Page 5952 – Christianity Today (2024)

Man doesn’t move in God’s direction easily. Shortcuts can help him down the path of service for a little way, but this will not last. Some church leaders keep hoping that stewardship executives and conferences will find some shortcut or some secret formula to move people to give, serve, and witness effectively. A pastor wrote us: “Motivational talks on stewardship are not needed. Supply what pastors lack: techniques of money-raising. Pastors should be presumed to know motivation. Please show us the ‘tricks of the trade.’”

None of us fully understands the truth and power of the Gospel as it affects lives, and that means we need to learn more about motivation in stewardship. Clear understanding and proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is intimately tied to stewardship commitment.

Recently I reviewed thirty-one current books on stewardship for their motivational content and discovered a very confusing picture. Inconsistencies abound, and some excellent statements on God’s grace and love in Christ Jesus are contradicted by legalistic concepts and methods. Many use the “will of God” as motivation, and many stop at the acknowledgment of God as owner and giver. “Man is accountable, so be ethical.” Some avoid legalism and suggest grace in their concepts, but give the impression of moral responsibility alone in their practical plans. One spells out God’s promises, the answer of love, and asks, “Is stewardship legalistic?” but fails to define or make the application. The duty motive and ownership by redemption is stressed: since Christ bought the Christian, it is now his duty to get to work. The “love of Christ” hardly ever gets above the level of the cliché, and motivation is perverted in one way or another. One book warns the reader, “Be sure your motives will find you out,” but devotes only two sentences to worthy motives even though it exposes fear, legal compulsion, and personal gratification as unworthy ones. The books ask “What shall I do with the Gospel?” instead of “What does the Gospel do to me and for me as a steward?”

Biblical exhortations to love and serve are addressed to those who are regenerate, who in communion with Christ possess what is required of them. Commands are always preceded by reminders of divine action to show where the strength for action comes. The directive to be God’s stewards comes after the miracle of deliverance and release from the house of bondage or the enslaved body.

“The greatest demonstration of God’s love for us has been his sending his only Son into the world to give us life through him” (1 John 4:9, Phillips). Love is the fountain of God, and it pours out all his gifts into the hearts of believers through the Spirit. Love is God’s “drawing power”—drawing men away from self, sinful pleasures, earthly temptations, drawing them to himself and all that he wills, to his peace and joy, his security and power. God’s love is his energy imparted to our lives, and this makes it possible to use these gifts faithfully. This love cannot be comprehended as only a noun—it must have the force of a verb. “Let us love not merely in theory or in words—let us love in sincerity and in practice!” (1 John 3:18, Phillips).

The world of complex human emotions and reactions was pierced for all time by Christ’s sacrifice of love. This love defies cataloguing and should pervade the Christian’s thinking, speech, and actions. Love is not simply an attitude that Jesus taught: it is the essence of his very being. Christ’s love is redemptive as he joins man’s common battle against wrong, accepting life in total obedience all the way to death and winning the victory in every way at every place. What is more practical—no tricks involved—than letting God judge, forgive, and empower for a revolutionary style of living? Not the desire for self-improvement but God’s grace makes us dynamic.

These facts are hard to learn and even harder to accept. Christian stewards need help in their search for the meanings of their behavior. They need to be challenged to serve from a “love which springs from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a genuine faith” (1 Tim. 1:5, Phillips). There is always the pull of many psychological factors to confuse even the faithful and move them toward an emphasis on meritorious works.

Think of the many options available for perverting man’s true motive for stewardship: the general good of the Kingdom, group pressure, pride or embarrassment, social approval, pity, tax exemption, conscience-salving, fear, owing the tithe, humanitarian ideals, loyalty, example of Christ, reward, and pursuit of happiness. Man wants acceptance or recognition, and he wants results in the way and time he desires. Some of these ways will destroy the integrity of the message, for they are a contradiction of the Gospel even though they succeed in raising funds. They may come from a desire to love God, but this does not give them sanction as motives. Only scriptural principles will produce scriptural giving habits. You cannot sow self and reap the Spirit.

Some church members are poor stewards because their lives are based upon convictions that are more secular, or pagan, than Christian. The solution is not to collect stewardship verses and inject them into Christians to get them to yield what the church needs, but to teach the Gospel so that the Holy Spirit knocks down human barriers in the heart and builds a house of love in the same place. God is concerned about motives: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting” (Gal. 6:7, 8).

Just as forgiveness and regeneration are entirely a work of God that excludes every conditioning activity on man’s part, so stewardship is the energy that comes simply out of Christ’s power and cannot arise from our own ingenuity or strength. “The one who has begun his good work in you will go on developing it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6, Phillips). “Whoever renders service, [let him do it] as one who renders it by the strength which God supplies” (1 Peter 4:11b).

Forgiveness is the stepping stone to responsibility. When our own burden is lifted, we are prepared to lift the burden of others. As sin alienates man from God, so forgiveness reconciles him to God. The Atonement is the answer: forgiveness is the monumental difference in our capacity to be what God called us to be, to fulfill our eternal destiny. The stewardship call is a call to repentance, to salvation, to eternal life, to sanctification, to patience and suffering, to servanthood, to a glorious hope. The call is not primarily duties but gifts—gospel gifts—and the content of the gift is the forgiveness of sins. Each new experience of forgiveness is a new assurance that God works out his fatherly purposes of stewardship in our lives.

Stewardship starts always with a repentant heart, a change of mind, not merely an adjustment of one’s opinions about earthly values. To repent is to reverse completely one’s goal and standards in his stewardship outlook and practice. It is to be separated from the excess fleshly baggage that hampers stewards. This is the stewardship counsel of Psalm 51: God wants the sacrifice of the broken spirit and the contrite heart; only then is he pleased with offerings; only as he cleanses and opens one’s lips can one’s mouth utter God’s praise.

We find the aims and goals of service in Christ’s motivating power. Christ is the Head of the body, and in him centers all priority of service and cohesion of action. The church is always the church because of what God does and never because the members are busy in it. The heeding of human tradition, the giving over to the elemental spirits of success-seeking, covetousness, humanism, greed, and secularism, robs the church of its true nature. If members are distracted by unworthy goals and practices, the old nature will dominate and the member will be timid and weak for the stewardship tasks, vessels unfit for noble work, not ready for those good works God planned for them to do.

The basic business of the church is to provide a rich supply of the Word through which every member grows in knowledge, faith, godly living. It’s God’s plan we follow and his will we seek. Our stewardship committees do not belong to us, and our stewardship programs are not our personal genius come to flower. We are not to confuse man-made policies and forms with the eternal Word.

Imagination easily lags because there is little encouragement or drive to rise above and cut loose from the neatly defined categories we have accepted in order to be considered successful. Who dares to dream dreams and see visions when the task is so carefully regimented by accepted models of past performances and by reaching averages and just “getting by”? Men can manipulate and regulate God’s priests in such a way that they feel they have done enough when they have reached human goals. Some people can easily give $250 to help exceed a church budget without giving the biggest gift—self. Grace will keep stewards from being satisfied with the cheapness of minimum requirements.

When people decide what to give, their motivation should not center in the question, “What is the budget? What is my congregation asking?” The point of emphasis is the ability of the individual to give, not the calculated needs of the congregation. Duty and responsibility can be understood only in the context of man’s relation to God, not to men and needs. If needs and budgets become the focal point, then guilt and failure are measured by man’s standards.

Church goals are to be set by the Gospel itself. The gospel goal will point to the whole counsel of God and then surround the hearers with God’s grace by his Word. The church holds the goal of the Suffering Servant before its people and the total needs of the world in which the body of the Servant exists. The “giving potential of God” and the faithfulness of his promises is the big concern, not the “giving potential of people” and their faithfulness.

Frank Laubach wrote ten years ago, “We have five more years, perhaps ten. We are running a cosmic race with time.” The immensity of our world mission task cries out for us to forsake any small plans we might have, tear them up, and write new ones inspired by the Holy Spirit. Only he who believes is obedient, so our proclamation ought to be “Trust God to make you strong for your tasks!” rather than “Give according to your duty!”

Faith is the “yes” of the heart. Faith takes from God the strong feet to walk the servant path. Adoniram Judson affirmed, “The prospects are as bright as the promises of God.” God has done his part; now we must claim his gifts. “He has by his own action given us everything that is necessary for living the truly good life.… It is through him that God’s greatest and most precious promises have become available to us men, making it possible for you to escape the inevitable disintegration that lust produces in the world and to share God’s essential nature” (2 Pet. 1:3, 4, Phillips).

“Believe!” is our stewardship plea, not “Do!” If people believe God’s stewardship promises, they will do. “He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your resources and increase the harvest of your righteousness” (2 Cor. 9:10). That stewardship faith can never overdraw its account.

The forces threatening to pull the Christian liberal-arts college from its philosophical moorings are almost irresistible. Their influence in America has been increasing since the mid-nineteenth century, when they became noticeable. At that time, numbers of liberally educated American students, attracted by the academic specialization found in the German universities, began going to Germany for post-graduate degrees. Returning home, they held doctorates in fields that were narrower than those customary in America. Their expertise and desire for professional research, patterned after their foreign mentors, lent strong support to those educators already questioning the basic validity of the traditional American general education.

Although the process of reappraising American liberal-arts education has taken a couple of major turns since the mid-nineteenth century, the assumptions behind it still stem from the Enlightenment and its philosophical aftermath. These assumptions did not underlie the thinking of the colonists as they established the earliest American colleges, however; their thinking was closer to the philosophical orientation that gave rise to the medieval universities. And it was also closer to the interpretation of Christian theism upon which virtually every evangelical Christian college of the arts and sciences is founded. But it is a position whose implications for higher education are less and less understood and followed today.

This version of Christian theism holds that God is freely the creator and sustainer of a universe in which he has always manifested his “eternal power and deity” through his handiwork. God is infinite personality, in whose image man is created. As such, he is a rational, moral agent whose holy and just will determines absolutely the moral quality of the actions of every human being. Furthermore, he has revealed himself historically through his Son as an infinitely merciful and loving Being ready to redeem the entire life of any person so desiring, through the assistance of the Holy Spirit. This special or supernatural revelation through his Son is infallibly recorded and interpreted in the Holy Scriptures. Hence, they are the final arbiter and guide in all matters of faith and practice for those who are members of his Church universal.

To construct a world and life view around these basic doctrines requires certain assumptions that many educators today find difficult to accept. This difficulty derives from the naturalistic understanding of the scientific method, and has been intensified by the Enlightenment and subsequent philosophical developments. Earlier, the Christian theism of the medieval universities had viewed the world of experience as finitely real. This gave scientific endeavors a metaphysical justification. But what is more important, the reality ascribed to the objects of science was dependent upon a Being who designed the world in such a way that it could never be truly understood unless seen as tending toward him ontologically and pointing toward him epistemologically. Medieval science, then, looked for the purpose behind the phenomena studied. Science was an integral part of the Christian’s world and life view, because it facilitated the discovery of the meaning God has placed in his earthly creation. But later, when the experimental method came to be regarded as the proper method of science, the corresponding purpose of science was thought to be describing what happened and how it happened. The nature of the reality knowable by man also underwent redefinition.

Anyone who still refused to exchange his qualitative and teleological view of reality for the quantitative and mechanical one demanded by the new scientific method had to break his world and life view apart. The theological part would have to thrive on unreasoned religious belief, while the philosophical part would be grounded upon, but limited by, whatever the scientific method was adequate to handle—that is, only that which could be measured quantitatively and described mathematically.

