Pennsylvanians Urged To End Church Tax Exemption

Pennsylvania’s constitutional convention is being asked to consider eliminating all property-tax exemption, including that of churches, in revising the state’s basic laws.

Milton W. DeLancey, secretary of the Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors, told the Committee on Local Government that “all property owners should pay their fair share for local services, and therefore we propose the elimination of all exemptions, including governmental and authority exemptions.”

Religious News Service, in reporting governmental operations in some small townships, and in municipalities, said exemptions have caused financial strain on local governments.

Asked by the committee if he proposed that churches lose their exemption, DeLancey said: “You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. If you are going to make exceptions for churches, then that opens the door for others to ask ‘why not us?’”

The township association’s stand was supported by the Pennsylvania League of Cities. Richard G. Marden, executive director, said that “not only would we prohibit property-tax exemptions, we would prohibit exclusions from local taxes, such as the exclusion won in the General Assembly by movies on theater admissions, and the proposals to exempt certain categories of elderly from local real-estate taxes.”

The tax-exempt status of churches is coming under increasing scrutiny. The December issue of Nation’s Cities, a monthly published by the National League of Cities, included a major critique of the problem by Margaret M. O’Brien. She declared:

“The financial resources of government, particularly at the local level, appear sometimes to dwindle before our eyes when we contemplate the vast, complex, and right-now needs of this nation. And yet, at the same time, the wealth of the nation’s churches continues to grow, having already reached incredible dimensions, thanks in large part to tax exemptions.”

SUPPLANTING THE GOSPEL

A special kind of missionary showed up in Cleveland for the quadrennial meeting sponsored by the University Christian Movement. He was the missionary of social change.

Some 3,000 students came to the Lake Erie city at the call of the movement, which is related to the National Council of Churches. Stressed throughout the program was the UCM’s organizing principle: To bring about change through reformulation of the university. This aim was adopted last summer by the organization’s governing committee. The UCM got its present name in 1966 when the National Student Christian Federation was dissolved so the base could be broadened to include Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Quaker collegians.

The broadened base and new goal failed to swell the attendance. The last NSCF meeting, held at Athens, Ohio, in 1963, registered more than 3,000 participants. Attendances of up to 10,000 were recorded in the heyday of the Student Volunteer Movement, one of the groups taken over by NSCF.

Three elements tied Cleveland Week (the meeting’s official name) to the predecessor quadrennials, one commentator quipped. There were students, long lines, and confusion. He could have added: heavy financial assistance by many denominational boards of missions. UCM President Steve Schomberg, a student at New York’s Union Seminary, claimed the meeting rightfully followed in the train of Student Volunteer Movement quadrennials in that it was concerned with mission. He said mission is how Christians live out their lives.

Definitely supplanted by the UCM principle of working for social change was the long-heralded SVM goal of “evangelization of the world in this generation.” Also supplanted were hymn singing, Bible study, and testimonies to the power of the Gospel. Students at Cleveland sang the protest songs. They studied books on social problems. And posters beckoned them to caucuses on student power, Catholic power, and black power.¹Delegates gave out four kinds of buttons urging the Presidential nomination of Senator Eugene McCarthy. The Young Socialist Alliance sold posters and stickers and took subscriptions for leftist publications.

Cleveland Week was only one part of a year-long educational effort called Process ‘67, according to UCM officials. Another part of Process was a series of network TV programs in November. Organizers said the final six days of the year were designated as an education experience and experiment.

Participants were divided into some 100 Depth Education Groups, to consider nearly that many topics. The list of subjects ran the gamut of social issues. Resource people and background material were provided to stimulate discussion.

The week was planned with a “dialogical” approach, since any answer is temporal, President Schomberg told reporters as the conference began. Paperback books prepared for the conference were called “dialogue focusers.” The same name was applied to closed-circuit TV programs produced at Cleveland and fed into participants’ hotel rooms.

Use of television in the week’s program was a major innovation. A studio was set up in the Sheraton-Cleveland Hotel with shows going out three times daily through the improvised network that took in two other downtown hotels. Volunteers recruited from among conference participants helped Cleveland technicians and a New York production crew put on the telecasts. Interview and panel discussions on social issues dominated the fare, but skits, music, dancing, poetry readings, news, and commentary provided variety.

