Page 6263 – Christianity Today (2024)

Contemporary interpreters of the world scene are constantly warning America that the greatest threat to the free world’s civilization is not the challenge of a militant Communism, but the present alarming decay of the moral fiber and the sense of purpose of the champion of the free world. No one today seriously doubts that America faces a severe test of her maturity and her strength in the years ahead. Can she meet this challenge? America can meet the challenge if she comprehends the secondary nature of her bout with Communism and seeks first to recover her own spiritual heritage, and thereby a firm national purpose and a renewed sense of God-given destiny.

What are the weaknesses of American society? In the first place, America is being weakened by a pluralism which is finding its way into every facet of our national life. In the late spring and summer of 1960, Life magazine published a series of eight essays by eminent Americans on the theme “The National Purpose.” Editorial motivation for these assessments was the disconcerting discovery that a nation of 177, 733, 190 Americans no longer seems unified by dedication to a common goal. Multitudes of citizens seem to cherish no articulate principles and purposes that unite them and govern their energies. In such a climate, the great American dream of individual freedom and of equal opportunity for all men appears to degenerate into a gospel of selfish individualism and personal aggrandizement.

America is also threatened by a creeping secularism, which is tending to defeat all interest in metaphysical ideals and to plunge our nation into a crass materialism little better than materialistic monism. In an interview with the editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Dr. Charles Malik, former president of the United Nations General Assembly, remarked, “I am not sure your Western materialism is better than the Soviet’s. If I were asked to choose between the dialectical materialism of the Soviet and the materialistic outlook on life and the practiced commercialism of the West, I am not sure I would choose the Western brand of materialism at all.” Such opinions are not uncommon in the “neutral” nations, and they account for the ambition of the religions of the Orient to “spiritualize” the Occident. Americans seem solely bent on increasing their military, industrial, and economic lead over the Soviet Union, as if this were all that is necessary to successfully resist the growing might of the Communist block. America must remember that it was only a small minority of Bolsheviks that captured Russia herself for Communism in 1917. The revolutionaries possessed poor weapons, were weak in numbers, and misplaced their idealism, but they were victorious because of their vigorous dedication. America does not need more scientists, former Harvard president and ambassador to West Germany James Bryant Conant is fond of saying. She needs more students of the humanities. America needs to know why she is fighting, whom she is fighting, and what she is fighting for.

Such a revitalized understanding of her destiny will not come from any advance in the materialistic sciences, but neither will it come solely from a study of the humanities. It will come only from an American ideology which has been revitalized by a rediscovery and reappropriation of the spiritual motivation and undergirdings of our heritage. This will mean repentance. Should America fail in this renewal, she may well find herself facing the crucial test of her endurance but failing in her courage and inner conviction.

There is a tendency in our generation to criticize the United States severely, forgetting that in the past America has had a strength of purpose and conviction which has served her well throughout her times of crisis. America has fought for freedom, justice, and religious liberty. Our urgent task today is to revitalize the American ideology—not to invent another, as social revisionists often tend to think. The question to be asked is this: What is the spiritual motivation, the ideological basis, that fired the American dream? What underlying purpose forged the American perspective of a Christian democratic people? If Americans can answer these questions, they will have taken the first step in recovering that sense of destiny which thrilled our patriots and which built a mighty nation in a hostile wilderness.

America needs to get back to a frame of mind and national purpose which make God’s cause throughout the world her own. Such religious idealism has fallen into disrepute in our generation, but its urgency is not weakened because ungodly men have used God’s name in support of devilish activities. The directives of Scripture teach men to value the individual, to pursue social justice, and to carry the message of a new life through Jesus Christ to all men everywhere. To the extent that we fulfill these purposes, America may claim to advance in the name and in the power of God.

America needs to make justice a national goal. In our secular, pluralistic society, emotionalism and a widespread “think-well-of-everybody-ism” have clouded the inescapable obligation of a nation to do what is right, because it is right. On the national scene, we seem to have more sympathy for the murderer than we do for his victim, more compassion for the sexual deviate than for the one whom he has irreparably injured. Internationally, America all too often seems motivated by a relative opportunism, rather than by a determination to act in accord with what she knows, or ought to know, is right. If we are to recapture our self-respect and the respect of our allies and the neutral nations, America must act in accordance with an unwavering standard of justice, as unqualified as possible by human frailties.

Finally, America must again honor the great moral imperatives. Justice is a moral imperative. Love for neighbor is another. So are honesty, respect for our superiors, chastity of mind and body. If these goals are honestly pursued, the climate of our civilization may be changed and our dominating self-interest replaced by a growing sense of individual integrity.

Can America weather the storm? She can if she does not attempt to do it alone. America must find her way back to God. The people of America must say again, and firmly believe, “In God we trust.” If this happens, the deteriorating effect of American pluralism and a broadly based decline into secularism may be successfully combatted, and a new sense of destiny under God imparted to America and the rest of the free world.

Enthusiasm Over Action In Cuba Yielding To Deep Disappointment

After the early sense of relief and thankfulness which followed America’s vigorous stand against the Soviet buildup in Cuba and Khrushchev’s precipitous backdown, the seeming incredible ineptness in handling the situation is producing a wave of deep pessimism.

In one of the strangest developments in history Russia has largely become the broker of negotiations, Castro finds himself more secure because of the United States’ commitment not to upset his regime by military action, the inspection teams are to come from an agency of Moscow’s choosing, and Khrushchev emerges in the Soviet sphere as the “preserver of peace.” Furthermore, the opportunity to step in and eliminate Soviet potentials in the Western world—to the delight of the Latin American countries and the admiration of the free world—has apparently been frittered away through endless negotiations with the guilty offenders.

What pressures have been exerted behind the scenes we have no way of determining. But the public release of a statement by leaders of the World Council of Churches which expressed grave concern and regret for so-called United States “unilateral” action and spoke in favor of the weak international organizations in which we participate (the O.A.S., the U.N., and so on) should give every Christian pause. Why did not the World Council speak out forthrightly against Russia’s offensive buildup in Cuba? This was most certainly a “unilateral military action,” yet America’s defensive measures alone were placed in that category. Why did not these leaders speak out as quickly and forcefully against Red China’s invasion of India?

We believe these World Council leaders, presuming to speak for the Christian community around the globe, have demonstrated again their inability to properly evaluate world affairs while at the same time illustrating their penchant for criticizing actions which might help to stabilize world conditions, all the while seemingly ignoring the slow but inexorable extension of Communism. And we believe that the United States has frittered away a golden opportunity which may not be hers again.

END

America’S Election Fanfare Quiets For Another Season

For another election season the razzle-dazzle of American politics is over. It may seem that these past weeks of campaign tumult and shouting have achieved little. Although there will now be three Kennedy profiles in Washington, the Congressional picture remains much the same—with the Republican-Southern Democrat coalition pitched against much of the President’s program. Richard Nixon’s loss to California Governor Pat Brown apparently ends his presidential possibilities, and Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s reelection by less than a landslide means his Republican nomination for 1964 is not wholly assured; Pennsylvania’s Scranton and Michigan’s Romney, and perhaps Oregon’s Hatfield, not to mention possibly numerous Congressional aspirants, may now also be in the race. Biggest loss to the nation was the defeat of Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota, whose realistic insight into the Communist menace is sorely needed in Washington, and against whom President Kennedy campaigned in Minnesota while Judd was in Washington promoting desirable aspects of the President’s program.

Politics sometimes seems sordid business even in the free world. But we may thank God for freedom to vote without fear. A passage in Johannes Hamel’s A Christian in East Germany describes an election day: “Many went to the polls and did not dare to use the polling booths, for that would have had the force of voting ‘No.’ The normal voter had nothing to write on his ballot with the approved names, and no pencils were laid out in the booths. Some of these, however, saved their consciences by secretly crossing out their ballots, which required great skill in order not to be noticed by the pollwatchers who observed everyone closely on their way from the ballot table to the ballot box.…”

So we thank God even for the exuberance of American politics. The secret ballot is one of the anti-totalitarian world’s great strengths. But its wise use and survival require our reinforcement of its opportunities with a feeling for the will of God in political affairs, and not simply for the preference of the majority.

Secret Of Fundamentalism’S Vitality Escapes Analyst

It would be a sad illusion for liberal Protestantism to think fundamentalism is dead, says Professor Thomas C. Oden, because “whether we like it or not” it is “one of the most vital forces in American Christianity”. Yet he argues that it has lost “its essential reason for existing,” and now fights “straw men.”

In an article in The Christian Century Oden urges that fundamentalism, and not only the older liberalism, succumbed to nineteenth-century historicism. Fundamentalism’s great mistake, urges Oden, was that it was more interested in the historic facts of the Resurrection and the Incarnation than in their meanings.

But the fundamentalists’ insistence on the importance of the actual historical occurrence of saving events ought not to be confused with a view that the key to any reality lies in its historical origin. For fundamentalists insisted that the origin of Christ and his resurrection lay not in history but in God’s action, and they further insisted (contra the old liberalism) that man’s redemption lay not in the ideas of incarnation and resurrection but in their actual historical reality. This insistence is something quite other than the historicism of the nineteenth century. Fundamentalists were far too little interested in history to fall into historicism, but they were not such starry-eyed idealists as to think that sinners are saved by ideas. They knew that by “taking thought” a man cannot add even an inch to his statue. They rightly realized that an idea of a resurrection without the fact has no redemptive power. It is this dynamic of the Gospel which they sought to retain, and which explains why fundamentalists are still very much alive.

END

The Word Of God … Multiplied: But Not By These Modern Methods

Once upon a time there was a Holy Bible. It existed in a number of versions and in many languages. Recently there has been an explosion of modern translations both indicating and contributing to the new larger interest in Bible reading and study. All this was to the good.

Today, however, we are getting various kinds of Bibles. This is something new. One Bible is regarded as a liberal Bible, another as orthodox. We have also received the Modern Adult, the Teen-age, and the Children’s Bibles. The latest is the Concise Bible (Henry Regnery Co., Nov. 19, 1962), 189 pages of quotations and condensations of the Bible’s 66 books. This averages out to about three pages each; Colossians gets 13 lines, 3 John 7 lines, and John’s Gospel a trifle over four pages. For good measure ten pages of additional quotations are added in an Appendix; and for unintended irony the last verse quoted is: “And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book” (Rev. 22:19).

Christians can only commend attempts to provide faithful translations of the Scripture in the most understandable English possible, as they can only commend new ways to induce people to read the Bible. Yet alteration of faithful translations of Scripture, even if into language a child or a teen-ager can understand, involves violence to the sacred text. There is similar want of reverent respect when a very small fraction of biblical verses are quoted, interspersed with synopses, and then placed on the market under the title of The Bible. The publication of various kinds of Bibles will soon have the consequence that the term “Bible” no longer has definite meaning. Christians had best exercise caution lest they undercut the very thing they are trying to promote.

Heresy Of Universal Salvation Dulls Evangelistic Passion

In a matter of weeks the opportunity will have gone to enter CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S sermon competition (see June 22 issue for details) on the subject of human destiny, with special attention to speculations about universal salvation now leavening some of the churches.

Ministers who have failed to address their congregations on the final doom of the unsaved may well resolve anew to emphasize the inescapable consequences of the rejection of Jesus Christ. In fact, some leading Protestant denominations ought to ask why the evangelistic passion seems to have vanished in their midst.

One great denomination—once among the fastest-growing—has sunk to mediocre gains. The director of its Division of Evangelism is an addict of the Barthian narcotic that all men are already in Christ and need only to be informed of it. Some denominational circles are encouraged to become more theologically conservative whenever funds lag for approved denominational programs. It would be a great boon if American Baptists could rise instead to a new era of evangelistic greatness through a rediscovery of the biblical imperative. There is increasing talk of a Baptist Federation of North America or a North American Baptist Alliance as the next phase of ecumenical momentum following the present Baptist Jubilee Advance. It is noteworthy that Southern Baptists, who represent one of the fastest-growing denominations (without the multiplication of figures through mergers), and in fact the one which is now the biggest Protestant denomination in the United States, are at heart evangelistic. Were American Baptist leadership to take evangelism seriously again in biblical dimensions, it would be a genuine sign of advance and a real token of jubilee.

END

Are Sunday School Lessons Soft On Trinitarianism?

While scanning Southern Baptist Sunday school literature recently, we discovered a rather disconcerting ambiguity in some expositions of the doctrine of the Trinity. Although biblical Christianity is thoroughly monotheistic, and expounds the unity of God, it is anything but Unitarian. Yet one cannot help wondering what has happened to the historic Christian emphasis that in the one Godhead there are three eternal centers of consciousness, when one reads passages which seem to reduce the personal distinctions to differences of function, and which emphasize that God is “one Person.” For examples: “The ‘persons’ of the Godhead have different functions but a single purpose. They act in harmony. Indeed, they are one” (The Adult Teacher, October, 1962, p. 59). “The word ‘trinity’ comes from two roots—tri, meaning three, and unity, meaning unit or one. The word was originally ‘tri-unity,’ suggesting that God, who is really one Person, reveals himself in three characters, each personal in nature and each distinct and individual. We cannot comprehend intellectually the full meaning of ‘three in one.’ As you—one person—are body, mind, and soul, so God—one Person—is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (Sunday School Adults, Oct.-Nov.-Dec., 1962, pp. 17 f.). Unless we have forgotten how to read, Southern Baptist adults are being taught the profoundly unbiblical theory that the distinctions in the Godhead are not eternal personal distinctions, but functional or modal.