Except for Roman Catholics, no significant thinkers reacting against this new use of the scientific method to define philosophical reality have turned back to the Christian theism of the medieval thinkers. Nevertheless, there have been groups of Christian theologians, such as the Puritan divines who established the colleges in colonial America, upon whom the leading philosophers of the day had little influence, for good or bad. They were largely untouched by the new view of God, man, and the world dominant in the Europe of their day. Their rationale for introducing higher education into the New World is more reminiscent of the last of the great integrative systems of orthodox Christian theism. That system appeared, of course, back in the Middle Ages.

More recent Christian educators, in overseeing and staffing institutions that are trying to maintain the liberal-arts tradition of the colonial colleges, have been unable to avoid interacting with the thinking of the day. In itself, this development is no doubt all for the good. But many of these men have proven equally unable to avoid compromising the Christian theism supposedly constructed around their conservative theological tenets. The result is a continual struggle within Christian colleges between those for whom the integration of religious faith and learning is the primary goal of a college education and those who share the dim view of this goal taken by the majority of American educators for over the past hundred years. The latter view, reduced to its logical implications, is more consistent with the Enlightenment’s proud deistic assessment of human culture, later philosophical developments notwithstanding.

No one wishes to argue that the intentional alteration of the basic fabric of American higher education in the mid-nineteenth century was done capriciously. The technological and social needs of the rapidly growing nation could no longer be met by colleges and universities that offered little more than a general education in the liberal arts and sciences. Nor can the Christian liberal-arts college today ignore such contemporary educational realities as the usefulness of the scientific method, the effectiveness of research in specialized fields at the university, the needs of the student as a whole person who is frequently immature and is in college for more than academic reasons, and the needs of our democracy for citizens trained in various socially helpful skills. But unlike the university, the Christian liberal-arts college is adaptable to providing the kind of synoptic, integrative education deemed philosophically possible by all educators in the Middle Ages and by the founders of the first colleges in the American colonies.

Such an education need not be viewed merely as a way of preserving and transmitting the cultural heritage of the past to the elite of the future. If it is to be described as Christian liberal-arts education, it must be grounded upon the conviction that reality can be known and systematically described. This means that no scientist may demand any kind of priority for the full understanding of reality. It means that no scholar in the humanities can ignore the assured results of the scientific study of God’s creation. It means that all branches of learning must be allowed to criticize and learn from one another. It means that no human knowledge can be truly grasped or interpreted outside the framework provided by God’s infallible Word. And it means that man’s ultimate happiness and purpose will be taught as lying in an ever closer conformity with God’s revealed will.

The unique purpose of the Christian liberal-arts college in providing the opportunity for an education of this type can easily be compromised by influences deriving ultimately from non-theistic sources. Such influences often encourage educators, when financial or other considerations force a decision, to sacrifice the philosophically integrative components of the college curriculum, and of the college scene in general. In their place are added components with greater value to the professor or student interested in specialization or in research, rather than in a general, liberalizing education. Such a professor or student may desire an inordinate emphasis on such things as the athletic program, or research facilities for the sciences or humanities, or a professionally tailored curriculum. The university provides for these needs, all of which are in themselves legitimate. But the college must never allow them to block its attempt to develop the student’s entire personality. The student in the Christian liberal-arts college must be able to gain a balanced perspective on all human knowledge as understood from the standpoint of Christian theism.

Compared with the university, the liberal-arts college is oriented more toward the accumulated wisdom of the past. It is interested less in increasing man’s total store of knowledge through investigation and research than in helping the student develop an understanding, appreciation, and critical evaluation of his cultural heritage. Such matters as the basic techniques of science, the needs of society, and the rudiments of business procedures will not be forgotten in the curriculum. But they must never be allowed to encroach upon the liberalizing courses. The graduate of a liberal-arts college should have a broad grasp of the insights into the human situation that men through the centuries have found most significant.

As a Christian college loses its liberalizing vision, it either ceases to be genuinely Christian or begins to dogmatize. Dogmatizing is as antithetical to a liberal-arts education as the compartmentalizing of knowledge found at the university. Dogmatizing in a Christian college prevents the student from gaining the intellectual poise and emotional stability necessary for leadership in the Christian community. Deprived of wide acquaintance with the basic problems and concerns of his fellow man now and in the past, uninformed about how mankind has dealt with these matters, the dogmatized student will be unable to decide for himself their relative merits. Instead, he will learn to labor under the false impression that the solutions his mentors have found for their generation’s problems are to be carried over into his own generation. What the student really needs is guidance in assessing the issues of the past and the present with confidence in himself, in the authority of Scripture, and in the assistance of the Holy Spirit. But from dogmatics he cannot avoid picking up a feeling of doubt about the relevance of his faith in Christ for the problems that have always confronted a human being most forcefully.

A similar apprehension about the significance of the Christian faith can be instilled in the hearts of students another way. A college can call itself Christian but see its real task as the training of Christians for meeting the specific needs of the community or for taking their place in the ranks of those engaged in scientific research, business, and other fields. Such training is indeed valuable, but it has no priority over the development of the whole man, which a truly Christian liberal-arts college claims to be able to accomplish uniquely. The Christian liberal-arts college whose main distinction is the demand of a commitment to Christ on the part of its faculty and students, but whose major objectives do not center around extending this commitment to the limits of man’s knowledge, gives the impression that the Christian either need not do this or cannot. Such a college would then not be a Christian liberal-arts college. It would be a training college for Christians who wish to prepare themselves for certain vocations and professions.

A college seriously intending to view the liberal arts and sciences within the framework of Christian theism can confidently affirm the possibility of accounting for both the natural order and man’s place in it in terms of God the creator and the Word of God incarnate. Anything less than this arises from a lack of faith in the sufficiency of God’s revelation of himself and his illumination of our minds. Christian theism can never countenance any theory of human knowledge and its boundaries that ignores the moral reasons for man’s existence. To the full extent of its manifestation to man, the existence and nature of God must be seen to have implications for all human knowledge and activity.

Guidance in the theoretical and practical implementation of this truth is the unique and primary purpose of the Christian liberal-arts college. Any goal less comprehensive and profound is a travesty of the relation between orthodox, evangelical Christian theism and the liberal arts in American higher education.

I am a first-generation American. My father was born in the north of Ireland. Driven by the poverty of the land, he immigrated to America. Here he found the opportunity to master his trade as a carpenter and earn a decent living.

My mother was born in the north of Italy. She saw no future for herself there, and so at seventeen she came to America to seek a better way of life. She became a traveling companion and a tutor in French and Italian in a wealthy home. She fell in love with a young Irishman and they were married.

One thing was always crystal clear to me: my parents loved America and cherished the freedom and opportunities this land provided. I remember well the day in 1929 when I returned from grade school and saw them holding their heads in their hands and weeping. The Olney National Bank had closed, and except for a small equity in the house and my father’s tools, all they had in the way of financial resources was gone. I can still see that Irish determination on my father’s face as he decided that this was not the end, that he could indeed start over again.

I also remember when sewers were being dug in front of our rowhouse in the northeast section of Philadelphia. The Italian ditch-diggers were my friends, and I often ate lunch with them during those summer days. One day when I came in all covered with mud, my mother said, “Robert, if you want to get ahead in America, somehow you’ve got to get a college education.” That was the first time I had ever heard of a college education. But I entered college in 1937 and was graduated in theology from Princeton in 1943.

It is through this kind of background that I must filter all my thinking about America. I found in my parents and in the opportunities they found here the confidence to believe that America is a land of hope.

Everywhere the prophets of gloom and defeat are raising their voices. It really doesn’t make much difference whether you listen to Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley, whether you read the National Review, the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times: the message voiced in different ways is essentially the same. “We are miserable sinners, the country is undone, there is absolutely no hope. All we can do is head for the wailing wall and there confess the sin of being Americans. The affluent society, which has been achieved after centuries of dreams, has now turned into a nightmare, with poverty multiplying, taxes piled upon taxes, uncontrolled inflation, the moral fiber of our people rotting, young people destroying themselves with pot and acid, everyone over thirty years of age shot through with hypocrisy and greed, no national leadership of any kind.” You have read it all and much more. The thing that seems to me to be so unusual about this flagellation is that no hope of any kind is held out except the total restructuring of society by violent means.

There are indeed things in America for which we ought to be ashamed, sins that require confession and repentance. But if we utterly destroy the confidence and moral strength of our people, then this country will be ripe for revolution.

In Europe last summer, I had the privilege of talking with people in high and responsible positions and with people in very ordinary circumstances of life. We talked for hours about America, its image and its influence. I began to examine critically some of the charges that are lodged against us as a people.

The problem of mass starvation arouses the conscience of the civilized world, and especially America. Many seem to think that America has not done all it could in this area. Perhaps we can and should do more, but mass starvation is largely the result of gross overpopulation and the lack of birth control, and of the false aspirations of rising nations. In the great nation of Egypt, the Nile River and the almost perfect climate make possible four complete crops every year. This gives promise that Egypt can again be the granary of the world. But the political leadership of Egypt has decided on a policy of industrialization at the expense of agricultural development. That begins to explain why there is famine in Egypt. We need to tell ourselves that America has done more than any other nation in history in attempting to alleviate starvation through people, money, commodities, and agricultural techniques.

In the complex and unpopular war in which we are involved, the suffering and atrocities beggar description. But it makes my blood boil when just about every world organization, including the World Council of Churches, condemns America for its participation, at the invitation of a sovereign nation, and says nothing about—or offers united praise for—the late Ho Chi Minh and the Communist forces from the North. I think it is about time that we recognize who our enemies are and realize that whatever the outcome may be, the major responsibility for this war rests on the Communist world. Let us stop accepting the guilt for something which we didn’t start but are involved in, and from which, unless there is peace with honor, there will be nothing but tragedy, mounting casualties, and a dollar drain.

Another matter troubling us is the crime on our streets. In vast areas of our cities, both black and white citizens are fearful of walking in their neighborhoods after dark. But 95 per cent of our citizens are not involved in the crime wave that is sweeping America, and I for one am not going to accept guilt for a situation which I didn’t create and for which I have no personal responsibility.

As for America’s race problem and poverty problem, definite progress is being made. In 1961, 22 per cent of all the people in America were listed as living in poverty. In 1969, the figure was 13 per cent. This is a decline of 11 million people. I know full well that this statistic doesn’t help very much if you are part of the 13 per cent living in poverty, but I am sick and tired of being told that we are doing nothing about this great human problem. When 11 million people have been lifted from poverty in less than eight years, we should take heart and get on with the job. The hopefulness of this situation is even more striking in the black community. In 1961, some 56 per cent of our black citizens lived in poverty; today 33 per cent do. That is, 23 per cent of our black neighbors have made a significant economic gain.

Statistics on personal income are encouraging also. White families have a median income of $8,900, black families $5,400. In 1960, there were only 20,000 black families with an income of $15,000 or more a year; today, there are 400,000 who make at least that much and 700,000 who earn $10,000 or more a year. This is real progress. I remind you of these statistical facts, not to whitewash or gloss over the terrible inequities in our land, but to thank God for the tremendous strides we have been able to make as we work together in a common cause.

In an address to a group of young people, one of the men in our congregation said, “There is no such thing as instant success. The problem is that part of our people have been in a long dark tunnel and they now see the light at the end of it and they are in a hurry to get into the sunshine.” This is understandable; but let us remember to thank God that we can see the light at the end.