Debate and discussion were also stirred up by demonstrations and rallies. First was a mezzanine sit-in protesting recruiting by defense suppliers. Dow Chemical Company, manufacturer of napalm, got the major attention, but government agencies and other war matériel producers were also spotlighted. The recruiters had not come to sign up UCM participants but were interviewing Cleveland-area college seniors assembled by the Chamber of Commerce.

Another kind of recruitment at the headquarters hotel all week long was that of the Resistance, a group encouraging draft-age youths to resist induction. The Resistance got eight young men to turn in their draft cards during a worship service.

Only two events were scheduled to draw together all the conference participants—a “happening” the first night and a New Year’s Eve party the last. French bread and beer were provided for the final night’s affair, and priests and ministers attending the conference were asked to help serve. The supply was exhausted before all the partygoers were served, however, so some latecomers brought their own provisions.

What made the Cleveland Week of Process ‘67 a Christian event? Leonard Clough, resigning as UCM general secretary February 1 to devote his time to other duties in the NCC’s Department of Higher Education, responded for reporters. He said the kind of things the UCM is interested in are the kind of things Christian people ought to be doing.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

CAUTIOUS FRIENDS

A highly significant development in relations between the National Council of Churches in the Philippines and independent evangelical groups in the islands was the participation of the latter in the third general convention of the NCCP. Observers were present from the Christian and Missionary Alliance, Salvation Army, Lutheran churches, and other evangelical bodies. Also on hand were Seventh-day Adventist and Roman Catholic observers.

The NCCP also invited observers from the Assemblies of God, the Pilgrim Holiness Church, Foursquare Gospel Church, and the New Testament Church of God, but these politely declined.

The presence of some conservatives reflected a growing friendliness among Philippine Protestants who are at odds theologically. But the conservatives were believed eager to be put on record as opposing compromise.

The socially-oriented NCCP has traditionally been looked upon with disfavor by evangelical leaders who were afraid that the movement represented a drift toward a super-church. Some of these leaders now are satisfied that there is no such intent and so are cautiously curious over NCCP functions.

Foreign conservative missions have also been worried that the NCCP might gain recognition as the official screening agency for missionary organizations seeking to enter the country.

EUSTAQUIO RAMIENTOS, JR.

EVANGELICALS DEBATE NEW VIEWS

Questions of faith and history, theological methodology, and the nature of biblical inerrancy loomed large in discussions at the nineteenth annual year-end meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, held at Toronto Bible College.

In the keynote address at Victoria College, University of Toronto, Editor Carl F. H. Henry of CHRISTIANITY TODAY noted the chaotic state of neo-Protestant theology and said the times were never more propitious for a reassertion of evangelical rational theism. The “distorted Word” of recent modern theology, he said, must be confronted by the “disclosed Word” of the Judeo-Christian revelation. “The revelation and manifestation of the Logos—the in-scripturate and incarnate Word—can reverse the current trend to a godless word,” Henry said.

A panel discussion on “Faith and History in Biblical Christianity” was enlivened by the projection by Dr. Daniel P. Fuller (of Fuller Theological Seminary) of the view that God “deliberately accommodated” errors in non-theological and non-moral facets of biblical teaching in order “to enhance the communication of revelational truth.”

Another panelist, Dr. Arthur F. Holmes of Wheaton College, argued that biblical inerrancy is not a first-order scriptural doctrine like revelation but is rather “a second-order theological construct.” Holmes noted that dialogue between philosophy and theology has been reopened by the current replacement of the empirical-verificationist techniques of logical positivism by ordinary-language analysis. Instead of imposing the logic of other “language games” on theology, he said, linguistic analysis opens the door to a description of the actual logic at work in ordinary theological language. He contended that theological concepts are derived, not solely deductively or inductively, but “adductively,” in terms of conceptual mapwork and models. The advantage of such a view, he argued, is that “it admits the legitimacy of theological diversity stemming from the scriptura sola principle.”

Another center of debate was a panel on “Constructing a Theological Methodology for Evangelicals” in which participants ranged from natural theology to the language-game proposal in support of biblical ontology. There was also vigorous espousal of more traditional points of view.

Illness derailed one scheduled participant, Dr. Gordon H. Clark, in whose honor a Festschrift is soon to appear.

The society’s twentieth-anniversary program will be held at Westminster Theological Seminary and will concentrate in Old Testament studies. The society currently has 524 members, 177 associate members, and 93 student associates. New officers are Dr. Kenneth S. Kantzer, president, succeeding Dr. Stephen W. Paine of Houghton College; Dr. Henry, vice-president; Dr. Vernon Grounds, secretary-treasurer.