END

‘Feed The Chinese’ Urges Moderator As China Feeds On India

It’s a good thing, in some cases, that newspapers relegate religious news to inconsequential, second-rate pages! This was especially true late last month, when world events were moving at a heady pace.

On October 22, as front-page headlines of newspapers around the world screamed forth the fact that Red China was biting off huge chunks of India, Religious News Service carried a story which looked a bit out of place in the context of world events. “Churchman Urges Canada to Send Gift Grain to Red China,” was the headline. The story began, “Dr. James R. Mutchmore, moderator of the United Church of Canada, said … that gifts of grain to Red China would be ‘Christian, and common sense.’”

Reporting on the fine Canadian harvest, he said that wherever people are hungry, they should be fed. This is a laudable generality, but Dr. Mutchmore had evidently forgotten that David, for example, never fed a hungry predator, or threw a dog biscuit to a glowering wolf preparing to attack one of his flock.

In a broadcast to the Indian people on the same date, Prime Minister Nehru called the Chinese “powerful and unscrupulous opponents, not caring for peace or peaceful methods.”

Perhaps there are no newspapers in ivory towers.

The Christian must be marked off by some kind of spiritual “anatomy” which distinguishes him from other men. In other words, if we are new creatures in Christ the world should sense this newness and see how different it is from the old man with his deeds.

The Apostle Paul, writing to the Christians in Philippi, describes just what they should be like: “That you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life …” (Phil. 2:15, 16a, RSV).

The question then is how do we get that way? Admitting the necessity of change, do we find in our own lives the evidences of supernatural transformation and power?

A homely illustration may help us realize that which God requires—and which he provides for us: The Anatomy of the Redeemed:

The Believing Mind

This is a converted mind, one renewed by the Holy Spirit so that it is capable of Spirit-directed reasoning coupled with a confidence in those things which can only be demonstrated by faith.

It is a fixed mind, fixed to the extent that we recognize that there are absolutes ordained of God which can never be shaken. The Apostle Paul warned Timothy against “the godless chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge, for by professing it some have missed the mark as regards the faith” (1 Tim. 6:20, 21, RSV).

Such an attitude is not anti-intellectualism but a God-given ability rightly to discriminate between human speculation and divine revelation.

The Seeing Eye

Spiritual blindness is a part of the unregenerate life. Paul tells us that the god of this world blinds the minds of those who refuse to believe, making relevant the prayer of the Psalmist, “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law” (Ps. 119:18).

The seeing eye is therefore the eye which has been enlightened by the Spirit of God so that things invisible become visible. It is the eye which looks beyond the temporal into the eternal, which discerns the difference between human speculation and divine revelation.

The Hearing Ear

For this there must be an act of the will. “Speak Lord, for thy servant heareth”; when this is the prayer of our hearts the Spirit of God does speak to our hearts. Then the promise of Isaiah 30:21 becomes a reality: “And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it,’ when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.”

One of our problems is “itching ears,” seeking the guidance and approval of man. This world-generated “eczema” is a delusion to the one affected and a snare to those to whom he ministers.

The Faithful Voice

This is first of all a matter of confession: “For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Rom. 10:10).

It is also a “foolish” voice, for the thing in which we believe and the witness we bear is to the folly of the cross of Jesus Christ and all implied therein.

The faithful voice is also humbled and disciplined, not with “excellency of speech and wisdom,” so dear to the world, lest we try to impress others with human reason, nullifying the work of the Spirit of God: only faith based in the power which comes from above can last for eternity.

This faithful voice will also be bold to speak the truth, in love and with deep conviction of the power and relevancy of the Gospel for our time.

The Loving Heart

Unless the transcending grace of God’s love is evidenced, our witness is nullified. It is love which begets compassion, and few there are who may not be impressed with that which flows from a heart where Christ dwells.

Love, the first fruit of the indwelling Spirit, is imparted by God. It is not something we can develop for ourselves, but a grace which can and must be put into practice.

The Compassionate Hands

It is revealing to note that the word “hand” is one of the most frequently used in all the Scriptures, three times more frequently than the word “love.”

This can well be because Christian love is so often expressed with our hands. It is such hands, converted from selfish to unselfish uses, which are a part of our spiritual anatomy.

The Bended Knee

This is, of course, the attitude of prayer. Not for nought does the Apostle Paul admonish us to “pray without ceasing,” for in that way we keep on God’s wavelength, not only in petitions and praise to him but also in receiving from him the guidance and help so necessary for the Christian.

That such knees may be straight, moving, active simply means that there is never a time or place when in spirit we may not bow the knees to the Father.

The Willing Feet

They are redeemed feet—“For thou hast delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, and my feet from stumbling” the Psalmist says (Ps. 116:8. RSV). And they are sure feet—“He … set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure” (Ps. 40:2, RSV).

Furthermore, they are guided feet: “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord; and he delighteth in his way” (Ps. 37:23).

Two more things are necessary. The body of the Christian must be clean—washed in the greatest detergent of the ages, the blood of the Son of God—and it must be a living body. We know that “the body without the spirit is dead,” so the Spirit of the Living God must dwell in and empower those who would be his servants.

How can we become Christians, exhibiting in our lives this new spiritual anatomy, the kind of people we ought to be?

The answer is not hard to find. We must be new creatures in Christ, our affections and desires centered in him and in doing his will, and all of this comes from spiritual regeneration.

Small wonder that our Lord says, “Ye must be born again.” It is the divine imperative from which none is excepted. It is the way to the kingdom of God and the way of Christian witness to others.

Jesus said that “the gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached in all the world as a witness.” To these new creatures in Christ, these people with a regenerated, spiritual anatomy, has the task been given.

L. NELSON BELL

Editorial

“The nation … is extravagant, as no people ever were from the beginning hitherto.… In the old world, and in ancient times, a few nobles and merchants were princes, and the masses were humble and frugal perforce; but here is a whole people struggling to be not only political sovereigns, but to live in luxury like the peerage of England.

“The increase of lunacy in this country is another frightful indication of the mad extravagance of the people. No wonder indeed that in a single new State they have built three lunatic asylums. The whole land will be a lunatic asylum if from some quarter … we cannot learn some degree of moderation.

“Posterity, we may be assured, will look with amazement at these times. The velocity of a railway train may be fearful, and yet by custom we forget the immense speed.

“The effervescence of ‘Young America’ manifests itself, as we all know, in its views of our ‘manifest destiny,’ to take possession of this Western Continent, and the melancholy Cuba expedition is but one of its outbursts.

“One asks in terror, whether this is the infancy of a country, and if it is, what kind of a nation will tumultuate over this land, when two hundred millions of people shall be flying to and fro, from the Atlantic to the Pacific?” (editorial, the Presbyterian Quarterly Review, June, 1853).

Well, sir, we have a new frontier now, and things are still tumultuating. We’re still flying to and fro at immense speeds, still extravagant and neurotic, and we still have a Cuba problem. Our businessmen still fit your description: “The merchant comes home too much worn out at night to converse with his family, and lays himself on a sofa, until he is roused to go into a deeper sleep in his chamber.…” Only television has been added.

You are quite right—“Will not our readers agree with us that something should be done?”

Further, we approve your suggestion that “our aim is wrong. We are too ambitious. We are not quiet enough.… One invariable characteristic of greatness is ‘capability of repose.’” I’m afraid that wisdom has still to be heeded.

Your closing words are the most timely—and timeless: “Deep is our benediction upon our native land, and fervent the prayer we utter, night and morning, that God, even our own God may bless us, and cause His face to shine upon us, and give us peace.”

Rome And The Protestants

I have found the edition (Oct. 12 issue) so fruitful for my own understanding of the Roman-Protestant tension that I felt it would be ungracious of me not to acknowledge my debt to you.

I am the organizing pastor … in a suburban area in which the new population is approximately 60 per cent Roman Catholic. I have discovered that there is a concerted effort on the part of the Roman church, which is also fairly new to the community, to present itself as part of one big happy family of Christians. But in discussion with the priests I have found a cordiality toward me personally which does not extend to my labors in the area. So far as the priests are concerned, there is only one Church of Jesus Christ; that church is Roman; I am a friendly but benighted heretic.

On the other hand, most of the Roman Catholic parishioners in the area are extremely puzzled by denominationalism and are not at all clear as to how evangelical Protestantism differs from the Roman view.

Church of the Redeemer

Roselle, Ill.

Although the … articles on Rome in the … issue were interesting reading, should the activities of Rome be listed under “Christianity Today”?…

Tucson, Ariz.

Your edition may be epoch-making, in that [it is among] the first guns opening in defense of Protestantism at this time.…

Townville, Pa.

Is it really necessary to weary your readers with the kind of pre-theological rubbish as is contained in the article “Should We Return to Rome?” by a Mr. Don Francisco Lacueva? Such vignettes … cannot but counteract evangelicalism’s recent bid for intellectual respectability.

Princeton, N. J.

I am writing just to say that I wish you would put in small pamphlet form the article … by Don Francisco Lacueva. I am sure that many pastors would welcome [such].…

First Baptist Church

Toledo, Ohio

The Spanish ambassador, addressing the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, claimed that 98 per cent of the Spanish people are Roman Catholics. Somewhere I read that 95 per cent of the Italian people are also members of that church.… It is only fair to ask, is the total population of these countries the right basis for judging the membership of the church?

It would be well if some dependable person or group … made a study of the annual reports of additions and of total memberships and of the methods used in arriving at the figures given to the public by the various churches.…

Mill Valley, Calif.

The preview of the Second Vatican Council (News, Sept. 28 issue) is interesting and informative. But will this really be “the first council with non-Roman representatives”? According to The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, the Holy Roman Emperor intended the Council of Trent “to be a strictly general or truly ecumenical council, at which the Protestants should have a fair hearing. He secured, during the council’s second period, 1551–52, an invitation, twice given, to the Protestants to be present, and the council issued a letter of safe-conduct (thirteenth session) and offered them the right of discussion, but denied them a vote” (Vol. XII, p. 2a). German Lutheran theologians drew up a statement of Protestant principles, the Confessio Wirtembergica, for submission to the council (Vol. II, p. 76a). Melanchthon started out for Trent but changed his mind about attending and got no further than Nuremberg (Vol. XII, p. 2a). In November, 1551, the German Lutheran theologian, Jakob Beurlin, “in company with Luther’s former steward, Jodocus Neuheller, pastor at Entringen, … was sent as theological advisor of the Würtemberg delegates to Trent, where they took notes of the disputations. On January 13, 1552, both returned home, but on March 7, Beurlin, Brenz, Heerbrand, and Vannius again started for Trent to oppose the erroneous decisions of the council, and to defend the Confessio Wirtembergica before it; but the council would not hear them in public session, and they returned home” (Vol. II, p. 76a).

Asst. Prof. of Philosophy and Religion

Little Rock University

Little Rock, Ark.

Bolt From The Blue

Re “A Protestant Prayer for the Vatican Council” (Editorials, Oct. 12 issue): … Some of the faithful in the Roman Catholic Church have great sympathy for the Ecumenical Movement; possibly because they are also sympathetic toward the liberal tendencies of Protestantism. Your suggested prayer will delight both groups of thinkers.

The Blue Church

Springfield, Pa.

Costs Of The Corps

I read with interest your [editorial] (Sept. 14 issue) citing the Peace Corps as an example of “inefficiency and waste in government bureaucracy” and comparing the annual cost of $2,000 for a missionary to the annual cost of $9,000 for a Peace Corps Volunteer.

The $9,000 figure is accurate and includes all training costs, medical examinations and care, transportation, termination payment reserved during service at the rate of $75 for 24 months, living allowances (food, clothing, housing, etc.), project equipment and materials, and all administrative costs.

Back in June a still-undetermined source began to compare this figure with a reported $2,000 cost for missionaries. When many churches reproduced this information in their weekly bulletins and one national columnist wrote an article based on them, I checked personally to see what the actual comparison might be.

The Reverend Theodore Braun of the National Council of Churches in New York City supplied me with information that Presbyterian missionaries cost about $6,000 annually, Methodists about $7,500, and United Church of Christ missionaries about $8,000. None of these figures, Reverend Braun told me, includes administration.

I also checked with my own denomination—the Southern Baptist Convention—and was told that the foreign mission budget for 1962 is $12,492,472 for 1,480 missionaries—about $8,711 per missionary. Furthermore, the information upon which you based your article quoted an unidentified mission budget of $12,500,000 for 1,350 missionaries—about $9,000 per missionary.

I realize that some mission boards can send people out for a relatively low cost. Nonetheless, other facts show the cost of many missionaries is not very much more or less than the cost of a Peace Corps Volunteer.

Frankly, comparisons are basically irrelevant. Our cooperation with missionaries has been inspiring. We respect the work they are doing and those with whom we have talked have a keen appreciation of what we are doing. That mutual good will, I believe, will continue.

Associate Director

Peace Corps

Washington, D. C.

Wrong Ring

Eston W. Hunter assigns his quotation (Eutychus, Sept. 14 issue) to Dr. Dale Oldham. Where Dr. Oldham found his quotation we are not told. Nor is the identity of its author divulged.