Or think about the problem of tastes and standards in our literature and motion pictures. For years I have been part of the fight to keep the distribution of obscene books and motion pictures under some kind of control. This is a difficult task at best and almost impossible under the guidelines laid down by the Supreme Court. But we can take heart at the phenomenal sales of a book entitled Good News for Modern Man. This is the New Testament in today’s English, and in less than three years the American Bible Society has sold over 17 million copies. Not all the American people are depraved, as we have often been led to believe.

In Austria last summer I took the “Sound of Music” tour in Salzburg. Many of us have been captivated by the magnificent scenes, the heart-warming story, and the lilting music of this lovely film. Did you know that this motion picture alone will probably gross over $200 million? Add to this the tremendous public response to Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady, and you wonder how Hollywood can be so stupid as to go all out for pornographic filth just to make money. There is an essential decency among our people that responds to wholesomeness in life and entertainment.

Our church, ministering in the heart of a great city, is an oasis for all kinds and conditions of people, especially young people. There is a generally accepted myth that American youth are alienated, misunderstood, lonely, and defiant. But much of their current image has been created by so-called sociological experts who get carried away with their own expertise. For the most part, I find them just people with their fair share of idealism, confusion, independence, and sincerity, and a large measure of impatience with the system.

To call them “the rejected generation” is absurd. Since some of us have failed as parents, we have expended all our energy, time, and talent in the pursuit of financial success. Yet never before have so many parents been informed and concerned—lovingly concerned—about their children. What on earth do our children have to feel rejected about? Too much affluence—perhaps! Too much parental indulgence—perhaps! But it is not fair always and under all conditions to fix the blame for the failure of our children on us as parents. Sure, we have failed, but on a percentage basis we are the most concerned parents in the history of our country.

My purpose is not to hand out rose-colored glasses so that we can tell ourselves to believe that God is in his heaven and all’s right with the world. God is in his heaven, but all is not right with the world. The world lives under the power of the Prince of Darkness. All I am pleading for is an honest reading of the record. That record, despite all its blemishes, is an encouraging one.

The thing that really disappoints me is the lack of understanding and appreciation for the American dream. America is composed of sinful human beings, and it has its faults and shortcomings; but they seem less significant when viewed alongside the accomplishments and fulfillment of the American way. There is a theme in our national heritage that can cause us to walk together to the music of distant drums. Bancroft, the historian, commenting on the Mayflower Compact signed on that tiny boat off the Massachusetts coast, said that in the opening words, “In the Name of God, Amen,” lay the birthplace of constitutional liberty. So the hope of constitutional liberty awaits fulfillment at a time when the words of Martin Luther King—“I have a dream that some day my four children may be judged not by the color of their skin but by their character”—will be realized for every citizen of this great land.

I say that this dream of the larger life for every man can be realized in America, and that the Christian faith has a significant part to play in its fulfillment. At a meeting in New York last year Billy Graham told of a conversation with a leading theoretician of the new left. This radical leader said, “Within five years we shall have either revolution or dictatorship.” “Can anything stop it?” Graham asked. “Only one thing can stop it, and that is a religious awakening.”

I do not know in what new direction the Holy Spirit will lead the Church, but I do know that the Christian faith speaks with relevance and power in the area of heart, mind, and actions.

We have faced difficult times in American history before. When Washington was at Valley Forge, the future of our country seemed to be in grave jeopardy. A third of Washington’s men had deserted, a third died from malnutrition, and only a scant third were left who were able-bodied. Yet in the snows of that incredible winter, prayers were answered, and out of the travail came the victory of the American Revolution. What could have seemed more hopeless than America’s plight during the Civil War, when brother was fighting brother and hate and distrust engulfed the country? But time after time Lincoln and his cabinet turned to God and, believing they had found his purpose for this country, they endured and the nation was saved.

In 1955, President Eisenhower gave an address with this theme: “The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice.” President Nixon has reminded us that our basic problem is a crisis of the spirit. Christianity was designed for just such a crisis. Eight hundred years before Jesus was born, God spoke through the Prophet Joel: “It shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions … and it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered …” (Joel 2:28, 32). There was a partial fulfillment of this great promise in the Pentecost experience of the Church. But the emphasis of true faith is never exclusively on what God did; it is always concerned with what God does now. There will be a great fulfillment of this truth in the days immediately preceding the second coming of Jesus Christ to judge the world. But in a very real sense this promise of the pouring out of God’s Spirit upon men so that they shall be able to see visions and dream dreams is available to all who believe. And it is everlastingly true, thank God, that “whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered.”

The Southern Baptist Convention is in trouble. Its woes stem from a problem that has wracked other denominations and movements over the years: the nature and extent of biblical authority. The roots of the problem lie deeply buried in the second half of the nineteenth century in German higher criticism, which has been the source of much American theological liberalism during the twentieth century.

The older denominations have generally felt the impact of German liberal theology much more than Southern Baptists. Until recently, graduates of Southern Baptist seminaries did not generally go overseas to study for the doctorate. They stayed home and completed their doctoral studies in one of the many denominational institutions. But this was not true for other denominations. The Presbyterians, for example, saw many of their finest scholars drinking at the fountains of higher criticism in Continental institutions. Some came back more deeply convinced that their evangelical views were sound; J. Gresham Machen is one outstanding evangelical scholar whose European educational experience failed to convince him that orthodoxy was not a tenable option. Others, however, quickly adopted and later propagated liberal views they picked up in Europe.

Now things have changed. More and more Southern Baptist scholars are pursuing graduate studies overseas. And many others are studying in schools in the United States that are not Southern Baptist and have long been exponents of German rationalism.

This broadening trend is one that the Southern Baptists share with other conservative groups, including the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. At the synod’s last annual sessions its incumbent president was defeated by Dr. Jacob A. O. Preus, an articulate theological conservative. But the struggle going on in the synod’s seminaries and colleges has by no means been decided.

Dr. Preus recently opened his heart in a letter to the pastors of the denomination. “Make no mistake about this, brothers,” he said. “What is at stake is not only inerrancy but the Gospel of Jesus Christ itself, the authority of Holy Scripture, the ‘quia’ subscription to the Lutheran confessions, and perhaps the very continued existence of Lutheranism as a confessional and confessing movement in the Christian world.” He concluded: “It would be far better for such people [i.e., the liberals] to leave our fellowship than to work from within to torment and ultimately destroy it.” Some indeed have suggested that the time has come for the synod to divide into two groups, with those of liberal and conservative conviction working out amicably a separation acceptable to both sides. So the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, like the Southern Baptist Convention, faces the question of biblical authority.

There is on the American scene an amorphous group identifiable primarily by the names of individuals but known to many under the regrettable label neo-evangelicalism. The term neo-evangelical probably had its beginning in an address delivered by Harold John Ockenga at the inaugural convocation of Fuller Theological Seminary in 1947. Since then a number of evangelical institutions and many individuals have been lumped under this umbrella term. Into this group has come the same problem of biblical authority.

One of the main purposes for the creation of Fuller Theological Seminary was to defend the old Warfield view of the Scriptures, a view that included inerrancy. About ten years ago the seminary was shaken by controversy over the question of biblical authority, and particularly inerrancy or infallibility. Some members of the faculty and the governing board of the institution resigned, but the controversy was not fully settled.

The seminary has as part of its doctrinal platform the assertion that the Bible is “free from all error in the whole and in the part.” This was unacceptable to some in the institution, and the process of revising the statement of faith began. Sometime this spring the trustees will be called upon to adopt a new statement of faith that omits this assertion from Fuller’s creedal commitment. The new statement will be more in harmony with the view of one protagonist in the school that there is revelatory and non-revelatory Scripture: that which is revelatory has no errors in it; that which is non-revelatory has errors. Other schools have been struggling with the same question, although perhaps with less public scrutiny than Fuller, an institution of national and international prominence whose image is inextricably tied to Charles E. Fuller, the face and voice of the famous “Old-Fashioned Revival Hour.”

The present agitation among Southern Baptists is hardly new but is notable for the large number of people involved, the seriousness of the assault, and the uncertainty of the outcome. The question of biblical authority has been raised before and has received answers. But whether earlier answers will continue to be satisfactory cannot yet be determined.

In 1879 the Toy case brought the issue of biblical infallibility to light. Crawford Howell Toy was an Old Testament professor at Southern Baptist Seminary who had studied in Germany. Acknowledging his “divergence from the prevailing views in the denomination,” he presented to the trustees of the seminary a paper outlining his position. At the same time he offered to resign if his viewpoint was not satisfactory. The board accepted his resignation with two dissenting votes.

At the heart of Toy’s position lay the conviction that the Bible is not infallible. He separated the spiritual message of the Book from historical, factual, and scientific matters. He held that the writers of Scripture were men of their times who entertained the prevalent ideas of the day about the universe, and that increased knowledge had revealed that these opinions were erroneous. “I find,” he said, “that the geography, astronomy and other physical science of the sacred writers was that of their times. It is not that of our times, it is not that which seems to us correct, but it has nothing to do with their message of religious truth from God.” He further said: “The prophets uttered everlasting truths which are embodied and fulfilled in Jesus Christ and with which the geographical and political details have no essential connection.” With regard to the New Testament he asserted: “I will not see lightly a historical or other inaccuracy in the Gospels or the Acts, but if I find such, they do not for me affect the divine teachings of these books. The centre of the New Testament is Christ himself, salvation is in him, and a historical error cannot affect the fact of his existence and his teachings.”

The issue raised by Toy in 1879 has come up again and again among Southern Baptists. It was against the backdrop of this sort of question that the convention adopted the Memphis Articles in 1925. These included a confession of faith that made the following statement about the Bible: “We believe that the Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired, and is a perfect treasure of heavenly instruction; that it has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter.”

Nearly four decades later the Kansas City Confession was adopted. It rose out of a controversy precipitated by the publication of a book on Genesis by a professor from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary “which some Baptists felt was not true to the historic position of Southern Baptists relative to the Scriptures.…” The 1963 action at Kansas City reiterated the assertion in the Memphis confession that the Bible is the Word of God and has “truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter.” Before and after that decision, various Southern Baptist seminaries were disturbed by this question, and some professors, including the one from Midwestern, were removed from their chairs.

At this writing Southern Baptists are in greater turmoil over this question than ever before. There is more outward, vocal dissent, and the dissenters are more numerous and more determined. Moreover, there is no reason to suppose that the attitude of the dissenters parallels that of Toy in 1879, who subjected his future to the decision of his brethren and departed from the fellowship once they had decided that his views did not accord with those of the denomination generally.

The controversy was deepened by the publication last year of Why I Preach That the Bible Is Literally True by Dr. W. A. Criswell, president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas. His book unquestionably was a response and a challenge to those in the convention who do not believe that the Bible is infallible. (Criswell occasionally overstates his case; for a review see the June 6, 1969, issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, page 21.) The publication of the book by Broadman Press fanned the flames of discontent and brought violent reactions from those in the convention who disagreed with Criswell’s views. He then published another book under the auspices of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board. Robert Alley, professor of religion at the University of Richmond, called the second book “both sad and pathetic.” And Reuben Alley, editor of the Virginia Baptist weekly Religious Herald, wrote that the Sunday School board “made a grievous mistake by allowing itself to become an instrument for stirring already troubled waters and for widening the breach between groups within the Convention.”

The criticism leveled at Dr. Criswell produced its own reaction: Criswell announced he intended to run again for president of the convention. “After the criticism of my book,” he said, “I couldn’t turn my back on the whole thing.” It seems clear that he intends to make the question of biblical infallibility a convention-wide question and expects his re-election or defeat to determine the direction of Southern Baptists for some time to come.

More fuel has been added to the fire by the publication of the new Broadman Bible Commentary, under the editorship of Clifton J. Allen, a retiree from the Baptist Sunday School Board. Reviewing the first of the Old and the first of the New Testament volumes, one writer stated:

Unfortunately, from the viewpoint of the evangelical reader, the Old Testament volume reflects the negative critical theories of the current Old Testament scholarly consensus, and lacks the moderate conservatism of the New Testament volume.… Professor Davies holds that God has given us two sources of revelation, the Bible and nature, and that we should assess the truthfulness of Genesis in matters of fact in accordance with the findings of science.… This dodge … robs the plain assertions of Scripture of normative significance and makes faith meaningless. To allow that the Bible is mistaken in the testable (scientific) parts is to make the claim wholly unconvincing that it is truthful in the untestable (theological) parts.… The introductory article to the entire series elaborates the low view of biblical inspiration that accounts for the disappointing nature of the Old Testament volume. Editor Allen rejects verbal and plenary inspiration in favor of an imprecise “dynamic” theory [Clark Pinnock, in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, December 5, 1969, issue, page 17].

Allen says: “Therefore, a dynamic view of inspiration is not dependent on a mystical, inexplicable, and unverifiable inerrancy in every word of Scripture or on the concept that inspiration can allow no error of fact or substance.”

The criticism of the Genesis commentary has stoked other fires in different quarters. J. Walsh Watts, former professor of Hebrew and Old Testament interpretation at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, has entered the fray. “In response to requests from former students and intimate friends that I express my opinion of the treatment of Genesis in the Broadman Bible Commentary,” he said, “I feel compelled to write frankly—briefly but frankly.” After stating how he feels the commentary author undermines the infallibility of Scripture, Watts asks: “Can Southern Baptists remain loyal to their confession of faith in the inspiration of the Bible and promote a treatment that abuses it as this one does?” (Baptist and Reflector, March 5, 1970, pp. 6, 7).

More recently, members of the Association of Baptist Professors of Religion convened for their annual meeting at the First Baptist Church of Atlanta. Professor T. C. Smith from Furman University called for a new look at the canon, message, and authority of the Bible. According to the Capital Baptist, Smith “said that modern Christians should have as much liberty in determining their canon as the church fathers had in their time.… He said that modern scholarship has more valid criteria for selection of the canon than did religious leaders sixteen centuries ago.”

When the authority of the Bible is re-examined, Smith asserted, it is “the Bible, not God, whom we are questioning.” This points to the heart of the problem. Criswell says that the only certain knowledge we have of God is what God himself has revealed; that what God has chosen to reveal is found in Scripture; and that, therefore, to question Scripture is to question God. Smith on the other hand, says that to question the Bible is not to question God. Thus the final question is how much of the Bible is to be accepted as the source of religious knowledge.

Criswell has the vote of the convention on his side. Both in 1925 and in 1963 it declared that the Bible is the Word of God and has for its matter “truth without any mixture of error.” Smith and those of similar views are asking either that the convention change its statement on Scripture or that it allow those who disagree with that statement to continue in the convention, with the right to declare their opposing views freely and to seek to persuade others to them. Are not these persons placed in an ambiguous position in being related to a fellowship parts of whose confessions they cannot accept? Are they not opening themselves to the charge of dissidency and subversion so long as they remain within a group whose statements place them outside its pale?

It is likely that the struggle will erupt on the floor during the annual meeting of the convention in June. And the fact that the Association of Baptist Professors of Religion has agreed to deal with the question of the authority of the Bible at its meeting next year is a guarantee that the issue will not be settled quickly. The Southern Baptist Convention cannot avoid full exposure of the question much longer. Where it goes in the next decade or two will be determined by how it answers the challenge it now faces.

Southern Baptists—whither?

MARTIN LUTHER

If a really

Good man

Could have

Gotten hold of

Him

And chopped

Off

His highs

And filled in

His lows

And taught

Him to function

Within the

Framework

Of things

As they are

Luther might

Have grown up

Capable

Of managing

His father’s

Foundry.

LEWIS CHAMBERLAIN

For more than a year and a half we have been suffering from computer problems in our circulation of the magazine. The electronic monster has not always behaved itself, and some of our subscribers have written me personal letters after trying vainly to get their problems solved and start the magazine coming their way again. I apologize to all who have been caught up in this confusion. But the end of the problem is in sight!

From now on we will handle subscription records in our own offices, where we have installed equipment that we can operate ourselves. We will be able to change addresses and service accounts with a minimum of delay, and we want all our subscribers to know about the change. I invite subscribers to write me personally if one month from now the service is defective.

Our last print order was 149,000 copies. Why not recommend the magazine to a friend, or subscribe for him? We’ve fixed a goal of 200,000 for ourselves in the next two years. Help us meet that goal!

We hope readers take particular note of the essay in this issue by Harold O. J. Brown, in which he shows that neither evolution nor revolution is the true answer to the world’s needs. Brown speaks a clear word about what it means to be in the world and yet not of the world. We all need this counsel today.

Proposing a toast last year at the National Secular Society’s annual dinner in London, Lord Raglan said that he was an “Anglican agnostic.” He reminded his fellow unbelievers how much they owed to the Church of England. “For every twelve bishops,” he declared, “there are twelve different opinions—sometimes thirteen.”

Three years ago Charles Smith, one of the founders of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, ingeniously explained the decline of organized atheism. Churches, he said, had been relegated to being mere social centers, and Christianity had been watered down until it had become little more than “cheer ’em up stuff.”

There may be a decline in organized atheism in those United States (though I doubt it), but in these British Isles the Humanist Association is still striving energetically to ensure that its voice is heard, particularly in political circles. It encourages members to participate fully in the work of their political party (whatever it is); it cultivates and briefs humanist members of Parliament; it compiles a dossier on all MP’s and makes their views known to humanist constituents; and through its “Humanist Lobby” it presses humanist policies on parliamentarians of both Houses.

Its evangelical urgency is impressive, as it audaciously exhorts the faithful to anti-religious action. When the secretary for education announced he intended to retain in the new education bill compulsory religious instruction and a daily act of worship in state schools, the humanists were quick off the mark with a circular to their supporters. It bore this message, all in capitals: “Please write without fail to your MP; in this emergency we cannot afford a single passenger.… Write at least two letters.… Write now—and keep on writing!” Supporters were urged to write to the education secretary, to answer his reply, and to send copies to the Humanist Lobby for collation.

Impressed by their admirable organization, the editor of a British religious weekly quoted the circular in full and asked his Christians readers to write to the secretary approving his education bill and to send copies to the newspaper. He got responses from precisely three people. The sequel is depressing: the humanists continued to inundate public authorities and individuals with their ceaseless and strident propaganda; the religious paper, on the other hand, closed down three months later for lack of financial support.

Irreligion seems to be becoming ever more arrogant in England, where religion is currently in the doldrums. As an evangelical I tried telling myself that I ought not to be surprised at this phenomenon, which has good biblical warrant (2 Peter 3), but I’m always a bit uncomfortable about leaving it there. It certainly ought not to mean, for example, that evangelicals settle for holy uselessness and leave a whole area of Christian action to non-evangelicals and humanists who consider themselves to have a corner on compassion which we have abdicated as being outside our terms of reference.

But to come back to England. Here in an area smaller than Alabama we have an established church with one thousand million dollars in investments and the Queen at its head. Of it the former bishop of Woolwich has said: it has “become heavily institutionalized, with a crushing investment in maintenance.… It is absorbed in problems of supply and preoccupied with survival. The inertia of the machine is such that the financial allocations, the legalities, the channels of organization, the attitudes of mind, are all set in the direction of continuing and enhancing the status quo” (The New Reformation?, page 26). He might be right, though I feel vaguely disloyal about agreeing with Dr. Robinson. He could have added but didn’t (I researched this myself) that thirty-nine of the forty-three diocesans in England are Oxford/Cambridge educated. A status suspiciously quo!

There is another angle, one on which Malcolm Muggeridge has views. “Words cannot convey,” says one not customarily short of them, “the doctrinal confusion, ineptitude and sheer chicanery of the run-of-the-mill incumbent, with his Thirty-Nine Articles in which he does not even purport to believe, with his listless exhortations, mumbled prayers and half-baked confusion of the Christian faith with better housing,” and so on. Muggeridge is, of course, a former editor of Punch now hailed as the “Mephistophelian televisual guru of the faith,” his latter-day espousal of which has not blunted his sense of humor.

Let’s turn from a couple of mavericks and look at some recent utterances from the establishment proper. From rural England, the bishop of Bath and Wells predicted that there would be no revival of Christianity in Britain in the 1970s. Dr. Henderson had this gem in a message to his diocese: “I do not expect to see the long-awaited swing back or swing forward—whichever way you look at it—to faith and the permanent unchanging moral values.” And just to clinch things, the swinging prophet continued: “When that swing comes there will be a danger of it going too far to the extremes of puritanism, which is not a Christian alternative.” Oh dear, it looks as though Adolf Von Harnack was right, and that the relevant question for this modern age is not “Is Christianity true?” but rather “What is Christianity?”

If Bath and Wells offers no encouragement to his evangelical clergy, a colleague further north shows what he is doing about preserving those unchanging moral values. The bishop of Durham, according to a national newspaper that has an eye for such things, chaired a London meeting to launch a campaign by small gambling clubs to stay alive. Because of a government clamp-down (puritanical influence?), only thirty-one casinos will continue to operate here this summer. Why is this being done by the bishop, who is regarded as one of Anglicanism’s leading theologians? Because he regards entertainment clubs in his industrial diocese as useful social amenities, and realizes that many of them will have to close down when their gambling licenses are withdrawn.

A concluding commentary comes from George Target in his newly published shocker Tell It the Way It Is (Lutterworth, 9s.), describing the clerical top brass engaged in irrelevancies: “And the millions continue to wander about in the wilderness, strawberry jam on both sides of their Vitamin-Enriched daily bread, milk and honey flowing out of their ears—but hungry, without knowing it, for that other, living, bread … and are offered stale crusts of semantic chatter dipped in water from polluted wells, polythene packets of split hairs, and a Christ denatured and demythologized … (‘If anyone of them can explain it,’ said Alice … ‘I’ll give him sixpence’).” I don’t pretend to understand it all myself, but somehow I think it’s worth sharing.

J. D. DOUGLAS

A prominent Chicago minister dropped into the offices of Associated Church Press the other day. He told Alfred Klausler, ACP executive secretary, that his church board had voted to discontinue 350 subscriptions to the denominational paper. The usual reason given for such cancellations is disagreement with editorial policy. In this case, Klausler relates, “the members said they got their religious news via the Chicago dailies, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News much faster and more thoroughly, and, possibly, reliably.”

“If this is true in Chicago, what about other urban centers?” Klausler asks.¹Regular readers of Christianity Today would be inclined to disagree. They get at least 5,000 words of interdenominational news coverage in each fortnightly issue. The magazine dispatches staff members or correspondents to more religious events in the United States and overseas than any other publication, religious or secular.