To me the alleged statement lacks the true Spurgeonic ring.… I question whether the gist of that statement can be found in one authentic Spurgeon biography. The three reputable Spurgeon biographies I own give the statement no recognition.

The writer of the present missive is neither a Baptist nor a smoker, but he dislikes seeing the figure of a great historic character distorted in the interests of anyone’s prejudice.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon has been resting from his labors for seventy years. It is a wicked thing at this late hour to wrest from him his principal terrestrial comfort.

Mariners’ House

Boston, Mass.

Beloved brethren: beloved, yet divided against one another; tending more to the doctrines of men than to the commandments of God, competitive, contentious fellow-pilgrims. William C. Fruehan has set forth one side of one of our commonest variances.… Indeed, he has made one statement which no layman-evangelist can allow to go unchallenged. “… I learned the hard way that you can’t witness for Christ with a cigarette or a glass of beer in your hand if you want to be effective.”

Negativists have only broadened the abyss between church-goers and the unenlightened by seeking to separate themselves from humanity rather than unto God.…

This writer has sounded more welcome notes of God’s gracious gift of salvation “with a cigarette or a glass of beer in hand” than at any other time.…

May God bless us with the will to practice unity in essentials, liberty in non-essentials, and give us the wisdom to know the difference.

Vancouver, B.C.

Wynt Spigot?

After puzzling over your last sentence “less spigot” (Eutychus, Sept. 14 issue), I have come up with what I believe is the answer.…

Is it “As long as English is our language let’s speak it”?

It’s a joy to read your column biweekly, and I trust you will have many more years to enrich our days, our language, and our laughter with your writings.

Director of Missions

Toronto Bible College

Toronto, Ont.

• Mr. Percy has the right answer and the right emphasis. Webster’s New Unabridged to the contrary, any inflated minting of new words will return us to the poverty of Babel.—ED.

Christian Love Isn’T Pink

Thank you for the perceptive and appreciative report of the two important Mennonite conferences (News, Aug. 31 issue). For an example of the Mennonite witness at its best, however, perhaps the most significant moment of either gathering was overlooked by your reporter. I refer to the adoption at Bethlehem of a statement on Christianity, Communism, and anti-Communism.

Delegates were aware that their convictions might be labeled “pink” by militant Americans who want to equate Christianity with anti-Communism. The statement declares: “While rejecting any ideology which opposes the Gospel or seeks to destroy the Christian faith, we cannot take any attitude or commit any act contrary to Christian love against those who hold or promote such views, but must seek to overcome their evil and win them through the Gospel.… We recognize the incompatibility of Christianity and atheistic Communism and the challenge to the cause of Christ which the latter represents.… Although we teach and warn against atheistic Communism, we cannot be involved in any anti-Communist crusade which takes the form of a ‘holy war’ and employs distortion of facts, unfounded charges against persons and organizations, particularly against fellow Christians, promotes blind fear, and creates an atmosphere which can lead to a very dangerous type of totalitarian philosophy.”

The statement also says that “our love, encouragement, and help, and our prayers must go out to Christians in all lands, especially to those who suffer for Christ behind the Iron Curtain.”

This affirmation of love and concern which transcends political boundaries has special force when it is recognized as the testimony of Christians who have suffered under Russian totalitarianism. The General Conference Mennonite Church counts thousands of members who fled the Bolsheviks; they bear heavy burdens of personal loss and anxiety for the fate of relatives who did not escape. Upon adoption of the statement, an elder minister, himself a refugee, led the assembly in a deeply-moving prayer, invoking God’s help in fulfilling these commitments to a ministry of reconciliation.

In terms of personal experience, there is probably no other church body in North America which would have a justifiable right to launch an anti-Communist crusade. But instead of crying out for hate and revenge, Mennonite Christians have issued a call for compassion, for understanding, for self-giving love, and for the readiness to suffer rather than to inflict evil.

Newton, Mass.

India: Key To The East

A recent reference to your magazine in Time seems to have created a little interest out here.

In our work of reaching the masses with Christian motion pictures, through Christian Film Festivals, we are in contact with many Christian leaders who so much need the challenge and the inspiration of a magazine such as yours.

Do you think any of your readers would be interested in posting out to us in India their used copies of CHRISTIANITY TODAY (Box 505, Bombay)?

To your readers it would mean a few cents postage. To Christian leadership in India, it would mean thousands of words of inspiration and challenge and encouragement.

Bombay, India

In confronting the evils of the world—as symbolized in the Four Horsem*n of the Apocalypse—the liberal social gospel of the America of the twenties seemed to identify the black horse of famine with the poverty and waste ensuing from drunkenness. During the critical 1928 presidential election The Christian Century, chief journalistic organ of the social gospel, singled out three paramount issues facing liberal Protestant churchmen: first was prohibition, then Roman Catholicism and world peace. These took precedence over fundamental economic and social reconstruction, important as this was to the journal. But the protocol would be upended by the crash of the stock market a year later and the ensuing Great Depression.

Through the years an instability in Protestant liberal treatment of social ethics, reflected in Century pages, would include an ambivalence toward socialism, which would be strongly affected by the depression. A drunken rider of the black horse would seemingly be replaced by a capitalistic one.

Back in 1912 Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive party, as a “liberal movement,” was hailed as an effective “counter” to socialism (Nov. 28, p. 4). The following year Century editor Charles Clayton Morrison wrote, “I am not a Socialist. I have profound sympathy with the Socialist program, but this program is not the same as the social program upon which the Church must more and more project its endeavor if it is to bring in the Kingdom of God” (Jan. 2, p. 8). In 1924 the Century saw little difference between the two major parties’ platforms and noted that both Coolidge and Davis were conservatives (July 10, p. 876; June 26, p. 814; July 17, p. 909). It was given an opportunity to support “a clean-cut liberalism” as represented by LaFollette’s new Progressive party (June 26, p. 814; July 17, p. 909). But as in 1928, other issues overrode fundamental economic and social reconstruction. La Follette lacked candor on the liquor issue (Aug. 14, p. 1037), and Democrat Davis was stuck with Wilson’s League of Nations with its detractory connection with the Treaty of Versailles (June 5, p. 717; Oct. 23, p. 1360). Only Coolidge sounded at all hopeful on outlawry of war, and the Century thus seemed to be leaning his way (ibid. pp. 1360 f.). For so important was outlawry to the journal that it announced its intention of sending a free subscription of a series of issues which contained articles on outlawry to every American Protestant minister and many Roman Catholic priests and Jewish rabbis (Nov. 13, p. 1461).

Rather than supporting a third party, the Century expressed hope that the 1924 campaign would start a “realignment of our national politics as between conservative and liberal” (June 26, p. 814). Donald B. Meyer has pointed out that

“social-gospel leaders could not have hearkened easily to third-party politics in the ’twenties, no matter how ideologically pure, for they had believed in their own majority. The Socialist party was now a sect; the social gospel thought in terms of a church—a church it wished to bring up to ideological sectarian purity, but that it wished to remain a majority. For the Century and the Federal Council, this was to remain so always” (The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919–1941, p. 127).

Meyer observes that “the liberal leaders had given little direct thought to the role of the state, either in the pursuit of justice or in the new social order itself. They criticized ‘mere’ state socialism, whatever the rigor of their ideals (ibid., p. 124). But by 1928, in the absence of party realignment, political frustration began to drive some social-gospel leaders into third-party action, and “a telling handful” of Protestant ministers supported Norman Thomas (ibid., pp. 122, 126). Most did not, and the Century backed Hoover.

Before the next election, the stock market had crashed and the Great Depression was an all-pervading reality. Yet, in 1932 the Century did not turn to the Socialist party, though it saw the two major parties as conservative, materialistic, and totally lacking in convictions and principles: “They exist for one thing only-office-holding and patronage.” The Century called for a “Disinterested Party” which would have no candidates but which would exert pressure on politicians to act according to political principles rather than special interests (May 25, pp. 663 f.; Dec. 14, p. 1536).

In 1928 capitalism had been spoken of as “only a phase in social progress,” and organized labor had been encouraged to challenge “the whole regime of capitalism” (Jan. 12, p. 39). By 1932 the anticapitalism was predictably stronger: “… The laissez faire capitalistic system is inherently unjust and unchristian, and … it must give place to an economic order based upon the principle of radical social control of economic processes” (Dec. 7, pp. 1496 f.). The Socialist party “represents ideals and a program far more closely in accord with the ideals of Christianity than does either of the major parties” (Oct. 26, p. 1294). But from this it did not follow that readers should vote for the Socialist party, inasmuch as the third-party method, in light of American history and politics, was “the most impracticable method which can be undertaken” (Dec. 7, p. 1497). The Socialists should rather convert citizens to socialism, especially from the ranks of labor, and thus acquire enough voters to gain control of one of the major parties. This, despite the fact that in the same editorial the ultimate objectives of Communists and Socialists were asserted to be “essentially identical.” envisaging “an economic order similar in principle to that which Russia is striving to work out.” The difference was “in method, not in goal.” Yet the pacifist-minded Century noted with misgivings a developing apologetic within socialism for resort to force—only a step away from “an ethical defense of revolution and dictatorship” (Dec. 14, pp. 1535 f.). On the other hand, in 1926 the “plain moral duty” of America had dictated recognition of the Soviet Union. The social experiment of “the Russian people” was a mixture of good and evil, but “the worst thing that could happen in Russia would be the overthrow of the present government—in a word, another revolution” (Oct. 7, pp. 1222 f.).

All this notwithstanding, the Century choice in the 1932 election was once again Herbert Hoover, despite the conviction that prohibition in the course of the campaign became “a washed-out issue” due to Hoover’s “retreat” which left him side by side with Franklin Roosevelt on the issue (Sept. 21, p. 1126). Roosevelt was seen as a “none too firm personality” with “enormous obligations” to the “sinister” William Randolph Hearst, an ominous portent for “peace-minded citizens” with liberal vision (Oct. 26, p. 1297; Oct. 5, p. 1193). And in domestic affairs he was “more than likely to move in a reactionary direction.” His capitalist views were inconsistent, Hoover’s sound. Although capitalism was unchristian, it was an “inexorable fact” that the rescue work in the emergency “has to be done within the orthodox capitalistic system” (Oct. 26, pp. 1295 f.). And Hoover, if elected, would “surely be driven by events from his doctrinaire laissez faire position before many months have passed. The automatic processes of the capitalistic system will not reabsorb the ten million unemployed” (Nov. 9, p. 1366).

Hoover did not survive to face the challenge, but the Century fell in behind his successor, who was seen to be leading the country away from laissez faire. From the day he took office, Roosevelt “sensed the fact that the old system had utterly broken down.” And American capitalism was “an inhuman system” which operated under “its inhuman motivation—the unrestrained individualistic pursuit of gain” (July 30, 1933, p. 1078). After six months of the New Deal, the Century verdict was: “Our leaders have so far been wise beyond the expectations even of their most sanguine partisans” (Aug. 30, p. 1080); after a year: Roosevelt is “a gallant and an inspiring leader” (Mar. 7, 1934, p. 310).

“The New Deal represented movement in a direction, and it was the direction that pleased the Century. There was no fear of words: the editors said they believed Roosevelt must move toward ‘socialism’ and they welcomed the process. The New Deal was not itself socialistic, nor did the President intend to institute socialism; the President was working within the capitalistic system and apparently he desired to keep it” (Meyer, op. cit., p. 318).

“We need a new United States,” said the Century, and toward such Roosevelt “is directing this nation.” The “Hundred Days” had barely begun when the journal praised the chief executive for doing “more to start the nation toward a socialist order … than all the agitation carried on by all the avowedly socialist agents in our national history.… His public works program—the Tennessee valley scheme, with its adjuncts—is as completely socialist in method and aim as any Russian five-year plan” (Mar. 22, 1933, p. 383).

Only three weeks earlier, the Century had voiced concern over Federal invasion of the sovereignty of the states, but this was in connection with the journal’s opposition to the repeal of prohibition (Mar. 1, p. 281). No such constitutional concern was evident in a May editorial, “A Nation-Manager,” which attacked Congress and pleaded in totalitarian accents for government by “controlled management,” with more authority granted to the President. It was just not sensible to commit government to “a body of nearly 600 politicians elected chiefly because they are masters of the art of getting elected.… Why not change our form of government?” (May 17, pp. 646–648, italics theirs). The following month the Supreme Court was the target: “… The nation is being carried forward into an hour when its fate rests” on the word of “nine old men” (June 21, p. 809). And in 1935 the Century spoke ominously about the Constitution: “Under the present constitution, the NRA decision made it clear, the whole idea of a national planned economy is illegal” (Dec. 25, p. 1648, italics mine).

For the journal was praising Roosevelt’s “revolutionary … enterprise” of displacing “an automatic capitalistic economy with a planned and controlled capitalistic economy,” involving “the open adoption of unprecedented functions by the state” (Nov. 8, 1933, p. 1398). The “planned economy” Roosevelt was attempting to establish was within “the framework of the profit-seeking order.” Envisaged was “a form of state capitalism not fundamentally at odds with that in Russia,” with state control rather than state ownership to make it more palatable to the opposition (Mar. 7, 1934, p. 311).

Thus what Roosevelt was doing was “not socialism.” Rather, he was injecting into the framework of capitalism “certain principles of social responsibility.”