Whatever the merits of the complaints, the effects are being felt. Klausler reports that “both Catholic and Protestant religious press face circulation problems.” Indications are that religious journals may be in for a period of consolidation. Several major mergers have already been announced this year. The American Baptist News Service ceased publication April 1, except for news to the public media.

This week in Chicago, several hundred experts in religious communications are meeting to assess the impact of changing human attitudes. The event, the Religious Communications Congress, has as its theme “New Dimensions in a Secular Age.” Sponsors include more than forty organizations, among them the ACP, the Synagogue Council of America, the National Council of Churches, the Evangelical Press Association (EPA), and the National Religious Broadcasters.

Sensitivity toward the need for broad adjustments is seen also in the formation several weeks ago of the Christian Communications Council. This group represents a desire for new coordination by some leading evangelical organizations including EPA, the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, the Christian Booksellers Association, and the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association. James L. Johnson of Evangelical Literature Overseas was elected interim executive secretary.

Among new hopes for Christian communicators is one still in a very theoretical stage: the revival of rhetoric as a major discipline. Rhetoricians are getting a new lease on life these days through new courses being offered on campuses and through books and articles. They are drawing support from linguists and philosophers, too. For the latter, the study of rhetoric represents a major step beyond linguistic analysis, the focus of recent decades.

DAVID E. KUCHARSKY

Austerity At New York: Degree Dropping

It looks as if both an old tradition and a new educational experiment are over for New York Theological Seminary (formerly the Biblical Seminary). The school announced it will cease granting B.D. and M.R.E. degrees after May of 1971.

The trustees voted March 12 not to renew faculty contracts for the next academic year, but they will explore ways to continue existing S.T.M. and lay-education programs. This decision came only one year after the school started an experimental “student centered” B.D. curriculum.

The problem is money: over the last four years the school has sold all its property in New York’s fashionable “Turtle Day” section except the main building. But the cost of maintaining the B.D. program has outpaced revenue.

Dr. George Webber, an urban-ministries specialist, is expected to remain president of the school. Webber hopes the graduate institute offering degrees in pastoral counseling and urban ministries can continue. These programs have been heavily subscribed by metropolitan ministers and pay their own way.

Meanwhile, it was rumored there would soon be a change at another New York seminary. The Right Reverend J. Brooke Mosley, deputy for overseas relations of the Episcopal Church, was expected to resign to become Union’s president.

JOHN EVENSON

Biafra Postscript

The last Roman Catholic missionaries serving in the former Biafra region left Nigeria last month. Unlike earlier groups deported (see March 13 issue, page 51), the final thirty-four were not charged with “illegal entry” into the country.

Assemblies of God missionaries are also gone from the Biafra region. During the civil war, notes General Superintendent Thomas F. Zimmerman, national members of the church not only held services but also established sixty new churches.

Now that rehabilitation has begun in Nigeria, the American Bible Society is working to restore Bibles lost and destroyed during the conflict. Last year the Bible Society of Nigeria distributed almost a million Bibles; this year, the society estimates it will need twelve to fifteen tons of Scriptures.

Dr. Akanu Ibiam, a former governor of Biafra and onetime medical missionary there, sees religious conflict in the civil war: most Biafrans are Christian; most other Nigerians are Muslim.

Religion In Transit

A group called Clergymen and Laymen for Justice, Order, and Peace was organized in Princeton, New Jersey, last month, headed by retired Navy and Columbia University chaplain Robert G. Andrus. He says that more than 100 ministers have signed his “pro-Nixon” statement and that the group intends to change the current public image of the Church as “being predominantly in support of the irresponsible moratorium approach to peace.”

“Z,” the French-made motion picture of political upheaval in Greece in 1963, has been picked as the outstanding movie of the year by national Protestant and Catholic film agencies.

According to a study by the Lutheran Church in America’s Commission on Evangelism, man’s current emphasis on materialism was rated the number-one reason for the decline in the denomination’s membership growth.

The United Methodist Church has asked that 25 per cent of the denomination’s expenditures for world service go to the black community for economic development and education.

The Southern Baptist Home Board has authorized the creation of a million-dollar loan fund for Negro and other ethnic Baptist groups.

The trustees of Southwestern Baptist Seminary—after a four-hour discussion—voted to delay construction of a proposed $125,000 home in Fort Worth for its president.

The American Council of Christian Churches’ Executive Committee went on record last month as being “unalterably opposed to the liberalization of present abortions laws … in the United States.”

Los Angeles’s radio station KRKD, established by evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, has been sold for $4,525,000 to a private broadcasting firm by the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.

Riverside Church in New York City—where James Forman gained national attention with his Black Manifesto demands for reparations—has responded by setting up a $450,000 fund to help the disadvantaged. The action, however, met none of Forman’s demands.

A New Jersey Superior Court judge ruled that the Netcong school board must cease the daily classroom reading of prayers from the Congressional Record because the practice is “unconstitutional” and “an evasion of the values of our American heritage.”

Directors of Union Theological Seminary last month rejected a student-faculty assembly request that the school put up $400,000 from its $27 million endowment to help bail twelve Black Panthers out of jail in New York.

This spring Asbury College students not only thought about evangelism—they took it on vacation with them. A thousand collegians from Wilmore, Kentucky, divided into teams to testify about their revival experience (see February 27 and March 13 issues) in the U. S. and Canada, in Kenya, Africa, and in Colombia, South America.

Child Evangelism Fellowship will begin a national television ministry this fall.

The General Commission on Chaplains and Armed Forces Personnel has asked the nation’s military academies to end mandatory chapel service requirements.

A newly developed text for Holy Communion has been approved by the Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship and is set for publication this summer.

An Alabama farm owned by Black Muslims plagued by the deaths of at least thirty poisoned cattle will be sold “to the Ku Klux Klan or anybody who wants it,” its manager declared last month after a series of harassments.

Charix, a popular and controversial teenage coffeehouse in Portland, Oregon, operated in the First Unitarian Church, voluntarily shut down last month. Police claimed it had become a haven for drug addicts, criminals, prostitutes, and other “undesirables.”

A taxpayers’ suit challenging federal construction grants to four Connecticut colleges with ties to the Roman Catholic Church was dismissed last month by a New Haven federal court.

Wheaton (Illinois) Academy (now called Wheaton Christian High School) severed ties with Wheaton College this month … Beginning next fall a major in religion will be offered by Wheaton College’s Bible department.

Westmont: Burning Heroism

Fast work by nearly 400 Westmont College students saved virtually all valuable records, books, and furniture during a morning blaze that gutted the school’s $750,000 administration building. Santa Barbara, California, officials say faulty wiring ignited last month’s fire.

Although ceilings collapsed during rescue operations, there were no injuries. Firemen, praising the heroism of students, bitterly contrasted the scene two weeks earlier when rioting University of California arsonists burned a bank building and drove firemen away.

“You kids deserve free tuition for this,” the fire chief declared to a drenched, weeping Westmont coed. “No, sir,” she replied, “we just love Westmont.” Then she returned to study for quarterly finals.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Personalia

Episcopal Bishop Gerald Burrill of Chicago, 63, announced that he will retire October 1, 1971, after heading the diocese for seventeen years.

Rabbi David Neiman, an associate professor in Boston College’s theology department, will become the first Jew to teach at the 416-year-old Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome next spring.

Geography professor Dr. Melvin G. Marcus of the University of Michigan will be the chief scientist of a team (SEARCH) making an expedition next summer to see if the remains of Noah’s Ark are buried under tons of rock and ice on Mount Ararat.

Dr. Samuel H. Sutherland, associated with Biola for thirty-four years and now president of Biola Schools and Colleges, will retire next August.

Next November Dr. Daniel F. Martensen will become editor of the Lutheran Quarterly, published by twelve Lutheran seminaries of the Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran Church.

Mrs. John C. Bennett, wife of the president of Union Seminary in New York, was among 182 persons arrested while trying to block the entrances of four draft boards in lower Manhattan last month during a loosely coordinated national protest against the war.

The new director of the Selective Service System is a United Methodist layman. Californian Curtis W. Tarr, 45, and his wife helped start a new church in Chico fifteen years ago, and he was a lay leader of the denomination’s Shasta District of the California-Nevada Conference.

Ulster militant minister Ian Paisley announced that collections in his Martyrs’ Memorial Church in Belfast totaled $183,000 during 1969. (The highest income for a Church of Scotland congregation was $60,000 for St. George’s West in Edinburgh.)

The National Council of Churches has named Randolph Nugent, a black minister who is an executive in the United Methodist Church, as NCC Associate general secretary for overseas ministry.

Evangelist-lecturer Dr. J. Edwin Orrreceived a doctor of theology degree from Serampore University, founded by William Carey in 1818. Orr said he is “the only living recipient of a doctorate earned in this historic institution” in India.

Eugene A. Dean of Austin, Texas, has been elected executive director of Presbyterian Survey, the official Southern Presbyterian magazine.

Grady Parrott, for twenty-one years the president of Missionary Aviation Fellowship, retired this month; replacing him is Charles J. Mellis.

Colman McCarthy of the Washington Post and Dan Thrapp of the Los Angeles Times were named co-winners of the Faith and Freedom Award in Journalism last month.

Sister Eleanor Niedwick, 25, doesn’t wear a habit, and she keeps her badge and her gun in her purse. She is a plainclothes officer in Washington, D. C.’s police-community relations division who rides a scout car and lives in the Daughters of Wisdom convent.

Former Roman Catholic Bishop Dr. James P. Shannon has resigned from his post as vice-president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in order to prepare for a career in law, according to the Minneapolis Star.

Dr. William M. Wiebenga, 32, a Calvin College (Christian Reformed Church) graduate who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale, was named dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Methodist-related American University.

World Scene

The civil-rights movement that has headed the political protest of the past two years in Northern Ireland shows signs of a split. Some prominent members have resigned, alleging that it is being taken over by extreme left-wing and revolutionary elements.

The just-published New English Bible is a runaway best seller, with 20,000 copies a week printed last month; orders were running at 10,000 a day.

Vatican City has experienced its first labor strike: employees at the Vatican museums refused to open the doors. They want—you guessed it—more pay, Italian Radio reported.

The names of women employees in the Vatican secretariat of state have been published for the first time in the Holy See’s annual yearbook. Women have been employed in various Vatican offices for a long time, spokesmen conceded; at present sixty-six are on the Vatican payroll.

The first Mormon stake (official district) in Asia was established in Japan last month, sixty-nine years after the church’s first missionary arrived there.

A delegation of the World Council of Churches’ Commission on Faith and Order shared with Orthodox churchmen the 1,100th anniversary of Orthodoxy in Bulgaria last month.

Men in Action, affiliated with the West Indies Mission, is planning an emphasis called “Christ for All” in Haiti’s southern peninsula. It is hoped 2,000 prayer cells can be organized.

A World Council of Churches evangelism official spent three weeks in the United States last month establishing contact with black Pentecostals. “They combine Pentecostal spirituality with political and social awareness,” said Dr. Walter J. Hollenweger.

Britain’s chief rabbi, Dr. Immanuel Jakobovits, has urged a strict moratorium on further “test-tube baby” experiments until complex moral issues have been examined. “To reduce human generation to such stud farming methods would be a debasement of human life,” he said.

Trans World Radio, the largest religious broadcasting network in the world, was honored on its fifth anniversary of operation in the Caribbean by commemorative stamps issued by the Netherlands Antilles government.

One million dollars in money and materials is the goal of the World Relief Committee of the Christian Reformed Church this year; expenditures in Korea will exceed $400,000.

The World Council of Churches has appealed for $4 million to assist churches in the Nigeria Christian Council in relief and rehabilitation programs.

The United Methodists and United Presbyterians contributed more than half of the $652,747 given by U.S. denominations to the 1969 general budget of the World Council of Churches.

The Office of Worldwide Evangelism-in-Depth (Latin America Mission) is publishing a paper called In-Depth Evangelism Around the World.

Blessed John Ogilvie will become Scotland’s first saint since 1256, according to Father Pedro Arrupe, general of the Society of Jesus.

The Canadian Congress on Evangelism is apt to be a non-evangelical happening, charge several of its critics. Most of the static revolves around the way the congress leaders have handled invitations to participants.

Two Toronto ministers, Dr. William Fitch of Knox Presbyterian Church and Dr. Paul Smith of the Peoples Church, believe the congress, to be held in Ottawa this August, has erred in asking Protestant denominations to designate their own delegates.

The crux of the criticism seems to be that such a procedure will weight the congress in favor of non-evangelicals. Smith has charged that the Ottawa gathering, like the Minneapolis congress (in his estimate), will be “90 per cent social gospel.”

Congress invitations chairman Kenn Opperman, a Toronto Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor and evangelical leader, staunchly defends the Canadian Congress procedure, which, he says, has been misunderstood or misrepresented.

Opperman maintains that the congress is a study gathering and not a deliberative legislative body. The desire, he states, is to penetrate all areas of Canadian life, and the organizers want the full spectrum represented. One third of the delegates, for instance, are to be under thirty, another third under fifty.

He further points out that the basic organizational committees are composed of men whose evangelical sympathies and position are well known and respected in Canada. The co-chairmen are Canon Leslie Hunt (of Wycliffe College, an evangelical Anglican training school in Toronto), and Wilbur Sutherland, Canadian secretary of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. The program chairman is Dr. Mariano DiGangi, North American director of the Bible and Medical Missionary Fellowship. Executive secretary is the Reverend Marney Patterson, Anglican evangelist. Opperman heads the invitation committee.

All program participants are to indicate sympathy with the statement of the World Congress on Evangelism, held in Berlin in 1966. Denominational appointees attending, however, need not, but will be aware of the evangelical thrust of the gathering.

Spokesmen say that the Canadian Congress, one of a series of national congresses on evangelism inspired by the World Congress, adopted its invitation procedures in order to secure a broad national participation. Organizers are persuaded that the Berlin statement, the solidly evangelical planning committee, and the evangelical speakers will clearly indicate the direction of the congress.¹The Canadian Congress invitation procedures appear to differ from those used for the U. S. Congress on Evangelism in Minneapolis. Victor Nelson, executive director of the Minneapolis congress, said first approaches were made to the denominational secretaries of evangelism, who were asked to name a stated number of delegates to be invited. Four months prior to the congress, its organizers opened the doors to others not appointed by the denominations.

Several denominations, some for technical and some for doctrinal reasons, will not participate officially in the Ottawa congress. Included are four Baptist bodies, the Associated Gospel Churches, and the Lutheran Church of America. Several of these, however, will send observers or delegates sympathetic with congress aims.

With the congress five months away, its organizers report a groundswell of support among Canada’s million evangelicals, who are found in both the mainline and the newer denominations.

LESLIE K. TARR

Black Concerns In The White House

“Amen,” and “Yes, Lord,” responded members of a ten-man group of black Baptist ministers as evangelist Billy Graham preached to a White House congregation in the East Room March 15. Graham, who also spoke at the first service in the Executive Mansion on January 26, 1969, preached this time on Psalm 23. “A revival can begin in your hearts today,” he told President and Mrs. Nixon and a selected audience of 350, including Vice-President Spiro Agnew and Chief Justice Warren Burger.

Graham was instrumental in arranging the appearance of the black ministers at the service. Later that day, he and the ministers met with the President for about three hours. The group, called the Committee of Concerned Ministers for Evangelism, is chaired by Dr. E. V. Hill of Los Angeles. Hill told Religious News Service correspondent John Novotney afterwards that the conversations with Nixon were “concerned primarily about the spiritual life and needs of our people.” Crime, housing, job opportunities, and poverty were also discussed.

“It’s a compliment to the President that he would take this much time to listen to a group of local pastors,” Hill was quoted as saying. Graham previously had met with the clergymen about evangelism programs.

All ten serve churches affiliated with one of three bodies: Progressive National Baptist Convention; National Baptists, U. S. A., Inc., and the National Baptist Convention of America. Besides Hill, the committee members are Roy A. Allen, Detroit; Isaac Green, Pittsburgh; Richard A. Hildebrand, Brooklyn; Oddie Hoover, Cleveland; S. M. Lockridge, San Diego; M. L. Scott, Los Angeles; John W. Williams, Kansas City; O. B. Williams, Portland, Oregon; and M. L. Wilson, New York.

Political Fever: See Clergy Run

Political fever is striking clergymen in unprecedented numbers this year. By late March, at least five ministers or priests were engaged in campaigns for the U. S. Congress, and three clergy members of the House of Representatives were expected to seek re-election this fall.

The new clerical contenders in primary races—all Democrats—are Joseph R. Lucas, a Roman Catholic professor at Youngstown (Ohio) State University, who is running against five Democratic primary candidates; Joseph Duffey of Hartford, Connecticut, a United Church of Christ minister who is running against Senator Thomas Dodd; and three men whose candidacy has already been mentioned in CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

They are Lutheran pastor Richard J. Neuhaus of Brooklyn and Dean Robert F. Drinan, a Catholic priest at Boston College (see February 27 issue, page 41); and the Reverend Andrew Young, an Atlanta Baptist (see March 27 issue, page 37).

House members expected to seek re-election are Adam Clayton Powell (D.-N. Y.), a National Baptist; John H. Buchanan (R.-Ala.), a Southern Baptist; and Henry C. Schedeberg (R.-Wis.), a former Congregationalist pastor.

The greatest number of clergymen ever to be in Congress at one time was four in 1960. If elected, Drinan and Lucas would be the first full-fledged congressmen from the Catholic priesthood. The bids of the two priests for nomination caused Father Daniel Lyons, editor of the conservative Catholic weekly, Twin Circle, to warn editorially that the action will “set a bad precedent” and “stir up hostility” against the Catholic Church.

Protestant ministers have been relatively few, although fairly constant, in the ranks of both congressional branches. A Lutheran pastor, Frederick A. C. Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania, was the first speaker of the House.²United Church of Christ pastor Channing E. Phillips of Washington, D.C., who in 1968 was the first black man ever to be nominated for the Presidency at a National Democratic Convention (he now is national Democratic committeeman from the District of Columbia), resigned as copastor of Lincoln Temple last month. Phillips alluded to tensions with the congregation over social issues. He denied that he was leaving to become more involved in politics.

Victories for the current clerical candidates for Congress could influence that body toward the left: all fit the liberal category, and all advocate a quick end to the Viet Nam war. Poverty, race, and civil rights are key planks in the platform of each.

Why the upswing in clergymen running for political office? Observations made by Dr. Albert C. Outler, a Southern Methodist University professor of theology, could provide one answer. He is quoted in a recent issue of U. S. News and World Report:

“The 1960s saw the passing of the ‘parson,’ a term which once meant that he was the person, the central figure, in the community. Discovery that this definition no longer applies, that your authority brings you into conflict and resistance, has brought a problem of morale within the clergy.

“That is why you find clergymen seeking alternative roles as prophets, political leaders, reformers, and revivalists. They no longer are confident that doing a good job in the leadership of the congregation affects the course of revolutionary history.”

Ethiopian Church: Obstacle To Progress

At pan-African or international conferences, the Ethiopian Orthodox (Coptic) Church strikes a progressive, at times radical, pose. But at home it stands squarely in the way of national progress. Ethiopia’s aging emperor Haile Selassie has long been interested in modernization. But the political situation prevents such plans from being successful.

For example, in 1967 a land-reform measure, calling for a tax on gross income derived from the harvest, became law. It was, in effect, an income tax, not a land or property tax. But the Coptic Church, which owns a large amount of land, refused to pay the new tax. In the wholly Coptic region of Gojam Province, the tax law triggered a rebellion. Many soldiers and farmers were killed, and the government had to back down.

Since nearly half of the population of Ethiopia is Coptic Christian, the church has great economic and political influence. In addition, it is really a government in its own right. It is allowed to collect its own taxes, to rent land, and to organize and operate school systems.

Coptic Church leaders are tied to centuries-old customs rather than to innovations necessary for the future. Thus the government finds itself powerless to force the church to abide by state laws or to enforce measures the church opposes.

ODHIAMBO W. OKITE

Ellington: ‘Praise God And Dance!’

While five soloists from the Duke Ellington band danced in the aisles of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D. C., last month, a largely black-tie audience of 1,000 clapped hands to the tune of $12,000 at a musical fund-raiser.

“Praise God and dance!” exhorted mellow jazz musician Ellington, and the last section of his Sacred Concert No. 2 began. Band members clapped, thrusting their hands heavenward toward the ceiling high above the arrow-like ribs of the sanctuary. Soon clumps of clappers in the audience joined in, timidly at first, then raising their hands straight up in a fervor of rhythm.

Tickets cost $25; $50 included the concert plus a champagne reception at the Belgian Embassy afterwards.

The concert was performed under the patronage of Mrs. Richard Nixon and Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower to benefit the Eisenhower Memorial Arts Fund, a project of the United Presbyterian Church’s World Arts Foundation. Chairman Kenneth G. Neigh presented a check for $12,000 to Dr. Lowell R. Ditzen, director of the National Presbyterian Center, to launch the fund.

The new National Church and Center will be formally dedicated May 10. In preparation for the event, a former religious news editor of the Washington Evening Star, Caspar Nannes, has written a book describing the history of the famous church since the 1790s.

Meanwhile, the church’s St. Paul window was dedicated to the late Frank Paul Morris, a theology professor at Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, under whom National Presbyterian Church pastor Edward L. R. Elson studied in the 1920s.

Fighting Behind Che

In a book just published by the Africa Evangelical Office in Nairobi, a leading French evangelical and missionary statesman has concluded that the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC) poses a real danger to Africa’s evangelical churches.

Despite many positive aspects, writes Pastor Jacques Blocher in Observations on Abidjan—1969, “I left the AACC … profoundly saddened by many things I have seen and heard.” Blocher was a visitor to the AACC General Assembly in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, last September.

Blocher asserts the conference was top heavy with consultants; only 142 of 481 persons attending were actually delegates, he maintains. And he scores the political, revolutionary tone of papers presented at the conference: “To evangelize today is to act so that the war in Viet Nam, the apartheid in South Africa, the horrors of exploiting capitalism, cease. To preach the Gospel means to fight behind Che Guevara.”

Blocher also criticized the apparent close connection between the AACC and the World Council of Churches: “The AACC is the means by which the ecumenical movement hopes to operate in Africa.”

“Abidjan,” writes the French pastor, “did not leave a great deal of time for African Christians to express themselves, but rather it made known to them the theories developed by Protestant intellectuals of Europe and America.”