“The essence of socialism is the substitution of public ownership for private ownership on a scale wide enough not only to transform the economic structure but to modify, deflect, transform, or render ineffectual the greed for personal profit and economic power upon which the capitalistic system inherently rests. Until the new deal [sic] gives evidence of cherishing such a purpose it cannot be justly characterized as socialistic.…

“The administration gives every evidence of desiring to preserve the capitalistic system. It has adopted the policies of the new deal for that very purpose. Mr. Roosevelt is the best friend capitalism could have in this crisis.…

“It is ‘up to’ capitalism now to justify the President’s faith. Not all of us share this faith in the degree in which Mr. Roosevelt holds it” (Apr. 11. 1934, p. 489).

As the Century saw it, the very process of reforming capitalism would drain its dynamic:

“If, within the narrower zone left by the new deal for profit-making, the business community does not find a sufficient motive power to resuscitate itself and produce the work and goods which public welfare demands, there will be left to the President but one option, namely, the taking over of business by the government itself and the operation of it for public welfare rather than for private profit” (Nov. 8, 1934, p. 1400).

Meyer fills out the picture: “Restriction and regularization of competition, child-labor regulation, wage-and-hour prescriptions, monetary and banking regulations—all these restricted the field for the profit motive” and thus pointed to the crumbling of capitalism (op. cit., p. 319).

If indeed capitalism was to prove impotent, and, following this, if Roosevelt could introduce a socialized economic order without violence and the sacrifice of democratic ideals, “he will stand in history among the greatest benefactors of mankind” (Nov. 8, 1933, p. 1400). And in the elections of 1934 a mandate was seen: “Go left, Mr. President, go left.… Many features of the 1934 election suggest that a union of forces for a vigorous offensive in support of an avowedly radical program is not impossible” (Nov. 14, p. 1443).

Thus, says Meyer, the Century “stood out among the organs of that benighted moralism castigated by Niebuhr and the socialist realists.” The Century and the realists agreed that the time was not ripe for the administration to legislate socialism instantly. What then was the difference between them? The socialist realists

“believed the political public had to be reconstituted. The Century did not. This difference came out in Morrison’s suggestion of the role open to the church in meeting a peculiar dilemma raised by the New Deal. Social-gospel logic argued that a system bred men in its own image; capitalism depended upon the profit motive, its men were bred selfish and grasping. A coöperative system would call out men of coöperation and good will. But in the New Deal season of transition, what would be the effect of the old sort of man upon the new system coming to birth?” (loc. cit.).

An agency with “immediate moral power” was required for the crisis (Oct. 11, 1933, p. 1263). And this was the Church, which would have to “preach forth the new economic man” (Meyer, loc. Cit.). The Century spoke of an “evolutionary revolution” which was in progress and judged that “the step from the Roosevelt system to a true and candid socialization of the economic system would be a much easier one to take than is generally recognized” (Jan. 17, 1934, pp. 78 f.). Comments Meyer:

“In this estimate of the New Deal as the critical, hardest step, Morrison was able to smother the issue of violence, and its coördinate, the issue of class.… Somehow a socialist issue from the New Deal could be anticipated without reconstitution of the political audience.

“The vision was a political parallel to Morrison’s neonaturalist theology, the key concept of which was ‘emergent evolution.’ The immanent processes of creation brought forth new and higher forms of meaning, genuine emergents inexplicable by mechanistic causation, revealing thereby the divine in history. It was sufficient for Morrison to read the New Deal and its future as emerging from the immanences of American life. He could not explain the fact, but the fact was enough. The anguish nerving pacifism, socialism, revolutionary absolutism, and realism was unnecessary” (op. cit., pp. 320 f.).

The mystique of an evolutionary theology commingled with an optimistic politics was vividly displayed as the Century rebuked Senator William E. Borah (for whom it once had words of highest praise) because of his opposition to the New Deal:

“[When Borah says] the economic system must be reestablished on the old lines to fit ‘the same appetites and passions, the same hopes and aspirations, the same desire to own and to possess,’ because ‘human nature does not change,’ he gives comfort to the old dealers …—the old-line, self-seeking, party-bound politician[s].” “… The recovery of national prosperity and morale depends upon creating a system based upon the hypothesis that human nature can change and has changed” (Apr. 4, 1934, p. 444).

The mystique was reflected in Century reaction to a speech by Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, wherein it found “evidence that there is at the heart of this administration the most profound sort of religious understanding.” The “genuinely prophetic-quality” of his thought raised the question whether actual religious leadership lay in church leaders or in a public servant like Wallace (Dec. 20, 1933, p. 1596). “The most staggering blow that Protestantism has ever received is the discovery of the fact that the capitalistic system and the capitalistic culture which are now passing away derived their moral and spiritual nourishment from the Protestant churches.” “Ascetic renunciation of all responsible involvements with capitalistic mammonism” was now needed (Apr. 25, 1934, pp. 550, 552). For after all, capitalism was “unchristian” and utterly pagan (Dec. 7, 1932, pp. 1496 f.; Apr. 11, 1934, p. 489).

Thus did the Century present an amalgam of Pelagius, Darwin, and Marx, among others, for the healing of the nation. Augustine was nowhere in view. Glided over was the biblical doctrine of sin. Resilient liberalism had retained its basic optimism even in the depths of depression. Blame for the human predicament was shifted from human nature to the economic system. Seemingly forgotten were Jesus’ words, “… There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man” (Mark 7:15). If there had ever been a Fall, it must have been, in Century context, a plunge into capitalism at some weak link in the evolutionary process. But such a fall was not so serious as to require violent revolution or class conflict (Marx, Niebuhr) or supernatural regeneration (Jesus, Paul). The liberal optimism yet held—an “evolutionary revolution” would suffice. It was an old story: man rejecting the offensive but realistic biblical assessment of himself at his own peril, his rejection prodding him toward fallacious theories on how to gain international peace and domestic tranquillity.

Late in 1934 an editorial on the Townsend Plan (for old-age revolving pensions for all over 60) rejected it as not radical enough. Though Townsend’s goal was “just,” it could not be “attained within the present capitalistic system.” Needed was “the nationalizing of credit and the socializing of the great monopolies. When these changes occur the system called capitalism will hardly be recognizable under its old name” (Dec. 26, pp. 1647 f.). Nor did Huey Long or Father Coughlin go far enough, in the sense that “they promise limitation on income through political action without touching the economic system which automatically makes for inequality and injustice.” In the same editorial, early in 1935, the Century looked disapprovingly on “President Roosevelt’s drift to the right”: “… His liberal and radical pretensions evaporate when the commercial and industrial oligarchy threatens to retard his plans for recovery by non-cooperation” (Mar. 13, pp. 327–329).

Nevertheless, in the election year of 1936 Roosevelt enjoyed Century support for the only time in his four presidential campaigns, and Robert M. Miller observes that the Century was the “only church paper … to support his re-election” (American Protestantism and Social Issues, 1919–1939, p. 121). The support was somewhat unenthusiastic; the journal already regarded the President’s “big navy proclivities with profound disquiet.” With some cynicism it declared: “Elections are not choices between the issues which candidates talk about; elections are choices between the controlling interests which stand behind candidates.… The Christian Century has always stood, as it has believed religion must stand, for the rights of the underprivileged.…” Hope for gaining those rights was said to be brighter under Roosevelt than under a Landon government administered “on behalf of the privileged forces which stand behind him” (Oct. 28, pp. 1414–1416).

But by the end of 1937 the Century was moving away from Roosevelt. The journal called his attempt to pack the Supreme Court “ill-advised” and suggested that the preferable procedure would have been to “liberalize the Constitution” by amendment toward making it “the more flexible instrument that it ought to be” (Dec. 29, p. 1615; Oct. 6, p. 1225). Moreover: “… The recession has served to prove that the basic purposes of the New Deal have not been achieved.… The tendency toward centralization of wealth and credit has not been checked, let alone changed.” There was evidence of need for “far more radical” political action (Dec. 29, p. 1615).

By the end of 1938 things looked even worse. The liberal legislation of the past six years seemed very mild and hesitant; desperation of the underprivileged, apart from some governmental changes, would produce “an explosion and chaos” (Dec. 7, p. 1491). Public confidence in Roosevelt as “a liberal spokesman and leader” had suffered. The “average American” had “begun to suspect” his program of being “mainly a patchwork of expedients” rather than a long-range balanced campaign with definite goals. Unemployment was still up, and government deficits accumulated (Dec. 28, p. 1599).

But now foreign perils began to overshadow domestic problems, and the Century attacked Roosevelt repeatedly for his armament measures. When in 1939 the President warned Congress that European dictatorships menaced America’s religion and democracy, the journal responded wrathfully:

“Here, we do not hesitate to say, is the most misleading and dangerous appeal made to the American people by a chief executive in the history of the Republic.…

“The reasons why Mr. Roosevelt tried to pitch his plea for a vast armament program in terms of a religious crusade are not difficult to discover. He knew … that the attempt to restore our American economic and industrial system to normal functioning by means of governmental pump-priming has not succeeded.… Such recovery as business shows is dependent almost entirely on a continuation of huge federal spendings. To guard against another such economic collapse as followed the curtailment of government spending in 1937, it was necessary … [to] insure the passage of gigantic appropriation bills.”

The threat of Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese was played down (Jan. 18, p. 78).

Indeed, in the election year of 1940 Century worries as to dictatorship seemed centered not on Hitler but rather on Roosevelt. If the two-term limitation were broken and conscription adopted, the President’s power would “be essentially the same as that of any European dictator.” The “New Deal’s constructive resources were exhausted” in Roosevelt’s first term, the second being devoted chiefly to “consolidation” of the party’s position (Aug. 28, pp. 1046 f.). But the third-term issue was the paramount one, for the two-term limitation constituted a “barrier” to a one-party system. Such a system was the essence of fascism, and Roosevelt was the “Führer of this inchoate fascism.” His party, “unable to unify the national life at the level of its economic well-being, now turns to the war as a unifying substitute.” Wendell Willkie accepted the “essential features” of the New Deal. The Century swallowed hard and backed Willkie (Oct. 16, pp. 1272 f.; July 31, pp. 942 f.).

The election year of 1944 found the Century accusing Roosevelt of “moving … toward reaction” (Mar. 8, p. 296). It strongly criticized the dumping of Wallace from the ticket, thus “smothering … the voice of liberalism” at the Democratic convention (Aug. 2, p. 895). The fourth-term issue alone was enough to rouse Century opposition to Roosevelt, but now also voiced were fears of government regimentation of the individual in the direction of totalitarianism—not a primary concern when the Century pushed for socialism but a fear for the pacifist-inclined journal when connected with war (Nov. 1, p. 1248; cf. the warning that Truman’s “universal training program” would result in something similar to the Young Communist League, coupled with a Century plea for continuation of “free and decentralized” institutions [Jan. 8, 1947, p. 381). As for the candidates themselves, Roosevelt’s “craft” and “deception” were traced to “a tragic lack of integrity at the core of his nature,” while on the other hand Dewey was progressive and laudably had “identified himself fully” with Roosevelt’s first-term programs (Nov. 1, p. 1249; Oct. 11. pp. 1158 f.). So the Century backed Dewey, the last time to date that it would declare for a presidential candidate. After the election the Century wished for Roosevelt adoption of a democratic policy, almost millennial in implication, which would safeguard individual liberties and also guarantee security. Could a “middle way” be found between control in the interests of a “profit-seeking capitalism” and control by “government ‘planners’” (Nov. 22, p. 1345)?

Almost a decade later Morrison declared that laissez-faire capitalism had given way to a “capitalist-labor economy, and he even defended the profit motive while at the same time voicing strong criticism of labor leaders (Jan. 21, 1953, pp. 75–78). The swing of churchmen away from the far left had been manifested in Reinhold Niebuhr, who during the war years had been moving from socialism toward the pragmatic approach of the New Deal and to support of Americans for Democratic Action—he had abandoned Marxism before 1940, becoming a sharp critic of Communism (John C. Bennett, “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Social Ethics,” in Reinhold Niebuhr, His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, ed. by Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall [New York: Macmillan, 1961], pp. 71–74; Meyer, op cit., p. 408).

The postwar Century drift was highlighted in a 1959 editorial which described a “worldwide decline of socialism” and pronounced it “not regrettable.” Nationalization was now “nonsense.” The idea that all would be well if government only controlled production, distribution, and commerce, was an “illusion.” “Gone is the simple faith of the New Deal that big government can set right everything that big business or big agriculture sets wrong”—“gone … the illusion … that big labor has only to seize … power and the poor will be succored.…” “We are all sinners”—Niebuhr’s more biblical doctrine of sin had gotten through. Now favored, in place of socialism, was a “free order of voluntary cooperation and mutual aid” (Dec. 30, pp. 1515 f.).

Subsequently, President John Kennedy would not always come up to Century standards as a liberal leader, Charles Bowles, to the President’s left, being hailed as one of the few in his administration “not expendable” (July 12, 1961, pp. 845 ff.; Aug. 2, pp. 925 f.).