ODHIAMBO W. OKITE

Genetic Engineering

“When I share the platform with a theologian,” said the scientist, “I rarely find myself the conservative.” But conservative he was, claimed molecular biologist French Anderson, when he and Joseph Fletcher (author of Situation Ethics) met early in March to discuss genetic engineering.

Anderson spoke first, explaining with plastic models and analogies how scientists translate the language of genes in order to change human genetic material. This ability brings some good news and some bad news, Anderson admitted. The good news is the possibility of controlling genetic defects, cancer, viral diseases, and even aging. The bad news is the “frightening power” to control the human race by manipulating certain genes.

The question, he said, is who should decide what genes to manipulate. Anderson’s optimistic answer: informed society acting as a sort of committee-of-the-whole.

The theologian sitting on his right wondered aloud about society’s ability to comprehend such complex matters fully enough to act for the greatest good of the greatest number of people. His idea of how to achieve that great good put Fletcher on Anderson’s ideological left.

The moral choices that bring great social good can be made on the basis of principles or by a utilitarian, pragmatic determination of the consequences, explained Fletcher, opting for the latter. Whatever—including intervention in natural genetic processes—produces good consequences is morally permissible. “Should we,” he asked pointedly, “follow the principles of our non-technical past, or should we work pragmatically in the present?” Those principles—contained in the “archaic Bible and outmoded tradition”—are no longer helpful because the modern situation is different. Thus, he illustrated, “the command to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ is not only irrelevant—it is downright dangerous and destructive.”

There is no question, then, Fletcher declared, whether man should by genetic engineering “play God.” “The God we are playing is the old God of the gaps [in our knowledge], mighty because man was weak and frightened by what he couldn’t control. That God, hypothecated in ignorance, is quite dead.”

In response, self-styled conservative Anderson asked, “Who else is [making this technical progress] if not God? It’s either God or the devil.” Deciding what is good for society is a subjective matter, the scientist noted: “A blond, blue-eyed baby may be good—unless you’re Negro.”

With a final warning from Anderson about centralizing the power to make such decisions, the moderator invited questions from the audience. The response made it clear the discussion was taking place in Washington, D. C. Military (“what if China can do genetic engineering?”) and political (“how can society be informed—you should see the letters from our constituents”) questions bounced off the beams in the east transept of the National Cathedral.

After nearly two hours, the audience had laughed and gasped at Fletcher’s biting sarcasm, but seemed reluctant to relinquish life principles; they had gaped at Anderson’s plastic molecules, but seemed disinclined to share his social optimism. The final forum in the “Issues of the 70s” program sponsored by the National Cathedral and the National Presbyterian Center raised sensational questions and offered few incisive answers.

JANET ROHLER

Amen, Father

A Roman Catholic priest led a revival meeting in a Southern Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, last month. Some said the event was precedent-setting.

Franciscan Duane Stenzel of Louisville preached during the revival series in Vestavia Hills Baptist Church and led renewal discussions with the congregation. He is noted for a movement he leads called “cursillo.” During a cursillo, thirty-five to forty persons gather for a forty-eight-hour period to study the Bible, pray, and share personal experiences of Christ.

Explaining why the church asked the priest to speak, the Reverend Otis Brooks of the Vestavia Hills Church said: “There is a new stirring of life in the Roman Catholic Church. If there is a genuine revival in the Roman church, all Christians should rejoice, because the hope of winning the world to Christ is that much closer.”

WALLACE HENLEY

The Consultation on Church Union has a product to sell. It has salesmen. Now it needs to convince the buyer.

The buyer is the grassroots churchman in the nine participating COCU denominations. The product is the plan of union, a 150-page document approved by the consultation in St. Louis last month (see March 27 issue, page 30). COCU salesmen (information officers of participating churches) will be promoting the union plan as 24 million churchmen begin to “study and respond” to it.

After ten years of talk, the concrete plan was unanimously adopted at the final day of the St. Louis plenary session; some 250 delegates then rose and sang the doxology. Responses and evaluations are to be submitted to the consultation headquarters by January 15, 1972. The consultation doesn’t want official votes on the plan until after that, since revisions are expected to be incorporated into a final plan (see voting procedures for each church in story following).

Heading the consultation between now and 1973, when some responses to the final plan are expected, is Dr. George G. Beazley, Jr., ecumenical officer of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).¹A “dump Beazley movement” by some leaders in the three black denominations apparently was dropped after publicity about it was reported in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Reliable sources said AME bishop Frederick D. Jordan was the black leaders’ choice for the next chairman. Had Beazley lost, it would have broken COCU precedent and would also have meant Beazley’s second loss in three months of an influential ecumenical post. Last December he resigned as chairman of the NCC nominating committee because of black pressure. Assisting him will be Dr. Charles Spivey, an African Methodist Episcopal clergyman and National Council of Churches official, first vice-chairman; United Presbyterian laywoman Mrs. Ralph Stair of Waukesha, Wisconsin, second vice-chairman; and Chicago graduate student George Mason Miller of the AME Zion Church, secretary. If COCU tradition is followed, Spivey, a black man, will succeed Beazley in 1973.

Another issue involving race concerned delegates at St. Louis. The plan-of-union drafting commission had proposed that the first presiding bishop of the united church be black, a move said to be wholeheartedly supported by black members of the commission. But the Reverend Othal H. Lakey, a Christian Methodist Episcopal minister from Dallas, eloquently presented a plan requiring rotation by race of the new church’s highest office.

Accusing the consultation of “tokenism,” Lakey charged that the first black bishop could well be the last one: “A lot of us who will be in the united church will have integrated a lot of cemeteries before we get another black bishop.” He later explained that the race need not alternately be black but might be “brown, Indian, black, Oriental or anything else,” so long as there would be assurance that the top position would not fall to two whites in a row (bishops may be elected to two four-year terms).

What the provision (accepted unanimously) means is that the 4 million black and other minority persons in COCU will have the same strength—in terms of holding the top office—as do the 20 million white Anglo-Saxons.

Throughout the united church structures, there will be “compensatory treatment of those who have been excluded in the past,” according to the plan.

One of the thornier issues thrashed out in St. Louis was the plan of union’s recognition of the “historic episcopate,” a ministerial office not now extant in four of the COCU churches. After the section dealing with this was sent to an editing committee twice, the accepted version still left the language muddy enough to satisfy many delegates. Asked at a news conference for his opinion of the episcopacy statement, Episcopal bishop Gerald F. Burrill of Chicago said, “Some will see the historic succesion in this, others will not.” COCU officials said the new church probably will have about 2,000 bishops—almost 1,800 more than there are now in the five COCU churches that have the office.

Also adopted was a statement that all members in the new church—from bishops on down—must hold membership in the parish—not the congregation or (for bishops) the district.

Floor debate on property ownership took an hour and a half, causing Episcopal Seminary professor Albert T. Mollegen to remark: “Jesus and Marx both said—and they may be right—‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ ”

Finally, COCU delegates approved a statement barring congregations and task forces from independent existence apart from a parish. The move disappointed some whose churches hold to congregational polity, especially since an amendment that would have allowed individual congregations to retain title to present property was turned down. But the consultation softened this stance by approving a motion by United Presbyterian stated clerk William Thompson that “present forms of holding property will be maintained during the transition period.” In some ways, this favors churches that vest property in the denomination. The “phase-in” time is expected to last several years.

Ordination standards for presbyters (ministers) in the new church were strengthened by an amendment made by United Presbyterian pastor Cary N. Weisiger of Menlo Park, California. A question on the Scriptures to be asked of candidates now says the “Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments convey the Word of God and are the unique and authoritative standards of the church’s life …” (Weisiger inserted “unique and authoritative”.)

Episcopal ecumenical officer Peter Day wanted the word “are” substituted for the word “convey” in the above wording, thus suggesting that God can reveal propositional truth. His motion lost by a fairly decisive margin.

COCU general secretary Paul A. Crow, Jr., summed up some future sticky wickets for COCU partners. He stressed that COCU enthusiasts envision not a merger of existing churches but a new church with a different life and mission.

“Fundamentally,” he said, “the issue is whether this unfamiliar form of a church has validity.”

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Embracing Cocu

There may be a huge huge-in and when the proposed Church of Christ Uniting gets its ministers together. It’s all right for official guests attending the ministries of the Consultation on Church Union embrace the COCU ministers after the service.

The COCU plenary session in St. Louis last month voted that duly elected representatives (clergy and lay) invited to the service (assuming two are more COCU denominations approve the proposed plan of union) may give each of the COCU ministers “the right hand of fellowship or an embrace and a quiet word of gretting.”

The plan doesn’t say whether the COCU ministers may hug back, or whether they may embrace each other.

Commenting on the addition of the words “or an embrace”—not a part of the original plan of union—Dr. David Colwell of Seattle, a former COCU chairman, said: “We need to loosen up a bit, like the blacks.…”

The earlier description of the consecration service called for “delegated ordained ministers from churches other than the uniting church … to share in this silent laying on of hands. Bishops in the historic episcopate and ministers from non-episcopal churches shall be invited.” The laying on of hands around a large circular table is to be done in silence.

Nuts And Bolts Of Union Vote

What procedures would be necessary in each of the nine denominations participating in the Consultation on Church Union for that church to become a part of the proposed Church of Christ Uniting?

CHRISTIANITY TODAY asked that question of top officials of the nine churches. Any final voting is at least two years away, and denominational officials were not certain in all cases of exact procedures or constitutional requirements. Considered opinions of those surveyed are as follows:

African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and Christian Methodist Episcopal Churches—These black denominations, all in the Methodist family, have similar requirements. In each case, the quadrennial General Conference must vote, followed by a vote of the church’s annual conferences. The COCU plan of union (revised) could be submitted to the General Conference of the AME Church no earlier than 1972. If approved there by a two-thirds majority, the annual conferences would then be required to approve the plan by the same majority at their next regular sessions. A final decision could be made by late 1973 or early 1974.

The same procedure applies for the AMEZ Church. (Bishop William J. Walls of Chicago and Professor John Satterwhite of Washington, D. C., both delegates at the St. Louis COCU, may have misunderstood a reporter’s question. But both repeatedly said that the decision for the AMEZ Church would be made at the congregational level and that they expected that COCU would set up a universal procedure under which all nine denominations would individually vote whether to join the united church.) The next AMEZ General Conference will be in May, 1972.

If the CME General Conference (probably 1974) approves the final plan of union by a simple majority, then the annual conferences would vote on the plan at their next meetings. It was not immediately clear whether a two-thirds or three-quarters vote would be needed at that level.

United Methodist Church—The General Conference, meeting in St. Louis this month, is expected to receive and adopt for study the plan of union in its present form. General Conference approval of the final plan could come (a two-thirds majority is believed to be required) in 1972. But the annual conferences would be asked to study the plan, and their voting might not be completed until 1976. Two-thirds of the aggregate vote within the total constituency of the annual conferences would be needed to commit the United Methodist Church to the COCU merger.

Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)—Since the Disciples only organized as a denomination (rather than a brotherhood) in 1968, there is no precedent for a vote of this nature. General Assembly approval presumably could not come before 1973. Officials speculate that the thirty-nine regions of the church will probably then vote, as they did in the restructure issue (this required a two-thirds majority). The Disciples’ General Assembly in Louisville in 1971 probably will be asked to set up procedures for the COCU vote.