From socialism (and earlier, prohibition), the Century had turned to other issues now of vital import to it, such as racial equality, Federal aid to education, and certain welfare legislation. Though sin had been rediscovered to an extent, there was no equivalent proclamation of spiritual regeneration and conversion as the cure. The emphasis was rather on resort to the ballot with big government pushing through the necessary reforms, even though imperfectly. So much for the black horse of human want. Liberal social ethics lacked the foundation of biblical authority and appeared driven by events of the times. Ethical instability was matched by theological instability. Fixed principles were wanting. The white horse of death and hades—of the ultimate enemies, the ultimate questions—was confronted with transitory weapons, transitory answers, which seemed to vanish with the polishing.

END

One Sunday night in October, 1961, the streets of Jerusalem, usually crowded with people, were empty. Restaurants, usually alive with diners, were serving no meals. Everybody was home, listening to the radio, for this was Israel’s most exciting moment—the night of the International Bible Contest.

In the United States, there is the World Series; in England, there are the Test Matches (cricket); in France, there is the annual bicycle race around the country, the Tour de France; elsewhere, it is football or golf or ski tournaments—but in this land of the Old Testament, the Bible quiz was the big sporting event.

Midnight struck and those people who go to bed early were still awake. The town was a blaze of lighted windows. At one o’clock, people were drinking coffee to stay awake, for the race was still on, with a Yemenite rabbi and a Protestant mother of four, from Brazil, tied for first place. Then, shortly after 1:45, the contest was over; the black-bearded rabbi had won. And with that there was a thud of feet on the pavements as several thousand rushed to the Convention Center to hail the winner.

A few minutes later the newsboys were crying the news. The morning newspapers had issued extras. Looked at with the eyes of the casual foreign observer, it was an extraordinary phenomenon: a Bible quiz arousing as much excitement as a World Series. For those who know the country, however, it is one readily understandable. You feel the Old Testament there all the time. To Israelis, it is not simply a religious document; it is living history, geography, a storehouse of national folklore, a personal literature, and a guidebook. The names of holy places—Beersheba and Jericho—are for us things far away; to them they are a bus stop, the address of a friend, a picnic area.

In school, it is a basic textbook, and up to college, nearly every child studies the Old Testament at least three hours each week, for here is language, literature, geography, history, in addition to the religious teaching. The teen-ager’s popular songs are from Solomon, and the Israeli equivalent of our corner boys sing: “Behold thou art fair, thou has doves’ eyes.…” “My beloved is mine, and I am his; he feedeth among the lilies.…” And a common kindergarten song is also from the Bible: “Behold he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.…”

A Biblical Zoo

Even the zoo in Jerusalem is a “biblical zoo,” containing only animals mentioned in the Bible and those indigenous to the land of Israel. On the cages one finds not only the name of the beast but with it the appropriate quotation printed in Hebrew and English. Here, for example, is a fox. The sign reads: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines.” And before the bear’s cage: “Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool in his folly.”

Some of the animals mentioned have become extinct. In these cases, a close relative of the beast has been substituted. There are, for example, no more lions in Israel. One from Ethiopia occupies a cage. The last leopard was killed in the 1930s, but, in the interest of accuracy, an Indian variety is on exhibition.

In the newly opened children’s part of the zoo, it is proposed to project Bible stories: Noah’s ark and a diorama of Isaiah’s prophecy of the animals living peacefully together.

Some Commercial Values

Not all is entertainment or education. There are a dozen practical reasons that make the Bible a guide and a help to the nation’s economic well-being and in their way explain the excitement of the contest. Careful reading has led scholars to the discovery of at least one of King Solomon’s mines—a deposit of copper. “A land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper,” it is written in Deuteronomy. The mineralogists looked and found. Another quotation led to a supply of natural gas.

Its agronomists have learned what to plant and where to plant it, using the Old Testament as a record of successful agriculture of the past. In the seemingly arid desert they have found it possible to grow grapes largely because the ancients grew them there. And the entire reforestation program is guided each step of the way by biblical references to trees that grew in each locality. But more dramatic than its help to the economy is how it has helped military commanders. In the first world war, a British officer remembered from his Bible reading a passage between two cliffs, one long since abandoned, and by using it outflanked and defeated the Turks.

Alive With Interest

The International Bible Contest is therefore more than a random quiz; it is an expression of a living interest, one which stirs the imagination of the people, whatever their profession or philosophy. Unlike our great sporting events which by their nature interest mostly men, this contest has something for all members of the family. It is the night when even the smallest child is allowed to stay up late.

It began, almost by accident, in 1958, as a device for celebrating the tenth anniversary of the country’s independence. Fifteen persons from 13 countries competed. It was so successful, both locally and internationally, that one was planned every three years. The 1961 competition which I attended was the second.

What dramatized the first year’s quiz was the winner, Amos Hacham. He had been paralyzed as a boy and still limped; in fact, he had to be helped on and off the platform. He had a speech impediment. He lived literally in a hovel, alone and with few visitors. He earned his living giving lessons in Braille and translating the Old Testament into this language of the blind.

When his victory was announced, some 3,000 people surrounded him, lifted him in the air, and bore him to his home. Out of neighboring homes came men with violins and drums and clarinets to make an impromptu orchestra, and in the humble street where Hacham had led his poor, lonely life there was dancing until broad daylight. The prime minister himself arranged for an operation that would enable him to walk with only a slight limp. Other surgeons labored successfully to lessen his lisp. The government made it possible for him to move into a two-room apartment of his own. Nor was that the end.

A newspaper engaged him at a good salary to write a daily column. And, at last cured of his physical defects, earning a comfortable livelihood, this boy who had looked forward only to an empty life found a girl who loved him and whom he loved, and they were married. The wedding was the social event of the year, held in the city’s largest hotel, and attended by the president, members of the cabinet, and the diplomatic corps. All of this fairy-tale sequence was directly due to his knowledge of the Bible, which was enough to make him a national hero.

The 1961 contest was announced early in the year, and religious organizations and radio stations sent the news into every home in the world. Each competing country held its own competition, stretching it out over several weeks, in some cases several months, of broadcasting, until a winner could be chosen. The lucky man or woman then received from Israel a free round trip to Jerusalem plus a week of travel.

The Bible is of course the best seller of all time, but the effect of the announcement was to increase its sales enormously. In Italy, for example, the number sold was three times normal, and in Uruguay the shops were completely sold out for many weeks.

The European Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters approved the contest; national chains in many cases sponsored local competitions. Elsewhere, sponsorship was undertaken by religious bodies. In Holland, for example, the Protestant Ministers’ Association was in charge, starting off with a written examination for 180 applicants. The 36 survivors were quizzed on the air for nine weeks, four at a time, until only nine were left. These were taken three by three until a victor emerged in the person of a civil aviation official.

The Sunday evening of October 3 Jerusalem’s Convention Center was filled with 3,000 people. In the front row sat the president (Ben-Zvi) and the prime minister (Ben Gurion), both of them with Bibles in their laps to check the answers. Flanking them and back of them sat cabinet ministers, ambassadors, and other distinguished visitors. The 18 national winners were seated in a long row, the width of the stage, beside each the flag of his country. They represented New Zealand, England, Holland, Switzerland, Finland, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, the Ivory Coast, France, Austria, Belgium, South Africa, Canada, Malta, and, of course, Israel. They were schoolteachers, artisans, engineers, lawyers. The American was an insurance man from Cincinnati, Ohio. Most of them were non-Jewish. One was a Seventh-day Adventist minister from South Africa. The Frenchman was a Roman Catholic priest.

Back of the contestants in a parallel row sat the interpreters. The microphone moved on a rail, pausing, let us say, before the Finn. At the same time another microphone in the row behind stopped before the Finnish translator. The question was put in Hebrew and at once was rephrased into the language of the competitor. His answer, in his own tongue, was in turn translated.

The audience was lively, full of enthusiasm, applauding every successful reply, but most of them, of course, were rooting for the home team in the person of the frail-looking rabbi with the black beard from Yemen, Yichye Alsheikh, who had been runner-up in the last national quiz.

As to the questions, they involved no interpretation, being simply a test of one’s knowledge of the so-called historical chapters: Judges; I and II Samuel; I and II Kings; Joshua; and the Pentateuch as well. In other words, not an exercise in philosophy but a memory test, like any other quiz. However, the sponsors felt that the Bible being a book which all nations of the West revere in common, the contest would have a universal meaning.

A pretty girl drew out the first question: “Who was it that said the temple was to be a house of prayer also for the Gentiles?” The Chilean answered promptly: “King Solomon.”

The first question to baffle the contestants was: “A foreign woman came to ask riddles in the land. A foreign man came to be cured. Who were they?” The interpreter recited the correct reply: “The Queen of Sheba and Na’aman, military commander of Aram.”

The microphone moved from flag to flag along the long row, and one by one, all but five were eliminated: Jacob Jacobus Combrinck of South Africa, Edmund Read of New Zealand, Tuvia Goldman of the United States, the Yemenite rabbi of Israel, and Senhora Yolanda Da Silva of São Paulo, Brazil, mother of four. Each now was given the same questions. The first was an easy one for all: “Name the Egyptian woman who was mother of two tribes of Israel.” The answer: “Aseneth, daughter of Potiphar, wife of Joseph, whose two children were Ephraim and Manasseh.”

The other two eliminated the American, the New Zealander, and the South African. Now only two remained: the rabbi with the black beard and the lively, attractive Senhora Da Silva. They had successfully weathered the ten scheduled rounds of questioning.

It was now a quarter to two. The judges decided to match them in an extra round. “Give seven verses mentioning Israel’s exile from its land and/or prophesying its return.” Senhora Da Silva, showing signs of strain, could cite only five. Rabbi Alsheikh knew all seven and was the winner. By the rules, he was to get a gold medal, the contestant placing second, a silver one, but by acclamation, the Brazilian was also awarded a gold medal. In addition she received a kiss on both cheeks by Premier Ben Gurion. There were no cash prizes. The 22-carat medal itself is three inches in diameter, bearing on one side a quotation from the Psalms: “I am the law”; the other side a vase such as contained the Dead Sea Scrolls. The American placed third and was awarded the silver medal.

The contest was now over, and the 17 contestants enplaned for home. Everybody was happy except the English-language Jerusalem Post, which mourned that the contest was not a challenge to one’s understanding of the Bible but only to one’s memory, and stated flatly that “as constructed at present, the competition could be won by an IBM machine.”

Whether or not this is true, the fact remains that this contest of an essentially religious nature has aroused enormous interest in Bible reading in countries everywhere, and who knows where this interest may lead? As it is written in Proverbs: “If thou criest after knowledge, … if thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; then shalt thou … find the knowledge of God.”

END

HIGH TIME AND LOW TIDE

FOR OR AGAINST—The Oxford Union recently voted by a fair majority against belief in God. This need mean no more than that the slight boom in university religion is now over. We need not suppose that a harassed Gabriel is anxiously muttering, “Dear me! Another byelection lost—all these spoon-fed children of an affluent society out-talking the spoiled children of the modern Church.” … None the less, to vote for God or against Him is something; better, Dante says, than to be uncommitted.—Professor GORDON RUPP, in The Guardian.

LET WELL ENOUGH ALONE—A Catholic priest in Edinburgh has been saying that we live largely in a pagan land. That may be so but that is no reason why ministers of the Church should stoop to evangelise or proselytise.—From “A Scotsman’s Log,” in The Scotsman.

UNIVERSAL RELEVANCE—It is time for the Church to pay the unpaid bill which syncretism represents. It is time to show that there is inherent in the Gospel a universalism sui generis.—Dr. W. A. VISSER ’T HOOFT.

THE MAJORITY—Comparatively few Anglicans really hold that everyone who dies an atheist is for ever excluded from the vision of God.—DAVID L. EDWARDS, Director, S.C.M. Press.

SOCIAL RELEVANCE—The children were revising their homework on the morning bus. One little girl, wearing a blue beret with the badge of a Roman Catholic school, thrust an open book into the hands of her companion and began to recite. Through the bus noises I could hear enough to identify the Magnificat, followed by a prayer of blessing. The “hearer,” in the dark red cap of a non-Catholic school, checked conscientiously and then returned the book. “Can I hear yours now?” offered Blue Beret. Red Cap shook her head. “We don’t get prayers to learn for homework,” she explained. Blue Beret looked surprised, but accepted the explanation. Their friendship in no way impaired by this doctrinal divergence, the two little girls proceeded to discuss the colour of Elvis Presley’s eyes in an atmosphere of mutual respect and affection.—Life and Work, Church of Scotland magazine.

ANCIENT PRECEDENT—The most outstanding fetish and obsession in the present-day religious and ecclesiastical world is an uncontrollable and unappeasable itch for an outward organizational church union, miscalled Christian unity, which is neither Christian nor a unity. Nothing comparable to it has occurred in world history since the building of the Tower of Babel.—The Free Presbyterian Magazine and Monthly Record, Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland.

I had been out of seminary only two months and was serving a small church in eastern Montana when this article was born. My Sunday dinner was digesting as I stretched out on a creaky go-with-the-parsonage iron bedstead in an upstairs bedroom. While I was trying to unwind from the strain of the morning service, my mind fell on the sermon I had delivered. The text was the familiar words from the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew: “I was a stranger, and ye took me in.”

Midway through my reminiscing on the third point of the sermon, my wife gently announced from the foot of the stairs that I had a visitor. I slipped downstairs to confront a middle-aged, shabbily-dressed stranger.