Episcopal Church—Approval by two consecutive General Conventions is necessary; the earliest of these could be in 1973. The following regular General Convention is set for 1976; a Special General Convention might be called earlier. “Widespread consultation,” and perhaps straw voting by dioceses, will occur between national meetings, an official said. Two-thirds of the House of Bishops and two-thirds of the House of Delegates must approve the plan at each convention. Voting in the House of Delegates will be by orders (lay and clerical votes are counted separately).

United Church of Christ—The General Synod could approve the revised union plan at the 1973 meeting. Then each conference must vote, followed by a vote by each congregation according to its own bylaws. Ultimate decision, then, after approval at the synod and conference level, still belongs to each congregation (some congregations may choose to abide by the vote of the conference to which they belong, however).²According to the present plan of union draft, any local congregation may withdraw from the united church within one year of the formation of the united church’s district council. A majority vote of the local congregation’s communicant members is sufficient; the local church may retain its property. A floor attempt at last month’s COCU plenary session to limit withdrawal to congregations “which had this right in the church law or polity of the uniting church of which it was a part prior to union” failed. It will require a minimum of one and one-half years after the synod votes before congregational voting can be completed.

United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., and Presbyterian Church, U. S.—General voting procedures are essentially the same. At the UPUSA General Assembly in Chicago next month, the plan of union doubtless will be referred to a committee set up to interpret and study it and send it to congregations for study. Approval of the revised plan could come as early as the 1972 General Assembly. After that, two-thirds of the presbyteries must approve, and final ratification by another General Assembly (1975 at the soonest) must follow. Only a simple majority vote at the General Assembly level is needed.

The Southern Presbyterian Church procedure differs only in that three-quarters of the presbyteries must approve the plan, rather than two-thirds. If, as some COCU enthusiasts hope, the two Presbyterian bodies unite prior to adoption of the COCU plan, the two-thirds—rather than the three-quarters—vote presumably could apply.

Union (joint) presbyteries between the two bodies (several now exist or are planned in Missouri and elsewhere) could complicate the voting. Delegates in a union presbytery might vote twice, once for the United Presbyterian Church, and again for the Southern Presbyterian Church.

King’S Dream Recaptured

“I wonder why we didn’t listen closer to Dr. King back then?” a white woman mused, obviously moved by King: A Filmed Record … Montgomery to Memphis. “I wonder if it’s too late to find the dream.”

Her reaction was shared by others who viewed the documentary of thirteen years in the life of civil-rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Nearly a million people attended the one-night stand in 1,000 theaters across the country, raising close to $5 million for a special memorial fund.

King the preacher of non-violence, who loved his enemies and sought dignity for his race, dominated the nearly three-hour epic. The film included shots of King in jail in Birmingham in April, 1963, while on the soundtrack he read his now classic “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” That response to eight clergymen who considered King’s Birmingham demonstrations “unwise and untimely” pointed to the civil disobedience of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and to the “extremism” of Jesus.

Also in the film were excerpts from many of King’s sermons, including one on Viet Nam he preached in New York’s Riverside Church in 1967.

Transition between segments of the film was provided by actors who read poetry and commented on events. One was Charlton Heston, who read from the Old Testament.

King won nearly universal critical acclaim: it was honest, admitting failure as well as success, but not sentimental. The clergyman’s widow said she was pleased with the production.

Although several theaters in New York and Washington, D. C., reported bomb threats, no violence erupted. That the film did not touch off a wave of violence, as King’s death did in 1968, was attributed by a black Washington columnist to its underlying sense of triumph and the inspiration it gave to take up Martin Luther King’s peaceful dream once again.

Morality Gap Shootout

The good guys and the bad guys met at Morality Gap March 16–18 and ideologically shot it out before nearly 400 Southern Baptist ministers and laymen.

The occasion was the annual seminar sponsored by the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and the place was the American Motor Hotel in Atlanta.

The meet pitted Playboy magazine public affairs director Anson Mount against Southwestern Baptist Seminary professor William Pinson. Joseph Fletcher, chief guru of situation ethics, hassled with Henlee Barnette, a professor at Louisville’s Southern Baptist Seminary.

“Others may go hopping down the bunny trail but I’ll follow Him who said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life,’ ” said Pinson, replying to Mount.

There had been enough emphasis, said Mount, on the “terrifying possibilities of sex,” and Playboy’s mission was to move away from that.³Mounting a defense for Playboy’s rising popularity, Mount said its huge circulation made it easy to understand why he had received a letter from Billy James Hargis, the Tulsa evangelist, saying he would be willing to be interviewed by Playboy magazine. Hargis was one of the most vocal opponents of the Atlanta morality seminar.

Fletcher, the Episcopal Seminary professor whose book, Situation Ethics, became the philosophical basis for the new morality in the minds of many, let it be known that the Christian commitment, in his view, might call for all kinds of behavior.

Noting that Jesus broke laws, Fletcher said: “I am prepared to argue that the Christian obligation calls for lies and adultery and fornication and theft and promise-breaking and killing sometimes, depending on the situation.”

The only laws Jesus broke were ceremonial laws, countered Barnette, and “nowhere did Jesus abrogate the moral law.” Fletcher’s system, he said, “is not loving enough, not situation-oriented enough, and not theological enough.”

Another Southern Baptist Seminary professor, Frank Stagg, in an address on morality and militarism, charged that the United States is the most militaristic country in the world.

“The alleged massacre of My Lai, if true, was no accident,” said Stagg. “Whatever the dimension of personal guilt, the system itself produces what is alleged to have occurred at My Lai. For it we are all guilty.”

Following the speech, Owen Cooper, a Yazoo City, Mississippi, layman, told Stagg he had done “as good a job of overkill as you accused the military of in Viet Nam.”

Sex education also entered the Morality Gap fray. However, there wasn’t enough disagreement for a debate between David Mace, former head of the Sex Information and Education Council in the United States, and James Dunn of the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission.

“The Christian view of sex is a hodgepodge of superstition and prejudice that answers to no set of coherent ethical principles,” said Mace.

Dunn blasted Southern Baptist leadership for not doing more about sex education in the churches. “Ten negative letters constitute an avalanche in Nashville,” he said.

The Atlanta meeting stirred controversy across the Southern Baptist Convention, primarily over the presence of Mount, Fletcher, and Mace. There was also unhappiness in some circles because Negro legislator Julian Bond of Georgia, a black-power advocate, was a speaker.

Participants enthusiastically endorsed a resolution praising the meeting, hoping it would at least muffle anger that could explode when the Southern Baptist Convention meets in Denver this June.

WALLACE HENLEY

Now and then I have suggested 1975 as an approximate turning point in the near-term destinies of evangelical Christianity.

Several developments indicate, however, that historic Christianity need not be relegated, after all, to an impending Dead Sea Caves survival of an isolated minority remnant. I would quickly add, at the same time, that the penultimate future of the evangelical thrust is far from settled. Decisions still pending—or being avoided—may very largely influence the immediate fortunes of biblical Christianity.

Distressing factors are obvious enough. The growing secularization of modern life, the bold godlessness rampant today, not to mention the aggressive atheism of our campuses—these supply religious background perspective for the seventies. When coupled with the inevitable population expansion and the declining interest in church attendance, especially among young people, such factors should quickly temper evangelical enthusiasm about religious prospects. The fact is that evangelical forces, inside or outside the conciliar framework, are much too unrelated and scattered to register an effective national and cultural impact.

The growing disenchantment with organized ecumenical Christianity, moreover, has had consequences for related evangelical churches, particularly those that fall short of clearly and boldly articulating biblical distinctives. To be sure, many independent churches have remained aloof from the struggles vexing conciliar ecumenism, and others have become embroiled only at a polemical distance. But conciliar ecumenism is not the only enterprise now faced with living on capital reserves. To avoid the same fate, some highly independent groups are being driven to deep budget-slashing. In not a few years many of the evangelical colleges may also be in dire financial straits; some have been surviving for years on accumulating bank loans.

In England, where church attendance has ebbed, and where ecumenical churchgoers themselves repudiated Anglican-Methodist merger proposals, the church in the home—and mainly in evangelical homes—has already emerged as a noteworthy evangelistic force. If in the notion of an “underground” church one includes movements neither originated, promoted, nor supported officially by conciliar ecumenism, then such house-church efforts and other activities—not least of them the Graham evangelistic crusades—reflect a dimension of New Testament concern rather foreign to twentieth-century conciliar ecumenism. It is true, of course, that evangelically oriented individuals in the conciliar orbit have given sympathetic support and ecumenical agencies have publicly endorsed and even encouraged such efforts if they avoid free-wheeling independence.

There is reason to hope that an evangelistic breakthrough might come nationwide to America in 1973. Already thirty denominations are committed to the bold Key Bridge proposals for transdenominational, simultaneous and/or cooperative evangelism in every community in the land; ten others are tentatively interested while awaiting official approval in upcoming national assemblies or conventions. If one counts Canadian churches also, the number of involved groups may be fifty or more. As recently as five years ago, some participating denominations—among them Southern Baptists, Missouri Synod Lutherans, and Assemblies of God—were not even on speaking terms about such possibilities of cooperative evangelism. Evangelical clergy and lay leaders in each city would determine what programs were best suited to their communities for presenting the claims of Christ. The aggressive leadership of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, the Graham organization’s promotional energies, coupled with those of Southern Baptists and the Lutheran Laymen’s League, among others, could ensure effective planning.

This development provides dramatic opportunities for inner-city cooperation among evangelicals of different races. Significant in our time has been the growing insistence of black evangelical leaders that black-power militants have less following in the black community than they claim, and, in fact, do not authentically reflect its convictions. If the predicament of the evangelical churches on the socio-cultural margin stems largely from isolationism, then the removal of this remoteness can now be achieved only by prompt reconciliation, through spiritual mutuality between white and black Christians and a spontaneous togetherness in the cause of Jesus Christ.

The great universities, television and radio stations, the major newspapers of our land, are located primarily in the big cities. More and more these cities are becoming meccas for black majorities, a fact that has far-reaching implications for the future of the mass media. If the dynamic for social change seems to issue largely from militants who do not know the regenerating Gospel of Christ and transcendent justice, then greater liaison between black and white evangelicals could mark a less problematical and more promising day. Such free liaison would restore, moreover, and on a transracial basis, those enduring spiritual emphases that have all but faded from the mass-media dialogue of our day.

Discovering their identity at long last, black evangelicals are assuming roles of responsibility for the inner city and raising up an increasingly articulate witness. Some are taking to the streets and to the public arena with a witness for faith, finding a courage for the Gospel that puts their white brothers to shame.

However indispensably central it may be, the evangelistic thrust is nonetheless not enough in the contemporary culture crisis. There has been, and this is only right, a growing sense of evangelical social concern and involvement, though its presuppositions are not always clear nor its direction articulate. CHRISTIANITY TODAY commented editorially that the U. S. Congress on Evangelism (Minneapolis, 1969) put “the call to social involvement … on a personal basis” and “avoided … a major error of the ecumenical movement, that of making the institutional church the agent of social revolution as though that were the mission of the Church” (October 10, 1969, issue). But what are the presuppositions and objectives basic to a biblically oriented thrust? One ecumenical churchman saw in the congress a confluence of the evangelical emphasis on personal conversion and the liberal social gospel. To avoid such misimpressions, evangelicals need to avoid not only a radical ecumenical alternative but also an ambiguous evangelical alternative.

Coming to the fore now are a new breed of “evangelical hippies” who more than any other group seem to bear the clear marks of an underground movement. A later report will deal with what they are saying and doing.

CARL F. H. HENRY