We both forced a smile, and then he began to recite one of the saddest tales of woe I had yet heard. He said that he had been called unexpectedly to his mother’s funeral in North Dakota, and in returning home to Sheridan, Wyoming, he had exhausted his meager funds and now needed some cash for gas and groceries.

I listened sympathetically, pushing to the back of my mind the inkling that his delivery seemed rather polished—as if it had been recited many times before.

The church had a small fund for such emergencies, and with the words of my morning’s sermon ringing in my ears, I made straight for the little cashbox which contained the emergency fund in the church office next door. While opening the box, I glanced out of a window and noticed the sleek tail fins of an expensive, late-model convertible protruding beyond one corner of the sanctuary.

“Is that your car?” I asked in a mildly astonished voice.

A hardened look crossed the stranger’s til-then-innocent-looking countenance. He wheeled around and walked brusquely out of the church without saying a word. As he flashed away in his convertible, my mind flashed back to the text of my sermon and I thought of the ironical twist the words had suddenly taken. The stranger almost took me in.

It was a rude jolt to an idealistic young theologue who had just spent three years learning a basic trust in mankind. But it was not to be the last.

In the five years that followed, I was “touched” for cash on the average of more than once a week. I soon learned that I was in a profession that is a special target for small-time con men, hucksters, beggars, and swindlers in general who try devious ways to relieve ministers of what little cash they have.

Few laymen know that their minister is subjected to this continual harassment that threatens not only his money, but his valuable time as well.

Of course, there are many legitimate askings and needs that confront a minister, and these can be deftly sensed as he gains experience. But the sad fact is that far too many people are making substantial livings off the softest touch they know—the Christian minister.

Every minister can relate many tragic and embarrassing episodes with unscrupulous people. This was revealed by a Chicago Theological Seminary survey which was begun in 1937 and is renewed periodically with spot checks. It was instigated at the request of the seminary alumni to determine the extent of the work of professional crooks, and to ascertain whether or not such thefts could be prevented in the future by warnings to those now in service, and by proper instruction to young ministers in training in theological seminaries.

While ministers are reticent to press charges against those who have buncoed them, they did pour out a general response to the survey. Letters came from every state, and one of the main conclusions of a leading clergyman who participated in the survey was that there exists a clearinghouse or bureau for the purpose of furnishing details at so much a case. Conventions of ministers where names and details are given are studied, he believed, and the swindlers are furnished the information desired from these resources.

I have had many experiences that would substantiate this—total strangers coming to my door, calling me by name, and stating that Rev. So-and-So in the next town back said that I would be able to “do something” for them. I soon learned that if the story sounded plausible and the needs seemed legitimate, the minor expense of a phone call to the neighboring pastor was a better investment than the risk of unwisely sinking ten or twenty dollars into a crook’s coffer.

A somewhat amusing incident once happened to me along this line. I was sitting alone in a parsonage living room in Spokane, Washington, where I was the guest of a fellow minister while attending a convention in that city. A man came to the door and with salesman-like quickness announced that he was a member of a particular church in Montana. I listened with interest and “baited” him on, because the church he claimed to have membership in was the one I pastored. After supplying accurate details about the church, he made some flattering remarks about his “good friend” the pastor and then launched into an emotional harangue about his desperate plight, ending with a plea for a $25 “loan.”

To prove what I was going to shock him with, I pulled out one of my business cards, handed it to him, and said, “The pastor of this parish is not in, but if you ever get over my way maybe I can be of some assistance.”

“A profession that is a special target for small-time con men, hucksters, beggars, and swindlers in general who try devious ways to relieve ministers of what little cash they have”—so this writer depicts the ministry in an informative and illuminating study of America’s least-publicized racket.

He stared comprehendingly at the small, white card, smiled, and said, “You preachers sure get around nowadays.”

Four Types Of Swindling

After studying the case histories in the Chicago Seminary survey and the countless ones collected on my own, I would say that there are four general methods of swindling the men of the cloth.

The first, and most common, is the “short loan” or the cashing of checks. This appeal is based generally on stereotyped stories, such as money lost or stolen; mother dying in nearby town; and out of work, but now have job in another place and need transportation money to get there.

The second method can be classified as the local business swindle. In this method, payments are made in advance on supposedly bona fide contracts, such as fake church directories, magazine and book subscriptions, and worthless correspondence courses.

The third and financially most dangerous method is the selling of worthless securities. The minister is invited to invest in oil wells, mining properties, fruit groves in Florida or California, fur farms, or real estate subdivisions in unknown places.

The fourth method is the offering of worthless, bargain-rate insurance. All types are offered, but health and hospitalization are most common.

Only a typically low-salaried minister, who many times must seek ways to augment and stretch his income, can know how appealing the last three of these appeals can be.

Cash is not always the target of the professional crooks. A ministerial friend of mine lost his brand-new typewriter to one of the clever boys. He was pounding out his Sunday sermon notes on the machine when a stranger appeared at his study door. The man asked if he would go to the hospital and baptize his dying uncle who the stranger said attended a church of the same denomination in another city. My gullible colleague made a posthaste exit, amid the stranger’s excuses that he could not go along as he was “late for work.” My friend returned from his fruitless mission to find his typewriter gone. The con man was kind enough to leave the sermon notes.

But cash is the prime goal. I have had countless people decline my offers to fill their gas tank, or buy them a meal or some groceries. Many go away in a huff at the mention of any assistance other than cash.

Encouraging Racketeers

To learn why ministers are special prey of the swindlers one has but to look at the encouragement the crooks are given. Never have I made application to the law, and I have yet to hear of a minister who has. What crook could resist such ideal “working” conditions?

E. G. Homrighausen, dean of Princeton Theological Seminary, believes the reason is that ministers “prefer to have an opportunity to talk with him [the swindler] and even reform him.”

Lack of business experience is another reason why the men of the cloth are approached and easily taken in. They do not work under the hard competitive laws of the business world, but rather are too often guided by sentimentality.

Ministers are not protected by business associates, either. They are usually found alone in their offices, whereas the businessman is somewhat protected by his private secretary and his associates.

What are seminaries doing to warn future ministers of this occupational hazard? To find out, I queried 20 leading and representative seminaries. While all of the schools contacted agreed that it is a real problem, they also concurred that it is unwise, academically, to devote an entire course to the subject. As it was put by Joseph D. Quillan, Jr., dean of Perkins School of Theology of Southern Methodist University, “For a seminary to teach a whole course dealing wholly with the problem of the swindling of ministers would be in itself an academic swindle of the first water.”

But almost every seminary makes an emphatic reference to the problem in courses dealing with practical theology or church administration. A West Coast seminary professor says: “I have two pages of notes on the subject and very carefully spell out the pitfalls that await the unwary.”

Robert G. Torbet, dean of Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, maintains that proper guidance to the ministerial student, along with information concerning the swindler’s approaches, should be given in church administration courses, but then adds, “The ability to recognize swindlers cannot always be taught in courses. Experience and common sense must be drawn upon to fortify the young minister.”

It is heartening to know that the future men who shepherd the flocks will not be so easily fleeced. They are receiving some hard facts of the world and its ways that I did not get in my pre-ministerial training less than ten years ago.

Denominational Awareness

Denominations have awakened to the problem, too, and are doing something about it. Besides informing ministers in local, district, and state areas where swindlers are known to be operating, some denominational magazines carry warnings in a special section set aside for that purpose. Most of them read like routine FBI circulars on “wanted men.” Here is one of several listed in a recent issue of The Lutheran Witness, the official publication of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod:

“A man using the name Leo Dupre, Leo Cox, etc., has been obtaining money under false pretenses from Lutheran churches and organizations around the country. He claims membership in Redeemer Congregation, Alexandria, La. (among others), and carries a forged ‘letter of introduction’ from the pastor of this congregation. His usual story is that he is an active member of the Lutheran Church, is in need of financial help to get to a VA hospital, and will return the money as soon as he can wire his home church. This man is not a member of the churches in which he has claimed membership and should not be given financial assistance.”

Perhaps the greatest assistance laymen can give to their minister in alleviating this problem is to see that the church has a special fund budgeted for legitimate and worthy askings which the minister may draw upon, rather than having to reach into his own pocket. Several seminaries suggested this.

Better yet, the church could appoint a “hardheaded businessman” member to oversee such a fund, to whom the minister could refer all askers. The only caution here would be to find a man who would not have antipathy to every need.

Concordia Seminary in St. Louis favors a minister’s being the administrator of such a fund, with laymen being brought into the matter when the disbursem*nt exceeds a certain amount.

By and large, the problem must be objectively accepted by the minister himself. Ministers must live with it and try to make the best of a potentially heartening or disheartening situation by developing a sixth sense of scrutiny.

Some ministers attempt to circumvent the problem by indiscriminately doling out to everyone who asks of them. The attitude was voiced by a clergy-friend who said, when I told him I was working on this article, “I would rather be swindled a dozen times than turn away one deserving case”—a noble attitude, but one that too often serves to encourage the swindler to keep the minister number one on his “sucker list.”

Many ministers also do not turn anyone away because of their interpretation of such Bible verses as: “Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee, turn not away.”

If a Bible verse is needed in regard to these tricksters, perhaps it is the one all-inclusive warning Christ gave to his very first ministers: “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

END

On the Apostles’ Creed

We live our fragmentary lives and sink in

fragmentary thoughts. We seldom see

reality as whole, a unity.

We smile on birth as part of life, yet shrink

from contemplating death; we see no link

between the two. That there may somehow be

a meaning which runs through nativity

and growth and pain and death we can’t forethink.

It therefore lends us comprehensiveness

to see that our belief in God’s design

swells from creation to the present day;

and that conception, birth and living, yes,

and death and resurrection, mark a line

of march for all who follow him, the Way.

TERENCE Y. MULLINS

THE PREACHER:

J. A. Motyer is Vice-Principal of Clifton Theological College, Bristol. Born in Ireland, he won many prizes during his studies at Dublin University, of which he is a graduate in Arts and Divinity. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1947 and was engaged in parish work for several years before joining the Clifton staff as tutor in 1950. Mr. Motyer is well known as a preacher and as a lecturer, and is the author of two books: The Revelation of the Divine Name and Introducing the Old Testament.

THE TEXT:

Ezra 7:10

For Ezra had set his heart to seek the law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.

THE SERIES

This is the eleventh sermon of our 1962 series in which CHRISTIANITY TODAY has presented messages from preachers in the United Kingdom and on the continent of Europe whose public proclamations God has greatly blessed. A sermon next month by the Rev. James Philip, Minister of Holyrood Abbey, Church of Scotland, Edinburgh, and known particularly in Britain to evangelical student audiences, will conclude the series. In 1963, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will publish sermons by Asian Christian workers.

It is the ambition of every citizen, whether God has placed on him the special responsibility of the ordained ministry or the inescapable responsibility of service and testimony, to know the power of God, honoring and blessing his work. This was the happy experience of Ezra. Did he seek to interest others in the work of God? God prospered him (7:6). Did he engage in some specific act of service? God prospered him (7:9). Did he require special endowment for special service? God gave it to him (7:28). Did he seek gifted colleagues? God called them out (8:18). Did he need the presence and power of God to face dangers in God’s work and to be brought through victoriously? God was with him and kept him (8:22, 31). The words the Book of Ezra uses to describe this experience of God’s power in life and ministry are these: the hand of God was upon him. As with us, so in the Bible, the “hand” is not vague power, but power specifically applied to chosen tasks. God saw to it—so we learn—that his power was deliberately made available to this man. He knew the reality which we covet so much for ourselves, and which we need so desperately for our Christian testimony.

The Precondition Of Blessing

The story of Ezra, however, is not set in the Bible merely to illustrate the fact of a divinely empowered life, but also to tell us the reason why Ezra was so blessed by God. The explanation is given in the words of our text. Reading through from verse 9, we see that this is indeed so: “… The good hand of his God was upon him. For [because] Ezra had set his heart.…” We are taught, to be precise, that the blessing of God resting upon a man is no accident. However much we rejoice in that independence of divine action which the Scriptures exalt (such that God cannot be coerced or cajoled into distributing his favors but, on the contrary, bestows them with absolutely sovereign freedom), nevertheless there is a “because” written into the story of Ezra in order to warn us that we are by no means permitted to relapse into any slothful complacency if we discern a lack of power evident in our service for God. We dare not sit back and say, “God will bless as and when he will”—true though that statement is in its own place. Ezra was blessed by God “because” certain things were true in his life, and this fact has been written by God in Holy Scripture for our learning.

The blessing of God, as Ezra knew it, was related, not to certain techniques, but to a certain character. In the work which he was called to do, it was open to Ezra to achieve his objectives through external equipment. A word to the king would have brought every needful worldly guarantee of power and security (8:22). Ezra deliberately rejected this procedure. It was not in terms of techniques or external methods that he was to know the reality of God’s power, but rather this truth proved itself in his experience, that the blessing of God attends a man of a certain character. We read of him (7:10), that he “set his heart.” The blessing of God which openly rested upon him, which gave him every ability for the task, which provided him with helpers, and protected him from foes—this all-embracing divine empowering was related to the hidden factor, the state of Ezra’s heart.

This is a general truth of Holy Scripture, and not an exclusive experience of Ezra, and it will be worthwhile to step aside from the history of one man to see the same principle at work on a broader canvas. Gideon was a man whom God blessed mightily. He was raised up by God to rid the land of a pestilential foe; he knew the power of God resting upon him to such an extent that an army too great to number fled in terror and confusion. And yet the latter end of Gideon was a personal disgrace, and a public tragedy. He made an ephod (Judges 8:27) which “became a snare unto Gideon,” and “as soon as Gideon was dead, … the children of Israel turned again, and went a whoring after Baalim” (Judges 8:33). The explanation is contained in the same passage. The people offered Gideon the throne after his great victory, and his refusal was a mighty testimony to the kingship of God (Judges 8:23). Outwardly there was not any reason why the power of God departed from this man, but inwardly? What of the state of his heart? Sometime after his refusal of the throne, Gideon had a son (8:31), and called his name “Abimelech”—“My father is king.” The testimony of the lips found no echoing response from the hidden man of the heart, apparently, and the power of God ceased to be a reality of experience.

Again, David was a man whom God blessed marvelously. But the same principle of divine working is evidenced. On the day of David’s initial anointing to be king, Samuel was impressed by other candidates, but he learned by what assessment the Lord measures a man: “… The LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.… And the Spirit of the LORD came upon David from that day forward …” (1 Sam. 16:7, 13). The Lord found David “a man after my heart” (Acts 13:22). Is it any wonder, therefore, that the wisdom of God commands a special watchfulness over the heart: “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life” (Prov. 4:23)?

A Purposeful Heart

Returning now to take up the study of Ezra, we notice that it is specifically the purposeful state of his heart that is mentioned. We might rephrase the literal translation “set his heart,” and read as follows: “Ezra had adopted it as his deliberate purpose.” The “heart” does not stand only for the general character of the man in its inner aspects, but also and particularly for the whole set and direction of his life as determined by those inner factors. Ezra was bent to a deliberate purpose. It is definitely worth noting that it was because of divine approval of the purpose that the blessing followed. The hand of God was upon him because he so made it his determination. God does not bless people because of their accomplishments, but because of their aspirations.

What was Ezra’s purpose? The verse (Ezra 7:10) sets it out as possessing three facets.

1. Ezra purposed a mind instructed in God’s Word: “Ezra … set his heart to seek the law of the LORD.…”

We do well to pause when we see the Bible using a word which we would not normally employ in the given context. We might have said here, for example, that Ezra purposed to study, or to read, or to understand, the law of the Lord, but the Bible says “to seek” it. The same verb is used of people coming deliberately and purposefully to a certain place, and returning there time and again (Deut. 12:5, ff.); likewise it is used of people setting out to “inquire” into mysteries and to find the solution (2 Chron. 32:31); and also it is used of peoples “inquiring” of the Lord so that they may order their lives aright (1 Kings 22:5). This is surely all involved in Ezra’s attention to the law of the Lord: the time he deliberately and purposefully set aside in order to be found there; the intensity of enquiry whereby his reading was no superficial glossing of the surface but a penetration into its meaning in depth; the submissiveness whereby his life was ordered by its precepts. Ezra purposed to seek the law of the Lord. The same recipe for spiritual prosperity was given by the Lord to Joshua: “… Meditate therein day and night, … for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous …” (Josh. 1:8), and Scripture exalts it into a general principle of godly life, for we read in Psalm 1 that the “blessed” man not only possesses the negative characteristics of verse 1, but also possesses as his sole positive distinguishing mark that “in his law doth he meditate day and night,” with the result that (verse 3) “whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.”

2. Ezra purposed a will submissive to God’s Word: “Ezra … set his heart … to do it.…”

We noted that, in principle, this submission of the will was involved in a true “seeking” of the law. But here it is plainly stated. Ezra triumphed where we so frequently fail. He possessed that true knowledge of God which, far from remaining a mere item in the contents of his head, powerfully conditioned his manner of life. How often our plea, on our knees, is that God will not allow his Word to return void, and how often our testimony is that the Word of the Lord is quick and powerful, and how often our lives are standing denials of this truth! The primary mark of the outward life of the man of God, the mark of obedience, was found upon Ezra. He purposed no trifling with God. He came before the law of the Lord to be briefed for the day, and he purposed solemnly and deliberately that what he found there he would practice.

3. Ezra purposed a tongue filled with God’s Word: “Ezra … set his heart … to teach … statutes and judgments.”

He apparently wanted to have the reputation for spiritual conversation. The statutes of the Lord, the categorical commands which God has set for the unconditional obedience of his people, and the judgments of the Lord, the particular applications of the law to special situations—these would exhaust the contents of Ezra’s vocabulary. On this he set his heart. The sequence in which Ezra’s ambitions are placed before us is notable: first, there is the mind stocked with divine truth, and then, secondly, the life conformed to divine truth, and then, thirdly, the testimony. The spoken word demands a double foundation: a hidden foundation in the biblically tutored mind; and a public foundation in the biblically framed life. Do we wonder that the blessing of God attended Ezra, and that the blessing of God is so often absent from our public utterance? Have we secured the necessary double undergirding for our testimony? We may say that these are the absolute essentials for authoritative and convincing declaration of God’s truth.

Dangers Avoided

We have concentrated so far on a positive examination of the text. We have seen that it sets out to explain why it was that God blessed Ezra as He did; we have noted that God’s scrutiny is directed towards the inner man of the heart; we have been taught that it is the purpose of the heart which, humanly speaking, explains the setting of the hand of God upon a person’s life and work; and the contents of that purpose have been Clearly stated for our warning and learning. But in conclusion we may profitably turn to a negative examination of the verse, and ask this question: By adopting this as his deliberate purpose, what dangers did Ezra avoid? They are three in number:

1. Ezra avoided the danger of neglecting what was familiar.

He had a great and covetable reputation, which is accorded to him six times over in this chapter (verses 6, 11, 12, 14, 21, 25): he was thoroughly versed in the law of God. This was the reputation which lived on, so that when the book of Ezra was written this was what the historian recorded of him; the same reputation was his in the presence of the king whom he served in Babylon. And it was this man, with all that store of knowledge of God’s Word, who made it his deliberate purpose “to seek the law of the LORD.” Without question, it would have been easy—indeed “natural,” according to the bent of our sinful nature—to say: I know all that; why bother any further with it? Not so with Ezra. He knew the Word, and he gave himself to the study and absorption and obedience of the Word.

It would be easy to overpress small indications here, but as a matter of fact the verses which speak of Ezra’s knowledge of the law of God also speak inferentially about the law itself: that it had its origin in the Lord (verses 6, 11, 21), and that its content was nothing less than the wisdom of God (verses 11, 14, 25), a book supernatural in its inception and in its teaching.

Was this why Ezra valued it so, and why, in the abundance of his knowledge of it, he yet “sought” it? Since this is our testimony about Scripture also, let us follow Ezra in avoiding the danger of neglecting what is familiar.

2. Ezra avoided the danger of mere head knowledge.

The Bible would refuse the name “knowledge” to anything which merely resided in the intellect and was not carried over into daily life. Ezra surely could have boasted of “head-knowledge” of the law, and even have contented himself with it. But he purposed for himself a knowledge properly so called, the knowledge which leads to “doing” the law. In a striking verse (1 Sam. 2:12) we read that “the sons of Eli were sons of Belial.” What a condemnation of the home of that godly man! What a challenge and warning to Christian parents! But why were they of such a character? We read that “they knew not the Lord.” Yet they were the priests of their day. They were full of information about the Lord; they were the teachers of their generation; they “knew” more than anyone else. But they did not know the Lord; they lacked that which the Bible would recognize as knowledge, for what they “knew” exercised no influence on their lives. When a man is not a hearer only but a doer, then he truly knows.

3. Ezra avoided the danger of novelty.

We read that he purposed to teach “in Israel” statutes and judgments. It was his earnest purpose to take to people who knew it already the same old teaching about God and his law. Ezra ministered in a critical day. The people of God stood at a real turning point in their history. They were an oppressed, downcast minority. They needed above all things some new enthusiasm, some injection of new vigor, some fresh vision. And Ezra came to apply the old balm. He purposed to say nothing new, but faithfully to minister “truth unchanged, unchanging.”

The spirit of the age, and the spirit of the carnal church, is always that of Athens, “to tell, or hear some new thing” (Acts 17:21)—surely this point of view did not lack exponents in Ezra’s time. If it did, then the moment was indeed unique! There are always voices crying out for a new law anew morality, a new God (e.g., Isa. 30:9–11); there are always those to urge that new situations cannot be solved but by new solutions. This is the constant pressure on the worker for God, and the constant danger he undergoes. Fail here, and we fail everywhere. Our message must never be dictated by the situation, or by pressures arising from the situation. Rather, like Ezra, and Ezekiel, and everyone who has stood in the succession of true servants of God, we must say, “… Thus saith the Lord GOD; whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear” (Ezek. 3:11).

END

Speaking of the Bible, Woodrow Wilson declared that a man who has deprived himself of this has deprived himself of the best there is in the world. When the Archbishop of Canterbury presented the Bible to Queen Elizabeth II, he called it the greatest thing in the world. President Theodore Roosevelt made bold to say that if a man is not familiar with the Bible, he has suffered a loss which he had better make all haste to correct. Dr. Robert Millikan regarded a knowledge of the Bible as an indispensable qualification of a well-educated man, and was convinced that only in the Bible can a man come into contact with the finest influences that have come into human life. President Calvin Coolidge, a man of no reputation for extravagance in speech, told the American people that the foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if these teachings ceased to be practically universally known in this country.

Is this Book, once the principal textbook in our schools, and now generally excluded from the schools, as important as these great men have indicated?

I think so. I read both testaments through before my fourteenth birthday, and thought them the greatest thing I had ever seen.

Doubtless, many will disagree, for an estimated fifty million Americans have never read the Bible and make no effort to include its teachings in the education of their children.

Ernest Gordon, now dean of Princeton University Chapel, but once a prisoner of war, has related how under his eyes men reached great depths of degradation in a prisoner-of-war camp. On the point of despair, he experienced spiritual rebirth in prison camp when he was reading the Bible. At the darkest hour, when men fought one another for scraps from Japanese swill pails, stole from fellow sufferers, robbed the dead, and became almost indistinguishable as human beings, Ernest Gordon began reading to some of them the New Testament. It spoke to the smothered greatness so cruelly crushed within them; attitudes were changed, and they discovered there in their darkness the validity of the redemptive miracle. It was a new birth, but nothing foreign to the history of Christianity.

The Christian enterprise in its beginnings and in its later development needed and fortunately often had leaders who spoke with the boldness of conviction that comes of a personal encounter and commitment. Strange it is we have forgotten how many became such from reading the Scriptures. It was by reading the Scriptures that Justin Martyr (A.D. 114–167), Tatian (contemporary of Justin), and Theophilus of Antioch (second century), men a mere generation removed from the Apostles, became Christians. Hilary of Poitiers, Veronius, one of the earliest Western exegetes, and Augustine of Hippo, the great theologian, are among the men converted from paganism by the reading of the Scriptures. Their names have claimed large space in the Who’s Who of the social and religious history of the world for more than sixteen centuries.

What of moral and social reform? Wilberforce rose from reading the Greek New Testament and went forth, in an atmosphere of disdain and in the agony of ill health, to shame the British Empire into the abandonment of the slave traffic, and to be remembered as “The Attorney General of the Underprivileged”; he is in the long line of public benefactors.

Before I heard in any impressive way of Wilberforce, Justin Martyr, Tatian and his Diatesseron, Augustine and his Confessions, or Martin Luther and his theses, I read the Bible. Somehow during the reading, the Saviour appeared as an ever-increasing reality and in such a manner as to claim my loyalty. I became aware, overwhelmingly aware, that the love of God revealed in Christ was for me—an obscure little boy in a great world of important people. It was a never-to-be-forgotten experience, vivid enough to me, but an experience that set me wondering how anyone else could believe that so obscure and immature a person could claim the personal attention of the Saviour of the World.

Then two years later, and while reading the first chapter of the Prophecy of Jeremiah, I was overwhelmed with the impression that Almighty God was speaking to me in that Book and indicating his purpose that I should be a minister. It has never ceased to overwhelm me, and seeing how little I have accomplished, it would not be surprising now, as it was not surprising then, that to others it might seem impossible to believe. In a tumultuous generation, in two world wars, the Korean conflict, and in the “piping days of peace,” it has caused me to make decisions my closest friends interpreted as “against interest,” and has caused some of them to confide to me that they thought I was a fool. But when I have “run with the footmen and they have wearied me” so that tasks ahead have seemed too prodigious for even God to undertake with so unlikely an instrument, and in anguish of soul I have cried out to him, “Ah, Lord, God! Behold, I cannot speak: for I am but a child”—there has been no discharge, but another “Thou therefore gird up thy loins and arise … be not dismayed at their faces, lest I confound thee before them.” For those who are made of my kind of “dust of the earth,” the Bible can be a very disturbing book. It may be that you are in need of the disturbing Word that awaits those who search the pages of the Bible in earnest desire for the meaning of life. Well, for me this Word has been the enchiridion of disciplines and the charter of a blessed freedom.

The Bible is a word of release for victims of fear. One does not read far to discover that the problem of despair is not peculiar to the space age. Nor need one go far to discover that light penetrates the darkness. The pages are aflame with what a man can do when he allows God to direct his way. A thief in flight becomes a patriarch. A plowman becomes a prophet of social righteousness. A man of unclean lips becomes a herald of redemptive grace. A hated tax collector becomes St. Matthew the Evangelist. A woman whose days were dogged by dingy nights in dark streets becomes a city missionary. An afflicted slave girl becomes an instrument of healing. An intolerant bigot becomes the world’s most impressive apostle of brotherhood. The Bible is the world’s great storehouse of unfolding possibilities. It is a story of grace abounding wherein all people are important people. People who want to remain as they are will find it disturbing. People who want to fulfill their higher destiny will find it a lamp to their feet, and a light upon the way to “the glorious liberty of the Children of God.”

END

THE BIBLE AND MODERN LIFE

THE WARFARE OF IDEAS—In our efforts to compete with the Communists in the cold war, we Americans have not been sufficiently interested in ideas.… We have stressed, for example, our free enterprise system and the American market.… But these things do not reach the heart of the problem in the ideological warfare. It is necessary that we endeavor to inculcate the ideals of liberty, freedom, justice, equality and rule under law and faith in God.… The use of the Bible will determine what kind of Christian heritage will be passed on to this new age of rockets and astronauts. It will determine whether God will still remain in our lives; whether this is still his world that we are learning more about.… The peace and security of the nation—the hope of millions of people around the globe—is in the balance. We must accept the responsibility of leadership in giving them the strength they need, which will come from the guidance of the Holy Spirit as they study the inspired Word of God.—Judge LUTHER W. YOUNGDAHL, Vice-President of the American Bible Society, in an address given at the 146th annual meeting of the society in New York City.

HOLY SLANG—The Rev. H. Hartley, Rector of Solihull, said that a member of his congregation expressed her opinion of the Gospels in the new Bible “very cogently when she said to me: ‘I think The New English Bible is excellent for the Epistles, but when I read the Gospels I expect to turn over the page and find Our Lord saying O.K.!’”—Report on Canterbury Convocation meeting in the Daily Telegraph, London.

AFTER EDEN—The Church of Scotland, which was once the garden of the Lord, is now a howling wilderness.—Young People’s Magazine, Free Presbyterian Church.

IN THREE DECADES—Two aspects of this action concerning Professor Hick [who refused to affirm belief in the Virgin Birth] are of significance in indicating the changes of thought in the church [Presbyterian, U.S.A.] since the 1920’s. One is that this decision has stirred up very little controversy. The other is that it was a member of the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary, fully defended by his institution, who was accused of heresy. This … clearly dramatizes changes in the theological map that have been taking place in the past three decades.—Dr. JOHN C. BENNETT, in Christianity and Crisis.

NEVER ON THE ADVENT—As far as I remember I have never written nor have I preached on the Second Coming of Our Lord.—Professor J. G. MCKENZIE, veteran Congregational minister, teacher, writer, in The British Weekly.

A DEEP ABYSS—Risking the danger of being considered doctrinal spoilsports, we must insist that the abyss dividing the belief of the Dutch Reformed Church and Roman Catholic dogma is deeper than many Catholic theologians think when they state that the Reformation can be integrated into the whole of Catholic truth.—Statement of the Dutch Reformed Church, quoted in The Universe, Roman Catholic newspaper.

That man Aristotle among others took the view that the learning process has to do with making distinctions—that is a dog and not a cat, and that there thing is an atomic weight. So it goes, and I should like to assay a distinction or two. One day hence, as I write, the General Council will open in the Vatican and will be the Roman Catholic version of the ecumenical movement in action. What we have to sort out are words like ecumenical and catholic, but especially Roman catholic.

The sorting process is simple enough and known to Everyman: the words catholic and ecumenical mean virtually the same thing, i.e., “universal,” with the word ecumenical having a more chummy sound to it because it includes something of the idea of one household. But the term Roman catholic is a contradiction in terms: insofar as a church is Roman, it is not catholic but limited; insofar as it is catholic, it goes far beyond Rome. We have used the term Roman catholic so long that we have blurred the distinction, but we can see it clearly if we try to talk about Roman ecumenical, or Pittsburgh ecumenical, or even Edinburgh catholic. We ought to try such terms on for size just to see the point, just in order not to forget it. This could give us a new sense of direction; we could invite the Romanists to join the catholic church instead of limiting themselves to Rome.

This could be great fun, inviting the Romanists to become catholics. They could lay aside strictly Romish questions, such as whether Peter really was the first pope in case he was ever really in Rome at all, or the infallibility of the Roman pontiff (that seems terribly Roman, doesn’t it, and terribly offensive to the true ecumenical spirit), or the Assumption of Mary, which is as unbiblical as it is incomprehensible. Not that this sort of thing is likely; not half. We are all so delighted that Rome is smiling on us, that they are so big about it all as graciously to allow Protestant “observers” as they go about their work. We have been so conditioned by the idea that Roman priests look like Bing Crosby and that nuns look like Audrey Hepburn (while Protestant missionaries are more like Katherine Hepburn riding down a river with Humphrey Bogart) and that popes are genial old gentlemen like the present incumbent, John XXIII, who would have been retired long ere since in Protestantism, but who will make a good appearance at the Vatican Council while “the boys in the back room” get the work done. How long ago was it that Protestants believed that Rome was the “whor* of babylon” and the “antichrist”? Has something happened to Rome or to us since those awful terms were used? It seems to me the words arose when men were having their heads chopped off because they opposed Rome. Have we changed or has Rome changed, in Colombia or Spain, for example? There is a monument of repentance in Geneva because Calvin should not have had a hand in the burning of Servetus. That sort of thing we are ashamed of and the monument says so. Where is the monument which tells us about Rome repenting for the Inquisition?

The Chicago Daily News late in August reported on a pamphlet written by the Reverend James J. McQuade, S. J. (Society of Jesus: that ought to be a pretty ecumenical term!), in which he quotes Dr. Julius Doepfner, Cardinal Archbishop of Berlin, who has listed five ways in which Roman Catholics can help establish Christian unity. Three of these are worth comment as illustrative of where Rome really stands in matters ecumenical, i.e., catholic.

1. They must develop a “thorough love of the Catholic Church” (he means Rome, of course) and reject “indifference which leads to decay of Christianity and frustrates all genuine reunion efforts.”

2. They must practice “prayer and penance to win God’s grace.” If I may here interject, look at that statement as against genuine Protestantism. Just how is one supposed by prayer and/or penance to win God’s grace? How does one earn a gift, and if it is grace, how does one win it? This is one place where we can get all blurred up in failing to see the differences in our longing for unity.

3. There can be “clarifying talks” with non-Catholics (he means, of course, non-Romanists) conducted in “strict adherence” to instructions of the Holy See and the bishops, without “blurring the differences.”

I quote Dr. Doepfner with great approval. We cannot and we must not think about ecumenical movements which “blur the differences.” John Calvin, called by Karl Holl a Unionsmann, engaged in many colloquies shortly after the Reformation began in efforts toward union with Rome. So did Melanchthon and Bucer, and Calvin reports on them in one of his letters:

Philip and Bucer have drawn up ambiguous and varnished formulas … to try whether they could satisfy the opposite party by giving them nothing. I cannot agree to this device … for they hope that in a short time they would begin to see clearly if the matter of doctrine be left open; therefore they rather wish to skip over it, and do not dread that equivocation than which nothing can be more hurtful.

In the book review section of The New York Times for Sunday, October 14, Liston Pope of Yale Divinity School has an excellent review of Robert Neville’s book The World of the Vatican. Parts of his review seem relevant to what we have been saying. “One announced purpose of the meeting,” Liston Pope writes, “was that it should ‘constitute an invitation to the separated communities to seek for unity, toward which so many hearts in all parts of the world are yearning today.’”

Professor Pope suggests, however, that this original theme of unity “has been rather muted in later discussion of the council’s purposes.” The purpose now seems to be to study the inner workings of the Roman church. Meanwhile, as Liston Pope points out, “Radio Vatican has added that there is only ‘one road to unity’—the road to Rome. Certainly the doctrines of Papal supremacy and infallibility comprise the chief stumbling blocks to union between Roman Catholic and non-Catholic bodies.”

There will be no equivocation in Rome; don’t look for it and don’t build your hopes on it. The Vatican Council affects so many people in so many different ways; in me it arouses cynicism and a certain sadness as I watch all those goings-on and think on the Man of Galilee. Meanwhile, as I write, the radio is just announcing that the council had prayers this morning for the “Catholics behind the Iron Curtain.” And they meant Roman catholics, I presume.

A federal or state requirement of an oath of office is not only not violative of the United States Constitution but is expressly sanctioned by this “supreme Law of the Land.” Such an oath requirement does not constitute in any sense or degree a religious test for office such as is barred by the Constitution. This is true whether or not the oath expressly includes the usual closing words, “So help me God.”

The soundness of these conclusions is readily apparent from the words of Article VI of the Constitution requiring that members of Congress and state legislatures, as well as all executive and judicial officials, federal and state “… shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Here we find not only in the same sentence but immediately adjoining each other the oath requirement and the prohibition of any religious test. Any contention that such an oath constitutes the forbidden religious test would be to condemn the quoted text as making nonsense. Such a conclusion as to any part of the Constitution is, of course, impermissible. Each and every part of this basic law must be accepted as having equal value and full validity, according to controlling principles of constitutional construction. No provision of the original Constitution can soundly be construed as invalidating any other part thereof. No part of any Amendment can soundly be said to invalidate any part of the Constitution, as amended, unless accomplished expressly—as in the case of the Eighteenth Amendment’s repeal by the Twenty-first Amendment. No such invalidation can be assumed to have been effected by implication, much less accomplished by “judicial interpretation.”

Extensive research in the writings of the Founders, notably those who framed and adopted the Constitution in 1787–1788, supports the above conclusions concerning oath of office and religious test for office. Nothing to the contrary in these writings has been found to exist nor, it is believed, could it be found. Those conclusions are entirely in keeping with the governmental philosophy of the Founders as a group, as recorded in their writings, as well as with the historical records’ evidence of the intent with which the Constitution was framed and adopted.

As the “father of the Constitution,” Madison’s observation regarding Article VI is especially noteworthy by way of illustration in his letter of April 10, 1788, to Edmund Randolph: “As to the religious test, I should conceive that it can imply at most nothing more than that without that exception, a power would have been given to impose an oath involving a religious test as a qualification for office. The constitution [meaning creation] of necessary offices being given to the Congress, the proper qualifications seem to be evidently involved.” [Emphasis added.] Such “proper qualifications” include, for instance, those based on age and citizenship as well as the prescribed oath.

A most interesting statement concerning the oath requirement of Article VI was made by former President John Quincy Adams in his “Jubilee” address on April 30, 1839: “The Constitution had provided that all the public functionaries of the Union, not only of the general but of all the State governments, should be under oath or affirmation of its support. The homage of religious faith was thus superadded to all the obligations of temporal law, to give it strength; and this confirmation of an appeal to the responsibilities of a future omnipotent judge, was in exact conformity with the whole tenor of the Declaration of Independence—guarded against an abusive extension by a further provision, that no religious test should ever be regarded as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. The first act of the Congress, therefore, was to regulate and administer the oaths thus required by the Constitution.” [Emphasis added.] [Pamphlet copy, Library of Congress.] The words, “guarded against an abusive extension,” stress that—to the extent that such an oath has religious significance—this fact can never soundly serve as the basis for a claim that such an oath constitutes the forbidden religious test for office. These two things, oath of office and religious test for office, are—under the Constitution—mutually exclusive; and the requirement of such an oath and the prohibition of such a test are entirely compatible constitutionally.…

The acknowledgment of the existence of a Supreme Being in any oath-taking is implied with the same effect as if made express in the usual manner, “So help me God.” It invokes God’s punishment for oath-breaking. Whether express or implied makes no difference. This assumes bona fide oathtaking, not falsely pretended belief in God.…

The oath provision of Article VI has nothing whatever to do with—does not trespass upon—any freedom, or right, guaranteed by the Constitution, as amended; it does not violate freedom to believe or not believe in God, nor freedom of conscience, nor freedom of thought, nor any other freedom. It merely expresses the sovereign people’s mandate as to one important condition, or qualifications pertaining to the privilege (there is no right) of holding office, federal or state. As to “So help me God” in the prescribed forms for federal officials, see for instance U. S. Code, Title 5, Sec. 16; Title 28, Sec. 453.

A recent Supreme Court case merits special mention here: Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U. S. 488 (1961). There the plaintiff, an applicant to be a notary public in the State of Maryland, sued the state on account of its denial to him of a commission as notary because he would not declare his belief in God as required by the state constitution, which expressly barred any religious test for office in Maryland “other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God.” The U. S. Supreme Court decided merely that this constitutes a religious test for office (as the Maryland Constitution itself expressly labelled it) which violates the First Amendment of the United States Constitution as made applicable—the court stated—to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment. The court’s opinion (in a footnote) expressly stated that Article VI was not considered in deciding the case; so the decision has no bearing upon the question being considered here.

In conclusion, an oath of office—expressly or impliedly including the words, “So help me God”—is not violative of Article VI or any other part of the Constitution, as amended. The oath requirement of Article VI is independently controlling.—HAMILTON A. LONG, member of the New York Bar (retired), in the American Bar Association Journal.